The Screengrab : donald westlake

The Rep Report (January 9 - 15)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A. has long been one of the best-hidden features from the director's '60s golden age. Godard claimed the "Richard Stark" (i.e., Donald Westlake) novel The Jugger as the credited basis for the script, but nobody bothered to get Westlake's permission or cut him a check, with the result that the writer managed to get a proper release of the film in the U.S. squashed. So its appearance at Film Forum for two weeks starting today counts as big news even for the Forum, which has taken to showcasing Godard's color classics from his Pop Art phase at the rate of about one a year. The funny thing is, the movie's connection to Westlake might be just another admiring reference point in a movie that features characters named "Donald Siegel" (for the veteran b-movie director who would ultimately hit paydirt with the original Dirty Harry and "David Goodis" (for the crime novelist whose Down There provided the basis for Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player), as well as villains named "Richard Nixon" and "Robert McNamara", and that Godard claimed was his attempt to remake The Big Sleep with his then-wife and muse Anna Karina in the Bogart role. (Her male co-star is Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Don Siegel.) This splashy affair, described by J. Hoberman as "more devoted to the vulgar modernism of mid-20th-century pop than any movie Godard made before or would make after," also features a cameo by Marianne Faithfull, singing "As Tears Go By" in the first full bloom of her misspent youth. It's being shown in a gleaming new 35-mm. print.

The first half of Film Society of Lincoln's Center' annual "Dance on Camera Festvial" is underway and runs through this weekend, with the usual invaluable collection of performance shorts and features and documentaries, including a tribute to Busby Berkeley that makes room for a screening of his 1943 surreal choreography classic The Gang's All Here. The series concludes next weekend with the Indian musical The Chosen One/Ishanou and an American Masters documentary profile of Jerome Robbins.

Related Stories: Donald Westlake, 1933 - 2008

Donald Westlake, 1933-2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Donald Westlake, who died New Year's Eve, at the age 0f 75, while vacationing in Mexico, was best known as a "crime writer", and in that capacity he won three Edgar Awards (including one for Best Screenplay for his adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters, directed by Stephen Frears in 1990) and was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the title of Grand Master. But such tributes barely hint at Westlake's stature as a supreme, all-around entertainer with a wide range within his chosen specialty. After publishing his first novel, The Mercenaries, in 1960, Westlake established such a steady rate of production that, in addition to the many books he published under his own name, he also adopted more than ten pseudonyms, partly to deflect criticism of him for overtaxing the marketplace. (He may have also had other, personal reasons, for sticking the name "John B. Allan" on the 1961 book Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America's Most Talented Actress and the World's Most Beautiful Woman and other pseudonyms on the pulp porn novels he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, some of them in collaboration with Lawrence Block, which have titles such as Sin Sucker and Campus Tramp.) Westlake also matched certain pseuds up with recurring characters, for instance writing a string of mysteries about a character named Mitch Tobin under the name "Tucker Coe".

His best-known alter ego was Richard Stark, who, starting with 1962's The Hunter, wrote more than twenty taut, mean thrillers about Parker, a cooled-out, super-efficient sociopath of a professional thief. Under his own name, Westlake wrote, among other titles, the John Dortmunder series, detailing the often hilarious adventures of an intelligent, hard-working, frequently put-upon crook with a knack for gaudily designed heists that tended to run into equally gaudy complications. (The series began with 1972's The Hit Rock, which he said began as a Parker novel; he realized that he needed to concoct a new hero for it when the plot started turning funny on him.) Stark and Westlake both kept 'em coming until 1974, when Parker abruptly disappeared after Westlake, as he would later say, lost internal contact with the hateful bastard. But in the late '90s, Westlake seemed to get back in touch with his Parker side, and Richard Stark began producing again, even as Westlake continued to publish under his own name such entertainments as The Ax, The Hook, and the further activities of John Dortmunder in such novels as Watch Your Back!

