The Screengrab : burt lancaster

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

DEAD MAN WALKING (1995)

The funny thing about Dead Man Walking (and, admittedly, “funny” doesn’t come up a lot in discussions of Tim Robbins’ excellent but grim 1995 adaptation of the memoir by Sister Helen Prejean) is the way its tale of a nun (Susan Sarandon) driven to become an activist against capital punishment in the wake of her experiences with death row inmates (embodied by Sean Penn’s fictional composite, Matthew Poncelet) did nothing to change my own views on capital punishment at the time. In the film, Sarandon (as Prejean) is contacted by Poncelet, a convict facing execution who swears he was only an innocent bystander to the crimes he’s been charged with and needs help with his final appeal. Yet for all her Christian charity, it’s hard for Prejean not to see Poncelet for what he truly is: an arrogant, ignorant, self-pitying racist thug...not to mention, as it eventually turns out, a rapist and cold-blooded killer. When his appeal is denied and Poncelet eventually gets lethally injected for his senseless, brutal crimes, I remember my thought at the time was...good. True, with death staring him in the face (and after weeks of selfless work by Sister Prejean), Poncelet finally starts acting like a human being and feels bad for his evil behavior, but...so what? Without the catalyst of his own looming execution, it’s doubtful Poncelet would have shown any remorse at all, and his jailhouse conversion is too little too late: the victims are dead and even a last-minute call from the governor would only upgrade Poncelet’s remaining time on Earth to life in prison (while offering no closure for the victim’s families). Recounting my initial reactions, I realize I’ve mellowed a bit since 1995: given the inequities of the American legal system, I’ve come around to a generally anti-capital punishment perspective (except in extreme cases involving no-doubt-about-it Hall-Of-Fame assholes like Timothy McVeigh and...well, I'll get back to you on Cheney). But it’s a tribute to Sarandon, Penn, Prejean and Robbins (not usually known for his subtlety in political matters) that Dead Man Walking is even-handed enough to credibly illustrate both sides of a difficult issue without preaching exclusively to any particular choir.

BRUTE FORCE (1947)

Most film noir dealt with men doing everything possible to stay out of prison. But master noir director Jules Dassin was never one to do things the easy or predictable way, so he set Brute Force -- one of the most memorable, intense, and violent post-war crime dramas -- inside the walls of the big house. Crammed with character actors who had worked with Dassin in the theater (and who, like him, would soon be victims of the anticommunist blacklist), Brute Force is also noteworthy for making a star out of Burt Lancaster, in only his second film after The Killers. Lancaster plays a nihilistic con who stages a prison riot, putatively to escape, admittedly to get out from under the thumb of a brutal yard boss, but really just to feel alive in a prison that feels to him like a living death. Hume Cronyn, as the prison guard, is likewise locked in a power struggle with a reformist administrator, and the three-way clash sets up a denoument that is as brutal as it is surprisingly human. Unsurprisingly, the director and his actors find a way to cast the whole thing in a political light until its doomed finale. It’s a powerhouse film with gorgeous William Daniels photography that deserves to be counted with Dassin’s best.

SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941)

Joel McCrea’s pampered director John L. Sullivan has his heart in the right place. He wants to make an epic about how tough it is for the little guy. He can see it all already. It will be called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and it will tell the truth in a way that movies so rarely do. His producers, however, would prefer that he make another comedy, because let's face it, those make lots of money for everyone. All Preston Sturges comedies come with a swift punch to the gut, a remedy highly recommended for all moviegoers on occasion. We can be a lazy bunch when we’re not watching out for that fast right. When Sullivan finally gives up on his dream of living like a hobo, the movie spins on a dime and hard times catch up with him faster than he expected. He learns the hard way how tough it is to be the little guy. He winds up with a sentence of six years of hard labor in a Southern prison camp, a brutal and bitter place in which even Cool Hand Luke would work to avoid any failures to communicate with his captors. The scene in the clip above is from that sequence, where Sullivan figures out what charity really is and what people really want from the movies. Fat lot of good it’ll do him, though, unless he figures out how to get sprung from jail. Luckily for him, despite all his boneheaded doofery, Sullivan is a clever guy. At least, he's written by a very clever guy, that Preston Sturges.

