'Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond' by Paul Sherman -- Web special: $16 including shipping!

R.I.P., 'Six Bridges to Cross' director Joseph Pevney

Joseph Pevney, who passed away several days ago, was a journeyman director who became very prolific in TV during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Most of his obits labeled him a Star Trek director, as he did several episodes of that series. But he also directed one of the earliest movies to use Boston locations, 1955's Six Bridges to Cross. Loosely based on the real Brink's robbery, Six Bridges is an odd movie that tries to take that real event and turn it into a very light drama, banking highly on the presence of Tony Curtis to keep the career criminal at its center likable (in his film debut, Sal Mineo plays Curtis' character as a boy so, amusingly, they both have the same wrong Bronx accent for the Bostonian). But the movie never really finds a convincing tone, so it doesn't quite work (it's certainly inferior to 1978's The Brink's Job, which took an overtly comic approach to the events and had a Runyonesque flair to it). Six Bridges has a few interesting sights to see of the city, pre-urban renewal, but otherwise it's not all that memorable. It has never come out on video.

Book excerpt: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle'

Don't miss the chance to see an archival print of the best damn movie ever made in Boston, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. at the Coolidge Corner Theater on June 5 at 7 pm. I'll be there introducing the movie, and selling and signing books, too. Father to the more recent Boston "neighborhood pictures," from Monument Ave. to Gone Baby Gone, it has never come out on home video.

1973. Directed by Peter Yates. Written by Paul Monash. Based on George V. Higgins’ novel. With Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Alex Rocco and Joe Santos. Cinematography by Victor J. Kemper.

ALL HAIL EDDIE. THE gritty film adaptation of attorney turned writer George V. Higgins’ terse debut novel is the best movie ever made in Boston, a touchstone with a legendary status enhanced by the fact that it’s never been released on any form of home video.
    Director Peter (Bullitt) Yates’ movie is one of the few post-1960 color thrillers to capture the desperation and doom of 1940s and 1950s film noir. Of course, it helps to have Robert Mitchum, who headlined such vintage noirs as Out of the Past and Pursued, playing the title character. Mitchum and his hangdog persona perfectly embody the weariness of Coyle, an aging, working-class crook awaiting sentencing for transporting stolen goods who reluctantly becomes a police informer in hopes that his tips to “uncle” will win him leniency.
    Like Higgins’ novel—which is almost experimental in its preferred use of two-character dialogues instead of conventional narrative—The Friends of Eddie Coyle atmospherically presents the workaday tug of war between crooks and cops. Seen through the movie’s gutter’seye view of the world, everyone’s looking for a leg up on the other guy, a favor or some sort of insulation from jail (for the crooks) or bad work assignments (for the cops). Eddie Coyle is the common thread running among gun seller Jackie Brown (Steven Keats), bartender/hit man Dillon (Peter Boyle), federal agent Foley (Richard Jordan) and a group of robbers that’s striking suburban banks.
    As Coyle secures handguns from Jackie for the bankrobbers, Dillon keeps tabs on Eddie’s travels and Foley fields tidbits of info from both men. These tips are cast out like fishing lines, hoping to return a nibble from Foley that might bring a desired favor. One such nibble comes after Eddie sees machine guns in Jackie’s car trunk and hears him say he has to get to the train station at Sharon. He gets there, but so do Foley and a half-dozen other agents.
    Still, Eddie’s aid in Boston is not enough to get Coyle a break with a New Hampshire prosecutor, and you can feel the vice tighten around him. He’s faced with a no-win situation: do jail time or fink on guys who, unlike younger Jackie, are his contemporaries and cohorts. In its own low-key, Eddie-ish way, The Friends of Eddie Coyle works to a tragic ending that, hard to believe, makes a change in the story that actually improves upon Higgins’ plot.
    Eddie Coyle is the first Boston movie with the guts to never be scenic (just look at the Quincy street Coyle lives on, with its row of drab, look-alike houses). It’s a grey, grey movie, because Eddie is stuck in a grey, grey world, lacking the resources to go to sunny Florida (as he laments) or the traction to climb out of his place on the crime ladder. Yates shot the movie in late 1972, with winter approaching, and you can feel the chill in the air. You often see the breath exhaled by characters during the conversations on the Boston Common or outside a Quincy Red Line station. The other locations are grungy spots Thomas Crown would certainly never be caught at, including Dillon’s bar (shot at the Kentucky Tavern at Mass. Ave. and Newbury Street), the cafeteria where Coyle and Jackie first meet (which appears to be on Boylston Street near Tremont), Boston Bowl and Dedham Plaza. A Weymouth bank, Memorial Drive, the old Boston Garden and even grim City Hall Plaza also serve the story very well. And rather than packing up back to Los Angeles for interiors, the production did everything here, even building sets, including the trailer belonging to robber Jimmy Scalise (hometown boy Alex Rocco), in Pier Five on the waterfront.
    Apparently, Higgins did an uncredited polish on Paul Monash’s script. When I checked with the Higgins archives at the University of South Carolina to see if the late novelist’s papers contained any info on the movie’s locations, the staff’s perusal of his archival materials from that period turned up at least one reference in his letters to restoring dialogue from the novel to the screenplay. Thirty-five years after it was released to audience indifference, it’s hard to watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle now and not think that it—the most essential movie Hollywood has made in Boston—deserves the awards, acclaim and popularity bestowed upon Mystic River, a lesser movie in the same vein. Oh, well. That’s showbiz.
►Locations: Back Bay, North End, Beacon Hill, Boston; Quincy; Sharon; Milton; Weymouth; Dedham; Cambridge.
►Accents: Surprisingly good. Mitchum, originally eyed for Peter Boyle’s role, manages to use a convincing Boston accent without losing his own distinctive voice. So Eddie comes off as an emotionally spent Mitchum character, and a neighborhood guy, too. Boyle and Richard Jordan use a light touch with their accents, too. Considering the strong sense of place the locations give the movie, thick accents might have been overkill. These guys sound right at home next to Alex Rocco.
►Local color: “Numbah faw, Bobby Aw!” Eddie bellows from the Boston Garden balcony during a Bruins game featuring helmetless players and no ads on the ice or boards. Of course, Eddie and his “friends” would be into the big, bad Bruins (just as they’d be into the Pats today). The hockey sequence appears to have been shot during a real game, and that’s the kind of authenticity you get here. It’s not as if other movie productions were lining up to shoot at the Kentucky Tavern or fluorescent-lit cafeterias. The locations are so real I expected to see Eddie pop into a Zayre at some point, but no such luck.
►Aftermath: Higgins fan Elmore Leonard borrowed the androgynous name Jackie Brown for the heroine of his novel, Rum Punch. When Quentin Tarantino made a film of Leonard’s book, he renamed the story Jackie Brown, as did the movie tie-in re-release of the book.

