Dangerous Game

(aka Snake Eyes, Abel Ferrara, USA/Italy, 1993)

Bob Dylan’s 1969 rendition of that melancholic Hart/Rodgers standard “Blue Moon” plays over most of the end credits of Dangerous Game (the very final play-out comes courtesy of rapper Schoolly D). I’m a big Abel Ferrara fan, although my devotional urge really only kicked in seriously at the start of the 1990s. In fact, I still tend to have intensely mixed feelings about some aspects of his films (like those washy synth doodlings on the soundtrack whenever Ferrara’s longtime pal Joe Delia strays from rock, blues and disco … ).

But Ferrara’s works have a purity, a determination and an intensity about them that I can’t easily shake from my mind. He is an American maverick in the tradition of the great John Cassavetes, but his style and preoccupations are entirely his own (and are sure to be, in turn, much copied).

Ferrara started out in his teens, making dozens of short films on Super-8. Already, he was collaborating with the writer who remained his right-hand man for a long time, Nicholas St John. Their first features in the late ‘70s were notorious slices of urban violence, The Driller Killer (1979) and Ms .45 (aka Angel of Vengeance, 1981). Right from the word go, his films displayed a kinky mixture of violent spectacle and sublime religiosity, exploitation and art.

In Ms .45, a young, mute woman (Zoë Lund) lives alone in a small apartment, traumatised by the experience of (repeated) rape. There are images of her still and alone, eyes darting about in the silence, recalling Roman Polanski’s work, or even Robert Bresson’s classic about a guy scratching his way out of a prison cell, A Man Escaped (1956). But then this Ms hits the streets dressed as a glamorous hooker or as a nun, wasting the scummy male population with her gun. The strange, endearing blend of religious imagery and sensational violence, which appears in all of Ferrara’s films, links him to Martin Scorsese, to Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

In the mid ‘80s, Ferrara took an unexpected turn into slick television production, thanks to showrunner Michael Mann, directing episodes of Miami Vice and Crime Story. This experience put Ferrara into closer proximity with the mechanics and juices of certain popular genres such as urban-action and suspense-thriller. His whole style of direction became more expansive, full of wild camera flourishes and operatic bursts of rock music. Then, in 1990, Ferrara made the first in an amazing run of films: King of New York, with a magnetic and quite vampiric Christopher Walken in the lead role as a crime lord who has a lofty, if somewhat paradoxical ambition: to provide hospitals and other sorely needed civic services by using the money he makes from a spectacular drug empire.

King of New York is unquestionably one of the great films of the ‘90s; in it, Ferrara’s style became completely organic. He returned to the spareness of his earlier works, but now every shot had a razor-sharp tension, as if the whole system of this city and its psychotic denizens could unravel apocalyptically at any moment. No one could tell, anymore, whether Ferrara was making rigorous art films or violent genre thrillers, because King of New York was both at once, indivisibly.

Ferrara had now found, with St John, his preferred mode of storytelling: elliptical, always plunged right into the unfolding confusion of each present-tense moment. And he had discovered, directing Walken, the power of actors, the possibilities of what can happen when you give them some creative space and learn how to explore the emotional truth of a scene in collaboration with them.

Ferrara continued the decade with Bad Lieutenant (1992), the start of his working relation with Harvey Keitel. Then he did the superb (and relatively handsomely budgeted) remake of the sci-fi classic Body Snatchers (1993), Dangerous Game and The Addiction (1995), an extraordinary, low-budget vampire film with Lily Taylor. Addiction and obsession are, indeed, Ferrara’s Big Themes.

In Bad Lieutenant, Keitel is zonked out on everything at once – drugs, booze, sex, gambling. This lieutenant struggles towards some self-insight, some glimmer of redemption, like a modern martyr saint – but it’s a last, desperate, downhill run. In Ferrara’s films, like those of his contemporaries James Toback or David Cronenberg, the only point of resolution for such frenzied anti-heroes is catatonia or death.

There are no gangsters, cops, zombies or vampires in Dangerous Game. The melodramatic trappings and extravagant metaphors that come with those action and horror genres appear, at first glance, to be missing; the subject is filmmaking itself. Keitel plays a director named Eddie Israel, rehearsing and then shooting a claustrophobic psychodrama titled Mother of Mirrors.

