OT: RIP William Friedkin - Psycho (1960) Discussion

[–] ElizabethJoestar (943) 9 months ago

Was sad to hear of his passing. It feels like so many of the greats from the 60s/70s have been going recently-- inevitable course of nature, but still a melancholy thing. I've only seen THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST, but THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S and SORCERER have been on my to be watched list for a while.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Was sad to hear of his passing. It feels like so many of the greats from the 60s/70s have been going recently-- inevitable course of nature, but still a melancholy thing.

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I was shocked to read that Friedkin was...88? Yet another Hollywoodite living real long, but its too bad he didn't join the "90 club" and honestly I thought he was in his seventies.

With all these Hollywood folks living into their 90s, I'm not too worried about losing Spielberg or Scorsese soon. Clint Eastwood(a director as well as a star) looks good for 100 and up. But we did lose Bogdanovich -- a year or too ago? I hope Coppola hangs in there.

That said, drink and drugs took a lot of those 70's folks early.
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I've only seen THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST, but THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S and SORCERER have been on my to be watched list for a while.

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There's a reminder in there that The French Connection was NOT Friedkin's first movie. I think his FIRST movie was for..Sonny and Cher("Good Times.") Then Minsky's, then the breakthrough gay film "The Boys in the Band." (Or did THAT come before Minsky's.) He was making a splash. I don't think he was the first director choice for TFC and surprisingly, he wasn't the first for The Exorcist either.

Mike Nichols turned it down first, and then drove with former partner Elaine May through Westwood and saw the famous "Exorcist line" for blocks. May reassured him, "If you had directed it, maybe it wouldn't have been a hit."

I recommend To Live and Die in LA. I've seen it quite a lot over the years.

With Friedkin's passing, I intend to revisit Sorcerer AND TFC AND The Exorcist. Funny: I don't own a single Friedkin film on DVD. Maybe its time -- a new Exorcist DVD is coming soon. And a sequel -- with a really OLD Ellen Burstyn. But good for her.

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[–] christomacin (4532) 9 months ago

Coppola recently completed shooting his latest movie (a Sci Fi called Megalopolis) and is well into post production.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Coppola recently completed shooting his latest movie (a Sci Fi called Megalopolis) and is well into post production.

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Very good! The last director of "The Directors Company" is still alive and working.

I read about that and this interested me: Coppola is using 80-something Dustin Hoffman in that movie. Dusty has been rather in exile for MeToo stuff in recent years(he can't go to Q and A retrospectives of his films, for instance); maybe it is time for redemption.

Friedkin said of The Directors Company that "Coppola double crossed us with The Conversation. He said it was going to be like a Hitchcock movie, but it was an art movie." Meanwhile, Friedkin claimed that Paramount sub-boss Frank Yablans(a mean guy) let Bogdanovich hang himself by using Cybill Shepard again. Bogdo delivered the only hit for The Directors Company(Paper Moon) and Friedkin quit.

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[–] christomacin (4532) 9 months ago

Apparently, the entire film was funded by the proceeds of his wine-making business. Coppola claims there will be "some stuff no one has ever seen in movies before". I wonder what he means by that? Anyway, I hope it's more amazing and interesting than his retooling of Godfather III, which turned out to be an overhyped bust.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Apparently, the entire film was funded by the proceeds of his wine-making business.

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Years ago, I visited the Napa California wine country and visited the FIRST location of his winery. He has since moved it. He had a small display room with a desk from Godfather TWO(not one) and the blood red armor from Bram Stokers' Dracula, and a few other things. Not much.

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Coppola claims there will be "some stuff no one has ever seen in movies before". I wonder what he means by that?

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Well, once the two Godfathers launched him, Coppola always seemed to become a mix of "visionary wizard" and PT Barnum. Remember "One From the Heart"?

That said, I thought his 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula DID have some wild visual motifs and non-CGI effects. It DID have a vision.

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Anyway, I hope it's more amazing and interesting than his retooling of Godfather III, which turned out to be an overhyped bust.

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Yeah, I never watched that. I am content with my copies of 1, 2, and 3.

And: Coppola is getting as old as everyone else. Can he still get the work done?

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Oh well, Friedkin, the King of two of the biggest, wildest, hardest-R years that Hollywood ever saw will never die.

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I will open by saying that I agree with that statement quite strongly...but it was a long, long time getting there and an interesting journey in "my movie life" in doing so.

Friedkin will be famous in film history for a long time. I am comparatively a nobody. But I certainly "grew up on movies" in the 60s and 70s -- "I was there" in theaters first run for The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) -- at a very famous theater in the latter case and...

...at that age, in those years, I didn't much like The French Connection and I flat out hated The Exorcist.

That's "subjective." Objectively, of course, The French Connection won Best Picture and Best Actor and Best Director etc, and was quite a big hit. Objectively of course, The Exorcist was a blockbuster with a capital B -- AND a horror classic to boot -- quite the sick film for its time. The Exorcist lost Best Picture to The Sting(also its competition as the biggest blockbuster of the year -- but that Billion Dollar List suggests The Exorcist shot out ahead over the years -- perhaps the 2000 re-release added to the take?)

In addition to having problems with the two films, I had big trouble with the filmMAKER(William Friedkin) based mainly on my readings about him -- and some of his own quotes -- but ALSO due to "personal experience."

I saw "The Exorcist" in its flagship months-long Los Angeles engagement -- at one theater only, The National near UCLA(now torn down even as the much older Village and Bruin still stand.) and I remember how LOUD the movie was. This contributes to a rather "cheap shot shock" early in the movie -- a big noise when Ellen Burstyn is rummaging around in the attic, but OVERALL the movie was way too loud to me.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Well, I read that Friedkin himself wanted the movie's sound to be "up to 11"(well above the usual volume) and would personally do "spot checks" at the National to make sure the sound was jacked up. So he PERSONALLY assaulted me and other movie goers. I guess many enjoyed it, me, not so much. (As I recall, the final exorcism scene was WAY loud.)

Later, I read that Friedkin was quite the tyrant during the making of The Exorcist. A key story is that after Burstyn complained of back pain from being pulled backwards by a rope into a wall to "enact" being thrown through the air by Linda Blair...Burstyn begged Friedkin not to hurt her again, he said he wouldn't...and then he quietly instructed the grips to pull hard on the rope AGAIN. Burstyn injured SOMETHING in that selfish act -- her spine? her back?

And yet, I LATER read -- via Burstyn's own quotes -- that she fell in love with Friedkin on The Exorcist , wanted him but (her words) "lost to Jeanne Moreau." So back break or no...a rich, mean director can still be catnip to the ladies.

Indeed, shifting a bit, Friedkin's four wives were beauties or powerful or both -- an attractive local LA news anchor named Kelly Lange; French sexual icon Jeanne Moreau, "real hottie" Lesley Anne Down, and ...his wife at death, studio head Sherry Lansing. (About her more soon.)

In addition to wealth and fame, Friedkin had roots as a near-criminal tough guy as a youth in Chicago, so he seemed to have had "the total package" to get the ladies AND to battle with Hollywood studios. But he made some enemies..

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

---swanstep wrote:

Unsurprisingly, Friedkin could never top this zeitgeisty 1-2 punch of the early 1970s. No further mega-hits came his way, and his somewhat abrasive personality (including towards Hitchcock) ensured that when he stumbled later, there was lots of schadenfreude attending those falls.

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Yes, the schadenfreude came down hard and fast when he made Sorcerer as his next film after The Exorcist. Several books -- and Friedkin's own quotes -- speak of a famous meeting he had with Universal "money suits" about Sorcerer at which he dressed in crummy clothes and made fun of them all through the meeting(faking fainting at one of their recommendations.)

Note in passing: both Shirley MacLaine and Eva Marie Saint(for two) said that Hitchcock "always flattered and respected the money men." And I have some interview quotes from Hitch where he said "I am privileged to be given money to make these movies by these owners, and I must spend their money carefully." Friedkin joined Orson Welles in expressing nothing but contempt for the money men and...paid a price when Sorcerer flopped.

And Sorcerer flopped famously by being kicked out of Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to make way for...Star Wars. This was 1977 of course, and Friedkin himself saw the Star Wars/Sorcerer massacre as symbolic: gritty early seventies filmmaking smashed by the new "high concept" teen-based entertainment.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

There were other problems with Sorcerer. People thought it would be supernatural horror, like The Exorcist, because of the title. No Sorcerer was the name of a TRUCK in an entirely earthbound remake of Clouzot's "The Wages of Fear"(which Hitchcock had tried to buy the novel of first.) Its a famously suspenseful story of four downtrodden men from four different countries driving two trucks filled with nitroglycerin to put out an oil well fire in South America. The movie is well regarded for its internationalism and grit...and some great suspense sequences but -- it was just too "Friedkineseque"(arty, realistic, kinda slow) and 1977 wasn't 1971 or 1973. Also American star Roy Scheider from Jaws didn't really carry the movie(Friedkin COULD have had Steve McQueen, but wouldn't agree to his terms.)

On this schadenfreude thing: You'd think after Sorcerer, Friedkin would be blacklisted, down and out, cheerily thrown out by the money men. At Universal maybe, but he kept working: The Brink's Job(a caper film), the notorious "Cruising"( Al Pacino in a movie about murders in the NYC male gay community), and eventually "To Live and Die in LA," which is my personal favorite Friedkin. I could always adapt my viewpoint.

Back to my problems with The French Connection and The Exorcist.

OK, I was only a teen at the time -- aging a bit in sophistication with each year, not fully formed but "reading a lot on movies" -- and with The French Connection, there were all these reviews about how thrilling and action packed it was and...I thought it wasn't.

Oh, it had that great car chase -- but you had to wait a long time for it and I personally didn't like it as much as the one in Bullitt(I thought the acting of the passengers in the elevated train was rather amateurish.) And there wasn't much excitement on either side of it. (I DID like Hackman's cat and mouse on the subway with "The Frog." Ahem.)

The movie was a big hit, but I found it - to my young eyes, sure -- somewhat incoherent and badly structured and heading towards a climax that was MOST unsatisfying, IMHO.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Two months later, Dirty Harry came out. Time Magazine led its Dirty Harry review thusly: "The French Connection was a thriller. Dirty Harry is a cop movie." I thought it was exactly the OPPPOSITE. Dirty Harry WAS a thriller -- a horror suspense film even(Scorpio was a horror villain) and made with "Hollywood polish" by veteran Don Siegel. It had the requisite cool jazz score by Lalo Schifrin(Mission Impossible -- Bullitt) and played very "R-rated Old School."

More recent re-viewings of The French Connection tell me it was more "important" than Dirty Harry, more realistic, a bit more cynical in its view on police but also -- very importantly, a film both of "early 1970's NYC grit" AND a Eurofilm arty sensibility(see the French villains and SPOILER...the main one gets away at the end.)

About that ending to The French Connection. I read Friedkin's autobio and he says that HE invented the outcome "in the editing room" it was "only when I was editing the film that I saw the REAL ending." So...script be damned.
Friedkin did the same thing with Cruising and got Al Pacino's rage over it . He suggested that PACINO was the killer and Pacino raged, "If that was the story, I would have played the part differently." Oh, well, Bill Friedkin "did it his way and Oscar proved him right."

About that Best Picture Oscar. The race came down to Peter Bogdanovich's Last Picture Show verus The French Connection and the movie critics were "trying to invent new auteurs" to replace Hitch and Hawks and Ford. Bogdo's movie was from countercultural BBS productions and Fox had an "action hit"(?) in TFC and it won.

Note in passing: The Godfather missed a Christmas 1971 release and ended up out at Easter of 1972. I contend if The Godfather had been released in 1971, it would have been Best Picture of 1971 and beaten TFC. But that's the Oscar game -- it WASN'T released in 1971 so TFC didn't have much competition.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

I can quote two guys -- on shaky ground with each -- who thought TFC was overrated.

One was critic Rex Reed, who fumed in 1972 at the Best Picture win writing "if a mediocrity like The French Connection can win Best Picture, movies are doomed." Or something like that ("mediocrity" I remember.)

The other was high-paid but lousy screenwriter Joe Ezterhas, who in one of his books about Hollywood noted how Friedkin went into therapy when TFC won Best Picture "because he didn't think he deserved it." Wrote mean Joe: "He was right." The point wasn't badly taken. Unlike people who make Lawrence of Arabia or My Fair Lady or The Godfather, Friedkin had no idea The French Connection was Best Picture material. Star directors had turned it down, stars had turned Popeye Doyle down(Steve McQueen and Jackie Gleason among them.)

So I've only got THOSE two guys(Rex Reed and Joe Ezterhas) on my side. I give in on The French Connection. It is a classic that has stood the test of time -- except Criterion has cut some of the racist language out, I've read.

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The Exorcist was a bigger deal. I was there for its many-month run at the National in Westwood...and nowhere else in LA for MONTHS. The "Exorcist line" snaked through many blocks and around many corners of "the Village" and was an attraction unto itself (The "big black whale" National theater -- modernistic -- put up a model of Regan's upstairs window -- curtains blowing in the wind -- on the outside wall. Creepy.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

I kept trying to gauge when I would drive over there and actually get in that line. Funny thing: somehwere around February , a male friend came up with a plan. We went and bought "clean" tickets to Woody Allen's "Sleeper" at the Bruin and then got into the "immediate entry line" for the next showing of The Exorcist at the National(a few blocks away.) We would have got away with it, but he kept looking for the "best seats." Ushers caught up with us and threw us out. We went back to the Bruin and saw Sleeper(which I had already seen, anyway.)

In March of '74, I got the stamina to stand in that long, long line on a Saturday afternoon, with a female date. Alex Rocco(Moe "shot through the eye" Greene in The Godfather) was right ahead of us. All I could do was say hello and not bother him for the two hours in the line.

Possibly it was because of the long, long, LONG wait to see The Exorcist, but I wasn't much impressed. It WAS too loud, and I guess I had enough "young innocence" in me to be truly disturbed by the things that young Linda Blair had to do and say -- I thought then that I was witnessing child abuse on the screen.

