Floyd Mutrux's "Aloha Bobby and Rose" (1975), Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1960)

In 1971, Floyd Mutrux made his directorial debut with the critically-acclaimed docudrama Dusty and Sweets McGee. Despite the film’s rave reviews, Warner Bros. pulled the picture from release after only one week after Time magazine questioned its graphic depiction of drug addiction. That same year, Mutrux wrote and produced The Christian Licorice Store, and found screenwriting work on Monte Hellman’s classic Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) starring Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson and Laurie Bird. During this period, Variety predicted that the five greatest directors to emerge from the so-called “New Hollywood” era would be Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Floyd Mutrux, Martin Scorsese, and Terrence Malick. In 1975, Mutrux wrote and directed Aloha, Bobby and Rose for Columbia Pictures. Filmed for a mere $60,000, Mutrux’s lovers on the road worked as a sort of homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Mutrux then helmed the seminal rock-and-roll film American Hot Wax (1978), which has since become a cult hit—despite its prolonged absence on the DVD market—earning Mutrux accolades and rave reviews. For his work on the film, Village Voice dubbed him the year’s Best Director in 1978.

As LA Weekly film writer Chuck Stephens observed, Mutrux was a “white-light guy in the white-heat moment of New Hollywood. His films were funny, freaky, dangerous as rock-and-roll, and portended a potential combination of Mean Streets edginess and Badlands beauty.” However, due to a string of films which have been shelved, rewritten by others, or continue to languish in development hell, Mutrux remains a virtual unknown. After directing the mainstream comedy The Hollywood Knights (1980), Mutrux took a lengthy hiatus from filmmaking. It’s interesting to note that Mutrux has sold over ten screenplays in Hollywood, but most of them have not yet been produced. He conceived and co-wrote Brian De Palma’s hit film The Untouchables (1987), but did not receive any screen credit. In 1990, Mutrux served as executive producer on Warren Beatty’s film Dick Tracy. In 1994, Mutrux returned to the director’s chair for the comedy There Goes My Baby, a semi-nostalgic film set in 1964, starring Dermot Mulroney and Kelli Williams. While the film was well-received, it fell victim to an untimely bankruptcy at Orion Pictures and received a limited release. Some of Floyd Mutrux's favorite films are: From Here to Eternity (1953), Giant (1956), Shoot the Piano Player (1960)—based on David Goodis' novel—, Breathless (1960), Jules et Jim (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Chinatown (1974), and Pulp Fiction (1994).

-Andrew Rausch: Variety magazine once predicted that the five greatest directors to emerge from the seventies would be Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and Floyd Mutrux. But after filming The Hollywood Knights, you took a fourteen-year hiatus from filmmaking. What happened?

-Floyd Mutrux: Look, I have a lot of regrets. I made a lot of choices that were not smart. I went on to work on a lot of projects that never got made, and wound up feeling sorry for myself. In that period in the late seventies, early eighties, I just sort of dropped out. The pictures I cared about weren’t getting made. I just disappeared from the scene. Then I wrote a lot of scripts. Some executives I knew from the studios got fired, and the pictures I’d written got shelved. Sometimes I feel like the movie business betrayed me, but that’s kind of a whiny attitude. Basically, I don’t give a fuck because the movie business betrayed itself. It makes a lot of shit now. It’s almost unwatchable. There are no longer any movies you really want to go see. Name your ten best pictures of the last five years, and they don’t compare to the best of the Golden Age, the fifties, the sixties, or the seventies. —Fifty Filmmakers: Conversations with Directors (2008) by Andrew Rausch

Aloha, Bobby and Rose: There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Floyd Mutrux, and that’s a shame, because he directed two of the great American movies of the 1970s (no small accomplishment, that). One was the infectiously energetic (and, these days, impossible to find) early-rock snapshot American Hot Wax; the other is this foggy 1975 delight, in which Paul Le Mat and Diane Hull high-tail it out of Hollywood when a date-night prank turns deadly. But Mutrux handily transcends the cliches of the “lovers on the run” movie, thanks to the oddball sadness of his characters and the wild unpredictability of his storytelling. Aloha Bobby and Rose is a primo portrait of 1970’s existential aimlessness disguised as a drive-in movie and is audaciously shot by William Fraker, one of the truly gifted cinematographers of the era. Aloha takes us back to the low-rent L.A. setting to show us how a smidgen of fatality propells the story through its star-crossed lover scenario. Bobby is an unambitious auto mechanic who drives a souped-up ’67 Camaro. When his co-worker Moxey shows enough initiative to apply to transmission school, Bobby derides such blatant careerism. Who wants to wake up that early? 

