Author: Sean Gallagher

Shelley Duvall and Robert Altman

There’s been a lot written about the great director/actress relationships, ranging from the seven movies Marlene Dietrich did for Josef von Sternberg to all the movies Ingmar Bergman did with many different actresses, including Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Liv Ullmann. One of the stronger actress/director pairings in America was director Robert Altman and actress Shelley Duvall, who passed away on July 11, four days after her 75th birthday. Duvall would later become known for creating, presenting, and appearing in Faerie Tale Theatre, and for appearing in other movies such as Annie Hall, Time Bandits, Roxanne, and most controversially, The Shining, where her performance was derided when the movie came out (she was nominated for a Razzie), though there’s been a critical re-evaluation of her performance since then, especially considering the many takes director Stanley Kubrick made her do (the Razzies rescinded their nomination years later – also, for the record, Duvall would later say in interviews she enjoyed working with Kubrick). Still, I think Duvall’s work with Altman represents the best part of her career.

Ironically, Duvall never intended to be an actress. She was living with artist  Bernard Sampson (whom she would later marry, though she would divorce him after 14 years of marriage), and would throw parties to help promote his work. Tommy Thompson (Altman’s assistant director on 14 movies up until his death in 2000) and Robert Eggenweiler (who was a producer on 11 of Altman’s movies) happened to attend one of those parties, and immediately told Altman about her. According to Mitchell Zuckoff’s oral autobiography of Altman, Eggenweiler and Thompson told Duvall a “patron” would like her to show him Sampson’s paintings, and that patron turned out to be Altman. Both of them were suspicious of each other at first – Altman thought Duvall was “full of shit”, while Duvall thought Altman was making a porn film – but they soon warmed to each other. Duvall (who would later give Altman the nickname “Pirate”) would appear in seven movies for Altman, starting with the movie Altman decided to cast her in even though he was already shooting it.

As Suzanne in Brewster McCloud.

Altman had a habit of making offbeat films throughout his career, but Brewster McCloud (1970), his follow-up to M*A*S*H (which came out earlier that year), was offbeat even by those standards. It involves the title character (Bud Cort), a recluse living in Houston Astrodome and building wings so he can fly, with the help of Louise (Sally Kellerman), a mysterious woman in a trenchcoat, while trying to dodge Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), a detective investigating a series of murders Brewster is responsible for. There’s also an ornithologist (Rene Auberjonois) who lectures the audience from time to time while gradually developing bird-like characteristics like chirping and twisting his body to look like a bird. In addition to his playing around with the credits yet again (the opening credits start twice, while the cast is introduced at the end as if it they were circus performers), this was the first time Altman would step out of the more “realistic” genre deconstructions he was known for to strive for something more dreamlike. It’s definitely not to everyone’s taste (except for Roger Ebert, critics at the time, even Altman champions like Pauline Kael, didn’t know what to make of it), but if you’re on the wavelength of its humor, I think it’s a lot of fun, and a lot of that is due to Duvall.

Duvall plays Suzanne, a tour guide at the Astrodome, who ends up seducing Brewster. This was the type of performance where the actor is said to be playing “themselves”, as Duvall doesn’t seem to be acting at first. Though Suzanne does her job as a tour guide well enough, she is quite willing to go off on tangents whenever it suits her (when asked about bathrooms, she says they’re not real bathrooms, because “they don’t have a tub or anything like that”), and even in the uniform of a tour guide, she looks like someone from the cast of Hair, with her shoulder length hair and the eyelashes painted on the bottom of her eyes. One day, when Brewster is caught in the rain and gets in his car, Suzanne gets into the car with him and accuses him of stealing her car, though she doesn’t seem to mind. The way she talks about her ex-boyfriend Bernard (William Baldwin – not Alec’s brother) – who works for Weeks (William Windom), the politician who brings Shaft onto the case of the murders – so guilelessly charms Brewster, as does when she drives him away from the pursuing police (the impish grin Duvall gives when she puts on racing gloves before she drives away is one of her finest moments on screen), and they end up sleeping together. However, Suzanne recoils when Brewster tells her of his dreams of flying, and that he was responsible for the murders, and she immediately contacts Bernard to tell him. As sexy, and apparently kooky, as Suzanne is, there’s also a decency to her, and Duvall effortlessly plays that as if she was a veteran, rather than making her film debut.

As Ida in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Altman then proceeded to cast Duvall against type in his next film, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which Claude and I talked about on our show. In the movie, Duvall plays Ida Coyle, a mail-order bride in 1902 Washington state (though the movie was shot in British Columbia) who becomes a widow when her husband (Bert Remsen)  gets beat up and killed, and she’s forced to become a prostitute after this. In contrast to her earlier, cheerful persona as Suzanne, Ida is naïve and scared of the world, and Duvall does a good job showing that, as well as when she loosens up. While Julie Christie (Mrs. Miller) is the commanding presence in the scene where she convinces Ida she’ll be better off as a prostitute (pointing out at least now, she’ll be getting paid for it), Duvall manages to keep up with her.

As Keechie in Thieves Like Us.

Duvall also had nice chemistry with Keith Carradine, who brought his own guilelessness to the role of a cowboy (called Cowboy) who comes to town as soon as he’s heard of the whorehouse Mrs. Miller and John McCabe (Warren Beatty) have set up in town, and who becomes a steady client of Ida’s. Perhaps after seeing this, Altman decided to team the two of them up for Thieves Like Us (1974), his adaptation of the novel by Edward Anderson (which had previously been filmed by Nicholas Ray as They Live by Night). In some ways, even though I generally prefer Altman as a director (I’ve never been part of the cult around Ray), I prefer Ray’s version of the story, as there’s a charged romanticism between Farley Granger and Peggy O’Donnell as doomed lovers Bowie and Keechie, respectively. Altman is more interested in recreating the time and place of Anderson’s novel (it has not been made available to stream because of rights issues, as Altman uses radio shows of the period), but Carradine and Duvall again have a nice chemistry together. (Note: This is the one movie Altman and Duvall did together that I didn’t get to rewatch before writing this – I’m basing this on YouTube clips and my memories of seeing this years ago)

As L.A. Joan, with frequent co-star Keith Carradine (Tom), in Nashville.

Duvall then went against type for her next movie for Altman, Nashville (1975), which Claude and I have also discussed. She plays Martha (though she insists on being called “L.A. Joan”), who’s ostensibly in town to visit her uncle, Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn) – who wants her to visit her sick Aunt Esther in the hospital – but who seems more interested in chasing after Tom (Keith Carradine), the self-involved folk singer and one third of the folk trio Bill (Allan Nicholls), Mary (Cristina Raines) and Tom. L.A. Joan seems at first glance to be flirtatious (even with Kenny (David Hayward), the loner who ends up boarding at Mr. Green’s house) and self-involved (when Mr. Green tries to tear her away from Tom to get her to see her aunt, she firmly tells Mr. Green she’s busy). However, upon rewatching the movie, I noticed something about her character I hadn’t noticed before. As I mentioned in our podcast about the movie, perhaps my favorite scene is when Tom is singing “I’m Easy” in a bar, and while L.A. Joan and Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), the (supposed) reporter for the BBC who’s in town, think he’s singing about them – while Mary, who has also slept with Tom, sadly knows he’s not singing about her – Tom is actually singing about Linnea (Lily Tomlin), a married woman (and mother of two) who’s in the bar. While Opal is clueless about this, L.A. Joan, who looks happy at first, turns her head and notices Linnea, and then turns back with a look of sadness in her eyes as she realizes the truth. It’s the kind of off-hand moment Altman specialized in capturing, and allowing Duvall to show that moment gives her a dimension her character might not have had otherwise.

Duvall didn’t get as much to do in Altman’s follow-up to Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976). She plays the wife of President Grover Cleveland (Pat McCormick), and is only in one sequence in the movie, when the two of them visit the show put on by “Buffalo” Bill Cody (Paul Newman) that purports to tell the “truth” about the old west (in reality, the version of history that makes Cody look like a hero). This tries to subvert our notions of history in the same way that Altman successfully subverted the Western genre in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but for some reason, Altman and co-writer Alan Rudolph aren’t able to bring it all together. About the only time Duvall gets any chance to show off any of her talent is the rather sweet moment when she introduces a friend of hers, Nina Cavallini (Evelyn Lear), before Nina performs an aria in Italian after the show.

As Millie, with Sissy Spacek (Pinky), in 3 Women.

I’ve found Altman’s attempts to ape Ingmar Bergman, one of the few contemporary directors he liked, to have mixed results, though I will admit 3 Women (1977) is his best effort in that regard, and it also has the side effect of contain what was probably Duvall’s best performance for Altman. She plays Millie, a physical therapist who works at a spa for seniors. While she seems to be good at her job, Millie is oblivious to a lot of things (as Ryan Gilbey writes in the chapter on Altman in his critical study of 70’s movies, It Don’t Worry Me, Millie fits in with other Altman characters who are motor mouths but don’t know much). For starters, Millie doesn’t realize while the patients seem to like her fine, her neighbors believe her cheerful disposition is annoying (they talk about her behind her back). More important, Millie doesn’t seem to realize Pinky (Sissy Spacek), a new hire at the spa, is obsessed with her (whether she’s in love with Millie, or wants to be Millie, or a combination of both, is something Altman and Spacek leave up to us to decide). Millie does act friendly towards Pinky, not just showing her the ropes at work, but also inviting her to live with her, and showing Pinky the places she likes to hang out at, such as a shooting range where Edgar (Robert Fortier),  a stuntman and the husband of Millie’s landlady Willie (Janice Rule) – the “third’ woman of the title – likes to practice at. But then one day, Millie gets upset at Pinky’s meddling in her social life, for which she kicks Pinky out, and that leads to Pinky taking a drastic action, which is when the movie shifts gears.

Altman has said the movie was inspired by a dream he had, but it’s obvious Bergman’s Persona was also a major inspiration, and the comparison isn’t always flattering. Altman and cinematographer Charles Rosher Jr. do get some nice visual effects in the use of water from the pool at the building Millie lives at, but there was always an inner logic to Bergman’s movies (even Persona) that Altman can’t quite pull off. Still, he does know how to showcase Duvall and Spacek. Spacek is a more naturalistic actress than Duvall, which she had shown as early as her first movie, Prime Cut, as well as in Badlands and Carrie (Welcome to L.A., which she did for Altman’s mentor Alan Rudolph, isn’t as good a showcase for her talents, but she still manages to shine), and in her hands, Pinky’s dew-eyed innocence is completely believable (as is her turn away from that when the movie shifts gears). Duvall, again, is more of a personality, but she and Spacek work well together. Plus, Duvall isn’t afraid to make Millie unlikable, and yet she has her moments of self-awareness, as when she she reacts to Pinky’s drastic action, and Duvall does show for all of Millie’s affectations, she does really care about people.

As Olive Oyl, with Robin Williams as the title character, in Popeye.

Popeye was the very first Altman movie I ever saw. It brought Altman and Duvall together with a few other talents; playwright/screenwriter Jules Feiffer (Carnal Knowledge), producer Robert Evans (I’ve always thought he was crap as a person, but he certainly produced some terrific movies), and in his first starring role on film, Robin Williams, playing the title character. Unlike Altman and Feiffer, I was a fan of the Max Fleischer cartoons growing up (now, I confess I find them repetitive), and being only 12 when the movie first came out (I saw it in the theater), I didn’t appreciate how Altman, rather than making a “family” film (like other franchise movies of its type have been since), he was trying to put his own stamp on the material. After rewatching it, I no longer dislike it (it used to be my least favorite Altman movie, along with Quintet and Beyond Therapy, but no longer), though I don’t think it completely works either (Popeye not eating spinach until the end seemed silly, and Williams seems to struggle with the role). Even then, however, I did sense Duvall was just perfect in the role of Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl, not just in the physical resemblance (Duvall originally didn’t want to play the role, as she had actually been teased by being called Olive Oyl when she was younger, but Altman talked her into it), but in the sweet-natured persona she brings to the role. The scene that shows Duvall off best is when she sings the song “He Needs Me” (written, as with all the movie’s songs, by Harry Nilsson) as Olive is sneaking, and dancing, around the dock where Popeye is. The fact she’s singing it as much to herself as she is about Popeye is what makes it so appealing (it’s little wonder Paul Thomas Anderson used the song – and quite effectively – in his movie Punch-Drunk Love).

