Manhattan Murder Mystery

Woody Allen was in trouble. Coming off the success of Husbands and Wives (1992), he was gearing up to make Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) with his then-wife Mia Farrow when their marriage broke up amidst allegations that he sexually assaulted one of their children, which resulted in a messy and very public custody battle over their three children. He responded by doing what he does best: making movies. He reunited with screenwriting partner Marshall Brickman and co-star Diane Keaton for a lightweight yet engaging comedy that, while receiving strong critical notices, failed to ignite the box office.

Larry (Allen) and Carol (Keaton) Lipton are middle-aged Manhattanites that have settled into a comfortable, routine existence, enduring each other’s passions (he loves hockey, she the opera). They’re also suffering a bit from empty nest syndrome and are worried that they are going to end up like Paul (Jerry Adler) and Lillian (Lynn Cohen) House, an older couple that lives down the hall: “Just another dull, aging couple with our little walks,” as Carol puts it. She fears they are turning into “a pair of comfortable old shoes,” and is looking for a spark to rekindle their relationship.

It comes in an unlikely form: Lillian dies suddenly from a heart attack. Initially, Larry and Carol think nothing of it, but over dinner with friends, she recalls how healthy Lillian was while Ted (Alan Alda), a friend of the Liptons, suggests that maybe she was killed by her husband. Later, Carol remarks that Paul seemed a little too upbeat so soon after her death. She decides to investigate further with Ted’s help, which makes skeptical Larry jealous. Did Paul really kill his wife or are Larry and Carol merely going through a midlife crisis and this is their way of dealing with it?

After her small role in Radio Days (1987), it was great to see Allen and Keaton reunited on-screen in another film. They slip effortlessly into their familiar rhythms, bantering back and forth as Carol immediately latches on to the murder mystery angle while Larry remains stubbornly unconvinced. Allen and Keaton clearly bring the best out of each other and it’s as if their characters from Annie Hall (1977) got married and settled into predictable domesticity. He establishes the Liptons’ stifling predictable routine early on in the film as Larry looks forward to watching a Bob Hope movie on television that night only to complain, “I don’t know why they put it on so late.” The Woody Allen of Manhattan (1979) would’ve stayed up late with Mariel Hemingway to watch it. The Woody Allen of this film, however, has gotten too old and set in his ways. This murder mystery is exactly what he and Carol need to rekindle the spark in their relationship.

Keaton, in particular, is wonderful as the instigator – getting the Liptons out of their rut with her fixation on Lillian’s murder. She brings her trademark vibrant energy and screen presence to the role. While Larry is content with where they’re at as a couple at this stage in their lives, Carol wants something more, like starting up a restaurant with Ted and then trying to solve Lillian’s murder. It is great to see her playing a proactive character while Allen is the passive one. Carol hones her amateur detective skills with Ted and the scenes where they excitedly theorize about the murder like kids are some of the best moments in the film. As he tells her at one point, Yes, this is crazy. But soon we’ll be too old to do anything crazy.” Alan Alda also shines in these scenes. With his knack for delivering witty banter, he is a perfect fit for Allen’s films and it is a shame he wasn’t in more of them as he really should’ve become part of his stable of actors.

Once again, Allen acts as the ideal foil for Keaton, responding to Carol’s newfound zeal for murder mysteries with his trademark neurotic angst (“You gotta go back to your shrink…You know how General Motors recalls defective cars? You gotta go in for a tune-up.”). Larry complains and criticizes what she’s doing but none of it deters her. Allen continued to show his knack for physical comedy as evident in the scene in which Anjelica Huston’s stylish writer teaches Larry how to play poker. It isn’t until an hour in that he realizes what he must do – take more of an interest in Carol’s obsession with Lillian’s murder if he wants to avoid them drifting apart. He’s also jealous of Ted and his boyish enthusiasm for her. It isn’t until he goes on a stakeout with her and they see something suspicious that Larry is finally convinced of what Carol has been saying all along. He finally believes her and goes from being passive to assertive.

The screenplay for Manhattan Murder Mystery originally started out as an embryonic incarnation of Annie Hall co-written with Marshall Brickman but Allen didn’t feel that it was substantial enough even though he loved mysteries and had always wanted to make one. He told Brickman that he should write and direct it and he would star in it. Over various rewrites, this element was abandoned as he decided to go in a different direction. He even told Brickman to go off and make it on his own but this didn’t happen. In 1992, Allen contacted Brickman and they worked on the story some more.

Allen had originally written the role of Carol for his then-wife Mia Farrow but after they divorced and became in embroiled in a contentious custody battle over their children, he called Diane Keaton and asked her to play the role of Carol. She immediately accepted. The film was shot in the fall of 1992 on the streets of Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side. For Allen, making the film was a form of escape as the “past year was so exhausting that I wanted to just indulge myself in something I could relax and enjoy.”

He found it very therapeutic working with Keaton again. After getting over her initial panic during her first scene with co-star Alan Alda, Keaton slipped back into her old rhythm with Allen. Anjelica Huston observed that the set was “oddly free of anxiety, introspection and pain,” and this was due to Keaton’s presence. According to Allen, Keaton changed the dynamic of the film as “I always look sober and normal compared to Keaton. I turn into the straight man.”

Manhattan Murder Mystery enjoyed decent reviews. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and called it an “accomplished balancing act.” Newsweek’s David Ansen wrote, “On screen, Keaton and Allen have always been made for each other: they still strike wonderfully ditsy sparks.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Although, Manhattan Murder Mystery struggles with its own contrivances, it achieves a gentle, nostalgic grace and a hint of un-self-conscious wisdom.” The USA Today’s Mike Clark gave it four out of four stars and wrote, “It’s very, very funny, and there’s no mystery about that.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, “There is however, little ‘new’ in this film. Allen and Keaton are essentially playing Alvy Singer and Annie Hall gone middle-aged.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Allen and Keaton make an endearing team. It’s a pleasure to see them reunited, not just because we’re spared Mia Farrow’s dishrag mopiness – surely the one piece of positive fallout from the Allen-Farrow split – but because Keaton’s smiling radiance has only deepened with the years.”

