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OT: "Hard Contract" (1969) -- Coburn and Remick -- A Hit Man Finds Love

posted 7 years ago by ecarle
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"Hard Contract" doesn't get shown much.

But I've got this book of Harlan Ellison reviews I've been reading off and on for a few months, and, back in 1969, Ellison gave it a rave review and noted that it had "lines around the block" at the flagship Bruin Theater in West LA, near the UCLA campus and where all sorts of big movies got their big debuts for a few decades...from Some Like It Hot to The Exorcist.

Hard Contract wasn't in THEIR league. But it was on cable the other night(it rarely is)...and I found it a fascinating example of how Hollywood studios just sort of lost their bearings in the late sixties.

1969 and 1970 were interesting years in Hollywood. Whereas the cusp of 1959 into 1960 found filmmakers like Hitchcock, Wilder, Hawks, Huston and Preminger at the top of their form, the cusp of 1969 into 1970 found them floundering, old in flesh and old in their filmmaking. Sherlock Holmes, Topaz, Rio Lobo, The Kremlin Letter, Tell Me That You Love Me Julie Moon -- this was not top drawer work.

And Hollywood hadn't really found a full replacement group for them yet.

The biggest hit of 1969 was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." It didn't get a lot of great reviews then, really, and it doesn't feel that great now. Newman and Redford never looked better, and were a great team, and had great one-liners(and a great scene on a cliff overlooking a waterfall) but..the movie as a whole seems glib and dull and very empty -- and that whole middle chase by the Super-posse is downright dull.

The Wild Bunch was a masterpiece, but a gory one and one that didn't get much box office traction.

Films I really liked THEN -- like True Grit and On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Italian Job -- look a bit constrained and cheapjack now(well, not OMMSS, but it IS overlong).

Now, those were actually the successful films. But Hard Contract is one of those floundering films of a new filmmaker. Its over-hip and WAY over-talky and hellbent to sound profound when it actually often sounds obtuse.

I found it fascinating.

Its from 20th Century Fox and I found it rather like a Fox movie from the next year that I really like -- The Kremlin Letter(by John Huston with Richard Boone and Patrick O'Neal.) Both films are ostensibly thrillers, but they don't particularly thrill. Its like "the wheels were coming off" traditional studio screenwriting, and both Hard Contract and The Kremlin Letter feel like movies where fine actors were gathered to do great work in the service of ...nothing much. All I could think -- watching both movies - is how Hitchcock used to tell stories SO much better than this. These new guys didn't know how to do it.

They were just waiting for Coppola and Scorsese and Lucas and Spielberg to arrive.

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Also like "The Kremlin Letter," "Hard Contract" is happy that the "R" rating is here and so everybody can be as amoral as they want to be.

James Coburn had a Fox contract. Interesting: he turned down the Patrick O'Neal role in The Kremlin Letter(perhaps he saw that Boone would steal it) and he was turned down to play Sundance.

Instead around the same time...he took this Fox "thriller". And thus found himself sacrificing his potential stardom to a weird hip potboiler.

Coburn's a hit man, though the film makes a point of not showing HOW he kills his victims. They just turn up dead. (No, wait -- he throws one out a window.)

To match his cold killing job, Coburn has sex only with hookers, and he doesn't kiss them, and he literally doesn't sleep with them -- they have to leave("I like doing things with other people in bed when I'm awake...I like to sleep alone.") Karen Black(hey, a Hitchcockian!) in an early role is the first hooker we see him with. Its pleasant, she's nice, he's nice...but his rules apply.

Burgess Meredith has a field day using that bizarre Penguin-voice of his to deliver pages and pages of obscure exposition as "the Boss Man" about how Coburn must execute a "hard contract" -- kill three men in Europe in one month, with only two of them identified at first. Its fine "set up" stuff(think Gavin Elster briefing Scottie) but...it sets up nothing.