Screening #5: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle,' Coolidge Corner Theater, June 5 @ 7pm

The next Big Screen Boston book-signing/movie-screening is a biggie: the best movie ever made in Boston, 1973's The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I'll be posting an excerpt from the book about the movie soon, but here's a little of what Eddie has to offer: a doom-filled film noir mood that's rare for a post-1960 color movie, a totally convincing Robert Mitchum performance as a low-level hood being squeezed by the law and the wonderful use of grimy Greater Boston locations, from brutalist City Hall Plaza to the Boston Garden. Without this movie and the novels of George V. Higgins (on whose first book this is based), it's hard to conceive of such subsequent stories as Monument Ave., Mystic River, The Departed and Gone Baby Gone. Dennis Lehane may be its purveyor now, but it was George V. Higgins who started Boston noir. So don't miss this rare chance to see Eddie Coyle on the big screen (it's still never come out on VHS or DVD). The Coolidge has just informed me that they're getting an archival print from Paramount, so the city will be on display in all its gritty glory.

Leonard Maltin chimes in

The ever-credible Leonard Maltin has included Big Screen Boston in his summer movie book round-up. Here's what he has to say:

BIG SCREEN BOSTON: From "Mystery Street" to "The Departed" and Beyond by Paul Sherman (Black Bars Publishing) — Film buff and critic Sherman has researched scores of films that were set and/or filmed at least in part in the Boston area and compiled this informative survey book, crammed with background information, assessments of the films, and detailed information on the use of locations. Obvious choices like The Boston Strangler, Charly, The Thomas Crown Affair, Love Story, The Brink’s Job, The Departed, Mystic River, Fever Pitch, The Perfect Storm and A Civil Action are cited alongside smaller, independent features. A separate section deals in brief with scores of films that had at least some Boston-area content, from The Cardinal to Stuck on You. I can’t imagine anyone producing a more definitive document on the subject.

