Global Discoveries on DVD:
Star Vehicles: H.B. Halicki’s Cinema Junkyard

By Andrew Tracy

Thom Andersen’s ever-more invaluable video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) devotes a particularly laudatory segment to H.B. “Toby” Halicki’s original Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), praising its “stubborn, even perverse literalism” against Hollywood’s geographical fragmentation. “Halicki realizes Dziga Vertov’s dream,” declaims Andersen’s dry commentary, “an anti-humanist cinema of bodies and machines in motion. His materialist masterpiece was the first manifesto for a cinema of conspicuous destruction.” An amusing aside in a compendium film which mainly trumpets the cast-off and the incidental against the supposedly definitive, yet what stuns upon being led to Gone in 60 Seconds itself is that Andersen’s tongue need only be slightly in cheek. Halicki’s half-forgotten car crash opus and the even more obscure(d) efforts that followed in his brief three-and-a-half film career, all recently resurfaced on DVD thanks to Halicki’s widow and a team of dedicated former collaborators, occupy that narrow stratum of junk too intriguing, provocative, and energetic to be reduced to sociological dissection by the genre anatomists—films too silly to be taken seriously but too fascinating to be taken any way else.

Halicki’s unintentional avant-gardism is thus both a godsend and a challenge to the critic, forced to cut a narrow path between the equally slippery slopes of condescension and hyperbole. Yet perhaps such insufferably clichéd sentiments as “kinetic,” or worse, “pure cinema,” can be avoided by focusing, pace Andersen, on the all-too human qualities of Halicki’s plotless, characterless, steel-and-chrome canon. Apart from the makeshift, handcrafted charm which stands in stark contrast to the suffocating Hollywood thrill-machines which succeeded it (including the Bruckheimered remake of Gone), l’oeuvre Halicki speaks poignantly of both the nightmarish stasis of modernity as well as its routes of escape. In his denatured orgies of ceaseless destruction, his circular vision of disposability and infinite repetition, and the madly intertextual formal structures he derives from it, Halicki realizes not only Vertov’s dream but Walter Benjamin’s as well: a junkyard art which explodes the myth of novelty by which modernity (or in this instance, Hollywood) has sedated the minds and emptied the wallets of its slumbering subjects.

The film capital here is not simply the straw man against which to favourably contrast the Halicki canon, but a genuine opponent to the mechanic-junkyard operator-stunt driver-real estate dabbler’s dream project, an enemy in fact as well as form. Gone in 60 Seconds is no poor cousin to the contemporary Hollywood thrillers it competed against and triumphed over—independently financed and distributed against studio aggression, it eventually took in a $40 million payday—nor simply an exploitation flick that got lucky. Gone announces its brazen distinctiveness from minute one, with perhaps the ballsiest credit sequence since Aldrich ran the titles backward for Kiss Me Deadly (1955). “H.B. Halicki Mercantile Co. and Junk Yard Presents,” announces the pre-title crawl, while the cast list is limited to a single name, “Eleanor,” the nom de vol of the 1973 Ford Mustang that a ring of car thieves has to deliver as the final item on their 48-car checklist. Halicki doesn’t just step on Hollywood’s financial toes in defying their stranglehold on distribution, he trumpets his amateur status within the film itself, his textual provocation both taunting his studio opponents and, by reserving the cast list for the film’s true leading lady, signaling his radical reversal of the ego-driven cinema they represent.

