Four From ‘67: A Dozen Thoughts on THE DIRTY DOZEN

Today, I’m diving right back into my new series where I knock out a handful of classic American films from 1967 that I have yet to see! And, wouldn’t you know it, just in time for Memorial Day, it’s time to dig right into the WWII classic THE DIRTY DOZEN!

The beautiful thing about writing an article about a movie with a number in its title is that it gives you an instant gimmick. To that end, what follows are my twelve not-so-dirty thoughts about this Robert Aldrich star-studded affair. If you want your freedom, read on!

THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967)

Directed by: Robert Aldrich

Written by: Nunnally Johnson, Lukas Heller

Starring: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas, many others

Released: June 15, 1967

Length: 150 minutes
1. It’s based on a true story…kind of.

Technically, THE DIRTY DOZEN is based off of a 1965 novel by E.M. Nathanson.  But that novel was based off of a real battalion during World War II.  Of course, there are a couple of creative liberties being taken here; it is my solemn duty to inform you that the realteam had thirteen members and were known as the “Filthy Thirteen”.  I can understand why the eventual novel and movie cut the team down by one: “The Dirty Dozen” is a much better name.

Also, despite the best efforts of war correspondents at the time to state the contrary, the Filthy Thirteen weren’t a team of condemned criminals.  Instead, they were a team of demolition experts that had a penchant for wearing mohawks and thumbing their noses at any semblance of military discipline.  There is a scene early on in THE DIRTY DOZEN where the team riots at the order to shave with cold water; in actuality, the Filthy Thirteen refused to bathe for a week in order to conserve resources and cook some stolen game.  Stuff like that.  That said, the daughter of one of the Thirteen would later say the movie was about 30% accurate, which honestly is a better batting average than I would have expected.

2. It has a satisfying premise

Let’s start proper with the actual premise of THE DIRTY DOZEN, one so good that it’s been lifted by other movies and media franchises ever since!  In short: General John Reisman (Lee Marvin) is assigned the reins to “Project Amnesty” by his superiors as an act of discipline.  Reisman’s assignment?  Take a dozen pre-assigned condemned or forever-locked up prisoners, all convicted for a variety of crimes (robbery, murder, rape), train them in the art of combat then complete a mission in Europe.

It’s an immediately intriguing set-up for a story (made all the more potent by the fact that it’s based somewhat in fact); how do you get a bunch of lowlifes to act as a team in the name of a greater good?  How could that ever work?  It’s no surprise that it’s been adopted by countless movies since 1967.  The big ones are the DC and Marvel franchise entries SUICIDE SQUAD and *THUNDERBOLTS, but you can also see DIRTY DOZEN influences in movies such as 1969’s THE WILD BUNCH, 1970’s KELLY’S HEROES (which also features DD alums Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland) and 1974’s THE LONGEST YARD, a football movie set in a literal prison.  Hell, even THE DIRTY DOZEN launched a TV-movie franchise of its own, generating three sequels in the 1980s.  

Of course, the key to making that premise work is one that gets forgotten about by many of its successors, especially the more modern superhero-y ones….

3. They let the dozen be bad!

So often in movies about "villainous anti-heroes”, the creative powers behind it seem downright terrified to actually give these heroes any sort of “anti”, any sort of incontrovertible fact about them that might make the audience not like the character.  This gets especially egregious when bigger media franchises give the “antihero” genre a go.  Disney’s first attempt to expand their Mandalorian Star Wars television universe flopped hard when The Book of Boba Fett turned out to be…well, mostly boring.  That’s what you get when you center your show around an organized crime boss who works his way to the top in order to…not organize any crime!  Organized crime is illegal, after all, and fans like Boba Fett.  What if he does something immoral that fans don’t like, and then people yell at us online?

THE DIRTY DOZEN doesn’t chain themselves down with this quandary.  Instead, they go all in.  Maggot (Telly Savalas) is an unremorseful bigot and anti-Semite.  Wladislaw is defiant and flippant against authority.  At least a third of the Dozen are literal murderers.  Now, some of them have context behind their crimes; Jefferson (Jim Brown) is a black activist who murdered in defense against racist attacks, while it’s questionable how all there Pinkley (Donald Sutherland) really is.  But for many of our leads, they’re just…not good men.  And we’re just meant to deal with it.  