Popeye proved to be the last collaboration between Altman and Duvall, as they had a falling out for reasons unclear (though he never liked it when actors in his stock company turned down roles, and she apparently turned down the lead female role in A Perfect Couple – which I think is one of his most underrated movies – because she was busy with The Shining; Marta Heflin eventually took the role). And as I mentioned before, Duvall did good work for other directors aside from Altman – she makes the rock critic she played in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall a real person instead of the conceit it was written as, she and Michael Palin are very funny together in recurring roles in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, she showed she could play someone “normal” as Steve Martin’s best friend in Roxanne, Martin’s updating of Cyrano de Bergerac (directed by Fred Schepisi), and she made a memorable cameo as a nurse in Steven Soderbergh’s underrated neo-noir The Underneath. Finally, I do like her performance in The Shining, even if it took me a couple of viewings to appreciate it. Still, along with Faerie Tale Theatre (I never saw any of other, similar anthology shows she produced), I think the best legacy of Duvall’s career is the movies she did with Altman, who allowed the full force of her personality, and acting ability, to come through.

The Long Good Friday (1982) – Review

One of the best scenes in The Godfather is when Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) goes to a meeting with the heads of the other Five Families (as well as mobsters from other parts of the country), and they, led by Don Barzini (Richard Conte), try to convince him to take the deal he had rejected earlier; that is, go into the drug trade, which they would control, and Don Corleone would allow the others access to the politicians he’s been paying off. At the end of his pitch, Barzini acknowledges Don Corleone could, by rights, bill the other families for his services here; “After all, we are not Communists.” This line is meant to get a laugh, but it’s also a way of illustrating one of the themes of the film, on how gangsters had become like businessmen (what few could see, of course, is how many businessmen, inspired by the film, would go on to act like gangsters) and embraced the virtues of a capitalist system they nevertheless operated entirely outside of. John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday, therefore, wasn’t breaking new ground in depicting the gangster as businessman (for that matter, neither was The Godfather), but it pushed the parallel even further by linking its gangster character to the pro-business philosophy of Margaret Thatcher (who had recently been elected Prime Minister of Britain), and contemplating what happened when it went up against a fanatical group, in this case the IRA.

Harold with Charlie (Eddie Constantine) and Victoria (Helen Mirren).

Ironically, when writer Barrie Keeffe and producer Barry Hanson got together one night in late 1977, they were merely looking to make a good gangster story (originally for TV), as Keefe had been fascinated by gangsters since encountering Ronnie Kray in a bathroom when Keefe was a teenager. But when Keeffe became disgusted with how his old neighborhood had been gentrified, and some time later, had found himself inside a pro-IRA bar in North London, he decided to combine those two strands into the gangster script he would write. Called “The Paddy Factor” (after the term Scotland Yard used for unsolved crimes that assumed the IRA were the culprit), the script eventually made its way to John Mackenzie, then known mostly for his work on television (though, ironically enough, he had just made his own gangster film, A Sense of Freedom, a biopic of Scottish gangster Jimmy Boyle). Mackenzie loved the main character of Harold Shand (played in the movie by Bob Hoskins, then best known as the sheet-music salesman in the BBC version of Dennis Potter’s “Pennies from Heaven”), but felt the script was florid in many places and needed work. Out of that work came The Long Good Friday (a temporary title – used by Mackenzie because he felt the original title gave the movie’s plot twists away – that became the real title).

Pierce Brosnan in his film debut.

As the movie opens, Harold is sitting on top of the world; there’s been peace in the gangster world for the past 10 years, he’s made an awful lot of money, and he and his associates are about to make more, thanks to an upcoming deal he has with Charlie (Eddie Constantine), an American gangster who’s in town. Soon, however, Harold’s world starts to fall apart; Colin (Paul Freeman, soon to be best known as Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark), one of his best friends and closest associates, is knifed in a bathhouse (in his first film role, Pierce Brosnan plays the killer), a bomb goes off in the car taking Harold’s mother to church, killing the driver, and a bomb is found in a pub Harold owns. Not only that, but when Harold and Victoria (Helen Mirren), his mistress, take Charlie and his lawyer to another restaurant Harold owns for dinner, a bomb explodes inside right as they’re pulling up, injuring all of the staff and customers. While Victoria tries to placate Charlie and his lawyer Tony (Stephen Davies), Harold tries to get to the bottom of what’s going on, even pulling in some of the other gang bosses to interrogate them (in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Harold has them hung by hooks in a meatpacking plant). Eventually, Harold discovers it’s the IRA who’s involved – Jeff (Derek Thompson), another one of his closest associates, was paying the IRA to avoid troubles with them, but Colin robbed them, and when the IRA learned Colin was associated with Harold, they targeted Harold. Everyone tries to warn Harold not to mess with the IRA, including Jeff, Charlie, and Parky (Dave King), the police detective on Harold’s payroll, but Harold thinks they’re no more dangerous than the usual thugs he’s dealt with. Of course, Harold is proven wrong.

In a famous scene, Harold confronts his associates in a butcher shop.

While Mackenzie insisted on beefing up the IRA angle, as he wanted not only to contrast the fanaticism of the IRA with the “it’s just business” attitude of Harold and the other gangsters, but also to contrast it with the Thatcher-like values Harold was espousing, it did prove for some rocky times when it came to getting the film released. The original company that was set to release it wanted to cut the film because of the IRA theme, and also dub over Hoskins’ voice. Hoskins eventually took them to court to get that stopped, and the producer bought the film back from the distributor, but it wasn’t until Eric Idle saw the film at a screening (at the behest of Hoskins or Mirren) and recommended it to Handmade Films (who had distributed Monty Python’s Life of Brian) that they picked up the film. And the IRA does add all of those elements to the film, making it more than just a gangster film. Of course, it’s also a character study, and Mackenzie and Keeffe bring that out as well. Early on in the film, George takes Charlie and other friends and associates (including Parky) on his boat, and announces the prospective partnership while they go under a bridge. Mackenzie and cinematographer Phil Meheux (who went on to shoot four more films for Mackenzie, including The Fourth Protocol, with Brosnan in a starring role this time) frame Harold in the center, making him a larger-than-life figure, which is of course setting him up for a fall. Harold at first seems to be, despite his working-class upbringing, a charming, if over-enthusiastic (Charlie has to warn Harold not to rush him), boss, and yet at the same time has to show the danger and anger lurking underneath, while also showing some vulnerability as well, and Mackenzie and Keeffe are able to bring all of that out.

Harold accepts his fate.

A lot of that is due to Hoskins, of course, He makes Harold into a dynamo despite his stature (watch the way he walks through the airport in his first scene), yet also someone who’s smart and capable of grief despite his toughness (as when he hears of Colin’s death, and after he kills Jeff in a blind rage after discovering Jeff’s betrayal). The most memorable demonstration of Hoskins’ ability (and the best, in my opinion) comes at the end of the film. After Harold finds out Charlie is pulling out of his deal because of all of the bombings and because of the IRA’s involvement, he chews Charlie out for being scared (“The mafia – I’ve shit ’em!”), and resolves to go into business with the Germans. He leaves the hotel where Charlie is at, and signals for a car, only to find out too late it has Brosnan and another IRA member inside (Victoria is trapped inside another car). Hoskins is able to go from disbelief to anger to acceptance, all without saying a word, and it’s a masterful example of good acting. Mirren is also terrific in making the role of Victoria more than just a gangster’s moll. She brings class to Harold, but she also brings intelligence (she’s able to guess Jeff is more involved with the story than he admits), and yet also toughness (she stands up to Harold when he berates her for spilling the beans to Charlie about the bombs) mixed with vulnerability (in that same scene, she also cries in fear, which was Mirren’s suggestion). Constantine, who replaced Anthony Franciosa as shooting started (Franciosa claimed he didn’t like the fact the script had changed so much before the film started shooting), was best known for playing the detective Lemmy Caution in a series of French films, and he may have been a bit flat in delivering his dialogue, but he has the right face for Charlie, and brings a nice presence as well. While Hoskins, Mirren, and of course Brosnan all went on to bigger things, Mackenzie and Keeffe never topped The Long Good Friday, but it’s a tough act to follow.

Thief (1981) – Review

The following review was originally written in August of 2012 as part of a blogathon for TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars”.

Frank (James Caan) at work.

Anyone who follows movie history in general, and Hollywood history in particular, know it takes a combination of factors to become a star, most of all luck. But once you reach that level, there are two roads open to you. You can try to capitalize on your success by appearing in the types of movies that allowed you to become a star in the first place, or you can continue to try to follow your own path and hope the audience follows with you. James Caan falls into the second category. Though he wasn’t the biggest name to emerge from the success of The Godfather, the film did bring him an increased visibility after his sterling work in such films as El Dorado, The Rain People and the made-for-TV movie Brian’s Song. Caan could have cashed in on his persona as Sonny Corleone – and in recent years, he has done that – but instead, he basically took his cue from the title of one of his films of that period, The Gambler. Though Caan appeared in a sequel (Funny Lady) and a couple of tough-guy films (Freebie and the Bean and The Killer Elite), he also appeared in a futuristic drama (Rollerball), a pair of romantic dramas with Marsha Mason (Cinderella Liberty, Chapter Two), an anti-war drama (A Bridge Too Far), a pair of offbeat comedies (Slither and Harry and Walter go to New York), a Western (Comes a Horseman), an arthouse drama (Another Man, Another Chance), and even a drama he directed himself, Hide in Plain Sight. Pauline Kael once wrote about Burt Lancaster’s film choices in the 50’s and 60’s that whatever their quality – she liked some but hated others – they weren’t complacent choices, but were offbeat and showed a restless talent at work. The same could be said of Caan’s work in the 70’s.

Frank demands what’s owed him.

Still, there must have been something inside of Caan that made him think it was time to return to a more hard-edged role, and so he teamed up with Michael Mann, who made his Hollywood feature film debut (his first movie, The Jericho Mile, was released theatrically in Europe, but made for TV here) with their effort together, which was Thief. Caan has gone on record as saying that next to The Godfather, this is his favorite of all the film’s he’s done, and I would also agree next to Coppola’s film, this is Caan’s best work and best movie. It wasn’t a big hit when it was first released, and as with almost every Mann film, it had both its admirers (Roger Ebert, who put the film on his top 10 list for that year, called it “one of the most intelligent thrillers I’ve seen”) and detractors (Pauline Kael called it “highfalutin hype”, and hated it from beginning to end), as Mann’s films tend to do, but today, Thief is rightly remembered as one of his best.

Frank tells his life story to Jessie (Tuesday Weld).

Adapted by Mann from the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer (a real-life burglar), the movie is about the title character, named Frank (Caan). Frank and his partner Barry (Jim Belushi), in the movie’s parlance, take down scores, but only jewelry, and only from businesses, never homes, and always at night. Like most other crooks, he has a legit business on the side (a car dealership), but what he really wants is his version of the American dream, which includes a home, wife, kids, and getting Okla (Willie Nelson), another thief and the closest thing Frank has to a mentor, out of prison. And like his work as a thief, Frank wants to accomplish all of this on his own terms, though, ironically enough, he plans to leave thieving behind once he does. To that end, he courts Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a hostess at a restaurant he apparently frequents, and after one date that starts off as a disaster (he’s late for reasons I’ll get to in a minute) but ends up well, she agrees to marry him. She can’t have children, but he agrees to adopt. And he has a lawyer making arrangements to get Okla out of prison before his parole is up (Okla is dying).

Frank visits Okla (Willie Nelson) in prison.

But all is not well as far as Frank being his own man to get what he wants. His usual fence, Joe Gags (Hal Frank), is murdered, and the man responsible for that murder, Leo (Robert Prosky), a mob boss, wants Frank to come work for him. Frank doesn’t like the idea of working for anybody, but Leo is offering the type of money that’s hard to resist for someone thinking of packing it in (he accepts after Jessie agrees to marry him). And when Frank and Jessie are unable to adopt a baby by going through regular channels, Frank reluctantly turns to Leo, who immediately gets them a baby boy (Frank and Jessie name him David, which was Okla’s real name). Plus, the cops, led by Sgt. Urizzi (John Santucci), are constantly following him, saying they’re Frank’s new partners and he needs to take care of them. Finally, Frank finds out his new house is being bugged. So even before Frank finds out Leo is not going to give him all the money he was promised up front (the rest goes into fronts like shopping malls), and is not going to let Frank walk after just a couple of scores, we can tell things are not going to go Frank’s way.

