The Maestro.Reverse album cover.Theatrical poster.Morricone/Argento/Animal TrilogyOriginal poster art.
With the success of 1970’s The Bird With a Crystal Plumage, the first instalment in Dario Argento’s so-called “Animal Trilogy” (also comprised of Cat ‘o Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet – all three scored by Morricone), came a succession of gialli (Italian thrillers) with animals or insects in the title (Argento rival, Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Ducklingand Lizard in a Woman’s Skin;Sergio Martino’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, etc.).
Blu-ray cover art.
Directed by fellow Italian, Paolo Cavara (the infamous Mondo Cane; Los Amigos, starring Anthony Quinn and this site’s favourite Italian superstar, Franco Nero), Black Belly… stars the always-watchable Giancarlo Giannini (7 Beauties; Hannibal) as a worn-out detective chasing a serial killer whose method of dispatchment involves injecting their victims with the poisonous venom of the titular arachnid before tearing their bellies open, much as a wasp would do to a tarantula.
Barbara Bach in Black Belly of the Tarantula.Barbara Bach (r).Barbara Bouchet in Black Belly of the Tarantula.Barbara Bouchet, cover girl.
Giallo fans will appreciate the presence of both Barbaras – Bouchet (The Red Queen Kills 7 Times) and Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me), genre stalwarts who are, as always, effective, but underused, in roles that require little more from them than to be beautiful and frightened.
Giancarlo Giannini.
The picture is far from one of the best gialli, certainly inferior to the Argento pictures that inspired its title, but it’s well anchored by Gianni’s world weary portrayal of the detective, and buoyed greatly by the classic score from the Maestro.
According to our friends at ChatGPT:
Ennio Morricone’s score for The Black Belly of the Tarantula (La tarantola dal ventre nero, 1971) is one of his most striking contributions to the Italian giallo genre—sensual, icy, and psychologically disorienting.
Japanese theatrical poster.
Overall Character
The music blends eerie avant-garde textures with lush, melancholic melody, a contrast typical of Morricone’s giallo soundtracks. Rather than leaning on sharp, stabbing motifs (a common horror approach), he creates tension through softness, fragility, and restraint, which makes moments of violence feel even more disturbing.
Edda Dell’Orso in concert.
Key Musical Features
Breathy, wordless female vocals Performed by Edda Dell’Orso, these ethereal lines float above the orchestration, suggesting both seduction and dread. They’re one of the score’s signature elements.
Hypnotic, pulsing rhythms Morricone employs slow, repeating bass lines and low percussion to produce a sense of creeping inevitability—almost like the crawling movement of the film’s titular tarantula.
Unsettling instrumental colors Whispery flutes, muted strings, and unusual electro-acoustic effects create an atmosphere of voyeuristic suspense, a hallmark of Morricone’s experimental 1970s work.
Melodic noir-like themes Amid the tension, Morricone inserts a haunting, sorrowful theme that underscores the film’s emotional undercurrent, giving the thriller a surprisingly tragic tone.
The score is sensual but chilly, beautiful yet unnerving, and it plays a major role in shaping the film’s identity. Many listeners consider it one of Morricone’s defining giallo works, alongside his music for The Bird with the Crystal Plumageand Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Its mixture of avant-garde fear and hypnotic beauty has helped it remain a cult favorite among soundtrack collectors.
Track-by-Track Breakdown
Here’s a track-by-track style breakdown of Ennio Morricone’s score for The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Because the soundtrack exists in a few different releases with slightly different sequencing, this follows the commonly circulated track list while focusing on the major cues and themes.
1. La Tarantola (Titoli)
A whispery, suspended opening built on soft bass pulses, delicate bells, and wordless Edda Dell’Orso vocals. It sets the tone: dreamy, erotic, and quietly menacing. The rhythmic figure underneath already hints at “predator and prey.”
2. Ragnatela
One of the more experimental cues. Morricone uses plucked strings, tense tremolos, and fluttering woodwinds to mimic the sensation of being caught in a web. Nearly atonal, it provides pure psychological tension.
3. Filamento Rosso
A slow, sensual theme. The breathy vocals glide over an almost bossa-like rhythmic sway. Its beauty is deceptive—Morricone uses softness to create a sense of vulnerability, a recurring device in his giallo scores.
4. Visioni
A more melodic, melancholic cue. Sustained string chords and a wandering flute line paint a feeling of isolation and lingering threat. This is one of the most “cinematic” pieces in the score.
5. Le Donne Guardano
A motif representing observation, sexuality, and danger. Built on hypnotic keyboard patterns and muttering percussion. It has a voyeuristic quality, as if the camera were gliding through the scene.
6. Sospiri da una Telefonata
Sparse and anxious. The telephone motif uses sharp piano clusters and breathy exhalations, creating a sense of fragments in the dark. Classic Morricone suspense writing.
7. La Vittima
A tragic, almost resigned melody for strings, punctured by dissonant harmonies. It captures the helplessness of the killer’s victims without resorting to melodrama.
8. Morte di una Larva
One of the score’s creepiest tracks. The pacing is funereal, built from slow heartbeat-like percussion and hissing string textures. Morricone builds tension through understatement.
Fuller orchestra
More emotional pathos
Less experimental texture work
9. Paura e Aggressione
More aggressive than most cues: sharp string attacks, swirling woodwinds, and disorienting tape effects. Morricone briefly allows chaos to take over—one of the score’s darkest moments.
10. Ossessione di un Delitto
A deep dive into the killer’s psychology. Low, throbbing electronics and whisper-level vocalizations create an obsessive, claustrophobic atmosphere.
11. Ritorno della Tarantola
A reprise of the main title idea, but thicker and heavier. The rhythm is slightly more pronounced, and the harmonic tension more explicit, as if the “tarantula” now fully reveals itself.
12. Finale
A return to the score’s melancholic side. Morricone ties together the sensual theme and the suspense material, ending on an unresolved chord—an echo of lingering danger and emotional residue.
Overall Themes and Structure
1. The “Sensual-Menace” Duality
Morricone alternates between:
beautiful, soft, intimate writing, and
nerve-shredding avant-garde experimentation
The contrast is what gives the score its iconic emotional shape.
2. Use of Voice as a Psychological Instrument
Edda Dell’Orso’s voice doesn’t function as melody alone; it becomes:
a sigh,
a whisper of fear,
a symbol of vulnerability.
3. Organic, Crawler-Like Rhythms
Subtle percussion patterns mimic small, creeping movements, reinforcing the tarantula metaphor without becoming literal.
4. Minimalism over Bombast
Instead of loud stabs or shocks, Morricone builds unease through:
slow pulses,
fragile timbres,
texture-based suspense.
Here’s a focused comparison between The Black Belly of the Tarantula and Ennio Morricone’s other major gialloscores. Morricone was one of the composers who defined the sound of the genre, but each of his giallo soundtracks has a distinct psychological angle.
Below is a clear breakdown by tone, musical technique, and narrative function.
Comparisons with Morricone’s Other Giallo Scores
⭐ 1. The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)
Tone: Sensual + icy
Signature elements:
Breath-heavy Edda Dell’Orso vocals
Hypnotic, crawling bass patterns
Soft, minimalist tension over explosive shocks
Psychological angle:
Fear through vulnerability; beauty as an instrument of dread.
This score’s hallmark is restraint: the horror comes from quietness, softness, and eerie eroticism.
Where Tarantula uses sensuality and icy surfaces, Bird uses infantile motifs (especially the la-la-la female vocals) to create a disturbed inner psyche.
More overt avant-garde writing (clusters, tape manipulations)
A more explicitly fractured, neurotic sound
More prominent dissonance and rhythmic instability
Similarity: heavy use of the female voice as psychological symbol. Difference: Plumage is far more jagged and surreal; Tarantula is smoother, hypnotic, and suffocatingly controlled.
3. Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)
Tone: Paranoia + urban nervous energy
How it compares:
This score is more rock-influenced, with electric guitars, drum kit, and psychedelic textures.
More rhythmic drive
More overt danger cues
More “external” threat, less “internal” psychological disintegration
Similarity: experimental sound design and Morricone’s love of unconventional timbres. Difference: Four Flies is edgy and modernist; Tarantula is intimate and atmospheric.
4. Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971)
Tone: Clinical + suspenseful
How it compares:
This score has a colder, more analytical feeling—reflecting its plot about genetic experiments.
Glassy piano sonorities
Clean lyrical themes mixed with sterile, precise tension cues
Less sensuality; more investigative feel
Similarity: both rely on textures more than melody for suspense. Difference: Tarantula feels humid and erotic; Cat o’ Nine Tails feels dry, sterile, scientific.
5. A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)
Tone: Dreamlike + hallucinatory
How it compares:
This score is Morricone at his most lysergic: swirling orchestration, surreal dream sequences, and expressionistic choral writing.
More colorful orchestration
More impressionistic harmony
Larger emotional range (from horror to quasi-spiritual passages)
Similarity: both use the female voice as a sensual-psychological instrument. Difference: Lizard is psychedelic; Tarantula is cool and knife-like.
6. Spasmo (1974)
Tone: Minimalist dread + psychological erosion
How it compares:
This is Morricone’s closest relative to Tarantula in terms of whispered tension and internal anxiety, but it’s even more minimal.
Sparse notes
Very slow build-ups
Less melodic; more atmospheric
Similarity: hypnotic, creeping suspense built on subtle patterns. Difference: Spasmo is bleaker and more abstract; Tarantula is melodic by comparison.
Summary: What Makes Tarantula Unique Among Morricone’s Giallo Scores
1. Most sensual/erotic use of fear
Other scores use psychological distress or surrealism; Tarantula uses softness and breath.
2. One of his most minimalist yet melodic
Few notes create the entire atmosphere; the beauty itself is the threat.
3. Strongest integration of rhythm as metaphor
The subtle pulse—slow, crawling, inevitable—evokes the tarantula motif without gimmick.
4. Edda Dell’Orso’s voice at its most haunting
Here it becomes a whisper in the dark, rather than the childlike or operatic functions in other films.
Based on the novels After Hours and Carlito’s Way by Edwin Torres.
Music by Patrick Doyle.
Edited by Bill Pankow & Kristina Boden.
Cinematography by StephenH. Burum.
Produced by Martin Bregman, Willi Baer, and Michael Bregman.
90s cinema superstar, Al Pacino (L), reunites with his Scarface director, the great Brian De Palma (R), on the set of Carlito’s Way.
“You’re always being criticized by the fashion of the day. And when the fashion changes, everybody forgets about that.”
-Brian De Palma
Brian De Palma (L) directs Al Pacino (R) for the first time on the set of Scarface (1982).Theatrical poster.Brian De Palma (L) with Robert De Niro (R) as Al Capone on the set of The Untouchables (1987).Theatrical poster.Pacino (L) and De Palma (R), filming one of the club scenes in Carlito’s Way.
Carlito’s Way arrived in theatres on November 12th, 1993 to mostly mixed reviews, calling the film derivative of even its director’s own previous mob pictures, Scarface and The Untouchables.
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/carlitos-way-93187/The NY Times’ film critic, Janet Maslin.
The headline to Janet Maslin’s November 1993 New York Times review criticized De Palma’s film for its “triumph of atmosphere over detail” (whatever that means).
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/carlitos-way-93187/Rolling Stones’ film critic, Peter Travers.
In his contemporaneous Rolling Stone review, Peter Travers trashed Pacino’s “Rican” accent, writing that he “slips into his Southern drawl from Scent of a Woman.” He called the shootouts “derivative,” the pacing “erratic,” and ultimately dismissed the entire enterprise, writing that it went down “smokin’ in the shadow of Scarface.”
Entertainment Weekly’sOwenGleiberman labelled the film “unsurprising,” “okay entertainment,” and wrote that, “the plot would have worked better as a lean and mean episode of Miami Vice.”
Of course, once again, this site’s favourite film critic, Robert Ebert, could be counted on to have the more clear-eyed view.
Ebert awarded the film 3.5 out of 4 possible stars, praising De Palma’s set-pieces, and rightfully recognizing CW as one ofthe director’s finest pictures.
Siskel & Ebert review Carlito’s Way and other films from Nov 1993.
Discussing it on their wildly popular TV program, Ebert gave CW thumbs up, but his salty partner, Siskel, thumbs down.
Siskel complained, “I had the same kind of objections I had toScarface, which was that it was about a character that I really wasn’t interested in, because the movie makes his behaviour heroic in a way that I didn’t think it deserved.”
Director Brian De Palma on the set of Carlito’sWay.Theatrical poster.
On the Making Of featurette that accompanied the 2004 DVD release, screenwriter David Koepp recalled how De Palma predicted, in the lead up to the film’s premiere, that “Pacino, having just won an Oscar, would be criticized; Koepp, having just done Jurassic Park, would “suck”; Penn would be “brilliant” because he had not done anything for a while; and De Palma, having not been forgiven for The Bonfire of the Vanities, would not quite be embraced.[11]“
Producer Martin Bregman (L) on the set of Carlito’s Way.
On the DVD’s audio commentary track, producer Martin Bregman, (also Pacino’s then-manager), said he was suprised by the negative reviews upon CW’s initial release, but noted that its reputation has improved over the years.
As Matt Zoller Seitz wrote for Reverse Shot: “Within seven years of its release, Cahiers du Cinema named it the best film of the Nineties.”
https://www.cahiersducinema.com/boutique/produit/n542-janvier-2000/Theatrical poster.Stills from De Palma (2015).
In Noah Baumbach‘s & Jake Paltrow‘s excellent 2015 De Palma documentary, the legendary filmmaker laments CW‘s initially poor reception.
De Palma directing John Travolta (in his best part), on location for 1981’s Blow Out.Theatrical poster.
For me, it is De Palma’s best picture, nudging ahead by a nose in a photo-finish horse race with Blow Out (1981), because it has so much heart, such melancholy emotion, such grandiose visual flourish. They don’t make pictures like this anymore.And De Palma may never make another picture again. Period. So, now feels like an appropriate time to look back and reappraise Carlito’s Way.
First edition hardcover.Edwin Torres’ “about the author” blurb from the back flap of his first novel, AfterHours, which introduced the character of Carlito Brigante.
“His books are a brass knuckle to the groin. There isn’t a false note on any page.”
–Richard Price, author of Clockers.
First edition hardcover.
De Palma’s film was primarily based on the novel After Hours, and to a lesser degree, its sequel, Carlito’s Way, by judge-turned-novelist, Edwin Torres.
First edition hardcover.Theatrical poster.Q&A director, Sidney Lumet.
Torres also penned the novel from which Sidney Lumet adapted his brilliant (and criminally underrated) 1990 cops & lawyers drama, Q&A (one of his best!), starring Nick Nolte, Armand Asante, and Timothy Hutton, and featuring CW’sLuis Guzmánin a key early supporting role.
CW screenwriter, David Koepp, in his office.Theatrical poster.
Judge Torres’ Carlito Brigante stories were adapted for the screen by prolific nineties screenwriting phenom David Koepp, hot-as-hellfire coming off the unprecedented success of Steven Spielberg’s giant summer dinosaurs-run-amok blockbuster, Jurassic Park (1993).
Fresh from his Best Actor Oscar win for Scent of a Woman the year before, Pacino headlines here as the titular hero, Carlito Brigante. A reformed drug dealer, Carlito chases the promise of a new life in paradise with Gail, his one true love. But when first we meet Carlito, he’s been shot and is hanging on for dear life by a very loose thread. This may, or may not, be the end of Carlito, but it sure isn’t the beginning of his story. And so the film flashes back a few months prior.
Carlito gets his day in court.
An incarcerated Carlito, doing 30 years in Lewisburg, has his case thrown out on a legal technicality. He’s been given a new lease on life, thanks to the work of his somewhat slimy lawyer, and best pal, Davey Kleinfeld(analmost unrecognizable Sean Penn).
As Kleinfeld, Penn is at his smirking, smarmiest best. Few movie stars are as capable of so completely disappearing into a part. Especially in a supporting role, second-billed to a much bigger star.
Penn displays his first Oscar (2004).Theatrical poster.And his second, in 2009.Theatrical poster.
CW is the first significant suggestion of the calibre of work Penn would go on to accomplish throughout the decade. He’s now a five-time Oscar nominee. He has won Best Actor Oscars twice. First for Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003); andagainfor Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008).
Penn (L) with Gary Oldman (R) in State of Grace (1990).Theatrical poster.
After 1990’s superb (and underappreciated) Irish mob drama, State of Grace, at the height of his rising popularity, Penn famously took a three-year break from acting.
Penn steps behind the camera for The Indian Runner.Theatrical poster.Sprinsteen’s best record.
During this hiatus, Penn wrote and directed 1991’s devastating family tragedy The Indian Runner, inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s song Highway Patrolman, from his best record, 1982’s Nebraska. Aftersuch a prolonged absence from the silver screen, Pennwas welcomed back with open arms and singled out for praise for his performance as Davey Kleinfeld, even by those critics who otherwise dismissed Carlito’s Way.
Theatrical poster.Pacino, “in the dark,” as Scent of a Woman’s blind colonel.Pacino with his Oscar.
I can’t say I noticed Pacino slipping into his Scent of a Woman drawl, but in the early courtroom sequence, he does seem to have trouble shaking the wild “blind” eyes of Lt. Col. Frank Slade, his character from that earlier picture.
Rather, Pacino’s performance in this scene reminds me of his “You’re out of order!” speech from the late great Norman Jewison’s …And Justice For All (1979). That film is often cited as the beginning of Pacino’s unfortunate penchant for overacting, but is a performance, and a picture, I very much enjoy.
Director Paul Mazursky as the Judge.
Fans of 1970’s New Hollywood will be happy to spot director Paul Mazursky (Blume in Love; An Unmarried Woman) in an effective cameo.
Theatrical poster.Theatrical poster.
Mazursky plays the judge forced to throw out Carlito’s case because of the federal prosecutor’s use of illegally obtained wiretaps.
Kleinfeld argues Carlito’s case.The DA, Norwalk, seethes, splendidly.90s character actor, James Rebhorn.
Norwalk, the overzealous DA with highly questionable methods , is played by one of my favourite 90s character actors, James Rebhorn (IndependenceDay). Rebhorn appeared in over 100 films and TV shows before he sadly passed away in 2014.
Rebhorn (R), with Pacino (L), in Scent of a Woman (1992).
Having previously shared the screen with Pacino as the antagonistic headmaster in Scent of A Woman (1992), Rebhorn specialized in playing those parts you love to hate.
Theatrical poster.Rebhorn in David Fincher’sThe Game (1997).
He would go on to appear again with Sean Penn inDavid Fincher’s beguiling puzzle thriller The Game (1997).
Rebhorn (L) with De Niro (C) in Meet The Parents (2000).
He was hilarious playing opposite Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro in 2000’s in-laws-from-hell cringe-comedy, Meet The Parents.
Polish theatrical poster for TheGodfather Pt. II (1974).G.D. Spradlin in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Pt. II (1974).Theatrical poster.Spradlin, reuniting with Coppola forApocalypseNow(1979).
Two decades earlier, it’s not hard to imagine Rebhorn cast in the parts made famous by another actor-you-love-to-hate: the late great G.D Spradlin (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Pt. II and Apocalypse Now).
Thanks to Kleinfeld’s efforts (and Norwalk’s misdeeds) Carlito emerges from the courthouse declaring himself a new man: “rehabilitated and reinvigorated.” He vows to leave the crimes of his past in the past. A one-time legend of the streets, Carlito Brigante is a criminal no more. But Norwalk, the DA, will be watching his every move.
Dancing and drinking the night away to celebrate his release, Carlito lays out his plan to his pal, Kleinfeld, and ignores the party girls the lawyer has lined up for the night. As we will soon come to learn, Carlito only has eyes for one woman: his long lost love, Gail. If Carlito can raise $75,000 he can buy into a used car lot in Florida. “You’re gonna sell cars?” an amused and incredulous Kleinfeld asks. “I know a lot about cars,” Carlito says, though his knowledge is most likely limited to how to steal them.
Carlito loves Kleinfeld, and feels he owes the lawyer his life. Considering the fatalistic events of the opening sequence, it is a debt Carlito may just have to pay back in full before the film’s end. Though he doesn’t realize it yet. For someone who always sees the angles, Carlito has a major, Kleinfeld’s-sized blind spot.
Carlito returns to the streets that made him, and finds them unrecognizable. But he hasn’t been forgotten by the old school gangsters who still hold sway over the barrio.
Carlito meets with his old partner, now a neighborhood kingpin, and assures him Carlito doesn’t hold any grudges. He certainly doesn’t resent his old friend’s success. Nor does he expect any compensation for keeping his mouth shut when he was first arrested. Carlito wants no part of his old life. And he’s no threat. He’s retired, going straight.
But, as is the way in these pictures, and as it will be for Carlito, it isn’t so easy to shake the tendrils of the past. To his young cousin, played by John Ortiz (American Gangster; Silver Linings Playbook), Carlito is a legend. He would be doing the errand boy a huge favor if Carlito would accompany him to a routine money drop. It’s no big deal, “these guys are friends,” his cousin says. It would greatly boost his own minor reputation if Carlito would walk in like his backup. Okay, Carlito says, if only to get this over with. Carlito has promised the boy’s mother that he will look after him. And Carlito is not beyond flattery. He tells anyone who will listen that he is a different man now, but Carlito never corrects anyone who remarks on his legacy. Being one of the biggest gangsters to ever walk these neighborhood streets is a matter of pride for Carlito.
And so, Carlito follows his young cousin into a dive bar pool hall to make the drop. But inside, these guys don’t seem like friends at all.
Actor, Rick Aviles.
Rick Aviles plays Quisqueya, the dealer who Carlito’s cousin is bringing the cash to. Aviles‘ face was instantly recognizable to CW‘s audience for two unforgettable, villainous appearances in a pair of 1990’s biggest blockbusters.
Theatrical poster.Aviles as Willie Lopez in Ghost (1990).Willie takes his shot.
Aviles‘ is probably best remembered for his portrayal of Willie Lopez, the mugger who shoots Patrick Swayze dead in Ghost. With only a few minutes of screen-time, Aviles was one of the true standouts of JerryZucker’s supernatural romance.
Theatrical poster.A masked Aviles holds a knife to Bridget Fonda‘s throat in a thrilling sequence from Coppola’sThe Godfather Pt. III.
Clip from Godfather Pt III.
He was just as memorable, in an even-briefer appearance, in FrancisFordCoppola’sThe Godfather Pt III; playing one-half of the deadly duo sent by Joey Zaza (Joe Mantegna) to kill Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia).
Aviles in a lobby card for Jim Jarmusch’s Memphis anthology Mystery Train (1989).
