Bollywood goes to Hollywood: DBB watches Kaante

I watched Kaante (2002) at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles this week. A few well-chosen and well-executed Bollywood production numbers helped make the movie's 2 1/2 hours fly by. Perhaps more heist movies should incorporate such numbers.

The major characters were all good, as were some of the minor ones. The solution to the movie's central mystery is arbitrary, but that's a red herring; the question drives the movie. The answer is beside the point.

The movie is in Hindi, liberally interspersed with English. All but one of the lead characters speaks both languages, and the script turns the linguistic duality into plot points both serious and comic. The film was shot in Los Angeles and incorporates several picturesque Los Angeles locations, among which is not, as far as I can tell, the Bradbury Building.

The New Beverly is Quentin Tarantino's theater, and Tarantino has been been quoted as rating Kaante high among movies influenced by his own Reservoir Dogs. I suspect that the occasional waves of what sounded like knowing laughter at the New Beverly reflected the audience's recognition of particular nods to Tarantino's movie, but knowledge of Reservoir Dogs is no prerequisite to enjoying Kaante.
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Kansas City Confidential: Good, evil, and Donald Westlake

Kansas City Confidential (1952), a movie about an innocent man caught up in a heist who must then fight to clear his name, has to be an interesting case study in the conflicting pressures American movie makers faced in the 1950s.

On the one hand, its plot is as noir as noir gets: Innocent man with a blot on his past gets caught up in a heist, is arrested, is brutalized by police, loses his job, and must fight to restore his reputation. John Payne does decent work as the innocent man, fairly believable when he has to get tough. (And the movie's punch-up scenes are more convincingly tough than corresponding scenes in other movies of the time.)

On the other, the movie's love interest and redemption-soaked ending are so thoroughly unconvincing, so obviously at odds with everything else, that it's easy to disregard them and to enjoy the good stuff.   The gulf between the redemption and the evil got me thinking about, and appreciating, the balance that moviemakers of the time must have had to strike between getting their dark visions on the screen, and making them morally acceptable in a conservative age.

Neville Brand

Maybe the era's social pressure to clearly delineate good and bad is responsible for the movie's splendid trio of heisters, played by Neville Brand, Jack Elam, and a young Lee Van Cleef. These guys are like crowd figures in a Northern Renaissance Crucifixion painting. You know they're evil just by looking at them.

Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about Kansas City Confidential for crime fiction readers is spotting the bits that Donald Westlake had to have picked up from the movie: The discord among criminals. The getaway car that drives up inside a tractor-trailer after a heist.  The caper masterminded by a disgraced former high-ranking police officer, a device Westlake used to great effect in The Score.   The movie's narrative arc is also similar to those of many of the Parker novels Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark name: We see a robbery being planned, but the real action happens after the heist. I wouldn't call Kansas City Confidential a heist film, though, because the pre-heist planning part of the story is given little attention.

(Westlake was a sharp observer of and commentator on popular culture. I don't know if he wrote about Kansas City Confidential, but I do know that the first place I'd look is The Getaway Car,  that recent collection of Westlake's nonfiction from the University of Chicago Press.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The golden age of hyper-violent crime comedy

I watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and The Boondock Saints (1999) again this week. (Has it really been that long since the golden age of ultra-violent comic crime movies?)

As much as I hesitate to say anything good about anyone who married Madonna, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (directed by Guy Ritchie) holds up better. The script is intelligently assembled, the story accommodates and makes good narrative use of its own quirkiness, and clever sound engineering makes the movie more than a highly kinetic music video.  I especially like the simple device by which the movie makes the crook protagonists more sympathetic than the competing gangs of crooks who surround and come into conflict with them.

The Boondock Saints? I'll tell you about that one tomorrow. For now, Willem Dafoe steals the movie as a brilliant eccentric, only to turn fritter away some of his gains when the movie suddenly can't figure out what to do with him. First he becomes merely eccentric, and then the script humanizes him, with disappointing results.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The Score: Actors who act as actors acting

You know that old commonplace that an actor's surest path to an Oscar is to play a handicapped character (Jon Voight, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Holly Hunter, Patty Duke, Harold Russell, et al.)? Edward Norton does something even more ego-gratifying in The Score, a 2001 heist movie that was also Marlon Brando's last film: He plays someone who plays at being handicapped.

Norton is a thief who uses a bogus handicap as cover to get a janitor's job at Montreal's Customs House so he can case the joint for a heist. (Wikipedia delicately calls Norton's character "intellectually challenged," ludicrous for its euphemism, and misleading, because the chief characteristics of Norton's guise are physical: distorted speech, a lurching walk, and a withered, clawlike way of holding his right arm.   He's an actor playing an actor. His role is self-conscious exhibitionism to the core, and he does a decent job of it. But then, he was playing opposite Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, so maybe he felt like he had to do something to keep up.)

There's nothing terribly wrong with this workmanlike heist movie, but:

1. The salient aspect of its first half for me was its interior scenes. I'm from Montreal, and I got to see the gorgeous modern interiors of the gorgeous stone buildings of Old Montreal.
2. The heist, of a precious golden scepter, involves computer hacking, electronics, underground mapping, physics, and De Niro's character hanging like a spider from a ceiling.  I've always thought simplicity was best. What proportion of real-life big heists involve such elaborate gimcrackery?
3. The movie transfers to screen one of the hoariest cheats in crime fiction, that of withholding information from the reader/viewer to build suspense when such withholding is out of character with what has gone before. One scene has Norton's character reading aloud plans for the heist as De Niro shows them to him. I find it unlikely that a person would do this in real life, but it's an acceptable solution to the problem of how to convey large chunks of information. Later, though, when De Niro shows Norton the coup de grace that will let them overcome increased security at the Customs House, Norton just says something like, "Are you sure this will work?", leaving the audience guessing. It's a cheap tease.
4. A later trick is much less obvious and hence, more effective. It also makes narrative sense. I won't spoil things for you, but it has to do with Norton's character's deliberate temporary inaction after it becomes obvious he will double-cross De Niro during the heist, and it's a lovely touch.
5. De Niro's character owns a jazz club. This is a perfunctory excuse to get a nice song or two on the soundtrack. He could just as easily be a mechanic, an office worker, a lawyer, or anything else. His profession is at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction.
6. Again according to Wikipedia, Roger Ebert called The Score "the best pure heist movie in recent years."  Peter Travers, on the other hand, wrote that when "two Don Corleones team up," he expected "the kind of movie that makes people say, 'I'd pay to see these guys just read from the phone book.'"  Travers concluded, however: "There's nothing you can't see coming in this flick, including the surprise ending. Quick, somebody get a phone book." Travers was right

© Peter Rozovsky 2014