A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, October 5, 2023

The Seven-Ups (Philip D'Antoni, 1973)


 Cast: Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco, Larry Haines, Richard Lynch, Bill Hickman, Jerry Leon, Victor Arnold, Ken Kercheval, Lou Polan, Matt Russell, Joe Spinell. Screenplay: Albert Ruben, Alexander Jacobs, Sonny Grosso. Cinematography: Urs Furrer. Production design: Ed Wittstein. Film editing: John C. Horger, Stephen A. Rotter. Music: Don Ellis. 

The Seven-Ups has sections that remind me so much of Jean-Pierre Melville's crime films, that I found myself wishing that Melville had directed it. I can sense director Philip D'Antoni striving for the kind of ambience Melville achieved in movies like Bob le Flambeur (1956) and Le Doulos (1962), and in Roy Scheider he has the kind of actor like Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo who could bring off a certain world-weary style. D'Antoni does succeed in using New York City settings as effectively as Melville does with Paris, but there's a slackness to the film's pacing, a lack of energy and tension, that undermines it. The exception, of course, is the great car chase scene in the film's middle. The Seven-Ups is part of a trilogy of car-chase movies for D'Antoni, who also produced but didn't direct Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). The chase in this film almost saves it from being just another movie about vigilante cops using unsanctioned methods to take out criminals, a subgenre that reached its peak in Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan movies, Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973), and The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976). 

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