L.A. Takedown

It says something about the kind of juice Michael Mann had within the industry in 1989 that he was able to create – and get on television – a rough draft for a film he would make six years later. He wrote an early draft of what would become Heat in 1979 that was 180 pages and based on real people he knew both personally and by reputation in Chicago. Ten years later, he cut the screenplay down to 110 pages and raised the financing himself so that he owned the rights to the material. The result was a made-for-television movie entitled L.A. Takedown, a cat-and-mouse story between a career criminal and a dedicated police detective that aired on NBC on August 27, 1989 at 9 p.m.
 
The origins for the project were based in large part from the experiences of a police officer and an old friend of Mann's, Chuck Adamson, who had been chasing down a high-line thief named Neil McCauley in Chicago in 1963. Mann wrote another draft after making Thief (1981) with no intention of directing it himself. In the late 1980s, he tried to produce the film several times and offered it to his friend and fellow filmmaker Walter Hill but he turned it down. Mann was still not satisfied with the script, which had developed the character of McCauley but who still needed work. It also lacked an ending.
 
Early on, L.A. Takedown follows the plot to Heat beat-for-beat with Scott Plank playing Los Angeles Robbery-Homicide division cop Vincent Hanna and Alex McArthur as Patrick McLaren (Neil McCauley in Heat), the veteran thief. It is fascinating to see the different choices that Mann makes, such as the tweaks in dialogue or in the casting of certain characters. For example, Xander Berkley, a fantastic actor in his own right, is cast as Waingro, the loose cannon McLaren hires to help his crew knock over an armored truck. The actor plays him initially as a jittery psychopath, only to later settle on a drugged-out look, whereas in Heat, Kevin Gage brings a scary, simmering intensity to the role – a stone-cold serial killer and agent of chaos.

The most interesting casting in the movie is Hanna’s team, which includes Richard Chaves (Predator), Michael Rooker (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), and Daniel Baldwin (John Carpenter’s Vampires). Unfortunately, they hardly get any screen time and therefore make little impact. Plank is okay as Hanna but lacks the confident swagger that Al Pacino brought to the role. That being said, he does have a nice moment with his estranged wife, Lillian (Ely Pouget), near the end, after McLaren is killed, where he admits that he loves her but isn’t going to change.
 
L.A. Takedown suffers most in the casting of McLaren and his crew. McArthur, eerily chilling in William Friedkin’s Rampage (1987) as a sadistic serial killer, lacks the gravitas of Robert De Niro. The same can be said for the barely seen Peter Dobson (The Frighteners) as Chris Sheherlis who comes off as a glorified extra in this incarnation, whereas the role was expanded significantly in Heat with Val Kilmer taking over the character. Vincent Guastaferro (NYPD Blue) plays Michael Cerrito and lacks the intensity that Tom Sizemore brought to the part. They are simply not convincing as a team of elite thieves but then, they aren’t given the screen-time.
 
The scene where Hanna and McLaren meet face-to-face is fine but it makes one realize just how much De Niro and Pacino brought to the table – nuance and subtlety –that is lacking from McArthur and Plank. There is stiffness to the line readings from both actors as they fail to bring Mann’s words to life, summing up what’s going on in this movie. The inflexible actors are cast in the lead roles and the actors you’d like to see cut loose, like Rooker, are wasted in nothing roles. The famous bank robbery shoot-out is still exciting to watch and one of the few times L.A. Takedown comes thrillingly to life. It lacks the visceral immediacy of Heat but does have some cool shots, such a McLaren and Sheherlis running back into the bank after Hanna and his team show-up, with them chasing the camera in a slick tracking shot.

There are some enjoyable bits of business, such as a montage of Hanna working the streets of L.A., asking around about McLaren and his crew. Mann gives us a brief slice of the city’s night life via quick, broad strokes. Perhaps what is most striking about L.A. Takedown is how it doesn’t feel or look like a Mann production. While Ron Garcia’s (Twin Peaks) cinematography is just fine, it lacks the widescreen mastery of Dante Spinotti’s work in Heat. The T.V. movie’s 1.33:1 aspect ratio certainly doesn’t do it any favors, giving it a boxed-in feel as opposed to Heat’s 2.39:1 aspect ratio, which opens everything up and gives the film more of an epic feel. The lack of Mann’s distinctive touch may also be due to the incredibly fast shoot – uncharacteristic for the methodical filmmaker – with only ten days of pre-production and 19 days of shooting. In comparison, Heat had a six-month pre-production period and a 107-day shooting schedule.
 
At the end of the day, L.A. Takedown is a fascinating curio, nothing more – a stripped down, rough draft. Gone is Shiherlis’ subplot, so is the bungled precious metals sting, the subplot involving Hanna's stepdaughter, and McLaren dies differently and less satisfyingly. Due to the short running time, everything feels condensed while Heat’s expanded running time allows the story to breathe and provide nuanced characterization, thereby shedding more light on the motivations for the characters’ actions. Heat shows how more time, millions of dollars and a talented, star-studded cast can make a difference. Afterwards, Mann had a much clearer idea of how he wanted Heat to be structured. More importantly, he also figured out the ending. In 1994, Mann showed producer Art Linson another draft of Heat over lunch and told him that he was thinking of updating it. The producer read it, loved it, and agreed to make the film, giving ‘90s cinema what would prove to be a timeless heist classic.

Desperado

In 1992, independent filmmaker Robert Rodriguez made his feature film debut with El Mariachi, a $7,000 action movie that showed a stylistic flare beyond its meager budget. It made the rounds at several film festivals with a lot of media attention on the self-assured young man and the incredible story of how he made a movie for so little money. Naturally, Hollywood came calling and initially Rodriguez resisted, making Roadracers (1994) for the Showtime cable television channel after his deal with Sony Columbia Pictures was put on the back burner due to scandal. He eventually made Desperado (1995), a sequel to Mariachi that not only saw him working with a significantly larger budget of $7 million, but with movie star Antonio Banderas.

