Radiator Heaven

Mike's Murder

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:40:00 +0000

Debra Winger is a great actor that has had a good career when she should have had a much better one. While she has certainly worked with some impressive filmmakers over the years, such as Richard Attenborough, Bob Rafelson, Alan Rudolph, Costa-Gavras, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Jonathan Demme to name a few, most of them are considered minor works at best, and her reputation for being difficult while making movies, including clashing with her co-stars and directors as well as refusing to promote pictures she didn’t like making, may have also hurt her career. The director that understood her the best was James Bridges who directed her in Urban Cowboy (1980), her breakthrough film, and Mike’s Murder (1984). He wasn’t afraid to be challenged by her: “When you work with a nice person, what you get on screen is 'nice' and nothing more. When you work with fire, there's smoke on the screen.”

The latter film, in particular, features Winger’s best performance to date, a layered depiction of a woman who discovers that a man she had a brief but passionate affair with wasn’t the man he appeared to be, drawing her into the Los Angeles drug underworld. Bridges adopted a challenging narrative structure that test audiences rejected, which prompted him to recut into a more conventional film where it proceeded to tank at the box office. Mike’s Murder is a haunting character study about a specific time and place that transcends its conventional thriller trappings.

Betty Parrish (Winger) has a brief but intense relationship with Mike Chuhutsky (Mark Keyloun), a tennis instructor. Six months later, she runs into him and he admits to being in trouble as he has started dealing drugs to pay the rent. She talks to him again on the phone three months later. They cross paths a couple more times with him wanting to hook up again but each time flakes out. There is something about him that she can’t stop thinking about to the point that she zones out in the middle of conversations with family and friends. Once she learns of his death – from a drug deal gone bad – she speaks to some of his friends and associates to find out what happened and to learn more about him. In the process, she comes to terms with the conflicted feelings she has for Mike.

Bridges expertly juxtaposes the mundanity of Betty’s life – she works as a bank teller who takes tennis lessons on the weekend – with the increasingly dangerous life of Mike who rips off high-end drug dealers thereby putting himself in peril. The film starts off with a brief montage of Betty and Mike as we see them laugh and flirt while playing tennis and then cut to them making love in tender slow motion in the shadows that is very film noir-esque. After the opening credits, the tone of the film shifts as we see the Mike narrowly escape retribution for intruding on an established dealer’s turf.

The first enigmatic nine minutes of Mike’s Murder show us a lot without telling us much and in doing so pose all kinds of questions. Who are these two people that seem in love and why is one of them in so much trouble? The first question is answered rather quickly while the second question is gradually answered over the course of the film. The questions of why he was killed and who did it aren’t really what makes this film so interesting. It is Betty’s reaction and how she deals with it over time as she tries to figure out what Mike meant to her.

Debra Winger is a fascinating actor to watch and director Bridges must’ve thought so, too, building this entire film around her, spending many scenes focused on her character, like when Mike calls Betty up after disappearing for three months. While they are chatting, we see the entire conversation from her side as the camera observes her looking at herself in a mirror. It is an unguarded moment as she is by herself with Mike’s disembodied voice in her ear.

Winger delivers a powerful, yet understated, lived-in performance doing an excellent job playing a normal person – not a movie star or a larger-than-life character, but a regular person just getting by like most of us are, day by day. Betty doesn’t have much going on in her life: she has her job and occasionally goes out with one of her co-workers. The actor does an excellent job of conveying a range of emotions with only her face as we see Betty deal with Mike’s death in stages. We see these feelings play across her eyes and it is fascinating to watch. This is particularly evident in the scene where Betty goes to Mike’s apartment to see where he was murdered and the horror that plays over her face is palpable. Part of her didn’t want to know the grisly details but another part of her had to know to get closure. Betty manages to keep it together for most of the day until she gets home and finally breaks down, letting all those pent-up emotions out.

Admittedly, Mike’s drug dealing escapades is standard fare seen in countless other movies of its ilk but Bridges handles it well by using very little dialogue in the scene where Mike and his partner-in-crime Pete (Darrell Larson) decide to rip off a high-end dealer, creating an intense scene. Darrell Larson does a fantastic job showing how his character gradually unravels with paranoia thanks to the cocaine he regularly takes and constantly evading the drug dealers he helped rip off. His storyline dovetails with Betty’s in an intense scene where he shows up at her house at night trying to explain himself. Larson delivers his dialogue in an emotional monologue that is insistent and pathetic simultaneously, delivered with sweaty desperation. This frightening encounter gives Betty a taste of Mike’s secret life and the dangerous people that inhabited it.

Of the people Betty crosses paths with during her informal investigation, the most notable is Philip Green (Paul Winfield), a record producer who Mike did work for at his home. He’s stand off-ish, at first, only to be somewhat anguished when talking about Mike’s death and then reflective about how they met. It is a wonderfully layered performance by Paul Winfield who makes the most out of his brief screen time.

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction and this certainly applies to the inspiration behind Mike’s Murder. Bridges and producer Jack Larson knew actor Paul Winfield as he had appeared in plays that both men had done. Through the actor they got to know a friend of his by the name of Mark Bernalack. The character of Mike was based heavily on Mark – both stayed with Winfield, were tennis pros, and ran afoul of local drug dealers resulting in their deaths. Larson said, “Jim was very haunted by it. It was because of how Mark was called a drug dealer in the newspapers. That was very sad to him. The papers portrayed Mark’s murder as if it was a good thing because he was a drug dealer.” It was a personal story for Bridges who had known people killed for dealing drugs in L.A. and it profoundly affected him. With this film he wanted to avoid the usual suspense thriller cliches and portray the city as “a disjointed society by using close-ups to imitate the view from a car.”

In early 1982, Bridges originally went to The Ladd Company to pitch another project – Jane Goodall in Africa – and while there he told Alan Ladd, Jr. about his idea for Mike’s Murder. The executive liked it and the title, agreeing to finance the project with a $5 million budget.

He wrote the film for Winger and insisted she do it. She remembers, “I had made one of my first left turns out of show business. He wrote this specifically for me to bring me back in and show me how this new ‘independent’ approach was the wave of the future.” She had moved to Cleveland and was in the process of giving up acting. Bridges recognized that it was a challenging role: “It wasn’t filled with a lot of things for an actress to grab on to. I needed someone who had that rare relationship with a camera that allows an audience to see her think.”

When it came to casting, Bridges and Larson had trouble finding the right actor to play Mike. They considered Kevin Costner but he was deemed “too old.” Larson’s agent told him about Mark Keyloun. He had done some television and theater work, but when they saw him in a film by long-time friend Paul Morrissey entitled, Forty Deuce (1982), and, after making sure he had chemistry with Winger, he was cast. To keep the costs down and preserve the production’s independence, the cast and crew took a 30% reduction in salary.

The Ladd Company liked the film but Warner Brothers not so much. They wanted another Urban Cowboy. The first test previews in Larkspur and Walnut Creek, California in February 1983 were disastrous as Larson remembers, “One guy in the audience stood up in the middle of the film and screamed, ‘This is the worst fucking movie I’ve ever seen!’ It was a wild and chaotic preview. People were very upset by the film, and it is an upsetting film.” Bridges recut the phone sex scene between Betty and Mike that originally showed the latter masturbating while talking to the former. Not surprisingly, this made test audiences uncomfortable and they reacted negatively to it.

According to Larson, Bridges re-edited “the ghastly murder sequence of Mike in the film and how Debra imagines that she sees them together in his apartment after he’s been murdered. Originally, Debra imagined them nude together in his apartment.” The film was restructured from the original version that was subjective in nature, focused on Betty’s point-of-view, to a more objective, chronological story. In addition, Bridges was allowed to film more scenes with Pete who was originally a “peripheral” character. In restructuring the film, Bridges removed singer-songwriter Joe Jackson’s score and replaced it with a more traditional one by John Barry. Some of Jackson’s songs are still in the film. The second preview in Seattle was much more successful with a stronger audience reaction.

Mike’s Murder had a brief theatrical run in March 1984 due to The Ladd Company and Warner Bros ending their partnership in April. What film critics that did see the film were mixed about it. Variety wrote, "As usual, Winger is wonderful to watch at all times, but her character is something of a cipher, and lack of any psychological angle holds down the film’s ultimate achievement." The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, "Mr. Bridges, who gave Miss Winger her big break in Urban Cowboy, leaves her high and dry in this one. Though she receives top billing, she has no role to play." In his review, Roger Ebert wrote, "Winger’s magnificently responsive performance creating a character who’s ecstatic when reminded of her onetime lover, then melancholy and obsessed after his death." Finally, Pauline Kael praised Winger’s performance: “It’s a performance that suggests what Antonioni seemed to be trying to get from Jeanne Moreau in La Notte, only it really works with Winger—maybe because there’s nothing sullen or closed about her. We feel the play of the girl’s intelligence, and her openness and curiosity are part of her earthiness, her sanity.”

Mike’s Murder is part murder mystery and part character study with the latter being stronger and more interesting than the former. Bridges juxtaposes noir tropes with a thoughtful meditation on what it means to know someone and the brief time they are in our lives. While he was alive Mike’s allure had an initially strong gravitational pull on Betty, but over time his inconsistent, unreliable behavior took the bloom off their brief but intense romance. She didn’t realize how much he affected her until she started examining his life and in doing so examined her own. Like Mike’s untimely demise, fans of this film will always wonder what could have been with Bridges’ original version of the film. Can we let it go or be forever haunted by its brief existence?

SOURCES

BAM, April 20, 1984.

Bozung, Justin. “Producer Jack Larson on 1984 Warner Brothers’ Maudit, Mike’s Murder.” TV Store Online. February 23, 2021.

Farber, Stephen. “Where’s There’s Smoke, There’s a Fiery Actress Named Debra Winger.” The New York Times. July 6, 1986.

The Hollywood Reporter. May 4, 1982.

Kael, Pauline. Hooked. E.P. Dutton. 1989.

Tonguette, Peter. The Films of James Bridges. McFarland Press. 2011.

Angel Heart

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:25:00 +0000

In 1987, the stars aligned for Alan Parker’s horror noir adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel, Fallen Angel, into the film Angel Heart. It was part of a trend in the mid to late 1980s of movies featuring supernatural elements tied to Caribbean or South American magic with Santería and brujería in The Believers (1987), and Voodoo magic in Child’s Play (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) being notable examples.

Several attempts had been made to adapt Hjortsberg’s book since its publication, but it wasn’t until Parker signed on to the project that it got serious traction. It didn’t hurt that he cast Mickey Rourke as his lead actor, red hot from the notoriety of 9 ½ Weeks (1986), and opposite him, Lisa Bonet, one of the breakout stars of the very popular television sitcom, The Cosby Show, which raised eyebrows at the time as she was known for playing a squeaky clean character in a wholesome show to starring as a femme fatale in a sexually explicit film.

Despite this, and the controversial, steamy sex scene between Bonet and Rourke’s characters, which forced Parker to cut 10 seconds to avoid an X rating, Angel Heart failed to make back its $18 million budget and received a mixed critical reaction. It has, however, gone on to influence filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and enjoyed a re-evaluation over the years as an atmospheric neo-noir fused with unsettling elements of supernatural horror.

New York City, 1955. Parker immediately immerses us in the snow-bound city with shadowy alleyways and great attention to period details with era-specific cars and clothes that set a noirish tone. Harold Angel (Rourke) is a slightly seedy private investigator approached by a mysterious client named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) for a job. They meet at a church in Harlem and right from the get-go something is off. It could be the woman outside on the verge of passing out, surrounded by family and friends, or it could be the room where a woman is scrubbing gruesome blood-spattered stains off a wall from an apparent suicide by a parishioner who blew his brains out.

The initial meeting between two of the greatest actors of their respective generations is as wonderful as one would hope as they face off against each other. Robert De Niro plays it low-key yet ominous with the occasional sidelong glances at his no-nonsense attorney (played by Law & Order’s Dann Florek) and exuding a cultured air while also a malevolence in his piercing stare. In contrast, Rourke playfully mispronounces Cyphre’s name and acts nervous, laughing uncomfortably as Harry is clearly intimidated by his future employer. Their scenes together, particularly their first and last one, are some of the film’s best moments if only to see De Niro’s bemused malice square off against Rourke’s smartass bravado.

Cyphre wants Harry to track down a well-known singer by the name of Johnny Favorite from back in the day who failed to honor a contract. Johnny came back from World War II suffering from shellshock and extensive facial injuries involving intensive reconstruction. He wants to know if the man is still alive but, of course, it isn’t that easy as Harry quickly realizes.

Rourke is perfectly cast as a low-rent P.I. in way over his head. He excels at playing these types of characters and delivers a memorable performance as a cocky gumshoe whose whole life gradually unravels. Harry is literally a tortured soul but not particular smart as it becomes apparent early on as he fails to pick up on the clues to the nature of his character. The film’s most significant moment of horror comes with his big revelation – something that was readily apparent to everyone else. Rourke gives it his all in the scene, conveying a truly tormented soul with raw intensity.

Much was made at the time of Bonet’s highly sexualized performance and how different it was from her family-friendly character on The Cosby Show. She shows off plenty of skin and is fine as a voodoo priestess with a secret, but comes off a little stiff, at times, in the scenes she shares with Rourke, a much superior actor. Fortunately, the camera loves her and she photographs very well, providing an alluring screen presence.

Parker’s screenplay tells us too much of what we are already seeing. On several occasions, Harry tells Epiphany Proudfoot (Bonet) how beautiful she is, which is unnecessary. We have eyes, we see her beauty by the way she is photographed. Harry also repeatedly says how much he hates chickens, which seems too on-the-nose, and that he’s from Brooklyn, which we quickly discern from his accent.

What Parker the screenwriter lacks in subtlety (Louis Cyphre = Lucifer – really?) Parker the director more than makes up for it with excellent direction and gorgeous cinematography courtesy of frequent collaborator Michael Seresin, aided by the incredible, period-rich production design by Brian Morris and art direction of 1950s era New York by Armin Ganz and Kristi Zea that envelopes you in this world with its evocative imagery of slow spinning fans and gated elevators going down, even if the latter image is rather heavy-handed (I wonder where it is going to?).

Visually, Parker contrasts the cold darkness of New York with the bright, sun-drenched heat of New Orleans. The source novel takes place entirely in NYC, but I can see what drew Parker to N.O. It is a visually stunning place with its own unique look and vibe. Parker plays up its hot house atmosphere, complete with sensual heat generated by Bonet and Rourke.

Alan Parker was sent the book when it was published in 1978 where it had immediately acquired a reputation for being tough to adapt as it was told in the first person “since so much of it happens inside the person’s head,” said the filmmaker. Paramount Pictures optioned the rights with the book’s author William Hjortsberg writing the screenplay. Robert Evans was being lined up to produce with John Frankenheimer directing. Not long afterwards Dick Richards replaced Frankenheimer with Dustin Hoffman starring as Harry Angel.

Parker was then re-introduced to the book when producer Elliot Kastner gave it to him in 1985. He hadn’t written a screenplay in a while, instead mostly rewriting other people’s work. He was also intrigued about the fusing of the supernatural with the detective story. In adapting the novel, Parker changed the story form being set entirely in New York City to half there and the other half in New Orleans for “very selfish reasons,” and “a lot of the leads within the novel itself went down to New Orleans, and I thought it was a way for me to open it up and give it a different look.” He also felt that New York was an “overly filmed city,” but was drawn to Harlem as he felt that not enough films had been shot there. He did research at the Harlem Library, looking into “bizarre religious movements of the 1930s and 1940s, born of economic isolation, and perhaps spiritual desperation.” He wrote most of the script there and “once I’d broken the back of the story” wrote the rest in New Orleans where he had wanted to move some of the action. It was there that he wrote, “sitting at corner tables in remote bars in the city’s shadowy back streets.”

In search of financial backing, Parker met with Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar at the Cannes Film Festival after a screening of Birdy (1984). The independent movie producers had made millions of dollars with the lucrative Rambo and Terminator franchises and were willing to take risks on films like Angel Heart, agreeing to finance it.

For the casting Harry Angel, Parker met with Jack Nicholson but he didn’t show much interest. He then met with Mickey Rourke for lunch and, according to Parker, “told me quite emphatically that he was the only one to play Harry Angel and so I should ‘stop talking to the other guys.’”

Parker courted Robert De Niro for months, meeting a few times, and went over the script, “every single line and everyone single idea that he had from the point-of-view of the character,” the filmmaker remembered. Two weeks away from filming and Parker still hadn’t gotten De Niro to commit to the film. Originally, he had been approached to play Harry Angel but told the director that he wanted to play Cyphre. Parker didn’t want to pressure the actor in case he said no as there wasn’t an alternative choice for the part.

Parker had not seen Bonet on The Cosby Show. She came and was the second person to audition for the part. Parker was impressed with her: “She was very young, she had an innate intelligence beyond her years.”

Not surprisingly, De Niro committed fully to the transformation into his character: “All I know is when we were working we always knew when he was on the set because suddenly we all felt kind of strange. He became very creepy…You’d feel his presence. Somebody would say, ‘Bob must be here,’ and you’d turn around and there he was,” Parker remembered. For De Niro and Rourke’s first scene Parker used two cameras simultaneously in opposite directions, “this way, should the two of them begin to improvise or go off at a tangent, provoking in the other an action or reaction, a moment’s magic that one inspired in the other would be captured on film.” Observing their acting styles, Parker said, “Bob was cool, meticulous, charming and generous, but had everything under control. Mickey was disarming and ingenuous, but at all times gave as good as he took.”

Angel Heart was originally given an X rating by the Motion Picture Association of America for the sex scene between Bonet and Rourke’s characters. Parker said at the time, “They have not told me what it is specifically they objected to. I am not really sure what is acceptable and what is not…It’s like carving up a body. You get down to where there’s only a foot left and they say, ‘Ah, that’s it.’” The Director’s Guild of America then-president Gilbert Cates leant his support: “We’re against any kind of censoring of material.” Parker appealed the X rating twice before cutting 10 seconds from the scene to obtain an R rating on February 26, 1987. Parker said of the experience, “The film will play uncut almost everywhere in Europe. In most countries, sex is not something that gives you a problem. Violence is. It’s almost the reverse of the way it is here, where you can blow 10 people’s heads off in two minutes and it’s OK.”

Angel Heart received a mixed to negative critical reaction. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars and wrote, “Angel Heart is a thriller and a horror movie, but most of all it's an exuberant exercise in style, in which Parker and his actors have fun taking it to the limit.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Affection of any sort is totally lacking in this film adaptation. The only wit is supplied by Mr. De Niro, who delivers his lines, some of which are genuinely funny, with a comic daintiness that gives firm style to the otherwise murky, pointless narrative “ The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “While it has a sinister elegance, the movie is over-stylized, and we're over-stimulated when the soundtrack goes berserk, from a few thumpity-thumps to a visceral, ventricles a-pumping score.” In her review for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote, “This is a lavishly sombre piece of hokum-funereal and loony.”

For all of its heavy-handedness, Angel Heart is ultimately a triumph of style over substance. I like how Parker gradually introduces the horror genre elements as Harry dives deeper into the voodoo culture that Johnny was a participant. He ratchets it up when more people Harry encounters wind up dead in all kinds of horrible ways. Horror noirs drenched in atmosphere are cinematic catnip for me and on this level the film certainly delivers. Parker has made a neo-noir as a waking nightmare with Harry trying to desperately to wake up, but unable to much like he is unable to escape his true nature.

Angel Heart would make for an excellent double bill with another horror noir, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999) also with a slight script offset by plenty of style to spare and featuring a damned protagonist to anchor the occult lunacy that threatens to overwhelm the film. Whereas Polanski’s film playfully pokes fun at genre conventions, Parker’s effort treats them with deadly seriousness, which exposes the script’s deficiencies. It could have used a bit more levity other than the occasional flourishes by Rourke. As a result, at times, we are laughing at Angel Heart rather than with it in the case of The Ninth Gate.

SOURCES

Daily Variety. April 28, 1986.

Gallagher, John A. Perfect Movies. February 17, 1987.

Parker, Alan. Angel Heart: The Making of the Film – Beat for Beat. Tri-Star Pictures. 1987.

Publishers Weekly. August 21, 1978.

RIP, David Lynch

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:20:00 +0000

This is a tough one. With David Lynch's death comes the passing of a cinematic titan, a controversial artist with his own unique vision of the world and who had the courage to express it with unflinching honesty in films, music, television, and art.

Even though I had seen Dune when it was released in theaters I was not familiar with Lynch. It wasn't until I had seen the first episode of Twin Peaks that I was properly introduced to his world. From the first shot to its jarring last moment, that episode had a profound effect on me. I was hooked. I was struck by how he managed to simultaneously adhere to conventions of the medium and subvert them.

I had to see everything else this man had done and quickly made my way through his filmography. It was a good time to be a Lynch fan as that period of time was a particularly fertile one with him seemingly everywhere - on magazine covers, late night talk shows, promoting his latest T.V. show, film, or art.

Before Lynch I don't think I really appreciated how much cinema could be more than just mere entertainment. His work demonstrated how film could be art that said something not just about the person who made it but about the world around them.

“Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen.”

Below are links to the various articles I've written about his work.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Lost Highway

On the Air

The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 13:56:00 +0000

From a very early age my parents instilled in me a love of movies. Some of my earliest memories are of seeing an animated Raggedy Ann and Andy movie in a darkened theater. This love of cinema also extended to my reading material. In addition to reading copious amounts of comic books and the young adult fiction of S.E. Hinton, I was given at an impressionable age a children’s novel by Daniel Pinkwater entitled, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. It not only contains several references to movies and movie stars, but also features such evocative imagery that I could so easily see it being made into a film. I always imagined it being directed by Beetlejuice (1988) era Tim Burton.

The protagonists of the novel are two boys – Winston Bongo and Walter Galt – who meet in English class at Genghis Khan High School. They become fast friends and bond over how “utterly boring, nauseating, stupid and generally crummy it is.” Winston introduces Walt to the practice of Snarking Out, which involves getting up at 1 a.m. and sneaking out of your home undetected. Oh, how awesome that sounded at my young age. The two boys meet and take a downtown bus to the Snark Theater, which has a different double bill every day (for example: Vampires in a Deserted Seaside Hotel at the End of August and Invasion of the Bageloids) and is open 24 hours – basically, my dream movie palace! Another perk of this place was that if you submitted the name of a movie they would get it and send you a letter with a free ticket when they got it. You can also submit your birthday and they will send you a free ticket for that day.

The Snarkout Boys takes me back to the heady days when going to the movies was a communal experience: “I’ve never had so much fun at the movies. As each new film started, and the audience heard the Laurel and Hardy theme song, everybody started cheering and clapping. We did, too.” Walt even champions seeing a movie in a theater as opposed to on television:

“The thing about Laurel and Hardy movies that you can’t get from the chopped-up versions on television is how beautiful they are. Things happen exactly at the moment they have to happen. They don’t happen a second too soon or too late. You can even predict what’s going to happen—and it does happen—and it surprises you anyway. It doesn’t surprise you because it happened, but because it happened so perfectly.”

On the way home, the bus breaks down so the boys continue on foot and take a detour through Blueberry Park, named after James Blueberry, the toothpick millionaire and whose will stipulated “that the city could have the park, as long as people were permitted to speak there. Anyone who wants to can make a speech there. They don’t have to have a permit or anything like that.” Winston and Walt listen to a trade unionist complaining about working conditions in beatnik-speak – pretty advanced stuff for a children’s book!

On a solo snark Walt meets a girl his age – Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews or Rat to her friends. She’s a skinny girl with blonde-green hair and happens to be a huge fan of legendary actor James Dean. Walt finds out that she’s been snarking for years. She tells Walt and Winston about her uncle Flipping Hades Terwilliger who has been snarking every night for 15-20 years.

The thing that struck me about these characters years later was their good movie-viewing habits, going to see films like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Song of the South (1946) – I had not heard of these films when I first read this book. I also love the snapshot Pinkwater gives us of the Snark Theater’s audience:

“The Attack of the Mayan Mummy came on. Almost at once, people began fidgeting, talking and leaving. As the movie progressed, those people still in the theater were almost all engaged in conversation in normal tones of voice. People lit up cigarettes, friends called to each other … Nobody complained. It wasn’t the sort of movie you’d want to pay attention to.”

What strikes me about the book now is its unique protagonists: two overweight boys and a rat-faced girl with punk rock hair, but Pinkwater doesn’t judge them and, in fact, champions them by further populating the book with oddballs and eccentrics typified by Rat’s family. There’s Aunt Terwilliger, an avid opera fan and yet prone to making speeches about how people shouldn’t listen to them. Uncle Flipping is a mad scientist who does research and development for Bullfrog Industries – the source of the family fortune. Their Chinese butler Heinz (who prefers to be called F’ang Tao Sheh) isn’t really Chinese. Finally, Rat’s mother, Minna Terwilliger Matthews, believes that all realtors are extraterrestrials that have been systematically replaced since the 1950s.

After breakfast, Uncle Flipping mysterious disappears. Has he wondered off? Was he kidnapped? Apparently, he does this often and it is up to the rest of the family to find him. Since they are on vacation, Walt and Winston offer to help Rat find her uncle. It may have something to do with international master criminal Wallace Nussbaum, the king of crime. He was kicked out of South American army for terrifying chickens and holds the world’s boomerang record.

The journey that Walt, Winston and Rat take finds them going to Lower North Aufzoo Street or, “the city beneath the city” as it is known. It is a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scenes as Walt and Winston discover the source of truck deliveries to the business district, where the garbage gets picked up, and a network of steam pipes that heat all the big office buildings. It is these descriptive details of the fictional town of Baconburg that Pinkwater really nails and immerses the reader in this vivid world. For example, at one point our heroes go to get a hotdog and even such a seemingly mundane task such as this is brought to life via such evocative prose:

“About half a block up the street, we could see a puddle of very bright, very yellow light. As we got close, we saw that it was a hot-dog stand with a sort of glass enclosure in front of it. There was a flickering blue neon sign in the window that said ED AND FRED’S RED HOTS … All the lights in the place were these yellow fluorescent light—the kind that are supposed to keep bugs away—and there were a lot of them. This made the brightly colored hot dogs and relish look even stranger than they must have looked in broad daylight.”