Off to Europe Coburn goes and waiting there for a "meet cute and sexy" is Lee Remick, as a loose American woman who realizes that Coburn has mistaken her for a hooker. She takes the pay and does the work...and when Coburn finds out that he has slept with a NON-hooker for the first time in his life ...everything changes. Its love, baby.

There ain't much more to say about Hard Contract except that once in Europe, Coburn meets his Third Target and its...Sterling Hayden, that fascinating B-actor who kept turning up in A movies(The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather...and Spielberg wanted Hayden for Quint in Jaws.)

Coburn and Hayden have a long, long long dialogue sequence near the end -- in a "North by Northwest" cornfield, near a thresher...which is pseudo-intellectual on the one hand and goofy on the other. But I LIKED it...these are two macho men sizing each other up and offering life lessons to one another (Hayden, you see, used to be The Best Hitman in the Business, but he retired, and now its Coburn and...well...)

The ending? Well, there isn't one, really. Its 1969 with a first(and last) time director who also wrote the film, and James Coburn said he didn't know what he was doing. "The actors directed themselves" and the technical were handled by DP Jack Hildyard(who also shot Topaz that year; two good-looking bad movies. Well, neither Topaz nor Hard Contract is BAD. They just underperform.)

Well, that's my report on Hard Contract. The nostalgia factor for Eurofilm-inspired plotless hippie-era American studio movies was strong with this one.

But hey...the main event was Coburn and Remick. They were stars for a little while. They are doing a highly sexed-up version of, say, Grant and Bergman in Notorious, and it WAS sexy to watch a handsome man(though not as handsome as Grant) and a beautiful woman(to my mind, prettier than Bergman) "go at it." Not so much physically as mentally. Though, yeah, Lee Remick strips down to her skivvies and she seems in much better shape than ten years earlier! Equal opportunity: Coburn strips down somewhat, too.

Recommended only as a nostalgic curiosity.

[–] swanstep 7 years ago

Thanks for the tip on Hard Contract (1969) ecarle, I'd never heard of it before (the fate often of movies by one-off or otherwise very-short-career directors).

A version taped off cable TV is up on youtube here:
https://youtu.be/5nTuujim47c

The poster for Hard Contract was pretty wild, maybe nonsensical:
http://www.impawards.com/1969/posters/hard_contract.jpg

an unmoral picture
Love. Murder.
Everything they do
is 97% control and 3% emotion.
A man for hire.
A woman for ire.
A love story. Unexpected.

[–] ecarle 7 years ago

Thanks for the tip on Hard Contract (1969) ecarle, I'd never heard of it before (the fate often of movies by one-off or otherwise very-short-career directors).

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I heard of it when it came out. I was an inveterate "newspaper movie ad reader" and this ad caught my fancy. My parents were inveterate movie goers, they went to this but declared it off limits on basis of the R ...and the print ad.

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A version taped off cable TV is up on youtube here:
https://youtu.be/5nTuujim47c

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Nothing really disappears no more. The Kremlin Letter's on YouTube now, too. My favorite Boone scene is at 1:23...though he's quite a bit hammy in it. Its fun.

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The poster for Hard Contract was pretty wild, maybe nonsensical:
http://www.impawards.com/1969/posters/hard_contract.jpg

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The photo is a bit...sexual, yes? For 1969. I wonder if that got into all newspapers.

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
an unmoral picture
Love. Murder.
Everything they do
is 97% control and 3% emotion.
A man for hire.
A woman for hire.
A love story. Unexpected.

---

How very 1969. "Unmoral." Not amoral. But also provocative: A man for hire(to kill.) A woman for hire(to you know what.)

The 97% control line is from the movie itself.

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Oh, well...as imdb heads into the sunset , a few of this wild stray movies are worth considering.

And remember: Harlan Ellison in 1969 thought this was a great, ground-breaking movie. Psycho level.

Oops.

