![]() In a brilliant twist that’s both a matter of dramatic import and of symbolic power, Jake soon discovers that his appearance arouses suspicion. Jake’s manner is taut and clipped, and he’s well aware that he’s out of place on the seamy side of the city. He sees that culture manifested overtly in the explicit pornography which he confronts, but also implicitly in seemingly innocuous sitcoms and talk shows and more or less everything that doesn’t issue from his church and its doctrines. ![]() Jake despises the sex-soaked contemporary culture that seems to have swallowed Kristen up, and that, long ago, lured his own wife away from him. (Schrader has spoken of having been barred from watching movies in his own childhood and adolescence.) As with Ford’s protagonist, who’s on a mission of vengeance aimed, with racist hostility, at all Native Americans, Jake’s rescue attempt is also a matter of revenge, fuelled by hate as well as by love. One of Jake’s family members, at a Christmas gathering, denies the assembled children even a bit of bland, holiday-themed TV. Jake is a single father who has brought Kristen up in the severe Calvinist tradition, marked by Bible disputations of Talmudic intricacy and by a radical detachment from secular and popular culture. He takes a leave of absence from the furniture factory he owns, heads to Los Angeles, fires Mast, and searches for Kristen in the city’s XXX-rated shadow world. The footage, which Jake has to look at but can’t bear to see, lacerates his soul, and his raving agony propels him to take matters into his own hands. One of “Hardcore” ’s exemplary scenes involves the cynical yet professionally dedicated Mast renting out a Grand Rapids adult theatre in order to give Jake a private viewing. Jake flies out there consults with the police, who offer little help and hires a private detective named Mast (Peter Boyle), who discovers a pornographic film in which Kristen performs. Scott), whose teen-age daughter, Kristen (Ilah Davis), vanishes during a church-run trip to California. Schrader’s drama is the story of a Michigan businessman, Jake VanDorn (George C. In Ford’s film, John Wayne plays a former Confederate soldier who spends years searching for his niece (Natalie Wood), who, as a child, was abducted by Native Americans who killed her parents. It’s now streaming on the Criterion Channel and is also available on other sites. Built on the very bedrock of Schrader’s being, “Hardcore” is one of the key works of his career, a cinematic declaration of identity and principle that echoes throughout his body of work. But Ford’s film, from 1956, is a Western, a philosophical drama set just after the Civil War, in a place and a time far removed from the director’s birth in Maine, in 1894, whereas Schrader’s is contemporary-set in his home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan (where he was born in 1946), and in the religious community of rigorous Calvinists in which he was raised. Paul Schrader’s second feature, “Hardcore,” from 1979, is his version of John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Both movies are dramas of an isolated, stoic, rigidly principled man who takes it upon himself to rescue a young female family member from a way of life-captivity, or something like it-that he deems unfit for her.
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