Seven More 1970s Crime Classics

Concluding our series with the best of the rest from the golden age of gritty crime thrillers.

The 70s were not an optimistic time, and most American cinema carried and echoed that cynicism. Cop films were no exception, eschewing the traditional white hat/black hat simplicity in place since the 1950s in favor of darker shades of gray among its cops and crooks alike.

Looking past the “D’Antoni Trilogy” of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups, movie theatres of the era premiered dozens of gritty police and crime thrillers, many of which rivaled or in some ways surpassed the blueprint those three films laid down. Known for their realistic settings, amoral protagonists, and meticulous attention to violent detail, the era’s crime films were often as bleak and unremitting as the real-life stories that sometimes inspired them.

The edges of film genre are seldom clear and almost never straight, but the following list includes films of a certain recognizable kind but deliberately omits others. There’s no question that Chinatown, for example, was one of the 70s best films. Including it as a crime film, however, both sells its considerable achievements short while ignoring the criteria of texture and mood that defines most “crime” films of the period. Likewise for other films such as Taxi Driver, Murder On The Orient Express, The Godfather and its sequel, The Parallax View, Dog Day Afternoon, and no doubt many others.

Shaft (1971): The decade saw the rise (and fall) of the blaxploitation sub-genre, typically low-budget efforts that brought the new cop movie morality to the inner city at a time when real-world crime and corruption were reaching catastrophic levels in those areas. Films including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Dolemite, Black Caesar, and Super Fly pitted strong black men against, in one film or another, evil white people, crooks, mobsters, revolutionaries and politicians.

The mack daddy of them all, however, was 1973′s Shaft, an eye-popping swirl of color, attitude, and especially violence. Richard Roundtree played the titular private detective on the trial of a local kingpin’s kidnapped daughter, bucking criminals and cops with help from a Black Panthers-like revolutionary cell. Touted as “The Black James Bond,” Roundtree reprised the role of John Shaft in three sequels, though none match the original. Note that the following is a fan-made trailer.)

Dirty Harry (1971): A film that’s become somewhat archetypal over time, Don Siegel (The Killers) directed this ultra-violent crime thriller about rogue San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, a role that after thirty-eight years and four diminishing sequels has become synonymous with star Clint Eastwood’s public and screen image. The plot puts the remorseless Callahan against a serial sniper loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killer, then at the height of his reign of terror over the Bay Area.

The story is straightforward and the characterizations rote, but Siegel keeps the mounting tension taut. Callahan and “Scorpio” are both unstoppable objects, making their inevitable collision loom mercilessly over the audience. At least the trailer gives fair warning:

The Getaway (1972): Mastermind criminal Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is paroled from a Texas prison on the condition that he plan a bank robbery for corrupt businessman Jack Benyon (Ben Johnson). One of the businessman’s goons kills a security guard during the heist, and Doc and his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) flee to the border crossing at El Paso while eluding pursuit by Benyon and the killer. McQueen and MacGraw became real-life lovers during filming despite her marriage to producer Robert Evans, making them a kind of 70s Brangelina. Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) directs the sleek, swift-moving thriller purely for the sake of entertaining the audience, who loved the palpable chemistry between its stars.

A 1994 remake starring then-married couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger flopped.

Serpico (1973): Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) returned to the theme of police corruption time and again through his career, though probably none of his works equal the haunting intensity of this true-life story of whistle-blowing narcotics detective Frank Serpico. Shunned and eventually set up for a near-fatal shooting by his NYPD colleagues, Serpico (Al Pacino) personified the righteous outcast persona typical of 70s film protagonists, as the film’s grim ending perfectly demonstrates.

Pacino was only just coming into his commanding screen presence, and the on-location shots of a crime-devastated New York showcase Lumet’s attention to precise realism. The two reteamed for the bank heist classic Dog Day Afternoon two years later.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973): The poster on the left isn’t meant to be cheap – it’s just that this film about the working class ranks of the Boston underworld is actually that stark and bleak. Faced with an impending jail sentence, low-level hood Eddie Coyle (the great Robert Mitchum, kicking off a late-career resurgence) agrees to snitch a gang of home invaders to the feds, only to learn that the gang was already caught that same morning.

Meanwhile the Irish Mob, believing Coyle was actually the informant, sends his friend Dillon (Peter Boyle) to kill him in retribution. Mitchum and Boyle, two consummate pros, build their characters comfortably and with unforced but nonetheless mounting tension, while great turns by unjustly forgotten character actors such as Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and others fill in the grimy, desperate world they inhabit. Peter Yates (Bullitt) directs, and after years of sporadic availability the film now enjoys a gorgeous Criterion edition DVD release.

The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola made this smart conspiracy yarn between the first two Godfather sagas, distilling the decade’s paranoia and fear of technology into an intense character study barbed with wicked irony. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who leads a life of deliberate isolation from others while keeping morally removed from the consequences of his discoveries. Haunted by a previous mistake that left three people dead, he becomes obsessed with the meaning of his latest taped investigation, ultimately finding himself the target of eavesdropping and pursuit for reasons not immediately apparent.

The script was written in the mid-60s, yet the film saw release during the height of the Watergate scandal. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford makes a rare screen appearance as the heavy.

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974): A British mercenary (Robert Shaw) and his three henchmen hijack a crowded New York subway train and demand a million dollar ransom. A Transit Authority detective (Walter Matthau) scrambles to stall the gang, which includes former subway system employees who know how to exploit the weaknesses in its safety features. Directed by veteran TV director Joseph Sargent, Matthau and the versatile cast imbue the film with a cynical New York humor, while Quentin Tarantino lifted the hijackers’ color-coordinated code names for his Reservoir Dogs.

We’ll be back next week with review of newer films. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Crime Cinema: The Seven-Ups

The French Connection‘s spiritual successor completed the trilogy of modern police action films begun by Bullitt.