THIEVES LIKE US (1974)

Thieves Like Us isn't a prison movie -- it's about criminals trying to stay out of jail -- but it does have one of the all-time great prison escape sequences. With Chicamaw (John Schuck) in the pen once more, it's up to Bowie (Keith Carradine!) to break him out. Bowie drives straight into the prison: it's the South in the 1930s, and with rampant inequality everywhere (Thieves Like Us presses way less heavily on this point than Bonnie And Clyde, which is all to the good), the warden is sitting down mid-day to a sweat-inducing fried chicken feast. The rail-thin Bowie has no trouble outfoxing and tying him up.

ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (1979)

Don Siegel's second great prison movie owes a lot (maybe too much) to A Man Escaped, but it also owes a lot to Clint Eastwood's fully-developed badass persona. The best parts aren't the methodical depictions of how Eastwood breaks out of the unbreakable, but his laconic assertions of selfhood. If you haven't seen Gran Torino yet (and you should!) and wonder how Clint Eastwood being racist sounds, watch the (possibly NSFW) clip above. What Escape From Alcatraz doesn't do is offer hardly any social context; it's just Clint versus the world, and it happens, almost incidentally, to be set in a jail.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)

Depending on when you check the IMDB, The Shawshank Redemption is either the first or second greatest movie of all time as elected by we, the people. (It duels back and forth with The Godfather.) How this came to pass is one of those mysteries that will never be answered. No one really expects IMDB users to be our most reliable cultural curators (see the #5 greatest film of all time: The Dark Knight), but one of those things that drives my cinematic acquaintances nuts is trying to figure out how a movie that performed only moderately on initial release has managed to somehow assume top rank in many people's hearts. The movie's fine -- it's nice and slow, bolstered by patience, a generous dose of well-judged sap and a rare non-smarmy turn from Tim Robbins -- but it cribs egregiously from basically every prison movie ever made without offering a whole lot back. Still, the people have spoken: it's the greatest film of all time, hence easily the greatest prison film of all time. Enjoy yourselves, folks.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab's Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

As part of Screengrab’s year-end List-a-palooza, we asked you, our imaginary internet friends, what topics you’d like to see featured in our weekly Top Twenty.

Janet immediately stepped up to the plate with the following suggestion: “Last week, Walker finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue, in my current reconsideration of all things Alex Cox. As I watched it, I kept thinking about My Best Fiend, which I had watched about a month ago. I realized that there were at least three films I could name that revolved around a White man traveling to Latin America and going crazy, and I started wondering if there were more. I'm not even sure if there are enough for a Take Five, but I count on your broader knowledge on the subject. So, if you would be so kind, I would love a list of White Man Goes to Latin America and Goes Insane movies.”

And so, in honor of Janet, this week’s list features plenty o’ white dudes livin’ la vida loca south of the border...but we also broadened our mandate to include all manner of fish-out-of-water stories -- from aliens in New York to city slickers in the Great Beyond -- as Screengrab travels the world (and the time/space continuum) to celebrate our favorite cinematic tales of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND!

WALKER (1987)

And speaking of strange, it’s hard to get stranger than the 19th century American soldier of fortune William Walker or the eponymous cinematic tale of his misadventures conjured by the determinedly peculiar British cult director Alex Cox a century or so later. The real-life Walker invaded Mexico and Nicaragua more or less on his own and was eventually executed by officials in Honduras for being such a colossal pain in the ass. Cox was inspired to make his film (starring Ed Harris in full, spooky glower) “in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people...with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks' outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation.” Although ostensibly a period piece, Cox filled his film with anachronistic elements like tanks and helicopters to show how “nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker's genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” Reaction, as they say, was mixed. Liberals were offended by Cox’s bizarre, slapstick take on the material (prompting Robert Redford to consider making his own preachy, ponderous version...a project that mercifully never materialized). Most everyone else was merely baffled by the quasi-biopic, and Universal essentially buried the six million dollar production, which barely grossed a quarter million dollars domestically...although, according to Cox, the movie was “extremely popular in certain places. It was the second biggest film hit ever in Nicaragua, after The Sound of Music,” thus making Cox's Latin American adventure about a zillion times more worthwhile than those of either Walker or North.

