A smarter than average bank robber (Walter Matthau) robs a small town New Mexico bank that, unbeknownst to him, is holding $750,000 in mob money. The job goes terribly bad. Matthau’s wife and wheel woman (Jacqueline Scott), an accomplice, and several deputies are shot dead. When Matthau and his surviving accomplice (Andrew Robinson, the memorable Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry) hear on TV that the robbers only got away with several thousand dollars, he susses out the massive shitstorm that is coming in the form of mob money man John Vernon and enforcer Joe Don Baker. Matthau has to figure out how to survive the ordeal.
This is a competent and serviceable Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz) crime flick. The picture is no great shakes but it has its moments, and the cat-and-mouse machinations of the characters are compelling.
The picture is also very very weird.
First, apparently, in the 70s, all you had to do to a woman to transform her to putty in your hands was rough them up a bit. Sure, 1960s James Bond could get away with it, but a majority of those women were play-acting for the post-coital kill, so, all’s fair. Not so the women of this flick. A slap or threat, and they positively melt. Times change.
Second, there are several actors who should not be kissing women in film. John Wayne is probably number one. Brad Pitt, with his blasé remove, is three. Matthau has got to be number two. In this flick, he kisses his dead wife on the lips – twice – and then he beds a live woman (Vernon’s executive secretary, Felicia Farr). It’s hard to tell which woman was less enthralled. Matthau looks ridiculous and uncomfortable.
Last, has there ever been a luckier actor than Joe Don Baker? “Oh, so, you want me to be a quirky Southern tough guy who can exude jovial sarcasm followed immediately by swift violence? I can do that.” And a career playing basically the same role – and playing it well – followed.
In these sensitive times, I’ll risk observing that Rachel Ward was exceedingly attractive. In various states of undress, even more so.
So, a steamy semi remake of Out of the Past featuring an on-the run Ward, coveted by her jealous and obsessive boyfriend, sleazy LA fixer and club owner James Woods, who enlists recently cut NFL player Jeff Bridges to find and recover her for him … it has promise.
Alas, the smoldering Ward is the only good thing about this Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Ray) dog.
Bridges does indeed find Ward. They fall in love and press the flesh in the steamy environs of Mexico.
So far, so good.
But soon, they are back in LA, propelling a paper-thin plot that lazily meshes real estate and political corruption, game-fixing, and blackmail.
Bridges is badly miscast as a jock. He is too effete for the role. Woods is working way too hard to do something with nothing, and everyone else is stock.
The script also calls for characters to do bizarre things. Case in point – Swoozie Kurtz is a legal secretary who meets Bridges briefly early on, is smitten, and on that connection alone, risks her life to help him gets files from her offices when he shows up out of nowhere later in the picture. Similarly, Alex Karras is a football conditioning coach who, after Bridges betrays Woods with Ward, comes down to Mexico to … bring her back forcibly, at gunpoint. Which means, by my estimation, even taking Bridges out of the equation, a ferry, a small plane and then a jet back to LAX, gun in hand.
Worse, the score is cheezy tech crap that makes every scene feel like you’re watching 70s porn or at a sketchy massage studio.
Bad through and through, as the ending will attest, as if Hackford said, “Well, we need to wrap this turd up with more Rachel and the Phil Collins hit.”
I did read that after this film, Ward took a sabbatical to study acting. That tracks.
John Cazale did five films and then tragically passed away from lung cancer. When you lament the early loss of a Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you at least have the comfort of a significant body of work, 60 plus films even in his too short life.
This documentary, available on Youtube and Tubi, remembers Cazale through the interviews of directors and actors who worked with him (Coppola, Lumet, DeNiro, Pacino, Hackman, Dreyfus) as well as Meryl Streep, who was his lover and co-star on his last picture, The Deer Hunter. We also get insights from character actors like Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, and Steve Buscemi, guys who are used to doing a lot with a little in terms of screen time.
A tight 40 minutes, the documentary is a taut and moving remembrance with specificity. Hoffman, Buscemi, and Rockwell are particularly incisive in highlighting certain choices Cazale made in pivotal scenes, and the observations of Coppola and Lumet on the “I’m not dumb, like everybody says” scene in Godfather II is fantastic. A really great watch.
