Tag: Michael Murphy

Salvador (1986)

Oliver Stone’s passionate denunciation of American policy, highly politicised but electrically made

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: James Woods (Richard Boyle), Jim Belushi (Doctor Rock), Michael Murphy (Ambassador Thomas Kelly), John Savage (John Cassady), Elpida Carrillo (Maria), Cindy Gibb (Cathy Moore), Tony Plana (Major Maximiliano Casanova), José Carlos Ruiz (Archbishop Oscar Romero)

To many countries the Cold War was very hot. The USA and USSR may not have crossed swords personally, but they were happy to funnel money and arms to governments and resistance groups in other countries to fight for them. The Salvadoran Civil War became another proxy battleground for East vs West – or rather Capitalism vs Communism. The US backed the military dictatorship, the USSR the left-wing revolutionaries. Caught in the middle? The people of El Salvador and their shattered human rights.

It’s not surprising this attracted the attention of Oliver Stone. Released in the same year as Platoon, Salvador is the second half of a one-two punch against the failures of American intervention. It was considerably less palatable to the masses though: Salvador is a furious, spittle-mouthed denunciation of American policy. Unlike Platoon where the victim is basically the innocence of a whole generation of Americans (an American tragedy), here you can’t fail to notice America is one of the bad guys. To Stone, El Salvador (as Richard Boyle points out in the film) was America’s chance to fight Vietnam again, only this time “right”: win it while sacrificing the lives of another country instead. It’s a considerably less easy to digest message.

Salvador is based on a fictionalised version of gonzo-journalist Richard Boyle (played with mesmeric intensity by an Oscar-nominated James Woods) who escapes from the mess of his life in San Francisco to cover the war first hand in El Salvador. There he finds himself growing increasingly sympathetic to the left-wing rebels, as the US-backed government forces commit atrocity after atrocity: mountains of corpses, assassinations and out-of-control death squads. And no-one in the embassy wants to admit to it, not when they are more concerned about keeping El Salvador from going Red. To stop that, any price is worth paying.

It makes for a passionate, angry but not subtle film. But then is Oliver Stone known for anything else? It hectors, it bellows, it hammers its points home. Stone’s writing is often a touch simplistic. There are traces of the unpleasant racism of Stone’s scripted Midnight Express in the scruffy, lecherous vileness of many of the government troops while death squad leader Major Max (Tony Plana) struts around like a mix of Tony Montana and Henry II, all but saying “who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” as he plots the murder of leading protestor Archbishop Oscar Romero.

It’s a film that lands punches that would have been better pulled. I could have done without the all-too-detailed recreation of the rape and murder of four American missionaries by a government death squad. Changing the names, doesn’t change the fact that these are fundamentally real people whose final moments are staged with a little too much queasy detail (or close-ups of their mistreated, bullet ridden bodies). But then, Stone is equally unafraid – and perhaps rightly so – to show us mountains of dead Salvadoran bodies, including children, so maybe it’s hypocritical of me to argue restraint for American victims.

Stone shoots the film with a real urgency and immediacy. Boyle frequently makes his way to the heat of the action and the camera follows him right in there. It ducks and sways among panicked mobs of people. It sees charges of horse-backed revolutionaries head towards it. It follows Boyle through devastated streets and scenes of despicable human carnage. It doesn’t flinch from executions and murders and when Boyle is thrown to the ground by explosions and gunfire, it goes down with him. Stone allows bombastic excess into the film, twinned with a score that adds a little too much classical self-importance, but at least his reasoning behind making this an overwhelming film makes sense. The whole ghastly civil war is overwhelming.

And so is America’s part in it. Aside from the ambassador – a Carter-ish hangover, played with ineffectual decency by Michael Murphy – the figures we see from government are heartless, cold warriors, interested only in the ends and caring nothing for the means. They pour money into death squads, provide air support and tanks for rebels to be strafed on the ground and are totally indifferent to morality. The media largely backs them all the way, parroting the government line and painting the revolutionaries as terrorists. They even suggest those dead missionaries were either foolish or mixed up with the rebels – either way fundamentally responsible for their deaths.