For as much as Bullitt presaged and The French Connection ushered in a new era of violent, realistic police procedural movies, 1973′s The Seven-Ups took that gritty baton and barreled away with it, bringing a depth of character and dramatic pathos to its narrative that, by and large, those earlier films had little interest in developing. A tough and morally complicated story with a deep melancholy at its heart, the film isn’t just a copy or derivative of its predecessors’ successful tropes (though it shares many of them), it’s also a more mature and well-rounded work of filmmaking. And for those reasons, many will find it a more rewarding viewing experience.

Small wonder, considering the shared talent involved. Produced and directed by Philip D’Antoni, who had previously produced both The French Connection as well as Bullitt, The Seven-Ups featured a story by NYPD detective Sonny Grosso, whom Roy Scheider had played in The French Connection. The film’s crew included stunt legend Bill Hickman, who had masterminded the car chases of both earlier films , and by Don Ellis, whose French Connection soundtrack won a Grammy. Finally, both Scheider and co-star Tony Lo Bianco returned in similar roles to their French Connection originals, playing respectively a rogue cop and low-level mobster.

For all that shared talent, it’s tempting to under-value The Seven-Ups as a cash-in to its predecessors’ immense popularity. The 1970s were an age of quick, cheap sequels that did little justice to their inspiration, all too often made hurriedly while the first film remained fresh in the pubic awareness. Yet The Seven-Ups’ elaborate plot, rooted as it was in character and police culture, belie such an easy dismissal. Scheider plays Bobby Manucci, leader of an elite “dirty tricks” squad of detectives who orchestrate sting operations that facilitate arrests by conventional police. The rank and file cops see Manucci’s group – named because their arrests are guaranteed to bring at least seven years in prison – as dangerous compromises of police tradition and morality. The squad keeps to itself, not especially close to their colleagues or even with one another. A leader by example, Manucci builds the group’s intelligence with a wallet full of mug shots of known gangsters combined with hearsay from childhood friend Vito Lucia (Lo Bianco), now a working-class wiseguy with a wife and children.

What Manucci doesn’t suspect of his old friend forms the crux of the film’s tension. Though supplying him with information, Lucia is using Manucci’s wallet file to target upper-level mobsters and loan sharks for kidnapping by two thugs (Hickman and Richard Lynch) that pose as police to bypass their victims’ defenses. The mobsters are ransomed off but seethe with hostility towards the police, and when one of the Seven-Ups is caught while conducting undercover surveillance a twist of fate ends in his murder at the hands of Lucia’s men. What follows is the film’s intense chase sequence, an effort that must surely have been D’Antoni and Hickman’s conscious effort to top The French Connection‘s landmark car-vs.-train set piece.

The sequence was shot in Uptown New York, down crowded city streets and busy thoroughfares. While its higher ambition lacks the novelty of Bullitt or The French Connection, like those other films’ sequences it improves with repeated viewing, when new camera angles and details come into better focus.

Scheider plays Manucci much as he played The French Connection‘s Buddy Russo, but minus Gene Hackman’s scene-swallowing screen presence his intense reserve and brooding intelligence hold the story’s center through moral ambivalence. Always an actor who understood the importance of not revealing everything, Scheider often seems more dangerous than other action stars of the period simply by remaining aloof. The realization that his lifelong friend has betrayed him plays out entirely in his eyes, as a scene in which their back and forth movement slows to a stop, indicating Manucci’s cold determination.

Yet Manucci never suffers for want of ruthlessness. Following the death of their compatriot he leads the remaining Seven-Ups on a midnight raid to a mobster’s home, threatening the gangster’s wife while holding a gun to the man’s face. Later, he coaxes information from a hospitalized mafioso by repeatedly removing his oxygen hose. The final shootout, set in what must have been the ugliest vacant lot in New York, is nasty, brutal, and merciless, while the denouement meeting between Manucci and Lucia makes a grim a comment on justice as opposed to legal procedure.

The film is not without its flaws. The hard-to-follow plot at times gets lost in the gritty atmosphere. Important plot points that bear further explanation (character movements, exposition that establishes characters’ relations to one another) are skimmed over, so that first-time viewing can provoke some searching-back and reviewing of key scenes to clarify story movement. In particular, the opening set piece in which Manucci and his men set up a sting against counterfeiters never quite comes together as much as it should; Lucia’s exact stature and position within the Mob also remains frustratingly nebulous.

But the film completes a growth set in motion by Bullitt and continued through The French Connection: whereas the former was about innovation and the latter about realism, both at the expense of conventional audience expectations, The Seven-Ups infuses its main character with depth and angst. Unlike Frank Bullitt’s glacial self-confidence or Popeye Doyle’s self-igniting rage, Manucci is troubled by self-doubt and self-recrimination. He tortures criminals but approaches his superiors with a trepidation born of doubt. He exacts revenge for his subordinate’s death, yet betrayal even to avenge betrayal leaves him miserable. The film’s frozen last image suggests as much: “You can’t do this to me, Buddy!” Lucia protests, as Manucci prepares to rat him out to the gangsters he kidnapped. “You watch me!” Manucci retorts, before storming away as the camera fades to black.

In our next installment we’ll have seven more classic crime films of the gritty 70s. Please join us then.

- Michael Kabel

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70′s Crime Cinema: Bullitt

Celebrating some of the great crime films of the decade known for moral ambivalence.

American cinema experienced a golden age in the 1970s, and no genre had more of a rebirth than the crime thriller. Films such as The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, the Dirty Harry series, and The Conversation (among many others) gave a new voice to the structure and narrative of the typical cops-and-robbers saga, which spent much of the 1950s and 60s languishing beneath a pontificating morality. Reflecting the uncertainty of the era, the new crime films boasted ethically ambivalent protagonists who often brandished the same ruthlessness as their opponents. The films were an idea whose time had come, and their brooding relativism would inform not only other crime movies but also the science fiction and Western genres throughout the 1980s and 90s.

