Both Sides Now
Sydney Irwin Pollack was born July 1, 1934 in Lafayette, Indiana, where he lived until moving to New York in 1952. There he studied at The Neighborhood
Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York where he studied with acting guru Sanford Meisner. After a stint in the Army, he taught acting at the Playhouse, marrying one of his former students. He did stage acting, television series work and eventually directing for the small screen. His movie debut as an actor came in 1962, where he met one of his closest collaborators and friends, a young actor named Robert Redford.
Pollack was not "gifted" in the way that I interpreted the word for the role, no, but damned good...and a very good student And intelligent, which was conveyed through his films and their subject matters. They were committed and with issues in the back of them that made you think, long after the film's images had faded from your retinas: The nature of truth in Absence of Malice (which, was a counter-argument to his thriller Three Days of the Condor); the idea of ownership and position in (of all things) Out of Africa; culture clashes—in OoA, Havana, Jeremiah Johnson, The Yakuza; gender roles, and the yoke of women in Tootsie; and the randomness and fragility of love in The Way We Were, Bobby Deerfield, Sabrina, Random Hearts—most of his films, really. Romance had to have roadblocks, some insurmountable, in Pollack's films, but they were more fueled by hope than by commitment. One got the impression no one dared "work" in a relationship in Pollack's movies.
He was at his best without a sure track, and his best films—Jeremiah Johnson, Tootsie, and Out of Africa—seemed to find their hearts in the editing room, more than in the direction.
"That's really where the film gets made. I'm not good at editing while I'm shooting. They're two different processes to me, and I can't quite discipline my brain to do both of them at the same time. While I'm shooting, I'm searching for something. Then, in the editing, it becomes like sculpting. Editing is the process I enjoy the most. It's the one time when you're alone and you don't have to go through an army of 200 people to get what you want. On the set, I have to go through a cinematographer, a gaffer, a production designer and use the right lens, the right camera movement, the right lighting, the right clothes, and so many specific practical disciplines to translate my subconscious wishes. What you want to say to everyone is: 'Can't you just reach into my brain and do what it is that I'm daydreaming?' When you're editing, you're in a dark room, you can try anything you want and it's instantaneous."
Anne Bancroft contemplating the fountains at the Pacific Science Center.
The emcee (Gig Young, who won an Oscar for his role)—serving as both Greek chorus, false-cheerleader, and Mephistopheles—eggs them on and ramps up the suspense among the thrill-seeking audiences watching the dancers crumble. If you want the best movie to display the "Every Man for Himself" cage-match that is American Capitalism, it's this one, where luck, stamina, and brute strength are the weapons of success. I think of this movie every time the news mentions the lottery hyping the glory, but negating the odds (it flashes in my mind at those TV "talent" competitions, too) that the entire system is rigged and that somebody is getting rich, just not who you think. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is one of the best films leading into the downbeat 70's, without some of the stylistic weaknesses that have aged other films of the time. It's smart, tough, and brutal.
Amazing Grace (1972/completed 2011/released 2019) The
film is a filmed recording of two nights that Aretha Franklin spent singing at
the Watts New Temple Missionary Baptist Church recording the album that
would be called "Amazing Grace,"
the best-selling live gospel recording of all time and Franklin's
best-selling album in her career. It would be like watching a film of
The Beatles making "Sgt. Peppers'" but instead of endless planning and
re-takes (calculation), replacing it with inspiration and the power of
vaulting faith...and doing it in one "take". Accompanied by the Rev. James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir—and
Aretha's discreet house-band—she recorded the album, which, as
dominating as she is, still feels like a community effort. There's
brilliance on all sides of the performance.
Sydney Pollack was assigned to do the film and he set it up, Woodstock-style—lots
of cameras (there is no attempt to hide the phalanx of cameramen
running around, angling for shots) with a live audience. It's all grainy
16mm footage and just as rough-looking as everything coming out of 1972
looked. There are the rare flashes of end-rolls, the
focus-on-the-fly-racking, and a perpetual shakiness and desperation to
the shots. But, it's a faithful chronicle...and that first night. Man!
