First, a quick rundown of the award winners at this year’s Cannes film festival:
- Palme d’Or: Titane
- Grand Prix: Compartment No. 6 and A Hero (tie)
- Jury Prize: Ahed’s Knee and Memoria (tie)
- Best Director: Leos Carax, Annette
- Best Actor: Caleb Landry Jones, Nitram
- Best Actress: Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World
- Best Screenplay: Drive My Car
- Camera d’Or: Murina
I’m obviously happiest about Carax winning Director, and ever more excited about seeing Annette, but I’m also quite intrigued by Titane (which has to be one of the strangest Palme winners ever), Nitram, and Drive My Car. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to see most of them later this year.
And now, on to the reviews.
The Lady Vanishes (1938) – ****
The first act of The Lady Vanishes would seem to have very little to do with the rest of the film. Yes, it introduces us to the main characters and sets up their dynamics, but we get precious little idea of what the real story is – it takes until 33 minutes, a full third of the way into the film, for the lady to actually vanish. Once she does, we’re off and running, but it would seem, simply going by the numbers, that Hitchcock and screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder take an excessive amount of time getting to the point. But, just as this is a film in which very little is as it seems, so the seemingly extraneous first act ties into the film as a whole in a much subtler way.
While The Lady Vanishes may in one sense be a tale of mystery and suspense, on another level it’s a grand satire of the English and how they relate to the rest of the world, how their sense of entitlement, their chauvinism, their cultural tunnel-vision blind them to what’s really going on in the world. It’s unmistakably a film of its time, a film made in those tense days before the war, when the British were trying to appease Hitler to avoid another war, even as it was obvious he would take everything he could get his hands on.
All the British characters, except perhaps the titular lady, the kindly Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), come in for a skewering. The worst of the lot is the craven Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker), who is embarrassed by his devoted mistress (Linden Travers) simply because she could jeopardize his chances of becoming a judge. When the chips are down at the end, he refuses to stand with his countrymen and literally waves a white flag – finding out the hard way that this no time for fence-sitting. On a more comic note are cricket buffs Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne), whose only concern is getting back to England for a test match, and whose dismissive attitude towards the local culture and population is reflected in countless other clueless vacationers, on screen and in real life.
Even the heroes get a ribbing. Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), who’s determined to find out what happened to Miss Froy despite all potential witnesses claiming they never saw her, is at the start of the film resigned to her impending marriage, saying she’s “done everything,” even when all she seems to have done is take vacations. And though her willingness to stop the train and turn everything and everyone upside down to get to the truth is vindicated, it’s not hard to see echoes of that sense of entitlement in her actions. And Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) is first seen forcing the staff at the inn to perform a native folk dance while he accompanies their noisy dancing noisily on a clarinet. Late at night, no less. Sure, he’s a musicologist studying native traditions, but people are trying to sleep, and he couldn’t care less.
Of course, after a decided meet-cute that night, he proves to be Iris’ closest comrade in the search for Miss Froy, and it shouldn’t count as any kind of a surprise that they fall in love by the end. This is, after all, Hitchcock in a fairly light-hearted mode, with villains who are as courtly as they are devious and very little time spent on overt politics; the film is even set a fictional mittel-European country, Bandrika, whose government the villains work for, to avoid inflaming tensions. There’s a MacGuffin in the form of a tune which contains a coded message, but the focus of the conspiracy, and the ideology behind it, is irrelevant. What matters is the atmosphere it creates and the characters who get caught up in it.
The film does suffer a bit for not explaining things better; you can, with a little reflection, figure out just what’s happened, but what really matters is the mystery of what happened to Miss Froy, the suspense of the heroes trying to outwit the villains, the comedy of the characters’ behavior, and the romance which gradually develops in the course of the action. It’s not a seamless piece of entertainment, but it’s awfully good.