According to an article in the Chicago Reader, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death was inspired by Pinkwater’s experiences growing up in 1950s Chicago with several of the fictional places standing in for actual landmarks that he frequented. For example, the Snark Theater is a reference to the now defunct Clark Theater, which would show movies 24 hours a day and feature a different double bill every day. The public debates that occur in Blueberry Park actually took place in Bughouse Square. The oddly named Lower North Aufzoo Street is a riff on the famous Lower Wacker Drive. I can only imagine what a treasure trove of nostalgia a book like this must be for readers who grew up in Chicago.

For Pinkwater, he is interested in preserving, “the dying cultural treasures of urban life… There are things I`ve seen and experienced that have been very precious and nice, and I feel almost bad that they`re gone now… And when you read about these things, you say, ‘Damn, I’d like to go there tonight!’ I enjoy keeping some of this stuff alive.”

The kinds of descriptions I mentioned earlier are ones that I can see Tim Burton bringing to life in a film. When I first read The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death I pictured the entire story in my head, imagining exactly what these characters looked like and the adventures they went on. Pinkwater wrote a sequel entitled, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, which continued the numerous film references, but wasn’t nearly as satisfying a read as Avocado of Death, but then sequels rarely are. That being said, like any good young adult novel, Pinkwater’s book appeals to both youthful readers and older ones that pick up the references to obscure foreign and B-movies. It is a worthy addition to any budding cinephile’s library.

SOURCES

Pinkwater, Daniel. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books. 1982.

Sachs, Ben. “My Favorite Book About Chicago Moviegoing.” Chicago Reader. June 17, 2013.

“Twisted Reality.” Chicago Tribune. February 21, 1990.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 15:13:00 +0000

After the critical acclaim of Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), filmmaker Gus Van Sant parlayed his newly-acquired clout within the film industry to realize one of his dream projects – an adaptation of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. This 1976 novel about the freewheeling adventures of Sissy Hankshaw, a young woman with enormously large thumbs that give her a preternatural ability to hitchhike through life. Robbins deftly used magic realism to tackle topics such as free love, feminism, drugs, animal rights, and religion, among others.

In 1977, Tom Robbins autographed Gus Van Sant’s copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and the future filmmaker vowed one day to adapt it into a film. Producer Robert Wunsch optioned the book and in April, 1977, hired screenwriter Stephen Geller to adapt it. This option expired a year later and actor Shelley Duvall bought the rights. In 1980, Warner Brothers hired her to write and star in a film version, for which she even wrote a screenplay, but nothing came of it. “One studio told me, ‘Too quirky even for us,’ and I had toned it down quite a lot!” She lost the option to Daryl Hannah. Let’s take a moment to contemplate what Duvall’s version would have been like…with her unconventional looks and style of acting, she might have been an excellent choice to play Sissy.

Jump to May 1990 and TriStar Pictures had the rights, hiring Van Sant to direct Cowgirls. Two years later, the studio put the project on hold after deciding that the material may not be accessible enough for mainstream audiences. In August of 1992, the rights moved over to Fine Line Features, who agreed to produce Van Sant’s adaptation for $9 million. Shooting began in September, in New York City.

When it was announced that Van Sant would write and direct the adaptation, it seemed like the ideal marriage between filmmaker and source material. His depictions of Bob’s (Matt Dillon) drug-induced daydreams in Drugstore Cowboy and Mike’s (River Phoenix) surreal, narcoleptic dreams in Idaho suggested that he was the perfect filmmaker to bring Cowgirls’ unique brand of hippie-tinged flights of fancy to life.

After Idaho, everyone wanted to work with Van Sant; he cashed in his cool clout to populate Cowgirls with cameos from the likes of Roseanne Arnold, Buck Henry, Carol Kane, and William S. Burroughs, while also casting prior collaborators Keanu Reeves, Grace Zabriskie, and Udo Kier. He even got k.d. lang, hot off her internationally lauded 1992 album, Ingénue, to create the soundtrack. In the central role of Sissy, he cast then-up-and-coming actor Uma Thurman, who had gotten good notices for her performances in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Henry & June (1990) and, a year later, would strike it big in Pulp Fiction (1994).

Cowgirls screened at the 1993 Toronto International Film Festival where it was savaged by critics. This prompted Van Sant to recut the film before its release in theaters where it was subsequently mauled by critics, grossing only $1.7 million off an $8.5 million budget. Where did it all go wrong for Van Sant, who had been such a critical darling prior to Cowgirls? Had he merely misunderstood the source material? Was it simply another case of a book that could not be adapted into a film? Most importantly, is Cowgirls any good?

Right out of the gate, Van Sant introduces Sissy in two scenes featuring cameos by Buck Henry and Roseanne, which was a mistake. We are trying to get a handle on who Sissy is and where she’s coming from, only to be distracted by these instantly recognizable celebrities. These cameos take one out of the film at the crucial moment we are meant to be learning about Sissy’s origin story. She finds that her large thumbs give her the uncanny ability to hitch rides from anyone and uses this power to satisfy her wanderlust. Like Mike from Idaho, Sissy comes from a troubled past and seeks to find a new family that will love her as she is. Sissy, however, is not a tragic character like Mike, finding hope and promise in the open road, speaking passionately about it: “Moving so freely, so clearly, so delicately…I have the rhythms of the universe inside of me. I am in a state of grace.”

Among the eccentric characters she crosses paths with is The Countess (a flamboyant John Hurt), a rich, New York-based transvestite that gave her numerous modeling assignments years ago when she first left home. The film shifts gears and spins its wheels for a spell when he sets her up with Julian (Reeves), an artist with an entourage of pretentious sycophants played by none other than Sean Young, Carol Kane, Ed Begley, Jr., and the inimitable Crispin Glover. In an odd and uncomfortable scene, the latter shows up sporting a horrible combover and proceeds to compare the size and shape of Young and Thurman’s breasts. This does little, however, to distract from the unfortunate decision to cast Keanu Reeves as a Mohawk Indian, complete with dark skin.

After this mercifully brief episode, The Countess gives Sissy her first modeling assignment in years: go out west to Oregon and film a commercial for two of his feminine hygiene products, with a group of whooping cranes, while they perform their mating ritual in the background. He warns her, however, to stay away from the cowgirls that populate the nearby Rubber Rose Ranch, a health spa for wealthy women. This is easily the weakest part of the film. Hurt’s cartoonish queen, complete with exaggerated pratfall when Sissy hits him, appears to be acting in a completely different movie.

Miss Adrian (Angie Dickinson) runs the ranch and is at odds with the young cowgirls, led by the bullwhip-wielding Delores Del Ruby (Lorraine Bracco) and her young charge, Bonanza Jellybean (Rain Phoenix). The film comes to life once Bonanza and Sissy meet. The cowgirls are unhappy with their working conditions and decide to take over the ranch by force. The reasons behind the takeover are as much about protecting as are protesting, specifically the endangered whooping cranes, who, like the cowgirls, are being threatened by the ruling patriarchy (i.e. the government). The cowgirls are protective of the birds and use them to protest the rule of masculinity that has kept them subservient for many years.

When the revolt begins, Sissy flees to higher ground and meets The Chink (Noriyuki "Pat" Morita), a Japanese-American quasi-religious guru. He tells her about the simple pleasures of life. Initially, he comes across as more holy fool than holy man but there is a method to his madness.

Uma Thurman is well cast as Sissy. In addition to her ethereal beauty she is also able to convey the earnest passion of her character. Her approach to wide-eyed, irrepressible positivity – is similar to what Johnny Depp did with filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr. in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), but not as extremely stylized…and not as well-written. Thurman’s approach portrays Sissy as incredibly naïve, which would go against her years in the modeling industry and a lifetime of hitchhiking. She’s seen and experienced too much to have such a naïve world view. I think Thurman is opting to play Sissy and as an eternally earnest optimist, always believing the best in everyone she meets.

Rain Phoenix has a natural presence in front of the camera with her big, expressive eyes. However, Van Sant saddles her with a lot of clunky, expositional dialogue that sounds like she is giving her dissertation about cowgirls for a Masters program, often delivered in stiff, wooden fashion by the inexperienced actor. Once we get past her awkwardly-written dialogue, the chemistry between her and Uma works its magic as their two characters fall in love.

Cowgirls screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 1993 to a disastrous critical reaction. Fine Line cancels the film’s November 3 release to allow Van Sant to re-edit the film. After the screening, Van Sant realized, “There wasn’t a focus on specific characters,” and had issues with “pacing and construction of the story.” It was a wakeup call for the filmmaker about its problems:

“Everyone liked the movie within our creative group, all parties were really happy with it and no one said it needed work. No red flags went up. It wasn’t until we had a chance to see it with an audience that we first heard feedback and got a different response than what we thought.”

Producer Laurie Parker said that the first cut was too episodic: “It was kind of like the greatest hits of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. You’d have to make it like Berlin Alexanderplatz to present all of Robbins’ digressions. As it was, we ended up going back to our original idea of focusing on Sissy and the cowgirls.” Author Robbins’ sticking point with the film was Sissy’s thumbs:

“I suggested that he change the size of Sissy’s thumbs from scene to scene. I used 30 or 40 metaphors to describe Sissy’s thumbs, ranging in size from a cucumber to a baseball bat, so that each reader could decide what they looked like. If there’s anything I don’t like about having the book filmed, it’s that the thumbs are pinned down to a specific size.”

Van Sant cut down the New York scenes, including Sissy’s relationship with Julian, in favor of more time spent on the Rubber Rose Ranch, with more attention paid to the relationship between Sissy and Bonanza. He also cut out an entire subplot involving the enigmatic Clock People, keepers of the keys of cosmic consciousness. Sissy getting pregnant by the Chink was also excised, only a shot near the end of the film of Sissy’s child in the womb remaining to note its occurrence.

This process was nothing new for Van Sant, who re-edited Drugstore Cowboy after the film’s distributors saw the first cut, and My Own Private Idaho, which took at least six months to edit. “This is a standard journey for me. It just took longer than usual this time,” he said. Nevertheless, the April 12, 1994 release date was moved to April 29, only to be postponed again to May 20. The official reason was that too many movies were coming out that weekend.

Roger Ebert kicked off the film's overwhelming negative reception by giving it a half of a star out of four. He wrote, "What I am sure of is that Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is one of the more empty, pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness." In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, "The central problem is Sissy. Uma Thurman looks the part. But she has a strained backwoods Virginia accent and is carried along by a script that tries to cram in so much of Sissy's life that she careers from one city to another without becoming more than a character sketch."

The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote, "Bereft of atmosphere, or even coherence, the movie becomes an episodic parade of goofballs, eccentrics and lesbians whose lives and purposes are barely outlined. Sissy and company deserve better than this." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "Though it is possible to pin various philosophical labels on Cowgirls, loaded as it is with undeveloped notions about feminism and individuality, nothing about it is really memorable except the appealing musicality of the fine k.d. lang/Ben Mink score, which deserves better." Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman wrote, "The patronizing archness of Cowgirls seems directed, finally, at the audience itself – at anyone who expects a movie to add up to something humane and involving."

The inherent problem any filmmaker faces with adapting a novel is that everyone who reads it – including them – has their own unique take on it that is different from others. When someone attempts to visualize their experience of the source material, they risk alienating others who didn’t have the same experience. Then there is a book like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that is chock-a-block with fantastical, metaphysical and philosophical elements that are hard to translate visually.

SOURCES

Eller, Claudia. “Cutting Room Corral.” Los Angeles Times. October 14, 1993.

Grimes, William. “How to Fix a Film at the Very Last Minute (or Even Later).” The New York Times. May 15, 1994.

Kempley, Rita. “The Thumbprint of Gus Van Sant. Cowgirls Director Ropes a Bum Steer.” The New York Times. May 19, 1994.

Kilday, Gregg. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: From Book to Film.” Entertainment Weekly. May 20, 1994.

Kort, Michele. “Shelley Duvall Grows Up.” Los Angeles Times. December 15, 1991.

Rochlin, Margy. “Shelley Duvall.” Los Angeles Times. March 9, 1986.

Medium Cool

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 20:37:00 +0000

In 1968, the United States was in turmoil. The country was mired in the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson announced his resignation. Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy – two beacons of hope for civil rights and an end to the war – were assassinated. Angry and frustrated, people took to the streets in protest, most significantly at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler was there filming his directorial debut, Medium Cool (1969), a prime example of cinema verité with its brilliant fusion of documentary and narrative filmmaking creating an immediacy and authenticity, with a loosely-scripted narrative set in and among the chaos of the Convention.

Inspired by the socio-political chaos that was going on at the time, he shot the film in Chicago, hoping that something would transpire at the Convention. Incredibly, he was filming as protests turned violent when word got out that the Democrats failed to take a stand against the war. His cast and crew mixed it up with actual protestors and police. The result mirrored what Wexler was trying to say – what is real and what isn’t – by intentionally blurring the line between fact and fiction.

Medium Cool opens with an example of the famous journalism creed – if it bleeds, it leads – as John (Robert Forster) and his partner Gus (Peter Bonerz) film the aftermath of a car accident, an injured person still in the car, only to dispassionately call for an ambulance after they get the footage they need. They then drive off instead of helping or staying with the victim, immediately testing our instinct to empathize with these characters. The opening credits play over a motorcyclist carrying the accident footage through the streets of Chicago at dawn coupled with Mike Bloomfield’s twangy, western score, setting the tone and establishing the city as a character unto itself.

The next scene takes place at a swanky party as a group of people – that includes John and Gus – discuss journalistic ethics. One man says:

“I’ve made film on all kinds of social problems and the big bombs were the ones where we went into detail and showed why something happened. Nobody wants to take the time. They’d rather see 30 seconds of somebody getting his skull cracked, turn off the T.V., and say, ‘Let me have another beer.’”

These words are eerily prophetic as journalistic standards have lowered significantly since then, generation after generation having been weaned on sensationalistic new footage with very little substance.

Wexler adopts the hand-held camera style of Jean-Luc Godard, accompanying a raw, improvisational approach to acting reminiscent of John Cassavetes. This creates an air of authenticity, encouraging us to wonder what is real and what is staged. It feels real and immediate – be it a violent roller derby match that John and Gus attend, or the scene where two little kids free a pigeon on a subway platform and play on the train ride home, in what feels like an unguarded moment. Other times, he keeps the camera mostly stationary with very little movement, simply observing his subjects, such as the scene where we watch the daily activities of Eileen (Verna Bloom), a mother, and her son Harold (Harold Blankenship).

A young Robert Forster anchors the film as an amoral journalist that doesn’t seem to care about anything but his job. He refuses to get involved with the stories he covers, a good thing, objectively speaking, until it is a matter of life or death. The actor brings a rugged charisma to the role and is quite believable as a veteran cameraman. His humanity begins to develop when he gets fired from his job and meets Harold trying to steal his hubcaps, taking him back to Eileen where he befriends the two of them. We see John and Harold bond watching a bunch of birds released into the wild, shot like something out of a Terrence Malick film with its stunning sunset. It is a rare moment where Wexler uses conventional shooting methods.

Wexler does a fine job portraying the different classes in Chicago, using John as a conduit to the more affluent citizens who pontificate on things about which they have little to no actual knowledge. He shows us the rough, economically-depressed neighborhood where Eileen and her son live in abject poverty. John also takes us to a black neighborhood where he follows up on a story about a man who returned $10,000 and gets into it with some of his friends and family, who question his motives as one of them says:

“When you come and say you’ve come to do something of human interest it makes a person wonder whether you’re going to do something of interest to other humans or whether you consider the person human in whom you’re interested.”

His friends give the two journalists a hard time because they are fed up with their perspective being marginalized on T.V. and the media in general.

John eventually gets a gig filming the Democratic National Convention, setting the stage for the film’s climactic scene. Eileen is there, too, looking for Harold, who has run away. What transpires is several actors mingling with a myriad of actual protestors and police officers as things turn ugly and violent for real. Even if you didn’t know that what was unfolding was real, you have to marvel at how Wexler ratchets up the tension between the cops and the protestors. You can sense that a clash between the two sides is inevitable.

Sure enough, violence erupts and we hear the iconic line, “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” juxtaposed with the delegates in the Convention Center who are completely oblivious to what is happening. Wexler cuts back to a montage of shots of protestors injured and bleeding. The cops start randomly beating people and it is absolute chaos.

In 1967, Haskell Wexler started writing a screenplay after reading Division Street America by Studs Terkel. He had been moved by the trials and tribulations of the denizens of the Appalachian ghetto in Chicago. In 1968, Paramount Pictures hired him to adapt the novel, The Concrete Wilderness by Jack Couffer, which focused on a young boy who loves animals. He merged ideas from both novels with what was going on politically in the United States, “because I was engaged with what was happening in the country that was not being reported in the regular media.” He was an active member in the anti-war movement and knew that the Democratic National Convention was going to have concentrated protests so he “junked most of the book’s plot and wrote a script about a cameraman and his experiences in the city that summer.” He wrote scenes of protest in his script: “For my film I had planned to hire extras and dress them up as Chicago Policemen, but in the end Mayor Richard Daley provided us with all the extras we needed.”

Wexler decided to shoot the film in his hometown of Chicago, making a deal with the studio that he would fund the production, but they had to buy the finished film, even though it no longer resembled its source material. During pre-production, he had oral historian Studs Terkel work as a “fixer,” introducing the filmmaker to Appalachian transplants, artists and musicians who portrayed Black militants in one scene, and actual journalists that appear at a cocktail party, arguing about the ethics of showing violence on-screen. Wexler had been away from Chicago for several years and needed someone who knew the lay of the land. The two men were friends in high school, and when they were reunited back in Chicago, spent a lot of time together with Terkel taking Wexler “on an adventure into my own city that many Chicagoans didn’t see being insulated by communities and money and suburbs.”

When it came to casting, Wexler chose Harold Blankenship as the runaway boy that Forster’s character meets – the only vestige left from the novel – and was actually a child from the hill country. His best friend in the film was played by his real-life brother, Robert. The filmmaker felt that the Appalachian residents were “somewhat of a forgotten people” and wanted them represented in his film. While shooting documentaries in the South during the civil rights movement, he had worked with them in Monteagle, Tennessee. To this end, he shot in the Appalachian ghetto of Chicago’s upper north side where mountain people from Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia had settled.

With the assassinations of King and Kennedy, Wexler anticipated trouble at the Democratic Convention and that drew him to the city: “I knew there would be demonstrations and that the police would suppress them, but I didn’t build the story or the script around that. It just sort of unfolded before me.” Wexler talked to Mayor Daley who approved police officers on the first day of filming but Wexler quickly realized that with them present, “nobody in the street would come out and talk to us. From then on, I said, ‘Look, I don’t want cops around when I’m shooting.” Wexler came to regret that while filming the riots in Grant Park where he and his crew were tear-gassed for their troubles. The famous line uttered during this scene, “Look out, Haskell; it’s real!” was actually added in post-production. During filming they didn’t have a sound man present and his assistant, Jonathan Haze, said something resembling those words when the Nation Guard shot tear gas at Wexler.

Wexler sensed that there would be trouble at the Convention, thanks to a leaflet the police had put out a month prior that had a list of new crowd-control weapons.

Paramount had no idea what to do with the finished film, sitting on it for months, telling Wexler that he’d have to get releases from all the people in the park sequences. They also objected to the casual carnage and nudity. When Medium Cool was released, the MPAA gave it an “X” rating, which Wexler felt was politically motivated: What no one had the nerve to say was that it was a political ‘X’.”

Medium Cool ends as it began – with a car accident, only instead of John reporting on the incident, he is the incident. A car full of people pass by and much like what he did in the opening scene, they take a picture and drive on, leaving it for someone else to do something. He is treated with the same indifference he showed to the accident victim early in the film. This rather nihilistic, downbeat ending comes as a surprise and is Wexler’s most cinematic flourish, taking the ending of Easy Rider (1969) and giving it a meta spin when the camera turns on him filming footage of the end. He faces the camera as if to say, it’s only a movie.

SOURCES

Cronin, Paul. “Mid-Summer Mavericks.” Sight and Sound. September, 2001.

“Haskell Wexler on the Criterion Collection Release of Medium Cool.” Time Out. May 22, 2013.

French, Piper. “High Visibility: Reexamining Medium Cool on Its 50th Anniversary.” Los Angeles Review of Books. August 23, 2019.

Lightman, Herb A. “The Filming of Medium Cool.” American Cinematographer. January, 1970.

Bullitt

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 22:54:00 +0000

In the late 1960s, Hollywood was undergoing a significant change. The studios had lost touch with what moviegoing audiences wanted to see. By 1969 and the release of Easy Rider and its subsequent success signaled a seismic shift in cinema, making way for a myriad of unusual films that were pushed through the system throughout the following decade. Actor Steve McQueen was at the height of his powers during the transition period with a toe in each era. He had risen to prominence during the ‘60s with such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963), which transformed him into a bonafide movie star but, at heart, he was a Method actor serious about his craft. He used his newfound clout within Hollywood to produce two films that catapulted him to the next level, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, both released in 1968.

Bullitt is a perfect example of the aforementioned transitional period that was going on in Hollywood. It is a studio movie, specifically a crime thriller that sees McQueen as a police detective, however, he cut a significant amount of his character’s dialogue to suit his particular style of acting. In addition, he had the production shoot on location in San Francisco (uncommon at the time) and adhere to strict authenticity when it came to police procedural details. One of the most important aspects of this shoot was the show-stopping car chase scene that eschewed traditional Hollywood techniques in favor of cars at actual high speeds on actual city streets. This not only added to the film’s realism - it gave the sequence a visceral thrill that hadn’t been done before.

The opening credits employ a fisheye lens, mixing black and white with color as Lalo Schifrin’s cool, jazzy score sets a stylish vibe. Initially we have no idea what is going on; the action that occurs during this sequence is without dialogue. Who is chasing whom and why? Even when dialogue is finally spoken, just before director Peter Yates’ credit, it is unclear exactly what happened.

Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by Senator Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) with protecting the star witness – Albert "Johnny Ross" Renick (Felice Orlandi) – in a big trial against the Mob, known here simply as The Organization. He has to keep him safe for 40 hours. What seems like a routine assignment turns out to be much more complicated: the witness and the police detective guarding him are critically injured by two hitmen in a situation that reeks of a set-up. Why would the witness let these two men into the apartment? Frank’s boss (Simon Oakland) tells him to investigate further and do it by the book… but, of course, a maverick cop like Frank goes his own way, authority figures be damned. As he puts it, “You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.” It is a beautifully succinct line that sums up Frank’s ethos as a cop.

What is so fascinating about McQueen’s performance is his choice to emphasize facial expression and body language (or the lack thereof) over dialogue. When a fellow cop is injured in the line of duty, he says little to the man, except to ask the identity of the person who shot him. The rest of the scene shows Frank reacting to what happened, the grave concern that plays across his face. No trite words of comfort are needed – the expression on McQueen’s face says it all.

This technique is used again when Frank revisits the crime scene where Ross and the cop were shot. No dialogue, just him looking over the scene and thinking about what happened, trying to piece things together. Typically, a scene like that would have a voiceover or Frank would be talking to himself or someone there explaining what he’s doing. Instead, the filmmakers assume the audience is smart enough to figure it out.

This being McQueen, Frank is a hip guy. He dresses stylishly and takes his beautiful girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) to a snazzy jazz club for lunch. Even his introduction is as low-key as the man himself: his partner (Don Gordon) wakes him up after a long night (he went to bed at 5 a.m.). Frank isn’t much for small talk and that’s all we know about him; their relationship is all business. They aren’t friends that crack jokes together or are at odds with each other like buddy cop movies of later decades. It is an underwhelming introduction that gives no indication of what kind of cop Frank is – we find out over the course of the film. This is quite unusual for a mainstream studio film at the time, which traditionally spelled everything out – this is not the case as Bullitt adopts its leading man’s less-is-more aesthetic, extending to its very economic use of dialogue. When Frank goes to dinner with a group of friends, his girl by his side, we see them all talking but don’t hear their conversation as the jazz music drowns out their voices. What they’re saying isn’t important, only that we see what Frank does in his off-hours.

For the most part, Jacqueline Bisset is saddled with the thankless token girlfriend role. Late in the film, however, she gets a moment to showcase her acting chops when her character confronts Frank about his job, after seeing a crime scene where a woman was brutally strangled. She tells him, “Do you let anything reach you – I mean really reach you – or are you so used to it by now that nothing really touches you?” She continues, “How can you be part of it without becoming more and more callous?” referring to the violence and ugliness of his job. He has no answer for her. She cannot reconcile the vast difference between her world and his, asking, “What will happen to us in time?” to which he replies, “Time starts now.” If up until now he’s kept her at arm’s length about the harsh realities of his job, perhaps now that she has gotten a glimpse of it, she understands why he doesn’t share the ugly details with her. Bisset does a fantastic job in this scene and one wishes she was given more to do in the film.

Yates shows off the hilly streets of San Francisco beautifully. You get a real sense of place and the city becomes another character unto itself. We see the neighborhood convenience store where Frank gets his groceries and the grubby, hole-in-the-wall hotel room in which the witness is hidden away. Throughout Bullitt, the director demonstrates his considerable skill at visual storytelling. A key example of this takes place at the hospital, when Frank shows up to check on the condition of the witness with Dr. Willard (Georg Stanford Brown). In the foreground of the shot Frank is eating while Willard is nearby. In the background we see and hear Chalmers tell a nurse that he wants Willard replaced as Ross’ doctor because, “He’s too young and inexperienced,” and he would prefer his own surgeon to take care of the man.

Frank and Willard exchange a look that indicates they know the real reason: he’s black. It’s not spelled out and nothing is said between the two men but they know and we know it, too. It also reveals Chalmers’ unsavory side that had not been revealed up to this point. Frank was already unsure of him because he came off as a smug prick, but this clinches it: Chalmers has his own agenda and is not to be trusted.

The film rights to Mute Witness by Robert Pike had sold five times with McQueen’s Solar Productions being the last buyer. Initially, he didn’t want to play a cop as he felt it would hurt his counterculture/rebel reputation. Over time, he changed his mind, reasoning that an authentic performance might change people’s opinions of the police. He enlisted Alan Trustman, who wrote the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, to write a treatment for Bullitt. McQueen wasn’t crazy about the complicated plot that the writer created.

While that was being worked on, he and producer Robert Relyea saw Robbery (1967), a heist film directed by Peter Yates, which contained a car chase sequence that impressed both men. Relyea said, “Yates had a car chase in that movie that involved cars moving along very fast, then cutting to these children at a crosswalk. It made you so nervous you couldn’t see straight.” The director was sent the script for Bullitt and thought it was “awful.” He was asked to re-read it and replied, “I’m not coming to America to make that kind of film!” He was eventually coaxed to fly to Los Angeles to tell McQueen and Relyea what he thought of the script and within hours signed on to direct the film.

