TCM's Robert Duvall tribute

Robert Duvall died last month, and TCM altered its schedule slightly to include three of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles tonight. Those films are:
8:00 PM Tender Mercies, in which Duvall plays an alcoholic country singer; (the night's original lineup was movies with alcoholics)
10:00 PM The Great Santini, with Duvall as a martinet of a father in an Air Force family; and
12:15 AM Apocalypse Now, which saw Duvall pick up a Supporting Actor nomination.

As I happened to have Apocalypse Now on my DVR, I decided that I was going to watch this one to put up the post on it in conjunction with the tribute, instead of doing it fairly quickly after the announcement of Duvall's death as had been my original intention.

Duvall having picked up a Supporting Actor nomination, the star of the movie is actually Martin Sheen. He plays Ben Willard, a captain in the US Army who, as the movie opens, is in Saigon in late 1969/early 1970 during the Vietnam War where he's spending leave drinking heavily in his hotel room and trying to forget nightmares. Voiceover has Willard speaking after the fact, but the action on screen is actually the beginning. His sojourn in Saigon is interrupted by a couple of men who have orders to take Willard to see Lt. Gen. Corman (G.D. Spradlin). Spradlin tells Willard about a colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz had a rising career in the army, but it seems that in about 1964 he did an intelligence mission to Vietnam that soured him on the whole thing. He went to Fort Benning and paratroopers' school, returned to Vietnam, and then went native, basically deserting to fight his own war, or at least that's what the official US channels think. Kurtz is a danger to them, and somewhere in the jungle in the borderland between South Vietnam and Cambodia, and it's Willard's mission to find Kurtz, and terminate him with extreme prejudice. It's a top secret mission, and nobody is actually supposed to know why Willard is headed where he is.

Willard heads out to the river system where a small patrol boat is going to take him as close as they can safely get to where Kurtz is suspected to be. For part of the journey, they're supposed to have air support, commanded by Lt. Col. Kilgore (that's Duvall). The boat on which Willard is traveling has a motley crew of men who seem to have been deeply affected by their experiences in the war, although they're not all going to show the effects at the same rate. It's obvious, however, when they intercept a Vietnamese boat carrying goods to a farmers' market.

Willard sees more and more surreal things on his way up to the edge of where the US has any control, such as a USO-type show with Playboy playmates, but eventually gets to people who know where Kurtz are. Along the way, he's been reading up on Kurtz from the classified material the general gave him, and begins to gain some sympathy. He also learns that his is not the first mission to try to assassinate Kurtz. The other guy, Colby (Scott Glenn), is officially MIA, but the classified information suggests he may have joined Kurtz. There's also a photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) who has also turned to Kurtz' side.

As I said, they do eventually find Kurtz, but as to what happens when they do, you're going to have to watch the movie yourself for that.

Surprisingly, I'd never actually seen Apocalypse Now in its entirety before this. I think that's a lot to do with my not being of the generation to be terribly interested in the Vietnam War and movies about it. I'm much too young for the 1960s protest era, and by the time I got old enough to appreciate classic cinema, there would be other Vietnam movies like Platoon that were the big ones.

I have to say that for me, Apocalypse Now is another of those movies that's very well made, albeit a difficult watch. However, I think I'd put it with movies like Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, or Au hasard Balthasar where I see why they're good, but for me not good enough to put all the way at the top of all-time great film lists the way a lot of critics do.

Let's talk about surveillance, baby

One of those movies that, for whatever reason, I had never seen straight through from start to finish was The Conversation. So the last time TCM ran it -- not as part of the programming tribute to star Gene Hackman -- I recorded it and finally got around to watching it and writing up this post on the movie.

The film starts off with an extended sequence of a young couple, Ann and Mark (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), meeting for lunch in San Francisco's Union Park, a busy place there are there are all sorts of people talking to each other and doing stuff. This is intercut with images of what looks like it could be a sniper on a balcony overlooking the park, as well as an older guy with a hearing aid who eventually unnerves Ann enough to make a comment that she thinks he's following them. And indeed, they are being watched, as the action pulls out to a van. In the van, supervising things, is Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). He's a surveillance expert, who has been contacted by Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), the executive assistant to the "Director" (Robert Duvall) of a large concern of some sort, to follow this couple for reasons not made clear to Harry and his staff.

