Category: Crime drama

Casino (1995)

De Niro gets sucked into temptation and vice in Scorsese’s Casino

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro (Sam “Ace” Rothstein), Sharon Stone (Ginger McKenna), Joe Pesci (Nicky Santoro), James Woods (Lester Diamond), Don Rickles (Billy Sherbert), Alan King (Andy Stone), Kevin Pollak (Philip Green), LQ Jones (Pat Webb), Dick Smothers (Senator), Frank Vincent (Frank Marino), John Bloom (Don Ward)

Scorsese’s Casino often gets overlooked in the master’s CV. Marking his first gangster film since Goodfellas, Casino is a very different film, a sort of combination history lesson and slice of violent gangster interplay, in which Las Vegas first gives these gangsters all their dreams coming true before chewing them up and spitting them out like all the other hopeless gamblers. And in doing that, it’s a perverse sort of nostalgia for the little guys being allowed to run the show – even if they did that by putting heads in vices – before they were shunted out by the even more ruthless efficiency of the mega-corporations. Because a world like Las Vegas only makes it easier for basic greed and personality flaws to take hold and ruin everything that’s good.

Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is a gambling and odds fixer, a man so expert at what he does and how he does it, so skilled at working the odds to spin out a profit for the Mafia, that the Chicago mob hires him to run their casino in Las Vegas. Rothstein turns the casino into the ultimate money making machine, understanding the odds of every bet and squeezing money out of every pore of the operation. While Sam takes care of the money, childhood friend Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) handles the other side of the Mafia business – increasingly abusing his position to make his own fortune on the side. Sam is further undermined by the only “against the odds” bet he ever made in his life: falling in love with Ginger (Sharon Stone), a selfish, self-destructive former hooker who is happy to take Sam’s money but will never offer him the love he craves. Disaster awaits.

Part of the reason perhaps why Scorsese’s Las Vegas epic (and the film is nearly three hours long) doesn’t have the warm regard of many of his other films is its focus on an intricate – although fascinating – explanation of how a Las Vegas casino operates, and the film’s reliance on voiceover to convey a vast amount of backstory, personal motivation and character insight. The opening hour of the film is almost entirely narrated (largely by De Niro and Pesci, although other characters occasionally intrude), as Scorsese shows exactly how a mob-skimming operation works in a casino, as well as nearly every detail of its operation, from day-to-day workings to dealing with cheats. The mechanisms of Las Vegas – along with its corruption, violence and blatant theft – are what fascinates the film. These sequences are assembled with the expected grace and skill of Scorsese and his regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker, but they lack the emotional connection of Goodfellas.

In fact, Casino might almost be some sort of tribute to silent film, so much of it is images accompanied alone by voiceover and well-chosen pop songs. It’s a film where imagery is all, with the camera prowling along the red-lined interiors of the casino itself (where daylight never intrudes), or lovingly following the progress of coins from slot machines to counting rooms to bags stuffed with cleaned bills for gangsters to carry away to their masters. It all makes for a rich and fascinating social history, even if you do feel slightly distanced from it by its near-documentary style voiceover.

But then, this voiceover does allow for a surprisingly rich character study once you plug into it. With the design stressing the demonic red-lined rooms and lights of Las Vegas – and the Saul Bass designed title sequence of a man falling through flames into a neon lit underworld – the idea of this place as some sort of hell is there all the way through. This context allows us to see three characters who are corrupted and destroyed by the pressures and temptations of five years running an operation in America’s capital of temptation and excess. And as the film goes on, everything gets bigger, from the garish colours and clothes to the music to the increasingly graphic violence.

And this film is astonishingly violent. Heads are placed in vices, people are brutally murdered by everything from pens to baseball bats, hits happen with a gruesome immediacy. And the person carrying out most of these acts is Pesci, a demonic imp lacking any sense of charm. Pesci retreads his role from Goodfellas, but even worse if possible, a man for whom violence is as second-nature as breathing. 

It makes a neat contrast through with De Niro, who dominates the film (and either appears in or narrates almost every minute). It’s one of De Niro’s calmer, most reflective performances ever in a Scorsese picture (arguably until The Irishman). He’s a quiet, meticulous, fastidious professional gambler, who never takes a chance professionally but takes huge gambles with his personal life. De Niro brings the film a calm centre, and the precision of a man who both loves what he does but is so obsessed with making things perfect he gets no pleasure from it. Unlike many De Niro roles in Scorsese, Sam is the closest you can see as a regular guy, someone who works in a world of theft and violence but sees that as a cost of doing business rather than a career choice.

It’s why he remains sympathetic, despite the destruction around him. Perhaps also helped by his simply appalling wife. Sharon Stone gets her finest part ever (she received the film’s only Oscar nomination, for Best Actress) as the self-destructive, greedy addict Ginger who doesn’t want to change anything about her life and marries Sam solely for his money, but continues her relationship with her pimp Lester (a sleazy James Woods) and snorts cocaine in front of her five-year-old daughter. But Sam takes the chance because he loves her – and this Jewish outsider, who moves in circles of Italian mobsters and Southern societies that control the state, wants nothing more than to be loved and accepted. It’s what keeps him close to Nicky – for all his horrific impulsiveness – because Nicky is the closest thing he has to a genuine friend.

It’s a theme that runs throughout the whole film. The Mafia allowed its “street” operatives to run this operation in Las Vegas – and would never allow such regular soldiers such power again – and Las Vegas itself closed its doors to these more “independent” operators in the future to give the riches to corporations and insiders. It’s part of what makes Casino such a fascinating history lesson – this is the Las Vegas we all kind of think of, dirty, corrupted and sexily run by gangsters (even if the film makes clear that these guys would crush your head for looking at them the wrong way). But it’s now a circus, an entertainment ride.  Because our heroes here make the same mistakes as the guys that go through their casino – “the longer they play, the longer they lose”.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

The immortal gang in legendary twist thriller The Usual Suspects

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Stephen Baldwin (Michael McManus), Gabriel Byrne (Dean Keaton), Benicio del Toro (Fred Fenster), Kevin Pollak (Todd Hockney), Kevin Spacey (Roger “Verbal” Kint), Chazz Palminteri (Agent Dave Kujan), Pete Postlethwaite (Kobayashi), Suzy Amis (Edey Finneran), Giancarlo Esposito (Jack Baer), Dan Hedaya (Sergeant Jeff Rabin)

SPOILERS: If you have been living in a cave since 1995, don’t read on as I discuss the twist at great length…

“Convince me”. That’s what Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) says as he begins his interrogation of limping, low-time crook “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey). That’s certainly what Kint does – and it’s what the whole film is aiming to do in this, the most famous confidence trick in movies. The Usual Suspects is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon films where everything comes together perfectly. It’s also a sleight-of-hand movie that remains hugely engaging and entertaining even when (as surely most people now do!) you know exactly what the magician has up his sleeve. Its solid gold entertainment factor even survives today, despite the slightly queasy presence of both Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer in its credits.

Told in flashback, the film follows the coming together of a bunch of regular criminals, pulled in for a line-up and deciding to team up. Along with Verbal, the others include McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Fenster (Benecio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollak) and ex-cop turned criminal Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). After a successful series of heists, the gang are conscripted by suspicious lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite) to take on a dangerous hijacking job for shadowy – possibly legendary – master criminal Keyser Soze, the bogeyman of the criminal classes. We know the job will go wrong – after all Verbal is banged up telling the whole story, the only survivor of the job – but how? And who is the shadowy Soze – or is he even real at all?

