Reeling Backward: "Between the Lines" (1977)

"Between the Lines" qualifies for COFF status -- Criminally Overlooked or Forgotten Films, the unofficial series I've long noodled with to spotlight movies most people have never heard of. It's not a great film, but it is a very good one and, more importantly, it's an interesting one, both culturally and in terms of cinematic history.

It recently got a handsome Blu-ray reissue from Cohen Media Group that's definitely worth checking out.

It was the second feature helmed by Joan Micklin Silver, a female director when there weren't many people who could say that. She made a small splash two years earlier with "Hester Street," a story about turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants that earned Carol Kane a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Silver would go on to direct "Chilly Scenes of Winter," "Crossing Delancy" and "Loverboy," among others, and worked steadily into the early 2000s.

"Between the Lines" is a movie about journalism but also how the counterculture of the 1960s morphed into complacency during the '70s. It's a snapshot of Baby Boomers as they embraced the full adulthood of their middle- to late-20s, in much the same was as "The Big Chill" caught them a few years later settling down and "Grand Canyon" ruminated on their middle years.

It features a pretty astounding cast of then-unknown actors including Jeff Goldblum, John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jill Eikenberry, Stephen Collins, Marilu Henner, Bruno Kirby, Gwen Welles, Raymond J. Barry, Richard Cox, Joe Morton and Lane Smith.

It's part sex comedy, part ensemble piece, part newspaper drama.

The setting is The Back Bay Mainline, an alternative weekly newspaper in Boston that began in 1969 as a rabble-rousing call to arms -- student protesters turned journalists. Seven years later with the Vietnam War over, the Mainline is going through an identity crisis, along with its newsroom staff. Most readers now consume it for its cultural coverage of rock music and film, along with a few investigative pieces that don't punch at the same level as they used to.

The film quintessentially captures the spirit of the alt-weekly culture -- cramped offices piled high with old papers and files, movie and concert posters, a rabbit warren of constant activity and heady interaction.

Nobody is married or has kids, so the paper becomes everyone's de facto family. They bicker and smoke joints and sleep around with each other, and also do some reporting.

Silver had once worked for The Village Voice, and screenwriter Fred Barron was a veteran of The Phoenix and The Real Paper, so the story sings with the authentic voice and rhythm of this world. Like "Bull Durham," it's the sort of movie that you can tell comes from a place of not mere observation but lived experience.

I never worked at an alt-weekly, though I had friends who did and got a few pieces into weeklies in Orlando and Indianapolis, and hung around their offices enough to feel the vibe. I also started at a small community weekly that we eventually turned into a daily: they doubled the reporting staff when they hired me.

Our office was in a (slightly) refurbished paint storage warehouse, the taint of turpentine still lingering. There wasn't even a newsroom per se, the reporters having desks in the hallway on the way to the sales department. I worked 70 hours a week for $17,000 a year, barely above the minimum wage at that time. I won't say I loved every minute of it, but I learned a lot of about journalism and about life.

The Mainline is successful, which is to say it has a presence in Boston -- at least the seedier parts -- and rumors of it being bought up by a larger media outfit are constantly in the air. The staff works for virtual slaves wages, though.

(Some things never change, the newspaper racket being very remunerative for owners and executives, not so great for journalists who eventually want to buy homes or send their kids to college.)

Max Arloft, the zany rock music critic played by Jeff Goldblum, probably has the biggest following at the paper but only takes home $75 a week. By his own reckoning he doesn't work very hard, but it's still less than minimum wage for an ostensibly full-time gig.

Max tools around in a mechanic's jumpsuit underneath a bright red sports jacket, hitting people up for drinks or joints or a few bucks. Both parties are aware of the true nature of these "loans." He's not above dropping his name at a bar to strangers if it'll get him a free beer.

There's a wonderful scene where Max is giving a tired talk to some college coeds on the future of rock 'n' roll, and the real purpose of the endeavor is so transparent that he finally gives up and just announces his phone number to the rapt women.

