Howard Hawks’ western is competent, light, entertaining, and currently on MAX. The film also sports a few surprises, the most enjoyable of which is the performance of Dean Martin as the shaky alcoholic deputy trying to go cold turkey. It’s a hell of a dark and moving turn from a guy who you normally think is all easy-breezy, no heavy lifting.
Other notes.
1) If you have Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in a movie, they’re going to sing, and while it’s a little bit clunky when they do, the tunes are still a lot of fun. It would’ve been better if they just had Nelson playing guitar and Martin and Nelson singing together in the live shoot, but I presume the sound obstacles were too great, so they used a studio track and lip-synched instead. The dissonance between the music and the normal soundtrack is dramatic, but I imagine audiences in 1959 didn’t give two hoots.
2) I laud Martin’s performance, but Nelson is pretty damn good too as a youthful medium cool gun hand. He’s not asked to do much, but what tasks are given, he fulfills well.
3) Wayne made the picture in part as a rebuttal to the more cynical High Noon. Per Wayne, “A whole city of people that have come across the plains and suffered all kinds of hardships are suddenly afraid to help out a sheriff because three men are coming into the town that are tough. I don’t think that ever happens in the United States.”
4) Other than The Quiet Man, this is the only film I can remember where John Wayne is a romantic lead. It half works. Wayne smartly plays flummoxed, and Angie Dickinson’s magnetic performance nearly carries the day (when she kisses Wayne the first time, and he is stunned, they kiss again, and she says to him, “it’s even better when two people do it”). Romance works a little better in The Quiet Man, because Wayne was not asked to woo Maureen O’Hara so much tame her, an endeavor that seemed a lot like breaking a colt.
5) If my recollection is correct, Kevin Spacey modeled his performance in L.A. Confidential on Martin’s here. You can see it.
6) Trigger warning. Back to Angie Dickinson – va va voom!
Franklin Schaffner’s (Patton) big-budget adventure/escape flick is competent, professional, well-acted (even if Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman have no interest in playing French people) and occasionally imaginative, particularly McQueen’s dream sequences as he fights solitary confinement and near-starvation. McQueen is the title character, sent to French Guiana for killing a pimp, where he meets the bespectacled Hoffman, a forger whose only protection is the ability to bribe officials. Their relationship deepens as McQueen, the Cooler King of The Great Escape, naturally attempts escape again and again here.
You may like the flick or not, but it is noteworthy for one scene, below. That crocodile has its snout wired shut and sure, it is drugged to the gills, but those are two massively bankable stars messing with a real crocodile. Nuts!
I’ve seen this film, conservatively, a dozen times. I cannot turn it off. It is flawless, and I never tire of watching. It is not just an exemplary historical drama and period piece, which would appeal to me more than others, but it is one of the finest films ever made.
Based on a Patrick O’Brian novel, it is 1805, the time of the Napoleonic wars, and we travel with Captain “Lucky Jack“ Aubrey (Russell Crowe), a protégé of Lord Admiral Nelson. Aubrey’s ship, The HMS Surprise, is hunted by, and then pursues, a French privateer with twice her guns and speed. As Aubrey drives his crew and spars with his more humanistic friend and subordinate, ship surgeon Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), we are immersed in the customs, allegiances and frailties of the crew. Director Peter Weir (Witness) provides the feel of an early 19th-century war vessel, a routinized machine held together by the lash, grog, duty, honor, deep-seated universal superstition, and a shared sense of oneness with the sea.
The action sequences are jaw-dropping. The final sea battle is the most effective and stunning rendition of combat on film, save for the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. Weir is expert at close quarter action and translating the ebb and flow of a battle that has been explained in its strategy at the outset. What follows is a stunning, intelligible melee’, and the only respite is a brief, awesome aerial tracking shot to provide scope and a quick catch of breath. And then, Weir dives right back in. The scene is even more impressive given the film’s commitment to authenticity. As with Spielberg’s triumph, Weir has made, in the opinion of one reviewer,“one of the most historically accurate movies of this century”.
Yet for all its visual delights and precision, the film is also memorable in its depiction of numerous secondary characters. Yes, the philosophical interplay between Aubrey and Maturin is well-honed, and both actors more than occupy the roles – their engagement is both familial and genuine, with a constant pull between friendship and chain-of-command. But the midshipmen, some as young as 12, and the salty crew, are the true stars. To see the former in such distress, under such pressure, and in the midst of terror and violence is heart rending. When one (Max Pirkis) must have his arm amputated, it is hard to choke back tears, such is his strength and vulnerability (if you have a son, it is doubly difficult). The mental breakdown of another young sailor is equally poignant. These boys, thrown into carnage, still do their duty, and Weir goes to great lengths to portray their bravery in tandem with their innocence.
