R.I.P. Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

"Somewhere in my strange career, someone has liked something." - Dennis Hopper 


Sadly, iconic actor/director Dennis Hopper lost his battle with prostate cancer Saturday morning. Every obituary will understandably point to his breakthrough milestone EASY RIDER (1969), but I'm sure most people who would read this blog know he had a ginormous crazy career spanning almost 6 decades. 


 Impressively IMDb lists over 200 film and television appearances in nearly every genre. In 1986 alone he appeared in HOOSIERS, BLUE VELVET, RIVER'S EDGE, and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, and from the looks of it that was a typical year for the man as he worked constantly until his illness got the best of him - 6 movies in 2008, 26 episodes of Crash 2008-09, and a couple of upcoming projects (THE LAST FILM FESTIVAL, ALPHA AND OMEGA) set for later this year. A career so vast is difficult to cherry pick from, especially since he had so many bit parts in major movies - his roles in friend James Dean's movies REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) and GIANT (1956) for example - and also because a few films he directed are unavailable on DVD these days - THE LAST MOVIE (1971) and OUT OF THE BLUE (1980). That said these are my picks for:


10 Essential (And Available) Dennis Hopper Performances


1. EASY RIDER (Dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969)



When I said every obit would highlight this as Hopper's most acclaimed achievement I wasn't saying I wouldn't also. It's inescapable as a classic counterculture event of a movie that helped kick off the "New Hollywood" movement of the late '60s/early '70s. It also solidified the long-haired mustached hippie wiseacre persona that Hopper would return to a number of times throughout his acting career. 


 Concerning a couple of drug dealers (Hopper and Peter Fonda) who make a huge score and set out on their motorcycles to go, in the words of the film's tagline, "looking for America", EASY RIDER is very dated with clumsy artistic cuts, redneck stereotypes, and a cringe-inducing psychedelic trip sequence, but Hopper's glee while riding through Monument Valley out over the sunset on his chopper is infectious. In those moments, which were innovative in their use of rock song scoring, the film's theme of freedom lets its freak flag fly the highest. 


2. BLUE VELVET (Dir. David Lynch, 1986)



Frank Booth, a Nitrous Oxide inhaling sexual deviant, was considered a comeback role for Hopper who had gone through more than one wilderness period in the years since EASY RIDER and the failure of its follow-up THE LAST MOVIE. Booth was scary and a bit funny at the same time; the manner in which he menaces nice boy Kyle MacLachlan being a twisted yet beautiful example: "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" The part won Hopper a few Critics' Association awards and in 2008 was voted #54 in Premiere Magazine's list of "The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time."


3. APOCALYPSE NOW (Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) Credited as "Photojournalist" and only given a small amount of screen-time in the final reel, Hopper is one of the most memorable elements of Coppola's seminal sprawling Vietnam epic. His cryptic speeches like this one still resonate 30 years later: "This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out in space without, like, you know, with fractions - what are you gonna land on, one quarter, three eighths - what are you gonna do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics, okay? Dialectic logic is there's only love or hate, you either love somebody or you hate them." Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz then angrily hurls a book at Hopper in a moment that doesn't feel scripted.



4. HOOSIERS (Dir. David Anspaugh, 1986) As I mentioned earlier, 1986 was a banner year for Hopper. His roles in BLUE VELVET, RIVER'S EDGE, and this Oscar nominated turn as the basketball supporting town drunk had him unstoppably on the comeback trail. It's a folksy formulaic sports film about underdogs triumphing against all odds, but Hopper's gutsy edge is no small part of the film's abundant charms.

Ongoing Adventures In Altman Appraisal

Seeing all of the films that iconic director Robert Altman made in his half century career can be quite a task these days.

Several titles have never been released on DVD (including BREWSTER McCLOUD, HealH, and COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN) and one of his first features, COUNTDOWN, is only available as part of Warner Archives Collection’s “Burn On Demand” series so you can’t get it from Netflix.

Recently, inspired by reading the excellent “Robert Altman: The Oral Biography” by Mitchell Zuckoff, I’ve been catching up with the handful of movies of Altman’s movies that I haven’t yet seen. These 3 films are easily available but still fairly obscure - here are my thoughts:

THE JAMES DEAN STORY (1957)

The opening titles of this - one of the very first bio-docs ever - declare that this is “a different kind of motion picture.” They go on to explain: “The presence of the leading character in this film has been made possible by the use of existing motion picture material, tape recordings of his voice, and by means of a new technique – dynamic exploration of the still photograph.”

