The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 9 - Episode #1.9 - full transcript
NARRATOR: At the end of the 1800s,
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multibillion-dollar
global entertainment industry now.
But what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz -
it's passion, innovation.
So, let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain',
and in Jane Campion in Australia,
and in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made...
..and in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world,
and in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story Of Film -
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter we explore the films
of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola
and Terrence Malick.
The '60s in America
had been a day in the sun,
but then night came.
The decade ended with the deaths
of Malcolm X, Jimi Hendrix,
Janis Joplin and Roman Polanski's
wife Sharon Tate and their friends.
400 colleges protested
against the Vietnam War.
In cinema, the Hollywood
studio system came to an end.
So come the new dawn, the '70s,
you'd think that movies in America
would be slumped in the corner,
but you'd be wrong.
The rising sun of the new decade
brought fresher air and new honesty.
The explicitly personal filmmaking
of the '60s
and a 'film school' awareness
of European cinema and film history
gathered momentum
and gained confidence.
The garden started to bloom again.
The New American Cinema,
as it came to be called,
fell into three separate types.
Satirical movies, made by people
like this man, Buck Henry,
that mocked society and their times.
Dissident films made by people
like Charles Burnett
that challenged
the conventional style in cinema.
And assimilationist movies,
made by Robert Towne and others,
in which old studio genres
were reworked with new techniques.
First, the mockery.
Many in the counterculture
in America in the '60s and '70s
thought, "It's too late to salvage
society, so let's satirise it."
And so they did.
American movies had satirised
society for decades.
Here, in the Marx Brothers film
'Duck Soup',
made in 1933...
..people wait for Rufus T. Firefly,
the president of Freedonia,
to arrive at the top
of the stairway...
..but he comes in from the bottom.
You expecting somebody?
Yes.
SONG: # Hail, hail, Freedonia
Land of the brave... #
A topsy-turvy world.
Come the '60s,
psychologist R.D. Laing's suggestion
that sanity is a bit insane
and vice versa
made the world feel even more
like a Marx Brothers movie.
So it's no surprise to find
that Frank Tashlin, Buck Henry,
Robert Altman and Milos Forman
brought new satirical bite
to American film.
Tashlin found consumerism vulgar
and offensive to his gentle eye
so made lurid films
like this one
which looked like a cartoon.
Its colour, style and happiness
were meant to show that society
is fake and manic and infantile.
We're just demonstrating
a new sign.
Oh! Oh-oh! Mr Kelly! Watch it!
He made a brilliant kids' book
that tells of a happy possum
that's hanging in a tree.
Passers-by see the possum, but
they mistake his smile for a frown
because he's hanging upside down.
They then take him on a tour,
into the city, through the air,
to make him happy,
to give him an adventure.
He sees the world
and doesn't like it.
It's scary and crumbling.
Eventually the people return him
to his tree.
They're pleased.
He looks to them like he's smiling,
but, of course, as he's upside down,
he's really frowning.
A lovely parable
about upside-downness.
The great French playwright Feydeau
said that in order to be funny,
you need to "think sad first".
Buck Henry is one of
American cinema's masters
of the upside down...
..of satire.
Henry's adaptation
of Joseph Heller's Novel 'Catch-22',
directed by Mike Nichols,
is one of the great movie satires.
It's World War II.
Bomber pilot Yossarian, on the right
here, tries to get out of flying.
This scene, which gives
the film and the novel its title,
explains why.
That's all.
And then you can ground him?
No. Then I cannot ground him.
Aaaarrgh!
There's a catch.
A catch?
Sure. Catch-22.
Anyone who wants to get out
of combat isn't really crazy
so I can't ground him.
OK. Let me see
if I got this straight.
In order to be grounded
I've got to be crazy,
and I must be crazy to keep flying,
but if I ask to be grounded
that means I'm not crazy anymore
and I have to keep flying?
You've got it. That's Catch-22.
Whoo!
That's some catch, that Catch-22.
Yossarian's world is upside down.
Like you?
Like us.
Well, you'll be surprised how easy
it is to like us once you begin.
You see, Yossarian, we're going
to put you on easy street.
We're going to promote you to Major.
Going to give you another medal.
We're gonna glorify your exploits,
send you home a hero.
You'll have parades in your honour.
You can make speeches
to raise money for war bonds.
And all you have to do
is be our pal.
Say nice things about us.
Tell the folks at home
what a good job we're doing.
Henry not only wrote the film
but, here, acted in it too.
Take our offer, Yossarian.
That brilliant exchange
which is Joe Heller's
of "We want you to like us"
is one of the, I think, great pieces
of American character.
You know, "We're going to chop
your children into little bits
"and feed them to the fish,
"but basically what we want
is for you to like us."
It's very, very, uh...
And it's the reason a lot of people
didn't like the movie.
They perceived it as being
anti-American or un-American.
Orson Welles plays General Dreedle.
If you've got any sense,
when you hire Orson
to play a part in your movie
you have already determined
that he will be the centre
of something.
And not necessarily good
or detrimental,
but he will be a force-field.
Orson did something
I've never seen an actor do.
We're out there doing the long scene
where Yossarian gets naked,
Yossarian gets the medal
from the general
for doing everything wrong.
Orson says to Nichols,
"You know something?
"In this exchange, Mike, I know you
hear it exactly the way you want it.
"Why don't you just stand
where you are
"and give me each line
as it comes up
"and I will do it exactly
the way you give it to me?"
So that whole exchange,
it's Orson copying exactly
what Mike says for every line.
I mean, that's so fabulous.
Well, one, I know he was up
all night drinking cognac,
so there wasn't a lot of time
for memorising lines.
I don't think he ever did.
Except maybe one line at a time.
They were all wonderful.
If he wants to receive a medal
without any clothes on,
what the hell business
is it of yours?
My sentiments exactly, sir.
Here's your medal, Captain.
You're a very weird person,
Yossarian.
Thank you, sir.
An actor will do anything to avoid
seeming to copy anyone else.
"Don't give me that line! Just tell
me the sense of what you..."
And in this turnabout,
I felt, well, that's great.
He's saving time and he's doing it
exactly the way Mike hears it.
'Catch-22' came out at the same
time as Robert Altman's film 'MASH'.
Another war.
Army surgeons operating
on appalling injuries.
But Altman's approach is innovative.
He fills the screen with actors,
mikes them all up,
records all their dialogue
at the same time,
then mixes a complicated soundtrack
of overlapping dialogue.
The fact that they're wearing masks
here means we can't see their lips
so he has even more freedom.
And though the situation is tragic,
the attitude is light-hearted,
mocking even.
An upside-down world.
Ugly, move out of the way
'cause I'm moving round over there.
Baby, we're gonna see some stitches
like you never saw before.
P.A.: Attention, attention.
OK, here she goes.
This is from Colonel Blake's office.
The American Medical Association
has just declared marijuana
a dangerous drug.
Despite earlier claims
by some physicians
that it is no more harmful
than alcohol,
this is not found to be the case.
That is all.
And because Altman used zooms
and long lenses,
actors weren't even sure
if they were on camera or not.
Hi. Just in time for practice.
Come on in.
Uh, no, no. Thank you.
I...I can't, really.
Hawkeye. Hawkeye...
Hawkeye, could I speak to you?
The satirical tone for such films
was set by Buck Henry's adaptation
of the novel 'The Graduate'.
It was a massive hit
around the world.
('THE SOUND OF SILENCE' PLAYS)
This student, Benjamin,
floats in the California blue
swimming pool
of his bourgeois LA parents.
A world of beer and boredom.
He's expressionless, inert.
Benjamin has an affair with
one of his parents' friends.
Well, my theory is
that what the great audience
of younger people
recognised in the film
was our generation's sense
of not being part
of the generation
older than we were
and a little bit lost,
which was just about everyone
who didn't know they were
going to become a doctor
and hoped
they weren't going to Vietnam.
We all were Benjamin.
Turman said, "I bought this book
because I am Benjamin,"
and Nichols said, "I am making
this film because I am Benjamin."
Dustin Hoffman's performance
played on this everyman quality
of Benjamin.
He walks like a robot,
dresses anonymously,
drinks beer
and slumps in front of the TV.
A blank sheet that Buck Henry's
generation would understand.
My generation would understand it.
My generation and my...
yes, I'll use the word, my class.
But it managed to go
far beyond that, I think.
He says, "What did you study?"
And she says, after a pause, "Art",
which is, of course,
a stunner to him.
As it should be to us.
That, "Oh, my God.
There was an aesthetic here?
"An intellectual side?
"A creative bone in this graveyard?"
It's really interesting.
What was your major?
Benjamin, why are you asking me
all these questions?
Because I'm interested,
Mrs Robinson.
Well, what was your major subject
at college?
Art.
Art?
But I thought you...
Hmm.
I guess you kinda lost interest
in it over the years, then.
That whole sequence of them
in bed together
is virtually lifted from the book
and it's an interesting exercise
in the difference between reading
something and looking at something,
because in the middle of it,
Mike said,
"Well, you know, it's fine,
"but they're just lying there
talking.
"We've got to do something."
So Sam O'Steen, the editor,
came up with the idea
of turning the lights off and on
to give a kind of pacing
to the scene
that wasn't there
just in the dialogue.
And it was very nice.
That's just a little lesson
in filmmaking
that I hope will profit you
and all the rest of us.
Will you wait a minute, please?
(SIGHS) Mrs Robinson...
Do you think we could say a few
words to each other first this time?
I don't think we have much
to say to each other.
(SPEAKS CZECH)
As we've seen,
Milos Forman started making films
in communist Czechoslovakia,
like this one, 'The Firemen's Ball',
deadpan, documentary-like,
making these firemen
look clueless and funny.
In America in the '70s,
Forman had to adjust his approach
remarkably little.
We're in a mental institution.
Forman again shoots
with naturalistic light,
close-ups to see the actors' faces.
I'm not getting upset, Miss Pilbow.
It's just that I don't want anyone
to try and slip me saltpetre.
Do you know what I mean?