The Usual Suspects takes what you know about movies and then works double time to use it against you. With a structure inspired by classic noir crime films from the 1940s – the whole operation has a touch of The Asphalt Jungle while the interrogation has more than a hint of Double Indemnity – mixed in with a lot of Rashomon, it’s a movie that has you primed so much for a reveal and a twist that it skilfully misdirects you into expecting the wrong thing. Because how could you guess that perhaps the whole movie is a spun-out-of-the-moment invention by Verbal, and that possibly almost nothing we see during the course of its run time even happened. 

But how can we guess? From the very first scenes with Kujan and Verbal, Kujan is shot dominating the frame, always taller, always filling the screen. Verbal is sitting, meek, trapped by the frame, the camera frequently looking down at him. Every shot subliminally tells us that he is weak. The story has to be dragged out of him, with the investigation outside of the room forcing Verbal to expand on issues he doesn’t want to touch on. Like Kujan we invest in what we are finding out, because it looks like Verbal doesn’t want to tell it to us. That’s how they get you.

Because Verbal, in his story, is sprinkling in just the twist that Dave (and the audience) is probably expecting – that Gabriel Byrne’s Dean Keaton, the guy who claimed to have gone good, who just wanted out, was bad the whole time and was the criminal mastermind this whole time. Christopher McQuarrie’s ingenious script primes us for this: Dave Kujan is casting doubt on Keaton’s “death” right from the start, and as the audience surrogate figure we want to be as smart as he is. So what does it matter that we ”see” Keaton shot in the opening sequence of the film? Surely that was an illusion, and we’re as clever as Kujan in seeing through it.

The film even gives us a brilliantly assembled “reveal” series of edited flashbacks, in which every small moment and hint that has existed in the film is replayed for us (John Ottman’s editing is flawless here – and he should also have credit for composing the film’s hauntingly classical score) to convince us, beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yup, poor simple Verbal was taken in all the time by dastardly Keaton, the guy who looks like a film star. Only of course it’s bollocks. That charred corpse that Singer jump cuts to at the start of the film as police investigate the boat massacre is indeed Keaton. And the clever twist we thought we were working out, turns out to be a mass distraction laid out for us by Verbal and the film.

So we get a second brilliantly edited reveal sequence as it hits Kujan while he studies that most famous notice board in film, that everything he thought he had worked out had been spun out of hints and clues off the board – from asides and anecdotes to entire locations and characters. And Kevin Spacey limps and then walks away, shrugging off the skin of timid, weak Verbal to transform into the chillingly amoral Soze. It’s a trick that worked especially well when Spacey was an almost unknown actor at the time (today it’s less of a surprise to find out that Spacey could be a creep). There is possibly no better reveal in Hollywood.

But the film continues to entertain even when you know it because Singer’s film is stuffed with richly layered characters, scintillating scenes and some rich and spicy dialogue from McQuarrie. It’s a brilliant combination and provides every scene with a clear and electric dynamism that makes it impossible to tear your eyes away. There are some truly striking scenes – not least the iconic line-up scene – and the film carries an improvisational energy (that line-up scene is a magic use of outtakes, as the actors couldn’t keep a straight face during the sequence).

Part of the magic of it comes from the brilliant clash of a group of vastly different actors bouncing off each other: the self-consciously method Baldwin, the edgy energy of Pollack, the chilly technique of Spacey and the classically trained professionalism of Byrne, who pulls off with aplomb a difficult job of playing a decoy protagonist and antagonist in one. And that’s not mentioning the wild card of Del Toro who, working out his character was a one-note plot device, throws in an eccentric chic and impenetrable mumbling accent that is part affectation (the sort of thing that made the actor more trying later in his career) and part jaw-dropping show of confidence. And backing them up is a collection of actors as eccentric as Palminteri channelling Law and Order with a smile and Postlethwaite as a sinister limey lawyer with an accent that sounds like it hails from the Raj.

Singer’s direction is flawlessly confident, creating a rich tapestry that you could lazily call Tarantinoesque, but actually reminds you of John Huston in its carefully framed mise-en-scene. It’s a very classical movie in its way, that loves clever wipes, slow build ups, brilliantly edited and surprisingly low key in much of its framing and shooting. Everything is perfectly placed to help build up the illusion. Singer never touched these heights of confidence and control again. It’s also superbly edited throughout by John Ottman, each beat landing perfectly, each transition perfectly judged. It wouldn’t seem out of pace to see Cagney playing Kint (with Bogart surely as Keaton). 

The devilish trickiness of the plot is kept largely under wraps until late on – Soze isn’t even mentioned until nearly halfway through the film – and the film’s confident misdirection suggests this might just be the gang aiming too high and getting burned rather than a shadowy mastermind manipulating it all. It’s a brilliantly judged change of pace, and all part of the impish delight of the film. It’s a clever game, but has more than enough force and invention in its story telling to keep you gripped time and time again. McQuarrie and Spacey won Oscars – and the film hinges so much on Spacey’s ability to both tell an anecdote and also not push his acting lame – and the film lives on forever in the memory as one of the finest twists. But it does so because the twist grows so organically from the film, and the film’s delight in tricking you is completely infectious.

Hustlers (2019)

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez head out to get what they want in Hustlers

Director: Lorene Scarfaria

Cast: Constance Wu (Destiny), Jennifer Lopez (Ramona Vega), Julia Stiles (Elizabeth), Keke Palmer (Mercedes), Lili Reinhart (Annabelle), Lizzo (Liz), Cardi B (Diamond), Mercedes Ruehl (Mama), Wai Ching Ho (Destiny’s grandmother)

Greed. To many people, it’s what powers society. Those at the top believe anything can be bought, that they can have anything and everything they want simply because they have the money to pay for it. Hustlers suggests that nowhere is this more true, than in a New York strip club. The rich and the powerful, the masters of the universe, descend on these clubs for their after-hours play and assume their ocean-like wallets will open every door for them. Can we blame the strippers if they decide to exploit this for their own gain?

Opening in the build-up to the financial crash of 2008, Dorothy aka Destiny (Constance Wu) arrives at Moves, a prominent New York strip club, the night-time spot of choice for the super-rich from Wall Street. Money flows liberally in return for the strippers’ performances and their stroking of these masculine egos. Destiny comes under the wing of the club’s star, Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez), who teaches her how to manipulate men for cold hard cash. But when that financial crash comes, both women find themselves out of work. In the new atmosphere, the clubs are now staffed by dancers from Russia willing to go further with the men for money. Thrown back together, Destiny and Ramona start a new hustle – target rich men in clubs, get them drunk (and later just simply drug them), drag them to Moves and max out their cards (with the ex-dancers taking a healthy cut). But as the strippers themselves become rich, they start to get greedy. Things aren’t going to end well…

Sharply and wittily directed, Lorene Scarfaria’s film is an excellent crime movie with a little bit of social commentary thrown in. Fast paced and done with just the right amount of flash, it brilliantly rejigs the usual lens that we see strippers through in Hollywood movies. Rather than clichés, hookers with hearts of gold or props for the male characters, here the strippers are real, rounded people working a job – a job that just so happens to involve taking their clothes off. There may be fun to be had at times, but it’s a performance, a show – and a large part of Ramona’s skill is to effectively and convincingly play what she knows the men want to see.

