Ranked 21 on AFI’s Top 100 films, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown opens with credits that suggest the romanticism of Rebecca, but what follows is a more cynical noir that reveals a pre-war Los Angeles rotten to its core. Private investigator Jake Giddes (Jack Nicholson) becomes embroiled in a snoop case that appears to be standard infidelity but the job embroils him in discovery of political corruption and sexual depravity. His client, Faye Dunaway, is hiding a horrible family secret that involves her titan of a father, John Huston. Giddes carries scars of his own, stemming from his time in the police force working Chinatown.
Polanski’s film is meticulously shot, presenting a classic LA that is mesmerizing and foreboding. Robert Towne’s script is taut and engrossing. Still, this is an overpraised film. Towne chooses to keep the demons of Giddes’ past a secret, which is ultimately unsatisfying, given how critical he is to the story. Moreover, the love affair between Nicholson and Dunaway is unconvincing, mainly because Nicholson is giving a modern performance, whereas Dunaway is mannered and breathlessly dramatic, as if they were working separate material. Nicholson is updating the tough talk of Sam Spade while Dunaway is embracing the older form. When Nicholson puts himself on the line for her, the act seems forced and inauthentic, and the closing line has the faint whiff of the Gouda.
A fine film but certainly not the 21st best picture of all time.
I was surprised to see several things in my recent re-viewing of Martin Scorsese’s classic, including Albert Brooks as the exact same character he has been playing for nearly 40 years; Scorsese himself making a Hitchcockian appearance in the background, but then taking a significant one-scene role as a lunatic in the back of Travis Bickle’s (Robert DeNiro) cab, suggesting he changed his mind about how much time he would spend in front of the camera; and the effectiveness of the score, which was Bernard Herrmann’s last one.
That aside, it holds up as the classic it is considered (47 on AFI’s Top 100). Scorsese’s New York is a modern hell. He shoots the city so it almost reeks. Steam pulses out of the grates, rot is everywhere and kindness is non-existent (I couldn’t get a fantastic book, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning” out of my mind). The viewer is immediately in kinship with Bickle’s voiceover, “All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Bickle is a Vietnam vet who can’t sleep and teeters on the edge of sanity. When he falls for a campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd) merely by viewing her through a plate glass window, it seems creepy only until he approaches her, and then there is charm and hope. He is similarly touching with teen prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster), passionately replying to her taunt that he is a square: “Hey, I’m not square, you’re the one that’s square. You’re full of shit, man. What are you talking about? You walk out with those fuckin’ creeps and low-lifes and degenerates out on the streets and you sell your little pussy for peanuts? For some low-life pimp who stands in the hall? And I’m square? You’re the one that’s square, man. I don’t go screwing fuck with a bunch of killers and junkies like you do. You call that bein’ hip? What world are you from?”
But they are from the same world. Bickle is not wired right, he sabotages himself with Shepherd, and soon, he retreats into the mode of a dangerous and unstable assassin, one who has gone from observer of the inferno to an extinguisher. Ahead of its time, Bickle’s would-be John Hinckley gets a Bernie Goetz makeover, cementing Scorsese’s theme that in the jungle, there’s often but a hair between hero and lunatic, moral beacon and dysfunctional threat. Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine doesn’t seem a natural comparison to Taxi Driver, but in essence, when it ends with Cate Blanchett in rumpled clothes, talking to herself in the park, the directors are exposing the same reality.
After seeing Harperas part of the AFI Silver LA Modern series, me and my son watched Paul Newman’s follow-up turn as Ross McDonald’s P.I. in 1975’s The Drowning Pool. Lew Harper finds himself in New Orleans in the middle of a scandal involving an ex-love (Joanne Woodward), a sleazy oil man (Murray Hamilton) and a protective local police chief (Tony Franciosa). Newman again gives an infectious star turn as the cynical but funny private detective brought into to town by Woodward to get to the bottom of her being blackmailed. When Franciosa is impressed by his $150 per day plus expenses rate, Harper explains that it isn’t all that much when you work four days a year.
