Category: Film about friendship

The Westerner (1940)

Entertaining but unspectacular Western fun as odd-couple friends turn rivals

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Gary Cooper (Cole Harden), Walter Brennan (Judge Roy Bean), Doris Davenport (Jane Ellen Matthews), Fred Stone (Caliphet Mathews), Forrest Tucker (Wade Harper), Paul Hurst (Chickenfoot), Chill Wills (Southeast), Lilian Bond (Lillie Langtry), Dana Andrews (Hod Johnson)

In 1882, Cole Harden (Gary Cooper) arrives in the town of Vinegaroon in Texas. The town is ruled by “Judge” Roy Bean (Walter Brennan), a corrupt, self-proclaimed justice of the land, who collects unfair fines and hands out “suspended sentences” (i.e. hangings). Nearly hanged, Harden escapes by peddling a story of his (fake) friendship with Lillie Langtry, the obsessive focus of Bean’s love. Over time the two men find themselves drawn to each other, forming a friendship – which is challenged by Bean’s favouring the violent cattle ranchers over the homesteaders.

The Westerner is a well-constructed, decent old-style Western that doesn’t do anything particularly radical – as if those making it needed a bit of downtime between more demanding projects, so put together something quite enjoyable to fill their time. It’s nominally a film about the clash between cowboys and homesteaders, but this plotline actually gets very little play – and is pretty unclear.

What it really is, is a sort of romance between Harden and Bean. They are two people surprisingly drawn together, who have a similar outlook on the world, and share a very natural and immediate bond. They have very real chemistry. In fact their chemistry is so strong there is barely room for anyone else to get a look in.

So the film is a sort of bromance tragedy, because of course it’s clear that they will end up on opposite sides. Because Bean has principles of control which Harden cannot allow to stand. Because the same instincts that lead Bean to champion the cowboys, are the same ones that lead Harden to champion the homesteaders. Both men think that they are basically in the right. The main difference between them is probably that, if push comes to shove, Bean would rather win than be right, while Harden is more concerned with meeting his moral standards than anything else.

Wyler brings all this together with professional crispness, shooting the action and more chamber-piece moments with skill. He draws a real playfulness from Brennan and Cooper – could many other directors have thought about including a scene where Cooper wakes up slightly confused in a bed with Brennan’s arm around him after a night of drinking? Confrontations throughout the film have a playful edge to them, even when guns are on the table. Even the final gun fight between the two has a reluctant edge to it, as if this was a game with a few more consequences than normal.

The bond between Bean and Harden is so strong, and so central to the film, that the relationship between Harden and Jane Ellen Mathews never quite clicks into gear. There is a charming scene where Cooper (with an honest flirtatiousness) cuts a lock of Jane Ellen’s hair – but the film isn’t really interested in this relationship. It feels like it exists for plot and scripting reasons – that the writers felt a romantic plot was needed, and wanted to give Harden a very clear personal motivation above and beyond his sense of justice. Doris Davenport is fine as Jane Ellen, but it’s not a performance you really remember.

Gary Cooper is rather good as Cole Harden, despite his reluctance to do the film. Cooper identified that Brennan had the best role and the best lines, and felt that he would actually be playing the support rather than the lead. Contractual obligation got him into the film. And it’s a good thing, as Cooper is actually very good. He has a light comedic touch which you don’t often associate with him, which he matches with his upright honesty and unflinching decency. But there is a playful grin behind his eyes throughout, and you get a real sense of his conflicting loyalties.

But Cooper was right – Judge Roy Bean is the role in this film, and Walter Brennan (who won his third supporting actor Oscar in five years for this) is quite simply terrific. His Bean is a wily, slightly crooked, maverick bully with a warped sense of personal justice – but he’s also a charming, rather sweet old man with a tough streak. The script gives a lot of focus to Bean’s obsessive love for the actress Lillie Langtry, which not only humanises him, but turns someone who we first see carrying out a ruthless judicial murder into some sort of teenage, love-struck rogue. That’s the genius here – Bean could be awful, but actually we (like Harden) end up loving him. Brennan’s effortlessly charismatic performance is central here – he is terrific in the role.

