miscellanium: still of lawrence dane as mitzi in rituals (1977) (rituals | put us back together again)
miscellanium ([personal profile] miscellanium) wrote2022-05-16 09:30 am
  • Add Memory
  • Share This Entry
  • Current Music: the rural alberta advantage - drain the blood
Entry tags:

rituals (1977) - part 2 of 2

this is a great, great movie if you like seeing middle-aged men beat up and pushed to a breaking point

In the mosquito-infested clearing north of Toronto where the final scenes of a movie thriller called Rituals are being shot, Lawrence Dane hangs, turning slowly in the windless night. He is dangling from a crossbar, eerily lit by klieg lights. His blood-streaked face is twisted in agony as he prepares for his Big Death Scene. The agony is not entirely feigned: the special body harness he wears cuts deeply into his flesh. “How does it feel, lad?” inquires actor Hal Holbrook. “Well,” Dane replies wearily, “it ain’t Peter Pan.”

-- "The face is familiar but you can't place the name? It's Dane, Larry Dane" by Ron Base for Macleans magazine, 1976


since this is part two i won't go over the rating and the plot again. (here's part one if you missed it, do please read that first if you haven't already.) obviously there will be more spoilers here, but one, if you think spoilers completely ruin a story then was it a good story in the first place? and two, this movie is over 40 years old lmao

the escalation of events in the second half is paced very nicely - the only point at which the pacing suffers is in the last few scenes, where we could have used a little more time to expand on the antagonist so there's not room to ask "but why now/why these guys specifically?" like, we can deduce a lot from what they give us, but i would have liked knowing what happened between the antagonist's trauma and the present day because i was left wondering why he apparently(?) hadn't tried anything before. was it just the first time he'd encountered doctors after being recovered enough to do anything about it? perhaps, but it's been decades.... maybe his isolation working to protect other people? his brother? these are all pretty different potential explanations. i feel like the narrative steps just a little too close to the line between letting the viewer figure things out versus withholding too much and confusing people.

that said, i still highly recommend this film because in my opinion that's not a severe enough shortcoming that it substantially impacts one's ability to enjoy the overall thing. like, you can still come away with a fundamental understanding of what happened, etc. and sometimes when media is flawed i find it more compelling since yeah, it does leave me asking questions even if they aren't the ones that were intended. and then of course there's the terrific performances from everyone involved.


highlight of the second half of the movie: it's very brief and mostly unseen but he pukes at one point and it was an unexpected treat uwu



screenshots and further commentary under the cut. several images have been altered to try and compensate for the poor film preservation, but i'm not a professional image editor lol. warning for gore and other violent imagery, and discussion of a homophobic slur






this is one of those moments where the bickering is funny because while mitzi is trying to talk to harry, marty keeps drunkenly rambling behind him about reasons these things could be happening to them and he's Not In The Mood so he starts kicking at marty. it's so juvenile but feels like a natural response from a man who's 1) at the end of his figurative rope for the day and 2) not the nicest guy around. it tells us a little more about mitzi as a person, that he'd resort to that instead of just ignoring marty.



"i've busted my ass all day for that little faggot, and then he turns around and plays head games with me!"

this doesn't go without comment - marty retorts "how quickly we forget our manners, eh, mitzi?" and harry tries to break it up by telling them both to quit it. clearly we're not supposed to side with mitzi here, which, considering the time period in which this film was made and what seems like a relatively macho premise, is a welcome surprise. but it doesn't feel like this is supposed to be a villain moment for him, just a moment of weakness born from frustration. it's a concise illustration of the fear they're all grappling with and how they're being worn down. flushed out, to use the prey metaphor they keep returning to.
(also, maurice moment lol. it's the scene that made my spouse turn to me and say "this character is just your oc". love my self-hating homophobe man)

the subsequent fistfight in the water between harry and mitzi doesn't screencap well but trust me when i say it is both hilarious and horrifying. rip marty

thinking about it, water features pretty heavily in this movie. for obvious reasons, sure, but it also works nicely with the theme of rituals and the christian symbolism. from the roaring catharsis of the whitewater rapids to the dried up dam, this movie does a fine job making the landscape a character in the story as well.


