The Heist

All one needs to make a film, Jean-Luc Godard has famously said, is a girl and a gun, but he might have added something or someone from whom the lady can steal. Because, as Film Forum’s sweeping new series devoted to the heist picture demonstrates, of all the fantasies we go to the movies to indulge in, perhaps none is more elemental than our dream of the big score.

The cinema of theft has been with us from day one, or at least since The Great Train Robbery (1903), but it wasn’t until the Eisenhower era that the modern heist picture took shape. Against the economic growth and sunny optimism of that period, films like John Huston’s b&w The Asphalt Jungle and Richard Fleischer’s Technicolored Violent Saturday gave voice to the workaday futility of those who felt left behind, as well as to those veterans repressing their acquired wartime savagery—such, Brian Keith’s PTSD victim, who in Phil Karlson’s 5 Against the House, plots to get his piece of the pie by filching from a Reno casino.

By 1955, when Jean-Pierre Melville made Bob le flambeur, the quintessential aging-crook-with-one-last-job-to-pull-before-retiring picture, the heist tradition had grown both more stylish and more pessimistic. The French were copying our noirs, as they called them, and we began to copy theirs—a cross-cultural dialogue that inspired the work of several auteurs in Film Forum’s series, including Jules Dassin, a blacklisted American director who shot and co-starred in the classic jewel caper, Rififi, while exiled in France; Godard himself (Band of Outsiders), who had a thing for Hollywood gangster movies; and, more recently, Quentin Tarantino. Mired in their own respective postwar doldrums, French and American audiences must have felt a shared affinity for the safe-crackers and the fences, the gunmen and the getaway drivers, all the loners and losers, who populate these movies.

Melville, above all, devoted the remainder of his career to character studies of supercool thugs, and Film Forum will be screening his final pictures, Le Cercle Rouge(1970) and Un Flic (1972). Both were vehicles for star Alain Delon—who along with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Lino Ventura, Harvey Keitel, and Sterling Hayden, is an axiom of the series—but Un Flic is notable mostly for what may be the sloppiest use ever of rear-screen projections, not to mention a comically shoddy action sequence involving a model train and toy helicopter.

Stateside, though, the 1960s was a time when the heist tradition petered, arguably because political engagement was considered cooler than alienation. The most iconic crime picture of that decade—Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)—was not so much a heist movie as a pander to the counterculture, and it is correctly missing from this series. But when our economy hit the skids again in the 1970s, amid the disillusionment of Watergate and Vietnam, the heist picture enjoyed a renaissance, as evidenced by Film Forum’s inclusion of Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes (1971), Don Siegel’s bewilderingly overlooked Charley Varrick (1973), and Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 (1974).

In some sense, the heist picture found its fullest expression in Paul Schrader’s bleak Blue Collar (1978), the very title of which foregrounds the class struggle that was always at the heart of this tradition. (The original Steve McQueen Thomas Crown Affair , the story of a tycoon who robs for kicks, is the outlier of the series and a fraud.) In Blue Collar , a trio of disgruntled Detroit auto workers—Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, and Richard Pryor, in a rare dramatic performance—are caught between late-night visits from the taxman and an F.B.I. agent who wants them to rat out their corrupt union bosses. They decide to steal not from the factory but from the union coffers, only to find themselves having fucked with the wrong racket.

In the immediate years following Blue Collar , the heist movie once again lost its cultural traction. The 1980s—with their patriotism and capitalist imperatives—were a particularly fallow period, represented in Film Forum’s series by a mere two titles, Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) and Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1981). Bruce Goldstein’s programming is as creative and knowledgeable as ever, but for the post-1970s era he might also have included The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and the escape-from-New York cult favorite Quick Change (1990).

Of course, Tarantino was able to revive our interest in the heist picture during the 1990s, but Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown are conspicuous for their throwback wardrobes and soundtracks, their knowing dependence on our familiarity with the milieux of Melville and Godard and Huston and Kubrick. Same goes for the neglected Dead Presidents (1995) and for Bottle Rocket (1998), both of which might also have fit into this series.

Some pretty decent new heist pictures have appeared in the aughts—Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You Are Dead (2007) and last year’s little-seen Armored—but ask anyone what late model heist pictures they’ve seen and they are most likely to cite Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean‘s trilogy. Now, Soderbergh’s fourth feature, The Underneath (1995), is an underrated heist movie—yet another title I wish could be included here—but the smug, triumphant Ocean ’s franchise represents, for now, the bottoming-out of this once popular subgenre. With their happy endings and slaps on the back and jobs well done, the Ocean ’s films betray the one core maxim we have all learned from our years of viewing heist pictures: If the big score sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Octoer 1-21 at Film Forum

Easy A
Directed by Will Gluck

Do kids today even know who John Cusack is? I sure hope not, since they’re more likely to have seen Hot Tub Time Machine than Say Anything . And yet it’s a question I have to ask apropos of Easy A, a film ostensibly about the sexting generation but so thick with allusions to the youth culture of the 1980s it actually seems pitched to the Gen X parents in the audience.