The film begins almost as if we are in a Quentin Tarantino film with a grungy gringo (Steve Buscemi) walking into a Mexican bar. He proceeds to tell a story about how he witnessed a massacre in a similar bar by a mysterious man. Rodriguez cuts back and forth between the storyteller and what happened at the bar to the strains of “Jack the Ripper” by Link Wray.
 
What is immediately clear from this opening scene is how far Rodriguez has progressed as a filmmaker. The screenplay is well-written as Steve Buscemi delivers his hilarious monologue with gusto. The director’s technique has also gotten better as the opening gunfight is stylishly choreographed with the El Mariachi (Banderas) dispatching bad guys like something out of a 1980s action movie as a shotgun blast sends a goon hurtling through the air.

It is interesting to note that Rodriguez not only plays up the mythic quality of El Mariachi, introducing him walking into a bar in slow motion in the shadows so you never get a good look at his face, but also has fun with the character as well, showing him playing with his band in a nightclub over the opening credits. El Mariachi even has time to stop a bar fight by striking a patron with his guitar without missing a beat. Rodriguez reveals that this sequence is a dream as we see the villain from El Mariachi appear in the nightclub and we flashback to the end of that film.
 
Another façade is stripped away when it is revealed that the story Buscemi’s character told was exaggerated for effect – he’s El Mariachi’s hype man. Armed with a guitar case full of weapons, the musician cum killer is working his way through the Mexican criminal underworld to find and kill Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), the man responsible for his wife’s death. Not surprisingly, the crime lord is surrounded by an army of flunkies, chief among them Navajas (Danny Trejo), a man armed with a seemingly endless supply of throwing knives. El Mariachi is aided in his quest for revenge by Carolina (Salma Hayek), the beautiful local bookstore owner who patches him up whenever he’s wounded (which is often).
 
In the film’s second action sequence, Rodriguez really cuts loose as he transforms Banderas into a two-gun-toting action hero in the tradition of John Woo’s heroic bloodshed films. Apart from doves flying in slow motion, it features many of Woo’s trademark action flourishes but with a cheeky sense of humor as El Mariachi and the last man left search frantically for a weapon that has bullets before he eventually breaks the man’s neck to the strains of “Strange Face of Love” by Tito & Tarantula. It is a beautifully choreographed action sequence that demonstrates his skill as not just a director but as an editor as he times the cuts to the rhythm of the action. When it comes to action editing is everything and Rodriguez understands this intuitively.

Rodriguez cast Antonio Banderas at just the right time in their respective careers. The former needed to cast a movie star and the latter was looking for a change of pace having just come off the big budget adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (1994). Banderas not only has the charisma to carry the film, he also demonstrates an ability to go from dramatic moments to comedic ones with ease. He also showed his ability to handle action, transforming himself into a credible action star. The actor also has wonderful chemistry with Salma Hayek as their characters develop a romantic relationship over the course of the film.
 
Desperado was Hayek’s first mainstream, Hollywood role, cast by Rodriguez against the wishes of the studio. The impossibly beautiful actor holds her own against the likes of Banderas as she demonstrates a light, comic touch and dramatic chops when Carolina explains why she is complicit with Bucho’s dealings with the town, aiding and abetting his drug operation in order to survive. She forces El Mariachi to realize that his desire for revenge is not the only reason to take out Bucho – it would also free the town of his tyrannical hold on it. He is a tragic hero and she gives him a reason to keep on going after he fulfills his goal.
 
Desperado would mark the beginning of a long-running collaboration with several actors, including Banderas, Hayek, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, and Quintin Tarantino, who he met on the film festival circuit while promoting El Mariachi. He made Tarantino the lead on his next film, From Dusk Till Dawn and has often featured him in cameos where he delivers a monologue and is then killed off in gruesome fashion. Marin and Trejo make quite an impression with the former playing a grinning bartender that meets his fate at the hands of the El Mariachi and the latter in a silent role as a deadly assassin brought in to take out the film’s hero but in an unexpected twist is taken out prematurely through a comic case of mistaken identity.

 After the success of El Mariachi, Rodriguez was eager to make a sequel and capitalize on his new deal with Sony Columbia but the studio put on the brakes while they dealt with the Heidi Fleiss scandal that broke in early summer of 1993. She was a high-end madam that facilitated call girls to several of Hollywood’s elite and a list of her clients, which included at least two studio executives, appeared in the press. At the time, producers Carlos Gallardo (who starred in El Mariachi), Elizabeth Avellan, and line producer Bill Borden had already begun pre-production and realized that the film was on hold until the scandal blew over. Never one to be idle, Rodriguez shifted gears and accepted another gig making Roadracers that he shot in less than two weeks in January 1994 for $1 million. It was his first Hollywood production and working with a union crew. He was struck by how wasteful and slow studio productions were as he was used to collaborating with a small, hand-picked crew that worked fast. It would give him a taste of what he would be in store for when working for Sony.
 
By the summer of 1994, Rodriguez finally got the greenlight to make his Mariachi sequel, then known as The Return of El Mariachi but soon changed to Pistolero during production and eventually became Desperado. Ironically, this was due in large part to his future employer – Bob and Harvey Weinstein – who approached Sony executive Stephanie Allain at the Cannes Film Festival telling her what a fan they were of El Mariachi and how they would be more than happy to make the sequel with Rodriguez.
 
The studio wanted a name actor cast in the lead role and Allain suggested Antonio Banderas but Rodriguez was hesitant to cast a non-Mexican in the part. Undeterred, Allain showed Banderas El Mariachi and he loved it. He said, “I thought, ‘This guy has incredible energy.’ It reminds me of the first films I did with (Pedro) Almodovar. Not in his style, of course. But it’s like, you know, the same thing, when you don’t have any money and you’re working outside the studio, with no trailer, no nothing, just waiting on the corner to do your shot. And I thought, ‘Wow! That’s the kind of cinema I would like to do again.’” She told Rodriguez this and he agreed to meet with the actor.

