Sunset Gun

Here's my New Beverly piece John Cassavetes' romantic, poignant, emotionally volatile and movie-drenched, "Minnie and Moskowitz — one of my favorite Seymour Cassel pictures. May the great man Rest in Peace. 

“I wish my life was a non-stop Hollywood movie show. A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes. Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain and celluloid heroes never really die.” – The Kinks, “Celluloid Heroes”

Movies set you up. That’s what movie lover Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) emphatically states to her older friend and co-worker, Florence (Elsie Ames), after the two women spend an evening out watching Casablanca. They drink wine in Florence’s dark little apartment and they talk; they talk like real women. It’s a disarmingly frank discussion between a much older woman with a younger woman about sex, men, doing what they can to please men (who seem to want everything from them, their heart, their soul, as Minnie states, only to learn men really don’t want it when they finally get it), loneliness and… movies. And yet, that “set up,” that fantasy, hangs over Minnie and Moskowitz in a complicated manner that neither damns the siren call of cinema nor negates their delusional pull. Perhaps we need movies. Perhaps we need them to realize we don’t need to believe in them? Perhaps to realize they’re often lovely, but often a lot of lovey bullshit? That’s how beautifully complex writer director John Cassavetes makes Minnie and Moskowitz  – it’s just not that simple. Nothing in the Cassavetes universe is that simple.

As Minnie says: “You know, I think that movies are a conspiracy. I mean it…. They are actually a conspiracy because they set you up, Florence. They set you up from the time you were a little kid. They set you up to believe in everything. They set you up to believe in ideals and strength and good guys and romance and of course, love. Love, Florence… So, you believe it. You go out. You start looking. Doesn’t happen and you keep looking…. There’s no Charles Boyer in my life, Florence. I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable, I never met Humphrey Bogart. I never met any of them… They don’t exist, Florence. That’s the truth. But the movies set you up. They set you up and no matter how bright you are, you believe it. ”

Morgan Morgan: “Uh-uh. I don’t care anything… I don’t know anything about cinema. I don’t like it. Bunch of lonely people, looking up. Forget about it.

Seymour: You don’t like Bogart?

Morgan Morgan: I only like one: Wallace Beery

See, even Morgan Morgan likes one movie star.

By allowing all of these scenes to unfold with remarkable but very real people, movies and real life intertwine in Minnie and Moskowitz showing both the naturalism and uniqueness of everyday individuals. Real people may not be movie idols, but they’re often interesting and different. And scary. Seymour’s love for Minnie verges on the frightening. He violently threatens, fights, yells and punches things in her bathroom (reminding me of the rage-filled, frustrated love outburst in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love only, Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan explodes with violence from repression whereas Seymour is constantly at full volume). Seymour exclaims: “That’s what happens when you love someone! You punch doors! You make a fool of yourself!"

But there’s a lot of tenderness here too. And, in one scene, while watching Casablanca together. Seymour tells her that she looks like Lauren Bacall from the side. She smiles and leans her head on his shoulder. Movies. When they take a night swim, they return to her apartment and she begins singing the song she sang earlier in the film with loneliness towards Jim: “I love You Truly.” But this time Seymour sings along. It’s a lovely moment and it’s another movie moment. The song is indeed evergreen, many singers have sung it, but I thought of Ward Bond and Frank Faylen lovingly serenading James Stewart and Donna Reed on their wedding night in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Cassavetes loved Capra.

From Ray Carney’s “Cassavetes on Cassavetes”: “I loved Frank Capra when I was a kid. I saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and I believed in it. I believed in the people in our country and our society. I believed that the rich were not that bad and that the poor had a gripe, but that people could come together and that made America a better place for me to live in and be proud of. And every Capra film I’ve ever seen showed the gentleness of people. There were corrupt people within that framework, sure. The poor people were always oppressed, but they were oppressed with such dignity and loveliness that they were really stronger than the rich; the rich had to be educated. I grew up with that idea. I grew up on guys that were bigger than life. Greenstreet, Bogart, Cagney, Wallace Beery. Those were my favorite guys. I’d think, God, what a wonderful life they had – to have an opportunity to stand up there in front of people, in front of a camera, to express yourself and be paid for it, and say things and have it mean something to the audience.”

Movies a conspiracy? Is it a wonderful life? Like Capra, John, Gena, Minnie, Moskowitz, Florence and Morgan Morgan, it’s never that easy to answer.

Out now in Ed Brubaker's Criminal number three…

I dig into Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money — a strangely under-discussed Scorsese featuring a wonderfully weird Tom Cruise before he was doing wonderfully weird and Paul Newman in all of his wizened movie star glory. This is like a samurai movie with pool cues for swords… it's also something of a vampire story … I love it.

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“Back in the 40s this town was crawling with dollies like you. Good looking cokeheads trying their damndest to act tough as hell. I got news for you: they did it better back then. This town doesn’t change. The just push the names around.”

“Jeez, Charles, he doesn’t look so hot to me.” So says Lily Tomlin’s new agey Margo when she first spies Art Carney’s retired private investigator, Ira Wells. She’s scoping him out at a place many young people think guys his age are about to set one foot in – a cemetery. A seemingly anonymous old looking guy in a rumpled suit paying his respects to a dead person and the dead person’s loved ones, Ira walks past crypts on one of those sunny, deceptively cheery Los Angeles days that would feel strangely depressing even if he wasn’t in a cemetery. It feels a little impersonal too, all out in the open with those rows of crypts, and especially as Margo is sizing him up for hire. The camera follows Ira and you can hear a plane passing overhead. It’s an interesting way to introduce Tomlin’s character as she’s introduced to Ira – just her voice and her first impression observation – and then her sleazy-slick pal Charlie (Bill Macy) reassuring her: “Let me tell you kiddo, Ira Wells used to be one of the greats.”

Used to be. We’re still not so sure even after we’ve been introduced to Ira in the opening scene of Robert Benton’s 1977 picture, The Late Show. When we first see Ira, he’s sitting in his little room – not in an apartment we don’t think at first – but what looks like a room in a boarding house. An old movie plays on his TV. This is a lived-in space and it’s nice that the movie takes the time to show us his surroundings: there’s books stacked around and taped up photos of the old days, socks hanging to dry, a messy bed. We’ve noticed from the start that he’s working on a memoir, the title reads: “Naked Girls and Machine Guns: Memoirs of a Real Private Detective.” Well, that’s quite something. Who is this guy? If we had no idea what this movie was about before watching, we’d wonder how much of that title is an exaggeration. Or, is he writing a detective novel? But, right away, we think, this man – this man in this humble, rather touching room – thinks of his life as something to remember (as he certainly should. As anyone should.) And he also thinks that his life is something others should remember, hence, a memoir, or writing based on himself. And he’d like to grab people right away with the pulpy title: “Naked Girls and Machine Guns” (kind of ridiculous and “immature,” as Margo might say, but, hey, it grabbed me too). Obviously, Ira sees glamour in his old, sexy dangerous days, and maybe at this point of the movie, he’s content to drown himself in times past. The present? Watch another old movie and go to the race track.

As he sits in this somewhat sad, sagging room, we see some glamour in a framed photo of a beautiful young woman. An ex-wife? An old sweetheart? Probably not, as the woman is actress Martha Vickers, so memorable in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep. A noir-soaked nod on part of the filmmakers, a fan photo for Ira and, at first glance, a possible old flame of Ira’s. An old flame is not likely but … you never know. Ira may have had an even more exciting past than we will ever know. This is a room of memories. Not cool or flashy or dingy in a hardboiled, black & white, neon-sign-flashing-in-the-window kind of way, but the room of an old man. The room of someone’s grandfather. But. We suspect that this guy doesn’t have any grandkids. Or any kids for that matter. Or, any grandkids or kids that he’s ever kept in contact with, anyway.