In addition to adapting Thompson for the Grifters screenplay (and, more recently, Patricia Highsmith for the 2005 Ripley Under Ground), Westlake wrote one terrific original screenplay, for the chilling yet witty serial-killer movie The Stepfather (1987), directed by Joseph Ruben and starring a then-unknown Terry O'Quinn. The list of Westlake novels made into movies include the 1973 caper comedy Cops and Robbers, which he adapted himself; The Hot Rock, with Robert Redford as Dortmunder; the calamitous 1974 Bank Shot starring George C, Scott; the 1982 Jimmy the Kid, in which a Dortmunder novel somehow got turned into a vehicle for Gary Coleman; the 2001 What's the Worse That Could Happen?, in which a Dortmunder novel somehow got turned into a vehicle for Martin Lawrence; and the 2005 French film Le Couperet, directed by Costa-Gavras and based on the novel The Ax. There have also been a slew of movies base on the Parker novels, though for some reason the character's name has yet to survive the screenplay adaptation process. The grandaddy of Richard Stark movies is John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank, based on The Hunter and starring Lee Marvin as the monolithically homicidal "Walker." (It was remade, in 1999, as Payback, with Mel Gibson as "Porter.") Jean-Luc Godard also used the Parker novel The Jugger as the (loose) basis for his 1966 film Made in U.S.A., without paying for the honor, which would ultimately cause his movie distribution problems in the States. Westlake's last novel, a Dortmunder number called Get Real, is scheduled to be published in the spring.

Take Five: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A., a documentary about the massive national debt being accrued by the United States, opens in limited release today. Using charts, graphs, and mountains of economics statistics, Creadon – the man who brought us the charming crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay – has essentially created An Inconvenient Truth 2: The Doomsday Debt. In the film, which features guest appearances from a pantheon of econ-nerd luminaries including mega-investor Warren Buffet, Comptroller General David M. Walker, and celebrated presidential candidate/crazy person Ron Paul, we are shown how our unthinkably huge national debt may lead to war, inflation, the collapse of our international alliances, economic catastrophe, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria. But hey, every movie with those three wonderful letters ‘U.S.A.’ in the title has to be about how we’re all doomed because of the short-sighted policies of warmongering, tax-cutting, pork-barreling, corporate-welfare-loving presidential administrations! Maybe it’s just some residual patriotism from the Fourth of July, but this movie inspired us to create a Take Five featuring other ‘U.S.A’ movies that aren’t quite so bleak. Or, at least, don’t have so many pie charts.

UNDERWORLD U.S.A. (1961)

A little-seen late-period noir from the underrated Sam Fuller, Underworld U.S.A. is a flawed film, particularly in its underwhelming cast, predictable action, and sometimes hokey dialogue. But Cliff Robertson is dynamite as Tolly Devlin, a man who, after seeing his father murdered by two-bit hoods, decided that revenge is a dish served straight out of the freezer, as he spends the next 20 years infiltrating their organization.

MADE IN U.S.A. (1967)

One of the most impenetrable relics from when Jean-Luc Godard really started to go off the narrative rails and into an experimental/revolutionary world of his own, Made in U.S.A. purports to be – and, to a certain albeit incomprehensible degree, actually is – an adaptation of one of Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark” novels. Bu really, it’s just a glorious excuse for Anna Karina to lounge around in a (French-speaking) Atlantic City hotel room, talking about socialism.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

Barbara Kopple set out to make a documentary about the bitter electoral dispute that was tearing the United Mine Workers union apart in the mid-1970s. Instead, after visiting an unauthorized strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, she found a new subject: the desperation, suffering, and nobility of the miners as they struggled to survive under the weight of bosses who crippled them at every turn. Moving, gripping, suspenseful, infuriating, enraging, affirming and beautiful – everything a good documentary should be.

GRANDVIEW, U.S.A. (1984)

Made during that period of the 1980s where they would apparently greenlight a movie about any old thing, this forgotten relic by Randal “The Blue Lagoon” Kleiser involves a painfully underfed C. Thomas Howell, who is a race car driver and aspiring oceanographer for some reason, falling in love with Jamie Lee Curtis, who owns the local demolition derby in the grand tradition of movie sports bosses who look nothing like Bud Selig.

INVASION U.S.A. (1985)

Now we’re talkin’! After all this 'waah-waah, the economy is failing, the unions are dying, some gangsters killed my dad' nonsense, here comes Chuck Norris, with a sleeveless denim shirt and a big pickup truck, to make everything all right. He does this by single-handedly wiping out a huge invasion force, consisting of a wide variety of swarthy foreign nationals, who have had the unmitigated audacity to take over some of our finest shopping malls. Now that’s the U.S.A. I’m talking about!