It’s quite well acted; Lockwood is suitably charming and determined, but Redgrave really carries the film with his puckish wit and resourcefulness, while Whitty, despite her limited screentime, is sweet and clever, her hidden depths coming not as a contradiction of the character we know, but an elaboration. Radford and Wayne’s double act was so popular they reprised it in a number of films, both as Caldicott and Charters and under different names. I prefer Radford’s pomposity to Wayne’s peevishness, but they work well together. Parker is properly pathetic and Travers suitably sympathetic. Also worth mentioning are Paul Lukas as a seemingly friendly surgeon with a dark agenda, and Catherine Lacey as an alleged nun, whose high heels reveal that she’s not what she seems.
It’s quite well written, with dialogue that’s witty (“My father always taught me, never desert a lady in trouble. He even carried that as far as marrying Mother”), characters that are well-drawn, and a situation that draws us in and keeps us guessing until (and to a degree, after) it’s all over. And, of course, it’s well directed, even if Hitchcock seems just a bit stymied by the limitations of the production; the opening shot and the climax are especially marred by dodgy model work and rear projection. (I’m not sure if the baggage-car fight is intentionally awkward or just clumsily managed.) Editing and cinematography are effective, if not outstanding.
For me, The Lady Vanishes isn’t quite Hitchcock at his best, but it’s not hard to see why it secured his international reputation and was key in his move to Hollywood, where he would make his greatest films – some of which I sorely need to return to for the sake of these articles.
Score: 88
Black Widow (2021) – ***½
I’ve never quite figured out how I feel about Scarlett Johansson. I think she’s a capable actress, but I’ve rarely been really impressed by her work; maybe it’s that she seems caught between being a star with a distinct persona and an adaptive performer, or maybe it’s that, too often, I see the technique rather than the character. And given that she shares a lot of scenes here with Florence Pugh – one of the most impressive young performers now working – for me, at least, she gets the film stolen right out from under her. And that’s before I mention David Harbour (not necessarily a great actor but a fine character player) and Rachel Weisz (a great actress without question). Johansson gives a solid, earnest turn here, but her co-stars command all the attention.
Of course, in Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman was forced into a similar position, playing the comparatively neutral anchor of the film while a dynamic supporting cast swirled around him, earning that SAG ensemble award. The supporting cast here isn’t as extensive or impressive, and the writing and direction aren’t on the same level (especially the writing), but it’s exciting enough and has enough strength in the supporting cast and characters to carry us through.
More or less, the plot involves Natasha Romanoff (Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Pugh), who lived as sisters for a few years as part of a sleeper-cell operation in Ohio with Alexei Shostakov, aka Red Guardian (Harbour) and Melina Vostokoff (Weisz) as their parents – the only real period of settled family life any of them ever knew. Although Natasha escaped the Black Widow program and joined the Avengers (the film is set in 2016, after the events of Civil War), Yelena remained an operative, until she’s exposed, early in the film, to a gas which overrides the mental conditioning Black Widows are subjected to. She sends vials of the gas to Natasha’s safe-house in Norway, which a mysterious figure in a mech-suit attempts to steal, forcing Natasha to flee.
She and Yelena are reunited in Budapest, and after escaping a group of Black Widows sent to kill them, resolve to find and destroy the Red Room, the facility where young girls are forced to become Black Widows, and assassinate Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the shadowy figure who runs it. To find it – because it constantly changes location – they first rescue Alexei from prison and then visit Melina at her research facility where she experiments on pigs to control their thought processes. Their ersatz family reunion doesn’t go smoothly, to be sure, but when Dreykov’s operatives arrest them (Melina still being a part of his program), they’ll have to work together to bring him and the Red Room down.
I’ve said before that I’m a sucker for stories about surrogate families; it’s a big part of why Guardians of the Galaxy is one of my favorite Marvel films. Black Widow doesn’t delve into the dynamics of its own “family” to the same degree, but it has some genuinely fun and touching moments: Yelena ribbing Natasha for her fighting poses, Alexei singing one of Yelena’s favorite songs (badly), and moments which suggest that Alexei and Melina were quite happy to pretend to be husband and wife. There are also intriguing nods to the logistics of assembling such a family, like the photo album, supposedly depicting years of events, which was staged in the course of a single day. I don’t think I’m the only one who would have taken a few more minutes of this material in exchange for a few minutes less of chasing and fighting.
