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.

Overshadowed: A Sport Enjoyed by All

As always with Overshadowed, spoilers are in effect.

Go into just about any pool hall in the country, especially those frequented by casual players, and I'll bet you that you'll see the above image, enlarged, framed and hanging on the wall. That's because in 1961, Paul Newman played Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen's film The Hustler, and by virtue of being Paul Newman (which is not, by any means, to say Newman is the only thing the film has going for it) every man of a certain age across America who wasn't already devoted to the game of pool suddenly decided that maybe picking up a cue stick could be worth their time. If you learned how to play pool, and could play it well, you could make money. You could show your superiority over other men. You could take on a pose of world-weariness. You could be a man. The culture of pool hustling obviously already existed, but Rossen's film, and Newman's incredibly skilled and seductive performance, turned it into a fad. Of course, most fads -- frisbees, Pokemon -- don't require the level of practice and accomplishment that a person needs to really take part in serious pool, so the vast majority of the people who put their quarters on the table after seeing The Hustler suddenly found themselves not living the life of Eddie Felson or Minnesota Fats, but, instead, merely discovered that they were the owner of a brand new hobby. Because once you've picked up the habit of shooting pool, you don't just drop it. You don't leave it behind when the next fad comes along. You might not be any good, but it's a damn good game to play. Even at the level of rank amateur, when shooting good pool -- good for them, anyway -- a person can still feel that "Nothing could be so clear or so simple or so excellent to do."
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That line's not from the film, and Paul Newman and Robert Rossen didn't create Felson or the film from scratch. The line is from the 1959 novel of the same name, by Walter Tevis. The Hustler was Tevis's first novel, and he would only publish five more, and one collection of stories, before he passed away in 1984 at the age of 56. Curiously, four of his seven books are science fiction (including the collection), and three were adapted to the screen: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and, of all things, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Focusing only on the first two, then it goes without saying that Tevis created not one, but two of the most enduring and iconic characters in post-War American fiction. There's Fast Eddie, of course, but also Minnesota Fats, a character given such presence by Jackie Gleason in the film that a professional pool hustler by the name of Rudolf Wanderone claimed, disingenuously but with the apparent aid of Willie Mosconi -- pool great and technical adviser on the film -- that the character was based on him (of course, this claim was made not after the novel came out, but in 1961, after the film was released). But the character of Fast Eddie Felson casts a big enough shadow over our culture that Tevis should be remembered for that alone. Yet, back where I'm from, there's a pool hall (two now, actually) called "Fast Eddie's", and I feel confident that if you were to walk in there and ask any ten people if they're a fan of Walter Tevis, ten out of ten times the response would be "Walter Who-vis?" Such is the power of cinema.
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Another odd facet of the Hustler phenomenon is how the the story seems to want to dissuade the fakers, those who don't come by the lifestyle honestly. Actually, the film seems to want to dissuade everybody -- more on that later -- but even the novel, in delineating what it says are the two kinds of hustlers, says: "The small-time men -- the scufflers, musclers, dollar jumpers -- prey in nibbles: on unwary but seldom wealthy drunks; schoolboys who aspire to what they take to be manhood; middle-aged men who aspire to what they take to be youthfulness... In other words, that means you. Still, everybody wants to be the best at something.
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Not that I need to tell you this, but the basic story of both the novel and the film is as follows: Eddie Felson, from Oakland, has just arrived in Chicago with his friend and financial backer Charlie (Myron McCormick in the film). Charlie is content with the profitable hustles they've been pulling up to this point, an example of which is beautifully illustrated in the first scene of the film, and the third chapter of the novel: pretending to be two traveling salesman, Charlie and Eddie go into a bar and start shooting pool. Eddie's no good sober, and even worse drunk, which is what he's steadily becoming. But he makes one amazing shot to win a game, and bets a skeptical Charlie that he can do it again. He fails, and wants to bet again. Charlie tells him to save his money, but the bartender wants in, even when the bet has been greatly increased. And, what do you know, Eddie makes the shot. Back in the car, Charlie takes his cut, and off they go. That's what Charlie wants. But Eddie believes that he's the best hustler in the country, or good enough to be though of as one of the best, and he wants to go to Chicago to prove it. Specifically, he wants to go to a particular pool hall (called Bennington's in the novel, and Ames in the film, which is just one of a number of apparently meaningless small changes) where many of the best hustlers congregate. In both versions of the story, he winds up playing Minnesota Fats at straight pool. He loses at first, but then he finds his groove, and at one point he finds himself ahead $18,000. Charlie wants him to quit now, but Eddie says the game isn't over until Fats says it is. From the novel:
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He said it very slowly, tasting the words thickly as they came on. "I'm the best you ever seen, Fats." That was it. It was very simple... He had known it, of course, all along, for years. But now it was clear, so simple that no one...could mistake it. "I'm the best. Even if you beat me, I'm the best."...

