Tag Archives: Frederic Forrest

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Apocalypse Now (dir by Francis Ford Coppola)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1979’s Apocalypse Now reimagines the Vietnam War as pop art.

Jim Morrison sings The End in the background as slow-motion helicopters pass in front of a lush jungle.  The jungle erupts into flame while in a dingy hotel room, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) gets drunks, practices his karate moves, and smashes a mirror before collapsing to the floor in tears.  The next morning, the hung-over and bandaged Willard ends up at a U.S. military base where he has a nice lunch with Lt. General Corman (G.D. Spradlin) and Col. Lucas (Harrison Ford) and a nearly silent man wearing an undone tie.  Willard is asked if it’s true that he assassinated an enemy colonel.  Willard replies that he did not and that the operation was classified, proving that he can both lie and follow military protocol.  Willard is told that a Col. Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gone rogue and his mission is to go into Cambodia and terminate his command with “extreme” prejudice.  It’s a famous scene that features G.D. Spradlin delivering a brilliant monologue about good and evil and yet it’s often missed that Willard is getting his orders from Roger Corman and George Lucas.

(Roger Corman was the mentor of director Francis Ford Coppola while the pre-Star Wars George Lucas was Coppola’s business partner.  Indeed, Apocalypse Now was originally somewhat improbably planned to be a George Lucas film.)

Up the river, Willard heads on a patrol boat that is populated with characters who could have come out of an old World War II service drama.  Chief (Albert Hall) is tough and no-nonsense.  Lance (Sam Bottoms) is the goofy comic relief who likes to surf.  Clean (Laurence Fishburne) is the kid who is obviously doomed from the minute we first see him.  Chef (Fredric Forrest) is the overage, tightly-wound soldier who just wants to find mangoes in the jungle and who worries that, if he dies in a bad place, his soul won’t be able to find Heaven.  The Rolling Stones are heard on the boat’s radio.  Soldiers on the other patrol boats moon the boat and toss incendiary devices on the roof.  It’s like a frat prank war in the middle of a war.

Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is a badass calvary officer whose helicopter raids are legendary amongst the enemy and a dedicated surfer who tries to turn every night into the equivalent of an AIP Beach Party film.  He’s a brilliant warrior who speaks with Malibu accent (“Charlie don’t surf!”) and who doesn’t flinch when a bomb goes off near him.  “I love the smell a napalm in the morning,” he says and, for a few moments, you really wish the film would just abandon Willard so we could spend more time with Kilgore.  “Some day this war is going to end,” he says with a reassuring nod, showing a non-neurotic attitude that is the opposite of Kurtz’s.  Willard says that he could tell Kilgore was going to get through the war without even a scratch and it’s true.  Kilgore doesn’t try to rationalize or understand things.  He just accepts the reality and adjusts.  He’s a true surfer.

The film grows progressively more surreal the closer the boat heads up the river and gets closer to Cambodia.  A USO show turns violent as soldiers go crazy at the sight of the Playboy Bunnies, dressed in denim outfits and cowboy hats and twirling cap guns like the love interest in a John Wayne western.  A visit to a bridge that is built every day and blown up every night is a neon-lit, beautiful nightmare.  Who’s the commanding officer?  No one knows and no one cares.

The closer Willard gets to Kurtz, the stranger the world gets.  Fog covers the jungles.  A tiger leaps out of nowhere.  Dennis Hopper shows up as a photojournalist who rambles as if Billy from Easy Rider headed over to Vietnam instead of going to Mardi Gras.  Scott Glenn stands silently in front of a temple, surrounded by dead bodies that feel as if they could have been brought over from an Italian cannibal film.  Kurtz, when he shows up, is an overweight, bald behemoth who talks in riddles and who hardly seem to be the fearsome warrior that he’s been described as being.  “The horror, the horror,” he says at one point in one of the few moments that links Apocalypse Now to its inspiration, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Directed by near-communist Francis Ford Coppola and written by the unapologetically right-wing John Milius, Apocalypse Now is actually less about the reality of Vietnam and more about how the images of the war shaped pop culture the world over.  It’s a reminder that Vietnam was known for being the first television war and that counterculture was not just made up of dropouts but also of writers, actors, and directors.  Kurtz may say that Willard’s been sent by grocery store clerks but actually, he’s been sent by the B-movie producers who first employed and mentored the directors and the actors who would eventually become the mainstays of the New Hollywood.  The film subverts many classic war film cliches but, at the same time, it stays true to others.  Clean dying while listening to a tape recording of his mother telling him not to get shot and to come home safe is the type of manipulative, heart-tugging moment that could have appeared in any number of World War II-era films.  And while Coppola has always said the film was meant to be anti-war, Col. Kilgore remains the most compelling character.  Most viewers would probably happily ride along with Kilgore while he flies over Vietnam and plays Wagner.  The striking images of Vietnam — the jungle, the explosions, the helicopters flying through the air — stay in the mind far more than the piles of dead bodies that appear in the background.

