12 Angry Men

Two points, as one juror says, are scored more or less backhandedly. The screenplay explicitly demonstrates the great gulf fixed between reasonable doubt and plausible suspicion, with all the attendant difficulties between. The filming shows, among other things, that if Columbo’s birthplace is Quai des Orfèvres, then certainly Matlock has his roots here (and in one episode returns to them as a juror himself).

Dramatically the case is resolved by, among other things, Shakespearean stagecraft ablating the avenger to reconcile fathers and sons.

Prof. Sarris’s charge of humorlessness is dispelled at once by Reginald Rose’s script and Lumet’s witty direction.

Fail-Safe

The dream of a bullfight attended by the dreamer, in his dream he watches the bull die and wakes up fearing the matador.

In the course of the morning, an all-out nuclear war is averted by dropping two twenty-megaton bombs on New York to satisfy the Russians after a bomber flight is accidentally given the go signal to bomb Moscow.

The pilot over New York is the dreamer, his wife is shopping in the city, the President’s wife is there on a visit, the command is from the President. After dropping the payload himself, the pilot jabs himself with his regulation cyanide needle. Dying, he explains to his absent wife that the matador is himself.

This, shorn of thematic reflections, is the frankly surrealistic method employed in Lumet’s famously realistic Cold War thriller. Prof. Groeteschele comes from Hitchcock’s Rope, he is a theoretician who plays at being a bull but is really a matador (his name looks like “grotesquely” but sounds like “go to hell”).

The faulty piece of electronic gear is the same flop as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A kind of psychological blindness accounts for Col. Cascio’s rhinocerine transformation, his humiliation must be redressed, this is a sub-theme. The other pilot, erroneously over Moscow, early on has occasion to lament the coming change to automated planes, he remembers flying B-17s and B-24s with Irish and Italians and Jews (Lumet’s upbringing).

The military engagement is provoked by a mechanical failure on one side answered by an automatic computer response on the other.

The Hill

This is like one of Tom Stoppard’s jokes (the opening of Jumpers, say), a house of cards built so tantalizingly for two hours that the conclusion is almost ironical.

The comprehensive structure is directly modeled on Kubrick’s Paths of Glory with the express purpose of covering the ground analytically and pointing out the single source of mischief in a rather different situation.

Kubrick has in mind the fall of France and musters his forces to defend the position. Lumet neutralizes this theme in a hysterical outburst on “Queen Victoria’s toy soldiers”, he has another kettle of fish, and where Kubrick has a competent officer bewrayed by the general staff, Lumet has a particular subset of the army undone by a raw subordinate.

The theme is making soldiers, out of Gung Ho and The Way Ahead and The DI, looking forward to MASH and Full Metal Jacket. The basis is laid in the opening scenes that begin with a remarkable stunt by the camera crane, leaving no tracks and traversing a barbed-wire fence (cf. Hitchcock’s Rope), followed by an intricate long take as the RSM greets his five new prisoners. The Hill is as tightly composed as Frankenheimer’s The Train, which has led critics and casual observers to find error where none exists. Crowther badly misses the later stage of Ossie Davis’s character, for example, as “implausible”. The one true hero of the piece is the medical officer (Michael Redgrave), who conquers his fear to report Staff Williams (Ian Hendry) to the area commander. The nominal protagonist is “a broken sergeant major” (Sean Connery) in for breaking his Major’s face and disobeying suicidal orders that subsequently killed all his men.

The RSM (Harry Andrews) who effectively runs the punishment camp is an extraordinarily capable non-commissioned officer with a real grasp of his duties and an ability to perform them. Two soldiers caught “away” in Cairo are “doubled out” after serving their time and shake each other’s hand, restored to the ranks. Staff Williams proves himself by drinking the RSM under the cot heroically, and then by brutalizing the prisoners. One of them dies, a rear-echelon desk man, the RSM errs by salvaging his command in a whitewash.

This already lengthy note gives only a few of the details in a much-overlooked film, because the particularity of the analysis it provides and the frankness of the style seem to have made for a difficulty in its reception even though there is nothing obscure about it. The subtlety of its various strands, such as the sergeant major’s joke about a shower-head “for the gas”, is rigorously constructed without a real perspective outside the events, the tragedy works itself into a sort of Fellini quandary addressed in Prova d’orchestra. Against the theme is the notion of breaking men down, the misunderstanding (if there is one) comes from the shock of a different angle on The DI that also affects and is answered by Full Metal Jacket.

