OT: Burt Reynolds RIP (with a Psycho story) - Psycho (1960) Discussion

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

At Long Last Love has its defenders, so perhaps that's the one I'll check out in Burt's honor now. A few years ago I watched a comedy he directed, The End (1978). It had some good script ideas but is so seemingly lazily executed that it drags and *feels* every inch like a vanity project. Apparently it still made a pile of money! which shows the problem you face when you get as big as Burt got in the '70s. You just can't stop making a mint etc. during that period....all the while your laziness and self-indulgence is quickly turning people off and bringing your halcyon days to a close.

Anyhow, three classics (Deliverance, Longest Yard, Boogie Nights) and a bunch of profitable smashes (Bandit, Hooper, Cannonball Run, Best Little Whorehouse). Not bad. Not Eastwood good either - they're twinned by getting fired from Gunsmoke and Rawhide respectively on the same day. But not bad.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

At Long Last Love has its defenders, so perhaps that's the one I'll check out in Burt's honor now.

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Well, it has Cole Porter songs(which are great) and a pretty great cast (including Eileen Brennan and John Hillerman, the latter of whom Bodgo pretty much discovered for What's Up Doc?) The weak link was Cybill Shepard, who, in two movies(Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love), pretty much provided the ballast to sink her boyfriend Bogdo's career. She was forbidden to be cast in his Nickelodeon -- Bogdo and Cybill even tried to fake a break-up to get her castable. As for Burt, I recall he did what he could, and he sang a little but...it just tanked. Burt was paired with Ryan O'Neal AND Tatum O'Neal in Bogdo's Nickelodeon -- an interesting movie buff's tale about the outlaw world of early silent filmmaking. It was like What's Up Doc Meets Paper Moon Meets At Long Last Love....and for Bogdo to have harmed the careers of Burt and both O'Neals in one movie...that sank him. (Much as Hitchcock harming superhot Newman and Andrews with Torn Curtain sank HIM.)

Poor Burt. He thought Bogdanovich was hot; turned down Family Plot by the "cold" Hitchcock.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A few years ago I watched a comedy he directed, The End (1978). It had some good script ideas but is so seemingly lazily executed that it drags and *feels* every inch like a vanity project. Apparently it still made a pile of money! which shows the problem you face when you get as big as Burt got in the '70s. You just can't stop making a mint etc. during that period....all the while your laziness and self-indulgence is quickly turning people off and bringing your halcyon days to a close.

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That was one of a few movies in which Burt's ego started to manifest up on the screen. The worst was Smokey and the Bandit TWO(not the fun original.) In TWO, I recall much of the story being about how The Bandit had become a superstar himself, and kept whining about how hard it was to BE a superstar. It was Burt, talking about being Burt.

The End wanted to be "out there" -- it was an entire movie about a man trying to kill himself and failing(with Dom DeLuise along to help -- funny guy, but helped turn Burt's career into an exercise in silliness.) But SPOILER...Burt doesn't kill himself, so the whole dark comedy aspect just collapses.

I watched more daytime TV talk shows in those days(didn't work all day) and I recall an appalling appearance by Reynolds on Mike Douglas or something going on and on about what a comic masterpiece he had delivered in The End. The self-delusion was apparent. The end was in sight.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Somebody on one of these boards made a point I had not considered before: Burt Reynolds was very much the macho tough guy in looks in the 70's and early 80's...but mainly made comedies, and some silly ones at that. I can only assume that maybe he didn't want to go up directly against his fellow superstar(at the time) Clint Eastwood as a tough guy, or Charles Bronson for that matter. Reynolds rather chose the James Garner career instead, and of his role in Lucky Lady, told the press, "I have the Jack Lemmon role." Jack Lemmon? When he could have been John Wayne?

About Lucky Lady. I was excited for it when it was announced. The director was Stanley Donen(Singin in the Rain, Charade, Arabesque, Damn Yankees.) It was a buddy movie(Burt Reynolds and George Segal) with a woman in the middle(Liza Minnelli) set in the 30's prohibition period of booze-running. A menage a trois; battles with gangsters, and a climactic machine gun boat to boat battle at sea.

And it was a mess. First of all, George Segal quit, and had to be replaced by a very expensive Gene Hackman. While Time Magazine felt that Hackman and Reynolds were very "Tracy and Gable"-like as the stars(they WERE stars)...they were given poor lines to read, Reynolds mainly played a boob and....the fatal flaw..Liza Minnelli just didn't seem like a woman to keep two men lusting after her. (Ann-Margret, maybe.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But it got worse. SPOILERS. I actually was given a script of Lucky Lady as it went into production. I read it(not impressed with the dialogue.) At the end, the Reynolds and Hackman characters are gunned down by cops on the beach and killed. KILLED. That ending was filmed, and rejected, and a new ending was cobbled together flashing forward to Burt, Gene, and Liza as old people on a boat.

The "Burt and Gene get killed" ending was eventually shown on a TV series called "That's Hollywood. I saw it there. A better, more professional ending, but surely a downer. Funny, LOTs of 70s movies ended as downers. Not quite sure why they decided that Lucky Lady couldn't.

Anyway, Lucky Lady was a flop, but a very WEIRD flop. It seemed not to know if it was a violent gangster movie or a comedy, and if it even had a love story. Hackman and Reynolds survived it, but Minnelli was seen, I think, as the film's fatal flaw. Her movie career floated away thereafter.

PS. George Segal walked off of Lucky Lady and years later he walked off of "10." Both times it cost money to bring in new actors to replace him...though Dudley Moore became a star for a few years. Anyway, Segal's actions quitting movies, plus some drug issues, killed HIS star career.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Anyhow, three classics (Deliverance, Longest Yard, Boogie Nights)

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Yes, that's probably the three. Smokey and the Bandit was his biggest hit, but it is a very slight movie...barely a movie. I remember thinking so when I saw it in 1977...it seemed to end before it got started...and I was amazed as it came in as one of the biggest grossers of the year. (The film proved the box office punch of the American South, for one thing; a very regional tale.)

Burt is muy mas macho as all get-out in Deliverance, but audiences showing up for a river run adventure found out they were going to see THE male-on-male rape movie instead(there have been such scenes since, notably in Pulp Fiction, but never as famously as here.) The adventure that follows rather peters out instead of building to climax. And Macho Burt gets incapacitated before the third act, can literally do nothing as Jon Voight takes over. In short...a very weird classic that undercut Burt's own macho.

Reynolds was on record as not much liking the porn storyline of Boogie Nights -- and he hated the director -- but yeah, it got him his only Oscar nomination(he was desperate to get one, pretty much broke up with Sally Field because she kept winning them.) His face at the Oscar ceremony when mincing, mugging Robin Williams won instead was barely disguised contempt. Still, oh well...its a great movie about a very tricky subject, and Reynolds captured the inner self-loathing of a "film director" who thinks he's an artist and doesn't even come close(the horrible finished product Reynolds delivers aside from the sex scenes shows he has no talent at all.) Reynolds played a good "father figure" in Boogie NIghts, but his most powerful scene is one in which he snaps and nearly beats a young punk to death. You felt the innate rage that Burt Reynolds always seemed to carry around. Maybe that's why he stuck to comedies.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Of all his hits, and his considerably fewer classics, I think The Longest Yard is the best Burt Reynolds movie.

As he said at the time, "the script didn't have Robert Redford and Paul Newman's fingerprints on it" -- it was brought to him first. Along with James Caan and Nick Nolte, he was about the only actor of his time who could play an NFL player (he'd been a college footballer), and the movie lets him play the first 20 minutes with long hair and a moustache(very cool) before sending him to prison and cutting off the stash and down the hair(he looks pretty brutal, primal -- his comedy chops shine through, but the character is a tough guy.)

The director was Robert Aldrich, who had had the hit The Dirty Dozen and here elaborated on that film's sequence in which convict GIs rout a bunch of regular Army guys in "War Games." Here its "the prisoners versus the guards" on the football field, and in its 70's way , the movie asks us to root for killers, rapists, and crooks as the GOOD GUYS versus sadistic, oppressive establishment guards. Burt was the key to making it work -- he was a NICE convict, a game-throwing self-loathing once-rich NFL superstar who gets thrown into prison with very financially poor men and has to earn everybody's respect.

I had three experiences seeing(or trying to see) The Longest Yard in '74 and '75.

First, I went out to see it on a Saturday night and...to my shock...all the night's showings were sold out. I told my companion...."A BURT REYNOLDS movie is sold out all night?" I sensed he might be a star after all.

Second, a few months later, I saw the film with about 1/3 of a house and I enjoyed it and I was gripped by it -- Eddie Albert's evil power-mad warden is a man you want to hate -- but there was little audience reaction.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Third...about a year later..they showed The Longest Yard for $1 admission at my college's truly gigantic dining commons -- a big building that could hold about twice as much as a movie theater. THAT crowd went nuts for the movie, and during the final 30 minute football game roared and cheered as if we were at a REAL football game -- not to mention laughing at the brutally violent slapstick violence during the game("I think I broke his f'n neck...he thinks he broke his f'n neck.") The college had smartly shown a Three Stooges short before The Longest Yard. It fit.

Anyway, that full house roaring cheering experience of watching The Longest Yard goes down with my Wait Until Dark, Jaws, Psycho and Star Wars "best audience night at the movies" of my young life.

SPOILERS FOR THE LONGEST YARD

Its Burt's best. Even if, photographically, it looks as flat and cheap as a documentary on factory work. And even if -- in accord with 70's downers -- Burt wins the game at the cost of probably having to stay in prison for the rest of his life (unless the warden's frame up can be exposed, which isn't promised.)

Favorite line, exchange, at halftime with good Burt and evil warden Albert talking alone. Albert demands Burt throw the game("You've done it before") or the other convicts will be punished and he'll be kept in prison for good. Burt agrees, then this:

Burt: There's just one thing I'm sorry about.
Warden: What's that?
Burt: That you're not out there on the field with us, busting heads.
Warden: Oh, I'm afraid I'm too old for that.
Burt: Nah. You just never had the guts in the first place.

Audience cheers -- but the evil warden takes that insult as reason to double-cross Burt later...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Not Eastwood good either - they're twinned by getting fired from Gunsmoke and Rawhide respectively on the same day. But not bad.

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Burt and Clint seemed to get "paired up" as their stardom rose in the 70's. It peaked with a 1978 Time Magazine cover in which the two men stood smiling, back to back("The Macho Men" I think the cover said.) Burt was marginally the bigger star than Clint that year, Smokey had hit the year before and Clint's Orangatan movie looked like HIS version of a Burt movie. Clint's syncophantic biographer, Richard Schickel, wrote that Burt put the cover on his wall and sent one to Clint for HIS wall, but Clint just had it moved to a closet or something. In short, the idea was that Burt was always trying to keep up with Clint and to get his respect.

In 1984, Clint and Burt finally made a movie together, City Heat. I've always felt that Clint waited to do it until Burt's career was weaker -- Stroker Ace and Cannonball Run II had been embarrassing flops. Clint and Burt WERE fun together, but the script was very weak, and another Xmas movie with hot young Eddie Murphy -- Beverly Hills Cop -- knocked Burt and Clint off the charts quickly -- and then stole their poster tagline: "The Heat is On."

The worst thing that happened on City Heat was stuntman broke Burt's jaw with a real chair, submitting him to years of pain and massive weight loss and a bad "look" on screen that helped bury his superstar career. Oh, well.

It does seem that Burt had enough hits, classics, and celebrity that all was forgiven in recent years. Many of the tributes to him make the point that he WAS a good actor as well as a good star, and that perhaps only his private demons(ego and insecurity) wrecked what could have been a Clint-long career.

I certainly enjoyed watching him on screen in his prime.

RIP.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Doing a little reading up on Burt Reynolds, and its interesting:

He was evidently the Number One Box Office Star from 1978 through 1982, but in that window after "The Longest Yard"(1974) he ended up in two big flops for Fox that really hurt their bottom line: At Long Last Love and Lucky Lady.

You can see where Reynolds thought he was doing the right thing doing those movies: Peter Bogdanovich was "residual hot" from his Picture Show/What's Up Doc/Paper Moon triad and Lucky Lady had comedy-adventure credentials and Stanley Donen at the helm.

But they tanked.

Burt re-grouped in 1976 by directing himself in Gator (a bigger, lighter sequel to White Lighting) and in 1977, for stuntman-director pal Hal Needham, Smokey and the Bandit(huge.) Together, those two movies gave him back his "good ol' boy persona" and locked in a working class fan base, and an American South persona(not unlike Jimmy Buffet's beach boy version of the same thing). Still, Reynolds would "branch out" to the New York stories of Starting Over and Paternity. But overall, he rode his good ol' boy bit to the bitter end. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas(very big, with Dolly Parton); Smokey and the Bandit II(uh oh), Cannonball Run II(yikes), Stroker Ace(oh no -- and instead of the Nicholson role in Terms of Endearment, which was written FOR Reynolds.) Then he flopped with Clint. The End.

One good one in the bunch was a good ol' boy Atlanta-based cop movie -- Sharkey's Machine -- that Burt directed and that allowed him to fight and shoot and be macho. But it still had a comedy overlay, and rather fell apart at the end.

Anyway, yeah...Burt Reynold DID become a superstar "in spite of his movies, not because of them."

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

OK, my 'tribute' to Burt watchlist is now set for this weekend:
1. The Longest Yard (I haven't seen it since the '90s. I rated it highly then but does it hold up?)
2. At Long Last Love (Bogdan. gap-filling for me as well)
3. Semi-Tough (Michael Ritchie gap-filling)
4. The Last Movie Star (Burt's last lead role - got decent-ish reviews)

I've watched a few Carson interviews with Reynolds this week. I gotta say that although there are always a lot of laughs, often a kind of edgy tension shows through too. The effect is almost Joe Pesci-ish or Jerry Lewis-ish - he *might* turn on you, and he's *not* the easy going drinking buddy you might have thought.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

OK, my 'tribute' to Burt watchlist is now set for this weekend:
1. The Longest Yard (I haven't seen it since the '90s. I rated it highly then but does it hold up?)

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I think so. Its very "basic" filmmaking -- the shots, cinematography and scene set-ups are almost TV-movie flat. But its got a great script, an underlying life-or-death sadism, a happy ending in the face of a tragic one...and a truly great villain in Eddie Albert(more on him downthread.)

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2. At Long Last Love (Bogdan. gap-filling for me as well)

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I saw it on release in '75, and never again. All I recall was liking the songs, liking the supporting cast, liking Burt...and really, really, REALLY hating everything about Cybill Shepard's performance. I don't think that Bogdo ever got that his girlfriend's perfect role was as the vain teen villainess in "Last Picture Show." Audiences were not going to warm up to her. And showcasing her singing? And dancing?

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3. Semi-Tough (Michael Ritchie gap-filling)

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Well, its kind of a "competition" film to go with his Bad News Bears, Smiie(teen beauty pageants) and even The Candidate. But I assume that the EST/New Age material was inserted from another script to give this "ballast." Its a strange movie, with a lot of Burt charm -- and one disturbing scene where he picks up a particular person in a bar.

Burt gave a ego-driven Playboy interview(in 1978 or '79..see?) where he very seriously said that it was an outrage he didn't WIN the Best Actor Oscar from Semi-Tough. I liked him in that movie, but evidently the good reviews and Grant comparisons went to his head. BTW in Don Siegel's just-OK "Rough Cut" of 1980(where Burt is a jewel thief type ala To Catch a Thief), Burt briefly does an actual Cary Grant impression. Its good.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

4. The Last Movie Star (Burt's last lead role - got decent-ish reviews)

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Well the movie is implausible, but his performance is very, very self-knowing.

One moment that ached: the very old Reynolds character looks down on a bed -- and a parade of the past beauties (in memory) who lay before him on various occasions fade in and out. Must be tough for guys who got women all the time, every night, different women..to realize that THAT is all over.

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I've watched a few Carson interviews with Reynolds this week. I gotta say that although there are always a lot of laughs, often a kind of edgy tension shows through too. The effect is almost Joe Pesci-ish or Jerry Lewis-ish - he *might* turn on you, and he's *not* the easy going drinking buddy you might have thought.

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Well stated, and absolutely. I've seen a couple of the Carsons, and you can tell that Reynolds had that "seething rage" thing right beneath the comedy. Reading his very insecure biographies, one senses that he hated the years of suffering to make it as a star, and once he BECAME a star, he was very mad that Nicholson and DeNiro and Pacino got the prestige roles and he did not. (Nicholson especially, bugged him, because of Cuckoo's Nest and Terms of Endearment, roles that Burt didn't get (Cuckoo) and turned down(Terms.))

In this RIP mode, Reynolds is getting a lot of salutes that reflect the fact that he WAS the biggest star for a few years. Attention must be paid, and I certainly liked him in his best films. But that churning inner Burt ego led to his career downfall, and must be remembered, too.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

By the way, here's a Burt movie I like: "Heat"(about 1986?) not the Pacino/DeNiro one, and written by the great William Goldman(no longer considered very great when he wrote it.) Burt is a bodyguard-type-for hire in Las Vegas who is hired by a wimpy guy to teach him how to be a tough guy. (Among the lessons: pulling a guy's ear off is easy and really slows him down; the pain from getting punched in the face DOES go away; you can slash a guy's throat with a credit card.). Burt was starting to lose his looks and the wig problems were developing but...he's tough, he's macho, he barely cracks any jokes in this one. He's a tough guy, and the movie is quite watchable accordingly. Recommended (as a "B.")

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

and a truly great villain in Eddie Albert(more on him downthread.)

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And here I am. I have to take note of a string of villain roles Eddie Albert played in the 70's. He's best (and nastiest) in The Longest Yard, but the others are good too(actually, he's a killer in one of them, maybe that's his nastiest.)

Albert had been rather macho and pompous on Green Acres, but he was a good guy. That changed in the 70's.

First up: a Columbo killer. 1971. Basically, General Patton as a killer -- hiding behind his medals and his rank to try to evade the detective, but no go (and also believably romancing Suzanne Pleshette, the witness to the murder he committed; he convinces her she was just seeing illusions.)

Next: The Heartbreak Kid. 1972. Albert got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for this one(versus three Godfather actors and the winner, Joel Grey -- THAT's making the grade.) He's not a killer, but he's an ultra-WASP rich Minnsota Republican blond man with a beautiful blond daughter(Cybill Shepard, cast RIGHT for vapid villainy with a touch of self-awareness)...and he ain't gonna let no con man Jewish New York punk marry his Viking Maiden. Especially when that punk(Charles Grodin, smarmy and superb) left his wife on their HONEYMOON in Miami to pursue Cybill to snowy Minnesota. Albert is the potential father-in-law nobody would want to have...scary, and funny.