The end result is that the stakes and drama are actually enhanced.  It’s possible our Dozen could kill Major Reisman in defiance.  They could even kill each other.  Who knows?  It also helps that these complicated characters are brought to life by the movie’s ensemble…

4. The stars shine

Much has been made of the fact that we don’t have “movie stars” anymore.  I basically agree, although I think it’s more a sign of changing times than it is some sort of desecration of a hallowed system.  Social media has made making a mystery of a movie star basically impossible.  Interesting character actors from places you’ve never heard of have been largely replaced by UCB alumni.  And, of course, “star-studded blockbusters” are now more about the characters the stars are playing, rather than the stars themselves.  People didn’t really express excitement about Robert Downey Jr. and Josh Brolin sharing the screen in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR so much as they did about finally seeing Iron Man and Thanos square off.

There’s something satisfying, then, to go back sixty years and see a star-studded cast be about the cast.  As the opening credits play, we’re introduced to our roster of dozen dirties, and you just sit there and go “holy shit, John Cassavetes.  Oh, Telly Savalas!  Is that Jim Brown?  Oh fuck, Charles Bronson.”  The anticipation for the rest of the movie becomes about wondering how these major names are all going to play with (and against) each other.

It helps that everyone seems cast correctly, relative to our understanding of their personas.  Donald Sutherland playing one of the sweeter (if only in comparison) members of the Dozen makes a lot of sense, as does Bronson playing one of the scarier, quieter ones.  We just sort of sense that Cassavetes is going to be one of the more unstable ones because we know him from his other roles.  Everything just feels intuitive and, thus, really satisfying.

5. It’s (relatively) anti-military

From the outside, THE DIRTY DOZEN feels like an awkward fit in the New Hollywood canon.  Compared to its relative peers like THE GRADUATE, BONNIE AND CLYDE, EASY RIDER and MIDNIGHT COWBOY, THE DIRTY DOZEN resembles more of the old studio system fare that dominated Hollywood fare.  A star-studded cast!  Big action sequences!  Sweeping music!  And, look, I personally don’t have a problem with that; one of the reasons I find this era of American film fascinating is that both sects of film theory were existing side-by-side.

But, as you actually watch THE DIRTY DOZEN, it becomes clear that more of an edge exists to it that aligns it more with the Hollywood to come.  Besides its aforementioned willingness to let its bad characters be bad (lining up perfectly with the rise of the American antihero in film), I was struck by how skeptical of the military this American war epic really is.  The very premise implies a deeply cynical view of military brass: the idea of leveraging a dozen criminals to perform work for Uncle Sam is satisfying, but not precisely moral.

On top of that, it’s mentioned more than once that many members of the Dozen seem more hostile toward their superiors than they do their actual enemies overseas.  As Reisman notes, the Nazis never did anything to these twelve.  This feels like anti-military commentary of the sort that’s out of step with colorful WWII epics, until you consider that THE DIRTY DOZEN was filmed and released smack-dab in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire, one that arguably destroyed an entire generation of American men and forever altered the average citizen’s view on war.  The idea that Nazis may be superficially “nicer” than military brass feels like an incendiary insinuation, but…putting yourself in the shoes of the Dozen, can you argue with it?

Now, does this anti-military streak meet the threshold of something like PATHS OF GLORY, released a decade earlier?  No, not at all.  After all, at the end of the day, the United States military is victorious and righteous.  But, there’s enough darkness and edge to THE DIRTY DOZEN’s views on the armed forces that the film actually fits in way better with the roiling New Hollywood movement more than I ever would have thought.

6. It’s funny!

For as much as THE DIRTY DOZEN has on its mind, there are more comedy beats embedded in its narrative than you might think.  The military band leader’s constant toothy-grinned false starts trying to anticipate Colonel Reed’s entrance to the base is a fun highlight, as is the good old-fashioned vaudeville routine of the Dozen informing each other via a game of telephone that the military guys who beat up Wladislaw have arrived on base, culminating in Maggot telling Wladislaw himself.  It’s a broad comic beat I didn’t expect from an otherwise fairly serious war drama.  Needless to say, I loved it.

7. The length

For as much as I like THE DIRTY DOZEN, I do have to question whether it really needed to be two and a half hours.  Admittedly, I sometimes find the topic of how long movies should be a little tiring (the answer ultimately is, as long as they’re supposed to be and not a second less or more), I do think a movie’s economy is really important.  If you feel like a film is wasting your time even a little bit, it can’t help but affect the viewing experience.

So, when the whole middle act of THE DIRTY DOZEN is devoted to a war game whose stakes are ultimately inconsequential when compared to the final mission…it’s no wonder that many walk away feeling like the whole section could be trimmed or omitted entirely.  I don’t fully disagree with this notion; it feels like THE DIRTY DOZEN is a brilliant 120-minute flick stuck in the body of  a 150-minute one, and this act is right around thirty minutes, so the math speaks for itself.  That said, I’m feeling a little feisty, so I will defend the wargame sequence just a tad.

