New York-Style

In memory of Erland Van Lidth  de Jeude, immortalized as Terror, leader of the Baldies, and owner of the most impressive onscreen display of rapid pizza ingestion.

I spent a few years in Chicago and there's probably nothing I missed more about the New York Tri-State Area than (good, easily obtainable) thin crust, New York-style pizza.

If you know of other similar moments (i.e. people chowing on slices) in NY-set movies of the era, please send 'em my way so that I may add them to this video.

I've a feeling Lenny's wasn't selling that Philly Cheesesteak when Travolta was prowling 86th St.

Films Within Films...or, Jurgensen x2

In the 1977 telefilm Contract on Cherry Street, cop Michael Nouri awaits c.i. Steve Inwood at the Queensboro Plaza subway station.  Note the tattered subway poster for William Friedkin's Sorcerer, also released in '77, to the right of Nouri. 

Yes, it's yet another example of this most exciting kind of synergy, this time Friedkin's Sorcerer turns up, in a way, in "dirty old New York" cop telefilm Contract on Cherry Street.  Interestingly, NYPD detective turned actor / consultant / producer Randy Jurgensen appears in both Contract on Cherry Street and Sorcerer.  Jurgensen broke into the movie game as a consultant on The French Connection...he was one of the cops who broke the case, along with Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso.

He also appeared on screen, for the first time, in French Connection in a humorous role as the sergeant in the police garage.  In that film, Gene Hackman would win an Academy Award for playing Egan surrogate Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle.  Two years later, Robert Duvall would essay another Egan-inspired character, Eddie Ryan, in Badge 373.  Logically, Jurgensen appears in the latter film, as well, as a cop alongside Duvall, in the finale at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Jurgensen's connection with Sorcerer and French Connection star Roy Scheider would carry over to The Seven-Ups and Still of the Night.  With Friedkin, he would collaborate on French Connection, Sorcerer, The Brink's Job, and Cruising.  Jurgensen's undercover work in the '60s in the gay community of Greenwich Village, and the cases related to those assignments, directly inspired the narrative of Cruising.

Essentially, if you've seen a New York City-set, '70s policier or two, you've almost certainly seen some of Jurgensen's work, whether it be in front of or behind the camera.

Sorcerer remains at the center of a lawsuit put forth by Friedkin, charging the two studios who financed the picture, Universal and Paramount, with withholding profits owed to him and mismanaging the distribution and stewardship of the film...in short: both studios plead ignorance as to who controls Sorcerer, which has kept it out of circulation on home video and the repertory circuit as of late.  Friedkin tweets that an end is in sight to the litigation.

Jurgensen plays movie trivia games with his partners, which include Frank Sinatra, over the airwaves in Contract on Cherry Street.

Jurgensen counsels Roy Scheider in Sorcerer.  Note the very pronounced collar Jurgensen sports in each screen shot.

Unsung Performer: John Glover, 52 PICK-UP

I just finally caught up with John Frankenheimer's sleazy 1986 Cannon actioner 52 Pick-Up., based on Elmore Leonard's novel (2 years earlier filmed by Cannon as the Robert Mitchum vehicle The Ambassador).  I'm a big Roy Scheider fan as longtime readers of this site likely know, but it was John Glover as central villain Alan Raimy who blew me away in terms of performance and overall impact.  A native of Salisbury, Maryland, Glover ingeniously utilizes the Baltimore dialect, or "Balmorese," which makes his smart, twisted, and funny crook all the more memorable and unique in the cinematic pantheon of criminal masterminds.  A close relative of the Philadelphia dialect, Balmorese, like the Philly variation, is rarely heard on film or television, probably because it's much more difficult for outsiders to approximate than the New York dialect, for instance.

In the Rocky films, for example, all of the primary characters are lifelong Philadelphians, as far as the script tells us, yet are voiced with New York dialects.  On The Wire, McNulty, a died in the wool blue- collar Baltimorean, is played by Dominic West, he of a posh British background, who does not even attempt Balmorese, but rather speaks in that terribly boring "non-accent" that so many Brits playing Americans resort to.  Love the show, but its verisimilitude is severely compromised, in my estimation, by not casting someone actually from the area.  It's not quite the same as casting whites as Native Americans or Latinos, as was so often the practice in studio-era Hollywood, but for a show that was so much about the place and what it meant to grow up and live there, it's still a head-scratcher to me as to why you would cast the ostensible central part with an upper class Briton.

