The Screengrab : elia kazan

That Gal! Amy Madigan

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Amy Madigan has been one of my favorite actresses for twenty-five years now. She's maintained her place in the rotation even though I've managed to see less and less of her as the years go by. A quick peek at IMDB confirms that she's never stopped working for very long, but it became clear pretty fast in the 1980s that she wasn't going to become a movie star, partly because she's never done "kittenish", and she's spent an awful lot of the past ten years working in movies that nobody saw and in TV shows about doctors that I didn't see. (I'm a hypochondriac. The last thing I need is to spend my down time learning about new symptoms.) Her last good role in a movie worthy of her time was in Gone Baby Gone, and it's probably not a coincidence that the picture also featured Ed Harris--her husband, who she met on the set of Places in the Heart and with whom she also co-starred in Louis Malle's Alamo Bay, Winter Passing, the TV film Riders of the Purple Sage, and Harris's own directorial debut, Pollack. One interesting aspect of her having been married to Harris for most of both their film careers may be that Madigan always has an easy reminder of how much easier it is for men to slide back and forth between a (relatively) great variety supporting and ensemble roles and character leads than it is for a woman.

Madigan has always had such strength and power onscreen that it must have cost her some roles--big roles that were being cast by people who find such power in a woman intimidating (and who extrapolate from that that folks in the audience will have trouble "relating" to her) and also small roles where the worry is that she'll stand out too much, as if it's supposed to be a bad thing when an actress is cursed with having such an effect on audiences that they can't take their eyes off her. This may be something that Madigan can't do much about, since she doesn't seem to be one of those performers who disappear into the woodwork when they're not acting. At the 2001 Academy Awards, when Elia Kazan tottered out to collect his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the camera picked her out, sitting in the audience, next to her husband, not clapping. I mean, she was not clapping up a goddamn storm, and glowering silently at the spectacle onstage. I remember the sight of her better than I remember most of the movies that were nominated that year. (I also remember looking at Harris and thinking, My God, son, if you know what's good for you, you'd better not clap!)

Where to see Amy Madigan at her best:

LOVE CHILD (1982):

This "true" story about a woman who entered prison at 19, had an affair with a guard, got pregnant, and fought for the right to hold onto her baby while in prison was directed by the infamous Larry Peerce, and in most respects, it's a like a Lifetime movie on hillbilly heroin. (Mackenzie Phillips failed to stage a comeback through her role as the prison's ducktailed head bull dyke.) But it was Madigan's first starring role, and those of us who saw it when it came out--on HBO, I mean, nobody saw this thing when it was in theaters--really knew we were seeing something. Madigan carries the movie to the movie on her back. She was in her early thirties but looked much younger, and uses her fireplug quality--the short frame seemingly on the verge of exploding from its own surplus of energy--very effectively to convey the David-and-Goliath side of the story, but without a trace of parthos; she's not a David you'd bet against. A year later, she got to give birth after a nuclear holocaust in the TV film The Day After, raising fears that she might be on the verge of being typecast as pregnant women carrying to term symbolic tokens of a second chance.

LOVE LETTERS (1983): This quiet, searching, imperfect yet emotionally rich film was written and directed by Amy Jones, and at the time it came out, it inspired some loose talk that it might be part of a new run of films looking at sex and love from a woman's perspective. (It wasn't, at least not from Amy Jones, whose subsequent films as writer and/or director amount to a steaming pile of junk, from Indecent Proposal and the Halle Berry vehicle The Rich Man's Wife to the Beethoven films. Earlier, she directed The Slumber Party Massacre from an original script by the novelist Rita Mae Browne. That one has a cult rep among people who want to believe that it must be intended as some kind of parody. People will always be kind...) The movie stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a single woman who, having found a cache of old letters written to her late mother by a man not her father, is compelled to jump into an affair with a married photographer (James Keach). Curtis is brilliant, and her scenes with Keach are fine, but it's the scenes she has with Madigan, playing her best friend, that set a new standard for capturing the distinctive rhythm of two intelligent women who care a lot about each other talking around the fact that one of them is doing something very, very stupid.

