What the *&#! Is This About?
In the San Fernando Valley of 1977, busboy Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) catches the eye of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), maker of “adult films, exotic pictures” at the nightclub where Eddie works. Jack lives in Reseda with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a coke sniffing adult film star whose line of work has cost her custody of her son. After Jack sends another one of his performers – the legendary Rollergirl (Heather Graham) – to inspect Eddie’s stuff up close, the troupe takes him for a cup of coffee. Jack expresses his vision to make an adult film where the story is so compelling the audience can’t get up and leave until they find out how it ends. Once Eddie’s spiteful mother (Joanna Gleason) kicks him out, Eddie finds a home with Jack.

Eddie’s new family includes the exuberant Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), actor/stereo salesman/cowboy Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), a grip (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who develops a crush on Eddie and The Colonel James (Robert Ridgely) who puts up the money for all of Jack’s films and urges Eddie to think about changing his name, “some name that makes you happy, or something with a little pizzazz.” Coming up with the handle “Dirk Diggler” while lounging in Jack’s hot tub, Dirk makes his film debut having sex with Amber. His physical endowments and charisma propel Dirk Diggler to the top of the adult film world, a position he solidifies with the character of Brock Landers, super agent and super lover whose debut Angels Live In My Town prompts Jack to declare, “This is the best work we’ve ever done.”

Dirk’s fortune takes a detour in 1980, after Amber introduces her “baby boy” to cocaine and the adult film industry transitions from film to the much cheaper format of video tape, ushering in an era of amateurism in the industry. Dirk’s drug use effects his acting and his ego gets him tossed off Jack’s set. Dirk and Reed take a shot at becoming rock stars, but shoot so much cash up their noses that they can’t pay the recording studio to retrieve their pathetic master tapes. On his way to rock bottom, Dirk falls in with desperado Todd Parker (Thomas Jane) who hatches a scheme to rob Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina), a drug smuggler with a fondness for mix tapes and firecrackers. Reaching a new low in life, Dirk Diggler realizes he has nowhere left to go but up.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Dirk Diggler Story was a 30-minute short Paul Thomas Anderson made when he was seventeen years old. Shooting on video and using two VCRs to edit, he was inspired not only by the porn movies he was obsessed with, but by fake documentaries like This Is Spinal Tap. Anderson chronicled the rise and fall of a porn star he based loosely on John Holmes, as well as a performer he’d seen profiled on A Current Affair named Shauna Grant. Anderson recalls, “There was some humor that I saw in it, I guess in a sick twisted way, maybe because it was the first time I was recognizing that a lot of these people in this story on A Current Affair were people I’d seen peripherally around the Valley, just in an area where I grew up, which is not a real shady area or anything, but there’s a lot of kind of goofy characters. So maybe it was just kind of being tickled by that.” Anderson ultimately wrote a feature length script based on The Dirk Diggler Story that ran 300 pages.

A 26-minute short Anderson made starring Philip Baker Hall opened doors for the filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. When Samuel L. Jackson agreed to join the cast of a feature Anderson had written – ultimately titled Hard Eight – financing was secured from Rysher Entertainment. Anderson enthused, “I remember on day two of shooting, calling my agent and saying, ‘After I’ve finished this movie, I wanna go right away and make Boogie Nights, ’cause I’m here with four actors and I LOVE IT! But I need more! I need fucking more! I need 80 of them!’ I knew it would be cool to consciously make a small movie – and a big fucking epic sloppy huge movie.” In the summer of 1995, Anderson went back to The Dirk Diggler Story, jettisoning the documentary approach and honing his script to a straightforward narrative of 185 pages.

One of the first people to get a look at Anderson’s script for Boogie Nights was the 31-year-old president and chief operating officer of New Line Cinema, Michael De Luca. Anderson’s pitch to DeLuca was that this was a four hour movie with a disco intermission. He talked about the opening shot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and how he wanted to open with something similar: a black screen with disco music thumping underneath, which would then explode into a club marquee with the film’s title. Anderson described a long tracking shot that would descend into the club and introduce nearly every character, without cutting. DeLuca – thinking this sounded like Lawrence of Arabia, with disco – was hooked. He signed on immediately, regardless of the running time. “I would do Berlin Alexanderplatz with Paul. He’s Orson Welles. I’m the blank check guy.”

New Line chairman Robert Shaye had reservations about the thick script, which DeLuca assured his boss that Anderson could cut. Other executives remained dubious. VP of Marketing Karen Hermelin recalled, “I remember Mike DeLuca asking me to read it and I thought, ‘Who would watch this? You can’t make this.’ But DeLuca was totally passionate, he believed in Paul. And Paul believed in himself.” Hermelin came around. “And he was totally uncompromising. He had this five-thousand page script which was completely misogynistic. I loved it.” Shaye struck a deal with Anderson: He could make Boogie Nights with the freedom to cast whoever he wanted, provided he kept the budget below $15 million, secured an R-rating from the MPAA and delivered a running time of no more than three hours, which New Line would ultimately retain final cut over. Anderson agreed.

The first actor Anderson seriously considered for Jack Horner was Warren Beatty, who had phoned to flirt with the role. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1997, Anderson revealed, “I think what I eventually, I started to figure out was that Warren wanted to play Dirk Diggler, you know? ‘You don’t really want to play Jack Horner. You want to be the kid on this movie. He said, ‘Yeah.’” Anderson felt Beatty’s reticence had something to do with morality. “I think what he might have been looking for, which maybe some other people were looking for, was a clear kind of moment or a clear moment when someone stands up and says, ‘What we are doing is wrong,’ you know?” After considering Jack Nicholson, Anderson made an offer to Sydney Pollack, but the director/actor blanched over the subject matter. Once they saw the film, Beatty and Pollack both regretted saying no. Burt Reynolds had said yes and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Leonardo DiCaprio attached himself to the role of Dirk Diggler, but weeks before shooting was to begin, the rising star was talked into taking the lead in Titanic. On his way out the door, DiCaprio recommended one of his co-stars from The Basketball Diaries – Mark Wahlberg – for the job. Joining him were most of the cast from Hard Eight - John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Ridgely, Philip Baker Hall – as well as actors that Anderson was eager to collaborate with. Don Cheadle had previously worked with Julianne Moore in a production of Jean Genet’s The Screens at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “I called her and said, ‘What’s up with this script? Are you down with this?’ And she told me she got a real good feeling from Paul. I did too, but I was still nervous about how the film would come off. I didn’t want to be naked and exploited. I wanted the film to take a deep look at these people. And it does.”

A twelve week shooting schedule commenced in July 1996. The perfect house for Jack Horner had been found, but the location ended up being in West Covina, a 45 minute commute. Little about the production was a breeze. Producer John Lyons recalls, “Boogie Nights was a truly grueling shoot. It was made for basically no money, $12 million. It was a period piece and we shot a lot of it in the San Fernando Valley and West Covina. It was very hot and we shot so many days where it was 104 or 105 degrees. We shot a lot at night, which was really exhausting. When we made that movie, there was a lot of talk about workers in the sex industry and how it was a liberating thing. The reality was that I think we all got sort of depressed during the making of the film. It was intense and the reality of the lives of those people were leading are far from glamorous.”

Screened for the executives at New Line, Boogie Nights met with enthusiasm, for the most part. At 165 minutes, Robert Shaye felt the picture was just too long. While Anderson hemmed and hawed at trimming anything, Shaye brought in his own editor to cut the movie. When test screened, New Line’s 140 minute version somehow scored even lower than Anderson’s version, which was generating a miserable 30% among recruited audiences. New Line marketing chief Mitch Goldman explained, “The truth was – people didn’t want to say they liked it, even if they did. That’s the fallacy of testing a picture like this. They’d applaud, laugh, cry at the right places. Then the cards would come in shitty. When they put pencil to paper they’d say, ‘I don’t know anyone I’d recommend this to’ because it was a distasteful subject. But you could tell they loved it.”

The MPAA’s reaction to Boogie Nights was predictable. Anderson recalled, “When we submitted the movie, it was NC-17. I said, ‘I can’t argue with you.’ What they said next surprised me: ‘We just want you to know we love this movie, and we want it to be NC-17.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘We created that rating for movies like this, movies that deal with explicit material but that are also legitimate films. Then Showgirls came along and made us look like girls, sort of wiped the rating back to an X. So we need a movie like this.’ That changed my mind. I understood, but I said, ‘I can’t be the guinea pig.’” After recutting and resubmitting the film at least six times to no avail, Anderson reshot the sequence in which William H. Macy discovers his wife nonchalantly enjoying sexual relations at a New Year’s Eve party. “The MPAA broke it down like this: you can either hump or talk. You cannot hump and talk.”

Boogie Nights premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 1997. By late October, it had opened in the U.S. to nearly universal critical acclaim. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Some of the most distinctive American films of recent years – Pulp Fiction, The People vs. Larry Flynt, L.A. Confidential and now this one – have invoked a sleaze-soaked Southern California as an evilly alluring nexus of decadence and pop culture. Boogie Nights further ratchets up the raunchiness by taking porn movies and drug problems entirely for granted, and by fondly embracing a collection of characters who do the same.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “From the second it begins, Boogie Nights seizes your senses and pulls you right in: no turning back, no time for debate, no regrets.” Emmanuel Levy, Variety: “Darkly comic, vastly entertaining and utterly original.”

Far from a blockbuster – grossing $26.4 million in the U.S. and another $16.7 million overseas – Boogie Nights did receive three Academy Award nominations (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Anderson’s script were up for Oscars). Anderson trumpeted his magnum opus in one of many interviews by stating, “It’s about finding a family, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds kinda preposterous, ’cause it’s about porno! You know, and that’s a really kinda weird thing, is that you want to say ‘Well, it’s about the pornography industry’ and then you want to quickly say well, not really. And then maybe people might look at you sideways and go, ‘Come on, which is it?’ But I think ultimately, the thing that I really liked most and really focused on is that it’s about a lot of people searching for their dignity, and trying to find any kind of love and affection they can get. And they find it in really fucked up and twisted ways – but they get it, you know?”

Why Should I Care?
Just about every minute of Boogie Nights – which clocks in at 155 minutes – looks, sounds and feels almost exactly like I’ve imagined that movies should look, sound and feel. Photographed by Robert Elswit, we’re dazzled on a technical level. Karyn Rachtman – music supervisor for Pulp Fiction – deserves some kind of special award for mixing up The Chico Hamilton Quintet and Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band with the usual suspects like The Commodores and K.C. and the Sunshine Band. In his script, Anderson tackles challenging subject matter and takes on big, sloppy ideas, while swinging back and forth between darkness and light. If the picture has a flaw, it’s in the two dimensional portrait of just about every single character, who speak, act but very seldom it seems, think. Rollergirl flies out of the movie almost as thinly sketched as when she flew in.

Great insight is not a service Anderson offers. Where Boogie Nights succeeds masterfully is as a document of a moment in show business history and how the camaraderie of the players binds them together after the show is over. As a pure entertainment, it features plenty of ‘70s kitsch, a consistently twisted black wit, a ceaselessly mesmerizing visual palette, and that ass kicking retro soundtrack. Musician Jon Brion pitches in with a sparse but wonderfully kooky musical score. The cast – which includes Luis Guzman, Melora Walters, Nicole Ari Parker and Ricky Jay – has to be one of the finest groups of character actors ever assembled under one tent. What’s most admirable is how Anderson resists making a crowd pleasing, derivative comedy and instead, has the maturity to explore the darkness in each his characters, redeeming the ones still left standing.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“The Don” By Justine Elias. Interview, 1997 August

“The Innocent Approach to an Adult Opus” By Margy Rochlin. The New York Times, 12 October 1997

Boogie Nights (New Line Platinum Series). New Line Home Video, 1997

“Q & A with PTA” By Matt Grainger. Cinemattractions. 1998 February

“20 Questions” By David Rensin. Playboy, 1998 February

Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. By Steven Priggé. McFarland (2004)

Rebels on the Backlot. By Sharon Waxman. Harper Entertainment (2005)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In 1980 – following the expulsion by Fidel Castro of 125,000 Cubans, many less than desirable – U.S. immigration officials question Tony Montana (Al Pacino). His bid for asylum falls short when the scar on his cheek and the prison tattoo on his hand brand him less than desirable. Tony explodes. “What do you want me to do, stay there and do nothing? I’m no fucking criminal, man. I’m no puta or thief. I’m Tony Montana, a political prisoner from Cuba. And I want my fucking human rights, now! Just like the president Jimmy Carter say. Okay?” Tony is interned at Freedomtown with the other Cuban refugees, including his best friend Manny (Steven Bauer), who secures them green cards by agreeing to kill a Castro lackey who arrives at the camp for their new benefactor. A job at a sandwich stand in Miami awaits, but Tony has his sights set on bigger fish.

Tony & Manny’s ragged but effective work as drug couriers gain the respect of their humble boss, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia). With cash in his pocket, Tony attempts to reconcile with his mother (Miriam Colon) and his adoring kid sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) who Tony harbors intense feelings for. He also sets Manny straight about America. “This country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” Coveting Lopez’s glassy eyed girlfriend Elvira (Michelle Pfeiifer), Tony takes the initiative on a business trip to Bolivia and negotiates a $75 million cocaine deal with the powerful Sosa (Paul Shenar). Lopez warns his protégé that the guys who last in their business are the ones who keep a low profile, but Tony has one ambition: “The world, chico. And everything in it.”

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The genesis of Scarface was with Al Pacino. In 1974, the actor was performing in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, a satire on fascism that the playwright had modeled on the American gangster movie, particularly the 1932 classic Scarface, starring Paul Muni. Pacino recalled, “So I was one day walking along Sunset Boulevard of all places and there was – I believe it’s the Tiffany Theater now – and it was playing on a double bill with something else, I forget. And it was Scarface, and it was a few of us, so I said, well why don’t we just go and take a look at it. And we went in and it was, you know, an astounding movie, astounding. And the performance of Paul Muni’s was astounding and inspiring. And I thought after that, that I just wanted to, yeah, I wanted to imitate him, I wanted to do something and was inspired by that performance. And I called Marty Bregman, who then put together some people and they started working on developing this as a film.”

Producer Martin Bregman – Pacino’s former manager and producer of Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon – has also claimed credit for the idea. “The reason I did Scarface - or how it came to my attention – was I was watching the old Paul Muni film about three o’clock one morning when I couldn’t sleep … and it occurred to me that a film like that, a film like Scarface – the rise and fall of an American gangster – had not been done, certainly had not been done recently. Hadn’t been done since Scarface.” To direct, Bregman approached Brian DePalma, who in 1981 was in post-production on Blow Out. Collaborating with playwright David Rabe, DePalma attempted to retain the setting of the original Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks and adapted by Ben Hecht. When the results failed to meet with anyone’s satisfaction, DePalma dropped out and Bregman turned to director Sidney Lumet.

Academy Award winning screenwriter Oliver Stone – uninterested in remakes – had already turned down an offer from Bregman to adapt a script. He changed his tune once Sidney Lumet came aboard and Stone heard his take. “It was not until Sidney Lumet came into the picture – I think shortly thereafter – we had another conversation and he told me Sidney Lumet was very anxious to do the movie and wanted to do it Cuban, Miami, 1980, ’81, the Mariel Boat Lift. I started into the research of Miami. I went to Miami extensively and I got to know both sides. I got to know the law enforcement side, the attorney generals, the attorney’s office, the gangster elements through the lawyers, the ex-gangster elements. And then eventually I wanted more. I plunged into the Caribbean. I went down to Bimini. On another trip – a separate trip – I went to Ecuador and to Bolivia.”

Stone’s self-confessed “drug period” – beginning during his adaptation of Conan the Barbarian, which was written on cocaine and downers, and continuing through The Hand, which Stone also directed – was in full swing during his research on the drug cartels. Ultimately, the screenwriter absconded to Paris for six months in December 1981, went cold turkey and wrote Scarface. Sidney Lumet – who had hoped to explore the geopolitical ramifications of the cocaine trade, including what he suspected was the involvement of the CIA – didn’t care for what Stone turned in. He commented, “I didn’t want to do it on just a gangster or cop level. As it stood, it was a comic strip.” Stone maintained, “Sidney did not understand my script, whereas Bregman wanted to continue in that direction with Al.” When Lumet dropped out, the producer went back to his first choice for director.

Brian DePalma recalled, “When I had first started with David Rabe, we had more or less tried to start with the original Scarface. Italian. Chicago. The script that came to me ultimately that Bregman had developed with Stone was completely different. Nothing that I had ever envisioned, and that’s why I liked it so much, ‘cause it was a whole new way of approaching this material. And those elements were in the original script. I liked the material specifically because to me it was sort of like a modern metaphor for The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where cocaine becomes gold and it’s kind of the American dream gone crazy, where you have this product that can turn into millions of dollars but in the process you destroy your life. And it’s sort of like the capitalist dream gone bizarre and berserk and is crazy as you get and completely self-destructive.”

After an ingénue named Michelle Pfeiffer flew to New York on her own dime and gave an intense audition with Pacino, both Bregman and DePalma were unanimous that she would play Elvira. Pacino was holding out for a leading lady with a bit more experience: Glenn Close. Bregman recalled, “I had a long, old relationship with Al, and I told him he didn’t know what the hell he was thinking. I told him he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. I said this character is partly a courtesan, and she has to be half a hooker. Glenn Close is many things, but she is not half a hooker.” In addition to warming up to Pfeiffer, Pacino worked with dialect coach Robert Eastson and co-star Steven Bauer – who was born in Cuba – to nail his character’s accent. Pacino became so immersed, he asked director of photography John Alonzo to speak to him only in Spanish throughout the shoot.

Under a budget of $21.5 million, Scarface was scheduled to roll September 1982 in Miami. The bullet riddled city did not celebrate. Fearing that the movie was set to portray Cuban Americans in a negative light, Commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr. introduced a resolution to City Council to deny permits to the production. The effort failed, but two weeks into filming, threats of demonstrations forced Bregman to shut down and move to Southern California. Costume designer Patricia Norris recalled, “I did think they’d have killed us if we stayed in Miami. There were members of the community who hated us because they thought we were doing a pro-Castro movie, which was absurd, but their anger was very serious. And then there were real drug people around, Colombians who came on the set. The day a fellow sat down in the chair next to me, and crossed his legs, and I saw a gun strapped to his ankle, I knew I wanted to get back to Los Angeles.”

The internment camp sequence was shot underneath the Santa Monica and Harbor Freeways in downtown L.A. The sandwich stand where Tony & Manny work was also shot in Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo. Tony & Elvira’s wedding was filmed at a 35-acre mansion in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, while Sosa’s Bolivian hacienda was also shot in Montecito. Many of the elaborate interiors were staged on the Universal Studios lot. To snag the Miami Beach exteriors, DePalma snuck back into town with a small crew for two weeks in April 1983. The director later stated, “It’s difficult enough to make a movie without adding more complications. Afterward, the governor and the mayor were upset, realizing that the company would have provided a lot of jobs in Florida. When we went back, there were no problems.” The delays added two months and $5 million to the budget.

When Scarface went before the MPAA, it returned with an X rating four times. Efforts by DePalma to trim the violence had no effect on the rating, which would have dissuaded exhibitors in many parts of the U.S. from booking the film. In early November 1983, Bregman called for a hearing, in which the producer joined DePalma, Universal distribution chief Robert Rehme and Broward County law enforcement official Nick Navarro to plead their case to the ratings board. DePalma maintained to Playboy at the time, “I didn’t take anything out except for the arm that was chainsawed off. You don’t really see it, just about twelve frames. I took it out, anyway. I sent the censors four versions and kept taking things out, and finally I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ and all four versions got an X for ‘cumulative violence,’ whatever that is. So I figured, ‘Hey, if we’re getting an X, let’s go with our first version.’” By a vote of 17-3, Scarface received an R rating and was clear to open December 1983 across the U.S.

Critics didn’t condemn Scarface, not completely. The New York Times (Vincent Canby) and Time Magazine (Richard Corliss) posted rave reviews. But the boo birds came out in equal force. Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “The whole feeling of the movie is limp. This may be the only action picture that turns into an allegory of impotence.” Walter Goodman, in a New York Times op-ed: “Brian DePalma evidently believed that enough gore and mayhem could save a plate of cold fried bananas fifty years after it has been served up piping hot.” Dave Kehr, the Chicago Reader: “Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.”

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert flew into debate over Scarface, with Siskel turning thumbs down over what he perceived to be lack of character development. Ebert: “You think there’s some rule that says a guy has to be good at the beginning and bad at the end?” Siskel: “No, I say it’s more interesting.” Ebert: “He’s a criminal when he gets off the boat …” Siskel: “That’s exactly right, an uninteresting criminal.” Ebert: “He has a criminal’s version of the American dream, which is get a lot of money, build a big house and marry this blonde. And then he falls into drugs and because of his own fatal flaws it all comes crashing down, so it’s the story of a guy who’s bad at the beginning and bad in the middle and worse at the end. What’s wrong with that?” Siskel: “Who cares? I didn’t care about him in the slightest. His life meant nothing to me.” Ebert: “There are a lot of people like this guy, I think.” Siskel: “All of the famous gangster films are not about louses who got lousier. Some of them are about interesting characters who got lousier.”

Scarface grossed a subpar $45.4 million in the U.S. and $20.4 million overseas. But instead of going away, audiences remained fixated on Tony Montana. Al Pacino mused, “You make a lot of pictures, and you realize some don’t have it. I knew there was a pulse to this picture; I knew it was beating. And then I kept getting residuals from the movie, kept getting checks. And wherever I was filming, in Europe, people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Tony Montana.’ In Israel the Israelis came up to me and wanted to talk about Scarface. The Palestinians wanted to talk about Scarface.” Due to popular demand, Universal has granted more than forty licenses for merchandisers in the U.S. to crank out Tony Montana T-shirts, action figures, belt buckles or money clips. When Universal announced the Scarface Two-Disc Anniversary Edition DVD in 2003, advance orders swelled to 2 million, the highest of any title in the studio’s library.

Tony Montana has even been resurrected as a video game – Scarface: The World Is Yours – allowing xBox and Wii users to rampage through Miami. Oliver Stone summed up the enduring appeal of the film by stating, “A lot of young businessmen quote me the dialogue and when I ask them why they remember it, they say, ‘It’s exactly like my business.’ Apparently, the gangster ethic hit on some of the business ethics going on in this country. Scarface has probably got me more free champagne than any film I’ve ever worked on. I’ve bumped into Spanish and Jamaican gangsters throughout the Caribbean and South America and gay gangsters in Paris, who bought me champagne all night long. I’ve even read reports in newspapers where gangsters have modeled themselves on Tony Montana.”

For the film’s 20th anniversary, Def Jam met with Brian DePalma to propose Scarface be re-released, updating the Giorgio Moroder score with a hip-hop soundtrack. Bregman and Pacino had given a blessing to the idea of a rap music reboot. DePalma scotched it. The director stated, “If this is the ‘masterpiece’ you say, leave it alone. I fought them tooth and nail and was the odd man out, not an unusual place for me. I have final cut, so that stopped them dead.” Def Jam pressed a tribute CD instead, compiling tracks by Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G. and others, loosely connected to the gangster classic. DePalma noted, “The hip-hop community was seeing all around them what was happening in the film: that cocaine makes you feel all powerful, and you surround yourself with entourages and palaces and outrageous clothes and women, and you lose all touch with reality; you become numb. Ultimately you divorce yourself from the people you knew in the past. You ultimately explode, you perish because of your own excess.”

Why Should I Care?
With characters exiting the movie almost as tissue paper thin as they were when they came in, only someone with a Tony Montana hoodie would say this picture is perfect. But one of the reasons it’s become enormously popular all over the world is how well it plays regardless of its audience. Arthouse, grindhouse, bootleg VHS, mall crowd or country club set, no matter what your setting, there is something to marvel over in Scarface, undeniably one of the greatest shoot ‘em ups of all time, as well as one of the most hilarious satires of that same excess. The visual palette of the picture is unmatched, with the finest possible recreations of early ‘80s Miami high life, courtesy production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. When it comes to Technicolor violence, the film is gruesome in a way that few Hollywood action movies are, with the possible exception of The Untouchables, also directed by DePalma.

What makes Scarface so potent isn’t its carnage or how well it was photographed, but the penetrating script by Oliver Stone. Bursting with lively one-liners – “Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy!” – and street corner sagacity about the nature of power, the film is full of color and excitement at the beginning before slowly taking a turn toward darker territory. Written as a swan song to cocaine, Scarface is the personal best screenplay Stone has ever cranked out of his own typewriter. Second best might be Wall Street, another warning about the blind alleys of capitalism that instead of being taken as a cautionary tale has become a training video for would-be entrepreneurs who completely miss the point. If Al Pacino’s lunatic raving about banking, trust and pelicans while immersed in a giant bubble bath isn’t the centerpiece of a great black comedy, I don’t know what is.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Al Pacino: A Life on the Wire. By Andrew Yule. Dutton Adult (1991)

Stone. By James Riordian. Hyperion (1995)

“The Healing of Scarface” By Elaine Dutka, Los Angeles Times, 17 September 2003

“A Foul Mouth With a Following; 20 Years Later, Pacino’s Scarface Resonates With a Young Audience” By Bernard Weinraub. New York Times, 23 September 2003

Scarface (Platinum Edition). Universal Home Video (2006)

Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America. By Ken Tucker. St. Martin’s Griffin (2008)

Synopsis
Resorting to a fantasy in which a stranger accosts her in the shower, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) gets through a thoroughly unsatisfying round of sex with her husband. Revealing this to her psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), she’s advised to think about where her anger is going and to confront her husband with her sexual frustrations. Kate visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art and after a prolonged game of gallery tag with an amorous stranger, climbs into a cab and indulges in a quickie in the backseat with him. Leaving his apartment, Kate is cornered in the elevator and slashed to death by a blonde with a straight razor.

Call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) witnesses the slaying and is hauled before the crass cop (Dennis Franz) leading the investigation. Kate’s geeky teenaged son Peter (Keith Gordon) eavesdrops on the interrogation electronically, hoping to nab the killer himself. Meanwhile, “Bobbi” – a disturbed patient who feels he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body – leaves a message for Dr. Elliott in which he reveals he’s taken the shrink’s razor. Peter follows Liz on the subway and saves her from Bobbi’s razor. Liz and Peter then hatch a plan to snoop through Dr. Elliott’s appointment book to learn who “Bobbi” is and stop her before she kills one of them.

Production history
Brian DePalma spent a year working on an adaptation of Robert Daley’s book Prince of the City when Orion Pictures balked at where the script was headed and dismissed the director. DePalma returned to an unproduced screenplay he’d adapted from the novel Cruising. Taking the idea of a character engaging in random sex, DePalma married it to a woman who gets picked up in an art gallery, something he’d tried in his college days. Seeing a transsexual interviewed on The Phil Donahue Show gave him the idea of a psychiatrist whose female side murders the women arousing his male side. This formed the basis for Dressed To Kill.

DePalma sent the script to his former agent George Litto, whose response was, “If you and I can’t agree that I can produce the movie, I’ll kill ya.” Litto knew that Samuel Z. Arkoff was an admirer of DePalma’s and set the project up at Filmways, which provided $6.5 million in financing and gave DePalma full creative control. His first choice to play Kate Miller was Liv Ullmann. The esteemed Norwegian actress turned the part down. Sean Connery was asked to play the psychiatrist and also passed. DePalma talked Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine into filling the roles, joining DePalma’s wife Nancy Allen, who the role of Liz Blake had been written for.

The first crisis arrived when DePalma submitted Dressed To Kill to the MPAA. The film was stamped with an X rating. To ensure that the theater chains would exhibit the film and that newspapers would run ads, the director reluctantly toned down the nudity in the shower scene and the bloodshed of Kate’s death to win an R rating. DePalma recalls, “I had an impression that because it so effective I was being penalized by being effective, not because I showed so much, but because it was so scary and so violent.” Audiences in Europe were able to see DePalma’s uncut version, while in the United States, they had to wait for home video.

Arriving in theaters July 1980, Dressed To Kill received some of the most enthusiastic critical notices of the year. The New York Times (Vincent Canby), the New Yorker (Pauline Kael) and New York magazine (David Denby) went out of their way to praise the film. Andrew Sarris dissented, calling it “soft-core porn and hard-edged horror” and citing DePalma for ripping off Alfred Hitchcock. An even more hostile reaction came from Women Against Pornography, which organized protests outside theaters in New York, Boston, L.A. and San Francisco. One of the group’s leaflets read, “If this film succeeds, killing women may become the greatest turn-on of the Eighties!”

The picket lines amounted to free publicity and vaulted Dressed To Kill past Airplane! and The Empire Strikes Back to the number one grossing movie in the country its second week of release. It went on to earn $31.8 million in the United States. Looking back on the furor in 2001, DePalma commented, “All those movies that they were trashing in the ‘60s and the ‘70s or ‘80s are the ones that people are writing about now and the ones that seem to have some kind of life. The revisionism will start basically and you basically as an artist, you just have to just do what you feel is what you’re doing and not get crushed by the particular establishment in place at the time.”

Opinion
Whether you’re an academic taking notes in the aisle with a pen light, a jackass up in the balcony with a box of Goobers, or a regular moviegoer somewhere in between, Dressed To Kill is a classic because it has something to marvel over regardless of which demographic you fall into. It’s my favorite Brian DePalma film, one that absolutely has to be considered on any list of top five achievements in the director’s infamous yet prodigious career. It is gruesome (the DVD features the film in both its theatrical and “unrated” versions,) but in a way that’s more electric than upsetting, soused on a pure intoxication for cinema and eliciting a visceral response from the audience. And does it ever.

From the opening chord of Pino Donaggio’s billowing musical score, the movie is too far over the top to be taken seriously as a drama. As an orchestration of camera movement, film and sound editing and art design, even the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock would have to admit that DePalma knows how to utilize the medium. Michael Caine sort of looks like he came in on his time off between Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and Blame It On Rio, but Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon have never been more engaging in a movie. Terrifying in parts, the film is also hilarious in others, courtesy Dennis Franz, who takes off running with the full range of New York cop talk, without ever looking back.

Gary Militzer at DVD Verdict writes, “Stylish psycho-shock films don’t come any better than this. Talented acting, superb direction, shocking twists, taut suspense – it’s all here. Sure, there is style to burn here – Brian De Palma is a filmmaker in love with his camera, after all – but De Palma sprinkles in just enough lingering substance to gel it all together into a memorable suspense classic that only gains in stature with repeat viewings. And it’s not just a one-trick, gimmick-twist of a film that insults your intelligence in the end… This is the real deal; Dressed to Kill is an essential De Palma masterwork that is not to be missed.”

“It has some genuinely creepy sequences and some really well-shot scenes, but De Palma strays too often into gratuitous violence and sensationalism. De Palma was one of the major voices in the 1970s-1980s school of filmmaking that wanted to see how far they could push the envelope. What they learned (or, at least, what the audiences learned) is that being able to show everything that classic Hollywood had to cover up is not necessarily a good thing, especially if the films exist only to see how far they could go,” writes Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies.

Daniel Stephens at DVD Times writes, “The brilliance of the movie begins at its core: the script. De Palma has managed to create a taut thriller filled to the gills with false avenues, red herrings and ambiguity. It is much more original than it may look at first glance, combining visual scenes driven by the camera rather than dialogue, and for all intents and purposes throws out any remnants of genre conventions. For all its worth as a thrilling psychological drama, it has true connotations of gothic horror, romance, comedy and porn.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) wakes up in his apartment on West 81st Street. His day starts with stomach crunches and anti-aging eye balm. Patrick reports to his job as vice president of an investment firm owned by his father. His secretary Jean (Chloë Sevigny) keeps track of his lunch schedule. Patrick later has dinner with his “supposed fiancee” Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), whose wedding planning interferes with his listening to the new Robert Palmer tape.

Unsatisfied by the lack of attention from his medicated girlfriend (Samantha Mathis) and feeling marginalized at work – where his smarmy colleague Paul Allen (Jared Leto) has business cards much more admired than his – Patrick stabs a homeless man and kills his dog on the way home. He settles on Paul for his next victim, distracting him with a critical analysis of the new CD by Huey Lewis and the News before chopping him up with an axe.

Patrick covers up the murder to make it look like Paul has run off to London. A police detective (Willem Dafoe) drops by the office, and Patrick is unable to answer a single question without looking guilty. His murder spree continues. With police closing in, Patrick calls his attorney and confesses his crimes. The attorney thinks it’s a gag. When Patrick maintains he’s not joking, the attorney informs his client it must be; he just had lunch with Paul Allen in London.

Production history 
Author Bret Easton Ellis had been anointed as the voice of Blank Generation with Less Than Zero and its follow-up, The Rules of Attraction. The ’90s didn’t go as well for him. Ellis’ third novel – American Psycho – was a first person account of investment banker Patrick Bateman, whose inability to fit in during the day leads him to murder the homeless, prostitutes and business associates by night.

Set to publish it in March 1991, Simon & Schuster was hit with a furor among feminists, who alleged the book was a how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women. The publisher bowed out. Random House issued the novel in paperback, while producer Edward Pressman bought the film rights. Johnny Depp and director Stuart Gordon expressed interest in the project. Pressman commissioned various scripts, including one Ellis wrote that ended with a musical number. None of the adaptations worked.

Mary Harron then entered the picture. Pressman felt the director of I Shot Andy Warhol got the “cosmic irony” of the novel. She wrote several drafts with Guinevere Turner. Of the many actors Harron met, Christian Bale was the first to recognize and want to explore the absurdity of murderous YUPPIE Patrick Bateman. He was warned by people that it would be career suicide to take the part, but that only made Bale more eager to give it a try.

The studio – Lion’s Gate – preferred a star in the lead role. On a whim, they sent the script to Leonardo DiCaprio, with a $20 million offer to take over the part. To the amazement of many, DiCaprio agreed to do the movie. Harron felt this was completely insane; the Titanic heartthrob was too young to be credible as an investment banker/psycho killer. She also felt casting a star with a young fan base in this type of film would be trouble down the road.

When she refused to meet with DiCaprio, Harron was fired. DiCaprio had a short list of directors he wanted to work with – Danny Boyle and Martin Scorsese were the top two – but it was Oliver Stone who came on board. Stone’s script was less satirical than Harron’s and more psychological. But Stone deviated too far from the novel for DiCaprio’s taste, and he opted to star in The Beach for Danny Boyle instead.

Lion’s Gate gave Harron her job back. The studio signed off on Bale, on the condition that Harron cast known actors around him, and kept her budget below $10 million. Shooting commenced in Toronto in March 1999. Harron’s cut was threatened with an X rating – not for any violence, but for a scene where Bateman appeared to be having too much fun with two prostitutes – and was trimmed to an R for its theatrical release.

The film was well received by critics and was a modest success at the box office. It inspired Lion’s Gate to do a laughable direct-to-DVD sequel – American Psycho 2: All American Girl – with Mila Kunis and William Shatner that had nothing to do with the novel or Harron’s film. Saw came along two years later and ended up being what the studio had in mind, an inexpensive horror film that the studio could launch into a franchise.

Opinion 
I don’t mind American Psycho. I mostly liked it the first time I saw it, and only liked it a bit less watching it again this week. There are at least two scenes here that are dead solid perfect in their execution: the business card duel, and the killing of Paul Allen while “Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News plays. Harron does a wonderful job balancing comic lunacy with stark, chilling tension in these two scenes.

Neither Ellis’ story or the filmmakers can sustain that level of absurdity for 101 minutes. Nearly all of the characters are a waste of paper; only Chloë Sevigny plays someone remotely interesting. Harron excels at not making a bad movie, but never makes a really good one either. The chief reason to see American Psycho is Christian Bale, whose performance is one of the decade’s most memorable. The actor’s willingness to look both goofy and bloodthirsty – often in the same scene – is brilliant.

The Vocabularist at Movie Cynics says, “American Psycho is one of the best looking horror flicks of the last decade and its tight dialogue and disorienting affect upon the viewer are seldom matched within the genre.”

“Harron has taken what was primarily a thriller novel by Bret Easton Ellis and shaped it into an often hilarious black comedy. With this move, Harron risks losing the poignancy of Ellis’ brilliant novel, but gains a satire of cutthroat corporate America that more than makes up for any flaws in the script,” writes Mike Dean at Jiminy Critic!

Brett Cullum at DVD Verdict writes that American Psycho, “skillfully points its finger at male culture run amok. The feminists never understood the real danger – it’s the men who should be screaming in outrage as they watch it. The film succeeds in rescuing the book from its own bad reputation.”

“That’s bone. And the lettering is something called … Silian Rail.” View the business card duel between Patrick Bateman and his fellow YUPPIES.

© Joe Valdez

Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) applies for a job at a cab company, commenting to the punchy personnel man (Joe Spinell) that he can’t sleep, and wants to work long hours. We get hints of Travis’ background. Age, 26. Education, “Some, you know, here and there.” Military record: honorable discharge, 1973.

As Travis transports fares from place to place, hell seems to have cracked open and unleashed pimps, prostitutes, gang members, drug dealers, and derelicts onto the streets of New York. Travis wishes a real rain would come and wash all this scum off the street, but night after night, he goes out there to walk among it. Then he spends his free time in porno movie theaters.

His life is limited to the thoughts swirling around in his head, and those he scribbles in a journal. “Twelve hours of work and I still can’t sleep. Damn. Days go on and on. They don’t end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don’t believe one should devote his life to morbid self-intention. I believe that someone should become a person, like other people.”

Travis fixates on a blonde named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign volunteer for a presidential hopeful named Charles Palpatine. Betsy seems above all the filth on the street. The taxi driver cleans himself up and asks her out, and amazingly, she agrees. But the socially inept Travis sabotages the relationship when he takes Betsy to a porno theater on 42^nd Street. She refuses to have anything more to do with him.

Instead, Travis tries to help a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster), who hopped into his cab one night stoned and asked him to take her away. Sober, Iris is much less inclined to break free from the psychological hold her pimp “Sport” (Harvey Keitel) has over her. So Travis arms himself for urban combat.

Paul Schrader wrote Taxi Driver in 1972 while staying in his ex-girlfriend’s empty apartment in Silverlake. Schrader was a failed film critic who’d been driving around at night, drinking scotch and going to peep shows. His head was filled with “morbid self-intention”, and many ended up in the script, his first. After The Yakuza (written with brother Leonard) sold big, Schrader wrote Obsession for Brian DePalma. He then reworked Taxi Driver.

Robert DeNiro told Schrader that he’d actually wanted to write a script about a guy walking around New York with a gun, and agreed to play Travis. David Begelman, president of Columbia Pictures, hated the script, but producer Julia Phillips – who had won an Academy Award for The Sting with her husband Michael – championed it, insisting director Martin Scorsese, coming off two critically praised films, could bring it in for $1.5 million.

Shot on the streets of New York in the summer of 1975, Scorsese and director of photography Michael Chapman were strongly influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave. They set out to focus not just on Travis, but document the world he lived in. New York became its own character, and the street scenes pound with a hallucinatory intensity; gritty, sad, and at times, disturbing.

If asked to name the three best movies I’ve ever seen, I’d probably include Alien, combine The Godfather & The Godfather Part II into one pick, and then name Taxi Driver. Scorsese, Schrader and DeNiro produce the most vivid portrait of a wingnut ever devoted to film. They never ask us to feel sorry for Travis, or think about his plight. The film plunges us right into the heart of darkness, through impressionistic imagery, acute dialogue and character, and the fear and self-loathing of performance.

From the opening shot – steam vapors rising from the street in saturated color, and a cab slowly emerging like a demon – the movie looks like no other. Scorsese doesn’t just move the camera around, he uses it as a window into Travis’ alienated inner state. Through his eyes, we do a 360 degree turn through the grimy cab company garage, or watch in slow motion as Betsy floats across the street like an angel, or stand still while hoodlums slide past on the sidewalk.

The film features neatly improvised dialogue, from Peter Boyle & Harry Northup as cabbies, Keitel (”I once had a horse on Coney Island. She got hit by a car”) and DeNiro, who made up his iconic “You talkin’ to me?” monologue. Bernard Herrmann – who did the music for many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films – composed a vibrant score filled with breezy saxophone riffs and ominous reeds. Hermann completed the music a few hours before his death at age 64, and the film would not be as great without it.

Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Taxi Driver was recently named #47 on the AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” list as well. Though only four characters are shot and killed, violence hangs over almost every scene, and the film initially received an X rating. It concludes with what would appear to be an upbeat ending, but like everything else in this masterpiece, it takes on a more dubious meaning the more times you watch it.

Documentary directed by Kirby Dick and written by Dick and Eddie Schmidt & Matt Patterson explores the enigmatic decision making process of the Motion Picture Association of America, the lobbying arm of the film industry, who, from an impenetrable building in Encino, hires anonymous parents to assign ratings to movies.

Their decision has major consequences for a filmmaker. Movies given an NC-17 aren’t permitted to advertise in TV or print media, be exhibited before a wide audience, or appear on the shelves of retailers like Blockbuster. The names of the parents making these decisions are kept secret. When appealing a decision, filmmakers are not told why their film was given a particular rating.

Instead, the filmmaker has to cut their film, resubmit it, and hope the shorter version passes inspection. Among the those who sit down to talk to Dick about their experiences with this are Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), Kevin Smith (Clerks was originally given an NC-17 rating, Jersey Girl an R), and Matt Stone, who was told the South Park movie had to lose the subtitle All Hell Breaks Loose.

For South Park, Stone changed his subtitle to Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and that actually passed. Two weeks later, the board realized they had made a mistake, the new title was even worse, but producer Scott Rudin notified them he’d already struck prints for the posters. It was a rare victory for the filmmaker, one of the few over the years.

Director Wayne Kramer and actress Maria Bello appear to talk about The Cooler, which was given an NC-17 for a brief scene where Bello’s character enjoys receiving oral sex. They raise a question that has been asked over and over again; why the MPAA overwhelmingly tries to keep adult sexual content out of sight, while graphic violence routinely passes with an R.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated features Dick not only submitting this film through the ratings process (it’s given an NC-17 for “some graphic sexual content”), but hiring two of the best private investigators ever seen in a movie, a mother-daughter team who stake out the MPAA office, get pictures of the raters and identify who these people are. 60 Minutes tried this once and failed. The ladies of Ariel Investigations succeed.

This flick has everything I enjoy in a documentary. There’s history, of the ratings system and why Hollywood employs it. There are interviews with the brightest, most articulate in their field. Thought provoking questions are raised. There’s humor. And instead of standing on a soap box, the director gets down and brings previously suppressed facts to light.

Dick – who was nominated for an Academy Award for Twist of Faith – gets out of his own way. Instead of trying to be a movie star, he has faith in his subjects to tell a story. Kimberly Peirce and Kevin Smith are very succinct and down to earth. Peirce – who was also given an NC-17 when one of her actresses spent too much time enjoying an orgasm on screen – asks “Who’s ever complained about an orgasm that lasted too long?”

In the wake of the film, MPAA president Dan Glickman announced that filmmakers would now be permitted to cite precedent when appealing a rating, and that raters would resign after their kids were grown. Glickman stated “The documentary made it clear that we probably haven’t done as much as we can to explain how it all works.” This is dynamite stuff, and a must-see for movie fans.

Decked out in a bowler hat, fake eyelash, and white combat suit, punk delinquent Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is introduced sitting with his “droogs,” Georgie, Dim and Pete. In an England of the near future, the boys lounge in a “milk bar,” sipping drug laced drinks and getting set for “a bit of the old ultra violence.”

Alex and the boys beat up a bum, brawl with a gang they encounter molesting a woman, then fly through the country in a stolen car. They arrive at the home of an elderly writer and his young wife. Alex tricks her into opening the door, and the boys burst in wearing bizarre masks. Alex launches into a song and dance of “Singin’ In The Rain,” kicking the writer and stripping the wife before he rapes her.

Skipping school to catch up on his sleep – and to have an orgy with two teenage girls he picks up at a music store – Alex is challenged by Georgie and Dim for leadership of the gang. They have an idea for a robbery, but Alex attacks them for their insolence. All is apparently forgiven, and Alex accepts their scheme to break into a farm.

Alex attacks the “Catlady” who lives at the farm, and is arrested. In prison, he entertains himself by perusing the Bible and imagining himself starring in the more lurid parts. Wanting out, he asks the prison chaplain about the “Ludovico Treatment Technique”. The chaplain reveals that this is a new state program that supposedly cures criminal behavior, but warns Alex not to volunteer because it would deprive him of free will.

Alex proves to be the perfect guinea pig, sized up as “young, bold, vicious.” He’s injected with an experimental serum, and is forced to watch graphic movies with his eyelids clamped open. The images begin to make him nauseous. Cured of his sociopathic behavior, Alex is released into society, where he encounters all those who knew him as a thug. Unlike Alex, they are free to react to him with hostility.