A serviceable John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) Cold War action/espionage thriller from 1968, currently on Tubi. The Soviets take photographs of our missile installations from space, but in attempting to retrieve the film, things go awry. The canister lands near a British scientific weather station in the Arctic, and the race is on for retrieval before the Soviets get there. The mission is led by nuclear submarine skipper Rock Hudson, who has MI6 spook Patrick McGoohan, friendly Soviet Ernest Borgnine, and Marine squad leader Jim Brown along for the ride.
I watched the flick when I was a little kid on TV. It was thrilling.
50 years later, it still holds up somewhat. It’s really worth catching for three particularities.
First, clearly of its time, a significant portion of this rather long picture (it has both an overture and an intermission) is devoted to the inner workings of a nuclear submarine, sometimes, pedantically so. But you have to remind yourself that in 1968, film audiences would have been thrilled with a long dissertation on the inner workings of a nuclear submarine.
Second, I never understood why McGoohan was not a massive star. He is a great villain, but he also has a charming smile and twinkle in the eye that communicates humor and a little menace.
I read up on him. He was swallowed up by television, which probably suppressed a budding film career. He was also extremely Catholic, and would not take any role in which he was required to kiss a woman other than his wife, thereby taking him off the James Bond list (and apparently, he was on it). Modern audiences would know McGoohan as the villainous king who steals and chews scenes in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.
Lastly, Jim Brown is still cool, even in a winter parka.
I signed up for Tubi because it has a lot of older movies that don’t get run on some of the other streaming services. This very competent Peter Yates (Bullitt) flick from 1977 beguiled me as a young teen for a couple of reasons. First, it was a Peter Benchley, post Jaws vehicle, with Robert Shaw as yet another boat captain, though this time his quarry is treasure, not a shark.
Second, well … I was 13 years old, Jacqueline Bisset, enough said.
My prurient childhood fascination aside, this is a pretty solid picture. Two tourists (Nick Nolte and Bisset) happen upon two collided shipwrecks while snorkeling. They cross a local drug lord (Louis Gossett) who also has an interest in what they’ve found (tens of thousands of vials of morphine from an old WWII medical ship) and must enlist a wily old diver and antiquity collector (Robert Shaw) to help them find treasure from the other vessel, deliver the drugs, and otherwise negotiate their way out of the mess.
Nolte exudes charisma as the thrill seeker captivated by the jewels of the sea. Shaw is Shaw, commanding and interesting even when he is probably phoning it in. Gossett is oozily charming as a lethal Haitian trafficker interested not in treasure, but in the drugs, until he learns of the treasure and gets greedy.
Bisset is every bit as alluring as she was when I was 13, and it turns out, now that I can focus, she can act. She is menaced throughout the picture and her terror is palpable.
The film gets balky when Gossett inexplicably harasses the trio even though they are working on his behalf, and the ending is the cheesiest finale in movie history. But otherwise, sexy and solid.
Tediously directed by the same person who helmed The Longest Day, once dubbed “The Longest Movie,” Ken Anankin’s resume’ does not inspire confidence. The picture takes forever to start, and when it gets going, it is permeated with flat ahistorical battle sequences and clunky dialogue. All the actors seem to be taking their cue from Henry Fonda, who plays the lone officer who foresaw the Nazi surprise attack through the Ardennes. Fonda sports a ho hum bemusement that screams, “Did the check cash?” The usual suspects for WWII flicks – Telly Savalas, Robert Ryan, Charles Bronson – make their bank as well, and similarly phone in their personas.
A bore through and through, it looks cheap and inauthentic, particularly when they put the leads in tanks with the actual film footage on a screen behind them.
Very Batman and Robin TV show driving.
Though it maintains a soft spot in this old heart for reasons having nothing to do with artistic merit.
