The pace of the film, small town politics, twisting plot-line, violence, black comedy and brooding characters all have a Coen Brothers feel about Charley Varrick and wonder if Siegel inspired their movies.
share[deleted]
Yes, clearly.
shareInspired? No way. Iconoclasts like the Coens were film makers from their early years. Having said that, everyone involved in a creative process sees the work of other people and to a greater or lesser extent some of that is bound to rub off. There is, after all, nothing new.
shareWhy wouldn't "iconoclasts" like the Coens be inspired by another filmmaker? All filmmakers have been "inspired" by something, and it makes perfect sense that the Coens were inspired by Siegel.
"...nothing is left of me, each time I see her..." - Catullus
Can you show me anything that would support such a claim? Siegel was a straight-line director, he filmed an uncomplicated narrative and rarely made use of humour or irony. If the idea made 'perfect sense' I wouldn't be querying it, would I?
The Coens may well have admired his films -I really have no idea - but it's a helluva stretch to insist that they were 'inspired' by him. A good film maker will always have an ear to the ground to keep track of what's happening (which is how Vin Diesel came to be given his start by Spielberg) and if he particularly likes something then he's going to incorporate it if he can. It's what all artists do.
Siegel and the Coens are chalk and cheese, for my money, and I certainly don't see any reflections of him in their films. If you know better, I'll be interested to hear it. In the meantime you should maybe bear in mind Jean-Luc Godard's dictum: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
You misunderstand me, I'm not saying that they had to be inspired by Siegel. What I said was, it makes perfect sense that they were, or rather that they *could be" inspired by him.
Maybe you and I have a different idea about what being "inspired" means. There is no director out there that hasn't been "inspired" by someone. The Coens didn't come along and invent filmmaking all by themselves. They saw what others did and put a spin on it.
As far as the Coens and Siegel being "chalk and cheese", I disagree. Seigel was one of the first directors to break away from the maxim that the "bad guys" needed to be caught in the end. He was able to inspire sympathy in the audience for a pretty lousy character. Charley Varrick and his wife were responsible for the deaths of several innocent, good people, and yet at the end we are pulling for him.
He and Peckinpah were a couple of mavericks who filmed slices of ugly life without trying to gussy it up for puritanical audiences. Like Siegel and Peckinpah, the Coens make movies as if they are real events. Irredeemable characters doing lousy things in a lousy world. Any filmmaker that followed had to be — in some way — influenced by that kind of filmmaking. I'm not saying they copied him or that everyone must have been influenced *directly* by their films, but it isn't out of the bounds of reality to say that anyone doing so could have been inspired by these directors.
"...nothing is left of me, each time I see her..." - Catullus
Get a room, you two.
Meanwhile, back to the thread. Yes, i think the Coens were most definitely inspired by Siegel.
I did not know until recently that Siegel was a 2nd director on Casablanca! He shot a montage sequence.
from http://www.transatlantichabit.com/noir/Don-Siegel.pdf
In Charley Varrick (1973) the audience spends
the first part of the film wondering why the main
character (Walter Matthau) is so inept and clumsy,
only to find out at the end that it is all part of his plan
for the coup of a lifetime. The fast and carefully con-
structed story evolves in a world of moral ambiva-
lence and violence, where a not-so-good-guy is still a
lot better than the bad guys. He is a descendant of the
classic noir hero, a man who is never very good—
whose character may in fact be profoundly ambigu-
ous—but who in the end proves to have some sense of
morals.
There are strong echoes of Varrick’s character in
Josh Brolin’s Llewellyn Moss in No Country for Old
Men (2007), except that the Coens kill off their loner
who takes on the big guys long before the end of the
film—to thwart anticipations, to ruin the story, to
shock. It is something Siegel would never have done,
for he believed in satisfying the basic needs of an
audience, including its moral demand for the not-
always-so-good guy to win in the end. The relentless
killer (Joe Don Baker) in Charley Varrick also reap-
pears in the Coen brothers’ “remake” (played by
Javier Bardem), and again the Coens refuse catharsis.
They let the dead-eyed murderer walk away at the
finale, whereas Siegel’s pudgy, smiling killer gets his
comeuppance.
Siegel counterposed these character explorations
with a high degree of technical cinematic
accomplishment: It was a way of having his
aesthetic cake and eating it too. (This also seems to
have rubbed off on the Coen brothers, and, in certain
of his films, Quentin Tarantino, though perhaps not in
a way that Siegel would necessarily endorse.) He
made difficult shots but never for their own sake, nor
did he engage in in-depth psychological portraits.
Siegel referred at times to his own “fancy directing.
Any "iconoclast" is more likely than most others to be inspired by a tough director of iconic films like Siegel. What the hell are you talking about?
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!
[deleted]
Not in the slightest. Genre films are the grist for iconoclastic filmmakers' mills and thus an inspiration of sorts. The Coen regularly play affectionately with the very same conventions they *beep* with. Jerk.
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!
[deleted]
If you don't think the Coen Brothers use a lot of conventions from genre films, you don't know the Coen Brothers.
edit: of course it should say they play with a lot of conventions in unconventional ways
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!
Fine. You're absolutely and totally right. Rude of me to even question it, since you are American and therefore know everything. Twazzock.
shareWhy do you assume I'm American? I'm not, by the way.
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!
The second part of your post disproves your first three words.
Hitler! C'mon, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade.
Which director with some self-respect is not inspired by Siegel....?
"Dyslexics have more fnu."
Maybe even more by Sam Peckinpah, Siegel's pupil :) .
Titus Androgenicus
"No Country For Old Men" is a faithful adaptation of a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The similarities between "Charley Varrick" and the McCarthy novel were noticed quite early, even before the Coens started to work on the adaptation.
Actually, McCarthy has more or less written his slimmed down version of the movie as a novel, with the main characters gaining even more simplicity and strength through the process.
Don Siegel's movies can be quite amazing. Try "The Big Steal", starring Robert Mitchum. You can swear it is a Tarantino movie, even if it's from 1949. It's that modern...
I'd say yes.
No Country For Old Men is practically the same story.