Next: The Longest Yard. 1974 Albert takes the villainy up to 11 as a prison warden with a passion to have a winning semi-pro team and an entire menu of oppressive power moves to get what he wants. I like how Albert varies up his line readings-- charming, considerate...menacing, bellowing...and you never know what you're going to get with this guy. Burt Reynolds is powerless against him..or is he?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Next: Hustle. Star Reynolds and director Robert Aldrich loved each other so much on The Longest Yard that they formed a company("Ro-Burt Productions") and made another movie right away...co-starring ..Eddie Albert. As a villain again.

Hustle was a deep-raunch sex-drenched tale of cop Reynolds quest to find whoever killed -- sexually -- a particular young woman. Ben Johnson is her unforgiving father -- he insults and beats up everybody in his quest to find the killer.

But there is a "side hook" to the story. Cop Burt Reynolds lives with a top dollar hooker, Catherine Deneuve. They love each other -- but she won't quit her job unless Burt marries her. He won't, so -- mental torture ahead.

Which is where Eddie Albert comes in. He's a very rich mob-connected lawyer, and he turns on his "smiling cobra' act in a scene where he lets Reynolds know that he knows Reynolds is dating Deneuve - -which means, just hours before, Albert had been having paid-for sex with Reynolds' girl. Albert rubs it in that they are both blanking the same woman, and macho cop Reynolds can't touch Albert. A painful scene -- with Albert selling the cruelty with a smile. (But ah....Ben Johnson is Coming.)

I can't say Hustle is that great a movie -- it never plays fun like The Longest Yard and the sex is sick -- but seeing Reynolds and Albert square off one more time is a treat(again, Reynolds is powerless against Albert...or is he?) And Hustle is very unique in the Burt Reynolds collection, for reasons I will leave as spoilers.

So that's it...a salute to the Smiling Evil of Eddie Albert in four sequential roles. Funny thing: the Columbo killer is actually probably the nicest of them.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

The Longest Yard (1974)
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Not as much fun as I remembered. It reminded me a lot this time of both Cool Hand Luke and Slap Shot.... but I much prefer both of those (better scripts and dialogue in both). Reynolds *looks* great in TLY but there's still a kind of vacant quality to his acting that doesn't appeal to me. Newman or Caan (who's *amazing* in The Gambler in 1974) just give you more on screen somehow. For Aldrich too I say that TLY is a step down from Ulzana's Raid and Emperor of the North.

In sum, I guess I have to revise Burt down from 3 classics to 2 (Deliv. & Boogie).

3. Semi-Tough (1978)
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Ugh, I *really* didn't like this one. It didn't convince as a football or pro-sports milieu film at all, the EST/New Age material felt out of place, and the semi-screwball rom-com, friend/love triangle is tepid at best. They all seem a bit old for these particular relationship shenanigans (leaving people at the altar? pretending for weeks to be sold on EST?). We can just about accept Clayburgh as a sports-adjacent, childhood gal-pal of both guys, but that both could turn around in their mid-30s having had a pro-athlete's banquet of women to their exact types (although we kind of have to infer this from the film's raunchy poster more than what we actually see in the film), and decide that she's the one is too much. Definitely the worst '70s Ritchie film I've seen. ST felt lazily put together and kind of time-wasting, certainly compared to the splendid, sexy North Dallas 40 from a year later.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The Longest Yard (1974)
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Not as much fun as I remembered. It reminded me a lot this time of both Cool Hand Luke and Slap Shot.... but I much prefer both of those (better scripts and dialogue in both).

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Ummm, different kinds of movies. Though I always enjoyed how The Longest Yard gave us a "mini-Cool Hand Luke" sequence of some length early in the film(Burt on swamp reclamation) and then -- abandoned the whole depressing Cool Hand Luke angle(my beef with THAT film is that it seems to be a two-hour ode to Sisyphus; he runs, he gets captured.)

Its possible, by the way, that Reynolds ends The Longest Yard as failed as Newman in Luke. Luke is killed; Reynolds looks to be spending his life in prison(or, said director Robert Aldrich, maybe getting killed on the warden's orders later.) But The Longest Yard sidesteps the unending depression of "Cool Hand Luke" to say: "En route to doom, this guy won and made heroes of other men." (Or as in Reynolds exchange with a mean guard after the win: "F you" "Not today.")

As for the Slapshot comparison, well I love Slapshot like I love some favorite uncles. Its funny, its rambunctious, its utterly un-PC(what Newman says to the villainous rich lady about her son) and Newman looks great and is incredibly believable as a good-lookin' low life with heart(I think Slapshot is far greater than Cool Hand Luke.) The funniest scene for me is Newman's improv-looking bit where he keeps changing stories to the cops at the door who want the violent Hanson brothers for arrest -- he veers from "look at this man -- he's taken a VICIOUS BEATING -- to "eh, take them off my hands, I don't know what to do with them, I give up.") The lines are all over the place and Newman is great.

But Slapshot is a great Paul Newman movie, of which there are many. The Longest Yard is a great Burt Reynolds movie, of which there are few.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Reynolds *looks* great in TLY

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Two different ways -- for the first 20 minutes with long 70's hair and that great moustache(I like him this way) and then for the rest of the film clean-shaven with short hair(macho, yet funny.)

And take a look sometime at the main poster that advertised The Longest Yard in 1974. Its the long-haired moustachoed Burt, with most of his muscular, hairy torso and near six-pack stomach on display(he's wearing an open jacket; its from the first scene in the movie). This poster is selling "Burt the centerfold" but one can also catch his macho charm in the photo(almost Gable-like.)

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but there's still a kind of vacant quality to his acting that doesn't appeal to me.

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I notice that in the amazing first scene, where he barely reacts to the rich hottie who is dressing him down as a sell-out(of football games) and her "whore." He doesn't quite seem to know how to control the character's self-loathing here, and things explode in that very brutal shot of Reynolds pushing the woman's face against a wall, hard, and then throwing her down. Its hard to think of another A-list star who would enact this scene -- even though it sets the stage for the character's prison stint and redemption.

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Newman or Caan (who's *amazing* in The Gambler in 1974) just give you more on screen somehow.

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Well, lurking behind Reynolds' big superstar ego and insecurity was probably a feeling that he didn't quite have it for in-depth acting. He had done a lot of TV. Newman was a "long distance runner" who lasted for decades, but Caan burned out along with Reynolds in the early 80's(drugs, in Caan's part.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

For Aldrich too I say that TLY is a step down from Ulzana's Raid and Emperor of the North.

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Oh, in quality, maybe , but TLY was a much, much bigger hit than those two flops -- which I saw on release(remember Ulzana' Raids was sent out first run with Frenzy! It wasn't believed to be strong enough to release by itself. I always figured this was a "Universal double-bill of the most violent movies of two auteurs.")

Its clear that TLY runs on formula elements -- the old footballer gets to finally make a touchdown but breaks his leg and loses the ability to walk forever doing it; Reynolds initially sells out his team(a lot of heavy pressure close-ups on his shame) but goes in to win the day on the audience-cheer inducing line to the old prisoner:

Burt: Hey
Old Man: What?
Burt : How did it feel to hit (warden Albert when he was a guard 30 years ago, which led to 30 years incarceration)?
Old Man: It felt good.
Burt : Was it worth 30 years?
Old Man: (Thinks) Yes.

So Burt goes on the field, ready to ruin his life forever, to save his friends. Audiences dug it, bigtime. Especially in dreary downbeat 1974 at the movies (boy , I thought 1974 was dreary and downbeat in general. Glad I didn't see 2018 coming.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Recall not only that The Longest Yard was Aldrich's biggest of the 70's, I think it was his ONLY hit of the 70's.

Aldrich was one of those directors "with a track record" who kept making deals and kept making movies even as they didn't do much box office. Take a look at his 70's list OUTSIDE of The Longest Yard. A lot of misses. Even a 1979 comedy Western, The Frisco Kid with Gene Wilder(then a big star) and New Star Harrison Ford(in a role turned down by ailing John Wayne) flopped.

After the massive success of The Dirty Dozen in 1967, Aldrich formed a production company and set out to make some fairly R-rated or near R-rated stuff: The Killing of Sister George(lesbianism), Lylah Clare(Kim Novak, nude); The Grissom Gang(a gang kidnaps an heiress, rape ensues), Ulzana's Raid(ultra-violent cavalry-vs-Indians realism...and the Indians are un-PC savage, they cut out a man's heart and play catch with it.) I only recall the Michael Caine/Cliff Robertson movie "Too Late the Hero" as being even close to normal.

To a certain extent, The Longest Yard fit with the queasy R-rated-ness of the Aldrich oveure(how Burt smacks that rich woman around; the cripplings and probable deaths on the football field) but it was FUN, and it had a happy-enough ending. And Aldrich got his first big hit since The Dozen.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In 1981, Aldrich promoted his film All the Marbles(with Peter Falk managing a pair of gorgeous female tag team wrestlers) thus:

"In the 50's, my big hit was Vera Cruz. In the 60's, my big hit was The Dirty Dozen. In the 70's, my big hit was The Longest Yard. In the 80's, my big hit will be All the Marbles, I hope."

Well, it wasn't. In fact, All the Marbles was his ONLY film of the 80's, he died within a couple more years and that was his last film.

Interesting, though, that Aldrich felt he'd really only delivered "one hit per decade," and that he felt...that was enough.

Side-note: All the Marbles was promoted as a "female Longest Yard." Just as TLY ended with a 30-minute football game in "semi real time," All the Marbles ended with a 30-minute wrestling match "in semi real time." It had good action, but ...nobody believed the wrestling match was REAL. Everybody knows the outcome is preordained. The movie "lied" to suggest otherwise, and it failed.

And this: Aldrich was famous for splitting between "fighting female films"(Baby Jane, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Sister George) and "macho male films"(The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Yard).....and All the Marbles gave us a "macho fighting female film," as if Aldrich was mixing his two genres.

For the last time.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

3. Semi-Tough (1978)
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Ugh, I *really* didn't like this one. It didn't convince as a football or pro-sports milieu film at all, the EST/New Age material felt out of place, and the semi-screwball rom-com, friend/love triangle is tepid at best.

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I agree with some of that, not all of it -- and I haven't seen the movie in years. Since I never read the book "Semi-Tough," I simply assumed that Ritchie took some other script about EST and welded it onto this script(maybe the Semi-Tough novel didn't have enough in it for a movie?)

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They all seem a bit old for these particular relationship shenanigans (leaving people at the altar? pretending for weeks to be sold on EST?). We can just about accept Clayburgh as a sports-adjacent, childhood gal-pal of both guys, but that both could turn around in their mid-30s having had a pro-athlete's banquet of women to their exact types (although we kind of have to infer this from the film's raunchy poster more than what we actually see in the film), and decide that she's the one is too much.

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Jill Clayburgh was an acquired taste; she didn't last long but 70's Hollywood saw her as a very sexual being -- I think her oversexed performance as Carole Lombard in the awful "Gable and Lombard" made her name in that regard, as well as a sexy Eve Kendall-based performance in Silver Streak, and a lustful rendention of "Sea Cruise" on SNL. She didn't LOOK like a sex goddess, but she played "available," and this played into the menage a trois aspects of Semi-Tough (also and as usual, the 70's were light on marquee female stars, Clayburgh was, for about 5 years.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Definitely the worst '70s Ritchie film I've seen. ST felt lazily put together and kind of time-wasting, certainly compared to the splendid, sexy North Dallas 40 from a year later.

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As I recall, I was supportive of Burt Reynolds as a movie star in this particular period. He had "it," and he was definitely taking Cary Grant lessons. He had longish hair(a wig, but a good wig) and the moustache in this one; he looked about as good as he was going to look. And in the "charm" department he rather did destroy good-looking "Star is Born" star Kris Kristofferson as a rival in charm or sex appeal(which was crazy; Kris had a great look himself at the time.)

I dunno...I remember liking it when I saw it, putting up with the EST stuff, enjoying Robert Preston in one of his rare appearances.

And this: I saw the film with a small group of male and female friends, and they all ROARED at one bit during the opening scene and credits of the movie, at a cut-in, cut-out gag of a black football player being tied up on a locker room bench with medical adhesive tape. It started the film off funny...and got away with the black guy being the victim, but one "in on the joke" == he was saying things like "OK, a joke's a joke. C'mon, man..." This led right into Ritchie's directorial credit as I recall -- and could never be filmed today.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

2. At Long Last Love (1975)
I watched the blu-ray version of ALLL which is a full two hours compared to the near 90 mins cut that flopped so badly back in 1975. The story behind this new cut is kind of amazing, as Bogd. himself explains here:
https://tinyurl.com/ycvz9bsu
Unfortunately I found even this definitive version terribly inert and boring. So bad in fact that I had to pause half-way through to watch Howard Goodall's fascinating doc. on Porter's music, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2htSTN1crU, to remind myself of what was great about Porter in the first place. I guess my considered view is that Porter doesn't really work with amateurs. His songs are all about their rhythmic subtleties and their tricksy chromatic melodies. Famously, the better singer or player someone is and the more they can swing, the better Porter's songs get - Ella, Sinatra, Coltrane, etc.. ALLL is the converse case: Porter's songs sound like trash when their melodic lines are uncertain and the singers have no time whatsoever (if I heard another lumpen, unsyncopated 'on the one hand, on the other hand' couplet I thought I'd scream!).

And, let's face it, ALLL has almost nothing to offer apart from those songs. There are no real dance numbers to speak of, let alone any of the superlative dancing that was so central to all Astaire and Rogers and Astaire and Powell films. Nor do we get much non-sung dialogue or acting through which to connect with characters - ALLL is *almost* sung-through. Nor is there any real story. So if, like me, you found the song interpretation side of the film terribly lacking then ALLL was just dead in the water.

Reynolds holds his own with the rest of the cast; the film's problems aren't his fault.

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[–] MizhuB (165) 6 years ago

I remember the reviews at the time (the live ones shown on TV) were terrible. And most were blamed on Cybill Shepherd. It seemed everything Shepherd and Bogdanovich were doing were trashed just because of their relationship by that point.

I've never seen the film, but I've always been interested in seeing it because I always felt it could fall into the 'so bad, it's good' category. The clips that were shown during the reviews showed some pretty terrible singing.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

@MizhuB. I gather that there was some backlash at the time towards Bogd & Shep from both critics and audiences. Shep. was perfectly fine in small but important parts in Last Picture Show and Taxi Driver, but Bogd. (seemingly channelling Charles Foster Kane w/ Susan Alexander) asked her to do the sorts of things that only true master actors (Streep, Huppert) and charisma supernovas (Dietrich, Nicholson) are normally ever asked or allowed to do: carry whole films or, as here, to sing *live* and act and semi-dance Porter on camera for hundreds of hours with average shot lengths I'm guessing of at least a minute.

I can't stress enough how Bogd.'s key decisions to
(1) have the show almost sung-through with Porter
and
(2) record all the near-continuous singing live
shape the picture. Because of those decisions, ALLL is shot almost entirely in masters with flat lighting and the same focus, and seemingly with little concern for the score/accompaniment (recorded from playback on set? sounds horribly like it). Bogd. is always instead focussed exclusively on having his camera stay at almost exactly the same recording distance from his always chattering actors. As a result, both score-wise and visually ALLL is probably the most boring and under-powered film musical I've ever seen.

In sum, the mess of ALLL is all Bogd's fault. Good on him for trying something new I suppose - God knows 1975 was an experimental time. But most experiments fail. 1975 is marked by so many out-there stunning *successes* from Day Of The Locust to Jeanne Dielman to Nashville to The Mirror to Shivers to Barry Lyndon and Night Moves and The Man Who Would Be King. ALLL wishes it were one of those but it's not.

Or at least that's how it has struck me. If you look at the Bogdan. link about the Blu-ray restoration I posted above you'll see a bunch of comments there from fans of the film (many of whom sound like they're true film-nerds). ALLL is worth seeing once not just because (if I'm right) it's a fascinating failure but also there *is* a small but non-zero chance that ALLL might hit the spot for one-in-a-million *you*.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I remember the reviews at the time (the live ones shown on TV) were terrible. And most were blamed on Cybill Shepherd. It seemed everything Shepherd and Bogdanovich were doing were trashed just because of their relationship by that point.

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Yes, it was as if separately, they had a chance(hers were in The Heartbreak Kid and Taxi Driver). But as a couple, something seemed very wrong.

Keep in mind that Cybill is only in the first of Bogdo's three in-a-row hits. She is not in What's Up Doc or Paper Moon. Seems that Peter (perhaps under the leash of his wife, Platt) knew to keep her out of certain of his work(though I doubt Streisand would have let her in, and there was no role for her.)

Of course, Cybill "came back" a decade or so later with "Moonlighting"(only to find Bruce Willis stealing her spotlight this time) and then some sitcom I never watched.

Mean girl or not...Cybill survived. Mean girls do, in Hollywood.

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I've never seen the film, but I've always been interested in seeing it because I always felt it could fall into the 'so bad, it's good' category. The clips that were shown during the reviews showed some pretty terrible singing.

--

How sad that with Burt Reynolds' passing, we're reminded of his bombs as well as his hits. I might just look at Lucky Lady again too -- at least Liza gets to sing a snazzy theme song.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

How sad that with Burt Reynolds' passing, we're reminded of his bombs as well as his hits.

Well, I'll be watching The Last Movie Star next... and I just noticed that my local Netflix has just put Smokey and the Bandit on tap (i.e., as their Burt tribute), so I may (re)watch that one too (maybe on Friday Night with beer and guacomole).

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 6 years ago

How sad that with Burt Reynolds' passing, we're reminded of his bombs as well as his hits. I might just look at Lucky Lady again too -- at least Liza gets to sing a snazzy theme song.
---- ---- ----- ---- ---- ----
They tried again with Rent-A Cop (if not already mentioned), to poor reviews. Makes me wonder if critics really thought the film was that poor, or some kind of reflex to instantly dislike it, or before even seeing it. I liked it, regardless of Liza's call-girl act. It was well-paced, and the villain-ending entertaining. I don't recall the box-office revenue.

I feel the same about Streisand's For Pete's Sake, her purest comedy-performance in my opinion, but called "forgettable" by one critic, along with "she wishes she passed on this one". It's not forgettable, and funnier than the higher-profile What's Up Doc. Snobbery.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

They tried again with Rent-A Cop (if not already mentioned), to poor reviews. Makes me wonder if critics really thought the film was that poor, or some kind of reflex to instantly dislike it, or before even seeing it. I liked it, regardless of Liza's call-girl act. It was well-paced, and the villain-ending entertaining. I don't recall the box-office revenue.

