Monday, January 16, 2012
Or: Money, It’s Gotta Be the Shirt
In late summer of 1996, a year before I would move to Los Angeles, my best friend, Andre, and I attended a wedding there together. During our visit, one of our destinations was Spike’s Joint on Melrose, the West Coast retail outlet for Spike Lee’s then-burgeoning production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. We were fans — particularly of School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X — and we came seeking swag. This was in the days before e-commerce as we know it today, so it was a rare opportunity to shop for official 40 Acres gear like that we’d seen Spike modeling in interviews and at public appearances.
Truth be told, what I really wanted was an X cap, but despite the sincerity of my intentions — I had in fact read The Autobiography of Malcolm X a few years earlier and was moved to a deeper understanding of and a profound admiration for the slain civil rights leader — I didn’t want to be seen as the white guy from the Midwest attempting to appropriate an aspect of the black experience to which I bore no rightful claim. So at gut-check time, I chickened out and settled instead for a perfectly respectable navy blue cap displaying the 40 Acres logo in red and a 40 Acres logo T-shirt whose back reads “Make Black Film By Any Means Necessary.”1
Over time, I stopped wearing my T-shirt as often, and to my chagrin my head has grown two or three hat sizes over the years, effectively rendering my cap unwearable. But Andre had gotten years of wear out of the gray fleece pullover with embroidered logo that he bought that day. So much so that the fleece lining had all but worn away over hundreds of washings. Naturally it was one of the most comfortable articles of clothing he owned.
And then it vanished.
The pullover had been packed among a few boxes of clothes and other personal belongings that had not arrived with the rest of their household when Andre, Michele and their daughters moved to Seattle. Of all the belongings lost among those errant boxes, I imagine that the pullover was one of the first things Andre missed, so often, so reflexively did he pull it from his closet when dressing for recreation and relaxation.
They’re in Seattle about five years now, and over time they had replaced anything necessary, anything that could be replaced. (One would hope there hadn’t been anything truly irreplaceable, items of great personal significance, sentimental value or family history, among the lost.) Life goes on.
Then one day the boxes turned up.
I can’t remember all the particular details of their reappearance, but they had been relatively accessible and close at hand all that time. Perhaps not properly or accurately labeled. Perhaps hidden just out of view.
In any event, Andre now has his gray fleece pullover back, and like a toddler reunited with his blankie, he will rejoice in the fact and the feel and the reassuring comfort of it after all this time apart. Never mind that three or four years spent crushed inside a box has left a permanent, shadowy crease down the front of the pullover, just off center, that no amount of laundering or ironing can repair. That’s not enough to prevent Andre from wearing that pullover until the rest of the fleece is worn from its lining like the plush of a much-loved teddy bear.
As any respectable wife would be, Michele is mortified by Andre’s insistence upon wearing the pullover. To her mind, it was lost once; he knows what it’s like to live without it; it shouldn’t be so hard to let go of it one more time, gently unto that good night. She’d prefer that it were donated, discarded, or perhaps immolated.
Which brings us up to the present.
Andre invited me to be his guest Monday at Microsoft’s annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And that is how we both happened to be wearing our now 15-year-old 40 Acres gear when we met the day’s keynote speaker: Spike Lee.
I had no expectation that we might actually meet Spike, even in passing, but after Andre said he was wearing his 40 Acres pullover, I decided, just for the hell of it, that I’d wear my 40 Acres T-shirt under the quarter-zip pullover I was wearing to the occasion.
It was a nice event, attended by a few hundred people who braved the snow, and featuring presentations by Microsoft officers about various diversity initiatives and charitable programs in which the company engages, in part to recognize and honor the legacy of Dr. King in the daily life of the company. Then Spike took the stage, and after he reveled in the Giants’ victory over the Packers Sunday, he spoke eloquently and passionately about what Dr. King’s life and legacy means to him. Then he challenged us all to not just treat the occasion as a day off from work but to go home and read Dr. King’s speeches or his letters from the Birmingham jail and to think about how we can put Dr. King’s example into practice every day of the year.
Had that been the end of it, it still would have been a great day spent with my best friend, making the most of the opportunity to celebrate the life of Dr. King, whose dream has, to a great, if not yet complete, extent, come to fruition in our lifetime.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
It is my particular gift, cast over me as though by a fairy godmother’s spell, to attend an event as a friend’s plus-one and end up taking home swag like I’m George Clooney’s Golden Globes date. (Case in point: I once attended a MINI Cooper function with my friend Todd and ended up winning a set of new wheels and tires, valued at upward of three grand, to a car that I didn’t own. No, really.)
And so it was that I found myself holding a specially marked raffle ticket that made me one of 50 attendees invited to meet Spike after the event and receive an autographed copy of an impressive coffee-table book about the making of Do the Right Thing. And so it was that Andre, who had so graciously invited me to be his plus-one for the occasion, became my plus-one.
When we finally reached the front of the receiving line, we said hello, and Andre explained quickly that Michele wanted him to get rid of the shirt. He asked if Spike would mind endorsing his pullover, as it were, which Spike did, inscribing it around the logo, “Nice shirt. Spike Lee.”
I stepped up next, and as Spike signed my book, I said, “We really didn’t think we’d get to meet you today, but we’re really glad now that we wore our 40 Acres gear,” and I held up the front of my shirt enough for him to see the logo on my own T-shirt underneath. At which point he rose again, with his pen held aloft.
“Oh, no,” I cut him off. “You don’t have to sign it.” I had only wanted him to know we were big fans from way back; I imagined that signing my T-shirt would be a much more unwieldy operation than Andre’s had been.
“Are you kidding?” Spike said. “I gotta sign it. That’s vintage!”
Spike motioned to my collar, so I unzipped the top of my pullover, and he Spike Lee’d me right along the neckline. We shook hands and I thanked him for the honor of having met with him. Andre and I exited feeling self-consciously giddy about how our day had transpired.
So now I have a vintage 40 Acres T-shirt that can never be washed again, as I can’t account for the permanence of the marker Spike was using. But perhaps best of all, Andre has a lovingly well-worn gray pullover that Michele can never throw out.
1 It’s almost quaint now to remember a time when Spike virtually propelled himself by force of will, marketing savvy and remarkable talent to the forefront of his generation, that rare African-American filmmaker who was getting his films produced, distributed, and seen by mainstream audiences. So much has the cinematic landscape changed during his quarter century of prominence that now we can’t get rid of Tyler Perry no matter how hard we try. That, brothers and sisters, is progress.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
1. Write more than 420 characters a day.
2. Edit better so that posts don’t always run to 5,300 words.1
3. Throw more punches.
4. Heal left elbow so I can stick more jabs.
5. Get out of the house more often.
6. Love Adriane even more than I already do.
7. See #1.
1 I hope you can appreciate, though, how necessary that is sometimes.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
THE LONG GOODBYE
Director Robert Altman enjoyed a long career on the fringe of Hollywood, working mostly outside the studio system, regarded as an iconoclast, and winning the respect and admiration of legions of actors who lined up for the honor of inclusion in his overstuffed casts.
But while I will admit to having liked McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Gosford Park more than I anticipated, I have always found Altman’s oeuvre to consist mostly of pretentious, slapdash exercises in improvisation with little or no regard for narrative coherence or structure. It’s no wonder actors loved Altman — often he let them run rampant, encouraging them to “make choices” and “take chances” in the moment, then Cut! Print! Next setup! “I don’t direct,” Altman said. “I watch.” If the screenplay is a blueprint for a motion picture, on Altman’s sets it was more like a scavenger hunt: If we collect enough of these story beats along the way, by the time we reach the end it’ll look like we’ve told a whole story.
Rather than pick the man apart with sweeping generalities, though, I have long put Altman on notice for one sin in particular: his adaptation of my favorite novel, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I have carried this festering wound since I first saw the film several years ago and had said many times that if I ever passed Altman on the street, I’d punch him in the face for shitting on something I love. I didn’t care that he was an old man with a heart condition. In my mind, there is no statute of limitations.
Then the bastard died in 2006, and my opportunity slipped away without ever having presented itself. In the grand scheme of things, I’m much more distraught about never having met Billy Wilder while I lived in L.A., but that doesn’t mean it’s over between me and Altman.
The subject of Altman’s The Long Goodbye has surfaced in print and in conversation in recent years — I am aghast at how often someone says they like the film1 — and I recently re-read the novel for maybe the seventh or eighth time, so I thought I should take another pass at the film while the book was again fresh in my mind. It would be pretty to say that I was giving the film a second chance, but I believe the preceding two paragraphs make it clear that I sought only kindling to throw on the fire of my righteous rage. Let’s not make me out to be a diplomat or a peacemaker here.
There’s an old saying about film adaptations, something along the lines of You don’t always have the luxury of being faithful, so instead you must be ruthless. What this actually means is that you’re going to have to throw out a lot of a 400-page novel if you want to get to the heart of a story that you can distill into 120 minutes (or less) of screen time.2 The travesty of Altman’s adaptation is that it is all ruthlessness, with no faithfulness to be found anywhere, except perhaps in the names of the main characters.
It is particularly unsettling that the credited screenwriter here is Leigh Brackett, who co-adapted Chandler’s The Big Sleep for Howard Hawks in 1946. (Her collaborators were Jules Furthman and another fellow whom you may have heard of: William Faulkner.) That film is quintessential to the private-eye genre, and if it is more an exercise in letting Bogart be Bogart than a pure interpretation of Philip Marlowe, it is still closer to the essence of the man than many other portrayals of the detective.3
Watching the DVD extras, one gets the impression that Brackett might have delivered a more or less faithful adaptation of The Long Goodbye, only to have Altman dismantle it brick by brick on the set. It is said that she was asked at one of the screenings whether it was OK with her that they had taken “so many liberties and gone beyond boundaries.” She is said to have replied that she was “more than OK” with the result and that her work was “more than validated” by the film, which in my courtroom makes her an accessory after the fact, if not in fact complicit to the murder itself
For his part, Altman seemed to think that Brackett died before the film’s release, which he said was “disappointing to me.” In fact, she lived another five years, so unless he was talking about the release of The Empire Strikes Back, which was her last screen credit (shared with Lawrence Kasdan, who completed the screenplay), we’re presented here with one more exhibit to reinforce Altman’s disregard for writers. (I don’t care that he shot the interview nearly 30 years after the film.)
