In All This Excitement

If only I could have seen DIRTY HARRY when it was released in 1971 to fully understand just how the movie played back then but that it’s still thrilling to see now has to say something. As social drama, the film isn’t exactly nuanced which certainly hurts its credibility and the way it takes a real life case that was still ongoing at the time in the exact same city the film is set in to use for popcorn thrills still feels more than a little bit wrong, only adding to the undeniable aura of dark, anamorphic nastiness that permeates every single frame. But in spite of all this I can’t help but continually realize as I watch it how, as an incessantly forceful piece of work, it’s just so damn good, it really is. Don Siegel’s DIRTY HARRY could be considered many things, whether a genuine right-wing tract or just a desperate howl over what was happening to America in general around this time framing old against young, establishment versus radicals who wanted to take things over. Or if you just want to ignore all that and look at it as a straight action movie about a cop who just happens to be more interested in protecting the innocent and punishing the evil than in any ‘rights’ the guilty might have, a true urban western, there’s that too. It also provided the basic template for just about every other cop movie made during the next twenty years and beyond so some of what was groundbreaking at the time may now play as cliché, but so what. What it achieves was proven once again with the showing of an absolutely beautiful print as part of director Edgar Wright’s The Wright Stuff II series at the New Beverly Cinema and the first night I attended. Wright was there on Jan. 18th to introduce the film to the sold out crowd, along with seeing it from the front row, and brought out surprise guest Quentin Tarantino to discuss it with him both before and after the screening. No surprise, Tarantino had a lot to say. And there’s a lot to say about this movie.


It’s hard to imagine that anyone out there doesn’t know the plot of the film but I just went for a walk with someone who hadn’t seen it so they exist. She’s still a nice person, though. Anyway: In San Francisco, a young woman is murdered by a killer who calls himself Scorpio in a letter to the police, in which he demands payment of $100,000 or his killings will continue. SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), known throughout the department as “Dirty Harry” is assigned to the case, but his captain forces him to take on rookie Chico Gonzalez (Reni Santoni) as a partner. When an attempt to catch Scorpio (Andrew Robinson) goes wrong, the maniac kidnaps another girl and demands an even greater ransom. Harry is the one assigned to deliver the money but even though Scorpio is captured things don’t quite go as planned and due to legalities the District Attorney is forced to set him free. Harry is enraged by what the system is allowing to happen, but of course Scorpio’s plan doesn’t end there.


What sticks in the brain after seeing DIRTY HARRY is all that grime and sludge that seems to ooze out of the frame, somehow making the gorgeous city of San Francisco not all that attractive a place to be. It’s photographed in anamorphic Panavision, unlike the comparable BULLITT from three years earlier and while that film feels more open-aired in its Bay Area compositions, DIRTY HARRY’s well framed Scope use somehow feels more crammed in, narrower, meaner. Basically the entire film looks to be shot in location with the obvious exception of the bank robbery sequence filmed on the Universal (not Warner) lot and the city somehow feels more horizontal than it does in any other film, odd considering what our normal perception of the place is. The numerous views we see from high above making it seem strangely flat and spread out as if its citizens are all insects in this massive landscape, ready to be mowed down by Scorpio as he lingers on a rooftop waiting to take down as many innocent lambs as possible.

Contrary to what the normal perception of it might be, the film isn’t without its lighter moments and there is humor in the character of Harry Callahan, like his desire to finish that hot dog before the bank alarm goes off and that degree of likeability along with how he takes care of those bank robbers with his .44 Magnum gets us on his side right away even the character’s supposed racism is done with more of a wink than anything (the one friend of his we ever meet is black, of course). We can see glimpses of the more relaxed Callahan who was once married but much of that has been buried by the overwhelming feel of the madness that’s happened to the world, to this San Francisco that’s been overwhelmed by all the hippies who as this film portrays them have gotten progressively skuzzier in the years since the summer of love, as if they’ve managed to wipe away everything that was ever serene and normal in this beautiful city. Seriously, the black & white, Mancini-infused EXPERIMENT IN TERROR was only nine years before this? VERTIGO was only thirteen?


The square white guys Callahan has to deal with in his job like John Vernon “as the Mayor” and John Larch’s police chief (Larch somehow seems like he only belongs in the world of 60s detective shows) are for the most part totally ineffectual at even having an idea of how to deal with the city they’re allegedly in charge of, totally incapable at dealing with the mad killer Scorpio who seems to represent everything anybody who voted for Nixon fears about the younger generation, distorting the peace symbol for his own means. For the most part a straight ahead narrative dealing with Harry’s pursuit of Scorpio, the film focuses on the case at hand than the more relaxed BULLITT does and it makes sense. Harry, working overtime even though he knows he’ll never get paid for it, has nothing else other than this case, no restaurants to go to with friends where a jazz combo is playing, certainly no women in his life (the sequels made him more of a stud, of course) and he can’t even seem to imagine wanting anything else. Even the one person in the film who seems like he might really become his friend sensibly decides he doesn’t want any part of all this. “No reason for it, really,” he says about his wife being killed by a drunk driver and in a world where that happened, where a mad killer is set free, he seems to have come to the absolute realization that there’s no reason for anything so by a certain point there’s no need to listen to those who rank above him that say otherwise.


The plots of each Dirty Harry entry always seem to feel like a number of elements sort of slapped together in the pursuit of a storyline and that’s a little true of the original as well but it easily works the best here with a script (Story by Harry Julian Fink & R.M. Fink, Screenplay but Harry Julian Fink & R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner, with uncredited contributions by none other than Terrence Malick and John Milius, who is the one responsible for the “Do you feel lucky?” speech) that is truly tight, lean and always knows how to push exactly the right buttons—along with one memorable exchange that was specifically parodied years later in THE NAKED GUN, of course. While introducing the movie Tarantino placed it into the context of the political shitstorm that resulted at the time, how it appealed directly to the far-right Americans that had voted for Nixon (“the tea baggers of the time” was the phrase he used, I believe) and were absolutely terrified by what to them had happened to the country over the past few years, with the particular city this film was set in seen as ground zero of all that was immoral. Addressing the mindset of the critics back then Tarantino mentioned if you go and read what people like Pauline Kael said about it, “You won’t know what the fuck they’re talking about,” since now it plays so much as a basic cop-movie plot we’re very used to, albeit an extremely effective one. And, yes, Kael called it a “right-wing fantasy of that police force as a group helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals,” and at one point adding that it’s a “stunningly well-made genre piece,” but you can kind of tell she hates it. I’m not sure how seriously I can bring myself to take it as political tract in either a 1971 or a 2011 world (maybe more than DEATH WISH, but I don’t know if that’s saying much), but simply as a cop thriller where its lone hero who everyone can depend on decides to take care of things on his own in the style of a classic western story the thing is goddamn gangbusters.

In his autobiography “A Siegel Film” the director pretty much downplays these elements in a ‘we were just trying to tell a good yarn’ sort of way, saying that he and Eastwood never had any political discussions at all (John Milius is also never mentioned in regards to the rewrites that occurred) but Peter Bogdanovich has written of recalling Siegel saying, “I don’t know WHAT people are going to think of this,” so there can’t be any doubt that he was aware of what he had. In 1972 Siegel told The New York Times, “I'm a liberal. I lean to the left, and I don't make political movies. I was telling the story of a hard-nosed cop and a dangerous killer. What my liberal friends did not grasp was that the cop is just as evil in his way as the sniper,” also adding in how he saw himself as a rebel, “I resent authority.” In some ways I can accept the film as more of a story of one man turning against the system he has attempted to be a part of, feeling he can only adhere to his own rules but more than that I wonder if it’s a statement made by a left-leaning filmmaker (working with others who, Milius included, certainly had different viewpoints) who was basically throwing up his hands, admitting that he didn’t know what to do about things anymore and asking the question of what could really be done. Maybe he simply wasn’t entirely aware of how much power the question he was asking about the world would have at the time.


