The Screengrab : two lane blacktop

Reviews By Request: Cockfighter (1974, Monte Hellman)

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Since the poll format of selecting movies for future Reviews by Request columns worked so well last time, I’ve decided to keep it for the time being. See the bottom of this piece to pick a Halloween column from five horror favorites I’ve never seen. But before you do, enjoy this review of the movie that was chosen by popular vote two weeks ago- Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.

I honestly have no excuse for not seeing Cockfighter before. After all, I’ve long been a fan of Warren Oates, who I believe to be one of the finest and most undervalued of all screen actors. And I’ve enjoyed a number of Monte Hellman’s films in the past, particularly The Shooting and Two Lane Blacktop, both of which also starred Oates. So why have I taken so long to see Cockfighter? It wasn’t the violence against animals, which I’ve been able to handle in numerous other films. Maybe I was just waiting for the right occasion to see it. So thanks to those of you who voted for it.

As those of you who haven’t seen it might guess from the title, Cockfighter tells the story of a man who raises gamecocks to fight for sport. The man’s name is Frank Mansfield and is played, of course, by Oates. Cockfighting isn’t a lucrative line of work, but Frank seems to be pretty good at it. He’s got a house, a farm, and a mobile home- that is, until he loses it by making a too-rich bet against a longtime rival, played by Harry Dean Stanton. It’s not the first time that Frank has let his greed get the best of him, and the film flashes back to a previous occasion when he lost his best rooster and his chance at the Cockfighter of the Year medal by running off his mouth. Since then, he’s maintained a vow of silence (though he’s prone to talking in his sleep). It’s Frank’s quest to make it to the top that serves as the film’s story.

Given its subject material and Deep South setting, it should go without saying that Cockfighter is a B-movie. But like all of Hellman’s best-known work, it’s a B-movie of the highest caliber, which is to say that it takes advantage of the possibilities of working quick and cheap. A more extravagantly-budgeted film on the subject would spare no expense to re-create the world of Southern cockfighting. But because all Hellman could afford was to film real cockfights, the world more or less created itself. The fans don’t feel like extras because they aren’t, and the blood from the fights is real. It’s this aspect of the film that troubles many viewers, who object to the non-simulated violence against the animals. But Hellman directs these scenes in a matter-of-fact style that avoids the cheap thrills that are often part and parcel with exploitation movies. Cockfighting is a way of life for these people in the movie, and for the most part they’re long past the point of being affected by the violence they see in the ring.

My only prior experience with cockfighting, either in real life or onscreen, came from Claire Denis’ No Fear, No Die. The difference between the two films is striking. In Denis’ film, cockfighting is an underworld activity, run by criminals and dominated by immigrants, with fights taking place in shady back rooms. By contrast, Frank’s world is out in the open- there are special cockfighting arenas, police officers are seen at the fights, and the final tournament is sponsored by a Senator. Everyone involved in the cockfighting world- be they trainers, sponsors, or fans who bet on the matches- accepts the way it is, which makes it all the more affecting when an outsider is invited in only to discover she can’t take it. A lesser film might take the side of Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy), who loves Frank before seeing the disgusting business he’s in. But the film is above all a character study of a man who has chosen a less-than-savory path, but is committed to riding it as far as it’ll take him.

For this reason, Oates’ presence is invaluable. Hellman fills the film with plenty of vivid character actors- Harry Dean Stanton, Richard B. Shull, Laurie Bird, a young Ed Begley Jr., the inimitable Millie Perkins- but Oates owns the film. Cockfighter was released the same year as another of Oates’ too-rare lead roles, in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, and the differences between the two performances illustrate Oates’ formidable acting talent. In his own way, Frank is just as desperate as Garcia’s Benny, but whereas Benny was a down-and-out loser, Frank sublimates his desperation into the pursuit of his goal and blocks out anything that’s unrelated to it. And Frank’s vow of silence allow Oates to demonstrate his gift for physical acting, which often leads to priceless bits of comedy (the film is sometimes very funny, something I’ve somehow neglected to mention before).

All the while, Oates never allows the character to become too charming or too heroic. Perhaps that was his greatest asset as an actor- his ability to keep his characters human-sized, with all the frailty and foolishness that implies. Rather than serving as larger-than-life vessels for audience wish fulfillment, Oates’ performances reflect the way we believe (or fear) that we ourselves would react to life’s biggest challenges. And while that’s not the stuff of top-flight movie stardom, it’s real grown-up acting of the highest order, and few did it better than Warren Oates.