Manhattan Murder Mystery takes an amusing look at a married couple whose life has become safe and routine only to be revitalized by murder. It warns of the danger of not being open to something new, be it opening a restaurant or solving a murder. Obviously, there are things that you do every day that are unavoidably predictable – that’s just life – but when this extends to what you do with your spouse you run the risk of losing sight of what made it so exciting to be with them in the first place. It happens all the time and as the film points out, you need to take an active interest in what your spouse wants.

When Manhattan Murder Mystery was released in 1993, the highly contentious court case between Allen and Farrow was fresh in people’s minds and it impacted on the film’s box office as it failed to make back its modest budget. To add insult to injury, TriStar Pictures ended their deal with him. There was speculation at the time that the deal wasn’t extended due to his personal problems and that his films weren’t very profitable but he denied it in interviews. Undeterred, he simply cut a deal with another studio and continued making films, bouncing back with Bullets over Broadway (1994), which garnered 7 Academy Award nominations with Dianne Wiest winning for Best Supporting Actress. Manhattan Murder Mystery holds a special place in the hearts of many Allen fans as it was callback to the days of Annie Hall and Manhattan and was the last time he and Keaton appeared in a film together.

SOURCES

Bjorkman, Stig. Woody Allen on Woody Allen. Grove Press. 1993.

De Curtis, Anthony. “What’s With Woody?” Toronto Star. September 5, 1993.

Dowd, Maureen. “Diane and Woody, Still a Fun Couple.” The New York Times. August 15, 1993.

Fine, Marshall. “Woody’s Take.” USA Today. August 18, 1993.

Lax, Eric. Conversations with Woody Allen. Alfred A. Knopf. 2007.

Span, Paula. “Here Comes the Judgment.” Washington Post. May 4, 1993.

The Rockford Files (1974-1980)

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When I was a child my grandfather and I bonded over several things: Clint Eastwood films, James Bond and The Rockford Files. Some of my fondest memories I have of him are watching an episode of the latter whenever I would stay at my grandparents’ house. My grandfather loved the show. Even though he never verbalized it to me, I think he admired private investigator James Rockford (James Garner) as a stand-up kind of guy with the ability to talk his way out of almost any situation, often with a good sense of humor and played fair even when those that conspired against him did not. He was an honest man in a profession not known for it.

The show was created by producer Roy Huggins and writer Stephen J. Cannell, originally conceived of as being about a private investigator who only took on closed cases. Huggins assigned Cannell to write the script who then proceeded to tweak the clichés and conventions of the genre. Garner signed on to the project and NBC agreed to finance the pilot episode. The show ran the gamut of the crime genre as Rockford investigated murders, blackmail, missing persons, finding stolen money and so on.

Rockford is an ex-convict (wrongly convicted) turned private investigator who worked the Los Angeles area in his gold-colored Pontiac Firebird with his base of operations a mobile home located on the beach. He doesn’t even have a secretary – just an answering machine (immortalized in the opening credits) to take his messages. His father, Joe “Rocky” Rockford (Noah Beery) is a retired trucker who constantly gives his son grief over his profession. Detective Dennis Becker (Joe Santos) delights in giving him a hard time but helps out when he really needs it. Santos is an underappreciated character actor who was the ideal foil for Rockford as the street-smart cop. He is definitely set in the same mold as the frumpy Andy Sipowicz that Dennis Franz would later make popular on NYPD Blue.

“The Girl in the Bay City Boy’s Club,” showcases Rockford’s ability to recognize and deal with potential conflict as he sorts out someone doing a poor job of tailing him while also stopping at a nearby Jack in the Box for food. When it turns that the person following him is a potential client (Blair Brown), he confronts her. This episode features an early, memorable appearance by Evelyn “Angel” Martin (Stuart Margolin), a lovable ex-con cum con man that occasionally helps out Rockford when he’s not hitting him up for cash or getting him in trouble, much to his friend’s chagrin.

Like many shows, some of its most memorable episodes feature appearances by notable guest stars. Case in point: Isaac Hayes in “The Hammer of C Block.” He plays Gandy Fitch, an ex-convict and Rockford’s former cellmate. It seems that Fitch served 20 years for killing his wife but claims that he didn’t do it. Rockford owes him a favor and Gandy has come to collect, asking him to find the real killer. Hayes brings a gruff edginess to the role of a surly ex-con who keeps calling Jim, “Rockfish,” much to his chagrin. Hayes brings an authentic, tough guy swagger that plays well off of Garner’s laid-back nature.

Occasionally, Rockford would play hard to get if he felt a case could be solved by the police unless the money was right and the potential client made a compelling argument like in “The Real Easy Red Dog,” when a woman (Stefanie Powers) is convinced that her sister’s suicide is actually murder. Rockford would rather eat a sandwich he just prepared and watch a football game but she finally wears him down. The woman turns out to be a rival private investigator and her job offer is just a smoke screen. This puts him at odds with Lieutenant Diel (Tom Atkins), a gruff police officer with a thing for P.I.s, specifically Rockford. The playful banter between Rockford and his female counterpart is a joy to listen to with Garner and Powers looking like they’re having fun with it.

Garner brings a considerable amount of charm and leading man good looks to his role. He has a snarky sense of humor but knows when to play it serious when the situation warrants it. I like that Rockford solves cases through good ol’ fashion legwork – searching for clues, reading and questioning people and using his smarts to solve the case. The show is set up so that we figure things out along with him. We’re rooting for Rockford as we like him and that’s down to Garner’s amiable take on the private investigator. It’s easy to root for him as he’s the perpetual underdog, often at the mercy of dangerous and powerful crooks that have no qualms about hurting or punishing him, but he keeps plugging away, using common sense, intuition and his wits to survive.

