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When Quentin Met Cinema: A Child's Perspective on the Silver Screen
In the late sixties and early seventies, the Tiffany Theater on the Sunset Strip became my gateway to adult cinema. At age seven, my mother and stepfather took me to see a double feature of "Joe" and "Where's Poppa?" - films decidedly not made for children. While "Joe" featured violence that put me to sleep (thankfully), "Where's Poppa?" had me wide awake from the moment George Segal donned a gorilla suit and Ruth Gordon punched him in the nuts. For a seven-year-old, this was the absolute pinnacle of comedy.
These early cinematic experiences shaped my understanding of adult life. I was like a child version of "Grizzly Man," observing grown-ups at night in their natural habitat. I learned how adults socialized, what they found funny, and how they behaved with each other. The rule was clear: don't ask stupid questions during the movie-save them for the drive home. I witnessed both the joy of communal movie-watching and its ugliness, like when gay characters were mocked in theaters. This was more than entertainment-it was my education in human nature, delivered through the flickering light of the silver screen. My childhood passion would eventually transform into one of Hollywood's most distinctive voices, with Tarantino's films like "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction," and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" becoming cultural touchstones that redefined American cinema.
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The Coolest Cop in Cinema: Bullitt's Revolutionary Impact
Steve McQueen ranked among the top three male movie stars of the sixties alongside Paul Newman and Warren Beatty. What distinguished McQueen was his consistent selection of quality material, despite his well-known dislike of reading. The secret to McQueen's superior film choices was his first wife, Neile. She would read scripts, narrow them down, write synopses, and explain to Steve why certain roles suited him. McQueen trusted her judgment, which steered him into his greatest career streak beginning with "The Cincinnati Kid."
Bullitt came about after McQueen made a deal with Warner Bros.-Seven Arts to back his production company, Solar Productions. Despite it being a logical follow-up to his hit "The Thomas Crown Affair," McQueen was reluctant to play a cop during the flower-child era when police were called "pigs." His embrace of counterculture made him hesitate, but he eventually committed, creating his most iconic role.
The film changed cop movies forever, breaking from the somber, interchangeable police dramas of the era. Frank Bullitt introduced audiences to a cop with style - waking in Hefner-worthy pajamas, dating a satisfied girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset), and wearing chic, perfectly tailored clothes throughout. Peter Yates' film doesn't waste time explaining its plot, instead moving confidently from one expertly executed set piece to another, focusing on action, atmosphere, San Francisco's locations, Schifrin's jazzy score, and McQueen's effortless cool.
McQueen's performance is a masterclass in minimalism - doing practically nothing but filling the frame with his presence in a way Newman and Beatty couldn't match. His Lieutenant Bullitt remains emotionally cool throughout, never losing his composure even when berated by Robert Vaughn's ambitious D.A. Chalmers. When he misses the killer at the hospital, he's only slightly frustrated before going back to work. After showing up Chalmers, there's no sarcasm - he simply exits.
This minimalist character design was a deliberate choice. Neile McQueen revealed the original script was "vastly different" and "almost genteel," but McQueen and Robert Relyea brought in Alan Trustman to build a movie around Steve. McQueen preferred physical performances over dialogue, often ripping out pages of lines or giving them to other actors. The result is pure cinema - McQueen moves forward, Yates follows him, and we the audience sit back and let them do our thinking for us.
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Dirty Harry: Siegel's Masterpiece of Cinematic Brutality
Don Siegel began his career in Warner Bros' Montage Department, working alongside directors like Raoul Walsh and his mentor Michael Curtiz. He designed iconic montages for films like "Yankee Doodle Dandy" before graduating to directing second unit action for major Warner productions. This background fundamentally shaped his directorial approach to violence.
Siegel's violence was more about brutality than explicit bloodshed, though moments like the bloody hit of the female pool swimmer at the beginning of Dirty Harry are unforgettable. His sequences need to be experienced in context to appreciate their power, and even after Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch shocked the industry, Siegel maintained his throne as master of screen brutality.
Dirty Harry was Siegel and Eastwood's fourth collaboration and defined both their careers. The film dethroned John Wayne, establishing Eastwood as America's premier action star and Siegel as Hollywood's expert practitioner of cinematic violence. Along with The French Connection, it shifted American action cinema from westerns to cop films and launched the serial killer subgenre that would dominate for decades.