While the script was being rewritten, McQueen was hands on with the casting, handpicking Robert Vaughn, Simon Oakland and others. Vaughn actually turned down the project three times and agreed to do it only after talking to McQueen, his agent and then Yates. For his partner in the film, McQueen cast long-time friend Don Gordon, whom he had known since the late 1950s when they were working in television. It was his first film role and gave his career a boost.

For the role of Frank’s girlfriend, McQueen cast Jacqueline Bisset because he was attracted to her, claiming that she was the most beautiful co-star he worked with up to that point in his career. He made excuses to his wife to keep her away from the shoot while he conducted an affair with Bisset during filming. He also thought she was an excellent co-star: “She catches good. She can throw it back to you with a great depth for a girl of that age.”

Yates thought it would be good for McQueen and Gordon if they researched their roles. They went on ride-alongs with San Francisco police officers. Yates said, “Steve and Don Gordon really had down their procedures. I thought it would be more exciting, and it was.” The two cops assigned to McQueen hazed him a bit to see if he was just another poseur actor and took him to a morgue. He was up to the challenge, showing up with an apple, eating it while being shown cadavers. Gordon, meanwhile, was taken out on a real drug bust and given a police I.D. card and carried a badge and a prop gun. He was even recognized by a suspect on a bust.

Up to this point, McQueen had a good relationship with the studio and its head, Jack Warner, who quickly agreed to make Bullitt and was hands off, trusting the actor. As production ramped up, Warner sold his stock and retired. Kenneth Hyman and Seven Arts took over and told McQueen that they wanted to be more hands-on. Relyea said, “We came in with one understanding and then found ourselves in another, it led to misunderstandings on both sides.” The studio told McQueen that his six-picture deal was now going to be a one and done deal.

Filming began in February 1968 and finished in May of the same year. The pressure of the new studio regime and his reduced deal weighed heavily on McQueen. He didn’t display the good humor he had on other sets as the pressure of carrying the film affected his day-to-day mood – but it did not deter him from fighting for what he wanted. The studio wanted Bullitt shot on the lot but McQueen pushed to have it shot entirely on location. Yates said, “My biggest concern was that if we were to make a picture totally on the lot, that it would look like a television series.” San Francisco’s mayor Joseph L. Alioto was very accommodating and the studio backed down. As a result, Bullitt was the first film to be shot on location with an all-Hollywood crew, a major feat unto itself.

Yates encouraged the actors to ad-lib and was not afraid to change a scene if it wasn’t working. For example, in the scene where Frank meets his girlfriend for dinner, McQueen didn’t feel comfortable with the dialogue as written. Yates told him and Bisset to act as if they were having a real dinner and filmed them from the outside.

During filming, the studio rode McQueen hard about the budget. Whenever a studio executive would show up on location, the actor would kick them off. The studio claimed that the production was going over budget while in actuality there was no real projected budget! In the end, the studio claimed that the budget went from four million dollars to six million when it actually only cost five million.

Some of the stunts that were performed during the production were quite dangerous and they didn’t always involve cars. In the scene where Frank pursues Johnny Ross on the airport runway and goes under a Boeing 707 passenger jet, the stunt involved 240-degree heat blasts from the engine with unpredictable cross winds. Stuntman Loren James talked to the FAA and pilots and was told that it couldn’t be done. Eventually, he found a pilot that was willing to do it and the stunt was done in one take. James was paid $5000 for the death-defying stunt.

The film’s famous car chase sequence was saved for the last two weeks of filming with the studio threatening to deny it if the production went over budget. Screenwriter Alan Trustman claims that the car chase was in the script but Yates has said that it was producer Phil D’Antoni that pushed for it. Yates had just done one in a previous film and didn’t want to do it. McQueen was prepping for the car racing drama Le Mans (1971) and didn’t want to do it either. Stunt driver Carey Lofton was brought in to coordinate the chase. He had known McQueen since the late ‘50s and they had a good relationship. The actor wanted to make the best car chase depicted on film and Lofton told him, “I knew a lot about camera angles and speeds to make it look fast. You can underground the camera so you can control everything in the scene.” Lofton told McQueen it would be expensive to do. The actor replied, “Money is no object here.”

McQueen wanted to do his own driving and Lofton spent four days trying to convince him otherwise. It wasn’t until he crashed into another car three times that Lofton asked McQueen’s friend Bud Elkins to double for him. Elkins said of his friend, “He took the corners too fast and he overshot them and crashed into cars.” The climactic explosion at a gas station was, not surprisingly, the most expensive aspect of filming and could be done only once. It was shot on the last day of filming. Even though the car overshot the gas pumps, clever editing covered this mistake.

The final showdown where Frank chases his suspect on a busy airport runway and beyond is more than a little reminiscent of the climactic showdown between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). This, coupled with the all-business Bullitt and the attention to procedural details, influenced filmmakers such as Walter Hill and the aforementioned Mann; both are fascinated by the machinations between cops and crooks.

Bullitt had its premiere on October 17, 1968 at Radio City Music Hall. Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars and wrote, “The beautiful thing is that Yates and his writers keen everything straight. There's nothing worse than a complicated plot that loses track of itself.” In her review for The New York Times, Renata Adler wrote that it was a “terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen: Fast, well acted, written the way people talk.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Apart from specific business assigned, McQueen is able to convey the same depths of complexity in close-up reactions throughout the film’s action, which stresses brutal action no less efficiently than the political intimidation, and opportunistic legal maneuvers which are the cool menace of Vaughn’s tactics.” In his review for Artforum, Manny Farber wrote, “in a long, near-silent and very good stretch in U.C. Hospital, which is almost excessive in the way it sticks like plaster to the mundaneness of the place, the movie hits into about seventeen verities: faces looking out as though across the great divide of 20th-century lousiness.”

After watching this film, audiences questioned: what was the point? Was Chalmers in league with The Organization or merely an arrogant and inept politician? Robert Vaughn keeps his cards close to his vest, never giving us a clear indication of his character’s true motivations. He maintains a slick, impenetrable façade that the actor does a great job of maintaining throughout the film. Bullitt simply ends with Frank returning home, his girlfriend asleep in his bed. He washes his face and looks in the mirror, a grim expression looking back. One wonders if this befuddled audiences at the time. It certainly isn’t the happy ending most expected with this kind of a film and again, it is further proof of the winds of change going on in Hollywood where McQueen could push a film like this through the system. It isn’t as radical as something like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), but it is groping towards that kind of reinvention.

SOURCES

Terrill, Marshall. Steve McQueen: Portrait of An American Rebel. Plexus. 1993.

The Lords of Salem

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 18:01:00 +0000

With the exception of Eli Roth, no other filmmaker in the 2000s has divided horror movie fans more than hard rocker turned director Rob Zombie. People either love or hate his brand of grungy, white trash nihilistic cinema where he identifies with the antagonists rather than the protagonists, be it the Firefly clan in House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and 3 From Hell (2019), or Michael Myers in Halloween (2007) and its sequel (2009). With The Lords of Salem (2012), he created his first traditional protagonist only to place her in an unconventional film. Enjoying the most creative freedom he had since Rejects, he eschewed the gore and extreme violence of his previous films in favor of a heavy atmosphere of dread. Freedom from the constraints of a studio franchise (Halloween) emboldened Zombie to push himself as a filmmaker, creating a fascinating phantasmagorical experience.

Heidi LaRoc (Sheri Moon Zombie) is a disc jockey at a local, popular Salem hard rock radio station where she co-hosts a show along with two others – Herman “Whitey” Salvador (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Herman “Munster” Jackson (Ken Foree). She lives with her dog in an old apartment building and one day spots a new tenant in the apartment down the hall. When she asks her landlady (Judy Geeson) the identity of the new inhabitant, she is told that no one lives there.

One day at work, a mysterious record shows up in an old wooden box, addressed to Heidi, by a band called The Lords. She listens to it with Whitey and the music causes her to have a vision of a 17th century-era coven of Satan-worshipping witches. She finds herself inexplicably drawn to the apartment down the hall and once there, finds herself confronted by disturbing visions, including a nightmarish beast in an otherworldly landscape. Heidi’s mind unravels over the course of the film as The Lords record really puts the zap on her, blurring the lines between reality and nightmare.

Right from the get-go, Zombie does a wonderful job capturing the cool, crisp autumn days in the Northeast via the cinematography, drawing us into this world. He utilizes a warm, amber filter for night scenes and muted colors, creating a grey, cold look for day scenes. For the first third, he adopts a slow burn approach, not revealing too much, gradually building the dread, letting us get to know Heidi so that we care about happens to her in the latter two acts of the film. He populates the film with Kubrickian low-angle shots of hallways and breaks up the story into days of the week, a la The Shining (1980). He also shows a knack for striking visuals as evident in the fiery, apocalyptic inferno that is the 17th century witch trials, illustrating the Puritans meting out their religious brand of ‘justice.’

Sheri Moon Zombie has gotten a lot of flak for her acting prowess and the fact that she almost exclusively appears in her husband’s films, usually in a supporting role, whether it be significant (Rejects) or smaller (Halloween). In The Lords of Salem she is cast in the lead role, the responsibility of carrying the film placed squarely upon her shoulders. Because Moon’s acting ability is inherently tied to her expressive looks and may not have the broadest range, she benefits from Zombie’s ‘less is more’ approach. Heidi doesn’t have a lot of dialogue and, once the effects of The Lords record take hold on her character. She spends most of her time reacting to the strange things going on around her. Sheri does a commendable job of showing a woman plagued by horrible visions of faceless surgeons pulling her intestines out, struggling to make sense of what is happening, and displaying increasingly erratic behavior.

Veteran actor Bruce Davidson is excellent as a Salem witch scholar that figures out the connection between The Lords record and the Salem witches. Zombie regular Jeff Daniel Phillips is also memorable as a disc jockey that works and is close friends with Heidi. There is a nicely understated romantic tension between the two characters, suggesting a longstanding friendship, evidenced by the familiar shorthand between them.

As with his other films, Zombie acknowledges horror films from the past by casting its royalty with the likes of Dee Wallace, Judy Geeson, and Ken Foree in crucial roles, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos by Barbara Crampton, Michael Berryman, and Sig Haig. This isn’t simple stunt casting or a knowing wink to fellow horror genre fans, rather actors playing bonafide, lived-in characters.

The Lords of Salem is a captivating film with Brandon Trost’s atmospheric cinematography giving it a much richer look than its meager $1.5 million budget would suggest. Zombie gets the most out of his locations, choosing those that give a real sense of place including, most crucially, the apartment building that Heidi inhabits. Everything has a lived-in look, from the clutter in the D.J. booth where Heidi does her show to Davidson’s bookcase-dominated home.

If there is one erroneous aspect of this film, it’s the reliance on the tired cliché of Satan-worshipping witches. Witchcraft is pagan in nature. While a large number of witches don’t worship any god or goddess, there are those that do…but not Satan. It could be that he is used in film because it is an easily identifiable embodiment of evil, even outside of the Christian faith. Zombie did such a great job in all other areas and seemed to be interested in bucking tradition, then fell back on a stereotypical portrayal that is disappointing, but hardly surprising as this has been done in countless horror films.

Zombie tones down the gore in favor of disturbing imagery reminiscent of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), creating an overwhelming feeling of dread and unease. In that sense, The Lords of Salem is a refreshing outlier in Zombie’s filmography as it dials back the aggressive, extreme horror films of such films as 31 (2016) by shifting gears to more supernatural-based horror, as demonstrated in the showstopping finale. Zombie pulls out the strangest imagery that he’s ever produced and marries it with his trademark downbeat ending, scored to chilling effect with “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Lords of Salem is not a scary movie per se… instead Zombie creates a more chilling, unsettling experience. It appeared that he was maturing and evolving as a filmmaker but when it barely made back its budget, he went back to what he knew best – extreme horror with hillbillies and white trash with 31. That being said, he is still capable of throwing audiences the occasional curve ball as he did in 2002 with the odd career move of making a studio-backed film adaptation of the much-beloved 1960s family sitcom, The Munsters. True to form, by design or not, Zombie’s work continues to fascinate fans and detractors alike.

L.A. Takedown

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 20:48:00 +0000

It says something about the kind of juice Michael Mann had within the industry in 1989 that he was able to create – and get on television – a rough draft for a film he would make six years later. He wrote an early draft of what would become Heat in 1979 that was 180 pages and based on real people he knew both personally and by reputation in Chicago. Ten years later, he cut the screenplay down to 110 pages and raised the financing himself so that he owned the rights to the material. The result was a made-for-television movie entitled L.A. Takedown, a cat-and-mouse story between a career criminal and a dedicated police detective that aired on NBC on August 27, 1989 at 9 p.m.

The origins for the project were based in large part from the experiences of a police officer and an old friend of Mann's, Chuck Adamson, who had been chasing down a high-line thief named Neil McCauley in Chicago in 1963. Mann wrote another draft after making Thief (1981) with no intention of directing it himself. In the late 1980s, he tried to produce the film several times and offered it to his friend and fellow filmmaker Walter Hill but he turned it down. Mann was still not satisfied with the script, which had developed the character of McCauley but who still needed work. It also lacked an ending.

Early on, L.A. Takedown follows the plot to Heat beat-for-beat with Scott Plank playing Los Angeles Robbery-Homicide division cop Vincent Hanna and Alex McArthur as Patrick McLaren (Neil McCauley in Heat), the veteran thief. It is fascinating to see the different choices that Mann makes, such as the tweaks in dialogue or in the casting of certain characters. For example, Xander Berkley, a fantastic actor in his own right, is cast as Waingro, the loose cannon McLaren hires to help his crew knock over an armored truck. The actor plays him initially as a jittery psychopath, only to later settle on a drugged-out look, whereas in Heat, Kevin Gage brings a scary, simmering intensity to the role – a stone-cold serial killer and agent of chaos.

The most interesting casting in the movie is Hanna’s team, which includes Richard Chaves (Predator), Michael Rooker (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), and Daniel Baldwin (John Carpenter’s Vampires). Unfortunately, they hardly get any screen time and therefore make little impact. Plank is okay as Hanna but lacks the confident swagger that Al Pacino brought to the role. That being said, he does have a nice moment with his estranged wife, Lillian (Ely Pouget), near the end, after McLaren is killed, where he admits that he loves her but isn’t going to change.

L.A. Takedown suffers most in the casting of McLaren and his crew. McArthur, eerily chilling in William Friedkin’s Rampage (1987) as a sadistic serial killer, lacks the gravitas of Robert De Niro. The same can be said for the barely seen Peter Dobson (The Frighteners) as Chris Sheherlis who comes off as a glorified extra in this incarnation, whereas the role was expanded significantly in Heat with Val Kilmer taking over the character. Vincent Guastaferro (NYPD Blue) plays Michael Cerrito and lacks the intensity that Tom Sizemore brought to the part. They are simply not convincing as a team of elite thieves but then, they aren’t given the screen-time.

The scene where Hanna and McLaren meet face-to-face is fine but it makes one realize just how much De Niro and Pacino brought to the table – nuance and subtlety –that is lacking from McArthur and Plank. There is stiffness to the line readings from both actors as they fail to bring Mann’s words to life, summing up what’s going on in this movie. The inflexible actors are cast in the lead roles and the actors you’d like to see cut loose, like Rooker, are wasted in nothing roles. The famous bank robbery shoot-out is still exciting to watch and one of the few times L.A. Takedown comes thrillingly to life. It lacks the visceral immediacy of Heat but does have some cool shots, such a McLaren and Sheherlis running back into the bank after Hanna and his team show-up, with them chasing the camera in a slick tracking shot.

There are some enjoyable bits of business, such as a montage of Hanna working the streets of L.A., asking around about McLaren and his crew. Mann gives us a brief slice of the city’s night life via quick, broad strokes. Perhaps what is most striking about L.A. Takedown is how it doesn’t feel or look like a Mann production. While Ron Garcia’s (Twin Peaks) cinematography is just fine, it lacks the widescreen mastery of Dante Spinotti’s work in Heat. The T.V. movie’s 1.33:1 aspect ratio certainly doesn’t do it any favors, giving it a boxed-in feel as opposed to Heat’s 2.39:1 aspect ratio, which opens everything up and gives the film more of an epic feel. The lack of Mann’s distinctive touch may also be due to the incredibly fast shoot – uncharacteristic for the methodical filmmaker – with only ten days of pre-production and 19 days of shooting. In comparison, Heat had a six-month pre-production period and a 107-day shooting schedule.

At the end of the day, L.A. Takedown is a fascinating curio, nothing more – a stripped down, rough draft. Gone is Shiherlis’ subplot, so is the bungled precious metals sting, the subplot involving Hanna's stepdaughter, and McLaren dies differently and less satisfyingly. Due to the short running time, everything feels condensed while Heat’s expanded running time allows the story to breathe and provide nuanced characterization, thereby shedding more light on the motivations for the characters’ actions. Heat shows how more time, millions of dollars and a talented, star-studded cast can make a difference. Afterwards, Mann had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured. More importantly, he also figured out the ending. In 1994, Mann showed producer Art Linson another draft of Heat over lunch and told him that he was thinking of updating it. The producer read it, loved it, and agreed to make the film, giving ‘90s cinema what would prove to be a timeless heist classic.

Miami Blues

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 12 May 2023 12:46:00 +0000

"The Sunshine State is a paradise of scandals teeming with drifters, deadbeats, and misfits drawn here by some dark primordial calling like demented trout.” – Carl Hiaasen

Author Charles Willeford has been called “the progenitor of modern South Florida crime novel” with his last four novels chronicling Miami’s shift from vacation paradise destination for retirees to “the nation’s capital of glamor, drugs, and weird crime,” inspiring writers such as Carl Hiaasen and James W. Hall, and filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino. It was his 1984 novel Miami Blues that started it all, featuring the first appearance of grizzled police detective Hoke Moseley who would go on to appear in three subsequent novels. Their commercial success eventually roused interest in Hollywood and Miami Blues was adapted in 1990, part of a fantastic crop of neo-noirs that also included The Grifters, The Hot Spot, and After Dark, My Sweet. A passion project for both its writer/director George Armitage and producer/star Fred Ward, it sadly did not do well at the box office, was coolly received by critics, and has become largely forgotten, despite its profane dialogue and sudden, often violence that anticipated the films of Tarantino two years later.

Frederick J. Frenger Jr. a.k.a. Junior (Baldwin) is an ex-convict flying into Miami from California, armed with someone else’s driver’s license, and ready to wage a one-man crime spree on the city. He gets off to a roaring start right out of the gate – literally, when he tries to steal another passenger’s luggage but misses the opportunity. Undaunted, seconds later, he bribes a small child and makes off with another piece of unattended luggage and for an encore, breaks the finger of a Hari-Krishna follower who subsequently dies from shock.

We meet homicide detective Hoke Moseley (Ward) negotiating money with a blind informant, which is the kind of colorful introduction that tells us a lot about his character. He and his partner (Charles Napier) investigate the Krishna murder and the scene illustrates the short-hand between these two men who have obviously been partners for a long time, while showcasing the film’s black humor: “Your turn to notify next of kin,” Hoke says to his partner who replies, “No way! I did the fat lady that sat on a kid. That’s good for two.” It’s great fun to see these two veteran actors share a scene together, lobbing dialogue back and forth. One almost wishes a prequel had been done about these two characters.

Junior checks into a hotel and quickly arranges for a hooker and meets Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh). He doesn’t want to have sex, but instead sells her clothes out of his stolen luggage. He takes an immediate shine to her. He hasn’t been with a woman in a long time – and initially it looks like he’s going to be rough with her – but instead is very tender.

Miami Blues is a battle of wills, fused with a cat-and-mouse game, as Hoke pursues Junior. He questions him early on at Susie’s over a dinner in a fantastic scene that’s crackling with subtle tension simmering under the surface, as the cop knows the crook is lying about the dead Hari Krishna, but puts on airs for Susie’s benefit. It is a wonderfully acted and staged scene as she is oblivious to what is going on while Hoke and Junior sniff each other out.

Junior is a career criminal who sees the world as a playground. If he wants something he takes it. Someone gets in his way he removes them. He is all about taking short cuts. The first third of the film mostly focuses on Junior’s exploits as we see him spotting a two-man pickpocket team and follows the guy with the loot into a public bathroom, beats him up, and takes the money. He’s a ballsy crook, buying a realistic looking water gun and then robbing a bunch of guys on the street. Baldwin looks like he’s having a blast playing Junior as a legend in his own mind as he sits in his hotel room at one point with a bunch of money, pretending he’s Al Pacino in Scarface (1983). He is excellent as a clever crook whose fault is that he never plans his crimes ahead of time. He’s spontaneous and this works for awhile but eventually catches up to him.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Susie as a naïve innocent who falls in love with Junior but is blind to his true nature. The actor conveys an earnest vulnerability. Susie sees Junior as a way to a better life – the house, the white picket fence, kids, and so on. Juniors taps into this when he tells her, “Let’s go straight to the ‘happily ever after’ part, okay?” She is the one ray of hope and optimism in his otherwise cynical world.

Ward’s Hoke is a broken-down detective on the outskirts of retirement but he’s smart and a student of human behavior, sussing Junior right away, correctly figuring out he’s an ex-con by the way he protects his food while eating dinner. He’s also pissed that Junior is running around with his badge impersonating him and makes it his mission to take the guy down. It’s a fantastic role that showcases Ward’s considerable talents and rare opportunity to headline a film. It’s a shame that Miami Blues wasn’t a bigger hit as it would’ve been great to see him reprise the role again in another adaptation.

Associate producer William Horberg gave Miami Blues to Fred Ward soon after it was published. After reading it, he thought it would make for a great film. “It has a certain irony about it, a certain dark comedy that I like. It’s a little absurd. There’s a random violence in it that I thought was very real,” Ward said in an interview. He optioned the book rights for a two-year deal with $4,000 that the actor paid out of his own picket. He brought it to friend and filmmaker Jonathan Demme, with whom he had worked with on Swing Shift (1984), in the hopes that he’d direct. Demme, just having shot Married to the Mob in Miami (1988), demurred but suggest another friend of Ward’s – George Armitage – to direct instead. Demme knew Armitage from when they were starting out, making films for Roger Corman. He read the book and loved it, going on to write a spec screenplay and agreed to helm it with Demme producing along with Gary Goetzman. Ward had pitched the project to Orion Pictures on two occasions and was turned down both times until he showed them Armitage’s script. They agreed but only if a young actor was cast in one of the lead roles.

Originally, Ward wanted to play Junior with Gene Hackman playing Hoke. The two men met and Hackman was interested but when Alec Baldwin came in to read for the part of Junior, he was so good they cast him in the role, and Ward decided to play Hoke. Early on, Leigh Taylor-Young (Jagged Edge) was originally cast as Susie but dropped out for unknown reasons. Jennifer Jason Leigh was later cast in the role and to prepare, she cut her hair short and isolated herself from the rest of the crew to replicate the loneliness of her character. She also went to Okeechobee, Florida, attended her first football game, and hung out with local high school girls to learn the dialect, their attitudes and aspirations.

Miami Blues received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars and wrote, “The movie wants to be an off-center comedy, a lopsided cops-and-robbers movie where everybody has a few screws loose. But so much love is devoted to creating the wacko loonies in the cast that we're left with a set of personality profiles, not characters.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Miami Blues is best appreciated for the performances of its stars and for the kinds of funny, scene-stealing peripheral touches that keep it lively even when it's less than fully convincing.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “Armitage, a Demme pal, has been struggling to escape B-moviedom for the past decade. But Miami Blues, panicky and sleek as a fire engine, is more than a snappy comeback. It's a centered lament, a screwball thriller about making ends meet, about how even an armed robber can't afford the American Dream.”

In his review for Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman wrote, “By the time Miami Blues winds into its crushingly bloody, absurdist finale, the only question of any urgency is, Which actor has become harder to watch: Baldwin with his histrionics or Fred Ward flashing those naked gums?” The Los Angeles Times’ Peter Rainer wrote, “This is the problem with the action-filmmaker’s anything-for-a-jolt ethos: Whatever doesn’t jump-start the story is skimped. In fact, in Miami Blues, the story is all jump-starts. I realize that this may be all that most people require from a glorified programmer like Miami Blues, but the film has so much finesse, and its best moments are so freakishly dippy, that you regret the devaluation.”

Miami Blues presents a heightened reality of a city where danger lurks behind every corner, where a veteran police detective is assaulted in his own home, and where an opportunistic crook can wage a one-man crime wave posing as a cop. As Hiassen has said, the film presents “a paradise of scandals teeming with drifters, deadbeats, and misfits drawn here by some dark primordial calling like demented trout.”

SOURCES

Fisher, Marshal Jon. “The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction.” The Atlantic. May 2000.

Leung, Rebecca. “Florida: ‘A Paradise of Scandals’.” 60 Minutes. April 17, 2005.

Mitchell, Sean. “Exploring the Dark Side.” Los Angeles Times. April 15, 1990.

Pinkerton, Nick. “Interview: George Armitage.” Film Comment. April 28, 2015.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. “Miami Splice.” The New York Times. September 30, 1988.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. “Fred Ward’s Blues.” The New York Times. April 20, 1990.

Weinstein. Steve. “The Transformation of Jennifer Jason Leigh.” Los Angeles Times. April 29, 1990.

A Flash of Green

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 14:53:00 +0000

What is the price for one’s soul? Is it ever worth the price, to betray loved ones, those who matter most to you? This is the dilemma that newspaper reporter Jimmy Wing (Ed Harris) wrestles with in A Flash of Green (1984), Victor Nunez’s adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s 1962 novel of the same name. As with all of the filmmaker’s films, this one is, first and foremost, a fascinating character study with a conflicted protagonist at its center.

Jimmy is a reporter for a local Florida newspaper in 1961. Developers are trying to buy Grassy Bay, a body of water in the heart of Palm City. Their goal: fill it in so that they can build homes on it, making a lot of money in the process. Some of its residents, however, have formed a committee called Save Our Bay (S.O.B.) to stop it, citing egregious environmental damage if it goes through.