Rodriguez and Avellan saw a rerun of Salma Hayek on comedian Paul Rodriguez’s talk show from 1992 where she talked about changing Hollywood’s refusal to cast Latina actresses. The next day, Avellan called her and asked her to audition for the female lead in Desperado. In addition to competing with many other Latina actresses, auditioning many times and performing several screen tests, she was up against the likes of Cameron Diaz who the studio liked as, according to Hayek, “her last name was Diaz, so they said she can be Mexican.” Originally Raul Julia had been cast as Bucho and Rodriguez had scheduled principal photography around his availability but when he suffered a stroke that preceded his death, he was replaced by Argentine actor Joaquim de Almeida.
 
On Desperado, Rodriguez was working with a significantly larger budget of $7 million and returned to Acuna, Mexico to use the same locations he had on his first film. It was a challenging shoot with cast and crew members staying on both sides of the border and filming equipment shipped in from both Mexico and the United States. During the first week of shooting the studio was not happy and threatened to fire people until Rodriguez showed them dailies and cut together a couple of trailers to give them a taste of what he was doing.
 
In addition, the studio insisted on using department heads and imposed a more traditional studio structure, which Rodriguez balked at having been used to working with a small crew and doing a lot of the different jobs himself. Gary Martin, head of physical production at Sony, was being told exaggerated stories that the filmmaker was “throwing a lot of tantrums and kicking cameras” on location with key crew members, such as director of photography Guillermo Navarro, ready to quit. Avellan claims that Borden was the source for a lot of disinformation and discord, creating problems on the set. Borden even played Gallardo, Avellan and Rodriguez against each other. When Allain called Avellan and asked her about these rumors she responded that everything was fine and defended Rodriguez. Avellan told Rodriguez about Borden and they decided to keep a close eye on him.

Hayek remembers that the film’s steamy sex scene her character has with El Mariachi was not in the screenplay and was added after a screen test. To try and make her as comfortable as possible, Rodriguez filmed it on a closed set with just him, Avellan and Banderas but Hayek found it a difficult experience nonetheless.

Martin met with Avellan and told her that Rodriguez would not be editing the film himself as he had done on El Mariachi and told her, “Honey, just like when you go to a beauty parlor and somebody does your nails because they specialize in that and somebody does your color because they specialize in that, it’s the same in the movie business.” Insulted, Avellan said nothing in order to keep the peace between Rodriguez and the studio but inside she was fuming. Post-production began in November 1994 in Los Angeles with the studio finally allowing Rodriguez to edit his own film but only if he did it there where they could keep an eye on him. Rodriguez said:
 
“They just didn’t want me to have that much control, but they let me do it. That was a big mistake because it sets another precedent. If my next movie hadn’t been Desperado, if I had done one of the really big budget movies they were offering me, I would have lost that control.”
 
His studio experience on Desperado soured the filmmaker on ever working in Hollywood and convinced him to put down permanent roots in Austin. With his deal done with Sony, he made his next film, From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), for indie film darlings Miramax who gave the kind of creative freedom he craved.

Desperado garnered mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars and wrote, "Rodriguez has a lively color sense, a good feel for composition and a willingness to put the camera anywhere it can possibly go. What happens looks terrific. Now if he can harness that technical facility to a screenplay that's more story than setup, he might really have something." In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Overdependence on violence also marginalizes Desperado as a gun-slinging novelty item, instead of the broader effort toward which this talented young director might have aspired. It's still clear that Mr. Rodriguez has a talent for fancy directorial footwork and that his movie has its fiery moments. But not even a Mariachi in Mr. Banderas's league can get by on looks alone."
 
In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "if you’re not a fan of huge explosions, oversized weapons and people getting sliced and diced in all kinds of ways, Desperado doesn’t have a lot more to offer." The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote about Rodriguez's jump from indie film to his big budget remake/sequel: "the commercial transition has been remarkably successful. This is primarily thanks to Rodriguez, who not only retains the original movie's kinetic flair, but takes it further. Finally, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman gave it a "B" rating and wrote, "The dawdling pace has us lingering a little too much over Desperado‘s primitive human dimensions. Still, when Rodriguez unleashes a scene with Banderas leaping backwards from one building to the next, or with a couple of mariachis launching rockets from their guitar cases, he’s a true corker. The action, in all its demonically outlandish wit, is its own show."
 
At the time, Desperado was a breath of fresh air in the action genre by starring a Latino actor with a predominantly Latino cast that also had universal appeal. In many respects it is a modern western with El Mariachi as a lone gunslinger that walks into town and rids it of the bad guys. Much like one of his cinematic heroes, director George Miller, Rodriguez draws inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces with El Mariachi as this mythic figure that makes the hero’s journey to redemption. In this respect, Desperado is part Mad Max myth-making and part John Woo action melodrama. Rodriguez gives this template a novel spin by having his film showcase Latino culture and present a hero that can be celebrated, which was largely absent in the mainstream at the time. It can’t be stated enough how significant an achievement that was back then or even now for that matter. Like, Evil Dead 2, Desperado is the rare successful remake/sequel hybrid that manages to not alienate fans of the first film while appealing to people who haven’t seen it. The film demonstrated that Rodriguez could work with bigger budgets and movie stars, paving the way for a fantastic career that he made his way.
 

 
SOURCES
 
Frederick, Candice. “’The Studio Wanted Cameron Diaz’: Salma Hayek on the Role that Changed Her Life.” Elle. October 15, 2020.

Leydon, Joe. “Cranking up the Volume.” Los Angeles Times. November 27, 1994.
 
Macor, Allison. Chainsaws, Slackers and Spy Kids: 30 Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas. University of Texas Press. 2010.
 