STREETS OF FIRE (1984)

Madigan has spent so much time playing rural and country women of good peasant stock that it's a real kick getting to see her as an urban action warrior. In Walter Hill's deranged "rock & roll fable", she plays McCoy, a two-fisted, pistol-packing super-mechanic with a tough-gal catch phrase: "Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna do it?" If Hill has employed her to hang around him when he was working on his scripts and bark that line out whenever his mind started to wander, he might have had more of a career since Ronald Reagan's first term. The movie stars Michael Pare, once a highly touted star of tomorrow who might as well have had "Where Are They Now?" scrawled across his birth certificate, as a pretty-boy bad-ass who's on a rescue mission to save his ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane) from the clutches of Willem Dafoe and his band of toughs. (They're so bad, they force the Blasters to perform for Jennifer Beals's body double in Flashdance.) When Pare and Madigan join forces, the movie seems to think that now she's his sidekick. It's so cute! Legend has it that Hill originally asked Madigan to read for the part of Pare's sister, and that after she'd done so, she pointed out to him that McCoy (who was originally written as a man) was the only part in the script worth a damn and, you know, what have done for me lately, Walter? Maybe if she's tried that line on her husband, she would have gotten to play Jackson Pollack.

CARNIVALE (2003--2005)

This HBO series would probably be finishing up its run right about now if the network had committed to the six-year plan that the producers intended. Instead, they cut it off after two seasons--and few who saw the second-season finale walked away thinking they had reason to complain, because the show seemed already to be doing a thorough job of swallowing its own tail. The show, about occult hocus-pocus set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, was a murky stab at an instant Twin Peaks-style cult hit, but it did provide you with a way to check in on Madigan week after week. She played the formidable sister of the scary preacher man played by Clancy "voice of Lex Luthor" Brown, and she always improved the show's focus, even when she couldn't even pretend that her character has a better idea than you did of what the hell was supposed to be going on.

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

Morning Deal Report: Jackie Chan Kicks Around “Karate Kid”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We already knew a Karate Kid remake was in the works, with Will Smith’s son Jaden set for the lead role. Now it looks as if the new Kid has his Mr. Miyagi – and, really, could it be anyone other than Jackie Chan? The Hollywood Reporter confirms that Chan is in negotiations to take on the role “made famous by Pat Morita in the original franchise…Like the original, which starred Morita and Ralph Macchio, the movie will examine the relationship between a martial arts expert and a boy who is picked on by bullies.”

Speaking of remakes, here’s one of the more bizarre Variety stories in a while. It’s not that I’m surprised to read that “Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer have set John Adams helmer Tom Hooper to direct and Christopher Hampton to write East of Eden, an adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel.” No, what surprises me is that nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a rather famous adaptation of this novel already exists. James Dean? Elia Kazan? Do these names ring a bell? Instead, Variety notes that “U and Imagine first optioned Steinbeck's book in 2004, when it shot to the top of the bestseller lists right after Oprah Winfrey chose it as the first selection when she revived her book club.” OK, so it took Oprah to bring this obscure work to their attention. Gotcha.

A Steve McQueen biopic is on the way, based on the book Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, which “delves into McQueen's offscreen penchant for motorcycles, fast cars and drugs. Project will examine his three marriages, including his stormy relationship with Ali McGraw, as well as his battle against lung cancer,” Variety reports.