So many other star-studded “gang of bad guys learn to fight for a greater good” movies skip over one of the central logic questions: “why would anyone permit this to happen in the first place?”  To THE DIRTY DOZEN’s credit, this is a question that hovers over the whole proceedings.  Major Reisman is constantly having to justify and contextualize the project to his superiors, despite it not even being his idea in the first place.  This need for justification culminates in a wager: the Dirty Dozen will take on the men of Reisman’s biggest rival, Colonel Reed, in the military version of an exhibition match.  It’s their strong (and unorthodox) showing that allows Reisman to take the Dozen to France in the first place.

So, yes, there’s a version of this movie that excises this and immediately raises the stakes (and increases its economy).  But…so many takes on this format skip this part, and just make its ringleader borderline-insane in order to justify letting criminals fight for the do-gooders, offering maybe lip-service “greater good” justifications.  Fleshing that part out makes for a film that’s longer in the tooth, but I appreciate THE DIRTY DOZEN’s attempt to do so all the same.  

8. The body count matters

The beautiful thing about unique characters played by compelling stars is that you end up caring about them, even when they’re people you’d never want to meet in real life.  So, when people start dying in THE DIRTY DOZEN’s finale, it can’t help but feel a little heartbreaking, no matter who they end up being.  Obviously it’s crushing to lose fan favorites like Pinkley feel crushing, and I can’t quite describe the despair when I realized Jefferson wasn’t going to be long for this world.  But I was shocked at how much I was affected by losing total degenerates like Maggot.  And when this movie pulls its last trick, having what remained of the Dozen pull away in their jeep, just to have one more bullet claim a life (this time, it’s Franko who bites it), I actively said, “oh, fuck you!”, meant in the best way possible.

Again, it can’t be reiterated enough what a magic trick wringing that amount of emotional investment from a group of criminals (many unrepentant!) really is.  Obviously, having a cast of beloved stars goes a long way toward establishing that sleight of hand.  But we also have to give it up to two other factors.  First…

9. Robert Aldrich’s direction

Robert Aldrich sneakily has one of the craziest filmographies of all time.

THE DIRTY DOZEN, KISS ME DEADLY, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX, HUSH…HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE and THE LONGEST YARD make up a set of movies that wouldn’t even be collected in the same section of the video store*, let alone exist on the same filmography.  But that’s Robert Aldrich for you, an old-school genre chameleon whose less-than-straightforward tonal approaches to his films made him a legend and probably helped inspire the French New Wave.  To be honest, his career is probably worth a deeper dive in this space one of these days. 

*To those readers too young to know what a video store is, imagine if the Netflix app was a brick-and-mortar building.  Also, start taking care of your teeth now, and realize that most of the friendships you have now are situational, and somewhat illusory.

Anyway, his somewhat more psychological and personal approach to filmmaking absolutely makes THE DIRTY DOZEN a richer experience than it would have been with anybody else.  He’s a skilled action director, but the action scenes almost feel secondary compared to the scenes where the Dozen and/or the various top brass are just kind of talking and bouncing off of each other.  Aldrich had a knack for drawing interesting (and precise) performances from his cast, and the bounty of talent he had to work with ends up being catnip for him.

Of course, those glorious dialogue-driven scenes are nothing without the people who wrote said dialogue…

10. Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller’s script

Between Heller, a frequent Aldrich collaborator, and Johnson, an industry vet who had forty years of experience writing the screenplays for all kinds of romantic comedies, dramas, and mysteries, THE DIRTY DOZEN had two writers who were uniquely attuned to the material that was being presented.  Fun fact: this script would turn out to be the last one Johnson would ever write prior to passing away ten years later, in 1977.

And it’s a good script to go out on!  I don’t know that THE DIRTY DOZEN is a film chock full of quotable lines, in the way that other movies in the 60s were (there’s certainly nothing in this as memorable as a “what we have here is a failure to communicate”), but there is an insanely creative amount of efficiency in its storytelling, with the centerpiece example being the scene where the Dozen go over their Big Master Plan.  It’s all done as a rhyming mnemonic.  Major Reisman calls out “one”, the Dozen respond with “down to the road block, we’ve just begun”.  He says “two”, they respond “the guards are through”.  On and on, until they reach step Sixteen.  My immediate disappointment with this aside (it should have been twelve steps, right?), this device is such a great way to set up the final act of the film.  It’s a complicated sequence, with everyone scattered about this Nazi-occupied castle.  But audience members who have been paying attention now have a handy-dandy poem to keep track of where we are and, crucially for what is basically a heist scene, where things are going wrong.