That’s what Scarfaria’s film shows – it’s all a careful hustle, a clever series of tricks and techniques used by strippers to minimise the amount of contact with the customers (and the indignities of their lecherous hands) and maximise cash return, over the longest period of time possible. And these rich Wall Street types are too arrogant and convinced of their own excellence to even notice. The men come out spectacularly badly, a bunch of leering assholes who believe money gives them the right to do anything they like. Scarfaria shoots this with a snazzy Scorsese-ish zing which makes the entire film bounce along like a light version of Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street.

And the film has a great deal of admiration for these women who decided to turn the tables – who dealt with the fact that they were basically trapped into a certain role by society by using their skills to steal from the rich. The scheme of conning men is perfect at first – after all what powerful man is going to want to say that he was drugged and fleeced by a gang of attractive women? What is interesting is that the greed that corrupted the men, is gradually the thing the corrupts the women as well: the more successful their scam is, the richer they become, the more they become obsessed with status symbols, just as the men treated them. It doesn’t take long for crime to start moving on from its original Robin Hood targets into something far more indiscriminate.

Leading that charge into hitting any and every target for as much as they can get (rather than a careful but continual fleecing of a select group) is Jennifer Lopez’s Ramona. This is the role Lopez has been waiting almost twenty years for, a charismatic woman so firmly in control of her own life she doesn’t even notice when it starts to hit the skids. It’s the sort of scene stealing role that demands the energy and personality Lopez can bring to it, Ramona being part mentor and mother and part greedy livewire. If you forgot what a promising actress she was in the 90s, this is a great reminder. Ramona is a force of nature, the woman who demonstrates sex is a tool that can produce fabulous, fortune making results. But she’s arrogant enough to let greed and her innate belief in her own infallibility guide many of her decisions.

Lopez also forms a wonderful partnership with Constance Wu in the “Ray Liotta” part of the young naïve innocent, drawn under the mentor’s wings who eventually has to turn against her. Wu draws a lot of charm out of the young stripper learning the ropes, but crosses this really well with an ambition and ruthlessness that only late on finds its limits. 

Hustlers bounds along telling a winning, crowd pleasing story with a depth and emotional force that produces great results. We root completely for its female leads, keeping them relatable even when their actions become less sympathetic. Strikingly directed by Lorene Scarfaria, it’s a film about women that makes themselves firmly the authors of their own destinies – and their own mistakes.

The Third Man (1949)

Orson Welles is the dark heart of The Third Man

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Joseph Cotton (Holly Martins), Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt), Orson Welles (Harry Lime), Trevor Howard (Major Calloway), Paul Hörbiger (Karl the porter), Ernst Deustch (“Baron” Kurtz), Erich Ponto (Dr Winkel), Siegried Breuer (Anna), Bernard Lee (Sergeant Paine),Wilfrid Hyde-White (Crabbin)

It’s regularly held up as one of the cornerstones of classic 1940s film-making – and it has frequently won polls of the Greatest British Films of all time. Does The Third Man live up to expectations? No it excels them. I doubt there has been a film more perfectly assembled than this, one where all the component parts click together to make one perfect whole. No matter how many times you see The Third Man, it weaves its spell every time.

In immediate post-war Vienna, the city is divided into four zones, each run by a different great power (the UK, US, France and USSR). The black market is rife between the zones. Into this city arrives pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), here to visit his old school friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) – only to find on arriving that Lime died in a traffic accident, with British policeman Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) insisting that he was a black marketeer. Holly can’t believe Harry was a crook, and decides to investigate himself – on the way falling in love with Harry’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli) and finding that nobody’s story on what happened to Harry matches up. Could the accident actually be a murder?

Carol Reed’s atmospheric film is beautifully, perhaps flawlessly directed – so well made that for years there were fevered efforts to assign its brilliance to Welles himself. Which was studiously unfair to Reed, a director at the top of his game in the 40s.  The Third Man was the crowning glory of a run of superbly stylish thrillers that matched thought provoking themes with striking film-making. The film is soaked in the atmosphere of post-war Vienna, a city half shelled out of existence. The film was shot on location, and Reed’s camera captures the “bombed about a bit” shambles of the city, its long shadows, cobbled streets and mysterious alleys.

The Third Man’s filming style also plays into this truly distinctive look. Working with (Oscar-winning) cinematographer Robert Krasker, the film is shot with a luscious almost German impressionistic style, with murky shadows and noirish lighting. Reed uses huge numbers of Dutch Angles to constantly present both this shattered city, and it mysterious story, from disconcerting angles. This visually represents the uncertainty and mystery that drip from every scene, making Vienna look like some sort of sinking ship, disappearing into a mire of crime and guilt. Reed’s camera fills the edges of the frames with tramps, beggars, the dispossessed and the plain scared – a brilliant snapshot of post-war Europe unsure about the future and ripe for exploitation.

The film looks simply stunning, with Reed’s visuals throwing up images that have stuck in film heritage, from fingers poking through a sewer grill, to the iconic entrance of Harry Lime itself (possibly the most famous entry ever). Shadows loom with gigantic proportions over the streets. A final sewer chase seems to take place in a nightmare world of water, false turns and foreboding architecture. And that final shot! Sublime cinema, the stillest shot in the film, and also a superb capturing of the film’s themes of loyalty, duty and betrayal.

The film was scripted by Graham Greene, and occupies a wonderful corner of Greene-land. His original concept was for Holly (or Rollo in the original script) and Harry to be British public schoolboys – a plan rejected when Hollywood co-funding came to call – but it did allow Holly to be transformed into a naïve American, lost in the cold realities of post-war Europe. Holly believes in the world of black and white, and writes stories where good triumphs over evil in the Wild West. He’s adrift in a Europe where everyone lies habitually, morality is flexible, and nothing is as it seems.

Holly is bound by old chains of loyalty to Harry – but how far does that loyalty stretch? What price personal loyalty when confronted with the impact of what a person has done? Joseph Cotton’s performance is pitch perfect, a middle-ranker who has orbited his whole life around brighter stars like Harry. How one-way was the relationship? Can Holly ever think for himself? 

And is the right thing to do to walk away or try and correct the wrongs done by another?This divide is shown in the relationship between Cotton’s Holly and Alidi Valli’s sensational turn as Harry’s ex-girlfriend. A woman who has seen the harshness of the world, and been through a war-torn life that Holly would struggle to even comprehend, she’s a woman to whom personal loyalty trumps all things. Should you be loyal to the man you know, your experience of him – or do you have a higher loyalty that trumps that? Anna is firmly of the belief that she knows all that she needs to know of Harry and she needs to learn no more. It’s the sort of European post-war compromise that Holly can’t adapt to, the ideas of morality becoming mired in shades of grey.

It’s a world he struggles to adapt to, but is a cold hard reality for Trevor Howard’s Major Calloway – a superb performance of cool reserve that hides a strong sense of justice. Howard’s wry half-smile and control is perfect for the film, and his disgust at the actions of black marketeers is subtly and brilliantly conveyed by both the actor and Reed’s restrained direction – a visit to a children’s ward full of victims of Lime’s penicillin, is notable for leaving everything to our imagination and communicating another loss by showing a Teddy bear being dropped into a box.

