Something to watch tonight: Friday 11 October

The Limey (Soderbergh, 1999)

This article at Cinephilia and Beyond reminded me that this is the 25th anniversary of Soderbergh’s The Limey in which Terence Stamp plays a cockney criminal in Los Angeles, seeking revenge for the death of his estranged daughter.

I hadn’t seen the film since it came out so I thought this was a good time to dust off the Umbrella Entertainment Blu-ray (from a 4K remaster made to mark the twentieth anniversary).

There’s no need for me to repeat many of the insights in that C&B piece (by Sven Mikulec) but here are some of my observations after rewatching last night:

• “You could see the sea from here if you could see it,” remains one of the 100 best lines in the history of cinema, helped by a beautifully deadpan performance from the great character actor Luis Guzmán.

• I discovered from the DVD extras that the wonderfully off-kilter editing (by Sarah Flack) and oblique attitude to time was the result of decisions made in post-production and not in the original script. That’s what elevates the film to close-to-masterpiece status and I was reminded of another film that completely changed its structure in post – Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. Evidently, Limey screenwriter Lem Dobbs is still sore about it.

• The film is famous for using a Stamp performance from 1967 (in Ken Loach’s Poor Cow) for the flashbacks, and it works wonderfully well, but the device also serves to point up the parallels between Stamp’s ex-con Wilson and his target, Peter Fonda’s Valentine. For both of them, their heyday was the 60s. Indeed, Fonda tells his new young girlfriend at one point something like, “the 60s weren’t really the 60s, it was just ’66 and a bit of ’67". Both of them are out of their time for different reasons.

• Stamp is a genuine East End lad, from the same part of the world where I grew up – the dad of a pal of mine from school was at school with him in the ‘50s – but there’s something a little off about his cockney ways in the film, as if he’s been away from the old manor too long and he’s trying too hard to put it back on. That’s probably the point – Wilson has been in prison for nine years for “the Wembley Stadium job” where his gang got away with the takings from a Pink Floyd concert, so he’s understandably not used to being around ordinary people. It’s a great performance, no doubt, but I think Stamp is at his best when he’s being beautifully inscrutable – check out Stephen Frears’ The Hit from 1984.

• Soderbergh was on a hot streak at this point. (One might ask, when has he ever not been?) He’d just had a huge hit with Out of Sight (and he sneaks a TV appearance of his great mate Clooney into a scene here) and would go on to make Erin Brockovich and Traffic in the following year. But The Limey initially tested badly and was rescued by his decision to get fully weird with the order of everything – not just scenes, but shots within scenes and dialogue within shots – and he was lucky that an experiment he’d made while shooting would help that pay off: he got his cast to run the same dialogue scenes in several different locations, allowing him to discombobulate the audience by having a conversation shift from one place to another and back again.

---

---

Where to watch The Limey