Meet Me At The Wrecking Ball - A Blog With A Cause

This post is going to be a bit different from my usual array of riveting reviews and looney lists because this time I have a cause. I rarely write about things local, except for mentions of the theatre I work at part time (The Varsity), but it has come to my attention that a historic house not far from where I live in Chapel Hill, NC is in danger of being demolished very soon. How this pertains to Film Babble is that this house was used as a film location almost 40 years ago. The house is the Edward Kidder Graham House (named for a former UNC President who died in 1918) located on Battle Lane at the edge of the UNC campus and the movie it was used in was THREE IN THE ATTIC (Dir. Richard Wilson, 1968).

Haven't heard of it? That's okay, I hadn't either - It isn't available from Netflix having never had a proper DVD release (I found online that some outfit called Must Have Films is selling DVD copies of it but they don't look quite legit) and VHS copies are fairly hard to find. After some phoning around I found a shoddy old videocassette copy at a local video store (a building surely to be demolished soon as well) and viewed it anxious to see some Lyndon B. Johnson era shots of my hometown. Through the awful picture full of drop-outs (horizontal white streaks) and the incomprehensible muffled sound I was able to make out the Edward Kidder Graham House as well as many shots of the UNC campus, surrounding neighborhoods and the Alpha Tau Omega House on Franklin Street which was used prominently in a party sequence.

The movie itself is honestly a pretty schlocky 60's sexploitation picture. Made by American International Films, a company that specialized in low budget fringe films that would appeal to teenagers, it is by today's AMERICAN PIE standards a fairly lame affair - though one not without its kitschy dated charms. James Dean look-a-like (and somebody who studied Dean's every move) Christopher Jones finds himself locked in a sorority house attic (The Edward Kidder Graham House stands in for Ford Hall as UNC doubles as the equally ficticious Willard College For Men and Fulton - A Women's College) after 3 college girls ( Yvette Mimieux, Judy Pace, and Maggie Thrett) find out he's been triple timing them. 

As Paxton Quigley, Jones' voice-over narration promises a look at the "groovy subculture of today's female" and he says "you've heard of the sexual revolution...well, I'm probably one of its first casualties" but this is pretty grandiose talk coming from someone decked out in what looks like the JC Penny Jim Morrison line - fluffy white shirt, love beads and yes, leather pants. No such social sexual commentary or satire is really presented - just dialogue like this between Quigley and girlfriend #1's (Mimieux) father, played by Richard Derr, who bursts in on them living in sin:

Mr. Clinton: "What kind of a man are you?"

Paxton Quigley: "Well, I think I know...I know where it's at."

Mr. Clinton: "What?"

Paxton Quigley: "I know my way around."

Mr. Clinton: "Are you one of those potheads?"

Yep, that's about the level of insight in THREE IN THE ATTIC. There was potential as Roger Ebert notes in his 1968 review that it could've been a "near GRADUATE" but the film makers motives were just as cheap as its budget. Essentially a series of love montages hanging on a bare narrative thread this movie still has some lure as a curio - fans of college cult films * will delight in its pre-ANIMAL HOUSE sensibility, cinéastes will enjoy the notion of what direction James Dean's career might've gone in (or at least looked like) had he lived through to that turbulent time, but for this blog's purposes Chapel Hill residents will celebrate THREE IN THE ATTIC as a snapshot of the town in the late 60's and a portrait of a house worth preserving and restoring.

* It is most certainly a cult movie - Joe Bob's Ultimate B-Movie Guide gives it 4 stars and says of it - "one of the weirdest flicks of the sixties" - Joe Bob Briggs, 2000

Postnote #1: There was actually a sequel entitled UP IN THE CELLAR (1970) also known as THREE IN THE CELLAR which also had Judy Pace in it. It was a little of a bigger deal with Larry Hagman and Joan Collins but since it was filmed in New Mexico I didn't seek it out.

Postnote #2: For more information and pictures of the Edward Kidder Graham House and other historic houses in Chapel Hill please visit :

The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill

Flickr: Photos from chapelhill.preservation

Also this interview with Preservation Society of Chapel Hill Executive Director Ernest Dollar is worth a read:

Independent Weekly: News: Q&A: Ernest Dollar

More later...