No. 68 - Mike Nichols - Part III: CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971)

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971)

After CATCH 22, Mike Nichols returned to the modern day but with equally challenging material in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE from a screenplay by Jules Feiffer that was originally intended as a play. It’s a very frank, adult depiction of sex and relationships between men and women covering the college years to middle-age in the lives of two best friends and how their attitudes to their needs define their future happiness.

Art Garfunkel is Sandy, the virginal, gauche one of the two. Jack Nicholson is Jonathan - who even as an undergraduate talks a wise experienced game as though he is a master seducer of women, lecturing his friend on what to do. Nicholson’s needs are shallower: ‘big tits’ attached to a nice body are really the vital pre-requisites. Garfunkel is a shade more romantic and idealistic yet his nice-guy bourgeois blandness is no more a guarantee of his later fulfilment than Nicholson’s wolfish bad-boy promiscuity. Both men change partners during the film; their sexual history at the start maps out their characteristic flaws – Garfunkel’s technique with women is clumsy, impatient – whereas Jonathan has less morals. He seduces Sandy’s girlfriend Susan (Candice Bergen) behind Sandy’s back, taking her virginity before his friend and continuing to see her without his knowledge.

Into the second act, by now Sandy has settled into dull domesticity while Jonathan has shacked up with Bobbi, the curvy Ann Marget (whom he would later team up with again in Ken Russell’s TOMMY). She is a model possessed of the looks, lack of inhibition and big boobs that satisfy his simple cravings – however she is miserable and craves marriage to give her life meaning. As she fails to please him or nourish herself, she deteriorates into a drudgery of compensatory over-sleeping, their sex life that was their only bond becoming moribund until eventually, uncared for, she attempts suicide.

As the story deepens and time passes, each man achieves career security, Jonathan as a lawyer, Sandy as a doctor - but neither man’s maturity has extended to their constant impulse to seek new, perceived better, partners. Sandy actually switches roles with Jonathan, gradually seeing himself as the counsellor, encouraging Jonathan to make a pass at his later girlfriend Cindy (Cynthia O’Neal) who proves more than a match for Nicholson’s ‘player’ tactics.

As the ‘60s end, female emancipation adds to Jonathan’s resentment of women, exacerbated by his impotence. In the middle-aged conclusion, he presents Sandy and his latest 18 year-old partner Jennifer (Carol Kane) with a slide-show of his conquests entitled ‘Ballbusters on Parade’ coupled with a sour running commentary. Jennifer is offended so they leave. Jonathan is all-at-sea and apologises to Sandy who is now full of modish encounter group pseudo-profundity for him, yet lacks the self-awareness to see his own mid-life crisis in his choices of women. Sandy calls Jennifer his ‘love teacher’ and crows about her beguiling youthful wisdom compared to Susan, failing to realise this is just his version of always looking for greener grass. Jonathan sees through his friend’s latest transient state but at least Sandy seems to find pleasure. Jonathan is reduced to paying experienced hooker Rita Moreno to recite well-rehearsed patter that swells his ego and hopefully his penis every visit.

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE is a brave and honest look at male and female sexual politics, which earned some critical disapproval for its reflection of a new openness and casuality about sex in modern western society. As in THE GRADUATE, Mike Nichols shows great sensitivity with the cast in long exploratory takes, and artful cinematography uses shadow to conceal the protagonists’ innermost conflicts (such as Jonathan’s break-up ‘phone conversation in the hallway).  An inciteful sign of the times…

No.67. Mike Nichols - Part II: CATCH 22 (1970)

 CATCH 22 (1970)

At the beginning of the 1970s as war in Vietman raged, consuming thousands of American soldiers on its misguided bonfire, revolt against the unjustified military waste of lives wasn’t just protested on the streets. Film-makers with a conscience took up arms too, another reason why this period is so resonant for me to focus on in my blog. Robert Altman targeted the insanity of US foreign policy and the senseless slaughter of the young by disguising it under the retro banner of setting the brilliant M*A*S*H during the earlier Korean War.

With CATCH 22, the equally revered theatre and film director Mike ‘THE GRADUATE’ Nichols and celebrated writer Buck Henry took Joseph Heller’s WWII novel, published in 1961 and used its past setting to comment with even darker satire on the then current war in South-East Asia. It’s a madcap and twisted collection of insane characters that all live in their own crazy reality on a fictional Mediterranean army base. They orbit around Bombardier Capt. Yossarian (a career high for Alan Arkin), a tightly-wound ball of tense paranoia on the constant verge of cracking up. His symptoms actually mark him out as being possibly the only sane person on the base. Everyone else seems to have developed bizarre idiosyncratic ways of coping with their situation which he cannot agree with. Sadly, that’s the problem - his relatively healthy mind-set means he cannot claim to be crazy enough to get out of the ever-rising number of bombing missions set by the brusquely plebeian Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam). He tries to get the marvellous Jack Gilford (as Doc Daneeka) to sign him off the lusicrously dangerous runs, but Daneeka’s hands are tied. He invokes ‘Catch 22’ – which he explains as “Anyone who wants to get out of combat isn’t really crazy – so I can’t ground them”. There’s the rub; “That’s some catch, that Catch 22” exclaims Yossarian. Daneeka is similarly admiring of its infuriatingly water-tight logic: “It’s the best there is”.