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

OK, I finally got around to watching the youtube copy of Hard Contract (1969).
"Hard Contract is one of those floundering films of a new filmmaker. Its over-hip and WAY over-talky and hellbent to sound profound when it actually often sounds obtuse."

Agreed. It's pretty terrible.... and really is stuck in a horrible half-way house between a To Catch A Thief/Charade-style Euro-fantasy and a harder-edged political/paranoiac/despairing '70s thriller. Signs of the latter include the demonstration scenes in Brussells and the references to some of Lee Remick's colleagues being actual war-criminals (who've done their time).

"Coburn's a hit man, though the film makes a point of not showing HOW he kills his victims. They just turn up dead. (No, wait -- he throws one out a window.)"
The one death we do see is probably the best scene in the movie (toss someone of a balcony amid an out of control demonstration and just walk away...) and illuminate just how idiotic the decision was to not show the earlier kills (I suppose in the name of keeping things in a chirpy To Catch A Thief zone for as long as possible).

Lee Remick, as a loose American woman who realizes that Coburn has mistaken her for a hooker. She takes the pay and does the work...and when Coburn finds out that he has slept with a NON-hooker for the first time in his life ...everything changes. Its love, baby.

Remick is seriously miscast in my view - she's prim and proper and it's simply impossible to imagine her hanging out with louche Euro-trash, trying on being a hooker for size, and the like. And as far as I could tell we never find out what the miraculous connection is on her side (we know what makes her special for Coburn - implausible as that is! - but not the reverse).
(cont'd)

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

Coburn and Hayden have a long, long long dialogue sequence near the end -- in a "North by Northwest" cornfield, near a thresher...which is pseudo-intellectual on the one hand and goofy on the other.

None of the dialogue in HC clicked for me and this scene was no exception. The scene reminded me of a key scene or two from Prime Cut (1972), which we've discussed a few times on this board. PC isn't a *great* film by any means but it's a lot better than HC in every respect, including of course dialogue. HC perhaps wishes it were more like the sort of hard-edged/strong-sense-of-place thriller that PC is but it just never commits to that and ends up instead hopelessly stuck in an impossible middle-ground.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Coburn and Hayden have a long, long long dialogue sequence near the end -- in a "North by Northwest" cornfield, near a thresher...which is pseudo-intellectual on the one hand and goofy on the other.
None of the dialogue in HC clicked for me and this scene was no exception. The scene reminded me of a key scene or two from Prime Cut (1972), which we've discussed a few times on this board.

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I suppose an interesting point to consider here is the nature of the "cornfield scene" in American cinema(or perhaps the "farm country" scene.) The crop duster sequence in NXNW is probably the progenitor of the idea: placing urban men and murderous attacks within the bucolic open air setting. A thresher chases Lee Marvin and Sissy Spacek in Prime Cut in an allusion to NXNWs crop duster. As I recall, Coburn and Hayden talk NEAR a thresher, or tractor(stopped) in Hard Contract. There is not violent action in the Coburn/Hayden scene, but it is suggested that it MIGHT happen (and the setting conjures up memories of NXNW to suggest that.)

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PC isn't a *great* film by any means but it's a lot better than HC in every respect, including of course dialogue. HC perhaps wishes it were more like the sort of hard-edged/strong-sense-of-place thriller that PC is but it just never commits to that and ends up instead hopelessly stuck in an impossible middle-ground.

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Well, Prime Cut knew what it was: a lean and tough gangster movie with the Chicago/NYC type action moved to the heartland. Hard Target is some sort of avant-garden pseudo-intellectual thing which, as much as it may have transfixed Harlan Ellison in '69, looks terribly pretentious today -- and, "non entertaining"(Prime Cut had plenty of action and Marvin vs Hackman as a great character star duel.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Speaking of Hitchcockian farmland visuals:

I do love the two shots in Torn Curtain in which Paul Newman walks out to a tractor where the "farmer"(Psycho's Mort Mills) is waiting on a tractor for him:

SHOT ONE: A screen-filling long shot of a field with crops. Screen right: Paul Newman, a tiny speck of a man(probably a body double) crosses to screen left, where a tractor sits idling(we hear the engine) with a farmer sitting on it. At that point when Newman's tiny figure REACHES the tractor..CUT TO:

SHOT TWO: Close medium shot: Farmer left, Newman right as Newman climbs aboard.