The government contrasts with the “ordinary” Americans we see. Missionaries down here to do good. And, of course, the cryptic figure of Richard Boyle. Boyle is, in many ways, a deeply unsympathetic character. Woods makes him selfish, sleazy and self-interested, constantly letting people down and taking what he can get from friendships and situations. But the things he sees in El Salvador reawakens his sense of right and wrong. He’s vile but he’s kind of brave. He will call out what he sees as wrong. He will protect others, instinctively covering those he loves when bullets fly.

And, finally, he tries to do something right, smuggling his girlfriend Maria (sweetly played by Elpidia Carrillo) and her young son back to America (needless to say, the authorities do not react well). Part of Salvador’s success is in seeing Woods perfectly craft a character arc that takes a man interested only in himself through to putting himself at risk for innocents. It’s a long road from the gonzo washout who drives down to the country stoned with drinking buddy Dr Rock (Jim Belushi, rather good as grungy stoner, sweeter than he appears, who grows to love the country and its people).

He’s a complex hero though, superbly bought to life by Woods in a performance that’s like a raw wound in a complex film. While Platoon could be seen, for all its loss of innocence, as a film where America was the victim, Salvador casts the country as the villain sharing morally responsibility for the piles of corpses Boyle picks his way through. Stone acknowledges the crimes of the revolutionaries – Boyle furiously denounces them for their shooting of unarmed soldiers pleading for the lives – but his real anger in this passionate, vibrant polemic is America itself. It’s delivered with verve, commitment and drama and helps make Salvador one of his best and most overlooked films.

The Front (1976)

The Blacklist is skewered in this heartfelt comedy that turns tragedy

Director: Martin Ritt

Cast: Woody Allen (Howard Prince), Zero Mostel (Hecky Brown), Herschel Bernardi (Phil Sussman), Michael Murphy (Alfred Miller), Andrea Marcovicci (Florence Barrett), Remak Ramsey (Francis X Hennessey), Lloyd Gough (Herbert Delaney), David Marguiles (William Phelps), Danny Aiello (Danny LaGattuta), Josef Summer (Committee chairman)

The first Hollywood drama about the “the Blacklist”, the shamefully unconstitutional banning of left-leaning Hollywood figures from working as a result of the House of Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation into alleged communist subversion. If there was any doubt how personal the film was to its makers, the credits scroll with the Blacklisting dates of many of its makers including Ritt, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, Mostel, Bernardi, Gough and Delaney. The Front is a tragedy told with a wry comic grin. Perhaps the makers knew that if they didn’t laugh they’d cry.

When screenwriter Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy) is blacklisted he asks an old friend, small-time bookie and cashier Howard Prince (Woody Allen) to attach his name to Miller’s scripts and submit them. In return Prince will keep 10% of all payments. The scheme is so successful Prince becomes “the Front” for two other writers and the quality and volume of Howard’s ‘output’ wins him a lucrative job as lead writer on a successful TV show, while his ‘genius’ wins the love of idealistic script editor Florence (Andrea Marcovicci). But, as the Blacklist takes hold – driving out of work actors with tenuous links to Communism like the show’s star Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel) – will Howard take any sort of moral stand about what’s happening in America?

The Front took a bit of flak at the time for not being more overtly angry about the Blacklist – as if the only response possible was spittle-flecked fury. However, today, its mix of comedy and real, visceral tragedy looks like the perfect response. The Front embraces the Kafkaesque ridiculousness the Blacklist created. Howard locked in an office at his studio to do an emergency re-write, calling Miller who taxies round replacement pages. Howard’s general ignorance of writing in general and his desperate mugging up on Eugene O’Neill and Dostoyevsky to pass them off as ‘influences’. The fact the list hasn’t done anything to stop these writers’ work from getting out there.

It’s also strong on the sense of underground community that grew among the banished writers. As veterans themselves, Ritt and Bernstein could be nostalgic about the sense of ‘all being in it together’ that the unemployed scribblers had.That vibe comes across well form Miller, Delaney and Phelps meeting in restaurants, libraries and hospital rooms to knock ideas around. There is the espionage-tinged excitement of watching script pages being palmed across to Howard like dead-drops. The film never forgets the gut-wrenching difficulty, stress and pain of not being able to work openly. But it also remembers the family feeling of a support network, giving people the courage to keep going.