It’s not a perfect movie partly for reasons having to do with the real world, which the film is a somewhat skewed mirror image of—considering the Scorpio plotline was pretty blatantly inspired by the actual Zodiac case the whole thing plays as kind of crassly exploitative if you really start to think about it (inspiring the scene in ZODIAC where Mark Ruffalo as David Toschi walks out on it five minutes in during that film) and the way the film stacks the deck in terms of the legalities during that scene with Josef Sommer’s D.A. feel ready-made for parody now—“implausible,” as Kael called it, but I doubt most people cared. That the judge who says everything Harry’s done to apprehend Scorpio is inadmissible in court gets introduced as teaching classes in “constitutional law at Berkeley” feels pretty designed to get a rise out of a certain audience the film is obviously aimed at, still fuming over the weasel muttering “I have rights” as Harry approaches him on that football field. And one imagines that the police could be a little more effective in letting the media know about this guy they’ve been forced to release instead of totally turning their backs while he goes wandering near playgrounds, but maybe I’m just overthinking things. The thing is, the way Siegel keeps the whole thing moving forward at a queasy, propulsive rate is massively effective in its grimy way and just as an action/thriller it can’t be stated enough times how truly effective it is, how well staged whole sections are and how much it knows how to get the blood boiling from the tension in builds. It’s an ugly movie, yes, but its ugliness feels absolutely right for what it wants to be and it’s maybe even a little beautiful in how it just makes me sad for the whole world.


Even when we think the movie is going to somehow let us off the hook, we’re wrong—it’s like a sigh of relief when Scorpio never puts his gun to the head of one of those terrorized kids on the school bus but then one more kid fishing by a creek appears for him to get a shot at, to keep this horror going for as long as possible. The extended sequence of Callahan being sent throughout the city from one phone booth to the other as he tries to deliver the ransom is phenomenally well-executed with amazing nighttime cinematography by Brice Surtees, one of those long sections of a movie without any score that I kind of love. It stretches out the suspense to the absolute breaking point, building to an absolute fever pitch in the classic football stadium scene as Harry finally confronts this killer in person that seems designed to play to any point of anger we’ve been feeling up to that point, knowing just what we want to see happen. Seriously, I want Callahan to press down harder on his leg. I don’t want him to stop and the film is doing everything within its expert power to make sure I feel this way. The scene ends with that astounding helicopter shot which allows us to finally exhale in the midst of all our rage, pulling back to reveal hero and villain, alone in that massive stadium, this arena the modern action movie has suddenly turned into and because of this power would never be anything else ever again.


But what struck me more than anything on this viewing structurally was how it proceeds to the final showdown and the way it pulls this off is pretty close to perfect. It had actually been some time since I’d seen the movie so I couldn’t remember exactly how it plays things when Callahan makes the decision to go after Scorpio himself. Does he go somewhere and mutter a line of dialogue? Does he go to clean out his desk first? Stop at a bar for a drink? Catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror? Pause for a moment after getting into his car? Nope—he’s just there, on that overpass off the Sir Francis Drake Blvd. exit, waiting like a mythical giant for that school bus and there’s no one left to stop him or yell about procedure. Trim and efficient in terms of narrative, it’s a hugely powerful moment of a sort that movies of any kind rarely achieve. As great as his smile after “Do you feel lucky?” is, as powerful as his stepping down on the wound plays, right here is where Clint Eastwood becomes a legend once and for all, the legend that he still is today. Early in the movie Clint Eastwood responds to something Harry Guardino’s captain says to him by spitting out, “That’ll be the day,” just as John Wayne said it in THE SEARCHERS (well, Buddy Holly had to get it from some place, didn’t he?) and it really seems to underline how much the film represents a sort of grabbing of the torch away from the older star for the new guard.


At this point Wayne had recently enjoyed maybe his greatest career triumph with winning the Oscar for TRUE GRIT and was moving into the final stage of his career. But the western was rapidly dying out by ’71 and DIRTY HARRY came along with a star famed for western roles but was now hitting the urban mean streets of the time—after the movie Tarantino pointed out the transition over multiple pictures of Eastwood as star in the Leone westerns, then playing the Arizona lawman (or cowboy, essentially) who goes to New York in Siegel’s COOGAN’S BLUFF. By DIRTY HARRY, that transition from the frontier to the city is complete and this film was ready to take things further than had ever gone. Whatever the terms ‘cop movie’ or ‘action movie’ meant before, it would never be the same thing again (as an aside, considering what an action landmark it is and city it’s set in it’s surprising to realize what the movie doesn’t have—I can’t remember, but except for the spoof in THE DEAD POOL is there a film in the Dirty Harry series with an old-fashioned car chase?). Wayne himself made a few so-so stabs at the formula of the modern day cop movie (I still kind of like McQ, though) and his final film, 1976’s THE SHOOTIST, was of course directed by Don Siegel. It’s like at the end of his career Wayne wanted to be more Eastwood than the Duke but as we all know when it comes to each of those men there’s really only one.

DIRTY HARRY led to four sequels, none of which were directed by Siegel unfortunately, spanning all the way to 1988 as well as countless imitations or whatever you want to call them, resulting in idiocies like 1986’s COBRA which not only had the gall to cast Reni Santoni as Sylvester Stallone’s partner but put Andrew Robinson in there as a whiny (presumably liberal) bureaucrat, for all I know to say that the Scorpios of the world had managed to infiltrate the system. All a film like that ever does is show how good DIRTY HARRY really is and how hard it is to come anywhere close. The final beat of it is of course right out of HIGH NOON, but it doesn’t matter because the film that has been building up to this moment is so powerful that it transcends simple homage. It’s just what absolutely has to be.


What can really be said about Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan by this point, playing the role that provided the perfect outlet for his screen presence, even more than he was able to do in the Leone westerns? The way he moves across the frame, letting nothing ever stop him, is undeniably powerful but seeing it on the big screen also spotlights just how likable he is when given the chance, a few of the offhand smiles he gives to people and his gentle way of talking to Lyn Edgington as Gonzalez’s wife. He seems like the sort of guy who it would be fun to have a beer with, as long as you catch him in the right mood that is but when that anger boils up in him he shows what Callahan has really become deep down. Placed up against him is Andrew Robinson as Scorpio, terrifyingly unforgettable in how he barely seems human, instead coming off as this unspeakably weird, sniveling, cowardly, evil force of nature, spitting out phrases like “oinker” to Harry and, really, who wouldn’t want to pound the hell out of the guy themselves? Paying attention to what he’s doing, every non-panicked line of dialogue he has seems to be some sort of test to whoever he may or may not be threatening as we waits to make his move (“My wife’s brother. I hit her. So he hit me. Several times,” he says to the liquor store owner who chuckles his approval) and it makes every quiet moment he has, not that thee are many, dangerously unpredictable in a way that is rarely ever seen from movie villians. Several of the other supporting actors seem deliberately cast in a way to not let them make much of an impression with Tarantino after the movie observing that “Harry Guardino is second billed and you forget about him even when he’s onscreen” and some of these authority figures do manage to disappear in that way.