But the picture lacks too many elements that made its predecessor so good. New Orleans ain’t LA, and while there is a certain fish-out-of-water charm to Harper’s investigation, the setting feels off. The score is also very cheezy, alternating between musical interludes worthy of a Mannix or Barnaby Jones and an annoying symphonic riff of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”. Worse, Joanne Woodward’s Louisiana drawl is borrowed straight from The Long Hot Summer. She’s ridiculous in her theatrics and a terrible replacement for Janet Leigh as Harper’s love interest. Hamilton does his best to give his character some flavor, and an 18 year old Melanie Griffith is an alluring near-jail bait, but most everyone else is either histrionic or blah.
While Woodward is a step down, Griffith as the poisonous Lolita is a significant upgrade from Harper’s Pamela Tiffin.
Often listed as a top picture in the horror genre, this 1979 release is rather dull and clunky. Based on a “true” story that is decidedly untrue, the Lutz’s (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) move into a cheap dream house in Long Island knowing full well a 20 year old murdered his entire family there the year before. When their local priest, Rod Steiger, comes to bless the house, the demons therein drive him out and eventually, blind him. The house soon possesses Brolin, and Kidder (and her three children) are endangered.
The house itself is awfully creepy and the score features a chilling sing-songy ghostly whisper of children’s voices. But Brolin is flat and ridiculously coiffed, even for 1979, Kidder is uninvolved, the children may as well have been mannequins, and Steiger overacts the hell out of his role.
Performances aside, the movie just isn’t that scary. Sure, flies congregate, the walls bleed, creepy eyes shine in the window, and there appears to be a guy dressed as the devil behind a wall in the basement, but these features come off about as frightening as a decently prepared house on Halloween. Director Stuart Rosenberg, who helmed some interesting films (Cool Hand Luke, The Drowning Pool) is clearly uncomfortable with the genre, and apart from some disturbing externals of the house, offers very little visually. It’s a blocky, uninteresting picture, and the ending (Brolin goes back for the dog!) is ridiculous, though not as ridiculous as when locals tell Brolin he is the spitting image of the 20 year old killer.
Carrie is often listed as one of the scarier films of all time (untrue) and one of the better adaptations of a Stephen King scary novel (true – in fact, The Shiningand Salem’s Lot are the only rivals). It certainly has a staying power, so much so it has spawned two remakes and a Broadway musical.
The story is simple. Untutored by her religious zealot/lunatic of a mother (Piper Laurie), Carrie gets her period in the shower after gym class, naturally freaks out and is humiliated by her classmates. When one of the more thoughtful ones (Amy Irving) tries to make amends by having Carrie escorted to the prom by her popular boyfriend (William Katt), one of the less thoughtful ones (Karen Allen) doubles down on the humiliation. Carrie, who has become increasingly aware of her telekinesis, responds, er, inappropriately.
Brian DePalma caught a much deserved rap for overly-aping Alfred Hitchcock, especially in his early films, and Carrie, his breakout picture, is Exhibit A. It opens with a shower scene, Pino Donaggio’s score is Bernard Hermann through-and-through (Hermann was supposed to score the picture but died before filming), and when Carrie uses her powers, we hear the 4 note violins of Psycho. The scene leading to Carrie’s ultimate indignity, where a bucket of pig’s blood is spilled on her head, speaks for itself (and much of Hitchcock’s oeuvre). Some mock the picture for this fealty, but there are worse directors to copy.
Hitchcock aside, Carrie stands on its own, even if some of its filler seems cheezy and dated. Laurie is riveting in her fanaticism (and her depressing prescience – they all did laugh at her), Irving and Katt offer an unheralded sweetness to the story, and the prom scene, projected with a gutsy and effective split-screen technique, is loaded with indelible, nightmarish visuals.
But the engine of the picture is Spacek, who DePalma makes downright homely and spooky. We all knew a kid like that in school. A few tormented her. A few were kind. Most ignored her, perhaps tactically, or laughed meekly when she was catching hell. Or, you just looked right through her. Spacek shows her pain and her promise, which is viciously crushed by the bullies.
So, it’s hard to root against her, even in the midst of her wanton slaughter.