But as proof that time hates a calendar, the new breed began two years ahead of their decade with the 1968 release of Peter Yates’ Bullitt. The taut, engrossing story (based on the novel by Robert L. Fish) centered on titular loose cannon Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen), a San Francisco police detective charged with protecting a mob witness until a district attorney (Robert Vaughn) can bring him to trial. When Bullitt’s assistants fail to guard the witness from mob hitmen, it falls to him to uncover the wide-ranging conspiracy behind the attack.

As a character Bullitt is archetypal of the 70s crime cinema anti-hero: noncomformist even among other cops but especially with respect to his superiors, he’s what in today’s jargon would be considered a “rogue.” Ignoring the district attorney and a writ served against him, he enlists his girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset) into the investigation, which soon reveals that the witness Bullitt’s men guarded was not actually a mob witness at all but someone else entirely.

The two are not quite Nick and Nora Charles: horrified by the scene of a dead body, Cathy attacks Bullitt with recognition of his world. “You live in a sewer, Frank!” she screams. (Her dread represents another new archetype that screenwriters have used to soften their cop characters edges ever since: the everywoman love interest, in turns nurturing and supportive yet terrified by the main character’s reality.) Despite her revulsion, Bullitt has to stop the true mob turncoat from escaping the country that same day.

The centerpiece of the film is the gripping 11-minute car chase through the San Francisco streets, a set piece that proved so popular with audiences that dozens of imitator films would make its use cliché by the end of the 70s. Yates (Breaking Away) shot the sequence on location, keeping the action not on deserted streets but rather on crowded avenues and through intersections, narrowing the viewer’s perspective while raising the tension.

Small wonder that the film proved a boon to the Ford Motor Company, whose 390 CID V8 Mustang essentially enjoyed a co-starring role as Bullitt’s vehicle of choice.

Other smaller details almost seemed aggressive in promoting a new image of masculine cool: Bullitt’s all-black wardrobe, his sleek underarm shoulder holsters (inspired by legendary SFPD Inspector David Toschi, who served as technical adviser on the film), and the aforementioned anti-authoritarian attitude all resonated with audiences grown bored with the straight-arrow lawmen that had populated crime movies and television since the heyday of Dragnet in the 1950s.

Similarly, Bullitt and Cathy enjoy a very modern relationship: highly sexualized but with little sense of real commitment. They each have their own careers (she’s an architect) but their lives intersect easily and without strain. Watching the film now, it’s easy and even tempting to misunderstand their dynamic as bullying or one-sided. But Bullitt only pulls Cathy into his world when he has no alternative, implying a protectiveness and trust towards her that stays powerful by remaining unspoken. The film ends with him staring at himself in a mirror while she sleeps in the next room, possibly reasserting his dedication to self-reliance in the future.

- Michael Kabel

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(We’ll be republishing more of our 70s Crime Cinema series of articles in the coming weeks.)

See This Movie: Zodiac

Reprising one of our best articles and singing the praises of an outstanding film.

Released in 2007 to warm but not rave critical reviews and a tepid box office reception, David Fincher’s Zodiac nevertheless represents probably the most precisely executed police procedural of the decade. It’s a haunting film not just about catching the bad guy or punishing evil but also a character-rooted, deeply emotional tale of crime and its human cost on both the victim and those who pursue the wrongdoer. That it’s meticulously based on a harrowing true series of events only makes its narrative and its broad ensemble of fine performances all the more resonant. For film noir fans, crime movie enthusiasts, or just those who enjoy good period pieces, it’s simply unmissable cinema.

Its true story is the stuff of legend. Beginning in 1968 and lasting through the Seventies, San Francisco and its surrounding environs were terrorized by a serial killer who typically preyed on couples alone in deserted areas, committing savage attacks that included elaborate costuming and hastily scrawled messages left at the scene. The killer, who called himself “The Zodiac” in postcards and letters mailed to local newspapers, taunted authorities with elaborate coded messages he defied experts to decipher. Though investigators from several police and sheriff’s departments spent years running down thousands of clues, ultimately his identity was never conclusively proven, passing into the realm of endless conjecture and debate. To this day confessions and leads continue to appear with steady, if frustrating, regularity.

Downey Jr., Gyllenhaal co-star as investigators Avery, Graysmith

Fincher’s film moves according to a delicately balanced tone, and in creating the Bay Area at the end of the 60s he emphasizes the dark edges of a region for whom the Summer of Love was already dead and gone. The marvelous set piece that opens the film moves at a deliberate pace that both establishes the terrible nature of Zodiac’s crimes and explains why the hunt for his capture would reach such desperate lengths in the months to come. This first attack, as with the later depictions, are not shown as sexy, stylized, or maudlin. They are swift and brutal, leaving the audience not scared or titillated but instead serve to provoke a moral response: repulsion, dismay, horror.

Yet the sequence is just prelude for the main segment of the narrative, which depicts the long and tortured investigation that suffered setback after maddening setback. When the Zodiac’s coded messages arrive at the San Francisco Chronicle, they attract the attention of star reporter Robert Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) and cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Graysmith, a former Eagle Scout and amateur cryptographer, finds himself both fascinated and repelled by the Zodiac killings, while the self-destructive Avery at first sees only his next story.

Edwards, Ruffalo as Inspectors Armstrong, Toschi

Meanwhile Zodiac strikes again and again, including an unforgettable daylight attack on the shores of a tranquil lake in which he appears as a hooded executioner, binding and viciously stabbing a young couple. Weeks later, the murder of a San Francisco taxi driver is assigned to SFPD Inspectors David Tosci and William Armstrong (Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards, both excellent). The two are dedicated, intelligent, methodical – career men experienced in difficult cases but also principled and even somewhat idealistic. (Toschi was an inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character and the visual model for Steve McQueen’s portrayal of Bullitt.) Together with police officials from neighboring areas (played with muted reserve by Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, and others), the two detectives slowly begin amassing a library of circumstantial evidence yet always come just short of discovering the one, case-breaking clue. Zodiac, it seems, was smart enough to strike in areas of overlapping or poorly defined police jurisdiction, so coordination and communication lags – the attacks occur just as the fax machine was becoming available – slow their respective efforts.

