Every 70s Movie: alvin sargent

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Monday, April 4, 2016

1980 Week: Ordinary People

One of the most harrowing domestic dramas ever released by a major Hollywood studio, Ordinary People tells the story of a family poised to implode in the wake of a tragedy. Tracking the emotional recovery of a teenager following a suicide attempt—which, in turn, was the direct result of his older brother’s accidental death—the picture uses a scalpel to peel back the socially acceptable masks that hide hatred, pain, and shame. Even with glimmers of humor from supporting actor Judd Hirsch, who plays a psychiatrist with an earthy demeanor, Ordinary People is rough going. The movie is almost relentlessly sad. Yet the final act is quite moving, a reward for viewers who cross an emotional minefield with the film’s characters. Another incentive: Ordinary People is exquisitely made in terms of acting, storytelling, and technical execution. The movie is not perfect, partially because it takes so long for tonal variance to emerge and partially because the stately pacing results in a slightly bloated running time. In every important respect, however, Ordinary People is a model for how small-scale dramas can achieve their full potential. When the movie works, which is most of the time, it’s almost transcendent.

At the center of the picture is the Jarrett family. The father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland), is an easygoing lawyer who can’t see how deeply his family was scarred by the death of elder son Jordan during a boating accident. The mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), is a tightly wound avatar of suburban perfection who suppresses everything that’s challenging and imperfect and weak. That’s why she can’t even begin to connect with the family’s surviving son, anguished teenager Conrad (Timothy Hutton). Because he was present when his older brother died, Conrad blames himself for Jordan’s death. Unfortunately, so does Beth, for whom the sun rose and set with Jordan. The unique dramatic crux of Ordinary People is the notion that parents don’t always love their children equally—Beth resents Conrad as much as she worshipped Jordan.

Despite its great sensitivity and meticulous craftsmanship, Ordinary People might have become the equivalent of a glorified TV movie if not for the involvement of one key player. Acting icon Robert Redford made his directorial debut with Ordinary People, and his work was so assured that he scored an Oscar for Best Director. Rather than showing off with visual trickery, Redford focused on molding performances and shaping scenes, with marvelous results. He led first-time movie actor Hutton to an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the way Redford exploded Moore’s girl-next-door image was masterful. Also netting an Oscar for the film was screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who beautifully adapted the story from a novel by Judith Guest by creating a tightly connected web of metaphors and signifiers. Collectively, the team behind the movie was rewarded for their efforts with the ultimate Hollywood prize: Ordinary People won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1980.

Ordinary People: RIGHT ON

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Julia (1977)

A posh drama that eventually morphs into a posh thriller, Julia is made with such consummate restraint and taste that it’s as delicate as silk. Alas, beautiful photography and elegant words and graceful direction go only so far, even when combined with strong performances by world-class actors, because, ultimately, story is everything—and the story of Julia is dull, episodic, and far-fetched. Adapted from a book by the venerable Lillian Hellman, the movie depicts an episode in the late 1930s when Hellman allegedly aided Germans who were resisting the rise of the Third Reich. Setting aside the question of whether the events in question ever really happened—even the film’s director, the venerable Fred Zinnemann, later expressed doubts about the veracity of Hellman’s tale—the problem with Julia is that it can’t decide whether it’s a quiet chamber piece or a wartime adventure.

The movie has at least four major components. First is a long prologue depicting young Lillian’s friendship with a sophisticated girl named Julia. Next comes a long passage during which the adult Lillian (Jane Fonda) becomes a famous writer under the tutelage of her lover/mentor, crime-fiction legend Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards). After that, Lillian ventures to Europe, where she’s reunited with the grown-up Julia (Vanessa Redgrave) for a passage depicting the subtle textures of adult frendship. And finally, the movie shifts into intrigue mode when a rebel operative (Maximillian Schell) enlists Lillian to carry a package through Nazi-occupied terrain. Seen generously, this is the story of how Hellman’s character was built on the road to performing a great deed of selfless heroism, but since even that reading relegates the first half of the movie to the role of backstory, it becomes obvious why the structure of the picture is so peculiar. After all, did the makers of Casablanca (1942) have to spend half the movie explaining Rick Blaine’s childhood so audiences would understand his actions during the movie’s final scene?