So, what’ll it be? The Hammer release that introduced the world to Christopher Lee’s Dracula? A semi-forgotten Euro-zombie movie that’s allegedly ripe for cult resurgence? A late-period Jacques Tourneur fright favorite? A Criterion-anointed Japanese classic? Or will it be a Dario Argento giallo, a subgenre in which I’m woefully underversed? You decide!

Choose a movie for my next Reviews By Request column: | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to stump for your favorites in the comments section, or suggest possibilities for upcoming columns. See you in two weeks!

Take Five: Road Trip

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Opening this Friday, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is a bit of a gamble as a follow-up to The Illusionist. Following the plight of three soldiers recently returned from Iraq (played by Tim Robbins, Michael Pena and Rachel McAdams), it quickly turns into a sort of social statement-cum-sign o' the times story as they find themselves on a road trip together across the country. It's hard to predict how The Lucky Ones will be received; Iraq movies are always a crapshoot, and the movie's curious blend of comedy and drama may not fit in with the subject matter. But it's always fun to see a new road movie, especially this late in the year when the possibility taking real-world road trips becomes more and more daunting. Road pictures have a long and storied history in Hollywood, and filmmakers have managed to fold everything from bone-chilling noir to high-concept comedy to existential drama into the format. America is especially adept at making road pictures, not only because of the grand canvas that is the national geography, but because of our total immersion in car culture. Here's five of our favorites.

DETOUR (1945)

Film noir, despite its association with the urban environment, was never afraid to take its show on the road as long as there was a nice juicy crime at the center of the story, and Detour serves up a doozy. A grade-z Poverty Row picture made for the cost of Clark Gable's lunch, Detour nonetheless proved to be one of the most effective noir films of its day, thanks to its relentless, grubby energy. Tom Neal, who starts the picture looking like he's had his insides scooped out and just gets worse from there, plays a sad-sack piano player who just wants to get to the west coast so he can be united with his former flame. But along the way he gets framed for murder after running afoul of Ann Savage in one of the most terrifying femme fatale roles of all time. A terrific, unsparingly bleak little film that proves a little can go a long way.

ROAD TO UTOPIA (1946)

The term "road picture" was more or less invented to describe the handful of movies made in the 1940s to showcase the comedic talents of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby team. The movies, which always featured the boys making an arduous comic trek to some picaresque location, were of varied quality, but were alway huge moneymakers. The last of these was the best; it featured Hope and Crosby (accompanied, as always, by Dorothy Lamour) as turn-of-the-century con artists heading to Alaska to strike gold. That was just the set-up, though, for one of the most anarchic comedies of the decade; scanning more like a Marx Brothers movie, Road to Utopia featured in-jokes, metahumor, wordplay, surreal gags, and even some inexplicable albeit hilarious voice-overs by master humorist Robert Benchley.

TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

A beloved film among your loyal Screengrab scribes, Monte Hellman's throat-clutching existential race movie Two Lane Blacktop opened to great praise and almost as quickly faded out of existence. It's not hard to see why: for all its greatness, it's a remarkably strange little flick, curiously aimless despite its implacable velocity, with characters who are little more than cyphers, as much as they intrigue us. Two of its 'stars', James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, basically never acted again, and Warren Oates turns in a performance -- as the impenetrable, self-inventing G.T.O., named after his car -- that's bizarre even weighed against his filmography. Still, it's probably the pinnacle of the road movie as metaphor for existence, and once seen, it's never forgotten. A real underground classic that's finally gotten its due.

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (1983)

Nowadays, the presence of the National Lampoon imprint is practically a guarantee that a movie is going to be a colossal pile of shit. There are those of us old enough to remember how lucky we were back in the days when only the next installment of the venerable National Lampoon's Vacation franchise was going to be a piece of shit, but even for us old cranks, it does us good to remember that the original was actually a pretty solid ensemble comedy. Directed by a still-fresh Harold Ramis, written by John Hughes (who adapted his own story, with surprisingly few changes, from the old NatLamp magazine), and starring Chevy Chase when "starring Chevy Chase" was a preferable alternative to suicide, Vacation has held up surprisingly well, both on its own merits and as, essentially, the blueprint for every road comedy since.

BROKEN FLOWERS (2005)

Even for fans of Jim Jarmusch -- a group of which I am a proud member -- there was a lot not to like about Broken Flowers. Though the music, by Ethiopian jazzman Mulatu Astaque, was fantastic, it felt like it was driving the aimless plot, and the hip-music-plays-as-America-flashes-on-the-windshield device was getting a bit tired. Bill Murray's aging sad sack character was becoming less of a revelation and more of a routine. The incomprehensible ethnic as source of boundless wisdom device was wearing thin. All in all, parts of Broken Flowers played like a pardoy of Jarmusch rather than the real thing. But the parts that worked, including some stunning acting by the movie's female leads and the whole road-trip-to-nowhere angle which Jarmusch has done so well before, remind you why you put up with the parts that don't.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Taxi!

