Snake in the Alley: Lee Van Cleef's Film Noir

Very bad, very big trouble;
probably a publicity still
from Guns, Girls, and Gangsters

[The following was contributed to a blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Film for a Film Noir Foundation Restoration Drive:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=LAWFPAB4XLHAW


All fans of movie villains know—or should know—the name and the face: Lee Van Cleef, the veteran character actor who snaked through over 90 movies and 100 TV appearances. One of the movies’ most enduring and endearing bad guys, he’s mostly remembered for starring in spaghetti westerns, especially his superbly creepy turn as Angel Eyes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—his terrorizing of the poor farmer at the opening remains one of the most unnerving portrayals of stalking evil I’ve seen on screen.

If snakes could walk, they’d all strut like Lee Van Cleef.

For awhile after, Van Cleef became a big star in Europe, his high-boned sneer appearing in movies of varying—and declining—quality. In the years before stardom, though, Van Cleef enlivened many a crime drama with his handsome reptilian coil and low menacing growl. His steely presence and hawk-like visage lit up even the worst movie or TV show. The camera simply loved him, even though bigger stardom never really came his way, like his many fans—including me--hoped it would. (Even David Thomson writes a fond tribute in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film.)

Two of Van Cleef’s most notable roles were in two famous noirs from the 1950s: The Big Combo (1955) and Kansas City Confidential (1953).

In The Big Combo, Van Cleef plays Fante, one of a pair of gay hit men (the other, Mingo, is played with puppy-like winsomeness by Earl Holliman). The two perform wet work for gangster Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), who, in turn, is being obsessively pursued by Lieutenant Diamond (Cornel Wilde).

(In an interview some years ago—and I’m working off memory here—Holliman admitted he and Van Cleef were well aware of Fante and Mingo’s relationship, even wearing each other’s pajamas.)

Fante and Mingo are relatively small prey in this cat and mouse game, but both Van Cleef and Holliman are helped by Phillip Yordan’s script, Joseph H. Lewis’s direction and, maybe, best of all, John Alton’s superb black and white cinematography. Alton—who also shot  the main dance sequence of
An American in Paris—created one of the starkest palettes in film noir, shooting in high contrast black and white in nearly every scene, especially the violent ones—absolute black shadows cut with white light and blasts of smog. The whole film smells like a an alleyway garage. (Visit this site to see some of his striking work).

Alton marvelously exploits Van Cleef’s unique presence. In some scenes—especially in the torture scene involving poor schmo Brian Donleavy—Alton lights him to look like exactly like an alley rat. Van Cleef is such a strong personage, we’re a little sorry to see him killed, as he mostly was in picture after picture.

Van Cleef had a much chewier—and more delightful role—two years earlier in Kansas City Confidential, a crime drama starring John Payne, Preston Foster and Colleen Gray. Confidential is a trip to what I call Bad Guy Heaven, because two of Van Cleef’s accomplices in this heist-gone-wrong picture are bulldog-faced Neville Brand and sweating, wall-eyed Jack Elam, two other fine villains from that golden
era of character actors. All three make for a perfect Three Bad Stooges.

Van Cleef has easily the best role as the wonderfully sleazy Tony Romano, one of the three thieves hired by chief bad guy Foster to pull off a heist and then hide out at a Mexican resort to divide the loot there. Tony Romano is a romantic manqué: an idiot drenched in the delusion that he’s smart and sexy
catnip to the ladies and cleverer than both his treacherous boss and good guy Payne.

It’s a delightful role for Van Cleef—the best from that period in his nearly 40-year career--and he plays this cheerfully brutal moron like he was born to it, while cinematographer George Diskant never misses a chance to frame the actor’s handsomely cruel face to full advantage. (Visit his fan site and take note of the large number of women who post there).

While a limited actor, Van Cleef is such fun in this movie, it’s frustrating to realize it didn’t immediately open the door to bigger things—say in Zachary Scott-type roles as fiendish romancing cads. Much too soon, he fell to the back row with his fellow character villains, sometimes in support of lesser players in boring movies. 