The film is also unreservedly old fashioned in its championing not only of manly camaraderie, but valor, pluck, and devotion to country. Most war films follow a certain post-Vietnam philosophy, often clumsily injected into period pieces of prior times. The combatants’ first devotion is to each other and then to the goal, and they are guided by training and solidarity. When the training fails and/or the goal is revealed as corrupt, or bleakness eclipses all, things break down, and atrocity normally follows. Which is all very modern and ignores any sense of longing for the sting of battle or patriotic instinct, both generally derided or characterized as the province of dimwits and cannon-fodder. It is always the smart guy anti-hero who says, “This is hell, we need to get out alive and with our souls intact, and [for the less cynical] the only thing that matters is the man next to you”’ or some such trope.
Not here, as Weir flatly rejects anachronism save for a few moments with the good ship doctor, but even Maturin’s more liberal stances are suited to his position. To put a finer point on it, there is a wonderful scene where one of the young midshipman, Calamy, implores Aubrey to share a tale of his service under the great Nelson. At first, Aubrey parries the request with a joke (Nelson once asked him to pass the salt, he laughs). The boy’s disappointment is palpable, and then Aubrey obliges:
Capt. Jack Aubrey : The second time… The second time he told me a story… about how someone offered him a boat cloak on a cold night. And he said no, he didn’t need it. That he was quite warm. His zeal for his king and country kept him warm.
[Maturin sighs]
Capt. Jack Aubrey : I know it sounds absurb, and were it from another man, you’d cry out “Oh, what pitiful stuff” and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm. But with Nelson… you felt your heart glow.
As fewer people know or cherish history, it will become a less desirable vehicle for entertainment. And that just ain’t going to change. But there will be this film and a few others that stand the test of time. Huzzah!
A WWII thriller and a staple on the Channel 7 four o’clock movie growing up, Steven Spielberg once named it as his all-time favorite war movie. I don’t know about that, but as a kid, I was pretty jazzed.
Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood lead a group of commandos dropped behind enemy lines in Bavaria – where the barmaids are buxom and the enemy plentiful – to kill an American general who has been captured by the Nazis. They must get to the general before the Germans extract critical information from him.
The picture is more than competent (though overlong at nearly 2.5 hours; in the 70s, on TV, it was cut to 90 minutes, and did not suffer for it). The movie is also smart, as much a whodunit as war thriller, and uber-violent to boot.
One major problem, however, is the setup. The American general is held in a castle fortress accessible only by cable car. Putting aside the suspension of belief necessary to accept ingress and egress, which is right and proper, the castle also houses hundreds of soldiers, heavy equipment, a barracks, a helicopter pad, a radio room, and enough ammo and explosives to blow itself up. All, of which, apparently, was ferried up in two cable cars that hold 8 people a piece.
Another problem is just a terrible cheat. In The Dirty Dozen, Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, dressed as German officers, must mingle with the Nazis in the chateau they plan to blow up. The fact that only Bronson knows how to speak German amps up the dread, leaving Marvin to play it stern and taciturn whenever a real Nazi speaks to him at a pre-all-hell-breaks-loose soiree’. Quentin Tarantino does the same thing with Brad Pitt at the film premiere in Inglorious Basterds , though he plays a bit more comic. But Tarantino also utilizes the speaking of German, or, rather, the sign language of a German, to brilliant, suspenseful effect, when Michael Fassbender makes a critical error and is thus found out, which was presaged in The Great Escape:
But I digress.
Here, as Burton and Eastwood approach a checkpoint, where their papers are to be reviewed, you wonder which one is going to speak German. I assumed Burton. Then again, I never assumed Eastwood would sing in a musical, but Lord Almighty, that’s him singing Gold Fever in Paint Your Wagon:
So, who knows, right? Well, it turns out, neither of them speak German. Instead, they speak English LOUDLY, and the guards figure they don’t want to interrupt two German officers speaking loudly. Translated? Neither actor wanted to learn a little German, so we are left to believe that the guards heard German, even though we did not. Very lame.
On the plus side, Eastwood is Eastwood cool and he conservatively, single-handedly, kills at least 100 Nazis. At 10 years of age, I was sold. There’s also a fair amount on double-crosses (the picture is written by Alistair MacLean), and while I can’t prove it, I suspect Tarantino saw the picture and it informed his unparalleled French cellar bar shootout in Basterds.
On HBO Max.
