Solved Nothing

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[Spoilers for The Missouri Breaks and sort of for Night Moves follow. I'd include Bonnie and Clyde as well, but, I mean, seriously.]

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When Arthur Penn died last year, it was my belief that in the wake of his passing, Bonnie and Clyde would be about the only film anyone was going to bother to remember, and that I might as well accept it (which, considering the man was dead, was exceptionally brave of me). Well, I should have known better, because while Bonnie and Clyde (1967) –a film I hate – is easily Penn’s best known film, and would appear to be his most consistently loved, and would further appear to be the one that is most likely to endure, God help us, the kind of people who are going to bother writing anything about Arthur Penn in the first place, even when he was alive, are going to have a deeper knowledge of the man’s work, and are going to appreciate more than just the poor-little-killers film that invites the audience to share in its own obliviousness.

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I hate Bonnie and Clyde. But I like Arthur Penn. Penn was a bit of a genre guy, which is always nice, even if his interest lay primarily in subverting them, or subverting what we expect and desire from those genres. His genres of choice tended to be Westerns and crime films, which are spiritually linked in a very basic way which somehow often goes unremarked upon. But listen: how many Westerns essentially double as crime films? Yes, you have your cowboys and Indians Westerns, and your historical Westerns (which Penn covered as well), and all that, but the tin star and the posse and the bad man fed just as many films as did frontier life and Cavalry uniforms.

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Such is the case, sort of, with Penn’s first feature film The Left Handed Gun (1958), and his later, commercially and critically disastrous (well I like it) The Missouri Breaks (1976). The Left Handed Gun, which stars Paul Newman as Billy the Kid, is plainly the work of a young filmmaker who desperately wishes it was already the 1970s, or at least the late 60s. In some ways, Penn is already pushing towards Bonnie and Clyde here, with its near-romanticizing of a punk kid whose claim to fame is spilling innocent blood (though probably less blood of any kind in reality than in this film). But eventually The Left Handed Gun takes a more peacenik approach to its violence, because of course – or not “of course”, because this is not an element you can necessarily bank on in films that print the legends of Billy the Kid, or, say, Jesse James – Billy finally goes “too far”, and Pat Garrett (John Dehner), who’d rather not kill the boy, finds that his hand is forced, for the greater good. No, if The Left Handed Gun has problems, which it does, it’s not due to the film collapsing under its own confused morality, but rather to the two men involved with the film who would eventually enjoy much higher profiles than Penn: Paul Newman and Gore Vidal. The film was based on Vidal’s play, and I’m willing to blame all the shortcomings on him because I hate Gore Vidal about as much as I hate Bonnie and Clyde. But the film’s real problem is its theatricality – despite the variety of locations, and the horses, and all the things you wouldn’t expect from a stage play, the damn thing still seems weirdly stage bound in the sense that it seems pitched to the back of the theater.

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Newman, who was still finding his sea-legs, doesn’t help. It’s I guess ironic that the common line on The Missouri Breaks is that Penn lost control of star Marlon Brando, who was at the “fuck it” stage of his career, and would, so the story goes, rather amuse himself on set than help whatever movie he was filming. But when I watch The Left Handed Gun, I see a young Paul Newman who is out of control, as yet unable to keep the lid on his worst instincts, and receiving no direction on how to do so from Penn, so that this great actor instead bounces around and mugs like a cartoon psycho. Meanwhile, when I watch The Missouri Breaks, I see a legitimately mad Brando who towers over everything else, and manages to raise the film up to his lunacy. Before Brando shows up, the film is a bit wearyingly ordinary: a bad rich man (John McLiam) takes to hanging horse thieves, thereby putting a group of otherwise decent horse thieves, led by Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), on edge. But the bad rich man hires Lee Clayton (Brando), whose line of work, while never described quite in this way, is that of an assassin. And once that happens, “ordinary” is no longer a word one could logically use to describe The Missouri Breaks.

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Is any of what follows Brando’s introduction – specifically, anything that actually involves Brando and his performance – really out of control? The commercial failure of The Missouri Breaks badly stalled Penn’s career, but I’m more inclined to blame the people who didn’t go see it and the critics who didn’t give it a fair shake than either Penn or Brando. My understanding is that giving Clayton an Irish brogue was Brando’s idea. Okay, so? Brando doesn’t do a bad job with the accent, however many people claim otherwise, so where’s the problem? And Brando wears a dress at one point. Yes indeed he does (he dresses strangely throughout, but this moment would, I admit, have to count as the pinnacle of that). By the time he puts on the frontier-lady dress, Clayton has been established, partly through Brando’s performance, and partly through what Thomas McGuane’s script has him do and say, as a complete lunatic, loyal to nobody, a sadistic chessmaster, so that, to a degree the dress makes sense, and anyway, as this scene goes on and the building burns and more blood is spilled, the dress adds a Psycho-esque chill.

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Then, of course, there’s the climax to Clayton’s story, his last night on Earth, spent with a couple of horses and Penn’s patient camera, which records Clayton’s loving interaction with one horse, then stern rebuke of another, then his lilting attempt to sing himself to sleep, then sleep, the blackness, then death. I have to rank this as The Missouri Breaks’ finest hour, and possibly Penn's, and if much of what precedes Clayton’s sleep was improvised by Brando – and I don’t know that it was anyway – then bravo to him, and to Penn for seeing the worth in it all. There’s some darkly comic poetry at work here, and if this counts as out of control, then I want more of it.

