Papillon (1973)

          This minor classic, which tells the real-life story of a Frenchman who endured 10 years of harsh imprisonment in South America during the 1930s, arose from a turbulent development process. After screenplay drafts by writers on the order of William Goldman were rejected, the film went into preproduction with a script by the fine popcorn-movie scribe Lorenzo Semple Jr. By that point, Steve McQueen was committed to play the title character. Then Dustin Hoffman agreed to co-star in the picture, only there wasn’t a role for him to play. Enter Oscar winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was hired to weave Hoffman into the picture. Trumbo’s writing continued well into production—he was generating pages just a few days ahead of when they were being shot—so after Trumbo fell ill, someone had to finish the work, fast. Trumbo’s son, Christopher, did the job, writing the movie’s poignant final scenes. Thus, if the resulting movie has a bit of a patched-together feel, there’s a good reason—and it’s a testament to the skill of everyone involved that despite the convoluted gestation, Papillon works.

          The film was adapted from a memoir by French criminal Henri Charrière, whose claim to fame was escaping from Devil’s Island, the infamous prison in French Guyana. (Never mind that many people have questioned the veracity of Charrière’s recollections.) When the story begins, Charrière (Steve McQueen) is convicted for a murder he did not commit, and then sent across the ocean to a lifetime term on Devil’s Island. (Charrière is nicknamed “Papillon,” French for “butterfly,” and an image of the winged insect is tattooed across his chest.) While in transit to Devil’s Island, Charrière befriends a bespectacled crook named Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman), who has money but isn’t physically formidable. Charrière, on the other hand, is a tough guy, so they strike a protection deal. Yet what begins as a pragmatic arrangement evolves into a full-blown bromance over the course of several years; among other incidents, Charrière protects Dega from assailants and Dega smuggles food to Charrière while Charrière endures inhumane solitary confinement.

          The movie combines intense scenes of prison suffering with thrilling escape attempts. Along the way, Charrière earns the respect of nearly everyone he meets by displaying superhuman determination. In one vivid but far-fetched vignette, the hero even curries favor with the charismatic leader (Anthony Zerbe) of a leper colony.

          Despite extraordinary production values and the sure hand of director Franklin J. Schaffner guiding the story, Papillion drags somewhat at a bloated length of two and a half hours. Ironically, however, the narrative’s most expendable element is also one of the movie’s strongest virtues: Hoffman’s character. Because the myriad scenes of Charrière’s imprisonment are painful to watch (at one point, he eats bugs for survival), producers were wise to add the leavening agent of a major friendship. Hoffman is oddly appealing, affecting a cerebral, sarcastic quality while peering out through Coke-bottle glasses. Better still, his tightly wound energy complements McQueen’s he-man stoicism, giving the picture contrast it would otherwise have lacked. (The last scene between the main characters also has an undeniable emotional tug.) Is Papillon overlong and repetitious? Sure. But is it beautifully made and sensitively acted, with a reassuring theme of man’s indomitable spirit? Yes. And that’s what matters, at least in terms of what this memorable movie offers and delivers.

Papillon: GROOVY

Executive Action (1973)

          To say that Executive Action has credibility problems is an understatement, because the picture offers a possible “explanation” for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that refutes the “lone gunman” hypothesis of the Warren Commission. (The movie is based on a book by inveterate conspiracy theorists Donald Freed and Mark Lane.) While there’s a chance the scenario outlined in Executive Action is something like the truth, history has yet to offer definitive validation of the picture’s guesswork. Compounding the credibility issue, the film’s storytelling is unusual, because instead of unfolding as a straightforward dramatic narrative, the picture features a combination of historical re-enactments, newsreel footage, and very long dialogue scenes, during which conspirators debate the pros and cons of killing Kennedy. Yet even though Executive Action is a bumpy ride, it’s fascinating.

          The movie focuses on the dynamic between Texas millionaires Foster (Robert Ryan), the prime mover behind the assassination plot, and Ferguson (Will Geer), a skeptical would-be financial backer. With the aid of covert-ops guy Farrington (Burt Lancaster), Foster tries to persuade Ferguson that taking out JFK will advance an insidious right-wing agenda. Foster describes a future in which JFK’s humanistic policies will thaw the Cold War and expand the rights of minorities and the working class, resulting in a world that power-mongers like Foster and Ferguson cannot control. Meanwhile, Farrington explains the mechanics he’ll use if the plan is authorized—he will frame Lee Harvey Oswald as a patsy and set up triangulated gunfire ensuring that JFK is killed.

          Even for viewers who don’t buy into the film’s most outlandish notions, it’s disturbing to watch men plan a murder like it’s just another item on their corporate agenda; the conspirators’ calmness is chilling. Amid the few snippets of action that break up the dialogue scenes, the most riveting sequence is probably an extended vignette set at a remote training facility. Gunmen led by an icy ex-military shooter (Ed Lauter) create a mock-up of Dealey Plaza and run a remote-controlled limo through a crossfire pattern to practice their assassination techniques. Executive Action springs to life during this sequence because of how vividly the film imagines what might have happened.

          Interestingly, the film’s director, David Miller, began his career making documentaries, and it’s easy to see traces of nonfiction storytelling in the methodical quality of Executive Action. Plus, beyond its historical status as one of the first films to question the official story about JFK’s death, Executive Actionis noteworthy as the second and last project involving both Miller and legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo; they previously worked on the great modern-day Western Lonely Are the Brave (1962).

