Times Mag: New Mexico Meth Yarn a Heartland Hit

The New York Times Magazine did an excellent article on "Breaking Bad" executive producer Vince Gilligan, and the twisted logic that makes the show's characters so enjoyable to watch. It's called "The Dark Art of 'Breaking Bad.'"
If the Times' online subscription technology prevents you from reading it, you can download this PDF file, which has the text but not the photos that went with the article.
The article points out that B.B. is a hit in the heartland of America, namely the Mid-West, but not so much on the two coasts. It's a "Red State" hit, you could say. Besides breaking standard TV taboos -- the heroes are meth dealers -- the writers have canned the heretofore iron-clad rule of series writing: The protagonist's character can never change. He's got to be the same person from beginning to end, or else the show's premise goes out the window. In B.B., our hero, Walt White, is the king of personality and morality disintegration. Yet we can't stop watching him.

'The Mechanic' Is Bronson At His Peak

They don’t make actors like Charles Bronson anymore. No one except Bronson, who shows his grizzled, hard-earned authority in every line in his face, could have played the role of Arthur Bishop in 1972’s “The Mechanic.” For those who haven’t seen it – or have only seen the remake starring Jason Stratham – you owe it to yourself to check out the original. It’s by far the better version.
Bishop is a hitman who pulls off highly planned assassinations, often designed to make the victim’s death seem to be an accident. Bishop is hoping to retire, but in his business that’s not such an easy thing to accomplish. He takes young sociopath Steve McKenna (Jan Michael Vincent) under his wing, and proceeds to teach him the killing business.
For an action movie – and that’s essentially what “The Mechanic” is – the film presents a hefty amount of character development, which is rare in this genre. In the early 1970s, studios had not yet given up on the idea of making good quality, character-driven films, even if they were crime movies. There’s also lots of explosions, gunfights, motorcycle jumping and car chases to offset the more cerebral junk. And check out the opening sequence – there’s no dialogue until 15 minutes and 10 seconds into the movie – for some great visual storytelling.
Bishop is an isolated figure who had a difficult childhood. Now, he seems to shun relationships by choice, and perhaps for professional reasons. His real-life wife, Jill Ireland, known here simply as “The Girl,” makes an appearance in a scene with an unexpected twist. We see that Bishop focuses all of his energy on his work. And he shows remarkable talent and creativity when it comes to wasting people.
It’s hard to talk about the movie without giving too much away, and the surprises in store for first-time viewers are good ones. One of the most exciting aspects of “The Mechanic,” to paraphrase crime novelist Jim Thompson, is that, “nothing is what it appears to be.”
While Bronson the actor did not have a wide range, the roles he played – often the enforcer or the vigilante – were perfect for him. He gives the impression of extreme mental focus on his target, and he maintains a strict code of behavior, usually outside the law. But the world he lives in suffers from moral decay, and we always sense that he’s going to do the right thing, even if he has to break a few rules, and maybe a few limbs and skulls, in the process.
This was the second movie of six that Bronson made with director Michael Winner. Prior to this film they made "Chato's Land" (1972), and after "The Mechanic" they collaborated on "The Stone Killer" (1973), "Death Wish" (1974), "Death Wish II" (1982) and "Death Wish 3" (1985).
“The Mechanic” was retitled “The Killer of Killers” at some point of its theatrical release, but thankfully has been returned to its original title. I suspect the title switch was supposed to show that Bronson only kills guys who need killing. No need to point that out. We already knew it.

Scorsese's Favorite Gangster Movies

James Cagney, “White Heat” (1949).

Director Martin Scorsese revisits 

crime pictures that most influenced him

Here are 15 gangster pictures that had a profound effect on me and the way I thought about crime and how to portray it on film. They excited me, provoked me, and in one way or another, they had the ring of truth.

I stopped before the ‘70s because we’re talking about influence here, and I was looking at movies in a different way after I started making my own pictures. There are many gangster films I’ve admired in the last 40 years — Performance, the Godfather saga, Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, The Long Good Friday, Sexy Beast, John Woo’s Hong Kong films.

The films below I saw when I was young, open, impressionable.

The Public Enemy (1931)

The shocking, blunt brutality; the energy of Cagney in his first starring role; the striking use of popular music (the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”)—this picture led the way for all of us.

Scarface (1932)

[Howard] Hawks’ film is so fast, so fluid, so funny, and so excitingly expressionistic. The audacity of it is amazing. It was finished by 1930, but it was so violent that it was held up by the censors.

Blood Money (1933)

Rowland Brown, a largely forgotten figure, made three tough, sardonic movies in the early ‘30s, each one very knowledgeable about city politics, corruption, the coziness between cops and criminals. This is my favorite. The ending is unforgettable.

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

In 1939, Raoul Walsh and Mark Hellinger’s classic was seen as a sendoff to the gangster genre, which seemed to have run its course. But it’s more than that. Much more. It plays like a journal of the life of a typical gangster of the period, and it covers so much ground, from the battlefields of France to the beer halls to the nightclubs, the boats that brought in the liquor, the aftermath of Prohibition, the whole rise and fall of ‘20s gangsterdom, that it achieves a very special epic scale—really, it was the template for GoodFellas and Casino. It also has one of the great movie endings.

Force of Evil (1948)

John Garfield is the mob lawyer, Thomas Gomez is his brother, a numbers runner who’s loyal to his customers and his employees. The conflict is elemental—money vs. family—and the interactions between the brothers are shattering. The only gangster picture ever done in blank verse, by Abraham Polonsky. Truthfully, it had as great an impact on me as Citizen Kane or On the Waterfront.

White Heat (1949)

Cagney and Walsh bit into this movie about a psychopathic gangster with a mother fixation as if they’d just abandoned a hunger strike. They intentionally pursued the madness of Cagney’s Cody Jarrett, a psychopathic gang leader with a mother complex. The level of ferocity and sustained energy is breathtaking, and it all comes to a head in the scene where Cagney goes berserk in the dining hall… which never fails to surprise me.

Night and the City (1950)

Desperation, no holds barred. We all loved and admired Richard Widmark from his first appearance in Kiss of Death, but his performance as Harry Fabian marked us forever. As did the rest of this hair-raising picture set in post-war London, the first made by Jules Dassin after he escaped the blacklist.

Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954)

Jacques Becker, who had worked as Jean Renoir’s assistant, made this picture with Jean Gabin, about an aging mobster who is forced out of retirement to save his old partner. The style is elegant and understated, the aura of weariness and mortality extremely powerful.

The Phenix City Story (1955)

A completely unsentimental picture by Phil Karlson that closely follows the true story of wholesale corruption, intimidation, racism, and terrifying brutality in the once-notorious town of Phenix City, Alabama—where it was shot on location… in 10 days! Fast, furious, and unflinching.

Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955)

A beautifully made picture, in glorious color and Scope, directed by and starring Jack Webb as a cornet player in the ‘20s whose professional life is infiltrated and turned inside out by a Kansas City gangster (Edmund O’Brien). This kind of situation happened over and over again in the big-band years and later during the doo-wop era. It’s also at the center of Love Me or Leave Me, another tough Scope musical made around the same time.

Murder by Contract (1958)

A highly unusual, spare, elemental picture made on a low budget by Irving Lerner—a lesson in moviemaking. It’s about a hired gunman (Vince Edwards), and it’s from his point of view. The scenes where he’s alone in his apartment preparing for a hit were very much on my mind when we made Taxi Driver, and we studied the haunting guitar score and its role in the action when we were working on the music for The Departed with Howard Shore. For me, an inspiration.

Al Capone (1959)

This sharp, spare low-budget film by Richard Wilson, one of Orson Welles’ closest collaborators, deserves to be better known. Rod Steiger is brilliant as Capone—charming, boorish, brutal, ambitious. There’s not a trace of sentimentality. Wilson also made another striking crime film, Pay or Die, about the Black Hand in Little Italy right after the turn of the century.

Le Doulos (1962)

The French master Jean-Pierre Melville, a close student of American moviemaking, made a series of genuinely great, extremely elegant, intricate, and lovingly crafted gangster pictures, in which criminals and cops stick to a code of honor like knights in the age of chivalry. This is one of the best, and it might be my personal favorite.

Mafioso (1962)

A transplanted northerner living up north with his wife and family (the great Alberto Sordi) goes home to Sicily, and little by little, gets sucked back into the old loyalties, blood ties, and obligations. It starts as a broad comedy. It gradually becomes darker and darker… and darker, and by the end you’ll find the laughs catching in your throat. One of the best films ever made about Sicily.

Point Blank (1967)

This was one of the first movies that really took the storytelling innovations of the French New Wave—the shock cuts, the flash-forwards, the abstraction—and applied them to the crime genre. Lee Marvin is Walker, the man who may or may not be dreaming, but who is looking for vengeance on his old partner and his former wife. Like Burt Lancaster in the 1948 I Walk Alone, another favorite, he can’t get his money when he comes out of jail and enters a brave new corporate world. John Boorman’s picture re-set the gangster picture on a then-modern wavelength. It gave us a sense of how the genre could pulse with the energy of a new era.

RIP Peter Falk, TV's Columbo

Actor Peter Falk, who was best known for his role as "Columbo" has died, according to a statement released by his family. "Falk died peacefully at his Beverly Hills home in the evening of June 23. He was 83. I always enjoyed the show, and have been re-watching it in recent months via Netflix streaming. The great thing about the "Columbo" show was the character himself. Falk played the unpolished L.A.P.D. detective with a huge humanitarian streak. The show always followed the same structure: Each week we'd see the perpetrator commit a murder and try to cover it up, step by step. No mystery as to who did the deed. The puzzle was figuring out how the lawbreaker tripped himself up. Columbo would without fail find the one mistake and bring the perp to justice. Better still, the unassuming Columbo would invariably be pitted against a pompous, wealthy villain who would patronize the blue-collar detective and greatly underestimate his abilities. Columbo always nailed the self-important jerk. Great stuff. Wish there were more like it.

The Bin Laden of Boston Finally Nabbed ... In L.A.

Just for the record, I had no prior knowledge of the whereabouts of James "Whitey" Bulger when he was arrested by the FBI just a few miles from my home. The former Boston gang leader had been on the FBI's most wanted list for 15 years until he was apprehended yesterday in Santa Monica. He's going to Federal Court in downtown L.A. today, maybe even as I write this. In this video, some folks from Whitey's old neighborhood, "Southie," (South Boston) react to the arrest.
This marks the end of an era for organized crime in Boston. Whitey was the last of the old guard. He was the inspiration for Frank Costello, the role Jack Nicholson played in Martin Scorsese's "The Departed." There are also several books written about the legendary criminal. An excellent read is "Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The FBI and A Devil's Deal," by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill.
Authorities will want to discuss with Whitey the 19 murders he is alleged to have committed or ordered. Stay tuned.

‘Breaking Bad’: Life and Meth in New Mexico

I finally saw the complete third season of AMC’s terrific series, “Breaking Bad,” hands down my favorite TV program of the past several years. In fact, I’ve got to say that BB might be the best thing on the tube – ever.
I hear your chiding. “Bold statement.”
Settle down and listen.
For it’s unpredictable twists, as well as the amount of heart the show displays, there are few, if any, that are better.
There’s more to talk about in this show than a mere blog posting can accommodate, from the protagonist, Albuquerque every-man Walt White’s relationship with his cohort, Jesse Pinkman, to his deteriorating marriage, and relationship with his handicapped teenaged son.
Bryan Cranston, who plays our anti-hero Walt White, achieves the near impossible (SPOILERS HERE, but if you haven’t heard, then you’ve been living in a Pakistani compound), he’s a likable guy who happens to be a meth manufacturer and dealer. It’s an incredible feat to make this work, but somehow Cranston does. This also speaks to the power of the “Breaking Bad” writers, who take hard-to-like characters and somehow make us root for them. (Another spoiler follows. If that’s a problem you should have already stopped reading.) The show’s conceit is that Walt suffers from terminal cancer. He’s got a handicapped son, a mortgage and a wife, and aside from being a high school chemistry teacher, he works a part-time job as a car wash attendant. And in economically broken America of the 2010s, he can no longer provide for his family.
We aren’t supposed to think, “So, under those circumstances, who WOULDN’T deal meth. Walt is a flawed character. He may be the dumbest genius we’ve ever seen on TV. He makes stupid choices, even though his heart is in the right place. Ultimately, we must feel sorry for his unsuspecting family.
Jesse, his partner in crime, is a former high school pupil of Walt’s, and a first-class screw-up. Together, they make beautiful music. Jesse knows the meth business – at least, somewhat – and Walt knows chemistry.
The sharpies and pros that they meet up with in the course of trying to run an illegal business are an education for Walt. Less so for Jesse, who has seen his share of drug-addled opportunists.
By Season 3, we see the transformation of Walt, from high school teacher to “gangsta.” And his mild-manner wife, Skyler, loses much of her innocence, as well.
There are too many sub-plots to discuss here, from the local drug king pin who seems to be a meek businessman, to the two strangely mute cousins who cross the border into Gringo-Land to raise a bit of hell with the locals and pursue Walt. I can only suggest that you see it, starting with Episode 1, Season 1. Immediately.

IMDB Hit Parade Names Top 50 Noirs

IMDB.com lists the top 50 films noir. The poll, it seems, is based on IMDB readers' ratings of noir titles. Some got a lot more votes than others, but apparently that doesn't matter. It's the number of rating stars the film gets. The choices are all good ones, but I'd like to have seen others, "D.O.A." for instance, make the cut. Which films do you think should have been included in a top 50 noir list?

1. 8.7 Sunset Blvd. (1950) 63,840
2. 8.6 Double Indemnity (1944) 43,265
3. 8.5 The Third Man (1949) 57,096
4. 8.3 The Maltese Falcon (1941) 57,659
5. 8.3 Touch of Evil (1958) 36,766
6. 8.3 Strangers on a Train (1951) 39,754
7. 8.2 Notorious (1946) 35,469
8. 8.2 The Big Sleep (1946) 32,415
9. 8.2 Ace in the Hole (1951) 8,418
10. 8.2 White Heat (1949) 11,181
11. 8.2 Rififi (1955) 9,629
12. 8.2 The Night of the Hunter (1955) 29,596
13. 8.2 The Killing (1956) 28,508
14. 8.2 Sweet Smell of Success (1957) 10,018
15. 8.2 Laura (1944) 15,424
16. 8.1 Shadow of a Doubt (1943) 23,601
17. 8.1 Out of the Past (1947) 11,770
18. 8.0 In a Lonely Place (1950) 7,256
19. 8.0 Night and the City (1950) 3,863
20. 8.0 The Big Heat (1953) 7,320
21. 8.0 Key Largo (1948) 16,042
22. 8.0 The Killers (1946) 6,569
23. 7.9 The Asphalt Jungle (1950) 9,372
24. 7.9 Mildred Pierce (1945) 8,281
25. 7.9 Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) 9,094
26. 7.9 Scarface (1932) 10,437
27. 7.9 Pickup on South Street (1953) 4,583
28. 7.9 Body and Soul (1947) 1,813
29. 7.9 Scarlet Street (1945) 4,179
30. 7.9 Bob le Flambeur (1956) 3,674
31. 7.8 The Set-Up (1949) 3,449
32. 7.8 Gun Crazy (1950) 3,670
33. 7.8 Thieves' Highway (1949) 1,742
34. 7.8 The Narrow Margin (1952) 2,552
35. 7.8 The Woman in the Window (1944) 3,925
36. 7.8 Nightmare Alley (1947) 2,862
37. 7.8 The Letter (1940) 4,251
38. 7.8 Gilda (1946) 9,817
39. 7.7 The Lady from Shanghai (1947) 9,007
40. 7.7 The Big Clock (1948) 2,638
41. 7.7 The Naked City (1948) 3,716
42. 7.7 Brute Force (1947) 2,553
43. 7.7 Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) 2,324
44. 7.7 Kiss Me Deadly (1955) 6,747
45. 7.7 Murder, My Sweet (1944) 4,314
46. 7.6 Spellbound (1945) 15,974
47. 7.6 Detective Story (1951) 2,309
48. 7.6 This Gun for Hire (1942) 2,685
49. 7.6 Leave Her to Heaven (1945) 3,457
50. 7.6 High Sierra (1941) 5,853