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Cops and criminals. Gangsters and prisons. Another one of the staples of movies over the years has been the crime movie. Sometimes the cop wins, sometimes the criminal wins up until the end when the cop wins. Often the viewer is left with the moral ambivalence that everybody is wrong.
Just this week, AMC had The Shawshank Redemption on twice a night for Monday through Thursday. Even with the editing so as not to offend people who want to believe all language at all times is suitable for Sunday School, it was still a good watch. No, I didn’t watch it every night, but I did watch it completely once again. Then there’s Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got heah is failuah to communicate..” Just one of the most iconic movie lines of all time. Con Air is another surprisingly fun watch, for all the violence. As always, when I’m watching movies, I’m looking for a fun tale and not necessarily striving for reality. In High Sierra, Humphrey Bogart is a prison escapee. Jimmy Cagney got to play the bad guy often but my favorite from him is White Heat. Edward G. Robinson is nearly as iconic in Little Caesar as Cagney.
It is impossible to talk about crime and gangsters without mentioning The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. Bogart also got to play the good guy going against the gangsters a few times including Deadline: USA where he was the crusading journalist exposing the corruption and racketeering and he goes up against Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo. Robert DeNiro got to play a Las Vegas mobster in Casino. And speaking of Las Vegas, I am much more of a fan of the original Ocean’s Eleven than I am of the remake. Sinatra and company just look like they’re having a bit more fun I guess. . . .
Bonnie and Clyde had one of the more graphic endings for its time. In more recent times, it seems the graphic violence of a Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vol 1, Kill Bill Vol 2, and Desperado are all so over the top as to be satires on the violence.
Dirty Harry presented the cop as an anti-hero and also has one of the more iconic lines with, “I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”
Other movies I’ve enjoyed with, shall we say, some morally ambivalent cops, include but as always are not limited to, Coogan’s Bluff (also starring Clint Eastwood – and I would not say for certain but I think this movie might have been the prototype for Dennis Weaver‘s later TV series McCloud.) Eastwood is definitely the good cop in The Gauntlet. Nick Nolte gets the morally compromised cop role who winds up being the good guy in Mulholland Falls while Russell Crowe has it in LA Confidential. Ice-T helps take down Wesley Snipes in New Jack City. Jean Reno and Gary Oldman take down each other in The Professional.
Both of the Thomas Crown Affair movies are good watches multiple times. It’s difficult for me to decide if I like Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway more than I like Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo. It’s also difficult for me to choose between the iconic chase scenes in Bullitt and The French Connection. In the Heat of the Night allows Sidney Poiter and Rod Steiger to come to an understanding of each other if not a friendship.
Not all the crime and punishment movies have to be serious all the time. Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs and Another 48 Hrs. and Murphy and the “Beverly Hills Police Department” in Beverly Hills Cop and Beverly Hills Cop II all provide some levels of humor. Murphy gets his time as a gangster in Harlem Nights. Running Scared has some good laughs while letting Jimmy Smits play against type while The Big Easy has the music of N’Awlins to support Dennis Quaid’s seduction of Ellen Barkin and take down of John Goodman while Get Shorty and Be Cool allow John Travolta to be John Travolta.
And because I can:
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So many good ones on the drama side…
Donnie Brasco
Reservoir Dogs
Dead Man Walking
The Departed
On the a lighter note, the Pink Panther series never fails to make me laugh.
“Inspector Clouseau: [gesturing to the hotel's dog] Does your dog bite?
German hotelier: No.
[Clouseau bends to pet the dog; it bites him.]
Inspector Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite!
German hotelier: That is not my dog.
”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Pink_Panther_Strikes_Again
Yeah, I kept forgetting to add “The Departed” to my list. “Goodfellas” is another good un
Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly is always fun; I laugh at the formality of their relationship.
Love Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, again with Jimmy Stewart and a great cast — but it’s a sentimental favorite because it was filmed in my family’s stomping grounds, and my grandfather was actually present when the murder on which this was based occurred.
Other favorites:
Silence of the Lambs — great female lead role, Jodie Foster perfect as Clarice
The Sting — really nice period movie, and what a cast for an ensemble.
The Untouchables — for yet another stellar cast, and Brian DePalma’s direction. My favorite scene is still that with Sean Connery defining “The Chicago Way,” he just chews it up.
The Professional — love Jean Reno’s intensity, breakout for Natalie Portman, and excellent direction by Luc Besson.
Fargo — still makes me laugh my ass off. And again, another ensemble movie, can’t imagine this performed by any other folks.
Favorite foreign crime/punishment flicks:
Run Lola Run — Franke Potente makes me feel out of breath every time I watch this.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — as well as its successors in Steig’s Millenium series. There is NO way that the American version will touch this movie. None. Casting is already disappointing. But you should see the originals so you know why I say this.
“Even with the editing so as not to offend people who want to believe all language at all times is suitable for Sunday School,”
I watched The Red Balloon in Sunday school, back before the Presbyterians went fundy and I fled to Unitarian Universalism. There. Everyone knows.
I also watched An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) in Sunday School. It was a trip, Still think about it.