Take away these performances though and you probably only have flashes here and there of class alongside. Scenes are well constructed, and the entire film is very well filmed by the great Gregg Toland, but it’s very much a solid piece of professional work rather than a great classic. Brennan is brilliant and Cooper impressive, but not much more of the rest of the film really settles into the memory.

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

It’s a lesson in how not to spend your gap year in American Werewolf in London

Director: John Landis

Cast: David Naughton (David Kessler), Jenny Agutter (Alex Price), Griffin Dunne (Jack Goodman), John Woodvine (Dr Hirsch), Lila Kaye (Pub landlady), Frank Oz (Mr Collins), David Schofield (Dart Player), Brian Glover (Chess Player), Rik Mayall (2^nd Chess Player), Don McKillip (Inspector Villiers), Paul Kember (Sergeant McManus)

Horror and comedy are both extreme genres, on the edges of normality and are designed to provoke extreme reactions, of either terror or hilarity. So it’s often a bit of a surprise that more films haven’t attempted to put the two of them together. But that’s what John Landis does in An American Werewolf in London. You’ll laugh, you’ll scream, you’ll even cry a bit. You’ll probably also look away a few times. And you probably won’t want to go hiking straight after it.

David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) are two students backpacking through the English countryside. Taking shelter from the rain in a pub, The Slaughtered Lamb (pub sign a wolf’s head on a spike), they are swiftly intimidated by the locals and head back out – ignoring suggestions to keep on the road. Sure enough, they are attacked by a crazed wolf… Three weeks later David awakens in hospital, plagued with nightmares and visions of himself running through the forest. Could he be a werewolf? Falling in love with his nurse Alex (Jenny Agutter), he soon finds himself staying in her flat in London – just as the full moon rises…

AAWIL is a playful movie, with a grungy, college-humour to it. The jokes are often laugh-out loud funny, and the central characters are very engaging. As well as this the film is filled to the brim with blood, guts and slaughter. Guts fly, blood sprays. Landis gets the balance more or less spot-on between heightened humour and bloody slaughter – every bloody moment is followed by an excellent comic punchline, and just when the humour and romances start to get too much of a hold, you get a moment of shuddering violence. It’s also crammed with some great music – although in a terrible oversight there is no playing of Werewolves of London (if ever a song seemed written for a film…).

It’s best remembered for its influential werewolf transformation sequence. Rick Baker won the first Oscar for make-up for this tour-de-force at the film’s centre, which showpieces David’s painful looking transformation. This sequence has inspired every single werewolf transformation since, including David Thewlis’ in Harry Potter. Limbs stretch and distort. Hair springs up. His body arches and his spine practically snaps itself into new positions. His face distort, and the entire shape of the body changes. And of course it’s screamingly painful. The sequence hasn’t aged a day, and it’s still a marvel of make-up and practical effects.

Landis’ decision to largely shoot werewolves from POV or in flashes is a good one – when we get the animatronic wolf on the screen towards the end it is strikingly unconvincing and artificial looking, like a wobbily muppet. But for the bulk of it he makes these animals terrifying forces of nature. No wonder the creepy pub denizens are terrified of them.

The opening pub sequence is a masterpiece of small village aggression. Who hasn’t gone into a pub like this and felt like the room went silent as soon as you entered? The actors here revel in these hostile villagers, not least Brian Glover as a domineering loudmouth and David Schofield as a sinister darts player. It also brilliantly shows from the start that David and Jack are fish out of water – stuck adrift in a land they don’t quite understand, with a condition they don’t really seem to be completely aware of.

Not that it’s all bad for David, as he gets a steamy love-affair with Jenny Agutter’s alluring Alex, every geeky college boy’s dream of a gap-year love affair. Sure the bond between them is rushed – and Alex alternates between being caring-and-observant and is actually fairly dim when the film demands it (Yeah David has come home naked over than a woman’s coat, having spent the night sleeping in a zoo and has no memory of the night – but nothing odd strikes her about his behaviour…) – but she still gives a cracking performance.