I had my "Psycho jones" going on , and while I will concede that The Exorcist was a more near-X rated horror experience -- adult where Psycho was for teens -- I didn't think that The Exorcist came close to the compact terror and perfect structure of Psycho. I felt The Exorcist lacked humor(except for Lee J. Cobb's cop, who doesn't really get much to do) and didn't have great lines (Bursryn --playing actress Shirley MacLaine in disguise, says the movie she is working on is "the Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story." Weak.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Indeed, about Burstyn: though it was totally understandable for her terrorized Mother character, she played the whole movie "up to 11" in hysteria, until rather collapsing under the weight of it all by the end to a whimpering wreck. No FUN. And the language. And the crucifix scene. And of course the pea soup the face -- which I accepted as vomit and which sickened me.

But this, and I remain mystifed about it to this day: friends who had seen The Exorcist told me how terrifying it was and for me...it wasn't. No scares at all. Just gross. And the exorcism scene itself -- well I just found it kind of funny. Including(SPOILER) the supernatural trope of Father Karras "making" the demon enter his body and then jumping out the window. It just sort of lacked that ol' Psycho plausibility.

In recent years, I tagged this issue with The Exorcist which actually might make it a very unique thriller indeed:

Psycho...and Jaws...and Halloween..and Alien...are horror movies about "shocking violent kills." As Stephen King wrote, "horror is about this : the monster gets you!" There are no kill scenes in The Exorcist(the movie director dies offscreen though his head turned around is an interesting mental image.)

Rather, The Exorcist is built on scene after scene after scene of (1) Burstyn(sometimes with someone) entering Regan's room and looking and WE see (2) Regan doing or saying something really gross.

SNL didn't come on the air until 1975, but soon they had an "Exorcist" spoof with Richard Pryor and this:

Regan: Your mother sews socks that smell!
Pryor: (Priest suddenly angry) What you said about my MAMA!!

I caught up with The Exorcist re-release in 2000(with the added "spider walk scene" -- rather tacked on) and felt SOMEWHAT better about it It certainly looked "of its time" -- very realistic in the photography, and the angst of Jason Miller's Father Karras was of more impact upon me.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Still, nope, but very much THIS:

I see modern movie history as having "three studio blockbuster Superthrillers":

Psycho
The Exorcist
Jaws

Alien(from a studio) and Halloween (indie) come close, but I understand Alien didn't hit those grosses and Halloween simply wasn't seen by the whole US nation and world.

And so, we lost the director of Psycho in 1980.
We lose the director of The Exorcist in 2023.

Mr. Spielberg shall now stand alone.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

As it turns out, William Friedkin was all connected to both Hitchcock and Psycho in many ways.

Take a look:

While Hitchcock didn't sponsor directors for movies as Spielberg did with Zemeckis and Dante, Hitchcock DID get some directors trained on his old HOUR TV series: Sydney Pollack(who married Hitchcock ingenue Claire Griswold, thus saving her from a Tippi Hedren fate); James Bridges(The Paper Chase, Urban Cowboy) and...William Friedkin!

But wait there's more: Friedkin directed the final episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour -- thus the final Hitchcock show of the 50s/60s run. And it starred Sam Loomis himself...John Gavin! And it was filmed NOT at the Psycho House(where they filmed "An Unlocked Window" for AHH.) but at the Bates Motel(re-dressed.) The episode was called "Off Season." Friedkin had to be approved to direct BY John Gavin, who took him to lunch and gave him the job. Evidently, Gavin and Friedkin remained friends for years.

Meanwhile, Friedkin claimed to have seen Psycho "100 times" and some of them were to prepare The Exorcist. Friedkin said he filmed one "direct homage to Psycho" when Regan grabs the psychiatrist's balls and he falls to a carpeted floor in a shot meant to...mimic Arbogast's fall in Psycho. (See, Arbogast's scene gets another win.)

Friedkin rejectred Bernard Herrmann to do the score of "The Exorcist"(imagine if he did, two out of the three superthrillers) and also threw out a Lalo Schifin score(calling it Mexican music.) Friedkin DID select that "radio hit of 1974," Tubular Bells and...well THAT worked. I don't think the movie is otherwise scored.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Friedkin was never entirely blackballed in Hollywood but everything changed for him when he married Paramount studio boss Sherry Lansing. I always figured that Lansing knew she had to "swim with the sharks" so what better husband to help her fight? In return, William Friedkin got quite a few Paramount movies to direct ..including a cable remake of 12 Angry Men.

Lansing lost her studio power job(they all do) but evidently she and Friedkin kept the marraige going to the end. Why not? They were both rich, especially him.

And William Friedkin did something that always amazed me:

He started appearing on DVD documentaries about...Hitchcock movies! Including Psycho! And he could be counted on to praise Hitchcock to high heaven. (Not like "sour grapes" QT.)

Yes, William Friedkin spent his last decades -- on documentaries at least -- as a REALLY NICE GUY. Its like how disgraced director John Landis(who, unlike Friedkin, actually got some people killed on his set) is now the most chummy and entertaining host imaginable on "Trailers from Hell." Redemption!

But this: Hitchcock evidently chided Friedkin , when he was directing that TV episode , for "not wearing a tie." (Sounds like Inspector Oxford in Frenzy.) Years later at dinner where Friedkin was now a big shot, he walked up to Hitchcock and said "how do you like my tie, Hitch?" He was wearing one. So Friedkin wasn't so nice TO Hitchcock, but later he was nice ABOUT Hitchcock.

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[–] swanstep (2619) 9 months ago

The other was high-paid but lousy screenwriter Joe Ezterhas, who in one of his books about Hollywood noted how Friedkin went into therapy when TFC won Best Picture "because he didn't think he deserved it." Wrote mean Joe: "He was right."

I think we all know what Ezterhaz and Freidkin were both getting at. French Connection has a cool, gritty vibe with broad appeal but I doubt whether *anyone* thinks it more gripping or better directed or that it has has more interesting characters or ideas than Clockwork Orange or Last Picture Show or Straw Dogs or Harold and Maude or Dirty Harry, or even other more marginal 1971 greats like The Devils and Wake In Fright. And a year or two later and Godfather or Chinatown or Last Detail or Cuckoo's Nest would have cleaned its awards clock. The stars had to align in certain ways for French Connection to pick up all the awards that it did.... and that simple fact means that some smart people have always looked down upon FC's wins. Of course, we've all recently experienced lots of stars-aligning-strangely Best Picture winners like CODA or Nomadland or Green Book or Shape of Water or Spotlight or Argo so that French Connection starts to look like a comparatively solid and legit. pick.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

The other was high-paid but lousy screenwriter Joe Ezterhas, who in one of his books about Hollywood noted how Friedkin went into therapy when TFC won Best Picture "because he didn't think he deserved it." Wrote mean Joe: "He was right."

I think we all know what Ezterhaz and Freidkin were both getting at. French Connection has a cool, gritty vibe with broad appeal but I doubt whether *anyone* thinks it more gripping or better directed or that it has has more interesting characters or ideas than Clockwork Orange or Last Picture Show or Straw Dogs or Harold and Maude or Dirty Harry, or even other more marginal 1971 greats like The Devils and Wake In Fright.

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Yep. How TFC beat THOSE movies, I suppose, is that it was closer to the mainstream than any of them --with the exception of The Last Picture Show(which made ITS splash, this then-teen remembers, with nudity and sex scenes.) The film also had a big studio behind it -- 20th Century Fox, which had won the year before with Patton and came close the year before that with Butch Cassidy.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

---And a year or two later and Godfather or Chinatown or Last Detail or Cuckoo's Nest would have cleaned its awards clock.

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THAT's the big point right there...and what sent Friedkin to therapy. I think he knew his movie was kind of a fluke and that he got everything TOO EARLY. (Picture, Director.) Ironically, his NEXT movie -- The Exorcist -- was a bigger deal but the Academy couldn't give him "two in a row." Interestingly, the Butch Cassidy crowd made it THIS time -- director George Roy Hill and a Newman/Redford vehicle.

Gaming the year of release in the Oscars is sort of a losing game. Yes, The Godfather or Cuckoo's Nest or Chinatown(which LOST the big awards to Godfather II) would have beat TFC, but...that's not what happened in 1971.

What DID happen in 1971 is something I lived through(reading Time, Newsweek and sometimes Kael in the The New Yorker) and has been made a little fun of these days:

A bunch of movie critics -- trying to "look serious"(and often out of film school) celebrating "a new auteur every week." Though these guys(and it WAS guys) all made good movies they got puffed WAY up as great: Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Coppola, Peckinpah, Ashby, Altman.

Newsweek critic Paul Zimmerman famously cursed Bogdo by called The Last Picture Show "the best debut by a young director since Citizen Kane." (Bad research, Paul -- it was NOT his debut. Targets was, or maybe some Corman film before that.)

Anyway, man did that go to Bogdo's head. He divorced his wife, took up with hottie Cybill Shepard(the cold VILLAINESS of Last Picture Show) , hosted The Tonight Show and, after two more hits(What's Up Doc and Paper Moon) quickly crashed with Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love(both with Cybill who was later banned by the studios from being in Bogdo movies) and Nickelodeon.

Bogdo was never really "with the 70s." He was remaking Ford and Hawks stuff. Friedkin hit action and horror just fine...and Lucas/Spielberg were on their way.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Meanwhile, reportedly all this "you're the greatest auteur" stuff REALLY went to Peckinpah's head(booze, drugs) and somewhat to Hal Ashby's (drugs.) And early deaths.

Friedkin's well-documented rage evidently got him a few years after The Exorcist when he suffered a heart attack of some sort while driving in Hollywood. Very painful, he almost died. This incident reportedly set h 1`im on a "calmer course."

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

A director who hit the highest highs, making dominating films in two of cinema's greatest years, 1971 and 1973. Take 1971. In the year of Straw Dogs, The Devils, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, The Last Picture Show, Carnal Knowledge, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Harold and Maude, Duel, Fiddler on the Roof, and many more greats, Friedkin's French Connection was a super-profitable, big hit and won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor for Hackman, and Best Editing.

Oh yeah, such great years -- with the provisio that you really had to dig on violence(including rape). Carnal Knowledge had no violence, but the sex was mean and brutal in tone. You can add Get Carter(a favorite of mine) to the 1971 mix. But: NONE of those movies really had a shot at Best Picture (I think A Clockwork Orange was nominated, but uh uh.) I think that Fiddler on the Roof and "Nicholas and Alexandra" were nominated but it came down to TFC versus The Last Picture Show.

As it turned out, Bogdanovich and Friedkin joined forces(with Francis Coppola after The Godfather the next year) to form "The Director's Company" in the spirit of Liberty Films(Capra, Wyler..Stevens?) But it collapsed. I don't think Friedkin ever made a film there. Bogdo hit with Paper Moon and Coppola got an art hit with The Conversation but...these guys couldn't play nice. Lucas and Spielberg did better.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

1973 may be an even better, more competitive movie year than 1971,

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I'd say so..with less of an emphasis on ultra-violence and rape. "Nice" movies came along like Paper Moon and The Paper Chase and The Way We Were and The Sting(which had some murders but was a "feel good film.) 1973 just had a huge VOLUME of movies, of all sorts, week after week after week. And The Exorcist and The Sting went head to head at Christmas. When Osdar time came, George Cukor led a crusade against The Exorcist and Liz Taylor said from the Oscar stage "Oh, I'm so glad" before announcing The Sting. (Which I liked very much and better than The Exorcist and -- I know -- The Exorcist is now MUCH more historic. I again concede.)

---and Friedkin's R-rated, still disturbing and disgusting horror landmark, The Exorcist was the biggest film of that year.

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It taught us all something about human nature, didn't it? Psycho did too -- but THIS went way beyond(not better, just beyond.)

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It made $233 Million domestic which inflation-adjusts to over $1 Billion (only seven films have ever made more than that domestically, see here for the details):
https://collider.com/highest-grossing-movies-adjusted-inflation/
The Exorcist is by some margin the nastiest, most radical, least family-friendly film on that list.

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Which raises the question: in the post-Spielberg, MCU, James Cameron era -- will we ever have a blockbuster as big as The Exorcist in THAT sick way again? I'm guessing no..though QT has put some gross things in some of his movies.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

For me, both Sorcerer and Live and Let Die In LA have their moments

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I saw Sorcerer on release; its another one I don't remember in detail but I didn't put it on my "favorites" list; more like "respectable" (and I do remember the truck stunts, no CGI(

Live and Die in LA surprised me --its my favorite Friedkin film, it had structure and plot in a way that TFC did not; it had a GREAT car chase on LOS ANGELES freeways(superhard to close down and film on) some sexedu up new male and female leads in it(I remember female office co-workers going nuts for William Peterson and his nudity in that film; but Willem Dafoe's in it too) and a pretty good twist near the end. It was perhaps a bit too formula at the beginning - an old cop(actually Secret Service on counterfeit detail) is killed "right upon retirement" and his partner goes out for revenge.

I MAINLY remember that great, hip, smooth Wang Chung theme song -- an 80's anthem on MTV and radio, and the tres' 80's Tangerine Dream score.

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and Friedkin's small, independent(?) films, Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011), were excellent and seemed to foretell a studio comeback, which never came.

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I think he made those AFTER Sherry Lansing lost her Paramount job -- he HAD to go indie, but he was still a "name."
He also directed "live operas." Where, I can't remembver. Read that in his book.

---

Amazingly, however, just before his death Friedkin completed a new film w/ Keifer Sutherland (for Paramount&Showtime) that's evidently a Gulf-war re-telling of the Caine Mutiny story first filmed as a Bogart-courtroom-drama film in 1954. Prima facie, that's the sort of thing that New Hollywood turk Friedkin would have ridiculed!

--

Yeah, but he remade 12 Angry Men in 1997. With Jack Lemmon in the Fonda role and George C. Scott in the Lee J. Cobb role -- two great actors WAY too old for their parts by then.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Oh well, Friedkin, the King of two of the biggest, wildest, hardest-R years that Hollywood ever saw will never die.

---

Alrighty then. I agree. I leave where I entered.