The film was Siegel's most political work since Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It created the quintessential Siegel protagonist in Harry Callahan, a cop who believes society has rewritten the rules to favor criminals over law enforcement. By pitting this transgressive character against a fictionalized version of the Zodiac Killer, Siegel created the template for countless cop-vs-serial-killer thrillers that followed.
What made it truly political was how Siegel tailored it for frustrated older Americans who felt alienated by the rapid social changes of the early 1970s. The film gave voice to their fears and provided a .44 caliber hero who would fight for them against hippies, militant groups, street crime, and cultural upheaval. While not the racist or fascist film critics claimed, Dirty Harry is unquestionably reactionary, speaking directly to Nixon's "silent majority." This reactionary element disappeared from the sequels, particularly in Magnum Force, which attempted to reverse course.
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Deliverance: When the Woods Get Too Deep
John Boorman's "Deliverance" builds to the most profound and disturbing violent sequence in early seventies cinema. When Ed and Bobby pull up riverside, they're confronted by two backwoods hillbillies (Bill McKinney and Cowboy Coward), one carrying a shotgun. The audience immediately shares their dread as these men reveal themselves not as territorial locals but as predators.
McKinney begins manhandling Bobby - touching his face, tweaking his nipples - in a scene that transcends standard suspense to become a genuine mind fuck. These aren't movie villains but frighteningly convincing indigenous natives. After forcing the men deeper into the woods, Ed is tied to a tree while Bobby is stripped naked, tormented, and ultimately raped by McKinney. The scene plays out like some ancient ritual from a nature documentary - disturbing yet impossible to look away from.
As the hillbillies prepare to force Ed to perform oral sex, Lewis arrives and kills McKinney with an arrow. Coward flees, and the four men face a moral crisis about what to do next. With the entire area soon to be flooded by the dam project, Lewis argues they should bury the body: "Man, that's about as buried as you can get."
While the film's first half showcases Reynolds' charismatic Lewis, it's during this debate that his performance truly shines. Like a makeshift court, Lewis stalks back and forth, making compelling arguments while Cox's character crumbles under his logic and leadership. The survivalist rhetoric is no longer just talk - Lewis has proven himself when it mattered.
However, after this peak, the film slackens. Drew's ambiguous fate confuses rather than intrigues, and Ed's cliff-climbing rite of passage lacks genuine tension. Most disappointingly, the climactic confrontation with authorities is strangely under-dramatized, wasting what should be the film's nail-biting finale. The film's decline coincides with Reynolds' character being sidelined. Before "Deliverance," Reynolds had been trapped in dry television roles, but Lewis allowed him to finally distinguish himself as a serious actor, just as the character had waited his whole life for this adventure to prove himself.
Capitolo 5
The Getaway: McQueen's Commercial Comeback
Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway" follows master bank robber Doc McCoy who, after serving four years in prison, receives parole in exchange for orchestrating a robbery for local bigwig Beynon (Ben Johnson), who sits on the parole board. The deal is brokered by Doc's wife Carol, who may have been responsible for his imprisonment in the first place.
Beynon partners Doc with two unstable accomplices, including a sadistic killer named Rudy (Al Lettieri). After the robbery turns violent, the couple escapes with the money. When they meet Beynon to give him his cut, he reveals that Carol had to sleep with him to secure Doc's release. Carol immediately shoots Beynon.
The couple then makes a desperate dash across Texas toward the Mexican border, pursued by Texas authorities, Beynon's henchmen, and a wounded, vengeful Rudy. Beyond these external threats, they must also confront their own relationship crisis, as Doc struggles to forgive Carol's betrayal with Beynon.
The film was conceived during a transitional period in Steve McQueen's life. After three commercial disappointments (The Reivers, Le Mans, and Junior Bonner), McQueen and producer Robert Relyea designed this project as a guaranteed hit. Peter Bogdanovich was initially attached to direct with Walter Hill writing the screenplay, but McQueen fired Bogdanovich after a meeting where the director seemed dismissive of McQueen's concerns about firearms for the character. Sam Peckinpah, who had just worked with McQueen on Junior Bonner, was brought in to replace him.
