The Screengrab : william holden

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

LUKE SKYWALKER & PRINCESS LEIA, STAR WARS IV-VI (1977-1983)

Getting his first look at Princess Leia in what was once the first and is now supposed to be the fourth Star Wars movie, Luke fairly moos, "She's beautiful!", thus revealing that he's an old-fashioned boy who likes his headphones big, round, and gnarly. Later, Leia will plant a quick smooch on him while he's in the process of saving their asses. This was back in those more innocent days when George Lucas, whatever he's said to the contrary since then, didn't know that he was going to be making a second movie, let alone that he had a whole complicated mythos to spin around it. By the time of The Empire Strikes Back, when Leia plants a hot one on Luke to make Han Solo jealous, it was clear that Leia had decided that her heart was with the bad boy who liked to hang out with Bigfoot, but just as clearly, Luke still thought he might be in the running. Certainly he didn't have the traditional manly response to his sister slipping him the tongue. You revisionist historians can dance around this all you like, but the fact is that for a couple of movies there, the all-ages audience for the Star Wars saga was treated to the sight of the Annakin sibs kind of hitting on each other. No wonder George Lucas opted to abandon his plans for a trilogy of films that would follow the action of Return of the Jedi, where the big reveal was made: he didn't have the heart to stage the most awkward holiday dinner scenes in movie history.

MAX SCHUMACHER & DIANA CHRISTENSEN, NETWORK (1976)

The May-December romance is always a tricky maneuver to pull off. This one stands out partly because it's totally bewildering; I've heard theories about how the moon landing was faked that make more sense than the plot turn that throws these two together. The movie sets them up as oppositional figures from the start: Faye Dunaway's "liberated" young woman Diana who, in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's cranky vision, stands for commercial exploitation and debasement, and the older man, Max, (William Holden) who, as the mouthpiece of traditional broadcast journalistic standards, represents the last stand against the corruption of the medium. When Max's old friend, the anchorman Howard Beale, has a breakdown and turns into a ranting crazy, Diana runs with it, turning the news into a showcase for the crazy man's diatribes in the name of entertainment; Max responds by accusing Diana of having "learned life from Bugs Bunny." Then, somewhere in the middle of all this, Max leaves his wife for her, they boink, and then they break up. And from the start of it all Diana's busy undermining Max's career, so it's not even as if she's using him as a stepping stone. Seriously, it's as if Eliot Ness and Al Capone just threw caution to the winds and got it on three-quarters of the way through The Untouchables. The closest thing to an explanation for this comes from Max's wife, played by Beatrice Straight, who parachutes into the movie just long enough to tell him that he's experiencing "his last roar of passion" before male menopause sets in. The Academy Award voters who gave Straight a Best Actress Oscar for this speech might almost have been reacting in self-defense.

BOBBY DUPEA & RAYETTE DIPESTO, FIVE EASY PIECES (1970)

This counterculture hit has its snobbish side, particularly in its scenes involving rich-boy classical pianist turned slumming hardhat Bobby's quote-unquote "romantic" life with "Rayette Dipesto", a name that the Minnie Pearl enthusiasts at the Grand Ole Opry would regard as a bit glaring in its white trashitude. Everything about Bobby's blue collar existence is there to signal that he's meant for better things, but there are real traces of affection and respect in his friendship with his co-worker (Billy Green Bush), whereas he treats his squeeze Rayette as if she were something he won at the company raffle when he was really hoping to come home with the waffle iron. Not that the movie doesn't agree with him that she's a nightmare: in scene after scene, he gets to smolder while she gets to whimper and whine. The question of what's wrong with him that he's chosen to keep company with such a horror never seems to get addressed. The ending, with him deserting her in the middle of nowhere, may be the act of a bastard, but it's definitely the best thing for him, for her, and for the audience.

DEBBY & VINCE STONE, THE BIG HEAT (1953)

In Fritz Lang's noir potboiler, Gloria Grahame is the platonic ideal of the smart moll, and as her gangster boyfriend, Lee Marvin, at his most bestial, is the last person in the world anyone should get smart with. By most conventional standards this is a horrendous pairing, but it's a classic if your thing happens to be mutally assured destruction. The evening that ends with him scarring her face with hot coffee even begins with him manhandling a different woman, which must be her version of foreplay. No longer able to count on her looks as her meal ticket, she throws in with the rogue cop (Glenn Ford) on the mob's tail and turns herself into a sacrificial victim by paying Marvin back and goading him to put her out of her misery. They were made for each other, dahling.

