Foot Im Himmel
The Man Who Killed Hitler
And Then The Bigfoot
2018 USA Directed by Robert D. Krzykowski
UK cinema release print.
Wow... this movie is absolutely phenomenal. I love it when something you thought might be pretty good turns out to be something even greater than you were expecting. I mean, for a film with the title of The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot, you kind of expect it to be quirky and kind of fun but, well... lets just say that unless Avengers Endgame And Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise Of Skywalker are absolute masterpieces, then I suspect this film will be the best one I see all year. Certainly it will probably be the most moving.
The film starts off with the back story mission of young Calvin Barr, played in the 1940s by Aidan Turner, as we see him infiltrate a building which houses Hitler, as he goes to kill him. We then cut to the ‘present day’, older version of Calvin, as played by the one and only Sam Elliot, as he remembers all of this. And when I say present day... it’s not really made completely clear in the text what decade this film is set in but I did notice that a grocery clerk in the movie is reading a copy of the Heavy metal Presents, square bound graphic novel adaptation of Ridley Scott’s Alien so, yeah, I guess that dates the movie to 1979 as to when the events depicted are supposed to be taking place (I still have my copy of that sitting in a box behind me as I write this review).
We then get a classic style ‘four thugs try to mug the lead character’ scene which is used to show that, while Calvin is fairly old now, he’s still more than enough of a match against knives and guns when push comes to shove. When Calvin parks his car up on the way back to the home he shares with his labrador, there is a perfect freeze frame with the title of the movie superimposed across the shot with a vertical strip down the middle to separate The Man Who Killed Hitler And from Then The Bigfoot... and the whole thing looks and feels like it’s straight out of a low budget, 1970s US made exploitation movie. It's absolutely spot on with that vibe but to dismiss this film as an homage to that would definitely not be 'on the mark' as this movie far exceeds the capacity of the majority of those old movies in terms of the drama and pathos which is injected through the character of Calvin Barr by both actors who play him here. As you would expect, Sam Elliot rules in this (doesn’t he always... such a contrast from the last thing I saw him in, Frogs, which I’ll put up on here as a review at some point soon, after my Easter reviews go up) but, I have to say, so does Aidan Turner as the younger version of him, who you will also see a lot more of in flashback throughout the course of the movie.
The basic plot is that, Calvin has become an almost mythical (behind closed doors) person after he managed to perform the task mentioned in the first half of the film's title and, because of a certain very rare quality he possesses, which I’m not going to go into here, he is sent to kill the bigfoot because, for more reasons I won’t go into here for fear of spoiling your appreciation of this wonderful piece of art, he’s pretty much the only person who can do it. And he has to go in and do it on his own, for even more reasons which will become clear to you with one of the slow build reveals which this movie uses to keep the audience engaged, in suspense and very much rooting for Calvin.
Calvin’s tragedy, as depicted in the movie, is that he’s a man alone (apart form his trusty dog), through his own choice... haunted by the memories of what he has done and all the things that have happened throughout his life. And, just like a good Sergio Leone movie (which this film in no way harkens back to stylistically), the story is one of memories and the person shaped by those memories, as the narrative goes back and forth between the two time periods, allowing both actors to shine and build up a picture of the man who is Calvin Barr.
The director plays with time in another way too. Asides from the wonderful segues between periods, he also does some amazing things which lull the audience into the film before, often quite gently, pulling the rug from under us in terms of where things are heading. For instance, when Elliot takes a pair of shoes off, the camera takes a slow, deep dive into those shoes before cutting to a moment which isn’t, as you might be expecting by this point, just another jump back through the decades but is instead used as a hard edit to visually punctuate a cut to a scene a few minutes later and draw attention to the importance of the slow contemplation of a certain closed box at some point soon.
Or there’s the wonderful moment where we see Calvin alone and standing at the threshold of the terrain where the bigfoot is going to be located where we are suddenly, by way of the edit, thrust into action with the titular creature, who is out of the frame again before we even get a chance to properly register that it was even there. Our first glimpse of the Bigfoot of the movie is, therefore, such that we only have a vague impression of the creature before the hunt is back on. And it’s this whole way the director has of pulling the audience in with slow and beautiful cinematography before a quick, almost aggressive edit pulls you into something that you aren’t necessarily expecting, that seems to be an underlying modus operandi for the movie. And it works wonderfully well, it has to be said.
The film is beautiful and quite poignant regarding the main character but the ponderous nature of the main protagonist and his past relationship with a woman, played here by Caitlin FitzGerald, in no way dilutes the wonderful action sequences which also, along with some brilliant scoring, pep up the pace at various key points in the narrative. The Bigfoot featured in the, somewhat, slow build to a surprise of a showdown, the writing of which seems to exactly mirror the intent of the editing style in this film, is a wonderful creature when you finally get to focus on it for long enough and the confrontation, coming before a long and brilliant wind down of a false ending followed by... stuff I can’t tell you about without spoiling things... is appropriately violent and intense. There’s also a nice element in the movie which is basically a red herring in that we never get to find out what a specific artefact is but, I have to say, the dramatic melancholy invoked by what Hitchcock would have called a McGuffin works really well and is on the level here, somewhat, of the final whispered words of Bill Murray to Scarlett Johansson in the last moments of Sofia Coppolla’s Lost In Translation.
All this is supported by a brilliant score by composer Joe Kraemer, who does some really great and subtle writing here, along with some deliberately not so subtle, propulsive music which helps pep up the pace in those scenes where ‘stuff’ is about to go down. It all kind of fits in with that 1970s vibe too. In fact, there’s one sequence in the film, where Sam Elliot reaches the peak of a mountain he’s been climbing, where Kraemer’s score sounds like early to mid 1970s John Williams at his best. It’s that great a score and I’m so glad I managed to somehow snag one of the first 100 of the limited edition CD releases out of the gate from La La Land records because it’s been signed by the composer and, frankly, I can’t wait to hear this cue again (hope it’s on there). I’m going to spin this thing right after I’m done writing this thing... which is pretty much now.
I think by now you’ve probably figured out just how much I love The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot and, frankly, I’d recommend it to anyone interested in cinema, the technique of how you put together narrative without having to rely solely on dialogue and, frankly, anyone who’s interested in how you can construct a compelling story and not just a bunch of post-modernistic references strung together to look like one. An absolutely wonderful movie which you should all go and see. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.