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Fish-out-of-water stories basically come in two variants: nightmares about characters who fall down a rabbit hole and land in Hell, or happier fantasies about some lucky bastard who happens upon Shangri-La. Bill Forsyth's beautiful little comedy, one of the few movies that might be called achingly charming, falls into the latter camp, but with a cruelly bittersweet twist. The setting is a seaside village on the coast of Scotland; the hero, Mac (Peter Reigert), is a young Houston oil company executive who is sent there to buy up the residents' homes so that the area can be despoiled. The residents are eager to get their checks so that the company can get on with the despoiling, but Mac, who in his native environment is so robotically detached that he has no trouble conducting a phone conversation with a co-worker who he can see to wave to through the other side of his glass office wall, falls so deeply in love with the place that when his boss, Happer (Burt Lancaster), flies out to connect with him, Happer doesn't recognize him. Happer himself is an amateur astronomer who looks deeply miserable sitting behind his desk in his lair atop his own personal skyscaper; he's outgrown his identity as a staid CEO, just as Lancaster had finally, fully outgrown his movie star identity as a grinning action hunk. Even in his suit and with his private helicopter, it's clear that he belongs in this magical landscape with its wide-open possibilities, just as it's clear that Mac, even with his new casual style and unshaven face, doesn't; much as he wants to, he still has his face pressed against the glass. The last scene, after Happer has blithely ordered Mac back to Houston so that the party can continue without him hovering at its edges, cuts deep.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

The British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg, who for a while made a specialty of eroticizing alienation, made his solo directing debut with Walkabout, a ghostly 1971 strangers/strange-land story about a proper white teeenage girl and her little brother who are stranded in the Australian outback. In this science-fiction film, Roeg extended his vision to cast the whole planet Earth -- or at least America, which to an Englishman trying to make a career in moviemaking in the 1970s must have seemed like pretty much the same thing --- as the strange land into which he drops his hero, an alien visitor (David Bowie) on a mission to save his dying planet from drought. On one level, the movie is a straight-faced joke on the idea that some of our most celebrated world-shakers, such as Howard Hughes, have scarcely seemed human at times. (Bowie's mission requires him to become titanically rich by bringing, and copyrighting, his civilization's advanced technologies.) But it's also a Christ story that happens to be set in a time so debased, and with such a short attention span, that the martyred hero, though he's able to have his purity corrupted through a developing lust for drink and television, can't manage to hold the villains' interest long enough for them to bother completing his crucifixion.

WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1926)

Lon Chaney and his favorite director, Tod Browning, made this silent version of the 1926 play Kongo, which is mostly set in what used to be called "darkest Africa." Chaney plays a married stage magician who loses the use of his legs after brawling with his wife's lover, played by Lionel Barrymore. Chaney, now known affectionately as "Dead-Legs," to his associates, relocates to Africa and sets himself up as the leader of a tribe of natives, who take his magic tricks for the mark of a peerless and dangerous witch doctor. When Chaney learns that his wife died in childbirth, he assumes that Barrymore was the father and sends for the now orphaned girl. He then proceeds to mistreat and debase her as cruelly as possible, with the intention of turning her into a broken animal; his plan is to present this ruined creature to Barrymore and then treat himself to the sight of Barrymore being treated to the sight of the natives burning the girl alive. You get one guess what the big surprise twist turns out to be. Kongo itself was later filmed as a talkie with Walter Huston; it, like Zanzibar and other films such as the weirdly stagebound White Cargo, belonged to a long-dead genre of films about white men in the jungle lording their superiority over the natives, unless they (like the juvenile character in White Cargo) are driven mad by the sultry, seductive powers of the helplessly sexy natives. Zanzibar is powered by the sheer, chugging hatefulness of which both Browning and Chaney were macabre masters, which is probably why it feels fresher now than those other films. The racial component, while never front and center, is more palatable today when it's presented as part of a horror fantasy, with the white antihero as twisted as anyone he's going to meet out there in the Congo.