I think this is why, even as THE DIRTY DOZEN approaches its third hour, you’re hard-pressed to know precisely where you would cut things.  The obvious answer is that aforementioned wargame sequence, but it still serves a purpose  in the greater scheme of things.  Even as it wanders, the Heller/Johnson script remains functional and engaging.  Good stuff!

11. It would go on to be a TV movie franchise.

As mentioned, THE DIRTY DOZEN would spawn several TV sequels, all of them released in relatively quick succession in the 80s on NBC.  Had I been on top of things, I would have located and knocked these TV movies out so I can impart to you my findings of the complete Dozen-verse.  Alas, I am on top of things.  Thus, I can only give you what stands out to me from afar.  Sorry.

First and foremost, I am shocked at the amount of returning cast members in these, starting with Lee Marvin coming back to lead the next mission in 1985’s THE DIRTY DOZEN: NEXT MISSION, which also brought back Ernest Borgnine’s Gen. Worden.  Borgnine also returns for 1987’s THE DIRTY DOZEN: THE DEADLY MISSION (whoah, this one’s deadly!), along with Telly Savalas, who has to play a new character this time.  As it happens, he takes on the “general of the Dozen” slot, taking over for Lee Marvin, who had passed away at this point.  It seems like it worked out because Savalas comes back once more in 1988’s THE DIRTY DOZEN: THE FATAL MISSION (which I guess is more dangerous than a deadly mission), along with…Borgnine!  Yep, Ernie turns out to be the unifying glue amongst the DIRTY DOZEN quadrilogy.

Anyway, all three follow-ups have pretty rancid reviews, so I probably won’t watch them, although who knows.  For now, though, that ends the DIRTY DOZEN media franchise.

12. There’s a remake in the works.

Oh, yeah, except there’s been a threatened David Ayer-directed remake that’s been in the works since 2019.  Now, I would argue we’ve already seen a David Ayer remake of THE DIRTY DOZEN and it was SUICIDE SQUAD and it suicide sucked.  From what I’ve seen of his work, Ayer doesn’t really have what it takes to make a redo of THE DIRTY DOZEN something satisfying, and it breaks my heart to imagine this movie being brought into this weird age of “Netflix action” flicks.  So forgive me if I feel like this should probably just remain in the development hell it’s currently in.  

But who knows?  Maybe it’ll actually get made and Ayer will prove me wrong.  It just feels like trying to take a movie that balanced genuinely nasty characters with the kind of verve and skill to get you to care about them dying and remaking it in an age where audiences don’t seem to want their movie characters to have any flaws whatsoever…it feels like a dangerous mission.

But then…I guess there have been more dangerous missions in the past.

The Enduring Horror of ROSEMARY’S BABY

When you start talking to women about their health-care experiences, a constant theme that emerges is that of dismissal.  Their reports of constant and unceasing physical pain is recontextualized as simply emotional reactions, if they’re believed at all.  It’s another one of life’s little indignities that make women’s lives arbitrarily harder.

There is no more vulnerable position, of course, that a woman can be than in a state of pregnancy.  Studies strongly suggest that a woman has a higher chance of being murdered during pregnancy than she does of dying as a result of the pregnancy itself.  You’ll never believe it, but the most common source of maternal femicide is an intimate partner, almost always men.  It’s one of the most chilling statistics I’ve ever come across, and it speaks to so many societal pressures and fissures.  For whatever reason, women and their wombs are seen as possessions by their male partners, like an asset that can be traded or outright liquidated when the bet turns bad.

That said, it’s not like life is always a bed full of daffodils for men.  A man’s world can be a whole other ball of stress, of expectations, of comparison, of having to be masculine and fatherly, to provide amidst severe existential doubt, especially in demanding, personal careers.  It’s very, very, very easy to feel like a complete failure when vocational aspirations fizzle out, or take turns, or morph into something nightmarish.  When those dark moments occur, there are a lot of dudes out there who would sell just about anything to the devil in order to reverse their fortunes.  Probably too many.

Anyway, life is fucking hell.  To that end, one of the finest horror movies ever made completely understands this, and it was made by Roman Polanksi, one of the touchiest subjects in all of Hollywood history.  Let’s talk about it!  Happy Halloween!

ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

Directed by: Roman Polanksi

Starring: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy

Written by: Roman Planski

Length: 137 minutes

Released: June 12, 1968

Adapted from the 1967 Ira Levin novel, ROSEMARY’S BABY tells the tale of Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse and their fateful encounter with Minnie and Roman Castavet, an elderly couple that live down the hall from them at the Bramford, their new apartment complex (one with a reputation for being haunted by a rumored deep and persistent evil).  Guy is a working actor, one with a prominent role in a commercial set to go national.  Rosemary is a full time homemaker, with aspirations of motherhood (the title of the movie is a bit of a spoiler in this regard).

