SPOILER ALERT!!!!!! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE PLOT TWIST(S) DON'T READ ON.
I admit it. I was leery of seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino = violence. I haven't seen any of his other films because of it. But I live in Hollywood--albeit a Hollywood Clark Gable probably never imagined, and I'm still entranced by its mysteries and former glamour, which, by the time the events of this movie unfold, is a lot less glamorous.
And, besides, as I drove in my own neighborhood about a year or so ago, I kept running into old buses with advertising for the old television show "Combat", and old cars, and 1960s era signage.
I mean, I could only admire a movie that using the remnants of Hollywood gone by--like the Musso and Frank Grill, open since 1919--recreated a time fifty years past. I wish I could say I wasn't around then, but I was, although I was on the other side of the country, vacationing with family in a little summer house in the Catskills, away from the tar beaches of the Bronx.
I was a teenager when the catatonic followers of the crazed and cunning Charlie Manson went to a mansion on El Cielo Drive in the Hills of the former Dream Factory and brutally killed an up and coming eight and a half months' pregnant actress, married to a famous director (Roman Polanski who was abroad at the time), and several of her companions. Unless you have a cast iron stomach, you really don't want to read the details of the demonic sacrifice of innocents achieved that day and the next, as another couple were also murdered by another of the Manson girls.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is set in months before and during the Manson murders. The fictitious fading actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio)lives next door to the soon to be accursed house. Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is Dalton's stunt double, errand boy and ego booster. He spends a lot of time at Rick's house and in the Hollywood milieu, but he lives with his well trained loyal pit bull, in a tiny messy mobile home. Few people mess with Cliff, because he's a stunt man with an actual fighting skill, and the long standing rumor is that he killed his wife and got away with it. There is a rather funny scene on a boat, where the soon to be late wife is hen pecking (are we allowed to say that now a days?) Cliff. He is carrying around what looks to be a spear gun. Nothing untoward happens in the flashback, but the moment allows the audience to speculate along with Cliff's colleagues, "Did he or didn't he?" And any guy who can take on Bruce Lee (a controversial scene I understand as Lee is not portrayed in a charming light) and toss him into a classic car, is someone to be reckoned with, although Cliff gets fired by the head stunt man (Kurt Russell) for his accepting Lee's challenge.
Rick started his career in the 1950s, playing the hero of a Western, kind of like Steve McQueen's first television role, as a bounty hunter who always gets his man---and in Tarantino anti-hero world, gets him never alive, always dead. But now, his "star" as it were is sinking fast, and he's the guy who almost gets the role- again we have the shadow of McQueen (who has a brief appearance in the movie played by Damian Lewis)--but doesn't in "The Great Escape". We even get to see Rick in a scene in the actual movie--thanks to techno magic, as well as in a scene in an actual episode of "The FBI". In this fateful time, for Rick and for Sharon Tate and her friends, Rick has a new role, as a villain, again, in the short lived TV Series (yes, I watched it), called "Lancer". If James Stacy, Wayne Maunder, and Andrew Duggan, who starred in the series were alive, they might be overjoyed at their Hollywood style resurrection. Stacy's life was particularly tragic, and a brief "you know what's going to happen to him bit" reminds you of the motor cycle accident that, in 1973, took an arm and a leg--all this before he was accused of molestation. As I am writing, I am thinking of what another friend who saw the movie said about it. It's called "Once Upon a Time" for a reason. It's really all about the "What if's" in life.
Cliff, fading alongside his boss and buddy, is driving along when he comes upon a fresh young thing at a bus stop, looking for a hitch. The first time he doesn't pick her up; the second, he does, and she invites him to a sexual encounter (which recognizing statutory rape is not something he wishes to be accused of, he declines) as he drives her to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where she lives with a bunch of other pre-and just slightly post-pubescent girls and boys while the elderly owner sleeps and corrodes in a little room in the clap trap house. At first, Cliff is inspected by Tex Watson, and the other girls, and is deemed acceptable. This whole scene is really creepy and the key thought I had? Get out of there Cliff. But Cliff is concerned about George Spahn, whom he used to know in the good old days, and he pushes his way into the house to see him. Spahn--in the movie at least--played by the always brilliant Bruce Dern, is addled and disinterested in being saved. Cliff is visibly less welcome by the drug fueled girls and boys. When he gets to his car followed by the staring threatening pack, he finds his tire stuck with a knife. And he takes on the young man who did it, not Tex, who is out giving horse tours of the ranch to a pair of middle aged tourists, and gives him a pasting and makes him put on the spare. By the time Tex is called to the rescue of these clearly disturbed people, Cliff has taken off.
The threads are tied, when Rick, alone in the next door Cielo Drive house, hears a loud muffler on his property and finds two of the Manson followers, Tex and one of the girls (probably Atkins, but I'm not sure) trespassing. He chases the hippies away, his courage fueled by the too much alcohol he has ingested.
When we all go to El Coyote with Sharon and her friends, the place of their last meal, the tension has fully mounted. Rick and Cliff have never met Sharon, and Jay and Abigail. But their paths are inexorably merging. Tex and the girls come back to the area. They get to talking. Well, you know, I know, it is about to happen. Me? I got up out of my seat and stood near the door of the theatre, but still in view of the screen---kind of like a guy on first base, away from it, but close enough, but ready to go. I have read what happened to Sharon, and her nearly ready to be born baby. I don't intend to see it. I can't stand the inevitability.
Rick is in his house pool with headphones on. Cliff is in Rick's House with his dog, getting ready to feed him.
Tex and the girls are in the stopped car, spouting off down with rich clap trap, and revolutionary word salad. I didn't get what was about to happen.
When Tex and the girls burst in, it is not into the Tate-Polanski House. It is into Rick's. The interactions that Cliff and Rick, brief, ordinary in a way, but confrontational, that have altered the trajectory. Cliff is outnumbered but he has a secret weapon. The very very well trained pit bull.
The sequence is so fast, I can't give you the blow by blow, but while the dog has Tex by the crown jewels, Cliff is about to take on the girls. Lots of screaming ensues. I hadn't run for the door. I was expecting violence, but not this violence and it is compelling in its justice I realize, despite myself.
Cliff reduces one of the girls to chopped meat, and sends her crackling through the main door and window to the pool. She shrieks all the way in the exquisite pain she would have to be feeling. Rick, startled on his sound muffled pool float, learning his lines, jumps out of the water, and retrieves--a flame thrower he just happens to have lying around from another movie in which appeared--very much like "Inglorious Basterds" of Tarantino fame. He incinerates what is left of the pounded girl.
Police. Ambulances. Cliff is badly hurt, but he'll live. Jay Sebring walks down the Tate-Polanski driveway to find out about all the shouting. Rick gives him a brief, uninspired summary. Jay recognizes Rick. Sharon is a fan. Rick and Sharon exchange pleasantries through the gate voice box. Sharon invites Rick in for a drink.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Sharon Tate, her baby, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno and Rosemary LoBianco, lived and a few crazy bad guys (Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle) got what was coming to them.
I am ashamed to say that it was an enormously satisfying alternative ending. Except Charles Manson, the coward who wasn't there for the mayhem in either version, was still out there.