Reni Santoni does do a very good job as Harry’s partner, selling how capable he ultimately can be and how intellectually curious he is as well but certain people in small roles, likable and villainous, are allowed to make a strong impression throughout. I kept noticing how Siegel seems to direct his actors at times as if they should actually be thinking about what they’re saying to someone, making even bit players somewhat multi-dimensional. The most unsung character, of course, is Lalo Schifrin’s amazing score, with a main title them that is as super-cool as you would expect but becomes truly unforgettable with the recurring driving force of Scorpio’s Theme along with those female voices presumably wafting through that characters head playing over and over until you can’t forget it, as much as anything helping to transform Siegel’s look at urban madness into a true modern day classic.


Speaking after the movie over the course of what was probably nearly an hour, Tarantino remembering seeing it as a kid when it was first released and covered just about all the bases imaginable from placing it in the context of both Siegel’s and Eastwood’s career, addressing the unmistakable visual style the film has when compared with such square-looking cop dramas from the period released by the likes of Universal (with Siegel’s MADIGAN correctly cited as one of the chief culprits in this regard). Tarantino also went into various socio-political elements of how the movie was aimed right at Nixon’s America who believed that San Francisco was the root of all evil in terms of the times while pointing out how there’s really no way to fully understand how different all this was at the time since so many movies and TV shows have aped various cop and serial killer elements that seemingly began here. Both men spoke admiringly of Albert Popwell, this film’s bank robber who utters the immortal phrase “I gots to know” and who appeared playing different roles in each other film in the series except for THE DEAD POOL. The name Popwell, of course turned up in Wright’s HOT FUZZ as the name of the sergeant with the ‘great, big bushy beard’. Tarantino also spent some time criticizing the first Harry followup MAGNUM FORCE, which he called a counterpoint sequel made more for critics of this film instead of its fans and both seemed to agree that considering how Siegel’s film ends this is one of a few films (along with HALLOWEEN, to name another) that would probably be more effective today if there were never any sequels at all.


Second on the bill that night (and it turned out to be a very late night, so many thanks to Phil and Jackie of the New Beverly for the ride home) was the early 70s buddy cop movie THE SUPER COPS which starred Rob Liebman and David Selby (recently seen in THE SOCIAL NETWORK as the Winklevoss’s attorney) and, like THE FRENCH CONNECTION, was actually based on true events. Directed by Gordon Parks and never released on video in any format, the film isn’t exactly a hidden masterpiece-- Neither a totally kick-ass action movie nor a totally rollickingly hysterical display of anarchy it’s still kind of fun in its scrappy early 70s way with enjoyable work from the two leads. Eighty-seven year-old screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr (a legend for things like THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, THE PARALLAX VIEW, FLASH GORDON and, of course, the BATMAN tv series) spoke before the movie, recalling his participation in a blunt, old-school way at one point basically saying, “I wrote a script, turned it in, there were no notes, I never met Gordon Parks, they shot the script.” That’s not an exact quote, but you get the idea. David Selby was there as well to speak at greater length after the movie with Edgar Wright, recalling making the movie with fondness but a little hazy on the reasons for certain difficulties that arose during production which resulted in the plug getting pulled while they were shooting in Brooklyn and eventually beginning again at the MGM lot in Culver City. For other thoughts on both of these movies as well as more of the fun going on at the New Beverly during this festival check out Dennis Cozzalio’s piece at his always terrific blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.


Maybe most surprisingly that night was how Quentin Tarantino admitted that he’d never seen THE SUPER COPS, even though he’d always wanted to. It just proves that everyone still has movies they need to see, so whether it’s encountering this one for the first time or returning to DIRTY HARRY once again there are still discoveries to be made in these films, rewards to be found in that celluloid to remind you how amazing it can be to spend time in a movie theater. And it’s important to go and once again discover why something like DIRTY HARRY is able to maintain such power nearly forty years after it was first released. Nights like this courtesy of Edgar Wright and the New Beverly can be the right way to remember.

To Have A Soul

Bullitt buying groceries. For some reason, that’s what I always think of. In the middle of this film with one of the most celebrated car chases ever put on celluloid, as well as a few other pretty damn great sequences as well, I always find myself thinking about those tiny moments of behavior from Steve McQueen that we get to witness throughout as we do nothing more than observe the man who is Bullitt. Patting down his hair, that gesture of grateful thanks to that nurse who brings him some food and that glare in his eyes every time he stares down Robert Vaughn. And of course that way he stacks up those TV dinners in the tiny shop across the street from his apartment, not paying any attention to what they are but he knows that he’ll need to eat something when not dealing with the annoyance of the whole Johnny Ross case or dallying with Jacqueline Bisset during nights out. BULLITT director Peter Yates died at the age of 81 on January 9, 2011 and looking over the titles of the films he made reveals a genuine range and a few surprises as well, the sort of directorial craftsman who probably isn’t allowed to exist today. THE HOT ROCK, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, MOTHER JUGS & SPEED, BREAKING AWAY, EYEWITNESS, SUSPECT, just to name some of the others. Some people might mention KRULL, but let’s not dwell on that. One day in Grand Central way back during the Fall of 1986 I happened to witness the filming of a spectacular Hitchcockian stunt for the climax of his thriller THE HOUSE ON CARROLL STREET. Not the best film he ever made (certainly not among the worst ever made by anyone, either) but because of that memory I can’t quite dislike it.


And there was 1968’s BULLITT, a film which maybe has become a little too ubiquitous through zillions of TV airings over the years (“We now return to BULLITT, already in progress,” as Clarence Worley once put it) and I’ll always remember how it was once playing on a local station when I received just about the worst phone call I’ve ever gotten. And there was also that viewing at Grauman’s Chinese back in ’98 which remains one of my favorite afternoons ever in that theater. I’ve seen this film so many times, getting lost in the mood, lost in that car chase, lost in that Lalo Schifrin easy listening score that I probably hum in my sleep by now. The movie often gets broken down to the elements of just the chase and McQueen’s star power with the rest of it possibly getting unfairly dismissed as dull but watching it now, long past the time you’d think it would have any surprises for me, I found myself studying what Yates was doing within each scene and my opinion of it suddenly became greater than it had ever been before.


BULLLITT does have a plot (screenplay by Alan R. Trustman and Harry Kleiner, based on the novel “Mute Witness” by Robert L. Pike), all set over the course of a single weekend, it’s just usually forgotten or barely ever followed. But just for the fun of it, let’s give it a try: San Francisco police lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is assigned to protect a mob witness named Johnny Ross in town at the behest of powerful Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn), an ambitious politician looking to take down “the organization”. The witness is sequestered in a sleazy hotel and Bullitt sets it up so he alternates shifts with he and the men in his unit. But late that night after Bullitt goes out to dinner with girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset) and other people, two gunmen burst into that room in an attempt to kill Ross. As he is being taken to the hospital Bullitt’s fellow officer tells him that Ross had undone the latch on the door to allow the gunmen to get in. Chalmers blames Bullitt, but Bullitt knows that there’s more going on here and when the witness Ross dies from the gunshot wounds, he arranges with the hospital to misplace the body so the investigation can continue. As Bullitt continues to avoid the arrogant Chalmers he also becomes increasingly aware that the gunmen are still after Ross and may be looking to take down Bullitt as well to put an end to things. I think I’ve got the plot down, just like I think I follow along when everything is finally explained. I think. I won’t worry about it right now.