It’s a big, messy, and ultimately overwhelming film and, while watching it, it’s hard not to get the feeling that Coppola wasn’t totally sure what he was really trying to say.  It’s a glorious mess, full of stunning visuals, haunting music, and perhaps the best performance of Robert Duvall’s legendary career.  The film is too touched with genius to not be watchable but how one reacts overall to the film will probably depend on which version you see.

The original version, which was released in 1979 and was nominated for Best Picture, is relentless with its emphasis on getting up the river and finding Kurtz.  Willard obsesses on Kurtz and really doesn’t have much to do with the other people on the boat.  It gives the story some much-needed narrative momentum but it also makes Kurtz into such a legendary badass that it’s hard not to be disappointed when Willard actually meets him.  You’re left to wonder how, if Kurtz has been living in the jungle and fighting a brutal and never-ending guerilla war against the communists, he’s managed to gain so much weight.  Brando, who reportedly showed up on set unprepared and spent days improvising dialogue, gives a bizarre performance and it’s hard to view the Kurtz we meet as being the Kurtz we’ve heard about.  As strong as the film is, it’s hard not to be let down by who Kurtz ultimately turns out to be.

In 2001 and 2019, Coppola released two more versions of the film, Redux and The Final Cut.  These versions re-inserted a good deal of footage that was edited out of the original cut.  Most of that footage deals with Willard dealing with the crew on the boat and it’s easy to see why it was cut.  The scenes of Willard bonding with the crew feel out of character for both Willard and the rest of the crew.  A scene where Willard arranges for Clean, Lance, and Chef to spend time with the Playboy bunnies seems to go on forever and features some truly unfortunate acting.  Worst of all, Redux totally ruins Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” monologue by having Willard suddenly steal his surf board.  Again, it’s out of character for Willard and it actually feels a bit disrespectful to Duvall’s performance to suddenly turn Kilgore into a buffoon.

But then there are moments that do work.  I actually like the lengthy French Plantation scene.  By the time Willard, Lance, and Chef stumble into the plantation,  the journey upriver has gotten so surreal that it makes a strange sort of sense that they would run into a large French family arguing politics while a clown tries to keep everyone distracted.  The new versions of the film are undeniably disjointed but they also shift the focus off of finding Kurtz and place it more on Willard discovering how weird things are getting in Vietnam.  As such, it’s less of a disappointment when Kurtz actually shows up.  Much as with the French Plantation scene, the journey has become so weird that Kurtz being overweight and pretentious feels somehow appropriate.

What all the versions of the film have in common is that they’re all essentially a neon-lit dream of pop cultural horror.  Is Apocalypse Now a horror film?  Critic Kim Newman argued that it owed a lot to the genre.  Certainly, that’s the case when Willard reaches the temple and finds himself surrounded by corpses and and detached heads.  Even before that, though, there are elements of horror.  The enemy is always unseen in the jungle and, when they attack, they do so quickly and without mercy.  In a scene that could almost have come from a Herzog film, the boat is attacked with toy arrows until suddenly, out of nowhere, someone throws a very real spear.  Until he’s revealed, Kurtz is a ghostly figure and Willard is the witch hunter, sent to root him out of his lair and set his followers on fire.  If the post-60s American horror genre was shaped by the images coming out of Vietnam then Apocalypse Now definitely deserves to be considered, at the very least, horror-adjacent.

