Medium Cool

In 1968, the United States was in turmoil. The country was mired in the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson announced his resignation. Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy – two beacons of hope for civil rights and an end to the war – were assassinated. Angry and frustrated, people took to the streets in protest, most significantly at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler was there filming his directorial debut, Medium Cool (1969), a prime example of cinema verité with its brilliant fusion of documentary and narrative filmmaking creating an immediacy and authenticity, with a loosely-scripted narrative set in and among the chaos of the Convention.
 
Inspired by the socio-political chaos that was going on at the time, he shot the film in Chicago, hoping that something would transpire at the Convention. Incredibly, he was filming as protests turned violent when word got out that the Democrats failed to take a stand against the war. His cast and crew mixed it up with actual protestors and police. The result mirrored what Wexler was trying to say – what is real and what isn’t – by intentionally blurring the line between fact and fiction.
 
Medium Cool opens with an example of the famous journalism creed – if it bleeds, it leads – as John (Robert Forster) and his partner Gus (Peter Bonerz) film the aftermath of a car accident, an injured person still in the car, only to dispassionately call for an ambulance after they get the footage they need. They then drive off instead of helping or staying with the victim, immediately testing our instinct to empathize with these characters. The opening credits play over a motorcyclist carrying the accident footage through the streets of Chicago at dawn coupled with Mike Bloomfield’s twangy, western score, setting the tone and establishing the city as a character unto itself.

The next scene takes place at a swanky party as a group of people – that includes John and Gus – discuss journalistic ethics. One man says:
 
“I’ve made film on all kinds of social problems and the big bombs were the ones where we went into detail and showed why something happened. Nobody wants to take the time. They’d rather see 30 seconds of somebody getting his skull cracked, turn off the T.V., and say, ‘Let me have another beer.’”
 
These words are eerily prophetic as journalistic standards have lowered significantly since then, generation after generation having been weaned on sensationalistic new footage with very little substance.

Wexler adopts the hand-held camera style of Jean-Luc Godard, accompanying a raw, improvisational approach to acting reminiscent of John Cassavetes. This creates an air of authenticity, encouraging us to wonder what is real and what is staged. It feels real and immediate – be it a violent roller derby match that John and Gus attend, or the scene where two little kids free a pigeon on a subway platform and play on the train ride home, in what feels like an unguarded moment. Other times, he keeps the camera mostly stationary with very little movement, simply observing his subjects, such as the scene where we watch the daily activities of Eileen (Verna Bloom), a mother, and her son Harold (Harold Blankenship).
 
A young Robert Forster anchors the film as an amoral journalist that doesn’t seem to care about anything but his job. He refuses to get involved with the stories he covers, a good thing, objectively speaking, until it is a matter of life or death. The actor brings a rugged charisma to the role and is quite believable as a veteran cameraman. His humanity begins to develop when he gets fired from his job and meets Harold trying to steal his hubcaps, taking him back to Eileen where he befriends the two of them. We see John and Harold bond watching a bunch of birds released into the wild, shot like something out of a Terrence Malick film with its stunning sunset. It is a rare moment where Wexler uses conventional shooting methods.
 
Wexler does a fine job portraying the different classes in Chicago, using John as a conduit to the more affluent citizens who pontificate on things about which they have little to no actual knowledge. He shows us the rough, economically-depressed neighborhood where Eileen and her son live in abject poverty. John also takes us to a black neighborhood where he follows up on a story about a man who returned $10,000 and gets into it with some of his friends and family, who question his motives as one of them says:

“When you come and say you’ve come to do something of human interest it makes a person wonder whether you’re going to do something of interest to other humans or whether you consider the person human in whom you’re interested.”
 
His friends give the two journalists a hard time because they are fed up with their perspective being marginalized on T.V. and the media in general.
 
John eventually gets a gig filming the Democratic National Convention, setting the stage for the film’s climactic scene. Eileen is there, too, looking for Harold, who has run away. What transpires is several actors mingling with a myriad of actual protestors and police officers as things turn ugly and violent for real. Even if you didn’t know that what was unfolding was real, you have to marvel at how Wexler ratchets up the tension between the cops and the protestors. You can sense that a clash between the two sides is inevitable.

Sure enough, violence erupts and we hear the iconic line, “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” juxtaposed with the delegates in the Convention Center who are completely oblivious to what is happening. Wexler cuts back to a montage of shots of protestors injured and bleeding. The cops start randomly beating people and it is absolute chaos.
 
In 1967, Haskell Wexler started writing a screenplay after reading Division Street America by Studs Terkel. He had been moved by the trials and tribulations of the denizens of the Appalachian ghetto in Chicago. In 1968, Paramount Pictures hired him to adapt the novel, The Concrete Wilderness by Jack Couffer, which focused on a young boy who loves animals. He merged ideas from both novels with what was going on politically in the United States, “because I was engaged with what was happening in the country that was not being reported in the regular media.” He was an active member in the anti-war movement and knew that the Democratic National Convention was going to have concentrated protests so he “junked most of the book’s plot and wrote a script about a cameraman and his experiences in the city that summer.” He wrote scenes of protest in his script: “For my film I had planned to hire extras and dress them up as Chicago Policemen, but in the end Mayor Richard Daley provided us with all the extras we needed.”
 
Wexler decided to shoot the film in his hometown of Chicago, making a deal with the studio that he would fund the production, but they had to buy the finished film, even though it no longer resembled its source material. During pre-production, he had oral historian Studs Terkel work as a “fixer,” introducing the filmmaker to Appalachian transplants, artists and musicians who portrayed Black militants in one scene, and actual journalists that appear at a cocktail party, arguing about the ethics of showing violence on-screen. Wexler had been away from Chicago for several years and needed someone who knew the lay of the land. The two men were friends in high school, and when they were reunited back in Chicago, spent a lot of time together with Terkel taking Wexler “on an adventure into my own city that many Chicagoans didn’t see being insulated by communities and money and suburbs.”

