In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes. Joe is not a professional curator and may not even show potential as an amateur one, but comments and recommendations for future double features are welcome below.
Harry and Walter Go To New York (1976)
Directed by Mark Rydell
Screenplay by John Byrum and Robert Kaufman, story by Don Devlin and John Byrum
Produced by Don Devlin, Harry Gittes
115 minutes
Disparaged by critics and ignored by audiences, Harry and Walter Go To New York deserves a reception much better than the one it was pelted with in July 1976, when all interested parties seemed to agree that the best thing for this lavishly produced comedy with music was to act like it never happened. Actor and veteran TV director Mark Rydell had delivered three solid films in a row — Steve McQueen in The Reivers, John Wayne in The Cowboys and James Caan & Marsha Mason in Cinderella Liberty — but unable to bank whatever producer Don Devlin was betting on, editor Monte Hellman was hired to recut Rydell’s footage. Harry and Walter Go To New York doesn’t jig to the rhythm of The Sting or any other recognizable genre really, but blunders onto something novel and even magnificent in its own right.
Adapting a story idea by Devlin was screenwriter John Byrum, one of the original staff writers Jim Henson hired for Sesame Street. In many ways, Harry and Walter Go To New York is like something The Muppet Theater might stage on the Muppets’ night off. The jokes don’t have punchlines, at least none that would get very far without a laugh track, but a gentle type of backstage tomfoolery runs through the piece, which like The Muppet Show, allows some of the finest actors of the 1970s — Caan, Gould, Keaton, Caine, Lesley Ann Warren, Charles Durning, Carol Kane — to get in on the low key fun. Whether you think the story is much ado about nothing, the cinematography by László Kovács and production design by Harry Horner make every moment of this visually splendid knick-knack a marvel to watch.
In Sudburry, Massachusetts of 1892, the singing and dancing duo of Harry Dighby (James Caan) and Walter Hill (Elliott Gould) take the stage in a variety show whose audience is filled with just as much poultry as people. In New York City, renowned gentleman thief Adam Worth (Michael Caine) falls into a trap sprung by Rufus T. Crisp (Charles Durning), a bank president whose safe was cracked by Worth and his gang. Meanwhile, the dim witted Walter wants little more than a career in show business, but Harry’s criminal enterprise lands the entertainers in the same Concord prison as Adam Worth. Harry and Walter are put in his employ as butlers, maintaining Worth’s lavish cell and receiving his guests, including crusading journalist Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton) who arrives to do an expose on the thief.
While Worth charms Ms. Chestnut, Harry cajoles Walter into using her flash lamp camera to photograph the blueprint of a bank vault that Worth plans to crack. When they set the precious blueprint on fire, Worth has Harry and Walter exiled to the prison’s rock quarry, where it’s hoped the idiots will blow themselves up. Using a vial of nitroglycerin, Harry secures an early release for himself and his partner. Arriving in New York, Harry volunteers to Ms. Chestnut’s newspaper hoping to get his hands on the bank vault photograph. Once Worth is set free, the crime lord smashes up the newspaper office in search of the photo. To repair the damage and forge on protecting the public, Ms. Chestnut implores Harry and Walter to help her and her staff (Jack Gilford, Carol Kane, David Proval, Valerie Curtin) crack the vault first.
In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” the programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes. Joe is not a professional curator and may not even show potential as an amateur one, but comments and recommendations for future double features are welcome below.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Directed by Joseph Sargent
Screenplay by Peter Stone, based on the novel by Morton Freedgood (as John Godey)
Produced by Gabriel Katzka, Edgar J. Scherick
104 minutes
Listening to a Beastie Boys LP or watching The Taking of Pelham One Two Three will not only assist a visitor in the successful navigation of the New York subway system, but for 1 hour 44 minutes, the latter is an electrifying 1970s cops and robbers thriller that captures the magnitude of NYC as well as the mettle of many of the people you’re likely to encounter there. Based on a 1973 bestseller by Morton Freedgood — a PR hack who published several potboilers under the name “John Godey” — Hollywood came calling during a bleak time for the Big Apple, which was depressed economically and threatening to crack with crime and ethnic tension. In an effort to turn the city’s fortunes around, Mayor John Lindsey invited the film industry to use Manhattan as a back lot, but his office initially found in this script exactly the type of social distortion he was trying to clean up.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is one of those once in a blue moon entertainments that fires on every cylinder from start to finish, sharply adapted by Peter Stone and supremely well cast right down to walk-on roles. If anything is better than “Walter Matthau as Lt. Zachary Garber” and “Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone”, I don’t know what is; the equivalent would be Ricky Gervais and Patton Oswalt starring in a $150 million summer action movie; in other words, unlikely. Even more so than The Fugitive, this is an E-ticket ride through a great metropolis, with accents and plot developments that feel singular to that city above any other. TV journeyman Joseph Sargent does a yeoman’s job balancing action across different locations, while the peerless camerawork by Owen Roizman and musical score by David Shire send this movie into another stratosphere.
On a subway train departing Pelham Bay Park Station in the Bronx at 1:23 in the afternoon, men sporting long coats, hats and wearing fake moustaches and eyeglasses move into position. Identifying each other as Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), Mr. Grey (Hector Elizondo) and Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman) and armed with submachine guns, the men access the motorman’s compartment and hijack the train, using Green’s expertise as a conductor to stop in a tunnel somewhere between 28th Street and 23rd Street. At the Transit Authority command center, the wry Lt. Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau) and Lt. Rico Patrone (Jerry Stiller) have their boredom interrupted when Blue radios threatening to execute hostages starting in one hour unless a ransom of $1 million is delivered.
