The Screengrab : robert mitchum

That Guy! Special "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" Edition

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

What is special about today, hardcore fans of '70s cinema? It is that today marks the long-awaited DVD release of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), as part of the illustrious Criterion Collection. Directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt, The Hot Rock, Breaking Away), who supplies audio commentary on the disc, Coyle was faithfully adapted from the 1972 debut novel by George V. Higgins, a journalist and lawyer who was working as a United States Attorney in Boston when the book was published. Higgins was a master of dialogue, and Paul Monash, who did the screenplay, had the good sense to transfer most of it to the movie unaltered. It was picked up by the cast members, who ran with it. It's the inhabitants of this grungy, lived-in Boston Irish milieu--the movie looks as if it were shot while the city was enduring a shampoo embargo-- and the firecrackers that they set off whenever they open their mouths, who make Coyle a cult classic.

Robert Mitchum still had a few more leading roles in him after this one, but never again would he would so fully remain both a movie star and an actor living in this moment as he did here, morose but game, sunk deep in the character of Eddie Coyle, a small-time gangster facing the prospect of heavy time he's too old to do, summed up by the cop who wants to turn him into a stoolie as a career runt "about this high up in the bunch" but who knows everybody and everything. Mitchum had been offered the role of the bartender-hit man Dillon but decided he would prefer to die a loser's death after delivering a drunken tribute to the glittering future of Bobby Orr. Peter Boyle wound up playing Dillon instead; he and Mitchum wound up surrounded by a rogue's gallery of the strongest character types of their time, including Alex Rocco, who some of you will remember from our "That Guy!" tribute to the cast of The Godfather. Let no one say that just because the Eddie Coyle mob will always live in the shadow of the Corleones is no reason they shouldn't be paid tribute of their own:

RICHARD JORDAN: As Dave Foley, the puppy-eyed, honey-tongued, utterly unempathic detective who wants Coyle to "turn permanent snitch", Jordan walks off with the movie if anybody does. The fascinating disconnect between the show of thoughtful sensitivity in his face and his brutal indifference to what happens to people after he's used them holds the viewer's attention like a vise. Born in New York in 1937, to the daughter of Judge Learned Hand, Jordan graduated from Harvard in 1958 and spent the 1960s working in New York theater, on Broadway and with Joe Papp's Public Theatre. He made his movie debut in 1971 with the Western Lawman. He also appeared in the 1972 filmed play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and the Canadian film Kamouraska, directed by Claude Jutra and co-starring Genevieve Bujold, before landing the role of Foley. Two years later, he re-teamed with Mitchum when he played the older actor's sidekick in the Sydney Pollack action film The Yakuza

Jordan's film career turned out to be erratic; he never became a star, and he gave some of his least distinguished performances when he was cast as a leading man in cardboard roles, such as in the 1976 TV miniseries Captains and the Kings and the 1978 TV version of Les Miserables, and the infamous 1980 Lou Grade production Raise the Titanic! He did better when allowed to break out the ham in such flashy supporting roles as his serial killer in the 1985 The Mean Season. He died of a heart attack in 1993, just a month before his 55th birthday, and months before the release of his final film, the Civil War restaging Gettysburg.

STEVEN KEATS: A Vietnam vet and son of the Bronx, Keats made his movie debut as Jackie Brown, the shifty young up-and-comer who has figured out that illegal guns sales are a growth industry. With his jagged-looking front teeth and eyes that take in the scene like a laser scan, he's like a bird of prey who's so intent on checking out the potential targets in front of him that he never notices the bigger bird that's above him with its claws extended. Keats later played Charles Bronson's son-in-law in Death Wish (1974), an immigrant to turn-of-the-century New York in Hester Street (1975), and Robert Shaw's sidekick in Black Sunday (1977), before turning mostly to TV for the balance of his career. He appeared in Kojack, The Rockford Files, The A-Team, Moonlighting, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Law & Order, and, well, basically everything else; he also played a fictionalized version of the packager Lawrence Schiller in the 1982 TV film version of The Executioner's Song. He died in 1994.

JOE SANTOS: Slight-looking and toothy, with a Brooklyn-bred nasal lilt to his speech, Santos became a familiar figure in early '70s crime movies (The Panic in Needle Park, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, Shamus, The Don Is Dead, Shaft's Big Score), where his mere presence seemed to confer a dash of authenticity to the least convincing low-life atmosphere. His career breakthrough came when he was cast as Dennis Becker, James Garner's irritable buddy on the force, on The Rockford Files. He had played many a goon before that; he would play many a cop afterwards. The most memorable of many roles since then saw him backslide into criminality, notably his guest arcs on Hill Street Blues, as a perp who confused the undercover Belker (Bruce Weitz) by asking him if he'd ever kissed a man before, and more recently on The Sopranos.

JACK KEHOE: Kehoe has one brief scene here, sitting in a car and waiting for Steven Keats to arrive and denounce him for his unprofessional attitude. Though it was only his second movie appearance--his first was in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight--he had already found his niche. Kehoe has two basic looks--clean-shaven on his usual days, and with a mustache when his character is putting on airs and trying to pass for respectable. In movie after movie--The Sting, Car Wash, Melvin and Howard, The Pope of Greenwich Village, The Untouchables--he's masterful as the guy who barely wants to make a strong enough impression that anyone will notice he's in the movie, but who, finally flushed out into the open, stoically sets his jaw and waits for the no good that he knows will come of having his existence recognized. He has a little more fun than usual in the 1988 remake of D.O.A., where he and Brion James, playing a couple of mouthy police detectives, perform the kind of duet that only a couple of first-rate character actors of wildly contrasting types can make of a pile of exposition. Though he hasn't appeared on screen in more than ten years, he is said to still be out there somewhere, as he always should be.

In Other Blogs: Roger Ebert Contemplates Eternity

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The weekend is almost here, so let’s turn to our old pal Roger Ebert for some cheery TGIF thoughts. “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing…I hope not. I have plans.”

Glenn Kenny brings reason to rejoice at Some Came Running: The Friends of Eddie Coyle is finally due out on DVD – in a Criterion edition, no less. “‘Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore,’ Kent Jones writes in his exemplary (as usual) essay on the 1973 film, included in the new Criterion DVD of it. ‘The truth is that they never did. There's only this one.’ Robert Mitchum's performance as Eddie, the hangdog, hard-luck crook whose quiet desperation—in this story, he's due to start serving some time in a couple of weeks, and he's just not going to be able to hack it—compels his every move, is a huge part of the film's uniqueness. He underplays like nobody's business, and never announces himself. Not only does the trademark Mitchum smirk never once cross his face—looking at his work here, you'd never believe he had it in the first place.”