But then the Kafkaesque comedy slowly drains away, as the punishing injustice creeps to the fore. Studio fixer – and vetting officer – Hennessy (played with self-satisfied relish by Remak Ramsey) calmly pressures creatives to turn on each other. Sure, there is comedy in him telling a victim of mistaken identity that there is nothing he can do to help him as the guy has nothing to confess to – that’s Kafka – but Ritt doesn’t miss the desperation and fear in the victim’s eyes. To Hennessy everyone is guilty, innocence is something that needs to be proved – and it’s a lot less funny when he strips people of their livelihoods because their personal views don’t fit.

The film’s true tragedy is actor Hecky Brown. Beautifully played by Zero Mostel, in a performance of a jovial front placed over ever-growing bitterness, anger, self-loathing and despair, Hecky can’t work quietly behind a front. As an actor, once he’s under suspicion, he’s unemployable. Despite his jokey pleas that he only marched on May Day and subscribed to the Socialist Worker (six years ago, when as he points out the USSR were our allies) to impress a girl, he’s goes from star to begging for work at the Catskills. There the manager is all smiles and pays him $250 for a gig worth thousands (based on a real life incident that happened to Mostel – and the pain and anger of it is still in his eyes).

Mostel’s performance is the heart-and-soul of the film which follows his increasingly bleak tip into despair. He scuffles with that Catskills manager over his hypocritical sorrow. Staying in Howard’s apartment, he despises himself as he searches through Howard’s desk for incriminating evidence. In a striking scene, he berates “Henry Brownstein” (Hecky’s real name) for stopping him turning state’s evidence. It’s a sad, moving picture of the real human cost of this injustice that helps moves the film past comedy and into dark drama.

And to get an even better of how serious this human cost, what could be better than placing a self-interested, politically disengaged chancer at its heart and seeing how he responds. The casting of Woody Allen – in one of the few films he appeared in and didn’t write – is perfect. There is no-one more politically disengaged and full of pinickity obsession that Allen. Howard Prince is a decent guy but his main interests are money (his eyes light up at earning 10% for nothing), his fancy apartment, seducing Florence and the adulation from fawning producers.

What better way to show the impact of the Blacklist injustice, than to see how Howard slowly shifts from a man so disinterested he doesn’t even know what the Fifth Amendment is, to someone who feels compelled to make a stand. Slowly he finds he can’t ignore the injustice – there is a beautiful moment when Howard embarrassedly drinks and stares at a poster on the office wall at the back of the frame while Hecky begs for $500 from that Catskill’s manager. He gradually realises a fun ride for him is a dystopian nightmare for others – his self-satisfied shrugs turning into real principle.

Because, he will learn, HUAC doesn’t care for names – they care about breaking people. Being as ignorant and disinterested in politics as Howard won’t save you. That’s what Ritt and Bernstein have been driving to: this wasn’t Kafka, it was Orwell, it wasn’t about the obstructive indifference of bureaucracy but Big Brother’s ruthless rooting out of thought crime. So, when Allen tells them – in the final lines of the film – to go fuck themselves, and the film freezes so he can walk out of it, you really understand why this is a glorious cry of wish fulfilment straight from the heart of the film-makers.

Nashville (1975)

Robert Altman’s sprawling classic takes on a whole city in the brilliant Nashville

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: David Arkin (Norman), Barbara Baxley (Lady Pearl), Ned Beatty (Del Reese), Karen Black (Connie White), Ronee Blakley (Barbara Jean), Timothy Brown (Tommy Brown), Keith Carradine (Tom Frank), Geraldine Chaplin (Opal), Robert Du Qui (Wade Cooley), Shelley Duvall (Martha), Allen Garfield (Barnett), Henry Gibson (Haven Hamilton), Scott Glenn (Pfc Kelly), Jeff Goldblum (Tricycle Man), Barbara Harris (Winifred), David Hayward (Kenny), Michael Murphy (John Triplette), Allan F. Nicholls (Bill), Dave Peel (Bud Hamilton), Cristina Raines (Mary), Bert Remsen (Star), Lily Tomlin (Linnea Reese), Gwen Welles (Sueleen Gay), Keenan Wynn (Mr Green)

Robert Altman’s magnum opus, Nashville has the city has its set and, seemingly, its entire population as the cast. Over the course of a few days, Nashville charts the interweaving lives of a host of people making (or trying to make) a living in the home of country and western and the hangers on and fans flocking around the edges. Meanwhile a presidential campaign plays out, trying to recruit stars as fund-raisers.

