The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

The opening scene of The Thomas Crown Affair begins with a man named Erwin (Jack Weston), enclosed within a small frame, walking down the hallway of a hotel. He nervously knocks on a door, but there is no answer. He knocks again, still no answer. Finally, he turns the doorknob and slowly enters a dark room. Having closed the door behind him, he suddenly finds bright spotlights shining in his face. Shielding his eyes from the light, he asks, “What’s going on here?”

There is a man behind a desk in the dark. His face cannot be seen, and his voice is disguised electronically. He tells Erwin that he has a job for him: “Work an hour, you do an errand, you drive a car.” Erwin is told that the job shouldn’t be dangerous, but if there is any shooting, he is on his own. Otherwise, he will get $50,000 for the job, paid out in monthly installments so there will be no quick spending. When Erwin asks how he will know that he will get paid, the answer is, “You don’t.”

Erwin agrees to the conditions. He is tossed an envelope full of cash and told to buy a Ford station wagon. When Erwin looks as though he is going to ask something, the man says, “No questions. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. You or me, Erwin, boy.”

In the next scene, we find out what we already really knew, that the man in the dark is the title character, played by Steve McQueen. We also find out that he is the head of a large, successful, financial company. He has his amusements—playing golf, flying a glider, driving a dune buggy, playing polo—but he suffers from ennui. The solution to that, apparently, it to mastermind a caper.

The caper turns out to be a bank robbery. We have seen a lot of movies featuring a bank robbery, some of them quite complicated and executed with precision, but in each case, the men all know each other and plan it together. This robbery is carried out by four men, in addition to Erwin, that don’t know each other and can recognize one another only by wearing sunglasses. Simply put, this is not believable. However, just before the robbery begins, one of the men, played by Yaphet Kotto, blesses himself, so I suppose that with God’s help, all things are possible.

Presumably, each of these four men went to that same hotel room. Erwin is a salesman, not a professional criminal. If we may be allowed to assume that the individual situations of the other four men were similar to that of Erwin, then none of these men were professional criminals either, each one just taking a few hours off from his regular job to rob a bank. This raises the question, what did Thomas Crown do, pick the names of these men out of a phonebook?

Alternatively, if they were criminals before the robbery, why did Crown select an amateur to drive the getaway car, especially someone like Erwin? He sells cosmetics, which calls his manhood into question, and he is frequently seen wiping the sweat off his face, not to mention the fact that Crown contemptuously referred to him as “Erwin, boy.”

Whatever the situations of the other four men, they were presumably offered the same deal as Erwin, that they would not get their share of the loot until later, and without any guarantee that they ever would, given that they would not know who the man in the dark was. Oh, sure!

And while that man in the dark was making these offers, the instructions could not have been as simple as telling them to buy a car. We have to imagine him handing each man a schematic of the bank, saying here is where you will be, and here is where the others will be, and then you will do this, and another man do that, and so forth and so on, all while the spotlight is shining in the eyes of the man being given these instructions.

This is the reason why it was only Erwin that we saw in that hotel room. We might believe that a character played by Jack Weston would be easily cowed by the setup and go along with it, considering that his role in the caper was simple enough, but seeing the other four men go through that would strain our credulity.

Finally, is it likely that Crown had to interview only four men besides Erwin? Would there not have been several men that declined to participate in the robbery, especially when looking at that schematic with drawings representing who does what when? Why, there might have been men parading in and out of that hotel room for weeks, not wanting any part of it, any one of whom might have called the police, letting them know what was going to happen.

On the day of the robbery, the four men drop the money they took out of the bank into Erwin’s station wagon. He drives the car to a cemetery where he deposits the money in a trashcan. After he drives away, Crown shows up in his Rolls-Royce. He gets out and puts on gloves. Then he puts a wreath of flowers on a grave while looking around to make sure he is alone. Then he gets the bags of money out of the trashcan, puts them in the trunk of his car, and drives off. I guess he put gloves on so he wouldn’t leave his fingerprints on the flowers.

Crown flies to Geneva and deposits some of the money in a Swiss bank, telling them there will be more deposits in the future. Meanwhile, the police are baffled. Enter Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), insurance specialist. Her specialty is to pick out the guilty party by looking at some photographs and then have sex with him. Lucky for her, Thomas Crown does not look like Erwin. Lucky for us too.

Speaking of Erwin, he is a henpecked husband whose wife hates him. Vicki puts an ad in the newspaper offering a reward of $25,000 to be a fink and report anyone who was in Boston on a June 9th (the day of the robbery), drives a 1967 Ford station wagon, and is nervous, jumpy, or irritable. Erwin’s wife sees a chance to get her hands on a lot of money and get rid of her husband at the same time. So, she makes the call. Erwin is arrested and confesses to his part in the robbery, but he is unable to tell Vicki who hired him.

Nevertheless, Vicki is convinced that Crown is her man, and she lets him know that she will make things difficult for him financially. However, he has so much money that he says it doesn’t matter. In fact, he tells her he is going to pull off another caper, not for the money, but for reasons existential, saying it’s between him and the system. [Back in the late sixties and early seventies, “the system” was an oppressive social structure that threatened to overwhelm the individual, keeping him in his place. “There is it again, the system,” says Buford Pusser in Walking Tall (1973).]

The plan is for Vicki to meet him at the cemetery where the drop will be made again, and together they will leave for Switzerland. It will be a test of her love for him. Another bank is robbed, pretty much in the same way, although I should think that this time Crown would hire a bachelor to drive the getaway car. In any event, when Crown’s Rolls-Royce shows up at the cemetery, Vicki is waiting for him with the police. Apparently, her love for him was not true.

However, there is only a hired driver behind the wheel. He hands Vicki a telegram, saying, “Left early. Please come with the money, or you keep the car.”

The Thomas Crown Affair was the first movie in which someone robbed a bank and got away with it. However, he had to give up the woman to do so, for she was still part of the system. It would not be until The Getaway (1972) that a heterosexual couple would rob a bank, get away with it, and live happily ever after.

The Persona of Pierce Brosnan

The Long Good Friday (1980) was a good movie, although it had a lot of characters in it that I had trouble keeping track of, their faces being somewhat ordinary, other than the main stars, Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. However, there was one actor who, though he had only a small part, stood out: Pierce Brosnan.

This was at a time when we were still suffering from James Bond movies starring Roger Moore. He was handsome enough, so we had no trouble accepting the fact that he had a way with women. But when he got into a fight with the bad guys, it always looked as though they were trying not to hurt him. Of course, we all knew that there would never be another Sean Connery to fill that role, although George Lazenby was good in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which I liked even better than some of the later movies with Connery. When I saw Pierce Brosnan, I thought to myself that he had the right look to be the next James Bond. Needless to say, a lot of other people thought so as well, and so it was that he eventually got that role. Looking back, however, I have to wonder if Brosnan looked too right for the part, actually making James Bond less believable on that account.

Before that happened, however, he starred in Remington Steele (1982-1987), a television show about a female detective, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalest), who finds that no one will take her seriously as a private detective because she is a woman. So, she makes up the name “Remington Steele,” with its manly connotations, and pretends that this fictional man is her boss. The ruse works, and business picks up. Through some fortuitous circumstances, however, a man played by Brosnan ends up fleshing out that fictional character. He doesn’t know much about actually being a private detective, but he has seen a lot of movies about private detectives, to which he often refers. This is reminiscent of Don Quixote, a man that tried to become a knight by modeling himself on what he had read in books on knight errantry, to comical effect. Of course, Laura is the one that solves all the mysteries, while pretending only to be helping her “boss.”

The show is partly a romantic comedy, so we are not supposed to take it too seriously. In real life, the name “Remington Steele” would be laughable, an obvious fake, just as Brosnan’s character, in filling that role, is fake. One wonders, if by looking the part too much, just as the name is too much, Brosnan is more suited to playing a phony detective than a real one. Furthermore, it is fitting that his character used to be a thief and a con man, because someone that good-looking would make you suspicious if he were trying to sell you something.

