Quality pays, even in the silly season

Alcoholic and despondent, the great country singer Hank Williams often needed to be driven around to be sobered up. On one such drive, or so the story goes, Williams wanted his fellow travelers to join him in singing his classic hymn “I Saw the Light.”

“So we started singing it,” performer Minnie Pearl told biographer Roger M. Williams. “All of a sudden Hank stopped, and he cried out: ‘That’s the trouble. It’s all dark. There ain’t no light.’ ”

As a movie critic coming out of the summer season’s bleak Slough of Despond, I would ordinarily be saying, “Hank, I share your pain.” It’s the prestigious fall now upon us that reviewers traditionally look to for nourishment and quality work, while the warmer months preceding it usually present a spectacle of such impenetrable creative darkness that even Williams would have been taken aback. This year, however, was a little different, a little more encouraging than usual.

I’m not talking about the inevitable franchise pictures like “Spider-Man 2,” “Shrek 2” and the third “Harry Potter” extravaganza, sequels as big as the Ritz with lives and rules of their own. Yes, they entertain audiences, but they also encourage unhealthy fever dreams in executive suites, leading to a lust for the next multiplex orgasm that is not conducive to the quality of individual productions.

And I’m not ignoring or forgetting (would that I could) how many truly feeble enterprises the summer did produce, films best left unmentioned so as to be merciful toward the guilty, films that did not exactly overflow with promise for the future of the medium.

Yet, in the face of everything, this was a season with definite hopeful signs. I’m talking about three major studio releases that met the summer on its own mass-entertainment terms and came out winners. These were not delicate refugees from the fall that lost their way but a trio of commercial genre films created with money-making in mind that found they didn’t have to sacrifice intelligence and sophistication to reach a market. If that’s not a hopeful sign, I don’t know what is.

Where there’s a will ...

For what’s often lost in Hollywood’s now-habitual pandering to the free-spending young people of America is that the tradition of studio pictures is not the current division between movies that think and movies that don’t.

It has always been possible to make satisfying genre pictures that don’t yearn for the lowest common denominator and live to see them make respectable sums at the box office. All it often takes is the will to make it so.

The films I have in mind -- “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Collateral” and “The Bourne Supremacy” -- all had that will. And encouraging as they are as a group, they also stand individually as representative of different specific trends that, if followed up on, could make entertainment that doesn’t insult the audience more of a regular pleasure.

What makes “The Manchurian Candidate” stand out is the film’s fearlessness in putting political and social context into a thriller package. It’s a nail-biter that’s made itself at home in the post-Sept. 11 environment; director Jonathan Demme and writers Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris have realized that you don’t have to check your head at the door to have a hell of a time.

“Candidate’s” world may be fictitious, but it is remarkably similar to our own, down to an imminent presidential election that will likely turn on the way the current administration conducts itself militarily. Instead of detracting from its ability to excite us, this reality-basing helps the film grab our attention, just as having characters we can identify with is essential for horror films to function effectively.

What “Collateral” demonstrates is the good things that can happen when top-of-the-line stars like Tom Cruise are willing to take the chance of working with gifted filmmakers on projects that feel no need to dumb themselves down.

Cruise has made no secret of his longtime desire to collaborate with Michael Mann, to experience the director’s characteristic intensity of background preparation and attention to detail that, to cite one example, led to the actor’s learning to take apart and put together his character’s weapon of choice without looking at his hands. Having an actor of Cruise’s enormous popularity collaborating with a director who will not compromise his vision pays dividends for both of them and for us as well.

A grasp of nuance

In some ways, the trend represented by “The Bourne Supremacy” is the most promising because it is both a second-generation situation and in some ways a surprisingly subtle one.

Both the original “The Bourne Conspiracy” and this film are notable for the willingness of the studio and the producers to use atypical directors for unapologetically commercial material, their determination to cast their net wider than the usual glib music video wunderkinder eager to step up to features. The quirky Doug Liman did the first film, and Universal went with Britain’s Paul Greengrass, whose last feature was the marvelous neo-documentary “Bloody Sunday,” for the second.

Though the new Bourne plays on one level like any other thriller, on another it does not. Having a director who understands nuance and character, who can ‘t help but gravitate toward capable actors and intelligent line readings, gives a different but unmistakable texture to the most market-driven fare. Even if directors like these are trying to make as commercial a film as possible, their intelligence will inform the project because it is inseparable from who they are.

The week I started working on this piece, the trio of films in question took three of the top four slots in the weekly box-office results, with a cumulative gross of nearly $190 million. Maybe that doesn’t qualify as Christmas in July, but it does offer more examples of intelligent, successful entertainment than the season usually provides. Hank Williams notwithstanding, maybe it isn’t all dark, maybe there is some light. Not just in the fall, but in the heat of the summer as well.

Kenneth Turan is a Times film critic. He can be contacted at kenneth.turan@latimes.com.