Over black screen we hear a subway car, the rumbling of the tracks fading in and out like a wave. We hold like this for close to two minutes as the credits pass by. Then the first image. A woman, desperate look on her face, grasping onto a pole in the middle of a packed subway carriage. As it reaches the next stop and the carriage empties out, she moves to a newly vacant seat. Moving is difficult, she’s in pain. She looks close to tears.

We cut to an apartment and a disinterested, emotionless man in a paint speckled shirt barely looks at the woman from the train. “Hurt?” he asks. “It hurt,” she replies. She’s just had a “free scrape”, an illegal abortion. The actress is Kitty Winn, a familiar face from The Exorcist franchise, whose soft-spoken emotionally sensitive performance in The Panic in Needle Park would seem to predict as meteoric a rise as her co-star, a young mop-haired pre-Godfather Al Pacino.

The Panic in Needle Park, directed by fashion-photographer-turned-film-director Jerry Schatzberg, is a raw, unflinching look at heroin addiction in 1970’s New York City. Unlike the later Trainspotting, it doesn’t rely on stylistic freneticism to paint its picture, but instead it depicts all the grit and dirt of its world completely straight. It isn’t cruel, it’s not judgmental, but it is unforgiving and it is at more than one time difficult to watch.

It is a blessing then that the actors that carry us through the experience give us some of the strongest performances of that half of the decade. Al Pacino is as charming and singular here as he is in the Dog Day Afternoons and The Godfather Part Twos the decade would later give us, and in Kitty Winn we’ve an almost unfair glimpse at what could have been a stellar career if only she’d been given the right parts.

But The Panic in Needle Park was not only the first film to star the future Michael Corleone but also the first film written by journalist/novelist couple Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Joan Didion at this time was already something of a literary celebrity, a novelist as well as one of the most defining and distinctive journalistic voices of the era. Her biting, anxious and seemingly effortlessly cool voice was perfect for the oncoming New Hollywood era and you only need to read an essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album to realise that it’s a shame there weren’t more films to her name.

This is a film that makes me think maybe Robert Towne was onto something when he said that screenwriting is closer to what a journalist does than to what a novelist does. It’s a film that makes me wish more journalists would have written screenplays. What would a film written by George Plimpton, or Joe McGinniss, or Gay Talese look like?

The perfect match for Didion and Dunne’s straight, sharp writing, the 1970’s saw an onslaught of fast film stocks that, for the first time in cinema’s history, meant filmmakers no longer required two dozen huge, blaring stage lights for every set-up. All of a sudden, we had films like William Friedkin’s The French Connection, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, and Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park. The rough cinema verite style that would come to define the New Hollywood era and its directors like Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson and John Cassavetes, would not have happened if it wasn’t for the sudden availability of these fast, light sensitive, grain heavy film stocks, that meant real locations, natural light and the volcanic spontaneity of actors like Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino.

Anyone who shoots New York City in anything but the grainiest of film stocks isn’t doing it right. New York City, for all its charms, is a dirty town. The only way to be honest to it is with the rich colours and grit of 24 frames of celluloid a second. There’s a cleanliness to digital filmmaking that I struggle to find a fitting use for. Film is expressive, and not thanks to post production grading or colour timing, but entirely on its own. Cinema is not meant to be a picture-perfect replication of reality and it isn’t meant as an impression, that’s theatre, it’s something else. It’s a time capsule. That’s cinema.

While starting a film when you can feel yourself dozing off isn’t the best idea, it does wind up giving whichever film you’re watching a pretty good challenge. After all, if it keeps you awake, it must be pretty good. It’s not always the fairest of challenges, I don’t recommend you try it with a Tarkovsky or Ozu film or anything that really requires much patience. But when it comes to suspense thrillers, what better challenge could there be? Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 thriller High & Low was the last film I gave that challenge and it passed.

I’d just finished a long day at work, the seats in the cinema were way too comfortable for my own good and I could feel myself slipping. The first few minutes of the film aren’t bad, mind you, they’re just expositional. Toshiro Mifune plays an executive at a large shoe company and he’s angling for power. We learn that for the past few years he’s been playing a chess match, secretly buying up shares until he finally has the majority. He’s mortgaged his house, he’s put everything he owns up as collateral, he’s got it in the bag. He can’t lose. It’s as thrilling as talk of underhanded corporate dealings can be, and that’s not sarcasm, it’s great, it’s just not enough to keep me awake. But then the phone rings.