His peaceful night of old movies and writing is interrupted when his old partner, Harry (Howard Duff – Duff played Dashiell Hammett’s private eye Sam Spade on the radio, and appeared in Brute Force, The Naked City, Private Hell 36 and While the City Sleeps – he was also married to Ida Lupino for a time) pays him a bloody visit. And then promptly dies in his room. He’s been shot. Ira is both pissed off and heartbroken. Now we see the tough guy Ira once was and still is: “God damn you, Harry! Letting someone walk up and drill you like that. Point blank. Nobody can palm a .45. Jesus Christ. You never had the brains god gave a common dog!” And then we see how heartfelt Ira is too: “Sorry you’re going off, pal. You were real good company.”

Ira starts tearing up.

Harry is the dead man Ira is seeing off at the cemetery, so it makes sense he’s so grumpy from the intrusion of Margo and Charlie. Let the man mourn his friend and partner for chrissakes. And worse, the case seems two-bit to him. You see, Margo wants to hire Ira to find … her cat. (We can’t help but think of Carney’s recent starring role in Paul Mazursky’s Harry and Tonto, though Ira does not give a toss about Margo’s cat). Margo owes a guy 500 bucks and, to settle the score, the guy has stolen her cat – he’s threatening to kill the animal if she doesn’t pay him. “So pay him!” Ira barks at her. Angry at Charlie he walks away muttering about how younger people should respect their elders. He’s sick of this shit, and he’s got other things to do. Like get on the bus. Go to the races. Sleep. Something. But soon enough, Ira knows there’s more going on here if Charlie is involved. In a terrific exchange, while Ira and Charlie are seated for a shoe shine (Charlie, wearing his flashy brown leather jacket, polyester shirt, orange pants and yellow socks, is reading The Hollywood Reporter – there’s ragged reminders of supposedly glitzy Hollywood all over this picture), Ira asks him what the hell is going on here with this “dolly” and the cat. Ira breaks it down: “Somebody puts the freeze on Harry Regan. Next thing I know you show up at Harry’s funeral with some dolly and a song and a dance about a stolen cat and all that hot comedy. What’s it all got to do with Harry?”

Well, something has got to do with Harry in this mess with the cat and “all that hot comedy,” and so Ira is on the case, discussing details with Margo in an amusing scene in her apartment, a space very different than Ira’s living quarters. Cat pictures, lots of plants, tapestries, bright colors, rock posters, there’s a meditation recording playing (she wisely turns it off), Ira shifts uncomfortably in his chair, while listening to her brief life story (wanted to be an actress, gave it up because she couldn’t play the Hollywood game, is now designing clothes, used to deliver items for some guy – probably hot – and split the money with the cat kidnapper. Only, one time she didn’t – here’s where Harry gets involved…). A woman of the 1970s, one who openly talks about her period and her therapist and astrological signs, Margo is a woman who’s seemingly trying anything in Hollywood, not just out of desperation, but out of, what she says, to “go with the flow.” I thought of the scene in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (Altman produced The Late Show) when Elliott Gould’s Marlowe tells bumbling Harry (David Arkin) what his scantily clad neighbors do for a living – they dip candles and sell them in a shop on Hollywood Blvd.  Harry exclaims: “I remember when people just had jobs.”

Tomlin makes Margo lovable and smart – not just kooky and stereotypical hippy dippy – and a little mysterious too. For how much younger she is, and all of her more youthful of-the-time speak, does she have any friends, really? Other than the singer she manages? And are they even friends? Surely, she has a whole other life, but as presented here, it seems Charlie is her only friend. You start to understand that Margo, like Ira, is actually lonely. And that Los Angeles can be an alienating town whether you were a once aspiring actress, or you’re a retired private eye. You feel like people don’t care about you anymore. You’re don’t have that “it” factor. You feel disposable. It’s this observation of the fringes of Los Angeles, the “real” people (who may have had extraordinary lives if you bother to ask them about it), that makes The Late Show so intriguing and moving. It’s showing the sleazier side of the city; one in which people are still hanging on – some, by their fingernails. But they’re not all down-and-out, not yet, though one day they might be.

As the complicated mystery unfolds, Ira and Margo grow closer, and his crankiness softens. He seems amused by her, even likes her. And, in one scene at a bar, she tells him that she confessed to her shrink that she thinks he’s cute. He’s not sure what to make of that but the old guy must be flattered. She is thrilled after a high-speed chase in her van and she delights at the idea of them partnering up – a P.I. team. You feel for Margo as she suggests Ira move in to the apartment next door because, well, not only is she thinking of her new venture past designing clothes and managing talent, but she’d like to have this guy closer to her. She likes his company. He tells her he’s a loner. But the movie never turns this into a typical May-December romance – their attraction works as friends, as potential partners, as two different generations who have found something within each other that works, even if they drive each other crazy. And the movie never makes fun of them either. Margo may be a little zany, even annoying at times, but she’s got a heart, she’s got substance. And Ira may be cantankerous, walking around with his bum leg and aching gut, but he’s not always cranky, he’s witty, he finds joy in some things. And he’s got a good soul. Also – he’s still a good shot. In a remarkable scene, Ira aims fire at a car, but before he shoots, he pulls out his hearing aid. Somehow this is not funny, it’s just badass.

Benton (who earlier had co-written Bonnie and Clyde) wrote and directed this picture, his second directorial effort after Bad Company, and before his next picture, the Oscar-laden Kramer vs. Kramer. The Late Show, mostly acclaimed upon release, but underseen, is one of his best, if not his very best (I also like his later work with Paul Newman, Nobody’s Fool and Twilight). This is a gentle character study about the seamier side of Los Angeles that’s also violent, funny and melancholic – not super striking cinematically-speaking, certainly not showy, but deeply felt and nuanced. And the actors are all splendid here including Eugene Roche as fence Ronnie Birdwell, John Considine as the creepy/stupid gold chain-wearing henchman, Lamar, Ruth Nelson as Ira’s sweet landlady Mrs. Schmidt, and a terrific Macy who is both fantastically oily and entirely human.

Carney, famous for his comedic (though touching) role as Ed Norton on the television show The Honeymooners was enjoying a resurgence in the 70s on the big screen (he hadn’t been in many motion pictures before), winning an Oscar for Harry and Tonto and co-starring in Martin Brest’s Going in Style (among other pictures). His performance here is beautiful. He’s rough and gruff and no-nonsense, spitting out hard-boiled dialogue naturally (he’s never forced, he never plays cute, he never fills his character with easy bathos), but he’s also poignant and real. There’s an inner life going on with this guy, one of regrets, surely, one of sorrows, but also one of past excitement. He doesn’t just play this simply as an aging tough guy gumshoe, as Mr. Cool, and that makes his performance even cooler. There’s a wonderful moment where Ira is trudging down the street, dragging his laundry along in a sack (he doesn’t have a car) and Charlie and Margo drive by, asking him where he’s headed. He’s snaps back, “I’m on my way to the Brown Derby to meet Louis B. Mayer! Where does it look like I’m headed?” The humbleness of the laundry, and the idea that he both doesand does not give a f*** about what it looks like, his quick-witted delivery –  it’s both charming and moving.

And the ending of the picture is charming and moving, circling back to the beginning of Ira and Margo and where they met – at a cemetery. Another friend is buried, and the two walk along to the bus stop. They sit on a bench that’s advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum: “Mingle with the Stars,” it proclaims. There’s nothing much star-studded going on as they sit on the bench, on a typical smog-choked Los Angeles street, wondering what to do next. But it appears hopeful. Maybe they’ll even partner up. After all, he’s still great at his job – age is experience, in spite of Hollywood’s endless quest for new stars, for youth – and he’s got a connection with Margo. And they’re in Los Angeles, a town, that Ira thinks, even as he grows older, never really changes: “The just push the names around.”

From my essay at the New Beverly

I forgot to mention … my piece on Michael Curtiz's Angels with Dirty Faces in the Feb. 13 edition of Criminal. Artwork by the great Sean Phillips.