For now...

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

(aka ecarle)

A little "mopping up follow up" having considered some of the remarks above:

Willliam Friedkin got marked for greatness early with just two films -- in a ROW -- The French Connection and The Exorcist, and that was IT. Those two in a row were certainly ENOUGH. A Best Picture for Oscar cred. One of the top grossing movies of All Time for blockbuster (and horror cred.)

But this reminds me of a couple of lesser lights(actors):

Rod Taylor. In his later years and in his obituary, it was : Rod Taylor(The Birds, The Time Machine.) Those were classic enough for Rod, and known to everyone(especially kids in the 60s and 70s.) I would add "Hotel"(a personal favorite) and the ultra-violent mercenary film "Dark of the Sun"(a QT favorite) but The Birds and The Time Machine were good enough.

John Gavin. HIS obituary led with : John Gavin(Psycho, Spartacus.) Not bad and from the SAME YEAR(1960.) Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were married at the time, and Gavin worked with each of them -- Leigh in Psycho, Curtis in Sparatcus. Gavin noted later: "If I'd known they were going to become classics, I would have paid attention when I was making them." A weak joke. Who WOULDN'T pay attention working for Hitchcock? Maybe Kubrick didn't impress yet. BTW, Gavin gets a third tearjerker classic around the same time -- Imitation of Life, from 1959.

Friedkin ONLY being known for two movies might be, actually, a little weak.

I'd say Kubrick was known for ...everything from Paths of Glory through Eyes Wide Shut, but maybe especially Strangelove, 2001 and The Shining.

I'd say that Spielberg was known for ...well a lot. Duel and Jaws and Close Enounters and Raiders and ET(I stop there, personally as "his era") but also Jurassic Park and Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. (The Color Purple met with some controversy and Empire of the Sun was wiped out by The Last Emperor that year -- a REAL prestige movie.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Back to actresses.

How about Julie Andrews? Mary Poppins(Best Actress) and The Sound of Music(Best Picture blockbuster) back to back made her a giant star indeed -- I think maybe she intimidated Hitchcock with her recent resume when he used her in the less interesting Torn Curtain.

And yet...it was a pretty fast fall for Julie "at the movies" in the 60's and 70s. Her new husband, Blake Edwards, bailed her out by casting her a lot.

Quentin Tarantino. Like Kubrick, he's out to give us a very small and easily managed canon of work. Has he done better than Friedkin?

Yah -- on quantity . The first three -- I call them "the LA crime trilogy" were all classics -- Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown -- and Pulp Fiction is the biggest of them all; QT's Citizen Kane (if not a movie to make Exorcist dollars.) And yet what above those movies AFTER the crime trilogy? All of them? Sure, says I. Except maybe Death Proof but its got a helluva car chase at the end.

But..nobody stood around blocks and blocks in Westwood Village to see Pulp Fiction.

(I found a short article where QT notes that he convinced Friedkin to allow QT to show The Exorcist in FILM prints -- not digital -- at the New Beverly Revival House QT owns. QT showed The Exorcist once a week for a month(Halloween?) and personally went to two of the screenings. Which reminds me -- someday I gotta drag my old bones out to LA and "relive the revival house experience" at QT's New Beverly.)

I think QT likes The Exorcist a LOT more than he likes Psycho, which makes all kind of sense. Is not The Exorcist just about the most RADICAL mainstream movie ever made, in terms of language, sexual content, and inducment of nausea?

For me in Psycho's corner -- forever -- will be that it came FIRST, but more to the point, there is just something heavily weird and creepy and mood-inducing in how it plays even BEFORE Marion reaches the Bates Motel. It does not play "normal" at all. It is oddly filmed, cut and staged -- and I always feel a specific 1959/1960 nightmare unfolding in the first 30 minutes of that movie. The Exorcist could not capture THAT. Its a matter of Hitchcock's style but ALSO of "Hitchcock's World" -- a creation of his mind and his sense of pacing and time and silence, etc.

So..how our Man Hitchcock on "Number of Movies" versus Friedkin? Not too well known now in regular circles, evidently. Mainly in classes. But enough of us are still around to remember when he WAS "The Man" and honestly, take a look at THIS Friedkin:

We could start and stop with : Alfred Hitchcock(Psycho, The Birds)...his horror classics that everybody STILL seems to know. (one critic said "they were a private preserve for teenagers and parents did not approve.)

But Sight and Sound called Vertigo "The Greatest Movie Ever Made" for 10 years, and it is still on their Top Ten list.

So: Alfred Hitchcock(Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo.)

But the American Film Institute in two separate polls named four Hitchcocks as among the greatest films of all time. Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window and North by Northwest.

So: Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

But wait a minute: "snob critics" in the 50's and 60s felt that everything from Vertigo through The Birds was lousy compared to Hitchocck's "greatest period": The British 30's. With The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes as the seminal classics: ("You've got the wrong man!" "You've got to believe me, she vanished.")

So: Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes.)

Oh, hell. What about his only Best Picture win? (Rebecca.) What about the one that Roger Ebert and other critics called the best(Notorious.)

What about his giant hit Strangers on a Train. Or his seminal psycho thriller Shadow of a Doubt.

Or his historic silent film The Lodger?

And some folks(Martin Scorsese among them) found room for Frenzy on a "Ten Best" list that didn't have Rear Window on it.)

So I daresay William Friedkin runs up against it with his paltry two titles versus Hitchocck EXCEPT..
two is enough for greatness and perhaps only Psycho among Hitchocck's movies even came close to the kind of box office that The Exorcist got.

Quantity vs quality?

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[–] swanstep (2619) 9 months ago

I want to knit together a couple of sentences here:

Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown -- and Pulp Fiction is the biggest of them all; QT's Citizen Kane....But..nobody stood around blocks and blocks in Westwood Village to see Pulp Fiction.....Is not The Exorcist just about the most RADICAL mainstream movie ever made, in terms of language, sexual content, and inducement of nausea?

I think Pulp Fiction stands a little comparison to The Exorcist. PF was a *big* *it*-movie hit - at least with the 20-40 age-group it was essentially mandatory viewing. You *really* felt left out at parties and dinner parties and late night show monologues if you hadn't seen PF. What this meant in practice is that a hell of a lot of people ended up seeing PF who would never normally see an intense violent film and PF became for them the single most traumatic film they'd ever see. Lots of those people, including my girlfriend at the time, fainted or had some other episode in response to the film and had to be dragged or stretchered out of the cinema. That, famously was what happened with The Exorcist too: lots of people who absolutely weren't horror-fans went, often on dares, to this 'it'-movie and then had profound bodily-reactions to it causing chaos at cinemas and inadvertently creating incredible buzz. PF and The Exorcist both created storms of publicity about these reactions unsuspecting people had to them which in turn was fostered by the social pressure lots of people (who'd later regret it) felt to see something way outside their comfort zones. The '90s had a couple of other movies that in a way hit almost the same spot as PF: Se7en and Trainspotting (which like PF had a great soundtrack that was everywhere in some circles). PF was, however, way bigger in the circles I mixed in than those films.

On the question of whether The Exorcist was the most radical thing ever made by a major Hollywood studio for general release. It's gotta be up there. Last Tango and Zabriskie Point were both studio films from the same wild period in Hollywood and probably bear some comparison (esp. Last Tango which undoubtedly had some of Exorcist's 'dare-you-to-see-it-"It"-movie appeal).

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

I think Pulp Fiction stands a little comparison to The Exorcist.

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I'll certainly take that point. I'm reminded that the very weird "combo package" we have gotten from QT from the very start(Reservoir Dogs) is really great, funny and unique dialogue coupled WITH one or more really violent or gross scenes(except in Jackie Brown, perhaps out of honor to author Elmore Leonard from whose book that movie was adopted.)

There is perhaps a link FROM the "pea soup vomiting" and sexual self-abuse in The Exorcist TO the scenes in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta plunges a needle into Uma Thurman's heart to revive her; or Ving Rhames receives "Deliverance treatment" from a sick criminal or Travolta accidentally blows the head off of a confederate, drenching himself in blood and brain tissue. QT "did it all funnier" but its not too far off The Exorcist shocks.

And there would be WORSE scenes in Kill Bill and Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds and (especially) The Hateful Eight. I've now seen a few QT interviews where he says something like "in the 80's, they didn't let filmmakers do certain things...came the 90's, myself and others did whatever we wanted."

----
PF was a *big* *it*-movie hit - at least with the 20-40 age-group it was essentially mandatory viewing. You *really* felt left out at parties and dinner parties and late night show monologues if you hadn't seen PF.

---

Yes, I recall that. And The Exorcist had the same "vibe." And -- from what I've read, so did "Psycho" in its earlier, quieter time in American culture.

True memory of mine, waiting in line at a Taco Bell in 1974. Two women talking to each other:

Woman One: Did you see The Exorcist?
Woman Two: Oh, yes. God that was shocking.
Woman One: It was the most scared I've been at the movies since I saw Psycho.

I recall a quiet pride. Alright, THAT woman got the connection.

---

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

What this meant in practice is that a hell of a lot of people ended up seeing PF who would never normally see an intense violent film and PF became for them the single most traumatic film they'd ever see. Lots of those people, including my girlfriend at the time, fainted or had some other episode in response to the film and had to be dragged or stretchered out of the cinema.

---

Its funny for me. I'm not the kind of tough thrillseeker who jumps out of airplanes, or hang glides or cliff climbs or bungee cord jumps off of high bridges but -- from my teenage years on, movies pretty much couldn't scare or terrify me at ALL. Its like the terror mechanism was missing. As I mentioned above, I had a male friend who was "terrified" when Linda Blair's head turned all the way around in The Exorcist but to me -- it was merely a "cool effect" -- and became a meme-like clip in all sorts of movie tributes. Nor did I much believe in the possession idea. Etc.

I felt SOME vulnerability at the "Jaws attacks" but really it was more of a "that's an interesting kill" feeling...detached. And I watched the final graphic long chomp swallow of Robert Shaw with due appreciation for "the best kill in the movie."

I will admit that "jump scares" can still get me -- I GUESS that means I'm "terrified" but mainly it means I don't like being yelled "BOO!" at.

It is a movie gift of my lifetime that Psycho DID scare me, but as I've mentioned before, it scared me as other kids TOLD it to me(so much bloodier than the movie itself) and when I opened up a copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut in a bookstore and turned the pages to the photos from the two murder scenes. Arbogast's slashed terrified face DID scare me and I DID need the lights on to sleep for a few nights.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

But I was very young -- too young -- when I looked at those still frames of the murders in Psycho. A few years later I SAW Psycho and...though I braced myself for the murder scenes, they didn't scare me at all. The "non-scare" part of my life had begun. Though I COULD feel the irony and tragedy and violence(especially to naked Marion in the shower) of the story and I still find it unforgettable.

---

Lots of those people, including my girlfriend at the time, fainted or had some other episode in response to the film and had to be dragged or stretchered out of the cinema.

---

There is some interview footage of people -- women, mainly -- coming out of The Exorcist and speaking to how horrific it was. One of them is interviewed having left in the middle for the lobby and saying "I can't go back in there."

This footage is both on YouTube and in a new four-part series(on Max, which I finally connected to) called "100 Years of Warner Brothers." The Exorcist gets its segment and it all comes back -- including footage of the line in Westwood at the National Theater. There is a brief interview with an aged Linda Blair in which she reveals that the cuss words she spoke weren't in the script -- Friedkin wrote them and then handed them to her before shooting. (I note now, in looking at the scenes of Reagan cussing so foul -- that here was a movie in which profanity was literally the Devil's language, used as a weapon against Good, God, and the Priests.

The impact of The Exorcist on your girlfriend, swanstep, reminds me of TWO incidents at movies in 1974 with a girlfriend of the time and how I learned that -- even if I was not personally scared by movies...or disturbed by them -- SHE was. Both times she made it through the entire movie without walking out but needed my physical assistance to half carry her home and stay the night with the lights on while she cried herself to sleep.

The two movies were Coppola's The Conversation and Polanski's Chinatown -- neither overtly a HORROR movie but -- to her - just too disturbing to handle.

I felt bad after The Conversation incident but after Chinatown, I drew the line. She and I made a deal: I would only see the disturbing movies with other guys, or alone. I read reviews to make this determination.

And yet, while I found both of those movies "disturbing" in certain ways -- they just didn't get to me like they did to her.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

The '90s had a couple of other movies that in a way hit almost the same spot as PF: Se7en and Trainspotting (which like PF had a great soundtrack that was everywhere in some circles).

---

Se7en was certainly grim in its violent horror -- here was a movie, though, where we didn't have to WATCH the murders take place(as in Psycho) but rather simply went with the cops to see the horrifically mutiliated victims(oh, one of them wasn't QUITE dead.)

I can't say that Se7en terrified me, but it did disturb me and I was very tense in the final ten minutes of the movie -- I surely didn't guess the twist til it happened, and THAT was grim, too. And unforgettable.

But you know what? Another serial killer movie came out around the same time as Se7en -- it was called CopyCat(about a killer who kills victims according to famous killers like Son of Sam and Jeffrey Dahmer) and THAT one disturbed me more than Se7en. (Especially the Dahmer killing, which we had to watch, rather than just see the body.) I recall feeling that after seeing Se7en and CopyCat in the same two weeks _- "Man, the movies have gotten SICK." But then the 90s was all to wall thrillers and serial killers and... hey was Hitchcock ahead of the curve or what.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

PF was, however, way bigger in the circles I mixed in than those films.

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I would guess this was because Tarantino hit really big as really GOOD...those dialogue scenes were soon being quoted EVERYWHERE("A royale with cheese" "I dare you to say what again!") and things like Sam Jackson and Travolta debating whether or not something was an "According to Hoyle miracle" or whether or not bacon is swine that should not be eaten ("You can tell me that sewer rat tastes like pumpkin pie, I'm not eating the mfing thing.") And on and on and on.

And Pulp Fiction was FUNNY. Se7en and Copycat and their sick ilk were not.

All of John Travolta's dinner at Jack Rabbit Slim's(no gore in the scene at all) is very funny and witty and observant ("Don't you just love it when you come back from the bathroom and your food is waiting for you.")