A professional setback strikes after Guy gets narrowly turned down for a potentially career-making role in a play, and he takes out his frustrations on Rosemary.  He’s not physically abusive or anything (at least not yet), but he develops a penchant for being neglectful and distant in pursuit of work.  Thankfully, the kindly-seeming elderly Castavets take the Woodhouses in and seem supportive of Guy’s career and Rosemary’s desire for a family.  After a particularly fruitful interaction, fortunes seem to reverse.  The actor who got the role over Guy suddenly goes blind and has to drop out.  Guy is in.  Also…Rosemary is pregnant!  By whom is a matter of debate; in one of the most stunning and batshit sequences in the entire film, Rosemary has too much to drink and dreams of being raped by a devilish creature during a nude orgy.  The reality of the situation might be even worse; the one who rapes her is her own husband, Guy, having done so while she was unconscious.

Still, once she becomes pregnant, everyone is over the moon, including Minnie, who starts encouraging Rosemary to see their physician, Dr. Saperstein, and giving her vitamin concoctions to drink.  Then…Rosemary’s health starts turning.  She loses a ton of weight and becomes gaunt.  Despite assertions from Guy, the Castavets and Dr. Saperstein, it becomes clear to outside observers that something is wrong.  And nobody seems to be treating Rosemary’s persistent pelvic pain, one that’s been going on for months.  It’s all completely normal, they tell her….

If you haven’t gathered from the above, the story of ROSEMARY’S BABY is one that wallows in a ton of resentment towards every institution you can think of: the Catholic Church, men, women, motherhood, modern medicine.  It’s a deeply, deeply cynical movie, one that could only have been made by Roman Polanski at this particular time in American history, a man who in 1968 hadn’t yet committed any of the sexual crimes he would later be accused and/or convicted of, in case this was something holding you back from watching one of the great horror films of the era, and one that manages to be fairly classy considering its subject matter (one of the least scary things in this movie is a coven of Satanists).

1968 was a turbulent time, both for the country and for Hollywood itself.  Six days prior to ROSEMARY’S BABY was released, Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, the capper to a multi-year run of politically-motivated murders that also claimed Martin Luther King Jr. and the President of the United States.  Meanwhile, the old studio system was about to be dead and in the ground after the release of movies like BONNIE & CLYDE and THE GRADUATE.  Things were very much in flux, to put it kindly (dancing on a razor’s edge would probably be more fair).  It’s in this anger and uncertainty that ROSEMARY’S BABY does its work.  There seems to be this strong sense throughout that something isn’t working, that something has irrevocably fractured, and that something very wrong and evil is about to emerge from the cracks.

Of course, this was all context I didn’t really have when I first saw this, probably on TV and probably when I was 13 or 14.  It was probably on TCM, probably with a Robert Osborne introduction.  I remember finding it interesting, its slow and steady pace captivating even to this young mind.  Certainly, by the end, there are enough memorable images (who can forget Mia’s bulging eyes as she finally sees her child?) to make for an unforgettable movie-watching experience. But…at that time, I also remember it feeling a little too alienatingly adult, even a little long.

Given that, it’s notable that the first thing I clocked about ROSEMARY’S BABY this time around (as an alienated adult myself) was indeed its length, a cool 137 minutes.  There’s been intermittent but persistent discourse about how long movies should be, usually whenever someone like Coppola, Nolan, or Scorsese releases a new picture (draw your own conclusions as to why that might be).  I admit that the creeping increase in the average length of a film is notable.   One of the beautiful things about going back to old genre pictures is that you can knock out quite a few of them in a day when they’re 60, 70 minutes a pop. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is 75 minutes!  DUCK SOUP is barely over an hour!  On the other hand, when something like Marvel’s ETERNALS clocks in at 156 minutes, you tend to wonder how much money is being spent on dead air.

But, I’ve always ascribed to the philosophy that good movies are exactly the length they need to be.  So, yes, even though ROSEMARY’S BABY’s runtime lies at 2 hours and 17 minutes, you never really feel it, nor could you imagine it being a second shorter.  Every scene, every frame is dedicated to establishing atmosphere, character, background, or circumstance.  It’s one of those movies where you learn tons of information all the time without it ever feeling too overwhelming.  Hell, even something as simple as its setting (the majority of the action takes place inside one apartment building) goes a long way towards putting you in the mindset of Rosemary herself: trapped, with no clear way to see daylight.  The movie may be long, but not a moment of it is wasted.