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I never saw Rent-a-Cop. It appeared during Burt Reynolds "sudden 80's downturn"(or was that in the 90s?) and he couldn't buy good reviews during that time.

I stuck by Burt as a fan during this time. I always felt that after he wrecked his career with Smokey sequels and Cannonball Runs and Stroker Ace...he seemed determined to "toughen up" in the 80's and he did good tough guys in "Heat" and "Stick"(with fellow 70's casualty George Segal) and "Malone"(Shane done modern, versus white supremicists.) The problem with these movies is that they had cheap budgets and felt like B's, but Burt at least TRIED to turn it around. And I didn't see Rent-a-Cop, and maybe I should.

Career downturns can happen to ladies, too. Liza Minelli was always going to be a tough sell as a movie star after Cabaret, and she didn't last too long. Lucky Lady hurt; and then she failed with Scorsese and DeNiro in New York, New York(I blame DeNiro, already playing the same woman-hating lout he would specialize in) But she got a surprise one-hit comeback with "Arthur," the perfectly witty and empathetic romantic match to Dudley Moore's sad lovable drunk.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I feel the same about Streisand's For Pete's Sake, her purest comedy-performance in my opinion, but called "forgettable" by one critic, along with "she wishes she passed on this one". It's not forgettable, and funnier than the higher-profile What's Up Doc. Snobbery.

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I saw For Pete's Sake at a sneak preview. I liked it, it was funny, but to me the fatal mistake was: no name male co-star this time. It was her next film after the iconic The Way We Were, and it just felt slight after working with Redford to be paired with...Michael Sarrazin.

With re: What's Up Doc? -- The multi-vehicle chase at the end is fun(and wildly dangerous flinging cars into San Francisco Bay at the climax), but a lot of that movie is leaden to me: the overacting and unfunny mugging of the various spies lugging suitcases and golf clubs around , for instance. Bogdanovich got a hit, but "in the know" critics felt he really screwed up. One wrote that it was "a comedy made by a man with no sense of humor" and another wrote "it was like being forced to shake hands with a man wearing a joy buzzer." The seeds of Bogdanovich's downfall are, ironically, in his biggest hit. I do think that Streisand, O'Neal and the car chase saved it. Streisand singing "You're the Top" at beginning and end, is charming, too -- convinces you that you are seeing/have seen a better movie than it is.

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 6 years ago

..he seemed determined to "toughen up" in the 80's and he did good tough guys in "Heat" and "Stick"
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That why perhaps he needed to stop with the tough-guy films, and play the characters which he was fearful of playing because he did not wish to be identified in real life with them.. That is having an ego.
Sally Field makes an interesting comment in her otherwise "poor me" book about Burt: that he once cried in high school on the track when he made a mistake (football, I suppose), and his father reprimanded or mocked him for it. Not good.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

That why perhaps he needed to stop with the tough-guy films, and play the characters which he was fearful of playing because he did not wish to be identified in real life with them..

--

Well, he played a pretty mopey guy in Starting Over...and the goof to Hackman's macho man in Lucky Lady. Reynolds seemed to want a comedy career, but he followed the Arnold/Sly model in the 80's. Yet a bit more cool than them, I'd say.

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That is having an ego.

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He had one. They all do -- they kind of earn them, movie stars do, but Burt's seemed very self-destructive and toxic.

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Sally Field makes an interesting comment in her otherwise "poor me" book about Burt: that he once cried in high school on the track when he made a mistake (football, I suppose), and his father reprimanded or mocked him for it. Not good.

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Yeah, Burt's dad was a sheriff. Tough guy. Burt loved him til the end but...tough love in return.

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 6 years ago

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I watched the blu-ray version of ALLL which is a full two hours compared to the near 90 mins cut that flopped so badly back in 1975.

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Sometimes more is...less.

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Unfortunately I found even this definitive version terribly inert and boring.

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Havent seen it since '75, can't say I remember anything about it but thinking it was terrible. And yeah -- sorry , Cybill -- but she was really key to the collapse(more on her momentarily.)

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I guess my considered view is that Porter doesn't really work with amateurs.

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An intriguing thought. I would suppose that ALL great songs don't work with amateurs, but I do recall Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin pulling off Lerner/Loewe songs in "Paint Your Wagon" and Walter Matthau having some fun with a song or two in "Hello, Dolly."

Still, its better to have Shirley Jones singing Oklahoma than Cybill Shepard.

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His songs are all about their rhythmic subtleties and their tricksy chromatic melodies. Famously, the better singer or player someone is and the more they can swing, the better Porter's songs get - Ella, Sinatra, Coltrane, etc..

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Yes, I think you are right. I recall Kevin Cline playing Porter in a movie a decade or so ago("Its De-Lovely" I think), I can't remember if that cast did the songs well.

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ALLL is the converse case: Porter's songs sound like trash when their melodic lines are uncertain and the singers have no time whatsoever (if I heard another lumpen, unsyncopated 'on the one hand, on the other hand' couplet I thought I'd scream!).

--

Ha ha....I'm getting so I want to track this down.

I do remember it being very "white" (visually.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Reynolds holds his own with the rest of the cast; the film's problems aren't his fault.

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Well, I think part of it was this: Burt was desperate to work with "quality" directors. He'd gotten one in John Boorman in Deliverance and Robert Aldrich in The Longest Yard. Bogdanovich looked hot at the time.

Indeed, so hot was Bogdanovich in the early 70's that it is said he turned down The Godfather(dubious) and also turned down The Getaway(some proof on this -- Steve McQueen refused to work with Cybill Shepard on it.)

That heat came from a group of reviewers who, it was said, "were discovering a new auteur a week" -- and thus anointing Bogdo , Friedkin, Altman, Ashby, and others a bit faster than they could produce great work.

David Thomson must be a Bogdo friend, he has always praised Bogdo for the rare achievement of "three hit in a row":

The Last Picture Show
What's Up Doc?
Paper Moon

Now that was a strange bunch, given Spielberg and Lucas right around the corner. You can't say these movies were going to drive the youth audience, or necessarily draw the art audience.

What's Up Doc was a big hit -- but got a few horrible reviews("A comedy made by a man with no sense of humor" ; "Like shaking hands with a joy buzzer," "He's seen a 100 classic comedies but learned nothing.") I didn't think it was THAT bad -- well, I don't anymore(when it came out, I sai, I said so, and some young guy in the group I was talking to, tore into me in rage as being a movie snob.) But honestly, some of those gags at the end where Streisand goes "look at that!" and some guy is dragging a big lock cutter on the floor, or another guy is in a bad disguise, mugging as he tries to book passage to some other country. Its really awful -- Blake Edwards(who could do such movies in his sleep) must have been appalled. Amazingly, the script was by Buck Henry(The Graduate) AND Robert Benton and David Newman(Bonnie and Clyde.) AMAZING! Its not that good.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But a fair amount of What's Up Doe DOES work -- I watched it just a coupla weeks ago and Streisand was Groucho-comedy dynamic, Ryan O'Neal did good Grant, Madeleine Kahn debuted..and the final chase was pretty damn good. (The REAL stunt cars flying off a pier into San Francisco bay almost killed one guy flying through the air.)

"The Last Picture Show" got a BIG rave from Paul Zimmerman of Newsweek -- "The greatest debut film from a young director since Citizen Kane." (Zimmerman evidently forgot that it was NOT Bogdo's debut -- that would be the Hitchcockian Targets of 1968, or maybe some Roger Corman movie.) Well, what would a young director do with THAT review in his hand? Go nuts? Yes. (A few months later, Zimmerman wrote that the "surprising" Frenzy was "one of Hitchocck's very best" and -- I gotta love the guy there.)

Zimmerman's rave aside, Last Picture Show got a slew of nominations, wins for Leachman and Johnson, a good rep. Me, I've always felt it was a bit weak, a bit stilted. And I SWEAR you can see the edit splices on certain cuts. I think the big draw of Last Picture Show in 1971(for us teens) was that it mixed a very John Fordian old-fashioned b/w quality with a helping heapin of sex scenes and nudity. (The message: hey, they had sex in 1951, and lots of it!)

Paper Moon was cute, and won Tatum O'Neal an Oscar(and evidently a slapping from her co-star, dad Ryan O'Neal), but I can only remember it as a mildly entertaining nostalgia act -- in b/w yet.

What happened next, we are told, was fate: Peter Bogdanovich dumped the wife who helped him make his movies(Polly Platt), took up with the vain and vapid Cybill...and proceeded to let the lady wreck his career.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A Machivellian movie mogul named Frank Yablans OKed Bogdo to put Cybill in "Daisy Miller"("Sure, that would be great"), knowing that would wreck the movie, and its flopping bugged Bogdo's new partners Coppola and Friedkin. Together they had formed the Director's Company. Bodgo gave them a hit -- Paper Moon; Coppola gave them an art film -- The Conversation; Friedkin gave them nothing, and it broke up(with Daisy Miller a flop, too.)

Lest I seem too entirely hard on Cybill Shepard, I'll say she fit her roles in Last Picture Show, The Heartbreak Kid, and Taxi Driver well -- but all three roles depended on her playing vain and cold and vapid. Trying to use her in sympathetic, empathetic parts flopped. And Bodgo backed an album called "Cybill Shepard Does Cole Porter." Bodgo sent Sinatra a copy and Sinatra wired back: "What a guy will do for a broad."

I guess Peter and Cybill hosted the Tonight Show; he wore an ascot and went on about Old Hollywood. Didn't take.

And Richard Schickel, in his rave for Frenzy in 1972(having hated What's Up Doc) wrote: "If Hitchcock is perfectly capable of imitating himself, why leave the job to a man like Peter Bogdanovich?" Billy Wilder (jealous, no doubt) said: "Peter Bogdanovich isn't a director, he's a copy machine." And Burt Reynolds had a Bogdo-type director written for his stuntman movie "Hooper" , played by Robert Klein -- and punched Klein out at the end on screen. Revenge for At Long Last Love!

Bogdo didn't just disappear. I recall he got good reviews for a little movie with Ben Gazzara called "Saint Jack," and way out in the 90's he directed a delightful all-star version of the stage hit "Noises Off"(Caine, Burnett, Reeve -- slapstick.) As an actor, he was an owlish offputting delight as the "shrink of the female shirnk" on The Sopranos.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One more thing: They made a movie about Peter Bogdanovich dumping Polly Platt for Cybill Shepard, but gave it a "hook"(Drew Barrymore wants to divorce her parents.). The names were changed. Still, if you knew the facts it was clear that Ryan ONeal was playing Bodgo; Shelley Long was playing Platt, and the relatively new Sharon Stone was playing Cybill. "Irreconcilible Differences," I think. The Bogdo character goes from a mansion to an apartment.

And this: for what it is worth , Peter Bogdanovich and Alfred Hitchcock were pals. Bogdo interviewed Hitch both before Bogdo was a hit director, and after. And Bogdo hosted the 1999 Alfred Hitchcock Centennial program at the Motion Picture Academy(I was there.)

And this, for sad tragedy: recall that Bogdo had stolen Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten from her sleazy husband -- the husband killed Stratten. Bodgo went into shock...and eventually married Stratten's sister (why, its Lila and Sam getting married...in real life.)

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Lest I seem too entirely hard on Cybill Shepard, I'll say she fit her roles in Last Picture Show, The Heartbreak Kid, and Taxi Driver well -- but all three roles depended on her playing vain and cold and vapid.

That sounds harsh but I guess you're right: Cybill is at least near-great in the 3 films you mention - she'll always have those (even if she was just playing herself).
****
Bodgo sent Sinatra a copy and Sinatra wired back: "What a guy will do for a broad."
****
Ha! Brutal.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

4. The Last Movie Star (2018)
A very sweet movie that, in the light of Burt's death, feels like a really well-crafted career capstone and final bow for him. I don't think Burt could have stage-managed a better exit for himself if he'd tried. It makes his death seem almost Bowie-like: a work of art.

At any rate, all Burt fans and semi-fans like me are going to love catching up with this film over the next few years. This is one of his better films and almost certainly his most emotional. Obviously the film's hardly groundbreaking, rather it follows well-trod indie comedy footsteps, and writer/director Rifkin doesn't have the chops or subtlety or budget (I assume) of, e.g., an Alexander Payne or David O. Russell. But the film gets better as it goes along and packs quite a punch by the end. I'm so glad they were able to get the rights to use and modify clips from Burt's career. It's a genuine thrill when the film hits the road to Knoxville and surprisingly shifts gears into a clip from probably the best driving sequence from Bandit (with Old Burt inserted to talk things over with Young Burt). In sum, TLMS is a solid, pleasantly shapely film that almost serves as a good obit. for the man.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

4. The Last Movie Star (2018)
A very sweet movie that, in the light of Burt's death, feels like a really well-crafted career capstone and final bow for him. I don't think Burt could have stage-managed a better exit for himself if he'd tried. It makes his death seem almost Bowie-like: a work of art.

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Well, I'm a bit surprised, swanstep, how much you seem to like it(on its modest terms). You will recall that I recommended this film some months ago(the thread is around here somewhere) and it had been recommended to me. With Reynolds death, this movie will suddenly become more important.

The corollary , to me, is The Shootist(1976), in which John Wayne played a gunfighter dying of cancer. Its debateable if he had active cancer when he made the film, but he barely made it through production(hospitalized during), and he DID die of cancer three years after its release.

Time wrote of The Shootist, "It's a little early for John Wayne to be acting in his own eulogy," but that's what it turned out to be(Wayne said he would make another movie, but never got the health or the backing to make one.)

And while The Last Movie Star puts Old Burt side by side with Young Burt to moving effect, The Shootist elected to OPEN with a series of clips of John Wayne in movie scenes -- ostensibly showing us the life and aging of his gunfighter(John Bernard Books) via clips from Red River, Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and The Sons of Katie Elder. THIS was kind of moving, too. We saw the young man, the middle aged man, the older man -- and then met tired old regal John Wayne circa 1976.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I think Burt Reynolds made a couple more straight-to-video type movies after The Last Movie Star. Not too many, I hope. It really is a perfect capper. (And just might get him at least the Best Actor Oscar nomination he so sought but never got while alive -- only a Best Supporting Actor nom for Boogie Nights.)

BTW, I was looking at the cast list for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood since Burt died, and whereas most of the actors have "character names attached"(Rumer Willis is Joanna Pettit -- a real actress of the time), one new name does not: Clu Gulager.

Clu Gulager was a difficult hipster type who was on The Virginian and very memorably played hitman Lee Marvin's more wild hit man partner in Don Siegels' The Killers. (Later on, he played an older man who deflowered Cybill Shepard in The Last Picture Show.) I know that QT loves The Virginian.

The question is: does Clu Gulager now have the Burt Reynolds role of Old Man Spahnn? We will see.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

At any rate, all Burt fans and semi-fans like me are going to love catching up with this film over the next few years. This is one of his better films and almost certainly his most emotional.

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Agreed. When I saw it, I was amazed at how FRAIL Reynolds looked. I've looked at it again, and the first shot of "old Burt"(after a clip of Young Burt on a talk show in the 70's) is startling: his skin is like wrinkled parchment, his face is too thin, his eyebrows are wrong. As the movie moves along, about all that Burt still has to even SUGGEST the star he once was is a low, authoritative and manly voice. Everything else, you realize; this man didn't have long to live.

But who knows? Clint Eastwood has looked very old for about 20 years now. Still, there is something to be troubled about here: we made these men our heroes back when they WERE young and handsome and virile. SHOULD they keep working into the years past 80 when the looks are pretty much gone? Connery, Hackman and probably Nicholson seem to have taken 80 as the year past which they would not appear. Redford is picking 82.

Cary Grant retired at a rather ridiculous 62 (which would have been close to "regular retirement age" for other regular people.) But he said, "I want to leave my fans with the memory of that tan good looking fellow on the Late Show." Not a bad choice, though, ironically -- a white-haired Cary Grant looked pretty great right to the end.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Obviously the film's hardly groundbreaking, rather it follows well-trod indie comedy footsteps, and writer/director Rifkin doesn't have the chops or subtlety or budget (I assume) of, e.g., an Alexander Payne or David O. Russell.

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Its always a difficulty with low budget indies. If the script and direction aren't "special" -- we just end up with a cheaper version of a studio comedy or a TV movie. Still, his one had BURT -- and he connected with material which(I have read) was written specifically for him (though he hadn't committed to the movie.)

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But the film gets better as it goes along and packs quite a punch by the end.

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Agreed on both points. That "Modern Family" teen actress held up her end OK; surly and vulnerable, over-sexed in attire(a lot of bottom hanging out), only slowly connecting with the Old Man who rather becomes a surrogate father. Her relationship with her movie-mad brother was fun, too. Formulaic, but fun. Burt's being around helped elevate the whole thing.

The 'punch at the end," I think, is there for that generation of us who are aging, perhaps a decade or two behind Burt, but aging, nonetheless. We're part of that huge Baby Boomer contingent. We're getting lots of "old man kicks ass" movies like Taken, but we are also getting the kind of "old age looking back" movies like The Last Movie Star to keep us thinking about "how to have the best third act we can have.

Isn't that a line in The Last Movie Star from Burt: " You can have a pretty shitty second act, as long as you deliver big in the third."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I'm so glad they were able to get the rights to use and modify clips from Burt's career. It's a genuine thrill when the film hits the road to Knoxville and surprisingly shifts gears into a clip from probably the best driving sequence from Bandit (with Old Burt inserted to talk things over with Young Burt).

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Yes, I was surprised, exhilarated, moved.

It is a rough confrontation for ALL of us of a certain age -- what if we could go back and meet our younger self? -- but for a man like Burt who was so damn handsome and muscular and macho in his prime -- its a tough scene. The later scene with "Deliverance Burt" feels even more emotional, because its Burt at the Beginning...before he honed his good ol' boy with a moustache bit.

On the female side of stardom, I recall reading that ventriloquist Edgar Bergen warned his beautiful daughter Candice, "You will eventually lose that beauty. I've known many gorgeous actresses who became alcoholics or committed suicide when they got old. Take up another profession as back up." Candice chose photography -- but stayed beautiful, anyway.

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In sum, TLMS is a solid, pleasantly shapely film that almost serves as a good obit. for the man.

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It does, it does. Goes right up there with The Shootist(my favorite of 1976) and is, of course, even more "on point." Who knows, maybe this will be my favorite of 2018.