The casting of Carol McCoy became contentious. Paramount head Robert Evans pushed for his wife Ali MacGraw, while Peckinpah wanted Stella Stevens. McQueen rejected Stevens, telling her directly, "I consider you competition." Other actresses considered included Lauren Hutton, Genevieve Bujold, and Angie Dickinson. Peckinpah initially wanted a bloody ending with Doc and Carol being gunned down in Mexico, partly to differentiate his slow-motion violence technique from Arthur Penn's in Bonnie and Clyde.
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Second-String Samurai: An Appreciation of Kevin Thomas
When I read his review of Malibu High I ran out and saw it that very night. And he was entirely correct. As cruddy as this little tawdry flick was, it had an undeniable power. And the lead actress, Jill Lansing (who never appeared in anything else again), proceeded to get better and better as the film unspooled, till by the final reel, when she's standing naked, towering over the body of one of her victims, she delivers a disreputable tour de force on par with Georgina Spelvin in The Devil in Miss Jones.
One review Kevin Thomas wrote in 1980, that I read when I was eighteen years old, was to have a significant impact on my film work seventeen years later. It was a review for the Lewis Teague-directed, John Sayles-scripted Jaws rip-off, Alligator. Thomas praised the film as "well made and lots of fun" and focused on the two lead performances of Robert Forster and Robin Riker, noting there was "an easy going naturalness to Forster and Riker that makes them seem like one of the couples in Return of the Secaucus Seven."
At the time, Secaucus Seven was the critical darling of the year, and comparing the characters in a Jaws rip-off to the indie hit was a bold proclamation. I saw Alligator three times that year and agreed with Thomas about Forster and Riker's charm. In fact, Forster became my choice for best male performance that year, even ahead of De Niro in Raging Bull.
Fifteen years later, when writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch (retitled Jackie Brown), I had to cast the likable bail bondsman Max Cherry. Though I considered Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, and John Saxon, I kept thinking about Forster in Alligator. I watched the movie again and felt that character could be Max Cherry, just fifteen years earlier. I wrote the script accordingly, right down to the discussion about his thinning hair. Without Thomas's positive highlighting of Forster in his review, I wouldn't have made that connection.
What made Kevin Thomas so unique in seventies and eighties film criticism was that he seemed to truly enjoy his job and his life. I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend. When I won an award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for Pulp Fiction in 1994, my first remarks at the podium were: "Gee, thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like."
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New Hollywood in the Seventies: Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs. Movie Brats
In the first half of the seventies, casual moviegoers grew weary of modern American cinema's darkness, drug use, and anti-everything cynicism. The Anti-Establishment Auteurs created films that reflected the senselessness and tragic irony of American life, where heroes died futile deaths that reaffirmed the cynical worldview that "you can't win." This worked for the Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman audiences, but not for Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson fans who "liked America just fine."
Almost every genre film became an Anti-Genre Film, designed to expose the absurdity and unsavory politics hidden beneath Hollywood conventions. Westerns became anti-westerns, cop films became anti-cop films. Audiences grew increasingly anxious about what they might be subjected to in darkened theaters. While they appreciated the new risque elements in films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, they weren't necessarily prepared for the tushy scene in Where's Poppa? or the male rape in Deliverance.
Then suddenly emerged a string of films-The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc?, The Godfather, American Graffiti, Paper Moon, Jaws, Carrie, Star Wars, Close Encounters-that were easily understandable, cut for maximum audience enjoyment rather than artistic indulgence, and offered fresh takes on familiar genres. These were the films the public had been waiting for.
The Movie Brats, the first film-school educated generation of young white male directors raised on television, defined the decade with their snazzy pop flicks. This group included Francis Ford Coppola (their artistic and spiritual leader), Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, John Milius, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Schrader. They formed a tight-knit community, supporting each other's work-Coppola championed Scorsese, De Palma introduced De Niro to Scorsese, Milius wrote Quint's Indianapolis speech for Spielberg, and Lucas and De Palma held joint casting sessions for Star Wars and Carrie.