Aviles’ promising career as one of the decade’s most interesting character actors was tragically cut short. Just two years after the release of Carlito’s Way, the actor sadly passed away from complications due to AIDS. Quisqueya may be his best work.
Almost instantly, Carlito smells something rotten in the state of Denmark. The whole set up feels wrong. De Palma imbues the scene with a creeping sense of dread as Carlito realizes they have walked into a trap.
An old school pro like Carlito isn’t going to simply wait for the other shoe to drop. He quickly formulates a plan. He will distract the goons gathered around the barroom pool table with one of his famous trick shots.
Of course, Carlito isn’t the only one setting up one of his famous trick shots. Pacino’s dialogue sounds like it could be De Palma himself speaking to the audience. The pool hall sequence, one of the most thrilling of the pictures many breathtaking set pieces, is enough, as Carlito promises, to “make you give up your religious beliefs.”
In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit-part, one of the pool-hall hoods is played by charismatic 90s supporting-actor Jon Seda.
Theatrical poster.Seda (L) with James Marshall in Gladiator (1992).
Seda was heartbreaking in the underrated teen boxing drama Gladiator the year before (the Cuba Gooding, Jr. picture, not Russell Crowe’s Roman epic).
Theatrical poster.Seda & Bruce Willis in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995).
He later played a small but memorable supporting part as a fellow time traveller opposite Bruce Willis in Terry Gilliam‘s1995 sci-fi classic, 12 Monkeys.
Theatrical poster.Seda, dying and desperate in Michael Cimino’s The Sunchaser (1996).
But his greatest role would have to be as the prison escapee dying of cancer who kidnaps Woody Harrelson in Michael Cimino‘s underseen road movie The Sunchaser (1996).
As Carlito lines up his shot, the shit hits the fan. He knew it would, and, of course, we did, too. But as with all De Palma set-pieces, the pleasure is not in being surprised by what is about to happen. Rather, it is in the skillful way that the director pays that set-up off. It’s all in the details. As De Palma says, “You have to know where everything is.” Once all the balls are meticulously arranged, knocking them into the pockets is the easy part.
Carlito is quick on the attack, but not quick enough to stop his cousin from getting his throat cut.
In the immediate aftermath, Carlito blasts away at the room full of killers, in a dizzying display of masterful cross-cutting by De Palma’s editors, Bill Pankow (9-time De Palma collaborator) & Kristina Boden.
Carlito survives the barrage of bullets blasted his way, and takes refuge in the empty washroom.
“You think you’re big time? You’re gonna fucking die BIG TIME!”
-Carlito Brigante
“You hear that? I’m reloaded!”
Emerging from the bathroom, Carlito finds his cousin murdered, and everybody else dead or gone. But there is no time to mourn the dead. Hearing approaching police sirens, Carlito scoops up the cash and hoofs it.
After disposing of the weapon he took off the goons in the pool hall, Carlito pays his lawyer a visit. Slumped on Kleinfeld’s sofa, Carlito is cool as a cucumber. If the shootout in the pool hall has rattled him, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t even mention it to Kleinfeld. Instead, Carlito says he has checked out the nightclub Kleinfeld has invested in, and thinks it’s a good investment. Kleinfeld needs someone to run it and keep an eye on Sasso, the slippery manager. Sasso has serious gambling debts and he’s been raiding the till to cover them. Kleinfeld offers to front Carlito the $25 grand that Sasso needs to cover the vig, but Carlito declines. With the $30K he netted in the shootout, he can put his own money in. Kleinfeld asks Carlito where he got the money. He was owed by “some people,” he tells his lawyer, from back in the day.
At El Paraiso, the aptly-named club in question, Sasso (ahilarious Jorge Porcel) welcomes Carlito with open arms, but tells his old friend he’s not called Sasso anymore. “Call me Ron,” he tells Carlito. I don ‘t know why I find that so funny, but I do. Carlito and Sasso/Ron, go back a long way, but Carlito doesn’t waste anytime reminiscing. They have business to discuss. And when it comes to business, Carlito doesn’t fuck around.
Waiting outside is Carlioto’s loyal muscle, Pachanga.
Pachanga is one of the few vestiges of Carlito’s past that he doesn’t try to distance himself from. But it’s evident in all of their scenes together that, while Carlito may tell himself he’s not a gangster any more, Pachanga hasn’t gotten the memo. And one can’t help but forgive him for being confused, because there is still plenty of the old Carlito left on display. There is no greater proof of that than in the first appearance of Benny Blanco, from the Bronx (John Leguizamo).
Benny Blanco represents everything Carlito is running from. Blanco may be the future of the streets, but all Carlito can see is the past. Specifically, his own past.
Fans of the picture know that Carlito has just made his first real mistake by dismissing Blanco, but for Carlito, the rising hood is nothing but a distraction. As always, his thoughts drift towards Gail.
Gail is the one thing from Carlito’s past, the one good thing, that he isn’t running from. Losing Gail is his greatest regret, and his longing for her is perhaps what ultimately sets Carlito’s Way apart from all those gangster pictures, De Palma’s own included, that it is so often compared to. Carlito, and by extension, the picture that bears his name, is undeniably romantic. Carlito is a little like Bogart’s Rick from Casablanca. He has loved and lost, and it has left a black hole in him.
Theatrical poster.The end of a love affair is the beginning of “a beautiful friendship” in perhaps the greatest ending of any picture ever.
But where Bogie made peace with letting IngridBergman go in the end, Carlito is holding onto his love for Gail with everything he’s got. Dreaming of her has sustained him through his incarceration, and all of his dreams for the future are built around her.
A vision of Gail.
But Carlito is forced to watch her from a distance. We will learn how he pushed her away, how he couldn’t bear to face his time inside while wondering what she was doing on the outside, who she was with. It was a selfish mistake, and we see in Pacino’s eyes just how much the mistake has cost him. Stripped of any dialogue to express his melancholy loneliness and his desperate need to re-connect with Gail, Pacino says everything that needs to be said with nothing more than his wounded gaze. It may be my favourite moment in the entire picture. It is truly a movie star moment. It’s pure cinema. You cannot get this feeling from a stage performance. Pacino’s face fills the frame and De Palma milks it for all he’s got, drenching Carlito in moody, torrential rain and blue-soaked light.
Penelope Ann Miller as Gail.
Gail is played with great tenderness and grace by Penelope Anne Miller (Kindergarten Cop).
Miller in The Shadow.Orson Welles performing the radio-serial, The Shadow.
A beautiful, talented actor, Miller mostly appeared in supporting parts in a few major pictures, like Alec Baldwin’s take on The Shadow (another failed attempt to re-capture the mega-success of Tim Burton’s Batman), the character made famous by thevoice of Orson Welles on the radio program of the same name (“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”).
Miller at the 67th Emmy Awards.
Rare lead performances in smallerpictures, like the comic, would-be star vehicle, The Gun In Betty Lou’s Handbag, unfortunately failed to make Miller the bigger star that she deserved to be.
Pacino doesn’t get enough credit for his appeal as a romantic leading man, something that distinguishes him from Robert De Niro, the actor (and friend) he is most often compared to.
Pfeiffer and Pacino in Frankie and Johnny (1991).
Consider the abundance of charm that buoyed his winning performance opposite his Scarface co-star, Michelle Pfeiffer, in director Gary Marshall’s (Pretty Woman) underseen 1991 film adaptation of the Terrance McNally play, Frankie & Johnny In The Clare de Lune(wisely shortened to just the characters names for the movie).
In her too-few scenes with him, Miller is every bit Pacino’s match. She runs through the gamut of emotions you would expect to feel if you were suddenly approached on the street by the lover who broke your heart after years of no contact.
As Carlito attempts to rekindle the old spark with Gail, Kleinfeld is busy trying to put out fires. Namely, the raging brush fire that is Mr. Taglialucci, the jailed mob boss from whom Kleinfeld has stolen a million dollars, promising to make a bribe on Taglialucci’s behalf, only to keep the pay-off for himself.
Kleinfeld fervently denies stealing from him, but Taglialucci isn’t having any of it. He knows Kleinfeld pocketed the money, so as far as the mob boss is concerned, he’s got a “million dollar credit” with Kleinfeld. The lawyer can either work off the debt by springing Taglialucci out of the joint (he’s paid off one of the guards to get him in the water and all Kleinfeld has to do is pick him up in this boat), or Taglialucci can have his kid Frankie put a bullet in Kleinfeld’s brain and dump his body in the river instead.
It’s not much of a choice, but as David Mamet teaches us in his MasterClass, character is not revealed by the choice between right and wrong, but by two wrongs. Everything that Kleinfeld does from here on out will ultimately come to define him.
Promotional advert for HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.Promotional advert for season two.
He’s a lawyer whose been flirting with being a gangster. But as we learned in Boardwalk Empire, “you can’t be half a gangster.” Kleinfeld is going to have to pick which side of the fence he’s on.
Poor old Davey Kleinfeld emerges from his prison visit with Taglialucci rattled to the point of vomiting. He knows Taglialucci will kill him either way. But looking out over the water, where he is meant to pick Taglialucci up the next day, Kleinfeld seems suddenly inspired. Maybe there’s a way to get out of all of this without winding up as eel food on the bottom of the river after all.
But Taglialucci isn’t Kleinfeld’s only problem. It isn’t only gangsters who want his head, which we learn when his courtroom nemesis, the prosecutor, Norwalk, pays Kleinfeld an ominous visit.
Meanwhile, Carlito is minding the club (and his own business), working towards that $75,000 grand he needs to buy himself a new life in Florida, when he is paid a visit of his own, by an old friend from his drug dealing past.
Played by a pre-Lord of the Rings-fame Viggo Mortensen, who previously starred in Penn’sIndianRunner debut, Lalin, Carlito’s old pal, was always a stand-up guy. But not anymore.
After taking a couple of bullets in the back, poor Lalin is confined to a wheelchair. But things could be worse. The last Carlito was told, Lalin was doing 30 years. But he beat it, he tells an unconvinced Carlito.
Carlito takes his Norwalk problem to Kleinfeld, who assures him that it’s just a fishing expedition. “You’re not dealing, so he can’t have anything on you.” Kleinfeld promises Carlito that he will take care of the DA.
Carlito goes down to 48th & Broadway, to the place where Lalin has seen Gail dance. But when he gets there, it’s not the classy joint Carlito was expecting.
Expecting to see Gail in a legitimate theatrical production, with her clothes on, he’s shocked to find her naked on stage in the kind of place where the regulars are middle aged men who drink themselves silly drooling over the mostly much younger dancers.
Back at the club, Kleinfeld is getting a lie too familiar with the hostess, Steffie. That usually wouldn’t be a problem, as Carlito says, “Good for Dave,” but Steffie “belongs” to Benny Blanco now. “Who?” Carlito asks. “You remember,” the unlucky waiter who Benny sends to fetch Steffie tells him, “Benny Blanco, from the Bronx.”
And though Carlito is ostensibly standing up for his friend and employee, his issue with Benny Blanco runs much deeper. “This guy is you 20 years ago,” Sasso says, pleading with Carlito to be diplomatic. But that is precisely the problem. Carlito hates the man he used to be. That man cost Carlito his freedom and the love of his life. If Benny Blanco from the Bronx is Carlito 20 years ago, then Benny Blanco from The Bronx can fuck right off.
Kleinfeld, feeling brave with Carlito behind him, makes things worse by pulling a piece. It’s the point of no return and now none of these gangsters can back down without losing face, and so Carlito has no choice but to have Benny Blanco from the Bronx taken out back, where we assume he willl have Benny killed.
But Carlito lets Benny go with a warning. He knows it’s a mistake. The old Carlito would never have left such a lethal loose thread hanging? But “I’m not that guy anymore,” he tells us.
Remember me? Benny Blanco, from the Bronx!
Benny Blanco, to Carlito
Carlito sees the light.
The Prequel:
DVD cover art.
Trailer.Title shot.
12 years after the original, Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power was released direct-to-video in September, 2005, to universally negative reviews.
https://movies.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/movies/01carl.htmlNY Times film critic Anita Gates.
In her brief NY Times review, film critic Anita Gates singled out what she considered to be the film’s sole notable achievement achievement: “It makes Sean Combs (better known, at the moment, as Diddy) unconvincing as a rich man who enjoys power and luxuries.” Faint praise, indeed.
Author’s screen credit.
CW producer, Martin Bregman, owning the rights to both of Torres’ Carlito Brigante novels, developed the prequel from the material unused by Koepp and De Palma in the first picture. But despite Rise to Power’s many shortcomings, and generally negative reputation, Torres’ allegedly* gave the film his ringing endorsement.
*According to Highdefdigest.com.
Jay Hernandez as the young Carlito.
Starring Jay Hernandez (Crazy/Beautiful) as the young Carlito, Rise to Power tells the story of the Puerto Rican gangster’s ascent in the underworld, building the legend that Pacino had to live down in De Palma’s film.
Mario Van Peebles, Michael Kelly, and Jay Hernandez in Michael Bregman’sCarlito’sWay: Rise To Power.
Carlito’s rise begins with his incarceration, locked up with a brilliant Harlem numbers man, played by Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City; Posse), and an Italian mobster, played by Michael Kelly (Netflix’s House of Cards remake), which feels like the set up to a joke that never comes (A Puerto Rican, an Italian, and an African-American walk into a bar…). Each of them represents a neighborhood, and a market, the others cannot access, so the trio conspires to transcend the ethnic barriers of their respective hoods and gang affiliations to make their fortunes together, trafficking in the new wave of heroin flooding New York’s streets in the 1970s.
Hernandez (L), Van Peebles (C), and Kelly (R) in Carlito’s Way: Rise To Power.
Without De Palma at the helm, or a writer of Koepp’s calibre penning the script, Rise to Power never approaches the dazzling emotional and aesthetic heights of the original (but really, how many directors can compete with a master stylist on De Palma’s level?). At its best, Rise to Power feels like an extended, feature-length pilot for a Sopranos-like HBO series. At its worst, it feels like what it is, a Direct-To-Video prequel. It’s nowhere near as good as it could have been, considering that it uses the same source material as the first film. But neither is it even remotely close to being the disaster that most DTV franchise pictures are.
Home video release cover art.
These “legacy sequels” often feature interchangeable sub-titles, new characters and stories, with fan-service cameos by familiar faces from the originals.
Home video release cover art.
They are, without exception, pale imitations intended to cash in on the popularity and success of those original films, and they tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth, souring our fond memories of the films they are meant to honour.
Home video release cover art.
How can you make a sequel to Spike Lee’s biggest commercial joint, without Spike Lee?!! It boggles the mind.
Home video release cover art.
The sub-genre is, to borrow the title of an Errol Morris classic: fast, cheap, and out of control.
Home video release cover art.Home video release cover art.Home video release cover art.Home video release cover art.
For irrefutable evidence, consider the partial list of remarkably un-remarkable DTV sequels featured above.
The nadir of National Lampoon?Theatrical poster.Theatrical poster.
And of course, let’s not forget about the depressingly diminishing returns of the National Lampoon franchise, which has fallen so far from the highs of Animal House and the first and third Vacation pictures.
DVD cover art.
Universal Pictures, which produced CW, is possibly the worst offender (for the 5 American Pie Presents movies alone!).
Diddy (L) & Hernandez (R).
Although Hernandez is saddled in Carlito II with the unenviable (and impossible) task of matching Pacino, one of the greatest actors of all time, in one of his best parts, he is likeable and engaging enough in the lead role.
Mario Van Peebles
MarioVan Peebles is great as the Harlem numbers man, and some other notable character actors also appear, including The Wire’s Dominick Lombardozi, and Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito, in minor roles.
Diddy as Hollywood Nicky.Mr. Untouchable, Nicky Barnes. Cuba Gooding Jr. as Nicky Barnes in Ridley Scott’s AmericanGangster (2009).
Even recently disgraced (and currently incarcerated) hip-hop mogul and sexual predator, Sean Combs (aka “PuffDaddy,” aka “Puffy,” aka “P.Diddy,” aka “Diddy”) is decent in his supporting role as Hollywood Nicky, clearly inspired by infamous Harlem gangster, Nicky “Mr. Untouchable” Barnes, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. in Sir RidleyScott’s underrated 2009 crime picture, American Gangster.
Luis Guzmán returns!
But the greatest joy for CW fans will be found in the return of Luis Guzmán, who plays a new character, but gives off heavy Pachanga vibes all the same.
DVD cover art.
Ultimately, the problem with Carlito’sWay: Rise to Power, is one that’s been a matter of public discourse of late: nepotism. To adapt & direct the prequel, Bregman hired his son, Michael Bregman, who served as executive producer on the first film. Bregman Jr., who co-produced the preciously mentioned Shadow reboot, had only one other picture to his name at the time, the forgettable Table One (also co-starring Guzman).
Theatrical poster.Ami Canaan Mann directs Sam Worthington on location for Texas Killing Fields.Screenwriter Don Ferrarone.
As with Michael Mann engaging his daughter Ami to direct former DEA Special Agent-In-Charge Don Ferrarone’s excellent screenplay for Texas KillingFields, these 2nd generation filmmakers more often than not, are lacking their famous parents’ chops (Sofia Coppola, being a notable example to the contrary).
Theatrical poster.Theatrical poster.Michael Bregman (R) directs Diddy (R), on the set of Carlito’s Way: Rise To Power.
With only one other picture to his name as director, Bregman Jr. is credited as producer, or associate producer, on a dozen other films, including the high of his father’s earlier Pacino film, Sea of Love (1988), and the low of the notorious Eddie Murphy bomb, The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002). Rise to Power suggests he shouldn’t quit his day job.
Here is a special video edit of the abridged version of the latest episode of The Filmography podcast. Bjorn and I were joined by very special guest Yaw Djang, Manchester-based restauranteur and former owner of X-Ray Films, a boutique video store specializing in Criterion and other hard to find distributors.
Do The Right Thing is Spike Lee’s incendiary third joint, a brilliant, fast, funny, and furious examination of tensions, racial and otherwise, that come to a boil on the hottest day of the summer in the Brooklyn, NY, neighbourhood of Bed Stuy.
It is a film that no one but Spike could have made. Click the links below to watch the special video episode or listen to the audio only episode on Spotify, or search for The Filmography wherever you get your favourite podcasts:
As part of a new series on the very best of true crime, this first post takes a deep dive into bestselling author & journalist T.J. English’s non-fiction masterpiece.
Author’s personal copy.
The Westies isn’t just another great true crime novel, it is THE great true crime novel. No disrespect to Truman Capote and his genre-giant, In Cold Blood, but English’s social history of the Irish gang who once reigned over New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen has greater scope, is more harrowing, and amongst others of its kind, has yet to be equaled.
Good morning, gentlemen. Nice day for a murder.
Jimmy Cagney, Angels With Dirty Faces.
So begins T.J. English’s epic gangland chronicle of The Westies, “Inside The The Irish Mob.” Though it reads like a taut thriller, this is non-fiction.
Homage or rip-off? The problem with State of Grace & Sleepers:
Theatrical poster.
Director Phil Joanou’s 1990 Irish mob drama, State of Grace, will no doubt feel familiar to readers of The Westies. A little too familiar.
Gary Oldman as “Jackie Flannery” in State of Grace (1990).
As “Jackie Flannery,” the greasy, charismatic, tortured, alcoholic, and homicidal Irish hood, Gary Oldman is clearly playing a version of Mickey Featherstone.
Penn (L) & Oldman (R).
Like Featherstone, Jackie is highly volatile, quick on the trigger, and loyal to a fault, both to his childhood best friend – now an under-cover cop (played by Sean Penn) sent back to the old neighborhood to investigate him – and to his big brother, Terry (Ed Harris), the leader of his gang.
Westies Mickey Featherstone (L) & Jimmy Coonan (R) in their mug shots.
Even the names betray the source of inspiration. “Mickey” became “Jackie.” “Jimmy” became “Terry.” Considering the degree to which Joanou and screenwriter Dennis MacIntyre seem to have modeled their characters on the figures in English’s book, you have to wonder why they even bothered changing their names.
Ed Harris as “Terry Flannery” in a publicity photo for State of Grace.
Like Jimmy Coonan, Terry Flannery is a cold, calculating killer and master manipulator who exploits his younger brother’s addiction to alcohol and propensity for violence, as Jimmy did Mickey’s, to further his own personal gains.
In an Interview Magazine article featuring Oldman and Joanou, writer Randy Sue Coburn met the actor and director, respectively, in Hell’s Kitchen’s LandmarkTavern, and the conversation quickly turned to English.
At this point both men claim not to have read The Westies, which, if you have read the book, and then seen their film, stretches credulity.
Take this for what you will: If you Google “Is State of Grace based on The Westies?” Their AIOverview provides this answer:
But perhaps the greater offender is Lorenzo Carcatera’s novel, Sleepers, and, by extension, Barry Levinson’s 1996 film adaptation of the same name.
First edition.
Ask Google the same question about Sleepers and you will get this answer:
Brad Pitt (L) with director Barry Levinson shooting Sleepers.
Accusations that the film stole from The Westies may be unfair. After all, the screenplay was adapted from the controversial memoir/novel of the same name by Lorenzo Carcaterra. As Sean Penn said to the judge in Carlito’s Way: “This is a classic ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’ situation.”
The controversy over where Sleepers’ author, Lorenzo Carcaterra, got his story from seems to have been ignited by the November 3rd, 1996 NY Daily News article: He Must Have Been A Pretenda.
The article questions whether or not the supposedly non-fiction book is truly inspired by events from the author’s own abusive childhood, as he and his publishers claimed, or if perhaps he stole some of it from a certain little book about The Westies.
I think what he’s done is take bits and pieces of information from my book, though he’s known about some people and events from the neighborhood, and then grafted it onto some version of his life story.
Other publications picked up the story and ran with it, prompting a larger conversation about the nature of truth in “true stories.”
So, what about an official adaptation of The Westies? Many have tried and failed to bring tbe book to the screen.
The legend throws his hands up.
Not even a cinematic giant like legendary American filmmaker Martin Scorsese (this site’s favourite) was successful in his attempt to mount The Westies as a feature drama.
I asked English about the possibility of ever seeing a Westies movie, and he wrote: “There have been so many development ups and downs over the decades, with different people, that I can’t begin to encapsulate it here. Currenty producers do own the rights and, I’m told, are working on setting it up as a series. Personlly, I think it’s too late now. The story has been borrowed from so much, the material is no longer fresh. The movie or series would be loaded with cliches. If it never gets made, I’m okay with that. I don’t come from a frame of mind where a book has to be made into a movie to have value. In fact, I’m pretty sure a movie/series wopuld only diminish the legacy of the book.”
