Sleuth is also fine. It isn't knockedout terrific the way The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is knockedout terrific, but it is so solidly put together one equates it with the English country manor house in which the action of the film takes place: sunk to its knees in the earth. Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier take turns outacting one another, with the former the Italo-English hairdresser having the affair with the wife and the latter the mystery novelist married to the wife, who has lured the former to his house to kill him. And if that sounds convoluted, it is only indicative of the Anthony Shaffer script, based on his hit stage play, which has more wrinkles than a Jack La Lanne reject. Set up in the form of the traditional Agatha Christie conundrum thriller, I would be a swine were I to unveil any of the plot. But director Joseph Mankiewicz has laid in one little goodie that must be brought to your attention. The name of the actress who plays the part of Marguerite is "Margo Channing." Toy with that in your skull for a while, and then you'll understand why you never heard of the actor who portrays Inspector Doppler. Beyond those clues, deponent sayeth not.
Those who know my work and my nature will attest to the fact that I am hardly a flag-waving VFW style Amurrrican. But I confess to misty eyes and a swelling of the chest as I emerged from 1776, the Columbia Pictures version of Sherman Edwards's Broadway musical, as scripted by Peter Stone and directed by Peter Hunt. In this stylized and too-frequently cartoony interpretation of how the fathers of our country got around to signing the Declaration, there is a kernel of grandeur that not even Hollywood flashslam can wither. Friends who've seen the film look at me as though I fell off the Moon when I tell them I adored it. They cite to me the staginess, the fustian, the pomposity, the flaws without number. I don't care. In fact, if the truth be known, I don't give a damn, Scarlett. It is a family picture with several moments—the young Union soldier's lament for the dead, John Cullum's slavery song—that stop the breath. It is the kind of film even revolutionary cynics like myself need to be drug to every once in a while, to remind us that as fucked-up as we are today, once we were the first true democratic republic. It's something we need to be told from time to time, and this elegant film does it nicely, thank you. And no, dammit, I don't need a Kleenex, so get the hell away from me.
Jeremiah Johnson is too long, Pete 'n' Tillie is absolutely great, I missed Hit Man and John Wayne's new one for Warners, The Train Robbers, is like listening to a long, bad joke for a mildly amusing punchline. It creaks with all of that 1942 "you're a man now, son, and you'll know it by not getting on your hoss like a sensible lad and hightailing it out of here when those twenty kill-crazed badmen come ridin' over the dune to blow your brains out" garbage. Ann-Margret is exquisite and does the best she can being really miscast; Rod Taylor is wasted; Ben Johnson is starting to get on my nerves with his grittiness; and Duke Wayne is . . . Duke Wayne. If you dig that sort of bullshit, go see it; as for me, with the exception of True Grit, Wayne's last nine hundred films have gone through me like beets through a baby's backside.
Which brings me to the National General/First Artists flick, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, starring Tab Hunter, Stacy Keach, Anthony Zerbe, Tony Perkins, Ava Gardner, a buncha others, and them sensational bulue eyes of Paul Newman, what get upstaged by a bear in the most hilarious face off ever recorded for posterity. Bean is one of those flagellant flicks where they sit you down and keep beating you and you keeping saying don't stop. It goes on and on, and you wouldn't cut a minute of it. One of the damnedest films you'll ever see. Keach, as Bad Bob, is the very last word to be said on mean gunfighters; Hunter is brief and brilliant as a hangee with a reluctance to be hanged; but that bear! He is a star; a furry, crotchety, lumbering, bloody star. I cannot urge you strongly enough to go delight yourself with Newman as Judge Roy Bean. It whips past at hurricane speed, spurred by John Milius's script and John Huston's superlative direction and, though one cannot detect the passage of a thought in its semimindless madness, it is for all that a treat. A two-popcorn-box treat. It opens with a shootout, it ends with a shootout, and everything in between is pure fool's gold. What I mean, a treasure for the childlike in heart.
