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.

The Great Gatsby

Ever since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus The Great Gatsby was published, Hollywood has been fascinated with adapting his novel into a film. To date, there have been five official versions, from a silent film made in 1926 to Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern take in 2013. Filmmakers have long been intrigued by the novel’s themes of decadence, excess and its portrait of the Roaring Twenties, making it a haunting critique of the pursuit of the American Dream.

In 1974, a particularly intriguing version of The Great Gatsby was released starring Robert Redford in the titular role and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, the object of his affection. It was directed by British filmmaker Jack Clayton and adapted by Francis Ford Coppola. The film received scathing reviews and was nominated for several Academy Awards and Golden Globes – even winning a few of them. It is generally regarded as an uneven adaptation at best and an outright failure at worst but I’ve always found it a fascinating take on Fitzgerald’s novel.

The opening credits play over a montage of Gatsby’s opulent mansion that is oddly devoid of life, coming across more as a sterile museum full of nice things: an expensive car, piano, ornate furnishings, marble floors, and exquisite décor, all the while echoey music plays as if to suggest ghosts of the past haunt this place. While the camera lingers over expensive jewelry, it keeps returning to a newspaper photograph and portraits of Daisy Buchanan (Farrow) – the only thing that Gatsby really cares about.

We meet Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) arriving in West Egg, Long Island via boat to spend the summer hanging out with his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom (Bruce Dern) who live in the far more fashionable East Egg, “drifting here and there, unrestfully, wherever people played polo and were rich together,” Nick observes via voiceover narration. He’s met by Tom and they head back to his house where he’s reunited with Daisy and meets her friend Jordan Baker (Lois Chiles).

One is immediately struck by Daisy’s flighty condescension and Tom’s smug superiority. These people live in their own rarefied world because they can afford it. She even tries to appear deep by making an observation about a bird on the lawn but it comes across as a half-hearted attempt. The film wastes no time showing what a hypocrite Tom is with his talk of the superiority of the rich, upper class and his polo games but his mistress Myrtle (Karen Black) is the wife of a destitute mechanic (Scott Wilson) living in a garage located among a desolate wasteland of ashes.

Nick arrives home and only catches a fleeting glimpse of his enigmatic neighbor Jay Gatsby (Redford). The film cheekily juxtaposes Nick’s simple existence – eating a modest steak dinner he prepared himself with a glass of beer on the porch of his modest rental house – dwarfed by the army of groundskeepers and caterers that prepare Gatsby’s estate for one of his lavish parties. We only catch a couple of glimpses of him until 35 minutes into the film when Nick is brought up to meet the man one-on-one in the heart of his mansion. It is an impressive introduction as Robert Redford flashes that high wattage movie star smile and one can see why he was the ideal actor to play the enigmatic man with loads of charisma.

Daisy and Gatsby have a doomed love affair. When they first met they couldn’t be together because she was rich and he wasn’t. This violated the rules of the upper class. Gatsby spent years amassing a large personal fortune, buying his way back into Daisy’s world in the hopes of proving himself worthy, only she didn’t wait for him and married another rich man. They reunite for a brief affair, knowing it can’t last but are determined to savor every moment they have together.

Bruce Dern does an exceptional job of portraying an Alpha Male reeking of entitlement. He uses up people with little to no thought of the consequences. Karen Black plays his ideal foil, an equally duplicitous spouse that when she wants something, like a puppy being sold on the side of the street, has Tom pay for it. The actress does a wonderful job conveying Myrtle’s indulgence of excess. These aren’t very nice people and Dern and Black aren’t afraid to portray them as such. And yet for all of her vanity, Black gets a moment to suggest that Myrtle is something of a tragic figure while Dern’s Tom is ultimately nothing more than a wealthy bully. “They’re careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smash things up and then they retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness…leaving other people to clean up the mess,” Nick says of them, which perfectly nails their characters.

Sam Waterston plays Nick as a blank slate audience surrogate, acting as our guide among the rich and powerful. The character’s purpose is to react to the behavior and actions of the colorful people he encounters throughout the film. The actor does a decent job portraying the wide-eyed outsider in a world he is familiar with but can never truly be a part of because he’s not rich. As the film progresses, a friendship forms between Nick and Gatsby and this gives Waterston something to do other than being an observer. Nick is a true friend to Gatsby as he doesn’t like him because of his money but because he truly admires him.