And the entire final act -- cleaning up a body with the aid of Harvey Keitel's Mr. Wolf -- nothing but laughs. ("And while we're at it, why am I on brain detail, anyway?") I smile just remembering these scenes and these lines and these actors.

Anyway, even as QT delivered the "sick shocks" in Pulp Fiction along the way to make his "heavy metal reputation"(his term)....the movie was funny and entertaining and unique and a new writer-director had clearly arrived -- if you already knew Reservoir Dogs, you knew this guy wasn't a one trick pony.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

On the question of whether The Exorcist was the most radical thing ever made by a major Hollywood studio for general release. It's gotta be up there.

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Certainly to that point in time. As Psycho was to ITS point in time. But I think it is well "on the record" now that Psycho simply got there first for EVERYTHING that followed it. Bonnie and Clyde. The Wild Bunch. The Exorcist. Each of those movies was "shocking" in a landmark way, but Psycho got there first and put violence, shock, and a certain "bad taste" (stuffed Mother in her bedroom) on the map.

But i will "separate out" The Exorcist because -- again, I guess -- its selling point was not bloody violent kills -- which is what Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch WERE about. No, The Exorcist was about Your Sweet Innocent Daughter saying horrible things and doing horrible things(including to herself) and it was like a primal shout from Dark America -- I think that Stephen King said that Regan represented all the teenage children whom their parents suddenly didn't RECOGNIZE. She was a Bad Hippie...a Manson follower...the Counterculture at its lowest. (And yeah, I'll cop to what all critics said about ALL violent or gross movies in those years -- Vietnam hung over the piece, too.)

--

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Last Tango and Zabriskie Point were both studio films from the same wild period in Hollywood and probably bear some comparison (esp. Last Tango which undoubtedly had some of Exorcist's 'dare-you-to-see-it-"It"-movie appeal).

---

I'll take those two but -- they were perhaps more famous as "foreign films" or "international films," what with their famous foreign directors, even as Last Tango had Marlon Brando and Zabriskie Point had...Rod Taylor!

Good ol' Rod Taylor. Note in passing: I looked up a Gene Hackman interview about The French Connection(in honor of the Friedkin loss) and he said he was based on cop Eddie Egan, who is IN The French Connection and wanted to be played by...Rod Taylor, because Egan thought Taylor looked like him. So..Rod Taylor would have been Popeye Doyle if the real cop had a say. Which he didn't.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Circling around on William Friedkin ONLY being known for two movies -- but they were so great that's all he needed.

I gave it some thought, and if one were to give Hitchcock the SAME formula, it would come out like this:

William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist)
Alfred Hitchcock (Rebecca, Psycho.)

ie. Each director had one Best Picture winner(an objective rare honor) and one giant horror blockbuster that was a worldwide hit and is still known to this day.

But that still leaves Hitch with a lot of OTHER movies unnoted. He was a Long Distance Runner(decades of classics and hits.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Circling around to the matter of "the long line for The Exorcist."

Memories are fading, but I wanted to zero in -- for my own purposes -- on the lines where I had to wait for two hours or more to get into the movie.

I count three:

The Godfather 1972
The Exorcist 1974(for a Christmas 1972 release.)
Jaws 1975

I am pretty certain that I am NOT exaggerating these three movies as having those lines. I saw The Godfather and Jaws with other guys, and we brought a deck of cards both times to play on line, and we talked. Easily enough done.

I took a young woman to see The Exorcist. No cards. We just talked. (Hey she was the same one who was freaked out by The Conversation and Chinatown -- but The Exorcist did NOT hurt her the same way -- maybe because of the supernatural elements.)

Now I will pit those three "two hour experiences" with a few more "short term" long lines:

Bullitt in 1968. One long line for less than an hour, outside the theater and then in the lobby. Wait Until Dark, 1968(a 1967 movie). Same. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981. Same.

So there could be long lines with SOME wait at the movies of my life, but those three -- The Godfather, The Exorcist and Jaws -- were ordeals.

I think they were set up like this:

No advance tickets or reserved seats.
So you got in one long line to buy your tickets, and if the current show was sold out...you bought tickets for the NEXT show BUT...you couldn't leave. You had to STAY in line.

Finally: you end up in an "admittance line": you are in line to actually go in and see the movie.

And while all of this is happening, the movie is PLAYING inside. That's why I stood in these lines for at least two hours, maybe three. You had to wait for The Exorcist(over two hours) or The Godfather(three hours) to PLAY ONCE inside while you waited outside.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

This was eventually solved by adding hundreds -- then thousands -- of screens to movie theaters nationawide and booking one blockbuster on say 10 screens in the multiplex. No long wait for ANY movie...and a blockbuster could make all its money in a month or less(this is happening with Barbie right now.)

I do have this memory as I wrack my brain: Summer 1997. Jurassic Park 2(The Lost World) was in my local multiplex -- on, like 10 different screens, many of them with SMALL lines to get in to each theater, but the entire LOBBY packed with people buying popcorn and making their way to the VARIOUS lines to see Jurassic Park 2.

Had Jurassic Park 2 been put on one screen in Westwood you can be sure ITS line would have gone for blocks, too.

And this:

I've been combing YouTube for Hitchcock/Psycho stuff(as well as Friedkin and QT and others) and I found a "documentary" on Hitchcock -- hit by hit, that reaches the Psycho 1965 re-release and its actual TV commercial:

(Voiceover)

If you were too young OR (the word "OR" fills the screen)

If you were too scared OR (the word "OR: again fills the screen)

If the lines were too long..(there it is!)

Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO(the greatest logo of all time) is BACK!

Quite a commercial. And the narrator says that the 1965 re-release of Psycho made $5 milliion -- more than most new releases of that year.

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[–] ElizabethJoestar (943) 9 months ago

Its funny for me. I'm not the kind of tough thrillseeker who jumps out of airplanes, or hang glides or cliff climbs or bungee cord jumps off of high bridges but -- from my teenage years on, movies pretty much couldn't scare or terrify me at ALL. Its like the terror mechanism was missing. As I mentioned above, I had a male friend who was "terrified" when Linda Blair's head turned all the way around in The Exorcist but to me -- it was merely a "cool effect" -- and became a meme-like clip in all sorts of movie tributes. Nor did I much believe in the possession idea. Etc.
--
My grandmother won't rewatch The Exorcist because it terrified her so. She's pretty Catholic and actually believes in the demonic possession stuff. I find a lot of people who do-- Catholic or Protestant-- tend to really be freaked out by the notion, since there is literally no real way to defend yourself from Satan or his lower level demons-- some think a bad thought can bring possession on or something. My religious mom has never seen The Exorcist, but when a friend and I tried watching it at the house back when I still lived with my parents, my mom insisted on not being in the house when we did. She also seemed offended that we wanted to put THAT DVD in her innocent little DVD player lol.

However, I have known non-religious people who are creeped out by the film. One YouTube reviewer who self-described as non-religious said what disturbed him was the plight of the mother, desperate to find a cure for her kid and no one seeming to be able to determine what was wrong with her. Personally, I get more freaked out by stalkers and serial killers in film than anything supernatural. Movies rarely scare me either, but the few that have are more earthbound in nature.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

My grandmother won't rewatch The Exorcist because it terrified her so. She's pretty Catholic and actually believes in the demonic possession stuff. I find a lot of people who do-- Catholic or Protestant-- tend to really be freaked out by the notion, since there is literally no real way to defend yourself from Satan or his lower level demons-- some think a bad thought can bring possession on or something.

---

Versus Psycho and Jaws -- the other two superthrillers -- The Exorcist is also differentiated in its willingness to recognize religion. Religion was a staple of movies from the 30s through the 60s, but started to lose traction once new generations(and the R rating) came in.

Pauline Kael in her review rather sniffed "The Exorcist is the biggest advertisement for the Catholic Church since Going My Way," and she was probably right: for all its horror, I'm willing to guess it DREW a large contingent of believers.

There is an old Wiliam Friedkin interview in that "100 Years of Warner Brothers" episode where he says (BEFORE he makes the movie) "I'm not so much interested in The Exorcist as a horror movie as in its being a study of faith." Which it is -- I mean, the whole PLOT is how medicine fails, and psychiatry fails and...the only way out for Ellen Burstyn(so harrowingly POWERLESS) is to go to the priests.

In this regard, the "radical" and foul mouthed and sexual Exorcist actually heads for a "happy ending founded in religious sacrifice." The two priests save the little girl; the two priests die in the effort(hell, all three guys DIDN'T die in Jaws, though two died in the novel.)

And faith is a topic worth considering.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

My religious mom has never seen The Exorcist, but when a friend and I tried watching it at the house back when I still lived with my parents, my mom insisted on not being in the house when we did. She also seemed offended that we wanted to put THAT DVD in her innocent little DVD player lol.

--

I've had both family and romantic partners let me know -- unequivocally -- that they will NOT watch pictures with a Satanic theme. The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby are at the top of the list.

Indeed, I was watching Rosemary's Baby "casually" on cable one day and my sig other walked in at the end where the "nice old people" are all chanting "Hail, Satan!" and the sig other practically screamed: "Oh,no no no no...what are you WATCHING?" and stormed out of the room and I felt the power of such a film to frighten for deeper reasons than just scares.

Some of it was "PR" but both Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist were "sort of cursed." The musical composer of Rosemary's Baby died in a staircase fall shortly after working on it; Polanski was set on course to the Mansons, and producer William Castle claimed to have been struck down by a near-fatal illness. The Exorcist ended up with its set burning down, one actor dying soon after(the film director actor, Jack MacGowran) and Friedkin having a heart attack a few years later -- but, the "curses" spared as many people as they got. Hard to prove anything.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

However, I have known non-religious people who are creeped out by the film. One YouTube reviewer who self-described as non-religious said what disturbed him was the plight of the mother, desperate to find a cure for her kid and no one seeming to be able to determine what was wrong with her.

---

Well, that's the wrenching key to The Exorcist -- ALL mothers (and fathers) felt the pain of a child being tormented and being unable to help. As I say above, Ellen Burstyn was believably hysterical and distraught in that movie which made it a pretty hard watch...Marion Crane and Arbogast and Sam and Lila were "cool customers" en route to horror.

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Personally, I get more freaked out by stalkers and serial killers in film than anything supernatural. Movies rarely scare me either, but the few that have are more earthbound in nature.

---

Totally agreed. This is perhaps "too broad a brush," but Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist seemed to generate a "supernatural horror cycle"(including The Omen) which slowly ended as Halloween and Friday the 13th brought back slashers(though Michael Myers and Jason DID seem a bit supernatural in their unstoppability.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 9 months ago

Here's some food for thought:

The trailer for Jaws opens with the narrator eventually saying:

"Its as if God put the Devil on earth and gave him...JAWS." (Cue attack montage.)

But still: the Jaws producers wanted an "Exorcist" connection.

it gets better.

Among the many 1960 reviews I have read of Psycho was a spoiler-ish one , I think from Variety(which felt it could give things away.) The sentence read:

"Anthony Perkins plays a young man who doesn't get enough exorcise -- I repeat, exORcise -- of the dead mother who possesses him."

So some wise sage was onto a Psycho-Exorcist connection 13 years before the Exorcist! I just LOVE that review, because it really does bring up the issue of Norman being "posessed" by his evil Mother just as Regan is possessed by...Pazuzu? (Such a funny name, Bill Murray got a lot of mileage out of saying Pazuzu in Ghostbusters, which had a spoof exorcist scene with Sigourney Weaver.)

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[–] [deleted] 9 months ago

I'd say you're as religious as your parents and grandparents, and to me, that makes YOU a LOSER.

Science & Reason all the way, baby!

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[–] swanstep (2619) 9 months ago

Norman being "posessed" by his evil Mother just as Regan is possessed by...Pazuzu? (Such a funny name, Bill Murray got a lot of mileage out of saying Pazuzu in Ghostbusters, which had a spoof exorcist scene with Sigourney Weaver.)

That name never crops up in 'The Exorcist' film (it was in the novel I believe). I think the only name we actually hear is Regan's juvenile 'Captain Howdy' which is actually fairly creepy. Mad magazine had lots to say about all this of course:
http://laughingreindeer.blogspot.com/2015/10/mad-about-exorcist.html

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[–] swanstep (2619) 9 months ago

And faith is a topic worth considering.

I recently watched Stars In My Crown (1950) because I'd heard that it was Jacques Tourneur's (Out of the Past, Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, Flame and the Arrow, Night of the Demon) favorite among his films. Here's the interview where he says this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYLQTFUN7yI
Well, it turns out that SIMC is an *incredibly* faith-driven fable that depicts old time religion as the answer to all life's ills. A preacher (Joel McCrea) is shown to not only be warmer, more decent, and basically more mature than the small reconstruction-era town's other authority figure, a callow young Doctor, he's also shown to be a better doctor who understands how Typhoid spreads in a way that the actual Doctor doesn't, and most importantly we see the Preacher, implicitly with god's help, instantly restore a woman to health whom the doctor gave up as terminal.

The preacher also shames a lynch mob (but also buys them off by giving them the intended lynchee's land that they're after? It's not clear.), turns a whip-wielding malicious bully into a laughing good sport, and so on. Religion is depicted as the universal social solvent.

SIMC isn't a million miles removed from stuff like Going My Way and Bells of St Marys (the endless repetitions of the title-hymn make SIMC almost a sing-a-long musical like those) but also It's A Wonderful Life and also things like How Green Was My Valley, Mrs Miniver which wear religious themes more lightly.

SIMC is a ball of charming naivete that stands out in 1950, the year of All About Eve, Sunset Blvd, Gun Crazy, Asphalt Jungle, In a Lonely Place, Rashomon, Panic In the Streets, The Men - all of which are pretty Godless and all of which effectively say that nothing's simple, that everything's always much more complicated than you think, and that traditional answers to life's questions are snares. SIMC is flatly opposed to all that. It's well made, but not my thing at all. My least favorite Tourneur film.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Treading gingerly on matters of faith and The Exorcist (as I youth, I was trained not to talk about politics or religion; seems a good bet modernly except...oh in an abstract way, I suppose.)

