Tag: Gene Hackman

Superman II (1980)

An odd mish-mash of styles and strange jumps in logic make this a less successful sequel

Director: Richard Lester

Cast: Christopher Reeve (Clark Kent/Superman), Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor), Ned Beatty (Otis), Jackie Cooper (Perry White), Sarah Douglas (Ursa), Margot Kidder (Lois Lane), Jack O’Halloran (Non), Valerie Perrine (Eve Teschmacher), Maria Schell (Vond-Ah), Terence Stamp (General Zod), Susannah York (Lara), Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen), EG Marshall (President), Clifton James (Sheriff)

Superman started with Brando’s Jor-El condemning Kryptonian criminals General Zod (Terence Stamp) and his sidekicks Ursa (Sarah Douglas) and Non (Jack O’Halloran) to ‘living death’ in the Phantom Zone. Decades later, Superman (Christopher Reeve) accidentally releases them by deflecting a Parisian Hydrogen bomb into space. They arrive on Earth with the same powers as Superman, hell bent on revenge. Unfortunately, Superman is unaware of this, whiling away time in the Fortress of Solitude with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) who has learned his identity. Sacrificing his powers to live a normal life, how will he stop the world’s population “kneeling before Zod”.

Superman II was to be filmed simultaneously with Superman. At least that was the idea. But as producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s tenuous control of finances spun further and further out of control, efforts refocused on finishing the first one. When that was a hit, work was due to re-start on Part 2. That’s where the trouble began. The Salkind’s relationship with director Richard Donner was already heavily on the rocks. Further disputes over the tone of the sequel – Donner claimed he wanted a serious film and that the Salkinds wanted a kid-friendly, gag-heavy chortle – led to Donner’s sudden sacking and replacement with the Salkind’s favourite director, Richard Lester.

To say the style of these two didn’t mesh would be an understatement. Donner was all about making the high-blown and ridiculous feel full of po-faced seriousness (you could say self-importance). Richard Lester, on the other hand, was the man who turned Juggernaut, a film about a murderous bomber, into a work-place black comedy. Any film that used an odd combination of both man’s material was probably doomed to be a Frankenstein’s monster, neither one thing or another.

That’s pretty much what Superman II is. In many ways, with Lester taking over 75% of the way through – and then looping back and re-shooting several scenes to ensure he had directed over 60% of the film and guarantee (after Donner refused to take any credit) that the film would have someone as a credited director – it’s a miracle it makes any sense at all. As it is, the tone varies wildly at times from scene-to-scene: a prat fall gets followed by a death, a romantic riff by a mortal threat. From it’s Parisian opening with its incompetent bombers (one of whom is played by Richard Griffiths of all people), through to its goofy comedy as villains trash a mid-Western town, each set piece is two thirds drama to one third farce. In addition, the long break in filming means the actor’s appearance switches and changes frequently and important plot developments suddenly spring out of nowhere.

A lot of that came from contract disputes. Original top-billed star Marlon Brando was suing the Salkinds, convinced they were stiffing him on his 11.75% box office share from Superman. Since Brando was entitled to the same share of this film if he appeared in it, every single frame of him was cut. Which would have been fine – if Brando’s Jor-El hadn’t been pivotal to a de-powered Superman regaining his powers. Lester had already re-shot several Fortress of Solitude scenes with the more amenable (and cheaper) Susannah York taking over as tutoring hologram. Clearly, they ran out-of-time – or just didn’t think anyone would care enough – about also getting her to reshoot a scene to take the place of the last vestige of Jor-El in the Fortress’ computer erasing itself to restore Clark’s powers. Instead, Clark just gets them back off-camera, no problem.

There are touches of this throughout the film. Hackman had refused to return after Donner’s firing, his scenes all too obviously finished by a stand-in with his back to the camera while another actor gives a nearly-but-not-quite impersonation of Hackman on the soundtrack. Several times scenes with Hackman suddenly stop, which feels odd – and then you realise they were impossible to finish. It also means poor Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine also fade into the background or disappear (presumably because it would have been hard to do her scenes with the camera fixed behind a double’s back).

The thrown-together madness of the film can be seen in the bizarre story. Zod’s entire time on Earth seems to take place more-or-less in real time: arriving, terrorising a small town, capturing the White House. Meanwhile, Clark and Lois romance at Niagara Falls on a very poorly explained journalistic sting operation (including an embarrassing pre-fame Antony Sher as a lascivious hotel bellboy) and retire to the Fortress for a night of passion, a depowering and then travel from the North Pole to America (by boat and car presumably!), presumably all in the same day. You can’t blame the staff at the diner they stop at being flabbergasted at how many world-shattering events they’ve missed.

As to be expected, Donner’s grand, Fordian vision is sacrificed to Lester’s love for sight gags. Donner sure wouldn’t have used Zod and crew creating a mighty wind to blow away a Metropolis mob as an opportunity for ice cream cones, wigs and hen-picked husbands clutching telephones to be swept away. Throughout, people are forever crashing into puntastic advertising boardings or (a classic Lester touch) letting loose little muttered asides we only half catch. He even ropes in Clifton James to repeat his JW Pepper from James Bond performance in all but name.

That final Metropolis fight is still impressive in places, despite its obvious sound-stage setting – it’s important to remember it’s the first time anything like this was ever attempted on screen. The actors work hard to maintain a sense of menace and danger from our villains, despite the odd dorky moment. One decision that works extremely well, is Stamp’s underplaying of Zod as a perpetually unimpressed aristocrat, almost immediately bored by his God-like powers. By not straining hard for laughs, Stamp is frequently the funniest thing in the film (and its most memorable performer).

Reeve and Kidder do their best, but the film gives them considerably less to play with. Largely because their relationship feels very rushed, Clark’s decision to de-power himself coming almost from nowhere and lacking any real explanation for why it’s necessary, and neither the script or character being quite nimble enough to not make both Clark and Lois’ reaction to his being duffed up in a bar fight feel like two people who suddenly feel like in losing Superman they’ve got the raw end of the deal.

Superman II powers itself on with a dorky sense of energy, but really it’s a bizarre hotchpotch of the grand and mighty and the ludicrous and silly, that frequently tries to put both in the same scene at the same time. Not surprisingly, it means a film that’s half Donner and half Lester ends up feeling much worse than if it had been made alone by either one of them. Which is not to say either of those films would have any good either.

Superman (1978)

First of the Superhero genre, a light and gentle film with simple black-and-white morality but very charming

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Christopher Reeve (Clark Kent/Superman), Marlon Brando (Jor-El), Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor), Ned Beatty (Otis), Jackie Cooper (Perry White), Glenn Ford (Jonathan Kent), Trevor Howard (First Elder), Margot Kidder (Lois Lane), Jack O’Halloran (Non), Valerie Perrine (Eve Teschmacher), Maria Schell (Vond-Ah), Terence Stamp (General Zod), Phyllis Thaxter (Martha Kent), Susannah York (Lara), Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen), Sarah Douglas (Ursa), Harry Andrews (Second Elder)

You’ll believe a man can fly! That was Superman’s punchy tagline for one of the first major attempts to bring a comic book hero to the screen. It’s also a landmark in special effects: after all the Man of Steel could fly faster than sound around the world, catch bullets, throw giant objects into space – he was going to need a mega special effects budget to do that. And of course, he would need an epic cinema screen to do it in, something producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind were determined to supply, with no expense spared (or, it seems, controlled) back stage, as a host of top-flight Hollywood hands were bought on board, led by Brando (picking up a record fee and 11% of the gross) for a first act cameo as Superman’s Dad Jor-El.