(KNOCKS ON TABLE)
It's alright, Nurse Pilbow.
If Mr McMurphy doesn't want
to take his medication orally
I'm sure we can arrange
that he can have it some other way.
Jack Nicholson isn't mentally ill,
he's just pretending to be.
Another film where the world
of the story is upside down.
Give it to me.
After the satirists
came the dissident
American filmmakers of the '70s
who challenged film style.
The first of these radicals
is Dennis Hopper.
His film, 'The Last Movie',
was Hopper's follow-up to
the massive success of 'Easy Rider'.
We're in Peru.
An American film crew
is making a Western.
Hopper films this
as a making-of documentary,
but this is the actual movie story.
Hopper, dressed in denim here, plays
a production manager on the film.
No, I have to look at that script
for a minute.
I just want to make sure
about one...
Mike, don't go anywhere,
you're in that shot.
The shoot finishes, the crew leaves,
but Hopper stays on.
Then remarkable things happen.
The locals make icons of
the film equipment out of bamboo
and treat these like they're real.
It's as if the film was
a kind of god that visited them.
And because they didn't understand
that the punch-ups on set were fake,
they re-create them
with real violence.
Anarchy ensues.
Hopper was drunk
for much of the shoot.
'The Last Movie' was a brilliant,
daring hate letter
to American film
and movie exploitation.
But the stupid critics
called it a fiasco and it bombed.
Hopper's said to have cried
every night.
Robert Altman was as radical
as Hopper
and, a year after MASH, he released
this film, 'McCabe & Mrs Miller',
another anti-Western.
As in MASH, Altman's camera roams,
the lenses are long,
the colours are muted.
Julie Christie is a savvy madam
who helps a naive,
opportunist man to run a brothel.
But they ultimately fail
in their aims.
Unlike the John Ford films,
there are no heroes here,
just characters lost in the snow,
in Altman's low-contrast imagery,
out of their depth
and uncertain about the world.
Visual uncertainty
to match a '70s uncertainty
about what American history
even means.
This man, Francis Coppola,
started as a dissident.
There was something
of the Orson Welles about him.
His film 'The Godfather'
is an assimilationist one,
but its success allowed him
to direct something more radical.
His film 'The Conversation'
was about this -
the new type of sound equipment.
A professional surveillance expert
is in his lair,
surrounded by the new equipment
that allows him to eavesdrop
on things far away.
He accidentally records
a conversation
between apparent lovers.
He can't see them, but Coppola
shows us them, filmed in long lens,
the visual equivalent
of the man's distant microphone.
The man becomes obsessed
with a mystery on the tape.
In doing so
he almost has a breakdown.
He'd kill us if he got the chance.
Coppola's film
was about getting so lost
in the fragments
of other people's behaviours
that your own life dissolves.
In 1970, Coppola met
a passionate, nervy young filmmaker
at the Sorrento Film Festival
in Italy.
Not nearly as radical
as Hopper or Altman,
nor as Wellesian as Coppola,
Martin Scorsese,
our fourth '70s dissident,
became the most respected
of them all.
In a single phrase, he expressed
more clearly than anyone
the aims of New Hollywood.
He said, "We were fighting
to open up the form."
Scorsese was brought up
on these streets
in New York City's Little Italy.
He was often unwell as a child,
so found himself observing
the life of the streets
rather than participating in them.
His first great film,
'Mean Streets',
is about these streets.
Scorsese said of a scene like this,
filmed in a church
with tracking camera,
"The whole idea
was to make a story
"of a modern saint
in his own society,
"but his society happens
to be gangsters."
It's all bullshit except the pain,
right?
As if to prove his desire
for sainthood,
its main character
holds his finger in a flame,
confessing his sins.
In 1976,
Scorsese filmed a screenplay
about a Vietnam veteran
driving around New York in a taxi.
Filmed in slow motion, the taxi
glided through the steamy night,
like an iron coffin.
The world of the story
was New York's Hell's Kitchen,
junkies, porno theatres.
This world disgusted
the taxi driver.
The film was written
by Paul Schrader,
who drank heavily, like
his main character Travis Bickle,
who lived in his car,
whose self-obsession
was festering like Bickle's.
The motivator behind 'Taxi Driver'
was existentialism.
So the two things that I re-read
just before writing it
were, um, 'Nausea' by Sartre
and 'L'Etranger' by Camus.
And, uh...and that's what
I was trying to do.
I was trying to do that character
in an American context.
Bickle's world
is one of booze and porn.
He walks around in
the blue light of dawn,
finds it painful to be alive.
Here, Bickle's making a phone call
to a woman he's obsessed by.
You didn't get them? I sent them.
Scorsese has the camera
track away from Bickle,
almost in embarrassment.
He later explained that it was
too painful to watch the scene.
Can I call you again?
This is wholly modern.
OK. No, I'm gonna...
OK. Yeah, sure. OK.
Its emotional wisdom
is close to the way
that Mizoguchi kept his camera
away from raw emotion,
not showing his characters' faces.
'Taxi Driver' was a huge success.
The new directors' storming of the
Hollywood citadel seemed to be easy.
They were pushing on an open door.
And so Scorsese, De Niro
and Schrader pushed harder.
At this table in Musso and Frank's
restaurant in Hollywood,
where Charlie Chaplin
and Douglas Fairbanks used to eat,
De Niro told Scorsese that he'd
be interested in acting in a film
about a boxer called Jake LaMotta.
The resulting film, 'Raging Bull',
written by Schrader,
was about
this self-destructive man,
a catholic boxer
on a downward slope
who reaches rock bottom
before finding redemption.
This scene was shot
documentary-style,
long lenses,
flat lighting and staging.
It was visually influenced
by the documentary
Scorsese had made about his parents,
'Italianamerican'.
The same type of shot, sofa,
table lamps and domesticity.
Why are you so far from me?
OK.
Get closer.
The boxing scenes were from
another stylistic universe.
Slow-motion shots
like bloody statues of Christ
in a baroque cathedral one minute...
..then fast-cutting,
wide-angle lenses
and tracking like
Orson Welles the next.
ANNOUNCER: The Bronx bull has taken
a lot of punishment in this bout.
Jake, tell me why.
I could have been somebody
instead of a bum,
which is what I am.
Let's face it,
it was you, Charlie...
At the end, the boxer recites
Marlon Brando's lines
in 'On the Waterfront',
the most reflective
moment in the film.
Ready? You got about five minutes.
OK.
Do you need anything?
Nah.
Are you sure?
I'm sure.
Never before had such explicit
Italian Catholicism
been the theme of an American film.
Ethnicity
and the specifics of ghetto life
were one of the things that
Romantic cinema had screened out.
You could feel Scorsese's
very nervous system in his films
and his city's metabolic rate.
The existential dilemma,
you know, should I exist?
And, you know,
the post-modern answer is,
you know, um...
..to put quotes around "exist".
It doesn't mean anything.
What does it mean?
Um, and as a result, you know,
we've lived in a kind of mash-up
world progressively,
where a lot of things
that we thought were...
(EXHALES)
..were the standards,
the artistic standards,
a certain kind of harmony,
a certain kind of balance,
a certain kind of beauty,
you know, the concept of beauty,
and once you get in that
post-modern frame of mind
and once you start talking
about meta-cinema,
then there really is no inner...
there's no centre anymore.
And so it's just a collection,
a pastiche.
When Paul Schrader came to direct,
he was a dissident too.
But his particular rebellion
took the form of, of all things,
a fascination with religious grace.
Schrader's film 'American Gigolo'
is about a male prostitute
floating through the world,
'80s red lighting.
His masterpiece 'Light Sleeper' is
about a drug dealer, also floating,
peeping at the world
in night-time blue.
Each man is spiritually empty.
In both films
Schrader wanted to show
their rescue from this emptiness.
How did he do this?
His solution was astonishing.
He borrowed this great ending from
Robert Bresson's film 'Pickpocket'
where a man in prison
is visited by a woman
and somehow her touch
represents the incursion
of heavenly grace into the world.
It's taken me
so long to come to you.
In 'American Gigolo' the male
prostitute's also in prison,
and again finds grace through
a woman in exactly the same way.
And in the ending of 'Light Sleeper'
the drug dealer has
a similar revelation.
Again, shot with
the exact same camera angles.
'American Gigolo' was a very
dissimilar film to 'Pickpocket'.
It's all a film about
a superficial person
and surfaces and glamour
and, uh...
..and, you know, kind of perversely
I took the ending of 'Pickpocket'
and put it on 'American Gigolo'
even though I didn't think
it was that kind of film.
And, uh...so it's really
a kind of perverse...
..uh, almost an in-joke.
Because, you know, the reference
doesn't really mean anything really.
And, um, so then some years later
I was writing another one
of these one-character stories,
um, and this one was about
a middle-aged drug dealer,
'Light Sleeper'.
And I was writing that and I said,
"Now, this is the one I should have
put the 'Pickpocket' ending on.
"I put it on the wrong film.
"So I'll put it on this one.
This is where it belongs."
(LAUGHS)
I did...four films
that are sort of alike.
And then they're double bookends.
So there's 'Taxi Driver'
which is bookended by
'Light Sleeper'.
And 'American Gigolo'
which is bookended by
'The Walker'.
'Taxi Driver'
and 'Light Sleeper' is you have,
one's in the front seat,
one's in the back seat.
And 'Gigolo' and 'Walker' is,
one's in the closet and one's not.
You know, frankly,
I kind of miss, um...
..you know, the existential cinema.
And I...I wish there could be
more of it.
On the other hand, sometimes
you look at it and you say,
"Oh, God, this feels old," you know.
"God, this feels old."
Hopper, Altman, Coppola,
Scorsese, Schrader.
Five brilliant, white, male
dissidents of Christian heritage
trying to open up
the form of American film
in the heyday of the '70s.
The story of the movies in the '70s
was full of rebels,
but then came this man,
Charles Burnett,
a different kind of outsider.
Burnett made one of the greatest
films of the '70s,
'Killer of Sheep',
but even how he got into movies
is revealing.
