The Godfather Archives - Words and Movies Podcast

R.I.P., Robert Duvall

As Boo Radley in *To Kill a Mockingbird*.

It remains one of the great screen entrances in movie history.

Near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, director Robert Mulligan’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s controversial novel (adapted by Horton Foote), Jem (Philip Alford) is taking his sister Scout (Mary Badham) home from a school pageant when they’re attacked by Bob Ewell (James “Buddy” Anderson), a man who swore he’d get even with their father Atticus (Gregory Peck) for humiliating him in court (by showing he beat up and possibly raped his daughter, even though Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man, was convicted of the crime). Sheriff Heck Tate (Frank Overton) questions Scout about what happened (Jem is unconscious after he broke his arm trying to protect Scout), and while Scout was limited by what she could see because of her costume, she tells the sheriff another man fought off Ewell, and looking around the room, she points to the corner behind the door, and says, “There he is, Mr. Tate, he can tell you his name.” She (and we) see a pale man with blond hair who looks wild and possibly unstable, but turns out to be less threatening than he appears, even smiling at Scout when she smiles and says, “Hey, Boo,” as she recognizes the man she and Jem have been trying to flush out for a long time. As it turns out, when it comes to Boo, while plenty of myths had sprung up about Boo, appearances prove to be deceiving, and Robert Duvall, who played Boo and who died on February 16 at the age of 95, made a specialty out of playing those types of characters.

Like Gene Hackman, one of his friends and contemporaries starting out, Duvall started out in the military (though he came by it from his father being in the Navy), joining the army when he was a private in the Army after the Korean War ended, though he would later make light about his service, saying he barely qualified as a private, first class. Besides, he would also claim the only thing he was good at, and the only thing he ever wanted to do, was act. He ended up going to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in the 1950’s, along with classmates like Hackman, James Caan, and Dustin Hoffman. Unlike Hoffman, who became a devotee of Lee Strasberg (arguably the most controversial teacher at the Actor’s Studio), Duvall became a pupil of Sanford Meisner, who taught his students (who also included Caan, Diane Keaton and Sydney Pollack) to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances, and worry more about listening to the other actors rather than using affective memory (Strasberg’s method). It was a method Duvall took to heart.

While rooming with Hackman and Hoffman, Duvall worked in both stage and on TV to pay the bills, but it was while he was at the Playhouse that he made the first of many associations throughout his career, with writer Horton Foote. A playwright who also ending up writing for TV, it was Foote who ended up recommending Duvall for the part of Boo Radley. Though he didn’t speak a single line of dialogue, and was only visible at the end, the success of the film (while it wasn’t a blockbuster, it made back over six times its budget, it was well-reviewed – though Pauline Kael, and in a retrospective review, Roger Ebert both said it was flawed – and was nominated for several Oscars, winning Best Actor for Peck) enabled Duvall to work steadily in film. Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1965), for me, is an overheated mess (though Penn and producer Sam Spiegel quarreled through filmmaking and Spiegel took the movie away from Penn in the editing room), but Duvall manages to stay realistic as the cuckolded husband of Janice Rule. Duvall had the small but crucial role of a cabbie who drives Steve McQueen around in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968). Although Duvall did not get along with director Henry Hathaway when making True Grit (1969), he’s one of the best parts of the movie as the outlaw Ned Pepper who nonetheless treats Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), the young woman out to avenge her father’s death, with respect.

