Killer Joe

by Tony Dayoub

Sometimes, like a crooner scat singing his way around a time-worn standard, the sharpness of a filmmaker's instrument is best revealed in nothing more impressive than an old, reliable genre piece. This has certainly been the case with William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist). After a few misfires in the '90s, one of the most zealous of the enfants terrible to make their name in the New Hollywood of the '70s proves he's still capable of hitting some shocking high notes with his latest, Killer Joe. The second of two fruitful collaborations with playwright Tracy Letts (August: Osage County), Killer Joe is based on his first play. It's a seamy look at a greedy trailer park clan through the skewed but precise eyes of the film's titular corrupt police detective.

Blu-ray Roundup: Shock Value

by Tony Dayoub

WARNING: Read at your own risk. This post includes SPOILERS.

I once took one of those screenwriting seminars with Robert McKee. You know, the guy Brian Cox plays in Adaptation (2003). Yeah, that guy is real. And he makes loud pronouncements in life much the same way he does in Spike Jonze's film. Subscribe too closely to his inspiring platitudes and you run the risk of producing a very mainstream commercial script, which I guess is the point since this seminar purports to help you write a script that sells. A lot of his admonitions are common sense, just put in a context which doesn't often come to mind.

One of those bits of guidance involves what he calls "turning." To hold a story's audience, the story must "turn." Frequently. I think screenwriter William Goldman refers to it as the "reversal." Goldman uses an example of it in his fascinating book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. He talks of the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) in which Katharine Ross walks into her home at night to find Robert Redford waiting in the shadows with his gun drawn. She freezes, and he makes some sexually threatening remarks as he orders her to undress. She begins to do so, and there is some phallic business with the gun (stuff that wouldn't play so well today, admittedly). While it is initially disturbing to see our hero behave like a deviant, a lot of this is defused when Ross finally says, "Know what I wish? That once you'd get here on time." The reversal, turn, or twist as I'll refer to it, is what draws you in. And the most masterful directors know when and how to employ the twist to maximum dramatic effect.

Long before M. Night Shyamalan robbed the "climactic" twist of its power by fashioning a career relying on it, director William Friedkin made what has become a cult classic that completely depends on it for the film to succeed. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) plays like your typical eighties cop thriller for roughly 105 of its tight 116 minutes. Most of it is rife with cliches: a Secret Service agent's obsessive pursuit of a counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe); his questionable methods, dangerous not only to his partner (John Pankow) but to innocent bystanders as well; his unethical relationship with a hot CI (Darlanne Fluegel). If it weren't for the interesting tweaks like the slick Miami Vice-like cinematography by Robby Muller, a surprisingly classic soundtrack by Wang Chung, and Friedkin's often subliminal inserts (as in The Exorcist), the movie would play like warmed over French Connection (1971). But the last minute twist of hero William L. Petersen's demise-by-gigantic-shotgun-hole-to-the-head instantly reframes his character's relentless hunt as the self-centered, addictive search of an adrenaline junkie looking for his next fix. Watch the film again immediately after you finish it, and you'll see Friedkin doesn't cheat. He loads the movie with foreshadowing, but you're so conditioned to accept the way such films usually turn out you ignore all the clues.

The Last King of Scotland (2006) brings its shocking twist in a little earlier. If you know your history, it's no surprise the often congenial Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) is more paranoid than he initially lets on to his Scottish sycophant, Nick Garrigan (James McAvoy). But a dumb affair with one of Amin's wives, Kay (Kerry Washington) serves to wake Nick up to the true danger of Amin while he is perched precariously at the top of Ugandan govenment. After Kay becomes pregnant, and is unable to find a safe way to terminate the pregnancy without Amin's knowledge, she risks going to local tribesmen. Nick is too late to stop her, instead finding her naked corpse, its arms and legs chopped off and sewn back onto the corpse in reverse. The gruesome shot of the body only appears in the film for a few frames, but it is enough to supercharge the movie as it heads towards its conclusion. A little research, however, reveals that the film's implication that Amin butchered his wife is not concrete. Speculation is that she died as a result of the botched abortion, and was dismembered by her lover (another doctor, not the fictional Garrigan) in order to make the disposal of her body easier.