At PopMatters, Kit MacFarlane reconsiders Mickey Rourke in Homeboy. “A glum and downbeat boxing film, Homeboy not only anticipates many of the key concerns of the highly-celebrated The Wrestler, but also, by now-obvious extension, the real life trajectory of Rourke himself. But the film fell into the ‘too depressing’ pit on its release, and the presence of standard genre cliches saw it treated dismissively by those who didn’t look close enough to see those same cliches being quietly, but firmly, derailed. Despite the presence of actors like Christopher Walken and Jon Polito, a delicate score by Eric Clapton, and even a fawning reference in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles ("The movie traveled to the moon every time [Rourke] came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him."), it is rarely mentioned today at all…Too depressing in 1988, Homeboy‘s aura of sorrow now seems too delicate, too nuanced and poetic, next to the sensationalized sledgehammer misery pioneered by today’s hip angst-peddlers like Aronofsky, Todd Solondz, Larry Clark, and Christopher Nolan.”

SmartMoney lists 10 Things Movie Critics Won't Tell You. We’re fond of #7: You probably don’t want to hear this, but you need me. “Want to stir people up? Ask them what they think of movie critics. Jen Davis of Louisville, Ky., is put off by what she sees as a superiority syndrome in the profession. ‘My opinion is just as valid, dammit!’ she says. Tammy Ras of Pascoag, R.I., is more militant: ‘If they say, “Don’t see it, it sucks,” that means, “Go see it, it’s great.”’ Sounds harsh, but the truth is, filmgoers need reviewers. As Salon.com’s Zacharek puts it, ‘Critics are the only thing standing between consumers and advertising.’ With hundreds of films released in theaters each year, ‘Critics are more important now than they ever were,’ she says. ‘There are just so many movies, so much aggressive hype.’”

Finally, it’s not exactly a blog, but The Worst Show on the Web is Blog Talk Radio, and more importantly, the most recent episode features your Screengrabbin’ pals Andrew Osborne and yours truly discussing some films screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, most notably (and contentiously) My Suicide. Give it a listen here.

"Rio Bravo" Turns Fifty

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

"Most cult films are too hip to be popular," Allen Barra writes in The Wall Street Journal, "and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But Rio Bravo is that rarest of films -- both popular and hip." This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Howard Hawks's Western, which Barra argues "may be the most popular cult film ever made...[which] was shot in glorious Technicolor and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history", John Wayne, and kudos to him for keeping in an eye on the calendar so as to be sure and catch this. One critic, Robin Wood, has written that "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo." Another, David Thomson, recently asked, "Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time?" Quentin Tarantino, who once listed it as one of his three favorite movies of all time, introduced a screening of it at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and informed the room that whenever he starts seeing a woman for the first time, he always wants to show her Rio Bravo. If the woman doesn't like it, it is not his opinion of the movie that he proceeds to re-evaluate.

Rio Bravo, Barra writes, "was designed as an Alamo story in which the besieged Texans win. In case viewers don't get the message, the hotel Wayne's sheriff lives in is called "The Alamo," and the outlaw boss hires a Mexican trumpeter to play "El Deguello," supposedly the song that Santa Anna had played for the Alamo's garrison. (Actually, the piece was written by the film's composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Wayne liked it so much that he used it in his 1960 film called The Alamo.)" Hawks and Wayne liked to tell interviewers that the movie was designed as a fuck-you to Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winning High Noon, which was written by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman. In that movie, the townspeople are too cowardly to help sheriff Gary Cooper when word arrives that four vengeful gunman are on their way to shoot it out with him; in the end, Coop mows them all down and throws his badge away in disgust. Oddly, what seems to have rankled Hawks about this wasn't that the townspeople were gutless but that Cooper was, as the director saw it, so unmanly as to stoop to asking for anyone's help. ""I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help," he said. So Wayne, in a town that barely seems to have any townspeople except for the staff at the hotel, faces down a much larger force than Cooper had to contend with, backed up by a drunk (Dean Martin), a crippled old man (Walter Brennan), and a suburban-rockabilly show biz kid moonlighting as a cow hand (Rick Nelson). "The odds," Barra notes wryly, "are about the same for the good guys in both films."

The fact is that most people couldn't care less about whatever political message the people behind either film imagined they were peddling at the time. Tarantino summed up Bravo's enduring appeal to a great degree when he called it the greatest "hang-out movie" of all time, a term, he explained, refers to movies that hold up under repeated viewings just because the people onscreen are so damned pleasurable to spend time with. Barra refers to Rio Bravo's longish running time (two hours, twenty minutes) and measured pacing, with a time out from the plot for such digressions as a musical interlude in the jail, as evidence of Hawks's "daring", but they play to what Tarantino perceives as the film's strength; the audience, enjoying the unlikely mix of personalities onscreen (which also includes Angie Dickinson, in her breakout role as a seductive lady gambler named Feathers), cares less about suspense and action than in kicking back with them and forgetting about the clock.

This was indeed a gamble on Hawks's part, but he had the elements to make it work. This is all the more remarkable considering how he had gone about casting the picture. Most people assume that the casting of Nelson, who then had one foot in the music charts and one on the set of his parents' The Ozzie and Harriet Show, was a sop to the youth audience and TV watchers, and they are not wrong. (His role was originally written for an older man, and Hawks considered such leathery faces as Robert Mitchum and Jack Palance before deciding to look for a pretty boy. He apparently toyed with the idea of using Michael Landon, then best known as the star of I Was a Teenage Werewolf< before deciding that it would be nice for Dean Martin to have a singing partner.) Surpringly, Walter Brennan, who had worked for Hawks in five earlier movies and won an Oscar for one of them, Come and Get It, was also asked aboard in part because he was, thanks to his series The Real McCoys, now a TV star. According to Todd McCarthy's 1997 biography of Hawks, this would in fact cause the only real tension on the set, when Hawks discovered that Brennan was locked into the lovable, folksy old duffer act he'd been doing on TV and had to scream at his old reliable for a spell before Brennan became sufficiently pissed off to become the picture of a "crabby, evil, nasty old man" that the director had in mind.