“The character I played in the picture, Rocky Sullivan, was in part modeled on a fella I used to see when I was a kid. He was a hophead and a pimp, with four girls in his string. He worked out of a Hungarian rathskeller on First Avenue between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth streets—a tall dude with an expensive straw hat and an electric-blue suit. All day long he would stand on that corner, hitch up his trousers, twist his neck and move his necktie, lift his shoulders, snap his fingers, then bring his hands together in a soft smack. His invariable greeting was “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?”  — James Cagney from “Cagney By Cagney”

“You'll slap me? You slap me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize.” – Rocky Sullivan

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My full piece from Ed Brubaker's Kill Or Be Killed

“When an actor doesn't face a conflict, he loses confidence in himself. I always want to have a struggle because I believe it will help me accomplish more.” – John Garfield

Nick Robbey is trapped. Everywhere. No matter what. The man can’t even escape this claustrophobic life he trudges through while sleeping. Sleep – a place where you can run through sunny fields, bask in wealth, make it with beautiful girls, or just truly, actually sleep – enjoy the warm cocoon of dark nothingness; your body restoring itself for another good or bad day of something – anything – at least you slept well. No such luck for poor Nick – you get the sense this fella is always being chased and traumatized and worried and haunted, awake or not. Running. All the Way. Where? By the end you see where and it’s not through some sunny field – it’s staggering in a gutter with Shelley Winters close behind.

That Nick is brilliant John Garfield in director John Berry’s tough, poignant and doomed (on and off the screen), He Ran All the Way – a movie that opens with this beautiful loser tossing and turning in his bed, sweaty and convulsed in bad dreams. But he wakes up to something worse – reality – his mother (a harsh as hell Gladys George). After hollering at him for moaning in his slumber (no maternal instinct in this woman), she pulls open the dingy shades of his room and screeches: “If you were a man you’d be out looking for a job!” His reply? “If you were a man I’d kick your teeth in.”  This ain’t no happy family. But family will become something important to Nick in this picture – even if he has to force his way into one.

When this over-age punk emerges into the light of the city streets, seemingly to do something else (perhaps look for a straight job?) he’s beckoned by one of his criminal friends – wormy Al (Norman Lloyd) – who convinces poor Nick to join in on a payroll robbery. Nick’s worried – he tries to discuss his bad dream, he was running, running, and he’s seeing it as some kind of portent of doom (he’s not so dumb after all). Al brushes it off and talks of his dream – wealth and sunny Florida. They go on that heist and the movie wastes no time in showing it all go to hell very quickly – like so many two-bit crimes do. Nick winds up killing a payroll guard. Shit. He didn’t intend for that. He didn’t want to kill someone today. He’s probably never really wanted to kill anyone, not even his mother (later on in the picture she doesn’t give a damn if he dies or rots). But he’s gotta run. He’s got the case of money (freedom! Yeah, sure) and so he runs and runs. It’s like his dream never really ended. He runs all the way to a public pool, a curious but ingenious place for a quick hide-out, shoving his money in a locker next to the guys with wet towels and swim trunks, Nick looking out of place but tough enough for people to just get out of his way. He’s jittery and worried about his locker and you feel for him, no matter what, something the movie and Garfield hold on to as rough as he gets. You can’t help it.

This guy was born under a bad sign and you know he’s never been treated right. There’s a vulnerability here that’s not forced by Garfield, it’s just there, so much so that even as he changes into trunks and jumps into the water, you feel for him. It’s so normal, but not. And water— it should be cleansing, so refreshing but it isn’t. However, it is there that he meets another worried, sad soul – Shelley Winters’ Peg Dobbs. She’s shy and charmed by this handsome creature offering her such attention in the pool (as usual Shelley has some weird fate with water – see A Place in the Sun, The Night of the Hunter, Lolita and The Poseidon Adventure), and soon she’s bringing him home to family.  Poor Peg. She thinks this is a proper pick-up and she landed herself a sexy bad boy (with depth) John Garfield. Even her sweet, welcoming family – Papa Dodd (Wallace Ford) and Mama (Selena Royle) along with kid brother Tommy (Bobby Hyatt) – seem a bit excited that she’s brought over this good-looking stranger, even if he’s sweaty and nervous and a little feral. They even go out for a spell, presumably so she can be alone with him. When they return, the entire family is held hostage.

It’s an intriguing set up – Nick running and holing up with this terrified family (a la The Desperate Hours before that movie was made, and this one is the grittier, better version) – and enclosing himself in further— a trapped rat. The romance, of sorts, between Garfield and Winters just feels tragic and awful – there’s nothing sexy or come hither about it. But as he’s pacing and planning his next move, he grows closer to the family, he does anyway, they really don’t – a nice family, something he’s never experienced. Watching him interact with the brood is fascinating. He threatens, sure, but he also wants to have family time, even setting up a turkey dinner for everyone to eat. The patriarch does not want to. He just won’t. And then Nick gets angry, forceful, hurt, actually. Eat the turkey! (I always think, Jesus Christ people, just eat the goddamn turkey).

So, it’s constant stress and worry and where he is going to go? Run off with Peg? Really? And why does it become increasingly important that this family accept him? Or in any way love him? Well, clearly he desperately needs love – but he has to reject it because, really? By the end of the picture, that’s what he’s screaming about to Peg in a beautifully acted (and shot) sequence as he shoves her down the stairs with him. Love. He’s yelling that she never loved him. Never. With the family turning on him, there’s no love anywhere in this world: “Nobody loves anyone. You, your old man, your family, the cops, my old lady, Al Molin! Garbage. Garbage!”

It’s a powerful scene that kicks you in the gut. You really believe John Garfield. You believe every move he makes here, in fact, and every line on his face says something. Ingeniously shot by James Wong Howe with some powerful deep focus close-ups, particularly of Garfield’s face, you get a visceral sense of dread – you want to wipe the sweat dripping from Garfield’s brow, and his eyes are so expressive and troubled that even when he twists into hoodlum mode, slapping Ford around or scaring Winters, you know it’s not out of mere power (though he wields it over them) but out of absolute panic. And watching this film now, and knowing what happened to its lead and its makers – damn. The experience is extra tragic. Victims to one of cinema's darkest, most shameful moments, the scabrous House of Un-American Activities Committee, Berry was blacklisted, two of the screenwriters, Hugo Butler and an uncredited Dalton Trumbo were blacklisted already, Lloyd was blacklisted for a time (he came back, thankfully, and is still with us) as was Royle. And of course, John Garfield. A serious actor and movie star (he trained in the Group Theater), a progressive man (and patriotic, he helped create The Hollywood Canteen) was called to name names and unlike many other actors, writers and directors, Garfield, both a once young street tough and a man of principle, refused to rat. Hero.

Work was then harder to come by and at the young age of 39, this great actor died of coronary thrombosis. Many speculate an already present heart condition was worsened by the stress caused by the House's inquisition, and that is probably true. Here was one of cinema’s greatest actors who looked fantastic on screen, pure charisma and craft and a precursor to Clift, Dean and Brando. His career with intense, funny, heartfelt, oftentimes roughly romantic and edgy performances in movies such as Gentlemen's Agreement, They Made Me a Criminal, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Body and Soul, Force of Evil, The Breaking Point, Nobody Lives Forever, Humoresque and so many more, was cut short because of the HUAC abomination. He Ran All the Way was his last movie. Watching the final shots of the picture – Garfield’s Nick staggering and slumping into that gutter – Jesus Christ, what a bad dream poor Nick had. Why didn’t anyone listen? Simple answer: no love. Well, we love you Nick. And we love John Garfield. And we’ll never forget him. He didn’t rat and he didn’t run.  

