REISSUES & REMAKES: THE GRADUATE MEETS THE BEGUILED

As movie posters go, the one for The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman's Benji staring in stunned bewilderment at Anne Bancroft's outstretched black-stockinged leg, Mrs. Robinson's temptation, is one of the best. Simple, effective, even haunting, it encapsulates the thrust of the film and reveals much about both characters.

Even if it leg, as it turned out, really belonged to Linda Gray, who confessed just a few years ago that she'd been called in to pose for the photo and been paid $25.

So imagine my surprise as I walked past our local hall and I saw a poster for The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman standing in a sort of mini-jungle with a big cat behind his shoulder. I had to cross the street to look close up: the Hoffman looks like an artist's rendering of a botoxed version of young Dustin. But I was still trying to figure out the cat until it came to me: Cougar!

Forget a female Dr. Who. The Graduate has now become a movie to be sold as a tale of a boy and his cougar. Plastics? The marketing guys wouldn't get it. It's got all the subtlety of that TV show with Courtney Cox. 'That's good!' they'd say. 'Friends sells!'

I was probably not in the best frame of mind to receive such a re-booting of a classic film, since a couple of days ago I listened to a powerfully anodyne discussion of Sofia Coppola's remake of Don Siegel's offbeat classic The Beguiled. It was one of those discussions framed by Coppola's best director prize at Cannes, and the residue of Siegel and star Clint Eastwood's heavily masculine approach to the film, yet the panel were incapable of suggesting any real virtue in the film, though they clearly wanted to. It looked very pretty, the dresses were far too nice for the situation (girls' school, Civil War, hard times) and the only black character, the maid Hattie, had been written out of the story, so all the cooking and cleaning and ironing happened as if by magic, as it would if you were Sofia Coppola or you were making another movie set in Versailles. So none of the Saturday Reviewers actually liked the film, but they were too polite in this cae to say so. Only Tom Sutcliffe, the host, appeared to have seen the original, and he was being very cautious about endorsing Clintonian misogyny.

Then I read the Sight & Sound review, which tried to pretend the remake was based not on the original film, but a 'new take' of Thomas Cullinan's novel. That would make more sense were not the screenplay of the Siegel film, by Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp (writing as John B Sherry and Grimes Grice) credited. You can fool Sight & Sound but you can't fool the Writers' Guild. The reviewer ended by praising the wonderful bits of ambiguity Coppola had inserted. Like the amputation of McBurney's leg. Were they punishing him or saving his life? Oh now there's one that never occurred to Siegel. Nor demanning him, symbolically. Sheesh. They just weren't sensitive enough to make a small masterpiece some big name could come along and remake.

ELI WALLACH: AN APPRECIATION

It's ironic that Eli Wallach's most obvious legacy is his role as Tuco, the Ugly part of Sergio Leone's The Good The Bad and The Ugly. But it's a legacy he embraced, playing with the title in his autobiography, and it also makes sense because Wallach, who thought of himself as a stage actor keeping busy and making money in movies, became the kind of character actor who can carry a film.

You can see the better part of his movie career reflected from his first two films, Baby Doll (1956) and The Lineup (1958). Baby Doll was adapted from a Tennessee Williams one-act play (Elia Kazan claimed he, not Williams, wrote most of the screenplay, but then, he would). Wallach was a favourite actor of Williams'; he'd madehis name on Broadway in The Rose Tattoo, did This Property Is Condemned with his wife Anne Jackson (they had one of the great marriages of American theatre) and Camino Real.

The way the story goes, in 1953 Wallach nailed the screen test for the role of Maggio in From Here To Eternity, but passed on the film to do Camino Real on stage. Of course the way the other story goes is that someone made someone an offer they couldn't refuse to cast Frank. He and Jackson also played, with Zero Mostel, in the 1961 Broadway production of Rhinocerus; he'd already done Ionesco's The Chairs and The Lesson in 1958. I think he's perfect for Theatre of the Absurd. He, Jackson, and Alan Arkin were in Mike Nichol's production of Murray Schisgal's Luv, and around the time he did Rhinoceros Wallach and Mostel appeared off-Broadway in a version of Ulysses directed by Burgess Meredith. It's a same he never appeared in any of the American Film Theatre productions; it would be wonderful to have a record of some of his theatre at his very peak.