Take Five: Ride Hard

Summer of ’78: “The Driver”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Driver

Release Date: July 28, 1978*

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley

The Buzz: It’s Barry Lyndon going really fast!

Keywords: Car Chase, Parking Garage, Existentialism, Pursuit, Neo Noir

The Plot: Ryan O’Neal is the titular Driver, the consummate wheelman. Bruce Dern is the Detective determined to bring him down. Isabelle Adjani is the Player, a gambler who sees the Driver’s face after a casino robbery and is brought in for questioning by the Detective. She has been paid off, however, and refuses to identify the Driver. Since he’s played by Bruce Dern, the Detective is not a by-the-book kind of guy. He sets up his own bank robbery, using two lowlifes (Glasses and Teeth) facing 10 years in prison as bait. Although he knows the Detective is onto him, the Driver wants to beat him at his own game. Car chases result. Lots of car chases. In the end, it appears the Detective has caught the Driver holding the bag, but it turns out that both men have been duped by a low-level money launderer. This is perhaps what makes the film existential, in addition to the fact that none of the characters have names and nobody besides Dern talks much.

The Test of Time: I’m surprised at myself. As a fan of car movies, '70s cinema and Walter Hill’s pre-Streets of Fire oeuvre, I really should have seen The Driver long before now. Forget about the so-called “existential” stuff; it was all cribbed from Two Lane Blacktop anyway. Walter Hill is a man of action, and he delivers some top-notch car chases here. The first one, in which the steel-nerved Driver manages to plow half a dozen cop cars into walls or over embankments, may be the best. The camera is placed right up front, either on the hood or in the front seat, and the chase unfolds in long takes – you know, so you can actually see what’s going on. (Hello, Michael Bay and company? Hello? Is this on?) My favorite scene, however (which you can watch in the clip below), is O’Neal’s “audition” for the lowlifes, in which he chauffeurs them around a parking garage, reducing their car to scrap metal in the process – then tells them he’s not going to work for them anyway. Hill uses O’Neal’s blankness to his advantage, but I couldn’t help but think as I watched it that this was a movie made for Steve McQueen. (Sure enough, checking Wikipedia this morning I see that was the plan.) Dern is very Dern, and Adjani is eye-catching, although in her first English-speaking role she matches O’Neal in the monotone department. The only real groaner comes near the end, when Dern and about 20 cops somehow materialize behind the ever-cautious and prepared O’Neal in a bus terminal, but The Driver is still a worthy entry in the annals of four-wheeled cinema.

Quotable Quote: “That's a real sad song. Only trouble is, sad songs ain't selling this year.”

2008 Equivalent: The best bet for automotive mayhem is, unfortunately, Death Race.

*Perhaps you are wondering why we’re still in July of 1978. Go check the IMDb for August 1978 releases and you’ll learn, as I have, that there aren’t many. You may think late summer is a cinematic dead zone now, but compared to ’78, it’s an embarrassment of riches. I did have plans to do Interiors (released August 2, 1978), but it was covered in last week’s 15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed by Someone Else list. (That’s fine by me, as I was spared having to sit through Interiors again.) But rest easy, for next week we’ll have a genuine August release to enjoy.

Previously on Summer of '78: Hooper

Yesterday's Hits: Smokey and the Bandit (1977, Hal Needham)

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It may be hard to remember now, but there was a time when Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in Hollywood. Throughout the seventies and early eighties, Reynolds sold millions of tickets using mostly his easy grin and patented good ol’boy charm. And no Reynolds movie made more money than 1977’s bootlegging comedy Smokey and the Bandit. Yet, as Reynolds aficionado Larry Aydlette said in his recent Burt Reynolds blogathon, Smokey has lost a lot of its luster today. Many critics look upon it with scorn, and more importantly the film has taken on the air of a movie that’s more often remembered than revisited. So where did the love go?

What made Smokey a hit? The easy answer is Reynolds, but there was more to the film’s popularity than Burt. The seventies saw a rise in movies marketed to Southern audiences- a rise that helped to contribute to Reynolds’ box-office success- and Smokey and the Bandit came along at just the right time to benefit from this movement. But Smokey was a big hit all over the country, not just down South. Audiences loved the character of Bandit, the legendary outlaw truck driver who was smooth and confident but also life-sized. The movie also benefited from the era’s CB radio craze, and contributed more than a few colorful expressions to the vernacular. Smokey and the Bandit had something for everyone to enjoy- comedy, vehicular mayhem, anti-authority sentiments, a little romance, Bandit’s iconic Pontiac Trans Am- and as such it reached a broad base of moviegoers who made Smokey the second-biggest hit of 1977 (after Star Wars) and kept the film in some theatres for years on end.