Leo (Robert Prosky) lets Frank know in no uncertain terms who’s in charge.

Admittedly, this does sound sort of sentimental (which is part of why Kael hated it, I think), but what’s interesting is, with the exception of his attachment to Okla, there’s nothing sentimental in how Frank approaches any of this. When tells Jessie about what he wants, and why he wants her to be with him, it may be the least romantic proposal ever put on film. Obviously, he’s attracted to her looks, but there’s no appeal made on that level; it’s more the case of one soul who’s been beaten down by life appealing to someone in similar circumstances. And even in the speech he gives her about what his life was like when he was in a juvenile home and then prison, there’s neither bravado nor pathos, just a clearheaded directness (on the commentary track he does with Mann on the DVD, Caan calls this the best piece of acting he ever did). Later, that relationship will blossom into something more romantic, but there’s always something precarious to it as well. And as for Frank’s dealings with Leo and the cops, there is the metaphor of Frank being the individual being beaten down by The System, but Frank’s desire to work alone comes out of being a product of the rigidity of the prison system, and not wanting to play by anyone’s rules again, not out of any rebellious side. Finally, except for Okla’s picture, all the pictures on the paper he carries around that shows his version of the American dream are generic, as if to show his idea of what he wants is nothing sophisticated or romantic, just what he’s seen in magazines or on TV or in movies and what he thinks he wants.

Frank and Barry (Jim Belushi) plan their next job.

One of the hallmarks of any Mann movie is the verisimilitude he brings to his movies to match the sober tone of the storytelling. Caan is using real tools in the safe-cracking scenes, and that heightens the very meticulousness of his character. Mann also casts a number of real-life cops and ex-crooks in the film; Santucci was a former thief, while real-life cop, technical adviser, and future Mann collaborator (in the movie Manhunter and the TV series Crime Story, which Santucci also appeared in) Dennis Farina plays one of Leo’s goons (not the only future collaborator of Mann’s in the movie; William L. Petersen, who plays the lead in Manhunter, appears briefly as a bartender, while Michael Paul Chan, who was in Mann’s short-lived series Robbery Homicide Division, appears briefly as a waiter). All of that lends a grit to the movie to complement the slick visuals (Donald Thorin, who had served as camera operator on such movies as Bound for Glory and Annie Hall, made his debut as cinematographer for this film), and while some have charged Mann with being more concerned with style than content, they actually mesh well together here. Another theme that shows us in Mann’s movies is people, almost always men, doing the jobs they do because that’s what they do, and they don’t know how to do anything else. This movie is the one movie where the protagonist struggles against his nature the most, but at the end, he ends up having to embrace it. Finally, another thing that Mann does well in his films is his use of music, and while I know the Tangerine Dream score may date the movie for some, it actually fits. It’s not just what Mann says on the commentary about needing a score that sounded more mechanical to match the grittiness of the film, though there is that. The music in Mann’s films tend to be about evoking a general mood – think, for example, of the piece of music by Kronos Quartet that plays over the opening credits of Heat, or how Moby’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” at the end – and though Tangerine Dream, an electronic music group, has been characterized as a “New Age” music group, they evoke the same kind of melancholy as in other Mann films. At the same time, the music is also appropriate for the big shoot-out scene at the end.

Frank goes after Leo.

A number of actors made their film debut here, and Prosky was the most prominent of them (he had made several television appearances, as well as appearing on stage in several plays). In the ensuing years, he split his time between playing essentially good-hearted authority figures (Broadcast News, Rudy, Dead Man Walking, and Sgt. Jablonski on Hill Street Blues) and tough guys and/or bad guys (The Natural, Things Change, Hoffa), with the occasional oddity thrown in (his memorable comic turn as an aging former TV star in Gremlins 2: The New Batch). But as far as playing bad guys and tough guys go, he’s never equaled his performance here. Leo can turn the charm on easily, and yet there’s a steeliness to him always that Prosky doesn’t overdo, especially when he’s threatening Frank. Weld is one of those actors who should have been a bigger star than they really were, radiating a sexuality and a toughness that suggested more than was often required of her. She may not look exactly like she did in movies like Lord Love a Duck and Pretty Poison, but her combination of toughness and vulnerability fit the role of Jessie, and in the scene where Frank tells her to leave, she’s able to go from desperation to anger without a sweat. Nelson could have easily let his role slip into bathos, but he avoids that for the most part. And given how many bad movies and smug performances he’s given, it’s easy to forget Belushi started out giving good performances in movies like About Last Night (as problematic as that film turned out to be), Salvador and this one. He doesn’t have as much to do as the others, but he does make a convincing robber, and considering his relative youth (27 years old when the movie was released) and experience (his first real movie role), he’s able to hold his own.

Writer/director Michael Mann.

But the movie rests on Caan’s shoulders, and he delivers.  On the commentary, Caan makes a big deal about how he and Mann decided Frank should avoid using contractions in his speech whenever possible, as to show how direct (and uneducated) he was, but he doesn’t make a big deal of it in his performance. He doesn’t sentimentalize Frank’s “American dream”, or his background (the way he has Frank, in his speech about his background to Jessie, glide over the difficulties he had in prison). And yet when Leo double-crosses him, and Frank feels he has to shed all of his humanity to take revenge, the effect is chilling, both in how he completely dismisses Jessie, and also how easy it is for him to go after Leo. As a fan of Mann’s, I’d have to say Thief serves as a warm-up to better films such as Heat, The Insider and Ali, but it’s still very good, and I agree with Caan it’s one of his best films and best performances.

The Claim (2000) – Review

Thomas Hardy, who wrote poetry and fiction, wrote detailed stories full of richly drawn characters struggling against society and fate. While they would seem to be the type of novels that could be made into successful movies, that hasn’t always been the case. Director Michael Winterbottom, for example, has made three movie adaptations of Hardy novels. The first one, Jude, a straightforward movie version of Jude the Obscure, had two great performances by Kate Winslet and Rachel Griffiths, but failed to capture how the city it took place in was as much a character in the story as the main character (played by Christopher Eccleston). The most recent one, Trishna, a loose, modern-day version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which also moved the setting to India, had the opposite problem; it captured the setting perfectly, but suffered from a flat performance by Frieda Pinto in the title role. Only The Claim, Winterbottom’s movie of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (adapted by Frank Cottrell Boyce), one of my favorite novels ever, comes off well.

Hope (Sarah Polley) and Donald (Wes Bentley).

Winterbottom and Boyce change the character names, and transplant the story from Victorian England to 1867 California during the Gold Rush (though it was shot in Alberta in Canada), but the story is essentially the same. Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan) runs a town called Kingdom Come (the original title of the movie), and has his hand in almost everything that goes on in the town – including the bank, the hotel, and the law – except for a saloon/brothel, though since that’s run by Lucia (Milla Jovovich), his girlfriend, that suits him fine. Plus, he owns a fortune in gold. However, three visitors come to town who prove fateful to him. The first is Donald Daglish (Wes Bentley), a surveyor for the Central Pacific Railroad, and Dillon wants to please Daglish so that the railroad will go through Kingdom Come and bring prosperity to it, rather than to another town. The other two visitors are more worrying to Dillon – Elena (Nastassja Kinski) and her daughter Hope (Sarah Polley). 18 years earlier, Dillon had been married to Elena, and they were poor, but on one drunken night, Dillon sold them in exchange for a gold claim that allowed him to get rich. Now that the two have come back, a guilt-ridden Dillon wants to do right by them – especially since Elena is dying of tuberculosis – but he also wants to make sure none of this gets revealed to anyone else in town. Unfortunately, things don’t work out the way Dillon wants them to.

Lucia (Milla Jovovich).

In addition to Hardy, Winterbottom and Boyce are also evoking Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in the way this is a western that isn’t about wide-open spaces and individuals determining their own destinies, but about cities, businessmen, and individuals whose destinies are determined by fate. They also have snow and cold in common. In spite of the bleakness of the setting, Winterbottom makes the town feel alive, rather than just a location. I have no idea if this is true, but the extras seem like they’re the same people throughout, rather than different people for each day, and it makes the town seem lived in. In addition to the major characters, there are also interesting supporting characters, such as Bellanger (Julian Richings), one of Daglish’s co-workers at the railroad, and Annie (Shirley Henderson, a Winterbottom regular), the prostitute who falls in love with him. All of this helps to augment the inevitable fate that awaits Dillon. Cinematographer Alwin Kuchler (in the first of two movies he’d shoot with Winterbottom) does a good job of evoking the look of the town as well.

Mullan has a tough job here, as we have to empathize with him despite the awful thing he did, but he never plays for false sympathy, and yet you can see goodness in him, as with the way he treats Lucia when they’re together, and also Elena. He’s also believable as someone in charge. Bentley looks a little too modern to be a 19th century railroad inspector, but he gets into the role, carries an air of authority to him, and also shows his essential good nature. And Polley, as usual, is natural and unaffected. The real surprise here is Jovovich. Best known for the Resident Evil movies, Jovovich has the bawdiness of a madam down pat (a real-life musician, she also sings well), but she also shows vulnerability in the way she reacts when Dillon leaves her for Elena, and in her scenes with Daglish. The Claim was pretty much ignored at the box office, despite the fact a few critics did champion it (as I recall, Richard Roeper put it on his 10 best list for the year), which is too bad, as it works both as a western and an adaptation of Hardy’s novel.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) – Review

 

On the surface, Robert Altman’s McCabe& Mrs. Miller may sound like your traditional Western film. The title character, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), is a gambler with a mysterious past who comes to town to set up a business, and he partners up with people in the town, including a saloon owner (Sheehan, played by Altman regular Rene Auberjonois), and another person from out of town who says they can help McCabe do better in his business. However, when two other men come into town to try and buy him out, McCabe refuses, and this sets up a showdown with some gunmen, who work for those two men, who come into town looking for McCabe. But this is a Robert Altman film, and Altman never did anything traditional, so McCabe & Mrs. Miller is different from your traditional Western (though, in my opinion, that doesn’t make it any less good).

For one thing, instead of being shot in the wide-open spaces of someplace like Monument Valley (the location of many a John Ford Western), Altman’s film (which he also co-wrote with Brian McKay, based on Edmund Naughton’s novel McCabe) was set in Washington state (though it was shot in British Columbia), and you get all of the familiar weather of the Pacific Northwest, particularly the rain and the snow (the final shoot-out is set in Mccabe & Mrs. Miller movie (1971) - Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois - video Dailymotionthe snow). In tune with the unfamiliar setting, Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (who went on to shoot two other movies for Altman) give this a grainy look, in contrast to the expansive, well-lit look of most Westerns. It also doesn’t sound like other Westerns, thanks not only to Altman’s traditional overlapping dialogue, but also the things people talk about; you get minor characters talking about whether or not to keep their beard, for example. Nor does the score sound like a traditional Western; it’s made up mostly of Leonard Cohen’s songs (“Sisters of Mercy”, “The Stranger Song”, and “Winter Lady”) – though there’s also “Silent Night” and a musical reference to Ford’s The Searchers – that not only fit in with the melancholy tone of the film, but also underscore the characters and story (“Like any other dealer, he was watching for the card/That is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another”, from “The Stranger Song”, is a good description of McCabe).

For another, McCabe’s “business” is running a brothel – Westerns in the past had women characters who were understood to be prostitutes (like the characters played by Claire Trevor in Stagecoach, or Shelley Winters in Winchester 73), but because of the Production Code, were never named as such – and his other partner, aside from Sheehan, happens to be a woman, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a prostitute herself. Also unusual is Mrs. Miller happens to be the smartest person in the film; not only does she know how to run the women more efficiently than McCabe ever could, but she’s the McCabe & Mrs. Miller | Movies ala Markone who knows McCabe’s efforts to stonewall Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland) – representatives of the Harrison Shaughnessy mining corporation that wants to buy him out – will lead to no good end (not that she can do anything about it; she’s an opium addict, and her last scene shows her in an opium daze). You would also expect McCabe & Mrs. Miller to become involved with each other – especially since Beatty and Christie were involved in real life at the time – but though Mrs. Miller does sleep with him, Altman never shows it, and she keeps it strictly a business relationship otherwise, to McCabe’s consternation; as he gripes, “I got poetry in me!”