P.S. After writing my suspicions about Tarantino, I Googled a bit and now claim semi-vindication. Tarantino has lauded the picture on numerous occasions, particularly during his promotion of Basterds.
Filmvetter has gaps. Many gaps. Truffaut, Godard, and Bergman come to mind.
And, until now, John Cassavetes.
I knew that Cassavetes was an influential filmmaker. Martin Scorsese credits two films that most informed his career: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Cassavetes’ Shadows. Quentin Tarantino also cites Cassavetes, which is strange, for, as one writer observed, Tarantino makes films “in which almost no element comes from life,” whereas Cassavetes’ work is infused with realism. Others who refer to his work include Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, and the aforementioned Godard.
But to me, Cassavetes was the nasty, cynical guy in The Dirty Dozen and the husband in Rosemary’s Baby.
Until I saw this picture, currently available as part of the Criterion Collection on HBO Max.
Ben Gazzara (“Cosmo”) plays a strip club/cabaret owner in Los Angeles, when showing some thigh and breast still required the trappings of a “show”. His stage girls are his children, and he is a small fish in a big pond. He just doesn’t know it. Until his big shot routine results in a sizable gambling debt to the local mob, who decide to absolve him of the “loan” in exchange for lethal services.
The film is visceral and immediate yet leisurely. Cassavetes brings you right in on the actors, often letting the dialogue of others register on the one. I was reminded of Boogie Nights and the long take on Mark Wahlberg right before the drug heist, but while that was showy, if effective, Cassavetes’ style is anything but. Instead, it feels natural, almost a controlled improv. Cassavetes gave his actors maximum room, eschewing the Strasberg Method as tired and narcissistic. Per Matt Zoller Seitz, reviewing Ray Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes: “Among other things, Cassavetes hoped to offer young actors an alternative to the Method, a sensory- and memory-centered approach that was taught, in personalized form, by Actors Studio founder Lee Strasberg (whose students included James Dean, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Elia Kazan, Shelley Winters and many others). Variants of the Method encouraged actors to draw heavily on their own experiences and feelings, and to treat hesitancy and inarticulateness as gateways to truth rather than obstacles to clear expression. A number of Method actors personalized this approach and had great success. But Cassavetes felt that the Method, and Strasberg’s Studio in particular, had become a different sort of factory, and he was ‘…resentful about the power the Studio exerted over casting directors, which he felt was what had held him back early in his career,’ Carney writes. ‘He was scornful of what he called the guru aspects of the Studio and pointedly described his and Lane’s school as anti-guru. He felt that the Method was more a form of psychotherapy than acting, and believed that although figures like (Montgomery) Clift, (Marlon) Brando and Dean had had a salutary effect on acting in the late ’40s and early ’50s, by the mid-’50s the Method had hardened into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring as the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle, furrow and stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity. The actor filled the character up with his own self-indulgent emotions and narcissistic fantasies…Normal, healthy, extroverted social and sexual expression between men and women dropped out of drama. Inward-turning neuroticism became equated with truth. The result was lazy, sentimental acting.’”
There is none of that in this film, which feels so authentic as to be revolutionary. The picture is riveting, grounded, and wholly personal, with an L.A. devoid of the well-know landmarks, not purposefully omitted but rather, naturalistically absent. Cassavetes sets up a noir-ish crime pic, but perhaps bored with the endeavor, detours repeatedly into Cosmo’s crisis of identity.
Gazzara is captivating. Cassavetes trains in on Cosmo’s every conceit when playing the big man. Cosmo’s descendant is none other than Burt Reynolds’ Jack Horner in Boogie Nights, a semi-proficient pornographer who makes himself father to the talent and creates his own world, one where he is Fellini. Similarly, Cosmo treats his girls like perpetual prom dates and tells the patrons in his seedy club, “I’m the owner of this joint. I choose the numbers, I direct them, I arrange them. You have any complaints you just come to me and I’ll throw you right out on your ass.”
When his powerlessness is revealed, Cassavetes lingers on Cosmo’s doubt and his insistence on maintaining the veneer of control and aplomb reveals a hollowness that progressively evinces during the film. But there is also decency and honor, one that becomes difficult for even the mobsters to ignore.
Taut, rich crime drama about the not very good day of London crime boss Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins). When we meet him, Shand is on the cusp of branching out to global semi-legitimacy. He’s even hosting his would-be U.S. partner when his entire organization comes under assault. Key associates are dispatched and an unknown enemy is blowing up his establishments, and just when he thought he was getting out, they pull him back in.
