Watching the detectives (1971-1981)

Klute (1971)

The Long Goodbye (1973)

The Conversation (1974)

Chinatown (1974)

Night Moves (1975)

Cutter's Way (1981)

A film season (on the DVD player, not at an art-house cinema), some of my favourite films fit together really rather well. All produced over a decade in which American film, having asserted an artistic, challenging sensibility since the late 1960s with some daring, uncategorisable, personal films from awkward cinephiles picking up the new wave attitudes of European filmmakers, has one last hurrah before being swallowed up by the new-New Hollywood choppers of Jaws and Star Wars. Directed by creative young(ish) directors who emerged in the 1960s (Altman, Coppolla, Penn) and ex-pat Europeans(Polanski, Passer), these are American genre movies - detective thrillers. They all hark back to film noir and earlier detective fiction (one is period set, the others contemporary). Most of the components of those earlier fictions are intact in these films, but in tone they are definitely products of their own time rather than pastiche.

So Noir, and yet so far

Film noir is characterised by a shadow obssessed visual style and a tone of threat and suspicion. Characters find themselves trapped in an uncaring world. Though a sense of hopelessness and doom is common to noir, generally the classical noir and detective films ultimately reward the virtuous and punish the evil, studio movies of the 1940s and 1950s obliged by Hollywood's production code to adhere to upstanding moralistic conventions, even if such outcomes can appear rather arbitrary and out of keeping with the general mood of the films. The 1970s noirish iterations, freed from a moralising production code, allow the bleakness to bleed through to the bitter end. Endings that follow the internal narrative logic of these films can end full of doubt, with no sense of resolution with threads ragged, suspended.

Urban paranoia, breakdown of authority and official responsibility, moral failure of institutions: corrupt power structures, callous capitalism - all the fun things! that run through noir are in the 1970s emphasised with renewed lack of faith in the correctability of tricky situations. In the later films justice isn’t served, not even natural justice: everyone ends up a loser.

David Thomson's Suspects is a book that connects characters from the classic film noir period with the later noiresque thrillers, a network of family and acquaintance, business dealings and changes of identity that intriguingly centre around one George Bailey of Bedford Falls. Harry Moseby (Night Moves), Mo Cutter (Cutter's Way) and Travis Bickle are revealed as long-lost Baileys. Thomson creates a continuity across these films (through a meta-fictional web) spanning 50 years of American cinema, and it is notable how the later films though bleaker and artier, more given to the actuality of psychological collapse, irresolution and ambiguity, an inability to put the pieces together again, do not actually transgress the fundamental rules of the genre.

The drive in detective fiction is to find out. The desire to know, and in darker works the disavowal of that which you ultimately find out. The classical mode: finding out means solving a crime, bringing the perpetrators to justice. The later mode: finding out comes too late to save the day and involves discovery of something you didn't want to know. Klute perhaps allows a more classical resolution, but its unsettling tone leaves more doubt than satisfaction at the end - do Klute and Bree really have a chance together? Self-knowledge and its corrolary, despair mark out these later films.

Chinatown's earlier setting plays out the loss of innocence, the seeds of America's moral decline. More traditional detective films made in this period Farewell, My Lovely (Chandler revisted again), and The Drowning Pool have their existential angst cranked up too.

I'm no historian but parallels with the USA's sense of itself post World War (directly into the Cold War), and the 1960s damage to the American psyche, must be influential in the tone of Hollywood's darker output of these periods. There was a bruised romantic world-weariness to noir, America edgy rather than triumphal after World Wars. It's a different dis-United State of America in the 1970s, its confidence in itself shot, ragged and tired, riven with self-doubt and division. Internally, assassinations, polarised over civil rights, political intrigue and corruption, vulnerable to oil import crises and rising unemployment; externally, the dispiriting generational drag of conflict in South East Asia, the continuing Cold War, wounded, waning in power and reputation, in Empire shock, overseen by a distrustful, paranoid president heading towards impeachment. The situations and characters of these films take their lead from the social mood. Cynicism, bitterness and indifference are the prevailing and appropriate responses to this atmosphere.

