Six Degrees of Richard Nixon

Three Days of the Condor, which was directed by Sidney Pollack, has at least one thing going for it: Robert Redford. Redford in his day was a terrific hippie-everyman. He was conservative enough in his demeanor to be mainstream, but progressive in his politics. But Redford loses some of his appeal when he starts to fancy himself a martyr for whatever cause his movies are about. In Three Days of the Condor, it's Robert Redford against the world, and it's a bit hard to take. I like him better when he's charming the world into compliance. 

Condor begins well: Pollack is a slick filmmaker, and the modern-jazz-funk score by Dave Grusin works for the opening shots, sounding more than a bit like the music by Weather Report from the same period. The film is set in New York, where a reader at the American Literary Historical Society named Joe Turner (Redford) is terrified to discover all of his colleagues have been gunned down while he was out to lunch. Turner pretty quickly realises that he missed death only by sheer coincidence, and that the party responsible (the CIA) isn't likely to make the same mistake twice. Soon he's hiding out in the Brooklyn Heights apartment of an icy photographer named Kathy, who's played by Faye Dunaway.

Pauline Kael criticized the casting of Dunaway as a mistake, but I'm not sure it's the casting so much as the character herself. There's a heady sort of macho intuition in the script that bungles the movie irretrievably: Turner, who's holding the terrified woman at gunpoint, looks around at her many pictures (all of them dreary black-and-white photos of autumnal trees and empty park benches: death and isolation and such) and basically pronounces her a frigid bitch. Where on earth does he get off? What's most distressing about this is that within twenty minutes of all this, they're in bed together. So I can't really fault Dunaway for what is decidedly silly writing.

Movies are supposed to be improbable, unlikely concoctions of fantasy, but this shacking up with your hostage business smacks of an improbability that only weakens the movie. Now that Kathy is on Joe's side (a new kind of putting the screws on your audience), she agrees to help him rough up a CIA desk jockey so he can find out what's really going on behind closed doors. It's depressing to realize that Dunaway had to settle for such a flat role, especially since she was one of the reigning queens of 70s cinema for a little while.

Meanwhile, Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (released a year earlier, in 1974), is equally muddled. Warren Beatty plays a reporter who witnesses the assassination of a politician in the Space Needle. Within a few years, six people who witnessed the murder have died mysteriously, and a frantic reporter (Paula Prentiss) turns to Beatty for help because she's convinced she'll be next.

Pakula doesn't have much facility for directing action sequences. In one case, Beatty's character deflects a gunshut with a fishing rod--by wrapping the wire around the would-be shooter's legs. It's a clumsily staged moment. Pakula's better thrillers--Klute and All the President's Men--didn't have scenes like this. He's better at transmuting static material than translating physical action to the screen.

Beatty's character, also named Joe, is a prototype for the smart-ass investigative reporter that Chevy Chase played so well in Fletch. Beatty doesn't exhibit contempt for his audience, but he does imbue Joe with a certain degree of hardness to the world. He doesn't seem particularly affected by any of the disturbing things he uncovers, particularly the strange mission of the ominous Parallax Corporation, which is apparently in the business of training assassins. If only it were as clever and interesting as The Manchurian Candidate. Instead, it's a rather obvious attempt to throw some doubt on the Warren Commission's investigation of JFK's assassination. 

Of course, all of these movies are inherently connected to the Nixon Whitehouse. Without Nixon (and Vietnam), we wouldn't have likely had such an interesting spate of paranoia thrillers. (The best of them, aside from All the President's Men, are less obvious, like Philip Kaufman's terrific remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) But has any other President spawned a whole sub-genre? These films are carriers of a Nixonian spirit that is quite unsettling and altogether fascinating. The fact that the movies themselves don't really hold up doesn't negate their relevance in the culture, because they're ultimately more interesting as reactionary objects, put forth to question authority.