Perhaps because some of the things that make the movie seem downright lovable today struck some critics as the time as something between facetiousness and blasphemous, Rio Bravo, despite being a great international success and the second-biggest box office hit of Hawks's career, it won no Oscar nominations, which seems an even more remarkable feat when you consider that Wayne's unfortunate The Alamo racked up seven of them. But we can guess at Hawks's estimation of it from the fact that, for the rest of his career, he continued to rifle it for spare parts. For some of us fans, Rio Bravo stands as the director's last hurrah. He worked for another dozen years, but the slow pace that feels so right here would come to see ever duller and more meandering, especially in the two additional Westerns he made with Wayne, El Dorado (1967) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970). Both borrow heavily from Rio Bravo for their stories and characters, but at least El Dorado made back its costs. In 1975, when John Wayne walked out onto the stage at the Academy Awards show to present Hawks with a special lifetime achievement Oscar, the star of Red River and Hatari! told the crowd that he and Howard Hawks had made four pictures together. Everyone who knew that the real total was five knew that the one they wanted to forget was Rio Lobo.

Set Your DVR!: October 27 - November 3, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Halloween week means more vintage horror! TCM in particular is even exceeding their own high standards this week, shoehorning in a night of Billy Wilder on Tuesday (nothing is recommended because everything is fairly well-known) and a few film noir classics on Wednesday before cranking up the scary on Thursday. As always, let me know in comments if you see something I shouldn’t have missed!

Mon, Oct 27:

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. As I said last week, it’s not a great movie, but it has a few iconic scenes.

Tues, Oct 28:

5/6 am: The Invisible Man on AMC. Based on Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of race in America... whoops, that’s not right. No one’s ever made that movie. This is James Whale’s classic horror film starring Claude Rains.

6:45/7:45 am: Bride of Frankenstein on AMC. And this is James Whale’s frankenlady movie.

7/8 am: The Desperate Hours on TCM. Neat little thriller about convicts on the lam starring Humphrey Bogart.

11 pm/12 am: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Wed, Oct 29:

1/2 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat. Last time I’m going to mention it, in fact.

7/8 pm: Murder, My Sweet on TCM. Killer adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

10:45/11:45 pm: Out of the Past on TCM. Film noir classic with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also made three of the Val Lewton-produced no-budget horror films we’re recommending this week.

Thurs, Oct 30:

12:30/1:30 am: They Live By Night on TCM. Earlier movie based on the same source material as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, which is one of his most underappreciated movies.

3/4 am: House of Wax on CHILLER. Vincent Price’s classic. Note: You will not see Paris Hilton in this movie.

3:45/4:45 am: The Thing From Another World on TCM. Howard Hawks directing an early sci-fi/horror movie. The John Carpenter movie The Thing was a remake.

6:30/7:30 am: The Beast with Five Fingers on TCM. FIVE WHOLE FINGERS! YAAAAAARGH!

7:30/8:30 am: 8 Women on LOGO. Francois Ozon assembles every major French actress of our time for a half-musical/half-murder mystery.

8/9 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Jacques Tourneur doing horror on a Val Lewton production.

9:15/10:15 am: Curse of the Demon on TCM. Recut version of the horror film Night of the Demon. Directed by Jacques Tourneur applying what he has learned from doing horror on Val Lewton productions.

10:45/11:45 am: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 4/5 pm and on 11/31 at 4:10/5:10 am). I just keep recommending it!

5:30/6:30 pm: House of Usher on TCM. Roger Corman! Vincent Price! Edgar Allan Poe! You might be surprised to learn that this is a tender romantic comedy.

7/8 pm: Dead of Night on TCM. Creepy little horror anthology from Ealing Studios. And no Sir Alec Guinness to be found!

Fri, Oct 31:

A quick note: TCM owns Halloween programming. You can’t go wrong with anything they’re showing all day.

1/2 am: Kwaidan on TCM. A beloved Japanese horror anthology.

3:45/4:45: Spirits of the Dead on TCM. A triptych of short films from Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini (which of these names is not like the others?). I’ve never seen it, but the cast of Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp, and Alain Delon sounds promising.

6:30/7:30 am: Cat People on TCM. More Lewton & Tourneur!

7/8 am: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC. Still brilliant, still vile.

8/9 am: Freaks on TCM.

8:30/9:30 am: Halloween on AMC. Halloween? Hasn’t everyone seen this? I suspect that some people have forgotten how effective it is with almost no budget and no special effects.

9:15/10:15 am: The Devil Doll on TCM. How many ways can I say “creepy”? This one’s directed by the creator of Freaks, Tod Browning.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Body Snatcher on TCM. More Val Lewton! With Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi!

4/5 pm: Bedlam on TCM. And even more Val Lewton! This one’s with just Karloff.

7/8 pm: The Host on G4. Korean horror movie with great special effects and a cruel sense of humor.

Sat, Nov 1:

1/2 am: The Host on G4 (repeats at 11/12 am).

1:30/2:30 am: Blood Feast on TCM. Things start getting ugly overnight at TCM. This is a challenger to Plan 9 From Outer Space for the coveted Worst Movie Ever award. Highly recommended! Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, whom you can read more about in our very own Scott Von Doviak’s excellent book Hick Flicks, which is a perfect stocking-stuffer for the film geek in your family.

2:45/3:45 am: 2,000 Maniacs on TCM. A follow-up to Blood Feast. I understand that the name is misleading, as Lewis only had to budget for 1,986 maniacs.

3/4 am: The Blob on CHILLER (Repeat at 6:00 am/7:00 am). Steve McQueen in the no-budget flick that might just be a parable about the insidious effects of CREEPING COMMUNISM! BOOGA BOOGA! Starring Barack Obama’s tax policies as The Blob and Sarah Palin as the small-town mayor who knows how to stop it. If only the people will listen!

5:15/6:15 am: Forbidden Planet on TCM. Ah, the horror is starting to subside. What better way to recover than a movie that puts Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space?

7/8 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. One of the finest classic Westerns of all time. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, this is a standard issue wuxia film in terms of plot and progression, but with Kurosawa’s unerring eye behind the lens, there’s moments of stunning beauty to be found. Unreleased on DVD, and a must for Kurosawa fanatics.

9:30/10:30 am: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat at 2:45/3:45 pm). Richard Chamberlain’s most shocking role (in which discernible acting can be detected!) about apocalyptic aboriginal weirdness in Australia. Directed by Peter Weir.

Sun, Nov 2:

Happy birthday to my mom and my brother-in-law Jeff!

7/8 am: Solaris on IFC. This is the Tarkovsky original, not the Soderbergh remake. A deeply sad, meditative movie about love and self and Otherness. I’m being purposely vague, but this review is only two sentences, and this movie deserves much more than that.

8:30/9:30 am: Macbeth on TCM. Orson Welles’s Macbeth with the bad accents and great filmmaking.

5:35/6:35 pm: The New World on IFC. Terrence Malick’s film about how struggle defines all human relationships, despite the transcendental indifference of nature. Did I just write that? This is easily one of the best films of the last decade, so just watch it.