The film certainly soars highest, whatever the scenario, when Pugh and Harbour are on screen. Pugh handles the action scenes well – she’s arguably more believable as a trained assassin than Johansson – and she gives the character scenes a wonderful blend of snark and sympathy, especially when Yelena defends the validity of their “family” in response to Natasha’s bitter attempts to wave it away. Pugh has a particular skill for striking a balance between deadpan humor and quiet rage, and makes fine use of it here. Harbour, for his part, is delightful as the oafish Alexei, who was at one time employed as a Soviet equivalent to Captain America, but is now both past his prime and outclassed by the foes he faces; he’s rather more successful (Alexei, that is – Harbour is strong at every turn) when he sets his ego aside and opens up to his surrogate daughters.
Johansson, as I’ve noted, does a solid job, but either the material or her performance falls just a bit short of being truly effective – except, perhaps, when she finally confronts Dreykov and she lets an extra bit of anger and determination shine through, especially when she “severs the nerve.” Speaking of which, Winstone is suitably slimy as the shadowy architect of evil; he has no illusions about his own nobility, holding power as his only value. Weisz is sadly somewhat underused, and the film hints at complexities in Melina’s character which it fails to make much of, but she’s too good an actress not to give her the necessary sincerity and humor – she has a one-liner during the climax which is one of the best moments in the film.
And while they’re not as compelling as the character elements, the action scenes are fairly exciting and coherent, and director Cate Shortland handles them well, as well as creating a suitably tense atmosphere in the quieter scenes which doesn’t overshadow the characters. She doesn’t break the MCU mold to any great degree, and she doesn’t greatly compensate for the flaws in Eric Pearson’s script, but she does a very solid job all told. Technically speaking, the film is about as good as you’d expect a big-budget franchise to be; it looks slick, sounds loud, but not too slick to look fake and not to loud to give you a headache. There’s just not a lot to specifically praise here.
That sounds a bit harsh, but Black Widow is a solid second-tier Marvel film, not too hung up on tying itself to other films in the series, though it gets a bit rough-going when it does – the post-credits scene in particular is marred by Marvel’s insistence on universe-building. Like many second-tier Marvel films, it hints at a better, more daring version of itself, or one with a tight enough story that you don’t find yourself wishing for more. But like almost all Marvel films, it’s solid entertainment that treats its characters with respect.
Score: 79
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972) – Dreck
I’d known about Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny since around 2002, when I first read the extended recap on The Agony Booth – around the same time I would’ve first seen Barry Mahon’s utterly dreadful The Wonderful Land of Oz and his slightly less dreadful Jack and the Beanstalk, which is edited into some versions of Santa. But the original version used Mahon’s version of Thumbelina, and that’s the version I watched for this review. Note that the Thumbelina version runs 95 minutes and the Jack and the Beanstalk version runs 71 minutes – so if you want 25% less suffering, that’s the one to go with.
But to be fair, Thumbelina, which accounts for 62 of those 95 minutes, is comparatively watchable. It’s not good by any means, but on its own, I’d probably rate it at *. It’s the framing device, featuring Santa Claus, a group of children, a whole menagerie of animals, and finally the Ice Cream Bunny himself, that really drags it down. It’s not just inept, it’s crushingly dull, confusing, and utterly un-magical. Some bad cheap films can be forgiven – to a degree – by virtue of their sincerity. But Santa is too pathetic even to hide behind that.
It begins with a group of young elves making toys at Santa’s North Pole workshop, singing a song we can barely make out (the sound quality is dreadful), but it has something to do with Santa not being there. In the first sign that we’re dealing with an unusually bad film, there’s a credit for “Kids,” quote marks and all, from Ruth Foreman’s Pied Piper Playhouse. Foreman, for what it’s worth, was a legendary figure in southern Florida theater, and it’s too bad the “kids” (seriously, why is that in quotes?) aren’t really given any chance to act, as they could’ve shown what they learned under Foreman’s direction. Also, they’re singing a cappella, and I’m not sure if this was an artistic choice or a financial one.