The Rockford Files is also a fascinating snapshot of Los Angeles in the mid 1970s: drive-in diners on the beach, rotary style phones, big cars and so on. The show certainly wasn’t groundbreaking, adhering to the tried and true crime/mystery format but doing so in a very entertaining way with well-written scripts that are well-acted by the reliable cast. Watching an episode of The Rockford Files is the equivalent of reading a really good mystery novel, albeit condensed into one hour. It was a prime time hit with a strong six-year run, enjoying a cult following in the 1980s thanks to syndication and this led to a series of made-for-television movies from 1994-1999.

For me, there is something reassuring and almost comforting about watching The Rockford Files. It is like revisiting an old friend. There is a lot of enjoyment in watching Rockford’s noble pursuit of the truth over the course of a given episode with Garner’s genial take on the private investigator guiding us through his character’s various misadventures. Sometimes he won, sometime he didn’t but it was always enjoyable to see what kind of case he was mixed up in.

Night Moves

Some of the best American cinema from the 1970s reflected a sense of disillusionment and pessimism as a result of a series of shocking political assassinations in the 1960s and culminated with the Watergate scandal in the early ‘70s. There was a deep feeling of mistrust in authority and a sense that the United States was no longer the great country people perceived to be.

One of the best films that reflect these feelings to come out of this decade is Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), starring Gene Hackman as a down-on-his-luck private investigator. The actor had a great run of diverse roles around this time (including The French Connection, The Conversation, and Scarecrow) and this one is among his very best.

Early on, the film establishes Harry Moseby’s (Hackman) lone wolf credentials as his wife Ellen (Susan Clark) asks him why he doesn’t join his friend Nick’s agency, to which he replies, “That’s not an agency, that’s an information factory.” Hackman shows a deft touch at handling shifting tones as Harry goes from a serious discussion with his wife about his job to messing with her uptight boss at the high-end antiques store she works at: “When are we going bowling again?” he says with a straight face to which the annoyed man replies, “You seem to get some kind of weird satisfactions from this sort of thing, don’t you?”

Harry is thrown a job involving Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward), a veteran actress whose teenage daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith) has gone missing. Arlene comes across as a bit of a washed-up boozehound and Janet Ward has a lot of fun putting an emphasis on the word “Biblical” when mentioning that her film producer ex-husband wanted to make Biblical epics. She represents the sad side of Hollywood where once beautiful actresses are phased out when they are deemed too old by studio executives.

Harry also finds out that Helen is cheating on him with a man named Marty Heller (Harris Yulin). The scene after he finds out shows Hackman masterfully conveying the jumble of emotions that must be playing behind Harry’s sad eyes. His new case has barely started and he’s dealing with his wife’s infidelity. She finally comes home from the movies and he’s watching a football game (although, his facial expression suggests that he’s not really watching it). She asks him who’s winning and he replies, “Nobody. One side’s just losing slower than the other.” It’s such a great line and sums up Harry’s mood perfectly. He doesn’t say much and he doesn’t have to because Hackman’s facial expressions say it all.

Harry methodically picks up Delly’s trail and encounters a beaten-up mechanic (a motormouthed James Woods), a bitter stunt coordinator (Edward Binns), and a good-looking stuntman (Anthony Costello) with a memorable laugh who’ve all briefly entered and exited her orbit along the way. Director Arthur Penn does an excellent job fleshing out these minor characters with their limited screen-time. They provide the initial impressions we get of Delly as a wild child with quite the sexual appetite.

Harry’s investigation takes him to Florida where Delly’s stepfather Tom (John Crawford) is chartering seaplanes. He finds her and begins to figure out what’s going: Tom is messing around with Delly, much to his girlfriend Paula’s (Jennifer Warren) chagrin. Tom’s also part of the local smuggling scene. In addition, Harry finds himself attracted to Paula, which only complicates things.

Gene Hackman is excellent as a private investigator that thinks too much. Harry is a complex character, haunted by his past – a strained relationship with his estranged father – and tired of dealing with lousy divorce cases, sifting through people’s dirty laundry when he has plenty of his own. The actor is given a rich character to fully inhabit, which he does with his trademark commitment.

While Melanie Griffith plays the free-spirited sex kitten who’s acting out to get back at her mother, Jennifer Warren plays a fascinatingly, fully realized character. Paula’s been around the block a few times but isn’t ashamed of her past. Regretful, perhaps, but not ashamed. She’s smart, demonstrating an understanding of the chess game Harry’s obsessively recreates, and matches him in the witty banter department. Warren has a down-to-earth beauty that has an authenticity to it and it is easy to see why Harry is attracted to Paula. She’s a sad character that seems lost in life much like Harry. These are damaged people looking for solace, trying to outrun the baggage of their past.

Scottish novelist Alan Sharp was working on a detective story called An End of Wishing with producer Robert Sherman. The former asked the latter, “Should I make this a typical detective story about a guy trying to solve a crime or should I make this what I really would like it to be, which is about a guy trying to solve himself?” Sherman told him to go the latter route and when the screenplay was completed, sent it to John Calley, then-head of Warner Bros.

The studio agreed to make the film for $4 million and brought Arthur Penn on board to direct. He was drawn to the script because the political assassinations in the ‘60s had made him depressed and “felt we needed to give voice to our grief. It was a beat-up culture.” Sharp changed the name of the script to The Dark Tower, which Penn subsequently changed to Night Moves during production. The screenwriter was surprised that the director liked his script as he felt it wasn’t resolved. They started working on it together and Sharp was also surprised that someone of Penn’s stature and experience didn’t know more about the screenwriting process than he did. The writer did find the director affable and very smart.

