8 Million Ways to Die (1986)

I’m an ex-cop. Los Angeles. Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges) is a part of LAPD’s Sheriff’s Department and he takes part in a drugs bust that goes badly wrong with his colleagues beaten to death. Six months after the internal investigation he’s in Alcoholics Anonymous celebrating his pin for sobriety but his marriage is gone, his daughter lives with his wife and he’s picking up private eye work from his meetings. A request from a call girl Sunny (Alexandra Paul) brings him back into contact with a drug dealer Willie ‘Chance’ Walker (Randy Brooks) he used to know from the streets who’s now running a flash gambling club where he has a business arrangement with Angel Maldonado (Andy Garcia) who himself has an ongoing interest in another one of the prostitutes, Sarah (Rosanna Arquette). When Sunny turns up at his home looking for help because she’s being threatened Matt agrees but she’s abducted and brutally murdered and he’s too late to help. He wakes up in a detox ward and signs himself out. When he finds evidence against one or other of the men at the club in Sunny’s Filofax, he embarks on a quest for vengeance aided by the discovery of a jewel and a mountain of cocaine while Sarah accompanies him and tries to seduce him before agreeing to help … You’re not a mindless lush after all. Adapted (somewhat) from Lawrence Block’s fantastic New York City-set novel, the fifth in the Matt Scudder series, this was a disappointment on several levels. Oliver Stone did the first pass (and more), with R. Lance Hill (writing as David Lee Henry) then went off to direct a film of his own, so Robert Towne was prevailed upon by director Hal Ashby to do a rewrite but took so long the production was already shooting and changes made on the hoof with improvisation by the cast by the time his pages started arriving. Unrelenting and cliched in ways and draggy in the second half, which is surprising given Ashby’s subtle way of controlling narrative, it retains some of the superficial interest that the cast and behind the scenes team accrues but takes too long to get where it’s going and is horribly violent in one scene. The plausibility of an alcoholic former cop being allowed back in the fold to exert a vigilante-type revenge seriously tests the saw suspension of disbelief. And yet this hovers on the edges of greatness which begs the question why it went wrong. The drift commences with the change in setting – which the opening voiceover does not assist in any way. It’s (obviously) set in New York City. Then, Matt Scudder is an NYC detective, cut from a very different cloth than any denizen of LA. All the performances feel a little too loose in a film that swings between character study and crime story. The contrasting styles of Sunny and Sarah seem off and Angel’s swagger is exaggerated. Bad writing, bad direction or both? I live in a world I didn’t make. Bridges had already done better in the era’s popular noir remake Against All Odds and the thriller Jagged Edge – so this was not his best performance although he has his moments as the lower depths of his addiction to the bottle are plumbed. The major problem appears to be the fact that the film was taken from Ashby and edited by someone else. Ashby, as we know, was one of the great film editors prior to directing so this made absolutely no sense albeit he had his own addiction issues and this was sadly his final feature. This is beautifully shot by Stephen H. Burum with a striking score by James Newton Howard but it fundamentally changes the intent of the book and the re-edit altered it completely. The final shootout is simply unbelievable and not in a good way. Novelist Lawrence Block was not happy (to say the least) with this first screen take on Matt Scudder, as he recounted to this author. You can read more about that and Robert Towne in Chinatowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne, https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Screenplays-Robert-Towne-1960-2000/dp/1695887409/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MXGOF3HFVGNA&keywords=elaine+lennon+chinatowne&qid=1705759297&s=books&sprefix=el%2Cstripbooks%2C847&sr=1-1. Waking up is the hardest part. #600straightdaysofmondomovies

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019)