Anyway, it turns out that Santa and his sleigh are stuck in the sand on a beach in Florida, and we’re treated to the spectacle of Santa (Jay Clark, who according to the IMDb is a pseudonym for Jay Ripley, who actually had a minor career in the 60s and 70s, but I’m not so sure about that) bemoaning the heat and launching into a musical number of his own, “Oh, Woe is Me,” which features some of the most tuneless singing and most lethargic choreography I’ve ever beheld. It really has to be seen to be believed (and both versions of the film can easily be found online, if you dare), but rest assured, it’s painful to watch.
During this song, we get glimpses of several kids, some jumping rope, some wrestling in the front yard, one jumping off their roof with a patio umbrella for a parachute (I’m not making that up), and so forth, all of whom freeze-frame until Santa, after dozing off, summons them, and they rush to his aid. As they do so, we get a glimpse of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, who have somehow made it to Florida from the Mississippi River, and who are accompanied by an instrumental of “Ol’ Man River” arranged for kazoos, because it’s not like that song has lyrics like
I get weary
And sick of tryin’
I’m tired of livin’
But scared of dyin’
But ol’ man river
He jus’ keeps rollin’ along
Oh, and famously, one of them has a pet raccoon who’s obviously not domesticated. They also don’t play any actual part in the action, but does that really matter?
Anyhow, Santa’s…little helpers, I guess we can call them, find out that Santa has been ditched by his reindeer (the heat was too much for them, or something like that), and he needs to get his sleigh moving again so he can be ready for his Christmas deliveries. Well, the little helpers debate what to do, then run off, leaving Santa to moan about the heat some more and the director to toss in a random shot of the waves rolling in, because it’s not like the kiddie-matinee audience deserves any better. But then we hear a grunting, and it seems like help is on the way!
Well, a man in a gorilla suit is on the way, at least, and he tries to pull Santa’s sleigh out of the sand (and I should note that there’s at most an inch of sand over the runners – one person could easily push it out), but fails. Then a donkey is brought on, but proves unsuitable. Ditto an especially unruly pig, a sheep, a cow, and a horse. If this sequence were written, staged, or edited with any skill at all, it might have been amusing, but it’s so tedious, and Santa is such a defeatist, that it falls flat. To top it off, we get more of Santa whining about the heat and pathetically trying to excavate his sleigh from the miniscule amount of sand it’s buried in.
Finally, 20 minutes into the film, Santa tells his demoralized little helpers that he’ll tell them a story about the importance of never giving up: the story of Thumbelina. And so we get Mahon’s Thumbelina in full, and it’s got its own framing device: a girl (Shay Garner) wandering around the long-gone Pirates’ World amusement park and finally going into their “Hans Christian Andersen Fairyland,” which turns out to be a room where a series of dioramas depicting the various episodes in the story of Thumbelina are set up. It’s narrated by Mrs. Mole (Pat Morrell) via a set of loudspeakers arranged about the room, which Mahon’s camera occasionally cuts to, a bit like the use of the PA announcements to bridge the scenes in MASH, only shitty.
Thumbelina itself is comparatively watchable; the acting is wooden and self-conscious, the writing is repetitive and graceless, and the repeated cutaways to Garner (who plays Thumbelina) looking at the dioramas and to the loudspeaker fuzzily relating the story really kill any sense of magic, but the songs by Ralph Falco and George Linsenmann aren’t that bad – one of them, “Swallow, Fly Away,” is actually relatively solid – and there’s some ambition in the sets, especially the moles’ tunnels, the mushroom-filled forest, and the land of the Flower People (subtle this film is not). Pirates’ World itself, which gets ample coverage at the beginning and end of Thumbelina, doesn’t look all that impressive, but amusement-park buffs will find these scenes historically valuable.
Anyway, once Thumbelina is over – and you can fairly question whether or not it really conveys any message that can be applied to everyday life – the little helpers dash off once more after an abortive attempt to pull the sleigh with a dog, and Santa finally takes off his jacket and passes out once more…at which point the sound of a fire engine is heard. And who should be driving the fire engine but…someone in a very bad Easter Bunny suit! Yes, it’s the Ice Cream Bunny, the least impressive title character in fantasy-cinema history!