This is the Zodiac speaking: Lynch as suspect Arthur Leigh Allen

They come closest when interviewing refinery worker Arthur Leigh Allen, a lumbering hulk of a man who appears helpful but subtly taunts the inspectors by flaunting a Zodiac wristwatch and boots that match tread marks taken from an early attack. Actor John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, Waking The Dead) is brilliantly economical in depicting Leigh – whom the real-life Graysmith and detectives believe was Zodiac – as an unassuming but inwardly arrogant figure with just enough edginess to be the sociopathic murderer. “I’m not the Zodiac, and if I were I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” Leigh tells the detectives with glacial calm. A search of his squalid house trailer reveals nothing, compelling the inspectors away from the man they feel certain is the killer.

Ultimately, however, as budgets shrank and other crimes demanded attention the pursuit of the case fell on Graysmith’s shoulders alone, despite repeated discouragement from colleagues, his bosses at the Chronicle, Avery, and later his loving but frustrated wife (Chloe Sevigny). Graysmith wrote the two books that serve as the film’s inspiration, and Fincher narrows the camera time given to each investigator until only Graysmith remains, often chasing the most dubious of leads. A final set piece, set in the creaking basement of an informant’s house, twists the oldest of suspense tropes by using it as a visual metaphor for Graysmith’s obsessive search. Despite a ruined marriage, suffering career, and estranged children, his motivation is explained in the simplest terms. “I want to look him in the eyes, and I want to know,” Graysmith explains late in the film. It’s a sentiment extended by implication to all the investigators who bend or break procedure to help his search.

The Code Breakers: Downey, Jr., Gyllenhaal

James Vanderbilt’s script connects the various set pieces together with dialogue-driven scenes that establish the characters while serving to display the slow procession of time. A leap of several years is shown by the time-lapsed construction of the Transamerica Pyramid building, a San Francisco landmark. True to real events, characters drop out of the investigation, get reassigned, or meet with career setback or other difficulty. When at the end of the film Allen remains free, guilty in the minds of those consumed by his pursuit but not by any official court, the resolution feels oddly fitting given their lonely efforts.

I am Paul Avery: Downey, Jr.

In a movie about human frailty and cruelty, the actors have to carry the drama, and the marvel of Zodiac is not the superb cast itself but rather how many of them capably perform when cast diametrically against type. There’s no reason to think frequent indie and romantic comedy star Ruffalo would work as the man who inspired Steve McQueen’s most memorable role, yet Ruffalo owns the part. As noted above, Lynch is a revelation as the benignly terrifying Allen. Gyllenhaal reportedly struggled with his part during shooting, but the vulnerability he brings to Graysmith gives the viewer an emotional focal point. Finally, Downey, Jr. is pitch-perfect as the debauched, imploding Avery, evoking alternate but equal amounts of sympathy and frustration from the viewer. If you thought his performance as Iron Man’s Tony Stark was clever and multifaceted, he’s even better here.

There’s a sense throughout that Fincher guided his actors but did not control them, so that each naturalistic performance becomes a part of the greater whole. That understated approach, the discipline to get out of the film’s way, allows Zodiac to tell a sprawling, complex story without getting bogged down in “hey look at me” stylization. Like Quiz Show and Serpico, the story is allowed to speak for itself and make a deeper point than mere directorial style. In that way, it’s a film that leaves you thinking not just about the events presented – and they’ll stay in your mind for some time – but about the very potential of film itself to relate human events.

-Michael Kabel

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Promising Starts: Great Film and TV Openings

Our favorite opening titles and sequences, in commentary and video

The opening to a film is like finally getting to meet someone you’ve only heard about, someone you know only through hearsay or reputation. You get the suspense of your own first impression and a hint of something to follow, even if you’re not sure what that something means or what it will become. If you’re seeing a film for the first time, one you’ve waited with anticipation – or dread – there’s also sometimes a sense of getting to the top of a roller coaster, the adrenaline rush of getting close to the exhilaration of what’s about to happen.

The best films recognize that their openings, like the openings to great novels, set the tone and lay the groundwork for the stories that follow. Some seek to dazzle us with style and attitude; others beat down our expectations or resistance, compelling us into their worlds. The following films represent some of our favorite movie and television openings, both title sequences and otherwise. Each one achieves something different, but each one puts forward a central idea of its film.

1. Seven Days In May (1964) – John Frankenheimer’s Cold War thriller centered around a rogue Joint Chief of Staff (Burt Lancaster) attempting a military coup of the federal government and the pacifist U.S. President (Fredric March) and breakaway Pentagon official (Kirk Douglas) attempting to stop him. Legendary title sequence designer Saul Bass puts the very U.S. Constitution under siege by the interconnected days, the hands of a clock becoming lightning bolts on the nation’s seal, and the White House shut off by nuclear missiles. It’s the film’s core struggle encased in a symbolic smart bomb, made more effective by Jerry Goldsmith’s martial score:

2. Crime Story (1986) – Michael Mann executive produced this NBC series starring Denis Farina (Law & Order) and Stephen Lang (Avatar) as 1960′s lawmen in perpetual struggle against a rising crimelord (Anthony Denison.) Halfway through the first season the show shifted locales from Chicago to Las Vegas, and the second season opening credits celebrated both the show’s edgy violence and Vegas’ neon-noir allure, all set to a souped-up version of Del Shannon’s classic “Runaway.” The rooftop fistfight image always bowls us over.

