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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Our Fall and Winter Preview 2010

Looking ahead to seven coming attractions in the coming weeks.

Every year about this time the movie industry starts rolling out their prestige pictures, the films they hope will gain them the acclaim and pursuant bragging rights that come from winning all the awards doled out around the first of the year (and helping them in the race to the Academy Awards, to boot.) The fall and winter seasons tends to cater to a more adult audience than the summer season, as well, with more fare for grown-ups taking their bows in multiplexes as well as the indie cinemas. Even the action films tend to offer more complex plots, with more mature stars.

The following seven films represent the coming attractions that caught our eye the most. There are dozens of more films premiering – and some look better than others, of course – but these are the ones we thought most worth ballyhooing.

Hereafter (opens wide release Oct 22.) – A triptych of stories dealing with death, the afterlife, and the meaning of both: a factory worker (Matt Damon) can reluctantly speak to the dead but has since abandoned the flashy media career that came with it; a television journalist (Cecile DeFrance) and her daughter are caught up in a cataclysmic tsunami; a young boy in London witnesses the death of his twin brother (George McLaren). All three stories converge at the end, as the characters unite.

The film opened in limited release last week, and response from the mainstream press has been uncharacteristically tepid compared to most of Clint Eastwood’s directing efforts.

The trailer reminds us, for no good reason, of last summer’s problematic Inception; we wonder how much this film’s debut played in Universal’s decision to push back The Adjustment Bureau, another reality-warping, Damon-starring melodrama, from September until next March.

Unstoppable (opens nationwide November 12) As an unmanned, half-mile long train loaded with combustible and poisonous materials threatens to destroy the city located in its path, a railroad engineer (Denzel Washington) and conductor (Chris Pine) race to intercept it and dismantle its engine.

The film marks Washington’s sixth collaboration with director Tony Scott; their last effort together, a remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, didn’t exactly set the world on fire in 2009. Nevertheless, Pine is an engaging and promising new talent and the concept is richer this time around, with far more water cooler potential. Too bad the poster looks like a direct-to-DVD jacket cover.

The plot is loosely based on a 2001 true story, though in reality the runaway train achieved speeds of only about 47 miles an hour. Crews slowed the train down to about eleven MPH, at which time a conductor jogged alongside, hopped aboard, and shut down the engines.

The Next Three Days (Opens nationwide November 19) – When his wife (Elizabeth Banks) is falsely imprisoned for murder, a college professor (Russell Crowe) plans her escape with help from a convict (Liam Neeson) who successfully staged his own jailbreak. Determined despite his inexperience, the professor goes through with the break-out even while his mistakes make the city close in around his family. Brian Dennehy, Olivia Wilde, and Daniel Stern co-star.

Directed by Paul Haggis (Crash), the film remakes the 2007 French festival hit Pour Elle. The American version moves the action to Pittsburgh, no doubt taking advantage of the city’s intricate layout and complex infrastructure.



The film seems intriguing for no apparent reason than it’s the kind of big-star attraction we keep wishing Hollywood would start making again (the vampires and super-heroes are getting old.) After years of less-than-satisyfing work, Crowe is overdue to lead something that shows his still-considerable everyman chops. Banks was seemingly in every movie released in 2008 but hasn’t worn out her welcome yet.

Casino Jack (Opens December 1) – Based on the true-life story of lobbyist Jack Abramoff (Kevin Spacey), who was convicted in 2006 for massive fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion in a far-reaching investigation that also jailed a U.S. Congressman and nine other lobbyists and congressional staffers. A legend among lobbyists and influence peddlers, Abramoff spent millions on hotels, vacations, and other incentives in order to curry political favors on behalf of his clients.

Directed by George Hickenlooper, the film co-stars Barry Pepper, Jon Lovitz and Kelly Preston, though of course the focus is on Spacey in full-tilt megalomaniac mode as the flashy Abramoff. Hickenlooper’s 2001 effort The Man From Elysian Fields was a quiet triumph of intelligence and grace, though expect more bombast given the subject matter and.. well, just by Spacey’s participation, really.