So much of the film has what seems like a relaxed, observational nature that it can be easy to miss how careful and controlled the direction always is, beginning right from the groove of the stylized main title sequence set in Chicago. Watching it this time I found myself becoming aware of how much Yates is always showing exactly what he wants you to see, whether taking in the feel of San Francisco in almost every single shot or the quiet, measured looks that characters are always giving each other in ways that tell the story more than any words ever could, like that silent glance between McQueen and doctor Georg Stanford Brown when they overhear Robert Vaughn asking for him to be replaced. The director appears to be always engaged by the environment that surrounds his film’s lead character whether watching his discomfort at being among those society ladies, observing the wide array of extras out in front of the Hotel Daniels or at the airport during the climax. And there are touches like that steady camera movement into the diagram being made up to identify a suspect as the Hotel Daniels night man describes him, bringing it closer to us just as the clarity of the case is coming into focus for Bullitt himself. When the movie kicks into gear it’s laid out beautifully—his pursuit of one of the gunmen through the hospital is like a model for how to put together this kind of sequence (Editor Frank P. Keller won the Oscar and he deserved it) and the airport climax has lost none of its power, as clear as it is how Michael Mann aped more than a little of it for the ending of HEAT. And yes, that famous chase is truly astounding, whether it has to do with correct geography through San Francisco or not. The more I watch it, the more I hear the incessant sounds of that Ford Mustang’s engine reverberating through my skull, the more I can’t possibly turn away from the screen even if I become increasingly aware of the obvious continuity errors, like the recurring appearance of a single green VW Beetle on what is probably the same stretch of street used multiple times. But, frankly, I really don’t care and things like this only manage to make me pay more attention to every single shot, every single effective edit, as I become ever more appreciative of what it achieves.


And though some of the most legendary sequences of the film are cannily played out with no music at all I just worship that score by Lalo Schifrin with its lovely AM radio-ready source tracks and super cool suspense cues as well--I still remember the audience at the Chinese beginning to applaud as “Shifting Gears”, that steady buildup to the car chase, began. I’ve bought two separate CDs of this music in the past and since Film Score Monthly has recently released a third, I’ll probably get that as well. The upbeat “On the Road to San Mateo” reminds me how truly enticing Schifrin driving music always is and the flute-heavy “A Song For Cathy,” the piece played by the jazz combo during the restaurant scene is a favorite as well. I just love this almost entirely dialogue-free section as we observe everything going on at this evening out from a distance with McQueen accidentally getting bopped by one of those menus, those glances between McQueen and Bisset as well as just the ultra-cool vibe in the air. I wish I could go to this restaurant with a girl who looks like Jacqueline Bisset. I always imagine the two of them are still relatively early in their relationship and Bullitt’s attitude towards his girlfriend in regards to his work is more than a little dismissive, saying, "It's not for you, baby," with her own job that seems to involve creating art for the world under the watchful eye of commerce (“It costs money to have a soul”) something that he obviously has no interest in. She might be somewhat frivolous in comparison as she sits at his breakfast table, but she’s clearly no dummy and was bound to be exposed to his world somehow sooner or later as it eventually happens. Some of Bisset’s dialogue during their roadside confrontation is of course a little too on the nose but the way Yates stages this saves things—the landscape no longer seems as lush and carefree as Bisset herself had been up to this point, instead replaced by a harsh landscape with a neverending traffic crawl as their argument is framed against the imposing sight of Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyards in the background. It reveals just how harsh and closed in some of what surrounds the beautiful city of San Francisco really is, how much closer that ugliness is to her than she ever realized and it can never be seen any other way ever again.


I’m not the first person to notice the obvious connections between BULLITT and DIRTY HARRY with both cop films sharing San Francisco, Schifrin and the same studio logo at the beginning but the shift in tones between the two is a little shocking considering they were only made three years apart. Any lilting peace of what we imagine the carefree 60s are that can be found in the air, however briefly, as Frank Bullitt crosses these city streets seems to have totally vanished by the time Harry Callahan turned up, in a world that has practically become one giant Altamont in comparison. It makes me wish all the more that we’d gotten a few other BULLITT films to add to the change but I guess I’ll have to just live with the daydream of Frank Bullitt and Harry Callahan eyeing each other with suspicion as they pass each other after separately being chewed out by the mayor over in city hall…maybe Bullitt would share an elevator with 5th Battalion Chief Mike O'Hallorhan of the SFFD on some other occasion as well. In the end, we probably learn as much about Frank Bullitt as McQueen’s eyes ever tell us through the course of the film, but he seems like a genuinely decent guy who chooses to do his job with as little BS as possible, knowing that following orders from those willing to kowtow to politicians isn’t ever going to do any good.


The cop movie formula is still being developed here and in some ways Robert Vaughn’s Chalmers is more of a villain than the person Bullitt ultimately has to gun down—Chalmers isn’t corrupt, he’s just more interested in money and power than actually chasing down justice, which is made clear from the last thing we ever see him doing and he’s the kind of suit who makes an offer of possible success and an absolute threat sound like the exact same thing. The bad guys the police have to go after are taken as a given in this world but the politician behind it all is looking to crack the Ross case for no reason other than his own glory and, not knowing why this working-class cop wouldn’t want some of that as well, is willing to obstruct his job however possible all while driving around with a “Support Your Local Police” sticker on his bumper. It’s up to Bullitt to get the job done however it needs to be done even if in the end, staring himself in the mirror, he knows that he can’t possibly answer what the purpose of that job really is in the end. At least Jacqueline Bisset is nearby, asleep in the next room, so we’re able to leave the character with that small piece of hope.


There’s no getting around it: Steve McQueen is just about the coolest guy there ever was, ultra-confident in every move he makes wearing that turtleneck and that stare he gives makes you certain that he knows what he’s doing every step of the way as murky as the plotting seems at times. He dismisses Vaughn and various other superiors around him who want him to just step in line, to do his job to the best of his abilities as long as it’s on their terms, but I couldn’t help but notice how he’s nothing but absolutely courteous to just about everyone he meets who has nothing whatsoever to do with this scummy world he works in and reading up some things on McQueen, that sounds a little like how the actor behaved when it came to studio execs versus every day people as well. Jacqueline Bisset, coyly eating that shredded wheat for breakfast, is absolutely beguiling (certainly her appearance in THE DEEP, the other film she starred in for Peter Yates, is somewhat legendary as well) and while she of course gets the one scene which really is kind of preachy in a writerly way, her genuine charm always comes through. Robert Vaughn is legendary here, adding a level of slime to a line like, “In your parlance, you blew it,” in a way that has never been heard before and every single nasty gesture he makes is a little fascinating. The familiar faces like Simon Oakland and Vic Tayback are the dependable stoic types we always want them to be, although I can’t help but think that Norman Fell is a little upstaged by how thin his tie is. Turning up pre-stardom, Robert Duvall’s brief screentime as a cab driver who helps Bullitt piece together the case is now slightly distracting and it’s also a little weird that he’s fifth billed but I always like how he says, “Take care, Lieutenant,” to McQueen the last time the film’s star gets out of his cab. Don Gordon, also by McQueen’s side in THE TOWERING INFERNO, is partner Delgetti and by this point I can’t think of anyone else who I’d want to see standing next to Bullitt during this investigation. I once saw Don Gordon at Nate ‘n Al’s sitting just a table away from me having breakfast with people and seeming like he was having the greatest time in the world. Goddamn it, I wish I’d said something to him.