Martinez, Jose and Christian Divine. “Hispanic Blood: An Interview with Robert Rodriguez.” Creative Screenwriting. December 21, 2015

The Steel Helmet

 “The only way to bring the real experience of war to a movie audience is by firing a machine gun above their heads during the screening.” – Samuel Fuller

Hopefully, most of us will never have to experience what it is like to fight in a war. It is a horrifying; dehumanizing experience and the best cinema can do is approximate it. If the filmmaker has seen combat, such as Oliver Stone, it can give the film an authenticity that it might not have otherwise. This is the case with Samuel Fuller, who served as an American infantryman in World War II, and applied his experiences into several of his films, most notably The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Big Red One (1980), however the former was his first war film and had the distinction of being the first one made about the Korean War while it was still ongoing. It was unflinchingly honest in depicting the war and drew criticism from some as “anti-American,” but was widely praised by most critics. It was also a financial success, paving the way for a Hollywood studio contract for Fuller.
 
The filmmaker kicks things off with his trademark provocative opening scene involving a shot of the titular helmet to reveal the man attached to it: Sergeant Zack (Gene Evans). Fuller pulls back to reveal that he’s the only survivor of a platoon whose bodies lie strewn around him, hands tied behind their back, including his own. He crawls towards a knife lying on the ground but someone gets to it first – a young Korean boy (William Chun). He takes the knife and after a tense moment frees Zack. It turns out that the boy is South Korean, smart, friendly and even speaks soldier lingo surprisingly well. Zack is a gruff curmudgeon that, initially, doesn’t want the kid tagging along but the child wears him down by making a convincing argument for his worth. The infantryman begrudgingly allows him to travel with him, nicknaming him Short Round.
 
Fuller immediately establishes the constant peril Zack and Short Round are in when they spot two people worshipping at a makeshift temple that turns out to be enemy soldiers in disguise. Even when fatally wounded, one of them tries to stab Zack only for him to kill them without hesitation. Eventually, they encounter a medic by the name of Thompson (James Edwards), also the lone survivor of a massacred platoon and together they meet up with a squad of soldiers tasked with establishing an observation post at a nearby Buddhist temple. The rest of the film chronicles their attempt to defend it against overwhelming odds.

The screenplay, penned by Fuller, is chock full of his trademark, pulpy, hard-boiled dialogue with such memorable prose such as, “You got nothin’ outside but rice paddies crawlin’ with Commies just waitin’ to slap you between two big hunks of rye bread and wash you down with fish eggs and vodka.” It’s exactly the kind of dialogue you’d expect these grizzled soldiers to say to one another.
 
The film is beautiful shot by Ernest Miller as evident in a moody, atmospheric scene where Zack and the squad of soldiers try to kill two enemy snipers in a fog-enshrouded forest that is also a masterclass in tension as Fuller uses no music, just the sound of gunfire and we see how Zack and another soldier come up with a clever idea to flush out the enemy. This is also evident in the film’s incredible climactic battle scene as wave after wave North Korean soldiers attack the temple the squad is holed up in. It is never confusing what is happening and really manages to capture the heat of battle in an effective way.
 
Gene Evans is perfectly cast as the perpetually scowling Sgt. Zack with a cigar always clenched between his teeth like a live-action Howling Commandos-era Nick Fury. Zack doesn’t seem to like anyone and only gives someone grudging respect when they’ve earned it. This role was early in his career and Evans acts very natural in front of the camera, disappearing effortlessly into the role. He also does an excellent job of bringing Fuller’s colorful, purple prose vividly to life. The actor understands that Zack’s only goal is to stay alive by any means necessary. He’s not interested in making friends, in case they die, hence his gruff exterior. Obviously, Fuller was impressed with Evans work in The Steel Helmet as he went on to cast him several of his other films, most notably, Park Row (1952).
 

One of the more interesting aspects of The Steel Helmet is the notions of race and racism. Initially, Zack sees every Korean as a “gook” until he meets Short Round who quickly corrects him by proudly proclaiming, “I am no gook. I am Korean.” He’s fresh-faced kid sidekick but much more than that as he frees Zack, can recognize the kind of rifle he has, and the ammo required for it. He also helps Zack navigate the territory without a map. In turn, Zack allows him to tag along, instructing him to take a helmet for protection, a rifle, and boots for his feet. Fuller refuses to present the North Koreans as a faceless enemy. This is evident in a scene where a captured major (Harold Fong) is attended to by Thompson and tries to get under his skin by asking him why he serves a country that treats African Americans so poorly. He tries out the same tactic with the Japanese American soldier in the squad (Richard Loo) but it doesn’t work on either of them, whose sense of duty trumps any conflicted feelings they may have for how they are treated back home.
 
The inspiration for The Steel Helmet came from newspaper headlines of the day reporting on the ongoing Korean War. Fuller felt that it was only “natural for me to come up with a tale set in the ongoing conflict, utilizing my own firsthand experience from World War II.” He wanted to debunk the clichés that riddled so many war films in the past. “The confusion and brutality of war, not phony heroism, need to be depicted,” he said.
 
Fuller wanted to make it his way and approached independent producer Robert Lippert who greenlit it after the filmmaker pitched him the story. One of the major Hollywood studios found out Fuller was putting it together and offered to produce it but under the condition that John Wayne play Zack. Fuller balked at this, realizing that if he cast Wayne, he’d be making “a simplistic morality tale,” and wanted his film to look real with the soldiered being “human and deeply flawed.”
 

Fuller worked with a low budget and a tight shooting schedule of only ten days! He had started rehearsals and was only days away from the start of principal photography without an actor to play Zack. One day, Gene Evans and his agent showed up at the production office. Even though he had never been cast in a major role in a movie he told Fuller about serving as an engineer in WWII. Without warning, Fuller tossed an M1 rifle at the actor who caught it and displayed his familiarity with the weapon. Fuller knew he had found his man.
 
