Tag: George C Scott

Hardcore (1979)

Familiar ideas from better films are mixed together in this revenge thriller

Director: Paul Schrader

Cast: George C Scott (Jake van Dorn), Peter Boyle (Andy Mast), Season Hubley (Niki), Dick Sargent (Wes De Jong), Leonard Gaines (Bill Ramada), Dave Nichols (Kurt), Gary Graham (Tod), Larry Block (Detective Burrows), Ilah Davies (Kristen van Dorn), Marc Alaimo (Rattan)

A man prowls the urban streets, his face fixed with disgust at their degeneration, looking for a soul to save, the whiff of potential violence strong on him. He hunts for a lost family member, in an obsessive quest where it’s not even sure he will want to take her back even if he finds her. If that makes Hardcore sound like a remix of Taxi Driver and The Searchers… well that’s because it is. Schrader’s film is a well-made, initially well-executed riff on familiar themes that eventually tries to settle for something far easier to digest, with an ending that stinks of a shallow Chinatown.

Jake van Dorn (George C Scott) is a devoutly Calvinist businessman in Michigan. A single father, whose wife has left him, his beloved daughter Kristen (Ilah Davies) disappears one day after a church-sponsored visit to California. Van Dorn leaves no stone unturned to investigate, eventually hiring sleazy PI Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), who discovers an 8mm porno film starring Kristen. Was she kidnapped? Is she in danger? Van Dorn will find her, throwing himself into the seedy world of porn in an obsessive quest where no line will be uncrossed until he brings his daughter home.

There are many things to admire in Hardcore. Shot by Taxi Driver veteran Michael Chapman, it’s immersive seedy view of the underbelly of California is extremely striking. Schrader also quite neatly counterpoints this with the picket-fence conservatism of van Dorn’s stomping grounds at home. Van Dorn starts as a man who expresses hesitation that a shade of blue in his office might be too garish, and ends donning fake wig and moustache alongside loud shirt to pass as a porn baron.

What’s interesting about Hardcore is that, even though its actually Schrader’s second film, it feels like an over-anxious debut. It’s blatant stylistic and thematic call-backs to Taxi Driver – hammered home as we watch van Dorn cruise the streets of California, the porn shops and theatres neon signs reflected in his windows – makes you feel Schrader wished he had held on to the rights to direct that film himself. It’s extremely on-the-nose pinching of most of the structure of The Searchers feels like a loving tribute from a director yet to find his own voice.

Schrader however does an excellent job with much of the film’s first half. The oppressive tension build-up from the moment Mast arrives (Boyle’s casting, of course, being another eerie reminder of Taxi Driver) really grips. Scott’s stunned, shattered and increasingly appalled, primal reaction to watching his daughter in a porno is delivered with the sort of gusto and commitment that only a great actor can pull off. His increasingly-obsessive, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer delve into the world of porn – from knocking shops to porn film sets – has just the right sense of van Dorn slowly developing into a time bomb that could go off, while never losing our sympathy.

Hardcore is contemptuous of porn. Sharing van Dorn’s perspective of the industry, the film cements the industry as being based in a Danteish circle of hell, with violence, exploitation and misery round every corner. Schrader also enjoys poking fun at the porn industry and the film industry (a flashy porn director trained at UCLA, much like Schrader’s contemporaries). Searching for witnesses, van Dorn sets up fake auditions for a new porn movie, attended by a series of optimistic, hopeful guys with show reels and CVs. The money-first producers look and sound like any other Hollywood executive – it’s just they openly trade in skin.

The problem is Hardcore can’t settle for this: as if worried that poking some fun at the seedy industry might get in the way of us relating to the gut-punch horror van Dorn feels. In the second half, Schrader sets up (out of the blue) a snuff film premise, with an anonymous big bad behind it all (a figure so undeveloped that the most interesting thing about him is he’s played by Marc Alaimo who played Deep Space Nine’s villain Gul Dukat) just so we can have someone so obviously unspeakable that we have no mixed feelings at all when the violence kicks off.