I recently saw a “filmumentary” on Jaws and realized I had not reviewed the greatest summer movie ever made, an astonishing, deep blend of adventure, terror, and action, communicated by Stephen Spielberg’s great eye, the deft casting of three disparate principal actors, and a John Williams score that evokes fear and exhilaration.
Spielberg at the advent of Jaws was hardly a wunderkind. Like William Friedken before The French Connection, Spielberg had a pedestrian resume’ — a Columbo, a few TV movies and an okay feature (Sugarland Express). With a production plagued by everything from the mechanical failures of the shark to the tax problems of star Robert Shaw (if he spent more than a certain amount of time in the U.S. he would face a tax liability, so he was flown to Canada on his days off), Spielberg took Peter Benchley’s piece of summer pulp and fashioned a moving, ingenious film, evident from the opening scene credits, which give us a shark’s point of view in what is the still and peaceful deep, an image followed by the jarring, horrifying massacre of the shark’s first victim, alone, at night, where none of us ever want to be.
Like Friedken in The Exorcist, who prefaces the introduction of the demon in the child only after an hour of exposition, Spielberg waits quite some time to show us the shark in full, making what is happening beneath the water all the more frightening. Indeed, when we see the second fatality (a little boy on a raft), it is from the vantage point of a beachcomber lazing in his chair, a brief, violent act that immediately makes the viewer question, “what the hell was that?”
After Spielberg stuns the audience, he introduces them to poor Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), a landlubber from New York who marshals for the summer town of Amity, As the bodies pile up, it is Brody who succumbs to the pressure of the townsfolk dependent on summer dollars, only to be shamed by his malleability. Emboldened and in need of reclamation, Brody is assisted by the articulate and passionate wisecracker, oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) and old salt Quint (Robert Shaw). The former wants the scientific find of the century, the latter is a modern Ahab, seeking his white whale, as explained in the famous scene written not by screenwriters Benchley and Carl Gottlieb (a comic writer who presumably penned some of the very funny exchanges in the picture) , but John Milius (writer of Dirty Harry, Apocalypse Now and creator of HBO’s fantastic Rome).
The experience of the three men from their separate vantage points, with their different motives and backgrounds, is the fuel of this picture, not the shark. As good as Milius’ Indianapolis speech is, or Shaw’s monologue to the town leaders opened by his nails on a chalkboard, the scene where Shaw’s grit runs up against Dreyfus’s privilege and Scheider’s quiet authority is better:
HOOPER You’re going to need an extra hand…
Quint turns to see this new voice, and starts walking towards him.
BRODY This is Matt Hooper…
QUINT I know who he is…
BRODY He’s from the Oceanographic Institute.
HOOPER I’ve been to sea since I was 12. I’ve crewed three Trans-pacs —
QUINT Transplants?
HOOPER — and an America’s Cup Trials…
QUINT I’m not talking about day sailing or pleasure boating. I’m talking about working for a living. Sharking.
HOOPER And I’m not talking about hooking some poor dogfish or sand shark. I’m talking about a Great White.
QUINT Are you now. I know about porkers in the water — (throws him some rope) Here. Tie me a sheepshank.
Hooper ties the knot effortlessly.
HOOPER I don’t need to pass basic seamanship.
QUINT Let me see your hands…
He takes Hooper’s hands in his own big bloody fists, and feels them as he talks.
QUINT Ha. City hands. You been counting money. If you had a $5000 net and $2000 worth of fish in it, and along comes Mr. White, and makes it look like a kiddy scissors class has gone to work on it and made paper dolls. If you’d ever worked for a living, you’d know what that means.
HOOPER Look, I don’t need to hear any of this working class hero crap. Some party boat skipper who’s killed a few sharks…
BRODY (interrupting) Hey. Knock it off. I don’t want to have to listen to this while we’re out there…
QUINT What do you mean ‘We…?’
BRODY It’s my charter. My party.
QUINT All right, Commissioner. But when we’re on my ship, I am Master, Mate and Pilot. And I want him… (indicates Hooper) …along for ballast.
BRODY You got it.
During shooting, Shaw rode Dreyfus very hard, making fun of everything from his star status, stature and his ethnicity. Any hostility was used to great effect on-screen.