There were part of us
who got into films
as a reaction to some of...
what Hollywood was making,
all the stereotypes
and things like that, you know.
We had debates about that
all the time,
discussions all the time
about what is a black film,
what is our responsibility?
You know, things like that.
One of the founding films in America
was this famously racist one,
'The Birth of a Nation'.
Here, black senators
were portrayed as drunks.
It took nearly 60 years
before black filmmakers like
Gordon Parks and Charles Burnett
got to make good feature films.
The delay was shameful.
Even liberal places like this,
UCLA's film school,
played an ambiguous role
in the emergence of black cinema
in America.
UCLA and the film department
didn't show any black films at all,
any African films
or anything like that.
It was all American films and
European films and things like that.
Um... Not even from North Africa
or any place.
It was only until this teacher by
the name of Elyseo Taylor came in,
and Elyseo was the first
black teacher, I think,
at the film department at UCLA
and he was very radical
and outspoken.
And he introduced
Third World cinema at UCLA.
And, you know, Latin American
cinema, all this kind of stuff.
And then he brought in
Ousmane Sembene
and people like that.
And so we had that same person,
and then he screened African films.
You know, that was the first time
and it was a mind-blowing
experience, you know.
And so at that point
it was very, you know...
..in the early '70s
that I got a chance to experience,
you know, African film.
INTERVIEWER:
Why was it mind-blowing?
It was like all those films, like,
Third World cinema and everything,
because they spoke to us, you know.
It wasn't...I mean, it was like
the same thing when I saw Ozu
and people like that,
you know, Kurosawa.
You saw all this propaganda
about people, you know.
And this myth
that was created about them
as though they weren't human.
And it wasn't until I saw
these films that, you know,
it's like you realise
that your neighbour exists.
That it's a person, you know.
That, um, you know, like,
you've been robbed of a reality.
Part of your reality had been,
you know, distorted
and, um, compromised.
You'd been brainwashed.
People telling their stories
outside this formula, you know.
And, like, they were real people,
live people and stories that were,
you know, about how do you live in
post-colonial society under racism,
stuff like that, you know.
Which, in a way, we were suffering
under, you know,
in a certain way, you know.
Um, and just the daily life
of a person,
like in Ozu and things like that,
you know,
and that...just make drama
out of that.
In 1977,
here in Watts and Compton in LA,
Charles Burnett took these ideas
and made a masterpiece,
'Killer of Sheep'.
I had looked at a lot
of photographic books
and paintings and stuff like that.
I was really aware of compositions
from a lot of these
photojournalist things,
but I wanted to tell it
from the kids' point of view mostly,
because I didn't want it to look
Hollywood at all, you know.
Burnett filmed in black and white,
often shooting details
of kids' play,
and used great black music,
like Paul Robeson here.
(PAUL ROBESON SINGS)
# A certain word, democracy... #
As a young kid I saw things
that I wasn't satisfied with
and putting it in the school system
and things like that
because I thought they just killed
a lot of kids, you know?
And the whole system.
And I wanted to write about that
and make films about that.
# The people that I meet
# The children in the playground
# The faces that I see
# All races, all religions
# That's America to me. #
So the only thing I'd do,
I'd put a narrative together
from all these incidents
that I have seen and experienced,
and let it comment on itself,
you know.
But I was looking at
the poetic part of what I saw,
you know, the oddities and the
absurdities and things like that.
But there were a lot
of poetic moments
in the community
that I grew up with.
Where black consciousness
was a belated, exciting,
new, dissident force
in American film of the '70s,
another innovation came from
a more surprising direction.
As the first movie moguls
were Jewish,
and as some of
the greatest directors,
like Ernst Lubitsch
and Billy Wilder were Jewish,
you'd think that Jewishness
would be central to American film.
But Jewish characters and situations
were more likely to be found
around the edges of stories.
Like here
in 'The Shop Around the Corner'.
On my word of honour.
The woman
is a central character,
charming, white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Felix Bressart on the left,
who fled the Nazis,
is not the hero of the piece,
but his logic and humour
provide the film's beauty.
Oh, then let's drop the whole thing.
You see, I thought of giving it
to my wife's uncle for Christmas.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Can't you give him something else?
It's not so easy.
You see, I don't like him.
I hate to spend a nickel on him
and still I must give him
a present.
So I thought,
if I have to give him a present,
at least give him something
he won't enjoy.
The box costs $2.29.
That's a lot of money.
But it's worth it to ruin
my wife's uncle's Christmas.
But then this man came along -
Woody Allen.
Here he's Alvy in 'Annie Hall'.
He's an intellectual,
explicitly Jewish character
at the centre of the frame,
at the centre of the film,
talking directly to camera.
He's an Ingmar Bergman fan
and about as far away from
Hollywood beefcake as you can get,
yet he falls in love
with a Midwestern girl,
Diane Keaton's Annie Hall.
You can't put it in the pot. You
can't put a live thing in hot water.
What did you think we were gonna do?
Take him to the movies?
Here you go. Oh, good, Alvy.
Thank you.
Ah!
OK, it's in.
The joke was that
New York Jewishness
is alien to just about everywhere
except New York itself.
This thing's heavy!
In this scene, Annie and Alvy
are trying to cook lobsters.
Cooking isn't very New York and
boiling lobsters certainly isn't.
We should've gotten steaks
'cause they don't have legs.
They don't run around.
(SCREAMS) Stop! Jesus!
The scene's a single shot,
there's no cut.
The kitchen light is hit by mistake.
One of the funniest moments
in American cinema.
One more, Alvy, please? One more.
Charlie Chaplin played the lead
role in his films too,
and 'Annie Hall' is the offspring
of Charlie Chaplin's 'City Lights'.
Chaplin is the butt
of his own jokes too,
but makes a blind girl see.
Allen makes the woman
believe in herself.
He does this montage
to show her magic moments.
Both are Pygmalion myths.
Brilliant films
that nonetheless reminded us
of how few women were themselves
making films in America.
In the late '70s,
Allen went from the free form
shooting of 'Annie Hall'
to the compositional rigour of films
like this one, 'Manhattan'.
A city symphony
if ever there was one.
Widescreen images
in love with the built world.
Again, Allen's Jewish character
is at the centre of the story.
Hopper, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese,
Schrader, Parks, Burnett and Allen
were all, in some way,
against old-style Hollywood.
They were about the modern truths,
about people and places.
An article in 'The New Yorker'
magazine said,
"Our recent films
have been about self-hatred.
"There's been no room
for decency or nobility."
But a third set
of American filmmakers
were less against nobility
or Hollywood or romance.
These were the assimilationists.
Take this man, Peter Bogdanovich.
Passionate film historian.
Friend of Orson Welles
and John Ford.
There's no way he could be totally
against the old guard.
This movie shows
how he mixed old and new.
We're in an old Texan town.
Young people are driving at night.
Bogdanovich uses old movie style,
black and white,
conventional reverse-angle editing.
They meet Ben Johnson, a regular
actor in old John Ford movies,
who plays Sam the Lion,
a decent, heroic man.
Country music plays.
Need any money?
No, we've got plenty.
Well, you better take
some for some insurance.
Take money below that border,
it sort of melts sometimes.
Thanks, Sam.
And try not to drink too much
of that buggy water.
At first look this could be
a John Ford Western
like 'My Darling Clementine'.
But then look what happens.
MAN: Well, let's sing
what's left of the last verse...
This woman,
played by Cloris Leachman,
is agonisingly lonely.
She's been having an affair
with Timothy Bottoms
but here, at the end of the film,
has found out that he's dumped her
for the local beauty.
He's too inarticulate
even to apologise.
Never you mind, honey.
Never you mind.
Bogdanovich and his creative partner
Polly Platt
have Leachman do the forgiving.
Then a slow 16-second dissolve,
as long as the longest dissolve
that Orson Welles ever used.
And we're tracking and panning
in the town.
A ghost town with all idealism gone.
A rotten place to live.
The camera pans around to show
a closed-down movie theatre,
where romantic films
once were shown.
(WIND HOWLS)
The American assimilationists
weren't as interested
in opening up the form
as restoring its power
by applying it to edgier,
more thoughtful content.
They worked in the clear light
of the new day of '70s cinema.
Their films were spatially clear,
but tense.
Almost all their central characters
were male,
never more so than in the films
of the assimilationist director
of this scene
from 'The Wild Bunch',
Sam Peckinpah.
Peckinpah took and stretched
Sergio Leone's neo-realist idea
of extending time
to slow down a scene.
Doing so revealed the scene's
constituent agony and beauty.
His beautiful widescreen film
'Pat Garret and Billy the Kid'
shows how torn Peckinpah was
by the mid '70s
about American history.
The film's set
at the end of the 1800s.
The Wild West
has been commercialised.
Idealism has long flowed
down the river.
Here, outlaw turned sheriff,
Pat Garrett,
sees a family drifting by.
Pointlessly, inevitably,
the father and Garrett end up
pointing their guns at each other.
The macho West, the beautiful West.
Cattle barons have hired Pat Garrett
to kill his former friend,
the outlaw Billy the Kid.
Both are part of the past.
Ghosts.
When Garret finally kills Billy...
..he quickly shoots himself
in the mirror,
something Peckinpah once did.
It's as if Garrett
couldn't face himself.
The void within, the shame.
Just before Garrett kills Billy,
he meets this coffin maker
who's played by Peckinpah himself,
in half-light,
as if he's been there all the time,
like Garret's conscience.
Go on, get it over with.
Peckinpah hated producers
and was as temperamentally
against the system
as Erich von Stroheim
was in silent days.
Peckinpah was too romantic
to detest the myth of the West,
and the assimilationist director
of our next film, 'Badlands',
was too romantic to detest
the myth of the outsider.
A young man with James Dean hair
and '50s denims.
His young girlfriend.
Asleep like a child.
He climbs a tree, drops her an egg.
They're like Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden.
But they play war games.
It's like he's in Vietnam.
GIRL: He gave me lectures on how
a gun works, how to take it apart...