Which is a shame because Hardcore looks, for a moment, like it is about to go somewhere more interesting. Van Dorn is broken from his obsessive focus only by meeting with Niki (played with just enough ballsy cuteness by Season Hubley), a girl on the margins of the industry dreaming of an escape. The two of them are drawn together in unexpected ways: she respects his religion in a way no-one else does, while van Dorn becomes the only man who doesn’t see her as a sex object, treating her with a fatherly gentleness you suspect he never showed his actual daughter. The film’s ruthless jettisoning of this plotline strives for hard-nosed reality, but ends up feeling like a too obvious attempt at pathos.

Despite all this Hardcore has its moments, not least thanks to George C Scott’s fire-cracker performance in the lead. Scott may have hated Schrader (allegedly begging him to never direct a film again), but he breathes life into this Ethan Edwards-Travis Bickle clone, making van Dorn just the right mix of pained, aggrieved and dangerous. Unfortunately, the film settles for something far more conventional, a revenge thriller with an obvious and inarguably horrible character created solely to make us feel good when he is dispatched.

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

The mechanics of courtroom showmanship is ruthlessly exposed in this gripping drama

Director: Otto Preminger

Cast: James Stewart (Paul Biegler), Lee Remick (Laura Mannion), Ben Gazzara (Lt Frederick Manion), Arthur O’Connell (Parnell McCarthy), Eve Arden (Maida Rutledge), Kathryn Grant (Mary Pilant), George C. Scott (Claude Dancer), Orson Bean (Dr Matthew Smith), Russ Brown (George Lemon), Murray Hamilton (Alphonse Paquette), Brooks West (Mitch Lodwick), Joseph N Welch (Judge Weaver)

Winston Churchill once said Democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others. You could say something similar about trial by jury: it ain’t perfect, but it’s better than any other justice system we’ve given a spin to in human history. Trials aren’t always forums for discovering truths: they are stages to present arguments (or stories), and they are won by whoever has the best one. Maybe cold, hard facts and evidence make up your story, maybe perceptions. Maybe it’s about how you tell the story. Elements of all three are found in Otto Preminger’s brilliant courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder.

In a small town in Michigan, a US army lieutenant, Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) is arrested for the murder of innkeeper Barney Quill. Manion says he did the deed only because Quill raped Manion’s wife Laura (Lee Remick). Representing him is lawyer Paul Biegler (James Stewart), a former district attorney looking to start-up a new practise. On the opposite side is new DA Mitch Lodwick (Brooks West) and, far more of a worry, hot-shot lawyer Claude Dancer (George C. Scott) all the way from the Attorney General’s office. They say there was no rape – only a jealous murder after a consensual affair. It’s he-said-she-said, only “he” is dead. How will the trial clear that one up?

Otto Preminger was the son of a noted Austrian jurist, and Anatomy of a Murder can be seen as a tribute to his father, and to the process of the law itself. Not that it’s a hagiography. The film recognises the virtues as well as the faults of the system. Above all, that the system is not perfect, it can’t base every decision on firm facts and often requires people to take leaps of faith based on their gut instinct about who may, or may not, be telling the truth.

Preminger’s film does its very best to put us in the position the jury is in. We get no real evidence about what happened beyond what they get, and very few bits of additional information (except, perhaps, for seeing what many of the characters are like outside of the courtroom). Instead, the viewer is asked to make their mind-up on whether events fell-out as Manion claims (or not) based on our own judgement of the probabilities and of his (and Laura’s) character. The film opens with the crime committed and closes shortly after the verdict: there are no flashbacks or pre-murder scenes to help nudge us towards one view or another. The murder victim appears only as a photo. Like the jury we have to call it on what we see in front of us.

Anatomy of a Murder also makes clear there are plenty of shades of grey in the process of justice. During his first consultation with Manion, Biegler carefully suggests he consider whether he was in fact insane when he committed the deed – as that sort of defence will be much easier, since he doesn’t deny the killing. Sure enough, on their second meeting, Manion is now deeply unsure about his state of mind. Biegler then works backwards to establish precedent for the plea (a finds a single, over 75 years old one) to pull together a defence of irresistible impulse and to peddle hard a picture of the victim as an unrepentant rapist practically asking for a wronged husband to do the deed.