The most successful movie to directly address Nixon may be, surprisingly, a kooky little Hal Ashby comedy called Shampoo, which also stars Warren Beatty. I remember watching it on television many years ago. But seeing a movie divided into segments by commercial breaks (and edited for cable) is no way to live. Shampoo is about an anomaly: a straight hairdresser who services unhappy rich women in Hollywood. (And he services them in more ways than one.) His name is George, and it's been suggested that he was inspired by Jay Sebring, the man who revolutionized men's hairstyles before being butchered by the Manson family at Sharon Tate's house in August 1969.

Shampoo is glib but sweet, and director Hal Ashby manages to make a film about unhappiness and moral decay without turning moralistic. George is bedding both the wife and the mistress of a big money businessman (Jack Warden) from whom he's hoping to finance his own salon. The ladies are both unhappy, but unwilling to forgo the various pleasures afforded by George's services. (The wife, Felicia, is played by Lee Grant, and the mistress, Jackie, is played by Julie Christie.) Meanwhile, George's official girlfriend, Jill (played by the sunny, wide-eyed Goldie Hawn, who's a willowy flower with a spark of fire inside her), is equally muddled and dissatisfied with her boyfriend. 

Warren Beatty looks perpetually stoned in Shampoo. (He looks more lucid in The Parallax View.) This is the right look for his character, a man who concludes that he's basically happy--even despite his career failings--because he gets to sleep with a lot of women. We feel for George, genuinely, when he's left alone at the end, a consequence of prior indecision.

Shampoo is set during Election Day and Night 1968, and at the end, we see actual footage of Nixon making his victory speech. It's easy to see how he won in `68--a slick and skilled politician playing against someone his own age, Hubert Humphrey--despite a blistering loss in 1960 to the suave John Kennedy. Shampoo thus signals the death knell of the Peace and Love Moment. It was, after all, Nixon and Manson who signaled it. 

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Last night I attended a special screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), celebrating its 40th anniversary and featuring a live in-person appearance by actor Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface. It was a particular treat to hear Mr. Hanson speak--so eloquently--about his experiences making that film during some long, hot summer days in Texas in 1973. He's a good-natured, honest, funny man and the crowd was obviously enamored of him. He also wrote a book chronicling the making of this seminal horror film,  Chainsaw Confidential, which I'm planning to read.

Seeing horror movies with an audience is so different from watching them at home, and even though I had seen Texas Chain Saw on the big screen before, it wasn't until last night that the movie really struck me as something truly masterful. For one thing, the print we watched last night was beautiful, and according to Hansen, superior even to the original print, which was marred by some naifs who accidentally mucked up the color of the film and made everything look several shades off. Scenes that were once too dark to distinguish shapes were now much clearer. The whole movie sparkled in a kind of stark panache. And yet, this new print did not diminish the film's raw, terrifying power. In fact, Chain Saw is one of the few horror movies that hasn't dated at all. No one in the audience was laughing--unless it was a part that was intended to be funny. Very few horror films sustain such levels of control over the audience forty years out.

 
As for the critics' initial reactions, it probably didn't matter that the print was botched upon release, because the movie is such a harrowing film to endure. Critics were quick to dismiss it, or deride it, much like they did with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. (And many who denounced those films later recanted.) Stephen Koch wrote in Harper's that it was a "vile piece of sick crap...It is a film with literally nothing to recommend it." Roger Ebert reacted more fairly, admitting that it was "well-made, well-acted, and all too effective," despite the fact that he couldn't "imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this." I can understand how Ebert felt, because when I first saw this movie, I absolutely hated it. I was utterly disappointed, bored, disturbed, and confused that some critics I'd read (remember, it's reputation improved greatly over time) had referred to it in such glowing terms as a sharp dark comedy and a great exercise in shock. Indeed, it was shocking, but at the time, its value was lost on me.

I was a kid and I rented a copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and watched it in my parents' living room in broad daylight. (My folks, while lenient about the movies I watched, were adamant that I not watch The Simpsons. I guess excruciating nightmares were better than the possibility of picking up Bart Simpson's smart-ass vernacular.) Perhaps my initial dislike of Chain Saw was because of the hype, which I'd read about and heard about. (This movie was after all ingrained in the popular culture, so that many a movie and TV show has alluded to it in some way. Gunnar Hansen recalled discovering Chain Saw's impact years later when he heard the name "Leatherface" referenced in an episode of Cheers.)