Finally, there’s McCabe. When he comes into town, people, especially Sheehan, think he’s a gunfighter, and though McCabe doesn’t like to talk about it, there’s proof at the end he does know how to handle a gun. However, McCabe is mostly defined by his gift for gab, though what he’s saying doesn’t always make sense (“If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much, follow me?”), and that’s a big departure from the usual laconic hero of the traditional Western. Not only that, but as I’ve hopefully made clear, despite his skill as a gambler, his ability to charm people (though he isn’t always successful at that), and his skill as a gunfighter (though that doesn’t save him), McCabe is pretty much a fool. While Beatty, like many actors when they become stars, was careful about his image, he also went further than most in playing with that image, and McCabe, in all the ways that I’ve described, was definitely a departure. Finally, unlike the traditional Western where the good guys win, no one ends up winning – not McCabe, not Mrs. Miller, not the gunmen who come after McCabe at the end (they kill him, but he kills them too), not an affable young cowboy (Keith Carradine, who went on to become an Altman regular) who is a hit with the women at the brothel, but ends up getting killed by one of the gunmen and certainly not Ida (Shelley Duvall), a mail-order bride who, after her husband is killed, is forced to become a prostitute – except the Harrison Shaughnessy corporation. Of course, this is a downer ending, but Altman nevertheless makes it an exhilarating experience to watch. Though Altman and Beatty quarreled during the shooting – both of them were control freaks, and while Beatty liked doing a lot of takes, Altman didn’t – that doesn’t show up on screen. According to Beatty, John Huston called McCabe & Mrs. Miller the best Western he had ever seen, and it’s easy to see why.

R.I.P., Robert Towne

As those who have suffered through a broadcast of an Academy Awards ceremony know, the acceptance speeches can all sound the same, with people thanking, in no particular order, the people who worked on the film with them, their families, God, and so on. However, every once in a while, you get an unexpected element in those speeches. For example, when Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (at the time, it was called Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium)  for The Godfather – which wasn’t a sure thing, given that up to that point, Cabaret seemed to be sweeping the awards – in his acceptance speech, Coppola mentioned another screenwriter who had written a crucial scene for the movie that helped make the movie the success it was. That screenwriter was Robert Towne, who died on July 1 at 89 years of age.

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Towne, born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles on November 23, 1934, was the son of a clothing store owner and land developer (the latter of which may have been a conscious or unconscious influence on his most famous screenplay, Chinatown). Apparently, when he saw the movie Sergeant York, which came out when he was seven, Towne (his father changed the family name from Schwartz) became infatuated with movies. After graduating from Pomona College, Towne decided to try his luck as an actor and a writer. He took a class taught by Jeff Corey, a character actor who may be best remembered for playing Sheriff Bledsoe in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and that’s when he met Jack Nicholson, who became one of the most important figures in his life. Also in the class was the late Roger Corman, who ended up giving Towne work acting and/or writing in such films as Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia (which Towne would later claim he worked harder on than any script he wrote), and A Time for Killing. Though Towne would later take his name off the film, it attracted the attention of Warren Beatty, who would become another important figure in his life.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

A Time for Killing came out in 1967, which was the same year Bonnie & Clyde, arguably the first film of the “New Hollywood” era, came out. Beatty, who both starred in and produced the movie, invited Towne to the set of the shoot. Although Towne would later joke he was brought there to referee the arguments between Beatty and director Arthur Penn (which, to be sure, came out of creative disagreements rather than any hostility between the two), Towne did end up working as a script doctor on Robert Benton and David Newman’s screenplay, removing a menage a tois relationship between Bonnie (Faye Dunaway), Clyde (Beatty), and W.D. (Michael Pollard), and making changes to the structure of the film, most crucially moving the scene where Bonnie visits her mother (Mabel Cavitt) to near the end of the movie to add a sense of foreboding to the story.

Towne in Drive, he Said (1971) with Karen Black.

Though Towne would later co-write the script for the 1968 western Villa Rides with Sam Peckinpah, most of his work for the next few years was script doctoring. Drive, he Said (1971) marked the directorial debut of Nicholson, and although it doesn’t quite hang together, it’s one of the few movies about the protest movement of the time that feels genuinely connected to the events. Towne  also appeared in the movie as Richard, the cuckolded husband of Olive (Karen Black), and I will admit his acting is undistinguished. He also doctored Cisco Pike (1972), one of the most underrated movies of the 1970’2. Kris Kristofferson plays the title character, a former drug dealer trying to make a go as a musician, but failing (rather ironic casting, as Kristofferson became a successful musician), and who gets sucked back into the drug business by crooked detective Leo Holland (Gene Hackman). Though Towne quarreled with writer/director Bill L. Norton, he did make the crucial decision of adding the character of Holland to the movie, and also beefed up the character of Sue (Black again), Cisco’s girlfriend, and Towne would later admit he liked the ensuing movie. But it was The Godfather, as well as Coppola thanking Towne in his acceptance speech, that put Towne in the spotlight.

The Godfather (1972) – the famous scene between Michael (Al Pacino) and Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando).

Fans of The Godfather know a scene Coppola struggled with was the scene where Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and Michael (Al Pacino) sit together after Michael has taken over as head of the family. It’s this scene where Vito confesses he wished he had been able to make sure Michael had gone down the path of the straight and narrow:

Vito: I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this, and Fredo, well, Fredo was…but I never wanted this for you. I worked my whole life – I don’t apologize – to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all of those big shots. I don’t apologize. That’s my life. But I thought that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone. Something.

That was Towne’s contribution to the film (Towne also worked on the scene where Michael tells his brothers he wants to kill Captain McClusky (Sterling Hayden) and Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri)). As you can see, it shows how Towne not only has a knack for writing dialogue, but also in screenplay structure. That contribution helped that scene between Vito and Michael one of the most memorable parts of the film, coming right before Vito dies and Michael ruthlessly takes on the other five families, and it helped make Towne’s reputation, which led to getting his own scripts filmed.

The Last Detail (1973)

First up was an adaptation – The Last Detail (1973), directed by Hal Ashby and based on the novel by Darryl Poniscan. Columbia, the studio that released the movie, was nervous about financing it because of all the profanity until Nicholson, whom Towne had shaped the main character of Signalman Billy L. “Badass” Buddusky for, got involved. Towne stuck closely to the novel for the most part, but he removed Buddusky’s wife, made him less of an intellectual, and more importantly, allowed the character to live to the end. As for the profanity (which, it should be clear, is not as shocking as it was at the time – you’ll here more of it in a film directed by Martin Scorsese or written by David Mamet than in this film), Towne argued that it was necessary to show how powerless Buddusky, his friend  Gunner’s Mate Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young), and Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) – the prisoner Buddusky and Mulhall are escorting to the navy’s prison – are, and how swearing was the only way they could exhibit any power. And it works – Nicholson gives what may be his best performance, and he’s helped immeasurably by Ashby’s direction and Towne’s script, which shows how, for all of his bluster, Buddusky really does have a heart, yet done without sentimentality. Towne followed that with the movie that won him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and what is unarguably his most famous credit, Chinatown.

Chinatown (1974).

In William Goldman’s book Which Lies Did I Tell? More Adventures, he mentions one of Towne’s peculiarities as a writer – when Towne was given a script doctoring job (at Beatty’s request, he did uncredited work around this time on The Parallax View), he always turned it in on time, but when he was writing his own screenplays, things took much longer. Chinatown was one example. Towne had been inspired by reading the book Southern California Country: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams, a magazine article about Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and the true story of William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power when it constructed an aqueduct in the 1900’s to bring water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles (though Mulholland did not meet the same fate Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the character based on him, did). Towne thought it would be interesting to construct a movie around the theft not of an object, but an essential force for life. But it took Towne a long time to balance the story of the land getting raped with the story of villainous businessman Noah Cross (John Huston) raping his daughter Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). As Sam Wasson revealed in his book The Big Goodbye, about the making of Chinatown, Towne received help with finishing the script from Edward Taylor, his old college roommate, but Taylor declined credit.

John Huston as Noah Cross in Chinatown.

More famously, Towne clashed with director Roman Polanski about the script – the film was originally going to be narrated by Jake Gittes (Nicholson), the private eye who’s the major character of the film, but Polanski cut that out, and whereas Towne’s original ending had Evelyn shoot Cross dead and go to jail, Polanski insisted on the famous ending where the police gun down Evelyn as she’s trying to get away with Katherine (Belinda Palmer), her sister and her daughter, and Cross gets away while Jake can only look on as one of his associates says, “Forget it, Jake – it’s Chinatown.” Towne would later insist his problem with Polanski’s ending was not the fact it was an unhappy ending, but that he felt it was melodramatic, though he would later change his mind and realize it’s part of why the movie works so well. Along with that ending, the most famous parts of the movie are Evelyn’s shocking admission to Jake about Katherine (“She’s my sister and my daughter!”) and Cross’ declaration, “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time in the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Towne would later say in an interview concerning another movie that he enjoyed melodrama because it allowed him to entertain audiences without being heavy-handed, as well as playing with the gap between appearance and reality, and any feelings the viewer might have about Polanski aside, Chinatown is certainly one of the best illustrations of that principle. It also gave Towne his only Academy Award, for Best Original Screenplay.

Shampoo (1975).

Shampoo, which Towne co-wrote with Beatty and which teamed him once again with Ashby, was another project that took a while. Beatty had conceived the idea in the 1960’s of a compulsive Don Juan and the resulting hang-ups – originally, that was the premise of What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), which Beatty was originally going to make with Woody Allen, until Allen’s script rewrites led Beatty to leave the project – and when Beatty brought the idea to Towne, Towne came up with the idea of making the main character of George (Beatty) a hairdresser, to buck the stereotype of male hairdressers always being gay. On the surface, Shampoo seems like just another sex comedy (updating a Restoration comedy to modern-day Beverly Hills), as George juggles relationships with Jill (Goldie Hawn), his actress girlfriend, Felicia (Lee Grant, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance), who’s married to Lester (Jack Warden), the banker George hopes will finance the shop he wants to open, and Jackie (Julie Christie), Lester’s mistress and George’s ex-girlfriend, whom he still has feelings for. But again, there’s more going on underneath the surface. The movie starts on Election Day in November of 1968, when Richard Nixon won the presidential election, and Beatty and Towne show how Lester, and others like him who voted for Nixon, showed up and cared about the election results, while those who didn’t really care, like George, didn’t show up and vote, which might have made the difference between Nixon winning or Hubert Humphrey, whom Nixon was running against, winning. Not only that, but if this type of story was told today, George would gradually find redemption and settle down with either Jill or Jackie being his one true love (along with opening his own shop), but Beatty and Towne know redemption is never that easy, and so George does not get any of the women at the end, and his future is up in the air (the ending was inspired by a real-life breakup Towne had with a girlfriend).

The Yakuza (1975).

Unfortunately for Towne, his future was up in the air as well, though it wasn’t immediately apparent. He followed Shampoo with The Yakuza (1975), which came from Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard. Originally, Robert Aldrich was going to direct, but when star Robert Mitchum didn’t want him on the film, Sydney Pollack replaced him, and brought Towne in to rewrite the movie. Neither Schrader nor Towne was happy with the finished film – Schrader thought Pollack strove for a poetic realism that was at odds with the gritty film he was trying to write – but while the film is another example of a story of non-Western culture told through the eyes of a white guy, I think Pollack shows respect for the Japanese culture he’s depicting, Mitchum, Ken Takakura (as a gangster Mitchum’s character has a history with), and Richard Jordan (as Mitchum’s friend), among others, are terrific, and for all the criticism Pollack received for being a sentimental middlebrow filmmaker, his films rarely had outright happy endings, and he helps make the bittersweet ending of this film work.. While the film wasn’t a big hit with audiences or critics, it has since gained admirers, most notably Quentin Tarantino, who called it Mitchum’s last great performance.