Bobby is played by Paul LeMat, fresh of his tough guy role as John Milner in American Graffiti. Diane Hull plays Rose, a single mother whose life seems so stifled her boozy mom encourages her to kick loose and go out with Bobby when he delivers her car from the garage. While on their date a dumb prank spirals out of control (leading to one of the cinema’s freakiest car crashes) and the two set off for Mexico in an attempt to escape the law. The 1970’s were the last time that popular films would be so casually fatalistic. Much like DeNiro’s character in Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), Bobby is a character that seems less likely to survive the film the more we get to know him. Apparently nearly broke throughout the entire film, Bobby seems to have no visible support, dreams or prospects. He’s more passive than self-destructive but his insouciance seems so profound you can’t imagine the future having a place for this guy. The “Aloha” of the title is a reference to a passing thought about running off to Hawaii, a dream Bobby and Rose seem to choose because of its very improbability.

Diane Hull makes her under-written role appear truly poetic and vivid. But the real star of this film is cinematographer William Fraker. The former President of the American Society of Cinematographers, Fraker shot some of the iconic films of the sixties and seventies, including ROSEMARY’S BABY and BULLITT. In ALOHA he seems to have been given a free hand to shoot some of his boldest work, as Fraker delivers a pictorial essay of L.A. at night. As Bobby and Rose escape towards the Mexican border they end up briefly riding with another couple, Buford and Donna Sue. Played by Tim McIntire (who had a mesmerizing turn playing rock and roll pioneer Alan Freed in Mutrux’s following film AMERICAN HOT WAX) and Leigh French (of the San Francisco comedy group The Committee), this duo pretends to epitomize the American Dream to Bobby and Rose. Buford wears a cowboy hat, owns a Cadillac and with his old lady Donna Sue, seems to just drive around and raise hell wherever he goes. Rose barely tries to play along, quietly distressed at Bobby’s boyish admiration for this insufferable blowhard.

But there’s no future in being this guy’s lackey and with no real place to run Bobby and Rose have no choice but to turn around the Mexican border and meet their fate. At 88 minutes, ALOHA plays like an American take on BREATHLESS, succeeding at what American films do best: taking a pulpy and recognizable genre and revving it up with an individualistic personal vision. Now, almost 50 years later, ALOHA BOBBY AND ROSE’s period stylizations have mellowed beautifully, turning what might have been a tossed-off youth film into a dreamy, blissed-out and tragic reverie. Source: flavorwire.com

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless is a film driven by a series of paradoxes which appear to present mainstream film elements yet subvert them throughout. Godard’s use of key imagery and character traits from the Hollywood film noir genre to create an internal dissonance by visually, such as the lighting of Michel, representing the inverted Hollywood film noir protagonist, using jarring cuts to disorient the viewer. The character of Michel is a direct reference to the archetypal Hollywood film noir male protagonist: he is dressed in a fedora and suit; smokes constantly; provides narration; he sees himself as a seducer of women,  engages in “tough guy” banter; he knows his femme fatale counterpart, Patricia, on the street as she tries to sell him newspapers. While Michel exhibits these traits which initially seem to categorise him as a mainstream Hollywood character, Godard challenges this characterisation through mise-en-scène and negating his protagonist’s overtly masculine dialogue by making him vulnerable visually and in his discourse with the quintessential femme fatale. 

During the scene in which Michel speaks with Patricia as she tries to sell newspapers, the power assigned to the Hollywood film noir male protagonist is given to the woman; even before Michel engages in conversation with Patricia, he has already been disempowered because of how the conversation is begun: Godard chose to have Michel look for Patricia in multiple places until finally finding her, rather than have the female chase after the male’s attention. This dynamic continues throughout and is made increasingly prominent as Michel and Patricia’s conversation progresses. Although the conversation has begun with Michel mocking Patricia, the formation of the misogynistic male archetype is subverted when Godard has Michel talk about his feelings, a subject about which Patricia has no interest in speaking. In having Michel harass Patricia with incessant declarations of love, which continue throughout the film, and speak about his sadness, Michel loses his film noir male protagonist categorisation. 

This paradox of the sensitive gangster created for the viewer is extremely difficult to reconcile and insists in the duration of the bedroom scene as in the rest of the film; soon after Michel acts as the antithesis of the mainstream Hollywood criminal, Godard again disrupts the audience’s attempt to label Michel as either being film noir or anti-film noir when he finishes the conversation with Michel stating in an authoritative and suddenly masculine tone that he has to find someone who owes him money, reintroducing Michel as the fearsome and forceful man character. Godard further argues against film noir’s governing male protagonist in a verbal, and visual, contradiction through Patricia’s stealing of Michel’s narration. At the ending of the film, as Michel speaks, Patricia begins to narrate for the audience and delivers her internal monologue as the camera follows her and ignores Michel, the first instance in which this occurs in the film. This rejection of the male protagonist, which would not occur in mainstream film noir, further disempowers and dissociates Michel from not only being a gangster, but as a leading character in the film. 