When it came to casting, Wexler chose Harold Blankenship as the runaway boy that Forster’s character meets – the only vestige left from the novel – and was actually a child from the hill country. His best friend in the film was played by his real-life brother, Robert. The filmmaker felt that the Appalachian residents were “somewhat of a forgotten people” and wanted them represented in his film. While shooting documentaries in the South during the civil rights movement, he had worked with them in Monteagle, Tennessee. To this end, he shot in the Appalachian ghetto of Chicago’s upper north side where mountain people from Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia had settled.
 
With the assassinations of King and Kennedy, Wexler anticipated trouble at the Democratic Convention and that drew him to the city: “I knew there would be demonstrations and that the police would suppress them, but I didn’t build the story or the script around that. It just sort of unfolded before me.” Wexler talked to Mayor Daley who approved police officers on the first day of filming but Wexler quickly realized that with them present, “nobody in the street would come out and talk to us. From then on, I said, ‘Look, I don’t want cops around when I’m shooting.” Wexler came to regret that while filming the riots in Grant Park where he and his crew were tear-gassed for their troubles. The famous line uttered during this scene, “Look out, Haskell; it’s real!” was actually added in post-production. During filming they didn’t have a sound man present and his assistant, Jonathan Haze, said something resembling those words when the Nation Guard shot tear gas at Wexler.
 
Wexler sensed that there would be trouble at the Convention, thanks to a leaflet the police had put out a month prior that had a list of new crowd-control weapons.

Paramount had no idea what to do with the finished film, sitting on it for months, telling Wexler that he’d have to get releases from all the people in the park sequences. They also objected to the casual carnage and nudity. When Medium Cool was released, the MPAA gave it an “X” rating, which Wexler felt was politically motivated: What no one had the nerve to say was that it was a political ‘X’.”
 
Medium Cool ends as it began – with a car accident, only instead of John reporting on the incident, he is the incident. A car full of people pass by and much like what he did in the opening scene, they take a picture and drive on, leaving it for someone else to do something. He is treated with the same indifference he showed to the accident victim early in the film. This rather nihilistic, downbeat ending comes as a surprise and is Wexler’s most cinematic flourish, taking the ending of Easy Rider (1969) and giving it a meta spin when the camera turns on him filming footage of the end. He faces the camera as if to say, it’s only a movie.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Cronin, Paul. “Mid-Summer Mavericks.” Sight and Sound. September, 2001.
 
“Haskell Wexler on the Criterion Collection Release of Medium Cool.” Time Out. May 22, 2013.
 
French, Piper. “High Visibility: Reexamining Medium Cool on Its 50th Anniversary.” Los Angeles Review of Books. August 23, 2019.
 
Lightman, Herb A. “The Filming of Medium Cool.” American Cinematographer. January, 1970.

Bullitt

In the late 1960s, Hollywood was undergoing a significant change. The studios had lost touch with what moviegoing audiences wanted to see. By 1969 and the release of Easy Rider and its subsequent success signaled a seismic shift in cinema, making way for a myriad of unusual films that were pushed through the system throughout the following decade. Actor Steve McQueen was at the height of his powers during the transition period with a toe in each era. He had risen to prominence during the ‘60s with such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963), which transformed him into a bonafide movie star but, at heart, he was a Method actor serious about his craft. He used his newfound clout within Hollywood to produce two films that catapulted him to the next level, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, both released in 1968.

Bullitt is a perfect example of the aforementioned transitional period that was going on in Hollywood. It is a studio movie, specifically a crime thriller that sees McQueen as a police detective, however, he cut a significant amount of his character’s dialogue to suit his particular style of acting. In addition, he had the production shoot on location in San Francisco (uncommon at the time) and adhere to strict authenticity when it came to police procedural details. One of the most important aspects of this shoot was the show-stopping car chase scene that eschewed traditional Hollywood techniques in favor of cars at actual high speeds on actual city streets. This not only added to the film’s realism - it gave the sequence a visceral thrill that hadn’t been done before.

The opening credits employ a fisheye lens, mixing black and white with color as Lalo Schifrin’s cool, jazzy score sets a stylish vibe. Initially we have no idea what is going on; the action that occurs during this sequence is without dialogue. Who is chasing whom and why? Even when dialogue is finally spoken, just before director Peter Yates’ credit, it is unclear exactly what happened.

Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by Senator Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) with protecting the star witness – Albert "Johnny Ross" Renick (Felice Orlandi) – in a big trial against the Mob, known here simply as The Organization. He has to keep him safe for 40 hours. What seems like a routine assignment turns out to be much more complicated: the witness and the police detective guarding him are critically injured by two hitmen in a situation that reeks of a set-up. Why would the witness let these two men into the apartment? Frank’s boss (Simon Oakland) tells him to investigate further and do it by the book… but, of course, a maverick cop like Frank goes his own way, authority figures be damned. As he puts it, “You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.” It is a beautifully succinct line that sums up Frank’s ethos as a cop.
 
What is so fascinating about McQueen’s performance is his choice to emphasize facial expression and body language (or the lack thereof) over dialogue. When a fellow cop is injured in the line of duty, he says little to the man, except to ask the identity of the person who shot him. The rest of the scene shows Frank reacting to what happened, the grave concern that plays across his face. No trite words of comfort are needed – the expression on McQueen’s face says it all.
 
This technique is used again when Frank revisits the crime scene where Ross and the cop were shot. No dialogue, just him looking over the scene and thinking about what happened, trying to piece things together. Typically, a scene like that would have a voiceover or Frank would be talking to himself or someone there explaining what he’s doing. Instead, the filmmakers assume the audience is smart enough to figure it out.