Oh...and
the delay in release? It seems that one can chalk this up to "technical
difficulties" as nobody in post-production could sync up the film with
the recordings...Pollack didn't use a clapperboard to mark takes as the
songs were long and there were just too many cameras, and the footage
just sat in a Warner vault until it could be transferred to digital
media and only once speeds were set in 1's and 0's could they marry the
recordings and the footage. Pollack died in 2008, and producer Alan
Elliott supervised the assemblage, managing to finish it in 2011, only
to have Franklin sue to prevent its release, ostensibly to maintain
control over her image and likeness—especially in footage that had been
severed from its earlier compensation deal. Evidently, she had seen the
film before her death and there are conflicting opinions about her
thoughts on it. 
Jeremiah Johnson (1972) If I have a favorite film of Pollack's, it's this one. Originally prepared for Sam Peckinpah to star Clint Eastwood (before it exploded in slow-motion) it is spare, exquisitely photographed, and does as little talking as it can get away with. This yarn (based on the passed-down stories of John "Liver-Eating" Johnson) was written by John Milius (who can be heard in the dialog—"Don't lose your top-knot" has stuck with me for years) with contributions by Edward Anhalt (an odd pairing, that) and shot on a shoe-string in the Utah countryside (Warner Brothers wanted to shoot it on its backlots and to accomplish the location work, Pollack mortgaged his house). Johnson comes west after spending time in the military, determined to make his way as a trapper. Between blind luck and tough lessons, he stumbles upon another mountain man "Bear Claw" (Will Geer), who gives him extensive training in surviving the wild and negotiating his way with the various Native tribes, primarily Crow, Blackfoot and Flathead, each of which will play parts in his life for good or ill. He forms partnerships, settles with a "found" family, and once he returns to the wild, finds himself the measure of courage for Crow warriors sent out to kill him. The story comes full-circle as he must make his way through the dangers of Man and Nature.
Redford is amazing in this—he's always at his best when not talking—and the film plays out as travelogue, tone-poem, and song-story that never feels forced or out of step. Supposedly the picture came together in an extensive editing phase and is one of those movies that feels iconic and (ironically) blazing new trails in form—it clearly had influence on Eastwood when he took over The Outlaw Josey Wales. Redford and Pollack disagreed on how the movie should end, but manage to reach a coda that makes its own peace without telling the end of the story.*
The Way We Were (1973) Arthur Laurents' soap opera about political and personality opposites attracting is hardly repellent. But, it ain't great, either (even the author didn't like the finished film with what Pollack had done with it—but then, some of the typewriters the film passed through belonged to Dalton Trumbo, Herb Gardner, Paddy Chayefsky, and Francis Ford Coppola so he might have been a bit biased). One of the first pictures to feature the Hollywood Blacklist as a subject, The Way We Were tells the story of Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand), a campus radical who meets a wasp-ish under-achiever Hubbell Gardiner (Redford in his third film with Pollack), their subsequent relationship after the war, and their tensions during the 1950's. It is a film killed by compromise—a lot of the politics is left out (although it probably seems like too much for some) in favor of a love story that works only due to the chemistry of the two leads (which, in itself, is something of a miracle) and can be summed up by "she loves the way he looks and he loves the way she looks at him."
And "that" song. But, even then, some of the editorial choices are, frankly, jarring—honestly, weren't you a little thrown by the break-up scene?
Still, like some past romances, folks choose to remember only the good parts, which is why it is ranked number six on AFI's top 100 romantic movies. The Oscars it won were for Best Score and for "that song."
The Yakuza (1974) With a story by Leonard Schrader, a screenplay by his brother Paul Schrader and re-writes by Robert Towne, The Yakuza should feel as literate and unique as what we would come to expect from such talent. Pollack's film, however, feels like one cliche after another. Attacked at the time for being too violent, one looks at it now and, given the nature of the fights and the rituals of cutting off one's little finger to pay off a debt, one could make a case for it not being violent enough. It's supposed to be a tough-as-nails gangster film, but doesn't want to get too squeamish. Still, Robert Mitchum is a good choice for the long-in-the-tooth American serviceman-turned-detective who is brought back to Japan by an old Army buddy (Brian Keith) to investigate the kidnapping of his daughter, but finds himself enmeshed with a decades long struggle of organized crime and having to partner with an embittered rival (the amazing Ken Takakura) before his work, which has many twists and turns, can be completed. Another director might have made more of this, but the film would have been more controversial. Maybe that's a good thing.