After an excruciating five-minute drive through, I’d assume, Pirates’ World and along some very unimpressive dirt roads, the Ice Cream Bunny and the little helpers arrive, and Santa greets the Bunny as an old friend, prompting another musical number which has the Bunny (whose eyes are supposed to blink, I think, but one of them is broken and he creepily seems to wink) dancing pathetically to a kazoo cover of “Jingle Bells.” Santa rides off with the Bunny, his sleigh vanishes before the little helpers’ eyes, and the words “Merry Christmas” appear on screen. And so it ends.
I mean, what more can I say? The “R. Winer” credited with directed Santa is apparently one Richard Winer, whose specialty seems to have been the Bermuda Triangle. Unfortunately, he didn’t try and have Santa get caught in the Triangle, or have the freakish Ice Cream Bunny be one of the Triangle’s horrors, even if some of the stranger bits of cinematography and editing on display suggest the influence of the paranormal, or just a bored filmmaker trying to amuse themselves.
If anything works against one’s ironic enjoyment of Santa, it’s how damned dull it is. The spectacle of Santa on his sleigh (the actor, by the way, is wearing one of the fakest fake beards I’ve ever seen), kvetching about the heat, saying cryptic lines like “My predicament lacks its usual cheer” (which does make sense if you use the Aristotelian definition of “predicament”), becomes positively numbing long before we get to Thumbelina, and Thumbelina itself is pretty poky, not helped by a totally unnecessary recap of the entire story near the end! Just watch Mahon’s Wonderful Land of Oz and see the baffling mixture of good intentions and impoverished ineptitude he brings to America’s Fairyland.
Score: 12
Pig (2021) – ***½
In many ways, the film Pig most reminds me of is Chef, in which Jon Favreau used the story of a celebrity chef rediscovering his love for cooking by starting a food truck as a metaphor for his own return to down-to-earth, character-driven cinema after two Iron Man films and the disappointment that was Cowboys & Aliens. (That he went right back to big-budget, effects-driven filmmaking afterwards says more than the film itself ever could.) Of course, there are two key differences between the films. First, Nicolas Cage, for all the utterly forgettable films he’s made to pay off his taxes, had never fully abandoned acting for acting’s sake; films like Joe, Army of One, and Mandy were oases of effort amongst long-forgotten titles like Pay the Ghost, The Humanity Bureau, and 211.
Second, where Chef is a bright, upbeat affair, Pig is closer to a culinary noir, albeit one that takes several unexpected turns as it goes along, resulting in a distinctly odd tale of love and loss, with the expected moments of Cagean intensity proving mere garnishes on a relatively grounded whole. While it falls short of being truly great, it’s got more than enough strengths to be worth seeking out – especially if you have an inkling of what you’re in for.
Cage plays Robin, a truffle hunter who lives in the Oregonian forest with his beloved foraging pig. His only regular human contact is Amir (Alex Wolff), a truffle dealer based in Portland who makes weekly visits to Robin’s cabin. Robin is nearly feral in his appearance – a distinct contrast to Amir’s self-conscious slickness – and speaks little, except to the pig. One night, unidentified persons break into his cabin and kidnap the pig, assaulting Robin in the process. In the morning, a bloodied Robin makes his way to the nearest phone and calls Amir, demanding he be taken to Portland. Amir is very reluctant, but Robin insists on rescuing his pig.
In Portland, they begin a journey into the underbelly of the city’s culinary world, during which Amir learns that Robin was once the most acclaimed chef in town, but dropped out of sight 15 years earlier after his wife’s death. Encounters with old contacts – and a beating which further mutilates Robin’s face, which he neglects to wash – lead to Amir’s father Darius (Adam Arkin), himself a truffle dealer and a ruthless businessman, who tries to buy Robin off, and when that fails, tells him to leave town lest he have the pig killed. Robin is hardly deterred, but what he does next – and how that pays off – I won’t reveal, except to say that it reinforces the film’s key themes of passion, loss, and memory.
