LIAM NEESON AND DEATH WISH: THE ANATOMY OF A CONTROVERSY

In the days of click-bait celebrity journalism, identity-politics opinion, and memory that extends no farther than the last hit of the 'delete' key, it was hard to figure out exactly what it was that actor Liam Neeson had done forty years ago after a 'close friend' had been raped that merited the headlines it generated. The rapist had been a black man, and the tabloids, both printed and virtual, screamed that Neeson had gone out on the streets looking to kill a black man in revenge. And of course the tabloid headlines generated more 'serious' reflection. One opinion piece in Britain's Guardian explained that Neeson confessed to having 'entertained a racist lynching fantasy' and gone 'looking for a black man to murder'.

But what Neesom had actually said was something not so subtly different, and it rang a warning bell in my head, as it should have done for anyone with a passing knowledge of popular film. Neeson told the online newspaper The Independent that he had packed a cosh and gone to black neighbourhoods hoping 'to be approached...that some black bastard would come out of a pub and have a go at me so I could kill him'. So he was a man seeking vengeance for a rape going out and making himself an obvious target so he could exact his revenge? I've seen that movie.

It was called Death Wish, based on the novel of the same name by the recently deceased Brian Garfield, and it starred Charles Bronson and was directed by Michael Winner in 1975, and thus not long before the incident Neeson described. It was a huge hit, and it's not unlikely that the 23 year old Neeson saw it. Bronson plays Paul Kersey, a New York City architect whose wife is murdered and daughter raped by a gang of intruders (including Jeff Goldblum in his first film appearance). He begins setting himself up as an obvious target for muggers, then kills them.

So rather than seeking out any black man as a revenge victim, Neeson was specifically looking for an attacker, so his vengeance might be justified. Obviously, he never acted out those impulses, possibly because his local community, normally a hothouse of revenge violence, was unwilling or unable to provide the requisite 'bastards' to have a go at him, but the whole thing is so close to the plot of Death Wish to suggest he may have been acting out a movie fantasy in his head. Which is still something for which he can indeed still feel ashamed.

But perhaps we also need to remember that although he was not an actor then, Liam Nesson is one now, and actors do tend to see the world as an extension of their movies. Let's set some more background here: Neeson gave this revealing and controversial interview on a promotional tour for his new movie, Cold Pursuit, in which he plays a snow-plow driver seeking revenge against the drug dealers he thinks murdered his son. The film is a remake of the Norwegian thriller In Order Of Disappearance, and Neeson's casting is rather like Winner's casting of Bronson, because like Bronson, Neeson is best-known for action hero movies.

In Garfield's original novel, Paul (called Benjamin) is an accountant. The book was originally adapted by screenwriter Wendell Mayes for director Sidney Lumet, the Michelangelo of New York City's urban decay in the Seventies, and was to star Jack Lemmon. In Garfield's words, the story was that of 'an ordinary guy who descends into madness'. It was meant to recall the adage about digging two graves when you embark on revenge. But when producer Dino DeLaurentis acquired the rights, Lumet backed off the project and Winner (whom Garfield called 'an idiot') was brought on board, along with Bronson, with whom he had a successful working relationship. In Winner's subtle hands, the violence was played with voyeuristic celebration, something perhaps more requiring of apology than Neeson's own fantasies. Bronson, of course, became an heroic figure. Enough to propel Death Wish to four film sequels, a fifth film based on Garfield's own sequel, Death Sentence, and a 2018 remake starring Bruce Willis, which I have not yet seen because frankly, life is too short.

In his interview, Nesson mentioned his growing up in Northern Ireland, during what are euphemistically called 'The Troubles'. He grew up seeing the urge, the constant demand, for vengeance played out all around him. His film career reflects that, especially the series of Taken movies, in which he avenges himself on kidnappers. Cold Pursuit was getting none of the buzz of a Taken film, and indeed opened to disappointing returns in the US, bringing in the worst box office for any Neeson action film since Darkman in 1990, his introduction to the genre. Which leads to the question of why Neeson felt now was the moment to unroll this forty-year old fantasy tale of revenge?

The original novel was called Death Wish because Paul Benjamin was acting out his own death wish, and, as noted, Brian Garfield wanted to show his vengeance was leading to his own self-destruction. Winner and Bronson's version was more celebratory of Paul's transformation. Ambiguity isn't a motif in Michael Winner movies.