The public gave a resounding “meh” in response to last summer’s similarly smart/caustic Middle Men, so who knows how they’ll embrace this one. And because you can’t make these things up, Abramoff will be released from prison just three days before the film’s release.

The Company Men (Opens nationwide December 10) – a drama taking aim at the Great Recession, this ensemble piece centers around an executive (Ben Affleck) forced to work construction for his brother-in-law after his six-figure salary corporate position is downsized; Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper also appear as men on different rungs of the corporate ladder similarly affected by the new economic realities. 

Television producer John Wells (Southland, ER) directs his own script, which from the trailer below looks earnest possibly to a fault. Given the subject matter, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Some media outlets still list the film’s October 22 release date, even though a recent postponement moved its berth back to December 10. Sadly, the economy likely won’t be any better seven weeks from now, either.

Tron: Legacy (Opens nationwide December 17) – Though not by design a film for grown-ups, it’s pointless not to expect thirtysomething Gen X’ers to check out this long-awaited upgrade to one of the 80′s seminal films. Set in the present day, the son (Garrett Hedlund) of the world’s most brilliant game developer (Jeff Bridges) remains haunted by his father’s disappearance. Traveling to the abandoned Flynn’s Arcade, he enters a virtual world and joins his father on a quest to overthrow CLU 2, its despotic master control program.

Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner both reprise their roles from the 1982 Disney original, with Olivia Wilde and Michael Sheen appearing as new additions to the digital universe. Everything else is familiar to fans of the original but made new again by the intervening three decades of special effects innovation.

CGI maestro Joseph Kosinski makes his debut directing effort, but as with the original the characters and story are probably only half the fun. Props to Bridges and Boxleitner for coming back, too.

True Grit (Opens nationwide December 25) – Speaking of Bridges (we’re doing that a lot lately, it seems), he headlines the Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic about a young girl (Hailee Steinfeld) who enlists an alcoholic marshal (Bridges) to find the outlaw who killed her father (Josh Brolin). Damon plays the Texas Ranger who accompanies them.

Wayne, probably no one’s idea of a great thespian, won the Best Actor statue for his performance in the original. This new version has Oscarbait written all over it, so expect nominations for Bridges (again) and likely for Steinfeld as well:

The Coens have for our money been in something of a slump over the last decade, with more misses (The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading) than bull’s-eyes thanks in part to a troubling mean streak that seems to grow with each successive film. On the other hand, their first effort with Bridges has become something of a cultural phenomenon, and their previous effort with Brolin did win Best Picture.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, January 2010 Edition

Our irregular roundup of news, observations and events that didn’t get a full post.

January came and went pretty fast where we live, with a lot of it buried underneath bitter, immobilizing cold and snow. We didn’t get to the movies much this past month, though we saw plenty of good ones and bad ones on the various movie channels (more on that below.)

Still and all, a lot happened in movies and television alike that was worth talking about or passing on, if only briefly. The following is our semi-monthly, semi-punctual roundup of items we think are interesting but yet don’t merit a complete blog post all on their own. You, our audience, seems to like these features, so if you’ve got suggestions on how to make them better our email address is just down there on the right. Now for starters, a couple of points on Avatar…

1. We didn’t review the film, or rather we haven’t yet, because the story didn’t interest us that much and anyway the word of mouth coming from people we respect was lukewarm at best. (One of our frequent collaborators even tried, then walked out from boredom.) But the film has made more money than Jesus now, and somehow that makes evaluation seem irrelevant, even though it shouldn’t. Films such as this, and indeed most of James Cameron’s work, defy criticism anyway. Assessing them as works of cinema, or even for their longevity, is almost beside the point. They thrill, make money by the wheelbarrow full, then fade away into endless cable reruns and home video releases. That’s not art, but it’s certainly good business.