The most incredible thing about ROSEMARY’S BABY is how hard its dark punchline lands.  After you’ve seen it once, it’s kind of funny how straight-forward the movie really is.  Every time you think, “Hmmm, the Castavets are acting really shady”, it’s because they’re being shady.  Every time you wonder, “Why is Guy being such an asshole?” well, it’s because he’s working with the Castavets to turn their baby over to the Devil.  Whatever horrible thing you’re imagining is happening in the background, in the margins, it’s exactly what’s happening.

But, on an initial watch (or distant rewatch), because everything is happening just outside the view of Rosemary, a character who is essentially in every scene, and because we’re only left to put the pieces together that we have in front of us, they’re just a little room for doubt most of the way as to whether Rosemary’s actually just losing her mind.  Maybe the pain in her pelvis was just that and nothing more.  Maybe Dr. Saperstein really is treating her to the best of his ability.  Maybe Guy is just a scared parent-to-be and handling it badly.  Maybe this idea of a coven conspiracy is just the fever dream of an unwell mind.  

My favorite moment in this regard actually belongs to Charles Grodin’s Dr. Hill, presented as the “good doctor” to Saperstein’s “evil doctor”.  Rosemary sneaks off to his office to explain her findings in witchcraft and lobby her allegations against Saperstein.  Hill calmly puts her in an examination room and says he’ll call Mt. Sinai, only for Saperstein and Guy to arrive instead.  Did he call them in because he’s a concerned doctor who thinks he’s seeing a decompensating patient?  Or is he also part of the coven?  Either read is potentially valid.  If you submit to it, ROSEMARY’S BABY really draws you into the feeling of intense, violent paranoia.

And then, with minutes left to go, the movie drops the conceit and has everyone just start screaming, “Hail Satan!”  It’s a shocking change in philosophy and pace, and it makes you almost want to laugh out of shock, even as your stomach drops into your feet.  As Rosemary starts to rock the cradle containing her Antichrist child, perhaps the darkest ending to a movie I can conjure up concludes.

Speaking of Rosemary, it should be stated in no uncertain terms that Mia Farrow’s work in this is simply astounding.  It’s a shame that so much of her legacy is wrapped in another complicated artistic monster, because this movie is a perfect example of what made her so special.  This cast is filled with heavy hitters.  John Cassavetes is so fucking good in this, and probably a more fitting choice than the original guy they had in mind, Robert Redford.  I get the thought there, Redford being the ultimate all-American of the era, but nobody expresses male anxiety than Cassavetes.  Ruth Gordon is so sweetly terrifying in this, a performance that earned her an Oscar that year.  Nobody has quite depicted the cruelty of the American health-care system like Ralph Bellamy (besides maybe Louise Fletcher in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST).  Even the aforementioned Grodin is putting in what would end up being an against-type performance as the seeming ally Dr. Hill.  Everybody is swinging hard and connecting every time at the plate.

And, yet, none of it would matter if Farrow wasn’t so fucking compelling.  The entire movie rests on her.  The amount of footage that doesn’t include her is minimal.  If we don’t follow her every emotion, if we don’t believe the pain she’s in, the anguish of being so brutally gaslit, of being used, of that maternal instinct still brimming through, even at the bitter end…the movie would cease to exist.  It may even come off as absurd claptrap.  Occultists?  The Antichrist?  What world is this, exactly?

But, because Farrow is so utterly perfect in portraying the anguish of a woman being gaslit all the way to hell, it’s made so clear what world we’re in when we watch ROSEMARY’S BABY.  We’re in ours. 

And that’s horrifying enough.

FOUR WEEKS OF MAY: MIKEY AND NICKY

My “film journey”, for lack of a less pretentious term, started relatively late in comparison to others in my circles.  In fact, I’d argue that it only really got going in earnest a couple of years ago.

Of course, I’ve been watching movies my whole life.  When I was a kid, my mom showed me the big works of Disney, Spielberg and Lucas as well as select viewings of Classic Hollywood and pre-code stuff.  My grandma opened me up to the comedic charms of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges.  Between me and my collection of friends, we covered most of the major blockbusters and Oscars bait that the late 90’s and early-mid 2000’s could offer.

But I’m not sure that I really dug into movies as something serious to study until the very recent past.  True, I devoured trade magazines like Entertainment Weekly, and dutifully watched Roger Ebert and the villainous Richard Roeper every Sunday night.  But this was really more of a way to stay on top of what was coming out, and what movies seemed to be trending upwards or downwards.  It wasn’t a way to check out what had come before, or even analyze why I liked what I liked.  It was just knowledge, nothing more.