Lippert met Evans and after consulting with Fuller approved his casting but days later associate producer William Burke tried to fire Evans, telling him they were going with a more famous actor instead. When Fuller found out he was furious and went to Lippert. He found out that actor Larry Parks was going to testify at the McCarthy hearings and in danger of being blacklisted. The producers figured they could the well-known actor for a cheap price and use the free publicity he was getting from the hearings. Fuller told Lippert that he and Evans were quitting and immediately walked out. That night, Lippert and Fuller talked things over and the next morning he and Evans were on the set filming.
 
Capitalizing on the relevancy of the subject matter, The Steel Helmet was a commercial success. One critic called Fuller a pro-Communist and anti-American. Another said the film was secretly funded by the Russians and Fuller should be interrogated by the Pentagon. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote, "For an obviously low-budget picture that was shot in a phenomenally short time, Samuel Fuller's metallic The Steel Helmet has some surprisingly good points." Variety magazine wrote, "The Steel Helmet pinpoints the Korean fighting in a grim, hardhitting tale that is excellently told.”
 

Another striking aspect of The Steel Helmet, and arguably much of Fuller’s body of work, is the lack of sentimentality. He’s not afraid to kill off the most beloved character of the film and in doing so reveals Zack’s humanity, that he tries to keep buried, in a rare, poignant moment of self-reflection. Evans handles this moment masterfully through facial expressions before snapping back to his hardened G.I. At the end of the film, exhausted but alive Zack continues on. What other choice does he have? Fuller ends the film with the title card, “There is no end to this story.” A powerful anti-war statement as Fuller acknowledges what few others do – there is no end to violent conflict. There will always be a war somewhere and that is the sad reality of our existence.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Fuller, Samuel. A Third Face. Alfred A. Knopf. 2002.

Lassiter

 

Tom Selleck has had one of the more intriguing what if film careers. If he had been able to get out of his contract for the television show Magnum, P.I. and done Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) who knows how his career would’ve turned out? Instead, he ended up doing a string of entertaining but mostly forgettable fare such as High Road to China (1983), Lassiter (1984), and Runaway (1984) that all underperformed at the box office to one degree or another as people were by and large content to watch him every week on T.V. It wasn’t until the smash hit of Three Men and a Baby (1990) that he had a significant financial success. Of all the movies he did in the early to mid-1980s, Lassiter is the most interesting effort.
 
Set in 1939 London, Selleck plays a high-end jewel thief by the name of Nick Lassiter. The movie begins with the man plying his trade, expertly breaking into a luxurious mansion and stealing expensive jewelry. He almost gets away with it until the lady of the house catches him on the way out. Instead of calling out to her husband, whom she has been bickering with since they arrived home, she lets Lassiter go but not before he helps her get undressed for her bath and the surprising female nudity signals that this won’t be family-friendly PG fare but naughty R-rated fun.
 
When he’s not robing the rich, he’s hobnobbing with them at a swanky nightclub with his beautiful wife Sarah (Jane Seymour) where they exchange unfortunately bland repartee, which is a damn shame as Selleck and Jane Seymour have lovely chemistry together. The next day, Lassiter is picked up by Inspector Becker (Bob Hoskins) and framed for a crime he didn’t commit but is given a chance to go free if he works with FBI agent Peter Breeze (Joe Regalbuto), helping steal $10 million worth of unset diamonds from the German embassy, slowing down their espionage efforts in South America.
 

To do so, Lassiter must get close to the courier, Kari Von Fursten (Lauren Hutton) and her Gestapo bodyguard Max Hofer (Warren Clarke). Breeze describes her as “pretty wild” and we quickly get an idea of just how wild when we see her kill one of her sexual conquests while they’re in bed together, evidently a perverse turn-on for her. Lauren Hutton looks like she’s having fun playing a woman with “unusual appetites,” as one character puts it, and she goes on to describe Shanghai as interesting for its diversions such as “women with animals, drugs, little boys, pleasure and pain.” She certainly looks the part of an elegant Nazi with some weird kinks.
 
Tom Selleck does an excellent job playing a suave jewel thief who is comfortable bantering playfully with a Nazi femme fatale in posh casinos as he is watching down ‘n’ dirty underground boxing matches. He’s also not afraid to get his hands dirty as evident in a scene where he and Max have it out in a bloody brawl at Lassiter’s apartment. This role allows Selleck to show off his leading man chops, demonstrating his capacity for romance with Seymour, action, his athletic prowess with the cat burglar sequence, and even a light comic touch in an amusing scene where he communicates with a Nazi guard only through facial expressions and gestures while wearing a frilly woman’s housecoat, trying not to wake Kari sleeping in the next room.

Jane Seymour is well cast as Selleck’s foil. Sarah enjoys their lifestyle but is not crazy about his current gig and doesn’t understand why they can’t just take off to Rome or parts elsewhere. He tells her, “Someone else dealt the cards, Sarah. I’m just playing them out,” to which she replies, “Well, you’re holding a losing hand now, Nick.” She is a strong-willed person that loves her husband but won’t have her life sent in a direction she doesn’t like and Seymour does a fine job conveying her character’s strength.

The always reliable Ed Lauter is cast refreshingly against type as Smoke, a prolific car thief and Lassiter’s best friend. Known mostly for playing cops and authority figures, he must’ve jumped at the opportunity to sink his teeth into a character on the opposite side of the law. He has an excellent scene with Selleck where Smoke and Lassiter reminisce about the good ol’ days when they bootlegged liquor during Prohibition.
 
Bob Hoskins plays Inspector Becker with his customary gusto. He’s a hard man that knows which pressure points to press with Lassiter but also keeps his personal life separate from his professional one when we see how he reacts to Lassiter paying a house call.
 