After that, while Towne did a number of uncredited script doctor jobs (on such films as Marathon Man (1976), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Heaven Can Wait (1978), and Reds (1981), where he was an uncredited consultant), he worked on what he hoped would be his directorial debut (like many screenwriters, he wanted to direct to protect his scripts) and what he thought was the his magnum opus, Greystoke. Based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel “Tarzan of the Apes”, this was arguably the first attempt at a “gritty reboot” of a franchise (Tarzan movies had been made as relatively high-budget B-movies during the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s), or at least a more realistic version of the story of a man and nature. However, when Towne ran over budget on the film that did become his directorial debut, Personal Best (1982) (more on that film below), thanks in part to an actor’s strike, he had to give up directing Greystoke, and Hugh Hudson, fresh off Chariots of Fire, became the director instead and brought in Michael Austin to rewrite the script – Towne would take his name off the film and use the name of his dog, P.H. Vazak, on the film instead. Greystoke (with the added subtitle The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes) was eventually released in 1984, and while it made its money back and got decent reviews, I found it rather pompous and staid, and most people probably remember it today as the film where Glenn Close dubbed the voice of Andie MacDowell (who played Jane) to hide her southern-accented voice.

Personal Best (1982)

Personal Best was not a box office hit, but it’s a much better film. It came out of Towne’s research and interest in human movement while he was writing Greystoke, and it’s about two female track and field stars – Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (real-life track and field athlete Patrice Donnelly) – who become romantically involved with each other while training for the 1980 Olympics (which the U.S. would boycott). Towne captures the details of being in track and field, and the work involved (Kenny Moore, who ran track and field at the University of Oregon, appears in the movie as Denny Stiles, a swimmer Chris takes up with after she breaks up with Tory, and Moore also served as a consultant on the film). More than that, however, this showed Towne able to think visually while not relying overly on one of his main gifts. When I think of Towne’s films, I think of some of the best dialogue I’ve seen and heard, even when it’s in speeches, as with the speech Vito gives to Michael that I quoted above, or the creative use of profanity in The Last Detail (when a bartender Buddusky tangles with threatens to call the shore patrol, Buddusky responds by slamming a billy club on the counter and yelling, “I am the mother****ing shore patrol, mother******!”), or the dialogue I quoted from Chinatown above, or George’s speech to Jill when he admits to sleeping around with several women In Shampoo (“Maybe that means I don’t love ’em. Maybe it means I don’t love you. I don’t know. Nobody’s going to tell me I don’t like ’em very much”). But while in Personal Best, Towne does give a speech to Chris and Tori’s coach Terry Tingloff (Scott Glenn) when he grouses about the issues he has to deal with when coaching women (“Do you actually think that Chuck Noll has to worry that Franco Harris is gonna cry ’cause Terry Bradshaw won’t talk to him?”), mostly, he uses naturalistic dialogue on focuses on the physical activities of the athletes, from training to doing the actual meets to their off-field activities. Towne’s film came under fire in the LGBT community at the time for the fact Chris goes from being involved with a women to being involved with a man (without any over indication she might be bisexual), but Towne avoids a judgmental tone, and doesn’t try to make us feel Chris is “normal” because she’s with a guy.

The Two Jakes (1990).

Another passion project later led to disappointment and heartache for Towne. The Two Jakes was going to be a sequel to Chinatown, with Towne directing and writing the script, Nicholson reprising his role as Jake Gittes, Robert Evans, who had produced Chinatown, playing Jake Berman, and oil being the subject rather than water (Nicholson later claimed this was part of a trilogy that would explore the 20th century history of Los Angeles through the character of Gittes – Towne would later dispute this). However, Towne became dissatisfied with Evans as an actor and wanted to fire him, and when Nicholson chose Evans instead of Towne, it ruptured the friendship Towne had with both of them. After a few false starts, Nicholson took over directing The Two Jakes, and it was released in 1990. While of course it’s a disappointment compared to Chinatown, like The Godfather Part III (another long-gestating sequel released that same year), it’s better than you might think, thanks in part to the ever-reliable Nicholson and a terrific performance by Meg Tilly as a grown-up Katharine Mulwray.

Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Before that was released, and after doing a few more script doctor jobs (including 8 Million Ways to Die (1986) for Ashby, and Frantic (1988) for Polanski), Towne was eventually able to return to the director’s chair with Tequila Sunrise (1988). Commercially it was the most successful film Towne was credited on, making over $100 million at the box office and almost five times its budget. Critics were more mixed on the film – Roger Ebert wrote “there are times when the movie seems to be complicated simply for the purpose of puzzlement”, and even Pauline Kael, a Towne fan who liked the movie overall, called it “much too derivative and vague to be a successful crime melodrama” – but my feelings about Mel Gibson (who plays the main role, Dale “Mac” McKussic) aside, and despite Towne clashing with Warner Brothers over the ending (Towne wanted Mac to die at the end, but the studio overrode him), I think it’s a terrific film. The story is again a melodrama – Mac is a retired drug dealer who’s being reluctantly pursued by Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell), his best friend and a narcotics lieutenant, and both of them are in love with Jo Ann Vallenari (Michelle Pfeiffer), who owns a restaurant – but Towne makes it work. Part of it is the performances he gets (while Towne and Pfeiffer clashed throughout filming, she gives a terrific performance), but another part is that dialogue. You got the feeling Towne was pouring his heart and soul into what the characters were saying, whether it’s Mac explaining why no one likes that he’s quit dealing drugs (“My wife, she wants my money. Her lawyer agrees, and mine likes getting paid to argue with him”), Nick trying to win Jo Ann back (“And what I didn’t figure is you’re not like me. You’re honest, kind, and principled, and I trust you”), or Carlos (Raul Julia) getting angry after he feels Mac betrays him (“Friendship is all we have! We chose each other! How could you f*** it up?”). And I think the movie is constructed well.

Like many filmmakers and actors who were part of the new Hollywood movement of the late 1960’s through the mid-1970’s, Towne struggled in the ensuing decades, both with his personal life (he battled drug addiction himself, and went through several failed relationships, including a divorce) and his professional life. For the latter, in addition to his script doctor work, Towne developed another professional relationship, this time with Tom Cruise, who first met him on Days of Thunder (1990), Cruise and director Tony Scott’s attempt to replicate the box office success of Top Gun from four years earlier. While the film avoids the rah-rah militarism of Top Gun, and was another box office success despite going over budget (Tarantino is a fan of this too), for me, it’s an empty film that’s typical of the movies produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson throughout their partnership (that is not a compliment). Cruise would work again on a Towne-penned film when Pollack brought Towne in to help David Rayfiel (Pollack’s writing partner) to adapt John Grisham’s novel The Firm (playwright David Rabe is also credited, as he was the first one to write a screenplay, though Pollack insisted he didn’t use any of Rabe’s work), with much better results (along with Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of The Client, I think it’s the best movie version of one of Grisham’s novels, and an entertaining movie).

The Firm (1993)

You can see Towne’s hand in what I think are the two best scenes in the movie, both involving Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman), who serves as a mentor to young lawyer Mitch McDeere (Cruise), and Abby McDeere (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Mitch’s wife. In an added subplot to the movie, Avery tries to hit on Abby, which she rebuffs, but when she finds out Avery will not be scuba diving while in the Cayman Islands (which complicates Mitch’s plan to have Avery’s files copied so he can give them to the FBI), Abby goes to the Cayman Islands herself and pretends to let Avery seduce her while she slips him a mickey. Before he passes out, Avery gets angry and wonders what Abby is really doing there, to which Abby, after trying to lie, admits part of the truth – she’s there to get even for the fact Mitch cheated on her when he was in the Caymans, and for letting the firm (which she now knows is a mob front) ruining their lives. As he’s passing out, Avery says, “It’s better than the alternative – that you wanted to be with me.” The other scene comes after the firm’s enforcer, Bill DeVasher (Wilford Brimley) has phoned Avery when he awakes to let him know Abby’s copied his files. When the phone call ends, Abby tries to keep up the masquerade of the two of them having slept together, but Avery simply says, “Don’t,” finds out Abby did everything to help Mitch (“That’s better than getting even with him”), tells Abby the girl Mitch slept with while in the Caymans was a setup by the firm, and warns Abby to leave before the firm finds her. Before she does, Abby, moved, asks him, “What will they do to you?”,  to which Avery simply replies, “Whatever it is, they did it a long time ago.” It’s one of the finest acting moments of Hackman’s career (Tripplehorn is his equal), but Pollack and (I presume) Towne deserve credit as well.

Without Limits (1988)

It would be nice to write that Towne ended his career on a high note. Sadly, that would not be the case. His other collaborations with Cruise, the first two Mission: Impossible movies, seemed mechanical, despite some thrilling scenes in the first one (thanks to director Brian DePalma), and the second one (directed by John Woo, who wasn’t able to bring his trademark style to play) ripped off the plot of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films, Notorious. At Beatty’s request, Towne also worked on Glenn Gordon Caron’s Love Affair (a 1994 remake of the 1939 film directed by Leo McCarey, which McCarey also remade more famously in 1957 as An Affair to Remember), which also reteamed Beatty with his off-screen wife Annette Bening (they had previously appeared together in Bugsy,  from 1991, where they had fallen in love), and while the movie had a strong first half, it became overly sentimental in the second. Towne also was one of many writers (along with Tarantino) who doctored Scott’s Crimson Tide (1995), a submarine thriller with Hackman and Denzel Washington, which many people liked more than I did (I found too slick and pseudo-profound). More disappointing was Towne’s fourth effort as writer/director, Ask the Dust (2006), adapted from the novel by John Fante. It was another Los Angeles-set tale about a doomed love affair between a writer (Colin Farrell) and a waitress (Salma Hayek) around the time of the 1933 earthquake in Long Beach, but the movie seemed lifeless and enervated, as if Towne no longer had it in him to make movies. At least Towne’s third movie as director, Without Limits, proved to be a great one (as Claude and I have already discussed).

File:Robert Towne 1 3.jpg

Still, even though Towne never wrote for movies again (while working under Corman, Towne had also written for such TV shows as The Outer Limits and The Man from U.N.C.L.E, and he returned to TV as a consulting producer on Mad Men), his legacy is assured from working on four of the best movies of the 1970’s (three as a writer or co-writer, one as a script doctor), and having written and directed three terrific films as well. Screenwriters have often been treated like the scum of Hollywood, but writers like Towne elevated screenwriting to an art form. That’s not a bad legacy to have.

 

R.I.P., Donald Sutherland

The following is an updated and expanded version of a post I wrote nearly 10 years ago for an “O Canada” blogathon.

Nearly an hour into The Dirty Dozen, Robert Aldrich’s WWII movie about the title group – American army prisoners, on death row or with long sentences – and how they’re trained for a mission behind enemy lines, Maj. Reisman (Lee Marvin) takes the platoon to a base run by Col. Breed (Robert Ryan), where they’re to train in parachute jumping. Except Reisman and Breed hate each other’s guts – Reisman thinks Breed is too much of a stick-in-the-mud in regards to rules and regulations, while Breed thinks Reisman is an undisciplined troublemaker – and to get Breed off his back, Reisman tells Capt. Kinder (Ralph Meeker), who’s been working with Reisman on behalf of their superior, General Worden (Ernest Borgnine), to tell Breed Reisman’s group is part of a secret mission and is being accompanied by a general traveling incognito.

What Reisman doesn’t realize is Breed has set up a welcoming committee for the general, complete with military band (playing “National Emblem”, of course), and with his troops ready for inspection. Once Reisman does realize that, he tells Breed he’ll check to see if the general is willing to do the inspection (telling Breed about the “general” traveling incognito, which Breed understands), going to the back of the truck carrying the others, and asking who wants to imitate a general. He finally settles on Pinkley, and while the somewhat slow-witted Pinkley is reluctant at first (“I’d rather be a civilian, sir”), he eventually agrees to do it.

As the others fall into formation behind him, Pinkley, wearing an Army helmet, joins Reisman, and turns around to make a funny face at the others, who all laugh at what he’s doing, to Breed’s surprise. Breed and “General” Pinkley salute each other, and Pinkley walks ahead of Breed and Reisman past one line of soldiers, turns, and starts walking between that line and another line of soldiers. He slows down and says, “They’re very pretty, Colonel, very pretty…but can they fight?” “Yes, sir,” Breed responds. “I hope you’re right,” Pinkley responds. He starts to walk again, but stops in front of one soldier (Reisman and Breed have to stop and fall back). “Where you from, son?” he asks, smiling. The soldier says proudly, “Madison City, Missouri, sir!” The smile leaves Pinkley’s face, and he shakes his head and drawls, “Never heard of it.” Reisman is pissed (when they’re alone a few seconds later, he threatens to beat Pinkley’s brains out if he ever does that again), and Breed is starting to wonder if he’s been had, but the others in Pinkley’s platoon are laughing hysterically.

