“The best thing about Red Dragon (Universal), the second adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel, is that it reminds you how scary and seminal the first adaptation — Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986) — was. This new movie, directed by Brett Ratner, recycles the same narrative, many of the same lines, and even some of the same camera set-ups, but it stubbornly refuses to haunt … you could be watching a plodding, Hollywood-studio remake of some idiosyncratic foreign classic: The beats are the same, but the eerie vibe has been lost in translation.” David Edelstein reviews Red Dragon for Slate Magazine, October 2002

Manhunter (1986)
Directed by Michael Mann
Screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
Produced by Richard Roth
121 minutes (theatrical version)/ 124 minutes (director’s cut)

For those who’ve feasted on almost every variation of the psycho killer genre — particularly through TV forensics shows, with their nice and tidy finishes in under an hour — this special category of crime thriller begins and ends with filmmaker Michael Mann’s fervent and nearly flawless adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1981 bestseller Red Dragon. The tightly wound source material launched a franchise and still endures as the ultimate dance between predator and prey, yet the original film version has precision moves and timing all its own. FBI Special Agent Will Graham (William Petersen) is semi-retired and living in Marathon, Florida with his wife Molly (Kim Greist) and 11-year-old son Kevin (David Seaman) when his boss Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) visits the beach with a plea for help.

Graham’s dark talent lies in his ability to enter the mind of a killer and think as they think. To track down a sociopath who’s slain two families — earning the nickname “Tooth Fairy” for the post-mortem bite marks he’s left on the women — Graham reaches out to Dr. Hannibal Lektor (Brian Cox), a homicidal psychiatrist who Graham almost died bringing to justice. A note recovered in Lektor’s cell indicates the doctor is in communication with Tooth Fairy through coded ads placed in a tabloid. A gambit to lure Tooth Fairy to Graham using sleazy journalist Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang) backfires when the killer makes a date with Freddy instead. Revealed to be a gargantuan, socially awkward lab tech named Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), “Tooth Fairy” is drawn out of his shell by a blind co-worker (Joan Allen) who threatens to become Dollarhyde’s next victim.

Film rights to Red Dragon were snared by producer Dino De Laurentiis and after David Lynch tangled with the material — which he found too violent for his taste — Michael Mann was approached. The executive producer of TV’s new sensation Miami Vice, Mann had corresponded with convict Dennis Wayne Wallace for a penal script he’d since abandoned. Using an FBI agent to descend into the psychology of a criminal opened a door Mann had been looking for into that world. To play Will Graham, the director held out for William Petersen, who Mann had auditioned for the role that went to Jim Belushi in Thief. In a battle over the film’s title, Mann was overruled by De Laurentiis, who felt Red Dragon was too similar to his maligned cop thriller Year of the Dragon. Released in late summer with scant marketing support, Manhunter was dismissed by many critics. At the time, audiences ignored it as well.

What Michael Mann brings to the Hannibal Lechter game — a pastime revisited by Jonathan Demme, Ridley Scott, Brett Ratner and Peter Webber with diminishing attention — is a relentless pace and brooding chill that evokes Thomas Harris’ page turner, even if much of the author’s backstory is left in the dugout. Instead of focusing on the peccadilloes of the prey, Harris created a hunter whose skills set is far more compelling. Mann knows that guy well. The scenes between Will Graham and his family have an emotional purity, even with the starkest of dialogue, while close attention is paid to the psychologists, cryptologists and ballistics experts working together toward a common goal. Collaborating with casting director Bonnie Timmermann and composer Michel Rubini, Mann was restricted in budget and in time, but in spite of them, perhaps because of them, cranked out the definitive thriller of its class.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 48,623 users: 70% for Manhunter

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“Some of the more didactic critics asked in their reviews, “What kind of film is this — is it a love story, is it a thriller, is it a political story?’ You could say that it unsuccessfully fails to fuse these elements, but to ask why deal with all those elements together, why not choose one of them, reveals a view of life and films that is very different from my own.” Peter Weir interviewed by Sue Mathews for 35mm Dreams: Conversations with Five Directors About the Australian Film Revival

