Inspector 2211

Film: Dirty Harry
Format: DVD from personal collection on itty bitty bedroom television.


It’s not too uncommon for an actor to be associated with one role or type of role for his or her entire life. Look at Fay Wray from yesterday’s movie. It happens to great actors, too—Errol Flynn will always be a swashbuckler regardless of his later career. Even Bogart had particular roles that seemed tailor made for him despite his versatility. Other times, actors are able to overcome that one great role and move on, becoming equally associated with other roles. Harrison Ford is a good example of this—he’s much more than Han Solo and/or Indiana Jones.

And then there’s Clint Eastwood, who seemed for years unable to shed the dual roles of the Man with No Name from many of his westerns and “Dirty” Harry Callahan from the series of movies started by the eponymous one from 1971. No matter what he did, the knock against him was that he didn’t have any range; he always played tough guys with a squint. Even now, you may well be nodding at this. Eastwood, the common wisdom goes, didn’t really find any range until much later in his career, and even then he didn’t find much.

I think that’s unfair. Eastwood is certainly remembered and loved for Dirty Harry, but the same year he made that film, he also directed and starred in Play Misty for Me, a seriously underrated film. As good as it is, though, it is overshadowed by the gritty cop with the .44 magnum.

It’s easy to see why, actually. Dirty Harry arrived at the perfect time—right in the middle of a whole bunch of classic “renegade cop on the loose” films starting with Bullitt and continuing on in the next year with The French Connection. Of all of these early “dirty” cop films, this one is the granddaddy, though, the one that people can quote and can remember specific scenes from. Much of the reason for that comes from Eastwood himself.

What’s easy to forget, though, is that Eastwood isn’t just a hardass in this film. That’s far truer of the later films in the series. In this one, he’s human, albeit a damnably tough human. This isn’t to say that this film features a softer Callahan than later ones, but it does feature one that is much more realistic. He’s not the perfect cop, and he doesn’t expect everyone around him to be the perfect cop, either. All he really wants is to do his job the best that he can.

In this case, the job involves a psychopathic serial killer who calls himself Scorpio (Andy Robinson). Scorpio starts out the movie with a sniper shot on a woman in a swimming pool, then goes on to kill others including a 10-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl. He shoots an officer or two, kicks the living crap out of Callahan, and hijacks a school bus full of children. This is not a nice man.

Much of the movie concerns Callahan’s dealings with Scorpio. He also has to deal with a partner named Chico Gonzalez (Reni Santoni). And this is where the Callahan you may remember is different from the Callahan of this film. He doesn’t particularly hate Gonzalez as much as he’d simply rather work alone because his partners tend to get shot. But, he’s stuck with Chico, and the two have to make the best of things.

There are a few other notables here, particularly John Vernon as the Mayor of San Francisco. John Vernon is a “that guy,” meaning he’s one of those guys that you instantly recognize (“Hey, it’s Dean Wormer from Animal House!) but can’t always name. It’s a good role for him here. He plays authority figures well, especially when they are clashing with the main character(s) of the film.

While Eastwood certainly lives and breathes this film while toting the big handgun, in many ways, this is Andy Robinson’s film. Scorpio is one of the great film psychos, a man who is completely evil and enjoys his evil. When he has the upper hand, he is sadistic, twisted, and brutal. When he doesn’t, he is a sniveling little worm who begs for mercy. In other words, he’s easy to hate, which is exactly what is called for here.

As his career has continued, Clint Eastwood has shown that while many people find him limited to a certain range as an actor, he is one of the very few people in the business who not only made a successful transition to the director’s chair, but also that the director’s chair is perfectly suited to him. He’s a hell of a director, and he’ll be remembered as such. However, he’ll also be forever immortalized on film as Harry Callahan, and that’s not such a bad thing.

Why to watch Dirty Harry: The greatest film in the “my way or else” breed of cop genre.
Why not to watch: Police brutality.

Beauty, Meet Beast

Film: King Kong
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.


I love used bookstores because it’s always a surprise at what is contained within them. That’s true to a lesser extent of a used DVD store. There, you can rest assured that 90% (or more) of what you find is utter crap, direct-to-DVD stuff that sells for next to nothing because nobody wants it in the first place. But sometimes, good things show up. When I find a real treasure, I can’t pass it up. I went movie shopping a couple of days ago and found some good ones, including the surprising find of Foolish Wives and an almost as surprising Forbidden Planet. But the real steal was King Kong.

