The Talkies/Reeling in the Years

...Scorsese's is a good idea for a morality play and probably more effective than Public Enemy as a deglamorization of mob life...

...Above all, we should take heart from it that the contemporary cinema is capable of recognizing the real truth of the maxim that the past is never more present to us than when we see ourselves in it...

...His standard answer to every proposal put to him is: "I'll think about it...

...We love to be reminded of what a 1972 Plymouth Fury looked like when it was new—and that gasoline cost 29 cents a gallon not so very long ago...

...Tom doesn't understand it himself, any more than he understands why he remains true to Leo even when he stands to gain nothing by it: "Do you always know why you do things...

...He is constantly referred to by the other characters, in both a complimentary and a disparaging way, as a "smart guy...

...Marriages and friendships are poisoned by the past, but it seems to have little other function in this film...

...In contrast there is the other mob boss, Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), whose hitman's motto is: "Always put one in the brain...

...Its milieu is that of an almost-crude cinematic gangsterdom, an Elliot Ness Never-Never Land from which the good guys have unaccountably departed, rather than the 1920s as anyone might actually remember them...

...he asks...

...The film is punctuated with his solitary moments of contemplation and smoking—which, whatever its deleterious effects upon the health, makes for beautifully atmospheric photography—in the half-light of his apartment...

...We're not like those animals, the hired killers," and he points out that he is being led out to die "like a dumb animal...

...And are we quite sure that the world isn't like this...

...At its most seductive, it is no more than tawdry delusion...

...Miller's Crossing, by contrast, deliberately cuts us off from contactwith the texture of real life in the past...

...Nowadays it is quite common even for films with a more or less contemporary setting, like Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas, to take their characters ten or twenty years back in the past in order to give the property, costume, and make-up people a chance to show off their period re-creations...

...What would the great Realists—and Neo-Realistshave thought of us...

...What heart...

...Paradoxically, the Technicolor Texasville seems more drab than the monochrome Last Picture Show, and so it is in Maurizio Nichetti's Icicle Thief, which puts together a pastiche of Vittorio De Sica's black and white classic, The Bicycle Thief, and the high-color images of television commercials...

...We are not allowed to moralize about the corruption or the violence because no alternative to them is dramatically present—or even imaginable, so effectively have the Coens (and our understanding of the gangster-movie idiom) done their work...

...Of course, if it got you anywhere, everyone would do it...

...he invokes "reason" in response to the more simple-minded creed of his gang boss, Leo (Albert Finney), who says that "you help your friends and you kick your enemies"—because sometimes your friends have to be sacrificed to your enemies in your own interests...

...Now it is our own lives of only a few years ago that seem irradiated with the aura of collective memory...

...It offers the most detailed and best documented account of the turbulent formative years of the CIA currently available and reveals the political and bureaucratic struggles that accompanied the creation of the modern U.S...

...James Bowman is TAS's movie critic...

...replies Tom...

...And he does, too...

...De Sica's cinema is as appalling as the poverty and unemployment which gave rise to it and which we are otherwise so happy to see the back of...

...T his appeal to a distinctive human quality also comes at the picture's central moment when Tom, having urged that his ally and the brother of his mistress, the odious Bernie (John Thrturro), be given up to execution in order to keep the peace with a powerful rival, is actually given the job of executing him himself...

...Bernie takes this act of mercy towards himself as a sign of weakness and attempts to exploit it further to his own advantage...

...It's a dangerous question for someone whose life may depend on his knowing why he does everything...

...look in your heart...

...we never feel what is asserted by the hero but hardly demonstrated by the film, the attractiveness of the gangster's life...

...But we know what heart...

...That act is a testimony to the humanity that everything else in the film conspires to render inert, if not to degrade...

...Finally he begs: "I'm praying to you...

...Can the eighties be far behind...

...And think he does...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...

...GoodFellas is a morality play, a remake of Public Enemy in a contemporary idiom...

...Both pictures deal with organized crime but with directly opposite means and intentions: GoodFellas uses a new cinematic language in order to make a very old point about its characters...

...Fr hese have been some of my 1 thoughts, too, as I have turned over in my mind why it is impossible to imagine Joel and Ethan Coen's magnificent film, Miller's Crossing, in a contemporary setting...

...Maybe this is the dark secret of all Realism, neo- or otherwise: real real people, in their headlong rush to material prosperity, have no use for such art and refuse to be patronized by it...

...Its Dashiell Hammett characters are carefully transplanted into an unlocalized, unspecified world of their own from which there is no exit into any other kind of life...

...it is as universal as the Fall of Man...

...Gabriel Byrne...

...Meanwhile, the Neo-Realist director (played by Nichetti himself) keeps trying to force his characters back into the mold of pathos and despair which his art has fashioned for them—and they keep ignoring him...

...Part of the appeal of the movies, too, these days is that they serve as a sort of national family snapshot album...

...Instead we have the triviality of consumerism...

...The rational man in Miller's Crossing is Tom Reagan, played by...

...For one thrilling moment in this unrelieved chronicle of cynical and violent self-advancement, someone acknowledges a humanity of the heart as well as of the head...

