The Screengrab : jules dassin

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Forum celebrates the life and career of director Jules Dassin, an American expatriate who died last year, at the age of 96. With such pictures as the French heist picture Rififi (1955), the prison picture Brute Force (1947), and the 1948 tribute to the virtues of on-location filming The Naked City, Dassin can claim a lot of the credit for shaping the evolution of the crime genre during its ripest years; the schedule also includes everybody's favorite underappreciated Dassin film, the 1950 LOndon-set cult classic Night and the City, with Richard Widmark giving the performance of his career as an ambitious grifter whose inability to put a cap on his ingenious schemes proves the downfall of everyone around him, himself included. Also included are such rarities and oddities as the truckers' noir Thieves Highway (1949) with Richard Conte and Jack Oakie and the 1968 Up Tight, a remake of The Informer that transposes the story to the black militant scene in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Rounding things out are more than half a dozen of the films that Dassin made starring his wife, Melina Mercouri (Never on Sunday, Topkapi).

Today marks the beginning of the annual New Directors/New Films festival, which among New York film freaks marks the first real day of spring. This year's schedule begins with Amreeka, Cherien Dabis's film about a Palestinian family who immigrate to America at the time of the invasion of Iraq. The closing night attraction, on April 5, is We Live in Public, director Ondi Timoner's long-awaited follow-up to her 2004 documentary DiG!

FLORIDA: The 11th Annual Sarasota Film Festival runs March 27 through April 5. This year's festival includes a retrospective tribute to director Hal Ashby, with screenings of The Landlord, Shampoo, The Last Detail, Harold and Maude, Bound for Glory, and others, and with appearances by Ashby biographer Nick Dawson, Illeana Douglas, Norman Jewison, and Jon Voight. There's also a complete retrospective of films that document the work of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who will also appear at a Q & A.

PHILADELPHIA: There's also the Philadelphia Film Festival and Cinefest 09, starting tomorrow and running through April 6. The opening night attraction is the comedy (500) Days of Summer. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Let's assume that you're already in Philadelphia. What the hell else do you need to know?

Jean Martin, 1922 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The French actor Jean Martin, who died on February 2 at the age of 86, had a distinguished career in the theater, where he appeared in the original productions of two of Samuel Beckett's plays, Waiting for Godot (as Lucky) and Endgame (as Clov). He also served with the French Resistance during World War II. In movies, though, he was one of those people who achieved immortality largely through his performance in a single role, that of Colonel Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo's great political film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Martin was the only professional actor in that movie's cast. Compared to the actors playing Algerian revolutionaries, his role was stylized and trickily conceived: he represented the face of the oppressive French colonial government, yet he was also the director's mouthpiece, explaining the film's view of guerrilla insurrection to the audience in speeches that made it clear that, however the action of the film migh turn out, he knew that he was playing a losing game. Eventually "the people" would emerge victorious; all he could do was postpone the inevitable. Martin delivered a remarkable performance, supplying a theatrical, instructional element to the movie without violating its documentary-style texture. (He might have been hired as much for his politics as for his talent; the actor was a commmitted leftist who, despite his heroic military background with the Resistance as an paratrooper in Indochina, was blackballed as punishment for having signed a petition protesting the French presence in Algeria.)

Martin would remain better known for his stage work than his movies, but The Battle of Algiers assured him of continued employment in European TV and films, often typecast as a villain. His most notable credits include Jacques Rivette's The Nun (1966), Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn (1970), Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973), the Sergio Leone-produced Western My Name Is Nobody (1974), Otto Preminger's Rosebud, and Roberto Rossellini's Jesus movie Il Messia (1975), in which he played Pontius Pilate. Legend has it that when he and Pontecorvo argued on the set of Algiers, the director was known to complain, "Just because he was in Godot doesn't mean he's a good actor." He was, though.