Jimmy meets with Elmo Bliss (Richard Jordan), a county commissioner, to get the skinny on the development. He is told that the plan is to create an island, populating it with homes; as he puts it, “We’re going to manufacture a paradise.” Elmo is tired of being a commissioner and is going to run for the governor’s mansion. He plans to use the money he makes from Grassy Bay to fund his campaign. He wants Jimmy to spy on the S.O.B.s and dig up dirt on them … for a price, of course. He lays it all out for the reporter when he tells him, “World needs folks like me. Folks with a raw need for power. Without us, wouldn’t anything ever get done.”

Initially, Jimmy stays neutral, giving Katherine Hobble (Blair Brown), one of leaders of the eco-group, a heads up and she begins to rally the locals to stop it. He checks in on her and her two children from time to time as her husband - his best friend -- died a year ago. The steady income from Elmo, however, sways Jimmy, who is adrift in life. Adding to the weight of this decision is his wife, Gloria (Tiel Rey), who suffers from a degenerative brain disorder that her doctors understand little about and from which, it appears, she will never recover. The rest of the film plays out his moral dilemma – help Elmo for the money and in doing so betray Kat, the woman he loves but is afraid to admit it, even to himself.

Ed Harris delivers a memorable turn as a man faced with a conflict, a crisis of conscience. The deeper Jimmy digs for dirt for Elmo, the more morally compromised he becomes. He passively watches as his friends are railroaded by local politicians. Why is Jimmy willing to do this? Has his wife’s medical condition left him so cynical that he doesn’t care about anything? Kat and her kids humanize him, give him something to care about – a life he’d like to have. Jimmy’s actions are ruining people’s lives … good, decent people he’s known for years. Even those closest to him, like Kat, are being harassed on the phone by religious zealots, surreptitiously employed by Elmo to scare of members of the S.O.B. Harris does an excellent job conveying the guilt that plays across Jimmy’ face when the S.O.B. fall apart, knowing that it is because of his actions.

Richard Jordan does an excellent job of expressing Elmo’s passion for the development deal. He’s honest with Jimmy about his ambitions but not about how far he will go to realize them. Jordan is a fascinating actor to watch as he so effortlessly disappears into his character, something he did often in such diverse films as The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The Mean Season (1985), and The Hunt for Red October (1990). In A Flash of Green, Elmo is the obvious villain of the film, but Jordan resists the urge to play him that way, even when he obliquely admits to sending guys to beat-up Jimmy repeatedly in the hopes of ‘persuading’ him to leave town after he turns the tables on Elmo. It is hinted that these two men have known each other for many years, the only reason why Elmo doesn’t have Jimmy killed.

Blair Brown is also very good as a woman still struggling with the loss of her husband, raising two children, trying to protect the bay from greedy developers, and sorting out her feelings for Jimmy. She has a lot on her plate and Brown’s intelligent, layered performance results in a fascinating character. At times, it is painful to watch her and the other committee members struggle against more powerful forces that they have no hope of beating. Brown resists any urge to inflate Kat’s fight to heroic heights, as one would see in a Hollywood movie, and instead opts to have that be only one of many aspects of her rich character.

There are also memorable minor roles, such as George Coe as a fellow journalist who doesn’t have the stomach for the darker stories that he and Jimmy sometimes cover. His response is to get so drunk that Jimmy must take him to his wife who cares for him. Even his character has his own arc and finds a way to redeem himself as he does his own part in the unfolding drama.

Sam Gowan, who had worked on Victor Nunez’s first film, Gal Young ‘Un (1979), went on to work at the University of Florida Libraries as the assistant director for special resources. Part of his division was the John D. MacDonald repository. MacDonald was a successful crime author, both critically and commercially, with his series of Travis McGee novels, and 1957 novel The Executioners adapted into film twice, in 1962 and 1991. Gowan and his wife enjoyed the man’s novels and she suggested asking Nunez to adapt one of them. Warner Bros., however, owned long-term options on all the Travis McGee novels, save for a couple of the early ones, which were available. He contacted MacDonald’s agent in Los Angeles and worked out a deal that required a small payment up front and a loaded backend, whereby if the film did well financially, the author would be paid more.

The budget for A Flash of Green was $750,000, ten times larger than Gal Young ‘Un. Half of the budget came from a small group of local investors with PBS American Playhouse covering the rest, who had been impressed with Nunez’s first film. To keep costs down, the entire cast worked for Screen Actors Guild minimum.

At the time the film was cast, Ed Harris turned down a chance to extend his run on Sam Shepard’s off-Broadway success, A Fool for Love (for which he won an Obie Award), and an offer from Paul Newman to appear in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, to go to Florida and act in Nunez’s project. Harris said, “I loved Victor’s sensibility and his cinematic tastes, his knowledge and how he films.” The actor was also drawn to the character of Jimmy Wing:

“I really appreciated the subtle character study that this guy is. He goes through so many changes. He’s someone who gets caught up in events that sort of catch him and sweep him away and he really has to climb his way back. He was a character I could really explore.”

To this end, the actor worked with the filmmaker on the screenplay, and during rehearsals, he frequented local stores for his character’s outfits. Harris’ hands-on approach extended to other cast members. Richard Jordan helped get period-specific props for the film and remarked on the challenge: “That era is too recent for anyone to collect and a lot of what you’d want to use has wound up in garbage cans.”

Critics of the day gave A Flash of Green generally favorable reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "A Flash of Green is attentive to the compromises of daily life, and it understands how people can be complicated enough to hold two opposed ideas at the same time." In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "A Flash of Green is not perfect, but it is provocative and nearly always intelligent." The Washington Post's Lloyd Grove wrote, "Nunez, who also worked the camera with an eye for faded beauty, has made Palm City a self-contained world where there can be no appeal to a higher authority. While sometimes he's a bit heavy on the symbolism -- having Wing, at one point, fiddle with a two-faced doll -- he usually handles the material with admirable subtlety, letting the story all but tell itself."

The worlds in Nunez’s films feel fully fleshed out and realized, populated by readily identifiable people with compelling dilemmas. In the case of A Flash of Green he also creates a real sense of place; the attention to period detail on a budget is fantastic, with vintage cars and clothes used sparingly and matter-of-factly. He achieves it with small details, such as the cluttered office that Jimmy works in or the Spartan wood interior of Elmo’s office. Nunez also has a great ear for dialogue, accurately capturing the way people talk, evident in the scene where Kat debates with her friends about the development of Grassy Bay, with one arguing that developing the land will help the depressed local economy. The film presents several different points-of-view and then shows them in conflict with one another.

Nunez does a deft juggling act of showing how parts of Florida are being ruined by greedy developers and the toll it is taking on the residents, without being preachy about it, and by focusing on the relationships between them. A Flash of Green might be the most low-key crusading journalist film ever made. There are no heroic, epic speeches, moustache-twirling villains, car chases or gun battles – just people trying to protect their own little piece of the world. Much like John Sayles, Nunez is interested in telling stories about everyday people trying to get by, finding that their personal dilemmas are just as worthy of telling as any epic tale. For the people in his films, what goes on in their small world means everything to them. Life is about the choices we make and having to live with them. Jimmy has to live with the choices he has made. They were tough decisions that took their toll on him physically and emotionally. Jimmy finds that it isn’t easy buying back even a part of his soul. It is a long, hard journey but by the film’s end, there is hope that he is on his way to redemption.

SOURCES

Crandell, Ben. “FLIFF Reunites Old Friends Ed Harris, Victor Nunez.” South Florida Sun Sentinel. November 17, 2015.

Fein, Esther B. “Shaking A Hero Image.” The New York Times. July 22, 1985.

Gowan, Sam. “My Life in Movies.” The Gainsville Sun. April 1, 2004.

Maslin, Janet. “At the Movies – Jordan Assembled Props.” The New York Times. June 28, 1985.

High Plains Drifter

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 15:52:00 +0000

From The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (1966) to Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) to Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood has made all kinds of westerns. High Plains Drifter (1973) is one of his more intriguing efforts in the genre – it takes the enigmatic Man with No Name gunslinger from Sergio Leone films such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), fusing it with the gothic sensibilities of the Don Siegel film, The Beguiled (1971). It starts off as a typical lone gunfighter-for-hire story. In this film, Eastwood’s mysterious character is part avenging angel and part vengeance demon, determined to punish the people of a town for a crime that is gradually revealed.

The Stranger (as he is referred to in the credits) literally materializes out of the hazy, shimmering horizon like an apparition while Dee Barton’s eerie music plays on the soundtrack. After Eastwood’s credit and the film’s title appears, the score transitions into a more traditional western motif, reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western soundtracks.

High Plains Drifter starts in typical western fashion with a hired gun wandering into the town of Lago looking for work. After quickly and efficiently dispatching three mercenaries who challenge him, he’s offered a job by the town elders. Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and the Carlin brothers, Dan (Dan Vadis) and Cole (Anthony James), have just been released from prison. They tried to steal gold from the town and whipped Marshal Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn) to death. Now, they aim to return, take the gold, and exact revenge on the townsfolk.

The Stranger agrees and is given unlimited credit at all of the town’s stores and proceeds to exploit their goodwill, starting off by giving two American Indian children candy they were eyeing and a pile of blankets to their grandfather, right after the store owner berated them with racial slurs. He goes on to accumulate material items for free – new boots, a saddle, and cigars. He then uses his leverage to humiliate the town elders by making Mordecai (Billy Curtis), the town dwarf, the new sheriff and mayor, and has the hotel owner’s barn stripped of its wood to build picnic tables, much to their chagrin. They have to go along with it, lest they lose the only person standing between them and the vengeful outlaws headed their way.

The film’s big question: who is The Stranger and what is his motivation? Within minutes of being in Lago he has killed three men and raped a woman (Marianna Hill). Initially, it appears to be a nasty, misogynistic streak in the character but, as we learn more about the town and in its denizens, the more we understand what this mysterious gunslinger is doing. His motivation begins to shift into focus early on when he dreams of the Marshal being whipped to death while the whole town watched and did nothing. The haunting music from the start of the film comes on as we see Bridges and the Carlin brothers whip Duncan at night. He pleads for help while all the townsfolk stand and stare, the camera framing them in near-dark shots, some almost in silhouette, which creates an ominous mood. As the poor man is whipped to death he mutters, “Damn you all to hell,” which is exactly what The Stranger plans to do to the complicit townsfolk.

Interestingly, the second flashback to what happened to the Marshal that fateful night is predominantly from Mordecai’s perspective. He takes us back and this time, we see the townsfolk’s faces more clearly. Unlike The Stranger, he was there and saw what happened. Eastwood also cuts back and forth from shots of the outlaws’ evil faces, the residents, and the Marshal’s point-of-view. In doing so, he makes the man’s pain and suffering more personal and we see the townsfolk’s reaction to what is happening more clearly – some are indifferent, some afraid, and some malevolently approving. It is Mordecai, however, who seems the most upset and remorseful.

Who is the Marshal to The Stranger? It is never clear. The hotel owner’s wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom) even asks him: he is coy with the answer, refusing to confirm or deny his relationship with the dead man. Everything he does in the town, from making a mockery of its elders to getting carte blanche with all of their resources, is to punish the townsfolk, not just for their complacency but for their sins. As the film progresses, we also learn more about what motivates the town elders – why they are so distrustful of outsiders, why they are so eager to cover things up, and why they hired The Stranger to protect them from Bridges and the Carlin brothers. The scenes with them illustrate the corruption inherent in the authoritarian structure – something Eastwood has been distrustful of his entire career – as The Stranger’s abuse of power eats away at the relationship among the town elders until they begin to turn on each other.

Future members of Eastwood’s informal repertory company of actors, Geoffrey Lewis, Anthony James, and Dan Vadis are well cast as the grungy, amoral outlaws that kill three men in cold blood as soon as they are released from prison, stealing their horses and clothes. These consummate character actors have no problem playing dirty, unrepentant, evil criminals and, over the course of the film, we anticipate their inevitable confrontation with Eastwood’s gunfighter. The key to his films is to have someone who is a formidable threat to his character and Lewis, with his character’s ruthless drive to exact revenge, is completely believable in that role.

Clint Eastwood received a nine-page treatment from Ernest Tidyman, known mostly for writing the screenplays for urban crime films such as Shaft (1971) and The French Connection (1971). The primary inspiration for the screenplay was the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York in 1964, in which 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack and failed to help her or call the police. The starting point for Eastwood was, “What would have happened if the sheriff in High Noon had been killed? What would have happened afterwards?” Once he agreed to do it, Tidyman took these two ideas and developed the treatment into a script that was subsequently revised by Eastwood’s go-to script doctor, Dean Riesner, who added, his trademark black humor: early in the film, one of Lago’s hired guns says to The Stranger, “Maybe you think you’re fast enough to keep up with us, huh?” to which he replies curtly, “A lot faster than you’ll ever live to be.” The biggest mystery of the film is The Stranger’s identity. Eastwood later admitted that the script identified him as the dead sheriff’s brother and that “I always played it like he was the brother. I thought about playing it a little bit like he was sort of an avenging angel, too.”

High Plains Drifter was put into production in late summer of 1972. The studio wanted Eastwood to shoot the film on its backlot but Eastwood decided to shoot on location. He originally considered Pyramid Lake, Nevada but his car ran out of gas before he got there. The American Indian tribal council were divided about a film crew shooting on their land. Someone in the production suggested Mono Lake in California, which Eastwood had visited in the past. Once he arrived, the filmmaker found a point overlooking the lake and decided that would be the site for the town. He went on to find all the other locations within a four-minute drive save for the opening shot, which was done outside of Reno. Production designer Henry Bumstead and his team built the town of Lago in 28-days. They assembled 14 houses, a church and a two-story hotel. These were complete buildings so that Eastwood could shoot interior scenes on location.

The Stranger has the townsfolk literally transform Lago into Hell by painting of all the buildings red – a striking image to be sure – which not only evokes hellish imagery but also symbolizes the blood on the hands of the townsfolk who were all culpable in the Marshal’s death. The climax of High Plains Drifter is where the film goes full-on horror as The Stranger leaves, letting the ill-prepared townsfolk “handle” Bridges and the Carlin brothers. Naturally, they put up little to no resistance as they are too scared to shoot and run away or as in the case of Drake (Mitchell Ryan), the mining executive, are shot and killed.

Later that night, Bridges and his crew terrorize the survivors, exposing their hypocrisy. It is at this point when The Stranger reappears, that, just like the Marshall, as Cole is mercilessly whipped to death with The Stranger framed with nightmarish flames of the town burning in the background. The two surviving outlaws walk through the town on fire – hell on earth indeed – only for Dan to be whipped around the neck and hung. Bridges still has not seen The Stranger until he hears the words, “Help me,” (sounding very much like the murdered Marshal) and turns to see him standing in front of a burning building for the final showdown. He easily guns down Bridges who asks The Stranger’s identity – and gets no response.

Late in the film, the motel keeper’s wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom) says, “They say the dead don’t rest without a marker of some kind.” High Plains Drifter ends on an emotional note as The Stranger observes Mordecai naming the Marshal’s previously unmarked grave before riding out of town, disappearing into the hazy horizon like a ghost with a reprise of the unnerving music from the opening credits. The dead Marshal can finally rest: those responsible for his demise have been punished. The film is a scathing indictment of how greed can corrupt those in positions of power. It is also a powerful critique of bystander apathy, as embodied by a town of cowards and petty, greedy tyrants that let a good man die. The Stranger embodies the dead man’s spirit and his search for vengeance.

SOURCES

Gentry, Ric. "Director Clint Eastwood: Attention to Detail and Involvement for the Audience.” Clint Eastwood: Interviews. University of Mississippi. 1999.

Hughes, Howard. Aim for the Heart. I.B. Tauris. 2009

McGilligan, Patrick. Clint: The Life and Legend. Harper Collins. 1999.

Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. 1996.

Wilson, Michael Henry. “’Whether I Succeed or Fail, I Don’t Want to Owe it to Anyone but Myself’: From Play Misty for Me to Honkytonk Man.” Clint Eastwood: Interviews. University of Mississippi. 1999.

White Squall

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 01:40:00 +0000

For a filmmaker as prolific as Ridley Scott he’s bound to have a lot of hits and misses. For every Gladiator (2000), there’s a few Someone to Watch Over Me’s (1987). It is some of the fascinating yet flawed outliers in his filmography that are the most interesting. Case in point: White Squall (1996), a dramatic recreation of the doomed school sailing trip lead by Dr. Christopher B. Sheldon on the brigantine Albatross, which sank on May 2, 1961, allegedly due to a white squall, killing six people. Adapted from Charles Gieg’s book The Last Voyage of the Albatross, the film received mixed reviews and, despite its cast, featuring a bevy of young, up-and-coming actors, performed poorly at the box office.

The film follows Chuck Gieg (Scott Wolf) as it opens with the young man giving up his last year of high school to sail on the Albatross. His brother got into an Ivy League school on a scholarship and it is hinted that he doesn’t have the grades to do the same. The rest of the boys are loosely sketched and it’s up to the talented young cast to breathe life into their respective characters. You’ve got Dean Preston (Eric Michael Cole), the bully who thinks he’s cooler than everyone else; Gil Martin (Ryan Phillippe), the meek one; Frank Beaumont (Jeremy Sisto), the spoiled rich kid who doesn’t want to be there, and so on.

We meet most of these boys as they are prepared to board the Albatross for a year-long voyage at sea where they’ll learn everything they need to know about operating a boat while also keeping up with their academic studies. They are immediately greeted by McCrea (John Savage), the grizzled English teacher who quotes Shakespeare’s The Tempest to them. They go below decks and are greeted by boys already there. True to Social Darwinism, a pecking order is quickly established but as they will find out, everyone answers to Captain Christopher Sheldon (Jeff Bridges) a.k.a. The Skipper who sets the ground rules when he addresses them for the first time: “The ship beneath you is not a toy and sailing’s not a game.” In this scene, Jeff Bridges tempers his innate likability and charisma by playing the Skipper as a no-nonsense disciplinarian who demands his students follow the rules. This is further reinforced in the next scene when he finds out that Gil is afraid of heights and browbeats the young man to climb up the rigging and in the process not only traumatizes him but humiliates him in front of the other boys.

Scott shows us what it takes to get a boat such as the Albatross ready for sea, how everyone works together, and how a rookie mistake almost costs Chuck his life when he hangs himself on the rigging only for the Skipper to rescue him. Early on, the boat hits a rough patch of water, a foreboding taste of what’s to come, and we see everyone act as a team to rescue one of boys who is tossed overboard. To make up for the deficiencies in the lack of character development in Todd Robinson’s screenplay, Scott includes several scenes showing the boys bonding, whether its’s Gil’s tearful recollection of how his brother died or Dean admitting he’s a poor student that doesn’t know to spell. We slowly begin to care about what happens to these boys, which is crucial later when they are put in peril with the storm.

Everything has been building to the film’s climactic set piece – a massive white squall that threatens to sink the Albatross. Scott and his crew create a harrowing scene that rivals the nautical disasters depicted in Titanic (1997) and The Perfect Storm (2000), only he did it with practical effects while those other films leaned on CGI to do most of the heavily lifting. This gives the sequence a visceral impact as it looks and sounds real. This isn’t some CGI creation but an actual thing that Scott captures in vivid detail. It’s a powerful visual reminder of the true power of nature and that we are insignificant compared to it. Every so often we are reminded of this fact.

Chuck provides the film’s voiceover narration, taken from the journal he kept during the journey. He is the wide-eyed idealist that is the calming influence on the rest of the boys and takes to the Skipper’s tough love style of leadership without losing his humanity. Scott Wolf channels a young Tom Cruise as he delivers a strong performance as the audience surrogate. After the survivors are taken back to land he breaks down in a moving scene, and then Chuck attempts to clear the Skipper’s name in the ensuing tribunal, Wolf delivering a passionate speech expertly. Chuck is the film’s social conscience as he struggles to do the right thing. He stands up for the Skipper when it looks like he will be blamed for what happened.

It is easy to see why the name actors in the cast such as Ethan Embry, Ryan Phillippe, Jeremy Sisto, and Wolf went on to notable careers. They are most successful at making their characters memorable but there is also Eric Michael Cole who plays the bully in the group. Channeling a young Matt Dillon his character is full of swagger and we eventually discover what’s behind the bravado as delivers an impressive performance that should have garnered him more high-profile roles.

White Squall, however, falters in its depiction of the Skipper. At one point his wife, Alice (Caroline Goodall), says to him, “You know, Sheldon, sometimes, not often, you act almost half human.” Therein lies the problem with this character – there’s nothing human about him, just some glowering Ahab that not even Bridges’ ample charisma can make a dent in. We get zero insight into what motivates him beyond running a tight ship. The actor tries his best but he’s not give much to work with, such as a scene where Frank inexplicably harpoons a dolphin. To punish him, the Skipper tells him to finish off the poor animal and when he refuses, does it for him. It’s an unnecessarily, ugly scene that provides no insight into either character.

This being a Ridley Scott film everything looks beautiful from the Albatross docked at dusk silhouetted against the sky to the slow-motion glamor shot of Dean diving off the highest point of the ship with the skill and grace of an Olympic athlete. We get a seemingly endless number of exquisite shots of the boat at sea with the sunlight hitting it at just the right angle.

Screenwriter Todd Robinson met Chuck Gieg while on vacation in Hawaii and the latter told him the true story of the Albatross. Inspired by it and the book Gieg had co-written about surviving the incident, Robinson wrote the screenplay with his close involvement, to ensure it stayed true to the actual events, and took it to producers Rocky Lang and Mimi Polk Gitlin. They shopped it around to various directors but they all wanted to change it to fit their vision. The producers finally brought it to Ridley Scott who bought it before Christmas 1994. At the time, he was considering directing Mulholland Falls (1996) but after reading Robinson’s script in 90 minutes he immediately wanted to do it. He was drawn to the lack of sentimentality and the coming-of-age aspect of the script.

As was his custom with films based on real-life incidents, Scott strove for authenticity and brought Gieg and the real Captain Sheldon on as technical advisors. For the ship, the production used Eye of the World, a 110-foot topsail schooner from Germany. He did not want to shoot the sea sequences in a giant water tank, common at the time, as he felt that the waves never looked large enough or realistic. He studied documentary footage and water patterns to see how they moved and reacted. He and director of photography Hugh Johnson shot mostly with hand-held cameras to get the raw look they wanted. To this end, they filmed four months on the seas, starting in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, where on the first day got 30-foot seas, “because the crew was so well-versed by then in terms of leaping around this boat and getting camera positions, we dealt with it pretty easily actually,” Scott said. From there they spent most of the time in the Caribbean with shooting the land scenes on the islands of St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Grenada.

Scott eventually had to concede using water tanks for the climactic storm sequence that sinks the Albatross. He waited to film this sequence until the end of principal photography as he was dreading it “like a big monster. I didn’t want it to be a 9-minute, crash-wallop-bang and everybody’s in the water. I wanted to experience the whole process of what it means to be shot out of the blue like that, to be trapped, to see people that you got to know quite closely just taken away from you.” He used two water tanks in Malta – one that held six million gallons of water and was 40 feet deep and the other held three million gallons of water and was eight feet deep. Initially, wave machines were used but they did not produce strong enough wind effects for Scott so he brought in two jet engines to do the job. As he said they “basically blew the shit out of the set – 600 mile-an-hour winds.” The storm sequences took five days to film with the production constantly having to worry about the cameras getting wet.

Filming the sequence wasn’t without its peril as Jeff Bridges recalled, “I’ve had some real-life close calls when I’ve been surfing, and I know that feeling of fighting for your life in the water. During the storm scene there were some long takes where we were being hit with wind and waves and being knocked underwater. You don’t worry so much about acting then--you just want to survive the take.” Scott remembered one day of filming: “We got the water pretty churned up and I saw Jeff sticking his arm rigidly in the air with his fist clenched. I thought he might be screaming, ‘Right on,’ but it turned out he was screaming, ‘Stop, I’m going under.’”

White Squall received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "The movie could have been smarter and more particular in the way it establishes its characters. Its underlying values are better the less you think about them. And the last scene not only ties the message together but puts about three ribbons on it." In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Written by Todd Robinson and photographed against beautiful blue skies by Hugh Johnson, White Squall improves when it takes on the daunting job of replicating the title storm. Mr. Scott manages to capture pure, terrifying chaos for a while, and this slow-moving film finally achieves a style of its own." The Washington Post's Richard Leiby wrote, "It's disappointing that a director with the vision of Ridley "Blade Runner" Scott and an actor with the depth of Jeff "Fearless" Bridges conspired to produce such a sodden venture, but Hollywood never seems to tire of flushing multimillions down the bilge pipes." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Jack Mathews wrote, "The 20 or so minutes we spend with the Albatross in the squall is high adventure, to be sure. Everything else is ballast." Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "White Squall is lovely to look at, but frustrating to behold. These boys are fine specimens of American manhood. But they’re unreachable, like ships in a bottle."

White Squall takes more than a few pages out of Dead Poets Society (1989) playbook – a coming-of-age story populated with a cast of young, aspiring actors, most of whom would go on to memorable careers. Scott’s film falters when it tries to replicate the heartfelt, emotional ending of Peter Weir’s film but instead feels forced as the soulless Frank suddenly redeems himself and all the surviving boys rally around the Skipper. It feels false as the film has done nothing to achieve this moment unlike in Dead Poets where its satisfying conclusion was the culmination of everything that came before. Also, the Skipper is such an unlikable character throughout the film it is hard to see why the boys admire him enough to rally to his defense at the end unlike Robin Williams' teacher in Dead Poets who gradually gains his students trust and admiration. Sometimes there is a good reason why a particular film is an outlier in a director’s filmography – it’s not very good. Such is the case of White Squall, a beautifully mounted film, pretty to look at but ultimately with an empty core.

SOURCES

Clarke, James. Virgin Film: Ridley Scott. Virgin Books. 2010.

Crisafulli, Chuck. “Stirring Up a See-Worthy Squall.” Los Angeles Times. January 28, 1996.

LoBrutto, Vincent. Ridley Scott: A Biography. University Press of Kentucky. 2019.

Williams, David E. “An Interview with Ridley Scott.” Film Threat. April 26, 2000.

Wilmington, Michael. “White Squall Director a Visionary without Visual Strategy.” Chicago Tribune. March 15, 1996.

Hoffa

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 13:58:00 +0000

Danny DeVito is quite the accomplished character actor, starring in television shows such as Taxi and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and highly regarded films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Get Shorty (1995). What isn’t talked about nearly enough is his directorial output, which is not as prolific but does contain some notable efforts. In the 1980s, he directed back-to-back hits with the Hitchcockian goof Throw Momma from the Train (1987) and the pitch-black divorce satire The War of the Roses (1989). Both films demonstrated his stylistic flare behind the camera and decidedly darkly humorous worldview.

