Made in USA

Plot

Jean-Luc Godard directed this brightly colored, pop-art homage to American crime cinema, which somehow finds room for extended commentary on leftist politics and the corrupt nature of advertising. Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) is a mystery woman (Is she a reporter? Perhaps a spy?) who used to be involved with Richard, a man who is now an outspoken Communist and has been linked to the murder of a foreign agent. Paula wants to silence Richard before he starts making trouble for her, but she can't find much hard evidence that's he's still alive outside of a recently discovered tape recorder that plays his recorded rants on current political issues. While speaking with Typhus (Ernest Menzer), a small time hood who knows about Paula's relationship with Richard, shots ring out and suddenly Typhus is dead. As Paula tries to find a way to get rid of the body, she tries to discover who killed him and why, as a pair of lackadaisical hoods (Laszlo Szabo and Jean-Pierre Leaud) follow her around Paris. Filled with references to American genre cinema and dedicated to Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, Made In U.S.A. was the last film Godard would make with his one-time wife and frequent collaborator Anna Karina, and it was filmed simultaneously with another feature Godard released in 1966, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. The admittedly flimsy plot was loosely adapted from the novel The Jugger by Donald E. Westlake (published under the pseudonym Richard Stark); Westlake wasn't paid for the rights, and he prevented the film from being released in the United States until after his death in 2008. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Review

It's amazing to think that Jean-Luc Godard's Made In USA (1966) took almost 43 years get a commercial release in the United States. The movie, done by Godard as a favor to producer Georges de Beauregard, ended up in legal limbo in the US owing to its literary origins -- it was based on a book by Donald Westlake, who ended up reacquiring the US rights to the film when de Beuregard's financial troubles prevented him from fulfilling his monetary obligations to the author. In 2008, Rialto Pictures licensed the rights directly from Westlake (who died suddenly two days after the picture's January 2009 opening) and struck new prints for a proper US run of the movie. As to the picture itself . . . it's a lean, fast-moving, and very witty, as well as extremely topical political satire, done up as an American-style gangster thriller (or satire of such a thriller), all with a serious underlying purpose. Anna Karina, the by-then-ex-Mrs. Godard, moves through the picture's "Atlantic City" setting in a succession of striking mod outfits, trying to find her missing boyfriend Richard P (his last name is forever obliterated by on-screen source sounds), crossing paths with diminutive conspirators, police detectives who may not be who they say they are (or, if they are, may not be operating legally); and Marianne Faithfull (uncredited) singing an all-acoustic "As Tears Go By." Forget the logic (or lack therein) of the events and some of what one sees, and simply absorb the pacing and the overlay of the conspiratorial web, all intended as a serious comment about the still-unsolved disappearance of Moroccan leftist Mehdi Ben Barka, rumored to be a result of a rightist Cold War conspiracy involving the government. The resulting film is disjointed, cuttingly funny and digressive, as well as illogical and downright silly in places -- and keeps calling attention to itself through the use of well-known names (Nixon, MacNamara, David Goodis . . .) for a multitude of characters, both on-screen and spoken of. The politics and discourse about the latter woven through the picture, as well as the presence of Faithfull doing a Mick Jagger/Keith Richards song, seems to set the stage for Godard's later One Plus One: Sympathy For The Devil, with its more direct participation of the Rolling Stones. Taken on its own terms, this picture is sometimes maddening, when it isn't being thoroughly entertaining in its own uniquely disjointed way (and a feast for the eye in its treatment of Karina's extraordinary allure). ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Cast

• Anna Karina - Paula Nelson
• Jean-Pierre Léaud - Donald Siegel
• Laszlo Szabo - Richard Widmark
• Kyoko Kosaka - Doris Mizoguchi

Claude Bakka - Man with Marianne Faithful; Jean-Pierre Biesse - Richard M. Nixon; Jean-Claude Bouillon - Inspector Aldrich; Marianne Faithfull - Herself; Remo Forlani - Workman in Bar; Philippe Labro - Himself; Rita Maiden - Woman Who Gives Paula Information; Ernest Menzer - Edgar Typhus; Alexis Poliakoff - Man with Notebook and Red Telephone; Jean-Luc Godard - Richard Politzer's Shadow and His Recorder Voice; Yves Afonso - David Goodis; Marc Dudicourt - Barman; Charles Bitsch - Taxi Driver

Credit

Claude Bakka - First Assistant Director, Jean-Pierre Léaud - First Assistant Director, Charles Bitsch - First Assistant Director, Jean-Luc Godard - Director, Agnès Guillemot - Editor, Raoul Coutard - Cinematographer, Georges de Beauregard - Producer, Jacques Maumont - Sound/Sound Designer, René Levert - Sound/Sound Designer, Jean-Luc Godard - Screenwriter, Ludwig van Beethoven - Featured Music, Robert Schumann - Featured Music, Donald E. Westlake - Book Author, Richard Stark - Book Author

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