AL & VERA FROM DETOUR (1945)

Film noir has given us a lot of self-deluding males who become willing accomplices to deadly females, but there’s no bigger chump than Tom Neal’s Al and no bigger a shark than Ann Savage’s Vera in Detour. A zero-budget production shot more or less over a weekend by Edward G. Ulmer and a crew of Poverty Row nobodies, Detour is one of the most nihilistic – and yet thrilling – post-war noir films in existence. Al Roberts is a never-was nightclub piano player who travels west to hook up with a woman who clearly couldn’t be more glad to be shed of him. It’s not hard to tell why: Al is a sad sack’s sad sack, a self-pitying, pouty loser who blames his every misfortune – and he’s got plenty of ‘em – on the whole rest of the world. When a kindly drunk slips him a big enough tip to go to California and see his girl, he looks at it like someone’s shat a big old turd in his morning coffee. Along the way, after an uncanny turn of events, he runs into the appropriately named Ann Savage playing Vera, who “looks like she just got thrown off of the crummiest freight train in the world”. She’s a seething cauldron of rage, and as up to no good as a hurricane, but that doesn’t bother Al, who’s looking for a new set of gams to walk all over him. Vera sizes him up as a grade-A cut of chump in about a millisecond and spends the entire rest of this wonderful, horrible little film heaping abuse over him, to his barely registered protests. The pure inappropriateness of this abusive relationship is part of what makes it such a filthily energetic noir classic.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Fish Stories

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Somewhat lost in the shuffle of the endless top ten lists that appeared at the end of 2008 was this curiosity: Stanley Fish's list of the ten best American movies of all time. Fish, a legal scholar, literary theorist, philosopher, and author, is well known for his irascible opinions, unique antifundamentalist arguments, and ability to make friends -- and, just as easily, enemies -- on both sides of the ideological spectrum. He's also a somewhat legendary film books, and several of his many books are peppered with analogies from and references to his favorite movies.

Fish is definitely a product of his time and place (as he'd be the first to admit), and his list relies pretty heavily on films that would have made a big impression on an urban male of his particular age. The few modern movies that make his list range from the predictable (Raging Bull) to the surprising (Groundhog Day), but his commentary on all the films is worth reading, as he excercises his rare gift to cut to the heart of moral poses and contradictions -- as in his review of Sunset Blvd.: "When the movie begins, Gillis comes across as a nice guy, somewhat down on his luck, and Norma Desmond (Swanson) comes across as an egomaniacal monster who pressures him into becoming her boy-toy. But even before the final incredible scene of Desmond descending a staircase while the camera, empty of film, rolls, she has earned the sympathy we extend to the terribly needy, and he has revealed himself to be the true monster, a betrayer of Desmond, of the young girl (NancyOlson) who sees more in him than there is, and of himself."