Essentially, the film is what you'd get if the gang from Scooby Doo ran into the Manson Family: five hippies (Sally, her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin, Kurt, Pam, and Jerry) traveling through rural Texas in their green van are stranded at an old dark house. They split up, and soon wander off and into the clutches of a backwoods family of psychopaths, including the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface, a mentally impaired man who wears a self-made mask of human skin. The film opens with a hokey yet brilliant narration (by John Larroquette) followed by chilling images of the Sawyer's grave-robbing handiwork. The director, Tobe Hooper, borrowed a little of the movie's content from the real-life killer Ed Gein, a Wisconsin creeper who robbed graves and dismembered the corpses, among other things. (It's rather sordid.) And, just to set the record straight, the movie is mostly fiction. Some movie-goers were fooled by the 2003 remake, which claimed to show "real police footage" of the "real" Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But in fact, it's all pretty much made up, concocted by screenwriters Kim Henkel and Hooper.

Pretty soon, Sally (played with sympathetic pluckiness by Marilyn Burns, who deserves a retroactive Academy Award for Best Suffering in a Motion Picture) is chased by Leatherface and captured, and then forced to spend a hellish night with the mad Sawyer family. It truly is a descent into a kind of 20th-century American Hell. The film captures the frightening possibilities of a free society, which by definition, allows people like the Sawyers to go about their business unhindered so long as they keep their proclivities under the radar. Indeed, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre cemented our fear of rural people, so secluded, so unchecked, that they could be doing anything in their creaky old farmhouses. The film plays on that inherent snobbish suspicion, and, like John Waters in his early underground films, makes fun of the snobs themselves by confirming their worst fears.

Last night, I was amazed and pleased to see how well this movie still works. And I was honestly relieved that I genuinely liked the movie. I can't say it's a movie people will enjoy, because it is rough going at times, but seeing the way the film works--as a movie, and as a horror movie--particularly on such a shoestring budget, one comes away giddy about the possibilities of film. It's a remarkably literate horror movie. Hooper and his team, which includes cinematographer Daniel Pearl, production designer Ron Bozman, editors Sallye Richardson and Larry Carroll, saturate the film will all kinds of creepy imagery. The modern Gothic look of Central Texas (it was filmed near Austin) is also a contributing factor, itself a kind of character in the film that shapes the nature of the horror: The clapboard houses, the tall grass swooning under the punishing sun, the faded tombstones in the country graveyard, the town drunk muttering to himself that he "sees things," (he sucks in a deep gulp of breath and the camera cuts away before he exhales), the goofy, naturalistic dialogue between the innocents, the murder house, full of bones arranged prominently in every room. It's probably a hard sell for some, but there's something darkly poetic and shattering about a movie that looks evil in the face, that lets evil parade itself around for a little while. (And actually, it's not anywhere near as gory as people imagine. Most of it is suggestion.)

With Jim Siedow, Edwin Neal, Paul A. Partain, Allen Danziger, William Vail, Teri McMinn, and John Dugan.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

How many movies has Martin Scorsese made that were about women? The only one that stands out is Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), starring Ellen Burstyn, whose performance is equal parts tender, histrionic, fraught, and courageous. She plays Alice Hyatt, a thirty-five year old housewife living in New Mexico. When Alice's husband dies in a work-related accident, she and her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter, who gives a delightfully cheeky performance) pack up and head for Monterrey, California. They're forced to make extended stops in Arizona in order for Alice to scrounge up enough money to get them to Monterrey, so she finds work as a lounge singer and a waitress.

