REMEMBERING TY HARDIN

While wandering around 1880 Town in Midland, South Dakota today, I came across a copy of the famous photo of the Warner Bros.' TV western stars drawing their pistols. What made this one special was that it was autographed by Ty Hardin, who at that point was playing Bronco Layne in a series that had originally been a replacement for Cheyenne, when WB had contract trouble with Clint Walker, and now was rotating through schedule spots with Cheyenne and Will Hutchins' Sugarfoot.

But it reminded me that Hardin died last week, and I wanted to write something then, so it's a good excuse to say a couple of things about him now. One thing I hadn't known was that he was a football player. His obits said he got a scholarship to Blinn Junior College, then attended Dallas Bible Institute before joining the Army. Then he enrolled at Texas A&M and, so the story goes, played for Bear Bryant there. It's hard to check, because he didn't graduate, but the stories I read said he played tight end, in the days before that was a position. He registers no stats as a receiver from 1954-56, when A&M had John David Crow, Bobby Joe Conrad, and Jack Pardee. I did find a picture of him in a football uniform, but I don't know who's it was and he looks younger than a post-Army Ty Hungerford.

What I did know a bit about was how fragile his career was. It resembles, in some ways, Clint Eastwood's early career, except that Hardin made a couple of bad decisions, whereas Clint made a couple of good ones. But they got into TV by luck, more or less. Both were hired originally because of their good looks, as beefcake. Clint was one of the last of Universal's apprentices, and he had been trying to get into acting. Hardin (or Orison Whipple Hungerford, Jr. as he then was named, though Ty was his family nickname) was spotted by a Paramount scout at a costume party (he was a cowboy) and was signed to a contract. He had bit parts in a couple of films, including Last Train To Gun Hill, billed as Ty Hungerford, when, like Clint, he got lucky and landed a TV gig.

Hardin met John Wayne, and  when he tried to get the Ricky Nelson part in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Wayne introduced him to Hawks, who was with William Orr of Warners. Hawks didn't give him the part, but Orr soon bought his contract. Warners changed his name to Hardin, gave him acting lessons, and introduced him into the Cheyenne series as Cheyenne's cousin. He was an instant hit, and Bronco ran for four years. His best film part was in Merrill's Marauders, and it looked like he was on his way. After Warners, he was getting 'exposure' roles in big films like Battle Of The Bulge and PT 109, where he had a blonde goatee, but not yet any serious starring parts.

Then Hardin made a couple of bad decisions. One was to pass on a western role offered by an Italian director, Sergio Leone. He wasn't the only actor to either pass or want too much money, and of course the part eventually went to Clint.  The next one was to pass on the TV show Batman, ironically because he had a comittment to film in Spain, on a  sort of spaghetti western, Hugo Fregonese's Argentinian Savage Pampas.

Hardin played the lead in Riptide, a series that was made in and set in Australia, but was shown in the US. He was in Custer Of The West, and in a weird British circus horror film, Beserk, with Joan Crawford. But his career stalled. He made three disposable spaghetti westerns in 1971, and then worked only intermittently, though he had a part in a TV movie remake of Red River, which starred James Arness and Bruce Boxleitner in the John Wayne and Montgomery Clift roles, but had parts for other old western TV stars like Hardin, Guy Madison, Robert Horton and John Lupton. Hardin was tall and good looking, but unlike Wayne or Eastwood, never really learned to control his image on screen.

Off screen was another story. His third wife was Marlene Schmidt, the East German-born Miss Universe of 1961. Ironically, she went into the film business after they divorced. In all Hardin had eight wives, and ten children. Which may help explain why he had problems with the IRS, which helps explain why he helped found the Arizona Patriots, which sounds like football team but was an anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party type group that evolved into a militia. In 1986 they were raided, and accused of planing to attack a federal office in Utah. Hardin wasn't charged with any crimes, but the group disbanded.

The photo above is not Hardin as a militia leader, but a fan show where he appeared alongside Clint Walker and Will Hutchins, and he was the only one not quite in costume. I find it tremendously nostalgic, especially now, viewing a Wild West town that only moderately appeals to my 13 year old.

Hardin died at 87. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which he was a successful film actor, or a busy TV star. But his other difference from Clint was lacking Clint's study of the business, and his nous for it. Clint's acting and directing careers are actually meshed into his producing career; he became virtually a studio himself; this would have been beyond Hardin. On the other hand, there aren't many people, not even Clint, whose obituaries will say 'he is survived by his eighth wife; his previous seven marriages all ended in divorce.'  And I found, while writing this, a reverse angle of that famous photo, an earlier unused take. Those were the days.

MICHAEL CIMINO: HEAVEN & HUNTERS, CHINATOWN & SICILY, THUNDERBOLT & LIGHTFOOT

Michael Cimino was eulogised in much the same way he was reviewed during his lifetime, with a double-barrelled critique aimed at both hubris and excess. Americans jumped to dismiss him as Europe's darling who received his just desserts. He was the man who brought down United Artists single-handed, who presided over the greatest financial flop ever, the movie whose failure also signaled the end of the 'movie brat' generation which revolutionised Hollywood in the Sixties and Seventies. He was the director who wasted his promise on Heaven's Gate after the huge success of the 'first' Vietnam movie, The Deer Hunter, the man who lived out a bizarre surgically-altered life in self-imposed exile in France for the twenty years since his last movie took in exactly $21,000 at the U.S. box office. Or about the cost of one day's lunch on Heaven's Gate.