Superman’s plot tried to balance comic book lore, with some Earth-bound heroics to put our hero through his paces as he gently works out who and what he is. Sent to our world as a baby by his doting parents (Brando and Susannah York) with their world Krypton doomed to destruction, he’s adopted in the Mid-West by the Kents. Growing up and discovering his past, Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) joins the Daily Planet as a plucky, mild-mannered reporter under lead investigator Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) – who he quickly gets a crush on (and who has a crush on Superman). While he saves people left, right and centre, criminal mastermind Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) plans to fracture the San Andreas fault in the most hostile landgrab ever. Can Superman stop him?

Superman is structured into four clear acts and is all about putting into place the sort of thing fans of the comic book would have remembered from back-in-the-day. From the prologue in Krypton (including an extended set-up for the sequel, which was being shot simultaneously), via Clark’s teenage years, his arrival in Metropolis and the final San Andreas fault wrestling of the finale that sees Superman swooping around the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam, every act rolls with heartfelt, comic book thrills from moment to moment. It’s all very light-weight – the villains, for all their dastardly plans, are goofy and any tragedy never really sticks when Superman can fly fast enough to turn back time – but there is also a gloriously old-fashioned innocence and decency about it.

Donner’s film goes for a mix between a David Lean-ish epicness, with sweeping Western vistas, soaring camerawork through the skies and Space Opera grandness, mixed with a screwball His Girl Friday aesthetic at the Daily Planet with Lois Lane as a fast-talking, story-fixated journo (like Rosalind Russell, only with more hanging off the side of dangling helicopters) and Clark Kent as a dopey, aw shucks mix of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. There is a nice screwball romance between Reeve and Kidder and surprisingly the two moods of the film hang together extremely well, aided enormously by John Williams’ epic score, whose fanfares stir just the right level of heroic wonder as Clark spins in phoneboxes from awkward Clark to unstoppable Superman.

It’s also a huge tribute to Christopher Reeve, who is both charmingly light and funny but also hugely endearing. It’s very easy to make someone so gosh darn perfect as Superman rather wearing. After all, the guy is scrupulously polite to everyone, never holds a grudge, always has a nice word to say and is as untainted by temptation as he is unbeatable in any situation. Basically, Superman is a character it’s very easy to get wrong, but Reeve leans into the everyday simplicity and humbleness. Clark Kent is essentially Superman exactly, but with his bashful earnestness dialled up and his resolute bravery carefully concealed. It’s a performance that really works.

It’s also a performance that plays only third fiddle in the billing. Which is to be expected in a Salkind film: these guys loved a big name. After all, they commissioned Mario Puzo to write the script because he was the most famous writer in the world. Donner called that script camp beyond belief (he claimed he didn’t use a word of it), constantly positioning the film in a more serious light. As befitted the high-brow crew, not least Geoffrey Unsworth as photographer. Top billing went to Brando, reading from cue cards as Jor-El, loaning the crystal set and glowing costumes his reputational seal of approval, while a host of classical actors (Howard, Andrews, Schell, York) flit around the edges as loomingly serious heads intoning grandiose lines.

Second billing went to Hackman as Lex Luthor who, like Brando, did the film as quickly as possible for a large pile of dollars. He dials up the comic ridiculousness as a foppish Lex Luthor. Not keen on shaving his hair (only briefly does he pop up a bald cap on), Hackman bounces comically exasperated dialogue off dim sidekicks Ned Beatty (even more OTT) and Valerie Perrine (giving good air-head glamour) and channels his inner used car salesman. Luthor of course isn’t really threatening at all – even if he does plan to kill millions – which feels about right for a film as playful and hopeful as this one.

He still causes enough havoc, requiring Superman to repair it with a neat mix of wire-work, model work and impressive miniatures, all put together with plenty of fast pace, awe-inspiring energy. Superman’s real enemy effectively becomes time itself – can he race around the world fast enough to save millions, fix the Fault and fish Lois Lane from deathly peril? – which also works very well for a film that positions the Man of Steel as a champion of decency, democracy and community spirit. Reeve gets a well-played moment of emotional torment in this, before the film settles back into its groove of gentle, crowd-pleasing reassurance that nothing really bad will happen.

Superman isn’t exactly a masterpiece. The flimsy lightness of the plot and it fast paced bounding from event to event makes it feel like a comic serial bought to life, where cause and effect aren’t necessarily important to understand. But it’s got a genuine sense of warmth and gentleness to it that perhaps explains why it made such an impact on those watching it. So much so, that every version of the character that followed on film would share major DNA with Reeve and Donner’s vision. I guess they really did make a whole generation of young filmmakers believe that a man could fly.

Night Moves (1975)

A private detective out of his depth in this excellent 70s conspiracy-thriller tinged noir detective drama

Director: Arthur Penn

Cast: Gene Hackman (Harry Moseby), Jennifer Warren (Paula), Susan Clark (Ellen Moseby), Melanie Griffith (Delly Grastner), Edward Binns (Joey Ziegler), Harris Yulin (Marty Heller), Janet Ward (Arlene), James Woods (Quentin), John Crawford (Tom Iverson)

“Yeah, but he didn’t see it. He played something else and he lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I know I would have.” That’s how Harry Moseby – PI, retired footballer and chess enthusiast – explains the fall out of a 1925 chess championship game, where the losing player failed to spot a checkmate in three through a brilliant flurry of knight moves. There’s a reason why a tweaked version of this makes the title (Penn argued it was because so many key scenes were set at night, though I suspect he just worried the alternative would either be too confusing or tip the wink too much). Turns out the case Moseby is investigating is just like that chess game, with himself as the losing player failing to spot the killer checkmate move.

That’s the set-up for a very seventies private detective movie, where the hero is effectively living out a fantasy of being Marlowe or Spade, turning down every opportunity to bring himself into the modern world (via a near-fangled database-using detective agency, awash with cash) and pays a heavy price. Because, rather like Matthau in Charley Varrick, Moseby sees himself as last of the Independents, but without (it turns out) the nous or ruthlessness to succeed. Instead, Harry misses everything that turns out to be important, heads down blind alleys, focuses on the wrong motives and ends the film like he spent it, drifting in circles drenched in defeat.

Harry (Gene Hackman) is hired by an ageing former Hollywood starlet (Janet Ward) to find her daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith), a case he solves with relative ease since she is staying with her estranged father-in-law Tom Iverson (John Crawford) and Tom’s wise-crackingly flirtatious marinist girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren). Easy peasy right? Wrong, as Harry finds himself embroiled in a further mysteries and deaths, revolving around links between the family and the world of Hollywood stunt drivers, led by the good-natured Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns). As he scratches the surface of the mystery, he will discover to his horror he is way out of his depth.