Criterion's newest release, the Oscar-nominated Revanche (2008) by Götz Spielmann, gives us a twist on the twist. Rather than save it for its last act, it is the motivating factor that propels the protagonist into the moral dilemma that occupies the majority of the film. Its early scenes seem to set up a tale of moral compromises involving the Ukrainian prostitute Tamara(Irina Potapenko) and her good-hearted lover, ex-con Alex (Johannes Krisch) who decide to rob a bank in order to escape their bleak life in the slums of Vienna. Though Alex doesn't even load his gun for the robbery, keeping his promise to Tamara to avoid violence, the same can't be said about the cop (Andreas Lust) the couple runs into as they make their getaway. A faulty aim as the cop fires at the getaway car changes the dynamic of the whole film from a banal lovers-on-the-lam story to a meditation on fate, culpability, and coincidence still haunting me over a week after I first saw it.

Seventies Cinema Revival: The French Connection

by Tony Dayoub

One of the great, iconic films of the 1970s, The French Connection (1971), finally makes it debut on Blu-ray this week with a little bit of controversy. But this does not change the impact the film still has today. A gritty, realistic look at all angles of a huge heroin deal by its then young film director William Friedkin, it also made a star out of its lead actor, Gene Hackman. It also went a long way towards romanticizing the seamy underbelly of New York City.

 

New York crime films became a staple of seventies cinema due in no small part to films like Gordon Parks' Shaft (1971) and The French Connection. Movies like Across 110th Street (1972), Serpico (1973), The Seven-Ups (1973), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) were all subsequently inspired to employ the washed out color and grainy look of fast film stock that was so often utilized by documentarians for its flexibility in shooting in low-light situations. The jittery hand-held camera in such films signalled a "spontaneous" stolen shot and an immediacy that was rare before Friedkin's film. And the littered streets of New York's backalleys were often spotlighted, rather than glossed over, in an effort to heighten the raw intensity of the docu-inspired dramas.

New York City cops Eddie Egan (pictured, above) and Sonny Grosso had participated in just such a takedown of a heroin smuggling ring a decade earlier, with much the same outcome; the alleged kingpin got away with the crime. But it was still the largest drug arrest of its time. And Egan and Grosso were exciting personalities to base a film on. Egan was a bigoted hothead with a cagey way of throwing his perps off by interrogating them about an incident unrelated to their arrest, "Ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" Grosso was a methodical cynic who helped rein his partner in. Egan harbored the ambition that actor Rod Taylor would play him in the cinematic adaptation of their story. So, as Grosso recounts in a documentary on the Blu-ray, he was very surprised when he was introduced to the mild-mannered man who would ultimately win the role of Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (based on Egan), Gene Hackman.

As Hackman tells it, even he wasn't sure he could sell the crude facets of Egan's personality. Doyle is a cop with no personal life, save for a predilection for women that might be too young for him. He's an alcoholic, frequently waking up from a bender; in one scene, cuffed to his own bed by a young woman he picked up off the street. In a warning to his partner, Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider), his deep-seated racism is more than evident:

Doyle: You dumb guinea. 

Russo: How the hell was I supposed to know he had a knife? 

Doyle: Never trust a n****r. 

Russo: He could have been white. 

Doyle: Never trust anyone!

But he does have an instinct and drive that suits the case that falls on his lap, a drug deal involving a supplier from Marseilles, Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Together with his partner, he relentlessly tracks all angles of the case, even on his off-hours, to the point of obsession and exhaustion. This obsession ultimately endangers anyone - cops, innocents - that get between him and his quarry.

Hackman gives us a nuanced take on what, according to Grosso, was the emotionally one-note Egan. Rather than play the constant intensity of the type-A cop, the actor instead leavens it with a world-weariness that humanizes the driven supercop. The dynamism in his performance makes it even more chilling when Doyle is able to spring into action after an exhausting night, as a sniper tries assassinating him on his way home. This leads to a nerve-wracking chase in which Doyle drives a car recklessly in pursuit of an elevated train.