This role captured the essence of Brosnan’s persona, that of someone that looks so right for the role he is playing that we cannot take him seriously. This showed up in the Bond movies he eventually made. As Roger Ebert noted when reviewing GoldenEye (1995), the first Bond movie Brosnan starred in, the formula for a Bond movie was there, but something was different:

“So, all of the parts are in place. And yet, in an important way, this James Bond adventure … marks the passing of an era. This is the first Bond film that is self-aware, that has lost its innocence and the simplicity of its world view, and has some understanding of the absurdity and sadness of its hero.”

Even though he admits elsewhere that Brosnan makes the best James Bond since Connery, he also acknowledges that, psychologically speaking, there is something different:

“Brosnan’s Bond looks at home in the casinos of Monte Carlo, but he’s more knowing, more aware of relationships. I am not sure this is a good thing. Agent 007 should to some degree not be in on the joke.”

Once again, we have that Don Quixote effect, as if a man is trying to be James Bond based on all the James Bond movies he’s seen.

Still, in these Bond movies, Brosnan must be the good guy and play it fairly straight. In other movies about espionage, however, he is a shady character, a bit unscrupulous, as in Remington Steele.

A good example is the movie No Escape (2015). This is principally a fantasy film for husbands who are failures. A lot of men feel they have let their wives down, and in this movie, Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has done so in a big way. From the dialogue we learn that he used to be in business for himself, but he eventually had to give that up. So, he takes a job with Cardiff, a water company, requiring that he relocate his family to some unnamed country in Southeast Asia, which means he and his family are strangers in a strange land, where they don’t speak the language and where the food being sold in the marketplace would cause you to lose your appetite. They check into a hotel where the phone doesn’t work, some of the lights don’t come on, and there is nothing but snow on television. And this looks like the best hotel in the whole city. It all proves to be too much for Jack’s wife Annie (Lake Bell), and in the middle of the night he finds her sitting on the floor of the bathroom crying. In other words, if things had proceeded normally from this point, this would have been a movie of misery, probably resulting in Annie’s taking their two children back to the United States before long and filing for divorce.

But then there is a coup, the prime minister is assassinated, everyone in the American embassy is killed, and the police are overrun by mobs of revolutionaries, whose ultimate goal is to slaughter every Caucasian foreigner in the country, especially employees of Cardiff. As horrible as that sounds, it gives Jack a chance to redeem himself, as he leads his family this way and that through one melodramatic situation after another, even to the point of killing a man who was threatening them, which he does in full view of his wife. And she thought her husband was a failure. Hah!

On his own, however, he would never have been able to get his family out of the country. Fortunately, on the plane coming over, they met Hammond, who is played by Pierce Brosnan. Given all the James Bond movies Brosnan has starred in, we are not surprised when he turns out to be a British spy. However, he is dissolute: he drinks too much and frequents strip clubs. Nevertheless, Hammond still has all the requisite lethal skills for a British spy. When Jack and his family are about to be murdered by several rebels, Hammond and another agent, a local named Kenny, are able to intervene and kill all the bad guys.

Hammond tells Jack he knows of a place where they will be safe. It appears to be a combination brothel and opium den. Presumably, Hammond is a regular customer. When they get on the roof, Hammond explains what is going on. It turns out that he is a corrupt version of James Bond. Now that the Cold War is over, his services are put to ends more pecuniary than patriotic. He confesses to being the ultimate cause of the revolution. His job is to get countries to borrow money for projects, such as waterworks, knowing that they will never be able to pay back the loans. Being hopelessly in debt, the countries have no choice but to let corporations like Cardiff come in and make big profits at the expense of the impoverished citizens. Normally, things work out well, and the citizens don’t realize how it all happened. But this time, things did not work out well, and so the people have risen up to take their country back. In other words, Hammond continues, they are trying to protect their families just as Jack is trying to protect his.

Unfortunately, Hammond and Kenny are killed in subsequent fighting, but Jack and his family are eventually able to make it by boat to Vietnam. From there, presumably, they will go back to the United States and stay there. And so, thanks to the revolution caused by Hammond, Jack and Annie will live happily ever after. Without that, he would have been a failure, and she would have divorced him.

However, it is in The Tailor of Panama (2001) that Brosnan’s persona was really put to good use. In that movie, Brosnan plays Andrew Osnard, James Bond’s evil twin, as it were. The movie begins with an establishment shot of MI6 Headquarters. An M-like character informs Osnard that he is being transferred to Panama, or rather, being banished there for his sins: blown cover, gambling debts, and the wives.

The “blown cover” is almost a joke in the James Bond genre. Only in Dr. No (1962) did Bond try to conceal the fact that he was a spy. By the next installment, From Russia with Love (1963), Bond is so well-known as a spy that SPECTRE has an island where men run around wearing James Bond masks so that assassins can practice killing James Bond.

Also starting with Dr. No, but continuing throughout the franchise, Bond always wins when playing chemin de fer, or whatever they play in those European casinos, especially when sitting opposite a beautiful woman. But in The Tailor of Panama, gambling is one of Osnard’s vices, resulting in serious gambling debts, something that cannot be allowed for someone that has access to state secrets, as those debts would make him susceptible to exploitation by foreign governments.

Finally, Bond’s womanizing is typically restricted to single women. Here we gather that Osnard has been fooling around with the wives of men with influence, including his superiors at MI6.

Osnard figures that he is expected to keep his head down, serve out his time in Panama, and retire with a pension. But “M” says Britain has vital interests there and warns him of much danger in what goes on in that country: money laundering, drug trafficking, and corruption. We see Osnard smile at this, figuring he will fit right in. On the plane to Panama, he scrolls through a list of two hundred Brits that are residents there. He takes an interest in a tailor, Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), about whom MI6 apparently has a lot of information.

The scene shifts to the shop of Pendel and Braithwaite, where Harry is promising to help a customer realize the dream of “becoming more than we are” with the proper attire. Harry approves of the suit the customer picks, referring to it as “Connery’s choice,” presumably an inside joke with the audience, suggesting that the suit could make the customer look like the first and best actor to play James Bond. Making appearances triumph over reality is the theme of this movie.

Osnard introduces himself to Harry as a future customer, but soon reveals that he knows the truth, that the business about Braithwaite is phony, that Harry has served time in prison, that his firm was never based in the prestigious Savile Row, and that he is seriously in debt on account of a farm he should never have bought. Osnard promises Harry that he will help him with that debt if he provides Osnard with secret information that might prove useful to him, information that Harry can glean from the powerful men for whom he makes suits.

Harry doesn’t really have anything to tell, but he needs the money, so he makes up stuff about the “Silent Opposition.” Later, when he makes up stuff about the president of Panama selling the canal to the Chinese, Osnard becomes excited, but not because he believes him, saying it’s “a better yarn than Arthur Braithwaite.” When Harry is surprised that Osnard sees through his spiel, Osnard says that the important thing is that “it plays,” something he can report back to MI6.

It all reminds me of Our Man in Havana (1959), where Alec Guiness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, before the revolution. He needs money on account of his daughter, who just bought a horse, which she wants to keep in a stable at the expensive country club, while he wants to send her to finishing school in Switzerland. He is approached by Noël Coward, who is a British Secret Service official, to get him secret information, for which he will pay a lot of money. Guiness is unable to come up with any secret information, but his friend Burl Ives has some encouraging advice: “That sort of information is always easy to give. If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination…. There’s something about a secret that makes people believe.” When Guiness says that they want him to recruit agents, Ives tells him to invent them too. And so he does.

Returning to The Tailor of Panama, we find that the story Harry made up, while good enough for London, was not accepted by Washington. So, Osnard puts more pressure on Harry to come up with something that Washington will believe. Harry says that will cost ten million dollars, thinking that will end it, but Osnard is fine with that. Things get crazier and crazier, leading the Americans to launch a military invasion, after paying fifteen million dollars for Osnard’s bogus information.