Biegler’s case is flimsy – but the key thing is to present it with pizzazz. And that’s what he’s got. Stewart’s performances in Hitchcock classics are highly regarded, but this might well be his finest dramatic performance. This is a brilliantly sly deconstruction of Stewart’s aw shucks charm: Biegler promotes an image of himself as a down-on-his-heels, bumpkin-like country lawyer, punching above his weight against the big city lawyers, Stewart dialling up the famous drawl. But it’s miles from the truth: Biegler is a former DA, an experienced trial lawyer and a formidable advocate. Stewart flicks the switch constantly, visibly putting on his persona like a skin, shedding it when no longer needed.

There is a constant suggestion that everything Biegler does is for effect. From fiddling with fishing tackle during the prosecution’s opening statements, to furious court-room theatricals as he thuds tables at slights and injustices. All of it is carefully prepared, rehearsed and delivered to make an impact on the jury. The constant parade of effect, manufactured outrage and appeals to an “us against them” mentality provokes exasperation from his opponents and a weary toleration from the Judge (played by real-life McCarthy confronting attorney Joseph N Welch). Stewart uses his Mr Smith Goes to Washington nobility, but punctures it at every point with Biegler’s cynicism and opportunism. Biegler, at best, persuades himself his client is innocent – but I would guess he doesn’t really care either way. He immediately perceives the personalities of his clients and then does his best to shield their less flattering qualities from the jury.

The one advantage we have over the jury is the additional insight we get into this strange couple, living a possibly unhappy, and certainly love-hate, marriage. Manion plays wronged fury in the court – but Gazzara gives him a lot of self-satisfied smarm and bland indifference to his crime in real life, meeting every event with a smirk that suggests he’s sure he can get away with anything. Equally good, Lee Remick’s Laura presents such a front of decency and pain in court, you’ll find it hard to balance that with the promiscuous, blousy woman we see outside of it, who provocatively flirts with intent with anything that moves. But it’s all about the show: present them right, and these unsympathetic people can be successfully shown as a conventional loving couple.

The prosecution is playing the same game. George C. Scott is superb as a coolly professional lawyer, who will use any number of tricks – from angry confrontation, to seductive reasonableness – to cajole a witness to say anything he wishes them to say. He will turn on a sixpence from being your friend, to berating you as a liar. And he’s not averse to his own morally questionable plays in court. Like Biegler, he knows presenting a good story is what is needed to win: the truth (or otherwise) isn’t enough.

Anatomy of a Murder still feels like a hugely insightful look at the legal process. Most of its runtime takes place in court, which Preminger shoots with a calmly controlled series of long-takes and two-shot set-ups, that help turn the film into something of a play (as well as a showpiece for fine acting). Along with its very daring (for the time) exploration of rape, it has a very cool soundtrack from Duke Ellington, that drips with allure and gives the film a lot of edge. The acting is all brilliant – along with those mentioned, Eve Arden is first-class as Biegler’s loyal secretary and Arthur O’Connell sweetly seedy as his heavy-drinking fellow lawyer. Anatomy of a Murder gives a first rate, at times cynical, look at the flaws and strengths of trial by jury – and is an outstanding courtroom drama.

Dr Strangelove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Peter Sellers tries to stop the end of the world in the terrific satire Dr Strangelove

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Peter Sellers (Group Captain Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley/Dr Strangelove), George C. Scott (General Buck Turgidson), Sterling Hayden (Brigadier General Jack D Ripper), Keenan Wynn (Colonel Bat Guano), Slim Pickens (Major “King” Kong), Peter Bull (Russian Ambassador), Jack Creley (Mr Staines), James Earl Jones (Lt Lothar Zogg), Tracy Reed (Miss Foreign Affairs)

“Gentlemen you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” Kubrick’s hugely influential satire helped shape our perceptions of the Cold War and its mantra of mutually assured direction. Showing no mercy to its targets, it mixes Goonish schoolboy humour with moments of genuine tension and rising horror. Sure it features some of the faults of its director –self-importance, cold distance and much of the wit is due to Sellers and the performers rather than the not-particularly-witty-Kubrick – but there is no doubt it remains a seminal classic.

