The
opening shot is low pale lime scrub and blue sky with clouds—New Mexico.
After the stage depot presents a picture of waiting among strangers, the film
moves gradually into mesquite and rocky hills and wide plains and the
occasional wildflowers, about as comprehensive a picture as you can imagine,
industriously photographing the place in many of its aspects.
Two killings
early on are filmed with the flashing sense of instantaneity Bertolucci got in 1900.
Then comes the ballad of Jody, “when will you learn?”
The set
constructions are architectural marvels in detail and scope. In the town, walls
are hefty painted adobe or stone or clapboard, all mixed in close together to
give that heterogeneous look of a calm, wayward urbanity. The Santee spread is
large flat structures made of thin logs with outbuildings and a fence and
corral system of those winding thin trunks too irregular for the house, all
built to settle the matter at first glance and put the drama forward rapidly. A
vast amount of planning and preparation went into these sets, and whether or
not they pre-existed this film they’re used well.
A day for night
is used to expose the bounty hunter Santee in Ahab guise, then
later on a flashback refines this image. A night exterior of ranch house and
moon expresses the calm before the storm.
A close-up of the
battered keys on the whorehouse piano begins the long and furious finale, which
closes on a complex freeze frame.
The coda is built
for suspense in the same way Fred Zinnemann handled Five Days One Summer,
and offers a whole parable of ingenious back-construction by way of reflection
on a truly remarkable film.
The original plan
was to shoot on videotape and transfer to film, but this proved impracticable
on location and a spare Arriflex was used for all but
about a minute of the footage.
Requiem for a Cop
Kojak
A homosexual ring
burgles and fences merchandise around the city, eluding months of stakeouts.
The senior detective on the case is shot and killed just before dawn in
Greenwich Village by the ringleader, whom he takes for a John
rolled for $10,000 by his son, a police academy washout. The detective stops
the man on the street, innocently returning the cash, not knowing it is the cut
received for disclosing the stakeouts in advance.
Internal Affairs
“shooflies” come down on the case “like a groom on his
honeymoon”. The $10,000 is found in the detective’s wallet,
it’s assumed he was on the take. A loan shark disabuses Kojak of any
notion that such a sum would be extended on a cop’s pay.
It takes a great
deal of sleuthing to solve the crime, and then it all depends on the son, whose
loyalties are divided between a crooked lover and a father’s spotless
reputation. He agonizes briefly over this, understands his position in the
case, and reveals the gang’s headquarters to Kojak.
The Girl
on the Late, Late Show
Dialogue
of the New York television executive and the Hollywood producer. “Where is that film that you shot?”
“In a bank
vault over in Century City.” The great paragon is William Castle’s The Hollywood Story, Fellini
subsequently has occasion to take up the theme (Intervista), the
mystifications impart a certain flavor of Penn’s Night Moves the following year.
“This is
the old F. Scott Fitzgerald territory, he used to live
at the Garden of Allah when it was across the street.”
In San Francisco,
a close memory of Siegel’s Dirty
Harry. In Mexico, of Boetticher’s ordeal (cf. Dick Richards’ Farewell,
My Lovely, again the following year, again with John Ireland).
Nicholas
Ray’s In a Lonely Place has the
last word (cf. Rod Serling’s
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” for The Twilight Zone, dir. Mitchell Leisen).
Murder in Coweta County
The stateliness
of these compositions allows Johnny Cash to unfold a really formidable
technique, and Andy Griffith to continue the deployment of his villainies
(which, when fully expanded, completed the long evolution of his acting career
and gave birth to that redoubtable creation, Ben Matlock).
Jimmy the Kid
You get plenty of
Don Adams and Cleavon Little, a good deal of Ruth
Gordon, and a dash of Avery Schreiber. Gary Coleman’s precocity is the
antidote to poisoned wind-up dolls of mop-top cuteness, with or without
spectacles.
Nelson’s
fine direction turns a hundred-thousand-dollar gag like
car-vs.-train-at-crossing into a million-dollar gag by putting a camera in the
car as it speeds inches in front of the locomotive.
Murder in Three Acts
A refined
Hollywood gag on The Butler Did It, tied by a very mysterious circumstance to
Altman’s Gosford Park.