DeVito parlayed the box office clout he accrued from those two films into Hoffa (1992), an epic rise and fall historical biopic about controversial labor leader James R. Hoffa, who led the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters union and eventually ran afoul of both organized crime and the United States government, disappearing on July 30, 1975 never to be seen again.

The success of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) kicked off a golden age of historical biopics in the 1990s with the likes of JFK (1991), Bugsy (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Quiz Show (1994), and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) among many others populating cinemas during this time. Stone’s The Doors (1991) and the aforementioned JFK, however, paved the way for Hoffa to get made – that, and the machinations of the film’s producer Edward R. Pressman to put together the team of legendary actor Jack Nicholson in the titular role, getting Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet to write the screenplay, and DeVito to direct.

This was going to be the latter’s magnum opus that would garner all kinds of awards and catapult him into the rarified air of the likes of Steven Spielberg and Stone. Some critics, however, bristled at the lionization of Hoffa as a hero, raising more than a few more eyebrows as the man was known for employing controversial tactics to get want he wanted. Hoffa failed to make back it’s $40+ million (which reportedly rose to close to $50 million) budget, received mixed reviews and picked up a few, scattered award nominations. What happened?

The film begins at the end of Hoffa’s (Nicholson) life – the last day he was seen alive with the rise and fall of his career seen through the flashback reminisces of Robert Ciaro (DeVito), a long-time friend and an amalgamation of several real-life associates. We see how the two men met, while Ciaro is on the road making a delivery and Hoffa pitches him a membership to the Teamsters, then a fledgling organization. At the time, truck drivers were overworked and underpaid. Hoffa shows up to the loading docks one-day spouting Mamet’s profane dialogue, telling the workers to go on strike, which starts a massive brawl. In doing so, he also costs Ciaro his job and later that night he ambushes Hoffa only to be held at gunpoint by one of his associates, Billy Flynn (Robert Prosky). “Life’s a negotiation. It’s all give and take,” Hoffa tells Ciaro as he apologizes and explains him motives.

We see Hoffa’s early, botched strong arm tactics, such as firebombing a local business that results in the death of Flynn. We see Hoffa mixing it up, yelling at scab drivers crossing picket lines, getting into scuffles not just with the cops but also the mafia. The strike is cutting into their profits and Hoffa cuts a deal with them, which not only aids in his rise to leadership of the Teamsters, but also, ultimately, led to his downfall. The film shows early on how Hoffa wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, helping a trucker change his tire while he pitches membership to the Teamsters, natch, and getting bloody while fighting in the strikes.

At times, David Mamet’s Midwest tough guy dialogue feels like it could have come from one of fellow Chicago native Michael Mann’s films but it has his distinctive cadence in such gems as “Because I’m sitting out here to meet with a fella,” or “What’s out the car is my guy. What’s in here is you watching the phone.” Another memorable bit of dialogue: “Are we talking words, here, we usin’ words? That’s what we’re doin’.” The cast, in particular Nicholson and DeVito nail the sharp, clipped style of Mamet’s dialogue.

Unlike the cast of The Irishman (2019), Nicholson, et al were cast at just the right time in their lives to play younger and older versions of their characters credibly. Nicholson does an excellent job delivering several of Hoffa’s fiery speeches. He fully commits to the role compared to Al Pacino’s take on the man in The Irishman where the legendary actor seems to be playing himself rather than the man. Nicholson certainly captures the bluster and swagger of Hoffa, a man with charisma and confidence to spare. One of the joys of his performance is watching him spout so much of Mamet’s dialogue – no easy feat – and he does it while adopting the Teamster’s distinctive tone and way of speaking. Some of his best scenes are the ones where he squares off against Robert Kennedy (Kevin Anderson) as he reduces their conflict to the working man versus the rich elite. Nicholson does get a few reflective moments in the scenes on his last day seen alive as he and Ciaro reflect on their friendship over the years.

Nicholson and DeVito are surrounded by a hell of a supporting cast with Anderson’s uncanny take on Kennedy, nailing his distinctive accent. J.T. Walsh shows up as one of Hoffa’s close associates who is initially loyal until he gets a taste of power and turns his back on his mentor at a crucial moment. A young John C. Reilly shows up as another one of Hoffa’s associates who worships him early on but eventually betrays him by testifying against him during the trial for labor racketeering. Armand Assante also pops up as the mob boss that Hoffa makes a deal with to gain more power within the Teamsters. The veteran actor wisely downplays his performance next to Nicholson’s acting pyrotechnics. He doesn’t need to chew the scenery as his mere presence exudes power and authority. His performance is a sobering reminder of how much his presence is missed films such as this and Sidney Lumet’s Q & A (1990). There are also small parts for Bruno Kirby and Frank Whaley, who was on quite the run at the time with pivotal roles in The Doors, JFK and Hoffa.

The film is ambitious in its scale and scope as evident in the scene where Hoffa leads a strike that turns into a massive brawl involving hundreds of people. DeVito captures the chaos masterfully as trucks are overturned, people are viciously beaten and even a mother is separated from her child all the while the corporate bigwigs can be seen watching safely from their lofty vantage point. It’s a tough, brutal sequence that is unflinching in its depiction of ugly violence. The epic look and feel of Hoffa is due in large part to his direction with the help of legendary cinematographer Stephen H. Burum as he digs deep into his stylistic bag of tricks including crane shots, split diopter lens, sweeping 360-degree camera moves, God’s eye overhead shots, point-of-view shots, and masterful framing of shots and scenes via 2:35.1 aspect ratio that rival the likes of Spielberg and Stone at the time.

Joe Isgro was a top record promoter making a reported $10 million a year but in 1989 a grand jury indicted him on 51 counts of payola and drug trafficking. The charges were dismissed a year later but the damage to his reputation had been done and he decided to pivot into the film business. Just before this legal mess he had been approached by Frank Ragano, former Hoffa attorney, and Brett O’Brien, son of Chuckie O’Brien, Hoffa’s adopted son. The former claimed he had obtained the film rights from the Hoffa estate, however, not long after Isgro signed a letter of agreement to do the film, O’Brien told him that they didn’t have the rights and their option had expired. Isgro told O’Brien the deal was off and made a new one with another production company for the rights to Chuckie’s story, which was used as the basis for the screenplay written by Robin Moore, who had authored The French Connection, and interviewed several members of the Teamsters union about Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975.

Isgro approached film producer Edward R. Pressman with Moore’s script hoping that Pressman could convince Oliver Stone to direct. Pressman liked what he read and optioned the script as well as the tapes and transcripts of Moore’s interviews. He found the script “very expositional, not fully formed as a movie but there was the raw material for one.” Caldecot Chubb, then Vice President of Pressman’s production company, pitched Hoffa to 20th Century Fox production executive Michael London in August 1989. He recalled telling London, “In America, everyone thinks they know Hoffa. They think he was a gangster, period. But he was a labor leader, a guy with courage and heroism, a guy who stood up for his men.” An hour and half after their meeting concluded, London called Chubb and told him that if he could get David Mamet to write the script they would finance the film.

Pressman had met Mamet in 1985 and called him, pitching the idea of Hoffa as King Lear. In October 1989, Mamet met with Pressman, Chubb and Joe Roth, then President of Fox. Pressman remembers Mamet telling them that his father had been a labor lawyer and he understood that world. His conditions were that they could give him and all their research material and he would give them back a finished script. He was paid in the neighborhood of one million dollars and put two other projects on hold while he spent several months writing the script.

The studio loved what Mamet wrote and told Pressman to hire a top director. His first choice was Barry Levinson but when he met with Mamet about the script in 1990, the men did not see eye to eye on the vision for the film and the director passed on the project. Pressman reportedly met with Stone and John McTiernan but they weren’t seriously considered for the film. Around this time, Danny DeVito was having lunch with Roth who was telling him about the projects they were working on and when the former heard about Hoffa he immediately wanted to do it. He met with Pressman in April 1990 and presented his vision of the film. The producer said, “It was clear to me Danny was articulate and ambitious and every bit as prepared as the best filmmakers I’d worked with.” DeVito was hired.

To play Hoffa, both Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino were considered until someone suggested Jack Nicholson. He read the script in the summer of 1990 after making The Two Jakes (1990) and agreed to do it but principal photography had to be delayed for six months while he filmed Man Trouble (1992) for Bob Rafelson. His salary increased the film’s budget dramatically to over $40 million and Roth told Pressman in the fall of 1991 that Fox would only pay for $37 million of it. Pressman sold the cable rights in France for $5 million and convinced DeVito to work for union scale, saving an additional $7 million in exchange for a share of the film’s box office receipts.

Hoffa shot for 85 days, starting in February 1992 in Pittsburgh before moving on to Detroit, then Los Angeles with the final two weeks in Chicago in June on an initial budget of $42 million that eventually came in just under $50 million.

Hoffa received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, "Hoffa shows DeVito as a genuine filmmaker. Here is a movie that finds the right look and tone for its material. Not many directors would have been confident enough to simply show us Jimmy Hoffa instead of telling us all about him.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Mr. Nicholson has altered his looks, voice and speech to evoke Hoffa, but the performance is composed less of superficial tricks than of the actor's crafty intelligence and conviction. The performance is spookily compelling without being sympathetic for a minute." The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan wrote, "All the audience is left with are snapshots of repetitive tough-guy behavior, a scenario that is too limited to hold anyone’s interest for a 2-hour-and-20-minute length."

Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman gave the film a "D" rating and wrote, "When an actor as great as Nicholson gives a performance this monotonous, it raises the question, Why make a movie about Jimmy Hoffa in the first place? The answer, I suspect, is that it wasn’t so much Hoffa’s life as his lurid, headline-making death that hooked a major studio into backing this project. The result is somehow perversely appropriate: a massive Hollywood biopic about a man who never quite seems there." In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, "The biggest mistake is DeVito's direction. He fills every moment with soaring, weighty music and spectacle-happy cinematography. Like a kid clutching power candy, he can't let go." While doing press for the film, DeVito made no apologies for his positive take on Hoffa: “He put bread on the table of the working man. That to me is a hero.”

DeVito does lay it on a bit thick at times, such as the scene where hundreds of trucks park by the side of the road as drivers show their support for Hoffa as he and Ciaro are driven to prison with David Newman’s score swelling dramatically. Hoffa’s home life is also never seen with his wife Josephine (Natalia Nogulich) trotted out for a few moments but we get no insight into their dynamic. If the film’s portrayal of Hoffa has fault it’s that we don’t get an understanding of what motivated the man. When we meet him, he is fully-formed. He is confident of his convictions. How did he get that way? What made him such a staunch defender of the working man? Why was he so power hungry? We never know for certain and maybe no one did but it is a lack of depth in an otherwise compelling portrait of the man. For all the hero worship of Hoffa, DeVito does try to show the ramifications of the man’s actions such as him ignoring the Teamsters leadership’s orders to back off and starting a massive brawl with the scabs and cops that results in the death of several of his fellow members. There’s also the scene where he uses intimidation tactics to kill a newspaper story that will portray him in a negative light thereby damaging his chances of being elected President of the Teamsters.

Among the gold rush boom of historical biopics in the ‘90s Hoffa has mostly become forgotten thanks to its lackluster box office and mixed critical reaction. By the time Stone made Nixon (1995), large scale, star-studded historical films were no longer en vogue and by the end of the decade less and less of these films were being made with notable exceptions such as Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), but despite stellar reviews it also underperformed at the box office. Hoffa has enjoyed some renewed interest thanks to The Irishman, which features the labor leader prominently. While he is not the central character his presence casts a long shadow over the film and is nowhere near as interestingly depicted as in DeVito’s film. Perhaps there is a more definitive take on the man? A limited series that could go into more detail? In the meantime, we have this lavishly staged, well-acted look at the man who had a profound effect on labor unions and the working class.

SOURCES

Freedman, Samuel G. “The Captain of the Hoffa Team.” The New York Times. September 13, 1992.

Goldstein, Patrick. “A Labor-Intensive Hoffa.” Los Angeles Times. August 30, 1992.

Willistein, Paul. “DeVito’s Hoffa Salutes Top Teamster Working Class Hero.” The Morning Call. December 25, 1992.

Dick

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:14:00 +0000

On June 17, 1972, Washington, D.C. police arrested five burglars breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building. It was later revealed that then-President Richard Nixon approved plans to cover up the break-in. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were instrumental in bringing much of this scandal to light with their chief anonymous source famously nicknamed “Deep Throat” after the mainstream pornographic movie that was popular at the time.

This scandal has been documented and dramatized numerous times, most famously in Alan J. Pakula’s film, All the President’s Men (1976), arguably the definitive take on this incident. In 1999, along came director Andrew Fleming and his screenwriting partner Sheryl Longin with Dick, a comical movie that pokes fun at the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal as it imagines “Deep Throat” being two naïve 15-year old girls. This was several years before the real identity of this informant was revealed so much of the movie’s humor comes from these unlikely teenagers helping take down Nixon.

Dick opens with a framing device of French Stewart as a Larry King-type talk show host interviewing an aging Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Bernstein (Bruce McCullough). Naturally, he asks them to reveal the identity of “Deep Throat,” which of course they refuse while bickering like an old married couple. The movie proceeds to riff on the famous opening credit sequence of All the President’s Men, poking fun at it with two teenage girls doing the typing and making a mistake that is corrected with White Out.

Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams) and Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) are hanging out at the Watergate Hotel where the former lives with her mother (Teri Garr) writing a fan letter some pop rock star of the day late one night. While mailing said letter they accidentally stumble into the Watergate break-in. The next day, they encounter G. Gordon Liddy (a wonderfully twitchy Harry Shearer) during a tour of the White House with their class and spot a piece of “toilet paper” stuck to his shoe. It turns out to be the CREEP list featuring financial pay-offs to the Watergate burglars. Naturally, the two girls are clueless as to what the list means.

While H.R. Haldeman (Dave Foley) is interrogating Arlene and Betsy (“When you think of your President do you think friendly thoughts?”), President Richard Nixon’s dog Checkers notices them and seeks attention from the two girls. To keep them quiet, Nixon (Dan Hedaya) appoints them official White House dog walkers, thinking that they are just a couple of dumb girls, but it allows them access to the inner workings of the White House where they witness cover-up tactics such as the shredding of important documents.

The characters of Arlene and Betsy carry on in the proud comedic tradition of movies such as Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion (1997) and Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000), of two, not-so-smart or naïve best friends bumbling their way through a series of misadventures. Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst are well-cast as two teenagers that aren’t exactly dumb per se, but rather inexperienced. Arlene is the smarter of the two and it is she who decides to ask Nixon to put an end to the Vietnam War when Betsy’s perpetually stoned brother (Devon Gummersall) gets drafted. The next day, Nixon announces an end to the war! Dunst’s Betsy isn’t as smart but plays her part in helping shape history. Williams and Dunst are believable as best friends that spend most of their time together in their own little world. The movie tracks their maturation from naïve teenagers to politically astute young women that help bring down a presidency.

Veteran character actor Dan Hedaya is a hoot with his wonderful caricature of Nixon as a gruff bumbler who thinks that he’s manipulating these two girls when it is the other way around. Hedaya is surrounded by impressive supporting cast of comedians from Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night Live, including Jim Breuer as White House counsel John Dean, Dave Foley as Haldeman, Ana Gasteyer as Nixon’s secretary, and Harry Shearer as Liddy. Much as Steven Soderbergh would do later with The Informant! (2005), these comedians were not instructed to ham it up but instead play it straight, which makes their performances funnier.

About an hour in, scene stealers Will Ferrell and Bruce McCullough show up as the famous Washington Post investigative journalists, playing them as antagonistic partners with the Bernstein being the vain one, occasionally checking his hair, and the Woodward as the more serious one refusing to share any of his work. These comedy ringers’ exaggerated take is in humorous contrast to the solemn view in All the President’s Men.

Much of the humor in Dick derives from a treasure trove of Easter eggs for history buffs as the infamous 18-and-a-half-minute gap in one of Nixon’s audio recordings is explained because of Arlene and Betsy recording a message for the President with the former professing her love for him at length. We also see Arlene and Betsy inadvertently help alter history as they not only contribute to ending the war but also aid in brokering peace between Russia and the United States. “I think your cookies have just saved the world from nuclear catastrophe,” Nixon tells them about the latter. Dean betrays Nixon and testifies against him after Arlene and Betsy shame him for his involvement in the cover-up.

Director Andrew Fleming and his co-screenwriter Sheryl Longin first started writing the screenplay for Dick in 1993 where they started with two teenage girls getting into all kinds of misadventures but none them worked. Longin remembered an experience she had at the age of seven. She was with her family on vacation at the same hotel as President Nixon in Key Biscayne. She and two older friends threw ice cubes at Secret Service agents from a seventh-floor window and was convinced that she would get in trouble. Nixon subsequently canceled a planned speech by the hotel pool. She and Fleming took that incident and came up with the idea of the girls being “Deep Throat.”

Initially this was just a joke that they found amusing, “and we kept absorbing that, and it just never went away. We just kept finding it amusing. I told people about it. They said, ‘That’s hilarious. No one will ever make that movie.’,” Fleming said years later. After the success of The Craft (1996), he decided to use the buzz from that movie to make Dick, shopping it around Hollywood. People thought it was funny but didn’t want to make it. Fortunately, Mike Medavoy, head of Phoenix Pictures, who had worked with Fleming on Threesome (1994), agreed to make it with Columbia Pictures.

They initially sent the script to former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee asking if he’d play himself but he declined. They also sent a copy to former John Dean who sent it back with a note that read, “Good luck.” For the two leads, Fleming was impressed with Kirsten Dunst in Interview with a Vampire (1994) and cast her alongside Michelle Williams, hot off the popular television show Dawson’s Creek.

Fleming and Longin were worried early on that the movie was too irreverent but after reading transcripts of Nixon’s infamous audio tapes they felt that “he was irreverent. He violated us, lied to us. Did things that were illegal and seriously, permanently damaged this country.” Longin said, “Our generation then felt very cynical about politics. We became cynical and apathetic, and we really feel it was because the earliest thing we knew about politics is that they were lying and abusing power.”

Dick was well-reviewed by critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the movie three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, "Comedy like this depends on timing, invention and a cheerful cynicism about human nature. It's wiser and more wicked than the gross-out insult humor of many of the summer's other comedies." In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "In exaggerating Nixon's mannerisms, Mr. Hedaya has created the year's funniest film caricature. With his hunched shoulders, darting paranoid gaze and crocodile grimace, Mr. Hedaya's Nixon is the quivering, skulking embodiment of a single word: guilty." The Washington Post's Rita Kempley wrote, "Dunst and Williams, with their giggly comic chemistry, loopy charm and resourcefulness, can be universally appreciated." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas said of the filmmakers, "the core audience they’re most likely hoping to connect with are Betsy and Arlene’s contemporaries, who today would be hitting 40. Actually, ‘Dick’ is so sharp and funny it should appeal to all ages." Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "Like Election and Rushmore, it’s a ‘teen’ comedy that isn’t a teen comedy at all, but cops groovy teen spirit in the service of something much more adult."

Dick uses The World of Henry Orient (1964) as its primary template with two young girls bonding over their mutual obsession with an older man that includes posters and scrap books dedicated to him. Once they get to see behind the curtain, as it were, they become disillusioned and mature both emotionally and politically, and participate in his downfall. The movie eventually mutates into a paranoid conspiracy thriller a la All the President’s Men as the girls not only witness the last days of the Nixon administration but help take it down while being followed and surveilled.

Dick is a fun movie but it is easy to see why it tanked at the box office, not even making back its modest $13 million budget. While it certainly can be enjoyed as a goofy comedy about the hijinks of two girls, as it was marketed, you really need to be well versed in the Watergate scandal and All the President’s Men to fully enjoy the humor and inside jokes. This is what killed it commercially as teenagers either didn’t know about it or didn’t care, which is a shame as Dick is an immensely enjoyable movie that deserves a second lease on life.

SOURCES:

Gajewsk, Ryan. “Dick Director on Challenges of Making a Watergate Comedy and Whether It Could Be Done Today.” The Hollywood Reporter. June 17, 2022.

Waxman, Sharon. “Generation X’s Tricky Dick.” Washington Post. August 1, 1999.

Gotham

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sat, 28 May 2022 14:04:00 +0000

Made during her bombshell period, Virginia Madsen is perfectly cast as an elusive femme fatale in Gotham (1988), a made-for-television movie for the Showtime Channel and that was part of a run of sexy roles in the late 1980s that also included Slam Dance (1987), and into 1990s with The Hot Spot (1990) and forgettable erotic thrillers such as Caroline at Midnight (1994) and Blue Tiger (1994). Fortunately, this one stars Tommy Lee Jones and whose angle is a neo-noir fused with a ghost story.

“You ever find yourself walking down a dark street, you think you hear footsteps coming up slowly, somebody just out of sight?” This question kickstarts the story as Charles Rand (Colin Bruce) asks down-on-his-luck private investigator Eddie Mallard (Jones) to find his wife Rachel (Madsen) and tell her to leave him alone. The only problem: she’s been dead for over ten years. Rand offers Mallard a lot of money to take the case, which he accepts even though, as he confesses to his friend Tim (Kevin Jarre) later on, he fears that he’s feeding into this man’s delusions.

Eddie humors his client and his odd ramblings about his wife (“She lusts for daylight. She wants power in the daylight.”). The man is truly haunted by her death and apparent resurrection and this intrigues Eddie – that and the hefty paycheck. One day, Charles spots Rachel across the street and asks Eddie to go over and talk to her. With her long white gloves, vintage hat tilted at just the right angle and retro black dress, Rachel looks like she stepped right out of a 1940s film noir. Of course, she denies knowing Charles and humors Eddie by going out for a drink with him where she explains that she is a woman of expensive tastes.

Rachel shows up at Eddie’s office and apologizes for coming on so strong the other day and takes him out for a bite to eat as a way of apologizing. She comes across as a slightly sad, lonely wealthy lady. He’s intrigued by her stunning looks and enigmatic past. Their paths cross again as she wanders out of the smoke on a deserted city street one night. The deeper he goes into the case the more he realizes it’s not as simple as it seems and like most noirs he finds himself drawn into an increasingly complex web with Rachel at its center. Is she really the deceased wife or is this merely the delusions of a crazy man?

The movie has odd beats that occasionally disrupt its traditional narrative, such as a scene where Eddie and Rachel are serenaded in an alleyway by a dirty bum with an immaculate acoustic guitar and a beautiful voice. It’s a poignant moment as the camera stays on Madsen’s face as Rachel reacts to “Danny Boy,” her eyes gradually welling up and a tear runs down her face. With the help of his very talented crew that includes the likes of David Cronenberg’s longtime production designer Carol Spier, legendary cinematographer Michael Chapman (Raging Bull) and composer George S. Clinton (Austin Powers), writer/director Lloyd Fonvielle creates a suitable neo-noir mood and atmosphere with a touch of the supernatural, such as a spooky shot of Rachel submerged in murky water, a gloved hand reaching out to Eddie.

With her old school looks, Virginia Madsen could have been a Classic Hollywood movie star and is perfectly cast as an elusive femme fatale cum woman out of time. She does an excellent job of coming across as this sweet, alluring presence and then transforms into a vulgar, vengeful creature. The actor is more than believable as a woman that could seduce men into doing her bidding and destroying their lives in the process.

Tommy Lee Jones is well cast as a world-weary gumshoe who thinks he knows all the angles until he takes on this case and becomes entangled in Rachel’s web. Like Rachel, Eddie undergoes his own transformation and Jones does an excellent job of conveying a man who has seen it all to one obsessed with a woman that tears his life apart.

The critics of the time weren’t too kind to Gotham. The Washington Post's Tom Shales wrote, "Madsen is a sensuously spooky Rachel. She is also quite naked in two or three scenes, popping up, literally, in the bathtub, and falling out of a refrigerator. Madsen holds Jones and the camera captive. Maybe it doesn't matter that the whole thing is senseless." In her review for the Los Angeles Times, Lynne Heffley wrote, "What viewers fall victim to is a flawed vision. Suspense fizzles into steamy homage to Madsen’s beauty, clad and unclad; New York City locales are unbelievably underpopulated; a street bum sings “Danny Boy"-all of it-and Madsen’s exquisite lips are either framing romance novel banalities or a favorite obscenity." The New York Times’ Walter Goodman described it as “a lugubrious telling of a story that at its best is incomprehensible.”

“It may be a dream but it’s one of those dreams you can’t wake up from,” Eddie says at one point and it is the narrow line Gotham treads between what is real and what we perceive as real. And isn’t that all down to perception anyway? One person’s reality could be another’s dream. Since this movie is a neo-noir typically things don’t go well for the protagonist but Fonvielle twists this convention so that his main character is spared while another character is doomed. He does an excellent job of grounding the movie in its own reality so we’re never sure what is real and what is a dream except for little details that he uses as signposts along the way. It’s a tricky balancing acting between the ridiculous and the sublime but then again, isn’t all a matter of perception?

Licorice Pizza

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sat, 23 Apr 2022 15:09:00 +0000

Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson was born, raised and continues to live in the San Fernando Valley in California. It has and continues to provide a source of inspiration for some of his most personal films, including Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and Licorice Pizza (2021). He even shot parts of his adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice (2014) in the Valley. Why does PTA return to this place repeatedly? Beyond the convenience of shooting close to home, he is fascinated by the towns and the people that inhabit them as evident most significantly with Licorice Pizza, a nostalgic look back at the area, focusing on the burgeoning romance between two young people in 1973.

This is a largely plotless film that follows the misadventures of Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a 15-year-old high school student, and Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a 25-year-old woman. He’s an aspiring actor with several projects already on his resume and she works for a photographer. They meet at his school during class photo day and immediately starts hitting on her. Initially, she’s repulsed by him but gradually he wears down her resistance through sheer force of will and she finds herself intrigued by his tenacity.

Gary is bursting with youthful confidence, ready to take on the world and launch his next entrepreneurial scheme, whether it’s selling waterbeds or opening a pinball emporium. Alana already seems resigned to her lot in life when she tells him, “I’m going to be here taking photos of kids for their yearbooks when I’m 30. You’re never going to remember me.” This is such a sad admission for someone so young.