This actor, Martin Sheen,
would later star
in the most operatic
Vietnam film, 'Apocalypse Now'.
These characters are even more
damaged than James Dean.
They're so needy
they're almost mentally ill.
The film was made by one of the most
reclusive figures in film history,
Terrence Malick.
Malick studied philosophy,
and it shows.
His follow-up to 'Badlands'
was this one -
'Days of Heaven'.
We're on a Texan estate.
A golden world.
The camera flows.
What are you talking about?
It's not fair!
Then leave, you're fired.
Cinematographer Nestor Almendros
attached the camera to his own body
with a cantilevered brace
called a Panaglide.
This was the first time
this was done.
Panaglides would soon evolve
into Steadicams
which gave a floating feeling
to much of cinema
of the '80s and since.
One of the main characters
is this migrant worker.
Malick cuts between him
and landscape shots.
He's trying somehow
to apprehend the infinite.
Almendros, who had worked
with Francois Truffaut,
tried to capture
the beautiful natural light
of D.W. Griffith's films.
Malick had key scenes shot after
the sun has dipped below the horizon
but before its glowing light
has died from the sky.
This magic hour
sometimes lasts only 20 minutes,
so there's always a panic
to capture it.
To simulate a locust swarm,
Malick and his DP dropped
peanut shells from a helicopter
whose rotor blades
made them into a whirl,
then they reversed the shot
so that the locusts appeared
to swarm upwards.
Actors and extras in such scenes
had to walk backwards
so that when the film was reversed
their action would appear normal.
At the climax of the film,
wheatfields go on fire.
Only the light from the flames
was used.
The resulting images
have amongst the shallowest focus
of any in cinema history.
The delicacy of this,
the cave-like darkness,
worked brilliantly with
the film's mythic ambitions.
It's only been recently revealed
that Haskell Wexler
shot much of 'Days of Heaven'.
Actually, in the final film
about 46 minutes are my shooting.
Terry is just a special...
..far-out...or far-in person.
Certain aspects that I know,
he has, um...he has sort of
an intimate contact with nature.
That life concept of connection
to...to the earth
and to people as well.
And, um, that's the way he writes,
that's the way he thinks.
And he seems to think
like D.W. Griffith too.
Griffith said that cinema
is the wind in the trees
and Malick loves to film wind too,
its poetic properties.
And in this film from Soviet
director Andrei Tarkovsky,
whose work has so much
in common with Malick,
wind seems to be nature
coming alive,
part of the story.
Malick's only made
a handful of films,
but they are love letters to life,
as if their screenplays
were by philosophers
like David Hume
or Martin Heidegger.
One of the greatest American films
of the '70s
to mix old techniques with
new style was this movie, 'Cabaret'.
A clean-cut young man
singing a melodic song.
Could be an old-style
Hollywood musical.
Except musicals weren't usually
shot in close-ups.
And there are lots of them here.
They tilt up as people stand
because we're in Nazi Germany.
The faces become more impassioned.
A shiver runs down our spine.
The film showed the life and loves
of Christopher Isherwood's character
Sally Bowles
in decadent Berlin in the 1930s.
'Cabaret's director, Bob Fosse,
was old Hollywood,
born of musical theatre parents
and steeped in Broadway.
He choreographed and directed using
the best of the old techniques.
(SINGS) # ..alone in your room
# Come hear the music play... #
This song is about
living for the moment.
Its performer, Liza Minnelli,
daughter of Judy Garland,
is a direct link
to old-school Hollywood.
But the political messages
and celebration of non-conformist
sexuality are very '70s.
# Life is a cabaret, old chum
# Come to the cabaret. #
That I cannot do.
Another assimilationist film
from 1972 was even more amoral.
Francis Ford Coppola's
'The Godfather'
was the most successful upgrading
of another '30s American genre -
the gangster movie.
Coppola had it shot
like a Rembrandt painting.
No trendy '70s long lenses,
no helicopter shots.
Gordon Willis, his cinematographer,
lit Marlon Brando from overhead to
create shadows in his eye sockets.
Audiences couldn't see clearly
the eyes of the Don.
I don't understand.
This so-called north lighting
was rare in American cinema,
and had not been used well
since the days of Marlene Dietrich.
You had a good trade,
made a good living.
Police protected you
and there were courts of law.
You didn't need a friend like me.
But now you come to me
and you say,
"Don Corleone, give me justice."
The low lighting levels also meant
that focus was shallow,
constraining actors
to minimal movements,
internalising their performance.
Gangster pictures of the '30s
were about the rise and fall
of individuals,
but 'The Godfather' showed
a network of relationships.
Robert Towne contributed
to its screenplay.
Francis called me one day and said,
"Jeez, I don't have the scene
between the two leads in my movie."
And then it fell to me to decide
what the nature of that scene
would or should be.
So, um, I had something structural
to do with that, yeah.
Yes, I mean, in the sense
that the way that I placed it,
what it was about.
And when it was your time that...
..that you would be the one
to hold the strings.
Senator Corleone.
Governor Corleone. Somethin'.
Another 'pezzonovante'.
Well...
There just wasn't enough time,
Michael. Wasn't enough time.
We'll get there, Pop.
We'll get there.
Now, listen, whoever comes to you
with this Barzini meeting,
he's the traitor.
Don't forget that.
Over dinner one day during
the shooting of 'The Godfather',
its producer, Robert Evans,
commissioned another film
about the lust for power.
Our final assimilationist movie
of the '70s.
Its style was old Hollywood,
film noir almost,
but somehow baking in
the clear light of the '70s day.
It would be based on the true story
of how the head of Los Angeles's
Department of Water and Power,
William Mulholland,
redirected water from the Owens
Valley, depriving farmers of water
in order to expand LA
and fill its swimming pools.
A rape of the land.
Los Angeles has a kind of...
and particularly in those days,
a lazy, dreamy quality to it.
And, er, left for him
to discover the dark shadows
in this sunny place.
And the crime
was right in front of his eyes
every time he turned on his spigot.
Robert Towne's screenplay
became 'Chinatown'.
It was shot widescreen,
had muted '30s colour,
and starred Jack Nicholson
as a puzzled private eye
driving around LA
who unknowingly stumbles
into the appalling story
of the theft of the water.
I think that the sunny quality there
is because the corruption
is so pervasive,
so all encompassing.
It's not just one criminal,
it's not just one Maltese Falcon.
It's everywhere.
And every really good
detective story...
..that you find satisfying,
always has that element in it.
Brigid O'Shaughnessy
in 'The Maltese Falcon'...
And then she's saying,
"I'm desperate, I need your help."
And the killer is right in front of
his eyes, from the very beginning.
It's her.
But it takes him an entire...
..exploration for him to discover
what he knew all along,
and didn't know he knew,
which was the killer.
In the case of Oedipus,
it's literal.
Help me, Mr Spade.
I need help so badly.
I've no right to ask you,
I know I haven't, but I do ask you.
Help me.
You won't need much of anybody's
help, you're good.
It's chiefly your eyes, I think,
and that throb you get in your voice
when you say things like,
"Be generous, Mr Spade."
I deserved that.
The lie was in the way I said it,
not at all in what I said.
It's my own fault
if you can't believe me now.
Now you are dangerous.
And I'm afraid I...
The director of
'The Maltese Falcon', John Huston,
played the businessman who steals
the water and rapes his daughter
in Townes' screenplay.
It was a time before World War II,
it was a time when the full extent
of the possibilities
of human evil hadn't occurred yet,
and mostly fell along the lines
of the usual graph of corruption.
The man who would be willing
to violate his daughter...
..that's just not an instinct.
The presence of evil
is kind of brilliantly rendered
by both Roman and John,
who's that kind of
false bonhomie and pleasantness.
"Yeah," he says.
"I've still got a few teeth
in my head
"and a few friends in town,"
he says.
My daughter's a very jealous woman.
I didn't want her
to find out about the girl.
How did you find out?
I've still got a few teeth left in
my head, and a few friends in town.
OK.
'Cause it goes beyond mere greed.
What do you hope to get
that you don't already have?
And...
..Huston's answer, I think, is
"The future, Mr Gittes. The future."
I just want to know
what you're worth.
Over $10 million?
(SCOFFS) Oh, my. Yes.
Why are you doing it?
How much better can you eat?
What can you buy
that you can't already afford?
The future, Mr Gittes!
The future.
Now, where's the girl?
I want the only daughter
I've got left.
As you found out, Evelyn
was lost to me a long time ago.
Who do you blame for that? Her?
The film was directed
by Roman Polanski.
Three years earlier, Polanski's wife
and unborn child and friends
had been horrifically murdered
by Charles Manson's
gang of deluded hippies.
Polanski's early life
had been tragic,
but the murders seemed to strip him
of any lingering delusions
about people.
Polanski's life
had had far too great an amplitude
to even countenance
the shallow pleasures
of escapist romantic cinema.
Nor had he any time for the
fleeting, impressionistic lightness
of 'Jules et Jim' by Truffaut,
for example.
(PANTS)
He had 'Chinatown'
filmed with wide-angle lenses,
bright lights and precise framing,
like an MGM musical almost,
except that the movie was about
rape, incest, power and greed.
Towne wrote an ending
with some hope,
but Polanski made it much darker.
In his version, Huston's daughter,
who had a child by him,
is shot through the eye.
(HORN BLARES)
(WOMAN SCREAMS)
We're in proper film noir territory
in this ending.
A car horn creates a sense of panic.
A hand-held swish pan to reveal
the scene of the atrocity.
(SOBS)
(SCREAMS)
Got to call the captain,
get an ambulance.
No! No!
Turn him loose,
turn 'em all loose.
(SOBS HYSTERICALLY)
Lord! Oh, Lord!
Towne called this tragic ending "the
tunnel at the end of the light".
'Chinatown' was a high point
in American film of its time.
New American cinema was full
of mockery and stylistically bold.
It was old-school,
laced with new truths.
It felt like the best movie party
to be at in the '70s.