Three Days of the Condor (1975) Redford (Pollack film #4) plays Joe Turner, a CIA researcher in the "book section," who comes back from lunch to find that his co-workers have been murdered. He contacts CIA HQ and is told to come in for his safety. But at that meeting, he is nearly killed, and he goes into hiding to find out who set up the hits and why, and without anyone he can trust. The film came out post-Watergate, but was in production when that conspiracy went down, so there are minor influences owing to the tenor of the times ("Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?" is a line that haunts). Where the film is prophetic is in its main root cause—oil—and the CIA's capacity for conducting operations inside the boundaries of the U.S. In the 20/20 of hindsight, one of the most unusual things is Turner's abduction, use, and eventual seduction of a total stranger (Faye Dunaway) to help him with his plans, including the kidnapping of his bureau chief (Cliff Robertson). That seems "formula" for a thriller in the 40's (studio demand for a love interest being the motivation), but it feels forced and strange and more than a little criminal these days. It also makes Dunaway's character seem a bit crazy. I mean, Redford is handsome and all, but, come on...
A competent thriller, but what I remember fondly is Turner's conversation with the puckishly ironic assassin, Joubert (Max von Sydow) who suggests that to stay in hiding, he should become an assassin himself, as he seems to have "skills."
Bobby Deerfield (1977) An adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's "Heaven Has No Favorites" but moved from its original 1948 setting to the 1970's. Francois Truffaut was originally slated to direct, but Pollack was given the script by actor Dabney Colman (with the suggestion that Gene Hackman star). Catherine Deneuve actively pursued the role of Lillian, the "hot-chick-born-yesterday" that Deerfield meets at a sanatorium when he goes to visit a fellow race-driver who's been injured in an accident that haunts him. Al Pacino, hot after The Godfather, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, plays the emotionally-distant title character whom the mysterious woman he becomes obsessed with describes as "driving around in circles." Apt. Although, that accident has been on his mind...a lot...and won't drive again until he finds the answer. Alvin Sargent, the screenwriter, has echoes of his adaptation of The Sterile Cukoo to it and that would be fine if the two leads had a more charming touch with comedy. But, they don't, no matter how much composer Dave Grusin tries to overlay a "light touch" with his score. The fact is, the movie doesn't know whether to be a drama or a comedy from one moment to the next and the result is disorienting, leaving the audience as perplexed as Deerfield, an American in Europe, is. Like the running gag of Deerfield not understanding any language, it just doesn't translate.
Redford is amazing in this—he's always at his best when not talking—and the film plays out as travelogue, tone-poem, and song-story that never feels forced or out of step. Supposedly the picture came together in an extensive editing phase and is one of those movies that feels iconic and (ironically) blazing new trails in form—it clearly had influence on Eastwood when he took over The Outlaw Josey Wales. Redford and Pollack disagreed on how the movie should end, but manage to reach a coda that makes its own peace without telling the end of the story.*
And "that" song. But, even then, some of the editorial choices are, frankly, jarring—honestly, weren't you a little thrown by the break-up scene?
Still, like some past romances, folks choose to remember only the good parts, which is why it is ranked number six on AFI's top 100 romantic movies. The Oscars it won were for Best Score and for "that song."
The Yakuza (1974) With a story by Leonard Schrader, a screenplay by his brother Paul Schrader and re-writes by Robert Towne, The Yakuza should feel as literate and unique as what we would come to expect from such talent. Pollack's film, however, feels like one cliche after another. Attacked at the time for being too violent, one looks at it now and, given the nature of the fights and the rituals of cutting off one's little finger to pay off a debt, one could make a case for it not being violent enough. It's supposed to be a tough-as-nails gangster film, but doesn't want to get too squeamish. Still, Robert Mitchum is a good choice for the long-in-the-tooth American serviceman-turned-detective who is brought back to Japan by an old Army buddy (Brian Keith) to investigate the kidnapping of his daughter, but finds himself enmeshed with a decades long struggle of organized crime and having to partner with an embittered rival (the amazing Ken Takakura) before his work, which has many twists and turns, can be completed. Another director might have made more of this, but the film would have been more controversial. Maybe that's a good thing.