Mifune’s son’s been kidnapped and the ransom is thirty million yen. I’m wide awake. Not only is that enough to checkmate any corporate chess matches he’s got going, it’s enough to bankrupt him. There’s not much more I’m going to say about the plot of the film, as it’s so full of enough twists and turns that it’s worth going in blind. It’s one of the best suspense thrillers ever made, definitely the best film about a kidnapping I’ve ever seen.

Akira Kurosawa is no doubt one of the most legendary and influential filmmakers of all time, with everyone from Sam Peckinpah to Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet to George Lucas, all praising him and citing his influence. With the often imitated Seven Samurai and Yojimbo under his belt, he’s understandably most well-known for his samurai films. But more than just a master of the action film, Kurosawa seemed to make anything work no matter what genre, style or story. Shakespeare adaptation, got it. Humanistic drama, got it. Film Noir gangster flick, got it. High stakes suspense thriller, got it.

Even though High & Low runs for a total of almost two and a half hours, as soon as it’s got the ball rolling it never lets up. It doesn’t take long for the police to get involved, led by the effortlessly cool and collected detective played by Tatsuya Nakadai, and when they do the film becomes an edge-of-your-seat thriller. For the first hour or so, the film barely leaves Toshiro Mifune’s living room. That’s a little under half of the film dedicated solely to the police and the man with the ransom to pay hiding from and contending with the kidnapper on the phone who’s watching through their window from who knows where.

The screenplay is impeccably well crafted and any screenwriters would be well served by watching High & Low closely and then one more time. From the set-up, to the turning points, to the action sequences, characters, themes, motivations and conclusion, it’s all pitch perfect. Adapted from a book by Western writer Ed McBain, it’s one of the best examples of Kurosawa’s keen ability to recontextualize Western works. It’s almost absurd, in a way, that Kurosawa’s own films like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo while widely imitated with Western remakes like The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars were themselves heavily inspired by the films of John Ford, the hardboiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and of course William Shakespeare.

High & Low doesn’t break much ground, it doesn’t revolutionize the genre or anything like that, instead it stands as one of the most solid examples of the genre ever made. It’s a rare film purely in that it’s a completely wholly satisfying experience. It knows what its genre’s conventions are and what the audience wants from it and so it delivers. It’s one of Kurosawa’s best and the Blu-Ray well deserves a place on your shelf.

Michael Caine once said, “Most directors don’t know what they want so they shoot everything they can think of—they use the camera like a machine gun. John uses it like a sniper.”

I can’t claim to have seen every boxing film ever made, not even all the good ones, but if you were to ask me what the two best boxing pictures of all time were, the two unquestionable masterpieces, without a second thought I’d say Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and John Huston’s Fat City.

While the two, of course, share a lot of common ground, both films really occupy two very different spaces. Both films are unrelenting and raw, but the way they get there are totally different. Raging Bull revels in stylistic exaggerations, full of slow-mo, quick cuts, dolly zooms, and an expressionistic use of blood splatter to create its power. Fat City feels real, full of that Jack London’s A Piece of Steak Kitchen Sink realism. It’s dry and unforgiving and doesn’t let you look away.

Fat City, whilst marketing itself as a boxing film, is far more than just a sports film. Raging Bull, as well drawn and sympathetic its secondary characters are, is first and foremost an unforgiving character study of Jake LaMotta. Fat City, on the other hand, is almost an ensemble piece. It follows two boxers, an up-and-coming Stacy Keach and a very young Jeff Bridges, and Oma Lee Greer played by Susan Tyrrell, an alcoholic that Keach bunks up with for a time. Fat City is pretty even handed with its characters, giving as much time to the plight of its fighters as to the plight of the deeply wounded Susan Tyrrell.

Based on a book by Leonard Gardner, Fat City really saved John Huston’s career, if not in his mind then at least in the mind of critics who hadn’t been too kind to what Huston had been turning out. Films like The Kremlin Letter and A Walk with Love and Death just not getting the attention they seemed to deserve. Even going as far back as 1963’s The List of Adrian Messenger, John Huston’s films just weren’t performing like they were back in the Asphalt Jungle days. Once upon a time, John Huston was one of the most prolific directors ever to work in Hollywood, releasing classic after classic after classic, with films under his belt like The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and so many others.