There is no question that this movie shows its age, which is probably why it’s been remade twice since the original 1933 version. Stop-motion animation was the height of technology in those early days of film, but it’s not so much used anymore. Admittedly, there is a surreal quality to stop-motion, particularly for something that requires as much movement as a giant ape. It doesn’t look real. It’s natural, I suppose, for modern filmmakers to want to go back to these early films and modernize them. The recent release of Clash of the Titans is much the same, and I fully expect to see a new version of Jason and the Argonauts announced any day now.

The story is one almost everyone knows. A filmmaker named Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) takes a film crew to an island in the South Pacific to create his new picture. When he can’t get a leading lady because of his secretiveness, he scours the streets of New York until he finds Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). Desperate, she agrees to go on the journey with him and the ship’s crew. For Ann, the most important member of the crew is John Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) who quickly falls in love with the Ann despite his misgivings about a woman being onboard the ship with him.

Eventually, the ship reaches Skull Island, where a tribe of natives is undertaking a ritual to marry off Kong, the local god. The chief (Noble Johnson) offers to buy Ann, but is refused. Instead, a few of the natives sneak on board the ship at night and spirit her away to be sacrificed to their god.

Of course, the god is real—he’s a giant ape, officially billed at 50 feet high, but more like 20 feet based on the scale of other objects and people in the film. Kong takes Ann off with him, and much of the rest of the film is the pursuit of Ann and Kong by the men from the boat. Many of them die in horrible ways, there are plenty of battles with dinosaurs, and with Kong himself, culminating in Kong’s capture and the long sail back to New York, Kong’s escape, and the final scene with Kong climbing the Empire State Building.

The original version of this film is a shocker for the time in which it was made, and it influenced possibly more films than any other in history. Anything with a lot of stop motion came from here, as did pictures with fighting dinosaurs, giant animals of any sort, films in exotic locales, jungle pictures, and almost anything else. Tarzan films to Jurassic Park owe a debt here in any number of ways.

Just as notable is how far this film goes for 1933 before the 1934 Production Code. In several scenes (cut in later re-releases of the film, restored in more recent versions), Fay Wray is quite obviously running about without the support of a bra; this is most evident in a scene on the deck of the ship when it is evident that Miss Wray is quite cold. Later, Kong nearly undresses her and starts to get a little frisky, the culmination of which is thankfully not shown. When she escapes, there’s damn close to nudity.

It’s not just the sexy-sexy, though. The battle between Kong and the tyrannosaur is pretty gruesome, with Kong essentially ripping the dinosaur’s jaw apart. But right before that, Kong drops half a dozen men off a log bridge into a deep ravine, and they splat in a way that is unexpected from a film made in a time when directors didn’t give gunshot victims much in the way of bullet holes or blood. Dinosaurs chop on sailors and toss them around like rag dolls, things that must have terrified audiences when the film originally opened. Kong beats another dinosaur to death and nearly rips the wings off a pterodactyl as well. He mashes natives into the ground under his feet.

The magic of stop-motion animation is that while it may not have the realism of more modern animation styles, there is a real charm to it. Kong is one of the greatest movie creations not because of his essential realism, but the opposite. Kong is a great creation because he is so fantastic and unreal. There is a pathos to him that cannot be otherwise duplicated. The Kong from the 1970s was more realistic, and Peter Jackson’s version more real still, but neither has anything like the empathetic power of the original.

This is not a movie to show anyone lacking maturity. The effects compared with those of the modern age cannot stand up, and anyone who can’t see past that surface reality will also never understand the magic of this original version of the giant ape and the woman he falls for.

It’s impossible to discuss King Kong at any length without talking at least a little about Fay Wray, who died just a few years ago about a month before her 97th birthday. Wray had a decent career, although she starred in a lot of B horror movies. She was the original scream queen (she screams a lot, and does it well), and while she was certainly in other movies, she is forever attached to this movie as completely as Kong is himself. Perhaps she deserved a better fate. Then again, being forever remembered as the star of one of the greatest movies ever made isn’t a terrible fate.

Why to watch King Kong: Perhaps not as pretty as its remakes, but infinitely more human, believable, and poignant.
Why not to watch: You need modern animation.

A Master of Comedy and Another Master

Films: The Bank Dick, The King of Comedy
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on laptop (Bank) and big ol’ television (King).

W.C. Fields is one of those actors of whom everyone has heard and can picture in their mind’s eye—straw boater, white gloves and a cane, bulbous nose bright red from too much booze, gravelly voice. A sizable selection of people who could pick Fields out of a crowd would also know of his predilection for drinking too much (at least in character) and his hatred of, in no particular order, women, children, and animals. Sadly, though, most people have probably not seen one of his films.

In The Bank Dick, Fields plays Egbert Souse (pronounced soo-SAY) essentially the quintessential Fields character—a drunk loser whose family hates him. He’s a disappointment to everyone who comes in contact with him except for his local saloon keeper, Joe (Shemp Howard!). Egbert reads detective magazines, drinks, smokes, and tries to support his family by thinking up slogans in contests. His wife Agatha (Cora Witherspoon) is a shrill nag, his mother-in-law (Jesse Ralph) detests him, his older daughter Myrtle (Una Merkel) is embarrassed by him, and his younger daughter Elise (Evelyn del Rio) frequently attempts to do him physical harm. In short, if you’ve ever seen anything Rodney Dangerfield starred in, you’ve met this character before, since it becomes immediately evident that Fields is who Dangerfield based his screen persona on.

The early part of the film is there simply to give Fields something to do until the plot starts working. He does a lot of mild slapstick, reacting not in the exaggerated way that might be expected but with what looks like real annoyance. He goofs around on the set of a film for a bit, leaves, and accidentally manages to capture a thief who has just run off with $25,000 from the local bank.

As a reward for his “heroics,” Egbert is given a new position at the bank, that of the bank’s private detective, or as the bank president says in the underground argot, the bank dick. On his first day on the job, Egbert encounters a con man in the local saloon. The con man is selling shares in a mine for ten cents apiece. Egbert convinces one of the bank employees, Og Ogglesby who also happens to be his potential son-in-law, to embezzle $500 from the bank until his bonus comes in to invest in the scheme.

Trouble arises when, just after the sale of phony mine shares is complete, a bank examiner (the wonderfully named J. Pinkerton Snoopington) arrives to go over the bank’s books. Much of the rest of the film concerns Egbert doing his best to keep the examiner away from those all-important books until Og’s bonus comes in. Of course, this is a comedy, so no one is going to end up in jail, but poor Og can’t even manage to stay conscious when the bank examiner is around, since the sight of the man makes him faint.

Essentially, the film isn’t much in the way of plot, but it really isn’t intended to be. It’s existence is nothing more than a vehicle for the continued and constant antics of Fields, who is a true master of comedic timing, diction, and attitude. Everything the man does in this film is funny—some of it is broadly funny and quite a bit of it is subtle. He’s the master of the double take, and does these throughout the film, always to good effect. He’s also got a great cast to work with here. Everyone in the picture is just believable enough in their role to make the film work. The whole thing ends with a ridiculous high-speed car chase that is a masterwork of stunts and comedy.

If you’d rather see a more modern version of this film, you can watch Dangerfield’s Easy Money, and while it’s plenty funny, it doesn’t have the same energy as this one. Fields should be better known today, and films like this one should show up on television a lot more often than they do. This is grand stuff.

When it comes to Martin Scorsese, the question isn’t whether or not he can direct, but whether or not he can direct comedy. He tries to answer that question with The King of Comedy, and he chooses as his comedic muse…Robert De Niro? Seems like an odd choice. Of course, in the years since this film was made, De Niro has done a number of comedy films, not the least of which are Meet the Parents and Analyze This. Before this, not so much.

De Niro is Rupert Pupkin, a wannabe comic who is desperate for his big break. To get that break, he has his sights set on the Jerry Langford Show. Langford (Jerry Lewis) is the film equivalent of Johnny Carson, and getting on his show is akin to making it in a very big way. The problem is that Pupkin is a nobody, he’ll always be a nobody, and his chance of getting on the show are nil.

So he comes up with a plan. The plan is to kidnap Langford and force himself onto the show. And this is precisely what he does because Langford doesn’t (or can’t) give him what he wants. Rupert lives in the world of the psychotic fan, a world inside his own head where Jerry Langford calls him for advice and where he is the most famous man in the world with the star as his best pal and confidant. He flashes in and out of fantasies interrupted by his mother shouting down into the basement (complete with laughing audience wallpaper) from the top of the stairs. Funny, and at the same time completely pathetic.

For me, the biggest downside to this film is the presence of Sandra Bernhard as psycho stalker fan Masha. I have an intense dislike for Bernhard and always have. She’s like nails on a chalkboard, or Fran Drescher’s voice.

This is a dark film for being essentially a comedy. Pupkin’s world is grim except inside his own head, and Langford’s world, for all the fame and money, isn’t that much better. He craves his privacy, but also seems very lonely, eating dinner alone with only his dog for company. It’s not necessarily that the grass is always greener, it’s more that while everyone wants what Langford has, Langford is the one who seems to understand that it’s not really worth getting.

The revelation here in terms of the cast is Jerry Lewis. He’s definitely an acquired taste, and there are plenty of people in the world who have decided not to acquire the taste. He plays a character here that I think may be much more like his real personality than his stage personality, and thus he’s a lot less zany than he typically comes across on screen. At times, he’s even sedate.

The message of the film, at least the message I got from it, is that there’s a little bit of Rupert Pupkin in all of us. There’s not an average Joe or Jane who hasn’t wondered at least for a few minutes what it would be like to have just a taste of that life of being recognized and beloved by millions of fans. The King of Comedy just takes us into the very sad and very twisted mind of one man who would stop at nothing to get there. Not content to be interviewed by Jerry Langford in his head, he does everything he has to for the reality, if only for a few minutes.

Of course, what the ending doesn't really tell us whether or not what's happening is real or simply another one of Rupert's mental vacations.

Why to watch The Bank Dick: The best work of one of early filmdom’s greatest comedians.
Why not to watch: Crime pays…and it’s funny.

Why to watch The King of Comedy: Blacker than black, incisive comedy.
Why not to watch: Too much reality.

A Different Kind of Love

Films: The Philadelphia Story, Belle de Jour
Format: DVD from Davenport Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop (Philadelphia); DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television (Belle).

What do you get when you take three of the finest actors of their generation and put them in the same movie? If you answered “a crap shoot,” you’d be right. Put that many powerful egos in one place and you’re apt to get a mess. Of course, if you can get them all to work together, you can end up with something significant. Of course that takes a significant director; fortunately George Cukor is up to the task.

The Philadelphia Story is the sort of film that made Hollywood great back in the day. It opens with perhaps the greatest break-up scene in movie history. C.K. Dexter Haven (the great Cary Grant) is being kicked out of his house by his wife, Tracy Lord Haven (Katharine Hepburn). His arms are full of bags, and she follows with his collection of pipes and his golf clubs. With nowhere for him to hold the pipes, she drops them unceremoniously on the ground, then does the same with all but one of his golf clubs. That, she breaks over her knee, then walks back to the house. Dexter follows her, and when she turns for a last retort, he mimes punching her, thinks better of it, palms her face in his hand, and shoves her to the ground. From there, we get the title card, “Two Years Later.”

Here’s where our other players enter. First, we have Tracy’s younger sister, Dinah (Virginia Weidler), who is at that strange age of innocence and not-so-innocence. She clearly misses Dexter and dislikes Tracy’s current fiancé, George Kittredge (John Howard). Kittredge is an up-and-comer with possible political aspirations. We also need to encounter Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) and Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), a writer and photographer for the society magazine Spy.

Spy also happens to be the employer of one C.K. Dexter Haven. The job of Connor and Imbrie is to get into the big society wedding and get a story for the magazine, with any help that Haven can muster. Of course, Haven isn’t too pleased about the wedding, and might be causing the story himself.

While all of these characters are real characters, the one I enjoy the most without any reservation at all is Dinah. The kid cracks me up. When she and Tracy discover the real reason that Connor and Imbrie are at their house, they do everything they possibly can to give the reporters the impression that the entire family is out of its collective mind. Dinah prances like a ballerina, talks in French, and wallops out a nice version of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” on the piano before running off because she might have smallpox. Great stuff.

I’m not entirely sure where to place this film in terms of genre. Is it a screwball comedy? Kind of, but not the sort I’m used to seeing. It is loads of fun though—rather than simply wacky hijinks, the constant situation is one of an elephant in the room. Connor and Imbrie eventually get wise to the fact that they’re being played. The Lord family, particularly the family matriarch Margaret Lord (Mary Nash) knows exactly what’s going on but refuses to admit that there’s anything fishy with her daughters both claiming that her brother is her husband or Imbrie’s constant photographing of everything around her.

This is beautifully played comedy. As Margaret attempts to keep things looking normal, Tracy and Dinah act in a manner to give the reporters a real sensational story, Uncle Willie (Roland Young) is completely confused, Haven stands in the middle attempting the ruin the impending nuptials, and through all of it is the not-so-subtle click of the camera that constantly stops conversation for just a half second each time a new picture is snapped.

This of course says nothing of the fact that there is an evident attraction between Tracy and Connor. She is touched by his evident skill as a writer. And, of course, Kittredge is something of a sweet, little nobody. This is further complicated by the fact that Connor and Imbrie are, without really saying it, something of an item. It’s less a love triangle than sort of a love pile-up.

The way a film like this works, the place to really start paying attention is right around the middle. Dexter Haven absolutely dresses down his ex-wife in a way that can only happen in the movies. And he’s right—Tracy Lord is a scold, a nag, and has the sort of standards that are impossible for anyone but her to live up to. Any deviation from what Tracy wants, since Tracy has always gotten what she wants, cannot be handled. Her father, who has run off with a dancer, tells her essentially the same thing. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t deny it. She is a snooty prig.

Of course, it’s a 1940 romantic comedy, so everything works out in the end. The ending is perhaps a little too pat and cutesy, but it’s still damn fun. And really, Cary Grant in this movie simply reaffirms that he was the most suave man to ever put on pants.

As for Belle de Jour, I’m not really sure where I should start. I’ve had the movie in my possession from the library for close to three weeks and simply haven’t had the courage to watch it until tonight. When a film is called Luis Bunuel’s “erotic masterpiece,” I start to worry a bit. Flatly, erotica makes me a little uncomfortable.

I shouldn’t have been worried. Certainly, Belle de Jour is a sexy film, and that’s most definitely one of the selling points of this movie, but it isn’t the entire point. Rather, it’s about desire and the blurred line between reality and fantasy.

Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) is the young housewife of a doctor named Pierre (Jean Sorel). In her mind, she lives in a fantasy world of kinky and somewhat degrading sex, but in the real world, she’s pretty frigid—to the point where she and her husband sleep in separate beds per The Dick van Dyke Show. A friend of her husband’s, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), gives her the creeps because of his rather open sexuality and evident desire to see more than might be appropriate of Severine.

A friend tells her of a mutual acquaintance of theirs who has garnered a new job for herself—working in a local Parisian house of ill repute. Evidently the money is pretty good and it’s exciting, so she keeps doing it. Husson tells her the same thing, and also of a similar place he used to go to that is still in business. Looking for a way to free herself from the boredom of her life, Severine goes and becomes the newest member of the staff.

This isn’t easy for her at first. Madame Anais (Genevieve Page) christens her “Belle de Jour” (beauty of the day) because she can only work during the day. It takes her a few clients to get it right, but Severine quickly takes to this new double life of hers, finding the “work” to be both exhilarating and something much more than she had with her marriage.

The trouble starts with a young client named Marcel (Pierre Clementi). The two are almost immediately attracted to each other—him by her obvious beauty and her by the fact that many of his teeth are metal from an accident and just as much by the fact that she is terrified of him. The problem becomes obvious—Marcel can’t have her, and he wants her. And he’s a violent criminal and will not stop at anything to have her.

The lines blur in this film between the fantasy sex world Severine lives in and the reality of her new life with Madame Anais. This is inherently interesting, of course. What I find more interesting is Bunuel’s incisive look into the human mind and spirit. One of Severine’s early clients is a gynecologist who wishes to be degraded, beaten, and otherwise humiliated. Severine is told to observe so that she can learn something, but she is disgusted by what she sees. This is a brilliant counterpoint to many of Severine’s fantasies, which involve her being degraded, beaten, covered in muck, and then forced into sex. Degradation is fine for her, evidently, but her embarrassment of this leads her to severely judge others who want the same thing.

This is an interesting film, and while there’s plenty of sex, legs, and a naked back or two, it’s not particularly racy in anything more than subject matter. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, but I was certainly wrong to dread it.

Why to watch The Philadelphia Story: A remarkable romance that goes in a lot of directions.
Why not to watch: If you’re at all like me, you’d rather slap Katherine Hepburn than kiss her.

Why to watch Belle de Jour: An interesting look into human psychology with a side of sexy.
Why not to watch: It’s not as sexy as you may be looking for.

All Good Things Must Come to an End

Film: Diner
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

There are movies that define a generation. Movies like Star Wars, for instance, are defining of the late 1970s. It’s impossible for me to think of the 1970s, particularly the year after the film came out without immediately referencing that film. More to the point, some films become the definition of a particular year or set of years. It’s difficult to think of 1962 (impossible for me since that’s several years before I was born) without American Graffiti being a part of the mix. That year is immortalized in that film.

The heart of the Ike years, 1959, is most indelibly represented on film in the movie Diner. Again, before my time. However, if you listen to people talk about the simpler time of the ‘50s, you’ll usually hear that things were a lot better back then. People were respectful and the world wasn’t so crazy. Diner makes something of a different case. There’s not a lot of innocence here, although the pranks pulled and the hijinks gotten up to are perhaps tame by current standards.

One of the selling points of a movie like Diner is the cast because the cast is as good as it gets. The film centers on a Baltimore diner that is also the center of the world of a group of friends. This group includes Eddie Simmons (Steve Guttenberg), who is allegedly getting married on New Year’s Eve. He’s not sure he wants to, and he’s seriously hedging his bets on the marriage thing. His fiancée needs to pass a test on her knowledge of the Baltimore Colts.

Part of his reticence comes from the marriage of his friend “Shrevie” Schreiber (Daniel Stern), who is married to Beth (Ellen Barkin). When asked about whether he likes his marriage, he can’t answer. He clearly loves Beth, but says that now that they are married, and no longer have to discuss sex or the wedding plans, they have nothing to talk about.

Also hanging around the diner are “Boogie” Sheftell (Mickey Rourke), who has a serious gambling problem and takes ridiculous bets to cover his other ridiculous losing bets as well as an insatiable appetite for the ladies; Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), who drifts around despite his obvious intelligence; Billy Howard (Tim Daly), who has opted for graduate school and a degree in business despite his pregnant girlfriend; and Modell (Paul Reiser), the group’s doubting Thomas.

The six, all young and dependent on each other for their mutual society and company and sanity, spend as much time as they can in the local diner making fun of each other, cracking jokes, and avoiding the necessity of really growing up.

That’s really what this film is—it’s a bildungsroman on a grand scale, covering the lives of half a dozen young men at a critical time in their own lives and a critical time in the life of the world. The year was the height of the Cold War, of course, although none of this figures in Diner, because this isn’t a movie about world shaking events—it’s about nothing more than becoming an adult.

Change is inevitable, and because of it, difficult. When we find a place in our life that is comfortable, we want things to stay the way they are, but they never can. There’s no doubt that I would love to return in my own life to an easier time without mortgage payments, car payments, and a job that frequently takes up parts of my weekends. But that’s not reality, and eventually, we have to grow up and move on.

“…you always have the guys at the diner,” Eddie says. But it isn’t true. It can’t be. And that’s the point.

Why to watch Diner: A remarkable cast in its prime and a story anyone older than 21 can buy into.
Why not to watch: What happened to Steve Guttenberg and Mickey Rourke, and to some extent Daniel Stern, after this film.

Rollo Tomasi

Film: L.A. Confidential
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

A great film noir requires a number of elements to make it sing. You’ve got to have people doing bad things, of course. Without people acting shamefully, there’s nothing to base the film around. Generally that means sex and murder, which always help. Additionally, you’ve got to have a detective—police or otherwise—who needs to discover the truth on some deep, spiritual level. A guy who wants to close a case isn’t enough. The gumshoe has to need the truth. You also need a complex plot, one with threads connecting all over the place. It should start simple and then, as a thread is pulled, reveal that everything is all connected in one sordid mess.

Of course, it also helps to have a great cast.

L.A. Confidential takes the idea of the 1940s and 1950s crime drama and modernizes it, but not really too much. Made in 1997, the film is designed to feel very much like a film noir from way back when. Admittedly, it loses a little something by not being in black and white. Color seems somehow too much for film noir, which should be loaded with shadows, sharp blacks, crisp whites, and plenty of grey in between blurring the lines.

The story starts easily enough. A group of Mexicans are arrested for allegedly injuring a couple of cops around Christmas. The cops themselves, in their cups because of the holiday, decide to take things out on the prisoners, and a brawl ensues. A few cops, those who’ve already earned pensions, are let go with one exception—Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel), the drunken, out of shape partner of Bud White (Russell Crowe). Stensland is booted from the force thanks to the testimony of Ed Exley (Guy Pierce), an up-and-comer in the department. The final nail in the coffin comes from Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey). Vincennes is a showboat cop who performs a lot of high profile, highly publicized arrests. He’s also the LAPD’s man on the scene for “Badge of Honor,” a Dragnet-style television show.

Much of Vincennes’s publicity comes from Hush-Hush magazine, a sleazy tabloid of tell-all stories run by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito). Sid will do anything for a lurid tale, and bribes to Jack keep him in cover stories rife with the sort of thing people have always loved reading.

Shortly after the jail riot, Dick Stensland is killed in a massed shooting at a diner called the Night Owl. Also killed is a young woman. She’s a prostitute who has had plastic surgery to look like a movie star. She worked for a man named Pierce Patchett (David Straithairn), who has an entire stable of prostitutes who look like stars. None of these is more sought after than his Veronica Lake look-alike, Lynn Bracken (Kim Bassinger).

And that’s just the start. As our three cops dig deeper into the Night Owl slayings, they start to put together facts that indicate the entire thing, as well as a number of other murders, were a set-up taking care of 25 pounds of heroin. Since the local mob boss had been put away for tax evasion, the void has brought in criminal elements from around the country. That, more than anything, is likely what lead to the shooting at the Night Owl, even though the official version reads somewhat differently.

The plot is a good one. Throughout, just enough is revealed to keep the audience clued in to the story as a whole, but not so much is revealed that everything can be explained readily until the very end. Instead, we learn things when the characters learn things, and not before. That’s how it should be.

As a rule, I don’t love Kim Bassinger in much. I’ve never really been sold on her acting skills, and while she’s certainly not ugly, she also really isn’t my tastes. Here, she is resplendently gorgeous. More importantly, the woman can act, and does it well. The other actors here I more or less generally like, the underrated David Straithairn in particular.

One aspect of this film I find attractive is the depth of the characters. It would be easy, for instance, to make Bud White a caricature of the hard-bitten cop on the edge. Instead, this is a real man with real needs and emotions. Flat characters may be easier to write, but they are difficult to care about. Everyone here, at least all of the major players, are fully realized as people, and thus simple to care for.

This film features great writing, fabulous acting, a cast of thousands, and a truly great script, one of the greats film noir scripts ever greenlit. Not watching this would be criminal.

Why to watch L.A. Confidential: As good a noir as you’ll find.
Why not to watch: I can’t think of anything.

Month Four Status Report

I'm a bit late on this, but only by a few minutes.

So it's 120 days in and I stand at 120 movies from the list, plus Avatar. Not bad. The bad discovery of the month is that my local library flatly refuses to get audio-visual material through WorldCat, which means I'm going to have to fall back on other resources for the four dozen or so films I can't otherwise locate.

So far, I haven't had to start a NetFlix account, although that certainly looms in the future.

Expect me to hammer through more musicals in May. I need to get to work on them, as well as keep up on all of the foreign stuff. I have a handful of foreign titles sitting here right now; I just haven't mustered up the will to watch them yet.

New goal: 400 movies by year's end.