The Screengrab : james caan

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Nick Nolte in WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN? (1978)

You could argue that this isn't technically a death scene, since Nolte's character doesn't die on-camera; in his last scene as Hicks, the Marine turned heroin courier, he's walking along the train tracks in the desert heat, determined to hold up his end of the agreement to meet his partners somewhere down the line, despite the fact that he's bullet-riddled and bleeding to death. He staggers along, alternately wincing in pain and performing old basic-training drill session games like a man fighting off sleep, and the next time we see him, he's dead. But seldom has an actor thrown himself with greater conviction and physical force into the act of dying. Nolte was in the best shape of his life -- Veronica Geng wrote that his body "was burned down to pure will" -- and especially well-equipped to seem alive enough to fully communicate the cost of a man's death. When he finally goes down, it's as if a whole species had been wiped out for good. (PN)

Bruno S in STROSZEK (1977)

Werner Herzog himself doesn't even know what the dancing chicken is a metaphor for. Perhaps Ian Curtis thought he knew. Even as Bruno S tries to lift himself out of life, he finds himself only circling up and down, while his truck winds around until it explodes, and they can't stop the dancing chicken. (HC)

Sean Connery in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

John Huston's long-delayed version of the Kipling story -- he'd originally planned to use Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable in the roles played here, magnificently, by Michael Caine and Sean Connery -- has a childlike desire to believe in adventure-book heroism that is shaded by an old man's wry awareness that violence and conquest are never purely heroic, and that while futile gestures can seem stirring and beautiful, they're also, well, futile. Connery goes out in glory here, as he would a dozen years later in The Untouchables, and a word should be said for his and Caine's sidekick, Saeed Jaffrey, whose last scene would bring Gunga Din out of the grave, saluting. (PN)

James Caan in THE GODFATHER (1972) & John Cazale in THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

Once upon a time, Michael Corleone had two brothers. A small army took one away from him. The other one he had to take care of himself. Here again we have the dichotomy between quiet death scenes and big, loud ones, and it's no surprise that Sonny, who for all his faults is the white-hot life force in The Godfather, an uncontainable live wire surrounded by people older or meeker or more icily calculating, goes out big. Perhaps more haunting is the death of John Cazale's Fredo, who goes out like an already flickering candle hit by the breeze, or like an afterthought. Sitting in a little boat and about to feel his brains emerging from the front of his head, he bows his head to pray -- and while it could be that he senses what's coming, it would be totally in character if he just wanted to catch a fish. (PN)

Slim Pickens in PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

Sam Peckinpah's elegy for the West is also an elegy for a disappearing generation of character actors. When James Coburn requests that old sheriff Slim Pickens accompany him to a shoot-out with outlaw L. Q. Jones, Pickens replies that he's gotten to a place where he doesn't do much of anything "unless there's a piece of gold attached." He then loads his gun and returns the money that Coburn's just thrown to him, thus establishing himself as one of those Peckinpah characters who mainly talks so that he can have the thrill of contradicting himself. (Jones, who goes out with shaving cream on his face, shot down while executing a comic heartbreaker of a wobbly-legged attempt at a heroic last charge, is another: "Us old boys oughtn't to be doin' this to each other," he complains to Coburn, while the two of them enthusiastically go about doing it to each other.) Fatally ventilated, Pickens, followed by his no-nonsense wife and deputy (Katy Jurado), staggers to the side of the river to die. His head slowly moves from side to side, so that it isn't clear what he's looking at, but from the expression on his face, you'd pay a lot to see whatever he's seeing. (PN)

HAL 9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1967)

Kubrick has a reputation as a cold bastard, but it's a terrible, moving moment when the only character in 2001 who seems to have a past, some intellect, and an emotional life bites the dust, out there in the iciness of space where there's no one he can turn to for help. You will be remembered, HAL 9000. (PN)

Vera Clouzot in LES DIABOLIQUES (1955)

I should start by mentioning that the above clip will spoil the greatest shock of this shocking movie. All of the tension in the prior 97 minutes comes to a sudden, heartstopping moment. I've seen this movie many times, and have yet to breathe during it. Be wary. (HC)