Including Balsam and Gilford, CATCH 22 has one of the biggest gatherings of top American talent in one film, no doubt helped by Nichols being in charge. It is especially impressive for its character actors. Richard Benjamin’s Major Danby is a gently crackers officer who announces missions in a sing-song bedtime story narration that clearly nails him as seriously out of touch with the grave consequences of his work. Charles Grodin is Capt. Aardvark, a pipe man whose calm exterior conceals a later alarming homicidal tendency. Bob Balaban’s Captain Orr is a rare chance to see him relaxed rather than the nervy nebbish he later plays so much – in fact he’s disconcertingly so, waiting patiently in his superior’s waiting room whilst dripping wet from being fished out of the sea for the umpteenth time. Anthony Perkins is a splendidly brittle and self-conscious Chaplain Tappman. Bob Newhart makes a hilarious Major Major, a paranoid over-promoted officer who dodges any interaction by always being out of the office, as he instructs the bemused Norman Fell.

Amongst the bigger leading names we have Martin Sheen’s Lt Dobbs, who first, unwittingly, introduces us to the circular logic in an argument with Yossarian that has our man at least making it work for him:

DOBBS: “Just suppose everyone thought the way you do”

YOSSARIAN: “Then I’d be a damn fool to think any different”.

Further into the plot, Dobbs decides to kill his commanding officer and goes missing to be heard about at the end.

John Voight is a winningly loopy Lt. Milo Minderbinder, whose entrepreneurial bent has him turning the base into a giant syndicate that trades all of its raw materials including parachute silk, morphine and military hardware in return for other goods to make a profit. Share certificates are given out but prove small consolation to dead men. Art Garfunkel is a blissfully serene Nately, who is glad of the increasing missions as he intends to never go home, instead shacking up with the love of his life whom he doesn’t understand is a professional prostitute using him.

Probably the most vivid character cameo of all is the terrifying General Dreedle - who else but the towering presence of Orson Welles? He roars into the base, intimidating all and sundry and generating at least some vestige of normalcy in his men via their tortured moans over his lusciously pneumatic girlfriend. Dreedle doesn’t suffer fools gladly, even within his intimate relations. “Get back in the car, you smirking slut”, he orders her, savouring such outrageous gem lines as these. His son-in-law, the great Austin Pendleton, gets similarly short shrift as his nincompoop son-in-law who continually reminds him of the perils of nepotism: “Don’t pay any attention to Dad”. Later, when Dreedle has to give a medal to the stragetically naked on parade Yossarian, he eyes the Bombardier with ill-disguised contempt: “You’re a very weird person, Yossarian”.

For much of the film, there is a recurring dreamlike series of vignettes featuring dazzling white backgrounds suggesting Heaven. We are gradually bled in scenes of Yossarian struggling with a dying crewman on board his plane, Snowden in surreal sequences that are peculiarly calming amongst the madness, until Snowden fatally bleeds out his entrails in gruesome detail.

As the film gets into its third act, the tone becomes progressively darker. Yossarian ventures into Rome, befriending an old cunning Italian man in his home who later disappears, we see male prostitutes and a farmer shipping his dead carthorse in a back street and the chilling discovery of Aardvark having casually raped and then killed a hooker. Hungry Joe, one of the crewmen, is cut in half by a bi-plane piloted by a colleague. McWatt, who was jealous over Yossarian’s romance with an American beauty. Daneeka is at their side watching the plane crash into a cliff-face, assuring the group that he is not on board, but he was all along and is a spectral presence.

Yossarian laments the waste of his life and the war, summing up the sum total of his former friendships around him: “Nately was blown to bits. McWatt killed himself. Hungry Joe’s chopped in two. Dobbs disappeared. Aardvark’s a murderer. Doc Daneeka’s a zombie. The only friend I had is Snowden – and I didn’t know him”.

The film ends though in upbeat, abandoned fashion as Yossarian finds out that Dobbs survived and got away. On hearing this, he tears off his uniform in delirious joy and dashes into the sea, paddling a dinghy as the camera pulls back to render him a speck on the ocean. It’s a gloriously futile way to go but what other option is there for a man trapped in insanity?

CATCH 22 is a fantastic, surreal, complex, dark and deranged satire that arguably makes sense of the climate of greater madness in serving someone else’s war machine. Like M*A*S *H, it’s a film whose themes will never date as the supposedly civilised western world’s governments and military continually find new reasons and agendas to throw men and women callously to their deaths...

