The Screengrab : the french connection

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Caden Cotard believes that he is dying. In a way, he is right. This is as true of him as it is of anyone who's ever drawn breath. Time slips away in a very special way for Cotard, though. He awakes one morning in September, but by the time he gets coffee, there's kids in Halloween masks running around. His wife takes his daughter to Europe for a short trip. His crush is flirting with him later, trying to get him to come home with her. He can't, he says, his wife is only gone for a week. "Caden, it's been a year!," she tells him. Some around him age at a startling rate, while others never seem to get a day older. Time is cheating Cotard. It's hard to describe how slippery time is in this movie, because it's utterly different than any other movie I can recall. I sat breathlessly waiting for the movie to start for a good hour, not realizing that this anticipation is itself the point. Life slips away while you focus on the future or the past. You are in a race against time - we all are - but how can a person get his or her head in the race when there are so many issues that need handling elsewhere? Dylan sang that he not busy being born is busy dying. Cotard is in a constant state of trying, and failing, to be born anew. With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, he sets out to prove that he's worthy of the money and prestige, launching an enormous production that seeks to mirror life itself. But time pulls away at him here, too. Years pass with startling swiftness while we watch the production grow. Cotard keeps suggesting new names, new ways to launch his play. But the future he looks towards is always holding hands with the past, as his life is constantly popping up in his production, actors speaking his inner thoughts to each other, and Cotard no closer to understanding that his life is happening now, right there, not in front of his eyes, but in him. The play he is staging at the beginning of the movie is Death Of A Salesman, the great 20th century play about a man who cannot live his life because of his dreams. Synecdoche, New York is the 21st century answer, a retelling of Death Of A Salesman with the classic Charlie Kaufman Borgesian mindfuck. But it's also one of the most nakedly emotional movies of his - or anyone's - career. I thought he would have trouble again scaling the heights of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but Synecdoche, New York goes right over the top, taking Eternal Sunshine's bittersweet mix of love and frailty and adding the sure knowledge that time is the enemy, indifferent to heart and soul and fair gamesmanship. Time will win in the end, and all that will be left of us are the structures we build, real and metaphorical. Leave something worthwhile. (HC)

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

The car chase scene in The French Connection is less a race against time than a race against a hijacked train. But let's not be nit-picky. You find yourself egging Doyle, Gene Hackman's obsessed cop on as he drives like the wind under the elevated tracks in Brooklyn, subway train speeding on above him. Why doesn't he just blast right through that mom and her stroller? Just put the pedal to the metal and out-drive all those damn squares for crying out loud. Who cares about regular folk when there is a mission to accomplish? But folks: Don't try this at home. In real life the subway always beats a car in New York City. (SCS)

VANISHING POINT (1971)

1971 was a good year for crazed lonely guys indulging in car chases. Vanishing Point is sort of like a porno. It does away with any extraneous exposition or dialogue, all that remains is a race against time for the pettiest of reasons. Footing the bill for a handful of amphetamines. Long stretches of open road and a car to propel the protagonist forward. The only way to beat this arm-rest clutching experience would be to actually race your own car across the continent. (SCS)

DEAD MAN (1995)

Being a fan of Two-Lane Blacktop, I like my races against time like I like my own race towards death: molasses-slow, meandering, and hallucinatory. Dead Man excels at these criteria. Many Westerns are morality tales, stories about people addressing conflicting ethical concerns out where the law doesn't apply, but Jim Jarmusch's Western is about learning to find your own soul before death takes you. Johnny Depp plays an accountant named William Blake. His parents are dead and he has nothing but the clothes on his back as he crosses out of civilization into the wild frontier town of Machine, somewhere in the Dakotas. The job promised him has dried up, and, despondent, he takes up with a beautiful woman. But her lover shows up and shoots her, and then waits, almost dispassionately, for Blake to do the expected thing and finish him off. Blake heads out into the woods, gut-shot and dying. This is where we begin. The first person to find Blake is an outcast Native American who calls himself Nobody (which he prefers to He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing). Nobody has been educated in Europe and believes Blake to be his namesake, the 18th century poet and painter. The two travel towards the sea, sowing death and destruction along the way. Rarely, however, do they encounter or kill someone who doesn't deserve it in some way. Out there beyond the grasp of civilization, all men are in a race towards death. Only Blake knows how close death hovers at his shoulder, and only Blake knows the preciousness of time. (HC)

Five seconds to Click Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five, McGruber!!!!!

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

DVD Digest for February 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, the midwinter doldrums hit the DVD market, with only a handful of notable DVD and Blu-Ray releases hitting shelves today.

The big news this week is the controversial Blu-Ray release of William Friedkin’s classic police procedural, The French Connection. Much ink has been spilled over William Friedkin’s tinkering with the look of his Oscar-winner for the Blu-Ray release, and while I can’t say for sure (not having bought into the Blu-Ray scene as yet) the images I’ve seen from the new release haven’t been encouraging. With their almost oppressive graininess and a color shift that appears to put the blue in “Blu-Ray”, nothing I’ve seen speaks very well to the suitability of the new technology Friedkin ran on the film when preparing the disc. But then, I’ve always been of the mind that DVD and Blu-Ray was meant to be not only a means of watching a film in the comfort of your living room, but also of film preservation, of keeping a record of the films they contain as close as possible to the way they were originally seen. Anyway, that’s enough of my editorializing. The French Connection is one of three Blu-Ray only releases getting released today by Fox, the other two being John Frankenheimer’s The French Connection II and Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, a prime future candidate for a Reviews By Request column.