In the end, Osnard is able to make it out of Panama, on his way to Switzerland, with two suitcases filled with the millions of dollars he was able to extract from Washington, after bribing the British ambassador with just over a million, since he had caught on to what Osnard had been doing. As the two of them walk toward the plane Osnard will be boarding, he says, “Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” alluding, of course, to the movie Casablanca (1942), much in the way Brosnan, as Remington Steele, would allude to old movies. On the plane, he flirts with a pretty stewardess, his next conquest. And so it is that James Bond’s evil twin will live happily ever after.

As a final note, early in the movie, Osnard meets Francesca, a beautiful woman that works at the British embassy. He makes a date with her at a place where a band is playing music. At one point in their conversation, he asks her to dance.

“Oh, God, you don’t dance as well, do you?” she asks. Even she realizes that Brosnan’s character is too perfect for the part he is playing.

Compliance (2012)

There is an old saying that truth is stranger than fiction. The movie Compliance exemplifies that principle. Were we not assured at the beginning of the movie that it was based on true events, we would have lost all patience halfway through, thinking the whole thing to be preposterous. The names have been changed, of course, including that of the fast-food restaurant where the story mostly takes place.

It is a hectic Friday, and Sandra (Ann Dowd), the manager of ChickWich, is under a lot of stress because someone forgot to close the freezer door and the bacon got spoiled, although she did manage to get a replacement shipment. Moreover, they are shorthanded because one of her employees is sick. And she tells everyone that a franchise quality-control person, a secret shopper, may be coming by that day, so everyone will need to be on his best behavior. This mention of a secret shopper introduces the idea of someone pretending to be something he is not.

Shortly after they open for business, Sandra gets a phone call from a man claiming to be Officer Daniels. He says that one of her employees stole money from the purse of one of the customers, and they have her doing so on a surveillance tape. He describes her, and Sandra realizes that he is talking about Becky (Dreama Walker), a pretty, petite blonde.

Daniels gives an excuse as to why he cannot come to the restaurant just then to arrest Becky, so he says Sandra will need to check Becky’s pockets for the money. It seems like a small request, so Sandra takes Becky into the back to do just that. No money.

Little by little, Daniels says more investigating will be needed. As this goes on, Sandra is having to run back out front from time to time to deal with situations, and she asks various employees to go back with Becky, all of whom are disturbed by the situation. Becky is told to remove all her clothes, including her underwear.

When an employee named Kevin is asked to be with Becky, he is appalled. Because he is her friend, he refuses to be a part of it, even though he believes, as does everyone else, that Daniels is really a policeman. He leaves the room.

By this point in the movie, we see where the phone call is coming from. It appears to be in a room where this Daniels is able to fix himself a sandwich. And yet, it doesn’t seem to be his house because later in the movie, he arrives home and talks to his daughter, a little girl. My guess is that he is calling from his garage, which he has fixed up to be his man cave, while his wife is at work, and his daughter is in daycare.

However, very early in the movie, we see Daniels putting two quarters into a payphone. Speaking into the phone, he says, “Listen. Listen to me.” Then he yells, “Sir!” followed by the word “sir” again, only much quieter. This is before he calls Sandra at ChickWich, and when he does call her, he is calling on a prepaid cellphone. So, I don’t understand this scene at the payphone. If anyone can make sense of it, let me know.

Anyway, Sandra is a homely, middle-aged woman, apparently in her fifties. She has a boyfriend named Van, whom she says will soon be asking her to marry him, although we have doubts about that. She asks Van to come over and help watch Becky until the police are able to come to the restaurant.

Now comes the part where we really needed to know that this was based on a true story in order to accept what happens. When Van gets on the phone, Daniels tells him to have Becky do jumping jacks while naked to make whatever she has hidden inside her drop out. Nothing does. Then Daniels tells Becky that she has been bad and needs punishment, and he tells Van to give her a good spanking. So, Becky puts her naked body across Van’s lap, and per Daniels’ instructions, Van gives her a long, hard spanking. And then, because Van has been so cooperative, Daniels tells him that it is time for Becky to do something nice for him.

Oh, no! Not that!

Oh, yes. In the next scene, we see Becky, still completely naked, on her knees, performing fellatio on Van. Van feels guilty, but only after he has reached the good part. Then he leaves.

Throughout the movie, we have been waiting for an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, which, now that I think about it, is another story in which someone is tricked into being naked in front of others. It happens when Harold, the custodian, shows up. Sandra asks him to go to the back where Becky is, handing him the phone. Daniels starts telling Harold he will need to do an invasive cavity search.

Harold goes back out front and tells Sandra that the guy on the phone is not a policeman, and the whole scam falls apart. The real police figure out who Daniels is, and he is arrested. Sandra breaks up with Van. She loses her job. Becky is advised not to bother suing Sandra, now an unemployed, former fast-food worker, but rather to sue the ChickWich corporation for being remiss in not warning employees about such fraudulent phone calls. (At the end of the movie, we are told that there have been seventy such phone calls across thirty states.)

So, why did all this happen to Becky? The answer is something I have commented on in previous reviews of other movies, and it intrigues me so much that I must mention it again, begging the reader’s indulgence if he has heard me go on about this before. It is a dramatic principle that a small sin must be punished severely.

At the beginning of the movie, when Becky first arrives at ChickWich and parks her car, Kevin comes up to her and starts kidding her about parking close to the front door, an area that is supposed to be reserved for customers, playfully saying he’s going to tell Sandra on her. Where Becky has parked is indeed close to the door, and this is the sin for which Becky is punished.

Later in the movie, after Becky has removed all her clothes, Daniels tells Sandra to take the clothes to her car, put them in the front seat, and leave the door unlocked so that the police can pick them up later for closer inspection. We see Sandra walking all the way to her car, the area where employees are supposed to park. The scene could have been shortened or even left out completely, but the movie deliberately rubs it in as to how far Sandra has to walk.

Here are some other movies exemplifying this principle. First, there is Storm Warning (1950), in which a woman ends up being whipped by the Ku Klux Klan because she took little advantages of her good-natured colleague. Then there is Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), in which a man ends up being enslaved by his supercomputer because he stole an ashtray from the White House as a souvenir. And then there is Rosemary’s Baby (1968), in which a woman gets her husband to lie to their landlady in order to break their lease, and as a result, she ends up being raped by Satan and having to give birth to the Antichrist. This principle has been around for a long time. For example, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character is punished with death because he hesitated.

In the true story on which this movie was based, on the other hand, the man corresponding to Daniels was acquitted for lack of evidence.

And so it is that there are two kinds of karma, one for nice people like Becky, who are punished severely for their peccadillos, and one for evil people like Daniels, who commit terrible crimes and get off easy.

In Cold Blood (1967)

In Cold Blood is based on a true story about the murder of the Clutter family and the execution of their killers, Dick (Scott Wilson) and Perry (Robert Blake), throughout which religion is seen to be ineffective, irrelevant, or inappropriate.

Having recently been released from prison on parole, Perry gets off a bus, intending to make a phone call. He unloads his stuff to do so, but at the last moment, some nuns reach the payphone first. One nun whispers something to the one that has picked up the receiver, and she turns around and apologizes to Perry, clearly indicating that she will be glad to let him use the phone first. He says nothing, merely giving her a cold look and then walking away.

Later in the movie, when Dick and Perry are buying the equipment that they will need to rob the Clutters, they have not been able to find the black stockings they need to wear over their heads to avoid being identified. At an intersection, some nuns walk in front of them on the crosswalk, and Perry suggests going to a Catholic hospital to see if they can get the black stockings there. Dick dismisses the idea as ridiculous, saying it is not important since they aren’t going to leave behind any witnesses.

