Category Archives: 1990s American crime films

Parker on the screen #5: Payback Straight Up (2006)

Posted on December 13, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

The idea to review every screen iteration of Donald Westlake’s crime character, Parker, originated much earlier in the year, when Melbourne was in deep in winter and the middle of hard Covid lockdown. Melbourne is out of that lockdown now and summer is here, and I am much busier, hence the delay since my last entry.

Anyway, back to it with the next Parker film, Brian Helgeland’s neo noir, Payback Straight Up (2006). This is retelling of the very first Parker novel, The Hunter, published in 1962 and, of course, first filmed by John Boorman as the immortal Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin (and which I wrote about on this site here on the 50th anniversary of the film).

Helgeland, who started out in the movie business as a scriptwriter, is not someone whose work I am particularly across. He did the script for the adaptation of Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential (1997), which I really liked. The same year he also performed wordsmith duty on the script for the simply abysmal post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner vehicle, The Postman. The 1999 film adaptation of The Hunter, titled Payback, was his first outing as a director (he also wrote the script) and by all accounts it was an exceptionally troubled shoot.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Crime fiction, Crime film, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Heist films, Neo Noir

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Projection Booth episode #495 :To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

Posted on November 26, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

I am thrilled to be co-hosting another episode of Mike White’s film podcast, The Projection Booth, this one on William Friedkin’s 1985 neo noir, To Live and Die in L.A. The film pits Treasury agent William Petersen as Richard Chance against Willem Dafoe as artist and forger Rick Masters, and is based on the novel of the same name by former US federal agent turned crime writer, Gerald Petievich. Along with my fellow co-host, Jedidiah Ayres, we were joined by the film’s editor, M. Scott Smith, and one of the its stars, Willem Dafoe.

We dive deep into this film, discussing the breathtaking work of To Love and Die in L.A.’s cinematography Robbie Muller and how the Friedkin demands complete suspension of disbelief from his audience in some many respects of the story and gets it.

We we also talk about the Wang Chung soundtrack, Los Angeles on the screen, how the film embodies the deregulated economic and political policies of the Reagan era, and how it relates to Friedkin’s broader ouvre and other America crime cinema, particularly the other film based on a Petievich book, Boiling Point (1993) and the Michael Cimino effort also released in 1985, Year of the Dragon.

The entire episode is online for your listening pleasure here.… Read more

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Posted in 1980s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Crime fiction, Crime film, Heist films, Neo Noir, William Friedkin

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Up periscope: a celebration of submarine cinema

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

I love a good submarine film. The claustrophobia of the confined setting, the tensions arising from a group of people having to co-exist and operate in a completely unnatural, extremely dangerous environment, is all pretty much guaranteed to hook me in every time.

I was reminded of this while I was watched the 2014 thriller Black Sea on the weekend. A hard as nails, embittered Scottish deep sea salvage expert, Robinson, (Jude Law), takes a job with a shadowy backer, to salvage hundreds of millions of dollars of gold rumoured to be in a sunken Nazi U-boat sitting on the bottom of the Black Sea. He has at his disposal a surplus communist era Russian submarine and recruits a fractious crew of washed up seafarers, half of whom are Russian because they are the only ones who know how to properly operate the vessel.

I don’t know why this film passed me by when it first came out but it ticked virtually every box on the my list of requirements for a good submarine film. The crew have to contend with a never ending series of life threatening technical and nautical challenges. Within the narrow confines of the aged submarine, the tensions between crew members ratchet up along ethnic grounds and how they will split up the gold.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Dystopian cinema, Ernest Borgnine, French cinema, Gregory Peck, Heist films, Jim Brown, Rock Hudson, Samuel Fuller, Sidney Poitier, Spies, War film

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Roy Scheider’s Last Embrace

Posted on June 29, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

This post is a short addendum to this piece I did on this site back in 2015 on the 5 great roles of Roy Scheider. I revisit these films every now and again and am always on the lookout for films I haven’t seen starring Scheider. So, when someone told me to check out Silence of the Lamb’s director Jonathan Demme’s thriller, Last Embrace, I was on it.

Last Embrace appeared in 1979, the same year as Scheider did his jaw dropping turn as the womanising, drug taking, dance instructor, Joe Gideon, in Bob Fosse’s All the Jazz. And, frankly, the two films couldn’t be more different.

Last Embrace sees the tanned, sinewy actor playing a character called Harry Hann, an agent for some shadowy unspecified US government intelligence agency. The film begins with Hann getting out of a sanatorium where he has been recuperating after the murder of his wife by unnamed assassins (look closely and you’ll see one of the killers is the late, great, Joe Spinell) in an attack that was obviously targeting him.

He makes his way back to New York City – nearly killing a civilian waiting for a train in PTSD flashback – and once there, goes to a makeup counter at Macy’s Herald Square, which is where he receives his assignments.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Crime film, Neo Noir, Roy Scheider

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Roger Donaldson double feature: Sleeping Dogs (1977) and Smash Palace (1981)

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

To the degree that I was familiar with the film career of director Roger Donaldson, it was probably because he made what I would argue is one of the best American thrillers of the eighties, No Way Out (1987).

Donaldson actually had a pretty lengthy and productive directorial career after he decamped to Hollywood in the early 1980s from his native New Zealand: The Bounty (1984), Marie (1985), Cocktail (1988 – a terrible but successful film which gets a pass from me only because it features another Antipodean who was making his way in the US film industry in the 1980s, Bryan Brown), the psychological thriller, White Sands (1992), the wonderful hot garbage that was his 1994 remake of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and the better than average action sci fi film, Species (1995).

But over the weekend I finally caught up with the two New Zealand films that Donaldson cut his teeth on as a director and which got him noticed internationally, Sleeping Dogs (1977) and Smash Palace (1981). I don’t want to go into too much detail but having finally watched them I wanted to write a little about them, because both of them are excellent.

Sleeping Dogs was Donaldson’s first film and tells the story of a loner, simply known as Smith (a very young Sam Neill), who is estranged from his family and living in a remote part of the country when he is reluctantly swept up in an underground revolutionary movement that is fighting against a right-wing dictatorial government that has taken over New Zealand.… Read more

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Posted in 1980s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Bryan Brown, Crime fiction and film from New Zealand, Dystopian cinema

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