What truly set the Movie Brats apart was their unabashed film geekdom. Unlike previous generations of directors who maintained an attitude of indifference toward cinema as art, these filmmakers were passionate students of film history. They were the first generation to grow up watching movies not just in theaters but on television, and the first to grow up watching television itself. In a way, that's why the Movie Brats wrestled the zeitgeist away from the Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs-the hippy directors couldn't understand, or didn't want to understand, that some people watch movies about giant ants and take Them! seriously.
Capitolo 8
Cinema Speculation: What If De Palma Directed Taxi Driver?
Brian De Palma was actually the first of the Movie Brats to read Schrader's screenplay and consider directing it. After Schrader wrote a good review of De Palma's Sisters, they became friendly, playing chess together. Despite initially rolling his eyes at the mention of a critic's screenplay, De Palma read Taxi Driver and recognized its quality but ultimately passed on it because he didn't think it was "commercial enough."
This reasoning seems depressing in retrospect. The script was commercial enough for Columbia Pictures, original director Robert Mulligan, and original star Jeff Bridges. After Ellen Burstyn's Oscar win, it was commercial enough for Scorsese, and after De Niro's Oscar, for him too-but not for De Palma?
In fairness, De Palma was looking for a hit after watching his Phantom of the Paradise play to empty theaters. Instead of Taxi Driver, he chose to make Obsession with Schrader as writer, furthering his "New Hitchcock" persona. Obsession isn't a bad movie, just dreary. Cliff Robertson's lead performance is extremely unappealing-"about as sexy as grandpa's big toe"-especially for a doomed love story. Genevieve Bujold delivers a tremendous performance, particularly in the closeup where she reverts to a seven-year-old girl remembering the night of the kidnapping. Despite lacking humor, the film works somewhat thanks to Vilmos Zsigmond's dreamy camera work and Bernard Herrmann's lush score.
It's peculiar that De Palma found Taxi Driver uncommercial when Columbia Pictures later had no trouble exploiting it as a Death Wish-style vigilante film. The trailer presented it as a lone man rising up who's had enough-like Billy Jack or Mr. Majestyk. When Scorsese read the script, however, he felt an immediate connection, telling Schrader, "I was burning inside my fucking skin; I had to make it."
The main difference between a Scorsese and De Palma Taxi Driver would be point of view. De Palma likely wouldn't have empathized with Travis Bickle as Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro did. In Scorsese's film, you become Travis Bickle-observing his rituals, understanding his loneliness, seeing him as a man rather than a monster. De Palma would have approached it differently, likely seeing it as "his Repulsion"-observing Travis objectively like Polanski observed Catherine Deneuve. His version would have been a political thriller focusing on how a disturbed loner becomes a political assassin, with the assassination attempt filmed as one of his grand slow-motion ballets with a Bernard Herrmann score vastly different from the minimalist one Scorsese received.
Capitolo 9
Rolling Thunder: The Perfect Revenge Film
John Flynn's Rolling Thunder tells the story of Air Force Major Charles Rane (William Devane), who returns home after being held prisoner in a "Hanoi hellhole" for seven years. He's greeted as a hero in San Antonio, but comes home emotionally damaged-unemotional, unresponsive, and stoic "to the point of not being among the living." While the community celebrates him with gifts including a red Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars (one for each day of captivity), his family has moved on-his wife Janet has fallen in love with a highway patrolman named Cliff, and his son Mark barely remembers him.
When four Texas scumbags called the Acuna Boys break into his home demanding the silver dollars, Charlie refuses to talk despite torture-they shove his hand down the garbage disposal, grinding it off. When his wife and son return home, Mark reveals the location of the money to save his father. The Acuna Boys execute Janet and Mark and shoot Charlie, leaving him for dead. The film transforms into what I call "a roaring rampage of revenge" as Charlie, now with a hook for a hand, drives through Mexico with barfly Linda Forchet to hunt down his family's killers.
Paul Schrader wrote Rolling Thunder after Taxi Driver and before The Yakuza, creating an interesting trilogy of scripts featuring complex male protagonists and blood-soaked violent catharses. While The Yakuza adapted Japanese crime films for Western audiences, both Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder subverted popular genres (vigilante films and revenge movies) with blistering critiques disguised as genre entries.