Allan Quatermain & The Lost
City of Gold
Undoubtedly a
signal work of cinema, a masterpiece of directorial style and a new mark for
films of this genre (Henry Levin’s Journey
to the Center of the Earth, etc.). Nelson’s work is dazzling,
but it is possible to discern brilliant performances by James Earl Jones
(resembling Oliver Reed somewhat in, say, Don Taylor’s The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday),
Richard Chamberlain (reprising his invention as Quatermain),
Doghmi Larbi, Henry Silva,
and above all Sharon Stone in a sort of part that actresses have had trouble
with in recent years, her performance is correctly modeled on Natalie
Wood’s in The Great Race,
and it is superb.
But the best
performance is Nelson’s. His emergence from the fiery underground caverns
onto Victoria Falls is wonderful enough, but he follows it with a slow pan of the
view that is breathtaking, which is what any sensible person would do with a
widescreen camera standing on top of Victoria Falls and looking at a rainbow.
The exact method
of composition is really hard to analyze (the correct solution might be found
as an application of television techniques to the wide screen). Shots are
variegated or modulated within themselves, and cut together at a rate seldom
less than one every five seconds, rarer still is the
shot lasting ten seconds or more.
The Watch Commander
Police Story
The quietly
spectacular finale is shot at night, across the rooftops of two downtown L.A.
skyscrapers, involving more technical difficulties than can be imagined, though
the precedents are many, by daylight or on the ground. The action takes place
in the background, where a hostage is being held, while two police officers on this side of the chasm prepare to fire
at the criminal. The arrangement of the shots is like a remote echo of Robin
Hood at the archery contest, somehow, but it’s fifty stories up and
dark...
Get Smart, Again!
Leonard Stern and
Gary Nelson, again. CONTROL has ceased to exist (Agent 99 is peddling a memoir,
Out of Control, to a very likely
publisher), the building is up for demolition. KAOS
(victim of a hostile takeover) has a Hottentot’s weather machine making
snowstorms in the Oval Office over a $250 billion ransom. The United States
Intelligence Agency is housed in a structure very like MI6-on-Thames in
Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama
in a way, which is how the story begins. “Get Smart,” says
Commander Drury, and the former agent who not only wears a shoe phone still but
has “shoe waiting” on top of that must be dug up out of the State
Department where he fills in for functionaries with ordinary duties that are
irksome, he’s a pallbearer that falls in, for example.
The “hover
cover” gag is not only one of the greatest in the cinema and pure Keaton,
it furthermore shows a curious gift of Nelson’s for high places.
The “pillow
fight” to avoid waking up 99 is another chef-d’œuvre. “You met the President? What’s
he like?”
“Everything
you’d expect him to be.”
“Oh,
I’m sorry to hear that.”
Agent 86 keeps
the Cone of Silence in his bedroom. “You want me to tie you up at the
book company?”
The
KAOS mole in the USIA lives at the Potomac Creek Trailer Park.
“Exaggerated
plotting, outré characters and... shameless sight gags”, said Variety, speaking of the original.
86
now communicates by way of computerized cashmere, but all he gets is Minnie Lefkowitz at Lingerie for Small and Tall.
“I
agree, 99, there’s something rotten in Detroit.”
“That’s
Denmark,” Hymie points out, “Max.”
“Oh.
Well, things haven’t been so great in Detroit, either.” Dr.
Denton’s Hall of Hush goes into Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty as a purely literary conceit. Siegfried’s
twin brother Helmut Schmelding (actually
they’re triplets) is a notion from Dassin’s Nazi Agent. “You’re the only one who can impersonate
Siegfried because you’re the only one who looks like him. Unless of
course your sister is in town.”
Hymie
puts the word out on the street, as ordered, where Siegfried finds it and
orders “schlep auffen
desk” (Hymie has latterly been a crash
dummy, Larabee’s been watering the plants for
fifteen years, Agent 13 is in the Archives), Starker is dismayed, “oh,
Siegfried, you really should speak wiss ze cleaning crew, zey seem to
have missed zis huge slab of concrete on your
desk.”
Ivanhoe, Nicholas Nickleby, Das Testament des Dr.
Mabuse and Maxwell Smart (“why couldn’t you just write a diet
book like everybody else?”) combine in the warehouse finale, where the
key is Curtain Call (dir. Peter
Yates) or very nearly. “99, I think he’s the wrong publisher for
your book.”
Smart’s memoirs are forthcoming. “What did he say?”
“That
the fate of the world was in my hands, you know, the usual.”