Three Films Make A Post: Get a Lift

Harry and Tonto (1974): Having lost his home to city development, and not really jibing with living with his son and his family, elderly New Yorker Harry (Art Carney) and his cat Tonto (Tonto) go on a road trip through the USA, encountering old flames and new experiences, living parts of life Harry never did before. Among other things, for this Paul Mazursky comedy is stuffed full with humanity and human encounters big and small, feelings simple and complicated, treating aging and old age and the loss that comes with it with as much dignity as humour, exhibiting an openness to different ways of seeing the world that seems to be utterly alien to today’s “you’re either for us or against us” world.

Mazursky creates (or sees) an America made out of very different people believing very different things that still express a shared humanity, never making a grand gesture out of this, but treating his characters kindly, even those that might not completely deserve it.

A Man Called Sledge (1970): This is one of two movies directed by actor Vic Morrow, though producer Dino DeLaurentiis apparently robbed him of the final cut, and there may or may not be material included shot by Giorgio Gentili instead. Despite an American cast, director and US money, in feeling and tone, this is a lot like an Italian Western, starting with its treatment of the Southwestern setting, over the “sweat and dirty shirts” production design, and certainly not ending in its pretty cynical view of the world. The film also includes a pretty hefty heist movie element and ends up as a Treasure of the Sierra Madre variation.

It features James Garner in one of his grimmer performances as the titular gunman Sledge, and moves through its set pieces of dust and mud with a degree of vigour. It never quite manages to reach the allegorical heft the director – at least going by the final act – clearly wants it to have, but then, I dislike allegories anyway. In the state it is in, it’s a solid enough movie, not as well directed as the best Italian westerns (nor as crazy as these can get) but entertaining enough for what it is.

Jiu Jitsu (2020): On the plot level, this thing directed by Dimitri Logothethis is a completely bizarre attempt to mix martial arts movie traditions with a Predator rip-off, plus the dreaded amnesiac protagonist (Alain Moussi is our hero, such as he is) syndrome. And Nicolas Cage is a crazy jiu jitsu swordsman veteran (jiu jitsu in this film has little to do with the actual martial art, by the way), so you can expect a couple of scenes of Cage flipping out entertainingly, doing his best in martial arts fight scenes against people who are actually good at this sort of thing, and doing an Obi Wan (just louder). Also appearing are action and martial arts film darlings like Tony Jaa and Frank Grillo, but they only get a couple of fights in. Moussi is good in his action sequences but pretty terrible at the whole acting thing. He was probably much cheaper than those members of the cast who can do both; but then, the script is so utterly bad at stringing the decent, sometimes fun, action scenes together, even a great actor might have not gotten through the affair with dignity intact.

Twilight (1998)

After having accidentally been shot in the leg by Mel (Reese Witherspoon), the wayward daughter of his clients, former Hollywood stars Jack (Gene Hackman) and Catherine Ames (Susan Sarandon), ex-cop turned private eye Harry Ross (Paul Newman) ended up moving into the couple’s mansion, living above their garage as an all-round hanger-on. Among the things that keep him there are a rather big crush on Catherine, who is playing up to it like the Hollywood pro she is, the loneliness of a man whose only child died years earlier and who doesn’t seem to have much in the way of actual friends, and a sense of being needed, even if it’s only in his mind. It certainly isn’t money keeping him there – Jack isn’t paying Harry anything.

Things begin to take a more interesting (in the probably made-up Chinese curse kind of way) turn for Harry when Jack asks him to deliver a package that looks rather a lot like the kind of blackmail money envelope you always see in detective movies to a woman. Soon, Harry’s wading through rather a lot of dead bodes, encounters shady people, reacquaints himself with old police partners (Stockard Channing and James Garner, mostly), and stumbles circles around a dark secret someone is very obviously willing to kill for.

Robert Benton’s film about elderly private eye Harry Ross taking on one last case, is a bit of a quiet joy, strolling through quite a few standard detective tropes, myths about Hollywood (this is a very LA-centric movie), and so on, while having thoughts about class, aging, guilt and responsibility. The film never presents its consciousness of older detective movies with ironic air quotation marks, but does use the structure of the genre to talk about the things that interest Benson, carefully shifting and twisting an element here or there without attempting to make any grand gestures of deconstructions. Which fits my tastes rather nicely, for I don’t believe this genre actually needs to be deconstructed or ironicized any further than it already has been in the past.