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)
Directed by Peter Weir
Screenplay by David Williamson & Peter Weir and C.J. Koch, based on the novel by C.J. Koch
Produced by James McElroy
115 minutes

Extracting the natural resources of Pre-Code Hollywood and refining them into a story vital to his own hemisphere, Australian filmmaker Peter Weir mined a diamond from the rough with The Year of Living Dangerously, a historical drama/ love story/ political thriller whose critics waged wasn’t properly committed to any one genre. Yet this Australian production — financed and distributed by MGM — has proven immune to category, forging atmosphere, foreign customs and sensuality into one mesmerizing throwback. It’s June 1965 and Australian radio correspondent Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) lands in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta on his first overseas post. Hoping that the friction between populist strongman President Sukrano and a Communist insurgency might spark his broadcasting career, Hamilton discovers an impoverished country seething with anti-capitalist sentiment.

While the seasoned correspondents (Michael Murphy, Noel Ferrier, Paul Sonkkila) scurry for a political scoop, dwarfish photographer Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt) sees potential in Guy to expose the real Jakarta, where the poor scramble for survival. He forms a partnership with Guy: exclusive film work in exchange for access to the contacts Billy has mysteriously developed in Indonesia. These include British assistant military attache Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver) who Billy uses his considerable social acumen to match Guy with romantically. In an effort to protect her lover, Jill tips Guy about an incoming arms shipment that will embolden the insurgents to launch a revolt against Sukrano. Choosing to broadcast this as the scoop he’s waited his career for, Guy takes advantage of Jill and alienates Billy, but as the country descends into revolution, Guy is given one chance to do the right thing.

C.J. Koch’s prize winning 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously was influenced by the author’s experiences as an ABC Radio producer and his travels in Southeast Asia. Film rights were quickly optioned by filmmaker Peter Weir. After Koch turned in an adaptation, Weir retained playwright David Williamson to collaborate on a script that hinged less on political intrigue and more on classical romance. Reuniting with rising star Mel Gibson after working together on Gallipoli, Weir chose Australian actor David Atkins to play Billy Kwan. Realizing in rehearsals he’d made a mistake, the director searched for a replacement who met the character’s height requirements. American stage actress Linda Hunt won Weir over in auditions, though even Hunt doubted she could convincingly play a man. Peers in the industry would disagree, voting her to an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Not content to illuminate the corners of a Third World humanitarian crisis as it unfolds, Weir’s fifth feature film works beautifully as another endangered species among movies: adult drama. To put it another way, The Year of Living Dangerously is hot. The screen intensity between Gibson & Weaver is almost as combustible as William Hurt & Kathleen Turner’s in Body Heat; like the tropical texture of Lawrence Kasdan’s film noir, we feel the humidity rising on the streets and how it changes those caught in its wave. A sophisticated screenplay and a spirited performance by Linda Hunt pose questions of individual responsibility to society at large without veering into sermon. Russell Boyd’s medieval lighting suggests uncertainty in the darkness, while Vangelis provided key musical cues to the passion that blossoms from that void.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 7,716 users: 73% for The Year of Living Dangerously

Metacritic “Metascore” average among 9 leading critics: 65 for The Year of Living Dangerously

What do you say?

“The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from beginning to end, from plot decision to the final scene — which has been used before on The Twilight Zone.” Stephen King interviewed for Playboy Magazine, June 1983

The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King
Produced by Stanley Kubrick
146 minutes (original U.S. theatrical version)/ 144 minutes (U.S. theatrical version)/ 119 minutes (international version)

Debating whether or not Jack Nicholson’s fortissimo performance in The Shining — as a family man who slips into homicidal insanity during his season as caretaker of a haunted hotel — needed to be played at such a high volume is like debating whether Jimi Hendrix really needed to light a perfectly good electric guitar on fire at Monterey Pop. There may have been a perfectly good exercise in gothic terror and things that go bump in the night lurking within Stephen King‘s novel, but the film version was designed and constructed by Stanley Kubrick. Drawn up as a last will and testament to the horror genre as far as the high and mighty Kubrick was concerned, the film inflicts such psychic trauma on the viewer that it needs a joker like Jack in the deck to soften its wicked blow.