As Pinkley in The Dirty Dozen, with Lee Marvin (back).

Pinkley doesn’t figure much in the narrative after this (originally, he had very few lines), and ironically, his character wasn’t supposed to be the one who imitated a general at all; it was Posey (Clint Walker), the soft-spoken soldier who only got violent when pushed around, who was originally supposed to play it. However, Walker felt the scene would be ridiculous for him, and asked Aldrich not to do it, so Aldrich assigned it to the actor playing Pinkley instead.

That actor, Donald Sutherland, who died today at the age of 88, had been studied to be an engineer, but dropped that to pursuit acting. Though he had worked steadily on the stage in London, his on-screen appearances were mostly in TV (he had played a villain on an episode of The Avengers – the show involving John Steed and Emma Peel, not Iron Man and Thor – modeled on Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians”), with only occasional film roles (bit parts in Promise Her Anything and The Bedford Incident, among others). However, he hadn’t made much headway in his acting career to that point; according to him, he was once turned down for a “guy next door” part – even though the powers that be loved his audition – because he was told he didn’t look like he lived next door to anybody. He had only gotten his role in Aldrich’s film because another actor dropped out.

Yet that one scene in Dirty Dozen ended up being one of the most memorable parts of the movie (Phil Kaufman, who would direct Sutherland a decade later in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, told American Film everyone he knew said about Sutherland, “Who is that guy?”), and while Sutherland was never a “marquee” actor – though he was in box-office smashes, he was never the guy who “opens” a movie, and though he appeared in Oscar-winning films, he himself was never nominated, though he eventually won an Honorary Oscar in  2017 – he enjoyed a long and distinguished career.

As Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H.

Directly, Sutherland’s performance in The Dirty Dozen led producer Ingo Preminger to cast Sutherland in what proved to be his breakout role, as maverick doctor Captain Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H. As fans of that movie know, Sutherland, as well as co-star Elliot Gould (as “Trapper” John McIntyre), wasn’t immediately receptive to director Robert Altman’s style of filmmaking (using overlapping dialogue, depending on actors coming up with their own methods, focusing on character and vignettes more than story), and he and Gould went to their agent (who handled both of them) and the studio (20th Century Fox) to complain. Preminger stuck by Altman, and Gould eventually went to Altman and apologized once he understood what Altman was trying to achieve, but while Sutherland would later regret his actions, he never went to Altman directly, and the two never worked together again. That’s ironic, as Sutherland seems quite at home in the movie (and Altman went on to praise his performance). The whistle he gives when he’s either lost in thought or making a joke (as when he reveals to Duke (Tom Skerritt) and Col. Blake (Roger Bowen) that he’s a doctor and not the driver), the way he convinces Father Mulcahy (Rene Auberjonois) to bless Painless (John Schuck) as he’s about to kill himself (or so Painless thinks), or the imitations he does (when Marston (Michael Murphy), the gas passer on an operation Trapper and Hawkeye are doing on a senator’s son in Tokyo, asks Hawkeye who he thinks he is, Sutherland puts on a creepy voice to say, “I’m Dr. Jekyll, and this is my assistant Mr. Hyde”) all are in sync not only with the style, but also the message of the movie; in an atmosphere as crazy as war (though nominally set in Korea, many understood Altman and writer Ring Lardner Jr. were really talking about Vietnam), decorum doesn’t matter, only professionalism. Sutherland shows this best when Hawkeye gets angry at Major Margaret Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), the new head nurse, for focusing more on his informality and lack of military discipline than his abilities as a doctor.

As the title character in Klute, with Jane Fonda.

M*A*S*H was one of five movies Sutherland appeared in that year (1970), which also saw him as a worried director in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (which I’ve never seen, but which was inspired by Fellini’s 8 1/2), as one set of mismatched identical twins (Gene Wilder plays the other) in Bud Yorkin’s uneven but funny French Revolution War spoof Start the Revolution Without Me, as a priest with an unusual relationship with religious fanatic Genevieve Bujold (like Sutherland, a Canadian, though she was from Quebec and he from New Brunswick) in Act of the Heart (which I’ve also never seen), and as an anachronistic hippie-ish soldier in Brian G. Hutton’s WWII adventure film Kelly’s Heroes, co-starring Clint Eastwood (with whom he would work again 30 years later). Sutherland didn’t appear in that many films in one year again (he had done it in 1968), but he would work steadily throughout his career, especially in the 70’s. It also showed how varied his choices were. Alan Arkin’s film version of Little Murders (with Jules Feiffer adapting his own play) is an uneven but often biting and hilarious black comedy, with Sutherland a highlight as the somewhat eccentric priest who marries Elliot Gould and Marcia Rodd. That same year, he played the title character in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, a detective trying to find his missing friend. The film works best as a character study of Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda), the prostitute Klute ends up falling in love with, and less well as a thriller/mystery, but while Sutherland’s role and performance are essentially passive, he shows how well he works with other performers. Look, for example, at the famous scene where Bree reacts angrily to Klute after she finds out he spied on one of her clients (an elderly garment factory owner who’s never been anywhere; all she does for him is pretend she’s just gotten back from some exotic vacation, and strip for him); while Fonda (who’s terrific) alternates between angry (“And what’s your bag, Klute? What do you like? You a talker? A button freak?”) and seductive (after Klute quietly asks her to zip her dress back up, she purrs, “Men would pay $200 for me, and here you are turning down a freebie”), Sutherland remains quiet and focused, yet the focus is always on Fonda and nothing else. Sutherland and Fonda had a brief affair during and after the making of that movie, and they shared the same passion for left-wing politics (they appeared in the “anti-Establishment” comedy Steelyard Blues two years later, where lightning didn’t strike twice, unfortunately, and they were also part of a tour of towns near military bases – which also included Peter Boyle and singer Holly Near – to play for soldiers who were against the Vietnam War, later documented in F.T.A., which stood for either “Free The Army” or “Fuck The Army”), which also probably inspired Sutherland’s appearance in Dalton Trumbo’s heavy-handed anti-war film Johnny Got His Gun, with Sutherland, as Jesus Christ (he appears in dream sequences), being the best part.

With Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now.

Don’t Look Now, the 1973 horror/thriller adapted by director Nicolas Roeg from the short story by Daphne Du Maurier, was not only another big hit, it was another turning point in Sutherland’s career. According to that American Film article I mentioned above, he quarreled with Roeg over a particular scene (Roeg insisted on doing it his way, Sutherland wanted to try another way), and it was that experience that led him to see that the director was the captain of the ship, and should be the one people defer to. Other actors have come to the conclusion that the director holds the power in movies – it’s a major reason why many actors say either they want to direct, or that they prefer the theatre – but few have put it into such stark terms (Sutherland called himself the director’s “concubine”, claiming his job for a good director was to be submissive to him), or in favorable ones (in that article, he gave credit to the director for all of his good work, and blamed himself for all the bad work). Whatever you think of Sutherland’s methods or feelings, they work for the film. I must say I’ve never been the fan of this other people are – for a film about the trauma from the loss of a child, it feels curiously detached, as if Roeg saw the story more as an intellectual exercise – but it is a film that stays with you and bears repeat viewings (as do all of Roeg’s best films), and Sutherland was again very good as the methodical character (he restores ancient architecture and paintings) who thinks in terms of logic, not realizing until too late just what it is he sees (he’s implied to be a seer, though he rejects that notion).

As Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust.

The Day of the Locust, director John Schlesinger’s adaptation of the notorious Hollywood novel by Nathanael West, is another film that doesn’t completely come together, but Sutherland was nevertheless very good in it. Fans of a certain long-running animated TV show will, of course, get a chuckle out of his character name, Homer Simpson, and it’s a part that may seem unplayable (an accountant who seems to be the one “pure” character in the cesspool of 30’s Hollywood). But Sutherland makes believable his Homer’s naiveté, his devotion to Faye (Karen Black) – the aspiring starlet who damages the lives she touches – even as he realizes she doesn’t love him and never will (the scene where he reveals that is touching, and all the more powerful for being one of the few scenes in the movie that’s still instead of frenzied), but also the danger behind him, as when, near the end, he attacks his child tormentor (Jackie Earle Haley), which starts the climactic riot at the end of the film. Homer’s especially short haircut and height (in real life, Sutherland stood at 6’4”) make him look out of place as well, yet Sutherland never overdoes it. The same can not be said, unfortunately, for the Fascist character he plays in Bernardo Bertolucci’s unwieldy epic 1900, where his overacting threatens to derail the movie (once again, Sutherland blamed himself rather than Bertolucci, even as he acknowledged the performance was all wrong for the film).

With Brooke Adams in the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

1978 saw two of Sutherland’s biggest hits, National Lampoon’s Animal House and the remake of the 1956 low-budget sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Michael Crichton’s film version of his novel The Great Train Robbery, which saw him, Sean Connery and Lesley-Anne Down rob a train in mid-19th century England – inspired by a true story – was a more modest hit, and a modest though entertaining film). In the former, Sutherland played another character out of step with the others, here a literature professor who professes contempt for what he’s teaching (he calls Milton boring, but says teaching it is his job), and is more interested in smoking pot (which he does with three students, played by Karen Allen, Tom Hulce and Peter Riegert, and he later has an affair with Allen’s character). This is another film I’m not as much a fan of as others – fratboy comedies are not my style – but Sutherland helps ground the movie in his few scenes.

The latter, according to that American Film article, represented another turning point in his career. Tired, as he said, of being typecast as “weirdo” characters, he lobbied hard for the role of the film’s hero, a health inspector who at first doubts his partner’s (Brooke Adams) assertion something strange is happening to people (insisting, yet again, there must be a logical explanation), only to realize it’s even more horrifying than he previously guessed. Director Phil Kaufman and writer W.D. Richter follow the lead of Don Siegel’s original film in using the story as metaphor (placing it within the self-help and cult movements of the time, especially in big cities like San Francisco, where the movie is set), but go beyond the original by upping both the humor (upon told the object he’s found in a soup pot is a caper, not a rat turd as he claims, Sutherland deadpans, “If it’s a caper, eat it”) and the viscera (we actually see the pod bodies being formed, as well as Sutherland smashing his clone, though he can’t bring himself to smash the others). And again, Sutherland’s performance is crucial to why the movie works so well (though he’s not the only highlight; Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum and Leonard Nimoy are all terrific as well), as he again grounds the movie in reality. That reality is also what makes the ending – the only version of this story that doesn’t end on a triumphant note – so shocking.

With Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People.

Wanting to play, again, more ordinary characters naturally led him to a movie with “ordinary” in the title: Ordinary People, based on the best-selling novel by Judith Guest, and marking the directorial debut of Robert Redford. Sutherland plays Calvin, an upper middle-class man who is trying to connect with his troubled son Conrad (Timothy Hutton, in his film debut). Calvin at first may seem excessively cheery, but then you realize he’s the main one who’s trying to make sure Conrad is okay (as the film opens, Conrad’s just back from the hospital after trying to kill himself), and you also see how devastated he is when he realizes how much his wife Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) has cut herself off emotionally from him and Conrad. The picture is mostly remember today as the film that deprived Raging Bull of winning the Oscar for Best Picture and Director, and that’s unfair. The film is somewhat schematic at times, but it is ultimately touching, and features terrific work from Hutton, Judd Hirsch (as Conrad’s psychiatrist Dr. Berger), M. Emmet Walsh (as Conrad’s swim coach), Elizabeth McGovern (as a student Conrad becomes friends with), and, of course, Sutherland. The highlights of his performance are his scene with Dr. Berger, and the scene near the end of the movie when he tells Beth he doesn’t think he loves her anymore. Sutherland plays it both times as if the emotions roiling underneath were just occurring to him, making them all the more powerful. Yet again, it’s surprising how, considering everyone else in the main cast (Moore, Hutton and Hirsch) received Oscar nominations (Hutton ended up winning), Sutherland was ignored, as his performance, next to Hutton’s, is arguably the most crucial.