From a "secular" point of view:

The Exorcist is about how a pre-teen girl is posessed by the Devil(or by SOME Demon), how psychiatry and then medical treatments fail to resolve the problem, and how the Church in the guise of two priests finally DOES resolve the problem.

Thus, a "fantasy ailment"(being possessed by the Devil) cannot be cured by psychiatry or medical treatments but CAN be cured by a "fantasy cure." (Exorcism.)

That's the supernatural plot of The Exorcist -- except evidently it drew many "believer" fans who bought into the religious (non-fantasy) version of that plot. It is conceivable that The Exorcist made more money than any other horror movie because its religious component brought in religious audience members.

There was also -- as all through history(yes, BEFORE internet gossip) -- some promotional hullaballoo at the time. Much as articles about shark attacks started proliferating when Jaws hit big in 1975, there were all sorts of articles about exorcism -- and a Time magazine cover story -- when The Exorcist hit big in 1973.

When Roman Polanski was offered Rosemary's Baby to direct, he resisted, saying "its about Satan, and you have to believe in God to believe in Satan, and I don't believe in God." But he ended up believing in Satan enough to take the job and make his American reputation.

I've been finding Friedkin interviews since his death, and he said that he didn't think an athiest could direct The Exorcist. He held himself out as an agnostic. It was author (of the best selling novel AND the screenplay), William Peter Blatty, who I believe was a believer.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

swanstep wrote:

(The Exorcist) made $233 Million domestic which inflation-adjusts to over $1 Billion (only seven films have ever made more than that domestically, see here for the details):
https://collider.com/highest-grossing-movies-adjusted-inflation/
The Exorcist is by some margin the nastiest, most radical, least family-friendly film on that list.

--

I looked at that list again, and drew interest from it.

No "Marvel movies" on it. So the comic book era hasn't quite penetrated yet.

Two "superthrillers" -- The Exorcist and Jaws. But not, alas, my pick for the THIRD superthriller -- Psycho. All reports are that Psycho was Hitchcock's biggest hit -- and what he called later "a once in a lifetime experience" for him. But it wasn't the biggest hit of 1960. On the other hand, it was the SECOND biggest hit of 1960 and certainly a big ENOUGH hit to register as something bigger than the usual Hitchcock release or the usual thriller. I still confer "superthriller" status on Psycho. Perhaps if it had been released in the more populated 70's along with The Exorcist and Jaws, it would have been a bigger grosser. On the other hand both Gone With the Wind and Snow White made this list -- but on the other OTHER hand, both of those films had frequent re-releases over the decades(Psycho had two.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

I "get" the other billion dollar grossers on that list -- GWTW, The Sound of Music(the musical that launched a thousand flop musicals), Titanic.

Except one.

"Doctor Zhivago." How and why did THAT do so well? I watched it again a few months ago on TCM and it remains very grim and very dull to me. I"ve read the love story drove it --- but its a TRAGIC love story, unfulfilled(and the Doc betrays wife and child to attempt the affair.) I've read that college students went nuts for it -- just as I've read that college students went nuts for Ingmar Bergman movies. Those must have been more intellectual college students than the ones who came later. (College professor Camille Paglia said that her 21st Century college students dug Hitchcock much more than Bergman.)

Myself, I wonder if the film's focus on the Russian Revolution and one family's subjection to Communist takeover was more "relevant" and fear-inducing in 1965, with the Cold War raging, Vietnam underway and the spectre of worldwide Communist takeover on people's minds. Of course, in both America and internationally, there were folks who were FOR Communism and they could take heart in how the movie demonstrated it "in action." Still -- a billion dollars(inflation adjusted) -- how? why?

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

The Exorcist is about how a pre-teen girl is posessed by the Devil(or by SOME Demon), how psychiatry and then medical treatments fail to resolve the problem, and how the Church in the guise of two priests finally DOES resolve the problem.

--

I return to get specific about the "medical treatments" part of The Exorcist.

The major treatment given to Regan is a spinal tap, and I remember how real and brutal and bloody and nauseating that sequence was. It was part of the reason(among MANY) that I really disliked The Exorcist -- it seemed a cheat to veer away from traditional horror to clinical medicine(quasi-surgical) to gross out the audience.

And yet: over a decade later, the term "Spinal Tap" became a thing of COMEDY, thanks to the early "mockumentary" -- "This is Spinal Tap" by director Rob Reiner but REALLY the first of the "Christopher Guest mockumentaries."

Thus does movie history proceed. "Spinal Tap" equals -- one of the most faint-inducing "horror" scenes in The Exorcist." "Spinal Tap" equals -- shorthand for the first mockumentary and others to follow.

But this: take out the supernatural possession material in The Exorcist and its study of medicine reminds us that many REAL diseases sometimes CANNOT be cured by medicine, and sometimes the attempts and treatments to do so can be painful and tortuous and come to nothing. I'm certainly more in favor of how medicine and surgery CAN save lives, or extend lives but -- in my personal experience, I have seen older relatives subjected to various painful treatments that didn't work at all. I recall our family confronting doctors after one such treatment and saying "that's it. No more attempts. Let our relative pass away."

So The Exorcist ALSO took up the heartlessness of "good medicine" as one of its subplots and maybe that was one of its "hidden horror strengths."

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Norman being "posessed" by his evil Mother just as Regan is possessed by...Pazuzu? (Such a funny name, Bill Murray got a lot of mileage out of saying Pazuzu in Ghostbusters, which had a spoof exorcist scene with Sigourney Weaver.)

That name never crops up in 'The Exorcist' film (it was in the novel I believe).

---

Wow. I could have sworn I heard Pazuzu in the movie but now I think I heard Pazuzu said by...William Friedkin in a DVD interview. I knew I was SURPRISED to hear it in an "Exorcist" context given how funny the name sounded in "Ghosbusters" -- especially said by Bill Murray.

--

I think the only name we actually hear is Regan's juvenile 'Captain Howdy' which is actually fairly creepy.

---

Yeah. That WAS a creepy name. Childish but intimating an adult male presence in/near a young girl.

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Mad magazine had lots to say about all this of course:
http://laughingreindeer.blogspot.com/2015/10/mad-about-exorcist.html

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Ha. Where would we have been without Mad Magazine in the formative 50's, 60s and 70's --its most influential decades, particularly among Boomers.

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[–] swanstep (2619) 8 months ago

"Doctor Zhivago." How and why did THAT do so well? I watched it again a few months ago on TCM and it remains very grim and very dull to me. I"ve read the love story drove it --- but its a TRAGIC love story, unfulfilled(and the Doc betrays wife and child to attempt the affair.) I've read that college students went nuts for it

It's a little weird that DZ hit quite as big as it did. One thing to keep in mind is that the Soundtrack sold an absolute truckload. I haven't seen any numbers-of-copies sold figures but it was high in the charts for *years* so that when Billboard compiles their list of albums by their chart dominance, DZ's Soundtrack comes out as the 8th biggest Album of all time!
https://www.billboard.com/charts/greatest-billboard-200-albums/

And, as you can see there Sound of Music's soundtrack from the same year was Billboard's 2nd biggest album of all time. Thus, I suspect that DZ was zeitgeisty in a way that's hard to appreciate now: (i) DZ had a big soundtrack album at the exact moment when the tradition of huge soundtrack albums stretching from South Pacific in the '50s reached its peak; (ii) DZ was the follow-up for Lean and Sharif to Lawrence of Arabia, one of the greatest instant-classics of all time, so that DZ almost functioned as Lawrence 2 for a lot of people; and (iii) DZ *is* a slow but grand love story set against the Russian Revolution and Civil War just the way Gone With The Wind is a romance/women's film set against the US civil war. Both DZ and GWTW can *not work* for some modern viewers because the stuff that's in the background can seem not to get enough attention or to be too vague. On the other hand, every couple of decades it seems that a mass/repeat viewing audience emerges for this sort of thing. We saw it with Titanic too and often we heard it expressed that whatever its problems T bore comparison with GWTW in delivering a grand doomed love story/weepie/Women's movie. DZ hit that same spot.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

"Doctor Zhivago." How and why did THAT do so well? I watched it again a few months ago on TCM and it remains very grim and very dull to me. I"ve read the love story drove it --- but its a TRAGIC love story, unfulfilled(and the Doc betrays wife and child to attempt the affair.) I've read that college students went nuts for it

---
It's a little weird that DZ hit quite as big as it did. One thing to keep in mind is that the Soundtrack sold an absolute truckload. I haven't seen any numbers-of-copies sold figures but it was high in the charts for *years* so that when Billboard compiles their list of albums by their chart dominance, DZ's Soundtrack comes out as the 8th biggest Album of all time!
https://www.billboard.com/charts/greatest-billboard-200-albums/

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Wow...I remember the INSTRUMENTAL of Lara's Theme as a radio hit, and as part of the overall instrumental tapestry of Doctor Z. I also remember that lyrics were put to it and I think...Andy Williams?...got a hit out of it...opening words, "Somewhere my love..." I THINK.

But what ELSE was worth buying that album for? All the instrumentals?

With the "Sound of Music" and "My Fair Lady" albums(both staples in my parental household, "the soundtrack of my life" from them along with a lotta Sinatra)....at least one got SONGS to SING.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

And, as you can see there Sound of Music's soundtrack from the same year was Billboard's 2nd biggest album of all time.

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THAT I remember. Like I said, the album played in our house all the time...and relatives houses. And neighbors houses.

And that was "family entertainment' -- little kids could enjoy Do Re Me, My Favorite Things and that one about the goatherd.

---

Thus, I suspect that DZ was zeitgeisty in a way that's hard to appreciate now: (i) DZ had a big soundtrack album at the exact moment when the tradition of huge soundtrack albums stretching from South Pacific in the '50s reached its peak; (ii) DZ was the follow-up for Lean and Sharif to Lawrence of Arabia, one of the greatest instant-classics of all time, so that DZ almost functioned as Lawrence 2 for a lot of people;

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How amazing -- in concert -- that Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Z -- could be the kind of big hits that we have now ceded to "the younger generation"(of whichever generation) brought up on horror, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and the Marvel movies.

And I get that Doctor Z as "Lawrence 2." With my Hitchcock buff status(OK, the LATER ones) I remember how the much more serious, epic and somber David Lean epics of the 60's were a much bigger deal and yet -- as we know here -- he just sorta sank like a stone came the 70's. Ryan's Daughter got an Oscar(John Mills) and a little respect, but not much and Pauline Kael evidently ruined Lean's ego and he quit(well, studios cut his projects down or out.)

I suppose one could say that Hitchcock succeeded by staying "below the radar," never proposing himself as a serious director even as he pitched "pure cinema" and made great works of popular art. He kept budgets low, profits almost guaranteed, a loyal fan base. And thrillers. He only made thrillers. Why? someone asked Cary Grant..."Money" Grant replied.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

and (iii) DZ *is* a slow but grand love story set against the Russian Revolution and Civil War just the way Gone With The Wind is a romance/women's film set against the US civil war.

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Yep. Those are big topics...TRUE civil war(this term keeps getting bandied about in modern America but I'd love to see folks try it without military organization and...who against, really?

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Both DZ and GWTW can *not work* for some modern viewers because the stuff that's in the background can seem not to get enough attention or to be too vague.

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Well, again...the studios started shifting attention and major budgets to "teenage movies" and it became hard to mount this historical stuff -- except as mini-series and limited series on cable and streaming I guess.

I keep trying to picture all these college students who dug Doctor Z and Ingmar Bergman. Hardly the "Animal House" crowd.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

On the other hand, every couple of decades it seems that a mass/repeat viewing audience emerges for this sort of thing. We saw it with Titanic too and often we heard it expressed that whatever its problems T bore comparison with GWTW in delivering a grand doomed love story/weepie/Women's movie. DZ hit that same spot.

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Yes, but Titanic also famously gave us one of the great disaster movies of all time...about an hour of pure, grandiose yet tragic action. (I recall how amused and enthralled I was to see the ship SPLIT in two, making a tower out of one half that could dump people into the sea or bounce off objects to their death, Leo and Kate could ride down...they were literally the last two people in the ocean...all according to Leo's brilliant survival skills.)

AND Titanic was about young lovers BUT hey, I suppose Sharif and Christie weren't all that much OLDER ...ones view of "young" changes as one grows older.

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I guess the billion dollar success of Doctor Zhivago makes more sense to me now but it was definitely and clearly of another time.

And this: Spielberg made his name on thriller/horror(Duel, Jaws) and SciFi but seems to have made a switchover to trying to be "the new David Lean" and declaring Lawrence of Arabia...his favorite, I think.

It was a weird switch..roughly from being HItchcok to being David Lean..but that's what Spielberg wanted. I know he made plenty of thrillers as time went on(Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds qualify in different ways) but his "David Lean jones" has never really gone away.

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[–] swanstep (2619) 8 months ago

I just discovered that (back in 2008) Friedkin recorded a commentary track for Vertigo. It's up on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYWiWoHIvS4
and is downloadable as an episode of the podcast 'DVD Commentary: The Original Podcast' from the usual sources. The Youtube Channel that the Friedkin commentary is on is connected to that podcast and has a range of other interesting commentaries:
https://www.youtube.com/@M.B.Archives/videos
See also the following website (a Tumblr page) for a range of downloadable commentaries:
https://thedirectorscommentary.tumblr.com/archive

Interestingly, I stumbled across or revisited all this stuff recently while (futilely) looking around online for a commentary on Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) starring Jack Nicholson. The (artsy, drifting, elusive) film didn't get much of a release even at the height of Nicholson's stardom, but Nicholson himself loved both the film and the whole experience of working with Antonioni, and he ended up holding most of the film's rights. Nicholson was therefore uniquely inclined to record a commentary track for the dvd of The Pasenger, something he hasn't done for any other film, and that commentary has been retained on all subsequent Blu-rays. I may have to get that rare/expensive dvd/bu-ray.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

I just discovered that (back in 2008) Friedkin recorded a commentary track for Vertigo. It's up on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYWiWoHIvS4
and is downloadable as an episode of the podcast 'DVD Commentary:

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Again I note that William Friedkin went from a pretty arrogant guy(in quoteable press AND in gossip) to quite the nice fellow with all sorts of praise for Hitchcock in DVD interviews and now -- I learn -- commentary. Funny that Friedkin would choose Vertigo to comment on...its Psycho that he said he saw 100 times.