At the end of their initial encounter and after repeatedly insulting Gary, rebuffing his advances, Alana walks away, giving a little smile and a shake of her head that is handled beautifully by Alana Haim. It’s a wonderful, little moment in a film full of them as we see how Garry has gotten to her and she’s smitten. The film examines the push-pull of their courtship. He’s a hopeless romantic and she’s a jaded cynic. She knows that this can’t go anywhere because of their age difference, but is intrigued enough by his impressible attitude that she wants to see how it all plays out.

Soon, Alana finds herself caught up in Gary’s infectious optimism and the rest of Licorice Pizza follows these two and their wild misadventures as they navigate the will they or won’t they fall in love journey we’ve seen before albeit through PTA’s unique filter. Much has been made about the age gap between the two lead characters and PTA seems acutely aware of this, deftly handling their romance in a way that is sweet while eschewing anything overtly sexual.

After the initial meet-cute between Gary and Alana, the film stumbles and loses its way for a moment with a baffling scene where we see Gary’s mother (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) handle public relations for a local Japanese restaurant owned by an American (John Michael Higgins) and his Asian wife (Yumi Mizui). He speaks normally to Gary’s mom but to his wife in a cartoonish Asian accent that comes off as offensive. This scene is jarring in tone and content compared to the rest of the film. What is the point of it other than showing us what Gary’s mom does for a living? What are we supposed to take away from this scene? People were racist back in the ‘70s? It serves no real purpose and temporarily breaks the enchanting spell of the film. The same could be said about a weird, random moment later when Gary is suddenly and literally yanked from a scene by the police who mistakenly arrest him for murder. No reason is given and it is never addressed again.

Like he did with Punch-Drunk Love, PTA casts unconventional actors for his leads. Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim aren’t your typical handsome Hollywood actors – hell, they aren’t even actors at all, but rather normal-looking people that could’ve come out of the 1970s. For two people whose first time it is acting in a film Hoffman and Haim have wonderful chemistry together and are believable in their respective roles as they aren’t saddled with actorly affectations that can happen to professionally-trained actors at that age.

Gary talks a good game but doesn’t really know what he wants to do as evident with all the endeavors he starts but doesn’t stick with – acting, waterbed salesman, pinball emporium manager – but that’s okay, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You are supposed to try all kinds of things and have all kinds of experiences. That’s called growing up. Alana is self-aware and acknowledges how weird it is that she’s hanging out with Gary and his 15-year-old friends. She may not have it all figured but she’s trying and this journey she takes is one of the most fascinating aspects of Licorice Pizza.

PTA deftly chronicles the ups and downs of their relationship, from getting to know each other only to back off when faced with obstacles such as jealousy and rivals for their respective affections. They are both young and still figuring out how to communicate with each other and sometimes mixed messages are conveyed such as Alana overcompensating for her attraction to the younger Gary by getting briefly involved with a much older man, Jack Holden (Sean Penn channeling William Holden), an actor in the twilight of his career. This segues into a memorable vignette involving a veteran filmmaker (played by Tom Waits no less) who coaxes Jack into performing a wild stunt. He may be much older than Gary but he’s just as immature as Sean Penn illustrates masterfully with a deliciously eccentric performance.

Another memorable sequence comes when Garry and his friends deliver a waterbed to the house of famous hairdresser turned movie producer Jon Peters (a hilariously arrogant Bradley Cooper) who proceeds to go on about his very famous girlfriend Barbra Streisand and threatens them if they mess up assembling his waterbed. Bradley Cooper’s take on Peters is equal parts comical and frightening – a Hollywood mogul high on his own supply and with a raging ego to match it.

Hoffman does an excellent job conveying the awkwardness of being a teenager because he is one. He also exudes the arrogant confidence of youth. Gary hasn’t been beaten down by life yet and has no fear of failure. Haim’s performance epitomizes that weird zone of being in your mid-twenties where she’s out of school but hasn’t settled on a profession. Alana is no longer a child but doesn’t quite feel like an adult either. Her relationship with him only complicates things.

Licorice Pizza perfectly captures what it means to be young with your whole life in front of you and not knowing what you want to do with it as evident in the montage of Gary’s burgeoning waterbed business set to “Peace Frog” by the Doors where we see his growing attraction towards Alana and vice versa. PTA remembers the age when you thought 30-years-old and over was ancient and a lifetime away. He also captures the awkwardness of youth, saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment, succumbing to petty jealousy and feeling insecure about yourself. Licorice Pizza is PTA’s most unabashed romantic film since Punch-Drunk Love and a love letter to the place he’s lived his entire life. Much like Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), PTA has crafted an affectionate hang-out movie bathed in the warm, comforting glow of nostalgia for the ‘70s.

Tequila Sunrise

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 21:43:00 +0000

Robert Towne needed a box office hit. By 1987, the legendary Hollywood screenwriter, who rose to fame in the 1970s with the likes of The Last Detail (1973) and Chinatown (1974), was in director’s jail after his debut, Personal Best (1982), flopped at the box office and he went through a messy legal battle against studio executive David Geffen. He was trying to get his second directorial effort, Tequila Sunrise (1988), off the ground and knew he’d need bankable movie stars in the lead roles. He managed to secure Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell who were all coming off successful high-profile hits with Lethal Weapon (1987), The Witches of Eastwick (1987) and Overboard (1987), respectively. They jumped at the opportunity to work with someone such as Towne, drawn to his well-written screenplay. The end result is a gorgeously shot neo-noir with a love triangle that tests the friendship between two long-time friends on opposite sides of the law.

Dale “Mac” McKussic (Gibson) is a high-end drug dealer that is supposedly retired even though Nick Frescia (Russell), head of narcotics for Los Angeles County, runs into him at a drug deal. They are friends from way back and so Nick lets him go before the bust goes down, however, Mac knew it was coming and got rid of the drugs. One gets the feeling from the casual way they interact with each other that they’ve crossed paths many times before this incident. Mac escapes and just makes his late reservation at his favorite posh restaurant run by Jo Ann Vallenari (Pfeiffer), who catches the eye of both him and Nick. The rest of the film plays out a twisty cat and mouse game as Nick is torn between busting his friend and trying to save him while Mac is torn between doing one last drug deal and his love for Jo Ann – the person that puts their friendship to the test. As the film progresses, various characters’ true motivations come into focus and we see if Mac is smart enough to stay one step ahead of the Columbian drug cartel he works for, the DEA and hold on to Jo Ann.

All three lead actors exude sex appeal like crazy and part of the thrill of watching Tequila Sunrise is how these three movie stars interact with one another, breathing life into Towne’s wonderful prose. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Jo Ann is no damsel in distress. She’s a strong woman who easily holds up to questioning early on from federal agents who grossly underestimate her fortitude as evident in a beautifully acted and written scene where Jo Ann expertly turns the tables on the Feds to Nick’s bemusement. She’s suave and knows how to deal with her classy clientele but isn’t snobby either. With her beautiful smile, Pfeiffer makes Jo Ann very charismatic and sexy. It is easy to see why Mac and Nick find her so alluring. In turn, she is drawn to Nick’s charisma and Mac’s vulnerability.

With his slick, Pat Riley hairdo and shark grin, Kurt Russell’s Nick is a super confident lawman that is great at his job as he is very perceptive and savvy, which comes from years of experience and knowing what goes on in his own backyard. The actor gives his character just the right amount of cockiness so that he doesn’t come across as arrogant. This plays well off J.T. Walsh’s humorless federal agent intent on busting Mac regardless of Nick’s friendship with him. Russell has a wonderful scene with Pfeiffer where Nick comes clean and explains why he got romantically involved with Jo Ann and the cocky façade comes down to reveal a brutally honest person not afraid to be vulnerable in front of her. He didn’t just get close to her to get close to Mac. He genuinely loves her and is willing to put all his cards on the table. Russell shows an impressive range in this scene but, like Jo Ann, you’re still not quite sure if he is 100% genuine and not playing an angle.

Mel Gibson’s laidback drug dealer is an excellent counterpoint to Russell’s gregarious lawman. Mac plays things close to the vest and Gibson gives little away which keeps us guessing as to how his character is going to evade the cops and not get killed by his South American counterparts. His performance may not be as flashy but it has a brooding intensity that is fascinating to watch. He can go back and forth between showing Mac’s day-to-day routine (work at his legit job and hang out with his son) and the aspects of his drug dealing trade and show how they inform his character.

The always reliable Arliss Howard is excellent as one of Mac’s drug contacts who is constantly trying to get him to do another drug buy but he’s savvy enough to know that this guy is bad news. Howard’s character comes across as amiable enough but it isn’t too hard to figure out his character is probably an informant trying to set up Mac. He’s a little too eager to do business and this ultimately tips his hand.

The great Raul Julia shows up partway through as the DEA’s Mexican counterpart but with a secret agenda of his own. The actor looks like he’s have all kinds of fun with his role, breaking out into song on two separate occasions for no reason at all, taking over the scene for a few seconds. He really gets to sink his teeth into the role once his character’s true identity is revealed.

Character actor extraordinaire, J.T. Walsh is excellent as a slimy DEA agent that immediately butts heads with Nick who is much smarter and has no problem rubbing the man’s nose in it. Walsh is a master of simmering rage, glowering constantly as his character is constantly outsmarted and proven wrong.

Tequila Sunrise is beautifully shot by the great cinematographer Conrad Hall (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) as evident from the stunning sunset featured in the background of a scene where Nick and Mac are captured in silhouette talking on the beach. It’s an excellent scene as the two men sniff each other out to figure out what the other knows and to tell each other to back off in so many words. We get a real indication of what’s at stake and it’s not just their friendship but potentially Mac’s life if he doesn’t play his cards exactly right as he’ll either get busted or killed.

Robert Towne based the Tequila Sunrise screenplay on the courtship of his wife. In the mid-1980s, he frequented chef Piero Selvaggio’s Valentino restaurant in Santa Monica. He would arrive late and talk with Selvaggio’s wife Luisa. She would end up leaving her husband for Towne. At one point, he moved to Paris to help Roman Polanski on the script for Frantic (1988) and met producer Thom Mount. He told him about his script for Tequila Sunrise and after reading it took it to Warner Bros. The studio agreed to do it if Mount could attract a movie star. Mount and Towne approached Harrison Ford while he was making Frantic with Polanski and he agreed to do it but as they got closer to principal photography he pulled out as he didn’t think he could play Mac.

Towne liked Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon and approached him about playing Mac. He flew to Australia to meet with the actor who asked him, “How do you feel about actors watching dailies?” to which Towne replied, “Fine,” and he agreed to do it. Mac was based after “one fellow in particular who was in that line of work, and who was experiencing the same painful difficulty of extricating himself from it,” Towne recalled. He wrote the role of Nick with Kurt Russell in mind and on then-L.A. Lakers head coach, and close friend, Pat Riley, while also being inspired by a close friend who was an undercover narcotics cop for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. He initially wanted Riley to play the part because of the way he “very carefully holds himself together – his necktie tight, his hair slicked back – so that he looks like he’ll never come unglued, he never seems stressed.” Riley turned it down and Alec Baldwin was considered before Towne decided to go with Kurt Russell who he introduced to Riley and proceeded to adopt his look. Towne saw Michelle Pfeiffer in Alan Alda’s Sweet Liberty (1986) and liked the “disparity between public and private behavior” in the role and cast her as Jo Ann.

Tequila Sunrise was financed independently by Mount with a negative pick-up for Warner Bros. It was only Towne’s second directorial effort, the first being Personal Best, which was a notoriously difficult shoot that resulted in the filmmaker liberating the negative of the picture while David Geffen said he stole it. The studio had to step in and make peace between the two men. As a result, Mount wanted to surround Towne with seasoned crew members and hired Richard Sylbert to design Tequila Sunrise. He had worked with Towne previously on Chinatown and Shampoo (1975) and they were good friends. Sylbert had also worked as a studio executive and, according to Mount, “understood the process from top to bottom. So you were hiring, not a production designer, not even a co-producer, you were hiring like this Renaissance maniac who was your partner in the movie, in every way.”

To save money on the $38 million budget, Sylbert found a large, old empty warehouse, instead of a soundstage, in Santa Monica to house the production offices and build sets. For the look of the film, Sylbert chose the colors of the Tequila Sunrise drink and the Los Angeles sunset – gold, orange and red. According to Mount, “Richard understood that the drink was the color key from the very beginning.” Sylbert based Jo Ann’s restaurant on Valentino’s and Matteo’s, an Italian restaurant in West L.A. It was built in the warehouse over eight weeks. He also helped design the menu and chose the cuisine. Towne even brought in Giuseppe Pasqualato, a former chef at Valentino’s to cook on set, which also had a functioning bar.

Filming began in February 1988 in the South Bay section of L.A. and lasted 68 days. Ten days in, cinematographer Jost Vacano was fired as his gritty, realistic style was not the tone Towne was after – rather a more romantic vibe. He called Conrad Hall, his first choice that was nixed by the producer, and within 24 hours was on the set.

Tequila Sunrise received mixed to negative reviews from critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, "Tequila Sunrise is an intriguing movie with interesting characters, but it might have worked better if it had found a cleaner narrative line from beginning to end. It’s hard to surrender yourself to a film that seems to be toying with you." In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Here the problem seems to be the fatal collaboration of a good writer with a director who wasn't strong or overbearing enough to pull him up short. The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb." The Los Angeles Times' Sheila Benson wrote, " It’s enough to send you out of the theater thirsty. Unfortunately, it sends you out hungry too, for a whole movie to offset this upscale grazing." In his review for the Washington Post's Hal Hinson wrote, "In Tequila, the divisions between business and pleasure, love and friendship break down, and the breakers...do it beautifully, with sweet talk, tough talk and hot kissing."

Tequila Sunrise was the box office success Towne needed but he didn’t direct another film for ten years – Without Limits (1998). He kept busy, though, thanks to a lucrative partnership with Tom Cruise, contributing several screenplays for the movie star in the 1990s, including Days of Thunder (1990), The Firm (1993), and Mission: Impossible (1996). Tequila Sunrise is a fascinating battle of wills. We have three highly intelligent people trying to figure out each other’s motives. It becomes complicated when mixed with emotions as a love triangle develops and clouds judgement. As one character says late in the film, “Friendship is all we have! We chose each other!” This is a film about friendship and loyalty. This is what motivates the three lead characters. Nick tries to save Mac from getting killed or busted as the drug dealer is his friend. Mac finds a way out of the drug dealing business as he loves Jo Ann. She loves Mac and doesn’t want him to get hurt. For a neo-noir it is lacking that fatalistic streak that runs through many of them. Towne is a little too enamored with the romantic aspects of his script to convey a convincing doomed protagonist that is a hallmark of the genre. Gibson’s Mac is a little too slick, a little too sure himself for anything really bad to happen to him and that is perhaps the film’s only glaring flaw in an otherwise wonderful, sun-drenched cinematic cocktail.

SOURCES

Lazar, Jerry. “Towne’s Country.” Chicago Tribune. December 4, 1988.
Mount, Thom. Audio Commentary. Tequila Sunrise DVD. 1988.

Sylbert, Richard & Sylvia Townsend. Designing Movies: Portrait of a Hollywood Artist. Frager. 2006

Turan, Kenneth. “Robert Towne’s Hollywood Without Heroes.” The New York Times. November 27, 1988.

Desperado

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 13:15:00 +0000

In 1992, independent filmmaker Robert Rodriguez made his feature film debut with El Mariachi, a $7,000 action movie that showed a stylistic flare beyond its meager budget. It made the rounds at several film festivals with a lot of media attention on the self-assured young man and the incredible story of how he made a movie for so little money. Naturally, Hollywood came calling and initially Rodriguez resisted, making Roadracers (1994) for the Showtime cable television channel after his deal with Sony Columbia Pictures was put on the back burner due to scandal. He eventually made Desperado (1995), a sequel to Mariachi that not only saw him working with a significantly larger budget of $7 million, but with movie star Antonio Banderas.

The film begins almost as if we are in a Quentin Tarantino film with a grungy gringo (Steve Buscemi) walking into a Mexican bar. He proceeds to tell a story about how he witnessed a massacre in a similar bar by a mysterious man. Rodriguez cuts back and forth between the storyteller and what happened at the bar to the strains of “Jack the Ripper” by Link Wray.

What is immediately clear from this opening scene is how far Rodriguez has progressed as a filmmaker. The screenplay is well-written as Steve Buscemi delivers his hilarious monologue with gusto. The director’s technique has also gotten better as the opening gunfight is stylishly choreographed with the El Mariachi (Banderas) dispatching bad guys like something out of a 1980s action movie as a shotgun blast sends a goon hurtling through the air.

It is interesting to note that Rodriguez not only plays up the mythic quality of El Mariachi, introducing him walking into a bar in slow motion in the shadows so you never get a good look at his face, but also has fun with the character as well, showing him playing with his band in a nightclub over the opening credits. El Mariachi even has time to stop a bar fight by striking a patron with his guitar without missing a beat. Rodriguez reveals that this sequence is a dream as we see the villain from El Mariachi appear in the nightclub and we flashback to the end of that film.

Another façade is stripped away when it is revealed that the story Buscemi’s character told was exaggerated for effect – he’s El Mariachi’s hype man. Armed with a guitar case full of weapons, the musician cum killer is working his way through the Mexican criminal underworld to find and kill Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), the man responsible for his wife’s death. Not surprisingly, the crime lord is surrounded by an army of flunkies, chief among them Navajas (Danny Trejo), a man armed with a seemingly endless supply of throwing knives. El Mariachi is aided in his quest for revenge by Carolina (Salma Hayek), the beautiful local bookstore owner who patches him up whenever he’s wounded (which is often).

In the film’s second action sequence, Rodriguez really cuts loose as he transforms Banderas into a two-gun-toting action hero in the tradition of John Woo’s heroic bloodshed films. Apart from doves flying in slow motion, it features many of Woo’s trademark action flourishes but with a cheeky sense of humor as El Mariachi and the last man left search frantically for a weapon that has bullets before he eventually breaks the man’s neck to the strains of “Strange Face of Love” by Tito & Tarantula. It is a beautifully choreographed action sequence that demonstrates his skill as not just a director but as an editor as he times the cuts to the rhythm of the action. When it comes to action editing is everything and Rodriguez understands this intuitively.

Rodriguez cast Antonio Banderas at just the right time in their respective careers. The former needed to cast a movie star and the latter was looking for a change of pace having just come off the big budget adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (1994). Banderas not only has the charisma to carry the film, he also demonstrates an ability to go from dramatic moments to comedic ones with ease. He also showed his ability to handle action, transforming himself into a credible action star. The actor also has wonderful chemistry with Salma Hayek as their characters develop a romantic relationship over the course of the film.

Desperado was Hayek’s first mainstream, Hollywood role, cast by Rodriguez against the wishes of the studio. The impossibly beautiful actor holds her own against the likes of Banderas as she demonstrates a light, comic touch and dramatic chops when Carolina explains why she is complicit with Bucho’s dealings with the town, aiding and abetting his drug operation in order to survive. She forces El Mariachi to realize that his desire for revenge is not the only reason to take out Bucho – it would also free the town of his tyrannical hold on it. He is a tragic hero and she gives him a reason to keep on going after he fulfills his goal.

Desperado would mark the beginning of a long-running collaboration with several actors, including Banderas, Hayek, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, and Quintin Tarantino, who he met on the film festival circuit while promoting El Mariachi. He made Tarantino the lead on his next film, From Dusk Till Dawn and has often featured him in cameos where he delivers a monologue and is then killed off in gruesome fashion. Marin and Trejo make quite an impression with the former playing a grinning bartender that meets his fate at the hands of the El Mariachi and the latter in a silent role as a deadly assassin brought in to take out the film’s hero but in an unexpected twist is taken out prematurely through a comic case of mistaken identity.

After the success of El Mariachi, Rodriguez was eager to make a sequel and capitalize on his new deal with Sony Columbia but the studio put on the brakes while they dealt with the Heidi Fleiss scandal that broke in early summer of 1993. She was a high-end madam that facilitated call girls to several of Hollywood’s elite and a list of her clients, which included at least two studio executives, appeared in the press. At the time, producers Carlos Gallardo (who starred in El Mariachi), Elizabeth Avellan, and line producer Bill Borden had already begun pre-production and realized that the film was on hold until the scandal blew over. Never one to be idle, Rodriguez shifted gears and accepted another gig making Roadracers that he shot in less than two weeks in January 1994 for $1 million. It was his first Hollywood production and working with a union crew. He was struck by how wasteful and slow studio productions were as he was used to collaborating with a small, hand-picked crew that worked fast. It would give him a taste of what he would be in store for when working for Sony.

By the summer of 1994, Rodriguez finally got the greenlight to make his Mariachi sequel, then known as The Return of El Mariachi but soon changed to Pistolero during production and eventually became Desperado. Ironically, this was due in large part to his future employer – Bob and Harvey Weinstein – who approached Sony executive Stephanie Allain at the Cannes Film Festival telling her what a fan they were of El Mariachi and how they would be more than happy to make the sequel with Rodriguez.

The studio wanted a name actor cast in the lead role and Allain suggested Antonio Banderas but Rodriguez was hesitant to cast a non-Mexican in the part. Undeterred, Allain showed Banderas El Mariachi and he loved it. He said, “I thought, ‘This guy has incredible energy.’ It reminds me of the first films I did with (Pedro) Almodovar. Not in his style, of course. But it’s like, you know, the same thing, when you don’t have any money and you’re working outside the studio, with no trailer, no nothing, just waiting on the corner to do your shot. And I thought, ‘Wow! That’s the kind of cinema I would like to do again.’” She told Rodriguez this and he agreed to meet with the actor.

Rodriguez and Avellan saw a rerun of Salma Hayek on comedian Paul Rodriguez’s talk show from 1992 where she talked about changing Hollywood’s refusal to cast Latina actresses. The next day, Avellan called her and asked her to audition for the female lead in Desperado. In addition to competing with many other Latina actresses, auditioning many times and performing several screen tests, she was up against the likes of Cameron Diaz who the studio liked as, according to Hayek, “her last name was Diaz, so they said she can be Mexican.” Originally Raul Julia had been cast as Bucho and Rodriguez had scheduled principal photography around his availability but when he suffered a stroke that preceded his death, he was replaced by Argentine actor Joaquim de Almeida.

On Desperado, Rodriguez was working with a significantly larger budget of $7 million and returned to Acuna, Mexico to use the same locations he had on his first film. It was a challenging shoot with cast and crew members staying on both sides of the border and filming equipment shipped in from both Mexico and the United States. During the first week of shooting the studio was not happy and threatened to fire people until Rodriguez showed them dailies and cut together a couple of trailers to give them a taste of what he was doing.

In addition, the studio insisted on using department heads and imposed a more traditional studio structure, which Rodriguez balked at having been used to working with a small crew and doing a lot of the different jobs himself. Gary Martin, head of physical production at Sony, was being told exaggerated stories that the filmmaker was “throwing a lot of tantrums and kicking cameras” on location with key crew members, such as director of photography Guillermo Navarro, ready to quit. Avellan claims that Borden was the source for a lot of disinformation and discord, creating problems on the set. Borden even played Gallardo, Avellan and Rodriguez against each other. When Allain called Avellan and asked her about these rumors she responded that everything was fine and defended Rodriguez. Avellan told Rodriguez about Borden and they decided to keep a close eye on him.

Hayek remembers that the film’s steamy sex scene her character has with El Mariachi was not in the screenplay and was added after a screen test. To try and make her as comfortable as possible, Rodriguez filmed it on a closed set with just him, Avellan and Banderas but Hayek found it a difficult experience nonetheless.

Martin met with Avellan and told her that Rodriguez would not be editing the film himself as he had done on El Mariachi and told her, “Honey, just like when you go to a beauty parlor and somebody does your nails because they specialize in that and somebody does your color because they specialize in that, it’s the same in the movie business.” Insulted, Avellan said nothing in order to keep the peace between Rodriguez and the studio but inside she was fuming. Post-production began in November 1994 in Los Angeles with the studio finally allowing Rodriguez to edit his own film but only if he did it there where they could keep an eye on him. Rodriguez said:

“They just didn’t want me to have that much control, but they let me do it. That was a big mistake because it sets another precedent. If my next movie hadn’t been Desperado, if I had done one of the really big budget movies they were offering me, I would have lost that control.”

His studio experience on Desperado soured the filmmaker on ever working in Hollywood and convinced him to put down permanent roots in Austin. With his deal done with Sony, he made his next film, From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), for indie film darlings Miramax who gave the kind of creative freedom he craved.

Desperado garnered mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars and wrote, "Rodriguez has a lively color sense, a good feel for composition and a willingness to put the camera anywhere it can possibly go. What happens looks terrific. Now if he can harness that technical facility to a screenplay that's more story than setup, he might really have something." In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Overdependence on violence also marginalizes Desperado as a gun-slinging novelty item, instead of the broader effort toward which this talented young director might have aspired. It's still clear that Mr. Rodriguez has a talent for fancy directorial footwork and that his movie has its fiery moments. But not even a Mariachi in Mr. Banderas's league can get by on looks alone."

In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "if you’re not a fan of huge explosions, oversized weapons and people getting sliced and diced in all kinds of ways, Desperado doesn’t have a lot more to offer." The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote about Rodriguez's jump from indie film to his big budget remake/sequel: "the commercial transition has been remarkably successful. This is primarily thanks to Rodriguez, who not only retains the original movie's kinetic flair, but takes it further. Finally, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman gave it a "B" rating and wrote, "The dawdling pace has us lingering a little too much over Desperado‘s primitive human dimensions. Still, when Rodriguez unleashes a scene with Banderas leaping backwards from one building to the next, or with a couple of mariachis launching rockets from their guitar cases, he’s a true corker. The action, in all its demonically outlandish wit, is its own show."

At the time, Desperado was a breath of fresh air in the action genre by starring a Latino actor with a predominantly Latino cast that also had universal appeal. In many respects it is a modern western with El Mariachi as a lone gunslinger that walks into town and rids it of the bad guys. Much like one of his cinematic heroes, director George Miller, Rodriguez draws inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces with El Mariachi as this mythic figure that makes the hero’s journey to redemption. In this respect, Desperado is part Mad Max myth-making and part John Woo action melodrama. Rodriguez gives this template a novel spin by having his film showcase Latino culture and present a hero that can be celebrated, which was largely absent in the mainstream at the time. It can’t be stated enough how significant an achievement that was back then or even now for that matter. Like, Evil Dead 2, Desperado is the rare successful remake/sequel hybrid that manages to not alienate fans of the first film while appealing to people who haven’t seen it. The film demonstrated that Rodriguez could work with bigger budgets and movie stars, paving the way for a fantastic career that he made his way.