The Wild Bunch doesn't make Fish's top ten (though he presents it as one of his uncommented-upon top twenty), which is too bad. The classic Sam Peckinpah western inspired him to write one of his most insightful illustrations of the problems of moral absolutism, in the early part of his book The Trouble with Principle: "While I was writing the chapters of this book, a scene from Sam Peckinpah's classic western The Wild Bunch was never far from my mind. The Wild Bunch is an outlaw gang led by two grizzled veterans played ot a career-performance turn by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. One evening, the two are sitting around discussing an old comrade who has gone over to the other side and now rides at the head of the band of railroad detectives pursuing them. The Borgnine character is incensed and can't understand why their old friend doesn't abandon the pursuit and come home to where he really belongs. You have to remember, the Holden character says, he gave his world to the railroad. So what? is the response; it's not giving your word that's important, it's who you give your word to. I read the scene as a profound and concise analysis of the great divide in political theory. On the one side is the man of principle for whom a formal contract must be kept irrespective of the moral status of the other party; when you give your word, you give your word and that's it. On the other side is the man who varies his obligations according to the moral worth of the persons he encounters; some people have a call on your integrity, others don't, and the important thing is to determine at every moment which is which. There is, I think, nodoubt about which of these two visions is today the more generally approved. The Holden character speaks in the accents of Enlightenment liberalism; what he says is in accord with maxims many of us have long since internalized: 'A man's word is his bond.' 'Ours is a government of laws, not men.' 'You can't justify the means by the end.' 'Respect for your fellow man must be extended to all and not selectively.' Each of these maxims urges us to enter a perspective wider than that formed by our local affiliations and partisan goals; each gestures toward a morality more capacious than the morality of our tribe, our association, our profession or religion; each invites us to inhabity what the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin calls 'the forum of principle', the forum in which our allegiances are not to persons or to wished-for outcomes but to abstract norms that neither respect nor disrespect particular persons and are indifferent to outcomes. Not that there has never been a strong argument on the other side. The Borgnine character is not alone in his sentiments, and among those who would support him in the exchange (though they would be an odd couple) is John Milton. Milton and his characters are always saying things like 'You are not worthy to be convinced' (the Lady to Comus in the masque of that name) or 'You don't owe any loyalty to a king who is not acting like one' (Milton to his countrymen in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) or 'Everyone should be allowed to speak and publish, except of course Catholics' (Milton to the Parliament in The Areopagitica). When Satan describes himself to the angel Gabriel as a 'faithful leader' (Paradise Lost, IV, 933), the angel immediately replies, 'Faithful to who,? To thy rebellious crew? Army of fiends?' Like the Borgnine character, Gabriel refuses a notion of fidelity that is indifferent as to its object; some are deserving of your faith, some others are not, and to maintain loyalty merely because you once pledged it is to mistake an abstraction for an object of worship and to default on your responsibility first to determine what (or who) is good and true and then to follow it."

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

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

20. GENE HACKMAN (1930 - )

Hackman was 33 when he made his movie debut in Robert Rossen's Lilith; he got to play a scene with Warren Beatty, who, admiring his colleague's mastery of his craft and maybe also thinking that his potato-faced plainness provided a splendid contrast on-screen to his own Colgate smile and dashing looks, cast him as his brother in Bonnie and Clyde. By that time, Hackman, voted Least Likely to Succeed by the good folks at the Pasadena Playhouse (a title he shared with his roommate Dustin Hoffman), had begun to build a steady career on the basis of his hard-won dependability as an actor. The impression he made as Buck Barrow lit a fire under his career, one that fanned out four years later when he starred in The French Connection and won the Academy Award for his performance as the obsessive cop Popeye Doyle, a job that he has often cited as something less than his favorite. Hackman's admiring notices in this period are full of tributes to his "anonymity" and lack of sex appeal; it was as if everyone was glad that he was getting treated by the casting office as if he were a star but wanted to get their personal disavowals of responsibility on the record in anticipation of the day when the world realized that a terrible mistake had been made. But Hackman remained a genuine movie star, a testament to the surprising fact that every once in a while, exceptional ability and hard work just seem to pay off. Maybe because he never really had any youthful bloom to lose, his stardom only grew more secure as he got older and grew into authority figure parts, some benevolent (such as the many father figures he played in movies like Twice in a Lifetime and Hoosiers), some malignant (like the sadistic Western sheriff in Unforgiven). Let the record show that he even, by God, developed sex appeal: in that department, he had an especially trumphant year in 1988, when he stirred many hearts playing the FBI agent who seduces Frances McDormand in Mississippi Burning and the smaller but indelible role of The Good Man Who Got Away Because You Told Him to Leave, You Stupid Cow in Woody Allen's Another Woman. He has given many noteworthy performances since then, the standout perhaps being his lovingly cracked variation on the father figure role in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. He has not appeared onscreen since 2004's Welcome to Mooseport, perhaps because he's waiting for someone to explain to him what the hell he was doing in Welcome to Mooseport.