Lumet follows The Pawnbroker by completely shifting to an essentially British perspective, beyond this in a remote location under difficult conditions he engages in the most brilliant filmmaking as first among equals with his cast and settings, so that in the division of labor it has been hard to see the actual work done in the several parts. Connery has a complex turn reflecting the pivotal structure, Andrews in a leading position carries the whole structure without visible strain except where the character shows it, Davis as a West Indian ranker (with Jack Watson, Roy Kinnear and Alfred Lynch) has the turns of the tragedy to play as a light effervescence, Hendry stands to under his cap as a remote revelation, Redgrave plays the MO as a John Ford character trembling ideally in his boots but realistically marching on, and Ian Bannen from another vantage also reflects the events as Staff Harris, all the while Lumet blazes with Oswald Morris’s camera in the blazing sun (a gas mask over the lens for a POV up the punishment hill with sound of forced breathing seems to have gone right into 2001: A Space Odyssey) and back at Borehamwood, always in exactly the right key with no waste or let, only the action drives the theme in a range of expressive fluctuations that give a subtle, complete account.

The last shot sets a precedent for Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes, Nelson’s Embryo, etc. The tragedy is laid to the hubris of the RSM, although everything in the film is understood completely rather than partially, he boasts of his autonomy under the ineffectual MO and the commandant. Things work easier that way, no doubt, and his twenty-five years on the job count as much for him as against him, in a way (on the other hand, his latter insulting remarks to ranker Davis are to be understood as a DI ploy, only the demoralization caused by Williams effects a breakdown). Truly a difficult film to appreciate at once, yet Crowther and Variety both responded to it bravely.

The Deadly Affair

The critical struggle to comprehend this film never took into account the simple mirror structure whereby the Foreign Office “suicide” and his wife are identical with the intelligence officer investigating the death and his own unfaithful wife (both wives are involved in sordid intrigues with the same man).

The point may be understood as a complete methodology and typology of Communism, from blushing Thirties ardor to postwar social justice and peace to the manipulator and assassin.

Bye Bye Braverman

A masterpiece with a void at its center, the epical tale of would-be literati out to bury the genuine article. This is most satisfying, this is really a feast, and everyone involved savors every mouthful, every whiff of aroma, right down to dessert and the stirrup cup.

The Offence

The transfer from play to film accords with the idea of a transposition or rather a setting in which the drama is laid as an explicatory text on New Britain, there is none of Jolly Olde to be seen, only several new developments on the American plan, residential and commercial.

Within these precincts, and most specifically the cinder-block walls of a new police station, the freshness of innocence and the burden of guilt are sought out forcibly.

Lovin’ Molly

Lovin’ Molly is, among other things, a very precise transcription of Jules et Jim from a European-centered political context into a purely American one, but as our critics have never bothered overmuch with any kind of understanding where Truffaut (or much of anything else) is concerned, they have been content to notice a superficial resemblance and add, somewhat feebly, “Texas it ain’t”.

France and Germany are not considered, but Republicans and Democrats, which accounts for the mummery. The great actors who have these roles (with Molly as America herself, who sees her dead or absent men “rising with the moon”, a note from John Ford) imbue them upon occasion with expressivity, especially physical, but a kind of realism sometimes regretted is not in the stores of a political cartoon.

The film is in three parts, filmed on location. Gid narrates the tale in 1925, in the days of Calvin Coolidge, when these two young cowpokes are nearly indistinguishable. Molly takes it up in 1945, when the nation is at war (she has married, because he needed her, a third party whom she has long since buried). Johnny concludes it in 1964, in LBJ’s days.

This sort of film (Ishtar is a prime example) tends to discombobulate party types, because, insofar as they most certainly are party types, they like to see themselves alone and alone in the right, which accounts for the rather more than rash comments directed at this film as though it were a parakeet’s mirror, ignoring its most comical, most subtle view—not that there is any attempt to conceal it overmuch (the makeup takes its cue from Mr. Arkadin’s broad farce), as if anything needed to be hidden when the critics are doing their job.

Dog Day Afternoon

Dali cast aspersions on Buñuel’s putative idea of filming all the stories in the day’s newspaper one day, it amused Buñuel to pretend he was a beggar once like Sullivan on his travels, and Lorca was denied even “a tiny bit of the Divine Dali’s asshole” to the painter’s regret later, “deep down, I felt he was a great poet”.

Lumet has every base covered in this epic on a Brooklyn street, he sews up the tatters in his net and includes everything in his satire, good does not triumph nor evil expire, though both get their due, but truth and beauty triumph over the lot.

Beckett has this in mind when he writes of language like a veil that must be torn to get at the underlying truth (or the underlying nothingness) there. The stress of action shows up cops and robbers in a compromise with reality, witness is the real response, that of Agent Sheldon, who is at least partly identified with Lumet.