Perry explains why he hates nuns, having spent time in an orphanage run by nuns. He specifically mentions how those “black widows” in that orphanage would hit him with a flashlight whenever he wet the bed. He tells Dick of a fantasy he had of a big, yellow bird, “taller than Jesus.” It was like an “avenging angel,” slaughtering all the nuns while they begged for mercy. Then it folded him in its wings and took him up to paradise. “Anyway,” he says, “that’s why I have an aversion to nuns, and God, and religion.”

When Perry finally gets to make that phone call at the bus station, it is to the Kansas State Penitentiary, person to person, to the Reverend James Post. Perry is upset because he was supposed to meet Willie-Jay, the chaplain’s clerk, and he wants to know if Willie-Jay made parole. In the novel on which this movie was based, we learn that Willie-Jay wanted to bring God to Perry, which seems not to have happened, although Perry did paint a picture of Willie-Jay to look like Jesus.

Later, Dick says that Willie-Jay is a “flaming faggot.” If Perry and Willie-Jay had a sexual relationship, this would certainly explain his being so emotional when Willie-Jay doesn’t meet him at the bus station. Moreover, there are indications that Dick and Perry had a homosexual relationship. Dick is always referring to Perry as “honey” or “baby,” signing a letter to him, “Love, Dick.” When Perry bemoans the loss of his friendship with Willie-Jay, Dick says he is Perry’s friend now, “for better or worse.”

Perry responds, “Till death do us part, huh?”

“All we need is a ring, sugar,” Dick answers.

If so, that might be important for understanding how they could murder the Clutter family. People in a sexual relationship, whether it is heterosexual or homosexual, sometimes get into a “you-and-me-against-the-world” frame of mind, enabling them to commit murders they could never have done on their own. That may well have been a factor in the thrill-killing on the part of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. They were also homosexuals, but there are plenty of heterosexual relationships that lead to horrible crimes too, such as the one that became the inspiration for the novel Double Indemnity and the 1944 movie based on it.

When Dick and Perry arrive at the Clutter farm, just before they will go in and murder the entire family, we see Nancy Clutter, the sixteen-year-old daughter, kneel on the floor, rest her elbows on the bed, and clasp her hands together in prayer. It is a prayer to a God that, if he exists at all, is either unable or unwilling to protect her. The next morning, her friend will drive up to the house to pick her up for church, where that same God will be worshipped. That friend will eventually go into the house and find Nancy, her brother, and her two parents, all tied up and with their throats slit or their heads blown off by a shotgun. Later, a waitress that knew the Clutter family says, “If this can happen to a decent, God-fearing family, who’s safe anymore?”

Dick and Perry go to Mexico, and when they run out of what little money they had, they return and start hitchhiking. Dick has a plan to kill whoever picks them up, take his money, and steal his car. Eventually, a man does stop to give them a ride, but just before Perry can strangle him from behind, the man stops to pick up a soldier too, saying, “This might get the boy home for Christmas.”

“Lucky break,” says Perry.

“Practically a goddamn miracle,” Dick adds, laughing.

At this point in the movie, we don’t take seriously the suggestion that what appears to be luck might instead be a miracle, especially not coming from Dick. However, it comes up again. Before they left Mexico, Perry shipped their stuff back to the States where they could pick it up later, which includes the shoes that they were wearing on the night of the murders: Perry was wearing Cat’s Paw boots, while the soles of Dick’s shoes had a diamond pattern. When Perry slit the throat of Mr. Clutter, his blood spurted out on the floor, and Dick and Perry stepped in it, each leaving a track of one of their shoes.

Some policemen spot Dick and Perry driving what has been reported to be a stolen car. The cops follow them for a while, eventually picking them up after Dick and Perry have retrieved the box with their shoes in it. Because of those shoes, the detectives have solid evidence that Dick and Perry were at the Clutters’ house that night, so much so that Dick confesses, blaming the murders all on Perry. The detective in charge, Alvin Dewey (John Forsythe), says to the officers that arrested the pair, “If you’d grabbed them five minutes earlier, before they’d picked up that box…,” leaving it implied that he would not have had the evidence he needed.

“Just luck, I guess,” replies one of the officers.

“Or something,” says Dewey.

Now, what could this “something” he is referring to be but a miracle? In other words, Dewey is suggesting that it might have been the hand of God that kept the officers from arresting Dick and Perry before they picked up the box. But if God was going to get involved, why did he allow the Clutters to be murdered in the first place? This is similar to the movie Compulsion (1959), in which Orson Welles, essentially in the role of Clarence Darrow, says to Dean Stockwell, essentially in the role of Nathan Leopold, that it might have been the hand of God that dropped Leopold’s unusual glasses at the scene of the crime.

Such an assertion is self-refuting, for it is absurd to think that God didn’t care enough to prevent the little boy from being brutally murdered by two psychopaths, but then belatedly decided to drop Leopold’s glasses by the boy’s body. The scriptwriter of In Cold Blood chose instead to be subtle, merely letting the word “something” only hint at a miracle on the part of a dilatory deity, while at the same time not being so explicit as to insult our intelligence.

Then we get half a trial. In other words, the only person we ever hear from is the prosecutor, played by Will Geer. We never get to hear the case for the defense. The same thing happened in “I Confess” (1953) and Helter Skelter (1976), where it was the arguments from the defense attorneys that would have been interesting, but we never got to hear them. What the prosecutors had to say, on the other hand, was predictable.

In the case of this movie, we only get to hear the prosecutor’s characterization of what the defense attorneys had to say. Apparently, they quoted the Bible, but the prosecutor doesn’t tell us which parts of the Bible were cited. Instead, he quotes Exodus 20:13, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Now wait a minute. Is this an argument for or against capital punishment? However, he then gives another quotation, one that clearly advocates for capital punishment. While dramatically holding the open Bible pressed against his chest, indicating how dear it is to him, he quotes it by heart: “Genesis 9, verse 12: Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” He should have kept the Bible open where he could see it. Then he would know that it was verse 6, not verse 12.

“Objection, your honor,” I can almost hear one of the defense attorneys saying, “the prosecution is misquoting the Bible. I call for a mistrial!”

Because the defense never got to make its case in this movie, we are not surprised that the jury brings forth a verdict that calls for the execution of both Dick and Perry. As Dick ascends the stairs for his hanging, he says to those around him, “You’re sending me to a better world than this ever was.” He apparently forgot that when he was being interrogated by the detectives, he said, “As God is my witness, may I burn in Hell forever if I ever killed anybody.” Well, technically, Perry did all the killing, so maybe Dick gets to go to Heaven after all.

When it is Perry’s turn to be hanged, the Reverend James Post starts reading the Twenty-third Psalm. In the middle of this reading, Perry asks, “Is God in this place too?”

Spotlight (2015)

At the beginning of Spotlight, we are told that the movie is based on true events. We might have suspected as much anyway since everyone in the movie seems to be white. Fictional movies so lacking in ethnic diversity are now discouraged. There are homosexuals in this movie, which would normally be a plus in favor of diversity, but they mostly turn out to be priests that molested young boys. The whole point of diversity is to portray in a positive light those who belong to a group that has historically been discriminated against, so featuring homosexuality in this negative way in a work of fiction would defeat the whole purpose. Given the requirements of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now in place, one wonders if this movie could have received the award for Best Picture were it made today. The Academy also encourages representation of people with disabilities, but the closest this movie comes to that is when one of the child-molesting priests seems to be mentally impaired. For example, he thinks it’s all right that he fooled around with boys because he never got any “gratification” out of it. On the other hand, maybe the Academy would have made an exception for all this on account of its being a true story. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is sometimes politically incorrect as well.

Speaking of which, there are some movies that would be unbelievable if presented as fiction, but are accepted by the audience if informed at the beginning that the story is true. In the case of Spotlight, however, the statement at the beginning that it is based on actual events has the additional function of making the movie morally permissible. If it were not true that the Catholic Church was guilty of covering up hundreds of thousands of incidents of child molestation on the part of priests for decades, making a fictional movie depicting such events would have been unthinkable.