And compare Friedkin and Martin Scorsese -- in their generally supportive commentary on Hitchcock -- to Tarantino just dumping all over him(and some others.) Seems a bit off-color for a successful writer-director like QT to dump on his famous forbears, but I suppose he felt Hitchcock got too much glory, was too censored, etc. I also detect a little jealousy. Hitchcock was a bigger deal over more decades than I think QT will prove to be. He should do some 'nice" commentaries or prepare for disfavor...hah.

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See also the following website (a Tumblr page) for a range of downloadable commentaries:
https://thedirectorscommentary.tumblr.com/archive

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That sounds fun. Generally I avoid the "work" of watching a movie with the commentary track, but there can be no doubt that with the right (famous) people...commentary can be fun and instructive to hear.

One interesting commentary track I listened to: Joe Stefano(writer of Psycho) doing commentary throughout Strangers on a Train. First, it was weird to hear the Stefano voice I USUALLY heard talking only about HIS Hitchcock movie(Psycho) talking about ANOTHER Hitchcock movie, but second, it was cool to hear the Strangers screenplay and film being analyzed by a guy who worked with Hitchcock!

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

The funniest commentary track I heard was "Elvis Presley"(revealing himself to be alive and in hiding) commenting on the comedy "Bubba Ho-Tep" about Elvis and JFK(now black and played by Ossie Davis) still alive and hiding out in a retirement home -- and battling a mummy. Wierd enough movie, but funny commentary.

Cult B-movie actor Bruce Campbell plays Elvis in the movie AND on the commentary track. I remember laughing hard where they came to a scene where Elvis and JFK open a chest and stock up on weapons to fight the mummy. Says "Elvis" on the commentary track:

"Alright, I always love it when they have this hear kinda scene. These boys are raiding the cabinet and breaking out the weaponry. They're grabbing guns, loading bullets, cocking the loads...and its gonna be a BIG ol' gunbattle now!"
But you have to imagine this in the Elvis voice.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Interestingly, I stumbled across or revisited all this stuff recently while (futilely) looking around online for a commentary on Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) starring Jack Nicholson. The (artsy, drifting, elusive) film didn't get much of a release even at the height of Nicholson's stardom, but Nicholson himself loved both the film and the whole experience of working with Antonioni, and he ended up holding most of the film's rights.

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I prided myself on having seen every Jack Nicholson movie from Easy Rider to the end of his career, but I realize now: no, I haven't seen The Passenger. Onward! (And I've seen Ironweed, which is on my list of the Most Depressing Movies Ever Made, and Man Trouble, that inexplicable comedy with Ellen Barkin. But no Passenger. I"m on it.

I DO know that The Passenger actually originated with a book that HITCHCOCK bought to film around 1951, called The Bramble Bush(in book form.) A man steals a dead man's passport and other things and is mistaken for him by bad guys . Somehow that moved from America to...whereever the Nicholson version takes place. And got real obscure and arty.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Nicholson was therefore uniquely inclined to record a commentary track for the dvd of The Pasenger, something he hasn't done for any other film, and that commentary has been retained on all subsequent Blu-rays. I may have to get that rare/expensive dvd/bu-ray.

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A NICHOLSON commentary? Very rare indeed. He would do print interviews but (like Cary Grant) would never do Johnny Carson or other talk shows. I think he did 60 Minutes late in his career. He did an interview for "Batman" on DVD I think where he is just as wacky in his syntax as folks say he is...making sense even as he doesn't make sense.

I have been reading that BluRays are getting very expensive. Like VHS tapes of movies(prerecorded) were in the 80's. We are going backwards. Meanwhile, last night I watched a movie I saw in theaters in 2021 on streaming ...and it had commercials in it. ALREADY. Backwards I tell you. Movies with commercials in them; superexpensive home discs. Backwards.

At least I know Psycho by heart.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

A bit more on Friedkin, from Peter Bart's recent obit.

Somehow Bart knew this:

When Friedkin was directing the final episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour -- "Off Season" starring John Gavin and the Bates Motel in 1965 -- evidently Hitchcock not only noticed that Friedkin wasn't wearing a tie but that he was going over budget on the episode.

Coming to Friedkin's defense was Hitchcock's TV producer and longtime friend Norman Lloyd(who also, as an actor, famously fell off Lady Liberty in Saboteur.) Lloyd asked Hitch to cut Friedkin some slack, he was new, he was doing some good work, etc.

And Friedkin remained friends with Lloyd til the latter passed away at age 107.

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[–] swanstep (2619) 8 months ago

I DO know that The Passenger actually originated with a book that HITCHCOCK bought to film around 1951, called The Bramble Bush(in book form.) A man steals a dead man's passport and other things and is mistaken for him by bad guys . Somehow that moved from America to...whereever the Nicholson version takes place. And got real obscure and arty.

That is indeed the premise of The Passenger but the writer of the film, Mark Peploe, who later won an adapted screenplay Oscar for The Last Emperor, always claimed that his story was an original idea. Peploe's screenplay ended up being at least as famous as the rather obscure final film because it was very flashily published in a paperback at the same time as the film. The paperback had 70 images from the film scattered throughout out it so it functioned as a photo-book, and the paperback also includes long rave reviews from The NY Times (Canby), and The New Yorker (Gilliat - Kael would have savaged The Passenger!) and an interview with Antonioni. This cinephile web page about The Passenger:
https://cinephiliabeyond.org/the-passenger/
includes a download link for a .pdf of the original screenplay paperback. I'd recommend grabbing a copy while that link still works.

The similarity between The Passenger's basic idea and an abandoned Hitch project is noted in Hitchcock circles, e.g. here:
https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/The_Bramble_Bush
but I can report that it *never* comes up in Antonioni discussions on line. The Passenger is definitely worth seeing in my view, but there's no getting around that its, at least on first viewing, and certainly for mainstream audiences, a pretty toxic combination of slow and confusing. The Passenger typically grows on you on subsequent viewings, e.g., see Ebert reviewing a re-release more positively in 2005:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-passenger-2005
No Country and Cache - two of the 2000s best films - have some The Passenger DNA in them. You have been warned!

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

I DO know that The Passenger actually originated with a book that HITCHCOCK bought to film around 1951, called The Bramble Bush(in book form.) A man steals a dead man's passport and other things and is mistaken for him by bad guys . Somehow that moved from America to...whereever the Nicholson version takes place. And got real obscure and arty.

---
That is indeed the premise of The Passenger but the writer of the film, Mark Peploe, who later won an adapted screenplay Oscar for The Last Emperor, always claimed that his story was an original idea.

....The similarity between The Passenger's basic idea and an abandoned Hitch project is noted in Hitchcock circles, e.g. here:
https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/The_Bramble_Bush
but I can report that it *never* comes up in Antonioni discussions on line.

---

Well, that combination of information above tells you where I got MY idea that The Bramble Bush became The Passenger, but evidently this was just a case of "two minds with the same great idea." In Hollywood -- and in international film, I guess -- lawyers are called in if somebody steals somebody's idea. But if they DON"T...never mind.

I have no idea of exactly where The Bramble Bush goes as a story. I do recall that Hitchcock's version would be set at least partially in San Francisco, so I suppose we were lucky he saved that gorgeous and haunting city for Vertigo.

I suppose modernly, nobody will make a movie of The Bramble Bush because its too much like...The Passenger.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Peploe's screenplay ended up being at least as famous as the rather obscure final film because it was very flashily published in a paperback at the same time as the film. The paperback had 70 images from the film scattered throughout out it so it functioned as a photo-book,

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Wow. That's quite a presentation for a movie that ended up largely unseen and obscure -- though with Nicholson as its star(alongside Maria Scheider fresh from Last Tango in Paris), its always on lists of Nicholson movies and thus known.

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and the paperback also includes long rave reviews from The NY Times (Canby), and The New Yorker (Gilliat - Kael would have savaged The Passenger!)

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As I've noted ,because of month of release, Gilliatt, and not Kael, reviewed Hitchcock's Frenzy in the summer of 1972 and gave it a rave, and I'm pretty sure that Kael would not have(she wasn't much of a Hitchcock fan, felt he repeated himself.)

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and an interview with Antonioni.

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One realizes that Jack Nicholson -- oh so careful in the 70's about building himself a "serious" career as a good actor who worked with the best actors -- would go for "The Passenger" if only to work with Antonioni. Jack knew he had some good movies behind him and under consideration at the time(Cuckoo's Nest and the surething-but-misfired The Fortune with Warren Beatty), he could afford the risk of an art film.

I remain amused that in 1970, Antonioni opted for American star -- Rod Taylor! -- to be in Zabriskie Point. I wonder how Taylor felt about being in an art film by the great Antonioni. I'm sure there is an interview somewhere. I also wonder why Antonioni WANTED Rod Taylor. Must have been a fan.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

This cinephile web page about The Passenger:
https://cinephiliabeyond.org/the-passenger/
includes a download link for a .pdf of the original screenplay paperback. I'd recommend grabbing a copy while that link still works.

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Which reminds me: years ago I tracked down a copy -- on the internet -- of Tarantino's script for Django Unchained'" that was readable BEFORE the movie even went into production! I've only had that privilege a few other times in my life -- when friends who worked at studios slipped me "advance scripts" for: Lucky Lady, Psycho II(without the final scene), and an unmade Harrison Ford film called "Night Train Down."

Anyway, I decided to read Django Unchained and spoil the story ahead of the movie. I still got to READ the surprises of various lead actor deaths in the film and other plot elements, and when I saw the movie, that was a little disappointing, actually. On the other hand, the script I read had an entirely different ending and many scenes that didn't make it into the movie. Moreover, a very villainous henchman -- pencilled in for Kevin Costner and then Kurt Russell -- was reduced to a much smaller role played by Walton Goggins when the bigger names dropped out. I can see why -- he was a racist son of a bitch.

Anyway, perhaps The Passenger will read like that...

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

The Passenger is definitely worth seeing in my view, but there's no getting around that its, at least on first viewing, and certainly for mainstream audiences, a pretty toxic combination of slow and confusing.

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Well, isn't "slow and confusing" the essence of art films great or not? If the story is too understandable -- and moves fast -- its closer to mainstream storytelling.

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No Country and Cache - two of the 2000s best films - have some The Passenger DNA in them. You have been warned!

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I need to see Cache, I have seen No Country for Old Men. Now THAT was an art film when compared to a movie that is a lot like it -- Don Siegel's Charley Varrick of 1973, with Walter Matthau. In both movies, a man comes into possession of criminal loot(Mafia in Varrick, Cartels in NO Country) and in both movies, an implacable hit man is sent to recover the loot and kill our anti-hero. But in No Country, the expected climactic showdown between good and evil NEVER happens and the villain gets away and there's no real ending...art film.

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[–] swanstep (2619) 8 months ago

Well, isn't "slow and confusing" the essence of art films great or not? If the story is too understandable -- and moves fast -- its closer to mainstream storytelling.

I guess I think that there slowness/contemplativeness (at least in parts) is a very common feature of art films (perhaps by analogy with walking slowly around an art gallery), but outright confusingness (not to be confused with open-endedness or ambiguity or elusiveness or even suggestiveness/multiple meanings) is not that common. The Passenger actively invites confusion and us-not-getting-it, e.g.(i) there are long sequences with different groups with the same basic form - African guys in suits+one fairly scruffy white guy - running around. It's pretty important for the plot that we can identify which groups are govt agents and which are revolutionaries but Antonioni refuses to cast distinctively or otherwise visually mark the groups so that unless you are incredibly attentive and disciplined in memorizing colors of jackets etc. you can't help but be confused as to who's who. I suspect that Antonioni is making a point about cultural difference and 'everyone looking alike' to outsiders but I was pretty annoyed first time through. E.g. (ii), The screenplay includes some lines of dialogue identifying a guy we see tape of Jack Nicholson's character interviewing with a person we earlier saw on tape being executed. Antonioni brutally cut the identifying lines out of the finished film and as a result I never made the identification. I learned of the identity later reading around and was alerted to the screenplay's greater transparency on this point. This made me mad!

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[–] swanstep (2619) 8 months ago

BTW, as I mentioned earlier. I haven't actually heard Nicholson's 2005 commentary on The Passenger yet but one paper I found online quoted the beginning of that commentary:

We're rolling now, so . . . I suppose the thing about an interlinear to this picture should be about Michelangelo Antonioni. In this period they had what they called the "art film." We first became aware of Antonioni with a picture called L'avventura. And this picture, The Passenger, was probably the biggest adventure in filming that I ever had in my life.

It's so interesting to me that Jack has a strong sense of how 'art film' was a functioning genre of film with a relatively reliable audience but for only a relatively brief period of time - maybe 1960-1976 - when Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais ,Godard, post-La Dolce Vita Fellini, Oshima, and a bunch of others roared.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Again I note that William Friedkin went from a pretty arrogant guy(in quoteable press AND in gossip) to quite the nice fellow with all sorts of praise for Hitchcock in DVD interviews and now -- I learn -- commentary.

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I return to note this: I've been cruising some William Friedkin interviews on YouTube and I found one where he looked pretty much to be the "elderly William Friedkin" -- the "nice guy" who says all those nice things about Hitchcock and there, suddenly "the young nasty William Friedkin" returned.

Interviewer: On Cruising, Al Pacino said that you changed the ending and that upset him --
Friedkin: (Suddenly raging) Al Pacino!? Let me tell you(talking over the interviewer), I don't give one flying fuck through a rolling donut WHAT Al Pacino thinks!