The star of the paper, or at least he thinks he is, is Harry Lucas (John Heard), the chief investigative reporter. He won a big award a few years ago for a series on poor conditions at nursing homes, but nothing much really changed and he's mostly skating on past glory these days. His chief rival for top dog status, Michael (Stephen Collins), left the paper a few months ago to work on a book, and Harry is clearly tempted to follow.

Michael is sponging off of his girlfriend, Laura (Gwen Welles), a columnist, living at her apartment and making her take care of his dog while he whacks away at a typewriter all day. A smooth WASP-y presence, Michael has already given up untucked plaids for oxford shirts and sports coats with jeans, a look reputedly pioneered by Lorne Michaels of "Saturday Night Live" fame that bridged the gap from hippie to yuppie.

About halfway through the movie, Michael sells the rights to his book and immediately transforms into (or is finally revealed as) an egotistical sellout, reveling in being the center of attention and chatting about "the movie rights." In another 20 years he'll be a talking head on cable TV news.

He automatically assumes that Laura will move with him to New York to carry on the duties of supportive significant other, while also beneficently opining that the Mainline could use a Big Apple perspective column.

Lindsay Crouse is Abbie, the chief photographer and on again/off again girlfriend of Harry. She's clearly in charge of their relationship, and it irks Harry to no end. With his schleppy hair and cute-guy glasses, he's the sort of person to knock committed relationships while desperately wanting one. Abbie pops over to his place one night to sleep with him, ignores him when Harry says he loves her, and is out dancing with other guys the next day.

"Between the Lines" is illuminating for its portrait of male/female relationships in the 1970s -- personally, professionally and where those two areas blur. There's a constant refrain of the men talking over the women, or even substituting their own voices: "I think what Laura really means is..." The women vary between craving independence and their own identity (Abbie) and knuckling under after a fit of rebellion (Laura).

In the latter case, this means Laura going home with Harry after she feels ignored by Michael, leading to an awkward bedroom encounter. It seems pretty obvious the two men are just using Laura as a tool to hash out their own antagonism.

The other notable female character is Lynn (Jill Eikenberry), who acts as secretary/central hub/den mother at the Mainline office. There's a terrific scene where the three women hang out together, dancing and fretting about boys but also the dynamic of the newspaper and its mission.

(Thus meeting the standards of the useful-but-often-misleading Bechdel Test.)

We get the sense that Lynn started out as another one of the writers but ended up shouldering the administrative duties because no one else wanted to. She is in many ways the true soul of the newspaper. When push comes to shove and the Mainline is finally sold to the minor media baron Roy Walsh (Lane Smith) -- who is perfectly willing to can the entire editorial staff unless they toe the line -- it is she who preempts him by quitting first.

The hard-charging true believer editor, Frank (Jon Korkes), who talks a good game about the importance of a free and independent press, cans Harry at Walsh's directive rather than "adding my own job to the pile." The rest seem to swallow this, and the paper's transformation from rebel iconoclast to quirky product of the mainstream is complete.

Other background players include Joe Morton as Ahmed, a jovial and flirty presence; Lewis J. Stadlen as Stanley, the buttoned-up sales manager who clashes with the reporters while secretly wanting to be part of their crowd; Michael J. Pollard as The Hawker, who sells the paper on the streets and sleeps under a pinball machine at the office, essentially acting as their mascot; and Bruno Kirby as David, a timid young reporter who wants to follow in the footsteps of Harry and Michael.

The movie doesn't focus on the process of journalism much, though I liked the portrayal of a rambling budget meeting where that week's stories are pitched. Harry works half-heartedly on a piece about sex workers, where we meet Marilu Henner as a surprisingly self-aware stripper. She and Abbie end up bonding, and Harry is annoyed that the photographer asks far better questions than his.

The only other story we really follow is David attempting to expose a local music promoter as the source of a lucrative series of bootleg tapes. Max already knows who it is, but is too lazy to do anything with it.

There's a fair amount of sex and skin in "Between the Lines," and trailers for the movie play this up pretty heavily. Welles has a sexy scene where she emerges nude from the shower and begins to apply makeup in the kitchen mirror where Michael is working, then pretends to be surprised when he reacts lustily.

