The alpha male gaze... Shamus (1973)

Ah Burt Reynolds, top-earning movie star for five years later in the decade and fresh off the back of his stunning turn in Deliverance, here displaying that unique chemistry that made men want to be him and women, no doubt, want to be with him. This is by way of balance with other films I may has assessed with reference to the characteristics of female stars, always couched in the most respectfully considered of phrases of course, but here the male gaze is very much on Burt’s physique through large chunks of the film. Director Buzz Kulik just can’t get enough of the Burt-bod and it’s displayed as often as possible along with the actor’s laconic charm.

Seymour “Buzz” Kulik worked mostly in TV and this film does have the feel of a TV movie being neither as gritty as a Clint Eastwood cinematic release nor as long on budget. We get plenty of good location work in New York along with a huge dash of class from Dyan Canon who, in the absence of a great script literally laughs her way through certain scenes. She first meets Burt’s character, a private dick called Shamus McCoy, in a bar as he pinches her bottom pretending it was an effeminate man nervously nursing a beer; Dyan knows there’s not enough here and we know but she smiles her way through all the same with enough brilliance to suggest real chemistry between the characters.

Burt

Shamus is indeed “of its time” but I chose to believe that the focus on Reynold’s sexuality is more ground-breaking than it might look, certainly in the absence of overt nudity from Cannon and the other female performers. It feels like a succession of early 70s tropes all tied together by a vaguely believable storyline laden with character quirks and action opportunities for the former parole officer, truck driver and stunt man.

"I don't care whether he can act or not, anyone who has this effect on women deserves a break…” said Lew Wasserman after Reynolds signed a seven-year deal with Universal in the late 50’s. But Burt worked hard to become a naturalistic player and enjoyed that huge career as a result of his work ethic as well as his natural charms. By 1973 it may have looked like he could walk his way through any movie and in Shamus he does exactly that… and he’s a force of nature matched only by Cannon’s elegantly restrained star power: she’s a Dyan Dazzler alright and technically very gifted. She had in fact withdrawn from the business after her toxic time on Such Good Friends (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) but was keen to work with Reynolds and they do work a screwball charm together.

Burt and Dyan showing their chemistry

Shamus starts of with the brutal murder of a couple who are burned to death in their bed and a packet of diamonds stolen. The titles roll as we cut to Shamus waking up with a hangover and a blonde in his bed atop a pool table in his “characterful” warehouse apartment somewhere in downtown Manhattan. Heck, minus the blonde-night stand (Melody Santangelo) and the pool table we’ve all had wakeups like this, albeit without Burt’s Velcro-vulnerable torso.

He gets the call to visit the local Mr Big, or as he is properly entitled, Mister E.J. Hume (Ron Weyand) who has all the signifiers of a weirdo criminal; large mansion, check, security guards walking huge attack dogs, check and aircon in his office which he keeps near freezing… check, but possible over-elaboration. Shamus is frightened of the dogs, possibly hinting at some childhood trauma or at least good common sense given the size of them. He gets offered the job of retrieving Hume’s diamonds and finding out who had the audacity to rob him…

Mister E.J. Hume and his men

This is a hot one and almost no one is talking not even at Shamus’s favourite pool hall not even the insatiably chatty Springy (Larry Block) , who can’t stop quoting sporting facts, unloading the contents of a memory almost full of photographic memories… Springy set out to find what he can while Shamus pops upstairs to a gambling den to chat with his childhood pal is Lieutenant Promuto (Joe Santos – who also played Jim Rockford’s favourite cop!), street-wise and willing to help his friend if only to keep him out of trouble.

A lead from one of the card players leads Shamus to a junky – cue chase and threats with violence – and from there to a bar called The Health Club where he meets Springy for a de-brief and, despite taking a brief time out to sexually harass Dyan Cannon’s Alexis Montaigne, who’s brother owns the bar, he spots a dodgy looking waiter. He stakes out the joint from a bookshop across the road run by an attractive redhead (Kay Frye) and passes the time by making a pass… sometime later her leaves the shop and then sets about assaulting the waiter in exchange for a little more information to lead him on.