Another ideal Reviews By Request topic would be Eagle Pennell’s early proto-indie, The Whole Shootin’ Match (Watchmaker Films). Considered by many a keystone of the independent film movement, Pennell’s film went unseen for years before turning up again in theatres last year. Other classics coming to DVD today include Hector Babenco’s Ironweed, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

This week’s selection of recent releases coming to DVD is a pretty meager lot, highlighted by a pair of arthouse offerings: the documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (Zeitgeist), about the author Christopher Isherwood and his decades-long love affair with much-younger artist Don Bachardy, and the Irish marital drama Eden (Ryko Distribution).

Finally, this week’s TV on DVD releases include: Bender and friends in their newest feature-length adventure Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad Season 1 (Sony); nineties “Must See TV” staple Just Shoot Me Season 3 (Sony); and family-friendly Indiana Jones-lite adventure in The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (Sony).

In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Oscar night is almost here and the blogs are a-buzzin’. Once you’ve made your way through our definitive look at the All-Time Best and Worst Best Picture Winners, head over to Future of Classic to compare notes with Flashback Five - The Worst Best Pictures in Oscar History. Here’s a hint on the number one choice: This “shaggy-dog story about a lovable dimwit was technically accomplished, cloyingly sentimental, and politically suspect.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir checks out the Foreign Film nominees. “Instead of trying to write a bunch of new jokes about the lameness of the Academy's foreign-language film nominations, I wonder if anyone would notice if I just republished a few greatest hits from my last three years' worth of bitching and moaning?... It should go without saying that the foreign-language Oscar bears no relationship to whether given movies are, y'know, actually any good, or to whether any paying audiences, American or otherwise, want to see them. In fact, it's difficult to say what the furrin-film Oscar measures, other than providing readings from an especially eccentric focus group: What kinds of movies with subtitles would a bunch of cranky, seniorish film-industry professionals in Los Angeles County like to watch, if they actually liked to watch movies with subtitles?”

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule makes the Best Actress case for someone who isn’t even nominated. “In a perfect world, one in which the academy supposedly devoted to excellence in motion pictures, but which routinely ignores genius-level comic performances or finds a way to ghettoize them in supporting role categories, actually acknowledged the age-old dictum that comedy is hard, Angelina or Melissa would have been kicked to the curb to make room for Anna Faris's hilarious sunburst performance in The House Bunny…she makes every scene she’s in feel like it’s something brand-new through a combination of brilliant timing, vocal mannerisms, physical grace (and its opposite, cannily choreographed clumsiness) and pure movie star charm.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny takes a look at the unusual Blu-ray release of a previous Oscar winner. “One supposes that it was inevitable—that someday, some extremely conscious men of vision would use the most advanced, sophisticated, versatile digital imaging technology extant for the purpose of making a given film look like an immaculate, scratch-free print of a '70s eight-millimeter porno loop. Do I exaggerate? A little. Maybe. I'm still not sure. I looked at the new Blu-ray of William Friedkin's 1971 The French Connection last night and have to say I'm still of several minds about it. Rather than use digital technology to make obvious, you know, fixes—like really nail down whether that Santa Claus bust scene at the beginning takes place at night or during the day—Friedkin and his tech cohort performed a radical overhaul of the film's look, stripping away any traces of studio-process sheen and going for a very detailed brand of grit.”

Finally, get an edge on the rest of your Oscar viewing party guests with Defamer’s “In Memorium” Oscar Montage Pool. Will Mr. Blackwell make the montage? Will Charlton Heston end it? And who will get the montage’s first sound clip? (I’m betting it all on Harvey Korman.)

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

UNFORGIVEN (1992)

To my way of thinking, the best Best Pictures are both flawless examples of their genre and also communicate something about the era that produced them. Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western scores on both counts. Not only does the film offer blue ribbon acting from a Master Class ensemble featuring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Frances Fisher, Jaimz Woolvett, Richard Harris and the Man With No Name himself, but Unforgiven also draws on the audience’s familiarity with Eastwood’s (and America’s) history of violence to reevaluate those legacies after twelve years of the Republican Party’s '80s go-round with faux-cowboy heroics. The beautifully constructed screenplay by David Webb Peoples is a sharp rebuke to the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Reagan/Bush years (not to mention a fair handful of Eastwood’s earlier films): drunken cowboys in the town of Big Whiskey maim one of the local whores, the whores seek retribution by hiring gunmen to kill the cowboys, and the town’s sadistic sheriff beats and kills the gunmen who show up. In the end, a lot of people are dead, nobody’s better off and justice has not been served. Sadly, the film’s grim portrayal of the futility of violence is just as timely now as it was at the dawn of our last “hope and change” administration.

AMADEUS (1984)

For starters, Amadeus is probably the best of the four other films nominated in 1984 (A Passage To India, The Killing Fields, Places In The Heart and A Soldier's Story), so it passes that basic test. Oddly enough, Amadeus is also one of the few movies that won Best Picture that I'd consider one of the ten best of its year — or at least close — and for a year that included Stranger Than Paradise, Once Upon A Time In America and The Terminator (just for starters), that's not bad at all. Amadeus probably won because it hit a number of reflexive buttons: it's a period costume drama where all the production and costume money is on-screen, it genuflects before Culture in the form of classical music without losing anyone with something truly alienating, it's based on a hit play, and it comes from a respectable, previously-lauded producer-director team. But the reasons Amadeus is actually pretty great have nothing to do with that and everything to do with the typical dry intelligence Milos Forman brought to the film. Forman treats this like a gigantic Brechtian exercise, paying meticulous attention to physical verisimilitude, then blowing it out with the likes of Jeffrey Jones and Tom Hulce — unmistakably American, out-of-place types. As in his later (not as good, still misunderstood) The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon, Forman scrupulously obeys the biopic formula, hitting all the high points of his subject's lives while refusing to shed any light on what made them tick. Point being: who/what could possibly explain that? It drives Salieri crazy that he can't figure out why God would waste his music on a drunken, disrespectful buffoon, but to Forman, that's just par for the course.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