Something about the NXNW-ish long shot and how it "crashes into" the close shot on Newman and the "farmer" feels utterly Hitchcockian to me, in composition AND editing. AND "meaning."(Hitchcock references his earlier, greater spy film while trying to "goose up" this new, lesser one.)

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

None of the dialogue in HC clicked for me

With one exception... Coburn's and Remick's characters have an interesting conversation in bed where they're discussing children and C's character remarks that if they had two kids and then each of those kids had two kids and so on then the downstream consequences quickly become unfathomably huge. C's character suggests that they assume 25 years for a generation and that they then consider a term of 1000 years, i.e., 40 generations. C's character doesn't get the sums right IIRC but he's right that the numbers are huge. With this simple model the final generation of descendants 1000 years from now has 2^40 = ~ 1 trillion members (whereas the current human population of the Earth is about .0075 trillions).

Again, the sum of all descendants after 1000 years in this simple model is (2^41) - 1 = ~ 2 trillion descendants. That's a lot of consequences!

Anyhow, much as I wasn't gripped by Hard Contract (1969), I haven't quite been able to get the concepts from this short conversation scene out of my head since. I can't stop thinking about the various ways to complicate the simple model to get the numbers to come out more reasonably. Hence this note.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Again, the sum of all descendants after 1000 years in this simple model is (2^41) - 1 = ~ 2 trillion descendants. That's a lot of consequences!

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Well, I won't be here to find out. "Its all about me." Hah.

I suppose one thought I have is that something always seems to happen to defeat a destructive model. People are having fewer children and having them later, etc. Living structures are being changed (more people to the house.)

I suppose in Hard Contract this speech allowed Coburn to be an intellectual AND to justify all the killing he does -- culling the herd.

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Anyhow, much as I wasn't gripped by Hard Contract (1969), I haven't quite been able to get the concepts from this short conversation scene out of my head since. I can't stop thinking about the various ways to complicate the simple model to get the numbers to come out more reasonably. Hence this note.

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"Hence this note." I like when a certain scene in an otherwise nondescript movie stimulates thought. You can usually take ONE thing -- a scene, a speech, a LINE, from ANY movie, and its memorable. But usually just one thing.

[–] movieghoul (213) 7 years ago

1969 wasn't all that bad if one looks a little out of the mainstream. THere was Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mazursky's debut, which turned the American sex comedy of the 50s/60s on its ear - sorry, Rock/Doris, no room for you in that bed! And Arthur Penn followed B&C with Alice's Restaurant, truly a film of its time, which if nothing else, captured the narrative of the song in all its glory. And if Hitchcock flunked with Topaz, Costa Gavras gets an A for Z, opening the same week in December.

And in the mainstream, it's hard to understand the negative reaction to Hello, Dolly except in the context of how big budget musicals were going out of fashion.

And if that still leaves the plate a little empty for 1969, you didn't have to wait long for quality films in 1970, since both Patton and MASH opened in January.

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

1969 wasn't all that bad if one looks a little out of the mainstream.

