What makes a great film? The easiest way out of that question is just to say the criteria are different for each instance, and that’s fine, that’s pretty well true. But if there’s one thing that every truly great film has in common, it’s that in one way or another it managed to redefine what or who films could be about. Films like Midnight Cowboy, Marty, The Bicycle Thieves, Fitzcarraldo, Come and See, even Raiders of the Lost Ark in its own way. Hal Ashby is a filmmaker who perhaps is a better example of this than any other.

In the 70’s, Ashby was one of the names in the industry. By the time he and Peter Sellers teamed up for Being There, he’d already given us the proto-Wes Anderson film Harold & Maude, the Robert Towne penned films Shampoo and The Last Detail, and Coming Home, one of the most devastating depictions of the cost of war. While his success was fleeting, disappearing once the studios caught up with him and all control over his films was ripped away, there are few examples of anyone being quite as against the grain in Hollywood as Ashby.

Somehow for a good decade he managed to get away with it. There’s no greater example of this than when a bearded, long-haired, t-shirt and sandal wearing Hal Ashby walked into a studio executive’s office, with a vagrant-looking musician named Cat Stevens, asking for 1.2 million dollars to make a film about Harold, a teenage boy with a death fixation who falls in love with a 79-year-old woman named Maude.

Before his career as a director, Hal Ashby was doing more than okay as an editor, working with Norman Jewison on In The Heat of the Night, The Cincinatti Kid and The Thomas Crowne Affair among others. Even then he was known to be almost painfully laid back, going so far as to take up residence on the couch in Norman Jewison’s editing suite whilst working on a film, sleeping there for weeks. His talent and intelligence was so clearly obvious to anyone and everyone who worked with him that, scraggly hippy beard aside, Hal Ashby was no question born to be a director.

For a period, Hal Ashby came out with great film after great film, each one touching topics no one else dared to through a lens that could belong to no one other than him. When it comes to redefining who cinema could be about, most filmmakers would be lucky to say they’ve done it once but most never come close to even that. Hal Ashby didn’t do it just once, he did it over, and over, and over. Whether it’s a story about a teenager in love with a near-octogenarian, a paraplegic war veteran, or a simple minded gardener with pudding between his ears instead of brains, Hal Ashby found the humanity in each of them, and about those everyone else deemed freaks he made films more affecting and more enduring than near any other.

But while he gained the reputation as the quintessential hippy, in the way he told his stories he was more classicist than anyone else working at the time. This was the era of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman, people who with film after film repeatedly exploded the ideas of narrative, and yet here was Ashby, a man whose personality and philosophy was as far from a studio executive’s as possible, telling stories the way Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Frank Capra used to way back in the 40’s and 50’s. He was a master of endings, with each film capping itself off with a succinct and powerful final punch. You never leave an Ashby film wondering what it was you were meant to get out of it. Like Marty or It’s A Wonderful Life, Hal Ashby’s Being There, Coming Home and Harold & Maude all had something to say, and those messages, as sentimental as they may be, were exactly what the cynical pessimistic 70’s needed. You’d be hard pressed to find a filmmaker with as much warmth, humanity, generosity, empathy and optimism as Hal Ashby, and oh man does he make me cry.

Who else could start a career with a film like the Duellists? With Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant on the near horizon, now seems as good a time as any to talk about it. Instead of taking the usual route of making a low budget comedy or a lean mean crime flick, Ridley Scott, in what would become his trademark go-big-or-go-home way, did the complete opposite. He made a period piece.

The Duellists, unlike most historical films and particularly Ridley Scott’s later work, is lean. It’s a rare breed for a number of reasons but perhaps most of all for the fact that it’s a period piece that manages to run only around one hundred minutes long. Adapted from a novella by Joseph Conrad, which was itself loosely based on true events, it’s a small story on a large canvas, following two men, played by Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine, as they duel repeatedly over the span of 15 years, driven by the bloodthirsty obsession of Keitel’s Lieutenant Gabriel Feraud. The Duellists makes the case for why perhaps we should be adapting more short stories and novellas rather than cutting down doorstop sized novels like we do a dozen times a year.

