Bogie and Bacall: KEY LARGO (1948)

The final installment in my series on the films of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall is up over at Criminal Element. Their final film was, I think, in some ways their weakest, but it was still a lot of fun. It was, of course, John Huston's KEY LARGO. 

How FAT CITY got made

Screw Rocky. Forget the Raging Bull. Tell the Cinderella Man to go find his glass slipper. For my money the greatest boxing flick of the past forty years is John Huston's 1972 FAT CITY. It's an extraordinary piece of work--dark, brilliant, and haunting. 

In all fairness, unlike ROCKY or CINDERELLA MAN (or even, to a lesser extent, RAGING BULL) it's not really a sports flick. It's a drama about boxers, and for all the interest it shows in fisticuffs, it could be a drama about guys who work at a factory. That's because unlike most every other boxing movie ever made, it's not really that interested in the mythology of the sport itself. It's interested in the people.

In that way, the movie it most reminds me of is Peter Yates's THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. That movie was a crime film that was wholly lacking in crime film cliches. It took its characters at face value and regarded criminal activity as another facet of capitalism. FAT CITY does the same thing with boxing. Here is a movie about boxers that doesn't lead up to "the big fight." There's an important, and brutal, battle toward the end but it's not the mythic fight that other boxing movies have programmed us to expect. FAT CITY doesn't present boxing as the romantic rite of passage for a stalwart hero (even RAGING BULL, for all its grittiness, contextualizes the boxing ring in religiously redemptive terms). Instead this film dramatizes boxing as a job done by poor men who supplement their income by working with itinerant workers in the lettuce fields. Nobody in this film was, is, or is ever gonna be the champion of anything. The best a boxer can hope for is a win and a manager who doesn't steal the whole purse. 

The film is a masterpiece by one of the masters of cinema, and its cast is nothing short of remarkable. Stacy Keach--at the time an experienced stage actor but still a relative newcomer to movies--is astonishingly good. He seems to have wandered out of a Robert Wise B-movie from the fifties. Jeff Bridges is baby faced and innately sympathetic. And as Keach's alcoholic girlfriend, Susan Tyrrell gives as good a performance as any I've ever seen. And I've see a lot. There's a long scene in a bar between Keach and Tyrell here that is simply perfect. It should be plucked out and shown in film schools. This is how you write, shoot, and act a scene between two characters who are flirting and fighting and falling in (something like) love.

All of this is to point you toward a great article over at The Stacks called "How A Great Boxing Novel Got The Movie It Deserved." It's a fascinating look at how Leonard Gardner's novel  found its way to Huston, as well as how the director brought it to the screen. Check it out. Great stuff.

  

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Heist movies have a different internal energy than a lot of film noirs. Movies about sex and murder have a certain inner fire. They’re fueled by lust or bloodlust, and it’s up to the creators of those movies to get our adrenaline pumping, to tap into our inner adulterers, our inner murderers. Heist movies, on the other hand, are colder at the core because they’re not about passion but process. That’s the key to their delicious appeal. They tap into the part of us that wants to be a professional transgressor.

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle is maybe the best heist movie ever made. If it’s not the best, then it certainly set the template that most other great heist movies (Rififi, The Killing) would follow. It assembles a large cast of character actors, arms them with a master plan to knock over a huge score, and then sets the wheels turning toward an eventual unraveling.

Sam Jaffe stars as Doc Riedenschneider, a criminal mastermind with a foolproof plan for a jewel heist. He goes to see a sweaty, smalltime bookie (Marc Lawrence) who puts him in contact with a morally compromised lawyer named Emmerich (Louis Calhern). Emmerich agrees to front the money for the heist, but we find out find out pretty quick that he has alternative plans for the jewels. The only person that Doc can really trust is a surly hood named Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) who just wants enough money to get the hell out of the city.

The cast here is superb, and superbly utilized. Character actors often relegated to the back of the frame are suddenly up front and center, and everyone rises to the challenge. Jaffe manages to be both likable and creepy as Doc, a brilliant tactician who also happens to have a soft spot for teenaged girls. Louis Calhern gives an elegantly nuanced performance as Emmerich, the very model of self-deluding corruption, and Marc Lawrence—who was in approximately every B-movie ever made— shines as the little bookie with a bundle of nerves and a big mouth. Throw in a scene-stealing James Whitmore as a feisty, hunchbacked getaway driver; Marilyn Monroe as Calhern’s much younger mistress; and Jean Hagen playing a dim-but-sweet cocktail waitress, and you have an ensemble with no weak link.

Leading this gang of thieves and misfits is Sterling Hayden as Dix, Jaffe’s right hand hooligan. Like fellow noir stalwart Charles McGraw, Hayden is about as artless as a punch in the gut, but he has a quality that seems readymade for the smoky backrooms and cheaply furnished apartments of film noir. Hulking and gruff, he looks as if he’s been up all night, drinking, gambling, and stalking his way through a city he hates. With this film alone, Hayden established himself as an icon in the genre. (He made a lot of other noirs or varying quality, but starred in two other masterpieces Crime Wave and The Killing.)

All this great casting would be for nothing if there weren’t steady hands at the wheel, but the work behind the camera is as good as the work in front. Harold Rosson’s exquisite cinema-tography is a mixture of the realistic and the atmospheric. The opening scenes remind me of something out of neorealism, but Lawrence’s hole-in-the-wall gambling den is bathed in smoke and shadows. Meanwhile the topnotch script (co-written by John Huston and Ben Maddow, from the book by WR Burnett) is finely crafted, giving dimension and good lines to even the smallest character parts (hearing a police siren in the distance, a safecracker’s worried wife says, “it sounds just like a soul in hell”).