He also wrote that, “Normally I don’t even repond to movie adaptation comments or questions. You’ve already gotten more out of me than anybody.” So, I consider myself particularly lucky that he went on to write, with some cautious optimism: “There are many talented young filmmakers who could do great things with it. It’s always a question of getting the budget. Movies are so expensive to make and promote.”
It’s a frustrating process that English continues to endure with his other books as well. In that same exchange over a Westies movie, English shared some of his travails in seeing his great Havana Nocturne to the screen: “Most authors go through it. Very fews books transition smoothly from page to screen. Its not how that biz works. I’m going through it right now with Havana Nocturne, which is a no-brainer as a movie or series (it’s being developed as a series). But its been 12 yrs in development so far. I try not to get emotionally involved, because it’s so frustrating.”
Theatrical poster.
Scorsese already made his Irish mob movie with Best PictureOscar-winner, The Departed (2006), so he’s unlikely to return to English’s classic. but the challenge remains open to any of those “talented young filmmakers” English refers to. Who among us has the sand to climb this particular mountain?
What the critics said:
Archived digital review.
Read Selwyn Raab’s full 1990 New York Times review here:
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I survived the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic in no small part thanks to English’s phenomenal podcast, Skull Fragments.
I wrote to English on the possibility of a second season. He replied: “It’s been a problem getting studio space, and getting people into a studio, during the pandemic. And since I’m insisting on doing the interviews live, in studio, not on the phone, this has been a problem. I do have a couple in the can, but I can’t post them until we have a full season of six. Plus I’m hard at work on a new book. So I don’t know when or if this is ever going to come together.”
Well, sir, that’s not a “no.” And with a couple “already in the can,” I’m holding out hope. The pandemic may be over, but the need for this kind of thought provoking, highly empathetic, curious, deep dive into the personalities and works of such a fascinating series of individuals only increases with time. If I suddenly find myself in charge of Spotify, or Apple, or some other commissioner of podcasts, my first act would be to order up a 2nd season, and pray for a 3rd. I’m not currently in the running for any of those positions, but prayer is free, so I think I’ll bend a knee, bow my head, clasp my hands, and keep on hoping.
Starring Jack Nicholson, David Morse, Anjelica Huston, Robin Wright, Priscilla Barnes, Piper Laurie, John Savage, KariWuher, Richard Bradford, Joe Viterelli, David Baerwald, Eileen Ryan, and Leo Penn.
Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond.
Edited by Jay Cassidy.
Music by Jack Nitzsche.
Produced by David S. Hamburger.
Written, produced & directed by Sean Penn.
A Miramax release.
Classic trailer.DVD cover art.
Like all of the greatest actors who distinguished themselves in the golden era of 1970s NewHollywood (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, etc), by the 1990s, Jack Nicholson was a bonafide movie star with a screen persona well established, polished, and refined over the decades. The distinction between “actor” and “movie star” is not meant to be pejorative. It is meant only to differentiate the roles in which, as younger men, they disappeared into their characters, and those in which, as older men, they were mostly vehicles that delivered what we had come to expect from them.
You can draw a line in the sand in De Niro’s career after Midnight Run (1988).
For Pacino, it’s Sea of Love (1989).
Hoffman, everything post-Rain Man (1988).
And the Gene Hackman of Loose Cannons (1990) was certainly not recognizable as the Popeye Doyle we know and love from both French Connection pictures.
JackNicholson as TheJoker, times three.
But more than any of his contemporaries, Nicholson entered the 90s as a mega-star thanks to a little man-in-a-rubber-suit-picture you may, or may not, have heard of:
That isn’t to say that these movie stars never showed up as “actors” again. For each of them, it was mostly in supporting parts that they were able to continue the kind of character work they did in the 70s, and occasionally, they would still get lead role roles (usually in much more modestly budgeted pictures) that showed, not only that they still had it, but that “it” had matured, and ripened with age.
De Niro would have a Night and the City (1992), Mad Dog & Glory (1993), or a Copland (1997), for every Meet The Parents (2000), or Meet The Fockers (2004), or Little Fockers (2010) or Little Fockers (2010)
Pacino would use his Best Actor Oscar-clout from Scent of a Woman (1992) to direct and star in the celebrity-packed Looking for Richard (1996), his actors-putting-on-Shakespeare passion project, in between major studio releases, Heat (1995), and City Hall (1996).
Hoffman would star in small art-house fare like the adaptation of David Mamet’s American Buffalo (1996), and Barry Levinson’s political satire Wag The Dog (1997), also written by Mamet, in between pure genre excercises like Wolfgang Peterson’s prescient killler-virus thriller, Outbreak (1996), and Levinson’sSolaris-lite sci-fi mindfuck, Sphere (1998).
Hackman would use the movie star cred he earned from blockbuster box office hits like Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide(1995) and Enemy of the State(1998), to fuel Mamet’sHeist (2001), and did some of his best work ever in Wes Anderson’s third (and my favourite) feature, The Royal Tennenbaums (2001).
For my money, Nicholson’s best performance in the 90s, and my favourite of his from any era, a role which onlyJack could have played, belongs to Sean Penn’s 1995 revenge-and-forgiveness drama, The Crossing Guard.
TCG was Penn’s second feature as writer-director, showing that his first, the searing, tragic family drama, The Indian Runner (1991), was no one-time fluke. With only two pictures under his director’s belt, Penn established himself as a genuine auteur, and one of the best American filmmakers of the decade.
Watch the video for Highway Patrolman on YouTube.
The story of the troubled relationship between two brothers (David Morse and Viggo Mortenson) on opposite sides of the law, Indian Runner was inspired by the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s Highway Patrolman from his Nebraska record (1982).
In an act of artistic reciprocity, The Boss would go on to pen the opening credits song, Missing, for The Crossing Guard.
Woke up this morning. There was a chill in the air.
Went to the kitchen. My cigarettes were lying there.
Jacket hung on the chair the way I left it last night.
Everything was in place. Everything seemed all right.
…But you were missing.
Missing.
Last night I dreamed, the sky went black.
You were drifting down. Couldn’t get back.
Lost in trouble, so far from home.
I reached for you. My arms were like stone.
Woke, and you were missing.
Missing (x II)
Search for something, to explain.
In the whispering rain, and the trembling leaves.
Tell me baby, where did you go?
You were here just a moment ago.
There’s nights I still hear your footsteps fall.
And I can hear your voice, moving down the hall.
Drifting through the bedroom.
I lie awake but I don’t move.
Bruce Springsteen, Missing.
In the opening scene, set at a group grief counselling session, we are introduced to Bobby, played by John Savage (The Deer Hunter; Do The Right Thing), who has lost his older brother.
Robert De Niro (L) and Savage (R) in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.
It’s an excellent showcase for Savage, who never found the level of fame that his Deer Hunter castmates (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep) did. But with only this brief appearance in the opening scene, Savage makes an impression that lingers long after the picture is over.
As Bobby tells us, his deceased brother was the family favourite, “Son number 1.” Bobby was always “Son number 2,” but since his brother’s death, Bobby is “Son number 3,” a nickname for “Bobby, depressed.”
Bobby talks about the piece of himself that died along with his brother. “I miss me,” Bobby says. And that’s the hard truth people don’t talk about – how we become collateral damage when we lose a loved one, and how we have to find a way to mourn that lost version of ourselves.
That loss of self, and of all the collateral damage that follows in death’s wake, is beautifully articulated in brief testimonials from the other members of the therapy group (in what feels more like documentary than drama, but is no less affecting for it), is the true subject of Sean Penn’s haunting, thoughtful screenplay.
Though she doesn’t speak once in the scene, we experience this moment through the eyes of Mary, played by Anjelica Houston (her father, John Huston’s, Prizzi’s Honor; and The Dead), identified by on-screen text as “the mother.” Mary doesn’t need dialogue for us to know that Bobby’s words speak also for her. A solitary tear from a masterful performer like Huston says it all.
Nicholson stars as Freddy Gale, “the father,” a slightly shady downtown LA jeweler drowning himself in booze and strippers in the aftermath of his young daughter, Emily’s, death in a drunk driving incident.
Freddy spends most of his nights in a sleazy stripclub with his drunken, middle-aged loser buddies, in what feels like the 90s equivalent to Cosmo’s joint in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).
Freddy has no time for group therapy. “I’m a busy man,” he tells us. “Always busy.” And besides that, Freddy has his own plan for combatting grief.
Freddy has marked his calendar. Today is the day the man who killed his daughter is being released from prison, and Freddy is going to kill him.
Played by The Indian Runner’s David Morse (12 Monkeys), John Booth is racked with crippling, gut-twisting guilt ever since accidentally killing Freddy’s and Mary’s little girl. His body may be getting out of prison, but his soul is another matter.
John doesn’t need Freddy to punish him, he’s happily taking care of that himself, as we see in an early flashback where John bashes his head against the bars of his cell, leaving him with a visible scar that can in no way compare to the invisible ones he shares with Freddy and Mary.
That’s the trouble with grief. You can’t see it. If we break our arm, we set the bone and wrap it in a cast. Everyone around us can see that we are injured, and healing. They know to take care around our broken parts. But with grief, there is no bone to set. Nothing to wrap a cast around. No sign of breakage. To everyone around us, we’re in perfect working condition. But we know better. Bobby already warned us.
Freddy, Mary, and John are all broken, but when Freddy shares his plan with Mary, his now ex-wife, remarried to Robbie Robertson (excellent in a rare dramatic performance), who is raising Freddy’s two young sons as if they were his own, she is less than grateful.
What does Freddy hope that murdering John Booth will accomplish? “Pride and relief,” he promises Mary.
Mary chides Freddy. She knows that killing Booth has nothing to do with honoring their dead daughter. It won’t bring her back. Freddy has never even had the courage to visit Emily’s grave.
“You ever have a sound build up in your head over a couple of days?”
Freddy returns to the strip joint, tries talking to his friends about his deteriorating mental state, but they laugh it off. Dismissed by Mary, and now by his pals, Freddy has nowhere to turn but to his ill-conceived plot for vengeance.
John Booth is surprisingly more receptive to Freddy’s plan. When he is confronted by Freddy sticking a gun in his face (fumbling and forgetting to load the weapon – Freddy is no practiced assassin), John seems to accept Freddy’s right to take revenge. We sense that he even welcomes it.
But he asks Freddy to take a couple of days to, “think about maybe not taking my life.” If, once those 72 hours are up, Freddy still wants to kill John, then he will be met with no resistance. “I’m not going anywhere,” John tells Freddy. “I’ll give you three days.” Freddy tells John. Maybe next time, Freddy will even remember to load his gun.
Tagline from poster (detail).
Of course, John is going somewhere. From the moment he is released from prison, he is on a collision course with Freddy. “Some lives cross,” the film’s poster tells us. “Others collide.”
Waking with a hangover and a gun.Freddy remembers to load the clip.New death day.
The journey John and Freddy are now on can lead only to one of two places – either Freddy will follow through with his pledge to kill John, continuing the cycle of tragedy and grief that began with his daughter’s death, or somehow, through all of their shared suffering and pain, their inevitable collision will bring about catharsis and change. For both of them.
John has friends and parents who love him, and would mourn him. He doesn’t want to die, but he isn’t sure he deserves to live. He returns home having served his sentence with no greater plan than just to “get on with things.” And over the next 72 hours, he will do just that, knowing that they could be his last three days on the planet.
The events of those next three days will force Freddy, John, and Mary, to confront their guilt, grief, and anger head on. Will they be further casualties of the accident that killed poor little Emily, or will they survive, and by some miracle of the Gods of Forgiveness and Redemption, find peace?
John isn’t asking for anyone’s forgiveness, and he certainly isn’t expecting to find love, but when his best friend, Peter (DavidBaerwald), introduces him to the beautiful painter, Jo-Jo, at a welcome home party thrown in his honor, suddenly, John finds himself standing across from someone with enough empathy and compassion to see past the death and guilt that have come to define his life, preventing him from really living it.
Freedom is overrated.
John Booth, The Crossing Guard.
A conversation about compassion, and who does, and does not, deserve it, has the flow and feeling of documentary that the opening grief counselling session does. It’s a wonderfully staged, edited, and performed scene which gives John and Jo-Jo time and space to safely size each other up, and grow curious.
Penn (L) and Wright (R) in State of Grace (1990).Wright (L) and Penn (R) in She’s So Lovely (1997).
Wright (L) and Morse (R) in TCG.
Played by an excellent Robin Wright (ThePrincessBride; Forrest Gump), reuniting with her past (State of Grace) and future (She’s So Lovely) co-star, and (now-ex) husband, Penn, Jo-Jo falls for John’s vulnerability, sees his pain, and offers him a port in the storm, a respite from his self-loathing.
Knowing that his days are literally numbered, John continues to sample the new life that awaits him, should Freddy choose to show him mercy, working on a fishing boat with Peter, who warns him that Jo-Jo is special, and to take care with her. “There are women and then there are ladies,” Peter tells John. “Jo-Jo is a lady.”
And as John builds bridges in his relationships, new and old, Freddy burns his own down.
Tickling the ivories.“You’re always with such pretty girls, Mr. Gale.”The dinner party.The old “tongue-in-an-aperitif” trick.Verna is unimpressed.Down the hatch!An interested party.“You must be a funny guy.”“I’m a riot.”“…Now, fuck off!”Freddy attacks.They crash into another table.Freddy’s dates love it, and cheer him on.But Verna is embarrassed.Dinner is ruined.Freddy goes full-WWE Smackdown.I pity the poor bastard (R) having to hold Freddy back.At the police station…Freddy gets fingered.The experience makes an impression on Freddy.Mugging for the shot.The flash of judgment.Ready for his close-up.“Where’s the fucking car?”
Intercut with the welcome home party sequence, is one in which Freddy escorts a trio of exotic dancers from the club, including his long-suffering, on-again, off-again girlfriend, Verna (Mallrats’ Priscilla Barnes), to a classy restaurant, only to ruin dinner with a violent outburst that sees him arrested, finger printed, and having his mug shot taken, before the girls can bail him out the next morning.
Searching…For God.Finding only…Ourselves.A moment of confession.
“The father of the girl I killed threatened to kill me last night. You’re the only one I’ve told.”
John.
“Why me?“
Jo-Jo
“I thought it would be romantic.”
John
Finding no refuge at work, Freddy’s rage and hostility are seeping out of him.
“A perfect fucking seven.”
He takes a little of that toxic bile of fury out on a dissatisfied customer, a ranting-racist played by Penn’s mother, Eileen Ryan.
Meanwhile, though Freddy has been unable to face his daughter’s grave, John visits with flowers.
There he finds Mary lost in thought, as her other children run around playing, without a care in the world. The sight of Emily’s grieving mother only further reminds John of all the pain he has caused and reinforces the idea that maybe his death really would be a fitting justice.
One of my favourite scenes in the picture is one in which a lonely, drunken Freddy visits a run down bar (brothel?) called Dreamland, where the patrons can dance with any of its “100 beautiful girls,” so long as they pay by the song.
A homeless man (played by Sean’s dad, Leo Penn) outside the bar warns Freddy not to enter Dreamland, “Unless you want to fall in love.”
My wife was a beautiful woman…
Freddy
…I met her in the sun… sun… sunny, sun…
Freddy
I could never fall in love at night.
Freddy
Follow the purple light to love (on sale).
And so, immune to any nocturnal amorous temptations, Freddy stumbles into Dreamland, where he does not find love, though he does find a selection of emotionally vacant, but physically available, young “dance partners.”
Lit like subjects for a Caravaggio painting, as a Spanish cover of Aerosmith’sLove Hurts plays on the jukebox, the women’s faces all tell the same, sad, lonely story.
Even in the arms of the woman he dances with, Freddy is totally, completely alone. There is nothing holding him to the earth. No love to tether him. Only hate.
Meanwhile John continues to explore his blossoming romance with Jo-Jo, but his guilt, she tells him, is “a little too much competition.” If they are going to have any chance at a future together, John is going to have to let go of his suffering, and forgive himself.
“Keep dancing”
Only then will John be free to accept love, from Jo-Jo, from his parents, or anyone else. “Let me know when you want life,” Jo-Jo says. But John doesn’t know how to let go of his self-loathing. He’s designated Freddy as his own personal St. Peter, and only Freddy has the power to absolve him. “What is guilt?” John asks Jo-Jo. She doesn’t have an answer. Instead, she asks him, “Do you want to dance?”
But Freddy, things will only get much darker before dawn.
In addition to an ex-wife, and a girlfriend, Freddy also has a mistress (Kari Wuher), Mia, a younger version of Verna, whom he tortures by openly flirting with Mia in front of her, even parading around on stage, to the wild amusement of his drinking buddies, as Verna looks on, trying, and failing, to hide her heartache, and Freddy takes no notice.
His dalliance with Mia proves more annoyance than distraction, as she (hilariously) serenades Freddy with a God-awful love song she has written just for him (“Freddy & Me-ee-ah,” she sings), and Freddy passes out, making him late for his date with John.
In a scene which should have netted them both Oscars, Freddy reaches out for one last desperate Hail Mary pass, calling his ex-wife after waking from a disturbing recurring nightmare.
Mary agrees to meet with Freddy, thinking that his vulnerability is proof that Freddy has turned a new leaf, but their reconciliation is short lived. Freddy’s rage returns, and so does Mary’s contempt.
Like something out of his nightmare, Freddy is haunted by the watchful gaze of a crossing guard as he drifts further away from mercy towards vengeance.
Today is judgement day.
John awaits Freddy’s arrival. There is no doubt that Emily’s father will come. Neither one of these men can escape the other’s trajectory. They are fated to make impact. But will they destroy each other? Or bring about each other’s salvation?
Freddy is delayed by a pair of LAPD officers, who pull him over for driving erratically. When he fails his roadside sobriety test, they attempt to make an arrest, but Freddy runs, and the police give chase.
“Time’s up.”
Freddy reaches John’s trailer but finds John no longer content to play the martyr. John gets the drop on Freddy, pulling a rifle. But John doesn’t want to kill Freddy. And so, now it is John’s turn to run, and Freddy’s turn to chase.
But John isn’t running away from anything. He stops more than once to allow Freddy time to catch up. Rather, John is running to something.
At the gates to the cemetery where Emily is buried, Freddy catches up to John. And as the younger man scales the fence, Freddy takes aim and fires. He clips, but does not deter, John, who rises and continues on, ultimately, to Emily’s grave.
What transpires between them as they kneel before Emily’s pink stone, is one of the most empathetic moments of any film from the 90s, or any other decade. If revenge is swallowing poison hoping that the other person will die, then forgiveness is feeding the other guy medicine and discovering that you get well, too.
Through the road was paved with hate, it has led Freddy here, back to Emily, whose loss rendered him this dedicated husk of a man. But now his anger melts away. All that is left is his grief. Finally Freddy is ready to mourn his daughter. The road ahead is long. It stretches as far as the eye can see. But hate is no longer behind the wheel. There is room for love. For Freddy, and for John. Through Freddy’s forgiveness and mercy, John is now ready to forgive himself, too.
Dawn breaks. Mary, her husband and kids, Peter, John’s parents, and of course, Jo-Jo, will all soon be waking. Maybe now, in the light of a new day, Freddy and John will be ready to face them. They want life again.
The Crossing Guard is the type of character-driven, adult-themed drama that New Hollywood turned out like hotcakes in the years between Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Heaven’s Gate (1980).
Legendary cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (R), with Nicholson (L) on location for The Crossing Guard.Publicity photo.Zsigmond, Man With A Movie Camera.
Penn’s choice of Vilmos Zsigmond as DOP ensured that TCG, at the very least, looked like one of those 70s masterpieces.
Zsigmond (R), (literally) working under genius director, Robert Altman (L).Zsigmond (L) with Cimino (C) and De Niro (R) on location for TheDeer Hunter.
Zsigmond was responsible for lensing some of that decade’s most beautiful and iconic pictures, from Robert Altman’sMcCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and The Long Goodbye (1973), to John Boorman’s Deliverance(1972), Brian De Palma’s Obsession(1976), Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Michael Cimino’sThe Deer Hunter (1978).
Troubled, but brilliant composer, Jack Nitzsche.
Theme by Jack Nitzsche.
And Penn’s selection of Jack Nitzsche to compose the score, made sure that TCG sounded like a long, lost 70s picture, too.
Excerpt from Jack Nitzsche’s score.Photo by the author.
I first saw The Crossing Guard at TIFF, when it was still referred to as “The Festival of Festivals.” It was my first exposure to the film festival, or any film festival, for that matter, an exclusive gala screening at Toronto’s magnificent Roy Thompson Hall.
Writer-director Sean Penn on the red carpet at an event for The Crossing Guard.
Sean Penn attended the gala to introduce his film and stepped on stage, smoking a cigarette (despite RTH being a strictly no-smoking venue), to declare that, although he wasn’t there in person, what the audience was about to see on screen represented Jack’s “blood, sweat, and tears.” Penn’s own blood, sweat, and tears were all over the screen, too. The film is all heart (and heartbreak).
Penn and Nicholson would reunite on the former’s next directorial effort, the very good The Pledge, another harrowing, emotional drama with exceptional performances (despite an unfortunately cast Benicio Del Toro as a mentally-diminished Indigenous man). But it is The Crossing Guard that I believe represents their greatest work together, and possibly their greatest work, full stop.
Penn (R), with Wright (C), and Gary Oldman in Phil Joanu’s State of Grace (1990).Theatrical poster.Penn, unrecognizable as Kleinfeld, Pacino’s double-crossing lawyer in Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993).
Penn famously took a three-year break from acting between 1990’s Irish-mob drama, State of Grace, and 1993’s melancholy gangster picture, Carlito’s Way, during which time he wrote and directed The Indian Runner.
Following The Pledge, Pennwould have a hit with 2007’s Into The Wild, and a miss with2016’s The Last Face. I’ve yet to see 2021’s Flag Day, but I have high hopes.
On screen, Penn followed The Crossing Guard with Oscar-nominations for Best Actor in Dead Man Walking (one of his best), the same year that TCG was released, and in 2002 for I Am Sam (not one of his best).
He won the gold statue twice, for Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003), and Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk bio-pic Milk (2009).
Penn’s star has fallen somewhat in recent years, with pictures like The Gunman (2015), and Asphalt City (2023), failing to connect with either audiences or critics, but with the upcoming release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025), he may soon be on the precipice of a major acting comeback. Only time will tell if he has enough blood, sweat, and tears left to deliver another Crossing Guard.
And with Nicholson happily and officially retired since co-starring with Morgan Freeman in Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List (2007), I’m confident we will never see a greater performance from Jack than the one he gifted us with his portrayal of Freddy Gale in Penn’s excellent and criminally overlooked 90s masterpiece.