19. MICHAEL CAINE (1933 - )

When Caine became a big star in the mid-1960s, be brought back something that had been lost in American films -- the kind of actor's energy born of naked desperation. In the Depression years, people like James Cagney went into acting as an alternative to starvation, but by the '60s, American stars from comfortable middle-class backgrounds entered acting because, as Paul Newman put it, they were escaping a life spent working in the family sporting goods store. But the Cockney Caine was trying to break away from an early life informed by class consciousness and poverty. The fact that he'd been hungry at one point in his life may help to account for his eagerness to keep working, even in poor films, a decision that actually got him teased by that guardian of lofty cultural values, People magazine. It might also account for the fact that he owns so many restaurants. (Regarding Jaws: The Revenge, the movie that caused People so much consternation, Caine has said, "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.") As Harry Palmer, the entertainingly grubby spy in eyeglasses in The Ipcress File and the serial seducer in Alfie, Caine magnetized the camera with his working man's anger and ambition, which he was skillful enough to channel into the characters' own drives and delusions. One critic analyzed the secret of Alfie's success with women and concluded that it was that he didn't know his own limitations, but it may have been that Caine himself was too frightened of failure to dare consider that any limitations might not be overcome. One might have expected Caine to lose his edge when he became rich and famous and the chip on his shoulder started to fray, but he just keeping getter better and better as an actor. The official notice that he had become something like acting royalty probably came in 1975, when John Huston asked him to co-star in the film version of The Man Who Would Be King (which Huston had longed to make for decades, in the role once intended for Humphrey Bogart); for the movie-loving Caine, that must have been a little like getting a call from John the Baptist asking if he could do a chore that Jesus just wasn't up to. Other especially notable roles from his sprawling filmography include his gangster antihero in Get Carter (1971) and, fifteen years later, his supporting role as the criminal kingpin Mortwell in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, a crook who would have scared the shit out of Frank Booth. He won his first Oscar that same year, for his supporting role in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters; he won another one for his surpassingly beautiful performance in 1999's The Cider House Rules, after which he played wintry roles in Last Orders and The Quiet American. After making that last one, and campaigning like hell to get it seen when Miramax threatened to dump it, Caine announced that he was, as far as he was concerned, "retired", which for Caine means that he now shows up in only a couple of pictures a year and doesn't take leading roles unless, as was the case with last year's Sleuth, they give him the chance to remake one of his older pictures so that he can play the role that he wasn't old enough to play the first time around. Some day he will die. When that happens, it would probably be a good idea to leave any messages for me with the doorman for a few weeks.

18. TOSHIRO MIFUNE (1920-1997)

Just try to look away when Toshiro Mifune's on screen. It's almost impossible. With his odd charisma and brooding intensity, he completely dominates any scene he's in. You can tell that he's trying to be generous with the other actors, but nature made him a cinematic powerhouse. Credited on IMDB with 181 movies between 1947 and 1995, Mifune is the Western face of Japanese cinema. Movies like Midway, 1941, and the miniseries Shogun brought him to the American masses, but it was his earlier work that made his career. He was the John Wayne to Akira Kurosawa's John Ford, casting as huge a mythic shadow across the face of cinema. Consider: Kurosawa made 32 movies during his life, and Mifune starred in 15 of them. Seven of those are five-star, drop-everything, must-see-immediately movies: Stray Dog, The Seven Samurai, I Live In Fear, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, and High and Low. Mifune also made four other movies that rank among the best movies ever made: Samurai 1 - 3 and The Sword of Doom. But enough about his importance to the canon! Let's talk about the man's signature moments, such as the mirthless laughter that rips out of his head like a bird from a cage, driving home just how close to the edge of sanity this character really is. Or the impassive-yet-sad dignity, when Mifune seems to be made of stone while the other actors flow around him like river water. Or, best of all, the way he could turn either of those on a dime into fear, horror, and pain, letting viewers in on an unspoken backstory that needs no further explanation. Even if you speak not a word of Japanese, you always know everything you need to know about Mifune's characters.

17. WILLIAM HOLDEN (1918-1981)

William Holden made a lot of movies, but the movies that made William Holden were few and far between. Don't get me wrong; Holden was a great actor, but his standout roles were so much brighter than his getalong roles that it's hard to believe they could coexist. That's probably true of most leading men, but it seems especially true of Holden. With Billy Wilder, he made Sunset Blvd, Stalag 17, and Sabrina. He made a bunch of war movies other than Stalag 17 (his face always seems to be hinting at the horrors he's seen and is trying to forget, thank you very much), but the best was The Bridge On The River Kwai with David Lean. He made a whole bunch of Westerns, even working with the great John Ford, but the really memorable one was Sam Peckinpah's stunning The Wild Bunch, which might be the best Western ever made. And he also made overrated Oscar bait like Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing and Network, for which the Academy duly rewarded him. I don't know whether Holden was a handsome man, but he was definitely a commanding and intriguing actor, and that's all that counts.