Alec Guinness in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949)

This one offers quality in bulk, because Guinness plays eight characters -- the members of the D'ascoyne family, each of whom has to be eradicated by the social-climbing antihero (Dennis Price) so that he will have no obstacles standing between himself and the dukedom he means to inherit. It's hard to single out a favorite, but we'll confess to a special affection for the one that Price doesn't have to take out himself: Admiral Lord Horatio D'ascoyne, who dies as "a result of a naval disaster which arose from a combination of natural obstinacy and a certain confusion of mind." (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Howard Zieff, 1927 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The director Howard Zieff died this past weekend of complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 81. Odds are that the name doesn't mean as much to you as it might. Zieff made his best pictures in the 1970s, but his name simply wasn't one of those that people associated with the glories of that movie era. And he had a special problem, so far as his lingering reputation goes, in that his biggest hits tended to be less distinctive than some of his flops, so that to the degree that he had an image as a director, it may have been as something of a hack. But Zieff, like Michael Ritchie (Smile) and the screenwriter W. D. Richter (who wrote Zieff's first movie, the 1973 Slither), other eccentric talents who left their mark on that period without winning much acclaim for it, he was a smart, funny entertainer with his own peculiar comic sense and a feel for everyday American insanity. He first made his presence felt in the culture with his work in advertising, both as a director of TV commercials and his work in print ads. Zieff was one of the first directors to develop a name for himself as a promising talent based on his ad work: in 1967, when he was 40 years old and still half a dozen years away from his first movie job, he was the subject of a profile in Time magazine, which noted that he had made 200 commercials in six years and called him "the leading practitioner of what the trade calls the indirect sell." (Translation: his ads inspired public affection for the products they touted not because they made such a great case for the products themselves but because the ads were so entertaining.) More recently, Zieff's ad photography was the subject of a 2002 show at a West Coast gallery. Talking about his penchant for using faces, some of which were attached to people he'd spotted on the streets of New York, that were different than the usual blond hair/Colegate smile models that dominated advertising in the Mad Men era, Zieff said of his models, "They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces." When he became a movie director, this lust for great faces--faces that could inspire both laughter and warmth--manifested itself as a love for character actors that sometimes gives his best work an almost Preston Sturges quality. He was devoted to the late Richard B. Schull, a character man with a strangled-sounding yet mellow whine of a voice and a friendly, baggy kisser, who helped get Slither off to a sweet start, celebrating his liberation from prison by singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Slither--the recent horror comedy of the same title is not a remake--was a very Watergate-year kind of comedy, a paranoid road movie about a paroled robber and former high school football hero (James Caan) who is wandering around the country trying to find some loot that the Schull character has tried to direct him towards. The key the the movie's charm may be that Caan--who came to the picture after playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, and who gives the performance of someone who's rather enjoying the novelty of finally getting to play the sanest and least assertive person in a movie--seems to just be along for the ride, carrying out this quest because he has absolutely nothing better to do. The cast also includes Peter Boyle and Louise Lasser, who play a married couple and come across as unexpectedly, almost supernaturally right for each other, and Sally Kellerman as an oddly fetching trigger-happy speed freak. The movie's paranoid vibe is established through such devices as a massive black van--it looks like Darth Vader's weekend getaway vehicle-- that follows the heroes everywhere at the pace of a sinister gold cart, accompanied by its own theme song. Yet it has a genuine grunginess to it, a faint scent of summer days spent in cars and motels in the middle of nowhere. (It's the only movie I've ever seen where a character who is involved in violent chicanery gets stopped by a cop and threatened with a citation for driving while barefoot.) The combination of everyday frustrations and baroque dark fantasy (which, in the end, turns out to have some very ordinary roots) makes Slither a very funny excursion into screwball-surreal Americana.