And the cause of all this suffering? Why it’s none other than Harry Lime himself. No film ever captured Orson Welles’ impish charm as well as this, his shy grin and air of an enfant terrible turned terrible are brilliantly captured in the boyishly young but demonic Harry. A Mephistopheles placed on earth to tempt men like Holly, Lime argues what do a few people (or dots) here and there really matter in the long run? After all governments sacrifice them all the time – look at Vienna! – why shouldn’t we? What’s the problem? Lime grins and casually outlines a demonic view of the world, casually uses a cheap historical justification or two, and then saunters off never suspecting that he could lose the argument. Like Welles himself, he has all the glamour and magnetism that we could never have, and to live a few moments in his shadow, as Holly and Anna do, is to live a lifetime.

So Holly has to make a choice – the friend he knew, or the strangers he has seen harmed. The film charts the slow passage to making this hard choice, presenting us with a man who refuses to believe his friend could be anything other than the victim of persecution, to the man who is destined to turn him in. With the framework of Carol Reed’s superb filmmaking, it’s still an absolute treat.

And finally, The Third Man is blessed with perhaps the most perfect film score of all time. Recorded by Anton Karas – literally discovered playing the zither on the streets of Vienna – the score is jaunty, lyrical, schoolboyish even but can switch subtly to something quite disconcerting. It perfectly captures the schoolboy bravado of Holly and the childish lack of morals of Lime. As a match with the bombed out Vienna and its rundown, cynical citizens, it’s perfect. Like all things with The Third Man, it just works better than you could ever have hoped.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

William Holden and Ernest Borgnine lead The Wild Bunch into one last adventure

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: William Holden (Pike Bishop), Ernest Borgnine (Dutch Engstrom), Robert Ryan (Deke Thornton), Edmond O’Brien (Freddie Sykes), Warren Oates (Lyle Gorch), Ben Johnson (Tector Gorch), Jamie Sánchez (Angel), Emilio Fernandez (General Mapache), Strother Marin (Coffer), LQ Jones (T.C.)

SPOILERS: Discussion of The Wild Bunch is pretty much impossible without discussing its ending – but then it does have a pretty famous ending. Well you’re warned…

It’s easy to look back the Wild West with rose-tinted glasses. To remember it as being when the American spirit was at its best and a romance ruled. To basically take the “Wild” out of the picture. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is all about putting that “Wild” front and centre, a stunning exploration of the closing days of the Wild West that replaces sentiment and nostalgia with violence and a group of men who know nostalgia is just the vanity of hardened, brutal killers.

In 1916 Pike Bishop (William Holden) is the leader of a notorious gang of criminals, ruthless killers all, wanted by the law – and the rail company they have been robbing for years – at any price. Pike’s latest bank job winds up being a trap, with a deadly shoot-out taking place in the middle of a town (with the population lethally caught in the crossfire) as the rail company tries to kill Pike’s crew, their efforts led by Pike’s former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), forced to work against Pike or return to the hellish jail at Yuma. The massacre sees only a few members of the gang survive – Pike, his best friend Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), the Gorch brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson), Mexican gun-slinger Angel (Jamie Sánchez) and old-timer Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien). The gang flees to Mexico, with Deke and his posse dispatched on their heels by the furious railway company. In a Mexico ripped apart by civil war, the gang are hired by would-be warlord General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) to hijack guns from the American army – but there are other dangers when Angel has friendly contacts with the Mexican revolutionaries.

Peckinpah’s film is a stunning exploration not only of the dying dreams and way of life of old men in the West – Pike, Deke, Dutch and Freddie are all old men while the Gorch brothers are hardly in the first flush of youth – but also the endemic nature of violence. Peckinpah’s film is unfailingly brutal in its depiction of violence, an infection that runs through every level of society. Everyone from the children – the film opens with a gang of children laughingly feeding two scorpions to a mass colony of ants, before setting all the animals on fire (look in vain for the “no animals were harmed in the making of this picture” message) – to the men themselves. The film’s opening shoot-out – a technical marvel and also a masterpiece of slow tension building by Peckinpah – is shocking in its brutality.

Unlike Leone, to whom violence is shocking in its suddenness, Peckinpah slows down the action so that we can see (and feel) the horror of each bullet. The Wild Bunch set some sort of record – in its final shoot-out sequence – for blood squibs used. It’s not a surprise after watching the opening shoot-out between the Bunch and the railway forces. With the Bunch using a passing Temperance march to cover their retreat, bullets are fired indiscriminately, killing passers-by and men from both sides alike. No one, aside from a furious and appalled Deke (the only character who has suffered himself from violence in prison) expresses a moment’s guilt for this massacre.

But then Pike and the bunch are hardened killers to a man. Pike cares nothing for the members of the gang lost – even forgetting until late on that he left a man guarding the bank staff while the gang rode out of town – and when a wounded survivor can’t ride and agrees that Pike should finish it, he doesn’t pause for a second. Any ideas of these men as being rogues or there being any charm to living a life on the margins of the law are rapidly dispelled. 

And this violence isn’t just an American thing – it dominates life in Mexico as well, where the drunken, bullying General Mapache is a brutal would-be dictator, whose soldiers frequently terrorise, steal from and murder the villagers around them. In Mexico, the gun is law even more than the US, and these guys have even closer to being criminals in uniform, just as Deke’s posse could just as easily be working with the Bunch as against them.

So what motivates these men? What is brilliant about Peckinpah’s film is acknowledging that these violent killers may feud and fight, but they are still stretching for some sort of meaning in their life. These are world-weary old men with little to live for, who are trying to work out what – if anything – is left in their lives. And that life has to have some sort of code, some sort of grounding basis, even if everything else is up for grabs. Pike says when you “side with a man, you stay with him and if you can’t do that you’re finished”. It’s a flexible rule for these guys – and they frequently shirk it in the film when events are dangerous – but it’s a code they need to believe they would keep.

It’s that code that comes into play late in the film as Angel falls increasingly foul of Mapache’s anger and whims. It takes the gang a while to stand by it, but when they do it’s also partnered by a sad realisation that for these old men what else is there? Their lives have been ruled by the gun and shoot-out after shoot-out. Peckinpah views the West with no nostalgia, but he understands that men need to view their own lives with nostalgia at times, to understand that they may yearn to point at something and say that was what their lives were for.

And what else is there? Everyone in the film knows it’s over. They’re old men, and the world is moving on and leaving them behind. At one point the gang look on at wonder at a car owned by Mapache, and the Gorch brothers flat out can’t believe in the existence of an aeroplane. The modern world is ending the world of these guys, and Pike knows it: “We need to start thinking beyond our guns” he says at one point, but offers no solutions at all about what that might be. The modern world is the real deadly bullet that’s taking out the gang: in the final shoot-out, the key weapon even turns out to be a modern machine gun, spraying death at a level ordinary shooters can’t even begin to match.

That final shoot-out sees all these themes come together brilliantly. It could almost be a rebuttal of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (released the same year) that sees our heroes captured in romantic sepia freeze frame, charging into certain death against the Bolivian army. Here we effectively see the battle, with additional machine guns and thousands of blood squibs as the Bunch take on Mapache’s army in fury at Mapache’s murder of Sanchez. In a furious shoot-out lasting almost ten minutes, it’s a blood bath as the Bunch mow down dozens and dozens of Mapache’s army while themselves being repeatedly shredded by bullets, adrenalin alone keeping them going. Peckinpah even has the final fatal bullet that takes out Pike coming from a child soldier.

