The Screengrab : joseph h. lewis

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Four

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 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.

RICHARD CONTE: Classically handsome and deep-voiced, with a trace of something anxious and melancholy behind the eyes, Conte made his Broadway debut in 1939 and was scooped up by the movies later that same year. The studio announced its intention to shape him into "the new John Garfield", but although Conte had plenty of starring opportunities during World War II when many other established and potential stars were busy overseas, he never seemed to be cast right or to have the material he needed to make a real impression. He did solid enough work in war pictures like Guadalcanal Diary and A Walk in the Sun, where his down-to-Earth, Jersey boy quality provided a much appreciated contrast to that film's misguided poetic intentions. But in muddled, sub-par noirs such as Jules Dassin's truckin' picture Thieves' Highway and Otto Preminger's demented, drooling Whirlpool, he just looked as despondent and confused as the people in the audience. He was much better in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1949 drama House of Strangers, which, while not strictly speaking a crime movie, has similarities to The Godfather, with its squabbling Italian family balling itself up over questions of loyalty and patriarchal authority.

It soon became clear that film noir was Conte's natural milieu, but by the time he gave his strongest performance in the strongest movie of his career to date, Joseph H. Lewis's intense 1955 low-budget crime picture The Big Combo, film noir had slid down to a B-movie genre. Conte starred in Fritz Lang's The Blue Dahliah and Phil Karlsen's The Brothers Rico, then rid out the 1960s alternating between TV guest shots and opportunities to hang out with Frank Sinatra. (He appeared in the original Ocean's Eleven and then turned up in three other Sinatra movies, Assault on a Queen, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Maybe Sinatra decided that, on Ocean's Eleven, he'd taken one for the team by agreeing to play the character who is required to say the line, "Give it to me straight, Doc. Is it the big casino?") Conte was reportedly considered for the role of Don Vito himself, but that was in the early stages, when the studio was thinking of making The Godfather as a cheap little action movie. Its elevation to prestige-epic level automatically took him out of the running for the title role, but by casting him as Don Barzini, the smiling-cobra nemesis of the Corelones who plays toastmaster general at the big meeting of the five families, Francis Ford Coppola was counting on Conte's movie past, with its long-time connection to the world of gangsters and other classic movie toughs (such as Edward G. Robinson, who played Conte's blustery Italian papa in House of Strangers) to give added weight to a character whose brief amount of screen time belies his power and importance in the narrative. Barzini was Conte's last hurrah as a Hollywood actor. He died in 1975 after spending the last three busy years of his life working in Italy and France, where even hacks know enough to be impressed with a long-time professional who has Fritz Lang pictures on his resume.

RICHARD BRIGHT: Was ever an actor more misleadingly named? It's not that Bright was dull, by any means. But he seemed to be allergic to flashiness and determined to never call undue attention to himself. He was very close to being the ideal example of a hard-working, serious character actor who finds his place in the overall pattern of whatever movie or play he's in, selflessly executes it with an unfussy mastery, and then recedes into the background until he's needed again. In 1965, he did his part for free expression and the counterculture by playing Billy the Kid (to his co-star Billie Dixon's Jean Harlow) in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which ended with a scene in which Dixon delivered a closing monologue while Bright simulated cunnilingus on her; the play so impressed the authorities that every night, the police came around after the performance to take Bright and Dixon down to the station house so that their eager fans there could have their fingerprints. In 1971, Bright appeared in The Panic in Needle Park, a young-junkies-in-love movie that marked Al Pacino's starring debut. The next year, he found the role for him as Al Neri, the most durable and colorlessly loyal of Corleone underlings in The Godfather. He would reprise the role of Al in Part II, and Part III, made fifteen years and set twenty-odd years later, found him still faithfully plugging away. He can also be seen in The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Rancho Deluxe, Mararthon Man, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Citizens Band, Once Upon a Time in America, and a great many other films. In 2002, he contributed a brief but memorable cameo to an episode of The Sopranos, playing the leader of a low-rent murder-for-hire crew, who negotiates a contract between puffs on an oxygen inhaler stuffed up his nose. Four years later, he was accidentally and fatally struck by a New York City bus.