In Baby Doll, Wallach plays Silva Vaccaro, who owns a cotton gin which his rival Karl Malden burns down, and he retaliates by seducing Malden's wife, Carroll Baker, who's still a virgin due to a promise Malden made her father, and who parades infantilized self around in what we now call baby doll nighties. This is Tennessee Williams at his best. It was the first of his great sleazy ethnic roles; he's ruthless, he's charming, and, as when he played Tuco, he can physically express something rat like in Vaccaro's character. In contrast, for Don Siegel's The Lineup, based on a popular TV show, he's Dancer, a psychopathic but stylish professional killer, rounding up heroin stashed in tourists' souvenirs. It's a slick procedural which Siegel turns thrilling as Wallach is eventually cornered.

These characteristics of charm, violence, ethnic grease and style came together in Calvera, the leader of the bandits who comes face to face with The Magnificent Seven defending a poor Mexican village. Of course Wallach was coming off playing a cowboy role in The Misfits. There's little doubt Leone had Calvera in mind when he cast Wallach as Tuco, though Leone himself always said it was Wallach's playing a bandit in How The West Was Won that convinced him. Leone liked to cast method (or method-style) actors against 'natural' actors to great effect: Volonte/Van Cleef/Wallach against Eastwood; Jason Robards opposite Charles Bronson; Rod Steiger and James Coburn. In Wallach, he certainly got more than he bargained for. Compare Wallach's Tuco with Gian Maria Volonte's Indio from For A Few Dollars More; Volonte is all inward chaos and explosive violence; Tuco is all outward chaos hiding almost as explosive, if slightly less sociopathic, violence.

Wallach made three other spaghetti westerns, the best of which is probably Ducio Tessari's Don't Turn The Other Cheek, set against a Mexican Reviolution, in which he plays alongside Franco Nero and Lynn Redgrave (!). The others are Corbucci's late (1975) 'comedy' The White, The Yellow And The Black and Ace High (1968) with Terrence Hill (playing a character called Cat Stevens!) and Bud Spenser. Leone wanted to reunite Wallach, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Van Cleef; they were going to be killed off at the start of Once Upon A Time In The West. Wallach and Van Cleef had agreed, but by then Clint was feuding with Leone over both creative and financial issues, and it didn't happen. Luckily, the two reconciled, leading to Clint's touching dedication of The Unforgiven 'to Sergio and Don (Siegel)', both directors who got the best out of Eli Wallach.

Eastwood would bring him back in one of his best later roles; he absolutely kills the part of a liquor store owner telling the cops about an old robbery; Larry Fishburne and Kevin Bacon just stand there and admire him.

I'd like to mention a few other hidden gems from Wallach's career: everyone mentions his role in Godfather III, but he also played Don Vittorio in the much-neglected Crazy Joe, one of the best of the spaghetti crime films. He played ABC television's corporate boss Leonard Goldenson, the capo di tutto capi when I worked there, in the TV movie Monday Night Mayhem, about the creation of Monday Night Football. There's a 1992 episode of Law & Order, Working Stiff, in which he's hugely touching as a bitter old union man. He had a nice cameo in The Ghost, as a conspiracy-believing recluse on Martha's Vineyard. Ewan MacGregor can only look on in awe.

There's an interesting little bit of trivia I came across when I thought I might write Wallach's obit: his daughter Roberta played opposite Paul Newman's daughter Nell Potts (and Joanne Woodward) in the film Newman directed of Paul Zindel's The Effects Of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. It was sort of a like one of those neighbourhood projects, but I remember seeing it when it was released, and liked it then, and wonder if the kids' performances would hold up now. Nell Potts now runs 'Newman's Own'.

As I said, I was hoping to write Eli Wallach's obit for one of the papers. But when you're that talented and you reach 98 years old, your obituary had better be ready to print. As it happened, I couldn't resist writing my appreciation anyway. What I admire most about him is the way he always seems to be enjoying what he is doing; like many of the greatest actors, he doesn't seem to be taking it seriously, even though he is.

STUART KAMINSKY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Stuart Kaminsky, whose Toby Peters series was one of crime fiction's great entertainments, and whose biographies of Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel were among the really excellent works of early popular film criticism, was published in the Guardian today (you can link to it here). The paper corrected an error that had crept into the print edition and the first version posted online: in my original copy I had written he was a conscientious objector who served as a medic (which I had seen in an appreciation by Sara Paretsky) but his daughter Tasha, whom I reached to check facts, corrected me, and I corrected the copy, but somehow the original snuck back in. In fact, as Tasha told me, he would have preferred virtually any job except being a medic, and sadly, had that been the case, he would likely not have contacted hepatitis.

