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.

The first thing that happens when I find a new writer that I really dig is I’ll start wishing they’d written a film. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it never happens, like in the case of Thomas Pynchon or Peter Matthiessen. Sometimes that wish was granted far earlier than I ever made it, like in the case of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s Panic In Needle Park or James Salter’s Downhill Racer.

Released in 1969 and directed by Michael Ritchie, Downhill Racer is set in the world of competitive skiing in the late 60’s. A character study focussing on an obsessed David Chappellet, played by Robert Redford, who sees little value in anything other than winning an Olympic Gold Medal.

Like another Robert Redford picture I’ve written about, The Great Waldo Pepper, Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer has some spectacular stunt work. Instead of taking the no doubt easier route of solely employing fast whip pans and disorienting quick cuts to depict the races that this film hangs its drama on, Downhill Racer takes it a step further. The racing sequences here show, from the skier’s point of view, the exhilarating and terrifyingly fast descent down the slopes. Everything from the trees to the spectators are hardly more than a blur.

The man who captured these sequences was former member of the U.S. National Ski Team, Joe Jay Jalbert, then only 19 years old. He’d never held a camera before, let alone had anything to do with the motion picture business, and now he was racing down the slopes of Austrian mountains with a 15 pound 35mm camera strapped to his shoulder. Puts any GoPro footage to shame.

Downhill Racer was very much Robert Redford’s passion project, having to fight to convince the criminally underrated writer James Salter to even give it a shot. But thank god he was able to convince him because what Salter wound up giving us is one of the sharpest, most thrilling and most intelligent sports films ever made. Kind of ironic given that Salter had made it very clear to Redford that he had very little interest in sports at all, let alone skiing.

What attracted Redford to Salter in the first place was a screenplay he’d written called “And Then They Were Three” which had impressed him with its lean economy of language. A film script as it was supposed to be, according to Redford. It’s that economy that Salter brings over to Downhill Racer to great effect. Like any great film, the scenes in Downhill Racer say a lot without having to do much at all.

Salter was often praised as being one of the finest prose stylists in the English language, with writers like Richard Ford, Susan Sontag and John Irving showering him with praise. “Sentence for sentence, Salter is the master,” said Ford. But while well deserved, this praise winds up distracting from Salter’s not to be overlooked strength as a storyteller. I don’t think there could be a better example of this strength than the ending of Downhill Racer. I won’t spoil it here, if you watch the film you’ll know exactly what I mean, but what makes the ending so great is that it belongs solely to this film. It’s an ending built from its premise, not one of those endings you could easily find in a dozen other films or maybe even a dozen other genres. The ending to Downhill Racer couldn’t be in any film other than one about competitive downhill skiing. That’s how endings ought to be.

The film did almost nothing when it was released. Poorly marketed most definitely, but like a lot of great films before it and a lot of great films to come, it was just drowned out. This is the late 60’s we’re talking about. In the span of four years, there’d been a revolution in Hollywood that would give us some of the most timeless films of all time. The first ever screening of the film was in a double bill with Midnight Cowboy with no intermission. People were so bummed out by the end of Midnight Cowboy, according to Redford, that people just didn’t want to give a film about skiing of all things a chance. It’s no wonder that in a period already cramped with dozens of near perfect films that one or two wouldn’t get the attention they deserved.

Someday I’ll commission a salt & pepper shaker set, one a bust of Midnight Cowboy and Serpico screenwriter Waldo Salt, the other of Robert Redford’s barnstorming pilot Waldo Pepper. Waldo Salt, 1914 – 1987, wrote some of the greatest screenplays ever produced. He was, without a doubt, one of the finest screenwriters ever to live.

He wasn’t an immigrant from the theatre like Paddy Chayefsky or Robert Bolt. He wasn’t a behind-the-scenes repairman of faltering scripts like Robert Towne, famous “doctor” of The Godfather, Bonnie & Clyde, Marathon Man and more. He wasn’t a novelist turning to the pictures for a quick buck like James Salter or William Faulkner. Waldo Salt began in the cinema, under the tutelage of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and remained there until his death, only once nearly broken by the Communist-paranoid Hollywood Blacklist.

At the time of the Blacklist, Waldo Salt was rising fast. He’d had a hit with The Flame and the Arrow and had enjoyed plenty of critical acclaim ever since his first produced original, the Shopworn Angel, released when he was just 24. He was on the verge of a directing career when the Blacklist finally caught up with him, and for the next ten years he’d have his name taken from him.

He assumed that of his then wife “M. L. Davenport”. It didn’t work. Only one film written during his time on the Blacklist would ever see the light of day, and that was something he only contributed narration for. That was 1961’s Blast of Silence. When the Blacklist broke, and Waldo Salt was at last able to attach his own name to his work, he discovered more damage had been done than was immediately apparent.

Salt wasn’t finally reclaiming his career as if it had been put on ice for a decade. He was getting his name back just to discover he didn’t have a career anymore. The first three films he wrote after not being able to use his own name for near a decade were films he’d later refer to as “Perhaps the three worst pictures I think I’ve ever seen.” He’s not wrong. Taras Bulba, Flight from Ashiya and Wild & Wonderful are three spectacularly bad films.

He’d had, in 1951 when his name was placed on the Blacklist, lost the vocation he’d been using to support his family. The weight of that burden made sure writing couldn’t possibly mean anything other than a way to make a living. By the mid-60’s, he was living alone in a tiny apartment in the dingy Paris Hotel stricken with pneumonia. It was there, watching her father cough his lungs out whilst sitting on a bed barely wide enough to sleep on, that Waldo’s daughter told him: “You know, none of us would really mind if you were writing something you really cared about.”

He’d forgotten why he started writing in the first place. He began to take his time. He purposefully built a reputation as a slow writer, willing to take the time to get his work just as he thought it needed to be. He would become known as the writer who’d sooner deliver you a 400-page screenplay three months late, than something you could go out tomorrow and shoot. But those 400 pages would be the best 400 pages you’d ever read.

What made Waldo Salt so singular and important was the way he approached stories. While his path wasn’t unique, he was undoubtedly the best at his game. Instead of approaching material the way the Paddy Chayefskys of the world did, by way of the “idea” or “theme, Waldo would approach it through the characters and their deepest, almost sub-conscious needs. Joe Buck’s need for physical affection. Ratso Rizzo’s need for a friend. Bob Hyde’s need for purpose.

He was a hugely empathetic writer. In Serpico he infused just as much of his own experience and emotions into the characters that Frank Serpico found himself battling against as Frank himself. Whether it was Joe Buck, Ratso Rizzo, Frank Serpico, Luke Martin or Bob Hyde, Waldo Salt studied outcasts. His writing was always, from the very beginning, not primarily concerned with introspection, but instead with desperately trying to understand the people around him.

When asked in a Q&A “What is the fundamental need of the character Waldo Salt?” Waldo isn’t sure how to answer. He pauses, um’s and ah’s. Finally he replied: “That’s quite fascinating… I’ve never thought of this…”