3. Taxi Driver (1976) – The beginning to Martin Scorcese’s dissection of mid-1970s alienation and violence drops the audience straight down into anti-protagonist Travis Bickle’s (Robert DeNiro) lonely world, a world of rainy gutters, dirty smoke, and fleeting images of humanity. The city around him shifts to streaking, muddled primary colors and back as the soulful interlude in Bernard Hermann’s otherwise menacing score almost mocks Bickle’s loneliness. Even the credits themselves are fleeting, with the cast’s names rising and falling into the steam clouds swallowing the cab.

4. Bullitt (1968) – the legendary, game-rewriting car chase sequence has overshadowed much of the rest of this sleek thriller by director Peter Yates. Yet the enthralling opening heist, highlighted by Pablo Ferro’s title design, seems to move in a half-dozen directions at once, thanks in part to Lalo Schifrin’s swinging score. For a film about shifting morality and individual sel-reliance, the sequence both cements the viewer’s own perspective while at the same time preparing them for the swirl of events and motivations to come. And – and! – it just looks so damn cool, besides.

5. Repo Man (1984) – Alex Cox’s snarly saga about a Los Angeles teen (Emilio Estevez) who falls into possession of a 1964 Chevy Malibu with extraterrestrial corpses in its trunk is quintessential punk rock cinema from a time before “punk” was merely a marketing brand. The opening credits, with typically belligerent music from Iggy Pop, lights up a series of road maps in radioactive greens, taking the viewer on the road to nuclear Hell.

The credits use (for their time) state of the art wipe edits and pixellated effects to show movement across the Southwestern United States, giving the largely L.A.-centered film a road movie sense of urgency. Still, they seem proudly low-budget and deliberately cool, which is exactly the mood the film wants to strike.

6. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) – An affectionate but undaunted homage and satire of film noir tropes (the script wears its Raymond Chandler influences on its sleeve), Shane Black’s dark comedy thriller was adored mostly by critics who got the knowing references but yet failed to draw much attention or box office among the public. Still, it was the start of Robert Downey, Jr.’s comeback, while also featuring an unfairly overlooked turn by Val Kilmer as a gay private investigator and a winning performance by Michelle Monaghan as an actress shifting between femme fatale and girl next door at whim.

Title designer Danny Yount based the breezy, colorful opening sequence on Saul Bass’ 1960′s work, matching the images to the music and keeping the tone playful and smart. In some ways it’s much lighter in tone than the film that follows, but it’s nevertheless perfectly fun to watch for pure enjoyment all on its own.

7. Trainspotting (1996) – A film that captured counter-cultural disgust with the mainstream in the 1990s much like Repo Man did for the 80s, Danny Boyle’s ensemble story of working class Edinburgh heroin addicts and assorted desperate souls (based on Irvine Welsh’s novel) briefly made the mantra “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career.” a sardonic catchphrase for anti-commercialism. The film also launched the careers of several of its stars, including Ewan McGregor, Kelly MacDonald, Kevin McKidd, Johnny Lee Miller, and Robert Carlyle.

The short, breathless opening sequence explains the characters’ whole lives, guided by McGregor’s flawless narration (which, by the way, is NSFW for several reasons.)

Some films that would surely have made this list, had their credits been available for embedding, include: We Own The Night, Fight Club, Fahrenheit 451, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and Sherlock Holmes. If this list were longer, it would also include  Spartacus, The Conversation, Cutter’s Way, To Live and Die In L.A., and The Man With The Golden Arm.

- Michael Kabel

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Seven More Crime Classics from the 70s

The rest of the best from the golden age of gritty crime thrillers.

The 70s were not an optimistic time, and most American cinema carried and echoed that cynicism. Cop films were no exception, eschewing the traditional white hat/black hat simplicity in place since the 1950s in favor of darker shades of gray among its cops and crooks alike. Looking past the “D’Antoni Trilogy” of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups, movie theatres of the era were held down by dozens of gritty police and crime thrillers, many of which rivaled or in some ways surpassed the blueprint those three films delineated. Known for their realistic settings, amoral protagonists, and meticulous attention to violent detail, the era’s crime films were often as bleak and unremitting as the real-life stories that sometimes inspired them.

The following list includes films that exemplified the crime genre. The edges of film genre are seldom clear and almost never straight, but the list includes films of a certain recognizable kind but deliberately omits others. There’s no question that Chinatown, for example, was one of the 70s best films. Including it as a crime film, however, both sells its considerable achievements short while ignoring the criteria of texture and mood that defines most “crime” films of the period. Likewise for other films such as Taxi Driver, Murder On The Orient Express, The Godfather and its sequel, The Parallax View, Dog Day Afternoon, and no doubt many others.

In chronological order:

Shaft (1971): The decade saw the rise (and fall) of the blaxploitation sub-genre, typically low-budget efforts that brought the new cop movie morality to the inner city, a locale where in the real world crime and corruption were reaching catastrophic levels. Films  including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Dolemite, Black Caesar,  and Super Fly pitted strong black men against, alternately, evil white people, crooks, mobsters, revolutionaries and politicians.

The mack daddy of them all, however, was 1973′s Shaft, an eye-popping swirl of color, attitude, and especially violence. Richard Roundtree played the titular private detective on the trial of a local kingpin’s kidnapped daughter, bucking criminals and cops with help from a Black Panthers-like revolutionary cell. Touted as “The Black James Bond,” Roundtree reprised the role of John Shaft in three sequels, though none match the original. (Note that the following is a fan-made trailer.)

 

Dirty Harry (1971): A film that’s become somewhat archetypal over time, Don Siegel (The Killers) directed this ultra-violent crime thriller about rogue San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty”  Harry Callahan, a role that after thirty-eight years and four diminishing sequels has become synonymous with star Clint Eastwood’s public and screen image. The plot puts the remorseless Callahan against a serial sniper loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killer, then at the height of his reign of terror over the Bay Area.