David Naughton balances the film very well as David – a geeky student, horny and almost wilfully ignoring what’s happening to him. Griffin Dunne possibly steals the show as Jack, a strange mixture of best friend, geeky off-the-cuff wit and giver of bitter-but-straight-forward advice (the make-up for Jack by the way is almost more impressive than the transformation itself).

American Werewolf in London is a bit of a (forgive me!) shaggy dog story. Structurally I’m not sure if it’s that great, as it tends to drift at times before a rush to the finishing line. The ending in particular is abrupt – not helped by a deliberately jarring final musical choice. It bowls along, but it’s so in love with its mix of horror and comedy that you never quite end up pulling for the romance at its centre as you should. I’m not sure John Woodvine was quite the right casting for the doctor investigating the werewolf phenomenon – he’s almost seems to feel as if he is above the picture. Landis gets some neat hits on British culture, but you can’t help but feel that there is more to be mined here – there isn’t quite enough American-British culture clash there to really sell David’s confusion.

It’s not a brilliant masterpiece – but it is very entertaining and crammed with striking scenes. Landis is playing around here – in fact he may be telling a massive joke, taking the piss out of monster movies while knocking slacker comedies by turning the slacker into a murderous monster. But it’s very good for all that – and for several key sequences alone you’ll find it hard to shake. It’s a film for late-night viewing and such a good mixture of comedy and extreme horror that it will always feel unique.

The Deadly Affair (1966)

James Mason deals with marital and professional deception and betrayal in spy thriller The Deadly Affair (in every meaning of the word!)

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: James Mason (Charles Dobbs), Maximilian Schell (Dieter Frey), Harriet Andersson (Ann Dobbs), Harry Andrews (Inspector Mendel), Simeone Signoret (Elsa Fennan), Kenneth Haigh (Bill Appleby), Roy Kinnear (Adam Scarr), Max Adrian (Adviser), Lynn Redgrave (Virgin), Robert Flemyng (Samuel Fennan), Corin Redgrave (David)

The Deadly Affair is a faithful adaptation of John Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, that first introduced to both Le Carré’s distinctive vision of espionage (a world where spying is a dirty, depressing business, miles away from Bond), and also his principal recurring hero George Smiley – although Smiley here is renamed Charles Dobbs (Paramount held the rights to several recurring Le Carré characters as it was making The Spy Who Came in From the Cold). The Deadly Affair often gets forgotten in the list of Le Carré films, which is unfair – this is a fine, gripping, character-led thriller.

Charles Dobbs (James Mason), a senior case officer in British intelligence, meets with Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng): a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, who has been anonymously accused of being a Russian agent. Dobbs all but agrees to clear Fennan in a friendly meeting – only for Fennan to go home and commit suicide. Dobbs investigates, but quickly finds that the facts – and the story of Fennan’s wife Elsa (Simone Signoret) – don’t seem to tie up. Working with retired police inspector Mendel (Harry Andrews), Dobbs investigates further – against the wishes of his superiors. This also helps to distract Dobbs from his disastrous home life with his serially unfaithful wife Ann (Harriet Andersson) and her growing closeness to his old war friend Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell).

The Deadly Affairhas an old-school, unflashy, Hollywood professionalism to it, very smoothly directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet and photographer Frederick A. Young slightly exposed each shot of the film to give the colours a drained, murky quality, which works extraordinarily well for the grimy Le Carré feeling. Lumet uses a series of careful POV and shot-reverse-shots to involve the audience neatly in the action – we are nearly always seeing events from someone’s perspective, and this helps us empathise with the characters and action. He also uses London locations expertly – everywhere is carefully chosen and shot for maximum impact, creating a world of dingy backstreets that perfectly matches the feeling of the story.

It also helps that Lumet changes very little from what was already an excellent source novel. It’s an intricate “whodunnit” puzzle, twisty and challenging enough to keep the audience guessing. What the film does really well is introduce Dobbs’ wife Ann as a central character in the storyline, and to make marital betrayal and deception a complementary subplot, alongside Dobbs’ involvement in the world of professional bluff and counter-bluff: during the day he practises the very same deception that pains him so much at home. (Le Carré would effectively lift some of the ideas of this film adaptation and reproduce them in later books, most especially Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy.)