When I was in high school, due to economic strain, my mother was forced to take in boarders. One, Klaus Kristmas (name changed because if my Googling is correct, he’s a rather accomplished German government official) was a smart, ramrod straight, punctilious young man whose father was in the Bundestag. Klaus was great fun, and my mother immediately made him part of the family. He even came to the beach with us, where we recoiled in horror as he pulled down his shorts to reveal a European look, the mini-Speedo.
At home, I would hang out with Klaus and watch TV. One night, sure enough, we watched this flick, which is all Germans kicking ass for the majority of the picture. When Robert Shaw, as the lead Panzer commander, nears the oil depot that will allow his continued advance, however, things have shifted. Shaw burns to death when a fuel drum hits his tank.
James Foley’s (After Dark, My Sweet) film never really decides what it wants to be, a family drama or a crime picture. Foley eventually throws up his hands and cedes everything to the captivating Christopher Walken.
Not the worst of decisions. Walken plays a minor rural Pennsylvania crime kingpin. He skippers a crew that includes his two brothers and a few other hardened locals. They do heists, car thefts, drugs, and, if necessary, murder, a lethal but merry band of crooks.
Walken’s estranged son, Sean Penn, is a townie still living at home with his mother and grandmother. The women smoke, glare at the TV and otherwise exude the hopelessness of abandonment and near poverty. Penn, seeking something more, falls in at-first-sight love with Mary Stuart Masterson, who looks his way as he cruises at night around the town square. It is for her that he joins up with his father’s crew, to “get out while we’re young … ’cause tramps like us …”
When Penn realizes murder is part of the gig, he splits from Walken, gets arrested working his own “baby” crew (which includes his brother Chris and a very young Crispin Glover and Kiefer Sutherland), and is incarcerated. There, the cops work on him to fink on his father.
Here, the film becomes ridiculous. Walken, paranoid Penn will flip on him, kills nearly every one of the kids working with Penn, even though Foley does not show them to be integral enough to his operation to be much of a threat. He also rapes Stuart Masterson, which makes even less sense if the plan is to bring Penn back into the fold. Penn comes out of jail, tries to make a run for it with his gal, fails, and in a rushed, abrupt ending, testifies against his father (for 30 seconds).
That’s that. Lights up.
None of it makes much sense, but the thematic indecision is worsened by gross character underdevelopment. Walken is a charming sociopath, but how did he get here? No clue. We even have his ex-wife moping about, warily eying the establishment of a relationship between Walken and Penn. Foley, however, suffices to use her as a sad totem, so we don’t get any insight into Walken from her. Similarly, Penn needs a Daddy. Then, on a dime, he doesn’t. As he is near mute for most of the picture, we are left to guess as to what he has missed and the basis for his immediate and strong moral stand. Stuart Masterson is looking for something, but as she and Penn prepare to light out for the territories, leaving her house, she is clearly from money. So why is she hanging with these lowlifes? Unexplored.
The film has its strengths. Foley’s feel for rural Pennsylvania is strong. The fields and woods are spooky and forbidding at night. During the day, the crappy cars and houses, the dead-end bars, they all contribute to Penn’s lust for some way to get out. Foley shows just how big and cold this country can be, the kind of place that swallows you up and tells no tales or grinds you down little by little. The murder spree is indelible.
As noted, Walken is the picture, and in every scene, he is riveting. Penn, however, goes low to Walken’s high, and the effect is somnambulant. He’s in with Daddy, then immediately out, then annoyingly internal until his final nose-to-nose with Daddy, all to the conclusion that he needed a better Daddy.
Another note – at the time of the picture, Penn was married to Madonna. She had a song for the picture which then became extended to the soundtrack. It is synthy, mid-80s fare, better suited to Vision Quest or even Risky Business. It has no business being near this gritty movie. Sure, I joked about Springsteen above, but his music would have been pitch perfect to the film.
Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Joseph Heller’s dark comic novel is energetically brisk and sometimes entertaining. Tonally, however, the film is an uneven mess, a pointless downer playing bleakness for laughs.
