There’s a moment in “The Old Man & the Gun” where Robert Redford appears suddenly in a doorway backlit by a sunrise, and I swear it could have been from the 1970s. The ol’ California blond still has that ineluctable twinkle that just makes you grin.
His character, Forrest Tucker, is known for his smile. He’s a well-aged bank robber who’s always charming and polite to those he steals from. He barely even bothers with a disguise, just donning a fake mustache. He even wears the same blue suit and brown fedora hat when he’s tooling around on his non-robbing days.
Granted, those aren’t a lot: this is a man born to steal.
This film, written and directed by David Lowery (“A Ghost Story”), is based on the true-life story of Tucker, a man who spent most of his life in prison for his various crimes. The movie looks at the period in the early 1980s when he and a couple of confederates (Danny Glover and Tom Waits) knocked over banks all over the country, becoming a media sensation as “The Over the Hill Gang.”
He also robs banks solo when he’s not part of the gang. His M.O. is simple as can be: show the bank teller or manager the gun, order them to fill a briefcase with money, tip your hat and walk out the door, calm as can be. Robberies often occurred without anyone else in the bank even knowing it was happening.
That’s what happens to John Hunt (Casey Affleck), a Dallas police detective who was starting a bank account for his son when Forrest robs the place. He’s miffed that it happened right under his nose. The case becomes a personal obsession for him. He hunts up clues from other law enforcement agencies, and is the first one to put together that all the robberies are related.
If you think this is another tense cinematic cat-and-mouse game where the criminal taunts the cop on his tail, you’d be only half right. The movie isn’t really about the hunt, but both men’s need for the hunt.
John has just turned 40 and is contemplating giving up police work because he’s tired of never fixing anything. The deep stack of cash in Forrest’s floorboard cache proclaims that he doesn’t really need the money. What they both need is a purpose, and for a time that’s squaring off with each other.
The film actually spends relatively little time with the usual procedural stuff: hunting up clues, a near miss, taunts traded through the appropriate communication vehicle of the day. When Forrest sees a TV news segment featuring John chasing him, he inscribes a $100 bill to him at their next heist.
Forrest is wooing Jewel (a glowing Sissy Spacek), a lonely farmer/widow he happens across after one of his jobs. He tells her he’s a traveling salesman, but then he tells her he’s actually a bank robber, and finally he says he was just pulling her leg.
That’s how it is with Forrest Tucker: you may not get the truth, but you will always get the authentic man.
There’s been some talk that Redford has declared “The Old Man & the Gun” his final film, though he’s pulled back from that since. If it turns out to be true, it would be a fitting coda to one of the finest careers Hollywood’s ever seen. It won’t stand among his most memorable films -- of which there are too many to name -- but it left this critic smiling wide.
"It's about a Jewish woman with a big nose and her blond boyfriend who move to Hollywood, and it's during the blacklist and it puts a strain on their relationship." --Lisa Loopner (aka Gilda Radner), describing "The Way We Were"
"The Way We Were" is one of the few well-known love stories that defies conventional male/female roles. The usual central dynamic can be summed up by what feminist critics call "the male gaze," in which the way the female character is portrayed is defined by how they are beheld by their romantic male counterpart.
In short: women in the movies exist to be gazed upon, and men exist to do the gazing.
The first few moments of "TWWW" flip this on its head. Barbra Streisand sees Robert Redford, and is so overcome by his beauty she literally gasps, her mouth hanging open like a trap door. Indeed, through virtually every encounter they have in the movie, it is she who is the active pursuer and he is the lackadaisical pursued. She is always looking at him, while he usually has his eyes turned elsewhere.
Director Sydney Pollack photographs Redford with a lustrous quality, like a fallen angel loitering about the Earth to amuse himself. His character, Hubbell Gardiner, is the object of affection to Katie Morosky (Streisand), a
passionate leftist political activist. She is the proactive character, while his is entirely reactive. Hubbell's defining characteristic is that he doesn't really have one, existing as a beautiful object upon which Katie (and others) project their own aspirations.
Much is made about Hubbell's blondness, which in the movie is intrinsic to his ability to mesmerize. I have commented before on Hollywood's declining favor for fair-haired male movie stars, and indeed, Redford in the 1970s more or less marked the last of the line of blond sex symbols. Katie refers to Hubbell as her "gorgeous goy guy," and one of her pet moves is to brush the coppery locks on his forehead with her fingers -- less a grooming gesture than a a miser fingering his gold.
Pollack was just establishing himself as a mainstream director, despite a number of features already under his belt. He was brought into the project solely upon the basis of his promise to entice Redford, with who he had just made "Jeremiah Johnson," to take the role opposite Streisand, for whom the part was expressly written.
Hubbell had originally been envisioned by screenwriter Arthur
Laurents as a supporting character to the firebrand Katie. Laurents based the story on his college experiences in the 1930s and
'40s, transposing his own Jewish identity onto the figure of a woman he
admired but never pursued romantically.
Pollack petitioned to expand
Hubbell to an equal footing, and reportedly brought in a raft of other
writers to change the script around without Laurents' knowledge or
consent. Despite some sloppy editing and story construction, "TWWW" was rather well-received at the time and was a huge box office hit.
