AFI #21: Chinatown (1974)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on August 21, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(M) ★★★★★

Director: Roman Polanski.

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, Roy Jenson, Roman Polanski, Dick Bakalyan, Joe Mantell, Bruce Glover, Nandu Hinds, James Hong, Beulah Quo.

"Got a light?"

In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind offers plenty of unkind evaluations of Hollywood's key players of the '60s and '70s, but one of the bluntest he saves for Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne.

"Towne had two weaknesses," writes Biskind. "He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts. And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller. He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events."

As Chinatown producer Robert Evans (who doesn't escape Biskind's withering pen) put it, "Towne could talk to you about a screenplay he was going to write and tell you every page of it, and it never came out on paper - never".

Remarkable then that Chinatown, the film Towne won his Academy Award for, is one of the best screenplays of all time. It's story of a detective hired to catch a cheating husband, only to uncover large-scale corruption, a land grab and worse, is still used today to teach screenwriting students. 

The secret to its success, according to Biskind and others, was director Roman Polanksi, who described Towne's script as a mess and spent nearly two months rewriting it to Towne's dismay. Polanski made huge cuts, re-ordered scenes, ditched the unnecessary narration, and wrote the bleak "European" ending. He also got rid of superfluous characters and scenes, effectively halving the script's length.

But most importantly, Polanski reshaped the mystery so the audience sees it unfold through the eyes of ex-cop-turned-private eye Jake Gittes (Nicholson). Polanski even frames numerous shots from Gittes' perspective, or over his shoulder, or by following him into a scene - when Gittes gets knocked out in a fight, the whole film goes dark and the action only restarts when Gittes reawakens. The detective is in every scene and we learn everything as he learns it, giving the film its propulsive edge, pulling us through the shocks and surprises with him. It's Towne's sizzling dialogue, well crafted characters and meticulously interwoven plots, but Polanski gave it the much-needed structure and distinctive point-of-view Towne couldn't.

This video explains a lot more of why the script is so great, but it's also full of spoilers FYI:

There's an old writing adage that it's not enough to have your hero stuck in a tree - you have to throw rocks at them too. Chinatown is a beautiful example of this. With every serpentine twist of this brilliant detective story, Gittes gets shot, bashed, threatened and sliced. The questions pile up and by the end, we have all the answers, but Gittes is a broken man, and you're left wondering was it worth it? Is it ever worth it? Nope. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. That's what that final line means - you can't solve them all, you can't help everyone. Hell, maybe you can't even help anyone. Try, and you'll end up a fractured shell of a human, like Gittes. It pays not to care. Bleak, innit? Pays to remember that the director's pregnant wife was murdered just five years prior in the very city where the movie was set and shot. It's fair to say Polanski, who would later flee America after allegedly drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl, did not have a terribly cheery view of humanity at the time.

Chinatown, arguably Polanski's best film, is a throwback, invoking the noir films of the '30s, '40s and '50s, and the tropes of writers Dashiell Hammett, James M Cain and Raymond Chandler, but not just in its 1937 setting or its detective story. Picture its shots in black and white, and Chinatown could easily have sat alongside the likes of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity or even Sunset Boulevard. The production design beautifully captures the Los Angeles of 1937, and the cinematography goes from gorgeous wideshots of drought-stricken California to wobbly handheld grabs of sudden violence. Polanski throws in focus pulls and slow camera moves for good measure - nothing too elaborate, just tricks that highlight Gittes (and the audience) taking in the evidence or assessing a piece of the puzzle.

Before Towne even struck the first key on his typewriter, Gittes was always going to be played by Jack Nicholson. The two were friends, and no one else was ever even considered for the role. It's one of his many great performances (he earnt his fourth of 12 Oscar nominations here) and showcases his ability to make questionable characters likeable. Gittes is a wise-ass but empathetic, well-to-do but not unscrupulous, cutting but kind, arrogant but clever. His moral code, like him, is far from perfect, but generally he is a good man. Nicholson showcases all these dichotomies beautifully, while also painting a portrait of an increasingly vulnerable man. There's an eyeroll he delivers, only half-caught by the camera, in the opening scene that perfectly illustrates the limits of his capacity to care in the midst of a moment where he's otherwise being generous to a cash-strapped man who's just found out his wife is cheating on him. By the film's end, there are no eyerolls - just the dead-eyed stare of devastation as Gittes is guided away from the carnage of Chinatown. Both men are Gittes, equally inhabited by Nicholson.