Dyan Cannon, Burt and Alex Wilson

He’s beginning to make connections which is exactly why he is ambushed in his apartment by three guys who beat him up and tell him to reconsider his career path. Springy finds him fully clothed in the bath soothing his bruises in his overly quirky way. But he’s not the kind of man to take a beating and knowing now that Alexis’ brother Felix (Alex Wilson) is involved he heads to their plus midtown apartment to find out exactly how much…

The film is a jumble of set pieces and set characters and naturally Felix is an Ivy League smart Alec too involved to feel the need to explain himself to a private eye. Still, it’s a chance for Shamus to charm Alexis some more and we know where this is headed… but he’ll have to work at his chance to play pool with Alexis.

The story has more twists and turns than is healthy and whilst these “McGuffins” are all necessary to move the story on, you don’t necessarily care about the central crime at the heart of the story. What you do get is plenty of action in the closing stages, allowing Burt to run some stunts and escape the bad guys after uncovering – part – of the shocking truth in a warehouse. Then he finds a military connection via Alexis and the two have to escape the same careless henchmen this time driving in a US Army truck… Smokey and the Bandit never had it so good!

Dusty Verdict: This film is fun, but the reasons for it are most certainly not to do with the story, you have two bankable, exceptionally likeable stars and some great period New York City and the vague satisfaction that these are the good guys. But the stakes are rarely raised and that’s surely something that could easily have been fixed.

All the same, worth watching for Dyan and Burt! Plus, a cracking score from legend Jerry Goldsmith!

What the World needs now… Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)

Everything falls into place right at the end of this film. You get so used to hearing classic popular songs as the background to modern drama (sometimes ironically so…) but when Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now” plays over the closing sequence you know it’s the real – sincere – deal. A sublime song, it acts as the perfect reflective enhancement of the theme of this film and the acting qualities that make its simple message a still resonant one.

Bob, Natalie, Dyan and Elliot

Paul Mazursky directed and co-wrote (with Larry Tucker) this tale of the times in which two established middle-class couples rediscover the truth about the difference between love and sex. In the Autumn of Love cynicism was rapidly crushing the flimsier ideals of the hippy era (some of them) as Vietnam raged on and change was all too slow in coming…

But I don’t feel that this is a reactionary film. It starts off in a new age retreat where a couple have gone to investigate the alternative therapies and ends up tuning in to the main thread of those practices: be open and honest but love the one you’re with.

Group therapy

The couple are a documentary film-maker Bob (Robert Culp) and his wife Carol (Natalie Wood). Bob is in his early forties and wearing the trappings of the younger generation – great casting of Culp who carries the masculinity of an earlier era even clad in beads and Peter Fonda’s flares.

They start their therapy Bob in confident professional mode and Carol laughing in a friendly way but soon they become lost in the collective emotion. They have their emotional epiphany and tell each other some home truths… is this actually helping them get closer or are they just getting a charge from the liberation from constraint.

Bob, Carol, Alice and Ted

They return home full of the experience much to the bewilderment of their best friends, Ted (Elliot Gould) and his wife Alice (Dyan Cannon). These two can’t take the “new truth” that seriously and cringe with the rest of us when Carol tells their regular waiter how much she loves and respects him. Her compulsion to tell the truth at all times is an addiction: the more truth she tells the more she needs…

But then Bob returns from a work trip to San Francisco and reveals that he has had a fling with a young blonde woman. Carol almost takes it in her stride and quickly compliments her husband on his honesty: it was just sex and meant nothing to their relationship.

Forgiveness is...

Bob, rather than delight at the let off, is mildly put out before getting hip to his wife’s scene: they have freedom because they have love.

But whilst Bob can handle the truth, Alice is less forgiving when, after a post-prandial toke, Carol reveals all.