There’s got to be a morning after
If we can hold on through the night
We have a chance to find the sunshine
Let’s keep on looking for the light

It’s New Year’s Eve on the SS Poseidon. And New Year’s Eve is often horrible. I’m sorry, I’m sure there are many who love New Year’s Eve and that is a wonderful thing, but good god it can be depressing. And especially at a party – crammed in a room (or on a boat) with people you’re supposed to be having a good time with. But there’s also something a bit mysterious about how woeful it can be. It’s not like you really want the same year to continue, not even if it was a great one, we all need a refresh of course, so that is the hope – a fresh start, a new beginning and, in some more dramatic circumstances, light out of the darkness. As Maureen McGovern sings, “There’s got to be a morning after…”

And that can happen for people. People who have permanently good attitudes, loads of self-motivation, or good luck. But with time and wisdom (and cynicism), you often know the next day, the New Year, really makes no damn difference from the day before. Unless you make it so (for yourself – for your community, or for the world, that’s something else). So here come the reflections about your life, which can fill you with melancholy or anxiety. And here come the resolutions. But will you empower yourself to even start them? Will you not, as Gene Hackman’s The Poseidon Adventure preacher testifies, “pray to God to solve your problems!” But instead, “Pray to that part of God within you! Have the guts to fight for yourself!” Maybe.

Or maybe you need an enormous push – a holler from a malevolent God, or a mischievous Devil (your choice), or, you need to take an absurdist journey through the looking glass. Or maybe you just need to freak yourself out. That all sounds so dramatic – it doesn’t need to be that dramatic, not in real life, and so this is why cinema is so glorious. You can, in the Ronald Neame-directed, Irwin Allen-produced, John Williams-scored, The Poseidon Adventure, live through all of these other people’s lives – their and hopes and their dreams and their freak-outs on New Year’s Eve. And enjoy the hell out of it. You can forgo a party or watching the ball drop or falling asleep early on the couch and experience the surreal hellscape of this aging luxury liner. There they go, sliding sideways across a dance floor, screaming. Here they are, terrified, hanging upside down from a table in a 1970’s party pantsuit. They’re not taking down the Christmas tree this year, they are, instead, climbing up it.

The passengers of the Poseidon, including four past Oscar winners, are facing the fight of their lives in an otherworldly realm of water, fire, explosions, and shimmering holiday tinsel. It’s ridiculous, it’s bizarre, it’s weirdly beautiful, it’s silly, it’s exciting, it’s, at times, incredibly human. You want a memorable New Year’s Eve? Or at least a pleasant kind of drunkenness? Watch Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine yell at each other about the right thing to do stuck in a capsized ship and watch Borgnine usually (always?) be wrong about it. No wonder, even beyond the whole disaster he’s found himself in, he’s often in a rotten mood.

And from the start, he’s sour – even as none of the sliding-across-the-dance-floor or hanging-upside-down has happened yet (the only one aware of danger is Leslie Nielsen, the ship’s captain, and his immediate crew). But Borgnine’s cop, Detective Lieutenant Mike Rogo, is, from the first scene, dealing with his sick wife, Linda (Stella Stevens), who is also upset. She’s often cranky and snips at him (“To love, dummy” she says later during a toast), but he clearly loves her. She’s a former prostitute (it’s discussed a few times after this moment – she’s worried someone on board recognized her – so much for new beginnings) and he’s bickering with her about suppositories (he doesn’t know where you put them – she does). He’s also annoyed with the doctor for taking so long, but, a portent of doom – three quarters of the passengers aboard the Poseidon are sick. New Year’s Eve is already starting off terribly.

On a more positive note, there’s sweet Belle Rosen (Shelley Winters) and her husband, Manny (Jack Albertson), a loving, retired couple who are traveling to Israel, thrilled that they’ll finally meet their grandson. Belle notices the older bachelor James Martin (Red Buttons), speed-walking on deck, an activity that looks wobbly and weird – it seems like he’s both running away from something or towards a goal he may never reach (it’s hard not to think of Buttons’ marathon dancer in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – and Jane Fonda’s Gloria dragging his dead body on her back across the dance floor). Belle thinks the health-conscious haberdasher is lonely. “That’s why he runs. So he won’t notice,” she says. God, what a bummer, Shelley, and on New Year’s Eve of all times. But she’s right.

Then there’s the rogue preacher, Reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman, who was in two great, very different pictures than this one –Cisco Pike and Prime Cut – the same year Poseidon was released), whose gotten in trouble with his church for, I suppose, being so rebellious, and is being sent to Africa. He thinks that’s just fine as he’s the best kind of reverend, he says: “Angry, rebellious, critical, a renegade. Stripped of most of my so-called clerical powers. But l’m still in business.” (He sounds like Royal Tenenbaum at that moment) We don’t know how to feel about him, he seems a little unstable, and he is going to become the hero of this movie, which is fantastic – a refreshing change of pace. He’s certainly not typical, he’s not square-jawed boring, this is going to be interesting…

He is full of New Year’s Eve assuredness and an almost creepy, all-powerful positivity towards the future. His punishment is, in fact, to him, “Freedom! Real freedom. Freedom to dump all the rules and all the trappings. And freedom to discover God in my own way!” He’ll discover something like God soon enough.

Later on, he’ll preach to a group of passengers – including a young woman (with a resourceful gown, we’ll learn that night) that he’ll bond with, Susan Shelby (Pamela Sue Martin), who is traveling with her ship-curious younger brother, Robin (Eric Shea), and the sensitive singer Nonnie Parry (Carol Lynley), who will form a connection – traumatized – with James Martin. The Reverend is sermonizing that God wants “winners, not quitters.” And he will, indeed, bring up, quite forcefully, New Year’s resolutions:

“So, what resolution should we make for the New Year? Resolve to let God know that you have the guts to do it alone! Resolve to fight for yourselves and for others and for those you love. That part of God within you will be fighting with you. All the way.”

He really seems to vibing something here, like perhaps a major catastrophe (or maybe he was really upset by the state of the world, hated Richard Nixon) and that is surely the point, but some of this preaching seems like it would creep out half of the ship. But Hackman is so good, so angry/charming, that he makes this guy’s weirdness riveting. I’d go see him preach if I were on that boat. I’d sit there all entranced and scared like Red Buttons in his natty scarf hoping his multiple doses of vitamins keep him virile enough to find a girlfriend or a wife or survive a 90-foot tidal wave. New Year’s Eve is awful anyway. Why not?

Once we get to the New Year’s Eve celebration, we’ve now met a likable waiter named Acres (Roddy McDowall), who is digging the young people and their music, and Arthur O’Connell as an older Chaplain who seems a bit disturbed by Hackman’s iconoclastic Reverend. Everyone’s celebrating in the grand, holiday-decorated ball room where the Captain doesn’t sit at his table for long – he and the greedy Linarcos (Fred Sadoff) must leave as there is an emergency (the undersea earthquake and all) – and Reverend Scott will take over as Captain. At the table anyway. But then he already seems like he has taken over. And then…  the boat, described by the purser as “a hotel with a bow and a stern stuck on,” will capsize. Spectacularly so.

It’s an incredible, strangely beautiful, artfully composed sequence. The passengers, adorned in bright gowns and suits with frills and funny hats, fall to one side, tumbling over chairs and tables and musical equipment. They keep rolling along with the boat as its turned over by the tidal wave – the floor becoming the ceiling. They slide on a surface strewn with colorful New Year’s Eve confetti, trying to grab on to anything, desperately attempting to hang on to loved ones. The tables now have screaming topsy-turvy passengers clinging to them as they hang in the air. It’s insane, wonderfully surreal – Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole by way of Hieronymus Bosch mixed with a Max Ernst collage. The Day of the Locust’s Tod Hackett could paint it in his mind – and go crazy for sure – or maybe Shelley Winters would save him.

And from then on, the movie does not stop. These passengers, who really become only the handful of survivors/movie stars (all mentioned above) – the ones who climbed up that Christmas tree (save for Roddy McDowall who was already at the top, and then poor Arthur O’Connell stays down with all those who sided with the by-the-book purser instead of the rebel Reverend), will work through an unearthly quagmire within this upside-down abyss. They are moving up, from the top of the ship to the bottom (insane), to the outer hull, and they climb and crawl and swim through various stages of hell. Belle, who is constantly worried that her weight will impede her, will perform her heroic, sacrificial swim (she was once the underwater swimming champ of New York) and it’s quite moving. People argue – Rogo and the Reverend, Rogo and Linda, some are braver than others, some nearly lose their minds, and some of them die. And they’re all being led by a Reverend who is so challenged by God that, in his last act, he screams to the big man upstairs: “How many more sacrifices? How much more blood? How many more lives?! Belle wasn’t enough! Acres wasn’t! Now this girl! You want another life? Then take me!”