LazyVision: Week Ending Feb. 14th

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

We know that fans of the Screengrab want the dish on what's happening now in Hollywood (hence the Weekend Box Office Report) and what's yet to come (hence the Morning Deal Report). We know you want to be aware of what's coming to home video, hence DVD Digest. And we know that sometimes, you just want to park yourselves in front of the tube to catch a good flick, hence Set Your DVRs!.

We also know that some of you are deeply, deeply lazy individuals. And, beyond that, you're cheap, and you can't figure out anything more technologically complicated than a light switch. (We say this in the most loving way possible, for we count ourselves in your number.) You want to be able to turn on the TV -- not the computer -- and watch a good movie, anytime you want, without having to program anything -- for free. After all, wasn't that the promise of the new modern era? Wasn't that the allure of the digital age -- any movie you want, any time you want, no waiting, no fees?

Well, assuming you have digital cable, Video On Demand was made for lazy gasbags like you. Most of the stuff shown on VOD is either pay-per-view or, to put it mildly, dire, but occasionally, a gem will pop up on the "Free Movies" feature as a reward for infinitely patient cheapskates like yours truly. So, once a week, we'll bring you a handful of not-completely terrible movies you can watch whenever you want, for zero dollars and change. (Check your local provider for channel details.)

- FEARnet this week is featuring Night of the Creeps as one of its free movies on demand. This underrated 1986 camp-horror classic from cult director Fred Dekker is a real winner -- it never takes its zombies-from-out-space-plot too seriously, and plays around with the conventions of the genre years before the Scream franchise got the idea. The characters are all named after cult directors (Raimi, Carpenter, Cronenberg, etc.), and best of all, it's held together by a swell performance from beloved tough-guy character actor Tom Atkins.

- The Sundance Channel's on-demand service is offering a look at John Huston's The Dead, gratis. The final film Huston ever made, it's also one of his finest and most personal; adapted from a very fine James Joyce short story, it features some astonishing performances (including by his daughter, Anjelica) in a story involving a woman's memories of her long-dead first love, and how it stirs emotions in her husband during an Epiphany gathering. Best of all, The Dead isn't currently available in a U.S. DVD release, so this opportunity is even more special.

- Turner Classic Movies also has an on-demand service, and free this week is the classic 1948 noir flick Naked City. Somewhere between solid post-war noir, hardboiled police procedural, and ripe pre-war crime drama, Naked City is a tightly wound look at every step of a brutal murder investigation in New York. Directed by legendary noir specialist Jules Dassin, Naked City features a terrific villain in Ted DeCorsia, a gritty semi-documentary filming style, and an absolutely gripping extended chase scene through the city. It was later made into a popular TV crime show in the 1950s .

- FEARnet's on-demand service coughs up another great free offering this week in Escape from New York. Made during the period when a new John Carpenter movie was cause for excitment, this cult classic takes place in a near-future dystopia where New York City is a maximum-security prison. When President Donald Pleasance's plane crashes there with the nuclear football on board, it's up to Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, one of the all-time great screen bad-asses, to bail him out. Russell gamely waltzes with a swell cast that includes Adrienne Barbeau, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton -- and good ol' Tom Atkins.

- Finally, TNT's on-demand service this week offers the chance to see John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood. The 1991 film set off a wave of west coast gangsta dramas, but Boyz was the first and is still one of the best, as Singleton (whose filmmaking skills are raw and exciting here) takes a look at a group of childhood friends who struggle in different ways against the rough life of gang-ridden south central Los Angeles. Larry Fishburne's performance is a standout, and this was one of the first movies in which evidence was presented that Ice Cube was a good actor -- evidence which has been sorely lacking in recent years.