When it came to trying to find an actor to play the lead role, the first person that came to Huston’s mind was an actor he’d worked with in the past on 1967’s Reflections in a Golden Eye: Marlon Brando. As anyone familiar with the production of The Godfather knows, Marlon Brando, at this point in his career, hadn’t been exactly popular among film producers and studio heads for some time, having repeatedly sent production after production way over budget and over schedule, the most notorious example of this being 1962’s The Mutiny on the Bounty. But, beyond all of this, he was still Marlon Brando, one of the greatest actors ever to work and for a moment it looked like he might be interested. But he didn’t call back. Instead Huston turned to an up-and-comer who’d caught his eye: Stacy Keach, familiar today as one of the most enduring character actors of all time but why he never had more starring roles is beyond me. As the Coen Brothers said in an interview with Noah Baumbach, “You start with Stacy Keach, you can’t go wrong.”

Fat City, a film about a Boxer far past his prime desperately trying to reclaim lost glory, has more than a few parallels to Huston’s own life. As Huston said in an interview: “I agree with Hemingway that winners take nothing anyway… Unlike the gambler who throws his money onto the table, the fighter throws himself in. He gives more to his profession than almost any other artist and the chances of him being a success are very remote indeed. Only one in several thousand ever get the chance of being champion and even being champion doesn’t necessarily mean he’s found any security or haven in life.”

“We’re all fighters in a sense. He’s a symbol. We all take the same beatings. Some spiritually, some mentally, and, maybe the lucky man, physically.” While glory may be fleeting, the wounds we receive attaining that glory have a knack for sticking around.

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.

This probably sounds dumb, but this film feels like a favourite film of Martin Scorsese. It is one, by the way, he’s spoken lovingly of it countless times. Seeing it for the first time when he was 14 or so, he’s cited its influence in the making of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and even as recently as The Departed. While not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract is a peculiar film to say the least.

From the opening minutes, the spare electric guitar score by Perry Botkin Sr, reminiscent of the same Mediterranean music that would later be found in films like The Godfather, sets up a tone altogether different from what one might expect from a film like this. It leaves the film feeling more playful than the grim serious tone of the typical gangster picture. In the same way that a satire might aim to use comedy as a roundabout way of discussing and criticising a contentious topic, Murder by Contract uses its stylistic levity in order to create real tangible dread. It’s creepy, something about it just makes your skin crawl.

This film, for all it’s shortcomings, is drunk with character. Inspired, no doubt, by the European filmmakers whose influence was only just beginning to be felt in Hollywood, Murder by Contract is full of small stylistic flourishes and cinematic steps-to-the-left. Similar to the works of Nicholas Ray, or Marlon Brando’s One Eyed Jacks, you can look at this film as a mid-point, fitting perfectly between the decaying Classical Hollywood and what was soon to come.

Of all the deviations from the norm this film makes, none is more important, I’d argue, than how it chooses to start it’s story. Instead of seeing a street-wise, cold-eyed killer picking up another job, we see a guy begging to be given a chance from a potential employer who doesn’t take him seriously one bit. Films about contract killers, or master thieves, or, really, any kind of criminal who’s any good at his job, almost always work the exact opposite way to how, say, Superhero films do. They are completely devoid of origin story and the characters rarely go on to experience any kind of real change through the course of the film. They’re treated like constants, immovable objects, treated as if they were the way they are since the womb. There are exceptions of course, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket comes to mind, but nonetheless, by doing this Murder by Contract sets itself up to be something very different.

The film isn’t without it’s flaws, but its because of these cracks that I feel like this film is so worth a watch. Like I spoke about in my review of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Murder by Contract lets loose with as many stylistic flourishes as it thinks it can get away with. It’s not afraid to fail and that’s not something you can say about many films. The films of Martin Scorsese, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, they’re all full of these scenes which if taken just one step in any other direction would fall flat on their faces, but yet they don’t let that deter them. Murder by Contract falls on its face plenty of times, but the risk of that never deters it. It tries a lot and lands some, and that’s to its credit.

This is the first film I’ve watched with the intention to write about it before I’d seen it, but I’m glad I did. While I can’t call it a favourite, it’s definitely worth a watch. While the late 60’s and the rise of the New Hollywood get all the credit, with films like Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, you can really see the seeds of revolution here. In the five year period around 1958, you can see several films like Murder by Contract, John Cassavetes’s Shadows, Marlon Brando’s One Eyed Jacks, and more that, while they might not have reached the audience required for critical mass, do give us more than a fair warning of what was to come.