Laurents ultimately retained the sole writing credit, he and Pollack buried the hatchet and even pursued a sequel, which fell apart in the early 1980s. The idea was still was being batted around as late as 2005.
As for Redford and Pollack, they would go on to make five more pictures together, including "Three Days of the Condor" and "Out of Africa."
Hubbell and Katie encounter each other in college around 1938, hit it off but never become a couple until they meet again at the war's end. She takes the drunken Navy man back to her apartment, where he sleepily has movie sex with her -- read: sweet, and short -- not realizing it's Katie. Later, though, he puts it in on purpose.
They stay a pair the rest of the movie, despite stormy waters and several near-breakups, before Hubbell finally dumps her for good right after she's given birth to their daughter. Later they meet up for a moment sometime in the 1950s, fond remembrances of love lost.
Hubbell is defined as being everything Katie is not: an easygoing, likeable WASP with no strong political convictions or even a core identity beyond being a BMOC in college, and the adult equivalent thereafter. His redeeming attribute is that he's aware of how easily everything comes to him, and is able to write about his privilege with flair and a little distance.
At first jealous of Hubbell's writing talent -- she's crushed when the professor picks his short story, instead of the one she'd been laboring on for weeks, to read aloud to the class -- she eventually becomes his caustic muse, pushing him to write more deeply about his characters and subjects. Forever taking a stand against the latest cause, she's vexed when Hubbell appears to stand for nothing other than his own success and comfort.
Their relationship is defined by a pedestal: Katie places Hubbell upon one, convinced he's the perfect man, except for needing a little prodding from her. He's fascinated by her sense of unfailing certainty, whether it's about politics or his own abilities, while she thinks he needs to push himself harder, in life and in his writing. When they move out to California together so Hubbell can pursue a lucrative screenwriting career, their resentments are slowly stoked to the point of no return.
It's fascinating how passive and inert Hubbell really is. Like a classic romcom woman, he allows himself to be defined by his lover, and then grows to resent the box in which she has placed him. Meanwhile, Katie goes through the paces of being the one who decides she must change, even if in the end she goes back to her old life of rabble-rousing.
The film is probably remembered now more for the title song, sung beautifully by Streisand, than the story itself. The supporting characters don't make much of an impact, the two most notable being Bradford Dillman as Hubbell's best friend, J.J., and Lois Chiles as Carol Ann, who ping-pongs back and forth between the two men.
James Woods and Sally Kirkland both turn up in small roles early in their careers.
Patrick O'Neal plays George Bissinger, the director whom Hubbell is working for on an adaptation of his first novel. As near as I can figure, the screenwriting process goes on for months and even years, which seems unlikely for the late 1940s, when it wasn't unusual for writers and directors to have three feature film credits in a year.
The section about the Blacklist isn't terribly compelling, other than it exacerbates the tension inherent in their relationship. Katie wants Hubbell to speak out against the House Un-American Activities Committee, while he thinks it's best to keep his head down. Entire families will be destroyed for nothing, he argues, while Katie sees that laying down before one monstrosity will only invite a worse one.
Unlike its two stars, "The Way We Were" hasn't aged very well. It feels like it would have been a better fit during the Golden Age of Hollywood, where it's set. Of course, it would have been rare for a film of that age to end with the couple splitting up. Just as it is to see a movie in which the usual gender roles are reversed so starkly.
In the vast and expanding forest of films whose echoes take up much of my cognitive array, "The Natural" stands out like a crowning oak. Its memory towers above nearly all others; its roots are sunk deep into the formation of my perception of cinema.
It's one of the movies that made me fall in love with movies.
I think about it often, though it's probably been close on to a decade since I last saw it in its entirety. I recall flashes, moments, snippets of dialogue -- generally not the big "wow" stuff, like Roy Hobbs smashing the final home run into the stadium lights, setting off a shower of falling stars.
More like, Pop's grumblings about his awful team and the middle-aged rookie they stuck him with; his whistling contest with Red to guess old songs; or the nimbus of light director Barry Levinson continually puts behind Robert Redford's head to give Hobbs a beatific halo.
Like the best sports movies, it's not really about the game. Rather, it's an exploration of the creation of myth.
Roy Hobbs was destined to become a legend, but didn't. Then in the twilight of his youth he decides to make another go of it, and runs into a buzzsaw of disdain, suspicion, sudden fame, greed, envy, betrayal and regret.
Odysseus' journey was no more laborious.
Ostensibly an uplifting movie, "The Natural" has sadness clinging to its every molecule. Bernard Malamud, upon whose novel it was based, had a very pessimistic view of humanity in the days after World War II. If you've read the book, you know that the big difference from the movie is that in his ending Hobbs strikes out, and is forgotten.
(At least, that's what we gather, given Malamud's signature run-on sentence writing style, where trains of thought can go on and on and on and on and on and on and...)
The essential tale is thought to have been inspired by Phillies first basemen Eddie Waitkus, who was stalked and shot by a female fan in a hotel in 1949. He had been nicknamed "the natural" during a brief major league stint prior to the war. However, he was already several years into his career when he was injured, returned to play less than two months later and batted .306 for the season.