So was Neeson's a bold confession, aimed at pointing out this futility of revenge? Or was he seeing, as Michael Winner had, a simpler vision, that, as Rap Brown reminded us,'violence is as American as cherry pie', and thus he was using his own life to bolster his standing as an action-hero purveyor of violence? Or was he conflating his fantasies conveniently with a deeper reality?

The link between films and reality is especially strong in Neeson's own life, where the tragedy of his wife Natasha Richardson's death recalled one his own most moving roles, in the days before he became the Charles Bronson de nos jours, in Ethan Frome. Eschewing cynicism, it would not be unreasonable to believe that Neeson was not simply promoting his latest, that he would feel drawn to unburden himself of a memory of great unpleasantness in order to remind viewers that his characters in films are just that, only characters in only movies, and reality is much more cruel. If that be the case, he should be faulted only for not realising that the sins of the past are today grist less for deep reflection than for the internet mill of short-lived high-flame outrage.

LOVIN' MOLLY AND LEAVING CHEYENNE, REVISITED

I reckon that I first saw Lovin' Molly probably in 1974 or 75, but maybe a bit later. I might find the exact date if I look though my old notebooks, wherever they are. I do know that I had already read Larry McMurtry's novel Leaving Cheyenne, on which it is based, before I saw the movie.

The story is a sort of West Texas Jules and Jim. Gid Frye (Anthony Perkins) is a stiffly upright young man, working on the ranch owned by his demanding father (Edward Binns). He and his best friend Johnny McCloud (Beau Bridges) are both in love with free-spirited Molly Parker, who loves them both. The novel is told in three sections, twenty years apart, each narrated from a different character's point of view: Gid in 1925, Molly in 1945 and Johnny in 1964.

Watching the movie again, I could almost feel my first responses to it, which I don't think have changed very much in the 40-whatever years since I saw it, and I also remembered the book even more clearly. The film is touching at its best, awkward at its worst. It never does feel real, never gets the sense of its location. It's too close, too clean, too colourful. Too many interiors where you don't sense the feeling such a romantic tale should lead to.There are a few shots to show Molly's beauty, and one or two where director Sidney Lumet does manage to engage with the wider landscape: there's one where the now-ill father looks out over his land and commiserates with Gid over Molly's marriage to a third boy, Eddie. 'A woman's love is like the morning dew; it's just as apt to land on a horse turd as a rose'. I remembered that line verbatim from the novel.

Which is the other big shortcoming: the drive of the movie comes from the characters, and from their dialogue, and all of that comes from the book. But the movie itself doesn't really manage to set up or build to its key points, its biggest conflicts and its most important actions are almost throwaways, or else telegraphed and then dismissed quickly. That seems to me to be a lack of feeling for story-telling from the screenwriter/producer Stephen Friedman, who also produced The Last Picture Show, the second hit movie made from a McMurtry novel (the first was Hud, from the novel Horseman, Pass By). The next hit wouldn't be until Lonesome Dove. The screenplay really works only when they are speaking, and the many forshadowings and mirrorings are lost in the shuffle. And I do think it would have been better to have called the movie Leaving Cheyenne. Or at least Loving Molly. Note McMurtry didn't feel the need to drop the final g in the novel's title, and replace it with an apostrophe, which the film makers did in a Hollywood way that seems very condescending. if only to get the song from which the title comes into the film to help explain what it is doing. Because as much as it is a film about love, it is more a film about life, or rather death: there are five deaths in the story, and as always love and death set the courses of our lives.

The casting doesn't quite work, though it tries to. The first story is the longest section, and because the ages are right works best. Anthony Perkins young is less jarring than I felt when I first saw it: he works hard, literally, on the farm and in some ways seems more real than Beau Bridges, who never seems to get dirty as a cowboy ought to. I remember being captivated by Blythe Danner's performance as the young Molly then, and maybe not as much now, though she's still more fun than Gwyneth Paltrow. Twenty years on, Perkins is a bit too rigid, Danner's still OK, but Bridges seems to be in his own character. Neither of the males ages very well: they try the creaky walk without success, and Danner's 1964 is heavily made-up. I also had forgotten that Susan Sarandon was in the film; her role is small but crucial, as the woman Gid marries, who proceeds to fulfill his father's warnings about marriage. 