16. CLINT EASTWOOD (1930 - )

I’m not a hippie, a swinger or a Mormon, but I nevertheless live a polygamist lifestyle, sharing my wife on a regular basis with a septuagenarian jazz enthusiast whose talent, machismo and flinty good looks still, apparently, inspire lust in at least one small Polish woman decades after inspiring much wider lust during the tight pantsed, bare-chested, absurdly large biceped days of his youth. Despite my wife’s leftist political philosophy, she’s willing to forgive Eastwood’s right-wing libertarian political leanings and starring roles in all those reactionary Dirty Harry movies and violent spaghetti westerns, partly because those early films were so damn entertaining, but mostly because Clint has mellowed since then, producing, directing and/or starring in deeply human films like Unforgiven and Letters From Iwo Jima which explore the root cause and grisly aftermath of the human fascination with violence that helped to make him a star in the first place. Yet even though Eastwood would have qualified for this list based merely on his collaborations with Sergio Leone (let alone his cop movies, let alone his Oscar-caliber directing chops), that’s still only half the story. Unlike largely one-trick action stars of the Bronson/Stallone/Seagal variety, the erstwhile “man with no name” ain’t afraid to let his freak flag fly or get down with his sensitive feminine side, headlining everything from weepy “women’s” films (The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby) to weird experiments (The Beguiled, White Hunter Black Heart) and inexplicable monkey comedies (Every Which Way But Loose), proving there’s a whole lot more to my wife’s beloved fake husband than just his big, big guns.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne

Summer of ’78: “Damien: Omen II”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Damien: Omen II

Release Date: June 9, 1978

Cast: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Robert Foxworth, Sylvia Sidney, Lance Henriksen

The Buzz: The son of Satan is back to raise more hell!

Keywords: Devil Child, Satanism, Ice Hockey, Attacked By Bird, Torso Cut In Half

The Plot: I'd never seen any of the Omen movies, but I do vaguely recall reading the novelizations. You know how it is; too young to see R-rated movies in the theater, but not too young to buy the book versions of same down at Mr. Paperback. (They were probably just happy I was interested in reading at all.) So I can’t tell you much about the first Omen movie, but let’s all agree to assume that Damien Thorn was born with the mark of the beast, and that those who figured out he was the Antichrist met with an untimely demise.

One of those people was Damien’s father Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), who apparently did not have the chance to change his will before attempting to kill his own offspring with sacred daggers, because as the sequel begins, the now teenage Damien is in the custody of Robert’s brother Richard (William Holden) and his wife Ann (Lee Grant). Now a military school cadet, Damien is still unaware of his destiny as the prince of darkness, until his sergeant (played by a young-yet-craggy Lance Henriksen) tells him to check out the Book of Revelation. “For you it is just that – a book of revelation, for you, about you.” Hey, who couldn’t use one of those?

Damien learns that being the Antichrist comes with certain advantages. For example, it turns out that he’s very good at remembering historically significant dates. And, you know, he can give heart attacks to old ladies and make people plummet down elevator shafts. It takes him long enough, but eventually Richard Thorn figures out that his brother has willed him a dud, and tries to get his hands on those fancy daggers. Sadly, even William Holden is no match for Satan’s boy.

The Test of Time: I have no idea if Omen fans were satisfied with this follow-up, but if so, they must have been easily impressed. The stakes never seem particularly high in this sequel; those who grow suspicious of Damien are pretty quickly hit by trucks or fall through thin ice on the lake. And there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to get rid of him, since his destiny involves taking over a big corporation with questionable ethical policies. Heck, if he doesn’t do it, someone else will! Damien was released a few months before John Carpenter’s Halloween would usher in the era of the slasher film, so its big scares must have looked dated almost immediately. (Perhaps not quite as dated as Robert Foxworth’s frightening Luke Spencer perm, but still.) Still, it was successful enough to spawn Omen III: The Final Conflict, and now that the first Omen has been remade, who knows? Maybe Damien will be back for another round as well.

