After seeing Harper as 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.

And a reminder of the horrors of plastic surgery.

Very much like Goodfellas, but with a broader palette and more compelling characters. In Goodfellas, Liotta, DeNiro and Pesci are sharks, swimming to survive and devour, and the peek Martin Scorsese gives us into their immoral, brutal world is such a dizzying kick, we tend to forget that these brutal archetypes are no more than that. In Casino, Scorsese aims higher. DeNiro’s Sam Rothstein is not just an Irish street thug, but instead, a wunderkind Jewish bookie who is handed the keys to the cash cow for the mid-West mob – the Tangiers hotel (funded, of course, by union pension money) in 70s Las Vegas. DeNiro finds his oasis in the desert and works to re-create himself as a solid citizen. His efforts are doomed to fail, however, because no executive title, country club membership, or professional success can sanitize the shit on his shoes. He’s still just a functionary effectuating the skim just like when he was picking Oklahoma, taking the points. But DeNiro’s self-deception is absolute. At one point, he even hosts a casino television show which he devotes to exposing the raw treatment he has received at the hands of the local politicians who have forsaken him, ala’ Lenny.

When DeNiro feigns respectability, his protector, Nicky Santoro (Pesci) is always around to puncture his pretensions. In one of my favorite scenes, Pesci accuses a silk robe wearing, cigarette holdered DeNiro of walking around like “fucking John Barrymore.” It is Pesci’s presence that ensures DeNiro’s success (he muscles out any competitor or threat) as well as his demise (every Pesci excess is linked to DeNiro). And DeNiro is incapable of truly weaning himself off of his criminal past. As he cannot reform or blunt Pesci, he uses him to bring his conniving wife (Sharon Stone) to heel. Stone was a working girl who DeNiro hoped to take with him on his journey to polite society, but she was no more malleable than Pesci. DeNiro is, rather strangely for a Nicholas Pileggi/Scorsese character, a romantic, opening the film with “When you love someone, you’ve gotta trust them. There’s no other way. You’ve got to give them the key to everything that’s yours. Otherwise, what’s the point? And for a while, I believed, that’s the kind of love I had.” So you invest in him. His inevitable tragedy is unsurprising yet moving.

Scorsese’s use of music is, as always, impeccable, and the fluid camera-work manages to convey not only the mechanics of Vegas but the exhilaration of the town. Moreover, the film’s ending lament about its corporatization is one of his few codas to a Scorsese film supported by what preceded it.

If there is a weakness, it is in the last third of the film, where the dissolution of the DeNiro-Stone marriage is exhausting and a bit tiresome.  That identified, this is a great film and certainly a top ten American crime picture.

Point Blank was introduced by its presenter at the AFI Silver as “the most pretentious good film ever made.” The “good” discussion follows, but there is no doubt John Boorman’s tough noir picture is arty, almost to the point of distraction.

The story is simple: Walker (Lee Marvin) and his pal Reese (John Vernon, Dean Wormer from Animal House, in his film debut) make a score, Reese double-crosses Walker, takes his lady and his dough and leaves him for dead. Walker returns and with the help of his sister-in-law Chris (Angie Dickinson) works his way up the criminal syndicate that protects Reese to get his money.

This is a cold film. The characters are hollow, and Marvin is catatonic. The story is near non-existent and Boorman relies on showy and repetitive flashbacks that suggest portent and meaning but do not deliver. Boorman’s prior film, Having a Wild Weekend, was a romp in the mode of Help, featuring the Dave Clark Five, so his high-mindedness may have been itching to get out.

On the plus side of the ledger, the color and texture of the film are vivid, Boorman’s depiction of violence is jarring (in particular, a vicious brawl in a cacophonous soul club), many of Point Blank’s images are stunningly iconic, and the fractured timeline clearly influenced Quentin Tarantino, among others.

The virtues of Point Blank are more identifiable in its legacy than in the viewing. Except for the incomparable Dickinson.

As part of the AFI Silver LA Modern series, I took my son and his friend to see a double-feature Saturday, the first entry being 1966’s Harper. I’d probably seen this Paul Newman vehicle 5 or 6 times before this weekend. It was on regular rotation as the 4 o’clock daily movie during the 1970s, and I was immediately enamored of the sarcastic, bedraggled Newman playing Ross McDonald’s updated private dick, Lew Archer, changed to Harper for the picture.

It turns out I’d never seen it in full. Those bastards at Channel 7 must have cut the living crap out of it, because there were at least four scenes absolutely new to me.