Executive Action: GROOVY

The Horsemen (1971)

          Macho and savage, The Horsemen is a sports movie for only the hardtiest of viewers. Set in modern-day Afghanistan (circa the early ’70s), the picture concerns the brutal sport of buzkashi—think polo, but with longer playing times and with a headless goat carcass in lieu of a ball. Exploring themes such as male identity and primitive codes of honor, The Horsemen is mildly fascinating as an ethnographic study, but it’s not an easy film for Westerners to embrace. Even though The Horsemen relies on certain clichés that are common to most sports movies (and most stories about fathers and sons), the picture is so thick with virility that it’s a sonnet to manly suffering. In The Horsemen, the best man isn’t the one who wins, per se; it’s the man who endures the most pain in the pursuit of winning.

          Based on a novel by Joseph Kessel and written by the formidable Dalton Trumbo—whose previous collaboration with Horsemandirector John Frankenheimer, 1968’s The Fixer, was just as tough and uncompromising—the movie revolves around a young man trying to win the respect of his unyielding father. Jack Palace, wearing a mist of old-age makeup over his leathery features, plays Tursen, a retired buzkashi player who makes a humble but respectable living tending horses for a wealthy landowner. After grooming his son, Uraz (Omar Sharif), to become a buzkashi champion, Tursen places a huge wager on Uraz’s performance in a match, only to watch Uraz lose. Never mind that Uraz suffers a broken leg; broken pride is all that matters here. Much of the film comprises Uraz’s excruciating quest to rehabilitate his body for a return to the game, and since this is a merciless Frankenheimer film, the cure is far worse than the disease.

          The Horsemen looks amazing, with cinematographers André Domage, James Wong Howe, and Claude Renoir conveying the stark majesty of the Afghan landscape—to say nothing of the ferocious action during buzkashi matches. Unfortunately, neither Palance nor Sharif is sufficiently expressive to deliver all of the subtle nuances inherent to the material. They convey a certain undeniable primal intensity, and each has affecting moments, but the film would have benefited from performers with broader emotional palettes. Faring even worse than the male leads is beautiful Leigh Taylor-Young, cast as a fallen woman who enters Uraz’s life. While she looks blazingly sexy with her long, dark hair and smoky eye makeup, Taylor-Young is merely ornamental to a story that’s all about men and their animalistic drives to impress each other.

The Horsemen: FUNKY

F.T.A. (1972)

A somewhat interesting artifact from the Vietnam War era, this documentary comprises filmed performances by a roving troupe of antiwar activists who toured small venues located near U.S. Army bases. The reason the picture got a theatrical release, and the reason it survives to this day via DVD and other formats, is the impressive wattage of the key participants. The major players are actors Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, who also produced the picture (with director Francine Parker). So, even though the skits captured in the film are not particularly inspired, it’s fascinating to see the shag-coiffed “Hanoi Jane” at the height of her controversial campaign against the war. Her passion burns through the screen, even if it sometimes reads as naïve stridency. It’s also compelling to watch the faces of the soldiers in the audience, because one can only imagine what was going through the minds of these young men as they watched a revue nominally titled “Free the Army” but really known as “Fuck the Army.” Most of the sketches, which were written by a cabal of satirists, feature obvious lampooning of military bureaucracy with an undercurrent of humanistic revolt against the bloodshed of a pointless war. Yet not everything in the movie strives for humor. In a particularly arresting sequence, Sutherland reads aloud from Dalton Trumbo’s legendary 1939 antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, the story of a World War I soldier wishing for death after losing his facial features and all of his limbs. Elsewhere, folksinger Holly Near performs tunes typical of the earnest era in which the film was made. However, perhaps the movie’s greatest claim to fame is its obscurity. The week F.T.A. opened in America, Fonda traveled to North Vietnam for a trip many perceived as traitorous, immediately making her the right wing’s Public Enemy No. 1. Buckling to pressure, American-International Pictures pulled the film from theaters before it completed its first week onscreen.

F.T.A.:FUNKY

Hollywood on Trial (1976)

          Arguably the best examination of the Hollywood blacklist yet captured on film, this solidly made documentary features interviews with many key figures who survived that awful episode. Clearly explaining why the changing attitudes of a post-WWWII America, film-industry labor disputes, and opportunistic lawmakers collided in the purging of communists and other left-wingers from the film industry, Hollywood on Trial gives heroes a venue for recalling their shining moments and lets villains cement their ignoble legacies. Tremendous archive footage takes viewers back to the tense days of Congressional hearings in which movie stars and studio executives stupidly claimed that commies were trying to take over the picture business; this same footage shows the famed Hollywood Ten, the first professionals banned from employment for political reasons, derailing their own defense by condescending to their persecutors. And then, in contemporary interviews, most of the Ten reveal the wisdom gained through the passage of time, while still issuing righteous fire.

          Given his oversized personality, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo provides some of the more memorable moments, his pithy parade of polysyllables amply displaying why under-educated executives perceived him as uppity back in the day. It’s riveting to watch the great man in twilight, knowing that he and his colleagues went to jail on matters of principle before finally undermining the blacklist in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Yet the most poignant footage is probably that of director Edward Dmytryk, the lone member of the Hollywood Ten to recant his original testimony and “name names” as a prerequisite for returning to work. Watching his face as Dmytryk tries to defend his indefensible actions is simultaneously edifying and excruciating; one sees glimmers of ambivalence, indignation, regret, and shame.

          It’s also infuriating to see archive footage of right-wingers like Walt Disney, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Nixon, since it’s impossible to discern which of them believed he was addressing a genuine social threat and which knew he was simply union-busting. The venerable actor/director John Huston provides narration for the piece, which has the simplistic visuals of a ’70s TV special but more than enough historical significance to generate consistent interest.

Hollywood on Trial: GROOVY