A competent thriller, but what I remember fondly is Turner's conversation with the puckishly ironic assassin, Joubert (Max von Sydow) who suggests that to stay in hiding, he should become an assassin himself, as he seems to have "skills."
 |
| von Sydow's rather happy assassin |
Redford plays Sonny Steele, former rodeo champ, who's making ends meet by being a spokesman for the "Ranch" cereal company, riding around on a city-tour, currently in Vegas, where the idea is for him to show up on horseback on-stage in an electrified suit. To do this, they've had to drug the horse into practically catatonia, which awakens the last vestige of integrity in Sonny and he rustles the horse to release it into the nearby desert—hopefully after it snaps out of the drugs. Parallel stories about being free and "true to your roots" blah blah blah...Fonda plays a reporter who's following the story and is the obligatory love interest. It was the first movie Willie Nelson appeared in, and the second for crusty Wilford Brimley—both veterans of just about everything but movie-acting.
The Electric Horseman is so incongruously inoffensive, simultaneously cashing in on the "cowboy-bar" phase the country troughed into in the late 70's (probably as an answer to "disco" and its excesses—this time it was mechanical bulls and oxycontin) while railing against corporate appropriation of "self" and "genuineness," put out by, not one, but two movie-making corporate entities while promoting Vegas at the same time holding it up for ridicule. The movie is more than a little smug and self-satisfied.
The Electric Horseman was the last film Pollack shot in wide-screen for a period of time as he was appalled by how his films looked when broadcast in the "pan-and-scan" process.
Absence of Malice (1981) A Miami reporter (Sally Field) gets wind of a story from confidential sources about suspicions around the death of a union rep and runs with it, thinking she's scored a big scoop. Turns out the story is a fishing expedition from an over-zealous prosecutor (a hyper Bob Balaban) who thinks that Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman), a liquor wholesaler whose father was a prominent mobster, had something to do with the rep's disappearance. The front-page story throws an unwanted spotlight on Gallagher and his business and, facing financial ruin, he decides to play offense by doing some double-dealing of his own. If a prosecutor can get away with planting a story, why can't he?
It's a good idea for a script (credit Kurt Luedtke), but some of the casting is a bit off. Newman plays it opaque and earnest, while Field plays a put-upon victim and neither one is those actors' strengths and there's little chemistry between the two. However, one performance shines through and that's the late-in-the-proceedings appearance of Wilford Brimley, who'd had moments in Pollack's The Electric Horseman and in The China Syndrome, and, refreshingly, sweeps away all the bullshit.
Tootsie (1982) Tootsie did not start out as a Sydney Pollack film. It was a project that Dustin Hoffman was fostering based on a play called "Would I Lie to You?" by Don McGuire and controlled by producer Charles Evans, who had become aware of the property from Buddy Hackett, who wanted to play the talent agent in the story. Dick Richards was to direct and worked on a screenplay with Evans and Robert Kaufman. Richards left and took over producing chores, instead. The screenplay went through many hands for tinkering—Larry Gelbart did a full re-write and such hands as Elaine May, Barry Levinson and Murray Schisgal put their fingerprints on it—and Hal Ashby was hired to direct. An extended post-production on another picture took Ashby away and that's when it fell to Pollack, who, after being badgered by Hoffman, took the role of his agent—after not having acted in almost two decades.
Such development antics usually spell disaster (too many cooks!), but Tootsie—the story of an out-of-work actor, Michael Richards (Hoffman) who only finds work posing as an actress and becomes a soap-opera sensation—is that rare movie that hits all the marks—funny when it means to be, dramatic in ways that surprise you, while managing to be a well-veiled statement on sexism, not by appealing to the brain but to the heart. The cast is astonishing: Hoffman, Pollack, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Charles Durning, Dabney Coleman, George Gaynes, Geena Davis—in her first role—and an uncredited Bill Murray, who slays—"That is one craaazy hospital!" It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and only won for Jessica Lange's Supporting Performance. It was voted into the National Film Registry in 1998.
Out of Africa (1985) Pollack's Best Picture winner. And possibly his best film, as well.
Many prominent film makers had attempted to make a film of author Karen Blixen's years in Africa after Bennet Cerf published it in 1937. Among them, David Lean, Orson Welles—who professed a love for her writing and for her—and at one point, it was even suggested as a return picture for Greta Garbo, but the closest was Nicolas Roeg, who planned to film a Robert Ardrey screenplay and cast Julie Christie as Blixen. When the option on the filming rights for the book lapsed, it was snatched up and Pollack, Kurt Luedtke (and eventually David Rayfiel) spent two years on a new screenplay, putting more emphasis on Blixen's love life than just her remarkable years living in Africa trying to maintain a coffee plantation. Pollack's films have had a tendency to meander unless the script is polished to a fine diamond, and Out of Africa, with its flashback structure—and that it's source, the book written under the pen name "Isak Dinesen", also tended to wander—still manages to convey the story of how an exploitive colonialist can be changed by the experience more than the place colonized.
