Flashback, 1981: 'Absence of Malice'

This post is the second in my "Flashback 1981" series: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first, on Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, was posted on this blog in late August.

Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born. 

Absence of Malice   116m., R, USA

Release Date   November 19, 1981

Distributors   Columbia Pictures

Director   Sydney Pollack

Writer   Kurt Luedtke (uncredited: David Rayfiel)

Producers   Sydney Pollack & Ronald L. Schwary

Music   Dave Grusin

Cinematography   Owen Roizman

Editor   Sheldon Kahn

Production Design   Terence Marsh

Cast   Paul Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Luther Adler,  Barry Primus, Josef Sommer, John Harkins, Don Hood, Wilford Brimley, Arnie Ross, Anne Marie Napoles, Shelley Spurlock

Originally, I had intended to post an entry in this "Flashback 1981" series about twice a month, hoping that by keeping tabs on successive releases in late 1981 I could get a very general sense of filmmaking trends and styles of the time. There were a few films I was especially looking forward to watching or revisiting: the Walter Hill actioner Southern Comfort (scored by Ry Cooder), released on September 21, 1981; My Dinner with Andre (October 11), which I saw about ten years ago and, I would expect, might appreciate a little more fully this time around; Shock Treatment (October 31), the semi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which might have made a fine, excessively-80s addition to my hungover Halloween weekend movie marathon; and Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (November 6), which hardly needs an excuse to be rewatched.

I'll be honest: much of the reason I didn't rewatch or write about any of these movies was a hefty work schedule, and the fact that there were plenty of new releases in theaters that I decided to catch up on instead. But another reason is that a surprising number of movies from the early 1980s—even those which might be considered classics, or at least fondly-remembered—are surprisingly difficult to find on DVD. I could only find Southern Comfort, for example, in a shoddy version posted on YouTube, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I assumed would be one of those overly stately "literary" movies available on a bare-bones "Special Edition" reissue DVD, was nowhere to be found. This makes me wonder if early-80s movies occupy a no-man's-land of past releases that have been given the cold shoulder by studios when deciding which of their holdings to reissue (though I suppose this is true of past releases from any period—it only makes sense that studios would give their attention to titles that have the greatest name recognition).

In any case, it's somewhat fitting that my second post in this Flashback series addresses Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice, as it would make a nifty double-feature with Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City. Both movies are about rampant corruption and the almost-inevitable loss of honor and morality in modern social institutions. Prince of the City's undercover narcotics officer is torn apart by guilt and self-loathing after he starts turning evidence over to an Internal Affairs investigation—he feels like he's betrayed his coworkers and friends and, what's worse, violated the unwritten code of honor among lawmen. Meanwhile, Absence of Malice's Megan (Sally Field), a journalist who begins investigating a liquor distributor for possible ties to the mob, compromises her integrity and destroys the lives of those around her with sensational stories that value tawdry gossip over the truth. Both movies even feature Bob Balaban in practically the exact same role: a weaselly government agent who, in his dogged efforts to advance his own career, cares little about what actually happens to the people he exploits.    

Between the two movies, Prince of the City is unquestionably leagues beyond Absence of Malice. Lumet's film is an epic, troubling account of how law, big business, the drug trade, and the federal government intersect in ways more symbiotic than antagonistic, ultimately shattering the lives of more than a few people. Its atmosphere of greed and self-compromise seemed particularly attuned to the economic state of the U.S. in the early 1980s, when urban drug trafficking was escalating at an alarming pace and Ronald Reagan's corporate-friendly government made the lower and upper classes drastically stratified. Absence of Malice, on the other hand, doesn't really seem to consider the specific sociopolitical climate of its story; it's a general (even cliched) take on the old journalistic cautionary tale about writers valuing "the scoop" over the actual lives of the people involved. Although Paul Newman did admit in a 1983 interview that the film was a direct attack on the New York Post's sordid "Page Six" gossip column, similar subject matter had been tackled in Billy Wilder's 1950 film Ace in the Hole and is even more pertinent today. In other words, Absence of Malice could have taken place anywhere at any time; Megan's lack of journalistic integrity has more to do with her own ambition and her romantic relationships than with any kind of external pressure from a corrupt industry or government. (Not that this character-based approach is less valid than a sociopolitical one; in the context of Absence of Malice, though, it's certainly less interesting.)

What the movie has to say about journalism and letting your emotions distort your occupational duty is simple, trite, and uninteresting, but Absence of Malice does feature some performances that lend the film a tough, compassionate humanism, giving it a much greater sense of gravity than might be expected. Field handles the vulnerability of her character more ably than her steely resourcefulness (for a character who's supposed to be so singlemindedly ambitious, she seems remarkably passive a lot of the time), but it's nice to see her in a semi-serious dramatic role in what was arguably the prime of her career (two years after her Oscar nomination for Norma Rae). She's someone I've always wanted to see more of, and Absence of Malice is a nice indication of her unique onscreen presence. 