The movie sums things up nicely in the first few minutes. The year is 1976. The place is a police station in Boston. At the front desk, a young cop is learning how things work from an older cop. It seems that Father Geoghan has been caught molesting a couple of boys. The older cop says, “The mother’s bawling and the uncle’s pissed off.” The mother is divorced with four kids, so Father Geoghan was “helping out,” the older cop says sarcastically. Later in the movie, we learn that priests often prey on boys from families where there is an absentee father.

In another room, the bishop emphasizes the good work the Church does for the community, assuring the mother, who is there with her brother and her two children, that Father Geoghan will be taken out of the parish. The screenplay says she is fingering some rosary beads, but it is not obvious when watching the movie. Toward the end of the movie, however, we see a similar scene with a mother and her two sexually abused children, only this time we can see the rosary she is holding.

The Assistant District Attorney arrives, encouraging the older cop to keep the press from finding out what is going on, but this cop already knows the drill. When the young cop says that it will be hard to keep the press away from the arraignment, the older cop says with derision, “What arraignment?”

This scene captures the essence of the situation. The State is in cooperation with the Church to keep the press from finding out, and to that end, the priest will be able to remain a priest, and there will be no charges filed against him.

The mother is devoutly religious, so in addition to the horror of finding out that her two boys have been molested, she must cope with the fact that it was a priest who was guilty of doing it. In general, the need people have for religion is so strong that it is thought better to let priests keep molesting children rather than have the truth come out and shake people’s faith in God.

Later in the movie, the year now being 2001, one of the reporters for the Boston Globe, Eileen McNamara, has written an opinion piece on how Father Geoghan has by this time molested eighty kids in six different parishes over the last thirty years, something Cardinal Law knows all about. When it is noted that the Church dismissed the claims, Eileen remarks, “He said, she said.” Actually, it is more a matter of “Adult says, child says.” And the sense we get repeatedly in this movie is that if women often have a hard time being believed when men abuse them, with children it is even more so. In fact, it is not so much a case of their not being believed as it is that children don’t seem to matter that much.

The discussion about Eileen’s opinion piece is brought up on the day that the Boston Globe is welcoming a new editor, Marty Baron, played by Liev Schreiber. He is especially interested in this story, but no one else at the meeting seems to care much. In fact, prior to Marty’s arrival, the attitude at this newspaper seems to be that it is just a dog-bites-man story. Priest molests child? Not news. Child molests priest? Now, that would be news.

There is an investigative team at the Boston Globe called “Spotlight,” consisting of Robby (Michael Keaton), Mike (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha (Rachel McAdams), and Matt (Brian d’Arcy James). They report to Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery). They were all raised Catholic, but they have lapsed or have drifted away from the Church for one reason or another.

Marty wants Spotlight to follow up on this story about Geoghan. Here is another instance of something that would not likely have been in the movie were it not based on actual events. Marty is a Jew. Having a Jew attack the Catholic Church for protecting pedophile priests would have been inflammatory had the story not been true. If this movie were fiction, my guess is that Marty would have been a Protestant played by an African American.

There are two other aspects about Marty that make him a suspicious character. In a discussion Robby has with Jim Sullivan, an attorney for the Church, Jim asks if Marty has a family, and Robby answers that he does not. Jim then asks if Marty is divorced. Again, the answer is No. Notwithstanding the fact that the Catholic Church regards divorce as a sin, Jim would have felt better if Marty were at least divorced because a lot of people don’t trust bachelors. Unless they are priests, of course. Also, Marty doesn’t care about baseball. Of all things! Jim can’t believe this guy is the new editor of the Boston Globe.

An attorney that has been representing the victims of Father Geoghan, Mitchell Garabedian, says that it takes an outsider like a Jew to take on the Church. That makes sense. Still, were this movie fiction, someone like Morgan Freeman would have been outsider enough, as well as satisfying the need for diversity without risking a charge of antisemitism.

By the way, I said that everyone in this movie seemed to be white, but Garabedian says he is also an outsider since he is Armenian, which would make him Asian. I guess in real life, he was. But he is played by Stanley Tucci, who is of Italian descent. That would never be allowed today. Those that made this movie would have had to go out and find an actual Armenian to play this part.

Garabedian is exceptional among lawyers, most of whom deal directly with the Church for some easy money, taking a third of the maximum settlement allowed by law for a suit against a charitable organization, $20,000 to be exact. Instead, Garabedian insists on taking these cases to court. As a result, he has been threatened with disbarment three times. Noting how widespread the corruption is regarding these cases, he says to Mike, “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

In the end, the Boston Globe finally publishes a series of stories revealing the many priests in Boston that have molested children and the coverup going all the way up to Cardinal Law. But this turns out to be just the beginning, for the epilogue lists places all over the United States and the rest of the world where the Church has also sinned by protecting priests rather than children.

Hopefully, this will be the last time we have to deal with a major conspiracy to protect pedophiles.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The first time I watched The Asphalt Jungle, my attention was naturally focused on the planning for the heist of a jewelry store and how it all goes wrong, both during its execution and in the days following. The mastermind is Herr Doctor Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) or “Doc” for short. Because he is a German immigrant, speaking with an accent, it is funny to hear him use the slang words “caper” and “hooligan,” but for him they are technical terms, the latter referring to a necessary ingredient of what is denoted by the former.

What caught my attention on a recent viewing was how pathetic most of the characters in this movie are. The man who supposedly is bankrolling the caper is Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern). He has a wife who says she doesn’t feel well, lying in bed, begging him to stay home with her because she gets so nervous in the big house they live in, with no one but servants around. He says he can’t stay home with her because he has “business” to attend to, that business being the double cross he is planning to pull on Doc after the robbery. You see, he doesn’t actually have the money to fence the stolen jewels, as he promised Doc he would, because he is on the verge of bankruptcy, what with “two houses, four cars, half a dozen servants,” and, as Doc learns from a prostitute he spent the night with, “one blonde.”

That blonde is kept in the other of those two houses Emmerich owns. She is Angela (Marilyn Monroe). It has been noted by film critics that Marilyn is often paired up with weak men, as in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Niagara (1953), and this seems to be the case here. Whether the men are weak to begin with or whether a man just naturally becomes weak when he falls for such a sexually desirable woman, it is hard to say.

Anyway, she calls Emmerich “Uncle Lon.” He tells her he doesn’t like it, but she persists in doing so anyway. The word “uncle,” if taken literally, would suggest incest, pouring cold water on his love for her. It also suggests that he is too old for her. In any event, when he kisses her, it seems all she can do to tolerate it for a second or two before easing away from him, her patience for this show of affection having reached its limit. From this we may infer that she lets him have sex with her when he visits, but she gets it over with as quickly as possible. Emmerich’s wife back home loves him, and she is nice looking, but he would rather take scraps from Angela. Later on in the movie, when Angela fails to provide him with an alibi, he blows his brains out.

The hooligan that the Doc needs for his plan is Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). At one point early in the movie, we see Dix in a lineup, if you can call it that. In any other movie I have seen featuring a lineup, about five men fitting the description of a witness stand in a row. Some of the men are just policemen in plain clothes, but least one of the men is the suspect, who cannot see the witness who might pick him out.

But not in this movie. There are only three men in the lineup, the rap sheet of each one being clearly announced, only one of whom would be likely to commit an armed robbery, which is Dix, of course. The witness previously said the man who pulled the stickup was tall. So, Dix, who is six feet, five inches tall is standing next to a man played by Strother Martin, who is five feet, five inches tall, a whole foot shorter than Dix. Moreover, Dix can see the witness and glares at him. The witness gets scared and says he isn’t sure. Lieutenant Ditrich is exasperated that this phony lineup, purposely designed to single Dix out for identification, has failed to bring about its intended result.

As a result, Ditrich is now in trouble with his boss, Police Commissioner Hardy (John McIntire), who is upset about all the crime statistics. When Ditrich tells him the witness got cold feet, Hardy tells him to lock the witness up and scare him worse, not exactly what you would call a witness protection program.