Striking ominous chords from the start, schoolteacher Jack Torrance (Nicholson) accepts a six month stint as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, encouraged that winter’s isolation will give him time to outline a novel. The general manager feels obligated to mention a tragedy in which a previous caretaker killed his wife and two daughters with an axe before shooting himself. Jack responds that his wife — a fan of “ghost stories and horror films” — will be thrilled. The skittish Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) finds the illustrious hotel spooky, while 7-year-old Danny (Danny Lloyd) receives visions of the future that are nothing short of terrifying. A departing cook (Scatman Crothers) confides to the boy that they share a special power his grandmother called ”shining”. Assured there’s nothing  to be scared of, Danny senses something bad lurking at the Overlook, particularly in Room 237.

Warner Bros. president John Calley knew that Stanley Kubrick had an interest in the paranormal and sent him a galleys copy of The Shining in 1977. Ignoring a first draft Stephen King had been contractually guaranteed to author, Kubrick adapted a script with novelist Diane Johnson, who was teaching a course on the gothic novel at UC Berkeley. Certain exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel would be filmed at the Timberline Lodge, on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon. The vast majority of the film — including the hedge maze — was manufactured at Elstree Studios outside London. Filming commenced in May 1978 and given Kubrick’s refusal to be hurried through a schedule, didn’t wrap until April 1979. Kubrick tinkered with his film even after it was in U.S. theaters for five days, cutting an epilogue in which the general manager visits Wendy in the hospital.

The film departed so radically from his book  that Stephen King authored the teleplay for a 4-hour mini-series version that aired on ABC in 1997. Kubrick ignored many of the elements King found eerie — an elevator, a firehose, animal shaped shrubs — to focus instead on a child’s subconscious dread of a parent turning into a monster. The magnificence of The Shining is how Kubrick exploits that fear viscerally. Snippets of a blood soaked future flash through Danny’s mind while the corridors of the hotel breathe with living images of the past. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind provided electronic sound elements, which Kubrick sourced with music from classical composers György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki to create one of the most unnerving film scores ever. Criticized at the time for not watching enough horror movies, the bottom line is that Kubrick’s vision is scary as hell.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 423,027 users: 91% for The Shining

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say? The fan trailer below was superior to any I could find from Warner Bros.

“For me, it’s still, emotionally, falls short of total satisfaction because I just think there is an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn’t run as true as I feel that it should do, and in a sense I felt that what we made was an incredibly beautiful looking – as one would expect with Rid – but it’s almost like an art movie.” Ivor Powell interviewed in 2007 for Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner.

Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Produced by Michael Deeley
117 minutes

One of the most massive electric train sets ever constructed, Blade Runner doesn’t address logic or emotional depth as much as it lays down magnetic track and sails a bullet train over them. Arduously drafted, painstakingly constructed and overwhelming in scale as well as detail, it’s a marvel of science fiction engineering all right, yet climaxes with such insight into the nature of humanity that a poet dipping his toes in a pond might even give it up for the movie. With a tumultuous production history chronicled by a 3-hour documentary (Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner) and book (Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon), the film’s genesis was a creative storm by author Philip K. Dick, who capped a prodigious decade with the publishing of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968.

Ten years later, struggling screenwriter Hampton Fancher was urged by a friend to consider the book as something he might make some money off of. Fancher optioned the film rights and found particular empathy for Dick’s vision of overpopulation and ecological malaise. His untitled adaptation was strong enough to ultimately attract producer Michael Deeley, whose choice to direct was Ridley Scott, a U.K. commercial stylist then mixing the sound for his second feature film: Alien. Scott had sensed the seismic industry shift toward sci-fi following the public reception of Star Wars and when he was unable to decipher an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, agreed to board what was then being called Dangerous Days. Fancher didn’t care for that title and jacked one from William S. Burroughs that he preferred: Blade Runner.

In a dark narrative that screenwriter David Peoples was hired to punch into a shooting script, Los Angeles of the year 2019 is drenched in industrial pollution and overrun by those too sickly or poor to relocate to an off world colony. The Tyrell Corp has created the Replicant, a being identical to a human, superior in strength and at least equal in intelligence. Retired cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned to hunt down four Replicants who have arrived in L.A. for reasons unknown. Deckard visits Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), who shows off his secretary Rachael (Sean Young), a Replicant implanted with memories so vivid she believes herself to be human. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks out Deckard in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the fugitive Replicants — combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), laborer Leon (Brion James), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) — seek reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.