Yet the shorthand conceals some deeper truths. Cimino had the misfortune of having his epitaph already  written, by Stephen Bach's Final Cut, an entertaining book about the profligacy involved in the making of Heaven's Gate, and Cimino played unerringly into the script Bach had written. But Final Cut is a story as much of the death of the studio system due to the abrogation of producing power and control as it is of one director's explosion of self-indulgent ego. Far from being an aberration, Heaven's Gate was part of a continuum in Hollywood; Eric von Stroheim's silent Greed writ large. It exists alongside films like Cleopatra, Ishtar, Gigli and Waterworld, except its expectations and its pretensions were greater than any of those. Especially Gigli. The finished product, when viewed in one of the two-hour 'restored' versions, is an almost-epic western, spoiled by its longeurs: most notably the roller-skating, derivative of John Ford's dancing scenes, but trapped in Cimino's, not the story's, needs. It owes much to Vilmos Zsigmund's cinematography, some of the greatest ever done on westerns. But if Heaven's Gate were part of a continuum of Hollywood Excess, it's also a part of revisionist cycle of westerns broadly about class struggle: Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid; Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller; Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West. All those films, however, foregrounded personal stories. In contrast, Cimino above all else seemed to be absorbing Bernardo Betrolucci's 1900; Heaven's Gate thus foregrounds the dialectic. This helps explain why European critics adored Heaven's Gate as much as most American critics hated it. That and his insistence on casting the wonderful Isabelle Huppert, for reasons one can easily guess at (and wonder about the United Artists executives who told Cimino 'she looks like a potato'.

In The Stunt Man, released two years after The Deer Hunter, Peter O'Toole plays Eli Cross, an ego-maniacal director making a World War I movie, whose anti-war 'statement' seems, to its writer, being drowned in farce. He tells his writer, played by Allen Goorwitz, “I know a man who made an anti-war movie, a good one. When it was shown in his home town, army enlistment went up six hundred percent.” Eli Cross might well be describing The Deer Hunter. It won Oscars, it made money, it was loved. Only after Heaven's Gate it received some re-assessment: Peter Biskind called Cimino our first fascist director, though Pauline Kael had already bestowed that title on Don Siegel after Dirty Harry. The Deer Hunter's most gripping scenes were those in Vietnam, the famous Russian roulette games organised by a sadistic enemy, in a strange inversion of the infamous 'Saigon Execution' photo. The Deer Hunter was one of three movies in 1978 which dealt more with the effects of Vietnam on America than with the war itself. It beat out Coming Home for the Oscars, while Who'll Stop The Rain (aka Dog Soldiers), probably the most acute of the bunch, fell by the wayside. Cimino's message seemed to be reassuring the faith Americans had in their own myths and dreams; combined with that Forties' war movie sense of racial propaganda in making the Viet Cong sadistic gamblers, The Deer Hunter lent itself to criticism from the left. In that sense, Heaven's Gate might be seen to be exploding the critiques of what Cimino would always insist was his anti-war vision.

At the time though, it seemed like the kind of movie someone who allegedly pretended to be a Vietnam vet might make. It was soon contrasted with Oliver Stone, a real Vietnam grunt, and his Platoon. Ironically, Stone and Cimino found their careers intertwined: Cimino had passed on directing Stone's script of Midnight Express; later he wanted to direct Born On The Fourth of July, with Al Pacino in the lead role, but the studios wouldn't go for that. Eventually Stone and Tom Cruise (in his best performance) got it done. Cimino then brought Stone in to write Year Of The Dragon, based on Robert Daley's dense novel of New York City corruption: between Stone, Cimino and star Mickey Rourke it became a troubling tale of one racist's journey to find redemption through the love of an Asian TV reporter. It's Cimino's Chinatown; Quentin Tarantino adores its drive, especially the final shoot-out between Rourke and John Lone, the Oriental villain. He also admired its only partial coherence; which other critics found less appealing; it flopped.

Two years later Cimino filmed Mario Puzo's The Sicilian. Audiences expecting a gangster story got a badly-acted film about pre-Corleone banditti which paled in comparison to its obvious influence, Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano. The film prompted a legal battle over the right to final cut. Although Cimino had it written into his contract, in court he tried to hide a letter from producer Dino DiLaurentis which had voided that specific part of the deal.

Following The Sicilian and an ill-fated remake of The Desperate Hours, American critics breathed a sigh of relief, perhaps, that Cimino's long-term project with James Toback and Rourke (what could possibly go wrong?) about the gangster Frank Costello, never came to fruition; nor did his version of the Legs Diamond story. He moved to France and wrote a novel. European critics waited for Cimino's versions of Malraux's Mans Fate (fascinating when considered in terms of the controversial treatment of Asians in The Deer Hunter and Year Of The Dragon); or The Fountainhead or Crime and Punishment. Some who've seen the scripts claim they are brilliant and, inevitably, way too long.

Then pictures emerged of Cimino after cosmetic surgery, no longer the pudgy Italian-American but a waif-like Mediterranean, eerily similar to Michael Jackson or the athlete Bruce Jenner's transformations. Jenner, of course, has since transitioned to Caitlyn; when rumours of his own sex-change surfaced Cimino denied them forcefully, both at Cannes when the latest final version of Heaven's Gate premiered and last year in a rare interview with the Hollywood Reporter.

But such talk of sexuality ought to be taken in the context of what may be Cimino's finest film, his first, Thunderbolt & Lightfoot. He had helped write Magnum Force, and Clint Eastwood, impressed with the original script of Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, offered him the chance to direct it, with Eastwood and his company Malpaso producing.

