Moviegoer Diary: Charley Varrick, The Long Good Friday

CHARLEY VARRICK

Plot in a Nutshell
Walter Matthau is a part-time cropduster who pulls off a bank heist, only to discover that he’s inadvertently made off with a fortune in Mafia cash, in this 1973 crime picture directed by Don Siegel.

Thoughts
I put off watching Charley Varrick for years because of a dim memory of starting to watch it on TV when I was a teenager, getting bored by it, and switching the channel after only about 10 minutes. Wow, what kind of hummingbird attention span must I have had when I was a kid? This thing takes off like a rocket and never lets up. After praising The Getaway to the skies just a few weeks ago, I’m kind of amazed to run across another early-’70s robbers-on-the-run heist flick that I like even better.

And Walter Matthau, surprisingly, is even cooler than Steve McQueen. He does a great little trick throughout this movie, slipping effortlessly back and forth between the folksy act Charley puts on around the police and the ruthless, cool-headed professional criminal that he is in private. In the opening scene, this switch is played for shock, as Charley enters a bank disguised as a doddering old man, hobbling around on an ankle cast as he yammers away to the manager, and then whips out a gun and brutally disarms the security guard. A little while later, this switch is played for comedy: when a police car stops his van (with more than half a million bucks stashed in the back), Charley does an impishly funny hayseed routine, chewing a wad of gum, never once dropping his expression of deadpan innocence, not even when the cop asks him what’s inside those big canisters rattling around in the back of his van.

I love the detail that Matthau and his wife (who helps him carry out the bank robbery, and gets shot for her trouble) used to appear in air shows together—he’d fly the plane and she’d do a wingwalking routine. The notion is so romantic and yet so dangerous—you can believe it wouldn’t take much for them to graduate to robbing banks together—and the ignominious way she dies, bleeding to death in a car from a bullet wound in her hip, seems especially poignant.

Even the most minor characters in the film are imaginatively characterized. I love the banter between Matthau and the sexy passport photographer played by Sheree North—especially when he tries to take one of her lollipops from her bowl and she tells him it’ll cost him $500 extra. And I adored Matthau’s elderly neighbour at the trailer park where he lives—the one who claims to attract improper sexual advances wherever she goes. My favourite bit in the film just might be the moment where she hears her phone ringing inside her trailer and shuffles off to answer it, sighing, “Probably another obscene phone call!”

It’s hard to watch Joe Don Baker in this movie and not see his character, Molly, as a forerunner of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Do these kinds of men exist in real life? Implacable, relentless hired killers who leave a swath of violence behind them as they track their prey, men so dangerous even the police leave them alone? Molly may not have Chigurh’s godlike detachment—he gets more of a sadistic kick out of his work—but I’d be just as terrified to have him on my tail.

Actually, Charley Varrick would probably get along well with Llewellyn Moss, Josh Brolin’s character in No Country, and probably would have told him what a stupid idea it was to go back to that crime scene to bring that guy some water. Forethought: that’s what separates guys like Varrick—“the last of the independents”—from guys like Moss. The tagline for No Country for Old Men reads “You can’t stop what’s coming.” Maybe so, but Charley Varrick would add, “But you can still lay a trap for it.”



RATING: 4.5/5



THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY

Plot in a Nutshell
John Mackenzie’s 1980 British thriller about Cockney gangleader Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), whose organization becomes the target of a mysterious but well-organized enemy just as he’s about to close a business deal that will elevate him to a new level of social legitimacy.

Thoughts
I know The Long Good Friday is regarded not just as a modern gangster classic but a landmark of British cinema. And watching Bloody Business, the making-of documentary included as a special feature on Anchor Bay’s edition of the film, I could certainly recognize all of the film’s virtues: the complex characterization of Harold Shand; the raw emotion in Bob Hoskins’ scenes with Helen Mirren (as Harold’s posh wife) and Derek Thompson (as his untrustworthy right-hand man); the clever staging of the scene in which a car blows up outside a church.

So why did I feel just a little underwhelmed by the film while I was actually watching it? Is it the British thing? British movies seem so opaque to me a lot of the time. It just seems that so many of them, despite being well-acted, intelligently written, and complexly plotted, still lack a certain cinematic essence. You get one perfectly solid scene after another, often with some imaginative shots thrown in (like The Long Good Friday’s upside-down POV shot of Harold’s criminal rivals strung up from their feet in the meat locker, or the shot of Harold in the shower, his face distorted by the rippled glass) and yet somehow they’re like a string of uncoupled train cars... they don’t flow together in a way that inexorably pulls you along through the story.

Or, more accurately, that didn’t pull me along through the story. But maybe I’m not alone. I found the first six or eight minutes of the film—a fragmented preamble that serves much the same function as the teaser in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent—totally confusing, which put me ill at ease even before Hoskins made his entrance. But according to Bloody Business, confusing audiences was the point: director John Mackenzie says he deliberately wanted to put people off-balance and signal to them that they’d better pay close attention to what’s happening onscreen. But Mackenzie has a ragged visual style that doesn’t guide your eye toward the things you especially need to take note of. I don’t know... I hate to think I need a director to hold my hand throughout the entire story, but this just doesn’t seem like a very user-friendly way to start a movie. Of course, hardly anybody else seems to have a problem with it. So where does that leave me? Moving onto the next paragraph, I guess.

But if the beginning of The Long Good Friday left me cold, the ending is sensational: Harold climbs into his limo, realizing too late that an IRA thug is behind the wheel. As a second thug (a smirking Pierce Brosnan, looking impossibly young and dashing and evil) emerges from the passenger seat and trains a gun between Harold’s eyes, the camera gives us a long, long closeup on Hoskins’ face as Harold silently goes from seething fury to a quiet acceptance of his fate. (I have a bad habit of compulsively noting similarities between old movies and recent ones, but you can’t help but think of George Clooney’s long closeup in the backseat of the cab in the great final shot of Michael Clayton as you watch this sequence.)

In Bloody Business, Bob Hoskins says that filming this scene taught him an important acting lesson: that if you’ve prepared properly for the scene and if you’re thinking the right thoughts, the movie camera really can read your mind. I think Hoskins’ performance in The Long Good Friday is kind of uneven, but in this scene, he’s downright telepathic. (What’s even more amazing is that he did it without ever meeting Brosnan—according to Bloody Business, their halves of the scene were shot separately.)

This brief, wordless performance makes me wonder why Brosnan didn’t make a more interesting James Bond. Brosnan has the same streak of cruelty in this movie that Daniel Craig brought to his performance in Casino Royale and which seemed so fresh after Brosnan’s more dapper, Astaire-like take on Bond. Brosnan found this quality again in movies like The Tailor of Panama and The Matador; what did he do with it during his 007 days? Why couldn’t the camera read his mind?



RATING: 3/5 (but the ending is a total 5/5!)