But there are other parties
around the world
that were just as exciting,
radical and self-possessed.
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multibillion-dollar
global entertainment industry now.
But what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz -
it's passion, innovation.
So, let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain',
and in Jane Campion in Australia,
and in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made...
..and in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world,
and in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story Of Film -
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter we explore the films
of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola
and Terrence Malick.
The '60s in America
had been a day in the sun,
but then night came.
The decade ended with the deaths
of Malcolm X, Jimi Hendrix,
Janis Joplin and Roman Polanski's
wife Sharon Tate and their friends.
400 colleges protested
against the Vietnam War.
In cinema, the Hollywood
studio system came to an end.
So come the new dawn, the '70s,
you'd think that movies in America
would be slumped in the corner,
but you'd be wrong.
The rising sun of the new decade
brought fresher air and new honesty.
The explicitly personal filmmaking
of the '60s
and a 'film school' awareness
of European cinema and film history
gathered momentum
and gained confidence.
The garden started to bloom again.
The New American Cinema,
as it came to be called,
fell into three separate types.
Satirical movies, made by people
like this man, Buck Henry,
that mocked society and their times.
Dissident films made by people
like Charles Burnett
that challenged
the conventional style in cinema.
And assimilationist movies,
made by Robert Towne and others,
in which old studio genres
were reworked with new techniques.
First, the mockery.
Many in the counterculture
in America in the '60s and '70s
thought, "It's too late to salvage
society, so let's satirise it."
And so they did.
American movies had satirised
society for decades.
Here, in the Marx Brothers film
'Duck Soup',
made in 1933...
..people wait for Rufus T. Firefly,
the president of Freedonia,
to arrive at the top
of the stairway...
..but he comes in from the bottom.
You expecting somebody?
Yes.
SONG: # Hail, hail, Freedonia
Land of the brave... #
A topsy-turvy world.
Come the '60s,
psychologist R.D. Laing's suggestion
that sanity is a bit insane
and vice versa
made the world feel even more
like a Marx Brothers movie.
So it's no surprise to find
that Frank Tashlin, Buck Henry,
Robert Altman and Milos Forman
brought new satirical bite
to American film.
Tashlin found consumerism vulgar
and offensive to his gentle eye
so made lurid films
like this one
which looked like a cartoon.
Its colour, style and happiness
were meant to show that society
is fake and manic and infantile.
We're just demonstrating
a new sign.
Oh! Oh-oh! Mr Kelly! Watch it!
He made a brilliant kids' book
that tells of a happy possum
that's hanging in a tree.
Passers-by see the possum, but
they mistake his smile for a frown
because he's hanging upside down.
They then take him on a tour,
into the city, through the air,
to make him happy,
to give him an adventure.
He sees the world
and doesn't like it.
It's scary and crumbling.
Eventually the people return him
to his tree.
They're pleased.
He looks to them like he's smiling,
but, of course, as he's upside down,
he's really frowning.
A lovely parable
about upside-downness.
The great French playwright Feydeau
said that in order to be funny,
you need to "think sad first".
Buck Henry is one of
American cinema's masters
of the upside down...
..of satire.
Henry's adaptation
of Joseph Heller's Novel 'Catch-22',
directed by Mike Nichols,
is one of the great movie satires.
It's World War II.
Bomber pilot Yossarian, on the right
here, tries to get out of flying.
This scene, which gives
the film and the novel its title,
explains why.
That's all.
And then you can ground him?
No. Then I cannot ground him.
Aaaarrgh!
There's a catch.
A catch?
Sure. Catch-22.
Anyone who wants to get out
of combat isn't really crazy
so I can't ground him.
OK. Let me see
if I got this straight.
In order to be grounded
I've got to be crazy,
and I must be crazy to keep flying,
but if I ask to be grounded
that means I'm not crazy anymore
and I have to keep flying?
You've got it. That's Catch-22.
Whoo!
That's some catch, that Catch-22.
Yossarian's world is upside down.
Like you?
Like us.
Well, you'll be surprised how easy
it is to like us once you begin.
You see, Yossarian, we're going
to put you on easy street.
We're going to promote you to Major.
Going to give you another medal.
We're gonna glorify your exploits,
send you home a hero.
You'll have parades in your honour.
You can make speeches
to raise money for war bonds.
And all you have to do
is be our pal.
Say nice things about us.
Tell the folks at home
what a good job we're doing.
Henry not only wrote the film
but, here, acted in it too.
Take our offer, Yossarian.
That brilliant exchange
which is Joe Heller's
of "We want you to like us"
is one of the, I think, great pieces
of American character.
You know, "We're going to chop
your children into little bits
"and feed them to the fish,
"but basically what we want
is for you to like us."
It's very, very, uh...
And it's the reason a lot of people
didn't like the movie.
They perceived it as being
anti-American or un-American.
Orson Welles plays General Dreedle.
If you've got any sense,
when you hire Orson
to play a part in your movie
you have already determined
that he will be the centre
of something.
And not necessarily good
or detrimental,
but he will be a force-field.
Orson did something
I've never seen an actor do.
We're out there doing the long scene
where Yossarian gets naked,
Yossarian gets the medal
from the general
for doing everything wrong.
Orson says to Nichols,
"You know something?
"In this exchange, Mike, I know you
hear it exactly the way you want it.
"Why don't you just stand
where you are
"and give me each line
as it comes up
"and I will do it exactly
the way you give it to me?"
So that whole exchange,
it's Orson copying exactly
what Mike says for every line.
I mean, that's so fabulous.
Well, one, I know he was up
all night drinking cognac,
so there wasn't a lot of time
for memorising lines.
I don't think he ever did.
Except maybe one line at a time.
They were all wonderful.
If he wants to receive a medal
without any clothes on,
what the hell business
is it of yours?
My sentiments exactly, sir.
Here's your medal, Captain.
You're a very weird person,
Yossarian.
Thank you, sir.
An actor will do anything to avoid
seeming to copy anyone else.
"Don't give me that line! Just tell
me the sense of what you..."
And in this turnabout,
I felt, well, that's great.
He's saving time and he's doing it
exactly the way Mike hears it.
'Catch-22' came out at the same
time as Robert Altman's film 'MASH'.
Another war.
Army surgeons operating
on appalling injuries.
But Altman's approach is innovative.
He fills the screen with actors,
mikes them all up,
records all their dialogue
at the same time,
then mixes a complicated soundtrack
of overlapping dialogue.
The fact that they're wearing masks
here means we can't see their lips
so he has even more freedom.
And though the situation is tragic,
the attitude is light-hearted,
mocking even.
An upside-down world.
Ugly, move out of the way
'cause I'm moving round over there.
Baby, we're gonna see some stitches
like you never saw before.
P.A.: Attention, attention.
OK, here she goes.
This is from Colonel Blake's office.
The American Medical Association
has just declared marijuana
a dangerous drug.
Despite earlier claims
by some physicians
that it is no more harmful
than alcohol,
this is not found to be the case.
That is all.
And because Altman used zooms
and long lenses,
actors weren't even sure
if they were on camera or not.
Hi. Just in time for practice.
Come on in.
Uh, no, no. Thank you.
I...I can't, really.
Hawkeye. Hawkeye...
Hawkeye, could I speak to you?
The satirical tone for such films
was set by Buck Henry's adaptation
of the novel 'The Graduate'.
It was a massive hit
around the world.
('THE SOUND OF SILENCE' PLAYS)
This student, Benjamin,
floats in the California blue
swimming pool
of his bourgeois LA parents.
A world of beer and boredom.
He's expressionless, inert.
Benjamin has an affair with
one of his parents' friends.
Well, my theory is
that what the great audience
of younger people
recognised in the film
was our generation's sense
of not being part
of the generation
older than we were
and a little bit lost,
which was just about everyone
who didn't know they were
going to become a doctor
and hoped
they weren't going to Vietnam.
We all were Benjamin.
Turman said, "I bought this book
because I am Benjamin,"
and Nichols said, "I am making
this film because I am Benjamin."
Dustin Hoffman's performance
played on this everyman quality
of Benjamin.
He walks like a robot,
dresses anonymously,
drinks beer
and slumps in front of the TV.
A blank sheet that Buck Henry's
generation would understand.
My generation would understand it.
My generation and my...
yes, I'll use the word, my class.
But it managed to go
far beyond that, I think.
He says, "What did you study?"
And she says, after a pause, "Art",
which is, of course,
a stunner to him.
As it should be to us.
That, "Oh, my God.
There was an aesthetic here?
"An intellectual side?
"A creative bone in this graveyard?"
It's really interesting.
What was your major?
Benjamin, why are you asking me
all these questions?
Because I'm interested,
Mrs Robinson.
Well, what was your major subject
at college?
Art.
Art?
But I thought you...
Hmm.
I guess you kinda lost interest
in it over the years, then.
That whole sequence of them
in bed together
is virtually lifted from the book
and it's an interesting exercise
in the difference between reading
something and looking at something,
because in the middle of it,
Mike said,
"Well, you know, it's fine,
"but they're just lying there
talking.
"We've got to do something."
So Sam O'Steen, the editor,
came up with the idea
of turning the lights off and on
to give a kind of pacing
to the scene
that wasn't there
just in the dialogue.
And it was very nice.
That's just a little lesson
in filmmaking
that I hope will profit you
and all the rest of us.
Will you wait a minute, please?
(SIGHS) Mrs Robinson...
Do you think we could say a few
words to each other first this time?
I don't think we have much
to say to each other.
(SPEAKS CZECH)
As we've seen,
Milos Forman started making films
in communist Czechoslovakia,
like this one, 'The Firemen's Ball',
deadpan, documentary-like,
making these firemen
look clueless and funny.
In America in the '70s,
Forman had to adjust his approach
remarkably little.
We're in a mental institution.
Forman again shoots
with naturalistic light,
close-ups to see the actors' faces.
I'm not getting upset, Miss Pilbow.
It's just that I don't want anyone
to try and slip me saltpetre.
Do you know what I mean?
(KNOCKS ON TABLE)
It's alright, Nurse Pilbow.