Check out Maltin's Movie Crazy site for the entire book round-up and more. Glad to see that, after all these years, Leonard is as enthusiastic about movies as he was when he was a teenager putting out Film Fan Monthly. I still have my copy of Leonard's Movie Comedy Teams that I got as a pre-teen in the early 1970s. And I still check it when I want to decide if a particular Olsen & Johnson movie (i.e., any other one than the great Hellzapoppin') showing at 4 am on TCM is worth recording or not.

'Backstage' interview clip, April 30, 2008

"Little" movies we like

Big Screen Boston is mainly comprised of two sections: one with the 80 movies getting "full entries," and another ("Brief Visits, Day Trips & the Rest") in which each movie gets a capsule review. There were a lot of borderline movies that might have landed in either section, and the determining factor wasn't always the quality of the movie. For instance, James Toback's Harvard Man is a horrible movie, but it's so outrageously horrible (Toback had tried to get it made for 25 years, it's set during college basketball season yet everyone is wearing summer clothes, it has no internal logic at all) that it merited the bigger space so its bizarreness could be fully covered. Another reason some good "little" movies didn't get the full treatment was that there were only so many instances when I could write "here's a little overachiever" in the full entries without the thought losing all credibility, since movies such as Ruby, Urban Relics and The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles already were being billed as such. Below are the capsule reviews of some enjoyable homegrown movies that didn't make it into the front section. They're an important part of the book.

All Kindsa Girls (2003)
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan’s evocative documentary about Boston garage-rockers The Real Kids, named for one of their quintessential 1970s Boston rock songs, isn’t just a portrait of John Felice’s on-again, off-again band. It also delves into what might be called “Boston band syndrome” (great band that should’ve become big, but doesn’t) and, to give the music context, dips into Boston rock history and the city’s preference for guitar-driven garage rock, with both Barry Tashian of The Remains and Jonathan Richman (who started the Modern Lovers with Natick neighbor Felice when the latter was 15) appearing. Of course, there’s onstage footage of The Real Kids, too, filmed at the Middle East, the Abbey and Avalon.







Dirt Boy (2001)
A New Yorker with a dark past (Jacob Lee Hedman) comes to fictional Atwater Commons to take a forensic criminology course, and discovers there’s more truth to a local author’s grisly bestselling novel than the townies want to admit. Jay Franco’s nifty no-budget thriller, set and filmed on Cape Cod, weaves a little spell and, thanks to its stripped-down production—no Anthony Hopkins or Christopher Plummer chewing scenery as the imposing author—avoids many a cliché along the way.




A Pound of Flesh (1994)
Catherine Burns, later producer of such homegrown indies as All the Rage and Starving Artists, directed this flimsy but funny comedy in which a black market human liver is the center of everyone’s attention. Its best parts are definitely those with Sandi Carroll and Ian Lithgow (son of John) as an irreverent couple looking for unconventional good times. This movie not only led to Starving Artists (its director, Allan Piper, is the assistant director here), but also to Brad Anderson’s The Darien Gap (he’s sound recordist and assistant camera); charismatic Carroll co-stars in both subsequent movies.


The Same Side of Rejection Street (2000)
Clunky moments aside, S.G. Collins’ hi-def feature has one of the more ambitious scripts of any homegrown indie film. Set over one action-packed day, it’s about the uneasy friendship that develops between a philosophical homeless man (Micheal Henderson) and an unemployed woman (Karen Ball). As the two walk from Downtown Crossing and the Financial District to South Boston and Dorchester, the movie mixes in heartache, laughs, the obstacle of racism and even gospel music. It’s an all-encompassing mix that usually works.


Starving Artists (1997)
The absurdity in Allan Piper’s Harvard Square comedy is hit or miss. Its funniest action involves his playwright character’s uncomfortable courtship of neighbor Mildred (Bess Wohl), whom he almost always manages to unwittingly insult. The production came up with a fun way to raise part of its $50,000 budget: everyone who donated at least $1 got his or her name in the movie, whether it was as graffiti, in a newspaper headline or on a note on someone’s wall.

"The Dark End of the Street"--tonight!

I'll be selling and signing books and showing one of the best Boston indie films, 1981's The Dark End of the Street, tonight at 6:45 at West Newton Cinema. This is the second in writer-director Jan Egleson's so-called Boston trilogy, and this Cambridge projects drama features dynamite performances from Laura Harrington, Henry Tomaszewski (in photo), Pamela Payton-Wright, Michele Greene and, before his great run as a Hollywood character actor, Lance Henriksen. Tonight will be its first local showing in nearly a decade, the movie is not available on home video and Jan Egleson will be joining me to talk about it. The Celts are off tonight, so come on down.

