Two-fer Tuesday - August 11
On Tuesdays Big Heads will "program" a double feature of thematically similar films. I will provide links so you can track down where to stream them and turn your house into a got-dang Cinematheque.
This week on the Two-fer we present a revisionist gumshoe exercise by an acclaimed auteur set in the swinging 60's that is really more depressing than swinging, and a revisionist gumshoe exercise by an acclaimed auteur set in the swinging 70s that is really more depressing than swinging.
Gunn (1967), directed by Blake Edwards
Blake Edwards was riding high in the mid-60's. The Pink Panther and The Great Race put him on the boffo box-office map and had the critical credibility associated with Breakfast at Tiffany's, Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses (which also were all, also, to a lesser extent). A toe-stub on the expensive flop What Did you do in the War, Daddy may have had him running to the safe haven of this movie adaptation of the television series he created, a big hit in the early 60s, of Peter Gunn. The one with that cool Henry Mancini title music (the music is back for the movie, over a groovy Bond-esque title sequence).
Turns out it wasn't a safe haven, and the flop of Gunn led to a series of box office misadventures that turned the once light-hearted auteur Edwards surly in his later life (the Hollywood excoriating S.O.B. from 1980 was a culmination of his hate and bitterness towards his home town). Edwards would have to return to the Pink Panther in 1975 to restore some of his cachet, though he made a series of masterpieces before in the interim (The Party, the Carey Treatment, Wild Rovers), that deserved better fates.
Gunn has subsequently been relegated to obscurity and it is fairly difficult to find in a decent print. It's genuinely dour demeanor, especially as it concerns the state of culture at the present moment of its creation, likely led to its lack of popularity, but also makes it so intriguing, especially as an antidote and rejoinder to the Bond pictures and their increasing frivolity.
Peter Gunn (Craig Stevens, reprising the t.v. role) is one of those gig working private detectives that permeated American Fiction at the time. When a mob-boss is who once saved Gunn's life is gunned down, Gunn takes it upon himself to investigate. Additionally he is offered $10,000 by Daisy Jane (Marion Marshall), the owner of a bordello specializing in twins (two of whom try to canoodle with Henry Mancini in a cameo role), to find the killer (we only later learn the suspiciousness of Daisy Jane's offer). This, Gunn, turns down, and later claims to be independently wealthy, which given his lifestyle, apartment wardrobe, and his ability to grease palms throughout his investigation, we come to believe.
In addition to (or because of?) the wealth and the natty attire, women can't seem to keep their hands off him. Gunn seems more or less bored with the whole idea and also seems genuinely interested in monogamy with lounge-singer Edie . That he is fairly chaste about these entreaties is another signpost that Edwards is offering an against-the-times conservative alternative to Bond. The sequences involving hippies and bohos and anyone else not in a Brooks Brothers suit is another sign. They are mostly monstrous. Audiences didn't dig it. I love it, but I am strictly squaresville, man.
The Long Goodbye (1973), directed by Robert Altman
Altman's The Long Goodbye is considered something of a classic these days, but when it was released in 1973, man did it bring some hate. It was reviled for its betrayal of the Raymond Chandler source material, its casting of Elliot Gould as the least likely Marlowe, it's meandering narrative (as if that wasn't a Chandler hallmark), it's catch as catch can visual and aural style (as if that wasn't an Altman hallmark), it's cynical, thrown-away denouement (Marlow would NEVER have done that), etc. It landed on some 10 worst films of the year lists.
It is, of course, a masterpiece, modernist ahead of its time even as it lands squarely in the middle of the American film renaissance of the 70s. Altman's pinnacle. It is the very characteristics by which it was reviled that make it soar. In 1973 it likely seemed like another film about 1973, but seen today it is a film about 1973. And that makes all the difference.
Gould's Marlowe is a chain-smoking private dick whose only friends are a novelist, Terry Lennox, who pays Marlowe to drive him, no questions asked, to Mexico, and a Coury-brand cat food loving feline (even the cat eventually leaves him). When Lennox's wife turns up dead Marlowe inserts himself, like Gunn, into the investigation. This brings to him all manner of trouble and more information about Lennox than he cares to learn. But it's all okay with him. (The line "It's okay with me," oft repeated, rhymes with one of the songs from Altman's Nashville, "It Don't Worry Me").
The Long Goodbye is a hang-out movie, par excellence. It's meandering nature can be oft-putting until you see what Altman is really after, which is an expose of the morally casual 1970s. Like Edwards' protagonist, Gould's gig-working Private eye Marlowe is sexless, dark-suit wearing and morally impenetrable. It turns out it is not all okay with him, It may be the 70s but he has a code. You may even say he is strictly squaresville.