Robert Redford always struck me as an actor that kept his cards close to the vest, never letting audiences inside and showing a vulnerable side. It always feels like he keeps audiences at arm’s length and in the process maintaining an air of mystery, which is ideally suited for playing Gatsby. The actor portrays him as an elusive figure that only interacts with people on his own terms.

If Redford is ideally cast as Gatsby then Mia Farrow is very much miscast as Daisy. Her fickle, bird-trapped-in-a-gilded-cage take on the character is grating at times and makes us wonder why Gatsby is so taken with her. That being said, the scene where Daisy and Gatsby meet for the first time in eight years demonstrates incredible on-screen chemistry between the two actors. In particular, Redford’s reaction to seeing her is quite powerful as we see Gatsby, a man always in control, caught up in the moment – a rare thing that sees him letting his guard down.

The Great Gatsby features beautiful cinematography courtesy of Douglas Slocombe (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and features memorable shots like that of Nick leaving the Buchanan’s at the end of the day with the sky and water bathed in the warm orange, pink and yellow hues of the sunset. The soft focus approach gives everything an almost hazy look, making all the metal of the expensive silverware, glassware and jewelry sparkle and shimmer.

For years, the likes of Sam Spiegel, Ray Stark and Sydney Pollack had wanted to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into a film. Actress Ali MacGraw dreamed of playing the much-coveted role of Daisy Buchanan, which prompted then-husband and head of production at Paramount Studios Robert Evans to buy the film rights as a gift to her. He partnered with Broadway producer David Merrick who was friends with Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie. At the time Merrick approached her there were other interested parties and it took him a year before he closed the deal for $350,000.

Potential directors circled the project, including Peter Bogdanovich, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols, but none of them wanted MacGraw to play Daisy. British director Jack Clayton was hired to helm the film. He had actually tried to acquire the rights to The Great Gatsby himself in the 1940s and was obsessed with the novel for 30 years. To this end, he not only consulted with Fitzgerald estate curator Matthew J. Bruccoli but also with Scottie and literary experts.

Evans hired Truman Capote to write the screenplay. Clayton felt that the first draft had “far too much dialogue and exposition.” Evans was also unhappy with the script, which included confusing dream sequences and flashbacks. He asked Francis Ford Coppola to write a more straight-forward adaptation. The filmmaker was looking for a change of pace from working on The Godfather (1972) and wrote the script in five weeks. Clayton loved Coppola’s script and removed some passages he felt were unnecessary and inserted material from the book that the filmmaker had not included. It was these additions that upset Coppola, including an ending that he felt was anti-climactic.

Evans wanted either Warren Beatty or Jack Nicholson to play Gatsby with the former agreeing but only if MacGraw played Jordan Baker, and the latter only if she was not cast as Daisy. Evans was determined to have his wife play the role. He approached Marlon Brando but couldn’t afford him, especially after The Godfather. They were two months away from the start of principal photography and still hadn’t found their Gatsby. When Robert Redford heard about the project he approached Evans who turned the actor down. Redford met with Clayton who was interested in Nicholson as Gatsby but after talking with Redford for 90 minutes wanted him to play the part. Clayton said of the actor, “You can see the possibility of danger beneath the romantic WASP image.”

Evans still wasn’t convinced and felt that Redford didn’t look the part, which drove the actor crazy: “I began to think Evans never read the book. Sure, he liked the idea of doing Fitzgerald, but he didn’t know the text.” He had first read the novel in college and found it “florid,” but revisited it for the film and “I saw it was something extraordinary, the depiction of human obsessions, and I felt some great screen work could come from it.” The studio also backed Redford and he was cast as Gatsby.

Merrick wanted MacGraw to play Daisy and McQueen to play Gatsby. At the time, Evans and MacGraw were getting divorced after he discovered she was having an affair with her co-star on The Getaway (1972), Steve McQueen. Evans, understandably, disagreed with Merrick and had Paramount executives meet with him and Merrick to decide on potential actresses to play Daisy: Mia Farrow, Katharine Ross, Candice Bergen or Faye Dunaway. Merrick continued to insist on MacGraw while Clayton wanted Farrow and Evans agreed. The studio executives concurred and she was cast in the role. After being cast she discovered that she was pregnant. The shooting schedule was moved up a week and her dresses were altered to hide her pregnancy.

Most people assume that the media blitzkrieg and merchandising of a movie started with Star Wars (1977) but forget that The Great Gatsby predated it with a then-unprecedented amount of hype as typified by Evans hubristically saying, “The making of a blockbuster is the newest art form of the 20th century.” Oh, how prescient that statement was when one considers the rise of the mass marketed studio blockbuster in the 1980s. Paramount spent $200,000 on publicity and promotion with product tie-ins valued at $6 million. The film was made for $6.4 million and made $18.6 million on advance bookings making it a financial success before it was even released in theaters!