People don’t tend to like a good critic. They tend to hate your guts. Film critic Pauline Kael had an unimaginable influence in the world of thumbs up, thumbs down reviewing and accumulated acolytes and rivals as she cultivated what she believed was an expressive art form. She was a failed playwright from California who moved to New York City, had an illegitimate daughter by experimental filmmaker James Broughton and returned to Berkeley where she started talking about movies on a radio show. What she failed at in her theatre writing she achieved in reviewing. Something just clicked, as one interviewee recalls. She loved Shoeshine, damned Limelight and got herself in print with a book called I Lost it at the Movies which made her a name. And that title underwrites everything about a woman who regarded every movie as a date. She worked at McCalls’ until she was asked to leave because she did not sit on the fence and was not in tune with the mainstream. She crucified some films, like Hiroshima, mon amour and Lawrence of Arabia. She deplored American cinema at the time. Bonnie and Clyde is the review that made her famous in the wake of Bosley Crowther’s famously damning criticism. Her review was rejected by The New Republic and when The New Yorker published it it was a sensation and she got a job there on a six-month on, six-month off contract.  Robert Towne, who consulted on the film, describes how it helped the film. She loved movies and famously wrote Trash, Art and the Movies where she delineates the difference between the good and the bad as she saw it. She experienced sexism, as she stated on a 1973 TV show:  It is very difficult for men to accept that women can argue reasonably. She had her favourites – Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Warren Beatty among them. Camille Paglia shudders and says she can’t understand why she went to the mat for Last Tango in Paris:  she bought her own ticket at the New York Film Festival and stole the march on her rivals, giving it a rave that weekend. Mean Streets she loved and Scorsese was one filmmaker who benefitted from her cheerleading. She crucified films she thought were phony – she described Shoah as having a lack of moral complexity and summed up Apocalypse Now as white man – he devil. She would not be intimidated. She hated horror movies – she lived in New York City and said she had a hard enough time living in such a scary place without having to contend with The Exorcist and its ilk. There’s an excerpt of a TV interview with author William Peter Blatty saying that Kael’s reviews are full of personal poison. She got herself a great big house in Massachusetts and would spend a week at a time in New York at screenings. She enhanced some careers,  damaged others. She had her camp followers and encouraged Paulettes like Paul Schrader who would take on a job on the LA Weekly and then jump on the bandwagon for a particular film at her request. She had a rivalry with auteurist critic Andrew Sarris whom she castigates in her essay Circles and Squares. His widow Molly Haskell says of Kael, No male critic had as much testosterone as Pauline. While this is quite good on context it never really nails the nitty gritty of what it is to be a journalist and to go out on a limb giving the only viciously – and presumptively – perceptive account of a film that other critics are afraid to give what she would call a con. Her famous book about Citizen Kane‘s authorship rehabilitated the reputation of forgotten screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his role in creating that masterpiece.  But just as Beatty sought to keep her quiet by giving her a job in Hollywood it showed she had blind spots and was perhaps rather naive:  she had come to believe her own publicity much as she professed to scorn the studios’: She was a virgin who was very willing to be seduced. Those six months made her bid a hasty retreat to the rather safer confines of critcism. When she loved something, you knew it:  she came out in a big way for Casualties of War. After 24 years and suffering from Parkinson’s she retired from The New Yorker. Readings from letters and telegrams that celebrities wrote to her capture some of the devastation she wrought including one from Gregory Peck:  You may have cost me good roles in the most productive phase of my career. Her review of Blade Runner was so damaging that director Ridley Scott hasn’t read a review since. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg wrote, 1000 reviews later you are the only writer who really understood Jaws.  It is interesting  – and impossible to credit in the democratised, non-edited non-hierarchical space and era of social media and the internet in which nobody has any particular importance – that one critic could have held such sway over popular opinion in a world where limited opening dominated. For Pauline Kael everything was a conversation. There are a lot of interviews here but their content feels circumstantial rather than deep or meaningful. It’s something of an irony. Written and directed by Rob Garver.  The movies needed her

 

Days of Thunder (1990)

I don’t expect I’ll see too much of him except in my rear view mirror.  Hot tempered budding stock car racer Cole Trickle (Tom Cruise) is recruited by a big brand headed by Tim Daland (Randy Quaid) but meets with an accident which seriously injures his team mate Rowdy Burns (Michael Rooker). However, when he returns with the help of his mentor Harry Hogge (Robert Duvall) and an attractive young doctor Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman), he has to face an ambitious adversary Russ Wheeler (Cary Elwes) who not only wants to defeat but also disable him… He’s destroyed both my cars! The Top Gun team reassembled to bring Cruise’s need for speed to the racetrack which he’d tasted with acting buddy Paul Newman and decided to cement on the big screen with a story he dreamed up with the help of Robert Towne. Hated by critics and not particularly insightful about the motor racing world (and it has to be said that the NASCAR series just doesn’t have the romance of Formula One’s European trackside dramas) this is nonetheless a loud, colourful, fast-moving blast as you’d expect from director Tony Scott. Duvall is superb as the mentor, it’s fun to see Kidman when she still looked like herself (and prior to marriage to Cruise) and the final showdown is well done.  It’s distinguished by Hans Zimmer’s score and the songs which include Maria McKee’s Show Me Heaven. Co-producer Don Simpson appears as racer Aldo Benedetti. For fans of this sporting sub-genre, John C. Reilly would get his kicks sending it up with Will Ferrell years later in Talladega Nights:  The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.  It may not reach the heights of Howard Hawks’ movies about professional male groups but this marked the beginning of a long collaboration and friendship between Cruise and Towne, which I’ve written about in my book ChinaTowne: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Screenplays-Robert-Towne-1960-2000/dp/1695887409/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=elaine+lennon+chinatowne&qid=1587925465&s=books&sr=1-1.  You are selfish, you are crazy and you’re scared

Happy 89th Birthday Robert Evans 29th June 2019!

