The Big Picture - Sidney Lumet at 100: The Essential Movies From an American Master

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Sean and Amanda are joined by Chris Ryan to commemorate the career of one of America’s greatest directors, Sidney Lumet. They talk about him as a person, his path to becoming a workman director, his methodology, and his standout moments (1:00) before going through his entire filmography and choosing the 10 most essential entries in the canon (43:00). Then, they each share their five personal favorites (1:37:00). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Chris Ryan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Sidney Lumet. CR, Chris Ryan, is here with us today. Hi, Chris. How's it going? Great to see you. Thank you for joining us for this very special episode of The Big Picture. We are celebrating one of the great makers of movies in the history of cinema. He would have been 100 years old this year. In fact, last month, Sidney Lumet.

Sidney Lumet, one of my favorite directors. He's come up, I would say, intermittently over the run of this show, but we've never really had a chance to talk about him in depth really ever. So I thought it would be fun as I prepare to go on a vacation to do an evergreen episode about a legend of cinema. Yeah. So Amanda, I'll start with you. Yeah.

We're also correcting or wrong a little bit here because like the fact that he doesn't come up that much is a little bit on us and a little bit on, I guess like the way that we, the three of us, but really the world at large talk about movies and the fact that we don't appreciate just like a stone cold capable genius like he is the king of like competence underestimates it he's an amazing filmmaker who just worked for 50 years and was so good at it and not flashy though occasionally flashy when he needs to be and i mean

some of the greatest movies are all of all time are among his filmography but it is not always about like here is sydney lumet you know moving the camera 45 times and then dropping in a stone's track and i'm that sounds like i'm subtweeting martin scorsese who i love very much but it's we just his approach to filmmaking i almost said style and then i was like oh no i've read making movies and i know how he feels about that word um his approach does not always lend itself to being like oh yeah yeah that's like yeah. That's like a Lumet fixture. But in fact, like a lot of what we love about movies is indebted to him. Yeah, that's a lot of what I was thinking about as I went through his career

and was looking at his movies, trying to identify the things that he did well that are often overlooked in the process of making movies. I know you're a huge fan of Lumet as well, although it's such a vast career, it's like hard to be a master of his work. Yeah, it's also like he had some misses, you know what I mean? And that's sort of part of the charm.

I think that, I was reading an article, I think it was in Film Comet by a writer named Michael Schragow, which was about the documentary that you recommended about Lumet. It's called By Sidney Lumet. Yeah, and... Available on Amazon Prime. It is. The writer said that Lumet. It's called By Sidney Lumet. Yeah, and- Available on Amazon Prime.

It is. The writer said that Lumet defied deification, which is funny that we're doing this podcast, right? Because it's going to be a little bit of a challenge to maybe do through lines thematically, stylistically, when this guy worked across multiple mediums, multiple genres, multiple decades, with multiple great and good and okay stars leading the way.

And so you have to actually dig into a lot about Lumet's biography and also his working methods to determine what you think about his films as the work of an auteur. Because I think he so often was like, this is part of a process. I love the process. I love to work. And for me, it's like when you look back on his contribution to popular culture, there's a lot of filmmakers I'm in awe of. There's a lot of filmmakers that I frankly worship.

This is the one that I feel like it would be really cool to have his career. It would have been really cool to have been this busy for this much of your life, getting to interact with so many fascinating people and tell so many different stories. That's awesome. That would be like the dream. Hugely accomplished and beloved within the industry, even by the most gifted people in the industry, but not annoyingly famous and also in a way effectively underrated. Never won best director, for example really won an oscar of any kind never won any academy award they gave him an honorary one which is just shame on them you

know a classic thing that the academy does especially with a lot of great filmmakers but i think some of that lack of that you were describing that like lack of style quote unquote that desire to kind of move around genre wise or style wise worked against him in terms of the way that he was celebrated. So today we'll talk about a lot of things. We'll talk about, I think, what you could effectively call like his essential movies because he does have these canonized movies that are so important in movie history. As we talk, even if you're a pretty sincere film fan, you may be surprised to learn that he directed, you know,

movies in 1960 that endure and movies in 1995 that endure, but he did. We'll also talk about his life as a person and what kind of a person he was we'll talk about his working style which i think is really important and you know there's a few core documents texts that we'll talk about through this conversation the first is the documentary that chris talked about called by a city lumet which is effectively a long interview with him interspersed with clips directed by Nancy Berski that is fascinating and is sort of the antithesis in a way of making movies, which is his guide slash memoir about his experiences making movies. It's sort of like his demythologizing of the process of making movies, which is just an exceptional book. And we'll talk

about it in detail here. And then the third thing is obviously his movies the work like the stuff that he did and he made 50 50 feature films in 45 years he directed hundreds of episodes of television he directed stage productions i mean his the the collected works is insane yeah it is thousands of hours of of work that you can go back and look at a lot of that tv stuff has lost to time but it is like a fine-grained mix of the best movies ever made yeah a ton of cool movies that you're like i really i'm glad i saw that and then movies that are actively kind of bad don't work and i guess when you work this often and you make this many things that's bound to happen but it is it is the opposite of the instincts that we have, the instincts that I have on this show,

to hail when a great master comes along and is ready to show us a new work. Because he's just like, he was working through it, always. He was trying stuff. And he enjoyed trying the stuff, to Chris's point. He talks about, like in that documentary, the in the book he was really happiest working and working with other people and it gives me like a little bit of a Soderbergh energy of just like okay you know like this is this is a person who is very efficient and who has real ideas about how things are should be done and and really likes doing them, but just keeps it moving,

which is, you're right, different than the tortured filmmaker writing his script for 13 years and then suddenly genius emerges once again. Right. Or doesn't. Like the prophet coming down from the mountain. It's not like that at all.

There's also the element of it where I think that, I don't know if he ever had a film by Sidney Lumet or a Sidney Lumet picture before as a title card, but he is directed by Sidney Lumet, you know? And I think he kind of changed my ideas about what a director did just as much as William Goldman opened up my eyes about what a screenwriter did.

A lot of it is politics. A lot of it is facilitation of performance, both from your actors, but from the teamster. A lot of it is interpreting material and thinking about what is the consistent tone that this film should take to best elevate this material, whether it's a cop story or an Agatha Christie story or a story about

british soldiers like he's able to like work through all these different kinds of genres you know you mentioned soderbergh i was going to ask you if lumet's artistic cousin might be mike nichols i was thinking a lot about that as well obviously like stage and theater and the theater and like early tv and New York 2 film in the relatively same time period. Also just like a great director of actors

and like the movies that stay with us feature like the great performances from some of the best movie stars of the 60s and 70s. Also that Menchie

reputation where everybody's like oh I love him. I'd do anything for him. Yeah you hear Al Pacino talk about Sidney Lumet it's the same way you would hear all the Meryl Streep talk about Mike Nichols, you know,

or just like I would have died for him. You know, he was so important to me and changed my life in so many ways. He's making comparison points is fascinating because his life is very different from a lot of the people that we venerate too. He comes from this fascinating background of performance that I didn't really know very much about until I first saw the documentary about him, where he talks in detail about, he was born in Philly in the 20s, but he moves to Manhattan with his parents who are immigrants and they are performers in the Yiddish theater. His father in particular, his mother died very young. His father in particular

was a very successful, quote unquote, successful during the, during the Depression and World War II, or rather in the 30s, in the Yiddish theater. And he pushed his son to be a performer. And he was a child actor and an actor at a very young age and made money for his family at a very young age and was a showbiz kid. You know what I mean? And you would not think that if you watch interviews with Lumet. He has this very kind of like matter-of-fact, regular guy kind of energy.

He's clearly like a sophisticated intellectual, but also just a dude, you know, who's interested in regular people. So you never would guess that he's somebody who basically from birth was being trained to be a part of the firmament of performance and artifice. And, you know, he goes through all the way up to getting to Broadway and performing on Broadway as a preteen. And you can tell that he thinks he's going to be

Charlie Chaplin or something. You know, he's going to be like a big star. And then it's interrupted and he goes to, he joins the service during World War II. And he serves in the army

for four years. And when he comes out, he goes right back to the theater. And he kind of like picks up where he left off. But now, rather than focusing his energies on being an actor, he decides to become a director.

And this period of time is so interesting because you could make the case, and this is to your point about having the right career, like was this the exact right time to decide I want to be a director of actors in filmed entertainment? Because he does a few off-Broadway productions and then all of a sudden, his friend filmed entertainment because he's does a few off broadway productions and then all of a sudden his friend yul brenner has a job in tv and he's directing tv and he's directing hundreds of hours of tv because there's this new device and there's

this need for all this new content it's kind of like the streaming breakthrough in some ways where you're just like they've just greenlit 300 episodes of wal Cronkite's You Are Here. Right. You know, and so like somebody's got to make these episodes of TV. So he kind of gets this like, forgive the Malcolm Gladwell, like 10,000 hours thing, but he gets to do the 10,000 hours thing in real time. I don't, you know, I didn't really revisit a lot of that work. You see a little bit of it in the documentary, but just in terms of where he lands in the arc of history in movies,

it feels like so serendipitous for somebody like him. Yeah, but it also speaks to his willingness or like interest in just like leaping in and being like, sure, I'll try this. Because as you said, he was an actor. He was like the first class of like the actor's studio, like the Bradley Cooper, like crying in the audience actor studio which again like you don't think of him as a child actor you don't think of him as one of those people like being interviewed on the on the dark stage um and he's he there's an anecdote uh in the documentary about why he left the actor's studio and it was a little bit because there they were focused just on like one the american form of like realist acting. And he's like, OK, but what about all the other types of acting and what about the other styles that we want to do? And no one cared. So he's like, so I got kicked out.

So then I just like wandered over to TV and just like picked it up. And suddenly I was directing everything under the sun. And then somehow Henry Fonda had seen a play that i directed and was like cool son yeah sounds good for 12 angry men yeah and so 12 angry men had been a tv teleplay that was actually directed by franklin schaffner who directed like pat and a bunch of kind of the apes movies but so he directs this tv teleplay of this story it's a hit on tv fonda sees it handpicks Lumet Lumet at the age of the 33 I want to say

directs this movie and it is instantaneously one of the greatest movies ever made it remains one of the greatest movies

ever made and he's kind of off and running and he just that's his first feature that's insane it's crazy and you know

it's obviously a modest feature because it takes place all in one room and it's this kind of character-based drama in which like these archetypes are kind of going back and forth about these big lofty ideas.