Its a fun moment, for several reasons. "Nice Friedkin" disappears in a millisecond. And, I didn't know he had such anger at Pacino -- indeed, he calms down to say how GREAT it was to work with...Tommy Lee Jones(I guess he was promoting his movie with Jones, The Hunted, at the time. That's one of those Paramount movies his wife Sherry Lansing got for him.) Also, I've heard the "front part" of Friedkin's "flying f-k" insult many times elsewhere, but NOT "through a rolling donut." Creative.

I'm reminded that one reason I didn't like The Exorcist in its time of release is that both of its main creators -- Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty(from his bestseller) just struck me through their interviews as mean arrogant men. At the Oscar ceremony, Blatty actually raged in the press room that The Exorcist was better the The Sting(which won Best Picture over it.) I liked The Sting better, but a matter of opinion , yes?

But years later I read Julia Phillips' autobio. She helped produce The Sting, and turned out to be as mean and arrogant as Friedkin and Blatty in HER discussions. I decided to: "like the movie, not the creators." They all seemed to be so mean and arrogant.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

But years later I read Julia Phillips' autobio. She helped produce The Sting, and turned out to be as mean and arrogant as Friedkin and Blatty in HER discussions. I decided to: "like the movie, not the creators." They all seemed to be so mean and arrogant.

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I'll note that I found Hitchcock and Joe Stefano more "pleasant" interviewees about Psycho than Friedkin and Blatty on The Exorcist(which they just took too seriously) but Hitchcock could be a Hollywood gut-fighter, too.

In one of the books on Hitchcock, there is a hilarous memo sent by Hitchcock to Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck. Lifeboat is the only movie Hitchcock made for Fox, and the memo suggests why. Zanuck sent an employee to "time" the script for Lifeboat; finding it too long and desiring cuts. Hitchcock raged: "You sent a MENIAL to time the script, with no understanding of filmmaking at all" and just kept on raging and threatening Zanuck and basically saying screw you, I"m going to make this my way."

So Hitch knew how to survive, too.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

It's so interesting to me that Jack has a strong sense of how 'art film' was a functioning genre of film with a relatively reliable audience but for only a relatively brief period of time - maybe 1960-1976 - when Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais ,Godard, post-La Dolce Vita Fellini, Oshima, and a bunch of others roared.

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Its said that Hollywood has periods in which certain genres thrive: Westerns, cop action movies, SciFi, and now Marvel/DC movies. Not to mention filmmakers copycatting certain directors. Practically everybody did a Hitchcock type film, and Spielberg drove a whole lot of teen-aimed fantasies.

That said, the 70's had its own "genre" going on in American films, and it was just as much a "Hollywood copycat period" as all that would follow it.

Many 70's movies(and some 60s movies, like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate) were mimicking: Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais ,Godard, post-La Dolce Vita Fellini, Oshima, and a bunch of others ...

Coppola cited foreign filmmaking as influencing both Godfathers and The Conversation. Paul Mazursky did a Fellini-esque movie("Alex in Wonderland.") Woody Allen started by satirizing Bergman(in Love and Death) and then tried a REAL Bergman like film(Interiors.)

Altman crossed over to foreign influences. So did Bob Rafelson(Five Easy Pieces) and Mike Nichols(The Graduate, Catch 22, Carnal Knowledge.)

And I'd say that Hitchcock got right into the act with his "Eurofilm trilogy" -- Torn Curtain, Topaz(with cast members who had worked for Truffaut, Bergman, and Bunuel) and Frenzy(British angry young man style.)

The problem eventually manifested: all these art film/foreign film American movies didn't make a whole lot of money. Jaws and Rocky and Star Wars famously set the course, and all these TV executives in the 80's took it from there. However, art film/Eurofilm influence continues in American indiefilm.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Its interesting how Jack Nicholson had all that art film/foreign film training. Like so many stars, Nicholson had little formal education --- though he did complete high school, which many of them do not.

But he seems to have been self-taught(books) about a lot of cultural matters, and art(he is a collector) and movie history and he was "ready to go for the 70's" not only with American "eurofilm copies"(Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge) but actually working for one foreign director of artistic note(Antonioni.) I guess it was like Brando going with Bertolucci. Or years earlier, Burt Lancaster going with Visconti for The Leopard...

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[–] christomacin (4532) 8 months ago

"The problem eventually manifested: all these art film/foreign film American movies didn't make a whole lot of money. Jaws and Rocky and Star Wars famously set the course, and all these TV executives in the 80's took it from there."

This could be among the reasons that both Black Sunday and The Sorcerer both failed in 1977. They both featured long opening scenes in foreign countries with lots of subtitled dialog. This is especially true of The Sorcerer. We don't get to Scheider's character for quite a while. And even after we do, he's off to Latin America and lots more foreign people and subtitles before anyone actually hops inside a truck. As a matter of fact, Friedkin related that executives had to assure film goers at the test screening that the whole film would not be in subtitles.

The "international" nature of The French Connection didn't seem to bother American film goers, at a time when America was looking outward for ansers to its problems (Swinging London, hip and trendy Paris and Rome, king fu kicking Hong Kong, the "mysterious and spiritual" India) in life, foreing policy, music, movies, etc. Post Vietnam and Watergate (1975 onward) Americans increasingly turned inward in their outlook, partly because, as you say, Americans were "doing Europe" in American films and there was no real need for "foreign-ness". America no longer needed spaghetti westerns because we had internalized them and started making our own (The Wild Bunch, Two Mules for Sister Sara, High Plains Drifter), as an example. Nudiy, sex and graphic violence were no longer the exclusive preserve of those naughty foreigners either.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

"The problem eventually manifested: all these art film/foreign film American movies didn't make a whole lot of money. Jaws and Rocky and Star Wars famously set the course, and all these TV executives in the 80's took it from there."

This could be among the reasons that both Black Sunday and The Sorcerer both failed in 1977. They both featured long opening scenes in foreign countries with lots of subtitled dialog. This is especially true of The Sorcerer.

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Yes, very true and especially with Sorcerer. In fact, I didn't SPECIFY William Friedkin as an "American Eurofilm maker," but very clearly The French Connection opens that way in Marseilles(subtitles) and The Exorcist opens that way in Iraq(subtitles) and by Sorcerer, Friedkin was going whole hog on the Eurofilm thing. This "bleeds into" a rather documentary style in The French Connection(Freidkin began in documentaries) and perhaps one reason I did not like The Exorcist in my youth is that a lot of THAT had a documentary style(I was used to Hitchcock's polished, matte shot world and I didn't mind his process work.)

Indeed, that's an important part of my young life "at the movies" -- I was really too young to understand WHY the movies were changing, but suddenly all of them became very gritty, realistic and documentary-style -- the Oscars got rid of the "Best Special Effects" category for awhile, I think, to salute "reality" in movies.

And I'm not all that sure that "reality" worked all that better than matte work. Case in point: Deliverance..in which Jon Voight's long "cliff climb" struck me as being filmed at lower places on the cliff and clearly "cheated." With a matte shot, they could have SHOWN the possible fall.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Hitchcock could adapt as well as anybody. In addition to its hard-R content, Frenzy was very gritty and realistic looking. I recall my happiness when a great matte shot finally turned up: the London skyline in the dead of night as Rusk approached the potato trucks.

Poor Hitch. He passed away right as Lucas and Spielberg brought matte paintings(if not process work -- well GOOD process work) back with a vengeance in the 80's. Hitch would have fit right in -- and gone ga-ga for CGI.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

This is especially true of The Sorcerer. We don't get to Scheider's character for quite a while.

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Doubly weird, I guess. Scheider wasn't as big a star as McQueen, but American audiences craved SOME sort of American star...and they still had to wait.

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And even after we do, he's off to Latin America and lots more foreign people and subtitles before anyone actually hops inside a truck.

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Yes, I think that William Friedkin was far more into both "Eurofilm" AND documentary style than other American filmmakers of the time, and was willing to take his time indulging himself on Sorcerer given how hot he was after TFC and The Exorcist.

Its funny. I KNOW that The Wages of Fear was a classic in suspense (though it, too, took about an hour to get going) and I KNOW that Sorcerer duplicated many of those suspense sequences at higher levels of effects but -- nobody remembers Sorcerer. That surefire suspense plot wasn't surefire at all. And maybe Friedkin was at fault for that. Perhaps Spielberg and/or Scorsese knew more about pace and action and would have REALLY done that story right.

All of this is pushing me to find and rewatch Sorcerer. I'm pretty sure I saw it only once, on release , in 1977.

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As a matter of fact, Friedkin related that executives had to assure film goers at the test screening that the whole film would not be in subtitles.

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I've never had a problem with subtitles, but I know of a few friends and dates who went with me to subtitled movies and complained loudly. I don't think we walked out, but they groused.

I use subtitles on all my streaming viewing now whether foreign or not-- and I've read that in the US, 70% of ALL streaming viewers, of ALL ages -- use subtitles, too. I see this as revenge against "The Sopranos mumblers" and other modern actors who refuse to say their lines with crystal clarity. Used to be, with The Sopranos, I had to rewind a couple of times just to get a line straight. No more.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

This downside to subtitles on streaming:

With comedy series AND comedy movies -- often the subtitle delivers the punchline before the actor speaks it. A real problem. I've learned to turn the subtitles off on comedies.

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Christomacin wrote:

The "international" nature of The French Connection didn't seem to bother American film goers, at a time when America was looking outward for answers to its problems (Swinging London, hip and trendy Paris and Rome, king fu kicking Hong Kong, the "mysterious and spiritual" India) in life, foreign policy, music, movies, etc.

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That's a great point. As I said, I was too young at the time to "understand the change," but now I do, and I suppose that remains something very interesting about how "the movies slowly change on us before we know it."

For instance, American studio filmmaking is said to have pretty much lost its ominpotence around 1962. Peter Bogdanovich wittily noted that this is the year that Warner Brothers shut down Bugs Bunny production...killing off a bunch of Warners stars in one fell swoop.

Meanwhile, even as foreign films(with nudity and sex and profanity) filled art houses, American STUDIO production moved to Europe for a lot of films. As I noted, Hitchcock got with the act, though he cheated a bit: he filmed at Universal studios but imported foreign ACTORS for Torn Curtain(all the way through) and Topaz(in parts; but he got some location work in Paris and Copehagen, NYC and DC.)

I think a key " international" deal in the 60's was: the James Bond pictures. They were officiallly foreign films(from Britain) and the American knockoffs(Our Man Flint, Matt Helm) looked silly and artificial by comparison.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Post Vietnam and Watergate (1975 onward) Americans increasingly turned inward in their outlook, partly because, as you say, Americans were "doing Europe" in American films and there was no real need for "foreign-ness". America no longer needed spaghetti westerns because we had internalized them and started making our own (The Wild Bunch, Two Mules for Sister Sara, High Plains Drifter), as an example.

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That's really true about the "American spaghetti Westerns," isn't it -- almost all of them starred Mr. Spaghetti himself, Clint Eastwood. Meanwhile there were still foreign Westerns being made with American stars -- Burt Lancaster was in "Valdez is Coming" and "Lawman."

The Wild Bunch seemed to mix spaghetti with good old American studio super-budget confidence. One reason that final gunbattle is such a spectacular classic -- APART from the blood and slo mo -- is that Warners brass kept giving Peckinpah all the time and money he needed to film it right...more days, more blood packs, more fake ammo...

Back at Eastwood. Started as TV star on Rawhide. Then the spaghetti. Then he came back -- almost as a "foreign" star -- and was misused in movies like Where Eagles Dare and Paint Your Wagon.

Came the 70's, Eastwood pretty much took over his own career, and split it between Westerns(fewer and fewer as the genre died out) and cop/non-cop action. But this: he was very much an R-rated star for the new R-rated era. He had sex with woman consensually(mainly) but non-consensually(in High Plains Drifter) and he was not John Wayne.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Nudiy, sex and graphic violence were no longer the exclusive preserve of those naughty foreigners either.

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Ah, the famous "coming of the R and X rating" in late 1968. (With the major R and X stuff coming out in 1969-1973, I'd say.)

It wasn't until I saw a lot of foreign films from the 50's and 60s(on TCM and elsewhere) that I got what REALLY drove American directors nuts was all the nudity and sex allowed in those foreign films -- not to mention "narrative content" (adultery, menage-a-trois) that was forbidden by the Hays Code.

I watched the original "Wages of Fear" in the past year and in an early scene in the 1953 film(1953!) there is clearly a poster of a topless woman on a wall in the men's quarters. Topless! Maybe naked!(I can't remember). 1953! American fillmakers must have gone nuts seeing that and knowing they couldn't do that.

Now these foreign films did play America, but only in restricted "art houses" in big cities like NYC and LA. I expect that college film societies got them, too.

The actor Ray Walston, who had worked in the great "The Apartment" for Billy Wilder in 1960 worked for Wilder in a bigger(starring) role in the not-so-great "Kiss Me Stupid" in 1964. Kiss Me Stupid was so sexually suggestive that UA sent it out for art house distribution via the Lopert label. No nudity, no sex shown -- just TALKED ABOUT all the time.

In a book on Wilder, Walston said that when he questioned Wilder about the sex content in Kiss Me Stupid while they were making it, Wilder said "We have censorship to deal with, but you watch: in just a few years, there will be a revolution in American films and we, too will get to film sexual scenes(paraphrased.)" Walston said: "Wilder was right."

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[–] swanstep (2619) 8 months ago

Friedkin's final film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, just premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The Guardian positively reviews it here:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/03/the-caine-mutiny-court-martial-review-william-friedkins-final-film-looks-for-the-truth
They also have reviews of Fincher's latest, a 'two-reeler' from Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos's latest provocation with Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic, and a few others. (sounds like Fincher's, Lanthimos's and an ambitious new film from arthouse fave Bertrand (Nocturama, House of Tolerance) Bonello are the hits of festival so far).

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Friedkin's final film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, just premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The Guardian positively reviews it here:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/03/the-caine-mutiny-court-martial-review-william-friedkins-final-film-looks-for-the-truth

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Lost in all the talk about William Friedkin's passing has been focus on this last film. I think what's interesting(up top) is that the movie is of the trial(I assume) not all the outdoor action at sea that comes before it in the 1954 film from Herman Wouk's novel. I've been reading about productions of "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial" as an enitity that seemed to last for more years(as a stage production) than the movie. I think Henry Fonda played one of the key parts on Broadway(likely the Naval lawyer who defends the mutineers) and James Garner evidently got his start in the play as a "navy juror" and never saying a word any night(I think he just watched Fonda act and took notes in his head.)