General Jack D Ripper (Sterling Hayden – excellent) orders his planes to drop their nuclear bombs on the USSR. Ripper is launching a pre-emptive strike to protect the American way of life from the Commies and, most importantly, to protect our precious bodily fluids. Yup he’s crazy, something his second-in-command RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) quickly realises, but can’t do anything about. US President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) reacts with horror at the prospect of all-out-war, negotiating with the Soviets to co-operate in shooting down the planes, while some of his advisors such as trigger-happy General Buck Turgidson (George C Scott, hilariously OTT) argue perhaps there is some merit in striking first. And sinister former-Nazi scientific consultant Dr Strangelove (Sellers one more time) spells out the impact of nuclear war.

Kubrick quickly came to the conclusion that if you were going to make a film about nuclear war, it almost couldn’t be anything buta comedy: after all the idea of two sides building a huge arsenal of weapons capable of destroying the world was so crazy, you wouldn’t believe it if you were told it. Dr Strangelove therefore ends up taking place in a world that’s one third grounded and two-thirds heightened reality. There is a great deal of college-style humour in the film (you can see it in those characters names which reference everything from the Whitechapel killer to female genitalia and excrement), but it works because its (mostly) played dead-straight.

Part of the film’s appeal was the number of sacred cows it slays. All the things that, at the time, America was meant to respect were ridiculed. The military, politicians, the Presidency, America’s moral authority, the ingenuity of American science and engineering. It’s all shown to be ineffectual, misguided, underpinned by fascist-tinged insanity, myopically obsessed with big bangs over humanity or plain ridiculous. Every single authority figure in the film is deconstructed over its course as some combination of childish, empathy-free or useless. You can’t come out of this film and every again have an unquestioning assurance our leaders know what they are doing.

This works, because it’s placed in a film that in many ways has the plot of a far more serious film (its very similar of course to Fail Safe). Chunks of it are played completely straight, or with just the merest touch of the surreal. In particular the sequences set on the bomber, commanded by Major Kong (played at short notice by Slim Pickens after injury prevented Sellers taking on that role as well) have that true sense of Kubrickian detail in their careful staging of all the procedures a bomber crew would follow (even if it still allows some fun to be poked at the expense of the survival kit, the contents of which would give a fella “a pretty good weekend in Vegas”).

Those bomber scenes sometimes outstay their welcome in their cold technicality (it’s odd to say that a film as short of this sometimes feels a little overlong), but that’s largely because in a film that is clearly demanding us to shake our heads at the madness, it struggles to get us invested in a more conventional heroic story (especially as success there is starting a nuclear conflagration).

Perhaps that’s because of the coldness in Kubrick’s style – emotion doesn’t often find its way into his greatest works, and he was often reliant on working with the right people (get a McDowell in it or a Nicholson and things can click, get an O’Neal and you can get a different story). Humour isn’t his strong suit, but fortunately he worked with Sellers at his finest hours. Sellers takes on three roles, all of them a sharp contrast, and he’s masterful in all of them. There were fewer more gifted improvisational performers than Sellers, and each of his parts benefits hugely from the dynamism (of various sorts) he gives them. It’s also interesting that two of them are actually the “one sane man” (Muffley and Mandrake) while Strangelove is a pantomime monster of insanity (introduced late in the film, he’s the final indicator that our fates are in the hands of complete lunatics).

For Mandrake, Sellers parodied the stiff-upper lip upper class, with Mandrake a stuffed-shirt, attempting to wheedle recall codes out with Ripper with a clumsy bonhomie. Muffley is played almost dead-straight as a weak man out of his depth. But he does have a phone call monologue with the Russian premier (largely improvised with Sellers) that is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see. There’s no restraint in Strangelove, a wheel-chair bound grotesque with a phantom (hardcore fascist) hand, constantly suppressing involuntary Hitler salutes and trying to hide his mounting excitement at the prospect of worldwide annihilation (“Mein Fuhrer! I can valk!”).

