And I've got one that I have barely any acquaintance with at all.
If you're late to the party -- that would be one day late -- I've decided to use this (hopefully only) week of lockdown in Victoria to have a little festival of movies borrowed from the library on DVD, one per night, as a chance to appreciate DVDs again, before they stop being available at all.
On night #2 -- actually, afternoon #2 -- I decided to watch Franklin J. Schaffner's Papillon, a movie I knew only from hearing its title here and there. And because it's 145 minutes long, I knew I wouldn't get in the whole thing after dinner. My pattern is to fall asleep during 90-minute movies, so I had to get an early start.
Fortunately, one of my lockdown traditions from last year has returned, which is garage nap time after work.
We've got a little beanbag setup in our garage, and that's a good place to go where I know I won't be bothered. I nestle in and close my eyes, with a sleeping bag to protect me from the encroaching cold. (June 1st is the first day of winter in Australia, after all -- they switch seasons on the first of the month down here.) The kids are watching TV (another lockdown allowance) so I know they won't come looking for me.
Now, whether I choose to actually spend that time napping or not is up to me. On Tuesday afternoon, I chose to use that time watching the first hour of Papillon, to leave me a far more easily digestible chunk for the evening hours.
This is where the second DVD player comes in.
It's actually a USB DVD drive I can connect to my computer, which I bought along with my new laptop back in October or thereabouts, because this is the first computer I've owned without a built-in CD/DVD drive since before that was a thing. But as you might expect, I've barely used it. I burned a CD or two on it, but then it's just sat among my other peripherals, waiting for its next chance to be of use.
Of course, this also meant I had to install a DVD viewer. It annoys me that Windows no longer has a decent DVD viewer that comes as part of the package. You used to be able to play movies through Windows Media Player, but for some reason that no longer seems possible. Anyway, I couldn't figure it out.
I first installed Nero DVD Player, but I think this software is some kind of scam. It kept wanting me to pay for something, even though it was billed as free. It played the movie, but it played it with lags about every two seconds, which I suspected is some kind of built-in defect that you can only fix by paying the $11.99 or whatever they wanted from me. Screw that noise.
So then I figured out what the DVD viewer I had on my last computer was, VLC Media Player, with the orange traffic cone as its icon for some reason. This worked great.
I did have a little bit of a nap when the warmth and coziness of the beanbag-sleeping bag combo was too much to resist, but I got through that first hour before I had to start preparing dinner for the kids, and finished up the rest of it by 10:30 on my regular DVD player in the living room.
On to the movie itself.
It seems to me that they used to make movies about surviving the prison experience a lot more than they do now. They still make them, but they no longer feature the biggest stars, they no longer play on the highest number of screens, and they certainly no longer run for nearly two-and-a-half hours. I could speculate on the reasons for that change, but it would only be speculation. My suspicion is people are no longer as excited to watch people suffering through miserable conditions and solitary confinement as they were when movies like Stalag 17, The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai were our biggest entertainments.
Actually the prison movie I got the most vibes from in Papillon was Cool Hand Luke, which had already been out six years when Papillon was released in 1973, the year of my birth. That movie is about breaking down a cocksure prisoner into a shell of his former self, and so is this one. I still give Paul Newman the edge in the star wattage department over Steve McQueen, but McQueen did really surprise me here.
Namely, I had always thought McQueen was more of a movie star than an actor, but he does some tremendous acting here. There's a scene where McQueen, the title character, is coming to the end of two years of solitary confinement in a French Guiana penal colony, and he's just come fully untethered from his sanity. He's trying to tell the guards that he just can't remember the name of the person who sent him the coconuts early on -- that would be Dustin Hoffman's Louis Dega, and the guards are desperate to get this information in order to spread the punishment around (up to and including decapitation in the town square). It might be a ruse, or it might really be that Papillon has lost it -- McQueen seems to go full method in this scene, and is really living through his character's deprivation and loss of selfhood. I was really impressed.
I haven't seen a ton of McQueen movies, but I always thought of him more as a gruff tough guy, a Clint Eastwood, who could (almost) never show any vulnerability. Not only does he show a lot of it here, but he's actually really soft-spoken, almost sounding a bit square in parts.
Papillon reminded me of some other movies than the ones already mentioned, including one that hadn't come out yet, making me wonder if that movie borrowed from this one. But when I googled Raiders of the Lost Ark and Papillon, I didn't get much in the way of results, even though there's a scene here where a fleeing companion of Papillon's get spiked through the chest by a booby trap in the Honduran jungle, one that reminded me very much of the one that gets Forrestal in Raiders. The fact that they are also pursued by natives whistling blow darts at them completed the comparison.
Speaking of natives, I even got a little bit of a Mutiny on the Bounty vibe here, as Papillon at one point spends some number of wonderful days in a Honduran paradise with a native woman, one he is loath to leave. The movie took me by surprise again in this spot as it goes a good ten minutes without dialogue.
I thought Papillon was solid but it's not a special favorite of mine. I was glad to see it though, as I have not been watching a lot of older movies this year outside of the ones I've watched for various viewing series where it has been assigned to me, or I've assigned it to myself.
Now, lest I forget the other component of this "series": Could I have gotten it on any of my streaming services?
I knew Netflix would be a no; they rarely have anything from before the year 2000 these days. But so too were Stan, Amazon, Kanopy, and just to be exhaustive, Disney+. So that makes us 2-for-2 on DVD movies I watched that I couldn't have gotten (for free) anywhere else.
Night #3 should be a proper night, as the movie I have in mind will be shorter, and will not require my computer in any way, shape or form.
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