Reviews By Request: The Hot Rock (1972, Peter Yates)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “Uncle Crizzle” (a.k.a. Craig Lindsey) for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

The more heist movies I see, the more I realize that the secret to a good one lies in three factors. First, the characters have to be engaging. There are only a limited number of heists one can pull onscreen, but if we enjoy the people onscreen it scarcely matters. Second, the script shouldn’t run out of ideas before the ending, so that the audience won’t be too sure where everything stands until all the pieces finally fall into place. Third- and perhaps most importantly- the movie has to be light on its feet. If the style or the storytelling becomes overbearing, the movie will turn into a slog, which is pretty much the last thing you want from a heist movie.

Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock succeeds on all three counts, with the added bonus of getting better as it goes along. In the opening scenes, I was expecting a fairly standard issue heist movie, albeit one with an impressive, quintessential seventies-era cast. But The Hot Rock has plenty of surprises up its sleeve, not least that the story’s central heist scene happens even before the midpoint of the film. Best of all, it takes itself just seriously enough that it doesn’t feel like a lark, but never too seriously. It’s a lot of fun.

But back to that central heist, which involves the titular rock, a massive diamond that’s long been a point of contention between the ruling factions of an obscure (and apocryphal) African nation. The country’s ambassador to the U.N., played by Moses Gunn, hires the recently-released-from-prison John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) to mastermind a plan to steal the stone for him. Dortmunder’s team- comprised of safecracker George Segal, driver Ron Liebman, and explosives expert Paul Sand- exhaustively plan the job which, while quaint by modern-day standards, is a pretty good one. Of course, it doesn’t quite go according to plan, and it’s the aftermath of the heist that makes the movie so enjoyable.

The Hot Rock was based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, who I was familiar with primarily for his hard-hitting crime novels written as Richard Stark and his nihilistic screenplay for The Grifters. However, this film is based on one of Westlake’s lighter Dortmunder books, which gave me some pause since my only previous exposure to a Dortmunder story was the godawful 2001 Martin Lawrence vehicle What’s the Worst That Can Happen? That film took Westlake’s story and buried it in shticky storytelling and hammy performances until it became all but unwatchable, and I feared the worst from The Hot Rock as well.

However, the difference between the two movies is telling. Whereas the broadly comic style of What’s the Worst That Can Happen? didn’t suite Westlake’s terse prose one bit, Yates wisely plays the story straight. Primarily known up to that time as an action director (his biggest hit had been 1968’s Bullitt), Yates never leans too hard on the film’s comedy. Instead, he directs the story like a straight thriller, matter-of-factly following his band of crooks from one complication to the next. This only makes the movie that much funnier. Due to unforeseen difficulties, the original heist ends up leading to another job, then another, then yet another, each more unlikely than the last. And the team, which seemed so well-chosen at the beginning, becomes less so with each successive job. Consider that Liebman is perfect behind the wheel of damn near any car, but fairly out of sort when he finds himself in an entirely different sort of vehicle.

As I said before, the cast is a lot of fun. I’ve never been a big Robert Redford fan, but he’s a natural here as the master thief who has to keep his cool in order to think himself out of the messes in which he keeps finding himself. Segal is his usual reliable self as Dortmunder’s trusty lieutenant, all business to the outside world but always kvetching to the boss. Liebman and Sand have some good moments as the other team members. Gunn gets lots of laughs as the seemingly imperturbable diplomat, at first amused by his involvement in the crime (observe his wry smile when he states, “I am a criminal”), only to become increasingly frustrated with every new development in the case. And there’s a choice supporting role for the one and only Zero Mostel, as Sand’s shifty father. Given his over-the-top signature performance in The Producers, I sort of expected Mostel to clash with the others, but instead his outsize personality is in service of an outsize character, which allows him to fit in perfectly with the ensemble. It’s an indelible character turn, with the unfortunate side effect of making me wonder how many priceless Mostel performances we lost to the blacklist.

The Hot Rock is yet another reminder of the kind of action movies Hollywood was great at making during the seventies, but not nearly as good at today. The cast is enjoyable, the storytelling efficient, and most of all, the direction never calls attention to itself. As fun as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films sometimes are, there’s always a layer of self-consciousness to them, as though Soderbergh deliberately means to evoke a bygone filmmaking style. By contrast, Yates trusts in his story enough to stay out of the way, and the result is a highly enjoyable example of its genre, and a darn good entertainment in general.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!