Director Stanley Kubrick was given a copy of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 social satire by his co-writer on Dr. Strangelove, Terry Southern. Adapting the book himself – and filming it with lightweight cameras, faster lenses and improved sound equipment that made location shooting easier – Kubrick’s cut was branded with an X-rating. It became the last of the few major studio films to be released with one.

After playing successfully for a year, a series of assaults in Western Europe were blamed on the movie. Kubrick and his family lived in England, and out of concern for their safety, the director petitioned Warner Bros. to remove the film from exhibition in the U.K., a ban he not only got, but remained in effect until Kubrick’s death in 1999.

My first reaction to A Clockwork Orange was that it was beyond tacky. The futuristic kitsch and the electronic music (by Wendy Carlos) are repellent to the point I not only wanted to turn away from the screen, but get up and run. The violence didn’t bother me, but the look and feel of the movie bothered me.

Kubrick locks you in this world – like Alex – and doesn’t give you room to breathe. I realized this when I watched it again, and while I don’t feel comfortable calling A Clockwork Orange a masterpiece, I respected it a lot more.

The pun-filled slang employed by Alex and the droogs is loaded with onomatopoeia, and Malcolm McDowell’s droll narration in this dialect is wildly creative and at times very funny. I chuckled at the idea that in the future, all artwork will be pornography. And the use of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie,” and “Singin’ In The Rain” are all strokes of genius.

But once Alex is sent to prison, the satirical wit and creativity that the movie starts off with seems to dissipate. As in Lolita, the script grows a beer gut and Kubrick becomes indulgent, padding the running time up to 136 minutes with scenes of Alex being processed, or reuniting with his hapless parents, scenes that seem to go nowhere.

The movie rebounds with a tremendous finale that suggests Alex hasn’t been returned his free will, but is more of a puppet than he was after his “treatment.” There’s a lot here that didn’t do enough for me, but Kubrick considered this his most skillfully made film to date, and I’m inclined to agree. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but lost in each category to The French Connection.

June Buckridge (Beryl Reid) is the beloved star of a sappy British television series, in which her character – Sister George – tools around amiably on a motor scooter, solving the problems of an idealized English community called Applehurst. Her four-year caricature is so popular that most of her acquaintances refer to her as “George.”

But off stage, George is a boozing control freak racked with insecurities, first over her relationship with her partner Alice (Susannah York), a young mod who collects dolls, spends most of her spare time in pajamas and who George reminds would be nowhere without her.

When members of the “Applehurst” cast mysteriously begin to have their characters killed off by the network, George fears she’s next. This prompts her to get toasted at her local pub and stumble into a taxi, where she gropes two novitiate nuns.

A network exec (Coral Browne) reads George the riot act, but her outbursts and embarrassments continue. This prompts the BBC to finally kill Sister George off in a dramatic collision with a lorry (”It so happens your death will coincide with Road Safety Week” the aging actress is told). As consolation, George is offered the part of a cow in a kiddie show. Her up and down relationship with Alice threatens to implode.

Directed by Robert Aldrich and adapted by Lukas Heller from the play by Frank Marcus, The Killing of Sister George was the first American film to receive an X rating, partly due to an explicit scene performed between two women late in the film. Aldrich said he was willing to trim the scene, but the MPAA cited the story’s theme as the real problem. With limited exhibition and poor reviews, the film flopped.

Aldrich – riding high with the success of The Dirty Dozen – chose to film Frank Marcus’ controversial play due to his fascination with behind-the-scenes intrigue, and his belief that George was a misunderstood character pushed out of a system that didn’t get her. Bette Davis reportedly eyed the role, but Aldrich cast Beryl Reid, who had been known as a comedienne in England until she won a Tony playing George on Broadway.

It’s novel to see a movie like this on Aldrich’s filmography, considering he could have gone on directing action movies for the remainder of his career. In addition to being the first film slapped with an X, it was also the first to really show two women cohabitating, or expressing their relationship physically, without the audience having to guess about what was really going on.

Susannah York – Kal-El’s mom in Superman: The Movie – is a doll I caught acting every now and then, but is good. Beryl Reid is brilliant. George’s inebriated excesses are honest, uncomfortable, and funny all at the same time. Reid never mugs for laughs, and is not afraid to take her character into painful, unattractive remotes.

While I stayed entertained, and the film’s 140 minute running time blew by quickly, I don’t know if I’d watch this again. After the highs of the first two hours, everything comes crashing down in the final 15 minutes and ends on a fairly depressing note. The casual viewer may get bored of the theatrical staging long before that. However, for fans of Aldrich’s or of gay cinema, I’d definitely recommend this.

A child-like dishwasher from Big Spring, Texas named Joe Buck (Jon Voight, in the performance that made his film career) sets off by bus for New York City, where he hopes to put his cowboy outfit and good looks to use as a kept man of wealthy older women. Instead, he quickly runs out of cash and is swindled by gimping, two-bit hustler “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman, risking his career as a leading man following The Graduate).

Both men are alone. The only two people who ever cared about Joe were his grandmother – who died while he was in the army – and a “loose girl” named Crazy Annie, who was committed to a mental hospital after they were caught in the back of a car. Given his deformity, Ratso has probably never had a real relationship with anybody. The men come to depend on each other to survive.

Directed by John Schlesinger, with a screenplay adapted by Waldo Salt from the novel by James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy was the only X-rated film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. It was released barely a year after the MPAA developed the ratings system. “X” was intended to designate real films that were for adults only, but this was one of only a handful of major studio releases that got the chance to utilize it.

While Midnight Cowboy is gritty, the actual content of the film is tame enough to play on prime time TV today. The cold sidewalks, adult theaters, indifferent pedestrians and Big Apple weirdos that Joe & Ratso encounter do make for an unfriendly environment.

They end up squatting in an abandoned building, scrambling for food and trying to stay warm in the New York winter. But the film carries a note of optimism, that despite the bleak environment and eccentric personalities, anyone can find companionship and redemption, a message that seemed to resonate with the times. Harry Nilsson’s iconic folk tune “Everybody’s Talkin’” though used much too much – resonates this sentiment well.

Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes and Bob Balaban make appearances, but the movie belongs to Voight & Hoffman all the way. Both received simultaneous Academy Award nominations for Best Actor. The film won Best Picture, Best Director for Schlesinger’s humane direction, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Salt’s textured, adult script. Adam Holender, whose neo-realistic camerawork became legend, performed career finest work as well.