It was around this time that Duvall made two more important professional associations. First was Robert Altman, who directed Duvall, Caan and Michael Murphy in Countdown (1967), a drama where the three play astronauts involved in a race to the moon. As the movie was taken away from Altman in the editing room by Jack Warner (who didn’t like the way Altman was already using overlapping dialogue), you can see the interference, but Duvall is certainly convincing as an astronaut. In 1969, Duvall made his second important professional association when he appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People as a motorcycle cop who finds himself in conflict with Caan (as a mentally challenged former football player) over a runaway housewife (Shirley Knight). I’ve never been a big fan of the movie – Coppola depicts both Caan and Knight’s characters in a simple-minded manner – but Duvall perks up the movie when he shows up, again by bringing a note of realism to the proceedings. It was his second movie with Altman, however, that got him even more attention, M*A*S*H (1970). While the movie may not be as well-remembered today as the long-running TV sitcom spin-off, it was the biggest hit of Altman’s career, allowing him to make movies without interference. Oddly enough, Duvall seems at first to be out of place here, playing the holier-than-thou Major Frank Burns realistically, rather than as the comic villain Larry Linville played on the show, but while his character exits the movie about halfway through, it ends up being a gamble that pays off, as he’s still the type of character Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) is rebelling against (Duvall himself enjoyed making the film, not only because he liked the freedom Altman provided him and the other actors, but because he thought it was funny).

After appearing that same year in Paul Williams’ The Revolutionary, where he played the working-class leader of a revolutionary group joined by a radicalized college student played by Jon Voight (an odd fit for Duvall, given his real-life conservative politics, though he did his best with an unwritten role), Duvall teamed up with Coppola’s friend George Lucas for the futuristic drama THX 1138 (1971), a dystopian movie where he plays the title character, an android who gets involved with a female (Maggie McOmie) even though it’s against the law. Lucas’ movie didn’t do well when it came out with critics or audiences when it first came out, and it’s certainly a cold movie, but it’s a compelling one, and Duvall is one of the reasons it works so well. It was his second movie with Coppola, The Godfather (1972), that made Duvall a name.

As Tom Hagen in the first Godfather movie.

When Claude and I talked about the Godfather trilogy, we concentrated on the work Gordon Willis did in photographing the trilogy, especially the famous wedding sequence that opens the first movie. However, we also talked about how, while Sofia Coppola’s performance as Mary in the third movie received the most criticism, it was the absence of Duvall as Corleone lawyer (and adopted son) Tom Hagen that hurt the third movie the most (Duvall decided not to return because they wouldn’t pay him enough). While Al Pacino (as Michael Corleone) gave my favorite performance in the trilogy (and his performance in the second movie is my favorite performance of all time), and Marlon Brando (as Vito in Part 1) and Robert De Niro (as Vito in Part 2) both won Oscars for their work, in a way, Duvall’s work as Hagen is the most crucial to the first two movies. Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) recognizes Tom isn’t in the violence end of the business, but he (and Coppola) also recognize the fact Tom is basically running that business, especially in the first movie when Vito gets shot. Tom may be affected by Vito getting shot like everyone else (and he’s certainly affected when Sonny gets killed), but he’s able to deal with the possibility of his loss in a completely dispassionate manner, just as he’s able to deal with Kay (Keaton) in both movies (when he wants to get in touch with Michael after he’s fled the country in the first movie, or leave the compound in the second) and a senate committee in the second movie (when Michael is being interrogated about his activities). Perhaps the best illustration of this comes in the second movie, when he visits Senator Geary (G.D. Spradlin), who had earlier threatened to squeeze Michael out of Nevada, in his bedroom when he’s been framed for murdering a prostitute. Tom is soothing towards the senator even as it’s obvious he’s also blackmailing him, and Duvall is able to embody smooth cruelty very well.

The same year Duvall appeared in the first Godfather movie, he also appeared in Phil Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), his second movie western (after True Grit), which became his favorite genre. In this one, he plays Jesse James to Cliff Robertson’s Cole Younger, and while it travels well-worn territory, it’s a good movie, and allows Duvall to show more intensity than he had up to that point. It still wasn’t a leading role, but Duvall got his chance on that the following year with The Outfit, John Flynn’s underrated version of Donald E. Westlake’s Richard Stark novel. Unlike Point Blank, John Boorman’s baroque adaptation of the first Start novel (The Hunter) – which works as both allegory and crime film – Flynn’s movie is lean and mean, keeping in line with what Duvall does as Macklin (the Parker figure in the movie), who goes after the mob for killing his brother. Duvall’s isn’t the only memorable performance in the movie – there’s also Joe Don Baker (as Macklin’s friend Cody), Robert Ryan (as the main bad guy), Timothy Carey (as an associate of Ryan’s), Marie Windsor (as a bartender), Jane Greer (as Macklin’s sister-in-law), Richard Jaeckel (as a mechanic who knew Macklin’s brother) and Sheree North (as the mechanic’s wife) – but Duvall does a terrific job in both the action scenes and the dramatic ones (especially when he tries to comfort his sister-in-law while she makes it clear she wants nothing to do with him).