Film critics savaged The Great Gatsby when it was released. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “But we can’t penetrate the mystery of Gatsby. Nor, to be honest, can we quite understand what’s so special about Daisy Buchanan. Not as she’s played by Mia Farrow, all squeaks and narcissism and empty sophistication.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Nothing that Mr. Clayton does with the actors or with the camera comes close to catching the spirit of Fitzgerald’s impatient brilliance…The plot has been dismantled like an antique engine and photographed, piece by piece, preserved in lots of pretty, glistening images that bath the film in nostalgia as thick as axle grease.” Time magazine’s Jay Cocks wrote, “A great deal of time, money and promotion have been concentrated here, but Gatsby’s sad and curious history has resulted in a dull, dreadful movie.” Finally, in his review for The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann wrote, “In sum this picture is a total failure of every requisite sensibility. A long, slow, sickening bore.”

Redford said of the film, “The truth is, Hollywood wanted to make The Great Gatsby because it was a literary success, not because it was great literature. Enough time may not have been taken to work that one out.” Coppola hated the film and felt that Clayton had ruined his faithful script. Farrow felt that it “was a victim of overhype.”

The Great Gatsby takes a fascinating look at the idle rich and their decadent lives as typified by the people that populate Gatsby’s parties. They are filled with people that want to see and be seen, lose their inhibitions and indulge in all kinds of excesses – this was the Roaring Twenties where the United States was prospering after World War I. And yet, the film ultimately shows these parties as empty affairs that its host Gatsby rarely attends. Why should we care about these people? When it comes to the likes of Tom and Myrtle, we don’t and neither does Nick who becomes disgusted by them and their phoniness, turning his back on their way of life.

As Nick observes early on, Gatsby is a tragic and romantic figure: “For Gatsby turned out alright in the end. It was what preyed on him, what foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams.” He’s a self-made man that built himself up to impress a woman he loved years ago and never forgot. Unfortunately, he thought that money could buy happiness and return things to the way they were once years ago, but this proves to be his undoing. For its faults, this version of The Great Gatsby is remarkably faithful to its source material and a strong indictment of the vanity of the rich and the dangers of achieving the American Dream.

SOURCES

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

Phillips, Gene D. Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. University Press of Kentucky. 2004.

“Ready Or Not, Here Comes Gatsby.” Time. March 18, 1974.

Sinyard, Neil. Jack Clayton. Manchester University Press. 2013.

Quiz Show

In a 1985 interview Robert Redford said of his film Downhill Racer (1969): “it represented what was happening in this country—the slow realization that you’ve been given a false legacy growing up as a kid. Namely, it wasn’t whether you won or lost but how you played the game. But that just wasn’t true. It was whether you won. People don’t remember who finished second. And you could get away with anything so long as you were winning.” As a profile on the man in Film Comment observed, Redford has been fascinated with “the American obsession with winning and capitalism’s inevitable exploitation of the winner.” This time, working behind the camera as director, he examined these ideas with Quiz Show (1994), an engrossing look at the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s.

Redford focuses on one show in particular, Twenty-One, and the rigged loss of the popular program’s reigning champion in favor of a more attractive and media-friendly contestant to help boost ratings of the NBC network and sales of the corporate sponsor Geritol. When rumors of the show being rigged surface, an investigation is launched and Redford tracks the ensuing fallout. In a rather ironic twist, charges in the press claimed that Quiz Show played fast and loose with the facts and this may have contributed to a lack of interest from mainstream moviegoers. More probably, audiences didn’t find the subject matter that interesting and did not want to watch a film that explored the darker side of America. It failed to make back its $28 million budget despite receiving numerous critical accolades and being nominated for several major awards. Quiz Show is a smart film that looks back at the past and anticipates the glut of reality shows that has since risen to prominence, often focusing on beautiful, wealthy “winners,” but in fact is just as fake as their fictional counterparts.

Redford spends the first six minutes of the film cutting between people all over America scrambling to get to their T.V.s and watch this week’s episode of Twenty-One, and a peek behind-the-scenes at how the show comes together just before it airs. In doing so, he establishes how popular the show was at the time and how the medium of television dominated people’s everyday lives. Herbert Stempel (John Turturro) is the returning champ, but the powers that be aren’t happy: the ratings are starting to slip because, despite his everyman quality, he’s not the most attractive guy and acts awkwardly in front of the cameras. Word comes down from on high that Stempel is finished and the show’s producer Dan Enright (David Paymer) is ordered to orchestrate his exit from the program.