Lee Van Cleef was more professional actor than ambitious star-artist, a man who went where the jobs were and always tried to do his best, the most professional of actors and one of those I most love to hate.


Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published this Spring by Ambler House Publishing. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.
 

They Have Faces Now: James Gandolfini and the New Character Actors

The sudden, saddening death of Sopranos  star James Gandolfini has inspired rolling waves of tributes from all over. Many have been deep-dish pieces on the place of Tony Soprano and the show in art and pop culture, the larger society, and the secret compartments of ourselves (mostly the ones in the basement, toward the rear, where the wolves and lizards live, that only God really knows about).

For those of us for whom movies are a pleasure beyond analysis, and whose viewing devices may be locked on to Turner Classic Movies, the 1999 debut of The Sopranos and the rise of James Gandolfini and his equally homely fellow goombahs, family, and friends, represented something else—the happy resurrection of a film tradition that seemed to be rapidly fading into irrelevance, sliding toward extinction.

The tradition of the character actor.

BY THAT WE MEAN . . . .

If you regularly watch any movie or TV show made before 1980—or even earlier—you know whom I’m talking about: those faces in the background, the men and women standing around or behind the handsome sturdy star.

They were snaggle-toothed sidekicks, wise aunts, wisecracking best girlfriends, gold-heart hookers, poncy servants, bumbling uncles, fussy bankers, drunken doctors, or, often best of all, the Bad Guys and their grizzled, snaky armies of thugs and murderers.

If you’re like me, you probably have a few favorites. Off the top of my head leap Frank Morgan, Una O’Connor, Edward Everett Horton, Harry Davenport, Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, Elisha Cook, Whit Bissell (I’ll explain someday), and Lee Van Cleef. There are many more; you likely have your own list.

They very rarely ever became stars, or stars in major A pictures (though Humphrey Bogart did), though they won supporting actor awards. Some, like Edward G. Robinson, actually started out as major stars, but as they aged, they accumulated greater texture—wrinkles and gray hairs, a gleam of experience in the eyes—that mark the best character actors. Their sex appeal dwindled, but another spirit, often a better one, twinkled to life in that empty space.

Each actor played within a narrow range of strongly identifiable types. They were rarely versatile chameleons in the manner of say, Robert de Niro or so impossibly dominating, you couldn’t imagine (or want) them in the background of anything, such as John Wayne.

Ordinary looking—even homely--they were often less than the stars, more like the man and woman on the street, or down the road; meaning, like you and me, lumpen proles. Sometimes, they acted as witnesses, providing a bridge between the movie and the audience. They were stand-ins for us. They made for comic relief and charming, homey familiarity, a family of sorts.

They were also, too often, the only things worthwhile about otherwise bad, boring movies. (This is notable, to me at least, in villainous Lee Van Cleef’s appearances, where my interest in the movie often slumps once he takes the Big Bullet and the danger to the hero dies with him.)

HISTORY, WITH DECLINE

The heyday of the character actor started when the movies began and lasted until the big studios did their slow dissolve in the late 1960s. These studios, Warner Brothers, MGM, Twentieth-Century Fox, and others, employed large stables of them and kept them busy year around, often for decades; for example, MGM’s Frank Morgan was kept so busy (playing among other things, The Wizard of Oz), he even earned his own large fan base. Character actors didn’t get rich in Hollywood, but if they found a niche, they could make a living.

But with the studios gone, those faces, those personalities, lost their means of support and began to disappear. The old ones faded away and no one rose in their place—the old factories to employ them were no longer there.

Many, like Lee Van Cleef, became “gypsy actors” overseas, often hustling for whatever scraps they could find to support their families. (This relates, I suspect, to the general hollowing out of Hollywood movies over the last four decades; that feeling they give of being rolled down a steep, rocky hill inside a loud and empty drum.)

The faces in the background became blander and scripts started making less room for that rich palette (and the movies became dull, too). If they appeared at all, it was mostly in the films of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, two true believers in the canonical history of the movies.