But it's a tribute to McMurtry's writing that enough of this story remains to make the whole think work, and make it moving. Or movin'. I suspect modern audiences might feel ambivalent about Molly's sort of 'premature' feminism, but it rings more real than that of, say, Fried Green Tomatoes. And it speaks more clearly within its Texas setting, which is what is lost in the filming, that sort of dry-sand Baptist community in which the rules are set for some.

I recalled the film's end verbatim, because it was again taken verbatim from the book, as Johnny thinks back to the first scene which Gid had narrated, and recalls it from his point of view, and regrets just two things: not seeing Gid's face when he surprised the two of them, and not having a Kodak to take a picture of Molly's face as she waited on the school house steps. Such regrets are what we all have, and in his way Johnny is lucky to have so few. It occurs to me that I am just about as far removed from my original viewing of the movie as Johnny is from his remembrance of that election day when he and Molly met at the polling station early. In my own narration, like Johnny's some forty years later, I find that the film, though not as moving as the book, touches via memory some of those very regrets from the first time I saw it, and those from the years that have passed since I did.

Now, when I die Take my saddle from the wall

Put it on the pony Lead him out of his stall

Ride her out, Old Paint, I'm leaving Cheyenne

And goodbye Old Paint, I'm leaving Cheyenne

ROBERT DALEY'S HANDS OF A STRANGER: A Forgotten Friday Entry

Robert Daley in the 1950s was the PR man for the New York football Giants, at the time the NFL was breaking into the national sports consciousness, and the Giants were about to challenge the baseball Yankees as the city’s glamour team. He reported from France for the New York Times, then worked for a year as a deputy commissioner, for public relations, of the New York City police department; his term, in 1971-72 coincided with one of the most turbulent in the NYPD’s history.

This led to his best book, the non-fiction Prince Of The City (1978), which was made into a great film by Sidney Lumet, starring Treat Williams, in 1981. Daley’s fiction has been less acclaimed, but a number of his novels are quite good, and were filmed: the underrated To Kill A Cop (1976) as a decent TV movie, Year Of The Dragon (1981) in an underrated movie by Michael Cimino, and Tainted Evidence (1993) as Night Falls On Manhattan (1993), again by Lumet in 1996. They are big books which read something like sagas; they inevitably present the police force as an extended family, sometimes like a mafia family, and like Joseph Wambaugh’s novels of the LAPD, they deal with the strains the cop’s world places on real family life.

Hands Of A Stranger (1985) is another of those, and it is a deceptive kind of story. It opens with Judith Adler, a rare female Assistant DA, who handles rape cases and aims to be a high flier. She’s brought into an investigation in New Jersey which involves drugs, but also women who appear to have been coerced and raped for a series of videotapes. The drug connection brings her to Joe Hearn, recently promoted to inspector and given command of the drugs squad. Joe is devoted to his wife Mary, but she is beginning to chafe as the pull of Joe’s career relegates to her to second place.

As Joe and Judith are drawn to each other, Mary embarks on a flirtation with her son’s baseball coach, which winds up with her in a sleazy Manhattan hotel room, trying desperately to get out. But before she can, an armed man crashes into the room, and with the coach bound and gagged, rapes Mary.

The set-up plays out as an almost inevitable personal car crash for almost all involved. Mary has to tell Joe she’s been raped, while witholding some details, and Joe, already devoting more time than he should to the videotaping case because he and Judith are starting an affair, begins investigating the rape on his own time, eventually learning the truth and looking for his revenge.

The story works in large part because Daley is so good on the pressures of the police department: the way Joe has to choose between family and job, the way his superiors assume Mary, with a college degree and a talented artist, is what one calls a typical broad, and the way Adler has to fight twice as hard as a woman for her job, and devote even more energy to it.

But it’s also a strange novel, because although it’s set in the Eighties, it seems to be taking place in the Fifties; it could be a novel of the police in the time of Mad Men. It could be largely because the morality of the police is still drawn on the previous era, and the people involved, largely Catholic, have that sort of 50s morality ingrained in their pysches, but there is a definite sort of double standard here, something that makes forbidden fruit seem more exotic than it might be, and something that Daley makes evident when, after the story resolves itself in shooting and near madness, Judith takes a Caribbean holiday and, in the end, is too moral to lose herself to a man she meets, instead returning to her job, a virgin as it were, a bride of the DA’s office. It’s rare to see such morality laid out so plainly, and of course, Adler is not Irish Catholic and not a cop.

