1980s, British cinema, Drama, Historical, Sports, Uncategorized

Chariots Of Fire (1981)

Director: Hugh Hudson
Screenwriter: Colin Welland

In Memoriam: Hugh Hudson (1936-2023) / Vangelis (1943-2022) / Ben Cross (1947-2020) / Ian Charleson (1949-1990) / Brad Davis (1949-1991)

By Roderick Heath

Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire can still be called a beloved and iconic work, even as it’s suffered a precipitous decline in stature since its release in 1981. At the time it was an uncontroversial winner of the Best Picture Oscar, marked by many as the official moment of resurgence for British cinema at a moment when the New Hollywood era had been decisively declared dead following Heaven’s Gate (1980). Actor turned screenwriter Colin Welland also gained an Oscar for the script, as did the Greek prog rocker turned electronica composer Vangelis. As if the film’s themes of patriotic toil and achievement were bleeding out into real life, entrepreneurial producer David Puttnam gained the climax to his and others’ efforts to foster that British film renaissance after the long, hard winter of the 1970s. That sentiment was famously summarised by Welland’s declaration upon receiving his Oscar, “The British are coming!”, and David Attenborough’s Gandhi would repeat the feat the following year. For years after its release, tributes, pastiches, and lampoons playing on its opening images of men running set to the shimmering electronic tones of Vangelis’ glorifying theme were all over the place.

With time however Chariots of Fire seems to have fallen away from attention, now often dismissed as the prototypical piece of Oscar bait that unfairly beat out Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in the ultimate prestige-versus-pop movie clash, and a flagship of 1980s conservative resurgence in moviegoing taste: Ronald Reagan reportedly loved it. Puttnam would piss off myriad players and onlookers with his brief period running Columbia Pictures a few years later. Hudson’s career would suffer a similarly jarring switchback of fortune. Hudson was one of a cadre of directors fostered by Puttnam, following Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, and Adrian Lyne, who had cut their teeth making TV commercials. Like Parker, Hudson had worked for Scott for a time, with Hudson’s signature talent, as evinced on a famous ad for Fiat showing cars being robotically assembled set to music from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, being interesting fusions of sound and vision. He had also demonstrated his interest in sporting subjects with his documentary on racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio, Fangio, A life at 300 km/h, and worked as a second unit director on Parker and Puttnam’s breakthrough collaboration Midnight Express (1978). Chariots of Fire was his feature debut, and for a follow-up Hudson made Greystoke – The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), and Revolution (1985): the latter proved a disaster both commercially and critically. Hudson was pushed to the margins, only returning sporadically for relatively straitlaced and classy fare no-one watched, with Lost Angels (1989), My Life So Far (1999), I Dreamed of Africa (2000), and Altamira (2016), although as his feature career broke down he kept up making much-admired commercials. His recent passing at the age of 86 was barely noted by many cineastes.

Despite the train wreck his once-dazzling career became, I retain admiration and interest in Hudson’s prime, when he seemed the least flashy but also most quietly experimental of the directors Puttnam fostered. Greystoke tried to reiterate the Tarzan tale in a fastidiously realistic manner, drawing on a script that was a long-time passion project for writer Robert Towne. The result was uneven but fascinating and, in its early portions, uniquely vivid. But it was also the first case of one of Hudson’s film being tinkered with, as would happen more destructively on Revolution, a film which certainly didn’t work but was also a product of authentic artistic ambition. In keeping with his fascination with culture clashes and boldness in risking elements of anachronism, Hudson tried to explore the American Revolution in a manner that nodded to both punk and new wave-era pop culture – notably casting singer Annie Lennox as a revolutionary maiden – and art cinema, particularly Mikhail Kalatozov and Miklos Jancso, with his rolling, flowing staging of communal events, whilst engaging seriously with the theme of an angry and vehement underclass emerging from revolt, as embodied by Al Pacino’s lead character. The film gained some reappraisal when Hudson reedited it in 2008.

Indeed, the singular thread connecting Hudson’s films despite their wildly varying reception was an interest in clashes between and within cultures, as experienced and embodied by individuals. Hudson himself came from an officially privileged background, having attended Eton as a lad – he notably filmed the other famous scene of Chariots of Fire, the Great Court Run, on location at his almer mater – but also developing a visceral hatred for the prejudice he often found espoused in such circles. As a consequence Chariots of Fire is far from being straightforward in its attitudes to patriotic endeavour and identity, revolving as it does around two core protagonists who become champions and national heroes but nonetheless do so in highly ironic ways and upholding vehemently different motives that somehow still mark them as perpetual outsiders, if only in their own minds. In the late 1970s Puttnam was explicitly looking for a story reminiscent of A Man For All Seasons (1966) as a study of a hero obeying their conscience, and discovered the story of Eric Liddell, 400m champion at the 1924 Paris Olympics, in an Olympic history book. He commissioned the former actor Welland to write the script, and Welland talked to everyone he could still alive and able to remember the 1924 Olympic Games where Liddell had competed, but he just missed interviewing Liddell’s teammate and rival Harold Abrahams, the 100m champion at the same games, as Abrahams passed in 1978. Welland nonetheless attended his funeral service, inspiring his script’s flashback structure and anchoring a story of the past in the then-present.

Stories about the British upper crust had been officially unfashionable for decades when Chariots of Fire emerged, around the same time as the hugely successful TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which similarly worked with serious purpose to convey the flavour and meaning of a bygone era’s mores on their own terms, whilst also noting the birth pains of the more recent epoch. If films like David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Joseph Losey’s King and Country (1963) explored the breakdown of the old British character in the face of the Twentieth century’s charnel house, Chariots of Fire evoked it from a safe distance, noting an age when it wasn’t considered absurd to put God before fame or when the idea of patriotic duty as a transcendental virtue was still a still-lit if flickering flame. Chariots of Fire didn’t just set the scene for other posh British dramas to start proliferating again on movie and TV screens, and lurk as an influence behind other ambitious sports films like Ford v Ferrari (2019), but perhaps also opened a door leading to Harry Potter films, which depended on a similarly elastic push and pull between nostalgic yearning and anxiety and rebellion in the face of haughty tradition.

Chariots of Fire has been described as a rare sports movie that even people who don’t like sports movies like. That could be whilst, as movie stories go, Chariots of Fire contains all the stuff of a heroic sporting drama, it also avoids the usual – by historical necessity of course but also but dint of focus and method. The film charts the rivalry, and mutual admiration, of the two standout champions of the British team at the ’24 Olympics: Abrahams and Eric Liddell, who nonetheless are fated not to compete head-to-head, but instead find separate paths towards their eventual reckonings with victory. Eric (Ian Charleson) is a China-born Scottish missionary and Rugby Union player turned runner. Harold (Ben Cross) is the son of a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant turned successful English banker. For both men faith defines them as individuals and in relation to the world about them, but in disparate ways: for Liddell his religion supersedes worldly cares and values, whilst Abrahams is driven by angry resentment. Eric muses with love on the Scottish landscape that is nonetheless new and foreign to him after years of hearing about it from his father, whilst Harold chafes at constantly feeling, despite ardent sense of loyalty and English identity, like others still consider him an alien. The title of course is comes from William Blake’s beloved poem “Jerusalem,” a relevant choice not just in the dashingly poetic lilt it lends but in evoking the centrality of religious faith to the drama as well as Blake’s anxious questioning of the changes befalling his beloved England, and desire to rebuild it as something finer and cleansed: in much the same way the film notes the enlargement of the idea and ideal of British identity.

The film’s flashback structure nods to Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) (also relentlessly mimicked by Attenborough on Gandhi, at a time when Lean still couldn’t get a film financed to save his life) as it commences with a funeral service for Harold, with a eulogy given by his former teammate and pal from Cambridge Lord Andrew Lindsay (Nigel Havers), and attended by some other old comrades including Aubrey ‘Monty’ Montague (Nicholas Farrell). Hudson dissolves from the sight of the old, withered men mourning one of their own to the spectacle of them in all the glory of their youth, dashing as a team through the surf at Broadstairs in Kent (although the scene was actually shot at West Sands, next to St Andrews Golf Club, in Scotland), both physical strain and sheer joyful pleasure in pushing their abilities to the limit apparent on their faces. Hudson returns to this vision at the film’s very end, partly in sustaining the motif of fluid time and restoration of glory days, and also with an old ad man’s knowledge he has a killer hook: it’s this vision, with Vangelis’ music over the top, that became an instant pop culture landmark. A brief vignette follows of Harold’s competitive and brattish streak on full display as he becomes frustrated at failing to bowl Liddell out during a game of cricket, staged with amusing bohemian verve within the plush environs of a seaside hotel’s ballroom, as well as Harold’s final ability to laugh at himself for all his concerted passion.

Loose framing narration comes from Monty in writing a letter home as he muses on Abrahams’ customary intensity, and thinks back to their first meeting three years earlier when first coming to Cambridge, setting the scene for stepping back again in time, as several of the future track and field stars meet whilst signing up for clubs during their induction at the university. Harold, a law student, also immediately makes his declaration of intent when he takes on a standing challenge that hasn’t been beaten in 700 years: the Great Court Run, referred to in the movie as the College Dash, sprinting around the courtyard of Trinity College in the time it takes for the school clock to strike noon. He unexpectedly gains a fellow challenger when the dashing young aristocrat Lindsay decides to try too: still, Harold manages to not just beat him but the clock too, making history. Truth be told, Abrahams never even tried to take on the Great Court Run (which was actually first beaten by Lord Burlegh, one of the two real men Lindsay is based on, a few years after this), but it makes a great scene in first evincing Harold’s blistering ability in the context of this capital of an eminent but hidebound establishment he’s clawing his way into, and its description of the essence of a certain British kind of exceptionalism blending schoolboy larkishness and fearsome ability, the spirit of eternal renewal and limit-stretching amidst echoes of hallowed tradition.

Soon Harold tells his fast friend Monty that he’s determined to avenge the many slights and insults turned his way by the British upper class, to “run them off their feet” literally and figuratively. Meanwhile, the more serenely modest and pious, if also hearty and good-humoured Eric is being feted in Scotland for his success as a footballer, and courted by coach Sandy McGrath (Struan Rodger) to turn his hand to running: encouraged to give a show of his speed during a sporting carnival he’s giving out trophies at, Eric demonstrates his astounding talent, complete with his signature move as he zeroes in on the finish line of leaning back with his mouth yawing wide in ecstatic effort. He soon decides to take up Sandy on his offer. On the one occasion Eric and Harold race against each-other in the 100m, at a meet at Stamford Bridge, Eric handily beats Harold, sparking a momentary crisis for Harold who’s built his entire identity around being unbeatable. He gains solace when a professional coach he’s approached, Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), assures him he can make him a better runner, whereas he thinks Eric has reached his limit as a sprinter and is a better fit for longer runs.

The story of the two runners is presented against the backdrop of a Britain recovering in the aftermath of the Great War, with both men competing unawares to be salves for, as one character puts it, “a guilty national pride.” Harold, first signing into Caius, deals with the patronising Head Porter Rogers (Richard Griffiths) in explaining that he only just missed fighting in the war and comments, “I ceased to be called laddie when I took the King’s commission – is that clear?” Harold’s habitual pugnacity and chip-on-the-shoulder attitude is both a reaction to various manifestations of anti-Semitism and taken by others as a justification for it, particularly the Masters of Caius and Trinity Colleges (Lindsay Anderson and John Gielgud), who observe the courtyard race with languid interest, two old trolls inhabiting the high reaches of this otherwise romantic world of blazers and boaters. They later put Harold on the spot for violating their purely amateur ethos by hiring Mussabini, which they worry will besmirch the honour of the university. “I take the future with me,” Harold ripostes, provoked to tension but also perhaps just a little thrilled to have put the old guard’s noses out of joint, to one Master’s exchange with the other once he’s gone, “There goes your Semite, Hugh.”

The two Master are played with snooty verve by the obviously cast Gielgud and the more mischievously cast, famously antiestablishment director Anderson, maker of what could be described as this film’s antithesis, If… (1968). The inevitable punchline that when informed of Harold’s eventual victory one Master notes to the other with satisfaction, “Just as I expected,” lends a more sardonic hue to the theme of the establishment making room. Some have expressed qualms over what Harold’s bucking of the Masters means over the years, considering that the Harold future claims as his own is the one we’re familiar with today, of professional sportspeople and the invasion of sporting endeavour by overriding commercial concerns and an attendant competitiveness that often manifests in drug cheating. More immediately, it also points to a subtext of Chariots of Fire wound in with its own making. Financing for the film was taken over by immigrant entrepreneur Mohammed Al-Fayed and his son Dodi: Harold’s expressions of a multigenerational intent to carve a path into the heart of the British establishment by immigrant outsiders against all headwinds of prejudice might well have caught Al-Fayed’s attention, as it could well have spoken to so many who had come to Britain in the post-Imperial age. He extends this to Mussabini, a man with a strong midlands accent who nonetheless is Arab-Italian in heritage, further exacerbating the complicating sense of national identity.

This theme is starkly at odds with the film’s reputation as being a conservative statement, although it could also be said to rhyme to a certain extent with the Thatcher-Reagan era’s mixture of embraced traditionalism and narrowly defined and channelled rule-breaking: the outsiders want to be insiders. The film is also cunning in offsetting its antagonist figures. If the Cambridge Masters represent a hidebound old guard, Lord Lindsay is presented as a gentleman bohemian who could also stand in for the Thatcher era Tory’s ideal self-projection, enjoying the fruits of his privilege, merrily practising his hurdling technique in the grounds of his country house with champagne used an actual training tool, but entirely open-minded and breezily reassuring to all in his circle.