There's a beautiful scene at the beginning of the movie where Alice sings and plays the Rodgers and Hart song "Where or When," and Scorsese lets us savor it. He cuts away as she's finishing, and we see her 12-year-old son pacing outside, feeling his own version of uncertainty while his mother dusts off her old talents. A few minutes later, another one: Alice and her neighbor/best friend Bea (Lelia Goldoni) tearfully part ways, and Bea cries, "Who's gonna make me laugh?" With very few words, this scene gets at the strong bond between these two women, whose feet have walked on virtually the same ground for all their lives. You feel a sense of compassion in this movie for its characters that just doesn't exist much anymore.

Alice has an easy, un-self-important quality to it. One of the problems with much of Martin Scorsese's work is that he's trying to top some other great film. Goodfellas was his attempt to top The Godfather, and most of Scorsese's recent efforts have seen the director once again striving for greatness in a very calculated way. But his earlier work doesn't have that quality. Even Taxi Driver, which I don't have any real affection for, is above that kind of posturing. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore works because it's about people and relationships. It's not "the women's lib picture," as though there could be only one and it had to be done by a man and it had to be great and it had to be Scorsese. These "women's lib pictures" represent a short-lived burst of activity on the subject. Nowadays, women have gone back to being the boring love interests and sub-important characters. But in the early to mid 70s, there were a few movies that were actually about women. And some of them may have been too generalized (as though there could only be one way to experience the world as a woman), but it was wonderful to see good movie roles for actresses.

When Alice moans, "I don't know how to live without a man," she's voicing the other side of the women's lib movement. She's spent much of the film crying herself into jobs and out of them, but her wise co-worker and chum (Diane Ladd) talks some sense into her. She's been in Alice's shoes already, and managed to walk her own path. Ladd makes a strong impression as the head waitress of a mom-and-pop restaurant where Alice finds a job. She's absolutely wonderful, embodying the brash personality of one of those blowsy talking flowers in Alice in Wonderland. Her big blonde beehive (which Jennifer Lawrence must have been imitating in American Hustle) looks like a giant dollop of cream: She's a tough, sweet gardenia with a strict no-bullshit policy.

Ellen Burstyn cries a lot in this movie, often in short but turbulent bursts. Sometimes it seems like Scorsese and screenwriter Robert Getchell thinking that's the only way a woman can accomplish anything: she must burst into tears to elicit a man's sympathy. And yet there's something real in her blubbering. It's messy and untempered. Burstyn has the looks of an accomplished actress, but she doesn't let herself rely too much on acting chops. She's all over the place in a good way, and she's got the look down pat: the scarves in her hair blowing in the wind as she and her son trek down the Arizona highway. Her son often seems unaffected by his mother's chaotic world, yet we see glimpses of their complex relationship that make it seem much more real than the garden variety sitcom-level familiarity present in most comedy-dramas. The chemistry between Burstyn and Lutter works: they play off each other nicely, and they switch from clownish pranks and smart-ass banter to genuine mother-son affection with surprising ease.

With Kris Kristofferson as Alice's laid-back, cowboyish boyfriend, Harvey Keitel as an early love interest with a scary temper, Jodie Foster, and Valerie Curtin.

Black Christmas

Black Christmas (1974) takes as its inspiration that old urban legend about the madman terrorizing the babysitter with taunting, malicious phone calls that are in fact "coming from inside the house." It's a nasty but surprisingly effective shocker from director Bob Clark, who had made two other genre pieces before this one, the schlocky zombie-cheapie Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972) and the laughable but slightly more intelligent Deathdream (1974), about a dead Vietnam vet who comes back to life a la "The Monkey's Paw." In Black Christmas, the setting is a sorority house at Christmastime, and the hormonal coeds are feeling rattled by the obscene phone calls of a psycho killer, who happens to be cloistered in the attic. Filmed in Toronto, Black Christmas feels like a bad 1970s youth drama--there's even a subplot about one of the sorority sisters contemplating an abortion--interspersed with violent murder set-pieces to ratchet up the tension. Strangely enough, it's effective, perhaps because of how crudely conceived it is. The script by Roy Moore dares you to live with the uncertainty of the killer's identity, and the dreary sorority house feels like Death itself with all its creaking floorboards and dark hallways. You find yourself drawn to the familiarity of the film's conventions, and its perverse method of turning the Christmas season into a time of dread and horror is chillingly done. (Clark himself once pointed out how many suicides there are during the holidays, just in case anyone thinks they're blissfully happy times for everyone.) With John Saxon as the police chief, Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder (who's brilliant as the brash, boozing member of the sorority), and Andrea Martin as three of the coeds, Keir Dullea and Art Hindle as two of their boyfriends, and Marian Waldman as the amusing alcoholic housemother, who hides bottles of booze all over the house. Released in America as Silent Night, Evil Night and later Stranger in the House, but it was not initially successful in this country. It has since become something of a cult classic. ★★★