The Reverend, who has not wasted any time praying, something he seems not to believe in (for good reason in this case, he’s got to keep himself and everyone moving, what good would praying do?) is fueled with an anger at a blood-thirsty God that feels damn righteous at this point. If God set up this entire catastrophe as a test – why? Why did brave Shelley Winters have to die a watery death again (remember A Place in the Sun, The Night of the Hunter, the rain storm in Lolita)? Yes, I am blurring Shelley Winters with Belle, and with everything else she’s played (am I forgetting another cinematic water death?), but this is what The Poseidon Adventure does to me. Why take out any of these people?

And more about God – God is all over this picture, and yet, it really feels like God isn’t around much, not any sort of benevolent God. This God is furious. This God does not give a good goddamn while they’re twisting through this upside-down underworld of a ship. (Maybe a kinder God helped with the Christmas tree?) Or, to go further, there is no God – how could one not feel that while being so tested and enraged by a higher being? There is a Devil, likely. And maybe nature is God. (Maybe Gene Hackman’s Reverend is really getting to me…)

Well, wait a second… perhaps there is something more powerful up there to believe – a divine intervention. Near the closing of the movie, when they reach the end of the line, their only chance out of this netherworld, Rogo hollers out, “My God, there is somebody up there. The preacher was right! The beautiful son of a bitch was right!” (That would be a terrific bible verse – someone should work on that) Rogo once angrily accused the Reverend of thinking that he, himself, was God. Now Rogo may think that “beautiful son of a bitch” was some kind of Christ figure.

But does everyone believe now? I don’t know. Certainly not all of the viewers. The movie’s power is from how punishing and surreal it is – not entirely spiritually, even if religious allegory is all over the picture and surely meaningful to some – there’s something more potent about it being a crazy, screaming spectacle intertwined with all of this God business – it moves into another realm, one of wonderful epic absurdity. It spins through your brain like those Alice in Wonderland passengers rolling through the ball room in loud clothing with confetti and pianos flying everywhere. It manages to be both mind-numbing and invigorating, inane and inspiring. Is that possible? Sure it is. Life can be like that. And the movie is strangely satisfying. What you might need as the year comes to a close. What you might need on a day before the morning after.

Originally published at the New Beverly.

“On The Cobweb, I’d arrive on the set and there he’d [Vincente Minnelli] be up on the boom, zooming up to the drapes, and I thought to myself, ‘He’s really in heaven now.’ The bloody drapes. It was all about the goddamned drapes in The Cobweb.” – Lauren Bacall

The drapes. The drapes in the library of the high-end private psychiatric clinic. Those dreary old Lillian Gish Miss Inch chosen drapes just hanging there for decades – taunting, not only the patients, but the doctors even more – enough to cause tense confrontations, enraged phone calls and … if you put your subtitles on while watching the movie, “fabric ripping.” Anyone who’s seen Vincent Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955) knows what I’m talking about because those drapes and the trouble they cause – who will order them, what will they cost, which material will be chosen, colors, colors are so very important, who will design them, will it benefit the patients, will it help Gloria Grahame’s marriage, will it ruin her marriage, will those drapes ruin everyone, will people die – are the dramatis impetus of the entire movie. It sounds absurd – drapes – and at times it very much wonderfully is, but it’s an absurdity rooted in a reality in which something as supposedly inconsequential as window dressing pulls out heightened emotions in various people – people at vulnerable stages in their lives. Focusing on those damn drapes, something to prettify a room, to obscure outsider view, to showcase taste, it is also a focus that could create anxiety and depression. It also works to detract a person from their actual problems. I’m fine! It’s the drapes!

What’s powerful about The Cobweb is that the coverings always unmask rather than obscure – which speaks to the filmmaker as well – color, patterns, furnishings, design were important to Minnelli, who shoots these details with such intensity you can practically feel the hues vibrating from the scene (Some Came Running, The Bandwagon, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Two Weeks in Another Town, are some examples – his Vincent Van Gough biopic, Lust for Life, was reportedly his favorite picture, not a surprise for a few reasons, some being Van Gough’s bold colors, thick strokes and then, his madness). In The Cobweb, swatches of vivid drapery fabric sitting on a table between two characters, indeed just the word “swatch,” has never felt so lacerating and intense. Whenever Gloria Grahame holds a swatch in her hand or tosses it on the bed, I get nervous. It’s not crazy to think this material would attract Minnelli. As Mark Griffin wrote in “A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli”:

“For a decor-obsessed director like Minnelli, being handed a story in which interior furnishings play a pivotal role must have seemed like a gift from the cinematic gods.” ‘The Cobweb was a psychological story that appealed to me greatly,’ Vincente said. ‘The thing that attracted me was that it wasn’t about the inmates, although the inmates happen to be strange. It was about the doctors and the foul-ups in their lives… It was so rich in possibilities that I volunteered to direct.’”

And he fulfilled all of those possibilities directing this movie (in Cinemascope, gorgeous Eastman Color, cinematography by George J. Folsey, a 12-tone score by Leonard Rosenman), with a cast that’s so star-heavy, you expect an Irwin Allen earthquake to shake up such icons. Nope, all Minnelli needed were drapes: Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish, Oscar Levant, Adele Jergens, Fay Wray, newcomer John Kerr (Minnelli originally wanted James Dean for the role) and Susan Strasberg inhabit this tony asylum –  the real one and the elegant homes and beatnik apartments – housed by the clinic workers and their wives. It’s fitting then, that the movie opens with the young, troubled artist, Stevie (Kerr) running down a road, only to be picked up by a doctor’s wife, Karen (Grahame), the neglected, kittenish and often angry stunner married to Widmark’s Dr. Stewart McIver. Their discussion? Color: Stevie says: “Red and green… Derain died last fall in a hospital. You wouldn’t know who he was …  He died in a hospital in a white bed, in a white room – doctors in white standing around – the last thing he said was ‘Some red, show me some red. Before dying I want to see some red and some green.’”

We get to the drapes before Karen even drops off Stevie – their ride to the clinic intercuts with Stewart discussing the new drapes with the dour, by-the-book clinic administrator, Victoria Inch (Gish), who is cheap, and sees no reason to be the least bit extravagant about curtains. Karen later notices the swatches and without telling her husband orders up the new drapes herself – and much more colorful and expensive drapes, to the later horror of Victoria. Karen’s action becomes a bigger problem when Stewart agrees with his patients and the clinic’s beautiful, slightly bohemian crafts director Meg Faverson (Bacall). Stewart and Meg are for the patients designing the drapes – chiefly Stevie. They think this is great therapy, something that will make the patients feel happier and satisfied and useful. But oh my god… the drapes. So much drama in the drapes. More time spent with Meg makes Stewart start falling for her, and less time with Karen makes Karen start unraveling even faster. The carousing medical director Douglas Devanal (Boyer) coming on to her after she strategizes with him and opens up about her marriage, doesn’t help. And it just goes on and on in circles – arguing about the drapes – until Karen becomes furiously proactive and drives to the clinic, hanging those drapes up herself. We should be proud of Karen at that moment, even if it’s destructive. My god, someone did something about the drapes!