Hobbs, of course, was just a kid going for a tryout with the Cubs when he was wounded by a black widow (Barbara Hershey) who'd already killed two other famous athletes and was gunning for the trifecta. She had set her sights on "The Whammer," a not-at-all subtle mirror of Babe Ruth played by Joe Don Baker. But after the young pitching prospect, on a dare, strikes out the pompous star with three straight pitches, her aim is altered.
Hobbs spent two years in the hospital recovering and was told he'd never play ball again because of the silver bullet lodged in his guts. As he reluctantly answers anyone who asks where he's from, he knocked around from here to there, odd jobs of this and that. Sixteen years after his shooting, now in the 1930s, he decides to give his dream one more try.
After two weeks of playing for the semipro Hebrew Oilers -- a fictional team that became a real one -- he's signed to a $500 contract by a scout for the lowly New York Knights.
Aging and the passage of time are very much at the forefront of the film's themes. To my recollection, the book is pretty specific in giving Hobbs' age as around 35 -- which is advanced but hardly ancient for baseball. Even back then, top players continued their careers into their early 40s.
(And, if they're Satchel Paige, allegedly well past that.)
Redford was nigh unto 50 when the movie came out, and looked every day of it. He remained gloriously handsome -- still is, past 80 -- but he wore his years plainly and proudly. Not until "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" has another movie star's aging process been so intrinsically woven into the fabric of a film.
Hobbs isn't the only major character worrying about his last shot at baseball glory passing him by. Pop Fisher is the manager and co-owner of the Knights, who loves the game more than anything but saw his heart strewn to pieces by it. His lament is a refrain: "I shoulda been a farmer!"
It's probably the signature role of Wilford Brimley's career -- he's just two years older than Redford, by the way -- a cantankerous oldster who's capable of small-mindedness and vindictiveness. He refuses to play Hobbs and is ready to send him down to the minors before a batting practice performance in which the lefty right fielder seems to hit every seat in the far stands.
Hobbs has many nemeses in the movie, the chief of which is The Judge, the other owner of the Knights. But the Judge's true antagonist is Pop, from whom he bought controlling shares of the team the previous season when fortunes were down. Unless the Knights win the pennant, Pop is out and the Judge becomes sole owner.
Physically Brimley and Robert Prosky, who plays the Judge, resemble each other so much it could not have been happenstance on the part of director Levinson. They're both older, squat men with thinning hair and owlish glasses. While Pop lives very much in the dirt and the sun, forever traipsing about the dugout, the Judge preens blackly in his high nest above the ballfield, the shutters kept perpetually shut against any ray of sun or inadvertent glimpse of baseball.
The sun-dappled counterpoint to all this darkness is Glenn Close as Iris, Roy's childhood love and (unofficially) betrothed. He was so hurt and embarrassed about being seduced and wounded by another woman that he apparently never bothered to even contact her again -- and likely would not have, if she hadn't gone to a game when the Knights were visiting Chicago. In one of the film's more iconic scenes, she stands in the sun when Roy, in the midst of an epic hitting slump, goes to bat, inspiring him to wallop a titanic homer.
The character isn't well fleshed out -- Close only has a handful of scenes, in which Iris remains rather remote and distracted. Nonetheless, she scored the film's only acting Academy Award nomination. We get the sense that she is reaching out for her own sake, a sense of closure, rather than seeking to rekindle long-dormant ashes. But, of course, she brings the light back into Roy's eyes.
He had been carrying on with Memo Paris (Kim Basinger), niece to Pop but secretly a creature of the Judge and his nefarious partner, Gus Sands. I love that name: Memo Paris; it connotes that she's exotic and beautiful but also somehow lacking a complete humanity. Her story is not a book or a chapter or even a poem -- just a scribble is all you need.
Roy's poor play coincides with his romance with Memo, who distracts him with the high life and moral corrosion. Iris acts as the tonic that cures him of what ails. It's the classic good woman/foul temptress dichotomy straight out of the mythology of the Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, etc.
Gus (a curiously uncredited Darren McGavin) is the bookie who's got a line on everyone, laying odds on everything and always finding a way to come up the winner in the long run. He even claims to have a magic eye to help him pick winners and losers. I had never noticed before this most recent viewing that one of Gus' eyes appears to be larger than the other, possibly even prosthetic. I believe this was achieved with makeup, as McGavin had two good googlers.
Richard Farnsworth plays Red, the laconic assistant manager who acts as Pop's shield man, protecting him as he can from the uncaring fates, but also from Pop's own ornerier instincts. Red's the one who convinces Pop to keep Hobbs around after he shows up unannounced, and quietly nudges everyone to behave better than they are.
Any movie about mythologizing isn't complete without the character of the chronicler, a journalist or storyteller whose job is to bear witness and relate the great events to the world with tremendous accuracy, or not. Here it's Robert Duvall as Max Mercy, a weaselly sports columnist and hustler.
He's happy to use Roy as a springboard to a great story -- oldest rookie inspires kids -- and also more than happy to turn him into a chump as needs be. It's implied that he's on the payroll of the Judge and Sands. He's the one who digs up Roy's salacious past and threatens to use it against him, after the gambits with Memo and outright bribery fail to force Hobbs to throw the big game.