RESURRECTION

Then I saw David Chase’s The Sopranos. In addition to my joy at its skill, imagination, and artistry, my thoughts flashed on the 1930s Warner Brothers genre movies, especially the musicals and gangster pictures. Behind Tony Soprano, Christopher, Paulie Walnuts, Big Pussy, Silvio, and many others, mugs and molls both, lurked those doughy ugly faces of the past like great ancient ghosts: not only Robinson, Cagney, and Bogie, but Aline McMahon, Ned Sparks, Hugh Herbert, and many others.

And one of the best and the most exciting things about The Sopranos was that these “supporting actors” and their characters were no longer pushed to the edge of the screen to lug the hero’s water—they were now front and center. Character and actor got their moment in the lights, often many moments. Thanks to the expansive format of the long-form series, they were given the time and space to shine in ways they rarely could before, even in the best Golden Age movies.

They were, collectively, the Stars.

My favorite Sopranos  moments? The beatific shine from Tony Soprano’s face as the ducks fly away from his backyard pond, an unhappy thug seeing beauty for the first time in his life; the “Pine Barrens” antics of Christopher (Michael Imperioli) and Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) bumbling around the freezing New Jersey backwoods like a psychopathic Laurel and Hardy; not even Walter Brennan had that much fun.

Since then, cable TV series have brought us a new era that can be rightly called “golden.” And it includes some broad galleries of faces and performers.

For another example, you could have set the best supporting actors from any western made from the 1930s to the 1960s in David Milch’s Deadwood and have a great show (one that John Ford, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah all might have been proud to helm, cussin’ and all).

We didn’t get those guys, but what we got was also perfect: a tremendous and tortured villain in Ian McShane; fine complicated heroes in Timothy Olyphant and John Hawkes; pungent portraits of frontier shit-birds and gnarly prospectors, as played by William Sanderson and Jim Beaver; and foul-mouthed female gunslingers and tough-minded hookers, as played by Robin Weigert and Kim Dickens. They gave life to every word and gesture. As actors, they’d roped in the roles of their lives and rode them for all they’re worth.

Time forbids elaboration here, but take a look at everything from Veep to Breaking Bad to Justified (also featuring Olyphant and the estimable Mr. Beaver). Note how almost no one in these shows looks like what we nowadays consider a movie star.

(It’s possible that cable TV series can’t afford to not hire actors with both skill and genuine personality. An amiable fellow like Sam Worthington (Avatar), would be steamrolled by most of the cast of Game of Thrones, a show where even little people stand way taller than they used to. Errol Flynn would have to work even harder now (and take much better care of himself, bless his raffish soul).

James Gandolfini and The Sopranos  opened the gates to this new, but familiar, world of film. They resurrected an old style of film acting that seemed lost, and broadened and deepened the craft. With the dramatic space provide by the form, clichés and reflective tics will no longer do. They have to echo something deeper.

With Gandolfini leading the way, the experience of watching narrative film, long or short, is now richer, more exciting, more pleasurable than ever. Watching these shows makes me feel like a child again, in the company of a family of a familiar faces.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has just completed BUTCHERTOWN , a 1920s gangster shoot-'em-up. He can be “friended” on Facebook and tweeted at on Twitter. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The Uglies: The Story of an Unproduced Screenplay

The pitch for my original script The Uglies (Ambler House Publishing) went like this:

“A down-on-their luck blue collar couple’s fortunes take a sharp turn when they’re kidnapped by a fractious gang of high-spirited bank robbers and taken on a cross-country crime spree.”

I wrote this screenplay in the early 1990s, when the United States was mired in a recession. Now, with unemployment up again and the middle class disappearing—maybe for a long time—it seems to be relevant again: You might call it a crime/suspense picture about the “99 percent.”

Still, I had reasons of my own for writing it.

CHARACTER ACTOR HEAVEN

The Uglies is the most “realistic” of my six screenplays, but it didn’t start out that way.