PS. He's only in the film a little bit, but Chevy Chase gets a similar dose of "then versus now" in the movie. No clips, just memories. Like Burt Reynolds, Chase had a reputation at his peak for arrogance...much worse than Burt's actually. But time, age, and weight mellow all men.

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 6 years ago

BTW, I was looking at the cast list for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood since Burt died, and whereas most of the actors have "character names attached"(Rumer Willis is Joanna Pettit -- a real actress of the time), one new name does not: Clu Gulager.
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I happen to bump into both of those actors, Clu Gulager was sitting on the pavement while waiting to see a film at a very cool vintage theatre in Hollywood where they play older films.. Joanne Pettett, I briefly met at the DMV after recognizing her, and she looked very different than expected. This also may have been near (before/after) the death of her son. I think I recognize veteran actors who may not wish to be recognized. Why is Pettett refrenced in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? (..she had lunch with Sharon Tate that day, now that I recall)

but all three roles depended on her playing vain and cold and vapid. Trying to use her in sympathetic, empathetic parts flopped.
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So, how 'apt' that Shepherd receives an Emmy nom for the Martha Stewart bio Tv film. I recall that Platt wanted Farrah Fawcett for one of those films ...maybe Taxi Driver, but not the studio. (Shepherd, known for being difficult/unlikable and a so-so/good actress..but unlike her peers, keeps bouncing back . Lucky lady)

Like Burt Reynolds, Chase had a reputation at his peak for arrogance.
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And it shows on his overrated (I liked him the least on SNL) face. What is that?! Is it just the way a person's face is structured, or that arrogance literally comes though, or manufactured by the person?

Me, I've always felt it was a bit weak, a bit stilted. And I SWEAR you can see the edit splices on certain cuts.
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Watch when Leachman is having her dramatic scene at the end, and the shot unnecessarily cuts away to what's his name. Her hand on the fridge--and coffee grounds-- is not the right continuity. Also, if a director wanted to show Leachman's face fill with genuine tears right there and then, do not cut away. There has always been strong debate over the Burstyn/Leachman neck-to-neck Oscar race

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

The corollary, to me, is The Shootist(1976)

I've been meaning to check The Shootist out for a while. Thanks for reminding me of it - after The Last Movie Star I was trying to think of other films that embraced an aging/ailing star as a kind of unifying special effect and I'd forgotten about TS. There aren't many of these films both because of the hit to vanity they involve, and because - no kidding around the irreplaceable star and special effect is dying - they're risky, uninsurable, very hard to make (even just to get all the rights you need to do a good job), etc..

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

The Shootist (1976)
TS was very good. I was expecting something very dated feeling for 1976, but the script's great (maybe only a notch or two down from being awards-worthy - and not a million miles away from Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) in general soulfuless), solidly directed by Siegel, looks mostly pretty great (shot by Bruce Surtees - would have been nice to have a little more landscape (I loved the opening valley shots), but I guess the 'town closing in on Books' as a central idea prevents that), sounds good thanks to E. Bernstein, one of the most well-rounded Wayne characters, and good supporting turns with Bacall and Stewart and Boone and Howard, and Harry Morgan and Scatman Crothers. All told, a near ideal send-off for Wayne.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

TS was very good.

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Well, I'm glad you liked it, swanstep.

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I was expecting something very dated feeling for 1976, but the script's great (maybe only a notch or two down from being awards-worthy -

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I think bringing in Don Siegel to direct -- with Dirty Harry and Charley Varrick (and the Michael Caine flop The Black Windmill) right ahead of it, gave The Shootist a "tough, tight crime noir" feeling that helped balance out the melancholy and light tears of the piece (and there ARE tears...the final scene between Wayne and Bacall in which she honors her promise not to be emotional...)

I thought the script dialogue was great, archaic but witty, just this side of True Grit for over-erudite lines:

"That's too thin."

"Does (the cancer) hurt?"
"Like sin!"

"What I'll do on your grave won't pass for daisies!"

(Wayne, to a very nice young woman who he has just met and is the last good person he will ever see in his life): "I sure hope the right fellah comes along."

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and not a million miles away from Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) in general soulfuless),

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Two fine Westerns in one year (1976)...though my heart goes with the Wayne one, for the obvious reasons.

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solidly directed by Siegel, looks mostly pretty great (shot by Bruce Surtees - would have been nice to have a little more landscape (I loved the opening valley shots), but I guess the 'town closing in on Books' as a central idea prevents that),

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Someone called The Shootist "a chamber piece" and indeed, after some opening footage filmed near Carson City, Nevada(which is near Reno), the tale heads down to the Warners backlot for the main street and an opulent saloon designed by Hitchcock's guy, Robert Boyle. (Richard Boone was so impressed by that set that he invited his wife to come down to the lot just to tour it -- the only Oscar nom The Shootist got was for art direction.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

By the way, the opening Nevada mountainside and trees out of which Wayne rides into view had been filmed three years earlier for Charley Varrick -- its the same area where Matthau blows up his getaway car with his dead wife in it. In Varrick, the Nevada area "stood in" for New Mexico in the first part of the movie, and then when the story moves to Reno....well, Siegel and the crew didnt have to go anywhere. They were already there.

I think and write about Charley Varrick so much that I keep wondering when I will give it my " favorite of 1973" slot, but that's still for "American Graffiti," for very emotional reasons having to do with my young life at the time. But its funny. Today, I watch Charley Varrick at least once a year -- and I cannot bring myself to put American Graffiti in the DVD player. Too much memory of too much emotion, when I was too young to know where life really goes.

Dirty Harry AND Charley Varrick AND The Shootist are all rather linked in my mind. Don Siegel as the director. Tough loner heroes(yep, even Walter Matthau.) Two "modern Westerns" and one "noir Western." A certain "tight perfection" to all three films, with the action sparing but exciting when it comes.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS for The Cowboys and The Shootist

sounds good thanks to E. Bernstein,

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Its an interestingly staccato, low-key score for Bernstein, that only occasional soars into "Magnificent Seven/True Grit" territory. Like all good film composers, he wrote music that fit the film: small-scale, tight, tense.

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one of the most well-rounded Wayne characters,

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Well, with John Ford behind him and Hawks in decline(Rio Lobo), Wayne seems to have spent the 60s and 70s in projects where all he had to do, most of the time, was "play John Wayne and entertain."

But three times after 1960, he got real characters to play:

True Grit(Oscar)
The Cowboys(Bruce Dern kills him in as cowardly and brutal a manner as possible.)
The Shootist(he's dying and he contemplates his life -- electing to go out with a bang.)

I always include his role in "Big Jake" as the best of his post Rio Bravo/El Dorado enterainments. Richard Boone at full length as the best villain in any John Wayne movie(said one critic, I agree and we also agree that Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance was second best). The "Big Jake" script was by the Dirty Harry scripters(partially) and came out the same year as Dirty Harry and rather had Wayne playing LIKE Dirty Harry . He would go there one more time in "The Shootist."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

---and good supporting turns with Bacall and Stewart and Boone and Howard, and Harry Morgan and Scatman Crothers.

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Yes. Wayne evidently put in personal requests to Bacall(a friend, but a political foe), Stewart(practically retired) and Boone(living in Hawaii at the time.) All heeded the call and thus appeared in The Shootist "trailing" their earlier films with Wayne and giving the production a feeling of "a salute to Wayne by his friends."

The Wayne/Bacall relationship in this film is far from a romance, but perhaps something more: a bonding of a man and a woman prepared to be companions for a final few days.

Stewart as the old doctor giving Wayne the news of his terminal cancer gives us an aching scene: "The death of the West," and Stewart adds his customary ornery bit to his lines:

"You want it straight? You've got uh CANCER!"

"I cant take it out. I'd hafta gut you like a FISH!"

"You and I are both in careers where we come in contact with death. I'm not as brave as you, but if I had your courage, I wouldn't die the death that I have just described."

Very moving, very tough.

And Boone? Just plain hilarious and vocally great, even with a face "left out too long in the rain"(some critic's line.) He has one scene where he talks, and one where he doesn't , and he owns them both.

Boone has a QT-ish send-off line to Wayne and Bacall: "And to you two I say....goodbye." QT would give this line to Christoph Waltz in "Django Unchained" but with more bite: "In my country one usually says Auf Wiedersehn(sp) in hopes of meeting again. But since I hope to never meet you again...to you, I will say...goodbye."

Boone invented his dying line (about avenging his brother Albert, who was killed by Wayne, by wounding Wayne right before Wayne shoots him), on the spot, and said it in the usual Boone sing-song tone:

"And I will tell you...that was for ALBERT!" (Falls and dies.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

All told, a near ideal send-off for Wayne.

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Yep. My favorite of 1976, hands down. I saw it three times in the theater, with different people with me each time, who were moved(sometimes to tears) every time.

I gave Family Plot -- flaws and all -- my second slot that year.

And as I've noted, there were interesting parallels between The Shootist and Family Plot:

Wayne's last film/Hitchocck's last film.

Each man swore he would make another movie -- but didn't.

Wayne died in 1979, Hitchcock died less than a year in 1980.

The men dueled at the Oscars in 1960: The Alamo got a Best Picture nom, but Psycho didn't. Hitchocck got a Best Director nom, by Wayne didn't.

Though the two had long careers, they both rather peaked in that 1950s/1960s cusp.

Importantly though: in 1976, The Shootist was a final bow for Wayne, and very much a Wayne movie; Family Plot was a final bow for Hitchcock(a wink, really) and very much a Hitchcock movie.

And we would never see their likes again.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

fter The Last Movie Star I was trying to think of other films that embraced an aging/ailing star as a kind of unifying special effect and I'd forgotten about TS.

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There aren't many of these films both because of the hit to vanity they involve,

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Yes, Reynolds in his film, and Wayne in his, had to be willing to play their age -- Reynolds was older and looked worse -- and to play infirm at times.

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and because - no kidding around the irreplaceable star and special effect is dying - they're risky, uninsurable,

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I recall how Spencer Tracy made "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" with everybody aware that he could die at any second. Hepburn and director Stanley Kramer gave up their salaries against insurance costs (should Tracy die), but Tracy lived just long enough to finish the film, and then maybe two more weeks.

As "perfect" as John Wayne is for The Shootist, it was shopped to other, younger, then-hotter stars first. Paul Newman. Gene Hackman. George C. Scott(who actually accepted "as long as not one word in the script is changed.") But somebody decided that Wayne was the best fit and filming was VERY risky with him. He couldn't handle the high altitude Nevada locations(he had only one lung.) And he got very sick and hospitalized at the worst time -- while filming the shootout climax of the film -- 90% of it was in the can with Wayne in the lead, replacing him for a reshoot would have been costly. But Wayne dragged himself down to the set to play...his death scene(ironic, yes?)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

very hard to make (even just to get all the rights you need to do a good job), etc..

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You mean the rights to the clips of Wayne?(The Shootist) and young Reynolds? (The Last Movie Star.)

I recall the movie "The Limey" using clips of Young Terrance Stamp(In "Poor Cow") to give us flashbacks of the older Stamp of "today"(at the time.)

And a couple of brief clips of Young Michael Caine(in Hurry Sundown) were used for flashbacks in one of those Austin Powers movies.

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The Last Movie Star, because it is ABOUT a movie star, may be the most perfect final (significant) film about a star ever made. But The Shootist comes close in bringing the John Wayne CHARACTER to his end. I mean, his career-long character.

Other "old star honored" movies include:

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Tracy and Hepburn, one more time, and when Tracy gives a long speech about his love for Hepburn at the end, as her eyes fill with real tears, together these two rise far above the plot of their movie("controversial" as it was) and make the movie all about them. In a good way.

Soylent Green. A clunky 1973 MGM movie that LOOKS like a clunky 1973 MGM movie(the failing studio made cheapjack movies in its death throes; Westworld was another one -- good in spite of itself) there's a gem in the pile: Edward G. Robinson, dying and in his final film, getting a scene where he checks himself in to a "suicide room" for a final glorious music-and-imagery send-off from his grimy real life existence.

Both Tracy and Robinson were already dead when these final films were released; only Tracy got an Oscar nom (will Burt get one?)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SOB. William Holden's unintentional final film was released in 1981, only about two months before his death the same year, from a drunken fall and head injury. Now, it looks like a "fitting finale" because Holden is playing an overaged, once-handsome, still-rutting lothario of a movie director, who tells his suicidal director friend, "We're ALL committing suicide...by drink, drugs, and sex...just in slow motion." (Paraphrased.) Like another one of Holden's later films -- Billy Wilder's "Fedora" -- SOB is informed, in its "inside Hollywood rot" themes, by arguably Holden's greatest film -- "Sunset Boulevard," in which, come to think of it, Gloria Swanson plays a madhouse version of her own career.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Reynolds was older and looked worse -- and to play infirm at times.

The final shot of smiling Old Burt was touching in part because, whether it's through the alchemy of having spent 90 mins getting used to Old Burt or just acting + the power of a full-on smile/grin on *that* underlying million-dollar facial geometry, e suddenly does seem like a handsome dude again. We *believe* that Vic Edwards is as contented as he's ever likely to be again at that moment, and at the meta-level the film's worked at that point and Burt has got himself a career-closer for the ages: damn straight he's got something to smile about and be proud of. I assume Rifkin got that shot early in the production before Reynolds got too tired out. Strategically you'd want to shoot all the LA stuff first in part just to cover yourself for an ending no matter how shooting in Tenn. transpired. A Making-of featurette would be interesting...

BTW, one nice feature of TLMS that we haven't covered: Vic/Burt asks us to compare movie stardom to other forms of performance stardom and finds the former wanting or testing in some ways. If you're a football star or a rock star or even a Broadway star you literally have thousands of people acclaiming your performance right as you're doing it every night. In movies you don't have that perfect feedback-loop of adulation, which leaves all sorts of room for mistakes as Vic/Burt see it. It's a simple thought but one that Vic visiting his old football stadium stomping ground makes well and with strong visuals.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Reynolds was older and looked worse -- and to play infirm at times.

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The final shot of smiling Old Burt was touching in part because, whether it's through the alchemy of having spent 90 mins getting used to Old Burt

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This is possible. We get used to practically anybody we spend time with on a movie screen for a long time. Old Burt at least still has the voice and the manner for most of the film, and yes, he does smile at the end and the story does end up on very up note (particularly up for older folks.)

One hurdle to overcome: just about the time we first get used to Old Burt...they put him in a clip with Young Burt. And suddenly Old Burt is very old again. But indeed by the end the Young Burt clips(only two of them) are behind us and we get used to a happier Old Burt.

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or just acting + the power of a full-on smile/grin on *that* underlying million-dollar facial geometry, e suddenly does seem like a handsome dude again. We *believe* that Vic Edwards is as contented as he's ever likely to be again at that moment, and at the meta-level the film's worked at that point and Burt has got himself a career-closer for the ages: damn straight he's got something to smile about and be proud of.

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I feel better about this movie all the time.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

You know, Burt's death pushed me to reconsider his career and it was a killer: he went from low to very VERY high...and then plummeted. It took a few films in the early 80s to do it, but when Burt was over, he was OVER. I'd say the failure of City Heat with Clint was the final straw -- worse Burt films had been made before it(Stroker Ace and Cannonball Run II), but the failure of City Heat the same Xmas that Beverly Hills Cop cemented Eddie Murphy's superstardom(short lived as it was)...well, Burt was pretty much over as a major star. Clint had to "regroup." (Clint had hits in Pale Rider and Heartbreak Ridge, but came a cropper with Dirty Harry V and bottomed out 1989-1990 before storming back in the 90's with Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire.

You can see Burt trying to "recapture the magic" in a series of mid-80s action films where he tried to play tough: Stick(from Elmore Leonard and with the similarly over George Segal -- his original Lucky Lady costar); Malone(kind of a modern day Shane) ; and Heat(the Vegas tough guy movie from William Goldman script.) Burt had charisma in all three films, but he looked wrong in certain ways(the City Heat jaw injury changed him and his wigs got faker), and they were very B-ish.

In The Last Movie Star, Vic/Burt claims he was the Number One star for six years.

Shall we figure...1977 through 1982?

That would bring in:

Smokey and the Bandit(HUGE)
Semi-Tough
Hooper
The End
Starting Over(New York based)
Paternity (New York based)
Smokey and the Bandit II(where Burt on screen rues his superstardom)
Cannonball Run(the first one, marginally better than the horrible II)
Sharkey's Machine(tough cop movie, with a touch of Laura)
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas(with Dolly Parton and really Burt's last major hit)

Its funny how that group of films kept him at Number One, all that time. Not a lot of classics in there, even pop classics.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Around the time Burt was Number One, Jack Nicholson gave a shrewd interview where he noted he was always a bit lower, "around Number Three" but that this gave him "plenty of power."

Implied in Jack's statement was that the Number One guys were perhaps less great as actors, more great as stars. And while he stayed Number Three, the Number One guy eventually changed.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I assume Rifkin got that shot early in the production before Reynolds got too tired out. Strategically you'd want to shoot all the LA stuff first in part just to cover yourself for an ending no matter how shooting in Tenn. transpired.

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Good points and they make sense. With the LA beginning and ending "locked in," changes could be made(if necessary) in Tenneesee scenes without injurying the final film.

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A Making-of featurette would be interesting...

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Is a DVD of this film already available? I saw it via streaming, which I am getting into , a little bit.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

BTW, one nice feature of TLMS that we haven't covered: Vic/Burt asks us to compare movie stardom to other forms of performance stardom and finds the former wanting or testing in some ways. If you're a football star or a rock star or even a Broadway star you literally have thousands of people acclaiming your performance right as you're doing it every night.

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Anthony Perkins, promoting one of the Psycho sequels, gave a funny remark along these lines. He said on Broadway, he could get immediate feedback and he was doing all the work. In movies, he said, his performance didn't reach people "until I have been filmed, recorded, edited, post-produced, scored and color-proofed for release." Or something like that.

Other actors who do Broadway and film say that in a play, reviews or directors notes can be used to "fix" the performance on later nights, but a movie performance is "locked in."

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In movies you don't have that perfect feedback-loop of adulation, which leaves all sorts of room for mistakes as Vic/Burt see it. It's a simple thought but one that Vic visiting his old football stadium stomping ground makes well and with strong visuals.

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Yes, a very good scene and a personal one: Burt played college football and almost made the NFL, but a car crash and some other injuries stopped it. (Burt said, "but I DID get my wish to get paid millons to play football, in The Longest Yard and Semi-Tough.")