Also bearing witness is Bobby Savoy (George Wilkosz, in his only film role), the plump, smiling batboy for the Knights who becomes Roy's first baseball apostle. He makes a bat of his own, the Savoy Special, as tribute to Hobbs' mighty Wonderboy, which he carved out of a tree split open by lightning outside his boyhood home.
When Wonderboy is shattered in Roy's last at-bat, Bobby offers up the Special like a knight's page surrendering his own sword to his master. Indeed, if Roy Hobbs is a mythological hero straight out of an Edith Hamilton text, then he needs his signature weapon: Hobbs/Wonderboy, Arthur/Excalibur, Thor/Mjölnir
Let me tell you about my favorite scene, which since I first saw it I have been able to recall with near-eidetic clarity:
The Knights are on a roll, playing great team ball on the back of Roy's power hitting. Max, who was witness to Hobbs striking out the Whammer so many years ago, has been unable to recall where he met Roy, or how such a great player could have come out of nowhere. He even drew a cartoon of the event that was going to go out to all the papers that syndicate him, but presumably when Roy failed to show up for his Cubs tryout, the story died.
(How any competent reporter would forget the young lad who struck out Babe Ruth, or fail to follow up on that story, we'll chalk up to Hollywood's general ineptness in depicting journalists.)
Perturbed at this vexing puzzle, Max hangs around the team all the time, even sneaking into the stands during batting practice. Roy saunters in from right field, passes across the pitcher's mound and is challenged by another player to throw one pitch in for fun. Roy pauses, considers, goes into a long wind-up -- possibly for the first time in 16 years -- and throws a heater with such force it sticks in between the links of the chain fence.
Everything goes into slow time; the music dims to practically a hum. Pop, Red and the other players sit speechless, before and after the pitch. The challenging hitter simply lets his bat slide through his hands to the plate, an ineffectual cudgel against such an immortal beast of a throw.
And up in the stands... Max's perched seat is suddenly empty. The lost connection has been made.
Randy Newman's musical score is critical to the success of this scene, and indeed to much of the movie's surging emotional tides. Its soaring crescendos and blaring horns have justly become some of the most recognized musical cues in moviedom.
Director of photographer (as he prefers to be credited) Caleb Deschanel had just scored his first Oscar nomination the year before for "The Right Stuff," and would add his second with "The Natural." There's an elegant washed-out beauty to his cinematography, a slightly gauzy quality that underscores the sense of history unfurling.
"The Natural" may be one of my favorite movies, but it is not one without flaws.
The character of Roy Hobbs is at the center of a tremendous tale, but he is rather uninteresting in of himself, aside from his prowess at baseball. He is good-hearted, unfailingly polite and cherishes the game for its own sake rather than what it could do for him materially. As we know, his only wish in life is to be able to walk down the streets and have people say, "There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was."
Screenwriters Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry translate Malamud's depiction of Hobbs as deliberately flat and pure. Like King Arthur, he is the stuff of legends, and I guess they thought the legends would be enough.
Still, at times it seems like even Redford struggles to imbue Hobbs with the basic shadings of an individual personality beyond the mythic persona.
The plot can be rather languid and shaky, particularly in the third act leading up to the big game. Hobbs has been laid low after being poisoned by Memo, which caused doctors to pump his stomach and inadvertently retrieve the silver bullet -- a totem of past misdeeds that causes the hero to doubt himself.
In short order Hobbs is visited in the hospital by his teammates, Iris and the Judge, who offer him condolences, empathy and $20,000 in cash, respectively. (About $350k in today's dollars.) Tonally, these encounter are all over the map, and for a moment it almost seems the movie will trundle completely to a halt just as it's approaching its denouement.
There's also the matter of Bump Bailey -- the star player played by Michael Madsen in one of his earliest roles, who happens to occupy the same position as Roy. He's a petulant prima donna, a thorn in Pop's side, and an impediment to Roy's rise. So the movie simply kills him off, having Bump ridiculously crash through the outfield wall chasing a long hit. His ashes are scattered over the field by airplane in a comic hiccup that sticks out from the rest of the movie like a sore thumb.
(And granted, my baseball knowledge is bupkes, but is playing right field really that different from center or left? Bump that guy.)
Still, in my long view these faults are less deficiencies in the facade of "The Natural" than intrinsic parts of a great movie's makeup -- like moles on the Madonna. Somehow, the imperfections make the film more approachable, human and eye-level. It's a story about how we come to look up with reverence, but the movie never condescends.
Can a film still be a masterpiece while remaining intrinsically flawed? If so, "The Natural" comes as close as it gets. Here is a movie that swings away.
Movies nowadays tend to fall, like our beleaguered politics, into silos. Superhero movies and gross-out comedies are aimed at men under age 30, animated flicks have lots of colors and boingy action for tykes, there are grim dramas and action movies for older men, a few pictures aimed at adult women are sprinkled here and there, often with a romantic flavor and usually as an antidote for the other stuff.
It’s all rather neat, and dreadfully boring.
“Pete’s Dragon,” beyond being utterly charming, is a throwback: a true family picture. Literally anyone from little children to oldsters to in-betweeners like me will fall under its sway.