But the movie really belongs to Paul Newman and, in a significant supporting role, Melinda Dillon. Newman plays Michael Gallagher, the liquor distributor who, after he's slandered in Megan's article and unduly investigated by slimy federal prosecutors, plots his devious (and too-convoluted) revenge against the public institutions that vilified him. Absence of Malice is ultimately a revenge story posing as a morality play, but at least that revenge is given sophistication and quiet, burning anger by Newman. In what might be deemed the middle period of his career (after the youthful vigor of movies like Hud, yet before the twilight irascibility of, say, Nobody's Fool), Newman is still quietly heroic, world-weary and stoic but restraining untold feelings. His Gallagher is an iconic Hollywood prototype (the cynical, intense crusader who's always one step ahead of everyone else) in a movie that's supposed to reflect real life, but that's what makes him so interesting and appealing to watch; rather than him seeming out-of-place, it's as though the movie strives yet fails to reach the same level of energy and bravado that he displays. Gallagher is granted one emotional breakdown: a suitably unsettling scene in which he claws at Megan, hissing furiously at her until he literally throws her onto a dirty warehouse floor. It's a pivotal and impressive scene, mostly because it unleashes the pent-up hostility of his character and allows some uncomfortable cruelty to sneak into a movie that's otherwise pretty tame (even though it pretends not to be).

Melinda Dillon's character is a bit more simplistic: she's all saintliness and misplaced trust as the Catholic school-worker who's most tragically affected by Megan's dishonorable actions. It's no coincidence her character's name is Teresa. But the movie obviously needs to give a human face to the negative repercussions of Megan's slander, and that face is given sensitivity and a poignant sense of naivete by Dillon (another actress whose late '70s/early '80s work I need to catch up on). The best moment in the whole movie, in fact, is her resigned, matter-of-fact attempt to suppress a shocking revelation about her (printed in another of Megan's articles) by walking up and down her block and stealing all of the newspapers from her neighbors' front lawns.

Stylistically the movie is even less distinctive than Prince of the City; Lumet and Pollack both come from television backgrounds, which lent them both a concise, uncomplicated style that could be either powerfully compact or lifelessly dull. With Absence of Malice, Pollack is content primarily to point and shoot, although he has the good sense to evoke both the sun and squalor of the Miami setting, and to let the characters dominate the storytelling. If those characters sometimes seem a little one-note, not to mention in the service of disseminating overly trite moral lessons, then at least they are given occasionally-exciting life by at least three actors who were all working at the top of their game. 

NEXT: Warren Beatty's Reds (Dec. 4)

Flashback, 1981: 'Prince of the City'

This post is the first in a new series I'm starting: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first entry is Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, originally released by Orion Pictures and Warner Bros. on August 21, 1981. (Yeah, I'm a little late on this one—I have a busy work week to blame.) I hope these posts will offer a snapshot of the cinematic and social climate in 1981, and will be an interesting way to chart developments and/or innovations in film since then.

Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born.

Prince of the City   167m., R, USA
Release Date   August 21, 1981   
Distributors   Orion Pictures & Warner Bros. Pictures
Director   Sidney Lumet
Writers   Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet, based on the book by Robert Daley
Producers   Jay Presson Allen and Burtt Harris
Music   Paul Chihara
Cinematography   Andrzej Bartkowiak
Editor   John J. Fitzstephens
Production Design   Tony Walton
Cast   Treat Williams, Jerry Orbach, Richard Foronjy, Don Billett, Kenny Marino, Carmine Caridi, Tony Page, Norman Parker, Paul Roebling, Bob Balaban, James Tolkan, Steve Inwood, Lindsay Crouse, Matthew Laurance, Tony Turco, Ron Maccone, Ron Karabatsos, Tony DiBenedetto, Tony Munafo, Robert Christian, Lee Richardson, Lane Smith, Cosmo Allegretti, Bobby Alto, Michael Beckett, Burton Collins

Commercially unsuccessful and middlingly reviewed upon its release (it was deemed inferior to Lumet's 1973 crime drama Serpico), Prince of the City is now generally seen as one of Lumet's strongest hours (or, to be more precise, nearly-three-hours). And that it is, though I don't consider myself one of the director's fans: too often, he oversells visual metaphors with a deadening obviousness, and he sometimes allows his actors to overplay or to encapsulate their characters in broad, simple character traits. While his background in directing TV series and made-for-television movies in the 1950s and '60s can lend his films a swift, tough conciseness, it can also make them overly schematic in their narrative arcs—as though he were still working under the rigorous scheduling and episodic demands of working for a television studio. (This blueprint-following brand of filmmaking especially hampers his 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.)