There were several reasons for this paucity of actual viewing experiences.  One of them was that watching the classics could be difficult, especially if it was a foreign film, as it often necessitated a trip to the video store and hoping for the best (Netflix’s “DVD by mail” service helped immensely in this regard).  The primary reason, however, was that I went through a prolonged “anti-pretension” phase that kicked in around mid-high school and extended itself through, I dunno, like my early thirties or something.  

It basically went like this: For the first third of my life, I hesitated to really dig into something that I knew was a passion of mine, lest I come off as a smart-ass know-it-all like the rest of the smart-ass know-it-alls I knew.  Of course, this failed to account for the fact that this kind of “fuck the elitists” posturing was itself a form of pretension, the belief that your opinions were simply better than everyone else’s (this also leads very easily into living your life as just the devil’s advocate.  People like this thing?  It must be shit.  I like something?  It must be an underrated masterpiece, even if the thing I’m talking about is Spider-Man 2).

Anyway, by the time I hit 30, it dawned on me that, as a result of this kind of time-wasting, there were a lot of classics I just hadn’t seen.  There’s still an embarrassingly long list.  Even worse, a lot of the friends I have now are very smart film buffs that I just couldn’t follow along with or add to in conversation, the result of years of burrowing into my already-established interests, rather than expanding them. 

To make matters even more devastating, I had discovered the much-beloved, now-defunct streaming app Filmstruck much too late, essentially after it had already been discontinued by Warner Media.  Here it was, a streaming site that had put selections from the Criterion Collection and Turner Classic Movies potentially at my fingertips for a couple of years and I squandered it, completely unaware it was an option until it was already gone.  It’s a terrible thing to find out about retroactively.  An easy-to-access doorway to film history and I had blown it. 

Enter The Criterion Channel.

For the unfamiliar, it’s what it sounds like: a streaming channel curated by the people behind the Criterion Collection, a pseudo-successor to Filmstruck.  At the beginning of 2019, the launch of the app was announced, and an advance mailing list was opened up to the curious.  As a lead-up to the app’s launch, a Movie of the Week program was announced.  This way, potential subscribers could enjoy a single movie on the prototype platform, typically a movie that would give one an idea of the kind of programming the Criterion Channel would eventually house.  I eagerly signed up, not wanting to miss another opportunity.  This way, at least it seemed to me, I could start my film education in earnest, one week at a time.

First movie up? MIKEY AND NICKY.

It’s fair to say, then, that this week’s movie is responsible for my curiosity being stoked, and is responsible for the last few years of articles.  Feels relevant, then, to revisit it again now for Elaine May Month.

Let’s get started.

MIKEY AND NICKY

Directed by: Elaine May

Starring: Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, Rose Arrick, Joyce van Patten

Written by: Elaine May

Released: December 21, 1976

Length: 106 minutes

MIKEY AND NICKY is a fairly simple movie, at least on its face.  John Cassavetes is Nicky, a paranoid man holed up in an apartment for reasons that are initially only alluded to, although it seems as if the recent murder of a bookie might have something to do with it.  Peter Falk is Mikey, Nicky’s lifetime friend who comes to his aid (not for the first time, it turns out) and just seems exhausted.  His relationship with Nicky seems to swing between that of an older brother and of a father.  At the beginning of the movie, he force-feeds him medicine; near the end of it, he’s fighting him in the street.  

The above premise leads us into that most satisfying of movie genres, that of the night-time odyssey through the streets of a major city, in this case, Philadelphia.  Nicky, fearing for his life, wants to constantly be on the move, while Mikey seems most concerned about keeping themselves in one place for reasons that are initially ambiguous.  All the while, they appear to be followed by a gangster, played by 70’s perennial Ned Beatty.  

MIKEY AND NICKY presents itself as a two-character play for the most part.  As they bob and weave from one place to another, we get to see a lot of conversations between our two titular characters.  As a result, we gain a ton of insight, implied or otherwise, as to the relationship between the two of them, as well as their own individual lives.

And, boy, do we have two great leads to present this tandem.

I want to first dig into Cassavetes’ work as Nicky.  John Cassavetes is known more as an influential independent director now that it’s all said and done, but his career started as an actor.  His appearance in MIKEY AND NICKY is interesting to me since the movie itself feels so influenced by Cassavetes’ directorial work; so much of it is close, intimate and honest.  