You could say that, on the surface, Nashville isn’t really about anything. Certainly, it’s plot (such as it is) is more based on observing our characters interacting with and responding to events. Wonderfully rich short stories overlap each other, the focus mothing smoothly from one and another. It’s not really grounded in an overarching plot, such as McCabe and Mrs Miller or The Long Goodbye. In many ways its more similar to M*A*S*H, an experience piece trying to capture the thoughts and emotions of a particular moment of time. It’s that which I think is the heart of it. Nashville is about very little, but really it’s about everything – and it’s one of the most enlightening and vital studies of twentieth century America you are ever going to see. A rich and fascinating insight into a particular point in history, in a country rife with tensions.

You can’t escape that Nashville takes place in an America under the shadow of traumatic events. The 1970s (and the legacy of the 1960s) has pulled America further apart than ever. It’s a country struggling with a wave of assassinations, still deeply scared by the sacrifice of JFK (several characters, most notably Barbara Bexley’s permanently intoxicated Lady Pearl, reflect on the loss of innocence that came with it). Scott Glenn’s uniform clad army private is only the most visual reminder that the country is being ripped apart by Vietnam. Bubbling racial tensions are captured by short-order cook Wade (a lovely performance by Robert Du Qui) who angrily denounces black country singer Tommy Brown (a suave Timothy Brown) as an Uncle Tom.

Politically, America isn’t heading anywhere. The film is continuously framed by a car literally driving around in circles, blaring out meaningless platitudes straight from the lips of Hal Phillip Walker a third-party Presidential candidate who is against a lot of stuff (lawyers in congress and the Election College) but doesn’t seem to be ‘for’ anything. His smooth advance man John Triplette (Michael Murphy, quietly unimpressed by the music stars around him) drums up musicians to appear at a benefit – not one of whom even ask about the politics of the man they are being asked to endorse. Nashville isn’t a film that feels particularly enamoured either with politics or the level of our engagement with it.

Instead there is a new religion in town: fame. The musicians of Nashville at the time were unhappy with the film, feeling that Altman planned an attack on their industry. Altman is, of course, smarter than this. Of course, there are some satirical blows landed – but the film has respect and admiration for artists with genuine talent. Its real criticism is for fakes and poseurs (of which more later). But for the talents at the centre, sure they are flawed – but there is a respect for their skills and genuineness that keeps the film relatable. (Altman would be far more vicious when he turned his eyes to Hollywood with The Player).

The artists at its heart are flawed but human. Haven Hamilton (a grandiose Henry Gibson) may be a blow-hard reactionary, but his patriotic pride and sense of personal responsibility is genuine (late in the film he will ignore a serious injury to show concern for others). At the film’s centre is fragile super-star Barbara Jean (a delicate Ronee Blakely), the beloved super-star teetering on the edge of a dangerous breakdown, overwhelmed with the pressures of fame and expectation. A lonely person, reduced to trying to communicate her unease to her audiences in rambling monologues. Looking for a human connection she’s unable to make elsewhere (this makes for a neat contrast with her rival, Karen Black’s bubbly but coolly distant Connie White who knows where to draw the line between public and private).

This humanity also makes for intriguing personal dilemmas. Singing trio Tom (a swaggering Keith Carradine), Bill (a frustrated Allan F Nicholls) and Mary (a saddened Cristina Raines) are in the middle of a love triangle (caused by Mary’s love for Tom, who loves the attention but doesn’t return the favour). Made more tense by Tom’s desire to go solo, the couple’s tensions are never firmly resolved – part of Altman’s avoiding of neat endings. Tom himself, in many ways a shallow lothario, is also shown to be feeling the same loneliness and emptiness as others.