Book excerpt: "The Dark End of the Street" -- showing 5/21 @ West Newton Cinema, 6:45 pm

The Dark End of the Street is one of the best homegrown movies to come out of Greater Boston. As he did in its predecessor, 1979's Billy in the Lowlands, writer-director Jan Egleson mixes engaging drama with genuine authenticity in this tale of Cambridge project kids, specifically Donna (Laura Harrington), who's seeking a better life than the one she sees around her. As an added bonus of sorts, among the fine performances are before-they-were-famous roles for Ben Affleck (then 8 years old) and Lance Henriksen (the latter did a lot of theater acting in the area during the 1970s). Here is the section of the book about it. The movie gets its first local screening in seven years at West Newton Cinema this coming Wednesday (May 21) at 6:45pm. I'll be signing books, and Egleson will be appearing to talk about the movie. [That's Harrington, right, and co-star Michele Greene sharing a fun off-camera moment in the photo below.]

1981. Written and directed by Jan Egleson. With Laura Harrington, Henry Tomaszewski, Michele Greene, Lance Henriksen, Pamela Payton-Wright, Albert Eaton and Terence Grey. Cinematography by D’Arcy Marsh.

TWO YEARS AFTER BRINGING grass-roots fiction filmmaking to Greater Boston with Billy in the Lowlands, Theater Company of Boston vet Jan Egleson returned to the streets of Cambridge for another life-sized drama. Billy Shaughnessy (Henry Tomaszewski), whom we left trying to right his life after legal troubles in Billy, is back in The Dark End of the Street (like its predecessor, named for a song). In the followup, vulnerable Billy’s need to steer clear of the law is again a big factor, but he’s not the main focus. Girlfriend Donna (Laura Harrington) is.
    The intrigue begins after some post-softball partying on a roof in the Cambridge projects where they live. Billy and Donna hang around so they can be alone, but they’re joined by Ethan (Terence Grey), a drunk friend who teases them, horses around a bit and then falls from the roof. The couple doesn’t tell the police for two reasons. One is Billy’s probation; he’s sure any hint of wrongdoing will land him back in juvenile prison (it’s an inside joke when he says, “I’ll be in Billerica until I’m 90,” a line he first utters in Billy in the Lowlands). The other is the fact that Ethan is black, and Donna and Billy are not. The chance of a race-related crime will surely make the police aggressively investigate the incident.
    Not being able to tell anyone what happened hits Donna hard—in totally convincing, everyday ways. Her best friend is African-American Marlene (Michele Greene), whose brother Brian (Albert Eaton) becomes the subject of the police investigation, since he and Ethan had quarreled earlier. When she hears that Donna might have seen what happened, the two fight in a disco and end up in jail overnight. Donna’s attempts to get Billy to go to the cops with her also threaten that relationship. She’s soon missing shifts at the greasy spoon where she works, and taxing her already overburdened mother (Pamela Payton-Wright) who, like Billy’s mom in the earlier movie, is raising her kids alone. Ethan’s death after several days in the hospital eliminates the one other person who could explain the incident. (That’s Boston power couple Flash and Bennie Wiley playing Ethan’s parents.)
    As with Billy in the Lowlands, the filmmaking in The Dark End of the Street is basic, and the dialogue sometimes flat, particularly in the big speeches by the detective (Gustave Johnson) investigating Ethan’s death. But the pleasure of the movie is in the intimate world it etches out, not just the plot. In a less intimate movie, the race question would swell into big crowd scenes with angry project residents and police barricades, and Donna and Marlene’s friendship might get lost in the shuffle. Similarly, the scenes with Donna’s weary mom, who’s so well-played by Payton-Wright, wouldn’t make the cut, since they don’t often advance the central plot. Straddling the plot and the more observational scenes is Jimmy, the exotic truck driver and the mom’s boyfriend, played with flippant charisma by Lance Henriksen, who’d worked in Boston theater and later scored in such cool movies as Near Dark and Stone Cold (he's in the photo below, with Payton-Wright).
    The Dark End of the Street doesn’t deliver a knockout the way bigger movies sometimes can, but it portrays the delicate balance of everyday life in ways most movies overlook. The world doesn’t change much over the course of its action. Life is just as much of a struggle for its characters as it was before, and the earthy characters (many played by non-professionals) remain in the same station in life. Since Hollywood was turning away from its uncharacteristic 1970s adventurousness, this and Egleson’s other Boston movies were a welcome departure from the crush of sequels, remakes and save-the-world escapism.
    Unlike the on-the-run plot of much of Billy in the Lowlands, The Dark End of the Street sticks closer to home: the most prominent Cambridge locations are where the characters live and work, including the Roosevelt Tower projects and Sexton Can (formerly in East Cambridge). The donut shop where Donna works is Linda’s, over the line in Belmont. We also see Flapper’s, a one-time club where Alewife Station now stands, as well as the old Howard Johnson’s off the expressway in South Bay and the Quincy quarries.
►Locations: Cambridge; Belmont; Dorchester, Boston; Quincy.
►Accents: Unlike most of the young cast, Laura Harrington is not from the projects. But the former B.U. student does a great job of blending in with her fellow actors. As with Billy in the Lowlands, the genuine accents are part of the deep credibility of the movie.
►Local color: With its plot in which characters try to get through their daily lives, the color is more class-based than geographical. Just about everything we see is related to work, home or play—where Billy and Donna work, where she lives, where they hang out. This is working-class life shown with no desire to glorify it or gloss up its bleakness. And considering that much of it is in East Cambridge before it changed from an industrial area to a high-tech area, this is working-class life from a specific time.
►Don’t blink!: Yup, that’s little Ben Affleck making his movie debut in the silent role of Donna’s brother Tommy.