Arguably the first action movie to win Best Picture, The French Connection really announced (along with 1969's Midnight Cowboy triumph) a shift in what was considered acceptable award-winning fare; only a few years before, it was all treacly musicals and your occasional "serious" film. (In 1971, it was up against Nicholas And Alexandra, whose makers badly miscalculated the changing zeitgeist at some point.) But it wasn't a permanent shift: The French Connection — absolutely lean, more reliant on atmosphere and street grit than characterization or take-home morals — is as anomalous-seeming a Best Picture winner now as it was then, which speaks badly of the Academy's heavy suet-pudding tastes. (Cue outraged Dark Knight fans here.)

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

David Lean is perhaps the only filmmaker whose natural inclinations and talents coincided perfectly with exactly the kind of material the Academy responds to: big, splashy physical filmmaking, heavy on conspicuous visual coups and visibly virtuoso acting. As it happens, Lawrence is one of my favorite films, and therefore the most important time the Academy got it right. Lawrence actually is the Best Picture of 1962, a beautiful film that (without getting too heavyhanded about it) uses exterior landscapes as a mirror for its otherwise unknowable protagonist. But surely it helped that it's long, launched Peter O'Toole in an instantly starmaking performance, and somehow managed to avoid taking a single meaningful political stance. Lawrence Of Arabia wears its ambitions plainly in every aspect — title, length, subject matter — but it lives up to them, too.

REBECCA (1940)

Hitchcock’s first American film was a contentious one, as the Master of Suspense famously quarreled with mega-producer David O. Selznick over myriad issues regarding his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. Such squabbles may have resulted in a film that feels somewhat more conventional than Hitch’s prior British works, but its preoccupation with emotional and psychological traumas nonetheless ultimately helped pave the way for the director’s future daring psychodramas. In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine takes up residence in the Brontë-esque home of her wealthy husband Laurence Olivier, where the specter of his deceased first wife looms large thanks in part to Judith Anderson’s unsettling manor servant, who remains devoted to her dead employer. Although devoid of significant aesthetic inventiveness, the director still generates a sumptuously creepy, unreal atmosphere that’s equally indebted to Wuthering Heights and Val Lewton’s horror classics. A technically superb thriller, it’s also an enduringly resonant depiction of societal expectations for, and demands on, women.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Nov. 22- Dec. 5, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Because I was busy digesting turkey, stuffing and pie while forming a deep groove in my couch, I neglected to post a highlight reel last week. That means you’re in for a treat – it’s the very first Supersized Highlight Reel! That’s right, we’ve got two weeks worth of leftovers for you. That means not only our Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six) but our list of the Top Biopics of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six).

But we’re just getting warmed up. We’ve also got reviews of not only Gus Van Sant’s new biopic Milk, but the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. And we’ve got more William Friedkin posts than at any time since 1974 (when the Screengrab was only available via short-wave radio): William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation, The French Connection Influenced Everything and The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin.

You want more reviews? How about The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, Waterloo, Mister Lonely, Frost/Nixon and the Stop Making Sense soundtrack? How about the first installment of Leonard Pierce’s 12 Days of Christmas, The Nightmare Before Christmas? How about the latest in Ozsploitation, Roadgames?

Still not enough? Check out these other headlines from the fortnight past:

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Roger Ebert: The Death of the Film Critic is the Death of Society

Oscar Launch: The Silly Season Commences

All The Real Girls Is One of the Most Influential Movies of the Decade

Site of the Day: A John Waters Christmas

The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

William Friedkin is going to explain himself to us if it takes him all night. His latest telegram from his subconscious is an article in the Guardian to which he has signed his name, ostensibly on the subject of the release of The French Connection on Blu-ray. "The myth of the incorruptible lawman persisted until policing scandals started multiplying [in the late 1960s]. The age of innocence was over with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War, so that after Watergate in 1972, people would believe anything about corruption in all walks of life." According to Friedkin, "Those of us who made films in the 70s were not following the zeitgeist: we shaped it. We no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed because we were flawed." This all has such a nice ring to it that you kind of hate to point out that everything Friedkin writes seems to be canceled out by his next sentence. Either he "shaped" the zeitgeist instead of "following it", which would seem to indicate that he was out ahead of the curve, or The French Connection, with its racist, trigger-happy supercop antihero Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was a reflection of attitudes that people had already formed from reading the newspaper. When discussing what set Connection apart back in the day, one factor that Friedkin doesn't bring up is Costa-Gavras's Z, the 1969 political thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and whose slam-bang style, with its percussive editing, was heavily influential on Friedkin's picture. Friedkin was very open about his debt to Costa-Gavras back when he must have thought that it was real artistic for a commercial Hollywood director to know enough about European movies to copy his moves from one. To judge from his deep thoughts here about how all the best cops have a lot of the dark side in them--"Actually, the best cops are the ones who can think like criminals; and there is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal that street cops cross every day. In spite of a series of laws designed to protect the accused, cops can go off the rails in a crisis, and it has to do with adrenaline and the authority the police officer has to exercise power."--Friedkin may have concluded that it would give his reputation a boost if people got the impression that David Milch filched his world view from him.