It bears little resemblance to the 1977 Disney movie with a cartoon-y green dragon named Elliot who befriends an orphan. Here, the magical creature is part parent, part pet, all best friend. He protects and nurtures Pete, here played by Oakes Fegley as a 10-year-old feral boy who was lost in the woods six years earlier after a tragedy befell his family.
The dragon is portrayed effectively through CGI, with just enough realism to make you feel like he could exist, but fantastical enough that he still seems mystical. He’s green, but with plush fur instead of scales, a body that is leonine (though the belly is a tad soft) and a dog-like snout with one broken fang. He seems to have human-level intelligence, and can fade into invisibility when pesky hunters or tree-cutters come snooping around.
Robert Redford turns up as a crusty old grandfather who had a run-in with Elliot decades ago, and his stories have become part of the lore of the town of Millhaven. No one really believes him, but they like having the yarn to spin for kids and visitors. His daughter Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) grew up into a park ranger who’s protective of the trees and critters.
Her husband, Jack (Wes Bentley), is nice in a bland sort of way, but her brother-in-law, Gavin (Karl Urban), is a jerk who likes to take his woodcutting crews too deep into the forest. This results in the discovery of Pete, who’s taken back to civilization while a lonely Elliot wanders along the trail looking for his little boy.
There follows some predictable but still poignant stuff where the grown-ups fail to believe Pete and his stories about his dragon guardian, but Grace’s wide-eyed daughter, Natalie (Oona Laurence), bonds with him immediately. Pete starts to see the appeal of leaving the woods to live with people again, but pines for his dragon.
The film is directed and co-written (with Toby Halbrooks) by David Lowery, whose last feature, 2013’s “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” is as different thematically as you can get from this Disney remake. Still, that drama about a convict on the run to be reunited with his family, was filled with a lyricism that segues naturally into the tone of “Pete’s Dragon.”
Alas, childlike wonderment seems to be in short supply these days, both among filmmakers and film-goers. “The BFG” bombed horribly at the box office, and there were more empty seats than filled at the preview screening I went to for “Pete’s Dragon.”
But, if for a precious few, there is still a magic that lingers.
Recently this column focused on "Theirs Is the Glory," a fairly unique film in which the actual participants of the failed Allied stratagem to end World War II by Christmas 1944, Operation Market Garden, returned to the site of the battles one year after the fact to recreate the action for a motion picture. The same military operation later became the basis for the 1977 feature film, "A Bridge Too Far."
In my essay on "Theirs Is the Glory," I mostly concentrated on the similarities between it and "Bridge," wondering if screenwriter William Goldman or author Cornelius Ryan, on whose book the latter film is based, were influenced by the earlier picture. That inspired me to go back to "A Bridge Too Far," and see how it has held up to my memory.
It only reinforced my opinion: "A Bridge Too Far" is one of the great WWII epics, and an incredible marriage of narrative structure, inspired direction, gritty performances and technical mastery from the support crew, particularly the musical score by John Addison (who himself served as a soldier in Market Garden).
Market Garden would remain a forgotten bit of history for 30 years until Cornelius Ryan wrote his book about the adventure, in which the Allies dropped 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines to capture a series of bridges. The plan was to have XXX Corp, the British armor column, punch up the road to connect the bridges, thus creating a hole directly into Germany.
Except, the Allies ignored evidence of a great deal of German resistance along the route, including an entire Panzer tank division near Arnhem, the last and most important of the bridges, since it spanned the Rhine River and the border into Germany itself. The British paratroopers, who were only supposed to have to hold the bridge for two days, gave up after nine, leaving behind 80% of their men as casualties or prisoners of war.
That's a lot of story to cram into a feature film, even a three-hour one, but Goldman's screenplay is an exercise in elegant structure. The story begins and ends with generals, both Allied and German, as they plan bold stratagems and then later try to pick up the pieces of where things went wrong. The middle section focuses on the lower ranks of soldiers, the dogfaces who actually have to carry out the fight their superiors dreamed up.
You've heard of "all-star casts," but this one is simply jaw-dropping. For the Brits: Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Sean Connery. For the Germans: Hardy Krüger, Maximilian Schell, Wolfgang Preiss. For the Americans: Robert Redford, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, James Cann, Ryan O'Neal. Not to mention Liv Ullman and Laurience Olivier as Dutch civilians. And Denholm Elliott and John Ratzenberger turning up in bit roles.
Redford, arguably the biggest movie star in the world at the time, doesn't even show up until after the two-hour mark.
I found it interesting how the script is laid out into essentially four sections. The first is the planning of Operation Market Garden, in which British heads are swelled and the first seeds of doubt creep in. Frank Grimes has a terrific role as a nervous major who unsuccessfully points out the presence of tanks, and is sent on medical leave as a result. The second section is the actual drop, a beautiful and daunting ballet of parachutes -- more than 1,000 men jumped out of planes for the sequence -- and the Allies' initial success in taking their objectives. The third is what I call the "American vignettes," and the last act is when everything goes to hell.