Japanese poster.
Like those great actors of the 70s, a period to which this film spiritually belongs, The Crossing Guard has only matured and ripened with age. It’s a film I intend to grow old with. As a 15 year-old falling in love with the movies for the first time, I didn’t just see this film, I collided with it.
Starring Clint Eastwood, Jeff Daniels, WandaDeJesus, Paul Rodriguez, Tina Lifford, Dylan Walsh, and Anjelica Huston.
Written by Brian Helgeland.
Based on the book by Michael Connelly.
Cinematography by Tom Stern.
Music by Lennie Niehaus.
Edited by Joel Cox.
Starring, produced, and directed by Clint Eastwood.
A Malpaso production.
A WarnerBros. release.
Preceded by Space Cowboys(2000).
Followed by Mystic River(2003).
Blu-ray cover art.
Warner Bros. official synopsis:
“FBI profiler Terry McCaleb almost always gets to the heart of a case. This time, that heart beats inside him. He’s a cardiac patient who received a murder victim’s heart. And the donor’s sister asks him to make good on his second chance by finding the killer. That’s just the first of many twists in a smart, gritty suspense thriller that’s ‘vintage Eastwood: swift, surprising, and very, very exciting!’”
Blu-ray reverse sleeve.
It was an opportunity to do a different slant on detective work, which I’ve been associated with over the years. At this particular stage in my “maturity,” I thought it was maybe time to take on some roles that had different obstacles than they would, say, if I was a man in my 30s or 40s doing these kinds of jobs.
Clint Eastwood on Blood Work.
Author Michael Connelly (L), and director/star Eastwood (R) on location for Blood Work.
Eastwood’s underrated 2002 cop-chases-serial-killer picture, Blood Work, wasbased on the novel by bestselling thriller writer, Michael Connelly, whose work has since been adapted with much greater success on both the big screen: the Matthew McConaughey-vehicle, The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), and small: Netflix’sMcConaughey-less The Lincoln Lawyer series; Amazon’s Bosch.
In-demand screenwriter of the day, Brian Helgeland.LA Confidential director Curtis Hanson, Helgeland, and their Oscars.
The book was adapted by (sometime) director (A Knight’s Tale; Payback), andprolific screenwriter, Brian Helgeland (Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, 2004), who was on a real career-high in the period between winning an Oscar for his James Ellroy adaptation, LAConfidential (1997), and being nominated for his next Eastwood collaboration, Mystic River (2003), adapted from the book by (sometime) TV-writer (HBO’sThe Wire) and novelist (Gone Baby Gone; Shutter Island) Dennis Lehane.
Opening helicopter POV shot.Arriving at the crime scene.Harry? Is that you?!
Based upon the opening images, with the camera swooping down from God’s point-of-view, descending on a fresh crime scene just as Clint Eastwood arrives flashing a badge, you could easily be forgiven for coming to this picture cold and assuming within the first few minutes that you’re watching Dirty Harry 6.
Clint Eastwood, as FBI profiler Terry McCaleb, ducks police tape.Author, Michael Connelly.
Despite superficial distinctions like the fact that Blood Work’s Terry McCaleb is an LA-based FBI-profiler rather than a San Francisco homicide dick, much of the film does play like the natural successor to Eastwood’s last outing as Det. Harry Callahan in 1988’s The Dead Pool.
Love notes from a serial killer.
But there is one significant way in which Blood Work distinguishes itself as not just another entry in the ongoing series of Dirty Harry misadventures: McCaleb is not the indestructible force that Det. Callahan was.
Kurt Russell (R) as Jack Burton in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China (1986).
Even as he aged throughout the decades with his off-screen alter-ego, Harry was always, to quote Big Trouble in Little China’s Jack Burton, “kind of invincible.” McCaleb, on the other hand, is vulnerable to the point of fragility.
McCaleb is an older man with a bum ticker, which we learn in the opening sequence when he spots a suspicious man gathered amongst the onlookers at the murder scene. McCaleb gives chase, only for his heart to give out on him before he can collar the suspect, allowing him the opportunity to flee, which he does, though not right away.
In an effectively creepy and surprising moment, which would not have been out of place in something like David Fincher’s genre-best, Se7en (1995), rather than run, the suspect turns, and never letting the light hit his face, comes closer. He seems to be concerned with McCaleb’s well-being as the elderly federal agent collapses against the chain link fence he was unable to scale.
We begin to think the suspect might even help McCaleb, who appears to be fast approaching death’s door – before pulling his piece (not a .44 Magnum, but might as well be) and begins blasting away.
Despite the barrage of bullets McCaleb unleashes in his direction, the suspect manages to escape, though one of the shots wounds him, before it’s lights out for poor Terrry McCaleb.
But McCaleb doesn’t die. He’s given a new heart via life-saving surgery by his frustrated doctor, a small part played well by a ridiculously over-qualified Anjelica Huston.
Theatrical poster.Angelica Huston in The Royal Tennenbaums.Theatrical poster (detail).Bill Murray (L) with Anjelica Huston (R) in The Life Acquatic (with Steve Zissou).Theatrical poster (detail).Anjelica Huston in The Darjeeling Limited.
At this time, Huston’s career was just beginning its late-period flourish. Call it her “Wes Anderson-period,” from The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), through Life Acquatic (2004) to The Darjeeling Limited (2007). Her presence here just adds a touch of class, though one can’t help but wish she had been given more to do.
As for McCaleb, his heart attack has finished his career, but at least he’s still alive. Though he’s not out of the woods just yet. Throughout the picture, McCaleb occasionally raises a hand to his chest, reminding us, and himself, of his precarious mortality. We begin to fear he may not be up to the task. Just about everyone he comes into contact with tells him he looks like death warmed over.
It’s hard to imagine seeing Det. Harry Callaghan in so fragile a state. Dirty Harry doesn’t get heart attacks. He doesn’t even have a heart.
McCaleb seems to have settled into his forced retirement, living an old boat he’s fixing up.
His neighbour in the marina is surfer bum, Buddy Noone, played by Jeff Daniels (The Purple Rose of Cairo; TheNewsroom), as a goofy, but harmless and likable harmonica-playing surfer bum.
Buddy alerts McCaleb to the presence of a woman waiting for him on his boat.
Her name is Graciela. She’s read about McCaleb in the paper and wants his help tracking down her sister’s killer.
“Which one is dead?”
McCaleb tells her he’s retired and offers to recommend a good private eye. But Graciela believes McCaleb is going to want to help her after all.
“You have my sister’s heart,” she tells him.
The news shakes McCaleb.
It keeps him up at night.
And so he calls Graciela, telling her not to get her hopes up, but promising her he will look into it.
He goes to see the cops working her case, the same two dicks he clashed with at the opening crime scene. He bribes them with some Krispy Kreme donuts for a look at the murder tape.
Paul Rodriguez plays the murder tape.
The more openly hostile of the detectives plays McCaleb the tape, which shows a Good Samaritan entering the store moments after the shooting, trying to save Gloria’s sister’s life. McCaleb thinks the Good Samaritan must have seen the killler, but the tape never reveals his face.
McCaleb visits the scene of the crime and spots the store’s CCTV.
Agita.
He also picks up a tail.
At the public library he does a little research into the liquor store homicide (and remembers to take his heart pills).
Then visits an old cop friend, who we learn he worked with on the “cemetery man murders,” the case we assume made his career.
The tape shows the killer addressing the surveillance camera directly, though there is no audio. “Yeah, he’s a real chatterbox,” McCaleb’s police friend tells him. MCCaleb remembers the killer appeared to speak in the liquor store tape, too. “Have you given this to any lip readers?” He asks her. She hasn’t. But she sure will.
“You look tired.”
McCaleb can’t drive with his heart condition so he recruits his marina neighbour, Buddy (Daniels). Buddy worries about McCaleb. “You look tired,” Buddy tells him. “You should get some rest.” It’s good advice.
But McCaleb cannot rest until he catches Graciela’s sister’s killer. He is literally haunted by her murder – dreaming about it from her perspective.
For my money, McCaleb’s nightmare sequence is the best use of negative imagery in any film since Scorsese deployed it in his Cape Fear remake (1991).
“Oh man, Starsky & Putz.”Clint interviews a witness played by Rick Hoffman (Louis Litt on Suits).Blame it on the Russian.
With Buddy now in tow as Clint’s personal chauffeur and the audience’s comic relief, McCaleb continues to follow clues, interview witnesses, and search for new suspects.
And as his investigation grows, so too does his relationship with, and affection for, Graciela. Their slow-burn romance is one of the best things about Blood Work. The part of Graciela could have felt like little more than a plot device, but in the hands of director Eastwood, screenwriter Helgeland, and actor WandaDeJesus, who plays her, Graciela is a fully realized character, suffering a terrible loss, trying to do the right thing by pursuing justice for his sister. Her presence in the picture moves the story along but also deepens our understanding for McCaleb through her eyes, and gives greater purpose to his mission. It’s one thing to lay everything on the line for a ghost, another for a living person, whom you will have to face when this is all over. Their blossoming love story gives the investigation emotional stakes.
Blood Work author, Michael Connelly.https://screenrant.com/blood-work-movie-clint-eastwood-terry-mccaleb-death-michael-connolly-hate/
Much of what makes Blood Work a satisfying thriller is down to author Michael Connelly, who apparently hated Clint’s adaptation (according to the Screen Rant article above) so much, he killed the character off. In the novel, Connelly created a character of uncommon vulnerability and compassion amongst thriller genre protagonists, and plotted an air tight-mystery where the killer’s reveal matters to us for once.
At this point, if you haven’t seen the film, you should save this post to your Reading List and seek out the movie, because you are leaving the spoiler-free zone.
Jeff Daniels as Buddy Noone.
Last warning…
There is no way to talk about Jeff Daniels’ performance without addressing the fact that he is ultimately revealed to be the psycho killer behind the blood-stained love letters to McCaleb, and the long string of dead bodies he offers up like wilted roses in a perverse courtship. Which is what the killings amount to.
Buddy is a little like JessicaWalters’ deranged stalker-fan in Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty For Me (1971): obsessed and delusional.
Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire.
When Buddy is finally caught, he makes declarations straight out of the Jerry Maguire “You complete me”handbook.
Even though this is a thriller with Clint Eastwood, the character (of Buddy Noone) was like a distant cousin to Dumb & Dumber.
–Jeff Daniels on Blood Work.
Interview with Daniel’s for DVD supplemental materials.Not a still from Dumb & Dumber.Theatrical poster.
Casting Daniels was a brilliant choice. Having long since established himself as an affable, non-threatening, light-comic leading man in pictures like WoodyAllen’sThe Purple Rose of Cairo (1984) and Pleasantville(1998), as well as slapstick comedies like the FarrellyBrothers‘ Dumb & Dumber pictures, his presence in Blood Work as Clint’s funny sidekick made a lot of sense. But that well-established screen persona is used here as a smokescreen. Daniels is such a likeable performer, with such an air of decency and kindness, that the reveal of Buddy as the twisted serial killer is a total surprise. But Daniels seems to have so much fun once Buddy is unmasked, that the audience can’t help but have fun with him, too.
Take the scene where Buddy encounters the dead body of a murder victim and becomes visibly upset before having to walk away. This moment connives us that Buddy is a harmless, sensitive guy, and his revulsion at the killer’s violence speaks to our own. We identify more with Buddy than Clint’s tough-guy FBI profiler. Buddy is us. But of course Buddy’s reaction to the dead body is just a performance that he is putting on for McCaleb’s benefit (like everything else he does in the picture).
What really makes the twist work may not be evident upon first viewing, but on a second look, knowing that Buddy is the villain, you can see the slight undercurrent of menace and perversion to Daniels‘ performance. There is something creepy upon second viewing about the way that Buddy is overly concerned about McCaleb in all of their scenes together. Buddy is a little too invested in McCaleb’s well-being. When you know Buddy’s true intentions, his actions are all the more unnerving.
Following the reveal of the Code Killer’s true identity, the story becomes a more perfunctory plotting out of their inevitable confrontation.
But it is so gorgeously shot, with McCaleb slipping in and out of the shadows and fog of the marina at night, that you can forgive the simplicity of its narrative design.
This is where the film plays most like the closing chapter in the Dirty Harry saga. McCaleb isn’t here to make arrests. There’s nothing he wants more than a justifiable reason to pull the trigger on Buddy and close the book on the Code Killer once and for all.
You can’t help but anticipate McCaleb spitting out Dirty Harry’s trademark, “Make my day,” before Buddy does just that by pulling his machine gun.
McCaleb shows no hesitation or mercy. Like Det. Callaghan, he has no qualms about putting down a rabid dog, which is what a psychopathic killer like Buddy is to a man like McCaleb.
But it’s the water, not the bullets, that finally puts an end to the Code Killer. And not McCaleb’s hands…
But Graciela’s. She has avenged her sister’s killing. She is at peace.
One look at McCaleb tells us he is at peace, too. His mission is complete. He can move on with his life now and enjoy what’s left of it. And he won’t have to do it alone anymore, either.
This being a Clint Eastwood picture, in the end, the bad guys are punished (killed), order is restored, and the hero is rewarded for his bravery (violence).
And they all live happily ever after.
When last we see him, McCaleb and his new love, Graciela, are literally sailing off into a perfect, golden sunset.
Theatrical poster.
It’s a far cry from the sadistic head-in-box ending that Fincher gave us in Se7en.
If it never achieves Se7en’s lofty heights, or those of that other genre benchmark that has so rarely been equaled, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, it still manages to rise above so many other lesser attempts to capture the magic of those two suspense classics (see: The Cell, Taking Lives, The Little Things, Longlegs, etc.).
Eastwood, his own best director.
You can tell when a scene is good. If you’re in the scene, and you’re playing the scene, you can tell when it’s working for all the characters. It can be difficult. Sometimes, when actors direct, when they are off camera, they start watching it, instead of participating in it. That can be a problem. You have to make sure you’re always throwing the switch.
–Clint Eastwood on directing himself.
Eastwood (L), and director DonSiegel (R), on set for their iconic film, Dirty Harry (1971).
Once again, Eastwood proves that no one since his mentor,thelate, great Don Siegel (Dirty Harry; Escape From Alcatraz), directs him better than he does himself. He never attracts attention with frivolous framing or movement, but in the opening and closing chase sequences he proves that he’s as good a genre filmmaker as anybody.
And as an actor, Eastwood understands his relationship to the camera and to the audience. It may seem, superficially, that he is often playing the same character, but it is in the fine nuances and subtle variations on his screen persona that his skill as a performer really shines through. It reminds me of listening to Philip Glass’ music. Initially, all his compositions sound the same, but the more you listen, the more you hear and feel the impact of even the slightest variation on a melody. Blood Work may be a familiar tune, but it’s catchy, and you may find yourself humming it long after the picture is over.
Double Demme! Uncle Jonathan (L) and nephew Ted (R).
Nephew of legendary filmmaker JonathanDemme (SilenceofTheLambs; Philadelphia), TedDemme quickly established himself as a talent all his own with the 1993 Yo! MTV Raps buddy cop comedy, Who’s The Man?, starring EdLover and DocterDré (not that Dr. Dre) as the cop buddies, and featuring Leary in one of his first roles as their angry sergeant.
“The first hip-hop whodunnit!”Theatrical poster.Demme (R), with his Monument Ave stars, Leary (L), and Sheen (C).
Developing a deep, lasting friendship off-screen, Demme and Leary would continue to work together successfully on multiple projects over the course of their careers.
Leary (L) and Demme (R) clown around in this magazine article photo.Demme (L) and pal, Leary (R).Theatrical poster. “He’s taken them hostage. They’re driving him nuts.”A young TedDemme while filming TheRef.
Demme’s follow up to Who’s The Man? was Touchstone’s (Disney’s) TheRef, co-written by Oscar-nominee Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, Living Out Loud), starring Leary in his breakout role.
DenisLeary as Gus, cat burglar-turned-marriage counsellor in TheRef (1994).
Leary plays Gus, a wise-cracking cat burglar forced to play marriage counsellor over Christmas when he breaks into the home of duelling spouses played by KevinSpacey and JudyDavis.
Demme (C) directs Spacey (L) and Davis (R) on set.
The film underperformed at the box-office, but was well received by critics. Roger Ebert (officially this site’s favourite) gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and said, “Ted Demme juggles all these people skillfully. Even though we know where the movie is going (the Ref isn’t really such a bad guy after all), it’s fun to get there.”
Demme (L), and Leary(R) on set.
Demme also directed Leary’s stand-up specials, No Cure For Cancer (1992), and Lock‘NLoad (1997).
Leary announced himself as the new Bill Hicks with his profane, rapid-fire monologues.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inLRcdZbO1ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB9RFRTiW70Demme checks the frame on set for “BeautifulGirls.”
Demme’s follow up picture to The Ref was the 1995 romantic-comedy-drama, BeautifulGirls, written by ScottRosenberg (Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead).
Check out that cast!
Trailer.
With shades of LawrenceKasdan’sTheBigChill, and JohnSayles‘ ReturnofTheSecaucus7, BeautifulGirlsis a sweet and funny ode to that particular brand of ennui and nostalgia you encounter in your 20s, when you’re too old to act like a teenager anymore, but too young to feel like a real grown up.
The men of BeautifulGirls (L-R) (Dillon, Emmerich, Perlich, Rappaport, and Hutton, knocked out by UmaThurman (L).Thurman is radiant in one of her first post-“PulpFiction” roles.The women (L-R): Sorvino, O’Donnell, Holly, and Thurman.
The dramedy boasts a ridiculously stacked cast (MattDillon, Mira Sorvino, Uma Thurman, Tim Hutton, Noah Emmerich, Michael Rappaport, Rosie O’Donnell, Lauren Holly,David Arquette, Max Perlich, Martha Plimpton, and Natalie Portman (among others).
Dillon (L), reunited with his “DrugstoreCowboy” cast mate, Perlich (R).Portman gives a fine performance, but the character is ill conceived.
Portman’s character’s storyline is the only element which has really aged poorly, that of a 13-year-old girl who would be the object of TimHutton’s affection if only she were five years older!
Hutton (L) and Portman (R).
Given the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against Hutton in the years since the film’s release, and especially those against cinematographer AdamKimmel (who also shot MonumentAve, Jesus’Son, and Capote), a registered sex offender charged with child sex assault in 2010, this cringe-inducing subplot, which seemed harmless to me in 1995 (when I was only 2 years older than Portman’s character), now seems so wildly inappropriate I’m hard pressed to imagine how it wasn’t excised from the shooting script, let alone the finished film before release.
One of the best of all time!
Demme did some very good TV work after BeautifulGirls.He directed two episodes of one of the greatest series in the history of television, Homicide: Life on The Street; one episode of the 6-film anthology series Gun, starring a pre-Sopranos-fame JamesGandolfini, with other episodes directed by the likes of the great RobertAltman (The Player, Short Cuts), and the very good JamesFoley (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Corrupter); the ManhattanMiraclesegment of the HBO short film anthology, SubwayStories, once again featuring DenisLeary, with contributions from my main man, AbelFerrara (KingofNewYork, BadLieutenant), and Demme’s uncle Jonathan (Melvin & Howard; The Truth About Charlie).
Next came the excellent and overlooked, Monument Ave. starring Denis Leary as a small time Boston car thief who has a crisis of conscious when his own gang kills two members of his family.
Demme (L) with Anthony Anderson (C) and Martin Lawrence (R) on set for Life (1999).
Demme followed it up a year later with 1999’s criminally slept-on EddieMurphy (Coming to America; 48 Hrs)/MartinLawrence (Bad Boys 1-4; BlueStreak), prison-dramedy, Life.
Theatrical poster.
Trailer.
Making of.Demme and his viewfinder.
Produced by BrianGrazer (Backdraft; Ransom), Life stars a perfectly-paired Murphy and Lawrence doing some of their very best work, playing characters with depth, not just delivering punchlines and sight gags.
Murphy (L), and Lawrence (C), take shit from NickCassavetes (R) in Life.
Written by RobertRamsey & MatthewStone (the CoenBros.’ Intolerable Cruelty), Life is the surprisingly empathetic story of two wrongfully convicted New Yorkers incarcerated for life in an all black Mississippi prison camp under the oppressive watch of Nick Cassavetes’ (Delta Force 3; Face/Off) white prison guard.
Lawrence (L) and Murphy (R) growing old together.
Where the film truly distinguishes itself is in its second-half, when the story begins to speed up to show Murphy and Lawrence advancing into their golden years.
Eddie Murphy’s old-age mask.Murphy submits to Rick Baker’s (L) make-up chair. Murphy (L) and Lawrence (R) in their old age makeup.Ready to roll film.Best in his field.
For the excellent artistry and craft that went into the process of creating the progressive looks for each of the characters through the passing years (not even Cassavetes’ prison guardisspared the ravages of time), prosthetics wizard, Rick Baker (An American Werewolf In London) received an Oscar-nomination for Best Make Up.
Life, make-up featurette.“You know what Frank Sinatra said to me?!”Murphy expanded his reputation for disappearing into a character through make up and prosthetics with this 1996 reimagining of the Jerry Lewis comedy.Hefailed to recapture the magic in this unfortunatley mean-spirited 2007 picture.
Even when it feels more gimmick (Norbit) than inspiration (the barber shop scenes inComing to America; The Nutty Professor), the truth is that nobody manages to be funnier under the weight of heavy prosthetics than Eddie Murphy. Though Lawrence holds his own here, faring much better than in the Big Mama’s Housepictures.
As if once wasn’t enough…They just had to do it again!And three times was decidedly NOT the charm for Big Mama.
Take a look at the scene in Life where Lawrence finally re-encounters society as an old man.
The scene isn’t played for laughs, cheap or otherwise. The make up-prosethics are used in aid of telling the story, not as a gag.
Getting older can sure feel like this. “What the fuck?” indeed.
The scene is truly moving in the way it centers Lawrence in a maelstrom of confusing change with gentle compassion.
The haircuts…
Lawrence is like The Man Who Fell To Earth here, an alien in a strange world that he doesn’t recognize or understand.
The radios…
He may be an alien in this place and time, but we are right there in that moment with him, because of the humanity in the writing, directing, editing and, especially, the performing of this scene, which wouldn’t have been out place in Shawlshank.
But mostly…
Life. Was it Jim Morrison who said, “None of us gets out alive”? No truer words.
…time changes us.
Though the film was overlooked upon its initial release, a slow re-appraisal has begun to build:
And probably my favourite thing about it is that it refuses to go out on a melancholy note.
Theatrical poster.Never too late for a ballgame.Waving goodbye.