2. The entertainment media, always a giddy celebrant of the hot property of any given moment, had a lot of fun speculating which new release would knock Avatar off the top of the box office charts. Nothing managed that, but really no film could have. This January was fairly typical, with only a couple of over-pedigreed B-movies – Edge of Darkness, The Book of Eli - making exceptions to the usual assortment of studio leftovers and also-ran new releases. Smaller-scale projects like Daybreakers and The Tooth Fairy were never going to make a lot of money, under any circumstances. We imagine much of Avatar‘s business, meanwhile, was either repeat viewing or otherwise disinterested people going to see what all the fuss was about.

So long, Sal: Batt

3. We were disappointed to hear that Bryan Batt, who plays the elegant, tortured Salvatore Romano on Mad Men, won’t return for the show’s fourth season. Series creator Matthew Weiner told TV Guide that the character’s departure was necessary for the show’s progress. In happier news, Aaron Staton’s contract was renewed, meaning Ken Cosgrove and his haircut will play a role in the show’s new era. January Jones will also come back as Betty Draper. A date for the season premiere has yet to be announced.

4. The web of acrimony surrounding Spider-Man 4 grew thick and taut this past month, with Sam Raimi quitting the production and Sony Pictures promising a bootstrap reboot featuring an all-new cast. From a financial standpoint, which is probably the only one the studio is considering, a reboot makes a lot of sense. Spider-Man is a story for the young, and when the new film opens in 2012 a full decade will have passed since the 2002 first film. To be honest, the Raimi cast was getting a bit old for their parts, and there’s no escaping that Spider-Man 3 was sabotagued by unchecked self-indulgence from almost everyone involved.

5. We’ve recently grown enamored of  Turner Classic Movies‘ morning and daytime programming, which has become a versatile showcase for little-remembered films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Often there’s a classic work that deserves a new appreciation, such as the recent Paul Newman-starring Somebody Up There Likes Me or the 30s melodrama Rain. Though the quality of the films slips occasionally, for classic film enthusiasts it’s cast miss DVR fodder. We’ve recorded so much good stuff we’ve recently started an anthology series of blog posts to follow it all.

Fox Movie Channel, by the way, runs a close second to the venerable TCM, though their choice of films runs more towards works of the 60s and 70s. This can include cult favorites like Mother, Jugs, and Speed and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, but FMC also tends to show the same few films over and over again. That’s sadly surprising, given the huge vault of films for which they presumably have access.

6. Leave it to MTV to use the country’s Great Recession as a means of introducing yet stupider programming. Jersey Shore, a program as willfully lowbrow as probably anything ever put on television, has effectively supplanted the far more opulent The Hills as the network’s tentpole attraction. There’s a point to be made that replacing the rich brats of the The Hills with the blue-collar troglodytes of Jersey Shore only seems appropriate given America’s dire economic straits. But was either program really necessary in the first place?  

Mick LaSalle, the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, tears the new show’s championing of “guido culture” into little tiny pieces on his blog.

7. We can’t help but feel, given its cast, that The Wolfman would have excited us more were it released seven or eight years ago. The embedding-proof trailer looks an awful lot like those stuffy Francis Ford Coppola-produced monster flicks of the early 90s, and while we shouldn’t hold that against this new film we’re not entirely enthused about it, either. We also can’t help but imagine the Wolfman using his fangs to try and chew as much scenery as co-star Anthony Hopkins.

8. We recently came across this picture of Baton Rouge’s defunct Cinemark Tinseltown Cinema, which got us to thinking about derelict movie theatres and the scars they leave on their communities. Movie theatres are an important part of any neighborhood, even the otherwise anonymous corporate multiplexes, and once they go under they’re very unlikely to reopen as anything else. If you’re going to the movies soon, please consider supporting a theatre you think might be suffering. You’re probably right, and they can use the business.

Having more movie theatres increases your chances of getting a wider variety of films to watch. Help out the theatres for your own sake if nothing else.

We’ll be back later this week. Thanks for reading.

-Michael Kabel

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Previews: Daybreakers, The Book of Eli, Legion

The world ends three times next month.