Dix is released. Sometime later, a woman he knows, Doll Conovan (Jean Hagen), comes over to his flat. She’s a dancehall girl, and the place where she worked got shut down because Police Commissioner Hardy is on a tear, having ordered Ditrich to shut down the clip joints. Doll is locked out of her apartment because the raid took place before she got paid. Out of the goodness of his heart, Dix lets her stay for a couple of days. The next morning, we see that he has slept on the couch. This is not something required by the Production Code. Doll is in love with Dix, but he just isn’t interested in her.

In fact, he doesn’t seem to be interested in any woman. In this way, he is the opposite of Doc, who is obsessed with women. Doc’s plan after the robbery is to go to Mexico and chase pretty Mexican girls in the sunshine. However, he never gets there. Because he spends too much time ogling a teenage girl on his way out of town, he is arrested by a couple of cops who just happened by.

But all Dix wants to do is save up his money and buy back the Kentucky horse farm his family lived on before they lost everything as a result of bad luck, including when a black colt of much promise broke its leg and had to be shot. Ironically, Dix could have saved up the money he needed to buy back the horse farm a long time ago, but he keeps playing the horses at the racetrack, and they keep losing.

He places those bets with a bookmaker named Cobby, who also helps Doc find the men needed for the robbery. In addition to Dix, there is Louis the safecracker and Gus (James Whitmore), a hunchback, who drives the getaway car. Louis is fatally wounded when a gun goes off accidentally. His wife becomes angry at Gus for getting him involved in all this, calling him a cripple and a crooked back. Cobby is also the one that arranges for Emmerich to finance the heist, who in turn is supposed to see about finding a fence for the jewels. Cobby is a weak, nervous man, whom Ditrich beats a confession out of, forcing him to rat out everyone else. But Ditrich has been on the take, so he also ends up in jail by the end of the movie.

The double cross Emmerich had planned doesn’t work, and by the end of the movie, all the men involved one way or another are either dead or in jail. Dix had been shot during the double cross, but he doesn’t believe in doctors. He is determined to make it back to that farm his family had when he was a kid. Doc had tried to disabuse Dix of his dream of home, saying, “Listen, Dix. You can always go home. And when you do, it’s nothing. Believe me. I’ve done it. Nothing.” But it often happens that when a man approaches the end of his life, he wants to go back home, wherever that is. So, with the help of Doll, he manages to make it back to what used to be the family horse farm before dying from loss of blood, saying that if Pa can just hold on to that black colt, everything will be all right.

Toward the end of the movie, Commissioner Hardy gives a speech about how much crime there is in the city and how terrible it all is. It comes across as an exculpatory epilogue, justifying the movie we have just seen as a kind of public service announcement, intended to make us ordinary citizens more vigilant and supportive of the police. But since it is Hardy’s policy to terrify witnesses and throw them in jail if they don’t do what they’re told, I don’t think those crime statistics are likely to get any better.

Coup de Chance (2023)

I just finished reading Coup de Chance. It’s a movie, of course, but I spent so much time reading the subtitles that it is with much reluctance that I can bring myself to say that I watched this movie. Apparently, Woody Allen was so enamored of foreign filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and several others, with whom you are doubtless familiar, that he just had to make a foreign film of his own. To that end, the movie is set in France, and everyone in the movie speaks French.

The difference, of course, is that whereas Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, et al. were simply making movies in their own language for domestic consumption, Allen is an American for whom English is his natural language. Furthermore, there is no reason that the story could not have been set in America. In short, his French foreign filmed is forced.

Let me make some distinctions. There are three kinds of foreign films. First, there are those made in countries where English is spoken naturally, like England and Canada; second, there are the movies where English is dubbed in; and third, there are the movies with subtitles. Back in the day when there were video stores, it was only movies in this last category that were grouped together as Foreign Films.

And for good reason. I don’t believe I am alone in saying that it is this third category that really tries one’s patience. It’s not too bad when there are only occasional subtitles or when they are limited to certain sections of the movie, as in Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), where he satirizes Italian foreign films in one segment. But when the entire movie is subtitled, that is a bit much.

This is especially so when the movie is talkative as is Coup de Chance. It wasn’t too bad in scenes with just one man and one woman, where I would know when it was the man who was saying what was written at the bottom of the screen and when it was the woman, although I still could not see their facial expressions or see what they were doing. But when there was a group of people all talking to one another, I had to keep rewinding the tape, so to speak, to see who had said what to whom. Had I seen this movie in a theater, that option would not have been available.

A long time ago, after forcing myself to watch movies by the likes of Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut, I decided that I had read my last movie. But since I have been a fan of Woody Allen since the 1960s, I decided to make an exception in his case. I’m glad I did because notwithstanding all the subtitles, it is a pretty good murder mystery, throughout which there are competing philosophies: one emphasizing the importance of chance or luck, as indicated by the title; the other, the role of the will in determining the course of one’s life.

I announced that this review would have spoilers, but I will not go so far as to give away the ending. In fact, part of what makes this movie so suspenseful is that while some of Allen’s murder mysteries have the bad guy get caught or killed in the end, like Scoop (2006) or Irrational Man (2015), he sometimes lets a major character get away with murder and live happily ever after, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) or Match Point (2005). So even toward the end, we are not sure whether the bad guy will get away with it.

Of course, I still say it would have been a better movie had it been in English and set in America.

On the Waterfront (1954)

The theme of On the Waterfront (1954) is the morality of testifying against others. When the movie starts, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brandon), a longshoreman, is given an order by union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) to trick Joey Doyle, a friend of Terry, into going up on the roof to get one of his pigeons back. Joey is hesitant because he plans on testifying against the union before the Waterfront Crime Commission, and he knows that his life is in danger. Nevertheless, he goes up on the roof where two mobsters are waiting for him. They push him off the roof.

Terry is devastated. He says he thought they were just going to lean on him a little. Problem is, Joey was standing right near the edge of the roof when they leaned on him. Anyway, Terry now knows that Friendly ordered that murder. He also becomes aware that several other hoodlums knew what would happen, including his brother Charley (Rod Steiger). Of course, Terry cannot say anything to anyone about the murder because that would be stooling.

Later, Charley tells Terry to attend a meeting at a church where Father Barry (Karl Malden) is trying to help longshoremen who are being exploited by Friendly. That way Terry can report back on who was there. Terry says, “Why me, Charley? I feel funny going down there. I’d just be stooling for you.”

But that’s different, Charley explains. “Let me tell you what stooling is. Stooling is when you rat on your friends, the guys you’re with.”

Of course, these so-called friends have just been using Terry. He is especially irked when Charley has conveniently forgotten that he was the one that told Terry to throw a fight because Friendly and other mobsters had placed big bets against him. And so, whereas Terry might have gone on to become a champion, his boxing career was over.

In the end, Terry decides he has been ratting on himself all these years, and he testifies before the commission.

Elia Kazan is said to have made this movie as a way of justifying his testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, admitting that he had been a member of the Communist Party and naming fellow members of the Party. Those on the right have long associated unions with communism, so when Terry finally testifies against the union before the Waterfront Crime Commission, it corresponds nicely to Kazan’s own testimony before HUAC.

I read that while the particular story was written by Budd Schulberg, much of it was inspired by a series of articles about union corruption, “Crime on the Waterfront,” by Malcolm Johnson. So, I thought I would look into that background. In so doing, I came across an article by Sean Murphy, “‘An Underworld Syndicate’: Malcolm Johnson’s ‘On the Waterfront’ Articles.” According to Murphy, Johnson’s articles led to the formation of the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, whose hearings were dramatized in The Godfather Part II (1974).

This naturally suggested a comparison between On the Waterfront and The Godfather Part II, not only in regard to testifying before a committee, but also in regard to the relationship between brothers.