But it's kind of like the perfect feature because it helpfully explains the themes that kind of dominate most of his work. What would you say that those things are? Like, what is he interested in? Well, he's a director who I was trying to think about this a lot, especially when it came to the New York Police Tril police trilogy a lot of his crime films network where i feel like the morality or at least the director's political worldview socio-political worldview is taken as a given it's like self

evident that we should try to be kind or that we shouldn't do the right thing yeah people over and be ethical yeah but it's not it's not to me at least heavy-handed it's not finger wagging um and now sometimes he works with material that is very heavy-handed and sometimes he has performances that are heavy-handed but there's not like a come to j moment. It's like, no, you should think this way. You should think Serpico is doing the right thing. You know, like this isn't about Popeye Doyle in the French connection where you're like, ah, he's a good cop, but he's a bad cop.

You know, it's like, no, Serpico is seeing injustice and he's going to go against everything to try and make the world a better place. And even if he fails, the trying is the thing that matters. And that's like we met in a nutshell now he will sometimes say like well that's you know like it depends on the piece and it depends on if it's eugene o'neill or agatha christie or whatever but i think that that generally speaking even the agatha christie that he chooses is about like achieving justice outside

of the system which is the other thing his his worldview is always that there is, it is an individual or a group of people that are trying against an institution or against that the larger systems are not really working out. I'll just say briefly, just to kind of dovetail with what you guys were just talking about with the timing of his career.

And I find his emergence, right? Like you said, with the actor studio, like he starts directing TV, I think in 52 I think and then on the waterfronts 54 rebel without a cause is 55 like the world changes in the course of those years in terms of like what people are going to the movies for and what they want to see on screen when they go to the movies. And I find it fascinating because he should have, and he really is, the modern purveyor of the Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz-style studio system director who's like,

I'm going to knock out like two to three movies a year because I love doing this, that, and the other thing. Across genre. Yeah, across genres. But he's directing at a time where there's all this social upheaval, all this upheaval in how art gets made. He directs

films through the end of the studio system, through the 1960s, into new Hollywood, and then into like the gaudy 80s and 90s. It's kind of like this fascinating, zealig career where he is able to adapt to the times, but always maintain, I think, what we're talking about, which is this very clear-eyed way of looking at humanity. Maybe even like a little bit of a rosy way of looking at humanity. I think it's aspirational. Yeah. I think he likes to portray characters who, Amanda is right, are often like singular figures who are sometimes outcasts or miscreants

or like misunderstood or maybe they're addicted addicted to something kind of antiheroes. There's sort of antiheroes, not quite on the level of like Tony Soprano, but people who in the mold of what you're describing with rebel without a cause are kind of coming out and redefining the concept of heroism. And he applies this fascinating version of his morality to the stories, which is interesting because he's not a writer-director. He doesn't write his own material.

In fact, most of the material that he works with is by very hallowed figures, like certainly Tennessee Williams and Chekhov and Eugene O'Neill, but also Chayefsky and Mary McCarthy. E.L. Doctorow. E.L. Doctorow. These giants of drama and E.L. Doctorow, these giants of drama and fiction. But he has this weaseling knack for rooting out what their stories are really about and how they make sense to him. Well, that is maybe not the best. The whole book is great. But that chapter in Making Movies where he's like, here's how I pick a movie and here's why I'm making it.

He's like, I have to know what it's about. Yeah. And that's not the plot. That is like, what is this movie about? He can give you like the elevator pitch

of the idea of the movie. He goes through his filmography. Which like, is an essential part of any creative endeavor that most creative endeavors, like the people,

aren't able to do it. And that's why we watch so many bad movies and read so many bad books or articles or whatever because people are just like, well the people aren't able to do it. And that's why we watch so many bad movies and read so many bad books or articles or whatever, because people are just like, well, I don't know, it's about all these things. And his ability to pin it down, I mean, I just really appreciate a guy

who doesn't waste words, you know? He's just like, okay, this is what we're going to do. But you're right. He picked projects based on that one sentence. This is what it means to me. And this is how I'm going to make the movie. And it dictated every decision he would make going forward. There's one other element, obviously,

sort of like justice, social responsibility, crime. These are all hallmarks, especially of the new Hollywood, where he is sort of like working in tandem, but not necessarily integrated into and that's true I think because he's such a New York filmmaker you know he's not a Hollywood director he does make some Hollywood movies but he never works that way the other thing is family which I think is like a little bit of an underrated theme of his movies and a theme that like I'm personally kind of obsessed with like most of my favorite filmmakers are obsessed with like their real

own families or their adopted families and it's human nature you know so it's like most great drama and tragedy it is but most movies are not

actually not about that anymore you know what I mean I guess they are if you're watching like well now they're about the trauma that your family inflicted on you which is like

okay great thanks so much well Long Day's Journey and Tonight you know that could be the ur text for the drama

that has been inflicted upon you they're still presentensing that trauma yeah they're all living through it and that's you know that could be the ur text for the drama there's still present tensing that trauma and that's you know that's his second feature and adaptation of this eugene oh eugene o'neill play and it's a three-hour sprawling intimate epic starring katherine hepburn which is the most like you're ready for the big leagues now kind of move that he could have made. And it's an interesting movie. Like I watched it for the first time last night.

I'd never seen it before. And it's like, it's like nauseating in a way. Like it's hard to watch because it's so painful and it's so in your face about how fucked up these people are and how they treat each other.

And I'm so interested in his decision to make that movie. To your Mike Nichols point, it's his who's afraid of Virginia Woolf for sure. And, you know, in the same like black and white claustrophobic, like great, great movie stars. Being undone. Losing it and going at each other in a confined space in a theatrical form. Like, you know, both theaters adapted to play, which to movie, which explains some of the three hour runtime.

They're not all that. One thing, my one note to Sydney is like sometimes we could cut a little, you know? adapted to play, which, to movie, which explains some of the three hour runtime. They're not all that. One, one thing, my one note to Sydney is like, sometimes we could, we could cut a little, you know, he likes a longer movie.

He does like a longer movie. I like a longer movie. He's so uncomfortable with a lot of his work. But no, and, and in Long Day's Journey Tonight, like that is the point that you're supposed to be like crawling to get out of there. The,

the runtime does create that experience of nausea. I bring that movie up because like I said, I don't think it has been canonized quite like his best loved classics, but it's one that he brings up a lot in the book. Yes. And it seems to have had a big impact on him. And I think part of that is Hepburn

and working with her and what that meant to him. Part of it was mounting a story like this. And like I watched Daniel for the first time last night too i don't know if you guys had a chance to see daniel i'd never seen it before it's a movie he makes in the early 80s that is this interesting like echo of everything in a long day's journey and tonight and so just because he made dog day afternoon and network he talks about those movies yeah but not as much as like dan and A Long Day's Journey and Tonight 2. So that's the other thing too.

And Prince of the City. Prince of the City. Yeah. It's like a really big one for him. Yeah. And that's an interesting one because that did eventually get to the point that I'm talking about.

Yes. Where bros like me and Chris are like the real one is Prince of the City. Once again, it's three hours long, Sydney. It is. It is very long.

But he likes to sit in it. Like he likes to like rub your nose in the themes of the movie a little bit in a way that I find appealing. I think for some people, they may feel like it's a little bit out of fashion to make art in that way, but I always enjoy it. I think those are like...

Do you feel like he is definitively East Coast? Is he alienating in the way that he is New York? The thing I always think about with him is that he's... Well, first of all, yes, because I think that he represented a nexus of a moment when the television industry was still very heavily based in New York City. The theater was providing a lot of the talent both for writing and acting.

It still does, but not so much. I think people now conceive of themselves as movie actors and movie writers without maybe ever thinking about being in plays or doing theater. But I think that more than anything, what I get from his East Coast roots and his New York roots specifically is a practicality. I really love all of the stuff in his book about, we lost the light, so I had to make it work. Or the thing I was thinking about here was like, we had to just get a low angle.

And then all of a sudden this person had to go because they had a photo shoot and I lost them for the rest of the day. Like there's a lot of that. And so that the New York part of it, the most quintessential, like my favorite movie of his is The Verdict, which is a Boston film shot in New York.

You know, and it never, you never think twice about the fact that it's not Boston because he's like, I can make it work. You know what I mean? I know how to make this bar in the Lower East Side look like a bar in downtown Boston near the courthouses or something like that. So I think about the New Yorkness of living in New York, how everything is like, ah, shit, Well, I missed that train. So I got to do this, this, and this, and then I got to do that. And that's like a New Yorker's way of thinking all the time. You walk out your door and you're like, how am I going to get through this day without accidentally falling in a puddle full of rats? And that's kind

of how his films feel sometimes. They do. A lot of the ones in the 80s really feel that way, actually, where you can feel like the luridness of New York kind of taking over a little bit. But also the complications and the thrill of navigating those problems, you know? So the other kinds of movie that he would make, you know, he makes these great adaptations of dramatic literature.

He makes these gritty New York crime dramas. He even makes like social dramas, but he also makes like potboilers and Agatha christie stories like he's he's a very neat triangulation i think of our taste on the show in terms of how he would bounce around he makes a musical and the whiz you know like he really um was unafraid to flex around in in a way that i guess some of our favorite directors do that. And you're right that Soderbergh in particular feels comfortable taking a swing on things. But he feels like someone who is kind of like unencumbered by the financial ramifications of any movie that he made.

Which feels different from how movies exist right now. Well, sure. Do you think that you owe that to basically him being comfortable being in the scale of filmmaking, not in society, a middle class filmmaker? Upper middle class, yeah. But he's like, I come in under budget and on time. Like almost all the time, you know, with the exception of The Wiz maybe. But like, I think he's like, I pride myself on hitting my schedule and hitting my number. Yeah.

I mean, I think something that I… Because we lionize the like like he's so over budget he's in the Philippines he's never coming back right Michael Cimino is killing the new Hollywood while Sidney Lumet

is just like grinding through his 39th movie I think I mean I personally relate to his story and like aspire to his story because he's like

a very thoughtful person who puts a lot of emotion and intentionality into the work that he does. But he is basically a pretty ruthless manager and not mean, in fact, beloved, but has a very specific set of rules that he lives by. And if you want to work with him,

as you guys well know working with me, like you kind of have to work in that mode to get what gets done. And he presages Eastwood. I mean, he makes his movies and does one or two takes while shooting fucking Tennessee Williams. You know what I mean?