Peter Yates was, at his best, a very good director who made some films that won acclaim—BREAKING AWAY—a few decent programmers—I always kind of liked SUSPECT—and several 70s titles that deserve to be better known now than they are—come on, go put THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, THE HOT ROCK and MOTHER, JUGS AND SPEED on your Netflix queue, you’ll be happy you did. But BULLITT, for me at least, is one where everything seemed to click and is the rare film that I can honestly say is gaining in resonance for me as the years go on and I find myself understanding its lead character a little more. Maybe this is just a personal response to the world and era it portrays, even if it is a sort of easy-listening car chase fantasy land of the late 60s in a beautiful city. And it’s a type of filmmaking that I respond to more and more as I get older, even if it is very much a Hollywood-infused carryover of New Wave elements that place it in the time it was made. But I love how this movie that I’ve seen so many times still has things in it for me to discover, each new viewing giving me a greater understanding of why its hero is who he is and how he gets things to work in the world around him in spite of every obstacle placed in front of him. That has to be the sign of a great film right there, directed by somebody who knew how to give it the right kind of staying power, to give this film something that causes it to continually play in some back corner of my mind as I continually return to it, already in progress.

“Time starts now.”

Now's The Time To Be One

So I’m sitting here, staring straight ahead. Pretty much out of ideas. I’m feeling pretty much done with the whole thing, even as I continue to look for a job. All I know is that when faced with the terrifying prospect of being a p.a. on some crappy reality show I begin to wonder if I should just give up, get the hell out of Dodge, move to a place like Santa Fe where it’s much quieter. Of course, I know for a fact that the movie theaters there are pretty lousy so that might not actually do much good. Maybe I’m stuck here. The other night I went to an art gallery opening where I spent some time chatting with this girl who seemed pretty cool and actually interested in talking to me but at the end of it all when we said good night I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do. Ask her out? Get her number? Act like a cool guy who isn’t broke and jobless? Maybe I was misreading the signs. I wasn’t totally sure that she was even single. It doesn’t matter anyway. So I sit here. Occasionally leaving, buying groceries, going to the movies, going on long walks, wondering how long some of these walks might end up being. And then when I’m done walking sometimes I sit here, staring straight ahead.


For a few years in the early aughts following their smash success with 1999’s AMERICAN PIE the brother team of Chris and Paul Weitz moved away from teen comedies towards what appeared to be a latter day Billy Wilder kind of thing, creating mainstream character driven pieces that had a certain amount of depth to them, willing to infuse what appeared to be romantic comedies on the surface with the right kind of darkness, the mixture of sweet and sour. That seems to have ended as each brother has branched out into separate directing careers helming would be franchises (THE GOLDEN COMPASS, THE VAMPIRE’S ASSISTANT) as well as sequels in series that had already been established (ECLIPSE, LITTLE FOCKERS) which seems sort of like a case of little risk, big-ass paychecks for a reward. It’s kind of a shame because while 2004’s IN GOOD COMPANY, which Paul wrote and directed by himself, was never quite as effective as it maybe should have been this approach seemed to really click when the pair traveled across the pond to make the Nick Hornby adaptation ABOUT A BOY. The film did fairly decent business along with receiving strong reviews and even an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay but has always felt more than a little underappreciated maybe because Universal decided to make it a sacrificial lamb by opening it directly opposite ATTACK OF THE CLONES in May 2002. That counter-programming approach of Hugh Grant vs. STAR WARS worked pretty well with NOTTING HILL in 1999 but not having Julia Roberts this time around probably made the competition a little too lopsided. It’s really too bad, because ABOUT A BOY is a lovely film with it’s own kind of charm, serving as a terrific showpiece for Hugh Grant in a story that contains a surprising level of seriousness. More than any film they’ve been involved with before or since the Weitzes offer an approach to this film that consistently brings a true visual intelligence to a story that is after all mostly people talking in rooms. I wish there were more movies like it being made now which contained characters genuinely willing to contemplate things in life, even if they were used solely as sacrificial lambs against giant blockbusters. After all, there’s gotta be something else to go see sometimes, right? I only wish.


Well-off Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) lives a leisurely life in London doing very little beyond watching TV, listening to music and going out on dates with women that rarely lead to a second date, by his own choice. After a brief, nearly accidental, relationship with a single mother shows him the benefits of coming off as a good guy, he decides to peer into the world of single mothers by pretending he has a child of his own. Going out on a few dates with one of them leads him to encountering 12 year-old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), the lonely son of Fiona (Toni Collette) who herself is going through a massive depression. After Will aids in rescuing Fiona after a botched suicide attempt, Marcus gets the bright idea that if this new guy dates his mom that will solve all their problems and she’ll never try this again. When Will tries to brush them off after one lunch date Marcus quickly figures out his charade of not actually having a kid but the two of them soon begin an odd friendship nevertheless. And when Will finds himself attracted to yet another single mother named Rachel (Rachel Weisz), he has to convince Marcus to take part in one more charade in an attempt to not seem like the total blank he really is.


Some of the pleasures of ABOUT A BOY may be minor but as its story goes on the film becomes genuinely satisfying, going to emotional levels that help place it in a considerably different category than the incessantly upbeat scripts Hugh Grant has played in several times for Richard Curtis. I like a few of those movies, don’t get me wrong, this one just seems to go a little deeper beyond a timeworn moral that friendship will solve everything and maybe because of its acknowledgement of what a certain sort of self-imposed isolation into ‘island living’ can do to a person I find myself returning to it more as time goes on. Merging its sly humor with a suicide attempt by one of the leads, depression amidst the holidays and genuine sense of resignation in life through what the characters are going through, Wilder’s THE APARTMENT is definitely an influence but ABOUT A BOY’s striking rhythms, dual narration and anamorphic visual stylization make it also easy to imagine that the Weitz Brothers had a DVD of CASINO right by their side all during making it and this seems to have inspired them in all the right ways. In a time when way too many characters in films turn out to be total ciphers, here’s one where the lead is intentionally a blank, gladly doing “nothing” as he goes by himself in his own kind of island living with no particular goals to doing anything beyond that until he finally comes to the realization that he has to do something, to feel something. Of course, unlike me this guy’s got plenty of money though I have known a few people out there just content to not do much of anything and while I may have a few more goals in life than Will does lately I can identify with this aimlessness, of drifting, of dividing your day into “units”, as if making it a point to avoid thinking about anything else. It’s something I can feel my life becoming more and more just as Will quietly seems to realize what he’s in danger of turning into—the backstory involving his father having made his wealth by writing one cheesy Christmas song is touched upon in just a few brief moments in dialogue, allowing the continued looks on Hugh Grant’s face whenever that song is heard to do the rest of the work with nothing more needed to be said.


Unlike the book which was set in the early 90s—the death of Kurt Cobain occurs during the narrative—the film isn’t as locked into 2002 quite as much but it occurs to me that the nature of the online world by now would give Will even less of a reason to go out into the world than he does here. He’d probably be on Facebook every hour and give that as even more of a reason not to deal with people in person. The character’s isolation seems a bit much at times considering how you’d think he would be close friends with at least somebody—the relationships with the few people we do see are never really explained which is fine—but I can actually understand this feeling of getting into your late thirties and not even wanting to try anymore, not wanting to go out to meet people, not wanting to risk anything as far as that goes, since by this point it feels much more likely that you’ll just wind up getting hurt in the end. I think I understand that last past most of all. One difference between Will and myself is that I’ve never been much for daytime TV even when unemployed but that aside, I get it, I really do. And seriously, just leave me alone, I’ve got Netflix movies to finish. The whole thing kind of cuts deep for me, being forced to acknowledge to yourself how you might really be a blank without anything to say to make you interesting and get any particular girl to like you. What would I really tell that woman from the other night or the ultra-cute waitress at the Dresden who I’ve become smitten by? I don’t think mentioning this blog is ever going to do much good.


