I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #137 - The Missouri Breaks (1976, dir. Arthur Penn)

Think about the extraordinary turn Marlon Brando’s career was taking in the 1970’s.  After stalling a bit in the late 60’s he came roaring back in 1972 - jowly, greying at the temple and more potent than ever in The Godfather and Last Tango In Paris. Two braver explorations of middle age could not be imagined, then… silence, until 1976 when he returned – greyer still, jowlier yet, but no less intense and seeming to have tapped into some sort of cosmic awareness that made him a real-life cross between con-man, genius, artist, shaman and fool. It was also impossible to take your eyes off of him in what could be considered his last great role of substance in The Missouri Breaks (I love Apocalypse Now, but it is hard to call what Brando did in it as “substantive.” Memorable yes, substantive maybe less so.).  Director Arthur Penn created a stylish western in the classic mode, which is elevated to something truly memorable by Marlon Brando’s inexplicable performance. From the moment he appears on screen as Robert E. Lee Clayton he is magnetic - both compelling and terrifying at the same time. He is a regulator (a legal assassin) who has been brought from Wyoming to Montana to help rancher David Braxton (John McLiam) and his attractive daughter Jane (Kathleen Lloyd) deal with a band of horse rustlers (Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid and more) who have been causing trouble. Brando enters the action as an exotic swashbuckler; fringed leather jacket, long hair and an Irish accent. He immediately shows himself as a man not to be trifled with, appraising Nicholson as the thief and beginning to exact punishment on the gang. His speed and deadly accuracy prove his reputation as an uncontrollable, but ultimately successful executioner.

With the central conflict established, Penn goes about turning the movie into a philosophical treatise on the difference between being a thief and a killer, and if either of those is morally worse than being a bad person on the right side of the law. David Braxton, it turns out, is a world-class creep who deserves whatever he gets, while Nicholson seems to be a more three-dimensional man than his designation as horse rustler might indicate. He yearns for the honest life - or at least the love of a woman who has lived the honest life - available in the person of Braxton’s daughter. Brando’s character Clayton appears more and more like a scorched earth psychopath, hell-bent on destroying his prey as violently as possible, letting no one - including those who hired him - stand in the way. His inhumanity grows with each scene as Nicholson becomes an increasingly sympathetic protagonist. As Clayton’s killings take on greater cruelty with each victim, Clayton’s personality takes on more complexity. He begins shifting accents from Irish to Southern, to female (complete with unforgettable drag costume) and back to Irish. His performance is always on the edge of hallucinatory, the cutting edge of menace and hilarity. In spite of it being one of his least famous movies, I believe The Missouri Breaks contains one of Brando’s most beguiling performances. By the end of the movie, he is a truly frightening presence - unpredictable, deadly and unstoppable - beyond the control of laws or bullets. The shocking twist at the end remains a great cinematic trick, never failing to surprise.

In the 34 years that have passed since I last saw this movie, I had forgotten almost everything about it. So the panoramic cinematography, realistic take on the Old West setting, excellent music and funny dialogue were all a welcome re-acquaintance. It is Marlon Brando’s terrifying depiction which I had not forgotten, and it was, in fact, even more potent than I remembered. He has had one of the most terminally appraised careers in the history of film, yet his depiction of Robert E. Lee Clayton does much to justify his genius reputation.

-         Paul Epstein

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #128 - Alice’s Restaurant (1969, dir. Arthur Penn)

Ostensibly a light-hearted adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s folk-rock, FM classic song, starring Guthrie himself, nothing could be further from the truth about this historically accurate, heavy-hearted farewell to 60’s idealism that it actually turns out to be. Hot on the heels of his blockbuster Bonnie and Clyde, director Arthur Penn creates a heartfelt but ultimately melancholy look at the youth culture of the era. The story mixes the actual events of Arlo Guthrie’s life (such as the protracted death of his father Woody from Huntington’s Chorea) and his life as a struggling singer/songwriter trying to forge his own identity as an artist with events of his song “Alice’s Restaurant,” and Penn’s own screenplay to create a kaleidoscopic view of the late-60’s malaise settling in as the realization that “selling out” and “growing up” were essentially the same thing.