Nobody asked me, but...while my esteemed colleague Vadim Rizov recently made an intriguing case for the argument that Friedkin has no sense of social obligation, I can't shake the feeling that it's something else that really sets him apart and that helps to explain why, for two years or so, he was the hottest director in Hollywood as well as why, for the 25 years since then, he's been, well, not so much. Looking down his nose at the young hotshots whose movies make more money than his stuff, Friedkin complains that "cop films have become more visceral, less realistic. The levels of violence that were allowed in the 1970s opened the doors to young film-makers who want to push the envelope beyond all limits." Pushing the envelope beyond all limits is, of course, what Friedkin did in both The French Connection and his other blockbuster, The Exorcist. It was shocking at the time, and can still get your pulse rate rising today, but it was silly at the time when some people, trying to find a justification for how exciting the movies seemed, to claim that Friedkin was introducing a new level of "realism" by having his cop so much meaner and the violence more in-your-face than audiences were used to. The Friedkin of The French Connection wasn't the Strindberg of cop operas, he was a hungry, ambitious young hotshot trying desperately to get the attention of an audience that demanded bigger and better shocks at a time when everyday life provided plenty of them. Over the course of two big hits, Friedkin really mastered the exploding-funhouse style that, thanks in no small part to him, set the standard in big commercial thrillers. Then he got a little complacent, and new directors arrived who contrived shinier, louder explostions.

It's not quite true to say that Friedkin is indifferent to how his movies are seen to reflect, or to effect, society. He did make at least one genuine message movie: Rampage, one of the biggest duds of his career, a courtroom drama about a beyond-evil serial killer which he first filmed in 1987 and which only won limited release in 1992, and which Friedkin tinkered with to turn it into a brief for the death penalty. And he did care enough about the charges that Cruising was a homophobic movie that linked homosexuality with psychotic murderousness by holding that unfortunate press conference where he said that he himself had no idea who had committed the murders in the movie or what the killer's motives or sexual orientaton might have been or what the hell the ending was supposed to mean. It's easy to believe him, because The French Connection and The Exorcist are themselves full of plot holes and loose ends and logical stretches out of the Bizarro World, but when Friedkin was truly on his game, the movies just plowed over viewers in a way that kept them good and distracted from that sort of thing. By the time he had finished The Exorcist, Friedkin was a master at the special craft of keeping viewers transfixed by how ugly and repellent everything onscreen was. He got in trouble with Cruising not because he had anything to say for or against gay lifestyles but because he was still working in the same way that had made him a hot ticket, but this time, because of the setting, the movie boiled down, not as "Ewwwwww!! Heroin dealers shot down in cold blood!" or Ewwwwww!! A little girl vomiting on a priest!" but Ewwwww!! Guys dancing together!" It could be that his subsequent films, such as Jade and To Live and Die in L.A., haven't been as successful just because his moment passed: other directors have stolen his thunder, and no matter how brutally he stages his chases and fights, they no longer pass for daringly ugly commentaries on What We've All Come To. And as his attempts to do something different, such as the "comedies" The Brinks Job and Deal of the Century show, it's not as if he knows how to do anything else.

Related Stories: "The French Connection" Influenced Everything

William Friedkins Has No Sense of Social Obligation

“The French Connection” Influenced Everything

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The Blu-ray edition of The French Connection is due next month, so director William Friedkin is making the rounds, talking up the film and reminding people he’s still employable. The Independent helps him make his case by crediting Connection with influencing everything from The Wire to Grand Theft Auto IV. “Roughly a third of the way through, gamers are faced with a mission, the Puerto Rican Connection, which emulates the famous chase scene at the heart of Friedkin's thriller,” writes James Mottram. “Commandeering a car, just as Gene Hackman's rogue cop "Popeye" Doyle does, you are asked to trail a target, who boards an elevated train, through the streets of Liberty City (the GTA version of New York)…Unsurprisingly, the 73-year-old Friedkin hasn't played the game, let alone completed the mission, but he doesn't seem concerned that the film that launched his career has been ripped off.”

“Joel Surnow, who created 24, told me he was most influenced by The French Connection,” Friedkin notes, and indeed, until now I had forgotten about the amnesiac cougar subplot in the 1971 Best Picture winner. It isn’t known whether the creators of CSI are similarly indebted to the director, but they did hire him to direct an episode – his most recent screen credit to date. “"It was fun and successful, so they've asked me to do another one in January.”

As for The French Connection, Friedkin plays it modest en route to patting himself on the back. “We thought we were making a little B picture, a little cops-and-robbers movie. So the fact that it became so celebrated, so memorable, and a standard for the genre – which I realize has been copied over and over again, including its attitudes – was a huge surprise.” He discounts the Oscar-winning script by Ernest Tidyman, claiming that hardly a word ended up in the mostly ad-libbed movie. And he takes a shot at Bullitt, Connection’s most oft-cited competition for the title of greatest car chase on film. “I don't think the chase is that great," claims Friedkin. "What they did basically was clear out the streets of San Francisco and drive these cars over the hills. There were no people on the streets. I decided I had to put the public in jeopardy.” Good to know.

Related:
William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation
When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (William Friedkin)

When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (1980, William Friedkin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Usually, when I watch a potential When Good Directors Go Bad title, I’m pretty sure of how I feel about it. Generally, it’ll be a movie I already know that I dislike, or one that I’ve heard enough negative things about that I’m almost positive I’ll join the chorus of naysayers. Occasionally, I’ve tried to defend movies which are much better than their reputations would suggest. But I don’t think I’ve ever been so conflicted about my feelings about a selection than I was with William Friedkin’s Cruising.

