70′s Crime Cinema: The French Connection

William Friedkin’s gritty masterpiece defined cop movies for a more cynical era.

The obsessive, street-hardened detectives on a collision course with a charming, elegant villain. The friction between local police and their arrogant, meddling federal colleagues. The urban decay that whittles morality down to killer instinct. 1971′s The French Connection might not have invented all the tropes that have since become the vocabulary of police procedural movies and television, but it brought them all together and made telling a cop story any other way seem like bullshit. The film was a game changer, much like Citizen Kane was for the biography and Blade Runner was for science fiction. And like those other classics it’s sometimes tricky to watch the film now without letting its legions of derivatives distract from its gripping audacity.

Based on real-life events and constructed with meticulous attention to realistic detail by director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), The French Connection was adapted in part from Robin Moore’s book of the same name but drew additional technical advice from the main characters’ real-life counterparts, who also played supporting roles in the film. The story’s premise is brutally simple: two NYPD narcotics detectives, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo, stumble upon word of a major drug influx while staking out a low-level wiseguy (Tony Lo Bianco). Sensing something big, the detectives resolve to stop the importation no matter how much extra work that entails.

The two are nobody’s idea of white knights: Doyle especially drinks too much, bullies women and minorities, and smacks around suspects and informants with an almost palpable glee. Russo, quieter and more methodical, abets Doyle’s rampages through intelligence gathering and measured consideration. They want wire taps to pursue the investigation, but the mistakes of Doyle’s past make the necessary clearance harder to obtain from their captain (Eddie Egan, the real-life Doyle). Russo gets the court orders but also the hostile assistance of two federal agents (legendary stuntman Bill Hickman and Sonny Grosso, the real-life Russo) who want the case for themselves.

Meanwhile the drugs, about $35 million worth of grade-A heroin, arrive in  the city hidden within the car of a French television personality, placed there by Marseilles shipping magnate Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) and his enforcer Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi). Upon their arrival in New York, Charnier and Nicoli find themselves under surveillance by Doyle, Russo, and the federal agents. But Doyle especially finds himself outmatched in short order by the suave Charnier, who smugly dismisses Doyle’s tail by outwitting him on a subway platform.

The film is distinguished throughout by its lack of explanation. There are no moments of clarification in the Captain’s office, no recanting of the details so that the audience can vicariously refresh their awareness of plot points. Friedkin and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman build an undertow into the film’s momentum, so that the viewer is pulled into and then along for the events as they happen in furious succession. Frankly, that speed does the movie a service, because careful or dogged examination will reveal any number of plot holes and gaps in logic that will likely annoy the very left-brained among its audience. But the filmmakers meant to engage the senses, not the mind, and in that sense the fluid plot works like a Swiss watch.

The centerpiece of the film, of course, comes in the legendary car-vs.-subway chase, in which Doyle madly attempts to overtake Nicoli’s hijacked train car on its overhead track. It’s here that the detective’s relentless drive gets stripped bare of job or duty and the obsessiveness beneath its surface grows exposed. What’s amazing, and what future derivatives would cheat, is the realism of the chase. The traffic lights don’t turn themselves off, and the streets don’t empty of pedestrians. The entire sequence took weeks to shoot over several locations, and included all manner of clever lens techniques and editing sleight of hand.

Make no mistake: Friedkin, Hickman and their crew accomplished all that without a single pixel of CGI.

The film’s third act relates the taking apart and reconstruction of the drug-laden car and the eventual bust of the New York criminals as the sale is concluded. Doyle, Russo, and the federal agents corral the criminals inside a trash-collecting facility on a tiny island outside the city (New York in miniature, really), precipitating a bloody shootout that moves Doyle’s character completely over the edge of morality. The tortuously ambivalent ending denies the viewer any real satisfaction, followed by postscripts that play out almost tauntingly rote. The film doesn’t end so much as it ceases to share information with the viewer.

But like the tonally similar Bullitt three years previous (the films share a producer in Philip D’Antoni) that sense of lacking resolution captured the decade’s mood of weary cynicism. There are no easy answers and no one heads home satisfied or even vindicated, if they get to go home at all. Though Doyle and Charnier would have their reckoning in a largely forgotten sequel released four years later, the ambiguity of this film keeps its point separate and inviolate. In displaying Doyle and Russo’s brutality, The French Connection along with Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (released the same year) began to craft what would soon be known as the anti-hero, and their success opened a floodgate of tough-guy performances good and bad that have continued ever since. Though modern actors like Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and many others have made a career out of such parts, in 1971 they were a new film species as different from their more heroic predecessors as those characters were of the Keystone Kops a generation before them. They were heroes of their time, for better but especially for worse.