Anyway, back to Glover and 52 Pick-Up...he's such an interesting performer and the character so intrinsically theatrical that his use of the accent--too often an over-abused, actorly tool--is justified and it elevates the performance into a strata of over-the-topness that is completely appropriate for the material.  It also overshadows Scheider in the lead role.  I'm not sure if this could have been avoided even if Scheider had brought his usual intensity to the role or if the part were better written.  As it stands, Scheider seems a little detached and routine here and his character's transformation from a philandering white-collar factory owner to a tough, underworld-savvy avenger isn't very convincing.

In addition to Scheider's limpness here, composer Gary Chang's synth-based score is sometimes effective, though it repeatedly sounds like a cheaper copy of Arthur B. Rubinstein's Blue Thunder music (probably what the filmmakers used as the temp track) and when it's bad and ineffective, it's very bad and wildly inappropriate, as is the case with the dopily cheerful end credit music.  This ill-fitting track plays in the aftermath of a violent climax, which will be quite familiar to viewers of Michael Winner's The Mechanic, where said ending is much less telegraphed than it is here.  Additionally, Winner's 1972 film plays without any music over its credits, a choice which says a lot about the differences between American films of the late '60s to mid-'70s, even mainstream genre pieces such as The Mechanic, and the slicker, more homogenized product that had taken hold by the mid-'80s.  Frankenheimer's film is far from happy at the end, calling for something a little downbeat in terms of music; instead we get this slab of horribly-aged synth cheese (please excuse the bad pun, but I think you'll agree):

The real joy here is watching Glover chew up the scenery in silk bathrobes and black bikini underwear, cackling as he puts a gun to Scheider's head and forces him to view blackmail video footage of his extra-marital dalliances with a younger woman (Kelly Preston) or when he later shoots up Scheider's wife (Ann-Margret) with dope.

Glover, as they say, kills it in 52 Pick-Up, and Clarence Williams III, as one of his cohorts, is right behind him, as a lethal man of few words, but revealing glances.  Robert Trebor, as the other member of this criminal troika, has had a long and distinguished stage career, as has Glover, but his annoying, sweaty theatrical flourishes just serve to underscore that he is an actor playing at being a low-life strip club owner and amateur extortionist.  So, the film provides a sort of acting workshop in action, wherein we see the low-key, less-is-more approach working extremely well (Williams) and not so well (Scheider) and the larger-than-life, big performance failing (Trebor) and succeeding (Glover). 

Ebert likes, Siskel doesn't:

In the what-might-have-been category, Glover was almost or originally cast as Kreese in The Karate Kid, which you can witness in this video, part of a fascinating collection of rehearsal tapes that John Avildsen has uploaded to his YouTube account.  The below video comes from a cast read through at producer Jerry Weintraub's home.  Whether Glover was just meant to stand in before a final performer (Martin Kove) was found, or whether he quit or was fired is not clear.  Avildsen is cheeky in the comments section when asked who the actor playing Kreese is, but it sure looks and sounds like Glover, who surely would have brought a different brand of cartoon performance (which the character demands) than did the stone-faced Kove:

Films Within Films: Roy Scheider

Jaws, co-starring Roy Scheider, appears in Marathon Man, co-starring Roy Scheider, by way of a movie marquee.  The theater is the long-gone Rivoli.

More Cult Films Within Films

Roy Scheider drags on a cigarette as he brings a slice of pizza to a freezing Gene Hackman in The French Connection.  The corner behind him (or is it a kiosk of sorts?) is plastered with Gimme Shelter flyers.  Interestingly, Gimme Shelter was distributed by Fox in the U.K., which also distributed French Connection.  U.K. lobby card, pictured above, has Fox copyright, if you look closely.

I Just Wasn't Made For These Times: Scheider Redux

I just read an interesting and somewhat depressing passage about Roy Scheider in Ryan Gilbey's It Don't Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the 1970s published by Faber and Faber in 2003.  In the wake of Scheider's recent passing, I thought it was worth highlighting and noting that, in fact, Gilbey's words read something like an early eulogy for Scheider, and other actors of his generation, for that matter.

Gilbey's book is divided into ten chapters each focusing on a different prominent director of the era.  The chapter on Jonathan Demme discusses Scheider's role as Harry Hannan in Last Embrace and while the author begins by commenting on Scheider's character, he ends talking about Scheider's already fading career as a leading man: 

"Demme had expressed the view that Scheider 'could be the Humphrey Bogart of the 1970s,' and you can just hear Bogart reciting those lines, sounding as ever like a man with lockjaw talking in his sleep. Scheider looks fabulously lost and, unfortunately, so untrustworthy that surely no one would want to help him find his way again.  With that flat face (he has no profile) and oily skin, it's clear now that he was an endangered species.  In the same year, Richard Gere would manage to look swell while also falling apart in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo, and the preppy locker-room blandness of Tom Cruise and his brat-pack siblings was only a few years away.  How could Scheider have hoped to survive?  The fact that he didn't, and was more stubborn and gnarled than heroic by the time he played the lead in Blue Thunder in 1983, lends Last Embrace an uninvited poignancy. 