This marital disharmony becomes a key theme in the movie – two people who are totally reliant on each other but can’t seem to stop hurting each other. Ann is in many ways the hellish wife – serially unfaithful and largely unrepentant – but Dobbs is equally difficult, unnervingly patient and silently (but never vocally or perhaps even consciously) judgemental. They have a complex arrangement, but also a clear understanding of each other, and their conversations sound like careful, familiar routines. Like a scab, Dobbs keeps picking at this wound of his wife’s infidelity – early in the film he returns home after a late call out to find his wife naked in bed. She rises to greet him provocatively, and they kiss, but Dobbs seemingly can’t let go of his own sense of impotence. Later Ann demands Dobbs expresses some rage and jealousy – as if looking for him to show some sort of feeling.

It’s a neat sub-plot for a film that focuses on a series of major personal and professional betrayals – I counted no fewer than five over the course of the film but there are probably more depending on how you define it – and which shows how spying can become wrapped up in personal affairs. Despite Dobbs’ apparent pride at treating his work with a determined coolness, everything is so very personal in this film. Characters react often with emotions rather than cool rational thinking – with the exception of one character who uses the emotions of others very rationally to manipulate them. Even the final confrontation of the film has a sad loss of emotional control at the centre of it – and leads to actions bitterly regretted by the survivors.

James Mason is very good as Dobbs, buttoned-up but slightly run-down, a man who presents a face of calm control and wisdom to the world, but at home is an insecure, deeply pained, impotent mess. Determined and principled in the world of espionage, he is hopelessly in love with his wife, to the extent of practically allowing her free rein to do as she wishes. Despite being in nearly every scene, it’s also a very generous performance, quiet and unshowy, that often cedes the scene to his partners. Harriet Andersson (though clearly dubbed) manages to make Ann someone who feels sympathetic and understandable – even though she is a colossal pain.

Lumet also gets some wonderful performances from the rest of the cast, not least from Harry Andrews who I think steals the movie as a narcoleptic Inspector Mendel, obsessed with facts and possessed of a dry professionalism. The film also gives a gift of a role to Simeone Signoret, a woman with a troubled past and indeterminate motives, bubbling with guilt and resentment. She is given no less than three tour-de-force scenes (one played almost in complete silence) and plays each brilliantly. There are neat cameos as well from Max Adrian (as a campy popinjay running Dobbs’ department) and Lynn Redgrave as an eager stagehand for an amateur theatre company with some vital evidence.

The film’s conclusion revolves around two masterfully done sequences: one during a performance of Edward II (by the real Royal Shakespeare Company – spot several familiar actors on stage), the second an emotional confrontation at a dock that erupts into violence. It’s a wonderful dwelling on betrayal and its impacts. It also works an absolute treat as a low-key counterpart to Bond at his Swinging Sixties height, while still packing a jazzy score from Quincy Jones (which at first seems completely incongruous but actually helps to establish the mood really well). Directed with professional assurance with a host of fine performances – it’s a little bit of an overlooked gem.

Double Indemnity (1944)

Barbara Stanwyck is the dark force beyond Fred MacMurray in Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Fred MacMurray (Walter Neff), Barbara Stanwyck (Phyllis Dietrichson), Edward G. Robinson (Barton Keyes), Porter Hall (Mr Jackson), Jean Heather (Lola Dietrichson), Tom Powers (Mr Dietrichson), Bryon Barr (Nina Zachett), Richard Gaines (Edward Norton)

In the wake of the Second World War, morally complex and dark (in every sense of the word) stories spoke to a nation coming to terms with what it had been through. Out of this was born a new genre: film noir. Double Indemnity might just be the best example and one of Billy Wilder’s best films.

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is a bored insurance salesman, smitten with the sexually alluring Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), wife of a potential client. When she suggests that, with his help, they could get rid of her husband and collect a massive insurance payout on his death, Neff is quickly won over. But murder is a hard thing to get away with – particularly when Neff’s colleague and close friend Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson), the best investigator in the business, smells something amiss in the ‘accident’.