And while future marketing wizards would label their approach to the world as “in your face” attitude, nevertheless there’s something more slippery at play in Hackman and Sheider’s performances. It would seem somewhat stupid, in retrospect, if cinema came out of the 1960s with the same perspective it had before that decade’s upheaval. By building protagonists out of flawed men, Friedkin, Tidyman, Hackman and Sheider were moving closer to true realism by accepting the world everyone was handed and then willfully grounding their performances and their entire films inside it. “Realistic” has since become an empty phrase in describing fiction, but forty years ago it was a goal to chase.

In our next installment we’ll look at The French Connection‘s creative and spiritual true successor, a great movie that’s grown  lost in its predecessor’s long, dark shadow.

-Michael Kabel

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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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Night Flights: March 2010 Edition

Condensed reviews of movies we stayed up too late to watch.

The days are getting longer and we’re not going to bed any earlier. Movie networks like Turner Classic Movies and Fox Movie Channel continue to show stuff that catches our interest, even while the DVR makes watching them way, way too convenient. Movie channels run day and night, which means even the good ones – especially the good ones – sooner or later get down to the off-the-beaten-path works that, more often than not, feel like uncovered treasure. At least, they do for us.

The following are five movies we recorded, stayed up late checking out, and the next day felt both groggy, happy, and guilty all at the same time for indulging ourselves. Any of them rate a blog post of their own, and time willing we’ll get around to giving them the attention they deserve.

The Seal Wolf (1941): For pedigree, you really can’t do much better than this: Michael Curtiz directs John Garfield, Ida Lupino, and Edward G. Robinson in a big budget adaptation of Jack London’s underrated proto-existentialist novel. Curtiz takes a damp, gritty approach to the doomed voyage of the seal hunting vessel Ghost and its desperate crew, led by manically evil captain Wolf Larsen (Robinson). Garfield plays  a fugitive whose sense of dignity won’t let him kowtow to Larsen’s caprices, while Lupino plays an escaped convict rescued (if that’s the right word) after a shipwreck.

Curtiz nails the foggy menace that surrounds the ship and the souls of its passengers, and Robinson and Garfield both polish their screen intensities to a white-hot edge. You can almost see the acrimonious sparks jumping between them. Also giving memorable, even haunting performances are Gene Lockhart as the ship’s rummy doctor given one last glimmer of redemption and Barry Fitzgerald (The Naked City) as a vile ship’s cook and turncoat informer. Only Alexander Knox disappoints, blandly portraying an author mesmerized by Larsen’s feral intelligence. Ultimately, the film is hampered somewhat by odd transitions and a plot that could stand to linger on its ideas a little longer, but the total result is nonetheless completely satisfying. Curtiz would return to the foggy textures and doomed, redemptive romance in his next effort – Casablanca.

Out of the Fog (1941): Released just three months later, Out of the Fog reteamed Garfield and Lupino while covering much of the same philosophical ground in a vastly different situation. Jonah (Thomas Mitchell) and Olaf (John Qualen) are meek, working class Brooklyn drones who escape the drudgery of their day-to-day lives (one’s a tailor, the other a short-order cook) by fishing in Sheepshead Bay from their modest rowboat. Jonah’s daughter Stella (Lupino) dreams of a more exciting life than her impending marriage to a local working stiff (Eddie Albert) promises; those dreams seem briefly close to fruition when she’s romanced by a gangster (Garfield) who’s come to the neighborhood to graft protection money from the local boat owners. Except he’s also extorting money from Jonah and Olaf, forcing the timid men to contemplate killing him to protect Stella and themselves.

Based on a play by Irwin Shaw, the film’s pervasive New Deal flavor of populism – “Ordinary people can love like millionaires or poets,” Jonah tells Stella – today comes across kind of dated and vaguely patronizing. Still, Garfield and Lupino’s chemistry is as sharp here as in The Sea Wolf, and the acting is impeccable all around, especially in the achingly vivid performances by Mitchell and Qualen.

Rebel Without A Cause (1955): It’s a film we’ve heard about all our lives and one we suspect is considered a classic by millions, but we’ll just say we don’t join in that opinion. The narrative wanders, characters are never really fleshed out beyond their positions in the script, and the ending is anything but satisfying or even conclusive. Directed by the semi-notorious Nicholas Ray (In A Lonely Place), the film seems to have something to say but, like its trio of over-indulged protagonists, can’t quite figure out what that is or why it might be worth saying. Maybe that was the point, but we don’t think so.

Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible to watch Dean’s performance - cool, deliberate, odd – and not recognize the influence it played on dozens of leading men that followed him, both immediately after his death and in the next several decades to come. Conversely, Natalie Wood’s blank, spoiled stare and girlish energy don’t suit her emotionally conflicted character, and Sal Mineo’s performance fails to capture the menace that the script suggests lurks just beneath his character’s milquetoast veneer, even while grasping at its confused sexuality. Overall, the film represents an interesting period piece, as far as that goes, but not a work worthy of its lasting popular stature.

Cutter’s Way (1981): If Rebel Without A Cause arrived at the peak of its era, the ennui and dissolution of Cutter’s Way represents the one drink too many at the ”who’s kidding who” party that was 70s American cinema. The trio of outsiders at its center – a gigolo, his bitter Vietnam vet friend and conscience, and the dissolute woman they both love – understand that something’s passing them by, even if, like the angsty teens of Rebel, they’ll be damned if they know what to do about it. Bone (Jeff Bridges ) witnesses the dumping of a dead body after hustling the bored housewives of Santa Barbara high society. When he thinks he recognizes the murderer the next day – one of the community’s most powerful oil tycoons, no less – his buddy Cutter (John Heard) devises a scheme to both blackmail the culprit and turn him in to the cops. Unless you’ve never seen a movie before, you’ve already figured out nothing goes as intended.

In the years since its release the film has borne comparisons to Chinatown, and given the trio of broken people at its center and the suburban California setting, it’s hard not to imagine what Robert Towne would have done with such a premise. Instead, director Ivan Passer leaves too many of the ambiguities in Jeffrey Alan Fiskin’s script (adapted by a novel by Newton Thornburg) unaddressed and unfocused, so that the final result isn’t the masterpiece that its best moments imply it could become. Of the performances, Heard is brilliant as the maimed veteran that understands the fences around the distant mansions are meant to keep him out, while Lisa Eichhorn is positively haunting as his doomed but devoted wife. Bridges, fresh off Heaven’s Gate, here began a flirtation with neo-noir that would last for half the decade (Against All Odds, 8 Million Ways To Die) but has seldom caught his interest since.

Transformers (2007): Friends have suggested we watch Michael Bay’s paean to Turtle Wax more than once, not for the acting, story, or script but rather just to watch “shit blowing up real good.” (We live in the South.) Look, we just gushed about a seventy year old seafaring adventure, so alien robots folding themselves into monster trucks and fighter jets probably isn’t going to naturally pique our curiosity. (On the other hand, we do love comic book movies, so maybe our friends thought the film stood an even chance.)

We promised in our mission statement to judge these kind of movies fairly and without condescension but man, there’s a limit. The film can barely stand up to viewing, let alone serious consideration. It’s an aggressively stupid pile of red state pandering that feels interminable when you’re watching any part of it but the admittedly enthralling fight scenes. They are the movie’s lone strength, but there’s not enough of them strung out along the almost 2 1/2 hour runtime to sustain interest.

What it does have in abundance is limp, broad comedy starring Shia LaBeouf and some actually rather tepid vamping by former-It Girl Megan Fox. The worst part is that we’re told the sequel “isn’t as good.” We can only imagine what that kind of weapons grade anti-quality that must entail.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with – finally – some reviews of current movies and DVD’s, and then another edition of our always-popular Miscellaneous Debris right after that. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Star Trek

Action-packed reboot of the beloved franchise boldly comes to DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

One of the biggest hits of last summer’s movie season – and a giant cause for relief among the franchise’s devoted fans – J.J. Abram’s (Lost, Mission: Impossible 3) re-energizing take on the Star Trek mythology arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week in a variety of single and multiple disc editions. It’s a hell of an action movie, and though explicit comparisons to rival franchise Star Wars aren’t entirely fair, this new Trek has the same sense of dizzying momentum. Maybe too much momentum, and possibly too much action for its own good.

The Star Trek TV series and films have never preoccupied themselves with stunts and pyrotechnics, often proudly wearing their cerebral ambitions on their form-fitting sleeves. While Abrams and company have jettisoned such a restrained attitude in favor of adventure, the new film’s bravado often sometimes drags it down or lets it skip over important plot clarification. Also noticeably missing is the Utopian optimism that, at its best, let the original series and its various children transcend their budgets as well as the usual pitfalls endemic to episodic science fiction.

The story’s basics are familiar but made vividly fresh by a crisp production design as well as Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s taut script. Centuries into the future, young James T. Kirk (Chris Pine, Bottle Shock) spends his childhood near the Iowa shipyards that construct massive starships used by the United Federation of Planets to bring stability to the galaxy. An orphan whose father died saving the U.S.S. Kelvin from an attack by the belligerent alien Romulans, young Kirk is recruited into Starfleet by veteran officer Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood, The Sweet Hereafter) on the strength of his natural aptitude and his father’s heroic legacy.

