Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981)

Kurt Russell in Escape From New York

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Season Hubley. Screenplay: John Carpenter, Nick Castle. Cinematography: Dean Cundey. Production design: Joe Alves. Film editing: Todd C. Ramsay. Music: John Carpenter, Alan Howarth.

John Carpenter is a curious kind of auteur, best known for horror flicks and action thrillers that often feature his name before the title, as in "John Carpenter's Escape From New York." I'm not much of a fan of his work, except for his wonderful Starman (1984), which demonstrated once again what a fine actor Jeff Bridges is. Escape From New York stars Kurt Russell, making a determined attempt to escape from Walt Disney, who established him as an all-American boy type in movies and on TV in the 1960s. Here he goes to the other extreme as Snake Plissken, a once-heroic soldier turned criminal. The premise of the film is that crime in America has grown so bad that in 1988 the entire island of Manhattan was walled in as a maximum security prison -- a reflection of the bad rep that New York City got during the 1970s. In 1997, when the film takes place, Snake is arrested and sent to this prison, but at the same time Air Force One has been hijacked and though the president (Donald Pleasance? How did that happen?) bailed out in an escape pod as the plane crashed into the Manhattan prison, he has disappeared. Because of Snake's earlier exploits, he is given a chance to free himself by rescuing the president, but he's implanted with a device that will kill him if he doesn't succeed in the next 24 hours. So he pilots a glider to the top of one of the World Trade Center towers and descends into the anarchy and nightmare that the inmates have made of the city. It's all pretty entertaining slam-bang stuff, with a colorful cast: Lee Van Cleef as a tough cop, Ernest Borgnine as a cabbie who drives a beat-up taxi through what's left of the mean streets of the city-prison, Harry Dean Stanton as an inmate who lives in the public library, Isaac Hayes as the boss of the prison inmates, and Adrienne Barbeau as his mistress. There's a tight-budgeted look to the film, especially when viewed today after the CGI revolution, but it works.

Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952)

John Payne and Lee Van Cleef in Kansas City Confidential

Cast: John Payne, Coleen Gray, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, Dona Drake, Mario Siletti, Howard Negley, Carleton Young, Don Orlando, Ted Ryan. Screenplay: George Bruce, Harry Essex, Harold Greene, Rowland Brown. Cinematography: George E. Diskant. Art direction: Edward L. Ilou. Film editing: Buddy Small. Music: Paul Sawtell.

This intricately plotted film noir benefits more from its supporting cast of heavies -- Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, and Jack Elam -- than it does from its nominal leads, John Payne and Coleen Gray. Payne's Joe Rolfe gets framed for a big heist, but there's not enough evidence to convict him, so he sets out to track down the hoodlums who set him up. The first twist is that none of the actual thieves know who any of the others are -- they were all sent on their mission in masks, supplied by the mastermind, known to them as "Mr. Big." And he turns out to be a retired police captain (Preston Foster) who was forced out of his job by politics. And he isn't interested in the loot itself but in staging a capture of the thieves and a recovery of the money so he can get the reward and maybe even be reinstated in his old job. As if this twist isn't enough, he's also the father of the young woman (Gray) whom Rolfe falls in love with after he sleuths his way to the Mexican resort town where the plot leads everybody else. Fortunately, Phil Karlson's no-nonsense direction keeps the movie from getting snared in its own twists and turns.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name* may be the movies' most famous picaro, the roguish hero who wanders through an often hostile landscape, surviving by his wits -- and in this case, his skill as a gunman. The picaro's heart is generally in the right place even if he doesn't mind breaking a few laws to get his way. In the first two films of Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy," A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), he is a loner, but in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly he has picked up an unlikely (and untrustworthy) sidekick in Tuco (Eli Wallach), with whom he is working a scam: Tuco has a price on his head, which our hero collects by bringing Tuco in to justice, and then splits with Tuco after rescuing him from a hanging. Tuco is a more vicious Sancho Panza to No Name's more capable Don Quixote. I think it's interesting that The Good.... was filmed in Spain, where the picaresque tradition began with Lazarillo de Tormes in 1557 and produced its most influential analog in Don Quixote. Okay, I'm getting a little pretentious with the literary history here -- though Leone himself once admitted his debt to the picaresque tradition. But who, in the mid-1960s, when Leone was making movies derided as "spaghetti Westerns," would have anticipated such analysis or the veneration those films receive today? Half a century ago, when Leone's trilogy was being released, critics were raving about films like A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), and Becket (Peter Glenville, 1964): "prestige" movies on high-toned subjects that have dated badly, while Leone's movies still get enthusiastic viewings. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly currently has an 8.9 rating on IMDb and a 97 percent favorable on Rotten Tomatoes -- the only two negative reviews cited on the latter are the ones from Time and Variety at the time of the film's release. My own view is that The Good.... is overlong, especially in its latest restoration, which runs for 177 minutes, and that there's some confusion in integrating the Civil War's New Mexico Campaign scenes with the story of the titular triad. But there are few scenes in movies more dazzling than Tuco's dash through the cemetery and the subsequent three-way standoff. Lee Van Cleef is a suitably scary Bad guy; Eastwood demonstrates the growth as an actor that would continue as his career soared; Wallach gives one of his best performances: and the contribution of Ennio Morricone is breathtaking. Raw and unpolished as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at times is, it remains memorable filmmaking, while the films more celebrated in its day are mostly forgettable.