Seeing him opposite Faye Dunaway, another of the all-time greats, is one of the wonderful bonuses of Chinatown. She may have feuded endlessly with Polanski on set, but you wouldn't know it from watching the finished product. Coolly subverting the noir stereotype of the femme fatale, Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray (a role intended for Ali McGraw, then Jane Fonda) comes across as villain and victim in different moments, switching easily from venomous to vulnerable. It's a beautifully written role (Towne gets the credit here), but a difficult one, and Dunaway makes all the complexities and secrets of Evelyn feel real. It earned Dunaway her second of three Oscar nominations, and the film sparks of electricity whenever she and Nicholson share the screen.

Another great Hollywood stare-off.

Rounding it all out is John Huston as the bad guy whose true depravity only becomes apparent late in the film when the shock twists pile up on each other like a car crash. Huston, who was at the time a living legend of noir having written and directed The Maltese Falcon, gives a marvellous performance that is deceptively human and frightening in its mundaneness. His actions in the final moments are soul-destroying, helping to give the film one of the great downer endings of all time.

Unlike a lot of films on this list, Chinatown was revered at the time by critics, award-givers and audiences alike. Towne was the film's only Oscar-winner out of eleven nominations - The Godfather Part II cleaned up that year - but Chinatown won four Golden Globes and three BAFTAs. Like now, chief among the recognition was for that screenplay. Google "best screenplays of all time" and you'll find Chinatown only a click away. Now, as it was then, people knew Chinatown's script was one for the ages.

AFI #20: It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on August 21, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: Frank Capra.

Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Beulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, H. B. Warner, Frank Albertson, Todd Karns.

The public was unsure about Santa's new look.

The opposite of Orwellian is Capraesque. The former imagines the worst ideas that humanity can conjure for the benefit of the few, while the latter imagines the best of humanity triumphing over those ideals through sheer goodness and decency. 

If such notions of good succeeding against a corrupt system seem sadly fanciful now, they were also derided back in Capra's heyday. "Capra-corn" some called it. 

In fact, It's A Wonderful Life was a box-office flop in 1946, and met with middling reviews. It earnt Capra his sixth and final Oscar nomination for best director, but at the time it signalled the end of his run as a can-do-no-wrong director. It was the first film Capra had made since his stint making propaganda films for the US War Department, and coming so soon after WWII, perhaps Capra's hopefulness didn't jive with the horrors of recent reality.

But It's A Wonderful Life is a tonic. It's easy to be cynical and dismiss it as "too easy", and "unbearable whimsy" as some reviewers did - or "sentimental hogwash", as chief villain Mr Potter puts it -  but shutting out the endless shitshow of 2020 and watching this optimistic ode to human decency and community is revitalising and even necessary. This reminder of goodness is part of what revived the film's fortunes - when its copyright lapsed into the public domain in the '60s, it became cheap Xmas fare for TV networks every year. It's A Wonderful Life turned into a yuletide tradition, and much like a nice snifter of the Christmas brandy, it warms the heart and makes you feel good.

It's hyper-American, but its message is timeless and universal. In George Bailey (Stewart) and the apple-pie small town of Bedford Falls, we see the American Dream - that everyone can own a home, and that if you endure and do good, you'll get your miracle. George gives up almost every dream he ever had and makes sacrifice after sacrifice, and every time he does something good, he suffers. He's pushed to breaking point, but every good deed he ever did is repaid by a community he didn't even realise he'd helped to build. 

Beyond its moral message, It's A Wonderful Life is entertaining and well made. As Karen Krizanovich noted in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, shorn of its "holiday distractions, the film is actually more a delightfully shrewd screwball comedy packed with fast, incisive observations on love, sex, and society". 