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (2007)

There's been a lot of ink spilled on Sylvia in the list-making blur we've all just emerged out of. Suffice it to say Sylvia is the rare movie not to capture the experience of traveling in a specific city or country, but just the essence of what it means to stay in one part of an urban European city for a few days and slowly begin to see the same strangers and places over and over again, acclimating slowly to the local rhythms. The fact that it's seen through the eyes of a young, self-consciously arty idiot doesn't matter one whit; with him out of the frame for maybe 1/3 of the film, it's as much a film about the weird pan-European charms of Strasbourg as anything.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My friends, last week in this space we paid tribute to the Top 10 films of the late, lamented Paul Newman, one of our favorite movie stars of all time...which, not surprisingly, got us thinking about the very qualities that separate the film industry’s classic, iconic Leading Men – the true gods of the silver screen – from, say, Shia LaBeouf.

My friends, I ask you: what is that special something, that ephemeral je nes sais quoi that makes for a truly great Leading Man? Is it talent? Sex appeal? Box office clout? Are we drawn more to the stars who remind us of ourselves or those who embody exactly the qualities we lack (but do our best to imitate in hopes of meeting girls)? Do the off-screen good deeds and/or drunken racist ranting and/or pro-Xenu proselytizing of the men behind the movies matter? Do we forgive the occasional bombs and missteps in a long, prolific career, or do we prefer a shorter resume packed with performances of a generally higher quality? And do foreigners count?

My friends, these difficult questions led to much consternation and debate within the hallowed halls of The Screengrab...but in the end, we all came together as a website, setting aside our individual differences to bring you this historic document, our bipartisan, multilateral picks for THE TOP 25 LEADING MEN OF ALL TIME!

25. FRANK SINATRA (1915-1998)

Sinatra's movie career had three distinct acts. In the 1940s, as a young singing heartthrob, he starred in such godawful musicals as Step Lively and The Kissing Bandit while dabbling with "acting" (as the kids call it nowadays) in such roles as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells. Some twenty years later, with his stardom set in concrete, he got paid for palling around on-screen with his buddies in such stuff as the original Ocean's Eleven and 4 for Texas, as well as for honoring his serious (or at least his self-serious) side by allowing his grumpy mid-life crisis to be recorded on camera in such downers as The Detective and The Naked Runner. But in between, starting with the famously career-reviving supporting performance as Maggio in From Here to Eternity, Sinatra had a good, solid career as a leading actor, a period which includes his political-assassination double feature of The Manchurian Candidate and the lesser-known 1954 Suddenly, in which he invades a house and plans to take out the president from a conveniently placed window. This period also included his best co-starring gig with Dean Martin in Some Came Running, his vividly sweaty impersonation of the nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild, and (especially) his rhythmic, convincing embodiment of a junkie poker dealer in The Man with the Golden Arm. The trick to getting work of this caliber out of Sinatra seems to have been that he felt in danger of fading away and washing out -- or at least becoming just another rich, famous entertainer -- and he had to deliver, a feeling that gave a charge to everything he did...for a while. When he felt his confidence return, he knew he wasn't going anywhere and so, in movies at least, he turned into a coaster. Maybe it's too bad that some way couldn't have been found to throw a good scare into him every ten years or so. But how the hell are you going to scare somebody after they've agreed to star in Dirty Dingus Magee, and even that check has cleared?

24. MONTGOMERY CLIFT (1920-1966)

James Dean was a tragic figure, but Montgomery Clift was a doomed one. When he finally died in 1966 (of arterial sclerosis, though his former acting teacher called it a slow-motion suicide), he was readying to play a lead role in Reflections in a Golden Eye opposite his friend Elizabeth Taylor; Marlon Brando took over the role. The two had a lot in common, including searingly handsome faces that would eventually be scarred by their self-destructive behavior and ill health, and a propensity for masterfully portraying emotionally complex working-class characters. That Brando was, at the time, considered the more stable of the two gives some indication of just how fucked up Monty Clift was. Brought up in an abusive family situation, wracked his entire life by ill health, and paralyzed by guilt over his own homosexuality and drug addiction, Clift was beloved by half of Hollywood and despised by the other half. So ruined was both his body and his career by the early ‘60s that he nearly became, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, the third Hollywood legend to make The Misfits their final film. Happily, Clift survived just long enough to turn in a riveting performance in Judgment at Nuremberg, but the cards were dealt for him almost from the time he was born. He didn’t live past 45, and for someone who had such a great reputation as an actor during his prime, he made precious few movies – only 17 total, and a dozen as the lead. But he left hardly a screen credit that didn’t make a lasting impression, and his legacy, curiously enough, can be seen in music: a number of bands have written songs about poor doomed Monty, including R.E.M. (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), Jets to Brazil (“Conrad”), and the Clash (“The Right Profile”).