His ideal replacement comes in the form of Columbia University instructor Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) who is the perfect package: handsome, wealthy and, oh yeah, smart. He comes from a privileged background being the son of famous poet and intellectual Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield) and novelist Dorothy Van Doren (Elizabeth Wilson). Redford foreshadows this fateful decision by cutting back and forth between the decision to get rid of Stempel with Van Doren watching the show and marveling at how well the champ does on it while his father dismisses it offhandedly. At the coaxing of his friends, Van Doren decides to try out for one of NBC’s game shows and is asked to go on Twenty-One where Enright pitches a scenario where they would give him the answers. This makes Van Doren uncomfortable and he agrees to be a competitor but only if it’s on the up and up.

Enright goes to Stempel and tells him to throw the next game, implying that he got as far as he did because it was rigged. He agrees and loses on a ridiculously easy question while Van Doren is given a question that had already been asked in Enright’s office. I like that Redford shows both men struggle with their respective dilemmas – Stempel is told to throw the game on a softball question because his approval rating has declined and Van Doren is given a question he was already told and answered and has to decide if he wants to remain honest or go for the money. The rest of Quiz Show plays out the ramifications of their respective decisions, which is further complicated when aspiring Congressional lawyer Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) investigates the rumors that quiz shows are fixed.

John Turturro demonstrates a refreshing lack of vanity by portraying Stempel as not terribly attractive – he has bad teeth, he sweats profusely on camera and has hints of a weasely voice – but he’s trying to support his family. Unfortunately, he’s doing it dishonestly by playing a game that is fixed. Turturro manages to make the abrasive Stempel sympathetic and unlikable. He’s a complex character that the actor brings vividly to life.

Fresh from his memorable role in Schindler’s List (1993), Ralph Fiennes shifts gears to play a very different person – an intellectual born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He initially wants to be honest, but is quickly seduced by fame and money. One suspects Charles is motivated by living up to his family’s lofty reputation. His parents are successful writers that exist in their own rarified atmosphere of intellectuals while he is a struggling writer and merely an instructor, not even a professor. Fiennes has a nice scene between Van Doren and his father. One can see the internal struggle play across his eyes as he comes close to telling his father what he’s doing but cannot and instead reminisces about simpler times. Charles wants to tell him and the secret is eating him up inside but he still can’t because he’s in too deep. It’s a quietly heartbreaking scene that Fiennes performs so well as does Paul Scofield who drops his character’s intellectual pretensions when he senses something is wrong with his son.

Rob Morrow is quite good as the lawyer that doggedly pounds the pavement and does the legwork, like seeking out former contestants, to uncover the truth behind NBC’s quiz shows. He is not just seeking the truth but also fulfilling an ambition to improve his lot in life, something he shares with Charles and Stempel. The actor has a nice scene where Goodwin confronts the head of Geritol (a nice cameo by filmmaker Martin Scorsese) and the businessman lays it out for the lawyer when he tells him, “The public has a very short memory but corporations, they never forget.” This nicely-written scene sums up rather well the corporate point-of-view and how it manages to steer clear of scandals that could ruin them. Morrow does a nice job of conveying Goodwin’s conflict of wanting to spare Van Doren the public embarrassment of testifying to a grand jury because he admires and even looks up to the man.

At their peak more than 50 million viewers watched quiz shows in the United States. Twenty-One was conceived and created by producer Dan Enright. It involved two contestants competing against each other in dual isolation booths. The goal was for each contestant to get 21 points by correctly answering questions that ranged from one to eleven points in value. Herbert Stempel first squared off against Charles Van Doren on November 28, 1956, and after three weeks of tie games, the latter defeated the former. Van Doren, in return, was defeated by Vivienne Nearing on March 11, 1957. In 1959, a grand jury investigation into quiz show fraud was completed in New York City but the findings were sealed prompting Richard Goodwin to conduct his own investigation for a congressional committee on legislative oversight.

In 1988, Goodwin published his book Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties and one of the chapters focused on the quiz show scandals of the ‘50s. It drew interest from actor Richard Dreyfuss and his partner Judith James who approached Barry Levinson to direct. Paul Attanasio was brought on board to write the screenplay based on the chapter with the focus on the Twenty-One show. The script was then given to Robert Redford who had starred in Levinson’s film The Natural (1984). He had gotten his start in New York with early roles on T.V. during the late ‘50s and early 1960s and connected with the subject matter. He was even a quiz show contestant in 1959 on a show called Play Your Hunch.