The Toby Peters books, inspired by Andrew Bergman, were a treasure trove of Hollywood lore and 1940s nostalgia. Kaminsky and Max Allan Collins had discussed bringing Peters together with Max's historical detective Nathan Heller, but sadly, that never happened. Peters' stock company could sometimes become a little farcical, but little things rang true: his feud with his older brother the cop, who resents that Toby has changed the family name of Pevsner, and his beat-up Crosley car; my parents moved into their house when I was two and their Crosley was still fully functioning (although almost impossbile to find parts for) when my mother finally moved out some 50 years later. Lots of people prefer Kaminsky's other series, which have their own virtues, but I like to think that, like black and white movies from that era of great film, the Peters books will always have their place.

CLINT EASTWOOD POLISHES HIS GRAN TORINO

I've wondered for a long time what Clint Eastwood might do as a valedictory film (in fact, in my 2001 Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood I guessed an adaptation of Fenimore Cooper's Prairie might be appropriate) and while Gran Torino may well not be his final film, it feels in some ways as if it ought to be. Clint has often been compared to John Wayne, and though one can take that comparison only so far, Gran Torino begins as if it intends to be Clint's True Grit, but winds up coming closer to being his version of The Shootist.

The film begins with a funeral. Clint's Walt Kowalski is a retired Detroit factory worker whose wife has died, and at the funeral we discover there is vast distance between him and his sons, and even more with their families (one of his grandchildren is played, almost literally, as a modern Veruca Salt). He wants nothing from the parish priest who comforted his wife, and the neighbourhood itself has, like his children, abandoned him; his neighbours are Laotian Hmongs, and Latino, black, and Asian gangs cruise the streets and intimidate anyone who gets in their way. Clint's Kowalski begins the film by literally growling, rather than speaking, to those who offend him. His neighbours, whom he calls gooks or slopes, remind him of his service in Korea, and he's quick to pull out a gun when he catches their young son,  trying to steal Walt's prized cherry 1972 Gran Torino, which a gang has intimidated him into doing. It's a world well delineated by the dark camera work of Eastwood regular Tom Stern, and even the sunshine takes on a flatness which suggests time past, or lost, certainly not the glimmering sunshine of, say, LA.

Most of the rest of the film details the gradual mellowing of Walt, brought about by his growing respect for his neighbours, and the intelligence of their sassy daughter, Sue, who's well-played by Ahney Her. He then takes on the initiation of the neighbour boy, Thao, into the lost rituals of American manhood, and the story becomes one of Walt's realisation that the immigrant Lors next door have far more of the traditional American values he cherishes than his own family. There's sometimes a marked lack of subtlety in Clint's approach, usually when he's working it for comic relief: the sequences of mutual ethnic insulting with his Italian barber are pretty cringe-worthy, although they do pay off when Bee Vang stops underplaying Thao, and speaks the language of the construction foreman with whom Walt's trying to get him a job. Clint also allows himself a moment of flashback, a specific reference to Dirty Harry (if not Charles Bronson in Death Wish), when he encounters a couple of black kids bullying Sue and a white male friend. That the white kid is a pretend gangsta again provides the comic relief, but the idea of the 70-something Walt backing down the toughs, gun or no gun, seems a bit forced.

What isn't forced is the film's ending, which spoiler warning prevents my discussing, but which works emotionally and structurally, and which doesn't involve the Gran Torino, which I'd been waiting for, and which I was glad Clint avoided. It's odd to think that in the major BBC interview around this film, uber-critic Mark Lawson somehow decided this film was set in Los Angeles, thus missing the titular metaphor: the Gran Torino was one of those big muscle cars which Detroit turned out in the era when Clint was becoming a star: now they are relics, just as Walt Kowalski is, and Clint himself is, big tough products of a world which accepted toughness, appreciated values of loyalty to family,tribe, and products manufactured in the country, and most of all didn't go all politically correct. Neither the Gran Torino nor Walt (and by implication, the image of Clint) have no real place in today's world, just as the city that produced them has lost its place, and the men who worked in that city's factories making things have fled to the suburbs while their jobs have fled to the very parts of the world that spawn the immigrants in this film.

But the film's ending is not concerned with those bigger issues. Instead, as I suggested, it is Clint's Shootist moment, and carries the same sort of emotional impact; if you think back to that film, and the difference between Wayne's performance in it and the Duke's Oscar for True Grit you'll also recall The Shootist was directed by Don Siegel, one of Clint's two directing mentors. Siegel would have been proud of this film.

directed by Clint Eastwood, screenplay by Nick Schenk, story by Schenk and David Johannson