The nominal enemies on the running track are the Americans, the flashy Charlie Paddock (Dennis Christopher) and the muscular, intimidating Jackson Scholz (Brad Davis), who have a rivalry not unlike that of Harold and Eric. Whilst Paddock is a figure ripe for a takedown, Scholz proves a serious person who feels unexpected kinship for Eric, eventually giving him a note that suggests equally serious religious feelings, which Eric then carries into the race. Davis had played the lead in the Puttnam-produced, Parker-directed Midnight Express (1978), the film that established the potency of Puttnam’s production approach if with a safe appeal to the US market; Christopher meanwhile was cast with some wit after his lead role in Peter Yates’ Breaking Away (1979) as another sportsman, albeit this one lean and mean, casually accepting a passionate kiss from a random woman when first setting foot in France. Scholz himself, who actually beat both Liddell and Abrahams in the 200m, was still alive when the film was made, as was Jennie Liddell, both thanked in the end credits.

The film’s deeper theme is the way an athlete – perhaps anybody, really – is obliged to find strength and motive within, in wellsprings distinct from and even perhaps alien to the society they represent, even as they’re expected to share out whatever success and glory they win in collective terms. In both Harold and Eric those wellsprings are apparent, Harold’s driving need to prove himself the best participating in a constant roundelay of pride and shame, versus Eric’s triumphal sense of spirituality expressed through physicality, and whichever compels one as an individual viewer the most perhaps says much about one’s own inner drives. Eric’s awesome talent is illustrated to both Mussabini and Harold’s profound wonder when they watch him in a race at a Scots vs English track meet: a fellow runner shoves Eric at the first turn and he falls down at the trackside, gets back up, chases down the other runners and wins, at the cost of collapsing as a breathless mess at the end. Here in particular Eric’s speed seems the purest expression of something beyond the merely human, a vitality of mind and body springing from a conviction so total as to be reflexive: whereas Harold needs the society he feels at odds with in a peculiar way, Eric is beyond it.

In much less airy terms, Eric’s talent has long been honed in active competition as a footballer, the furore of actual struggle a realm he’s been trained to be indifferent amongst, where Harold for all his bloodymindedness competes as the gentleman amateur, and he needs Mussabini’s keen sense of technique to help him improve. Whilst he never does get to race Eric again after losing to him, leaving a tantalising ambiguity in the air, Harold gains something that lets him take on the rest of the best in the world and win. “Short sprinters run on nerves,” Mussabini tells Harold when assessing his and Eric’s differing capacities, “It’s tailor-made for neurotics.” He and Mussabini develop an almost paternal relationship during the course of their labours, with Mussabini finally crying, “My son!” when Harold triumphs. Harold’s friendship with Monty sees him praising him as a “complete man” even as Monty is hurting after grievous failure, even as Harold despairs that he himself might be too scared to win after a life of being scared to fail.

Welland’s script was rife with historical and dramatic licence, including the actual circumstances of Abrahams’ race(s) against Liddell and of Liddell’s quandary at the Olympics, Jennie’s age and attitude to Liddell’s running, the timing of Abrahams’ meeting of his future wife Sybil, and inventing the character of Lindsay as a concatenation of two real historical figures, one of whom didn’t want to be involved with the film and the other competed at a later Olympics. Montague was actually a student at Oxford, although the narration his letters provides is practically verbatim from his real missives. But Abrahams’ authentic musical talent – and Cross’s – and love of Gilbert and Sullivan in particular, was smartly tapped as one of the running motifs of the film, as songs from the G&S catalogue provide jaunty leitmotifs for Harold and the other Cambridge adventurers. After his self-explaining soliloquy to Monty, Hudson shifts into a spry and witty montage of Harold’s training regimens and running victories, scored to his own singing in the Cambridge G&S Society’s production of H.M.S. Pinafore: his signing the anthemic “He Is An Englishman” is a gesture laced with both spry sarcasm and perfect earnestness given Harold’s mission.

Later Harold is distracted from his pure dedication when he’s dragged by his friends to see a production of The Mikado, where he he’s instantly smitten with Sybil Gordon (Alice Krige), playing the role of Num-Yum, belting out “Three Little Maids From School Are We.” Much to Monty’s heartache given his own long-nursed crush Harold successfully asks her out on a date, in part because Sybil’s younger brother is athletics mad, and the two have immediate chemistry even as Sybil tries awkwardly to reassure Harold as he explains his position as Jewish: “I’m what they call semi-deprived…It means that lead me to water but they won’t let me drink.” A moment of crisis seems to arrive when the special of the restaurant Sybil ordered for them both proves to be pig’s trotters, only for this to set them both laughing. Later, as they’ve become a firm couple, Sybil tries with mixed sympathy, irritation, and frustration to coax Harold through his crisis after losing, a moment where despite the jaggedness of emotion it’s plain that Sybil has become along with Mussabini a person Harold can show his deepest, most inchoate vulnerability to.

Eric and his sister Jennie (Cheryl Campbell) have a similarly fraught and close relationship, both being predestined to take up their father’s work in China. Jennie becomes worried that his new passion for running is drawing him away from his habits of faith and their duty, and Jennie is particularly upset when Eric is late from a training session for a prayer meeting, making anxious appeals that he remember what their ultimate purpose it. As he walks with her up Arthur’s Seat outside Edinburgh, Eric explains patiently but firmly that he’s already committed to becoming a missionary but is also determined to take his running as far as he can, feeling that his talent is god-given, that when he runs he “feels His pleasure,” and so must honour it to the upmost. This attempt to balance faith with passion will of course be strongly tested, foreshadowed early in the film when he chides a boy for playing football on a Sunday, although he also makes sure to play a game with the lad and his family the next morning so he doesn’t think “God’s a spoilsport.” Just as Eric and the rest of the team selected for the ’24 Olympic embark on a Channel ferry for their great venture, he learns from an inquisitive reporter’s questions that the heats for the 100m will be held on a Sunday.

When Eric soon declares he can’t participate in the heats, he’s soon taken before number of British Olympic Committee bigwigs including Lord Birkenhead (Nigel Davenport), Lord Cadogan (Patrick Magee), the Duke of Sutherland (Peter Egan), and Edward the Prince of Wales (David Yelland), in a scene that becomes, in Eric’s words, a form of inquisition in the pointed test of loyalties. Eric stands up for himself effectively against Cadogan’s stern espousal of patriotic duty above all and Birkenhead and the Prince’s smoother espousals of the same, whilst the Duke has more sympathy, retorting to Cadogan’s comment “In my day it was King first, God after,” with, “Yes, and the war to end wars bitterly proved your point.” Eric’s steadfastness places them all at loggerheads until Lindsay intervenes: having already won a silver medal in the hurdles, he suggests that Eric take his slot in the 400m, to be held on a different day, and the offer ends the impasse. Meanwhile Harold is obliged to install Mussabini in a hotel room a safe distance away from the Olympic stadium lest he taint it with his professionalism (“I’ve seen better-organised riots,” he quips earlier on regarding a different meet).

Holm’s expert supporting performance was invaluable, presenting the worldly professional flipside to all the toffee-caked youth, whilst Cross and Charleson’s effective performances went oddly ignored even in Oscar nominations. Hudson lost the Best Director Oscar to Warren Beatty’s work on Reds (1981), an ironic win given that whilst both directors paid homage to Lean in their elliptical approaches to stories set in the same period if contending with highly divergent social perspectives, and because Beatty’s work was generally much more traditional than Hudson’s. Hudson’s exacting recreation of the period milieu, and equally exacting feel for the classically British virtues and foibles at play in the drama, blends throughout Chariots of Fire with an aggressively modern film aesthetic. This is most obviously keyed to the boldly anachronistic electronic textures of Vangelis’s score (which made so much impact that Peter Weir pinched the idea for his Gallipoli, 1982, as did Michael Mann for The Keep, 1983, whilst Vangelis was immediately hired by Scott for Blade Runner, 1982), but is also apparent in Hudson’s restless camerawork and innovative editing. Not that Hudson was being entirely original. Slow motion, freeze frames, and replays were already an accepted part of the average TV sports broadcast by this point, and films like Grand Prix (1966) and Le Mans (1972) had played with fracturing time in filming sporting contests.

Hudson still went a step further in trying to use it all for dramatic, even poetic emphasis, balancing the relentlessly fleeting nature of sporting competition, in which entire lives and fates can be decided in a few brief seconds of perfect physical expression, clashing with the mind’s capacity to experience it in expanses of dilation and distillation, the surging physical effort of racing glimpsed in contorting slow motion that turns events into arias of motion and character. Harold’s loss to Eric in their one race is a blink-and-miss-it affair where the difference between the two men seems trifling and yet means everything, and Harold’s obsessing over it is illustrated in constant, drawn-out flash-cut returns to it, each moment and gesture turned over with agonising meaning, punctuated by Vangelis’ moody electronic stings. Harold’s climactic race is filmed first in a deadpan shot looking down the track, the race that has obsessed the runners and become the focal point of the drama disposed of in a few seconds, the winner hard to make out because of the angle – the event of such grand drama is also a mere blip in movie time, never mind the history of the world, but then is revisited in glorifying slow motion, becoming a dream of individual will translated into speed.

Other innovative touches are more subtle, including Hudson’s use of steadicam shots not just for flashy effects but subtle unity that emphasises more communal moments, in the induction day scene, as he moves through the crowd with and around Cross, and then with more intense effect when he films the American Olympic team training fiercely for the contest, set to pulsing music from Vangelis. Later Hudson’s clever feel for making sound and vision interact manifests as he turns a scene of Eric giving a sermon on the Sunday into a study in contrasts, Eric’s meditative words spoken over footage of the athletes who are racing in various states of pain and effort, including Monty who suffers falls during a steeplechase, and Harold loses to Scholz in their heat, rendered studies in slightly absurd pathos as their efforts crash to earth in dreamy slow-motion. Hudson also honours more familiar and hallowed flourishes, like a montage of spinning newspapers used to communicate the furore Eric’s refusal to run sets off in a battle of religion versus patriotism.

Hudson’s direction has weathered better than Welland’s script in some regards – as intelligent and well-layered as it is, not all Welland’s dialogue is crisp and convincing, as he uses Sutherland to deliver a brief, annoyingly essayistic note on the dangers of severing Eric’s strength from his motives, or when Scholz, after the American coach (Philip O’Brien) dismisses Eric to one of his American competitors, notes, in clunky cliché, “He’s got something to prove, something personal – something guys like Coach’ll never understand in a million years.” Nonetheless, the essence of Chariots of Fire that drives it well beyond the usual kind of sports drama never goes out of focus, even as the film ratchets up tension in building to Harold and Eric’s climactic races. That we usually expect a certain outcome in following the story of a sportsperson in a movie is factored into the viewing experience, in the way Hudson presents Harold’s victory with that deadpan long shot, cutting briefly to Eric cheering him on before returning to a slow motion shot of Harold lunging through the finish tape in exact obedience to Mussabini’s instruction. The coach himself is forced to wait until he can hear the strains of “God Save the King” until he knows his protégé has won.

The more interesting point, reiterating the essence of the entire film, is how he wins, and how it affects him: reeling after the effort of his lifetime, Harold doubles up as if in mortal pain, again in slow-motion, whilst the race flashes once more in his head, this time with his sheer and perfect focus on display. The music on the soundtrack is plaintive and eerie even as Eric comes over to shake Harold’s hand in a gesture of great meaning. Here Hudson captures something profound about victory even whilst resisting the usual movie language for conveying it: for Harold it is a purgation, an emptying out indeed, of his previous identity. Harold afterwards shirks out of the changing room as Lindsay counsels the worried Monty to leave him along: “Now one of these days Monty, you’re going to win yourself, and it’s pretty difficult to swallow.” Eric’s subsequent win is a more traditional kind of heroic payoff, if still one filmed and conveyed in an unusual manner. Eric’s earlier conversation with Jennie is heard over his run, emphasising the vitality of his words as part and parcel with his deeds. He charges home to victory with his signature wide mouth and back-flung head, watched with knowing joy by Sandy and Jennie, and Harold with blazing intensity. The heroes’ return to England sees some further irony in the way Eric readily accepts adulation with the others whilst Harold quietly waits to slip off the train and meet with Sybil, his private war over at last, and his victory that of simply becoming a fully functional man.

The film offers title notes on the Harold and Eric’s different ends, with Harold living to a ripe old age whilst Eric’s air of being a little too good for the world is confirmed in the report of his death at the end of World War II (he died of a brain tumor whilst in a Japanese POW camp), which suggests a whole other, equally interesting story in itself. “He did it,” the aged Monty notes to Lindsay as they leave the church in a brief return to Harold’s 1978 funeral service, “He ran them off their feet.” Whereupon Hudson returns to the opening vision of the athletes running on the beach, restored again to their youthful glory. This encore is particularly cunning in the way it lingers on the men for a few moments after a performance of the hymn version of “Jerusalem” ends, with only the sound of their feet splashing in foam and went sand, nailing a plaintive sense of the ephemeral and immediately physical before Vangelis’ theme returns. Sure, Chariots of Fire might indeed not be as great as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it is a movie in the top echelon of its kind, a properly mature spectacle that represents a rare melding of dramatic intelligence and stylistic vigour. Tragic lustre has been imbued upon Chariots of Fire’s meditations on the dimming of golden youth and sadly exulting nostalgia in the time since its release, by the sheer fact that several of its stars died young, with both Charleson and Davis claimed by the AIDS epidemic, and whilst Cross lived to be an august character actor, even he departed too early. Still, they’re always young in this movie.

