Welcome to my recurring Five-Star Three-Star Cinema Club column, in which I am out in search of that rare delight: the five-star three-star movie. Inspired by my post about 1996’s Twister, and expanded upon in a follow-up post, the idea here is to build out a canon of movies that are not exactly great, and certainly not transcendent, but are great at being the exact kind of perfect mediocrity you sometimes crave on a Sunday afternoon.
Peter Hyams has his shooters. I’m not exactly one of them, though maybe I need to work on that. Hyams is best known for Capricorn One, Outland, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (and for being the father of Universal Soldier: Regeneration director John Hyams). Something like a journeyman, Hyams has picked up a reputation in some corners for his incredible eye. An eye so good, he eventually became his own cinematographer. For something like two decades, he pumped out reliably handsome productions of often trashy material, making an art of the three-star movie. No surprise, then, that he ends up here, the subject of another Five-Star Three-Star Cinema Club entry.
The film in question: The Star Chamber. Michael Douglas is a young Los Angeles judge, Steven Hardin, almost zealously devoted to the letter of the law in a crime-ridden city tearing itself apart at the seams. In two separate cases, Hardin follows clear precedent leading to dismissal of charges against obviously guilty parties having committed heinous crimes. Frustrated by both the limits of the law as a neutral arbiter of justice, and the moral weight he carries as its adjudicator, Hardin is pulled into a conspiracy of judges exacting extralegal justice on those criminals unduly protected by the law. Things quickly spiral out of control.
There is such thing as good conservative art, and it often comes in the form of movies like The Star Chamber, whose paranoid world view is born out of a sense of social collapse. It’s a conservatism recognizable in the work of Clint Eastwood, for example, a filmmaker whose right-wing, libertarian leanings reflect a society lacking a spiritual core rather than any bigotry or will to dominate. This sort of conservativism is often the domain of self-described liberal filmmakers, who nonetheless twist real societal ills into hysterical fantasies. The solution rests, ultimately, on the individual who sees the world clearly. The Star Chamber depicts a dystopian L.A. in which depraved serial killers are let off because of arcane technicalities. But its suspicion of systems and bureaucracy is also matched by a mistrust of authoritarian power. Hardin sits between these polarities, the man who recognizes the need for a deeper commitment to traditional values of law, morality, and good, hard work.
The Star Chamber is a perfectly fitting cross between crime and legal dramas, with a descent into conspiracy thriller, and in a lot of ways feels like an ‘80s movie that forgot it’s not the ‘70s anymore. It’s a movie filled with great faces. Douglas, of course, but also rougher faces, like Hal Holbrook, and Yaphet Kotto, and Larry Hankin, and Don Calfa, and on, and on. It’s shot halfway like Dog Day Afternoon and halfway like Gordon Willis on steroids. Out of the crosscurrent, Hyams produces a film at once heightened in its gritty crime hysteria and grounded in a sense, however thin, of moral seriousness. If it can’t reach the heights of those actually great films of the ‘70s—All the President’s Men and Klute, this ain’t—The Star Chamber nonetheless tickles similar nerves. At the same time, its got one foot planted firmly in a more, generously speaking, pure sene of entertainment. The silliness of the plot, the sensationalism, sometimes put it in the realm of a thinking man’s Death Wish. Hyams’ movie is one whose veneer of sophistication is held up by the spit-and-duct-tape of a less morally queasy ending than that Charles Bronson reactionary classic, and a far more interesting, expressionistic style.
Indeed, if there’s anything that places The Star Chamber several rungs above shoddier attempts at dancing the same tightrope, it’s the film’s style. I came to watch the film, not because I was on the lookout for it, or because I was delving into the work of Peter Hyams. No, it came to me as a fan scan of a 35mm theatrical print. A Czech print, in fact! Complete with a whole extra title sequence for the dub artists.
The scanned print, which is appropriately rough in spots, looks absolutely magnificent. A real testament to the work of DP Richard Hannah, who was no doubt being bossed around by his director and DP-to-be. It’s a sumptously film, dark and and gorgeous, and also rough and real.
Hyams and Hannah make the most of the anamorphic widescreen frame, using its scope and distortion to isolate characters in washes of light.
The result is a film whose siliness, not merely elevated by style, is consumed by it, plunging the viewer in its mesmerizing world of mixed-up morality. That it doesn’t add up to much more than the ideas it throws out there is beside the point when the way the movie looks and feels is this great. It helps, too, to have excellent actors.
Is it possible Michael Douglas is now underrated as an actor? An unusual movie star, when you really think about it, Douglas’s appeal was always the feeling that just beneath the surface is a guy just slightly more depraved than he should be. As Hardin, he leans heavily into the do-gooder side of his charisma, but with his character’s professional frustrations slowly unravelling him to reveal an uneasy attraction to vigilantism. Holbrook—ostensibly the movie’s true villain, the man behind the judges’ conspiracy—leverages his own earthy American gravitas, exposing its grasping, desperate qualities. Kotto, one of the best actors to ever grace the screen, makes a full meal out of his brief screen time as the one cop who, like Hardin, cares as much about the moral implications of doing his job well as meeting the technical requirements. A key scene between them reads almost like the De Niro/Pacino meeting in Heat.
Everything finally collides in a sequence where Hardin, now realizing the two seedy guys he had let off on charges of sexually trafficking, abusing and murdering young boys were genuinely innocent of the crime, sets off to save them from vigilante justice. It’s not much more than a chase through a building, with shooting and explosions. Spectacle, with a look that seems to anticipate MTV and David Fincher. Hardly the stuff of the properly sophisticated dramas and thrillers it apes. But here again the style comes to the rescue, as Hyams delivers one of the best looking such sequences I’ve ever seen, put plainly. Not Se7en level, but in the conversation.
Sometimes the paranoid thriller reduces itself down to pure visual paranoia, pure thrill, and that’s what The Star Chamber does at its climax. The slow build of the narrative bursts into splashes of surreal light. A beautiful culmination, and incredibly satisfying.
What’s interesting about The Star Chamber is despite its beauty, it never transcends its crasser impulses, not just toward commerciality (it was a bomb anyway), but toward its own thematic interests. It may look and feel like a serious film on the surface, but any seriousness it exhibits is ultimately pretention, intentional or not. Hyams’ simplistic (lazy, even) moralism is there in 2010, as well: a film that takes a masterpiece about the amoral evolutionary urge toward human progress, and makes it all about “World Peace.” This is not some big thinker we’re talking about, no matter how great Hyams is with a camera. But where 2010 suffers for its pretentions, The Star Chamber finds harmony in its tone and style and superficiality. A film that draws you in with the feeling that it might have something to say, fails to back that up, but is so well made it leaves you perfectly content at having been taken on the ride.
The Five-Star Three Star Cinema Club Canon (so far):
The Star Chamber (1983)
Didn’t quite make the cut: