Maverick (1994)

 

Place Your Brets

Maverick
USA 1994 Directed by Richard Donner
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This review contains a big
spoiler about a character from the outset.

Maverick was a big budget reboot, by director Richard Donner and actor Mel Gibson (the director/actor team of Lethal Weapon fame) of the classic James Garner small screen character of Bret Maverick, who had been in many iterations of the show (you can read my reviews of the various variants of Maverick here). And it’s kind of open to interpretation to just who Gibson is playing in this one as he’s called Bret Maverick and, just like Garner used to, provides a voice over narrative as he goes along on his adventure... although I could have honestly done without the added swearing here because it didn’t seem quite right sitting in the Maverick universe but, hey ho, I guess the writers maybe imagined it was edgy or something.

The thing is, though, James Garner also plays a major role in the movie, as a Marshall called Zane Cooper, which I’m assuming is an homage to the two Western writers Zane Grey and James Fenimore Cooper. However, at the end of the film he is revealed to also be a Maverick, running an elaborate con with his son, Bret. Now, you can either take that as he’s playing Pappy (as he did once in the original show where he played both father and son in one episode) and Gibson is the original Bret or, like me, despite the lack of timing continuity between pretty much every iteration of the show in various forms, you can interpret it as he’s still playing Bret Maverick and also called his son the same name. Either way, this is a fairly affectionate nod to the original show (asides from the swearing) and is a nice addition to the original stories.

It has a stellar cast such as Jodie Foster as the main romantic lead (another con woman and this is not unusual for what would have been an episode of Maverick), Alfred Molina as a villain and James Coburn in another prominent role in the last third of the movie. There are also a lot of old time cowboy show (and Maverick show) cameo appearances by various actors such as Leo Gordon (Big Mike in the original show and also one of the original series' writers) and Doug McLure, not to mention lots of uncredited cameos too, including Garner’s brother turning up once again, plus some country and western singers too, for some reason.

One cameo moment is wonderful when Danny Glover, Gibson’s co-star from the Lethal Weapon movies, comes face to face with Gibson while robbing a bank... and the music suddenly goes into a dead-on parody of Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton’s score for the Lethal Weapon films. That’s very nicely done.

Another great uncredited cameo, larger but still short, is the inclusion of a character played by Margot Kidder. Of course, Kidder also played James Garner’s regular love interest in his post-Maverick TV show Nichols (which I reviewed here) and it’s nice to see the two sharing the screen together again (come to think of it, she also worked for this particular director in her most famous role as Lois Lane in Superman The Movie and its sequels).

And, getting back to the musical cameos... Randy Newman’s score for the film incorporates a heroic melody line for Gibson’s Bret character that is almost, but not quite, an instrumental version of the shows original theme and song. It’s like he’s been asked to do it straight but delete one note and change two others and I can’t quite understand why because, well, Warners would surely have owned the rights to the music from the original show. Maybe, going with the idea that this was actually the original Bret Maverick’s son, the composer decided to make it a variant, possibly intending to bring the full version of Garner’s theme back later for... the big reveal. That doesn’t happen but, it’s quite close and fans of the old show will certainly hear the old theme in it when Gibson does anything heroic here.

And it’s a nice film with some interesting scenes, nice action and a real suspenseful finish to the big poker game near the end of the movie. It’s also very humorous, in exactly the way the original show was although, certainly Gibson’s young Bret is more willing to pull his guns out, it seems, than the original character was. There’s a big problem with the film though... and I’m not just talking about the waterwheel on the ferry changing speeds between long shot and close up in one scene either...

I’m sure the various plot twists... Jodie Foster actually after Maverick’s money whenever she can thieve it, the James Garner reveal, the Indian who turns out to be an old pal of Bret... would have seemed fresh or at least unpredictable to the younger segment of the audience who were unfamiliar with any of the various versions of the show over the years. Old hands at Bret’s game though, through Garner’s always pitch perfect and immensely entertaining portrayal, will see a lot of the reveals coming way before they happen because they’ve become almost cliché by this point in the franchise. So, yeah, I think this movie appeals to two different audiences but, luckily, it holds it own quite well and at least meets the expectations of an older and more familiar crowd.

Maverick, the movie version, is a real hoot, to be sure and definitely one to watch. It doesn’t come close, it has to be said, to many of the earlier versions of the character but, that’s okay, Gibson does well in the part, as does Foster and they’re both helped out tremendously, in my opinion, by the presence of James Garner returning, effectively, to his roots here. A lovely, romantic Western flavoured with just a favourable dash of its powerful legacy of ingredients. One to watch.

Nichols

 

Sans Sheriff

Nichols
Airdate: September 1971 - April 1972
Warner Brothers Region 1 DVD 24 Episodes

Warning: Some last episode spoilers.