It’s not Daley’s best work, but it is well paced and detailed, and fascinating for its odd insight. And it has a feel of reality to it. It too was filmed, as a three-hour two-part TV movie, with great leads: Armand Asante as Joe Hearn, Beverly D’Angelo as his wife (Italians playing Irish) and Blair Brown as the DA, renamed to make her a WASP rather than Jewish. The screenplay is by Arthur Kopit which in itself is interesting, given the issues of morality and the way behaviour is repeated, as a way of coping. I haven’t seen it, but the supporting cast (Michael Lerner, Forest Whitaker, and Arliss Howard) is strong, and includes Ben Affleck as the Hearn’s baseball-playing son. I will be searching it out, not least to see what Larry Elikann, a TV and TV movie director, did with the kind of material Sidney Lumet would crush.

Hands Of A Stranger by Robert Daley

Signet Books, 1986, $4.50 ISBN0451145097

SIDNEY LUMET: CRIME, THEATRE, BRAVERMAN AND MOLLY

Tributes to Sidney Lumet have concentrated, and rightly so, on his major pictures and his knack for giving actors real chances to shine. But there is a danger of seeing him, particularly in light of 12 Angry Men being his first film and Network being arguably his best-known, and the one with the best sound-bite clip for obits, as a social realist, if not a satirist, or looking at his work along the lines of many of the other directors who came out of live television in the 1950s and went on to make the kind of earnest, feel-good work Hollywood loves to honour with Oscars (cf The King's Speech). Network has more of an edge than most such films, but at the same time it is far from Lumet's best work; it lacks subtlety, even when considered as a farcical black comedy, and like many of his films it resolves itself mechanically. But there's no question that Lumet deserves to be noted as a major director of crime films, as both 12 Angry Men and The Verdict have to be counted among the top courtroom thrillers, and they are by no means his best crime films.

And while it's important to recall Lumet's grounding in theatre (and the Actor's Studio) that background combined with his work in the early days of live television to produce a style which to many seemed utilitarian, albeit actor-friendly. Live TV offered most of the limitations of theatre (closed sets, limited casts) intensified by the audience's dependence on the single camera's point of view; a dependence which Lumet quickly turned into an asset with use of close-up and very quick cutting to create the illusion of action, or better, to draw the inner action out. Most of his best films let the actors work in extreme close-up, and those close-ups usually come quickly from ensemble shots that define the characters: once they take centre stage; think not just of Peter Finch in Network but say, Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men or Paul Newman in The Verdict. 12 Angry Men, released in 1957, was actually adapted from an original teleplay; of his next five films, four were adapted from plays. The Fugitive Kind (1960) is pure Tennessee Williams meets Actor's Studio, but Lumet injects Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) with an energy that transcends O'Neill's words; it remains one of the great filmed plays, and Katharine Hepburn one of O'Neill's greatest interpreters. I haven't seen Lumet's TV version of The Iceman Cometh (1960), with Jason Robards and a young Robert Redford, but it is now available on DVD.

It's interesting to watch him progress through filmed theatre: The Sea Gull (1968) with Vanessa Redgrave, James Mason and Simone Signoret, Robert Marasco's Child's Play (1972) again with Mason, Robert Preston and Beau Bridges, and later smaller productions with big-name actors: Peter Shaffer's Equus (1977) with Richard Burton and Ira Levin's Deathtrap (1982) with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, in what is as much a crime film as his Murder On The Orient Express (1974) is a filmed play.

Most of Lumet's best films are those which are set in the corrupt world of New York City politics and policing. Serpico (1973), which is the one people gravitate onto, was the entry point for Lumet, and part of that great revival of New York crime movies sparked by The French Connection. It may be the key film in Lumet's career: it's conducted via close-ups of method acting Al Pacino set against a paranoid world in which he never knows who among his cop colleagues and bosses and politicians is corrupt and a threat. His paranoia turns out to be fully justified. Although Lumet returned to that dark side of New York corruption repeatedly, it seems to me that Serpico and its urban paranoia, make it closer to films like Midnight Cowboy, and as such it and its successor Dog Day Afternoon (1975) are less connected with Lumet's later, more sombre, crime films than they are with Network; all three concerned with frustrations about the mores of society and its institutions, as revealed by almost insane paranoids.