Double Indemnity is one of those films that it’s easy to forget was as influential as it was, precisely because it’s narrative and filmic techniques have been so comprehensively imitated in a host of films since. But imagine: this was one of the very first real film noirs. It was one of the first films that used shadows and darkness as effectively as this to reflect mood and atmosphere. It was the one of the first films to use a femme fatale as prominently (and unapologetically) as this. It’s also one of the first films where sex permeates almost everything you see in the picture.

Phyllis is a woman who understands the power of sensuality, who is well aware of how she can use her body and aloof mystery to get what she wants out of men. But even more than that, Stanwyck’s wonderfully cold performance suggests she hardly seems to care about anything at all: in fact the impression is almost that she is locked into moving forward, passing through husbands and lovers, leaving men dead on the wayside. That’s the magic of Stanwyck in this film: can you remember a character as unremittingly, unapologetically sinful, manipulative and conscience-free as this?

Of course Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff is the perfect rube for this fiercely intelligent and determined woman. MacMurray’s slight B-movie blandness – his lack of star quality, his everyday, folky unimaginativeness – is perfect for the overconfident, slightly smarmy, laziness of Neff. It’s never said outright, but you suspect that the attraction of the danger Phyllis offers is escape from his own dull life. Does he love Phyllis? I would say almost certainly not – but is he horny for her? You better believe it. It’s a man on the cusp of a mid-life crisis getting a chance to throw himself into a sex-driven affair.

What do these two think of each other? Both of them seem barely capable of trusting each other, using sex and flirting almost as a filler between bouts of mutual suspicion. Does she care for him even a little behind her use of him? And does he feel anything like a bond with her inbetween the bouts of sex? They stumble so quickly into the plan that it almost feels like they are going through the motions – she is so used to manipulation and murder, it’s all she knows; he is so bored with his life that the excitement of violence and murder with his sex seems impossible to resist.

And Wilder lets sex run through this whole film. From Phyllis’ long descent down her flight of stairs at her first entrance to the irresistible anklet, everything about Stanwyck in this film is about the power of her sex. The dialogue exchanges between Neff and Phyllis crackle with magnetism. Later, Wilder skilfully shoots a sex scene without showing a thing: we cut from the two of them kissing on a sofa, to their positions shifted, Phyllis fixing her dress and Neff reclining smoking.

It helps that the dialogue is scintillating. Each exchange is packed with crackling and quotable lines. You get a perfect marriage here between Wilder’s acerbic cynicism and dry wit, and Raymond Chandler’s arch, spiky, carefully constructed dialogue, with its gritty poetry. I mean just watch the exchange here – perfection.

And they write some knock-out speeches too – but then you would if you had an actor as brilliant as Edward G. Robinson to deliver them.

Neff’s voiceover uses the technique where it should be used – not to tell us information any well informed viewer can already work out for themselves, but to allow us insight into Neff himself and his situation, that complements and develops our appreciation of the picture (it’s also beautifully well delivered by MacMurray). I’d also add it’s the same conceit as Sunset Boulevard – its lead character narrates the film mortally wounded – and it works just as well here, stressing the disaster that hangs over every action by our anti-heroes.

Added to this, the film looks beautiful. The shadows have an all-consuming inky depth. Cinematographer John Seitz is not afraid of turning the lights down and down, and the darkness absorbs and consumes the whole picture. It allows striking lighting effects – the blinds that seem to be in every room allow slits of light through them that draw lines across the faces and bodies of the actors (as many viewers have commented, it also has the effect of making half the characters appear like they are behind bars). The darkness looms in from the corners of the frame, trapping the leads into the action – and into their own disastrous decisions.

Wilder’s skilful camera placement is what makes this film really work. He presents action constantly in challenging and different ways, never doing the expected. During the actual murder (committed while Phyllis drives), the camera never looks at Neff committing the crime, but closely follows the look of almost sensual satisfaction on Phyllis’ face: she never once looks at what is happening in the seat next to her, but her face makes us experience the killing in an even more disturbingly intimate way than watching it would be.

