film – All Good Movies

Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Robert Mitchum were born within a few years of each other and found great success in Hollywood in the decades immediately after World War II. They were often cast in similar roles: If you see an American movie from that period featuring a tough as nails cop or PI, a brawny cowboy slugging it out in a saloon, or a strong-jawed soldier saving his platoon or battleship, one or more of them was probably on screen. But by the end of the 1960s when they were all in late middle age, Mitchum had fewer films that would be remembered as classics (Out of the Past and Night of the Hunter being the strongest candidates) to his credit than did his contemporaries, perhaps because he never took his job that seriously (He famously noted that acting can’t be that hard given that Hollywood’s biggest star in its early days was a dog). With a few exceptions, Mitchum’s work in the 1940s-1960s was overall simply not at the level of Douglas or Lancaster (or for that matter Peck or Wayne).

But as he got old, Mitchum got more interesting. His tired eyes began to match the shambling body that carried them, his air of disinterest became more melancholy than insolent. Mitchum’s world-weary Phillip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (my recommendation here) is one of my favorite performances of the mid-1970s, and I would argue that he reached his greatest height just before that in the 1973 movie The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

The plot of the film closely follows the novel by George V. Higgins, who as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston knew the terrain he was describing. Under grey Beantown skies, a gang is pulling off a string of bank robberies using handguns supplied by minor league criminal Eddie Coyle (Mitchum). Coyle purchases the weapons from a better-connected gunrunner (Steven Keats) who also traffics in machine guns. Because Coyle is facing a sentencing hearing for smuggling a truckload of whiskey for his shady bartender (Peter Boyle), he is tempted to give information about the machine guns to an ATF agent (Richard Jordan) in the hopes of a lighter sentence. Coyle doesn’t want to go to prison again at his age, for his own sake and for that of his wife and kids, but he also doesn’t want to be a rat nor accept the risk of harsh punishment if the mob finds out he dropped a dime.

Director Peter Yates follows the compelling formula he established in my recommendations Robbery and Bullitt, namely one exciting scene with cars (in this case an inventive chase in a parking lot) and a lot of low-key atmosphere and acting everywhere else. Sporting a haircut and clothing that looks like it ran him a ten spot all in, Mitchum quietly commands the screen without a whiff of movie star about him. Eddie Coyle is not a particularly good man, but he some sense of duty to his friends and family, and Mitchum makes the audience care about him, defects and all, not least by portraying more vulnerability than toughness.

The supporting cast members all give excellent naturalistic performances that make a life of crime look gritty, unglamorous and even a bit tedious. Combined with ideal use of Boston locations, the movie at times takes on the tone of a docudrama about real world cops and robbers. It’s superb slice of life cinema anchored by the best work of Mitchum’s career.

p.s. This movie lost money but has become a cult favorite among film buffs. I assume Quentin Tarantino is one of them given that Steven Keats’ character is named Jackie Brown.

I had the recent pleasure of discovering the once-famous novels of Eric Ambler. Although many people think of writers like Graham Greene and John le Carré as the creators of English language thriller/espionage novels, those giants themselves would point to Ambler as the font from which it all flowed. His crisply-paced books employ what later became a staple of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (Ambler knew Hitch and indeed married his secretary): creating suspense by putting an ordinary person into perilous only half-understood situations swarming with secret agents and international conspiracies. His best-remembered book, 1939’s The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios), is a pluperfect example. In 1944, Warner Brothers did film noir lovers a favor by turning it into a fine film of the same name.

The plot: Cornelius Lyden (Peter Lorre) is an academic turned thriller writer who while travelling in Istanbul is befriended by secret police chief Colonel Haki (Kurt Katch, more compelling than Orson Welles was playing the same character in Journey Into Fear). Haki tells Lyden the story of a Basil Zarahoff-type villain named Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott, in his debut role) that the authorities had been pursuing for years until his murdered body washed up on the beach. Lyden is intrigued by someone who might well have appeared as the bad guy in one of his books, and embarks, Citizen Kane-style to uncover the true life story of the shadowy Dimitrios. Along the way he meets the mysterious Mr. Peters (Sydney Greenstreet) who seems to know more about Dimitrios and Lyden than he is telling.

