Jon Hastings has begun exploring what he’s termed the Golden Age of American Action Movies. He’s starting by stating the films’ defining characteristics. Besides being action movies (duh), meaning that they’re driven by action scenes in terms of plot and character development, he says

They share two major stylistic/formal elements: (1) a commitment to surface realism and (2) spatial integrity is the cohering idea behind their action sequences.

By #1 he means that “no-nonsense spectacles” without the fancy (artsy?) camerawork of genre stylists like Sergio Leone. I like what he’s getting at here as it articulates something I’ve noticed in my hobby of watching ’80s action movies: they exist to show you the action. You know how most comedies are utilitarian, from a filmic perspective? Shots, lighting, sound, mise en scène are all designed so as to distract as little as possible from the jokes. This is why you can probably count the number of great comedies you’ve seen that also function as beautiful or striking movies on one hand if you remove the ones by Woody Allen or the Coen Brothers first. Well, I think the same is true of the action movies Jon’s talking about. They’re there to wow you with the “action” half of “action movie,” not the “movie half.” Because of this even slight, largely failed deviations from the norm become very noticeable; I was really struck by Sylvester Stallone’s strange freeze-and-dissolve cuts and almost comical overuse of montage sequences in Rocky IV, for example.

Jon’s second point is, he admits, kind of just a way of restating point one in the context of action scenes themselves, especially when he formulated point one thusly:

despite the craziness of the situation, despite the often superhuman feats, despite the frequent fudging of the laws of physics, Golden Age Action Movies present everything with a straight face. There’s no stylization or attempt to put quotation marks around any of the action.

In fact the two points are so blended together that I hope he tries to distinguish them a bit more in the futur, or else just mash ’em together. Anyway, regarding point #2 again, in terms of direct comparisons, he says that rather than Bourne Supremacy-style hand-held cameras and choppy editing (an “impressionistic” approach to shooting action) or John Woo-style operatic slow-mo and lighting (an “expressionistic” approach),

these movies aim for scenes that make sense spatially in terms of how everything is happening. Not that there isn’t fudging and not that the integrity isn’t really an illusion.

Of course. But I think where this criterion needs a little tightening is in the idea of the spacial integrity itself. Thinking of scenes from movies that obviously don’t fit in this category of action film–the House of Blue Leaves sequence from Kill Bill Vol. 1, the subway fight from The Matrix, the three-way lightsaber duel from The Phantom Menace, the treetop chase in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon–it’s clear that a sense of the spatial relationships between the characters themselves and between the characters and the objects in their environment is absolutely key. As a matter of fact I would assert that this is a necessary ingredient to any great action sequence. This is actually something I realized while reviewing countless superhero and genre comics every week for Wizard–a sense of place, a sense of space, a sense of where the characters are in relation to one another and to their surroundings, is the difference between, say, a memorable fight in Miller or Maleev or Lark Daredevil and some generic lasers-shooting-in-all-directions pose-fest from early-90s X-Men.

What I think differentiates the films of the Golden Age of American Action Movies from other great action movies isn’t so much the spatial integrity, which is always important, but how the bodies (or vehicles, which in these films are extensions of bodies) of the characters act within a space. Simply put, I’m saying that in these action movies, the actions and abilities of the combatants may strain credulity, but never do so in an openly obvious way. When John McClane ties a firehose around his waist, jumps from a rooftop, rappels against a glass window, shoots it out in midair and swings through it to safety, it’s something that’s unlikely to happen in real life to say the least, but it’s presented–in the performance, in the filming, in the special effects–as something a human being could conceivably do with his or her body given the right combination of strength, canniness, and luck. Compare that to bullet time, wire-fu, CGI Jedi powers–while when done right there’s still a palpable physicality to it all, it’s obviously intended to call attention to the superhumanness. The reaction from the audience there is “wow!” The reaction from the audience in the case of Golden Age Action is “whoa!” or more bluntly, “holy shit!”

It’s a really fascinating post and you should read it. I look forward to reading what else he has to say on the subject.

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