Zieff's second picture, 1975's Hearts of the West, has a more raggedy script (by Rob Thompson) but a richly felt milieu--it's set in Hollywood in the early 1930s, which looks like a factory set-up on Dress Like a Cowboy Day--and a great deal of charm. It stars Jeff Bridges, all of 25 and as convincingly ingenuous as a freshly hatched chick, as Lewis Tater, who goes West in hopes of becoming a Western dime novelist and gets roped into a job acting in cowboy pictures. Besides Bridges, Hearts features especially fine work by Blythe Danner as a script girl named Trout, Alan Arkin as a touchy director, and Andy Griffith as a veteran cowboy type with a handsome, rugged exterior. (He looks exactly like the guy who Central Casting would have sent to play his part, which in a Zieff project is the surest sign that you shouldn't trust him any farther than you could throw him.) The movie also features a collection of Western stuntmen, played by such modern-cowpoke types as Matt Clark and Burton Gilliam, and when Zieff had an excuse to spend time with actors like these playing characters like these, his work had the happy hum of a man being paid for being totally in his element, as much as Michael Bay on a day when all he has to do is blow something up. Neither of these pictures is currently available on DVD, which is something that I, for one, would really like to hear President Obama address in his speech before Congress tonight.

Zieff finally had a couple of hits: the 1978 House Calls, which starred Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson and which was later made into a TV sitcom even though the movie was sort of one already, and the 1980 Goldie Hawn vehicle Private Benjamin, a film that I like to think he made just because, as an old man, he could picture what a terrific poster it would make: Goldie, in her Gomer Pyle drag, pouting. In 1984 he helmed a remake of Preston Sturges's great Unfaithfully Yours, with Dudley Moore in the role originated by Rex Harrison. I have no evidence to support this theory, but nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that he only agreed to do it after studio goons kidnapped his grandchildren. The movie is bad, but not really that bad considering that the whole idea behind it is blasphemous, and does boast a performance by Albert Brooks that true devotees of comic genius will want to savor with one finger on the fast=forward button. Zieff's last films were the 1991 My Girl and its sequel, the 1994 My Girl 2, after which he was forced to retire in the face of the onset of Parkinson's. My own favorite of his later films is 1989's The Dream Team, which is formulaic but likable, and which reunited the director with Peter Boyle, to great effect: he plays an institutionalized dude who thinks he's Jesus, and he would get no argument from me. The movie also boasts excellent performances by Michael Keaton, Lorraine Bracco, and Christopher Lloyd, and also has a few bits, such as a scene in an army-surplus clothing store run by a hard-to-faze dude played by Jack Duffy, that showed that, when he could fit it in, Zieff's genius for faces was still firing on all cylinders.

If It's Tueday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Every time Carmine Caridi turns on the TV and sees James Caan kicking the shit out of his brother-in-law or getting gunned down at the toll booth in The Godfather, something inside him dies a little. In his account of the making of that movie in the new Vanity Fair, Mark Seal report that Caridi was cast, as in told that he had the role, as Sonny Corlone, and managed to hold onto it for a few days. "Caridi", Seal writes, "was a Sonny straight out of [Mario] Puzo’s book: a six-foot-four, black-haired Italian-American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, 'One of the boys made it!' 'Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,' Caridi says. Caan recalls, 'He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. And I said, "Hey, don’t do this. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you." … He was going to this club and that club,' meaning clubs frequented by the boys from Caan’s old neighborhood. 'They said, "What do you want to hang around us for?" And he says, "Well, I want to get the feeling." They said, "We’ll give you the feeling. We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 90."'”

Caridi may have been the very image of Sonny Corleone down to his toes, but he didn't have the inside view of the casting process that Caan had by then. Caan was part of the core group of four--along with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall--who Francis Coppola wanted from the very start. He met with active resistance to both Brando and Pacino from the studio, and though Caan seemed to have the best chance of all them of getting into the movie, the studio wanted Coppola to consider him for Michael, Pacino's part. "That was the last thing Francis wanted," Caan says now, "because he had it in his mind that Michael was the Sicilian-looking one and Sonny was the Americanized version." (It may be some kind of proof of the genius of this casting idea that, after the movie came out, Caan says that he "won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.") While Caridi was out spending his salary, Coppola made one last hard press for Pacino as Michael, a move that would practically demand that Caan, then officially cast as Michael, be shifted to the role of Sonny because of the difference in height between Pacino and Caridi. Finally, the Paramount chieftain Robert Evans--who looked much more like a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star than Pacino, and who thought that the role demanded a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star type because it was the role he'd have coveted if he were still an actor, relented. "“I don’t think I’ve gotten over it, still,” says Caridi, who at 74 is still a working actor. Coppola must have felt just godawful about all this, because he cast Caridi in small roles in both The Godfather, Part II and, many years later, The Godfather III. Caridi did strike other casting directors as sufficiently mobish that he got to play Frank Costello in Bugsy (1991) and Sam Giancana in Ruby (1992). Whatever happened to all those babies he kissed for luck has not yet been determined.