Rather than worrying about how to cut down John Steinbeck’s East of Eden to a tight two hours, Ridley Scott and screenwriter Gerald Vaughan-Hughes only have to worry about a measly 30,000 words. Why the shorter works of great writers are so often overlooked by film producers I don’t know. Lack of name recognition maybe? Whatever the reason, they almost always seem to provide the better result. Whether you’re talking about the Burt Lancaster version from 1946, or the 1964 version directed by Don Siegel, The Killers is a far better Hemingway adaptation than 1957’s Farewell to Arms. After all, Apocalypse Now, king of the Vietnam War epics, was of course adapted from Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness.

Starring two Americans as soldiers in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Duellists does away with the already tired by 1977 cliché of giving their leads English accents regardless of who they’re meant to be portraying. That said, neither of them seem too concerned with hiding their country of origin. At most, the two adopt a flat homogenized American accent that, to Hollywood raised ears, might well be as universal a sound as one could get. Similar to Milos Forman’s adaptation of Amadeus, having a period piece where the characters all speak like they came from the modern day United States seems odd once you put your mind to it. But, as was the case with me, if no one points it out to you both films establish themselves with such confidence and at least the appearance of realism that you may never notice. Anyway, what would be more appropriate for a 19^th Century Frenchman to sound like: an American or an Englishman?

This goes to the core of what makes this film so remarkable. Like Ridley Scott himself, this film stands so sure of itself, so full of confidence, that you have no choice but to place your trust in it. There are plenty of ways you could pick it apart. The film’s riddled with continuity errors, some scenes you could mark with a texta the exact position of the fog machine, and the first duel ends with a man getting skewered with a saber using the tried and true practical effect of “hold it under your arm and wail in pain”, the exact same way kids in their backyard would… albeit with a little more fake blood. The Duellists doesn’t worry about lettings its weaknesses show, however minor they may be, and that’s to its credit. Like all great films, to the Duellists the story comes first.

There’s an energy to the early films of Bob Rafelson, one that when watching recent interviews with him you’d wonder where it came from. His voice is deep, speaking slow, saying as much in an hour as a young Paul Thomas Anderson would in five minutes. Five Easy Pieces, Stay Hungry and today’s topic The King of Marvin Gardens all typify that New Hollywood feeling. That rough-around-the-edges meandering that makes it feel as though there wasn’t a script to begin with, that all they did was take the actors with the most volcanic personalities and sit them in front of a European with an Arriflex.

Those volcanic actors were Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn and Julia Anne Robinson. The European was Laszlo Kovacs who, along with Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall and Gordon Willis, was one of the greatest cinematographers of the New Hollywood, establishing a style that’s still mimicked today.

The King of Marvin Gardens follows Jack Nicholson, a late night radio show host, as he travels to Atlantic City to bail his estranged would-be-con-man of a brother played by Bruce Dern out of prison. Along for the ride, ticking time bomb Ellen Burstyn and Julia Anne Robinson, who share an ambiguous relationship to say the least.

This film plays into my own personal tastes almost ridiculously so. Pseudo families, long and meandering scenes, simple yet beautiful cinematography with it’s fair share of film grain, estranged siblings, and people who when they get angry they monologue, stiltedly and disjointedly. It’s written, clearly, but it’s acted. Everyone talks about the 70’s being the era for method acting. It gave us Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, and Jack Nicholson here. The energy he and the rest of the cast inject into every single one of their lines gives even the more surreal and heightened scenes a real palpable emotion.

In many ways, the film can be viewed as a time capsule. Shot on location in the middle of winter in 1972, it captures a kind of grand resort town architecture that now is as foreign as something from a thousand years ago. A great many of the buildings the film sets itself around would be demolished only a few years later, replaced with towering gaudy casinos.

Julia Anne Robinson too is reason alone to watch this film. She would, only three years after the film was released, tragically die in an apartment fire at the age of 24. Plenty of attention is paid to the lost great male character actors snuffed out far too early like the ever heartbreaking John Cazale, but never enough to the women like Julia Anne Robinson or those who just faded into obscurity, perhaps willingly, like The Panic In Needle Park’s Kitty Winn.

It’s a sentiment repeated over and over, whether by Robert Altman, Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, or any number of others, that directing really is just surrounding yourself with the best people you can and letting them do their job. It’s not as derogatory as it might sound as finding those people can be the hardest task of all, as is evidenced by the bad films made by those directors, or any director really. Bob Rafelson said himself, “What I felt was that America had considerable talent, but we lacked a talent to recognize talent.”