The Staff/January 19, 1973
2nd INSTALLMENT
In 1970 I read Wally Ferris's novel, Across 110th. It was a tough and uncompromising naturalistic novel of underworld life in Harlem, not as good as Chester Himes's Coffin Ed Johnson-Grave Digger Jones books, but a direct lineal descendant of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson in terms of honesty and dealing with the pragmatic realities of omnipresent violence. It was an upfront piece of street fiction, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Consequently, I waited with some breath bating for the film version, having heard Anthony Quinn would be cast in the role of Detective Frank Sullivan (Mattelli in the film version), a role that promised to be his meatiest since Barabbas, Zorba and Conchis in The Magus in 1968. Trepidation assailed me when I learned Barry Shear was to be the film's director—I once worked on a film with Barry and I've followed his credits pretty closely since that time with, I must confess, a steadily increasing dismay with his film technique—and that Luther Davis would script from the novel. Mr. Davis's last film before this assignment was the seriously flawed Lady in a Cage, ten years earlier; and nothing between except television, a vineyard guaranteed to dull the originality and vigor of even the most splendiferous of toilers. But I waited. Somehow, the prerelease screenings were denied me, God and the Motion Picture Producers Association only know why. Then I read with joy Judith Crist's review in the 18 December issue of New York magazine wherein she lauded the film as a "ruthless, hard film that presents just the facts, ma'am—and does so with a slamming realism that makes this film something more than a Saturday night entertainment special." Heartened, I sojourned to my Van Nuys nabe last night to catch Across 110th Street, top half of a bill that included one of my personal favorites, the undersold and much-denigrated The Wrath of God.
Thank goodness The Wrath of God was on that bill, because Across 110th Street was a total washout. A deceitful, dishonest, utterly unpaced and inept piece of violence for violence's sake, flensed of all logic and purpose, deaf to its own idiom, caked with cliché and devoid of any of the values to be found in the Ferris novel; a film that once again panders to the basest needs of the black audience, at the same time offering masochistic release for our white liberal guilt.
The film tells the story of three down-at-the-heels Harlem blacks who rip off a co-op Mafia/Black policy bank and are thereafter stalked to death by their brothers, the Family and the fuzz. The accent, however, is placed upon the machinations of the mafiosi as they ham-handedly exploit the black underworld in ferreting out the heistmen; and while the two films bear little resemblance I could not help comparing Across 110th Street to Fritz Lang's M (recently seen again, for the nth time). Both films concern, in part, the efforts of an underworld apparat to locate criminals who are endangering their own security. In the case of M, a child killer, located by the safecrackers, robbers and beggars in Berlin's Threepenny Opera underground of the early Thirties. In 110th, the black Mafia hired hands of the policy/pills/prostitution trinity. But where M paints an arresting portrait of the life and times of the era, however sordid and ominous, 110th skims across not only the streets but the sense of life in the Manhattan ghetto. The devilish pull of intensity and individuality in Harlem is subjugated to the fripperies of Technicolor bloodletting even Peckinpah has eschewed lately out of sheer familiarity, boredom and, yes, overkill. Black films like Sounder, Trick Baby and Top of the Heap have shown us ways in which the special world of the black experience can be viewed through anycolor eyes with the impartment of veracity and empathy. 110th takes the cop-out route into insensate cliché and the vile charnel houses that lie at the core of all our souls. It is the route of anti-art and anti-truth.
I don't know how much of this ugliness is attributable to Davis's script, but I do know that Shear has tried to steal the film by upstaging plot, characterization, good taste and artistic reserve with a camera t
he like of whose cockeyed vision has not been seen since the earliest moments of Richard Lester-Sidney Furie keyhole-peeping.
(An example, the better to illustrate to those of you who wonder how film critics make their assessments of good or evil: in one scene the policy hoods have located the wife of the man whose car was used in the heist. They have her in an office in Harlem, sitting in a chair, and Tony Franciosa [brutal son-in-law of a Capo Mafioso] enters to question her. He walks to the desk, sits on it and leans far across in an unnatural posture, one hand on the telephone—which he never uses—forming a triangular hole through which the camera moves down and in to shoot through, framing the woman. It was clearly a staged motion, out of sync with the action in the room, ordered by the director to enable him to get an artsy-craftsy shot. Bad, because it was an unnecessary move by the actor, misleading because it directed the audience's attention to the phone which was never used, intrusive because it detracted from the tension intended to be built in the scene. It was Shear, saying, "Looka meeee!")