But what makes this film truly brilliant and unique is that its main relationship isn’t even the one you expect. Neff and Phyllis may have an electric physical relationship, but the real romance in the film is between Neff and his colleague Keyes. These two share a deeply close and personal bond. Theirs is a friendship that skirts around a platonic romance – made sharper of course as Keyes is the only man who stands a chance of working out what exactly is going on. There is a fine visual motif throughout of Neff lighting matches (with his thumb!) for Keyes – a gesture that feels both manly and intimate.

Keyes is played by a career-best Edward G. Robinson. Robinson blazes through the big speeches – but with a confident skill that never makes them feel like showboating moments. He gives Keyes an eccentric brilliance, mixed with a delicate humanism. To be that good at sniffing out wrongdoing and deceit from his fellow men, you can’t help feeling that he must have a pretty good idea about what human fallibility feels like. It’s this warm human understanding that Robinson does so brilliantly. It’s also what helps to make this relationship so moving. It’s hard not to share the obvious awkward discomfort MacMurray gives to Neff when he feels as if he is letting down his friend, and betraying the trust between them.

It’s this that makes Double Indemnity stand out. It’s a film that’s actually about the relationship between two men – part friendship, part father-and-son, part romantic – their love for each other, which happens to have an irresistible femme fatale thrown into the middle. It feels like a very unique and different approach – a touch of Wilder magic if you will – that makes the film stand out. It’s also what lies behind the link it has with audiences, the human interest that makes you come back again and again to this film about two ruthless killers.

This is a film in which everyone was at their best. MacMurray never did anything again to match it, Stanwyck seized the part with such commitment that she spawned countless imitators, Robinson is just magnificent. Wilder’s direction is perfect, the film looks ravishing, the script is to die for. Double Indemnity may not only be the most influential film noir ever. It might also be the best.

Donnie Brasco (1997)

Pacino and Depp deliver low-key, carefully controlled, sensitive performances: how often do you get to write that?

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Al Pacino (Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero), Johnny Depp (Joseph Pistone/Donnie Brasco), Michael Madsen (Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano), Bruno Kirby (Nicky Santora), Anne Heche (Maggie Pistone), James Russo (“Paulie” Cersani), Željko Ivanek (Tim Curley), Gerry Becker (Dean Blandford), Robert Miano (Al “Sonny Red” Indelicato), Tim Blake Nelson, Paul Giamatti (FBI Technicians)

The Mafia film genre is a crowded market, so it’s a brave film maker who enters it with something a little different. But we get that with Donnie Brasco, which focuses on the bottom rungs of the Mafia ladder, suggesting that being a low-ranking member of “this thing of ours” is in many ways quite similar to being a corporate drone in the big city, only with more killing.

Joseph Pistone aka Donnie Brasco (Johnny Depp) is an undercover FBI agent, infiltrating the New York Mafia. He wins the trust of “Lefty” Ruggiero (Al Pacino), a Mafia hitman. Drawn deeper into the Mafia world, the pressure builds on Pistone/Brasco, who slowly becomes more and more indistinguishable from the criminals he spends his time with – and feels guilty about the deadly fate Lefty will meet if the Mafia discover he inadvertently introduced a rat into the family.

Newell’s film (from Paul Attanasio’s excellent script) is a dry deconstruction of the gangster life, bringing it closer to the grind of the 9-5. The criminals put in long hours to earn the income they need to push up to those above them. Class distinctions abound – in one scene, Sonny Black (a good performance of ambition and resentment from Michael Madsen) forces a smile onto his face while mob bosses laugh openly at his dress sense. Lefty whines like a mule about everything from his lack of recognition to how put-upon he is (never has a mantra about 26 hits over a lifetime sounded more like complaints about constant filing requests). He could easily be mistaken half the time for a harrassed office junior who never made the grade. When violence comes, it’s sudden, graphic, confused and brutal – a hit in a basement goes far from smoothly with one victim struggling for his life while another screams in pain.