With Kate Nelligan in Eye of the Needle.

As I mentioned earlier, Sutherland was a prolific actor when his career got going (in The Eagle Has Landed, a rote 1976 adaptation of Jack Higgins’ novel about a Nazi plot to kidnap Churchill, he co-starred with Michael Caine, arguably the most prolific star at that time), but starting in the 80’s, for whatever reason, he seemed to take things easy for a while. In that American Film article, he mentioned how while he loved acting, he felt it had become a compulsion, and he wanted to get back to working because he wanted to, not because he felt he had to (this also may have had to do with an attack of meningitis he suffered in 1979). But as with many actors who came to prominence in the late 60’s and the 70’s, he wasn’t able to find as many good movies and roles in the 80’s. Sometimes, he’d be the best thing, or one of the best things, about a mediocre or bad movie, as in the leader of a group of would-be robbers in Crackers, Louis Malle’s indifferent remake of Big Deal on Madonna Street, as the firm but fair priest in Michael Dinner’s uneven comedy/drama Heaven Help Us (though, to be fair, he’s not the only highlight; John Heard and Mary Stuart Masterson are equally good), or as a doctor who tries to help troubled teen Adam Horovitz (aka Ad Rock of The Beastie Boys) in Hugh Hudson’s overwrought Lost Angels. However, he also seemed to show indifference, as when he played a British colonel in Hugh Hudson’s abysmal Revolution, or played the warden menacing Sylvester Stallone in the equally abysmal Lock-Up, directed by John Flynn, or was surprisingly flat, as when he played a South African who becomes radicalized in Euzhan Palcy’s well-meaning but heavy-handed A Dry White Season (to be fair, Marlon Brando and Zakes Mokae were the only ones who came off well).*

The only films where he not only seemed engaged, but the film seemed to support that engagement, were Eye of the Needle, which is not a great movie, but sizzles when Sutherland, as a Nazi agent, is stranded on an island with lonely housewife Kate Nelligan, Threshold, where he and Jeff Goldblum shone as doctors who performed the first artificial heart transplant, and the Neil Simon-penned Max Dugan Returns, where he plays a police detective investigating con man Jason Robards. And while all three of those were watchable, none measured up to his best work in the 70’s.**

With Kevin Costner in JFK.

As the 90’s began, Sutherland started to work more again, but seemed no better off than he had been in the 80’s. For the second time in his career, he played Norman Bethune, a well-known Canadian doctor who helped the Chinese during their war with Japan in the late 30’s, in Bethune: The Making of a Hero (he had earlier played Bethune in a made-for-TV movie in 1977), but the film was somewhat stilted. John Irvin’s Eminent Domain was at least an interesting try – he and Anne Archer play a couple in 1979 Poland whose lives are turned upside down when he’s drummed out of his government position for what seems to be no reason – but the film runs aground after a suspenseful first half.

As the psychotic arsonist in Ron Howard’s impressive looking but shallow firefighter drama Backdraft, Sutherland gives the movie its only charge, particularly in his scene with Robert De Niro (as the arson investigator who catches him), and he does it by underplaying. By contrast, while Sutherland was hardly the only reason why the movie of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is nowhere near as good as the subsequent TV series – director Fran Ruben Kuzui made the film campy and joke-filled, cutting out the emotion that helped make the show so memorable – he is completely bland as Merrick, the man who reveals to Buffy (Kristy Swanson) her destiny. (Joss Whedon, who wrote the script and created the show, and Sutherland clashed during filming).

Only his cameo in Oliver Stone’s controversial JFK, as a “Deep Throat”-type figure who gives crucial information to Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), seemed to not only fully engage him, but also be worthy of his talents. In 1993, however, he gave a terrific performance in Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of John Guare’s Tony-nominated play Six Degrees of Separation. He plays Flan, an art dealer who, along with his wife Ouisa (Stockard Channing, reprising her stage role), is charmed by Paul (Will Smith), a man who claims to be friends with their children, and the illegitimate son of Sidney Poitier. Understandably, he was overshadowed by Channing and Smith’s performances, but Sutherland was very good in showing the hypocrisies of his character without being condescending.

With Stephen Rea in Citizen X.

Sutherland hit his 60’s in the middle of the 90’s, and whether by happenstance or design, ended up playing mentors or authority figures. Often, the films ranged from mediocre (Disclosure, which was better than the Michael Crichton novel it was based on, but not by much, The Puppet Masters, adapted from the novel by Robert Heinlein, The Assignment, a fictional film about trying to catch the terrorist Carlos with a double) to awful (A Time to Kill, an overheated adaptation of John Grisham’s overheated novel, Shadow Conspiracy, a dopey governmental conspiracy movie), though it must be said he was good in all of them. However, he gave his two best performances of the decade – and two of his best performances ever – in mentor roles as well. The made-for-HBO movie Citizen X, directed by Chris Gerolmo (who wrote the screenplay for Mississippi Burning), is based on the true story of a serial killer that terrorized the former Soviet Union in the 1980’s. Sutherland plays Col. Fetisov, the one military officer who is sympathetic to the efforts of forensic specialist/detective Lt. Burakov (Stephen Rea) in trying to solve the case – the official Soviet position was that “serial killers” were an entirely Western phenomenon, and the government is more interested in locking up gays than in trying to find the real killer – though he does so by pragmatism and even blackmail while Burakov has no talent for dealing with bureaucracy, at least at first. Sutherland, of course, had played this type of part before, but what was especially notable was the sharpness and humor he brought to it (when Burakov, late in the movie, actually butters Fetisov up in order to get what he wants, Fetisov dryly notes, “I’ve created a monster”), and he also underplayed his character’s hidden decency as well. Arguably the best scene in the movie is after communism collapsed, and Fetisov tells Burakov they are now free to conduct the investigation the way Burakov has wanted to all along. Rea has the showier role here in that his character breaks down in tears – though it’s understandable, and he doesn’t overdo it – but Sutherland perfectly compliments him, especially when he’s retelling an FBI agent’s praise of Burakov.

Sutherland deservedly won his first Golden Globe (for Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Mini-Series, or Made-For-TV Movie) for his performance here. Claude and I did an episode about Robert Towne’s Without Limits, where Sutherland played Oregon track and field coach Bill Bowerman, and he was nominated for a Golden Globe for that performance as well. Again, the role shows off his humor (as when Steve Prefontaine [Billy Crudup], frustrated by all the orders Bowerman is giving him, asks if he thinks there’s such a thing as over-coaching, and Bowerman deadpans, “Yeah…I’m against it”) and his ability to underplay (as when he tells Pre about his relationship with his wife (Judith Ivey), whom he doesn’t understand but loves anyway).

With Billy Crudup in Without Limits.

Nothing Sutherland did after Towne’s unjustly neglected film was quite as memorable, although he had a few bright spots. When Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys, about four aging astronauts (Eastwood, Sutherland, Tommy Lee Jones and James Garner) who go into space on a mission, is a comedy, it’s on sure ground (it loses its way when it becomes an action movie in the second half), and Sutherland is a hoot as lech (when Blair Brown, as a doctor, comes in while the four are naked, the other three all try to cover themselves, while Sutherland stands still with a smile on his face and tries to flirt with her). Playing another mentor – albeit a twisted one – in Panic, another unjustly neglected film (written and directed by the late Henry Bromell), he’s quite chilling as the father of reluctant professional killer William H. Macy.

Though he doesn’t give the standout performance in John Frankenheimer’s last film, the made-for-HBO road-to-Vietnam docudrama Path to War – Alec Baldwin, as Robert McNamara, has never been better in a dramatic performance  – Sutherland is very good as Clark Clifford, the close adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson (Michael Gambon), and one who, like many others, parted ways with the President over Vietnam. Joe Wright’s adaptation of the classic Jane Austen novel Pride & Prejudice wasn’t well received by many Austen fans for being grittier than Austen adaptations usually are, but Sutherland is very good as Mr. Bennet, especially in the scene near the end when Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) tells him she wants to marry Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), and Sutherland also brings a dry humor to the role.

And whatever you think of the Hunger Games movies, Sutherland was appropriately creepy as totalitarian leader President Snow who nevertheless thinks he’s the one who knows best. I also liked the movies Cold Mountain, the remake of The Italian Job, and to a lesser extent, Reign Over Me, but admittedly, his work in those films was more routine, if watchable. Still, even if he never found a role, or movie, as good as his best work (which, IMHO, is M*A*S*H, the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ordinary People, Citizen X, and Without Limits), overall, Sutherland, in a career spanning 60 years, was one of the best actors who ever lived. Not bad for someone who supposedly didn’t look like he lived next door to anybody.

With Kate Bush in her music video for “Cloudbusting”.

*-One area Sutherland did sometimes struggle with in his acting was in expressing anger. He could either be merely self-righteous, as in A Dry White Season, or monotonous, as he was in playing an evil army general in Wolfgang Peterson’s disease thriller Outbreak.(click here to go back)

**-For my money, the best thing Sutherland appeared in during the 80’s was Kate Bush’s music video for her song “Cloudbusting”, where he played Wilhelm Reich. (click here to go back)

There Will Be Blood (2007) – Review

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) makes his pitch with his “partner” H.W. (Dillon Freasier).

When he was promoting his solo album Nothing Like the Sun, Sting gave an interview to Rolling Stone. One of the questions he was asked was why he had turned away from the type of music he had made with The Police, and instead towards what the interviewer seemed to criticize as “art rock”, to which Sting replied, “Having made some of the simplest and most direct pop music, I don’t know whether I want to do it again.” I wonder if something similar happened to Paul Thomas Anderson. In his first four feature films, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson had told stories that were emotionally direct, using bravura filmmaking and what seemed to be a deep, empathetic connection to, and understanding of, his characters, as well as of pop culture, to draw you into the characters and world he was depicting. However, after Punch-Drunk Love failed at the box office (despite being well received by critics), Anderson seemed to go in a completely different direction in his films after that. His movies have become more emotionally distant, especially in how the main characters are portrayed (the bravura filmmaking style has remained, though)*. Also, as it happens, the next four movies Anderson made since Punch-Drunk Love centered on conflict between two characters, which also is a conflict of two completely different world views, and they get resolved differently in each film. Finally, while Boogie Nights was a period piece, the other films in Anderson’s more direct period are set in the present day, but his last five films are all period films, set (mostly) in different times of the 20th century. Normally, of course, I prefer movies that hit me on an emotional level, but I’ve liked all of the movies Anderson has made since he went in this new direction, especially the first one he did, There Will Be Blood.

Eli Sunday (Paul Dano).

Loosely adapted on the novel Oil! by muckraking socialist writer Upton Sinclair (Anderson has said he only used the first 150 pages of the novel’s 528 pages, but he does borrow such elements as a preacher character, a father/son conflict, and a character loosely based on tycoon Edward L. Doheny), the film starts in 1898 New Mexico, where Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) starts out as a silver prospector. Over the next several minutes of the film, there’s almost no dialogue as we see Plainview break his leg and endure various other failures before he finally strikes it rich, not only in silver but, a few years later, oil. During this time, he also adopts the young baby son of one of his workers when the worker dies in a drilling accident. By the time 1911 rolls around (about 14-15 minutes into the film), Plainview has a small but successful company, and goes from town to town in California, presenting his adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his “partner” so he can present himself as a family man (his real partner is Fletcher Hamilton (Ciaran Hinds)), to get people to let him drill for oil near their lands. One such piece of land Plainview goes to is in Little Boston, California, where the Sunday family lives. Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), one of the sons of the patriarch, Abel Sunday (David Willis), had already alerted Plainview to the oil around the land in exchange for a price. When Plainview visits the family, Paul’s twin brother Eli (Dano, who replaced original actor Kel O’Neill two weeks into shooting), a preacher, forces Plainview to agree to spending more money than he wanted, but Plainview ends up getting the land, except for a farm nearby owned by William Bandy (Hans Howes). The already frosty relationship between Plainview and Eli deteriorates even further when Plainview breaks his promise to let Eli bless the ground before drilling commences, and accidents happen during drilling, including a blowout that causes H.W. to lose his hearing. Plainview eventually does get a pipeline built and rights to Bandy’s land, but is forced to humiliate himself at one of Eli’s services by making a public repentance of his sins. Plainview becomes even further alienated when a man name Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor) shows up, claiming to be his brother, only for that to not be the case.