Arthur Penn’s detective drama soaks in the paranoic style he virtually made his own, mixed with grimy depression at the world gone to hell. “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Paula asks Harry who responds with a weary sigh of “which one?” Everything feels sordid and shabby: Harry’s job is essentially trailing unfaithful wives; Hollywood is a cheap exploitation flick machine and alcoholic ex-starlet Janet bemoans how good her breasts used to be. It’s a film shot with a grainy, dirty detail by Bruce Surtees and edited with a deliberately disjointed suddenness by Dede Allen, scenes often feeling like they end abruptly or jarringly, leaving us as off balance as Harry is. There is, throughout, a creeping air of confusion and uncertainty – Penn designed the film to require multiple viewings and even then questions remain – not least since vital clues and hints are dropped in with marked casualness, while major red herrings are flashed in front of us.

In the middle of this, Harry wants to be a resourceful, determined, ingenious private eye plucked from Chandler. But he’s far from that, not quite smart enough to realise he’s not that smart. His naïve cluelessness should be clear, since he stumbles only by chance on an affair his wife (Susan Clark) has been having for some time. He lets his prejudices and opinions get in the way of conclusions – most especially in the instant dislike he takes (who can blame him) of James Woods’ snivelling bitter mechanic, a casual boyfriend of Delly, who looks more beat up and scarred every time we see him (a nice hint he’s not the criminal-in-waiting Harry assumes he is). On the other hand, since he likes Edward Binn’s jovial stunt driver Joey, he seems to forget in their first meeting he watched Joey violently rough up a young man in a bar for trivial reasons.

He’s superbly played by Gene Hackman, who makes Harry full of vulnerability and shyness that marks him out as a slightly naïve lost soul, despite his more hard-bitten outer shell. Hackman understands perfectly that Harry is really a big kid, living out a fantasy, but without the instincts or the skill to pull it off. He’s flustered by women (Delly’s casual teenage sexuality, in particular, disorientates him no end) and his all-too-obvious crush on Jennifer Warren’s very well-played mix of femme fatale and wisecracking sidekick is rather sweet. Hackman also invests Harry with an old-world decency and (knightly!) sense of chivalry: he’s disgusted at Tom’s sleeping with his step-daughter (“There should be a law against it” Tom sighs; “There is” Harry contemptuously states) and quickly feels a protective feeling towards Delly.

But despite this, he’s as much a clueless patsy in all this as he is in his marriage, unable to see the wood for the trees. Just like Chinatown, he ends up out of his depth – the difference being the case turns out to be far more mundane then he suspects. In fact, Harry turns out to be the main destructive force of the film: his ham-fisted persistence in delving deeper, panicking characters into murderous actions, even while Harry fails to understand for a moment what he is involved in and who he should be wary of.

It’s a great visual metaphor that Harry only realises (possibly) what’s been going on in the whole film, when he stares down through the sea-view window of Paula’s boat at a vital clue he’s missed all this time. Harry has to strain to interpret what he can see, water and bad lighting obscuring his view. It’s the murky, obscured world of the film bought to visual life. A film during which Harry has closed his ears and eyes to all the crucial details, failed to appreciate the real meanings of the things he has focused on and left himself alone and adrift in a sea of carnage, only just beginning to piece things together (but far too late).

It makes for a superb, labyrinthine detective drama, laced with paranoia and unsettling mystery, with a superb Hackman full of a mix of bashful charm, world-weary cynicism and tragic naivety, clinging to a fantasy that can’t survive contact with reality. Penn’s film might rival Chinatown as the definitive hard-bitten detective drama of the 70s, one where the hero’s every action leads to disaster, every decision is misguided in some way, every conclusion flawed and learns only too late how wrong he was. If that’s not hard-bitten 70s cynicism I don’t know what is.

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Earnest drama about racism, whose narrative perhaps focuses on less important issues and people

Director: Alan Parker

Cast: Gene Hackman (Agent Rupert Anderson), Willem Dafoe (Special Agent Alan Ward), Frances McDormand (Mrs Pell), Brad Dourif (Deputy Sheriff Clinton Pell), R. Lee Ermey (Mayor Tilman), Gailard Sartain (Sheriff Ray Stuckey), Stephen Tobolowsky (Clayton Townley), Michael Rooker (Frank Bailey), Pruitt Taylor Vince (Lester Cowans), Kevin Dunn (Agent Bird), Badja Djola (Agent Monk)

In June 1964 three civil rights workers – two white New Yorkers Andrew Goorman and Michael Schwerner and a black Mississippian James Chaney – were arrested, released and then murdered by Neshoba County law officials working alongside KKK white supremacists. An FBI investigation (codenamed Mississippi Burning) revealed the crime, arrested the criminals and managed to convict several (but not all) of them on the federal charge of violating civil rights (convinced the state charge of murder would lead to acquittal from racist juries). Mississippi Burning fictionalises this true-life atrocity into a hard-hitting thriller, mixed with the conventions of crime drama.

It’s directed by Alan Parker in the style of Midnight Express, pulling no punches in chucking the vileness of the KKK up on screen. During the course of Mississippi Burning we see Black people chased, beaten, flung out of moving cars onto the street, lynched and a praying child kicked in the face by a KKK thug. Rightly, the murderers are a vile parade of bullies, cowards and knuckle-dragging monsters portrayed by a group of actors (Dourif, Rooker, Sartain and Vince among them) used to going all-in on portraits of the scum of humanity. It’s a tightly directed, intense film – with a repetitively pounding score by Terry Jones – with Oscar-winning photography by Peter Biziou capturing the flame-lit night-time atrocities these repulsive people execute on innocents.

Mississippi Burning is undoubtedly well-made, with a very earnest message behind it. It’s impossible to fault its rightful disgust at the appalling injustice and racism, but you can’t help but feel it’s focusing its heroic lens on the wrong part of the story. It drew fire at the time for its fictionalisation of almost every element – wisely so in its portrayal of the initial crime, where their names and exact nature of their murder are altered – and the way this pushed the FBI (an organisation that had in many cases actively worked against civil rights) into a traditional heroic role, while reducing the Black people to passive recipients of beatings or kind words from whites. It’s hard not to feel today that, for all the skill of the film, the impact of those decisions have magnified the film’s flaws over time.

At heart, Mississippi Burning uses the conventions of a mis-matched buddy-cop investigative drama to add narrative drive to a social issues film. The two FBI agents are played so well by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, you barely notice both are stock roles straight out of central casting. Hackman gives such energy and life (with a lovely touch of shame that his own past conduct, as a Southern sheriff was presumably only a degree better than the people he’s investigating) to his role as no-nonsense, veteran maverick who understands the streets, that he transforms this cliché into a real person. Similarly, Dafoe plays the by-the-book, stuffy superior who has too learn rules-bending sometimes break the case, with such commitment you forget how role familiar it is.

The personal narrative of the film revolves around whether these chalk-and-cheese investigators will overcome their initial iciness – they address each other formally throughout the film and butt-heads frequently on the conduct of the investigation – to become a team which feels odd for a film where the other stakes (violent institutional racism) are so large. In many ways an alternative cliché – two disconnected investigators investing more in a case based on the injustice they see and the witnesses they talk to – might well have served it better and also reflected contemporary complaints that the FBI was more interested in the letter than the spirit of the law. Mississippi Burning does, at times, address this by having characters explicitly ask if the FBI would even lift a finger if two of the victims weren’t white. But seeing as the film generally considers raising the question the same as engaging with it, it doesn’t go anywhere.