Altman’s film stars Elliott Gould as Marlowe. Elliott Gould! Don’t get me wrong — he’s a fine actor at least half the time and a very likable guy, but the mere idea of Gould as Marlowe inspires in me a variation on Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s vice-presidential debate takedown of Dan Quayle.
The only way Gould makes sense in the role at all is to think of him as the perfect actor to play a character whom the filmmaker views with disdain at best, contempt at worst. To wit, when we first see Gould as Marlowe, he is sleeping off a drunk, unshaven and fully dressed in rumpled clothes and Gould’s rumpled hair.4 Chandler’s Marlowe is a rather fastidious bachelor and sharp-witted professional, but Gould plays the detective as a slurring, mumbling, drunken slob, virtually a vagrant. Altman pointlessly devotes the film’s first 11 minutes to a late-night trip to a grocery store and Marlowe’s going to great extremes to trick his cat into eating some off-brand cat food.5
The story actually begins when the fugitive Terry Lennox arrives at Marlowe’s apartment, in need of a ride to Tijuana, which Marlowe obliges, driving him down in a 1948 Lincoln Continental that is the movie’s only period effect. We are essentially told that Marlowe and Lennox are good friends who’ve known each other for years, when in fact (read: in the book), they have known each other several months at most. Even if this relationship is being established quickly in the interest of moving the story along, why waste the first 11 minutes on the cat?
In the film’s first bit of stunt casting, the role of Lennox is played by Jim Bouton, the onetime major-league pitcher whose memoir Ball Four is, for my money, the best book about baseball ever written. As an actor, however, Bouton is strictly bush league, an inexplicable, indefensible choice to play the film’s most pivotal character, even if he is largely absent throughout the story. And truth be told, Altman’s Lennox, who is supposed to be such an old and dear friend of Marlowe’s, is really a thoughtless, self-absorbed asshole with none of the qualities that make Chandler’s Lennox a sympathetic, even occasionally admirable, character.
This first act sets the tone for Altman’s full-scale abdication of both the immediate story and the Marlowe myth writ large. In the book, Lennox is helplessly drunk (but unbelievably polite) outside a restaurant when Marlowe first encounters him, and both the parking attendant and the woman Lennox is with (his wife, it turns out) can’t toss him into the gutter fast enough. Marlowe doesn’t like the way Lennox is being treated, so he takes Lennox home and sobers him up enough to find out where he lives. Later Lennox invites Marlowe out for a drink to express his gratitude for looking out for him when he didn’t have to, and the two men bond over gimlets in a Hollywood bar in the late afternoon.
Theirs is at once a tenuous friendship — they have met on only a handful of occasions as the novel’s plot unfolds — and yet the most meaningful friendship the lone wolf Marlowe enjoys over the course of a half-dozen novels.6 It is based on nothing more than a shared understanding between men about the world they inhabit. Each is without illusions about themselves and each other, but when Lennox has his back against the wall — his rich, beautiful, promiscuous wife, Sylvia, has just been bludgeoned to death — he knows instinctively that Marlowe is the only man he can count on. He is not taking advantage of Marlowe’s friendship; he is relying implicitly on the code of honor that is at the core of Marlowe’s being.7
That code, much more so than his feelings for Lennox, is why Marlowe clams up under questioning and allows himself to be tossed into the tank for a few days. He’s released only after the cops get news out of Mexico that Lennox has killed himself in an Otatoclán flophouse.
Altman, however, plays this situation for cheap comedy, as Marlowe is booked in a police station that uses a coin-operated photo booth to take his mug shots (no, really), and Gould improvs his way through an interrogation scene by smearing fingerprint ink all over his face when the cops refuse him a means of cleaning his hands. It is the shambling-drunk routine all over again instead of an opportunity to reveal — or reinforce — Marlowe’s true character.
His stint in the clink earns Marlowe some press and the attention of a number of interested parties. These include Sewell Endicott, the lawyer for Harlan Potter, the wealthy, publicity-averse father of Terry Lennox’s dead wife; a gangster named Mendy Menendez, who shared a foxhole with Lennox and another gangster, Randy Starr, in the war; and Howard Spencer, the representative for an East Coast publishing house. Endicott believes Marlowe looks to make a buck off the Lennox murder case (he doesn’t); Menendez wants Marlowe to accept the official account of Lennox’s confession and suicide and let Lennox rest in peace (he won’t); and Spencer wants to hire him to locate one of his best-selling authors, Roger Wade, a blackout drunk with a tendency to disappear to a fly-by-night sanitarium to detox (Marlowe’s gotta eat).
As we enter Act II on-screen, the Law of Economy of Characters decrees that most of these people are unnecessary to the plot. These include Endicott and, by extension, his client Harlan Potter; Potter’s other daughter, Linda Loring (more about her later); and her husband, Dr. Loring, the personal physician of Mrs. Eileen Wade, who renders Spencer irrelevant by hiring Marlowe herself. Menendez, Starr and their back story with Lennox are replaced by a different gangster altogether: a racketeer named Marty Augustine, for whom Lennox was allegedly holding (or perhaps just owed) a few hundred thousand dollars, which Augustine believes Marlowe is now in possession of.
As the wayward drunk Roger Wade, whom Marlowe is employed to first locate, then ostensibly babysit, Altman cast Sterling Hayden, a towering figure but an incredibly insecure actor — a man who won a Silver Star and other commendations for gallantry in World War II, then spent an entire career making a lot of money doing something that he reportedly hated because he couldn’t believe he got paid so much for doing something so frivolous. Some damn people just can’t be happy even when everything goes their way.
The Internet Movie Database informs us that Hayden was allowed to write his own scenes, which, given the information in the previous paragraph, seems like precisely the sort of thing Altman would do to placate a pathological ego like Hayden’s, the bonus being that he’d get to throw out just that much more of the screenplay for which Brackett is credited.
Our introduction to Wade, then, is one hastily improvised scene loosely based on a sequence from the book — his liberation by Marlowe from shady Dr. Verringer’s sanitarium — followed by his homecoming, a noisy shouting match between Wade and his Doberman pinscher while Marlowe attempts to mumble a conversation with his client, Eileen. One need spend only a couple of minutes of screen time with this version of Roger Wade to wonder why anybody — his wife included — would believe he’s worth rescuing.
Back at his apartment, Marlowe is braced by Marty Augustine and his men. Played ridiculously by film director Mark Rydell, Augustine is less a convincing gangster than a flashy, insecure poseur with an entourage. Rather than just order any number of his men to rough up Marlowe to extract what he came for, Augustine smashes his own mistress’s face with a Coke bottle to demonstrate … I’m not sure what he’s trying to demonstrate. Even for a burgeoning psychopath, it seems counterproductive to brutalize someone you purport to love when you’re surrounded by a roomful of guys you pay to brutalize people you don’t. (A roomful of guys, I might add, who are just as horrified as the rest of us by what we’ve just witnessed. So how tough can they be, really? See also: superfluous.)
In this respect, Altman is posturing just as much as Augustine, demonstrating the lengths he will go to in his rapacious mistreatment of the source material specifically and narrative logic in general. As a result, the whole lot of them come off as comically feckless throughout the rest of the movie, whereas in the book Mendy Menendez (a homophone for menace?) and his henchman Chick Agostino (for which Augustine is itself a homophone) make for a much more interesting standoff — an ongoing battle of nerve between two sides who each know better than to underestimate the other.
Immediately thereafter, Marlowe tails the Augustine party to the Wades’ place in Malibu, where he spies Augustine in an animated confrontation with Eileen. It’s a throwaway scene whose only purpose is to establish that all these characters know each other without having to do any serious character development or offer any foreshadowing.
The following day, Marlowe pays a return visit to the Wades, ostensibly to see how Roger is doing, and here Altman commits his next inexplicable crime against storytelling. As with the novels, the entire movie is told from Marlowe’s point of view; we are in his shoes every step of the way … except for this one scene, in which Marlowe takes a walk down to the beach so the Wades can have a private conversation. Instead of going with Marlowe, we stay with the Wades and are forced to sit through another ham-fisted improvisation, another indulgence Altman allows his actors, a scene of marital discord that tells us nothing we don’t already know about these defective people and, worse, does nothing to advance the plot. It’s as pointless as the 11-minute quest for cat food that opens the movie, though mercifully more brief, even including the rambling conversation that follows between Wade and Marlowe, which is also so much hooey except that Wade claims to be owed money by Augustine and admits that he knew both Terry and Sylvia Lennox. Great. Everybody knows everybody.
Now things begin to happen very fast. Which is to say that things finally begin to happen. Perhaps Altman realized that he had wasted a great deal of screen time up to this point, because now he starts cramming in plot points right and left.
We cut to Marlowe riding the elevator up to his apartment, reading his mail, specifically the letter from Lennox containing the portrait of Madison — a $5,000 bill. In the book, this happens much earlier in the story, and it’s a much more significant moment than it is allowed to be here; the portrait of Madison even takes on a life of its own, as a curiosity, an amusement, but mostly a conundrum, another encumbrance at odds with Marlowe’s code. He never wanted any money from Lennox, and Lennox’s grand gesture is virtually unspendable anyway. Lennox’s letter takes up a page and a half of the book — a literal sort of long goodbye in which he explains somewhat the corner he has backed himself into and apologizes for making so much trouble for Marlowe, even as he reinforces what Marlowe has always believed: that Lennox could not have, and in fact did not, murder his wife. Not that anyone but Marlowe cares.