Somewhere in Eddie, deep in him, a weight was being lifted away. And, deeper still, there was a tiny, distant voice, a thin, anguished cry that said to him, sighing, You don't have to win. For hours there had been the weight, pressing on him, trying to break him and now these words, this fine and deep and true revelation, had come and were taking the weight from him. The weight of responsibility. And the small steel knife of fear.

So, naturally, Eddie -- who is by now also quite drunk on JTS Brown bourbon -- winds up losing. Same thing in both the novel and the film, but the film has already, at this point, made one very big change. When Fats starts losing, he tells one of the on-lookers to get him some whiskey, and, specifically, to get it from Johnny's. In the film, that's a signal to bring back Bert Gordon (George C. Scott, to my mind every bit as good here as Newman, though no one ever seems to talk about him). In the novel, Fats is his own financial backer, but in the film, when he's losing badly, he needs Bert to come in and stake him, which he does. This is where Bert and Eddie first meet, while in the book, though we learn Bert was watching them play, he doesn't actually appear in the book until almost halfway through..

After losing, a beaten-down Eddie leaves Charlie and meets Sarah (Piper Laurie in the film), an alcoholic student for whom Eddie feels an odd attraction. They end up living together, and quietly and gloomily fall in love, although maybe not in so many words. And Sarah and Bert are at the heart of the differences between the novel in the film. First, in the novel, Bert is a pretty unlikable guy, but in the film he's positively Satanic, and in the novel Sarah is...Sarah is what? In the film, she tells Eddie stories: she says she got the money she lives off from a former rich lover, and has a limp due to an injury sustained in a car accident, before later coming clean and admitting that the money comes from her father, and the limp comes from childhood polio. In the novel, she's up-front -- because why wouldn't she be? -- about both right from the beginning. On screen, she also wants to be Eddie's conscience. When Eddie has taken Bert on as his backer, she travels with them to Louisville, where Bert wants to set him up in a high stakes game against a rich loser named Findlay (Murray Hamilton).
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In the book, she doesn't go with them to Louisville. She never even meets Bert. Which, if you're familiar with the story, should tell you something else about where the film goes its own way, but first, here's what happens in the novel when Sarah finds out how Eddie earns his living:
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"But why pool? Couldn't you do something else?"
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"Like what?"
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"Don't be cute about it," she said. "You know what I'm driving at. You could...sell insurance, something like that."
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He looked at her for a moment, wondering whether he should take her to bed, work up a little action. "No," he said. "What I do I like fine."
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"I've heard that pool can be a dirty game," she said.
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He walked back into the living room and, not looking at Sarah, looked instead at the [clown painting in the living room]. The clown looked back, sad and mean, holding the wooden staff. His fingers were painted in only sketchily, but they were graceful and sure of themselves. The clown was, apparently, unhappy, but was not to be pushed around a good, solid clown and a figure to be respected. Eddie stretched again, his back to Sarah, still looking at the picture. "Yes, it's dirty...Anyway you look at it, it's dirty."
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Sarah, in the novel, doesn't understand why Eddie does what he does. It seems frivolous to her, and, after he gets his thumbs broken by some guys who catch him hustling them, dangerous. And, when he tells her he's going to Louisville for a week, she sees it as a wedge between them. She's a desperatly, unhappy woman, and Eddie has raised her hopes, but maybe he doesn't care the way she thinks he does.
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Eddie can also be fairly cruel. Interestingly, in the film, she asks a question of Eddie when she first invites him back to her place -- "Why me?" -- that she doesn't ask in the novel, but the novel may actually provide the answer, or at least actually say the answer, that the film doesn't. Towards the end, Eddie and Sarah have a blow-out about his trip to Louisville, and he calls her a "born loser". Which is what Bert calls him when he first broaches to Eddie the idea of becoming his backer. At the time Bert says that, and when Eddie and Sarah first meet, that's what Eddie is. But in the novel, he's about to go to Louisville to beat Findlay and make enough money to get a new game with Fats, which Eddie will also win. He's not a loser anymore, so he's going to leave Sarah behind (although he does say she can come along, he doesn't make the offer until he sees how upset she is). It's also interesting that in this argument, Eddie essentially calls Sarah a whore, which is what Bert calls her (also essentially) in the film. And many of Sarah's retorts in this scene in the novel are, in the film, actually delivered by her to Bert -- the idea that he wants to take his opponents' pride as well as their money, and so on. The climactic showdown between Piper Laurie's Sarah and George C. Scott's Bert in the film is, in the novel, actually had by Sarah and Eddie. And this is the argument that, in the film, leads to Sarah's suicide!
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Which, in the novel, never happens. The above argument, cruel as it is, is the evidence we need to know that these two kids will never be able to make it work. In the novel, after winning in Kentucky, Eddie goes back to her and buys her a very nice watch. He tells her -- again, rather cruelly, but at least unintentionally so, this time -- that he almost bought her a ring ("What kind of ring?" "What kind do you think?"). They have an expensive but melancholy dinner, and part ways. Then he goes to Bennington's to beat Minnesota Fats.
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Meanwhile, over in the film, Sarah is in Louisville, trying to be Eddie's conscience, and get him to pick the right side in the class war she sees waging around her. Not just a class-war, I suppose, although notice the way Murray Hamilton, the rich Mr. Findlay, looks at her with amused contempt when he sees her passing through his opulent home during a cocktail party. Everyone treats her like a whore, like trash, and she begs Eddie to rise above it. Eddie can't walk away from his past defeats, and snaps at her, talks to her like she means nothing. So she decides that, if everyone is going to treat her like a whore, then that's what she'll be. Bert, who has made it clear that he doesn't want her around, unless she's willing to have sex with him (then she should go, of course), pays her off from the money Eddie just won off of Findlay. They're in her hotel room, and she says, "Leave it on the dresser. Isn't that how it's usually done?" Bert agrees that it is. Then she agrees to have sex with Bert, and afterwards goes into the bathroom and kills herself.
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(I think this is a great film, but watching it again, I really don't believe that Sarah would have sex with Bert. I believe that, under the circumstances, she would kill herself -- she was really bad off before Eddie met her, and now she's been stomped and spit on -- but I don't think she'd lower herself to have sex with a roach like Bert, even if she did only do it to make a point.)