The car-chase landmarks that immediately preceded Gone had all been couched in larger narratives of movie-star iconography (Steve McQueen and Bullitt, 1968), New Hollywood auteurism (William Friedkin and The French Connection, 1971), or half-baked, audience-flattering hippie existentialism (Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, 1971), the signature autos reduced to both literal and figurative vehicles for the self-important humans at the helm. Despite his justified bragging rights for personally planning and executing Eleanor’s impressive feats, not to mention his many hats as writer, producer, director, and star—in the role of crackerjack insurance investigator/car thief Maindrian Pace, whose name is his most memorable quality—Halicki reverses this balance with truly remarkable self-effacement. In the face of the vehicular carnage that is the film’s raison d’être and his own pallid onscreen presence, Halicki himself inevitably and intentionally disappears, even underlining his own essential facelessness by spending the bulk of his screen time—including the spectacular 40-minute chase sequence that makes up the greater part of the film—disguised beneath a grey wig and facial hair. Concealed behind their uniform wigs and ‘staches (a possible inspiration for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video?), the gang is nearly impossible to tell apart. The near-total removal of identifiable humanity also results in a near-total removal of human agency. Greed, desire, jealousy, and revenge are briefly invoked and quickly forgotten, self-aware sops to convention which barely attempt to mask the film’s true narrative: the fascination of mechanism divorced from motive.

This doesn’t mean that Gone is simply car porn, however; it’s too fast to be fetishism. Halicki doesn’t dispense with ego and personality in the human realm to simply displace it onto his machines. In the trite and already forgotten remake, Nicolas Cage’s laughably sentimentalized outlaw (“I didn’t do it for the money. It was for the cars”) caresses his anthropomorphized auto/woman for the benefit of cheap laughs and lazy minds, two frauds hiding behind that cynical and contemptuous personalization which Hollywood excels at. Halicki’s having none of it: Eleanor’s star billing belies the fact that Gone features a multiplicity of Eleanors. Yellow Mustangs dot the Los Angeles landscape, their locations duly noted down by Pace’s gang in the event that a spare is required. The interchangeable thieves are mirrored in the interchangeable objects of their thieving, a correlation made clear in the gloriously anticlimactic conclusion, where, following the film’s greatest moment of pathos—a slow-motion, multi-angled and thrice-repeated jump over a wreck which crumples Eleanor’s front end like an accordion—Pace simply spots another Eleanor at a car wash, quickly switches the plates and drives off into the sunset.

To claim that Gone is all action and no story is to miss the radically reconfigured narrative it tells to perfection: the interaction of two machines, man and vehicle, independent of any reason apart from their functional compatibility. Halicki’s colourless Pace is the inadvertent symbol of that symbiosis: both investigator and thief, his heists carefully restricted to vehicles insured by the very companies that then hire him to investigate his own crimes, Pace is not between two worlds (as the ad copy would say) but at the heart of a ceaselessly functioning mechanism. Gone’s narrative is a systemic, not a dramatic one. The final chase is not an outburst of defiance; there’s none of the requisite cop-baiting of the good ol’ boy car-chase cycle to follow. Pace’s escape has all the outlaw triumph of an accountant’s tabled report, nothing more than the completion of a process that, we can only assume from the “open” ending, will begin anew with the next commission. Speed leads inescapably back to stasis, to a ceaseless recurrence masked by the spectacle of bodies and machines in motion, by the chimera of conspicuous destruction.

Pace and his gang are not archaically romanticized rebels in a time of modernity, but its very agents. Pillaging and repackaging the machines that define the space around them (the network of South Bay roads and bridges which push people to the periphery), Pace’s anonymous crew disintegrate the proprietary identity invested in these automotive status symbols with a mere change of plates, recycling them to new owners who will eventually commit them to the junk pile when their time in fashion has come—from which Halicki will finance another movie to reduce more vehicles to scrap. Gone is the cinematic distillation of Benjamin’s commodity society-as-Hell, where “precisely what is newest doesn’t change, where the ‘newest’ in all its pieces keeps remaining the same. [This] constitutes the eternity of Hell and its sadistic craving for innovation.”

Few more appropriate descriptions could be found for the Hollywood machine which so relentlessly cannibalizes both its own products and those of maverick upstarts like Halicki, which envelops and consumes the “original” (if such a term even means anything in such an innately bastardized medium) on the way to the replica’s own eventual disappearance. What liberates Gone in 60 Seconds from this hellish cycle of repetition is its complete immersion within it. By exquisitely detailing the prison in all its raw, geometric beauty, Halicki frees his filmic language from the conventions that would entrap it; and concurrently, by removing himself as the focal point of attention, he inscribes his own person on every frame. The anti-humanist ballet which Halicki orchestrates twists back into genuine personalization, genuine singularity, and novelty, which presents a knotty metaphysical dilemma when the time comes for Halicki to capitalize on Gone’s success, to plug back into the cycle which it had disrupted. As Gone and Halicki’s own role as its creator were now incontestable (and commodifiable) facts in the world, so they had to become part of Halicki’s filmic world.