This being McQueen, Frank is a hip guy. He dresses stylishly and takes his beautiful girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) to a snazzy jazz club for lunch. Even his introduction is as low-key as the man himself: his partner (Don Gordon) wakes him up after a long night (he went to bed at 5 a.m.). Frank isn’t much for small talk and that’s all we know about him; their relationship is all business. They aren’t friends that crack jokes together or are at odds with each other like buddy cop movies of later decades. It is an underwhelming introduction that gives no indication of what kind of cop Frank is – we find out over the course of the film. This is quite unusual for a mainstream studio film at the time, which traditionally spelled everything out – this is not the case as Bullitt adopts its leading man’s less-is-more aesthetic, extending to its very economic use of dialogue. When Frank goes to dinner with a group of friends, his girl by his side, we see them all talking but don’t hear their conversation as the jazz music drowns out their voices. What they’re saying isn’t important, only that we see what Frank does in his off-hours.
 
For the most part, Jacqueline Bisset is saddled with the thankless token girlfriend role. Late in the film, however, she gets a moment to showcase her acting chops when her character confronts Frank about his job, after seeing a crime scene where a woman was brutally strangled. She tells him, “Do you let anything reach you – I mean really reach you – or are you so used to it by now that nothing really touches you?” She continues, “How can you be part of it without becoming more and more callous?” referring to the violence and ugliness of his job. He has no answer for her. She cannot reconcile the vast difference between her world and his, asking, “What will happen to us in time?” to which he replies, “Time starts now.” If up until now he’s kept her at arm’s length about the harsh realities of his job, perhaps now that she has gotten a glimpse of it, she understands why he doesn’t share the ugly details with her. Bisset does a fantastic job in this scene and one wishes she was given more to do in the film.
 
Yates shows off the hilly streets of San Francisco beautifully. You get a real sense of place and the city becomes another character unto itself. We see the neighborhood convenience store where Frank gets his groceries and the grubby, hole-in-the-wall hotel room in which the witness is hidden away. Throughout Bullitt, the director demonstrates his considerable skill at visual storytelling. A key example of this takes place at the hospital, when Frank shows up to check on the condition of the witness with Dr. Willard (Georg Stanford Brown). In the foreground of the shot Frank is eating while Willard is nearby. In the background we see and hear Chalmers tell a nurse that he wants Willard replaced as Ross’ doctor because, “He’s too young and inexperienced,” and he would prefer his own surgeon to take care of the man.

Frank and Willard exchange a look that indicates they know the real reason: he’s black. It’s not spelled out and nothing is said between the two men but they know and we know it, too. It also reveals Chalmers’ unsavory side that had not been revealed up to this point. Frank was already unsure of him because he came off as a smug prick, but this clinches it: Chalmers has his own agenda and is not to be trusted.
 
The film rights to Mute Witness by Robert Pike had sold five times with McQueen’s Solar Productions being the last buyer. Initially, he didn’t want to play a cop as he felt it would hurt his counterculture/rebel reputation. Over time, he changed his mind, reasoning that an authentic performance might change people’s opinions of the police. He enlisted Alan Trustman, who wrote the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, to write a treatment for Bullitt. McQueen wasn’t crazy about the complicated plot that the writer created.
 
While that was being worked on, he and producer Robert Relyea saw Robbery (1967), a heist film directed by Peter Yates, which contained a car chase sequence that impressed both men. Relyea said, “Yates had a car chase in that movie that involved cars moving along very fast, then cutting to these children at a crosswalk. It made you so nervous you couldn’t see straight.” The director was sent the script for Bullitt and thought it was “awful.” He was asked to re-read it and replied, “I’m not coming to America to make that kind of film!” He was eventually coaxed to fly to Los Angeles to tell McQueen and Relyea what he thought of the script and within hours signed on to direct the film.

While the script was being rewritten, McQueen was hands on with the casting, handpicking Robert Vaughn, Simon Oakland and others. Vaughn actually turned down the project three times and agreed to do it only after talking to McQueen, his agent and then Yates. For his partner in the film, McQueen cast long-time friend Don Gordon, whom he had known since the late 1950s when they were working in television. It was his first film role and gave his career a boost.
 
For the role of Frank’s girlfriend, McQueen cast Jacqueline Bisset because he was attracted to her, claiming that she was the most beautiful co-star he worked with up to that point in his career. He made excuses to his wife to keep her away from the shoot while he conducted an affair with Bisset during filming. He also thought she was an excellent co-star: “She catches good. She can throw it back to you with a great depth for a girl of that age.”
 
Yates thought it would be good for McQueen and Gordon if they researched their roles. They went on ride-alongs with San Francisco police officers. Yates said, “Steve and Don Gordon really had down their procedures. I thought it would be more exciting, and it was.” The two cops assigned to McQueen hazed him a bit to see if he was just another poseur actor and took him to a morgue. He was up to the challenge, showing up with an apple, eating it while being shown cadavers. Gordon, meanwhile, was taken out on a real drug bust and given a police I.D. card and carried a badge and a prop gun. He was even recognized by a suspect on a bust.

Up to this point, McQueen had a good relationship with the studio and its head, Jack Warner, who quickly agreed to make Bullitt and was hands off, trusting the actor. As production ramped up, Warner sold his stock and retired. Kenneth Hyman and Seven Arts took over and told McQueen that they wanted to be more hands-on. Relyea said, “We came in with one understanding and then found ourselves in another, it led to misunderstandings on both sides.” The studio told McQueen that his six-picture deal was now going to be a one and done deal.
 