No 66. Mike Nichols - Part 1: THE GRADUATE (1967)

THE GRADUATE (1967)

There’s a number of reasons why I deliberately chose 1967 as the beginning year of my favourite period in film-making. Aside from being a vital time in infusing film with the political and social engagement of western youth, it was also a hugely fertile era in the drug and music inspired counter-culture; the release of SERGEANT PEPPER (the birth of the concept music album) and experimentation with form and technique in movies. Another exciting mould-breaking aspect was in the casting of Hollywood and British films.

Already by the mid-‘60s, Britain had seen the rise of a new generation of working-class actors who challenged the long-held notion that only attractive and well-groomed, middle class Rank charm School-type actors could play leading roles. Till then, If you sounded ‘common’ or looked somewhat average, you were relegated into patronisingly depicted character parts who provided colourful cockney chimney sweep support, for example, to the heroic handsome leading man. Actors like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Terence Stamp, and Tom Courtenay not only emerged in films as viable bankable talent but in a period when working-class credibility contributed to pop music, fashion and more, their lives on screen became the focus of a film’s central interest instead of background detail. Films like SATURDAY NIGHT, SUNDAY MORNING; THE LONELINELESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER and Michael Caine’s bespectacled, low-key anti-Bond in the spy thriller THE IPCRESS FILE all injected new life and interesting stories that better reflected the real world of the movie-goer.

State-side, Hollywood was somewhat slower to respond to this egalitarian shift…until Mike Nichols went looking for the main part of Benjamin Braddock in his film of THE GRADUATE. In Calder Willingham/Buck Henry’s script, Ben is very much the tall, blond athletic Ivy League educated WASP – essentially a Robert Redford type. In the film, you hear him celebrated on his homecoming by family and frends as the ‘track star’. Nichols was daring and shrewd in choosing the antithesis of this in Dustin Hoffman, a diminutive, dark-haired Jewish actor but who gave Ben more interesting qualities than someone like Redford would naturally. Hoffman suffered from veiled anti-semitism in the reviews of the film, his large nose drawing comment aside from other physical comparisons, but in his physicality and behaviour as Ben he is instantly sympathetic. Whilst Redford would not have been a loss in the role, his movie-star looks and an assumed appeal to college girls would have made his virginity and seduction by Mrs Robinson far less believable.

Hoffman’s appeal is an ill-at-ease fumbling, a willingness to do and say the right thing with his family’s friends, to be the model graduate student – and it’s unfair to say he doesn’t embody something of the winning physicality. He clearly trained hard to develop a good physique and tan for the role, but it masks a little-boy-lost who is all potential but no idea what to do with it when he comes home to begin his adult life. Amidst the excellent actors populating the older generation of his people are William Daniels and Elisabeth Wilson as his pushy socially-focused parents and Murray Hamilton as the glib Mr Robinson.

Nichols is skillful at ensuring we are on Ben’s side right from the opening, the camera tracking him closely from the airport travelator and on to his home. He is surrounded by a bombardment of family and friends all backslapping him and asking his plans, one well-meaning elder giving him the famously gnomic tip-off of the future: “One word. Plastics!”. His closely-followed vacation humiliation continues at his 21^st birthday party when forced by his somewhat insensitive father to parade in a present of full diving gear. We see the partygoers from Ben’s point-of-view as he breathes loudly through the respirator going in and under the water , a brilliant technique that isolates us from their noisy good intentions and identifies with his. He leans against the pool wall enjoying the peace in a nice pull-back that reinforced how alone he is. The mood of this shot has been echoed by countless indie film-makers since.

The two female leads are equal to the task of matching Hoffman in striking and sympathetic characterisations of their own. As Mrs Robinson, Anne Bancroft is a perfectly-realised portrait of bored, spoilt, disappointed wealth. Her humdrum life is passionless, a monotonous directionless playing-out of routine dulled by alcohol. She is nobody’s fool though. Bancroft commands her space elegantly, her privileged lifestyle assuming the compliance of waiters, and of Ben with feminine wiles. She is beautiful but covers up a youth of crushed dreams, sidelined by the unexpected birth of their daughter Elaine and now distracted when she can with affairs to retain some ego boosting and booze to forget the rest. It’s not clear whether Mrs Robinson is accustomed to regular cheating when she seduces Ben. She is certainly practised at getting her own way and betrays nervousness at the activity – unlike him. The build-up to the consummation of the adultery is cringingly funny. Hoffman’s ‘phone conversations with her, his awkward relations with the hotel reception staff, the crippling need to avoid social embarrassment, all met with serene and puzzled grace by Bancroft, right up to the cunning way she goads him into taking her by mocking his perceived ‘inadequacy’.