He was a successful child actor on radio and made the transition to juvenile roles on the silver screen. When that ran out of road he sold ladies’ slacks with his brother, making a million in women’s pants, as he liked to put it. Then he became the head of production at Paramount and was behind some of the best films in the last era that we can truly call a golden age of cinema, the New Hollywood.  He prioritised story above all so it’s apt that he wrote one of the best memoirs ever about the movie business The Kid Stays in the Picture which became a documentary (and an ace radio book). He’s hilarious and now he’s eighty-nine. Happy birthday Robert Evans!

 

 

 

 

Marathon Man (1976)

How am I to fathom your mind if you continue to hide it from me?  Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is a Columbia graduate student and long-distance runner who has just enrolled in a doctoral seminar with Prof. Biesenthal (Fritz Weaver) where his focus will be the fate of his father a fellow historian driven to suicide in the McCarthy era purely on the grounds of his Judaism.  He is oblivious to the fact that his older brother, Doc (Roy Scheider), is not in fact an oil executive but a government agent chasing down a Nazi war criminal Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) and who is almost murdered by a blue-eyed Asian hitman in a Paris hotel. Doc visits Babe in NYC and meets his girlfriend the allegedly Swiss Elsa Opel (Marthe Keller) whom he figures out immediately as one of Szell’s couriers. Babe doesn’t believe there’s a bad bone in her body.  Doc is murdered and his colleague Janeway (William Devane) tells Babe the muggers who ambushed him in Central Park are Szell’s henchmen but they won’t come for him tonight – but they do, and Babe is held at the end of Szell’s dentist’s drill constantly being asked Is it safe?  He is caught in the middle of a transaction being expedited by The Division who clean up matters arising from disagreements between Washington and the CIA ... Listen, I want you to rob my apartment.  Director John Schlesinger reunited with his Midnight Cowboy star Hoffman to make this iconic paranoid thriller adaptation by William Goldman of his 1974 novel which invokes all sorts of historic nightmares not to mention the fear of unnecessary dental surgery. For a liberal pacifist you have some sense of vengeance Doc tells Babe when he realises he still has the gun their father used to blow his brains out. The last time I saw this was in the middle of another sleepless night during a three-month bout of glandular fever and the words Is it safe? made it impossible for me to recover, for, oh, probably another month at that point. There might be plotholes you could drive a truck through that not even Robert Towne’s putative and uncredited rewrite fixed but even fully conscious and in broad daylight it remains a transfixing piece of work whose echoes are still felt. The schematic structure is emblematic of a film whose many well-constructed sequences take place in famous locations – Columbia, Central Park, the diamond district, where Szell is recognised by two of his victims. Szell! Der Weisse Engel! shrieks a camp survivor as the old Nazi is ironically forced to get a price for his diamonds from the very race he tortured and executed with extreme prejudice thirty years earlier. The entire text is replete with such irony, expressed by Janeway in the line Everything we do cuts both ways after he supposedly rescues Babe only to deliver him back to the Nazi. The dialogue is biting and great:  I believe in my country/So did we all. Michael Small’s score is superb with a real feel for the emotive fraternal and familial issues underlying the narrative action whose logic turns on the notion of history itself and the versions of truth which we tell ourselves and in turn are told to keep us happy.  He did much the same job on The Parallax View, another paranoid conspiracy thriller whose similarly allusive style (and on which Towne also did some controversial rewrite work during a writers’ strike) makes it the best political film of its time. It looks incredible, thanks to Conrad Hall. Oh the Seventies really had great films. Nowadays they’d probably give Szell a sympathetic backstory. Not so much in real life for Keller whose father actually was a Nazi. History is all around us in this persistent, resonant film. Pauline Kael called it a Jewish revenge fantasy. Goy veh. You’re weak. Your father was weak in his way, your brother in his, now you in yours. You are all so predictable