Lassiter features workman-like direction from veteran T.V. director Robert Young (Bitter Harvest) that could’ve been done with a little more pizzazz, a rather pedestrian script by David Taylor (Hanky Panky), and an unmemorable score by Ken Thorne (Superman II) that is low-key to the point of being non-existent, which prevents the movie from being something truly special. Instead, it is just pleasantly entertaining – certainly nothing wrong with that. What saves it from being forgettable is the cast who all play their roles admirably.
 

Comparing the diverging career paths that Harrison Ford and Tom Selleck respective careers took it isn’t hard to see why the former had a thriving career full of iconic roles in diverse films while the latter returned to T.V. with renewed success. It’s not just that Ford was the better actor but he also had a better instinct for movie roles. Part of it is being in the right place at the right time and part of it is knowing what works best for your talents and I think Selleck eventually realized that T.V. is where he belonged and the proof is in a show such a Blue Bloods, which he has starred in for 12 seasons and counting. Lassiter, in some respects, typifies his film career – entertaining and full of promise but just falling short of excellence.

Above the Law

In the Search of the Last Action Heroes (2019) is a documentary that is both a loving tribute to 1980s action cinema and a lament of the decline of R-rated action movies starring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Remember when Steven Seagal was a lean, mean fighting machine, kicking ass in mainstream Hollywood studio movies? He emerged from seemingly nowhere fully formed, complete with model-starlet wife Kelly Le Brock and a headline-grabbing backstory that involved teaching martial arts in Japan and being recruited by the CIA to participate in top secret missions, all thanks to a boost from legendary power broker cum agent Michael Ovitz who helped engineer his semi-autobiographical Hollywood debut with Above the Law (1988).

Back then Seagal was a breath of fresh air in action cinema. He wasn’t a muscle-bound one-man army like Schwarzenegger and Stallone, but a normal-looking guy that was a master of the martial art Aikido. There was a no-nonsense vibe to his persona that cut against the grain of the wisecracking tough guys that were dominating the box office at the time. All he needed was the right vehicle to showcase his talents and Above the Law was that movie, more than doubling its budget at the box office and launching Seagal’s movie career.
 
Nico Toscani (Seagal) is an ex-CIA agent now Chicago police detective whose past comes back to haunt him when a nasty fellow agent by the name of Kurt Zagon (Henry Silva), who he encountered during his stint in the Vietnam War, helps a Salvadorian drug lord peddle his trade on the streets. Of course, Nico is a bit of a loose cannon, refusing to back down when two FBI agents tell him to leave the drug lord alone. He’s a straight arrow who loves his family, his neighborhood, and city, doing everything in his power to rid it of crime. This involves, at one point, scaring a young cousin straight and helping a local parish priest bring immigrants into the country. It becomes personal, however, when the neighborhood church Nico attends is bombed, wounding countless people including his grandmother and killing the presiding priest.
 

Roughly 13 minutes in we get to see Seagal do his thing as Nico enters a seedy bar looking for his young cousin who has gotten mixed up in drugs. Naturally, all the barflies give him grief and try to start some shit (look for a young Michael Rooker in a cameo), which he quickly finishes in impressive fashion. What catches your eye is not just Seagal’s skills but Andrew Davis’ no-nonsense direction and how he shoots the action, capturing his star in full-body shots so that we see him actually doing these moves with very little editing unlike his more recent fare.
 
Davis handles the action like a pro, mixing it up so we don’t get an endless series of scenes of Seagal beating up guys. We see him using his gun and even hanging onto the roof of a car trying to bust some scumbags. It’s not The French Connection (1971) but it is exciting. There’s also a fantastic foot chase where we see Seagal running and not the usual Hollywood bullshit but him flat-out sprinting in smoothly choreographed tracking shots.

Seagal acquits himself just fine in Above the Law and what he lacks in acting chops he more than makes up for in intensity and confidence in his abilities. It helps that Davis surrounds him with the likes of Pam Grier and a bevy of Chicago character actors such as Ron Dean (The Fugitive), Jack Wallace (Homicide), and Ralph Foody (Home Alone) – most of whom appeared in the director’s previous Chicago-based actioner Code of Silence (1985). They provide local color and help give a real sense of place.

I like the unconventional casting of Grier as Seagal’s long-suffering partner. Instead of going for the stereotypical white guy partner, the filmmakers cast a woman of color and never address it or made a big deal about it. She’s just his partner and a damn good one at that. In a nice touch, the filmmakers make a point of showing Nico and his partner doing the day-to-day grunt work, like pounding the pavement asking locals questions. Unfortunately, a young Sharon Stone doesn’t fare as well, playing the thankless role of Nico’s wife who has very little to do except look adoringly at him when he does something good and frightened when their family is threatened.
 
Above the Law sets up CIA drug traffickers as the bad guys led by the always reliable Henry Silva who bookends the movie as a nasty piece of work that specializes in torture. With his smooth voice and icy intensity, he makes for a chilling villain that enjoys his work a little too much thanks to the actor’s deliciously evil performance. His imposing presence makes Zagon a formidable antagonist for Seagal.
 
When he was a teenager, Steven Seagal moved to Japan in 1968, studied and became an expert in the martial arts known as Aikido, so much so that he was the only Westerner to operate his own dojo there. He claimed that several CIA agents operating in the country became students at his dojo. It has been said that Seagal was subsequently recruited by the agency but in interviews he refused to cite specific missions only saying, “You can say that I lived in Asia for a long time and in Japan I became close to several CIA agents. And you could say that I became an adviser to several CIA agents in the field and, through my friends in the CIA, met many powerful people and did special works and special favors.”

It is telling, however, that at the time of filming director Andrew Davis said, “What we’re really doing here with Steven is making a documentary.” Furthermore, Seagal said, “The whole motivation behind me doing this film was my trying to make up for all the things I’ve seen--and done. I’m tired of seeing us try to destabilize governments, prop up dictators and get involved with drug smugglers and crooks.” We will probably never know if Seagal worked for the CIA but it made for good hype that helped garner interest in the movie.
 