Passion, indeed, is what Robin seems to hold as the greatest virtue. In one great scene he confronts an old underling, whom he fired for incompetence, who has become a successful experimental chef, but whose professed dream had been to open an old-fashioned pub. Robin coldly calls him out for pursuing trendy success instead of his dreams, reducing him to tears before demanding the information he seeks. And later, he reveals that he can forage for truffles perfectly well on his own – he wants the pig back because she’s his family, a sentiment which the cold-blooded Darius cannot appreciate.
Senses of loss and haunted memories permeate the film. Even before we learn why Robin left Portland all those years ago, it’s clear that he has a tragic past, and the very length and totality of his exile is tragic in of itself; when he first returns to civilization, he goes into a diner and asks for someone, only to be told they’ve been dead 10 years. And in one poignant scene, he visits his old house and speaks to a boy who lives there, noticing sadly that the persimmon tree which once grew there is now gone. Wherever he goes in Portland, he’s remembered, often revered, and occasionally embraced. But there seems no possibility of his ever truly going back, a feeling underscored by his apocalyptic monologues on how the area will be inevitably be destroyed by earthquake and tsunami, or by the eruption of Mt. Hood.
Amir and Darius are likewise haunted by the past, though Darius is able to keep his pain buried under his greed, while Amir confesses to Robin the pain caused by his mother’s loss and his father’s coldness, both as a father and as a competitor. Of course, it’s not until well into the film that we realize the full extent of their losses and how much they still overshadow their lives, but suffice to say that Pig is a film filled with (figurative) ghosts and the inability to fully let go – illustrated, rather gruesomely, by Rob’s face throughout the film. It makes for a thoughtful, elegiac experience, at least when you’re not focusing on how very strange it all is.
Director Michael Sarnoski’s script (he developed the story with Vanessa Block) beguiles with its themes and unexpected turns, but I found it just a bit frustrating for what it fails to fully develop; what we see of Robin’s bond with the pig is quite sweet (there’s a really magical little moment when Robin is making a wild-mushroom tart and the flour sort of snows down on the pig), but I wanted more of it before the pig-napping occurs. And I wanted more of Robin’s journey through the Portland culinary underworld, or at least felt it needed an extra step or two; the film as a whole is somewhat oddly structured, being at once brisk (it’s only about 90 minutes long) and leisurely paced, and I feel like a little more time to flesh certain story elements out would’ve made the film just a touch stronger.
But it’s very strong as it is, thanks to Sarnoski’s graceful direction, Patrick Scola’s lovely cinematography (the forest scenes at the beginning are luminously beautiful), Brett W. Bachman’s editing, dreamlike at the beginning and jarring as Robin plunges back into his old world, the alternately beautiful and unsettling score by Alexis Grapsas and Philip Klein, the immersive sound design, the queasily effective makeup, and the subtly intelligent production design. Definitely see it on a big screen if you get the chance to appreciate the craft on display.
And of course, there’s the acting, with Cage doing a fine job as a man who’s at once a pretty typical eccentric Cage protagonist and one who’s methodical and fearsomely patient, whether he’s cooking a meal or trying to solve the mystery of his stolen pig. He rarely goes very far over the top, and only does so when it makes sense (and to be fair, in these circumstances it often does), more often bringing a brooding stillness to the material. I’m not sure it’s one of his greatest performances, but it’s a reminder of what he can do when he’s fully invested.
Wolff will likely only get a fraction of the praise, but he’s quite good as well, revealing the desperate, vulnerable young man beneath a cocky façade; we believe in him at every turn, which is not something to take for granted. Between this and his fine turn in Hereditary, he’s firmly on my radar. And Arkin (son of Alan) is chillingly believable as a man who believes he can get anything he wants and crush anyone who gets in his way. He rarely raises his voice either, because he knows he doesn’t have to. And when his own forbidding exterior is peeled back, he’s properly pathetic. He doesn’t have a great deal of screentime, but he does well with what he’s got.
