Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)

John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in Mikey and Nicky

Cast: Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, Rose Arrick, Carol Grace, William Hickey, Sanford Meisner, Joyce Van Patten, M. Emmet Walsh. Screenplay: Elaine May. Cinematography: Bernie Abramson, Lucien Ballard, Jack Cooperman. Production design: Paul Sylbert. Film editing: John Carter, Sheldon Kahn. Music: John Strauss.

"I came as soon as I got your towel." That line, spoken by Mikey (Peter Falk) to Nicky (John Cassavetes) after the latter has thrown a bottle and a towel out of his hotel room window to get the former's attention, has an Elaine May ring to it. It's followed by a sardonic in-joke when Mikey chides Nicky for throwing the bottle because the broken glass could have put his eye out. (Falk lost an eye to cancer when he was 3.) The scene feels like a set-up for a comedy of rude manners, which Mikey and Nicky could well have become. But because May famously let the two great improvisatory actors have their head -- resulting in a shoot notorious for going way over budget and consuming reels upon reels of film -- the movie is a raucous, bittersweet tragicomedy about two old friends who have found themselves mobbed up beyond their control. Nicky, when we meet him, is a gibbering nervous wreck, so paranoid about being the target of a mob hit that he can't trust Mikey, even though he has called him to his aid. This time, the paranoia is justified: Mikey, it turns out, is in touch with the hit man, Kinney (Ned Beatty). But even the hit man is paranoid, fearful that he'll be the target next if he botches the hit on Nicky. And so goes this jittery one-of-a-kind movie, which is a kind of tribute to the movies Cassavetes directed himself. (Stories have it that he did direct some scenes.) I'm generally on the fence about Cassavetes's work, feeling that improvisation is a hit-or-miss way to make a serious movie: The misses seriously undermine the hits. Still, the energy generated by Falk and Cassavetes in Mikey and Nicky is potent and irresistible. The film is almost a two-hander, with the supporting cast, even Beatty, good as he is, serving as objects for the two leads to bounce off of. I can wish that May had exerted more control over her film -- she almost lost complete control of it to an uncomprehending studio -- but I also admit that I couldn't stop watching it.

Hopscotch (Ronald Neame, 1980)

Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau in Hopscotch

Cast: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom, David Matthau, George Baker, Ivor Roberts, Lucy Saroyan, Severn Darden. Screenplay: Brian Garfield, Bryan Forbes, based on a novel by Garfield. Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson, Brian W. Roy. Production design: William J. Creber. Film editing: Carl Kress. Music: Ian Fraser.

Hopscotch is an engaging trifle with just enough bite into the hindquarters of international espionage bureaus to make it seem more substantial. It also has the improbable teaming of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, who have a kind of chemistry that recalls Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn at their best (which was mostly when George Cukor was directing them). It was their third film together, and Jackson reportedly accepted the part because she liked working with Matthau so much. With good reason: Their first film together, Melvin Frank's 1973 A Touch of Class, won her an Oscar, and their second, House Calls (Howard Zieff, 1978), was a solid box office success. Hopscotch actually doesn't give Jackson much to do: Her character, Isobel, is an old flame of Matthau's Miles Kendig, a CIA agent who decides to write a tell-all memoir to even the score with his blustering boss, Myerson (Ned Beatty), a far more committed Cold Warrior than Kendig, who sees the spy games for what they are. Isobel's role is mainly to help out occasionally when Kendig needs it, which he mostly doesn't; he's almost always ahead of the game. They have a few good scenes together, including their first encounter in the film, when they pretend not to know each other -- a scene that was actually written by Matthau. There are also some breezy moments between Kendig and his opposite number from the KGB, played with weary good humor by Herbert Lom. There's a special buoyancy to the film contributed by abundant borrowings from the music of Mozart, along with some Rossini and Puccini -- Matthau was an opera lover, so these bits of filigree are probably his contribution to the film, too.

Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011)

Cast: voices of Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, Timothy Olyphant, Ray Winstone. Screenplay: John Logan, Gore Verbinski, James Ward Byrkit. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Mark "Crash" McCreery. Film editing: Craig Wood. Music: Hans Zimmer.

Rango's Oscar win for best animated feature is anomalous: The award typically goes to a product of the Disney/Pixar factory. And unlike the usual winners, the characters aren't the usual cuddly figures destined for the toy shelves, but a gnarly selection of lizards and rodents and other desert creatures, centered on Rango himself, a bulbous-eyed chameleon voiced brilliantly by Johnny Depp. Visually, then, Rango is aimed more at adult audiences than at the kiddies. On the other hand, its story is the usual excuse for harmless mayhem that is the stuff of most animated features. There is a good deal of wit in the film, much of it aimed at Western-movie clichés, but I found that on the whole it left me a little cold. There's something to be said for cuddliness after all.

Cookie's Fortune (Robert Altman, 1999)

Cookie's Fortune (Robert Altman, 1999)

Cast: Charles S. Dutton, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Liv Tyler, Patricia Neal, Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty, Courtney B. Vance, Donald Moffat, Lyle Lovett, Danny Darst, Matt Malloy, Niecy Nash, Randall Mell, Rufus Thomas, Ruby Wilson. Screenplay: Anne Rapp. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Abraham Lim. Music: David A. Stewart.