And we'll talk about the style that he works in. But he's this interesting confluence of business efficiency and heartful creativity that you just don't really hear about. Because if you're heartful creative, you have to don't really hear about because if you're heartful heartful creative you have to spend 300 million dollars and make everybody work till midnight right well some of that is also like again the theater and the live tv background

where it's like i mean he was doing tennessee williams live on tv and it's like you don't get a second shot at that so you got to rehearse you got to ever get everything ready and so and so the theater training and preparation both for him and i guess for some of the actors it's funny later on one of the at the end the last chapter of making movies is just him complaining about studios and and budgets and uh you know it's it's it's old but it's new but it's you know it's incredibly resonant i thought totally yeah but and he's he's like when a movie star needs like an extravagant trailer you know that is like literally this much money that you can't see on the screen anymore so you're right he is he's very specific um

but i think also just the the 10 000 hours to your point sorry sorry again to Malcolm Gladwell, really, really helps and contributes. And it's a type of training that people just can't get anymore. I think it's something maybe people don't fully understand about the dawn of television that shows like Playhouse 90 or the Kraft Theater would run 60 or sometimes even 90 minute versions of stage plays or original stories and they would shoot them live and in order to shoot them live there had to be this extraordinary rehearsal period so that everybody could not just deliver their lines but hit their marks i mean imagine trying to move sets in between commercial breaks and put we can do it now when jimmy kimmel sponsors the live rendition of a musical but those suck that time, it was really, really hard to do this. And you had to be like,

you had to be a kind of a drill sergeant to do that work. That's the other thing, he was a military person too. So he had a kind of like efficiency built into him through this work. I do think there's also, it's worth noting that it's not all kind of middle management. You know, like we have to be on time. It's the rehearsal stuff is also like, I want to look at every line of the script and ask what's going on here.

And I want to know how you're going to play it. I want to know how you're feeling about it. And then I want to talk to my DP and talk about how we're going to shoot it and what lens we're going to use and whether we should show the ceiling or whether this should be on a set or whether we should go find a bar,

all these things. And that was the best part of the book to me was the script part, because like him going through all like every single part, noting the script being like, okay, this, this, this, we're breaking these things down into their fundamental building blocks and talking about how do we get actors as diverse as Ralph Richardson and Dean Stockwell to be on the same page with Eugene O'Neill over the course of three and a half hours or whatever in a movie. It's like that stuff is like work. The same way getting on being on time and being on budget is it's like really interrogating the stuff you're doing and not having it be one of five things you're doing in a day there's a certain uh real romance to the book and to like you look at his filmography of like imagining this being the central preoccupation of a movie star's day is like how do we get the

verdict to be the best movie it possibly can and not being like it's important for me as paul newman to be seen as to be as cool and as heroic as possible and other than that i don't give a shit and when you look at the actors who recur or who celebrate him across his work there are people with less vanity or less at least a certain kind of lack of vanity you know he doesn't it doesn't mean he doesn't work with glamorous people like paul newman like jane fonda but they're more willing to not worry about those things as much because yeah one of the through lines of the book is not just a contempt for the like whether we can get the money on screen it's like the makeup person who trails a performer and makes them feel bad about themselves so they feel indebted like their personal entourage but the makeup and hair yeah that's like a very insightful but wither like

so much contempt for these people and the apparatus of hollywood that you do not hear about you don't hear directors publicly talk about these things you do not hear them complain about the actors in the trailer you definitely do not hear them complain about the teamsters right and that's another fascinating aspect of this which is like hollywood is built on these particular structures and no matter who populates the structures they are locked in place. And in order to make a movie, it's going to cost X amount of dollars

and require X amount of days. And there are things that participate across this apparatus. And he really doesn't like. Yeah. And I wouldn't say like many of those things have changed. And in some cases,

some of them have become more outsized since he was making movies. But part of what's fun about the book is his willingness to just be like, this is matters this is what i love i had a great experience doing this also fuck this yeah it it feels like a very candid portrayal of a person working that i really like what else like jumped out to you in the book well we were just talking about his disdain for the hangers-on particularly particularly for the actors. But he also has a huge reverence for actors as well. And the little details about what an actor could do,

technically, that meant so much to him. I'm thinking about, I guess it was the rehearsal scene or something where they're blocking. And because of camera angles or something, he needs Sean Connery to like lean back the banana and to yeah do the banana in order or something and it's like it's intent and he's like well you know actors of a certain caliber have no problem doing the banana while they're also you know and they don't drop a line Sean Connery was great at it and like that's the sort of stuff that does the the banana even exist anymore? Like, it probably does.

They're just like, we'll fix it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll fix it in post. And he's talking about how like European actors are like amazing at looping or ADR. And he's like, I have never understood why like they're so good at it. And Americans have the same. But it was very cool. And he also, you know, isolates all of the, many of the performances that he loves. The scene of how he got the dictation of the will speech from Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, how they stage, like, they run it back again to get almost like a, you know, like a Fincher-like lack of... No affect. No affect. No affect. And also does that, I think, for the Ned Beatty scene in Network, which is incredible because that is like, imagine having to do that physicality twice. And the speech of speeches.

Yeah, of course. So, but he really, really has like great affection for, and you learn things about Paul Newman or William, the anecdote about William Holden, like holding something back because he like, didn't want to look Faye Dunaway right in the eye because it's so powerful. And then Lumet's like, why don't you look her right in the eyes?

And then boom, like so good. Come on. I mean, that's literally the stuff that makes movies work. Like that movie doesn't work if you don't believe that they're emotionally entangled. Yeah. He's in love with her work if you don't believe that they're emotionally entangled in what they both represent.

Yeah, he's in love with her and he's willing to throw everything away from her. And that she feels something for him but will never let herself truly give over to feeling. Like, that's like an emotional dynamism that is in his movies

that can feel labored over very easily. Right. And it always feels, I shouldn't say it always feels effortless because he has some stinkers where it does feel really labored over. easily right and it always feels I shouldn't say it always feels effortless because he has some stinkers where it does feel really labored over but when it's working

it is the coolest thing in movies to me I think for me the biggest the biggest joy I got out of the book was the chapter on

actually like what lenses and lighting he chooses and how he goes about doing that there's like as a major connoisseur of YouTube videos about David Fincher what lenses and lighting he chooses and how he goes about doing that. There's like,

as a major connoisseur of YouTube videos about David Fincher and all these like- And a subscriber to American Cinematographer. Exactly. I love reading about this stuff, but usually the stuff I read is about the making of quote unquote great films or highly stylized films. And so to read about lens choices in a movie like Prince of the City,

where usually when I'm watching Prince of the City, I'm like, this is essentially like docu-realism. I don't really even know what you guys would have been talking about. And him talking about like, as the movie goes on, the lighting changes so that everything in the background is starting to be in shadow as Danny perilously goes towards a point of no return.

So that it's only him and it's only him and his decisions by the end of the movie. And then the last 40 minutes of that movie are in fucking darkness. It's like Gordon Willis shot it. And I was like, oh my god, this is cooking my noodle I can't believe

that these things that don't seem labored over at all in his movies are actually incredibly well considered and that you know

I think so much about like the composition of this shot as like Terrence Malick follows this guy walking through wheat and it's like but he thinks

just as much about it as David Fincher does and also but there's that anecdote he's like I once asked Kuros much about it as David Fincher does and also but there's that anecdote he's like I once asked Kurosawa why this shot was like a certain way

and Kurosawa said because like if I'd moved the camera one inch to the left you would have seen a factory and one inch to the right like you know yeah there's a telephone call

yeah the whole book is this act of an upending new criticism where it's like you can really appreciate this shit a lot more if you just listen to people talk about why they did certain things i had this experience i just had

this experience on the pod where i saw long legs liked long legs i was like it's pretty cool definitely want to talk to the director he came in and he started talking about the movie that he made and i was like oh that's the movie and that's why did that. And it elevated my appreciation for what was done. It's the same thing you're describing with Prince of the City, which are these like critical but durational choices in all of the movies where you have to like sit through and ponder. And if you don't ponder, it's okay. But it's okay to let an artist explain to you

why they made a certain decision. It's also okay if 99.9% of the audience never thinks about it. Because he knows, like all great filmmakers do, that all of the decisions I make, they're not going to even know. They're not going to even understand explicitly. They don't know that Stanley Kubrick doesn't use electric lights in Barry Lyndon. But how does it make them feel, right? Like, what is the effect on the audience as they're watching this piece of storytelling

every decision i make is going to change the temperature in that theater what am i going to do to it and so it's like it doesn't always have to be like oh my god what a sick warner it can be i've chosen this lens for lauren bacall you know because x y z and sometimes it might be because she's short or because she doesn't like standing up a lot. So we did this way. And it's like, that's amazing. That's amazing to consider. I feel like it's an ode to you because the unobtrusive camera is the thing that he talks about utilizing. And it is not these breathless tracking shots or this like the athletic style that you talk about.

It's an inversion of that. It's like, how can I minimize the affect of the filmmaking while still giving you the emotional punch and still making choices? You know, like the Lens stuff is cool because he's explaining something that is very heady and technical in a very direct and practical way. But it is still science. Like he is still explaining a science to the work that he is doing. Like don't mistake what's happening here. It's not just like a guy crying about reading Tennessee Williams. Like, it is...

Right. There's a rigor. Yes. But to Chris's point, he's explaining it in the context of the book because, like, we want to know how movies are made, and he does it beautifully and directly, and I think, like, without pretension.

But he does, he wants you just to feel the effect of whatever decision um and whether it be the lighting or the lens or you know or the the music or lack thereof so i i've been re-watching movies the last few days and my husband has been in and out of the room and last night he was like it's been really fun just to walk in and you just, you see something on screen and it's just like a master at work. You know, like everything just like looks right on the screen, no matter where you are in the movie, no matter what movie it is. It's just like, oh, okay, this is in the hands of someone who like is really purposely knows what they're doing. Even in the movies that don't work entirely.