Certainly Altman doesn’t. The movie’s version of the letter, in its entirety, reads:
I’m sorry
Terry
Again, you don’t have to sell me on the Law of Economy in screenwriting, but this scene could have at least hinted at much greater depth and an actual sense of, you know, friendship, seeing how Altman wants us to believe that these guys go back years together and not just since last October. We don’t even have to read the whole letter or hear it in voiceover, but we could at least be shown that some thought and feeling went into it. As it stands, this moment exists only as a setup gag to a literal payoff arrived at later like a line drawn in a child’s connect-the-dots coloring book.
Next we cut to Marlowe getting off a bus in Mexico. Pan past a couple of dogs humping each other in the street (no, really), then dissolve to Marlowe’s meeting with the Otatoclán chief of police and the coroner who examined Lennox. The latter shows him some badly developed, not entirely convincing photos of Lennox’s body. The three men pause to pay their respects to a funeral procession in the street below and …
We cut back to Malibu. A large party is in full swing as Marlowe threads his way to the back of the Wades’ house, where Roger is wildly drunk and holding court. In the book, the party is a set piece, attended by, you know, characters, flesh-and-blood people with agendas and attitudes and motivations, and Roger is sober as a bishop; in the movie, it’s just a bunch of extras, random groovy Malibu types standing around to be an audience for another of Roger Wade’s drunken meltdowns.8 Creepy Dr. Verringer (played by creepy Henry Gibson9) appears out of nowhere to demand the balance of Roger’s bill, and more bad improvisation ensues until Roger yells at everybody to go home and finally surrenders a signed check to Verringer before passing out in his study.
Eileen cooks dinner for Marlowe while Wade sleeps it off, and a pleasant couple of hours or more pass before Marlowe finally confronts Eileen about Augustine’s appearance at their house a few nights earlier. Wade owes Augustine money, she says, not the other way around. Marlowe presses her about whether she knew Terry Lennox and if so, how well, but before he can get any real answers out of her, they look out to see Roger Wade walking into the Pacific Ocean. Marlowe and Eileen give chase but to no avail, as Roger, yes, literally wades to his death.
As the Wades’ strip of beachfront becomes a scene of search-and-recovery efforts and rubbernecking neighbors, a soaking-wet Marlowe is drunk (read: Gould is improvising) as he gets in the face of Detective Farmer — who threw Marlowe in jail earlier for his Tijuana taxi service — demanding that the Terry Lennox case be reopened, to account for Wade taking his own life, perhaps out of guilt, even though he’s never uttered a single intelligible phrase that could support such speculation.
Now we jump to the big reveal, because time is fleeting and Altman still has to connect all those dots I alluded to earlier.
Marlowe is dragged up to Augustine’s office, where the latter says he apologized to his battered mistress by appearing in her hospital room completely naked. He thinks Marlowe should come clean the same way, and with his mummified mistress there to witness the ridiculous scene, decrees that not only Marlowe but also Augustine and all his men will strip naked. This lunacy seems to exist only as an opportunity for more stunt casting: a preliterate, pre–Pumping Iron Arnold Schwarzenegger as a member of Augustine’s entourage. The future Terminator and Governator appears nowhere else in the movie, speaks no lines, and was apparently cast just so the ladies in the audience wouldn’t rue the 110 minutes of their lives they’d never get back. He stands out among this group, as Chandler would say, like a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
The scene also exists for the deus ex machina, which fortunately arrives before anyone in the room actually makes it down to the full monty. As Augustine and company try to wrestle Marlowe out of his clothes, the portrait of Madison falls from Marlowe’s pocket, and Augustine identifies it as having been among the stash that Lennox was “holding” for him. Just as Augustine is ordering one of his half-naked lackeys to circumcise Marlowe, cue another lackey who re-enters the scene with important news: Unto us this day a satchel is delivered, containing the missing 350 large. And so joyously are these glad tidings received that Augustine cuts loose a fully clothed Marlowe and lets him keep the portrait of Madison as a souvenir of their time together.
Where’d the money come from? Why, from Eileen Wade, whom Marlowe runs after on foot as she drives away from the scene in her Mercedes convertible. And he might have caught her too, had he not run out into traffic and been hit by a car. By the time Marlowe releases himself from the hospital on his own recognizance, the Wade house is cleaned out and being prepped for sale by a real estate manager.
So, to recap: Dot (newly widowed Eileen Wade) was holding dot (Augustine’s money) all along for her lover, dot (the fugitive Terry Lennox), whom she has now dot (blown town to be with). See how simple that was? And it was all accomplished in about 10 minutes of screen time, freeing up the other 100 for the ridiculousness described herein.
So Marlowe’s off to Mexico to locate Terry Lennox, who is very much alive, thanks to an assist from the aforementioned Otatoclán coroner and chief of police. Marlowe bribes them with the portrait of Madison to learn Lennox’s precise whereabouts.
Lennox, it turns out, is no friend at all and has no regrets about either killing his wife or leaving his supposed friend Marlowe on the hook to deal with the fallout and possibly take the rap. He explains the whole plot in less than 30 seconds and is every bit as dismissive of Marlowe as Altman himself is, so much so that Marlowe takes out a gat and shoots him dead on the spot.
The end.
So there you have it. I, who ordinarily wouldn’t dream of spoiling a movie for you, wouldn’t dignify this one by allowing you to sit through it. You may have noticed that I haven’t said much about the end of the book. That’s because it is infinitely better, more thoughtful and complex, and deserves to be read someday when you have the time and the inclination. Of course, I’d recommend that you first read one or two of the earlier Marlowe novels so you’ll have a more fully developed sense of the man and can appreciate what it all means in the end. It will not be a waste of your time.
I’ll say this much more: By dispensing with Menendez and Starr, and turning Terry Lennox into an irredeemable asshole, Altman strips the story of its themes of friendship, sacrifice and honor. By casting aside Linda Loring, he eliminates a midnovel flirtation, some dramatic tension involving her rich and powerful father, and a coda that invests Marlowe with romance, a sense of longing, and the possibility of a life beyond his dusty office in the Cahuenga Building and his lonely nights in whatever apartment or house he’s renting that year. By excising any number of other key characters and compelling subplots, he frees up 11 minutes for the freaking cat.
Everything meaningful that elevates the book above even the best of Chandler’s previous output is disregarded and discarded by Altman, who shot Marlowe’s reflection in a funhouse mirror because it was easier to tear down something great than to create an original commentary on or deconstruction of film noir and the detective genre, as he so disingenuously claimed to be doing. Writing is hard work, not that Altman would have known anything about that.
Raymond Chandler published The Long Goodbye 14 years before I was born and died six years later. I was 6 years old when Altman perpetrated his travesty against the novel. Another 10 or 11 years passed before I discovered Chandler in my high school’s library during study-hall period and had my world and my writing style forever changed. I was in college by the time I caught up with The Long Goodbye. Hence my dismay when I finally caught up with the movie.
Put another way: All those millions of fanboys worldwide who grew up entranced by J.R.R. Tolkien, the ones who would have torn Peter Jackson limb from limb then set fire to the dismembered pieces of him if he’d screwed up the Lord of the Rings trilogy? I am them, except I’m Chandler’s guy, and though there aren’t nearly as many of us, I contain multitudes. I’m essentially the rage of millions crystallized in one being, representing anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand like-minded souls who don’t work a heavy bag as often as I do and might never have thought the whole thing through like this. And if they have, I’d like to think they’d nominate me to be the guy they live through vicariously, the guy who’d make Altman’s mug go all Cubist with an overhand right and then, standing over his prone figure like Ali over Liston, say, “That was for Marlowe.”
It won’t happen in this lifetime, but neither will forgiveness.
1 These include the noted film critic Roger Ebert, with whom I am ordinarily simpatico but who included Altman’s film in his Great Movies collection for reasons that surpass my understanding no matter how many times I re-read his review.
Mining an Internet so jam-packed with people fellating Altman’s corpse in their praise of the film, the only vein of reason I’ve located so far is found in excerpts of a Time review by Jay Cocks, onetime film critic and a frequent collaborator of Martin Scorsese’s:
“The movie opens with a rasping fanfare, a blast from an old record of ‘Hooray for Hollywood.’ It very neatly sets the tone for this travesty of Raymond Chandler’s superb novel about honor and friendship, two subjects among a great many that Robert Altman cannot bring himself to take seriously. …
“… Altman’s lazy, haphazard putdown is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire.”
Sounds familiar. And my hand to God, I had never read those quotes before beginning this endeavor. Travesty has long been my go-to descriptor of this film. Abortion is always close at hand as well.
2 One filmmaker who embodied that ethos — among the very best at capturing the essence of a novel even at the cost of omitting much of its specific content — was the late writer-director Anthony Minghella, a lovely man who had a particular gift for absorbing the story, then throwing out the book and writing the movie he had envisioned. He was equally successful adapting both a book I loved (Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient) and a book I disliked (Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley) into movies that I greatly admire.
3 Among them: Robert Montgomery in 1947’s The Lady in the Lake is too goofy and self-aware, overselling every wry throwaway line to ensure that the people in the back row of the theater get the joke, and the film’s conceit of being filmed through Marlowe’s eyes (we see him only when he’s reflected in a mirror or a window) is too clever by half.
James Garner more closely embodies the spirit of the detective in 1969’s Marlowe, an adaptation of Chandler’s The Little Sister, but the film’s contemporary setting and late ’60s sensibility undercut the sense of Marlowe being a man of his time, aging and evolving as he does over the course of Chandler’s six original novels, from 1939 to 1953. (Playback in 1958 was something of an afterthought, cobbled together from an unproduced screenplay of a non-Marlowe story.) Garner would go on to become the best — and in many ways the most Marlowesque — of the TV private eyes in The Rockford Files a few years later.