Popcorn diversion is provided by the symmetry of the robber pair, an abstaining suicide-murderer and a sodomite wishing to change the view.

Network

The Chayefsky/Lumet remake of Capra’s Meet John Doe has largely been taken as a satire of television, which it partly is, and nowadays is marveled at properly for its prophetic truth, but it’s the same story now as it was in 1941, only Chayefsky has honed a few details and essentially transposed the medium from newspapers and radio to TV news. Chayefsky’s economy elides Capra’s conclusion, but the same comfort is offered then as now.

Lumet carried the analysis still further in Power, sharpening a fine point at issue, but it was made in Avildsen’s The Formula as well (“We are the Arabs”). By the same token, Network is the genesis of Robocop in its vision of Mammon ruling the world and stock ownership replacing the irreducible individual.

Garbo Talks

No matter how you look at it, the material presents certain difficulties. Lumet adopts a hands-off policy, instead concentrating on set-ups and camera movement. At the great meeting, the camera is at an angle looking past Garbo to the patient, then as slowly as possible moves in to a close-up of the latter, eclipsing the former—a shot adapted out of The Lady from Shanghai.

The other great meeting, of the son and the actress, is handled similarly: at an angle, very slowly, and dividing the screen by décor.

Hermione Gingold’s performance also has a somewhat altered tempo, and seems miraculously to have escaped notice. John Schlesinger’s son the critic appears as himself, and so does Adolph Green (Betty Comden appears as “another person”).

A relatively early example of a marketing débâcle which is now de rigueur, because truth and beauty are notorious apple cart upsetters.

Power

The Candidate laid the bride of politics bare to the bachelors of her public, and still political advertisements are big business, the stuff of political commentary and now the subject of reform. And yet they are as interchangeable and meaningless as shampoo bottles.

So you have Power, which perseveres along the line exposed by The Selling of the President 1968 and Michael Ritchie, just so you know the Wizard of Oz is Frank Morgan and no other. Roger Ebert tells, in his review of this film, how flabbergasted television executives were by the truth of Network. Alas, in political circles he was not used to running, and so we have had to wait twenty years or so to see the truth of Power.

The equivoque of the title is prepared by a tacit jest which is framed in the context of a Latin American election campaign managed by the all but ubiquitous Pete St. John (Richard Gere). During a rally, a car bomb goes off, and the candidate rushes from the dais to comfort one of the wounded. Let me remind you, please, that the English word “candidate” comes from the white garment worn in Rome by seekers of public office. St. John directs a camera crew to capture the scene on film, then tells the candidate to wear his now bloodstained white shirt at every rally henceforth. “If it bleeds it leads,” says a reprehensible journalistic axiom, and in this case it leads the country.

There is one more great joke at least. New Mexico gubernatorial candidate Wallace Furman (Fritz Weaver) is dressed as a cowboy riding a white horse and spearheading a wagon train across the desert in a mammoth campaign ad again directed by St. John, with a helicopter shot and all. As Furman reaches the foreground, his horse begins to scare at the noise of the helicopter, and throws him off. The expensive shot is ruined, but St. John recoups by stopping the film just at the moment when the horse rears, making it look as if Furman were The Lone Ranger.

Video output and statistical information are the keys to power, which is the meaning of the culminating montage that so vexed Ebert. As a matter of fact, St. John simply quotes a price to one prospective candidate for the U.S. Senate, not his own fee but the amount of money that must be spent to secure the seat.

But where is real power? It is in oil, and that governs the actual making of men of state. St. John is bullied and bugged into a sudden access of well-meaning whimsy, during which he bolsters the manly purpose of a marginal candidate whom he had earlier derided.

Great play is made with surfaces that are shiny to the point of liquidity, which gives floors that are so reflective the actors appear to be lighted from below (another thing which mystified the Sun-Times).

The Morning After

This is all told a very patient study of Los Angeles in 1986 from a photographic point of view, with color pictures patently rivaling Harry Callahan’s or nearly, and cinematically a study of various light in the city.

Running on Empty

Not a serious film. “‘Tis the supreme of power; ‘tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm.”

A warning shot across the bow of unreason, sufficiently.

Two paths in a wood by Frost, arrived at by intermittences. The opening shot suggests Bergman’s query, and leaves it behind.

Family Business

Plasmids for agriculture free of fertilizer are the loot. They are the figment of a start-up company that needs more time to satisfy its investors.

A ganef, the ganef’s son turned legit in the meat business, and the ganef’s grandson on a scholarship, rob the joint to redress a wrong against Prof. Jimmy Chiu, fired and cheated, so as to share in the profit from his rightful invention.