There’s also the film’s other lead in Nicholas Hoult’s Marcus, a kid who is genuinely sad and alone but since he hasn’t had everything beaten out of him by the world just yet he’s admirably trying somehow to figure out what to do about it. The hell of dealing with other kids in school is really only briefly touched upon but this is still is the rare movie that seems to acknowledge how shitty a time childhood can really be. Part of the goal of the story from Hornby’s novel seems to specifically be to avoid what it automatically sounds like it will be about so fortunately the prospect of Will and Fiona becoming a couple never seems likely for a second, keeping things all the more unpredictable and the friendship that develops is ultimately extremely satisfying. There’s a spirit that infects the movie all through the song score by Badly Drawn Boy with the recurrence of the song “Something To Talk About” (a GRADUATE influence in how it repeats, I suppose) staying with me in particular. The ambitious visual style doesn’t always feel completely disciplined—like the mirror shot in the hair salon where the camera moves from Will in the frame to a female extra behind a pillar for no reason—but the willingness of the Weitzes to make the film this way makes it different, makes it alive, so you feel every bit of the desperation and loneliness and desire to be alone through every shot. Ultimately, part of what makes ABOUT A BOY so satisfying is that it doesn’t have to destroy the character of Will to provide him with a feel-good ending like some bogus Chris Columbus movie—actually, I’ve never seen NINE MONTHS, which Grant starred in, but maybe that’s what I’m thinking of. What I’m trying to say is that the film never cloyingly becomes about somebody who hates holding a baby, as what happens here early on, but then learns to love holding a baby. Will doesn’t need to change everything about Will but sometimes in life a little connection, a willingness to make the plotline in your life complicated and to mean something, to help you genuinely grow as a person among other people, isn’t really so bad. The rewards of ABOUT A BOY are, in the end, relatively minor and maybe don’t add up to much more than discovering the desire to close ones eyes while singing a certain song, but they are rewards nevertheless. Even if things feel just a little too happy in the end—the directing pair on the DVD audio commentary can talk about the final shot being a 400 BLOWS homage all they want but a freeze frame ending of somebody smiling is still just a little too cut and dried—there is enough messiness along the way, enough of an acknowledgement of all the crap that’s out there, so those rewards mean something. It’s not a great film but it is good enough that it feels like it’s being made by somebody building towards making a great film which makes the more recent output by the brothers that much more of a shame. Granted, I haven’t seen LITTLE FOCKERS yet, but still.


Hugh Grant does some of his best work here, burying that FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL charm as much as possible and making palpable how closed off he wants to be while paired up against the very talented Nicholas Hoult (also seen in THE WEATHER MAN—the two might be an interesting double bill) who here maybe gives one of the strongest, least cloying performances by a child actor in the past twenty years. Toni Collette never overplays Fiona’s daffiness while Rachel Weisz totally sells how special her character potentially can be to Will in relatively little screen time. Overall, there’s a sensitivity in how the actors are directed that allows respect for everyone, even the bit players (somehow I suspect that if I knew more BBC shows there would be more actors here I’d recognize), a refreshing change from how one of the Richard Curtis scripts will get a cheap laugh out of somebody having blue hair or whatever--I actually really do like a few of those movies, but those touches can sometimes really bug me. One of the things that makes ABOUT A BOY so special is how it seems to genuinely like everyone and acknowledge that they each have their own stories, their own reasons for being worried about leaving the house at the beginning of the day.


I go for walks. I shop at Trader Joe’s. I watch DVDs. I watch TCM. I drink coffee. I work on this blog. I write other things. I obsess over certain girls who have been a part of my life in the recent past. I go for walks in my neighborhood up to the Albertson’s on Hillhurst and back to my apartment, staying within my own island. And I do look for jobs but nothing I’m willing to mention on that front, at least not right now. Maybe there never will be. On the other hand, as I write this, Paul Weitz is reported to be reuniting with FOCKERS star Robert De Niro for the drama ANOTHER NIGHT, which he’ll be directing from his original script. So maybe there is hope out there, hope for some decent movies to be made, hope that at some point in the future I’ll wake up into a day that I find myself actually looking forward to. Right now, I suppose, all I have is the ability to imagine the joy of closing my eyes while singing a favorite song, lost in some sort of reverie that right now I feel I can only imagine, dreaming of a life I hope that I will someday get to live.

The Only Wealth In This World

From a beginning comes an ending. Whether you like it or not, twenty years later we still have to contend with THE GODFATHER PART III. It exists, it’s what was made at the time and that’s just the way it is. Removed from the furor that surrounded its original release on Christmas Day 1990 the way the film plays now seems quieter and more personal than it may have come across at the time, in many ways almost nakedly so on the part of director Francis Ford Coppola. Arriving sixteen long years after THE GODFATHER PART II it may never live up to the degree of greatness shown in the first two films but it deserves better than easy dismissal or cheap shot jokes in pop culture. Regardless, it’s never been seen that much on the revival circuit so when the New Beverly screened it recently as their last showing of 2010, following a double bill of I and II, I leapt at going--partly because of the rarity of the occasion, certainly, but also out of sentiment for the twentieth anniversary. As admirable as some of it is and as much as I may have a soft spot for it due to my own memories (damn right I was on line at Loews Astor Plaza early Christmas morning) looking at it now some of its flaws don’t just become more apparent—they deepen, to the point that it becomes plain how in making the film they needed another year. Another year in the writing, the shooting, the casting, the cutting, another year to allow them to find the movie and figure out what it was, what they wanted it to be.


And, really, I think it’s time for the world to move beyond that fantasy of insisting that either the inclusion of Robert Duvall or the substitution of Winona Ryder for Sofia Coppola would have solved everything. Duvall as Tom Hagan is undeniably missed, yes, but the problems that are there go beyond casting, beyond mere plot points. There is a movie inside of it which genuinely reveals something of who Coppola was as a person in 1990 and there are many things in there that I genuinely respond to on an emotional level. But too many of the concepts it wants to explore haven’t been adequately fleshed out either because Paramount insisted on the movie being in theaters that Christmas, because the madman of the 70s that Coppola was didn’t really exist anymore or just some natural combination of the elements. I admire the hell out of some what it achieves and my fondness for what’s there remains but the end result still feels a little like a shadow of what it really should have been, what it needed to be. And yet, I still kind of want to defend it.


New York, 1979: Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), years after ordering the death of brother Fredo and divorcing his wife Kay (Diane Keaton), has left Nevada and moved back to Manhattan, hoping for some sort of reconciliation between him and his two children, Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) and Mary (Sofia Coppola). At a party in his Park Avenue penthouse after receiving a special honor by the Roman Catholic Church Michael tries to make peace with his family, allowing Anthony to pursue being an opera singer and hoping he and Kay can still have some sort of relationship. He also comes across the energetic Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), his late brother Sonny’s illegitimate child, who is chomping at the bit to become a member of the family. Michael has little interest in such matters anymore, instead making an effort to finally go completely legitimate and purchase a controlling interest in the Vatican bank Immobiliare. As he attempts to make the deal go through, Vincent is making his own moves to gain power as he battles rising mob boss Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) but he also takes an interest in first cousin Mary, an interest she returns. Michael forbids this but soon forces beyond his control both cause him to reassess the wave of corruption that exists wherever he goes and how certain attempts to control his and his family’s destiny may truly be out of his hands no matter what he tries to do.