Arlo Guthrie himself is entirely charming as he recreates what are undoubtedly many of his own experiences coming of age with a very hip and famous last name in the 1960’s. We follow as he tries out college in Montana, gets kicked out for smoking pot and being a long-hair, and then drifts back to the East Coast, where he lands at the commune-like home of Ray Brock and his wife Alice (she of the restaurant). Ray and Alice are older than the large group of hippies who call Ray’s converted church home. They have cultivated a party-time, familial vibe, where not only are the kids sheltered and fed, but there is an unspoken understanding that their emotional needs will also be met. This kind of works out until, like in all utopian communities, the human frailties of the people at the top start to poison the well. Once Arlo gets back to the Connecticut commune, the movie takes on a far darker tone. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not. Like so many the best relics of the 60’s, I find them unbearably poignant because of the unwitting sadness they portray. The folly of my own youth and some of the less flattering aspects of the 1960’s subculture are meant to be seen as sympathetic or even heroic, yet it is their juxtaposition with the sad realities of the world as it actually exists today that give the movie its greatest resonance to a modern audience. All the ills of society exist in Ray and Alice’s world, it’s just that there are no parents telling you what to do. Ray and Alice nurture and care for the kids, but then things get a little weird when they sleep with some of them, and look the other way while another lapses into mental illness and addiction. During all this, Arlo goes back and forth to a hospital in New Jersey where his father, Woody Guthrie (played by Joseph Boley) lays mute in painful deterioration. We get a good sense of Guthrie’s love for, and confusion about his father. Between these two worlds, Arlo is seeing the disintegration of his biological family and his adopted group of peers. The film reaches its denouement as Arlo rushes to his father’s bedside only to miss his death by minutes, at the same time that his friend is being buried after over-dosing. Director Penn handles this beautifully and sets a bleak tone that sees the film through to its conclusion.

During the last third of the movie the majority of the events in Arlo’s famous song take place. These scenes, involving a small-town cop busting Arlo for littering on Thanksgiving Day and his subsequent adventures in jail and at the New York City Draft Board, are light hearted and probably account for the movie’s initial popularity, and its lasting status as a cult film. However, considering the last movement of the film, they seem almost irrelevant. The Brocks decide to renew their wedding vows in an attempt to bring themselves, and their adoptive family back together. The wedding ceremony starts as a glorious day filled with music, food, partying and dancing, but things start to turn sadly sinister as Ray’s drunken behavior becomes increasingly outlandish and hurtful to Alice. As the embarrassed kids start to drift away, Ray embarks on a futile speech intended to inspire his following. He panders to their utopian instincts, but it is too late…the dream is over, as Lennon would proclaim around the same time.

Alice’s Restaurant ends with a profoundly sad Alice Brock, standing alone next to her home, now literally and figuratively devoid of life and happiness. There couldn’t be a more effective metaphor for the end of the dream that was the 1960’s. While this movie may not succeed at the somewhat modest and unambitious goal of bringing Guthrie’s cartoonish song to life, it succeeds like no other film at bringing down the curtain on a tremendously important, but equally confusing decade in American history.

-          Paul Epstein

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #99 - Night Moves (1975, dir. Arthur Penn)

The 1970’s and the New Hollywood movement produced a lot of fascinating work rooted in the turmoil of the times. The changing milieu of mainstream cinema allowed for films that reflected the distrust, paranoia and cynicism – and also the good humor and thumbing noses at authority – of the younger generation(s) of the time. It was director Arthur Penn’s own Bonnie and Clyde (1967) that is often cited as being a landmark film that ushered in the movement. Hated by the old school film critics and the studio heads that financed it (including, but not limited to, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, who released the film), it was shuffled on to B-movie billings and drive-ins at first, but it spoke loud and clear to a younger generation with its edgy editing style influenced by international art cinema, its ambiguous morality, and its far less chaste take on sexuality than recent blockbusters like The Sound of Music and it eventually earned millions for the studio and became a hit. After the film opened the doors for more financial successes like The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and MASH, Penn went on to make the counter-culture classics Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man before taking a break for several years.

He returned to feature filmmaking with this film, released in 1975 and considered a failure on its first release. Where Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man had been fairly major hits and Alice’s Restaurant had been a small-scale success, and even in a year where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon were hits, Jaws reclaimed for Hollywood the blockbuster style of filmmaking they were used to and set the path for filmmaking that persists to this day. There was very little room then for a small downer of a film like Night Moves that did not go for a major statement (as did Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day) but instead mined a darkly resigned personal drama, even if it hearkens back to another era and genre of Hollywood films – the films noir of the 1940’s. Where film noir mined the repressed sexuality of the day with grim crime films and sparkling dialogue, the more open 1970’s allowed for an up front examination of many of the same topics – here again sexuality and debauchery are linked to the failures of our lead man, the no-bullshit-taking Harry Moseby (played brilliantly by Gene Hackman), a former football player turned low-rent private eye specializing in divorce work. He’s having marital problems of his own and is hardly happy with his work as he’s belittled by his wife and others for having retreated from his former glory and not doing something more reputable. It’s a very human version of the P.I. story, not the distanced cool associated with a Bogart-styled character. But Harry’s got integrity, something decidedly lacking in everyone else around him, from his friend who buys Central American antiques on the cheap to turn a huge profit, to his cheating spouse, to the washed-up former actress who hires him to find her missing daughter but is more concerned with looking glamorous and laying Hackman than locating her missing daughter. And in true noir fashion as his investigation shifts from L.A. to Florida to find the missing girl, he uncovers a far bigger mystery, and as he gets closer to the truth all his leads start disappearing or turning up dead.

The film kicks off gloomy with his bad relationship before he’s ever even found the girl Delly (short for Delilah) or the first of several bodies that turn up, or even really begun his investigation. She’s played by a young Melanie Griffith, a wild kid in trouble (a year before Jodie Foster’s similarly street-wise and daring turn in Taxi Driver). Between his rocky relationship and the way the film’s shot – all dark tones when it’s night (as it often is in the film) and muted brightness in the daytime (even on the sunny shores of Florida) – and edited, much in the same unusual, off-kilter manner as Bonnie and Clyde, it sets an unsettling vibe from the get-go. And then there’s dialogue like this, as Harry watches a football game on TV at home, in the dark:

Ellen: “Who’s winning?”

Harry: “Nobody, one side’s just losing slower than the other.”

Or once he’s found Delly and is still trying to piece together the parts that don’t add up, there’s her simple, to the point statement: “I think people are shitty. But you’re OK.”

            Like many classic noir films (The Big Sleep comes to mind), the plot is dense and convoluted – there are so many connections, double crosses, and loaded dialogue that means more only later once you see the bigger picture that it requires multiple viewings to sort it all out. And the worldview is sour for sure – also in line with the grimness of much film noir. It’s easy to see how in the summer of Jaws, where the big bad guy is defeated in explosive, exciting fashion, that this film – gloomy, insecure, inconclusive – wouldn’t have been a hit, or even a moderate success. And the other films produced out of the counter-culture of the day provided exhilarating revolutions, even if they failed. This one shows the vice grip of corruption and debased behavior on its characters and doesn’t let fly with glib statements to reassure anybody. But it’s a classic, a worthy heir to masterpiece of The Big Sleep from the writing to the stellar performances across the board, to the superb filmmaking that updates and touches back to the classic noirs without overtly mimicking them. It’s a gem in Arthur Penn’s catalog, rivaled (for me) only by Bonnie and Clyde. And some days this one feels truer than even that film.

            - Patrick Brown