The movie in one sense lacks a big name star, but in another sense it doesn’t. Although audiences saw Lorre and Greenstreet as character actors as individuals, they could not get enough of the “Little Pete-Big Syd” double act that began when John Huston paired them in The Maltese Falcon. The Mask of Dimitrios is the mid-point of their nine movie run, and between them is a chemistry on par with a world class gin and tonic.

Screenwriter Frank Gruber should be grateful that he was paid well for easy work, because his script follows Ambler’s novel almost point for point, with a significant amount of dialogue adapted verbatim. Surely, Ambler could have done that himself. Ambler did eventually become a superb screenwriter, including of two of my most heartfelt recommendations: The Cruel Sea and A Night to Remember. But in any event, Gruber delivers here a fine, suspenseful script about human frailty and ugliness, leavened by a main character who tries mightily to do the right thing.

This movie was director Jean Negulesco’s big break, and he makes the most of it, getting strong performance from actors in parts large and small. His background as a painter shows in his keen visual sense about set dressing, camera angles, and lighting (hat tip also here to cinematographer Arthur Edeson, who had established his noir chops on The Maltese Falcon).

Many film buffs would argue that if I were going to highlight a movie based on an Ambler novel, I should have picked 1943’s Journey Intro Fear. It’s an above average movie, but I think it was strange for Welles and Cotten to throw out a script by the legendary Ben Hecht and do their own instead. Particularly, they moved away from the emotional driver of Ambler’s book, namely the main character’s repeatedly thinking he can trust someone and then having it all go pear-shaped such that he is eventually whittled down to trying desperately to save himself. Cotten and Welles did make two small improvements to Ambler’s story (SPOILER ALERT): Having the main character being witnessed by the villains being handed a gun explained how they knew to steal it from his cabin, and making the ship’s captain alcoholic helped explain better why he would not listen to reason. In terms of acting, Welles is a bit hammy, but I did love the wordless, menacing performance of Jack Moss (Welles’ agent rather than a professional actor) as one of the killers. Like many of Welles’ projects, he either didn’t or couldn’t finish Journey Into Fear himself and it was chopped up by studio editors, in this case to a badly rushed (no pun intended) 71 minutes. It’s definitely still worth a look, but if you want a film with Welles, Cotten and other Mercury theater stalwarts about a moral and somewhat naive American intoxicated by a European beauty while coping with international intrigue and ever present danger, I would recommend instead the genuinely magnificent The Third Man.

Back to Ambler. I am glad he eventually got to do some screenwriting, though disappointed his collaborations with Hitchcock were limited to an episode of the latter’s TV show. His most famous novels, including The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey Into Fear remain fresh, exciting, and full of endlessly quotable dialogue (“I am old and have the luxury of despair”). He deserves an audience today. Reading and then watching The Mask of Dimitrios — or the other way round, if you like — is an excellent way to introduce yourself to Ambler’s oeuvre.

p.s. In an effort to cash in on the huge success of Casablanca, Warner Brothers quickly and cheaply cranked out another Lorre-Greenstreet film based on the Ambler novel Uncommon Danger in 1943 (The most slavish element being an opening montage that nearly copies Casablanca’s, including having the same director and narrator). Background to Danger was undone by star George Raft, who with the boneheaded judgment for which he was famous, insisted on changing Ambler’s everyman protagonist into a tough, streetwise federal agent! The screenwriter, W.R. Burnett said he worried about running into Ambler after the movie came out. Lorre and Greenstreet are both fine as usual, but it’s a forgettable film that is a million miles from the spirit of the novel on which it is based. Would avoid.