As Elaine, Katharine Ross is not only gorgeous but also instills a male desire to protect her like a delicate flower. I don’t care if that sounds sexist. I defy any male not to feel huge empathy for her when Ben takes her out on their date unwillingly and subjects her to a rude inappropriate front-row show of a stripper swinging her tassles at her. Her innocent confusion and tears are heart-breaking. Ben is full of remorse, breaking though the pose of trying to put her off out of a deal he made to continue seeing her mother – realising that this truly is the woman for him.

Ben is then given a purpose for the first time since the plot started, to win Elaine at all costs, against her family’s opposition (the affair has been outed by Mrs Robinson, cynically spinning herself as raped to cause extra hardship for Ben) and Elaine’s hastily arranged marriage to someone she doesn’t love. Hoffman goes into overdrive, committing hell-bent to the emotional nakedness of his need for her, uncaring of the consequences. There’s a welcome cameo by Norman Fell as his temporary landlord, a slow-burning disapproving of Ben’s volatile love-life -  and a fleeting glimpse of young Richard Dreyfus as a nosy student offering to call the cops.

Hoffman amps up the stakes by literally running after Elaine and then turning up at the church in what has since become a staple climax of rom-coms. It’s a crowd-pleasing moment when he presses himself to the upper-window glass, screaming Elaine’s name as the wedding service ends. Amidst the cleverly-silenced ferocious curses of her parents, Elaine screams his name back primally like a mating call and they fight off the attendees to escape onto a bus. The closing image of them is a subtly-played and directed two-shot as their adrenaline gradually subsides into a dawning understanding that they no idea what their future prospects will be  - in a world without parental support and a love that is uncertain…

A special mention must go to the sublime, evocative Simon and Garfunkel songs liberally woven into the film. Wistful, urgent, clean and bright or darker-toned, their work is one of the best uses of pop music in modern film.

THE GRADUATE paved the way for actors like Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and Richard Dreyfus, top talent whose appearance in a former age would have consigned them to playing heavies and character parts, to inhabit central roles that would immensely enrich the film they made. This film is deservedly a classic not just for its quality but for what it represents in breaking stereotypes…

No.65 Music on Film: SLADE IN FLAME (1975)

(SLADE in) FLAME (1975)

At the height of Slade’s three years of fame as a British glam rock group, with three of their singles hitting number 1 in their first week, their manager ex-Animal’s member Chas Chandler master-minded a plan to make movie stars of the band as part of a planned Beatles-style career trajectory. The band were keen to make a gritty film of a rock band’s fictional story grounded in reality rather than a slapstick film the fans would have expected.

After considering a number of scripts, one of which was a pastiche of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT called THE QUITE-A-MESS EXPERIMENT, they settled on working with writer Andrew Birkin (whose sister was Jane ‘Je t’aime’ Birkin. His script, like many, tended toward the myths of rock n’ roll – the glamourisation rather than the true picture. The band wanted him to understand the reality of life on the road, so they took him to the USA on their tour. He only lasted two weeks amongst the mayhem, but came back with many stories that Slade had told him about their touring lives and that of other groups – so the resulting script is truthfully about many different bands, not to be confused as an autobiography of Slade. Setting FLAME in the ‘60s also helped in slightly distancing the plot from being confused with Slade’s own history.

The plot is the downbeat cautionary rise and fall of a rock band comprising most of Slade, from their low-rent beginning scratching a living with a singer Jack Daniels (Alan Lake) and a rivalry with the similarly tacky the Undertakers, a Damned-style theatrical horror band led by Noddy Holder. The band ditch Daniels and take on Holder, then are dropped by their manager Harding (Johnny Shannon). When a smooth corporate marketer Seymour takes them on and aims to construct a successful image for them, Flame gradually fall apart, not helped by the re-emergence of Harding trying to cut himself a portion of their new-found profits.

SLADE IN FLAME is a satisfying film. Although it shrewdly features all-new songs at the time such as the atypical ballad ‘How Does It Feel?’ and a couple of concert performances, it’s not a thinly-disguised promo outlet for the band’s music. It works as an admirably unsanitised down and dirty depiction of the back-stabbing and deceit within the music business, a gratifyingly adult movie in many ways, with bad language and some violence to reinforce this, much like the nastier STARDUST released at the same time and the later BREAKING GLASS. (You can’t imagine a group like One Direction daring to present something this daring to their fan-base).