AL LETTIERI: Lettieri kicked around in TV and movie bit parts for a decade or so before starting to get real supporting roles in such movies as The Bobo with Peter Sellers and The Night of the Following Day, a godforsaken kidnapping-plot movie starring a peroxided Marlon Brando. His performance as Solozzo the Turk is not the most subtle and nuanced element of The Godfather--Lettieri's performance was never the most subtle and nuanced element in any of his movies, not even the ones that starred Charles Bronson--but he had energy and the distinctive presence of a man who'd decided to act as if looking like a warthog in spats was really working for him. The Godfather established Lettieri as a good man to hire if you were making a movie whose heroes were killers and thieves and you needed a clearly contrasting type to make it clear why these other killers and thieves were the good guys. If sheer, unadorned vicious meanness is what floats your boat, it's hard to think of a riper example than Lettieri's bad guy in the 1972 The Getaway, who enlivens his pursuit of the movie's ostensible hero and heroine by abducting a husband and wife (played by Archie Bunker's little girl, Sally Struthers, and Jack Dodson, formerly Howard Sprague on The Andy Griffith Show) and indulges in an infantile, trashy affair with the wife while the husband is forced to watch from the back seat. Off camera, Lettieri seems to have been one of those uncontainable, life of the party types who other character actors tell stories about until they turn into legendary figures. He is said to have arrived on the set of the Bronson vehicle Mr. Majestyk in a car full of hookers he'd thoughtfully brought along to service the crew, which definitely puts those gift baskets that Jay Leno sends out into perspective. Once there, he persisted in addressing his co-star, who played a melon rancher in dutch with the mob, as "my melon-Chollie baby," something that all the witnesses agree seemed to strike Bronson as the single least amusing thing in the world. Sadly, Lettieri would have no more time to feel around for the location of Charles Bronson's funny bone. He died of a heart attack in 1975, at 47.

The Rep Report (May 22--26)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: The 34th Seattle International Film Festival opens tonight and runs through June 15. The opening night attraction is Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart "Mr. Charlize Theron" Townsend and starring an ensemble cast led by Charlize Theron. The movie is a "semi-fictionalized account" of the 1999 meeting in Seattle of representatives of the World Trade Organization, which was plagued by demonstrators who thought that globalization sucks, man. (As part of the movie's celebration of down-with-the -street anti-capitalist action, the festival organizers promise an "unforgettable opportunity to walk the red carpet with the stars" to be followed by a "fabulous gala party will follow with live entertainment, and complimentary champagne cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.") For more information and a lot of laughs, check out The Stranger's festival blog.
CAMBRIDGE: Of all movie genres, film noir may be the one that ascribes the most value to the low-rent and obscure and unloved, but by now the contents of the vaults have been through the sluice many times by wild-eyed men looking for the last hidden gold nugget of intense sleaze. So cultists are bound to impressed by the people who assembled Harvard Film Archives's Unseen Noir series (May 23-26) just for making good on their billing. It's a long weekend full of titles you may have heard of but probably haven't seen by directors you know you need to catch up on: Joseph H. Lewis's My Name Is Julia Ross with Nina Foch and Dame Mae Whitty; Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall with Brian Keith, Aldo Rey and a young Anne Bancroft; Andre' de Toth's Pitfall; and a double bill of Phil Karlson pictures: The Brothers Rico, starring Richard Conte in a loose adaptation of a Simenon novel, and 99 River Street, which has a great poster showing a rabid-looking John Payne apparently being restrained from chain-whipping a street sign that has the effrontery to bear the film's title.

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives celebrates Memorial Day with a four-day weekend's worth of Korean films about the Korean War and its aftereffects, from May 22 through the 25th. Included are Lee Man-Hui' The Marines Who Never Returned, the 1984 Warm Winter Was Gone, and 2000's Joint Security Area, directed by Chan-wook Park, who has since become best known in the West for the films in his "venegance trilogy", including Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

For those balmy summer nights, the IFC Center launches a series of Friday and Satuday midnight screenings of sci-fi cult classics, to run through June. Things kick off this weekend with the scientifically accurate Alien before taking a massive nosedive in the plausibility department with the original 1978 TV pilot-turned-"feature film" Battlestar Galactica and John Boorman's giggle-a-minute Zardoz. Also on tap: David Lynch's love letter to the city of Philadelphia Eraserhead (he didn't film it there, but it was his way of telling it that he wasn't coming back), Woody Allen's Sleeper, and the original, feral Mad Max.

