The Talkies: Loyalty Tests

...Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels by Guy Ritchie is both funny and (that rare thing these days) brilliantly plotted, so that one can scarcely keep oneself from admiring the sheer craftsmanship of the cinematic joinery...

...The American Spectator March 1999 69...

...Liam cannot pay, McGowan cannot let him off paying without breaking his legs or losing his business ("I'd be a laughingstock," he says...

...The trouble with it is that it is an exercise in Tarantinery, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its striving for what the press materials over and over again describe as "authenticity" in its depiction of the criminal subculture of London's East End...

...He also passes the time coaching a soccer team, one of whose young members, Liam (Davie McKay), he is encouraging with an ex-addict's missionary fervor to beat his own drug problem, for which Liam has already spent some time in prison...

...0 f course, in the post-modern, post-Tarantino world, audiences don't necessarily mind fakery if it is, as this is, clever and amusing...

...He spent his childhood learning Latin and French and German, science and perfect table manners, and all he seems to have missed is learning how to curse, or to speak ill of his parents...

...He does not give a moment to the portrayal of the moral struggle that produced it, but takes it as much for granted as he does the evil of the polluters or the still unproven link between their pollution and leukemia...

...In his rudimentary moral world, the only thing that can make any impression is that an ambulance-chaser like Travolta's character might learn to care about something more than money...

...Some of us don't have a f---ing choice," he cries—and we recognize the sense in which this is true at the same moment when Joe himself recognizes the connection between that plea and the sort of things he used to say in the days when he was drinking...

...And how nice to see something like the old-fashioned, hell-raisin' cowboy back in the saddle again after a quarter of a century of Westerns that have been mainly political attacks on the dominant culture's treatment of the Indians, or the workers, or the environment...

...Maybe both the good and the bad of that time have been swept away together as merely old-fashioned...

...Ai James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...

...He sets about trying to break his dependency on the subculture of petty44 A true conservative ought to think twice about celebrating an act of betrayal...

...But this atmospheric lament for "the old ways" when, as the opening voiceover tells us, "things were a lot simpler than they are now" — when men on horseback herded cattle to market instead of trucking them and when they were supposed to have spent the rest of their time fighting and boozing and fornicating—seems to have died at the box office...

...It is not a judgment I share...

...Maybe, the film allows us to hope, now that this old-fashioned style of dancing is fashionable again, other gentlemanly accomplishments —and gentlemanly virtues —will be too...

...Another irony is that, artistically, Hollywood is very much of Kazan's mind...

...The great irony of his life has been that the Communists and ex-Communists and other fellow "progressives" who have blacklisted him all these years went medieval on him and set up personal loyalty as superior to all else...

...and Joe cannot help except by agreeing to run drugs for McGowan—which he knows will spell the end of his burgeoning relationship with Sarah...

...But anything that lasts in art, as opposed to fashion, has to look real...

...But it also makes for a touching tribute to a period that Hollywood, in its customary spirit of self-congratulation, regularly patronizes or insults —most recently in the awful Pleasantville...

...It is a role which they have continued to play ever since, and practice in it has doubtless been of great benefit to them in their current one as staunch defenders of that sexual harasser and champion of the old-fashioned predatory male, Boy Clinton, and as haters of Linda Tripp...

...In A Civil Action James Gandolfini ought by rights to bethe central character...

...Her moment of realization of her feelings for him and what he represents comes as he is dancing, swing-style, with two other women...

...The movies are by now so automatically on the side of the whistleblower —this lonely figure who dares to stand out against family, friends, or benefactors naturally appeals to the popular culture's vulgarized romantic existentialism—that they scarcely even bother to make his betrayal morally problematical...

...He took dancing lessons from his mother in the fallout shelter...

...Yet this betrayal is of no intrinsic interest to the writer-director, Steven Zaillian...

...As someone once said of the French Legion d'honneur, there was more honor to those who had not received it than those who had...

...When he meets Sarah (Louise Goodall), an attractive health visitor a couple of rungs up the social ladder from him, he has to learn how to hang wallpaper and to bowl just to have an excuse for meeting her...

...As you might expect, this makes for some predictable comedy, not enough unlike that which Fraser has virtually trademarked in movies like Encino Man and George of the Jungle...

...It is his decision to inform on his polluting employers which makes the case (such as it is) for John Travolta's crusading attorney...

...The movie has always seemed shrill and preachy to me, and lacking in the tragic sense of life that can see the good in loyalty for its own sake, even to a corrupt union boss...

...It suited them in this instance to proclaim personal loyalty ideologically correct, though of course they took a very different view of matters back in the Homeland of the Revolution...