The film was shot in roughly eight weeks and all on location with no studio scenes. Slade’s own experience of filming as completely novice actors affected each member differently and they acquit themselves well. Jim took his part and the trauma he undergoes very seriously. Don, the ‘mad drummer’ was the buffoon in real life but the year before filming had suffered an almost fatal car-crash rendering his senses of taste and smell non-existent and his short-term memory only functioning haphazardly. This meant that mostly he could only be filmed in short one-liners but managed an extended heart-to-heart beach scene well. Dave Hill and Noddy Holder both had enough confidence to handle their roles and emerge as the most convincing actors, Dave feeling on reflection that they should have made a lighter rather than darker movie. Noddy stuck to his belief that it was better to challenge the fans’ expectations. It ‘killed the myth’ of the jolly japesters they were on stage yet earned surprisingly strong critical reception for their performances and desire to reach for something a little more sophisticated. Mark Kermode has since called it the ‘Citizen Kane of rock musicals’.

The profesional cast included Tom Conti, whose first film it was. In the DVD interview Noddy Holder said they got on well with him and that any aloofness he had was perfect for his role. Two others who fitted their parts perhaps too well were Alan Lake and Johnny Shannon as the manager Harding. Lake was a heavy drinker, and although full of tales that made him great company for the band and ideal for his character, he was prone to liquid lunches that rendered him aggressively the worse for wear to the point where he was fired, and it took his wife Diana Dors to persuade the studio to take him back, holding him to an honoured promise that he stay dry for the rest of the shoot. Johnny Shannon, a non-actor who became known for his first gangster role in PERFORMANCE, was hired on the strength of that film and made the most of the menacing relationship with Slade that was true to rough manager dealings the band had experienced. During a confrontation with Holder in one of their scenes, Noddy recalled that he suffered repeated painful hair-grabbings by Shannon without any fakery for the camera for each take. Rather than apologise, the East End tough declared that it would make the scene more authentic.

SLADE IN FLAME made money; although it would perhaps have been more succesful had it pandered more to fans’ pre-conceptions. Knowing that St Louis was a big market for the group in the U.S. they chose to hold the American release there. Such was the difficulty Americans had in understanding their Black Country accents, that the film had to be subtitled. (US fans on tour always mistook them for Australians).

Slade were offered a follow-on film  - a Russian spy comedy with the Two Ronnies - but it was never formalised and the band were also concerned about the time another movie’s commitment would take out of their relentless schedule of recording and touring.

SLADE IN FLAME is well worth seeing, both for Slade fans who want to see a different side to the group and for movie-buffs who enjoy rock music behind-the-scenes biopics…

No.64. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

In 1968 Paul Newman teamed up with Robert Redford, director George Roy Hill and writer William Goldman to create not only one of the greatest Westerns, but probably my favourite film of all time. I’ll attempt to explain why in some detail…

The plot is loosely based on the true adventures of two outlaws, Robert Leroy Parker (aka Butch Cassidy) and Harry Longbaugh (known as the Sundance Kid). Butch was the extremely likeable head of the Hole In The Wall Gang. The Kid was the somewhat ruthless crack-shot killer of the group, a loner who had no friends except for Butch. After pulling off a series of robberies culminating in the looting of a sum from a train belonging to E.H. Herriman, their tycoon victim paid to assemble a Super Posse so impressive that the two fled to Bolivia with the Kid’s girlfriend Etta Place in tow, where eventually the two thieves were cornered and killed in a shoot-out by the authorities.

William Goldman was extremely smart and justly celebrated in how he wove the story together to craft one of the most brilliant movie scripts of the art form in both plot and priceless dialogue. Goldman wasn’t a fan of the Western genre, hated horses and knew nothing about the period but what appealed to him was the fact that Butch and Sundance ran away to South America. This created a problem: at that time Western films only featured heroic leading characters; you’d never see John Wayne allowed to be a cowardly runaway. Goldman solved this by staging a 27-minute extended sequence in the middle of the movie showing the Super Posse’s pursuit of the pair with almost supernatural and relentless skill. The on-screen staging supported this masterfully by Conrad Hall’s camera direction always filming them tantalisingly too far away to be identified, increasing their looming intimidation “Who ARE those guys?” the boys repeatedly declare in fearful wonder.

Also, Goldman initially struggled with the portrayal of Etta. He hated writing for women in action films as (with the exception of Ripley in the ALIEN series) they were never able to do anything influential. Plus, almost nothing was known about her except that that she was beautiful and possibly a prostitute. Goldman’s solution was two-fold. He gallantly gave her the benefit of the doubt professionally by making her a school-teacher, and conceived her such that in every scene she surprises us. (This ended up being true of the male leads as well).

In casting BUTCH CASSIDY, George Roy Hill, a renowned Broadway and film director of comedy stuck to his guns, so to speak, in wanting Robert Redford opposite Newman. Paul Newman was an established box-office name and the studio demanded Steve McQueen as the Kid. Redford had only done a handful of films at that point and was not an A-list draw yet. Hill knew that there would be great chemistry between Newman and Redford, using their own natural affinity for their parts. He was proved right in spades. Newman (who actually didn’t mind which of them he played)  gives Butch his own loose, warm generosity. Redford though also a likeable man could project an air of suitably cool reserve. They also looked extremely attractive on screen, enhanced even more by the addition of the enchanting talent of Katharine Ross. Redford was made by this film, his career and life changed immeasurably. Incidentally, Goldman’s writing title was THE SUNDANCE KID AND BUTCH CASSIDY until Newman’s star wattage caused it to be reversed to favour him.