But the Bunch are taking this suicidal last stand because it’s their last –  their only – chance to have stood for something, to have a code they stuck by. To stand by their partner and if that means going down in a hail of bullets, at least there is some sort of glory to it. And besides – what else have they got? The modern world has drained all purpose from their life, so why not at the end wordlessly agree to leave behind the greed that has dominated their lives and die for something?

Peckinpah’s film is simply brilliant, fabulously made and brilliantly shot and edited. The cast of pros is simply excellent. Holden’s world-weary faded glamour now leaving only a cold ruthlessness and a wish that he had more to show for it is perfectly partnered with Borgnine’s easy-going sidekick who wants to do the right thing but needs to find the reasons. Ryan is excellent as a guilt-ridden Deke, who finally has begun to understand the impact of violence. The rest of the cast also excel. The Wild Bunch may be the least nostalgia infected Western ever made, a grim reminder that the West really was Wild. But it’s also a stunningly well-made and challenging picture.

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger confront racism In the Heat of the Night

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Sidney Poitier (Virgil Tibbs), Rod Steiger (Chief Bill Gillespie), Warren Oates (Sam Wood), Lee Grant (Mrs Colbert), Larry Gates (Endicott), James Patterson (Purdy), William Schallert (Mayor Schubert), Beah Richards (Mama Caleba), Peter Whitney (Courtney)

A slim, tight thriller with a social message, In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture in 1967, beating out Bonnie and Cyde and The Graduate (both films with a revolutionary impact on films making) as well as another Sidney Poitier starrer, the even-more message heavy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. An unflashy, cleanly made, efficient film, In the Heat of the Night is in some ways a surprising winner – but the shocking depiction of racism in the Deep South at the time still hits home today.

In Sparta, Mississippi a wealthy industrialist from Chicago is found murdered in the street. Who committed the crime? Well surely it’s the well-dressed black man with a wallet full of money waiting to get out of town at the train station. The man is hauled in – only for him to reveal he is an expert homicide detective from Philadelphia named Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). Tibbs is sucked in to assist local police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) to investigate the crime, partly on the order of his boss, partly due to his disgust at the police department’s racism and incompetence, and partly at the pleading of the victim’s widow (Lee Grant) who recognises him as the best officer for the case. But will Tibbs’ expertise crack the case in a town where the idea of a black man in a suit, asking questions and taking no shit, is a still a surefire recipe for a lynching?

Nominally In the Heat of the Night is a murder mystery, but you’ll be hard pushed to remember much about the case after you finish the film. The eventual killer emerges from left field and the steps of the investigation are often unclear. While the film is trim, it does mean the tension around the killer’s identity never really builds up and we never get a real sense of the personality of the suspects (apart from the uniform racism).

Where its real strength is, is in the mis-matched “buddy” movie structure of two men forced to work together, the difference being that both casual and violent racism underpins every interaction Tibbs has in the town. Poitier was seen as a calm and graceful figure, but In the Heat of the Night finally gave him the chance to mix dignity with resentment and anger that had never been seen in a black character on screen before. The film works due to Poitier’s inherent toughness, his lack of compromise and anger at injustice. Poitier was never more hard-edged, defiant and determined to get what he deserves. Unlike Poitier’s other racial buddy movie The Defiant Ones, you can’t imagine Tibbs jumping off the train to freedom to try and save Tony Curtis.

Tibbs isn’t just the smartest, toughest policeman on the screen – he demands to be treated like it. The film’s most famous scene – and shocking at the time – is during Tibbs’ questioning of genteel racist Endicott in his orchid greenhouse. Endicott – whose home resembles nothing more than a plantation, loaded with black workers – is well spoken but inherently racist, and slaps Tibbs when his questions go on too long – only to immediately receive a backhand from Tibbs in return. Endicott is as shocked as audiences were – the idea of a black man striking back was on unheard of.

It’s terrifying and sickening to realise however that the American South at the time was genuinely like this. The slap is a proud moment – but it marks Tibbs for retribution. There is a genuine danger Tibbs will get lynched in this film (twice he narrowly escapes murder at the hands of a gang of furious rednecks). In real life, Poitier was very hesitant to film in the South, and for the brief location shooting in Tennessee slept with a gun under his pillow. The film is littered with casually dropped racial slurs, the politest of which is “boy”. It leads to the famous line from Tibbs that back home “they call me Mister Tibbs” – but you forget that it follows from Gillespie asking him what an n-word copper is called in Philadelphia. And even after that Gillespie only calls him Virgil, as if still not quite able to compute the idea of a black man who can be a “mister”.

The relationship between Tibbs and Gillespie is the heart of the film. And the film is brave to not have this turn into “they were opponents but then they became the best of friends”. Instead there is a sort of grudging respect that grows, even though Tibbs clearly thinks Gillespie is an impulsive racist and Gillespie thinks Tibbs is a stiff-backed but brilliant n-word. Rod Steiger won the Oscar for Best Actor, and he does some fine work as the complex Gillespie. Keeping his explosive energy in check (despite the inevitable outbursts), Steiger sketches out a character who is smart enough to know he isn’t smart enough, who can respect Tibbs’ professionalism and understand on some level that racism is beyond all sense but still drop racial words with an instinctive ease.

Steiger’s Gillespie is a tough-talking, stereotypical cop but he’s also got a sad little hinterland – a late dinner at his home with Tibbs has him confess that Tibbs is his only guest for years – and while he arrests no fewer than three innocent people for the crime, there is no doubting his dedication to justice. Steiger doesn’t apologise for Gillespie’s appalling attitudes, but also does enough to suggest that his racism is learned rather than innate. While never completely sympathetic, especially today, the film lays hints of hope that a racist cop from the South could work side-by-side with a black officer – and that was considerable progress at the time.

But it’s Poitier’s movie, and while in many ways he has the simpler part (and Poitier generously ceded his admiration for Steiger’s skill and craft pushing him to a level he felt he not reached before), Tibbs is the centre of the film. Jewison skilfully shoots Poitier as always the outsider, from his looks and Sherlock Holmes style skills, to the way the camera focuses on his hands touching things – from dead bodies to door knobs – to the visible discomfort of the white men watching him. Tibbs may be arrogant but he’s right and Poitier’s refusal to compromise or offer any concessions is a striking thing – Tibbs is who he is and he won’t change a thing to be accepted by the white man. At the end, he may respect the steps Gillespie has taken – but I doubt he’d consider the man a friend and certainly not a professional equal. 

In the Heat of the Night is still shocking for the openly displayed racism and menace of violence that black people faced in the Deep South in sixties America. Jewison’s film is efficiently assembled and tightly edited – not a single minute is wasted in one of the shortest Best Picture winners ever – and while its mystery is little to write home about, its portrait of racism in America is still shocking and stirring and its two lead performances are things to linger in the memory.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Malcolm McDowell burns up the screen in Kubrick’s masterful but cold A Clockwork Orange

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Alex DeLarge), Patrick Magee (Mr Frank Alexander), Michael Bates (Chief Guard Barnes), Warren Clarke (Dim), Adrienne Corri (Mrs Mary Alexander), Carl Duering (Dr Brodky), Paul Farrell (Tramp), Clive Francis (Joe the Lodger), Michael Gover (Prison Governor), Miriam Karlin (Catlady), James Marcus (Georgie), Aubrey Morris (PR Deltoid), Godfrey Quigley (Prison Chaplain), Sheila Raynor (Mum), Madge Ryan (Dr Branom), Anthony Sharp (Minister), Philip Stone (Dad)

For decades, A Clockwork Orange was unseen in Britain. After a number of copycat crimes led to a backlash, Kubrick – who had complete control over the rights of the film in the UK, his adopted country – essentially refused to let the film be shown anywhere in the country during his lifetime. This gave Clockwork Orange a sort of mystique for UK audiences that it has only slowly worn off, the air of the banned product, impossible to see other than through a dodgy knock-off or by travelling to another country. Released from the vaults this century, the film still carries a chilling pull, even if it’s a compelling but still muddled piece of intellectualism.