In The Godfather Part II, Frankie Pentangeli agrees to cooperate with the FBI to avoid prosecution. He is assured that Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) will probably refuse to testify, pleading the fifth, in which case Frankie will not have to publicly testify either. Unfortunately for him, Michael does testify in his own behalf, proclaiming his innocence, denying that he is involved in organized crime. Much to his chagrin, Frankie knows he will have to testify as a result.

Michael thought that Pentangeli had been killed by the Rosato brothers. From what is said during the hearing, Michael figures out that Pentangeli is actually alive and will be testifying against him. On the day Frankie sits before the committee, he sees Michael enter the room with Frankie’s brother, who is a Mafia boss in Sicily. This makes Frankie feel ashamed. The idea of violating the law of omertà in front of his brother is too much for him. He recants what he told the FBI previously, saying he just went along with whatever they said, and none of it was true.

In On the Waterfront, Johnny Friendly sends Terry’s brother Charley to talk Terry out of testifying. Failing that, Charley is to set Terry up to be killed by one of Friendly’s hitmen, essentially asking a man to participate in the murder of his own brother.

Instead, Friendly should have just told Charley to try to persuade Terry not to talk. When Charley reported back, saying he was unable to do so, Friendly could say, “Thanks for trying, Charley. You did the best you could.” After Charley leaves the room, Friendly could then give orders for a hit on Terry.

If his goons are unable to find Terry, Friendly could tell Charley, “Plan on sitting in the committee room Friday morning so that Terry will have to look you in the eye while he testifies.”

The guilt Terry would feel would be even stronger than that felt by Frankie. Frankie would know that even if he testified, his brother would simply go back to Sicily, whereas Terry would know that in testifying, he would be sending Charley to prison right along with Friendly and several other hoodlums.

Finally, the last thing Friendly should have done is to kill Charley and display his corpse on a hook in an alley for Terry to see. At that point, Terry knows that by testifying, he won’t be sending his own brother to prison, thereby removing that motive for being silent. Furthermore, the murder instills in Terry a desire for revenge strong enough for him to disregard his own safety. He is completely freed up to testify, physically and morally.

Well, Johnny Friendly is no Michael Corleone, so I guess it’s believable that he would be as stupid as the movie makes him out to be.

Shoot (1976)

To say a lot of people, including critics, dislike the movie Shoot is an understatement. Many of them detest it. Leonard Maltin rated it BOMB. There are some people, like me, who really liked this movie as a satire on gun enthusiasts. However, there are not enough of us for this movie even to achieve cult status. As a result, it is pretty much unavailable, except for a version of poor quality on YouTube.

At the beginning of Shoot, Rex (Cliff Robertson) wakes up, not gradually with sleepy eyes, but suddenly, as if he willed himself to wake up early that morning. He looks at his watch, the face of which is black. He presses the button on the side, causing red numerals to light up. We are used to seeing outdated technology while watching old movies, but when we do so, it generally strikes us as incidental. In the 1970s, however, featuring an LED watch in a movie was supposed to impress us as being the latest thing, but it looks so out of date now that it provokes derision.

Anyway, the time is 4:02. He gets out of bed, his wife still sleeping, and starts getting ready. After performing his daily ablutions, he straps on a .45 automatic. But that is not the only gun he has, for we see a full display of rifles against the wall, including a submachinegun.

He selects a hunting rifle with a scope from his collection and then proceeds to clean and oil it in a manner that is unmistakably sensual. Holding a rod with a patch secured at the end, he penetrates the barrel, inserting it all the way. After that, he squirts oil on a cloth, which he firmly squeezes. Still holding the cloth, he encircles the barrel with his hand and slowly slides it all the way down. Then he oils the other parts of the rifle, gently caressing them.

He is obviously a veteran of World War II, for as he does all this, we see pictures on the wall that were taken while he was deployed overseas, and we see a photograph of a saluting General Eisenhower. Ah, those were the days! At the present time, he is the leader of the local National Guard Unit. Somewhere in the midst of all the pictures is one of his wife.

Speaking of his wife, she is a miserable alcoholic, whom he neglects. He cheats on her, but his affairs with other women are only a minor form of infidelity. His true love is for his guns.

Rex leaves in a camouflage outfit, suitable for winter weather. He arrives at a parking lot where he picks up his four friends, among them Lou (Ernest Borgnine) and Zeke (Henry Silva). He drives them to his hunting lodge out in the woods. They are all having a good time as they walk through the woods, getting back to nature.

As a hopeful sign that there may be deer close by, one of them says that he saw some “deer shit.” Zeke says it was “hippie shit.” When asked how he knows that it was hippie shit, Zeke replies, “It had hair in it.”

Now, that’s not much of a joke, but it reminds us of the title character in Joe (1970), who is also a veteran of World War II, a gun nut, and someone that hates hippies and blacks.

Anyway, after hours of walking, they become frustrated because they haven’t come across any animals. It’s hard to appreciate the beauties of nature if you can’t find anything to kill. As they reach the bank of a river, they decide to give up, but then they hear something from the other side of that river. It is another group of hunters, who apparently have not had any luck finding something to kill either. The two groups stare at each other for a long time. Then a hunter from the other side aims his rifle and fires, grazing one of the men with Rex. In return, Zeke shoots back, hitting the hunter that shot at them right between the eyes. Both sides take cover and begin shooting at each other, until the hunters on the other side disappear back into the woods.

Of course, this reminds us of The Most Dangerous Game (1932). In that movie, Count Zaroff has discovered that hunting men is the only challenge left that still excites him. However, Zaroff never gave his human prey a rifle and ammunition to shoot back with. I guess he knew that would be too exciting. This movie, however, takes things to that next step.

Rex and his friends argue about whether to call the police. Zeke especially does not want to do that since he is the one who killed the hunter on the other side. But Lou thinks calling the police would be the right thing to do. Finally, they decide to hold off and see what happens. At first, they are relieved when the other hunting party does not report it to the police. Instead, there is only an obituary notice of a man from a nearby town, Ed Graham, that might be the hunter that was killed.

Rex decides to check it out, calling Graham’s widow, pretending to be an old friend and wanting to pay his respects. Like Rex’s wife, Mrs. Graham is an alcoholic, and she is just as miserable, expressing contempt for the way hunters are so close to one another, closer than they are to their wives.

But then she sympathizes with the way her husband had to put up with all that “bleeding heart gump from his own son.” She says her son became an assemblyman, adding that he was elected by “the hippies and the junkies and the jigs, not to mention the ecology nuts and the anti-gun nuts.” When her son expressed his dislike for the way his father willfully hurt the wildlife, she told him he should move to India where they worship cows, letting them shit right in the street.

However, she goes on to say that it’s not really about protecting the wildlife:

It’s all part of great plot to disarm the American household so the hippies and the junkies and the jigs can come in whenever they like and beat you half to death and rape you, while their buddies downstairs are taking out the TV sets so they can sell them and buy more heroin.

She tells Rex she has her own .357 Smith & Wesson in her bedroom to shoot any of those hippies, junkies, or jigs that try that stuff with her. She also tells Rex that she isn’t wearing any bra or panties under her robe, having earlier told him she was “stark naked” when he called her on the phone. Well, everyone grieves in his own way.

She mention’s her husband’s best friend from college, Marshall Flynn, who was said to be a one-man army against the Japs. When Rex leaves, we see a man sitting in a car watching him, presumably the friend she was telling him about. Soon after, we see Flynn in Rex’s town in various places, checking things out.

Rex comes to the conclusion that because the other hunters did not report it to the police, that means they prefer to get revenge their own way. He calls a meeting of those who were involved. Speaking of the hunters on the other side, Rex says, “They know where we hunt. They know when we hunt…. I think those bastards are going to be waiting for us Saturday, and this time, we’re going to be prepared.”