Penn rehearsed with the cast for ten days before principal photography, which Hackman, with his improvisational theater background, enjoyed. Filming began in the latter half of 1973 at Sanibel and Captiva Islands in Florida and Los Angeles. Hackman, at the time, was dealing with personal issues and reportedly acted sullen during filming. Penn admitted that they didn’t pay much attention to plot and that it was “not going to be achievable, that you were never going to be able to delineate a mystery properly,” which may have hurt its commercial chances. Furthermore, he said, “We’re part of a generation which knows there are no solutions.” He and Sharp disagreed over how to end the film with the former wanting there to be hope that Harry would get back with his wife while the latter wanted Harry and Paula to go off together. They compromised on the ending that exists now.

Night Moves received mostly positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “Miss Warren creates a character so refreshingly eccentric, so sexy in such an unusual way, that it’s all the movie can do to get past her without stopping to admire. But it does.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Harry is much more interesting and truly complex than the mystery he sets out to solve.” The Los Angeles Times’ Doug List wrote, “Few actors can communicate that kind of inner struggle better than Hackman…doesn’t require a role with offbeat characteristics or an overcharged personality to create an unforgettable character.” In his review for Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum called it a “haunting psychological thriller ambitiously sets out to unpack post-Watergate burnout in American life.”

Damaged people populate Night Moves: Arlene, chewed up and spit out by Hollywood; Delly following in her footsteps; Paula, an ex-hooker using Florida as a temporary waystation, and Harry, an ex-football player turned small-time private investigator. Near the end of the film, Harry tells Paula, “I didn’t solve anything. Just fell in on top of it,” which sums up his journey. What does it all mean and does it have to mean anything? These are some of the questions Harry wrestles with during the course of the film. Ultimately, he’s driven by the truth no matter how ugly or fruitless as the last image so brilliantly conveys. Night Moves is a fascinating character study with a tangible, lived-in feel that places an emphasis on behavior, and serves as a snapshot of a battered and bruised era trying to recover from turbulent events that took place in the ‘60s.


SOURCES

Hunter, Allan. Gene Hackman. St. Martin's Press. 1987.

Segaloff, Nat. Arthur Penn: American Director. University of Kentucky Press. 2011.

Plain Clothes

Early on in her career, Martha Coolidge was destined to be a subversive alternative to John Hughes’ 1980s teen comedies with films like Valley Girl (1983) and Real Genius (1985) that championed outsider-type protagonists that refused to be part of the status quo, which most movies of its ilk ultimately embraced. Sadly, after the surprise commercial and critical success of Valley Girl, Coolidge’s films struggled to find an audience and she moved onto the emerging independent film scene with Rambling Rose (1991). Wedged between it and Real Genius is Plain Clothes (1988), a film that, in retrospect, was a transition between her ‘80s teen comedies and the more mature fare of her 1990s output. The film was given limited distribution, was poorly reviewed and went largely ignored, but is a fascinating mash-up of the high school comedy and murder mystery with an eclectic cast led by underappreciated character actor Arliss Howard.

One day, a teacher stumbles into his classroom and promptly dies from a knife wound to the back, uttering the words, “Easy grader.” Meanwhile, we meet Nick Dunbar (Arliss Howard) and his partner Ed (Seymour Cassel) busting a couple of punks while the former is posing as a traveling ice cream man. Nick is tired of being assigned cases where children are involved because he can’t stand them, never having a regular childhood himself.

He gets a call that his younger brother Matt (Loren Dean) has been accused of killing the aforementioned teacher at his high school. Coolidge playfully undermines the seriousness of the situation by having Matt take a “hostage” at a kids’ fairy tale playground only for much of the cute equipment smashed by an overzealous SWAT team. After being suspended for punching out a fellow detective that was badmouthing Matt, Nick decides to go undercover as a student named Nick Springsteen (“Any relation, dude?” a student asks him. “Distant,” he replies) and find out who killed the teacher and framed his brother.

Nick’s first day at school is a mixture of culture shock and barely concealed contempt for the meathead jocks that give him a hard time in the halls. He also has to endure mind-numbingly boring classes with the only saving grace being now that he’s a reasonably intelligent adult he is more confident and savvy about the whole high school experience.

Ever since seeing him in Full Metal Jacket (1987), I’ve been a fan of Arliss Howard’s work and always look forward to the rare opportunity of seeing him in a starring role like Plain Clothes. Part of the enjoyment of this film is watching Howard react to the various students and teachers Nick encounters during his investigation. He walks through the school with a bemused expression affixed to his face as he comes from the perspective of already having experienced it. This is a problem because Nick can’t get any of the students to trust him until he loosens up and starts acting like them. Howard does a nice job of maintaining a tricky balancing act of portraying a frustrated police detective posing as a student while conducting an investigation to clear his brother. He also gets some nice moments to display his acting chops, like the scene where Nick reads a very suggestive e.e. cummings poem in class that gets the girls and the teacher (Suzy Amis) all hot and bothered. It’s an excellent reading that Howard delivers with a slightly mischievous glint in his eye.

Plain Clothes’ supporting cast is an embarrassment of riches, populated by veteran character actors like Seymour Cassel as Nick’s reliable partner, Diane Ladd as the mean school secretary, and Robert Stack as the absent-minded principal. Max Perlich, Abe Vigoda and George Wendt show up in smaller roles, adding to the offbeat atmosphere of the film. If there is one minor flaw it is the growing attraction between Nick and his English teacher. There doesn’t seem like much chemistry between Howard and Suzy Amis despite their best efforts to generate some.

