sidney lumet search and destroy etc

I might not be clear on the time line, but The Anderson Tapes (1971) seems like it was a couple of years ahead of the curve on the whole "70s paranoia thriller" thing, even if its basically a heist movie seasoned with some contemporary concerns re: surveillance issues. It feels a bit padded--the Dyan Cannon character and a scene involving Alan King's mafioso patriarch mostly serve to kill time until the caper gets underway--but it has a killer Quincy Jones score, and a supporting cast that includes a twinky Christopher Walken in his film debut, Martin Balsam as a gay stereotype (warning: the movie is in love with that word), Conrad Bain being punched in the nose, and Margaret Hamilton reading dirty books.

Wow--I always thought Annie Hall was Walken's debut. Took him another six years to land a one-minute part (albeit an unforgettable one)?

Walken had a big role in Next Stop Greenwich Village ('75)

saw Anderson Tapes at a rep house, possibly in the '80s

also a pre-SNL Garrett Morris!

watched The Pawnbroker the other night. just a great performance by Steiger, and the movie it reminded me most of oddly was The Blue Angel. Steiger looks and acts like Emil Jannings in that movie, they're both professors, movies + stories set at opposite ends of the biggest event of the 20th century. the difference is at least Jannings has Dietrich, and for 5 years no less. Steiger has his apprentice, who ends up dead and Steiger has to continue on! there are similarities too in the lighting and blocking of everything in the pawnshop, it's very Sternbergian / clearly drawing from German Expressionism in a way that I haven't seen in any other Lumet films.

Fail Safe was great. Really the perfect movie to watch during a pandemic. I couldn't stop violently sobbing at the end!

Very New Wave, mostly in the titles and that truly overwhelming final shot of white

also watched the Fail-Safe Criterion last night, which i've been a fan of since high school, although I think it's a very good film while Strangelove is great and more attuned to my sensibility.

Didn't remember the second part of Matthau's first appearance, where his Herman Kahn-like nuclear hawk is nearly picked up by a D.C. party girl who is aroused by nuclear doomsday. Weird scene, though one of the few bad ones in the picture.

I also think the backstory of the breaking-down colonel (Fritz Weaver)'s shame over his alcoholic parents was too on-the-nose and gratuitous, and Lumet says pretty much the same thing on his commentary track (recorded in 2000).

Funny that Matthau, Dom DeLuise (one great sweaty scene) and Sorrell Booke (Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard, here playing -- only 33! -- the bespectacled congressman in the SAC hq) all reached stardom as comedic actors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but was anyone in American movies doing anything like this w/r/t title-cards/text/opticals? The timing, style, and purpose of the titles and very quick cuts and that final white screen just scream Godard. and not only that, there's the photo negative footage of the planes, something Pasolini claimed Godard invented in Alphaville, in 1965.

I think nouvelle vague stuff starts showin up in some US films by '62 tho I can't think of any examples right now (Manchurian Candidate?)

also A Hard Day's Night, made by a Yank

obv this was more apt to show up in indie productions

The use of hard cuts (instead of dissolves/wipes) as transitions in Lawrence of Arabia was Nouvelle Vague-influenced.

Lumet was ahead of the curve in many ways. There are Kurosawa visual riffs in The Fugitive Kind from 1960.

I started watching the 2000 remake with George Clooney a few years ago, and either I gave up on it, or it made so little impression on me I've forgotten it all.

Fail Safe was great. Really the perfect movie to watch during a pandemic. I couldn't stop violently sobbing at the end!

― flappy bird, Friday, March 13, 2020 12:58 PM (two days ago)

In addition to the pandemic, I'm reading an essay on "Cold War rationality" right now. So now I'm trying to decide whether to watch Fail Safe or Seven Days in May tonight (I've seen neither).

Tried watching "Network" with my 15-year old and it was pretty tough going. Crossing over with the "Is Dylan overrated?" thread,I noted there how I tried to explain to her why Dylan was so important or noteworthy, and even though I could list all the reasons, not many of them resonated with a (my) teen in 2020. Same things with "Network." I see William Holden and Faye Dunaway, she sees mostly old men she can barely tell apart. I see a satire of Things To Come, she sees a milder version of what she has lived with and seen her whole life. I see an iconic (like it or not) exemplar of '70s filmmaking, she sees ugly earth tones everywhere (compared to "His Girl Friday," which she loved for the acting, characters *and* wardrobe). We made it about halfway, since it proved a paradoxical dead end: trying to explain its novel ideas was pointless, since those novel ideas are not only no longer novel, but they're downright quaint (if not outright clunky) compared to what we see and hear on TV etc. today. She's seen and liked "Dog Day Afternoon" and "12 Angry Men" (and seen and hated the slo-mo "Murder on the Orient Express"), so I think that might be it for her and Lumet.

the group is pretty interesting

I see William Holden and Faye Dunaway, she sees mostly old men she can barely tell apart.

kinda harsh on Faye Dunaway!

Ha, yeah. I guess I mean she didn't even recognize her movie star qualities, she was struggling so hard to tell apart the old white men. I mean, she's seen "Chinatown" and still couldn't place her! Which is a testament to Dunaway, in a sense, but also underscores the distractions built into the movie that my daughter had to deal with. Fwiw, she's seen and liked "Sunset Boulevard," too, but failed to make that connection as well, thus missing the impact of stately, old veteran William Holden in the put out to pasture role. It would be like showing her "The Verdict" years after "The Hustler" or something and expecting old Paul Newman to resonate as more than old white man.