The film requires the agents to undertake mis-steps in order to educate the audience (would Dafoe’s character really be as ignorant about the nuances of segregation as he frequently is here?) and blunder about for much of the early acts, most notably Dafoe’s public conversation with a Black man in a diner, that inevitably leads to the poor man kidnapped and beaten by the KKK. But on the whole, the FBI are presented as noble straight-shooters, aghast at the state of affairs in the South, rather than a body run by the morally-ambiguous J Edgar Hoover.

It also means Mississippi Burning relegates its Black characters to passengers and passive victims, reliant on white people for protection and vindication. While it would be false to claim the system in the South didn’t leave Black people largely powerless, the film’s failure to introduce a single memorable character giving voice to the Black perspective of a series of crimes that happened to them feels more and more uncomfortable as the film ages (particularly as the film’s hopeful ending very much places racism as a problem in the past, not a dilemma America continues to face).

The film’s real conscience (and the victim given most development) is instead Frances McDormand as the wife of Dourif’s vile racist sheriff. Parker’s film subtly indicating her lack of racism early (she consoling touches the arm of a Black man), and McDormand (who is excellent) brings real force to her pained, frightened longing to do the right thing. She contrasts neatly with the committed vile cowardice of Dourif, Rooker’s swaggering bullying and Stephen Tobolowsky’s Hiterlian racism as a KKK Grand Wizard. Parker successfully makes these guys so repulsive, that when Hackman’s Anderson gets free reign to intimidate, rough-up and bully them back it carries real satisfaction. But the film making the most developed victim of the film’s KKK a white, gentile feels more like filmmaker concerns that otherwise the bulk of the likely audience may otherwise have trouble relating to the bulk of the victims.

Mississippi Burning tries to be hopeful. This extends to some slightly forced moralising – the suicide of one character is attributed to guilt at the crime, rather than the more likely guilt at having ‘betrayed’ his fellow KKK – and a general sense that Mississippi is on the road to peace, feels a bit of a stretch for a region that had decades of continued unrest ahead. Saying that, in its sometimes clumsy way, you can’t doubt its power and its righteous disgust at racism. It’s well directed and has some excellent performances – Hackman and McDormand were both Oscar nominated – but it feels like a film that only focuses on part of an overall picture and not always the right part.

Under Fire (1983)

Well-filmed but politically naive Nicaraguan revolution film that pulls its punches and settles for melodrama

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

Cast: Nick Nolte (Russell Price), Gene Hackman (Alex Grazier), Joanna Cassidy (Claire Stryder), Ed Harris (Oates), Jean-Louis Trintignant (Marcel Jazy), Richard Masur (Hub Kittle), René Enríquez (President Anastasio Somoza Debayle), Hamilton Camp (Regis)

In 1979 Nicaragua was torn apart by revolution as the regime of right-wing President Somaza was challenged – and eventually overthrown – by the Sandinata National Liberation Front (FSLN), a coalition of left-wing revolutionaries. The US largely threw in its lot with the Somaza government until its appalling human rights record – and the outrage at the murder of journalist Bill Stewart, which was caught on camera – led to it withdrawing aid and the collapse of the regime. Not that it led to peace in the country, as Raegan’s government promptly began supporting the right-wing Contra rebels (but that’s another story).

A version of this is bought to the screen in Roger Spottiswoode’s earnest but slightly naïve film which tries to walk the walk but largely pulls its punches. Here Bill Stewart is translated into Alex Grazier (Gene Hackman) whose journalist ex-wife Claire Stryder (Joanna Cassidy) is in love with his best friend war photographer Russell Price (Nick Nolte). Price and Stryder are embedded in Nicaragua and find their sympathies growing for the left-wing revolutionaries – and their hackles rising at some of the actions of their country.

That “some” is the key here. For all Under Fire would like to be a firebrand political film – a sort of Battle of Algiers by way of All the President’s Men – it’s a film that continually pulls its punches. When compared to the brutal honesty Missing (a year earlier) looked at America’s bungled, self-serving and short-sighted foreign policy in Latin America, bashing any communist leaning revolutionary, even if meant propping up blood-soaked dictators, Under Fire looks very tame indeed.

Only the barest information and context is given to American policy. The only two villainous representatives of American policy we see are carefully distanced from the government. Oates, played with empathy-free gusto by Ed Harris, is a mercenary as happy driving trucks as he is executing POWs. The CIA’s man-on-the-ground is not even American – instead he’s a supercilious, lecherous Frenchman played with awkwardness by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Trintignant gets the closest anyone gets to a political speech, pointing out today’s sympathetic left-wing revolutionaries are tomorrow’s Stalinist purgers. But he’s always a degree separate from official American policy.

Instead, America remains the innocent here. The implication is the true decision makers don’t realise what’s going on, on the ground. It’s only the murder of Alex – and the smuggling out of Russell’s photos showing his execution – that leads to America having its eyes opened and withdrawing its support. This neatly lets everyone off the hook. Neither does the film dare suggest the hypocrisy of a country pouring money and arms into the bloody Somaza regime for years, only stirring when one innocent American journalist is killed. Not once does the film challenge the unpleasant truths that lie behind a statement made by a Nicaraguan: “if we had killed an American journalist years ago perhaps you might have done something”.

Instead, the film settles for a slightly naïve romance of the largely decent, young and sympathetic rebels vs brutish Government soldiers. The rebels are all plucky kids – like the young man and would-be baseball player Russell and Claire follow through a street battle in Leon (naturally, he’s shot by Oates, in the back of all places). Either that or decent, wise figures who would never consider sullying their hands the way the government forces do. It all feels a long way from the mutual brutalities of Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers or the (admittedly spittle-mouthed) fury of Oliver Stone’s Salvador.

After a while you start to feel Nicaragua is really a backdrop for a half-hearted romance between two journalists who re-discover their idealism under fire. The sense that the film could be set anywhere really is backed up by it’s opening in the Chad civil war, which is explored in fifteen minutes in the same cursory depth as the Nicaragua revolution. It’s all exotic backdrop for a drama about whether Russell and Claire can get over the guilt of sort-of betraying Alex (although Claire and Alex are already separated by the time they get it-on) and convert their affair into something more meaningful.

Truth be told all three journalists are thin characters, invested with more depth than they deserve by three very strong actors. Nolte is at his gravelly best, scruffy but impassioned, righteous anger bubbling not far under the surface. Cassidy turns a character that could have easily been “the woman” into a dedicated, intelligent and inspiring professional. Hackman finds beats of self-doubt and sadness in an anchorman worried he’s left what he’s loved (personally and professionally) behind.

Spottiswoode films with sweep and energy – helped by a very good score by Jerry Goldsmith and some impressive recreations (sanitised as they are) of street clashes in Nicaragua. But the story never takes flight and its political edge gets far too blunted. Even the murder of Alex is turned into melodrama, the focus quickly shifting to a wild chase for Russell to smuggle his film out of the country to end the Somaza government claims that the killers were the rebels not his soldiers.