At the start of 1985, aspiring screenwriter Scott Frank was hired by Paramount Pictures and worked with Lindsay Doran, an executive at the studio, who taught him how to write screenplays. He wrote Plain Clothes over approximately two years. Martha Coolidge was originally hired to direct Some Kind of Wonderful (1987). She spent months developing the script and working on pre-production only to be fired four days before principal photography. Producer John Hughes gave the job to Howard Deutch, a friend of his and whom he had a falling out with prior to Coolidge being hired. They rekindled their friendship and he got the job. Ned Tanen, then president of Paramount, met with Coolidge and apologized, offering her the job to direct Plain Clothes. Coolidge said of Frank’s script that it was “more of a fun-lark-of-a-murder-mystery-comedy.”

What few critics that saw Plain Clothes were not kind to it. In her review for the Sun Sentinel, Candice Russell wrote, “Coolidge and screenwriter A. Scott Frank don’t know what to make of this veteran cast. Nobody’s funny, though attempts are made in that direction.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, “A little more complicated than most, and a little less interesting, Plain Clothes tries to combine a police investigation story with the usual classroom and locker-room stuff. Less would not necessarily have been more, but it would have been shorter.”

What I like about Plain Clothes is that it has more on its mind than being simply a teen comedy by also incorporating an engaging murder mystery. Even the comedy aspects are well done, slyly subverting their conventions thanks to Howard’s knowing performance. He’s our audience surrogate, acknowledging the genre conventions with a wry look and deadpan sarcastic replies timed to perfection. For example, he doesn’t really look young enough to pass for a high school student – a potential stumbling block for the audience, but to the film’s credit it works hard to make you forget it.

The consummate professional, Coolidge’s direction doesn’t draw attention to itself, getting out of the way of the actors and letting them do their thing, especially Howard who does some of his best work. She would go on to make several more films before seguing into television, including such notable efforts like the highly acclaimed made for T.V. movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999) and episodes of Sex and the City. Plain Clothes remains an oddball film that never found an audience and will hopefully be rediscovered on home video.

SOURCES

“Back to the 80s: Interview with Director Martha Coolidge.” Kickin’ It Old School. January 31, 2011.

Dawson, Nick. “Scott Frank, The Lookout.” Filmmaker magazine. March 30, 2007.

Insdorf, Annette. “Women Film Directors Make a Strong Comeback.” The New York Times. April 24, 1988.

Inherent Vice

There are unfilmable novels and then there is Thomas Pynchon, the premiere post-modern novelist responsible for legendary tomes like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. He is known for producing dense, complex novels that explore themes such as racism, philosophy, science and technology while fusing theological and literary ideas with popular culture references to comic books, films, urban myths and conspiracy theories. Satire and paranoia are common currencies that he uses in his novels. And that’s only scratching the surface.

The 1960s were an important decade for Pynchon. It was at this time that his novels V. and The Crying of Lot 49 were published and the bulk of Gravity’s Rainbow was written. He would revisit the ‘60s again from the perspective of the 1980s with Vineland and, most recently, with Inherent Vice, which was published in 2009. The latter novel has been considered his most accessible work since Lot 49 and has been adapted into a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, the American auteur responsible for such memorable efforts as Boogie Nights (1997), There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) among others.

Possibly informed by Pynchon’s stint in Manhattan Beach, California during the mid-‘60s, Inherent Vice is part stoner comedy/mystery and part lament for an era that was all but gone by 1970 when the story takes place. If the ‘60s was about having your head in the clouds then the ‘70s was about having your feet on the ground. Like its source material, the film plays fast and loose with notions of plot and story, riffing on elements of a Raymond Chandler-esque mystery through a counterculture filter.

Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a private investigator of the rumpled variety. One night, he’s visited by an ex-girlfriend by the name of Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) whose latest boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), a big-time real estate developer, and his wife are involved in some kind of shady scheme. Doc soon finds himself framed for murder, Shasta disappears (as does Mickey) and he runs afoul of hardass Los Angeles police detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). During the course of his investigation, Doc finds himself immersed in the bizarro social strata of California culture, including a drug-addicted surf musician (Owen Wilson), a member of the Black Panthers (Michael K. Williams), a cokehead dentist (Martin Short), and a secret cartel known as the Golden Fang.

Inherent Vice is the second collaboration between Anderson and actor Joaquin Phoenix and the former may have found his cinematic alter ego. Working together brings out the best in both of them with the actor delivering another excellent performance. He portrays Doc as a peaceful hippie P.I. content to coast through life surrounded by a cloud of pot smoke, but is thrust into a strange world when an ex-lover comes back into his life. He acts as our guide on this journey and the key to navigating the sometimes murky narrative waters is to never lose focus of the primary mystery: the disappearance of Shasta. Doc represents the peace-loving idealism of the ‘60s and who is confronted by all kinds of outlandish people that represent the aggressive excessiveness of the ‘70s.

Anderson populates Inherent Vice with a stellar cast of supporting actors that includes Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, and Martin Short, all of whom bring this collection of oddball characters vividly to life. Some may find the cavalcade of recognizable movie stars distracting but, on the contrary, they act as important signposts along the way to help us keep track of the numerous characters Doc encounters during his investigation.

Josh Brolin gets the most screen-time of the supporting cast as Bigfoot Bjornsen, a throwback to cops of the early ‘60s, complete with crew cut and deep loathing of hippies like Doc. Initially, Bigfoot starts off as Doc’s primary nemesis, but over the course of the film he reveals a frustration with his lot in life, displaying a grudging mutual respect. Brolin certainly has the imposing frame to play Bigfoot and wisely plays the role straight, which makes several of his scenes that much funnier because the uptight character is a product of a bygone era that clashes with the more easygoing Doc as much as the excessive culture of the ‘70s.