Dumping a wallop of psychic despair on audiences and losing critics in a labyrinth of wayward plot, Blade Runner was salvaged through midnight screenings and one of the first ever “director’s cuts” that in 1992 permitted Ridley Scott to smooth over miscues he made a decade earlier. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them still seem as clumsy as they ever were, but the film dances with questions about what it means to be human and where we might be headed if we stop troubling ourselves with that question. Deliberate and dangerously close to paralyzing the viewer with sensory overload, Scott’s eye for detail and his design virtuoso are stamped in every shot, while the nighthawk cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, electronic score by Vangelis and spellbinding visual effects work are a triumph in mood over matter.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 288,583 users: 89% for Blade Runner

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“I was angry about seeing so many movies with naked women and never seeing a naked guy. So when I shot the sex scene between Stacy and Damone in the poolhouse, I wanted it to be uncomfortable. She was naked, so I wanted to show the guy naked too. And the ratings board said, ‘You do that and you’ll get an X rating.’ I said, ‘How come you can see all these naked ladies in movies?’ And they said, ‘Because the female organ is not aggressive, but the male organ is.’ So what? Should we shoot it? Whatever. But I was a very cranky young lady, and the idea of compromising makes you crazy.” Amy Heckerling in Sean Penn: His Life and Times by Richard T. Kelly

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on his novel
Produced by Irving Azoff, Art Linson
90 minutes

A guerrilla handbook to growing up in America, Fast Times at Ridgemont High should have been the last word in high school movies for a while, just like The Outlaw Josey Wales put a nail in the pine box carting around the western genre in 1976. Fast Times didn’t set out to perform last rites on the teenager movie per se, but is such an exhilarating, A-to-Z tour of familiar landscapes that it’s a wonder John Hughes found any territory to carve out for himself. Rather than an incursion by adults into the world of teenagers, Fast Times feels like an inside job. The project was the brainwave of Cameron Crowe, a prodigal 22-year-old Rolling Stone reporter whose publisher David Obst suggested that the only way to uncover what high school kids were all about these days was to actually go back to high school.

So in the fall of 1979, Crowe returned home to his parents in San Diego and received front office permission from Clairemont High School to enroll as a student. Crowe’s surveillance culminated in six characters: a middle class brother and sister, her sexually experienced friend, a nerd, a music obsessed ticket scalper and a stoned surfer. At the end of the school year, Crowe approached his subjects and revealed he was writing a book. At the time, they were indifferent. Universal Pictures grabbed the film rights and put Crowe to work on a script with Art Linson, a producer Crowe had met reporting from the set of American Hot Wax in 1975. In the search for a director, Linson recalled an AFI student thesis he’d seen titled Getting It Over With and offered the job to Amy Heckerling, a 27-year-old who’d yet to direct a feature film.

What qualifies as a plot goes like this: Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works at Perry’s Pizza in the mall. When a foxy looking stereo salesman asks her out, Stacy’s friend Linda (Phoebe Cates) encourages her to be sexually aggressive with him. Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) is assistant to the assistant manager of the movie theater and shares his ardor for Stacy with the smooth talking Mike Damone (Robert Romanus), who dispenses love advice to the geek. Stacy’s brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) is employee of the month at “All America Burger” but after blowing his cool with a customer, suffers the indignity of accepting work at “Captain Hook Fish ‘n Chips”. Stoner Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) rejects the concerns of his peers, but runs afoul with history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) in a battle of wills that spans the entire school year.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High shoves other high school movies aside like wimps because Crowe and Heckerling inject so much honesty into the film: laugh out loud honesty, quirky honesty, tender honesty, brutal honesty. It’s not a war documentary, but it sometimes feels like it could be. Rather than turn predictable, Fast Times samples from several  genres. The duels between Spicoli and Mr. Hand are like highlights from a stoner comedy, while Heckerling isn’t kidding around with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s sex scenes, opting for stark realism. What lingers through all of this is how court jester Spicoli suggests there may be more to growing up than consumerism and sex. Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards and Nicolas Cage (billed as Nicolas Coppola) made early career appearances.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 148,349 users: 76% for Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“The companies, the majors, were afraid of it. They felt that it’s a downer, that the main character is going to be not very likable. And they also were suspicious about the genre, because they kept saying that the murder mystery plot isn’t very strong, which they were right about! They really wanted a murder mystery. Finally they said yes. Then they regretted it, I’m sure. And now they are glad.” — Ivan Passer interviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum in New York, July 1981