“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” goes the famous line Pacino rolls out in his gravely voice and surely the one thing people seem to remember about the film but the phrase also maybe inadvertently says something about it as a whole. Just as Michael Corleone is dragged back into this world against his wishes when he thinks he’s finally rid of it Coppola himself seems to be dragged back into telling a story about this world which in turn makes the movie into kind of a sludge, a film being made by someone who doesn’t want to make it and as a result he tries to mold it into a story he actually does want to tell, about a lead character who wants nothing more than to not be in this movie at all. As ambitious as it is at times and as admirable some of what it reaches for is, too much in THE GODFATHER PART III just doesn’t come together. Something in its very blood seems to be missing right from the start, a less adventurous feel to the approach is evident beginning with a rather dull expository letter-writing sequence at the top in place of a more GODFATHER I-like opening with the Archbishop which was instead pushed back to forty minutes in—for me, not one of editor Walter Murch’s better ideas and results in the film slightly faltering in the very first moment when it should be making a firm grab for our attention. One of the thrusts of the basic idea (the script was of course written by Mario Puzo & Coppola) is how Michael Corleone is looking for some sort of redemption for his actions of the past, especially ordering the killing of brother Fredo and the loss of Kay, but considering how insular the character seemed to irretrievably become by the end of PART II it’s a little difficult to reconcile that with the jovial businessman seen here, wisecracking about going into the kitchen to listen to Tony Bennett records. It seems a little more like Al Pacino circa 1990 dressed up as an old man with more wrinkles in his forehead than I can count (with maybe a little of Coppola tossed in) than any logical extension of when Michael Corleone was last seen out at Lake Tahoe.


And too much of the story, with nothing left from the original novel to mine, is just kind of shapeless with not enough momentum to things—the steady GODFATHER pacing is sort of there but not really, as if they were trying to move ever so slightly faster to keep up with the times but there’s the feeling that the rhythms in the editing haven’t been entirely worked out. Even the basic thematic thread of the American Dream that had carried through the series, beginning from the very first line of the original, feels more than a little abandoned in pursuit of the Vatican storyline and setting so much of it in Sicily. Too many elements feel either missing or in there for reasons that are never clarified so it’s a little like a sculpture that hasn’t been properly molded yet—why is John Savage in the movie as Tom Hagan’s son but practically an extra? If he’s a priest was he going to be more involved in the Vatican intrigue at one point? Why is Bridget Fonda (smoking hot here, it can’t be stated enough) prominent during the opening sequence only to suddenly disappear? How is Don Altobello the family’s oldest friend when we’ve never heard of this guy before? Why do side characters like Anthony ‘The Ant” Squigliaro get a big introduction (“He dips his bullets in cyanide.”) but then never do anything? How come George Hamilton is just standing there? Why does somebody recite Michael Corleone’s catchphrase back at him, is it that well known in the GODFATHER universe? Why did Michael get his hair cut like that anyway? Every now and then a fade out occurs to conclude a section—a stylistic carryover from the previous entries—but with so many scenes just kind of dwindling away as we watch them in this case it just seems to cause the audience to shrug its shoulders and wonder what the purpose of any number of things were. All throughout there’s a feel I get that Coppola is happy to be on the set working out stuff with the actors but, with the timeworn assumption that the jungle of APOCALYPSE NOW bled the insanity out of him coming to mind, there’s never the sense that he wants to push some of these scenes to the wall so he can get the best possible versions of them. It’s like he’s happy to just get some takes and move on. Big, violent GODFATHER-like setpieces such as the Atlantic City helicopter massacre of the other mob bosses or the mounted policeman execution of Joey Zasa are…fine, they more or less get what’s needed done. But not really more than that.


On his genuinely revealing DVD audio commentary with the film, Coppola at one point during the Atlantic City negotiations offers, “Michael doesn’t care about any of this stuff anymore,” and it’s hard not to realize that Coppola himself doesn’t care about this stuff anymore, instead interested to focus on personal matters of the family as well as just the desire to be left in peace. If they had the time to solve such inherent conflicts with the material, preferably when the script was being hashed out with Puzo, maybe they could have found a way to reconcile these opposing themes and come up with a movie to go with them. On a basic storytelling level it all winds up crippling the movie in a way that goes beyond the absence of Duvall—although the loss of Tom Hagan does feel like a large hole in things, like Michael is missing an extra person to be talking to—or placing daughter Sofia in such a key role. For those who don’t remember, the response to Sofia playing the part of daughter Mary after Winona Ryder dropped out at the last minute due to exhaustion resulted in a veritable outrage of criticism when it was released—people were lining up to give Hayden Christensen a pat on the back after ATTACK OF THE CLONES came out in comparison—and looking at it now, yes, she isn’t all that good with no particular acting technique at all but there is an awkward earnestness to her that becomes more endearing as the years go on and she hardly deserves to have been made some kind of punchline out of all this. Of course, we all know that she’d moved on from it by now.


Out of any number of personal feelings I get from the film, there are times where I got the feeling that Coppola was as happy as anything while making this when he got to put her in front of the camera but when you think about it, can you blame him? It’s his daughter, after all, and it may not be for the good of the film but is understandable in terms of what he was going for and where the plot was leading. In a similar way, the prolonged opera climax set during son Anthony’s performance of Cavalleria Rusticana (Coppola is credited with the staging) is also a sequence where the director seems genuinely engaged with what he’s doing, relieved to be staging something a little different from what everyone expects and enjoying the excuse he’s come up with to stage an opera. It’s not necessarily enough of a reason to have it there and at times it reflects events seen in the film in a way that’s a little too obvious, but at least some passion is there. The Coppola eccentricities find their way in at various points throughout like the children he’s clearly fond of having run through scenes—I may joke about it and it doesn’t have much to do with anything but my favorite moment of the whole movie is still probably when Michael tells Al Martino’s Johnny Fontane he’s going to the kitchen to hear those Tony Bennett records. Other side characters from old times like Lucy Mancini and Enzo the Baker played by the same actors appear to remind us of the old days but I can’t help but wonder about some of those Corleone family photographs around Michael’s apartment—did someone really snap a shot of his private garden conversation with him and Vito in the first film when it was happening? Vincent Mancini, meanwhile, appears to have two framed photos of James Caan-as-Sonny in his apartment, which also seems a touch cheesy.


The entire cross-cutting of the ‘settling of accounts’ that surrounds the opera during the climax is, again, pretty much fine but nothing all that special compared with what has come before in previous movies and also makes me wonder how somebody broaches the idea of using a pair of glasses a target is wearing as the murder weapon. And, no, there’s absolutely nothing I can say to defend that whole goddamned poison cannoli thing. I also can’t help but wonder just what this entire section is supposed to represent—in the first film intercutting the killings with the baptism of Connie’s baby was supposed to represent Michael’s triumph over everyone once and for all while in the second film a similar sequence of crosscutting was meant to represent the dark version of that, such as with the Jack Ruby-like killing of the no longer threatening Hyman Roth. But, really, what is all this supposed to be? A return to glory? A Passing of the torch? One last triumph? Maybe I’m overthinking it all and it’s just how a GODFATHER movie is supposed to end.


