Category Archives: 1970s American crime films

Asia hands

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

In the early-nineties, I lived for several years in Vientiane, the sun bleached, run down capital of one of the more remote countries in Asia, Laos. One of my acquaintances in the small expatriate community was a man who’d fled Australia after being accused of embezzling money from several companies.

He spent most nights drinking with a pack of other Australians and their mostly Lao girlfriends at a bar that circled a large fountain in the city’s centre. Drunk he exhibited an air of menace; otherwise he could be entertaining company. He knew a lot about Laos. Obviously, he also had contacts in government that enabled him to stay despite being wanted back in Australia.

He was the first, but by no means last, person I met in the six years I spent in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand who could be given the title ‘Asia hand’.

The Asia hand has usually been a minor character Western crime films set in Asia, the drunken Westerner propping up the bar in some seedy hotel or proffering false information or documents. Two films that explore in more detail the themes embodied in the persona of the Asia hand are Peter Bogdanovich’s 1979 Saint Jack, based on the Paul Theroux novel of the same name, and the little known 1982 Australian thriller, Far East.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Australian crime film, Bryan Brown, Crime fiction and film from Singapore, Crime fiction and film from the Philippines, Crime film

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Violent Saturday

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment
Over the weekend I managed to catch a film I’d been keen to see for a while, Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday. Made in 1955, it focuses on a bank robbery in small southern US town.

It’s not hard to see why it was so heavily criticised upon release. Apart from the violence there’s some pretty warts and all portrayals of the residents. The owner of the local copper mine, the town’s main business, is an alcoholic cuckold and the manager (Victor Mature) is ashamed because he never got to serve in WWII. The librarian’s a petty thief and the bank manager a peeping tom.

All this comes to a head when hoodlums (headed up by Stephen McNally and including a very young Lee Marvin) arrive in town to hit the local bank. They car jack Mature then take a local Amish family (Ernest Borgnine is the father) hostage so they can use their farm as a hide-out after the robbery.

As usual with Fleischer, a director who could walk and chew gum at the same time, it’s a good, solid effort. There’s gritty action and interesting, convincing characters.

Previously unavailable, Violent Saturday has been released by a new Melbourne outfit, Bounty Films. The DVD didn’t include any special features, just the movie.

… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime film, Ernest Borgnine, Film Noir, Heist films, Lee Marvin, Robert Aldrich, Victor Mature

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Fast Walking: James Woods and how to do sleaze

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

Ever since I posted on the underrated movie Cop a few months ago, I’ve been engaged in my own James Woods film festival.

As I wrote at the time, Cop is a great little neo noir that combines the rogue cop, police procedural and serial killer genres. But it works so well due to the casting of James Woods as the central character of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a sleazy burnt out LAPD homicide dick trying to track down a maniac no one else thinks exists.

Watching and re-watching Wood’s films only confirms his status as the original hard-boiled bad lieutenant. With his whippet thin body and bedroom eyes, his looks are more lounge lizard than movie star perfect. And his permanently up turned lip and slightly bad skin make him look like a man with a bad past.

Starting with The Onion Field (1979), in which he played a disturbed ex-con who panics one night when he and his partner are pulled over by cops and murders one of them, Woods went on to play some of the most repellent yet strangely charismatic sleazes on film.

Videodrome (1983): This early Cronenberg effort hasn’t dated in the slightest and Woods’ is in top form as sleazy soft porn cable TV producer, Max Renn.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Crime film, James Woods

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Sidney Lumet: the prince of the New York

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Anyone who has an interest in cinema from the fifties, sixties and seventies will by now be well and truly used to logging onto the Internet or picking up the newspaper, to discover that one of their favourite actors or directors has died.

So it was this morning, when I got the news that Sydney Lumet was dead at the age of 86.

Lumet made some crap films and some great films. Mostly he made great films, including Dog Day Afternoon in 1975 and Prince of the City in 1981.

Both films examined corruption and the situation of people trapped in circumstances beyond their control. They also showcased the good and the bad of the director’s beloved New York.

Clocking in at approximately 240 minutes, the much underrated Prince of the City is based on the real life case of New York cop Robert Leuci, or Daniel Ciello as he is called in the film, played by Treat Williams.

Ciello is a member of a special unit of narcotics investigators known as ‘princes of the city’ for the power they wield. Uneasy with some of the corrupt practices going on in his unit, Ciello agrees to help an internal affairs probe.

It’s a complicated, dense, claustrophobic, drawn out story that mirrors the situation facing Ciello.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Charles Durning, Crime film, Heist films, Sidney Lumet

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Parker and the art of hard-boiled crime writing

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

December 31 2010 marks the second anniversary of the death at age 75 of one of the masters of hard-boiled crime writing, Donald Westlake.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Westlake lately and his best known creation, the professional criminal Parker.

Westlake was a prolific writer. While he specialised in crime fiction, he also did science fiction, erotic stories and westerns under a myriad of pseudonyms of which Richard Stark, the name he used for the Parker books, remains the best known. He also worked on a number of screenplays, including the adaption of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters.

Sixteen Parker novels appeared between 1962 and 1974. For reasons I’m not clear about, Westlake took a rest from the character until 1997, then wrote another eight Parker books.

Several of the books were filmed, the best known of which is Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (later remade as Payback with Mel Gibson as the lead, but the less said about it the better).

I recently discovered via The Violent World of Parker website, The Outfit, an excellent 1973 adaption of Westlake’s novel of the same name, is finally getting an outing on DVD. (The details are here).

Robert Duvall does the honours as Parker or Macklin, as the central character in the film is called, alongside Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan and the siren of seventies American B-movies, Karen Black.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Garry Disher, Heist films, Jim Brown, Lee Marvin, Noir fiction, Parker

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