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat on 11/3 at 1:15/2:15 am). John Hillcoat’s Aussie Western written by Nick Cave. It wants to be a Peckinpah movie, but it’s not even a Boetticher. That’s not to say it’s worthless, but it bites off more than it can chew. Hillcoat’s the director of the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I hope is better than this.

9:45/10:45 pm: The Year of Living Dangerously on TCM. Remember when Mel Gibson could act? Good times. Oh, ok. This is most definitely not a good time. Directed by Peter Weir.

11 pm/12 am (11/3): True Stories on VH1CL (repeat on 11/3 at 7/8 pm). It’s not a good movie, but it’s fun. This is David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures. The Talking Heads songs aren’t their best, but they’re pretty good, and pretty good looks good from here.

Mon, Nov 3:

3/4 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER. Another Val Lewton production! Why is it on after Halloween? Apparently CHILLER has started the Halloween 2009 season early.

5:05/6:05 am: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music on IFC (repeat at 12:30/1:30 pm). Delightful documentary about the man with the golden ear who flawlessly recorded some of the greats of 20th century music.

10:05/11:05 am: The New World on IFC. Repeat.

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of quirk, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

15. AMITABH BACHCHAN (1942 - )

Devotees of Bollywood cinema won’t need any explanation for why Bachchan is included here. But for those of you who are scratching your heads, imagine a movie star with the brooding good looks of a young Al Pacino, combined with formidable gifts for goofy comedy and intense drama alike. Now imagine that this supposedly imaginary star is one hell of a dancer as well -- maybe not Fred Astaire, but with an infectious dance style nonetheless. Put those ingredients together and you’ve got Bachchan, who was the reigning superstar of Bollywood cinema in the late seventies and early eighties before being temporarily sidelined due to a stunt gone bad on the set of his movie Coolie. Bachchan -- known to fans as “Big B” -- began his career as the Mumbai film industry’s resident “Angry Young Man,” but quickly segued into more heroic roles in a string of hits that came at the end of the 1970s. With his imposing figure and deep baritone voice, Big B became best-known for what were called “masala movies” (such as the 1978 classic Don, featuring Big B in a dual role) that required the combination of comedy, drama, romance, action, and dancing that few actors could provide, but which Bachchan could pull off almost effortlessly. And he looked good doing it, too -- who else could not only keep his dignity, but actually look cool in that purple outfit and newsboy hat ensemble he sported in Amar Akbar Anthony? Since appearing on the scene in 1969, Big B has appeared in more than 175 movies, plus innumerable television appearances and a stint as host of India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, all of which have helped to make him one of Bollywood’s biggest names even today. Unlike many leading men of foreign descent, Big B never made the move to Hollywood. But then, he didn’t have to -- with his talent and charisma, Hollywood clearly needed Amitabh Bachchan more than he needed Hollywood.

14. ROBERT DENIRO (1943 - )

Like too many actors of his time, driven by personal quirks that become obsessions, freed from the harsh demands of the studio system, and spoiled by unthinkable wealth, Robert DeNiro seems to have decided to spend his waning years making everyone forget why he was once one of the greatest actors in the world. But even if he made the worst possible choices from now until his end – even, I daresay, if he pursued the career path of an Al Pacino – he would never do so much damage that he could unmake the reputation he built as a younger man. If the last 25 years on his résumé were wiped clean, he’d stand as one of the finest screen performers of his or any other generation. Never before had someone allowed their Method approach to so fully consume their very existence; while Marlon Brando was unable to use the teachings of Lee Strasburg to combat his own worldly appetites, DeNiro was able to mold and shape his appearance, his personality, his very essence as easily he did his mind. Though often typecast as playing gangsters and lowlifes, his special gift was to never play the same gangster lowlife twice. The bristling Johnny Boy of Mean Streets, eaten up by his own energy, is a world away from the quiet, calculating Vito Corleone of The Godfather Part II; both are entirely foreign to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, probably the most striking example of alienation in movie history; and none of those characters seem like they were played by the same actor – and could it have been only one actor? – who played Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. And as much as he seems to have set his career on coast, think of all that would be lost if his post-1983 film career were erased: as well as some nuanced explorations further into the territory of gangsters and tough guys, DeNiro has put in memorable appearances in Wag the Dog, We’re No Angels, Midnight Run, and Brazil, even risking a glorious failure (like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mad Dog and Glory or Cape Fear) when he sensed he could do something new with a role. DeNiro has a lot of bad to make up for, but my money is on his restlessness and intensity yielding at least one or two more incredible performances before his day is done.

13. GEORGE CLOONEY (1961 - )

Back in June, during a post comparing the original 1960 Ocean’s Eleven to its 2001 remake, I relayed a tale about the day my fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak hepped me to the fact that we had to start respecting the Cloon. The occasion was the 1998 release of Steven Soderbergh’s egregiously underrated Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight, in which Clooney evolved from the floppy-haired TV star of ER and wannabe nipple-suited matinee idol of Batman & Robin into a genuine movie star, the kind of old school Leading Man who brings class and gravity to the art of film acting while never taking it too seriously, the type of celebrity for whom tuxedos and red carpets were invented, a box office behemoth who brings A-list heat and polish to indie films and indie quality and depth to the mainstream. A cool cat, rat pack successor to Bogart, Sinatra and Nicholson, Clooney further infuriates the mere mortals among us by not only being talented, good-looking and socially active (serving recently as a United Nations “messenger of peace” AND a mediator between “the Suits” and his fellow creative types during the Writer’s Guild strike), but he also seems like a genuinely nice, relatively humble guy, making it impossible to even hate him despite our (okay, my) intensely seething jealousy.

12. JEAN GABIN (1904-1976)

One of the great pleasures of French cinema is the wide variety of noses among its leading men. For every relatively petite nose that you’ll find on the face of an Alain Delon or Benoit Magimel, there’s a Gerard Depardieu or Jean-Paul Belmondo. But the king of the generously be-schnozzed acteurs was the great Jean Gabin, leading light of the French films of the 1930s. Not being blessed with fashion-plate looks, Gabin’s appearance proved ideal for the scruffy proto-noir films that French filmmakers were making at the time, from the underworld figure of Pepe le Moko to the reformed criminal in Port of Shadows. Likewise, he was a great match for the sensibility of master filmmaker Jean Renoir, who cast him in roles as diverse as the pragmatic prisoner Marechal in Grand Illusion and the ill-fated sucker of a train engineer in La Bete Humaine. Gabin flirted with Hollywood stardom in 1942’s Moontide, but he was better-suited to his home country. Well into his fifties and sixties -- his nose more resplendent than ever -- he remained viable as a leading man, even romancing the young Jeanne Moreau in 1952’s Touchez Pas Au Grisbi. All the while, he was the epitome of big-screen cool even before the French New Wave came along to define it for us.

