The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974)

William Atherton, Michael Sacks, and Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express

Cast: Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, Michael Sacks, Ben Johnson, Gregory Walcott, Steve Kanaly, Louise Latham, Harrison Zanuck, A.L. Camp, Jessie Lee Fulton, Dean Smith, Ted Grossman. Screenplay: Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Steven Spielberg. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Art direction: Joe Alves. Film editing: Edward M. Abroms, Verna Fields. Music: John Williams. 

Critics disagree in the most interesting ways. When Roger Ebert reviewed The Sugarland Express in 1974, he disliked Steven Spielberg's use of the automobiles: "If the movie doesn't finally succeed, that's because Spielberg has paid too much attention to all those police cars (and all the crashes they get into), and not enough to the personalities of his characters." But for Pauline Kael, the cars were one of the major reasons she referred to Spielberg's first theatrical feature as "one of the most phenomenal début films in the history of movies": "Spielberg patterns the cars; he makes them dance and crash and bounce back. The cars have tiffs, wrangle, get confused. And so do the people." For once (and I don't think it always happened), Kael's insight into a director's gift was more acute than Ebert's. She got at the essence of at least one aspect of Spielberg's genius as a moviemaker: the ability to provide an environment for characters, to express their personalities through their toys and tools. Goldie Hawn never gave a better performance than she does in this film, perfectly capturing the naïveté, the vanity, and the implacable determination of Lou Jean, showing the grit behind the giggle. (She and William Atherton do a wonderful scene in which they do almost nothing but laugh.) I think Ben Johnson is a little underused as the highway patrol captain in charge of trying to capture Lou Jean and Clovis, while at that same time trying to rescue the young officer (Michael Sacks) they have hijacked, but maybe that's because Johnson was such an old pro that we naturally want to see more of him. The film was unaccountably not a box office success, but to my mind it's one of Spielberg's best movies, with a texture of supporting characters (and cars) that aptly reminded Kael of Preston Sturges.

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.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

Cary Guffey in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Roy Neary: Richard Dreyfuss
Claude Lacombe: François Truffaut
Ronnie Neary: Teri Garr
Jillian Guiler: Melinda Dillon
David Laughlin: Bob Balaban
Barry Guiler: Cary Guffey
Project Leader: J. Patrick McNamara
Farmer: Roberts Blossom

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Steven Spielberg
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Production design: Joe Alves
Film editing: Michael Kahn
Music: John Williams

There are two undeniable facts about Steven Spielberg as a director: He is one of the great visual storytellers, and he often doesn't know how to end his movies. The latter is usually held against him, as with the extended didacticism of the concluding scenes of two of his greatest films, Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). We can see both at work in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film that let everyone know that his big breakthrough movie, Jaws (1975), was more than just beginner's luck. Spielberg resists spelling things out for the viewer through dialogue from the beginning, letting images and situations carry the narrative weight. Even a simple gag can work wonders: Roy Neary, the lineman out to resolve a power outage, is stopped at a railroad crossing to look at his maps when we see headlights behind his truck. A car then pulls around him and the driver calls him an asshole. But then another set of headlights shows up, and instead of pulling around him, the lights go up and over the truck as Roy has his first close encounter. The first sightings of the alien ships are thrillingly enigmatic: Where can Spielberg go with this? But by the time we get to the final payoff, things drag out much too long, as if Spielberg has become so enamored of the special effects that he can't bring himself to lose a minute of them. Nevertheless, Close Encounters is epochal filmmaking, not just in its elevation of sci-fi to a major film genre but also in its revelation of Spielberg's genius for instilling a sense of wonder in an audience.

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Elliott Gould and Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye

Philip Marlowe: Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade: Nina van Pallandt
Roger Wade: Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine: Mark Rydell
Dr. Verringer: Henry Gibson
Harry: David Arkin
Terry Lennox: Jim Bouton
Jo Ann Eggenweiler: Jo Ann Brody

Director: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: John Williams

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's loopy take on the myth of the hardboiled private eye, holds up well today, thanks to Elliott Gould's performance as Philip Marlowe. A long way from the world-weary, cynical Marlowes of Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, Gould's version of the character is a guy who will go out in the middle of the night to buy food for his cat and will stop dead in the middle of the street for a dog that refuses to get out of the way of his car. Not that he's a softy, exactly. He's not above meting out his own brand of punishment -- a bullet to the gut -- for someone who's eluded the law. It's just that he sees the world as a messed-up place and feels sympathy for its innocents: mainly, cats and dogs. Otherwise, there are few innocents in the circles Marlowe finds himself caught up in. He smokes incessantly, even though no one else around him does, thinking nothing of lighting up -- often from the butt of a previous cigarette -- before he enters someone else's space. He smokes so much that it's surprising he has the wind to chase Eileen Wade's car on foot for several blocks. The plot, as so often in adaptations of Raymond Chandler, doesn't matter so much as the attitudes on display, Marlowe's as well as the various people who are trying to prevent him from uncovering their secrets. Altman indulges himself in his usual overlapping, improvised dialogue, especially in group scenes like the one at the L.A. police station or the ones at which Marlowe is surrounded by gangster Marty Augustine and his henchmen. (One of whom is played by the unbilled and mute but indomitably there Arnold Schwarzenegger.) There are some great set pieces, such as the horrifying scene in which Marty Augustine smashes a Coke bottle in his girlfriend's face, or the attempt of Marlowe and Eileen to rescue Roger from the crashing surf -- with the nice touch that the Wades' Weimaraner fetches Roger's cane from the waves. There's some entertaining filigree around the narrative edges, like the gaggle of nubile starlets who live next door to Marlowe. And there's some offbeat casting that, for once, works: Nina van Pallandt, whose chief claim to fame is that she was hoaxer Clifford Irving's mistress and ratted on him about his fake Howard Hughes autobiography, and Jim Bouton, the ballplayer whose behind-the-scenes book Ball Four tattled on the misbehavior of idols like Mickey Mantle. Leigh Brackett, who collaborated on the screenplay for Bogart's The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), is the credited screenwriter, and apparently did shape the plot for Altman, but the dialogue has that off-the-cuff, on-the-set character of most of the director's films. John Williams's title theme, sometimes with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, is wittily deployed throughout the movie, as doorbell chimes or supermarket Muzak, and in various arrangements, including one for the municipal band of the Mexican town of Tepotzlan.