“I can’t tell if you know anything about women,” said Ellen Burstyn to then up-and-coming Martin Scorsese. “No,” he said, “but I’d like to learn.” Martin Scorsese has made his fair share of forgotten great films, drowned out by his unquestionably more popular films about violent and chaotic men. It can be easy to forget that Scorsese has had one of the most varied careers of any director in history, having made films everywhere from the brooding angst-driven Taxi Driver to the touching Hugo. Why some of these films become forgotten isn’t too surprising; Kundun had a pretty niche audience to begin with, King of Comedy was far before it’s time, etc. etc. but one that just doesn’t make any sense at all is Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Made when Martin Scorsese was still riding the wave of the success of Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore follows Ellen Burstyn, driving cross-country with her son in hopes of becoming a singer after having, in a way, been freed by the sudden and tragic death of her neglectful husband. The film has it’s fair share of men behaving badly, from Scorsese regular Harvey Keitel to songwriter-turned-actor Kris Kristofferson, but it will push their stories to the side any moment it seems like they might distract from what this film is really about: A mother and her son.

Perhaps I’m just more ignorant about film than I think I am but, while there’s an ever-growing deluge of great films about fathers and sons, I can probably count on one hand films that focus on the other half of that equation. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a beautiful and touching and often hilarious movie. As you’d expect from a Scorsese picture, it doesn’t hold back any punches, not shying away from letting things get dark from time to time, but through all that this film has more heart and more optimism than near anything else he’s ever made.

Throughout every moment of Scorsese’s best work is a real presence of the director, not in a stylistic self-aware sense, but in a personal and emotional sense. Like Scorsese, Elia Kazan also primarily worked from material written by others and as he put it: “The director has to restate succinctly the play, its meaning and form, in his own terms; he has to reconceive it as if he had created it. What does it mean to him? What does it arouse in him? How does the manuscript affect his soul?” Of course, directors taking a writer’s work and “changing” it or “mangling and deforming” it, depending on who you ask, is one of the most notorious aspects of filmmaking.

But there’s a difference between the horror stories of once great scripts turned into garbage films, and a director like Scorsese finding a way to make a film that affects him, that represents something about him. Even the greatest director can’t just grab a script and take on faith the deep meaning that piece supposedly holds for the writer, while meaning nothing to himself, and expect to make a great film. What you end up with is poor translation, something that’s empty and flat.

It seems the popular idea today that the director and the camera need to be as objective and unnoticed as they possibly can be. But these kind of limitations are only damaging. Zooms can look amateurish, directorial presence can be obnoxious and pretentious, but stripping tools from one’s toolbox can only ever hinder one’s pursuit of making great work. Directors like Scorsese, or Kubrick, or Cassavetes, or Leone, would use anything they believed they had at their disposal to make the greatest films that they possibly could. They were daring.

In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Scorsese flexes all his usual muscles; his feel for music, his love for classic movies, his willingness to throw the script out and let great actors improvise, you see him do it all. Like one of Scorsese’s films that did find an audience, Raging Bull, this film is both brutal in its emotional honesty and not afraid to be creative with it’s editing or stylistic choices as long as they fulfil a purpose. In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Martin Scorsese uses every tool in his toolbox. He puts everything on the table and, in this case, gives us one of the greatest films he’s ever made.

This is the coolest film I’ve ever seen. From the pulsating, bassy, synth drenched soundtrack, to the gripping heist sequences, to the neon lit night-time cinematography, this is the film Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive wished it was. Led by a top-of-his-game James Caan, Thief is the first film by Michael Mann and it is one of the greatest debut films I’ve ever seen.

Starting with perhaps Terrence Malick’s Badlands in 1973, the floodgates seemed to open giving us over the next few years some of the best debut films ever released. With films like Badlands, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and Michael Mann’s Thief, I’d argue this period has never been topped. Not even by the rise of the independents in the 90’s.

That said though, the folk who burst out onto the stage in the 70’s and early 80’s came from different places than the video-store-clerks of Quentin Tarantino and film-school-grads of Wes Anderson. Terrence Malick had of course been a pretty well-to-do screenwriter, doing uncredited rewrites on things like Dirty Harry (and when you’re called onto the same project as John Milius, I’d be pretty flattered). Ridley Scott had done all manner of work for British TV before becoming a highly sought after ad director (a path David Fincher would later also take). And finally Michael Mann, the man who’d later make the most underrated Hannibal Lecter film, finally put Al Pacino and Robert De Niro face to face and give us one of the all-time best Tom Cruise performances, got his start making TV movies… like that other “Steven Spielberg” guy.