The vignettes are a quick succession of three stories centered around American characters. Elliott Gould is up first in a semi-comedic bit about his regiment failing to take the first bridge before the Germans blow it up, necessitating the building of a claptrap "Bailey bridge" to get the tanks across -- but not before delaying them 36 hours. Gould is terrific and charismatic, chomping on a cigar and shouting jokes in between the orders. Addison's music goes into a jazzy, bouncy mode.
Then we get James Caan as a nearly monosyllabic sergeant who protects his young captain -- he doesn't put on his coat at first, so we think he's just a punk private or something -- even guaranteeing the officer that he won't die. He appears to fail in his mission, as the captain is left for dead after being shot in the head. But the sergeant carries the body in a jeep through enemy lines to a mobile Army hospital and, at gunpoint, forces the surgeon (a spot-on Arthur Hill) to examine the wounded lad, revealing that he's still alive.
(This may sound like Hollywood bullshit, but other than the part about being chased in a jeep by German soldiers, it really happened.)
The last and most harrowing of the vignettes is Redford as the major tasked with crossing the Waal River and taking the bridge at Nijmegen. Due to logistical snafus, they had to make a daytime crossing in flimsy portable boats, the wind blew away their smoke cover, and the unit was cut to pieces. Watching Redford with his helmeted head tucked down, pulling his rifle butt through the water like an oar, all the while chanting "Hail Mary, full of grace..." remains one of my seminal cinematic moments. (Again, this really happened.)
Sean Connery also gets a mini-vignette of his own as Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the British airborne division dropped near Arnhem, who gets cut off from his own command and has to hide out in a little Dutch enclave, dodging from house to house, during which time he is presumed dead.
Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, played by Dirk Bogarde, more or less acts as the heavy, playing the gung-ho Brit general who will not cancel the operation for any reason. Those who "rock the boat" are encouraged to clam up or suffer the consequences.
At the end of the film Browning is depicted as duplicitously claiming to always have been skeptical about the operation -- "As you know I've always thought we tried to go a bridge too far" -- rather than an unreserved booster. In reality, Browning raised his doubts prior to the operation, and he and his family -- Bogarde actually served alongside Browning during the war -- were outraged at his villainous portrayal.
It being only three decades and a bit after the events depicted, many of the actors had an opportunity to talk with and even befriend the men they were playing. Edward Fox knew Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commander of XXX Corp, prior to filming and later cited it as his favorite movie role. Michael Caine changed some of his dialogue after asking his counterpart how he would have issued orders, and the real Lt. Col. Johnny Frost had to explain to Anthony Hopkins that he would never have run too quickly between cover, because he had to show his men how contemptuous he was of enemy fire.
The production of "Bridge" is a Homeric story unto itself, and one others have already told better than I could -- notably by Goldman himself, who wrote a making-of book, "Story of a Bridge Too Far," and also included an entire chapter about it in his seminal showbiz tome, "Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade."
(Extremely short version: Joseph E. Levine, a lifelong maverick producer, personally financed the film's $22 million budget -- about $86 million in today's dollars -- himself, then convinced some of the biggest global movie stars to participate by all accepting the same weekly pay rate. He recruited Richard Attenborough (him again) to direct, undertaking an incredible logistical and artistic challenge. Then as some of the amazing footage of the airdrops and battle scenes started to come back in, Levine showed the rushes to distributors who bid on the international distribution rights to the film. As a result, "Bridge" was already in the black before the first ticket was sold.)
The ultimate result was surprising, and not. Everywhere but the U.S. the film was a smash hit. Here, American and audiences and critics used to rousing pro-Allies depictions of the war collectively shrugged their shoulders at a massive production about a colossal military screw-up. Thus, "A Bridge Too Far" is barely known on these shores.
Their loss; "A Bridge Too Far" was perhaps the last of the great World War II epics.
Oh, of course there's the literal man-stuck-out-of-time thing, with a World War II super-soldier put on ice for 70 years to reawaken and pummel bad guys again. If you liked the last go-round of action-filled mayhem, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" offers more of the same.
No, what I mean is that Captain America, aka Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), isn't like the other more recent iterations of comic book superheroes on celluloid. Lately it seems like we want our Batmen and Spider-Men filled with dark thoughts and forbidding back-stories.
Rogers is exactly what he seems: a straightforward, honest and terribly uncomplicated man who just wants to do right. After undergoing a secret experiment that turned him from a 90-pound weakling into the apex of manhood, he's increasingly concerned that his work for the spy/military agency S.H.I.E.L.D. isn't on the up-and-up.
It's a difficult thing to make a boring, bland guy into an engaging hero, but directors/brothers Anthony and Joe Russo -- TV guys making the transition to big-screen spectacle -- manage it well enough. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, making a return engagement, learn their lessons and keep things focused on the action-adventure without any unnecessary romantic entanglements.
The secret when your main character doesn't have a lot of layers is to dress up the background with interesting personalities, and there are plenty here. Scarlett Johansson is back as the Black Widow, a former KGB spy with a mysterious past and not a trace of a Russian accent. She and Rogers dance around each other the whole movie, trying to figure out if the other one is trustworthy.