Filmstruck

Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)

Heaven's Gate, for all its history as a calamitous flop, is not so much a bad movie as an inchoate one. You can see it go awry from the very beginning, when it tries to pass off the ornate architecture of Oxford University, where the scenes were filmed, for the spare red brick and granite of Harvard Yard. The film opens with a frenzied commencement for the Harvard class of 1870, which devolves into a swirling dance to the "Blue Danube" waltz. It's potentially an exhilarating opening, but it goes on and on and on, and serves almost no purpose in the rest of the film, except to introduce us to James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and his friend William C. Irvine (John Hurt), members of the graduating class. Then the film jumps 20 years, to Wyoming, where Averill is marshal of Johnson County. We never learn why Averill, who is a wealthy man, winds up in this hard and thankless job, living in near-squalor and hooked up with Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), the madam of a brothel. As for Irvine, with whom Averill reunites during a stopover in Casper on his way back to Johnson County, he has somehow become involved with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a group of cattlemen led by the sinister Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) who are trying to keep immigrants from settling on the land they want to graze. It's clear that director-screenwriter Michael Cimino at some point wanted Irvine, who is presented as an effete intellectual, to serve as a kind of chorus, commenting on the action, and as a foil to the more robust Averill, but Irvine keeps getting lost in the turns of the narrative and the excesses of Cimino's ideas. (The shooting took so long that Hurt was able to film David Lynch's The Elephant Man during his down time from Heaven's Gate.) In Casper we also meet Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who works as a kind of hit man for the cattlemen. But Champion is also a friend of Averill's and a rival of his for the attentions of Ella. There is the core of a more conventional Western in the relationships among these characters, but Cimino isn't interested in being conventional. What he is interested in are the elaborate set pieces like the waltz scene, a later scene with dozens of couples on roller skates, enormous throngs of extras milling through the streets of Casper, crowds of immigrants making their way to Johnson County, and battle scenes in which the citizens of the Johnson County settlement retaliate against the troops led by Canton that are determined to exterminate them. There are pauses in the hullabaloo for quieter scenes designed to work out the triangle formed by Averill, Champion, and Ella, but their characters are so lightly sketched in that we don't have much sense of the motives behind their sometimes enigmatic actions. And yet, it's a somehow maddeningly watchable film, thanks in large part to the often breathtaking cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, a committed performance by Huppert, the Oscar-nominated sets of Tambi Larsen and James L. Berkey, and yes, the sheer extravagance of what Cimino throws onto the screen. Without a plausible screenplay it could never have been a good film, but occasionally you can see how it might have been a great one.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller

I have been watching Deadwood on HBO GO, and now realize how much that series owes to what may be Robert Altman's best film, which is also the greatest of all "stoner Westerns." McCabe & Mrs. Miller is very much of the era in which it was made, with its fatalistic view of its loner protagonist, doomed by his naive willingness to go up against the big corporate mining interests who want to buy him out. Hippies against the Establishment, if you will. But as shows like Deadwood demonstrate, that agon has continued to play itself out in popular culture, long after the counterculture supposedly met its demise. It's also very much at the heart of the mythos of the American Western, which always centered on the loner against overwhelming odds. McCabe & Mrs. Miller came along at a time when the Western was in eclipse, with most of its great exponents, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, in retirement, and some of its defining actors, like John Wayne, having gone over to the side of the Establishment. So when iconoclasts like Altman and Warren Beatty, coming off of their respective breakthrough hits M*A*S*H (1970) and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), took an interest in filming Edmund Naughton's novel, it was clear that we were going to get something revisionist, a Western with a grubby setting and an antiheroic protagonist. The remarkable thing is that McCabe & Mrs. Miller, perhaps more than either M*A*S*H or Bonnie and Clyde, has transcended its revisionism and formed its own tradition. For once, Altman's mannerisms -- overlapping dialogue, restless camerawork, reliance on a stock company of actors like Michael Murphy, John Schuck, and Shelley Duvall, and a generally loosey-goosey mise-en-scène -- don't overwhelm the story. Some of this is probably owing to Beatty's own firmly entrenched ego, which was often at odds with Altman's. His performance gives the film a center and grounding that many of Altman's other films lack, especially since he works so well in tandem with Julie Christie's performance as Mrs. Miller, the only thing about the film that the Academy deigned worthy of an Oscar nomination. How the Academy could have overlooked the contribution of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond remains a mystery, except that at this point the cinematographers branch was dominated by old-school directors of photography who had been brought up in the studio system, which was to flood the set with light -- one reason why Gordon Willis's magisterial chiaroscuro in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) failed to get a nomination the following year. Altman also made a brilliant directoral decision to film in sequence, so that the town of Presbyterian Church, the work of production designer Leon Erickson and art directors Al Locatelli and Philip Thomas, takes shape around the action.