In Easy A , Emma Stone (Superbad, The House Bunny, Zombieland ), a young actress whose husky voice is as preternatural as her timing, finally gets her star turn. She’s Olive, an ironical teen bored enough with unpopularity so as to spread rumors about herself with the goal of acquiring a reputation. It’s a nasty little premise—in one early scene, Olive pretends to bang a classmate’s brains out at a kegger—and Will Gluck, who directed last year’s underrated and equally raunchy Fired Up! , runs with it. He’s abetted capably by Stone holding her own against Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci as her oversharing, totally with-it California cool parents.

But as satires of born again piety go, Easy A is no Saved! Which is another way of saying that Amanda Bynes, cast as Olive’s New Testament-toting nemesis, has nothing on Mandy Moore. In striving to be a throwback John Hughes clone, an update of The Scarlett Letter , and tres Juno , all at once, Easy A is too broad in its humor, too reliant on its quotation of other films, to have an identity of its own.

Opens September 17

An offbeat drama about a woman knocked up, filmed while its lead actress was herself preggers, Hideaway, François Ozon’s typically idiosyncratic new feature, concerns a young Parisienne named Mousse (Isabelle Carré), who is utterly nonchalant about, even indifferent to, the child growing inside her.

Mousse learns she’s got one in the oven only after awakening in a hospital from a coma having survived the heroin bender that killed her boyfriend. Hideaway (Le refuge is the original title) takes place during the summer weeks late in her term when Mousse, staying by herself at her parent’s beach house, receives a visit from Paul, her dead lover’s brother (played by Francophone pop chanteur Louis-Ronan Choisy). Naturally, the two develop a friendship, but Paul, younger and for obvious reasons less encumbered, still indulges in the nightlife Mousse needs to give up.

Hideaway‘s gimmick is not unprecedented—Demi Moore was carrying Rumer during the filming of 1988’s otherwise forgettable The Seventh Sign, for starters—but as on-screen expectant mothers go, Carré’s performance is. Ozon, shooting in rich saturated HD for the first time, encourages us to take in the actress’s lovely distended belly, her rounded face, her appealingly swollen feet. And we’re not alone in our admiration—to Mousse’s annoyance, strangers keep approaching her to tell her how beautiful she looks, and in one case to pick her up. Ozon has consciously objectified his protagonist, but it’s to remind us that she’s unknowable, that we don’t really understand what’s going on inside her head.

Opens September 10

Mesrine: Killer Instinct
Directed by Jean-Francois Richet

Mesrine: Killer Instinct—the first installment of a two-part biopic about the notorious bank robber and jailbreaker—debuted at Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series in 2009, along with the concurrently shot sequel, Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1. (The latter will be released here next month). Together they make for a stylish, distinctly Gallic take on the American gangster picture.

In Killer Instinct, future P.E. Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), discharged from the Algerian War, returns to the cool Paris of Breathless and Bob le flambeur. Though Mesrine’s father has arranged a steady position for him, he’s drawn instead to the underworld, and is soon doing heists and hits for a mobster (Gerard Depardieu, thriving in a small but stately role).

In these early scenes especially, director Jean-Francois Richet (Assault on Precinct 13) apes his share of Scorsese—the gliding Steadicam shots, the garish wardrobes, the ironic soundtrack. Much the way Goodfellas and Gangs of New York portrayed violence as a dimension of the American character, Killer Instinct posits crime as inextricable from French identity. Mesrine’s proclaimed political convictions were mostly horseshit (e.g. his support for Quebecois secessionism), but as Richet shows, his wartime service and xenophobia are crucial to understanding the development of his criminal mind.

As an epic about a self-styled insurgent from the middle class, the Mesrine cycle bears more than a passing resemblance to Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che. But whereas Soderbergh’s films were joyless, Killer Instinct (if not the darker Public Enemy No. 1) has the lightness, the flair, and the sense of humor of an old-fashioned swashbuckler. Near the end of Killer Instinct, Mesrine breaks into a prison he has recently escaped. Ostensibly he’s there to rescue some buddies, but the impish look in Cassel’s eye suggests he’s doing it because he can.

Opens August 27

The Last Exorcism
Directed by Daniel Stamm

In the summer of 1977, four years after its predecessor had landed with the impact of a meteor on American culture, John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic floundered at the box office so badly that it looked like curtains for the entire franchise. But instead, since 1990, there has been one more official sequel, two versions of the same prequel by different directors, various low budget knockoffs, and 2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose
, a combination Exorcist rip-off and courtroom drama. And this despite the fact that, as the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin
has pointed out, “the only theatrical release of an Exorcist movie that’s made any money since 1973 was 2000’s re-release of William Friedkin’s original.” Thirty-seven years on, The Exorcist endures, not because it’s the flagship of a proud brand but because it’s the ur-text for a whole subgenre, the Nosferatu of what we can now safely call exorcist movies with a lowercase e.

