Old Yorker

  • Bullitt

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Yates (1968)

    Are you now or have you ever been interested in car chases?  No, but I went obediently to see Bullitt at the York Odeon sometime in the early 1970s.  My filmgoing life was in its infancy and my deference to other filmgoers’ views at its peak.  William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), a multi-Oscar winner, had featured what was reputedly the best car chase since Bullitt.  So I had to see that, too.  Half a century on, BFI has put together a three-month ‘Art of Action’ season, celebrating ‘high octane’ cinema.  I’d retained no memory of Bullitt, except for a vague recollection of cars going up and down hills, and nothing else in the programme appealed much.  I decided to give Peter Yates’s crime movie another go:  at least nowadays, if I’m very bored, I’ve no compunction about walking out of a film, however highly rated.  Bullitt revisited was a surprise:  I enjoyed it a lot.

    Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is a San Francisco police lieutenant.  Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) gives Bullitt and his team the job of keeping watch on Chicago mobster Johnny Ross during the weekend preceding Ross’s appearance as a witness before a Senate committee on organised crime, scheduled for the Monday.  It’s not too clear what Ross is expected to tell the committee or who Chalmers is exactly – a senator, an attorney? – but he clearly expects everyone to do as he says, which Bullitt refuses to do.  Ross is apparently shot in a San Francisco hotel room and dies in hospital.  To cut a long story short (it’s not worth getting into detail), it turns out that Ross has duped Chalmers, who in turn has instructed Bullitt to guard a man who’s a doppelganger for the mobster.  The real Johnny Ross (Pat Renella) means to fly out to Europe on the Sunday evening.  Bullitt and his right-hand man, Delgetti (Don Gordon), intercept the plane before it takes off from San Francisco.  Ross jumps out but Bullitt pursues him across the airfield and, in a confrontation at gunpoint in a crowded passenger terminal, shoots him dead.  Chalmers, thoroughly thwarted, is driven away.

    The screenplay, by Alan R Trustman and Harry Kleiner, is adapted from a novel, Mute Witness, by Robert L Pike.  For the most part, the dialogue is tersely serviceable – Peter Yates puts it to good use anyway.  The main character’s name is almost a spoof – exactly what a tough, uncompromising cop should be called – but Steve McQueen makes him interesting.  McQueen’s high star wattage and minimal acting style are a strong combination here:  despite some outlandish plotting, Bullitt is professionally convincing.  McQueen never grandstands.  Well aware he’s not too expressive vocally, he does a great deal through his movements and with his eyes.  When Bullitt eventually tells Chalmers, ‘I don’t like you’, the line is such an understatement that it’s very funny.  Robert Vaughn had been developing a promising career in cinema by the time he was diverted to Man from U.N.C.L.E. duties, on the big screen and the small, for much of the 1960s.  Vaughn overdoes Chalmers’ nasty suavity – he’s too deliberately theatrical – although the film does need him, as Bullitt’s chief antagonist.  There’s some excellent naturalistic playing in smaller parts from Don Gordon and Robert Duvall, as a cab driver (shortly before the roles – in M*A*S*H (1970) ahead of The Godfather (1972) – that changed his life).

    It doesn’t do to be too nostalgic about Bullitt.  These were the days when the hero’s girlfriend’s function was chiefly decorative.  Although the beautiful Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset) is supposedly an architect, it’s a while before she has anything more to do than lie in bed with Frank then saunter through his apartment in a pyjama jacket, asking if she can fix him breakfast (‘Just coffee’ is the reply).  When they drive to a hotel and discover the corpse of a garroted woman there, Cathy suddenly comes out with a morally urgent speech that’s all the more phony thanks to Jacqueline Bisset’s elocuted delivery.  Cathy tells Frank that he lives ‘in a sewer’ (an amusing coincidence hearing the phrase again so soon:  only two weeks ago, Zoë Saldaña’s lawyer character in Emilia Pérez described her professional life in the same terms).  She concludes with the agonised question, ‘What will happen to us in time?’  Frank’s gnomic reply – ‘Time starts now’ – appears to settle their differences.  At the end, when the crime action’s done, Frank returns to his apartment.  Cathy’s asleep in bed, waiting for him to join her there.