Michael Ovitz, then head of CAA, one of the most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood, was a martial arts aficionado that reportedly studied with Seagal at his West Hollywood based Aikido Ten Shin Dojo. They became friendly and Ovitz felt that Seagal had the raw materials to become a movie star. Then Warner Brothers president Terry Semel remembers Ovitz being Seagal’s biggest fan: “He went far beyond the role of just being Steven’s agent. In fact, with the type of superstar client list Michael has, you wouldn’t normally see him work so closely with a first-time actor.”
 
Ovitz kept insisting to Semel that Seagal had potential to be a movie star. When it came to the studio courting Seagal, he claimed that they felt Clint Eastwood was aging out of the action genre and told the martial artist, “We’d like to see you take his place. We think you can be the next Eastwood.” They gave him a several scripts, told him to pick one and they’d make it. Not surprisingly, Semel’s account differs: “I don’t think it was a matter of anyone replacing Clint. He’s gone far beyond being just an action star.”

Before Warner Brothers greenlit the movie, they wanted to see a demonstration of Seagal’s martial arts prowess. Needless to say, he didn’t disappoint, putting on quite a show with his assistants: “The demonstration was quite miraculous. With just a toss of his hand, Steven would send the other guy flying. I’m no martial-arts expert, but he had the ability to knock these guys up in the air so effortlessly--well, it was pretty astounding,” said Semel. It was enough for the studio to bankroll a $50,000 screen test with Davis shooting several scenes from the screenplay.
 
The nine-week shoot was not without incident. Seagal broke his nose in a scene where Henry Silva accidentally punched him. Seagal went to the hospital, was treated and came back to work. Afterwards, he didn’t blame Silva: “My biggest nightmare is having someone like Henry--whose eyes are bad and isn’t trained in stunts--to be swinging at me. I should have my own people in here, doing the stunts.” In addition, Seagal was not used to the slow pace of the filmmaking process with technical delays and having to compromise in action sequences: “Sometimes I’ll tell Andy (Davis) that a scene isn’t going to work. And sure enough, when we see the dailies, it doesn’t look right. I just feel that I’m being shortchanged, that I’m not getting to show enough great martial-arts action.” The filmmakers were also under the gun to finish before a threatened Director’s Guild strike, which only added to the pressure.
 
Not surprisingly, Above the Law received mostly negative reviews with the exception of Roger Ebert who gave it three out of four stars and said of Seagal, "He does have a strong and particular screen presence. It is obvious he is doing a lot of his own stunts, and some of the fight sequences are impressive and apparently unfaked. He isn’t just a hunk, either." In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that the movie, "may well rank among the top three or four goofiest bad movies of 1988. The film...is the year's first left-wing right-wing-movie. It's an action melodrama that expresses the sentiments of the lunatic fringe at the political center." The Washington Post's Hal Hinson wrote, "Above the Law, which offers Steven Seagal to the world as a new urban action hero, is woefully short on originality, intelligibility and anything resembling taste. But none of this comes as a surprise. What is surprising is how little invention or energy there is in the movie's action sequences."

In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington wrote, "Starting in the semi-realistic framework of the ‘70s cop movies, it veers off into ‘80s action movie cloud-cuckoo land: the paranoid one-against-a-hundred clichés of the average Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job." Finally, the Chicago Tribune's Dave Kehr wrote, "The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good. Upstanding liberals both, Davis and Seagal seem distinctly uncomfortable working in a genre as inherently right-wing as the cop thriller, and they`ve tried to salve their consciences by introducing some heavily 'progressive' elements."
 
The commercial success of Above the Law launched Seagal into the action movie star pantheon, kicking off a fantastic run of movies in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He was paired with solid directors like Davis and John Flynn (Out for Justice), worked with wonderful character actors like Chelcie Ross (Major League) and William Forsythe (Raising Arizona), and worked with decent budgets. Seagal, however, began to believe his own hype and his ego took over. He began making odd choices in movies, exerting too much control, like starring, producing and directing On Deadly Ground (1994), and the quality suffered. Hollywood stopped bankrolling his movies and he became a cautionary tale, a pop culture punchline and downright toxic when allegations of his sordid personal life eclipsed his professional one.
 
Above the Law has a coherent, well-written story wedged between action sequences that deals with political assassinations, international drug cartels and drug money-funded wars – ambitious stuff for an action movie. It’s good to see that the filmmakers cared about such things instead of it being an afterthought to be stitched on. Davis doesn’t try to re-invent the cop movie genre and he doesn’t need to – instead, he expertly fulfills many of its conventions and in entertaining fashion. The movie acts as a showcase for a talented action star and is a fantastic snapshot of an emerging movie star with a promising career ahead of him.
 

SOURCES

Goldstein, Patrick. “Steven Seagal Gets a Shot at Stardom.” Los Angeles Times. February 14, 1988 

Zack Snyder's Justice League

When Zack Snyder was hired to launch the DC Extended Universe with Man of Steel (2013), his mandate was clear: to create a fully-realized world that would eventually be populated by a roster of superheroes starting with their most famous, Superman (Henry Cavill). The filmmaker would provide the stylistic template for other directors to follow and with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), he introduced Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) (along with brief cameos by the Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg) into the DCEU and one could sense he was building to something even bigger, not just a larger threat for our heroes to face but a bigger response.

Justice League (2017) would see Batman recruit the Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), and Wonder Woman to stop an alien threat of unimaginable danger. Anticipation was high for the movie and then towards the end of production Snyder was confronted with terrible tragedy that forced him off the project. Without missing a beat, the studio brought in Joss Whedon to do significant work and complete it in time for its intended release date. This version pleased few and was savaged by critics, underperforming at the box office.