Hoskins is ferocious, at once charming and gregarious and then lethal, but palpably human throughout. You really root for him but sense that his time may have passed, especially as he waxes on about the greatness of the Brits and attempts to connect his own rise to the glory days of his homeland, which doesn’t seem all that glorious as depicted by director John Mackenzie. His London is grimy, gray, and decidedly tired, like Harold’s organization, and is starkly juxtaposed against Shand’s fantasies.
The film is also slyly funny. Shand, for example, scolds his spooked American partners about empire and declares, “we’re in the common market now, I’m going into business with the Germans, yes the bleedin’ Krauts!” And even in the midst of their potential destruction, Shand and his gang share knowing, even juvenile laughs that speak to their intimacy.
Helen Mirren is his devoted wife, desperately trying to keep him grounded, and his entire crew feels more like a disintegrating family than a dangerous group of cutthroats. As it all goes bad, Shand’s hubris, parochialism, and self-satisfaction conspire against him, but the strongest theme is just how hard it is to keep “family” together. One of Shand’s more endearing qualities is his patience with underlings who disappoint him like wayward sons. He’s always in between slugging and hugging them.
The film works as a character study and, for a time, a whodunit (or, “who is doing this?”). Occasionally, it is a bit arty, and weighted down by a strange, synthy 80s score, but for the most part, it is riveting.
An old Twilight Zone episode depicted three soldiers on National Guard duty in Montana who went back in time and found themselves spectators to the Battle of the Little Big Horn. They struggled with the implications of intervention, essentially foreshadowing Star Trek and violation of the “prime directive” (i.e., never mess with history when time traveling lest you step on a bug and forever alter what is meant to be). They eventually jumped into the fray. This flick is essentially the same concept, but with a modern aircraft carrier being time-portaled back to the day before Pearl Harbor. Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and James Farentino have to contend with the same conundrum.
It’s fun. A little discordant, alternating between whimsy (the commander of the modern USS Nimitz, Douglas, has a certain Disney movie mien to him, but then there are very bloody scenes that punctuate the film). But solid.
It is also clearly a joint effort with the Navy. There is so much aerial footage and extended scenes of flying and taking off that it feels like a recruiting ad, Top Gun sans the volleyball. Curious sidenote. The Department of Defense actually sued the producers for reimbursement, alleging fraud on the reporting of actual flying time. My father’s law firm represented the producers, including Kirk Douglas’ son.
On Amazon.
P.S. There was a big to do in the last several years over a Reddit discussion: “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?”
A short story followed. Hollywood then bought the short story. Good rundown below. Stay tuned.
Another of the 70s flicks my Dad took me to when I was probably way too young I remember being so jazzed at the back-and-forth between the manic Alan Arkin and wisecracking, nattily dressed James Caan, two San Francisco detectives trying to take down a mob boss. To make things cooler for a 9 year old, the violence was hilarious yet brutal, the dialogue scabrous, and the car chases relentless and in great supply.
Would it hold up 50 years later?
Yes, and how. Quentin Tarantino has raved, “nothing short of a masterpiece…absolutely brutal…part of the way the film worked was for you to laugh at the brutal violence and then feel bad about yourself for laughing.” That is too much praise, but not by much. Caan and Arkin are a scream, very natural, yet way, way out there in terms of chemistry, perhaps riffing before it became standard, but fully committed, never lazy. I remember cracking up with Dad in the theater and after paying $2.36 for the rental on Amazon this weekend, I laughed out loud a half dozen times and smiled throughout.
It’s a strange duck of a picture, a flimsy cynical story giving way to an entertaining buddy cop yarn (clearly echoing The Odd Couple). Director-writer Richard Rush allows for very long takes of Arkin and Caan needling each other and then, there’s absolute chaos, followed by sweet scenes between Caan and his gal and Arkin and his wife. You get the sense that tonally, no one is steering the ship, and Arkin has remarked that he never really knew what kind of movie Rush was trying to make. Still, Rush makes it more seamless than it has a right to be. Good fun through and through, and The Nice Guys owes a lot to this picture.
Also, wildly offensive. For those keeping count, Arkin of European Jewish descent plays Hispanic (he is “the Bean” – get it?), as does Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”). The script is littered with politically-incorrect jibes that would likely result in a campus protest these days, and the treatment of the villain would require the calling in of the National Guard. So, gird your loins.
John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin) handles this thriller with crisp professionalism. Proof? My wife, who loathes 70s films, came in for the last 25 minutes and was riveted. I even had to pause to get her up to speed on who was who and what was going on.
Granted, Frankenheimer has some pretty ingenious material to work with – Palestinian terrorists intend to fly the Goodyear blimp into the Super Bowl where they will detonate a massive bomb that will disperse shards of metal for maximum carnage (the film is adapted from Thomas Harris’ only non-Hannibal Lecter book).