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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

Take Five: The Squared Circle

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling. High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that. It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies. And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible. Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage. While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! Whattya want, a road map?" Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves. John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS (1998)

Bret "Hitman" Hart comes from what can only be described as one of professional wrestling's royal families. His father, a tough-as-nails Canadian legend and a strict disciplinarian who planned his childrens' careers from the crib, runs one of the most respected schools in the sport, and almost everyone around him -- his brothers, his in-laws, his friends -- are involved in pro wrestling. In this A&E documentary, we follow the everyday life of someone immersed in the game: his strained family life, his true feelings about the sport, and his growing discomfort with the storylines being written for him -- which results in one of the most memorable betrayals, both real and staged, in the modern-day history of wrestling. A little-seen film, Wrestling With Shadows is a sharp, perceptive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

Jules Dassin's legendary British film noir would probably have worked just as well if it had featured boxing -- that violent and often rigged sport so beloved by the makers of moody crime dramas -- instead of professional wrestling. But by having Richard Widmark's needy, creepy, desperate little hustler Harry Fabian wrapped up in the sport of wrestling, we get a number of elements that prove highly rewarding: Herbert Lom's compelling performance as Kristo gives some sense of the strange dynastic quality of some of the great wrestling families, and best of all, we get the unforgettable fight scene between Mike Mazurki as the Strangler and Stanislaus Zybyszko as Gregorius. Both men were actual wrestlers -- but Zybyszko, then an astonishing 70 years old, was from the transitional era when it was actually a legitimate sport. His performance in the scene -- almost silent, incredibly brutal, and absolutely mesmerizing -- has both incredible dignity and repulsive, visceral emotion.

BEYOND THE MAT (1999)

Inspired by Wrestling with Shadows and covering a lot of the same thematic territory, Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat had a theatrical run and thus attracted a good deal more attention than its predecessor. Both films shared qualities in common, though, from the alternatingly absurd and tragic lives of those who try to make a living as professional wrestlers to the personal dramas of the ring workers that mirror their gamed-out struggles. (They also share the quality of making WWE head honcho Vince McMahon look like an utter fucking creep, but that's not so hard, since he does the same thing himself every time he opens his mouth.) This time out, the most compelling figures are the ruined, crack-addicted wreck Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his opposite number, the witty, gregarious family man Mick Foley.

SPIDER-MAN (2002)

One of the most successful and enjoyable big-screen super-hero adaptations, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man gets a lot of its juice from the way it envisions Peter Parker's origin story without being boring or disrespectful. Since Spider-Man's is one of the most familiar origin stories in comics, Raimi had to do it just right, and one of the just-rightest scenes is the one where Parker, his powers newly acquired but not fully mastered, decides to cash in on them by taking part in a televised wrestling match. Raimi updates the scene by making it a big, flashy, ECW-style 'extreme' competition, but keeps the sense of fun and absurdity, most especially by casting lovable legend Randy Savage as Spidey's squared-circle nemesis, Bonesaw. To this day, the scene is one of my all-time favorites in any superhero movie to date.

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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: August 21--27

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's that time of year--the humidity-soaked dead space between the last of the real summer movies and the first of the autumn "serious" pictures--where unexpected flurries of stray weirdness count for a lot even in repertory programming. Starting August 21 and running for a week, Anthology Film Archives digs deep into the seamier recesses of the nostalgia glands for a celebration of New York vigilante movies from the 1970s and 1980s. including the official kick-start to the genre: Michael Winner's Death Wish, with Charles Bronson in his most archetypal role, and a movie that Jeff Goldblum (who made his screen debut with a five-second appearance as one of the caterwauling thugs who fuck up Chuck's wife and daughter) has been apologizing for ever since. The schedule also includes Abel Ferrara's moody, arty-looking bloodbath Ms. 45, which is notable for its wordless star performance by the beautiful and doomed Zoe Lund, who would later write Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant under the name Zoe Tamerlis. (She also appeared in that film as one of Harvey Keitel's drug connections. Zoe Tamerlis Lund died in 1999, of a heart attack brought on by cocaine use, at the age of 37.) The schedule also amounts to the closest thing you're ever likely to see to a William Lustig Festival. Lustig, the subject of a new interview in the New York Press, directed the 1988 Maniac Cop (which was written by Larry Cohen and boasts one of the all-time classic B-list casts of its era: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Sheree North, Richard Roundtree, William "Big Bill" Smith, and the cruelly-underappreciated-by=everyone-except-Larry-Cohen Laurene Landon) and its sequel Maniac Cop 2 as well as the 1983 Vigilante. (Say what you like about Lustig, nobody can accuse him of going in for opaque, misleading titles.) Vigilante, which stars Fred Williamson and my man Robert Forster, has an impressive back-up choir itself in Richard Bright, Joe Spinell, Woody Strode, Joseph Carberry, Rutanya Alda, and Steve James, a talented performer who died young after practically taking out a patent on the category "Action Hero's Sidekick, Black Male." There are people who actually watch the Times Square scenes in Taxi Driver and tear up from thinking about the "good old days." They'll be squeezing them into the theater with a crowbar.

