The Film Club (10 page)

After an hour or so, the rat-faced real estate agent emerged and asked the lads if the owner was home. I was cringing in the living room, trying to watch television, my entrails shuddering as if a car alarm was going off inside me. (Guilty conscience.)

“No, no,” I whispered to Jesse, “tell him I'm not here.”

At four o'clock the showing ended. Twenty minutes later, as I was stealing down the front stairs to get a drink at the local Greek restaurant, my nerves shot, the agent appeared. He had a small, bony face as if unpleasant judgments had shrunk the skin and given it an off-putting shine. The “gentlemen on the porch,” he said, were posing “quite the problem.” I tried to change the subject; in jolly tones I asked him about the real estate business, about the neighbourhood, maybe I'd use him myself, I was going to buy a house. Ha, ha, ha, my pirate's laugh. He was not put off. Unsmiling, he said they'd frightened off a number of buyers with their swearing. Never! I said, as if defending my queen.

There was a showing the following day, Sunday. A fine rain fell, the sky a soft grey, seagulls flying low over the park, some walking with their heads back, their beaks open as if they were gargling. In spite of profound misgivings, I persisted in my strategy. More beer, more cigarettes, more hunched-over louts glaring into the middle distance. I didn't have the stomach to stick around and beetled off across the bridge on my bicycle to take care of some imaginary business. I didn't come back until after four. The rain had let up. I was just passing the Greek restaurant where we often ate when I saw Jesse walking along the sidewalk toward me. He was smiling but there was something cautious, almost protective about it.

“We had a little problem,” he said. A few minutes into the showing, the bald man had stormed across the lawn— this time
he
was wearing the sunglasses—and knocked on the door with both fists. With the louts looking on, he demanded to see me.

Me?

“He's not here,” Jesse told him.

“I know what he's doing,” Baldy roared. “He's trying to
assassinate
the sale.”

Assassinate the sale?
Tough words. Especially since they were true. I felt a sudden, sickening wave of shame; even worse, I had the adolescent sensation, like flames licking at the inside of a house, that I was in “big trouble.” That I'd taken out my dad's car without a licence and cracked it up. I also had the uncomfortable feeling that Jesse knew I was in the wrong, had known it all along. Not to mention the fact that I'd implicated
him
in it. A sterling example of parental guidance. How to handle a crisis. How to get what you want. Put him in my hands, Maggie, I'll make sure he straightens up and flies right.

“I got everybody inside,” he said.

“Is it safe to go back?”

“I'd wait awhile. He's pretty pissed off.”

A few days later, I asked a friend of mine to “beard” for me, pretend he was the purchaser and put in a bid on the house. But they must have seen clear through it; they hardly gave him the time of day. It had all been for nothing, my machinations, my involving a bunch of kids in a stupid, unethical scheme. A gay couple with a flower shop got the house for nearly half a million dollars.

Was this episode, I wondered, going to be one of those things that Jesse remembered for the rest of his life? (You never know when the window is open. And when it is, you don't want to throw a dead dog through it.) I took him aside the next day. “That was a king-size mistake I made,” I said.

“There's nothing wrong with wanting to live next door to your family,” he said. But I stopped him.

I said, “If some guy did that to me when I was trying to sell
my
place, I'd go over there with a machine gun.”

“I still think you did the right thing,” he insisted.

It was hard to make him see things differently. I said, “I'm just like that guy in
The Bicycle Thief
. I make something the right thing to do just because I need it done.”

“What if it
was
the right thing to do?” he came back.

Later, when we went outside for a post-film cigarette, I found myself looking furtively this way and that to make sure Baldy or his wife weren't around.

“You see the consequences?” I said. “Now I have to look out for this guy every time I go on the porch. That's the price. That's the
real
price.”

7

I designed a Stillness Unit for us to watch. This was about how to steal a scene from all the actors around you by not moving. I started, of course, with
High Noon
(1952). There are happy accidents in the movies where everything seems to just click into place. Right script, right director, right cast.
Casablanca
(1942) is one,
The Godfather
(1972) is another; and so is
High Noon
. A sheriff, Gary Cooper, is on his way out of town with a new bride when he hears that a very bad guy has just got out of jail and, along with three friends, is headed this way to “get” the man who put him away. They're coming on the noon train. Cooper runs here and there all over town trying to get help; everyone's got a good reason to say no. In the end, it's just him, an empty street and four men with guns.