It has been said that actors feel somewhat "less than" musicians(who can play instruments), singers(whose voices ARE instruments, but then so are most actors), and sports stars(who perform and win on the basis of physical prowess.)

All an actor has to do, by contrast, is look good and read lines written by somebody else outloud.

As we know, that may not be a hard job, but you have to work hard to GET the job, to GET stardom, and to BE a star. There are magical elements involved.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Still, this self-esteem problem that some actors have leads them into side careers: directing (Warren Beatty, Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner all won Best Director Oscars but no acting Oscars to date); race car driving(Newman, McQueen, Garner), golf (in the olden days, Hope and Crosby and Dino and later Clint -- but not so much today.)

And political action. Though Burt Reynolds said, "most of my fans aren't right wing, and they're not left wing. They're just living their lives."

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[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

As big as he was it always surprised me that he did not make a war movie. That is the one type of role that may have gave him the prestige he sought.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

He would have been great in a war movie...they weren't making too many of them in his era. Clint got Where Eagles Dare and Kelly's Heroes. I doubt he would have fit in the all-star cast of A Bridge Too Far.

Word is that Burt was a first choice for one of the leads in MASH the Movie...I don't know if he turned it down or if the producer's choice was vetoed.

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[–] yatzo376 (7717) 6 years ago

•Deliverance
•The longest Yard
•boogie nights and a forgotten gem from 1989 called •Breaking In
Those are his best
R.I.P. Burt

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

•Deliverance
•The longest Yard
•boogie nights and a forgotten gem from 1989 called •Breaking In
Those are his best

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I'll take those. I keep hearing about Breaking In, I guess I better see it.

I found a quote the other day: Burt hated his role in Boogie Nights -- "I don't like playing men who don't respect women." But he did it, and perhaps his disgust with the role informed the character's self-loathing and rage.

Also I recall in one of his autobios, Burt wrote "I won't ever play a lawyer."

Of Deliverance, Burt wrote: "I've been in a lot of movies...but only one film: Deliverance."

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[–] MizhuB (165) 6 years ago

Interesting. I recently saw Deliverance for the first time since it was released, and I thought he gave a sub-par performance. I thought he was too Actor-y, not natural at all.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILERS for Deliverance

Interesting. I recently saw Deliverance for the first time since it was released, and I thought he gave a sub-par performance. I thought he was too Actor-y, not natural at all.

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He kind of overdoes the macho poseur but...that's also sort of the character, a man who presents himself as the Big Man of Nature. As the story proves, he DOES have what it takes to survive and kill and lead men, but eventually, he is physically injured and incapacitated and his more "mellow" friend(Jon Voight) has to get the job done.

Still, I dunno...maybe good acting from Burt("posing" as macho) or maybe he was intimidated by his first role in a truly major and anticipated movie and couldn't quite pull it off. Hard to say. But I noticed the performance as you describe it. James Dickey's "poetic" lines from his novel may not have helped, either.

Burt wrote in one of his autobios, "When I made Deliverance and it was such an event, I thought I would be in other movies of that quality. But I wasn't."

Well...it was a classic...for a very specific, creepy reason...but I'm still not convinced it was the best movie Burt Reynolds was in. Whether in limitations of the novel or of the movie-making(ending scenes were cut before release)...the movie seems to lose its way at the end, rather runs out of gas on what was promised.

Its far less "arty," but I go with The Longest Yard as the big hit, serious-enough movie that fit Burt Reynolds like a glove and gave him something to work with(at the end, things are dire.)

BTW, Sam Peckinpah("The Wild Bunch") was rejected in his bid to direct "Deliverance," and wrote his pal, critic Pauline Kael about Boorman's movie: "I can't believe such a shitty movie got three Oscar nominations." Jealous, much? Or seeing something WAS wrong?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In sum, I guess I have to revise Burt down from 3 classics to 2 (Deliv. & Boogie).

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Oh, well. Not for me. In fact, I'll stick to TLY as the best of the three. Its Deliverance that I think is overrated...deep in its heart, it is really ONLY about "that scene," and it is as if the rest of the movie is ignored in terms of "going someplace." (Oh, its also about that great Dueling Banjos scene at the beginning, too.) By comparison, Frenzy of the same year is about "that scene," too -- but pays attention to plot and character and set-pieces all the way to the end.

I suppose the word "classic" is very, very elastic. I believe Smokey and the Bandit was Burt's biggest hit and most famous movie, so some call it "classic" -- and yet it is a damnably slight movie. Jackie Gleason --( at the time a long dormant star who seemed to come out of retirement for this film) pretty much saves the day with his comedy line readings; Burt looks great, but looks bored.

Burt Reynolds was right about becoming a star "in spite of his movies." One is hard-pressed to find a classic on his list of films OTHER than Deliverance. Even Boogie Nights isn't really HIS classic(its Mark Wahlberg's story.)

If The Longest Yard is my favorite, I suppose it is because it has a much more exciting story to tell than Deliverance and delivers at the climax. Boogie Nights is a big downer -- I think the film carefully tip-toed around the fact that porn stars and porn filmmakers are very , very messed up people(from poverty, abuse, mental health/drug issues, and family rejection) and -- we ignore their pain even as they entertain millions.

Oh, back to "classic status." I guess "we know it when we see it." GWTW is a classic(under siege today.) Citizen Kane is classic. Casablanca is a classic.

On the Hitchocck list of classics: Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo(by force), North by Northwest, Psycho. Rebecca? The Birds? Maybe, but not definitely.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And then there are what I call "pop classics." A Mad Mad World and The Great Race are two big examples from my youth. Practically every friend I've ever had would mention those as the greatest movies they'd ever seen; I think a lot of 60's kids carry fond memories of the films with them. But do they have classic scripts? Classic direction? Hard to say.

Grease is a pop classic. Smokey and the Bandit is a pop classic. Ghostbusters is a pop classic. Die Hard is a pop classic.

And The Longest Yard is a pop classic. As far as I can see.

And what about Brother Clint, the longest lived superstar?

Of the spaghetti Westerns, GBU is a classic. A pop classic, though?(The dubbing hurts it.) Dirty Harry is a "classic" as far as I am concerned, and not just a pop classic. Unforgiven is a classic. And everything else in his canon are just "Clint Eastwood movies."

Interesting: in its William Castle, haunted house "boo!" roots -- Psycho SHOULD be a "pop classic." But Hitchcock's artistry is too great, the cinematic work is too special -- and Anthony Perkins performance is too important -- for "Psycho" to be anything other a "classic."

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I suppose the word "classic" is very, very elastic.

I agree... I know for myself that some classic-statuses are built on extreme rewatchability. You end up knowing Psycho or Casablanca or Jaws or Godfather or Goodfellas almost by heart because it's *so* rewatchable. All the details and sturdiness of these films *convince* you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the initial pleasure jolt these films provide is something real and shareable.

Other classic-statuses aren't built on rewatchability in the same way - the films are too tedious or unpleasant at least in parts to be rewatched much or be recommendable to diverse others. Some examples of what I mean:
1. Touch of Evil used to be a wild, zippy 90 minutes and was absolutely a classic of the first sort. It was't a big hit but everybody *in* the film business and all film buffs had seen it a bunch of times - it was, along with Vertigo from the same year one of the great secret key texts in world cinema influencing almost everyone. Now, it's a stately 110+ minutes and feels more like a classic of the second sort, more complete and sober, more art-house.
2. Straw Dogs and Clockwork Orange and Deliverance and The Devils and Cries and Whispers and King of Marvin Gardens and Frenzy (all from 1971-1972!) are all movies as bad experience engines. Lots of people refuse out of hand to see such films, and even those of us who dig them can't/don't want to watch them too often. A *lot* of the films I rate as classics are of this sort: e.g. from the '80s, Blue Velvet, King of Comedy, Brazil, Threads, Seventh Continent, Blow Out, Fanny and Alexander. If I'm honest my whole basis for loving these films is more tenuous than in the highly-rewatchable and highly-shareable cases. Often these kinds of classics 'look cool' or have some other overwhelmingly great idea or stylistic feature that pulls you through their longeurs, indulgences, oddness etc. disarming all your usual conservatism and resistance to the new.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

3. We've been discussing Toni Erdmann (2016) on another thread. Well, part of why that film blew up at least by arthouse standards was that it was something completely surprising: a 3 hour, German, cringe-comedy (a classic classic-of-the-second-sort!). It should never have worked, should never found an audience. It was an instant near-classic founded in part, if one's honest, on a kind of audience self-congratulation at having had the good taste to find this film and make it an arthouse sensation (see also things like My Dinner With Andre for this effect). One reason the remake may not happen without Jack is because he's the unique figure who can give you so much that you know you'll still have a whole lot to work with when you lose the German-ess and the 3 hour ramblingness - maybe even becoming a classic of the first sort!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I agree... I know for myself that some classic-statuses are built on extreme rewatchability. You end up knowing Psycho or Casablanca or Jaws or Godfather or Goodfellas almost by heart because it's *so* rewatchable

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Yes, rewatchability is a very big deal. Its why we can usually quote all the lines verbatim(well, paraphrase them verbatim...I still even screw up the Psycho lines I thought I knew by heart.) Its usually why we know all the great scenes, in our heads, by heart. And its why, if one stumbles onto one of these on TV , ...you watch it all the way to the end.

And I guess I truly am Mainstream Man because, Psycho and Casablanca and Jaws and The Godfather and Goodfellas are my favorites of their respective years(giving up a lack of having a favorite for EVERY year in the 40s, I'm just not that attached to the decade.) But the funny thing is: I don't go ga ga for EVERY blockbuster or accepted classic out there. Not The Exorcist. Not Love Story(well, I never saw it , but I didn't want to.) Not Rambo. Not Top Gun. To a certain extent, not Star Wars.

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All the details and sturdiness of these films *convince* you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the initial pleasure jolt these films provide is something real and shareable.

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Yep. For the most part, they "hit big on initial release" -- everybody loved them -- and just kept holding up. This, of course, is why Vertigo remains a little suspect -- it was NOT big on release, it had to be promoted and "taught" to earn its classic status.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Something I've noticed in recent years that may not help the support of classics is that there are no real broadcasts to keep classics in the public eye. Lots of local TV channels ran classic movies over the course of a year; you could find them a lot. Now, any classic you might want to see is available -- on a streaming or cable menu, but not specifically geared to one big audience at one single time.

I've noted how, in my young life, the annual showings of North by Northwest and Psycho on local channels(only once a year in the 70's) were pretty much "holidays" to me -- much like the annual showing of "Wizard of Oz" was a holiday to everyone in the US. Well that kind of "you've got to wait for it and it won't be back for a year" stuff is over. Harder for classics to take hold, to be regularly seen . Except on...TCM of course. But not everybody gets that channel.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Other classic-statuses aren't built on rewatchability in the same way - the films are too tedious or unpleasant at least in parts to be rewatched much or be recommendable to diverse others.

--

Like with me, this conversation:

Person: What's another Hitchcock movie you can recommend?
Me: Oh, Frenzy, I really like that one.
Person: I can't wait to see it.
Me: NO! Don't see it, it was good but I can't recommend that you see it.
Person: Wha?

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Some examples of what I mean:

1. Touch of Evil used to be a wild, zippy 90 minutes and was absolutely a classic of the first sort. It was't a big hit but everybody *in* the film business and all film buffs had seen it a bunch of times - it was, along with Vertigo from the same year one of the great secret key texts in world cinema influencing almost everyone. Now, it's a stately 110+ minutes and feels more like a classic of the second sort, more complete and sober, more art-house.

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I"ve kind of lost track of the versions over the years, but I liked them all. With my little "list" of favorites, TOE comes in third for 1958 -- after Damn Yankees, and, yes, Vertigo(which needed decades to do it, but has locked in my heart finally.) The incoherency of Touch of Evil(versus something as tight as Psycho) always knocked it down a notch for me -- but it is eminently watchable and "alive." And its WELLES! On American turf again(and Mexican turf.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

2. Straw Dogs and Clockwork Orange and Deliverance and The Devils and Cries and Whispers and King of Marvin Gardens and Frenzy (all from 1971-1972!) are all movies as bad experience engines

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"Bad experience engines." Indeed -- what was the DEAL with all those movies coming out around the same year? I think the relatively new "R" rating fed them -- a lot of pent up sex and violence had to come out from filmmakers who felt too connected to it. I saw a QT interview on YouTube the other day where he says "I think motion pictures were invented to show violence." Maybe he's right. But there is violence in Die Hard, too - -and its "fun." These 71-72 films were just plain grim.

I saw an interview on YouTube with Burt Reynolds, of recent vintage, where Conan O'Brien of all people asked Burt, "could Deliverance be made today?," and the two men rather agreed that it was FROM that period.

And this: in my very formative teenage movie buff years, I got a lot of my movie news from Time and Newsweek. And they did "Christmas month" movie pages back then -- not Xmas movies, but on the blockbusters to be released AT Christmas (then, much more of the time of year for such than the summer.)

Anyway, Xmas 1971 had a big "Christmas Season Movies" layout in Time on: Straw Dogs(Peckinpah), A Clockwork Orange(Kubrick), Dirty Harry(Siegel) and..The Boyfriend(Ken Russell). I recall The Boyfriend seeming out of place, but I set my sights on seeing the R-rated Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs(I had to wait a few years for the X-rated Clockwork.) But my point is: I was being programmed and promoted to dig on these violent movies because they were the BIG movies of the year. (Peckinpah, Kubrick and Siegel were "auteurs of violence" and Hitch would soon join them with Frenzy.) It took a few years -- but only a few years -- for the movies to shake the sex and ultra-violence out of the system.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Lots of people refuse out of hand to see such films, and even those of us who dig them can't/don't want to watch them too often. A *lot* of the films I rate as classics are of this sort: e.g. from the '80s, Blue Velvet, King of Comedy, Brazil, Threads, Seventh Continent, Blow Out, Fanny and Alexander. If I'm honest my whole basis for loving these films is more tenuous than in the highly-rewatchable and highly-shareable cases. Often these kinds of classics 'look cool' or have some other overwhelmingly great idea or stylistic feature that pulls you through their longeurs, indulgences, oddness etc. disarming all your usual conservatism and resistance to the new.

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Well, its what we respond to, what we were brought up with, I think.

Plus, movie critics of the 70's ...an odd bunch...often rather exclusively supported "dark movies" as the best things out there. I think they were a little misguided in thinking that the real world was as bad as A Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs or Blue Velvet...but they wanted to indulge the dark side...and so did we.

I suppose "sick" classics are almost unto themselves. "Deliverance" is a sick classic. As I recall, it was a hit, but not a BIG hit. Audiences seemed to "will themselves" to go see it so as t make sure they were part of the crowd who "saw THAT scene"(much as with the shower scene 12 years before.)

But back to the shower scene and Psycho in general: Anthony Perkins had a nifty little speech at Hitchcock's 1979 AFI tribute in which he said the difference between Psycho and the rest of the blood and guts slasher movies out there was "you ENJOY Psycho." He had a point. I don't think you enjoy Deliverance or Frenzy.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I think they were a little misguided in thinking that the real world was as bad as A Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs or Blue Velvet...but they wanted to indulge the dark side...and so did we.

I've definitely wanted to peer into the abyss a bit... and I'd say that almost every year I find a new dark masterpiece or two. But beyond strictly grim/dark stuff, I guess I do find that what we might call narrow-appeal masterpieces are much more vulnerable to sharp reassessments as you get older and, say, become less easily impressed by 'stuff looking cool', less shockable, more sensitive to sources, maybe a little more sensitive to time being wasted, etc.. E.g., I watched most of Brazil (1985) again for the first time in over a decade and things really bugged me that hadn't before. Lots of the background action felt super-affected to me this time, like stuff someone would write thinking it would look cool regardless of whether it made any sense; great thudding tributes to Battleship Potemkin and Metropolis and M and A Matter of Life and Death felt like artless film school time-wasting now, and so on.

When I think back over recent films I've rated highly but that for various reasons (often just too grueling) I've barely rewatched, e.g., 12 Years a Slave (in fact everything by that director - McQueen himself seems to have needed to lighten up and has a new noir Widows w/ Gone Girl writer Flynn that sounds good & fun coming out), Son of Saul, Under The Skin... I guess they're all *very* vulnerable to my mood, life-perspective changing whereas more straightforwardly pleasure-giving classics don't seem to decay away for you as easily.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I've definitely wanted to peer into the abyss a bit... and I'd say that almost every year I find a new dark masterpiece or two.

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I'm torn. Its clear that the vast majority of my favorite films are films of violence -- Psycho, The Wild Bunch,The Godfather, Goodfellas, practically all of QT less Jackie Brown -- but that is almost an issue of "excitement" rather than darkness.

The 1971-74 stuff -- I'll stretch to '73 to pick up The Exorcist and to capture the "ultra-downer" year of 1974(Chinatown, Godfather II, Lenny, The Conversation) seems to have reflected a pessimism of both audiences and filmmakers that overdid it a bit. I recall seeing a pair of George C. Scott films in the early 70s -- Chafeysky's The Hospital(doctors) and Wambaugh's The New Centurions(cops) -- that instilled in me at a young, impressionable age the idea that the world was a depressing cesspool. And yet, I survived and thrived in real life, did well enough, found love, etc. But the residual gloom of those two "formative" films has never left me. And one of them was inspirational:, at the end of The Hospital, Scott's cynical and suicidal doctor decides he must stay alive and fight, fight fight the horrors of his time, even if its to no avail. SPOILER for The New Centurions: in THAT one, Scott's newly retired, utterly lonely old cop DOES kill himself, in a smog-choked LA neighborhood. I've never forgotten THAT scene.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I guess I do find that what we might call narrow-appeal masterpieces are much more vulnerable to sharp reassessments as you get older and, say, become less easily impressed by 'stuff looking cool', less shockable, more sensitive to sources, maybe a little more sensitive to time being wasted, etc..

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Well, I think movies -- whether mainstream or "niche" are more exciting when you are young and certain curiosities are in place. I've always tracked my big change on movies to whatever year it was that I realized I was "working for a living" above all else. Time is money, time is valuable, the time for fantasy is limited. The movies changed instantaneously for me when I went to work. For one thing, I craved more entertainment. (But others would likely crave more SUBSTANCE.)

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E.g., I watched most of Brazil (1985) again for the first time in over a decade and things really bugged me that hadn't before.

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I think that's a real danger with art films, which get more sympathy on release.