Goldblum is also an earthy, charismatic presence as the hedonistic Max. At one point he is beset by a pair of groupies both named Annie. Later he engages in some butt-bumping dancing with them as Southside Johnny Lyon croons the night away, which is perhaps the film's most iconic moment.

Smart and sexy, "Between the Lines" reminds me a little of "Everybody Wants Some!!", a recent film I absolutely adored. At first glance it doesn't seem to be about much of anything, until you realize it's a  little bit about everything.

Reeling Backward: "The Verdict"

If there's a greater actor in a better role than Paul Newman in "The Verdict," I haven't met it.

This 1982 legal drama directed by Sidney Lumet is one of my cinematic touchstones, a film that grabbed me at an early age and profoundly affected the way I approached movies. It still retains a strong hold on me and I think about it often, even though I doubt I've seen it more than a total of three times.

Watching it as a precocious preteen bedazzled by Jedis and replicants, "The Verdict" opened me up to a universe of serious films where the characters didn't do much more than talk. It's an incredibly spare film, lacking big showy moments, and with barely any music to push or pull the audience into easy emotional catharsis.

Even Frank Galvin's courtroom speeches are rambling and unfocused -- he comes across less as an attorney presenting a compelling legal argument than a stumblebum hanging out on the corner lamenting the woes of the world to no one in particular. It's hardly the fiery "you're out of order!" brimstone you usually see.

To call Frank down on his luck would be to presume that he ever had any.

When we first meet him, Lumet and screenwriter David Mamet (on just his second screenplay) go out of their way to depict him as a lowlife ambulance-chaser. He plays pinball with grim concentration, taking a breakfast of a beer with a raw egg cracked into it before heading out on his daily rounds. This mostly consists of following the funeral notices in the paper for potential cases. He bribes the morticians to introduce him to the bereaved family as an old friend, so he can slip them his card and drum up a wrongful death lawsuit.

We learn he's only handled four cases over the last three years, all of them out-of-court settlements. And that Frank had a brush with the law, nearly losing his law license for jury tampering a decade ago. Since then he's been riding the downward spiral, with retired lawyer friend Mickey Morrissey (Jack Warden) throwing him a case from time to time, and peeling him off his office floor when Frank's been on one of his benders.

The latest is a good one, a real "money-maker," Mickey promises. But Frank can't even remember the case when Mickey brings it up, 10 days before trial. He pulls himself together enough to meet with the clients, the sister and brother-in-law (Roxanne Hart and James Handy) of a woman who fell into a coma after going to the hospital to give birth and being given the wrong anesthetic. (Interestingly, the film never mentions what happened to the baby.)

The hospital is owned by the Archdiocese of Boston, and the calculating-but-not-uncaring Bishop (Edward Binns) offers Frank a $210,000 settlement. For his standard one-third fee, that would garner him a neat $70,000 (about $170k in today's dollars) -- enough to keep Frank flush in cheap cigarettes and breath spray for years. But he refuses, and insists on taking the case to trial.

Why? Part of the film's greatness is never definitively answering this question. Clearly Frank is deeply impacted when he visits the woman in the hospital, curled up in a permanent fetal position, and takes Polaroid photos of her. Lumet cleverly doesn't allow his camera to show her from the same angles as Frank's pictures, which bring her sad plight into focus -- for us and for him.

His clients don't want to go to trial. They make clear they're looking to recover $50,000, which is the amount a local facility wants as an endowment to take over perpetual care of the woman. The sister and brother-and-law want to move out west and wash their hands of the burden. So why does Frank turn down the settlement -- nearly coming to blows with the sister's husband when he finds out?

From a legal standpoint, his case is a mess. He only has the testimony of one over-the-hill country doctor (Joe Seneca), who turns out to be black to top things off. It's funny and sad to think about how just three decades ago, having an African-American doctor as your star witness was seen as undermining the case.

Of course, Frank stumbles into luck with a last-minute witness, an admitting nurse who was bullied into changing the medical form to cover up the doctor's mistake (played by Lindsay Crouse employing a full-on Boston blarney accent). He does so in part by breaking into a post office box to get an uncooperative woman's phone records.