Nichols was a one season TV series featuring James Garner as, arguably, the titular character (give me a sec, I’ll get back to that soon). It’s said the show struggled because it wasn’t just some kind of a rehash of his old Maverick character (which, admittedly, was amazing, I review various TV iterations of it here) with some new paint slapped on. Apparently the ratings were bad although, from what I can make out, a lot of people including Garner himself loved the show and, honestly, once it was cancelled, none of the programmes shown on the same channel from the following year did as well as Nichols so, yeah, they should have renewed it, I think.

The series remains a footnote in the annals of television history but it certainly shouldn’t be and perhaps that’s why there’s even a DVD edition of it. The show was certainly an unusual one and a cut above a lot of stuff that was airing at the time (and most stuff airing these days, to be fair).

Nichols is set in that transitionary period in the early 1900s when the Old West was just starting to get modernised and it was half in/half out of the barbaric and violent times of confrontation which delineated the two periods, to a certain extent. So it’s set in a small town where everyone carries their six shooter and goes to the local saloon for a drink but, at the same time, one of the main characters has a car and there are even airplanes featured in two episodes. Garner himself is more often than not on an early Harley Davison motor cycle rather than a traditional horse.

It starred James Garner as Nichols, who was a long serving soldier in the cavalry but who didn’t really like guns all that much and preferred to shy away from them due to the old truth that they tend to place you in more danger if you are carrying one. He was a good soldier but, at the start of the first episode, he sees a demonstration of a new type of Gatling gun which does untold damage to whatever it’s aimed at and, that’s enough for Nichols, he quits being a soldier and finally returns to his home town of... Nichols.

Yeah, okay, so the title of the show could be the character name and could be the name of the town, which is named after Nichol’s family who started the community many years before. However, when he gets back home, he finds his parents dead and his land grabbed. He no longer has ‘legal’ entitlement to his former home and property but, during the course of the first episode, the town’s matriarch Ma Ketcham, played superbly by Neva Patterson, cons Nichols into taking the sheriff’s job for the town. Patterson is one of a few, highly talented cast members who had regular recurring roles on the show.

The pick of the bunch for my money would be a pre-Superman Margot Kidder as the astonishingly beautiful Ruth, Nichol’s sometimes girlfriend and confidant. She actually does an amazing job in this and it’s the most sympathetic character I’ve seen her play. Then we have future The Rockford Files and Bret Maverick co-star Stuart Margolin as the slobby, cowardly deputy Mitch. Margolin would be alongside Garner often in the course of his television career and also went on to become a very good TV director with many Emmy award nominations to his name. And then there’s the local bully and half-villain, half ally character of Ketch, Ma Ketcham’s disappointing son, played by John Beck. Beck is a very under appreciated actor in my book, who readers might best know from his roles as Moonpie in Rollerball (reviewed here) and as one of the rebels in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Beck would also star in two episodes as pilot Orv, who looks no different from Ketch and the only eyebrows raised is when people say he looks like someone back in the town of Nichols. Go figure.

And yeah, it was a really unusual programme, mostly because it’s really well written and the plots don’t go anywhere near where you think they are going at the start of an episode. For the most part these are not the formulaic plots you would know from their appearances in various guises on other shows and quite often the obvious conclusion to the story comes half way through... and then it goes off on another tangent. There’s even, for instance, a story where the majority of it depict how Nichols and a young man are trying to figure out how to get a horse out of a basement they’ve been trapped in after an earthquake in a neighbouring town, without getting shot up by the local ruffians.

The pacing is gentle, a little like Maverick... but no less intriguing and it’s probably the most entertaining show that got aired that year. And it’s a shock somewhat when, presumably due to the pending cancellation, the writers decided to retool the show and make it into something that could be perceived as a more traditional show worth renewing. So something happens in the last episode that changes things slightly but at the same time, serves as a nice ending to the show if it didn’t get picked up again (which it obviously didn’t).

A shock because, in the last episode, before the pre-credits sequence is even done, Nichols is shot dead by a hoodlum in cold blood. After the credits of a smiling James Garner, we are at the wake in the local saloon and in walks... Nichols. Except it’s Nichol’s previously unheard of older brother, played also by James Garner and looking exactly the same apart from a big black moustache. He spends the last episode ensuring his brother’s killers are brought to justice and he’s offered the job of sheriff by Ma Ketcham at the end. He declines but says he might be back (so he could take over if a second series was requested) but... as it is he rides out of town at the end on his brother’s motorbike, passing a street sign reading ‘You are now leaving Nichols.’ It’s a lovely ending but it sure is a shame that the character I grew to love over the previous 23 episodes was buried in a hole in the ground before the opening credits were even rolling. However, it does give the show a sense of closure and that’s admittedly a lot more than most shows get.