As good as these three actors are, they are more than ably supported by Lorraine Gary (as Brody’s wife), Murray Hamilton (as the oily mayor) and a boatload of locals who lend the film a great air of authenticity. Again, kudos to the script, because it allows dignity for Hamilton in the aftermath of his grave error, when, shaken at the hospital, he says to Brody, “Martin . . . my kids were in that water too.”
Finally, Williams’ score is a mixture of dread and adventure, the simplicity of dark repetition (“duh, nuh . . duh, nuh . . . dun dun dun dun dun dun dun”) followed by a near-swashbuckling romp as the men seek their quarry.
I never tire of this film and always find some new marvel or nuance when I watch it. If only the Hollywood shit that is shoveled in summer these days could sport 1/10 of the chops of Jaws, the town wouldn’t be losing its shirt.
Was John Wayne being an old Green Beret stick-in-the-mud when, after seeing High Plains Drifter, he wrote to its director and star Clint Eastwood, “This isn’t what the West was all about. That isn’t the American people who settled this country”?
Wayne was never a lover of nuance, and he had little patience for depicting the darker side of the American psyche, as is evident from his evaluation of another film: “High Noon was the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ol’ Coop [Gary Cooper] putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it. I’ll never regret having run [screenwriter Carl Foreman] out of this country.”
Eastwood second directorial effort was released in 1973, and he wasn’t interested in Wayne’s myth. It was a time of callous selfishness and a vicious appraisal of the institutions so revered by Wayne, hardly the environment for an uplifting Western about the strong stock of the frontier.
Eastwood’s story of a drifter returning incognito to the town that ran him out via a brutal whipping is assured (he was clearly taking mental notes when directed by Sergio Leone and Don Siegel with this bizarre, even trippy revenge flick). It is also supremely cynical. Nearly everyone in the town is guilty of either directing the whipping or standing by when it happened, frauds and cowards all, and these villains unwittingly give Eastwood a run of the place so he’ll protect them from the very same thugs (newly released from prison) the town set on Eastwood. Eastwood enjoys the power, as well as sticking it to townsfolk for their hypocrisy, per this exchange with a preacher upbraiding Eastwood for evicting people from the town hotel:
PREACHER You can’t turn all these people out into the night. It is inhuman, brother. Inhuman!
EASTWOOD I’m not your brother.
PREACHER We are all brothers in the eyes of God.
EASTWOOD All these people, are they your sisters and brothers?
PREACHER They most certainly are!
EASTWOOD Then you won’t mind if they stay at your place, will ya?
PREACHER All right, folks, let’s go. Put your bags here. Friends, don’t worry. We shall find haven for you in our own homes… and it won’t cost you one cent more than regular hotel rates.
But let’s not dismiss that old fuddy duddy Wayne out of hand. High Plains Drifter is also groundbreaking in a different, uglier way. Eastwood’s character rapes a woman in the first 15 minutes of the film, yet his status as the anti-hero is none the worse for wear. While she was a complicit bystander in his whipping, even cheering, when she tries to shoot Eastwood (and misses), he asks, “I wonder why it took her so long to get mad?” to which a character replies, “Because maybe you didn’t go back for more.”
Compare and contrast Wayne: “I want to play a real man in all my films, and I define manhood simply: men should be tough, fair, and courageous, never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either” and you can better understand his distaste.
This 1974 documentary is devoid of voicever narrative, alternating between footage of the Vietnam War, news footage of the era, anti-communist propaganda documentary clips, movie clips, and interviews with ordinary American citizens, Vietnamese villagers, American soldiers and policymakers. The thrust of the documentary is that the conflict was precipitated by a racist, warrior society (high school football being an engine of the former malady), a hysterical fear of communism, and a hubristic, imperial policy. It is skillful, affecting and pernicious, simplifying a complicated reality with editing that feels deceptively selective. Worse, because it is comprised of raw footage and heartfelt interviews, it presents as an honest portrayal. As Roger Ebert noted, “Here is a documentary about Vietnam that doesn’t really level with us … If we know something about how footage is obtained and how editing can make points, it sometimes looks like propaganda … And yet, in scene after scene, the raw material itself is so devastating that it brushes the tricks aside.”