The trailers for Inherent Vice are misleading in the sense that they sell the film as some kind of madcap comedy and while there are some out-and-out funny scenes, like Martin Short’s cocaine-addicted dentist, there is a melancholic tone that permeates most of the film expanding on “The High Water Mark” speech Raoul Duke gives late in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) as he laments the death of ‘60s idealism. Inherent Vice even ends on a surprisingly emotional moment that is quite affecting. Instead of going for quick, comedic beats, Anderson applies the aesthetic he used in There Will Be Blood and The Master by breaking the film down into lengthy, dialogue-heavy scenes between Doc and one of the many people involved either directly or tangentially to Shasta’s disappearance, which may test the patience of some expecting the stylish zaniness of something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. While Terry Gilliam’s film reflected Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo sensibilities, so too does Inherent Vice reflect Pynchon’s peculiar sensibilities. Like the book, Anderson takes his time and lets you sink into Pynchon’s world, which is certainly not an experience for everyone.

Several reviews have compared Inherent Vice to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998), but they are only similar on a very superficial level. Anderson’s film is its own thing – a shaggy dog journey through a corner of Pynchon’s universe that the filmmaker has brought faithfully and lovingly to life. Much like Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (2012), Inherent Vice is made by and for fans of Pynchon’s novel, which will leave the uninitiated out in the cold, struggling to follow a film that may seem like an incoherent mess, but is actually quite faithful to its source material with huge chunks of the author’s prose coming out of the characters’ mouths. You shouldn’t have to see a film more than once to “get it,” but there are some that reveal themselves in more detail and whose nuances are appreciated upon repeated viewings. This is such a film. As Pynchon himself once famously said in response to the complexity of his novel V., “Why should things be easy to understand?” The fact that one of Pynchon’s novels has been adapted into a film is quite a significant accomplishment. That it successfully translates his worldview is even more noteworthy.

SOURCES

Siegel, Jules. “Who is Thomas Pynchon . . . and why did he take off with my Wife?” Playboy. March 1977.

L.A. Confidential

Prolific crime novelist James Ellroy has only had three of his books adapted into films (Blood on the Moon, L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia) while other novels continue to languish in development hell. On the surface, this is baffling as they are chock full of memorable characters, colorful period dialogue and engrossing mysteries at their heart. Dig deeper and it becomes readily apparent why his novels have largely failed to go into production; they feature large casts of characters, each with their own subplots pivotal to the main story. Additionally, the period dialogue is sometimes raw with racial epitaphs, and his lengthy tomes are quite plot heavy.

Where does a screenwriter begin in tackling one of Ellroy’s novels?

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland and director Curtis Hanson found a way with their adaptation of L.A. Confidential (1997), a sprawling epic that was part of Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, a series of novels set in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles, a universe occupied by several recurring characters, and the sordid crimes they sought to stomp out in their city. It wasn’t easy as the two men shopped their passion project around a Hollywood wary of a period neo-noir much like the women of Ellroy’s world were wary of the johns they met on a nightly basis. It starred two then-unknown Australian actors, Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe. Fortunately, Warner Bros. took a chance and the gamble paid off with a film that managed to distill the essence of Ellroy’s novel without gutting it completely. L.A. Confidential performed well at the box office ($126 million), it was a critical darling and an awards magnet, winning two Oscars for Best Supporting Actress (Kim Basinger) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson).

We are introduced to three police officers. Bud White (Russell Crowe) uses strong-arm tactics to get the job done, especially when it comes to men that are violent towards women. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) stages busts with Hollywood actors and actresses for tabloid journalist Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) and is the technical advisor on the Dragnet-esque television show Badge of Honor. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is by the book to a fault and has plenty of ambition to burn. As his commanding officer Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) tells him, “You have the eye for human weakness but not the stomach.”

These three men each have their own respective beats that they patrol, but are brought together with their involvement in “Bloody Christmas,” which saw several cops beat on six Mexicans in custody accused of assaulting two police officers. Their careers are shaken up in the aftermath, but get a chance at redemption courtesy of the Nite Owl Massacre, a coffee shop shoot-out that saw six people brutally murdered. What appears initially to be an open and shut case involves aspects of police corruption and a high-end escort service with prostitutes surgically altered to resemble famous movie stars, chief among them Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) who looks like Veronica Lake. For Bud, the case is a chance to prove to himself and others that he is more than an enforcer for Dudley. For Jack, it’s a chance to get back to why he became a cop in the first place. For Ed, it’s a chance to prove himself and get out from under the shadow of his father, a legendary Los Angeles Police Department detective.

Known mostly for unsuccessful genre movies like The Quick and the Dead (1995) and Virtuosity (1995), L.A. Confidential put Russell Crowe firmly on the A-list. He brings the requisite physicality necessary for Bud White with a ferocity and an intensity that is riveting to watch. Over the course of the film he does an excellent job of conveying Bud’s change of heart as he begins to question his reputation as hired muscle and uses his brains when he becomes embroiled in the Nite Owl case. His romantic involvement with Lynn also shows a romantic, more vulnerable side, which comes as a pleasant surprise.

Kevin Spacey is well cast as the publicity-seeking cop who would probably trade places with the celebrities he busts on a regular basis. Jack loves the attention that his technical advisor gig gets him and loves hobnobbing with movie stars. However, early on, Spacey hints at a dissatisfaction that exists in Jack’s life. He’s tired of staging pot busts for Sid’s tabloid rag and begins to yearn for the more substantial police work he used to do. This is encapsulated in a nice, reflective moment Jack has during a quiet interlude in a bar when he stares long and hard at his latest payoff and himself in the mirror.