Quotable Quote: “You’re not my brother! The Beast has no brother! You were born of a jackal!”

2008 Equivalent: It’s a sequel about the son of a demon, so I’m going with Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Previously on Summer of '78: Capricorn One

Yesterday's Hits: The Towering Inferno (1974, John Guillermin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For most movie lovers today, the idea of 1970s Hollywood conjures up an image of maverick filmmakers being given the keys to the castle. It was the era memorialized in histories like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when young turks like Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg did some of their greatest and most famous work. But the truth was more complicated than that. Certainly, movies like The Godfather and Jaws were huge hits, but films of that caliber striking gold at the box office were the exception rather than the rule. Then as now, Hollywood has always been first and foremost in the business of churning out big, mindless spectacles, and the blockbuster of choice for many studios in the early 1970s was the disaster film. The biggest of them all was the highest-grossing film of 1974, The Towering Inferno.

What made The Towering Inferno a hit?: In the 1950s, a journalist named Irwin Allen decided to turn his lifelong love for movies into a career. After producing several documentaries and modest features, he turned his attentions to television throughout most of the 1960s, producing hit series like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Following the success of 1970’s Airport, Allen jumped on the disaster movie bandwagon by making the 1972 smash The Poseidon Adventure. Poseidon Adventure didn’t invent its genre, but it stood in contrast to other films of its kind by moving its central disaster closer to the beginning of the story and focusing instead on how its characters reacted to the disaster.

Allen rarely directed movies himself- The Towering Inferno was credited to John Guillermin, with Allen credited as the director of action sequences- but there was little doubt who was running the show. With The Towering Inferno, Allen more or less perfected the disaster movie formula- impressive effects, gigantic sets, and a sappy romantic ballad often performed by cheeseball chanteuse Maureen McGovern. Likewise, as with all of the most successful disaster movies, Allen gave The Towering Inferno the most stellar cast he could manage, top-lined by three of the era’s biggest stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway. In addition, he cast the key older characters in the film with old-guard Hollywood stars like William Holden, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones. And what would a big-budget film of the period without such quintessentially seventies names as Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner, Susan Blakely, and Robert Vaughn? The formula worked- The Towering Inferno was produced for a then-outrageous sum of $14 million dollars, but it ended up grossing more than eight times that amount in America alone, and much more than that overseas.

What happened?: If history teaches us anything about genre moviemaking, it’s that moviegoers are a fickle bunch. The disaster movie was at its peak at the time of The Towering Inferno’s release, but that was about to change. Within the next few years, movies like Jaws and Star Wars gave audiences a new kind of thrill ride at the movies. In light of the lean, efficient nature of these movies, suddenly old-school disaster movies were a thing of the past, and The Towering Inferno, with its galaxy of stars and nearly three-hour run time, seemed stately by comparison. Allen himself couldn’t even resurrect the genre, closing out the decade with three consecutive flops (The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and When Time Ran Out) that pretty much closed the book on disaster movies for years.

Does The Towering Inferno still work?: Not really. If the movie was quaint in comparison to blockbusters made only a few years later, it’s practically a fossil by today’s standards. One of the most distracting elements of the movie is Allen’s tendency to focus on small and fairly cliché bits of character business. At the time, the sight of one or two big-name stars dying onscreen was something of a shock, but from the beginning it’s pretty clear which ones are destined not to survive until the end. Allen pretty clearly divides his principal cast into three groups- the good, the bad, and the doomed. While some people are resourceful enough to survive the tragedy, others clearly exist to be victims or to get their comeuppance in the end. So not only does the story feel safe and comfortable, but it also takes on an element of kitsch as we wait to see how certain characters will meet their ends.

Another problem with the film was its bloated 165-minute running time. You’d think that a movie about people escaping from a fire would be fairly simple narratively-speaking, but there’s so much incident in The Towering Inferno that it overwhelms everything else. The film had its origins in two similar skyscraper-on-fire novels, The Tower and The Glass Inferno, and rather than judiciously cherry-picking elements from both books, Allen had Sterling Silliphant combine the stories of the two books and take the seven principal characters from each. As a result, the movie feels needlessly busy, forever cross-cutting between groups of characters as they attempt to escape the blaze. Some of the actors make an impression- Newman has an effortless authority in his scenes, and Fred Astaire gets a few nice moments- but most of them are lost in the shuffle.