It's a taut but offbeat script, directed tightly. It opens with Bridges confessing he may not be 'man enough' because he's got a wooden leg, while a priestly Clint delivers a sermon before turning and running from a hit man. It's part road movie, with incredibly wacky monologues by Bill McKinney and Dub Taylor lighting up the highway, but mostly it's a dissection of the buddy film as romantic comedy. Clint and Jeff Bridges are the eponymous buddies; Bridges (Lightfoot) is a drifter who hooks up with Clint's Thunderbolt, a bank robber who's being pursued by two ex-partners who believe he ripped them off after their last heist. The plot requires them to make a big score together, and the caper requires Bridges to dress in drag and go to the drive-in movies as Clint's date. This enrages the film's other buddy pair, Leary (George Kennedy) and Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), whose characters are revealed by their names: Leary leering at Bridges with a barely restrained combination of lust and hate alongside generation-gap resentment; Goody (or goodwife, as the Puritans would have it) suffering in silence. Robin Wood famously analysed the cross-cutting of the robbery scene as love-making, climaxing as Bridges removes a pistol from the rear of his woman's panties while Eastwood, having got his 20mm armour-piercing cannon erect, more force than any Magnum, lets it explode into the vault. You may recall similar seduction imagery in the British 'thriller' Sexy Beast many years later.

What a difference control makes. With Clint calling the production shots, T&L was made for $4 million, and returned $25 million. Like many Hollywood wunderkinder, all Cimino may have needed was a producer to do what producers at their best are supposed to do. But few producers are Clint Eastwood. In that 2015 interview Cimino spoke of himself in a way that suggested, in different circumstances, his career might have been far different. 'I'm sort of an accidental filmmaker, you know,' said the art student turned commercial director turned scripter turned director. 'I come to it by accident. I sort of bumped into it. And then the results have been what you've seen, for better or worse'.

THE ASSASSIN: HOU HSIAO-HSIEN AT THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

I mentioned The Assassin yesterday, when I posted a 20-year old essay I'd written on Tsui Hark. My entry into wuxia films came via Hark and the London Film Festival; the offbeat The Butterfly Murders and Zu: Warriors Of Magic Mountain, and they seemed to trigger the explosion of Hong Kong cinema in Britain and elsewhere in the Eighties. I mentioned in my review of Hark's The Lovers its slow pace, a real change from the frantic action and cutting we associate with wuxia, and it is against that tradition that I watched the The Assassin.

Hong Kong swordplay is easier to follow these days, the production values are more Hollywood, the pace more classic, the storytelling more linear. In that context, Hou Hsiao-Hsien seems to be working almost with a deconstruction of the genre, yet one done as if creating its ultimate apex. It looks both outward and extremely inward at the same time; as I watched the long and wrenchingly beautiful shots of landscape, and the slow takes, even in action scenes, I found myself thinking of Bresson's Lancelot du Lac, which took its epic heroism and brought it down to a realistic, dirty, creaking and slow stereogramme, as if to take apart filmmaking as well as the myth it purveys. His knights are just simple people in tin suits, clanking around a landscape on which Bresson's camera lingers long after they've left the shot.

In a similar way, Hou's landscape transcends those marching through it. But rather than being reduced, it is magnified in beauty, highlighted and savoured. It is something that will last. In great westerns, the landscape is something bigger than man, threatening not least for the other men it contains. In John Ford movies men move through it as if on their way to conquer or tame it. But here we are presented with the definite picture of something that will endure long after the machinations of Chinese courts and the battling of deadly fighters has passed. Ford's audience knew the west had been conquered. Hou's knows that for centuries, the landscape has endured.

In ninth-century China, Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) is an assassin, trained by nuns to kill officials deemed corrupt or dangerous by the court. But she fails to kill one such target, because he is holding his infant son, and even though he takes a parting shot at her, which she parries, she leaves him. The mother superior is angry, and as punishment sends Nie back to Weibo, the most powerful province in the empire, where she wants the governor Tian Ji'ang (Chang Chen) killed. But Nie was once betrothed to Tian, before her family gave her up to the nuns. She heads to Waibo, and when she arrives the film changes: in a Wizard of Oz moment the high-contrast black and white (Nie's black outfit and her mistress' white garb work like a glorious take on western cliche) in 'Academy' ratio (1.375:1) changes to colour and widescreen 1.85:1. Shots are framed like paintings or screens, and held for appreciation, not just of Mark Lee Ping Bing's camerawork, but of the landscapes themselves.

The story now becomes one of Nie's inner discovery, defying her mistress and finding ways to maintain her inner self as she does. At times the story, slow as it is, becomes hard to follow: there is much plotting, debating, and ambiguity in the intrigue of China's hierarchy. In effect, Nie's newfound strength is the one sure thing in the film.

The Assassin is a showcase for Lee's camerawork, and especially for Shu Qi, whose performance as the quiet heroine brings a touch of the Clint Eastwood while suggesting inner turmoil underneath the cool skill. It's worthy of awards, and will resonate to any audience. Within the visual beauties of landscape, interiors, and costumes whose tones seem to echo the characters' emotions while maintaining a sense of distance, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's take on wuxia is both captivating and thought-provoking.

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.

THE AFGHAN WAR FILM: THE FILM PROGRAMME DISCUSSION

I was on BBC Radio 4's Film Programme today (we taped it yesterday). It's available on I player (link to it here), and will also be repeated on Sunday at 11pm; it's the first item on the show. Francine Stock and I had a fascinating conversation, both on and off air, which was cut down considerably for the slot; what remains is largely the wider view, which makes sense following the Peter Berg interview about Lone Survivor.

Doing the research for the interview, I realised there are quite a few Afghan war films I not only had not seen, but which had barely made an impression on me. We didn't record a conversation of why these films have made less impact than a number about Iraq, but I may review some here at IT along the way. We did discuss the two versions of Brothers, Susanne Bier's Danish one starring Ulrich Thomsen, and the American remake, directed by the Irishman Jim Sheridan, with Toby Maguire and Jake Gyllenhall. I pointed out that the Danish experience in the Middle East has had significant play in their TV series shown here, not only Borgen but some of the crime series as well, and more significantly that I am convinced Brothers is the source material, or inspiration, for Homeland.