Nichols is well worth a watch if you’re an admirer of the great James Garner and the ensemble cast do an amazing job, rising to the high quality of the writing and lifting it somewhat above the average TV fodder of the time. This might possibly rank somewhere in my top twenty best TV shows and it’s certainly something some of you might want to check out, I think.

Sisters (aka Blood Sisters)

De Palma, Sans Cheese

Sisters (aka Blood Sisters)
1973 USA 
Directed by Brian De Palma
Arrow BluRay Region B/DVD Region 2 Dual Edition

Warning: Spoilers stabbing you 
repeatedly as you bleed out on the floor...

The early part of the 1970s was the last big hurrah for American movies. You had Brian DePalma’s contemporaries, The New Hollywood Mavericks (as I think they were labelled back then) making their important, breakthrough films around this kind of time, give or take a few years. Directors such as Scorcese (Mean Streets), Spielberg (Jaws), Lucas (American Graffiti) and Coppola (The Godfather)... this was a big creative push which ushered in a brief but potent renaissance in American film making with lots of works by these directors having a lasting impact and influence on both American and International film. A legacy which is still being plundered to this day.

DePalma was no exception, of course, making great movies like this and Dressed To Kill, both of which owe a huge debt to Hitchcock’s Psycho and, of course, De Palma’s Obsession (a film which is quite reminiscent of Vertigo in some ways). Sisters is pretty much my favourite Brian De Palma movie. It comes from that great point in his career when he was experimenting with recycling Hitchcock tropes and motifs and then mixing them in with the kind of visual sensibility found in Italian giallo movies of that era.

Sisters tells the story of Dominique and Danielle (one living, one dead and both played by Margot Kidder) and it’s very much like Psycho in the fact that it starts out with a main protagonist, Philip (played by Lisle Wilson) who, like Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s seminal slasher, disappears from the narrative in a very sudden and brutal manner, once he’s been established for a while as the main lead. Philip is introduced, along with Danielle, as an unknowing participant in a TV game show called Peeping Toms. De Palma has always been considered a bit of a voyeuristic director due, I suspect, to the laid back and casual observational style of the kind of camerawork he employs in his movies. Slow, static or sometimes swooping along a track, it takes in everything and doesn’t necessarily stay with any one character for the bulk of his movies and Sisters is certainly no exception. So when we start off with a scene which is a “set up” for a voyeuristic dilemma, followed by the audience in the studio watching that, followed by us, the audience, watching that TV show presenting that footage... we get a whole voyeurism within voyeurism within voyeurism thing in the very first few minutes of this movie... just in case anybody was maybe missing one of De Palma’s key preoccupations at this point.

So let’s talk about blood and death.

The infamous “Birthday Cake” stab scene, where Philip has brought a cake back to Danielle’s apartment for her and her “sister”, who he heard talking through the wall earlier (not realising that Margot Kidder’s character was, without her even knowing it, talking to herself), is both shocking in its sudden opening slash (even if you are savvy enough to be expecting it on your first viewing) and, even by today’s standards, quite shockingly intense in both its brutality and its duration. After Philip is initially stabbed twice in a crossing blow at the top of one of his legs, near the groin, this is followed by a stab through the mouth which takes most of his left cheek out. As Dominique, brought into play in Danielle’s mind from the trauma of her sexual encounter with Philip from the night before,  drops the knife, which is sent spinning... she is clearly suffering from some kind of schizophrenic fit. All the while, Philip is very slowly crawling across the apartment floor towards the knife, expending all his energy on just trying to stay alive and not “bleed out” without a fight. When Dominique/Danielle notices this, though, she flings herself on him and starts stabbing him repeatedly in the back before spinning the knife away again. The twitching Phillip finally dies trying to write help on the window in his own blood... a murder which is witnessed, Rear Window style, by Jennifer Salt playing Grace Collier, the person who will take over the rest of the movie as the lead protagonist.

As we see the end and then aftermath and clean up of the murder from both her point of view and from the viewpoint of Danielle and her ex-husband, Emil, played by William Finley, we are introduced to what is a very early example of De Palma’s split screen technique. Of course, split screen was nothing new, but DePalma does use it a lot in his films to do things like, in this case, totally set up the character of Grace Collier via a feed of her newspaper columns, summing up her stance on life, while also getting the murder clean up out of the way simultaneously. He also uses it to build suspense, such as when Grace and the police narrowly miss Emil in a series of corridors, shown from two angles, as he escapes with the murder weapon and the bloody rags. Even at this early stage of his career, De Palma showed himself to be a master at this kind of thing.