Always a sturdy sub-genre of science fiction, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic cinema is on the rise again, with a new cycle of films about the end of the world spread out over the holiday season and January. That’s no surprise, considering the mood of exhaustion the country feels, and the frustration. No less than Time magazine has even recognized the last ten years as “The Decade from Hell.” Movies have always followed trends, and when it feels like everything’s ruined, you can bet there’ll be a movie about life after everything’s fallen apart.

Past the “disaster porn” of 2012 and the artier, comparatively restrained melancholy of The Road, three new postapocalyptic thrillers debut just after the new year. All three have intriguing concepts, and all three  boast an impressive array of talent on both sides of their cameras. They’re listed below, with trailers, in the order of their premiere.

Daybreakers (January 8): After a mysterious plague transforms the world’s population into vampires, the few remaining humans are carefully contained and drained of their blood. While separate bands of vampires and free humans seek to restore the world to its previous order, a scientist (Ethan Hawke) devises the plague’s cure. Willem DaFoe and Sam Neill co-star as vampires who like things the way they are. The film is written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, the team behind 2003′s zombie comedy Undead. Random thoughts: Has DaFoe really not played a vampire until now? The vampire world previewed in the trailer looks intriguing, complete as it is with blood-serving fast food restaurants and anti-human propaganda; Hawke standing in a lab will always make us think of Gattaca.

The Book of Eli (January 15):  In 2043, a man travels across the ruins of civilization carrying a book that holds the keys to rebuilding society. Passing through a village of survivors, he runs afoul of the local warlord (Gary Oldman) that dominates its population. Denzel Washington stars, along with Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Malcolm McDowell, Ray Stevenson and Michael Gambon. Directed by the Hughes Brothers, their first screen offering since 2001′s muddled From Hell. Random thoughts: It’s unfair to hold the film responsible, but holy Christ the first third of the official trailer (below) looks an awful lot like the trailer for The Road. We love Oldman, but projects in which he plays the heavy rarely please audiences: Murder In The First, The Fifth Element, Lost In Space. He’s frightening enough as a good guy. We’re trying not to remember Kevin Costner’s The Postman.

Legion (January 22): After God sends his angels to wipe out humanity, the archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) sides with a group of survivors in a remote desert cafe to protect a pregnant woman (Adrianne Palicki) who may be carrying the second coming of Christ. The group must learn to fight and then withstand a horde of angels intent on killing them. Random thoughts: The obvious “yeah, but wha?” plot contortions aside, this could be geeky fun in an Intro To Religious Studies sort of way. Maybe we’re getting old, but every new movie seems a combination of two or more that we’ve already seen. This one seems like Maximum Overdrive cross-pollinated with any of the Christoper Walken-starring Prophecy flicks. Having said that, we like the B-movie friendly ensemble cast, including Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, Kate Walsh, Charles S. Dutton, and Kevin Durand.

See you next week. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, June Edition

Items of interest and observation that don’t merit 750-1000 words.

 

The Fourth of July is more or less the halfway point of summer, meaning we’re virtually halfway through the biggest movie season of the year. And yet for a while now we’re been just trying to stay awake. Far from anything really memorable, summer 2009 will likely go in the books as more memorable for what it wasn’t than what it ever was. Films are making money, by and large: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had its 200 million dollar opening week, putting it on a fast track to top the summer’s current money maker Star Trek. But there’s no surprise, crossing-demographic runaway blockbuster this year, compared to 2008′s The Dark Knight or even Iron Man. The big summer movies, immediately recognizable as such, are marching through the theatres with dreary precision, one giving way to another like multimillion dollar dominoes.

Still, movie news keeps accumulating. The following list includes some observations, ideas, and occasional snarky remarks we’ve compiled while working on longer pieces. All the opinions are just our own, of course.

1. Is the lowest common denominator approach that’s been stifling the selection of available Blu-Ray format titles finally beginning to thaw? Recent weeks saw such classics as The Seventh Seal, Dr. Strangelove, and Last Year at Marienbad making their debut on the high-def medium, classing up shelves usually dominated by much lower brow fare. Fans of foreign cinema will be glad to know that Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha makes its Blu-Ray debut August 18, while Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing debuts just this week. We imagine Sal’s Pizzeria looks great in high definition.