We observe the patients, the so-called mad ones, and we see them lose it a few times, chiefly Strasberg’s agoraphobic Sue, and of course Stevie – once the new drapes are put up, he runs again, suspected dead. There’s also the acerbic Levant taking hydrotherapy baths and uttering darkly amusing, disturbing observations (some based on his own psychiatric problems – the movie was adapted by John Paxton from the 1954 novel by William Gibson). But the non-patients are the ones going crazy in The Cobweb and madness seems inescapable – nothing can seemingly contain it – certainly not those goddamn drapes. Grahame (who gives the picture’s best performance – pouty, insolent and vulnerable) talking in a phone booth to a grim Victoria during a symphony is so unusually dynamic, you can truly feel how “sultry” the air is, as Karen explains in the overheated booth. And they’re talking about … well, what do you think they’re talking about? The small, stuffy phone booth is an apt place to be arguing about drapes – these are characters contained in their marriages, their rigidity, their guilt, their losses, their need for expression, and all feel, to varying degrees, on the verge of exploding, of running, whether out of something or back into their own torment.

There’s hints of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” here (“It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw-not beautiful ones like buttercups but old foul, bad yellow things.”) though Minnelli’s characters are stuck in an unstable rest cure in their own minds, with drapes and bright flowers and Gloria Grahame’s red lipstick, which at times looks almost running from the corner of her mouth – she always seems just a little mussed, not matter how beautifully dressed. Mussed seems appropriate as Minnelli cracks his characters over the head with the drapes and he never let’s go of those swatches for a second. Stewart says, “Before we know it, we’ll have so many drapes around here we’ll wrap the clinic up in them.” He’s almost right. By the end, someone will be wrapped in those drapes. Literally. For comfort. For calm. Watching Karen wrap Stevie up in the dreaded drapes like a blanket – oh, god – it’s not so calm. And, yet, the drapes have served some kind of utilitarian purpose. Which, seems at this point, well, insane.

“I was a lesbian owner of a disco who fell in love with Juliet Prowse and got strangled on Ninety-third Street and East End Avenue with a silk stocking by Sal Mineo. Jesus, who’s not going to play that part?” – Elaine Stritch

Joseph Cates’ Who Killed Teddy Bear is a movie that lives in its own kind of sickly stunning, neon-blinking 1965 New York City nightfall – a terrifying and terrified world that’s drawn towards deviancy while desperately running from it. A world that punishes perverts via men who become so obsessed with punishing perverts, that they become perverts themselves; and perhaps even more demented than the nutjobs they bust. A world that observes the beauty of the pursued, but relishes, indeed pants over the beauty of the pursuer, focusing very specifically on the physicality of the depraved. And that’s a depraved Sal Mineo, which is really something quite unique and disquietly beautiful here.

It’s a world in which an independent, intelligent female disco DJ – all health and sweet sexiness – a single woman who should be free enough to walk to work or to dance with unabashed joy, finds herself terrorized by an obsessed stalker who torments her with upsetting, escalating obscene phone calls. He also watches her. And follows her. In fact, he works with her – she just doesn’t know it. Kind-hearted woman that she is, she’s nice to him.

But she, Norah (an impressive, lovely Juliet Prowse) is a brave heroine, and one based on the very real feelings women have when being stalked. She doesn’t want her world enclosed by a psycho. She doesn’t want to be constantly scared. She doesn’t want to check her back every time she leaves her apartment. She’s scared but it pisses her off that she’s scared. Because now she will have to check herself – that’s the world the movie also walks us through – Norah’s loss of freedom as this crazy life rages outside and around her, bodies dancing, hair swinging, to the music she plays. She can’t live her life trapped like this anymore.

So then there’s the police – who wants to drag the police into all of this? As a woman she senses this will become a whole other drama, or useless. But she must involve them, and so the police detective who comes to help her, Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray), does not arrive in the form of the upright, steadfast F.B.I. agent Glenn Ford in the much tonier obscene phone call thriller from a few years before this one – Blake Edwards’ darkly beautiful Experiment in Terror.  No, the detective who comes to her aid is one who listens to disgusting cases on tape, of men saying sick-o things to female victims, and within earshot of his ten-year-old daughter (when his child sees Norah she asks her father if she’s a “hooker”). He also has books like “Sadism and Masochism: Vol. 1” and magazines like “Teenage Nudists” splayed out on his desk in full view of his little one. Research. Indeed it is research, but this guy really really loves his research. His own Police Captain is even creeped out by him and says: “Dave, you’ve gone over the line. You’ve joined them.” You’ve joined them.

But, as Dave protests, his daughter has to know there are perverts out there in the world and he’s not going to shield her from it, even if apparently, he becomes one himself. After all, his wife was raped, murdered and mutilated by a psychopath. Oh. Yeah, that part. As you can imagine, Norah is a little disturbed by all of this. But, hey, this is all she’s got right now. Her lesbian boss (played by a fantastically acerbic Elaine Stritch) makes a pass at her, and in a wonderfully shaded scene, nice Norah keeps saying, “If I’m wrong, I apologize.” She doesn’t want to offend this woman but she also wants to be left alone. Her boss does leave, and is then … murdered by her stalker. OK. Now what? And what the hell can she say to a police detective after he tells her that kind of backstory?

What the hell do you say or make of anyone or anything in this movie? It’s a potently bizarre little cookie, but it’s not entirely foreign in terms of our primacy and darker curiosities. If we’re truly honest about how much as viewers we are drawn towards darkness and depravity – in terms of watching it – and the mixed emotions of exploitation – Who Killed Teddy Bear? plays less like a trashy curio and more like the compelling character study that it is. I don’t really think there’s anything trashy about this movie at all, in spite of its reputation. Of course we are a little disturbed, and at times, thrilled and strangely delighted, maybe even nervous by the odd characters – chiefly, the stalker’s little teenage sister. She has been brain damaged after seeing him sleep with… their mother? A family member? (I’m still not certain) and falling down the stairs. There are incest vibes are all over these two, and yet, he’s always trying to protect his sister, unlike the weird-ass police detective who think his daughter should actually hear obscene phone calls as she’s going to sleep. But it’s not necessarily the lurid content of the picture that’s interesting in and of itself – it’s not there for cheap thrills or laughs – it’s the curious mixture of dual pathologies viewed with a tonally discomforting poignancy. That tonal discomfort and power is in large part due to the picture’s real star – the obscene caller, Lawrence, played by a brilliant Sal Mineo.

It’s one of Mineo’s greatest performances and shamefully not seen or discussed enough. Mineo’s large-eyed vulnerability so powerful in Rebel Without a Cause, Crime in the Streets and Dino, is heightened and morphed into a grown-up man here – primal and strong and damaged and, yet, disarmingly helpless. He’s sick in the head but something made him that way. That the picture is fixated on him sexually was a bold move for Mineo. Mineo said:

“I played a telephone freak, and we were having this hassle with the censors. In some of the shots while I was on the phone they wanted to sorta suggest that I was masturbating, but I couldn’t be naked. So I was just wearing jockey shorts. It turned out that was the first American film where a man wore jockey shorts on-screen.”

Those jokey shorts didn’t exactly help his career, in spite of some fine notices for his performance, which seems unfair watching it now. The lingering on his body, and instead of Prowse’s (which is how it would normally go), is fascinating, and it happens in ways that manage to not feel exploitative, but more artful, more leeringly thoughtful, if that makes any sense. In this movie, it does. (Even Norah tells him he’s got a nice body) We’ve turned our eyes on the stalker – we stare at him. There’s the tightness of his clothes, an extended, bare-chested work-out scene where he seems to be powering through perversion (or stoking the fires), there’s a pool scene in which his suit is much more revealing than Prowse’s, and a dance in which Mineo’s shirt shows off his midriff – these scenes are all here to take in, but we truly think about what we’re looking at, because, how perverse are we?

The movie turns the gaze back, makes us wonder what that weird police detective wonders (probably not Sal Mineo), and removes the idea of watching this movie to get an eyeful of Prowse. And, looking at how gorgeous Sal Mineo is – we ask, why must he be so sexually screwed up? Why can’t he just enjoy himself? Even Norah wonders this.