Now with regard to ALL films, I must admit, swanstep, that sometimes I feel when you view some film I recommend(or reminiscence about) and you don't like it, at least PART of the problem is you are viewing the film "cold" today. There WAS something to my seeing certain films when I was 13 or 17 or 22. I was different; the world was different. Even the THEATERS were different. I will grant you that a great film should "hold up" -- but who is to say that a film isn't "most great" when it FITS its year of release?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

When I think back over recent films I've rated highly but that for various reasons (often just too grueling) I've barely rewatched, e.g., 12 Years a Slave

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I dutifully watched that film for Oscar reasons, and -- found it grueling indeed. No entertainment to it, just a sobering reminder of cruelties past. I doubt that I will ever see it again, "good" as it was.

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(in fact everything by that director - McQueen himself seems to have needed to lighten up and has a new noir Widows w/ Gone Girl writer Flynn that sounds good & fun coming out),

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My problem with that director is his name! MY Steve McQueen was a formative influence. The idea that his name will soon be lost and replaced is...sad.

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Son of Saul, Under The Skin... I guess they're all *very* vulnerable to my mood, life-perspective changing whereas more straightforwardly pleasure-giving classics don't seem to decay away for you as easily.

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We often "talk past" each other here, swanstep, not becasuse of disrespect, but because our respective film tastes and breadth are so different. You are certainly more willing to look at my movies than I am at yours. But that's MY problem. Reading about them is the next best thing....

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One more thought about the movies of the early 70's.

Leaving aside the "downer" aspects of the films(reflective, I think, of the depressed, self-medicated and perverse men who sometimes made them) , these films were meant to enact a business model:

TV was where the audiences were and had to be competed with by the movies. And whereas b/w TV programming was counteracted by Cinemascope and Technicolor -- TV was now in color too. So the movies went to something else TV couldn't show or "sound": Cussing(George Carlin's famous 7 words); nudity; simulated sex; and violence beyond what TV could show.

The resultant movies WERE MASH and Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs and Deliverance.

Hitchcock reportedly looked at 1500 plot summaries before picking the book from which he made Frenzy. I'm assuming Hitchcock was looking for a book with sex and nudity and cussing and violence, so he could "join the trend." and he found one.

Evidently, movie attendance was about rock bottom low in 1970/71 or so. And yet, R rated hits emerged: MASH..The Godfather(huge), The Exorcist(huge.)
But more R rated movies tanked.

Hollywood assumed that kids and family audiences were watching TV now, but Star Wars famously brought them all back -- and made more money than most R-rated films.

Eventually, PG-rated films became the big money ticket, and R-rated films were looked at askance -- limiting the audience limited the box office take. (Though QT remains resolutely R in his approach, and has made some big bucks accordingly. Sometimes.)

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Here's the worldwide box-office list for 2018:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?view2=worldwide&yr=2018&p=.htm
It's *overwhemlingly* sequels and animation and sfx-heavy spectacle. Setting aside politically astute mediocrities (Black Panther) and niche horror mediocrities (A Quiet Place, The Nun, Hereditary - I assume), it's striking that you have to go down to #47, to Spike Lee's BlaKK Klansman ($72.8 mil) before you hit anything Awards-worthy. Death of Stalin at #77 ($24.6 mill) is probably the most acclaimed and respected film on the whole list.

In other words, the first 9 months of the year has seen almost *no* new releases of interest to adults who can read reviews!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Well, they do tend to pile up what Oscar-worthy films they think they have near the end, but I haven't heard of any front runners yet.

That somewhat depressing list spells out what we've been talking about around here, at least Oscar-wise: the ceremony is largely irrelevant now because the major studios don't make Oscar-worthy movies as their mainstream product anymore.

I'm sure that a list of 9 or 10 (it bugs me how it isn't "locked in") will be offered up for the ceremony, but what that list REALLY will mean in terms of lasting cinema is dubious.

The ratings will always be enough to justify doing the Oscar show, I guess, but I note this:

Back in 1979, the American Film Institute salute to Alfred Hitchcock(with the near-dead man himself there for a poignant tribute) was shown on CBS to very big ratings. The AFI awards continued to play on network for some years, honoring folks like Henry Fonda and Bette Davis with "lifetime salutes" at the end of their careers.

But they ran out of people to give "lifetime salutes" to, and soon we were seeing AFI Lifetime Tributes to folks like Tom Hanks and Michael Douglas, each of whom still had plenty of movies to make.

And the AFI show left CBS and went "down channel" to basic cable -- TBS, maybe? TNT? I can't remember.

The most recent "lifetime salute" was to George Clooney, which may be appropriate because he recently announced he's quitting movies "for now"(he can't buy a hit outside of The Descendants on his own, he's been in too many bombs, albeit often of quality) It was broadcast on TCM , which is a great place to put these things, but hardly a ratings giant.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I can see the Oscars eventually meeting the fate of the AFI salutes, becoming something one has to remember to watch, and might miss if you don't read the promotions. Could the Oscars head to TNT, or TBS or TCM? I doubt it -- but the Oscar broadcast would probably go to cable before the Golden Globes did. The GG's has double the acting categories, double the stars, no "below the line" awards, and TV shows and stars are given equal time.

Perhaps that's the future of awards shows. The Oscars can go to TCM and stay "pure."

PS. Don't cry for George Clooney. All those flops paid HIM well, he's in the public eye with his famous wife...and he evidently earned $300 million off of the sale of a tequila company he co-owns. He doesn't need to be a movie star anymore. And -- as with them all -- he might come back.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Chafeysky's The Hospital

I'm half way through watching this one for the first time now. It's great, very funny but horrifying (This Chafeysky kid's pretty good isn't he?!). It cuts pretty close to home for me because my now aged parents have both had some very indifferent hospital experiences recently.

Having Scott's character be both a senior doctor doing rounds *and* a hospital-level administrator is a stroke of dramatic genius. I suspect that no one has such joint responsibilities these days perhaps in part because of films like The Hospital showing how the joint job is way too much for one person (maybe it needs a whole team).
****
Scott: What was that all about?
Rigg: I thought I was obvious as hell. I'm trying to tell you, I have a thing about middle-aged men.
Scott: I admire your candor.
Rigg: You've been admiring a lot more than that.
Scott: You're wasting your time. I've been impotent for years.
Rigg: Rubbish.
Scott: What the hell is wrong with being impotent? You kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians..... I got a son, 23-years-old. I threw him out of the house last year - Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love, he despised everyone......
****
Brilliant! Subsequent angry, not strictly consensual sex scene is a bit challenging tho'.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

OK, The Hospital is about as good a film as you can get while being barely visually directed. Director Hiller & his DP have no visual ideas whatsoever. Someone with the skills of a Lumet or a Nichols or a Hitchcock would have made TH an ultra-classic I think, whereas as it stands it's a 2nd or even high 3rd-tier film in the stellar company of 1971.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I got a son, 23-years-old. I threw him out of the house last year - Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love, he despised everyone......

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I loved Scott's additional line and how he read it:

"I grabbed him by his....(Scott is disgusted, angry,searching for the word.) PONCHO!! ..and I threw him out."

I haven't seen The Hospital in years, but I remember how sexy Diana Rigg was and how jolting that sex scene was. There's love of sorts, on both sides, but it makes the point that some men need rage to get going. One year later: Bob Rusk goes all the way with his rage to get ...aroused.

I doubt the scene could be filmed today. And George's problem wouldn't exist with Viagra today.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I'm half way through watching this one for the first time now.

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Just amazing to me, swanstep. I saw it on first release, likely 47 years ago. Its but a memory.

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It's great, very funny but horrifying (This Chafeysky kid's pretty good isn't he?!).

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Yep. Oscars for Marty, The Hospital, and Network. Not bad...though The Hospital is rather the forgotten one.

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It cuts pretty close to home for me because my now aged parents have both had some very indifferent hospital experiences recently.

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I'm sorry to hear that. We've all been there...or will be there. Vigilance is key. Gotta fight for your loved ones. Or yourself.

I recall a killer's line in The Hospital: "I rang the bell for the nurse. This insured me an uninterrupted hour."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

OK, The Hospital is about as good a film as you can get while being barely visually directed.

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Well, when the film is "By Paddy Chayefsky," the director has to fight to make himself known. Lumet pulled it off. I guess Hiller didn't -- but then I found so MANY of the early 70's films to be rather grubby looking. I felt the loss of the gloss of the 60's and 70s.

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Director Hiller & his DP have no visual ideas whatsoever. Someone with the skills of a Lumet or a Nichols or a Hitchcock would have made TH an ultra-classic I think, whereas as it stands it's a 2nd or even high 3rd-tier film in the stellar company of 1971

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Well, its pretty good. All things considered, we ended up with so FEW Chayefsky films. They are rare gems.

PS. Arthur Hiller: Love Story. The Hospital. Silver Streak. What gives with the all over the map-hood?

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

The New Centurions (1972)
Solid film. Depressing as hell with several scenes that remain deeply shocking. Director Fleischer does good work here again. Crime feels very disorganized in TNC, unglamorous but still very dangerous to police. I guess the emphasis on the toll taken on cops' sanity and personal lives would become Topic A for TV cops shows after this (Hill St Blues, NYPD Blue, Prime Suspect, etc.) so TNC probably can't have the impact of novelty that it enjoyed in 1972, but it's still a good and sobering watch. Glad I've caught up with it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The New Centurions (1972)
Solid film. Depressing as hell with several scenes that remain deeply shocking.

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Even in faint memory, I remember how rough some of those scenes were.

Current(at the time) cop Joe Wambaugh got an instant following with The New Centurions...a "new kind of look at policing." He had to pump out bestsellers for awhile -- The Blue Knight(Bill Holden took the TV movie lead), The Choirboys(Robert Aldrich made it into a movie that looked as clunky as The Longest Yard but with less interest), The Onion Field(back when critics LIKED James Woods.)

A scene I remember working surprisingly well in the book ON THE PAGE was one young cop's ride on the window(from the outside) of a speeding car driven by a furious hooker. Its an exciting scene in the movie, but in the book, it rocks across your brainpan.
And it is not a depressing scene. So much else in book and movie is.

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Director Fleischer does good work here again. Crime feels very disorganized in TNC, unglamorous but still very dangerous to police. I guess the emphasis on the toll taken on cops' sanity and personal lives would become Topic A for TV cops shows after this (Hill St Blues, NYPD Blue, Prime Suspect, etc.) so TNC probably can't have the impact of novelty that it enjoyed in 1972, but it's still a good and sobering watch.

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Well, we are reminded, even in the time of BLM(uh oh, politics), that policing as a job is one of the toughest out there for the honest man. As New Centurions showed us, the cops meet people who are "at the bottom of the pit" and have to deal with rage or mental loss.

It was certainly a rejoinder to "Adam 12."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Glad I caught up with it.

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Well, I'm glad you saw them both. Again, amazing. I can't get to all your recommendations, and I am sorry.

Now that you've seen them both, imagine me in my young teens being exposed to such depressing, horrible views of the life ahead for me in certain ways. But I didn't become a doctor and I didn't become a cop, so I didn't have to face the life or death horrors. But the films are a guide to the roughest waters in human life. Still, what a difference some decades make: the modern youth is exposed to fantastical CGI superhero movies -- the depressing grit of The Hospital(which, again, I saw as teenager), isn't too mainstream today.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Now that you've seen them both, imagine me in my young teens being exposed to such depressing, horrible views...But the films are a guide to the roughest waters in human life. Still, what a difference some decades make: the modern youth is exposed to fantastical CGI superhero movies -- the depressing grit of The Hospital(which, again, I saw as teenager), isn't too mainstream today.

Right - popular film these days is *deeply* escapist. I guess that's part of the reason for Get Out being such a sensation last year (ultimately winning a screenplay Oscar too). While it was derivative and not especially gritty, it was at least really about something urgent as well as being very entertaining (and visually and technically superior). Provocative, thoughtful big hits are rare birds probably in any era but especially now.

Genuine grit is I suppose the province of niche TV: The Wire. Maybe The Deuce is the current representative of that tradition.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Right - popular film these days is *deeply* escapist.

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I think so. You know, neither The Hospital nor The New Centurions were sold as "art films," especially not the cop movie. They came "to a theater near you" and were sold as what Hollywood was selling at the time.

So, I , as a regular teen filmgoer(I was more rabid about it in my teens and 20's than any other time in my life), simply went out and saw them -- along with all manner of depressing MAINSTREAM movies that the studios were releasing back then. (WUSA with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Anthony Perkins strikes me as another one, though it had a wide-screen , glossy look to "cover" its depression.)

I suppose these movies had an impact on making me wary and survivalistic from an early age. I "braced myself" for a world that, for me at least, wasn't really THAT bad, but which sometimes hit those very bad notes.

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I guess that's part of the reason for Get Out being such a sensation last year (ultimately winning a screenplay Oscar too). While it was derivative and not especially gritty, it was at least really about something urgent as well as being very entertaining (and visually and technically superior). Provocative, thoughtful big hits are rare birds probably in any era but especially now.

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That's a great point. Critics and certain audiences respond to difficult subjects(here, race) and disturbing depictions of same(here, entertaining, nonetheless.)

This is not to say that some movies of grit aren't made. Usually they end up on the Oscar nom list -- last year that would be Get Out and Three Billboards, for two. But -- the first of those two had a happy ending and the second found "hope" in a bad character(Sam Rockwell's redeemed bigot.) Too often in the 70s, hope was dashed, the good guys lost.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

My man QT retains the R rated violence and language of the 70s, but for the most part, he is making verbally funny crime thrillers, nothing of much import or depression.

That said, certainly Inglorious Basterds, Django, and The Hateful Eight have "something on their minds" about human struggle, and The Hateful Eight is radically a study of "all races and both sexes hating each other."

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Genuine grit is I suppose the province of niche TV: The Wire. Maybe The Deuce is the current representative of that tradition.

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I would agree in both cases, which is why we are told "cable TV is where the adult dramas and grit can now be found, movies are a fun factory."

There is something to be said for a period of time in which the movies were gritty and depressing as a matter of course(it compels you to confront the tougher edges of life and really THINK about them, maybe take action yourself)...but I suppose that was "overdone." George Lucas said he made Star Wars because "I was tired of movies where you felt worse coming out of the theater than when you came in."

Anyway, I tell ya: I think I'm off to take another look at The Hospital and The New Centurions myself. For old times sake. Especially The Hospital.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

A scene I remember working surprisingly well in the book ON THE PAGE was one young cop's ride on the window(from the outside) of a speeding car driven by a furious hooker. Its an exciting scene in the movie, but in the book, it rocks across your brainpan.

Interesting. I thought the movie scene was incredibly good. It's really well-staged (equal to French Connection) for sheer visceralness. And while I guess I've seen lots of people hanging onto the outside of cars before in movies, this uniquely got at the experience of being out-of-control & *caught haphazardly* on a car that's viciously speeding away (it's better and flat out more real in this respect than anything in Death Proof). I was mortified and terrified more than excited. Also we're on an emotional rollercoaster at that point: Stacey Keach's character has started to crack, booze up and act like a real creep. He's been an uncharacteristically sadistic and sleazy creep to the hooker in 'Silver Pants'. Then *she* snaps. Roy deserves something bad but not this, so the whole thing is heartbreaking as well as terrifying. Brilliant scene! Should be more famous than it is.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Interesting. I thought the movie scene was incredibly good. It's really well-staged (equal to French Connection) for sheer visceralness.

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I'll have to take a look again. I read the novel first(it was hanging around the house as a paperback, with all these "greastest cop book ever written" blurbs) and that car scene somehow "came to life" on the page in a very exciting way. Perhaps my reader's imagination took it higher in my mind that the movie could produce.

But I take your word, its a great scene in the movie. And a helpful break.

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And while I guess I've seen lots of people hanging onto the outside of cars before in movies,

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SNL once did a sketch with William Shatner as TJ Hooker hanging onto the outside of a car for the whole sketch, picking up other people along the way,as I recall.

But New Centurions was first and scariest and real.

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this uniquely got at the experience of being out-of-control & *caught haphazardly* on a car that's viciously speeding away (it's better and flat out more real in this respect than anything in Death Proof). I was mortified and terrified more than excited.

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Well, I remember the fear factor of a car accelerating so fast that -- the cop's dead IF he falls off.

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Also we're on an emotional rollercoaster at that point: Stacey Keach's character has started to crack, booze up and act like a real creep. He's been an uncharacteristically sadistic and sleazy creep to the hooker in 'Silver Pants'. Then *she* snaps. Roy deserves something bad but not this, so the whole thing is heartbreaking as well as terrifying.

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That all comes back to me now. He's being very evil to the hooker and she goes nuts on him, prepared, indeed, to kill him.

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Brilliant scene! Should be more famous than it is

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Well, I remembered it, and now you will too -- let's get the word out....

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

SPOILER for The New Centurions:

PS. I've always remembered a phrase George C. Scott in The New Centurions to an unseen friend on the other end of the phone in what ends up his final scene: "Keep it frosty." Scott's acting hale and hearty with that phrase, but actually he's signing off with false cheer...en route to ending it all.

Keep it frosty.

Does he say "Keep it frosty, my friend." Then it would be like that Interesting Guy: "Stay thirsty, my friends."

No, I think it was just "keep it frosty." Never heard it before, don't think I heard it after.

But I liked it.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Well, I remembered it, and now you will too -- let's get the word out....

I'm gonna. It's funny, this connects back to Burt: when we get the clip from Bandit in The Last Movie Star, the speeding car shots and in-car angles are *shockingly* good and fun. It was a reminder to me that a big part of Burt's biggest successes *was* having the best stunt drivers, etc.. This wasn't ordinary, Dukes of Hazard car chase coverage, rather people paid good money at the time to see real hell-for-leather stuff and that's what Burt and his stunt-buddies delivered.

Quite a few '70s movies have an ace somewhere like this, e.g., The Seven Ups is a so-so movie that turns into a must-see half way through with an amazing chase. And two I'm a little blurry on: both of Pam Greer's big movies, Foxy Brown and Coffey are uneven but they also have some killer action highlights, and violence that's a bit nastier than you expect.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

this connects back to Burt: when we get the clip from Bandit in The Last Movie Star, the speeding car shots and in-car angles are *shockingly* good and fun. It was a reminder to me that a big part of Burt's biggest successes *was* having the best stunt drivers, etc.. This wasn't ordinary, Dukes of Hazard car chase coverage, rather people paid good money at the time to see real hell-for-leather stuff and that's what Burt and his stunt-buddies delivered.

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Yes, Smokey and the Bandit(and, as I recall, its first sequel, the one with Burt) showed this off quite well. And The Longest Yard opened with a fine car chase before moving Burt and the movie into prison.
(The car chase and Burt's slapping around of his rich girlfriend are what put him into prison. Check out the difference some time between the brutality with which Burt treats his rich girlfriend in his version of The Longest Yard versus the cornball version of the same break-up in the Adam Sandler version, which as remakes go, is wrong in every way.)