The driven mastermind is Martha Keller (so driven because the Israelis have destroyed her entire family) and the psychologically impaired stooge is Bruce Dern (a former POW flyer in Vietnam, stripped of rank for “breaking”, now working for Goodyear flying the blimp). Robert Shaw is the relentless Mossad agent hot on their heels, guilt-ridden because he had a shot at Keller but let emotions engender mercy.
There is a little too much Dern and Keller relationship stuff, and in particular, Dern and his mental breakdowns/quirks, and the film could’ve been cut easily by 20 minutes. But there is much to like here, and in particular, Frankenheimer does the madness of public violence great justice. His insistence in showing just how many innocent people actually get killed if criminals and cops decide they’re gonna’ shoot it out in the streets is welcome, as evidenced by a thrilling Miami Beach sequence.
But the coolest facet is the fact that the NFL let them film the movie at the actual 1977 Super Bowl between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Goodyear people let them use the actual blimps, almost otherworldly in these days of image consciousness, risk-aversion, and fear of offense. Frankenheimer may have had Goodyear over a barrell. In one of his biographies, Frankenheimer recounted that he helped persuade Goodyear to let him use its blimps because if not, the production would rent a large blimp, paint it silver-and-black, and people would think it was the Goodyear blimp anyway.
The impact truly heightens the tension when we see Shaw and FBI Man Fritz Weaver running around the Orange Bowl past Tom Landry, Franco Harris and even this guy…
Okay, not the real Jimmy Carter, but this is the only shot of him in the film, and though it’s very quick, it is a testament to Frankenheimer’s desire for verisimilitude.
There is no rhyme or reason to William Friedken’s (The French Connection, The Exorcist) serial killer flick, which plays clumsily with both timeline and identity. While the killings are unique, in that gay men in New York City’s S&M scene are the prey, Friedken’s execution is non-existent and the picture is a tiresome. muddled mess.
The year is 1980. Foot patrolman Al Pacino, who we know absolutely nothing about, is brought in by Police Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) to go undercover and smoke out a serial killer plaguing the BDSM community in the Meatpacking District. Pacino is chosen solely because he bears a physical resemblance to other victims. That’s it, and when he’s told where he’ll be working, he shows little reticence. You see, he’s bucking for detective.
Pacino is clearly too long in the tooth for the role. In 1980, he was 40, not a very convincing ambitious beat cop. Hell, Pacino was pushing it a bit in 1973, when he was a 33-year-old rookie in Serpico. Friedken would have done better with Richard Gere, his first choice and 10 years younger.
After his perfunctory selection and acceptance, Pacino just goes from club to club, bar to bar, pick up spot to pick up spot, cruising. Pacino is less acting the role of a man than being a worm on a hook. Not a lot of heavy lifting and given no motivation or backstory, Pacino seems particularly disinterested. It is clear the actor has no idea how to convey whatever is happening to him internally.
With barely a story and zero character development, Friedken focuses on the grimy, fetishistic world of leather and sweat, so much so that when word of the picture got around, many in the gay community were outraged to the point of protest against what they thought was a demeaning and offensive portrait of their community. Indeed, the picture had to have its audio almost totally redubbed due to protestors on scene screaming to screw up the sound production.
They need not have worried so much. The movie is a bore and rather than being misled, most audiences likely shrugged. Not that the bones of a good flick aren’t there. There’s a promising subplot of two police officers who are forcing hustlers to dole out sexual favors. Unexplored. There’s a nice friendship that a develops between Pacino and his gay neighbor. Dropped. And there is little done with the pressure on Pacino and girlfriend Karen Allen (the whole of it is that the more he becomes immersed in the lifestyle, if only as a voyeur, the less he wants to be intimate with her).
Is he gay? Is he curious? Shockingly, you don’t care, and neither does the director. Friedken just wants to get to the next dank cellar where the testosterone-soaked steam is rising.
Sure, there is some obligatory, “I’m in too deep” dialogue. But nothing more. Fleshing out the relationship between Pacino and the gay neighbor would have been the smart way to explore whatever was happening internally, allowing Pacino to search and inquire, maybe even to test.
No dice.
The film is also hobbled by a pretty elemental impediment. Pacino is, seemingly, straight. So, it seems less and less possible that he’s ever gonna’ get close to the killer, who murders all of his victims in the process of or after sex.
The whole thing is draggy and confused and more than a little gutless.
If you sally forth, look for a very a young James Remar, Ed O’Neill, and Powers Boothe.
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