The result was Halicki’s own 8½, 1982’s The Junkman, in which, under the transparent pseudonym of “Harlan B. Hollis,” Halicki stars as…himself, junkyard operator, director of Gone in 60 Seconds, and now owner of a mini-empire centred upon a Western-themed compound which houses his enormous collection of classic cars and one of the world’s largest toy collections. Where Gone announced its dissolution of (human) personality in its opening credits, The Junkman forcefully re-asserts the primacy of the personal in its painstakingly handcrafted title cards, little moving dioramas populated by some of Halicki’s thousands of toys. The jaw-dropping naïveté of this opening sequence removes the taint of the vanity project by once again singing the praise of the amateur. Halicki’s proud bearing of what could be a rather derogatory nickname celebrates his role as a craftsman of the cast-off, a collector and preserver rather than a purveyor of macho heroics. That Halicki/Hollis is the film’s hero—once a drive to a personal appearance at the fictional James Dean Festival turns into an assassination attempt, the filmmaker/junkman pursued by hard-driving hitmen and explosive-laden biplanes—has less to do with egotism than it does with Halicki’s bizarre literalism: as he is the maker of the film and the driver of the lead car, and as there must be a car chase for the film to exist, thus he must be the object of the chasing. If Gone was inadvertent modernism, The Junkman is inadvertent postmodernism, and the enduring fascination of its blithely metatextual “reality”/“illusion” puzzle (obviously not caring, Halicki/Hollis at one point places himself next to a sign clearly labeled “Halicki Garage”) sustains it through its more garish passages. Halicki evidently felt he had to swim against his own uniqueness by throwing in more mainstream conventions: hick jokes, cop jokes, old lady jokes, a swipe at the French(!), and a hilariously “sexy” end credits sequence where models pose uncomfortably with cars and guns, the conspicuous atonality of it all indicating how foreign such devices were to Halicki’s stripped-down, chop-shop artistry.

That rag-and-bones aesthetic is made manifest in Halicki’s next and most perplexing effort, Deadline Auto Theft (1983), which splices together footage from The Junkman and Gone in 60 Seconds to create a “new” film. Combining two films into one was hardly an unknown practice—Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb begat Journey to the Lost City (1959), Lightning Swords of Death (1973) and Shogun Assassin (1980) handily compiled the Lone Wolf and Cub series, not to mention the merger of Queen of the Cannibals and Tales That Will Rip Your Heart Out into Francesco Martino’s magisterial Dr. Butcher, M.D. (1979)— but what elevates Halicki’s hybrid above those purely mercantile manoeuvers is the perpetuation of his unwitting formal gamesmanship. The opening chase sequence of Deadline Auto Theft, which establishes the enmity between Halicki’s reprised Pace and a police captain played by the burly Hoyt Axton (who later interacts with scenes filmed a decade earlier for Gone), is lifted from the opening of The Junkman, where the scene ended with Halicki/Hollis calling “Cut!” and wrapping up his “latest project.” Yet the version we see in Deadline has a more detailed framing narrative involving Axton’s onscreen daughter and her sleazy photographer boyfriend, while a major portion of the chase—a back-and-forth melee in a warehouse—was only briefly glimpsed on a Movieola screen in The Junkman as Halicki/Hollis consults with his editor; not to mention the fact that Axton had several scenes in The Junkman playing himself as an actor on Halicki/Hollis’ set. At which point does this constellation of fictions/non-fictions converge? Was The Junkman announcing the imminent arrival of Deadline (yet why would Halicki prime the publicity pump for a mere combination of his previous two films?), or did Deadline simply lift the newer footage from The Junkman to complement its swipes from Gone (yet when and why did Halicki film the footage that went unseen in Junkman)?