The film was made at a time when westerns were usually in colour and for the most part featured a kind of granite-chinned, high-minded hero, more of a cartoon than a human being. Suddenly along came
High Noon
, shot in stark black and white; no pretty sunsets and gorgeous mountain ranges; what we got instead was a small, rather mean-looking town. At the centre of the story was something else unusual: a man who was afraid of getting hurt and showed it.

I remind Jesse that the film was shot in the early '50s, that you can see a parallel with the witch hunts that were going on at the same time in Hollywood. People suspected of leftist sympathies found themselves deserted by their friends overnight.

It's hardly believable now but when
High Noon
came out, it was picketed by all sorts of people. They knocked it for being anti-American. Here, they complained, was a story about a so-called hero who, at the story's end, gives up on the townsfolk and leaves. The film's writer, Carl Foreman, was exiled to England; he'd been stamped a “fellow traveller”; no one would hire him. Lloyd Bridges, who plays the cowardly young hothead, didn't work again for two years; “un-American” was the verdict.

I point out that there are wonderful, artful things to look for in the movie. Look at the way the film shows the empty train tracks. We see them again and again. It's a wordless, eventless way of creating a sense of danger. Each time we see those tracks we are reminded that it is from that direction which evil will come. Same thing for the clocks. Tick, tick, tick, tick. They even slow down as the hour of noon approaches.

And then there is Cary Cooper. Actors who worked with him were often surprised at how little he did during a scene. It seemed as if he hardly “acted,” hardly did anything at all. But when you see his performance onscreen, it pushes everybody else into the background. Actors saw their performances disappear into a blur around him.

“Watch where your eye goes during his scenes,” I told Jesse. “Imagine being a fellow actor and trying to compete with
that
.”

Just so we didn't get too lofty-minded, I showed him
Internal Affairs
(1990), a nasty piece of fun, indeed. Richard Gere plays a corrupt cop. When an unstable fellow officer (William Baldwin) is called to testify, we see just how magnificent a villain Gere can create. (Better than his leading man.) With those small eyes, this is Iago on the LAPD. Gere's stillness—and the moral self-possession it suggests— is hypnotically attractive. You understand how his character holds on to even his ex-wife. And how, if he feels threatened,
nothing
is beneath him. I ask Jesse to watch for the scene where, with just a few sentences delivered in an offhand, even amused way, he cranks up the sexual horror in the imagination of Andy Garcia, the officer assigned to investigate him.

“Don't be fooled by his smug good looks, or his talk-show philosophizing,” I said. “Richard Gere is the real thing.”

We turn to David Cronenberg's
Dead Zone
(1983). Christopher Walken as a lonely psychic; so sad; a true prince of stillness. Then
The Godfather: Part II
(1974). What can you say about “Big Al” Pacino? He has the poised, “held-in” feel of a moray eel at the mouth of a cave. Wait for that gorgeous scene with a senator who misses the significance of Pacino's second, lower offer for a casino licence.

I showed
Bullitt
(1968); it came out nearly forty years ago but still has the authority of stainless steel. With a blue-eyed Steve McQueen never handsomer. McQueen was an actor who understood the value of doing very little; he listens with the titillating stillness of the great leading man. I dug up from the basement an old interview with the chatty Canadian director Norman Jewison, who made three films with McQueen.

“Steve wasn't the kind of actor who could stand onstage with a chair and entertain you,” Jewison said. “He was a
movie
actor. He loved the camera and it loved him back. He was always real, partly because he was always playing himself. He never minded if you took a line away from him. Just as long as the camera was on him he was happy because he understood that it was a visual medium.”

McQueen had a difficult life. He spent a couple of years in a juvenile home for delinquent boys. After a stint with the Marines, he drifted to New York and took some acting classes. In other words, I explained to Jesse, this was no arty, president-of-the-drama-club guy. Talent, I said, doesn't always turn up where you think it should.