It was sparked by my great affection for the army of character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. During that halcyon era, each of the seven biggest studios employed in their factories a stable of supporting players they employed in film after film. Many of them, such as Walter Brennan, Edna May Oliver, Frank Morgan, Una O’Connor, and Peter Lorre, worked practically year-round. A tiny handful, like Brennan and Morgan, brushed real stardom, scoring Oscars and the like.

They were not the glamorous Crawfords and Gables, the buoyant Flynns and the glowing Lombards. They ran the beauty gamut from homely to ugly. They served many purposes, as they brightly colored the background of films, providing friendship to the heroes, comic relief, menace, or just carrying strands of plot and story.

Some of them, like Basil Rathbone, portrayed formidable indelible villains who created a genuine palpable threat that sometimes tricked you into thinking that Errol Flynn might be in real danger and made you cheer when Errol finally ventilated him with a sword. Few genre movies can do without a great villain.

These actors were always a pleasure to watch, like your favorite uncles and cousins. They saved countless movies from fatal dreariness, even if only for the few moments they were on. More interestingly, the European emigrants among them—many of them Nazi refugees, such as S.Z.Sakall—had been major stars in their own countries . . . but not here.

Right now, I can only think of one of these stalwarts who finally stepped to true stardom—his name was Humphrey Bogart.

Character actors were an often especially pungent presence in crime films and westerns. I’m particularly fond of the crew of rattlesnakes, alley rats, and dirt bags who populated the films and TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s: Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam,  Leo Gordon, Warren Oates, Strother Martin and many others who I’m sure many of you old-movie fans could name. (Among them, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, and Van Cleef managed to reach stardom; Borgnine, Marvin, and Ben Johnson won Oscars.)

AND THEN THEY WERE GONE

As the studio system disappeared in the 1960s, so did reliable employment for this colorful gnarly bunch. Some of them, like Van Cleef, luckily found work in Europe and even did well for themselves.

Otherwise, they grew old, left the business, passed away. As time went on, the new actors failed to fill that gap. Starting in the 1960s, most of the new supporting actors were dough-faced, Caucasian bland, with the looks of dry clay and the personalities of gel implants. The character actor as distinct personality seemed to be disappearing. The movies—especially genre movies—lost a little of their color. Once in a while someone like Robert Shaw would pop up in Jaws, but otherwise . . . .

It was in tribute to that vanishing species that I started writing The Uglies, a movie with no blond bombshells or muscle-bound granite-jawed studs; no six-pack abs or buns of steel. Instead I populated it with homely people with old craggy faces, big noses, sagging boobs, beer bellies, no hair, and bad skin. I thought they deserved a movie all to themselves, so I wrote one.

Happy to say, though, I needn't have worried: the old tradition of the character actor is alive again, thanks to cable television, starting with such series as The Sopranos, The Wire, Justified, and Deadwood whose entire cast would fit nicely into the world of The Uglies.

BAD INFLUENCES

I also wrote The Uglies as an ersatz Sam Peckinpah film. And it was ersatz in its early drafts. One afternoon, I had a couple of actors, Claudia Rosa and Michael Anduz, act out a scene or two for me. They giggled as they struggled through my faux existential, tough-guy twaddle. I still recall the sting as they doubled over laughing.

So, I rolled it back through the typewriter. I stopped thinking of it as a character-actor homage. I flushed out the pompous, cornball Peckinpah-isms and other Po-mo movie references (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Quentin Tarantino) and thought hard, like Sam would. (It had to be its own movie, not his):

Who were these people, these hard-luck souls in dead-end lives of poverty and crime? What kind of world did they move through with such feverish desperation? What’s the difference between real criminals and those forced to take up crime to survive? How far might someone go to stay alive? How might the urge to survive both pull us together and drive us apart? No matter how extreme the moment, does all armed confrontation end in bloodshed . . . ?

No movie can, or should, answer those questions, but it can bring them up in old-fashioned, entertaining way, and I think The Uglies succeeds in that sense.