And then there’s Steve McQueen. Arguably the biggest action star of the day, McQueen was cast early in the production and then proceeded to throw his weight around. After being cast as the heroic architect Doug, he decided that he preferred to play fire chief O’Hallorhan. Then, after Newman was cast as Doug, McQueen insisted his role be given equal weight as Newman’s. McQueen was to have exactly the same number of lines as Newman, and their roughly equal star stature necessitated the pioneering use of what was called “diagonal billing.” All of these headaches might have been worth it if McQueen was on top of his game, but he’s mostly on autopilot throughout the film, giving one of his laziest performances. The point of casting a star of McQueen’s caliber is for the audience to care about his character, but whenever he’s onscreen, I was mostly just anxious for Newman and Dunaway (then at the peak of her gorgeousness) to show up again.

Ever since Allen’s reign as the “Master of Disaster”, Hollywood has made several attempts to resurrect the disaster genre. But despite the best efforts of filmmakers like Roland Emmerich, the genre hasn’t caught on. CGI has made effects cheaper and easier to create than ever before, but just as key to The Towering Inferno’s popularity was its all-star cast, and the cost of such a cast today would be astronomical, and a huge gamble at a time when the importance of movie stars seems particularly questionable. The heyday for movies like The Towering Inferno has long since passed, and it looks like audiences will never love a movie like this again.

The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History, Part 1

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

With a few notable exceptions, the elaborate main title sequence has gone the way of the drive-in double feature. In fact, many of today’s movies eschew opening credits altogether, opting to plunge the audience directly into the experience and saving the who-did-whats for last. There’s something to be said for that, but we feel a vital part of the moviegoing experience is being neglected, whether it’s the establishment of tone or mood, or just a playful visual riff on the film’s themes. Join us now for a journey of sight and sound we like to call The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History.

PSYCHO (1960)

If you only know the name of one title designer- and chances are you do- the designer would almost certainly be Saul Bass. Before Bass came on the scene, the opening titles of films were mostly utilitarian, occasionally interesting to look at but primarily a way to honor the studio's obligations to the principal cast and crew. But this began to change after Bass was hired by Otto Preminger to design the opening credits to The Man With the Golden Arm, with his cutout-style animation working in tandem with Elmer Bernstein's score to create a title sequence that's arguably as good as the film that follows. Bass went on to work with Preminger numerous times, as well as filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer, Robert Wise, and later, Martin Scorsese. But for our money, Bass was never better than when designing titles for Alfred Hitchcock, which he did on three occasions. Any of these (the other two being Vertigo and North by Northwest) would be a worthy entry for this list, but we're going with their final collaboration, 1960's Psycho. For one thing, it's the most deceptively simple of Bass' classic output, with little more than white titles on a black background occasionally shoved aside by grey bars. A perfect rhythmic match to Bernard Herrmann's legendary score, Bass' titles are a classic case of "less is more"- a more complex animation might have given the game away, but Bass preserves the mystery of what is to come while still managing to set the tone for the film before we even see a frame shot by Hitchcock. And this was Bass' greatest breakthrough, to take what was once considered an overture to the feature film and turn it into an organic element of the movie itself.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)

Few people involved in the making of A Hard Day's Night had particularly high expectations for its quality. The producers of the film intended it to be a cash-in on Beatlemania, which they then believed would be short-lived, and its potential took a backseat in their minds to that of a tie-in soundtrack album. However, from the legendary opening chord it was clear to audiences that A Hard Day's Night was much more than a quickie B-movie. Somehow, director Richard Lester had taken the budgetary limits that were placed on him by the money men and flipped them around to his aesthetic advantage. Except for the priceless comic dialogue, everything that makes the film great is in evidence during the opening credits. The black-and-white camera work, intended as a cost-cutting measure, gives the film a scruffy documentary feel, never more so than during the opening titles when the Beatles are mobbed and chased through the streets by actual fans. The sense of humor that permeates the film makes multiple appearances here, as when band manager Norm, for no good reason, struggles with a container of milk. But the most revolutionary element of these credits is the way Lester and editor John Jympson cut the sequence to the rhythm of the title tune, creating an early ancestor to the modern-day music video. As much as they (and the film itself, for that matter) have been imitated and parodied since its release, the original titles for A Hard Day's Night still elicit the same amount of infectious glee they did more than four decades ago.