That should have been it. Rumors, however, persisted among Snyder’s dedicated fanbase that a cut of his version existed and support for it began to gradually gather traction over time until the studio finally took notice. They were launching a new streaming app and not only needed content but a big and splashy title that would garner a lot attention and, more importantly, subscribers. Negotiations began with Snyder and he was given enough time and money to complete his version of Justice League (2021), a massive, four-hour epic that concludes his DCEU trilogy.

 

The movie begins with an ending: Superman’s death that we saw at the climax of Batman v Superman only now seeing how the literal aftershocks of his demise are felt all over the world by other mighty beings such as himself. Fearing that Doomsday, the villain of that movie, was only the beginning, Bruce Wayne seeks out other powerful titans with little success, initially. People like Aquaman are content to protect their own pockets of the world until, that is, a portal appears in Themyscira, and hordes of aliens led by Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) appear seeking the Mother Box, an “indestructible living machine,” as Wonder Woman later puts it, that when united with two others, can manipulate great power.

This is only the tip of the iceberg for if Steppenwolf can unite the Mother Boxes and summon his master, Darkseid (Ray Porter), this will unleash a destructive power that universe has never seen. Only when it becomes personal do the heroes feel compelled to band together and stop this overwhelming threat.

After the Frankenstein-like pastiche that was Justice League, this new version feels and looks much more consistent with Snyder’s other DCEU movies, in particular, Batman v Superman. Given the creative freedom he was reportedly given, he really cuts loose as evident in the sequence were Wonder Woman recounts a story about how Darkseid and his minions arrived on Earth thousands of years ago to conquer it only to be repelled by an alliance of Gods, Amazons, Atlanteans, humans, and a Green Lantern. This allows Snyder to do what he does best – show powerful beings smiting each other in slow motion only on a much grander scale than he has ever done before. Imagine the epic battle scenes from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films with Snyder’s own 300 (2007). This battle is Zack Snyder at his most Zack Snyder-ist with almighty gods having it out with ancient aliens on a massive scale all to the strains of a vaguely operatic score.

 

Snyder certainly has a knack for staging action set pieces and where his trademark slow motion/speed up technique is used most effectively is the introduction of Barry Allen a.k.a. the Flash when he applies for a job only to save a woman from a deadly car accident that he locked eyes with moments before all to the strains “Songs of the Siren” (hauntingly covered by Rose Betts) that is hypnotically and as visually arresting a sequence as anything in the filmmaker’s canon.

Of course, having this kind of creative freedom allows Snyder to indulge in his some of his more indulgent tendencies that feel a tad out of place in a movie like this, such as moments of ultraviolence when Wonder Woman takes out a group of terrorists in a museum in London, England. She doesn’t just dispatch the baddies, Snyder makes sure we hear them slam hard against walls with a sickening thud and accompanying blood splatters. Wonder Woman straight up murders these guys, literally exploding the ringleader at the end and then, without missing a beat, turning around to a little girl and giving her some aspirational pearl of wisdom. It’s not like she hasn’t killed people before in other movies but it is the way they are depicted in Justice League, which is so disturbing.

Like a lot of contemporary CGI villains, both Steppenwolf and Darkseid lack personality and whose motives are the same old tired clichés we’ve seen a million times before. Marvel broke the mold with Thanos in the Avengers movies, coming the closest to almost making us forget he was a completely digital creation. The baddies in Justice League look exactly like they are and, as a result, we don’t really feel that tangible threat or sense of danger as we know these are purely digital beings. That being said, they aren’t really that important to the story beyond being a catalyst to get the heroes together.

 

The most significant change from the theatrical version is how Snyder’s version acts as a backdoor origin story for Cyborg, placing him and his relationship with his father (Joe Morton) at the movie’s emotional core. In Whedon’s version, his character was relegated to almost an afterthought. In fact, he plays a pivotal role in the movie’s climactic moment.

Snyder is an impressive visual stylist and before Justice League his movies often felt hampered by miscasting in pivotal roles and uneven screenplays with clunky dialogue that sometimes failed to understand their source material. This obscured his distinctive directorial vision. The script for Justice League, written by Chris Terrio, is the first one since James Gunn’s work on the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, that matches Snyder’s visual prowess. With Justice League, he wanted to make something grandiose and mythic – after all he’s dealing with both ancient gods and contemporary beings with god-like powers – and with the help of Terrio’s script he successfully achieved that goal.

DC didn’t want to copy the look of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and hiring Snyder made sense as he brought an epic, operatic feel to his entries in the DCEU. His movies are decidedly darker in tone and look, which divided comic book fans, especially those of Superman who felt that Snyder went too far in reinventing the character. Where the superheroes of the MCU are relatable to one degree or another, Snyder’s superheroes are god-like Übermensches wrestling with living among mortals and having to assume alter egos so that they aren’t persecuted by a public at large that either doesn’t understand or fears them.

 

The central thesis of Snyder’s DC movies has focused on the power that superheroes like Superman wield: how they choose to use it as opposed to how they use it to help the greatest number of people. In Justice League, Batman makes the decision to activate the remaining Mother Box, attempting to resurrect Superman thereby putting the entire planet at risk as it will bring Steppenwolf and his army to them. Fortunately, the gamble pays off but this strategy contains more than a whiff of Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophical system where the most significant moral purpose of human life is to pursue happiness over everything else, even if it means disregarding the needs of others. Batman takes it upon himself to assume that he knows what is best for everyone and executes that plan consequences be damned.

If Batman v Superman posed the question, should these super-powered being be held accountable for their actions then Justice League was a resounding no. They are going to do whatever they think is right whether that aligns with the greater good or not. It certainly provides a fascinating spin on the superhero mythos and is one of the many things that makes Snyder’s DC movies stand out from others in the genre. If Justice League is to be his swan song for the studio and for the genre he certainly has done so in spectacular fashion.