You can say that again. In addition to the mighty Z, the following are all 5 star films (though not easy viewing):
Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (shown once in 1966 in Moscow before the Soviets banned it; got first showings in the West in France in 1969)
Ken Loach's definitive 'social realist' film, Kes.
Melville's great (and-that's-the-point!) action-free film about the French Resistance, Army of Shadows
Visconti's unclassifiable Nazi decadence epic, The Damned is kind of Cabaret, The Night Porter, and Day of the Locust all in one.
Ken Russell's classical-but-a-lot-of-fun Women In Love.
Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and The Pity (most famous now for being a gag-line in Annie Hall!) is a long, painful doc about collaboration with Nazis in a small French town. Hard to watch but great.
[And Bunuel, Chabrol, Truffaut, and Bergman had perfectly good, characteristic, but minor films that year. Every fan has to see The Milky Way and The Man Must Die, Mississippi Mermaid, and The Passion of Anna eventually.]

And there were lots of important partial successes in 1969: Hello Dolly's been mentioned but also Sweet Charity. It's a dull movie overall but its musical numbers are wonderful and immortal. And crazy cult comedies like Putney Swope and Mr Freedom are full of brilliant, influential ideas - who cares if they're messy misses in other respects?

And gloomy, moody '70s-pictures-a-year-early like They Shoot Horses and Last Summer (i.e., in addition to Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy's and Easy Riders downer endings) are valuable and haunting.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

1969 wasn't all that bad if one looks a little out of the mainstream. THere was Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mazursky's debut, which turned the American sex comedy of the 50s/60s on its ear - sorry, Rock/Doris, no room for you in that bed!

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Ha. Yes. I read some book about the counterculture and evidently Doris Day was targeted with a VENGEANCE "at the movies." They wanted her and her type of movie GONE.

Too bad, really. But BTCA was a necessary corrective for the New Age.

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And Arthur Penn followed B&C with Alice's Restaurant, truly a film of its time, which if nothing else, captured the narrative of the song in all its glory.

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So weird, that was. The song practically WAS a movie ("Circles and arrows and numbers on the back of each one"..."I want to kill! Kill!") And they still made a movie out of it.

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And if Hitchcock flunked with Topaz, Costa Gavras gets an A for Z,

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Nicely put all the way across the sentence!

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opening the same week in December.

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I recall the comparative pain of the comparison.

Me, I was an early teen, hardly an experienced cineaste, but I saw both films and honestly, I liked Topaz better. The car chasing the guy in Z seemed like a minimal and too realistic version of what Hitchcock had done on a grand scale with the crop duster in NXNW; you can see I had no concept of realism or Eurofilm. And if I liked Topaz "better" well -- it was Hitchcock. And it still had some of that gloss and plushness of the suspense sequences in Copenhagen and the Hotel Theresa in Harlem.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

And in the mainstream, it's hard to understand the negative reaction to Hello, Dolly except in the context of how big budget musicals were going out of fashion.

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I wrote at imdb (transferred here?) about how Hello Dolly was the favorite movie of a favored grandmother and how I therefore transferred her love into mine. That counts for two viewings: one at the theater with her in early 1970; and one at her home watching with her when the film got a 1974 CBS TV premiere. Her love became my love but..its truly fine in other respects. Many of the songs. Streisand's singing talent. Matthau's comedy talent. Streisand and Matthau TOGETHER as a comedy team. It worked despite the age difference because Streisand always seemed older than her age.

And Ernest Lehman wrote the adaptation and Gene Kelly directed it.

I found Charles Champlin's LA Times review of Hello, Dolly. He loved it in a very special way, writing(paraphrased): "They say that the musical is dying out. Well, if it is, Hello Dolly is a great way to go out." He praised "all the money on the screen," Streisand's singing, Matthau's comedy, the sheer spectacle of it all.

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And if that still leaves the plate a little empty for 1969, you didn't have to wait long for quality films in 1970, since both Patton and MASH opened in January.

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Isn't that amazing? January releases and they were among the two hottest contenders for Oscar in 1971(and Patton won.)

But release patterns were different back then. Not so much "opening the same time around the US" (and today, around the world.)

I recall vividly that whereas Deliverance was a Summer 1972 release in Los Angeles, in my "lesser" small town city, the movie DEBUTED at Christmas 1972!