If Mr McMurphy doesn't want
to take his medication orally
I'm sure we can arrange
that he can have it some other way.
Jack Nicholson isn't mentally ill,
he's just pretending to be.
Another film where the world
of the story is upside down.
Give it to me.
After the satirists
came the dissident
American filmmakers of the '70s
who challenged film style.
The first of these radicals
is Dennis Hopper.
His film, 'The Last Movie',
was Hopper's follow-up to
the massive success of 'Easy Rider'.
We're in Peru.
An American film crew
is making a Western.
Hopper films this
as a making-of documentary,
but this is the actual movie story.
Hopper, dressed in denim here, plays
a production manager on the film.
No, I have to look at that script
for a minute.
I just want to make sure
about one...
Mike, don't go anywhere,
you're in that shot.
The shoot finishes, the crew leaves,
but Hopper stays on.
Then remarkable things happen.
The locals make icons of
the film equipment out of bamboo
and treat these like they're real.
It's as if the film was
a kind of god that visited them.
And because they didn't understand
that the punch-ups on set were fake,
they re-create them
with real violence.
Anarchy ensues.
Hopper was drunk
for much of the shoot.
'The Last Movie' was a brilliant,
daring hate letter
to American film
and movie exploitation.
But the stupid critics
called it a fiasco and it bombed.
Hopper's said to have cried
every night.
Robert Altman was as radical
as Hopper
and, a year after MASH, he released
this film, 'McCabe & Mrs Miller',
another anti-Western.
As in MASH, Altman's camera roams,
the lenses are long,
the colours are muted.
Julie Christie is a savvy madam
who helps a naive,
opportunist man to run a brothel.
But they ultimately fail
in their aims.
Unlike the John Ford films,
there are no heroes here,
just characters lost in the snow,
in Altman's low-contrast imagery,
out of their depth
and uncertain about the world.
Visual uncertainty
to match a '70s uncertainty
about what American history
even means.
This man, Francis Coppola,
started as a dissident.
There was something
of the Orson Welles about him.
His film 'The Godfather'
is an assimilationist one,
but its success allowed him
to direct something more radical.
His film 'The Conversation'
was about this -
the new type of sound equipment.
A professional surveillance expert
is in his lair,
surrounded by the new equipment
that allows him to eavesdrop
on things far away.
He accidentally records
a conversation
between apparent lovers.
He can't see them, but Coppola
shows us them, filmed in long lens,
the visual equivalent
of the man's distant microphone.
The man becomes obsessed
with a mystery on the tape.
In doing so
he almost has a breakdown.
He'd kill us if he got the chance.
Coppola's film
was about getting so lost
in the fragments
of other people's behaviours
that your own life dissolves.
In 1970, Coppola met
a passionate, nervy young filmmaker
at the Sorrento Film Festival
in Italy.
Not nearly as radical
as Hopper or Altman,
nor as Wellesian as Coppola,
Martin Scorsese,
our fourth '70s dissident,
became the most respected
of them all.
In a single phrase, he expressed
more clearly than anyone
the aims of New Hollywood.
He said, "We were fighting
to open up the form."
Scorsese was brought up
on these streets
in New York City's Little Italy.
He was often unwell as a child,
so found himself observing
the life of the streets
rather than participating in them.
His first great film,
'Mean Streets',
is about these streets.
Scorsese said of a scene like this,
filmed in a church
with tracking camera,
"The whole idea
was to make a story
"of a modern saint
in his own society,
"but his society happens
to be gangsters."
It's all bullshit except the pain,
right?
As if to prove his desire
for sainthood,
its main character
holds his finger in a flame,
confessing his sins.
In 1976,
Scorsese filmed a screenplay
about a Vietnam veteran
driving around New York in a taxi.
Filmed in slow motion, the taxi
glided through the steamy night,
like an iron coffin.
The world of the story
was New York's Hell's Kitchen,
junkies, porno theatres.
This world disgusted
the taxi driver.
The film was written
by Paul Schrader,
who drank heavily, like
his main character Travis Bickle,
who lived in his car,
whose self-obsession
was festering like Bickle's.
The motivator behind 'Taxi Driver'
was existentialism.
So the two things that I re-read
just before writing it
were, um, 'Nausea' by Sartre
and 'L'Etranger' by Camus.
And, uh...and that's what
I was trying to do.
I was trying to do that character
in an American context.
Bickle's world
is one of booze and porn.
He walks around in
the blue light of dawn,
finds it painful to be alive.
Here, Bickle's making a phone call
to a woman he's obsessed by.
You didn't get them? I sent them.
Scorsese has the camera
track away from Bickle,
almost in embarrassment.
He later explained that it was
too painful to watch the scene.
Can I call you again?
This is wholly modern.
OK. No, I'm gonna...
OK. Yeah, sure. OK.
Its emotional wisdom
is close to the way
that Mizoguchi kept his camera
away from raw emotion,
not showing his characters' faces.
'Taxi Driver' was a huge success.
The new directors' storming of the
Hollywood citadel seemed to be easy.
They were pushing on an open door.
And so Scorsese, De Niro
and Schrader pushed harder.
At this table in Musso and Frank's
restaurant in Hollywood,
where Charlie Chaplin
and Douglas Fairbanks used to eat,
De Niro told Scorsese that he'd
be interested in acting in a film
about a boxer called Jake LaMotta.
The resulting film, 'Raging Bull',
written by Schrader,
was about
this self-destructive man,
a catholic boxer
on a downward slope
who reaches rock bottom
before finding redemption.
This scene was shot
documentary-style,
long lenses,
flat lighting and staging.
It was visually influenced
by the documentary
Scorsese had made about his parents,
'Italianamerican'.
The same type of shot, sofa,
table lamps and domesticity.
Why are you so far from me?
OK.
Get closer.
The boxing scenes were from
another stylistic universe.
Slow-motion shots
like bloody statues of Christ
in a baroque cathedral one minute...
..then fast-cutting,
wide-angle lenses
and tracking like
Orson Welles the next.
ANNOUNCER: The Bronx bull has taken
a lot of punishment in this bout.
Jake, tell me why.
I could have been somebody
instead of a bum,
which is what I am.
Let's face it,
it was you, Charlie...
At the end, the boxer recites
Marlon Brando's lines
in 'On the Waterfront',
the most reflective
moment in the film.
Ready? You got about five minutes.
OK.
Do you need anything?
Nah.
Are you sure?
I'm sure.
Never before had such explicit
Italian Catholicism
been the theme of an American film.
Ethnicity
and the specifics of ghetto life
were one of the things that
Romantic cinema had screened out.
You could feel Scorsese's
very nervous system in his films
and his city's metabolic rate.
The existential dilemma,
you know, should I exist?
And, you know,
the post-modern answer is,
you know, um...
..to put quotes around "exist".
It doesn't mean anything.
What does it mean?
Um, and as a result, you know,
we've lived in a kind of mash-up
world progressively,
where a lot of things
that we thought were...
(EXHALES)
..were the standards,
the artistic standards,
a certain kind of harmony,
a certain kind of balance,
a certain kind of beauty,
you know, the concept of beauty,
and once you get in that
post-modern frame of mind
and once you start talking
about meta-cinema,
then there really is no inner...
there's no centre anymore.
And so it's just a collection,
a pastiche.
When Paul Schrader came to direct,
he was a dissident too.
But his particular rebellion
took the form of, of all things,
a fascination with religious grace.
Schrader's film 'American Gigolo'
is about a male prostitute
floating through the world,
'80s red lighting.
His masterpiece 'Light Sleeper' is
about a drug dealer, also floating,
peeping at the world
in night-time blue.
Each man is spiritually empty.
In both films
Schrader wanted to show
their rescue from this emptiness.
How did he do this?
His solution was astonishing.
He borrowed this great ending from
Robert Bresson's film 'Pickpocket'
where a man in prison
is visited by a woman
and somehow her touch
represents the incursion
of heavenly grace into the world.
It's taken me
so long to come to you.
In 'American Gigolo' the male
prostitute's also in prison,
and again finds grace through
a woman in exactly the same way.
And in the ending of 'Light Sleeper'
the drug dealer has
a similar revelation.
Again, shot with
the exact same camera angles.
'American Gigolo' was a very
dissimilar film to 'Pickpocket'.
It's all a film about
a superficial person
and surfaces and glamour
and, uh...
..and, you know, kind of perversely
I took the ending of 'Pickpocket'
and put it on 'American Gigolo'
even though I didn't think
it was that kind of film.
And, uh...so it's really
a kind of perverse...
..uh, almost an in-joke.
Because, you know, the reference
doesn't really mean anything really.
And, um, so then some years later
I was writing another one
of these one-character stories,
um, and this one was about
a middle-aged drug dealer,
'Light Sleeper'.
And I was writing that and I said,
"Now, this is the one I should have
put the 'Pickpocket' ending on.
"I put it on the wrong film.
"So I'll put it on this one.
This is where it belongs."
(LAUGHS)
I did...four films
that are sort of alike.
And then they're double bookends.
So there's 'Taxi Driver'
which is bookended by
'Light Sleeper'.
And 'American Gigolo'
which is bookended by
'The Walker'.
'Taxi Driver'
and 'Light Sleeper' is you have,
one's in the front seat,
one's in the back seat.
And 'Gigolo' and 'Walker' is,
one's in the closet and one's not.
You know, frankly,
I kind of miss, um...
..you know, the existential cinema.
And I...I wish there could be
more of it.
On the other hand, sometimes
you look at it and you say,
"Oh, God, this feels old," you know.
"God, this feels old."
Hopper, Altman, Coppola,
Scorsese, Schrader.
Five brilliant, white, male
dissidents of Christian heritage
trying to open up
the form of American film
in the heyday of the '70s.
The story of the movies in the '70s
was full of rebels,
but then came this man,
Charles Burnett,
a different kind of outsider.
Burnett made one of the greatest
films of the '70s,
'Killer of Sheep',
but even how he got into movies
is revealing.