Adapted faithfully from Anthony Burgess’ novel, the film follows the life of violent young man Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), leader of a gang of street thugs who delight in evenings of “ultra violence”, with a bit of “the old in-out” thrown in for good measure. Which, in the invented Ingsoc style dialogue Burgess came up with, basically means Alex is essentially a psychotic rapist, albeit one with a huge degree of anti-authoritarian charm and cheek. Alex’s crimes eventually catch up with him however, whereupon he is imprisoned and volunteers for what he assumes is an easy option: an experimental psychiatric aversion treatment, designed to make him incapable of taking parts in acts of violence and sex. Released back into the world, Alex finds it and himself unchanged – the only difference being that violence makes him feel sick, which is poor defence as he encounters all his victims yet again, all bent on revenge.

Did something about the film scare Kubrick? Was part of his later mixed feelings about the film based around the fact the film is seduced by Alex, that it indulges his awfulness and utter lack of morality and makes points comparing the authoritarian government with the murderer they are trying to deal with. Yes, Kubrick makes clear that Alex feels nothing but pleasure about his awful acts, and the distorted fish-eyed lens he uses to capture much of this really hammers home the awfulness of his actions. But it’s also a film that takes a giddy delight in Alex’s charm and larger-than-life persona, and makes it easier for us to find him an attractive figure.

Of course part of this is through the way Kubrick seizes upon a once-in-a-lifetime performance from Malcolm McDowell, who roars through the film with such giddy power, such perverse force of nature electricity that he never captured it again. McDowell’s impish delight is what powers the film, and Kubrick’s clear admiration for the actor’s improvisation, his pushing of boundaries (the film’s most famous sequence, Alex singing Singin’ in the Rain while assaulting and – off camera – raping a woman, was McDowell’s own improvisation). McDowell’s performance is a magnet, his sneering contempt for authority and his sexy confidence and cultured intelligence makes Alex a character far more attractive than he should be.

And quite possibly to Kubrick as well. The film’s moral force loses some of its direction from the novel, by its skill in presenting in such a bravura way Alex’s horrors and because McDowell charges through the film. Kubrick was always the ultimate technician of film, so it’s not a surprise that A Clockwork Orange is a triumph of style and design; perhaps that is at the heart of its enduring power and impact. Kubrick’s design pushes the film a few degrees into the future from 1971, with a grimy, rundown look at Britain mixed with primary colours and garish 70s design. The look of Alex and Droogs is inspired, the sort of cos-play triumph that was way ahead of its time.

The film wants to make points about morality and free will, but these ideas get lost in the mastery of the film-making and the technical triumph of Kubrick (and John Alcott’s) camerawork. The film makes extensive use of fish-eyed, wide angle lenses that distort the world around Alex, hammering home the ultra-realism of the film. At several points Kubrick uses slow pan outs that go from tight shots to reveal more and more of the world of the film, granting an epic status to this squalid world (and increasing the status of Alex all the more). It’s sublimely made, but this is part of the problem.

The main problem is that Kubrick as a director is all technocrat genius, and no heart at all. He loses himself in what he can do, and forgets what he should do. It’s a film where it’s easy to sympathise with the anti-hero, as no voice is really given to the victims. Kubrick seems able to overlook the horror of the events, in his admiration for the actor and the technique. It muddies as well the questions of morality around the mind-altering control of the state – and these ideas are less thought-provoking than Kubrick might have thought anyway. It wants us to ask if a repressive state that prevents someone from committing violent acts – but does nothing to change their basic personality or desire to change, only forces them to do so – can really take the moral high ground? The film argues not – and the Kubrick’s general misanthropy is focused as much on how violence from one naturally begets violence in others – but this is pretty basic stuff.

Perhaps if Kubrick had invested more time in the reality of moments, to off-set the ultra-realism of Alex’s violence and the epic grandeur of McDowell, the film might have been able to explore this further. We see all of Alex’s victims respond with anger and fury and violence when given their chance for revenge in the second half of the film, but we don’t get a sense of the internal journey that takes them there. What we get is the look of horror (and later the near panicked reaction when he realises he has given shelter to his wife’s rapist) from Patrick Magee’s Mr Alexander, but that’s it. Otherwise, the focus places the victims on the outside of the drama and zooms in on the perpetrator and the government trying to control him.

It makes for a misbalanced film, which fails to make the points you wish it could make. Kubrick’s film is an electric piece of filmmaking, dynamic and skilled behind the camera, but the film lacks the heart it needs to counterbalance its coldness and slightly smug satire. It grips and envelops you when watching it – not least due to McDowell’s genius in the lead role – but it’s not a film that works as well as it should. You admire it and then realise its lack of soul.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

A masterplan goes wrong in John Huston’s crime drama The Asphalt Jungle

Director: John Huston

Cast: Sterling Hayden (Dix Handley), Louis Calhern (Alonzo D Emmerich), Jean Hagen (“Doll” Conovan), James Whitmore (Gus Minissi), Sam Jaffe (“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider), John McIntire (Police Commissioner Hardy), Marc Lawrence (Cobby), Barry Kelley (Lt. Ditrich), Marilyn Monroe (Angela Phinlay), Brad Dexter (Bob Brannom)

“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) is out of the slammer after seven years, and the self-proclaimed “Professor” of criminal plans has a scheme for one final job. But rather than sell it to the highest bidder, Doc approaches crooked lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern) to fund the crime and then split the proceeds with Doc. To carry out his robbery on a jewellery safe in a bank, he’ll need a gang including get-away driver Gus (James Whitmore) and Gus’ pal and “hooligan” Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). But even the best laid plans of criminals can fall foul of events and the basic untrustworthiness of criminals themselves.

John Huston surprised some by turning his attention – Oscar in hand from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – to noir cops and robber’s thrillers, but that was to forget he had made his name with his masterful adaptation of Dashell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. And in The Asphalt Jungle he created a small scale but almost perfect slice of criminalise noir, a brilliantly paced and acted film beautifully assembled that effortlessly chronicles the disastrous fall out of a robbery where it seemed everything was going perfectly.

Huston’s direction of the piece is, as nearly always, superlative. His painterly framing of scenes is dead on the money here, his framing of the actors within the scene absolutely without fault. Huston has an uncanny scene for arranging his actors in the minimum number of shots necessary, reducing dramatically the need for clumsy cut aways. Instead multiple actors are often artfully arranged in the frame, allowing the performers to react in the moment and the camera itself to capture the complete story in one smooth shot. It also allows for some great character intros, not least a shot of the Police commissioner in the background of the frame while foregrounded are the hands of his subordinate Dietrich, nervously fondling his hat. Straight away we get the mood of the scene.

This is all part of the brilliant noirish construction of a film that largely features sympathetic criminals – and it’s clear that the film’s sympathy is with the robbers here, the cops either incompetent, bureaucrats or corrupt themselves – either turning on each other, crumbling under pressure, making rudimentary errors that wind up getting them caught or failing into tragic fates that are left questioning what the point of it all was. This is all superbly caught in the moody darkness and shadows that soak over the picture, and highlighted further by the superb script, that packs some excellent lines and beautiful thematic points throughout the film.