I digress. Harper is a treat. Newman’s jovial cynicism fits the character perfectly.  Thankfully, Frank Sinatra was not interested in the role.  He lacked Newman’s playfulness and ability to make fun of himself.  Interestingly, when Dirty Harry came around 5 years later, Sinatra again begged off, as did numerous others, and Newman was approached.  Turned off by its politics, Newman suggested Clint Eastwood.

Lauren Bacall is deliciously venomous as Newman’s client (the paralyzed wife of a missing tycoon), Harper’s byzantine plot is more than serviceable (though, overly complicated), LA is well traversed, and the supporting cast (Robert Wagner, Strother Martin, Julie Harris, Arthur Hill, and Janet Leigh as Harper’s suffering ex-wife) is impressive.  It also didn’t hurt to see the film in AFI’s palatial main theater.

The Coen brothers’ finest film, a gritty, nerve-wracking crime story and an existential horror movie set in the harsh and desperate environs of dusty, bleak Texas.  Josh Brolin takes the wrong money from the wrong drug dealers, victims of a cocaine buy gone bad, after he happens upon their slaughtered bodies while hunting.  Javier Bardem is dispatched by the higher-ups to get it back, killing most everyone he encounters along the way (including rival bounty hunters sent by his employer).  The pacing is taut, the terror near-asphyxiating.   But interwoven in the story is a sense of generational disconnect, rot and the utter bewilderment of an older generation at the brutality and senseless violence of the new.  An observation from a friend is also spot on: “I thought the most important theme in the movie was that older men gradually lose contact with their country, and that this sad fact has nothing to do with the objective reality of what’s happening but is the natural consequence of getting older.”

Set in 1980, the young are depicted as callous and corrupt.  Brolin, shot and desperate to get to Mexico, encounters kids on the border bridge returning to the U.S. after a night of carousing.  He offers to buy a shirt from one of the trio to cover his bleeding, but they quickly demand money, and when he asks for a beer, they want more.  Similarly, at the end of the film, two boys encounter a wounded Bardem and bicker over the share of what he has given them for a shirt.

The Vietnam generation is represented by Brolin and Woody Harrelson, the latter sent to bring Brolin in before Bardem gets to him.  Brolin is not exactly honorable but he still maintains a tie to some principles.  He literally awakes with guilt because he can’t let a dying drug dealer go to his end without water, and it is that charity that brings Bardem his way.  Harrelson, also a Vietnam vet, has a similarly flexible code (he is a killer), but at least there is some code there.  As he says to Brolin about Bardem: “You can’t make a deal with him.  Let me say it again.  Even if you gave him the money he’d still kill you.  There’s no one alive on this planet that’s had even a cross word with him.  They’re all dead.  These are not good odds.  He’s a peculiar man.  You could even say that he has principles.”  When Brolin returns from Mexico, still hobbled but intent on stopping Bardem, a border guard lets him through on the strength of Brolin’s Vietnam service.

Then, there are the old men for whom there is no longer a country.  Tommy Lee Jones and his law enforcement contemporaries just don’t get it.  It’s all gone to hell and a hand basket and while they understand violence, they don’t understand the new violence.  As Jones says, bewildered, reading the paper: “Here last week they found this couple out in California they would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks.  They’d torture them first, I don’t know why.  Maybe their television set was broke. And this went on until, and here I quote… ‘Neighbors were alerted when a man ran from the premises wearing only a dog collar.’ You can’t make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.”

It is not Jones’ world anymore (my favorite Jones musing was from Cormac McCarthy’s book – “She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don’t like the way this country is headed.  I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion.  And I said well ma’am I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed.  The way I see it goin’ I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion.  I’m goin’ to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep.  Which pretty much ended the conversation”).

The film ends with Jones driven to retirement, talking to other older lawmen about what it all means:

Roscoe: It’s all the goddamned money, Ed Tom. The money and the drugs. It’s just goddamned beyond everything. What is it mean? What is it leading to?

Jones: Yes.

Roscoe: If you’d a told me twenty years ago I’d see children walkin the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses I just flat out wouldn’t of believed you.

Jones: Signs and wonders. But I think once you stop hearin’ sir and madam the rest is soon to follow.

Roscoe: It’s the tide. It’s the dismal tide. It is not the one thing.

And the end of the film, Jones has retired (he’s done, “overmatched,” he says) and he sits with an older retired lawman, Barry Corbin, who observes, “All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin’ out the door.  After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”

And the coda:

Corbin: You’re discouraged.

Jones: I’m… discouraged.

Corbin: You can’t stop what’s comin.  Ain’t all waitin’ on you.

Bardem is what is waiting on us all. Certain, unstoppable, arbitrary death.

This is a beautiful, unrelenting movie, deservedly winning Oscars for best picture and supporting actor for Bardem.