Film Pairings — Two Films From The Seventies, Escape American vs. European Style

I can’t think of two more diverse approaches to film than these two 1970s crime films. One is American (U.S.) and the other European. If one needed an explanation of the difference in our cultures, this double feature should do the trick. 

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw

The Get Away (1972) is about as American as a movie can get.  Sam Peckinpah directed.  Arthur Hill wrote the screen play based on a Jim Thompson novel.  There are are guns — lots of guns — car chases, crashes, fires, explosions, falling elevators, even a potential hydraulic compaction in the back of a trash truck. McQueen is an ex-con who, in his exchange for what he imagines to be his freedom, trades his girlfriend and agrees to do a bank heist.  We go from bad to worse.  No end to treachery.  Along the way, the Thompson noir got a Hollywood detour.  Quincy Jones provided some happy ending music.  Even so, the movie was a big hit, and despite its ‘70s sentiment, Getaway is nonetheless an adventure. You won’t doze off.  The casting director deserves an award.  Ali MacGraw costars with merit, and supporting actor Al Lettieri is appropriately and masterfully despicable. Sally Struthers is at her irritating best.

Maria Schneider and Jack Nicholson

The theme of the evening is “escape,” from what to what.  In The Passenger we find Jack Nicholson playing British-born American TV journalist David Locke who is fed up with his wife, his life, and his job, which has devolved into a shallow practice of a once important profession.  At a remote hotel in Chad, he discovers that a fellow Western traveller with whom he had befriended has died of natural causes. The dead man had few ties back in England. Locke figured that, given the circumstances and with a little tinkering, he could exchange identities.  It was Locke who would be dead, officially. And the Nicholson character would be reborn as Robertson, set free from his encumbrances. However, Robertson turns out to have been a munitions supplier in the Chad civil war.  The new Robertson comes into a large sum of money, but of course cannot deliver the goods.  In this European film, written in part and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, the threats are more implicit than manifest.  The character’s philosophically existential dilemma is more important than his physical survival.

The Passenger (1975) is a slow, beautiful film. While Getaway is nearly all action, The Passenger slows so you can see the amazing stream of still photographs that make up the whole.  The life force in the film, however, comes from actress Maria Schneider, who plays a young and eccentric "passenger,",if only the main character would get it. She is a sprite who does her best to help a human (Nicholson) find what he is really searching for.

Oddly, at the end of Getaway, Steve McQueen tells Slim Pickens, “I hope you find what you’re lookin’ for.”  The thing is that the Slim Pickens’ character, hardly pivotal, was the only one (in both movies) not looking for anything and seems quite content.

The roughly four hours watching these two movies are spent in hot, dry and desolate places.  To help you endure your cinematic surroundings, put some ice into a glass with tequila or rum to stay cool.  Lemonade is nice too.

Film Pairing — "The Big Lug," Sterling Hayden, Classic Noir Star

I was pretty young, maybe six, when I began riding the electric bus from Indianapolis’ Eastside to the city’s downtown on the weekends. Under the watchful eye of my older brother we would take in lunch and at least two films. Sometimes we’d see a double feature or we’d go to two of the half-dozen grand old movie theaters to extend our escape from reality for as long as we could.

I was always more attracted to adventure films — especially westerns and crime. But who was in the movie was important. I was attracted to movies starring Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, David Niven, and Humphrey Bogart. If I saw Sterling Hayden in those days — and I must have — he made little or no impression. I understand why he didn’t make an impression then and why he is much more interesting now. His characters, while they were tough, didn’t come across smart or in control. He was a “big lug.” At 6’5”, he was big. And in the films I’ve seen he wasn’t the smartest man in the room. He was kind of a lug.

And that’s it. He wasn’t leading man handsome, but ordinary. He was never really in charge of anything. As a character, he played along with people he trusted. He had his own code, but it wasn’t set up so he could get ahead. If he made a promise, he’d keep it, whether that promise was to himself or someone else. But he wasn’t charming and sophisticated like Grant and Niven or as tough and smart as characters played by Mitchum and Bogart or Edward G. Robinson, for that matter. Hayden’s characters weren’t extraordinary. They were regular guys who seemed confused by and caught up in the system. They were, perhaps, a little too true-to-life.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) — A weakness for the horses puts the big lug in debt. A blow to his pride causes him to borrow some money to pay off the bookie. In his own honorable way, to pay off what he borrowed from a friend means taking a job to rob a jeweler. And when it’s over, he thinks, he’ll leave the big city and go home to a happier place in Lexington, Kentucky. He’d hang around racehorses rather than bet on them — all in beautiful blue grass country. John Huston directed the film, based on a novel by W. R. Burnett, who also wrote Little Caesar. It’s an extraordinary black and white film that focuses on the layers of corruption and hypocrisy among respected business leaders, corrupt law enforcement and most certainly members of the criminal class. Marilyn Monroe has a small role in this classic.

The Killing (1956) — This is also classic noir. It was directed by Stanley Kubrick who, along with Jim Thompson, adapted the screenplay from Clean Break, a book by Lionel White. The film has Hayden in a role very similar to the one he played in Asphalt Jungle. It is another heist film, and the story follows a similar pattern. Our guy is going to do one last job and then he’s going to put it all behind him — the crime and corruption. How it ends is how it has to end. These are the rules. There is no escape. But this time it’s the ingenious heist itself that makes the movie. Stunning timing, stunning cinematography and brilliant directing.

What to drink? Cheap whiskey, probably. Not beer though. Not tough enough.