Preparing it for publication, I found I still enjoyed its rousing action, its color, its coarse, crude, and boisterous humor, and the human vulnerability of its characters. Also, in part, it turned from an homage to Peckinpah to an argument with him.

HOLLYWOOD REACTS

Of the six screenplays I completed, it received the most praise, repeatedly called “entertaining” and a “good read” by numerous agents and readers.

But, as happened throughout my ten-year fishing trip off the Hollywood pier, many a fish nibbled, but not a one bit and they all swam away.

The Uglies also received the most criticism: One agent actually called, saying that while my writing was excellent, “everyone in it is ugly!” Then she lay down the condition that she would represent it only if I completely rewrote it to her specifications. Such a promise, I already knew, would never be kept and the discussion ended.

I also submitted the script to numerous workshops and contests. I received a few comments, the most memorable of which was from a reader who was bothered that Frank, the gang’s leader, wasn’t portrayed as a murderously evil figure, simply a criminal with gruff charm and delusions of folk-hero grandeur. Maybe he was right, but, with this script, I didn’t feel like turning loose one of my dazzling Dracula-like sociopaths. I wanted a sense of a group of people against the world.

The Uglies isn’t perfectly “realistic”—its climax is perhaps too hero-mantic—but I did wish to capture the reality of criminals, the grubby limitations and dead-ends of their lives, without taking away their humanity and even charm. All sociopaths may be criminals, but by no means are all criminals sociopaths. Based in part on my  observations during my brief employment in law enforcement, most of them are limited people, born into closed worlds and knowing nothing else. Some are smart, many are stupid, even downright hapless. “Short-sighted” doesn’t begin to describe them. All of them are dealing with life as they found it to be, which is, to say, not much.

In the late 1990s, I had the pleasure of meeting Stuart Whitman, an excellent actor and 1960s star. Then in his seventies, he would have been excellent as the bandit leader and loved the script . . .  but he too swam away.

SOMETHING TO OFFEND EVERYONE

Some caveats: The Uglies is about the criminal underworld and some working class and middle-class professionals who sink down into its mire. Therefore, there are many un-P.C. factors to offend both Left and Right. To many on the Right, to empathize with criminals is to glorify them. Also, everyone cusses a lot and almost no one believes in God, the Flag, or American exceptionalism. Ideological capitalism gets slapped as law enforcement is portrayed as subsidiary of big business.

As for the Left, well, criminals are not sensitive, pacifist, vegan liberals from Minnesota who carry ACLU cards in their holsters tucked next to the Glock. They lie and cheat, steal and sometimes kill; the threat of violence is never far away; they smoke, eat poorly, drink too much, are often drug-addicted, and laugh at concepts like “healthy lifestyle.” They are mostly male, sexist, thuggish, sometimes racist, always bigoted toward some group or other and while I wanted to avoid blunt messaging, I didn’t want to be egregiously dishonest either.

The sensibilities here may be generally liberal, but I don’t regard The Uglies as a specifically ideological work. If that’s important to you, well, there it is.

A THOUGHT FOR A LOST FRIEND

As for real-life sources for The Uglies, I’m vague on them 20 years later, but from my own life I drew the colorful Carlos, one of Frank’s partners in crime. I based him very closely on the first friend I made when I arrived in San Francisco in 1982. He’d been a criminal himself once—and had the knife scars to prove it, dug deep across his stomach. He was, in his way, an extraordinary man, uneducated but fiercely intelligent, lovable one minute, infuriating the next. He roared and danced with a love for life and was tremendously kind to this young naïve man trying to get his feet down on the hard streets of a big city. I used him not only in The Uglies, but also in an earlier script, The Devil’s Due, which will come out later this year.

Carlos and I drifted apart after a time and lost touch. In the late 1990s, I learned he had died of cancer. The Uglies in its small way is a remembrance of my friend Carlos. I pray he knows it.

(Re-edited 2/16/12; 2/23/12)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author; cover design by M.S. Corley.