The later crime and corruption films provided Lumet with a different theme, with a framework, and with the perfect way of blending the lead character back into the ensemble, getting away from Pacino and Finch. The best of the films I'd call his 'New York cycle' (and include Serpico and Dog Day if you insist), and maybe the best of all his films, was Prince Of The City (1981), with Treat Williams proving Lumet's skills with actors who never quite became stars. In fact, there are no stars, it's full of lesser-known New York actors, like Jerry Orbach, and the ensemble feel gives it a 'you are there' character (You Are There, hosted by Walter Cronkite, was a series Lumet worked on in the 1950s, which reenacted moments of history in docu-drama fashion). Prince was followed by The Verdict, which I'm tempted to include in this cycle even though its setting is Boston, and even though as a vehicle for one of Paul Newman's absolute best performances, it's closer in some ways to Serpico or indeed Network, though in this case Newman is brought back from the edge. Jack Warden leads a brilliant supporting cast, including James Mason and Edward Binns. If David Mamet's script becomes mechanical as his then-wife Lindsey Crouse cracks up on screen, Newman's rebirth carries it off. However the edge Mamet brings to the tempatations of evil is what is missing from the next two of Lumet's New York cycle: Q&A (1990), with Nick Nolte doing the Newman, Night Falls On Manhattan (1996), like Prince based on a Robert Daley book, and this time with Andy Garcia as Treat Williams/Newman and Richard Dreyfuss chanelling Jack Warden. Lumet's late-career return was marked by the last of this cycle, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), which is less concerned with institutional corruptions, and more with families, with fathers and sons, but which captures that feeling of uncertainty in relationships that ought to be certain. Or you could look at it as a serious version of the unfunny comedy Family Business, made almost 20 years earlier.

Many critics think of Lumet the way David Thomson described him: a solemn, often humourless adapter with no personal signature. Certainly he has made some clunkers, some in the 80s, more in the 90s, when his choice of material seemed flawed—and sometimes despite getting good performances from people you might not expect to deliver. But looking at some of his more overlooked films tells us something about Lumet's real strengths. Yes, if his sense of humour were better the black comedies might have more edge -- Fail Safe (1964), of course, for all its many strengths, which were never more apparent when George Clooney and Stephen Frears paid homage to it with their live TV version in America, will always be covershadowed by the satirical farce of Dr Strangelove-- but no one seems to remember Bye Bye Braverman (1968) which was very funny indeed. It probably reflects Lumet's upbringing with parents in Yiddish theatre, and indeed the bit I remember best from it is the excellent Godfrey Cambridge as a black, Yiddish-speaking, New York cabbie, and the brilliant Warden, whose career might have been sterling even if he'd never acted in anything but Lumet's movies.

Another film no one seems to recall is Lovin' Molly (1974), his next film after Serpico. It's an odd, almost urban adaptation of Larry McMurtry's excellent novel Leaving Cheyenne, one of his modern westerns like Horseman, Pass By (Hud) or The Last Picture Show which preceded his epic westerns. You might think Lumet was trying to cash in on the success of Peter Bogdanovich's film. The book is Jules et Jim set in Texas; two very different men in love with the somewhat difficult Molly, and is told in three parts, by each character in succession, at twenty year intervals. I call the film almost urban because the casting and indeed the settings do little to suggest the Texas background which is so rich in the novel. Beau Bridges is fine as the easy-going man, and Blythe Danner handles Molly with aplomb, especially if you don't try to believe she's Texan. The same applies in spades to Anthony Perkins. It's not quite the miscasting of Fear Strikes Out, because part of the story is the way his sensitive boy is a disappointment to his father, played with a bit more Texas ornery-ness by Ed Binns, who gets the great quote when explaining to his son (Perkins) why Molly isn't worth worrying about: 'A woman's love is like the morning dew: it's as just as apt to settle on a horse turd as a rose'.

I also have a lingering fondess for Daniel (1983) from EL Doctorow's fictionalised Rosenbergs, again partly for its New York casting, including Mandy Patinkin, Ed Asner, and Tovah Feldshuh. The Morning After (1986), with Jeff Bridges and a surprisingly good Jane Fonda, might be considered a near miss, but among the crime films it's hard to raise much affection for A Stranger Among Us (Melanie Griffith with the Hasidim should have made a great comedy), Guilty As Sin (Don Johnson can't repeat Hot Spot with Rebecca DeMornay) or Find Me Guilty with Vin Diesel. Luckily, Lumet's reputation doesn't have to rest with these films. In fact, it doesn't have to rest on his crime films at all, there is too much else to consider. But considered on his crime work alone, he is a major director.