Like Michael Keaton and pals in The Dream Team, andJim Belushiin Taking Care of Business before them, Murphy and Lawrence escape the hooscow to catch a little of America’s favourite pastime.
Remembering that they forgot to finish arguing.
In the end, though still bickering like an old married couple, Murphy and Lawrence have truly formed a hard won friendship. Watching that develop slowly over a lifetime locked up together is the film’s true joy.
French poster.
Also of note in Life, among its wonderful supporting cast, which includes Bernie Mac, Ned Beatty, and a silent Bokeem Woodbine (Strapped; The Sopranos) is Nick Cassavetes.
Father John (l) and mother Gena (r), with baby Nick (m).
Atalented director in his own right (She’s So Lovely; Alpha Dog), Nick is the son of cinema’s premiere iconic power couple, JohnCassavetes (Husbands; Killing of a Chinese Bookie) and GenaRowlands (Woman Under The Influence; JimJarmusch’sNight on Earth).
Theatrical poster.
Trailer.
The young Cassavetes went on to co-write (with David McKenna) Demme’s next picture, 2001’s Johnny Depp (TimBurton’sEdwardScissorhands; Jarmusch’sDeadMan) cocaine epic, Blow.
Depp’s hair outshines his performance as George Jung in the disappointing Blow.
The film co-starred PenelopeCruz (VanillaSky; Almodovar’sVolver), Franka Potente (Run Lola Run; The Bourne Identity) Run, EthanSupplee (American History X; Wolf of Wall Street); and Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure; Batman Returns), in a rare dramatic part.
Demme (r), directs Depp (l).
Adapted from BrucePorter’s non-fiction book, the film tells thetrue story of American drug kingpin, GeorgeJung.
Depp (l) and Demme (r).
Though it grossed $30M over its $53M budget, the film was considered somewhat of a disappointment, drawing unfavourable comparisons to more successful sex, drugs & rock n’ roll saturated dramas of human excesss, like Scorsese’sGoodfellas, and PaulThomasAnderson’sBoogieNights.
Director TedDemme with hisBlow cast member PaulReubens (Pee–Wee’sBigAdventure“), and Goodfellas‘ DebiMazar (SpikeLee’sJungleFever) .(l to r): Demme, Reubens, Ann and DenisLeary at the Blow premiere.Demme promotes Blow on Charlie Rose.
Demme’s final film was as co-director with his TheRefscribe RichardLaGravenese on the excellent documentary A Decade Under The Influence: The 70’s films that changed everything.
Poster art recalling the iconic “Blow Up” design, with a cinema camera instead of a photos-only point-and-shoot.
The documentary is a cinephile’s dream, featuring interviews with just about all of the luminaries who made the 1970s the true golden age of cinema. It also serves as the ideal syllabus for anyone unfamiliar with the films of the period wanting to know where to start watching.
Demme tragically passed away before the film was released, suffering a fatal heart attack (supposedly as a result of excessive cocaine use) during a celebrity basketball game on January 14, 2002. He was only 38 years young.
And with that, American cinema lost one of its most promising young directors, but he left behind a legacy of 7 wonderful films, all very different from each other in terms of genre but unified by the great warmth and empathy Demme bestowed upon all of his characters. My kind of filmmaker.
Uncle Jonathan’s fun and frenetic 2002Charade remake.
JonathanDemme dedicated 2002’s Charade remake, The Truth About Charlie to his nephew.
Wahlberg in a regrettable beret in TTAC.Cary Grant in Charade.Thandiewe Newton in TTAC.Audrey Hepburn in Charade.
TTAC starred a woefully miscast MarkWahlberg (BasketballDiaries; Boogie Nights) in the CaryGrant role, and a delightful ThandiweNewton (the underrated 2Pac/TimRothaddictiondramaGridlock’d; JonathanDemme’sBeloved) in the AudreyHepburn role.
Adam Sandler hits the right note as Barry in Punch-Drunk Love.
The honour was also bestowed upon the younger Demme by P.T. Anderson, who dedicated his 2002 Adam Sandler vehicle, Punch–DrunkLove, to him.
Demme, not long before his fatal heart attack at the age of 38.
Starring Denis Leary, Ian Hart, Famke Janssen, Noah Emmerich, Billy Crudup, JasonBarry, JohnDiehl, ColmMeaney, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Greg Dulli, and MartinSheen.
Written by MikeArmstrong & DenisLeary (uncredited).
Cinematography by AdamKimmel.
Music by ToddKasow.
Edited by JeffreyWolf.
Produced by TedDemme, NicolasClermont, ElieSamaha, JimSerpico, and JoelStillerman.
A Miramax release.
Synopsis from miramax.com
“In a tough Irish-American neighborhood, Bobby is a small-time car thief for the area’s top mobster. But when Bobby’s own gang kills members of his family, he is faced with a tough choice: defend his family honour or obey the rigid neighborhood code of silence.”
Theatrical poster for Armstrong and Leary’s previous collaboration.Home video poster (detail).
With a screenplay by Mike Armstrong (1996’s decent, but overlooked, Denis Leary/Sandra Bullock romance, Two If By Sea), MonumentAve (aka Snitch) was marketed as an “Irish MeanStreets,” but mostly dismissed in its day as another in the endless stream of post-Reservoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction QuentinTarantino knock-offs. It’s so much better than that.
QT, often imitated, rarely equaled.The film that started an Indie revolution…And the one that made Tarantino a legend.The most famous example of Tarantino-esque imitation.Guy Ritchie’s debut had the Independent peg him “the British Tarantino.”Even poor Vincent Mancini fell prey to the trend.A forgettable picture save for the star-making turn by CharlizeTheron. The most egregious offender: TroyDuffy’s bafflingly popular Boondocks Saints.Decent cast, dull script.
Monument Ave, in contrast to those other pictures, works not only as a compelling, minor-key gangster film, but also as a finely-drawn character study, morality tale, and like Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead (expect a future post on that film in this series) would do a year later, it is a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of grief and guilt.
In fair Charlestown, where we lay our scene…
DenisLeary(Judgement Night; Rescue Me) stars, in his best film role, as Bobby O’Grady, a small time car thief but big fish in the local pond that is his South Boston Irish-Catholic neighbourhood.
The viewer gets the immediate impression that Bobby is basically a good guy, that he’s only a criminal because he never found anything else he was any good at.
“The fuck’s up?”“Hey, who’s holding?”
He’s not particularly greedy, nor violent (except when he’s finally pushed too far), and mostly spends his days and nights hanging out with his lifelong best pals, Mouse, played by IanHart (Backbeat, the new season of Shetland), Red, playedby NoahEmmerich (Demme’sBeautifulGirls; PeterWeir’sTheTrumanShow), Digger (JohnDiehl, Mo‘ Money; Heat), and Bobby’s cousin Seamus (JasonBarry, McCallum), visiting from Ireland.
Their underworld activities feel more like the harmless pranks of a bunch of overgrown juveniles than actual crimes. There’s nothing malicious about their transgressions.
Like the scene where they run down a quiet street at dawn setting off car every alarm on the block just for a laugh.
Or take, for example, the deceptively tense car “chase” that opens the film.
We see flashes of two men inside their respective vehicles, which are racing down a busy street, in what appears to be a hot pursuit, but is revealed to be two car thieves just having a bit of fun on the job before they turn in the Porsche they just boosted.
Winona Ryder.Jessica Lange.Michelle Pfeiffer.“Winona Ryder’s a cracker.”
And what do they do to celebrate the successful grand theft auto that opens the picture? Bobby, Mouse, and Seamus have a sleepover, watch TV, and discuss the famous women they fantasize about, but will never encounter, like Winona Ryder, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jessica Lange, while cutting up lines from an 8-ball of cocaine.
Seamus is off is face.The salad days.Young Teddy and Bobby and friends.
Demme and his editor, Wolf, use the clever device, introduced in the “chase,” of inserting photos from the recent and long ago past (with Leary’s son Jack standing in as Young Bobby) to suggest their shared history.
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight: The Prequel.
It proves to be a very elegant and economical way of stitching back- story into the main narrative with very little screen time and without relying on clunky dialogue for exposition.
As boys, they played “Cowboys & Indians.” As men they’re playing “Cops & Robbers,” only now the stakes are much higher – even if none of them realizes it until it is far too late.
“It’s not the car you steal, Mouse, it’s the car you bring in.”
Bobby’s relatively easy-going existence is complicated by another cousin, Teddy, who is more like a brother than a cousin to him.
Bobby is concerned.Billy Crudup as Teddy in Monument Ave.
Teddy is supposed to be in prison doing a three-year bid. He most certainly should not be down at the local pub telling cock ‘n bull stories about outsmarting the feds to get himself early release.
Ron Eldard (L) and Billy Crudup (R) in Sleepers (1996).Crudup in Jesus’ Son (1999)
Teddy is played in a fun and flashy extended cameo by a young BillyCrudup betweenstar-making turns in Barry Levinson’s Sleepers (1996)and Jesus’ Son(1999).
David Proval (l) and Robert De Niro (r) in Mean Streets.Colm Meaney (l) as the neighborhood’s Irish don.
Like DeNiro’s Johnny Boy in MartinScorsese’sMeanStreets, Teddy is a walking live-wire who has run afoul of the local crime boss, Jackie, played by a scenery-chewing ColmMeaney (Far & Away;The Van).
Teddy’s tall tale is that he only gave up some lowlife called Perez, and that he would never ever give up Jackie. When the cops asked about the boss, he told them to go fuck themselves.
Neither the audience, nor anyone at the table, finds Teddy’s story very credible, but it seems to pacify Jackie, who raises a glass and toasts to Teddy’s return.
Crisis seems to be averted. For now. But Teddy is the kind of guy who thinks the rules don’t apply to him, and Bobby knows that Jackie is fast running out of patience, and it’s only going to be a matter of time before there are consequences.
Harvey Keitel in MeanStreets.Meaney (l) and Leary (r) play hard.
And like HarveyKeitel’s Charlie in MeanStreets, Bobby is forced into the unenviable role of playing peacekeeper between these two volatile men that he can’t control.
Keitel and Amy Robinson in Mean Streets.FamkeJanssen (r), as Katy, the boss’ wife and Bobby’s mistress.Katy and Bobby in a clandestine bathroom rendezvous.
But also like Keitel in MeanStreets, Bobby is compromised by a secret (and doomed) love affair: in this case, with Katy, Jackie’s neglected and deeply unhappy wife, played by FamkeJanssen (GoldenEye), also in her best role.
Seamus has a laugh with the fellas.
One of the pivotal scenes in the film is the sequence which begins with the gang sat around a table at their local, telling stories over pints of beers.
Red (Emmerich) and Gavin (Brian Goodman) laugh it up.
We get the feeling that this night is just like hundreds of other nights these guys have spent getting drunk and shooting the shit together. But this night will soon change the rest of their lives.
Digger (Diehl) and Shang (Greg Dulli), a captive audience.
Demme creates a mood of great conviviality here before pulling the rug out from under us.
Bobby delivers the punchline.
Unbeknownst to anyone else at the table, Jackie has ordered Shang, one of his henchman, to take Teddy out.
Shang gets the last word. In this case the word is a bullet.
In a nice bit of sleight-of-hand directing, Shang is first established as just another one of the guys, listening to the story and laughing along with Bobby and the others, before suddenly pulling a gun and, without a moment’s hesitation, squeezing the trigger.
The drama turns with the muzzle flash.
It is a moment of cold, brutal violence, perhaps most shocking for the casual manner in which it is dispensed.
Teddy goes down for the count.
Neither Bobby, his friends, nor the audience sees this gangland execution coming. And because it is so unexpected (preceding the shooting is a long, funny, anecdote about Mouse taking a nap in the middle of a burglary), this eruption of violence, seemingly out of nowhere, hits us hard. As it should.
The recently departed.
The sudden change in tone is masterfully handled by Demme, screenwriter Armstrong, editor Wolf, and the entire ensemble cast, allowing each character time to react in the immediate aftermath.
Red runs from the table. Gavin tellingly, does not.Digger is shocked.Bobby is devastated.Mouse calls it like it is: “Fucking Jackie.”Jackie and Teddy in happier times.
And though Shang pulled the trigger, there is no doubt about who is ultimately responsible for Teddy’s killing. Fucking Jackie.
Dulli performing with his band.
The relatively small part of Shang is played effectively by Greg Dulli of 90’s rock band AfghanWhigs, who appeared as himself in Demme’s previous picture, BeautifulGirls.
Poster (detail) for Ian Softley’sBeatles-centric musical drama.
Dulli also served as vocal stand-in for future Monument Ave castmate Ian Hart’sJohn Lennon in Ian Softley’s underrated 1994 StuSuttcliffe/Beatles biopic, Backbeat.
Shang leaves the gun. Where’s the cannoli?
Shang makes a hasty exit, passing the smoking gun to Gavin, played by Brian Goodman (writer/director of the Ethan Hawke/Mark Ruffalo crime drama, What Doesn’t Kill You), another one of be gang, without challenge from Bobby or the others. None of them knows what to do. What options do they have? The underworld has a firm hierarchy. They are foot soldiers and Jackie is the general. They are expected to fall in line. And under no circumstances would any of them even about going to the cops.
Enter the law.
To solidify this point, mere moments after the shooting stops, appearing almost out of thin air, as though he were the weary ghost of justice herself, is the tired and angry Det. Hanlon, played with great decency by MartinSheen.
LeonardoDiCaprio (L) with Martin Sheen (R) in Martin Scorsese’sTheDeparted.The real Irish Mean Streets?
The righteous fury and Irish wit of the role feels a little like a dry run for Sheen’s Capt. Queenan in Scorsese’s 2006 Best Picture-winning Irish mob drama, The Departed (written by William Monaghan.)
Even the Irish observe omertà.
As Hanlon surveys the crime scene, Bobby turn to Seamus, visibly the most shaken among them, and raises a finger of warning to his lips. In this neighborhood, you do not talk to the cops. Even if you’ve just witnessed the murder of your own flesh and blood.
Seamus is horrified.
As the neighborhood outsider, Seamus serves as the audience surrogate (another effective device to hide expositional seams), and expresses our own shock and horror at the senseless killing we, too, have just witnessed.
Martin Sheen as Det. Hanlon, getting the run around from a bar full of witnesses who all saw nothing.
In a humorous exchange, when Hanlon is frustrated in his attempt to solicit any witness testimony, he explains how these things work to Seamus. Despite a bar full bystanders, no one will have seen anything because they were all “in the bathroom” at the time of the shooting.
Bobby actually was in the bathroom before the shooting.
And sure enough, somehow, they very fortuitously all squeezed in there together just as the fatal shots were fired.
The gang gathers for Teddy’s funeral.
As Teddy’s friends and family gather for his funeral, Bobby’s grief and guilt begin to boil over into seething anger.
Leary and Janssen.Drinking with friends and enemies.
If this is his best chance to do something about Seamus’ death, Bobby doesn’t take it.
I cut you off? You’re back working the wire factory quicker than you can wipe your ass. End up just like your dad.
Jackie to Bobby in Monument Ave.
Here the real dramatic engine of the film starts up and the film kicks into a higher gear as Bobby is faced with a moral dilemma: follow the code of the street, which dictates that he fall in line and accept the boss’s decision, or follow a deeper code that calls for him to avenge Teddy’s death, even if it means he will probably be killed himself. After all, Jackie is the king in this neighbourhood, and taking on the king has a way of shortening the life expectations for all those under him who would try. As Jackie tells us, “Twenty men have tried to screw me.” None of them are around to tell their side of the story.
Katy interrupts the building tension between Jackie and Bobby, picking a fight meant to humiliate Jackie and appease Bobby at the same time. But she underestimates Jackie’s restraint in the face of an audience.
Jackie strikes Katy and Bobby finally stands up to his boss. But only for a moment. Jackie quickly reminds Bobby of his place and tells him in no uncertain terms that he is in fact going to do the robbery.
That leads to a crackerjack heist sequence that plays like a DavidMamet one act tucked inside the larger drama that is the rest of the film as the planning, execution, and aftermath of the robbery are intercut with tension and wit.
Bobby and Mouse race against the clock.
Contrasting the events of the robbery with their planning creates great suspense in the moments when the disparity between expectation and reality is at its apex.
Bobby and Mouse successfully break into the third floor of a parking garage and steal a high-end Ferrari, which they drive out of the parking structure in reverse, one assumes, because it just looks cooler.
But every plan has its flaws.
There are always unknowns.
But Bobby is a cool guy. It’s why everybody wants to hang around with him. Even his pal-turned-nemesis, Jackie. And so, Bobby keeps his cool.
They pull “a Sweeney,” and outmanoeuvre the cops.
The boys live to steal another day.
And having escaped their narrow brush with the law, they return to their neighborhood without incident.
Only things are not all well. There are lights and sirens and onlookers crowding the street around Digger’s car.
And poor Digger has to break the bad news to Bobby.
Something very bad has happened.
Something awful.
Something is broken that cannot be fixed.
And it crushes Bobby’s soul.
In a beautifully played moment that recalls the feeling of EliaKazan’sOn The Waterfront…
Elia Kazan’s masterpiece.Elia Lazan (l) directs MarlonBrando (r) on location filming On The Waterfront.KarlMalden (l) and Brando (r), whose back is literally against the fence in Waterfront.
Bobby’s world suddenly closes off to him in a moment of deep moral crisis.
Bobby looks up to see neighborhood windows and drapes pulled shut and lights turning off. In this neighborhood, we don’t talk to the cops.
Bobby isn’t ready to accept his part in this tragedy. Not when there is someone else to blame right in front of him.
The eyes say it all.
He puts that burden squarely on Det. Hanlon’s shoulders. If Hanlon hadn’t picked Seamus up, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, no less, Bobby’s cousin would undoubtedly still be alive.
Hanlon points the finger at Bobby.
But Hanlon aims it right back at Bobby. Putting it as explicitly and emphatically as it can be put, if there is any question remaining as to Bobby’s complicity in his own cousin’s death, Hanlon sets the record straight in a tirade that hits Bobby Bobby hard with both barrels.
Det. Hanlon let’s it loose.
Teddy Timmons had it coming. Probably would have ended up back in the joint if he’d have lived, but this kid? This kid just got off the boat! He had his whole life in front of him! Then you got ahold of him, and you taught him the rules. Now this! So, if you’re looking for someone to blame, don’t look at me! Take a good luck in the fucking mirror, brother!
-Det. Hanlon to Bobby in Monument Ave.
Bobby goes for the throat.
It’s not what Bobby wants to hear, even if it’s what he needs to hear. So, his first inclination is to anger. It’s a lot easier than taking self-inventory. And since Jackie isn’t around, Hanlon will have to do.
Bobby goes home to face the music
But everywhere Bobby goes, the message is clear. This is on him. And him alone.
Tears that hit harder than a slap.
Even Bobby’s own saintly Irish mother thinks he’s a disgrace.
The guilt, grief and anger finally overwhelm Bobby,
Ultimately, Bobby knows that no one is angrier, or blames him more directly for Seamus’ death, than himself. He is going to have to do something.
The big dance.
And as we learned in Godfather II, when the young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) assassinates local mob boss, Don Fanucci, at the Feast, neighbourhood gatherings in crime pictures are always propitious times to makea killing.
Following in Vito’s footsteps, Bobby chooses the occasion of the big dance at the AOH to take his vengeance.
Demme establishes the revelry of the event, leaning into the Irish flavor of the evening.
And like the Irish rocker Bono once sang…
“Everybody was having a good time…
“Except you…
“You were talking like it was the end of the world.”
Bobby finds Shang at the bar, exchanges a few words that we cannot hear and follows Shang out of the hall into a back room.
There he finds Jackie doing blow and holding court.
But Bobby hasn’t come to shoot the shit or reminisce about the good old days. Jackie owes him money.
Bobby has come to collect what he is owed.
The mood is tense with dim, cold lighting, deep shadows, and cocaine-fueled anxiety.
Miraculously, Jackie has Shang produce Bobby’s cut from the robbery. Jackie even does the unthinkable. He forgives Bobby’s alleged debt. Bobby is back on easy street.
Oh, just one more thing…
Maybe Bobby doesn’t have to kill Jackie after all. He may think Jackie ordered Seamus’ death, but does he know it for a fact. Maybe he will just have to live with his guilt and grief. But as he takes his money and turns to leave…
Jackie’s feeling too damn good to keep his mouth shut. He’s flush with cash, and chuffed on cocaine. He has to push Bobby a little more. And so he taunts Bobby, in the guise of a rare moment of gratitude, as he tells Bobby he appreciates how he “handled that Seamus situation.”
It stops Bobby cold. But just long enough to pull the gun stashed inside his jacket.
The spark is lit.
Jackie has just finally pushed Bobby too far.
But Bobby is not a psychopath and this is not the Irish Taxi Driver, either. So, Bobby spares
But of course, Shang killed Teddy, and probably Seamus. The rules of underworld decorum dictate it: Shang’s gotta go.
And now, as Bobby slips away into the neighbourhood’s shadows at night, he has crossed a point of no return.
Which isn’t to say that his problems are over. Not by a Boston mile.
Det. Hanlon stops Bobby in the street minutes after killing Jackie and Shang.
Bobby’s adrenaline spikes as he realizes he is caught.
Contraband.
A tense moment follows where Bobby’s fate hangs in the balance. His life is now completely in Det. Hanlon’s hands.
Hanlon tells Bobby “how this is gonna go. We’re gonna play it your way.”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
Seemingly free from legal consequence or criminal reprisal, Bobby simply returns to the bar where everybody knows his name (it is a Boston bar, after all).
He gets a returning war hero’s welcome home reception from his friends at the bar, despite the fact that he just committed a cold blooded homicide.
The king is dead…
Long live the king!
But always remember…
Heavy is the head…
…that wears the crown.
Alternate Posters:
Original theatrical poster.Final poster design by JoshWalker (https://www.behance.net/TheJWalker).Green variant poster design by JoshWalker (https://www.behance.net/TheJWalker).Alternate poster design by JoshWalker (https://www.behance.net/TheJWalker).
Director Spotlight: Ted Demme
Double Demme! Uncle Jonathan (L), and nephew, Ted (R).
Nephew of legendary filmmaker JonathanDemme (SilenceofTheLambs; Philadelphia), TedDemme quickly established himself as a talent all his own with the 1993 Yo! MTV Raps buddy cop comedy, Who’s The Man?, starring EdLover and DocterDré (not that Dr. Dre) as the cop buddies, and featuring Leary in one of his first roles as their angry sergeant.
“The first hip-hop whodunnit!”Theatrical poster.Demme (R), with his Monument Ave stars, Leary (L), and Sheen (C).
Developing a deep, lasting friendship off-screen, Demme and Leary would continue to work together successfully on multiple projects over the course of their careers.