Actually, the use of the split screen technique in this movie is very apt to push the concept of “doubling” and schizophrenia here and De Palma makes full use of this throughout. For instance, in one shot during this sequence, Danielle is looking at herself in a bathroom cabinet mirror on the left hand half of the screen... but the cabinet is made up of two doors and there is a split right down the centre of her face, which is a big visual clue thrown in the face of the audience about what is really going on here... the two characters inhabiting the mind of one body. Also, this means you basically have a split screen (the double doors) within a split screen, which is also visually interesting... this is all good stuff.

The other notable thing about the first murder sequence and, indeed, the whole movie, is Bernard Herrmanns absolute powerhouse scoring. The stab scene has already been visually pre-empted when Philip is getting the writing on the cake iced in a bakery and the angle at which the hands doing the icing makes it look very much like a knife stabbing downwards, as the lady behind the counter oozes the pinky red icing onto the white surface. It’s a phenomenal shot and Herrmann scores this with a child like motif which is reused in the immediate prelude to Margot Kidders stab-frenzy freak out, just before Herrmann segues into full on, in yer face, stab music mixed with weird moog synthesiser sounds, rivalling his earlier, more famous stab music for Hitchcock’s Psycho. I remember musicologist Royal S. Brown noting in an interview once, on a documentary about Herrmann, that the child like melody of the cake theme is replaced with an antagonistic childrens game melody “Nyah nyah nah, nyah nyah!” and this becomes very clear when you think about it. And, of course, this links in perfectly with the tone of the naive and child-like Danielle as compared to the aggressive mindset of the Dominique half of her brain.

There’s a lot going on in this movie and there are some great scenes which all involve the fact that Dominique and Danielle were siamese twins... until something happened and they had to be separated. There’s a very potentially confusing flashback scene which echoes the history of Margot Kidder’s role but it also doubles as a dream sequence for the Grace Collier character, who projects herself into the sequence by being Dominique in the shots. This is because Collier’s mind has, by this point, been rendered easy to manipulate and also provides De Palma with a great sequence, as well as a good conclusion for the camera in that she carries a certain memento of her experiences locked in her brain once the film is concluded. After the flashback/dream sequence plays out, we are then treated to a scene where Emil explains verbally the real history of the characters, in case there’s any confusion with the fact that Daniellle was indeed becoming Dominique at certain parts of the movie. This helps things considerably if you are still wondering how she can’t be two people and how she changed from one set of clothes from another and back again without changing her original “laying on the floor” position during the transition. I’m wondering if Emil’s explanation was either added on after the preview (or at studio insistence) or, maybe if the script originally concluded differently from the version presented in the final cut.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter. The film kind of has three end scenes which give closure and conclusion to Emil, Danielle and Dominique but which also leaves things quite potently inconclusive in terms of both Grace Collier and the private detective she hired, who has “followed the sofa” in which Philip’s body has been stashed. It’s one of De Palma’s better endings, I feel, and Herrmann’s music is a considerable aid to getting the sinister sense of things “not quite at rest” across to the audience by this point.

There’s another story I remember about Herrmann’s score for this film, again from a documentary of some kind, or possibly a biography, and it revolves around his amazing Main Title cue, which is a variation of the stab music which later surfaces in the movie. I think I recall hearing that De Palma had originally asked for a quieter prelude rather than the blood and thunder that Herrmann delivered here. Herrmann said to him something along the lines of... “Hitchcock can get away with nothing really happening in the first half an hour or so because the audience knows something terrible is going to happen. You are not yet as famous as Hitchcock, so they need to know something terrible is going to happen from the opening title music.” That’s not the exact words, I couldn’t find it on the internet... but that’s the gist of it and, for that particular stage of De Palma’s career... I reckon Herrmann was right. The opening titles/stab music in Sisters is one of the most blistering score cues in the history of film music. It’s kinda funny because I use it for the ring tone on my iPhone and my dog always barks when he hears a phone ringing... the upshot of that in terms of watching this excellent new blu-ray version from Arrow was that, every time someone gets stabbed in Sisters, my dog barks at me. Oh well.

There was apparently a remake of this film a few years ago but I can’t bring myself to watch a retread of something which holds such a high place of esteem in my celluloid loving heart. The original Sisters is an absolutely classic example of one of the best American thrillers, before the hack and slash craze had quite got going in the US and, certainly, far more superior to some of the slashers that came after it. If you like this period in American cinema history and you want to see a really entertaining movie with some smart camerawork and some really excellent music, then you probably should add this new dual blu-ray/dvd edition from Arrow to your list. I haven’t watched any of the extras yet but, like the Criterion edition before it, it looks like it’s got some nice stuff on there and it’s not all just recycled from the Criterion DVD, from what I could tell. Definitely have a stab at this one, if you have the inclination.