Harry would prefer to work alone, as he's understandably a bit of a paranoiac considering the occupation he's in. But since a lot of the jobs require multiple sorts of expertise and people being eyes and ears from more than one location, he works with people like Stan (John Cazale) on this job, although Stan begins to get on Harry's nerves and ultimately takes a job with a competitor. Harry has an uneasy relationship with his girlfried who doesn't know what he really does for a living. And when Harry has a social function with some people he meets at a professional conference for the surveillance industry, he decidedly doesn't want to talk about how he got the information in a previous case back in New York in the late 1960s. This especially because that job resulted in a couple of deaths.

A major portion of the current job involves listening to the conversation Ann and Mark had in the park, which contains a bunch of seemingly innocuous stuff, as well as one passage that resulted in distortion, making it sound garbled. But this is where Harry's expertise comes in. He works on that tape and is somehow able to resolve the garbling and distortion, to the point where he can finally clear up that missing passage: "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

So Harry is naturally uncomfortable, since the implication is that the couple is in fear for their lives, and Harry doesn't want to be responsible for more deaths. He attempts to investigate further, and, hearing a particular hotel room mentioned, tries to find out what might be about to go on in that hotel room. Meanwhile, at that party following the surveillance convention, Harry realizes that his tapes have been stolen. This, as you might guess, only makes Harry more paranoid.

Now, I'm not certain quite how realistic The Conversation is, mostly because I don't know if it would have been physically possible to clear up that distortion on the original tapes even with the audio technology of today, never mind what they had in the early 1970s. There are some other plot holes around whether characters in the real world would have had the wherewithal to do some of the things they do, but I don't want to go into more detail in that regard since it would give away key plot points in the second half of the movie. In any case, The Conversation is as much a character study of the Harry Caul character as it is about what's going on in the actual conversation he's been asked to record. In that regard, The Conversation works extremely well, thanks to a very strong (and surprisingly not Oscar-nominated) performance from Gene Hackman. The supporting cast also does a fine job, and the general atmosphere of the film is consistently off-kilter, which I think it needs to be for a movie like this that's ultimately about paranoia.

If you haven't seen The Conversation before, you really should. It's a fine movie that stands the test of time fifty-plus years later.

Rumble Fish

I mentioned yesterday that I've got two unrelated movies on my DVR that TCM happens to be showing fairly early on May 11, so I'd be blogging about one of them on May 9 and the other on May 10. The first one up is Rumble Fish, which you can see at the midnight between May 10 and May 11 (technically the intro will start just after midnight on May 11 ET, which means that in other time zones it's still late in the evening of May 10).

After some stark black-and-white cityscapes in Tulsa, OK, we go inside a pool hall where a gang of high school friends hang out. The nominal leader of the gang is Rusty James (Matt Dillon), although he's only the leader if you will because he inherited it from his older brother, who had the nickname Motorcycle Boy. Motorcycle Boy left Oklahome some time back to go out to California. Among the friends are Smokey (a young Nicolas Cage), looking like he belongs in one of those 50s juvenile delinquent movies, and the rather nerdy Steve, who looks decidedly out of place although he seems closer to Rusty James than does Smokey.

Rusty James gets word at the pool hall that a member of another band of delinquents wishes to pick a fight with him; the two gangs are to meet at a designated location at 10 PM if Rusty James isn't a coward. Rusty thinks he isn't a coward, but first he has to go see his girlfriend Patty (Diane Lane) and have some nookie with her before he can go off for that fight. At first it seems like the fight is going to be your standard issue fistfight, but more like Fight Club than with Marquess of Queensbury rules, unti Rusty James' opponent pulls out a knife. Rusty James gets a board and is more or less able to subdue his opponent until a surprise -- the return of Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke). This distracts Rusty James, leading to his getting slashed in the abdomen.

Motorcycle Boy (I don't think his real name is ever given) doesn't really want it known that he's back in town. Meanwhile, Rusty James looks up to him much like the relationship between two brothers in American History X. This time, however, there's a father in the picture (Dennis Hopper) but no mother, although Dad is also an alcoholic, which is why he hasn't been able to keep his kids in check. Rusty James' behavior gets progressively worse, leading to a fight where the gets hit in the head and really ought to have suffered at least a severe concussion if not a fractured skull, although he goes on as if it's only a one-night headache, much like he's gone on from the stabbing.