When it came to casting Quiz Show, John Turturro was chosen early on. He had met Redford at the Sundance Institute and was the first choice to play Herb Stempel. The actor gained 22 pounds and had his hair cut like the man but was not interested in “doing a mimic of the character, but finding the overall qualities instead.” To prepare for the role, Rob Morrow met with Richard Goodwin and his wife at their home in Massachusetts. The actor said of the man, “He comes from a time when there was a general sense of hope that government could change the world for the better.”

Redford heard about Ralph Fiennes working with Steven Spielberg on Schindler’s List and agreed to meet during filming to discuss the role of Charles Van Doren. Fiennes agreed to play the man but was unable to meet with Van Doren as he had become somewhat reclusive after the quiz show scandals. The actor studied kinescopes of the man’s appearances on Twenty-One. He found Van Doren to be a “very gifted actor. He had a quality of being slightly diffident yet charming.” The actor went straight from making Spielberg’s film into Quiz Show and he was thankful because it “rescued me from waiting until Schindler’s List came out, and everyone thinking ‘Uh-oh this is the actor who played that Nazi.’”

Quiz Show was in theaters for a few months before being pulled by the studio due to its poor performance. Once it received Oscar nominations, the film was placed back in theaters with a new T.V. campaign and print advertisements. At the time, some industry insiders suggested that the film didn’t do well because it was a period picture with no sex or that Fiennes was not enough of a box office draw or that the rather enigmatic poster Redford designed didn’t work.

Redford was upset by several articles that came out when Quiz Show was released claiming it distorted history. One of the more extreme examples came from the Los Angeles Daily News who quoted retired New York judge Joseph Stone, the man that led investigations into the scandal. He said, “This movie is filled with fabrications and distortions from beginning to end.” He argued that most of the film was complete fiction.

When asked how accurate his film was, Redford said that he used “dramatic license, to make either a moral point or an ethical point and move too far out of what could possibly have happened.” He did admit to compacting three years of quiz show scandals into one year and gave Goodwin a more important role in the film than he had in breaking the actual case. Furthermore, he said of the film’s failure to connect with an audience: “Either we don’t want to face our loss of innocence, because it’s asking us to admit we’ve lost one of our virtues. Or we don’t want to face it because we’re as shallow as people accuse us of being, and as spoiled.” Paul Attanasio said, “What we attempted to do was criticize the culture, and that’s never going to be terribly popular.” ABC correspondent and news analyst Jeff Greenfield summed it up best: “To tell today’s audience that powerful institutions and people lie is not compelling. It isn’t that we fear confronting our loss of innocence. It’s that it bores us.”

Quiz Show enjoyed positive notices from most of the major critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “The screenplay, by former Washington Post film critic Paul Attanasio, is smart, subtle and ruthless. And it is careful to place blame where it belongs.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Redford, always a fine director of actors, elicits knowing, meticulous performances. One hallmark of this film’s high caliber is that its smaller performances are impeccable.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “As Charles Van Doren, the sleek Columbia English professor who succeeded Stempel as champion, Ralph Fiennes is an ambiguous light charmer, fascinating in his very opaqueness.” Jonathan Rosenbaum praised the film as Redford’s “best and richest directorial effort.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, “So it is an especial triumph that Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford and written by Paul Attanasio, turns that footnote of television history into a thoughtful, absorbing drama about moral ambiguity and the affability of evil.” Finally, in his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “Though Quiz Show is insightful in its larger, social observations, it doesn’t allow its cultural statements to dwarf its human dimensions. As dazzling as its staging of the congressional hearings and the show itself may be, the movie is at its best in its more intimate moments.”

Herb Stempel said of the film: “There was some poetic licence here and there, but I don’t begrudge the filmmakers for that … I think John Turturro was a little too hyper. I do sometimes get a little frenetic, but he was really, really frenetic.” Charles Van Doren also saw the film and said of it, “I understand that movies need to compress and conflate, but what bothered me most was the epilogue stating that I never taught again. I didn’t stop teaching, although it was a long time before I taught again in a college.”

Redford does a nice job of showing the very different worlds that Van Doren and Stempel come from – the former eats at the nicest restaurants, buys himself an expensive sports car and visits his folks at their expansive home out in the country while the latter lives in the blue collar neighborhood of Queens trying hard to make ends meet. Redford makes a point of showing how important Stempel’s reign on Twenty-One is to his neighborhood where he’s treated like a big shot, but at home his wife (Johann Carlo) is not so thrilled with her husband’s newfound celebrity, unconvinced that they can get out from under her mother’s shadow (she supports them financially) and this causes considerable tension between them.