1970s, 1980s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, Drama, Sports, Uncategorized

Rocky (1976) / Rocky II (1979) / Rocky III (1982) / Rocky IV (1985)

Directors: John G. Avildsen, Sylvester Stallone
Screenwriter: Sylvester Stallone

By Roderick Heath

Rocky’s genesis and success is deeply entwined with the story enacted in the movie series it birthed, and a fundamental aspect of its mystique and popularity. Sylvester Stallone, born in Hell’s Kitchen in 1946, had suffered from partial paralysis in his face from a difficult birth, a debilitation he patiently tried to entirely erase as he became an actor. Stallone’s peculiarly dichotomous image had roots in his background, with his mother founding a gym for women in the mid-1950s and powerfully influencing her son’s celebration of physical prowess, even as Stallone proved himself no dunce in attending the University of Miami. His early acting days were harsh, and raw desperation drove him to appear in the porn film The Party at Kitty and Stud’s (1970). Stallone recovered to find scattered but eye-catching jobs in films like Bananas (1970), The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Death Race 2000, and Farewell, My Lovely (all 1975), usually as tough guys and thugs. Tired of being relegated to such meathead roles, Stallone resolved to write himself a leading part. He found his theme when he watched heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali defend his title against the white journeyman Chuck Wepner, who surprised many by lasting 15 rounds against the great master.

Inspired, Stallone wrote a script, taking the basic premise of an unrated contender taking on a terrifying champion, and cobbling together bits of popular boxing lore, encompassing figures like Jim Braddock, Rocky Marciano, and particularly Rocky Graziano, whose autobiography Somebody Up There Likes Me had provided Paul Newman with his own breakthrough starring vehicle in 1956. He also knew his old movies about boxers and fighters along the lines of The Champ, Flesh (both 1932), Kid Galahad (1937), Golden Boy (1939), and Gentleman Jim (1942). Stallone’s script was initially, relatively muted with the original ending having Rocky throw his fight after deciding he didn’t really like boxing. But as the production moved along, and Stallone’s do-or-die project became a more tangible proposition, it evolved into a hymn to the ideals of persistence and hardiness in the face of adversity. In the mid-1970s film milieu, that kind of old-fashioned sentiment was unfashionable, but Stallone proved he was in the same place as the mass audience. As the Bicentennial rolled around in the immediate post-Watergate hangover, the hunger for something thrilling and affirmatory proved rife. Stallone’s script was good enough to gain a lot of studio interest as a possible vehicle for an established star, but Stallone insisted he play the role. Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, producers attached to United Artists, were able to take risks on movies they made provided the costs were kept restrained, and they gave Stallone his shot on a $1 million budget.

For a director, they turned to John G. Avildsen, who had served a sturdy apprenticeship as an assistant director before becoming a director in his own right and was best known up to that point for Joe (1970) and Save The Tiger (1973), quintessential works of the early decade as restrained and moody character portraits contending with the battered American psyche of the time. Save The Tiger had even netted a Best Actor Oscar for Jack Lemmon. Avildsen proved perfectly in tune with what Stallone’s script offered, able to apply a potent sense of verisimilitude and muted realism to a story that ultimately offered crowd-pleasing pleasures. Rewards were immediate: the film was a huge hit, and pitched against flagship works of the American New Wave’s height like Taxi Driver, All The President’s Men, and Network at the Oscars, Rocky emerged the victor. Stallone was vaulted to popular stardom. In the immediate wake he evinced warning signs of hubristic self-confidence in directing, writing, starring, and singing in the vanity vehicle Paradise Alley (1978), badly denting his standing even as he was just getting going. Stallone decided to make Rocky II, again directing as well as starring and writing. This proved another huge hit and cemented him as the biggest star of the next decade, particularly once he gained his other signature role as John Rambo. To date there have been eight films featuring Rocky Balboa as a character, and all of them are worthwhile to some degree, but it’s the first four films that constitute the most fiercely beloved portion of the series.

Even in physical terms Stallone was a contradiction, his large limpid eyes and long, equine nose in his youth like an Italian princeling out of a renaissance portrait, jammed onto a stevedore’s frame. Rocky and Rambo became almost diametrically distinct yet closely joined concepts defining Stallone’s screen persona, the genial, covertly ferocious man rooted in community and the angry but stoic outsider, connected only by their gifts for mayhem, and embodying oddly complex and contradictory ways of conceiving patriotism. Rocky is carefully deployed as a figure out of a very specific enclave, the working-class Italian neighbourhoods of Philadelphia. Robert ‘Rocky’ Balboa is introduced on a telling note in the opening scene of his first film, fighting Spider Rico (Pedro Lovell), with Avildsen’s camera zooming back from a painted Jesus icon on the grimy venue wall to encompass the fighters in the ring below, immediately establishing a semi-ironic affinity: boxers bleed for the crowd’s sins, serving the function of sublimating and wielding the pent-up aggression of the fans and very occasionally rewarded by becoming a true faith. Rocky seems almost lackadaisical in the bout until Rico delivers a gash to his scalp that infuriates him, and Rocky pounds his opponent into the mat. From the start Rocky is characterised as a man whose real potency remains latent but impossible to repress once incited, an essentialised rendition of the self-image of a vast number of men.

Pushing 30, Rocky’s problem isn’t that he lacked talent but seems to have missed the kind of kinetically exploited anger and will that fuels champions, as well as facing a general prejudice against left-handed “southpaw” boxers. Although he’s well-known and liked around town, Rocky has become a figure of familiarity to the point where his latest victory is met with the most casual interest. Even Rocky’s nominal trainer, gym owner and elderly former pug Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith), is so unenthused by him now that despite his victory he strips him of his locker, a humiliation Rocky can scarcely be bothered protesting. Rocky makes his living working as a standover man for loan shark Tony Gazzo (Joe Spinell), but is such a soft touch he lets men he’s supposed to rough up go with partial payments. Rocky maintains a shambolic friendship with the rotund and resentful meat packer Paulie Pennino (Burt Young), and tries to charm Paulie’s painfully shy younger sister Adrian (Talia Shire), who works in a pet store and sold Rocky his beloved turtles. As Rocky and Adrian stumble towards a relationship, Rocky receives a life-changing offer out of the blue, made by fight promoter Miles Jergens (Thayer David) on behalf of the heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Desperate for an opponent after other contenders scurry for the woodwork and seeing the chance for a great publicity coup, Creed wants to take on a Philadelphia fighter as an exercise in Bicentennial showmanship, and chooses Rocky strictly for his great nickname, “Italian Stallion.”

“Sounds like a monster movie,” Creed chuckles as the sound of the match-up, and certainly by the time the fourth and fifth instalments in the franchise rolled around many a wag felt sooner or later Rocky would take on Godzilla. But Rocky’s largely low-key, even ambling pace in its first two-thirds is matched to a stringent realism, and even the finale’s note of triumph is restrained by technical failure. Part of Stallone’s cunning lay in how carefully he rooted the drama in a sense of characters who prove much larger than they seem, battling those who generally prove much less awesome than they appear. Avildsen’s camera, with James Crabe as DP, surveys grimy surrounds in that classic blotchy, moody 1970s colour. Paulie is Rocky if he lacked even a singular talent, used to feeling his flesh and spirit sag amidst the hanging meat carcasses, just as childlike as Rocky in some ways but with barbs, often verbally abusive to Adrian and erupting in shows of frustrated aggression. Adrian is deeply repressed and makes a bond with Rocky, as she compares the advice he often received, to work on his body because his mind was no good, to the opposite advice her own mother gave to her. The characters are adrift in a blue-collar environment that’s portrayed both in a harshly gritty fashion, filled with litter and crumbling infrastructure and patches of snow on wasteground, replete with seedy arenas for building and wasting flesh, and also extremely romantic, where everyone knows everybody and close-harmony singers hang about on street corners.

Much of Rocky feels in close accord with Avildsen’s work on Save The Tiger, following around a character in near-picaresque encounters as he faces with sullen apprehension a moment in his life he experiences as pivotal even as it just seems to involve more of the same, the stern spiritual economics of persistence and taking punishment. The only real signal we’re not just watching something along the lines of early ‘70s bummers like J.W. Coop (1972) is at the outset as the title sweeps across the screen, Gone with the Wind-style, with Bill Conti’s instantly rousing trumpet fanfare resounding, clearly declaring we’re not just watching some bum roaming around Philly but setting the scene for an Olympian contest. Part of what makes the film work is how carefully Avildsen mediates the transition from the passive to the active as embodied by Rocky. The Rocky films would become beloved and mocked equally for their training montages, but Avildsen builds very slowly to such a point, first portraying Rocky’s early exercise efforts in laborious detail, scoffing down a glass full of raw eggs and heading out for jogs on frigid mornings. When Paulie first ushers Rocky into the abattoir and the boxer realises the potential for training by punching the meat carcasses, it comes with a sense of ponderous, punishing violence, Rocky’s knuckles left bloody and raw even as he works up the force to crack the ribs of the carcasses. A TV news crew shoots Rocky doing this, and Apollo’s canny trainer ‘Duke’ Evers (Tony Burton) watches with some apprehensive attention, but can’t attract Apollo’s interest.

The ingenuity of Rocky as a character was in fusing his raw corporeal strength and fighting grit to a personality that’s eternally innocent, a goombah who knows what he is and yet constantly struggles to transcend it. A memorable vignette early in the first film sees Rocky trying to give a straight talk to a neighbourhood girl, Marie (Jodi Letizia), who hangs out with the rough local urchins. Rocky tries to illustrate the way reputations supplant actual people, until Marie tells him, “Screw you, creepo!”, and Rocky wanders away laughingly accosting himself with the insult. His attempts to strike a spark with Adrian nonetheless revolve around his rambling persistence, leading to a first date Paulie manipulates them into making. Gentle character comedy – Rocky gently pleads at Adrian’s bedroom door for her to consider coming out with him after she retreats in shock when Paulie springs the date on her, only for her to emerge entirely prepped for a night out – blends with a portrayal of tentative connection and finally painfully revealed need as Rocky bribes a Zamboni driver to let Adrian skate in an empty rink, before inviting Adrian into his shabby apartment. Adrian hesitates at the threshold before entering and almost dashes again as Rocky desperately appeals for her to stay, before the final melting clinch. Gloriously well-observed and trenchant as a distinctly unidyllic romance that is of course actually ideal, Rocky and Adrian’s coming together is also the subtle cue for other transformations about to spur Rocky towards greater things.

As a character and conception, Rocky is a brilliantly definite creation standing in contrast to an irritating tendency in more recent heroic tales to make protagonists as blank and broadly worthy as possible. He’s offered as an example of a truism, that truly physically strong and imposing men often project a gentle persona. Rocky swiftly becomes as familiar as a friend in his traits and actions and reactions, his background and situation tangible, his specific mannerisms, his habits of talking around challenges and provocations and deflating verbal aggression and projection of earnest geniality that so strikingly contrasts the pith he unleashes in the ring. And yet he easily becomes an emblematic archetype. He’s there on screen readily accepting identification with anyone, anyone who’s been bullied or outcast, down and out, felt their potential waste and their souls wrung out, knowing they have the stuff to go the distance and only requiring one true chance. Rocky is again close to a secular Jesus in that regard, taking all the pops on the chin for us. Even in the most recent series entries, Creed (2015) and Creed II (2018), revolving around Rocky’s acting as trainer to Apollo’s illegitimate son Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), Rocky still dominates despite not being at the centre of the story because of what is by now the almost reflexive skill Stallone wields in inhabiting such a well-defined character, where the younger man is more defined by the things the filmmakers don’t want him to be.

That’s especially frustrating as Apollo as inhabited by Weathers made for a surprisingly strong character too, one whose similarities to Rocky, and his differences, are totemic throughout the first four films. Many sports films negate opponents or present them as ripe assholes, and indeed that’s a direction the third and fourth episodes would readily turn in. Rocky’s grounding in the mid-‘70s zeitgeist also invoked some cultural animosities as well, with it all too easy to see Rocky as a great white hope thrown up against the juggernaut of black pride and power that Ali so forcefully identified with even whilst nimbly retaining his media star stature. Stallone quietly and cleverly deflates that sort of reading even if her perhaps still benefited from it, as he portrays Rocky watching Creed on TV in a bar. Apollo is gifted with a similar talent for media performance to Ali, and the bar owner grouchily and racially berates him as a clown, to Rocky’s offence: Rocky knows very well how good a boxer Apollo is, and offers him unqualified respect that’s oblivious to other issues. Clearly intended as an avatar for Ali, Apollo is nonetheless a rather different creature, apolitical and driven more by intense pride and ego and lacking any clear sense of communal grounding beyond his awareness that such clannishness can be financially exploited to make the match lucrative, envisioning himself as more an entrepreneur of sport than a rough-and-tumble warrior.