There were part of us
who got into films
as a reaction to some of...
what Hollywood was making,
all the stereotypes
and things like that, you know.
We had debates about that
all the time,
discussions all the time
about what is a black film,
what is our responsibility?
You know, things like that.
One of the founding films in America
was this famously racist one,
'The Birth of a Nation'.
Here, black senators
were portrayed as drunks.
It took nearly 60 years
before black filmmakers like
Gordon Parks and Charles Burnett
got to make good feature films.
The delay was shameful.
Even liberal places like this,
UCLA's film school,
played an ambiguous role
in the emergence of black cinema
in America.
UCLA and the film department
didn't show any black films at all,
any African films
or anything like that.
It was all American films and
European films and things like that.
Um... Not even from North Africa
or any place.
It was only until this teacher by
the name of Elyseo Taylor came in,
and Elyseo was the first
black teacher, I think,
at the film department at UCLA
and he was very radical
and outspoken.
And he introduced
Third World cinema at UCLA.
And, you know, Latin American
cinema, all this kind of stuff.
And then he brought in
Ousmane Sembene
and people like that.
And so we had that same person,
and then he screened African films.
You know, that was the first time
and it was a mind-blowing
experience, you know.
And so at that point
it was very, you know...
..in the early '70s
that I got a chance to experience,
you know, African film.
INTERVIEWER:
Why was it mind-blowing?
It was like all those films, like,
Third World cinema and everything,
because they spoke to us, you know.
It wasn't...I mean, it was like
the same thing when I saw Ozu
and people like that,
you know, Kurosawa.
You saw all this propaganda
about people, you know.
And this myth
that was created about them
as though they weren't human.
And it wasn't until I saw
these films that, you know,
it's like you realise
that your neighbour exists.
That it's a person, you know.
That, um, you know, like,
you've been robbed of a reality.
Part of your reality had been,
you know, distorted
and, um, compromised.
You'd been brainwashed.
People telling their stories
outside this formula, you know.
And, like, they were real people,
live people and stories that were,
you know, about how do you live in
post-colonial society under racism,
stuff like that, you know.
Which, in a way, we were suffering
under, you know,
in a certain way, you know.
Um, and just the daily life
of a person,
like in Ozu and things like that,
you know,
and that...just make drama
out of that.
In 1977,
here in Watts and Compton in LA,
Charles Burnett took these ideas
and made a masterpiece,
'Killer of Sheep'.
I had looked at a lot
of photographic books
and paintings and stuff like that.
I was really aware of compositions
from a lot of these
photojournalist things,
but I wanted to tell it
from the kids' point of view mostly,
because I didn't want it to look
Hollywood at all, you know.
Burnett filmed in black and white,
often shooting details
of kids' play,
and used great black music,
like Paul Robeson here.
(PAUL ROBESON SINGS)
# A certain word, democracy... #
As a young kid I saw things
that I wasn't satisfied with
and putting it in the school system
and things like that
because I thought they just killed
a lot of kids, you know?
And the whole system.
And I wanted to write about that
and make films about that.
# The people that I meet
# The children in the playground
# The faces that I see
# All races, all religions
# That's America to me. #
So the only thing I'd do,
I'd put a narrative together
from all these incidents
that I have seen and experienced,
and let it comment on itself,
you know.
But I was looking at
the poetic part of what I saw,
you know, the oddities and the
absurdities and things like that.
But there were a lot
of poetic moments
in the community
that I grew up with.
Where black consciousness
was a belated, exciting,
new, dissident force
in American film of the '70s,
another innovation came from
a more surprising direction.
As the first movie moguls
were Jewish,
and as some of
the greatest directors,
like Ernst Lubitsch
and Billy Wilder were Jewish,
you'd think that Jewishness
would be central to American film.
But Jewish characters and situations
were more likely to be found
around the edges of stories.
Like here
in 'The Shop Around the Corner'.
On my word of honour.
The woman
is a central character,
charming, white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Felix Bressart on the left,
who fled the Nazis,
is not the hero of the piece,
but his logic and humour
provide the film's beauty.
Oh, then let's drop the whole thing.
You see, I thought of giving it
to my wife's uncle for Christmas.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Can't you give him something else?
It's not so easy.
You see, I don't like him.
I hate to spend a nickel on him
and still I must give him
a present.
So I thought,
if I have to give him a present,
at least give him something
he won't enjoy.
The box costs $2.29.
That's a lot of money.
But it's worth it to ruin
my wife's uncle's Christmas.
But then this man came along -
Woody Allen.
Here he's Alvy in 'Annie Hall'.
He's an intellectual,
explicitly Jewish character
at the centre of the frame,
at the centre of the film,
talking directly to camera.
He's an Ingmar Bergman fan
and about as far away from
Hollywood beefcake as you can get,
yet he falls in love
with a Midwestern girl,
Diane Keaton's Annie Hall.
You can't put it in the pot. You
can't put a live thing in hot water.
What did you think we were gonna do?
Take him to the movies?
Here you go. Oh, good, Alvy.
Thank you.
Ah!
OK, it's in.
The joke was that
New York Jewishness
is alien to just about everywhere
except New York itself.
This thing's heavy!
In this scene, Annie and Alvy
are trying to cook lobsters.
Cooking isn't very New York and
boiling lobsters certainly isn't.
We should've gotten steaks
'cause they don't have legs.
They don't run around.
(SCREAMS) Stop! Jesus!
The scene's a single shot,
there's no cut.
The kitchen light is hit by mistake.
One of the funniest moments
in American cinema.
One more, Alvy, please? One more.
Charlie Chaplin played the lead
role in his films too,
and 'Annie Hall' is the offspring
of Charlie Chaplin's 'City Lights'.
Chaplin is the butt
of his own jokes too,
but makes a blind girl see.
Allen makes the woman
believe in herself.
He does this montage
to show her magic moments.
Both are Pygmalion myths.
Brilliant films
that nonetheless reminded us
of how few women were themselves
making films in America.
In the late '70s,
Allen went from the free form
shooting of 'Annie Hall'
to the compositional rigour of films
like this one, 'Manhattan'.
A city symphony
if ever there was one.
Widescreen images
in love with the built world.
Again, Allen's Jewish character
is at the centre of the story.
Hopper, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese,
Schrader, Parks, Burnett and Allen
were all, in some way,
against old-style Hollywood.
They were about the modern truths,
about people and places.
An article in 'The New Yorker'
magazine said,
"Our recent films
have been about self-hatred.
"There's been no room
for decency or nobility."
But a third set
of American filmmakers
were less against nobility
or Hollywood or romance.
These were the assimilationists.
Take this man, Peter Bogdanovich.
Passionate film historian.
Friend of Orson Welles
and John Ford.
There's no way he could be totally
against the old guard.
This movie shows
how he mixed old and new.
We're in an old Texan town.
Young people are driving at night.
Bogdanovich uses old movie style,
black and white,
conventional reverse-angle editing.
They meet Ben Johnson, a regular
actor in old John Ford movies,
who plays Sam the Lion,
a decent, heroic man.
Country music plays.
Need any money?
No, we've got plenty.
Well, you better take
some for some insurance.
Take money below that border,
it sort of melts sometimes.
Thanks, Sam.
And try not to drink too much
of that buggy water.
At first look this could be
a John Ford Western
like 'My Darling Clementine'.
But then look what happens.
MAN: Well, let's sing
what's left of the last verse...
This woman,
played by Cloris Leachman,
is agonisingly lonely.
She's been having an affair
with Timothy Bottoms
but here, at the end of the film,
has found out that he's dumped her
for the local beauty.
He's too inarticulate
even to apologise.
Never you mind, honey.
Never you mind.
Bogdanovich and his creative partner
Polly Platt
have Leachman do the forgiving.
Then a slow 16-second dissolve,
as long as the longest dissolve
that Orson Welles ever used.
And we're tracking and panning
in the town.
A ghost town with all idealism gone.
A rotten place to live.
The camera pans around to show
a closed-down movie theatre,
where romantic films
once were shown.
(WIND HOWLS)
The American assimilationists
weren't as interested
in opening up the form
as restoring its power
by applying it to edgier,
more thoughtful content.
They worked in the clear light
of the new day of '70s cinema.
Their films were spatially clear,
but tense.
Almost all their central characters
were male,
never more so than in the films
of the assimilationist director
of this scene
from 'The Wild Bunch',
Sam Peckinpah.
Peckinpah took and stretched
Sergio Leone's neo-realist idea
of extending time
to slow down a scene.
Doing so revealed the scene's
constituent agony and beauty.
His beautiful widescreen film
'Pat Garret and Billy the Kid'
shows how torn Peckinpah was
by the mid '70s
about American history.
The film's set
at the end of the 1800s.
The Wild West
has been commercialised.
Idealism has long flowed
down the river.
Here, outlaw turned sheriff,
Pat Garrett,
sees a family drifting by.
Pointlessly, inevitably,
the father and Garrett end up
pointing their guns at each other.
The macho West, the beautiful West.
Cattle barons have hired Pat Garrett
to kill his former friend,
the outlaw Billy the Kid.
Both are part of the past.
Ghosts.
When Garret finally kills Billy...
..he quickly shoots himself
in the mirror,
something Peckinpah once did.
It's as if Garrett
couldn't face himself.
The void within, the shame.
Just before Garrett kills Billy,
he meets this coffin maker
who's played by Peckinpah himself,
in half-light,
as if he's been there all the time,
like Garret's conscience.
Go on, get it over with.
Peckinpah hated producers
and was as temperamentally
against the system
as Erich von Stroheim
was in silent days.
Peckinpah was too romantic
to detest the myth of the West,
and the assimilationist director
of our next film, 'Badlands',
was too romantic to detest
the myth of the outsider.
A young man with James Dean hair
and '50s denims.
His young girlfriend.
Asleep like a child.
He climbs a tree, drops her an egg.
They're like Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden.
But they play war games.
It's like he's in Vietnam.
GIRL: He gave me lectures on how
a gun works, how to take it apart...