As Quiz Show begins, Stempel is a winner but this quickly changes when he is told to lose because he doesn’t fit the attractive public image that NBC wants to project to their viewers. Van Doren looks the part and is soon groomed for success while Stempel is relegated to the outside looking in. Van Doren may have a more attractive façade than Stempel but he is just as dishonest. Meanwhile, the public is fed a lie and accepts it because they have no reason not to believe it. While Van Doren and Stempel are hardly unwitting dupes in the scandal, Redford makes a point of highlighting its architects – NBC executives and the corporate sponsor who are only interested in making money.

Quiz Show’s commercial failure, despite being critically-acclaimed, anticipated a similar trajectory by Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), which also criticized a powerful corporation – big tobacco – and was met with a media backlash that questioned its accuracy. Whether this impacted the public’s perception of both films is a matter of some debate, but one should remember that these films are not documentaries. Critics worried that people would see these films and perceive them as historical fact. However, in most cases, the film should only be the starting point for one to dig deeper and find out for themselves what actually happened. Fictional films take significant liberties and dramatic license to make something that will entertain and inform. In this respect, Quiz Show is a resounding success thanks to Attanasio’s insightful script and Redford’s assured direction that allows his talented cast of actors to breathe life into their fascinating characters and thereby painting a fascinating portrait of a time when the American Dream turned sour.

SOURCES

Auletta, Ken. “The $64,000 Question.” The New Yorker. September 14, 1994.

De Turenne, Veronique. “Inaccuracies In Redford’s Quiz Show Called Scandalous.” Los Angeles Daily News. October 9, 1994.

Needham, Dick. “Redford.” Ski. April 1985.

Quiz Show Production Notes. Hollywood Pictures. 1994.

“The Enigma of Quiz Show: No Crowds.” The New York Times. February 12, 1995.

Van Doren, Charles. “All the Answers.” The New Yorker. July 28, 2008.

Walker, Beverly. “Declaration of Independence.” Film Comment. March/April 2015.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

When we last saw Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans), he had just helped save New York City from an alien invasion and was still acclimatizing himself to modern life having been frozen in ice since World War II as chronicled in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). The sequel, The Winter Soldier (2014), takes place two years after the events depicted in The Avengers (2012) and sees Cap working as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., a top-secret spy organization that, among other things, deals with the fallout from the adventures of superheroes like Iron Man and Thor. However, as hinted at in The Avengers and the television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., there is something rotten at the core of the spy organization and Cap soon finds himself not only embroiled in a vast conspiracy, but also confronting someone from his past he thought had died in the war. The result is a fantastic fusion of the super hero movie with the conspiracy thriller.

Cap and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) are now a team and as the film begins they intercept a covert S.H.I.E.L.D. ship in the Indian Ocean that has been hijacked by Algerian terrorists led by French mercenary Batroc the Leaper (Georges St-Pierre). In a nice touch, the filmmakers manage to transform Batroc, who was a pretty ridiculous villain in the comic books, into a bit of a badass. Afterwards, S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) lets Cap in behind the scenes, showing him three Helicarriers armed with state-of-the-art jet fighters that are linked to spy satellites created to anticipate global threats in a program known as Project Insight.

Cap is not at all comfortable with Fury’s secret project and the notion of creating a climate of fear that potentially robs people of their basic freedoms. However, when Fury suspects something is wrong with Project Insight he voices concern to senior S.H.I.E.L.D. official Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford). Immediately afterwards, Fury is attacked on the streets of Washington, D.C. by S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives and an enigmatic figure known as the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan). Fury barely escapes and finds Cap before being gravely injured. It’s up to Cap and Black Widow, along with the help of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), a war veteran and post-traumatic stress disorder counselor that Cap befriends early on, to uncover the corruption rampant in S.H.I.E.L.D. and stop it.

Chris Evans does an excellent job of reprising his role of Captain America and providing layers to a character that is essentially a super strong boy scout who comes from a simpler time. He is now immersed in a convoluted conspiracy where he doesn’t know who to trust. As a result, he has to do a bit of soul-searching, which Evans handles well. He also has nice chemistry with Scarlett Johansson, especially when Cap and Black Widow go off the grid together and try to find the Winter Soldier. There’s a hint of sexual tension going on as two people with wildly different backgrounds and approaches to life are forced to look out for each other. Johansson finally gets some seriously significant screen-time than she did in Iron Man 2 (2010) and The Avengers and it’s nice to see her character fleshed out a bit more as well as giving her plenty of action sequences to kick ass in.