Homeland was also a connecting point for me, to examine how wars that are unpopular, or at least not being fought by the country as a whole (the Bush wars are now 11 years old, and still make little impact on the home front--people scream 'support the troops' and keep their children home to watch American Idol) produce films that tend to concentrate on the effect of the war on us. In our discussion I had declared Three Kings the best of the movies set in these specific wars, but it had the advantage of that war's being over, and the ambiguity of our withdrawal as its political core. Most of the early, successful, films about Vietnam were about the home front, not just The Deer Hunter (which I still consider hollow) but Coming Home, Tracks, Rolling Thunder, and Who'll Stop The Rain (aka Dog Soldiers). Taxi Driver is part of that bunch too. Of course there were allegorical critiques, like MASH, Catch 22, or Soldier Blue.

The best of the recent  homefront movies is probably In The Valley Of Elah, where Tommy Lee Jones hardens director Paul Haggis' more liberal instincts. But you heard Francine mention Lions For Lambs, which we actually discussed in the tapings--I called it a remake of Starship Troopers which dares to question Ayn Rand.

We used to be less triumphalist. The British think their war films are more realistic and more understated, but they aren't. Look at the World War II combat films produced during the war, and how many of them involve loss and last stands. They Were Expendable, Air Force, Bataan, Corregidor, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, are the films of a nation who like to feel themselves the underdogs.

We also mentioned 9th Company, Fyodor Bondarchuk's movie set in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which I'm going to see soon and write about, and we didn't get to talk enough about the specific documentaries.

And though when they called I assumed it was to ask me to talk about  Jersey Boys, as I've written The Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood and I am old enough to have bought Four Seasons' 45s, I did at least get to talk to Francine about Clint's next film, American Sniper, which, like Lone Survivor, is based on Navy Seals, in this case the memoir of a Seal sniper. It's interesting that Clint played an assassin in Where Eagles Dare, a very Sergio Leone character in Kelly's Heroes, but when it came to war movies he's made only three: the very triumphal, very cliched, and basically Green Berets update (with victory at the end) Heartbreak Ridge, and then the much more sombre Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, both very much about the kinds of issues which Peter Berg described, the horrible toll taken on men at war. So I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of take Clint brings to that one.

DENNIS LEHANE WALKS THE MOONLIGHT MILE

It's been twelve years since Patrick Kenzie found Amanda McCready, returned the four year old to her negligent mother, saw her kidnappers jailed, and broke up with Angie Gennaro. Patrick and Angie got back together, and now have a daughter of their own. Angie's more or less out of the private eye business, studying to work with Downs Syndrome children, and Patrick's trying to get a staff job being perpetually dangled in front of him by a big-time agency, so he'll do the kind of work he despises for the kind of people he despises. And then Amanda, now 16, goes missing again, and her aunt Beatrice knows how to appeal to the guilt Patrick feels.

Dennis Lehane returned to Kenzie and Gennaro after a ten year hiatus that saw the huge jump forward of Mystic River, which of course rode the success of Clint Eastwood's film. He followed that up with Shutter Island, a daring and offbeat novel rather than one designed to capitalise on Mystic River's success. That one became a Martin Scorsese film, and he went on to script for The Wire, so there was little predicting his next book, the remarkable historical novel The Given Day. When I interviewed Lehane about The Given Day, we talked about the return of Kenzie and Gennaro, and Lehane explained it simply: 'he (Patrick) hadn't talked to me for ten years, and then all of a sudden I heard his voice in my head'. I asked if the voice he heard was Casey Affleck's, who had played Patrick in his brother Ben's faithful adaptation of the Amanda story, Gone Baby Gone. He said 'no, but it's funny, because Casey wasn't anything like I'd pictured Patrick, but I can't get him out of my mind'. (You can read the whole interview here)

To an extent, that's a problem with Moonlight Mile, because it's hard now to separate Affleck's protean ability to enter a character and reflect his inner workings from the Patrick we may have imagined. If anything he adds depth, and Lehane himself was scared by the task. 'Do I still have that looseness,' he wondered. 'They had an ignorance about them, and I wonder if I can recapture that now that I've flirted with self-importance.'

Patrick remains an unlikely detective hero. His world sometimes seems to be an extension of high school, where he was not quite tough or cool enough to be successful, or become a target, but just cool and smart enough not to be a mark. And trying to locate Amanda quickly throws him in over his head, because her mother Helene and Helene's latest loser boyfriend are tied in with the Russian mob, and a hit man named Yefim who's got almost as funny a line of ironic patter as Patrick. Of course Patrick finds Amanda, he's too good and dogged not to, and everything gets far more complicated than he could have imagined. Which is what happened in Gone Baby Gone, and as in that book Patrick needs to make a decision. But this time the decision is informed by his added age, his added responsibility as a father, and his exposure to the results of his moral decision twelve years earlier.

Lehane does a nice job of picking up his characters and allowing them their changes. He's as sharp as ever; Patrick remains a knowing-smart ass; 'I see a future for you in self-help,' he says to a drug-addled youth counselor who's made some bad decisions. At times it seems this book is more consciously funny than its predecessors, but that may be because it is more informed by the world around Kenzie and Gennaro; the concerns of Mystic River, The Wire, and The Given Day are never far away. It is not a world gone well: the shadow of economic inequality, of injustice, of greed, hangs over everyone in the novel. Lehane's remarkably straight-forward about society's failures; a dog-walking woman in western Massachusetts launches into a fantastic diatribe against the perverted values of our education system that could have come right out of The Wire. And, if I may be indulged one pedantic quibble, his sense of geography remains odd; in The Given Day a train took an impossible route to New York; in Moonlight Mile there's a house in western Mass 'south of the New York border', which is weird because the border runs almost due north-south!