It’s also helped by some great performances. Sam Jaffe (Oscar-nominated) is terrific as the cunning calm and businesslike “Doc” who seems unable to understand why things are not quite panning out as he planned, but is heartily sorry that it’s the case. He at least has honour among thieves, refusing to abandon his fellow criminals and quietly disappointed when betrayal raises its head. I love as well his screamish apology that the crime will involve one “hooligan” – or heavy – since he’s not the sort of guy who likes to resort to messy crimes (no matter that things quickly slide out of hand). He’s the sort of professional who expects everyone to play by the same rules, but that doesn’t stop him having his own private passions, particularly for the fairer sex, that will wind up catching him out.

He’s especially proved wrong since Sterling Hayden’s ‘hooligan’ Dix turns out to be the moral force of the gang, despite his down-on-his-luck scruffiness. Hitting crime as a way to finance his dream of buying back his family’s horse farm – and sadly losing most of that finance on the horses – Hayden is gloomy faced and gruff but has his own clear moral code in an affectingly gentle performance of vulnerability beneath the toughness. Debts and betrayal are anathema to him, and he winds up far more of the decent crook than any of the rest – he’s also the only one of the lot who can hold down a loving relationship, forging a genuinely sweet relationship with Jean Hagen’s Doll. Huston’s sympathies are clearly with the down-on-his-luck Dix, a decent guy who has just lost at life.

Of course the crook they can’t trust is the lawyer, a fine performance of snivelling weasliness under a veneer of culture from Louis Calhern. Puffed up, arrogant but desperate for the money and fundamentally weak and easily led, Calhern is excellent as the money man who only adds to the gang’s troubles, led on by Brad Dexter’s wonderfully impatient and ruthless hired gun. Calhern’s sad air of corrupted authority is only enhanced by his lecherous delight in his lusciously young mistress, a radiant early performance from Marilyn Monroe (shot like a classic painting by Huston).

Huston’s film throws this gang together flies together into a superbly detailed and gripping drama of the planning, execution and dreadful fall out of a robbery that clearly inspired the (perhaps even better) Rififi (so much so that it practically has the same story and structure), The Asphalt Jungle is a fabulously made and written pleasure, unpretentious but wonderful story telling marshalled expertly by a director at the top of his game.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Robert De Niro embodies dangerous loners everywhere in Taxi Driver

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro (Travis Bickle), Jodie Foster (Iris), Cybill Shepherd (Betsy), Albert Brooks (Tom), Harvey Keitel (Sport/Matthew), Leonard Harris (Charles Palantine), Peter Boyle (Wizard), Harry Northup (Doughboy), Steven Prince (Easy Andy), Martin Scorsese (Passenger)

A grungy taxi ploughs through the neon-lit back alleys of New York, the glow of stop signs and tail lights washing the car in a hellish red glare. Inside that taxi, the interior monologue of its driver tips ever closer towards paranoia and fantasy. It’s no surprise that something is going to give. Martin Scorsese’s influential Taxi Driver is the definitive exploration of fractured psyches, the key text in film for exploring how isolation, loneliness and an inability to connect with people can tip someone into being a danger to others.

Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is our taxi driver, an honourably discharged Vietnam vet who can’t sleep so works the night shifts. He’s seemingly quiet, shy, self-contained but this hides a desperation to connect with the world, a horror at what he sees around him that he can’t understand, a paranoid disgust at the crime and dirt he feels infect the street and a desire to be someone or do something. His failure to understand to or relate to the world on any level will eventually lead to a gradual collapse as Bickle determines that he must lash out at something, must attack something, to make himself a place in the world.

Taxi Driver is such a brilliant analysis of disaffection and confusion at the world, such an insightful understanding of how feeling separate and locked out from events around them can make a person feel they must act to make their mark, that it profoundly influenced the motivations of Ronald Reagan’s would-be-assassin John Hinckley Jnr in 1981. The film was even screened for the jury as part of Hinckley’s (successful) defence that he acted due to insanity (Hinckley claimed he was trying to impress Jodie Foster). Tragic as that is, it speaks something to the power of the film and its acute understanding (but not excuse) for lonely, fractured, potentially violent souls like Hinckley.

Scorsese’s direction is pitch-perfect. The film uses a series of tightly held shots – and some go on for a very long time, staring at trivial events (such as the shot of an empty corridor while we hear Bickle being rejected on the phone by his stalking target Betsy) – or stately intercutting between actors that brilliantly serve to establish both Bickle’s isolation and his lack of connection. This is intermixed with tighter editing that captures Bickle’s undirected fury and paranoia towards the real world, presented as he drives as a concussive collection of sounds and images that seem to hammer down on the taxi, combined with Bernard Herrmann’s superb classically tense score, lyrical but haunting. 

Every scene Scorsese constructs is designed to show Bickle’s isolation, his weakness and continual succumbing to fantasy and false perspectives. His internal monologue has a monotone fluency to it, but talking to people he’s tongue tied, clumsy or prone to tip into the rantings of a crazy man. Slow motion camera tracks show Bickle moving through crowds like an alien, unable to comprehend or understand what he is seeing, later prowling the frame like a misguided hunter. New York is a hellish underworld – although you are certain we are seeing it largely as Bickle sees it, every scene filtered through his disturbed POV (Michael Chapman’s photography by the way is faultless). 

It works so well because De Niro himself is so restrained, and at first feels rather sweet, even handsome, like someone who you want to look after or feel sorry for – a million miles from the mohawked gun totter he will become by the film’s end. He’s quiet, shy and desperate for friends. He can manage bursts of seeming like a compelling person – his fooling of Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy into a date is a tribute to his ability in short bursts to appear charmingly eccentric. The date of course flounders on his inability to understand human norms (buys her a record she says she has, takes her to a porn film, points out he has a taxi when she tries to get into one to leave), and his response to it is of course to get angry and make a scene, to blame the other person for his own failings.

De Niro immersed himself in the dark psyche of this man, and never loses touch of the gentleness and vulnerability that underpin his violent actions. Bickle talks the talk often of a crazy person, but by his own lights he’s a well-meaning man. It’s just that his well-meaning actions involve multiple murders, and it’s only by a twist of fate that he guns down a house full of pimps and gangsters rather than putting a bullet through a Presidential candidate.

And that’s the scary thing about the film: Bickle is strangely sympathetic, for all his obvious psychosis. Who hasn’t felt alone and lost in the world? Who hasn’t felt scared by events around them or dangers unknown? Who hasn’t wondered “why don’t people like me”? We just deal with it a lot better than Bickle and his messianic sense of mission that he develops.

Bickle channels what human emotions he can muster or understand into ciphers he barely knows. These people become totems, or stalking targets, who he becomes persuaded must be “saved”. With Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy, the delusion is clear: here is a confident, career woman, independent and smart, for whom Bickle can feel an attraction but clearly no understanding at all beyond her being an object he cannot have. The awkwardness and later stunningly poor judgement and reactions he shows when around her mark him immediately as a weirdo and danger to others.