We've read a lot of articles about the making of The Godfather by now, and if you follow these links the way we tell you to, so have you. The special fascination of Seal's account is the emphasis it places in the actual (ahem) Mafia's role in almost preventing the movie from getting made, in its getting made, and the enthusiasm for it that overtook them once it was finished. Although neither Puzo nor Coppola ever met a real gangster--Coppola recalls that “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”--many people tried to get into the movie by boasting of their real-life organized crime bona fides. Alec Rocco, A.K.A. Moe Greene, wanted everyone to know that he had a past as a bookie and had the butt-ugly mugshot to prove it. Al Martino, the singer who played Johnny Fontaine, let it be known that he had the role coming to him because he was Johnny Fontaine, mob connections and all, which must have given Frank Sinatra, who reportedly wanted the production shut down because he thought everyone in the world thought that he was supposed to be Johnny Fontaine, mixed feelings. In the end, Martino got the role, despite Coppola's reported preference for Vic Damone, despite the fact that he was so inexperienced an actor that Brando had to resort to throwing an unscripted slap to the face into their big scene together in an effort to startle him enough to get him to come out and play. Bettye McCartt, assistant to producer Al Ruddy, broke her watch on the set one day and was approached by Lenny Montana, the mountainous former wrestler who played the Corleone family emforcer Luca Brasi. McCartt recalls that “He said, ‘What kind of watch would you like?,’ and I said, ‘I’d like an antique watch with diamonds on it, but I’ll get another $15 one.’ A week passes, and Lenny comes and he’s got a Kleenex in his hand wadded up, and he’s looking over his shoulder every step of the way.” He placed the wad of Kleenex on her desk. She opened it, and there was an antique diamond watch inside. “And he says, ‘The boys sent you this. But don’t wear it in Florida.’”

Meanwhile, Joe Colombo, the most "media-savvy" of the leaders of the Five Families, was battling the production through his "civil rights" organization, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which had "a membership of 45,000 and a $1 million war chest." Looking to make peace, Al Ruddy invited Colombo to come to his office and examine the screenplay. “So next day Joe shows up with two other guys. Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window.” Ruddy pulled out the 155-page script and gave it to the Mob boss. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it for about two minutes. ‘What does this mean—fade in?’ he asked. And I realized there was no way Joe was going to turn to page two.” Luckily, Colombo decided to cut to the chase: his only demand was that the word "Mafia" be deleted from the script and never appear in the movie. This, it turned out, was not the most difficult thing he could have asked for: the word appeared in the script exactly once, when the movie studio boss played by John Marley read Duvall's Tom Hagen the riot act, telling him in the most offensive way possible that he has no fear of Italian crime lords. Considering that Marley's diatribe also contained the words "dago", "wop", "greaseball", and "goombahs", the general feeling was that even with the "M"-word removed, the speech would still retain the necessary flavor. In the end, the movie would become a beloved totem among Italian Americans, law-abiding and otherwise, but Colombo himself would not live to see it. He was executed by a gunman, presumed to have been hired by rival gangster Joey Gallo, while appearing at an Italian-American Civil Rights League Unity Day celebration in New York in June 1971, at the same time that part the movie was being filmed a few blocks away. Al Ruddy had declined an offer to sit beside Colombo on the dais.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Elf"