Leary (L) and Demme (R) clown around in this magazine article photo.Demme (L) and pal, Leary (R).Theatrical poster. “He’s taken them hostage. They’re driving him nuts.”Ref (1994) original theatrical teaser trailer
A young TedDemme while filming TheRef.
Demme’s follow up to Who’s The Man? was Touchstone’s (Disney’s) TheRef, co-written by Oscar-nominee Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King; Living Out Loud), starring Leary in his breakout role.
DenisLeary as Gus, cat burglar-turned-marriage counsellor in TheRef (1994).
Leary plays Gus, a wise-cracking cat burglar forced to play marriage counsellor over Christmas when he breaks into the home of duelling spouses played by KevinSpacey and JudyDavis.
Demme (C) directs Spacey (L) and Davis (R) on set.
The film underperformed at the box-office, but was well received by critics. Roger Ebert (officially this site’s favourite) gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and said, “Ted Demme juggles all these people skillfully. Even though we know where the movie is going (the Ref isn’t really such a bad guy after all), it’s fun to get there.”
Demme (L), and Leary(R) on set.
Demme also directed Leary’s stand-up specials, No Cure For Cancer (1992), and Lock‘NLoad (1997).
Leary announced himself as the new Bill Hicks with his profane, rapid-fire monologues.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inLRcdZbO1ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB9RFRTiW70Demme checks the frame on set for “BeautifulGirls.”
Demme’s follow up picture to The Ref was the 1995 romantic-comedy-drama, BeautifulGirls, written by ScottRosenberg (Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead).
Check out that cast!
Trailer.
With shades of LawrenceKasdan’sTheBigChill, and JohnSayles‘ ReturnofTheSecaucus7, BeautifulGirlsis a sweet and funny ode to that particular brand of ennui and nostalgia you encounter in your 20s, when you’re too old to act like a teenager anymore, but too young to feel like a real grown up.
The men of BeautifulGirls (L to R) (Dillon, Emmerich, Perlich, Rappaport, and Hutton, knocked out by UmaThurman (L).Thurman is radiant in one of her first post-“PulpFiction” roles.The women (L-R): Sorvino, O’Donnell, Holly, and Thurman.
The dramedy boasts a ridiculously stacked cast (MattDillon, Mira Sorvino, Uma Thurman, Tim Hutton, Noah Emmerich, Michael Rappaport, Rosie O’Donnell, Lauren Holly,David Arquette, Max Perlich, Martha Plimpton, and Natalie Portman (among others).
Dillon (L), reunited with his “DrugstoreCowboy” cast mate, Perlich (R).Portman gives a fine performance, but the character is ill conceived.
Portman’s character’s storyline is the only element which has really aged poorly, that of a 13-year-old girl who would be the object of TimHutton’s affection if only she were five years older!
Hutton (L) and Portman (R).
Given the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against Hutton in the years since the film’s release, and especially those against cinematographer AdamKimmel (who also shot MonumentAve, Jesus’Son, and Capote), a registered sex offender charged with child sex assault in 2010, this cringe-inducing subplot, which seemed harmless to me in 1995 (when I was only 2 years older than Portman’s character), now seems so wildly inappropriate I’m hard pressed to imagine how it wasn’t excised from the shooting script, let alone the finished film before release.
One of the best of all time!
Demme did some very good TV work after BeautifulGirls.He directed two episodes of one of the greatest series in the history of television, Homicide: Life on The Street; one episode of the 6-film anthology series Gun, starring a pre-Sopranos-fame JamesGandolfini, with other episodes directed by the likes of the great RobertAltman (The Player, Short Cuts), and the very good JamesFoley (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Corrupter); the ManhattanMiraclesegment of the HBO short film anthology, SubwayStories, once again featuring DenisLeary, with contributions from my main man, AbelFerrara (KingofNewYork, BadLieutenant), and Demme’s uncle Jonathan (Melvin & Howard; The Truth About Charlie).
Watch Subway Stories on YouTube for free:
Demme (L) with Anthony Anderson (C) and Martin Lawrence (R) on set for Life (1999).
Next came Monument Ave,which Demme followed up a year later with 1999’s criminally slept-on prison-dramedy, Life.
Theatrical poster.
Trailer.
Making of.Demme and his viewfinder.
Produced by BrianGrazer (Backdraft; Ransom), Life stars a perfectly-paired EddieMurphy (Coming to America; 48 Hrs) and MartinLawrence (Bad Boys 1-4; BlueStreak), doing some of their best work.
Murphy (L), and Lawrence (C), take shit from NickCassavetes (R) in Life.
Written by RobertRamsey & MatthewStone (the CoenBros.’ Intolerable Cruelty), Life is the surprisingly empathetic story of two wrongfully convicted New Yorkers incarcerated for life in an all black Mississippi prison camp under the oppressive watch of Nick Cassavetes’ (Delta Force 3; Face/Off) white prison guard.
Lawrence (L) and Murphy (R) growing old together.
Where the film truly distinguishes itself is in its second-half, when the story begins to speed up to show Murphy and Lawrence advancing into their golden years.
Eddie Murphy’s old-age mask.Murphy submits to Rick Baker’s (L) make-up chair. Murphy (L) and Lawrence (R) in their old age makeup.Ready to roll film.Best in his field.
For the excellent artistry and craft that went into the process of creating the progressive looks for each of the characters through the passing years (not even Cassavetes’ prison guardisspared the ravages of time), prosthetics wizard, Rick Baker (An American Werewolf In London) received an Oscar-nomination for Best Make Up.
Life, make-up featurette.“You know what Frank Sinatra said to me?!”Murphy expanded his reputation for disappearing into a character through make up and prosthetics with this 1996 reimagining of the Jerry Lewis comedy.Hefailed to recapture the magic in this unfortunatley mean-spirited 2007 picture.
Even when it feels more gimmick (Norbit) than inspiration (the barber shop scenes inComing to America; The Nutty Professor), the truth is that nobody manages to be funnier under the weight of heavy prosthetics than Eddie Murphy. Though Lawrence holds his own here, faring much better than in the Big Mama’s Housepictures.
As if once wasn’t enough…They just had to do it again!And three times was decidedly NOT the charm for Big Mama.
Take a look at the scene in Life where Lawrence finally re-encounters society as an old man.
The scene isn’t played for laughs, cheap or otherwise. The make up-prosethics are used in aid of telling the story, not as a gag.
Getting older can sure feel like this. “What the fuck?” indeed.
The scene is truly moving in the way it centers Lawrence in a maelstrom of confusing change with gentle compassion.
The haircuts…
Lawrence is like The Man Who Fell To Earth here, an alien in a strange world that he doesn’t recognize or understand.
The radios…
He may be an alien in this place and time, but we are right there in that moment with him, because of the humanity in the writing, directing, editing and, especially, the performing of this scene, which wouldn’t have been out place in Shawlshank.
But mostly…
Life. Was it Jim Morrison who said, “None of us gets out alive”? No truer words.
…time changes us.
Though the film was overlooked upon its initial release, a slow re-appraisal has begun to build:
And probably my favourite thing about it is that it refuses to go out on a melancholy note.
Theatrical poster.Never too late for a ballgame.Waving goodbye.
Like Michael Keaton and pals in The Dream Team, and Jim Belushi in Taking Care of Business before them, Murphy and Lawrence escape the hooscow to catch a little of America’s favourite pastime.
Remembering that they forgot to finish arguing.
In the end, though still bickering like an old married couple, Murphy and Lawrence have truly formed a hard won friendship. Watching that develop slowly over a lifetime locked up together is the film’s true joy.
French poster.
Also of note in Life, among its wonderful supporting cast, which includes Bernie Mac, Ned Beatty, and a silent Bokeem Woodbine (Strapped; The Sopranos) is Nick Cassavetes.
Father John (l) and mother Gena (r), with baby Nick (m).
Atalented director in his own right (She’s So Lovely; Aloha Dog), Nick is the son of cinema’s premiere iconic power couple, JohnCassavetes (Husbands; Killing of a Chinese Bookie) and GenaRowlands (Woman Under The Influence; JimJarmusch’sNight on Earth).
Version 1.0.0
Trailer.
The young Cassavetes went on to co-write (with David McKenna) Demme’s next picture, 2001’s Johnny Depp (TimBurton’sEdwardScissorhands; Jarmusch’sDeadMan) cocaine epic, Blow.
Depp’s hair outshines his performance as George Jung in the disappointing Blow.
The film co-starred PenelopeCruz (VanillaSky; Almodovar’sVolver), Franka Potente (Run Lola Run; The Bourne Identity) RunEthan Supplee (American History X; Wolf of Wall Street); and Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure; Batman Returns), in a rare dramatic part.
Demme (r), directs Depp (l).
Adapted from BrucePorter’s non-fiction book, the film tells the true story of American drug kingpin, GeorgeJung.
Depp (l) and Demme (r).
Though it grossed $30M over its $53M budget, the film was considered somewhat of a disappointment, drawing unfavourable comparisons to more successful sex, drugs & rock n’ roll saturated dramas of human excesss, like Scorsese’sGoodfellas, and PaulThomasAnderson’sBoogieNights.
Director TedDemme with his “Blow” cast member PaulReubens (Pee–Wee’sBigAdventure“), and Goodfellas‘ DebiMazar (SpikeLee’sJungleFever) .(l to r): Demme, Reubens, Ann and DenisLeary at the Blow premiere.Ted Demme presents his movie, “Blow,” on Charlie Rose.
Demme’s final film was as co-director with his “TheRef” scribe RichardLaGravenese on the excellent documentary A Decade Under The Influence: The 70’s films that changed everything.
Poster art recalling the iconic “Blow Up” design, with a cinema camera instead of a photos-only point-and-shoot.
The documentary is a cinephile’s dream, featuring interviews with just about all of the luminaries who made the 1970s the true golden age of cinema. It also serves as the ideal syllabus for anyone unfamiliar with the films of the period wanting to know where to start watching.
Demme tragically passed away before the film was released, suffering a fatal heart attack (supposedly as a result of excessive cocaine use) during a celebrity basketball game on January 14, 2002. He was only 38 years young.
And with that, American cinema lost one of its most promising young directors, but he left behind a legacy of 7 wonderful films, all very different from each other in terms of genre but unified by the great warmth and empathy Demme bestowed upon all of his characters. My kind of filmmaker.
Uncle Jonathan’s fun and frenetic 2002Charade remake.
JonathanDemme dedicated 2002’s Charade remake, The Truth About Charlie to his nephew.
Wahlberg in a regrettable beret in TTAC.Cary Grant in Charade.Thandiewe Newton in TTAC.Audrey Hepburn in Charade.
TTAC starred a woefully miscast MarkWahlberg (BasketballDiaries; Boogie Nights) in the CaryGrant role, and a delightful ThandiweNewton (the underrated 2Pac/TimRothaddictiondramaGridlock’d; JonathanDemme’sBeloved) in the AudreyHepburn role.
Adam Sandler hits the right note as Barry in Punch-Drunk Love.
The honour was also bestowed upon the younger Demme by P.T. Anderson, who dedicated his 2002 Adam Sandler vehicle, Punch–DrunkLove, to him.
Demme, not long before his fatal heart attack at the age of 38.
Starring, written, produced, and directed by ClintEastwood.
Cast list from IMDb.com.
Co-starring Isaiah Washington, Lisa Gay Hamilton, James Woods, Denis Leary, Mary McCormack, Diane Venora, Michael McKean, Michael Jeter, and Bernard Hill.
Written by Larry Gross, Paul Brickman, and Stephen Schiff, based on the novel by Andrew Klavan.
Produced by Lili Fini Zanuck and Richard D. Zanuck.
Cinematography by Jack N. Green.
Edited by JoelCox.
Music by Lennie Niehaus
A Zanuck Company / Malpaso production.
A WarnerBros. release.
Preceded by Absolute Power.
Followed by Space Cowboys.
Streaming release artwork.DVD front cover.
WarnerBros.’ official synopsis:
“Boozer, skirt chaser, careless father. You could create your own list of reporter Steve Everett’s faults, but there’s no time. A San Quentin death row prisoner is slated to die at midnight – a man Everett has suddenly realized is innocent. ClintEastwood memorably plays Everett in “TrueCrime,” a savvy beat-the-clock thriller. IsaiahWashington, DenisLeary, LisaGayHamilton, JamesWoods, DianeVenora and others populate this suspense tale that tightens to nerve-fraying intensity, intercutting the parallel stories of the inmate and Everett’s scramble to save him… and perhaps lift his own life out of the trash heap along the way. Everett is harried, determined and trying not to self-destruct. And the clock is ticking.”
Reverse cover of blu-ray release.The podcast that exploded our current true crime craze.
Eastwood’s overlooked 1999 mystery-drama was significantly ahead of its time in prefiguring the true crime craze of the post-Serial, post-COVID streaming era.
The iconic WB tower.Eastwood (L) in promo for Warner Bros. cenenial celebrations.Director ChristopherNolan’s “special relationship” with Warner Bros, famously flamed out over the studio’s pandemic/Tenet-era day-and-date release strategy. His Best–Picture winning Oppenheimer was produced at rival studio, Universal.Theatrical poster.Available on the platform in the US, True Crime is not currently streaming on Netflix in Canada.
If not for Eastwood’s singularly special relationship with WarnerBros. (only ChristopherNolan has had it so good at the studio, though for nowhere near as long a tenure), this is exactly the type of picture that would premiere on Netflix if produced today.
A critical and commercial disappointment upon its release (though Roger Ebert notably gave it a favourable review), twenty-five years later, nearly all of it has aged remarkably well (with the exception of poor, underused Christine Ebersol, who is saddled with some dead-on-arrival, faux-progressive, flirty banter in a thankless role).
Eastwood takes a call in a Japanese advert for True Crime.
Eastwood wears the part of Steve Everett, a disillusioned, time-weathered, down-on-his-luck reporter, like a tailored suit (or one of the comfy, rumpled, button-ups that he favours in this picture).
JamesWoods (R) counsels ClintEastwood (L) on journalistic etiquette.
If your nose for a story is gone, my friend, you’re gone, too.
James Woods to Clint Eastwood in True Crime
Clint’s charm is the picture is effortless, and his dogged investigative reporter is a nice variation on the tough-guy detective roles he made so famous in the DirtyHarry (1971) franchise, along with his many other cop procedurals like Coogan’s Bluff (1968), TheGauntlet (1977), CityHeat (1984), Tightrope (1984), TheRookie (1990), APerfectWorld (1993), and BloodWork (2002).
The original DirtyHarry(1971) was followed by four sequels: MagnumForce (1973), TheEnforcer (1976), SuddenImpact (1983), and TheDeadPool(1988).DirtyHarry gets the Barbie doll treatment.Theatrical poster for Coogan’s Bluff (1968).Theatrical poster for The Gauntlet (1977).Theatrical poster for City Heat (1984).Theatrical poster for Tightrope(1984).Theatrical poster for The Rookie (1990).Theatrical poster for A Perfect World (1993).Theatrical poster for Blood Work (2002).
Eastwood gives a much gentler performance here than in those other pictures mentioned above. His washed-up newsman is not just another tough cop spitting out trailer-friendly one-liners before knocking off some undesirable bad guy. He doesn’t threaten, flash a badge, pull a gun, or throw any punches. He’s just a man of advancing years who has learned to survive by his wits and his charm.
Eastwood (R) and ReneRusso (L) in InTheLineofFire.Theatrical poster for In The Line Of Fire (1993).
Playing Everett afforded Eastwood opportunities for some lighter comedic, even romantic, moments, recalling his work as Frank Horrigan in 1993’s excellent political assassination thriller, In The Line Of Fire, directed by WolfgangPeterson (Das Boot), my favourite Eastwood performance of all.
Eastwood’s trademark glower is slightly less menacing this time out.
In TrueCrime, Eastwood stars as the newly-sober, old school investigative reporter, Steve Everett, who is on something of a life and career downturn after screwing up an important story back when he was drinking way too much.
MaryMcCormack (L) doesn’t quite fall for Eastwood’s (R) charms in TrueCrime.
Everett gets an unexpected shot at redemption when his colleague at the paper, Michelle, played with much charm by MaryMcCormack (the HowardStern pseudo-biopic, PrivateParts), is killed driving home drunk from a night out at the bar with him. McCormack’s brief performance is impressive in that she is only given this brief opening sequence in which to make an impression that must last for the rest of the picture, and she does just that.
McCormack makes a big impression with little screen time.
The bar scene is a playful, nicely nuanced two-hander in which Eastwood’s aging, habitual philanderer’s fading charms almost work on Michelle, before she wises up (though not enough to call a taxi).
Establishing aerial shot of San Quentin from the days before drones, when you needed a helicopter for a shot like this.Washington is excellent as death row inmate Frank Beecham.
After Michelle’s death, a deeply shaken Everett takes over the last story she was working on before her crash: the possible wrongful conviction and incarceration of death row inmate Frank Beecham (IsaiahWashington, Clockers, Outof Sight), whose scheduled execution by lethal injection is imminent.
MarissaRibisi (Giovanni’s sister) plays dead.
Isaiah Washington displays great compassion, dignity, grace, and fury in the role of a man clinging to his faith in god and his unwavering asseveration that he is innocent of the brutal murder for which he has been convicted – the cold blooded, daylight killing of a convenience store clerk, played by alt-rocker Beck’s ex-wife, MarissaRibisi (RichardLinklater’sDazed&Confused).
Washington in Clockers, bathed in RobertRichardson-inspired top light, courtesy of cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed (Belly).
Four years earlier, Washington showed that same slow-simmering intensity, passion, and quiet suffering in the RichardPrice-penned, SpikeLee-directed Clockers (1995).
Original theatrical poster.The revised design, after the original poster art was attacked for being a rip-off (and not the homage Spike claimed) of Saul Bass‘ AnatomyofaMurder design.SaulBass‘ iconic cut up design for the OttoPreminger/JimmyStewart classic.In SpikeLee’s 1995 Joint, Clockers, MekhiPhifer’s Strike is rarely seen without his Chocolate Moo!
With his deeply empathetic and compassionate portrayal of protagonist Strike’s older brother, Victor, Washington showed us a complicated, burnt-out family man, who commits the murder Strike doesn’t have the stomach for, literally and figuratively (Chocolate Moo!, anyone?), as the desperate act of man at the end of his tether. And while the part of Beechum, as written, is much less complex than that of Victor in Clockers (Beechum may have been a more interesting character had the writers created a credible, or at least, reasonable doubt as to his innocence), Washington’s performance supplies whatever layers the character is missing on paper.
Eastwood (L) with SydneyPoitier (R), daughter of another great Hollywood icon, SidneyPoitier.
Especially effective in TrueCrime is the slow-burn manner in which Eastwood’s Everett, now “sober as a judge,” takes up the cause that Beecham may, in fact, be innocent. It’s not what his editors want to hear. Everett’s article is only meant to be a side-bar, a “human interest” piece, not an exposé on an impending miscarriage of justice.
Washington (L) with Lisa Gay Hamilton (R) (JackieBrown, TheTruthAboutCharlie), excellent as always, playing Beecham’s traumatized wife.
What begins solely out of a sense of guilt and responsibility to his dead colleague and friend (and would-be paramour), slowly deepens from curiosity to crusade, as Everett becomes Beecham’s final (and only) hope for clemency in a desperate race against time.
A slightly misleading publicity still with that DirtyHarry,GranTorino vibe.
Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Jesus Christ. I don’t care about justice in this world, or the next. I don’t care what’s right or wrong. Never have. But you know what this is? That’s my nose. To tell you a pitiful truth, that’s all I have. When my nose tells me something stinks, I gotta have faith in it, just like you have faith in Jesus.”
-Clint Eastwood to Isaiah Washington in True Crime.
“Your usual-usual? Or your new-usual?”Aged lothario.
Everett may be a callous, shallow, journalistic has-been, and (only recently) ex-drunk, who’s sleeping with his put-upon editor’s (Denis Leary) wife seemingly out of spite, and claims his only interest in Beecham is in getting a juicy story, not in the noble pursuit of justice for a wrongly imprisoned man about to be put to death, but he risks way too much in his life and career to save Beecham from the needle for us to believe his apathy. And with no time to spare! The looming execution is scheduled for midnight.
Itis a testament to the skill of Eastwood, the director, his screenwriters, Brickman (Risky Business); Schiff (Oliver Stone’sWall Street: Money Never Sleeps), and Gross (Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs), and long-time editor, Joel Cox (Unforgiven; Richard Jewell), that True Crime never lets up on the tension of the ticking clock that is Beecham’s coming execution. Essentially the B-story to Everett’s investigation, Beecham’s last day on earth is a harrowing, gut wrenching, heartbreaking one.
GayHamilton in a moment of great anguish as her husband is led to his execution.
In its detailing of the hours, minutes, and seconds leading up to the state killing, the film sneaks up on the audience, who have been lulled by the leisurely pace of the first few prison scenes into forgetting that time is very quickly running out, and soon there will be none left.
“Like the sands through the hourglass, so are the “DaysofOurLives…“
Eastwood and Cox use repeated inserts of a clock on the prison wall to remind us of the fact that time is short, but we don’t really need them.
Protesters gather outside the prison walls.Beechum, keeping his fear to himself.
As the protesters gather outside the prison, and those around Beecham, or connected somehow to the case, become more desperate, solemn, panicked, blood-thirsty, etc., we know that poor Frank is really not long for this world.
Even his exhausted, well meaning lawyer runs out of all hope when his final appeal is denied and Beechum refuses to accept the only lifeline left open to him: He could save his own life, she tells him, if only he would admit his guilt and show remorse for the heinous killing.
But that would mean Beecham’s young daughter growing up believing that her father was a murderer. Beecham would rather die than be seen as a killer in his baby’s eyes.
Beecham’s daughter may be more of a story device than a fully fleshed out character, but as devices go, her presence is effective on two fronts.
Not the call he was hoping for.
First, Beechum’s undeniable love for her, evident in his patience and kindness towards her, and his choice to die an innocent man rather than live with her thinking him a guilty one, goes a long way towards creating audience affection for him, and making us invest more into Everett’s investigation into Beechum’s possible, then likely, innocence. No decent human being wants to see an innocent child deprived of a loving parent.
Bernard Hill as the warden.Search…And rescue!Roger that.
It also allows us to see the prison staff as actual human beings, rather than just a bunch of needle-happy executioners when, in one particularly heartwarming sequence, the warden deploys what appears to be a full-scale bomb squad search of Mrs. Beechum’s vehicle, not because there have been any threats made against her, but to find the little girl’s missing green crayon, which she needs to draw the green pastures where her daddy tells her he is going. In a lesser director’s hands, with less-skilled performers than Washington, GayHamilton, and BernardHill (as the sympathetic, but duty-bound warden), this scene could have been terminally cute and unbearably sentimental.