Apocalypse Now was controversial when it was released.  (It’s troubled production had been the talk of Hollywood for years before Coppola finally finished his film.)  It was nominated for Best Picture but lost to the far more conventional Kramer vs Kramer.  Robert Duvall was the film’s sole acting nominee but he lost the award to Melvyn Douglas’s turn in Being There.  Douglas was very good in Being There and I imagine giving him the Oscar was also seen as a way of honoring his entire career.  That said, Duvall’s performance was amazing.  In his relatively brief screen time, Duvall somehow managed to take over and ground one of the most unruly films ever made.  The Oscar definitely should have gone to him.

As for the film itself, all three versions, flaws and all, are classics.  It’s a film that proves that genius can be found in even the messiest of productions.

Film Review: Tucker: The Man and His Dream (by Francis Ford Coppola)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1988, Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a biopic about Preston Tucker.

Tucker was an engineer in Detroit who went from designing vehicles for the Army during World War II to trying to launch his own car company.  His ideas for an automobile don’t sound particularly radical today.  He wanted every car to have seat belts.  He wanted a windshield that popped out as a safety precaution.  He want brake pads and he also wanted a car that looked sleek and aerodynamic, as opposed to the old boxy cars that were being pushed out be Detroit.  He wanted a car that got good mileage and he wanted one that could be taken just about anywhere.  Unfortunately, Tucker’s dreams were cut short when he was indicted for stock fraud, a prosecution that most people agree was a frame-up on behalf of the Big Three auto makers.  Tucker was eventually acquitted but his car company went out of business.  Of the 50 cars that Tucker did produce, 48 of them were still on the road and being driven forty years later.

The film stars Jeff Bridges as Preston Tucker, Joan Allen as his wife, Christian Slater and Corin Nemec as two of his sons, Lloyd Bridges as the senator who tried to take Tucker down, Martin Landau as Tucker’s business partner, and Dean Stockwell as Howard Hughes, who shows up for a few minutes to encourage Tucker to follow his dreams regardless of how much the government tries to stop him.  One gets the feeling that the film was a personal one for director Francis Ford Coppola, a filmmaker who has pretty much spent his entire career fighting with studios while trying to bring his vision to the screen.  Tucker fought for seat belts.  Coppola fought for a mix of color and black-and-white in Rumble Fish.  Tucker stood up for his business partner.  Francis Ford Coppola stood up for Al Pacino when no one else could envision him as Michael Corleone.  As is the case with many of Coppola’s films, Tucker: The Man And His Dream is a film that Coppola spent years trying to get made.  It was the film that Coppola originally intended to be the follow-up to The Godfather, with Marlon Brando projected for the lead role of Tucker.  After watching the Tucker, it’s hard not to feel that it worked out for the best that Coppola was not able to make the film in 1973.  It’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Jeff Bridges in the role of Preston Tucker.

“Chase that tiger….chase that tiger….chase that tiger….” It’s a song that Tucker sings constantly throughout the film as the camera spins around him and how you react to Tucker: The Man And His Dream will largely depend on how tolerant you are of Coppola’s stylistic flourishes.  Coppola directs the film as a combination of Disney fairy tale and film noir.  The opening of the film, with Tucker running around in almost a manic state and excitedly telling everyone about his plans, is presented with vibrant colors and frequent smiles and an almost overwhelming air of cheerful optimism.  As the film progresses and Tucker finds himself being targeted by both the government and the other auto companies, the film gets darker and the viewer starts to notice more and more shadows in the background.  The moments of humor become less and less and there’s a heart-breaking moment where Martin Landau, in one of his best performances, reveals just how far the government will go to take down Tucker’s company.  But, in the end, Tucker refuses to surrender and Jeff Bridges’s charming smile continues to fill the viewer with hope.  The film becomes about more than just cars.  It’s a film that celebrates all of the innovators who are willing to defy the establishment.

There’s a tendency to dismiss the majority of Coppola’s post-Apocalypse Now films.  However, Tucker: The Man And His Dream is a later Coppola film that deserves to be remembered.

Film Review: All The King’s Men (dir by Steven Zaillian)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On September 10th, 1935, a Senator named Huey Long was shot and killed at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rogue.