SOURCES

Frederick, Candice. “’The Studio Wanted Cameron Diaz’: Salma Hayek on the Role that Changed Her Life.” Elle. October 15, 2020.

Leydon, Joe. “Cranking up the Volume.” Los Angeles Times. November 27, 1994.

Macor, Allison. Chainsaws, Slackers and Spy Kids: 30 Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas. University of Texas Press. 2010.

Martinez, Jose and Christian Divine. “Hispanic Blood: An Interview with Robert Rodriguez.” Creative Screenwriting. December 21, 2015

The Razor's Edge

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:49:00 +0000

After starring in several successful comedies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bill Murray wanted to try something different. He wanted to flex his acting chops and do something more dramatic. He wanted to make a passion project of his, an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge, the spiritual journey of its protagonist Larry Darrell. The book had already been adapted into a well-respected film in 1946, starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney. Not surprisingly, no Hollywood studio was interested in making the modestly budgeted film until Murray’s former Saturday Night Live cast member, Dan Aykroyd, cut a deal with Columbia Pictures. They would bankroll The Razor’s Edge (1984) if Murray would star in their summer blockbuster Ghostbusters (1984) alongside Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Murray agreed and got to make his film, but the big question – would anyone want to see it was quickly answered upon its theatrical release. It received mixed to negative reviews and flopped at the box office, only making half of its $12 million budget while Ghostbusters was a massive success.

It is the early days of World War I and the United States has yet to throw their hat in the ring but gear and supplies are being donated to aid their future allies. Best friends Gray Mautrin (James Keach) and Larry Darrell (Murray) have volunteered to accompany an ambulance overseas and help the cause. When we meet Larry he’s the sarcastic wisecracker we’ve come to expect from Murray as he dabbles in bits of physical comedy, flirting with longtime sweetheart Isabel Bradley (Catherine Hicks) and close friend Sophie MacDonald (Theresa Russell) – two women that will feature prominently in his life.

There is a feeling of hopeful idealism in these scenes as we see the idyllic home he’s leaving behind for the grim, meat hook reality of the war. The tone of the film changes immediately once Gray and Larry arrive at the battlefront and meet their no-nonsense commanding officer Piedmont (Brian Doyle-Murray). They are told that their squad has been depleted and are given sidearms even though they are neutral participants in the war. Murray doesn’t say anything – no witty, snarky comments a la Stripes (1981) – just a worried expression on his face that seems to say, what the hell did I sign up for?

He says very little for most of the WWI sequences as we see Larry take everything in and get the lay of the land thanks to Piedmont’s tough love approach. He also experiences the horrifying effects, transporting the wounded and the dying from the battlefield to a nearby first aid station. Gone is the wisecracking Murray as Larry does everything he can just to survive. The actor does an excellent job of conveying the utter despair Larry feels after what he’s seen.

The war sequences are among the strongest in The Razor’s Edge, especially the last one where Larry and his squad are caught out in the battlefield and find themselves facing insurmountable odds. Larry is wounded and Piedmont is killed saving his life. After the danger has passed, Larry delivers a stirring anti-eulogy for his fallen comrade that is the one Murray gave his SNL castmate John Belushi when he died. It is a powerful and moving moment as it is something real and authentic captured on film.

Larry returns home from the war and finds himself adrift in life after being deeply affected by his experiences overseas. He spends the rest of the film finding himself by shedding his trappings of wealth, by working menial jobs and living in modest accommodations in Paris. This comes at a cost as his friends and family reject his new bohemian lifestyle, including Isabel who cannot understand why he is willing giving up his wealthy life of privilege. He tells her, “I got a second chance at life. I am not going to waste it on a big house, a new car every year and a bunch of friends who want a big house and new car every year!” She returns to the States and marries Gray while Larry continues his spiritual journey, gaining life experiences such as working in a coal mine where he meets a man that extols the virtues of India, which becomes Larry’s ultimate destination and the source of the spiritual enlightenment he seeks.

The always reliable Theresa Russell is excellent as one of Larry’s closest friends that goes on her own harrowing journey. There is a scene where a grief-stricken Sophie tearfully tells Isabel about her husband and son dying in an automobile accident that is raw as she chastises the nuns at the hospital in an understandable outpouring of grief. How does she find the will to live after such a horrible event? As a result, she numbs the pain that comes from a catastrophic loss by losing herself in alcohol and prostitution. Russell and Murray have wonderful chemistry together and her impressive dramatic chops forces him to up his game in their scenes together. The sequence where Larry gets Isabel to quit drinking and prostitution are well done as Murray uses his easy-going charm to incredible effect. This is the film at its most romantic as we see these two characters falling in love in Paris. Larry brings her back from the brink in a way that is quite moving.

One must give Murray credit, he gives the role everything he has in what was obviously a labor of love but he wasn’t a good enough actor back then to know when to tone down his comedic shtick and this results in an uneven performance. At times, he can’t quite cut loose of the broad physical comedy that made him a star, such as a scene where Larry runs from a gaggle of poor children begging for money on the streets of India. It must’ve been hard to let go of comedic tendencies that came so naturally to him. It would be years before he’d try it again and was more successful as the scary mob boss in Mad Dog and Glory (1993), but it wasn’t until he made Rushmore (1998) with Wes Anderson that he was experienced enough as an actor to modulate his performance to accommodate the tone of a given scene.

Filmmaker John Byrum met Bill Murray in New York City in 1974. The two men hit it off and wanted to work together but the opportunity wouldn’t arise until almost 10 years later. Byrum was interested in adapting W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge but assumed that 20th Century Fox, the studio that released the 1946 adaptation, still had the rights. When he approached the studio, they wouldn’t even take a meeting with him and after doing more digging found out that the rights had reverted to the Maugham estate. Unfortunately, recording industry executive Bob Marcucci had already acquired them. Byrum struck a deal – he would write the screenplay for no fee, for a 50-50 partnership and the right to direct. Marcucci agreed and in 1982, Murray joined the project after Byrum gave him a copy of the book. He wanted to make the film after reading 50 pages, drawn to the project as he was getting offered the same kind of scripts repeatedly and wanted to try something new.

Byrum asked Murray to write the script with him and the two men worked on it for a year-and-a-half. Murray suggested writing in bars and restaurants as he believed “that good things come from difficult conditions, and I thought that no matter how badly we did, at least we’d have the experience of trying to concentrate on one thing while being distracted all the time.” To this end, they went to all kinds of places in Manhattan, New Jersey and upstate, southern New York. They wrote in spas near San Francisco and even a monastery in Ladakh, India during a religious war!

Byrum and Murray approached several studios but none were interested as they felt that no one wanted to see the comedian in a serious role. Dan Aykroyd was working on a script for an ambitious comedy called Ghostbusters that was generating a lot of interest around Hollywood and Columbia Pictures made a deal to bankroll The Razor’s Edge if Murray also starred in Ghostbusters. Murray agreed and started filming the former soon after.

It was a tough shoot lasting five months. The production fell behind schedule while shooting the war sequences. As Byrum said at the time, “To set up an explosion takes time. Then the wind might shift and destroy the shot, and you have to rewire all the explosives and organize the extras.” They shot for a month in Paris and then three hard weeks in India. At one point, a crew member attempted suicide and another developed such a crippling drinking problem they had to be sent home. Many got food poisoning with Byrum himself losing 12 pounds. While all of this was going on, the studio kept asking when they would be finished as they were eager for Murray to start shooting Ghostbusters.

As soon as principal photography was finished, Murray flew to London where he saw a rough cut of the film and then got on the Concord where he flew to New York City. He got off the plane, went straight to Madison Avenue and 62nd Street, and donned his Ghostbusters outfit. “A week before I had worked with yellow-hat lamas in the Himalayas,” he remarked in an interview.

Most film critics at the time were not kind to The Razor’s Edge. Roger Ebert gave it two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “I didn't feel that the hero's attention had been quite focused during his quest for the meaning of life. He didn't seem to be a searcher, but more of a bystander, shoulders thrown back, deadpan expression in place, waiting to see if life could make him care.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it, “slow, overlong and ridiculously overproduced.” The Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio wrote, “Murray's style into the '20s is jarringly bizarre. Murray puts his comedy together with riffs drawn from contemporary popular culture, in the way a modernist sculptor welds fragments found in a junkyard. Much of the humor of The Razor's Edge simply isn't intelligible within the context of the period; he's a Connecticut hipster in President Hoover's court.” Finally, in his review for the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "If Murray's young Ghostbusters fans do go to see The Razor's Edge, they will receive a pleasant, thought-provoking surprise, a film that gently asks us to consider lifestyles other than the one into which we were born."

The Razor’s Edge is an impressively staged and beautifully shot period film directed by John Byrum (Heart Beat) and shot by Peter Hannan (Withnail and I) that gives a real sense of place. The film juxtaposes the opulent wealth of Larry’s friends back home with the physical limits he pushes himself for spiritual enlightenment. He makes an arduous journey through punishing environments, constantly pushing himself, testing his limits.

While hardly the cinematic disaster that it has been regard as over the years, it isn't that successful either. Chalk this up as a noble failure. Murray's heart was in the right place but he miscast himself in the lead role of Larry Darrell, a man who finds himself thrust from the upper crust of society to the battlefields of WWI where he is forever changed by the horrors he witnesses, motivating him to find personal enlightenment in India. Timing is everything and at the time of its release mainstream moviegoing audiences did not want to see Murray in a serious role. As a result, The Razor’s Edge tanked at the box office the same year that the crowd-pleasing Ghostbusters was a huge hit. To be fair, Murray hadn’t developed the dramatic acting chops to pull off a role like Larry Darrell. He delivers an uneven performance in an uneven film. Understandably, disappointed with its reception and disenchanted with making movies, Murray took his family to Paris and except for a cameo in Little Shop of Horrors (1986), didn’t act for four years.

SOURCES

Crouse, Timothy. “Bill Murray: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone. August 16, 1984.

Pollock, Dale. “Bill Murray on The Razor’s Edge After Ghostbusters.” The Victoria Advocate. October 29, 1984.

Weinstein, Wendy. “John Byrum Traverses The Razor’s Edge.” The Film Journal. September 1984.

JFK

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 14:00:00 +0000

There’s only one thing everyone can agree on regarding the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy: he was killed on November 22, 1963. Everything else around this watershed event in American history has been subject to intense debate and one that has provoked people to question their own beliefs and those of their government. Yet, for such a highly publicized affair there are still many uncertainties that surround the actual incident. Countless works of fiction and non-fiction have been created concerning the subject, but have done little in aiding our understanding of the assassination and the events surrounding it. Oliver Stone's film JFK (1991) depicts the events leading up to and after the assassination like a densely assembled puzzle complete with jump cuts and multiple perspectives. Stone’s film presents the assassination as a powerful event constructed by its conspirators to create confusion with its contradictory evidence, to then bury this evidence in the Warren Commission Report, which in turn manifests multiple interpretations of key figures like triggerman Lee Harvey Oswald. JFK offers a more structured examination of the conspiracy from one person's point of view where everything fits together to reveal a larger, more frightening picture implicating the most powerful people in the United States government.

Stone’s film filters an examination of two conspiracies, one to kill the President and one to cover it up, from one person's point of view — Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) — the New Orleans District Attorney who then assembles all the evidence at his disposal to deliver a powerful and persuasive case for a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Stone saw his film consisting of several separate films: Garrison in New Orleans against Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), a key figure in the assassination, Oswald’s (Gary Oldman) backstory, the recreation of Dealey Plaza, and the deep background in Washington, D.C. JFK is the mother of all paranoid conspiracy thrillers, the ultimate one man against the system film with Garrison taking on the establishment, attempting to uncover one of the most nefarious plots in history. It created such profound shockwaves in the real world that Stone was criticized and vilified in the press.

“God, I’m ashamed to be an American today,” says Garrison when he finds out that Kennedy has been shot and we see people in the bar he’s in applaud the man’s death. Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson desaturate the colors in the 1963 scenes, which creates a somber tone as the country reacts to the Kennedy assassination.

Six years later, the color returns to the film as Garrison shares a plane ride with Senator Russell B. Long (Walter Matthau) who plants the first seeds of doubt in the District Attorney’s mind about the Kennedy assassination. He points out that Oswald was a lousy shot and couldn’t have made all those shots in that time with that kind of accuracy. He also scoffs at the “magic bullet” theory – that one bullet created seven wounds and came out in pristine condition. “I’d round up 100 of the world’s best riflemen. Find out which ones were in Dallas that day. You’ve been duck hunting. I think Oswald is a good old-fashioned decoy.”

This encounter provokes Garrison to go through all the volumes of the Warren Commission Report and find that, “Again and again credible testimony ignored, leads are never followed up, its conclusions selective, there’s no index. It’s one of the sloppiest, most disorganized investigations I’ve ever seen.” He concludes that this was by design: “But it’s all broken down and spread around and you read it and the point gets lost.” He continues to dig deeper and the testimony of Lee Bowers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who hints at another shooter on the grassy knoll, is the final straw.

Garrison walks the streets of New Orleans with two of his investigators Lou Ivon (Jay O. Sanders) and Bill Broussard (Michael Rooker), recounting Oswald’s time in the city in a brilliantly written and performed monologue (one of many). He points out to them that Oswald, a supposed communist sympathizer, spent his time in the heart of the government’s intelligence community with the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service and the Office of Naval Intelligence all within spitting distance of each other. As Garrison tells them, “Isn’t this seem to you a rather strange place for a communist to spend his spare time?” He tells them that they are going to reopen the investigation of the Kennedy assassination and this is where the film really begins to gather narrative momentum.

Garrison starts interviewing people that had some link to the conspirators, namely Clay Bertrand a.k.a. Clay Shaw, which gives Stone the opportunity to trot out a parade of name actors such as Jack Lemmon, John Candy and Kevin Bacon to portray a very colorful cavalcade of characters. The interviews paint a vivid picture of David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) and Shaw working with Oswald. Stone uses Bacon and Lemmon to detail the conspiracy on a local level, expounding a ton of expositional dialogue brilliantly, while Candy’s hipster lawyer conveys the danger Garrison faces digging into the murder of the President.

Stone presents a series of lengthy dialogue-driven scenes conveying an incredible amount of information in palatable fashion by having recognizable actors as his mouthpieces while dynamically shooting and editing them. He has a character spout a fact or theory and then cuts to a dramatic reenactment that depicts it in black and white and/or different film stock, often blurring the line between fact and fiction, which is the point. In a case as complex as this it is hard to discern which is which as witness testimony conflicts one another making it difficult to make sense of it all.

A great example of this is the sequence where Garrison and his team explain Oswald’s background leading up to the assassination with Stone cutting to staged footage, actual documentary footage and the famous Life magazine cover photograph that cemented Oswald’s guilt in the public’s mind but might be a doctored image. It is a bravura sequence that marries complex editing, pasting together all kinds of different formats, with past events being discussed in the present with many characters talking as the conspiracy deepens and the thriller elements take hold. It culminates with Broussard disbelievingly saying, “We are talking about our government!” to which Garrison replies, “No. We’re talking about a crime, Bill. Plain and simple…We’re through the looking glass, here, people. White is black and black is white.”

The scene where Garrison first meets Shaw is a fantastic clash between two characters as the former goes after the latter who defiantly deflects and denies any involvement in the assassination plot. During the conversation, Stone intercuts footage that shows he is lying or, at least, that is Garrison’s interpretation. Tommy Lee Jones is brilliant here as he changes tone on a dime, going from amused elegance to angrily indignant and back again all the while maintaining an air of cultured sophistication. Finally, Garrison tires of his act and accuses him of killing Kennedy. When Shaw finally leaves, he gives parting pleasantries but Jones gives Costner a lingering, threatening look. From this point on, the pressure on the D.A. and his team increases as the powers that be attempt to discredit him.

Stone’s portrayal of Garrison is reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) – the last honest man in government – and he tries to temper this by showing the trouble he faces at home as his wife (Sissy Spacek) complains that he’s never around anymore and that he cares more about the Kennedy assassination than his own family. She is the film’s weakest character whose sole purpose, initially, is to provide strife on the home front. Stone then has her come around to her husband’s way of thinking after he tearfully tells her late one night that Robert Kennedy has been shot and killed. She admits he was right all along and they make love in a scene that is unnecessarily maudlin. These scenes feel shoehorned in and take away from the main thrust of the film. Stone is on more comfortable ground when he returns to more familiar turf as we see the press arriving in droves to Garrison’s office, making it impossible for he and his team to get any work done. Funding for his office has dried up and he is forced to use his own savings to keep the investigation going. We also see infighting among his staff and Ivon and Broussard butt heads as we see the latter scared off the case.

Another bit of tour-de-force acting comes from Joe Pesci in the scene where Ferrie rapidly unravels as he fears for his life based on what he knows about the plot to kill Kennedy. Ferrie gets increasingly manic as he rattles off the people and organizations involved, getting worked up until he utters the iconic line, “It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!” It’s hyperbolic and over-the-top to be sure but it does illustrate how complex the assassination plot is with fake Oswalds and conflicting eyewitness accounts. After the incredible outburst, Ferrie winds down as Pesci elicits sympathy for this terrible man who is under a lot pressure and is incredibly paranoid. This scene threatens to throw the film right off the rails as Pesci goes for it, acting his ass off, chewing up the scenery in breathtaking fashion.

The centerpiece of the film is when Garrison travels to Washington, D.C. to meet with an ex-high-ranking CIA officer known only as Mr. X (Donald Sutherland). In this bravura sequence he lays out the motivation for killing Kennedy including how and why. It’s an incredible amount of dialogue and Stone wisely cast a skilled actor such as Donald Sutherland to convey it in a coherent and engaging way. X lays out the most important aspect of the assassination: why? “The how and who is just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia – keeps ‘em guessing like some kind of parlor game preventing them from asking the most important question – why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefitted? Who has the power to cover it up?”

X posits that Kennedy was killed because he wanted to break up the CIA, make peace with Russia and end the Vietnam War, which not only pissed off a lot of powerful people but would cost a lot of money as he tells Garrison, “The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is the war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.” He encourages Garrison to “come up with a case. Something. Anything. Make arrests. Stir the shitstorm. Hope to reach a critical mass that’ll start a chain reaction of people coming forward. Then the government’ll crack. Remember, fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth.” This is the film’s idealistic mission statement. Judging from the critical reaction towards the film, Stone certainly succeeded in stirring up the shitstorm and in the court of public opinion he helped reshape the perception of the Kennedy assassination.

These increasingly dense and dynamic exposition scenes lead up to the mother of all courtroom scenes as Garrison goes in knowing he’s going to lose and goes for it anyway. It is Costner’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington filibuster moment by way of Gary Cooper as Garrison debunks the Warren Commission Report’s account of Oswald by audaciously showing the real Zapruder film that depicted the Kennedy killing in real time. Stone edits in recreation footage with actual footage of the assassination as Garrison lays it all out. The filmmaker also recreates Kennedy’s controversial autopsy and shows actual photos of the man taken at the time.

This scene involves a massive amount of dialogue and information to convey and Costner handles it like a pro, making this exposition compelling, especially at the end when the actor performs his final speech without the aid of intercutting other footage. It’s Costner out there on his own, even getting emotional towards the end at the most powerful moment when Garrison address the jury, “Show this world that this is still a government of the people, for the people and by the people. Nothing as long as you live will ever be more important. It’s up to you.” And with that last line, Costner breaks the fourth wall. That line is meant for us and is one of the most moving parts of Garrison’s speech.

While attending the Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Cuba, Stone met Sheridan Square Press publisher Ellen Ray on an elevator. She had published Jim Garrison's book On the Trail of the Assassins. Ray had gone to New Orleans and worked with Garrison in 1967. She gave Stone a copy of Garrison's book and told him to read it. He did and quickly bought the film rights with his own money. The Kennedy Assassination had always had a profound effect on his life and he eventually met Garrison, grilling him with a variety of questions for three hours. The man stood up to Stone's questioning and then got up and left. His hubris impressed the director.

Stone was not interested in making a film about Garrison's life but rather the story behind the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. To this end, he also bought the film rights to Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs. When Stone set out to write the screenplay, he asked Columbia University’s Professor of Journalism Zachary Sklar to co-write it with him and distill the Garrison book, the Marrs book and all the research he and others conducted into a script that would resemble what he called "a great detective movie." Stone told Sklar his vision of the movie: "I see the models as Z (1969) and Rashomon (1950), I see the event in Dealey Plaza taking place in the first reel, and again in the eighth reel, and again later, and each time we're going to see it differently and with more illumination.”

Sklar worked on the Garrison side of the story while Stone added the Oswald story, the events at Dealey Plaza and the "Mr. X" character. To tell as much of the story as they could, Stone and Sklar used composite characters, a technique that would be criticized in the press, most notably the "Mr. X" character played by Donald Sutherland and who was a mix of several witnesses and retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, an adviser on the film.

In 1989, Stone met with the three top Warner Bros. executives – Terry Semel, Bob Daly, and Bill Gerber – who had been interested in his work for some time. At the time, Stone was trying to make a film about Howard Hughes but Warren Beatty owned the rights. Stone then pitched JFK to them in 15-20 minutes: “I told them I wanted JFK to be a movie about the problem of covert parallel government in this country and deep political corruption.” Semel remembers Stone asking them, “’Are you concerned politically? Would it affect your company? Are there negative reasons why you wouldn’t do it?’ My immediate reaction was, ‘No, we should do it.’ If it’s entertaining and it’s intriguing, a great murder mystery about something we all cared about and grew up thinking about, why not?” A handshake deal was done and the studio agreed to a $20 million budget.

Stone could have shopped JFK around in the international market but chose WB because, “I knew the material was dangerous and I wanted on entity to finance the whole thing and the history of WB, given Terry Semel’s record of political films (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and The Killing Fields), was my first choice.” Kevin Costner signed on to play Garrison in 1991, which pleased the studio who wanted a bankable movie star attached to the project. In addition, independent producer Arnon Milchan came on board as an executive producer and doubled the budget allowing Stone to cast a star-studded supporting cast around Costner.

Stone ambitiously wanted to recreate the Kennedy Assassination in Dealey Plaza and his producers had to pay the Dallas City Council a substantial amount of money to hire police to reroute traffic and close streets for three weeks. He only had ten days to shoot the footage. Getting permission to shoot in the Texas School Book Depository was more difficult. They had to pay $50,000 to put someone in the window that Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have shot Kennedy. They were allowed to film in that location only between certain hours with only five people on the floor at one time: the camera crew, an actor, and Stone. Co-producer Clayton Townsend has said that the hardest part was getting the permission to restore the building to the way it looked back in 1963. That took five months of negotiation.

Filming was going smoothly until several attacks on the film in the press surfaced in the mainstream media including the Chicago Tribune, published while the film was only in its first weeks of shooting. Five days later, the Washington Post ran a scathing article by national security correspondent George Lardner entitled, "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland" that used the first draft of the JFK screenplay to blast it for "the absurdities and palpable untruths in Garrison's book and Stone's rendition of it.” The article pointed out that Garrison lost his case against Clay Shaw and claimed that he inflated his case by trying to use Shaw's homosexual relationships to prove guilt by association. Other attacks in the media soon followed. However, the Lardner Post piece stung the most as he had stolen a copy of the script. Stone recalls, "He had the first draft, and I went through probably six or seven drafts.”

The film depicts the events leading up to and after the assassination as a densely constructed story complete with jump cuts, multiple perspectives, a variety of film stocks and the blending of actual archival footage with staged scenes dramatized by a stellar cast of actors. This blurring of reality and fiction by mixing real footage with staged footage makes it difficult to discern what really happened and what is merely speculation. Stone does this to create what he calls "a countermyth to the myth of the Warren Commission because a lot of the original facts were lost in a very shoddy investigation," and simulate the confusing quagmire of events as they are depicted in Warren Report. Stone creates different points of views or "layers" through the extensive use of flashbacks within flashbacks. Stone has said that he “wanted the film on two or three levels — sound and picture would take us back, and we’d go from one flashback to another, and then that flashback would go inside another flashback ... I wanted multiple layers because reading the Warren Commission Report is like drowning.” This technique conveys the notion of confusion and conflict within evidence

Kevin Costner acts as the perfect mouthpiece for Stone’s theories. The auteur’s infamously forceful directorial approach to his actors pays off here as he reins in the Costner’s usual tics and mannerisms. Stone was no dummy — he knew that by populating his film with many famous faces, he could make the potentially bitter pill that was his film that much more palatable to the mainstream movie-going public. The rest of the cast is phenomenal. Gary Oldman delivers an eerily authentic portrayal of the enigmatic Lee Harvey Oswald. Tommy Lee Jones is note-perfect as the refined, self-confident businessman, Clay Shaw. Even minor roles are filled by such name actors as Vincent D’Onofrio, Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon, and Walter Matthau.

The film throws many characters at us and it is easier to keep track of them by identifying them with the famous person that portrays them. Stone was evidently inspired by the casting model of a documentary epic he had admired as a child: “Darryl Zanuck's The Longest Day (1962) was one of my favorite films as a kid. It was realistic, but it had a lot of stars ... the supporting cast provides a map of the American psyche: familiar, comfortable faces that walk you through a winding path in the dark woods.” Future biopics with sprawling casts, like The Insider (1999), and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), and The Good Shepherd (2006) would use this same approach.

Seeing JFK now, one is reminded that first and foremost, it is a top-notch thriller. There are so many fantastic scenes of sheer exposition that would normally come across as dry and boring but are transformed into riveting scenes in the hands of this talented cast. For example, the famous scene between Garrison and X (Sutherland) where the mysterious man lays out all the reasons why Kennedy was killed and how is not only a marvel of writing but also of acting as the veteran actor gets to deliver what is surely one of the best monologues ever committed to film.

Once the film was released in theaters, it polarized critics. The New York Times ran an article by Bernard Weinraub entitled, "Hollywood Wonders If Warner Brothers let JFK Go Too Far.” In it, he called for studio censorship and wrote, "At what point does a studio exercise its leverage and blunt the highly charged message of a film maker like Oliver Stone?" The newspaper also ran a review of the film by Vincent Canby who wrote, "Mr. Stone's hyperbolic style of film making is familiar: lots of short, often hysterical scenes tumbling one after another, backed by a soundtrack that is layered, strudel-like, with noises, dialogue, music, more noises, more dialogue.” However, Roger Ebert praised the film in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, saying, "The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche.”