Guy Pearce has the toughest role as he plays a largely unlikeable character for most of the film. Ed is a prissy bureaucrat in a cop’s uniform. He’s a political animal not afraid to sell out his fellow officers to further his own career. This brings him in direct conflict with Bud who is everything Ed is not. Pearce does a nice job of showing how Ed changes as the deeper he gets into the Nite Owl case the more dirt he gets on his hands and blood on his face. The actor’s best moment comes in the scene with Spacey where Ed explains to Jack why he became a cop. He also admits to losing sight of why he became one as does Jack (Spacey’s sad expression at this moment is particularly affecting). It’s a nice little moment between these two characters that provide personal motivation for their continued involvement in the Nite Owl case.

Kim Basinger is an actress with limited range and I’ve always felt that she was somewhat miscast as Lynn Bracken and that someone like Jennifer Connelly, with her experience in period movies like The Rocketeer (1991) and Mulholland Falls (1996), would have been a much better choice. Basinger certainly looks the part, but lacks the dramatic chops to pull off the role convincingly except for a scene where Lynn lets Bud in past the prostitute as movie star façade to her personal bedroom where Hanson provides us with visual cues to her small-town past. Lynn sits on her bed and for a moment she doesn’t look glamorous, but someone who has been playing a role for too long and is tired. Basinger achieves an aching vulnerability that is impressive and one wishes that the rest of her performance was as good as this scene.

Hanson surrounds his three lead actors with a rock solid supporting cast. James Cromwell is perfectly cast as the fearsome Dudley Smith, the Irish cop that employs brutal and unorthodox methods to enforce the law. David Strathairn’s Pierce Patchett is a cool as they come millionaire and power player with a secret side. Danny DeVito gets a juicy role as sleazy mudraker Sid Hudgens, a man who didn’t uncover or create a scandal he couldn’t exploit.

Hanson wisely hired cinematographer extraordinaire Dante Spinotti (Heat) to capture a bygone era on film and he creates a warm look in the day scenes and a shadowy one at night, but without overdoing it to the point of slavish film noir homage. There are many standout sequences in L.A. Confidential, chief among them a virtuoso sequence where Ed masterfully questions three men suspected of the Nite Owl Massacre, going back and forth, playing them against each other. This sequence is not only wonderfully edited, but also well-acted by Pearce who starts off grilling the three men thinking that they did it, but when one of them spills his guts, realizes that they are guilty of a completely different crime. This sequence also deepens the mystery as the killers are still at large and their motives unknown.

Helgeland and Hanson’s screenplay does an excellent job of gradually building narrative momentum. It introduces the three main protagonists right off the bat with scenes that show their distinctive approaches to police work, which informs their character. Over the course of the film we learn more about them from how they act and what they do. The screenwriters also excel at raising the stakes the deeper Bud, Ed and Jack go into the Nite Owl case and the more they uncover. One gets a tangible sense of danger that these men are in, which makes the film’s climax that much more exciting.

Filmmaker Curtis Hanson had been a long-standing admirer or Southern California fiction writers like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and John Fante. He had read half a dozen novels by James Ellroy before he turned his attention to L.A. Confidential. He found himself drawn to the characters and not the plot. “What hooked me on them was that, as I met them, one after the other, I didn’t like them – but as I continued reading, I started to care about them.” Ellroy’s novel also made Hanson think of L.A. and provided him with an opportunity to “set a movie at a point in time when the whole dream of Los Angeles, from that apparently golden era of the ‘20s and ‘30s, was being bulldozed.”

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland was originally signed to Warner Bros. to write a Viking movie with director Uli Edel and then worked on an unproduced modern-day King Arthur story. He was a long-time Ellroy fan and when he heard that the studio had acquired the rights to L.A. Confidential in 1990 as a potential mini-series, he lobbied to write the screenplay. However, Warner Bros. was only talking to well-known writers. When Helgeland finally did get a meeting it was cancelled two days in advance. He found out that Hanson had been hired to direct and met with him while the filmmaker was helming The River Wild (1994). They discovered that not only did they shared a love for Ellroy’s novels, but they also agreed on how to adapt L.A. Confidential into a film. Hanson felt that the key was to “concentrate on the three cops, use them as our tentpoles to hold up the rest of the story and ask what scenes are most important to these guys. Where are the scenes where they play off each other? And how can we bring all their stories together?” He realized that Ellroy’s novels were not “blueprints for movies” because of their many subplots and backstories. He decided to have the characters, not the plot, be their guide because if he and Helgeland approached the adaptation on the plot level they would have “ended up with wall-to-wall exposition.”

The two men worked on the script together for two years with Hanson turning down jobs and Helgeland writing drafts for free. When the studio optioned his book, Ellroy assumed that it would never be made into a film because he designed it to be difficult to adapt and if it was made, he figured that “they would screw it up. But if they do screw it up I am honor-bound to keep my mouth shut because I took the money.” When Hanson and Helgeland finished the seventh draft they showed it to Ellroy. The author had seen Hanson films The Bedroom Window (1987) and Bad Influence (1990) and found him to be “a competent and interesting storyteller,” but wasn’t convinced that his book would be made into a film until he talked to the director.

Warner Bros. didn’t like Hanson’s approach to the script and wanted to condense it into a predictable solo star adventure story. Hanson refused and the studio backed off, suggesting New Regency Productions get involved and handle distribution. Warner Bros. executive Bill Gerber showed the script to Michael Nathanson, CEO of New Regency, which had a deal with the studio. Nathanson loved it, but they had to get owner Arnold Milchan’s approval. Hanson prepared a presentation that consisted of 15 vintage postcards and pictures of L.A. mounted on poster-boards and made his pitch to Milchan. The pictures consisted of orange groves, beaches, tract homes in the San Fernando Valley and the opening of the Hollywood Freeway to symbolize the image of prosperity sold to the public at the time. Then, he showed the darker side of Ellroy’s novel with the cover of scandal rag Confidential and the famous shot of Robert Mitchum coming out of jail after his marijuana bust. He also had photographs of jazz musicians of the time: Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker to represent the music people listened to at the time. Hanson emphasized that the period detail would be in the background and the characters in the foreground. Milchan was impressed with the presentation and agreed to finance the film.