There’s a lot of wondering going on with Who Killed Teddy Bear? There is nothing like this picture – the closest I can compare it to is the pictures of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey or the novels of Hubert Selby, Jr. – there’s a downtown pulp and a gritty art to it – but it’s really in its own universe. The black and white cinematography by Joseph C. Brun (with Taxi Driver’s Michael Chapman as assistant camera) is gorgeous and experimental. I’m not sure why some find this picture junky – you can imagine Edie Sedgwick slinking into the frame and sizing up young Sal.

And Mineo takes this performance so much further. As I’ve written before about this picture, you might be thinking about beefcake, but it veers into a beefcake where violence and sex messes up a traumatized character’s mind, who happens to look like someone Lou Reed would sing about (someone like Little Joe). And then you’re thinking about Mineo, the actor, the characters he’s played before, and characters he is perhaps running away from as his career was changing. Take a look at your “switchblade kid” now. And, really, take a look. Everyone else in this movie does.

From my piece in Ed Brubaker's Kill or Be Killed

The New Beverly has re-opened this December. The first movie they played? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a favorite, and one I was pleased to write about for the theater. Here's my piece. Welcome back, New Beverly! Christmas came early.

"Every studio but one rejected it…The studio head said, ‘Well, I’ll buy it if they don’t go to South America.’ I said, ‘But they went there!’ He said, ‘I don’t give a shit. All I know is John Wayne don’t run away.’” – William Goldman

Butch: You know, when I was a kid, I always thought I was gonna grow up to be a hero.

Sundance: Well, it’s too late now.

Butch: What’d you say something like that for? You didn’t have to say something like that.

Newman and Redford. Butch and Sundance. We know those faces. Those beautiful, almost ridiculously handsome, rugged, wrinkly-eyed smiling, goddamn charming faces. And those eyes – those twinkly and soulful eyes – these guys were made for the cinema beyond their physical beauty – they said so much with their eyes and in such different ways, and with a power that is, like the western anti-heroes they are portraying, instantly mythic.

In fact, it’s Newman, Redford and William Goldman that made the men – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – truly mythic – the real-life pair, not a household name before the picture, could have been forgotten by the mainstream world had the movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, never been made. But no one will forget them now. And there’s something ultimately touching about that. These two guys living and dying as the last outlaws during the remnants of the Old West, men who were up against the modernization of the world (while taking advantage of it – until they couldn’t outrun it), are emblazoned in our minds because of technology – the movies. And not just the movie made about them, but the big screen mythology of the western outlaw that was occurring in their own time – Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903 – five years before Butch and Sundance ended their lives in Bolivia. I wonder if they saw it? I can only imagine the possible glee (or anger – and screenwriter William Goldman thought of this too) on their faces. Even with the few photographs of the real life Butch and Sundance, I picture them sitting in the theater as Newman and Redford, smiling and elbowing each other, or angrily objecting (young Sundance, in fact, then Harry Longbaugh, as cited in Thom Hatch’s wonderful, The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, wrote to a newspaper to set the record straight about his undeserving status as “one of the most dangerous outlaw in the West: “I read a very sensational and partly untrue article, which places me before the public not even second to the notorious Jesse James…”). There they are, in my mind, taking in the same kind of crime they had committed, listening to the audience oohing and awing in rapture.

Think of it: Butch and Sundance, looking at that in-your-face medium close-up of Justus D. Barnes as he shoots his pistol point-blank. And the amazement in the audience! To think that one day Butch and Sundance would also be on that big screen – they likely never anticipated that. They too, would get their close-ups. And people would flock to see them. So, yes, I imagine their eyes, whether Butch and Sundance or Newman and Redford (now I am blending the two images – see how mythology melds in your mind?) pondered the thought.

And those eyes are lit up.

Director George Roy Hill opens the film with newsreel footage resembling Porter’s train robbing revolution, elegiac music playing along. This isn’t just a happy story, we are already warned: this won’t end well.

Similar to my imaginings of Butch and Sundance watching themselves on screen, the superb title sequence was originally conceived as a scene in the movie. As discussed in Art of the Title, Butch and Sundance and Etta all view this in a theater in Bolivia – and are upset by it. Considered too downbeat within the flow of the film, Goldman moved the silent film idea at the start of the picture, setting the viewer instantly within the myth – an excellent decision. It’s a wonderful, unforgettable opening, a touching meta-moment – we watch a movie within a movie about the end of our protagonists and their Hole in the Wall gang followed with the print-the-legend: “Most of What Follows Is True.”

And then… that beautiful shot of Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy, shot in sepia. The rack focus from the reflection of a bank in a window to Newman’s face –  staring out at it – his eyes casing the place. Hill, cinematographer Conrad Hall and Goldman were clearly thinking of John Ford’s decree: “The main thing about directing is: photograph the people’s eyes”

There’s a lot of watching in this movie as Butch and Sundance are either casing or keeping an eye or being watched by others. The camera watches, their girlfriend watches, the viewer watches, the law watches, the super posse watches, they even have to watch themselves in a certain respect. And it seems the more everyone watches, the more everyone loves them – even if they hate them. It’s not superficial or a bunch of mush either, it’s not just physical attraction – it’s the chemical makeup of these two guys and what they project. In a Tracey and Hepburn way, in a Mirna Loy, William Powell way, in a Laurel and Hardy way… And as everyone watches, people see what they want to see, as Goldman’s screenplay introducing Butch puts so succinctly, so lyrically:

“He is Butch Cassidy and hard to pin down. Thirty-five and bright, he has brown hair, but most people, if asked to describe him, would remember him blond. He speaks well and quick and has been all his life a leader of men; but if you ask him, he would be damned if he could tell you why.”

Butch approaches the guard at closing time and asks what’s happened to the old bank. Butch says, rather disarmingly, that it was “beautiful.” The Guard tells him that people kept robbing it. “That’s a small price to play for beauty,” Butch opines. And from that gorgeous line comes the gorgeous intro of … Sundance. Another close-up, another shot fixed on the eyes – this is almost two minutes of Robert Redford playing poker, and we just keep looking at him, and for so long that it feels cinematically daring. Who is this guy? Well, we all know now, but at the time, we are looking at a true star-is-born moment. The Sundance Kid will never be forgotten because of this image and because this is Redford as what we know and think of as ROBERT REDFORD (the all caps ROBERT REDFORD).  There’s so much mythmaking in this moment that it feels beyond cinema. There’s a reason he’s called a star.

Hill insisted on this majestically lit Conrad Hall close-up and to hold this shot at length because he wanted the audience to know that we are staying with this guy through the entire movie. This isn’t just some actor playing poker, some guy who will get shot in the first five minutes, this is one of the two who we will be following, rooting for, and falling in love with alongside that well-established star, Paul Newman. To think that anyone needed convincing of Robert Redford seems almost absurd now, but then he wasn’t a huge star. And so, again, to watch the mustachioed 32-year-old stoically playing poker, hat brim low, eyes piercing the darkness, and thinking of all that Redford will become (not to mention the Sundance institute) underscores how important a film entrance like this was. Redford, whom Hill fought for as Sundance (producer Richard Zanuck couldn’t see it – until he watched the dailies and realized how very wrong he was), won out on casting, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The picture moves from sepia to full color, and we drink in Hall’s stunning compositions (shot in Zion National Park, Utah) as the men ride their horses, completely in tune with nature. Watching Butch and Sundance slowly ride through a stream is such a simple thing of beauty, so exquisitely and meticulously shot by Hall, that we’re simultaneously at peace and in awe. Hall’s framing carefully keeps them in balance and not dwarfed by the landscape, even as its majesty is all around them – this is where they belong, this is where they seem content. Amy Taubin, when discussing Redford in a brilliant essay, described a scene later in the picture when the two are on the run:

“We see a close-up of Sundance as he surveys the terrain below, and from his point of view we see a sweeping moving-camera shot of vast stretches of plains and hills, dappled by the sun. Sundance is on the lookout for their pursuers, but his gaze is also smitten by the beauty of the landscape. No actor other than Redford could have turned, however briefly, a bittersweet comedy about two charming bank robbers into a tragedy of disenfranchisement.”