Filming began in February 1968 and finished in May of the same year. The pressure of the new studio regime and his reduced deal weighed heavily on McQueen. He didn’t display the good humor he had on other sets as the pressure of carrying the film affected his day-to-day mood – but it did not deter him from fighting for what he wanted. The studio wanted Bullitt shot on the lot but McQueen pushed to have it shot entirely on location. Yates said, “My biggest concern was that if we were to make a picture totally on the lot, that it would look like a television series.” San Francisco’s mayor Joseph L. Alioto was very accommodating and the studio backed down. As a result, Bullitt was the first film to be shot on location with an all-Hollywood crew, a major feat unto itself.
 
Yates encouraged the actors to ad-lib and was not afraid to change a scene if it wasn’t working. For example, in the scene where Frank meets his girlfriend for dinner, McQueen didn’t feel comfortable with the dialogue as written. Yates told him and Bisset to act as if they were having a real dinner and filmed them from the outside.

During filming, the studio rode McQueen hard about the budget. Whenever a studio executive would show up on location, the actor would kick them off. The studio claimed that the production was going over budget while in actuality there was no real projected budget! In the end, the studio claimed that the budget went from four million dollars to six million when it actually only cost five million.
 
Some of the stunts that were performed during the production were quite dangerous and they didn’t always involve cars. In the scene where Frank pursues Johnny Ross on the airport runway and goes under a Boeing 707 passenger jet, the stunt involved 240-degree heat blasts from the engine with unpredictable cross winds. Stuntman Loren James talked to the FAA and pilots and was told that it couldn’t be done. Eventually, he found a pilot that was willing to do it and the stunt was done in one take. James was paid $5000 for the death-defying stunt.
 
The film’s famous car chase sequence was saved for the last two weeks of filming with the studio threatening to deny it if the production went over budget. Screenwriter Alan Trustman claims that the car chase was in the script but Yates has said that it was producer Phil D’Antoni that pushed for it. Yates had just done one in a previous film and didn’t want to do it. McQueen was prepping for the car racing drama Le Mans (1971) and didn’t want to do it either. Stunt driver Carey Lofton was brought in to coordinate the chase. He had known McQueen since the late ‘50s and they had a good relationship. The actor wanted to make the best car chase depicted on film and Lofton told him, “I knew a lot about camera angles and speeds to make it look fast. You can underground the camera so you can control everything in the scene.” Lofton told McQueen it would be expensive to do. The actor replied, “Money is no object here.”

McQueen wanted to do his own driving and Lofton spent four days trying to convince him otherwise. It wasn’t until he crashed into another car three times that Lofton asked McQueen’s friend Bud Elkins to double for him. Elkins said of his friend, “He took the corners too fast and he overshot them and crashed into cars.” The climactic explosion at a gas station was, not surprisingly, the most expensive aspect of filming and could be done only once. It was shot on the last day of filming. Even though the car overshot the gas pumps, clever editing covered this mistake.
 
The final showdown where Frank chases his suspect on a busy airport runway and beyond is more than a little reminiscent of the climactic showdown between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). This, coupled with the all-business Bullitt and the attention to procedural details, influenced filmmakers such as Walter Hill and the aforementioned Mann; both are fascinated by the machinations between cops and crooks.
 
Bullitt had its premiere on October 17, 1968 at Radio City Music Hall. Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars and wrote, “The beautiful thing is that Yates and his writers keen everything straight. There's nothing worse than a complicated plot that loses track of itself.” In her review for The New York Times, Renata Adler wrote that it was a “terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen: Fast, well acted, written the way people talk.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Apart from specific business assigned, McQueen is able to convey the same depths of complexity in close-up reactions throughout the film’s action, which stresses brutal action no less efficiently than the political intimidation, and opportunistic legal maneuvers which are the cool menace of Vaughn’s tactics.” In his review for Artforum, Manny Farber wrote, “in a long, near-silent and very good stretch in U.C. Hospital, which is almost excessive in the way it sticks like plaster to the mundaneness of the place, the movie hits into about seventeen verities: faces looking out as though across the great divide of 20th-century lousiness.”

 
After watching this film, audiences questioned: what was the point? Was Chalmers in league with The Organization or merely an arrogant and inept politician? Robert Vaughn keeps his cards close to his vest, never giving us a clear indication of his character’s true motivations. He maintains a slick, impenetrable façade that the actor does a great job of maintaining throughout the film. Bullitt simply ends with Frank returning home, his girlfriend asleep in his bed. He washes his face and looks in the mirror, a grim expression looking back. One wonders if this befuddled audiences at the time. It certainly isn’t the happy ending most expected with this kind of a film and again, it is further proof of the winds of change going on in Hollywood where McQueen could push a film like this through the system. It isn’t as radical as something like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), but it is groping towards that kind of reinvention.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Terrill, Marshall. Steve McQueen: Portrait of An American Rebel. Plexus. 1993.

The World's Greatest Sinner

Without a doubt, Timothy Agoglia Carey is one of the most eccentric character actors in American cinema. This is a man that was fired from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) for faking his own kidnapping. One only must see his scene-stealing performances in the likes of the aforementioned film where he breaks down and cries hysterically before a firing squad or in The Killing (1956) where he speaks most of his dialogue while flashing his clenched teeth to witness the wonderful off-kilter choices he made that enhanced the films he was in. Unfortunately, he rarely got to headline a film with The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), which he starred in, wrote, directed and produced, being one of the rare exceptions. Freed from the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, he created a crudely made, yet fascinating look at the cult of personality.
 
The film begins, appropriately, in bizarre fashion with the title song playing over a black screen and the sound of an explosion segues into the opening credits with classical music playing over the soundtrack inducing wicked tonal whiplash. In a gleefully audacious move, the story is narrated by none other than God (and then, bafflingly, abandons it for the rest of the movie) who introduces us to Clarence Hilliard (Carey) by describing him as “just like any other male the only difference is he wants to be God. And that’s coming right out of the horse’s mouth.”
 
