Summer movies aren’t about summer and they don’t have to open during the summer movie-theatre doldrums. For me, they’re the movies that come up in conversation at night with friends on the porch or during a long drive, or even late in bed when somebody says, “What was the name of that movie where the cow falls down a well and everybody’s looking for that famous old Irish tenor who’s disappeared and—wait a minute, it’s, it’s—” And you say, “Oh, my God, yes, it was—I know this—it was Ned Beatty!” And the first person says, “Yeah, got it now—Ned Beatty, can you believe? In ‘Hear My Song.’ I think it was English or maybe Irish but, you know, not Irish. Great movie, remember?”
Summer movies aren’t classics and don’t always make money, but they make friends. Some of them are counter-classics, like “Remember the Night,” the 1940 Barbara Stanwyck–Fred MacMurray thing that isn’t “Double Indemnity.” This time, Fred is a young New York prosecutor who’s about to send Barbara away for a jewelry-store shoplifting rap when the trial goes into Christmas recess. Barbara has no place to stay for the holiday, and so Fred, what else, takes her along to his Indiana home, where Mom (Beulah Bondi) and the tree and popcorn and songs around the piano and love and tears are waiting; the script is by Preston Sturges, so not to worry. Other summer movies—I’m thinking of “Tremors,” that 1990 Kevin Bacon-vs.-underground-monster-worms battle—start off small and end up in multiple sequels and play all year round on back-channel TV. “Trees Lounge,” by contrast, opened and disappeared in a nanosecond in 1996, leaving only a handful of fanly conservators to recall Steve Buscemi (who wrote and directed it as well) as a shaky alcoholic slowly driving an ice-cream truck around Valley Stream, Long Island, and making out with the junior-teen Chloë Sevigny.
Another summer movie that sneaks into mind—one of its devotees was the late Saul Steinberg—is pre-suburban by about eighty thousand years. Without access to Con Ed, members of the Ulam tribe have to carry their light and power around with them in a small basket containing smoldering coals. When a careless elder Ulam slips while crossing a swamp and drowns the spark, there’s a crisis. Three strong pithecan homeys are dispatched to find and grab off a fresh ember or burning branch from their nearest heat-keeping neighbors, hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles away, who will mash them with a boulder or have them for lunch if they fail. This, in a gourd-shell, is the story line of “Quest for Fire,” a captivating 1981 French-Canadian caveman movie, which was recently retrieved via Netflix and, by popular demand, played two nights in a row at my place. No subtitles are offered, since the film’s language, created by Anthony Burgess, comes largely in grunts, but different grunts, depending on tribe. The actors’ primitive lopings and body language and their styles in rock warfare were choreographed by the celebrity ethnologist Desmond Morris. This exhausts the film’s list of stars. Our heroine, Ika (the lithe Rae Dawn Chong), is talkative in a high-pitched-screamy sort of way, coming as she does from the more advanced Ivaka, and she dresses fetchingly in ashes and little—well, actually, nothing—else. Ika knows stuff, like how to make fire with a palm-whirred stick, and—scandalizing the Ulams—frontal sex.
Being non-ironic, “Quest for Fire” will never remind you of those persistent Geico caveman commercials, but it takes on any built-in resistance to Neanderthal entertainment with suavity—my own disappearing about thirty minutes along, when our three fire hunters are treed by sabre-toothed lions in a bending, inadequate sapling. There’s a falling-nut joke a little later, though the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, isn’t after laughs but emotions: long, sweeping shots of thickly vacant landscapes, dotted at one corner by a minute campfire (the movie was shot in Canada and Scotland and Kenya); an unexpectedly charming herd of woolly mammoths; and the prognathous Ron Perlman picking at a bone as he awaits the dawn of cogitation. There are wolves and bears but no dinosaurs, and Annaud has you holding your breath when the hairy Naoh (Everett McGill) nervously throws a stick at a low, menacing apparition he’s not seen before: a hut. “Quest for Fire,” it turned out, was never quite a box-office hit, and it wasn’t solemn or cheesy enough for a cult. Catching it again, you remember the terrific music (by Philippe Sarde) and the kick, back then, of finding friends of yours who had also just come upon this strange little flick for the first time and were dying to talk.
Sidebar, June, 2007