Burt and his stuntman pal Hal Needham knew how to deliver quality stunt work...problem was, they increasingly paid little attention to things like script, story, character.

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Quite a few '70s movies have an ace somewhere like this, e.g., The Seven Ups is a so-so movie that turns into a must-see half way through with an amazing chase.

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A VERY so-so movie without the chase, though a typically gritty 70s one. Its a sequel to The French Connection, but only about Roy Scheider's character. Another sequel to the The French Connection with Gene Hackman would be made later. I think both films were from the official production company that made the first one.

I do believe that Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven Ups had the same producer. Some maybe he's the "auteur car chase man" of his era, not the directors so much.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And two I'm a little blurry on: both of Pam Greer's big movies, Foxy Brown and Coffey are uneven but they also have some killer action highlights, and violence that's a bit nastier than you expect

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I watched them some time ago. They are nasty -- she's getting some tough revenge against white gangsters and occasionally the white women they use for sexual favors and other tasks.

That whole seventies Blaxploitation thing remains one of the distinctive eras in American film. "Outta nowhere," hot for awhile, then gone. Hitchocck reportedly watched a lot of Blaxploitation movies in his private screening room. He had no way to use the genre in his own remaining films(film?) But he wanted to learn about other movie cultures in America...from a safe distance.

Me, I love Shaft. The first one. For the great song, but also for the cool handsome lead Richard Roundtree(Sam Jackson just didn't cut it in the remake that was really a sequel, because he was playing ANOTHER Shaft, Roundtree was in it playing his original role and STILL looked better), his camaraderie with the white cop and a funny scene with very cool Issac Hayes music(the flip side of the Shaft single that I played incessantly) where Shaft has an expresso in the Village and is served by a dizzy hippie waitress. A classic scene that nobody knows but me.

PS. Meanwhile, back at the Seven Ups. It came out a few weeks after Charley Varrick in 1973. I saw them at the same theater. I remember feeling that Varrick was a much more involving thriller.

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[–] movieghoul (213) 6 years ago

Interesting how TCM On Demand has altered my perspective on watching films there. If I watch what's on the schedule, I can imagine that there might be at least thousands of others watching along at the same time. On Demand is more of a vacuum, for a fairly obsuce film, I might be the only one in the world watching at that time, not quite the same.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Interesting how TCM On Demand has altered my perspective on watching films there. If I watch what's on the schedule, I can imagine that there might be at least thousands of others watching along at the same time. On Demand is more of a vacuum, for a fairly obsuce film, I might be the only one in the world watching at that time, not quite the same.

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I think this is an important point about "movie watching at home on TV."

Tim Burton grew up in Los Angeles, and reminisced about the Saturday night horror movies that were on in his formative years(mine too, when I lived there.)

Burton pointed out that he felt there was an "energy" to thousands of Los Angeles residents all tuned in to the same horror movie at the same time -- a shared experience.

Certainly, the KABC-TV showing of Psycho late on a November 1967 Saturday night(in a slot not usually reserved for horror) was the talk of Monday when I lived in LA. It HAD been a shared experience. Nobody seems to have watched the movie on against it(Written on the Wind, as I recall.)

Modernly, if TCM shows Psycho, I suppose with a nationwide audience, at least a few thousand people are watching together. It can still be a "communal experience" --- and shared on boards like this.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

The death of any major movie star is not only an opportunity to assess their pros and cons, their ups and downs, it's also an opportunity to reflect on movie stardom (or even just stardom) more generally. In Burt's case, since the 'downs' of his career were a little more pronounced than usual, it's especially interesting to reflect on other seemingly better played trajectories. To wit, GQ has a series on youtube of 'Established (male) Movie Actors reflecting on their 10 or so most iconic roles/characters:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0hKMB1-xkc-IZgAqdrVO6qlPaDWW_jEl
I haven't watched them all (not all have quite worthy resumes yet in my view) but Nic Cage's and Ethan Hawke's reels are both worth checking out. Arguably both have been more interesting dudes all along than anyone seriously credited them with being, and, deep into middle-age, both have become some of the most beloved male stars out there. Recommended.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Some late breaking casting news on QT's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the filling of "The Burt Reynolds Role":

The role of George Spahnn, the old man whose old movie ranch was the Manson Family hangout -- was for Burt Reynolds. But he passed before it could be filmed -- two days are all that would have been necessary.

The role has been filled, with a Hitchcock player:

Drum roll:

Bruce Dern.

That's a bit deflating. For while Burt Reynolds would have been a "newbie" to the QT universe, and "just in time" given his age -- Dern has already been in two QT films: The Hateful Eight(at length) and Django Unchained(in a hateful cameo as the slave owner who splits up husband Jamie Foxx and wife Kerry Washington, to different plantations.)

Still, Dern makes sense as Spahnn, may add some creepiness to the part.

Bruce Dern sure is the last man standing. He got "Nebraska" as an Oscar bait lead when Jack Nicholson and Gene Hackman(both pretty much retired) turned it down. And now he is getting a role vacated by a superstar.

Dern is becoming, in his old age, quite the respected actor -- not an over the title star(like Nicholson would still be), but a "grand old institution" -- whose career goes back to 1960 in movies. (That's the year of "Psycho" if you didn't know. Ha.) He was a reputed long-distance runner , so he might just last into his 90's, just getting more and more "Dern like," with age.

Funny: I have a companion right now who just doesn't much like Bruce Dern, found him annoying when I showed her Family Plot and Black Sunday, and noticed he keeps turning up in movies recently. The Hateful Eight. Chappaquick earlier this year and White Boy Rick recently(she saw Dern in the TRAILER and went "oh no.")

You can imagine her joy when I announced who was taking the role over for Reynolds. Ha.

Me...I think its quite a late breaking comeback for Mr Dern. He's become legendary.

And as I've mentioned before, now Family Plot has a pretty legendary star in it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The death of any major movie star is not only an opportunity to assess their pros and cons, their ups and downs, it's also an opportunity to reflect on movie stardom (or even just stardom) more generally. In Burt's case, since the 'downs' of his career were a little more pronounced than usual,

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It is the sad truth that emerged after the initial warm reminiscenes were over -- folks had to go back and really LOOK at his career, and the fairly mediocre films that came from about 1985 on. He had a successful sitcom, though.

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it's especially interesting to reflect on other seemingly better played trajectories. To wit, GQ has a series on youtube of 'Established (male) Movie Actors reflecting on their 10 or so most iconic roles/characters:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0hKMB1-xkc-IZgAqdrVO6qlPaDWW_jEl
I haven't watched them all (not all have quite worthy resumes yet in my view) but Nic Cage's and Ethan Hawke's reels are both worth checking out. Arguably both have been more interesting dudes all along than anyone seriously credited them with being, and, deep into middle-age, both have become some of the most beloved male stars out there. Recommended.

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I'll take the recommendation, but I fear that Nic Cage is going the way of Burt in recent years. Evidently (and just like Burt) money problems have forced him to make a LOT of movies, almost none of which are major, many of which go straight to streaming, and the goodwill of his star years(a little bit of the 80's, a lot of the 90s, and then National Treasure as a franchise) are almost played out.

Cage is a classic case to me of how an actor "earns" major stardom(his Leaving Las Vegas Oscar did it, along with action leads in Con Air and Face/Off)...keeps it for awhile...and then loses it. It happens. Its a tough business.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Ethan Hawke depends on those "Sunrise" movies, yes? I always found his facial features a bit odd, rather starved and misshapen. It kept him out of Tom Cruise type stardom...but he found glory in indie films, Oscar-bait and non.

I liked him a coupla years ago in The Magnificent Seven, where it seemed that middle age, a beard and a cool costume overcame his younger, callow looks and transformed him into a likeable gunslinger(though he had the role of the PTSD victim who can no longer shoot...for awhile.)

Cute story about how he got his role. Hawke had been in "Training Day" for director Antoine Fuqua with star Denzel Washington(who won an Oscar for playing "bad" in that one.) That was in 2001. But when he got word of The Mag 7 remake he went to director Fuqua who said, "Well, I'm making it with Denzel" -- and Hawke said "So you need to fill six other parts? Got one for me?"

They found one. He was good. And "buddied up" with a cool Korean actor as the knife expert. They were practically a couple.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Oops. I just looked at the clip. Hawke tells that same story about The Mag 7. 6 roles.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Back to Burt Reynolds for a bit (why not; its his OT thread)

I watched his old 1973 movie "Shamus" the other night. My memory is that it came out as part of the "Burt Reynolds package" in 1972: The prestigious Deliverance, but then also Fuzz, and, I thought, this one. And also the Cosmopolitan centerfold. But evidently Shamus is from the next year.

That centerfold informed the posters for Fuzz, Shamus, and, in 1973, White Lighting. For "Fuzz,' it was horrible, as I recall; I think they drew a cartoon version of Reynolds in his Cosmo pose and just stuck it "into" the poster.

With the posters for Shamus and White Lighting, the idea was simple: take Reynolds' already fit and muscular torso and "supersize it" so that a shirtless Reynolds(in cartoon) looked like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger(who was yet to come) and a porn star; bigger than life. A more nuanced version of this approach came with The Longest Yard poster: the REAL Reynolds (not a cartoon) with his shirt mainly off but with a jacket on.

The message from these posters is simple: in the early 70's, Burt Reynolds was sold as ...Macho Man Beefcake.

And yet, as "Shamus" demonstrated, he was different than that. The movie opens with Burt shirtless indeed for the entire credit sequence, awakening from his pool table bed(with a nude sleeping beauty beside him) and stumbling around his crummy apartment shirtless in jeans, with a bad hangover. Shirtless, Reynolds was muscular and hairy, yes, but he was a far more thin and compact body than the muscleman featured in those posters. And he was funnier and less macho on screen than in those posters.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Anyway, he stumbles around hungover and makes some bad coffee(this whole sequence is rather an homage to Paul Newman waking up as a private eye in Harper) and eventually engages the sleeping beauty when she wakes up -- and proves to be not THAT much of a beauty, and possessed of a screechy-squawky dumb blonde accent. Reynolds is appreciative and polite to her, but his last words as he leaves his own apartment are: "You're terrific....but please be out of here by noon, OK?" And he leaves.

I dunno.It seems a perfectly reasonable play out of "the morning after a one night stand," but I'm not sure it would fly in a movie made today. (Hey, maybe the woman is a hooker...)

As Reynolds dresses up in to a private eyes' sportcoat, slacks and tie uniform, its pretty clear: in 1973, this guy Reynolds had the star power up and ready to go. He looks great here; came the eighties, age, injury, and hairpiece issues would take away the natural power of his look in Shamus. But he looks great in Shamus.

And he has his comic timing down pretty good(chewing gum jaw motions help; that's how Norm MacDonald nailed his BR impression for SNL), and his ability to change expression and modulate his voice so that he projects manly confidence in all directions. The old cliché: men want to be him, women want to bed him.

Shamus rather goofily elects to put in two direct homages to "The Big Sleep" early in the picture, and then abandons any further interest in that classic. But they are there: (1) Reynolds gets his case from a rich guy in a freezing room(Bogart got HIS case from a rich guy in a superhot room) and (2) Reynolds flirts and seduces a hot book store clerk into closing the shop for a brief tryst(as unseen in 1973 as it was in 1946, though there is much more emphasis on the woman's breasts in this one. Because there can be.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

After The Big Sleep intro, Shamus --set in NYC -- moves on to violent 1970s grittiness. Visually, it reminded me of 1971's Shaft; action-wise, it reminded me of Michael Caine's brutal and realistic English crime film Get Carter, also of 1971. The Caine film has the best script and is the classic of these three, but they are rather of a piece: beatings, knifings, shootings in the gritty old seventies.

Fun: Burt came off of a TV show called "Dan August" which had a weekly chase or stunt fall. The best thing he did -- featured in the "Dan August credit sequence" -- was to slide on his belly, fist out straight at the camera placed a floor level. He repeats this stunt for "Shamus," as if he knew this movie would survive longer than that TV show. Plenty of good fight scenes and footchases in Shamus . I like how in one instance, when surrounded by three thugs, Reynolds nods and deadpan observes: "You guys are going to beat the s==t out of me, aren't you?" And they do.

There's not much more to recommend Shamus for , other than Reynolds star power quite visibly THERE. But there is this:

A trivia note: Joe Santos plays Reynolds' cop friend -- the same type of role he'd play with James Garner on the Rockford Files. I guess the Rockford makers got their idea here . (Decades later, Santos would play a mob guy for Rockford/Sopranos writer David Chase on The Sopranos.)

A trivia note: Hard times -- when they made a "Shamus" TV series pilot a few years later, Rod Taylor(The Birds) got the part. Taylor's movie leading man days were over. Taylor followed Burt's lead and played this private eye for fighting, but the pilot failed.

And just a plain note: Dyan Cannon is Reynolds love interest here, and they prove a good match: two people with beautiful bodies and sexy faces...and a great sense of humor. They eventually bed down, but Cannon is laughing so much the rest of the time that you almost can't take the love scene seriously.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Two years earlier, Dyan Cannon had played ex-con Sean Connery's squeeze in The Anderson Tapes. its like Cannon was perfect counterpoint to macho men Connery and Reynolds, which reminds me: Deliverance director John Boorman offered the weird SciFi movie "Zardoz" to Burt Reynolds before giving it to Connery. Connery had to go shirtless in a red diaper in that film, for the whole film. I suppose Reynolds wasn't into that.

Anyway, Shamus. A mishmash of The Big Sleep and the gritty violent seventies, well anchored by Burt Reynolds, proving he was ready for his close-up.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Interesting, I'd never heard of Shamus before, and will definitely now give it a look some time.

Somewhat relatedly I recently tracked down The Terminal Man (1973?) w/ George Segal, directed by Mike Hodges hot off Get Carter (1971) (and a followup with Caine called Pulp which I've not had a chance to see yet), and written by Michael Crichton.

I read Crichton's underlying novel as a kid and remember finding it like a sleazy version of The Andromeda Strain - lots of included medical reports and computer printouts again but this time with lots of sex and violence. The movie feels a bit like this too but is only half-hearted about the sleaze. Hodges pushes things towards Andromeda Strain with a bit of Clockwork Orange's social satire (Kubrick praised the film to the ceiling for some reason.). But Segal is no Malcolm McDowell or Jack Nicholson or Caine - someone who could embody menace and sexiness which the sleazy side of the story requires. Jill Clayburgh is also miscast as a stripper in my view, and nothing about her character makes much sense. She's only in a couple of scenes but each time one goes 'Huh?'

I followed online advice and omitted a dopey, incomprehensible prologue that the studio forced on Hodges but the film still didn't work. The medical predictions and sermonizing - 'Some Day We'll all have wires in our heads.' - are wrong and heavy-handed. Occasionally a picture of sleazy and over-confident male doctors emerges that would have made for a better story: The Hospital Part 2, perhaps, this time with computers and robots and strippers.

In sum, The Terminal Man is nowhere near a 'lost classic'. It's not a good sleazy thriller and it's not a sharp satire like The Hospital or Clockwork Orange. It's watchable but that's about it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Interesting, I'd never heard of Shamus before, and will definitely now give it a look some time.

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Well, its a little bitty thing, I didn't see it when it came out, catching up with it now its just massively nostalgic....Burt Reynolds when he looked about his best(if THIS Burt Reynolds had been with Clint Eastwood in City Heat, it mighta been a hit) , the gritty semi-documentary look of the film(ala ALL 70's crime movies of this type), the "Rockford" guy and the extremely weird decision on somebody's part to put in two Big Sleep scene references(though I think "sex-ing" up the book store conquest was probably something the shockingly frank 1946 scene always invited somebody to do)

I find myself more interested in seeing and opining on old "pulp movies" than trying to watch something important and report on it. Like, I've never seen The Man Who Fell to Earth, but I expect I should and yet...I doubt I'd know how to talk about it as I can about Shamus. (That said, I may yet see The Man Who Fell to Earth.)

One note on Shamus: there are many stunt chases and falls in the film(one can see why Burt Reynolds hobbled around on a cane as an 80-something in The Last Movie Star) but one stands out: Burt(or stuntman Hal Needham), for a low angle on a real jump, leaps for a tree branch that snaps in his hands and causes him to plummet about 30 feet to the ground. It looks like a bad fall. Evidently there is debate whether Reynolds or Needham took this fall, but it looks real, and painful.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One memory I have of Shamus is its review by Jay Cocks in Time magazine. He wrote that Reynolds was basing his stardom on mimicking the timing and line delivery of....Johnny Carson! Well, yeah, a little bit.

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This was months after this memorable Cocks review of Frenzy, not quite a rave, but good enough: "Frenzy is not at the level of Hitchcock's greatest work, but it is smooth and shrewd and dexterous, a fitting reminder that anyone who makes a suspense film is but an apprentice to this old Master."

I might add that in the early 70's, I was an inveterate reader of the film reviews in Time and Newsweek, which my parents subscribed to. I got my film education -- and my excitement about movies -- from these reviews, and I also picked up the "smarty pants" approaches taken by these writers.

Cocks wrote of American Graffiti -- "As the kids back then might say, American Graffiti is bitchin. Superfine."

He loved Don Siegel's Dirty Harry and Charley Varrick and wrote about both films as if they were the events of the year(maybe that's where I picked that up.) The opening bank robbery in Dirty Harry, wrote Cocks, "is a set piece that pummels the senses." Well, OK.

Speaking of Charley Varrick, I streamed a very interesting artifact the other day: a very cheap 1959 movie called "Gangster Story." Its a rather interesting little thing.

It stars Walter Matthau as a bank robber -- so there's your Charley Varrick connection right there. It barely runs over an hour. I have no idea if it was released anywhere.

Matthau wrote and directed it! And what's weird is that, while the production is at Ed Wood "Plan Nine from Outer Space" level, Matthau was already Walter Matthau in 1959, so its like a movie star is inexplicably in an Ed Wood movie. His romantic interest is the woman he became his second (and permanent) wife, Carol...something.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Matthau wrote one nifty idea for an early bank robbery in the picture. He summons real police(three of them) to a bank before opening, tells them he is playing a bank robber in a movie(!), and that the local bank manager will be playing himself in scene set after a robbery.

Matthau: Now he's going to drive up and say "what happened?" and I want you(picks one cop) to say: "Go inside, please." Then he and I will film our scene."