Credit Friedkin for that inspired setpiece, which he hyperbolically insists that he shot from inside the car himself, an assertion disputed by the film's cinematographer, Owen Roizman, in a recent interview with Aaron Aradillas on Back by Midnight. He also admits to daring his stunt driver, Bill Hickman, to drive the car (with only a siren on top to warn oncoming traffic) as fast as possible even though no permits were secured to close off the street for the shoot. The driven Friedkin obviously saw a kindred spirit in Egan (and the character of Doyle). The manipulative director, by his own admission, was prone to yelling at Hackman in order to keep him in a constant state of stress. The results are on the screen, though. The French Connection wound up winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

While much of the controversy concerning Blu-rays of older films has to do with the elimination of grain in the film, the debate over this one is over the opposite. As Friedkin illustrates in a documentary on the disc, he has color-timed this new addition by starting with a sharper, grainier black and white base element and slowly bled in a little color. As Glenn Kenny observes in a recent posting, ironically titled What hath Friedkin wrought? , "...considerations of cinematic ethics aside, Friedkin's re-visioning of the picture really is a radical one." While I agree with him that a copy of the original iteration should have been included in the Blu-ray, especially for archival purposes in what is probably an "ultimate" edition, I am not averse to the film's new look. Essentially, the blacks are darker, the film grainier, and the color less intense, all qualities that enhance the look he was aiming for in his movie originally. And the change is nowhere near as eviscerating as what he did to The Exorcist(1973) in his "Version You've Never Seen" (2000). Great new documentaries shot with Friedkin at the original locations make this Blu-ray worth purchasing (one dedicated to Scheider, who died last year, is sorely missed), and for those wedded to the film's original look, make sure you don't throw away the original DVD.

Update 3/3: Among other things, director William Friedkin responds to Roizman's opinion on the new Blu-ray, and critic Glenn Kenny gives his take on the debate, on this week's Back by Midnight.

The French Connection and French Connection II are both available this week on Blu-ray disc. Stills provided courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

DVD Review: The Night They Raided Minsky's and If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium - Ekland and Pleshette Highlight Iffy Flicks

by Tony Dayoub

















You're wondering why I have these photos of two very striking women at the top of this review. Well, let me tell you about each of them. The one on the left is Britt Ekland, featured in The Night They Raided Minsky's, recently released on DVD. The one on the right is the late Suzanne Pleshette featured in If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, also recently released.

Ekland is a Swedish actor, underrated in my opinion, whose career never gained the notoriety that her private life has. Best known for her role as Mary Goodknight in the 007 adventure The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), she also made some more than respectable appearances in such films as Get Carter(1971), The Wicker Man (1973), and Scandal (1989). But she will always be better known for marrying actor Peter Sellers, who proposed after having only seen her in a picture. She also had a long relationship with Rod Stewart, before having a series of relationships with other rockers such as John Waite and L.A. Guns singer Phil Lewis. Her daughter with Sellers, Victoria, has been in the news, primarily stemming from her association with "Hollywood Madam" Heidi Fleiss.

Pleshette was an American actor, also underrated, who was often cast as the supporting character in such movies as The Birds (1963), Nevada Smith (1966), Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), and was a frequent guest star in a long list of TV shows including Route 66, Ben Casey, Kojak, and Will & Grace. She was best known for playing Emily Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show which led to one of the best cameos in TV history in the later series, Newhart. In Newhart's series finale, Bob Newhart wakes up describing a strange dream, about being an innkeeper in Vermont (the premise of Newhart), to Pleshette who reprises her role as Emily. Sultry and sardonic, she later played the title role in a TV biopic called Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990). She died on January 19, 2008 of respiratory failure.

I tell you all this, and show you each of their photographs, because they are each the best reasons to see their respective movies.

Minsky's is a badly executed film with an interesting premise. Notable mainly for being William Freidkin's sophomore directorial effort (though it was released after his third movie), and Bert Lahr's (The Wizard of Oz's Cowardly Lion) last appearance, the story had potential. Ekland plays an Amish woman who runs away from home to join Minsky's Burlesque, and inadvertently becomes the innovator of the striptease. Her onstage sexual awakening at the end of the film is both funny and assertive, despite being surrounded by leering men. It's too bad that the film is edited past the point of comprehension. The signs are there that a lot of effort was spent in trying to save the movie, as there are numerous zoom shots which, because of excessive graininess, appear to have been created in post-production.

Belgium on the other hand is a pleasant romp that follows Pleshette on a whirlwind tour of Europe while she falls in love with their tour guide (an unexpectedly dashing young Ian McShane from Deadwood). Directed by Mel Stuart (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), it is full of cameos by John Cassavettes, Joan Collins, Vittorio De Sica, Ben Gazzara, Virna Lisi and Robert Vaughn, among others. Witty and disarming, it is enjoyable, but beyond that, it is such a trifle, that the only thing I can really hang my recommendation on is a chance to see Pleshette carry a movie.

Not bad enough to be offensive, but not great enough to be classics, don't expect anything more than the chance to appreciate these two underrated actors in these films.