We expect lots of this.

2. Meanwhile, the Lord of the Rings trilogy seems to be inching closer to a release of its own, according to this report, even though a release of the films’ straight-to-DVD expanded versions will wait until the 2011 premiere of The Hobbit. The three films collectively made just shy of three trillion dollars in worldwide box office receipts, so why Warner Brothers would drag heels on releasing a full edition in the meantime is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’re as pessimistic about Hobbit co-director Guillermo Del Toro’s vision for the LOTR prequel as we are?

Box office 'Deliverance': Ferrell in LOTL

3. In a summer with no surprise hit (yet), what about the bombs? So far Terminator: Salvation, Angels & Demons, Land of the Lost, and The Taking of Pelham 123 have all fallen short of expectations, while the mid-range budgeted Year One also seems destined not to recoup its money. Poor word of mouth hurt Terminator, and Pelham 123 likely should have come out later in the year, when more adults frequent multiplexes. As for Land of the Lost, Angels & Demons and Year One, we’re blaming audience shtick fatigue in all cases. We’ll tempt fate here and predict that Bruno also disappoints: previews make it out to be nothing more than Gay Borat, and audiences may take a “been there, done that” attitude as a result.

Just dandy: Depp

4. If Universal pushes Public Enemies any harder they’re going to risk a groin injury. The seemingly relentless advertising campaign, already somewhat misleading in depicting Michael Mann’s reported character study as an action-adventure romp, has commercials all over television, mostly featuring Johnny Depp’s good looks. We expect very good things from the film, but if early audiences feel baited and switched the film could likely join the crowd of turkeys mentioned above. It’s also not a good sign that all the rave critical comments used in the TV ads are from Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, who’s essentially the go-to guy for movie critic testimonials.

The cast of The Nine

5. DirecTV deserves some applause for bringing two of HBO’s most acclaimed dramas that aren’t The Sopranos to a wider audience. Last month the satellite provider began airing reruns of Deadwood and Barry Levinson’s landmark 90s-era prison drama Oz on its The 101 channel, presenting them uncut and without commercials. Coupled with its resurrection of worthy but prematurely cancelled network dramas Smith and The Nine, the all but unknown The 101 offers better summer programming than the major networks.

Not your father's G.I. Joe - and that's the problem.

6. The rumors about fired directors and other postproduction crises surrounding G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra only throw fuel on a bonfire of backlash for a film that’s due to premiere for another five weeks yet. Part of the cynicism, and a big chunk of the problem, is that the creators have violated a lesson that Hollywood seems to finally have learned about adapting comic books: don’t screw with what endeared the subject matter to audiences in the first place. Past superficial costuming similarities in some of the characters, the film bears little resemblance to the 80s cartoon and toy line, trading loyalty to that nostalgia for some generic looking Michael Bay-style histrionics. The producers should know better. And knowing is half the battle.

7. Continuing his long odyssey through the entirety of genre flick purgatory, Nicolas Cage will appear next March in Swordfish director Dominic Sena’s sword and sorcery horror adventure Season of the Witch. Cage plays a knight transporting a witch to a group of priests who will determine if she started the Black Plague. Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy) and British actress Claire Foy (Little Dorritt) co-star. Hard to believe Cage was once considered one of America’s most potent leading men, with versatile turns in Leaving Las Vegas and Red Rock West. But, films like this, Knowing and Bangkok Dangerous must be making money somewhere, because they keep getting made.

8. Finally, Ang Lee returns to theatres with August’s Taking Woodstock, a based-on-true story about the small Upstate New York town that more or less played host to the Woodstock music festival (the original one in 1969, not the corporate crap in the 90s.) Though comedy is probably no one’s first thought when discussing the meticulous Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) the unpretentious feel and goofy spirit in the trailer below looks all kinds of promising. The broad ensemble cast includes Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch, Zoe Kazan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Paul Dano. It also stars Liev Shreiber as a gun-toting transvestite, which we hope was actually a common sight at the over-revered music concert.