There is almost an inevitability to the denouement, and Patrick in particular is again forced into decisions that make him question how best he can be true both to himself and those he loves. And follow the responsibilities of society as well. He's helped a bit by a twist which some may see coming; but it's no small task, just as revisiting a successful series more than decade later wasn't. Lehane has written the kind of comeback novel any writer would admire; he has questioned his characters, and let them find their own way. It's another fine achievement.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane
Little Brown, £15.99 ISBN 9781408703137

This essay will also appear at Shots: www.shotsmag.co.uk

ON SCREEN IMPOTENCE: WARREN BEATTY & PETER BISKIND'S STAR

When Star first appeared, the attention was directed at Peter Biskind's claim (established through a mathematical assumption that had no basis in statistical reality) that Warren Beatty had slept with 12,775 women. The number fell far short of Wilt Chamberlain's 20,000, but Beatty's might claim a triumph of celebrity quality over quantity. Some who argued against Biskind's exaggeration would point to the relative stability of Beatty's longer term relationships: opportunity argued against Biskind's multiplication of an arbitrary daily body-count. The numbers game got Biskind the publicity he sought, but served to distract the audience, including most reviewers, from the heart of the book, which, in its way, is as penetrating an analysis of the workings of Hollywood as was his Easy Riders Raging Bulls. The British edition of Star was subtitled 'The Life And Wild Times of Warren Beatty', perhaps to cash in on Easy Riders, but the American subtitle was 'How Warren Beatty Seduced America', which is better, but really should have been 'How Warren Beatty Seduced Hollywood'. Because it's arguable just how much America itself has ever really been seduced by him, but inarguable that from the start Beatty has known who his real constituency was, and that constituency has bought was he is selling. Not for nothing was he on the cover of Time billed as 'Mr. Hollywood'. Beatty repeatedly seduced studio execs into ponying up money, even when his reputation for going over budget and over schedule and his remarkable inability to make creative decisions preceded him.

Beatty's film career is most often summed up in comparison to Orson Welles, the only other filmmaker to receive Oscar nominations as producer, director, writer and actor. Like Welles, his career is marked by remarkably few films, and his reputation built on even fewer. Bonnie & Clyde, a landmark which he produced as well as starred in, was Beatty's eighth feature film; he has appeared in only 14 in the 40 years that followed. He's directed only four: Heaven Can Wait (in which Buck Henry managed to hang onto a co-directing credit), Reds, Dick Tracy and Bulworth, and taken credit on five as a writer: Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bulworth, and Love Affair. But as Biskind demonstrates in great detail, it would be foolish to assume Beatty wasn't in some degree of control on virtually all his post-Bonnie films.

Beatty's career resembles his love life: the shining highlights of which are almost buried under an almost childish desire not to miss a single opportunity. Again and again in Star, we see Beatty's relentless and tireless ability to pursue what he wants, but his inability to decide what it is that he does want. He shoots scores of takes, miles of coverage, and relies on armies of editors to keep it all straight. He's not a director, he's a decider, says one observer. He drives screenwriters to distraction, becoming a co-writer by simply reworking, or getting them or someone else uncredited, to rework every word they write.

Beatty's reputation rests largely on seven films: Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bugsy, and Bulworth. Some might add Dick Tracy. I'd include The Parallax View, but I'd consider Heaven Can Wait a pleasant but fairly useless vanity remake which Hollywood liked because it showed them in the kind of light in which they like to be seen.

What stands out in all those canonical films is Beatty the actor plays relatively impotent characters upon whom fate plays itself out. They are often puzzled, if not befuddled, and looking for answers to questions they might not even be able to frame. Clyde Barrow is literally impotent and dies defenseless in an ambush. McCabe dies in a snowdrift, George just peters out, Joe Pendleton might or might not come back and be recognised, John Reed gets sick and dies, Bugsy and Bulworth are assassinated (as is Joe Frady in Parallax). Even Dick Tracy, like Beatty, can't make up his mind about women and families. Apart from Tracy, they are all cut off before they get to accomplish what they set out to accomplish, and if that isn't a metaphor for Beatty's film career I don't know what is.

Biskind isn't very interested in the forgettable parts of that career, and it's true few of his other films bear watching. Beatty started as beefcake on Broadway, interestingly by being taken up by Joshua Logan and William Inge, both of whom were gay. He gathered a Tony nomination, and his first film role came in Elia Kazan's adaptation of Inge's Splendour In The Grass, where he starred with Natalie Wood. Before that, however, he had played Milton Armitage, a sophisticated charmer, in six episodes of TV's Dobie Gillis show. Armitage is set up in opposition to the all-american Dobie, and I'd argue that was always the position he was in to the mainstream audience: America may have been seduced by the outward charm, but failed to fall for the overall package.

Biskind does discuss the notable failure of Mickey One, partly because Arthur Penn is so intent on making something faux new wave, but also because Beatty is so inept at playing a comedian: it asks him to give too much away. It's a problem that won't be overcome until Bulworth, where for once he's willing to let himself look ridiculous. Otherwise, we rightly pass over much of Beatty's career, though there is considerable discussion of the massive clunker of Love Affair.