Yeah, this is still really good. I thought about that. I watched Critical Care last week, which is this late 90s movie that he made with James Spader about the... That was a bomb, right? The world of medicine, you know? And it's about a woman whose father is on life support

and she has a sister and they're in a battle for the estate. And so she sleeps with a doctor in order to implicate him in the case it's a really it's a really rickety script and it's it's a it's his attempt to do network for the world of hospitals and medicine and health care but there's a side plot in the movie about jeffrey wright a young jeffrey wright plays another character who is on life support and is kind of at the end of his life and he shoots these sequences against all white and he's in a hospital bed and nurses and doctors

come in and it is this like epic spiritual portrayal of like a b or even c plot in this movie that is otherwise like not working at all and it was exactly what you're saying i'm just like this is a an incredibly sophisticated gorgeous work of modern art inside of like kind of a bad comedy and I think it's because of what you're describing you know where it's like he's making choices

very intentionally sometimes you rise to the material and the material is Chekhov sometimes you fall down to the material that you're working with but you still are able

to do things that get keep me interested you know um it's really it's really hard to like smash the movies down

yeah because there's so many there's still a few that I still have never seen I tried really hard to watch everything but I couldn't get through all 45

and I had to do a lot of re-watching also because I didn't even get to do very much of it at all unfortunately can I ask a fun one to start us

as we get into the filmography yeah was there a movie that you'd never seen that you were really pleasantly surprised by or enjoyed? You want to go first? I don't think that there was. But that was just because like, respectfully, I hadn't

seen Prince of the City in you know, 15 years since I did my first, okay, I'm going to sit down. And so I was doing more re-watching than new discoveries. I have to be completely honest, I did not know The okay I'm gonna sit down and so I was I was doing more rewatching than than new discoveries I have to be completely honest I did not know

The Deadly Affair existed I was yeah you liked it really really into it yeah it's a very cool it's a John le Carre adaptation

so I feel ashamed for admitting that wow but it's James Mason plays the smiley-esque character I

it's it's on Pluto if you're looking for it. It's also available to rent. But I was like, holy crap, man. This is really good. There's a beautiful edition on Indicator on Blu-ray. I would recommend people check that out. That's the other thing is that this man's filmography is a testament to physical media.

Because a lot of this stuff, you can rent almost everything, but not everything. There's a few movies that are not available yeah or some that are just on you know youtube or just on daily motion or whatever so did you have a uh a delightful discovery i mean i don't daniel is not a delightful movie it's a very very difficult and challenging movie about the son and daughter of a couple who are stand-ins for the Rosenbergs who were executed by the United States government. And sort of like these, the,

the, the son and daughter played by Tim Hutton and Amanda Plummer. And they're sort of like working through and told through flashback who their parents were, what they did or did not do, what they mean to their family and to America. How it impacted their lives. And really what happens to them.

And it's just an agonizing movie. Like a fearless, hard movie about how fucked up families are and our country is. And written based on an E.L. Doctorow novel and the screenplay is written by Doctorow. It's a totally sui generis piece of work that i'd never seen before that i i liked it but i'm not sure i should be like you should race out

and see daniel today because it's um a bit of a downer but that's the only one that i'd never seen that i was really moved by like i watched a bunch of stuff like i watched just tell me what you want i watched love and molly you know, I watched The Deadly Affair. I watched That Kind of Woman. Like a bunch of movies I'd never seen before. And I was like, okay, this is probably why I haven't seen this. You know, like it didn't totally cohere for me. But the stuff that does is the best stuff ever.

Should we do this Hall of Fame style? Like do you want to really walk through? That's you. I mean mean there are a lot of them. You're trying to do essential, the 10 essentials

and then like maybe some personal favorites, right? Yeah, we can do a Hall of Fame style. I mean some will just be like no this is not Hall of Fame.

Some will be easy. For example, 12 Angry Men. Sure, yes, that's in the Hall of Fame. That's pretty good. That's his first film. Yeah, legendary stuff.

Take a look at this knife it's a very unusual knife i've never seen one like it neither had the storekeeper who sold it to the boy aren't you asking us to accept a pretty incredible coincidence i'm just saying a possible and i say it's not possible it's a very important film it's about a trial for a boy's life but we only see the story told through the lens of the 12 men who are in a room navigating his fate um starring henry fondonda and a wrecking crew of Hollywood character actors circa 1957. 1958 stage struck and 1959's that kind of woman.

I would say no. This is him effectively getting like shotgunned into the Hollywood system and taking on specific kinds of stories that don't totally click. 1960,

The Fugitive Kind. This is a hugely celebrated movie that's never been a big movie for me personally I don't know if you guys have any thoughts about this one it's really good Brando I checked it out

I don't know if I'd seen it but this is this is kind of right in that era of like if you want to know why Brando was a big deal you should watch movies from this era

and you should also maybe watch movies from right before this era and think about what that must have done to people's heads to see this guy doing this. But it's not like, I don't think I would fire it up. So it's an adaptation of

Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending. One of the reasons to recommend it, even if it's not going to go into our list, is there's an amazing Anna Magnani performance in it that I think reveals something that he talks about a bit in the book and he talks about a bit in his oscar acceptance speech in 2004 which is that he's also incredibly literate in world cinema and even though you would not get the impression that this is somebody who watched bergman or kurosawa or rossellini movies or jean

vigo or any of the like masters of european or or Asian cinema he's seen it all you know what I mean like he knows everything and his ability to work with actors like to your point earlier about in different styles like Anna Mignani and Marlon Brando don't work in the same style of acting just like Catherine Hepburn on A Long Day's Journey Into Night does not work in the same style of acting and somehow he manages to get like world-class performances out of them is this the film that includes the Brando anecdote about how Brando would test every director the first time? He was like, which take do you want? And if you pick the wrong take, he basically phones it in. Yeah. Amazing stuff. Super easy to work

with him. And you can tell because he worked with him so many times after this, you know, they collaborated nonstop. I also just like that Joanne Woodward's in this because like, it's like, he's just friends with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman from the actors. 1962 is A View from the Ridge. This is one that I didn't see that I think is

not widely available. It might be on YouTube right now. Obviously an Arthur Miller adaptation. Yet another giant. And then Long Day's Journey into Night.

But you feel better today, don't you? All the same, you've grown much too thin. Come on, sit down. All you feel better today, don't you? All the same, you've grown much too thin. Come on, sit down. All you need is your mother to nurse you. Big as you are, you're still the baby of the family to me, you know. Never mind me.

You take care of yourself. A tricky one. It's an important movie in his career. Yeah, but... You don't like it. It's not that I don't like it. Like, we can yell it if we're doing Hall of Fame. It's really important in his career and clearly to him uh in the book he taught references a lot

in terms of both the hepburn of it all and the way they stage it and the and the way they are he's putting together the takes but you know like it them. Well, if you didn't have 12 Angry Men, then it would be most representative of the like theater to movie period. But you do, in fact, have 12 Angry Men. You're right. You're right. That's an interesting way to think about it. Okay. 1964 is The Pawnbroker.

This is one of the first. I saw two films of his when I was really young because they were personal favorites of my parents. I don't know why they like The Pawnbroker. It's a difficult film to watch. It's very similar to Daniel. Historical drama about a tortured central character. And Rod Steiger has actually never really been my cup of tea, frankly. But I do remember very vividly seeing this at a very young age.

I wouldn't put this in this essential top 10. I would put the next film in. I'm going to yellow Pawnbroker just because it is widely considered an essential pre-New Hollywood text because it is like a really radical portrayal

of homosexuality and it's, you know, the ideas about surviving in the post-Holocaust PTSD experience is really critical too. 64's Fail Safe is definitely in for me. It's in for me. This is a Cold War nuclear anxiety movie

about what would happen if there was a strike and a reply. Yeah. This and 12 Angry Men, you can pair as a director over the course of like eight years here right being like alright how do I shoot a movie in a room and it's really cool like and with a little bit of a detour

into Eugene O'Neill which is also in a room or two but like how do I build tension in such a claustrophobic space and you know having Henry Fonda helps yeah I mean it's a it's a return to a safe pair of hands um and I know this is one of Adam Neiman's favorite movies he's he's asked me about

it like multiple times he's been like have you seen it I'm like I have I have seen I promise I've seen the movie um it's so early in this kind of storytelling. I mean, this movie is before Dr. Strangelove. Like it's before all of those things. I remember when I was on blank check for Dr. Strangelove, I was like, have you guys seen Failsafe? And they hadn't seen it. So it's weird. It's in the Criterion Collection

and it's been remade by George Clooney live on television in the 2000s. But it still doesn't quite have that like level of notoriety that you might think a movie like this has. But it's so taught. Like it's so intense. think a movie like this has, but it's so taught. It's so intense. I think it's awesome. Yeah, it's really great.

1965 is The Hill. This is his first collaboration, I think of five, with Sean Connery. I know this is a movie that you like quite a bit. It's one of the best Connery performances. It's such a dark, fucked up movie. It's about basically insubordinate British soldiers who are in a prison camp in Libya, I believe.

And they are being put through their paces on a daily basis by a monstrous drill sergeant who makes them run up and down a hill. And it is a really, really incredible portrait of like, you know, Connery quickly becomes like late middle age immediately in his career. But to see angry young man Connery, and also in this story,

and also just like this quintessentially New York Jewish director who's just like, I can also make a film about like, what English society does to men. You know, it's like pretty amazing. Jewish director who's just like I can also make a film about like what English society does to men you know it's like

pretty amazing this is one of my dad's favorite movies so he showed it to me really young I always love this one I know this is very cute

no but it's also like this is a tough one this is a tough set yeah my dad's like what school was like yeah yeah yeah okay

we're gonna put you through the paces on the rewatchables of this going through Bernthal and Byron Mayo over and over again 19 or 20 oh okay

I was just imagining like 8 year old giant glasses being like wow this was like on WHYY it was on like on public television

my dad was like you have to watch this I was like they're being incredibly mean to each other Transformers don't do this another movie that when it ends

you're like Jesus like it has a very harsh and tough ending great movie would say probably a yellow yeah um 1966 the group i mean what a swing it was sentimental favorite but also it doesn't work but that's okay but like but i love so much that he tried it yeah terrific cast yeah an adaptation of a very popular novel at the time um mary m McCarthy, still a great novel. Read it if you, you know. Yeah, it was a big hit.

So it was a big, you know, if it were made in 2024, I don't think a man would be directing the group. Just one of my takes. But I like that Sidney Lumet was willing to do it in 66. You know? You can see at this stage, after the success of 12 Angry Men, Long Day's Journey, Pawnbroker, Failsafe,

he's like, I'm going to move around a little bit. I'm going to try a few things that I otherwise would not have been able to try if I didn't have these acclaimed movies. But the group, yeah, it's ultimately, I don't know if it's a misfire.