He lives in domestic bliss with his wife Edna (Betty Rowland) and his two children, working as the head of the department of an insurance company. One day, he decides to give everyone the day off which doesn’t sit too well with his boss (Victor Floming). It doesn’t help that Clarence has also been telling potential clients not to get insurance, telling one person not get a funeral policy because, “When you die, your body starts to stink.” Not surprisingly, he gets fired from his job, comes home and tells his wife that he wants to write a book and get into politics (?!).

While he earnestly tells her about his aspirations she falls asleep so he tells his pet horse Rex about a dream he had: “I’m gonna make people live long. I wanna put something into life. I wanna make life be eternal.” These are the seeds for a cult that he plans to start but how will he get people to follow him? One night, he goes to a rock ‘n’ roll concert and observes teenage girls screaming in excitement at and worshipping the lead singer. The next day, Clarence hits the streets, literally, preaching eternal life to anyone who will listen. He wants to make people super human beings, promising, “age won’t exist anymore.”
 
Clarence transforms himself into a rock ‘n’ roll preacher in a show-stopping sequence that evokes Elvis Presley and James Brown in raw energy and showmanship as he sweats, yells and dances with wild abandon. It is a truly astonishing performance to behold. He eventually changes his name to God Hilliard and becomes drunk on power, alienating his earlier followers and even his family. He meets a shady, political fixer whose credentials are that he worked for one of the leading political parties but fell out of favor thanks to “a few jealous underlings” and “got into a few difficulties.” He dazzles Clarence with political doublespeak and tells him, “If you can stir the people’s emotions, you can win.” The first thing he does is get Clarence to drop the rock ‘n’ roll preacher shtick, which he agrees to do by dramatically smashing his guitar over a desk.
 
He is soon running for President of the United States on his eternal life platform. Eventually, his rhetoric changes to that of a fanatical dictator: “We must gird ourselves with an armor of inspiration. We’ll reach them in the big cities! In the small towns! And the crossroads! We’ll weed them out! Any place where there’s people, we’ll get our message to them!” Carey lays on the fascist imagery as Clarence’s followers wear armbands of their party and have their own book documenting Clarence’s manifesto. Soon, he is speaking at larger and larger rallies until he has a crisis of confidence and of faith at the film’s climax.

The making of The World’s Greatest Sinner was almost as wild and unpredictable as the film itself with the inspiration coming from Carey’s desire to shake things up in Hollywood: “I was tired of seeing movies that were supposedly controversial. So I wanted to do something that was really controversial.” He began filming in 1956 in El Monte, California, where he lived, at his home and on the city streets, using locals as extras. This continued sporadically until 1961 on a budget of $100,000 under its original title, Frenzy. While making The Second Time Around (1961), Carey was approached by a young musician by the name of Frank Zappa who complimented his acting. Carey told him, “We have no music for The World’s Greatest Sinner. If you can supply the orchestra and a place to tape it, you have the job.” The aspiring musician composed the score and then went on The Steve Allen Show and said it was “the world’s worst film and all the actors were from skid row.”
 
Filmmaker Dennis Ray Steckler (Incredibly Strange Creatures) also got his start on the film. After several cameramen had been fired during filming, Carey brought Steckler out to Long Beach to shoot scenes of extras watching Carey on stage and then rioting. Steckler later claimed that at while was in a closet loading film, Carey threw a boa constrictor in with him. To top it all off, at the film’s premiere, Carey fired a .38 pistol above the heads of the audience, causing a riot.
 
The World’s Greatest Sinner warns about the dangers of demagogues like Clarence by showing how he whips a large crowd into a blind frenzy showing how they are swept up by his fiery rhetoric. Carey shows how this can be dangerous as his followers riot, destroying property in his name with the camera lingering on a mob of people trashing and turning over a car. He has affairs with multiple women, including a 14-year-old girl. This kind of behavior and these kinds of tactics anticipate T.V. evangelists that became popular in the 1980s and in recent years people with little to no political experience or knowledge getting into office based mostly on their cult of personality and ability to appeal to people’s basest instincts.

What is so incredibly inspiring about The World’s Greatest Sinner is how Carey commits 100% to the wonderfully insane narrative. Imagine if Brad Garrett and Nicolas Cage had a baby and you get Carey. He has the former’s hulking frame with the latter’s bedroom eyes and fearlessness as an actor, not afraid to look ridiculous all in the name of art. The film is shot and edited roughly, almost haphazardly in a non-traditional way with awkward transitions and shifts in tone that is also part of its charm. Carey is not only flaunting Hollywood conventions he is throwing out the rule book as he makes all kinds of odd choices throughout the film, like when Clarence’s boss takes him to his office to reprimand him and it plays over a cacophony of noises so that we can’t hear the dialogue. The screenplay, at times, is truly inspired with such blatantly provocative lines, such as “The biggest liar of mankind is Christ!” This is truly an auteur film – Carey’s magnum opus, a weird and wild film he was somehow able to be unleashed on the world seemingly through sheer force of Carey’s will.
 
 
SOURCES
 
McAbee, Sam. “Carey: Saint of the Underground.” Cashiers du Cinemart. #12. 2001.
 
Murphy, Mike. “Timothy Carey.” Psychotronic. #6. 1990.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

In a career as vast as Elizabeth Taylor’s, you’re bound to find the occasional oddity or strange outlier that doesn’t get mentioned often or is given much attention but is just peculiar enough to invite rediscovery. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) is such a film. It started out as a way for Taylor to get her long-time friend and fellow actor Montgomery Clift an acting gig and boost his spirits after surviving a horrific car accident that shattered his good looks and confidence. It eventually became a twisted Southern gothic tale starring Marlon Brando opposite Taylor, directed by none other than John Huston who imposed its distinctive golden filter over every scene.