But Eastwood’s hand as a director in this scene, and throughout the picture, is as subtle, and honest, as ever, and we never feel that we are simply being manipulated into a short cut to caring for Beechum.
There is no doubt about the pain and fear in Washington’s eyes, but his behaviour is never anything less than completely controlled. He bottles his turbulent emotions for the benefit of his wife and daughter, and to retain whatever dignity that six years of wrongful incarceration have yet to strip away from him.
An ill-advised father-daughter outing at the Oakland Zoo.
The second manner in which the inclusion of Beechum’s daughter proves to be a smart choice is in the opportunity it creates to contrast Everett’s own parenting. Where Beechum is attentive, and invested in his relationship with his little girl, Everett is anything but. Spending time with her is an obligation, an item simply needing to be scratched off his overly cluttered to-do list.
“Speed zoo!”“We go fast!”And crash!The infamous (and heavily memed) “No wire hangers ever!” scene in Mommie Dearest.
It’s unusual in a legal thriller for one of the most harrowing and anxiety-inducing sequences to centre around bad parenting, but the game of “speed zoo” that Everett inflicts upon his daughter, about the same age as Beechum’s, qualifies as some of the worst on-screen parenting that we have seen since Faye Dunaway went batshit crazy over wire-hangers in her JoanCrawford biopic, Mommie Dearest (1981).
Eastwood (L) & Washington (R).
Everett and Beecham finally meet at about the film’s halfway point, when Everett arrives at San Quentin to interview Beecham on the precipice of his execution.
Convinced now of Beecham’s innocence, Everett races against the clock, tracking down leads…
But the potato chips!Early appearance by Lucy Liu.
Interviews witnesses…
Eastwood’s ex-flame, Frances Fisher. ColemanDomingo (L) in one of his first on-screen appearances.
Follows clues…
Annoys his editors…
Diane Venora (Heat) plays Everett’s long-suffering wife.
And tries (and fails) to appease his neglected wife and daughter by squeezing in some quality family time (the disasterous zoo sequence)…
As the death hour fast approaches.
And because this is the kind of movie where we know all of our questions are going to be answered before the end credits roll, Everett, of course, gets to the truth before the fatal needle can be administered, and we learn, in flashback, what really happened in the convenience store that fateful, awful day.
Japanese advert.
In the end, it’s no longer just a juicy story for Everett. He finally realizes that he isn’t just on a quest to save Beecham’s life, but to save his own, too. Everett’s story proves to be a lifeline for both men. There lives will never again intersect, but they will both be forever changed because they once crossed paths.
Eastwood in his Oscar-winning western, Unforgiven.Early theatrical poster for Unforgiven (1992).
In the end, True Crime doesn’t offer up many surprises, or re-invent the genre the way Clint did with the American Western in his most beloved film, 1992’s BestPicture-winner, Unforgiven, but this film’s charm is actually in how fully it delivers on what we have come to expect from an old-fashioned investigative thriller, something which fewer and fewer entries in the genre seem capable of doing.
The Firm, First Edition.John Grisham, king of legal thrillers.
True Crime is no more, but certainly no less, successful in realizing its (admittedly) modest ambitions than the kind of popcorn mysteries that made John Grisham adaptations (probably the closest corollary films) so popular in the 1990s.
It’s not as good as Sydney Pollack’s take on The Firm (1993), or Coppola’sunderrated MattDamon vehicle, The Rainmaker(1997), but it’s better than Alan J. Pakula’s mounting of The Pelican Brief (1993), a lot better than JamesFoley’s dreadful waste of Gene Hackman, The Chamber (1996),and pretty much holds its own against The Client (1994), and A Time To Kill(1996), the pair of Grisham adaptations that Joel Schumacher directed between his franchise-stalling Batmansequels, Batman Forever (1995), and Batman & Robin(1997).
Stop fucking Bob’s wife. He doesn’t like it.
-James Woods to Clint Eastwood in “True Crime“
One of True Crime’s greatest pleasures is the embarrassment of riches that comprise its overqualified supporting cast.
James Woods and Denis Leary as Everett’s long-suffering bosses.Michael McKean as Reverend “Shit-For-Brains.”Michael Jeter enjoys his 15 minutes of fame.
Bit parts that might otherwise be populated by unknown faces in a typical film of this sort are played here by the likes of MichaelMcKean (Spinal Tap,BetterCall Saul), as a pushy priest, JamesWoods (Salvador, Casino), as Eastwood’s frustrated publisher, DenisLeary (MonumentAve, RescueMe), as his cuckolded editor, Bob, Michael Jeter (The Fisher King), as an overzealous witness, and Bernard Hill (Titanic, Lord of the Rings), as the kind warden.
Eastwood directs Washington and GayHamilton in an emotion moment of separation by one of the prison guards.
And as always, there is the assured, subtle, deceptively effortless direction by the film’s star. Because Eastwood directs himself, famously gives little in the way of verbal instruction to his actors, and because there is nothing flashy about his visual style, always opting for as few set-ups as possible to convey the story he’s telling, the intelligence of his shot choices, the considered rhythms of his pacing, and the uniform consistency of the performances in his films are often over-looked outside of those periods in his legendary and uniquely lengthy career where he has found himself suddenly back in fashion.
Another legend of cinema, Robert Altman.
Clint is a little like another American auteur that way. It was the late, great, Robert Altman (The Player, Short Cuts) who ascribed his waxing and waning popularity through the decades to the circular whims of fashion.
1992’s The Player resurrected Altman’s lagging career.1993’s Short Cuts re-established his reputation as one of America’s leading auteurs.1994’s Pret-A-Porter did not.Spanish theatrical “awards” poster.
And though this period of Eastwood’s career, from AbsolutePower (1997) to Bloodwork (2002), saw him mostly out of critical and commercial favour, he would soon be back in fashion with the overrated butwidely adored Million Dollar Baby (2004).
Theatrical poster.Sergio Leone’s The Man With No Name trilogy blu-ray collection.Clint and two of his Oscars.
This year he’s back in awards contention once more, at 93-years-old, for 2024’s Juror #2. The one-time Man With No Namemay not have taken his last turn on the merry go-round of Oscar-glory just yet.
Shot For Shot: The Crash
Tom Cruise (L), Nicole Kidman (R), and Ron Howard (C), promote 1992’s Far and Away in the now defunct US edition of Premiere Magazine, a young cinephile’s dream.
As an avid young cinephile of about 11 years old, I talked my parents into allowing me a subscription to PremiereMagazine. Though it survives today in a French-only format, the English-language US publication I came of age with is now defunct. In the form that I encountered it, Premiere was a glossy film-school-in-a-magazine that taught me so much about filmmaking and filmmakers that I can scarcely disentangle its influence in shaping my tastes during those formative film-watching years from the films themselves.
GlenKenney’s reviews were second in my heart only to RogerEbert’s, who was, even then, my favourite critic.
My absolute favourite feature in Premiere Magazine was its ongoing series Shot By Shot. I most vividly recall the photo spread on the bus-jumping-the-highway-gap scene in 1992’s Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock-breakout, Speed. It is in the spirit of that series, and that article, that I offer the following argument for Eastwood as a genuine auteur: The crash scene from True Crime:
Eyes not on the road.
Distracted by the radio.
Fixing her lipstick.
Checking it twice.
Ignoring the treacherous conditions.
Accelerating at speed.
Reduced visibility / blurred vision.
Losing traction.
Out of control.
Hitting the rail.
Spinning the wheel in vain.
Struggling to see.
A view of impending collision.
A Hail Mary swerve.
Slamming on the brake.
Throwing up her hands.
Quiet after the storm.
The aftermath.
As a special treat to kick off this inaugural post for the new series:
The FilmographyPresents: Bjorn’s Take:
Eastwood double fists Oscars.
“True Crime (1999) comes at an interesting period for Clint Eastwood, one of a number of “workhorse” eras where he was between periods of outsized critical and cultural recognition.
For me, this falls in with a number of somewhat interchangeable two-word title vehicles that he cranked out between his most broadly adored film, the Oscar-feted Unforgiven (1992), and his second period of near-universal acclaim, earmarked by Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), a pair of films I find mildly and majorly overrated, respectively.
I didn’t bother with True Crime when it was first released, nor was my interest adequately piqued by the similar (and similarly titled) cranky-old-guy-on-a-crusade pictures that bookended it, Absolute Power (1997), and Blood Work (2002).
I did, however, take a chance on Space Cowboys (2000), a paleolithic dad-movie that’s one of his poorest directorial efforts.
P.T. Anderson and some of his films.
Yet man can not live on Paul Thomas Anderson movies alone, and the 21st century auteurists finally aroused my interest sufficiently to delve deeper.
Eastwood’s 2024 drama Juror #2.
It’s kind of amazing to realise that Eastwood, a man who directed a widely-acclaimed movie in 2024(Juror#2), was already three years past conventional retirement age when he made True Crime. Not that he acknowledges it here, as his Steve Everett, a Samuel Fuller-style old school newspaperman, has a wife in her 30s, a mistress in her 20s, and a daughter barely out of diapers. Everett smokes indoors, enjoys a hearty glass of whisky, and brawls (verbally, but with a definite undercurrent of fisticuffs) with his editors. But he also knows an injustice when he sees it, and he spends most of True Crime trying to prove the innocence of death row inmate Frank Beechum (played by Spike Lee regular Isaiah Washington).
Theatrical poster for Eastwood’s Coogan’s Bluff.
True Crime is the stuff of formula, but it’s a formula that’s worked for Eastwood since Coogan’s Bluff (1968): A tough, no-nonsense figure rights the wrongs of injustice, causing carnage both physical and emotional along the way.
Eastwood’s mythical gunslinger gets his own Barbie-doll treatment.Eastwood (L) with his cinematic mentor, the late, great director of tough-as-nails action pictures, Don Siegel, on location for their Dirty Harry (1971).
It seems important to Eastwood to have disassociated himself from the amoral “Man With No Name” once he established himself as the kind of actor who wanted to call his own shots every step of the way, perhaps because of his own personal, very prominent own moral compass, but also as a compliment to his directing mentor, the great Don Siegel, who explored similar themes in his own work.
Japanese advert.
True Crime is mostly a ticking-clock kind of movie, with Everett running around the Bay Area in his beat-up Mustang, as the possibility of clemency for his condemned inmate dwindles.
He does take a few moments for some quality time with his daughter – racing around the San Francisco Zoo in a truly unhinged sequence – and attempts to mend his broken relationships, but this is mostly a movie with one purpose in mind: solving a mystery to save a man’s life.
Eastwood infamously addresses an empty chair as if it were PresidentObama, as at the 2012 Republican National Convention, August 30, 2012.
For a lot of True Crime I was wondering to myself what noted Republican Eastwood thought of the death penalty. During his most politically cranky period in the Obama-era, he claimed to be vehemently in favour, but it’s hard to reconcile that with this movie’s suspense being largely derived from the possibility of an innocent man being put to death. Eastwood might suggest that bad investigative practices, and the same sort of bureaucracy that Insp. Harry Callahan would butt heads with, are to blame, and that it’s up to good people to do right. Whether or not that means we should all be invetigating cold cases in our space time, True Crime does not make evident.
The upshot is that Eastwood is as watchable and complelling as ever, and the psychological stability of his on-screen exemplar is never definite. That’s one of things things I always find most interesting about Eastwood’s personality-driven projects, and something I look forward to invetigating deeper as we dive into his work.”
–Bjorn Olson, guest contributor, is the co-host of The Filmography podcast, which just wrapped its second season. Season 3 is launching soon!
SolveigDommartin (WimWenders’ Wings of Desire) stars as Claire, inUTEOTW.Title shot from the original trailer.
Produced and directed by Wim Wenders.
Starring SolveigDommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neil, Rudiger Volger, Ernie Dingo, Adele Lutz, Chick Ortega, Eddy Mitchell, Allen Garfield, David Byrne, Tom Farrell, Kuniko Miyake, Chishu Ryu, MaxVon Sydow, and Jeanne Moreau.
Story by Solveig Dommartin & Wim Wenders.
Screenplay by Peter Carey and Wim Wenders, with an early, uncredited draft by Michael Almereyda.
Cinematography by Robby Müller.
Edited by Peter Przygodda.
Music by Graeme Revell.
Produced by Anatole Bauman and Jonathan Taplin.
An Argos Films production.
A Warner Bros. release.
Restoration and release of the Director’s Cut by TheCriterion Collection, Janus Films, and Wim Wenders Stiftung.
UTEOTW was confoundingly Rated-R upon it’s initial release considering there is nothing in the way of gratuitous sex, or violence, excessive profanity, or any of the other fun things that usually earn a picture its R-rating.
Original French theatrical poster.Title shot.
When it was originally released theatrically in 1991, in its excessively-abbreviated form, cut down to a more theatre-friendly 128 mins from Wenders’ 247-min Director’s Cut (finally made available in North America in recent years by The Criterion Collection), and the (allegedly) 20-hour first assembly, Wenders’ strange, quirky, romantic, sci-fi road movie epic was mostly met with earth shattering silence. It is an exhibiting artist’s worst fear: widespread indifference.
The release of the restored and expanded Director’s Cut has significantly improved UTEOTW’s reputation, and gives cause for a major re-appraisal.
Panicked dreams.
Selections from the original story treatment, published in Wim Wenders On Film, by Faber & Faber:
“It’s surely no exaggeration to say that in the whole history of the cinema, no subject has been handled as much as love.
Wim Wenders, On Film
A story in which love is possible, love works , is right and proper, and with an ending to match. At any price. All received wisdom to the contrary. (And where did that ever get us?) With a courage born of despair. With fortunefavouring the brave. In spite of everything and, if need be, TO THE END OF THE WORLD.
Wim Wenders, On Film
The story itself is very simple. Maybe it will become more complicated. We’ll see. At any rate I’d like to make this film in the same way that I made Alice in The Cities, Kings of the Road, The State of Things, and not least, the second half of Paris, Texas.
Wim Wenders, On Film.
Use an almost empty ‘narrative structure’ and gradually have it filled in by the actors and by pooling all of our experience. Discover the story, in other words.
Wim Wenders, On Film.
It’s the only way I can do it now. And there’s no better way of making an adventure film.
Wim Wenders, On Film.
Waking from one dream to find yourself living in another.
Wenders’ resulting “adventure film” tells the story of Claire Tourneur, a listless young Parisian woman trying to find herself in Venice, Italy, but mostly losing herself in “a lot of parties, designer drugs, and one-night stands.”
Claire, through the looking glass.Nouvelle Vague star Anna Karina and her trademark bangs.International theatrical poster.
As an off-course Indian satellite circles the earth, threatening to destroy it, Claire wakes up from a falling nightmare, in bed with one of her disposable lovers (in a black wig, looking like Anna Karina in Alphaville), though we assume she hasn’t rested long, since we learn that Claire doesn’t really sleep.
Claire and some Talking Heads.
She wanders, drifts, really, through the stragglers, die hards, and miscellaneous detritus left over from last night’s revelry (or however long ago this Bunuelian-party-that-never-ends began).
Party like it’s 1999, because, it is.
Claire seems at once to belong to and remain apart from the people and environment she wanders past and through.
She is clearly very far from home. This place is not a final destination for her, just a quick stop along the way to who-knows-where?
And like the shark that will surely die if it stops swimming, Claire must move on from here. But where will she go?
She is on the run, even though no one is chasing her. Yet. Calire is simply trying to escape the very relatable pain of a recent breakup.
But, of course, heartbreak is something you carry with you, and so, everywhere that Claire goes, and she goes just about everywhere over the course of the film, there it is: heartbreak.
Her writer boyfriend, now ex, the film’s ever-patient narrator, Gene, played by Sam Neil (Żulowski’s Possession; Jurassic Park I & III), has just cheated on Claire with her best friend, Makiko. And though her friendship with Makiko seems to have survived, maybe a little bruised, but mostly unscathed, what Claire had with Gene has forever been lost.
Off the map.Taking the road less travelled.The freedom of the open road.Claire’s world is literally turned upside down.
Claire is on the fast track to nowhere-in-particular when a (miraculously non-fatal) automotive crack up irrevocably changes the course of her life forever.
Chick Ortega as Chico.Eddy Mitchell as Raymond.Shoot The Piano Player.Charles Aznavour and his captors in Piano Player.Theatrical poster.
Claire rolls her car, swerving to avoid collision with a vehicle driven by two French bank robbers, played here by Chick Ortega (Wings of Desire; Jeunet&Caro’s Delicatessen) and Eddy Mitchell (Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon and Round Midnight) as a friendlier, goofier version of the two hoods who harassed Charles Aznavour in FrancoisTruffaut’sShoot The Piano Player.
Claire entertains an unusual job opportunity: stolen money courier.
A surprising exchange follows. Rather than a road rage incident erupting at gunpoint (as one might expect when colliding with a pair of desperate, armed, fleeing bank robbers) out in the middle of Italy’s version of nowhere, these apparrently harmless bandits have a surprisingly attractive, albeit highly dangerous, and clearly illegal, proposition for Claire.
If she will transport the money they have stolen in a headline-making heist at the Nice airport (they are too hot, and one of them too injured, to do it themselves), they will cut Claire in on thirty-percent of the loot.
Suddenly, Claire’s wayward wanderings are given purpose and direction. She has a mission. And she sets out to accomplish that mission with great enthusiasm. With her 30 percent, she can buy herself an apartment back in Paris, perhaps overlooking the Seine.
At the very least, she will not have to return to Gene, whom she still loves, but can no longer trust.
William Hurt as Trevor McPhee/Sam Farber.
Her mission is initially derailed, then defined by, a chance encounter at a (video!) pay-phone with a man claiming to be an Australian called Trevor McPhee, but who is really an American named Sam Farber.
You have very sad eyes.
-Claire to Sam.
I’m not a sad man though.
-Sam to Claire.
Played by a never-so-dashing William Hurt (Altered States, Body Heat). Sam is handsome, charming, and mysterious, with a little boy lost quality to him. Claire naturally falls in love at first sight. The first thing she notices? His eyes.
Sam is being followed by a mysterious man with an Australian accent (Ernie Dingo), who may or may not be a hitman. Claire covers for Sam, and when he is desperate for her help in evading his pursuer, she reluctantly agrees.
Where have you been?
Sam to Claire.
Everywhere… and back.
Claire to Sam.
Claire whisks Trevor away in her badly damaged (and foam-covered) automobile, and unknowingly embarks on the beginning of what will be the adventure of her lifetime, one that will take her across the globe and possibly heal her heartache.
When they are stopped by some futuristic police vehicles for a roadside check, Sam learns that he isn’t the only one on the run. Claire is afraid of the police and it has something to do with the heavy bag she’s carrying.
Sam offers to drive, and surprising herself, in his presence, Claire is able to finally fall (and stay) asleep.
While she’s lost in dreams, curious about the contents of Claire’s luggage, Sam exploits the opportunity to search her bag and help himself to some of the cash.
How long did I sleep?
Claire to Sam.
About 500 kilometres.
Sam to Claire.
It’s telling that in a road movie like this, time is measured not in seconds, minutes, and hours, but in distance travelled.
Pygmy singing.
Claire returns to Paris to deliver the stolen money and collect her cut. She drops Sam off, only to discover once he’s gone that so is some of her money. In its place is an I.O.U. and Sam’s prized recording of a group of Pygmy children singing.
“I went to a lot of parties. I cried a lot.”
Taking brief refuge at Gene’s apartment to count the money and figure out how much is hers, Claire decides she has to go after Sam, telling herself that it’s only to retrieve the money stolen from her, but knowing, as we do, that the money is only an excuse.
Gotta be 5 o’clock somewhere in the world, right?Claire takes in the Tokyo skyline.Relics of the future past.At the end of the world.
And so Claire departs to track down Sam and the stolen money, a journey that will take her from Paris to Berlin, to Moscow, to Tokyo, and beyond, ultimately to the Australian outback, where Sam hopes to reunite with his parents before the Indian satellite brings about the last of days.
Rüdiger Volger as Winter.
The trail leads to some encounters with the other interested parties who are hunting Sam for their own reasons, apparently having to do with some rare opals that Sam has stolen along with a mysterious, top-secret video-camera headset that his father has invented.
Volger in Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976).
Chief amongst Sam’s pursuers is the rumpled, German private-eye, Winter, played by Rüdiger Volger (Wenders’Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, and Lisbon Story), who proves alternately annoying and useful to Claire.
Winter has resources that Claire does not, and with his high tech tracking gear, he quickly picks up Sam’s scent. Reluctantly, Claire agrees to partner up with Winter. Perhaps together they will have a greater chance of finding Sam.
A young Max Von Sydow (R) plays games with Death (L) in Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece.Three Swedish legends of cinema: MaxVon Sydow (L), Liv Ullman (M), and revered auteur-filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman (R).
Sam’s father, Dr. Farber, is played by the great icon of Ingmar Bergman’s cinema, Max Von Sydow (The Seventh Seal; Spielberg’sMinority Report).
Like so many brilliant but myopic men of his generation, and every generation before him and since, Dr. Farber has been figuratively blinded by his career ambitions to the harm that his life’s work is causing the people who love him most, mainly his son, Sam. Slowly, Sam is being literally blinded while trying to complete his father’s research through over-exposure to the visionary camera that Dr. Farber has invented, the American government has stolen, and Sam has “repossessed.” What makes the camera so special? Among other things, it can record our dreams.
Sam looks, but cannot see.
Blindness, literal or otherwise, is one of (if not the) main themes of the picture, which is highly ironic given that UTEOTW is a film with such an abundance of visual splendour.
The late, great Robby Müller.
It should be counted among the finest examples of the late Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller’s very best work, a long list of excellent pictures that includes:
German poster for Down By Law, JimJarmusch’s triumphant follow-up to his indie debut, Stranger Than Paradise.Theatrical poster for Wenders‘Paris, Texas (1986).Theatrical poster for Alex Cox’s Repo Man.Theatrical poster for Jarmusch’s brilliant, dead-panwestern.Theatrical poster for Lars Von Trier’s most acclaimed film.Spanish poster for Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark.Theatrical poster for Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People.A walk to the end of the world.
Perhaps it is precisely because UTEOTW is so beautiful to look at that the prospect of losing our ability to see, as Wenders’ story presents, becomes so terrifying, and thus, such an effective dramatic engine for what may initially appear to be a rambling, globetrotting journey without destination. That all changes once we learn the true nature of Sam’s mission. But first, back to blindness:
Beloved French film icon (and ex-wife to William Friedkin), Jeanne Moreau.