Also returning is Samuel L. Jackson as S.H.I.E.L.D. chief Nick Fury, who prefers to keep his agents in the dark as much as possible while confabbing with high-level international muckety-mucks, who hold video conferences and sneer at each other. Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), an old friend of Fury's, mans the politics and leaves him free to build a new fleet of deadly hovercraft.
Fury has plans to identify and wipe out terrorists and the like even before they hatch their plots, which strikes Rogers as a bit un-American. He wears a U.S. flag on his indestructible shield and goes by the surname "America," so he should know from patriotism.
Serving as the able new wingman is Falcon (Anthony Mackie), a burnt-out military veteran with a very specialized type of aeronautical expertise. One thing I like about the Marvel universe as it's been depicted in movies is that the line between super-hero and guys who just have nifty gear and some gumption is rather fuzzy.
Of course, we also have to mention that other guy in the title, who happens to be Captain America's nemesis for the sequel. With long black hair, a snarly uncommunicative 'tude and a super-strong robotic left arm, the Winter Soldier is a mystery man whose story parallels Rogers' in some rather discomfiting ways.
At 2¼ hours, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" is a bit too long for its own good -- I feel like a broken record these days; most new movies seem too long to me. But it's an agreeable mash-up of spy thriller intrigue and CG-assisted battles. It's a popcorn movie with enough kickin' spices to make things interesting.
In many ways, “All Is Lost” is 2013’s companion film to “Gravity,” though far fewer people saw it.
Written and directed by rising young talent J.C. Chandor, “All Is Lost” stars Robert Redford as “Our Man,” an unnamed lone seafarer aboard a high-class sailboat. Like Sandra Bullock in space, he is faced with an existential crisis when his vessel is fatally damaged, and he spends the rest of the movie trying valiantly – though without much hope – to survive.
Apart from a brief narration right at the beginning and a handful of epithets sprinkled throughout, the film is wordless. It’s just Redford’s presence, Chandor’s beautiful yet haunting photography, and music by Alex Ebert.
Trouble begins when a lost cargo container smashes into his hull, flooding the living compartments and shorting out his radio. He labors at repairs, but a sea storm soon rises and damages the ship even more severely, dashing his hopes at an easy fix.
As his situation grows ever more dire, Our Man must rely on his ingenuity to contact ways to navigate and procure drinking water – even as his will to live ebbs.
The comparison to “Gravity” is obvious, though another film with similarities is “Cast Away” starring Tom Hanks. Made prisoners by circumstance, these three protagonists become our champions as they endeavor to use the meager tools at hand to fashion a chance at life.
A transfixing experience, “All Is Lost” should prove to be a true find on video.
Extra features, which are the same for Blu-ray and DVD editions, are reasonably generous, and include a feature-length commentary track by /Chandor and his producers – though not Redford, alas.
There are also a number of short featurettes and vignettes focusing on storyboards, special effects, sound design and editing, the script, director and star.
"Not me. I’ve got no choice. I’m not superstitious, and I don’t believe in jinxes, but that stone’s jinxed me and it won’t let go. I’ve been damn near bitten, shot at, peed on, and robbed. And worse is gonna happen before it’s done so I’m taking my stand. I’m going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me!"
That's a line of dialogue from "The Hot Rock" that I'm not sure if it came out of the typewriter of screenwriter William Goldman or author Donald E. Westlake, who wrote the book. I highly suspect the former, because Goldman -- one of the most celebrated script men of all time -- has a penchant for giving main characters long-ish speeches where they more or less tell you everything you need to know about them.
That line is from Dortmunder, a career thief played by Robert Redford, talking about a massive diamond he and his team are after at the behest of an African diplomat named Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn). Dortmunder has had a run of bad luck during his life in crime; indeed, as the story opens he's just getting out of a long prison stint.
He takes the job, even though he has every intention of taking up the plumbing trade he learned behind bars, because his brother-in-law Kelp (George Segal) convinces him to. It's fun to see Redford play a character who is inherently pessimistic and downbeat -- he even chews a special medicinal gum to soothe his pre-ulcerous stomach.
They case the museum where the diamond is held, leading to another great exchange of dialogue as he explains their likelihood of success:
Dortmunder:
"It's good, and it's bad. There's a guaranteed return, and that's good.
But the guarantor is Amusa, and Amusa's a rookie, and that's bad. But
it's an easily transportable object, and that's good. Only it's in a
rotten position in the museum, 30 steps to the quickest exit, and that's
bad. And the glass over the stone, that's bad too, because that's glass
with metal mixed in it, bulletproof, shatterproof. But the locks don't
look impossible, three, maybe five tumblers. But there's no alarm system, and
that's the worst, because that means no one's going to get lazy
watching, knowing the alarm will pick up their mistakes. Which means the
whole thing has got to be a diversion job, and that's good and that's
bad, because if the diversion's too big, it'll draw pedestrians, and if
the diversion's not big enough, it won't draw that watchman." Kelp:
"Dortmunder, I don't know where the hell you are, or what the hell you're saying. Just tell me, will you plan the job?!?" Dortmunder: "It's what I do."
The basic joke of this comedy-caper is that the crack team of criminals are very good at what they do, but something always seems to go wrong and they keep having to steal the same diamond over and over again.