While it’s generally agreed that Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a political opponent, approached Long, there’s still some debate as to whether or not Weiss was the one who shot Long. Did Weiss fire one shot at Long or was Long himself accidentally shot by his many bodyguards, all of whom opened fire on Weiss? (Weiss died at the scene, having been wounded at least 60 times.) There’s even some who argue that Weiss didn’t even have a gun on him when he approached Long and that Long’s bodyguards misinterpreted Weiss’s intentions. Or, as some more conspiracy-minded historians have suggested, perhaps Long’s bodyguards were themselves paid off by one of Long’s many enemies. With Huey Long, anything was possible.

Huey Long has been described as being an American dictator, a man who ran for office as a populist and who, as governor and then senator, ruled Louisiana with an iron fist. His slogan was “Every man a king,” and he promoted a platform that mixed Socialism with redneck resentment. (In modern terms, he mixed the vapid but crowd-pleasing rhetroic of AOC with the bombastic but calculated personal style of Donald Trump.) He often played the flamboyant buffoon but he also knew how to reward his friends and punish his enemies. At the time of his death, he was planning to run for President against FDR. It’s said that, in typical Long fashion, he planned to run as a third party candidate and draw away enough votes from Roosevelt to allow Republican Alf Landon to win. Then, in 1940, Long would run for the Democratic nomination and send President Landon back to Kansas.

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Whether his plan was feasible or not, they came to an end with his death. However, his legacy continued as members of the Long family dominated Louisiana politics for decades to come. Huey’s brother, Earl, served as governor of Louisiana for several contentious terms. Huey’s son, Russell, spent nearly 40 years in the Senate and, as chairman of the Finance Committee, was one of the most powerful men in the country. As late at 2020, Huey’s third cousin was serving in the Louisiana Senate. In the past few years, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been compared to Huey Long. Of course, if Huey were alive today, he’d probably be very popular online. Political Twitter has never met an authoritarian that it couldn’t make excuses for.

Among those who were fascinated by the life and death of Huey Long was a Southern poet and novelist named Robert Penn Warren. Warren used Long as the basis for Willie Stark, the man at the center of the novel All The King’s Men. In the novel, Stark is a classic and tragic American archetype, the man of the people who loses his way after coming to power. Stark starts the book as an idealist who wants to make life better for the poor but who, as he works his way up the political ladder, loses sight of why he first entered politics in the first place. He goes from fighting for the people to fighting only for himself. The book was controversial but popular and won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. In later interviews, Warren often said that All The King’s Men was never meant to be a book about politics but instead a book about two men, Willie Stark and reporter Jack Burden, losing their way during the tumult of the Great Depression.  Regardless of Warren’s intentions, most readers and critics have focused on the book as a cynical look at American politics and the authoritarian impulse.

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Considering the book’s popularity, it’s not surprising that All The King’s Men was turned into a movie just three years after it was published.  Directed by Robert Rossen and starring a perfectly cast Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark, the film won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1949.  Just as with the book, the film was considered to be controversial.  Many claimed that the film’s cynical portrayal of American politics was the equivalent of supporting communism, despite the fact that both the novel and the original film present Stark as being the epitome of the hypocritical Marxist dictator.  Indeed, if any character would have inspired audiences in 1949 to distrust socialism, it would have been a faux populist like Willie Stark.  Still, John Wayne was so offended by the book and the script that he very publicly turned down the role of Willie Stark.  That was all the better for Broderick Crawford, who won an Oscar playing the role.  When seen today, the original All The King’s Men holds up surprisingly well, as does Crawford’s lead performance.  Filmed in harsh black-and-white and featuring a cast of cynical, tough-talking characters, it’s a political noir.

Those who found the 1949 version of All The King’s Men to be dangerously subversive obviously had no idea what was in store for them and the country over the next couple of decades.  There’s a reason why the best-known book about the downfall of Richard Nixon was called All The President’s Men.  By the start of the current century, with all of the political corruption that was happening in the real world, the flaws and crimes of Willie Stark seemed almost quaint by comparison.  In 2006, with George W. Bush serving his second term, America embroiled in two unpopular wars, and the economy looking shaky, it was decided that it was time for a new version of the story of Willie Stark.

