Tag Archives: James Woods

M Emmet Walsh and Blood Simple

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Walsh“Well Ma’am if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.” 

The late Roger Ebert called it the “Stanton-Walsh Rule”. Any movie “featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M.Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can’t be altogether bad”.

I’ve always liked Walsh as a character actor. But it was only when I recently re-watched the Cohen Bother’s Blood Simple after many year, that I realised just how on the money Ebert was.

Walsh plays a seedy PI called Loren Visser. Visser hired by a rich Texan bar owner, Julian (Dan Hedaya), to kill his wife, Abby (a very young Francis McDormand), who is cheating with one of Julian’s employees, Ray (John Getz).

If you haven’t seen Blood Simple, it won’t spoil your viewing pleasure too much if I tell you Visser kills Julian, tries to frame Abbey for the murder, and all manner of hell is unleashed.

On one level, Blood Simple comes across as a fairly standard small town film noir. Characters chase their own shadows and do very bad things in an effort to extract themselves from an increasingly fraught and dangerous situation.

What really raises it about the pack of similar films is the Cohen brother’s signature brand of dark weirdness, which managers to be both restrained and shocking. … Read more

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Posted in 70s American crime films, 80s American crime films, Film Noir, James Woods, M Emmet Walsh

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Hunger and other films about doing time

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 10 Comments

I haven’t spent a lot of time in prisons and don’t want to. But I won’t deny they make tremendous story settings.

This was brought home to me again over the weekend after watching Hunger, Steve McQueen’s 2008 depiction of the final months in the life of IRA militant Bobby Sands. Sands and 9 other IRA inmates staved themselves to death in 1981 in protest against the Thatcher government’s insistence of treating them as common criminals rather than political prisoners.

I recently reviewed Adrian McKinty’s book The Cold Cold Ground, which dealt with a Catholic cop in a Protestant neighbourhood trying to solve a murder against the backdrop of the civil unrest unleashed by the hunger strikes.

Hunger is about what happened inside the walls of the Maze Prison. It’s a visceral, blistering film, all the more so because it’s made with incredible slight of hand.

It opens with the arresting image of a pair of bloody knuckles being soaked in water. These belong to one of the prison guards and were acquired administering incredibly savage beatings to IRA prisoners in response to their “blanket and dirty protests” in which the prisoners refused to wash and smeared shit over the walls of their prison cells. The guard is subsequently murdered in the aged care home where his mother lives, one of 16 guards killed by paramilitaries in retaliation for the treatment of the prisoners.… Read more

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Posted in 60s American crime films, 70s American crime films, 80s American crime films, Adrian McKinty, Australian crime film, Bryan Brown, Burt Lancaster, Film Noir, James Woods, Michael Fassbender, Stuart Rosenberg

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Split Image: James Woods and how to do sleaze redux

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

It’s taken a while, but last night I concluded my James Woods festival by finally watching the 1982 film Split Image.

I won’t say what I had to do to track down a copy of this little known gem. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy. But it was worth it.

Split Image, in which Woods plays a cult deprogrammer, confirms the central thesis of my previous post on this actor, that no one does sleaze as good as Woods, especially at the height of his career in the greed is good eighties.

Split Image occupies an interesting position in the Woods oeuvre, sandwiched between Fast Walking earlier the same year (Woods as a sleazy prison guard who gets mixed up in a neo-Nazi plot to murder a radical black nationalist) and Videodrome in 1983 (Woods as sleazy soft porn cable TV producer).

The plot is relatively simple. Danny Stetson (Michael O’Keefe) is a talented but highly-strung aspiring Olympic gymnast, from a loving but over achieving family, presided over by patriarch Kevin Stetson (Brian Dennehy).

He meets fresh-faced cult devotee Rebecca (Karen Allen, who played  the love interest in two Indiana Jones films) and is sucked into visiting Homeland, an alternative community run by Kirkander (Peter Fonda). It doesn’t take long before Danny has been renamed Joshua and chanting “make it perfect” with the rest of them.… Read more

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Posted in 80s American crime films, Crime film, James Woods

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Fast Walking: James Woods and how to do sleaze

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

Ever since I posted on the underrated movie Cop a few months ago, I’ve been engaged in my own James Woods film festival.

As I wrote at the time, Cop is a great little neo noir that combines the rogue cop, police procedural and serial killer genres. But it works so well due to the casting of James Woods as the central character of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a sleazy burnt out LAPD homicide dick trying to track down a maniac no one else thinks exists.

Watching and re-watching Wood’s films only confirms his status as the original hard-boiled bad lieutenant. With his whippet thin body and bedroom eyes, his looks are more lounge lizard than movie star perfect. And his permanently up turned lip and slightly bad skin make him look like a man with a bad past.

Starting with The Onion Field (1979), in which he played a disturbed ex-con who panics one night when he and his partner are pulled over by cops and murders one of them, Woods went on to play some of the most repellent yet strangely charismatic sleazes on film.

Videodrome (1983): This early Cronenberg effort hasn’t dated in the slightest and Woods’ is in top form as sleazy soft porn cable TV producer, Max Renn.… Read more

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Posted in 70s American crime films, 80s American crime films, Crime film, James Woods

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Cop: is it the best movie ever made of a James Ellroy novel?

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

CopI’m going to go way out on a limb here, and say that in my opinion the relatively unknown movie Cop may just be the best adaptation of a James Ellroy book to hit the screen.

When I opened my recent review of the 1988 film Cop for Back Alley Noir’s Film Noir of the Week with that statement the response was interesting.

Some disagreed with the merits of my choice. Others felt the need to refer back to what the man himself, Ellroy, had said about the merits of the movies made of his books.

I did a quick search on what Ellroy has said on the subject before submitting the review. There’s a lot of contradictory quotes out there. Whether this is because he’s changed his mind a lot or he’s out for a headline, well, I’ll let you all be the judge of that.

For me, the debate raised the interesting question of what value we should give to the opinion of an artist in one area (writing), when their work is translated into another (film).

I am a huge Ellroy fan and I think Cop works as a movie precisely because the book is not a dense, labyrinthine crime epic in the vein of LA Confidential and the Black Dahlia (both of which failed, Black Dahlia much more so, in the almost Herculean task of transposing Ellroy’s words onto the screen).… Read more

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Posted in 80s American crime films, Charles Durning, James Ellroy, James Woods, Neo Noir

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