'The Frugal Yankee' interview

Garen Daly is not only the fellow responsible for Boston's annual Presidents' Day sci-fi marathon. He was also once manager of Cambridge's late, great Orson Welles Cinema, ran the Somerville Theater during the 1980s (he was one of the people responsible for making Davis Square's turnaround possible--i.e., no moviehouse, no Redbones, no Disc Diggers, then no "Paris of the '90s")  and he co-hosts the Frugal Yankee radio program. Last week, Garen and co-host Louise Reilly Sacco interviewed me about the book, and you can listen to it here .

Dude, read the book already!

I heard that Ty Burr had some nice things to say when Big Screen Boston came up on an online chat on boston.com, saying yours truly "knows his stuff." But he confessed that the book was still sitting on his desk and he hasn't had a chance to read it yet. Let's hope he gets around to it and is able to review the book in the Globe. Ty grew up locally and has always been a shrewd assessor of movies shot here, so I'm interested in hearing what he thinks of the book.

Book excerpt: "Walk East on Beacon!"

If 1950's Mystery Street is a good example of the post-WWII location thriller coming to Boston, 1952's Walk East on Beacon! is its not-so-good counterpart. While the first brings a foreboding film noir tone to the city, the second just uses it for some hysterical anti-Communist fear-mongering (I guess the exclamation point in the title is a dead giveaway). Ironically, though, Walk East offers a better peek at the city because it has more daylight action (and it lacks the skill to create a mood through use of darkness)--for instance, it's the only Hollywood movie that shot in Scollay Square. It's also never come out on home video, so it's certainly worth checking out if you ever get the chance.

1952. Directed by Alfred Werker. Written by Leo Rosten and Emmett Murphy. Based on Crime of the Century by J. Edgar Hoover. With George Murphy, Finlay Currie, Virginia Gilmore and Karel Stepanek. Cinematography by Joseph C. Brun.