Benton is not a viscerally exciting director – even those scenes where bad stuff happens to people seem calm and subdued – and the film’s tempo is of a slowness appropriate to the age of its stars. Instead, he’s trusting in his wonderful cast of veterans, character actors and extremely competent young blood to understand and carry the ideas of his film, which they do clearly, calmly and to great emotional effect. Paul Newman has of course never been a terribly great actor, most of his better moments were based on presence and face, but he can rise to the occasion in the right movie under the right director, and Benson’s sensibilities seem to be just the right fit. Newman certainly has a couple of highly regarded detective roles on his CV, too, fitting into Benton’s work with genre history here very well.


I am sure this isn’t a film for everyone – I’ve seen critics complaining about the film being too slow (it certainly isn’t fast, but I don’t see why it would have to be), the plot being preposterously constructed (as if that weren’t exactly the kind of plotting you’d expect of a hard-boiled detective movie), and so on and so forth – but if you’re like me, Twilight might be just the right paean to the private detective as moral arbiter (or knight in shining armour, Mr Chandler, if you insist), Dark Los Angeles, and shadows of the past that certainly do not become lighter the older you get.

Skin Game (1971)

A few years before the US Civil War (going by the appearance of John Brown, I’d go with 1858), conmen Jason (Louis Gossett Jr.) – a free black man from New Jersey - and Quincy (James Garner) are touring the slave states in the South. Quincy plays the slave owner hitting on hard times who has to sell off his valuable and deeply harmless slave – Jason - quickly and cheaply. Once the deal is done and Jason locked away somewhere for the night, Quincy returns and frees his friend to repeat the same deal again in the next town.

The con is coming to an end though – the duo has played the trick in most every small town in the South by now, and there’s too much risk involved in bigger towns. Additionally, Jason is really growing tired of the whole affair, what with his slowly awakening political consciousness and the little fact that he’s taking the much higher risk of the two partners here. Quincy does convince Jason to do their thing one last time (and after that another last time), though, and as it goes with one last times, things go so wrong, they’ll not only find all their money stolen by con-woman and thief Ginger (Susan Clark) but their next attempt to get some pocket money lands Quincy in jail. Even worse, Jason finds himself an actual slave in the hands of the – appropriately – vile slave hunter Plunkett (Edward Asner). At least there’s honour among thieves, and Ginger might just come back and help Quincy out; and say what you will about Quincy, but he’s certainly not someone who lets what we can only assume to be his only actual friend end his life as a slave. Jason for his part clearly won’t just lie down and take it either.

The thing that’s most interesting about (as far as I know) otherwise undistinguished director Paul Bogart’s Skin Game is how well it manages to make a comedy about something that’s up there with murder and rape as one of the least funny things I can imagine, slavery. It does this without either pulling its punches when it comes to its depiction of slavery (this depiction is of course far less brutal than reality but that’s pretty much a given with anything you put on screen), or falling into the trap of pretending that slavery is funny.

A large part of the film’s humour is based on the joy we derive from seeing rich, powerful, and morally disgusting people put in their place by charming rogues, as evidenced by basically all caper movies ever made, or everyone’s favourite running gag in the Zatoichi films when our blind masseur does the trick that will only hurt the kind of people who’d cheat on a blind man gambling. There’s nothing nicer than seeing bad people get their comeuppance, and there are few people as deserving of said comeuppance than the slave owners. The film is too thoughtful to pretend its protagonists are some sort of Western (Southern?) Robin Hoods, though; they’re really doing what they do for their own gain, and while they are not out to hurt harmless people (much) they aren’t actually helping anyone either. Jason, as the one much more directly hit by the implications of what’s going on around them, does slowly come around to something more altruistic, but he only really takes care of somebody other than himself, and realizes that this skin game isn’t a game for the slaves around them, after he’s become a slave himself and is quite literally feeling the whip.

As you know, Jim, playing the sort of conman playing the games our characters here do was what James Garner spent much of his career on, and his performance is as perfect as they get. There’s the slightly smarmy charm, the curious core of what could be authentic friendliness, the willingness to fuck everyone over, but only up to a point, and the often misguided cleverness that may lead him into a good plan as much as into the kind of trouble you can get into when you’re congratulating yourself for your own cleverness too much – all played up to just the right amount, until you can’t help but like Quincy despite everything. Which, pretty much, is how Jason feels about him too.

Speaking of Jason, turns out that Louis Gossett Jr. is able to play the conman to the same level and style as Garner can, but with some really effective hints of fear, and a bit more sense than Quincy shows with all his cleverness. Gossett also handles the moments when Jason realizes a bit more about how the world around him works for the people who actually have to live in it wonderfully, developing a sense of responsibility his friend will never have, and sticking with it, without things getting preachy. And in the end, while Jason can’t change the world, he decides to save some people and take care of them. Which probably is the best you can do when you don’t want to be maimed by the wheel of history, the film suggests.

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