The dog days are also a great time for rummaging in the career of actors who had such long and busy careers that they can to be part of the landscape and rediscovering what they were like when they were walking cult items. The Brooklun Academy of Music is having a three-day Richard Widmark festival from August 25 through the 27th, and the inclusion of the London-set Night and the City makes it an event. This febrile yet moving noir was directed by Jules Dassin, who as it happens died this past March, as did Widmark himself, when both men were in their nineties. Neither ever did better work than they did here.

The Rep Report (August 7-12)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "The French Crime Wave: Film Noir Thrillers, 1937-2000" at Film Forum, runs August 8 through September 11. The programmers' definition of "thrillers" is pretty loose: it includes not just Henri-Georges Clouzot's great existential nailbiter The Wages of Fear but Robert Besson's existential and ascetic Pickpocket and A Man Escaped, as well as the pure horror poetry of Eyes without a Face. But then the French do take their crime literature seriously. One of the charms of the schedule is the chance to see what the work of a number of famous thriller writers--including Jim Thompson (whose Pop. 1280 and A Hell of a Woman provided the basis for, respectively. Bertrand Tavernier's Clean Slate and Alain Corenau's Serie Noire), Patricia Highsmith (whose The Talented Mr. Ripley was turned into Rene Clement's Purple Noon), and Cornell Woolrich (Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid) looked like after a pass through the French film hopper. The series is dedicated to honorary French director Jules Dassin (b. Middletown, Connecticut), who died last March at the age of 96, and who kicks things off with his influential 1955 caper film Rififi.

Over the course of the last dozen years, the Dardenne brothers have built up a remarkable body of films that address hard questions with intellectual and moral seriousness and with a rigorous filmmaking approach that is never condescending and usually aesthetically stimulating. Starting Thursday and running through the weekend, Anthology Film Archives is showing the films that put and kept them on the world film map: La Promesse, Rosetta, The Child, and perhaps their most extraordinary work, The Son.

Criterion Gets Comical

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:45:00 GMT

"Cozy Lummox" is the name of a blog owned and operated by one Eric Skillman, who happens to be a rather good graphic designer whose work, if you are a big film buff, you've probably seen before. He's one of the primary designers for the Criterion Collection, and has been responsible for some of their finest package design (we're big fans of his work on Jules Dassin's Night and the City in particular). In addition to the gorgeous work routinely featured there, his blog is also highly enjoyable, giving an insider's perspective on the sometimes amusing, sometimes agonizing work that goes into designing for the world's most prestigious home cinema collection. His accounts of putting together the package for Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz are particularly enjoyable.