I used to think that Humphrey Bogart(in one of those great roles he played as an "old man" in the later stages of his career -- he died at 57!) was "Captain Queeg," but a look at IMdb for the new one has Kiefer Sutherland as "Lt. Commander Queeg." Boy. I think its much more fun to call the character Captain Queeg, and so I shall.

Its funny how, over the years, Bogart's Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny has come to be overshadowed by Jack Nicholson's Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men. Its like the two courtroom dramas have rather merged and that's too bad -- because The Caine Mutiny is really a much more nuanced story and Queeg, while paranoid(rolling those ball bearings in his hand on the stand) is not nearly the arrogant villain that Jessup is.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

In my youth, I was into books as much as movies, and in my readings about movies, I sought out the books that launched them -- because the movies weren't available. Make sense? Around 1969, the movie of The Caine Mutiny was nowhere to be regularly seen on TV let alone movie theaters(it was a 1954 film), so I got the book and read it, and enjoyed it. Maybe four or five years later, The Caine Mutiny finally got another TV showing and I could "catch up"(the movie was a truncated version of the book.)

From the book, I recall being surprised at the end in realizing that one mutineer who seemed heroic turned out to be the true villain of the piece. In ths movie, this was Fred MacMurray, and his Keefer is one of his three great "against-type" villains: the killer in Double Indemnity, Keefer in The Caine Mutiny, and his masterpiece, Sheldrake the womanizing boss-tyrant(with a smile) in The Apartment. Keefer will be played in the new movie by Lewis Pullman -- the near-lookalike son of actor Bill Pullman(I didn't know of the connection until I looked him up.) , not quite the star casting of MacMurray.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

Indeed, it looks like this Friedkin version is light overall on the star casting:

Queeg(Humphrey Bogart) (Kiefer Sutherland)
Defense Lawyer(Jose Ferrer) (Jason Clarke)
Maryk(Mutineer) (VAn Johnson) (Jake Lacy)
Keefer (Mutineer) (Fred MacMurray) (Lewis Pullman)

and Friedkin has done one sex switch -- male naval prosecutor EG Marshall becomes a woman (Monica Raymond.)

Friedkin remade 12 Angry Men for cable in 1997 (with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott in for Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb) and while he put no women on the jury he did add some African Americans. My take on that one, btw, was that Lemmon and Scott would have been great casting -- 20 years earlier. The story became "2 Angry and Tuckered Out Old Men."

I think its -- nice? -- that William Friedkin's bow out will allow a classic American drama of stage AND screen make a new appearance in a new version for the 21st Century. Which reminds me: he didn't do it modern-day did he? I'll have to check that review!

PS. Seeing as I read The Caine Mutiny long before I saw the movie, I recall being floored as a young person by the defense attorney's post trial speech to the mutineers, and his "toast". One of the best things I ever read in my young age.

PPS. I read the paperback of The Godfather only a few months before reading the paperback of The Caine Mutiny. While my young eyes popped out of my head at the wall-to-wall sex in The Godfather book, I was intrigued that even a 1950-book like The Caine Mutiny had a LITTLE bit of sexual content( a few sentences) -- books were not as censored as movies, even then.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

They also have reviews of Fincher's latest, a 'two-reeler' from Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos's latest provocation with Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic, and a few others. (sounds like Fincher's, Lanthimos's and an ambitious new film from arthouse fave Bertrand (Nocturama, House of Tolerance) Bonello are the hits of festival so far).

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Maybe Wes Anderson can redeem Asteroid City with that two-reeler. I saw "The Equalizer 3" a a movie theater yesteday and they showed the trailer for the Emma Stone movie -- quite weird looking indeed, but I know that director made The Lobster and I know this could be something else too. I was VERY intrigued that an art film trailer got shown with The Equalizer 3(which is just GREAT doing what those movies always do -- torture-kill the most evil villains imaginable) but...Emma Stone maybe?

And David Fincher. That Venice lineup also included a new Roman Polanski film. And we've got Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon" FINALLY almost here.

So: the auteurs are back. In fact since this summer we had Chris Nolan(longtime auteur) and Greta Gerwig(newbie auteur) I guess you could say auteurs are REALLY back.

Of course I loved Licorice Pizza about 2 years ago, but that movie really benefitted in the movie press by Paul Thomas Anderson being almost the LONE auteur with a movie in release that COVIDish year. PTA and the movie and the young stars got a LOT of press because...nowhere else to go, much.

Polanski's film got panned the one review I read. From time to time, I do like to opine on Polanski's infamous legal situation of decades ago. I've read some books with some remarks on his overall lifestyle back then and I have come to this conclusion: many of us speed over the limit in our cars all the time, but maybe we only get caught and ticketed ONCE. I think Polanski only got caught and ticketed once.

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[–] swanstep (2619) 8 months ago

I saw "The Equalizer 3" a a movie theater yesteday and they showed the trailer for the Emma Stone movie -- quite weird looking indeed, but I know that director made The Lobster and I know this could be something else too.

The trailer that's on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlbR5N6veqw
didn't do much for me. I'm a bit 'over' or burned out on over-designed, unreal worlds at this point. But Lanthimos is one of the best directors out there. I've liked him since his Greek days, with Dogtooth (2009) especially being some sort of off-beat, creepy masterpiece, and he's made jumping to work with Hollywood studios while continuing all his original weird obsessions look easy (The Lobster - my fave of 2016, The Favourite - my equal fave of 2018, Killing of a Sacred Dear - a bit meh, and now Poor Things) which it isn't. So, trailer notwithstanding, I'm pretty excited about Poor Things.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

I saw "The Equalizer 3" a a movie theater yesteday and they showed the trailer for the Emma Stone movie -- quite weird looking indeed, but I know that director made The Lobster and I know this could be something else too.
The trailer that's on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlbR5N6veqw

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There 'tis. Willem Dafoe's face looks uh, VERY difficult for mainstream consumption. Emma Stone(being pushed as a repeat Oscar favorite by...somebody) looks pretty weird and then a little better and hey...its a given...her Frankenwoman eventually needs/wants sex a LOT. They will be selling THAT.

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didn't do much for me. I'm a bit 'over' or burned out on over-designed, unreal worlds at this point.

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I suppose you could say it is the "art film flipsideto Marvel movies." And wasn't Everything Everywhere etc -- in that category , too? Or for that matter the "mainstream" Barbie(but I gotta admit, that pink world she lives in was cool to look at -- if nightmarish to me.

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But Lanthimos is one of the best directors out there. I've liked him since his Greek days, with Dogtooth (2009) especially being some sort of off-beat, creepy masterpiece, and he's made jumping to work with Hollywood studios while continuing all his original weird obsessions look easy (The Lobster - my fave of 2016, The Favourite - my equal fave of 2018,

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I remember your praise of that director and those films, and frankly I remembered you when the trailer came up in my theater(at Equalizer 3, heh -- but wait on that one, below.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

I can't always promise to watch exactly the movies you watch swanstep, but when I stumble onto them...I do try. In the past year, I've seen Under Her Skin and Nope on streaming, for instance. Both intrigued me, but I felt overmatched in trying to SAY something about them. Maybe later. Under Her Skin is clearly an art film, albeit with some rather non-sensual ScarJo nudity as a "come on"(literally to the doomed men she lures -- and what a COOL thing that happens to those guys.)

Nope is, as someone out there noted, a cross between an M. Night movie and an extended Twilight Zone, but with a clear and appropraite racial POV and nice emphasis on wide screen. (Peele said something like "I wanted this to be a movie you see in a theater.") The business with the ape(?) on the sitcom going nuts -- I liked both the idea and the hide-and-seek way the aftermath was presented.
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Killing of a Sacred Dear - a bit meh, and now Poor Things) which it isn't. So, trailer notwithstanding, I'm pretty excited about Poor Things.

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Perhaps I can get the time together to see Poor Things in a theater and then stream The Lobster and The Favourite(which landed a Best Actress award, yes?) I will be I like them all.

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

A few things about Equalizer 3:

ONE: Denzel's career management has been pretty cool to watch. He has won two Oscars(Supporting for Glory and Actor for Training Day) and has the "bonafides" to do Oscar bait and art films like Fences and MacBeth (not to mention his Oscar-nommed turn in "Flight" which was half studio stuff/half art drama). But then he is all too willing to hang with the action roles. In the begining especially, Denzel took standard thrillers that "second tier stars" HAVE to do(anybody see Richochet? I did, at the theater), but after his second Oscar he branched out to the arty and downbeat action thriller "Man on Fire."

But he could do standard stuff, too. There was a buddy movie with Mark Wahlberg called "Two Guns" which was standard action fare -- but it had to do with a robbery at the Tres Cruces Bank(hello Charley Varrick.)

And then we reached The Equalizer in 2014.

It was based on an 80s TV show with a middle aged Brit hiring himself out as protector/avenger/punisher to "regular New Yorkers," but the Denzel version had a middle aged man with superior and lethal fighting skills and HE took out the trash permanently.

The Equalizer came out in the fall of 2014, alongside the first (and best) John Wick, and the two were compared and contrasted. Keanu Reeves was a lesser star, but he was in a cooler, hipper package in which he killed something like 47 Russian gangsters to reach the one who KILLED HIS PUPPY. It was so element, yet complex at the same time. Bad guy kills puppy. Bad guy's father is the top Russian Mafia man in NYC. Father KNOWS his worthless son is a jerk off, but must send scores of men to die protecting him. All very "primal" with the side dish of "The Continental," a "hotel for assassins" where the rules are: you can't try to kill anybody there (we also learn of specialy currency and special body removal people, etc.)

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

While "John Wick" made its entrance with flash and men dying like video game targets, "The Equalizer" adapted itself to the more calm and measured acting style of its star: Denzel.

Like John Wick, Denzel is a retired assassin, but whereas Wick lives in an expensive glass luxury home, Denzel lives in a spartan downtown Boston apartment, and has a sensible meal while reading "The Old Man in the Sea" and befriending a too-young hooker (Chloe Grace Moretz, who has always looked like Kim Catrall to me.)

Denzel takes his time getting stirred up, but once we see how vicious, sadistic and arrogant THESE Russian gangsters are, its that great satisfaction of watching them call him "pops" and dying VERY violently(not like that old CBS show at all.)

The Equalizer(the first one was the best; see Psycho) ended with Denzel brutally killing all the bad guys while protecting his fellow Home Depot employees(under another name) and simply coverting Home Alone into a hard-R revenge fest(saving the worst villain -- who cruelly murders pretty young women) for last.

More so than John Wick(whose cause was personal -- a puppy), you can trace The Equalizer back to Dirty Harry, a tough guy who delivers wonderful and ongoing payback to a bad guy who killed or threatened women and children with equal evil. THAT was incredibly satisfying.

LESS satisfying was Death Wish(1974) when "regular guy"(heh) Charles Bronson became an vigilante avenger after his wife is killed and their grown daughter raped by thugs(in a scene even worse than the more stylized one in Frenzy.) The big problem, now and forever, with Death Wish, is that Bronson never FOUND the thugs who killed/raped his family and the muggers he DID kill seemed like "collateral damage."

The Equalizer knows to stick to Dirty Harry(introduce sadistic villains, kill them brutally) and to leave the Death Wish frustration behind. For that matter, The Equalizer would have known what to do with Hitchcock's rapist-killer Bob Rusk. CONT

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

I"ve always said that Hitchcock's biggest mistake with Frenzy was, after showing in detail just how cruel and sexually sadistic Bob Rusk could be -- he just had the guy ARRESTED at the end(though I've always finished it in my mind after "The End" -- Blaney beats the holy hell out of Rusk with that tire iron.) Denzel would have known how to handle Bob Rusk...

Equalizer 3 takes Denzel to Italy and to a coastal village menaced by Mafioso who (1) hang an old disabled man in a wheelchair; (2) beat up the local police chief; (3) threaten a little girl with death and (4) threaten her attractive mom with rape AND death.

Denzel knows what to do.

I'll just add this. The Equalizer 3 benefits from 2 things: (1) A two-time Oscar winner multiple Oscar nominee as the lead -- he ACTS, he dominates the screen, and his voice(especially when making matter of fact threats) is as comforting as John Wayne's used to be back in the day versus baddies.

Cinematography by: Robert Richardson. RR usually works for QT (and calls QT "the best director I have ever worked with") but has worked with Oliver Stone(so not HIM?) -- remember the great imagery of JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon? So you can bet the Italian coastline looks great and different in this one.

An Oscar caliber star. A top cinematographer. Equalizer 3 isn't a Van Damme movie.

Additional points:

ONE: All 3 Equalizers were directed by Antoine Fuqua, who guided Denzel to his Training Day win but usually directs him in action now.

TWO: Between Equalizers, Fuqua directed Denzel in "The Magnificent 7" remake, in which , frankly, Denzel talks and acts a LOT like the Equalizer versus Western vermin. So that movie is EITHER "The Equalizer plus six" or "The Magnificent 7 Equalizers."

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[–] roger1 (2351) 8 months ago

THREE: Equalizer 3 reunites Denzel with Dakota Fanning 19 years after he played her bodyguard in "Man on Fire" (and BOY did he torture kill the baddies in THAT one.) Funny: in between then and now-- Dakota got to play a very smarmy and authoritarian Squeaky Fromme for QT in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood(after J-Law turned the role down; I guess to avoid playing second fiddle to Margot Robbie.) I could only see and hear SQUEAKY in this movie. I'll leave aside if Dakota is good or bad, here,

FOUR: Shortly after Training Day, Warner Brothers announced a remake of Strangers on a Train to star Denzel directed by Antoine. Denzel confirmed he was "attached" but as Bruno or Guy? I've always wondered. The movie got dumped and Denzel switched to ...The Manchurian Candidate. Sigh.

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