Leonard Pierce — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Hello again, and welcome back to the sixth installment of the Screengrab's trip through some beloved (and some not-so-beloved) holiday film fare, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon. While, technically, the twelve days of Christmas extend all the way into January and culminate in Epiphany, I'm sure you'll all be too hung over by that point to be able to deal with any Christmas cheer. Plus, most of us will be back at work by January 6th, and we don't want to be the movie-blog equivalent of that one guy on your block who annoys the whole neighborhood by leaving his Christmas lights up long after the joy and wonder of the holiday has vanished. So we've got a lot of movies to get through in the next three days. Let's start with the 2003 Will Ferrell vehicle Elf, which is now general considered a canonical new-classic Xmas flick.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and to further reinforce my reputation as Bob Cratchit and Scrooge inhabiting a single body, I'll admit that, as big a sucker as I am for Christmas movies in general, I didn't think much of Elf when I first saw it in a theater. I was in a bit of a lousy mood at the time, but that doesn't alter the fact that there really is a lot to dislike here: the delicate balancing act between po-faced sincerity and winking, snarky sarcasm, for one thing, doesn't always work, and the movie's tone can come across as artificial. The pace is a bit manic, the premise is undersold, and Ferrell's performance is unneccessarily called upon to carry the entire movie, which is a shame, given that he's surrounded by tons of extremely capable actors. And Jon Favreau's direction can be charitably described as 'clunky'.

The story of Buddy, an orphan child who crawls into Santa's bag one lonely Christmas and ends up the only stranded human at the north pole, gets some early-running gags -- some predictable, others hilarious -- out of the notion of a normal child (especially one as hulking and clumsy as Ferrell) being raised among the elves. Not enough time is spent on this appealing notion, which is especially regrettable given that Buddy's father is played, in a rare screen appearance, by one of the absolute masters of awkward comedy in the person of Bob Newhart. But one of the appealing things about Elf, which becomes much more clear on repeat viewings, is how economical it is: it's constantly making a dollar out of a quarter, milking the script's gags for more than they're worth and making the most out of Ferrell's screen presence.

Indeed, I even surprised myself at how much more I liked Elf each additional time I saw it. It could be argued that I had allowed familiarity and comfort to stand in for quality, but I don't think that's necessarily the case here: a lot of the movie's strengths go beyond script and direction, and for the few wasted performances (there could have been so much more to the character of Buddy's real human father, especially when played by an actor as capable as James Caan), there's always a compensatory moment where an actor does the absolute best with what they're handed, such as Faizon Love, Ed Asner, Peter Dinklage's scene-stealing bits and Bob Newhart's determination to make even his somewhat pointless opening narration a thing of comedic beauty. And, of course, there's Zooey Deschanel, at maximum adorability.

Of course, some parts of it never get better, such as the occasional cloying moments, the overall 'off' feeling of the tonal quality, and the hammier bits of Ferrell's moon-faced performance -- whether those are the fault of the actor or the script they can be extremely grating. And Favreau's direction in his second full-length feature film never gets any better no matter how many times you watch it. But it's at least possible to watch Elf now as the work of a man who's learning his craft, not the work of a man who doesn't know or care about what he's doing. Elf will never be a great movie, or even a great holiday movie, but it's at least an appealing little Christmas tidbit, a tastly little morsel that goes down easy, and at worst, makes you feel slightly guilty that you're overindulging yourself so much on your vacation.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A respectable if undignified 7 swans-a-swimming. Its placement in the middle of the pack of my personal 12 days of Christmas marathon proved to be quite appropriate: it's neither the bottom-feeding camp-only tripe at the bottom or the transcendent art at the top, but merely a non-fattening treat to keep your energy up in the middle. Watch it in the late afternoon, unless you're an angry elf.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

And Bob Hoskins As Joe The Plumber

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Well, we figured it was only a matter of time. I suppose we're just lucky it's the still somewhat respectable Los Angeles Times who's doing it, instead of, say, the New York Post, or worse yet, the National Review.

We're talking about casting the lead roles in the 2008 election, which, if it ends anything as crazily as it's played out so far, will be in theaters near you by around 2010 at the latest. (Of course, that depends on who wins. There may not be any theaters near you by 2010 if it's the G.O.P. candidate.) The Times has decided to put their best guesses to filling the big-screen roles of the candidates and their various First Ladies and Gentlemen, and their choices run the gamut from obvious (Tina Fey as Sarah Palin) to intriguing (James Caan as Joe Biden) to inexplicable (Paul Giamatti as John McCain?).