The film chronicles the dysfunctional marriage of Major Weldon Penderton (Brando) and his wife Leonora (Taylor) who likes riding horses and having an affair with Lieutenant Colonel Morris Langdon (Brian Keith), good friends with her husband. Private Williams (Robert Forster) is a young man that tends to Leonora’s horse and does yard work for the Penderton’s. He becomes obsessed with the couple and in particular Leonora, observing their most private moments from their yard at night.

We are introduced to the three main characters in a way that tells us something important about each one of them. Williams is a gentle soul that enjoys hanging around the stable, taking care of the horses. Weldon is a vain man obsessed with making himself look better as evident by the way he admires himself in a mirror after a workout, flexing his muscles. Leonora is all about what makes her happy, whether it’s making sure all the details for an impending party are just right or her affair with Morris.

Weldon and Leonora have a loveless relationship that borders on the contentious. She likes to have fun and he’s a humorless man, which begs the question, was it always like this? Were they ever happy together? Now, they have an antagonistic relationship as typified when he chastises her for walking around the house in bare feet. She responds by taking off all her clothes and walking around the house, which only infuriates him more. As she heads upstairs, Leonora simply turns, looks over her shoulder and says, “Son, have you ever been collared and dragged out into the street and thrashed by a naked woman?” While Brando seethes and chews up the scenery, Taylor wisely plays it low-key with simmering contempt. If Weldon is repressed then Leonora is the complete opposite, an exhibitionist who has no problem expressing how she feels at given moment.

This is a juicy role for Elizabeth Taylor to sink her teeth into as she vamps it up as a boozy, spoiled housewife with voracious appetites. She relishes her dialogue and delights in Leonora’s rebellious behavior towards Weldon and cheerfully condescends to Alison (Julie Harris). She is blissfully oblivious to everyone else’s problems, going on about her preparations for the party or casually dismissing Alison’s flamboyantly gay houseboy Anacleto’s (Zorro David) obvious disdain for her.

Marlon Brando is terrific playing a tragic figure trapped in a repressive prison and wanting so desperately to escape it. The scene where he is almost killed while riding a runaway horse is a powerful one as it culminates in a complete emotional breakdown. All of Weldon’s suppressed emotions come bubbling to the surface, erupting like a volcano in a powerfully acted moment by the actor. He can’t harm is wife directly so he punishes her in more insidious ways, such as taking out her beloved horse Firebird. When it nearly kills him after he provokes the animal, Weldon viciously whips it with a tree branch. He’s clearly venting his anger at Leonora out on this poor horse. Weldon is doing this as much to punish her as himself, lying to his wife about beating Firebird so that when she finds out and comes back understandably enraged, she begins striking him with a riding crop while he just stands there and takes it.

Williams is an enigmatic figure. Why is he so fascinated with these people? His obsession with them only grows as the film goes on. Robert Forster delivers an intriguing, largely wordless performance as a voyeuristic young man that spends most of his time observing the Penderton’s disintegrating marriage. Williams often stares impassively, his obsession guiding his actions as he increasingly takes more risks to spy on Leonora. He even goes so far as to breaking into their house, going into her bedroom and watching her as she sleeps.

Julie Harris plays Morris’ long-suffering wife, still dealing with the death of her child three years ago. The only comfort she finds is with Anacleto, a colorful character with a flair for the dramatic as he cuts loose while Morris looks on disdainfully. Zorro David delivers a wonderful monologue about a dream he had in such an odd way that anticipates similar showstopping moments in David Lynch films. His character would not be out of place in one of them. It's a shame David never made another film after this one as his onscreen presence is absolutely riveting.

Everyone in the cast is going for it, playing their respective roles to the hilt, be it Brando’s repressed major, Taylor’s lusty housewife, Forster’s stoic voyeur or Harris’ tragic wife.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a beautiful shot film by Aldo Tonti with a golden filter that saturates the entire film with one object in a given scene naturally colored. This is in reference to Anacleto’s drawing of a golden peacock whose eye reflects the world. The film also features excellent use of shadows during night-time scenes where Williams spies on the Penderton’s, creeping around the outside of their house. There is another stand-out shot of a train, enshrouded in smoke, leaving the station at dawn.

After saving Montgomery Clift’s life in a horrendous nearly fatal automobile accident, Elizabeth Taylor had been trying to find a project for them work together on. The accident not only physically disfigured him but also had a huge psychological impact and his subsequent reliance on drugs and alcohol made him almost unemployable. In 1964, his agent suggested that they star in an adaptation of Carson McCuller’s novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, a Southern gothic story about sexual repression. Clift was to play a latent homosexual army officer that becomes fixated on a young private. Taylor was to play opposite Clift as his wife and object of the private’s obsession.

Producer Ray Stark was understandably worried about insuring Clift and told the actor he’d have to put up his beloved brownstone as collateral. He was so desperate for work he considered but Taylor wouldn’t hear it and announced to the press that she and Clift were making the film together – their first since Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). When Stark asked her to reconsider, she offered to give up her salary to pay for his insurance.

Complications arose when Taylor told Clift that her husband Richard Burton wanted to co-star and direct the film. Not only did Clift not consider Burton a serious actor but also felt uncomfortable in the presence of the Welsh alpha male. Burton eventually decided not to do the film and John Huston was hired to direct. Unfortunately, Clift died in July 1966 and was subsequently replaced by Marlon Brando at the suggestion of Taylor.

Production on the film began in October 1966 in Rome where Burton and Taylor had been filming the play Doctor Faustus. It was a ten-week shoot with Brando often going out to dinner with Burton and Taylor. The film’s distinctive golden amber look was a result of extensive experimentation for a specific effect as Huston remarked, “This served to separate the audience somewhat from the characters, who were in various ways withdrawn from reality, and to make their story a bit more remote and erotic.”