One running theme of the series would become the problem of not simply achieving but avoiding the pitfalls of success. Apollo, as offered in the first two films, is not vilified but certainly embodies those pitfalls, stung to repeatedly try to swat the small Italian fly but failing to comprehend the danger lurking in a rival driven by naked hunger and spirit. Apollo’s fancy gyms and parade of sparring partners prove of less worth than the gritty, almost primal techniques Rocky and Mickey favour. Apollo’s great project in the first film is to exalt himself in the guise of patriotic celebration. He dresses up as George Washington crossing the Delaware as he enters the arena for the bout against Rocky. Apollo’s self-identification with America – he even wears stars-and-stripes shorts in the ring – carries schismatic import. His spectacle can be seen as black mockery of and subsuming of white patriotism in sectarian triumphalism, and at the same time a kind of democratic parable warning that the essence of American life is the underdog, not the fat-cat, and that regard the wheel’s always in spin as to who holds what role. Rocky IV would later signal that Apollo’s patriotic fervour isn’t facetious but rather entirely earnest, and his felling at the hands of the hulking Russian Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) is offered as a vivid metaphor for the bloodied American nose of Korea and Vietnam.

It’s tempting to read the schism between Rocky and Apollo as Stallone wrestling with his own nature and contradictions, the canny, driven, conservative, self-made self-promoter and the struggling, belittled outsider, the arch professional and the man unsure of his place in the cultural firmament. Apollo’s slow transition from Rocky’s great foe to his pal and mentor and then finally as spurring martyr is an essential aspect of the classic quartet. The climactic bout of the first film sees Apollo shocked when Rocky knocks him down for the first time in his career, turning it from a lark to a proper fight, and soon the two men are delivering savage blows, Rocky cracking Apollo’s ribs and Apollo breaking Rocky’s proudly hawkish nose. The rematch, which sees Rocky finally, properly besting Apollo, still only comes by a thin margin after they knock each-other down and Rocky gets to his feet quicker. When Apollo steps up to train Rocky in Rocky III, he ushers Rocky out of the homey precincts of Philly to the even grittier climes of black Los Angeles, at last spotlighting the place Apollo clawed his way out of, and furthering a kind of cultural exchange in a tale of interracial cooperation, even as the uneasy Paulie makes such witticisms as, “You can’t train him liked a colored fighter, he ain’t got no rhythm.”

The closeness of Rocky and Apollo in prowess and talent is underlined again at the end of Rocky II as Rocky wins by the narrowest of margins, as the two men knock each-other to the ground and Rocky is able to get to his feet. The motif of their close-matched machismo is finally brought to a comedic head at the very end of the third film as they arrange a secret bout far away from media purely to satisfy themselves as to who’s the best, the film fading out on a freeze-frame of the two launching mirroring punches at each-other. Rocky’s eventual amity with Apollo contrasts his fractious relationship with Paulie, who browbeats his sister and wields a baseball bat around the living room in unleashing his toxic mixture of rage and envy aimed at others but really conveying his own self-loathing. Mickey as a character, and Meredith’s scenery-chewing bravura in the part, was one of Stallone’s plainest attempts to recapture old Hollywood flavour: the gruff and grizzled old-timer played by one, armed with folkloric traditions and disdain for hype, resplendent in wool cap and coming armed with theatrically worn hearing aid.

As with Rocky’s friendship with Paulie, sharp undercurrents of anger and frustration define Rocky’s ultimately paternal relationship with Mickey, who answers when Rocky finally snaps and demands to know why Mickey rides him so much, that Rocky had real promise but never capitalised on it. Mickey nonetheless tracks him down to his apartment after learning of the arranged fight and offering to share his wisdom, cueing a scene of pathos as Mickey digs out ancient, yellowed newspaper cuttings recounting his great bouts in a distant past, whilst Rocky, still smouldering in resentment for the old man, ignores him and then chases him out of the building with his bellows, his frustration finally released, before finally dashing out to catch Mickey and agreeing to the partnership. Mickey’s death in Rocky III comes shortly after he reveals to Rocky he’s tried to keep him away from truly dangerous opponents, an act blending aspects of care and treachery, as it only put off the moment when Rocky would have to truly test his champion standing and deepest resources of courage.

Rocky’s shot at success is nonetheless closely entwined in narrative and character progression with his relationship with Adrian, one arming him and inspiring him with fresh potency for the other, and the first film’s iconic ending as Rocky and Adrian embrace in obliviousness to the bout’s technical outcome. Shire was perfectly cast as the apparently mousy woman who proves Rocky’s equal when she finally unleashes on Paulie and remains, despite interludes of fear, her mate’s rock-solid supporter. Another matchless aspect of the film’s power was Bill Conti’s score, with Rocky’s fanfare resembling Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and the driving theme “Gonna Fly Now,” a rather oddball piece of film music in fusing big orchestral sweep matched to choral vocals and touches of pop, soul, and rock, a multigeneric stew that perfectly articulates the film’s celebration of American alchemy. As the moment of the fight approaches, Rocky’s renewed verve and fight-ready prowess breaks into clear ground, dynamically illustrated in one of the most famous, copied, and lampooned sequences in cinema, as Avildsen depicts Rocky pushing his body to new heights in a montage of exercises, climaxing in him running through the streets on a cold Philadelphia morning, past smoke-billowing factories and railway lines and along streets piled with garbage, the lean and fluid intensity of Rocky’s refashioned body contrasting the blight all about him.

There’s a touch of genius in the way this sequence converts the film’s driving ideas into thrilling visual statements. Rocky jogging with bricks in hand with the rising sun behind as Bill Conti’s heroic fanfare rings out suggest the birth of new tidings. Avildsen films Stallone running along the waterfront, a sailing ship moored in the background as if mindful of an immigrant nation’s seaborne past, Rocky suddenly picking up speed as if the further he goes the more power he becomes, before making his iconic dash up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Variations on this sequence would inevitably recur in most of the subsequent films. One difference between the first iteration of this scene and the later ones however is the aspect of sarcasm in Rocky’s postures of triumph as he reaches the summit and dances before the dawn, Stallone deftly showing even in such an unimpeachably inspiring moment that Rocky knows very well he’s still just one lone man play-acting his triumph. The most joyous and effective variation comes in Rocky II where Rocky this time is pursued through the streets by a horde of young fans cheering him as he makes his dash, the lone warrior now folk hero.

The climactic bout of Rocky is no elegant ballet of technique but instead an intense slugfest Rocky forces Apollo to participate in, a dialogue not just of duelling personalities but ways of comprehending life through action, taking cues less from Ali’s match with Wepner or event the near-mystical artistry of the Rumble in the Jungle than his notoriously grim brawls with Ken Norton and Joe Frazier. Apollo still wins the first fight by a split decision, but it’s Rocky who emerges as the hero. Rocky II takes off immediately after the first film as Rocky and Apollo are both rushed to hospital to recover, where Rocky asks Apollo if he gave him his best and Apollo replies that he did. Rocky enjoys the fruits of his success but spends his purse quickly and unwisely, and because of damage to one of his eyes he doesn’t want to fight again. Rocky is soon reduced to working in the same meat plant as Paulie, whilst Adrian goes back to the pet shop despite being heavily pregnant. Paulie prospers in taking over Rocky’s old beat as Gazzo’s debt collector, and buys Rocky’s beloved sports car off him after Rocky gets sacked from the plant. Apollo, increasingly stung by a general belief Rocky really won the fight, decides to goad his foe back into the ring, provocations both Rocky and Mickey eventually feel are too cruel to ignore.

Rocky II sees Stallone nudging the material into a zone where what was previously earnest, convincing, and low-key began to give way to shtick and formula, and trying many a broad ploy to make Rocky seem even more likeable and straightforwardly good. The former standover man is now playing with kids in the street and begging for blessings from the old Italian local priest. What would soon become the ritualised killing-off of familiar, beloved characters for the requisite emotional juice was presaged when Adrian falls into a coma when there are complications with her pregnancy, intensifying Rocky’s unease in returning to fighting. This climaxes in a happily corny hair-on-your-neck moment when, after awakening and with their son Robert Jnr safely born, Adrian asks one thing of Rocky: “Win.” The second match-up of Apollo and Rocky proves a radically different affair as Mickey has trained Rocky to fight in right-hand style in order to protect his eye, only to unleash his pulverising left hooks in the last round to finally claim victory. The climactic bouts in the first three sequels have a similar shape as Rocky absorbs intense punishment much as he and his loved-ones feared, only for Rocky to gain strength as his foes cannot keep him down, and soon he’s actively taunting them with their failure and luring them into self-destructive overreach.

Rocky made Stallone but to a certain extent proved a millstone for Avildsen, who was changed forever from a maker of artful character studies to a director constantly tapped for his ability to make rah-rah narratives work, in subsequent efforts like three Karate Kid films, Lean on Me (1989), The Power of One (1992), and Eight Seconds (1994). Avildsen only returned to Rocky for 1990’s lumpy, if perhaps undervalued Rocky V, which more or less took the series full circle. Rocky II clearly saw Stallone claiming full auteur status in the series, and meditating on his breakthrough success and folk heroic standing, and the difficulties negotiating with it. Rocky’s fast ascent and equally quick descent mimic Stallone’s immediate experience, and the film sustains the honest emotional tone of the first film by feeling palpably rueful in this regard, as well as asking the right questions about how a guy like Rocky would sustain himself after such a life twist. Stallone portrays Rocky attempting to earn money through appearing in commercials but failing because he’s a poor reader and can’t work off cue cards, which feels like a pointed dramatic translation of Stallone’s own difficulties in being taken seriously as an actor after overcoming his facial tic. Despite being a relatively green director Stallone proved himself entirely capable of mimicking and augmenting Avildsen’s style, although the film has an odd, slouchy pace at points.

Rocky III and IV are by contrast tighter, flashier bits of filmmaking, almost to a fault, with Stallone knowing well that the essentials of the characters are now so locked down he doesn’t need to waste too much time reiterating them. If the first Rocky is the “good” movie in terms of its modest and substantial intensity, then Rocky III is the highpoint of the series as pop entertainment, the most emblematic and purely enjoyable, for several reasons. Before he got a bit too montage-happy on Rocky IV, Stallone here grasped the way Avildsen’s montage work could condense story: like its heroes, once the breaks into clear ground, it can just get on with things in the most kinetic and visually fluid fashion. One vital new flourish was the Chicago rock band Survivor’s gleefully cheesy, thumping anthem “Eye of the Tiger,” played over an opening montage showing Rocky’s successful defences of his title, interspersed with vignettes showing Rocky evolving into a slick and confident media player, now even readily making credit card commercials. Another was casting former bodyguard Lawrence ‘Mr. T’ Tureaud as the fearsome new contender, ‘Clubber’ Lang, a verbally aggressive and ferociously physical boxer.

If Apollo represented a depoliticised, well-scrubbed take on Ali’s popular image, Lang seems more like a compendium of the less charitable caricatures of Ali, actively contemptuous of opponents and wrapping his colossal ego and resentment in coded racial agitation: “This country wants to keep me down,” he declares in picking a fight with Rocky, “They don’t want a man like me to have the title!” He also sharply contrasts both Rocky and Apollo like the embodiment of their own dark sides. Where both of them have more or less defeated the aspects of their fighting drive, like anger over their roots and experiences of classism and racism, Lang weaponises both as part of his annihilating persona. Rocky is doubly spurred because Mickey keels over and dies from a heart attack amidst the convulsive tension and furore before Rocky takes on the feral contender, long in the offing but finally provoked by Lang’s behaviour, and he then loses his match-up with Lang partly because of his worry for Mickey as well as from losing his edge. Apollo steps into the breach to train Rocky, taking him to Los Angeles to learn in the environs that made Apollo. This time around, Stallone’s personal metaphors highlight his awareness that stretching out the series risked turning it cartoonish – not that that stopped him – as Rocky is first glimpsed battling giant wrestler Thunderlips (Terry ‘Hulk Hogan’ Bollea). The rest of the film’s angst over whether Rocky really still deserves champion presages Stallone’s efforts to try and prove himself a lasting star beyond the character, and his difficulty in finding good vehicles beyond Rocky and Rambo would dog him long after.

Rocky III’s narrative proper opens with Stallone tracking a drunk and dispirited Paulie around the old neighbourhood, getting himself jailed for smashing a pinball machine with Rocky’s face on it. Rocky comes to bail him out and after insulting and trying to punch him Paulie finally asks him point-blank for a job, and Rocky readily agrees. This vignette has a box-ticking aspect to it but also carries a sharp sense of the way success radically changes relationships and also how it can make great life problems much less complex, and so even as the series becomes more crowd-pleasing and fantastical it retains a sense of how personality and sociology combine. Stallone’s wonderfully slick style on Rocky III verges occasionally on self-satire, particularly as Rocky and Apollo train together with lots of long, luscious close-ups of their heaving muscles and emphasis on their friendly rivalry that it borders on soft-core interracial homoeroticism, reaching an apogee when Rocky finally beats Apollo in a footrace and in celebration splash about together in the surf. Given that Rocky and Adrian’s relationship has by this time become fixed in stone, their relationship is much less vivid and central, although Adrian is given a crucial speech as she helps Rocky leave behind his lingering guilt and fear and again lends him new velocity.