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The life of a killer can be a lonely one, whether pursued professionally or as a hobby. In last year's Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner, who based on some of the stories about his on-the-set behavior that have hit the papers ought to have had some experience with having no one to play with, was so lonesome that he had to summon up an imaginary friend (William Hurt) to give him someone to talk to on those long nights of stalking and shooting. (In the course of the movie, a real person who knows about his secret life approaches him and asks if he can apprentice with him as an aspiring psycho, but since this asshole is played by Dane Cook, having to put him up with him just means Costner needs to lean on the nonexistent Hurt more than ever.) Michael Haneke's new English-language version of his 1996 Funny Games also underlines the need for a killer to bring along a spare, someone with whom he can trade wisecracks and rely on to keep an eye on the prey and one hand on the remote control. (If you haven't seen the movie, don't ask. And if you haven't seen the movie, also don't see the movie.) Then there's Pete and Sidney, who work for Joe Brody in the classic The Big Sleep. After Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe meets them, he asks Brody about the weedier, goofier one: "Is he any good?" "Sidney?" replies Brody. "He's company for Pete." ("He kills me," says Pete, by way of an unsolicited testimonial.) These pairs kill us:

Henry (Michael Rooker) & Otis (Tom Towles), HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1990)

When watching a couple of characters prancing through a movie laying waste to half the cast, you might let your mind wander to the question of just how these folks met. Are there conventions? Classified ads? It's easier to understand why a serial killer would want another pair of hands than to envision how he'd go shopping for someone to supply them. There are any number of ways that such a conversation could go wrong. Not the least of Henry's virtues is that it addresses head on the issue of how a solo killer goes about trying to establish a franchise. Henry is already well into his serial-killing career when, after a good long stretch on Otis's couch, he concludes that his old friend might have the stuff to join him on his visits to the homes of strangers. For a while, it does look as if having the fun-loving Otis along has made it more rewarding to rampage around town performing random acts of dismemberment. But, as our nation has learned since 2000, being a good person with whom to have a beer is not the best qualification for a job requiring careful planning and precise execution. Careless and uncontrollable, Otis finally proves himself an unacceptable risk and winds up as one more load of filler weighing down a Hefty bag. Like Rick in Casablanca, Henry is forced to consider the possibility that he is destined to be one of life's romantic loners.

Mingo (Earl Holliman) & Fante (Lee Van Cleef), THE BIG COMBO (1955)

There’s a lot to love about Joseph H. Lewis’ nasty little noir: the gorgeously dark camerawork by John Alton, the snarling screenplay by Philip Yordan (its vicious snap most clearly evident in an early scene where the mob boss, played toothily by Richard Conte, chews out a losing boxer), the barely sublimated sex and the creative violence. It’s one of the best movies of its kind, and criminally underseen by audiences both today and when it was released. One of the most enjoyable bits of the movie, though, is the presence of Mingo and Fante. These two characters, with their bizarrely unlikely names, are the goons of Conte’s Mr. Brown, and they’re memorably played by the lunkheaded Earl Holliman and the domineering Lee Van Cleef, respectively. Alternately menacing, comical and even sympathetic, they’re two of the best-written minor characters in noir history, but one of the reasons that they’re fondly remembered by a handful of film buffs today (Joss Whedon named a couple of characters in his Firefly series after them) is because, predating Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever by a good twenty years, they are perhaps the first murderous duo on the big screen to be portrayed as gay. Of course, this being the ‘50s, neither Yordan or Lewis could come right out and say so, but it’s made plenty clear for anyone who’s paying attention: Fante and Mingo share a room together, sleep feet apart, bicker like a married couple, express a great deal of, er, manly fondness for one another, and even dine together. Which, in fact, leads to the movie’s big oh-what-a-giveaway line: holed up in a ratty dump waiting for the heat to die down from their latest killing, our gruesome twosome are reduced to dining on take-home lunchmeat, leading Mingo to lament, “I can’t swallow any more salami!” Even if the movie version of The Big Sleep had been allowed to be as explicit about the sexuality of Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook as the book was, they wouldn’t have been this much fun.