When you get to the memorable movies, Bonnie and Clyde does what Penn failed to do in Mickey One. It also caught the popular zeitgeist, to the extent it even became a fashion trend, and of course its choreographed violence (which according to Dede Allen was down to Penn's insistence on taking out more and more) was hugely influential. Beatty drove both Robert Altman and Alan Pakula to distraction, but McCabe and Parallax are key films of the era, yet atypical of Beatty in their sense of deconstructing familiar genres, rather than improving on them. In contrast, Hollywood has most rewarded Beatty for a great gangster film that recalled the glory days of the Thirties, for a comedy of manners (Shampoo) which caught the change from the swinging 60s to the me-decade, for a remake, and for a classic epic (Reds) that for all its innovation (primarily the witnesses) and brilliance was more stirring in the sense of Dr. Zhivago than, say, Northern Lights, and wound up taking a Stanley Kramer-type safely liberal position on the Russian revolution. Dick Tracy might be seen as an attempt to revisit the fashion triumph of Bonnie and Clyde. He deserved more attention for Bulworth, whose ultimate failure may be its uwillingness to go beyond a safe liberalism in its ending, and which cynics might have suggested was simply Beatty's chance to get close to Halle Berry and as a side-benefit also reach a new audience thereby.

Biskind's tale is littered with stories of writers left exhausted and discarded (Paul Schrader, after 'winning' the same argument five mornings in a row when Beatty was supposed to star in Hardcore, simply walked away) but remaining (cf Robert Towne) tremendously loyal to Beatty and his charm. Beatty can be tough on his friends: Jack Nicholson's performance as Eugene O'Neill in Reds is one of the best of his career, but apparently there was even better stuff left on the cutting room floor. And when it all goes wrong, as, say, on Ishtar, it goes monumentally wrong.

Biskind is also honest about Beatty's personal life, showing his need to control relationships just as certainly as he controls his films. But in relationships, you can't always steal the credits, or get other people to do the crucial work to allow your ego its full range. Beatty wants always to have it all ways, and that he succeeds much of the time is a tribute to his charm, but even more to the strength of his ego and his persistence in satisfying it. Where this gets shown up is in politics, where Beatty has been at times a power-broker for good causes (most notably George McGovern). His efforts on behalf of Gary Hart, originally McGovern's campaign manager, came to naught because Hart wanted to 'be' Warren Beatty, but in the end he did a better job of that than Beatty did of being Hart. One might speculate what Beatty might have done actually running for office. In a country where lummoxes like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger can move from the screen to high office, Beatty could not have been much worse. But he lacked the ability to commit himself to the quest. It's a strange inversion of his film career, where he's great at the quest and can't commit himself to the result.

Bugsy may be the best of Beatty's film roles. Barry Levinson seems able to avoid some of the worst distractions of his star, and in the part of the immensely charming gangster whose grandiose dreams fall apart and run afoul of the money men, Beatty again was playing himself. But he did allow himself a touch of the dark side as Siegel. It's almost as good as he would have been playing Howard Hughes, in a project he nutured for decades, but never got around to doing. He was beaten to the post by Martin Scorsese and an unconvincing Leonardo DiCaprio. His Hughes would have also been a facet of himself, especially as Hughes was also a film-maker with the power to indulge his every whim, and get away with it. That Hughes died alone and nutzoid, whereas Beatty simply moved to a domestic life years behind schedule, is ironic.

History may well see Beatty primarily as a producer, a maverick producer working outside the studio system while being dependent on it, and able to create the occasional memorable film. It will be kinder to his personal attributes which may have kept him from doing more and better work. One thinks of Clint Eastwood, who began as studio beefcake, and had his third late flowering as a director not happened in his 70s, might also have been recalled as an interesting film star whose production company kept him working for decades. Beatty, at his best, scored bigger than Clint; Unforgiven didn't have the impact of Bonnie and Clyde, though Sergio Leone might be said to have got to the slow-motion opera of violence before that film. Like Eastwood, you might argue Beatty has always been playing variations of himself, the true definition of a star, as opposed to an actor. But Eastwood's directing, you might argue, is best when he is ignoring his own vanity as a star, which includes films like Mystic River in which he doesn't appear.

With this book Biskind has provided the groundwork for eventual re-interpretations of Beatty's work. His legacy is likely to fall closer to Welles than to Eastwood, both for the work he did, the work undone, and for the personal life and elements of character that both defined him and stood in his way.

Star: The Life And Wild Times of Warren Beatty
by Peter Biskind
Simon & Schuster 2010, £17.99, ISBN 9781847378378

PUSHER MAN: PLUGGING PELECANOS IN PICCADILLY: THE WAY HOME INTERVIEW

I've interviewed George Pelecanos any number of times before, but this one was something special. On stage at BAFTA, before the gathered work force of the estimable Orion Books, I got to do for George what he used to do for ladies shoes: sell to an audience that seemed already eager to buy. As it turned out, my selling was so emphatic I'm not sure I left George much room to reply, or many gaps to fill in, but it was rewarding to be able to push an author to his own publisher. Not that George needs much pushing. As I said to the Orions, Pelecanos has the enviable status of someone who's gone from cult writer to best-seller without losing his cult status. And his profile has been raised immeasurably by his writing/producing for The Wire, which started the cult status thing all over again. It seems non-stop; on my way to meet him at his hotel, I was startled to see his face staring out at me from an underground poster for his latest novel, The Way Home, which wasn't surprising because the Channel Four TV Book Club has picked The Way Home in its launch books. And that wasn't surprising because The Way Home to me is the kind of book that would appear both to fans of crime fiction but also transcend to 'the mainstream' as well; its themes of work and family are strong, but the book also plays with the tropes of pulp fiction and, indeed, westerns as well. You can link to my original review of the novel here.