Even though Julia enjoyed considerable acclaim during its original release—winning Oscars for Redgrave, Robards, and screenwriter Alvin Sargent—it’s a tough film to love. For, while Julia contains many great things, from Robards’ world-weary characterization to the gorgeous cinematography by Douglas Slocombe, the various elements never cohere. Worse, the idea that Hellman might have fabricated such an outlandishly self-aggrandizing narrative leaves a bad taste on the palette. In any event, Julia occupies an interesting place in pop-culture history, because it was upon collecting her Academy Award for this film that Redgrave made her infamous “Zionist hoodlums” speech during the 1978 Oscar broadcast.

Julia: FUNKY

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Bobby Deerfield (1977)

Two Hollywood heavyweights famous for intellectualizing their work succumb to bad habits in Bobby Deerfield, a plodding romantic drama without enough narrative substance to support its heavy themes. Ostensibly the story of a racecar driver mired in existential crisis, the big-budget misfire gets lost in a maze of pretentious dialogue and vague characterization. Despite all their obvious effort to craft something surpassingly sensitive, producer-director Sydney Pollack and director Al Pacino ended up making something utterly artificial: The storytelling lacks the depth found in Pollack’s best dramas, and Pacino’s performance is so internalized it validates every criticism about self-indulgence ever lobbed his way. Bobby Deerfield is especially disappointing because Pacino and Pollack should have comprised a dream team for fans of thoughtful movies. Based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque and written for the screen by the literate humanist Alvin Sargent, Bobby Deerfield begins with narcissistic Formula One driver Bobby Deerfield (Pacino) watching a nasty crash that injures one driver and takes the life of another. Jarred by the realization that his career involves courting death, Bobby starts wandering around in an angst-ridden haze, eventually visiting the hospital where the surviving driver is recuperating. While there, Bobby meets a fellow troubled soul, Lillian (Marthe Keller), who has a whole different set of issues with human mortality. Even with Pollack’s consummate skill for constructing love stories, the dynamic between Bobby and Lillian holds zero interest. Bobby’s such a cipher it’s impossible to care whether he finds love, and Lillian’s an ice queen—thus, since their interaction is the whole movie (aside from a few moderately distracting driving scenes), Bobby Deerfield is a 124-minute spiral into a black hole of downbeat boredom. The movie is skillfully made and the acting is strong, within the limitations set by the murky writing, but who cares? Digging the good stuff from the muck simply isn’t worth the effort.

Bobby Deerfield: LAME

Monday, April 23, 2012

Footsteps (1972)

Nominated for a Golden Globe as the best TV movie of its year, Footsteps is a hard-driving character drama set in the competitive world of college football. Yet instead of focusing on the tribulations of athletes, as is the norm for the genre, Footsteps explores the psychology of a ruthless coach whose belligerence, drinking, and shady ethics have made him a pariah among top schools. Richard Crenna, putting his customary intensity to great use, stars as Paddy O’Connor, a cocky ex-player with a good record of guiding teams toward victory, but a bad record of holding onto jobs.
When the movie begins, he arrives in a small Southwestern town to start work as a defensive coordinator at a regional college. Since the school’s head coach, Jonas Kane (Clu Gulager), once played for O’Connor, O’Connor bristles at taking orders from a former subordinate. O’Connor also angles for Kane’s job, sleeps with Kane’s secretary to get inside information, cozies up to a deep-pocketed sponsor (Forrest Tucker) in order to have a star player moved to defense, and makes passes at Kane’s girlfriend, beautiful drama teacher Sarah Allison (Joanna Pettet). For a while, O’Connor gets away with his behavior by delivering a winning season, but things come to a head when moral crises reveal how conscience sometimes inhibits ambition.

Although it suffers from brevity, running the standard 74 minutes for a ’70s TV movie, Footsteps is quite solid. Featuring a script co-written by future Oscar winner Alvin Sargent, the movie has several compelling confrontations. Moreover, the O’Connor character is such a force of nature that it’s fascinating to parse how much of his act is bluster and how much is justifiable confidence. Though generally not the deepest actor, Crenna slips into this role comfortably and delivers a virile performance. The supporting cast is fine as well, with Bill Overton doing strong work as O’Connor’s star player. (Ned Beatty is wasted in a tiny role.) Veteran TV director Paul Wendkos accentuates the story’s inherent tension with tight compositions placing actors in close proximity, and the filmmakers employ trippy effects like solarization and split-screens to enliven big-game montages that were obviously cobbled together from stock footage.