CHELSEA NATIVE LOUIS de Rochemont was one of the producers behind the post-World War II wave of docudrama thrillers that includes Mystery Street and this 1952 Boston movie. Some of these movies take creative inspiration from Italian neorealism, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City or Anthony Mann’s T-Men. But de Rochemont’s inspiration wasn’t fictional entertainment, it was his own career producing the March of Time newsreels. At the tail end of WWII, he wed the heavy narration and real locations of newsreels with a ripped-from-the-headlines plot in the Manhattan-set The House on 92nd Street, in which an FBI agent infiltrates a Nazi spy ring.
    Seven years later, he came home for Walk East on Beacon! There’s no infiltration in this overheated Cold War drama, but there is a spy ring and the FBI to crack it, led by the agent played by future politician George Murphy. The movie adapts an article written by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (or by whoever ghostwrote it for him), and it starts and ends with much flag-waving on behalf of the Bureau and the fine, upstanding men who keep America safe from its “hidden enemies.”
    Although Walk East is painless enough to sit through, a more expressive story might have better paid tribute to law enforcement than the anti-Communist message movie we get. Whatever legitimate threat there was from Soviet espionage after WWII was clearly exploited by Hoover into a menace that allowed him to position himself as America’s watch dog, and the movie eagerly plays Hoover’s enabler. After all, what can you say when a character who lost two children in a concentration camp tells an FBI agent, “I survived Buchenwald, Inspector. I know many Communists and how they work.” That, of all people, this survivor should know better than to shift Nazi blame? That the screenwriters ought to be ashamed of themselves?
    But that’s the kind of hysteria Walk East seeks to inspire. The story itself is a rather routine investigative thriller lacking much emotion and mood. If it has any style, it’s an anti-style. But since this was made at a time when shadowy, visually expressive film noir was in full swing, such anti-style seems flat by comparison. When there actually is a scene of human emotion—when the Commie-aiding cab driver (Jack Manning) confesses to his wife about being trapped into helping them—you momentarily see what the movie is missing. But that’s the only taste you get of such human drama.
    The value of the movie’s real Boston footage in the early 1950s is much greater than that of its FBI cheerleading, stock characters (like pipe-smoking intellectuals) and forensic gadgetry (Mystery Street integrated the last into a thriller much better). Action takes place in the Public Garden, Louisburg Square, South Station, Longfellow Bridge, Storrow Drive and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial across from the State House, among other places, while there are incidental shots of Harvard Square, Memorial Drive, the Mystic River (Tobin) Bridge, the old Ritz (now the Taj), pre-makeover Faneuil Hall and the corner of Park and Tremont streets, with a nice shot of a Dorothy Muriel’s bakery. And that’s legendary Scollay Square where we see the amazing sign for Jack’s Lighthouse, as well as a tattoo parlor and The Tasty (any relation to the one in Harvard Square seen in Love Story and Good Will Hunting?).
►Locations: Charlestown, Back Bay, South Station, East Boston, Scollay Square, Beacon Hill, West End, Boston.
►Accents: Full of FBI agents from all over the country, spies who’ve come to Boston to hide their real identities and immigrants, the story doesn’t have much call for local accents. But it seems that many of the bit parts—lower-lever agents, dispatchers, etc.—were cast with local non-professionals (probably guys who did those real jobs everyday). So every so often you’ll get a real Bostonian talking.
►Local color: Although some of the movie was shot in New Hampshire and beyond—the huuuge mainframe computer seen was the Selective Service Electronic Calculator at IBM in New York—this is the one category where Walk East outdoes Mystery Street. The latter is a much better movie, because its dark mood summons the danger Walk East does not, but that darkness obscures the shooting locations. Walk East isn’t a quarter as creative, but its preponderance of broad daylight shots in public places is just great for playing “Where’s that?” and seeing how certain spots have changed in 50-plus years.

Screening #4: "The Dark End of the Street," West Newton Cinema, May 21, 6:45 pm

After making one of the best Boston independent dramas, 1979's Billy in the Lowlands, Cambridge writer-director Jan Egleson was able to secure much of the funding for the follow-up from WGBH, which had aired Billy after its local theatrical run (and had been able to get some of the glory when the movie won a New England Emmy award). Like its predecessor, 1981's The Dark End of the Street is set in the world of the Cambridge working-class youths Egleson had met at The Group School. Although DEOTS has a more complex story, it sacrifices none of the decidedly un-Hollywood rawness of Billy. This time Henry Tomaszewski's Billy Shaughnessy is still around, but his girlfriend Donna (Laura Harrington) is the center of attention. Once again, it's a story of a "project kid" trying to find a better way in life, and there is no "Hollywood ending." I'm thrilled to be able to present the movie at West Newton Cinema, at 6:45pm on May 21. This very entertaining and significant Boston movie has never come out on home video and has not shown locally since 2001, and Jan Egleson will be joining me at the screening. Oh, and did I mention a little blond 8-year-old named Ben Affleck plays the heroine's little brother? That's him in the photo, with Harrington (left) and Janice Brown (sporting a nifty Group School t-shirt). Ben, we'll save you a seat...

Book excerpt: 'The Thomas Crown Affair' [at the Brattle, May 10]

Coincidental to the screenings of Boston movies I set up, the Brattle Theater is showing the original 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair as part of its great United Artists retrospective. That seemed like the perfect excuse to offer this excerpt about the movie, a film so blatantly "fabulous" that you have to cut it slack for having little relation to reality.

1968. Directed by Norman Jewison. Written by Alan Trustman. With Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke and Jack Weston. Cinematography by Haskell Wexler.