11. ROBERT MITCHUM (1917-1997)

If you were asked to guess which major American movie star had once served time on a chain gang, Mitchum might not necessarily be your first answer. On the other hand, maybe he would be, and you'd probably pitch his name out there before you thought to try mentioning Donald O'Connor or Steve Guttenberg. You might need a few more tries to guess that he was the one who wrote the oratorio that was performed at the Hollywood Bowl and cut the calypso record that made fun of Elvis Presley. Though he broke in by working in Westerns, Mitchum's sleepy-eyed, reptilian presence was made for film noir -- nobody, not even Bogart, looked more natural in a trenchcoat -- and he even carried some of the atmosphere of noir into projects set far from the rain-streaked city streets, most notably in his greatest role as the murderous preacher with the words "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed between his knuckles in Charles Laughton's hypnotic classic The Night of the Hunter. Part of Mitchum's myth, which he liked to keep alive through some of the most entertaining interviews ever given by a mortal man, is that the fatalistic manner of his characters in movies like Out of the Past was an emanation of his own truly not giving a shit, and people sometimes even point to the very great number of truly shitty movies he made to back up their theory that the man was the real, supremely indifferent thing: for them, if it turned out that Mitchum ever bothered to read one of his scripts before shooting began, it would spoil everything. I hate to burst their bubble, but if Mitchum hadn't been a committed, serious actor working his hardest at appearing so unconcerned, it's doubtful that Charles Laughton would have wanted him within a mile of the set of his directorial debut. (In fact, Laughton called Mitchum up personally when he was casting the film. The story goes that Laughton told Mitchum that he needed to fill the role of an unredeemed bastard, and that Mitchum replied, "Present.") Mitchum also had a softer side, which was best displayed in one of his finest but least-known films, The Sundowners, in which he plays an Australian sheep herder whose inability to live a settled existence is a source of torment to his wife (Deborah Kerr).

Click Here for Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Yesterday's Hits: The Longest Day (1962, Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki)

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Longest Day a hit?: In 1962, World War II was still fresh in the minds of the American people, most of whom were alive when it was being fought. In the intervening years, movies about the war became popular, but seventeen years after the war was over, super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided the time was right to make the biggest war movie of all, focusing on one of the turning points of the war- D-Day. Zanuck called upon Cornelius Ryan to adapt his exhaustive book, which approached the battle through many different perspectives, from the top brass on both sides to the men on the ground, and Zanuck even went so far as to have the French and German soldiers speak their own languages for the film rather than having everyone speak English.

In addition, Zanuck enlisted an impressive cast- one that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Curt Jürgens, Jean-Louis Barrault, Red Buttons, and an up-and-comer named Sean Connery- to help him pay tribute to the men who fought and died to help turn the tide for the Allied forces. It worked, and The Longest Day became one of the biggest hits of 1962, grossing almost $40 million domestically, trailing only another pair of super-productions- How the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia- at the yearly box office.

What happened?: While the American people saw World War II as both a military and a moral victory, the country was soon to enter into a conflict that wasn’t nearly so simple- Vietnam. As our involvement in Vietnam dragged on for years with no victory in sight, both the soldiers and the people at home were souring on the idea of war, especially as images of various atrocities began showing up on television. After Vietnam, war meant something very different to many Americans than it did after World War II, and the war movies that came out of Hollywood reflected this. The morality of these movies became more complex, with less cut-and-dried heroism and more characters questioning the validity of war. This coincided with the fall of the Production Code, and consequently battle scenes became much bloodier and more chaotic. 1998 brought the most violent mainstream war movie of all, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, whose brutal take on D-Day quickly replaced The Longest Day’s comparatively tame recreation of the battle in the minds of most moviegoers.

Does The Longest Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Having been raised on violent, gritty anti-war movies, I expected a star-studded classically-styled movie about Normandy to come off as quaint. But it actually holds up pretty well. Much of this has to do with how its story is told- instead of re-creating the battle from one perspective, we see it from many angles- the Allied generals who planned it, the Germans who didn’t quite anticipate it going down like this, the paratroopers who were dropped inland, the men on the beach, the Resistance fighters, even the residents of the surrounding towns. Because of this, The Longest Day becomes less about morality than it does about tactics and strategy- hardly a contemporary approach to the war movie, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Even the star-studded cast worked better for me than I’d anticipated. Often, casting so many stars can be distracting, with the familiar faces taking the audience right out of the action. But here it’s almost necessary to keep all of the different plot strands straight. It helps that most of the big names are playing officers, so we can remember that Mitchum is leading the boys on Omaha Beach, Fonda heading the charge on Utah, Wayne commanding the paratroopers, and so on. Wayne’s presence is key here- he never fought in World War II himself, but he appeared in so many war movies both during and after the war that he fit the Hollywood mold of a soldier more than most of the stars who actually did fight.

One could make a similar claim for The Longest Day- it didn’t exactly look like war, but the classical Hollywood image of what war ought to look like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of changing times. At one point in his career, Zanuck famously quipped, “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic.” The Longest Day fudged a number of details about D-Day (for example, a key battle takes place at an abandoned casino that hadn’t even been built yet in real life), but from a dramatic standpoint it works. And although it doesn’t correspond to our contemporary idea of what a war movie should be, it’s fascinating as an example of what was once the prevailing popular view of war, from a time when it was easier for us to feel that way.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ryan's Daughter (1970, David Lean)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

By the late 1960s, old-fashioned epics had fallen on hard times. With the counterculture movement in full swing, fewer young moviegoers were interested in large-scale entertainments, with sweeping vistas and larger-than-life filmmaking. However, Hollywood has always been a little slow to catch up with popular tastes, and this led to a string of big-budget flops, as the roadshow musicals and bloated period pictures failed to rope in audiences who went wild for The Graduate and Easy Rider. But if anyone could still make an old-school epic under these circumstances, it was David Lean, coming off the award-winning blockbusters Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter wasn’t remotely up to the standard of the director’s best work.

From the beginning, Ryan’s Daughter had problems. The filmmakers took a suspiciously long time to cast the film, with name actors like Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole turning down the role of the British Maj. Doryan before up-and-comer Christopher Jones was cast. But things got far worse once production began. Lean was a notorious perfectionist, often taking hours to set up a single shot, which angered several of the film’s stars, with Leo McKern commenting, “I don’t like to be paid 500 pounds a week for sitting down and playing Scrabble.” And Jones’ acting talent- or, more appropriately, the lack thereof- caused friction between him and both Lean and leading lady Sarah Miles.