It’s where the film goes wrong, settling for melodrama and romance where it should be angry. In the end it’s a romantic film, where American policy is misguided for the right reason and good triumphs. The cheering crowds that end the film ring especially hollow considering the continued violence that plagued the country throughout most of the 80s. It’s a solid thriller, but a flawed film.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Our heroes climb up an overturned cruise liner in the film that launched a thousand enjoyable disaster movie clichés

Director: Ronald Neame (Irwin Allen)

Cast: Gene Hackman (Reverend Frank Scott), Ernest Borgnine (Mike Rogo), Red Buttons (James Martin), Shelley Winters (Belle Rosen), Jack Albertson (Manny Rosen), Carol Lynley (Nonnie Parry), Roddy McDowell (Acres), Stella Stevens (Linda Rogo), Pamela Sue Martin (Susan Shelby), Arthur O’Connell (Chaplain John), Eric Shea (Robin Shelby), Leslie Nielsen (Captain Harrison)

New Year’s Eve on the biggest cruise liner in the world and the money men have ordered “Full steam ahead!” into a storm – after all, it would be terrible publicity to arrive late at harbour. Needless to say, it’s a terrible idea, as the Poseidon is hit by a tsunami and flipped upside down. Everyone at the top of the ship is killed, leaving only the party goers in the promenade room alive. Who is going to make it out from the one of the most famous disaster films of all time?

Produced by the Master of Disaster himself Irwin Allen – he personally staked half the budget and made a fortune – the ship’s passenger log is a host of Oscar-winning stars, each balancing soapy plotlines. Gene Hackman is the maverick priest, body pumping with muscular Christianity, who believes God helps those who help themselves. Ernest Borgnine is a grumpy police chief, on a long-delayed holiday with his ex-call girl wife Stella Stevens. Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson are a retired couple heading to Israel to see their grandson for the first time. Red Buttons is an unlucky-in-love fitness freak, Roddy McDowell a plucky steward. Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea are two (unbearable) kids travelling to join their parents while Carol Lynley is the ship’s terrified singer.

The Poseidon Adventure cemented the tropes you’d come to know and love in disaster films. The maverick leader, the grouchy contrarian, a plucky pensioner with a vital skill, adorably brave kids, a self-sacrificing nice guy… They’re all in here, the actors playing these cardboard cut-out characters with gusto as they climb up the endurance obstacle course set of an upside-down cruise liner.

Allen’s film takes a while to get going: a quarter of the run time is dedicated to setting up the various character dilemmas. Is a member of the crew a former client of Stevens’ Linda? Will Gene Hackman find new purpose in his faith? Will Red Buttons find love? Neame shoots these opening exchanges with the uninspired professionalism the exposition-filled dialogue demands (there are several variations on “What am I doing on this ship? Let me tell you…” lines). But what makes the best of these films work is when the soapy shallowness manages to make the characters endearing. It’s what happens here: the cast could do these scenes standing on their head, but gosh darn it we end up hoping the Rosens will live to see their grandson at the foot of Mount Sinai.

The film of course “starts” proper with that wave hitting. At which point, Allen (and Neame) knows exactly what works. He makes the stakes clear, the target simple (climb up, get out) and taps into common fears of falling, drowning etc. He knows how to make us thrill at the stunts – that tipping ballroom, with various stuntmen plunging downwards – and throw in the odd moment to remind us how tragic it all is (like Red Buttons sadly laying his jacket across some poor soul).

It also understands that we need to feel smarter than the crowd of extras caught up in the drama. When Gene Hackman earnestly tells everyone their only chance of survival is up, we want to feel that we’d be smart enough to go with him, rather than join the sheeple listening to the literally-out-of-his-depth purser (“What you’re suggesting is suicide!”). Allen knows we need to feel smarter so much he later throws in another group led by a confident-but-wrong authority figure (the ship’s doctor) blithely walking downhill to the flooded aft, ignoring Hackman’s cries that they are striding to a watery grave.

No, we’d definitely be with the plucky stars. After all Hackman can’t be wrong! (Gene Hackman’s priest, for all his bluster, is remarkably unpersuasive – he even only just holds onto authority in the group). The stunt work and production design as the battered stars climb up the overturned ship to the hull are remarkable – not for nothing did this scoop nine Oscar nominations – and while the film is undeniably slightly cheesy, it’s played with an absolute earnest seriousness by the cast (Hackman, to his eternal credit, acts as if his life depended on it – which considering it’s clearly a pay cheque role other actors would have coasted through is admirable).

The set pieces are superb. As the cast is whittled down, the deaths carry a certain weight – again conveyed by the honesty of the grief from those left behind. Shelley Winters bagged the best role – and the most iconic scene – as an overweight old lady with a Chekhov’s skill, performing (at great cost) an act of heroism no one else could manage. (She landed an Oscar nomination, largely for this stand-up-and-cheer moment with a sting). Most get a moment to shine – although Carol Lynley’s pathetic, panicking singer (she can’t swim or climb or hold her breath or run…) who spends her time shrieking tries your patience no end.

The film is so much about the experience of seeing this group of people overcome death-defying climbs, swims and flames that when the survivors stagger into the sunlight, the film abruptly ends. It’s all about the ride, with most of the plot points established earlier settled by someone dying on the way up. But it’s entertaining and lands just the right side of involving. The characters may be artificial, but we still care about them.

The Poseidon Adventure was a massive hit and still the best maritime disaster film made (certainly much better than its belated, lame, remake). Allen cements a formula where swiftly sketched characters, played by recognisable actors, go through endurance tests in front of us via terrifying set-ups and death-defying stunts. It’s grand, old-fashioned entertainment, perhaps taking itself a little too seriously, but giving us lots to gasp and cheer at.

French Connection II (1975)

Change of setting isn’t really enough to justify the existence of this half-hearted sequel

Director: John Frankenheimer

Cast: Gene Hackman (Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle), Fernando Rey (Alain Charnier), Bernard Fresson (Inspector Henri Barthélémy), Philippe Léotard (Jacques), Ed Lauter (General Brian), Charles Millot (Miletto), Jean-Pierre Castali (Raoul Diron), Cathleen Nesbitt (Old Lady)

Did The French Connection really need a sequel? Friedkin’s original was a self-contained gem, based on a true story, that even ends with a series of “what happened next” captions. But there was enough of a foot in the door for a completely fictionalised resolution to fates left hanging. French Connection II has some similarities with the original, but it’s also a slight film caught even more obviously than the first between documentary realism and trigger-happy actioner.

The whole film feels like it has been assembled in a rush. The plot is incredibly slight. “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) arrives in Marseilles to help the police track drug kingpin Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Doyle doesn’t speak a word of French and charges around pissing everyone off and generally making a nuisance of himself. He’s grabbed off the streets by Charnier’s men. To get him to talk they spend weeks force-feeding him heroin until he’s hooked then cut off his supply. They then return him to the Marseilles police who lock him in a cell and help him go cold turkey. When he comes out if Popeye wasn’t mad before, he certainly is now.