23. JAMES CAGNEY (1899-1986)

Cagney was originally cast as the sidekick to the hero in his first big picture, The Public Enemy, but after the director, William Wellman, saw the rushes from the first day's shoot, he had a rude shock when he discovered that nobody could take their eyes off the runty smartass guy who wasn't supposed to be the star. It is a tribute to the common-sensical, whatever-works spirit of the early talkies that Wellman, rather than agonize over this perturbing situation, marched onto the set the next day and simply informed the two actors that they'd be swapping parts. Anybody who wanted to establish, with as little effort as possible, that the movies are probably the work of the devil could do worse than to screen a few of Cagney's choicest gangster movies -- say, The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, and his middle-aged kiss-off to the genre, White Heat. In these films, Cagney emanates danger and energy as naturally as an electrified fence, and his satisfaction in being able to discharge his anger in ways that are unpleasant for the people he's discharging it all over is deeply unwholesome, but no actor in history has ever been more dependably watchable. A veteran of the vaudeville stage, he used a dancer's physicality, as well as his natural likability and an unpredictable streak ot dark wit, to keep his tough guys from ever seeming like mere brutes or bullies. He had range, and he tore it up in his hoofers' musicals, including the movie he was proudest of, the George M. Cohan musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy. But he remains chiefly identified as old Hollywood's favorite unromantic urban tough guy. (Bogart, who he shot full of lead in a couple of movies, has the romantic division sewn up.)

22. BURT LANCASTER (1913-1994)

Lancaster established his stardom as a big manly hunk of action star, but he's endured better than many of the trigger-happy lunks who starred in Hollywood action pictures, because he was both a throwback to the days of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and a predecessor to the gravity-defying stars of Hong Kong martial arts movies. A former gymnast, Lancaster had turned to acting after an injury cut short his career as a circus acrobat, and in such movies as The Crimson Pirate (co-starring his former circus partner, Nick Cravat, who appeared in nine of Lancaster's movies, and who died the same year Burt did) and Carol Reed's Trapeze, he demonstrated that it was possible for a big man to spin and pirouette through the air in ways that were not dreamt of in John Wayne's philosophy. At first, other aspects of the actor's art, such as speaking dialogue and making it through a whole scene without yawning, came less naturally to him than dancing in mid-air, but Lancaster, a long-range-plan kind of guy, became interested in developing the skills that would enable him to keep his career going when he could somersault no more. He also seemed to think that it would be a useful thing to make a few movies that would be good enough that he could stand to look at himself in the mirror the day after the premiere. In some of the "serious" pictures he made (The Devil's Disciples, The Rose Tattoo, Come Back, Little Sheba, Birdman of Alcatraz) when he was still in his beefcake prime, Lancaster seemed to be sponsoring his own on-the-job-training acting course. The training paid off when Luchino Visconti offered him the role of the prince in the 1963 epic masterpiece The Leopard, arguably the finest work of his career and one more film that likely wouldn't have been made at all without Lancaster's participation. Infuriatingly, The Leopard would not be seen in its full, uncut majesty in the United States until 1983. However, there was something fitting about that, because by the time it did arrive here, Lancaster's work in Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1981) and Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), to name two, had established him as one of the great old men of the movies, a weathered but still-beautiful oak of a man whose courtly bearing seemed to mark him as an emissary from a better time.