Of course, stories like this are nothing new in show business. Moreover, had the movie turned out well none of this would have mattered. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter was a flop with critics and audiences, to the point that Lean didn’t direct another film for more than a decade. The film is a lumbering bore, without so much as an interesting character to hold the audience’s interest. Naturally, this being a Lean movie, Ryan’s Daughter is often gorgeous to look at, but that’s hardly enough to tide the audience over for upwards of three hours.

In fact, I’d say the visuals are part of the problem, or more accurately, that Lean cares more for the pictoral beauty of the film than he does for the people who inhabit it. Now, I realize that this criticism has also been levied at several films of another notorious perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick. The difference is that if you look at films such as 2001 and Barry Lyndon, you’ll see that Kubrick’s style demands a degree of distance from the characters, and the visuals are a large part of this. By contrast, Lean means to tell a human story in Ryan’s Daughter, and this distance only hinders his ability to do so.

Consider the early scene in which Rosy Ryan (played by Miles) sees her former teacher Charles Shaughnessy (Mitchum) after he comes home from a conference in Britain. As Rosy has long felt love for Charles- the man she will eventually marry, mind you- you’d think it might be good to see her reaction to his arrival. However, Lean’s staging of the event is so clumsy that he forgets to show us. One minute, Rosy is alone at the shoreline, then suddenly Lean cuts to an extreme long shot as Charles walks into the frame, so that they’re hardly more than specks on the beach moving toward each other. It’s only after they come together and begin talking that he cuts to their conversation. I wish I could say this was atypical of Lean’s style in Ryan’s Daughter, but this isn’t the case. Time and again, Lean’s characters are upstaged by the landscapes that surround them.

Then again, perhaps extreme long shots would’ve been the best way to deal with Christopher Jones, so that the audience couldn’t have seen how untalented and inexpressive an actor he was. Of course, this was hardly the first time a director was faced with the challenge of a difficult leading man, but Lean never figures out how to successfully work around this. Initially, the film gives most of Jones’ dialogue to a subordinate, but once he embarks on his affair with Rosy this becomes impossible, so Lean resorts to swelling music, longing glances from Miles, and cutaways to nature. But worst of all are the scenes in which Maj. Doryan flashes back to the battlefield- Jones screws up his face and flails around, but never convinces us that there’s anything underneath the surface. Jones’ performance is so inept that our antipathy toward him extends to the character itself, and by extension to Rosy, who by forsaking Robert Mitchum for this clown looks less like an impetuous youth than a horny little fool.

Speaking of fools, if Christopher Jones’ performance is inept, John Mills’ is downright embarrassing. Mills plays Michael, a local oaf who sadly has nobody to grapple with, in what surely has to be one of the most ignominious performances ever to net an Oscar. But even if Mills’ hammy turn isn’t completely Lean’s fault, the way the character is used has to be, as Michael functions as a comic mirror to the events of the story, eavesdropping on the lovers and following them around at pivotal moments. It’s a cheesy touch on the part of Lean and frequent screenwriter Robert Bolt, one that they should have known better than to include.

All of this isn’t to say that Ryan’s Daughter doesn’t have good points. For one thing, Miles’s and Mitchum’s performances would distinguish a film that told this story on a more intimate level (especially Mitchum’s). However, Lean’s style here is so unnecessarily grandiose that we lose sight of any reason why we should care about them or anything else we see onscreen. By the time the film actually justifies the magnitude of its scope, it’s far too late. There’s a spectacular sequence in which the townspeople aid a band of IRA fighters in bringing weapons ashore in the middle of a storm. But impressive though it is, all I could think of was how difficult it must have been to film. And that’s just about the last thing one should be thinking about during a scene like this.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Desmond Llewelyn, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Despite a pretty decent theme song, The World Is Not Enough hardly qualifies as a great film (or even a particularly great Bond film), but it earns a spot on this list for one perfect scene. Desmond Llewelyn first appeared as the cranky go-to guy for state-of-the-art British spy paraphernalia in 1963’s From Russia With Love and returned in every subsequent 007 installment (except for 1973’s Live and Let Die) thereafter, outlasting Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton before finally teaming with Pierce Brosnan for three late ‘90s adventures. In his final big screen appearance, the aging Q is seen schooling his protégé (and eventual replacement) R, played by John Cleese, before disappearing from view with the classic exit line, “Never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan.” Sadly, Llewelyn died shortly after the production wrapped, not of old age (he was 85), but in a car crash, on his way home to his beloved wife of 61 years after dinner with a friend...not, as my dad pointed out, the worst way to go, especially after spending your life as a beloved cinema icon (who once said he’d play his signature role “as long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn't").

Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (1996)

Most of Robert Mitchum's contemporaries from the Golden Age made their onscreen farewells as frail shadows of their former selves (as we'll explore in-depth next week). Not Big Bad Bob. There could be no greater contrast between the classic Hollywood tough guys and the man-children of today's cinema than Mitchum's brief scene with Johnny Depp near the beginning of Dead Man. Even pushing 80, Mitchum looks like he could snap Depp in half like a breadstick. As John Dickinson, owner of a steelworks in the Old West town of Machine, Mitchum has a mane of white hair, an ever-present shotgun, and a life-sized self-portrait lurking behind him as if he is already in the process of passing into legend. When he hires a band of bounty hunters to track down Depp's William Blake, he can hardly bring himself to acknowledge their existence, instead addressing his initial remarks to the stuffed grizzly bear mounted in the corner of his office. It's as if he can only relate to the one other larger than life creature in the room.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)

Born in 1977, the legendary great director and provocateur Luis Bunuel cashed out with this minor classic, in which the rage and audience-baiting tricks of his early work seemed to have been replaced by a serene but sly playfulness. He gives the impression here that he's just enjoying the company of one of his favorite actors (Fernando Rey) and a couple of beautiful women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) as he uses them to jauntily illustrate his story about a gentleman who is driven half mad with frustration by a young woman who alternately invites and repels his advances. (The women is played by both of the lead actresses; a great deal of ink has been spent by critics speculating on what this device means, though it could have been something as simple as Bouquet having quit or been fired from the production and Bunuel deciding that he didn't feel like reshooting her scenes.) Having enjoyed one final round of good reviews and hossanahs, Bunuel settled in for a few years of drinking, studying insects, and working on his autobiography, My Last Sigh, which appeared not long before his death in 1983.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Three

The Rep Report (June 5 --11)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:06:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" (June 6-12) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcases the work of what the programmers see as "a new generation of Italian filmmakers .. defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach but unified through a spirit of independence that has allowed them to break away from old models and genres." It includes Biùtiful Cauntri, an eco-minded drama that is being shown in conjunction with the Film Society's "Green Screens" program, and The Waltz, which tells its multi-character story in a single, continuous ninety-minute shot.