Thomas Burchfield is the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, and the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Scribed and now at the Red Room bookstore. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter and reads at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Eye on Movies: Noir City 15: Ten-Day Crime Spree

Alright, I’ll talk! Stop! Don’t hit me no more! I’ll tell ya everythin’ I know. Get that light outta my eyes, will ya? I can’t think!

It was Eddie and his gang. The Film Noir Foundation. Yeah, you coppers know them heisters. Chumps like me are scrapin’ the gutter for peanuts, while Eddie and his FNF gang are breakin’ into film vaults all over the world and makin’ off with the crown jewels of sixty years of crime flicks. He’s made crime pay alright damn him while I’m stuck in the middle of Oaktown watchin’ reruns of Midway on AMC!

Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell ya where. Put my arm back in my socket first, will ya? And take that thumb outta my eye!

Eddie and his pals are showin’ off the goods at the fifteenth annual Film Noir Foundation’s Noir CityFilm Festival, held at San Francisco’s legendary Castro Theater and hosted byEddie. The fest is runnin’ from Friday January 20 thru January 29.

What’re the movies about!? What the hell d’ya think they’re about, flatfoot? Heists! Big heists! Big steals that wind up screwin’ the pooch . . . jus’ like they’re always goin’ wrong with me. Well, how the hell was I s’posed to know them rocks belonged to the Kardashians!?

No, I don’t know all the jewels, but I seen a whole bunch of ‘em, some of ‘em a long time ago. Yeah, they’re beautiful all right . . . lemme tell ya . . . .

***********************************************************************

The first gem from the vault is the Robert Siodmak-directed Criss Cross from 1947, starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, both ashine with resplendent youth. Like many a noir, it’s about the things a guy will do for love. Lancaster is the love-befuddled sap to Gardner’s femme fatale, who’s attached to that perfectly slimy piece of toast Dan Duryea. You may find the ending a little weak as I did, but the build-up is terrific.

Better yet, the festival tops off its opening night with what some call the crown jewel of all heist films, The Asphalt Jungle (1951). From a W.R. Burnett novel, it’s true to its title as there’s not a whiff of nature to be seen anywhere until the unexpectedly moving ending in another of director John Huston’s many masterworks. I also like how it portrays the human violence unfolds in real life—randomly, stupidly.

The first Saturday matinee brings a little treat for fans of the character actors of the 1950s and 1960s in Kansas City Confidential (1953). Directed by Phil Karlson, it’s the story of a poor mug (John Payne) framed by criminal mastermind Preston Foster for a robbery he didn’t commit. Once out of the can, Payne tracks Foster down to a Mexican resort to get his justice.

The film’s best fun comes from the casting and performances by Foster’s gang of hapless miscreant mugs in the background: growling block-headed Neville Brand, sweaty, wall-eyed Jack Elam and, best of all to some, Lee Van Cleef, dispensing a bit with his great reptilian sneer to cheerfully play a self-styled Valentino named Tony Romano with humor, charm and skill. (You can read more about Van Cleef’s work in this film here and in my recent two-part profile of the actor in Filmfax magazine.) No doubt about it, it’s Bad Guy Heaven. Be seeing you there!

Winding up that Saturday afternoon is Violent Saturday, an offbeat thriller from 1955 about a gang of bank robbers (Lee Marvin, another angel from Bad Guy Heaven, of course; Stephen McNally; and J. Carroll Naish) attempting to rob a small-town bank while trying to avoid entanglements with its troubled residents—sort of Peyton Place meets Richard Stark. Directed by a master craftsman, Richard Fleischer (The Narrow Margin) the film’s violence is quite brutal for its era. And Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer seems some sort of peak in oddball casting.

While some pick The Asphalt Jungle as the best heist film ever, others will nominate Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) in that eternal debate. Dassin directed this after his exile from the United States during the Red Scare. French filmmaking benefitted thanks to the bringing of American skill and sensibilities to their genre movies. The heist sequence is the most exquisite ever as it unfolds without a word of dialogue, a perfect example of what Hitchcock called “pure cinema.” This or The Asphalt Jungle? It’s enough to split a guy’s heart in two.

The following Monday, January 23^rd, brings The Killing, directed by a young Stanley Kubrick, from a script he cowrote with Jim Thompson (The Grifters). In addition to the terrific cast (Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., Timothy Carey, Vince Edwards et al), you can also get an early look at Kubrick’s unique sense of space in widescreen format. Bay Area horse racing fans will also enjoy the scenes of long-gone Bay Meadows racetrack.

Tuesday night, the 24^th, brings one of the best comedies in any genre The Ladykillers. (1955, which seems to be a peak year for the heist genre) Produced by Ealing Studios and directed by Alexander Mackendrick (A Fish Called Wanda), it concerns a band of thieves who rent a hideout in which to plan their next heist. Unfortunately, they fail to account for their exquisitely caring and very nosy landlady. There’s Alec Guinness (with the greatest set of bad teeth ever), Peter Sellers and the underrated Herbert Lom. But all of them crumble before the adorable force of nature that is Katie Johnson. You owe yourself this one.

I haven’t seen The Sicilian Clan (1969) in years and due to the late hour of the screening (late Wednesday, the 25^th), I’ll be missing it again. It’s a very good example of the crime thrillers Europeans started turning to as the spaghetti western craze played out its freaky string. This one features Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, and Jean Gabin and was directed by the Turkish-born Henri Verneuil, the director of another nifty Euro-thriller called The Burglars. At their best, these films are as sharp and entertaining as any B-crime picture from the 1940s and 1950s. And there’s Ennio Morricone’s score, one of the best of his huge catalogue. I may not have seen this one in a long time, but I know its music by heart (and good luck at finding the soundtrack).

For crowd-pleaser of the festival, I nominate 1974’s The Taking of Pelham 123, one of the best New York thrillers ever, filmed against the gloriously scuzzy backdrop of 1970s Gotham. It features hangdog Walter Matthau, chilly-eyed Robert Shaw, Jerry Stiller and a winsome Martin Balsam in a tale of a violent subway hijacking that comes down with a URI. It’s a perfect blend of laughs and thrills and is pure New York down to its bawdy bones. But hey . . . what d’ya want for twenty-five cents!? Take my word for it: see this with an audience!

Matthau returns yet again on the last Saturday matinee in Charley Varrick (1973), directed by genre legend Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, still a good movie even if you don’t like its politics). It’s a good two-fisted thriller: Matthau’s knockover of a small-town bank lands him in even deeper waters after he finds the bank was owned by the Mob. Good tough stuff as only directors like Siegel could pull off--the kind Hollywood studios cannot make anymore, even if they wanted to.

Immediately following Charley Varrick, comes Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, an offbeat tale of two crooks (Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges) and their lives on the lam. It's another I haven't seen in years, but it plays well in the memory. It’s one of the films credited with raising Eastwood’s profile among serious filmgoers, as well as Jeff Bridges' profile, who’s also terrific here. The film was directed by Michael Cimino, whose subsequent work (The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate) seems to provide weight to the adage that success can ruin a man.

If you’ve ever wondered about the secret face of Mahatma Ghandi, you may get a real clue with Sexy Beast (2000), featuring the film embodiment of Gandhi himself, Ben Kingsley, the soul of yin and yang. He plays Don Logan, a mob enforcer of rabid ferocity who barks his way into the sunbaked retirement of ex-thief Ray Winstone, dragging, pushing and shoving him into pulling one more heist. Tense, funny, disturbing, seedy and stylish to a fault it, it also features Ian McShane as the big boss, a few years before his triumphant turn as Al Swearengen in Deadwood.

The festival closes with the last film in the distinguished career of Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. It plays like a chamber piece, sort of The Asphalt Jungle meets Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) concoct a harebrained scheme to rob their parents’ jewelry store. A genuine air of pathos and tragedy suffuses the film, making it a fine coda to Lumet’s career. And, of course, any excuse to see the much-missed Mr. Hoffman is a good one.

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel will appear this Spring 2017. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies Now Speaks the Devil, and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Scribed, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, The Strand magazine and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.