Dyan Cannon

Now it is Ted and Alice’s turn to explore new feelings as they drive home and then, in one of the film’s most impressively improvised sections, confront each other in their bedroom. Ted is still stoned and very agitated whilst Alice is physically affected by her friend’s news. Ted wants sex but Alice is nowhere near in the mood. She is cross with both Bob and Carol whilst Ted feels his mate’s big mistake was in telling too much truth. Gould and Cannon are superb.

Alice cannot understand and ends up in therapy trying to confront her own feelings alongside a rather detached psychiatrist. Mazursky and cast play it for laughs but everything is so near the knuckle, you have to be on your guard.

Ted talks with his buddy and tells him how he came close to infidelity but couldn’t go through with it. Ted tells him that he’s missing out on an opportunity that may only happen once. It’s all very much self-actualisation for the sake of it: free love with no consequence.

But, when Bob gets another chance to play away, he turns it down so that he can return home. Arriving a day early he finds Carol in the midst of entertaining another man: Horst her tennis coach. Initially angry he soon calms down and is offering the confused young man a drink…

"Hey man, what's good for he goose..." he might have said...

The final section of the film sees the couples off to Las Vegas for the weekend. They get drunk and it’s Ted’s turn to reveal that, on a recent business trip, he too has had an affair. Carol’s initial anger is replaced by her “therapised” rationalisation that the pleasures of the flesh are divided from love and she attempts to initiate an orgy.

Bob considers Alice...

All parties agree to partner-swap but, after a promising start for Bob at least, left alone with Carol and Alice whilst Ted gets ready… everything fizzles out as they come to their senses.

The couples get dressed and walk out to join the throng headed to watch Tony Bennett and, as the Bacharach song plays in you finally get Mazursky’s point. The couples look intently at the other people but they only really have eyes for each other and that is the only truth that should guide their actions. The arc of their experience has only served to take them back where they should have started.

Not a complex story perhaps but an unusual one even now. Naturally some of the situations and fashions look of their time but the film still stands largely because of the performances of its leads. Roger Ebert noted at the time that Dyan Cannon was better than Natalie Wood who was better than he expected. In truth both are excellent as are the slightly uptight Robert Culp and Elliot Gould who plays Elliot Gould wonderfully well.

There’s also a super score from the outrageously talented Quincy Jones and that song from Burt…

Dusty verdict: Doesn’t quite carry the same impact in these jaded times but just imagine if you had to spend the weekend at a Scientology “de-programming” camp with your partner… Worth watching for the fine acting and, let’s be honest, Natalie Wood in skimpies…

 

 

 

Got it taped… The Anderson Tapes (1971)

This film shows that already by 1971 and a highly-prescient two years before Watergate, there was a healthy preoccupation with surveillance technology.

Throughout the characters are recorded, listened into and followed around by third parties who may or may not use the ensuing data. Interestingly and in an uncanny echo of British intelligence recent exposure for “monitoring” internet behaviour with the key rider that they wouldn’t actually use it, much of the recorded material proves to be unusable: compromised by the same civil liberties that still get in the way of over-protective snooping.

Dyan Cannon and Sean Connery: class acts

Directed by Sidney Lumet, The Anderson Tapes raises these questions although I’m not sure if it ends up making whatever point he had in mind. Civil liberties are in question as is the nature of freedom: a number of the characters come out of long-term incarceration and at least one of them wants to return to the (high) security of that situation whilst others are temperamentally unsuited to straight society. But is surveillance the way to deal with recidivism?

Sean's bored...

Sean Connery’s character, Mr Anderson (how about that, Matrix fans?) is one such repeat offender but as his opening interview with the prison psychologist – videotaped of course… shows: he doesn’t recognise the difference between his “crime” and the tolerated behaviours of bankers, the police and even married people. He’s a complete XYY Man: highly-intelligent, highly socialised and yet seemingly incapable of moral alignment with the Norm…

Lumet confronting the nature of “criminal” intelligence as he was to do again in Dog Day Afternoon, rather more successfully it has to be said.