Its sharp gags and charming sense of humour are offset by the darkness of its "what if?" episode, which is weirdly (but perfectly) brief. The film runs for 90 minutes before it swerves into its version of A Christmas Carol (or the alternative 1985 of Back To The Future 2, if you prefer). Its structure is deceptive - ask people about the film and they all talk about guardian angel stuff, which is really just the big finale.

Even if you can't stomach the white-picket-fence wholesomeness and idyllic Christian decency of it all (note how Bedford Falls turns into a run of booze halls, gambling dens and dancing girls in its dark timeline), you have to at least acknowledge Stewart's amazing turn. It earned him the third of his five Oscar nominations for best actor, and in the pantheon of great Stewart performances it's one of his best. There is plenty of the aw-shucks earnestness he was renowned for, as well as the Mr Smith Goes To Washington-style pontificating, but when things get grim he shows the darkness that categorised many of his post-war performances. He's as convincing as a gangly 20-something as he is as an angry, broken man terrifying his family. Whether he's joking with his girl, crying over a stiff drink at a bar, trashing the family home, or realising that it is indeed a wonderful life, Stewart is at one with his character, and nothing short of amazing.

The rest of the roles around him are thinner - it's very much the James Stewart show - but are well played. Reed is a great foil for Stewart as the love of his life Mary, Barrymore is an enjoyably hissable caricature as villain Mr Potter, and perpetual sideman Mitchell is under-rated as Uncle Billy.

Capra's direction is unobtrusive but the film is deceptively well-crafted. The pacing and shape of the story, the way it builds your deep affinity for George Bailey before trying to break your heart; this is good editing, and strong filmcraft. Capra was famous for letting his actors improvise - rare for the time - and it gives scenes a natural feel, which helps to win you over.

Many of the films on this list are recognised and celebrated for their artistic boundary-pushing, directorial excellence, complex characters and great performances. It's A Wonderful Life has some of those things, but really its calling card is its endearing sentiment and heartwarming messages - that community is important, that good deeds are worthy, that kindness is a valuable virtue, and that individuals can make a difference. These ideals are as vital now as they were in 1946.

AFI #19: On The Waterfront (1954)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on August 7, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: Elia Kazan.

Cast: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Pat Henning, John F. Hamilton, Leif Erickson, James Westerfield, Fred Gwynne, Rudy Bond, Martin Balsam, Katherine MacGregor.

Not pictured: the waterfront.

Many films are difficult to separate from the circumstances around their making. Apocalypse Now's production was a shitstorm of apocalyptic proportions. Many saw Raging Bull as Scorsese's therapy, as he exorcised his cocaine demons in a boxing ring. And On The Waterfront is indelibly linked to what its director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg did two years before the film's release.

Kazan and Schulberg were so-called "friendly witnesses" before the US Government's communist witch hunt, the House Un-American Activities Committee. They named names and detailed the political allegiances of a number of Hollywood folk, effectively ending the careers of the people Kazan and Schulberg outed. Kazan was seen as a rat, as opposed to a whistleblower. When he received an honorary Oscar in 1999, almost half a century after he doomed numerous colleagues to the dreaded Hollywood blacklist, half the audience remained seated, refusing to applaud. The after-effects of his testimony lingered long.

The hero of On The Waterfront is a whistleblower, seen by his colleagues as a rat. For Kazan, this one was personal. As he wrote in his 1988 autobiography, "On the Waterfront is my own story; every day I worked on that film, I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and fuck themselves."

"Did someone just tell me to go fuck myself?"

Kazan mistakes or misunderstands his place in history - what he did is not even close to comparable to Terry Malloy's stand against the corrupt union bosses and Mafioso that ran the docks of New Jersey to suit their own ends and fatten their own pockets. He ruined the careers of some of is former friends because of their one-time affiliation with a political organisation to appease a corrupt arm of government. 