This version was directed by Steven Zaillian, the screenwriter whose credits included Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York, Hannibal, and American Gangster.  The role of Willie Stark was played by Sean Penn, who was both an Academy Award winner and an outspoken critic of George Bush.  (And, make no mistake about it, the new version of Willie Stark would be as much based on Bush as he was on Huey Long.)  Jude Law played Jack Burden, the reporter who narrated the story of Stark’s rise and fall.  Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo, Jackie Earle Haley, and Kathy Baker all had supporting roles.  This was a cast full of Oscar nominees and, indeed, the film’s trailer had that portentous, “the movie is very important and award-worthy” feeling to it that studios go with whenever they’re trying to convince audiences that they have an obligation to see a film, regardless of how boring or annoying it may look.  Entertainment Weekly predicted that All The King’s Men would be an Academy Award contender. For nearly two months, one could not see a movie at the Dallas Angelika without also seeing thee trailer for All The King’s Men.  It was a movie that was due to arrive at any minute and it was coming with an awful lot of hype.

And then, the strangest thing happened.  The film itself kind of disappeared.  It arrived and then it promptly got lost.  The reviews were overwhelmingly negative.  Audiences did not turn out to see the film.  It was a box office bomb, one that pretty much ended Steven Zaillian’s career as a director.  The film played for a week in Dallas and then left the city’s movie screens.  Even if I had been planning on seeing the film when it was originally released, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity.  The Gods of cinema, politics, and Southern accents were conspiring to protect me from suffering through a bad movie and I guess I should be thankful.  There’s nothing that makes me cringe more than hearing a bad Southern accent in a movie and the trailer for All The King’s Men was full of them.

Way back in November of last year, I noticed that the 2006 version of All The King’s Men was available on Encore On Demand.  At the time, I had politics on my mind.  The Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections had bee held earlier that week.  Biden’s huge infrastructure bill had passed the House on the very same night that I came across the film.  Hell, I figured, could watching Sean Penn as Willie Stark be any worse than watching Joe Biden try to give a speech from the Oval Office?  So, I decided to give the movie a chance and I quickly discovered that watching Sean Penn’s Willie Stark was a lot worse.

In All The King’s Men, Sean Penn gives the type of bad performance that can only be given by a good actor.  Penn yells and grimaces and barks out order like the villain in a badly dubbed Bollywood movie.  When he watches a dancer, he doesn’t just look at her.  Instead, he stares with all the intensity of a cartoon wolf who has just spotted Little Red Riding Hood.  There’s nothing subtle about Penn’s performance, least of all his overbaked accent.  The only thing wilder than Penn’s accent is his hair, which often seems to be standing up straight as if he’s just removed his fingers from an electrical socket.  It’s a performance that is heavy on technique but empty on substance.  In both the book and the original film, Willie Stark is flamboyant in public but cool and calculating in private.  In the remake, Penn yells and sweats and jumps around and comes across as being so desperate that it’s hard to buy into the idea that anyone would believe a word that he said.  Broderick Crawford’s Willie Stark was believable because Crawford, with his bulky build and his plain-spoken manner, came across as being a real human being.  One could imagine voters looking at Crawford and believing that he was just like them.  Sean Penn, on the other hand, comes across like a rich man’s version of a poor man.  Penn is too obviously condescending to be an effective populist.  Voters will forgive a lot but they’ll never forgive a politician who openly talks down to them.

As for the rest of the cast, they’re a very talented group but not one of them is convincingly cast.  In fact, many of them give career-worst performances.  Anthony Hopkins does his usual eccentric routine but it doesn’t add up too much because the audience never sees him as being anything other than Anthony Hopkins using a rather spotty Southern accent.  When Hopkins’s character dies, it’s not a tragedy because the character himself never feels real.  Instead, you’re juts happy that Hopkins collected a paycheck.  Kate Winslet seems to be bored with the role of Stark’s mistress.  Mark Ruffalo is dazed in the role of Winslet’s brother.  As Jack Burden, Jude Law seems as lost as anyone, which wouldn’t be problem if not for the fact that Jack is the one narrating the film.  When your narrator is lost, you’re in trouble.