Related:
Video of the Day: "Karate Kid III" After Dark
Bullitt: The Greatest Car Chase Ever Google Mapped

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1985)

It’s probably not a great sign that two of my heroes wound up killing themselves once old age began to creep in. After famously inserting himself into the gonzo dispatches he filed from the trenches of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson infamously inserted a ball of hot lead into his cranium as a permanent cure for depression and the nagging pain of various medical conditions. Likewise, the late, great monologist Spalding Gray jumped off a ferry in 2004 after years spent battling his own depression (stemming partly from his mother’s 1967 suicide) and pain (from a 2001 car accident) while also chronicling his own misadventures and neuroses in a series of seriocomic one-man shows for New York’s experimental Wooster Group theater company. Several of Gray’s monologues were filmed over the years (by directors including Steven Soderbergh and Nick Broomfield), but the first and best screen adaptation of his stage work was Jonathan Demme's Swimming To Cambodia, a rambling, fascinating (and extremely quotable) collage of national and personal history encompassing the Thai sex trade, the weird insanity of Richard Nixon, the horrific reign of the Khmer Rouge and Gray’s own search for a perfect moment while employed as a character actor on the set of Roland Joffe’s 1984 biopic The Killing Fields.

BILOXI BLUES (1988)

I understand my wife’s disdain for Neil Simon. His schticky, schmaltzy brand of lowbrow theater ain’t for everyone (and he extended the career of Marsha Mason way past its natural expiration date). Yet there’s a lot to recommend Biloxi Blues, the charming middle installment of the playwright’s alliterative autobiographical trilogy (bookended by Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound). For one thing, Matthew Broderick is at his Ferris Beuller best as a World War II-era army recruit forced outside his blue state comfort zone during basic training in a deep red Mississippi boot camp. The film, which never feels the least bit stagy, is two parts nostalgic coming-of-age comedy and one part “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture war drama, but the true highlight is Christopher Walken in a memorable supporting role as a deceptively affable, quietly menacing drill sergeant just as scary in his way as the more traditional expletive-spewing Full Metal Jacket variety.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (1993)

John Guare's finest play, a steadily escalating comedy of modern manners, was given the instant-classic treatment by director Fred Schepisi and a cast headed by first lady of the theater Stockard Channing, grizzled counterculture figure turned acting eminence Donald Sutherland, and Will Smith, then best known as the Fresh Prince. A movie whose wit and sophistication can make your head swim, it looks easy enough to make you wonder why all deserving plays haven't gotten as deft a movie treatment. Your first clue to the answer to that question may be that not even any other play of Guare's has made it to the Hollywood starting gate.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)

Working with Tennessee Williams' great play and the director Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando created thunder and lightning onstage during the Broadway run. Then he and Kazan packaged it in film cans and sent it out across the country to poison the minds of lucky youths everywhere. (Though there have always been people who expressed their regrets that Brando's performance hadn't been filmed early in the run -- you know, when it was really good.) Most of the rest of the Broadway cast came along for the ride, but the one key exception, Vivien Leigh as Blanche, turned out to be one of those uncanny marriages of a great, difficult role to a performer with an unsteady career who had something of her own that the character had always needed. The movie lives as a record of one of the most startling and sublime acting duets ever performed.

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE (2002)

Clare Peploe, a gifted director probably best known as the wife of Bernardo Bertolucci, had a small, too-little-seen triumph with this joyous and charming version of a romantic comedy written by the French Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux in 1732. The plot, which involves Mira Sorvino as a seductive royal and Ben Kingsley as a crackpot philosopher who has taught the object of Sorvino's romantic designs (Jay Rodan) to regard love with disdain, is a roundelay of schemes, masks, and mind fucks that Peploe weaves into a comic celebration of theatrical artifice itself.

LES PARENTS TERRIBLES (1948)

Jean Cocteau had already enjoyed a scandalous triumph with his play, an explosion of the form of the "boulevard comedy" likened to "Noel Coward on opium." He dove in head first when he decided to film it, resisting the urge to open up a text that has the small, overheated cast waging familial warfare in the confines of their cramped Paris apartment. The masterful handling of the farcical complications within the claustrophobic setting can make a viewer happily delirious.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for September 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s DVD Digest is highlighted by a bumper crop of new TV-on-DVD releases in conjunction with the upcoming fall season. In addition, a large number of Blu-Ray only releases and a crush of new indie films on DVD helps to smooth over the lack of a first-rate “DVD of the Week”-worthy release.