An executive at Warner Brothers objected to the look of the film and Huston was able to convince the studio to release his version in select cities. Reflections in a Golden Eye received poor reviews and did not perform well at the box office. Variety said, “Brando struts about and mugs as the stuffy officer whose Dixie dialect is often incoherent.” Newsweek said that the film was “devoid of style and grace,” and called it “perverted.” The New York Times criticized the film’s “odd and pretentious use of color to convey the notion of reflections in a golden eye, I suppose that is, the suffusion of the whole thing in a fluctuating golden wash or monotone.” Finally, Pauline Kael gave it one of its more merciful reviews, stating, “Despite everything that is laboriously wrong with Reflections, the visual style – like paintings made from photographs – is interesting and the director, John Huston, and the actors are able to do some extraordinary things with Carson McCuller’s conceptions.” Technicolor prints had been struck at the same time as Huston’s version and replace them when the film was given a wider release.

The Penderton’s are a tragic couple that shouldn’t be married as he’s gay but unable to come out of the closet as a result of the repressed times and the environment in which he lives in. She, on the other hand, can’t empathize with other people as she’s so concerned with herself. Reflections in a Golden Eye is about damaged people, from the repressed Weldon to the selfish Leonora to the unhappy Alison to the obsessed Williams.

The film is also about perception – how people perceive others and themselves, from Weldon admiring himself in the mirror to Williams obsessively gazing at Leonora while she sleeps. It is an unhealthy, destructive gaze that Anacleto observes more succinctly when he shows Alison his watercolor of a peacock, explaining that in its eye are “reflections of something tiny, and tiny and…” upon struggling to find the right word, settles on “grotesque,” contorting his face. This film features grotesque caricatures of human beings doing horrible things to each other with often tragic results.

SOURCES

Kashner, Sam and Nancy Schoenberger. Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century. itbooks. 2011.

Phillips, Gene D. “Talking with John Huston.” Film Comment. May/June 1973.

Spoto, Donald. A Passion for Life: The Biography of Elizabeth Taylor. Harper Collins. 1995.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

In 1969, two important westerns came out examining the end of the Wild West in very different ways. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was a blood-soaked elegy to its aging protagonists who found themselves increasingly marginalized in a world that was passing them by. George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid also featured bank robbers finding it increasingly harder to ply their trade albeit in a lighter vein, emphasizing the undeniable chemistry between its two lead actors, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Screenwriter William Goldman and director Hill helped create a classic buddy action film that would shape and influence the genre for years to come.

Infamous outlaws Butch Cassidy (Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Redford) have spent their careers robbing banks with their Hole in the Wall Gang. Butch is the smart one who plans all the jobs they do while Sundance is the man of action. Sundance tells him, “You just keep thinking, Butch. That’s what you’re good at,” to which he responds, “Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” Times are changing, however, and it has become harder to be a criminal. Now that they are legends Butch and Sundance have become well known with the authorities. It is also getting tougher to rob banks as they now have more security.

Even one of the guys in their Hole in the Wall Gang challenges Butch’s leadership – a rather large, imposing man (Ted Cassidy). This scene sets the tone for the first half of the film and also tells us a lot about Butch and Sundance. The former keeps talking as a way of stalling until can figure out a way to beat his physically superior opponent. The latter simply stays quiet but his intense look implies that if Butch gets in any kind of real trouble he’ll step in as evident in the amusing exchange between them before the showdown. Butch tells Sundance, “Listen, I don’t mean to be a sore loser but, uh, when it’s done – if I’m dead – kill him,” to which Sundance replies, “Love to.” He then turns and gives Butch’s opponent a wave and flashes his iconic smile. It is this moment of levity before an action sequence that would be imitated most by subsequent buddy action movies.

After robbing the same train twice, Butch and Sundance are pursued by a posse of determined lawmen. Their introduction is a mythic one as we never get a clear, up-close view of these men but they are always in pursuit, killing off two of the Hole in the Wall gang members right away like an inhuman killing machine. Butch and Sundance are doggedly pursued over rugged terrain, desert, rivers, rocky ground and dangerous rapids, day and night for miles. It is downright spooky as we never lose sight of the posse. It is like they are in the background of every scene. They never stop and rest, even traveling at night with the aid of lanterns. Butch tries all kinds of ways to evade them but to no avail, which unnerves the unflappable outlaw. It is also unsettling for us because, up to this point in the film, we’ve see Butch and Sundance gleefully stick it to The Man but as this super posse continues their relentless pursuit, Butch actually looks worried. The posse are the literal embodiment of progress as the years of robbing banks has finally caught up to the film’s protagonists.

Chemistry is crucial in a film like this and Newman and Redford have it right from the get-go as evident when Butch tries to talk Sundance out of a showdown with a card player who accuses the latter of cheating. It looks like they are going to have it out with guns until Butch calls Sundance by name and the other man, realizing who they are, backs down. Newman and Redford’s comic timing is superb and they work so well together. They are believable as long-time friends in the way they banter and bicker with each other – courtesy of Goldman’s razor-sharp screenplay – like when they jump off a cliff into water to evade the posse. Sundance refuses as he can’t swim. Butch laughs and points out, “The fall’ll probably kill ya!” The comedic interplay between these two actors, coupled with the action-oriented misadventures they find themselves getting into would later become a very popular template for buddy action films in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The one jarring sequence that seems out of place in the film is when Butch and Sundance’s girlfriend Etta (Katharine Ross) ride around on a bicycle to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” a contemporary song written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach and recorded by B.J. Thomas. This whimsical song feels out of place in the film. There are already many comedic moments all of which are much better than this one. It feels like the filmmakers needed more scenes with Etta in it and came up with this scene but it comes across as unnecessary and wouldn’t be missed if it was taken out.

