One of the more interesting German new wave directors that emerged in the 1970s along with compatriots Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Volker Schlondorf, Wim Wenders evidenced a fascination with place and a deep admiration for American popular culture. In Don’t Come Knocking, the principal action is set in his favorite American town, Butte, Montana, which was the locus for his favorite American novel, Red Harvest, by his favorite novelist, Dashiell Hammett, to whom he had paid homage in the rather awful film, Hammett, made for Francis Coppola’s Zootrope studios back in the early 1980s.
Working with playwright/actor Sam Shepard, Wenders has created a visually stunning, yet emotionally shallow film in the ‘male menopause’ genre, with many similarities to Jim Jarmusch’s superior, but also somewhat empty, Broken Flowers.
Shepard plays the lead character, Howard Spence, a broken-down actor in Western movies, who scuttled a once-promising career through over-indulgence in the prerogatives of stardom. His piercing blue eyes puffy, his crew cut patchy, he neverthless evokes the rangy spirit of Gary Cooper. Escaping from the set of his latest film (Phantom of the West) on horseback, still in costume, he heads home to mother. Meanwhile, a comically repressed and anti-social bounty-hunter for the film’s insurance company, Mr. Sutter (played in an intensely deadpan fashion by Tim Roth) is hot on his trail. Sutter must have been a throwback to Hammett’s Continental Op detective, based on the strikebreaking Pinkerton agents of the depression era. After a night of drunk and disorderly behavior in a local (Elko, Nevada) casino, Howard is informed by his mother (Eva Marie-Saint, of On the Waterfront and North by Northwest) that he has a long-lost son in Butte, Montana, whom he fathered with a local waitress during his biggest movie triumph 25 years ago. Howard makes contact with his old flame Doreen (played by Shepard’s real-life partner Jessica Lange), following her into a club, where he learns that his son, Earl, is the musician performing on the bandstand. However, Earl, who has seemingly inherited many of the character flaws of his prodigal father, is not happy to see him or even know of him. Howard also has a daughter - Skye, played by Canadian actress Sarah Polley – who is searching for him: a rather angelic figure, she carries around the cremains of her mother in a big blue earthenware jar, and a memory stick filled with evidence of her lost father’s exploits around her neck. In his fury at Howard’s reappearance, Earl trashes his apartment, throwing all of his possessions out of the window, including a floral-patterned sofa upon which Howard spends the night (with the camera constantly circling around him, again reminiscent of the penultimate scene in Broken Flowers). Urged on by Skye before she goes off to scatter her mother’s ashes, Howard walks down the empty Western street to meet Doreen on her way to work and beg for a reconciliation. This also fails, and he is found in his car by Sutter, who has faithfully tracked him to Butte. After saying goodbye to his two newly-discovered children, Howard is led off in handcuffs to complete the picture from which he has fled.
As are all of Wenders films, this is in some sense a movie about movies. One of the principal themes of the Western was the protagonist’s search for a place where he could fit in – a place he could call home; which, due to his internal psychological conflicts, he could never remain. The character Howard Spence is also invested in this search, riding off into the sunset, again and again, only to find the nothingness of self-destruction in real life.
Don’t Come Knocking is a picture filled with implausibilities – the timeline for Howard’s career is way off – classic John Ford-style Westerns were not being produced in the 1970s, when the Shepard character would have been at the apex of his stardom. It is also hard to believe that even as irresponsible and self-indulgent a man as Howard would be so out of touch that he ignored his mother for decades, and was unaware of his father’s death – the same father who has left him a mint-condition 1954 Packard, just waiting to be driven over the salt flats.
The visual iconography of the film consciously echoes the work of painter Edward Hopper, with its lonely, bare vistas, underlining the principal characters’ futile search for connection, and its use of Hopper’s color tones. Structurally well-crafted, Don’t Come Knocking is worth seeing just for the visuals, which won Franz Lustig a European Film Award for cinematography. To some degree, this film evokes the feeling of Paris, Texas, a far superior film with a similar theme that Wenders made back in 1984. However, none of the characters, and especially Howard, is interesting enough to raise the picture above its inherent sense of futility, resulting in a rather lacklustre piece of work which, like its main character, squanders its own potential.
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