I don't remember thinking super highly of Network when I watched it the first time as a 14-year-old either.

But it is hysterical to imagine someone my age now showing it to a 14-year-old today and defending it as a "those were the good old days of things-getting-worse" proposition.

I was 14 when it came out. I liked the high-pitched acting, jokes and profanity.

the "politics" of it probably worked for me as well, since i hadnt yet learned that Walter Cronkite was a bullshitter.

i've said it before but Lumet's a classic non-auteurish workman of often enjoyable movies, i can't imagine Network blowing any kid's mind

he made the best possible film out of Chayefsky's screed in this instance.

sure, i love a bunch of his films, i never think of him as top tier tho

As Welles said, "You only need one." And he has, at least, Long Day's Journey into Night and Dog Day Afternoon.

I can't conceive of any age in which i don't recognize Network as garbage.

xp good point Morbs

I saw Network for the first time pretty late (a year after Trump elected) and yeah, not only is it overwrought, it is quaint. Very funny that your daughter wasn't impressed, Josh. It makes sense.

Lumet has like 5 classics... Fail Safe, 12 Angry Men, DDA, The Pawnbroker, even Network is still enjoyable.

Chayefsky's dialogue wouldn't work in any age, though. "Why is it that a woman's first instinct when she wants to hurt a man is to impugn his cocksmanship?" -Oscar winning screenplay

Damn right it is.

https://media1.tenor.com/images/80a1533cd59f394429938ffa9bb83417/tenor.gif?itemid=5486328

The most hyperliterate, loquacious newsmen I've ever met.

Really, what grates most about Network is its cynicism, which is, of course, another version of and indistinguishable from sentimentality. Even Laureen Hobbs is in on the take! Her KFC-eating leaders said so.

i'm a sucker for sentimentality but you're right Alfred, cynicism is it's arch-shadow and i can usually leave that

i remember really enjoying Q&A tho thinking at the time it was a lesser version of Internal Affairs

i'm sure i read at least 3 profiles of Respected People in the News Business between 1980 and 2000 which included some variant of the quote "Have you watched Network lately? It's all happened."

the eighties version of "it's just like a scene from 'The Thick of It'"

well, TV news has always been 99% shit, except in Paddy's golden memories

sorry everyone but network is still a brilliant film, not flawless by any means, but still brilliant.

I guess Network is also an early example of Boomer-loathing, not in the prior sense of despising them for being bratty kids/hippies but from the perspective of seeing them as adversaries in the workplace

It loathes Boomer women, and black Boomer women especially.

As far as I remember there's just one black woman character, yes, she's easily the worst-drawn character in the film, but in no way the most unlikable, and her scenes could (and probably should) be cut with no real impact on the film as a whole.

she's easily the worst-drawn character in the film

Wellll...

but in no way the most unlikable

OK, agreed.

I think the only thing in Network that hasn't become trite and/or sentimental is the phenomenon of Beale's catchphrase becoming popular just because it's fun to scream out windows and like, knock over a trashcan. Just the total impenetrability of any kind of real message. Once they get into newsroom & media politics, it's just a joke, self-congratulatory and trite. "The media and politicians lie and corporations run the world." Whoa, stop the presses. I mean that last Ned Beatty speech... talk about bathos! Great performances though and Lumet directs brilliantly.

I didn't make it to the end this viewing, but iirc the Unspooled podcast noted that at the beginning the board meeting is all old white men, but supposedly there's a fleeting second shot of the board at the end and it now features more women and even a couple of black characters, so I think Lumet et al. were aware and maybe (for once) subtle to a fault.

The Ebert (original) review homes in on how the movie loses the focus of its satire of the news/TV and starts to take scattershot aim at all sorts of stuff:

If the whole movie had stayed with this theme, we might have had a very bitter little classic here. As it is, we have a supremely well-acted, intelligent film that tries for too much, that attacks not only television but also most of the other ills of the 1970s. We are asked to laugh at, be moved by, or get angry about such a long list of subjects: Sexism and ageism and revolutionary ripoffs and upper-middle-class anomie and capitalist exploitation and Neilsen ratings and psychics and that perennial standby, the failure to communicate. Paddy Chayefsky's script isn't a bad one, but he finally loses control of it. There's just too much he wanted to say. By the movie's end, the anchorman is obviously totally insane and is being exploited by blindly ambitious programmers on the one hand and corrupt businessmen on the other, and the scale of evil is so vast we've lost track of the human values.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/network-1976

Still a 4-star review, as is the 2000 reassessment.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-network-1976

Both are worth a (re)read.

BTW, I think Beatrice Straight still holds the record for least amount of screen time in an Academy Award winning performance. 5 minutes, 40 seconds.

If you see earlier Chayefsky-written films, particularly The Hospital, his race/gender peeves are consistent. I think Lumet was obviously more liberal, enough to make 3 (or 4?) police corruption movies where the rot can be traced to his own generation of Jewish, Italian, and Irish peers.

xp yes, though amazingly enough not the shortest nominated performance, which is hard to fathom

Judi Dench should pop up as Queen Victoria again in something to break the record