GOLDFINGER (1964)

The Screengrab legal department has informed us that the inclusion of at least one James Bond title sequence is mandatory on a list such as this, and after careful consideration, we realized there was really only one choice. First of all, Shirley Bassey’s rendition of the title track is clearly the greatest of all 007 theme songs, despite what you Duran Duran fans think. Secondly, although Maurice Binder is justly praised for his many groovy Bond openings, it was graphic designer Robert Brownjohn who established the template of projecting images from the film onto the semi-nude bodies of lovely young ladies, an achievement we rank just below the discovery of the polio vaccine. In this case, of course, those semi-nude bodies are tinted gold, the crowning touch that pushes this one over the top.

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Some observers, looking on Stanley Kubrick's body of work, have concluded that the man who made HAL 9000 a movie star must have been a misanthrope. But maybe it was just that he loved machines so much that he had little affection left over to bestow on human beings. Consider Dr. Strangelove, a film in which there is no trace of romance and little human warmth, and in which sex is a mysterious offscreen force that makes men in the war room snigger in anticipation of post-apocalyptic orgies and that compels the director to show us George C. Scott in open shirt and shorts. But then there is, at the very opening, that entrancing aerial ballet, with the military jets appearing to get it on, while music that suggests a romantic ballad is heard accompanying the credits. In its way, it may be the last real love scene that Kubrick ever shot. In his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, he tried to generate the same kind of heat with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman standing in for the airplanes, and the fact that he was not fully successful may prove that Scientologists are partly human after all. Or maybe it just proves that there are machines and then there are machines.

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Early in Sam Peckinpah's bloody Western masterpiece, there is a sequence, involving a shoot out between two factions (the outlaw gang of the title and the equally heedless, heartless "law men" on their trail) that lays waste to the town's main street, that (among other things) serves notice to the audience that this is not your father's cowboy movie. In order to minimize the number of paying customers who died of massive coronaries during the film's first fifteen minutes, it behooved Peckinpah and his collaborators to prepare viewers as best they could by making with the ominousness. This sequence--with the credits flashing onscreen as the images of the Bunch making their way into town keep freezing and turning to black and white, like cloud formations designed to signal that anyone who sees them had best build themselves an ark--do the trick nicely. No small degree of credit should go to Jerry Fielding, whose music sets a tone both lyrically elegaic and deeply scary. And the concluding freeze frame of William Holden declaiming the line, "If they move--kill 'em!" as that leading candidate for most beautiful four-word phrase in the English language, "Directed by Sam Peckinpah", appears alongside his head, is both a great in-joke and a heartening declaration of personal responsibility on the part of the artist.

SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE (1978)

“You will believe a man can fly,” said the famous tagline of Hollywood’s first big-budget superhero movie. We didn’t, quite – the movie had innumerable problems, and while it set a precedent for movies based on comic books to be profitable and even worth watching, it should be remembered more for being the first than anything like the best. But if there was one moment when it reached perfection, it was its opening credit sequence. A testament to the power of simplicity, the credits beautifully conjured the eternal four-color appeal of comic books by giving us nothing more or less than a simple backdrop of stars (occasionally broken up by something – a nebula? A muscled arm? A fluttering cape?) and the cast and crew of the movie rushing past us in a glorious and understated conjuration of classic comic book cover design. Having already brought together the perfect visual elements, the filmmakers go us one better – and cement Superman’s status as having one of the great credit sequences of all time – by hiring John Towner Williams to produce what is arguably his finest main theme. Williams’ compositions are all too often obvious and overbearing, but here, the triumphant but never aggressive or clamorous tone of the Superman theme fit the mood perfectly. Williams, despite having one of the most storied careers of any film composer, never again managed to so quite so exactly capture the feel of a film in its main title; Hollywood legend has it that, upon hearing it for the first time, producer Alexander Salkind bellowed to him “You’ve saved my movie!”

- Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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