Oh, hell. Can you blog about The Red Balloon and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge nowadays and not get attacked?
“…and for what? A little bit of money…”
Fargo. Haunting.
BTW Rayne: Do you read Sutter Cane? (movie line. Carpenter. In the Mouth of Madness. also in the movie: “You drive.”).
Rayne, this one’s for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrTsuvykUZk
No problem.
Breathless (1960)
Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
The Killing (1956)
The Killers (1946)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Ossessione (1943) this is “The Postman Always Rings Twice”
Rififi (1955)
Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
True Romance (1993)
The Public Enemy (1931) Martin Scorsese says that James Cagney enters and modern film acting begins
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
The Grifters (1990)
He Walked by Night (1948)
Mean Streets (1973)
The Day of the Jackal (1973)
A Simple Plan (1998)
The 39 Steps (1935)
Psycho (1960)
Since these are my lists and I get to make the arbitrary distinctions, The Maltese Falcon, Day of the Jackal, and 39 Steps are on the list for a later post on “Spies & PI’s” :})
Ah, so many good ones. I want to go outside and yell…
“We Need a HERO!”
Madeleine Carroll, from “The 39 Steps,” was married for a time to Sterling Hayden. I discovered that this week. I was describing the scene where she and Robert Donat are in Scotland, handcuffed together, sitting on a bed in a room in an inn, fully clothed. Her stockings are wet. She will need to remove them and hang them by the fire. His left hand is handcuffed to her right 1, as I recall. He’s chattering and looking off into space. She uses 2 hands to change stockings… Very witty. It shows her legs, pretty much in their entirety, to great advantage.
The really old movies listed are great. There was nothing more menacing than Edward G. Robinson on a large screen.
Double Indemnity is a great movie. The novel (a short novel) is written by James M. Cain, who also wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice. The screenplay is by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck are the stars. He’s an insurance salesman and she is a housewife. They devise a plot to kill her husband, and make it look like an unusual accident, and thereby get a double payoff from the insurance company that employs him. Edward G. Robinson is the claims manager, Keyes. Now, I know the dialog from this movie practically by heart. However, there was a time when I had not seen it for many, many years. Seeing it after a long hiatus, the performance that stunned me for its excellence and force was the 1 by Edward G. Robinson. Robert Osborne of TCM says Robinson had been the lead in every movie he’d made since Little Caesar in 1931 and now in 1944 was asked to play a supporting role for the 1st time. Born in 1893, he moved into a new stage of his career past age 50.
Wilder lived in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris before the US. Jewish. Left Germany after Kristallnacht. He was a journalist in Vienna in the 1920s. Interviewed Sigmund Freud. Wilder said his newspaper sent him to elicit comments from famous people on some newsworthy event. He arrived at Freud’s place at lunchtime and Freud was wearing a napkin at his throat. Wilder said he saw the couch, the famous couch: “a little couch.” Freud wanted nothing to do with journalists and basically threw Wilder out.
For the Thomas Crown Affair, I’ll go with Brosnan and Russo. Each one alone is powerful, and the combination is truly smoldering.
To borrow from Annie Savoy in Bull Durham, “Oh my . . .”
The movie is told in flashback, narrated by MacMurray. At the beginning a car is driving recklessly, careening throught the streets of Los Angeles at 4:00 AM or so. Some workers seem to be repairing a streetcar line. MacMurray (Walter Neff) goes up to his office at the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company. His arm is injured. He begins to dictate a memo, into a recording machine, to Keyes regarding the Dietrichson matter. (Stanwyck is Phyllis Dietrichson). Neff tries to ignite a wooden match with his thumbnail in order to smoke. He fails. Throughout the movie he will succeed 1st time every time he tries to light a match with his thumbnail.
The streetcar metaphor is used throughout the movie. Keyes points out that when you commit a murder with someone, it’s far more intimate than love, you are riding a streetcar with them, all the way to the end of the line, and the last stop is the cemetery.
Early on, Neff says he is 35 years old, never been married, no visible scars.
He goes to the Dietrichson house late in the afternoon, hoping to obtain a renewal on an automobile policy. The husband is not home. Neff has a line of patter. He flirts with her and comes on fast. She tells him the speed limit in this state is 45 mph.
At 1 point she says I wonder if I know what you mean. He says I wonder if you wonder.
She raises the question of whether it would be possible to insure her husband’s life without him knowing about it?
She comes to his apartment. It is raining. She is wearing a trench coat and has her hands in her pockets, i.e., she is carrying nothing. He answers the door. She says “You left your hat when you were at the house this afternoon.” He says “Come on in and lay it on the chair.”
At 1 point he walks at night. He says he never knew that murder could smell like honeysuckle.
Stanwyck was born in 1908, the same year as Katherine Hepburn. In 1944 she made $400,000 and was the highest paid woman in the US.
MacMurray says Wilder approached him about the movie in a studio cafeteria. MacMurray was very reluctant. He was known for light romantic fluff and usually got the girl. He was afraid what fans he had would not like Walter Neff.