Recently, Skillman has been discussing a different collision of comic books and movies than we usually talk about around here: for a few recent Criterion releases, he's enlisted the services of a number of high-profile comics artists to do the cover art. Of particular interest: Jaime Hernandez (of Love and Rockets fame) designed the cover of Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style; Mad Man's Mike Allred was brought in to do Germi's Seduced and Abandoned; Sean Phillips of Criminal contributed the cover to Allen Baron's Blast of Silence; and the legendary Bill Sienkiewicz on Byron Haskin's Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It's a fascinating combination of great artists from one field applying their talents to the work of great artists in another -- and there's still more to come: Darwyn Cooke (best known for his terrific retro art on DC's Justice League: New Frontier) will be handing the package art for an upcoming collection of Boris Karloff films entitled Monsters and Madmen.

Jules Dassin (1911-2008)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:32:00 GMT

I came home tonight to the news that the great Jules Dassin, director of the seminal heist film Rififi, has passed away. I think I speak for all of us when I ask this question:

Jesus, when will this end?

Dassin rose to prominence as a director of Hollywood crime dramas, particularly the four films he made between 1947 and 1950: Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves' Highway, and Night and the City, all of which have received the Criterion treatment.

His promising career hit a snag when he was named as a Communist in 1952, blacklisted, and forced to continue his career outside the U.S. Fleeing to France, he directed Rififi, which has influenced countless filmmakers with its 30-minute dialogue-free heist sequence, as well as Dassin's eye for the Parisian underworld. Other post-blacklist Dassin films included The Law and He Who Must Die.

Even after the lifting of the blacklist, Dassin remained in Europe, makiing such films as Never on Sunday and Topkapi, both of which starred his future wife, Melina Mercouri. Along with their cinematic collaborations, Dassin and Mercouri remained active in politics, working to help restore democracy to Greece during the rule of dictator Stylianos Pattakos.

Dassin, who in a strange irony was arguably more productive and influential after his blacklisting, was 96 years old. Take a moment of silence to remember this master of the medium. Better yet, take half an hour.

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Richard Widmark has died at the age of 93. Widmark made a splash with his movie debut in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which he played a sniggering young gangster named Tommy Udo. Widmark shaved his eyebrows off for the role and cultivated a skin-crawling giggle that was all the creepier for the times he employed it: among the things that amused Tommy in the course of the movie were the chance to shove an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs and his own delivery of the line, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over." It was a supporting role, designed as a contrast to the movie's hero--a remorseful, older, family-man hood, played by Victor Mature in what was probably his best performance. Yet Widmark took the picture straight away from him, and Tommy Udo and his giggle entered permanent crime-movie folklore, referenced in the Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and the Kaleidoscope song "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", and reportedly serving as a role model for the New York mobster Joey Gallo. Widmark received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for the new male star of the year. In later years, he would express mixed feelings about the attention the performance got: "It’s a bit rough, priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

His career had its ups and downs, but he is remembered for a bit more than that. Predictably, he came out of Kiss of Death typecast as a hood, but he began to get to play good guys after Elia Kazan cast him in the 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets. And his edgy appeal proved ideal for the good-bad heroes of more offbeat noirs such as Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which he played a career pickpocket named Skip who reaches inside the wrong purse and finds himself in possession of some stolen microfilm coveted by foreign agents, and Jules Dassin's London-set Night and the City (later ineptly made as a vehicle for Robert De Niro); his performance there, as the doomed con man Harry Fabian, is probably the best of his career. As noir died out by the end of the 1950s, Widmark spent more and more time in Westerns; he was cast as Jim Bowie in The Alamo by his ideological arch enemy, John Wayne, whose battles with the actor over both politics and their shared profession were the stuff of Hollywood legend. He also turned producer in order to set up a few projects, including the submarine melodrama The Bedford Incident, in which the studios had little interest. His last big, attention-getting starring role was as the title character of Don Siegel's police drama Madigan (1968), which he later resurrected for a short-lived TV series. In the later stages of his career, he specialized in character turns as authority figures: presidents, politicians, millionaire string-pullers, etc. He retired from acting on- screen after playing a United States Senator in the 1992 True Colors. “The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he once said, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”