As the original Corporal Klinger, Alan Arkin’s Captain Yossarian is the engine of the picture, a bombardier stationed in Italy who is losing his nerve and wits. His superiors (Bob Newhart, Buck Henry, and Martin Balsam) vex him by upping the number of bombing missions necessary for a ticket home to curry favor with their commanding officer (Orson Welles). Yossarian’s fellow fliers (including Martin Sheen, Richard Benjamin, Anthony Perkins, Charles Grodin, Bob Balaban, Jon Voight, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford and Norman Fell ) all suffer under the same yoke, but with cheerful acceptance or apathy rather than the indignation of Arkin’s whirling dervish. How the Academy overlooked Arkin astonishes me; whatever the flaws of the picture, his commitment and on-the-edge turn requiring an actor’s entire skill set is unforgettable.
The film’s main problem is rooted in the see-sawing expanse of the endeavor. Yes, war is FUBAR, and aspects of it are both craven and bizarre. In the world of Nichols and Heller, the poor bombers are riddled with asinine and unctuous leadership, wackadoodle stir-crazy types, suicidal loons, sex-crazed fiends, one murderer, and one uber-capitalist who trades parachutes for commodities on the open market.
When played for laughs, the picture is solid, and no one is begging for verisimilitude. However, when pathos is introduced, such as truly tragic deaths of compatriots (including a particularly brutal death of a young flier) and civilians, the film feels incongruously cruel.
Worse, the picture is more than anti-war. It is anti-American, maybe even anti-everything. As nothing matters, there is no investment in the fates of anyone. A fair juxtaposition is Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, in which the madness of the endeavor is clear but even in that madness, the professionalism of the medical staff is unquestioned and laudable, the loss of life truly sad. Nichols himself felt M*A*S*H did his picture in: “We were waylaid by MASH, which was fresher and more alive, improvisational, and funnier than Catch-22. It just cut us off at the knees.” All of which is true. But M*A*S*H also had heart and a respect for the craft of combat surgery. Here, there is no respect for anything or anyone and the characters seem more from Looney Tunes than Heller’s book.
Indeed, every hallmark of the American ethos is there for Nichols to malign. The military leaders are insecure dolts, silly and moronic, who care not a whit for the men. The fliers are chumps or burn outs, pawns in the great game, either oblivious or devious in their plans to get out and shirk. Everyone is also an automaton, caring for nothing, even each other. The goal and aim of the war, and this is World War II we are talking about, is at best corrupt and ultimately criminal, as we bomb not only towns with no military significance, but, in a perversion of capitalism, we allow the Germans to bomb our own base for profit. The Italians are victims of the Americans, just as they were victims of the Germans, because, you see, there is no difference between the two. By the end of the picture, the genius behind the corporate conglomerate, Jon Voight, is now close to full Nazi in regalia and trappings.
Hell, even parents who come to Italy to see their dying son are treated as props for a goof.
Yes, yes. None of this is to be taken literally in a “war is madness” story, and the film is a black comedy grossly overgeneralizing for the laughs. Still, it’s the kind of smart set entertainment that fairly encapsulates the philosophy of the sophisticate, a sneering besmirchment that puts the last torpedo into a sinking ship.
I wonder what Heller made of the movie’s iciness. Obviously, his book was a cynical send-up (I read it in high school, along with Vonnegut’s SlaughterHouse-Five), but Heller also flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier during the war.
Another war flick I watched in grade school with my Dad. Cynical Lieutenant George Segal is being ridden by gung ho Major Bradford Dillman to save or blow (the mission changes) the last bridge across the Rhine in the waning months of World War II. Segal in turn rides Sergeant Ben Gazzara, who eclipses Segal’s cynicism (he’s a looter of the dead) and then some. On the other side, cynical German Major Robert Vaughn is sent by his superior officer to save or blow (the mission changes) the bridge. All the subordinates are let down by their superiors, and they wear their hard-bitten sensibilities on the bedraggled sleeves of their fatigues (or in the case of Vaughn, his snappy leather trench coat).