Opening today and running through June 15th: "NewFest 2008: The 20th Anniversary NY LGBT Film Festival". On tap and buzzed about: Affinity, Meadowlark, and the documentary SqueezeBox!, a movie whose accompanying party at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival took no prisoners.

BERKELEY: Through June, Pacific Film Archives presents a quartet of punk concert clips and documentaries just in time for anyone looking to get nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the summer when London punk in particular was in full, frothing snarl mode. The schedule begins tonight with The Blank Generation, which captures such New York bands as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television when they were young, loud, and snotty. Still to come: D.O.A., in which Johnny Rotten does not spend the Sex Pistols' "terminal" American tour desperately looking for the man who's fatally poisoned him, and Penelope Spheeris's first and finest document of noisy West Coast alientation, 1981's The Decline... of Western Civilization.

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“PETER BOYLE’S BAR,” THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973)

Peter Boyle's Boston Irish bar in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a low-key, specialized place, a dimly lit oasis where the community's down-and-out, aging petty criminals, such as Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), can seek refuge, wet their whistles, and bitch and moan a little about the cruel hand dealt to them by the fates. Mind you, we don't mean to imply anything by referring to it as "Peter Boyle's bar." Boyle, who definitely works there managing the counter, does slip once in conversation with the federal agent (Richard Jordan) he deals information to and calls it his bar, and Jordan has to correct him: "You mean you work for a man who has a liquor license, right? You're a convicted felon." "Like I said," replies Boyle without missing a beat, "I work for a man who has a liquor license. I forget sometimes." Boyle must have some wicked student loans to pay off, because even with the gig at the bar and whatever he gets from Jordan, he still has to hold down a second job as a hit man. When Boyle sells out Alex Rocco and his crew of bank robbers to Jordan and the big boys think that Mitchum might have been the rat, Boyle ties everything up neat as a pin by agreeing to whack Mitchum for his treachery, and even makes sure the job will be easy to perform by plying Mitchum with free booze until he's practically ready to be poured into his coffin. Somehow we feel certain that the man who has the liquor license will understand.

And what goes together better than booze and violence, you may ask? Why, milk and ultra-violence, as we jet overseas for a little in-out, in-out with the gang at the...

KOROVA MILK BAR, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

It's no accident that Stanley Kubrick's still-controversial odyssey into a violent near-future begins in its most stylized locale. We know we've entered a strange new world from the moment Kubrick's camera pulls back from Alex the droog's demonic stare to reveal the Korova milk bar. It's a quintessentially Kubrickian venue: symmetrical, heavenly lit and made up of a few bold strokes of décor. There's the lettering on the walls, words unknown to us until our humble narrator explains that "moloko plus vellocet or synthamesc or drencrom" means milk spiked with drugs, the drink of choice at the Korova, served straight from the nipple spigots of ceramic nudies. (Talk about objectifying the female form – the tables in the place are also made up of these gleaming white statuettes.) The ambient music tends toward droning synths, but during the breaks you may hear a snatch of Beethoven, as if some great bird has flown into the bar. It's a setting so iconic it has served as the model for several real-life cocktail lounges, including this one in White Plains, New York. It's sure to be a stop on the Screengrab staff's next cross-country pub crawl.

But, in the meantime, we’ll continue our cinematic bar golf with some tasty blue goo at the wretched hive of scum and villainy that got us all hooked in the first place...

THE MOS EISLEY CANTINA, STAR WARS (1977)

We ask you, what else is there to say about the Star Wars cantina sequence? So much ink has already been spilled over its daring expose of discriminatory serving practices towards droids, the startling revelation that Werner Herzog has a death sentence in twelve system, humorous and amusing observations on the many similarities between the bar's clientele and one's graduating class or family reunion, Luke Skywalker's hands-on method of getting the bartender's attention (we'd love to see him try that sometime at Coyote Ugly) and the unnerving news that things have gotten so bad that Satan has nothing to do all afternoon but hang out at a corner table, softly chuckling to himself. Suffice to say this scene was experienced by enough people not yet old enough to drink that it may have had a strong impact on a generation's expectations of what a night out would be like, and that it turned out to be a lot closer to reality for some of us than for others.

RICK'S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN, CASABLANCA (1942)

And finally, what cinematic pub crawl would be complete without (arguably) the most famous movie bar of them all? After a long night of drinking, there’s no better place to unwind: no garish colors to contend with, indoor smoking(!), and if you’re lucky, Rick himself may keep the place open late, sharing a bottle and stories of the good ol’ days in Paris. There’s no loud rock and roll on the jukebox, just Sam on piano, a talented jazz band and occasional national anthem sing-offs between visiting groups of tourists. The dress code is casual but stylish, and you can even get a bite to eat or some coffee if you need a little something to settle your stomach. Just remember to keep your passport handy, be sure you tip the waitstaff (and the local constabulary), pay attention to the local curfews, don’t drive drunk and use protection if you begin any beautiful friendships before last call...

...speaking of which, that pretty much wraps it up for The First Annual Screengrab Pub Crawl, so gather up your jackets and move it to the exits, ‘cuz you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here (although you’re more than welcome to go back and enjoy Part One of this list!

Here’s lookin’ at you, kids.

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Rose McGowan: TCM's Latest Essential

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

So it turns out that Rose McGowan is a total movie geek! (Man, does Robert Rodriguez's cup runneth over, or what?) As of last month, McGowan has been supplementing her income by co-hosting Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials", a weekly slot where TCM host Robert Osborne chews over whichever film classic has just earned the title designation with a regular partner. The show has gone through a different co-host every season, and most of them have been best known for their behind-the-camera talents, even if some of them, such as directors Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Peter Bogdanovich, have also dabbled in acting. Before McGowan, Osborne's last couple of sparring partners for Osborne were film critic Molly Haskell and Carrie Fisher, who has evolved from actress to professional wisecracker. Whether it was just the luck of the draw or the gender differences had something to do with it, both Haskell and Fisher juiced the show up a little; they were more inclined to turn prickly and even quarrel with the programming choices than their predecessors had been. McGowan's selection may have something to do with the desire to add some youthful glow to its viewing demographic that once had TCM lure Rob Zombie to its studios so that he could stalk out onto the set of what looked like his mom's basement and lecture viewers about Arch Hall, Jr. at two in the morning. But to listen to McGowan talk about movies is to see that the woman does have game. And she likes The Great Escape!