*Actually, he picks up a name in each of Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" films: In A Fistful of Dollars he is called "Joe," which is a generic name for an americano. In For a Few Dollars More he is known as Monco, the Italian word for "one-armed," in reference to his tendency to use his left hand while keeping his gun hand under his poncho. And in the third film he is dubbed "Blondie" by Tuco. (The color of Eastwood's hair seems to me like a minor characteristic, but I guess "Tall Guy Who Squints and Smokes Cheroots" would have been a mouthful.)  

For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)

Most of us didn't realize it until much later when he was an Oscar-winning director, but Clint Eastwood was a very smart man. When Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars became a hit in Italy in 1964, he asked Eastwood if he would make a sequel. Eastwood hadn't seen the movie, which hadn't yet been dubbed in English and released in the States, so Leone sent him a print of the Italian version. Even though he didn't speak Italian, Eastwood immediately recognized Leone's skill, and signed up to do the sequel. It was a gutsy move: At the time, making genre films like Westerns and sword-and-sandal epics in Italy and Spain was a job for has-beens and never-weres. Eastwood was on the brink of becoming one of the latter: His career to that point had been mostly in TV, on the long-running series Rawhide, with a few unmemorable movies. But cultivating a persona distinct from that of Rawhide's callow Rowdy Yates, that of the taciturn Man With No Name* of the Leone films, proved to be precisely the right thing to do. By the end of the 1960s, he had become a major star. Narratively, For a Few Dollars More is not quite so tight as the first film -- for one reason because it lacks the well-tested framework of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) that was the underpinning of Fistful. Also, setting up a rivalry between Eastwood's character and that of Lee Van Cleef's Col. Douglas Mortimer tends to diffuse the story a bit: As in Fistful, Eastwood's character is beaten to a pulp by the bad guys, but so is Mortimer, and the double mauling feels gratuitous, especially since there's no particular reason why the bad guys shouldn't just kill them. But the sequel shows Leone growing in style and technique, with a fine use of widescreen in establishing shots and a deft use of closeups in establishing the characters, especially the bad guys in the mob headed by El Indio (Gian Maria Volontè, who had also been the chief villain, Ramón Roja, in Fistful). Am I the only one who suspects, from Leone's closeups of the mob's faces, that Leone had been influenced by Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929)? One standout in the mob is a superbly twitchy Klaus Kinski as a hunchback named Juan. The cinematography is by Massimo Dallamano. And once again, Ennio Morricone's score is integral to the film's success. The spareness of the music, scored only for a few instruments, serves as a contrast to the sweeping orchestral scores for Hollywood Westerns by composers like Dimitri Tiomkin and Max Steiner. Morricone and Leone recognized the need for silence, punctuated only occasionally by a penny-whistle tweedle or a guitar riff, to maintain the film's texture.

*Actually, he has a name in both films: In Fistful he is called "Joe," which is obviously just a generic name for an americano, while in the sequel he is known as Monco, the Italian word for "one-armed," in reference to his tendency to use his left hand while keeping his gun hand under his poncho.