That (long) sequence of heroin addiction and painful cold turkey is one of two things that really makes Frankenheimer’s sequel stand out. I think it must be what attracted Hackman to the film. Not only did the liberal Hackman (troubled by Doyle’s slight neo-fascism in the first film) probably enjoy the idea of seeing this guy hit rock bottom, it’s also an opportunity for an acting tour-de-force. Hackman is probably given more challenging material in this largely forgotten sequel than in his actual Oscar-winning role.

Weaned onto the drugs, Hackman’s body language shifts from defiant resistance to despondent, dope-strewn lethargy until he can’t be bothered to record the passing of days any more in his tally chart. He goes from being cuffed and dragged around, to blankly following his captors and rolling up his sleeve to accept another shot. But that’s nothing compared to the cold turkey scenes.

Locked up in a dingy cell under the police station (the French police worried about taking the blame and also feeling a brotherhood with this fellow cop), Doyle goes through withdrawal mourning – anger, bargaining and eventual grief – in a series of calmly shot, claustrophobic scenes that allows Hackman let rip. And he certainly does, deconstructing this proud man’s self-image until he’s a weeping mess, kicking doors, throwing food around and so full of self-loathing, he can barely face himself in the mirror. It’s hard to watch, and something truly unique – a twisted punishment for a drugs cop and a man who defines himself by his lack of reliance for anyone or anything else.

This long sequence takes up the centre of the film – and includes an equally difficult scene to watch, as Frankenheimer stages in (a single take) forensic detail the French police’s pumping of Doyle’s stomach to get a final (deadly) overdose out of his system. It’s quite unlike anything else I’ve seen before in a cops and robbers shoot-em-up (which is what most of the rest of the film, at heart, is) and you can guarantee it’s the one thing people will remember.

The other element that stands out is Frankenheimer’s – a long time Francophile – ability to shoot Marseilles not as a tourist destination, but a strikingly real urban environment. On top of this anti-picture-postcard environment, he stresses Doyle’s isolation. None of the French dialogue in the film is translated, leaving us as stranded as Doyle is in trying to understand what is going on and what people are saying. Doyle clumsily pantomimes for everything he wants, be that information from a suspect (he tries his toe-picking line to no effect what-so-ever) to a drink in a bar (a long exchange until he finally reaches an understanding with the barman on “whiskey”). Doyle, of course, has made no effort to learn any French and blunders about in a city he doesn’t understand, ruining operations and getting himself and others in trouble.

Aside from these moments though – and despite the film being well shot by Frankenheimer, with a nice continuation of the original’s drained out neo-realism – this is otherwise a conventional and unimaginative film that ticks a number of expected boxes. It has an action set-piece at a dry dock that feels unreal (and also copies the central idea of the car smuggling operation from the first film) and concludes in a chase and shoot-out that’s almost a copy of the original’s ending – with an ending even more sudden. For all Frankenheimer’s love of France, the film still has a suspicion for Europeans – be they smooth criminals or obstructive cops.

French Connection II tries a couple of different things, but never really makes a case for itself as a truly stand-alone film. It’s main rivalry between the hero and villain is dependent on having seen the first film and its slender plot veers into the sort of shoot-outs and set-pieces that don’t feel remotely like they are occurring in a ‘real’ world. It deserves credit for the bravery and honesty of its cold turkey sequence, but it’s a sequence caught in a film that otherwise offers little that’s truly unique.

The French Connection (1971)

A ruthless, obsessed (of course!) cop chases down a drug kingpin in this Best Picture winning crime drama

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Gene Hackman (Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle), Fernando Rey (Alain Charnier – “Frog One”), Roy Scheider (Detective Buddy “Cloudy” Russo), Tony Lo Bianco (Salvatore Boca), Marcel Bozzuffi (Pierre Nicoli – “Frog Two”), Frédéric de Pasquale (Henri Devereaux), Bill Hickman (FBI Agent Bill Mulderig), Ann Rebbot (Marie Charnier), Harold Gray (Joel Weinstock), Arlene Faber (Angie Boca), Eddie Egan (Captain Walt Simonson), Sonny Grosso (FBI Agent Clyde Klein)

Cops and criminals: do they have more in common than we’d like to think? In Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection, the lead cop and criminal are both obsessive, single-mindedly ruthless and locked into a cycle of actions that isn’t going to be change with one big bust. Look at them in isolation and its hard to tell at times which is which: the French drug dealer is a suave cosmopolitan type, unfailingly cultured and polite, but remorseless; the cop is a border-line racist and narcissist who doesn’t give two hoots about collateral damage, kills without remorse and whose life is one of tunnel-visioned obsession.

Based on a true-story – the model for Doyle, Eddie Egan, has a cameo playing his own boss – the film covers the arrival in New York of French heroin dealers, led by Alan Charnier (Fernando Rey) looking to make a killing with their prime product. Opposite them is narcotics officer Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman), who’s practically the dictionary definition of anti-hero. Doyle and Charnier engage in a battle of wits and force across New York during one blisteringly cold few days in Winter, and never mind who gets in the way.

The French Connection is about masculinity, and that no matter what many men don’t like to lose. Getting beat is certainly the main concern for Doyle, who I’m not sure has ever really thought twice about the impact of drugs (he’d be just as passionate chasing down coca-cola or stamps if you banned those). Neither has Charnier, with his reassured cool of old Colonial Europe, which just knows better than the nouveau Americans. (there is an underlying subversive fear of America being undermined by this suspiciously metropolitan Frenchman, the country’s best defence being a loud-mouthed, son of the streets).

Played superbly by Gene Hackman, Doyle is presented as a man we are invited to make up our own mind about. He’s obviously an effective detective and he doesn’t just go the extra mile: the job is a night-and-day obsession. He’ll spend hours pounding the streets, staking out a hotel on a rainy street, walk miles tailing a subject and barely spend a minute off-duty. He’ll also drive cars wildly though crowded streets, shoot a man in the back, rough-up suspects and treat others with an abrupt anger, xenophobia or both. As a model for the society he’s sworn to protect, he’s a disgrace – but is he the effective agent of crime-fighting we need?

Friedkin’s film largely aims to present Doyle as he is, within its documentary realism – although I’d argue the film repeatedly looks at his commitment and never-say-quit-energy with barely veiled admiration. The film is assembled with an on-the-streets immediacy reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers – added to by the casting of many non-actors in key roles. It’s shot with a drained-out series of muted colours (even more drained-out in Friedkin’s egotistical blu-ray remastering). All shot on location, it captures the slummy flavour of the rougher ends of New York. Right from the off, we see Doyle and Russo roughing up an informer in something between a slum and building site (including the famous “do you pick your toes in Poughkeepsie” exchange, a classic bit of psychological messing with criminals – incidentally check out Scheider trying not to corpse as Hackman roars through this.)

The investigation proceeds with a muted sense of grounded realism. There is a lot of time-consuming following, watching and taking notes. Word is picked up by informers. Careful surveillance work fills out the gang and its members. Doyle is constantly frustrated by bureaucratic demands, not to mention turf-war squabbles with the FBI (who, in addition, think he might be next door to a dirty cop which is pretty fair). Similarly, the criminals go through careful negotiations around timing, testing the purity of the goods and working out the best way of dodging the cops.