I HAVE VERY VAGUE recollection of the media coverage of the glittery Boston premiere that greeted Norman Jewison’s movie. Such events were (and still are) a very rare occurrence down around here, but for some reason Hollywood really, really liked Boston in 1968. Along with Charly and The Boston Strangler, the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair gave the city a Hollywood hat trick that year. For better or worse, none of them is as “Hollywood” as this glossy romantic drama.
    It’s a state-of-the-art confection set in an impossibly urbane Boston concocted by Alan Trustman, a local lawyer who went on to pen more movies. Director Jewison and composer Michel Legrand then buffed it to a spiffy sheen. Steve McQueen plays the title character, a blue-blooded investment wiz who, between buying low and selling high at his Post Office Square headquarters, masterminds crimes and seeks thrills wherever he can find them, whether it’s from golf-course betting or piloting gliders. He’s a sort of American James Bond in a three-piece suit, but he serves only his own interests.
    As with The Boston Strangler, this exercise in style shows the influence of the split-screen films screened at Expo ’67—Christopher Chapman’s A Place to Stand in this case. Jewison uses multiple imagery often in the story’s first third, when a Crown-hired crew descends on a bank and robs it of $2.6 million (in scenes shot at the old Shawmut Bank on Congress Street). The build-up and execution of the heist are thrilling and offer glimpses of a wide variety of sights, from Washington Street and Stuart Street to the corner of Cambridge and Linden Streets, with the Allston train yard behind it.
    The little celebratory dance and chuckle in which Crown privately indulges once the job is done, and he can kick back in his Mt. Vernon Street townhouse, tells you all you need to know about why he takes risks that jeopardize his cushy life. He gets a life-affirming kick out of it. Posh insurance investigator Vicky Anderson (Dunaway) recognizes Crown’s need to push himself because she has the same sort of driven personality. When she’s called in to crack the case, The Thomas Crown Affair ignites its romantic sparks and turns into the tale of two alpha dogs in heat. Canine personalities aside, their affair is pure cat-and-mouse stuff, with Vicky telling him why she’s in town and why she’s keeping an eye on him, and Crown similarly finding her to be both a kindred spirit and an enemy.
    But sometimes the movie overdoes it. It’s one thing for the romance to be a metaphorical chess game, it’s another for it to have Crown and Vicky sit down and play chess, especially with the overripe chess-as-sex images that accompany the game. It’s enough to make you think the moviemakers aren’t in on the fact that the movie is a fluffy, silly diversion, nothing more. Then again, any movie containing the hats Dunaway wears would have to be partially silly.
    Jewison estimates on the movie’s DVD that he shot “70%” of The Thomas Crown Affair on location. Hamilton’s Myopia Hunt Club (the polo sequence) and Crane Beach’s dunes provide outside-the-city scenery, Cambridge Cemetery figures heavily in the plot and the Haymarket and Copp’s Hill Burying Ground add urban atmosphere. Of course, the 1999 remake decided Boston just wasn’t upscale enough
and moved the story to New York.
►Locations: Beacon Hill, Financial District, Allston, North End, Back Bay, Boston; Cambridge; Ipswich; Hamilton; Beverly; Belmont.
►Accents: McQueen attempted a Boston accent in rehearsals, but it was decided against. Hopefully, someone told him a character like Crown most likely wouldn’t even have a Boston accent. Locals in supporting roles provide the accents here, including Worcester-born Nina Marlowe as cop Paul Burke’s secretary and the two real Boston Police patrolmen who rouse the detective that Crown KO’s, douses in
booze and then puts in a car.
►Local color: While there are plenty of familiar and not-so-familiar sights on display, the movie takes place in a rarefied, upper-class Boston. For those of us who don’t drive a Rolls, stable a polo mount at the Myopia and bed down in a Beacon Hill townhouse (complete with butler), this is a Bizarro Boston we don’t generally experience. But it is true to Crown’s world. The color is more class-specific than location-specific, since Crown has more in common with other rich people, regardless of where they’re from, than he does with other Bostonians. It’s not as if he’s hanging out with bookies from Jamaica Plain or cheering on Ken Harrelson from the bleachers at Fenway.

NewEnglandFilm.com interview

Just noticed that an interview I recently did with filmmaker/writer Jared M. Gordon is now up on NewEnglandFilm.com. Fairly coherent, despite my rambling!

Book excerpt: 'Titicut Follies'--screening 5/3, Noon, MFA

Appreciative audiences have enjoyed Girltalk and Billy in the Lowlands the last two nights. The third screening to help celebrate the release of Big Screen Boston is of Frederick Wiseman's squirm-inducing 1967 documentary, Titicut Follies, which I'll be introducing at the Museum of Fine Arts, on Saturday [May 3] at Noon. Here is the book's section on this disturbing and unforgettable movie.