The main creative force behind the camera was, of course, John Huston, a director who could make any kind of movie, and did, though his prodigious output was wildly uneven. He made great movies, shitty movies, and every kind of movie in between. For every masterpiece (The Maltese Falcon), he made a piece of junk (Freud). And when he wanted to, he could even make a movie that seemed both great and shitty at the same time (Reflections in a Golden Eye).

With The Asphalt Jungle, Huston reached the peak of his game. One might object that The Maltese Falcon is better, but Huston’s direction here is snappier, more interesting. There’s a showdown late in the film between Hayden and Brad Dexter (playing Calhern’s henchman in another of the film’s fine performances), and the scene is a lesson in how to use the camera to build and then release suspense. Likewise, the jewel heist itself is a classic bit of cinema and a blueprint for all the heist flicks which followed it.

The entire movie feels way. Huston marshaled his cast and collaborators into telling a story that is ultimately rich with pathos but for the most part unfolds with the cold logic of an arrest report. These characters make their living out of crime (“just a left-handed form of human endeavor” Calhern observes), and for much of the movie Huston was content to sit back and let us watch them at their work because he instinctively understood that it was the work we wanted to see, the work of professional thieves. By making that the emphasis, he created a prototype. What The Maltese Falcon was to detective flicks and Double Indemnity was to the femme fatale movie, The Asphalt Jungle was to heist movies. It is classic, indispensible film noir.

*

For an interesting look at the career of John Huston, read here. I disagree with some of what it says--Falcon and Jungle are masterpieces, not simply casting coups--but it's a smart look at his body of work.

Wise Blood (1979)

At first glance, John Huston would seem to be a problematic choice to adapt Flannery O'Connor's novel WISE BLOOD. On one hand, the grotesque story of a young hillbilly "preacher" named Hazel Motes who tries to begin a "Church Without Christ" might seem good material for a director who'd always had an instinctive feel for oddballs. On the other hand, O'Connor's vision wasn't merely grotesque, it was, as she famously put it, "Christ-haunted." Her vision was dark and funny, yes, but O'Connor believed furiously in heaven and hell. Huston--the director of masterpieces like THE MALTESE FALCON and THE ASPHALT JUNGLE--was an atheist. How could an unbelieving, hard drinking, globetrotting, hairy-chested womanizer like Huston adapt the twisted vision of a Jesus-obsessed, lupus-stricken, farmer's daughter who once said that her life had been lived mainly "between the back door and the chicken coop"?

That question can only be answered by watching Huston's remarkable adaption of WISE BLOOD. The director always had an excellent eye for the best parts of a novel, and his unfussy shooting style seemed--when he was at his best--to do exactly what was needed and no more. O'Connor must have posed a particular challenge, though. Her story centers around the disturbing figure of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) and his quest to blaspheme his way into unbelief, but Motes is also surrounded by gallery of freaks and nutcases. There's the con man Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton) posing as a blind man, his nympho daughter Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright), and a psycho named Enoch Emery who steals a small mummified corpse from a museum and then dresses up in a Gorilla suit. With this kind of material, it's difficult not to spiral into sheer madness.

Huston manages to embrace the story without letting it get away from him. The final twenty minutes or so of this film have a quiet, terrible power. They're shocking, but Huston doesn't really play them for shocks. He simply goes all the way with Hazel Motes, an objective observer to the man's passions and foibles, which is the hallmark of any great John Huston movie. He builds this film on the fanatical central performance by Brad Dourif. Best known to most people as the stuttering Billy in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (though he also served as the voice of Chucky in the CHILD'S PLAY series), Dourif was an inspired choice for this role. He gives Motes a rawboned restlessness, and he seems to instinctively grasp that the man is tormented, as O'Connor wrote, by the ragged figure of Christ in the back of his mind. For much of the film, his sky blue eyes are wild with that torment. Keep that observation in mind when you get to the end of the film. Eyes, and their function and failure, are vital here.

WISE BLOOD doesn't have the classic perfection of some of Huston's best work. The film's cinematography (by Gerry Fisher) is flat, and I wish the filmmakers had been able to shoot the film in period detail. O'Connor's novel was released in 1952, and there's something disconcerting about seeing it unfold in 1979. I mean, were kids still lining up to see a guy in a gorilla suit in 79? Hadn't they already moved onto Wookies at that point?

Still, these quibbles aside, WISE BLOOD is one hell of an odd movie, based on one hell of an odd book--which makes for a fascinating piece of cinema.

***

Flannery O'Connor might be, pound for pound, my favorite writer. She's certainly one of the most original literary talents that this country's ever produced. WISE BLOOD is the better of her two novels, but her most indispensable work is THE COMPLETE STORIES, a funny, terrifying, and masterfully wrought work of art. She's the poet laureate of fanatics and Jesus Freaks.

There's a lot of stuff on the web about O'Connor, but the best site is Comforts of Home: The Flannery O'Connor Repository

Finally, a quick word about the Criterion Collection DVD of the film. This is a terrific package, featuring interviews with Dourif and the screenwriters. It also contains an insightful essay by Francine Prose and an astounding audio recording--the only one in existence--of O'Connor giving a reading of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" at Vanderbilt University in 1959. It should also be noted that the Criterion DVD has the best picture quality of this movie that I've seen. (It also has a gorgeous package. Click here to take a look).