Let’s get this out of the way- as straight-up narrative, Cruising is pretty terrible. Plotlines are introduced and abandoned, the central mystery doesn’t really work, and there’s a final “twist” that’s borderline incoherent. Yet for all it faults, Cruising is too haunting and strange a piece of work to be dismissed lightly. It made me scratch my head and occasionally pissed me off, but I was never bored.

Much of the narrative muddiness can be doubt be attributed to the film’s provocative nature. Released in 1980, Cruising tells the story of a murderer who’s prowling New York City’s gay S&M underworld. It was the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, when homosexuality had become more visible in society yet was still misunderstood and frowned upon by most Americans. Naturally, Cruising aroused quite a bit of controversy from both sides. The increasingly-vocal gay rights groups protested the film for its portrayal of homosexuals as being scary, violent psychopaths. Meanwhile, United Artists was looking to make a commercial thriller, so many of the more risqué elements of the film were left on the cutting room floor.

Friedkin has stated that his original cut of Cruising was 140 minutes long, which means that nearly one-fourth of the movie had been shorn away by the time the 102-minute final cut hit theatres. And boy, do the seams show. There’s at least one major subplot- involving a pair of crooked cops who strong-arm a drag queen into performing sexual favors- that the film does absolutely nothing with. Likewise, the film presents a sympathetic homosexual friend for undercover officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), only to forget about him for a long stretch of time until he turns up dead.

Faring even worse is the character trajectory of Burns himself. After being sent undercover to investigate the killings due to his resemblance to a number of the victims, Pacino is purported to be changed greatly by his experience in the gay underworld. Unfortunately, the film has to come right out and tell us this, having Pacino tell his girlfriend (Karen Allen) that “what I’m doing is affecting me.” Really? It seems to me like he isn’t really touched by most of what he sees. It doesn’t help that the film shies away from the more graphic details of Burns’ experiences inside a club called The Ramrod. Does he ever actually have sex with any of the other men, or does he simply walk into the clubs, look around, and leave? The film doesn’t seem to know.

Some of the blame can no doubt be placed on United Artists and the MPAA for demanding such liberal re-cutting of the film. Yet Friedkin is not altogether blameless. Looking back at Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection, one can find another cop character- Popeye Doyle- who gets far too caught up in his work. But while Friedkin had Popeye define himself almost entirely through his work, Cruising gives Burns a personal life to make him more three-dimensional. However, the scenes we see both of Burns’ personal life and his undercover work are unrevealing, and so he remains largely an enigma. Popeye Doyle was similarly enigmatic, but while we liked him we weren’t meant to care about him. By contrast, we’re meant to get caught up in Burns’ psychological journey, so the fact that we don’t should be construed as a failure on the film’s part. What’s unfortunate is that Pacino gives a fine, surprisingly low-key performance in the role that might distinguished a better film.

In addition, the gay rights protestors did have a point when they spoke out against Cruising. While Friedkin’s portrayal of the S&M underworld is certainly not meant to be a definitive statement about all homosexuals, the character of the killer is nonetheless pretty troubling. The killer is eventually revealed to be a musical theatre student whose father made him feel guilty about his homosexuality, and who takes his guilt out on the denizens on the men he picks up in clubs. After he seduces them, he stabs them repeatedly with a knife while telling them, “you made me do that.” Unfortunately, the killer-queen stereotype was one that wouldn’t go away, as evidenced by the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. To say nothing of the film’s ending, which seems to be saying that Burns’ experiences have turned him into a killer himself. If this is the case, then it’s both laughable and highly troubling.

Yet while Cruising has a multitude of problems, I found myself fascinated by it, and not in a train-wreck sort of way. For one thing, the film’s portrayal of its seamy underworld is still bold by Hollywood standards. In a time before the PC police patrolled every big-studio release and homosexuals became dependable romantic-comedy sidekicks and prestige-picture martyrs, it’s bracing to see a major motion picture that actually allows its homosexual characters to be sexual beings. Although Burns is ostensibly all about the ladies, Friedkin doesn’t shy away from the details of the sex lives of the other denizens of The Ramrod (how’s THAT for un-PC?). There’s a tangible allure to the danger this world presents to those who inhabit it, yet when you consider that the very real danger of AIDS still hadn’t announced itself, these scenes feel almost poignant. Also, it’s hard to believe Friedkin got away with a shot in which a character lubes up his entire forearm, but there you go.

On top of it all, the movie’s just too damn weird to dismiss, and it’s easy to see why Cruising has amassed a sizable cult since its original release. What can one say about a movie that pauses for Powers Boothe to describe the meanings of the various bandanas that are worn by the cruising men, to say nothing of a police interrogation that’s abruptly interrupted by a hulking black man wearing only a cowboy hat and a jockstrap? On balance, I suppose Cruising does indeed qualify as a case of Friedkin “going bad,” another step in the downward spiral that torpedoed the career of the once-hot director of The French Connection and The Exorcist. But damn if it’s not fascinating.

Taverns on the Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fine example of the way lazy, excessive reliance on ridiculous CGI (and CGI monkeys) can ruin an otherwise passable movie. And there’s no finer argument for the good ol’ fashioned non-CGI pleasures of real world filmmaking than the Nepalese bar sequence in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. To recap: winsome badass Karen Allen (oh, Hollywood, HOW did you ever let her get away?) drinks a yak-herder under the table, then her flaky ex-boyfriend shows up while she’s all full o’ rotgut and she slaps him in the face and sends him on his way. And THEN, creepy Nazi torturer Toht (a.k.a. Mr. Melty-Face) shows up with a bunch of evil minions and things really get interesting. What follows is a master class in cinematic action, pacing, camera placement, stuntwork, pyrotechnics, performance and editing...all without a bluescreen (or hangover) in sight.