But it's easy to dismiss such quibbles in the context of Lumet's long career, which undeniably expressed the cohesive style and thematic concerns of an unassuming auteur. The director (who passed away less than five months ago, on April 9th) offered us at least two great films, 12 Angry Men (1957) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and several almost-great ones (Network [1976], The Verdict [1982]). He has been deemed one of the quintessential "New York directors"—not unlike Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen, the director's adopted hometown is a driving character in many of his films. Some of his works would be inconceivable set in another city. He also returned consistently to the theme (which always fascinates me) of how large-scale institutions (television networks, police forces, urban governments, the court system, hospitals and health care) influence the lives of individuals embroiled within that system—and, correspondingly, how individuals may actively resist or refashion those systems.

Prince of the City is one of the finest examples in Lumet's filmography of both of these tendencies. His status as a New York filmmaker has never been more impressively displayed than in this film: the city is an indelible backdrop here, a writhing, squalid creature that instills moral crises in more than a few characters. The aspect of Prince of the City I'll likely remember more vividly than any other is its encapsulation of a pre-Giuliani New York, a snapshot of a city that could not be more foreign to us than the New York we now know. Like the city as seen in Taxi Driver (1976), Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977), or Bette Gordon's Variety (1983), New York here is a grittily evocative contradiction: glittering and disgusting, monumental and festering, impressive and disheartening. Prince of the City is absolutely a product of its time and place, which here should be taken as a thunderstruck compliment rather than a disparagement—it is the most immersive portrayal of New York in its Ed Koch days that I've ever seen.

The film is also a complex, sprawling document of the ways that numerous forces of law and order interacted (and, to an extent, still interact) in the city. The story concerns an esteemed narcotics agent, Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), who undergoes a crisis of conscience (and self-identity) and decides to work with the FBI's Chase Commission in exposing corrupt agents on the New York police force. Like any other undercover narcotics agent at the time, Ciello relies upon addicts and junkies for information, often being forced to supply them with hard drugs in order to get them to cooperate (and, more distressingly, simply to survive). One of the film's strongest scenes is his excursion to the underbelly of Manhattan at three in the morning to console an informant suffering from withdrawal; rescuing the shivering, desperate man from a grimy alleyway during a rainstorm, Ciello drives him from one supplier to another, looking for anything that will placate him (heroin, coke) and keep him in Ciello's good graces. Eventually, Ciello winds up chasing down another junkie named Jose, beating him mercilessly in order to score two bags of coke for his informant. Shortly thereafter, Ciello, in the midst of self-loathing, drives Jose to a decrepit rattrap of an apartment covered with graffiti—then simply watches in helpless horror as Jose beats his girlfriend for getting high off of his stash. Swiftly and unforgettably, Prince of the City evokes a cesspool of a world in which the close relationship between narcs and junkies makes it easy, as Ciello later confesses, to mistake heroes for villains, right for wrong—to commit unspeakable acts and defend them, sometimes self-righteously, as ultimately moral behavior.

It is this blurring of previously absolute moral codes that leads Ciello to provide testimony to federal agents investigating corruption. Initially, he is told that their targets will be the true overlords of the urban drug trade: wealthy suppliers, lawyers, judges, mayors, city officials that are bought off in order to look the other way, or even to facilitate the profitable narcotics industry. Ciello is immediately (and, as it turns out, rightly) distrustful of the agents who approach him, including Rick Cappalino (Norman Parker), a kind, mild-mannered young agent who genuinely respects and empathizes with Ciello but has no way to defend him from the manipulations of the system in which they find themselves. (Parker gives what may be the most sensitive performance in the whole movie, which seems amazing to me—I had never heard of him before, and besides this film he appeared mostly in television series.) Ciello vociferously tells the FBI he will never betray the trust and camaraderie of his partners in narcotics, he will never rat on them, and at first he is told he will never have to. But of course, as powerful corporate and business agents are targeted by the FBI and exposed by Ciello, accusations against him and his squad force him to expose their past indiscretions—confessions which ultimately have deadly, soul-shattering consequences.