William Devane wielded significant power on set, with Fox backing his vision for the character. Devane's conception of Rane was essential to the film's subtext-a man so damaged he's incapable of emotion except for avenging his son's death. Unlike Schrader's script where Charlie understands his wife's dilemma and she offers herself to him out of genuine love, Devane's Rane completely closes the door on his wife once she accepts Cliff's marriage proposal. Even her execution-style murder doesn't unthaw his heart.
Linda Haynes' performance as Texas barfly Linda Forchet created a small but devoted cult following. I count myself as a "forty-five year member" of the Linda Haynes Fan Club, calling it "one of my favorite female performances in seventies cinema." Vincent Canby noted in his New York Times review that Haynes "manages simultaneously to look beautiful and slightly ravaged (something it took Ava Gardner years to achieve)."
In Schrader's original script, Charlie and Linda are "two Mexican-hating, Texas white-trash peas in a pod" with genuine connection and companionship. Unlike Devane's burnt-out shell, Schrader's Charlie blossoms after his family's massacre, relieved to jettison societal pressures. The pair share meaningful conversations about country music singers-something unimaginable from Devane's character. Schrader felt the film was "ruined" because his thematic conception was jettisoned-similar to what happened with Taxi Driver.
Capitolo 10
The Funhouse: Hooper's Carnival of Horror
For readers of Fangoria magazine in the early 1980s, Tobe Hooper was a superstar alongside directors like John Carpenter and George Romero. It's fascinating how this magazine encouraged its adolescent readership (boys thirteen to twenty-three) to embrace Andrew Sarris' Auteur theory, elevating horror directors and special effects artists to hero status. This marked a significant shift from Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, which had focused on Universal monsters and horror actors rather than directors.
The period from 1979 through 1982 saw the biggest horror movie boom in cinema history. The slasher film cycle was in full swing, accompanied by monster movies, animal attack films, and countless rip-offs of Jaws, Alien, The Omen, and Carrie, plus haunted house movies, ghost stories, vampire films, science fiction terror, and the last gasps of theatrical Italian horror. In 1981, it seemed like every two weeks another horror title was playing at theaters.
Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse, like Brian De Palma's Blow Out from the same year, opens with a parody of both the slasher genre and Psycho's shower scene. The film begins with a POV shot exploring a young boy's monster-obsessed bedroom before cross-cutting to his teenage sister Amy (Elizabeth Berridge) preparing to shower. The fake-out reveals the "killer" to be Amy's ten-year-old brother Joey playing a cruel prank. This opening isn't just a throwaway homage-it establishes a disturbing undertone that permeates the film.
Larry Block's deceptively thin screenplay follows four remarkably unappealing teenagers on a double date to a seedy traveling carnival. Each character is an unpleasant version of stock slasher film archetypes: Cooper Huckabee plays Buzz, the insensitive muscle-headed jock with a bit of "scumbag pizzaz" (like "Harrison Ford's low-life younger brother"); Miles Chapin is the wimpy, creepy Richie, complete with an irritating sweater tied around his neck; Largo Woodruff plays the slightly slutty Liz in tight red pants; and Elizabeth Berridge's Amy transforms into the uptight final girl archetype. Unlike most slasher films, we never truly like Amy-we simply dislike her less than her repellent friends.
While Robert Kaylor's Carny focused on shady midway games, Hooper's seedy carnival is both more compelling and entertaining. We're treated to authentic freak shows with real animal oddities, hoochie-coochie dancers that "seem as real as a gas station toilet," and vivid nighttime cinematography by Andrew Laszlo capturing the flashing, blinking colored lights of this trashy enterprise. Production designer Morton Rabinowitz's impressively eerie funhouse set balances being a showcase while remaining believable as part of this low-rent carnival, with ghoulish faces and rickety, paint-chipped animatronic dolls becoming the film's real stars.
The film's most sympathetic character is the stumbling funhouse worker who wears an oversized Frankenstein mask. This figure immediately draws our sympathy, which persists even after he removes the mask to reveal his deformed face. Played by San Francisco mime Wayne Doba, the character (credited simply as "The Monster") is a pitiful, naive young man with a birth defect, exploited by his cruel father (Conway) who forces him to kill the teenagers. The film's best scene shows the teens peeping and giggling as this poor wretch receives a hateful handjob from the carnival's phony fortune teller (Sylvia Miles), creating a slasher film version of The Elephant Man-except compared to this poor thing, John Merrick had it good.