There’s really only two members of the cast who escape the film unscathed.  Jackie Earle Haley is properly intimidating as Stark’s devoted bodyguard.  Haley doesn’t get many lines but one look at his disturbed eyes tells you all you need to know about how far he’ll go to protect his boss.  On the other hand, James Gandolfini gets several lines and he does such a good job of delivering them and he plays the role of a corrupt political boss with such a perfect combination of good humor and cold pragmatism that you have to wonder just how much All The King’s Men would have been improved if Gandolfini had played Willie Stark instead of Sean Penn.

Steve Zaillian’s direction involves a lot of soft-focused flashbacks and several visual references to the Nuremberg rallies.  Just as with Penn’s performance, there’s nothing subtle about Zaillian’s direction, despite the fact that the story itself is so melodramatic that it calls for the opposite of a heavy-handed approach.  One wonders what exactly Zaillian was trying to say with his version of All The King’s Men, which presents Willie Stark as being a monster but still as the audacity to end with a clip of him giving a rousing campaign speech.  Again, the problem is that we never buy into the idea that Willie Stark was ever sincere in his desire to help the common man.  Everything about both Penn’s performance and Zaillian’s direction serves to suggest that, from the start, Stark viewed them as just being a means to an end.  Ending the film with a flashback of Willie giving a campaign speech is about as moving as a friend from high school contacting you on Facebook and then trying to get you to take part in a pyramid scheme.  There’s no sincerity to be found in any of it.

In the end, it’s a film of overheated performances and meticulously shot scenes that all add up to very little.  There are a few moments where Sean Penn’s body language and his vocal inflections suggest that he’s trying to channel George W. Bush but there’s nothing particularly shocking or subversive about that.  In 2006, every movie and TV show had to find a way to take a swipe at Bush and Penn’s never been particularly reticent when it comes to broadcasting his politics.  Though All The King’s Men was executive produced by political consultant James Carville, there’s very few moment in the film that feel authentic.  It’s like a high school senior’s view of politics.

All The King’s Men came and went quickly.  Fortunately, everyone was able to move on.  Steven Zaillian has not directed another film but remains an in-demand scriptwriter.  Sean Penn, Anthony Hopkins, and Kate Winslet all won Oscars after appearing in this film (though, it should be noted, none of them won for this film).  Mark Ruffalo and Jude Law went on to join the Marvel Universe.  Jackie Earle Haley continues to be a much-respected character actor.  Tragically, James Gandolfini is no longer with us but his performance as Tony Soprano will never be forgotten.  The second version of All The King’s Men wasted a lot of talent but, fortunately, talent always finds a way to survive.

Citizen Cohn (1992, directed by Frank Pierson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1986 and the powerful attorney Roy Cohn (James Woods) is dying.  The official story is that Cohn has liver cancer but the truth is that he’s dying of AIDS.  As he lies in his hospital bed, he thinks about his past and the events the led to him becoming one of the most feared and powerful men in America.  He is haunted by the ghosts of his many enemies, people like communist spy Ethel Rosenberg (Karen Ludwig) and his former colleague, Bobby Kennedy (David Marshall Grant).

Not surprisingly, a good deal of Cohn’s memories center around his association with Sen. Joseph McCarthy (Joe Don Baker), a charismatic alcoholic who, in the 50s, charged that he had a list with the names of communist spies deep within the government.  Cohn and Kennedy served as the counsels on McCarthy’s committees.  Cohn is with McCarthy from the beginning and he’s with him until the end of the senator’s career.  In fact, it’s Cohn’s own shadowy relationship with an army private that ultimately leads to McCarthy’s downfall.

Except for one aspect of the film, Citizen Cohn is one of the best films to ever be produced by HBO.  The film covers a lot of history in a little less than 2 hours and it does so in a way that is always interesting and easy to follow.  By including incidents from every phase of Cohn’s life, as opposed to just focusing on his time as McCarthy’, the film also shows how someone like Roy Cohn can become a behind-the-scenes power player despite the majority of the country having no idea who he is.  James Woods gives one of his best performances as the hyperactive and unapologetically corrupt Cohn while Joe Don Baker is perfect as the self-pitying Joseph McCarthy.