Perhaps the truest portrayal of Marlowe is perpetrated by Dick Powell in 1944’s excellent Murder, My Sweet. Powell had first made his name as a song-and-dance man, but he wears the role of Marlowe nicely, playing him with great understatement and a innate feel for the detective’s wry sensibility. I seem to remember Powers Boothe being awfully good too, in a period-faithful HBO series based on Chandler’s short stories from the Black Mask days.
4 Altman says in the DVD extras that they developed the idea of “Rip Van Marlowe” — that is, the idea of Chandler’s Marlowe waking up 20 years later and essentially sleepwalking through the 1970s. But this is a specious excuse for a premise that isn’t fully committed to. I’m not saying that Marlowe has to be thawed out of cryogenics like Fry on Futurama (another Philip, incidentally), but if that were the case, then his pre-existing relationship with Lennox and the fact that everyone else knows who he is means that the whole justification for Marlowe to be the way he is here is a ruse born of laziness and sloppy storytelling, as well as an excuse to give Marlowe a houseful of stoned, stupid, frequently naked hippie chicks as next-door neighbors.
5 Someone named Mark Edmundson recently wrote in something called The American Scholar: “In The Long Goodbye, the detective’s ridiculous affection for his cat, and his drive, against all opposition, to get precisely the right cat food is surely more affecting than all the giant crowd scenes that Cecil B. De Mille ever put on the screen.”
This is typical of the kind of fawning over Altman that I’ve never understood. He is essentially being given a pass here for wasting roughly 10 percent of the film’s total running time on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the story. There is in fact an affecting story right there in the pages of Chandler’s book, if only Altman had bothered to read it before wiping his ass with it.
6 One could make an argument for the recurring character Det. Bernie Ohls, a former colleague of Marlowe’s, but Ohls tends to turn up only in an official capacity — as he does again in The Long Goodbye — and if there is no obvious friction between the two men, there is certainly nothing like warmth or affection. Ohls is always as likely to arrest Marlowe as to take him out for a beer.
7 “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”
— Chandler in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1945
8 The party represents a perfect microcosm of the movie as a whole: Altman didn’t invite to the story anyone who is even remotely interesting or dramatically compelling, and as if inviting only uninteresting people isn’t bad enough, he got everyone else drunk who might otherwise have been interesting or compelling enough to spend time with.
9 I hate Illinois Nazis.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Fulfilling the Chronicles’ mission to serve the public good whenever possible, I have created, for Jerry Sandusky and others like him, this helpful and, I hope, instructive flow chart to address at least one of the thorny moral and ethical questions that have brought the erstwhile Penn State defensive coordinator, his colleagues, and the institutions they serve to this explosive moment on the national stage.
Please consult it as necessary.
Monday, August 08, 2011
It was, for all intents and purposes, a spur-of-the-moment decision. Adriane and I had briefly discussed going someplace out of town for my birthday weekend but hadn’t zeroed in on any details apart from the possible destinations of Santa Cruz and Monterey.TYLER If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?
JACK Shatner. I’d fight William Shatner.— Fight Club
It was around 1 p.m. Friday when the idea began to take hold and our scramble for accommodations began. After a couple of failed attempts to bid for a room on Priceline.com, Adriane spotted a “featured deal” that was within our desired price range and in close proximity to those places we were interested in visiting.
Salinas, California, is the birthplace of the Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, and the Travelers Hotel, which was offering us a room at $70 a night, is located downtown, a block and a half away from the National Steinbeck Center. It was pure coincidence that this weekend should also mark the 31st Annual Steinbeck Festival, which may in part explain why the Travelers was the only place in town that could offer us two nights instead of only one.
When we first entered the lobby around 9 p.m., we were met by a smell of chlorine so strong as to be off-putting. My first impression was that it might be necessary to cover any of myriad other odors that lay in wait, but Adriane observed that it was coming from the adjoining Mexican restaurant, which, having closed for the night, had just had its floors mopped.
An older Indian man greeted us with a smile when we arrived at the registration window. This was not the desk clerk but a handyman who was just making a call on the office phone. He gestured to us that the clerk would be with us shortly.
The clerk was a younger, 20-something Indian man, Americanized and without much of an accent. A cautious, nervous sort, he seemed somehow apologetic, explaining his math as he wrote out our registration by hand and looking up at us with eyes that were giving us every opportunity to cancel right then and there and make a run for it. As he checked us in, he explained where we might find dinner nearby at that late hour, told us of some of the events taking place in Monterey County that weekend, then volunteered to guide us up to our room.
We could have found the room on our own, but admittedly the layout of stairwells and rooms resembled more or less a rabbit warren designed by M.C. Escher. The carpet running throughout the hotel corridors was dark brown with an orange crisscross pattern. One imagines that it might have been selected for its ability to hide all manner of unpleasantness.
By the time the desk clerk opened the door to our guest room, we were already screwed. Adriane’s Visa card had been swiped and processed, and to back out then would likely have meant a $155 donation to the management and a three-hour return drive to whence we came, given the improbability of another vacancy nearby.
The walls of our guest room were painted mint green, while the doors and trim were dark brown. Banish from your mind this instant the stylish, Martha Stewart Collection connotations this color combination implies. In any event, the paint clashed with the navy blue carpeting and the flammable bedspread and matching curtains of many colors.
While our guest room contained a sink, a medicine cabinet, and a bag-lined 5-gallon bucket in lieu of an actual trash can, there were no private bathrooms in the building. Rather, on each floor were two community bathrooms with shower and sink1 and two community toilets — one each for “gentlemen”; one each for “ladies.” As we were not warned in advance that the management did not provide toilet paper in any of these facilities, my larcenous beloved took it upon herself to liberate a roll from the ladies room of the restaurant and brewery to which we repaired for dinner after check-in.
The wall-mounted television did not work. Neither, presumably, did the other four televisions that the management was apparently storing in our closet. However, the room did contain a full-size refrigerator, which, remarkably, was operational.
The closet itself was a walk-in, but there was not a single hanger in sight. If we wanted to hang anything, it would have to hang from one of four coat hooks. The room’s lone dresser either was intentionally designed to have two drawers under a cubby that could double as a bookshelf, or it was simply missing its top drawer. One drawer contained a small ashtray, the other a Gideon Bible.
Our street-facing windows had a broken latch and were held shut only by inertia. One need not be a particularly agile or graceful cat burglar to have accessed our room from the fire escape a few feet away. (One saving grace, perhaps, was the streetlight that stood sentry directly across from our windows.) Furthermore, our curtains could not be drawn completely closed, so we had to pin them together in the middle with one of Adriane’s hair clips.
Saturday night, Adriane and I went to a late movie up the street just so we wouldn’t have to return to our room any earlier than necessary. Upon exiting the theater, we were crestfallen to discover that it was only 11:13 p.m.
In all fairness, I should note that Adriane and I once stopped to sleep a few short hours at a Motel 6 in Meridian, Idaho, which charged us the same $70 rate and failed us in just about every way imaginable.2 Here, then, in the interest of equanimity, I will say a few nice things about the Travelers Hotel:
- Despite the general skeeviness of the room itself and a mattress on which one could feel pretty much every individual spring, our sheets were clean, and I did not experience even psychosomatic itchiness by imagining an infestation of bedbugs in the hotel.
- Despite a slow login process, the hotel’s Wi-Fi signal — its only truly modern amenity — was consistent whenever we needed to access it.
- Despite the total inability of the bathtub in the gentlemen’s community bathroom to drain, leaving me ankle deep in water after only a few minutes under the shower nozzle, the water itself was blessedly hot.
The Travelers Hotel is the sort of place for which words like “dump,” “fleabag,” “squat” and “flophouse” were originally coined. It no doubt served as a boarding house at one time — perhaps it still does — and one can easily imagine so-called lives of quiet desperation being eked out, drowned in cheap liquor or cut-rate heroin, and eventually snuffed out in those squalid mint-green rooms. If I hadn’t been on an unplanned weekend adventure with the woman I love, whose company makes everything brighter, I might have started feeling such dark impulses myself.
1 For the record, I have twice before stayed in so-called “European-style” or “tourist class” hotels in which guests shared bathrooms: at the Belleclaire Hotel on New York’s Upper West Side and at the Ace Hotel in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. Any misgivings I may have had about the arrangement were quickly forgotten, thanks to the cleanliness of the facilities and the complete sense of privacy I enjoyed at both hotels. Travelers Hotel, on the other hand, illustrates perfectly why “hostel” and “hostile” are homophones.
2 You may read Adriane’s review of that 1-star experience here, under the headline “Absolutely Heinous.”
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
“Obey my commands,” the third man in the ring routinely tells the combatants before the first bell, “and protect yourselves at all times.”
I’m learning the hard way that I’ve got to respect that second directive.
The heavy bag is by its nature an instrument of physical activity, at once a stationary and moving target, a monolith of resistance and an absorber of kinetic energy, an object to be acted upon with varying degrees of physical force.
But for all its self-evident physicality — its weight, its heft, its density, its mass — I have for so long imagined it as a salve to soothe the savage psyche and soul that I may have taken its true raison d’être for granted.
In short, it’s tougher than it looks.
And even though I bought bag gloves nearly as well padded as a pair of ring gloves, there is only so much impact against which that padding can protect you. It can only cushion the blow — not diminish the force of the blow. It cannot save you from yourself. It cannot stand between you and the ravages of time.
I used to drink a lot more milk. Chocolate milk — the colder, the better — was practically a vice of mine at one time. I can make a quart of milk disappear in about the amount of time it will take me to type this paragraph. When I last lived in Kansas City, I became obsessed with the local Shatto Dairy and its banana whole milk1 sold in glass quart bottles. I had to limit myself to one quart a week (Fridays, at lunchtime) because I was afraid that too much of a good thing would be, you know, too much of a good thing.