Jump ahead three years and Kirk has breezed through San Francisco’s Starfleet Academy, even rigging a no-win mission simulation test (which veteran Trek fans will recognize as the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan) in his favor. A disciplinary hearing, spearheaded by Academy instructor Spock (Zachary Quinto), is interrupted by a distress signal from Spock’s home planet of Vulcan. With the rest of Starfleet’s armada preoccupied elsewhere, it’s up to the cadets to respond in seven brand new starships including the venerable U.S.S. Enterprise. The Romulan craft that destroyed the Kelvin has returned again, and with help from his friend “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban, The Bourne Supremacy) Kirk stows away beneath Captain Pike’s notice to help out.

The action that follows includes time travel, black holes, the destruction of planets, parachuting from low-Earth orbit, and swashbuckling sword fights. It often seems as if frequent Abrams collaborators Orci and Kurtzman threw everything they could devise into the chain-of-set-pieces script, leaving no idea discarded. For the most part that damn-the-torpedoes strategy works. Other times, including a tedious man vs. monster chase sequence on an ice moon (itself too derivative by half of The Empire Strikes Back), all that action instead feels superfluous and distracting from the main story thread.

And it’s a very linear thread. One thing happens and then another, each sequence building on the one before rather than happening from circumstance. Abrams et. al. have a lot to accomplish in the film’s two hours, yet despite the diversions, repetitious stunts and sometimes glaring plot holes the story makes sense without seeming simplistic; it’s easy to see where everything might have dissolved into chaos instead. The stakes, thanks to the Romulan commander Nero (Eric Bana, Munich), are demonstrably high enough that the rapid pitch continuously seems justified. Add that to Kirk and company’s relative inexperience and you feel justified in believing the danger.

What’s missing most is backstory, and context. We are told that the Federation is a noble cause but not of its origins, or why Earth and other alien worlds remain devoted to its purpose. The time-travel elements are explained but not developed, so that depending on your familiarity with that trope’s mental contortions the ensuring plot details will seem opaque at best and frustrating at worst. Kirk’s childhood is given only the barest amount of explanation, likewise the motivations of bad guy Nero or the Romulans in general. Extant Trek continuity is apparently filled with details on almost all of the above (we’ve just scratched the surface ourselves), so there was no shortage of source material from which to draw. Maybe Abrams and company have deferred such embellishments until the already-announced sequel? Whatever the case, the story needed greater depth to bring the film’s setting into a completely coherent focus.

Luckily the cast is up to the script’s ambitious challenges. Pine, given the task of bringing the famously pre-politically correct Kirk to the modern age, finds his character not in the swagger but rather in the relentless self-confidence that made William Shatner’s Kirk legendary. Quinto, a talented actor not given much to do on Heroes anymore except beckon or arch his formidable eyebrows, builds Spock from barely restrained and (oddly enough) seething emotion. Urban is underused as the crusty Dr. McCoy, as is Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz) as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. Playing the heavy, Bana makes the most of a perfunctory role. In origin movies like this it’s enough for the villain to simply be menacing, but thanks again to impeccable costuming and production design a large part of that work is already accomplished. Still, he makes the most of each line of dialogue allowed him.

Speaking of design, the new Enterprise vessel looks great most of the time. This latest interpretation of the classic shape is sleek and detailed, keeping the recognizable form while incorporating new elements including a dynamic new electrical effect to the warp nacelles. The bridge is a swirl of translucent display screens and fluorescent lights, selling the movie’s futuristic setting all by itself. Less impressive, unfortunately, are a generic-looking medical bay and an engineering section that’s exactly as anonymous as any petrochemical refinery. For such a classic and famous ship you’d expect a bold new vision of its engine room to be just as impressive and well-thought out. It’s something to consider as Abrams and his group boldly go into plans for the sequel.

- Michael Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

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 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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See This Film: Zodiac

David Fincher’s 2007 true crime saga is an overlooked masterpiece.

Released in March of last year to warm but not rave critical reviews and a tepid box office reception, David Fincher’s Zodiac nevertheless offers possibly the most precisely-executed police procedural of the decade. It’s a haunting film not just about catching the bad guy or punishing the evil but is instead a character-rooted, deeply emotional tale of crime and the human cost of crime 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 umissable cinema.

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 even 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 decypher. 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 legend and endless debate. To this day confessions and leads continue to appear, so much so that the San Francisco Police Department has reopened the investigation.

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 sees a momentous 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. (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 treadmarks 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, 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 dubious leads. A final set piece, set in the creaking basement of an informant’s house, twists the oldest of suspense movie tropes by using it for 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, or 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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