Matthau having already called the bank manger to panic him, watches as the manager drives up, indeed says "What happened?" and is ushered into the bank by the cops, who wait outside as Matthau indeed robs the bank, getting the manager to open the vault and locking him inside. Matthau then walks out with the loot and talks to the copsl

Matthau: Well, that's it. Its a wrap. Thanks for your help. That bank manager is a real method actor. He locked himself in the vault. I have no idea how he''ll get out.

The cops go in. Matthau drives away. Funny scene in an Ed Wood-level production with tinny "purchased music" that doesn't fit. Gangster Story.

I think I better see The Man Who Fell to Earth! Nick Roeg and all.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Somewhat relatedly I recently tracked down The Terminal Man (1973?) w/ George Segal, directed by Mike Hodges hot off Get Carter (1971)

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Get Carter is a movie that I have taken to heart in recent years. I own a DVD copy and I find myself watching it two or three times a year. I find its tres' early 70's grit up there in Newcastle mesmerizing. The city is presented as drab and grim and yet I'm fascinated by scenes in its pubs and big cavernous dance club(which resembles a bingo parlor, seems very depressing, and yet likely in real life DID provide a place for the working class to meet and love.)

I love Caine's scene where he shakes down his old pal(actually enemy) "Eric" at the racetrack and they have this exchange on the chauffer outfit Eric is wearing:

Caine: Nice outfit. Are you selling martinis?
Eric: Oh...you've been watching television. (Except Eric pronounces it "telly-VISH-shun" with an emphasis on the middle syllable.)

The rest of the time, Caine keeps nastily using Eric's name with the man all the time -- "Doing good, are you, Eric?" "Looking at a good pension, Eric?" "Come off it, Eric") and famously remarks that Eric's eyes still look like "pissholes in the snow." Later in the film, Caine will be forcing Eric to drink a whole bottle of whiskey as a prelude to murder: "I want you...to drink all of that...drink up! DRINK UP, Eric!"

And then on to various beatings, some pretty good sex scenes, an appalling knife murder ....just a great movie that looks so 1971 you can taste it(greatness on a budget of what looks like $100,000.)

Had to stop and praise Get Carter. Some days, I think it has dethroned Dirty Harry as my favorite of 1971. They are now l likely tied for all time, with me.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

(and a followup with Caine called Pulp which I've not had a chance to see yet)

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I tried with that one, but couldn't get through it on a cable viewing. One feels that "Get Carter" was Mike Hodges peak, though he pulled off the similar Croupier decades later(I showed up because of Get Carter) and he did Flash Gordon in 1980, and I thought that was pretty swift(with its Queen score, its square blond hero --now immortalized in the talking-bear "Ted" movies -- and Timothy Dalton getting ready for Bond.)

Mike Hodges also wrote a great essay, for a Film Comment, on seeing Psycho in a small town in England in 1960...he conveyed how the cavernous old Palace theater - usually empty when playing "normal" movies -- was packed to the gills , how the audience screamed in unison "DON"T GO UP THERE!" when Arbogast climbed the stairs, how Psycho added Mike Hodges to its list of people who decided to get into movies because of it. But...I think the great power of the piece is to remind us that Psycho -- decades before the movies became the worldwide enterprise that they are today -- still managed to travel to some upstate small town in England and terrorize an entire theater on one summer night. Psycho was a phenomenon that travelled the world with terror.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I read Crichton's underlying novel as a kid and remember finding it like a sleazy version of The Andromeda Strain - lots of included medical reports and computer printouts again but this time with lots of sex and violence.

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I recall being excited by both the book and the movie of "Andromeda Strain" and how The Terminal Man seemed like a big letdown with both of its versions ...even with the sex and violence it was as if Crichton didn't have the proper "hold" on his subject: a kind of Frankenstein's monster of a modern man.

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The movie feels a bit like this too but is only half-hearted about the sleaze. Hodges pushes things towards Andromeda Strain with a bit of Clockwork Orange's social satire (Kubrick praised the film to the ceiling for some reason.). But Segal is no Malcolm McDowell or Jack Nicholson or Caine - someone who could embody menace and sexiness which the sleazy side of the story requires.

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Though I guess you could say I was a big fan of ANY movie star in the 70's, , George Segal was near the top of my list. There just seemed to be a good mix of the handsome, the cool...and the exasperated...to him. He looked great with a moustache and longish hair in "Where's Poppa?" and "The Owl and the Pussycat." He looked good without a moustache as Redford's buddy in The Hot Rock, and in a movie everybody but me hates -- "The Black Bird," where he plays Sam Spade's misbegotten private eye son.

In The Terminal Man, it was like Segal was badly miscast and forced to "not look his best." He made no sense as a monster. He was Cary Grant, not Boris Karloff.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Jill Clayburgh is also miscast as a stripper in my view, and nothing about her character makes much sense. She's only in a couple of scenes but each time one goes 'Huh?'

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Heck, I forgot she was in the movie. Actually I forget a lot about the movie. I didn't see it in the theater. I saw it on a very primitive "LA-Only" early version of HBO called "The Z Channel" that showed three movies a week, for a week. Period.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I followed online advice and omitted a dopey, incomprehensible prologue that the studio forced on Hodges but the film still didn't work. The medical predictions and sermonizing - 'Some Day We'll all have wires in our heads.' - are wrong and heavy-handed. Occasionally a picture of sleazy and over-confident male doctors emerges that would have made for a better story: The Hospital Part 2, perhaps, this time with computers and robots and strippers.

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Its funny. I never saw Shamus when it came out. I saw The Terminal(on cable) around the time it came out -- but can barely remember a thing. That's one reason I can' t say much about it...I didn't think it was good enough when I saw it to retain it in the memory banks. I do remember thinking it was a real step backward for George Segal in role and look, and much less "big" than The Andromeda Strain.

Maybe I can track it down for one more view, for old time's sake.

It took Michael Crichton awhile to get relevant again after "Andromeda Strain" and his nifty movie "Westworld"(which we have in a much more sumptuous version today.) All the way to "Jurrassic Park" (Which was called "Westworld with Dinosaurs" at first.)

In sum, The Terminal Man is nowhere near a 'lost classic'. It's not a good sleazy thriller and it's not a sharp satire like The Hospital or Clockwork Orange. It's watchable but that's about it.

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A rare 70's George Segal misfire.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Back on the Burt Reynolds beat...with sidetrips to Ryan O'Neal, Peter Bogdanovich, and Stanley Kubrick. (I just watched a few films which criss-cross these players.)

Where to start?

Nickelodeon. A Bogdanovich movie from 1976. I haven't seen it in decades. I remember it as bad, and I know that it was the final killer punch after one(Daisy Miller), two (At Long Last Love). Three and Bogdo was out. This after the one(Last Picture Show) two(What's Up Doc) and three(Paper Moon) of hits made him a Big Auteur.

I always felt that weakneses in the good three showed up in spades in the bad three and -- Bye, Bye, Bogdo.

What's hard to watch about Nickelodeon is how one can see not only the good movie it COULD have been(probably if Bodgo had not co-written the often stilted and awful script), and the great movie it IS -- star-wise , that is.

Often Bodgo lines up his star talent grouped (like a Hawks group) and looking out into the distance together and its like Bogdo is saying: "Look who I landed for this movie!") Burt Reynolds standing next to Ryan O'Neal(two differing visions of manly handsomeness, truly movie stars at the time), standing next to Tatum O'Neal(which brings back the Paper Moon vibe) standing next to John Ritter(a new young actor at the time ,but handsome and pleasant looking), standing next to Stella Stevens(a pretty but worn woman with "movie history") standing next to...Jane Hitchcock(?)

About Jane Hitchcock. Utterly gorgeous. Got this role when Columbia steadfastly refused to let Bodgo cast Cybill Shepard(Hitchcock was a Shepard friend.) Can't act, at least not very well. Only did one other movie.

But still, you've got two major movie stars(O'Neal and Reynolds -- billed in that order; O'Neal was bigger at the time), one Oscar winner(the other O'Neal...quite charmingly deadpan here yet again), one newbie star(John Ritter) one total hottie(Hitchcock) and...Stella Stevens (always welcome.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Plus you got Brian Keith -- big and blustery and macho, back in his prime.

That's a GREAT cast. And they are all playing "pioneers of the first silent films" in a tale based on a great deal of Bogdo's scholarly research about a time when the "Patents" movie monopoly literally shot at and beat up any indie filmmakers out there. On paper, this should have been a great movie. And the great, generally great looking cast ARE a great movie(just looking at them).

Too bad so much about this film is so horrible. Its all Bodgo's fault. Not only is the script terrible, but he "over-directs" everybody to talk too fast(fake Hawks), act too false, and move ridiculously. (In one scene, O'Neal punches Reynolds and Reynolds knocks down seven people behind him who all fall at once...it looks fake and plays dumb.)

The seeds for how bad Nickelodeon is are in What's Up Doc, another movie where Bogdo directed people to talk and move in an over-done, stilted manner. One watches NIckelodeon in literal anger: he had THIS cast(you see my theme) and he made them do THAT?

Example: Jane Hitchcock(in a bad close-up) has to deliver these lines to a door bouncer:

Bouncer: What is it?
Hitchcock: I....I....I...I
Bouncer: What?
Hitchcock: My...my....my...my

What? What? What? (And poor Jane Hitchcock...who COULD deliver those lines?)

The exposure of Bogdanovich's creative bankruptcy was total. He was over as an auteur, decades of small projects (some of them good) and struggle began.

I read an autobio of Billy Bob Thornton, and Billy Bob said "I can understand good reviews, but why waste your time writing about how you don't like something? Who does that help? Do you just want to be mean?"

Well, I think when -- for whatever brief time -- Peter Bogdanovich was held up as a brilliant filmmaker and paid millions and lauded that...if he delivered something as poorly done and witless as Nickelodeon...its not like you should PRAISE the guy.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Its funny: Ryan O'Neal and Burt Reynolds both signed on to a Bodgo movie because he still had a great rep at the time. After all, he had delivered two hits for O'Neal: What's Up Doc and Paper Moon. But Reynolds found himself in two Bodgo bombs in a row(At Long Last Love and this one) and O'Neal ended up sinking with him.

O'Neal and Reynolds are good flavors together on the screen, btw. One blond "pretty" boy and one brunette macho guy -- though Reynolds does the first act of Nickelodeon without his stache and plays things as a young naif. One realizes, watching them together, that both already had a "schtick" going -- O'Neal's "Whats Up Doc" pseudo-intellectual prissiness; Reynolds great ability to project utter coolness with a light smile and a thoughtful look(he DID channel Cary Grant in this period.)

A leap backwards: Ryan O'Neal did "Nickelodeon" in '76 one year after he did "Barry Lyndon" for Kubrick in '75, so he came into this movie with a "prestige rep" that probably overshadowed Reynolds. And yet, O'Neal had gotten some bad reviews for his "miscast pretty boy" in Barry Lyndon.

And yet, I read -- last week after watching Barry Lyndon -- that O'Neal is in Barry Lyndon because Warners wouldn't finance the movie without a 1973 "Top Ten Star" in it...and only two fit Barry Lyndon that year: Robert Redford(who turned Lyndon down) and O'Neal(voila!)

But this...at the time(1973), O'Neal was a BIGGER STAR than Redford...but that changed within three years and when they made "A Bridge Too Far" in '77, Redford got the top pay in the picture.(Redford and O'Neal do one scene in the movie, and Redford comes out better.)

That's quite a little "star roundelay" -- O'Neal to Redford to Reynolds - -and by the time things settled, O'Neal lost his stardom, Redford became the Top Dog who Survived, and Reynolds became the Top Dog Who Crashed.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Which brings me to:

Burt Reynolds in "Raven." A straight-to-cable movie.

It was on streaming the other night. It had a date of "2018" but Reynolds looked pretty good, so I checked and it was really from 1996.

It was humiliating to watch. I thought about how Reynolds had had the cover of Time with Eastwood in 1978, and it had come to this: Eastwood with his "Unforgiven" Oscars and still a star in 1996, Reynolds doing not only THIS straight to cable movie, but about five others("Hostage Hotel," "Big City Blues" "The Maddening." ) I haven't seen those others, but Raven was bad enough.

Raven isn't really a movie. Its not a TV show, either. Its simply some people with a camera making a simple story as cheaply as possible, with a bad script, and not well. Reynolds is off screen a lot of the time -- he probably shot his role in a week or two. But it is not a cameo. Sadly he DOES have to show up a lot , start to finish.

The rest of the cast are young studly men(bodybuilders) and young pretty women(in bikinis or less.) There a couple of sex scenes for the young ones(Reynolds does not participate.) Its a spy plot thing where Reynolds is actually the BAD GUY...out to kill off people who quit his gang.

But the main thing to say about Raven, as bad as it is, and as badly written as it is, is this: Burt Reynolds is a star in it. The old charisma is still there, he doesn't "slum," its almost gallant to see Burt giving this piece of junk the star power he always had. (He has a great hairpiece in this one, too -- natural.)

I"ve had rather a "Cook's Tour" of the Burt Reynolds career(less Smokey) in the past few weeks. He's macho, charming and funny in Shamus(he just looked great at that age), "stretching" a bit for innocence and comedy in the terrible "Nickelodeon"(and well-paired with O'Neal) and doing good work for low pay in "Raven." What a career. Yikes (oh, well, he did Boogie Nights one year after "Raven" and got his only Oscar nom. Go figure.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And this: as bad as Burt Reynolds crash-and-burn career was, Ryan O'Neal's was worse. And he seems to have deserved it, if not his kids, (almost?) all of them on drugs, some in jail, all messed up(including Oscar winner Tatum.) Watching Ryan O'Neal and Burt Reynolds as Big Stars in "Nickelodeon" is a cautionary tale: maybe you WOULDN"t want a star career.

And this: a cursory check of Ryan O'Neal's career on imdb revealed that he was a boxer in his youth and won a LOT of Golden Gloves fights. No wonder he carved a path through all those Hollywood women. That pretty face AND a boxer's background. O'Neal and Reynolds have a comical fistfight in Nickelodeon, but I watched it knowing that O'Neal was a real pro...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One last thing on Nickelodeon(bringing Orson Welles in)

When they put "The Other Side of the Wind"(Orson Welles' last film) on streaming a few weeks ago, they put a Welles documentary on too.

And in that documentary, Peter Bodganovich notes that, even as he thought he was a pal of Orson's (he's in The Other Side of the Wind and he let the broke Welles live i his house), Welles went on the Tonight Show with Burt Reynolds as host and they had this exchange:

Reynolds: We had Peter Bodganovich on here the other night as a guest host --
Welles: How you manage to get him OFF?
Reynolds laughs.
Welles: I know you did Nickelodeon for him. I felt that movie really needed you.
Reynolds: (Winces, smiles) It needed a lot MORE than me.

Peter Bodganovich learns: you have no friends in Hollywood.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

One major O'Neal movie (at least for cineastes) you don't mention: The Driver (1978) directed by Walter Hill. Edgar Wright has drawn attention to how many shots and locations in downtown LA and general action beats that The Terminator lifted from The Driver, and I rewatched it last year in that light (and in Baby Driver's and Drive's light too).

O'Neal is good in it. We believe him as a laconic tough guy who'd attract some equally inscrutable French hottie (Adjani) but also be able to coldly walk away from her. I guess O'Neal never had much ability to project much of an inner life on screen but in The Driver that fact works for the role. Too bad for O'Neal that icy male leads didn't become a thing in Hollywood after this.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One major O'Neal movie (at least for cineastes) you don't mention: The Driver (1978) directed by Walter Hill.

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Oh, yeah, I liked that one and saw it on opening weekend.

The print ad/poster was rather cool, for this was that brief period in which Bruce Dern was an above the title movie star (The Laughing Policeman, Posse, Family Plot -- the very A list Black Sunday) and he was on the poster with O'Neail and Adjani. I believe they were named only "The Driver," "The Cop" and "The Girl." (that last one, I'm not sure...)

O'Neal...not leashed to the Bogdanovich "Cary Grant silly deadpan" model, said very little, acted very cool(I think McQueen turned this script down) and was very good.

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O'Neal is good in it. We believe him as a laconic tough guy who'd attract some equally inscrutable French hottie (Adjani) but also be able to coldly walk away from her.

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As he did in real life, with lots of ladies. Though he remained loyal(if not faithful) to Farrah Fawcett in her last months.

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I guess O'Neal never had much ability to project much of an inner life on screen but in The Driver that fact works for the role. Too bad for O'Neal that icy male leads didn't become a thing in Hollywood after this.

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Well, its somebody's old rule: they don't become stars without having SOME special power. Seeing O'Neal and Reynolds in Nickelodeon, one is reminded that they fought their way up(starting in TV, both of them), succeeded in certain films, demonstrated star power beyond "good looks."

Getting stardom is very hard. Keeping it can be harder. Only the luckiest (Eastwood) and best(Nicholson) go on for decades.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

That said, I don't think The Driver was a big hit, and as the 80s came -- for O'Neal and so many other 70's male stars -- his star faded. Off the top of my head, I remember one funny 1981 film(from the writer-director of the hilarious "In Laws") called "So Fine" that I saw and liked, with O'Neal. But he didn't last much longer than '81. O'Neal himself says he felt that Barry Lyndon actually, in some way he could not pinpoint, killed his career. Perhaps the bad reviews HE got, when the film did not. Unfair...that's the guy he was playing.

Still: Love Story, What's Up Doc, Paper Moon...Barry Lyndon(a major classic in some quarters, and by a true auteur)....enough to leave behind a legacy. And then all the rest, led perhaps by The Driver. But a HORRIBLE private life. I salute the movies, not the man.

PS I re-watched Nickelodeon(it will leave streaming soon) and darned if I didn't like it better the second time. I fast-forwarded less, found the "good" story (about a Hawksian crew of silent film adventurers) that had been obscured by the bad lines and overdone slapstick. I also came to see the slapstick(however awkward at times) to be the point of things.

One good scene has the crew and their star(Reynolds), viewing a silent movie they made, and then being followed down the street by a crowd. Turns out that this crowd is the first coming of....fans. Reynolds is stunned to see that they worship him -- O"Neal, not so much("You just directed it? You weren't IN it?" they say, pushing him aside) . Soon these fans are tearing Reynolds clothes off to get "fan souveniers(sp)" and chasing him down the street. Movie fans started on their own out of nowhere; human nature made them.

Before watching again, I read a few good reviews of NIckelodeon that supported its sometimes charming style, its Rio Bravo-like love for its characters, and its deep love for how the movies started. OK, its a little better than I first thought. A little.

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