Daily Blague

In the old days, you'd go to a movie, and maybe you'd be really captivated. But you'd leave the theatre with one thing only: a determination to remember what you'd seen. You didn't have the time or the money to go back and see the film again (or maybe even the opportunity). You couldn't say, "Gee, I can't wait till that comes out on tape/DVD." The movie was history. If it was a great movie, you might catch it at a university film series - if you paid attention to film society calendars.

(Conversely, if you traveled in different crowds, you got to see Help! and Star Wars seven times at least.)

In the early Seventies, I saw a movie that stuck with me forever. I would talk about it often; I remembered how it was put together and what made it different. I know that I knew this because I've just seen it again, and I was flabbergasted, watching it, by how much I'd held on to. When movies began appearing on tape about ten years later, I looked for it all the time. Then I gave up, or at least checked it out only once in a while. The other day, I don't know why, I did an IMDb search, discovered that the movie was out on DVD - and very cheap! - and bought it pronto. As I say, I really remembered it well. You had to, in those days.

Now, everybody's going to howl at my demotic taste. So I'm going to use the title of the film that I saw back in 1974: The Pyx. Do you know what a pyx is? I certainly didn't, but after the movie, I never forgot it, either. Whether or not you know what a pyx is, though, you'll agree with me that The Pyx is a much better title than The Hooker Cult Murders. How can I be writing about The Hooker Cult Murders at the magisterially respectable Daily Blague? I feel that I owe an apology to every woman who frequents the site. Can we go with The Pyx?

The movie does not merit extensive comment. It's simply not complicated enough. But its memorable angles have aged well to make it watchable despite a ghastly transfer to DVD. ('Bootleg' would be more like it.) The narrative strategy is, so far as I know, unique. Everything starts with a woman falling from a penthouse terrace to the ground. Then, in well-judged autonomous chunks, the film proceeds to alternate the course of the investigation into her death with the course of her actions the days before. Christopher Plummer is the lead detective, and if he's not as hateful as he is in Dolores Claiborne, he's well on the way, and a big slob to boot. Karen Black is the unfortunate faller. The supporting cast, when you can see it in the staticky print, is magnificent. A minor character - a driver for the bad guys - gives an object lesson in "the male gaze."

Production values are just as awful as you'd expect them to be in a 1973 release by a low-budget Canadian enterprise. A lot of people will hate the settings of scripture that Ms Black wrote and sung, but they have the virtue of being very, very period. So is the cinematography. As a film, The Pyx is worse than TV was at the time. Except for everything in it. While the film's in print, rent it at least!