GARY COOPER (1901-1961)

Gary Cooper is one of the greatest stars in Hollywood history, and yet he never strayed very far from one very basic role. That was both the upside and the downside of the old star system; it may have prevented more versatile actors from taking on roles that would have let them break out of their public personality, but it also kept stars of somewhat limited talents thriving by letting them play to their strengths. Cooper the actor wasn’t hard to define: he was the straight-shooting, simple fella who might not have been too bright, but damn it, he knew what was right, and he was going to do what was best no matter what. He essentially filled that narrow role again and again throughout his career, mostly in the Westerns that made him famous; it was a limitation he recognized, but probably never fully accepted. When the roles within that archetype were good enough, when they were handled by capable directors and backed up with good supporting casts, you could see why Gary Cooper became a legend: as Alvin York in Sergeant York, as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, and most especially, and unforgettably, as Will Kane in High Noon, he didn’t so much transcend his limitations as an actor as he did fill out the outlines of his role with complete perfection, with nothing left out. In life, Cooper was a much more complex and contradictory character than any of the roles he played on screen, but the biggest contradiction of all is that the actor, with all his shortcomings, will be remembered long after the man is forgotten.

Click Here for Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)

Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

19. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

When Truffaut delivered his famed advice about the impossibility of anti-war film, he might as well have been talking about movies like The Great Escape. Not that it’s anything even remotely like an anti-war film: though its final moments contain some of the futility and brutality of war, they’re aimed squarely at the enemy, and the movie itself is a pure, unvarnished celebration of movie-style heroism and the fighting man at his best. But when Truffaut noted that action argues only for itself, this is the sort of thing he meant: even the ultimate futility of the real-life escape attempt fictionalized by John Sturges in this WWII classic is swept away on the back of all the thrilling set pieces, cunning scenes of calculation, defiant acts of heroism, and sheer thrilling action. Even if you know what’s going to happen to the individual escapees in the end, you can’t help but get caught up in the excitement of it all again and again, borne along by Elmer Bernstein’s unforgettable score and some larger-than-life performances by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve “Hey, Guys, Let’s Throw a Motorcycle Chase Scene in Here, Why Not?” McQueen. Even the poster knew what it was selling, tagging the movie as “THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT,” putting a good-times spin on the 30-years-later words of a rapper who issued his grim tales of ghetto warfare under the telling title Your Entertainment, My Reality. The Great Escape even spawned a genre of epic war pictures that clung to its formal elements: the dangerous-secret-mission plot, the all-star cast arrayed on boxes on the poster, all given colorful nicknames, the overblown heist-movie action elements. But the lousy quality of most of its imitators shouldn’t be held against it: its ‘reality’ may have been pure fantasy, but you can’t watch despairing anti-war pictures all the time.

18. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

This awesomely well-executed slab of 1950s melodrama is based on the first novel by soldier turned writer James Jones, and it isn't actually set in wartime: it chronicles the frustrations and tensions that are building among the men killing time at a military base in Hawaii in 1941, which will explode when the Japanese attack on December 7. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's scene on the beach deserves an automatic inclusion in any montage of legendary screen make-out scenes, and Frank Sinatra's supporting performance as the uncontainable Maggio more than justified both his career comeback and the gangsters-got-him-that-job rumors that were set in stone in the early scenes of The Godfather. (Even though, sadly, the rumors probably weren't true; it's more likely that Ava Gardner got him that job.) But the movie belongs to Montgomery Clift's beautiful performance as the doomed bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, who loves the army and can only say, when it's pointed out that the army is making his life miserable, "A man loves a thing, that don't mean it's gotta love him back." Which is pretty good advice no matter what you love, especially if it's the movies.

17. BEFORE THE RAIN (1994)

This Macedonian film, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, shows how the passions that war thrives on spill over uncontainably into the lives of people who want no part of them. The Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija plays a burned out war photographer who, after being affected by a violent ourburst in supposedly civilized London, goes home to retire in the Macedonian countryside and finds that the remote village that represents peace and tranquility to him has been split by civil war and the woman he left behind lives in fear for her daughter's life. The powerful-looking, bearded Šerbedžija does about as good a job as any actor ever has at suggesting an intelligently troubled man's desire for a peaceful life, and his feeling that no alternative could be worth living.

16. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)

(See #11)

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

OST: "Local Hero"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Local Hero is a perfect example of a soundtrack that, in many ways, outstrips the film it was meant to complement -- and in this case, at least, it's a pity. Which isn't to say that the score isn't absolutely wonderful. It is, or it wouldn't be listed here. I'm not normally a fan of Dire Straits or of Mark Knopfler's solo work, but the stirring, sentimental but never overdone combination of blues-influenced electric guitar, sweeping synthesizer stings, and Scottish folk music he put together is perfectly suited to the visual, narrative, and emotional arc of the movie. The soundtrack itself sold more copies than the movie sold tickets, and it became so popular amongst his fans that he began to incorporate some of its better tracks into his solo shows. It's an amazing piece of work; the pity is that the movie has, over time, become far less known.

A movie of good grace, light step, and gentle humor, which pulls at the heartstrings in an exceptionally powerful way without ever becoming expressly manipulative, Local Hero is the lost Scottish director Bill Forsyth's best film -- and his last great one, as well. It tells the story of Mac (Peter Riegert, charming as hell), an American oil and gas executive who visits a remote village on the Scottish coastline in an attempt to buy up property cheap and open it up for drilling. Complications set in, as complications do, as the locals prove both quirky and reluctant, difficult to communicate with, seductive, crammed with local color, and worst of all, incredibly friendly and accepting of the alienated Mac, who more and more begins to think that throwing all of these people out of their homes on the cheap isn't what he wants to do with his life. His dilemma lies in convincing his employer, the oil tycoon Felix Happer -- played with hilarious belligerence by Burt Lancaster in one of his best film roles -- to abandon his drilling plans, into which he's already sunk millions.

The music itself, for all its wistful beauty and nearly trascendental appropriateness to the material, isn't all that divergent from the typical Dire Straits experience; Knopfler even drafts some of his bandmates, including bassist John Illsley and keyboardist Alan Clark, to contribue. But what makes it more than just a record of Dire Straits instrumental tracks is Knopfler's sense of restraint. He understands scoring enough to know the importance of returning to a strong melodic theme that runs through the entire work, rather than following the pop-record temptation of trying to make every track sound distinct; and he throws in just enough elements of traditional Scottish folk music to give the soundtrack a very particular feel, but never beats you over the head with ill-gotten 'authenticity'. The end result is a beautiful, listenable piece of work.

BEST TRACKS: The best-known track on the album is "Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero)", which appears in the film as the end credits music but has become a regular fixture of Mark Knopfler's concerts as a final encore. It's a fine piece of music, no doubt, but it's not the best on the record: that honor belongs to "The Ceilidh: Louis' Favorite/Billy's Tune", the song featured at the local dance that forms the movie's emotional high point, for which Knopfler brings in a local Scottish folk outfit, the Acetones, who perform gorgeously. Also of note is the recurring main theme, which appears in various forms as "The Rocks and the Water" and "The Rocks and the Thunder", and "The Way It Always Starts", the soundtrack's sole vocal number, sung by Scottish pop singer Gerry Rafferty (who, curiously, doesn't appear in the film).

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Sydney Pollack, 1934--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Sydney Pollack has died at the age of 73, ending a recent struggle with cancer. As a young theater buff, Pollack, who grew up in South Bend, Indiana, went to New York after graduating high school and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where he first studied under and later served as assistant to the legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner. Early in his career, Pollack appeared on Broadway in A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Dark Is Light Enough as well as on TV, incluyding episodes of Plyahouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Have Gun, Will Travel. After Burt Lancaster, who he would later direct in the late sixties in The Scalphunters and Castle Keep, suggested that Pollack consider directing, he stepped behind the camera for work on several TV series and eventually broke into movies with the 1965 The Slender Thread. He brought a skilled rapport with actors and a taste for old-Hollywood glamour to his feature film work, and he became associated with certain high-caliber performers who placed a lot of trust in him--particularly Robert Redford, who he directed in seven starring roles, beginning with the 1966 Tennessee Williams adaptation This Property Is Condemned and including the winner of the 1985 Academy Award for Best Picture, Out of Africa. They also worked together on The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand, probably the most successful of Redford's old-style romances, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, Havana, and The Electric Horseman, which paired Redford with Jane Fonda. Pollack was also an important figure in Fonda's career, having directed her in the 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which marked her transformation from sex-kitten comedienne to hard-edged dramatic actress. That picture went a long way towards establishing Pollack as a new-style Hollywood pro; it won Academy Award nominations for Fonda, Pollack, and Susannah York, and earned Gig Young a Best Supporting Oscar for his brilliant performance as a dance-marathon emcee.