1967. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Cinematography by John Marshall.

FREDERICK WISEMAN’S FIRST DOCUMENTARY is still shocking today. Just imagine what Titicut Follies was like in 1967, when it was first shown. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned his peek behind the walls at Bridgewater State Hospital, claiming the movie invaded the privacy of patients there, who are often shown nude and in various states of helplessness. Of course, the ban—finally lifted in 1991—couldn’t have had anything to do with the cruelty with which the institution often treats those patients, right?
    Although Wiseman (High School, Domestic Violence) has long been a pillar of the documentary, he came to filmmaking in a roundabout way in the 1960s. He was already a lawyer when he made Titicut Follies, having lectured in law at Boston University from 1958 to 1961 and taken his students to Bridgewater State Hospital during that time. After working on Shirley Clarke’s minor independent classic Cool World, he decided to make a movie about the hospital. He asked for permission in 1964, and ultimately was allowed to film there in 1966.
    From the moment the movie begins, we enter a sort of absurd hellhole. The absurdity comes through mainly in the talent show that gives the movie its name (and bookends it). First, we see a group of uncomfortable men sing “Strike Up the Band”; then an eager emcee tells a corny joke about two beetles and a priest. But, wait, in the next sequence, in which guards search the belongings of stripped patients, we see that this emcee is not a patient, but a guard. One thing is sure: there is no scorecard to tell us who’s sane and who’s insane, who’s dangerous and who’s not dangerous.
    What follows—as is so often the case in Wiseman’s films about various institutions—is an impressionistic portrait of the hospital. Sometimes Wiseman focuses on specific threads, like a psychiatrist’s therapy session with a man sent to Bridgewater for molesting an underage girl, while other times there’s a more random series of sights and sounds, as when we follow the goings-on in the courtyard outlined by the hospital’s buildings. The treatment is never sensational.
    These glimpses of daily life can be amusing. One incessant ranter (in photo above; courtesy Zipporah Films) lets loose a stream-of- consciousness barrage of gibberish, real words and famous names that’s a cross between a jazz solo, a sermon and a stand-up routine. A later shot of the guy spewing verbiage in the courtyard while, behind him, another fellow stands on his head and sings a hymn may be the emblematic image of the collision of individual realities in the movie.
    But, mostly, Titicut Follies is grim and disturbing. Clearly Bridgewater, an exile for the maladjusted, presents a tough situation for staff there to handle. It is practically a no-win situation. But the casual cruelty dished out by the same staff can be striking, particularly in two instances. The first comes when one guard repeatedly questions a patient named Jim about his cell’s cleanliness. “How’s that room gonna be?” he asks over and over. And after nearly every reply from Jim, he says “What’d you say?” Treat the most normal person like this, and he or she will get agitated; try it on someone who’s locked up and vulnerable, and the effect is tragic. Later, a force-feeding of a patient who won’t eat—the movie’s most squirm-inducing sequence— is performed so casually that the psychiatrist doesn’t even put down his cigarette as he shoves inch after inch of tubing up the patient’s nose and funnels soup into the guy’s stomach. To make the action even more unsettling, Wiseman inserts shots of the patient’s corpse— presumably, taken not long after—into the sequence.
    Rejecting the cinema vérité label and the objectivity it implies, Wiseman has regularly examined the relationship between individuals and society’s institutions in his movies (including Near Death, filmed at Beth Israel Hospital). Titicut Follies remains one of his most potent looks at this difficult relationship.

'Billy in the Lowlands' tonight!

LAST NIGHT, A SMALL but appreciative audience at the Brattle Theater got to see the first local screening of Kate Davis' Girltalk in many years. Up tonight at the Brattle is Jan Egleson's groundbreaking Billy in the Lowlands, the most influential indie film ever made in Boston. Full of locations that just aren't there anymore (pre-Red Line extension Harvard Square, Paragon Park, Fresh Pond Shopping Center with its late-1970s roster of stores [Zayre, anyone?]), it inspired movies just after it (such as The Dozens, which won a Grand Prize at Sundance before it was called Sundance) and 15 years later (Rob Patton-Spruill's Squeeze and, to a certain extent, Good Will Hunting). Writer-director Jan Egleson will be joining me to talk about how he was the first Bostonian to make an attempt at sustained, grass-roots dramatic filmmaking.
    The book should be in stores today. If you go to a store and they don't have it, please ask them to carry it!