In Rocky III the climactic bout isn’t one about the fighting spirit of great boxers but a quest to slay a particularly vicious dragon. Rocky this time unwaveringly returns Lang’s gorgonizing stare, and after taking and shrugging off a few of Lang’s most lethal blows Rocky expertly turns his foe’s size and ferocity against him by revealing new staying power as well as refined strength and nimbleness, and then pounding him to pieces. In Rocky IV, Rocky’s resurgence and evolution are complete, now a rich and widely loved man, slicker in speech and confident in the world with Adrian and young Robert at his side. It’s Apollo who’s facing frustration in retirement that finds an outlet when Drago, visiting the US with his smug Soviet apparatchik manager Nicolai Koloff (Michael Pataki) and his wife Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielsen), provokes his patriotic pride. Apollo arranges a match-up against Drago, although the Soviets want to fight Rocky, only for Apollo to receive a fatal beating from the Russian hulk. Determined to avenge his friend and take up the symbolic contest, Rocky agrees to head to the USSR to fight Drago despite Adrian’s certainty he’ll end up like Apollo, taking Duke with him and this time training in the harsh Russian landscape.

With Rocky IV Stallone leaned into the notion that his kind of resurgent Hollywood blockbuster was a weapon in endgame Cold War cultural contest, something many critics and commentators saw as inherent in the re-emergence of morally straightforward and expensive B movies as the Reagan era ascended. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1984) had already explicitly revised Stallone’s other alter ego from outcast warrior at odds with his own society, rooted in the waning Vietnam-age angst, to avenging angel settling old scores with arrogant external enemies, underlining and even perhaps helping to author a shifted zeitgeist. Rocky, as Stallone’s more conscientious persona, tackled the same idea more generously. Rocky IV is perhaps the film most emblematic of a popular concept of a 1980s movie, replete with music video-like montage inserts that provide visual emotional shorthand, complete with one in which Rocky drives his car at night whilst conjuring up demonic visions of a strobe-lit Drago. Rocky is reborn as a yuppie who buys a pet robot for Paulie, and now turns his attention from domestic struggle to geopolitical forums. Now Rocky’s fighting pith needs blood sacrifice to bring it to the boil.

Drago is offered as the near-monstrous incarnation of a paranoid American concept of Soviet prowess, scrubbed of emotion and human frailty, trained with space-aged precision and liberal doses of steroids, his face festooned on huge Stalinesque propaganda banners: the übermensch as state project. Drago’s wife, with her hair short-cropped and blonde like his, suggests a slightly different model of cyborg. Clearly by this point the series had lost a great deal of touch with its initially earthy sensibility and had embraced a new, campy, high-style approach. And yet there’s still a strand of the old thoughtfulness, as Stallone alternates Drago and Rocky’s perspectives as fighters plunged into disorienting new arenas filled with dazzling lights and surrounded by forms of hoopla they don’t quite understand. Before his fight with Apollo, Drago is depicted as solitary and bewildered amidst the splashy pre-bout show featuring James Brown and Vegas showgirls, and Apollo prancing about dressed as Uncle Sam. Rocky by contrast stumbles out into an arena filled with booing Commies and the full spectacle of political import as a Gorbachev lookalike and other Presidium members settle to watch the presumed inevitable victory of their man. Stallone portrays the cold war antagonists as studies in clashing aesthetics, first signalled in the credits as two boxing bloes emblazoned with their national liveries collide and explode, and then reiterated, Americana seen as gaudy, flashy, vulgar, and lively, Soviet spirit as monumental, monolithic, and possibly more potent in its lack of such wooliness.

The contrast is illustrated most vividly as Stallone returns to the classic training montage but this time intercutting Rocky’s exertions with Drago’s. The Soviet man is ensconced in futuristic gyms and tested with machines as well as injections of mad-scientist drug cocktails, whilst Rocky gets down and dirty in the world of a Russian peasant, running along frozen roads, hefting about farm equipment, and finally dashing up mountain flanks to bellow out his foe’s name in vengeful intent. Stallone’s showmanship is at a height of glorious absurdity here, inflating the notion of real manliness as the product of toil rather than calculation to the nth degree. There’s also a ghost of topical commentary on the general suspicion that Eastern Bloc countries had been using performance enhancing drugs on athletes for years before sports organisations began actively stamping it out. Ultimately, though, Rocky IV’s method keeps it from being as deft as the third film as the montages pile up and the dramatics prove largely supernal and rote. Adrian quickly makes up with Rocky and lets him get back to his push-ups, and the death of Apollo, a singular galvanic figure in the franchise, is quickly left behind. It’s also rather tempting to see Rocky IV’s subtext as less political parable and more a portrayal of Stallone’s amused anxiety at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent emergence as a rival bemuscled action star: Drago is essentially a stand-in for the Terminator and Lundgren’s mock-Slavic drawl evokes Schwarzenegger’s accent.

Ironies abound around Rocky IV: as the shortest and most abidingly formulaic of the series, one that even commits the crime of omitting Conti’s key themes, it’s also perhaps the most fiercely loved for its hyperbolic purity. The basic notion driving the series, the relatively little guy taking on an intimidating enemy and finding it vulnerable, is pushed to its limit as Rocky gets into the ring with the towering Lundgren, who delivers his inimitable threat, “I must break you,” with haughty dispassion, and Rocky goes through his a-man’s-gotta-do paces with grim commitment. Rocky finally impresses the Russian audience so profoundly they start cheering for him, proving crowds everywhere love an underdog. This in turn so infuriates the frustrated Drago he finally exposes himself as a failure by both communist principles and sporting ones as he angrily tells the audience he fights for himself. Rocky finally flattens him and then delivers a conciliatory message, in his own inimitable fashion, based in the changes in his attitude to the crowd and vice versa mean that “everyone can change.”

It’s both absurd and entirely fitting that Rocky turns his big lug charm and intrinsic humanism to defusing political tensions and forging national outreach, with the fadeout on the image of Rocky literally wrapped in the American flag. The next four films in the Rocky-Creed saga would commit to reining in the pop-movie excess of Rocky IV to a more quotidian frame again, eventually seeing Rocky resettled as a fairly average Joe back in his old neighbourhood, after being nearly bankrupted by a corrupt accountant in Rocky V. Turning to training, the fifth film sees Rocky foster a young fighter who then betrays him, leading to a literal street fight between the two men Rocky manage to win. The middle-aged and widowed Rocky returned for a surprisingly good show of battling a champion in a gimmick bout in Rocky Balboa (2006), and even revisited the Drago legacy in Creed II with a newly shaded sense of generational suffering and anger. As a series the films have half-accidentally become something unusual, a portrait of a character and the actor playing him marching through the stages of life, steadily losing his loved-ones but gaining new ones as well. This fits well with Rocky’s symbolic cachet. But it’s hard not to wish the series, and life, could’ve ended with Rocky at his peak, the guy who always has one last pile-driving punch to aim at fate’s chin.

2010s, Action-Adventure, Biopic, Sports

Ford v Ferrari (2019)

aka Le Mans ‘66

Director: James Mangold
Screenwriters: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller

By Roderick Heath

Rain, speed, dark: the opening scenes of James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari offer a driver’s-eye-view of racing on the famous Le Mans circuit at its most treacherous, deep in the night where the world loses all texture but the consequences of lapsed attention can be deadly. This proves to be a dream-distorted memory of Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), winner of the race in 1959 who learns he has to quit racing as he’s developed a heart condition. Ford v Ferrari casts its mind back to the heady days of 1960s motor racing, a time when the sport was on the cusp of new technological wonders but was still leaning heavily on the eyes, minds, guts, and nerves of its committed builders and drivers. The title frames the story as one of clashing brand names, but the more vital battle here is between the dynamic grunts in the cockpits, pit lanes, and factory floors, and fatuous executives engaged in territorial pissing.

The story grows out of an attempt at corporate rebranding, as young sales executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) tries to turn around a buying slump for Ford as it trundles along under the glum stewardship of Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). Hoping to imbue the Ford marque with new, hip appeal, Iacocca talks the boss in trying to buy the great Italian car manufacturer Ferrari. That company has been dominating racing with its brilliant, carefully fashioned cars for several years, but has run out of money. Iacocca travels to Italy to arrange the purchase with Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone), only to be contemptuously seen off after Ferrari uses the Ford offer to leverage a buy-out from Fiat instead. When Iacocca reports Enzo’s barbed and personal insults, emphasising that the boss is just a feckless inheritor and maker of ugly, boring cars, Ford II decides to get revenge in a fitting but arduous manner, in setting up his own racing division.

Iacocca hires Shelby, who has set up a fledgling car design enterprise, to attach his concern to Ford with the aim of producing a champion car. Shelby fixes on Ken Miles (Christian Bale), an eccentric and often truculent British-born racer with a knack for winning but no head for business or public relations, as a most fitting collaborator and driver. It’s an uneasy partnership: Miles takes such exception to Shelby’s criticism that he tosses a spanner at him, shattering his own car’s windscreen instead, turning off some Porsche bigwigs who were interested in hiring Miles as a test driver. Miles, who lives with his wife Mollie (Catriona Balfe) and son Peter (Noah Jupe), has recently had his garage taken from him for unpaid taxes, but still hesitates at Shelby’s offer because of his uncompromising streak. That streak, once he does sign on, quickly rubs another Ford exec, Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), the wrong way as he sees through the marketing glitz around the Mustang. Beebe nixes Shelby’s intention to have Miles drive at Le Mans in 1965, which proves to be a good thing as the first Ford cars entered prove glitch-prone if promisingly fast. Shelby has to repeatedly convince Ford II to let him run the show as he sees fit, and eventually Miles proves his mettle by winning at Daytona, setting up an epic clash Le Mans in 1966.

Ford v Ferrari is a potent example of an endangered breed in contemporary mainstream cinema, a breed that used to be pretty commonplace: an ambitious, well-produced entertainment taking on a story rooted in fact, armed with all the technical might and storytelling savvy Hollywood has to offer. One justification for the all-consuming vortex that is contemporary franchise cinema is that it helps directors who sign on for a spell get other, more risky and personal projects financed. Ford v Ferrari represents the payoff for James Mangold after slogging his way through two vehicles for the Marvel comic book character Wolverine. A lot of people liked those films but they bored me silly, for they demonstrated Mangold had no affinity for the fantastic genres as he tried valiantly to skew them towards his native turf of melodrama driven by strident, conflicted characters, but he could never quite contend with how such efforts foiled the best qualities of each mode. Ford v Ferrari is much more a work in Mangold’s wheelhouse, a tale of striving and grounded struggle for protagonists whose objects of aspiration promise release from, and intensify the pain of, their private hells.

It’s a touch surprising that Mangold, who debuted with a modest entry in the ‘90s indie film stakes, Heavy (1995), has proven to be one of current Hollywood’s most dextrous artificers, one who’s gone to a lot of effort to become a plain master of his craft on a technical level. Ford v Ferrari is beautifully crafted, with a palpable sense of physical context. Mangold’s second outing, Copland (1997), was a crime tale inflated well beyond its rather modest storyline by being overloaded with stars and production values when Miramax decided to try and make it a major award contender, resulting in a bruising flop, but Mangold persisted and rebounded with the slick and popular drama Girl, Interrupted (1999) and the psychothriller Identity (2003), a film that amusingly rendered Mangold’s interest in fractured personalities trying to piece themselves back together in gleefully literal and schlock-fun manner. His 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, whilst inevitably reducing the scope of Cash’s achievements, evinced Mangold’s cunning talent for digging out the raw nerve of a strong, essential storyline, in a manner that reproduced Cash’s own propensity for mythic-moralistic yarn-spinning, style and subject uniquely well-aligned.

The emphasis in Ford v Ferrari on antagonistic personalities who eventually realise a hair too late they’re friends also recalls Mangold’s flavourful if lumpy remake of the canonical Western suspenser 3:10 From Yuma (2007). Ford v Ferrari reproduces some of the best qualities of Mangold’s work on Walk The Line, particularly Mangold’s feeling for period detail and sensibility, and gift for being attentive to his actors without devolving into shaggy indulgence. Ford v Ferrari might have grown as a project out of Michael Mann’s long-frustrated intention to make a biopic about Enzo Ferrari, as Mann was a producer here. The initial precepts of Ford v Ferrari, from its title on down, describe a clash between European and American sensibilities and business methods, and propelled, at least initially, by the potent emotions lurking behind the pudgy, pale faces of suit-clad industrialists. The script, by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller, tiptoes around the more disturbing political associations of both companies, Ford as founded by a rabid anti-Semite and Ferrari by a former Fascist collaborator, but it retains a surprisingly attentive engagement with its various characters, and companies, as social phenomena.

Ford II encourages Shelby to get to work by pointing out the building where the company built bombers during the war and instructing him to treat their venture the same way, as a war of worlds. In our peculiar epoch, such a story could be taken as a metaphor offered in dogged celebration of an Anglo-American partnership, for all its fraternal fractiousness, sticking it to snooty Europeans, in line with some political desires amidst Britain’s ongoing divorce from the EU. But as the film unfolds it disowns such readings, or at least complicates them. Shelby presents himself as the archetypal American individualist, half-cowboy, half-artisan, a man who once flew the bombers Ford built and who gives speeches wearing a Stetson. Miles, a man who’s left one country for another, is the battered progeny of an age, a war hero who nonetheless acts in a way that makes Beebe describe him as a beatnik, and whose intense, angular physicality on top of his unstable behaviour suggests he may be suffering from lingering PTSD, even if he manages most of the time to expend his angst in racing. His wife’s well-used to his mercurial strangeness and understands too well his particular addictions because she shares them to a degree, terrifying her husband as she drives the family wagon at speed whilst chewing him out for being evasive over his dealings with Shelby. His evasiveness is rooted in his deep-set ambivalence for the idea of becoming a company man, a deal with the devil he knows well will sooner or later cost him some big lump of pride.