Cutter’s Way (1981)
Directed by Ivan Passer
Screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, based on the novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg
Produced by Paul R. Gurian
105 minutes

Coloring outside the lines of its literary source material as much as a movie adaptation needs to, Cutter’s Way is a damn near perfect picture of character, atmosphere and idiosyncrasy. This is a rare film that feels like it leapt to screen from the Smith Corona of a 20th century novelist without any artificial sweeteners; you can smell the cigarette smoke dangling in the air. Firmly in the Han Solo stage of his career, Jeff Bridges stars as Richard Bone, a fop who divides his time between boinking housewives, pimping sailboats in Santa Barbara and shirking responsibility at large. His best friends are a one-eyed, one-legged, one-man wrecking ball named Alex Cutter (John Heard) and his wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), whose sultry bloom is beginning to peel behind alcohol and her marriage to Cutter, a Vietnam vet.

Returning from a session with his latest paramour (Nina van Pallandt), Bone abandons his piece of shit Austin Healey in an alley. There, he encounters a man dumping a woman’s body in a trash can. When Bone tries to intercede, he’s nearly run over. Selling his alibi to the police, Bone is introduced to Valerie Duran (Ann Dusenberry), the spunky sister of the murder victim who asks Bone to help her nab the killer. He prefers to celebrate Old Spanish Days with Cutter and Mo, but while watching a parade, identifies the killer as J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott), an oil company tycoon who owns Santa Barbara. Refusing to suffer the indignity of another fat cat buying his way out of a crime, Cutter hatches a scheme to nail Cord. Bone resists getting involved until his fatalistic friend leaves him no choice.

No fan of the mystery genre per se, Newton Thornburg published his fourth novel Cutter and Bone in 1976 to raves and respectable enough sales for Paul R. Gurian to option the film rights. Screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin was hired to adapt a screenplay and the project was set up at EMI, where it may have been hoped that The Deer Hunter had wet the public’s appetite for Vietnam themed movies. Director Robert Mulligan was attached and Dustin Hoffman pursued to play Alex Cutter. When Hoffman dissipated, Mulligan moved on. Gurian ultimately turned to Ivan Passer, a Czech filmmaker whose 1965 debut feature Intimate Lighting may have impressed the producer with its nonjudgmental look at human nature. When Jeff Bridges agreed to play Bone, United Artists stepped in to bankroll the quirky, character driven lark.

Management upheaval at United Artists during the fiasco of Heaven’s Gate (in addition to contemptible reviews in the New York Times and New Yorker) prompted the studio to orphan Cutter and Bone in March 1981 after one week in limited release. A flurry of ecstatic reviews and film festival awards forced UA to reconsider and six months later, the film was rereleased under a new title: Cutter’s Way. It remained enough of a marketing enigma to stay off VHS until 1991 and DVD until 2001. Meandering and moody, Cutter’s Way doesn’t have the payoffs of a popcorn thriller. As a sensual rendering of three souls, their environment and their personal aberrations, the film is exhilarating. Cast and performed to perfection, cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth lit the picture like some dingy beer hall of dream while Jack Nitzsche composed the bewitching musical score.

Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

Across 110th Street (1972)
Directed by Barry Shear
Screenplay by Luther Davis, based on the novel Across 110th by Wally Ferris
Produced by Ralph Serpe, Fouad Said
102 minutes

Short on pimps, prostitutes or private dicks, long on urban decay as New York caught a peek at itself in the mirror, Across 110th Street is one of the few legitimate A-movies to emerge from the “blaxploitation” genre. Hitting bookshelves in 1970, Across 110th was the first and last published novel by Wally Ferris, a career television cameraman who worked at WNEW in Manhattan for many years. United Artists acquired film rights and Film Guarantors — a motion picture completion bond company — made what would be a brief splash into production. Producer Fouad Said hired veteran playwright/ screenwriter Luther Davis to adapt a script and Barry Shear, whose only notable feature was the ’60s cult movie Wild In The Streets, to direct; Shear did have hundreds of hours of TV credits on his resume, from Hawaii Five-O to Julia to The Streets of San Francisco.

Anthony Quinn came on board as executive producer, but when the role of Frank Matelli was apparently turned down by John Wayne and Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, Quinn stepped in front of the camera. Across 110th Street barely qualifies as “blaxploitation”; the same production could have been staged a decade earlier (or later) and would be far better known as the morally complex, street smart film noir it actually is. The bleak but fast moving story examines how one robbery ripples across a community, from the cops struggling to keep the peace, to the perps looking to make a clean getaway, to the civilians trying to make it through the day. While Quinn doesn’t seem fully committed to his character of Archie Bunker cop, Yaphet Kotto and Paul Benjamin are electric. Bobby Womack wrote (with J.J. Johnson) and performed five smooth tunes.

Summer gets a whole lot hotter when three black men — epileptic ex-con Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin), dry cleaner Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) and driver Henry Jackson (Antonio Fargas) — rob a bank operated by the Italian mob in Harlem. The brazen heist ends with two blacks, two Italians and two New York City police officers dead and flips the neighborhood upside down. Don Gennarro (Frank Mascetta) dispatches his dilettante son-in-law Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) to restore order by capturing the perpetrators and making an example of them. Meanwhile, Capt. Frank Matelli (Anthony Quinn), a veteran of enforcing his own style of law in Harlem, is disconcerted to learn that the investigation has been handed to Lt. William Pope (Yaphet Kotto), whose youth and ethnicity reflect the new NYPD.

Sent uptown to crack skulls, D’Salvio is greeted as little more than “a punk errand boy” by Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), the kingpin who runs Harlem on behalf of the Italians. Doc dispatches his fearsome right hand man Shevvy (Gilbert Lewis) to piece together information on the robbery, one $100 bill at a time. Shevvy approaches a dancer named Laurelene (Gloria Hendry) for help, unaware that her boyfriend Jim Harris is the man they’re after. Trying to stay one step ahead of the hoods, Matelli and Pope are slowed by contrasting methods in everything from how to question a suspect to how to do favors in Harlem. As the night drags on, the 55-year-old cop realizes that his era is over. Mobsters, police and thieves finally meet atop an abandoned tenement on Lenox Avenue & 142nd Street, where Harris is holed up and armed to the teeth.

What do you say?

Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973)
Directed by Ivan Dixon
Screenplay by Sam Greenlee and Mel Clay, based on the novel by Sam Greenlee
Produced by Ivan Dixon, Sam Greenlee
102 minutes

Any trip through “blaxploitation” would be missing something without The Spook Who Sat By The Door. Written in 1966 and published in 1969, Sam Greenlee‘s political thriller notched 1.5 million copies sold. The author went into business with Ivan Dixon, an actor and television director who’d gunned his way into features with Trouble Man in 1972. Greenlee & Dixon’s plan to finance and distribute the film independently stalled when black investors proved scarce; Greenlee’s attorney put up roughly $800,000 to get cameras rolling and United Artists acquired distribution rights, contributing $200,000 in completion bonds. Yanked from release by exhibitors fearful that the movie would spark revolution in theater lobbies across America, The Spook Who Sat By The Door went underground for almost 30 years.

In 2000, actor/producers Tim and Daphne Reid offered to distribute the cult classic on DVD through their Obsidian Home Entertainment. Fitting to Greenlee’s fantasy of America’s ghetto masses mobilizing into a resistance movement, The Spook Who Sat By The Door is hard hat wearing, metal lunchbox swinging independent filmmaking at its finest, a professional piece of work that makes up for what it lacks in budget with ample amounts of backbone. The material goes easy on the sermonizing to settle into a potent blend of social drama, character study and espionage thriller. Lawrence Cook is exceptionally well cast in the lead, soft spoken and scholarly, highly motivated and lethal, a militant Jack Ryan. Herbie Hancock composed a musical score that’s as durable, spartan and means-business as the movie.