It's a kind of a leaden movie. You know, like, an hour in, you're like, how long has this been on? 1967 is The Deadly Aff deadly affair which is like i is a pretty sturdy spy movie yeah it's good um but is not is not in 1968's bye-bye braverman which is the kind of movie that i would love to love and i think sydney lament would love to love it as well yeah effectively like his first comedy um a george seagull movie about being jewish about new york

about being in relationships and um getting a little bit older and that's like i just missed on this one and it's just there's a tonal an inability to grab yeah the tone comedy not his forte i would say perhaps not i think there's some comic elements there are funny things in his serious movies but comic timing yeah yeah he tends to struggle with that touch

he's good at satire which is very hard to do right but not great at pure comedy 1968's The Seagull I admit I've not seen this not seen it Chekhov

it's Chekhov yeah I mean it is that that Seagull yeah a hallowed cast James Mason you know

you want to put it in having not seen it the only seagull that I really that I really respect is the seagull in that Blake Lively shark movie

remember that one oh okay Steven Seagull The Shallows it was that was the name of the actor yeah

yeah that's good that's funny the actor the bird actor that they used I feel like you've seen like many productions

of the seagull recently. No, I only saw Cherry Orchard. You've seen Cherry Orchard a bunch, okay, yeah. Me and Todd Field. Todd Field joined you? You went arm in arm? But I looked across the theater

and there was Todd Field. Do you think he enjoyed himself? And I was like, we got the data! It's a Twister reference I know last of the mobile hot shots bewildering movie

this was the first movie that I watched months ago and we decided we were going to do this and I guess

it's a comedy and then you were like oops I guess we're doing well I was like oh I forgot I'm going to have to

watch a lot of movies that don't work and don't have like a big reputation. Um, it is an interesting, there are a series of interesting elements of the movie. So it stars James Coburn and Lynn Redgrave.

And, um, it's based on a Tennessee Williams play. It's scored by Quincy Jones. It's shot by James Wong Howe. Everything about this should have been like, this is an American classic. Yeah. And again, very similar to

Bob Raverman where it was like, isn't this so funny? He's in a little bit of a weird spot here. We skipped The Appointment, I think, which is the James Salter movie. Oh, I did. I'm sorry. James Salter is one of my favorite novelists. He wrote a book called Sport and a Pastime, which is about a guy having sex in Spain for 200 pages.

But it's beautifully written. It is. And he was very influential on Batman. See, also Light Years, if you like those ideas. And it's Omar Sharif and Anika May, right? Yeah. And it's not good. No.

And he's like, it wasn't good. I just thought it would be cool to shoot a movie in Paris. So like, if this happened, if this happened to another director who had like

early success in their career, he'd be out. Yeah, he'd be out. I mean, if you went Bye Bye Braverman, Seagull,

The Appointment, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, you'd be out. He returns to working with Sean Connery on this really nifty movie called The Anderson Tapes did you watch this one?

no I didn't okay I think you would really like this it's Connery and Diane Cannon it's again a kind of a spy thriller kind of like a MacGuffin movie it's a little bit

a little Hitchcock-y a little Hitchcock-y at least in it's premise and a little bit like subverting some Bond tropes for Connery and you can tell that Connery in this period

is constantly being like I'm not just Bond I'm not just Bond but this is a little bit of averting some Bond tropes for Connery. And you can tell that Connery in this period is constantly being like, I'm not just Bond. I'm not just Bond. Yeah. But this is a little bit of a thumbing his nose. I like it. It's not, I don't think it should go in, but it's a very, very good movie. It's cool.

It's a Frank Pearson script. It's just really well done. Yeah. Yeah. And this is starts their collaboration. It's like a safe cracker who like cracks something. So it's his time. Cracks the wrong thing.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way of thinking about it. 1972 Child's Play. Not that Child's Play not that Child's Play not this is not about a killer doll who's possessed

by a demon it is about two teachers in a boarding school and a series of mysterious deaths that happened

at the boarding school big holdovers energy in this movie it stars James Mason and he was supposed to be opposite a really big star I can't remember who the star was

who was supposed to be in it. And you can see when this... Marlon Brando. Was it Marlon Brando? And that person dropped out. And when Brando drops out, you can see that the air just comes out of the movie.

Yeah. Because he's replaced by a much lesser known actor and all of a sudden you've got James Mason just chewing the scenery around everybody else. And in the movie,

I like James Mason a lot. But another movie that like is interesting, he never really fully gets his arms around the kind of more supernatural elements I felt like in the movie. I like James Mason a lot but another movie that like is interesting he never really fully gets his arms around the kind of more supernatural elements I felt like in the movie but it's an interesting one.

Also there are supernatural elements in the movie. I'm good. We have two in the ten right now. We have two in but the seventies

are coming. Okay. 1973 The Offense. Awesome movie. Fucked up. Really fucked up really fucked up yeah this is about

it's about a police officer who kills someone during an interrogation yes but the person he kills he believes to be like a child murderer yeah

and is a heavy psychological thriller starring Connery and you can see Connery is like I want to make

another fucked up movie I have to go to my buddy Sidney and then Connery at the time I think had a production company and so he was getting a lot of movies made by dint of his success as Bond and so he was doing trying to do a lot of challenging stuff this is very very good I don't think it's quite at the level of like a couple of movies that are coming up but it we can yellow it it is like it is as good to me as like before the devil knows you're dead you know what I is like it is as good to me as like Before the Devil Knows You're Dead you know what I mean

like it is just really good a really really good thriller and sometimes that's enough so yellow is a good place to be 1973 Serpico I would say this is it

I would say I actually gotta say I find Serpico underrated at this point yeah I feel like Serpico's gotten beaten up a lot

a bunch over the years and I think that people find first of all it's like Serpico has gotten beaten up a lot, a bunch over the years. And I think that people find it. First of all, it's like Serpico as an idea has become like almost a cliche. Like it's like, all right,

Serpico relax, you know, like, but this movie still is really, really, really gripping. And if you're a Pacino connoisseur, if you're into it,

it's about as good as it gets, man. Like I, sometimes it's, he's making a lot of choices in this movie but it's really really cool the ballet dancer like doing the you know yeah take doing the ballet on the and then him seducing you know his next girlfriend with the opera like out on this it's i mean obviously the styling of al pacino is iconic. But yeah, it's great.

It's an amazing subvert, like, rejection of Michael Corleone too. You know, like the, not just the look, but the performance style is very, very different from what he had gotten the most acclaim for up until that point. I don't know if it's like a turning point necessarily for Pacino, but this legendary movie. 1974's Love and Molly, currently available on Tubi. Based on Larry McMurtry's Leaving Cheyenne novel, which is a lovely novel. Have you finished your McMurtry project?

Oh, yeah. I've been thinking about starting over again. Okay. That's beautiful. I forgot to mention the McMurtry note on the pod we did yesterday. It's so amazing. It's too bad. Another movie that doesn't work.

It's Blythe Danner. She's fucking awesome in this movie. Gwyneth's mom looks beautiful in 1974. Anthony Perkins and is it Bo Bridges? Bo Bridges

in a love triangle in Texas. Sidney Lumet, maybe not the bard of Texas. If you think a love triangle in Texas sounds good, just read the book. It's really good.

Okay. So that's Red. 1974, Murder on the Orient Express. I'm going to go green for this. I think it's in. I think we have to. I mean, it's one of my... I love that he did it.

As a Christy head, I have some notes. As an Oscar viewer, I have some notes of like, is this why what it is bella rosslini when out of all this like what are we doing yeah i mean and we know why because of you know academy nonsense but um you would say that the 2017 version is superior no bretta bretta choosing his lenses wisely. Yeah. I'm still mad about the continuity break at the end of that. No, it's really good. And the book is great on this one.

He spends like a fair amount of time talking about it. And the fact that they just like recreated the train compartments. They just like took them from the archives in Belgium. And we're like, okay, now we'll just, you know. We couldn't build anything as nice as this so we're just gonna use it the making movies is it this film

that they spend they can only get one shot of the train yeah the train and they talk about the train I love that part it's so good and he has to stay up

all night lighting it and getting ready for it and they can bring the train in once but they can't shoot behind because you can see bristles or whatever at the door

it's an important one it's the most star-studded cast he probably ever worked with you know it's Lorne McCall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bessette, Sean Connery, Albert Finney, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave,

Richard Widmark, Michael York, like tons of, you know, stars or legendary actors of the stage. It was a big hit, made $40 million, tons of Oscar nominations. Ingrid Bergman won. It's a good it's a good

Agatha Christie adaptation also just for like a just taking a look at two years of work yeah London crime drama New York crime drama

Texas melodrama pan-European murder mystery sure caper yeah that's fucking incredible it is kind of amazing

24 months of releases 1975 Dog Day Afternoon and the greenest of the greens nobody's gonna worry over kidnapping charges the most you're gonna get is five years you get out in one year huh kiss me what kiss me when i'm being fucked i like to get kissed come on come on come on you're a city cop right robbing the banks of federal offense they got me on kidnapping armed robbery they're gonna bury me man i don't want to talk to somebody who's trying to call me get somebody in charge i don't know what's i it's a kind of a hard movie to talk about because it's such a um work of inspired perfection like it seems like such an unlikely masterpiece given the

shape of the story and the fact that it is similarly like a more or less a single location drama it's a a very unlikely story in terms of the characters that are centered and the kinds of like the sensitivity that this movie still has 50 years later to the story that it's telling um it's also like so propulsive and exciting and emotional and you're so locked in on al pacino and john Cazale. Great movie. Just give one note on this which is that the book is fascinating

about who met directing the background players and the extras. Yeah. And I watched it I watched like

two thirds of it the other day knowing that. He actually also kind of has contempt for these people. Yes. Because he's like

they like get more money if they bring their own clothes or something like that but well isn't that that's the extras union which i think is different there's like a the extras that that's like the in los angeles he's talking about it and he's saying that these background actors are good are different well because a lot of them were in the neighborhood yeah and it's just the people he's using and he tells them to like to wear their own clothes yeah right so just like go watch this and keep an eye on them because know that lumet was like walking up to guys and being like this is your cousin but you're fighting with him but you guys are both here today right but it's it's so good and then when you watch it, you're like, oh my God, like these people are all acting too.

And then watch like literally anything where background actors are like, hey. Well, there are so many sequences of huge crowds, you know? But like watching a TV show where like 30 people are supposed to be 80 people

and they're all just like, I'm standing here because like Homelander is talking. And now then like there's like a CGI person in a spurs between every two people. No, like obviously Pacino and Cazale are like amazing and carry this movie. But not just like the background actors. Every single supporting, like every person in that bank.

And the way that Pacino is interacting with them is unreal. It is like this movie like can't be underrated because it's so celebrated, but every time I watch it, I'm like, this is really underrated. Also, like, Attica and everything,

like, was improvised? Yeah. He wants to kill me so bad he can taste it. Attica! Attica! Attica!

Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! And the way, I thought that the way that Lumet talks about writers generally was like very lovely but he was like it was improvised but not really because the spirit of what they were saying you know what they're saying is this yeah and like we blocked it all out and they knew where to go and they knew what they needed to communicate every line, which I thought was very respectful. And I think in doing so, he explains,

I think, did Frank Pearson win best original screenplay for this screenplay? And so he's like, he deserved it, even though some of the best moments of this wrote this. Yeah, yeah. 1976 Network. I mean, the other greenest green? All right, you heard.