The picture is competent if forgettable, with a few interesting facets. This is one of several World War II pictures that carry a Vietnam mentality, where the mission is FUBAR, the line of authority weak, the sense of duty subordinated to the futility and the carnage. Even the coda – that the bridge collapsed 10 days after Segal’s unit gave so much blood to take it – is steeped in Hamburger Hill pointlessness (the filmmakers leave out that in those 10 days, 25,000 American troops crossed and three tactical bridges above and below Remagen were built). The picture is also notable for the introduction of the sympathetic Nazi. Here, it is Vaughn, juxtaposed with the evil SS officers in impeccably tailored outfits who are busily shooting civilians and deserters. The same dichotomy can be found in Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (James Coburn), as well as The Eagle Has Landed (Michael Caine). The phenomenon petered out (along with WWII films) until years later, in Band of Brothers (the surrender scene and subsequent speech by a German general to his defeated troops), Land of Mine, Das Boot, Stalingrad, and, later, more controversially, Downfall, which rankled many given Bruno Ganz’s commanding performance, which elicited some innate sympathy. Per one reviewer, “the very thought of humanizing Hitler makes me queasy. If he had a good side, I don’t want to know about it.”
Historical note: when the movie was near complete, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, where it was being filmed. Most of cast and crew decamped to a hotel in Prague, where they voted on whether to split or stick it out. They split, to Germany, in a long wagon train of cars, until things simmered down.
My dive into the crime films of Amazon Prime gets deeper.
I was intrigued by this flick because I like Jeff Bridges, the movie was an early Oliver Stone screenplay (a co-write), and it was one of last films directed by Hal Ashby (Shampoo, Being There, Coming Home).
I don’t have 8 million reasons to hate this film, but I have 8.
Stone’s writing is garish and ridiculous. In an attempt at modern noir, we actually hear Bridges say, in voiceover, “Yeah, there are eight million stories in the naked city. Remember that old TV show? What we have in this town is eight million ways to die.” A high-priced call girl ups the retch factor, cooing to Bridges, “the streetlight makes my pussy hair glow in the dark. Cotton candy,” as she lays out ala’ Ms. March 1978. Maybe these gems were penned in the source novel by Lawrence Block. I don’t know. It doesn’t land here.
Hal Ashby knows about as much about film action as I do taxidermy. It’s not like Coming Home’s Jon Voight was doing wheelies in his chair. This picture, which involves blackmail and cocaine and kidnapping and gunplay, is as flat and unimaginative as professional bowling.
As the alcoholic ex-cop, Bridges seems as confused by the script as the viewer. There are times you feel, his eyes alone, Bridges is communicating, “What the hell is this thing about, again?” When he’s involved in a bad shooting, and guns down a man in front of his family, he says, “Shit.” Like when you don’t get a good score in Skee Ball. And then, “Fuck,” like when you leave home without your iPhone.
Bridges is also forced to play an alcoholic who relapses; he does this by reprising his role in Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, after he was thunked on the head.
The plot is inane. Bridges is lured into the entire mess because the girl with the cotton candy pubic hair heard his name from the friend of a friend.
Roseanna Arquette is terribly miscast as the sultry, misunderstood, cynical call girl with a heart of gold. Arquette is cute best friend, quirky neighbor. She ain’t this.
The supporting turns are execrable. Andy Garcia is so over the top (see below), it’s hard to stop laughing, as if he saw Scarface and said, “Hmmmm. Pacino seems a bit muted.” Another actor, Randy Brooks, nemesis to Garcia, is also near-lunatic. Brooks scurried off to TV after this flick, only to return as the worst actor in Reservoir Dogs six years later. The cotton candy girl is the badly miscast Alexandra Paul. She is the girl next door. Here, she’s over-the-top coquettish, as erotic and worldly as Georgette in The Mary Tyler Moore show. To be fair, this may not all rest on the actors. From the analysis below, “Ashby’s style of directing, according to Block, involved letting the actors do takes where they exaggerated their emotions, before reining them back in for subsequent takes. Since Ashby did not have final cut, some of these ‘dialed up’ takes were used in the film.” Seems like all of them were.
Scenes are interminable. The characters scream the same thing at each other ad nauseum or endlessly posture. Behold, the longest, loudest, most idiotic confrontation scene in film history:
filmvetter 