Mangold’s visual shorthand captures contrasting aesthetics as rooted in cultural gaps, Ferrari having his breakfast in the workshop of his factory in leafy old world surrounds that mimic the old padrone overseeing his villa’s business, versus Ford II ensconced high in his shiny tower, a man who almost accidentally embodies a specific moment in human history trying to work out the biggest trick in business, how to transcend that moment: can the great modernist project survive its own all-consuming will? Ford II makes clear to his workforce, both on the factory floor and in his executive ranks, the ultimate cost of failures of imagination and will, when he shuts down the assembly line in mid-flow and asks his employees to imagine that as a permanent state of affairs. “James Bond’s a degenerate,” he comments when Iacocca tries to use the fictional hero as the perfect example of a style icon for a new generation as a fantasy of gone-wild thrill-seeking and licentiousness, sharply contrasting the Ford imprimatur’s self-perception as a pillar of parochial American values. Enzo is offered the personification of a certain European ideal of the owner-manager who protects his brand and his personal aura with the integrity of an artist. Ford II speaks another kind of language, flying in and out of race events in a helicopter, stirring the mockery of the Italians but also stating to the world at large he’s a being from a vastly different stratum of business, one who exhibits his imperial, dynastic might in new ways.

Letts, who’s also of course a playwright, beautifully nails the key moment of the drama when Ford II absorbs the import of Ferrari’s insults, the look of stirred anger blending with a shade of blank despair, the one weak spot in his armour expertly located and pierced. But it’s telling that even as Ford v Ferrari gives unexpected insight into what makes a man like Ford II tick, it carefully metes that empathy. Mangold takes unseemly delight in a sequence where Shelby takes Ford II out for a ride in his new racecar only to leave the great industrialist weeping in shock and fear, newly respectful of the abilities of people who can work at such extremes. This gives way quickly to a more familiar narrative pitch, concentrating on Shelby and Miles as the men who do the real work, building and wielding formidable hunks of technology, in tension with an increasingly corporatized enterprise. By the last act the games of plutocratic dick-measuring have given way instead to the efforts of risk-taking inventors and performers. It doesn’t take much critical squinting to see Ford v Ferrari as Mangold’s report on his experience as a director working for big studios on packaged product, arguing his belief that in the end even the most valuable property has to be turned over to creative people whose ways and means are alien and fear-inducing to boardroom types.

Bale plays a version of Miles, who was generally known as a polite customer in real life but here is portrayed as a prickly misfit brilliant at his job but hampered by a volcanic temper that he almost seems to unleash with calculation just to see how people will react to it. This is Bale plainly offering rather a variation on his own public persona, star performer as a being who must walk the existential line. But this also aids Mangold’s conflating purpose, as if arguing the car/movie industry needs such personalities to make things happen, Miles as unruly but dynamic movie star and Shelby as visionary director. Bale’s a natural-born scene stealer, but Damon, asked to play the more grounded straight man, gives one of his most effective performances, sharpening his drawl to a point in moments like when he has to muster an effective argument for Ford II to keep the racing team going. Shelby and Miles’ working relationship reaches a crisis point when he has to bypass Miles in the ’65 Le Mans, a benching Miles takes with surprising calm and settles for listening to it on the radio whilst working on a car (in reality he competed in the race along with Bruce McLaren in a Ford only to retire with gearbox trouble, but hell, this is the movies). When Shelby begs Miles to work with him again, Miles punches him in the face, overture to a John Ford-esque moment of manly expiation of friendly contention through fisticuffs. The following year, Miles wins both Daytona and the Sebring 12 hour race, and goes into Le Mans on a red-hot streak, for the ultimate duel with Ferrari’s team.

Car racing movies have a long if not always honoured pedigree in movies, reaching back to Howard Hawks films like The Crowd Roars (1932) and Red Line 7000 (1965) and extending through the likes of James Goldman’s Winning (1969), Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder (1990), Renny Harlin’s Driven (2001), and Ron Howard’s Rush (2013). There are even distinct narrative affinities between Ford v Ferrari and Ben-Hur (1959) in the theme of a man with a race-winner looking for the right driver to prove both a personal and cultural point. The two best films on car racing to date are John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966) and Lee H. Katzin’s Le Mans (1971), both of which were hefty hunks of pricey filmmaking but expressive and unusual in their filmmaking and muted in their emotional palettes, avoiding the triumphalism we now more squarely associate with such films: they came out of a day when a sports movie could also be a study in alienation and disaffection. But the racer subgenre very often concentrates on characters who remain in some fashion enigmas to themselves and those close to them, trying to understand what pushes them out to such extremes of life and death, cutting them off from the ordinary world.

Another telling inequality between Frankenheimer and Katzin’s films, products of a more cinematically adventurous age, and Mangold’s is that the older films aimed to offer almost poeticised evocations of speed and motion, like the awesome depiction of a car crash in fragmented visions and distorted time perception in Le Mans. Whereas Ford v Ferrari is, like many contemporary films, obsessed with nailing down a specific storytelling arc, an approach that does at least facilitate Mangold’s preoccupation with characters trying to understand themselves. Mangold’s visuals have real beauty that sometimes grazes the poetic in their way, but they’re thoroughly contoured into straightforward function. Mangold’s sharp yet textured images, his use of rich colours and light come in frames rendered with a clear, illustrative force, are one of the pleasures of his best films: his filmic approach is both muscular in a contemporary fashion but also quite classical and unmannered. The racing sequences here are some of the best ever staged, with Mangold’s framings expertly tethered to lines of linear motion, the soundtrack replete with the sonorous thunder of a well-tuned muscle engine at full throttle, cars moving at great speed as rivals and friends crash and hunks of wreckage tumble about your ears.

The brilliant climactic recreation of the 1966 Le Mans race depicts with immediate verve and intensity the experience of driving a car pell-mell through thickets of rivals amidst flurrying rain and dark, frames awash with gushing spray and red taillight glow and boiling flame, a realm where Miles is most perfectly himself, delivered from a world of compromise and pettiness, brushing the edges of the sublime state he believes resides in the zone above 7000 rpm. But the whole film is wrapped in a lush gloss apparent even in interpersonal moments as when Ken talks with his son whilst sitting on a stretch of LA airport tarmac the team likes to use for practice runs, transformed into an amphitheatre of technological grunt amidst the glowing mid-century twilight. Mangold uses James Burton’s instrumental cover of “Polk Salad Annie” as a recurring leitmotif on the soundtrack, an instant dash of distilled retro Americana that also communicates the sheer fidgety urge to defy a limit and the love of rolling velocity encoded in its nervously thrumming rhythm. Ford v Ferrari actually digs into the business of making a winner as well as noting the forces that often get in the way of making a good movie. I mean, car.

There’s a fine sense of detail in the sequences depicting the process of creating such a car, like coating supermodern machines in bits of flapping wool to analyse wind dynamics, as Shelby, Miles, and the Ford brains steadily winnow what they learn to arrive at the GT40, a car with a huge bundle of horsepower jammed into the rear of the car, and coming up with novel notions like a completely replaceable braking system when Miles almost gets wiped out as the car’s braking system locks up during an endurance test. What hampers Ford v Ferrari is its habits of narrowing its focus down to some stock-standard conflicts and refrains. Lucas is again stuck playing the kind of snooty establishment antagonist he embodied in A Beautiful Mind (2002), aggravating through the pinewood texture of his voice. The battles with the Ford hierarchy and Beebe in particular have roots in fact but it’s an aspect, along with the constant swaying between Miles’ work and his home life, that starts to interfere with the pace of the film. And yet the conventionalities are frustrating but serve a function that doesn’t quite become clear until the end.

The emphasis on the conflict between the racers and the executives proves eventually to have a different cumulative meaning than is usual, and the refrains to Lee’s mostly happy home life, often seem superfluous despite Balfe’s terrific performance as Lee’s stalwart lady, but it ultimately becomes clear that the Miles’ story is one of how what makes us love some people is also what we know well might take them from us some day. Moreover, the climactic race, which has the lustre of folklore amongst race fans for understandable reason, presents a fascinating dramatic situation where character and machinery both are tested. What’s ultimately most interesting about Ford v Ferrari is the degree to which it’s not quite a classic crowd-pleaser, becoming rather a story of heroes trying to identify their deepest, truest yardsticks for success rather than those imposed by worldly expectations. Branded legend is invoked only to force the audience to identify with men who eventually realise their talents and abilities always come second to the interest of those whose business it is selling a product. Enzo Ferrari’s gesture of respect is ultimately tipped to the racers, not Ford II: European auteur gives respect to American studio hand, for there is no difference when the dream is the same and achieved superlatively. The genius of Shelby’s team and Miles’ ability are ultimately subordinated to this interest, as Beebe talks Ford II into arranging the three Ford cars in the race to cross the line together.

It’s a chance for a perfect publicity photo that however cheats Miles of his win, as McLaren (Benjamin Rigby) is declared the winner for a technicality through backstage chicanery. The irony however is that Miles has already fulfilled his own standard of achievement, setting incredible lap records with ferocious driving, and defeating both Ferraris in duels. Finally he decides to obey the company decision as he finds he’s outrun the need to win alone. The cruellest punchline lies in wait a little further down the road, as Miles dies as a car he’s testing careens off a desert test track, the old braking problem still a lurking imp ready to upturn all faiths of men. Shelby gives the spanner Miles tossed at him to young Peter, and settles in his car for a fit of grief as he wolfs down his heart medication. A surprisingly ambivalent ending for such a movie, leaving the question as to whether all this defiant business is actually worth anything in the face of the human wreckage left in its wake. But the way Shelby drives off confirms he still has the fire in the blood, perhaps an irreducible component of the human condition that burns itself out in different people in different ways — the sense that life is not life unless it’s known at the very limit. Ford v Ferrari certainly doesn’t reinvent the cinematic wheel. But it is the the sort of film that gives popular moviemaking a good name.

1960s, Drama, Sports

Grand Prix (1966)

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Director: John Frankenheimer