ON_LINE (2002)

Okay, so maybe I’m biased, given that I co-wrote this one (with director Jed Weintrob), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the scene in this under-the-radar internet sex comedy where neurotic shut-in John (Josh Hamilton) goes to an odious, overpriced Manhattan nightclub on a disastrous double-date with Jordan (Vanessa Ferlito), the wild cybersex enthusiast he picked up on the internet, his oversexed roommate, Moe (Harold Perrineau, Jr.) and Moe’s pill-popping, manic-depressive girlfriend (Isabel Gillies). But don’t take my word for it: in a Salon review that (almost but not quite) made up for any number of really quite nasty reviews of the film, the extremely cultured and discerning Andrew O'Hehir summed up the appeal of the scene thusly: “John's nightclub internal monologue, as he watches Jordan dance and reflects on how hot she is, how shallow he is for thinking that and how little chance he has of actually getting in her pants in the off-line world, is probably the movie's high point.” Thanks, Mr. O’Hehir...I couldn’ t have said it better myself!

BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

Before that dastardly Hedley Lamar (played with nefarious gusto by the late Harvey Korman) decided to run the railroad through it, the hamlet of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had everything an Old West town needed: a church, a hoosegow for when Mongo came to town, and proximity to the Hollywood Hills. And, of course, it had its own saloon. But unlike most of the filthy, rowdy joints in the history of westerns, this particular saloon was always kept nice and clean, thanks to the stewardship of the unfortunately named Anal Johnson. All that came to an end, however, with the arrival of the Teutonic songbird Lili von Shtupp, played with Dietrichian élan by the Oscar-nominated Madeline Kahn. Lili’s world-weary act, sweet set of curves, and foul-mouthed stage patter (“Why don’t you get your friggin’ feet off the stage?”) brings every rough rider in the county, but it’s her love of that delicious schnitzengruben that leads Lamar to hire her to seduce and abandon Bart, the new sheriff in town. In one of the most memorable scenes ever set in an Old West saloon, Lili sighs out “I’m Tired” before being carried off, James Brown-style, by her backup dancers and deposited in the arms of Sheriff Bart – who, it turns out, has more schnitzengruben than she can handle.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

It’s a scene we’ve watch play out a million times in a million action movies: a nameless bar in the middle of nowhere is taken over by a generic group of bikers, who wreak havoc in the place until they push the wrong guy just a little bit too far. But William Peter Blatty’s disturbing cult hit The Ninth Configuration is no typical action movie, and the bar fight won’t play out in a typical way. The set-up to the scene is more complex than it seems: mentally disturbed former astronaut Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), disillusioned that sensitive psychiatrist Col. Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) has turned out to be a blood-soaked Marine Corps commando, escapes from an asylum and seeks refuge in liquor at the nameless biker bar. A combination of booze, despair and a smart mouth enrages the boss bikers (the unstable brute Stanley and the cunning, sadistic Richard, played by the gaunt, devil-faced Richard Lynch), who abuse Cutshaw until Kane arrives to rescue him. Kane, who has forsaken violence and taken up the mantle of the caring, well-meaning shrink in order to bury his own murderous past, attempts to come to a peaceful resolution, but finally he can take no more. The scene that follows is one of the most stunning bar fights every captured on film – although to call it a fight ignores what truly happens: Kane utterly annihilates the biker gang in a matter of seconds, killing a number of them. It’s an astonishing scene, and even more astonishing is the fact that it’s not even the climax of The Ninth Configuration.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

In an audio commentary track recorded for the French Connection DVD, Gene Hackman described Eddie Egan, the real-life model for Hackman's obsessed narc "Popeye" Doyle, as having been "flippant" to a degree that he'd never encountered before in a human being. It's easy to imagine the conversation among the patrons of the Harlem bar that Popeye raids after he's stormed in and out like a hurricane: "That fellow was certainly flippant, wasn't he? I'm a fervent supporter of our boys in blue, but speaking as an amateur observer of the law enforcement process, I can't help feeling that some of that flippancy was unwarranted! Here, help me tie off this tourniquet?" The raid, which is actually a cover for a meeting in the men's room between Popeye and an informant, establishes Popeye's adversarial relationship to the city's civilian population, his casual racism, and the gleefully sadistic tinge to his brutality. (Obliged to rough up his informant so that no one will suspect the guy is a rat, Popeye asks him, "Where do you want it?" The man thinks about it for a second and points to his right cheek, and Popeye slugs him on his left. The blow looks hard enough to crack the guy's jaw, but this is Popeye when he's just playing.) In a recent interview in Reason, Ed Burns, the twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department turned TV writer whose HBO series The Wire dismantled the logic behind the nation's "war on drugs", called the scene "iconic" and blamed it for instilling the wrong mindset in a generation of cops by "put[ting] out the idea of this guy who cracks heads," Popeye set police work back by reinforcing the idea that cops should act like swaggering badasses instead of establishing a functional relationship with their communities. So if you're a fan of The Wire -- a not uncommon condition among Screengrab writers -- then give it up for Popeye Doyle; without him, The Wire might not have been necessary.