Anyway, after all that, the novel's final pool game seems like a bit of an anticlimax, or it does if you come to the novel after being very familiar with the film, as I've done. The stakes just seem so much lower. I think the essence of these differences lie in the different approaches Tevis and Rossen take to pool itself. I've heard it said of the film that it isn't really "about" pool, that pool is incidental. And at one point, Newman's Felson, in describing his love of the game to Sarah, says that "anything can be great". Maybe Rossen felt that way, and that's why Sarah's character goes in such a different direction in his version. He wanted to expose what Sarah refers to as the "perverted, twisted, crippled" side of this kind of lifestyle, the disregard for basic humanity that is necessary to hustle someone, the pursuit of money at almost any cost. So maybe Rossen doesn't care about pool, and as far as he's concerned it could have been any game or sport. But The Hustler is about pool because Tevis's novel is about pool, and Tevis did care about that game. He couldn't have just slid poker in there as a substitute. His love of the game, reserved as it might be, is stamped on every page. The book is about a game and a unique lifestyle and the people who inhabit that lifestyle. And that translates to the film, whether Rossen or anyone else wants it or cares that it's there. Rossen wants the story to be universal, but Tevis knows that not everything worth talking about applies to everybody. In its way, Rossen's film is as good as Tevis's novel, which is very good indeed, but he should know that there's no shame in making a movie that's actually about what it pretends to be about. After all, when Eddie finally beats Fats, he doesn't beat him at tennis:

And Fats' one victory did not affect Eddie, for Eddie was in a place now where he could not be affected, where he felt that nothing Fats could do could touch him... Eddie Felson, with the ball bearings in his elbow, with eyes for the green and the colored balls...with geometrical rolls and falling, lovely spinning, with whiffs and clicks and tap-tap-taps, with scraping of chalk, and the fingers embracing the polished shaft, fingers on felt, the ever and always ready arena, the long, bright rectangle. The rectangle of lovely, mystical green, the color of money.

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