Taking Tiger Mountain

Director-Tom Huckabee, Kent Smith

Cast-Bill Paxton, Barry Wooller, David Guthrie

Country of Origin-U.S./U.K.
 

Distributor - Vinegar Syndrome

Number of discs –  2

Reviewed by - Bobby Morgan

Date- 07/24/2019

The story behind the making of Taking Tiger Mountain is even stranger and more fascinating than the film itself, which is an authentically mind-melting work of experimental narrative cinema. A collaborative effort that didn’t see a theatrical release until nearly a decade after it was filmed, Taking was directed by aspiring filmmaker Kent Smith and starred a 19-year-old actor he had met while making an educational documentary for Encyclopedia Britannica – the late Bill Paxton. Smith had a desire to make an independent art film inspired by both Albert Camus’ existentialist novel The Stranger and a poem Smith had written about the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty, even though he never had a script.

That didn’t stop him and Paxton from attempting a journey to the Moroccan city of Tangiers, a world-famous cultural melting pot where William Burroughs went to write Naked Lunch, with Arriflex Techniscope camera equipment and 35mm short ends left over from Bob Fosse’s 1974 Dustin Hoffman classic Lenny. Techniscope is a film format that has been used for decades by directors in the U.S., U.K., and Italy as it allowed them to shoot their productions in widescreen while owning using half the 35mm film usually required by formats like Panavision. Sergio Leone shot The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West with Techniscope. Hammer Films used it for several of their film productions. The format was still in use as late as 2017.

Upon their arrival in Tangiers, the camera equipment was impounded, and Smith and Paxton were held in the custody of the local authorities for two days because they hadn’t paid the “baksheesh” (a bribe, basically). The production ended up in South Wales because Paxton had known someone there from his time as a foreign exchange student. They later returned to America having shot approximately ten hours of silent black & white footage that still had no narrative tissue to string any of it together outside of Smith’s original concept. Paxton went off to work as a set dresser for Roger Corman and further his acting and filmmaking ambitions, while Smith handed their footage to a University of Texas student named Tom Huckabee, who subsequently constructed a story using Burroughs’ novella Blade Runner (a movie) and ideas from his own friends for inspiration.

Huckabee raised an additional $30,000 to complete the film and secured Burroughs’ permission to incorporate Blade Runner (the title of which had been purchased by Ridley Scott to serve as the name for his 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) into the story that was taking shape from Smith and Paxton’s mass of footage from the Wales shoot. In his editorial reconfiguration of the film’s vague intentions, Huckabee transformed Paxton’s nameless wanderer into Billy Hampton, an aloof WWIII draft dodger who has been help captive by a network of middle-aged militant feminist scientists for two years and subjected to every form of psychological and physical experimentation they could subject him to, not limited to removing and later reattaching his genitalia.

Billy soon ends up on a train bound for a village in Wales where prostitution is still legal, and the aimless youth can have his every sexual desire fulfilled without hesitation. But the scientists have also spent their time conditioning their willing subject into assassinating Major Whitfred, the country’s Minister of Prostitution, by convincing Billy the minister is really a tiger who killed his father and now intends to kill him. That’s all the plot synopsis you’re getting out of me, unfortunately, because to reveal any more would be to deprive you of the opportunity of allowing this wild little oddity to entrap you in its spell.

Since Smith’s footage was shot silent to begin with, all the dialogue was added after the fact, and the failure of said dialogue to match the actors speaking it only adds to the film’s bizarre, dreamlike mood. Paxton’s dialogue in the opening scene was reportedly taken from actual conversations with the actor conducted under hypnosis, while his scenes during this introductory montage were not even part of the Welsh shoot but rather came from an early short film he made with Smith. American and British radio news reports play throughout the story and create in the background of the main action an audio portrait of a dystopian world slowly crumbling to pieces while its oppressed citizens drink and screw to excess before it all comes crashing down.