Will Smith as Barack Obama seems like a boringly safe choice; why not Don Cheadle, or our personal favorite pick, Anwan Glover? You gotta take risks sometimes, in casting no less so than in politics. What about you, Screengrab readers? Who would you cast as the 2008 contenders and their spouses?

Warners DVD Keeps John McCain Interview Under Lock and Key

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Five

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue. Eventually she wears herself out with her own acting out and returns to the nest, and by the time of Part III, she's more active plotter than Michael. She has her ideas about how things ought to be done and takes full advantage of all the perks she figures she has coming to her as blood relation. And nobody is going to take her out in a rowboat and put one in her head while it's bowed in prayer.

The Godfather is one of two big movie franchises that dominate Shire's filmography. The other is the Rocky series, where she played Adrian, the ugly duckling who became the hero's loyal wife, hanging in there from the 1976 original through to Rocky V in 1990. (Her absence from the 2006 Rocky Balboa is explained by her character's death from, in the tasteful words of her widower, "da woman cancer.") Although she was perfectly charming in the first Rocky movie, the role called for her to return to the likable-mouse range of the first Godfather movie, and in invited audiences to like her for being so drably unimaginative and for being faithfully devoted to America's Lug. The success of Rocky did lead to her having, for a few months from 1979 to early 1980, a brief fling as a leading lady, but the movies she starred in--the uneven and off-putting Old Boyfriends and the terrible horror pictures Prophecy and Windows (which is the only film directed by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and which cast Shire as the target of a dangerous lesbian stalker played Elizabeth Ashley)--were such bombs that they left Shire open to public ridicule. The whole experience may have let her a little gun-shy; for the next ten years or so, she didn't stray far from Rocky's apron strings, and though she has continued working pretty steadily in recent years, she seems to have a pretty good sense for picking scripts whose finished films will scarcely see the light of day. I suspect that Shire may still have some surprises in her, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will arrange for them to be turned loose.

G. D. SPRADLIN: A big believer in the value of a varied CV, the Oklahoma-born Spradlin was an attorney, an independent oil man, and a politician before turning professional actor in his mid-forties. He had already built up an impressive roll call of intimidating but not always trustworthy authority figures--cops, doctors, politicians, military officers--before Coppola brought him on board to play Senator Pat Geary, a man who the Senate doorkeeper can't introduce with the words "the honorable..." without dissolving in giggles. Having earned his place in movie history, Spradlin continued to play admirals, sports coaches (including, in the 1979 North Dallas Forty, a character said to be modeled on Tom Landry), and even, in his last job before his official retirement in 1999, Ben Bradlee in the cross-eyed Watergate spoof Dick. All of these roles now seem informed by the fact that the man onscreen once set his nastiest sneer in place to go head to head with Michael Corleone, and that it took a bloody bed full of dead girl to make him blink, and shudder. Especially worthy of mention is his other job for Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, where he plays the general who gives Martin Sheen his assignment up river, and where his sad, weary face--the face of a man who by God will do the job he signed on to do, but at the time he signed on he sure didn't know he was going to be doing this shit--is like a red flag to the star, and maybe to the audience. Whatever happens next, you can't look into those eyes and say that you weren't given fair warning.