The problem with the film, and your mileage may vary on how big an issue this is, is that it almost presents Cohn’s final days — dying of AIDS in a lonely New York hospital room — as being some sort of deserved fate for everything that he did wrong in life.  For me, even in the case of someone like Roy Cohn, that’s a step too far and it comes very close to presenting AIDS as some sort of divine punishment (which, itself, comes dangerously close to mirroring the homophobic statements that were made — and still are being made — by anti-gay activists).  That may not have been the film’s intention but, with the flashback structure and all of his dead enemies materializing to taunt Cohn as he lies dying, it’s still a very valid interpretation.

Some of that is perhaps unavoidable.  Cohn, in both real life and the film, died largely unrepentant for anything he did during his life.  As the central character of a biopic, Cohn never has the type of big moment that you would hope for, where he would realize that it was wrong for him to destroy so many lives and show at least a hint of contrition for his past behaviors.  That Roy Cohn is even a compelling character is a testament to the talent of James Woods because it’s certainly not due to any sort of hidden goodness lurking underneath the surface of Cohn’s snarling personality.  The lack of apologies and regrets that made Cohn a powerhouse in real life also makes him an ultimately unsatisfying subject for a movie.

A Movie A Day #335: Ruby and Oswald (1978, directed by Mel Stuart)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1963.  The month is November.  The city is Dallas.  The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, is coming to visit and two very different men have very different reactions.  An eccentric and lonely strip club owner, Jack Ruby (Michael Lerner), worries about an anti-Kennedy ad that has just appeared in the Dallas Morning News.  Another loner, a strange man named Lee Harvey Oswald (Frederic Forrest), is busy making plans of his own.  When Kennedy is assassinated, history brings Ruby and Oswald together in a way that a shattered nation will never forget.

This is a curious one.  It was made for television and, according to Wikipedia, its original running time was 180 minutes.  The version that I saw, on VHS, was barely 90 minutes long so obviously, the version I saw was heavily edited.  (In the 70s, it was common for made-for-TV movies to be reedited for both syndication and overseas theatrical release.)  Maybe that explains why Ruby and Oswald felt do disjointed.  In the version I saw, most of the emphasis was put on Jack Ruby running around Dallas and getting on people’s nerves.  Very little time was devoted to Oswald and the film was almost entirely stolen by Lerner. Michael Lerner is a familiar character actor.  You may not know his name but you will definitely recognize his face.  Lerner was convincing and sometimes even sympathetic as the weaselly Ruby.  Ruby and Oswald supported the Warren Commission’s findings, that Oswald killed Kennedy and Ruby shot Oswald out of a sense of loyalty to Jackie Kennedy.  Michael Lerner’s performance was so good that he almost made that theory plausible.

One final note, for fans of WKRP in Cincinnati: Gordon Jump and Richard Sanders, best known as Arthur Carlson and Les Nessman, were both in Ruby and Oswald, though they did not share any scenes together.

A Movie A Day #245: The Missouri Breaks (1976, directed by Arthur Penn)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson) and his gang of rustlers (played by Randy Quaid, Frederic Forrest, and Harry Dean Stanton) rob a train, Logan uses the money to buy a small ranch.  Their new neighbor is Braxton (John McLiam), a haughty land baron who considers himself to be an ambassador of culture to the west but who is not above hanging rustlers and hiring gunmen.  One such gunman is the eccentric Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), a “regulator” who speaks in a possibly fake Irish brogue, is a master of disguise, and uses a variety of hand-made weapons.  Braxton hires Clayton to kill Logan and his men, despite the fact that his daughter (Kathleen Lloyd) has fallen in love with Logan.

A flop that was so notorious that it would be five years before Arthur Penn got a chance to direct another film, The Missouri Breaks is best remembered for Marlon Brando’s bizarre performance.  Brando reportedly showed up on the set late and insisted on largely improvising his part, which meant speaking in a comical Irish accent, singing an impromptu love song to his horse, and disguising himself as an old woman for one key scene.  (According to Patrick McGilligan’s Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, co-star Harry Dean Stanton grew so incensed at Brando’s behavior that he actually tried to rip the dress off of Brando, saying that he simply would not be “killed’ by a man wearing a dress.)  Brando’s later reputation for being a disastrously weird performer largely started with the stories of his behavior on the set of The Missouri Breaks.