Motorcycle Boy also returns to petty crime and, being known to the police already, this is bound to have a deleterious effect. Ultimately, he and his brother wind up at a pet store where Motorcycle Boy admires the Siamese fighting fish. He ultimately returns to the pet store to steal a tank of the fish, while at the same time liberating the other animals in a move that horrifies Rusty James since he doesn't want to run that afoul of the law.

There are two big problems that I had with Rumble Fish. One is that the protagonist, Rusty James, is in many ways not a particularly likable character. Once again this is the sort of thing that's a problem in a movie where we're probably supposed to be identifying with him. The even bigger problem for me, however, is how the story felt terribly aimless, as though there's no real plot. And what plot there is felt like it had terrible holes. Notably, how did Rusty James not end up in hospital considering how badly he got hurt? And how did someone like Steve both wind up with a badly wrong crowd and maintain his nerdiness at the same time.

Francis Ford Coppola directed, and the technical aspects of the film, especially the cinematography, are worth noting. I think the fact that it has a "name" director is part of why in the years since it was released it's gained a higher reputation than I would give it. But that's also the reason why you should probably watch and judge for yourself.

Rainy people and Mondays always get me down

Quite a few months back TCM ran a night of road movies, including the new-to-me The Rain People. I had put off watching it for some time after watching Number One, because I didn't want to do two football-themed movies in close succession. Recently, I finally got around to watching The Rain People to do a post on it.

Shirley Knight plays Natalie Ravenna, a housewife from Long Island who drives off from home one day and goes west, probably not to grow up with the country but because she has to figure out a lot of problems. She's left behind a husband and, as we later learn, she's pregnant and thinking of getting an abortion, an extremely controversial topic for the late 1960s.

Somewhere out on the road she passes a hitchhiker, stopping to pick up the youngish man. That man is Kilgannon (James Caan), nicknamed Killer in part because of his surname, and in part because he was a college football player with a hard-nosed style of playing. So hard-nosed, in fact, that nowadays everybody would hold him up as an example of CTE, but in those days they really only thought about dementia pugilistica in terms of boxing. Killer has brief flashbacks to his college days. In any case, now that he can't play football anymore, the college responded first by giving him a make-work job doing some of the landscaping like raking leaves, and then giving him $1000 as a parting gift.

Natalie is turned on by Killer, but as she gets to know him more she begins to understand more about his brain damage. So she'd like to get rid of him, preferably by getting him a job with somebody. She can barely handle her own life; how can she handle his? Thankfully, Killer had an old girlfriend who's father had offered him a job back in his college days, so Natalie takes Killer there. Unfortunately, the girlfriend doesn't want Killer any more now that he's got his brain injury, and is very vocal about it.

On again further west, as Natlie tries to find herself and tries to find a job for Killer. They stop in a small town in Nebraska where there's a farmer with a "reptile ranch" and a bunch of chickens, and it would be Killer's job to do all the dirty odd jobs around the place. Natalie realizes that the farmer is exploiting Killer for his $1000, but is at the point where she just wants to get the hell out of town.

She gets out so fast that the local cop Gordon (Robert Duvall) pulls her over for speeding and makes her drive back into town to pay the fine. The two get to talking. Gordon has some sympathy for Natalie, as he'd lost a wife he didn't really love in a house fire, and lost an infant son. He's got a daughter about to enter puberty, and she's hell to raise without a mother around. Gordon invites Natalie back to his trailer, and....

The Rain People is one of those movies that's really more about the characters than their stories. As such, some people might have some problems with the movie and its narrative structure. It doesn't help that all of the characters have enough personal problems that it would be easy not to have much sympathy for them. Thankfully, however, we get three pretty darn good acting performances from the leads, more than making up for the narrative flaws. The other positive is the location shooting, as director Francis Ford Coppola directed on the road over several months on a tight budget. The authentic locations are much more authentic than anything Hollywood's studio system would have given us just a few years earlier.

The Rain People isn't perfect by a long shot. But it's ultimately compelling, and absolutely worth a watch.