I love her description there – “a tragedy of disenfranchisement” – she’s so right. As Butch and Sundance ride to their way to their Hole in the Wall gang hideout, we are already lamenting any kind of loss they may feel away from those beautiful surroundings.  As the two men talk, we immediately see that Butch, the leader, is the gabbier one, goofy, full of big ideas – not silly necessarily, there is some gravitas to him – he just doesn’t take life too seriously. Or he doesn’t let on that he does. Why? It could all go away in a flash. Death could be around the corner and he’s seen death, though Butch is not one to kill a man, (he, in fact, only killed one man in his life). Sundance is the quieter, deadlier, more serious one, he’s a thinker, but not without a dry wit of his own – and he’s a wonderful straight man to Butch. They ride and talk:

Sundance: What’s your idea this time?

Butch: Bolivia.

Sundance: What’s Bolivia?

Butch: Bolivia. That’s a country, stupid! In Central or South America, one or the other.

Sundance: Why don’t we just go to Mexico instead?

Butch: ‘Cause all they got in Mexico is sweat and there’s too much of that here. Look, if we’d been in business during the California Gold Rush, where would we have gone? California – right?

Sundance: Right.

Butch: So, when I say Bolivia, you just think California. You wouldn’t believe what they’re finding in the ground down there. They’re just fallin’ into it. Silver mines, gold mines, tin mines, payrolls so heavy we’d strain ourselves stealin’ ’em.

Sundance: You just keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.

Butch: Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.

Butch says such proclamations without mere braggadocio – there is a touching blend of intelligence and insecurity, and, if I see it, I can make it happen, kind of attitude. And then of course when you know what happens in Bolivia, the enthusiasm is tempered with our own sadness. Because for such a buoyant movie full of life and fun, brimming with its counterculture heart and its New Wave approach to the Western (Hill is not doing John Ford, he’s not doing Sergio Leone, nor should he, he works with his own strengths, his own deconstructive/reassembling of the myth approach), and there’s a melancholic sense of loss to it all. The juxtaposition of their banter and behavior, modern at heart, and the characters’ collision with the machinery of modernity (they are already being phased out) makes me think of a much less Hollywood movie, a much more iconoclastic, rock and roll movie, Easy Rider (out the same year – 1969) – as Peter Fonda’s Wyatt, a.k.a. Captain America and Dennis Hopper as Billy, are trying to find any kind of freedom in the beautiful open America, only to feel it closing in on them. “We blew it,” Captain American says. And when Butch nears his end, he waxes sarcastic: “Oh, good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.”

There’s a girl (a woman), and I would say, of course there’s a girl, but this is not the typical movie girlfriend. Sundance’s partner, beautiful, bright schoolteacher Etta Place (a luminous but nobody’s-fool Katharine Ross) lives, in a most unconventional relationship, with both Sundance and Butch. She sleeps with Sundance, but that doesn’t stop her from enjoying a romantic bike ride with Butch (set to B.J. Thomas singing Burt Bacharach’s earworm “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” one of three musical interludes that should be corny, and for some, it is, but it comes off charming – I loved it as a kid when I saw it on TV and I still love it as an adult). That famous bike ride (the bike represents the future) with Butch clowning and flirting and cuddling up to Etta is perhaps the most joyfully romantic moment in the picture – and it’s not even with her actual boyfriend, Sundance (though we don’t know what’s been happening beyond what we see on screen, which is both incredibly sexy and romantic, Noel Coward and Ernst Lubitsch would approve). Etta wonders how it would have turned out had she met Butch before Sundance – would they have become involved? “Well we are involved, Etta,” Butch says, “Don’t you know that? I mean, you are riding on my bicycle. In some Arabian countries, that’s the same as being married.”

This Jules and Jim situation was somewhat modern in movies in 1969 and was certainly modern, indeed radical, back in the day, as Etta Place really did live with both Sundance and Butch, and likely aided in at least one of their robberies. Looking at a picture of the real-life Etta and Sundance, he suited up nicely, looking slick, and she, so very pretty, wearing a beautiful dress and a watch pendant Sundance gave her, with a soulful look in her eye, you wish there was an entirely separate movie just about this fascinating woman (And there is! There are two TV movies about Etta, one with Ross, I’ve just learned of, that look to extend the mythology – Etta and Pancho Villa? Not sure if they are any good but I now need to check these out – digging to see if there are others…)  Ross plays Etta with a warmth and intelligence and some mystery, and you want to know more about her. She’s a lover, but she’s also game, and she’s smart – she sees the end coming and gets the hell out of there. The real Etta took off as well – never heard from again – I wonder how long she lived? What was her life like? How much she missed those guys. Oh, she must have missed those guys.

And we’re gonna miss those guys. For as light as the picture plays – that touching sepia-toned montage of Butch, Sundance and Etta’s high time in New York City, the music, the smirking banter – we know that this almost unseen force, the super posse, which takes up a good final third of the picture, is weighing down on them.

Shot at a distance, the posse is like a machine, emblematic of the future… and the future is the one thing Butch and Sundance cannot shoot their way out of. The amusing refrain “who are those guys?” is funny but also haunting as, really … “who are those guys?” That’s a question many of us could ask when we’re trying to untangle exactly who is at the bottom of it when our lives are suddenly upturned and things are beyond our control.

The great Goldman surely thought of all of this as he spent years researching Butch and Sundance (real names, Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longbaugh – already fantastic names) as this would go on to become one of the most influential works of screenwriting – a gold standard for not just the buddy film genre, but for screenwriting in general.  Numerous filmmakers have been influenced by it including, not surprisingly, Shane Black, who said, “I studied William Goldman’s writing style, especially the scripts for Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I found both of those to be really riveting, entertaining in their own right, as if you were reading a condensed novel good for one sitting.”

It does read like a condensed novel – and you can understand why Goldman went lyrical with these men – their lives were not just mythic, but incredibly real – they came from hard working, religious backgrounds where the American dream is always out of reach. Both Butch and Sundance watched their parents work themselves to the bone, never getting ahead, and, after attempting backbreaking work themselves, decided – this is not for me. What is the point of this? Working without joy, working without profit? Why do this?

Much like the audience the film would amass, these two antiheroes were turning on, tuning in and dropping out

Goldman’s brilliance and dedication shine sin the way he subtly added layers of their biography and truth to the story without subverting the flow of the narrative, and you get glimpses of their past in pointed remarks or even double-meaning jokes. At one point Butch says to Etta, “I swear, Etta, I don’t know. I’ve been working like a dog all my life, and I can’t get a penny ahead.” And Etta answers:  “Sundance says it’s because you’re a soft touch and always taking expensive vacations, buying drinks for everyone, and you’re a rotten gambler.” Butch quips: “That might have something to do with it.” In Sundance’s poker playing introduction he’s asked the secret of his success: His answer “prayer.” The answer is both ironic and earnest – coming from a religious background, prayer, even if rejected, likely never left him.

By the picture’s end, we know they’re gonna die (we know it earlier, in fact, as the film’s opening newsreel footage reads “The Hole in the Wall Gang, led by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, are all dead now …”), though we’ve been so charmed throughout the picture, and the chemistry between Newman and Redford that we may have forgotten. In a beautiful circular fashion, the movie opens with the legend – the film footage in sepia- and closes with the legend, the sepia freeze framing Butch and Sundance as they choose their fate in a spectacular kamikaze fashion. By allowing the soundtrack of the gunshots to continue over the frozen image of our heroes, Goldman and Roy Hill acknowledge the historical that these guys died (exactly how is up for question – they may have fulfilled a murder/suicide pact), but grants them immortality.

We want them to live – but we know their fate. And as an audience member, I think of the worried Etta stating to Sundance earlier in the picture, “They said you were dead.” And of tough, laconic Sundance, brushing past her with, “Don’t make a big thing out of it.” Quickly, the man changes his mind, and in his most moving, romantic moment, he shows his vulnerability and says, “No. Make a big thing out of it.”

We did. We do. And we will keep on making a big thing out of it.