Friedkin’s film is so wrapped up in a perfect “slice of life” documentary realism shell, that it gets away with much of the second half being a piece of pure filmic flair. First and foremost is its famous car-chase. Narrowly surviving an assassination attempt from “Frog Two”, Doyle requisitions a car and hares through New York at 100mph trying to beat the elevated train “Frog Two” is escaping on, to the next station. In this superbly cut sequence, Friedkin pioneers the sort of low-angled front bumper shots that would be a staple of car chases for years to come. It’s pounding, gripping and brilliantly assembled, a raw slice of action that uses the film’s documentary style to trick you into thinking it’s something akin to the realism elsewhere.

But it’s a bit of filmic fantasy – and wouldn’t be out of place in Dirty Harry, the other 1971 film about a morally-complex cop. Doyle is certainly a less attractive person than Callahan – with no real moral feelings just a love of winning. Winning is what motivates him in this car chase: he has little interest in questioning the shooter (who has, to be fair, taken out several civilians, including a mother of a young baby) or preserving public safety and way more about getting revenge. He tears through the streets, sending civilians flying, scares Frog Two into killing two more people and finally caps it by shooting his unarmed would-be-killer in the back after a cursory warning. (Not the first time he’ll pull the trigger after only the most slender of warnings).

Winning is all that matters though. Charnier is just as bad. He ruthlessly exploits a patsy and has no concerns about bodies piling up. Fernando Rey’s impish smile and campily cool little wave to Doyle through the subway doors, after he has managed to shake him off in a marvellous sequence in a subway station, is all about enjoying a smug triumph. No wonder Doyle repeats the same gesture to him late in the film when the tables are turned.

It’s the way Friedkin’s film mostly doesn’t ask us to blindly root for Doyle that really makes it stand out. In many ways the film is less exciting – or even less intriguing a character study – than Dirty Harry. It uses its documentary realism heavily at times, to justify showing the sort of shocking, exploitative material (at one point, the camera lingers on the incidental victims at a car crash scene at distasteful length) that you would expect to find in Dirty Harry or Shaft. What Friedkin’s euro-inspired style – and Hackman’s committed playing – managed to do was make itself feel like it was making a higher artistic statement than those films, which played a much more conventional hand.

That and the sense that nothing has really changed. Early in the film Doyle and Russo charge into a bar – a bar by the way with an entirely black clientele, who Doyle delights in abusing – to seize whatever drugs people seem to have on them. It’s a basic clean-up and shakedown – but hours later you can be sure it will be look nothing happened there. Similarly, the film’s end credits reveal all involved basically dodged charges (except for the patsy for the smuggling of course), while the cops got transferred. We’ve got one small win at the cost of at least five lives.

I seem to change my mind on The French Connection every time I see it. Sometimes I think it’s not that different from a host of other police actioners released at the same time (add Bullit to that list). At others, I get gripped by its edgy mise-en-scene and Friedkin’s challenges to conventional morality. And I guess, a film that can make you switch your mind constantly, should be seen as some sort of classic.

Reds (1981)

Warren Beatty brings his passion to life in Ken Loachesque Reds

Director: Warren Beatty

Cast: Warren Beatty (John Reed), Diane Keaton (Louise Bryant), Edward Herrmann (Max Eastman), Jerzy Kosinski (Grigory Zinoviev), Jack Nicholson (Eugene O’Neill), Paul Sorvino (Louis C Farina), Maureen Stapleton (Emma Goldman), Nicolas Coster (Paul Trullinger), William Daniels (Julius Gerber), Jan Triska (Karl Rodek), Gene Hackman (Pete van Wherry)

Reds is the film only Warren Beatty could have made. Imagine the pitch meeting: I want to make a three hour long biopic about American communists, with the hero being the only American buried in the Kremlin, and I need $30million dollars to do it. Only Beatty had the force of personality to get major companies to invest greenbacks into a film celebrating a man who would have happily cheered their demise. Reds is a tribute above all to the dedication of its multi-titled director and his refusal to compromise. It’s a big piece of serious minded, educational but also dramatic and romantic storytelling. Not many people could have pulled it off.

In 1915 Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), a young would-be journalist and suffragette, meets and falls in love with left-wing journalist John Reed (Warren Beatty). The two of them tun off together to Reed’s bohemian circle in Greenwich Village, New York then to Massachusetts, becoming the centre of a community of anarchists, socialists and artists. Their mutual love is damaged by affairs – in particular Bryant’s heartfelt affair with the sensitive Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson) and Reed’s own (off-screen) infidelities – but is rekindled as they are swept up in the Russian Revolution, an event that motivates Reed to try and build a similar communist party in America (with very little success). But, when Reed is trapped in Soviet Russia, how far will Bryant go to reunite with him?

Beatty’s dream of making a film on Reed’s life had been knocking around in his head since the 1960s, but it took the success of Heaven Can Wait in 1978 for him to finally have the muscle to get the film made (when Studio execs, having signed the deal, begged him to consider another subject Beatty stuck to his guns). He originally planned only to produce: that quickly expanded into also writing the script (with Marxist British playwright Trevor Griffiths, a hilarious personality mismatch with the Virginian millionaire Beatty), then directing it and finally, to be completely sure the project went where he wanted it to go, playing Reed as well. It would result in Beatty joining the short list of people nominated in four different categories for one film at the Oscars (but he won only Best Director, Reds losing out the big one to Chariots of Fire).

The real strength of Reds is probably Beatty’s producing. This is a huge epic, filmed across multiple countries in Europe (standing in for each other and for America), marshalling a vast number of sets and locations. Much like Attenborough’s Gandhi, it’s a film directed with a smooth, professional competence, but stage-managed to the screen with the flair of a master producer. Each department was staffed by an expert: Vittorio Storaro shot the film with a Golden Age beauty; Stephen Sondheim contributed to the score; Dede Allen assembled thousands of hours of footage, and dozens and dozens of takes of every scene, into a coherent, pacey movie that effectively balances politics and romance.

In many ways, Reds is like the mirror image of Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (it even has a late train ambush set-piece, chugging through the Spanish wheat fields, that could have come out of Lean’s epic). That film was a romance-for-the-ages that used politics and revolution as a backdrop. Reds uses romance and personal stories as a context-setting background, to push to the forefront politics and revolution. This is perhaps the most earnest and impassioned exploration of the history of American left-wing politics in film history. Giving a lot of time – particularly in its second half – to scenes made-up entirely of impassioned socialists sitting in a room arguing at each other over the minutia of party rules and ideology, this is the sort of epic Ken Loach would have been proud of making.

The politics are also genuinely interesting, quite a feat in itself. Beatty is unafraid to look at the fundamental weaknesses of Western left-wing politics: its own worst enemy is always itself. People who agree on 90% of the issues, swear themselves to become life-long enemies because of differences over the remaining 10%. In one dynamically filmed sequence, Bryant is a frustrated and resigned observer as Reed oversees the split of the American Socialist Party into no less than three factions, two of which set up rival claims to be the “official” Communist party of America.