Kubrick’s directorial approach – wisely – seems to have been to acknowledge that Sellers was providing so much of the madness and dark comedy the concept demands, that he could be more restrained. Interestingly, for being his most famous film, it often feels like one of his least personal ones. It stands outside much of the Kubrick cannon – it’s short, its often brisk, technically it’s unflashy and often unobtrusive – and it plays on the director’s weakest vein, comedy.

But it’s got his mastery of detail – partly also due to its faultless set design by Ken Adam. The reconstruction of the bomber interior is overwhelmingly convincing (the Air Force was amazed at how accurate it was). Ripper’s low-ceilinged office is a visual metaphor for the character’s insular insanity. Most influential of-all, the Bond villain-ish War Room, with its vast circular table and huge screens was so perfectly conceived, it cemented the idea for generations of what war planning rooms should look like (Reagan even asked where it was when he took office). The film may be darkly surreal, but its surroundings give it an authority that is essential for its success.

Authority is what the film needed to work. Perhaps that’s the greatest contribution of Kubrick, to create a structure of convincing reality, allowing the surreal and insane actions to work. From Ripper’s clear fixation on his own impotence (“I do not avoid women but I do deny them my essence”) – to Turgidson’s increasingly bombastic militarism (“I don’t say we won’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops.”), they all work because they contrast with a setting soaked in reality and detail. It also adds the important depth that gives the film impact: sure it wouldn’t happen like this, but something like this could happen.

Dr Strangelove’s humour has at times dated – there’s something undeniably schoolboyish about its tone. Stretches showing the detail of the bomber’s operation go on way too long. The film itself also takes a while to get going, and like many Kubrick films it has an air of being pleased with itself. But in Sellers it has a comic genius at the height of his game and its impact in changing the way we think about the world can’t be denied. Still a classic.

Patton (1970)

George C Scott triumphs as Patton in this excellent World War Two biopic

Director: Franklin J Schaffner

Cast: George C Scott (General George S Patton), Karl Malden (General Omar Bradley), Michael Bates (General Bernard Montgomery), Edward Binns (Lt General Walter Bedell Smith), Lawrence Dobkin (Colonel Gaston Bell), John Doucette (General Lucian Truscott), James Edwards (Sgt William Meeks), Frank Latimore (Lt Colonel Henry Davenport), Richard Münch (General Alfred Jodl), Morgan Paull (Captain Richard Jenson), Siegfriend Rauch (Captain Oskar Steiger), Paul Stevens (Lt Colonel Charles Codman), Karl Michael Vogler (Field Marshall Erwin Rommel), Peter Barkworth (Colonel John Welkin)

Patton was garlanded with eight Academy Awards in 1970, but rarely seems to get a mention when people list landmark best pictures. This is unfair, as Patton is a marvellous, intelligent, professional piece of film-making that rewards re-viewing: not least because, in George C Scott, it has one of those performances you simply must see, an extraordinary melding of actor and real man to such a great extent many people can’t believe they are seeing the real thing when watching newsreel footage of the actual Patton.

Patton is nominally a war film, but it’s actually an intriguing character piece. It follows the career of General George S Patton (George C Scott) during the course of the Second World War. Patton was a soldier’s soldier, a dyed-in-the-wool military man with a warrior’s instinct and a poet’s soul. The sort of man who berated men for not wearing proper uniform, then astounded them with thoughtful reflections on classical history. The film charts his command in Africa against Rommel, the invasion with Sicily (and feud with British counterpart Bernard Montgomery), his benching after striking a soldier suffering from shellshock in a military hospital, and his command of the Third Army during the Normandy invasion, including his pivotal role in the Battle of the Bulge.

With a script co-written by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund North (later president of the Screenwriter’s Guild), Patton was a warts-and-all portrait of one of America’s most famous generals that came out amidst the country’s growing disillusionment with Vietnam. It was embraced by both sides of the argument because it very skilfully walks a tight-rope: for the hawks, there is enough of the “if we had more like him …” stance. For the doves, the film doesn’t shy away from Patton’s egomania, lack of tact and love of war (he even strongly advocates immediately turning on Russia – ‘cos they’ve already got all the men in Europe anyway – which you can interpret as visionary or insane depending on which side of the fence you are on).