Rafelson certainly seemed to succeed here though. The King of Marvin Gardens is one of those films were you can see and feel on the screen all these disparate elements converging perfectly. Plenty of love is tossed the way of the writer/director, the so-called auteur, but not nearly enough to those folk like Rafelson, Lumet and Demme. Film is and always has been a collaborative process. Martin Scorsese without Thelma Schoonmaker, without Robert De Niro, without Leonardo DiCaprio… David Lean without Alec Guinness, without Robert Bolt, without Freddie Young… a director is nothing without the people they choose to go into battle with.

Robert Mitchum is an ordinary man, with an ordinary wife, an ordinary house, and all he wants is an ordinary life. He wants out. Adapted from the novel by George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, in premise at least, could be mistaken for any number of crime films. Career criminal wants out and they have one final job that we know, as the genre savvy audience we are, is bound to go south. But The Friends of Eddie Coyle isn’t any crime film, and, as modern as it feels, it is still somehow a member of a rare breed.

Peter Yates, like Alan J. Pakula, Michael Ritchie, Bob Rafelson, etc etc etc, ought to be a household name. Give the guy some credit, he directed Bullitt after all. But while that may have allowed him to have the rather prolific career he wound up having, it didn’t seem to guarantee the audience he’d surely earned. Even just a few years out from the runaway success of Bullitt, Peter Yates’s films were getting almost entirely ignored by the box-office. The Hot Rock, written by William Goldman, being one. The Friends of Eddie Coyle being another.

It has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert gave it 4/4, it’s consistently rated as one of the best crime films of the 1970’s, and yet upon release it barely broke a million. I guess it probably shouldn’t be too surprising. Starring an over-the-hill Robert Mitchum as an over-the-hill small-timer, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a relentlessly grim and gritty film. Rounding out the cast with some of the best character actors of the decade such as Peter Boyle, Steven Keats, and Alex Rocco, you certainly aren’t given much eye-candy. Everyone in this film is “ordinary”, they’re people you’d see on the street and wouldn’t give a second look, they’re certainly not faces you’d put on a poster. Robert Redford has no place in a film like this.

It’s storytelling in the vein of Richard Ford or Raymond Carver, devoid of any artificial romance, as realistic as one can get while still having a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. It’s interesting to look at The Friends of Eddie Coyle, adapted not long after the novel was released, as almost the beginning of the crossroads that would send literary fiction and cinema down two sharply distinct paths. It was that early 70’s period that introduced us to writers like Higgins and Carver who’d soon cement that idea of hard-bitten kitchen sink realism that would go on to be, almost notoriously so, the dominant literary fashion for the next few decades. By contrast, cinema began to go the complete opposite direction, with the likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas bursting on the scene and in the space of two films virtually invent the blockbuster with 1975’s Jaws and 1977’s Star Wars. You don’t need me to tell you where cinema went after this. We all saw it. Even the smaller personal dramas like Ordinary People had that narrative artifice that Carver and Higgins were fighting tooth and nail against.

A little like the poorly-selling debut album of the Velvet Underground about which Brian Eno once said, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” The Friends of Eddie Coyle’s influence on the crime genre is huge. The man who’d go on to be king of crime fiction, Elmore Leonard, said the novel was “the best crime novel ever written… [George V. Higgins] saw himself as the Charles Dickens of crime in Boston instead of a crime writer. He just understood the human condition and he understood it most vividly in the language and actions among low lives.” And just like Leonard, the work of George V. Higgins translates better to the screen than near anything else I can think of.

In 2012, another criminally underrated director, Andrew Dominik, released Killing Them Softly. Adapted from another George V. Higgins novel, Cogan’s Trade, and starring Brad Pitt, Killing Them Softly was another sharply written, sharply directed, sharply acted, gritty crime film that just failed to find an audience. Almost from the premiere it had been sent straight to the “cult film” bin. A little wordier than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and a little slower, it’s just as great a film. Hopefully, with any luck, someone will come along and give us another Higgins adaptation, just as razor sharp and waterproof, and he’ll finally get the wide audience his writing deserves.