Some critics can't separate the film from the film-makers' actions - Jonathan Rosenbaum told fellow reviewer Roger Ebert he could “never forgive” Kazan for using the film to justify himself. In Rosenbaum's review, he called On The Waterfront "self-serving" and "pretty pretentious". Similarly, in The Great Movies, William Bayer agreed the film "is surrounded by ambiguities which cannot be wished away".

"It is possible to argue - and many have - that On The Waterfront is not the film it seems because it is really a self-serving effort used by Kazan to justify his own actions," wrote Bayer.

But shorn of Kazan's post-curricular activities, On The Waterfront deserves all the accolades it can get (which included eight Oscars and four Golden Globes). It looks unlike any other film of its era, embracing a documentary-style in places to help deliver its gritty realism. Not even Leonard Bernstein's saccharine schmaltzy score can undo the power of the film, which is a triumph of naturalism, led by a cast of Method acting acolytes.

Leader of those disciples is Brando, giving one of his two Oscar-winning performances. He perfectly conveys the creeping weight of conscience as it rests on the shoulders of the simple-minded Malloy - a boxer with heart who slowly awakens to the corruption around him on the docks of New Jersey. But on top of being a stand-out in the movie, his ragged turn is seen by many as a turning point in acting. His Oscar helped validate drama teacher Stella Adler and the Stanislavski system, but it also (along with his performance in A Streetcar Named Desire) revolutionised acting. 

Brando also gave a lot of credit to Kazan for his acting skills. One of Kazan's great talents as a director was the way he worked with actors, and in On The Waterfront, he populates his cast with a stellar line-up to weave his magic with. Cobb is commanding as mob boss Joe Friendly, Steiger is under-rated (and more than holds his own in the famous "contender" scene) as Malloy's older brother Charlie, Maldon brings the right amount of believable fire and brimstone to the role of Father Barry, and Saint gives depth to what could have been a forgettable role in her film debut (Kazan's other great skill was finding actors - he's credited with "discovering" not only Saint, but also James Dean, Warren Beatty and Jack Palance).

But On The Waterfront and its committed cast would have been nothing without Schulberg's script, which took a series of articles about real-life corruption on the docks of New York and New Jersey and carved out a strong plot about a corrupt union killing workers who would dare to speak out against it. It's a meaty tale of good and evil, honesty and judgement, conscience and guilt, hawks and pigeons, and heaven and hell, with a heavy dose of Catholicism throughout the film - Malloy is unsubtly elevated to Christ-like level by the film's end, his final walk mirroring Jesus' stations of the cross.

That element attracts detractors. While some denounce the film's "overblown pretentiousness" (as Bayer's otherwise complimentary review puts it), it might be more accurate to characterise it as passion. That passion is at its heights in Maldon's fiery but under-rated crucifixion speech, and played low-key in the contender speech, but it's always there, giving heart to a film that has big things to say.

"On The Waterfront offers the required amount of social comment: on the exploitation of the working class, of the toughness of life at the bottom, on the dehumanisation of meaningless labour," wrote Bayer. "As a film of concern, On The Waterfront is about the best the American cinema has to offer."

There were "issue" films before On The Waterfront, but the ones that came after owe it a debt for the level of realism it injected into its modern day morality play. For all their misdeeds, Brando and Kazan had a profound effect on cinema, and much of it stems from this gritty dockside drama.

AFI #18: The General (1926)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on August 7, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(G) ★★★★★

Director: Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton.

Cast: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack, Glen Cavender, Jim Farley, Frederick Vroom, Charles Henry Smith, Frank Barnes, Joe Keaton, Mike Donlin, Tom Nawn.

There must be an easier way to travel.

When the American Film Institute first drew up their list of the 100 greatest American films in 1998, Buster Keaton's The General was nowhere to be seen. In 2007, wrongs were righted, and Keaton's classic action-adventure was inserted at #18.

The snub and subsequent un-snub are emblematic of Keaton's career. The General bombed at the box office and received only middling reviews. The film's lack of immediate success, coupled with the end of the silent era, started Keaton's career decline, leading to him losing much of his independence as a film-maker and eventually becoming a (temporarily) forgotten figure of Hollywood's dawn. While his contemporary and one-time co-star Charlie Chaplin never really went out of favour, Keaton fell on hard times and was cast sparingly in the sound era. Sight & Sound's once-a-decade best movie polls featured Chaplin films on and off since their inception in 1952 - it took until 1972 for The General to rate a mention.