Not that Reds has any sentiment for Russia: Beatty is savvy enough to know (I wonder if Griffiths was?) that the USSR is about a million miles away from ideal. Factionalism is just as prevalent there, with the difference being the main faction happily uses, suppresses and crushes the others. Reed’s time in Russia sees him becoming increasingly disillusioned and homesick, as he realises a dictatorship isn’t made palatable just because it’s a Communist Dictatorship. As the representative of that system, author Jerzy Kosinski makes for a grippingly stone-faced and ruthless Zinoviev, brow-beating any deviation from the party line.

Beatty makes all this political theorising and left-wing political infighting palatable, by framing it carefully around a genuine romance between Bryant and Reed. For all the unconventionality of their open-ish relationship (their feelings on this change from infidelity to infidelity), these are two people who share a deep and lasting bond on both an emotional and a political level. Both skilled writers, we are shown time and again that they bring out their best work from the other and that when they are focused on each other, they have a mutual understanding few can hope to match.

As Bryant, Beatty (who was in a relationship with her at the time – which didn‘t survive the epic shooting schedule) cast Diane Keaton. It’s a stroke of genius – and this is certainly Keaton’s finest performance. In a way no other role has allowed her, this looks past Keaton’s comedic skills and allows her to match her intelligence and spark with a woman who challenged norms, as a skilled writer and journalist. Keaton can play heart-rending emotion just as well – her breakdown fury at discovering Reed’s infidelity is fully-committed without being OTT – and she’s perfect as the increasingly disillusioned observer of left-wing failures. She believably flourishes from a woman uncertain of who she is to become a determined intellectual willing to cross continents to find what she wants. It’s a brilliant performance, smart, sharp and moving.

Beatty fronts-and-centres her so much, he slightly short-changes himself – playing Reed he doubles down on the boyish charm and enthusiasm (and he feels really young here), making Reed an enthusiastic, vulnerable, naïve figure. We just don’t quite get a real sense of who he is beyond that. You can’t say the same for Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill, delivering a remarkably low-key, restrained and sensitive performance. He’s loving, emotionally vulnerable and eventually devastated, in one of his finest acting performances. Maureen Stapleton won the Best Supporting Actress for her Earth-mother anarchist Emma Goldman, the cuddly aunt of firey, confrontational anarchic politics.

Reds is marshalled by Beatty into an epic that powers along effectively. The first half of the film gets its narrative balance right: contrasting personal and political growth with a backdrop of War and Revolution. The second half leaves a little too much to chew, a vast amount of political debate rushed through with a series of increasingly short and sometimes disconnected scenes. Beatty balances the narrative with extensive “witness” interviews, from real-life contemporaries of the characters. (These are never identified, which is a bit of shame as it never allows to really know what their perspective was). It adds a feeling of earnestness to a project that gets an effective balance between politics and the personal, between showmanship and details and between scale and intimacy. While it is more of a producer’s film – and rushed in its second half – than a triumph of directorial imagination, it’s still an impressive – and informative – achievement.

Enemy of the State (1998)

Will Smith and Gene Hackman dodge the surveillance state in Enemy of the State

Director: Tony Scott

Cast: Will Smith (Robert Clayton Dean), Gene Hackman (Brill), Jon Voight (NSA Director Thomas Reynolds), Regina King (Carla Dean), Jason Lee (Daniel Leon Zavitz), Lisa Bonet (Rachel Banks), Barry Pepper (Agent Pratt), Loren Dean (Agent Loren Hicks), Jake Busey (Agent Krug), Lisa Bonet (Rachel Banks), Jack Black (Agent Fiedler), Jamie Kennedy (Agent Williams), Seth Green (Agent Selby), Ian Hart (Agent Bingham), Stuart Wilson (Congressman Sam Albert), Jason Robards (Congressman Philip Hammersley), Tom Sizemore (Paulie Pintero)

A congressman (a cameoing Jason Robards) is murdered for refusing to support intrusive new counter-terrorism legislation championed by NSA director Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight). Unfortunately, someone caught the killing on camera. When the NSA come hunting, he plants the recording on an unwitting lawyer friend, Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith). Dean has no idea he has evidence that could blow the conspiracy – and is nonplussed when they set about destroying his life. The only person who can help is mysterious surveillance expert Brill (Gene Hackman), who has spent decades living off the grid. Can the clear Dean’s name and stop the bad apples in the NSA?

Enemy of the State is a fun chase movie, that enjoys the technical possibilities of the surveillance state, packaged with the fast-pace, bright colour-filtered style of Tony Scott (this is one of his best films). There is more than enough wit and enjoyment about it – not to mention watching a host of very good actors, many of them unknowns at the time, bring a lot of sparkle to the film (you’ve got to give kudos to the casting director). Everything of course gets tied up in a neat, pretty bow but it’s a damn lovely bow so that’s fine.

In its detailed look at the power of the surveillance state, Enemy of the State was, in a way, ahead of its time. The ability for the intelligence agencies here to look into literally everything in your life is pretty unsettling, from bank details to computer accounts. Every camera is an eye and satellites are tasked at will to watch anything. In fact, it’s quite something to remember that the state is only more powerful today – the internet and mobile phones would making tracking Dean even easier than the bugs they secrete about his person, which causes him to flee our baddies stripped to his undies. (Also, if only Reynolds had waited a few years, congress would wave through legislation such as he is requesting here, without batting an eyelid).

The film also dares to shade a little bit of naughtiness into Will Smith’s character. Sure, he’s a crusading labour lawyer (we’ve got to know he’s on the right side!) but he’s also an adulterer with trust problems in his marriage. Smith’s still at his charming best here, and his frazzled desperation as he struggles to understand why on earth the NSA is destroying his life is well-handled. Regina King gets a thankless role as Dean’s shrill wife, whose trust in her husband oscillates according to the requirements of the script, rather than any internal character logic.

Enemy of the State sometimes teeters on the edge of making a point about the dangers of the surveillance state. How easy could it be to abuse this power? Unfortunately it puts most of these arguments into the mouth of Regina King’s holier-than-thou wife, which rather undermines them. It’s also made abundantly clear that we’re witnessing rogue agents. This allows the film to focus more on the cool things surveillance can do, rather than clearer moral statements about whether that’s right or not, other than it being a dangerous tool in the hands of the wrong men.

Scott’s film is more of an entertainment than a treatise though (and thank God for that). It also has a nice little touch of 1970s’ conspiracy thriller to it, something the film leans into with the casting of Gene Hackman in a role reminiscent of Harry Caul in The Conversation. Sure, I can’t remember Caul driving a car while it was on fire or blowing up a building, but Hackman still gives the film some class and a touch of old-school espionage and cynicism. Truth-be-told, other than profession, Caul and Brill have very little in common (Brill is far more confrontational and confident, and much less likely to rip his apartment apart) but it’s still a nice call-back. I also rather enjoy Gabriel Byrne’s smart, playful little cameo as ‘fake’ Brill (hardly a spoiler as you can’t move without knowing Hackman is in the picture).

Scott’s high-energy fun culminates in a smart little trap laid by Dean for all his enemies, that plays nicely off the fact that the NSA agents and the Mafia are definitely paranoid and stubborn enough to not realise they are all talking at cross-purposes. The end of the film sees everything back to normal (it’s unclear how, or if, Dean got his job back considering his unceremonious firing), but I wouldn’t worry about it. It would be nice if it had said more, but as a rollercoaster ride it’s short, sharp and sweet.