Join us Friday for our review of Public Enemies. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel
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Preview: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Tony Scott, Denzel Washington and John Travolta team for the second remake of the 1974 cult classic.

There’s an argument that says you can remake a story if the original film depicting it wasn’t that good in the first place. Already a grimy 1974 caper film starring Robert Shaw (Jaws) and Walter Matthau (The Odd Couple) as well as a 1998 telepic featuring Vincent D’Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket) and Edward James Olmos (Stand & Deliver), Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 presents the biggest-budget production of the hijacked-subway hesit film yet, starring Denzel Washington, John Travolta, and James Gandolfini. Both the 1974 and 98 versions were very good in their own rights, so is a second remake at all necessary? Probably not, but that’s not say it can’t make for diverting escapist summer fun. Anyway, the story’s nailbiter premise is so enticing we can understand why Scott et. al might want to try their luck at it.

Washington plays Walter Garber, a New York City Transit Authority dispatcher who receives word that a group of criminals have taken the Pelham Bay Park subway car hostage. The gang, led by the mysterious Ryder (Travolta), demands one million dollars for each passenger aboard the car, giving the Transit Authority one hour to meet their demands before they start killing their hostages. Garber’s willing to negotiate, even offering to trade himself for the hostages after a first ransom drop goes horriby wrong, but finds his efforts stymied both by the hostility of Ryder’s gang and a mayor (Gandolfini) reluctant to accede to their demands.

The original film, based on the novel by John Godey, included the nifty plot twist that Ryder’s gang, who use color-coordinated code names (inspiring Quentin Tarantino to use the same gimmick in Reservoir Dogs), includes a former subway motorman adept in manipulating the system’s vast network of failsafes and security precautions to provide for their escape. Garber and his fellow Transit Authority workers ultimately succeed in beating Ryder and the surviving hijackers by the narrowest of margins, with no real help from city officials. The film is famous for its New York style of cynicism, which by the crime-plagued mid-1970s was no doubt in ample supply. Like Vanishing Point or Assault On Precinct 13, over time it’s become a cult classic appreicated for its mood and outlook as much as technical accomplishment.

Scott’s new version is sleeker and brighter than its predecessors, and co-screenwriter David Koepp (War of the Worlds) reportedly labored to update the remake with 21st Century technology such as cell phones and GPS locators, as well immersing the hijacking elements within New York’s post-9/11 political climate. The film also marks the fourth collaboration between Scott (Enemy of the State) and Washington, after Deja Vu (2004), Man On Fire (2003) and Crimson Tide (1995), though each successive team-up has brought diminishing box office returns. Scott lobbied hard for Travolta’s involvement, likely as a counter-balance to Washington’s formidable screen presence.

Movies such as this – slick, well-heeled action efforts featuring A-list stars and with plots that don’t expect much from their audiences – were rampant in the Schwarenegger/Willis heyday of the 1990s but in recent years have become rarer or less accomplished: last year’s Eagle Eyewas a notable failed effort to recapture such films’ polished bankability. Washington by now owns the concession on playing harried, professional everymen after Inside Man and John Q, and he’s actually more appealing playing such characters than the outsized mega-men of American Gangster and Training Day. For Travolta, who seldom plays the heavy, (most notably in 1996′s otherwise-underwhelming Broken Arrow), the role apparently offers him the chance to ham it up and chew his lines after years in drag (Hairspray) and voicing computer animated dogs (Bolt). Gandolfini, The Sopranos notwithstanding, is sometimes repetitious in his performances, so we expect plenty of smug New Yawking from his turn as the opportunistic mayor.

Still, there’s an audience for the film’s brand of faux, easily digested realism, and it almost certainly doesn’t aspire to be anything more than entertaining, which is itself true to the pulpy spirit of the original. Finally, it’s also good to see Luis Guzman (Boogie Nights) returning from wherever the hell he’s been the last few years, appearing here as a crucial member of Ryder’s crew. John Turturro, Michael Rispoli, and Victor Gojcaj also star.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 opens nationwide June 12.

- 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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