With so much going on, it was nice to be able to relax for a couple of hours at the Cork & Bottle wine bar, where I tried an Ernest Hemingway burger (somehow I can't see Papa getting down with mango relish, but you never know) and held myself to just one glass of wine before going onstage. George wears the trappings of fame easily; his books originally attracted some cult status because of their prominent use of music, not just as scene-setting background but also for insight into character. Pelecanos play-lists were soon appearing in rock magazines. Indeed, while he was visiting Britain, he appeared on Open Book, and asked to pick his book of the decade, chose Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin, of the band Richmond Fontaine. Coincidentally (or not) he's going to see the band that very night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, along with the crime writer Mark Billingham. Since it was Mark and Martyn Waites who converted me to Richmond Fontaine in the first place, that brings something full circle! George also chose Charles Portis' True Grit as his favourite book, and we spend a long time discussing both the book's subtleties, especially as it's narrated by an aged spinster Mattie Ross, whose recollections may well be suspect, and the upcoming remake of the John Wayne version by the Coen Brothers, with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. 'People forget how strong the supporting cast was in the original,' George says. 'This is known as the Glen Campbell effect,' I say. 'But Robert Duvall, Jeff Corey and Dennis Hopper are all great.' 'And Hank Worden as the undertaker,' I say, and that, as they say, was that.

Over the rest of a conversation that raged from the joys of fatherhood to the tribulations of George's beloved Washington Redskins, I discovered that although he's done 16 novels in the past 18 years, he doesn't have a new one in the works. But I suggested that, as a writer who's done most of his books in contained series, his last three novels formed a trilogy, linked by the theme of fathers and sons (their predecessor, Drama City, shared important themes of work and family, but not directly fathers and sons.)

After just brief consideration George agrees, though he says it wasn't a conscious intention. He attributes the increasing focus on the microcosm of the family at least in part to The Wire. 'We did such a good job (with social issues of crime) I didn't have much left to say on those themes.' To me, it seems a natural progression, especially when you consider that Pelecanos is one of the few writers, in any genre, who's always concentrated not only on race but on issues of family and work – both keys to The Wire (series two, as you may recall, was themed around the disappearance of meaningful employment for the working classes of the city). Family and working values are the core of No Way Home, which John Harvey likened to a 'moral fable', (you can read about that discussion here) and which has elements of both westerns and 1970s exploitation films about it, points which appear to have got lost, in America at least, behind the fable. To me, it recalls Shoedog, still one of my favourite Pelecanos novels, and another book with pulpy fictions framing a story about men working.

'The Night Gardener was my biggest selling book in America,' George says, 'in fact, Clint Eastwood was interested in making a movie of it for a while, and he wrote me a very nice letter about it, which I will treasure, but it just didn't happen'. He's got other big-time fans too: Barak Obama gave George the same kind of moment Bill Clinton provided both Walter Mosely and Stephen Hunter, when he carried a copy of The Way Home with him as he left Air Force One.

But The Way Home didn't do so well.' George explains that he thinks his audience wanted him to stick with cops, or private eyes, and their investigations. In Britain, however, The Way Home has been his most successful so far, which has encouraged Orion to push him even more. 'They've got it right from the start,' George says, and I'm not sure if he means his British publishers or the audience. 'Well, both,' he says, diplomatically. It gratifies him too, because the book grew out of his experiences working in a prison reading project. 'I started to wonder not only what its like for these kids, but what it's like for their parents,' he says. He also talks about his own lucky history. 'When I was 17, I accidentally shot a friend of mine in the face. With a different background, in different circumstances, my life could have taken a far different course,' he explains. And the theme reverberates throughout Pelecanos' work, the idea that one small moment can have consequences that change your life, that you can be powerless to stop. This is also one of the classic themes of noir.

Whether these family novels will end as a trilogy or whether there's something more to come Pelecanos can't say. He hasn't launched another novel, but not because because he hasn't been busy. He's been working on two TV series for HBO. One is Treme, named after a district of New Orleans, comes from David Simon and many of the team that did The Wire, dealing with the lives of musicians and others in the post-Katrina Big Easy. Not long after we met, Pelecanos' writing colleague on Treme (and The Wire), David Mills, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm (see the link to my obituary, and George's comment on Mills, here). The other is Pacific, a sequel of sorts to Band Of Brothers, set in the Pacific war, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Pelecanos is again a writer/producer, and it had deep resonance for him. 'My Dad was a Marine and served in the Pacific, so it's a subject very close to my own history, and it's something I admire.' There's a sense of regret, of a sort, in much of Pelecanos' work, that his father's generation grew up in the experience of a war they could believe in, as opposed to a generation faced with a war no one could believe in, and a generation tried to avoid if they could.

That's because George Pelecanos is very much about the things a man's gotta do, or that he used to think he had to do. Thus his fondness for muscle cars, for football, especially at the youth level, for the social world of bars, for the importance of work and its camaraderie. It's an old-fashioned attitude that returns social contact, personal relationships, 'man to man' as it were, to the fore. And that's what his books boil down to: the sense that by letting these simple values be sacrificed on the altar of economics, or leisure, or whatever, we've lost something important, and that crime and tragedy is often the result.

GEORGE PELECANOS BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nick Stefanos Novels:
A Firing Offense (1992), Nick's Trip (93), Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go (95)

Shoedog (1994)

The DC Quartet:
The Big Blowdown (1996), King Suckerman (97), The Sweet Forever (98), Shame The Devil (2000)

Derek Strange Novels:
Right As Rain (2001), Hell To Pay (02), Soul Circus (03), Hard Revolution (04)

Drama City (2005)

Fathers & Sons
Night Gardener (2006), The Turnaround (08), The Way Home (09)

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.