Watching Mann’s TV movie, the Jericho Mile, it’s no real surprise that he would go far. Like Steven Spielberg’s Duel, it’s a TV movie only by happenstance. Set in Folsom Prison and shot in Folsom Prison in amongst the real prison population, it’s here that the first seeds of Thief were planted. Michael Mann: “It probably informed my ability to imagine what Frank’s life was like, where he was from, and what those 12 or 13 years in prison were like for him… An outsider who has been removed from the evolution of everything from technology to the music that people listen to, to how you talk to a girl, to what do you want with your life and how do you go about getting it.”

Thief is incredibly daring. The opening scene, one of the greatest of all-time if you ask me, has James Caan break into a safe, a real safe. Tangerine Dream soundtrack thumping, cinematography dark, and James Caan slowly turning this huge whirring magnetic drill into a $10,000 safe bought just to be broken into. I won’t spoil it here, but there’s a video put up by the Criterion Collection where James Caan talks about shooting this scene and I gotta say it’s all the more impressive having seen that… But watch the movie first.

I could spend the rest of the article listing off each element that this film absolutely nails. I could ramble on about Tangerine Dream’s score, Donald Thorin’s cinematography, the performances by James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson, and on and on and on… But what I really have to mention is just how tight the screenplay is. The dialogue is some of the sharpest I’ve heard in a long time, made all the better by the fact that the dialogue seems to belong solely to this film. These aren’t jokes or “cool lines” that could be ripped out and shoved into any heist film, the lines belong completely to the characters that speak them.

Michael Mann’s Thief feels absolutely fresh. It’s one of the most modern and cool films I’ve ever seen. Michael Mann, like the 1960’s Batman series or King of the Hill as odd as those parallels may be, knew exactly who he was right out of the gate. Michael Mann, as far as he’s letting any of us now, was brilliant from the start.

D. A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” is screening next Monday the 27^th with the Rolling Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter” at the Astor Theatre.

Show this film to anyone who dares treat any artist like one constant, unchanging identity. Anyone who believes that Shakespeare is just Shakespeare, that Carver is just Carver. Dont Look Back catches Bob Dylan just as he, already a cultural icon, was beginning down what would be remembered as the most controversial road he ever took: Turning electric.

Although the film was made before this actually happened, looking back at it in retrospect makes it seem almost as if Pennebaker and Dylan are trying to tell us “See? It was always going to happen!” like stacking up a mountain of evidence. This is a restless and perhaps terrified Bob Dylan tearing down a myth as recklessly and as violently as he possibly can.

Directed by D. A. Pennebaker, this film catches its subject walking a tight rope. In one scene we see Dylan yowling like Guthrie into a microphone with an acoustic guitar in front of an old flatbed truck out in wheat fields. And in another, in dark sunglasses acting all too cool, posturing around a young Donovan in a hotel room cluttered with reporters and sycophants. He seems bored, maybe. Definitely frustrated.

I’ve always been hugely frustrated with the idea that any artist at the beginning of their career could be expected to be at all like they are at the end. Early Stanley Kubrick is a far stretch from Late, same for Bellow, same for Roth, same for Neil Young, who once in an interview with Charlie Rose paraphrased Bob Dylan saying “I’ve heard Bob Dylan say that he doesn’t know who wrote those songs any more” and how could he? How could a 40 year old Bob Dylan, a 50, a 60 year old Bob Dylan, be anything close to a 20 year old?

D. A. Pennebaker is often credited as being one of the pioneers of the Cinema Verite movement of “direct observational cinema”. It’s an important thing to note that Pennebaker never for one moment pretended that his subjects could forget he was there, that he had any chance of disappearing into the wallpaper. The camera’s never forgotten and that’s an unavoidable truth that Pennebaker exploits it as far as it can be taken. The camera just sticks around, it doesn’t let the subjects rest, eventually becoming just another personality for the subject to try and impress.

Bob Dylan was said to have been pretty mortified after seeing a rough cut of Pennebaker’s film, it having left him feeling pretty rotten about how that film seemed to make him appear. Perhaps he’d started to believe the crap his rabid fans and adoring press kept spewing about this noble moral messenger… Although I doubt it. It was this point he realised that it didn’t matter, just like everything else he did, it was all part of an act. It was all just as fake as anything else.

This is what’s special about Pennebaker’s film: Not that it shows an uninhibited look at the behind-the-scenes Bob Dylan, but instead that we see a legendary self-mythologiser mastering that craft. There are those figures in the culture like Joan Didion, Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway or Bob Dylan that understand that their public persona is as much a character to be invented and presented and utilized as the work they’re more famous for. Although, how rare is it that we’re ever given a chance to see these folks actually inventing these public personas?

Recently restored by the Criterion Collection with a fantastic 4K scan, there’s never been a better time to see it. So go, see it.