After a memorable cameo as The Director in Coppola’s The Conversation (which Coppola did in between the first two Godfather movies), Duvall teamed up again with James Caan in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite, which is ostensibly about to intelligence contractors who start out as friends but end up rivals, but which works best as an allegory about Peckinpah’s troubles with studios, and Duvall and Caan work well together. I don’t feel right taking about Duvall’s next two movies, The Eagle Has Landed (John Sturges’ adaptation of the Jack Higgins novel about a (fictional) plot to kidnap Churchill) and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (Herbert Ross’ adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s revisionist Sherlock Holmes novel) because I haven’t seen them in a long time and barely remember them, though I remember Duvall being restrained again as Dr. Watson. It was in Sidney Lumet’s Network (which Claude and I also already talked about) that allowed Duvall to show what he could do when he went over-the-top, as he did when his character, television executive Frank Hackett, was butting heads with Max Schumacher (William Holden) and Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), though he also shows restraint when he and Diana are discussing what to do with controversial news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) at the end in a business-like tone, making him all the more horrifying.

After another small cameo (in Kaufman’s 1979 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Duvall went over-the-top again in what is arguably best-known performance, as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s attempt to take Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness and transplant it to the Vietnam War. Whatever you think of the movie – I think it works brilliantly until Marlon Brando shows up at the end as Kurtz; I think his performance only makes sense in Coppola’s Redux version – Duvall’s performance is undeniably a high point, as he commands the screen during the entire time Kilgore appears, whether he’s chewing out an interpreter for refusing to feed water to a prisoner (“Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped to him can drink from my canteen any day!”) to when he leads an air strike on a village just so his idol Lance (Sam Bottoms) can go surfing in the water by it (“Charlie don’t surf!”) to his most famous speech in the movie, when he’s telling his troops about an earlier mission he once fought in (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”). Also in 1979 (though it wasn’t released in theaters until 1980) was one of the roles closest to Duvall’s heart, as Bull Meechum in The Great Santini, Lewis John Carlino’s adaptation of Patrick Conroy’s novel. Meechum is another military character, a Marine lieutenant in 1962 South Carolina, who is in conflict with his superior officers and his oldest son Ben (Michael O’Keefe). Much of the movie feels like warmed-over Southern melodrama, but again, Duvall holds the screen, especially in the movie’s most famous scene, a basketball scene between Bull and Ben where Bull refuses to declare Ben the winner. Duvall never sentimentalizes Bull, yet you can see how afraid he is of no longer being number 1.

After Duvall and De Niro both appeared in The Godfather Part II (though, of course, they didn’t share any scenes together), the two appeared together as brothers in True Confessions (1981), Ulu Grosbard’s film version of the novel by John Gregory Dunne (who also wrote the screenplay with his wife Joan). Loosely based on the infamous “Black Dahlia” murder (later immortalized in James Ellroy’s novel of the same name), the movie casts Duvall as the police detective brother of De Niro’s priest character. The first time I saw this movie, I couldn’t get into it, but when I watched it again recently, while I think Grosbard and Dunne weren’t able to stick the landing, I found the movie compelling otherwise. Duvall again has the role that allows him to go over-the-top, but he does so in character, nicely paired with De Niro’s underplaying.

As Mac (with Tess Harper as Rosa Lee in the background) in Tender Mercies.