Happy 80th Birthday Jack Nicholson! 22nd April 2017

Is there anyone who doesn’t like this guy? The legendary wild man of the American cinema turns an unbelievable 80 this weekend. The self-proclaimed Irish Democrat from the Jersey shore has never given anything less than an interesting performance and there’s a lot to choose from as you can see from the posters – chronicling sixty years of his films from his beginnings with Roger Corman and the first decade where he really paid his dues and wrote several screenplays into the bargain. We all have our own favourites among his work and there are the great films like Five Easy Pieces, Cuckoo’s Nest and Chinatown (written by Robert Towne for him – they became friends at an acting workshop) and The Shining.  And there are the not fully great ones where he crafts truly hilarious or interesting or moving performances, like The Border or Ironweed, Blood and Wine, The King of Marvin Gardens or The Pledge. He’s been pleasurable in truly terrible films like As Good as it Gets or a challenging one like Carnal Knowledge. His forays into directing have been fascinating – Drive, He Said, The Missouri Breaks, Goin’ South, The Two Jakes. He will hopefully return to the screen in the US version of Toni Erdmann, recently announced, but until then he has a truly magnificent back catalogue to plunder. Choose your own Jack Nicholson Adventure. Happy Birthday to a great star and an astonishing talent.

The Two Jakes (1990)

We’re approaching Jack Nicholson’s landmark 80th birthday and he’s not very far from our minds anyhow, is he? Nobody dislikes this guy, a Seventies superstar whose offscreen life never threatened his essential abilities to act better than most anyone else. Two Jakes is the continuing story of Jake Gittes whom Nicholson inhabited so memorably in the classic Chinatown, a mythos of Los Angeles created by Robert Towne as part homage, part interrogation of that great city and its wobbly foundations. Now it’s post-WW2 and Gittes is hired by another Jake, Berman (Harvey Keitel) to do a routine matrimonial job. Gittes leads Berman to his wife’s lover, whom he murders. He’s Berman’s business partner. We return to the world of deceit and conspiracy that characterises film noir, albeit we are in living colour with a fabulously feline Madeleine Stowe as a very fatale femme.  It isn’t always a success and while the voiceover narration is true to the style it’s not always satisfying in a plot which might have been tightened a tad had screenwriter Robert Towne been around to finish it, an issue that caused trouble for Nicholson, who directed this outing. However there’s a lot to savour – it looks amazing and there’s a flavoursome soundtrack by Van Dyke Parks. It makes me wish we could finally have the last part of Towne’s projected LA trilogy. For more on this see my book about Robert Towne:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Elaine-Lennon-ebook/dp/B01KCL3YXQ/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1492610518&sr=1-2&keywords=elaine+lennon

Happy 91st Birthday Roger Corman 5th April 2017!

Aside from being a great opportunity to look at 50 years of wonderful poster art and titles to die for, today is trash-horror-exploitation maestro Roger Corman’s 91st birthday. The legendary Pope of Pop Cinema started life as an engineer but lasted just 4 days in the job. After a spell studying literature and reading scripts for Hollywood studios he got into the whole filmmaking thang himself and created a company that eventually served as a film school for some of the most notable directors in American cinema, from Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese, Stephanie Rothman to Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich to Penelope Spheeris. The most acclaimed of his work is the Edgar Allan Poe series, adapted by top-class scenarists like Richard Matheson and Robert Towne. His own best work as director (The Intruder) was so controversial he steered clear of such subject matter (racism) again and passion projects like Von Richthofen and Brown aka The Red Baron eventually gave way to serial producing:  his last directorial effort was a quarter of a century ago (Frankenstein Unbound). He audited acting classes with blacklistee Jeff Corey to understand performance and meet talent – which is how Jack Nicholson got his break in Cry Baby Killer and Robert Towne started writing screenplays. What I love about his early work is the way the women come to the fore:  June Kenney, Fay Spain, Beverly Garland and Susan Cabot are some of my favourite ladies and some of his alumni like Paul Bartel, Ron Howard and Demme have called upon him to act in small character parts in their mainstream successes. I once presented him with a project on biker movies and it was returned to me with the dry comment ‘Very accurate.’  High praise indeed! A scattering of my own fave raves from this renaissance man would include Gunslinger, Sorority Girl, A Bucket of Blood, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Wild Angels and Cockfighter. So much choice! Happy Birthday Mr Corman!