At the centre of everything, George C Scott is quite simply a force of nature as Patton – I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is surely one of the greatest Best Actor winning performances ever. Patton is in nearly every scene, and even the one’s he’s not in he’s the subject of every conversation, and Scott totally dominates the movie. You can’t put your finger on it, but he quite simply becomes Patton. It’s extraordinary, but the actor totally disappears and you feel you are watching some remarkable act of resurrection (fitting since Patton had a profound belief in reincarnation).

Scott’s Patton rages, he shouts, he goes into fits of childish egomania – but he’s also sensitive, intelligent and poetic. He can write a touching letter to the bereaved mother of his adjutant, expressing his sorrow, but also write how tragic it is that he will miss the wars to come. Scott is ramrod in his posture, and more than embraces the theatricality of Patton himself – when an adjutant tells the General sometimes his soldiers don’t know if he’s joking or not, the General softly replies “It’s not important for them to know. It’s important for me to know”.

It’s easy to eulogise over Scott at the expense of all else – but the film is so focused on Patton that he is intrinsically linked with the film’s success. The film is episodic, but every scene tells us something different about the man. Although since the film starts with one of the greatest opening scenes in movie history, we feel like we pretty much know him from the start.

It opens with an enormous American flag, in front of which Patton emerges in full dress uniform to encourage new soldiers to do their duty and, most of all, to “remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Scott famously refused to do this scene when told it would open the picture, as he felt nothing else in his performance could emerge from its shadow (they eventually told him it would go later in the film – no word on how he responded when he first saw the film!).

In a nut shell you get the whole movie. Is the giant American flag ironic or does the film really mean it? Patton is both strangely terrifying and also awe-inspiring, charisma, determination and force seeping from every pore of his body. Scott nails every detail of this speech, just as he nails every other part of the performance, while the camera work reinforces his mythic status (or his hubris depending on where you stand) as a symbol of Americana.

Schaffner’s direction of the film is easy to overlook, largely because it is refreshingly unflashy. It’s superbly professional –not a single scene falls flat. He marshals each scene with extraordinary effect, and manages the film’s difficult balancing act of sly satire and hagiography brilliantly. He also, within an epic canvas, works very well with actors – there are a host of great cameos in here, not least from Michael Bates as a preening Montgomery and Edward Binns as an exasperated Bedell Smith. Karl Malden is the only other really major character as Patton’s junior (later commanding) officer and he is perfect as the honest professionalism in contrast to Patton’s flash.

And the film gives us plenty of Patton’s flash. The man who loved war and combat, also loved performing – and does so with abundant skill. But the film isn’t afraid to show his warts: in Sicily he threatens to sack a general who refuses to risk his men’s lives on a risky operation, primarily motivated by Patton wanting to reach Messina before Montgomery. Later, when striking the scared soldier, his actions are tough to watch even as part of you sees his point about other men having been wounded in the line of duty (the playing of the soldier as a teary whiner probably doesn’t help). The film never fails to show that Patton’s worst enemy is his own arrogant lack of thought – he constantly shoots his mouth off with no thought for the impact.

The film is brilliantly constructed. The photography is excellent, the editing superbly marshals a long film of many individual scenes into a story that seems a lot tighter and forward moving than it probably is. Schaffner makes us feel we go on a clear journey with this character – helped as well by Jerry Goldsmith’s excellent score that conveys a great deal with ancient mythic weight, playing off Patton’s own belief in resurrection.

Patton is often forgotten a bit – but it is a great film, well made, brilliantly balanced, wonderfully written and directed. And at its centre: what a performance. George C Scott is simply astoundingly brilliant, completely transformed into the old general. His Oscar (which Scott declined, thinking awards phony) was as well-deserved as these things get. A wonderful film, a true epic, and a marvellous character study of an enigma – it deserves to sit near Lawrence of Arabia in the personal epic stakes (to which it has more than a few similarities).