As for the actors, no one was permitted freedom and consequently all seemed hamstrung. Quinn could have phoned in his part, so mannered and flaccid was he in his portrayal of the aging racist cop. Yaphet Kotto as his black opposite number on the force was wasted. And as for Anthony Franciosa, the best that can be said for his grimacing, strictured antics is that his brief marital liaison with Shelley Winters failed to rub off on him any of her talent . . . but all of her hysterical mannerisms.
United Artists' Across 110th Street is a deceitful, shallow, crazed production that will look, in retrospect, like precisely what it is: a venal attempt to rip off the cinematic needs of both blacks and whites in a transition period of film where honesty is desperately needed, but in which we are being fed unpalatable helpings of gore and other vittles that can by no stretch of the appetite be considered soul food.
Steelyard Blues is an outrageously adroit high-wire act performed without a net over a terrain of orchestrated lunacy. Forget the direction by Alan Myerson, which is slovenly, fractious and framed with all the élan and artistry of a Super Bowl half-time choreographer. Ignore the screenplay by David S. Ward—and as a scenarist who contends the auteur theory and Bogdanovich suck just rewards from the screenplay, you will not often catch me saying ignore the screenplay—but ignore it this time: unless you're one of those freaks who enjoys unraveling the "world's most challenging crossword" from the Sunday Times of London. Ignore, in fact, everything but the performances of the principal cavorters in this buxom brouhaha. It is an actors' film, pure frolic from opening sequence of Trick Baby's Mel Stewart in a jail cell, spitting on Donald Sutherland . . . to final moments as Peter Boyle in gunslinger gear, sided by Jane Fonda, Sutherland, Garry Goodrow and John Savage, ride thataway over the horizon to the pocketa-pocketa sound of a chopper warming up for The Great Escape.
What plot there is consists of tracking Sutherland—as the slammer-prone, destruction-derby-loving brother of a politically upward-mobile district attorney—across an urban landscape of junkyards, rooftops, hooker-festooned doorways, lion shit–laden zoo cages and highways from which Goodrow tries to taxi a rattletrap PBY amphibian. Sutherland, as Jesse Veldini, is superlative; he mugs and dimples and beams with all the ingenuousness of Puck from the Comic Weekly, caught in the act of going down on Tinker Bell. His Veldini as societal outlaw plays vividly against the manic counterpoint of Howard Hesseman, absolutely perfect as the toothy D.A. brother, Frank . . . and it is a moth's wing contrast that writes the very last word on ugly sibling rivalries . . . or didn't you catch the name-play of "Frank" and "Jesse"?
Ms. Fonda melds the tastiest elements of her roles in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Klute to bring forth the character of Iris, happy hooker and ex-paramour of the erratic Veldini with a subtlety as strong as the best jazz bass line, and a graciousness that says watch Boyle and Sutherland, I'll be here when you get back.
One marvelous exchange between Sutherland and Fonda goes like this:
Fonda: "When are you going to stop thinking being a criminal is glamorous, Veldini?"
Sutherland: "I'm not a criminal, I'm an outlaw."
Fonda: "What's the difference?"
Sutherland (realistically): "I dunno."
But it's Peter Boyle (see accompanying interview) who pulls off the caper. His creation of Eagle, escapee from a lunatic asylum, ex-human fly, man of many schizoid incarnations, is a breathtaker. If he gets overlooked for an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting, may God strike the Academy members with bolts of lightning in their hardening arteries. He has to be watched every moment, like an IRT dip, as he becomes the hooded human fly, a carpenter, a mad dog, the 1950s pinball greaser, the platinum-wigged airline captain, and even (with one lightning line) a Bogart surrogate. He is simply remarkable. Joe was memorable, The Candidate was masterful, but as Eagle he emerges as one of the best all-around actors this country has produced since Robert Blake. In all the subcutaneous ways that keep a movie fresh in the mind years after it's faded from the screen . . . it is his film.