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Though the connection is thin at best, when, in its early going, The Missouri Breaks seems to be about how law and order crushes otherwise peaceable thieves, or at least that the idea of "frontier justice" was an oxymoron, it plays a little bit like a wheezing version of Bonnie and Clyde (thin at best, I know, I said that, but you gotta connect these things somehow). Bonnie and Clyde. Motherfucking Bonnie and Clyde. It's a well made film, I'll grant you -- watching it again recently, I was impressed by how well it moved -- but if I had to boil my contempt for it down to one scene, it would be the part where the gang robs a bank and Clyde fires a shot at the bank guard (Russ Marker), who'd been going for his gun. In this same scene, Clyde tells a bank customer to keep his money (because he's nice like that), and later we see both the customer praising Clyde's generosity to a newspaper reporter, and the bank guard vainly posing for a photograph while he describes looking into the face of death. We're meant to laugh at this guard because, additionally, we're supposed to scorn the way he pumps up the danger in his story. In order to do this, the audience needs to forget, or not care, that not only after that robbery, but before it, Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) have been killing policemen by the handful. The real Bonnie and Clyde did the same thing (though, in terms of the film, I'm told this doesn't matter), so it's more than a little appalling to see the police represented in the film either as glory hounds or bumbling seekers not of justice, but of vengeance (this in the form of Denver Pyle's Sheriff Hamer, who after being humiliated by the Barrow gang, later orchestrates the ambush that will lay our heroes low).

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There's a sense that Bonnie and Clyde played to audiences who outwardly professed to abhor violence and bloodshed, but might be okay if the blood was being shed from pigs. I'm sure the film's admirers, as well as Penn and screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman, would wave their hands in the air and say "No no no no no!" if presented with the theory. But look at how the stage blood is dispensed in Bonnie and Clyde. One innocent victim, the first one Clyde kills in the film, is allowed a brutal death, with shattering glass and a blown off face. The film comes very near to making something out of this, but in order for that to really click, the pursuit by law enforcement of the Barrow gang would have achieve at least ambiguity, but it doesn't -- the cops aren't good, and we're shown this. Not only that, but the dozen or so cops who are murdered by one or another member of the Barrow gang don't get to be brutalized, and therefore humanized. All those deaths are of the grab-chest-and-fall-over variety of the Hollywood crime films and Westerns that Bonnie and Clyde is supposed to be signalling the end of. That is, of course, until Bonnie and Clyde are most cruelly ambushed by the police force, whose ranks the Barrow gang has bravely thinned. Then, Penn makes with the red paint, and how. Because these were human beings, damn it. We know this, because the manner in which their deaths are depicted invites the audience to look away. All those cops, though, well, you know. You can't make an omelette, etc.

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There's a terrible smugness to Bonnie and Clyde that I absolutely cannot stand. It flatters its audience, those who like it, in a way that, say, Sam Peckinpah, the master of moral confusion and splattered viscera, never did. It's a kids film in a lot of ways -- Clyde's gun is like a penis that one time, and so on -- and thankfully Penn would grow out of it. He would do this most notably, to my mind, and going by my incomplete experience with his work, with Night Moves (1975). Written by Alan Sharp and starring Gene Hackman, Melanie Griffith, James Woods, Jennifer Warren, and Edward Binns, Night Moves is the kind of loose, digressive detective story that, in literature, is perhaps best represented by the fiction of James Crumley. There's not a huge narrative drive to solve the mystery, and in fact for quite a while it seems that there is no mystery, once Hackman's Harry Moseby, a private detective, does right by his client (Janet Ward) by tracking down her free-spirited and often nude teenage daughter (Griffith), who has been hiding out in Florida with her stepdad (a quietly terrific John Crawford). When bodies start to appear, and motives come into question, all the plot elements that had been held in reserve -- which have to do with stuntmen and filmmaking and drugs and statutory rape -- are released in a rush towards the end, so that while Moseby is able to piece together what's been going on, he has to acknowledge that it all just fell into his lap. "I didn't solve anything," he says.

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He sure didn't, as the film's incredible and devastating final ten minutes makes clear. It takes a great deal of courage, not to mention confidence, to intentionally leave an audience as confused by why something has just happened as Penn and Sharp do at the end of Night Moves. I've said before that one of the great tragedies of the word "mystery" as it relates to genre fiction is that it has come to mean, in most people's minds, "something that is solvable." Night Moves rejects that utterly. This embracing of uncertainty is one reason why Night Moves feels like the film of an adult, or group of adults, rather than a film like Bonnie and Clyde, which was made by people who just wanted to set fire to all the shit that was older than they were.

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TIFF's Lightbox is running an Arthur Penn series in the coming weeks. All films discussed in this post, and many more besides, will be shown. The Left Handed Gun will be screened on March 27; The Missouri Breaks will screen March 28; Bonnie and Clyde on March 24, March 27 and April 6; and Night Moves on March 31.