...Kazan could argue, of course, that there is nothing to regret in putting principle above personal loyalty...

...True, occasionally a film like Stephen Frears's Hi-Lo Country comes along that seems to celebrate the virtue of loyalty, in this case between a couple of cowboys played by Billy Crudup and Woody Harrelson, in spite of love, money, and morality...

...Ken Loach is British, like Stephen Frears, and a leftie, Hollywood has much in common with Elia Kazan...

...Phoniness will out, although a lot of people, especially in Hollywood, manage to make a lot of money from it first...

...Kazan's progressivism was perfectly consistent...

...But, like the booze, all these things are so much a part of who he is that it remains a question in the end if it is even possible for him to uproot them...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website—http://www.spectator.org...

...So authentic is it, in fact, that Ritchie hired as actors some actual East End hard men and ex-cons, including a former bare-knuckle heavyweight champion who died shortly after the film was completed and to whom it is dedicated...

...He also took boxing lessons from his father...

...Maybe, after all, it's again hip to be square...

...When Adam finds his Eve (Alicia Silverstone), she is at first repelled by his cornball innocence and then attracted by a goodness and gentlemanliness that could scarcely otherwise, one sadly reflects, have survived into our own time...

...And even in Hollywood, when fashion comes around again some people may see in it something more than fashion...

...Mistakenly believing that World War III had started during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Calvin and his pregnant wife (Sissy Spacek) went underground in 1962, and Adam emerges from their time capsule 35 years later with the morals and tastes of the 1950's undisturbed by the intervening decades...

...68 March 199 9 The American Spectator like Elia Kazan, but his new film, My Name Is foe, in Glaswegian with English subtitles, is an honest and compelling account of what it means for a man to be caught in the midst of a conflict between his personal happiness, his duty to a friend, and doing the right thing...

...Everyone would be having a go...

...To Kazan there are the good guys, and there are the bad guys (as Wittgenstein is supposed to have said about his fondness for Westerns), and the hero is constantly being nudged along towards one and away from JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...I liked this film more than another British import which deals with some of the same themes...

...But a true conservative ought to think twice about celebrating an act of betrayal, however necessary it may sometimes be...

...crime and drugs and the local and childhood loyalties that help make it so resistant to change and does so with the same determination that he brought to beating the booze...

...Like Joe, Liam is fighting his way back to sobriety and decency, but his girlfriend, Sabine (Anne-Marie Kennedy), with whom he has a small child, is less successful and has landed the couple in debt to a local drug-dealer and loan shark called McGowan (David Hayman...

...If we look beyond Hollywood's preoccupation with fashion, however, we may find elsewhere a willingness to take seriously the theme of loyalty...

...Of course for the Communists this was no particular stretch...

...I don't begrudge him his belated Oscar, God knows, considering how many nonentities have received that award over the years and are sure to receive it again this year...

...There is a heart-rending moment in which Joe tries to explain to Sarah, to make her understand that not everybody lives in her "nice, tidy world" where you can go to the police when you are threatened, or take out a bank loan when you are in debt, or even, if things get really bad, go somewhere else...

...In fact, he does argue it in On the Waterfront, the Oscar-winning film of 1954 that most people consider his masterpiece...

...the other by writing and direction lacking in subtlety or moral nuance...

...These men are playing themselves —and the real actors are playing them too—and they are having such a good time about it that they only confirm what the polished and witty dialogue and the carefully wrought plot suggest: namely, that it's all a fake...

...In Kazan's case, unlike Whittaker Chambers's for example, it was not necessary as a matter of national security, and Kazan's regret at having ratted out his friends was rather pro forma compared to that of Chambers, who said that for him informing on Alger Hiss amounted to moral suicide...

...He has to be, too, since in Glasgow there is hardly any social life that does not involve drinking...

...Both in his life and in his art he saw personal loyalty as being atavistic and primitive and of no consideration when matters of ideological correctness were involved...

...But God must have enjoyed the joke as these left-wingers found themselves here cast in the role of the most vigorous defenders of traditional values against the prevailing ideological currents of the 1950's...

...That's one reason why I liked the Movie of the Month, Blast From the Past, directed by Hugh Wilson, a sharp, witty, very funny tale of a young man called Adam (Brendan Fraser) who has spent his whole life in a fallout shelter built by his, father, Calvin (Christopher Walken...

...Joe Kavanagh (Peter Mullan) is an unemployed laborer struggling with alcoholism, and the film begins with his testimony at an AA meeting, which shows him to be a morally serious person...