Related Stories:

Tavern On The Screens - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

CGI Must Die: Five Reasons Why

Harvey Korman, 1927--2008

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 10

Paul Clark — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Longtime Screengrab readers may recall that back in the day I wrote a Movie Moment column on William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., the source of last week's quiz. However, part of me couldn't resist using it again here, not least because that final line really is perfect. Friedkin's 1985 policier is in many ways a West Coast equivalent to his Oscar-winning The French Connection, highlighting the sunlit horizontally-sprawling landscape of Los Angeles in much the same way its prdecessor captured the feel of seventies New York. To Live and Die in L.A. is a model of brutal efficiency, up and and including that classic final line. Congrats to those who got it.

Admittedly, last week's quote was fairly easy. By contrast, this week's could prove to be a little tricky:

“Come on, you’re hanging up the parade!”
“Get rid of those things!”

Kind of an odd quote to end a movie on, wouldn't you say? Submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For the rules of the game, click here. And remember, all guesses must be submitted by Wednesday at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

Bullitt: The Greatest Car Chase Ever Google Mapped

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The high-speed automotive pursuit from 1968’s Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt has long been regarded one of the three greatest car chases in movie history, along with The French Connection and, of course, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. But you’ve probably never heard anyone describe it as the most accurate car chase ever filmed. Mention the scene to anyone from San Francisco and they’ll jump at the chance to explain in excruciating detail how the chase defies the laws of space and time.

Now you can see it for yourself. Some enterprising soul, using intel gathered from Ray Smith’s comprehensive account of the chase, has detailed every impossible twist and turn on Google Maps. If you were already impressed with McQueen’s driving skills, wait until you get a load of this. Impressive as it is, though, what we’d really like to see is the Google Maps version of The Cannonball Run.

While we’re waiting for that, here’s the scene from Bullitt. See if your newfound knowledge of the inaccuracies detracts from your enjoyment.

Yesterday's Hits: Chariots of Fire (1981, Hugh Hudson)

Paul Clark — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Every year, on the eve of the Oscar ceremony, I like to re-watch with a former Best Picture winner. Normally, I’ll pick a favorite of mine (as I did last year with The French Connection) but this year I decided on a change of pace, selecting a movie that I haven’t seen and have barely thought about in at least fifteen years. And while there’s no denying that Chariots of Fire made an impact on popular culture, its status as an Oscar-anointed “classic” is much less certain.

What made Chariots of Fire a hit?: Chariots of Fire was the festival favorite of its day, winning accolades at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival and taking home the audience award at Toronto that fall, and it became the word-of-mouth hit of the year. Much of the credit for the film’s success belongs to its story, about two young runners whose competitive drive is rivaled only by their principles. The film’s producer David Puttman supposedly wanted to make a film akin to A Man For All Seasons in which the principle characters are guided by their consciences, and in the stories of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams he found an ideal vehicle for this theme. Chariots of Fire is a straight-laced British production, but it’s also an inspirational sports movie that focuses on characters who are both heroic and relatable.

But let’s not overlook some of the other factors in the film’s success. Consider some of the major world events of the era. Just one year before, the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics, and it’s possible audiences turned to the cinema to get the Olympic fix they weren’t able to get on their television. In addition, 1981 saw a groundswell in anglophilia following the lavish nuptials of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. And let’s not underestimate the impact of Vangelis’ theme music from the film, which was one of the few instrumental pieces of the day to get regular airplay on top 40 radio.

What happened?: Along with the aforementioned factors, much of the appeal of Chariots of Fire lie in its underdog status. At the 1981 Academy Awards, the film was the night’s unlikely success story, beating out such high-profile nominees as Reds and On Golden Pond for Best Picture. But once the film took home the big prize, it was no longer an outsider, but the establishment’s choice. What’s more, an unassuming film like Chariots often has a difficult time standing up to the scrutiny such a high-profile honor can bring, and it’s easy to imagine moviegoers who first experienced the film after its Oscar win wondering what the fuss was about.

In addition, few (if any) of the people involved with Chariots of Fire capitalized on the film’s success. Leading men and Royal Shakespeare Company alums Ben Cross and Ian Charleson failed to parlay their roles into movie stardom, with Cross finding a steady career onstage and in big-screen character work (usually playing villains), and Charleson succumbing to AIDS in 1990. Director Hugh Hudson found brief success in Hollywood with 1984’s Greystoke, but his star plummeted after the box-office and critical drubbing of 1985’s Revolution. Vangelis’ theme music helped to kick off a decade of often-regrettable synthesizer scores, as well as spawning a host of cheap and easy parodies of the film’s signature scene.

Does Chariots of Fire still work?: In some respects, yes. What distinguishes the film from other inspirational sports movies is its bifurcated structure, with the stories of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams running alongside each other but only occasionally intersecting. By choosing to tell the story this way, Hudson and screenwriter Colin Weiland give the audience two characters to root for, while at the same time setting up an eventual showdown between them. Unfortunately for the film, real life didn’t quite work out this way, and instead of a race in which we feel conflicted about the possible outcome, Chariots of Fire gives both of its heroes a moment of gold medal glory.

Also, while Puttnam succeeded in his goal to make a film about characters driven by conscience, Chariots of Fire often neglects to paint these characters in much depth. Liddell in particular talks about little else besides his Christian convictions, and while Ian Charleson is fine in the part, the character doesn’t quite come alive as he should. Ben Cross’ Abrahams is the more complex of the two roles, an ambitious young man who sees winning as a victory against the anti-Semitism he experiences every day. Abrahams is such an interesting character that he might have carried a film unto himself, something that can’t be said of the film’s conception of Liddell.

