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.