Al (Charles McGraw) & Max (William Conrad), THE KILLERS (1946)

These guys have a special weapon: the dialogue from the classic original short story by Ernest Hemingway. In the story, two strangers walk into the small town diner where they plan to kill "the Swede" for reasons unspecified, and, feeling serenely untouchable in their big-city arrogance, proceed to taunt the rubes while they sit there and wait for their target to walk in. ("We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.") The first fifteen or twenty minutes of this movie amount to probably the most faithful film adaptation that Hemingway ever got: McGraw, the star of the cult noir The Narrow Margin (and a man who looked as if he'd been carved out of granite and was royally pissed off about it) and Conrad (TV's Cannon and the narrator of the Bullwinkle cartoons) just play out their little scene together, and then the Heningway story runs out. The movie, which was co-written by Anthony Veiller and the uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks, and which is not bad at all, proceeds to fill itself out to feature length by having an investigator, played by Edmond O'Brien, fill in the backstory of why the Swede — Burt Lancaster, in his film debut — had a price on his head. There was a sort-of remake in 1964, directed by Don Siegel, which is best remembered as Ronald Reagan's last film as an actor. (He plays the head villain and gets to slap Angie Dickinson around.) The remake, which hews closer to the Lancaster movie than to the Hemingway, eliminates the O'Brien-investigator figure and has the killers themselves — called Charlie and Lee, and played by old pro Lee Marvin and younger hepcat punk Clu Gulager — decide to find out why they'd been hired. This version lacks the crackle that the earlier one had, but it does have a scene where the title characters trap Norman Fell in a steam bath while Gulager mockingly wipes his sunglasses on Mr. Roper's head.

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) & Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), LA CEREMONIE (1995)

Bonnaire and Huppert are two of France's greatest and most fearless actresses, and it's a wonder it took a director so long to put them together. But when Claude Chabrol finally did so in his masterful thriller, the result was quite possibly the finest psychotic duo in French cinema. Bonnaire plays Sophie, an illiterate yet hyper-competent young maid for a rich family, and Huppert is Jeanne, a nosy, gossipy postal clerk who becomes her friend. "What a pair," Sophie's employer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) exclaims. "One can't read and the other reads our mail!" It's clear that the two women need each other — Jeanne, with her playfully forceful personality, draws Sophie out of her shell, while Sophie gives Jeanne a sympathetic ear compared to the other townspeople who shun her for the accidental killing of her young daughter. Soon, the two of them are partners in crime, getting into all manner of mischief around town and at the charity where they volunteer. But after Sophie is fired for trying to blackmail the family's pregnant daughter, she and Jeanne sneak in one night to take revenge. The night begins innocently enough — some torn clothing here, some ruined bed sheets there — but quickly turns deadly once the girls see the shotguns hanging on the wall. Jeanne wants to have fun by scaring them, while Sophie insists on loading the guns, yet it's entirely possible that they hadn't planned to kill anyone until Cassel happens upon the gun-toting duo in his kitchen. Once they've killed him, they have no choice but to kill off the rest of the family as well. For all the big-screen psychopaths who plan their murders down to the last detail, cases like Sophie's and Jeanne's are arguably more chilling, as the killings aren't a premeditated act of vengeance but the climax of a prank gone horribly wrong. Funny games, indeed.

Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) & Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

Like Sophie and Jeanne, Heavenly Creatures' heroines Pauline Parker (Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Winslet) are a pair who first bond over their shared outcast status. In their case, they both suffer from health problems, and as their classmates take exercise, they become fast friends. Together they rule over a lurid, elaborate fantasy world of their own creation. The pair are inseparable, spending every possible moment together, and they eventually their frenzied teenage hormones lead them to experiment with sex. But more than anything else, it's their fantasies that sustain them and help them to escape their difficult lives in 1950s New Zealand, but they also lead to their downfall. From the beginning, they look down on anyone else, and eventually this disdain turns to paranoia about those who would threaten their happiness together. Of all the perceived threats to the world they've created, the most threatening is Pauline's pragmatic, hardworking mother, so one day the girls decide to join her on a leisurely stroll, and when they're alone on a path, they bludgeon her to death. Heavenly Creatures was based on a real-life case, and while the facts might have lent themselves to a sensationalistic treatment, director Peter Jackson keeps us with his heroines all the way. The film follows Pauline and Juliet into their fantasies (rendered in loving detail by a pre-Lord of the Rings Jackson), mostly because it's the only way to truly understand what led them to carry out their hideous crime. Along the way, we grow to love the sinners even as we hate their sin, and it's because of this that the film's final scene, in which Pauline and Juliet are forced apart by the courts, is almost unbearably sad.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.