This actor, Martin Sheen,
would later star
in the most operatic
Vietnam film, 'Apocalypse Now'.
These characters are even more
damaged than James Dean.
They're so needy
they're almost mentally ill.
The film was made by one of the most
reclusive figures in film history,
Terrence Malick.
Malick studied philosophy,
and it shows.
His follow-up to 'Badlands'
was this one -
'Days of Heaven'.
We're on a Texan estate.
A golden world.
The camera flows.
What are you talking about?
It's not fair!
Then leave, you're fired.
Cinematographer Nestor Almendros
attached the camera to his own body
with a cantilevered brace
called a Panaglide.
This was the first time
this was done.
Panaglides would soon evolve
into Steadicams
which gave a floating feeling
to much of cinema
of the '80s and since.
One of the main characters
is this migrant worker.
Malick cuts between him
and landscape shots.
He's trying somehow
to apprehend the infinite.
Almendros, who had worked
with Francois Truffaut,
tried to capture
the beautiful natural light
of D.W. Griffith's films.
Malick had key scenes shot after
the sun has dipped below the horizon
but before its glowing light
has died from the sky.
This magic hour
sometimes lasts only 20 minutes,
so there's always a panic
to capture it.
To simulate a locust swarm,
Malick and his DP dropped
peanut shells from a helicopter
whose rotor blades
made them into a whirl,
then they reversed the shot
so that the locusts appeared
to swarm upwards.
Actors and extras in such scenes
had to walk backwards
so that when the film was reversed
their action would appear normal.
At the climax of the film,
wheatfields go on fire.
Only the light from the flames
was used.
The resulting images
have amongst the shallowest focus
of any in cinema history.
The delicacy of this,
the cave-like darkness,
worked brilliantly with
the film's mythic ambitions.
It's only been recently revealed
that Haskell Wexler
shot much of 'Days of Heaven'.
Actually, in the final film
about 46 minutes are my shooting.
Terry is just a special...
..far-out...or far-in person.
Certain aspects that I know,
he has, um...he has sort of
an intimate contact with nature.
That life concept of connection
to...to the earth
and to people as well.
And, um, that's the way he writes,
that's the way he thinks.
And he seems to think
like D.W. Griffith too.
Griffith said that cinema
is the wind in the trees
and Malick loves to film wind too,
its poetic properties.
And in this film from Soviet
director Andrei Tarkovsky,
whose work has so much
in common with Malick,
wind seems to be nature
coming alive,
part of the story.
Malick's only made
a handful of films,
but they are love letters to life,
as if their screenplays
were by philosophers
like David Hume
or Martin Heidegger.
One of the greatest American films
of the '70s
to mix old techniques with
new style was this movie, 'Cabaret'.
A clean-cut young man
singing a melodic song.
Could be an old-style
Hollywood musical.
Except musicals weren't usually
shot in close-ups.
And there are lots of them here.
They tilt up as people stand
because we're in Nazi Germany.
The faces become more impassioned.
A shiver runs down our spine.
The film showed the life and loves
of Christopher Isherwood's character
Sally Bowles
in decadent Berlin in the 1930s.
'Cabaret's director, Bob Fosse,
was old Hollywood,
born of musical theatre parents
and steeped in Broadway.
He choreographed and directed using
the best of the old techniques.
(SINGS) # ..alone in your room
# Come hear the music play... #
This song is about
living for the moment.
Its performer, Liza Minnelli,
daughter of Judy Garland,
is a direct link
to old-school Hollywood.
But the political messages
and celebration of non-conformist
sexuality are very '70s.
# Life is a cabaret, old chum
# Come to the cabaret. #
That I cannot do.
Another assimilationist film
from 1972 was even more amoral.
Francis Ford Coppola's
'The Godfather'
was the most successful upgrading
of another '30s American genre -
the gangster movie.
Coppola had it shot
like a Rembrandt painting.
No trendy '70s long lenses,
no helicopter shots.
Gordon Willis, his cinematographer,
lit Marlon Brando from overhead to
create shadows in his eye sockets.
Audiences couldn't see clearly
the eyes of the Don.
I don't understand.
This so-called north lighting
was rare in American cinema,
and had not been used well
since the days of Marlene Dietrich.
You had a good trade,
made a good living.
Police protected you
and there were courts of law.
You didn't need a friend like me.
But now you come to me
and you say,
"Don Corleone, give me justice."
The low lighting levels also meant
that focus was shallow,
constraining actors
to minimal movements,
internalising their performance.
Gangster pictures of the '30s
were about the rise and fall
of individuals,
but 'The Godfather' showed
a network of relationships.
Robert Towne contributed
to its screenplay.
Francis called me one day and said,
"Jeez, I don't have the scene
between the two leads in my movie."
And then it fell to me to decide
what the nature of that scene
would or should be.
So, um, I had something structural
to do with that, yeah.
Yes, I mean, in the sense
that the way that I placed it,
what it was about.
And when it was your time that...
..that you would be the one
to hold the strings.
Senator Corleone.
Governor Corleone. Somethin'.
Another 'pezzonovante'.
Well...
There just wasn't enough time,
Michael. Wasn't enough time.
We'll get there, Pop.
We'll get there.
Now, listen, whoever comes to you
with this Barzini meeting,
he's the traitor.
Don't forget that.
Over dinner one day during
the shooting of 'The Godfather',
its producer, Robert Evans,
commissioned another film
about the lust for power.
Our final assimilationist movie
of the '70s.
Its style was old Hollywood,
film noir almost,
but somehow baking in
the clear light of the '70s day.
It would be based on the true story
of how the head of Los Angeles's
Department of Water and Power,
William Mulholland,
redirected water from the Owens
Valley, depriving farmers of water
in order to expand LA
and fill its swimming pools.
A rape of the land.
Los Angeles has a kind of...
and particularly in those days,
a lazy, dreamy quality to it.
And, er, left for him
to discover the dark shadows
in this sunny place.
And the crime
was right in front of his eyes
every time he turned on his spigot.
Robert Towne's screenplay
became 'Chinatown'.
It was shot widescreen,
had muted '30s colour,
and starred Jack Nicholson
as a puzzled private eye
driving around LA
who unknowingly stumbles
into the appalling story
of the theft of the water.
I think that the sunny quality there
is because the corruption
is so pervasive,
so all encompassing.
It's not just one criminal,
it's not just one Maltese Falcon.
It's everywhere.
And every really good
detective story...
..that you find satisfying,
always has that element in it.
Brigid O'Shaughnessy
in 'The Maltese Falcon'...
And then she's saying,
"I'm desperate, I need your help."
And the killer is right in front of
his eyes, from the very beginning.
It's her.
But it takes him an entire...
..exploration for him to discover
what he knew all along,
and didn't know he knew,
which was the killer.
In the case of Oedipus,
it's literal.
Help me, Mr Spade.
I need help so badly.
I've no right to ask you,
I know I haven't, but I do ask you.
Help me.
You won't need much of anybody's
help, you're good.
It's chiefly your eyes, I think,
and that throb you get in your voice
when you say things like,
"Be generous, Mr Spade."
I deserved that.
The lie was in the way I said it,
not at all in what I said.
It's my own fault
if you can't believe me now.
Now you are dangerous.
And I'm afraid I...
The director of
'The Maltese Falcon', John Huston,
played the businessman who steals
the water and rapes his daughter
in Townes' screenplay.
It was a time before World War II,
it was a time when the full extent
of the possibilities
of human evil hadn't occurred yet,
and mostly fell along the lines
of the usual graph of corruption.
The man who would be willing
to violate his daughter...
..that's just not an instinct.
The presence of evil
is kind of brilliantly rendered
by both Roman and John,
who's that kind of
false bonhomie and pleasantness.
"Yeah," he says.
"I've still got a few teeth
in my head
"and a few friends in town,"
he says.
My daughter's a very jealous woman.
I didn't want her
to find out about the girl.
How did you find out?
I've still got a few teeth left in
my head, and a few friends in town.
OK.
'Cause it goes beyond mere greed.
What do you hope to get
that you don't already have?
And...
..Huston's answer, I think, is
"The future, Mr Gittes. The future."
I just want to know
what you're worth.
Over $10 million?
(SCOFFS) Oh, my. Yes.
Why are you doing it?
How much better can you eat?
What can you buy
that you can't already afford?
The future, Mr Gittes!
The future.
Now, where's the girl?
I want the only daughter
I've got left.
As you found out, Evelyn
was lost to me a long time ago.
Who do you blame for that? Her?
The film was directed
by Roman Polanski.
Three years earlier, Polanski's wife
and unborn child and friends
had been horrifically murdered
by Charles Manson's
gang of deluded hippies.
Polanski's early life
had been tragic,
but the murders seemed to strip him
of any lingering delusions
about people.
Polanski's life
had had far too great an amplitude
to even countenance
the shallow pleasures
of escapist romantic cinema.
Nor had he any time for the
fleeting, impressionistic lightness
of 'Jules et Jim' by Truffaut,
for example.
(PANTS)
He had 'Chinatown'
filmed with wide-angle lenses,
bright lights and precise framing,
like an MGM musical almost,
except that the movie was about
rape, incest, power and greed.
Towne wrote an ending
with some hope,
but Polanski made it much darker.
In his version, Huston's daughter,
who had a child by him,
is shot through the eye.
(HORN BLARES)
(WOMAN SCREAMS)
We're in proper film noir territory
in this ending.
A car horn creates a sense of panic.
A hand-held swish pan to reveal
the scene of the atrocity.
(SOBS)
(SCREAMS)
Got to call the captain,
get an ambulance.
No! No!
Turn him loose,
turn 'em all loose.
(SOBS HYSTERICALLY)
Lord! Oh, Lord!
Towne called this tragic ending "the
tunnel at the end of the light".
'Chinatown' was a high point
in American film of its time.
New American cinema was full
of mockery and stylistically bold.
It was old-school,
laced with new truths.
It felt like the best movie party
to be at in the '70s.
But there are other parties
around the world
that were just as exciting,
radical and self-possessed.