LENNY MONTANA: Six feet six inches tall and not whisper-thin, Montana (nee' Lenny Passofaro) worked as a bouncer and is rumored to have had some kind of mob connections before he entered show business as a professional wrestler, where he worked under the names Lenny the Bull, Zebra Man, and Chief Chickawicki. Lenny was 45 when he made his movie debut in The Godfather playing Luca Brasi, the old family enforcer who didn't expect to be invited to his boss's daughter's wedding. If the scene in which Luca thanks Don Corleone for having been so honored had been played and shot as written, it might have been less memorable. As it turned out, Lenny the Bull was so starstruck by Marlon Brando that he couldn't be in Brando's presence for two seconds without looking as if he were going to shit his pants and maybe bleed from the eyes a little, so after all attempts to calm him down failed, Coppola reconceived the scene: in the finished product, Luca is so overwhelmed by the Don's willingness to let him enter his home through the front door in broad daylight, and so unused to social interaction that doesn't involve threatening to leave someone with fewer body parts than he had when he showered that morning, that he has laboriously prepared a written speech for the occasion, which he has trouble getting out even in the sealed labratory conditions of the Don's office. In Lenny's other big scene, he gets to have a drink with some fellows who pin his hand to the bar with a knife and then garrote him, and Lenny played it as if getting throttled with piano wire came much more naturally to him than wedding-day small talk. Given the massive international success of The Godfather and Lenny's easily recognizable face and physique, is it any wonder that his acting debut did lead to other offers? He appeared in James Toback's Fingers, a TV film starring Frank Sinatra called Contract on Cherry Street, the Jackie Chan vehicle The Big Brawl, the Steve Martin hit The Jerk, and Robert Aldrich's ...All the Marbles, as well as in such trivia as the Italian spoof The Funny Face of the Godfather. He even took a co-writing credit on one of his last films, Blood Song, a horror flick that co-starred Richard Jaeckel and Frankie Avalon. His artistic vision more or less fulfilled, Lenny retired from the screen that year and died in Italy in 1992.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

The Rep Report (June 5 --11)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:06:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" (June 6-12) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcases the work of what the programmers see as "a new generation of Italian filmmakers .. defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach but unified through a spirit of independence that has allowed them to break away from old models and genres." It includes Biùtiful Cauntri, an eco-minded drama that is being shown in conjunction with the Film Society's "Green Screens" program, and The Waltz, which tells its multi-character story in a single, continuous ninety-minute shot.

Opening today and running through June 15th: "NewFest 2008: The 20th Anniversary NY LGBT Film Festival". On tap and buzzed about: Affinity, Meadowlark, and the documentary SqueezeBox!, a movie whose accompanying party at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival took no prisoners.

BERKELEY: Through June, Pacific Film Archives presents a quartet of punk concert clips and documentaries just in time for anyone looking to get nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the summer when London punk in particular was in full, frothing snarl mode. The schedule begins tonight with The Blank Generation, which captures such New York bands as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television when they were young, loud, and snotty. Still to come: D.O.A., in which Johnny Rotten does not spend the Sex Pistols' "terminal" American tour desperately looking for the man who's fatally poisoned him, and Penelope Spheeris's first and finest document of noisy West Coast alientation, 1981's The Decline... of Western Civilization.

And Fredo Is the Green Party

Phil Nugent — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Have you been sitting there staring at CNN thinking, I wish someone would translate the political debates of the day into terms I can understand, such as classic '70s movies? Good news! In an article in the journal National Interest, John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell use The Godfather and the conflicting approaches suggested for dealing with the threat from Sollozzo and the Tataglia family to explain the thought processes of what the authors identify as tht three main currents of American geopolitical thought following September 11, 2001. It is Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the consigliere and family diplomat, whp represents "liberal institutionalism"; his mantra is "we oughta talk to them." "First, like many modern Democrats," write the authors, "Tom believes that the family’s main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to 'reclaim its proper place in the world.'” He butts heads with Sonny the hothead, who is the voice of neoconservatism, brandishing a big stick and quick to accuse anyone who expresses a lack of enthusiasm for seeing him swing it of disloyalty to the family. When Tom offers advice and counsel, Sonny (James Caan) replies that there is only one thing of value that Tom can offer: "Just help me win." As the authors see it, "Sonny’s damn-the-torpedoes approach belies a deep-seated fear that the only way to reestablish the family’s dominance is to eradicate all possible future threats to it. While such a strategy makes emotional sense following the attempted hit on his father, it runs counter to the long-term interests of the family."

Fortunately, we still have Michael (Al Pacino) to arrive at a compromise alternative to namby=pamby compromise and kneejerk aggression. "Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family’s interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today’s foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist. Viewing the world through untinted lenses, he sees that the age of dominance the family enjoyed for so long under his father is ending. Alone among the three brothers, Michael senses that a shift is underway toward a more diffuse power arrangement, in which multiple power centers will jockey for position and influence. To survive and succeed in this new environment, Michael knows the family will have to adapt." So he marshals his forces, considers his options, and the next thing you know, bada-bing, Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey have been duly adapted to the new realities. Not the least of the many things to love about this essay is that it essentially describes the current administration and its enablers as "yearning for the moral clarity" of a fictional Mafia organization. But what we want to know is, does this mean that Crawford, Texas is the new Lake Tahoe?