1983 saw Duvall hit two milestones in his career. The first is when he won his only Oscar for best acting for his performance in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies, written by Foote, where he played Mac, an alcoholic country singer (a genre Duvall was a fan of in real life) trying to connect with both Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), a widow and single mother. and with his estranged daughter Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin). Although this is one of the few Beresford movies I like (the others being Crimes of the Heart and Black Robe), he doesn’t give enough charge to the material, so it doesn’t go as deep as it should. Fortunately, though he and Duvall apparently didn’t get along during the making of the movie, he trusts Duvall, who is not only believable as a singer, but also as an alcoholic trying to put his life back together again. That same year, Duvall also made his feature directorial debut (he had earlier directed a documentary about a rodeo family called We’re Not the Jet Set) with Angelo, My Love. Duvall said he was inspired to make this movie about the gypsy subculture when he was walking to the theater and overheard a young boy saying, “Patricia. if you don’t love me no more, I’m gonna move to Cincinnati!” The result was an uneven but compelling look at the gypsy subculture in the U.S., showing Duvall’s curiosity about that subculture (the plot, involving two rivals, is the weak part of the film, with the portrayal of the subculture the best part).

Like many actors and directors who gained attention in the 1970’s, Duvall, though he worked steadily, wasn’t always able to find good roles in movies worthy of his talents, though with rare exceptions, he was good in whatever he appeared in. One of his rare missteps, in my opinion, came in The Natural (1984), Barry Levinson’s adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s novel, though, to be fair, no one comes off well in that movie for me except Wilford Brimley, Glenn Close, and Barbara Hershey (by casting Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, Levinson turned the story of an ordinary guy who could hit the hell out of a baseball into a Christ allegory). Duvall played Max Mercy, a reporter suspicious of Hobbs, and it’s one of the few times he played the characters as one-note, which hurt the film. Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988) and Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder (1990) both cast him as the wise older man serving as a mentor to a young hotshot (Sean Penn’s brash rookie police officer and Tom Cruise’s brash race car driver, respectively). At least in the former, whatever you may think of the portrayal of the drug war, Duvall (well-matched by Penn) makes the cliché of the old cop/young cop portrayal seem new again, whether he’s advising Penn on the best way to handle the gangs (with the tale of a bull advising his son on the best way to go after a herd of cows) or trying to defuse a situation with those gangs (Duvall comes off best with Trinidad Salva as the leader of a Mexican gang).

Though Volker Schlondorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), his adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, seems to be pushed aside thanks to the TV show adaptation, I think it’s an honest, if not entirely successful, movie, thanks mostly to Natasha Richardson’s performance in the main role, but one shouldn’t count out Duvall’s work as The Commander, who represents the patriarchy of the movie. Unlike what he did as Max in The Natural, Duvall doesn’t play The Commander as a mustache-twirling villain, but as a true believer, making him even more dangerous. Similarly, the following year, in Martha Coolidge’s Rambling Rose (1991), Duvall plays what seems to be a stock role – the patriarch who is simultaneously repulsed by, and obsessed with, the title character (Laura Dern) – and makes it come alive, especially in his scenes with Dern.

As Detective Prendergast in Falling Down.