Plainview sits while his oil field burns.

Sinclair’s novel focused on the son and was along his usual lines of critiquing capitalism. Anderson seems to do the latter, except that by shifting the focus to Plainview, he’s doing it from the inside. Anderson has said he took inspiration from John Huston’s classic tale of greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and you could argue Plainview is cut from the same cloth as Humphrey Bogart’s character, Fred C. Dobbs, is Dobbs had survived but had become even more paranoid and isolated than he was. There’s also a bit of Michael Corleone in there, especially in how, as Coppola did in the first two Godfather films, Anderson is tracing the gradual fall of someone. The major difference, of course, is we saw Michael’s humanity before his fall, while there’s very little of that in Plainview (as he tells Henry, when he thinks he’s his brother, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people”), except maybe his relationship with H.W.

Sunday forces Plainview to publicly confess his sins.

On the opposite side is Eli Sunday, and if Plainview represents the logical endpoint of unchecked greed in business, Eli represents his opposite number when it comes to religion. Eli may seem at first to be a lowly preacher, but in his own way, he’s as sick in the soul as Plainview is. Whereas Plainview at least tries to charm the people he’s trying to do business with, Eli, while at first trying to be charming, is out to pretty much browbeat them into submission. He does have a calm exterior at first, but underneath burns a fury that comes out when he feels he’s been betrayed, and that especially comes out in the scene where Plainview reluctantly agrees to repent for what Eli claims to be his sins. Eli is almost possessed as he goads Plainview into confessing that he abandoned H.W. (part of what makes the scene so powerful is the suggestion you get from Day-Lewis that he’s right). And when Eli goes to try and extort money from Plainview near the end, his breakdown is just as dramatic, and as chilling to watch, as Plainview’s is.

The infamous “I drink your milkshake!” scene.

Unlike his previous period piece, Boogie Nights, which luxuriated in period detail from the late 70’s and early 80’s, the world Anderson depicts here is pretty sparse. Production designer Jack Fisk and cinematographer Robert Elswit emphasize the barren nature of the California landscape, and Elswit uses a lot of low lighting, especially in the night scenes with Plainview. Anderson and Elswit haven’t abandoned tracking shots, of course; there’s a terrific one at the blowout where H.W. loses his hearing, and we see Plainview running back with him. But for the most part, they use a lot of close and medium shots; even though the movie is of epic length (158 minutes long), this is a character study first and foremost, and those close-ups and medium shots are a way of peering at those characters up close. The score by Johnny Greenwood (of Radiohead fame) is also very different from your normal period film; even though he uses orchestras to play his music (the BBC Concert Orchestra, to be precise), Greenwood emphasizes dissonant sounds, especially in the scenes where Plainview first strikes oil, and the closing credits. This perfectly captures the emotional states of the characters. That’s also true of the classical pieces Greenwood uses in the movie, such as Brahms’ Third Movement of his Violin Concerto in D Major and Arvo Part’s “Fratres for Cello and Piano”.

Day-Lewis with Paul Thomas Anderson.

Day-Lewis won his second Best Actor Oscar for his performance here (his first was for My Left Foot; he’d win his third for Lincoln), though he also had a lot of detractors for what people saw as a hammy performance (one of my co-workers at the last video store I worked at especially felt this way). I, however, thought it was riveting, and worked for the character. Day-Lewis is broadcasting his charm to hide the fact it’s facile, which is what many people who are trying too hard do (people who are naturally tough don’t have to act that way). Where he’s subtle is in showing how the hatred inside him is eating away at him inside, and that’s done mostly through his eyes. Dano may not be Day-Lewis’ equal in acting stature, but he holds his own in their scenes together, and carries himself not only as a preacher, but as a sham. To counterbalance Day-Lewis and Dano playing big, there’s a stillness to Freasier in his performance, even before his character goes deaf (as an adult, H.W. is played by Russell Harvard, an actual deaf actor). And the dependable O’Connor and Hinds are also very good. I can understand those who felt left behind at the direction Anderson went with starting with There Will Be Blood, but I think it may be his best work.

*-Only the main character of Inherent Vice is someone who can be seen as accessible. With his most recent film, Licorice Pizza, Anderson seems to have returned to more accessible characters and more emotionally direct films.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madres (1948) – Review

Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), Howard (Walter Huston), and Curtin (Tim Holt).

John Huston made all kinds of movies, from film noir (The Maltese Falcon), to war movies (The Red Badge of Courage), to heist movies (The Asphalt Jungle), to romantic adventures (The African Queen), to sports movies (Fat City), to religious movies (Wise Blood), and even a musical (Annie). The one type of story he seemed to have been drawn to more than anything else, however, is a character’s quest after something, be it treasure (The Maltese Falcon), love (Reflections in a Golden Eye), a white whale (Moby Dick), or home (The Asphalt Jungle), and while the quest has usually been futile, Huston usually finds something noble or honorable in the quest, especially the futility of it, even when undertaken by less than honorable people. One of the best films Huston ever made along those lines was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which he also adapted from the novel by B. Traven (a mysterious figure no one was able to identify).

John Huston as the man Dobbs hits up three times for money.

In 1920’s Mexico, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Curtin (Tim Holt) are two Americans living hand-to-mouth (Huston cameos as another American Dobbs hits up for money three times), including getting work from Pat McCormack (Barton MacLane), a corrupt businessman who has no intention of paying them (at least until they beat him up). One day, they run into Howard (Walter Huston), an elderly prospector who tells them he knows where there’s gold, and he’s willing to go after it, but only if he has partners. When Dobbs wins the lottery, he and Holt now have the funds to go in, and they agree to go with Howard to a spot he’s told them about. At first, it’s slow going, and Dobbs and Curtin are ready to quit, until Howard points them in the right direction. They get enough gold they can dream about what they’ll do with it – Howard just wants a store of his own, while Curtin wants an orchard farm, and Dobbs just wants to spend it all – but there are outside forces to deal with. For starters, there’s Cody (Bruce Bennett), another prospector, whom they become suspicious of. There’s also a group of Mexican bandits, led by Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya), whom they tangle with. Most importantly, however, Dobbs starts getting paranoid about the others, especially Curtin, taking his gold away from him.

Dobbs as he becomes increasingly paranoid.

Huston wasn’t often known for his visual sense, as just about every movie he made was an adaptation, and he saw himself as serving the material. However, he and cinematographer Ted D. McCord (a veteran of 20 years whose most distinguished credit before this was Action in the North Atlantic, a so-so WWII movie starring Bogart) do a good job of showing the harshness of the Mexican landscape, which helps contribute to the way the characters, especially Dobbs, are affected by their pursuit of the gold. Unlike many other Hollywood movies of the time, Huston actually casts Mexican actors as Mexicans (though not always; Robert Blake plays the boy who sells the lottery ticket to Bogart), and we hear Spanish spoken by them amongst themselves. Huston, who actually lived in Mexico for a long time, seems to know the territory, and the people well. Some critics then and now complained about Max Steiner’s score being too melodramatic and intrusive, but it’s so well-written and catchy it doesn’t bother me. Huston also handles the theme of greed and how it changes men well without being heavy-handed about it. He’s helped, of course, by the acting. Bogart and Walter Huston weren’t the type of actors who could disappear into their roles, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t good actors, or capable of subtlety. Watch the scene when Dobbs says they should kill Cody, and Howard conveys he’s against it but not willing to argue about it, or the scene where Dobbs finds out what he thought had happened didn’t actually happen. Holt was never the greatest actor, but he holds his own against Bogart and the elder Huston. Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a direct influence on films such as Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (which Claude and I discuss in Part 2 of our latest episode), but it stands out on its own.

A Most Wanted Man (2014) – Review

Gunther Bachman (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Though I obviously have no problem ranking my favorite films (even though I sometimes struggle with the order, as well as whether I can limit it to 10 favorites per year), and I also don’t have an issue with ranking individual performances, I’m not really good at ranking individual actors in their overall careers. Nevertheless, I can probably say my favorite actor of my generation (born around the same time) is Philip Seymour Hoffman, even though he’s been dead for several years. While there have been times I thought his performances fell short (State and Main, Jack Goes Boating), or he was wasted on the role (Moneyball), he was never bad, even if I didn’t like the film he was in (Happiness, The Ides of March). More to the point, Hoffman was great in so many great films, including his last major leading role, in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man, adapted by Andrew Bovell from the novel by John le Carre.

Gunther with Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams).

As with the novel, the film is set in Hamburg, which had been where many of the people who helped plan the attacks on 9/11 had gathered for a time. Therefore, German and American governments are on the lookout for anyone who might be suspicious. So, when Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a Muslim son of a Russian father (a colonel) and Chechen mother, comes into Hamburg without documents concerning his identity, only with a letter and key concerning money in a bank that belongs to him, the German and American governments start watching him, particularly Gunther Bachman (Hoffman), a German intelligence officer who believes Issa can be pointed towards Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a Muslim scholar who preaches against Arab terrorist acts, but whom Gunther suspects is intentionally (or perhaps unintentionally) funding terrorist groups, including those involved in 9/11. While Issa gets taken in by a Muslim family, and they in turn approach Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), a human rights lawyer – who, in turn, approaches Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), a banker who handles the money that’s due Issa – Gunther tries to set up Issa, with the (reluctant) help of Annabel and Tommy, so he can approach Dr. Abdullah, and the help of his team, including Irna (Nina Hoss), Gunther’s right hand, and Max (Daniel Bruhl). At the same time, Gunther is also trying to keep those who simply want to round up Issa and Dr. Abdullah at bay, including Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bock), Gunther’s superior, and Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), a CIA liaison whom Gunther has a history with.

Gunther with Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright).

As a character, Gunther should be a familiar type to any le Carre fan; you could imagine le Carre, or his agent or publisher, asking the question, “What if George Smiley was involved in the War on Terror?” Gunther believes that spying involves patience (or, as a character in “The Russia House” puts it, “Spying is waiting”), checking facts and intelligence against other sources, recruiting sources, following people for long periods of time before moving in on them, and in general, avoiding the smash and grab routine of the CIA and his superiors. Gunther also doesn’t believe Karpov is a menace, unlike Dieter, and while he’s not above playing bad cop with Annabel to get her to work with him (Irna plays good cop), he wants her, and Tommy, to work with him, not against him, to help keep Issa safe. Le Carre’s novel, while being a pointed critique against the way the U.S. operated during the War on Terror, concentrated more on Issa, Annabel and Tommy, with Gunther merely being an equal among them. You could argue by pulling the focus towards Gunther, Corbijn and Bovell are marginalizing Issa and the other Muslim characters, but I don’t think they treat Issa and Dr. Abdullah in a clichéd way, and there’s certainly a lot to be gained from critiquing the War on Terror from the inside, in seeing how gathering intelligence should be done by people who know how. Corbijn’s previous film, The American, also dealt with that type of world, but while it featured a sharp performance by George Clooney in the title role, Corbijn didn’t have a handle on the story the way he does here. He and cinematographer Benoit Delhomme don’t light the movie like a usual spy movie, but they do capture how tense the atmosphere is, as well as the divide between the haves (Tommy) and the have-nots (the family Issa stays with). I also give Corbijn full credit for not compromising the ending, which is even more of a gut-punch than it was in the novel.

Gunther with Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe).

Bruhl, best known here for his work in Inglourious Basterds and Captain America: Civil War, doesn’t have a lot to do here, but he’s convincing as an intelligence officer and electronics expert. Hoss, best known for the films she’s done with director Christian Petzold, brings strength and intelligence to Irna, and she keeps up well with Hoffman. Wright is able to keep you guessing throughout of her motives. McAdams’ German accent is a bit shaky at times, but she carries herself well as the lawyer, and she’s especially good when Annabel is with Issa and trying not to reveal she’s been recruited by Gunther. And Dafoe is dependable as always. But it’s Hoffman’s show here. He looks ragged here, which fits the character (who seems to live on coffee, cigarettes and booze), but you can always see his mind working, and he even brings a bit of humor to the role (when Martha asks if his being in Hamburg is punishment for his networks being blown in Berlin, he replies, “Depends on whether you like Hamburg”). A Most Wanted Man may not be as morally complex as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but it hits you on a gut level just the same, and it gave one of the best actors of all time a great role to end his career on, even if it was sadly cut short.