Cassavetes’ Nicky is all tics and neuroses, befitting a man who feels like every moment could be his last.  He’s obviously not taking care of himself and has a penchant for rash and impulsive actions, which is why he’s found himself in trouble in the first place.  He refuses to do anything to take care of the ulcer he’s obviously suffering from.  And most of all, he’s unspokenly suspicious of his only friend (as it turns out, rightly).  Cassavetes has a lovely, natural chemistry with Falk, no doubt the result of years of collaboration together.

Peter Falk is yet another one of those guys that I think we all know, but maybe don’t appreciate to the fullest.  I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m actually not that familiar with his most famous role, that of Columbo.  But I have become increasingly more acquainted with Cassavetes.  But, man, is there an emotion that face, that so unique face, couldn’t so subtly register and embody?  In a movie that’s all about what’s not being said (like jazz, man), Falk’s portrayal of Mikey is the audience’s emotional Cliff Notes.  You are keenly aware of his overlying (and often conflicting) feelings: guilt, exhaustion, genuine brotherly affection, anxiety….it’s all there.  I don’t know that the movie would have worked without him.

Both Falk and Cassavetes complement each other’s performances so well.  Nicky comes off as so sufficiently tiresome that Mikey’s frustration and exhaustion with a lifetime of being maybe his only friend feels justified and obvious.  His eventual betrayal also feels emotionally true, and Nicky slowly sussing out how the night is destined to end without ever truly explicitly confronting Mikey about it is ultimately where MIKEY AND NICKY derives its power.

(May I say how much I like mob movies that are almost exclusively about the lowest rungs on the org chart?  So many are about making your way to the top.  However, MIKEY AND NICKY there’s much drama to be wrung from the people that are frankly fortunate to even be at the bottom.)

The production of MIKEY AND NICKY was the one that appeared to run May away from the director’s chair for over a decade.  Filmed in 1973, the movie wouldn’t be released until 1976, so long and how tense the conflict was between her and Paramount Pictures, her old foes from A NEW LEAF.  

Again, May’s budget ballooned quickly; when the movie was being produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, the budget went from $1.6 mill to $2.2, which caused the studio to drop the film entirely, allowing Paramount to swoop in to save the day.  Paramount’s involvement came with stipulations, the most vital of which were the $1.8 million budget and the hard deadline of June 1, 1974 for the film to be completed.  Well, 6/1/74 came and went, and no completed movie was delivered, although the budget had inflated to almost $4.5 mill.  

Part of the extended production had to do with May’s decision to constantly keep the camera rolling, maybe for hours at a time if she deemed it necessary, even when Falk and Cassavetes had long since left the scene (as the famous story goes, a new camera operator got in trouble for calling “cut”; when asked why in the world the take should continue after the actors left the physical set, May replied, “because they might come back”).  As a result of this unusual decision, the film has this completely improvisational feel to it, even though it indeed was pretty much entirely scripted all the way through.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about this approach.  On the one hand, it does feel wasteful, and I can’t help but understand why Paramount was having a panic attack regarding all this.  I also don’t quite understand the point of continuing to roll the camera at the end of the scene if you’re following along with a tight script.  Except to say that, as mentioned, MIKEY AND NICKY has this sprawling feel as a result.  Even though the film is only 106 minutes, it feels, in the best way possible, like you’re with these two characters the entire twelve or so hours that the story unfolds during.  You’ve been through a marathon evening, and I don’t know if the movie would have had the same effect if a more efficient director (say, Clint Eastwood) had directed it.  We’ll never know.

Anyway, Paramount took Elaine May to court.  Having flashbacks to how everything regarding A NEW LEAF went down, May was determined to not let the same studio butcher two of her movie.  She took the extraordinary measure of essentially holding two reels of the movie hostage, storing them in a garage in Connecticut that belonged to a friend of her husband’s.  She eventually relented and allowed Paramount to create the final cut, although the experience was devastating enough that she wouldn’t return to the director’s chair for another ten years.

Maybe all of this was the sacrifice needed to make MIKEY AND NICKY what it was.  Because interestingly, although I ultimately don’t think it hangs together quite as well as THE HEARTBREAK KID, I think if I had to recommend just one Elaine May film, it would be this one.  It illustrates so well the disruptor spirit that May retains to this day.  She made a masterpiece by doing it her way, even though her way led her into a courtroom once again, and her treating a random suburban garage like it was WACO or something.

And, more importantly to me, this version of MIKEY AND NICKY ultimately led me to this moment right here, turning this space where I was awkwardly reviewing episodes of SNL or whatever to a space to talk about movies and why they work.  It was a joy to run down the streets of Philadelphia again.  Do yourself a favor and do the same sometime this week, too.