Duvall always thought one of his best performances came in Randa Haines’ Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993), where he plays a retired Cuban barber who forms an unlikely friendship with a retired Irish sailor (Richard Harris). However, while I’ve liked Haines’ other movies (Children of a Lesser God), too often, it seems like the movie goes for easy moralizing, and Duvall gets stranded in that (it doesn’t help his Cuban accent isn’t convincing). Duvall comes off much better in two other movies that came out that year. Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down is best remembered today as a movie about the angry white man, though I don’t know if the movie is endorsing what D-Fens (Michael Douglas) is doing or appalled at what he’s doing. What I do know is the movie snaps into focus every time Duvall appears on screen as Prendergast, a detective on his last day investigating the carnage D-Fens has perpetuated. A man who’s scorned by his colleagues for being out of touch, and with a sickly wife (Tuesday Weld) whom he loves but can’t please, Duvall makes Prendergast someone who still retains knowledge and a moral code, yet never sentimentalizes him (watch his final scene with D-Fens’ daughter, when he claims his name will be Mud after his wife finds out he’s not quitting after all, or his scene with D-Fens where he tells D-Fens his troubles. Though there are many fans these days of Walter Hill’s Geronimo: An American Legend (from that same year), I’m not one of them, as this is yet another film about a non-white character (played well by Wes Studi in the title role) through the eyes of a white character (played by Matt Damon, back when I didn’t think much of him as an actor), and the one scene between Duvall (as Al Sieber, who tracks Native Americans for the U.S. Cavalry) and his friend Hackman (as Brigadier General George Crook) comes off flat. Nevertheless, Duvall is very good as the crafty Sieber, who is racist towards Native Americans, though he has a grudging respect towards Geronimo.

As editor-in-chief Bernie White (with Glenn Close as managing editor Alicia Clark) in The Paper.

Except for another misfire, as Demi Moore’s cuckolded husband in Roland Joffe’s ill-advised Hawthorne adaptation The Scarlet Letter (1996), Duvall’s next few roles saw him take roles any actor of his age could have played and making them his own. Ron Howard’s The Paper (1994) intends to be a throwback to the fast-talking newspaper movies of the 1930’s and 40’s, and until it goes sentimental at the end, it mostly succeeds. As Bernie, the editor-in-chief of The New York Sun (which was fictional – then), Duvall gets saddled with the crusty old editor stereotype, one dealing with prostate cancer, as well as an estranged daughter (Jill Hennessy), but again, Duvall breaks through and makes it real, whether he’s pleading with his daughter to give him a chance, or commiserating with a city worker (Jason Alexander), not realizing the worker is gunning for one of Bernie’s reporters (Randy Quaid). He also keeps it real as Julia Roberts’ father in Lasse Hallstrom’s Something to Talk About (1995), who loves Roberts but gets exasperated by her sometimes. Duvall makes a sharp cameo appearance as the racist father of Karl (Billy Bob Thornton) in Sling Blade (1996), which Thornton also wrote and directed. And even though Jon Turteltaub’s Phenomenon (from that same year) is pretty much an apologia for Scientology, Duvall again lends a note of realism as a doctor friend of the main character, played by John Travolta.

Duvall followed that up with the third movie he ever directed, The Apostle (1997), which he also wrote, and always considered one of his best movies. i can’t quite get there – I think while it is accepting of other religions (E.F., the preacher character Duvall plays, goes to visit an all-black church and muses while they use different means, he and them essentially believe in the same thing), it’s also an apologia for fire-and-brimstone preaching, which I’m not a fan of. However, there’s little denying the charisma in Duvall’s performance, whether he’s leading his flock or talking down a racist (Thornton in a sharp cameo, returning the favor). You might have expected him to slow down after that, but the following year, he reteamed with Altman for The Gingerbread Man, a rare genre film for Altman where Duvall plays the hillbilly father of Embeth Davidtz, and is a lot craftier than meets the eye. That same year, Duvall was the best part of Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, where he gives his astronaut character (sent to stop an incoming comet heading to Earth) a dignity the movie doesn’t deserve, and Steve Zaillian’s A Civil Action, based on a true story, where he’s very good as Jerome Facher, the wily lawyer opposing personal injury lawyer Travolta suing the company Duvall represents because Travolta claims the company poisoned the water. Duvall’s best moments come when he’s advising other lawyers in the firm how to obfuscate their opponent’s case by yelling, “Objection!” whenever possible (Facher even does this when he wakes up while in court).