Frank sees this as his last shot for ... well, not greatness, but at least legitimacy. After he wins this case, the final scene of him reposing in his office, refusing to answer a phone call he knows he oughtn't to, suggests that Frank will resume practicing the law with something like resolve. He'll probably keep boozing, and probably handle lowlife cases, but he'll be an attorney again.

About that phone call. Charlotte Rampling plays Laura, a divorced woman who takes Frank up like a lost child off the street and becomes his lover/confessor, bucking him up when things look bad. Certainly it's not because a burned-out 55-year-old drunk has any business nabbing her interest. Even his initial come-on lacks embellishment: "My God, you are some beautiful woman."

Secretly she's being paid off by Frank's opposing counsel, Ed Concannon (James Mason, in pure aristocratic arrogance mode), to feed him information. When Frank finds out, he belts her ... hard.

I'd like to talk about that punch. It was the thing I most remembered from seeing the movie, when Mr. Movie Star Paul Newman punches out a willowy-looking woman. There's a long, silent pause before he does so, as they look at each other. Wordlessly, the look of betrayal on his face is reflected in her own, as she realizes the gravity of what she's done.

The look on Newman's face is just classic. It's the expression of a beat-down dog who's just had his last bone taken away from him, and he's finally riled up and mad. He's ready to fight. Frank has lost everything -- his status, his wife, his friends -- and here is this woman gnawing away the last tatters of his dignity.

Violence against women is repugnant, but in the film's context it feels totally justified.

Aside from Newman, the performances are roundly solid. Rampling has a certain reserved, damaged quality -- we later learn she used to be a lawyer herself and is looking to get back in the game. Concannon is the real twisted soul, taking a case he could easily win and putting a couple of fingers on the scales of justice. I wonder if it ever occurred to Concannon that he is engaging in the sort of activity that nearly cost Frank his law license?

Warden is his usual blowsy, hard-talking presence. Seneca has a quiet dignity as a man who earns most of his livelihood testifying against other doctors in court. He acknowledges his vocation but fervently affirms the validity of it. Wesley Addy also has a small, subtle role as the accused doctor.

Milo O'Shea, who recently passed, is just terrific as Judge Hoyle, who handles Frank like a wayward student hawking spitballs in the back of his classroom. In his heart of hearts, he'd rather just see Frank thrown out in the the wilderness, but he does his duty anyway. Not without prejudice, however -- it's quite clear that the judge favors the defendant, and works to undermine Frank's case.

Yet, when the surprise witness has just undermined Concannon's case, he and the judge have this great exchange of stares where O'Shea peers out from beneath those marvelous caterpillar eyebrows with a look that says, "You're on your own, me bucko."

That's one of the things that dazzled me when I recently watched "The Verdict" again -- how it makes every big moment bigger by going smaller. In its lean, small, often wordless and soundless way, "The Verdict" is a piece of true greatness.

Reeling Backward: "Slap Shot" (1977)

Paul Newman has commented that he did not swear much before making "Slap Shot," a 1977 sports comedy that was considered very raunchy for its time. Newman's character and most others drop the F-bomb liberally, and also spew epithets about gay men and women that would be considered very un-P.C. today. Supposedly Newman found much of that language creeping into his everyday speech.

A modest hit at the time, "Slap Shot" has gone on to cult film status, particularly among sports writers who regard it as one of the best sports comedies ever, and fans who call it one of the finest hockey movies of all time (which isn't saying that much since there aren't that many of them.)

For me what makes it stand out is that it's one of the few sports movies that is openly contemptuous of its sport, or at least the modern state of it. Professional hockey in the view of screenwriter Nancy Dowd has devolved into a shallow show of grandstanding and violence, in which the blood-dripped spectacle is more important than the skating or the scoring. It remains the one mainstream team sport in which fighting between players is tacitly encouraged.

Director George Roy Hill seems to have gone out of his way to show as little hockey action as possible, focusing instead on the mayhem and the fisticuffs. In defiance of every sports movie cliche, the big championship game at the end is decided by forfeit.

The result is both very funny and very depressing, at least if you're a hockey purist.