The story is straightforward and the characterizations rote, but Siegel keeps the mounting tension taut as piano wire. Callahan and “Scorpio” are both unstoppable objects, making their inevitable collision loom mercilessly over the audience. At leat the trailer gives fair warning:

The Getaway (1972): Mastermind criminal Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is paroled from a Texas prison on the condition that he plan a bank robbery for corrupt businessman Jack Benyon (Ben Johnson). One of the businessman’s goons kills a security guard during the heist, and Doc and his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) flee to the border at El Paso while eluding pursuit by Benyon and the killer. McQueen and MacGraw became real-life lovers during filming despite her marriage to producer Robert Evans, making them a kind of 70s Brangelina. Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) directs the sleek, swift-moving thriller purely for the sake of entertaining the audience, who loved the palpable chemistry between its stars. A 1994 remake starring then-married couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger flopped.

Serpico (1973): Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) returned to the theme of police corruption time and again through his career, though probably none of his works equal the haunting intensity of this true-life story of whistle-blowing narcotics detective Frank Serpico. Shunned and eventually set up for a near-fatal shooting by his NYPD colleagues, Serpico (Al Pacino) personified the righteous outcast persona typical of 70s film protagonists, as the film’s grim ending perfectly demonstrates. Pacino was only just coming into his commanding screen presence, and the on-location shots of a crime-devastated New York showcase Lumet’s attention to precise realism. The two reteamed for the bank heist classic Dog Day Afternoon two years later.

 

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973): The poster on the left isn’t meant to be cheap -  it’s just that this film about the working class ranks of the Boston underworld is actually that stark and bleak. Faced with an impending jail sentence, low-level hood Eddie Coyle (the great Robert Mitchum, kicking off a late-career resurgence) agrees to snitch a gang of home invaders to the feds, only to learn that the gang was already caught that same morning. Meanwhile the Irish Mob, believing Coyle was actually the informant, sends his friend Dillon (Peter Boyle) to kill him in retribution. Mitchum and Boyle, two consummate pros, build their characters comfortably and with unforced but nonetheless mounting tension, while great turns by unjustly forgotten character actors such as Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and others fill in the grimy, desperate world they inhabit. Peter Yates (Bullitt) directs, and the film will see a long-anticipated DVD release this May.

The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola made this smart conspiracy yarn between the first two Godfather sagas, distilling the decade’s paranoia and fear of technology into an intense character study chock full of irony. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who leads a life of deliberate isolation from others while keeping morally removed from the consequences of his discoveries. Haunted by a previous mistake that left three people dead, he becomes obsessed with the meaning of his latest taped investigation, ultimately finding himself the target of eavesdropping and pursuit for reasons not immediately apparent. The script was written in the mid-60s, yet the film saw release during the height of the Watergate scandal. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford makes a rare screen appearance as the heavy.

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974): A British mercenary (Robert Shaw) and his three henchmen hijack a crowded New York subway train and demand a million dollar ransom. A Transit Authority detective (Walter Matthau) scrambles to stall the gang, which includes former subway system employees who know how to exploit the weaknesses in its safety features. Directed by veteran TV director Joseph Sargent, Matthau and the versatile cast imbue the film with a cynical New York humor, while Quentin Tarantino lifted the hijackers’ color-coordinated code names for his Reservoir Dogs. A remake, starring Denzel Washington in the Matthau role and John Travolta as the hijacker’s ringleader, is scheduled for release this June.

- Michael Kabel
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70s Crime Cinema: The Seven-Ups

The French Connection‘s spiritual successor completed the new direction in cop films begun by Bullitt.

For as much as Bullitt presaged and The French Connection ushered in a new era of violent, realistic police procedural movies, 1973′s The Seven-Ups took that gritty baton and ran with it, bringing a depth of character and dramatic pathos to its narrative that, by and large, those earlier films had little interest in developing. A tough and morally complicated story with a deep melancholy at its heart, the film isn’t just a copy or derivative of its predecessors’ more successful tropes (though it shares many of them), it’s also a more mature and well-rounded work of filmmaking. And for those reasons, many will find it a more rewarding viewing experience.

Smll wonder, considering the shared talent involved. Produced and directed by Philip D’Antoni, who had previously produced both The French Connection as well as Bullitt, The Seven-Ups featured a story by NYPD detective Sonny Grosso, whom star Roy Scheider had played in The French Connection. The film’s crew included Bill Hickman, who had orchestrated the car chases of both earlier films as stunt coordinator, as well as music by Don Ellis, whose French Connection soundtrack won a Grammy. Finally, both Scheider and co-star Tony Lo Bianco returned in similar roles to their French Connection originals, playing respectively a rogue cop and scheming low-level mobster. Hickman also had a small part as a hired goon, a shift from playing that film’s doomed federal agent Mulderig.

For all that shared talent, it’s tempting to under-value The Seven-Ups as a cash-in to its predecessors’ immense popularity. The 1970s were an age of quick, cheap sequels that did little justice to their inspiration, all too often made hurriedly while the first film remained fresh in the pubic awareness. Yet The Seven-Ups’ elaborate plot, rooted as it was in character and police culture, belie such an easy dismissal. Scheider plays Bobby Manucci, leader of an elite  ”dirty tricks” squad of detectives who orchestrate sting operations that facilitate arrests by the conventional police. The rank and file cops see Manucci’s group – named because their sting arrests are guaranteed to bring at least seven years in prison – as dangerous compromises of police tradition and morality. The squad keeps to itself, not especially close to their colleagues or even with one another. A leader by example, Manucci builds the group’s intelligence with a wallet full of mug shots of known gangsters combined with hearsay from childhood friend Vito Lucia (Lo Bianco), now a working-class wiseguy with a wife and children.