I had heard so many bad things about Brando and The Missouri Breaks that I was surprised when I finally watched it and discovered that it is actually a pretty good movie.  For all of his notoriety, Brando does not enter this leisurely paced and elegiac western until after half a hour.  The majority of the movie is just about Jack Nicholson and his gang, with Nicholson giving a low-key and surprisingly humorous performance that contrasts well with Brando’s more flamboyant work.  While Arthur Penn may not have been able to control Brando, he still deftly combines moments of comedy with moments of drama and he gets good performances from most of the supporting cast.  Quaid, Stanton, Forrest, and Nicholson are all just fun to watch and the rambling storyline provides plenty of time to get to know them.  Whenever Brando pushes the movie too close to self-parody, Nicholson pulls it back.   The Missouri Breaks may have been a flop when it was released but it has aged well.

A Movie A Day #117: Shadow Hours (2000, directed by Isaac H. Eaton)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Straight from the direct-to-video graveyard comes this journey through the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles.  Michael Holloway (Balthazar Getty) used to drink every hour and snort cocaine every night.  That was the past.  Now, he is clean and sober.  Michael is married to Chloe (Rebecca Gayheart) and they have a baby on the way.  In desperate need of money to support his family, Michael gets a job working the night shift at a 24-hour gas station.  Most of his customers are the scum of the Earth until, one night, Stuart Chappell (Peter Weller) steps into the station.  Stuart claims to be a writer and he hires Michael to accompany him on an exploration of the dark side of L.A.  They start with strip bars and then eventually move on to fight clubs and BDSM parlors.  Everywhere they go, Stuart is recognized but everyone knows him by a different name.  Soon, Michael is not only drinking and doing drugs again but he is also the prime suspect in a murder.

Shadow Hours is a dumb but entertaining vision of Los Angeles as Hades.  It has loads of atmosphere but it’s all taken from other movies, a hint of Taxi Driver there and a pinch of 8mm here.  The film’s main weakness is that it stars Balthazar Getty, who, as an actor, has the least sympathetic screen presence this side of Edward Furlong.  Even if Getty was playing a paraplegic veteran who had devoted his life to finding good homes for stray puppies, he would still come across as unlikable.  Make him a loser who spend most of the movie lying to his pregnant wife and it is impossible to care what happens to Michael.  The film’s main strength is that it also stars Peter Weller, who is pitch perfect as the mysterious Stuart, who might be the Devil.  If the whole movie had just been Peter Weller going to bars and fight clubs and hanging out with Lydia Lunch, Shadow Hours would have been a B masterpiece.  It’s too bad he had to take an oil heir with him.

A Movie A Day #108: Against The Wall (1994, directed by John Frankenheimer)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1971 and Malcolm Smith (Kyle MacLachlan) has just started working as a prison guard at Attica Correctional Facility.  Even though his father (Harry Dean Stanton) was a prison guard, Malcolm does not fit in with the other guards at Attica.  Malcolm is younger than them and is disgusted by the inhumane treatment of the prisoners.  If not for his wife (Anne Heche) and the child that they are expecting, Malcolm would just quit but he needs the money.  He fears that he is going to eventually turn into just another sadistic guard.

When a prison riot breaks out, Malcolm is one of the guards taken hostage.  While the psychotic Chaka (Clarence Williams III) wants to kill all of the guards, Jamaal X (Samuel L. Jackson) realizes that killing the hostages will sacrifice what little leverage that prisoners have.  If the guards are killed, Jamaal X reasons, the state police will have no reason not to storm the prison and violently restore order.  Over the course of the four-day riot, Jamaal and Malcolm become unlikely friends and allies but it turns out that, even with the guards being held hostage, the government has no interest in negotiating with the prisoners.

This moving, thought-provoking, and well-acted docudrama originally aired on HBO and it won John Frankenheimer a well-deserved Emmy.  Samuel L. Jackson is powerful as Jamaal X and this is one of the few times that Kyle MacLachlan got to play a thoroughly normal person with no dark secrets or weird quirks.  Malcolm Smith is just a regular everyman who finds himself in the middle of a history-making event.

For fans of Twin Peaks, Against the Wall features three alumni of the show.  Kyle MacLachlan, of course, starred as Dale Cooper while Clarence Williams III appeared in one episode as Roger Hardy.  Finally, Harry Dean Stanton, a longtime favorite of David Lynch, appeared in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.