Cookie's Fortune is one of Robert Altman's lesser-known movies, but it's an eminently likable one, a comedy about that familiar literary trope, the dysfunctional Southern family. It's set in the picturesque small North Mississippi town of Holly Springs, which I know well because it was on the way from Oxford to Memphis back when there were no four-lane roads to travel on. In the film, it's a place with no apparent racial tensions: When a black man, Willis Richland (played by the great Charles S. Dutton), is arrested for the murder of elderly Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (a wonderful performance by Patricia Neal), the white sheriff refuses to believe he did it: "I've fished with him," he explains to the skeptical out-of-town forensics expert. Altman and screenwriter Anne Rapp simply choose not to make racial animosity a factor in their story, which is really about how difficult it is to keep secrets in a place as small and as nosy as Holly Springs and its like. Cookie's death is actually a suicide, but her niece Camille (Glenn Close), who discovers the body, chooses to cover it up -- actually eating the suicide note, which is not addressed to her -- because (a) the fact of suicide would cause a scandal in the town and (b) she stands to inherit as the next-of-kin to Cookie, assuming there's no will. (There is, but she doesn't find it in the cookie jar where it's hidden.) Camille enlists her rather slow-witted sister, Cora (Julianne Moore), in the cover-up. But suicide will out, as well as lots of other family secrets. All of this is taking place over Easter weekend, when Camille's production of Salome -- by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon, as the poster says -- is being staged in the local First Presbyterian Church, starring Cora in the title role. Cookie's Fortune is a charming film, carried along by a cast that Altman stands out of the way of and lets do their thing.

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

Ronny Cox, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Burt Reynolds in Deliverance

Ed: Jon Voight
Lewis: Burt Reynolds
Bobby: Ned Beatty
Drew: Ronny Cox
Old Man: Ed Ramey
Lonnie: Billy Redden
First Griner: Seamon Glass
Second Griner: Randall Deal
Mountain Man: Bill McKinney
Toothless Man: Herbert "Cowboy" Coward
Sheriff Bullard: James Dickey

Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: James Dickey
Based on a novel by James Dickey
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Art direction: Fred Harpman
Film editing: Tom Priestley

I haven't read James Dickey's novel Deliverance, but I think I can see why Dickey grew so angry at director John Boorman's revisions on his screenplay version of the book. The film never quite decides what it wants to be: an adventure story, an environmental fable, or a story about a clash between cultures. It works best as an adventure story, which is in the nature of film, and somewhat as a clash of cultures. The four suburban hotshots who arrive in the backwoods of northern George for a weekend adventure are from the outset rude and condescending to the people who live there year-round, and of course they get their comeuppance in extreme ways. The irony is that the one man in their company who sympathizes with the locals is the one who fails to survive: Drew brought along a guitar, not the bows and arrows that Ed and Lewis bring with them, and he interacts musically with one of the supposedly "inbred hillbillies" in the celebrated "Dueling Banjos" sequence. Drew is also the only one who tries to hold out for facing justice after Lewis kills one of the mountain men who attack them. Lewis argues that if they stood trial for killing the man, they'd face a jury of the man's peers; Bobby doesn't want the story of his being raped to get out, and Ed passively goes along with them. Better backgrounding on the four adventurers might have given more substance to their characters and their ideas, and the villainous mountain men are monsters out of nightmares rather than actual human beings, so the debate over justice seems a little out of focus. But it's mostly the environmental issue that falls by the way: There's little sympathy shown for the people who face seeing their homes flooded -- one of them even says it's the "best thing that ever happened to this town" -- an almost no feeling for the wilderness that will be sunk beneath the man-made lake. Boorman would later make The Emerald Forest (1985), a more environmentally conscious film also about the construction of a dam, set in the Brazilian rain forest.

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

What everyone remembers about Network is its prescient look at the corruption of American television news. It's not just that the rantings of Howard Beale (Peter Finch) foreshadow the antics of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly, it's that where once TV news was in the hands of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, trusted and avuncular, it's now dominated by Anderson Cooper and Megyn Kelly, glamorous and glib. But the chief problem is that recalling Network as a satire on television misses its real target: corporate capitalism. What we remember from the film is Beale's "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway in perhaps her best performance) reaching orgasm at the very thought of improving her network's ratings, and Diana and Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) conspiring to assassinate Beale after his ratings decline. What we should remember is that Beale's ratings decline because he decides to tell his audiences what he perceives as the truth: that they've become mere pawns in a multinational drive to subsume individuality into corporate identity. The key scene in the film really belongs to Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen, the head of the Communications Corporation of America, the conglomerate that owns the network and that Beale has disclosed is about to be taken over by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate. In the voice of God, Jensen tells Beale, "There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immanent, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, yens, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today." But when Beale tries to share this epiphany with his audience, they forsake him. In other words, remembering Network as a satire on television is to mistake the symptom -- the dumbing-down of journalism (and it applies as well to print as to electronic media) -- for the disease: the cancer of corporate greed. The screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky is partly at fault for making Howard Beale and Diana Christensen and the old-fashioned TV news executive Max Schumacher (William Holden) the central figures of the film instead of Jensen. It might have been partly remedied if Jensen had been played by a figure of equal charisma to Finch, Dunaway, and Holden, instead of by Beatty, a likable character actor best known for being violated by mountain men in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972). (That said, Beatty delivers a terrific performance in his big scene, which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination.) In the end, Network is really a kind of nihilist satire, not far removed in that regard from Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) in its presentation of a world without alternatives or saviors. It's an entertaining film, with terrific performances, but a depressing one.