It’s interesting that the film’s warmest character, Lily Tomlin’s Linnea, lies half-way between the world of the music and the world of normal life. A dedicated performer of gospel with an all-Black choir, Linnea also works tirelessly at home to support her two deaf children (who attract very little interest from their father, would-be fixer Ned Beatty). Linnea though is never portrayed as someone trapped in her life, in the way others are, but in complete acceptance – and even contentment – with her lot. Similar to Keenan Wynn’s grieving husband, desperate for his niece to engage with her aunt’s illness, the film’s real warmth is for those people grounded in real-life worries.

The film’s real fire is saved for the shallow wannabes that flock around the edges. The music stars may be flawed but they have talent (as witnessed by the film showcasing almost an hour of musical performance in its runtime – all the songs written and performed by the stars). Shelley Duvall’s would-be groupee is hilariously empty-headed and selfish. Ned Beatty’s greasy-pole climbing political animal is ridiculously pompous. At the top of the pile is Geraldine Chaplin’s reporter, an empty headed fame obsessive, hilariously fawning to the rich and famous and abrupt and rude to ‘the staff’, pontificating emptily in a car junkyard. Is she even a real reporter or just a fantasist?

Altman’s film also finds time for two very different women trying to find fame in this heartland of country and western. Sueleen Gray (Gwen Welles) is a waitress carefully cultivating all the patter of a star, but lacking the key attribute – talent. So desperate is she to ‘make it’ that she is willing to be exploited for a big chance, with only Wade having the decency to tell her she should cut her losses (advice she bats away in anger). By contrast, Barbara Harris’ Albuquerque, running from her husband to find fame, has the talent but never gets the opportunities – until of course at the very end (and it’s the result of the tragic fate of another woman whose doomed fate hangs over the film).

Nashville is a rich character study, but all these characters link back into an America at a turning point in its cultural history. Detached and disillusioned with politics, this is a country that is starting to see fame – and the indulgence of your own passions and desires – as the new religion. A religion that attracts both wannabes and also stalkers and dangerous obsessives (at least two of whom populate the film, one with fatal consequences). In this world, as idealism dies and is replaced by cynicism, people start to check out and either engage more with their own problems or yearn to change their lives and become something else. Altman’s film captures this moment in time personally, as well as being a compelling melting pot of stories. A rich, multi-layered tapestry – of which a review can only scratch the surface – it’s a great film.

McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971)

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie fail to conquer the Wild West in Altman’s revisionist Western McCabe and Mrs Miller

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Warren Beatty (John McCabe), Julie Christie (Constance Miller), RenéAuberjonois (Sheehan), Michael Murphy (Eugen Sears), Antony Holland (Ernest Hollander), Bert Ramsen (Bart Coyle), Shelley Duvall (Ida Coyle), Keith Carradine (Cowboy), Hugh Millais (Butler), Corey Fischer (Reverend Elliot), William Devane (Clement Samuels), John Schuck (Smalley)

The Western is such a familiar genre of Hollywood film-making that you can be pretty familiar with nearly all the concepts that it contains – from the stranger in town through to the final shoot-out. All these familiar tropes were just challenges though for a film-maker like Robert Altman: how do we make a Western that features all these, but then completely twists and subverts it all into something that also feels like a product of the 1970s rather than the 1870s? Well Altman runs with all this in McCabe and Mrs Miller, his successful anti-Western.

In Washington State in 1902, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a conman and card sharp, rides into Presbyterian Church, a town so small it’s named after its only prominent building. McCabe’s skills at cards quickly make him rich, and as the town’s mining fortunes grow so do his. He sets up a gaming and cat house in the town. Constance Miller (Julie Christie) is a cockney opium addict with experience of running whorehouses and she quickly partners with McCabe, promising that she can raise his profits tenfold. All goes swimmingly – until big business heads into town and makes an offer to buy out McCabe’s holdings (and the whole town) for redevelopment. When McCabe says no he quickly finds himself in over his head.