But the film’s smarts – and it has a terrific script by Paul Schrader, whose understanding of dark psyches was never better captured than here – is that these fixations have a totally different impact when targeted on a child prostitute. Suddenly, Bickle’s unwanted attentions have the air of righteousness, even though intellectually he makes no distinction between either Betsy or Jodie Foster’s Iris (a performance of staggering emotional maturity from an actress barely 12 at the time). For all Iris is clearly a victim of society and abuse (in a way Betsy isn’t), for Bickle she’s pretty much the same, someone he must ‘rescue’ – and from her pimp Sport (a disturbingly fey and incestuous turn from Harvey Keitel).

So Bickle takes up the guns, and eventually does what we all wish we could do sometimes. Because who hasn’t stood in front of the mirror and dreamed about saying “you talkin’ to me” to our enemies – the difference being most of us don’t fantasise about blowing them away, let alone actually go on to do it. De Niro’s brilliance is the chilling emptiness behind the exterior, the way he captures universal fears and doubts but shows us a character who has no personality of his own but only collects titbits from those around him (like his would-be murderous passenger – played by Scorsese himself – who eagerly talks about how he wishes he could murder his cheating wife).

So the violence comes – and it is horrific – as Bickle shoots up a lowlife prostitute den with sickening graphicness (nothing this violent had really been seen before). But it’s only fate that has turned him away from his real target, Senator Palatine (George Lucas must have had this film in the back of his mind when naming his Evil Emperor!), reverting to his secondary target and killing a group of people far more acceptable to Joe Public to be wasted.

Scorsese’s genius final epilogue asks us questions about truth but also perceptions. The camera takes on a “God’s view” POV overhead shot as Bickle’s slaughter ends (and De Niro’s jerky, terminator like physicality here is stupendous), tracking back through the house. Is this his soul leaving a dying body? But then we flash forward and there is Bickle in the taxi again, hailed as a hero by society for rescuing the girl – the same society that would have condemned him as psychopath if he had taken his first target. He even gets a sympathetic conversation with Betsy.

But he hasn’t changed. And the world hasn’t changed. And Bickle may be a hero now but the same dark impulses still ride within him – and they will, the film suggests, lead him to kill again. Scorsese’s film is a masterpiece of alienation and disaffection, a brilliant analysis of what makes a killer kill – and how vagaries of fate can see us miss the signs – with a wonderful script and a superb performance from De Niro, a landmark turn that manages to tap into such existential fears we all have on our place in the world that we completely miss we are starting to relate to a psychopath. Dark and brilliant, a landmark.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the perfect partnership in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Director: George Roy Hill

Cast: Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy), Robert Redford (The Sundance Kid), Katharine Ross (Etta Place), Strother Martin (Percy Garris), Henry Jones (Bike Salesman), Jeff Corey (Sheriff Bledsoe), George Furth (Woodcock), Cloris Leachman (Agnes), Ted Cassidy (Harvey Logan), Kenneth Mars (Marshal)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a monster hit in 1969. It struck cinematic gold by combining Newman (originally first choice for the Sundance Kid) and Redford (fourth choice at best after Jack Lemmon – and what a different film that would have been! – Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen) and got the tone just about spot on between old school charm and hit 1960’s chic. It reinvents no wheels, but it’s a prime slice of classic Hollywood entertainment.

In the dying days of the Old West, the Hole in the Wall Gang is finding trade tough. The banks are wising up to how easy they are to rob, and the new idea of holding up trains is fraught with danger. Not least from the powerful backers who don’t like to see their money and goods being half-inched off the tracks by a gang of desperados. The leader of the gang, affable, fun-loving Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and his sidekick sardonic ace-shot the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) continue to ply their trade of stealing, but they are fighting a losing battle. Hounded out of the states by a crack squad of lawman they make their way to Bolivia – but find the life of crime isn’t easier there either, what with no one speaking English and the Bolivian army being even more trigger happy than the American law and order forces. What’s a couple of guys to do?

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is really a celebration of nostalgia, repackaged with a wry sense of 60s cool that merrily seizes on its lead characters as the sort of anti-authoritarian, free-spirited, jokers who were bucking the rules of Vietnam-era America. But fundamentally at heart, it’s a joke filled sad reflection on a lost America and a lost sense of freedom – even if it was the freedom for two basically decent guys to make a living from robbing banks – that even shoots most of its opening segment in a romantic sepia. 

Because this is all about Butch and Sundance being two guys left behind by progress. Their way of life is dying out around them – the opening sequence sees Butch walk around a new bank, with its impressive new security measures. What happened to the beautiful old bank? Asks Butch: “People kept robbing it” comes the cold response. This follows on from a recreation of old sepia newsreal footage that states that the entire membership of the Hole in the Wall Gang is now dead – meaning that we know where the film is heading from day one. It’s a world where the train and modern communications are leaving our heroes behind. Even the humble bicycle is a sign of the future – “the horse is dead!” crows a bike salesman to a crowd of red necks.

The film may be cool and whipper-sharp in its style and the characterisation of its lead characters, but it’s a firmly nostalgic film that sentimentalises the Wild West and our heroes. No wonder at its conclusion it freeze frames (famously) as the heroes charge out to certain death in a shoot-out with the Bolivian army. It’s like Hill can’t bear seeing these guys torn apart ala Bonnie and Clyde or The Wild Bunch by the cold hard truth of a bullet. 

The film makes an interesting comparison with The Wild Bunch released the same year. In many ways the latter is a more traditional western, both in its style and its content. But in every other way it’s a far more radical piece, really embracing the lack of rules, the cruelty and the lack of glamour of life in the west – and ending with its heroes being shot to pieces on screen in a prolonged bloody shoot out that set a new record for use of squibs. Compared to this, Butch Cassidy is very light stuff, with its final image almost hopeful in its sepia toned romanticism.

Not that it’s not entertaining for all that. Its sense of sixties defiance is perfectly captured in the film’s lightness and playfulness – and in the fine lines and gags in William Goldman’s well structured (and Oscar winning) script. From its opening lines “Most of what follows is true” through the offbeat wisecracks of its lead, it’s a lot of fun. Newman and Redford are both just about perfect. Newman is the very picture of relaxed, casual cool while Redford’s style of handsame smartness works perfectly for the more plugged in Sundance. The two of them also form a very swinging sixties sexfree-Thruple with Katharine Ross as Sundance’s girlfriend, but essentially a companion to both men.

Not that Etta isn’t aware that the good times are coming to end. She makes it clear she won’t stick around to watch them die, and when (late in the film) she announces she will return to the US, it’s a clear sign to everyone that things are near the end. But then Butch and Sundance have already faced the cold realities, as an attempt to go straight protecting bank money from robbers see them gun down a group of bandits (the first real bloodshed in the film), an action that leaves them both slightly stunned.

It’s very different from the hijinks of the film’s first three quarters. The two of them spend a chunk of the film trying to evade the lawmen chasing them, each attempt failing, ending in them making a desperate jump off a cliff into water (because no one would follow unless they had to) and even their early career robbing banks in Bolivia is hampered by their inability to speak Spanish (cue a series of lessons from Eta on the rudiments of larceny in Spanish). The film’s lightness and warmth early on lies behind its popularity.

Butch Cassidy is a film that is designed to please and for you to love it. It has two fine actors giving superbly entertaining performances. It has some wonderful scenes, not least the introduction of each character, two superb scenes (Butch’s facing down of a challenge against his leadership of the gang is a scene so good I don’t think the film bests it). But Hill’s film is also a cosy and safe picture, that drips with sentimentality towards its leads and nostalgia for its era. It’s successful because it’s such an unchallenging and safe film.