On the other hand, the gangsters are also suggested to be maladjusted teens who never grew up. The more time Donnie spends with them, the less and less capable he becomes of relating to (or even communicating with) his wife and family. The gangsters have a routine lack of empathy for each other and treat the rules of “our thing” like a boys’ clubhouse. Many of their actions have an ill-thought-out juvenility to them: Sonny at one point steals a lion for Lefty as a gift – in a bizarre scene immediately afterwards, Lefty and Donnie feed it hamburgers through the window while it sits in the back seat of Donnie’s car. On a work-trip in Florida, the gangsters behave like kids – mucking around in the pool, delightedly going down waterflumes, burying Lefty in the sand on the beach while he sleeps. Even Lefty is overcome like a star-struck teen when meeting a famed Florida boss.

It’s not surprising that Donnie and Lefty, both outsiders in a way, are drawn together as kindred spirits in this strange, unbalanced world. Donnie obviously is an FBI agent, but Lefty is a world-weary old-timer, with a sense of honour who seems (apart from his ease with killing and violence) to be the most “normal” of the gangsters. The film is a careful construction of the growth of loyalty between these characters – particularly the slow development of Donnie’s feelings of genuine friendship towards Lefty. What’s effective is that this is a gradual process without a definable key moment. Instead, it becomes rather touching as Donnie starts to avoid moving closer to better “contacts” in order to remain close to Lefty. Donnie Brasco might be one of the few films that really gets a type of male friendship, and the unspoken emotional bonds that underpin them.

Perhaps the best things about Donnie Brasco are the two wonderful performances we get from actors who never knowlingly underplay. Watching this and Ed Wood is a reminder of the actor Johnny Depp could have been, before clowning in Pirates of the Caribbean seemed to shatter his focus. Brasco/Pistone is a brilliantly low-key presentation of a fractured personality. At first, the differentiation between the two personalities is distinct and clear – but as the film progresses, Depp allows the two to almost c/ollapse into each other. Everything from his body language to his manner of speaking slowly repositions itself as he becomes more consumed by the gangster world. Depp is also very good at not losing track of Pistone’s horror at murder and violence, while allowing the Brasco persona to take part in its aftereffects. The quiet building of guilt in his eyes at the fate he is creating for Lefty is also gently underplayed, making it more effective.

However, this is Al Pacino’s movie. It’s certainly Pacino’s last great performance: with the added frisson that he’s Michael Corleone demoted to the bottom rung of the ladder, Pacino is magnetic. Lefty is a put-upon whiner, who still has a charisma of his youth that draws Donnie (and others) in. A man of strong moral principles, who treats Donnie with a fatherly regard, uncomfortable with much of the ostentation of his fellow gangsters, he’s also a ruthless killer who blithely shrugs off his killing of an old friend. All Pacino’s bombast is only rarely deployed for impact – instead Lefty is a low-key, almost sad figure, whose chance in life has passed by.

One extraordinary scene late on deserves particular mention. I won’t spoil things too much, but Lefty prepares to leave the house after a phone call full of bad news. Carefully, sadly, he smartens himself up then returns (after saying goodbye to his wife) to gently remove his valuables and leave them in a drawer for his wife – he even carefully leaves the drawer ajar so she can find it. Setting himself before leaving the house, he takes a small look around. It’s a beautifully gentle scene, which could be overloaded with meaning from another actor, but Pacino plays it with such quiet but intense focus, and such careful precision it works brilliantly. Take a look at the scene here (warning spoilers!)

Newell’s strength as an actor’s director is apparent in all the performances, and Donnie Brasco is a film of many wonderful scenes and moments. The film never loses track of the danger of undercover heart – and several striking scenes have Pistone close to being discovered. The film is not perfect: the aim of the FBI investigation, and the impact Donnie’s work are never really made clear and the scenes involving Pistone’s homelife feel far more predictable and conventional than the rest of the movie (Anne Heche has a thankless part). But when it focuses on the two leads, and their dynamism together, it’s a damn fine film. It’s not going to challenge Goodfellas as a story of low-key hoods, but it’s certainly a worthy addition to cinema’s mafia films.