And since the Vatican plotline (inspired by actual events surrounding the brief reign of Pope John Paul I) has never been entirely clarified anyway some of these killings have no real impact. I’m still not aware how anyone has any idea that Donal Donnelly’s Archbishop isn’t on their side unless it just reached them via their ‘man inside the Vatican’ like they get informed of something else. During one montage of the numerous newspaper headlines that are seen the type on one beneath the banner is visibly revealed to be dummy text (check it out at 43:27), a glaring error that seems to say something about the movie as a whole--the broad strokes are there in the characters and photography and plot machinations but the blanks haven’t been filled in to give us the same sort of richness, scenes like Clemenza making that spaghetti sauce that would make it fully satisfying in the way it should be, the way I desperately want it to be. I guess it shows that you can give a movie a beginning, middle and end and it can make sense but sometimes it needs more than that. It’s a film where both Joe Mantegna and Eli Wallach at different points tell someone, “I have a stone in my shoe,” as if nobody was paying enough attention to realize that the script was using the same line twice. If you look at the lengthy trailer or the making of materials there seems to be quite a bit of deleted and alternate material which indicates how much things were maybe being rethought all along the way—one that has always interested me is how in the HBO special when Connie introduces Vincent Mancini to Michael she says, “Michael, this is Vincent Mancini,” but in the film she is dubbed to say, “Michael, you know Vincent Mancini,” as if somebody decided that it made more sense to have Michael already know of him.


THE GODFATHER PART III is a movie at war with itself, at war with anyone who wants to see a GODFATHER film. And yet, in the end the film is THE GODFATHER. It does have that sumptuous feel that it needs with Gordon Willis’ photography (honestly, the film actually looked better this time than I remembered), with the dialogue, with the music, with Pacino forever locked in the role of Michael Corleone, weeping over what he did to his own brother decades ago. The grace notes are there, small touches sprinkled in on occasion which haunt me to this day. And, as sad as it might be, in a way the film is my own GODFATHER, the only one I got to experience when it was first released as well as being set in a world and a New York I was familiar with—in spite of when it’s set, period detail feels limited to not much more than getting the New York license plates right—and the brief glimpses we get of these characters in present day is enough to make me wish there was more. And say what you want about the final coup de grace (just like what happened on opening day, I heard a genuine gasp from someone who clearly had never seen the film before from behind me at the New Beverly) it kind of hits home like a sledge hammer for me every single time and the degree to which that moment actually pays off means that all of the awkwardness and puzzlement that has come through in the proceeding two-and-a-half hours (not to mention the brilliance of the two prior movies) obviously had some sort of proper effect. Michael’s final scream of agony is, for me, absolutely shattering, making it clear once and for all what this film was meant to be for Coppola as well as what he was trying to say about his own life with it (anyone who doesn’t know what I’m referring to, go look up what happened to him on May 26 1986). The thing is, the more I write about THE GODFATHER PART III, the more I criticize it, the more I watch it, the more I nitpick it, the more I kind of love it and even weep a little for it. I want to scream at the film for not living up to its potential while embracing it with every ounce of love that I have in my heart.


Some of that uncertainty extends to Al Pacino’s performance, at times maybe uncertain how old he should be playing things and at other times seeming like he hasn’t fully shed playing Big Boy Caprice in DICK TRACY but more often than not totally revealing how haunted Michael really is down to his very soul that is beyond redemption. Even if the character’s odd tendency towards joking is still a little awkward watching it now it’s just one of those things in the movie I find endearing in spite of itself. Diane Keaton never had the best role in these movies, obviously, but her genuine rapport with Pacino that comes from the other films and probably their own real-life romance as well undeniabely comes through so their big reconciliation scene achieves a genuine rawness to it which is truly effecting. Talia Shire makes for an effectively earthy dragon lady as the older Connie and though his performance as Don Altobello may not be his best work as he goes way over the top with that accent, it’s very hard not to enjoy Eli Wallach each time he appears. Joe Mantegna as Joey Zasa for some reason never seems as effective as he should be while George Hamilton looks very cool and ready to act, but never gets to do anything making it strange just what he’s doing there (his role in things feels somewhat clarified to me in the longer cut). In her small role as photojournalist Grace Hamilton, Bridget Fonda sets off such a spark that it makes me wish that somebody had thought to pair up her and Andy Garcia in another movie that they could have all to themselves. As for daughter Sofia she does have a certain charm to her presence and, hey, the Italian in me finds her pretty damn attractive even if she’s still kind of gawky at this young age. I truly admire the films she’s directed (I just love SOMEWHERE--that said, she still can’t have the seat I was saving for someone she asked me to give up on the opening night of RANSOM at the Cinerama Dome back in ’96) but if in casting her director Coppola was trying to give it all that much more of a personal dimension, like so many other aspects where the film falters he needed to find a way to bring that out. In terms of discussing her performance, I’ll just leave it at that.


Andy Garcia is fantastic as Vincent, no doubt about it, making it puzzling why he didn’t become an even bigger star after this but frankly the effectiveness of his performance feels slightly hurt by the script since the actions that lead to Michael wanting him to take over the family never really seem all that special (not in a take out Sollozzo and McCluskey in Louis’ Restaurant in the Bronx kind of way, at least). There’s also the simple fact that when he’s playing love scenes with Sofia he’s working opposite somebody who really isn’t able to help make these scenes work as well as they need to so it ultimately hurts the character in the end, making him not quite the legend he probably should be. Over the years leading up to the 1999 death of Mario Puzo there were occasional rumors of a fourth film (dividing Vincent with Sonny back in the 30s maybe?) and during the commentary as the credits roll on this film Coppola hints at what might have been in such a scenario. The thing is, through no fault of Garcia’s, I’ve always felt that part of the problem with moving on from this point might have been that I never felt anyone ever really cared about Vincent Mancini, maybe because ultimately the film never becomes about him to the extent it’s already about Michael.

In addition to the main stars, familiar recurring players (Richard Bright is Al Neri! Franc Citti is Calo!) and bits by recognizable faces like Catherine Scorsese are some who are now familiar to me from various other films I’ve now seen over the years, particularly a number made over in Italy--Raf Vallone who plays the Cardinal who hears Michael’s confession and is later named Pope was the head of the Mafia in THE ITALIAN JOB, Helmut Berger whose many credits include MAD DOG KILLER with Marisa Mell (heard in JACKIE BROWN between Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda: “Is that Rutger Hauer?” “No, it’s Helmut Berger.”) is Vatican banker Keinszig, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY English dialogue director Mickey Knox is one of the Atlantic City Dons (sharing the scene with Eli Wallach!) and Brett Halsey, star of Mario Bava’s FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, appears as Kay’s new husband.


Since the film was rushed into theaters for Christmas what was released on video months later was a slightly extended version, adding back in 9 minutes (the very nice print at the New Beverly was of course the theatrical cut) and that’s what can be found on DVD now. Several new scenes were included and though having Michael give Anthony back his drawing from PART II is kind of silly for the most part they help clarify and enrich a few points so I suppose it’s the best possible version of the film (I once noticed that a single line of Pacino’s was cut from a scene and have a feeling that something else was snipped but I’ve long since forgotten whatever it was). For the most part, this is THE GODFATHER PART III that the world has, that we’ll always have and be forced to deal with. Whenever I see the film again I find myself wishing that the last shot (if you’ve seen it, you know what happens) would simply be Michael sitting in that chair, seen from a distance, followed by the cut to black. Of course, it goes a little further than that, again harkening back to a famous scene from a previous film. As a result, the final image we ever see in a GODFATHER film is an odd one, a little messy and to a great extent honest. Which kind of describes the entire film as well and if that’s what Coppola felt he had to do, that’s the way it should be. THE GODFATHER PART III will remain forever frustrating but because of its connection to the other films and because of some of its own power which it does achieve in the end, I’ll always feel protective of it anyway. The films you love sometimes need your protection, even while you still wish they could live up to their potential and all you can do is sit there, dreaming, hoping, wishing, for the redemption that will never come. Just like Michael Corleone.

“When they come, they’ll come at what you love.”