The dialogue of the film is not only extremely witty and economical, it was deliberately composed with a contemporary feel to the characters, giving them a modern sensibility that audiences could relate to. In a lengthy pre-production phase, Goldman and Hill shaped the script’s tone to ensure that the comedy didn’t overshadow the careful relationship they wanted the viewer to have with the boys. Too many laughs would spoil our compassion for them when they die. This concern continued beyond the film’s initial release with some gags possibly being taken out to emphasise this. BUTCH CASSIDY also benefitted from Hill’s theatre background in giving the cast two weeks of rehearsal prior to shooting, an almost unheard-of luxury today.

Shooting went very smoothly, despite Hill being repeatedly hassled by the studio to finish quicker to meet a release date. He was under so much pressure that he slept in one of the dressing rooms to save valuable time in getting onto set fast each day. Newman and Redford developed a generous mutually-supportive bond on and off screen, the beginning of a life-long friendship. (After THE STING, also made with Hill, they hoped for further collaborations – never as sequels – but surprisingly one never materialised).

The one relationship that unfortunately suffered was between Hill and Ross. In her 1994 interview for the DVD, Katharine explained that one day when the crew needed six camera operators and had only four, she volunteered to helm one for them. She’d fancied possibly developing this as a skill. It was not a key position for the shot she filmed, but Hill, one or two of the camera team and stuntmen were angered by this ‘infringement’ and she was thus banned from the set from then onwards apart from her on-screen days, which sadly coloured her enjoyment of filming – although she did marry Conrad Hall. “I was the straight man”. she said self-deprecatingly of her role, which downplays Etta’s humanising of the men-folk. Equally, there is a nice modernity in how she stands up for herself. The Kid takes her for granted as coming along with them to Bolivia. Etta submits to being ‘den mother’, but then curtly supplies her own terms: “I won’t watch you die. I’ll miss that scene if you don’t mind”.

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID is a perfect blend of wry and sarcastic commenting humour and one classic scene after another. Watch how the Kid is introduced after Butch’s casing of the bank. We enter a card-game as late as possible (part of Goldman’s skillful construction), where he is accused of cheating. The camera stays on him as the tension mounts. Even when Butch enters, we are focused on potentially unavoidable violent resolution. Then Butch reveals who Redford’s character is and the Kid demonstrates his shooting prowess. Enigmatic, taciturn and dangerous -  a perfect introduction to Sundance – nicely undermined by Butch’s waggish teasing as they exit: “Like I’ve been telling ya. Over the hill…”.

The by-play between Butch and Sundance is never based on gags for the sake of it. Their bickering reveals character as all the best writing does:
“You just keep thinking, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”

“Boy, I got vision - the rest of the world wears bifocals..” Butch mutters in reply.

My favourite of their exchanges is at the end of the Super Posse chase, the seeming impasse of the cliff-top. Firstly, Butch is getting nowhere asking the Kid for his thoughts on escape:

“How come you’re so talkative?”
“Jus’ naturally blabbly I guess.”

Butch then realises the only way they can evade their pursuers is to jump into the precarious rush of the river below. It is then that the frightened Kid is forced to reveal he can’t swim. Butch laughs at this, reasoning there’s no other way out:
“Wouls you make a jump like that if you didn’t have to?”
“I have to and I’m not gonna”.

“Are you kidding? The fall’ll probably kill ya.”

Of course they survive it. By now we’ve grown to like them so much, we’d hate the chase to end any other way.

The lovely Burt Bacharach score deserves praise as well for how it helps to not only cement the warm playful chemistry between the three leads, but also bridges the comedy and seriousness of the developing plot - another vital and distinctive element of the film.  ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ seemed a bizarre non-sequitur idea, and let’s not forget it’s a very contemporary-sounding song, yet its joyful coupling with Butch and Etta’s romantic ride and his madcap bike stunts became very popular. (A stuntman was hired but wasted two weeks coming up with zero stunts so Newman did almost all of his own as you see). This idyllic sequence is hilariously undermined by another favourite dialogue gem. The Kid asks what Butch and Etta are doing as they embrace platonically afterwards:

“Stealin’ your woman.”

“Take ‘er”, burps the Kid, casually walking off.

“You’re a romantic bastard, I’ll give ya that” observes Butch.

Goldman never forgets the human drama at stake, and grounds the chuckles with the fearful inevitability of their demise when they seek refuge with their friend Sheriff Bledsoe (a brief but excellent Jeff Corey). He cares about them and tells it like it is: “Your times is over and you’re gonna die bloody – and all you can do is choose where!”.