    Even so, there’s so much in Peter Yates’s direction that is now refreshing.  The city’s steep gradients instantly became the film’s signature image but Yates creates plenty more absorbing settings – hospital corridors at dead of night, San Francisco streets coming to life next morning, a store where Bullitt picks up a stack of TV dinners (as if Cathy isn’t going to come up with something better …).  Descriptions of surgical and police procedure have a nearly documentary realness but there’s always more going on in them.  A forensic pathologist, examining the corpse that isn’t Johnny Ross, speaks his report into a dictaphone while taking the corpse’s fingerprints; Bullitt and Chalmers are at the margins of this morgue scene, saying nothing but telling us plenty through the looks they exchange.  Airline passengers caught up in the climactic shootout express their horror but continue to gawp at the bodies of Ross and the officer he shot dead moments before Bullitt shot him.  What’s striking is that, high octane as Bullitt‘s set pieces may be, these are far more rationed than the almost non-stop ‘highlights’ of a present-day film – which isn’t an action film as such – like Anora.  Lalo Schifrin’s score for Bullitt is pretty generic but Yates uses this also sparingly and effectively.  Although Frank P Keller no doubt won the Best Film Editing Oscar because of the car chase, his cutting of the film is often more unobtrusively excellent.

    So how is the great chase, the hero’s car pursued by one with a pair of mob hitmen in it?  I can’t really judge except to say that I felt more involved in Bullitt‘s other, car-less chases – Bullitt running after an assassin down flights of hospital stairs or tracking Ross across the airfield to the terminal (although this goes on a bit too long).  A decade later, Peter Yates would make a better vehicular movie – about a cycle race, and real human relationships into the bargain.  I still prefer to remember Yates as the director of Breaking Away (1979) but Bullitt serves as a decent commemoration of his talents – and the talents of Steve McQueen.

    21 November 2024

  • Bird

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrea Arnold (2024)

    Andrea Arnold made her film-making debut with Wasp (2003), a short that won her an Oscar.  Her first documentary was Cow (2021).  Now Bird takes its place in Arnold’s cinematic animal kingdom.  At the start of the film, the main character, Bailey, smiles fondly at a seagull that lands near to where she’s standing.  As dive-bombing greedy guts, seagulls get quite a bad press so Bailey’s reaction may be a hint that she hasn’t much else to smile about, and so it proves.  A mixed-race twelve year old, she lives with her elder brother and their father in a squat somewhere in present-day North Kent.  She has three younger half-sisters, who are with their and Bailey’s mother in a house in another rundown area; the mother’s current, violently abusive boyfriend is also in residence there.  Bailey’s parents are both drug users – the father is perpetually hyped up, the mother groggy.  Her brother, Hunter, belongs to a local group of teenage vigilantes, sorting out things the police won’t deal with.  But that momentary friendly meeting with the seagull anticipates a more important encounter that soon follows for Bailey – with a solitary thirty-something man, who calls himself Bird.

    There’s plenty more animal life on evidence in the film – and on film within Arnold’s film.  Bailey’s constant companion is her iPhone.  She uses its camera to record horrors – one of Hunter’s vigilante attacks, her mother’s boyfriend’s threats against Bailey and her sisters – but, more often, to photograph the natural world:  crows or gulls on the wing, a horse in a field, a butterfly that lands on her finger.  At one point, Arnold inserts a desolate montage of shots that includes a dead bluebottle.  Bailey’s father is known as Bug:  his upper body, exposed most of the time he’s on screen, is covered with insect tattoos.  His latest barmy get-rich-quick scheme centres on a frog:  Bug’s going to persuade it to ooze sellable hallucinogenic slime (by playing it Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’).  The latest bone of contention between Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and Bug (Barry Keoghan) is his decision to marry Kayleigh (Frankie Box), his girlfriend of three months.  Bailey tells Bug she’s not going to the wedding, certainly not as a bridesmaid wearing the purple-and-white leopard-print jumpsuit that he and Kayleigh present her with.  Eventually, though – the wedding party is the story’s finale – Bailey does attend, and in the jumpsuit.  A fox also wanders into the celebrations.  Briefly but crucially, so does Bird (Franz Rogowski).

    The film is itself a strange, hybrid creature – a piece of magical/kitchen-sink realism.  Bailey hasn’t a bed of her own, just a sleeping bag.  A thin curtain separates her space from Hunter’s.  She can hear his phone conversation with his girlfriend, asking anxiously when she had her last period; a moment later, Bailey is bleeding from her first period.  As for Bird’s habitat, he seems to spend nights as well as days on the roof of an apartment building.  The slightly ragged kilt he wears sometimes suggests feathers.  Bailey’s mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), and her vicious boyfriend, Skate (James Nelson-Joyce), split but he soon returns to menace Peyton and the children.  Bird turns up, sprouting huge dark wings – and talons with which he attacks Skate, who disappears from the film.  The household’s pet dog that Skate had apparently killed now returns, alive and well.

