The Last Run (Richard Fleischer, 1971)

George C. Scott in The Last Run

Cast: George C. Scott, Tony Musante, Trish Van Devere, Colleen Dewhurst, Aldo Sambrell. Screenplay: Alan Sharp. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Art direction: José María Tapiador, Roy Walker. Film editing: Russell Lloyd. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. 

The Last Run begins with a love scene so intense it might have needed an intimacy coordinator if it weren't between a man and his car. The man is Harry Garmes (George C. Scott), a retired driver for the Chicago mob, now living in Portugal. The car is a souped-up BMW 503, and it's practically the last thing in the world Harry loves after his small son's death and his wife's disappearance. He does occasionally visit a friendly prostitute named Monique (Colleen Dewhurst) and he gets along with Miguel (Aldo Sambrell), who sails his fishing boat for him. Otherwise, there's not much to keep him from coming out of retirement to meet up with an escaped con, Paul Rickard (Tony Musante), and drive him across Spain to connect with some guys who say they're going to smuggle Rickard into France. Harry doesn't know that Rickard will make him stop along the way to pick up Claudie Scherrer (Trish Van Devere), but when Harry meets Claudie he doesn't much mind. Naturally, none of this goes exactly as planned. The Last Run was a critical flop when it was first released, partly because of stories about behind-the-scenes problems. The first director attached to it, John Boorman, disliked the script. So did the second one, John Huston, whose efforts to rewrite the screenplay led to conflicts with Scott. When Huston left the film, it was assigned to a journeyman director of no great distinction, Richard Fleischer, who mostly went back to Alan Sharp's original screenplay. Meanwhile, Scott, whose wife, Dewhurst, had taken the small role of Monique, began an affair with Van Devere; after filming ended, Dewhurst and Scott divorced and he married Van Devere. I think critics may have seen the film through a lens smudged with such gossip, because it's by no means a bad movie. Roger Ebert's review, for example, makes much of the fact that it could have been directed by Huston instead of Fleischer, whom Ebert calls a "prince of mediocrities." Huston, he says, "would have been incapable of [the] mawkishness" that occurs at a key moment in the final scene. But who knows for sure? I, for one, didn't find the moment Ebert singles out particularly mawkish, but rather an effective link to the film's opening scene. Ebert is right in criticizing the film's failures of tone and inconsistencies in characterization, and the ending is a bit of a muddle. Still, Scott is always fun to watch and the Spanish landscape, handsomely filmed by Sven Nykvist, making a 180 away from his work for Ingmar Bergman, is spectacular.

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Annie Hall

Alvy Singer: Woody Allen
Annie Hall: Diane Keaton
Rob: Tony Roberts
Allison: Carol Kane
Tony Lacey: Paul Simon
Pam: Shelley Duvall
Robin: Janet Margolin
Mom Hall: Colleen Dewhurst
Duane Hall: Christopher Walken

Director: Woody Allen
Screenplay: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Costume design: Ruth Morley

Annie Hall is generally recognized as the movie that took Woody Allen from being a mere maker of comedy films like Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973) that were extensions of his persona as a stand-up comedian and into his current status as a full-fledged auteur, with a record-setting 16 Oscar nominations as screenwriter, along with seven nominations as director (the same number as Steven Spielberg, and only one less than Martin Scorsese). It is one of the few outright funny movies to have won the best picture, and also won for Diane Keaton's performance and Allen's direction and screenplay. Watching it today, in the light of his later work, I still find it fresh and original and frankly more satisfying than most of his later films. Marshall Brickman shared the screenwriting Oscar for Annie Hall and was also nominated along with Allen for the screenplay of Manhattan (1979), as was Douglas McGrath for Bullets Over Broadway (1995), one of his most entertaining later movies. Is it possible that Allen should have worked with a collaborator more often? Would that have curbed his tendency to overload his movies with existentialist conundrums and his increasingly creepy fascination with much younger women -- viz., Emma Stone in Irrational Man (2015) and Magic in the Moonlight (2014), Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works (2009), and Scarlett Johansson in Scoop (2006) and Match Point (2005)? But it does Allen's achievement in Annie Hall a disservice to view the film in light of his later career (and his private life). He made a step, not a leap, forward from the goofy early comedies by playing on his stand-up persona -- the film opens and ends with Alvy Singer (Allen) cracking jokes and includes scenes in which Alvy does stand-up at a rally for Adlai Stevenson and at the University of Wisconsin. What makes the movie different from the "early, funny ones" -- as a rueful running gag line goes in Stardust Memories (1980) -- is his willingness and ability to turn Alvy into a real person who just happens to be very funny. Keaton's glorious performance also succeeds in giving dimension to what could have been just a caricature. Annie Hall may not have deserved the best picture Oscar in a year that also saw the debut of Star Wars, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, but it's easy to make a case for it.