The kid gets caught, his father turns himself and granddad in. Probation for everybody save granddad, who keeps the phony plasmids and the formula that doesn’t work a secret.

This ought to have meant something at the time, but every ten years it becomes more telling, so that any day now critics will be admiring it, another robbery for naught like The Anderson Tapes. A fairy tale about the true ganef, the conservative ganef, and the liberal ganef, with something in it of Coppola’s three godfathers.

Guilty as Sin

The Hollywood Pictures ending would tally this as a wishful plea for State’s evidence from the junior Senator from New York, but on the whole it’s a parody of the Clintons, taking for its cue a line from Nabokov’s story, “The Assistant Producer”: “And that is why I know perfectly well the kind of face General Golubkov and his wife had when the two were at last alone.”

Technically its point of departure is And Justice For All and The Verdict. A Hitchcockian finale is prepared a few scenes earlier in the Metropolis courtroom by a Hitchcockian treatment of actors. The compositions are among the most perfect ever achieved in film, brilliant planar associations and dissociations.

Night Falls on Manhattan

The title is precise, though Kauffmann saw a last light peeping (also, in his otherwise instructive review, he failed to appreciate Andy Garcia’s rendering of Al Pacino). The film isolates the horns of a dilemma it cannot resolve.

A nefarious hoodlum (Shiek Mahmud-Bey) is sought for drug-dealing, kills several cops and escapes. A “great attorney” (Richard Dreyfuss) surrenders him and offers a plea of self-defense, the cops were out to execute the man because a rival offered a bigger payoff. That’s the dilemma.

The plot is detailed and symbolic, and sparing the critics only because Lumet’s lightning-quick technique demands re-viewing, all of its parts mesh, though at some pretty far removes occasionally, as in the relationship between the DA and a member of the defense team (Lena Olin).

All it does, this film, is state very clearly in a single work a certain conflict that occurs in the dark, so as to avoid the jarring surprises offered by its elements. That’s really useful, and if it gives a dramatic equilibrium, observe the breakdown of law and order leading in Serpico to exile, but in Gordon Parks’ The Super Cops to the daily grind (hence, perhaps, Ron Leibman’s presence).

The acting and direction have been universally commented on, with only slight reservations as to this or that nuance, owing to some difficulty with the perception of shifting perspectives, but that would be to miss the general effect of eyes dilating in the dark, or more strictly speaking, of stumbling-blocks located in obscurity.

The performances are brilliant, especially Leibman as the outgoing DA and Dreyfuss as a workaday crusader. The detail work is quite extensive among the cast, Mahmud-Bey does an explosive turn like Clarence Williams III’s onstage in Stoppard’s Night and Day, and the jury seen in a slow dolly shot is remarkably true to life.

Gloria

Lumet’s copy of the Mona Lisa.

She comes from taking a three-year rap in Miami to defend the Puerto Rican kid from the Irish designer mob in New York, he doesn’t like the posh upstate school and he’s not safe there anyway, she takes him down to Miami for her date with a parole officer. The mob keeps his father’s “bible”, a computer disk of every cop, judge and congressman on the pad.

Lumet’s version is therefore different from its original. A thorough new consideration of the theme, much closer to Richardson’s The Border and De Palma’s Scarface despite a central point and several lines directly from Cassavetes.

Find Me Guilty

Ira Reiner, former District Attorney of Los Angeles, was asked before one trial conducted by his successor how he thought it would go, and replied that it wouldn’t be one of those Perry Mason trials where the truth is suddenly revealed at the end, without realizing perhaps that this was Hamilton Burger’s own reply to a similar question, in practically the same words.

Lumet’s film imitates life consciously, determinedly and precisely. These are the cozening lawyers who practice upon a rapt jury, this is the complaisant and vain judge, it’s the daily life of legal practitioners as we know them. “God only knows,” they say, when asked what it means that the jury has returned early.

The majesty of the law, nevertheless, reveals itself. And there is a defendant who rises to the occasion in propria persona to answer the charges and expose a prosecution built on sand.

One critic, G. Allen Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle, has understood this film rather well. Others complained of its moral unfitness. Their position is explained by still others who rank the film as incompetent, so scrupulous and exacting is its representation of reality.

The beginning cites The Godfather and Goodfellas in quick shorthand exposition, the ending suggests Cool Hand Luke. Tom Horn figures in the pasty-faced justicers throughout.

The image is so grievously deteriorated by the digital transfer that the reasons for its treatment thus must have included a firing squad for distant relations.