What Manucci doesn’t suspect of his old friend forms the crux of the film’s tension. Though supplying him with information, Lucia is using Manucci’s wallet file to target upper-level mobsters and loan sharks for kidnapping by two thugs (Hickman and Richard Lynch) that pose as police to bypass their victims’ guard. The mobsters are ransomed off but seethe with hostility towards the police, and when one of the Seven-Ups is caught while conducting undercover surveillance a twist of fate ends in his murder at the hands of Lucia’s men. What follows is the film’s intense chase sequence, an effort that must surely have been D’Antoni and Hickman’s conscious effort to top The French Connection‘s landmark car-vs.-train set piece.

The sequence was shot in Uptown New York, down crowded city streets and busy thoroughfares. Its higher ambition obviously lacks the novelty of Bullitt or The French Connection, but its sheer technical bravado makes for intense viewing. And like those other film’s sequences it improves with repeated viewing, when new camera angles and details come into better focus.

Scheider plays Manucci much as he played The French Connection‘s Buddy Russo, but minus Gene Hackman’s scene-swallowing screen presence his intense reserve and brooding intelligence hold the story’s center by virtue of its moral ambivalence. Always an actor who understood the importance of not revealing everything, Scheider often seems more dangerous than other action stars of the period simply by remaining aloof. The realization that his lifelong friend has betrayed him plays out entirely in his eyes, as a scene in which their back and forth movement slows to a stop, indicating Manucci’s cold determination.

Yet Manucci never suffers for want of ruthlessness. Following the death of their compatriot he leads the remaining Seven-Ups on a midnight raid to a mobster’s home, threatening the gangster’s wife while holding a gun to the man’s face. Later, he coaxing information from a hospitalized mafioso by repeatedly removing his oxygen hose. The final shootout, set in what must have been the ugliest vacant lot in New York, is nasty, brutal, and merciless, while the denouement meeting between Manucci and Lucia makes a grim a comment on justice as opposed to legal procedure.

The film is not without its flaws. The hard-to-follow plot at times gets lost in the gritty atmosphere. Important plot points that bear further explanation (character movements, exposition that establishes characters’ relations to one another) are skimmed over, so that first-time viewing can provoke some searching-back and reviewing of key scenes to clarify story movement. In particular, the opening set piece in which Manucci and his men set up a sting against counterfeiters never quite comes together as much as it should; Lucia’s exact stature and position within the Mob also remains frustratingly nebulous.

But the film completes a growth set in motion by Bullitt and continued through The French Connection: whereas the former was about innovation and the latter about realism, both at the expense of conventional audience expectations, The Seven Ups infuses its main character with depth and angst. Unlike Frank Bullitt’s glacial self-confidence or Popeye Doyle’s fiery self-justifying rage, Manucci is troubled by self-doubt and self-recrimination. He tortures criminals but approaches his superiors with a trepidation born of doubt. He exacts revenge for his subordinate’s death, yet betrayal even to avenge betrayal leaves him resolved but miserable. The film’s frozen last image suggests as much:  ”You can’t do this to me, Buddy!” Lucia protests, as Manucci prepares to rat him out to the gangsters he kidnapped. “You watch me!” Manucci retorts, before storming away in guilt and shame as the camera fades to black.

Friday we’ll have seven more classic crime films of the gritty 70s. Please join us then.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Crime Cinema Preview: Bullitt

Celebrating some of the great crime films of the decade known for moral ambivalence.

American cinema experienced a golden age in the 1970s, and no genre had more of a rebirth than the crime thriller. Films such as The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, the Dirty Harry series, and The Conversation (among many others) constructed a new voice to the structure and narrative of the typical cops-and-robbers saga, which since the late 1930s had maintained and languished in an instructional, moralistic tone. Reflecting the uncertainty of the era, the new crime films boasted morally ambiguous protagonists who often brandished the same ruthlessness as their opponents. The films were an idea whose time had come, and their brooding relativism would inform not only other crime movies but also the science fiction and Western genres throughout the 1980s and 90s.

But as proof that time hates a calendar, the new breed began two years ahead of their decade with the 1968 release of Peter Yates’ Bullitt. The gritty story revolves around loose cannon Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen), a San Francisco police detective charged with protecting a mob witness until a district attorney (Robert Vaughn) can bring him to trial. But Bullitt’s assistants fail to guard the witness from mob hitmen, and it falls to Bullitt to uncover the wide-ranging conspiracy behind the attack.

Bullitt the character is archetypal of the 70s crime cinema anti-hero: noncomformist even among other cops but especially with respect to his superiors, he’s what in today’s parlance would be considered a “rogue.” Ignoring the district attorney and a writ served against him, he enlists his girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset) into the investigation, which soon reveals that the witness Bullitt’s men guarded was not actually a mob witness at all but someone else entirely. Horrified by the scene of a dead body, Cathy attacks Bullitt with recognition of his world. “You live in a sewer, Frank!” she screams, presaging the appalled love interest archetype that would also become a mainstay of cops-on-the edge actioners. Bulitt then has to stop the true mob witness from escaping the country that same day.

The centerpiece of the film is the gripping 11-minute car chase sequence through the San Francisco streets, a set piece that proved so popular with audiences that dozens of imitator films would make its use cliche by the end of the 70s. Yates (Breaking Away) shot the sequence on location, keeping the action not on deserted streets but rather on crowded avenues and through intersections, narrowing the viewer’s perspective while raising the tension.

Small wonder that the film proved a boon to the Ford Motor Company, whose 390 CID V8 Mustang essentially enjoyed a co-starring role as Bullitt’s vehicle of choice.

Other smaller details almost seemed aggressive in promoting a new image of masculine cool: Bullitt’s all-black wardrobe, his sleek underarm shoulder holsters (inspired by legendary SFPD Inspector David Toschi, who served as a technical adviser on the film), and the aforementioned anti-authoritarian attitude all resonated with audiences grown bored with the straight-arrow lawmen that had populated crime movies and television since the heyday of Dragnet in the 1950s. Bullitt and Cathy enjoy a very modern relationship: highly sexualized but with little sense of real commitment. They each have their own careers (she’s an architect) but their lives intersect easily and without strain. Watching the film now, it’s easy and even tempting to misunderstand their dynamic as bullying or one-sided. But Bullitt only pulls Cathy into his world when he has no alternative, implying a protectiveness and trust towards her that stays powerful by remaining unspoken. The film ends with him staring at himself in a mirror while she sleeps in the next room, possibly reasserting his dedication to self-reliance in the future.