But since they figure the other hunters will bring more men with them on Saturday, Rex says they will have to get more men they can trust too. One of the extra men suggested is John, a security guard who works in Rex’s store and who is African American. Zeke doesn’t like the idea of including “that black guy,” but Rex says he is someone they can trust, and that is what matters. We see Rex talking to John, who apparently agrees to go along, but we really don’t see much of him after that.

However, he does serve an important moral function. Zeke already expressed his disdain for hippies, and now we see that he is prejudiced against blacks as well. To that extent, he is like Mrs. Graham, who gave us insight into the attitude held by her late husband, his friend Marshall Flynn, and all the other hunters that were on the other side of the river. This is the movie’s way of disparaging gun nuts in general. On the other hand, it is important that we recognize that Rex and his friends are the good guys, relatively speaking, and that is the point of having Rex include John as a man they can trust. As opposed to this, the men they are going up against would never dream of including anyone in their group who wasn’t white.

In addition to the extra men Rex says they will need, they intend to arm themselves with automatic weapons, along with 100,000 rounds of ammunition, a B.A.R, camouflage helmets with netting, and hand grenades. These guys miss the war, and they feel good about being real soldiers again.

When Saturday arrives, snow has fallen on the ground, something they seem unprepared for as they keep slipping and sliding while they move down a slope. When they get to the same spot as the previous week, there is no one on the other side. One of the soldiers, who was not part of the original group, starts talking in a loud voice, saying it’s all ridiculous because there is no one there. In fact, we have been wondering all along if this would happen, that no one would be there, and they would end up looking silly.

Suddenly, the other side of the river comes alive. Men in white camouflage rise up out of their foxholes after tossing aside the corrugated metal sheets that had covered them, on which the snow had accumulated. They all start firing their submachine guns and tossing grenades, slaughtering everyone in Rex’s company. Only Rex survives, sort of. We see him holding his hands over his face as a bloody gob of brain goo oozes out between his fingers.

There is a transition to a nursing home, where Rex has been for a long time, unable to move, barely aware of the light, which reminds him of snow. He is filled with regret as he thinks of the friends he lost:

God, I wish I had them back. If only we could go back together and do it right. If only we’d gotten there first. Then we could have cut them to pieces, the bastards.

Coma 1978

At the beginning of the movie Coma, Dr. Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) arrives at Boston Memorial Hospital where she and other doctors talk medicalese all day, which impresses us because we don’t understand it. She and another doctor at the hospital, Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas), finally finish their day and arrive at his apartment where they live together.

It doesn’t take long for them to start squabbling about who gets to take a shower first, who fixes dinner, and who brings whom a beer. Susan becomes fed up and leaves. She leaves him on a regular basis, but then she always goes back to him. She is able to do this because she never gave up her apartment. Later in the movie, we hear Susan telling a psychiatrist, “Mark’s whining about how I can’t make a commitment, and I’m cold, and I’m afraid of intimacy.”

Mark tells her she doesn’t want a lover; she wants a wife. Of course, it’s also true that he wants a wife. And since, as long as they remain a couple, they can’t both have a wife, it would be best if they split up. We wish they would. We know they won’t.

Susan’s best friend Nancy needs an abortion. It is referred to as a therapeutic abortion, presumably because if Nancy’s husband found out she was pregnant, it would be bad for her health. We are not told how her husband would know that the baby is not his, but several possibilities are available: military deployment has kept him away from home for the past six months; he had a vasectomy five years ago; Nancy has been having an affair with a man of a distinctly different ethnicity.

Whatever the reason, the doctor performing the abortion seems to know all about it, commenting on her situation to others in the operating room, saying that she is in “a hell of a mess,” but that what she has done is none of his business. “I’m just her surgeon. I don’t run her life.” Because he feels the need to justify doing this abortion, he seems to regard the procedure as morally dubious. Moreover, in the very act of congratulating himself for not being judgmental, he is implying that she has done something shameful. His attitude appears to be that of the movie itself, that she is guilty of committing one sin in order to cover up another.

In that case, movie karma says that she should be punished. And so, she is. During the procedure, she goes into a coma and never recovers. When another young patient has a minor operation and goes into a coma too, Susan becomes suspicious. When she decides to investigate to see how many young, otherwise healthy patients have inexplicably gone into a coma during surgery, she is thwarted by Dr. George, Chief of Anesthesiology. He won’t let her look as the files. Worse yet, Dr. George is played by Rip Torn, who often plays unsavory characters.

Susan finally gets a sneak peek at the files, and she discovers that all the patients have something in common: Operating Room 8. Further investigation on her part reveals that a device allows certain patients being operated on in that room to be fed carbon monoxide instead of oxygen. Then their bodies are sent to the Jefferson Institute where their organs can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It is while she is snooping around there that she overhears a conversation indicating that “George” is behind it all.

Because Susan’s investigation may jeopardize all the money that the Jefferson Institute is raking in, an assassin is assigned to her case. He chases her into the amphitheater and then into a room where she sprays him with a fire extinguisher. At that point, he pulls out his pistol and chases her into a room full of cadavers, which is kept really cold so that they don’t rot. While he is trying to find her in that room, she pushes a bunch of cadavers onto him and runs out of the room, locking it behind her.

The lock is a barrel slide bolt. Such a lock does not prevent anyone from entering the cadaver room, but it does keep the cadavers from getting out. Well, you never know. What if Herbert West is a doctor at this hospital? In any event, the assassin is locked in with the cadavers.

At this point, the most natural thing in the world is for her to call the police and tell them a man just tried to kill her, and that she has him locked in the cadaver room. Instead, we next see her in Mark’s apartment, crying hysterically about Operating Room 8, while he strokes her hair in a patronizing way, telling her she needs a Valium.

I suppose we should have known it would turn out like this when the movie condemned Nancy for trying to conceal an adulterous affair by having an abortion. The movie is faux feminist. It starts out by letting us think of Susan as being intelligent and resourceful, and indeed she is. But then the movie does this!

Can you imagine the roles being reversed? That is to say, imagine it was Mark who began to suspect something strange going on with these comas. And then, after almost being killed by the assassin, whom he locked up in the cadaver room, he fails to call the police and instead runs to Susan, sobbing and blubbering, while Susan strokes his hair and humors him as if he were a child.

But that’s just it. This movie plays into sexual stereotypes so vividly that their roles cannot be reversed. Susan may be a doctor and able to hold her own in that profession, but she is still a woman, and Mark is still a man. So, according to this movie, that means she is weak, and he is strong.

Anyway, while she is resting, she hears Mark talking suspiciously to someone on the phone. Perhaps Mark is in cahoots with Dr. George? She sneaks out of the apartment.

You might think that having had a chance to regain her composure, she would now go to the police and tell them that a man tried to kill her, and that he is locked in the cadaver room. Instead, she goes to see Dr. Harris (Richard Widmark), Chief of Surgery, and tells him all she knows. Like Rip Torn, however, Richard Widmark is also known for playing unsavory characters. And it turns out that Dr. Harris’s first name is “George.” He slips her a drug that not only makes her drowsy, but also causes her to have symptoms of appendicitis. He gets her prepped for immediate surgery. Of course, there haven’t been any lab tests, and she hasn’t signed all the necessary forms agreeing to have an appendectomy, but no one is willing to question Dr. Harris.

However, Mark hears Dr. Harris insisting on using Operating Room 8, reminding him of Susan’s theory. He manages to stop the carbon monoxide from being fed into her breathing apparatus in the nick of time, thereby becoming the hero of the story. Then, because Mark is a man, he knows to call the police. Dr. Harris sees the two policemen waiting for him outside Operating Room 8, and he realizes he is going to be arrested. As for that guy who is locked up in the cadaver room, he probably froze to death by now.

Given the way the way this movie subverts its superficial feminism, we may guess how things will be for Mark and Susan going forward. She will make a commitment, quit being cold, and quit being afraid of intimacy. She will give up her apartment and become Mark’s wife. And that means she will be the one to fix dinner and bring him a beer.

disinterestedspectator

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