    Arnold’s staging of the extraordinary events in Bird is more impressive than the apparently realistic, somewhat clumsy scenario she has devised to propel the story.  Bird tells Bailey that he and his parents used to live in the flat above the one where Bailey’s mother and grandmother lived; his father disappeared when Bird was still a young child; Bird, after flying the nest himself a few years later, lost touch with his mother.  Bailey goes to ask her mother if she remembers this family and the name of the man who was Bird’s father:  zonked as she is, Peyton quickly comes up with a name; Bailey and Bird (somehow) track this man down, although the interview with him doesn’t lead anywhere.

    There’s a larger problem with Bird’s realistic aspect.  From Wasp onwards, Andrea Arnold has been interested in showing the possibilities of splendour as well as misery in the lives of people deprived of love or money or both.  Here, though, the social conditions and bad habits of the characters are grimly dominant to a degree that makes the film’s transcendent elements uncomfortably fanciful – albeit Arnold knows from personal experience much of what she’s showing.  She was born (in 1961) to teenage parents, who separated when she was very young, and was raised on a Dartford council estate.  Bug and Peyton, who look to be in their late twenties, have a teenage son and a nearly teenage daughter:  Hunter (Jason Buda) wants his pregnant girlfriend to have the baby she’s expecting but Bug urges his son not to repeat the mistakes he made.  This sudden access of responsible parenting, which comes out of nowhere, seems meant to confirm that Bug, though an alarmingly loose cannon, is also a decent, loving father – it’s just his unfortunate socio-economic circumstances that get in the way.  It sounds like a positive that Arnold wants to show all her characters worthy of sympathetic interest but her generosity doesn’t extend to Skate.  It seems arbitrarily unjust for her to include someone as simply blameworthy as this in the set-up – isn’t Skate also the product of an unenviable background?

    In BFI’s screenings handout, programmer Kimberley Sheehan rhapsodises about Bird as ‘warm’ and ‘exuberant’; she refers to ‘the details of working-class communities’ captured by the film.  There may no denying the existence of communities like this one but to imply, as Sheehan does, that it’s typical is outrageously insulting to working-class communities more generally.  Arnold describes a part of North Kent where there appear to be no schools or contraceptives or people in employment.  The young vigilantes’ claim that the police do nothing is taken as read:  no one in Bird tries phoning 999.  It’s maybe the film’s non-realistic parts that allow the likes of Kimberley Sheehan to feel comfortable writing as she does.  Bird enters Bailey’s life when she wakes up from sleeping in a field to see him standing before her.  He exits after partnering her in a dance at Bug and Kayleigh’s wedding reception and assuring Bailey that everything will be all right.  Is much of what we’re seeing just Bailey’s imagination – is Bird the fantasy figure she needs in her life at this particular stage of it, in order to come through?  Nonsensical as this may sound, does interpreting Arnold’s film in this way help to make even the brute facts of Bailey’s existence less troubling?

    Although Bailey looks older than twelve, newcomer Nykiya Adams actually was that age when Bird was shot in mid-2023.  It’s right enough that Bailey has to seem mature beyond her years:  she’s as protective as she can be to her younger siblings and her feckless mother.  The girl is, of course, vulnerable too:  she seems all the more vulnerable, as well as more tomboyish, when she decides to have her hair cut.  Nykiya Adams has a directness that’s very likeable.  Barry Keoghan’s Bug is the latest impressive addition to his gallery of dynamic oddballs.  (There’s an in-joke reference in Bird, by the way, to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’:  Saltburn was in the can by the time the film was shot.).  Arnold handles the whole cast well, although Jasmine Jobson’s Peyton stands out as too acted, and thereby a bit incongruous.  Bird is saved by the amazingly versatile Franz Rogowski in the title role.  Following on from his admirably complex portrait of the protagonist in Sebastian Meise’s fine drama Great Freedom (2021), Rogowski made his character in Ira Sachs’ Passages (2023) potently hateful, despite the film’s stupidity.  In Bird, his unusual looks and speech, and extraordinarily authentic gentleness, are a remarkable combination.  Rogowski’s acting is completely natural yet he’s highly charismatic.  Bird is both as fragilely human and as out of this world as Andrea Arnold’s film needs him to be.

    15 November 2024

     

Posts navigation