Get back to your office. Muldanian called me. Joe Donnelly called me. We got a goddamn hit, goddamn it. Dinah's showing the Times. We even got an editorial in the holy goddamn New York Times. A call to morality. I don't know where he is.

That crazy son of a bitch Beale has caught on, so don't tell me you don't know where he is. He could be jumping off a roof for all I know. The man is insane. He's not responsible for himself. This was like my introduction to Lumet. This was my favorite movie for years. Like this and like Pulp Fiction were like when I was a teenager, I was like, I guess these are the movies.

These are the great movies. And it's like a different expression. It's the opposite of Pulp Fiction, right? It's a movie that's like all ideas. Like it is Paddy Chayefsky dumping every feeling he has about the media corporate power relationships family programming you know our prurient interests like all those things capitalism money without question how power works um and I'd still like pretty much hums for me you know i've seen him many many many times i watched it one more time this is really my only like big re-watch yeah and i had re-watched

it in part because there was this faye dunaway documentary on hbo that i had watched and she speaks very lovingly of lumet and she is radiant in this movie she is on fire as diane christiansen that's it it's a tough part she's surrounded by all these like legends of Hollywood and they're all yelling at her and she comes out of the movie and holds it. I like this story that Lumat tells about interviewing her

for this movie and like he walks into her palatial apartment or wherever and is walking across the room and just yells like there's no humanity or like there's no vulnerability in her

so don't look for it. Like before they even he even gets to her and then they talk and she laughs and talks about it uh and and then she takes the part um but it's it's both like very insightful about that performance and character and also just like incredible management and diplomacy and uh in getting someone on your side. In moments of self-criticism, I have thought like maybe Network is a bad script because it is just so speechy. Everyone does not talk as though humans talk. Everyone talks like Patty Chayefsky thinks,

which is something that happens in a lot of Chayefsky scripts. But that Lumet is able to make you buy into the simultaneously realistic and farcical nature of the story like it's been written over and over

again about how prescient the movie was it's a testament to this era that a couple of these movies specifically the back-to-back Dog Day and Network but even Serpico and a

couple of others have moments that have now almost tower above the film themselves. So Mad as Hell, Attica, are things that you will see in any clip show of any, like the history of American movies or celebrating movies at the Oscars.

But go watch these movies because they're really, really, really great top to bottom movies. And this is also another one that's really good. He talks about in the style section and the lenses lighting section because as it goes on, he kind of ramps up

the surrealism of it. Kind of culminating with the Ned Beatty scene where it's like this starts out as like a pretty gritty office drama that then kind of

almost approaches like stuff that the Coen brothers would rip off 12 years later, you know, and it's very, all the lamps down the table. My obsession is every time Robert Duvall talks in this movie,

he is, it might be his, it might be his best performance as Frank Hackett, the meddling. I would have agreed with you before Sunday night. Yeah. Yeah. We just see another movie recently that is in that conversation.

So that's three in a row. And that's a very, very, very powerful trio in three different styles and three different tones. And he absolutely nails it. All three movies were hits. All three movies were acclaimed. All three movies got attention from the Academy. At this point, Lumet, a New York filmmaker with a background in television and the theater,

is helping to define the new Hollywood. He's not really a participant in what Easy Rider was doing, but as the studios are empowering creative people to take bigger chances, he's there.

Then he makes this weird choice in 1977 to make Equus. Well, he likes the theater. He does. It's another adaptation of a play about a psychiatrist

and a boy who's been blinded. And I'm not a fan of this movie. I'm sorry to say. It didn't come up in our 1977 draft. I don't think. I don't think so.

No. Nominated for Oscars though, right? It was. It was acclaimed at the time. It's fine. I don't really care for another. I don't know if I'm for Oscars though right it was it was a claim at the time you know it's fine I don't really care for another I don't know if I'm like a big equus

in general fan in general yeah did you see Daniel Radcliffe in his performance I did did you really I did

what was that like my seats were really far away so I couldn't see anything by anything he was nude yes in that performance I'm glad that you picked up

on my reference absolutely I did I did not see that okay i'm not a big fan of this story ultimately i think i mean same i was like for the daniel rod greek myth like rehash yeah um so that's red 1978's the whiz i think there's a strong case for this i do as well it's like it has maybe not achieved cult classic by the time that he's writing, making movies. Yes. But it has been handed down to all of us.

Yes. As a cult classic. Like, it's pretty amazing to look at. I know he was like heartbroken that the Reds didn't come out the way that he wanted to. But I'm like, I don't know, man. What I saw looks good. Yeah. I mean, it's a, you know, reimagining of the Wizard of Oz story starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

Yeah. And Nipsey Russell and Ted Ross and Lena Horne and all these great, basically, like, icons of Black American music in the 20th century. It's produced by Motown. It's got some great musical numbers. It is, I would say, it's a little fat, you know, to your point. Sure, yeah. It's a long movie. I wish it was a little bit shorter. Many, many musicals of the, you know, to your point. Sure, yeah. It's a long movie. I wish it was a little bit shorter.

Many musicals of your are. Also, many musicals made today are, but they are also bad in every way. Yeah, I think, so one of the reasons why, I don't know. You gonna see Wicked? You wanna fill in? No, I think I'll take that one off.

You know, Lumet was married to Lena Horne's daughter and I and I think that's why he ultimately was the director of this movie and that's a fascinating thing obviously they would not

have asked Sidney Lumet to direct an all black musical staging of The Wizard of Oz today but I think it's pretty sensitive and fun and it does have a kind of like hokiness to it

that I think lingers. Yeah. But I would at minimum yellow it. I would yell it as well. It's a crowd pleaser. Yeah. And honestly, like meaningful that a movie like this was made at this time. It was a flop, unfortunately.

Yeah. And he's hard on himself about it in the movie. But that's okay. 1980s is just tell me what you want. This is kind of him like licking his wounds trying to make a comedy with ali mcgraw and alan king um it's ali mcgraw's last movie right so there are a number of um blind items in the book where you think it's ali mcgraw yeah well one of them where he's like he's either talking about movies that don't work or actors who like

aren't really ready or anything and i did i think he think he gave Al McGraw away as one of them where it was just like, oh, she's not ready for what's... Which is weird because she's so complimentary of him. She has, I think, described him as the greatest director of actors ever. Yeah. And that's fascinating. Maybe I'm wrong. It's possible. I mean, she's not a very good actress.

Right. I don't mind saying so. In most of her movies, I don't wrong. It's possible. I mean, she's not a very good actress. Right. I don't mind saying so. Like, in most of her movies, I don't understand what she's doing. And I think even as he's saying that, he's like, what are you going to do? Fire the person? Or are you just kind of like go on and make the movie? Yeah. Yeah.

So. It's a tough one. You know, maybe he was diplomatic. That movie is red. Okay. Unfortunately for Allie and for Sydney. 1981's Prince of the City. This can green it.

This is a green. Yeah. Yeah. This is the City. You guys can green it. This is a green. Yeah. This is the one. This is probably I think you can make an argument that this is the best police movie ever made. It's not the most famous. I think it gives the most complete

morally complicated it may not be always realistic but it has verisimilitude always. And I think also part of it is that specifically he made choices in the casting because he was like, I can't do Pacino and I can't have De Niro because they'll take people out of what this character is going to do.

Right. So the Treat Williams playing Danny Cielo, who's a cop basically in Moral Freefall, is... It's this amazing performance. This is always a very intimidating movie to me. It was one of the first double videos I used to see at the video store. And I'd be like, I don't know if I can watch two videos. Yeah, it was like Wu-Tang forever.

But this is like one of my favorites of his. I think it actually stands the test of time more than Serpico in some ways. The Tree Williams performance is amazing. Incredible. It's the first of 10 collaborations with Andre Bartowiak, the cinematographer. And the person who I think is most responsible for like codifying the second half

of Sidney Lumet's visual style. Gets great performances. Jay Press and Alan an awesome screenplay oscar nominated uh this movie is also shown to me by my father my dad has some complicated feelings about this movie does he he does as a police officer i think he thinks some things about it are interesting and resonate and other things don't i think you know it's just him returning to this idea of like corrupted institutions and what do we do in the face of them?

Danny Cello is so tragic and so sad. Trey Williams just died. I don't know if we mentioned that Trey Williams passed away last year. And this is one of those movies that was supposed to be the movie that was going to make him a forever star. And it didn't totally happen.

And this movie, again, was just not a big success. It did. Okay. Um, I'll say if you've seen Prince of the city and haven't seen, we own the city, or if you've seen, we own the city and haven't seen Prince of the city,

they're very deeply related. Not least of which, because treat Williams is character. And we own the city is the, is almost the retort. He's the Greek chorus. Yeah. Yeah.

He's like Danny Cielo 40 years later. Yeah. It's a, that was a brilliant little stroke of casting. 1982's Death Trap. Real crowd pleaser.

What's the take on this one? I really like this, but I also, this, I watched this a while ago when me and my wife were going through like a bunch of like

mystery kind of like sort of Russian nesting doll plot movies. What was the movie that was it's on a boat

and it's like Last something of Sheila. Yeah. The Last of Sheila. Yeah. So like it was like we watched Last of Sheila and then we basically

watched every recommended if you like Last of Sheila and got to Death Trap. Do you guys like this one? Yeah. I obviously like it. Yeah. It's very Amanda Cork.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing we're getting against it is it's so similar to Sleuth, the movie that came out in 1972 that also stars Michael Caine in the Christopher Reeve part about an older guy and a younger guy and kind of like how they're, you know,

upending each other. But this movie is clearly a palate cleanser after the, like like slog of making prince of the city the challenges making prince of the city and it's a really fun it's based on ira 11 novel who wrote so many novels that were adapted into movies jay press now and again writes this screenplay and michael cain and christopher eve play an old playwright and a young playwright and the old playwright is at a series of flops and he's looking for a little juice. The young playwright's

got something special one of his students so he tries to bring him in. Diane Cannon plays Michael Caine's wife. She's very amusing in this movie. This is one that if you just like tell your buddy

like you should check this out like they'll have a great time with it. It's weird to be like this is in the canon with Dog Day Afternoon. I don't think it is. But it is a good movie. Yeah, no, it's a good. Next one is in in the canon with dog i just really like it but it's a good movie no it's a good um next one is i mean it's like we've had many different shades of green

but this is like ringer green this is the ringer green i like yeah yeah the verdict 1982 we doubt our institutions and we doubt the law But today you are the law. You are the law. The subject of a rewatchables episode. Arguably the greatest Paul Newman performance. The hottest Charlotte Rampling performance. Yeah. We forgot to mention her on the Throw Your Life Away. Yeah, when you threw your life away

for her on that podcast. That's also the podcast where Bill just really slanders Redford for like 45 minutes. Yes. In a podcast about Paul Newman and Sidney Lumet. It's a tough one.