he's very cute with the busted lip uwu

it makes sense that harry would feel responsible for what happened to marty and therefore be reluctant to let him go; mitzi picked the fight, but harry took the bait - though i'm not sure mitzi was actually looking for a fight. he seems like the kind of character who wants some kind of acknowledgement of his work, which tracks with the way he focuses on how harry "owes" him for dealing with harry's father and then how after his apology is refused he goes back to needling harry about the same thing albeit a little less directly. it's selfish, absolutely, ill-timed for sure, but does he have a point? shrugs

at the same time, it feels a bit like the one-sided conversation they have over marty's barely-conscious body is mitzi's way of reinforcing his statement of "don't be too proud, harry. we still need each other" because he compares his own father to harry's - likely to show that he doesn't seem himself as morally superior (though it's a very passive-aggressive way of doing so, lol)

if mitzi feels remorse over what happened to marty he doesn't show it here. he's more focused on his own survival, so that makes sense, but then we have this interesting detail in the next scene.



mitzi wearing marty's glasses, busted by the tumble in the rapids when marty hit his head. he doesn't do this again in the remainder of the film. is it a gesture of guilt or affection or something else? how did harry react when mitzi pulled the glasses out of marty's breast pocket? what rationale might mitzi have given? the perfect moment for a "missing scene" fic.




*stares at his butt* me too buddy. if nothing else at least the antag has good taste in ass


another example where the bickering is soooo funny in a way that doesnt work against the movie - like i said in part one, it feels authentic and rounds out the characters.









"holy mary, mother of god, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death!"

his sarcastic little prayer here in response to what he thinks is harry being sanctimonious is funny because his delivery is so good but also because my oc maurice is a priest, so..... and apparently in the italian dub for this they made mitzi like. super religious. to the point where my italian friend was surprised how not religious he was in the original. lawrence dane/mitzi is AMBI - assigned maurice by italians, lmao


cute.....






after harry yeets abel's head but is still determined to press on with marty in tow - i don't blame mitzi for balking. like obviously by now harry's the final girl, but let's be honest: mitzi's reactions are the more realistic. i'm sure a lot of people would like to see themselves as following in harry's footsteps but i'm skeptical they actually would. 







"fuck it. you'll get us both killed."

when he catches back up with harry - interesting choice of visual imagery here since mitzi is far from being a sun-crowned savior. but he hasn't abandoned harry and this particular moment is from harry's pov - a palpable sense of relief at not being left alone.










he's so cute when he cries........ *breathing heavily*






he's so cute i wanna wipe his face clean and just smooch him. smooch his delicious nose




"you're crazy. you hear me? you're crazy."



tbh? i don't blame mitzi one bit for fucking off here. if harry wanted to carry marty this far but is willing to just mercy-kill dj without further argument, i'd be scared for my own safety too. like, what changed between here and the rapids? i personally do understand why harry made the decision he did here but i can also sympathize with mitzi. if dj gets the chopping block what's to stop harry from sacrificing mitzi as well? obvs it's more complicated than that but when self-preservation is at stake then mitzi's reaction is entirely fair imo.





and then the next time we see him he's tied up in what might as well have been shibari. nice





even when he knows the end has to be near he's STILL squabbling with harry lol. like, i can't blame him too much, he knows harry has a gun and wants it to be used to help free him, and after what happened earlier with dj he's surely thinking that harry would be willing to let him die, but.... harry told him he'd had an artery slashed and mitzi just blows it off like "i'll take care of you just shoot him first" LMAO. at least when he starts wailing his voice is so cute


yeah he's burning to death here but look at his TITS


*manly fainting noises*

rip mitzi. after harry recovers from self-treating his slashed artery it's just flambe time. harry doesn't even have a real chance to grieve, though it's clear he feels horrible about it. i've been told it would take much longer to die from being burned alive but shhh. i'd rather think he asphyxiated from the smoke before suffering any further, unlike father grandier in the devils (1971).

and that's lawrence dane in rituals! like i said, do please watch it if you haven't already; it's much more thoughtful than the movie it's constantly compared to, and has a nicely understated ending once harry gets out of the cabin after mitzi dies. everyone's performances are just fantastic. i could watch this movie so many times and not get tired of it.

 
 

dane was quoted in a 1981 profile of the actor gordon pinsent as saying that “hollywood has a kind of aura about it, a kind of place where you cannot rid yourself of the feeling that one day you might wake up and be 65 and waiting for the phone to ring.” that sentiment is part of why he moved back to canada, he explained, and I'd like to think that despite the rather tortured distribution history of rituals it was still a project he could remember as a high point of his canadian career.

there's more i could say but this post is long enough as it is. as always, feel free to leave a comment!