It was the 1982 Tootsie, though, that really took Pollack's career to a couple of different levels. A massive hit and instant classic, it elevated his profile as a director. And because Pollack earned many of the film's biggest laughs in his on-screen performance as Dustin Hoffman's agent, it unexpectedly revived his acting career. (Pollack took on the role at Hoffman's insistence; the actor apparently thought that the movie could benefit from the brio that Pollack brought to the many legendary screaming fights that the two of them were having off-camera.) After Tootsie and Out of Africa, he directed such big pictures as The Firm, Random Hearts, and The Interpretor; he also contributed memorable performances to Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her, Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where he was brought in an emergency replacement for Harvey Keitel. In the last several years of his career, he also branched out as a producer of others' films, including The Fabulous Baker Boys, Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Quiet American, 40 Shades of Blue, and Michael Clayton, where he also played George Clooney's boss. He also served as executive producer on his own last film as a director, the 2005 documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry.

Paul Scofield, 1922 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Paul Scofield has died, at the age of 86. He had been suffering from leukemia. Widely regarded as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation, Scofield had a richer career in the theater than in the movies, where his recessive, slightly chilly presence as much as his devotion to the stage may have prevented him from ever becoming a major star. Yet he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his fourth film and second Hollywood-funded production, playing Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (1966), director Fred Zinnemann Oscar-garlanded film version of Robert Bolt's play. (Scofield had earlier played the Nazi villain in John Frankenheimer's The Train, starring Burt Lancaster. Maybe he and Lancaster got on well, because one of his few other adventures in Hollywood hackwork came in the 1973 Lancaster vehicle Scorpio.) Scofield already had a Tony for the Broadway production of the play, in which he had made his American debut. Even after winning the Oscar, Scofield was mostly seen in movie theaters in filmed versions of plays, such as the movie of Peter Brooks's famously icy production of King Lear with Scofield in the title role, and Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, made in 1973 as part of Ely Landau's American Film Theater subscription series. In 1989, he appeared briefly as the King of France in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, and a year later he played Hamlet' father's ghost in Franco Zeffirelli's ill-advised film of the play with Mel Gibson in the lead. He also played the historian Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show (1994) and the witchfinding judge in the 1996 The Crucible. His final film role was as the voice of the horse, Boxer, in an ambitious 1999 TV movie version of Orwell's Animal Farm.

Deborah Kerr, 1921 - 2007

Peter Smith — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Deborah Kerr has died, after a long bout with Parkinson's, at eighty-six. The Scottish-born Kerr first made her mark in English movies with big, challenging roles in the Powell and Pressburger films The Life and Death of Major Blimp and Black Narcissus. In 1946, she made her first Hollywood film, co-starring with Clark Gable in The Hucksters, but probably her best-remembered screen pairing was with Burt Lancaster in the 1953 From Here to Eternity, where their iconic kissing scene lying on a beach set an enduring standard for thirtysomething romance. (Sixteen years later, director John Frankenheimer reunited the two of them for The Gypsy Moths, a yawner perhaps most notable for featuring the then forty-eight-year-old actress's only nude scene.)

Although she could be a charming ingenue, from the start of her career there was always something about Kerr that suggested a maturity beyond her years. If that put off some executives who liked their actresses simpering, it made for a strong presence and the ability to bring suggestions of depth and emotional complication to the right role. She triumphed in such parts as the adulterous military wife in From Here to Eternity and the loving but discontented wife of an Australian rover (Robert Mitchum) in The Sundowners, directed — like Eternity — by Fred Zinnemann. She won Oscar nominations for both those films, as she did for The King and I and Separate Tables. (She was nominated a total of six times without winning, though she was given a special honorary career Oscar in 1993.) She basically retired from movies after 1969, though she came back once to star in the small 1985 English picture The Assam Garden and sometimes turned up on TV until 1986; she also starred in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee's Seascape in 1975. Her survivors include her husband of forty-seven years, Peter Viertel, the author of the novel White Hunter, Black Heart. — Phil Nugent