Cinematographer Gordon Willis' passing (see
THIS THREAD) brings up a LOT of great 1970s movies. He shot
three Best Picture winners in that decade,
The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and
Annie Hall as well as the nominee
All the President’s Men. Those need less than no help to appear on many a list.
But he did some beautiful work in films that are less famous.
I think most would agree that
The Drowning Pool is not in the same class as
Chinatown,
Night Moves, or
The Long Goodbye for '70s private detective movies, but I do like it an awful lot, and would place it firmly on a second tier with
The Late Show.
The Drowning Pool is a sequel to
Harper, which Paul Newman starred in back in 1966. After nine years, they decided to make a second one. It wound up the last (though the underrated
Twilight from 1998 feels like a spiritual, unofficial entry). I think Newman is at his most effortlessly cool yet vulnerable here, and while perhaps the mystery isn’t super complex, the Louisiana setting and top-notch cast elevate it for me. I doubt it is going to make a lot of top twenty-five lists, but if you like detective thrillers and Newman, it’s a very good watch. Gordon Willis’ work is nice, though not as revolutionary or as lovely as some of his others from the ‘70s.
Bad Company I mentioned in my earlier post of alternative Westerns, but I didn’t go into detail about it. Directed by Robert Benton, it stars Barry Brown as a young feller who avoids the draft for the American Civil War by heading out into the untamed West. In Missouri he is bushwhacked by Jeff Bridges, and ultimately joins up with his band of young, desperate, not-too-bright outlaws (which also includes John Savage). It is a very unromantic, demythologizing look at life on the plains. No John Waynes or Clint Eastwoods here, just desperation and circumstance.
Benton had co-written the screenplay for
Bonnie & Clyde, and
Bad Company was his feature debut. He made two more movies in the 1970s: the aforementioned
The Late Show with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin, and the Best Picture winning
Kramer vs. Kramer.
The other Western Gordon Willis lensed was Alan J. Pakula’s
Comes a Horseman. Their other collaborations in the decade,
Klute, The Parallax View, and
All the President’s Men, are all better known and more widely seen than
Comes a Horseman. It features a star cast of Jane Fonda, released the same year that she would earn her second Best Actress win for
Coming Home, James Caan, and Jason Robards, who had won Best Supporting Actor the previous two years for
All the President’s Men and
Julia. But for the powerhouse cast and elemental story types, it never fully comes together. It is magnificently shot by Willis, one of my favorites from him. And if nothing else, it gave us Richard Farnsworth as an actor. He had been a stunt man since he was a kid in the 1930s! But
Comes a Horseman was really the first time he was given a part that was more than a bit, and he makes the most of it. It resulted in an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor, the only nod the film received.
Annie Hall and
Manhattan are both well known and loved in Woody Allen’s canon, and Willis shot both of them. But he was also the D.P. on
Interiors, which remains one of Woody’s most divisive pictures. Sandwiched in between those other two hits,
Interiors is a purposefully muted, quiet drama that owes more to Ingmar Bergman (who Woody adores) than it does to The Marx Brothers. It seems to be equally praised and reviled. That reputation is what generally keeps it being one of the last movies a new Woody devotee takes a gander at. Again, love it or lump it, Willis’ photography is definitely a highlight.
Hal Ashby is another director who had a marvelous decade, with
Harold & Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and
Being There. But before all of those triumphs, his debut,
The Landlord, was shot by Gordon Willis. The tale of a rich white kid, played by Beau Bridges, buying a tenement in Park Slope hoping to destroy it but becoming enamored with the low-income, racially diverse residents is well done, for what it is, but extremely dated and I think easily the least of those seven films Ashby exploded out of the gates with. Probably unlikely to show up on multiple lists here, but if you have just discovered Hal Ashby, or broadened your appreciation for him,
The Landlord is surely worth seeing.
A dark and insane comedy that is dated but holds up much better for me is Alan Arkin’s debut as director,
Little Murders, adapting Jules Feiffer’s play and starring Elliott Gould. It came out the same year as the slick
Klute, and that’s the picture that really started to establish more fully his aesthetic of darkness and negative space. But I think the twisted fun of
Little Murders is much more engaging at this point than the thrills of
Klute, even if visually it is Pakula’s film that is much better regarded and remembered (mainly for Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning turn).
The Paper Chase’s look at what it takes to survive Harvard Law was very well known at the time, even spawning a television series that starred the breakout performer who was not Timothy Bottoms nor even the pre-
”Bionic Woman” Lindsay Wagner, but John Houseman’s droll, cruel, yet somehow inspiring Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. The then-71-year-old had been Orson Welles’ producer on the stage and in the business ever since. He won Best Supporting Actor at that year’s Oscars, and it started an entire new career for him late in life as an actor. It isn’t Gordon Willis’ best shot film, but it is a crisp aid to the storytelling.
Gordon Willis also shot a couple movies for Irvin Kershner (best known for
The Empire Strikes Back):
Loving starring George Segal and Eva Marie Saint, and
Up the Sandbox starring Babs Streisand. I haven’t watched either in ages. I remember
Loving feeling pretty pedestrian, almost TV movie quality, despite a cast that also includes Sterling Hayden and Keenan Wynn, and
Sandbox I barely remember at all, having melded in my memory with
For Pete’s Sake and even
All Night Long. Think I watched them all during the same period.
Up the Sandbox is likely due for a re-watch, though something tells me the reason it didn’t separate in my memory is because it isn’t in the same class as Bogdanovich’s
What’s Up, Doc?
ANYway, yeah, Gordon Willis had his visual fingerprints all over the decade, not just in those four or five big films likely everybody has heard of/seen.
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