Huckabee’s funky, subversive remix of the grainy, plotless footage Smith shot in Wales incorporates themes of sexual identity, societal upheaval, and the eternally convenient political subterfuge of inciting fear of immigrants in the populace. The stunningly frank carnality of Billy’s various encounters with women is both provocative and consistent with the establishment of the lead character as a man who only enjoys sex for the pleasure it brings him and no one else. News updates of another man who could have been brainwashed by the feminists into killing the German minister of prosecution and was later found dead in his prison cell of an apparent suicide attempt grimly hint at a potential outcome for Billy, but then it could also be a bit of misdirection layered atop the film’s mood of overpowering paranoia.

Technically speaking, Taking Tiger Mountain is quite an accomplishment given its meager budget and improvisatory production. Smith shot some gorgeous Techniscope footage of the Welsh villages and countryside that Huckabee was later able to sculpt into a druggy, sexually charged fever dream of a futuristic thriller. On the other side of the camera, the film clearly belongs to young Bill Paxton, giving a fearless performance that requires him to bare his body, mind, and soul for the character of Billy Hampton only to have all three systematically broken down into nothing over the course of the story. I’m still at a loss to explain what the final moments could possibly mean.

Never officially released on home video, Taking Tiger Mountain comes to Blu-ray/DVD combo pack courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome with a new high-definition transfer presented in full 1080p resolution in the film’s original 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio. The transfer was sourced from a recent restoration created from a 4K scan of the original 35mm Techniscope camera negative. Compared to the lousy quality bootlegs that have been floating around for years (at one point, you could watch the entire film on YouTube), the picture quality here is incredible. Smith’s black & white cinematography has never looked better, with the upgrade in sharpness and resolution revealing a wealth of image depth and crisp fine detail. The condition of the camera negative was less than pristine and modern restoration technology can only accomplish so much, leaving the film with the occasional noticeable scratch, minor traces of dirt, and heavier grain occasionally. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 track replicates the original mono sound mix with laudable results. Dialogue and ambient effects come through with as much as clarity as possible and their artificiality is even more apparent than ever before given that nothing was recorded live on set. English subtitles have also been provided.

Two separate cuts of Taking Tiger Mountain have been included for this release – the 81-minute 1983 theatrical cut and a more recent reedit overseen by Tom Huckabee entitled Taking Tiger Mountain Revisited. In his 75-minute revised version, Huckabee digitally added titles, text cards, and other effects and pared his original edit down in places in order to make greater sense of his own narrative and tighten the pacing, so it’s not a radical rethink of the material at all. The newer cut doesn’t look as good as the original since it was taken from Huckabee’s own digital film master and not Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K restoration, but admirers of the film can still appreciate it as an alternate vision of a truly unique genre-bending work of cinema.

Huckabee supplies brief video introductions to both cuts and appears in two new interview featurettes. In “Taking Over Tiger Mountain” (28 minutes), he talks extensively about the film’s production, how he came to know Smith and Paxton, assembling their footage into a somewhat coherent narrative, and its influences. “Revisiting Tiger Mountain” (18 minutes) finds Huckabee discussing the reasons behind his decision to create a new edit of the film and how he came about making it a reality. “Interviews with Welshmen” (16 minutes) is exactly as it sounds, a black & white montage of interviews with the men and women who occupied the Welsh village where Tiger Mountain was filmed, a few of whom appeared in the film.

This release also comes with a DVD copy, reversible cover art, and a collector’s booklet featuring a new essay on Taking Tiger Mountain written by Heather Drain.

While not a perfect film, Taking Tiger Mountain is an audacious and imaginative film that has the power to fire up your brain and challenge your expectations. It may enthrall you, it may even infuriate you, but at least it will make you feel something, and that’s far more than I can say for the excessively expensive and spiritually empty sensory overloads that crowd the theaters these days. I look forward to revisiting Kent Smith, Tom Huckabee, and Bill Paxton’s intriguing dystopian adventure after I’ve had plenty of time to consider what I just saw. Vinegar Syndrome’s dual-format Blu-ray/DVD release does this unclassifiable labor of love proud with its excellent picture and sound and supplemental content. If you prefer science fiction cinema that’s more intellectually stimulating than what Hollywood typically gives us, Taking Tiger Mountain comes highly recommended.