Directed by Daniel Stamm, and produced by Eli Roth, The Last Exorcism is a respectful but forward-looking attempt to rewrite Friedkin‘s rules, to establish new mythologies. Jettisoned for the first time ever in an exorcist movie are Catholics, absentee parents, and distracting subplots set in Africa and the Middle East. Gone are the celibate priests. And while knowing winks are made both to the Friedkin (“Catholics get all the press because they got the movie”) and to the underrated Boorman (drawings of a man on fire that foreshadow later events), the style and updated mockumentary conceit are very post-Blair Witch. (So is the movie’s killer viral marketing campaign utilising Chatroulette.)

A Baton Rouge-based Elmer Gantry (Big Love‘s Patrick Fabian) plans to come clean and expose the rampant fraud in the exorcism trade. He invites an indie documentary crew—one camerawoman, and one sound man who, ingeniously, we never see—to shoot his final sham performance in a backwoods hamlet that in production design terms is three parts Flannery O’Connor, one part Deliverance. Zoltan Honti’s handheld camera can be unnecessarily jerky in places (it’s an amateur documentary, we get it) but he’s skilled at light and shadow and makes beautiful impressionistic use of video’s blurry attributes during The Last Exorcism‘s climactic nighttime bonfire scene.

Younger horror fans weaned on the Roth oeuvre or the Saw series may be disappointed by The Last Exorcism‘s relative visual reticence, its frequent refusal to show us too much too soon, although there will be blood soon enough. Anchored by judicious pacing and strong performances (in addition to Fabian, Ashley Bell stands out as the requisite demonically possessed teenage girl), The Last Exorcism isn’t so much groundbreaking as classical. And that’s a compliment.

Opens August 27

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
Directed by Brigitte Berman

I might as well cop to it: I have been known to read Playboy, though for the articles of course. Playboy was once among the most literate and leftist of general interest magazines, a combination New Yorker and Harper’s, but with boobs. But beginning around 1980—with the election of Ronald Reagan, the coincident sudden encroachment upon the centerfold of fake breasts, and the murder of film actress and reigning Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten— the glossy began the long decline from which it has never recovered. Today, Playboy Enterprises is rumored to be for sale.

Too bad then that Stratten’s death gets short shrift in Brigitte Berman’s oft-fascinating documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel. Too bad also that only twenty minutes of the film’s two-hour runtime are alloted to the years since 1971, when the Chicagoan flew west on Big Bunny, his black stretch DC-9, and set up shop in a Holmby Hills mansion-cum-zoo and grotto.

Granted wide access to her subject beyond the typical one-on-one interview, Berman presents us with artifacts of juvenilia, snapshots of high school reunions, even home movies of Hef’s 50th birthday party (there’s Warren, there’s Jack) and 1989 wedding to his second wife, complete with paparazzi helicopters circling audibly overhead. But this access, though it’s what makes Playboy, Activist and Rebel so compelling, had to have come with strings attached, and in any event, Berman’s portrait of America’s greatest pornographer never risks making him look bad, except maybe for a brief mention of a one-time addiction to Dexedrine, though that too is explained away as the function of a workaholic spirit.

Don’t get me wrong, the lord of bunnies deserves all the props this film throws his way. In print and practice, Hefner was an early advocate for civil rights, gay rights, contraceptive rights, a woman’s right to choose, and the legalization of marijuana. Dude even received an award from the NAACP, and how many white guys his age—he’s now 84—can say that? But Hefner was also a pied piper of capitalist hedonism and male prerogatives. He filled Playboy‘s pages with bachelor pads and hi-fis, sports cars and single malt Scotch. And naked women, lots of naked women. (“Girls” is what Hefner called them, as one of his critics points out.) It was a lifestyle hippie radicals and Mad Men alike could aspire to.

Yet contradictions like these in the “Playboy Philosophy” (the title of a regular feature in the magazine) go unacknowledged in Playboy, Activist and Rebel, along with any serious consideration of Hef’s personal, political, or professional failings. Berman seems content to let him off the hook with ribbing from longtime secretary Mary O’Connor and some rather feeble attacks from dated feminist Susan Brownmiller, who tut-tuts the “misogynist” in vintage Dick Cavett episodes and then all over again in recent conversation.

Berman’s interviewees, with the exception of Jenny McCarthy, are mostly out-of-touch Baby Boomers like Brownmiller, and in some cases even older. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this-—nd while the director, to her credit, elicits a trove of inadvertent money quotes from Pat Boone, Gene Simmons, and George Lucas (“I create fantasies, Hef creates fantasies”)—Hefner the man would have benefited from the critique and praise of voices younger than Tonys Curtis and Bennett. Because Berman’s senior cast only serves to remind us of the codger we know from The Girls Next Door, not the jet-set rake of old. Sad but true, a giant of the print era is hanging on at the margins, harmless and slow as the medium that made him famous.

Opens July 30