Knowing the answers to these questions—and they are likely easily answerable—takes away the pleasure of asking them, the pleasure of regarding Deadline as a perpetually confounding object. For while this last “completed” film is hardly essential viewing in the Halicki canon, in a way it is the apex of his involuntary, mechanistic radicalism. In Halicki’s cinema as in Benjamin’s Hell, precisely what is newest doesn’t change: the “new” no less than the “old,” the “real” (The Junkman’s pseudo-biography) no less than the “fictional”, is just so much debris from the junk pile, endlessly rearranged and tacked together. Yet Halicki’s openness in his pilfering, the all-too-obvious disconnect between the vanished 70s of Gone and the nascent 80s of The Junkman as combined in Deadline, opens an awareness in the viewer’s mind—an awareness of time, of a simultaneity of past and present, of a temporal dimension that has been lost in the illusory novelty of Hollywood product. “In reality, we live in the past; that is, the world that surrounds us is not new,” intones Andersen’s narrator in Los Angeles Plays Itself. “The things in it aren’t created anew every day. So any particular period is an amalgam of many earlier times.” Halicki’s endlessly circular footage sparks our active memories in dissent and derision (“Shit, I’ve seen this before!”), and then awakens us to the overlaps of time with which we live daily, the unnoticed lags between a still extant past and a lived present—a vital truth which the myth of novelty, the tyranny of “progress”, has obscured.

It would not be inapt to apply to Halicki Raymond Bellour’s rather disproportionate praise of Lang’s silly Indian adventures: “an inability to lie carried to the point of tragedy.” Unfortunately, and appropriately, in Halicki’s case the tragedy was a literal one. While filming Gone in 60 Seconds 2 in 1989, a water tower that had been rigged to collapse at the end of a chase scene toppled over during the crew’s preparation; cut in the fall, a steel support cable lashed out and killed Halicki instantly. What remains of the aborted sequel, thanks to Halicki’s strategy of filming the chase sequences first and the “dramatic” material later (an infinitely more honest method than Hollywood’s furtive elevation of what was once second unit work to principal photography), is his testament in more ways than one: a solid half hour of action with no dialogue, no framing narrative, no characters to speak of, and those familiar connecting shots from his previous films. If Gone 2 is “incomplete” on one level, its signature Halickiness, for once freed from even the pretense of narrative context, is also freed from the consumptive cycle which its conceptual radicalism—a radicalism that was no more than unerring honesty—had both utilized and subverted.

Danny Peary wrote of George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) that it is “less interesting as a story about ‘people’ than as a marriage between a filmmaker’s machines (his camera, his editing tools) and the motor-powered machines that he films.” Halicki pushes that marriage even further to the front of the frame. His cobbled-together canon acknowledges and carelessly reveals the fragmentary nature of film itself: snippets of the real joined together by machines, a mishmash of several divergent times hiding their joins behind the mask of narrative, the illusion of character and motive. Simply incapable of manufacturing that illusion, Halicki, in the final footage he shot, even went so far as to remove the vestiges of characterization which had attached themselves to the motor-powered machines he so loved. The star of Gone 2 is the Slicer, an ugly, trapezoidal contraption which (without the benefit of special effects) overturns dozens of cars with its low, smooth planes. There’s none of Eleanor’s battered beauty here; the Slicer wreaks its havoc impersonally, unscarred and untouched by the destruction around it. Strange then that the final freeze frame of this floating scrap of film carries a poignancy beyond the fact of Halicki’s death. It’s one of those blessed paradoxes that govern art that a man’s unclouded knowledge, articulation and exploitation of his own automatism can so movingly reveal the intractable humanity behind the wheel.

Articles in this Section

Global Discoveries on DVD
by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Books Around
by Chris Gehman

Global Discoveries on DVD
Star Vehicles: H.B. Halicki’s Cinema Junkyard
by Andrew Tracy

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