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VAULTED TREASURES: MOVIES YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT, YOU FORGOT,
... OR YOU FORGOT TO LOVE MORE THE FIRST TIME AROUND!
Dir. by - Brian Kirk
Prod. by - Anthony & Joe Russo, Mike Larocca, Robert Simmonds, Gigi Pritzker, Chadwick Boseman
Screenplay by - Adam Mervis, Matthew Michael Carnahan Story by - Adam Mervis
Dir. of Photog. - Paul Cameron
Edited by - Tim Merrill
Prod. Design - Greg Berry
Music - Henry Jackman,
Alex Belcher
Run Time: 100 mins.
Release: 11/22/2019
Production Companies - MWM Studios, H. Brothers, AGBO, X-Ception Content
Dist. by - STXfilms
MARSHALL
Dir. by - Reginald Hudlin
Prod. by - Paula Wagner, Reginald Hudlin,
Jonathan Sanger
Written by - Michael Koskoff, David Koskoff
Director of Photography - Newton Thomas Sigel
Edited by - Tom McCardle
Production Design -
Tom Meyer
Music - Marcus Miller
Run Time: 118 mins.
Release: 10/12/2017
Production Companies - Starlight Media, Chestnut Ridge Prods., Hudlin Entertainment
Dist. by - Open Road Films
It's been asserted by many filmmakers that a damn good score and / or editing can make a bad film okay, an okay film good, and a good film great, ... and the opposite to the same degree with a bad score, bad editing, etc. I've always felt the same about a film's cast. And, as such, I've always thought 21 BRIDGES and MARSHALL as damn fine examples of the former side of the (pun entirely intended) creative bridge.
I remember when both films opened, and the general consensus among many filmgoers and critics - particularly with 21 BRIDGES - was "Well, yeah, it's okay, but in the end it's a standard police procedural, isn't it?". And my response was always along the lines of, "Well, look at something like REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER, or hell, even THE SEVEN UPS. There's really nothing overly remarkable in either of those screenplays, in either of those narratives. They're very well / very tightly written screenplays, to be sure. But in comparison to something like, say, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, SERPICO, PRINCE AND THE CITY, or even the later Q&A, they don't have the fire and irony of any of those.", ... once again, in their scripts, at least.
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| (top) REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER (1975) / (bottom) THE SEVEN UPS (1973) |
COMMISSIONER and SEVEN UPS, however, are ignited, and become something truly, TRULY special because of a) the directors behind them, and b) phenomenal cast members who make the characters live and breathe and feel completely sweatily-funkily-nervously-foot-shakingly-lived-in-for-real. Now, I'm not saying that either 21 BRIDGES or MARSHALL will ever (or ever deserve to) become the classics any of those aforementioned films are. But, just as with COMMISSIONER and SEVEN UPS, they're as damn good as they are because of the casts and filmmakers behind them, and the style and voice they all bring to the proceedings. Of course, in the midst of all of this, one can't help but single out a very important element in both 21 BRIDGES and MARSHALL - the star of each, Chadwick Boseman: an actor whose presence and craft helped both films rise to a quality status / level a bit more than what seems to have been in their respective script pages. Damn good actors and damn good directors can do this.
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| 42 (2013) |
Starting out in smaller roles in movies such as THE EXPRESS: THE ERNIE DAVIS STORY (2008) and DRAFT DAY (2014) ... . Oh, and it's (a slight digression here, sorry) still hard for me to reconcile that his role as Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013) was before DRAFT DAY. Hard to reconcile because for me it was with both 42 and GET ON UP (2014, with Boseman as James Brown) that he really became a major star. With DRAFT DAY, though, his name in the credits is way down on the list. But like I said, I digress. Just one of those odd/weird ones to me, though, one of those things that bothers me ... and, once again, apologies for the slight turn off course. Anyway, back to the things at hand.
After the critical accolades for his performances as both Robinson and Brown, Boseman (of course) became a worldwide cultural sensation / star with his role as T'Challa / The Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. But I love how, in spite of that, he was determined to not fall into the "Connery / James Bond", "Christopher Reeve / Superman" trap of becoming so identified with one character, that he'd forever have a hard time getting people to believe he was capable and worthy of any other kind of role. Connery and Reeve were always capable and worthy as well. They just had to battle for a decade or more to get others to believe / understand / get on the same page with it.