When it came to casting Hanson had seen Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper (1992) and found him “repulsive and scary but captivating.” The actor fit the image Hanson had of Bud White. Like countless other actors, Guy Pearce auditioned and Hanson felt that he was “very much what I had in mind for Ed Exley.” Hanson explained his logic in casting them: “My hope was to replicate my experience of the book. You don’t like any of these characters at first, but the deeper you get into their story, the more you begin to sympathize with them. I didn’t want actors audiences knew and already liked.” At the time, both Australian actors were not well known in North America and Milchan was worried about the lack of movie stars in lead roles.

Regardless, he backed Hanson’s casting decisions and this gave the director the confidence to approach Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito and Kevin Spacey. In the case of the latter, Hanson specifically cast the actor against type and told him to think of Dean Martin while in the role. Hanson felt that Jack Vincennes was “a movie star among cops.” Hanson was confident that Spacey “could play the man behind that veneer, the man who also lost his soul.” Once everyone was on board, Hanson gave his cast and crew points and counterpoints to capture L.A. in the 1950s by screening The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), which epitomized the glamorous Hollywood look of Lynn Bracken, In A Lonely Place (1950) to show the ugly side, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) because it was “so rooted in the futuristic 50s: the atomic age,” and The Line-Up (1958) for the “lean and efficient style.” Hanson and Spinotti agreed that L.A. Confidential would be shot widescreen and watched two Cinemascope films of the period: Douglas Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (1957) and Vincente Minelli’s Some Came Running (1958). However, Hanson didn’t want the film to be an exercise in nostalgia and had Spinotti shoot it like a contemporary film and use more naturalistic lighting.

Before filming took place, Hanson brought Crowe and Pearce to L.A. for two months and immersed them in the city and the time period. He also got them dialect coaches, showed them vintage police training movies and had them meet with real cops. Pearce found the contemporary police force had changed too much to be useful research material, finding the police movies more valuable “because there was a real sort of stiffness, a woodenness about these people” that he felt Exley had as well. Meanwhile, Crowe studied Sterling Hayden’s performance in Stanley Kubrick’s film noir The Killing (1956). Early on, Crowe and Pearce conducted rehearsals with Helgeland and Hanson, which consisted of them discussing each scene. As other actors were cast, they would join in.

L.A. Confidential received nearly universal praise from the critical community. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “L.A. Confidential is immersed in the atmosphere and lore of film noir, but it doesn’t seem like a period picture—it believes its noir values and isn’t just using them for decoration.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Spacey is at his insinuating best, languid and debonair, in a much more offbeat performance than this film could have drawn from a more conventional star. And the two Australian actors, tightly wound Mr. Pearce and fiery, brawny Mr. Crowe, qualify as revelations.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “This is the first film that has truly gotten Ellroy on screen, and, in many ways, it’s a sleeker and more pleasurable experience than his hard-boiled-bebop prose. With its plot that zips and zags like knife slashes, its cynicism stoked to the melting point, the movie brings the thrill of corruption crackingly to life.” Andrew Sarris wrote, “Ms. Basinger’s career has been spectacularly uneven but considerably better and subtler than one would think from the lurid reputation of most of her vehicles. She has never been as good, as sensitive and as moving as she is here as an unusual angel of mercy in her relationships with two of the three protagonists.”

In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Brian Helgeland and Hanson have expertly extracted the essence of the proceedings and boiled them down to a concentrated screen story where appearances are deceptive and nobody gives any information away.” The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote, “Hanson delivers something ever rarer in film culture, not a new film noir but an old-fashioned total movie, somehow of a single piece.” Finally, the author himself, James Ellroy weighed in on the film: “They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main themes, which is that everything in Los Angeles during this era of boosterism and yahooism was two-sided and two-faced and put out for cosmetic purposes … Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny.”

Helgeland and Hanson successfully adapted Ellroy’s novel because they not only understood that the central theme of the L.A. Quartet is the Evil that Men Do, but also how to translate it on film much in the same way he did it in the source material. Older white men conspire to cheat, lie and kill their way into positions of power and in the process ruin countless lives. These are very bad men who hide behind a façade of respectability and commit heinous acts in order maintain control. This is why L.A. Confidential is a much better adaptation than Brian De Palma’s beautiful looking, but ultimately empty take on Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia (2006). It hasn’t stopped people from trying replicate the special alchemy that Helgeland and Hanson created with the likes of Gangster Squad (2013) on the big screen and Frank Darabont’s short-lived T.V. show Mob City. L.A. Confidential the book and the film take us back to the heady days when the LAPD was trying to clean up its act, the city was ambitiously expanding, and the public’s thirst for celebrity scandal was taking off in a big way. These are all background details that flesh out the vivid world they brought to life, populated with fascinatingly flawed characters embroiled in a mystery that will change their lives forever.

SOURCES

Arnold, Gary. “Casting for L.A. Confidential Went in Unexpected Direction.” Washington Times. September 21, 1997.

Chollet, Laurence. “A Movie Made, An Author Happy.” The Record. September 14, 1997.

Mathews, Tom Dewe. “Through A Lens Darkly.” The New York Times. “October 17, 1997.

Seiler, Andy. “They Came From Down Under! And Now They’re Cops!” USA Today. September 19, 1997.

Sragow, Michael. “City of Angles.” Dallas Observer. September 11, 1997.

Taubin, Amy. “Confidentially Speaking: Curtis Hanson Makes a Studio-Indie Hybrid.” Village Voice. September 23, 1997.

Taubin, Amy. “L.A. Lurid.” Sight & Sound. November 1997.

Veniere, James. “Director of L.A. Confidential Hits Stride.” Boston Herald. September 14, 1997.