The film is one of those seemingly light comedies that has a strong vein of social commentary running just underneath the surface. The fans of the inept Charlestown Chiefs only get excited about their home team when they resort to goon tactics. In this sense, "Slap Shot" is thematically closer to "Network" than "Semi-Tough" or "The Longest Yard."

It's more akin to "North Dallas Forty" than anything else, and I'd speculate there was cross-pollination between the two creations. Peter Gent's book came out in 1973, before Dowd wrote her screenplay based on her brother's experiences in minor league hockey, but the film version of "Forty" came out two years after "Slap Shot." Indeed, Dowd is reported to have served as an uncredited writer on the football film.

(The Oscar-winner for "Coming Home" enjoyed a low-profile career where she often wrote uncredited or under a pseudonym.)

"Slap Shot" was the third and final pairing of Hill and Newman, after the phenomenal success of "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid" and "The Sting." He also made another film, the underrated "The Great Waldo Pepper," with Newman's co-star in those other two films, Robert Redford. The easy, loose feel of Newman's performance is probably due to their well-established rapport.

Newman plays Reg Dunlop, a once-great player eking out an existence as player-coach of the Chiefs. When the local mill is scheduled to close, it becomes clear that the team's mysterious owner plans to disband it. Reg, who is cagey if not necessarily intelligent, comes up with the idea of making the team viable to be sold to a new owner by amping up the violence.

The impetus for this new tactic is the arrival of the Hanson brothers, a trio of young hockey enforcers who have become the most enduring iconography of the film. The brothers' thick black glasses and long hair became their trademark, both in the movie and real life. They were based on an actual trio of brothers who were hockey players, and in fact two of the three were played by the actual siblings. The third couldn't appear because he had been called up to the NHL. Many former and current pro hockey players also acted in the movie.

The Hansons are angelic bruisers, who play with toy cars when not in the rink and dole out punches and brutal take-downs when in it. There seems to be no malice in them, being perfectly polite and respectful of their elders. To them, that's simply the way hockey is played. It's an opportunity to hit people without the fear of arrest ... or at least less chance of it.

In a couple of famous scenes, the Hansons start a fight when the teams are doing their warm-up skate, and are the victims of a reprisal as soon as the puck is dropped. Perhaps the funniest moment in the film is during the national anthem, when a referee clued into the Hansons' tactics screams at him not to try any of that stuff on his rink. "I'm trying to listen to the fucking song!" the lead Hanson retorts, and this sideways appeal to patriotism shuts the other man up.

After some initial hesitation, the other members of the Chiefs happily join the punch-drunk party, especially when they start racking up wins as a result. The one player who won't go along is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), the team's clean-cut leading scorer. The noble knight-errant of the story, Ned refuses to sully the purity of the game ... at least until it serves his purposes.

Things get so bad that Reg starts openly hitting on Ned's deeply depressed wife Lily (Lindsay Crouse), who dresses like a man, drinks like a fish and drives like a hellion. He's only doing it in hopes of riling Ned up, but is nonplussed when his wooing works and Lily actually shows up on his doorstep with dog and suitcase in tow.

Reg foists her off on his estranged wife (Jennifer Warren), who he thinks will serve as a model of how happy a woman can be when she gives her hockey-playing husband the boot. Part of the comedic gold of Reg's machinations is that he genuinely feels like he's doing everyone a favor. He's really a manipulative mook, but he's so gosh darn charming at it.

The roll call of supporting players is rich and deep, including Strother Martin as the Chiefs' bow-tied, conniving PR man; M. Emmet Walsh as the local newspaper hockey beat reporter, who's always "trying to capture the spirit of the thing" but usually getting conned  into carrying Reg's water; Swoosie Kurtz as an uptight hockey wife; Melinda Dillon as an enemy player's lovesick wife who has a fling with Reg; and Jerry Houser as a player who thinks Reg's goon philosophy is not incompatible with the New Age harmonies of yoga and meditation to which he's attuned.

Personally, I'm not much of a hockey fan. It's too violent, but if you took the violence out everyone would realize how profoundly boring it is. I think the greatest trick of "Slap Shot" is undermining the state of hockey while mining it for comedy gold.

3.5 stars out of four