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| GET ON UP (2014) |
In Boseman's case, after the acclaim for his roles as Robinson and Brown, he followed them by doing something deliberately off-the-wall-kilter - his delightfully humorous performance as the arrogant ancient deity Thoth in Alex Proyas' GODS OF EGYPT (2016). Then after the superstardom of BLACK PANTHER (2018) hit, he'd then deliberately go extremely "dark night of the soul" in Fabrice Du Welz's MESSAGE FROM THE KING (2016) as a South African who comes to Los Angeles in search of his sister, learns she's been killed, then burns a hole through LA's underworld avenging her death. So, yeah, not unlike other great stars ... who were also just great character actors (and I'd count among them people like Gene Hackman, Denzel Washington, Diane Ladd and Diane Lane, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Duvall, and others), ... I loved how Boseman never allowed himself to be turned into a self-important "act-tor" of the cliched' sort, nor a commercial pretty boy / action star on the other side of the spectrum - but always remained a damn-good character actor regardless of his star status. All of which brings us to 21 BRIDGES and MARSHALL.
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| (L to R) DRAFT DAY (2014) / GODS OF EGYPT (2016) / MESSAGE FROM THE KING (2016) |
21 BRIDGES is for me one of the best and most enjoyably straight-ahead "modern-day programmers" of the last decade. For those perhaps not familiar with "movie buff" jargon, "programmers" were essentially films produced from the 1940s - 80s which, for all intents and purposes, were done on the cheap (or at least the less expensive end of things), usually intended to fill out the second slot of a double-feature or drive-in "two-fer", and intended and expected (because of the "thrifty" manner in which the studios made them, ... and keep in mind they were usually studio films; so, even while "less expensive", they had a lot at their disposal in the ways of technicians, sets and more) to turn a profit within a short period of time. The only thing, though, was they were sometimes so damn well made, that they'd become more popular than the "first half" of the double-bill they were meant to fill-out.
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| BLACK PANTHER (2018) |
This is how the 1952 "B movie", THE NARROW MARGIN - directed by a pre-20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, FANTASTIC VOYAGE, TORA TORA TORA, SOYLENT GREEN Richard Fleischer - eventually came to be known as a noir classic. This is how even earlier, a "B" flick originally titled THE GENT FROM FRISCO, intended to be the directorial debut of a screenwriter named John Huston, became the timeless cinema gem we now know as THE MALTESE FALCON.
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| (clockwise from top) THE NARROW MARGIN (1952) / WHITE LINE FEVER (1975) /21 BRIDGES (2019) |
As such, over time, the word (and concept of a) "programmer" morphed from an object of subtle "derision" to a "badge of honor". And later films by directors like Jonathan Kaplan (among them WHITE LINE FEVER, TRUCK TURNER, UNLAWFUL ENTRY, BROKEDOWN PALACE), Peter Hyams (CAPRICORN ONE, THE STAR CHAMBER, OUTLAND), Andrew Davis (CODE OF SILENCE, ABOVE THE LAW), and even the Coen Bros.' FARGO, and more would all come to be known / thought of by many as "modern day programmers". For me, ...
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| 21 BRIDGES (2019) |
That's exactly what we get in 21 BRIDGES. Back in the 70s it could have, yeah, just been a cool-as-hell drive-in flick or TV Movie of the Week with a bad-assed premise - "Over the course of a few fateful days, an obsessed New York detective convinces city officials to have all 21 river crossings into Manhattan shut down / blocked, in order to box in two cop killers". But director Brian Kirk (THE TUDORS, DEXTER, GAME OF THRONES) gives his urban actioner such visual sophistication and style... . And not only that, but because it's performed by a great cast of character actors - along with Boseman, Sienna Miller, the always excellent Keith David, forever awesome J.K. Simmons, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS' Taylor Kitsch, STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE's Alexander Siddig, and others, in the end the film just rises above the Movie of the Week it could have been in lesser hands, and emerges as an old-school "programmer" win of the best sort.
In parts I actually get the vibe of some of the films adapted from the novels of former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, too - among them Friedkin's TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (1985), '93's BOILING POINT with Wesley Snipes, Dennis Hopper, and Viggo Mortenson (based on Petievich's MONEY MEN), and 2006's THE SENTINEL with Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, and Eva Longoria. Just a nice wiff here and there of that Petievich vibe. And I think that's wholly intentional.
In Petievich's yarns (which themselves are cut from the mold of 40s era "programmers") there's one person, one soul (tarnished or not) who becomes our tour guide through the societal maze (often an urban one) of amorality, divided loyalties, double-crosses and more. It's through that person's eyes and world view (often somewhat changed by the story's end because of their experience) that we come to either agree with (or at least understand) this world or reject it. Bogie in THE MALTESE FALCON (perhaps the greatest "programmer" of all time) is such a tour guide for us. And that's Chadwick Boseman's same function in 21 BRIDGES. Now, before you get that look on your face because of me comparing Boseman to Bogie, keep in mind I didn't say that he, or even his character, was the same. I said his and Bogie's characters serve the same function for the audience.
In Petievich's yarns (which themselves are cut from the mold of 40s era "programmers") there's one person, one soul (tarnished or not) who becomes our tour guide through the societal maze (often an urban one) of amorality, divided loyalties, double-crosses and more. It's through that person's eyes and world view (often somewhat changed by the story's end because of their experience) that we come to either agree with (or at least understand) this world or reject it. Bogie in THE MALTESE FALCON (perhaps the greatest "programmer" of all time) is such a tour guide for us. And that's Chadwick Boseman's same function in 21 BRIDGES. Now, before you get that look on your face because of me comparing Boseman to Bogie, keep in mind I didn't say that he, or even his character, was the same. I said his and Bogie's characters serve the same function for the audience.
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| The World Through Their Eyes: (Clockwise from top) Humphrey Bogart - THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) / Dick Powell - MURDER MY SWEET (1944) / Robert Mitchum - FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975) / Keith David and Chadwick Boseman - 21 BRIDGES (2019) |
While primarily a blitzkrieg of an actioner, 21 BRIDGES has still got Bogie, and Dick Powell, and Robert Mitchum and the rest of the boys in its creative DNA. The only thing with Boseman is that he's much less "stylistic and noirish" than the others, and much more real world. He's got a little bit of all of them inside, to be sure. But there's probably more of Nathan Fillion's John Nolan from TV's THE ROOKIES. It's this quality which anchors 21 BRIDGES and helps make it just a bit more than "what the actors say and do". And, hey, one more thing before we leave the Big Apple and its bridges, ...
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| Director David Kirk and Boesman on set |
Also, nice that, just like the best of "programmers", 21 BRIDGES isn't self-important enough to think it needs a running time over 2hrs. to "realize its vision". Nah! Back in the day, most, good, tightly wound, smoothly composed and executed programmers managed to get a helluva-lot-of-narrative-bang-for-the-buck in under 90s mins. And 21 BRIDGES runs just slightly over that. If you include its end credits, it runs just under 100 mins.
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| Chadwick Boseman and Josh Gad in MARSHALL (2019) |
Now, interestingly, while based upon real people and real incidents - here, an early, life-defining court case involving Thurgood Marshall, the man who would one day become America's first black Supreme Court Justice - MARSHALL the film chooses to veer from the norm (veer from cliche'?) in not carrying out its narrative as a dry history lesson / social studies class, but more as a (in tone, at least) modern-day "court room thriller / mystery programmer". In this case it focuses on the true story of Marshall as an NAACP-appointed attorney at the center of 1941's earth-shattering "State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell" trial - where a black chauffeur was accused of raping his boss, a rich white woman. As such - the dark nature of its fact-based story notwithstanding - it's rather refreshingly clever (not to mention daring) that director Reginald Hudlin and his screenwriters wrap the telling of this "look-back into America's dark past" in the blanket of what at times almost feels like an Earle Stanley Gardner, John Grisham, Scott Turow-like page-turner. Now, ...
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| Kate Hudson / MARSHALL (2019) |
Telling an historical story in the form of a (for lack of a better term) "popular thriller" is a double-edged sword. On the one side, you get to tell it not as the aforementioned "dry history lesson (of sorts)", but with the emotional fervor of which most of those who actually lived it surely felt, ... but of which most Discovery / History Channel / Nat-Geo docus can't always get across. But you also run the risk of people saying that you're being "disrespectful to the material by 'Hollywood-ing' it up". Y'know, that you're assuming the audience is too dull, and won't "get it" and / or be willing to sit down long enough for a straight-forward docu-drama that doesn't "pander to an audience with the ADD level of a flea". The thing is, I understand and agree with both sides of that argument.
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| Historical effrontery or creative license for the sake of drama?: PEARL HARBOR (2001) / POCAHONTOS (1995) / ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE (2007) |
I mean, I agreed, ... in a huge way!, ...with the former when (and hey, we all have our opinions) I first saw Michael Bay's PEARL HARBOR, which I still feel is the biggest affront in general to anyone who ever served in combat, and the biggest affront to the memory of those actually at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th, 1941, in particular. But I also realize / vividly remember, too, how over the years there have been more than a few films at the time of their original releases that were brutally criticized for (supposedly) sacrificing drama for the sake of historical accuracy and authenticity. Y'know, they were too accurate and / or too concerned with data to the detriment of being entertaining. Films like Richard Fleischer's THE BOSTON STRANGLER and TORA, TORA, TORA, and Richard Attenborough's A BRIDGE TOO FAR were all victims of such criticisms.
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| "Too beholden to data to be entertaining?" (top to bottom) THE BOSTON STRANGLER (1968) / TORA, TORA, TORA! (1970) / A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977) |
Yes, it's hard to believe now, in our post-SAVING PRIVATE RYAN / post-SCHINDLER'S LIST era, where BOSTON STRANGLER, TORA, and BRIDGE TOO FAR have over the years become much more respected for "getting it right",... or at least making a sincere attempt to do so. But this wasn't always the case. And, hell, even take a look at more recent years where we've had films like Adam McKay's VICE (2018) - the kind of movie people say they want more of, but don't seem to actually go out to see. And this while (let's call them) more "fanciful historical films" like 300, MARIE ANTOINETTE, ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE (a film I love), and, perhaps most historically egregiously, Disney's animated POCAHONTAS, emerge as some of the most critically acclaimed and financially successful movies of their respective years. All of this to get across the fact that, yeah, there's gotta be a balance. And if a filmmaker and their cast and crew can get it just right, there's a power / double-punch combo in that balance of memorable storytelling with the ability to elicit from an audience - one which may not have known a damn thing about the historical subject matter beforehand - not only a need to, but a desire to remember and learn more.
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| Balance of power with history revived for some, and for others learned for the first time through genre: HBO's WATCHMEN recalls "The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921" |
Remember after the debut of HBO's TV series version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' WATHCMEN, how over the next few weeks almost every conservation you heard at every work water cooler, school lunchroom, inside delivery trucks, or wherever, consisted of people saying, "Wow, I never even heard of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, before!". So, on one side of the scale you've got history told in one kind of gripping narrative form in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, SCHINDLER'S LIST and others, while on the other side you've got history being just as grippingly told with WATCHMEN; then somewhere in the middle, under the guise of an Earl Stanley Gardner-like programmer, you've got Reginald Hudlin's MARSHALL, in my opinion one of the better bio-drama examples in recent years to nicely do the same in finding its own "balance of power" - in its case, a blending of entertaining mystery-drama, historical education, and cry for modern-day social activism.
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| Young Thurgood Marshall: the left a High School graduation photo from 1925 |
With a film walking such a precarious balance, regardless of how it's directed, edited, scored, etc., in the end the fulcrum point in such an endeavor, surely in this one, becomes the actor portraying the titular character - once again Chadwick Boseman. If you can get the average person to admit it, the only thing they really know about the late Thurgood Marshall is that he was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Most know nothing of his early life, that he was an NAACP lawyer, that he traveled across the U.S. defending blacks wrongly / falsely accused of (so-called race-based) crimes which could have them (at best) imprisoned or (at worst) lynched. To most people Marshall was an icon, ... and not simply a man.
So, with the film MARSHALL, its intent becomes three-fold - a) to enlighten the present generation on certain parts of America's not-so-long-ago history, ... of which many young people are still amazingly unaware, b) to humanize Thurgood Marshall, and c) to do both by allowing us to see said world through the eyes and emotional experiences of a young lawyer at the beginning of his career during arguably one of the most dangerous eras ever for the concept of law in the U.S., and the effectiveness, and even survival, of its Constitution, ... an era some might say is running fairly neck-and-neck with our own present one. But making that analogy, ... yes, even a decade before our present state in the U.S., ... was the intent of director Hudlin, Boseman, and the rest - this as ten years ago, or ten or thirty years from now, history has proven that it has, and continually will, tend to repeat itself.
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| (L to R) Bruce Greenwood as JFK in THIRTEEN DAYS (2000) / David Oyelowo as MLK, JR. in SELMA (2014) / Chadwick Boseman as Thurgood Marshall in MARSHALL (2017) |
Actor Bruce Greenwood, in discussing his portrayal of JFK in Roger Donaldson's THIRTEEN DAYS (2000), and David Oyelowo, in doing the same regarding his depiction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Ava DuVernay's SELMA (2014), both spoke of the ease, ... and great mistake, ... it would have been to attempt to imitate such icons of history in their voices, look, and even getting too caught up in trying to duplicate physical mannerisms. They both spoke, instead, of attempting to "inhabit" them as simply men, and in so doing help the audience to relate to the pain and pressure and fear, as well as triumphs, they endured - all of which helped to form our world today. To depict them as icons is to do them a great disservice. Depicting them as human men, however - flaws, screw ups, and all - not only makes them more relatable to us years later. But it also - quite ironically, doesn't it? - make them even more heroic and iconic for doing what they did regardless.
Boseman wisely chooses to do the same with his representation of the young Thurgood Marshall. He gives us a man, and in so doing, just like with his earlier depictions of James Brown and Jackie Robinson, here Marshall's real-world humanity makes the time he lived in more accessible to us, and makes the man himself all the more "grippingly fascinating" and, yup, infinity more heroic / iconic because of it. And, oh, by the way, in conclusion, in those "grippingly fascinating" and earlier mentioned "grippingly entertaining" categories, ...
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| Boseman and Sterling K. Brown / MARSHALL (2019) |
MARSHALL is considerably aided and abetted, and kept from falling into "Preachy TV Movie territory", by its lineup in front of and behind the camera. As for in front of that lens, we've got Boseman alongside Josh Gad - the later in probably his best role ever (hard to imagine him at all here as the "funny sidekick" of the Disney films), Sterling K. Brown as Joseph Spell - the chauffer accused of raping his boss, Eleanor Strubing - portrayed here by Kate Hudson. There's also James Cromwell as Judge Foster, Spike Lee regular Roger Guenveur Smith, Frank Darabont "stock player" Jeffrey DeMunn, and actress / vocalist Andra Day (THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLLIDAY) among others.
And as if that weren't enough, behind the lens we've got the murderer's row of director Reginald Hudlin (BOOMERANG, THE GREAT WHITE HYPE, THE BLACK GODFATHER, producer of "T"s DJANGO UNCHAINED), legendary jazz / film composer Marcus Miller (SIESTA, BOOMERANG, SERVING SARA, THE BROTHERS, not to mention his years of collaborations with Miles Davis, David Sanborn, Bootsy Collins, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Jimmy Buffett, and others), cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel (THE USUAL SUSPECTS, FALLEN, APT PUPIL, X-MEN, BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, DA 5 BLOODS), and many more. So, nah, ...
It's just damn hard (for me at least) to "brush off" either 21 BRIDGES or MARSHALL as "Yeah, okay programmers". In the strictest sense of the word, perhaps they are. But, maybe ironically so, I can't think of a greater badge of honor. And, while at it and speaking of, ...
How 'bout all due respect, said honor and love to the memory of the late/great Chadwick Boseman.? Effin' miss you, man!
CEJ
Learn about the CHADWICK A. BOSEMAN MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP
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