Furthermore, since Godard subjects his other characters to filmic darkness, Michel appears vulnerable in comparison to his counterparts by being more visible; other characters in Breathless are allowed to hide visually through the shadows while Michel is unable to do so, akin to the powerlessness Godard verbally represented through Michel’s conversations with Patricia. The final way in which Michel as a character is robbed of power and dignity is the final scene, in which he dies. When Michel is shot by the police, Godard films Michel running, injured, away from the police while Patricia runs after him. In showing the viewer only Michel in one frame then only Patricia as she runs after him and never together creates a haunting power dynamic; by filming them both separately, Godard defines visually the person who is running away and the person who chases him relentlessly, rather than making it appear as though Patricia and Michel are running together as equals by putting them together in the frame. In making this impactful decision, Godard characterises Patricia as the hunter and Michel as the hunted, wounded animal which cannot comprehend its inability to physically run from death. The visual emasculating of a potential film noir protagonist is further impressed upon the viewer when Godard films Michel lying on the ground on his back overhead with the police and Patricia’s feet encircling him, their bodies thereby being made to seem indomitable by comparison, then finishing the film with Patricia speaking and looking directly into the camera, reclaiming the film from Michel, now forcibly removed by Patricia's betrayal.

A major paradox to Breathless is its presentation to the audience of what would structurally appear to be a mainstream film noir in that the major features of the film are centralised around a gangster, money, and a femme fatale, while visually, it is a totally unique departure from the genre to the extent that it transcends its categorisation. A radical component of the filming of Breathless is that the camera is at eye-level with its characters for most of the film; rather than physically moving the camera by utilising high or low-angle shots to set the tone of a scene, Godard instead uses jarring and sudden cuts to create motion in the film. In the beginning scene of the film, in which Michel drives the stolen car along a road flanked by trees, and during the nighttime scene towards the end of the film in which Michel and Patricia converse in another stolen car, for instance, the audience is confronted with an unsettling dissonance: while the car continues to move forward, as does the narration or conversation, without interruption, the background as a result of the cuts, stutters and changes abruptly. 

This in itself creates another paradox embedded in this film: the logical nature of physical and verbal forward movement contrasted against an illogical background of the unexpected disruption of an assumed forward moving scenery. Also, the opening of Breathless is “unprecedented,” in that we never learn what route brought Michel Poiccard to the Vieux Port of Marseille, where he surveys the future from the very edge of France. This first shot strikes a match to touch off an oil fire that will race through the film’s incidents and images, indeed through the New Wave altogether. We can feel Godard’s own outlaw freedom in this sequence, carjacking a Hollywood genre and putting it into drive. The film lurches forward as he shifts up with wild shot changes; it charges ahead on bursts of music and sound effects, and on Belmondo’s spontaneous speeches. Breathless is still the definitive manifesto of the New Wave. The movement was well under way when Godard made his entrée. In a much-discussed 1957 inquest, the pop­u­lar weekly L’express had dubbed the ascendant generation “la nouvelle vague.” Claude Chabrol had come out before the triumph of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour at Cannes in spring 1959. But Breathless sealed the movement, defining it as simultaneously nonchalant and sophisticated. In Breathless, Belmondo gave to his character an engaging insouciance that resonated with Godard’s unapologetic way of making his film. 

Jean Seberg, though a well-known ingenue (particularly at Cahiers du cinéma, on whose cover she appeared in February 1958), likewise plays at finding her character—perhaps at finding herself, an American in Paris—as she adopts pose after pose for close-ups that come to make up over 20 percent of the film. Similarly, the editing and music constitute elements as well as signifiers of tone and rhythm, visually and aurally structuring our experience. Godard’s writings have always sounded brash, yet his earliest projects often sang the purity of artistic expression. Poe, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were his models. Godard could write without irony, “What is difficult is to advance into unknown lands, to be aware of the danger, to take risks, to be afraid.” Breathless announces this as its principal theme early on, when Michel Poiccard passes a movie poster advertising Robert Aldrich’s Ten Seconds to Hell: “Live Dangerously Until the End!” 

Godard believed that the powerful writers of the past (Stendhal, for instance, who provided the epigraph for Godard’s scenario) would surely have been auteurs of cinema in the mid-twentieth century. Long before Gilles Deleuze, Godard called on popular genres—the musical, the western, and of course the film noir—to address the philosophical issues of his day. Sartre, after all, had worked in film, as had Malraux, who lent his personal support to get The 400 Blows to Cannes. Merciless and intrepid, Godard took himself to be a loner even within the Cahiers du cinéma clan, tying genuine art to courage and solitude. “The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone? means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them. Nothing could be more classically romantic.” Source: criterion.com