Now that I’m slinging leather in earnest, though, it has occurred to me that I need to increase my calcium intake. When I threw my first couple of big left hooks to “the body” — the patented Irish Micky Ward punch behind which I’d like to develop more power — I felt the impact acutely in my wrist. A few evenings later, I was going at the bag pretty hard, throwing great looping right hooks to “the ribcage,” and when I finished I had to ice my right hand because of what I feared was either a mildly strained tendon in the butt of my palm or, worse, a potential hairline fracture of my fifth metacarpal.
Hence, the milk. Some people are lactose-intolerant. I’m lactose-insistent.
It is perhaps apocryphal, but one influential story as I remember it goes like this: Tommy Morrison — grandnephew of John Wayne and onetime WBO heavyweight titleholder — was cast by Sylvester Stallone in the role of Rocky Balboa’s protégé in the 1990 sequel Rocky V. So Morrison would strike a lean, cut, magnificent figure onscreen, he stopped drinking milk while in training for the film, to reduce body fat. Then, when filming wrapped and Morrison resumed training, he promptly broke one of his hands because the bones were weakened from the lack of calcium in his diet.
The other influential story — most assuredly not apocryphal — I have told here before: about the time I punched a countertop at work and my hand, inexplicably, did not shatter into a hundred little pieces. I can’t help but believe that dairy consumption played some significant role in that episode.
Because of that latter experience, I had every reason to believe that a canvas bag full of sawdust would be much more yielding and forgiving to what are essentially the same hands I had seven years ago.
Except that they’re not. And the heavy bag? Not exactly a pushover just because it doesn’t hit back. And for the last year or so, I haven’t consumed milk in the volumes I once did. Plus, if my hands feel the way they do after a routine recreational outing, I must account for their potential condition after a particularly angry therapy session with Dr. Everlast. Therefore, the hand having sent its electrical impulses to the brain, I am heeding those communiqués by shoring up these very old bones against catastrophe, one way or another.
1 You have no idea. Never mind that I have peeled and eaten precisely two actual bananas over the course of my 44 years (a texture, or mouth-feel, issue that I can’t get past). For some reason I love banana-flavored foods, even if they’re artificially flavored.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Thirty-three years is a long time to wait for a reunion. Some old friends never change, though.
Our long and winding road began in a white house on Bird Street in Joplin, Missouri, when I was about 9 years old.
My grandfather, Howard Rutherford — Poppy — had trained young Golden Gloves fighters in the low-ceilinged basement of that house, the house he raised my mother and uncles in. My uncles, Don and Jerry, were among the young men he coached in the sweet science of hitting and getting hit. He would begin to train me in that house, at least on the first subject; we never got around to the getting-hit part, though.
Sometime during the summer of 1976, I was staying with my grandparents for a few days, and one evening Poppy came home from the furniture store and told me to come outside with him. He popped open the trunk of his blue Chrysler Newport — an enormous trunk, built for carting golf bags to the course and bodies to isolated dumping grounds; a mobster’s trunk — and there it was: a brand-new, 60-pound canvas Everlast heavy bag.
At first, I was taken aback — my 9-year-old imagination couldn’t see the possibilities in a big ungainly bag of sawdust. If I was going to learn to box, why not give me a nice pair of bright red gloves — eye candy — so that I could learn by actually hitting another person? Poppy was taken aback — he couldn’t believe I was shitting on his gift before he could even take it out of the trunk. Sensing this, and not wanting to disappoint Poppy, ever, I came around over the course of the evening and decided to give it a chance.
The heavy bag would go home with me. My training would commence without it. First things first.
After dinner, we retired to the living room, and as my grandmother sat watching from her gold brocade wing chair, Poppy produced a couple of new rolls of ACE cotton bandage and proceeded to wrap my hands. I don’t know when he would last have wrapped a pair of hands — surely a dozen years or more, since my uncles had stopped fighting — but he did it as quickly and expertly as though he’d done it just the night before. Soon my hands were tightly swaddled and amply reinforced.
Poppy probably held up his hands and had me punch at them for a bit, but the evening became the stuff of legend for me when he opened the heavy, solid front door of the house and braced it for me, telling me to punch it squarely as he had been instructing me. My grandmother was apoplectic — “Stop it, Howard! He’s going to hurt himself!” — but Poppy kept drilling me in his gruff trainer’s voice, commanding me to punch harder. Again. Again. Again.
Thus did I learn by repetition to throw a punch with purpose and authority. Not a flailing, haymaking, windmilling of the arms in the vain hope of hitting more target than air. A punch. With a tight, squared fist. And another punch after that. And another. And a combination. Then a punch again. Always aiming for the target. Always looking to score points. Always looking to make contact.
The lesson ended, and Poppy unwrapped my hands, which were neither bloodied nor broken nor bruised. Grandma was relieved. Poppy was proud of me, which was the most I could ever have hoped for. I was exhilarated.
The heavy bag went home with me, to Neosho. We hung it in the garage of the house we rented on Benton Avenue. I marvel now that we found a beam sturdy enough to support it and to weather the abuse it absorbed. Not necessarily from me, but from my older brother, who could attack the bag with a lot more power than I had and who had apparently discovered the therapeutic value of the bag a lot earlier than I would.
I came about the getting-hit portion of my education the hard way.
The first blow landed when Poppy died the following January. His health had long been in decline — not that you’d have noticed that night he wrapped my hands for the first time. His fourth heart attack had been the one he couldn’t fight back from, and he died at age 63.
I love my father beyond measure, but as male role models go, Poppy was larger than life to me, loud and fearless and profane, an outsize character like something out of literature (inasmuch as I understood the concept at that age). He was the first person in whom I invested emotions much more complicated than mere love. The way he carried himself, the way he treated others, the way others regarded him — I sensed innately that he was someone to be respected, enthralled by, even feared. Toward the end I understood that he wasn’t well, but even as he became smaller, weaker, he was still a giant to me. I couldn’t imagine how he could actually be brought down. Until he was.
The next blow landed about a year and a half later, when my family picked up and moved to suburban Kansas City, away from the only life I had ever known.
The emotions of that time comprise another story altogether. For the purposes of this one, I shall say only that the Everlast bag came down from its moorings, was loaded onto the truck, and made the journey north with us. There was no properly sturdy place to hang it in our new duplex, though, so it was summarily dispatched to a corner of our garage to sit unused, its purpose made moot, its potential unfulfilled.
Had Poppy not died so soon, he could have taught me so much more. Had the bag not been relegated to a corner, I could have worked it to develop my skills. At the very least, maybe I wouldn’t have had my ass handed to me by that sociopathic little freak Bobby Hill that November day in our front yard.
The summer before my sophomore year at KU, my family moved again, into a house across town, where the Everlast bag took up residence in the basement, first propped in a corner, out in the open, then eventually under the stairs. It remained there as I moved out on my own after college, living in apartments even less suitable for it than our homes had been. It remained there when I relocated to L.A.; neither did I live anywhere in that city that would have accommodated the Everlast bag. It was still waiting in my parents’ basement when I returned home from L.A. after eight years and it stayed there for another five as I romanced Adriane from afar and worked toward the two us being together in one place, under one roof.
When we merged our lives and converged upon Sacramento in May 2010, I brought the Everlast bag with me.
Together at last.
Absence and asshats make the heart grow fonder.
If my 9-year-old brain couldn’t wrap itself around the notion of a heavy bag, my 20-something imagination could see nothing but upside. All I needed for a come-to-Jesus moment was to enter the American work force and hold down a steady job among customers and co-workers.
As a highly evolved social creature and a productive member of so-called polite society, I knew I couldn’t actually hit people when they pissed me off. Suddenly the Everlast heavy bag came alive to me as the ultimate absorber of anger and frustration, like a clinical psychologist for my fists.
An irate customer berates you. Take it out on the bag.
A boss belittles you. Take it out on the bag.
Surrounded by idiots and jerks. Take it out on the bag.
In the early ’90s, around the time I was working as a bank teller, often dealing with snotty people who were particular about their money, I read about how the Japanese incorporate into the workplace quiet rooms and other refuges to which employees can steal away for five or 10 minutes to escape stress, if only briefly, to calm their spirits, restore their sanity and help them better engage their responsibilities, clients and co-workers for the rest of the day.
I became obsessed with the improbable dream of a small gym with a heavy bag, a short walk from my work space, to which I could duck away when necessary, during certain opportune windows of downtime, to rain savage blows upon a yielding inanimate object. In short, to obtain some semblance of satisfactory payback, if only against a surrogate, for having endured the most recent of many indignities and grievances. Then to return to my post, cleansed of rage, drained of tension, at least for the moment, to re-engage and, in the dubious parlance of Col. Saito, “be happy in my work.”
Those who know me well, however, would argue that I’d spend a lot more time in the “serenity room” than at my work station.
That no such haven has existed in any of my places of employment means suffering through the day, accruing anger and frustration over the course of eight or nine hours, letting it build up inside and eat away at me like a cancer, then arriving home at 5 p.m. and making Adriane stand in front of the blast furnace while it all pours out of me in torrents. (Always as a patient audience, I hasten to add; never as an unwitting surrogate herself.)
It was on an evening such as this a week or so ago, after a thoroughly infuriating day in the trenches, when I offhandedly remarked, “It’s times like this when I really wish I had the heavy bag to take it all out on.” To which my wise and wonderful beloved replied, “Well, maybe we should go buy you a stand tonight. Would you like to do that?”