Which, you know, fine. This movie's incredible. A good example of what Lumet does that is a very simple choice is the way that he shoots the closing argument that Newman delivers

which is just at a great distance and not in close up and 99 times out of 100 a filmmaker would be locked in just as say

we saw Jake Gyllenhaal deliver his don't no no no no no no that's what I'm doing while you're on vacation stop

well nothing's been spoiled by saying that on the television series Presumed Innocent. The verdict is five-star class. Yes, unreal. You watch this movie and you're like, every single thing about it is basically perfect. And then you read about the making of the movie where it's like Paul Newman's like, I don't know my lines.

And they also had David Mamet's script and went through like five other writers trying a different version of the verdict only to go back to the mamet script and you're like it's just fucking amazing that movies get made yeah also it was like seriously it's like there was something missing newman from newman in rehearsals and he's like when I know my lines I'll have it. But it was like a defense mechanism. But then Sidney's like yeah he's like you can choose to open it up or you can't. He's like but that's what's missing. And then like Newman comes

in on Monday. And everybody just loses their mind. Unreal. We have eight greens and we have 25 years worth of movies left. I think we'll be okay. I think we'll have some arguments but I think we'll be okay. We'll be okay. I think we'll have some arguments, but I think we'll be all right. 1983's Daniel,

I already mentioned. Certainly an interesting piece of work by him, but not in the Hall of Fame. Yeah. 1984's Garbo Talks. This one eluded me. I did not get a chance to see it.

I still intend to watch it, movie starring Anne Bancroft. That apparently is pretty interesting, but there's others I can't say. 1986's Power. Underrated. So I can't say. 1986 is Power. Underrated.

So I didn't revisit. I've definitely seen it. Richard Gere plays like a fixer, like, I don't know, like a media consultant for politicians and it's about corrupt politicians. Quite good.

I don't think it has like a huge reputation, but for if you like watching morally bankrupt, morally bankrupt people, this is good. JT Walsh, E.G. Marshall, really good. A traditional cast of heavy hitter supporting actors. He consistently had some of the best supporting casts of any movie, but it's well known as an early Denzel performance

where he plays kind of like a message man for a politician. He's almost like a marketeer for politicians. Interesting movie. Not in. Big flop. Big flop. $14 million budget made $4 million at the box office. 1986 is The Morning After.

This is his big collaboration with Jane Fonda. It's a movie that Jane Fonda really loves. Yeah. But I think it's like a little rickety, personally. It's... It doesn't... As we know,

I love Jane Fonda. And I loved trying to, like, read between the lines of making movies to, like, how does Sidney Lumet really feel about Jane Fonda? You know?

Where I think he, like, he likes her and admires her passion. But you wonder if she was one of the ones with an entourage, especially in 85, 86. Does she have a lot of the makeup people who are like, she's shooting poorly?

It's also like jazzercise area. Once again, sometime can we please do the Jane Fonda autobiography for Book Club? I would like to do a whole fan episode about her. Okay, well that book is just 400 pages of incredible content. Smokeff bridges performance well and we are in peaked smoke show jeff we really we really are the mid-80s were doing these things but it doesn't totally

come together she was nominated sure she's jane fonda it's one of the last real hits that she had from the Barbarella through the new Hollywood before she becomes jazzercising Jane. Interesting movie. Not in the Hall of Fame. 1988's Running on Empty. I will walk out if this isn't green. It's green. I'm glad to hear that. I was ready to mount a defense.

It's like one of Phoebe's favorite movies. Well, sure. Because the River Phoenix. You asked if there was anything that i discovered and i didn't discover running on a feed this time because i watched it last year when we were working on brian raftery's vietnam uh show which you should listen to it's on our feed if you haven't listened to it um but i i decided to re rewatch part of it the other day. Um, which just like as a, as a pregnant lady with a son, you really shouldn't do. I was just absolutely a mess.

This, I mean, this is an amazing movie with a, and speaks to a lot of his themes of, you know, anti-establishmentarianism and parents and kids and has the great river Phoenix performance. But who that Christine Lottie scene at the end with the dad. With her father at the restaurant. Yeah. I mean. Unreal.

Incredible stuff. This is an amazing movie. This is probably what Daniel wanted to be. Yeah. They're very similar thematically. But it's like much more straightforward. Yeah. It's a very similar kind of like

semi-fictionalized portrayal of a couple who may have been a part of something like the Weather Underground in the 60s and participated in a- And have been on the run since. In a terrorist act at home and have been on the run and they have a family and they've been raising their family, bouncing from town to town, changing their identity over the course of two decades. And it's about how that impacts their children. And one of their children is played by River Phoenix, Academy Award nominated, one of the great performances of the 1980s.

Just like a piano prodigy. So they've got their like, this kid is basically going to waste his gifts if we keep pulling him out of schools. Yes. And he meets Martha Plimpton in another incredible performance as a young woman who is the daughter of his teacher, his music teacher. And they show him the potential for a different kind of life than the one that he is currently living with his parents. I mean, the movie is this, honestly, like, boomer classic of having lived through a tumultuous period of your life

and then emerging into a life of a different kind of responsibility and what that means. So, like, you can really see the movie through the eyes of Judd Hirsch and Christine Lottie, or you can see it through the eyes of River Phoenix. I was going to say, it really does justice. And, I mean, the River Phoenix performance is amazing

but gives it's like a very respectful teen plotline and gives it a lot of weight. He talks so humorously about test audiences in the book. About how this movie was screened almost exclusively for kids by the studio

because River Phoenix was the star. But it's something so different from that. You know, it's something way like a more emotionally weighty and kind of obsessed with the idea of like parents and parenthood. And you know, that lot he seen that we're talking about with her dad and what we give to our kids.

Just a really, really interesting movie. Naomi Fomer wrote this. I think it's like a really great example of showing and not telling. Cause there's almost everything that they have to talk about is a result of something that's happened. So it's like if John Hirsch feels like they're being surveilled, you know, and then they have to move again, that action brings out conversations about like what they've done in the past and what they're going to do in the future. It's not people

sitting around being like, I truly regret my actions well i don't because we were morally justified like it's all it's actually weirdly like an action movie like they're always moving and doing things it's just not guns and bank robberies and and but it's a phenomenal piece of of screenwriting if very, yes, despite there not being shootouts. 1989's Family Business. This is one that he's a little bit bewildered was not a bigger hit. It's Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick as a grandfather, father, and son. It's rude that he would be like, I don't understand why this didn't work.

And then the number one thing is, do you think that Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick are related? It's not ideal. Their chemistry is okay. You never really buy them. They're really good actors, but if they're like, Dad, and it's like,

that's Dustin Hoffman and that's Sean Connery. Yeah, it is a challenge. It's a challenge that Sean Connery has a lot, honestly, where you're meant to believe that he is something that he can never be because he's so Sean Connery. Like a Lithuanian submarine captain? Precisely. How dare you? Are you going to believe that he is something that he can never be because he's so Sean Connery. Like a Lithuanian submarine captain?

Precisely. How dare you? Are you going to get that? Is it happening? I have to watch this other movie first. You still haven't done it? Yeah.

Okay. You're referring to whether or not you will be able to on the rewatchables cover the film The Hunt for Red October but you have to watch

Inside Moves first. This is some deep rewatchables lore you're referring to. Family business is fine. It's fine. Itves first. Yes. This is some deep Rewatchables lore you're referring to. Family Business is fine. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah.

It's not in. No, it's not in. 1990s Q&A, personal favorite of mine. Yeah. I think that it's between this and another movie for the last slot, personally.

Oh, interesting. Well, if it's the other movie you're talking about, I would do the other one. I'm fine with that. I don't know where I am on Nick Nolte. Oh my God. Don't you dare.

Well, I mean, but that's just a little bit like where I, you know, I came of age. There's nothing cool about it. It's just like volcanic and ugly, but it's not like, oh man. And he's also like very charming. He's like, oh Christ. Your dad see this one?

He also showed this to me. Nick Nolte. Your dad showing you tons of corrupt cop movies. But these are the kinds of movies he likes. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, these are the kinds of movies he likes. Crime movies. And he has lived inside of that life.

Nick Nolte, obviously, in the 70s was a kind of a heartthrob. In the 80s, he really emerged as a big star. And like people's sexiest man alive. Yeah. And then in the 70s was a kind of a heartthrob in the 80s he really emerged as a big star and like people's sexiest man alive and then in the 90s he made I Love Trouble among many other things well since that was like that's where I come in

you know right things take a downturn but like before I Love Trouble he has this stretch where he makes Q&A another 48 hours Cape Fear

The Prince of Tides Lorenzo's Oil I'll Do Anything, and Blue Chips. And he's like a man torn asunder in all of these movies. He's Satan in Q&A. He is evil.

Brilliant in this movie. Carries this movie. Armand Asante is good, but he carries this movie. Hutton's good. Yeah. I really like it. It's a really hard bit.

Even by the standards of Sidney Lumet movies, it's a tough, tough movie, but I like it a lot. Yeah, it's good yeah I really like it it's a really hard bit even by the standards of Sidney Lumet movies it's a tough tough movie but I like it a lot yeah it's weird that this like somehow Prince of the City feels more hopeful

than this one it does I would yellow this yell it A Stranger Among Us it's a Melanie Griffith film I enjoy all the making of stuff

I do not like this movie this movie screened recently at the New Bev. I can't remember why. But, you know, it's about a woman who goes into hiding in the Hasidic community in New York. A bit of a stretch for Melanie Griffith, I would say. Maybe not the right choice for this character. Not one of the most successful movies that Sidney Lumet ever made. I'll say it's red. Now I'm like, is she one of the most successful movies that Sidney Lumet ever made. I'll say it's Red.

Now I'm like, is she one of the blind item actresses as well? He's pretty complimentary to her in a couple of the things. Well, he's like, I mean... Yeah, but you're right. When he uses someone's name

in the book, he's being complimentary. But there are a few things I wish I meant to Google. I remember actually, I feel like I have a memory of reading about this movie

in Premiere Magazine as a child basically as a kid I'd be like this doesn't sound very good. Well like before it even came out.