In addition to the stock plot components: the false friend, the red herring, the ulterior motive, the femme fatale, the wisecracking hero, there is the dialogue. Earlier noir was in love with its hard-boiled repartee. In the later films, this ping-pong talk comes off as elliptical and abstract, as if the characters know that words are meaningless, their hearts aren't in it, it's a reflex. It seems in these films, communication is murkier, connections are missed, coming together is impossible. In the case of The Long Goodbye, Chandler's trademark tough-guy act gets subverted and celebrated at the same time through Gould's mumbly riffing whether in the police interrogation room or the cat-food aisle of the 7-11.

In style there is a new wave influence to the films - jumpcuts, no establishing shots, naturalistic lighting, diegetic soundtracks, and in another break from classical noir, shot in colour. Not only colour, but much of the action of these later films occurs in the open air and Californian or Floridian sunshine, as if to say bad things don't just happen in the dark, it's all around you and being out in the open is no hiding place (and that there's plenty of fog and shadow on the inside). The use of telephoto lenses and other non-standard lenses adds to the disconnect, disorientation and discontinuity (lots of disses). For the viewer this means difficulty in placing the leads in a confused picture, a sensation shared by the characters who seem like they can't get a grip on where they are in relation to the space they're in and other people. The opposite effect to the convention of classic Hollywood eye-level medium-close two-shots. These shots also emphasise the sense of observing and being observed, but with the difficulty of contextualising what you're seeing. Early noir used shadow and camera angle to achieve an effect of pitting the characters against dark destiny, so it is an interesting comparison to see how the development of a surveillance-culture has given later filmmakers a tool to represent disorientation. The Conversation, Klute, Night Moves all heavily feature recordings, audio and video, answerphone messages, voices from the grave.

A feature of these films is how the female characters are subtler than their archetypes, the femme fatale predecessors from film noir are powerful but here they tend to be well drawn complex people from a recognisable world with all too recognisable emotional baggage, life-toughened, vulnerable, operating through depression and half-masked desperation - Evelyn Mulwray-Cross in Chinatown, Mo Cutter, Bree Daniels, Paula in Night Moves. In Cutter’s Way, Mo (Lisa Eichorn) is alcoholic, lost, bruised, numbed. Bree in Klute, genuinely menaced, but tough-fragile, an actress; is brittle victim a role, is self-destructive survivor?

Eye Eye

The detectives here are anachronisms in an increasingly amoral indifferent world. The knight errant of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade is a constant reference for these detectives, and however much they try and follow the same principles, they can't live up to it, situations unravel, their grip on the situation is useless, intangible, the big picture eludes them. They are liable to distraction or the old trope of deception - duped by a femme fatale. In darkest noir the leads are trapped by the human condition. In the 1970s films too even their effectiveness in decoding the plot has deteriorated: lost and alone, their confidence is shot, instincts distrusted and unfounded.

The physical beatings taken by Marlowe are translated into damage with a psychological edge - Gitte's slit nose, the pre-dated trauma and emptiness in Cutter and Bone, and Moseby's closedness in Night Moves. In post-Kennedy America, wounded by Vietnam, the detectives seem withdrawn, almost in a daze, (the big picture eluding them is not new) tranced out by the gloomsteep in the human condition, often less a man of action as a man of inertia. Though a variety of types played by the pantheon of 1970s male leads - Gould, hip (stoned?), Sutherland withdrawn, Hackman two degrees of slippery-abrasive, - they are all forced to face up to their own naivety and half-hidden idealism, the broadly ethical, well-intentioned behaviour of the detectives at the mercy of the unethical toxic monoliths.