It’s been more of an investment than I was counting on. That the two-station stand with speed bag platform was on sale, costing only $20 more than a stand for the heavy bag alone, didn’t necessarily translate to a great bargain. The $70 I saved on the retail cost of the stand — and then some — has since been reinvested in 70 pounds of barbell weights to secure the stand so it doesn’t inch across the floor like an old washing machine; a chain and swivel that I had to order from Everlast to hang the bag; some hand wraps; and a new pair of bag gloves. My beloved hasn’t even blinked. I think she knows the investment will pay dividends over the long term.
And it needn’t stop there. When I move beyond the mere need of an outlet for my aggression, my potential wish list includes the speed bag (once I’m sure I can insulate my neighbors from the sound of it: ratata-batata-ratata-batata-ratata-batata…); a double-end bag with weighted base (which I can attach to the speed-bag swivel; two birds, one stone); some of those fancy, newfangled gel wraps for my hands; a digital round timer, perhaps. There’s a version of this story in which it becomes a hobby as expensive as my father’s healthy obsession with golf.
At the center of it all, however, hangs my white canvas Everlast bag, practically an antique now, a relic of its time. (These days they make them out of durable leather or ballistic nylon or space-age synthetic something-or-other.) That it has weathered years of neglect and indifference without becoming a chew toy, domicile or urinal for rodents is somewhat miraculous, and the bag’s structural integrity has lived up to its brand name.
Most importantly, it is, for all intents and purposes, the last thing my grandfather ever gave me. Even as it sat unused and unseen all those years, it was always present in my imagination as a symbol of the life my grandfather led and the wisdom, intel and basic equipment he wanted to pass down to me — to stand up for myself, to be a man, to take on the world. The heavy bag has endured. It is, as the saying goes, a gift that will keep on giving. Because every time I hang it, and with every jab I stick and every punch I throw, I will think of Poppy, I will hear his voice in my ear, and I will remember that he is still and always in my corner.
Monday, July 04, 2011
The following is the adapted text of an e-mail I sent today to the Reading Cinemas theater chain and our local Tower Theatre regarding my and Adriane’s repeated experiences with dim projection at the Tower:
This is the second such missive I’ve been compelled to forward to a movie theater over the years. I wrote the first — a sort of template for this letter — in December 2004 in response to a distressingly dark screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s period drama A Very Long Engagement at the Regent Showcase theater in the middle of Hollywood, of all places. I had gone to see the same film projected beautifully at the Laemmle’s Royal in Santa Monica two days later and wanted to see if I could get some satisfaction from the management of the Showcase. I never received a response, not even a screw-you for my trouble and effort.To Reading Cinemas and the management of the Tower Theatre:
Saturday evening, April 16, 2011, my fiancée and I attended the 7 p.m. screening of Tom McCarthy’s Win Win on Screen 3 at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento.
We both enjoyed the movie very much. Our experience, however, was made less pleasant by obviously dim projection. Even during daytime exterior scenes, it was as though we were watching the film through smoke-tinted glass. (We had a similar experience at a recent screening of Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre in the largest of the Tower’s three screening rooms, although that film is marked by much bleaker production design, making the nuances of projection less immediately apparent to the eye.)
Roger Ebert has written often on his Chicago Sun-Times website (see here, here and here) about the common misconception among theater owners and some projectionists that they are somehow conserving power or bulb life, saving money, or protecting the film stock by projecting films with the lamp turned down to a dimmer (or, erroneously, “cooler”) magnitude. In fact, none of these assumptions are true, and by doing so, all you ensure is a diminished viewing experience for your paying audience of a film that deserves much better presentation.
Fast forward to Saturday, June 25, when we attended the 9:30 p.m. screening of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life on Tower’s Screen 2. Here is a film which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, whose director is widely acknowledged as a visionary of the cinema. Because his last film was released in 2005 and the one before that in 1998, a film by Malick should be treated as an event. The director himself even went so far as to send a letter imploring projectionists screening The Tree of Life to follow certain specific guidelines.
Admittedly, I don't know the particulars of film projection well enough to argue Malick’s letter point by point, but I know dim projection when I see it. I saw it again on Screen 2 that Saturday evening, and it was enough like watching a movie projected through smoked glass that I am fairly convinced the Tower Theatre disregarded most if not all of Malick’s instructions. I have now seen dimly projected films on all three of Tower’s screens over a span of two months and have begun to believe that I should expect such a presentation to be the rule, not the exception, whenever I lay down my $9.50 at the Tower.
We had enjoyed the Tower on a number of previous occasions since we moved to Sacramento last year and had looked forward to coming back often. Because the Tower is an art-house theater, it is in many cases the only venue that offers Sacramentans certain indie or foreign films with necessarily limited distribution — a public service in itself. The opportunity to watch these films is not enough, though, if we can't also see them as they were intended. And so we find ourselves on the Fourth of July, eager to see Mike Mills’ new film Beginners but unwilling to squint through dim projection at a film worthy of better treatment, even if the Tower is our only local option.
While I appreciate that the cost of replacing a Xenon projection bulb is vastly greater than, say, my swapping out the headlamp on my Volkswagen (I priced the former recently via Google, and believe me, I sympathize), the mere act of projection is the first and foremost service your theaters perform that bring us all to your doorstep when we'd otherwise just stay home and watch TV or, God forbid, read a book.
Yours truly,
Brent Shepherd
I don’t expect to receive one from Reading or the Tower, either. But I also want them to know that they stand to lose business once filmgoers make the connection between projection quality of the films they’re seeing at the big multiplexes and that of the films they’re seeing at the Tower.
No one appreciates more than I the economics of movie theaters in general and marginalized independent theaters in particular, which earn virtually none of their revenue from the ticket sales of the films they screen. They are kept in business by those advertisements they screen before the movie, by leasing their theaters out for other uses during the day, and by the increasingly exorbitant prices they charge for concessions.
But let’s face it: When those advertisements a theater screens before the movie are projected more brightly and crisply than the films you have paid to see — they are almost always projected using a separate projector that throws up images at a much lower resolution — we now have a breach in the contract between the service provider and the consumer.
You don’t have to be a cinephile like me to know when something you’re watching isn’t projected brightly enough to be worth your two hours and your 10 dollars. If something doesn’t look right to you, you’ll know it, in which case you should take the matter to the management by threatening to take your business elsewhere.
NOTE: The above applies to theaters that still project film prints. For information about the issues inherent to the more modern digital and 3-D equipment being installed in the larger multiplexes, you can do no better than Ty Burr’s excellent May 22, 2011, Boston Globe article “A movie lover’s plea: Let there be light” and the aforementioned Roger Ebert’s May 24, 2011, blog entry “The Dying of the Light.”
Sunday, April 10, 2011
In all of cinema, the time-travel movie is perhaps the one subgenre that asks the most of its audience in terms of suspending disbelief. It’s not enough for us to want to be entertained or to want to believe that time travel is possible. The most successful time-travel movies must meet the audience at least halfway, by doing two things:
1. As preposterous and scientifically impossible as the idea is in reality, it must be cinematically plausible — i.e., the rules by which it is possible in the movie you are watching must be watertight and must be delivered with a straight face.
2. The movie must be wholly committed to the premise it supposes and play strictly by the rules it has established to govern that premise.
Duncan Jones’ sophomore feature, Source Code, supposes time travel with a twist, its premise being that, after a person dies, the last eight minutes of that person’s life remain imprinted on his or her brain. By connecting a living subject to the memory receptors in the decedent’s brain, that subject can repeatedly access those eight minutes, not merely to relive them but to construct an alternate, parallel reality, interacting with the physical surroundings in the dead person’s memory instead of being a passive observer.
Ridiculous? Of course. Confusing? Certainly. Cinematically plausible? Surprisingly, yes.
Our subject, Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a soldier who wakes up on a Chicago-bound commuter train with no idea how he got there. Christina (Michelle Monaghan), the beautiful passenger seated opposite him, seems to know him, although he’s never seen her before. Their first eight minutes together don’t go so smoothly, because Stevens is unaware that he is inside the memory — and the body, as it were — of a teacher named Sean Fentress, who died with Christina and everyone else aboard that train when a bomb exploded onboard.
The explosion jars Stevens back to consciousness, inside a capsule that he believes is a simulator of some kind. His handler, Capt. Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), doesn’t have time to explain what he’s doing there because she needs urgently to know everything he saw onboard the train before the explosion. It’s the calling card, Goodwin says, of a bomber who has something much bigger planned for downtown Chicago. Stevens can’t do anything to save the people on that commuter train, but he can gather information about the people on the train, locate the bomb and perhaps identify the person who planted it in time to stop the next attack. So back he goes, into the titular “source code” that allows him to relive Sean Fentress’ final eight minutes.
At first, the movie seems in danger of dragging us through an infuriating, never-ending loop, but after the first few abortive attempts — and one humorous, obligatory nod to Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day — Stevens finds his footing and commits to the mission like the good soldier he is, piecing together information and weighing all the likely scenarios eight minutes at a time.
Meanwhile, Stevens is also making the most of those eight minutes with Christina, and here the movie again accomplishes the improbable: drawing us into and making us root for a truly doomed romance. Over the course of their repeated encounters, Stevens begins to care for Christina, and her attraction to Sean becomes more apparent as she sees this new, more assertive side of her colleague and fellow commuter. Make of this complicated love triangle what you will; as an audience, we are drawn to the chemistry of our leads, and fortunately, Gyllenhaal and Monaghan have it.
In service of this high concept, the acting is generally solid: Gyllenhaal is much less wooden and one-dimensional than I have found him to be in previous films. Monaghan is typically appealing in a necessarily redundant and underwritten role. Back at the command post, Farmiga and the excellent Jeffrey Wright (as the source code’s developer, Dr. Rutledge) don’t move around a lot, spending most of their screen time in close-up, but still manage to convey the urgency, authority and, occasionally, deceit necessary to propel both a mission and a plot in which information must be meted out on a need-to-know basis.