...The Coens' rendering of it is schematic but it resembles our world morally (as opposed to materially) enough to give us an uncomfortable sense of reality in spite of its generic setting...

...The Central Intelligence Agency An Instrument of Government, to 1950 Arthur B. Darling With Introduction and Commentary by Bruce D. Berkowitz and Allan E. Goodman This official history of the early CIA written in 1953 by the agency's first historian, Arthur B. Darling, is the first CIA document declassified and released under its Historical Review Program...

...The film says to us: "Say that the world is like this, i.e., a Hobbesian state of nature in which might makes right and survival depends on choosing the winning side...

...His term for anything less than complete submission to his own will is "the high hat," which is one of the many references to the film's laboriously established symbolism of hats, those outward and visible signs of more inward and theoretically useful headpieces...

...art of the contrast between past and present is captured in the difference between black-and-white and color...

...Miller's Crossing uses an older, traditional cinematic language to say something new about them...

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...What follows is that the rational man lives only for himself, pursues his own ends ruthlessly and trusts no one...

...For once in his life he has sacrificed his own interest, even his own safety, in response to the sufferings of a fellow human being...

...Both remind the audience of that which is supposed to distinguish humanity from the brute creation—so hilariously invoked by Johnny over the opening credits when he says that a world in which a fixed fight doesn't stay fixed is one on the verge of anarchy, "the law of the jungle...

...Tom himself is nearly killed at least twice as a result of it, and in the end he seems to repudiate it when Bernie, now transparently manipulative, asks him to "Look in your heart" for a second time...

...Miller's Crossing is an old-time gangster flick that rises to the level of world-drama...

...Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe Pesci act the three principals brilliantly, but we never understand them from the inside...

...In much the same way, a lot of people living in the time capsule of Eastern Europe these days must wish that they could enjoy the benefits of a Western economy while preserving the more comfortable features of a world which has so largely been protected from progress...

...Look in your heart...

...But it is still a morality play...

...In a world of prosperity the worst thing we have to worry about is low self-esteem...

...Recently the first Swatch watches, made between 1983 and 1985, fetched up to $20,000 at auction in Milan...

...600 pages Cloth, $60.00...

...They seem to have as little understanding of their earlier selves as they do of nineteenth-century Texas...

...But,when they arrive at their heart's desire, they find that they have created a society—like our own—more or less inhospitable to any art that doesn't need insurance...

...I do really believe that this is one of the greatest films to come out of Hollywood in a generation...

...The sequel, Texasville, looks back only to 1984, and its characters, now supposedly thirty (really twenty) years older, are celebrating their town's centennial...

...Already they're collectors' items...

...When Peter Bogdanovich made The Last Picture Show in 1971, he was looking back at rural Texas in the fifties, which was itself looking back upon the romantic (and cinematic) vision of the Old West with increasing anxiety for the gap between myth and reality...

...The result is an aimless picture about aimless people which seems to have little more to say to us than that we ought to hug more...

...Both movies, that is, are used only as backdrops to what seem like quite pointless battles...

...intelligence community...

...Scorsese's do a bang-up job...

...Part of the comedy of The Icicle Thief lies in the frantic attempts of its characters to establish some modusvivendi between the two worlds, by, for example, bringing shopping carts full of groceries from the unreal, consumerist nineties back into the impoverished but warm-and-fuzzy universe of the Realist cinema...

...My preference, you will see, is for the latter...

...Perhaps it is the price we pay for our material happiness...

...Here the trappings of the 1920s look more like the generic reality of Dick Tracy than like the lovingly re-created 1950s and '60s of GoodFellas...

...We're not muscle," he says...

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...But in its way and in the grim world of this picture, it is as much a hallmark of moral heroism as the act of the man who lays down his life for his friend...

...what follows then...

...The scale model of old 'Texasville is attacked for celebrating fornication and liquor, still the town's principal pastimes, and the behavior of the characters in high school is a reproach to them in the present—either because of what they have done or because of what they have not...

...As Tom leads him to his death in a marvelously evocative woodland setting, Bernie appeals to the fact that "You can't change a guy's nature...

...It is brilliantly written, beautifully photographed, and marvelously acted, and it makes everything else—especially movies which use similar techniques or have similar ambitions, such as Dick Tracy or Wild at Heart—look feeble by comparison...

...The original Back to the Future derived a lot of its appeal from its nostalgia trip back to the 1950s and all the Vietnam films are evocations of the sixties and seventies...

...And, wonderful to say, Tom does...

...The comedy of having an interchange of characters between the two wears a little thin but it makes a serious point about how postwar neo-realism is as much a part of the past as Realism itself—because the social conditions which gave rise to both are gone...

...It invites the audience to feel superior and smug as it recognizes the mirage of power and prestige for which these uneducated characters ruin their lives and the lives of others...

...The official history of...

...Instead of having THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 43 his hero come home to Mamma riddled with bullets, he has him reduced to the banality of anonymous suburban existence in the federal Witness Protection Program...