When Harry visits the graveyard, the New York skyline is set high in the distance behind him, and beyond it stands a rusty sunset: he seems to be saying goodbye to more than just his wife (Scheider might be bidding farewell to his own popularity, and also to the era of Jaws, his greatest success).  When he steps out on to the viewing deck next to Niagara Falls in the film's climax, he lets out an involuntary groan that corresponds to the visual shock of his white suit infiltrating a throng of banana-yellow sou'westers, and you imagine that Scheider's reaction to the encroaching generation of pretty-boys, flawless, and homogenous, was similarly fraught."

After reading this passage, you would not think that Scheider would live nearly thirty more years and complete many other film projects. Yet, Gilbey's sentiments about the next generation, with its preponderance of pretty faces and callow personalities, largely rings true. Still, the continued success of contemporaries like his French Connection compadre Gene Hackman indicate that some of Scheider's late-career troubles were due, in part, to poor film choices and a fiery persona that did not always endear him to the industry. Diane C. Kachmar's in-depth, Scheider: A Film Biography details Scheider's infamous troubles on Jaws 2 (which you can read about in this free preview), a film which he was contractually committed to, and which contributed to his having to bow out of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (his role went to Robert De Niro).  Scheider finished the gig, but not before scuffling with director Jeannot Szwarc (Somewhere in Time; Supergirl).

No, that's not Jaws 2 director Szwarc about to get whacked by Scheider, but a very young and unknown Mandy Patinkin.  

R.I.P.: Roy Scheider

I was very sad to hear that Roy Scheider had passed away due to complications from multiple myeloma.  In fact, when I saw him at a 2006 gala for Steven Spielberg in Chicago it was apparent to my eyes that Roy was not in the best of health.  Still, he gave a warm and humorous tribute to Spielberg to kick off of the evening's festivities. One of the finest stage and screen actors of the last forty years, Scheider will be most remembered for his starring role in Jaws, however he lent his rugged, blue collar presence to many other quality films including: The French Connection, Sorcerer, Marathon Man, All That Jazz, Klute, Last Embrace, Blue Thunder, 52 Pick-Up, Naked Lunch, Still of the Night, and Cohen & Tate.  

Of Scheider's films, I must confess a special affinity for Blue Thunder in which Scheider plays a slightly unhinged Vietnam vet police helicopter pilot who goes against a collection of crooked feds led by a deliciously over-the-top Malcolm McDowell.  This was one of the first R-rated films I saw and I vividly recall sneaking into an afternoon showing with my father after seeing Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone in 3-D.  Aside from the juicy McDowell role, Blue Thunder also features the inimitable and irascible Warren Oates (coincidentally pictured in the below post) in his final feature film role.  [Richard Fleischer's Tough Enough, released just after Blue Thunder and in which Oates also appears, was actually completed earlier in 1981.]

Last Embrace, a Hitchcock-like thriller, is often overlooked in director Jonathan Demme's oeuvre, but it is worth pursuing.  Needless to say, this sleeper is not yet available on DVD. Scheider stars with the late Janet Margolin (David and Lisa), John Glover, Sam Levene, Charles Napier (a Demme and Russ Meyer favorite), and Christopher Walken.  Cult director Jim McBride, cult actor Joe Spinell, and Mandy Patinkin make brief appearances.  The screenplay is by the late David Shaber, who wrote or co-wrote several memorable scripts, including The Warriors, in a relatively brief career.  The legendary Miklos Rozsa contributed one of his last scores to the film.

In the late 1980s and into the 90s, Scheider transitioned to more character and supporting roles and was seen in less high-profile productions.  Scheider had been ill for the last several years, but continued to appear in a mixture of film and television productions, mostly of the independent variety.  At the same time, he became increasingly active in the political arena and was a visible presence at anti-war rallies in recent years.  For further information, take a look at Dave Kehr's obituary at the New York Times.

At the risk of sounding slightly crass, I'll sign off by quoting McDowell's favorite catch phrase from Blue Thunder, one which Roy memorably throws back in his face, "Catch you later."