An example: interviews with American bombers, where we never hear the documentarians, but it is clear the answers of the fliers have been elicited by questions about the experience, followed by footage of Vietnamese peasants, who are asked to recount the effect. I imagine most viewers would deem this strategy hunky dory, but the effect is to create an easy falsity-our boys dig on the need for speed and the kick-ass of it all, encased in their imperialistic manned drones, while the carnage below them escapes their notice. Indeed, I saw this storyline on an episode of M*A*S*H.
Another: the treatment of the policymaker interviewees. The anti-war Senator Fullbright and Daniel Ellsberg are edited as erudite, comprehensive and certain, and Ellsberg is even filmed breaking down recounting the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Walt Rostow’s contribution as selected is halting, petulant and confused. William Westmoreland seems near-sandbagged, even in a sit down interview.
Finally, if there is a patriotic rally or demonstration, the filmmakers always find the most extreme commenter, generally dressed up in a historical costume to punctuate his inevitable, “America, love it or leave it!”
This film is the father to the staged propaganda of Michael Moore, saying less about the subject matter and everything about how the filmmakers want you to feel about the subject matter (it is an indictment of Moore’s skills that he must insert himself as the center of his films to hammer home his points). In that manner, it is comprehensive, a cinematic Cliffs Notes to the most basic conventional wisdom about the conflict.
The picture was also clearly influential on Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
George Miller’s frenetic, creepy vision of a future where a version of The Wild Ones terrorizes the roads is a confident, distinctive picture made all the more impressive by its paltry $400,000 budget. Miller went on to make The Road Warrior, cementing Mel Gibson as the most bankable of stars, but in Mad Max, Gibson barely resonates until he is transformed, ala’ Charles Bronson in Death Wish, into a silent, dispenser of retributive violence. His payback is gripping, played out on a widescreen lens at high speeds on the desolate roads of Australia. Still, the picture stops dead in its tracks halfway through as we wait for the brutal thugs of the road to incur Gibson’s rage. It is also the worst scored film in the history of movies, a blaring and bizarre Bernard Hermann knock-off.
Late Roger Moore Bond films, with the cornball quips and the hideous 80s fashion, obscure the fact that Moore used to be a pretty cool James Bond. After the confusion of George Lazenby’s bizarre withdrawal from the series having only done one film (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) Sean Connery was hurried back to woo Jill St. John in Diamonds are Forever for a then-astronomical $1 million. But Connery was finished, so Moore was signed up (he’d already played a secret agent – Simon Templar – on television’s The Saint) .
Live and Let Die has Bond tracking Dr. Kananga (Yaphet Kotto), the dictator of a small Caribbean nation, after MI6 agents start dropping like flies. Kananga is into drugs and voodoo, using Solitaire (Jane Seymour) and her gift with tarot cards to his advantage (until Bond deflowers her and she loses her “sight”). Paul McCartney and Wings produced a rollicking theme (ranked number two here), there is a tremendous cigarette boat race, and Bond effectuates one of his better escapes from a Florida crocodile farm.
The new Bond presents as unflappable, as well as perpetually amused. He’s also the horniest of the Bonds. Moore, who just wrote a book on his time as Bond, articulated both his admiration for current Bond Daniel Craig and his own ethos: “Now they’ve found the Bond—Daniel Craig…. I always said Sean played Bond as a killer and I played Bond as a lover. I think that Daniel Craig is even more of a killer. He has this superb intensity; he’s a glorious actor.”
Moore also identified his principal weakness as Bond: “Quite honestly, I do everything the same and I think everything comes out the same, whether I’m flinching as James Bond or raising my eyebrows as Simon Templar.” His casualness often borders on disinterest and a certain “mailing it in” approach results.
As for the film, it has two primary faults. First, an annoying Louisiana good ole’ boy, Sheriff Pepper (Clifton James), brought in for broad, Jerry Lewisesque comic relief. Second, a very poor finale, with the delightful Kananga dispatched in a manner way beyond the special effects capabilities of the time. He deserved better.
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