By Roderick Heath

James Garner’s recent death came to a man of ripe, old age (86) with a rich, full life behind him. But it was still a stinging loss to movie and TV fans of multiple generations. Garner’s specific charm, masculine but tongue-in-cheek, breezy but subtly soulful, had invigorated pop culture for more than 50 years, from his quick breakthrough as a young actor in Sayonara (1957) through to his still-magnetic turn as the elderly version of Ryan Gosling in The Notebook (2004). In between came a lot of work which still defines an ideal of entertainment.
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During the 1960s, Garner busted out of his status as a TV star after talking a walk from “Maverick” to become a movie star, and indeed, he probably did more than any other actor of the time to attack the strict status barrier between the two mediums. His work of the period included the clever, kinetic war films The Great Escape (1963) and 36 Hours (1964), the cynical satire The Americanisation of Emily (1964), before he returned to TV for his other great shows, “Nichols” (1971-72) and “The Rockford Files” (1974-1980). In the 1990s, he was still giving poised, flagrantly charismatic turns in the likes of the prototypical HBO telemovie Barbarians at the Gate (1993) and Twilight (1998), Robert Benton’s moody tribute to aging stars like Garner, Paul Newman, and Gene Hackman. Grand Prix, one of MGM’s super-sized productions designed to take advantage of the Cinerama format for narrative film, was one of the few blockbuster-grade productions Garner was called upon to anchor, though as in The Great Escape, he had to share the limelight with big-name international actors—Yves Montand and Toshiro Mifune, as well as would-be new stars Brian Bedford and Antonio Sabato.
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Grand Prix was helmed by John Frankenheimer, who had debuted as a feature director nine years earlier after making a name for himself as a TV director. Frankenheimer’s early work was done mostly under the aegis of Burt Lancaster’s production company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, formed to make substantive dramas that often touched upon social issues. Frankenheimer’s first four films, The Young Stranger (1957), The Young Savages (1961), All Fall Down (1962) and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), certainly fit that bill as lightly poetic studies in alienated youth, misfits, and criminals, with only The Young Savages quite suggesting the oncoming potency of Frankenheimer’s vivid, Wellesian visual technique, which would flourish in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), his chief claim to cinematic immortality. Frankenheimer’s career remained prolific until his death in 2002 as he fought to remain an industry player, defined best by his run of important, vivid films made between The Manchurian Candidate and 1975’s French Connection II. He spent most of the ’80s making ambitious, but shaky B-movies. Ironically, a late-career return to making TV films revived his reputation and helped him round off his oeuvre with some variable high-profile films, the best of which was Ronin (1998). Grand Prix is a quintessential relic of both Frankenheimer’s early career and 1960s big-budget cinema, as the tyro filmmaker took advantage of the era’s stylistic openness and willingness to let cinematic language be stretched. He worked with Saul Bass, the innovative editor and title designer, and his technical team, incorporating ideas from New Wave filmmaking and TV sports coverage, to give the audience a new kind of epic cinema.
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It’s easy to imagine screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur’s screenplay handled in a completely different fashion, as the kind of spare, intimate drama Frankenheimer had done before. The film might be more appreciated if it had been. Grand Prix’s big, flashy surface seems to demand titanic gestures and heroes, but Aurthur’s downbeat script and Frankenheimer’s cool, dramatic style emphasise instead the fallible humanity of its protagonists who try, Achilles-like, to inscribe their names on history at the possible expense of a long life. As with many of Frankenheimer’s best works, the characters are obsessives seeking expression through action and release but shot through with neuroses that border on the maniacal. Grand Prix tries to walk a line, not always successfully, but with a certain honour, between pop-existential study loaded with fatalistic gravitas, and an Arthur Hailey-esque yarn of competitive alpha people living and loving in glamorous surrounds.
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The film’s biggest drag is the chief concession to the latter quality—the beautiful-people romance of Sicilian motorcyclist-turned-Formula 1 driver Nino Barlini and his girlfriend, race timer Lisa. They’re supposed to be the eye candy and comic relief counterweight to the other protagonists, but the performances of Sabato and Françoise Hardy in the roles are stiff enough to be taken for Ikea furniture. Sabato’s weak grasp on English declamation retards his good-humour as the film’s breeziest figure, the poor kid who’s found success and become the type of randy, proletarian, I’m-so-fucking-good character which today would inevitably be passed off onto a black actor: his complete lack of neurosis is expressed best when Lisa asks him if he’s worried about racing, and he answers, “I am immortal.”
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The other three racing drivers Grand Prix depicts, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sarti (Montand), American Pete Aron (Garner), and Brit Scott Stoddard (Brian Bedford), are very different. Sarti, a former champion, is recovering from a string of bad luck and now seems set to sweep all before him racing with Nino for Ferrari. Aron, a former Ferrari driver and a bullish, hard-driving competitor, is teammates with Stoddard for BRM at the outset. Stoddard’s chief competitor is his dead brother Roger, who died three years earlier after a triumphant career. Scott still keeps all his brother’s trophies and memorabilia as “something to shoot for.” Scott’s wife Pat (Jessica Walter) knows the cost of his compulsion; she’s introduced sleeping off a night boozing on Ouzo with some Greek guys the night before the Monaco Grand Prix, the kind of escapade she gets up to as she tries to avoid the spectacle of her husband lying in a cold sweat before a race.
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The Monaco race, a set-piece that opens the film, sees Aron well outpaced by Sarti and Stoddard, with his car’s gearbox giving him trouble: the BRM manager Jeff Jordan (Jack Watson) doesn’t believe Aron when he reports the trouble, and Aron continues racing, though at the point of being lapped by Stoddard. Aron insists on racing Scott, to Jordan’s irritation, but when Aron finally gives up and waves Stoddard past, his brakes seize up, causing their vehicles to collide. Stoddard’s car careens into an embankment, badly injuring him, whilst Aron’s car flies into the harbour, from which he emerges uninjured. Aron is sacked by an irate Jordan and blamed by Stoddard, but Sarti, who wins the race, takes it all as part of their rough business and asks Aron if he ever gets tired of racing. Sarti’s tone that makes it clear Sarti himself is rapidly losing interest in the sport, but he’s still driven to push himself to the limit to retain his belief that he is the best.
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During the race season, Sarti gravitates towards Louise Frederickson (Eva Marie Saint), a high-profile American magazine journalist who’s been assigned to cover the racing season but, in a manner that resembles Howard Hawks’ communal studies, remains puzzled by its subculture, one that parties after men have been seriously injured or even killed. Sarti himself, who confesses that when there’s a serious accident on the track, he speeds up because everybody else is slowing down, and that “there is no terrible way to win.” Although he sounds like a douchebag, Sarti is actually a calm, collected, serious man who’s separated from his wife Monique Delvaux-Sarti (Geneviève Page), the boss’s daughter he married before starting to race. Sarti and Louise’s gently mature romance is countered by the tormented relations Stoddard and Aron share with Pat, who leaves her husband when he’s lying a mangled wreck in his hospital because she’s knows full well that Scott will keep racing. Going to work for Louise as a model, Pat remains close to the race scene and drifts into an affair with momentarily exiled Aron. Such a rebound romance seems unlikely after Aron sourly blasts her for bullshitting about her marriage for a TV interview, but that proves instead overture to a coupling that has more than a hint of mutual masochism and self-castigation. Aron, forced to sit out the next race, the French Grand Prix, briefly takes a job as an interviewer for American sports TV. He leaps at an offer to race again from Japanese tycoon Izo Yamura (Mifune), whose racing team lacks a potential champion.
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Grand Prix is rife with the kind of tarnished angel beloved of ’60s pop culture, as the protagonists’ veneers of professional commitment hide turmoil and dilemma. The film sports many similarities to the same year’s fighter-pilot epic The Blue Max, which likewise focuses on an antihero laden with powerful class envy in control of fantastically liberating technology through which he tries to outgun competitors. But there are also strong reasons to empathise with Sarti, Aron, and Stoddard. Sarti is feeling his age but still driving with fixated determination because the speed and stature of driving allows him to forget the unpleasant facts of his failed marriage to Monique, which still persists because she won’t divorce him and his business interests demand its continuation. Sarti’s focus is shaken, perhaps irreparably, during the Belgian Grand Prix, at a rural race course where driving in rain is a constant hazard: during a shower that drenches the field, one of Sarti’s wheels comes lose and he crashes, killing two children. The kids’ father (Jean Michaud) assaults Sarti as he babbles technical details and plans for future races, trying to remain detached, whilst Eve hugs him in desperate anguish. A sense of entrapment begins to form around Sarti, whose subsequent weak racing performances result in the Ferrari boss, Agostini Manetta (Adolfo Celi), a smooth creep who dismissed Aron’s attempts to rejoin the team, now pressuring him for better results with tactics like withholding his replacement car until the last minute. Aron declares himself an “old-fashioned boy at heart,” so Pat takes care to assure him she’s getting a divorce before seducing him. Aron finds himself constantly demonised thanks to a series of events beyond his control, though he also repeatedly miscalculates, like still trying to race Stoddard when his car’s playing up.
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Aron wins the Belgian race after Sarti’s crash, providing an immediate payoff for his pact with Yamura. But the real curveball in the championship is Stoddard’s determined leap back into racing: still bleeding from some of his wounds and keeping pain under control with strong drugs, Scott, running cold and fuelled by losses old and new, competes in the Dutch Grand Prix. He breaks records and quickly becomes a force to reckon with as he captures the New York Grand Prix. The moment he turns back up at the race scene, still on crutches, to confront his wife, leads to a marvellously uncomfortable scene where Aron politely excuses himself whilst Scott states his determination to win Pat back whilst maintaining his cool, self-deprecating sense of humour, and delivering the perhaps inevitable lament that humans can’t be stripped down and easily repaired like a race car can. Aurthur’s script often feels like reportage from the frontlines of mid-’60s gender relations, the uneasy ménage of Pat, Pete, and Scott testing new definitions and zones of tolerance in relationships, whilst Sarti is ironically trapped in an unhappy marriage whilst trying to romance feminist Louise. When Louise finally tells him, “I love you, Jean-Pierre,” he replies, “As I you—we have to discuss the consequences of those terrible words.”
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Such touches indicate the surprisingly adult tenor of much of Grand Prix that is strengthened by the cast, including Montand, who blends wry, yet sad-sack grace and terse Gallic focus. The grown-up attitude of the film does, however, curiously work against the project’s nominal appeal, as Sarti’s toey romance with Louise never quite combusts and is certainly never as interesting as the weird triangle of Pete, Scott, and Pat, which is in turn too angst-ridden to be sexy, whilst Nino and Lisa might as well be Ken and Barbie dolls. Bedford is good as Scott, tossing off his barbed, blackly humorous self-deprecation and sarcasm and putting across the character’s odd mixture of dry cool and morbid obsession, but he also lacks charisma and warmth, one reason perhaps his film career didn’t amount to much after this. Walter’s role as Pat, superficially shallow and certainly life-hungry, but actually rather tormented, plays as both antithesis and anticipation of her famous part as the psycho stalker in Play Misty for Me (1970), a psychic grease trap for flawed macho men. She is, in many ways, the heart of the film. Garner is cast against type, playing the kind of cool, seemingly detached, but actually deeply fixated customer patented by Steve McQueen, who indeed had been the first choice for the role; McQueen signed up for a rival production instead.
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Garner’s best scenes come opposite Mifune, who isn’t given that much to do really and whose impact is doubly hampered by a clumsy and wooden dub job by Paul Frees. But Mifune’s poise and thoughtfulness still come across, as the American hotshot and Japanese magnate find accord, even friendship, even as Yamura admits that he shot down 17 American planes during his stint as a WWII fighter pilot. Aron tells Yamura he likes him because he comes to the point, and Yamura confirms that’s why he chose Aron as his champion, because he races in the same fashion. Their accord is strained momentarily as Aron admits he makes more mistakes than the triumphant Scott, as Yamura subjects him to hours studying footage of his various stuff-ups. But the theme is ultimately a positive portrait of postwar reconciliation that fits in not just the film’s internationalist viewpoint, but also the romantic pairings, for everything in the film is viewed at some point in a cycle of integration and disintegration, fitting for a tale which revolves around systemic variations and the quest for infallible interactions of fickle parts. Frankenheimer constantly binds his four protagonists together in the filmmaking, visually and aurally counterpointing their actions and their perspectives before and during races, and more ominously, noting each man’s blood group medallion before the last race. Such motifs suggest Frankenheimer playing games with autonomy and identity in a much less direct manner than he did in The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds (1966), but still finding ways to express it as the racers adventure in extreme zones where they are only as good as their machines: they become something other than human in such zones.
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Grand Prix is most famous for its technical achievements over and above its human side, and whilst as I’ve noted that’s not entirely justified, what is certain is that Frankenheimer’s work with Bass, supervising editor Frederic Steinkamp, and DP Lionel Lindon succeeded in creating a new kind of sports film. Whilst the film’s portrait of the sportsman as existential adventurer in search of perfection in the game but suffering in human interactions surely stands in the shadow of The Hustler (1961), its own immediate influence both stylistically and thematically is intrinsic in films like Downhill Racer (1969), Winning (1969), and Le Mans (1971), and stretching through to Chariots of Fire (1981) and Any Given Sunday (1999), before the more familiar style initiated by Rocky (1976) made the recent sports film a dance towards inevitable triumph.
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Right from the opening frames, the stylistic boldness of Grand Prix is writ large and in many ways still unsurpassed, as the filmmakers assault the familiar limitations of the frame and big-cinema technique by strip-mining various mediums and approaches. The use of split-screen, an idea in mainstream filmmaking that perhaps hadn’t been seen since Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), presents subdivisions that rapidly multiply and turn alternatively kaleidoscopic or analytical. Some shots invoke photo-essayistic technique, capturing detail and momentarily frozen or stuttering vignettes where physical time loses meaning and internal time screws in toward moments of decision and anticipation. One clever motif combines TV, documentary, and New Wave film style in journalistic interviews with the four drivers—their reporting on their personal motives, perspectives, and technical challenges in races are heard in the midst of already unfolding races, providing swift, intelligible exposition and characterisation amidst action.
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Frankenheimer and Bass also took care to film none of the races in quite the same manner, varying rhythmically and visually. For example, the French Grand Prix sequence is rendered as a dreamy discursion, the cars dancing in blurs of motion, viewed obliquely through spring flowers, mimicking both Louise’s viewpoint, as she falls under the spell of both Sarti and his sport, and that of the crowd of Sunday folk out to watch the glamorous event. The Belgian race depicts the difficulty of powering along in clouds of flying water, made alarmingly clear by alternations of point-of-view shots from the cars shooting along the narrow roads (with real spectators captured sometimes in the act of dashing across in front of the cars) and high helicopter shots. The vertiginous car-mounted shots, some of which were captured by cameras fixed to Phil Hill’s car in real races, must have been dizzying on the Cinerama screen, and certainly communicate great velocity even on TV. Frankenheimer nixed any under-cranking to give the impression of speed, knowing full well audiences could spot that, and so everything was staged at high speed, though most of the cars in the film were actually Formula 3 racers made to look like Formula 1 cars.
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In spite of the fancy visual language on display throughout, Grand Prix belongs to an age of cinema where the immediacy of spectacle entailed dazzling the audience with an overwhelming impression of real thrills with attendant risks. Whereas recent works in a similar vein like the Fast and Furious films or Rush (2013) drench the eye in furious cuts and wobbling camerawork to give the impression of speed and danger, Frankenheimer takes care to show his actors’s faces in cars moving at high speeds in elegant panning shots. This is more startling when you learn that among the actors, only Garner was actually an accomplished driver—in fact, he gained high praise from the Formula 1 aces who helped make the film. Amongst that roster of racers who helped make the film are names that still have the ring of legend for aficionados of the sport, including the aforementioned Phil Hill, Graham Hill, Jack Brabham, and Juan Manuel Fangio. The dramatic shape of Grand Prix emphasises that the drivers are, to a certain extent, interchangeable, and each man succeeds, fails, lives, or dies through complex collaborations. Each driver is victimised by bad luck and the tiny faults in their machines: Nino is the only one not to have mechanical trouble, which is why he’s in front in the overall championship by the last race.
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The film contends with the notion that morbid delight in the spectacle of death is the great attraction of the sport, a notion Pat voices outright. The film’s bitter cynicism about the voyeuristic urge, especially those professional voyeurs, the press, is old hat these days, but was much less so at the time. Grand Prix interestingly suggests this is merely the dark side to the need of both audience and drivers to explore the grey zone between life and death and thus “know living more intensely,” as Aron describes it to Yamura. Louise herself tries to cheer up Sarti with this very idea, that he puts something in people’s lives they can’t find elsewhere, a truly invigorating spectacle of challenge where the result can never be entirely known. But Louise is forced to confront the dark side of this dialogue in the raw, hyperbolic instant when she holds up hands smeared in her lover’s blood to a gaggle of photographers, screaming “Is this what you want?”
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The finale, the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, sees the drivers taking on a challenge long since banished from Formula 1 racing, as they venture onto dangerous banking that sends them careening at terrific speeds, constantly buffeted by slipstreams and the very road surface. Sarti’s number comes up, as seems curiously inevitable after his chilly encounters with both his wife and Manetta and his admission of love with Louise: a piece of tailpipe falling off Scott’s car causes Sarti’s vehicle to lose control and fly off the banking like a rocket, leaving him dangling bloody in a tree like some pagan animal sacrifice whilst his car explodes in a ball of fire. Manetta displays surprising decency by calling in Nino and surrendering the race to Pete and Scott, who then duke it out unaware of their friend’s death. Pete takes the race and the championship, and invites Scott to share the winner’s podium with him, but any sense of triumph is stymied by the realisation of Sarti’s death. The film leaves off with a poetic vignette of Aron long after the carnival has moved on walking alone around the starting grid at the Monza track, imagining the engine roar of the cars and the announcer naming his comrades, some now gone. It’s hard to imagine a film would be made today leaving off on such a wistful bummer of an ending. The reality around the film’s making bears out the truth of it, too: of the 32 drivers who helped to make the film, 10 would die in races within the next 12 years.