This melancholy edge infuses the rest of the film beautifully, even tingeing the fabulous Bacharach melodies, After the carefree ‘Raindrops’, the second of the three musical sequences is a terrific period sepia-tinted montage of still photos showing the three friends whooping it up in New York before taking the ship to South America. Notice though how the tune shifts in tone - from an amusing social whirl to the poignant on-board shot of Etta and the Kid dancing while Butch sits brooding on their fate at the side -  before grinning at it all. He’s not short of insane optimism for long. This montage along with the gorgeous multi-movement harmonic ‘ba-ba-ba’ piece for the Bolivia bank-heists later were designed not just to quickly expedite the story; they purposely add to Etta’s involvement in the boys’ lives - more at stake for them to lose by the end. This is wonderful economic story-telling by great talents.

By the time Butch and the Kid get to the dilapidated Bolivia, we know it’s just a matter of time before their crimes catch up with them. The ‘Banditos Yanquis’, equipped with Etta’s attempts to teach them basic ‘professional’ Spanish, soon fall foul of local thieves when delivering payroll for the great ‘colourful’ Strother Martin.  Knowing they have to kill the Bolivians to regain the money and live, Butch reveal his own secret: he’s never killed a man. The cold-blooded killing of the thieves is given due pause for grim reflection amidst the settling dust.

Ultimately, Butch and Sundance are cornered in the iconic marketplace climactic shoot-out, precisely filmed by Hill with meticulously prepared storyboards. By the time they lie wounded and resigned to going out in blazing abandoned style, we’ve become immensely fond of them. Butch has time for one last outlandish scheme - to head to Australia - before they rush out and are immortalised in that famous anti-heroic freeze-frame of defiance.

Watch BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID for a classic film of sensational writing, wonderful performances, sensitive directing, superb camera-work and all-round brilliance. Hollywood modern art is not an oxymoron.

No.63. Music on Film: BORN TO BOOGIE (1972)

BORN TO BOOGIE (1972)

In 1971 Marc Bolan was enjoying the height of fan worship of his music, dubbed ‘T-Rexstacy’, the early ‘70s version of Beatlemania. At that time, T-Rex was selling 60,000 singles a day. Even the Beatles themselves acknowledged Bolan was more popular then than they ever were in the UK at his high-point.

So it was a fitting kind of of anointment or passing of the mantle by Ringo Starr that he made a documentary celebrating his friend, composed of live film from T-Rex’s first British concert in six months at the Wembley Empire Pool and intercut with studio sessions and playful home-movie style footage.

Beginning with ‘Jeepster’, the live set is excellent quality, the sound reproduction mixed prominently to overshadow the crazed teenage rampage of the fans, although you can hear the occasional girly squeals of delight. There is a great, infectiously loose studio version of ‘Tutti Frutti’ with Ringo on drums and Elton John’s ferocious boogie-woogie keyboards. Fans of Bolan’s acoustic guitar-playing will love his sit-down rendition of ‘Spaceball Ricochet’. I’d never heard this song before, not being familiar with ‘the Slider’ album and found it very touching, preferring it to the slower original album recording I compared it to later.

The supplementary scenes for the most part are a mish-mash. The first one is a surreal nonsense at an airfield beginning with an interminable long-shot of Bolan eventually arriving in a convertible in Mad Hatter guise, accompanied by someone dressed as a giant rat. He recites some of his poetry, conversing it into the ‘phone as if in a conversation, then magically produces a dwarf who scoffs his wing-wirror. Your guess is as good as mine. Later, there is a series of indulgent out-takes in the same location where he and Ringo keep corpsing while trying to deliver lines to camera starting with : “Some people like to rock/Some people like to roll…” before abandoning it in laughter.

The one extra scene that may be of interest to fans is a sort of country Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, where Bolan does a nice acoustic medley backed by a string quartet  - including ‘Jeepster’, ‘Hot Love’ and ‘Get It On’, while nuns devour the sandwiches and Geoffrey ‘CATWEAZLE’ Bayldon performs.

The other highlight from the concert is the final eleven-minute ‘Get It On’ which goes from electric into an extended free-form jam session with Mickey Finn on bongos and Bolan imitating Jimi Hendrix by playing his guitar with a tambourine.

Despite Ringo’s unnecessary padding-out of the running time, BORN TO BOOGIE is a valuable time capsule of T-Rex’s stage performance and the fan hysteria of the time before Bolan entered his ‘Fat Elvis’ temporary spell of implosion  - as well as showing that Bolan had entered the Rock world establishment of impressive musical friends.

