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Joe’s diatribe ends with the sentiment that somebody oughta kill ’em all (the hippies). Well, Patrick just did and, in an unguarded moment, makes a barroom confession that only Joe hears. What follows is the strangely antagonistic, yet symbiotic, relationship between the two different men from two different classes. They’re not exactly friends (Joe’s practically blackmailing the anguished father), but in a black-comic twisted way they do become compadres. The distinguished middle-class man of the executive class has enacted the fascistic rants of this low-class blue-collar loudmouth slob. By
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And the audience at the Tiffany Theater in 1970 watched the early section of the film in silence. But once Dennis Patrick enters the tavern, and Peter Boyle’s Joe enters the movie, the audience started laughing. And in no time at all the adult audience went from repulsed repose to outright hilarity. I remember they laughed at pretty much every fucking thing Joe said. It was a superior laugh; they were laughing at Joe. But they were laughing with Peter Boyle, who enters the movie like a force of nature. And the talented screenwriter Norman Wexler gives him a bunch of outrageous lines. Boyle’s
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I remember just as it seemed the laughter in the tavern scene had started to calm down, Joe gets up from the barstool and moves over to the jukebox to drop some coins in. And as soon as he gets a look at all the (I assume) soul music on the jukebox’s playlist, he yells out, “Christ, they even fucked up the goddamn music!” The audience of the Tiffany Theater burst out laughing even harder than before. But after the bar scene was over, and sometime after Dennis Patrick and his wife go over to Joe’s house for dinner, I fell asleep. So I missed the whole scene where Joe and his newfound acolyte go
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Well, I might have slept through the second half of Joe, but once the movie was over and the lights came on, I woke up. And in no time at all the second movie on the Tiffany double feature started, the more overtly comedic Where’s Poppa? And right from the get-go when George Segal puts on a gorilla suit and Ruth Gordon punches him in the nuts, this movie had me. At that age, the height of comedy was a guy in a gorilla suit, and the only thing funnier than that was a guy getting punched in the nuts. So a guy in a gorilla suit getting punched in the nuts was the absolute pinnacle of comedy. No
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Yes, some of those adult movies were fucking amazing! MASH, the Dollars Trilogy, Where Eagles Dare, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Owl and the Pussycat, and Bullitt. And some, to an eight- or nine-year-old, were fucking boring. Carnal Knowledge? The Fox? Isadora? Sunday Bloody Sunday? Klute? Goodbye, Columbus? Model Shop? Diary of a Mad Housewife? But I knew, while they were watching the movie, no one cared whether or not I was having a good time.
I remember Airport being a big hit with my family in 1970. Mainly due to the surprise of Van Heflin’s bomb going off. The moment the bomb exploded on board the aircraft was one of the most shocking moments in any Hollywood movie up to that time. As Curt said on the ride home, “I thought Dean Martin was going to talk the guy out of it,” subtextually remarking on how a Dean Martin movie of 1964 or 1965 would have played out, compared to a film—even a relatively old-fashioned one—of 1970. And the scene that followed—the hole in the aircraft sucking people out—was the most intense cinematic set
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Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren’t letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you.” Right fucking on, Connie!
Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. Whether it was James Caan being machine-gunned to death at the toll booth, or Moe Greene being shot in the eye in The Godfather. That guy cut in half by the airplane propeller in Catch-22. Stacy Keach’s wild ride on the side of the car in The New Centurions. Or Don Stroud shooting himself in the face with a tommy gun in Bloody Mama. But just listing grotesque moments—out of context of the movies they were in—isn’t entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother’s point of view—that she
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The film they paid to see was Sweet Sweetback. Now the reason I didn’t attend that screening was because since it was rated X (“by an all-white jury!”), I couldn’t. I’m sure Curt, Uncle Roger, and Robin didn’t know what to make of Melvin Van Peebles’ howling cry of black empowerment any more than they did Brewster McCloud. But while I’m sure they couldn’t fathom why anyone would bother to make Altman’s malarkey, the Van Peebles film was something. Something they didn’t understand. Something they couldn’t grasp (which made them mad). Something that wasn’t for them (after it rejected them, they
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This being the Saturday night showing of the brand-new Jim Brown movie, the huge auditorium (there were probably 1,400 seats) wasn’t exactly packed, but it was definitely busy, and buzzing with anticipation. My little face was the only white one in the audience. This was to be my first movie in an (except for me) all black movie theatre in a black neighborhood. This was 1972. By 1976 I would be venturing on my own to a mostly black theatre called the Carson Twin Cinema in Carson, California, which is where I would catch up on all the Blaxploitation and kung fu film classics I’d missed in the
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I was wiping tears of laughter from my eyes as the lights came up in the massive auditorium. I started figuring out, because of my mother, Reggie was trying to get in good with me. So, I asked him could I get a Coke and some candy at the snack bar. But instead of taking me to the concession stand, he just dug out his wallet, whipped out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Get anything you want.” As far as I was concerned, mom could marry this cat.
To one degree or another I’ve spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972.