1980s, Auteurs, Drama, Sports

The Color of Money (1986)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

As Scorsese himself put in the documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his kind of pre-indie film artist seemed to have no place once the era of the blockbuster began. Through the early ’80s Scorsese’s oeuvre was still interesting and provocative. The sweat-inducing pop-culture satire of The King of Comedy (1983), along with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, could be said to have closed the curtain on an unofficial trilogy studying the intersection of the celebrity media and the sociopath. After Hours (1985), a picaresque, absurdist comedy featuring Griffin Dunne as an office drone whose momentary lapse into frightened anger at loopy date Rosanna Arquette is punished to the point where he seems to have an entire city out to get him. The film gained Scorsese a Best Director award at Cannes. Yet The King of Comedy, though sickly brilliant (and brilliantly sick), is borderline unwatchable in its sourness, and After Hours is formless and cartoonish, inferior to the Elizabeth Shue vehicle Adventures in Babysitting (1987), the Disney rendition of the same idea. Satire was not Scorsese’s thing, and his eruptive visual sensibilities had been tamed almost to flatness.

The Color of Money was both a ticket for Scorsese back to the mainstream and a return to his cinematic roots in the pungent milieu of bars, pool halls, and wiseguys (and girls). It also presented a daunting challenge in that it was a star vehicle for Paul Newman returning to his greatest role in one of the great American movies – one that had paved the way for filmmakers like Scorsese – Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961). In Rossen’s film, based on a novel by Walter Tevis, eponymous hero “Fast” Eddie Felson (Newman) challenged the world’s greatest pool player, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) twice. He lost the first contest because of his emotional volatility. He won the second when all that had been scoured from his body, in the intermediate process of romancing and losing to suicide the self-destructive, bottle-abusing bohemian girl Sarah (Piper Laurie). Both the suicide and the rematch were thanks to Eddie’s sharklike backer Burt (George C. Scott). Finally, Eddie, unlike, it is suggested, Fats, refuses to sell himself out to this nocturnal life, walking out on Burt and the life with a bag full of cash, to Burt’s jocular threat, “Don’t play anymore big-time pool halls!”

Walter Tevis’ follow-up novel The Color of Money touched the expected bases, such as reuniting Eddie with Fats. For their adaptation, Scorsese and screenwriter Richard Price (a fine author whose The Wanderers had been lovingly filmed by Phillip Kaufman) reduced references to the first film to a cryptic line from Eddie, when he recalls that “somebody retired me,” in explaining why his titanic skills on the green felt have gone to seed. We rediscover Eddie smooth-talking his girlfriend, bar owner Janelle (Helen Shaver), but being distracted by the sounds of the pool tables in her joint, most specifically the “sledgehammer break” of Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise), who is kicking the ass of Julian (John Turturro), Eddie’s own stakehorse. Eddie is now a wealthy liquor salesman, but he longs for the adrenalin-factory that is high-stakes pool playing, betting, and hustling.

Times, of course, have changed. Nine-ball is now the game of choice, and the young players are all cokehead punks rather than boozy sharpies. Vincent is an horrendously talented player who prefers his abilities at computer games and doesn’t give a fig – yet – for money. His femme fatale girlfriend, Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), met Vincent at the police station, when she drove getaway for her previous boyfriend who robbed Vincent’s parents’ house. She shows her necklace to Eddie; it belonged to Eddie’s mother’s, and Vincent remarks that his mother “has one just like it…Vincent’s sweet – Vincent’s real sweet.” Therese mutters, adoringly awed by this royal schmuck. Vincent works as a quick-talking toy salesman in a hideous suburban retail barn. Eddie, carefully soaking in these details, begins with equal care to manipulate them. His master plan is to take Vincent on a full tour of East Coast pool halls to teach him the arts of hustling in a carefully plotted campaign to win a major nine-ball championship in Atlantic City.

Eddie must extricate Vincent from his work-a-day life. He establishes his grandee abilities in a memorable dinner table scene in which he explains that Vincent has, in his gauche, the overeager style a “natural character…you’re an incredible flake,” that is, a perfect persona for entrapping the greedy, self-impressed types who engage in the almost mystically charged macho challenge of the pool hall. Eddie appeals to Vincent’s enormous ego and pride by giving him a Balabushka cue, the most perfect instrument of pool. “John Wayne carries ’em like this!” Vincent gushes. Eddie also works on Vincent’s insecurity over keeping Carmen with his low wage (“She don’t dig the allure of this place,” Eddie assures Vincent, regarding the toy store), a game Carmen eagerly buys into in. “We got a racehorse here! You keep him happy, I teach him how to run,” Eddie urges, and the pair tie Vincent’s ego in knots until he signs on.

Eddie is leaving behind frayed relationships with an aggrieved Julian, and with Janelle, fuming at his almost adolescent inability to commit. Vincent and Eddie’s relationship evolves, part father-son, part jealous admiration on Eddie’s part (“Like watching movies of myself thirty years ago”). Vincent is driven by a young egotist’s need to establish dominance, which leads him to brazen shows of skill and spectacles, all of which cuts against the grain of Eddie’s efforts to teach how to be an actual hustling champion, the guy who makes the big scores by sucking in money players. Returning to Chalkie’s, a pool hall run by its one-time sweeper Orvis (Bill Cobb), Vincent’s insistence on caning Eddie in a warm-up match and then the local quickdraw Moselle (Bruce A. Young) costs him the chance to play the desired opponent, a numbers chieftain who always plays with $5,000 in pocket. Eddie walks away cringing and berates Vincent later. Asking how much he won, Vincent announces “One-fifty!” Eddie retorts; “You walk into a shoe store with a hundred and fifty bucks, you come out with one shoe!”

Carmen, trying to manipulate Eddie, teasingly flashes him. Eddie irritably puts paid to this when he drags her in the bathroom: “I like it in the shower!” “Child care!” is how he describes handling this pair. Eddie teaches Vincent a vivid lesson of the harsher aspects of the game. When Vincent won’t bring himself to beat a man whose esophagus has been removed, Eddie tells him to lose on purpose and then leaves him without any money to pay up just long enough for Vincent to be roughed up. When Eddie returns to rescue him, pretending to be his angry father, he’s made his point: nice guys finish last. Slowly, Vincent learns to temper his showiness with Eddie and Carmen’s carrot-and-stick approach, and in a marathon match with the fatuous reigning champ Grady Seasons (Keith McCready), after a sexual threat from Carmen, dumps the game, setting up the perfect scenario for Atlantic City.

Eddie, on a high, takes the Balabushka out for a spin, and gets caught in a match with a weird young player, Amos (Forest Whitaker, positively screaming “star potential”), who eventually proves to be a sublime hustler. It’s a humiliation Eddie finds crippling. He tells Vincent and Carmen to do the rest by themselves, giving them the stake money, a rejection to which Vincent reacts with howling filial rage, tearing a rail off the wall and throwing the cue after Eddie. Eddie determinedly sets about rehabilitating himself as a player, first acknowledging his weakened eyes by getting a pair of bifocals and then retracing steps, refining his style, and taking down all of Vincent’s opponents and a few more (including a noxious punk, played by Iggy Pop, the epitome of everything Eddie’s at war with), before arriving at the championship. Scorsese’s merciless eye for kultur evokes the town’s faux-classy aura with such touches as presenting the pool hall using a soaring crane shot and a blast of organ music, suggesting it’s a cathedral for spivs, and highlighting a lacquer-haired singer killing the exoticism of “The Girl From Ipanema.”

When Eddie encounters Vincent and Carmen again, she is goggle-eyed in stating “Vincent’s changed!” Vincent is now hard, critical, and voracious. Instead of being tempered by Eddie’s lessons, he’s absorbed them into his narcissism. In the championship, Eddie destroys Julian, and Vincent breaks Seasons, bringing them to a quarter-final face-off. But Vincent has devised an intricate revenge on Eddie; he deliberately loses to him. Eddie is, of course, overjoyed, and reunites happily with Janelle in his hotel room, until Vincent and Carmen knock on the door, presenting him with a cut of the money they won betting on him. Janelle dismisses Vincent: “Little prick!” But Eddie stews until he uses Carmen to bait Vincent into a private rematch. “All I want is your best game,” Eddie requests. “You can’t handle my best!” Vincent spits. But he relents. “If I don’t beat you this time I’ll beat you next month,” Eddie says assuredly, and declares, before the film’s concluding freeze frame; “Hey, I’m back!”

AMPAS agreed, and awarded Newman his belated Oscar for the role; in ’61, Newman had bewilderingly lost to Maximillian Schell’s excellent, but more limited supporting turn in Judgment at Nuremberg. Advised by Scorsese to play the film’s comic scenes as if they weren’t comic, Newman delivers an often sublimely sketched performance as a man who seems light years removed from his youthful, volatile, suffering self, but still has him lurking inside, along with a large dash of Burt’s master manipulator. Eddie is still fighting his worst side, trying to age gracefully without losing his zeal – he’s still shy of commitment and complacency. But Newman occasionally hits beats too heavily, like his berating of Mastrantonio in the bathroom scene, which degenerates to pure Oscar-clip gravitas.

The film contains perhaps Tom Cruise’s best performance. Scorsese uses Cruise’s trademark persona – blithe embodiment of a yuppie-masculine ideal of unleashed hubris, athletic grace, and emotional vacuity – and drags it down quite a few social levels. Vincent is as antiseptically charming a wunderkind as his Top Gun character. Vincent partly hankers to go to West Point (he believes his video games will, in a few years, make him a qualified push-button warrior), but soon heartily embraces the vicious, venal qualities of a great pool shark. Mastrantonio keeps pace with both men in her flinty, charged performance, and she masterfully manages the bitterly amusing shift of her character from dominant witch to terminally confused backseat driver.

Superbly scripted by Price, with endlessly quotable dialogue, The Color of Money is nowhere near as dramatically compressed as The Hustler or Scorsese’s best works, but it is one of his most purely watchable films. It is also in a different mould and predicts in some ways Scorsese’s next film, The Last Temptation of Christ, in that it is a drama of moral and personal regeneration, countering the tragic arc of The Hustler. It also charts, as precisely as other Scorsese works, like The King of Comedy without that film’s contempt for its characters, the often painful things men and women do to each other in situations charged with desire and ambition.

Scorsese slyly extends Taxi Driver’s motif of the iconography of the motion picture Wild West extending into and defining modern, unheroic existence. The pool artistes of The Color of Money pitch themselves as gunslingers – Moselle even wears a cowboy hat – trying to best each other. Eddie, as the aging gentleman of the game trying to leave behind a troubled past recalls one of Peckinpah’s aging heroes, or Gary Cooper’s Man of the West (1958), a man for whom the seediness of his past and the sorrows of the milieu he dwells in has a humanizing, sensitizing effect. In this way, Scorsese links together strands that swirled through his early films and through the American life he charted. The Balabushka cue, swapped back and forth by Felson and Vincent, is an Excalibur, loaded with suggestions of male sexual potency, as surrogate father and son jockey to see who is the most worthy to wield it. Eddie eventually retains the stick, and, in a hilarious touch, Janelle presents him with its vaginal counterpart, a cue chalk.

The film, Scorsese’s second with German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who paints the film with a gauzy, smoky appeal, was a real stylistic reinvigoration. The soundtrack is a careful layering of punchy original music by Robbie Robertson and rock classics, some re-recorded specifically for the film to blend them precisely into the film’s texture. In between the crisply caught evocations of seamy urban America, the pool sequences are dazzlingly filmed. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing makes abstract whirlpools out of the skittling balls. When Vincent beats Moselle, the camera rapidly circles the table as Cruise strikes samurai poses and dances to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” between performing shots of supreme legerdemain – a perfect fusion of Scorsese and Cruise’s show-off voltage.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Category Archives: Sports

Rocky (1976) / Rocky II (1979) / Rocky III (1982) / Rocky IV (1985)

Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Grand Prix (1966)

The Color of Money (1986)