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 Pairings — Smart Crime Films And Great Car Chases

There was a period in American cinema when a thrilling crime film meant stringing together a series of wild car chases. Oops, that time never ended. But it may have begun in 1968 with Bullit, which had one brilliant chase scene around and over the hills of San Francisco.  The French Connection came along three years later with a classic chase that seems to one up the climactic scene in Bullit.  This time we have another classic chase, with a cop in a ’71 LeMans trying to keep up with a speeding and eventually out-of-control elevated train. These two films went a long way to seal the fame of two fine actors — Steve McQueen as Bullit and Gene Hackman as “Popeye” in The French Connection.

The French Connection has the more complex plot and, perhaps because of this, takes a little time to take off.  We start in sunny, seedy and scenic Marseille, the city we all suspect is France’s center of illicit activities. We eventually find ourselves in New York, where there is a shortage and consequently a hungry consumer demand for heroin. Based on a true story recounted in the novel by Robin Moore, a couple of second-rate cops want to bring down a clever narcotics chieftain. Director William Friedkin brought this kind of dark film from a stylish and perhaps mannered noir to a gritty realism — or at least the realism as it is perceived in the 1970s. No heroes here.  Just a thriller that builds to an end that is both frantic and mad.  The film won several Academy Awards and nominations including wins for Hackman and Friedman. Roy Scheider was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

You can credit or blame Bullit for making the car chase as big a deal as it is? And who knows how many Ford Mustangs it helped sell?  Like The French Connection, Bullit was both a critical and box office success.  It had a few Academy Award nominations as well. 

A smarmy, pompous D.A., played to a tee by Robert Vaughn, calls on San Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, played with admirable restraint by Steve McQueen. Respected cop, McQueen, is ordered to guard a key witness before he testifies in a high-profile trial of a dangerous man.  It all goes wrong in a hurry and the D.A. wants Bullit’s head.  Bullit thinks there’s something fishy about the whole thing. The story is tight and told quickly — downright breezy compared to the first on the bill.  The pay-off is the car chase on the streets of what may be the hilliest city in the country.  Peter Yates (The Friends of Eddie Coyle) directs.  The film is based on the book, Mute Witness, by Robert L. Fish, who was twice awarded an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America.

Hackman, in his role, drinks whiskey on the rocks when he’s at a bar and straight from his flask when he isn’t. But we do have these characters from France.  They drink red wine. And while Bullit probably doesn’t consult the Wine Spectator for wine selection advice, he is in San Francisco and appears to like wine more than your average homicide cop.  So keep those facts in mind when you decide how you want the evening to go.