The Osborne-McGowan team has also torn through The Music Box and The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie that McGowan should probably remake, just so we can see her name on the posters next to that title. Of the selections coming up, McGowan is especially high on Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a hallucinatory masterpiece starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher. “It’s heavy-handed, sure, I get it. It’s just so smart. It’s very much a classic metaphor for the big person to proclaim for all to hear how Christian he is, and then there’s Lillian Gish, who probably only weighs about 90 pounds. … And she’s the quiet Christian, and it’s her behavior that speaks for her about her Christian belief.” Of the TCM gig itself, McGowan says, “I had no idea that they were even going to pay me. Seriously, a job where I get to sit and discuss these movies? Are you kidding me? I’ve been boring my friends for years!” One can't help but wonder how any lost soul could become so miserably jaded as to ever be bored by the sight of Rose McGowan rhapsodizing about Laurel and Hardy, but perhaps she has better tastes in movies than in friends. Rose, call us! We'll introduce you to some really cool new people at Trivia Night.

Watch It (But Not For Free): “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Even if you think Amy Ryan’s wicked pissah performance in Gone Baby Gone wuz robbed on Oscar night, there’s no denying we’re living in the golden age of Boston crime movies. Mystic River kicked it off, The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture last year, and now Martin Scorsese is set to direct an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island starring (who else?) Leonardo DiCaprio. But the granddaddy of all these films remains criminally unknown, rarely screened and never released on home video: The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Adapted from the novel by Boston crime writer George V. Higgins, the precursor to Lehane and Spenser creator Robert Parker, Coyle is the story of a small-time gun dealer who turns informant when he learns he’s facing a stretch in prison. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Robert Mitchum as Coyle, the film isn’t big on plot twists or even much violence; its power comes from Higgins’ pungent dialogue, gritty locations and one of Mitchum’s finest performances. It has a devoted cult following, and the leader of that cult has to be Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Jeffrey Wells, who has been pursuing Coyle’s DVD release like Ahab pursued the white whale.

It began with this column from 2001, back when Wells still wrote for Reel.com. “Coyle was originally distributed by Paramount Pictures, which still owns the rights,” he wrote. “However, there are no current plans by Paramount to put it out on DVD, according to PHV spokesperson Martin Blythe. ‘But you're the second person to ask recently, so I'll mention it,’ he said earlier this week. ‘Sometimes this is how things start.’” Sometimes, perhaps, but not in this case. Wells has restated his demands periodically through the years, right up until earlier this month. Despite rumors that Criterion plans to release it (the same rumors surround virtually every rare or unreleased movie you can imagine), Coyle remains unavailable on DVD.

However, you can watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle any time you’d like, either on your computer or your TiVo, if you have such a thing. It is available as a digital download through Amazon’s Unbox service, and you can either rent it for $3.99 or buy it for $9.99. I have no information about the quality of the video – actually, I’m hoping one of our devoted readers will serve as the guinea pig and report back here. Here’s the trailer; if it interests you, why not take the plunge?

No, But I've Read The Movie: THE BIG SLEEP

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

It's almost hard to believe that Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep — which featured the first appearance of quintessential hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe — and Howard Hawks' hugely celebrated film adaptation — appeared within a mere six years of one another. So hugely has the cultural landscape been shaped by the twin conceptions of the private eye, so resonant have both versions of the story proven over the decades, so incredibly influential have both Big Sleeps beein to film and literature that you might almost imagine the book was some sort of ur-text penned around the same time as the epic of Gilgamesh. But in fact, when Chandler wrote what many consider to be his greatest work, it was very much in the pulp milieu at a time when that carried no hint of respectability. It was later generations of critics who would rightly elevate Chandler from his pulpy surroundings into his rightful place in the upper eschelons of American writers; in 1939, when it was written, it was a popular entertainment and nothing more. No one much realized at the time that they were witnessing the making of an American classic, the early shadings of film noir or the creation of something that would become like a second literary language to generations of writers. The book would be filmed twice, in 1946 and 1978 (three times if you count the Coen Brothers' delightful, if not entirely canonical, updating of the story as The Big Lebowski); here we concern ourselves only with the Howard Hawks classic and not the well-intentioned but inferior remake starring Robert Mitchum. Like the book, the movie illustrated that however humble the origins of a story, it could be elevated to the ranks of high art by placing someone at the helm who was supremely interested in his craft and determined to make the most out of what he chose to work with. In a rare feat for literary adaptations, both the source novel and the film adaptation are masterpieces. Here's why.

WHAT IT HAD: Everything. With Howard Hawks in the directing chair, William Faulkner handling the lion's share of the script, and the hugely popular duo of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the leads, the first film version of The Big Sleep was pretty well destined to be a classic, and it comes through on almost every conceivable level. I've written elsewhere about how the film's conception of Philip Marlowe is uniquely great, thanks to the disparate but complimentary influences of the men who created him. The film is also paced like liquid mercury, gorgeously costumed and set, cleverly written, beautifully filmed, and simply a pleasure to watch in every way.

WHAT IT LACKED: Not much. There are two versions of the film floating around (both of which are included on the popular DVD release), and the earlier 1945 version is somewhat lacking when compared to the 1946 recut; it's not quite as well-paced. Despite the terrific dialogue, the movie lacks Chandler's breathtaking prose, especially his phenomenal descriptive ability. The city of Los Angeles is a character in all of Chandler's best work, and the fact that the movie was made on sets and back lots instead of with location filming hurts it somewhat, but much care is taken with the sets to make them as evocative of Chandler's L.A. as possible. And sure, the plot is confusing to the point of being impenetrable, but so was the book — legend has it that Chandler himself didn't know who killed Owen Taylor.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Without question. The movie and the book of The Big Sleep are both undeniable classics, which is rare enough, but even rarer is the fact that they're both classics for pretty much the same reasons: scintillating dialogue, strong central characters, intriguing support roles, evocative situations, and a highly trained professional eye envisioning it all for us. Though Chandler didn't have a hand in writing the film, his book was brought to the screen by people who understood and appreciated his vision and his style, and it shows through in every frame. What was taken out was the bare minimum needed for time constraints and other practical reasons; what was added did no harm to the book. It's one of the very few examples in the history of film of such a harmonoius match-up of source material and adaptation, and that's why it's one of the greatest films of all time.

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent