Saturday, July 3, 2021

Three Beautiful Things 07/02/2021: My Travel Plans Change, *Cinema Verite*, Watching *The French Connection*

 1.  I'm not sure I ever documented in this blog that I am not, it turns out, traveling to Baltimore nor to Newark this weekend. Last weekend, a turn of events occurred regarding Ellie's enrollment in a day care and so she will stay home for the next couple of months or so. Debbie and I didn't really even have to talk about whether Debbie would stay in Valley Cottage and continue to care for Ellie -- it was a given, from both of our points of view, that Debbie would stay.  

Today, Debbie and I were in touch with each other a lot. She drove Jack and Olivia to Kingston, NY so the kids could spend a few hours learning about sailing on the Hudson River. Debbie sent me pictures and videos of the splendor of the river and the area around Kingston and her excited commentary.  The day before she had taken Jack and Olivia to a science center in Jersey City. She is very happy with how it feels to drive our new Camry. She likes how well she can see out of it, its comfort, and the way the car handles. 

2. I couldn't, and didn't want to, shake off the impact Minnie and Moscowitz had on me Thursday. I went online and did more reading about John Cassavetes as a filmmaker and one salient point about his approach came back to me. Cassavetes was devoted to making movies in the style of documentaries. My reading reminded me of the term for this approach: cinema verite. Cassavetes wanted to make movies that went against the grain of slicker looking studio productions. He worked with small budgets. He filmed on location, often using hand held cameras, so that we, as viewers, feel we are watching action unfold in real time. We get drawn into the jostling and noise of bars. We feel like we are in diners, coffee shops, ice cream shops, apartments, and the front seat of the movie's vehicles. 

Cassavetes not only created immediacy in the locales of his movies, but also in the behavior of his characters. Emotions erupt. Fists fly. Characters' responses and reactions to each other are fluid, often quick to change, in short, they seem actual, not artificially created. 

At some time in my love of movies, I knew all of this was true about John Cassavetes' approach to movies, but it wasn't what was on my mind as I watched Minnie and Moscowitz. I was responding viscerally to the things I wrote about yesterday -- especially the verbal and physical assaults and the overbearing, immature, and controlling nature of the male characters in the movie.

Today, with some distance, I thought more -- and appreciated -- Cassavetes' commitment to cinema verite and his drive to make movies unlike what the studios were producing.

3. So, this evening, I retired to the Vizio room, cooled off by eating a Klondike ice cream bar, and flipped on one of the most famous of all movies made in the style of cinema verite: The French Connection.

As I watched this movie,  pleasant memories cropped up that took me back to my sophomore year at North Idaho College and a year long course I took in modern literature, taught by Virginia Tinsley-Johnson. That course introduced me to the concept of the anti-hero, a character who, like Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) in The French Connection, battles to triumph over evil, but, in doing so, is not virtuous -- in fact, the anti-hero often employs the same kinds of violence, rule breaking, and sociopathy practiced by his adversaries in order to vanquish them. 

In short, as a cop on special assignment in the Narcotic Division, Popeye Doyle is a thug looking to bring down thugs. He's quick tempered, obsessive, amoral, racist, and cruel -- even sadistic. 

So, while Gene Hackman's performance riveted me, I was not riveted to Popeye Doyle. Yes, he is the story's hero, but a hero created to confuse our sense of right and wrong, not clarify it.

I am all but certain that the only time I ever watched this movie was on my old Betamax back in Spokane sometime between 1982-84. 

It didn't stick with me. 

Tonight, though, I kept thinking about how this role and Gene Hackman's role in The Conversation paralleled each other in the way that both Popeye Doyle and Harry Caul are so obsessive. This point of contact between the two movies was most vivid as Popeye Doyle oversaw the disassembling, in a police garage, of the Lincoln Continental that had been used to transport heroin from France to New York City. In much the same way that Harry Caul, certain that his apartment is bugged, tears the whole place apart, Popeye Doyle insists that every component of this luxury car be taken apart. He's obsessed with the idea that the heroin is hidden somewhere in the car. 

When I saw The French Connection before, I hadn't yet visited New York City. More than anything else, I think I most loved this movie for its portrayal of New York City.  The movie opened up to me a New York City that I'll never know, for better or worse. Action took place in various places in Manhattan and Brooklyn, on trains, in subway stations and on subway trains, abandoned warehouses, in vacant lots, and in hotels, delis, and one fine dining restaurant, too. Most of these places have been replaced, cleaned up, or removed. It's inevitable that these changes would take place. I'm grateful we have them on film in this movie. 

I interrupted my viewing of the movie and went online to a blog called Scouting New York. It's maintained by a movie location scout and, with pictures, he draws contrasts between places we see in New York movies and what's at those places now. 

I loved going through his five pages of pictures of locations where scenes from The French Connection were filmed and looking at what's at those place in 2014, when he posted his study of this movie. 

So, in the end, the way William Friedkin shot this movie in the style of cinema verite definitely enhanced the action, gave the movie its dirty, steamy feel, and gave us, as viewers, the sense that we were watching the procedure to arrest these drug dealers happening in real time.

But, for me, this style of filmmaking made the city itself not just a character in the movie, but the main character. I thought the urban details, the dives, the street hockey game, the view of the Williamsburg Bridge from Ratner's, a dairy deli in the Lower East Side, and all the rest of the NYC details gave this movie its character, intensified the experience of watching it, and was the major contributor to my enjoyment of The French Connection tonight. 


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