In the mid-1960s, William Goldman was a novelist making ends meet teaching creative writing at Princeton University. He was in-between projects and decided to write a screenplay about legendary outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, whom he had been interested in since the 1950s. He was taken with their adventures, the fact that Butch didn’t kill people and the rumor that the duo survived a shoot-out in Bolivia. What really crystallized things for him was the famous line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon – “There are no second acts in American lives.” Goldman’s research proved otherwise when it came to Butch and Sundance. According to the writer, the two men “ran to South America and lived there for eight years and that thrilled me: They had a second act.”

Goldman shopped his script around Hollywood with little success. He worked on it further and in the meantime, wrote the screenplay for the Paul Newman detective film Harper (1966). He visited the actor on location in Arizona while he was filming Hombre (1967) and told him about Butch and Sundance. Weeks later, fellow actor and friend Steve McQueen called Newman up in November 1967 raving about the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and that they should make it together. Both men agreed to buy the script themselves but it had already been sold to 20^th Century Fox. Newman figured that was it until studio chief Richard Zanuck asked him to star in it. The studio then hired George Roy Hill to direct. He was coming off the incredibly successful musical Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967).

When Newman first read Goldman’s screenplay he loved it and envisioned playing the role of Sundance. The writer had always imagined Jack Lemmon for the role of Butch but he was no longer a right fit for the film. Hill assumed Newman would play Butch but when they first met the actor went on about Sundance – his motives and changes to lines in the script. A confused Hill told Newman that he was to play Butch. The actor disagreed and then re-read the script that night and realized, “the parts are really equal and they’re both great parts. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be Butch.’”

Warren Beatty heard about the script and wanted to do the film but when he heard that Newman was going to play Butch he wanted to play the character. He even claimed he could get Marlon Brando to play Sundance but when he got the script the actor wanted to play Butch as well! McQueen still wanted to play Sundance. He liked the script but was unhappy that Newman, the bigger earner and more impressive filmography, would receive top billing. When told of McQueen’s issue with billing, Newman refused to relinquish first star billing.

This cleared the deck for Robert Redford, who, at the time, was a rising star thanks to guest spots on television shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, and was coming off the critically and commercially successful Barefoot in the Park (1967). He was acting on Broadway when he got the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and was wary as he suspected that he was being used to lure a bigger co-star for Newman. Redford’s agent, Goldman and others kept after him to read the script and meet Newman, which he did. They talked about everything but the film and Redford said, “We didn’t really need to, because right away there seemed to be this understanding that I would make the picture.”

Redford, Newman, Katharine Ross, Goldman, and Hill got together for two weeks of rehearsals in September 1968, which Newman loved. “What George did from the rehearsals onward was allow us to run with the script, to just go nuts, then nurse the whole shebang in the direction he wanted, which was original and visionary.” Filming began on September 16 in Durango, Colorado. Right from the start there was a brotherly relationship between Newman and Redford with the former playing on the difference in experience between them to create memorable moments that weren’t in the script. Hill said, “I played off Newman’s history and Redford’s newness. Up till then, Paul was known as the hard rebel loner of Hud or Cool Hand Luke. Bob was a blank sheet of paper. For the movie we made them goofballs, and because that was so fresh in context of what we were doing, it won over the audience.” During filming in Mexico, Redford and Newman bonded over drinks and playing Ping-Pong. They also played practical jokes on each other and engaged in good-natured trash-talk.

When the production relocated to Los Angeles to film the bicycle-riding scene that Hill added at the last minute to create a love triangle between Butch, Sundance and Etta, the director hired a stuntman and they argued that the vintage bike wouldn’t withstand the trick riding. While they argued Newman rode by standing on the bicycle seat, his hands on the handlebars. The stuntman was fired and Newman did his own riding in the scene.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did not fare well with critics of the day. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby said it had “gnawing emptiness,” while Pauline Kael complained that it left her “depressed…and rather offended.” Time magazine felt that Redford and Newman were "afflicted with cinematic schizophrenia. One moment they are sinewy, battered remnants of a discarded tradition. The next they are low comedians whose chaffing relationship—and dialogue—could have been lifted from a Batman and Robin episode.” Even Roger Ebert felt it was “slow and disappointing.” Regardless, it performed very well at the box office, grossing $102 million and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning four: Best Original Screenplay, Original Song, Original Score and Cinematography.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came along at just the right time. 1969 was a year of change. People were still reeling from the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy as well as the Manson family murders during the summer of ’69 with Altamont just around the corner, all of which helped put an end to the Flower Power Generation and the idealism of the ‘60s. People wanted to feel good about something again and this film offered them a brief respite from what Hunter S. Thompson called, “the grim meat-hook realities” in his book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid laments the loss of an era with the Wild West acting as a metaphor for the ’60s. In some respects, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the brother film to Easy Rider (1969), which also signaled the end of an era where the two main characters meet a violent end. They were a product of and defined by the times in which they were made. Butch and Sundance’s refusal to go quietly spoke to audiences. Their end was a more palatable version of Easy Rider for mainstream audiences that weren’t ready for the radical nature of that film or their two lead actors. Redford and Newman, on the other hand, were clean-cut all-American actors that the public knew they’d be safe going to see as opposed to the “damn dirty hippies” that Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda represented.

At one point, Butch says to Sundance, “Every day, you get older. Now that’s the law.”

They represent a dying breed: outlaw cowboys who find it increasingly harder to ply their trade. They are getting older and aren’t as fast and as tough as they used to be. And they are starting to feel it. Times are changing. Banks are getting harder to rob. Butch’s solution is to keep outrunning progress but eventually it catches it up to them at the end of the film. After the Summer of Love in ’67, the Hippies tried to hold on to it but time keeps moving on and you can’t stop it.

SOURCES

Feeney Callan, Michael. Robert Redford: The Biography. Vintage. 2012.

Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. Three Rivers Press. 2009.

“The Making of a Movie Classic.” Life magazine. September 2019.