The Godfather Part II

In the first Godfather, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) never believed he could be sucked into his father's way of doing things. And in The Godfather Part II (1974), he can't accept that he has. His corruption happens quickly but subtly. Under the guise of vengeance, of protecting family honor, Michael becomes a tragic fallen hero. Director Francis Ford Coppola and author Mario Puzo have created a sequel that fills in a lot of detail for us, simultaneously depicting Michael's rise as the new Don Corleone and the life of young Vito (played in flashback by Robert De Niro) as he leaves Sicily for America and gradually begins a life of crime.

There are moments of greatness in The Godfather Part II, and moments of great drama. Some of the images stay with you, and considering how much it attempts, much of this movie is a smashing success. The actors are exceedingly good: Pacino shines darkly. You can see the transformation he's undergone in his face, which was once innocent. Now it has a yellow patina of greed and an addiction to power. Diane Keaton gets some stronger material in this sequel as well. She's the good wife who's stuck by Michael for longer than she should have, who's looked the other way too many times now. De Niro is a solid Vito (it's no small feat filling the shoes of Marlon Brando), Talia Shire adds a new level of depth to Connie, Michael's sister, who was always getting roughed up by her sleazy husband Carlo in the first one. In Part II she's given herself over to money and things, at the expense of her family. But then she experiences something of a reversal of character, and she rises up to be the family's new matriarch. It's fascinating to watch all these performances and the depths to which the actors take them.

But it's lacking something. Many critics have proclaimed this an even better film than its predecessor. They praise it for deepening the material, for elevating it to a mythological status. It's just that in the process of demonstrating how far Michael has fallen, the movie too seems to lose its soul. Despite the fact that he had already been corrupted by the end of the first Godfather, that film left you with a sense of ambiguity. That perhaps things were going to be different. After all, Michael's involvement in murder had been about "vengeance" and "justice." But in the sequel, we start to see the consequences of that. It's beautiful and compelling yet bleak and depressing. And the powerful scenes are linked by many scenes that lumber along. (It's three hours and twenty minutes long, where the first was under three, a significant difference.) The tacked-on ending, a flashback of the days before WW2, when all the children were alive, but grown, feels too TV-movie-ish, like Coppola was already showing signs of the bad judgment that would taint his directing ever after. (It is nice to see James Caan reprising his role as Sonny, if ever so briefly. His absence is really felt--Sonny was such a presence, such an iconic character, and Caan turned him into a hot-headed bad boy who you liked because of his brashness and his macho love for his family.)

Part II deserves credit for what it does and what it is: a very good movie, and a compelling study of the soul-destroying power of an America that has built-in methods of abiding criminal activity. It also gets at the things which knit this family together, and the myriad forces which tear it apart. With Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Lee Strasberg, Michael Gazzo, G.D. Spradlin, Richard Bright, Bruno Kirby, Morgana King, and Gianni Russo.

Young Frankenstein

The line between horror and comedy is tenuous, which is why so many horror films unintentionally enter into the domain of comedy. The straight horror film's mission of terrifying the audience frequently fails because the audience proffers a new, reverse-mission onto the film: to engender heckling and laughter. This is, perhaps, why Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974) is still so funny. It tells the straight horror story, but allows its over-the-top nature to reign freely.

