You Ain't Seen Me, Right? - Hardcore (1979)

While the rest of the website celebrates its Total Film Best Movie Blog nomination with a roomful of coke and hookers, this weekly feature shines a spotlight on little-known films and loudly tuts in the corner.

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? is brought to you by Daniel Palmer, of Part-Time Infidel web fame. Hmm, we never got award nominations before he started writing these features. Coincidence?.

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Paul Schrader is primarily known as a writer, penning the screenplays for Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), but he is a director in his own right. While his 'movie brat' brethren were ushering in the blockbuster age with The Godfather (1972), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), Schrader chose to pursue a wildly unconventional and deeply personal course, helming films as divergent as Blue Collar (1978), American Gigolo (1980), Affliction (1997) and Auto Focus (2002).

Echoing Schrader's own upbringing, Hardcore begins in a sleepy mid-western town where the deeply conservative Calvinist faith predominates. Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) is a businessman whose daughter, Kristen (Ilah Davies), goes missing on a church trip to Los Angeles. When private investigator Andy Mast (Peter Boyle) discovers a porn film featuring Kristen but proves ineffective in tracking its origin, Van Dorn ventures into LA himself, entering the labyrinth of peep shows, cathouses, sex shops, strip clubs and adult theatres to rescue his daughter.

Hardcore deftly delineates the disparity between Van Dorn's provincial comfort zone and the decadent world into which he is thrust. Michael Chapman's cinematography juxtaposes the muted palette of Grand Rapids with LA's dizzying maelstrom of flickering neon; as does Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack, with plaintive organ giving way to distorted guitar. LA is presented as a world of faded glamour, bathed in sickly primary colours whose lustre has been stripped away by generations of neglect.

Scott's famous range is in evidence as Van Dorn, a man whose faith is deserting him at a time when he most needs it, whose cruel streak belies his devout bearing. The scene in which Van Dorn watches his daughter in the porn film is a perfectly realized moment, using subtle physical signals to illustrate that something has snapped and his anger has finally consumed him. Peter Boyle provided another grotesque from his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire as the sleazy PI who enjoys his work in LA's dissolute environs, and Season Hubley shines as Niki, the prostitute who helps Van Dorn navigate this murky world.

Hardcore presents the other side of the 'dream factory', a parallel world where failed hopefuls go when every other possibility has been exhausted, ready to be exploited by those who profit from our peccadilloes. But Schrader is equally unkind in his assessment of 'small town' values, positing from experience that such an environment only serves to stifle emotions until they explode. He reserves particular scorn for the moral relativism that fuels religious belief, be it Van Dorn's Dutch Calvinism or Niki's professed affiliation to the Venusian Church.

The film was shot at the height of Star Wars mania, with Schrader taking a swipe at the space opera in a scene where two strippers play suggestively with light sabres, one wearing a Darth Vader mask and the other sporting a Princess Leia hairdo. On the other hand, it could have been an admission that his work would never permeate the public consciousness in the way that had Lucas's intergalactic morality play.