Running a tight reelection campaign, a U.S. senator opts to raise his profile among urban voters by appointing a token black agent to the Central Intelligence Agency. One promising finalist appears to be Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook), ostracized by his classmates for studying too much and initially overlooked by management due to his habit of fading into the woodwork. But Freeman’s physical, intellectual and personal assets match what the CIA is looking for and he wins the spot. Freeman spends five dutiful years in a sub-basement toiling as a document “reproduction section chief”, growing estranged from his childhood love, a social worker (Janet League) who wants to get married and start a family. Instead, Freeman resigns his position as the first black spy to return home to Chicago, ostensibly to become a social worker.

Freeman makes contact with the leadership of a street gang he ran with as a teenager. Unimpressed with the gang’s puny resistance against the pigs, Freeman drills the hoodlums in guerilla warfare tactics, from building explosives, to organization, to how to rip off the enemy (“Remember, a black man with a mop, tray or broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country, and a smiling black man is invisible.”) Freeman connects with an ex-hoodlum turned cop (J.A. Preston) he hopes to flip to their cause, as well as a D.C. prostitute Freeman dubs “Dahomey Queen” (Paula Kelly) who becomes a crucial source of information. The Black Freedom Fighters of North America find their plans for armed resistance rushed into the field when Chicago police shoot a dope peddler, striking the match for rebellion.

What do you say?

This month’s theme was hatched after yet another person with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for nine more films with similar themes, “Polaroid”, “Sushi” and “Loan Payment” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

Elegy (2008)
Directed by Isabel Coixet
Screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the novel The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
Produced by Gary Lucchesi, Tom Rosenberg, Andre Lamal
112 minutes

If Elegy wasn’t a movie, it would probably be a rug, the rugs that men of a certain age wear on their heads. Pulitzer Prize winning author Philip Roth had two of his novels adapted by the movies — Goodbye, Columbus (1969) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1974) — but it wasn’t until Nicholas Meyer adapted The Human Stain (2003) for Lakeshore Entertainment that the results were even somewhat well received. Lakeshore optioned the film rights to Roth’s 2001 novel The Dying Animal and founder Tom Rosenberg sent a copy to Penelope Cruz. The actress spent five years lobbying to get a film made. With Meyer tackling a script, the producers wooed Al Pacino for the role of professor David Kepesh. Cruz had more luck getting fellow Spaniard Isabel Coixet, director of My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words, behind the camera, with Ben Kingsley as Kepesh.

Under a title Nicholas Meyer coined, Elegy commenced shooting April 2007 in Vancouver. Though Lakeshore had a deal with MGM, the film was screened for the first time at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival without a distributor. Samuel Goldwyn Films agreed to release it in the U.S., with Netflix’s Red Envelope Entertainment promoting the DVD among its subscribers. Elegy is intimately crafted, with Isabel Coixet dialing down the melodrama and striking a rhythm that’s soulful and intimate. The dialogue is cut from equal fine quality, but the story of a student entering into an affair with her professor is older than dirt. If there was anywhere to go with this material, Elegy is unwilling or unable to. Ben Kingsley doesn’t exhibit the charm the role called for, though Penelope Cruz has never been more appealing in an English speaking role.

Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show to promote his book about hedonism in pre-colonial America, author David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) hints at regret he’s experienced for a marriage in the 1960s that did not live up to its promise. Kepesh looks back on how passion recently entered and exited his life by recalling a student named Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz) in his practical criticism class at Columbia. Attracted to her beauty and sophistication, Kepesh waits until grades have been passed out and he throws a cocktail party for his students to make his move. She gives her professor permission to stop calling her “Miss Castillo”. He replies, “There’s something about you that invites a kind of formality.” Consuela accepts his invitation to see a play. Kepesh’s best friend poet George O’Hearn (Dennis Hopper) ridicules this, advising Kepesh not to mix conversation up with sex.