Gene Wilder, whose performance would be criticized as too much in a serious film, suddenly becomes nothing short of magnificent. He possesses an energy that few actors can summon, and turns Victor Frankenstein into a live wire: a mad genius obsessively devoted to science and to his "creation," a reanimated corpse. He becomes endearing within seconds of that first scene, in the lecture room, where he corrects a taunting medical student on the pronunciation of his name, which he has changed to "Fronk-en-steen." He doesn't want to be linked to his famous ancestor, the original Dr. Frankenstein.

What's interesting about that scene--and indeed, the entire movie--is how much effort the director, Mel Brooks, and Wilder himself (who co-wrote the screenplay with Brooks) invest into recreating the look and feel of a 1930s Universal monster classic. The black-and-white cinematography, the antiquated sets--many borrowed from the original movies themselves, John Morris's beautiful music score, all work toward creating a legitimate representation of those films. It's in the process of carefully reconstructing the elements of the classics that Brooks and company turn every convention into a gag, pointing up (and out) the humorous side of horror. The humor has always been there, but was de-emphasized by the "serious" movies.

Marty Feldman is one of Young Frankenstein's greatest assets. As the hunchbacked assistant, Igor, Feldman never gave a funnier performance. He's a foil to Wilder's unflinching devotion to the art of science. Cloris Leachman, who has always been game when it comes to being made-up in nightmarishly unattractive make-up and costume schemes, plays the creepy Frau Blucher. Madeline Kahn turns in a small but memorable part as Frankenstein's neurotic, repressed fiance who becomes a love interest for the Monster (Peter Boyle), Teri Garr plays Frankenstein's naive East European assistant, Kenneth Mars plays an eccentric local inspector with a fake arm, and Gene Hackman has a fun cameo as a blind man who's visited by the monster.

Young Frankenstein may be Mel Brooks' best overall film. It does "spoof" right--telling its own story and letting the humor find its way to the surface. (Even still, Brooks and Wilder and the supporting cast have taken care to drench the movie in gags of every kind, in case things weren't funny enough). It's a classic, one that I always like to watch around Halloween. ★★★★

Foxy Brown

Foxy Brown (1974) was part of the blaxploitation genre, a movement that was always morally ambiguous. The genre glorifies revenge, but it also portrays strong, fearless black role models who aren't addicted to drugs. One of the few redeeming qualities of this genre is that it exhibited the destruction the drug culture heaped on black families (not to mention the patronizing, dehumanizing treatment by white figureheads).   

As a piece of narrative, Foxy Brown is surprisingly dull. It's full of badly staged fight scenes that elicit tepid laughter if anything. Even the motivations of the characters seem watered down, because the actors don't appear to believe any of the lines they're saying. The director is Jack Hill, who obviously slapped this movie together as quickly as possible to turn a buck. It lacks the storytelling power that made Pam Grier such a force to be reckoned with in Jackie Brown, which, more than 20 years after she acquired a sort of cult status for her revenge pictures, elicited more fire and power from her than just about anything she'd done before that.

Grier is undeniably beautiful and strong, and an appealing lead. But the director would rather show off her body than her bravery most of the time, and because the fight scenes are poorly done, you never really believe she's as tough as she's supposed to be. She bungles things, and seems too single-minded to be a truly remarkable heroine. And the violence is so inhuman--on both sides--that it's hard to root for anyone. It's sordid and sleazy, and it brings us all down without even the satisfaction of having a good time.

The villain is played without much finesse by Kathryn Loder, and her sleazy accomplice is played by Peter Brown. She screams at the end, "Go ahead! Shoot! I don't wanna live anymore!" Foxy replies, "Death is too easy for you, bitch. I want you to suffer." Hilariously bad dialogue permeates the movie. And these strong words are delivered with precious little conviction from a woman who has suffered, presumably a lot. And yet, she never shows it. She loses the love of her life (Terry Carter) and her two-timing brother (Antonio Fargas), and doesn't seem to feel anything. The movie confuses coldness with strength. Or perhaps she's taken it on the chin so much she bottles up her emotions. Maybe it's her only option. If the movie were made with any feeling or care or cleverness, perhaps that might have gotten through. All that is there onscreen is dumb, thoughtless revenge.