Next week we’ll be reviewing three crime films of the 70s, including the Oscar-winner that’s one of the best cop films of all time. Please join us then.

- Michael Kabel
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Five Movies That Ought To Be On DVD (But Aren’t)

We are all over the place with this one.

Yet there is no Blu-Ray release scheduled for Citizen Kane

This being the Christmas of Blu-Ray and all, we were thinking of how the movie industry backburnered the release of older and more obscure films to the DVD format, most often for the sake of releasing more commercially popular – and by which we mean far, far worse -  films. For example Dude, Where’s My Car? got to DVD a hell of a long time before Serpico, though probably everyone in the world except Ashton Kutcher and Stifler can agree Serpico is the better film. Lowest common denominator doesn’t always apply to taste in film, but the simple rules of mass production economics means it’s harder to stock a Target with films apealing to discriminating tastes. In other words, you’ll more likely find There Will Be Blood than Throne of Blood on the shelves of any given big-box’s electronics department. 

And now Hollywood, the movie industry, studios, or whoever figures out how to market films to the home entertainment market looks pretty stoked about repeating that approach to DVD. Yet there are thousands of good films that haven’t made it so far as the DVD level yet, while at the same time their out-of-print VHS copies slowly deteriorate with age. There’s a big chunk of movie history getting left to wither on the vine.

The five films below are either critical, personal, or sentimental favorites we hope and wish make it to the more or less permanence of a major, professional grade DVD release. Some are long overdue for their time in the DVD key light; one or two routinely make wish lists at more reputable film journals than this one. But they’re our pet wishes anyway, the ones we’d like to preserve for antiquity.

The Electric Grandmother (1982) Three children mourning the loss of their mother are brought to a fantastiscal factory and given a robot caretaker (Maureen Stapleton) who will care for them, until one of the children rejects her synthetic affection. Ray Bradbury adapted his own story to the small screen, a version of which also became the famous “I Sing The Body Electric” episode of The Twilight Zone. Though the made-for-TV film won a Peabody award and numerous educator’s recognitions, it’s made only hazy bootleg and foreign DVD appearances. But with children’s and intelligent science fiction making a big comeback - look at Wall*E racking up Best Picture awards already – there’s surely a market for a work such as this.

Heartbreakers (1984) - Not to be confused with the toothless 2001 Sigourney Weaver farce, this character study of two lifelong buddies (Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso) getting their asses kicked by middle-aged regret in 1980s L.A was the first movie I saw that demonstrated film could be about more than lightsabers and robots and, well, shit getting blown up. Coyote especially is compelling as a failed artist refusing to quite sell out and/or cash in, while supporting performances by Kathryn Harrold and Max Gail, among others, keep the story moving. A brazenly honest film with genuine character-driven twists and turns, writer-director Bobby Roth’s script doesn’t shy from making his two man-child protagonists sometimes unlikeable – truly unlikeable, which is far different from the “they’re nasty but cuddly just below the surface” tripe of modern screen curmudgeons-in-crisis. In other words, it’s a rare film in that you feel something is actually at stake for the characters involved.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) – There’s no such thing as too much 70s crime drama on DVD, and this notable omission just begs for DVD release; Amazon.com’s online offering isn’t the same thing. Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum, not getting older here so much as wearier) is a low-level Boston gunrunner compelled to snitch on his associates (including Peter Boyle, Joe Santos and Steven Keats) or risk a dangerous jail sentence, even while they in turn betray each other – and him, too. Mitchum’s work through the 70s is usually overshadowed by his earlier performances, but there’s no denying the perfection he brings to Coyle’s dogged, exhausted strength. For that matter, Boyle deserves to be remembered for the pit bull he was in this, Joe, The Candidate, and his other period work, as well. Finally, director Peter Yates also made such semi-classic fare as Bullitt, Breaking Away, and Year of the Comet. Update: The film is now available on Criterion DVD.

The Breaking Point (1950) Nothing against the 1944 Bogart and Bacall vehicle directed by Howard Hawks, but this 1950 version, closer to Ernest Hemingway’s original novel and starring John Garfield (The Postman Always Rings Twice) and Patricia Neal (The Day The Earth Stood Still) is too much of a film curiosity not to be included in any classic film fan’s library. It’s directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), reportedly in a manner much closer to the novel’s mean and gritty tone, and with greater respect for the author’s bleak worldview. Garfield’s downed-power-line screen persona was best used playing desperate characters, and the role of broke-but-not-broken Gulf of Mexico charter boat captain Harry Morgan suits his energies to a perfect fit. Neal is a fine early example of what we call “the Nancy Travis Paradox,” and she’s always rewarding to watch for just that reason.

Long Gone (1987) Years before CSI, William Petersen headed this HBO original about minor league baseball in Florida during the 1950s, a time when racism and corruption largely controlled minor league sports everywhere but especially in the South. Petersen plays Studs Cantrell, a swaggering jackass manager/pitcher for the floundering Tampico Stogies who uses a hot young recruit (Dermot Mulroney) and a black player posing as a Venezuelan (Larry Riley) to keep his team going one hard-living game at a time. Along the way he romances a free spirit with a name that could make Tennessee Williams blush: Dixie Lee Boxx (Virginia Madsen, at her loveliest), who he falls for despite his own sexist bravado. Watching the film is as much fun as a 4th of July pickup softball match, thanks in no small part to Martin Davidson’s laid back, sun-drenched direction.

- Michael Kabel

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