This film within Dangerous Game happens within the rooms of a single set – a cold, steely, modern apartment – and features only two actors hammering away at each other: James Russo and Madonna (naturally, in the film’s tricky structure, these are actors playing actors playing characters – lines that are deliberately confused by the manner in which Ferrara “stole” some video rehearsal/workshop/improv footage and inserted it into the montage, much to Madonna’s eternal chagrin). In Mother of Mirrors, Frank/Russo plays a guy named Russell who lives for booze, drugs and sexual experimentation; he goes crazy when his wife Claire (played by Sarah/Madonna) becomes a feverish convert to Catholicism.

As you might expect, the subject matter of Mother of Mirrors spills spectacularly over into real life, the filmmaking situation run by Eddie. Ferrara explores what it is for creative people to immerse themselves in a psychodrama, to deliberately blur the boundaries between acting and being in search of a searing, dramatic truth – the movie marks a full-blooded return to the kind of agonised, existentialist musing that has never really left American culture (check out Parker Tyler’s critique of this tendency, already in the early ‘60s).

In a classic Ferrara sequence, Eddie enters Frank’s trailer to give him a heavy pep talk. Ferrara’s camera stays bolted at the back of the trailer, as the scene goes on, around and around for some minutes between these two angry men (not forgetting Frank’s cohort of hangers-on who reluctantly get shuffled out at the start). Eddie is dissatisfied, because his actor is blocking the emotional truth of the scene, falling into clichés and mere actorly mannerisms. Eddie’s ultimate directorial advice to this troubled, borderline-psychopathic performer is priceless: “You’re doing too much fucking drugs and booze – or not enough!”

The filming of Mother of Mirrors spirals out of control. Drugs are snorted on the set, an ambiguous but definitely ugly sexual incident occurs while the camera rolls (inspired by an infamous tale from the set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris [1973]?), and Eddie verbally abuses Sarah-as-actor (a “Hollywood piece of shit”) in order to get an appropriate dramatic reaction from her. What does Ferrara want us to make of this rather sordid spectacle? Some have taken it, not too kindly, as Ferrara’s self-portrait, a candid statement about the depths to which a true artist must sink in order to reach authentic expression. Certainly, Keitel’s performance seems to be channeling his director, just as Lou Castel channeled Rainer Werner Fassbinder for Beware of a Holy Whore (1971).

I’m not so sure about that autobiography angle. To my mind, Ferrara wants to show the extreme dysfunctions to which the artistic process can sometimes lead. He was no doubt inspired by those famous documented cases of film directors tipping over the edge into megalomania, like Werner Herzog when he made Fitzcarraldo (1982) – a clip from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982) is also in the montage mix here – or Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now (1979/2001/2019).

Dangerous Game, admirable and grimly captivating as it often is, does not rate among my favourite Ferrara films. It crashes against a big problem that has faced many movies about movie-making: how to give any kind of compelling substance to a film-inside-the-film. The project that Eddie is directing is only superficially like a Ferrara film. It has, for starters, surreally reduced dimensions: a couple of ultra-shouty scenes on a single set. And Ferrara would never (?) take on such a banal, repetitious, ponderous script as this, with characters storming around yelling pretty inane lines (over and over) about the “materialistic” consumer society and “Mother Cabrini” (founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, FYI).

Dangerous Game gets much better in its final third, when it suddenly swerves away from Mother of Mirrors (one wonders, for a few moments, whether its production has been shut down) and goes deeply into the crisis of Eddie’s marital situation. His wife, Madlyn, is played by Ferrara’s wife of the time, Nancy – a tremendously authentic and riveting presence (especially convincing in sex scenes with Keitel!). Madlyn and their little child, Tommy (Reilly Murphy from Body Snatchers), show up mere minutes after Eddie has been sleeping with Sarah – his attempt to tidy up the tell-tale bedroom traces is classic.

At last, we are on true Ferrara turf, as Eddie wrestles with the schism between his home life and his artistic life, between what Cassavetes once called night experience and day experience.

It is no accident that several Ferrara films, including this one, begin with a man, a family man (as in Bad Lieutenant), walking out the front door of his home. It is a simple enough gesture, but it always inaugurates a trauma for these anti-heroes. They are immediately torn between going all the way with the excesses of the night, or getting back to the salvation of home base. Go check if Eddie makes it back in Dangerous Game.

MORE Ferrara: The Blackout, China Girl, New Rose Hotel, Pasolini, Mary, 'R Xmas, The Funeral

© Adrian Martin January 1995