A film like this, which intentionally raises the stakes in comparison to the first one needs a credible threat that makes us feel like Cap and his allies are in real danger and the Winter Soldier does that. He rarely speaks, but looks cool and is extremely dangerous so that we anticipate the inevitable showdown between him and Cap. He isn’t some anonymous bad guy, but something of a tortured soul and the screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (who also wrote the first film) offers some tantalizing details of his backstory and how it ties in with Cap’s past.

Markus and McFeely have crafted a solid script that is well-executed by directors Anthony and Joe Russo. They establish just the right rhythm and tone with well-timed lulls between action sequences that are used wisely to move the plot along and offer little moments of character development that keep us invested in the characters and their story. For example, there is a nice scene where Cap goes to an exhibit dedicated to his World War II exploits at the Smithsonian, which succinctly recaps his origin story in a rather poignant way that reminds us of his internal conflict of being stuck in the past while living in the present. One way he deals with this is befriending Sam and they both bond over being war veterans – albeit from very different eras. In addition, the script features several well-timed one-liners and recurring jokes that add moment of much-welcomed levity to an otherwise serious film.

The action sequences are exciting and expertly choreographed with the exception of the opening boat siege, which takes place at night and involves way too much Paul Greengrass/Jason Bourne shaky, hand-held camerawork. Once the filmmakers get that out of their system and Cap takes on Batroc, the camera settles down and is a decent distance from the combatants so that we can see what’s going on. There is also an intense car chase involving an injured Fury in an increasingly bullet-ridden SUV that has the feel of the exciting car chase in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and a little later Cap takes out an elevator full of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents intent on neutralizing him that evokes an elevator scene in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). The fights between Cap and the Winter Soldier are fast and frenetic, but never confusing as they convey the frighteningly deadly speed of the latter’s moves, so much so that I really felt like Cap was in some serious danger.

Drawing elements from writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Steven Epting’s 2005 “Winter Soldier” storyline in the comic book, this film has a decidedly darker tone than The First Avenger as our hero is nearly killed on several occasions and his world is shaken to the very core as he uncovers all sorts of ugly secrets. In this respect, The Winter Soldier is reminiscent of paranoid conspiracy thrillers from the 1970s and this is acknowledged with the casting of Robert Redford who starred in two of the best films from that era – Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976).

It is refreshing to see a sequel that isn’t merely content to rehash the first film. Where The First Avenger was essentially a mash-up of a super hero movie and war movie, The Winter Soldier is super hero movie and a political thriller with events that are a major game changer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the past, S.H.I.E.L.D. had been the connective tissue that linked several of the films together that led up to The Avengers. It should be interesting to see how the events depicted in this film set the stage for Avengers: The Age of Ultron (2015). That being said, The Winter Soldier has its own self-contained story that is engrossing with a lot at stake for our hero and this in turn gets you invested in what is happening to produce a rare super hero movie with heart.

The Hot Rock

It’s safe to say that the 1970s was a pretty good decade for Robert Redford with stone cold classics like The Sting (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976). Sandwiched in-between these films is a wildly entertaining caper film called The Hot Rock (1972), an adaptation of the Donald E. Westlake novel of the same name by none other than legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt). With this powerhouse line-up behind the camera you’d expect the film to have been a box office success, but aside from decent critical notices, it did not connect with mainstream moviegoers. Perhaps it was a matter of timing? Were people not ready to see the usually ultra-serious Redford do light comedy in 1972? And yet, a year later he scored big with The Sting, a comedic con man movie. Go figure. Of course, his co-star in that film was none other than Paul Newman, which I’m sure helped considerably at the box office. Regardless, The Hot Rock has aged quite well with its solid cast of character actors that ably support Redford and Yates’ experienced direction as he contrasts these colorful people against the gritty backdrop of New York City.

Career criminal John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) has just been released from prison. Dortmunder is met at the gates by Andy Kelp (George Segal), his locksmith brother-in-law who almost accidentally runs him over. As a result, Dortmunder responds to this greeting by socking Kelp in the jaw. Despite his half-hearted refusal to work with Kelp again, Dortmunder agrees to at least hear his latest scheme. Kelp plans to steal The Sahara Stone, a rather large diamond from the Brooklyn Museum for a Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn) who claims that it was stolen from his country in Africa only to be re-stolen by various other nations in the continent over several generations. The fact that this gem exchanged hands so many times should have raised a red flag for Dortmunder.