What happened? Reynolds may have been the era’s biggest draw, but his biggest downfall has always been an unfortunate inability to discern quality from junk. While Reynolds occasionally leveraged his Smokey popularity to take on more adventurous projects (1979’s Starting Over, 1981’s Reynolds-directed Sharky’s Machine), more typical were the rash of Smokey sequels and ripoffs designed to piggyback on the original film’s success. So began a string of Bandit-like cocky showoff roles for Burt, most of which are indistinguishable today. By the mid-eighties after Burt had made three Smokeys, two Cannonball Runs, and many other movies in this vein, audiences decided they’d been to this well too often, and Reynolds’ popularity went into free-fall.

Does Smokey and the Bandit still work? That’s a big 10-4 there, good buddy. The plot is simplicity itself- Bandit (Reynolds) and best pal Snowman (regular Reynolds costar Jerry Reed) take a bet that they can make a round trip from Atlanta to Texarkana, Texas and back in 28 hours, bringing back 400 cases of (then-illegal in Georgia) Coors beer for Big Enos and Little Enos Burdette (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams). But after they’ve picked up the beer and started heading eastbound and down towards home, Bandit picks up a runaway bride who he christens Frog (Sally Field), and in doing so runs afoul of Texas Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), the father of Frog’s betrothed.

OK, so Smokey and the Bandit will never be mistaken for great art- as far as onscreen cross-country drives go, it’s no Two Lane Blacktop. But in the intervening three decades, the movie has lost almost none of its charm. Much of the film feels like a live-action Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam cartoon, with Bandit smooth-talking his way out of scrapes while the rootin’ tootin’ Sheriff Justice fulminates about his ever-slippery quarry. However, the film is made with real style and wit, and even if the film hits every note we expect it to- there’s even a short romantic interlude where Bandit and Frog take time out from the drive to do a little offscreen he-in’ and she-in’- it’s pretty darn irresistible.

The key to the film rests in the performances, which for the genre are first-rate. At the center of the film is Reynolds, who gives the best star turn of his career. It’s tempting to say that Reynolds was only playing himself, but to do so would be to underestimate the comic verve and star presence he brought to the film. Whether he’s trying quips over the squawk box with Snowman or pissing off Justice, Reynolds makes it all look easy.

For her part, Field makes a funny and surprisingly romantic counterpart for Reynolds- a talky, insecure, very seventies leading lady who’s a far cry from the damsels in distress and one-dimensional sex symbols that populate most movies of this sort. In addition, she and Reynolds have a palpable chemistry (which later translated into an offscreen romance between the two), and it’s this comfort level between the two that really sells their scenes together, most of which consist primarily of two people talking in a car. And Jackie Gleason remains, as ever, a treasure, giving a blustery performance that’s as agreeably salty as a bag of pretzels. Sheriff Justice may be a sumbitch with a badge, but darn if Gleason doesn’t make the guy lovable.

Like its star, Smokey and the Bandit is an unassuming movie with no ambitions except to show audiences a good time. It’s what you might call cinematic comfort food- there’s nothing new or bold about it, but it’s highly satisfying all the same. Thirty years down the line, Smokey also evokes a bygone era in movies, both in terms of its pre-CGI car chases (courtesy of stunt driver turned director Needham) and its pre-irony iconography. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine a big-screen hero sporting a cowboy hat without so much as a wink to the audience, but it’s a testament to the enduring appeal of the film, and of Burt Reynolds’ performance, that Bandit can still pull it off with ease. And of course, that Trans Am is as awesome today as it ever was.

Video of the Day: It's Monte Hellman Time!

Peter Smith — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Cult director Monte Hellman may be one of the few major influences on Quentin Tarantino whose films it's still somewhat difficult to see. While his major achievements, like Cockfighter and Two Lane Blacktop (one of the most famous scenes from which is above, followed by an interview with the director) have been released in swanky critic-baiting editions, some of his other films aren't even copyrighted and end up in those fifty-DVDs-for-ten-bucks anthologies you get at drugstores. Witness his first film, the freaky vampire schlocker Beast from Haunted Cave, or his revisionist western China 9, Liberty 37, neither of which are available in anything but the jumbo family pack edition. (The kung-fu movie he partially completed in between Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter is allegedly available as a two-pack, but we've never seen it, and even YouTube couldn't find us a clip. Where's Rolling Thunder when you need them?) — Leonard Pierce