Wrapping up a round of “pure fucking” with his lover of 20 years, Caroline (Patricia Clarkson), Kepesh receives a call from his son (Peter Sarsgaard), a doctor still coming to terms with his father’ walking out on his mother. After their date, Kepesh lures Consuela to his apartment by agreeing to play the piano for her. They spend the night together. Though Kepesh maintains to George that Consuela likely thinks of him as a new experience and nothing more, the couple is unable to move on. A relationship blossoms, but Kepesh realizes he’ll never possess Consuela and obsesses over her. She reads him the riot act and allays the professor’s fears of their 30-year age difference, but his insecurity erodes the love affair, prompting Kepesh to return to the familiarity of Caroline. Two years later, out of the blue, Consuela returns to Kepesh with a revelation.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10,718 users: 60% for Elegy

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 66 for Elegy

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This month’s theme was hatched after yet another person with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for nine more films with similar themes, “Chopsticks”, “Slacker” and “Fitting Room” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

Shopgirl (2005)
Directed by Anand Tucker
Screenplay by Steve Martin, based on his novella
Produced by Ashok Amritraj, Jon Jashni, Steve Martin
106 minutes

As dazzling as Christmas pageant and equally bloated, Shopgirl is blessed and dogged by its formality. Not exactly an autobiographical account, Steve Martin drew on 25 years of relationships for a novella, published in 2000. A film version was set up at Lakeshore Entertainment, with director Anand Tucker and actress Claire Danes attached. Thrown into turnaround, film rights were picked up by Ashok Amritraj, who was sold on the property while working with Martin on Bringing Down the House in 2002. The former tennis pro’s production company Hyde Park Entertainment had a deal with Touchstone Pictures and once Jason Schwartzman took a role vacated by Jimmy Fallon at the last minute, they had a movie. A 45-day schedule commenced October 2003 in Beverly Hills and Silverlake. Several of the interiors were filmed at Delfino Studios in Sylmar.

Steve Martin had gambled on Englishman Mick Jackson to direct his script L.A. Story and 14 years later, the Thailand born, U.K. bred Anand Tucker certainly brings a European depth to Martin’s material. Deliberately paced and nearly devoid of chuckles, the approach is eye popping, a poor man’s David Fincher for better or for worse. Claire Danes & Jason Schwartzman are superbly cast as L.A. lovers who meet a year too soon, but Martin’s subdued older gentleman intrudes like an afterthought from a previous draft. Shopgirl is worth watching for Danes, whose gifts of refinement seem rarely in demand for high concept Hollywood these days. David Cronenberg’s frequent DP Peter Suschitzky provided the carnivale lighting scheme, though the musical score by Barrington Pheloung suggests something heartbreaking is set to occur at any moment.

In Beverly Hills, Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) is relegated to working the lonely 3rd floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, where she sells the antiquated women’s garment of hand gloves. Returning to her plain apartment building in Silverlake, Mirabelle dedicates herself to etchings, which she sells here or there to local art galleries. The Vermont native otherwise toils in obscurity, hoping someone important heralds her unique talent. At the Launder Land coin-op laundry, Mirabelle instead meets the slovenly Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a fellow artist who stencils fonts of his own design onto amplifiers. After an awkward first date totally devoid of chemistry, she throws Jeremy’s phone number in the trash. Succumbing to loneliness, Mirabelle initiates a sexual tryst that ends up being cut short by her reclusive house cat.

Back at Saks, Mirabelle receives a customer in the silver haired Ray Porter (Steve Martin), whose reserved approach and taste in shoes catch her eye. The mystery man sends Mirabelle a gift of gloves attached to a dinner invitation, which she accepts after he pays her work station another visit. A Seattle logistician who rents a home in Los Angeles so he won’t have to spend time packing when visits, Ray plays it proper with the emotionally maturing Mirabelle, making a speech the morning after they consummate their affair that his job doesn’t permit a long-term relationship. Mirabelle translates this as Ray planning on being with her long term as soon as work permits it. While Ray continues to keep Mirabelle at arm’s length, Jeremy follows her advice, showing some initiative in his field. Finding great success, he returns to Mirabelle a man.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 17,747 users: 51% for Shopgirl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 62 for Shopgirl

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