Duvall continued to work steadily in the next two decades (including directing his fourth movie, The Assassination Tango (2002), which I never saw, and his fifth and final movie, Wild Horses (2015), which I also never saw), often being better than the movies he was in, such as the remake of Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), The 6th Day (from the same year, teaming him with Arnold Schwarzenegger), Kicking & Screaming (2005) – the Will Farrell soccer movie, not the Noah Baumbach movie – Lucky You (2007), We Own the Night (the same year), Crazy Heart (2009), The Road (the same year), Jack Reacher (2012), and The Judge (2014). Of the movies he did during this time, the only one I saw that I didn’t like was Thank You for Smoking (2005), Jason Reitman’s smug satire, and the two I liked the best were Aaron Schneider’s Get Low (2009) and Steve McQueen’s Widows (2013). For the former, he plays a hermit who requests a funeral party from the bemused Bill Murray, and again takes a conceit and makes it real, especially when Duvall’s character, Felix Bush, reconnects with Mattie (Sissy Spacek). For the latter, he plays the racist father of Colin Farrell’s candidate for alderman, and digs deep into the hateful nature of his character, again without sentimentalizing him. This was the last movie Duvall made that I saw, and it’s one of his best.

As Gus McCrae (with Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow Call) in Lonesome Dove.

One genre Duvall returned to time and again, ever since True Grit, was the Western, and it was a genre he felt a particular affinity for (in an interview he gave late in his life, Duvall praised The Sopranos in comparison to the Godfather films, saying he thought the show got mobsters right, but was dismissive of Deadwood in relation to Westerns. I have not seen the latter, so I can’t comment), both in movies (Open Range) and on TV (Broken Trail). It was in a Western that Duvall gave one of his favorite performances, and my favorite performance of his, Lonesome Dove, adapted by director Simon Wincer and writer William Wittliff from the novel by Larry McMurtry. Duvall plays Augustus “Gus” McCrae, a retired Texas ranger living in the title town (a small town in Texas) who is content to do nothing more than drink, banter with whoever wants to banter with him (and even those who don’t, like best friend and fellow Texas Ranger Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones), play cards, and buy time with prostitute Lorena Wood (Diane Lane). That’s until Jake Spoon (Robert Urich), another former Texas Ranger, comes to town while on the lam (for murder) and charms Lorena (into joining him) and Woodrow into driving the cattle he and Gus have all the way to Montana. Gus reluctantly joins along for the ride, which doesn’t turn out the way anyone expects.

Claude and I discussed this mini-series, which will air in a future episode, but what I want to emphasize is Duvall’s performance. Originally, Duvall was approached to play Woodrow, but Duvall’s then-wife Gail Youngs thought he should play Gus instead, and Duvall agreed, saying he had played parts like Woodrow already. While I occasionally wonder what it would have been like if Duvall and Jones had switched roles, I certainly agree Duvall is terrific as Gus. I also think while there’s definitely a gadfly nature to Gus that Duvall brings out (Gus etches out a Latin motto on his and Woodrow’s cattle company sign – “Uva Uvam Vivendo Varia Fit”, which is incorrect, by the way – and says any bandit who knows what it means is welcome to rob them), and Duvall is also good at showing how Gus is lazy enough to give the Dude a run for his money. However, there’s a lot more to Gus than that, and Duvall brings that out as well, such as the way he can handle himself in a fight (when Woodrow nearly beats a cavalry officer to death because the officer was beating Newt – who, though Woodrow won’t admit it, is his biological son – it’s Gus who manages to calm Woodrow down), his sentimental side (he starts weeping when he comes across a meadow where he and Clara (Anjelica Huston), the only woman he ever loved, once had a picnic), and his soft side (he’s the one who comforts Lorena after he rescues her from Blue Duck (Frederick Forest), who had kidnapped her and let her out to be raped). Duvall ended up winning a Golden Globe for his performance, and while I think Jones should have won (the series, and the novel, is really a tragedy in Western form about Woodrow), Duvall deserved the win. Even though he worked plenty before and after, Duvall’s performance as Gus is, for me, the crowning work of his long and illustrious career.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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).

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.