Clearly, the actors had a romp. They whirl and spin and do a dervish number that those weary of Burton/Brando deep breathing and boundaryless blood-baths will applaud. In short, in Steelyard Blues Warner Bros. has a rare joy, sui generis, and is one of the happiest ways to spend an evening in many months.
It was a lean two weeks for screenings, otherwise I wouldn't inflict this one on you; however, a word to the wise might save you a couple of wasted hours of TV watching on 21 February when ABC-TV's Wednesday Movie of the Week presents Lee Remick starring in And No One Could Save Her.
What hag-demon possesses networks like ABC, or production companies like England's Robert Stigwood Organization, compelling them to proffer such pallid floral bouquets as this, their first cooperative venture into filmed-for-TV movies?
Surely no one connected with this dreary little "thriller" could have held any illusions about the freshness of the plot as concocted by Anthony Skene (a gentleman who ought to have his wits, as well as his pencils, sharpened):
Fern, heiress, has been married six months to Sam, a devilishly handsome broth of an Irish lad, who works for the Boston branch of the London Bank. One day he receives a cable, your father is dying. He splits for Ireland. Fern, who has a history of emotional breakdowns, starts to get twitchy when he doesn't call. Finally she flies to Eire (for no logical reason save the show would have ended after five minutes had she not) to track him down. No records of Sam. He isn't who he said he was. Plot complications ensue—devoid of logic or inevitability but simply programmed out of coincidence at the whim of the plot-manipulators—and finally we discover Sam is some species of Blarney-enriched gigolo, thrown out of prep school for "getting a girl in trouble," womanizing through young manhood, making ends meet by making ends meet with wealthy ladies on tour boats, married already.
That's right, you've got it: marrying Fern, the cable, running off . . . it was all a plot so Sam could get Fern's money when she killed herself out of hysteria and grief at his loss. But when she doesn't (as chancy a piece of plotting as one could wince at witnessing in an adult drama), he decides to do her in himself. Fern is saved. Sam falls to his death. Fadeout.
The definitive statement of this arthritic plot was Gaslight, and that was 1944. A hundred thousand potboiler "gothics" and "women's novels" have celebrated it ad nauseum. Every hack writer and hack producer who didn't want to spend the location budget for a hack western or hack war epic has redone this story till only the most culturally deprived and cinematically naïve viewer fails to spot it within moments of the opening credits. It is a fool's game, and one even ABC should be above playing . . . at least publicly.
Lee Remick, as Fern, is her usual somnambulistic self, wandering through yet another eminently forgettable nonperformance; Milo O'Shea plays a Dublin attorney named (of course) Dooley with such overblown affectation it becomes more parody than portrayal—a hysterical mismatching of unequal parts Brendan Behan and drunken leprecha
un; Jennie Linden, she of Women in Love, flashes onscreen too briefly, and has been dealt too mundane a role, to remain long in the memory; everyone else serves as shadows.
There is the stench of corrupted Abbey Players technique throughout, and only the camera lingering lovingly on sites and vistas of Dublin prevents this reviewer from suggesting the lynch rope for all concerned. Yet even the pleasures of watching a travelogue behind Ms. Remick's ghostlike peregrinations is not enough to succor us against the idiot script. It is a waste of time, an utter waste of time.
And to return to the original question, why does ABC cast all the way to England for a production company whose ineptitude and banality of product can easily be matched by our own, home-grown schlock outfits?
Leave it to the traditionally last-running network to avoid all the talented filmmakers overseas and grasp with both hands the overseas equivalents of the Quinn Martin/Aaron Spelling dreck-makers. ABC takes the lead at last . . . in the importation of offscourings.
The Staff/February 16, 1973
A SORT OF AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER BOYLE
What comes to mind first is: Why should anyone grant an interview?
The answer is a simple one, most of the time: To promote a property. If it's an author, the current book on the stalls. If it's a public figure, it's the career, the image, the upcoming trial, the political position. If it's an actor, the soon-to-be-released film he or she is contractually obligated to hype. If it's a fanatic, clearly it's the need to be seen, to be heard, to be noticed.