No.62. Sam Peckinpah - Part VI: PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

(2005 DVD ‘Special Edition’ - 110 minute version)

With this 1973 western, Sam Peckinpah returned to the whisky-slugging man’s world of the genre for which he had the greatest affinity. James Coburn wanted him to direct as he had a yearning to play Pat Garret. PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID is an affectionate film with rich themes explored about the passing of the old Wild West, the easy and not so easy resolutions of disagreements through violence and the friendships and bonds between men as they age.

Garrett is an old friend of William ‘Billy the Kid’ Bonney; their history together going back to when Billy was a badge-man and Garret was an outlaw. Now their roles are reversed and Garret tells him as a friend that in five days he must take up the duties of Sheriff and bring his old buddy in as a criminal. The rest of the film is the lawman’s dogged pursuit of his mark but with respect accorded between the two men until their fateful last meeting when Garrett shoots Billy dead.

It’s easy to see why Coburn was attracted to Pat Garrett as a role. He plays the Sheriff with a cool understated elegance and an easy authority that sets him apart from other men, coupled with a reflective side that mourns the loss of friendship that comes with duty. Kristofferson is a genial, laid-back Billy but convincing also in his equal dead-eye physicality with a gun.

Along the way, Peckinpah stacks the deck with a marvellous collection of Western character actors. Jack Elam is Garret’s gentle deputy, resigned to a fatally cheating (for him) duel with Billy. R.G Armstrong gives a splendidly enraged cameo as the deputy almost psychotically infused with religious fervour and boiling hatred at Billy’s provoking of him: “Repent, you son of a bitch”, before Billy kills him with a blast from his own dime-crammed shotgun. Jason Robards makes an urbane Governor Wallace, offering Garret $500 on behalf of a syndicate to apprehend the Kid. Garrtet suggests Wallace’s group “take your $500 and shove it up your ass and set fire to it”. He will bring in Billy anyway, but as his decision, not for money. Chill Wills is featured as a saloon owner.

Another memorable and moving portrayal is Slim Pickens as Sheriff Baker. Pickens was born to be a Western movie player and here he is tremendously poignant when he is gut-shot in a siege by Billy and makes his way to the water’s edge, watched lovingly by his wife Katy Jurado, at peace as he knows he will soon die.

Aside from Kristofferson, there are two other actor/singers in the film. Rita Coolidge, married to Kristofferson at that time, is his lover Maria. The most well-known and publicised addition to the cast and soundtrack is of course Bob Dylan. As an actor, playing the enigmatic stranger Alias (always referred to as ‘Boy’ by Garrett), Dylan doesn’t make a strong enough impression on screen, despite a number of scenes and close-ups. He’s very much along for the ride, but his music is indelible. PAT GARRETT was the first time many people would have heard his seminal ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ which resonates beautifully at key moments in the film. Astoundingly, Peckinpah didn’t like the song and left it out of his longer ‘Preview Cut’.

The issue of varying prints of the film would become a real bone of contention when PAT GARRETT was released - and aside from a truncated editing period due to cuts in the over-run budget made by producer James Aubrey, was symptomatic of a breakdown in Peckinpah’s relations with the studio MGM. His increasingly erratic behaviour was fuelled by the full-blown alcoholism and cocaine use that would later ruin him. On the first day Dylan reported for work on the set, he watched previous dailies with Kristofferson and Peckinpah, who was so unhappy with the footage that he stood up and urinated on the screen.

PAT GARRETT involved a record six editors struggling to complete a satisfactory theatrical print. Peckinpah approved a 124-minute preview cut which the studio demanded be shortened to 106 minutes. Peckinpah kept a copy of his version which wasn’t made available publicly for many years. In 1988 his cut came out on Laserdisc, which caused a positive critical re-evaluation of the film’s quality. To add to the confusion of different versions, in 2005 there was a Special Edition on DVD (the version I have) which not only was a composite of both releases but also added previously missing scenes.

Whichever way you see it, PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID is a Western gem, and I say this as someone who only likes certain examples of the genre. I tend to be drawn mainly to those that are ‘revisionist’ myth-busters, comedies or deeper Westerns that deal with consequences of actions (rather than the old-fashioned racist ‘Cowboys versus Indians’ fodder) such as BUTCH CASSIDY and UNFORGIVEN. This film has a pleasing sense of mature regret about the facile way that guns cancel out life thoughtlessly, doubly powerful for being made by a director felt to be a pornographer of firearm-related violence. A great and wordless scene demonstrates this neatly whereby Pat is on a river-bank and idly joins in a boating family’s shooting target practise of a bottle in the water. The father is seemingly threatened by Garret’s involvement and begins firing at him instead.

Peckinpah himself has a short Stan Lee-style spoken cameo near the end just before Garrett goes to reluctantly take down Billy. He quietly encourages the Sheriff: “You finally figured it out, huh? Go on. Get it over with.” I’d venture that as a last pure Western of his, in spite of his personal battles Peckinpah had figured out some things in his own work…