This makes me think so one of my favorite things about doing this exercise was thinking about like what he represented to each decade. Yeah. So in the 60s

he's one of these TV guys he's like Altman like Frankenheimer who comes out of the tv system gets plugged into hollywood and starts making these socially dynamic movies right and then in the 70s he's kind of arrived at this great time where the studios are more flexible the kind of stories that they're telling he's like i'm gonna tell a lot of different kinds of stories i'm gonna go all over the map i'm doing a musical i'm doing an agatha christie movie in the 80s it feels like he's working hard to kind of reject or or shine a light on maybe what's happening in the political culture of the country

like the city on a shining hill reagan era like everything's great don't look over here look over here don't worry about iran contra don't worry about corruption in your government don't worry about how your city is falling apart and cindy lumette's like let's only look at that let's here's power here's q a here's these movies about like things rotting from the inside and then in the 90s he gets like a little bit flummoxed and you can see that he's trying to stretch into what fits in the system and he's a little bit too old. No disrespect to him, but he's a little bit too experienced to fit in. And so like Stranger Among Us is like the first sign that you're like, ah, maybe this is getting away from you a little bit.

Then he makes Guilty as Sin, which is a very watchable. Andy Garcia thriller, right? No. Oh, that's Night Falls on Manhattan. It's Don Johnson. Don Johnson and Rebecca De Mornay. Yeah.

And it's not quite an erotic thriller but you can feel him like having seen a couple of erotic thrillers and wanting to make a movie that fits in that mold. And he doesn't quite have the like sickness

that you need to make a good he's no Adrian Lyne in other words. I flip to those two movies not only because they come really close to each other but if you start looking

at the posters of Sidney Lumet movies in the 90s they all start to feel way more generic. Yeah. And like anyone could have directed this movie.

I would say with one exception in this decade, which to me is the Andy Garcia movie, which is Night Falls in Manhattan, which I think is very good. Sure, but the poster

is just like an anguished lawyer. Yeah, sitting at it in front of a desk. And it does. It feels like it's not about anything, but it's actually this pretty classical story about

corruption within the New York City government. Andy Garcia and Richard Dreyfuss are both fantastic in this movie. I don't think it's in but it's probably it is the best movie I think that he made during this stretch where he's trying to figure out what to do. He's also

this, he writes this in Q&A, right? Like he's writing where he's trying to figure out what to do. He's also, this, he writes this in Q&A, right? Like he's writing, he writes more films around here, right? Yeah, I can't remember what films he had screenplay credits on.

It's Q&A and Night Falls in Manhattan. Yeah. Does he write demo? Was Night Falls based on anything? I don't know. Let's find out.

Yes. Based on the novel Tainted Evidence by Robert Daly right so both of those are adaptations that he's writing and he wrote

Find Me Guilty right 1997's critical so Night Falls in Manhattan I would just say yellow I don't think it's gonna make the cut but we can just

hold it for the time being 1997's Critical Care I already talked about that ultimately a movie that doesn't work it is streaming on Tubi if you'd like to check it out okay

1999's Glory a movie that really doesn't work I was surprised by how much I did not dig this one it's just kind of a pointless movie because if you've seen the Cassavetes movie

with Jenna Rollins you just don't need this movie yeah I mean it was only like 18 years later after the Cassavetes movie so it you know

it's capitalizing on Sharon Stone's incredible moment in the mid-90s. And she's taking on a lot of like star parts. But it just feels duplicative to me ultimately. 2006, Find Me Guilty. The best Vin Diesel movie, in my opinion. It is a long film. It is a film about a kind of like endless wait for a trial the like a forever like story about the mafia going before um a jury and uh it is a comedy

as well or it's close to a comedy yeah no not a fan it's it just it you guys don't like this movie i i just can't do it i can't do vin yeah it's so long too and like the pacing that you you know by 2006 movies have a different pace than they did when sydney lamont was really cranking them out you know it is durational for sure very purposefully you're meant to be like waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for this guy to do something okay find me guilty's out before the devil knows you're dead this is his final film what a fucking i mean how do you do Guilty's out. Before the devil knows you're dead, this is his final film. What a fucking, how do you do that?

It's, I mean, the argument for this being the green is just like, it is amazing that he reaches like back and, you know.

And pulls out to probably underrated but career, some career best performances from Hoffman and Hawk. 83 years old. And this movie,

like this movie is also, it does not pull punches. It is. No, it's vicious. Yeah. Vicious. Yeah.

I think, so there's this great turn of phrase that Pauline Kael had about Lumet's work, which was agonized morality. And in all of his films, you can feel the characters like clenching their fists and grinding their teeth. And my kind of my personal counter to that is like a vicious sentimentality

that there's like a deep emotionality but the way that it's expressed in a lot of his best movies is like through rage and violence and discontent. And this is amazing

to be in your 80s and to be like this is a story I want to tell about these brothers who are loser, drug addict flunkies who robbed their own parents and create like the most epic tragedy. It's kind of like what we're talking about with the equest trying to be like a mimic of a Greek myth. But this actually is like a Greek myth about like, you know, what you can do to your parents and what they do to you. You know, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nathan Hawke, I think this is in the conversation for their best performances. They're both amazing in this movie.

Albert Finney is stellar in this movie. He's so good at fucking starting something that feels so practical and maybe even the start of like a dime store crime novel. And then by the end of it you're like oh this is Oedipus or this is this is this is like a true tragedy

of epic proportions and you're like I didn't if you if I just tell you the premise of The Devil Knows You're Dead you're like yeah like that's like a

cool thriller and it's like no it's much worse than that this is primal yeah this would be an automatic green for me yeah me too

there you go you nailed it we didn't have to fight I didn't think we would I feel good about it Oh, it's much worse than that. This is primal, yeah. This would be an automatic green for me. Yeah. Me too. There you go. You nailed it. We didn't have to fight. I didn't think we would. I feel good about it. We just celebrated 100 years of a great Philadelphian's work. You claim him?

It's a data point. He doesn't claim you. Keep that in mind. Sydney is from New York. That's my great process. That's my Lumet movie is trying to live up to him, you know, as a Philadelphian. One other thing I'd like to cite is Strip Search,

which I'd never seen before, but I watched on the Max streaming service, which was released in 2004. Sound like an alien visiting Earth. It stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ken Lung and Glenn Close.

It's a post 9-11, very stagey portrayal of two interrogations and the way in which they mirror each other. One, I believe in communist China and one in the United States. It's very upsetting. That's what I'll say. Yeah, I would imagine. And really like the old guy still got it kind of thing. And it's really more like a TV show than it is like a film but it has a filmic quality to it he also like

another TV what was the basically his Law and Order that he made was it like 100 Center Street or something like that

oh yeah I forgot about that yeah because I didn't think you could make the argument that he essentially visually invents Law and Order

totally in the 70s but he had like a procedural law show for a while there there's a lot of stuff and I think that

if you go rooting around in the history of his Playhouse 90s there's tons to recommend. So his 10 films before we talk about some our personal faves 12 Angry Men

Fail Safe Serpico Murder on the Orient Express Dog Day Afternoon Network Prince of the City The Verdict Running on Empty

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I think that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Amanda, what are your faves? I mean, they all made our list. So I'm not, you know. Well, they did.

Well, I know. I thought about doing the group because, again, I really like that you tried it, that he tried it. But it's so, it's pretty boring. So Before the devil knows your dad murder on the Orient Express running on empty which I put it

number three but probably should be higher the verdict and network. But that also feels stupid because Dog Day Afternoon isn't on here.

I don't know. Nothing is stupid. Nothing's stupid. When you get a filmography like this how could you be stupid. Yeah I mean I had fail safe before the

devil knows your dad running on empty and network on my list and the only other one is Q&A that I think is a filmography like this how could you be stupid yeah I mean I had Fail Safe Before the Devil Knows You're Dead Running on Empty and Network on my list and the only other one is Q&A that I think is worth the attention yeah Sierra what about you

Hill and Deadly Affair I'll just do my British military industrial complex there Running on Empty which I have now changed like three times

since we've been sitting here Network Prince of the City and The Verdict I think we did a good job. I think we paid tribute to a great American filmmaker. Any closing thoughts? Anything else you want to say? Read the book.

Yeah, read the book. The book is so great. I mean, watch the movies, but we get a lot of questions about like, how can I learn more about filmmaking? Do you think we should do this exact same format pod, but for the works of Sean Levy? Stay tuned, you know know we don't yet know what the box office will be for deadpool and wolverine but recorded in the past i know i have

a solo adam project yeah the sean project i'm super excited about new feed actually we're sean project that i guess that is we just all live in that right no no participants in the way that i'm a participant we are equal partners wouldn't you say yeah yeah okay that's definitely how you make it feel thank you so much amanda have a great time without me cr thank you for joining us thanks to leah zanaris thanks to jack sanders thanks to our producer bobby wagner bob what's your favorite sydney lamette movie i mean it's too cliche but dog day afternoon is like one of my favorite movies ever. The first time I watched that, it just unlocked something.

I mean, that movie is just incredible. Everything about it. Bob, have you seen Prince of the City? I haven't seen it yet. No. Good project for you. In the meantime, I'm going on vacation.

Yeah. I'll be back pretty soon. Are you going to be watching any films on your vacation? Will you ever take a vacation from cinema? I don't plan to. I think I'll be watching

some movies with kids. Oh, okay. I'm going on a vacation? Will you ever take a vacation from cinema? I don't plan to. I think I'll be watching some movies with kids. Oh. Okay. I'm going on a vacation with nine children under the age of nine. So... Is it a traveling baseball team?

They get to decide they're the programmers. Correct. Not you. Correct. So what do you think is going to be on the docket? Well, so this...

We took a very similar trip two years ago and I saw Encanto 14 times in six days. So, I don't know. We're going to find out. Okay.

Will you catch up on television? I intend to watch The Bear. Okay. Season three of The Bear, which I have not watched any. I watched the first five minutes of the first episode

and I was like, actually, no, I shouldn't do it this way. I want to be able to really focus on this. You've seen all of The Bear? Yeah. I've heard your commentary. you agree with me no but that's okay oh I mean mostly yeah what will you watch while I'm while I'm gone presumed innocent for me yeah pretty excited about that and then rolling straight into oh I guess industry

got moved back a week so now it's August 11th. Yeah. Okay. We're all very excited about industry. Yeah. Yeah. Should we do an industry pod? What was that?

That was... When I come back, we're going to talk about trap. Yeah. Also, it's not your birthday, but your birthday will have passed. My birthday will have passed. I've gone from one you know reality to the next that's right i'll pass through the veil yes absolutely i think you've got a great attitude about this that's what happens when you see deadpool and wolverine you know you think

about the multiverse in a different way 27 years old happy birthday thank you thank you everyone we'll see you next week. Thank you.