Rita Kempley in the Washington Post wrote, "Quoting everyone from Shakespeare to Hitler to bolster their arguments, Stone and Sklar present a gripping alternative to the Warren Commission's conclusion. A marvelously paranoid thriller featuring a closetful of spies, moles, pro-commies and Cuban freedom-fighters, the whole thing might have been thought up by Robert Ludlum.” On Christmas Day, the Los Angeles Times ran an article entitled, "Suppression of the Facts Grants Stone a Broad Brush" attacking the film. New York Newsday followed suit the next day with two articles – "The Blurred Vision of JFK" and "The Many Theories of a Jolly Green Giant.” A few days later, the Chicago Sun-Times ran an article entitled, "Stone's Film Trashes Facts, Dishonors J.F.K." Stone even received death threats as he recalled in an interview, "I can't even remember all the threats, there were so many of them.” Time magazine ranked it the fourth best film of 1991. Roger Ebert went on to name Stone's movie as the best film of the year and one of the top ten films of the decade.

Stone paints his canvas with broad brushstrokes and powerful images. This isn’t a documentary or even a docudrama. It is a fever dream straight out of Stone's head. He’s a Baby Boomer upset that the death of Kennedy obliterated the idealism of the '60s and uses the film to vent about it. JFK is an important work in the sense that it accurately portrays the assassination of Kennedy as a complex public event surrounded by chaos and confusion. Stone’s film presents an intricate conspiracy at the source of the killing with one main protagonist who exposes the conspiracy to be an intricately constructed coup d'état. JFK takes a larger, confrontational stance by boldly implicating the government in the conspiracy and the mainstream media in conspiring to cover it up. Stone is using the persuasive power of film to reach the largest number of people he can to wake them up and to reveal how they have been deceived by higher powers. There is no mistaking the importance of the assassination of Kennedy in American culture. Based on the excitement that surrounded Stone's film, the American public was still greatly interested in the event with more and more people believing in a plot to kill the President. Kennedy's death continues to intrigue and interest people who are more open to the idea of a conspiracy that this film openly advocates. For better or for worse, it helped cultivate a conspiracy culture that has only grown larger and more unwieldy with the rise of social media. JFK continues to serve as a powerful piece of cinematic agitprop whose conspiracy theories can be questioned and criticized but its power as an engaging and moving thriller cannot.

SOURCES

Fisher, Bob. “The Whys and Hows of JFK.” American Cinematographer. February 1992.

Petras, James. “The Discrediting of The Fifth Estate: The Press Attacks on JFK.” Cineaste. May 1992.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Aurum Press. 1996.

Scheer, Robert. “Oliver Stone Builds His Own Myths.” Los Angeles Times. December 15, 1991.

The World's Greatest Sinner

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 16:31:00 +0000

Without a doubt, Timothy Agoglia Carey is one of the most eccentric character actors in American cinema. This is a man that was fired from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) for faking his own kidnapping. One only must see his scene-stealing performances in the likes of the aforementioned film where he breaks down and cries hysterically before a firing squad or in The Killing (1956) where he speaks most of his dialogue while flashing his clenched teeth to witness the wonderful off-kilter choices he made that enhanced the films he was in. Unfortunately, he rarely got to headline a film with The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), which he starred in, wrote, directed and produced, being one of the rare exceptions. Freed from the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, he created a crudely made, yet fascinating look at the cult of personality.

The film begins, appropriately, in bizarre fashion with the title song playing over a black screen and the sound of an explosion segues into the opening credits with classical music playing over the soundtrack inducing wicked tonal whiplash. In a gleefully audacious move, the story is narrated by none other than God (and then, bafflingly, abandons it for the rest of the movie) who introduces us to Clarence Hilliard (Carey) by describing him as “just like any other male the only difference is he wants to be God. And that’s coming right out of the horse’s mouth.”

He lives in domestic bliss with his wife Edna (Betty Rowland) and his two children, working as the head of the department of an insurance company. One day, he decides to give everyone the day off which doesn’t sit too well with his boss (Victor Floming). It doesn’t help that Clarence has also been telling potential clients not to get insurance, telling one person not get a funeral policy because, “When you die, your body starts to stink.” Not surprisingly, he gets fired from his job, comes home and tells his wife that he wants to write a book and get into politics (?!).

While he earnestly tells her about his aspirations she falls asleep so he tells his pet horse Rex about a dream he had: “I’m gonna make people live long. I wanna put something into life. I wanna make life be eternal.” These are the seeds for a cult that he plans to start but how will he get people to follow him? One night, he goes to a rock ‘n’ roll concert and observes teenage girls screaming in excitement at and worshipping the lead singer. The next day, Clarence hits the streets, literally, preaching eternal life to anyone who will listen. He wants to make people super human beings, promising, “age won’t exist anymore.”

Clarence transforms himself into a rock ‘n’ roll preacher in a show-stopping sequence that evokes Elvis Presley and James Brown in raw energy and showmanship as he sweats, yells and dances with wild abandon. It is a truly astonishing performance to behold. He eventually changes his name to God Hilliard and becomes drunk on power, alienating his earlier followers and even his family. He meets a shady, political fixer whose credentials are that he worked for one of the leading political parties but fell out of favor thanks to “a few jealous underlings” and “got into a few difficulties.” He dazzles Clarence with political doublespeak and tells him, “If you can stir the people’s emotions, you can win.” The first thing he does is get Clarence to drop the rock ‘n’ roll preacher shtick, which he agrees to do by dramatically smashing his guitar over a desk.

He is soon running for President of the United States on his eternal life platform. Eventually, his rhetoric changes to that of a fanatical dictator: “We must gird ourselves with an armor of inspiration. We’ll reach them in the big cities! In the small towns! And the crossroads! We’ll weed them out! Any place where there’s people, we’ll get our message to them!” Carey lays on the fascist imagery as Clarence’s followers wear armbands of their party and have their own book documenting Clarence’s manifesto. Soon, he is speaking at larger and larger rallies until he has a crisis of confidence and of faith at the film’s climax.

The making of The World’s Greatest Sinner was almost as wild and unpredictable as the film itself with the inspiration coming from Carey’s desire to shake things up in Hollywood: “I was tired of seeing movies that were supposedly controversial. So I wanted to do something that was really controversial.” He began filming in 1956 in El Monte, California, where he lived, at his home and on the city streets, using locals as extras. This continued sporadically until 1961 on a budget of $100,000 under its original title, Frenzy. While making The Second Time Around (1961), Carey was approached by a young musician by the name of Frank Zappa who complimented his acting. Carey told him, “We have no music for The World’s Greatest Sinner. If you can supply the orchestra and a place to tape it, you have the job.” The aspiring musician composed the score and then went on The Steve Allen Show and said it was “the world’s worst film and all the actors were from skid row.”

Filmmaker Dennis Ray Steckler (Incredibly Strange Creatures) also got his start on the film. After several cameramen had been fired during filming, Carey brought Steckler out to Long Beach to shoot scenes of extras watching Carey on stage and then rioting. Steckler later claimed that at while was in a closet loading film, Carey threw a boa constrictor in with him. To top it all off, at the film’s premiere, Carey fired a .38 pistol above the heads of the audience, causing a riot.

The World’s Greatest Sinner warns about the dangers of demagogues like Clarence by showing how he whips a large crowd into a blind frenzy showing how they are swept up by his fiery rhetoric. Carey shows how this can be dangerous as his followers riot, destroying property in his name with the camera lingering on a mob of people trashing and turning over a car. He has affairs with multiple women, including a 14-year-old girl. This kind of behavior and these kinds of tactics anticipate T.V. evangelists that became popular in the 1980s and in recent years people with little to no political experience or knowledge getting into office based mostly on their cult of personality and ability to appeal to people’s basest instincts.

What is so incredibly inspiring about The World’s Greatest Sinner is how Carey commits 100% to the wonderfully insane narrative. Imagine if Brad Garrett and Nicolas Cage had a baby and you get Carey. He has the former’s hulking frame with the latter’s bedroom eyes and fearlessness as an actor, not afraid to look ridiculous all in the name of art. The film is shot and edited roughly, almost haphazardly in a non-traditional way with awkward transitions and shifts in tone that is also part of its charm. Carey is not only flaunting Hollywood conventions he is throwing out the rule book as he makes all kinds of odd choices throughout the film, like when Clarence’s boss takes him to his office to reprimand him and it plays over a cacophony of noises so that we can’t hear the dialogue. The screenplay, at times, is truly inspired with such blatantly provocative lines, such as “The biggest liar of mankind is Christ!” This is truly an auteur film – Carey’s magnum opus, a weird and wild film he was somehow able to be unleashed on the world seemingly through sheer force of Carey’s will.

SOURCES

McAbee, Sam. “Carey: Saint of the Underground.” Cashiers du Cinemart. #12. 2001.

Murphy, Mike. “Timothy Carey.” Psychotronic. #6. 1990.

Halloween II

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 12:10:00 +0000

Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 2007 was a financial success prompting the studio to greenlight the inevitable sequel. Enough time had passed after the making of that movie that he had forgotten what a difficult experience it and was willing to go again but this time he would no longer be constrained with having to remake another person’s movie thus allowing him to follow his creative bliss, making a follow-up that was more brutal and refreshingly stranger than the previous movie. The result was Halloween II (2009).

After a brief flashback to Michael as a child, recounting a dream he had to his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie), we are brought back to the present with a bloody and battered Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) walking down the middle of the road in a shell-shocked daze after having just fought off and killed Michael Myers (Tyler Mane). Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) catches up to and tries to calm her down. Slam cut to a close-up of her screaming face as she’s wheeled along a hospital corridor on a gurney.

Back at the site of the climactic showdown, an unconscious Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is also sent off in an ambulance while Michael’s body is carried away as well but when the two inept coroners driving the truck crash into a cow (?!), Michael rises and disappears into the night. At the same moment, Laurie rises from her hospital bed to see her friend Annie (Danielle Harris), another survivor from the encounter with Michael, and Zombie makes a point of lingering on these two young women, their bodies damaged by what happened to them, but those wounds will eventually heal. It is the psychological damage that Zombie is interested in exploring with this movie.

He does pay tribute to the original Halloween II (1981) in the first 20 minutes or so as Michael stalks Laurie through the corridors of the hospital and manages to avoid the obvious error or having a nearly empty building for the two to engage in a prolonged cat-and-mouse game that always rang false by having her quickly escape out into the pouring rain, but oh wait, it was a nightmare and a year has passed since the events depicted in Halloween. It feels like Zombie’s fuck you to the original sequel as if to say don’t we all wish that movie was a nightmare we could forget?

Laurie takes pills for pain, anxiety, you name it, still traumatized and living with Brackett and his daughter Annie. It’s a well-played scene as we see these people trying to get on with their lives as best they can considering what they’ve been through. Laurie, especially, is lost in the world. Her parents are dead and Michael’s body was never found, which leaves her frustratingly without closure.

Meanwhile, Loomis has bounced back as a flashy television personality, cashing in on what happened a year ago and Zombie re-introduces his character via a super slick tracking show that would make Michael Mann proud, combined with a very Aaron Sorkin-esque walk-and-talk sequence. He’s become a petulant primadonna, which Malcolm McDowell has fun playing to the hilt. The “good” doctor happily cashes in on the fascination with Michael Myers but when someone brings up the possibility of the killer still being alive he loses it and we see the cracks in the façade. He is not above doing an interview in front of the now-abandoned Strode house as he tells his long-suffering assistant, “Bad taste is the petrol that drives the American Dream.”

Halloween II is a more visually interesting movie when we finally see what Michael has been up to all this time, living in an abandoned barn out in the middle of nowhere, killing and eating animals to survive, and having visions of his mother. Initially, it is of her dressed all in white next to a white horse but soon they become more involved. His mother was the only good thing in Michael’s life and once she was gone so were the last vestiges of being human. These visions are beautifully surreal sequences, bizarre tableaus that anticipate what he would delve into to a greater degree with The Lords of Salem (2012), which eschewed gore and violence for atmospheric dread.

The movie has the requisite kills that fans have come to expect from the franchise but here it feels as if Zombie is getting them out of the way as he’s more interested in tracking the shattered lives of the main characters than goosing the body count for cheap thrills. We get considerate character beats, such as Sheriff Brackett extolling the virtues of Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou (1965) to Laurie and his daughter who have no idea what he’s talking about. They provide brief moments of levity in an otherwise extremely grim movie.

A child of the 1970s, Zombie populates his movie with a bevy of character actors who were stars during that time and so we have Dr. Johnny Fever himself, Howard Hessman as the owner of a cool independent record store that Laurie works in and Margot Kidder as Laurie’s therapist. Despite working for a studio, Zombie still manages to find room for his troupe of favorite actors, such as Richard Brake, Jeff Daniel Phillips and Daniel Roebuck, many of whom get the honor of being brutally dispatched by Michael.

This being a Rob Zombie movie and his perchance for all things white trash, he trades in the suburbs of Haddonfield, that we normally associate with the Halloween franchise, for his preferred locales – indie record stores, deserted barns and sleazy strip clubs. He employs a desaturated color palette for this grim movie, saving key moments for splashes of color, such as the aforementioned strip club and the Halloween party Laurie attends – both awash in garish reds.

With Loomis’ endless press interviews and book signing gigs, Zombie is showing how infamous crime cases are commodified and exploited by people like Loomis without caring about the damage that has been done and continues with this careless exploitation. It brings out kooky fans and grief-stricken parents of kids killed by Michael that want to vent their anguish and anger on the doctor who has nothing but contempt and indifference for his audience. Laurie continues to unravel, permanently scarred both physically and psychologically by Michael and Loomis’ book only reopens these old wounds.

With both of his Halloween movies, Zombie is not interested in making a gimmicky Scream meta slasher movie or an over-the-top kill-happy Friday the 13^th movie but instead grounding the franchise mythos in something approximating realism by showing the toll Michael’s bloody rampage takes on Laurie and those close to her. It’s not funny but sad, leaving one drained by the end of the movie, much like Laurie. Characters live with trauma and try to carry on with their lives but Michael won’t let them. People are killed in horrible, painful ways and those that survive are haunted, their lives shattered beyond repair.

The Steel Helmet

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 13:43:00 +0000

“The only way to bring the real experience of war to a movie audience is by firing a machine gun above their heads during the screening.” – Samuel Fuller

Hopefully, most of us will never have to experience what it is like to fight in a war. It is a horrifying; dehumanizing experience and the best cinema can do is approximate it. If the filmmaker has seen combat, such as Oliver Stone, it can give the film an authenticity that it might not have otherwise. This is the case with Samuel Fuller, who served as an American infantryman in World War II, and applied his experiences into several of his films, most notably The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Big Red One (1980), however the former was his first war film and had the distinction of being the first one made about the Korean War while it was still ongoing. It was unflinchingly honest in depicting the war and drew criticism from some as “anti-American,” but was widely praised by most critics. It was also a financial success, paving the way for a Hollywood studio contract for Fuller.

The filmmaker kicks things off with his trademark provocative opening scene involving a shot of the titular helmet to reveal the man attached to it: Sergeant Zack (Gene Evans). Fuller pulls back to reveal that he’s the only survivor of a platoon whose bodies lie strewn around him, hands tied behind their back, including his own. He crawls towards a knife lying on the ground but someone gets to it first – a young Korean boy (William Chun). He takes the knife and after a tense moment frees Zack. It turns out that the boy is South Korean, smart, friendly and even speaks soldier lingo surprisingly well. Zack is a gruff curmudgeon that, initially, doesn’t want the kid tagging along but the child wears him down by making a convincing argument for his worth. The infantryman begrudgingly allows him to travel with him, nicknaming him Short Round.

Fuller immediately establishes the constant peril Zack and Short Round are in when they spot two people worshipping at a makeshift temple that turns out to be enemy soldiers in disguise. Even when fatally wounded, one of them tries to stab Zack only for him to kill them without hesitation. Eventually, they encounter a medic by the name of Thompson (James Edwards), also the lone survivor of a massacred platoon and together they meet up with a squad of soldiers tasked with establishing an observation post at a nearby Buddhist temple. The rest of the film chronicles their attempt to defend it against overwhelming odds.

The screenplay, penned by Fuller, is chock full of his trademark, pulpy, hard-boiled dialogue with such memorable prose such as, “You got nothin’ outside but rice paddies crawlin’ with Commies just waitin’ to slap you between two big hunks of rye bread and wash you down with fish eggs and vodka.” It’s exactly the kind of dialogue you’d expect these grizzled soldiers to say to one another.

The film is beautiful shot by Ernest Miller as evident in a moody, atmospheric scene where Zack and the squad of soldiers try to kill two enemy snipers in a fog-enshrouded forest that is also a masterclass in tension as Fuller uses no music, just the sound of gunfire and we see how Zack and another soldier come up with a clever idea to flush out the enemy. This is also evident in the film’s incredible climactic battle scene as wave after wave North Korean soldiers attack the temple the squad is holed up in. It is never confusing what is happening and really manages to capture the heat of battle in an effective way.

Gene Evans is perfectly cast as the perpetually scowling Sgt. Zack with a cigar always clenched between his teeth like a live-action Howling Commandos-era Nick Fury. Zack doesn’t seem to like anyone and only gives someone grudging respect when they’ve earned it. This role was early in his career and Evans acts very natural in front of the camera, disappearing effortlessly into the role. He also does an excellent job of bringing Fuller’s colorful, purple prose vividly to life. The actor understands that Zack’s only goal is to stay alive by any means necessary. He’s not interested in making friends, in case they die, hence his gruff exterior. Obviously, Fuller was impressed with Evans work in The Steel Helmet as he went on to cast him several of his other films, most notably, Park Row (1952).

One of the more interesting aspects of The Steel Helmet is the notions of race and racism. Initially, Zack sees every Korean as a “gook” until he meets Short Round who quickly corrects him by proudly proclaiming, “I am no gook. I am Korean.” He’s fresh-faced kid sidekick but much more than that as he frees Zack, can recognize the kind of rifle he has, and the ammo required for it. He also helps Zack navigate the territory without a map. In turn, Zack allows him to tag along, instructing him to take a helmet for protection, a rifle, and boots for his feet. Fuller refuses to present the North Koreans as a faceless enemy. This is evident in a scene where a captured major (Harold Fong) is attended to by Thompson and tries to get under his skin by asking him why he serves a country that treats African Americans so poorly. He tries out the same tactic with the Japanese American soldier in the squad (Richard Loo) but it doesn’t work on either of them, whose sense of duty trumps any conflicted feelings they may have for how they are treated back home.

The inspiration for The Steel Helmet came from newspaper headlines of the day reporting on the ongoing Korean War. Fuller felt that it was only “natural for me to come up with a tale set in the ongoing conflict, utilizing my own firsthand experience from World War II.” He wanted to debunk the clichés that riddled so many war films in the past. “The confusion and brutality of war, not phony heroism, need to be depicted,” he said.

Fuller wanted to make it his way and approached independent producer Robert Lippert who greenlit it after the filmmaker pitched him the story. One of the major Hollywood studios found out Fuller was putting it together and offered to produce it but under the condition that John Wayne play Zack. Fuller balked at this, realizing that if he cast Wayne, he’d be making “a simplistic morality tale,” and wanted his film to look real with the soldiered being “human and deeply flawed.”

Fuller worked with a low budget and a tight shooting schedule of only ten days! He had started rehearsals and was only days away from the start of principal photography without an actor to play Zack. One day, Gene Evans and his agent showed up at the production office. Even though he had never been cast in a major role in a movie he told Fuller about serving as an engineer in WWII. Without warning, Fuller tossed an M1 rifle at the actor who caught it and displayed his familiarity with the weapon. Fuller knew he had found his man.

Lippert met Evans and after consulting with Fuller approved his casting but days later associate producer William Burke tried to fire Evans, telling him they were going with a more famous actor instead. When Fuller found out he was furious and went to Lippert. He found out that actor Larry Parks was going to testify at the McCarthy hearings and in danger of being blacklisted. The producers figured they could the well-known actor for a cheap price and use the free publicity he was getting from the hearings. Fuller told Lippert that he and Evans were quitting and immediately walked out. That night, Lippert and Fuller talked things over and the next morning he and Evans were on the set filming.

Capitalizing on the relevancy of the subject matter, The Steel Helmet was a commercial success. One critic called Fuller a pro-Communist and anti-American. Another said the film was secretly funded by the Russians and Fuller should be interrogated by the Pentagon. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote, "For an obviously low-budget picture that was shot in a phenomenally short time, Samuel Fuller's metallic The Steel Helmet has some surprisingly good points." Variety magazine wrote, "The Steel Helmet pinpoints the Korean fighting in a grim, hardhitting tale that is excellently told.”

Another striking aspect of The Steel Helmet, and arguably much of Fuller’s body of work, is the lack of sentimentality. He’s not afraid to kill off the most beloved character of the film and in doing so reveals Zack’s humanity, that he tries to keep buried, in a rare, poignant moment of self-reflection. Evans handles this moment masterfully through facial expressions before snapping back to his hardened G.I. At the end of the film, exhausted but alive Zack continues on. What other choice does he have? Fuller ends the film with the title card, “There is no end to this story.” A powerful anti-war statement as Fuller acknowledges what few others do – there is no end to violent conflict. There will always be a war somewhere and that is the sad reality of our existence.

SOURCES

Fuller, Samuel. A Third Face. Alfred A. Knopf. 2002.

Lassiter

noreply@blogger.com (J.D.) — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 13:09:00 +0000

Tom Selleck has had one of the more intriguing what if film careers. If he had been able to get out of his contract for the television show Magnum, P.I. and done Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) who knows how his career would’ve turned out? Instead, he ended up doing a string of entertaining but mostly forgettable fare such as High Road to China (1983), Lassiter (1984), and Runaway (1984) that all underperformed at the box office to one degree or another as people were by and large content to watch him every week on T.V. It wasn’t until the smash hit of Three Men and a Baby (1990) that he had a significant financial success. Of all the movies he did in the early to mid-1980s, Lassiter is the most interesting effort.

Set in 1939 London, Selleck plays a high-end jewel thief by the name of Nick Lassiter. The movie begins with the man plying his trade, expertly breaking into a luxurious mansion and stealing expensive jewelry. He almost gets away with it until the lady of the house catches him on the way out. Instead of calling out to her husband, whom she has been bickering with since they arrived home, she lets Lassiter go but not before he helps her get undressed for her bath and the surprising female nudity signals that this won’t be family-friendly PG fare but naughty R-rated fun.

When he’s not robing the rich, he’s hobnobbing with them at a swanky nightclub with his beautiful wife Sarah (Jane Seymour) where they exchange unfortunately bland repartee, which is a damn shame as Selleck and Jane Seymour have lovely chemistry together. The next day, Lassiter is picked up by Inspector Becker (Bob Hoskins) and framed for a crime he didn’t commit but is given a chance to go free if he works with FBI agent Peter Breeze (Joe Regalbuto), helping steal $10 million worth of unset diamonds from the German embassy, slowing down their espionage efforts in South America.

To do so, Lassiter must get close to the courier, Kari Von Fursten (Lauren Hutton) and her Gestapo bodyguard Max Hofer (Warren Clarke). Breeze describes her as “pretty wild” and we quickly get an idea of just how wild when we see her kill one of her sexual conquests while they’re in bed together, evidently a perverse turn-on for her. Lauren Hutton looks like she’s having fun playing a woman with “unusual appetites,” as one character puts it, and she goes on to describe Shanghai as interesting for its diversions such as “women with animals, drugs, little boys, pleasure and pain.” She certainly looks the part of an elegant Nazi with some weird kinks.

Tom Selleck does an excellent job playing a suave jewel thief who is comfortable bantering playfully with a Nazi femme fatale in posh casinos as he is watching down ‘n’ dirty underground boxing matches. He’s also not afraid to get his hands dirty as evident in a scene where he and Max have it out in a bloody brawl at Lassiter’s apartment. This role allows Selleck to show off his leading man chops, demonstrating his capacity for romance with Seymour, action, his athletic prowess with the cat burglar sequence, and even a light comic touch in an amusing scene where he communicates with a Nazi guard only through facial expressions and gestures while wearing a frilly woman’s housecoat, trying not to wake Kari sleeping in the next room.

Jane Seymour is well cast as Selleck’s foil. Sarah enjoys their lifestyle but is not crazy about his current gig and doesn’t understand why they can’t just take off to Rome or parts elsewhere. He tells her, “Someone else dealt the cards, Sarah. I’m just playing them out,” to which she replies, “Well, you’re holding a losing hand now, Nick.” She is a strong-willed person that loves her husband but won’t have her life sent in a direction she doesn’t like and Seymour does a fine job conveying her character’s strength.

The always reliable Ed Lauter is cast refreshingly against type as Smoke, a prolific car thief and Lassiter’s best friend. Known mostly for playing cops and authority figures, he must’ve jumped at the opportunity to sink his teeth into a character on the opposite side of the law. He has an excellent scene with Selleck where Smoke and Lassiter reminisce about the good ol’ days when they bootlegged liquor during Prohibition.

Bob Hoskins plays Inspector Becker with his customary gusto. He’s a hard man that knows which pressure points to press with Lassiter but also keeps his personal life separate from his professional one when we see how he reacts to Lassiter paying a house call.

Lassiter features workman-like direction from veteran T.V. director Robert Young (Bitter Harvest) that could’ve been done with a little more pizzazz, a rather pedestrian script by David Taylor (Hanky Panky), and an unmemorable score by Ken Thorne (Superman II) that is low-key to the point of being non-existent, which prevents the movie from being something truly special. Instead, it is just pleasantly entertaining – certainly nothing wrong with that. What saves it from being forgettable is the cast who all play their roles admirably.

Comparing the diverging career paths that Harrison Ford and Tom Selleck respective careers took it isn’t hard to see why the former had a thriving career full of iconic roles in diverse films while the latter returned to T.V. with renewed success. It’s not just that Ford was the better actor but he also had a better instinct for movie roles. Part of it is being in the right place at the right time and part of it is knowing what works best for your talents and I think Selleck eventually realized that T.V. is where he belonged and the proof is in a show such a Blue Bloods, which he has starred in for 12 seasons and counting. Lassiter, in some respects, typifies his film career – entertaining and full of promise but just falling short of excellence.