While the Mayor (Lee Wallace) dithers over how New York voters will respond to his decisions — negatively, it seems, no matter what he does — his deputy (Tony Roberts) and wife (Doris Roberts) advise that it would be wise to pay the hijackers and avoid risking another Attica. Sparring with Blue over the radio, Garber is stumped over how the meticulous ex-British Army colonel plans to escape an underground tunnel. When a sharpshooter fires off a round on accident, Blue makes good on his threats and executes one of the hostages. With the ransom cash running late, Garber thinks fast and produces a ruse to prevent Blue from shooting anyone else, including an undercover transit cop whose identity remains unknown. As Pelham 123 gets moving again and hurdles toward Manhattan, Garber hits on how the hijackers plan to escape.
In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” the programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes. Joe is not a professional curator and may not even show potential as an amateur one, but comments and recommendations for future double features are welcome below.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Written by Michael Cimino
Produced by Robert Daley
115 minutes
For everyone who’s wished that Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges could have acted together in the same movie, the good news is that it’s called Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. The GREAT news is that this screwball buddy caper road movie has everything that a fan of drive-in movies could want: bank robbery, fist fighting, fast cars and fast women. If those weren’t enough, Gary Busey (billed as Garey Busey) even shows up. The script by Michael Cimino came to Eastwood in 1972 courtesy their mutual reps at the William Morris Agency. Responding to the offbeat bent of the piece (“Michael must have written it in some hallucinative state” Eastwood joked to biographer Richard Schickel), Malpaso agreed to let Cimino — a Michigan State grad with an MFA in painting from Yale and a successful career directing commercials in New York — make his feature film debut.
One of the innumerable charms of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is that Cimino never seems in a hurry to go anywhere or prove anything here, putting the “idio” in “idiosyncratic” as if the Coen brothers were making a heist flick. Instead of being wed to pulp fiction, the material has a noble innocence to it. Filmed in the towns of Ulm, Fort Benton, Hobson, Augusta and Choteau in the Great Falls vicinity of Montana, it’s one half road movie and one half situation comedy, with four men who have nowhere else to go moving in together, taking day jobs and plotting the score of a lifetime. Whether a credit to the script or to the exuberance of 23-year-old Jeff Bridges, Clint Eastwood has never smiled in a movie as much as he does here. One of the few reflections of the time period it was made is a whimsical theme composed and sung by Paul Williams, “Where Do I Go From Here”.
At the rustic Spirit Lake Idaho Community Church, the sermon of John Doherty (Clint Eastwood) is rudely interrupted when a stranger opens fire and chases the pastor through a field of wheat. A white ’73 Pontiac Trans Am crosses the pastor’s path and he jumps in. The wheelman is a kid who just stole the car and gives the name Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges). Watching the pastor pop his dislocated shoulder back in, the kid deduces that this is no ordinary clergyman. Stealing a ‘73 Buick Rivera, the pastor tires of grand theft auto and parts ways with Lightfoot, only to spot two more associates, bank robbers Red Leary (George Kennedy) and Eddie Goody (Geoffrey Lewis). The pastor changes his mind about riding shotgun with Lightfoot and even accepts the company of two women (Catherine Bach, June Fairchild) the kid picks up in town.
After Red comes gunning for the duo, the pastor reveals that he’s a Korean War veteran answering to the name Thunderbolt. A bank robber by vocation, Thunderbolt punctured the vault of an armored car company with a cannon firing 20mm artillery shells; the mastermind of his gang hid the money behind the blackboard of an old schoolhouse, but upon his death, only Thunderbolt knows where the loot is stashed. Believing he ripped them off, Red and Goody want Thunderbolt dead, but he explains to them that the schoolhouse and the loot have vanished. Lightfoot infects the thieves with the idea of hitting the same armored company again. The four men move in together and take day jobs to raise seed money for the job, devised more as an antidote to boredom and an excuse to build camaraderie than anything else.
Clint Eastwood was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, California. 80 years later, there aren’t any superlatives or awards left to bestow on the filmmaker and movie icon. December 2009 saw the theatrical release of Invictus, his 31st film credit as director. Short of Woody Allen, no working director has produced such a prodigious body of work, which like Allen’s, spans the entirety of the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and ’00s. Eastwood hasn’t filed for retirement benefits yet, having already wrapped the supernatural thriller Hereafter starring Matt Damon and set for release in 2010.
There weren’t enough days in May for me to cover every Eastwood film. The Man With No Name trilogy he made for director Sergio Leone — A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) — are without words, while Eastwood’s work for Don Siegel in Escape From Alcatraz (1979) is exceptional as well. Some fans have a fondness for Clint gunning down every Nazi in Europe in Where Eagles Dare (1968) and somebody might even love his ill-fated pairing with Burt Reynolds in City Heat (1984).
There is one movie that Eastwood starred in and produced that I had a hell of a time tracking down in time for this series, but one that will be appearing on This Distracted Globe shortly.
Here are links to each of my 31 Days of Eastwood posts, listed in order of their U.S. theatrical release. Happy 8-0, Mr. Eastwood.