The brotherhood between Ciello and his partners—and the antagonism between Ciello and the federal agents who work for the Chase Commission (and, especially, between Ciello and the prosecutors who consider him a corrupt rat but still hypocritically rely on his testimonies)—is powerfully established by a huge and mostly impressive ensemble cast. Countless crime dramas and police stories have been about the unbreakable bond between the partners who work together, but rarely has that bond been as believable as in Prince of the City. Even when Ciello is initially pressured to deliver information about fellow cops, he tells his partners (drunkenly, despondently), and they respond to him with understanding, sensitivity. (An abrupt cut to a low-angle close-up of Ciello on the brink of madness and self-disgust in this scene is devastating.) They still don't believe he could or would ever betray them. The fact that he inevitably does is an indictment not against Ciello but against the system: the faceless, interconnected network of corporate, government, judicial, and police institutions that conspire to exploit one man in order to obtain a conviction, to offer their functionaries promotions, or to protect or dismantle a lucrative criminal enterprise.

Prince of the City is the most thematically complex of Lumet's movies I've seen—there's actually much more to be said about the film's employment of characters emblematic of different social forces and how they respond to and coerce Ciello's behavior. (He's a man who mistakenly believes he's in control of his own fate, his own morality—the movie is tragic partially because he eventually realizes how untrue this is.) It's tempting to claim that a movie like this—so long, so complex, so dark in tone and subject matter, so attuned to character and to societal forces—could no longer be bankrolled by a major studio, but this isn't exactly true: recent epic crime dramas like Zodiac (2007) and The Dark Knight (2008—more allegorical but almost as insightful) remind us that signs of creativity, intelligence, and power can still be found in Hollywood action movies.

What may be peculiarly early-80s about Prince of the City, though (aside from its garish costuming—itself a time-capsule wonder to behold, or bemoan), is its stylistic simplicity, its un-flashiness. Again, this may be largely the result of Lumet's origins in television, which serve the atmosphere and elaborate themes of Prince of the City extremely well. It seems like most crime dramas made today would be distinguished by a certain aesthetic panache: to return to the two examples above, Zodiac abounds in David Fincher's elaborate, sleek, razor-sharp form (though at least there it serves a purpose), and The Dark Knight delivers its themes through operatic superhero machinations. Or we may think of Michael Mann's so-beautiful-they're-hollow digital compositions (in his movies, the overabundance of style is itself a form of substance), or the self-conscious grittiness of movies like Narc (2002) or We Own the Night (2007), with their grainy handheld cinematography.

While Lumet does include a few stylistic flourishes—like cuts to the identification cards of policemen or federal agents accompanied by throbbing electronic music, or quotes from Robert Leuci, the narcotics officer who was the real-life inspiration for Ciello, splayed at the bottom of the screen in bold newspaper-esque lettering—for the most part his aesthetic choices are subtle, careful, well-thought-out. He gives the impression of a documentary-like remove from the material, but his cutting between expanded extreme long shots in wide angle (which make the characters near-microscopic), solid, static medium shots that simply observe groups in conversation, and emphatic close-ups of characters at the height of self-loathing or desperation reveal a sensitive knowledge of the material's emotional and psychological undercurrents. It doesn't seem overblown to claim that Lumet's style here is reminiscent of the precise yet "invisible" style practiced by classical Hollywood masters like William Wyler or Anthony Mann, though the subject matter is considerably (and justifiably) darkened and deepened for its early-1980s setting.

The weakest aspect of the movie, as I see it, is Treat Williams's performance in the lead, though this is something I'm still debating: his performance is either completely original or drastically off-base in its interpretation of Ciello's early moral crisis. There's a manic energy to it that seems miscalculated early on, though this desperation makes more sense as the movie progresses and Ciello becomes increasingly distraught by guilt, moral confusion, and self-disgust. An early scene has Williams shouting to the proverbial rafters, rabidly defending his impending actions to two federal agents, in a long and frankly irritating scene; the point, it seems, is to recognize Ciello's fraught attempts to rationalize his inner conflicts, his bipolar attitude towards the ethical leap and calamitous risk he's about to take, but this could be conveyed in a manner more subtle, more believable, and more in tune with how the character behaves at this early point in the film. I wonder if this style of overacting, of absolute self-abandonment and immersion, is something more common in movies of the late 1970s and 80s—a time, perhaps, when previous theories of Method acting coalesced with the expressive aesthetic techniques of American New Wave directors like Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola. After all, this bombastic acting style also irrevocably harmed Lumet's Serpico—a film that features such an overblown Pacino performance it's impossible to believe in the main character as a real human being (obviously, a quality that does not work well in a character study). In any case, my ambivalence towards Williams's performance corresponds strangely well to the movie's own ambivalence towards the character of Ciello—to the film's credit, it never decides absolutely whether its protagonist is a selfless moral crusader or a self-righteous hypocrite, a moral complexity that is unforgettably envisioned by the final freeze frame.