We watched
The Samurai
(1967) (Alain Delon); Lauren Bacall in
The Big Sleep
(1946); and, of course, the mighty Clint Eastwood (any stiller and he'd be dead) in
A Fistful
of Dollars
(1964). You could spend a long time on Clint. I start by naming five things I love about him.

1. I love how he holds up four fingers to the coffin maker in
Fistful of Dollars
and says, “My mistake. Make that four coffins.”

2. I love it—it was the British critic David Thomson who pointed it out—that when Clint stood beside Prince Charles at London's National Film Theatre in 1993, it was clear to everyone in the audience who the
real
prince was.

3. I love the fact that when Clint directs a movie, he never says “Action.” He says calmly, quietly, “When you're ready.”

4. I love watching Clint fall off his horse in
Unfor-given
.

5. I love the image of Clint as
Dirty Harry
walking down a San Francisco street, gun in one hand, a hot dog in the other.

I mention to Jesse a brief junket-chat I had once with William Goldman, who did the screenplay for
Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid
(1969) and later wrote
Absolute Power
(1997) for Eastwood. Goldman adored him. “Clint is the best,” he told me. “A complete professional in a world dominated by ego. On an Eastwood set,” he said, “you come to work, you do your job, you go home; usually you go home early because he wants to play golf. And he eats lunch in the cafeteria along with everyone else.”

When Clint was offered the script for
A Fistful of Dollars
in 1964, it had already been around for a while. Charles Bronson said no, it was the worst script he'd ever seen. James Coburn didn't want to do it because it was going to be shot in Italy and he'd heard bad things about Italian directors. Clint took it for a fee of fifteen thousand dollars, but—and I emphasized this for Jesse—insisted on cutting down the script, thought it would be more interesting if the guy didn't talk.

“Can you guess why he did that?” I said.

“Sure. You imagine all
sorts
of things about a guy who doesn't talk,” Jesse said. “The minute he opens his mouth, he shrinks a couple of sizes.”

“Exactly.”

After a few distracted seconds, he added, “It'd be nice to be like that in real life.”

“Uh?”

“Not talk so much. Be more mysterious. Girls like that.”

“Some do, some don't,” I said. “You're a talker. Women love talkers, too.”

Three years went by before Eastwood saw the finished film. By then he'd pretty much forgotten about it. He invited some pals to a private screening room and said, “This is probably going to be a real piece of shit, but let's have a look.”

A few minutes in, one of his pals said, “Ah, Clint, this is pretty good stuff.”
A Fistful of Dollars
revitalized the western, which had become, at this point, a kind of rest home for aging movie stars.

After the film, I asked Jesse to indulge me, to allow us to revisit the rope scene with James Dean in
Giant
. Dean surrounded by slick businessmen trying to cut him a deal; Rock Hudson laying twelve hundred dollars on the table, “What're you gonna do with all that money, Jed?” Everyone moving, talking, except Dean. Dean just sitting there. “Who steals the scene?” I asked. “Who steals the whole movie?”

I even made a foray into television, Edward James Olmos as the black-suited police chief in
Miami Vice
(1984–89). I said, “This is a stupid, implausible show, but watch Olmos, it's almost sleight of hand. By not moving, he appears to be in possession of a secret.”

“What secret?”

“That's the illusion of stillness. There
is
no secret. Only the implication of a possessor,” I said. I was starting to sound like a wine writer.

I clicked off the DVD.

“I wouldn't mind seeing the rest of the show,” Jesse said. “Would that be okay?”

So while the contractors banged and sawed and blow-torched the second floor of the condo (getting bigger every day) across the street, Jesse and I watched three consecutive episodes of
Miami Vice
. At one point, our neighbour Eleanor clomped past the window and glanced inside. I wondered what she was thinking, the two of us watching television day after day. I experienced a kind of cretinous desire to run after her, to say, But it's not television, it's
movies
. There was, I noticed in myself, an occasional, unattractive hurry toward explanation these days when it came to Jesse.