They successfully distract the guards by having their wheel man, Murch (Ron Leibman), crash a car in front of the museum and pretend to be injured, while their explosives guy, Greenberg (Paul Sand), portrays a doctor helping out. But things go awry and Greenberg is arrested after swallowing the diamond.
Then it becomes a prison break movie, with Dortmunder and the team forced to get Greenberg out. Then they learn he stashed the diamond in the holding cell at the 9th Street police station, so they have to break in there with the help of a helicopter and more diversions.
Finally, after learning Greenberg's father, a slimy attorney played by Zero Mostel, has double-crossed them all and hidden the diamond in his bank safe deposit box, they have to break into there, strong-arming the bank clerk with the help of a hypnotist.
The movie's not terribly funny, but the caper bits are really inspired and nerve-wracking. Director Peter Yates, know for "Breaking Away" and "Bullitt," has a tight feel for action scenes, while simultaneously knowing how to make each character vivid and distinct.
The film contains several notable aspects. While they're flying the helicopter to the police station, Murch -- a novice at piloting a chopper, but insisting "I can drive anything!" -- nearly crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, which was then still under construction. Christopher Guest makes his film debut with a bit part as a cop at the police station.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Robert Redford in a non-golden boy role, playing a man who's a ball of nervous energy and low expectations for himself. The part at the end where Dortmunder, having successfully retrieved the diamond from inside the bank, walks away is just a treat.
He finally has a bounce in his step, and Redford practically floats above the sidewalks of New York City, almost seeming to dance his way into the arms of long-elusive success.
"The Great Gatsby" is a production design in search of a movie. It is jaw-droppingly gorgeous to gaze upon, from the actors whose eyes literally sparkle to their handsome clothes, ostentatious homes and gleaming automobiles.
But just like F. Scott Fitzgerald's overpraised novel -- still boring the tears out of high schoolers nearly a century after its publication -- the 1974 movie is beautifully lifeless and unengaging. It's a critique of an age, not a story about flesh-and-blood people whom we can adore or despise. Novels can just be about "a time and a place," but narrative films need to go places.
It has been commented by others that Fitzgerald simply took a timeless story, a love triangle, and set it against the backdrop of the Jazz Age of the 1920s and the nouveau riche who partied carelessly until the great, inevitable fall came.
Actually, if there's one group Fitzgerald finds more contemptuous than the oilmen and stock market dandies who got wealthy quick, it's the snooty Old Money types who wear their wealth like a mark of royalty. Mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby may be a reckless climber, but the book and movie save their sharpest barbs for Tom and Daisy, who think they deserve to dance above any disaster.
Tragedy is something that only happens to the unmoneyed. The wealthy maintain a cocoon by always sticking together. Or, as Daisy puts it to her long-lost lover, "Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby."
At least Gatsby is ambitious; the Buchanans merely want to keep riding their wave of entitlement.
There have been at least a half-dozen cinematic adaptations of the novel, including a silent film version that came out the year after it was published. There was also a 1949 movie starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field, which I haven't seen.
I think "Gatsby" is a story that works for different times and people of certain ages, but not others. The '49 film must have had some added subtext, coming at a time when the country had just come out of two decades of war and economic struggle. Back then, the 1920s must have seemed like the grand, foolish ball before disaster struck.
The 1974 film has no such timely advantages, and arrived when the people who lived the Jazz Age were growing old and dying. It exists as an artifact, a critical representation of an era that was by then already forgotten.
Director Jack Clayton and his cast seem to have approached the picture
with a very theatrical mindset. Most of the actors deliver their lines
in stiff, diffident formal tones. Robert Redford is almost a total cipher as Gatsby, seeming to come out of his shell of mystery only when he nearly comes to blows with Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern), the snobbish old-money playboy married to Daisy (Mia Farrow), his former love.
Farrow has a few interesting notes as the hysterical Daisy, who treats life as a party that never needs winding down. She's not a bored rich wife in need of distraction -- her entire life is a distraction. To her, motherhood consists of giving her little girl a hug and compliment from time to time when she happens by with the governess.
"That's the best thing a girl can be in this world -- a beautiful little fool," she purrs.
Sam Waterston doesn't have much to do as Nick, ostensibly the main character and narrator, but that's the way Fitzgerald constructed him: a Midwesterner who approaches the high-living life of rich Long Islanders like a zoologist studying the behavior of exotic beasts in the wild.
I don't really blame Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay, which actually follows the book rather faithfully, right down to the heavy-handed symbolism of the Buchanan's blinking green dock light beckoning Gatsby from across the lake, and the optometrist's bespectacled gaze frowning down on the proceedings from a billboard marking the fork between the old-money enclave and the upstarts.
Rounding out the cast are Scott Wilson and Karen Black as the Wilsons, poor folks who are used and abused in various ways by the Buchanans, and Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker, an amoral golfer and Nick's itinerant girlfriend.
I think what disappoints me most about the movie is that it's so completely bloodless. The characters seem to glide through a world lacking consequences or waypoints, creating their own rules as they go along. That's Fitzgerald's central criticism of the era in which he lived, and it makes for a wonderful-looking but detached movie.
Perhaps the new film arriving later this week can find the passion that eluded this one.