CHABROL'S GIRL CUT IN TWO

When I reviewed Claude Chabrol's Comedy Of Power back in Crime Time 52, I noted that its French title, L'Ivresse du pouvoir, translated better as 'the intoxication of power'. That intoxication remains at the core of his 'new' (released in 2006 in France) film The Girl Cut In Two. On the surface it is about a different sort of power, sexual power, but at its heart it retains Chabrol's instinctive recoiling from the upper crusts of French society; here the heroine, TV weathergirl Gabrielle Deneige (ie, Snow) is torn between the old aristocracy and the power of new sort of intellectual class, nurtured by a media they affect to despise. There was a seeming Greek chorus of powerful men who watched the action in L'Ivresse du pouvoir; they could be the men gathered in their soft chairs at Charles' private club in Lyon. As he gets older, Chabrol, like Clint Eastwood, seems to work with a kind of shorthand of his own iconography; despite its operatic overtones, The Girl Cut In Two is as much about Chabrol's movies as it is a tragedy about a spoiled innocent or a withering dissection of the haut-bourgeoise.

Gabrielle, played by Ludovine Sangier with a sort of confident passivity that invites exploitation, meets the much older novelist Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand), and begins an affair with him. She is also being pursued by young Paul Gaudens, flamboyantly wastrel heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. Chabrol is never kind to the haut-bourgeoisie, for good reason, but Benoit Magimel plays Paul like a French version of Freddie Conway, his thin layer of charm buttressed by money. Gabrielle, raised by her bookshop-owning mother, falls for the older father-figure, and meanwhile is elevated, by more older men who obviously fancy her, to presenting a chat-show, a lighter version of the kind of faux-intellectual discussion programmes we've already seen Charles endure. Charles uses Gabrielle; for her birthday he takes her to that exclusive sex-club, where (we are later told; there is very little prurience in Chabrol's lubricious filming) he watches her have sex with his friends. He then abandons her; his wife takes care of changing the locks on his city baisodrome. Gabrielle lapses into lethargy, from which Paul's louche Prince Charming wakes her; eventually she will agree drunkenly to marry him, much to the disgust of his inevitably snobbish mother. But the marriage, and Paul's performance, is overpowered by the shadow of Charles; Paul is obsessed with what he did to Gabrielle, and we are aware that when Paul is obsessive bad things can happen.

The film follows the outline of the story of Evelyn Nesbit, whose wealthy husband Harry Thaw famously murdered architect Sanford White at the roof theatre of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Thaw escaped with loose confinement at a mental institution only after Nesbit agreed to testify, at his second trial, to White's depravations, which included his pushing her on a red velvet swing (hence the title of the 1955 movie The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing). Nesbit, of course, was younger, an artist's model and showgirl who from the age of 14 was her mother's breadwinner; Gabrielle here is a bubbly innocent, convinced of her own ability to handle men, with a protective, not exploitive, mother. The bit of the original story Chabrol follows most closely is telling; Nesbit was promised a big pay-off for her testimony, and of course then cut-off completely, the same happens to Gabrielle, although it seems to be Paul's mother's pleading and telling her secrets of his childhood which convinces her, rather than the promise of riches made by her (third) sleazy lawyer. Why learning that Paul may have drowned his brother in their kiddie bath would make anyone more sympathetic to him is something only the French could explain.

Chabrol is best with the juicy details of the society he pillories; he is so convincing with the provinicialism of Lyon that one British reviewer described the film as being set in a 'small town' (another referred to Gabrielle throughout his review as Camille--wake up and smell the reference!). Early in the film he sets out his theme when Charles tells a TV interviewer that France is 'drifting into either decadence or puritanism' but we don't see much evidence of the latter. We gradually learn that Charles' pose as an intellectual is just that, a pose. His real name is Denis, not Saint-Denis; he writes on a computer, not in longhand as he tells people; his wisdom consists of aphorisms borrowed from other people. One reference to DeSade is all we need to put this into context; the character Chabrol's camera catches most lovingly is Charles' agent, Capucine (Mathilda May), one of the boys, as it were, but displayed at every opportunity. This raises another interesting comparison to another aging director, Woody Allen. Where Chabrol's camera quite blatantly objectifies these women, one never has the sense, as you do in Allen's work (all the way back to Manhattan) that there is an element of wish-fulfillment. Although me may be tempted to draw a parallel between Charles/Chabrol, our identification is kept firmly on Gabrielle. In fact, the more interesting women are Gabrielle's mother Marie (Marie Bunel), who plays her as well-intentioned but perhaps not dynamic enough to protect her daughter the way Paul's mother (played brilliantly by Caroline Silhol) does, and Charles' wife Dona (Valeria Cavelli), who, true to her name, is constantly referred to as a saint, but whose cheery adoration apparently includes full acceptance of everything her husband does to other women.

As if DeSade were not enough, Charles buys Gabrielle a copy of Pierre Louys' La Femme et la Patin (The Woman And the Puppet), the source material for films like The Devil Is A Woman and The Obscure Object of Desire. It's as if the world inhabited by Charles and his circle is a last gasp of a fading misogynistic society, and although the Pauls cannot replace it, Gabrielle's chance at being part of the apparent new order, via TV, disappears. The film's cylinders click into place in the carefully foreshadowed finale, as Gabrielle appears as the assistant of her magician uncle, being sawed in half, with a buzz-saw. Literally, this follows the Nesbit story; after being shafted by the Thaw family she had a career in vaudeville, but it ties Chabrol's threads together neatly.
The vaudeville world is more dead than that of Charles' circle, more old-fashioned, and, in her position in the act, Gabrielle is now totally passive, being acted upon, deconstructed and put back together for the audience. We never see them in the theatre, because they are not there; the audience is us, watching Uncle Denis do to Gabrielle what Chabrol has done. It is we who are the decadent, or the puritans, and Chabrol the magician. It is a wry comment on decades of work, and centuries of France.