The few signal films of director Alex Cox

LITTLE ROCK — Sid & Nancy (1986) was released on Blu-ray last month (suggested retail $24.99), and I’ve been meaning to get around to writing about it because it’s an important movie to a lot of people who came of age in the ’80s, and because it represents the highlight of the bizarre career of the extraordinary Alex Cox.

Cox is responsible for two of the signal films of the ’80s — his professional debut was the cult classic Repo Man — yet he’s been virtually invisible for the past 20 years. The romantic view is to see Cox as a kind of modern-day Rimbaud who retreated into self-willed obscurity after skirting commercial success (he was at least talked about as a potential director of the 1986 Steve Martin-Chevy Chase-Martin Short comedy Three Amigos, a job that eventually devolved to John Landis), but the reality is probably closer to Cox’s contention that he was “blacklisted” for his lefty politics and avantgarde approach to cinema.

My semi-informed feeling is that Cox is simply a difficult hire for anyone who wants to make a movie that’s not about the soul-destroying corrosiveness of Western capitalism. Anyone who can manage to offend the late Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (Cox was the first choice to direct Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but was replaced by Terry Gilliam after meeting with the author; he sued for, and won, a screenwriting credit on the film) is probably not going to charm too many studio executives.

Anyway, Cox has kept busy over the past couple of decades, but his work has not always been easy to find in this country. His most recent original project, 2009’s Repo Girl, which was not a sequel to the 1984 film, was a green-screen-heavy novelty that went straight to video in this country. In 2010, Cox released an “enhanced” version of his baffling 1986 film Straight to Hell called Straight to Hell Returns, which included six minutes Cox cut from the original, and new digital effects.

He’s done a few other low-budget independent features, and a couple of documentaries for the BBC, and in England he’s probably best known for hosting the BBC’s Moviedrome series, a Sunday night program that presented cult films from 1988 to 1994.

Cox is a middle-class Englishman from Bristol who studied law at Oxford but abandoned the path for film school at UCLA. He was there at the end of the 1970s, and his exposure to the Los Angeles punk scene combined with his fascination with a neighbor’s occupation led to Repo Man (1984). Though the movie was a box office flop — according to Box Office Mojo, it made only $129,000 in its single week of release and Cox says it didn’t even recoup its $1.2 million budget until 1999 — it was one of the first movies rescued from obscurity by home video, and it’s almost universally loved by those who (like me) first saw it at a susceptible age.

He followed that with Sid & Nancy, a punk take on Romeo and Juliet that used the real-life tragedy of lovers Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, and their triangle affair with heroin. (Vicious, the 22-year-old bassist for the Sex Pistols, died of a heroin overdose in February 1979, four months after Spungen died — likely was killed — in the couple’s room at the Hotel Chelsea. Vicious was under indictment for her murder at the time, but there’s never been any clear resolution of the case. In the minds of most people in the know, it’s not entirely clear who killed Spungen.)

Sid & Nancy is f illed with fantastic scenarios of violence and squalor, and it ends on a jarringly sweet note — one that Cox has said he now regrets. It can be read as an anti-drug screed or as a romanticization of the heroin lifestyle, as a love story or as the story of the nihilistic obliteration of a couple of talentless poseurs.

And while it’s obviously not a completely accurate account, its grim authority is underpinned by two heavyweight performances by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as the title characters.

Even John Lydon, formerly known as Johnny Rotten, has consistently slagged off on the film since its release, complaining that its portrayals of the main players were fanciful character assassinations based on nothing more than Cox’s lurid imagination. However, he credited Oldman’s performance, though he complained that the actor could only play Vicious’ public persona because Cox and co-writer Abbe Wool never bothered to talk to anyone who actually knew Sid or Nancy.

(A dozen years ago, in an interview with the Onion A.V. Club, Cox implied that Lydon’s criticism of the film was actually kind of a publicity stunt — that Lydon trashed the movie as a “favor” to the filmmakers, believing that controversy would stir up interest in it. “I thought it was rather a charming response to the film,” Cox says. “He’s a good lad.” So who knows?)

But strict adherence to the facts of the doomed romance isn’t what a reasonable person would come to Sid & Nancy for. What matters is the way that Cox teases something sweet and heartbreaking out of the morbid dregs of human existence.

It’s instructive to see the young, fierce Oldman embodying Vicious here — he’s fascinating, and his musical performances are better than the real punk’s ever were. (Vicious tried hard, but never really learned to play his bass guitar.) Now, go see the same actor as the preternaturally still George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

After Sid & Nancy was a critical hit (like Repo Man, it didn’t do much at the box office), Cox took his Three Amigos meeting; he had the chance to undertake a more mainstream Hollywood career.

Instead he made the surreal spaghetti western Straight to Hell, and Walker, an absurdist historical drama about the real-life “filibustering” American adventurer William Walker, who tried to annex Mexico, and in 1856 installed himself as president of Nicaragua.

Ed Harris played Walker with the intensive integrity we’ve come to associate with his performances. Like Straight to Hell, the film was filled with purposeful anachronisms — such as copies of TIME and Newsweek, an abundance of automatic weapons, helicopters and a car. It is a crazy but not incompetently made movie and I retain some fondness for it, though I’m not sure I could call it a good movie. Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and called it “a pointless and increasingly obnoxious exercise in satire.” Now, if you want to see it, you have to get ahold of the Criterion Collection DVD (or search it out on the Internet).

And Alex Cox never worked in that town — Hollywood — again.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com blooddirtandangels.com

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 01/27/2012

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