The movie falters only at the very end. I will tell you only that, for all its impossible science and improbable leaps of logic, Source Code culminates in a very satisfying ending that makes perfect sense within the rules established at the outset by Ben Ripley’s fast-paced screenplay … after which it tacks on an utterly ridiculous epilogue that I believe to be the “contribution” of one studio executive or a roomful of them who, adhering to the prime directive of all studio executives, refused to leave well enough alone.
Duncan Jones and Ben Ripley should be rightfully proud of the smart, engaging popcorn thriller they’ve made. Neither of them should stoop to participate in the sequel this epilogue so flagrantly promises.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Back in September, after I wrote about 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair, a friend and frequent reader of these all-too-infrequent dispatches requested that I follow it up with a piece about Steve McQueen’s signature film, released later that same year: Bullitt.
It was an excellent suggestion. I immediately scheduled a viewing of Bullitt and made some notes as I watched, but it became evident during that viewing that a closer examination of the film would be required. Alas, daily life intervened, and I didn’t get around to another viewing.
Then on January 9 of this new year, the film’s director, Peter Yates died, leaving behind a legacy that includes not just Bullitt but also Breaking Away and the excellent The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Finally, my cinematic guilt has driven me to follow through on my promise. With a bit of a vengeance.
Mention Bullitt to even the most casual film fan, and almost invariably, their immediate, somewhat Pavlovian response will be something to do with The Chase. Possibly McQueen. Possibly the Mustang. But almost certainly The Chase.
What no one ever seems to remember when you say “Bullitt,” though, is how badly written it is. And boy, is it ever.
Co-writer Alan R. Trustman’s first three screenwriting credits are The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt in 1968 and They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! in 1970. McQueen, McQueen, Poitier — that’s nice work if you can get it. It’s a shame Trustman didn’t do more with those opportunities, though, because after Tibbs his filmography slides into relative obscurity, and it becomes obvious that he peaked with this lazy bit of writing hanging sloppily like saddle bags off either side of the car chase against which all others are measured.
The story is adapted from Robert L. Pike’s 1963 novel Mute Witness (pretty badly written in its own right), about a decidedly un-McQueen-like New York City detective named Clancy. It was apparently being developed as a starring vehicle for Spencer Tracy, who died two weeks after he wrapped 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In reworking the story for a star 30 years Tracy’s junior, the script’s principal flaw is that it persists in being a character study and a procedural and doesn’t realize until it’s too late that what it really wants to be — what it had every right to be once McQueen signed on — is an action movie.
According to the invaluable Internet Movie Database, Robert Vaughn initially turned down the role of Walter Chalmers in Bullitt because he thought the plot was too thin. He was absolutely right.
He was also absolutely right for the part, and thank God that McQueen talked his Magnificent Seven co-star into doing it — and the producers threw a lot more money at him — because without Vaughn, the movie would have no compelling antagonist to speak of.
Sure, there are bad guys, but they’re cardboard stand-ups in a shooting gallery, too vaguely defined to achieve true villain status in the mind of the audience. There’s a bad guy whom Bullitt is enlisted to protect, and there are two other bad guys trying to kill the first bad guy on behalf of a lot of other bad guys, and the only reason we care at all is because we’re invested in Bullitt, whose pride and work ethic are at stake.
But casting Vaughn as Chalmers turns up the heat under our hero. Vaughn, to me, has always exuded untrustworthiness, with his precisely clipped diction and his slightly beady eyes and — let’s face it — his uptight banker’s hairline. If he had a mustache, he would twirl it. Vaughn is cast perfectly to type, and he plays Chalmers to the hilt, even though Chalmers, as written, is nothing but a lot of hot air in a suit and tie.
For starters, we only ever hear him called Mister Chalmers, but every other character in the movie snaps to attention at the mere mention of his name. One might get the impression that he was a district attorney or attorney general1 — these would seem to be the most likely offices for someone who claims to “have a star witness who needs protection” — but one would be wrong.
I’ll stipulate that the film’s Chalmers likely possesses a law degree of some kind, but the primary source of his considerable influence is his wealth, judging by his ostentatious Pacific Heights manse and the massive gathering there of what appears to be a ladies’ garden society, in the scene in which we — and Det. Lt. Frank Bullitt — first meet him. Upon this introduction, Chalmers lays out the preposterous plot of the movie:
“Once and for all, the top men in law enforcement are united. We’re going to expose the Organization.”
“I read your speech,” Bullitt says. “Why San Francisco?”
“Ross is safer here. That’s your province. Keep him out of reach for 48 hours.”
Johnny Ross is a mob functionary from Chicago, now on the lam after embezzling $2 million. He is slated to testify against “the Organization” before a “Senate subcommittee hearing” that, inexplicably, has been convened in San Francisco. Not Washington, D.C., where the Senate is, mind you, but San Francisco, where Frank Bullitt works. Chalmers enlists Bullitt to babysit Ross over the weekend and deliver him to the hearing Monday morning.2
“A senatorial hearing has a way of catapulting everyone involved into the public eye,” Chalmers tells him. “With a subsequent effect on one’s career. It’d be a pleasure to have you along. … Have him in court on Monday, Frank.”
After this meet-cute, Bullitt asks his captain, Sam Bennet (Simon Oakland), if he knows why Chalmers asked for him. Bennet replies, “He’s grooming himself for public office. And you make good copy. They love you in the papers, Frank.”
While this last exchange confirms that Chalmers is nothing more than a well-to-do dilettante with nebulous political aspirations, it is also the only indication, aside from the casting of McQueen, that there is anything special or noteworthy about Bullitt. To this point, we have been shown nothing, except for his partner, Det. Delgetti (Don Gordon), waking him from a dead sleep (in some of the most awful brown paisley pajamas you ever saw) to drag him to the Friday-morning meeting with Chalmers.
Later, after Bullitt leaves Delgetti — and, subsequently, young Sgt. Carl Stanton (Carl Reindel) — at the Hotel Daniels to guard Ross, there’s some typical ’60s hipster nonsense set in some tony restaurant with a jazz combo playing, solely for the purpose of making Bullitt appear to have a life of his own. I will forgive this sequence only because it establishes Jacqueline Bisset as Bullitt’s love interest, Cathy, and if a story that already makes no sense must grind to a complete screeching halt, it might as well do so for Jacqueline Bisset, who is 24 years old here, achingly beautiful to begin with but even more stunning in high definition.3
What these scenes achieve, however, is to make Bullitt appear to have taken his eye off the ball after he was personally assigned by Chalmers to guard Ross. Bullitt’s delegation of authority translates in Chalmers’ mind to dereliction of duty when the shit hits the fan.
And hit the fan it does. Two gunmen appear at the Hotel Daniels at 1 a.m. After they claim at the night desk to be “Mr. Chalmers and a friend,” Stanton phones Bullitt, but before Bullitt can get there, the gunmen burst into the room with a Winchester pump-action shotgun, seriously wounding Stanton in the leg and blasting Ross against the wall, gravely wounding him in the chest and neck.
As Bennet tells Bullitt, “Now [Chalmers] can’t produce the big surprise he promised everyone. He may try to make up some mileage by layin’ it on us.” Well, that’s exactly what he’s going to do, because the dialogue in this script, as in the book, is so on-the-nose that it could be melanoma.
Chalmers is a typical politician, instantly seeking to assign blame and blustering past the one direct (and perfectly legitimate) question Bullitt asks him — “Who else knew where he was? … They knew where to look for him, and they used your name to get in” — to skirt any accountability of his own. It’s only the force of Vaughn’s will as an actor that allows him to appear formidable even as he threatens Bullitt with such overwrought, melodramatic ultimatums as this one:
“Lieutenant, I shall personally officiate at your public crucifixion if Ross doesn’t recover during the course of the hearing so I can at least present his deposition. And I assure you I shall not suffer the consequence of your incompetence. And even if there wasn’t any, I’m rather certain I can prove negligence on your part. … There may be another attempt on his life. I’ll be back in the morning … with my people.”
Next Chalmers pointedly insists that the young African-American surgeon, Dr. Willard (Georg Stanford Brown), be removed from the case because he’s “too young and inexperienced.” Never mind that Willard has already operated on Ross and so far kept him alive, nor that Chalmers instructs a supervising nurse to have the surgeon replaced — when Walter Chalmers speaks, apparently all of San Francisco shudders and obeys.4
We now enter a sequence that deserves its own chapter in Screenwriting for Simpletons:
Having predicted that there may be another attempt on Ross’ life, Chalmers and his men exit the hospital at the exact same time and via the same street entrance by which the gray-haired shooter from the Hotel Daniels (Paul Genge) — who is indeed coming to make another attempt on Ross’ life — arrives.
The shooter stands scanning a hospital directory. Bereft of anything resembling nonchalance, he asks as passing doctor where they might be keeping “his relative” who was admitted with “a gunshot wound.” The doctor helpfully directs him to the second-floor ICU but has the presence of mind to call upstairs and warn Bullitt that a suspicious man is in the hospital and that he instructed him how to find Ross.
A nurse screams when she stumbles upon the shooter in a stairwell as he removes a cork-capped icepick that he’s taped under his pant leg. He runs; Bullitt chases him through the basement of the hospital; and sometime during all the excitement, throughout which he is unconscious and undisturbed, Ross goes into cardiac arrest.
There are so many missed narrative opportunities in that sequence that I need an abacus to count them.
Having lost the shooter, Bullitt gets back upstairs just in time to see Ross flatline. It’s a great excuse for a close-up of McQueen making his best “That’s my career hooked up to that heart monitor” face, although we still haven’t been persuaded that Chalmers has enough actual authority get a dog catcher fired.