James Caan vs. The Cookie Monster

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The other day we caught up with the congenial David O. Russell, the director who rassled George Clooney while making Three Kings and whose tirade against I Heart Huckabees star Lily Tomlin became a YouTube sensation. At the time, all we knew was that James Caan had left the set of Russell’s latest opus, Nailed, for the usual reason: “creative differences.” Now that we know what those differences were, the story is even better.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, “The trouble started Wednesday on the first of Caan's two days of shooting the role of a U.S. speaker of the house who chokes to death on a cookie. Russell asked him to cough as he choked, but Caan argued that the character couldn't cough and choke to death at the same time. Russell suggested that they shoot it both ways, but the actor expressed distrust that his version would be considered and left the South Carolina set.”

Please, YouTube. We’re begging you. Come through for us here, because we need to see this. How long did this cookie dispute go on? Was there some tension over the choice of cookie? Perhaps Russell wanted an Oreo and Caan insisted on a Nutter Butter. It’s just a shame they couldn’t work this out, but according to the Reporter, Caan’s part is being recast.

David O. Russell: People Person

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

A new David O. Russell film is in production, which must mean that the notoriously prickly filmmaker isn’t getting along with somebody. George Clooney was the first to report that Russell might not be all sunshine and roses on the set; actor and director famously had “creative differences” while making Three Kings. Clooney elaborated in an interview with Playboy in 2000. “David is in many ways a genius, though I learned that he's not a genius when it comes to people skills…He yelled and screamed at people all day, from day one…he screamed at the script supervisor and made her cry. I wrote him a letter and said, 'Look, I don't know why you do this. You've written a brilliant script, and I think you're a good director. Let's not have a set like this. I don't like it and I don't work well like this.'…He turned on me and said, 'Why don't you just worry about your fucked-up act? You're being a dick. You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.' I'm looking at him like he's out of his mind. Then he started banging me on the head with his head. He goes, 'Hit me, you pussy. Hit me.' Then he got me by the throat and I went nuts. I had him by the throat. I was going to kill him. Kill him.”

So that went well, and although it’s sad that there’s no video evidence of this dust-up – at least, none that’s surfaced so far – the same can’t be said for I Heart Huckabees. Anyone reading this has no doubt seen the infamous footage of Russell flipping out on Lily Tomlin, but we’ll take any excuse to post it again.

The good times roll on, as the New York Post blog Popwrap reports. Russell's romantic comedy Nailed, co-written with Kristin “daughter of Al” Gore, concerns a small-town waitress who gets a nail lodged in her head, then finds a “clueless young senator” to champion her cause. The cast includes Jessica Biel, James Marsden, Jake Gyllenhaal…and, until last week, James Caan. According to Caan’s publicist, the actor “did amicably part ways with this production due to creative differences. He wished all of the actors and production crew well when he departed.” One wonders if these creative differences took the form of knuckle sandwiches and, more importantly, whether video evidence exists. It does kind of seem like Russell was asking for trouble in casting the similarly hot-headed Caan in the first place. But apparently even seemingly mild-mannered Gyllenhaal has been infected by Russell’s good vibes. “The crew was filming at the South Carolina State House on Wednesday when Jake began acting like a diva, according to one report. ‘He was complaining that the room was too small, complaining about the temperature, complaining about his chair,’ the source says. ‘It was like watching a two-year-old having a meltdown every five minutes.’ ”

You know the Cloon is loving it. As he told Entertainment Weekly after the YouTube clips from Huckabees surfaced, “I felt bad for Lily but I also felt a little vindicated for anyone that thought that that had anything to do with me on [Three Kings]. But, you know, the last thing in the world I would have done is stick it on the Internet. I don't even know how to get onto YouTube.” The question is: does James Caan?