But even in light of the parodies that we’ve seen over the past quarter century, the running scenes still work beautifully. In my experience with sports movies, the most cinematic sports tend to be the ones that have (a) momentum, and (b) simple rules, which would explain why basketball is better-suited to movies than football. In this respect, running may be the most cinematic sport of all, and few of any films capture this better than Chariots of Fire. Hudson does an interesting thing in the running scenes by focusing less on the outcome of the race than on the faces and bodies of the runners, showing in detail their physical and psychological exertions. Chariots of Fire may not be the classic the Academy once decreed it to be, but its racing scenes are every bit as effective now as they were on the film’s release.

Roy Scheider, 1932-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks. As the land-locked seaside Sheriff Brody, Scheider was the tentpole of a central triumverate that also included Richard Dreyfuss (wisecracking, brainy, Method) and Robert Shaw (macho, demented, classically theatrical). It was Scheider's job to anchor what would become the most successful movie ever made by serving as the likable audience identification figure, he pulled it off with a smooth, pro's grace.

Scheider starred in a number of other movies (including William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Last Embrace, Still of the Night, and Blue Thunder) but never again found himself at the center of anything near as big a blockbuster. He was also forced, by contractual committment, to appear in Jaws 2, which cost him the chance to star in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. He did get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for serving as the director Bob Fosse's alter ego in the 1979 All That Jazz; he didn't want, but his work in that picture will be remembered as among the best performances of his career. However, by the mid-1980s he was only getting big parts in smaller-budgeted pictures (such as 52 Pick-Up, made for Cannon Films) and indie productions (such as 1997's The Myth of Fingerprints) and appearing in smaller parts in such films as Fred Schepisi's The Russia House, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. He also starred in the first season of the TV series SeaQuest DSV and played studio chief George Schaefer in RKO 281, an HBO film about the making of Citizen Kane. He kept working at a furious rate, and in one of his last appearances, as a serial killer on Death Row last year in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, he showed that he was still capable of doing memorable work when the material he was given managed to meet him halfway.

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

This week's top ten comes to us from guest writer Gabriel Mckee, friend of Nerve and author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction. Read his fantastic blog here.

Recent years may well be remembered for bringing back the over-the-top action hero. New sequels to Rocky, Die Hard, and Rambo have revived long-dead franchises, and the trend is continuing. Indiana Jones 4 has started filming, and a fourth Mad Max film would have wrapped by now had scheduling conflicts not led director George Miller to make Happy Feet instead. Though it's an easy trend to mock, it opens the door for other action heroes to be resurrected — here are some top candidates.

10. Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), The Delta Force

Before he was a meme, before he was Walker, Texas Ranger, even before he was a Karate Kommando, Chuck Norris was Maj. Scott McCoy of the Delta Force. This elite antiterrorist strike force, led by Lee Marvin, consists of some thirty soldiers who are highly trained in standing around in the back of a cargo plane while Chuck Norris rides around on a motorcycle killing terrorists. Delta Force came out in the pre-Die Hard world, before we expected our action heroes to have pathos, depth or family troubles. There's not much character to this character, but when it comes to straightforward ass-kicking, Norris is the undisputed master. Norris is ripe for a Stallone-style comeback, and in the and in the age of the War on Terror, a new entry in the Delta Force saga is the perfect vehicle for his revival.

9. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), Beverly Hills Cop

Remember when Eddie Murphy made movies that people enjoyed? Barring Dreamgirls, his film career has been on a losing streak for over a decade, putting him just below Robin Williams on the list of actors who need to be rescued from their own careers. A return to the role of Axel Foley, the detective/con man of Beverly Hills Cop, might be the best way to ensure that Norbit never happens again.

8. Jack Carter (Michael Caine), Get Carter

Michael Caine has made a major comeback in recent years, but in most of his recent roles — in Batman Begins, Children of Men,and The Prestige, for instance — he's played the Kindly Old British Guy. It's easy to forget that he made his name playing jerks — first a heartless cad in Alfie, then a brutal-but-suave thug in Get Carter. This story of a London gangster who travels to Newcastle (Britain's equivalent of South Jersey) to investigate his brother's murder isn't as flashy as more recent tales of the U.K. underworld. But Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham nevertheless owe everything to Get Carter's blueprint and Caine's cynical performance. A return to the character of Carter would give Caine a chance to recapture both the grim violence and the effortless sexiness of one of his greatest roles.

7. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman), The French Connection

The most successful action film of the '70s didn't star Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee or any other established veteran of the genre. The French Connection owes much of its success to Gene Hackman's performance as hot-headed bad cop Popeye Doyle (which earned him his first Academy Award). More than just a tough guy, Doyle is a contemptible bully, and instead of an invincible supercop, his temper makes him a bit of a screw-up. Hackman is still more than capable of this kind of complexity (as proven by The Royal Tenenbaums), and it would be thrilling to see what he could do with this character after thirty-five years.

6. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier)

The 1973 film Coffy established Pam Grier as the undisputed queen of '70s blaxploitation. Foxy Brown (originally intended as a sequel entitled Burn, Coffy, Burn!) justified her ascension — whether infiltrating a high-end call-girl ring, shooting her drug-dealing brother in the ear, or hijacking a drug runner's crop duster, Foxy is "a whole lotta woman." At turns smiling and sneering, she violently opposes an oppressive society symbolized by a white-operated heroin syndicate. Grier has had a slightly higher profile since Quentin Tarantino reintroduced audiences to her charms, but it's been far too long since she's kicked ass like she did in Foxy Brown.

Read PART 2.