Footsteps: GROOVY

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Straight Time (1978)

After the flurry of activity that followed his star-making performance in The Graduate (1967), Dustin Hoffman became incredibly selective in the ’70s and ’80s, sometimes letting years pass between projects. Not coincidentally, his commitment to the parts he actually took was incredible, manifesting as deep involvement with story development and meticulous research into the lifestyles of his characters. The excellent drama Straight Time is rooted in this uncompromising craftsmanship: Hoffman’s character appears in virtually every scene, so his performance shapes the film.

Hoffman stars as Max Dembo, a small-time crook recently released from six years in prison. After a few halting attempts at living within the law, Max drifts back to criminality in part because his hard-driving parole officer, Earl Frank (M. Emmett Walsh), finds drug residue left in Max’s dingy apartment by Max’s useless friend, fellow ex-con Willy Darin (Gary Busey). Feeling like he’s damned to incarceration whether he commits crimes or not, Max starts executing risky robberies despite the promise of his new romance with Jenny Mercer (Theresa Russell), a sweet young woman he met at an employment agency.

The intense drama of Straight Time stems from an exploration of whether Max ever really has the opportunity to go straight. In a way, the picture is an indictment of the social structures that ensure a lifetime of punishment for any significant infraction. Based on a novel by real-life criminal Edward Bunker and directed by Ulu Grosbard, all of whose films are distinguished by extraordinary acting, Straight Time has authenticity to burn. It’s uncomfortable watching Max gauge the reactions of people who discover the truth about his past, and excruciating to see him tossed back in the slammer on the mere suspicion of a parole violation.

The genius of Hoffman’s performance is that he plays Max as an addict: Whenever Max gets his teeth into a promising score, he loses the ability to perceive anything except the loot in front of him, so he frequently overstays his welcome at crime sites, endangering himself and his accomplices. Therefore, the movie provides a resonant portrait of a career criminal, someone who, accurately or not, believes no other options exist.

The performers supporting Hoffman are terrific, with Busey and a young Kathy Bates playing an impoverished couple trying to steer clear of trouble despite the Busey character’s many weaknesses. Harry Dean Stanton essays a frightening professional crook whose ruthless discipline makes him a public menace. Russell is credible and sensitive in one of her first roles, and Walsh does wonders with the movie’s thinnest characterization. Although a slew of writers worked on the script (including A-listers Michael Mann and Alvin Sargent), it’s to Grosbard’s and Hoffman’s credit that the film comes together as smoothly as it does: Straight Time is essentially a character study, but the movie also works, at least in moments, as a gripping thriller. More importantly, it resonates.

Straight Time: RIGHT ON

Saturday, September 10, 2011

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972)

   In addition to being one of Hollywood’s longest-lasting offscreen couples, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward made a formidable combination whenever Newman stepped behind the camera to direct his wife. Case in point: The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, a bleak drama about a bitterly unhappy single mother raising two young daughters even though she’s barely capable of looking after herself. In a dodgy urban pocket of Connecticut, Beatrice Hunsdorfer (Woodward) lives in a disorderly house with high-schooler Ruth (Roberta Wallach) and grade-schooler Matilda (Nell Potts). Beatrice squeaks by on a meager income, which includes lodging a procession of decrepit seniors in a downstairs room.
   Beatrice is a foul-tempered, hard-drinking, self-loathing harridan, a lifelong misfit whose sharp tongue made her a class clown back in her school days, but now serves to alienate her from nearly everyone she encounters. Resentful that her husband left her and subsequently died, dooming her to a hand-to-mouth existence, Beatrice brims with so much rage that she lashes out with every breath, deriding her daughters and burdening them with her adult problems. Ruth is old enough to retreat into the distractions of a teenager’s social life, but Matilda is so young and sensitive she can’t figure out where she belongs in her horror show of a home life.
   Adapted by sensitive-drama specialist Alvin Sargent from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paul Zindel, the story tracks an excruciating stretch in the life of the Hunsdorfer clan, during which Matilda slowly discovers a self-affirming identity as an exceptional science student (the film’s title relates to her horticultural experiment), and during which Beatrice spirals deeper into depression. Newman’s direction is clinical and unobtrusive, observing Beatrice somewhat like a wild animal in a zoo, and he concentrates much of his energy on coaxing affecting performances from the girls playing Beatrice’s offspring.
   Wallach, the daughter of durable character player Eli Wallach, is appropriately reserved and sullen, but Potts provides the crucial counterpoint to Woodward’s intensity. The real-life daughter of Newman and Woodward, Potts (born Elinor Teresa Newman) is a fragile presence, her pale blue eyes expressing the unique confusion of a child frightened by her mother. Woodward is as powerful as usual, delving into Beatrice’s darkness and finding the wounds behind the ugliness, so when the story comes together in the last half-hour, the juxtaposition of Potts’ performance with Woodward’s creates something simultaneously beautiful and excruciating. The Effect of Gamma Rays is tough going, since Newman builds emotional tension without any reprieve, but it’s a worthwhile journey.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds: GROOVY