On the outside

That’s not to say that The Anderson Tapes isn’t a very interesting movie. There’s a superb performance from Sean Connery which famously helped free him of the James Bond casting whilst we also have the screen debut of one Christopher Walken. Oh and Dyan Cannon’s in it as well although she isn’t really given enough to do.

The soundtrack from Quincy Jones is also worth a mention as it skilfully combines electronica with the soulful modern jazz composition you’d expect: a giant of modern music who worked with everyone from Duke Ellington to Michael Jackson with Frank Sinatra and New Order in between.

A welcoming Dyan Cannon

 Connery is John "Duke" Anderson who is released on the same day as “the Kid” (Walken) and William "Pop" Myer (Stan Gottlieb) who is so desperate to go back. If the Kid has plans to go straight, Duke’s objectives are to stay outside the law.

But his immediate concern is to renew acquaintance with his old girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) who is being kept in a very fine apartment by her sugar daddy Richard B. Shull. After a few days Duke hatches a plan to burgle the entire building which is crammed full of wealth and possessions.

Young Chris Walken

He enlists the aid of the Kid as well as Pop and some old friends, including antiques expert Tommy Haskins (Martin Balsam giving a superbly camp turn: easy to forget how out of bounds homosexuality still was at this time).

Martin Balsam

But to get funding Duke needs to call in favours from the local mob and goes cap in hand to Pat Angelo (Alan King) who owes him a favour after he took the time for someone else’s crime… but there are strings attached, Duke needs to add a character called "Socks" Parelli (Val Avery) to his crew and then he needs to “dispose” of him at the caper’s close…

There are the traditional stirring sequences of the job being set up, Tommy knocking up the varied residents in order to assess their valuables and the finer details being argued over.

Also at this time, Duke loses the upper hand with Ingrid as her boyfriend has recorded all of their conversations and, rather generously, offers Duke a free run at the apartment block just so long as he gets the girl. Left with little choice, Ingrid follows the money and leaves her risk-laden lover adrift… Further proof if Duke would only heed it of the cards being stacked against him.

The job kicks off and Duke seems to have all the angles covered as each apartment unveils its loot and a rich assortment of New York’s wealth elite: outraged upper middle class professionals, a man who won’t even give up his safe’s combination in exchange for his wife’s safety and an elderly woman who claps her hands in glee: “a robbery!”

But the men fail to secure the room of an asthmatic boy who has a ham radio – those electronic gadgets just get everywhere… He contacts other "good buddies" who manage to relay his call for help to the police (in those heady days of private radio broadcasting, it wasn’t so easy to target your messaging: a bit like posting a comment online waiting for a response…is there anybody out there?).

Duke is undone but he doesn’t know it yet and the robbery proceeds as the police amass in the surrounding streets. It’s quite chilling to see the quiet streets around the apartment over-loaded with hundreds of armed police, fire trucks and cars: Lumet offers a sardonic view of the forces of order. Would even a fraction of this army be mobilised for a corner shop hold-up on the Lower East Side?

Officer in charge Captain Delaney (Ralph Meeker) orders a squad to climb onto the building from the neighbouring one and the camera follows their efforts, mirroring the efficiency of Duke’s operation: all this effort and for what?

The officers work their way down the interior stairs of the house and Duke finally hears their voices. Lumet darts back and forth from the aftermath as the victims are interviewed and taken care off. It’s an interesting technique which not only reveals elements of the narrative but also reinforces the inevitability of Duke’s defeat.

No way out?

But there are twists and turns and this chopping in sequence and time underscores the drama and the desperation of Duke’s struggle to grab what he can from life.

The Quincy Jones soundtrack is superb and not what you’d expect perhaps but he was a man of very broad talent!

Sean Connery

Dusty verdict: Sean Connery gives a Bond-busting performance that helped move him on from gadgets if not guns and girls.

The Anderson Tapes has more going for it than a simple heist movie even if all the surveillance motifs are ultimately almost tangential. Then again, we were watching too… and taping. What do we do with all this recorded information? Delete or keep? Delete or keep? Delete…