However, he can’t change his criminal tendencies and love of planning jobs or resist Kelp’s persuasive nature. So, they begin assembling the team they’ll need to do the job. There’s Stan Murch (Ron Leibman), a getaway driver cum mechanic who enjoys listening to records of cars racing. He’s followed by Allan Greenberg (Paul Sand), an explosives expert who studied extensively (including the Sorbonne). Despite meticulous planning, Greenberg is caught with the diamond and so begins a cat and mouse game as Dortmunder and his crew keep on trying to steal the gem. This includes such crazy schemes like breaking Greenberg out of prison and then breaking into a police precinct jail!

Right from the get-go, Yates plays the opening prison sequence straight and no-nonsense so that it could almost be an outtake from a similar scene that begins Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972). His use of the widescreen frame is a thing of beauty, here. For example, there is a shot of Dortmunder leaving the prison and Yates captures it in a long shot so that the criminal is a tiny figure dwarfed by the massive prison, its long, horizontal slabs of white brick wall stretching the length of the frame. As he demonstrated with Bullitt (1968), Yates certainly knows how to choreograph an action sequence. With The Hot Rock, he orchestrates several exciting and tense heist sequences accompanied by a groovy jazzy score by Quincy Jones. Even though these sequences have a tense, will-they-pull-it-off vibe, Yates applies the slightest of light touches with an assist from William Goldman’s snappy dialogue. There’s also some impressive aerial photography in the last third of the film as our heroes buzz around the city in a helicopter with some lingering shots on the World Trade Center, including the south tower, which was still under construction when the film was made.

Robert Redford and George Segal play well off each other with the former playing the straight man who gets increasing exasperated over the latter’s neurotic motormouth, whom he seems, at times, to barely tolerate. They compliment each other with Dortmunder the pessimist while Kelp is the eternal optimist. Thanks to the inherent likability of Redford and Segal, we are rooting for these guys to succeed. After so many missed opportunities it becomes a point of pride for them to see this through to the end and one has to admire that kind of tenacity. Interestingly, at the time he made The Hot Rock, Redford needed money and did the film for the paycheck. He was also drawn to the cast, which originally saw Segal cast as Dortmunder and George C. Scott set to play Kelp! However, when Redford came on board he was considered more of a box office draw then Segal and took the role of Dortmunder, Segal was bumped over to Kelp, and Scott was out entirely. Other members of the crew included Ron Leibman who plays his gum-chewing wheelman to a T and brings a cocky intensity that plays well off the others. The scene where Murch assures Dortmunder he knows how to pilot a helicopter is an amusing moment as he lets his bravado slip just a bit he figures out how to start the machine. Paul Sand’s Greenberg is definitely the weak link of the group and is responsible for the many attempts to steal the diamond, but he gets a moment to shine when his character confronts his father played by none other than Zero Mostel.

Perhaps audiences were expecting more of a wacky comedy a la The In-Laws (1979), but instead much of the humor in The Hot Rock is understated and only flirts with outrageousness during the heist sequences as somehow the fates seem to conspire against our anti-heroes, denying them the prize that they pursue with dogged determination There are little snafus in each heist, like Greenberg being unable to scale the prison wall without help or Kelp getting trapped inside the large glass case with the diamond. It’s not that these guys are incompetent per se. It’s just that they are susceptible to the same problems as everyone else: nervousness, lack of confidence and plain ol’ bad luck. Each heist increases with difficulty and the risk of getting caught, which makes the final one that much more agonizing because we don’t know if the clever plan Dortmunder has devised will succeed.

After The Hot Rock came out and was a commercial failure, Redford laid the blame on Yates’ doorstep, claiming that the Brit failed to grasp American humor: “His specialty was action and this was more of a comedy. The trouble was he didn’t understand our humor.” Personally, I think Redford was a little harsh on Yates who did a fine job with this film. It’s funny and entertaining with a fantastic cast and solid writing. Sometimes it boils down to a matter of timing and for whatever reason the film did not connect with mainstream audiences at the time, but The Hot Rock deserves to be rediscovered and appreciated.

SOURCES

Quirk, Lawrence. J. The Sundance Kid: An Unauthorized Biography of Robert Redford. Taylor Trade Publishing. 2006.

For further reading, check out a great review of the film over at the It Rains... You Get Wet blog.