"Stony-faced clown Buster Keaton (was) an artist whose ill-deserved but unavoidable decline during the sound era has since been substantially countered by a great resurgence in critical admiration," the Woodsworth Book Of Movie Classics wrote in 1996, noting the "one-time vaudevillian fortunately lived long enough to appreciate this belated recognition".

While he has many great films (Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality, The Navigator and Steamboat Bill Jr among them), The General is rightly seen as a high point, rather than the overly ambitious big-budget flop it was derided as back in 1926. 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die called it a "strong contender to the title of the greatest comedy ever made". 

"One might even argue that it comes as close to flawless perfection as any feature ever made, comic or otherwise," reviewer Geoff Andrew wrote in 1001 Movies.

"Check, check... is this thing on?"

The story is simple enough - perfect for an era when the fewer intertitles the better (and Keaton reportedly like to use fewer intertitles than most). Set during the Civil War, Keaton plays Southern train engineer Johnnie Grey who is much aggrieved when Northern troops steal his train. He gives chase in another train and soon discovers the Union soldiers have also kidnapped the girl who shunned him because the Southern army wouldn't accept him as a soldier due to his important occupation. 

Comedically, The General burns slower than the likes of Sherlock Jr, or any of Chaplin's big guns like City Lights or Modern Times, largely because it sets up its stakes in a careful way. Keaton wanted The General to have heart, solid characters, a strong story, and a realistic setting, and not just be an excuse for a string of non-sequitur gags. He achieved all this - and made the film hilarious once it builds up a head of steam (pun intended). In fact, once it gets going, it's an unstoppable comedic force, rolling through some impressively huge set pieces - the climactic bridge destruction is believed to be the most expensive sequence of the silent era.

"Do it again - someone looked at the camera."

The beautiful wide shots not only capture the extent and drama of Keaton's insane stunts, but also his methodical historical accuracy. Real steam trains race along real tracks, and cannons fire real cannonballs, while perfectly costumed armies charge across the fields. The insanity of big budget silent era-moviemaking is captured unflinchingly and in gorgeous detail. The epic nature of the film even becomes a gag. 

"Leave it to Keaton to turn a 'cast of thousands' moment of an advancing army into a background gag while the oblivious Johnnie toils away chopping firewood for the engine," wrote Sean Axmaker. 

"The sheer scale of the scene gives what could have been a tossed-off gag and rudimentary piece of exposition a powerful sense of place and threat."

Keaton's wide shots demonstrate the balance of art and action he was after - The General looks gorgeous, sells its jokes perfectly, and shows off Keaton's remarkable athleticism at the same time. 

"All are presented in long shot to reveal the authentically daring stuntwork and Keaton's habitually precise camera placement is often crucial to the comic impact," agreed The Woodsworth Book Of Movie Classics. 

"It compares favourably with Chaplin's functional mise-en-scene which is concerned solely with recording the Little Tramp's pantomimic paces."

The big gags - the cannon shot, the railway sleeper throw, Grey's obliviousness to the war around him - are mixed in with some great little gags, such as a missing shoe and a cigar burn. But they're all serving the story, and continually demonstrating that this also a wonderful period piece. 

The influence of The General lives on. Aside from Keaton's influence on the stuntwork of Jackie Chan, you can see the birth of the chase film here - this is basically the 1920s answer to Mad Max: Fury Road - or in the mis-fired homage of George Lucas' The Phantom Menace, where Jar Jar's battlefield antics pay tribute to Johnnie Grey's klutz-wins-the-battle finale.

Looking at The General almost a century on, it's baffling that it could ever have been considered a flop, critically or commercially. In many ways, it's the peak of silent cinema. Beautifully shot, meticulously designed, hilarious, action-packed, neatly told - The General has it all.

And you can watch it all here for nothing. What's your excuse?