The role of the private eye is to observe and work things out, but here they can't see it, they look, can't work things out til it's too late, heroic interventions are mistimed, badly handled. Moseby in Night Moves plays an old chess game over and over where the beautiful endgame he admires wasn't seen at the time, the player left to worry at it after the event ("He didn't see it. He played something else, and he lost."). The un-detectives are left holding a shot woman, bleeding in a boat circling, just circling, left blowing a sax in a torn up apartment, or impotently pointing a gun at someone who has already defeated you and laid waste to your principles - why pull the trigger? why not pull the trigger? These detectives are not destined to come back for more, to pull another adventure from their casebooks; these films are the cases that knock the stuffing out of them, shatter them, tip them into breakdown or retreat. There is no triumph, just despair. Bleak. Nicholson's depressed character in The Passenger another (artier and challenging) version of this, sleepwalking into a change of identity and a gun-running plot; loss of self and loss of narrative grip.

Nixonland

Paranoia became part of the mainstream of American politics in the 1960s, suspicion of government becoming the default position of left and right - the acceptance that governments, presidents and corporations lie to the consumer/citizen. Secrecy, disillusionment (the Watergate scandal broke in 1972), abuse of power, the country polarised and disunited. The sinking feeling captured in these films made under the presidencies of Nixon, Ford and the failed promised of Carter - the Iranian hostage crisis seen as another marker in US power-failure. The overtly politically paranoid thriller of conspiracy spins out of a similar reaction to the corrupted role of the US – Pakula, following Klute, picks up the political paranoid vibe further with The Parallax View, All the President’s Men. Along with The Manchurian Candidate, (earlier than the rest), Three Days of the Condor, and plenty since, these films though expand the narrative to big conspiracy theory territory, political assassination, global corporate power games. The detective films are low-key, personal, infused with a sadness and sense of loss (American Paradise lost?) , believable people let down by the world, overmatched and unprepared by the situation, but not at the centre of a vast malevolent network of global control. They are more resonant films it seems to me, because of this sense of scale, proportionality. Intimate and concentrated in their paranoia they are not so easy to dismiss as dystopian fantasy. The same reason that Edge of Darkness (the original BBC series 1985) works so well: its changes of pace, its soundtrack, casting and characterisation, wilful transgressions too – Craven’s conversations with his dead daughter, the tangible grief in sniffing and kissing her vibrator - are natural and intimately observed. The wider plot of crime, secrecy and protection afforded to corporations and their nuclear energy and defence contracts, fits around the central character’s need to discover more about his daughter.

Seen as slices of life in this unbrave new world, they highlight the bigger picture, erosion of trust in government and justice, the sense of subjugation to corporations, at the mercy of inexorable capitalism that is above country, government, the law. There is no one man against all odds make or break moment, everyone and everything is already broken, whether they realise it yet or not. Noah Cross is too rich and entrenched to be subject to the law, but his control of state-wide water resources is wrapped up in his incestuous control of his daughter, granddaughter and daughter-granddaughter to the point where he’s essentially blithe to anyone’s efforts to try and save anyone or change anything for the better. J.J. Cord in Cutter's Way is another manifestation of this, imperturbable control over Santa Barbara, able to dismiss law or retribution with more (or less) than disdain. What may be smuggling plots, or insurance frauds, or grubby sex crimes, that spiral out of missing person investigations, pit the detective against richer more powerful people, but the sense of right and wrong spirals out too: something’s wrong, everything’s wrong, I’m wrong, the world is wrong.

Unaccountable, unsolvable; what's a clue and what's 'just' another grisly reminder of humanity's jarring disconnect? Everything is perhaps a clue to the crime of being human on this planet (original sin?) - the only solution: shut your eyes, close your ears and walk away ("It's Chinatown, Jake"). And don't hold out hope that cinema will save you either. Maybe the little beat up boat at the end of Night Moves, circling, is about to be swallowed by a blockbusting great white shark (or blown out of the water by the Death Star).

No Country for [young girls and] Old [fat, one-eyed] Men

The 2010 version of 'True Grit' from the Cohen brothers is a very different film to the original John Wayne vehicle, almost studies in how disparate adaptations of the same source material could be.

Adventure and colour rollick the Wayne picture along, the 2010 True Grit is a darker and deeper film. If it wasn't for the extreme violence in other westerns of the period (The Wild Bunch was also a 1969 release), the first True Grit might have been remembered as a violent film - it has some vivid scenes that exceed what was depicted in earlier classics - instead of its status as a regular family-fun Sunday afternoon TV-schedule filler. The Cohens' film won't be the weekend matinee destined for repeat showings, but it is a more complete, emotionally dense movie.

In the first version the viewer is encouraged to find the enduring star charisma of the Duke as the Rooster comical, he is gently poked fun at - well, he is kinda old and fat (though not actually much older in 1969 than Jeff Bridges is in 2010), and scenes of drunken clumsiness ring almost true - Wayne by all accounts also liked to pull a cork.

The larger-than-life Rooster Cogburn is one of the iconic roles of the western genre, alongside Shane, The Man with No Name, Ethan Edwards, Tom Dunson, Pike Bishop. (The semi-real roles - Earp, Holliday, Billy the Kid and so on - don't count in the same way, though based on fact, they're actually half-made up before an actor embodies them: skins waiting in the locker-room for the next tenant. This allows such roles to be inflated, deflated and eviscerated depending on the filmmaker's whim, rather than created from scratch with an actor's face imprinted on it). That characters played by Wayne recur in this list runs counter to the notion that Wayne was only ever singularly himself on screen. Wayne - not meaning to blind the reader with technicalities of screen acting - was of the 'not doing very much' school of emoting. A few signature moves: that walk, a twinkly expression that conveys dismay as a combatant in the battle of the sexes, a tougher look that puts younger liberal generations in their pinko place, and a narrowing of the eyes that means business. The rest is the grace of a big man swinging loose limbs and that shoutydrawl (or is it a drawlyshout). In a handful of roles, either when playing older, or in his true aged years, a humane, even sensitive side is glimpsed behind the over-simplified world-view and sentimental toughness. In his most celebrated roles, it is the combination of grimness and tenderness, with the connective tissue of tortured, that lifts Wayne from one-dimensional star to great movie actor. Wayne's Cogburn does not reach the peak (or more importantly the depth) of his Edwards or Dunson; it is in that second rank, though as blatant a vehicle for Oscar as an ageing genre actor could ever have been allowed. But still, The Duke abides.

Jeff Bridges' Ruben 'Rooster' Cogburn is a somewhat different cat to Wayne's. Bridges, regularly praised as a modern day Mitchum (another graceful big lad from the acting school of not doing very much), is a relaxed but commanding figure, as ever. Bridges' 'Rooster' has a Lebowskiesque introduction - gunslinging U.S. marshall as stoner - his natural terrain seemingly the hammock and out-house rather than the prairie. Bridges, lugubrious, bearded, weatherworn, a physical presence but not the bullyboy barrel girth of Wayne. Half of his lines are incomprehensible, the grit and sand attributed to his character sound like they are rattling round his epliglottis. He does of course get his words out for the rather marvellous battlecry, the most memorable line from both films: "Fill yer hands, Ned Pepper, you sonofabitch".

The 2010 True Grit is sombre, it stares death in the face. More than any echoes of a traditional film western it is more Cormac McCarthy inflected it seems to me. The Cohens having adapted one of McCarthy's more generic (but still brilliant) novels (No Country for Old Men), it is as if they are still steeped in that desolate world. Feeling the McCarthy influence on the Cohens in this movie, who knows if Charles Portis (whose 1962 novel 'True Grit' apparently combines the tough-hide, the biblical language, the black humour) was not an influence on his near contemporary the longer-lived McCarthy. The visualisation of this world, a desolate bleached landscape is beautifully captured by Roger Deakins' cinematography. Naturalistic soft-lit it evokes the American rural realism of Wyeth with the same enigmatic visionary quality; throughout the film Deakins' uses a desaturated palette: cool greys of daylight, tobacco and oil-lamp stained nighttimes. He also shot The Assasination of Jesse James which though somewhat strained and pompous, looks beautiful in similar ways.

The Cohens' signature style of camera movement is here - scenes where the camera moves like a character. Their trademark compositions too - a certain depth of field, a certain central placement of figures, a sense of staging, as if the figures are waiting for the viewers to adapt, to adjust their eyes as the curtain goes up.

A storyline that is sparse and linear, the Cohens show that you don't need 3 and a half hours to get that elegiac vibe (even though their pacing can suggest they're not into the whole brevity thing) that revisionist westerns (and the dreary self-importance of most of Costner's efforts in the genre) obsess over.

An epilogue and voiceover ensures that you see the film as Mattie's tale. A darker Twainish adventure laced with death seen through a child's eyes. Several moments are seen from Mattie's perspective, looking up at the grown-up world. Her point of view is used especially when observing adult attitudes - nostalgia, regret, violence. On the child's viewpoint, there is surely something too in the way that nightime, sleep and waking feature as regular signposts in the film. These moments recur over the 5 or 6 nights of the film's narrative bringing a story-ness to the ensuing scenes: chapters in a bedtime story, episodes in an extended yarn told around the campfire.

Kim Darby in the 1969 film is utterly usurped by the newcomer in the Mattie role, Hailee Steinfield pulling off the character as tough, precocious, practical and self-possessed, with a Tom Sawyer-like appetite for gaudy adventure, as opposed to just a cute girl playing young with the comic effect of oversized clothes and a big fringe. The way she takes her deceased Daddy's things for her mission has a texture and nuance in the new version; Henry Hathaway the director of the earlier film was not known as a director sensitive to either acting or mise en scene.

Damon is nicely effective as the Texas ranger, 'Le Beef' (leBoeuf), a witty performance in the Glenn Campbell part (who frankly was poor casting, a lightweight in the earlier film). Surely they just couldn't resist casting Barry Pepper as Ned Pepper (the Duvall role, curiously courteous but mean). The earlier film did have the wonderful benefit of the colourful supporting players of the period : Strother Martin, Dennis Hopper, members of Duvall's/Pepper's gang.

There is inevitably a sense of nostalgia in the remake. The Cohen Bros have trod this line before (think the hat fetishism of Millers Crossing). The iconography of a genre and 'period' detail, like the historical novel allows the author to re-animate old customary twitches of that genre with spasms of their own sensibility: a Frankenstein's monster of authenticity, appropriated archetypes. The animating electricity (good or bad) in revivals of genre is anachronism in some form, either through playing with tone, cliches, stock characters and narrative subversion. The Cohens' approach contains a certain attention to detail that reeks of a genuine respect or a nerdy fandom at least as much as it does an ironist's smirk; anachronistic mock-sincerity always a Cohen concern. This is not necessarily a post-modern attitude alone though. Twain's storytelling is loaded with the author's wry displacing of conventions, furry old eyebrows raised and sideways winks. The film follows a tradition of bloody sincerity and the austere half-mocking voices of Twain and McCarthy. Gallows humour is always ironic.

With their interpretation of True Grit the Cohens continue their own auteurist trail. Their filmic language is not Peckinpahs, Hawks', Ford's or Eastwood's. It doesn't try to re-do a Ford picture, or mimic Leone, or the great Peckinpahs or form a composite of them like a signature book of the genre's motifs. It is definitely a western, but just as definitely it is a Cohen picture. In tone, in addition to McCarthy and Twain, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is the western closest to it - particularly in its waking-dream-like encounters - an unnamed body hung inexplicably high in a dessicated wood; a starlit sky that hangs overhead like a painted ceiling.

There are hints too of Night of the Hunter. A homebound chase at night has a fairy tale quality that subtly releases the emotional build-up of connection within the film and the enduring symbolism of the western genre: horse, landscape, home and wilderness. This scene as un-typical as anything I can think of in a western, moved me in a similar way to the weepiest moment in film this westernhead knows: Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado in Slim's death scene in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, by the stream, Slim's half-built boat, Katy's big ol eyes, 'Knocking on heavens door' starting up. Dagnabbit, I think I've got something in my eye...