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973)

Best known for the Oscar-winning adapted screenplays of Julia (1977) and Ordinary People (1980), Alvin Sargent has spent his career writing stories about troubled characters. Some of these stories hit a perfect target of idiosyncratic sensitivity, and some of them, well, don’t. An example of the latter circumstance is Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, the tale of an emotionally disturbed American youth and an uptight middle-aged Englishwoman who fall in love while traveling through Spain. The story is reasonable enough, since we discover why each character has fled home and why each character feels sufficiently adrift to latch onto an unlikely paramour, but the execution is awkward.

As directed by the venerable Alan J. Pakula, who specialized in heavy drama, Love and Pain has an oppressive seriousness that inhibits Sargent’s attempts to blend comic and dramatic elements. Pakula anchors shots in deep shadows that create distractingly ominous portent, and his handling of performances is almost too sensitive: Pakula lets Bottoms and Smith go so deep into their characters’ traumas that viewers are more likely to be frightened for these people than to root for them. It doesn’t help that vignettes in Sargent’s script range from generic to silly.

On the generic end of things are many aimless scenes of the couple walking around historical sites, and on the silly end is the sequence in which the guests encounter a strange duke (Don Jaime de Mora y Aragón), who literally rescues Smith on horseback after she suffers a fall. Sargent also occasionally succumbs to hippie-era psychobabble, like this speech delivered by Bottoms: “We’re free, we’re coming alive, we’re talking to each other—what do you want to go back to crying in the dark for?” Complicating matters further, the picture features dissonant moments of lowbrow physical comedy, like the bit of Smith tripping on her panties while fleeing an interrupted sexual liaison.

Ultimately, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is an extremely odd movie, with a jumble of erratic tonalities and fleetingly touching performances; though the picture has such admirable intentions and genuine feeling that it can’t be dismissed, it’s an aesthetic hodgepodge.

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing: FUNKY

Sunday, February 27, 2011

I Walk the Line (1970)

Gregory Peck’s campaign to complicate his image throughout the ’70s was admirable, and the public’s expectation that he would always play morally righteous characters gave him an edge whenever he ventured outside of his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, not all of the material he used for his experiments was worthy of the effort. I Walk the Line is a good example. A standard melodrama about a small-town Southern sheriff tempted from morality by the sexual charms of a moonshiner’s young daughter, the picture is salacious, but far too sluggish. Worse, Peck isn’t loose enough to convey the extremes of a man driven beyond his inhibitions by animal lust; instead of coming across as feverish, Peck comes across as psychotic. The blame for this atonal portrayal can probably be shared equally by Peck and by director John Frankenheimer, a wizardly storyteller when handling the right action/suspense material but a hit-and-miss filmmaker in the world of straight drama. Given that he specialized in generating close-quarters tension through mano-a-mano psychological warfare, Frankenheimer probably had no more business tackling this sort of simplistic Southern-fried pulp than his leading man did; Frankeneheimer doesn’t come close to creating the sort of sweaty, melodramatic aesthetic that would have kicked this thing into the realm of, say, Tennesse Williams-style hysterics.
Still, the picture looks great, thanks to Frankenheimer’s characteristically slick camerawork and the participation of strong artists in front of and behind the camera. As the moonshiner’s daughter, Tuesday Weld brings more than enough wild sex appeal to make her role in the story convincing, and cinematographer David M. Walsh creates a glossy look capturing the untamed openness of the picture’s Tennessee locations. While the device of scoring the movie entirely with Johnny Cash songs is gimmicky, the Man in Black’s haunted drone is an effective sonic signifier for the torment inside the sheriff’s soul. The picture also benefits from supporting actors who sink their teeth into screenwriter Alvin Sargent’s meticulous dialogue. Charles Durning gives a sharp turn as Peck’s sly second-in-command, Ralph Meeker is appropriately odious as Weld’s pragmatic father, and Estelle Parsons suffers poignantly as the sheriff’s cast-aside wife. With all of this talent involved, I Walk the Line offers many rewards for the patient viewer, but lackluster storytelling keeps the picture mired in mediocrity.

I Walk the Line: FUNKY