I can’t help but think a second viewing might push Pig a bit higher for me, given how much food for thought the first viewing offered, and that I wouldn’t be tripped up by the various twists in the story. It didn’t fill me with the same sheer enthusiasm as Color Out of Space, but it’s also such a wildly different film that it might not really matter at all. Suffice to say, Pig is a rather fascinating little film, and recommended.
Score: 85
Cops and Robbers (1973) – ***½
Cops and Robbers begins with Joe (Joseph Bologna), a NYPD officer, casually holding up a liquor store while in uniform. As he walks out of the store, he smiles. What are they going to do? It’s New York in the 70s, and as we’ll see, it’s a pretty rough place to live – and a rougher place to be a cop. So when he tells Tom (Cliff Gorman), his neighbor and fellow officer, that they should pull off a heist together and get out of their dangerous jobs and this dangerous city, you get where he’s coming from. And when they make a deal with the Mafia to steal bearer bonds from a Wall Street brokerage, it’s hard to feel too bad about anyone involved, no matter the outcome.
Indeed, Cops and Robbers isn’t a film which banks on your rooting for any of the characters; if we root for Joe and Tom, it’s as much out of instinct (and a certain respect for their resourcefulness) as out of any particular sympathy or likability on their part. That’s not a knock on the film, because it’s more a portrait of a time and a place and a relatively objective depiction of this particular caper than a character study. And what it lacks in emotional pull it makes up for in wit and style.
The script is by noted crime novelist Donald E. Westlake; it was his first original screenplay, though he seems to have turned it into a novel as he wrote the script, given that the novel was published a few months before the film opened. In any case, that may explain the relatively thin characterizations (it’s a lot easier to develop a character when you can literally tell us what they’re thinking), but the sharp observations, realistic dialogue, and wry humor likewise speak to his skill.
At the same time, director Aram Avakian’s documentary experience shows through in the way the film captures New York’s slums and suburbs, its run-down police precincts and arid business offices, its violence and its sheer expansiveness, all of which cinematographer David L. Quaid does a fantastic job of depicting (the scenes of the city at night are especially evocative). And Avakian’s experience as an editor is felt in the flow of the story and the brilliant work by Barry Malkin of balancing the chaos in the streets with the dull tranquility of the suburbs and the crisp decorum of Wall Street, as well as the amazing work in the heist sequence itself.
Ample credit is due to art director Gene Rudolf, who realizes the disparate settings of the story beautifully (I especially like the kitschy high-class homes Tom keeps ending up in), and to the sound team, who do particularly fine work layering radio and television broadcasts onto the soundtrack. Michel Legrand’s score isn’t one of his more notable works, but he did co-write the theme song, “It’s a World of Cops and Robbers,” which is a rather enjoyable little tune, sung in the film by Grady Tate the same year he recorded a couple of songs for Schoolhouse Rock!
As for the acting, it’s consistently solid, but the film doesn’t give the actors much opportunity to truly shine. Gorman and Bologna are good (Gorman especially – he’s got that 70s New York neurosis), but they’re held back by how much Joe and Tom blur into one another. Joe is a bit more assertive, Tom is a bit more wily, but they primarily function as a pair, and even then they primarily serve the story itself. There are also reasonably effective turns from John P. Ryan as the mafioso who recruits them, Shepperd Strudwick as a senior partner in the firm they rob, and Ellen Holly as his secretary, who finds the heist an emotionally taxing experience. (Coincidentally, Holly, who mainly worked on TV, had only three film roles, and I’ve now seen all of them – Take a Giant Step, this film, and Spike Lee’s School Daze. )
Cops and Robbers has never been too well known; I found my copy of it by pure chance, and even with a Blu-Ray release a few years back, it remains pretty obscure, with only about 700 votes on the IMDb. Maybe it’s the lack of stars in the cast, or maybe it just got buried among all the other crime thrillers of the era. But it’s a smartly conceived, intelligently executed, and rather entertaining little film, well worth seeking out for fans of the genre or purveyors of hidden gems.
Score: 84
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