Celluloid Heroes

I wouldn’t be infringing on your coffee break if I thought it was a nickel-and-dimer.

William Friedkin’s The French Connection is a lean, uncompromising example of filmmaking without a single gram of fat on its bones. Nothing unnecessary to telling the story is on screen, allowing Friedkin to tell a fairly complex story within a surprisingly compact running time of 104 minutes. Gene Hackman’s balls-out performance as unconventional obsessive narcotics cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle elevates what was already a superior film to the level of a classic.

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That’s what I’m afraid of. Later. Later we’ll do something about pollution. Later we’ll do something about the population explosion. Later we’ll do something about nuclear war. We think we’ve got all the time in the world. But how much time has the world got?

The ending of Beneath the Planet of the Apes seemed to preclude any sequels and, despite the financial success of the first two films, the budget for a third movie had been slashed. The producers of this film series had to think creatively. The result, while far from the equal of the 1968 original, stands head and shoulders above any of the other sequels, re-introducing the concept of character development and semi-intelligent writing back into the series. Sure, the audience is asked to accept a premise that, when you follow the logic of the first two films, is staggeringly ridiculous, but once you get past that, the story moves along relatively well.

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This isn’t just a thousand to one shot. This is a professional bloodsport. And it can happen to you. And then it can happen to you again.

The 24-hour race at Le Mans every June is still considered one of the ultimate tests of driver, crews and cars, but in 1970, when this film was made, it was even more so. This was before many of the safety features drivers now take for granted and when the cars were insanely powerful and fast. The Mulsanne straight was still more than two miles of flat-out, unbroken driving, with cars reaching over 230 mph before braking for the next curve.

Steve McQueen didn’t write, direct or produce this film, but it was still in every way his baby. He wanted to make the ultimate racing film. When not acting, McQueen raced cars and motorcycles for real, much to the horror of the studio executives who coveted the box office he brought in. McQueen was no dilettante, either. He was a serious driver who was competetive in virtually everything he raced and was well respected by his fellow racers. To them, he was just one of the guys who also did some acting on the side.

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Tell me, Harold, how many of these, eh, suicides have you
performed?

Harold and Maude is one of those “little classics” that’s a shared secret among the few who saw it on their first run, sort of the Lost in Translation of its generation. Like the 2003 film, there are going to be those who love it and those who just don’t understand the appeal. I’m sure if I had been my current age in 1971, I would have been charmed out of my socks by this idiosyncratic May-December romance.

As it is, separated by thirty-five years, the cultural rust has accumulated on this movie, which is almost completely a creation of its times. Among those perhaps ten to fifteen years my junior, it would probably be a rare person who could connect to this film. That doesn’t make it bad, just dated.

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Day six of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

There’s a fire, sir

The Andromeda Strain is the greatest science fiction film ever made. I know that is very sweeping statement, so I’ll qualify it by adding that The Andromeda Strain is one of the few films made that genuinely deserve the label of “science fiction,” stories in which speculative science is at the core of the plot.

2001: A Space Odyssey is probably a better film, but it really only qualifies as science fiction if you consider metaphysics to be a science. Most all other films we normally classify as science fiction, or SF, are really just fantasy, action or horror stories set in a futuristic setting.

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