This week’s high-profile new releases on DVD include Ira Sachs’ acclaimed fifties-set drama Married Life (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Norwegian import Reprise (Buena Vista) (click here for Bryan Whitefield’s interview with the filmmaker), and the animated direct-to-DVD Marvel feature Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray). Also, in a strange coincidence, this week also brings the release of four films I caught at Columbus’ Out@Wex series of GLBT films this past spring: Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Strand), the coming-of-age drama Water Lilies (Koch), the gender politics comedy Itty Bitty Titty Committee (Wolfe Video), and Lagerfeld Confidential (Koch), a documentary about the fashion designer.

This week’s slate of classics coming to DVD is highlighted by three new Fox Noir releases: Elia Kazan’s Boomerang, Jean Gabin in Moontide, and Road House (no, not that one), which includes a commentary track from Screengrab favorite Kim Morgan. Somewhat less notable is MGM’s 20th Anniversary Edition of the unholy union of Michael J. Fox and Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City.

In the TV-on-DVD department, this week brings Desperate Housewives Season 4 (Disney), Eli Stone Season 1 (Disney), Ghost Whisperer Season 3 (Paramount), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 3 (Fox), Life Season 1 (Universal) starring the ever-underrated Damian Lewis, Supernatural Season 2 (Warner), and The Office Season 4 (Universal).

Finally, this week’s action-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: Jet Li in Black Mask (Lionsgate), Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser (Warner), the Clint Eastwood double feature Every Which Way But Loose (Warner) and The Gauntlet (Warner), Marvel’s animated The Invincible Iron Man (Lionsgate), the killer-virus thriller Outbreak (Warner), Michael Bay’s Transformers (Paramount), and Steven Seagal ridin’ the rails in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (Warner).

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Richard Widmark has died at the age of 93. Widmark made a splash with his movie debut in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which he played a sniggering young gangster named Tommy Udo. Widmark shaved his eyebrows off for the role and cultivated a skin-crawling giggle that was all the creepier for the times he employed it: among the things that amused Tommy in the course of the movie were the chance to shove an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs and his own delivery of the line, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over." It was a supporting role, designed as a contrast to the movie's hero--a remorseful, older, family-man hood, played by Victor Mature in what was probably his best performance. Yet Widmark took the picture straight away from him, and Tommy Udo and his giggle entered permanent crime-movie folklore, referenced in the Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and the Kaleidoscope song "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", and reportedly serving as a role model for the New York mobster Joey Gallo. Widmark received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for the new male star of the year. In later years, he would express mixed feelings about the attention the performance got: "It’s a bit rough, priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

His career had its ups and downs, but he is remembered for a bit more than that. Predictably, he came out of Kiss of Death typecast as a hood, but he began to get to play good guys after Elia Kazan cast him in the 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets. And his edgy appeal proved ideal for the good-bad heroes of more offbeat noirs such as Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which he played a career pickpocket named Skip who reaches inside the wrong purse and finds himself in possession of some stolen microfilm coveted by foreign agents, and Jules Dassin's London-set Night and the City (later ineptly made as a vehicle for Robert De Niro); his performance there, as the doomed con man Harry Fabian, is probably the best of his career. As noir died out by the end of the 1950s, Widmark spent more and more time in Westerns; he was cast as Jim Bowie in The Alamo by his ideological arch enemy, John Wayne, whose battles with the actor over both politics and their shared profession were the stuff of Hollywood legend. He also turned producer in order to set up a few projects, including the submarine melodrama The Bedford Incident, in which the studios had little interest. His last big, attention-getting starring role was as the title character of Don Siegel's police drama Madigan (1968), which he later resurrected for a short-lived TV series. In the later stages of his career, he specialized in character turns as authority figures: presidents, politicians, millionaire string-pullers, etc. He retired from acting on- screen after playing a United States Senator in the 1992 True Colors. “The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he once said, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.