In a daring bit of subterfuge and collusion, Bullitt persuades Dr. Willard to misplace Ross’ chart as Bullitt has Ross’ body admitted to the morgue as a John Doe. This may be the first smart, logical thing the movie allows any of its characters to do, not least because it solidifies the chess match between Bullitt (and his captain, Bennet) and Chalmers (assisted by his own oddly deferential police captain, Baker, played by the terrific Norman Fell) that has become, by default, this movie’s ‘A’ storyline.
At about the 48-minute mark, we pause for more pointless filler (and a giant continuity error, because Bullitt is wearing clothes that we see him put on several minutes later after getting out of the shower): Outside the corner grocery near his apartment, Bullitt steals a newspaper from the machine because he doesn’t have any change on him. (Oh, that Bullitt — he bends the rules to suit his brand of justice!) Inside he grabs some produce, including a bunch of green onions (“Fresh today!” the grocer tells him) — the implication being that he might actually cook something back at his apartment — but then he goes to the freezer case and indiscriminately grabs the top half-dozen Swanson TV dinners.
If that scene is intended to cement Bullitt’s lone-wolf status, all that hard work is undercut around the 53-minute mark: Enter Jacqueline Bisset, parading around Bullitt’s apartment wearing only a blue pajama top. She offers Bullitt breakfast but he wants only coffee, which she brings to him as he’s pulling on a blue turtleneck and strapping on his low-slung shoulder holster. Mark it down: This quiet little scene of domestic bliss is the moment the modern era of cool was born.
It is now Sunday morning, and Bullitt and Delgetti re-examine the crime scene and lean on the night clerk at the Hotel Daniels, after which there’s an extended bit of business with Robert Duvall as Weissberg, the cab driver who chauffeured Ross around town before depositing him at the Hotel Daniels, retracing that day’s stops for Bullitt.5 Meanwhile, having discovered that his star witness is missing from the hospital and been stonewalled by Bullitt on the phone, Chalmers delivers a writ of habeas corpus to Bennet outside church.
Their fact-finding mission complete, Weissberg drops Bullitt off where they first met, reuniting him with the film’s other most vital co-star, ready now for its close-up: the highland green 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback.
As plots go, the first 65 minutes 30 seconds of the film amount to little more than a protracted setup for The Chase, like a hastily assembled Rube Goldberg device designed primarily to deliver Bullitt in his Mustang and the gunmen in their black 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 (piloted by stunt driver Bill Hickman) to their fateful intersection.
The chase sequence is by no means perfect. There are improbable insert shots of the white-haired gunman appearing in the rearview mirror, even though Genge is in the front passenger seat — literally riding shotgun — and the camera is shooting just over Hickman’s right shoulder. The chase cars pass the same dark-green VW Beetle and white Pontiac Firebird multiple times as they careen down the vertiginous streets of San Francisco.
But for all its minor flaws, it is the birth of the chase sequence as we know it today, spanning 10 full minutes of screen time, and it would seem to at least acknowledge a small debt to the crop duster sequence in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in terms of its structure, its mounting suspense and its dramatic conclusion.
A game of cat-and-mouse ensues: Bullitt is followed. Bullitt disappears in a residential neighborhood. The gunmen see no sign of him, select as likely a street as any to turn down. Cresting a hill, Bullitt’s Mustang reappears in the Charger’s rearview mirror. The hunted becomes the hunter. The filmmakers could even have prolonged this part of the chase, adding a few more turns, a little more hesitation, another nervous glance or two — to heighten the tension, to tighten the vise around the audience, but mainly to show off a little more of Lalo Schifrin’s über-cool jazz score. (Who among us has never wished he had his own theme music? Who among us would not place Bullitt’s in his top five?)
And Schifrin himself is credited with one of the smartest decisions in the entire film: When Hickman clicks and cinches his seat belt, then peels out to begin the high-speed chase in earnest, the music abruptly stops, because as Schifrin rightly pointed out, the sounds of revving engines, rattling suspensions, squealing tires, car horns and assorted collisions is the only soundtrack you need.
Not only are Hickman, McQueen and stunt drivers Carey Loftin and Bud Ekins driving at speeds of 80 to 110 mph, but in most shots the camera car has to be going at least as fast, shooting through traffic to capture the action. A helmetless Ekins (“Paging Busey, party of one…”) also executes a spectacular motorcycle stunt by laying his bike down and sliding it headlong into oncoming traffic and between the two chase cars, precipitating a particularly excellent spinout in the dirt by the Mustang.
Next we have about 55 seconds of just McQueen and the Mustang, opening it up on the winding back roads, playing catch-up. There’s some business with Genge loading shells into his Winchester. There’s Hickman weaving through oncoming traffic, barely squeezing between a freight truck and a guardrail. Bullitt pulls alongside the Charger — paint gets traded; doors and quarter-panels get dented. Genge climbs into the back seat of the Charger to open fire on Bullitt. Bullitt backs off. Bullitt speeds up. Bullitt acts decisively to bring the battle to its inevitable conclusion.
The genius of what I’ve just described — the brainchild of Yates, McQueen, their drivers and stunt coordinators — is not merely the thrill of the chase itself, a pure invention of nerve and adrenaline and velocity inserted into the middle of a story otherwise devoid of real action. If you break it down as I just did, you see that those 10 minutes are a perfect three-act movie within the movie, told so well, so precisely, so much more effectively than the rest of the picture it’s in that it stands alone on its own merits. And in a movie that insists on making its hero a flat, mirthless automaton, a skeleton on which an archetype might be draped in a better-developed picture, the chase is perhaps more effective at revealing Bullitt’s character than the rest of the plot.
I will spare you another 2,000 words or so and, in case you’ve never seen Bullitt, the inevitability of spoilers about the second half of the movie. Suffice it to say that inconsistencies continue to pile up and Chalmers continues to be imbued with the kind of power and influence usually accorded to the likes of Voldemort. Hell, he may actually be Voldemort, seeing how he keeps turning up wherever the action (or inaction) is, day or night.
Bullitt preceded the modern blockbuster era of motion pictures by seven years, and while it misses — and often resists — so many opportunities to be a tighter, leaner, faster, grittier police story, it nonetheless sets the bar for the coming generation of crime dramas.
Without Bullitt, there certainly would be no Dirty Harry Callahan, but the film might also have paved the way for the more thoughtfully crafted, fact-based police stories of Sidney Lumet, such as Serpico and Prince of the City. We wouldn’t have the exquisite oneupsmanship of William Friedkin, who directed two certifiably great car chases of his own in The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A.6 We wouldn’t have Pacino and De Niro’s LAX showdown at the end of Michael Mann’s Heat. As cold and unemotional as McQueen’s performance is, without Frank Bullitt, there would be no colorful, loose-cannon franchise detectives like Martin Riggs or John McClane. And that’s just on the big screen — the knockoffs Bullitt inspired on television comprise a list as long as your arm.
Selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in 2007, cited as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” Bullitt probably holds the distinction of having the most tenuous, dubious qualification of any film on the National Film Registry. If less is indeed more7, it is a movie whose best 10 minutes left a greater impression on the public imagination than many films achieve with their entire two-hour running time and catapulted Steve McQueen from stardom into legend.
1 In the book Mute Witness, Chalmers is in fact an assistant district attorney, so it’s anybody’s guess why the filmmakers elected to make him an ambiguous figure with apparently unlimited influence and sway but with no specific office or title, as though he were a baron or feudal lord plunked down in the middle of modern-day San Francisco.
2 The film includes a prologue that could have been given ample screen time to explain the story better, but it’s buried behind slick camera moves, the floating titles of the opening credit sequence, and a very literal smokescreen that enables Johnny Ross’ flight from the Organization he is double-crossing. This group appears to include his brother and business partner, Pete Ross (Vic Tayback), who helps Johnny escape but whom Johnny apparently leaves holding the bag in Chicago. When Pete informs the capos that Johnny has gotten away, they inform Pete that he’ll be paying for the contract they’re putting out on his brother.
Even if you watch this sequence closely, it is deliberately devised to obfuscate the plot until you arrive at the dramatic third-act twist that clears up the whole story in a manner just this side of the most egregious dei ex machina. In the end, we’re told an awful lot of things that we are never given the benefit of seeing with our own eyes.
3 Beautiful as she is, though, Bisset does absolutely nothing to advance the plot. Her character, Cathy, is an architectural designer of some kind, working out the water-flow rate for a public fountain when we first see her at work. (If Bullitt were being produced today, she might at least happen to be a nurse or doctor in the hospital where so much of Act II takes place. And she would likely be threatened or endangered at some point.) She provides some relationship angst in Act III, wading with McQueen through some painfully ham-fisted dialogue, but their dynamic is never really developed in a way that elevates her importance to the story.
4 Incidentally, principal photography for Bullitt took place — and the story itself is approximately set — in April 1968, the same month that Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. At that time, apparently, a Negro surgeon still counted as only three-fifths of a white nurse. In any event, making Chalmers appear also to be a racist is merely a bonus at this point.
5 It’s remarkable to see Duvall relegated to a bit part here, several years after Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird — during which time he had done a lot of guest-starring roles on television — and a year away from Lucky Ned Pepper in True Grit, then Maj. Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, then Tom Hagen in The Godfather, after which he was once and forever, indelibly, Robert freaking Duvall as we know him today.
6 Friedkin also deserves credit for filming a San Francisco car chase that might best be described as “the anti-Bullitt” and which is for me the lone highlight of the perfectly atrocious 1995 thriller Jade: A typically nail-biting chase sequence, involving star David Caruso behind the wheel of the chase car, becomes an almost tongue-in-cheek meta-chase, when the lead car drives into the midst of a crowded Chinatown parade route — complete with dragon — and the chase grinds to a 5 mph crawl. Having directed great chases in New York and L.A., it’s as though Friedkin was acknowledging that he couldn’t out-Yates Yates in San Francisco, so why bother.
7 And boy, don't you wish it had been for this post?
