I give this confusing tale of mayhem and treachery some bonus points because Sam Pekinpah was able to make it at all. By this time, he was what he himself called "a functioning alcoholic." And if this doesn't bear watching too often, it's still a colorful and relatively well-done piece of journeyman film making.
The story has to do with a private company that works for the CIA. This handful of well-paid professionals do the wet work and other odd jobs for the government. Pekinpah adds a sarcastic printed epilogue, claiming that the idea of the CIA privatizing its usual responsibilities is "preposterous." Hah hah. At the time it struck me, as it probably did almost everyone else, as emblematic of Pekinpah's roguish paranoia. Now, what with Blackwater and other private agencies guarding high-level power brokers abroad, interrogating noncombatant enemy detainees, and who knows what else -- responsible to no one and costing a thousand times what the U. S. Marines would cost -- it no longer strikes me as too "preposterous."
I don't know if it's worth going into the details of the plot. Everybody double crosses everybody else, except Robert Duvall, who seems to have double crossed James Caan's protagonist, really doesn't. There is a powerful Chinese political family that must be guarded from other powerful Chinese, several shoot outs, a comic interlude with a state trooper on a bridge, and a climactic ninja fight aboard the mothball fleet at Suisun Bay, where I first learned of President Kennedy's assassination. The bad guys are suitably punished and the good guys sail away on a sloop with lots of money, leaving corruption behind. Pekinpah blamed the movie's disjointedness on Hollywood and one imagines he put himself aboard that yacht as it plowed its sleek way under Golden Gate bridge, with Pekinpah himself at the helm.
James Caan and the others give decent performances. Caan exudes a masterful calm, even when he's collapsing. Something came to me while watching Burt Young's performance as an auxiliary hood and Caan's sidekick. The guy can't act. He was Curly in Chinatown, the cuckold who was warned by Jack Nicholson not to eat the venetian blinds. And he was fabulous there, as he is here. He certainly looked the part of the Lower Proletarian -- plump, simian-face, balding, heavily accented. And his locutions emerged out of nowhere, sounding vaguely odd, vaguely original. Then, seeing this again, it occurred to me that they came out the way they did, not because Young was exercising some kind of sprezaturra, that he was successfully hiding his art, but because he was artless to begin with. Don't get me wrong. This doesn't make his performance any less effective. I have to say, though, that I preferred Gig Young as a light comedian rather than a serious heavy. Arthur Hill, with his generic Canadian voice, looks and acts fine in either kind of role. He's always dependable.
When I learned Pekinpah was shooting a movie in the city, I watched the scene at the beginning in which a building is blown up near the Embarcadero. (It took several tries.) I couldn't wait for it to be released, but when it was, it turned out to be something of a disappointment, considering Pekinpah's earlier work. A considerable step down to commercialism. Yet, I can't say that it's badly done for what it is. If some of it -- that ninja sword fight at the end -- is just plain silly, there are indications that Pekinpah knew how ridiculous it was and nudged the audience from time to time. It's full of color and action, San Francisco offers some stunning locations, and if the story isn't very original, I don't know that anyone else would have made it quite this way. We should all "function" this well.
The story has to do with a private company that works for the CIA. This handful of well-paid professionals do the wet work and other odd jobs for the government. Pekinpah adds a sarcastic printed epilogue, claiming that the idea of the CIA privatizing its usual responsibilities is "preposterous." Hah hah. At the time it struck me, as it probably did almost everyone else, as emblematic of Pekinpah's roguish paranoia. Now, what with Blackwater and other private agencies guarding high-level power brokers abroad, interrogating noncombatant enemy detainees, and who knows what else -- responsible to no one and costing a thousand times what the U. S. Marines would cost -- it no longer strikes me as too "preposterous."
I don't know if it's worth going into the details of the plot. Everybody double crosses everybody else, except Robert Duvall, who seems to have double crossed James Caan's protagonist, really doesn't. There is a powerful Chinese political family that must be guarded from other powerful Chinese, several shoot outs, a comic interlude with a state trooper on a bridge, and a climactic ninja fight aboard the mothball fleet at Suisun Bay, where I first learned of President Kennedy's assassination. The bad guys are suitably punished and the good guys sail away on a sloop with lots of money, leaving corruption behind. Pekinpah blamed the movie's disjointedness on Hollywood and one imagines he put himself aboard that yacht as it plowed its sleek way under Golden Gate bridge, with Pekinpah himself at the helm.
James Caan and the others give decent performances. Caan exudes a masterful calm, even when he's collapsing. Something came to me while watching Burt Young's performance as an auxiliary hood and Caan's sidekick. The guy can't act. He was Curly in Chinatown, the cuckold who was warned by Jack Nicholson not to eat the venetian blinds. And he was fabulous there, as he is here. He certainly looked the part of the Lower Proletarian -- plump, simian-face, balding, heavily accented. And his locutions emerged out of nowhere, sounding vaguely odd, vaguely original. Then, seeing this again, it occurred to me that they came out the way they did, not because Young was exercising some kind of sprezaturra, that he was successfully hiding his art, but because he was artless to begin with. Don't get me wrong. This doesn't make his performance any less effective. I have to say, though, that I preferred Gig Young as a light comedian rather than a serious heavy. Arthur Hill, with his generic Canadian voice, looks and acts fine in either kind of role. He's always dependable.
When I learned Pekinpah was shooting a movie in the city, I watched the scene at the beginning in which a building is blown up near the Embarcadero. (It took several tries.) I couldn't wait for it to be released, but when it was, it turned out to be something of a disappointment, considering Pekinpah's earlier work. A considerable step down to commercialism. Yet, I can't say that it's badly done for what it is. If some of it -- that ninja sword fight at the end -- is just plain silly, there are indications that Pekinpah knew how ridiculous it was and nudged the audience from time to time. It's full of color and action, San Francisco offers some stunning locations, and if the story isn't very original, I don't know that anyone else would have made it quite this way. We should all "function" this well.