Sam’s mother (played by Jeanne Moreau, another legendary icon of international cinema), is already clinically, legally blind, which is why Dr. Farber invented the camera in the first place.
Sam and his father’s camera.Sam records a video message from his sister in Siberia.Sweet dreams (machine).
Sam’s true mission, we eventually learn, is to travel the world collecting images of family, friends, and various landscapes for his mother to finally “see.” Dr. Farber’s camera does have the capacity to record our dreams, but it was originally designed for the sole purpose of allowing blind people to see.
Reeling from the fresh heartbreak of Gene and Makiko’s betrayal, Claire is now “love blind” over Sam. As she says, she is like some teenage girl with a bad crush, refusing to see the many red flags warning her off pursuing the troubled Sam, who robs her, abandons her, sleeps with her, ties her up, robs and abandons her again.
Winter’s upgraded bounty hunter software finally locks in on Trevor McPhee, who is really Sam Farber.
Sam really does not want to be followed, even by someone as intriguing, beautiful, and selflessly invested in helping him (for no discernible, logical reason), as Claire.
Winter and Claire chained to the bed and each other.
When he skips out on her for a second time, leaving her stranded, broke, and handcuffed to Winter in a Tokyo hotel room, Claire calls Sam a bastard. But she isn’t going to give up on him. When Claire loves someone, she is prepared to go to the ends of the world for them. And thats’s exactly what she will have to do for Sam.
For his part, our hapless narrator, Gene, is blind to how badly he has hurt Claire, and how she could have so easily and speedily fallen out of love with him, only to immediately fall in love with a criminal like Sam, who treats her so much worse (in Gene’s estimation) than he did through his one-off transgression with Makiko.
Gene and Winter make unlikely bedfellows.Claire, Gene, and Winter, unable to find beds at their Moscow hotel.
Gene will have to traverse the globe chasing after Claire, then chasing Sam with her, footing the bill along the way, before he is ready to see that he has lost her forever as a partner, but never as a friend. And anyone who knows Claire will attest that, to be her friend, is certainly worth crossing the globe for, even if only to finally let her go.
Winter cuts the figure of a classic Hollywood gumshoe, like a German version of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.
Winter, the lovable, but lonely private eye, by the very definition of his occupation, is always looking for what cannot be found, and therefore cannot be seen.
Like his Bounty Bear program, Winter is perpetually searching, searching, searching.
Winter is his name, finding people is his game.
But by the time he reaches the Australian outback in the film’s more philosophical and decidedly slower-paced second-half, his eyes are now open to something more profound than the endless pursuit of chasing people for money.
He is, after all, as Gene tells us in his narration, a “bleeding heart,” who previously made finding lost children his life’s mission.
End of the world music.
And though poor Winter suffers much through the film, always the one most put out by the double crosses and desperate attempts to evade him, the experience of venturing to the end of the world with Claire, et al, has seemingly delivered him to a moment approximating some form of enlightenment. By the film’s end, Winter is at peace, his heart still bleeding, but intact.
Claire comforts Sam.You’ll see me in my dreams.
Ultimately, the most urgent concern of Wenders’ film is with the blindness that we all share — the inability to truly see into each other’s hearts, minds, and dreams.
A frustrated scientist & his microscope: LiamNeeson in SamRaimi’sDarkman (1990).
We have modern, ultra-sophisticated microscopes that can show us our cellular makeup…
Jim Carrey discovers one of the hidden cameras in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show.
Tiny, fibre-optic videocameras that can be inserted under our skin to allow us to see inside our bodies and study our internal organs…
Theatrical poster.
We have X-ray machines that sometimes look and make us feel like we’re strapped in for one of those nasty procedures in JohnFrankenheimer’s prototypical 1966 body-horror, Seconds, that show us our bones, but none of this technology can show us what we feel or think.
MRI brain scan.
We can look at our brains with an MRI machine, but we cannot see our thoughts. Dr. Farber’s revolutionary dream camera rectifies that.
Dr. Farber in his underground lab (lair?).Claire (L), and Farber, Sr. (R).
To see each other’s dreams would be to reveal an open window directly into the deepest, hidden, unexpressed reservoirs of our innermost thoughts and feelings.
Sam’s blind mother dreams…And can finally see her son, as he was when he was a little boy.
And Farber’s device records not only what we are looking at, but also how we feel about what we are looking at. It records our emotions. It can “see” a child’s love for its mother, for example.
This site’s favourite film critic, Mr. Roger Ebert, in his best formal wear.
My favourite quote ever about movies comes from Roger Ebert, the one about how they are “empathy machines,” but a camera that can show us our own and other people’s dreams? With all due respect, admiration, and apologies to Sir. Roger, Dr. Farber’s camera would easily have the movies beat.
Incidently, Ebert gave UTEOTW a very lacklustre two stars in his contemporaneous review, and wrote somewhat dismissively: “The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making.”
Ebert and the thumbs of judgment.
But in all fairness to him, Ebert only saw the truncated version, not the Director’s Cut. In effect, he only saw half the picture, so awarding the original version half of the stars that the Director’s Cut rightly deserves actually seems apropos.
Claire is weary of Sam’s futuristic head gear.
Should such a device as the one Dr. Farber invents in the film ever come into existence, I fear that, at least for the cinema, it truly would be the end of the world.
From lonely heart…To mad bomber.
But with the exception of a small bit of comic relief around one minor character (Tom Farrell) whose apocalyptic Cassandra Complex turns him from anxious dive-bar lonely heart into an anti-nuclear-activist-cum-terrorist, that sort of thesky is falling (or in this case, Indian satellite), doomsday rhetoric is mostly avoided by Wenders’ hopeful, romantic, ode to travel, technology, love, and dreams, and so, I’ll avoid it here.
Poster for Paul Schrader’s 2002 sex and videotape drama,Auto Focus.Family man Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) shows off his new video camera in Paul Schrader’sAuto Focus (2002).Then puts it to its real use…A different kind of “home movie.”
Like Paul Schrader’s 2002 sex-and-videotape drama, Auto Focus, would do a little over a decade later, UTEOTW also holds a special significance for those of us with an interest in the history and development of digital video photography.
Early reel-to-reel video tape.
At the time of UTEOTW’s production, although analog tape had been around since 1951, the digital medium was very much in its infancy. If it were a baby, it would have taken its first breath, but not yet opened its eyes.
To sleep… Perchance, to dream.Farber’s tech is the holy grail in the search to capture our dreams.Shades of Hurt’s earlier immersion in visionary sci-fi, Ken Russell’s 1980 film of Paddy Chayevsky’s script for Altered States.Hurt in Altered States.Theatrical poster for KenRussell’sAltered States.
Dr. Farber’s camera remains the stuff of science-fiction fantasy, but since the audience would have to view so much of the footage that the Farber’s device was supposedly capturing, there was a real need for Wenders to find a credible way of presenting digital images that would still be recognizable as videotape to an audience in 1991, when the film was to be released, but also show how the technology might significantly advance by the year 1999, when the story takes place.
This required Wenders, his creative and technicalteams, and the Japanese engineers in R&D over at SONY, who would have to actually develop or invent the working hardware and software required by the task at hand, to imagine the potential future of video ten years down the road.
Claire captures the sights.Playback.Early digital video capture of Hurt, as Sam.You can just barely make out the shape of a doorway captured by Claire’s handicam.The canals in Venice.Thai-chi at the end of the world.Child on bicycle.Face of the future.Visions from the underground.Self-portrait of a hitchhiker.
They set about accomplishing this in three ways. First, they would have to create the blurry, pixelated, desaturated digital images captured by Claire with her consumer-grade mini-handicam.
Then there would be the higher resolution, but still slightly impressionistic (since they are imbued with the beholder’s feelings about what they are seeing), much crispier, high-end digital images captured by Sam while out in the field. We see them as double images as we would with modern 3-D cameras, which, like our own brains, rely on two overlayed visual inputs to create the illusion of depth, as we perceive it with our eyes.
Terminator (2) vision.
With the on-screen computational overlays, Sam’s footage is a little like Schwarzenegger’s POV shots from James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, released the same year as Wenders’ film, though obviously to much greater box office.
Lastly, they would need to create the vibrant, impressionistic, colour-saturated (occasionally black-and-white or monochromatic) images, distorted to the point of abstraction, of the various characters’ dreams (and sometimes, nightmares).
Digital vision of Claire.An analogue one.
The first challenge for the team of artists and technicians assembled by Wenders’ would be the inevitable, unfavourable comparisons of the aesthetic qualities of the digital footage to the well established look of traditional film.
Pixel-vision Claire.
By juxtaposing digital video images with those shot on celluloid, as Wenders intended to do, the fear was that, by contrast to the pristine look of contemporary film stocks, which, unlike digital video, had advanced considerably by the early 90s (film admittedly had more than half-a-century’s head start on its baby-sister medium), that video footage would just look bad. Grainy. Ugly. Unusable.
Digital noise.
Pixels were simply no match for film grain in 1991. Was it even possible to make video look beautiful back then? Wenders and his collaborators were undaunted in their many trials and errors along the way in that most honourable of pursuits: artistic and technological innovation.
The real-world images that Sam and Claire would record with their respective cameras in their across-the-world adventures would be challenge enough, but how could Wenders and team even hope to approximate the look and feel of our dreams?
SalvadorDali’s conceptual sketch for the “eyeball” set from AlfredHitchcock’sSpellbound.
Beyond those technical difficulties associated with the use of digital media in its early form, there was an even more daunting artistic obstacle: the generally accepted notion that dream sequences in cinema (and television) have traditionally, more often than not, simply been inadequate in their attempts to articulate the intangible, amorphous look and feel of our dreams, which do not adhere to any of the visual logic that film grammar is dependent upon. Of course, there are exceptions:
The Salvador Dali sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’sSpellbound (1945)is one prime example.
The world’s most famous surrealist painter and its most famous director of suspense pictures, respectively, Dali’s and Hitchcock’s worlds collided in Spellbound with stunning results.
Gregory Peck needs a nap after all that dreaming!60th anniversary Vertigo re-release poster.The director’ screen credit.Bass’ screen credit (detail).
Topping his work inSpellbound, the Saul Bass psych-out sequences in Hitchcock’s1958 masterpiece, Vertigo, remain the very best of their kind.
A restless night of sleep for Jimmy Stewart’s Scotty. Haunted in dreams.Or is he awake?Flowers for the dead…Transform into cartoon leaves.They tumble towards us.Scotty travels through the void.He sees red.He is transported to a graveyard.Where an open grave is waiting…For him!Head trip.The face of fear.Not Boris Karloff.A falling silhouette.The trademark Bass cut-out style.Falling in black and white.Scotty wakes up in fright.Fellini’s masterpiece. Or, at least, one of his masterpieces.
Fellini’s opening to 8 & 1/2 (1963)isanother exampleof dreams done right, probably the finest articulation of dream imagery in international cinema to date.
Stuck in traffic.Under the watchful eyes of strangers in the other vehicles.A busload of passengers, so jammed in, their limbs are spilling out of the windows. Makes the TTC look slightly less like Dante’s Inferno.Trapped in his car.Glared at, by more commuters.Ignored by those with more pressing things on their minds.Riders on a bus to nowhere.Freeing himself from the vehicle…But not the scrutiny of the strangers.Preparing for take-off.Rising.Taking flight.Comes a horseman.“Down you come!”Tethered to the earth.Some people just don’t know when to let go!Prognosticator of prognosticators.“Down for good!”Shades of Vertigo.
Woody Allen’s opening to Stardust Memories (1980), riffing on Fellini’s opening to 8 & 1/2, also comes to mind.
Allen & longtime casting director, Juliet Taylor, proved they could rival Fellini in selecting extras with great faces. Just look at the mug on the train’s ticket-taker. Is that not the face of Judgement?
There are even those few, extra rare examples of films which successfully create and sustain a dreamlike quality for the entirety of their runtime.
Theatrical poster for DavidLynch’sLost Highway.Theatrical poster for what some say is Lynch’s best work, Mulholland Drive.
The most obvious example would be the cinema of(recently departed genius) David Lynch, especiallyLost Highway (1997), and Mullholland Drive (2001).
Season 5 advert.
Outside of the movies, the most successful dream sequences in narrative television are likely to be found in select episodes of HBO’s landmark mafia & psychoanalysis drama, The Sopranos (1999-2007).
Tony goes full Gary Cooper, his spirit animal.
The most notable example would have to be Season 5’s 11th episode, The Test Dream – the one where Tony rides a horse through his living room.
What sets UTEOTW apartfrom those other stories in this regard, is that it never attempts to recreate the distorted narrative logic of our dreams. It’s not bothered with their elusive plots (trying to remember the stories in our dreams only ever proves to be an exercise in frustration), but is instead preoccupied with the meaning of the images and with the emotions they elicit in the dreamer.
The dazzling, impossible physics of Christopher Nolan’s dreamthrillerInception (2010).
There are no gravity-defying Inception-like dream-within-a-dream (within a dream!) heist sequences to be found here. Instead, Wenders and team explore the new and emerging aesthetic possibilities inherent in imagining how our brains would interpret and process images without the benefit of our eyes to actually see them.
It’s a fascinating visual problem, and as such, a distinctly cinematic one. And because it is so interested in how we see, how we feel about what we see, and how we reproduce and share what we see, UTEOTW is a story that can really only be properly told through the uniquely visual medium that is the magic of moving pictures.
Cinema remains the art form that most closely approximates our dreams, despite its over-reliance on pesky little elements like visual and narrative logic.
Lovers in flight.
The great joys of the film’s first half are to be found in exploring the visual pleasures of our external realities: of so many diverse, breathtaking landscapes (from the Blade Runner-esquemetropolisof near-future Tokyo, to the vast, tranquil emptiness of the Australian outback) in such rapid-fire succession; of so many beautiful and captivating movie-star faces; of such a rich and varied, and when called for, impressionistic colour palette (remember when movies weren’t just orange and green?!); of the great sounds and songs that play throughout Claire’s big adventure on the film’s soundtrack (more on that later).
In contrast, the great pleasures of the second half are to be found in the film’s scientific and philosophical musings, its ideas about ways of seeing, and in its intellectual curiosity about humankind’s shared compulsion to steal glimpses into the mysterious abyss of our unexplored interior lives through our dreams. Wenders’ characters do this armed with the full knowledge, as Nietzsche warned us, that the abyss always stares back.
Sam’s fading eye-sight is but one of the dangers (physical, psychological, moral, and otherwise) inherent in the use of Dr. Farber’s dream machine.
The good doctor’s intention of restoring sight to the blind is, of course, a noble one, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with.
Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Saw The Futute (and was terrified).
You don’t have to be a paranoid genius on the level of Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) to imagine the real world implications and potential for harm that abuse of Farber’s device would cause if placed in the proverbial wrong hands.
We have been well warned by Dick in his novels and the films adapted from them.
NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden.
The concept that technology might be used in the future to harm us is one that we are all very familiar with in the post-EdwardSnowden reality in which we find ourselves currently living, as we’ve seen in Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizen Four (2014), and Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016).
But the surveillance state hasn’t just been forced upon us by Big Brother, like we saw in Michael Radford’s 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Theatrical poster.
We happily adopted it ourselves, volunteering our locations, memories, and thoughts in an endless stream of Facebook updates, Instagram posts, and Twitter/X tweets (Xs?), as we saw in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010).
Gunmen hot on Sam’s trail.
That using the futuristic tech his father invented will put Sam’s life in danger is more than a distinct possibility considering the rogues gallery of bounty hunters, private dicks, and even hitmen, that the US government has dispatched to solve their Sam problem. All of that makes for great high stakes drama and suspense as Sam circumnavigates the planet in his efforts to evade them.
The personal risks that Sam takes in his righteous quest to collect images for his mother almost excuse his bad behaviour towards Claire before they inevitably (as people must do in the movies), finally, properly fall in love.
Sam slips away again.
It’s not that Sam is a bad person, it’s just that he has a mission, too, and he cannot afford to get distracted or waylaid by anyone or anything, not even true love. Time is running out for Sam before, like his mother, he can no longer see.
In Tokyo, Sam is lost in more than translation. He has finally, completely lost his sight.
By the time Claire and Winter finally track Sam down to that Tokyo hotel, he is now effectively, totally, blind.
Since an image collector needs only two things: a camera, and the use of their eyes, at about the halfway point in UTEOTW, Sam is unable to complete his mission, and here, the film does something very odd. Already more than two hours in (more than the entire length of most movies) Wenders stop the story cold, pausing the frenetic pace of the global chase narrative, to allow Sam as much time as he needs for his eyes to heal, and for he and Claire to really get to know each other, and genuinely fall in love. From here on out, Claire will no longer have to chase after Sam.
The chemical process we experience as romantic love may occur in an instant, hence, “love at first sight,” but that is only the intense, but shallow, quick-fading flame of lust and infatuation, not the everlasting, till-death-do-us-part, raging fire of selfless, heart-bursting, life-lasting true love, the stuff Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas wrote about, the kind of love that can make you forget the world is soon coming to an end.
Lovers embrace.
Once Sam stops running, and lying, and finally tells Claire all of his secrets and fears, when he is truly vulnerable with her for really the first time, Claire isn’t angry that he has been keeping so much from him.
She says only, “You could have told me this before.” It’s not the admonishment that it sounds like. Claire just wants Sam to know that everything she learns about him only makes her love him more. It has taken them such a long time, over so many miles, to finally reach this place of trust, affection, and connection with each other, and it could well prove to be that very rare and special kind of love after all.
Despite its never-ending fountain of ideas, optimism, and hope for the coming (now past) future of 1999, it is Wenders‘ romantic, humanist tendencies that have had me revisiting a film which perplexed me greatly 34 years ago, when both the movie and I were so much younger.
Spanish VHS cover art.
Not really understanding the deeper implications of the story as an 11 or 12 year-old, and despite the aesthetic limitations of first seeing it on VHS tape, the movie’s sumptuous visuals and its ultra-cool soundtrack intrigued me sufficiently to return to it again and again every few years. Now that we’ve both matured (hopefully, in my case) with the passage of time, UTEOTW has finally, totally enchanted me.
Though the film fared poorly at the box office, the soundtrack album was a considerable hit for a little-seen art film, peaking at #114 on the US Billboard 200 sales chart.Reverse album cover with one hell of an impressive track listing!
I’m not ashamed to tell anyone who will listen that I absolutely adore this film. To echo Nick Cave’s words on my favourite (among many standouts) track from the album, which I’ve happily had stuck in my head since re-watching UTEOTW for this post, (I will love it) till the end of the world!
Gene and Claire reminisce.The Stones, still at it.
There is a funny music joke in the film, too. When Claire reminisces with Gene about the time they saw The Rolling Stones’ last concert, Gene corrects her. “But it wasn’t their last concert, was it?” Claire smiles, knowingly, and we smile, too. That’s another of many predictions that Wim got right.
The Stones (who did not contribute any songs to the soundtrack) did not have their last concert in 1999 nor, as of this writing in early 2025, in any year since. In fact, according to our friends at Google (by which I mean myself, using their search engine), The Rolling Stones are currently planning a 2025 European tour. Wherever they are in the world right now, I’m sure they are either performing live, or rehearsing to do so imminently.
Dommartin (L), shares a laugh with Wenders (R), her then-partner in life and art.
Wenders’ former screen muse and life companion, the luminous Solveig Dommartin, died tragically young on January 11th, 2007 in Paris, France, after a heart attack. She was only 48 years young.
Dommartin (L), with Wenders (R).Dommartin (L), with Wenders (R).Dommartin (L), with Wenders (R).Wenders (L), with Dommartin (R).Wenders (R) directs Dommartin (L) on location for Wings of Desire.Dommartin with Bruno Ganz as the love-struck angel, Damiel, in Wim Wender’smasterpiece, Wings of Desire.
I hope she is with Damiel and Cassiel now, and all the other angels of heaven, joyfully spreading her own wings of desire, while keeping a friendly watch over the great many of us who return again and again to the enduring gifts she left behind in her all-too-few screen appearances.
Dommartin with Peter Falk in Wings of Desire.
In Wenders’ Wings of Desire she gave one of world cinema’s finest performances, one that must not be forgotten.
But it is her portrayal of Claire in UTEOTW that remains my personal favourite. I think I fell a little bit in love with Dommartin myself when I was 13 or 14 and first saw her lighting up the screen in that circus tent, or going alone to a dingy underground club to see Nick Cave perform live in Desire. And that’s the other bit of magic to be found at the movies. It doesn’t matter where I am in my life, whenever I see this picture, or Wings of Desire, or any of the films I fell in love with in my formative movie-watching years, I am instantly 13 again, and happily love blind.
Immersed in a digital landscape.
But I’m not 13 anymore, of course. I’m 45 now. It is January 27th, 2025 as I write this. Nearly 35 years have passed since the film was made, and more than a quarter-of-a-century since 1999, when it take place. We are living in the future of the future that UTEOTW envisioned.
Dr. Farber, by way of Steve Jobs.
Probably the closest thing we have today to a device that even remotely resembles Dr. Farber’s dream machineis Apple’sVision Pro headset.
Shades of that iconic, Sam Farber style.Merging reality with your desktop. Images come to life.An out-of-this-world experience for just under $6,000!
The Vision-Pro looks a little like Dr. Farber’s device, and though the headsets may not be able to record our dreams (yet!), they do just about everything else, including immerse us fully in an alternate, 360-degree-spanning, dream-like reality.
Staying connected with friends and family anywhere in the world.
Not to mention video calling, as predicted in the film (along with the internet, GPS, and Winter’s iPad-like computer tablet).
Record your loved ones…Just by looking at them!
Apple’s Vision Pro offers the wearer of its headset the ability to record, as Sam does, their memories, not as they might do through the cumbersome apparatus of a video camera in their hands, but hands-free, just by looking.
Our greatest hope for realizing Farber’s vision of seeing our dreams through some kind of digital medium continues to rest on tbe efforts of doctors, scientists, and technicians (and dreamers!) working to find new and improved technologies for mapping and reading our brains. According to the BBC article above (its slightly misleading headline aside), we’re getting a lot closer to achieving the reality that UTEOTW envisages. Soon, it will be science-fiction no more.
Claire sees the future.The Orgasmitron from Sleeper.
Whatever technology we do ultimately adopt to enhance it (Sleeper’s Orgasmitron, anyone?), human beings will always seek most to connect to each other, to fall in love, to share our memories, our fears, our hopes, and, perhaps more than anything else, our dreams.
And so, this post is dedicated with much respect and admiration to the memory, and in honour of, the great, multi-talented, human being and artist, Solveig Dommartin. May she forever rest in peace and power.