Along with Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen was the biggest of the younger male movie stars of the sixties. The UK had its share of exciting young leading men like Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Albert Finney, and Terence Stamp, but of the young sexy guys in America—that were also genuine movie stars—it was McQueen, Newman, and Beatty. On the next level down was James Garner, George Peppard, and James Coburn. But for the most part, anytime one of them got a picture, it was because one of the top three turned it down. Producers wanted Newman or McQueen, they settled for George
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The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve’s success as a movie star can’t be overemphasized. It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve. Steve’s agent, Stan Kamen, would read ten scripts that were being offered, then narrow that down to five and send those off to Neile. She’d read those five scripts, write a synopsis on the material, narrow it down to the two she liked best, and then tell Steve the stories and explain her reasons why she liked them for him. Which would usually end up
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Eventually McQueen put Bullitt into production as a Solar picture with Warner Bros.-Seven Arts handling distribution. The end result was not only Steve McQueen’s biggest hit, but a zeitgeist smash, and finally McQueen surpassing his greatest rival, Paul Newman. The way Dirty Harry (which Steve later passed on) took the already iconic Clint Eastwood and gave him a new level of Clint-specific iconography, is what the chic cool-dude, slow-boil, fast-driving Frank Bullitt did for McQueen. Bullitt also changed the cop film genre, and later cop shows on TV for good. Thanks to James Bond, it was
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Peter Yates’ film doesn’t quite have the same zeitgeist position it enjoyed through the last decades of the twentieth century. While a lot of people born since 2000 may have heard of it, and they probably have heard about its famous car chase, that doesn’t mean they’ve seen it. I’m old enough to have actually seen Bullitt at the cinema when it came out. Which means I saw it at six. I don’t remember the movie. I remember the car chase. And that’s what most people usually remember about Bullitt. But they also remember how cool Steve McQueen was as Frank Bullitt, his cool clothes, his cool
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The story itself is more or less simple to follow. What’s unclear, especially during the middle section, is exactly what Bullitt’s up to, or why he does half the things he does. And if you think about it later, some of the things he does don’t make sense. At least not narrative sense. But as you watch—as you follow him breezing through San Francisco—it makes emotional movie-sense. One of the producers of the film, Philip D’Antoni, would also make The French Connection a few years later. And he followed the same narrative strategy in that film as well. The audience doesn’t know what’s going on
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If Bullitt was going to change action films (I’d say create the modern action film), it first had to break the back of the police procedural. The snazzy opening credit sequence with Lalo Schifrin’s score and Pablo Ferro’s stylishly designed titles sets the audience up for the whole movie. We don’t really have any idea what’s going on. But the characters on screen seem to know what’s going on. And we don’t really care, because it’s groovy to watch. Instead of wasting time trying to explain a mystery, it’s the first urban action movie to go from one expertly executed set piece to another (you
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Aside from the opening credit sequence, the other scene that sets up the movie is early on when Frank takes his girlfriend out to dinner. They go to a restaurant called Coffee Cantata. And we watch them have a good time and eat dinner. Yet, we don’t hear a fucking thing they say. Other than demonstrating they like each other and that Frank is capable of having a good time, nothing personal is revealed about the couple during the whole sequence. What Yates feels is important is the jazz band performing at the restaurant, the sound of jazzy music, the hip vibe of the establishment, the San
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Don Siegel did terrific location photography in his career, and he would do a good job shooting San Francisco three years later in Dirty Harry (even though half the movie would be shot on the Universal back lot). But nobody had ever shot San Francisco as great as Peter Yates did or ever will again. The way he utilizes location to such a dynamic degree suggests a master cinematic stylist. One of the reasons he did such a dynamite job was he went thirty days over schedule. Yates was shooting a movie, not a schedule. While Yates would do good work many times again—Breaking Away, The Hot Rock, The
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Rarely in the entire history of Hollywood movie stars being movie stars has a movie star done less and accomplished more than McQueen with this role in this movie. The part is nothing and yet he makes it a great role. He practically does nothing, but nobody in the history of movies did nothing like Steve McQueen. As great as McQueen could be, this is the role he needs to be remembered by. Because it’s in this role he demonstrates what he could do that Newman and Beatty couldn’t. Which is just be. Just fill the frame with him.
Yates doesn’t employ the old movie-star trick of having everybody else overact, while the lead underacts so he comes across as cooler and more in control. The ham and phony dramatics that always accompanied the supporting players in their stock roles in cop movies were stripped away by Yates. Robert Vaughn, in his own way, is as effective in his role as McQueen. Vaughn never overplays his smarmy oily act. He never makes a meal out of his provoking dialogue. Like McQueen as Bullitt, he finds his own register, his own monotone, and never veers off course. In his entertaining study of the actor’s
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When Eastwood as Frank Morris in Escape from Alcatraz doesn’t speak for the first fifteen minutes, it’s self-conscious too (it’s also cool and effective). But Bullitt’s lack of dialogue is never self-conscious. Because it’s a physical performance. Bullitt doesn’t explain to the audience or other characters what he’s doing or thinking. He just does them and we watch. When I mentioned to Neile McQueen how little Bullitt spoke, she said, “That was all Steve. He really didn’t like to talk too much in movies. He would just rip out pages of dialogue. He’d do scenes with Don Gordon and say, ‘Give
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