Altman’s film combines all the techniques that he had been experimenting with throughout his career into a perfect storm of Altmanesque technique. He and Vilmos Zsigmond, his skilled cinematographer, deliberately “flashed” the film to slightly over-expose it, giving the picture a slight sepia hue like a series of old photos. The camera leisurely roves around like curious spectator to the film, letting itself catch moments of interest here and there – sometimes refusing to focus on events that feel, by rights, that they should be centre of the film. It gives the film a real lived in feeling, while also making it look slightly like a historical record of true events. Either way, as the cold hits Washington State, it looks beautiful – candle-lit interiors mixed with coldly blue exteriors of snow and ice-covered surroundings.

But those visuals are as nothing compared to Altman’s experiment with sound. Sticking rigidly to the script was hardly ever Altman’s way and it’s certainly not here. In rehearsals, the actors felt free to experiment with and rework a script that had already been through the hands of several writers. Altman kept this loose, free-flowing, improvisational tone in the final film. As the camera roves round, so does the microphone, picking up snatches of conversation here and there – sometimes giving us a mixture of conversations from which we need to pick out what to listen to. In addition to that, most of the actors deliberately mumble their lines – or happily deliver them from mouths clutching cigars or chewing food. Anarchic is almost the right word for it – Altman doesn’t want to tell you what to listen to, and is more interested in getting across the atmosphere of the scene rather than the facts and figures. It takes some time to get used to – and at points is highly frustrating – but it creates its own mood.

And this mood is very different from what you might expect from a Western. There is a distinct lack of glamour here. This world of Presbyterian Church is dirty, grimy and lacking in any moral fibre or real sense of right and wrong. The church itself is respected but largely ignored by the citizens, who are far more interested in drinking, screwing and gambling. When violence occurs it is ignored as much as possible or – as in the final shoot-out that ends the film – it happens around people so wrapped up in their own concerns (from domestics, to a large fire) that they barely notice it happening. Needless to say, for those in the fire fight, there are no rules to be played by at all. People are shot in the back, shoot down innocent bystanders, and play by no rules whatsoever, stalking and shooting opportunistically.

McCabe is a perfect hero for this very different kind of Western. As played by Beatty, he is a cocksure coward nowhere near as clever, confident or controlled as he thinks he is. Arriving in the town, he seems like the height of glamour in his bearskin coat, and he swiftly masters the simple townsfolk with his tall tales and charisma. However, the more people who intrude on this world, the more quickly it emerges that McCabe has very little clue about what is going on, is easily cowed and has only the barest understanding of how the world works. Meeting with a lawyer, one scene later he is parroting a (completely misunderstood) version of the law that he has heard from there. Meeting with the “muscle” from the corporation, he deflates like a balloon, desperately making offers hand over foot. Beatty is very good as this puffed up coward, confused and constantly living a front but out of his depth in the world.

Julie Christie’s Mrs Miller is far more worldly than him, immediately able to recognise the dangers and understanding exactly the sort of men McCabe is dealing with. Mrs Miller’s opium habit is a quietly understated obsession, one the other characters seem unaware of, but which the viewer alone seems to know about. It raises questions of course – is this meant to imply perhaps some of what we see is a drug induced fantasy? But it doesn’t impact otherwise the relationship she develops with McCabe, part meeting of partners, part a protective relationship with Miller guiding McCabe.

The rest of the cast is stuffed with a series of Altman regulars, all of whom deliver fine performances. The stand-out is Hugh Millais, an English writer making his acting debut, who is simply sublime as the articulate and ruthless chief heavy sent by the company to intimidate McCabe.

For the film itself, your enjoyment of it is largely going to be affected by how easily you plug into its style of storytelling. There is very little story for much of the first half of the film, instead events continue in a loose and undisciplined style, but the second half delivers a more focused story of ambition pushed too far, and culminates in an impressively filmed ruthless shoot out. It is perhaps more of a film that is about the atmosphere and the style than the story, but as a redeveloped Western that carries across the style of the grimy 1970s it works extremely well. At first I thought I would never get into it, but by the end I found myself wrapped up in the story it was telling. Visually and performance-wise it’s superb. Altman is an acquired taste, but acquire it and you will be richly rewarded.

Coda: Much like The Long Goodbye I watched this film about a week ago at time of posting and I find myself thinking over several sequences in it again and again with ever more admiration. When watching it I felt it had been over promoted by critics. Now I increasingly think it might be something very special indeed.