The Missouri Breaks (1976)

You ain’t the first mental wizard I ever met, you know. I’ve met ranchers, outlaws, stock detectives who thought they was mental wizards like yourself. Nicholson and Brando. A legendary pairing. Nicholson is cattle rustler Tom Logan, whose friend has been hanged by David Braxton (John McLiam) so he decides to avenge his death by buying land next to Braxton and he and his gang start stealing his horses. Braxton hires bounty hunter Robert E. Lee Clayton (Brando) to deal with them. Clayton is, to say the least, an eccentric but an efficient and ruthless killer too … This is my fourth frontier and I know how they run. Nicholson arrived on the $8 million set to discover that his role had been minimised in his absence, due to Brando’s influencing of director Arthur Penn.  ‘Poor Nicholson was stuck in the centre of it all,  cranking the damned thing out,’ Brando said, ‘while I whipped in and out of scenes like greased lightning.’ He also kills while wearing a dress. He dreamed up a handmade weapon for his character, a cross between a harpoon and a mace. It should have been great but it’s disjointed and thematically incoherent. Nicholson thought it could have been saved in the editing, but his opinion was disregarded.  He didn’t like the film, and he told director Penn so.  Penn was offended and stopped speaking to him. Written by Thomas McGuane, Robert Towne was brought in to try and fix the script (like he’d done for Penn and Beatty on Bonnie and Clyde) but it is unclear as to what his contribution might have been. A Seventies oddity with an affecting performance from Brando which in hindsight we might see as an expression of a dying genre. Why don’t we just take a walk and we’ll just talk about the Wild West and how to get the hell out of it!

Drive, He Said (1971)

Jack Nicholson had been busy in one of the leading roles for Bob Rafaelson in Five Easy Pieces so it was 1970 before he could begin shooting on his directing debut. He had already written a number of screenplays but he was over-committed at the time he wanted to make this. He was starring in Carnal Knowledge for director Mike Nichols so he began Drive… without a complete script.  Jeremy Larner adapted his own book but Nicholson wasn’t happy with it and had begun writing a second draft himself.  He brought in Robert Towne to complete his vision on set, with the added bonus of an acting role for his screenwriter friend – that of a cuckolded, broad-minded professor. Reclusive screenwriter and director Terrence Malick also did a rewrite – prior to making Badlands (1973). The film was completed on time for Nicholson to report to the East Coast for Mike Nichols.  He edited Drive… on weekends and downtime from shooting Carnal Knowledge.  Drive… is an exposé of Sixties left-liberal attitudes, set on a campus infected with radicals  and replete with ready-made mythological references which must have appealed to Robert Towne:  a leading character called Hector  (who of course  as the eldest son of the king, led the Trojans in their war against the Greeks,  fought in single combat with Achilles and stormed the wall of the camp and set it alight). And, as if we don’t ‘get it,’ Hector’s major is Greek. The radical elements were complete with the casting in the lead role of William Tepper – a dead ringer for producer Bert Schneider, whose famously radical approach to production would lead Hollywood out of the old-style studio system but would embalm him in the mid-Seventies forever. There is a romantic element that interferes with male friendship: Gabriel is the guerrilla, played by Michael Margotta. Hector is besotted with Karen Black, married to Towne’s professor in the film. Her name, Olive, signifies her role as peace-maker in the narrative.  Gabriel runs away to escape the draft.  Hector is the warrior in love – he is in touch with nature (his surname, is, after all, Bloom.) He communes with the trees in the forest, stays in a log cabin and is generally at one with everything that is not ‘the Man.’ The film was entered in Cannes and Nicholson’s efforts were the subject of scorn.  It opened in New York on 13 June 1971 where it got mixed reviews.  BBS apparently offered more money to promote it but were deflected by Nicholson himself, who was depressed at the critical reception. But its lyricism, message and sub-Godardian construction have held up considerably better than Nicholson himself believed and its countercultural theme still produces a striking effect.The film is structured around Hector’s basketball games – the opening titles are underlined in a stunning sequence by the use of cult musician Moondog’s music – later paid homage by the Coen Brothers in The Big Lebowski (1998). The slo-mo filming style corresponds with much of Visions of Eight (1973),  itself an influence on Towne’s approach in his own directing debut, Personal Best. For more on Nicholson’s work with Towne, you can read my book ChinaTowne:  https://www.smile.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Elaine-Lennon-ebook/dp/B01KCL3YXQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490221804&sr=8-1&keywords=elaine+lennon

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