It won the 1986 Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Music.
Havana (1990) Redford's seventh (and last) movie with Pollack features him as Jack Weil, a wheeler-dealer American in Cuba with the looming revolution on everybody's mind. He's always the smartest guy in the room and can read anybody and knows the score before the police can find out. He's a professional gambler, a pick-pocket, and—according to Bobby Durán (Lena Olin), who is connected to the rebels and utilizes him to smuggle military radios into Havana—arrogant. "I try and stay out of the way of things I don't understand," he says at one point. In other words, he sticks his neck out for nobody. If that line sounds familiar, it's deliberate because the problems of two little people still amount to a hill of beans in a crazy, unstable world, be it Havana or Casablanca. The timeline's just moved up a bit in this one. Alan Arkin (always a pleasure) slots himself into the role of Col. Renault, thinking he knows Jack...but, he "knows Jack." There's also good work done by Tomas Milian as a Batista loyalist and particularly by Daniel Davis. Director Mark Rydell has an amusing turn as mobster Meyer Lansky. Even Richard Farnsworth is in this.
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| "I had a farm in Africa...at the foot of Ngong hills" |
Raul Julia has a significant cameo, but is un-billed in the film.
If you've read the book, there's a "fugitive"/timing element that is riveting. In the movie, it just isn't there. In fact, the film stays pretty much focused on Cruise's character Mitch McDeere, looking trapped and running around cities, back-alleys and building basements. And Grisham's book solution for McDeere and his wife (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn) just isn't good enough for screenwriters David Rabe, Robert Towne, and David Rayfiel—good writers all!—whose own solution buttons everything up nice and neat, but strains credulity while at the same time being underwhelming. It apparently wasn't enough for Cruise's hero to escape the problem, as much as solve the problem.
But, it's an amazing cast...with Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, and Wilford Brimley, all doing nice work.
Sabrina (1995) Remake of the 1954 Billy Wilder film (itself broadly based on a Samuel Taylor play "Sabrina Fair") and one of those instances where one of the things wrong with the original could be corrected in the remake. As anyone who's seen Wilder's Sabrina knows, Humphrey Bogart was just the wrong age to be the eventual love interest to Audrey Hepburn. Pollack's Sabrina corrects that by casting the younger and hunkier Harrison Ford as the cold-fish business whiz who sweeps the younger daughter (Julia Ormond) of the family chauffeur (John Wood) away from an irresistible younger brother (Greg Kinnear) who is already betrothed in a mutually beneficial business-marriage (to Lauren Holly).
Trouble is...it still doesn't work!
Seeing it on it's debut Christmas Day of 1995, I found it underwhelming. A recent revisit astounds at the great cast—Paul Giamatti has a bit part!—, a sophisticated John Williams
score, and sumptuous cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno, but for all that, this Sabrina is missing the "Wilder Touch," the slightly more vinegary version of "The Lubitsch Touch." It's not fair to compare Ormond to Hepburn (Hepburn was a preternatural creature meant for the movies) and Ormond is a worthy successor(if you can ignore Hepburn) and as winning and winsome as Harrison Ford can be, there is always a touch of reluctance in the way he plays romantic scenes. In another actor, this could be seen as vulnerability; in Ford, (where vulnerability doesn't quite translate), it's lack of a character's commitment.
Random Hearts (1999) He's a D.C. Internal Affairs Sergeant. She's a New Hampshire Congressman running for re-election. What do they have in common? Both of their spouses are cheating on them, but they only find out when the plane the cheating couple were taking to Miami ends up nose-first in the Potomac. Both Sergeant William "Dutch" Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford) and Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas) both get the double-whammy that their spouses are dead and that each lied to them about their destination plans. And Van Den Broeck, being a detective, just can't seem to let go of the story discrepancies and ultimately discovers that his wife (Susanna Thompson) and Chandler's husband (Peter Coyote) were having an affair. Once he discovers that, he starts bugging Chandler for any information she might have had about if she knew about it (short answer that he doesn't seem to "get": she didn't). One can make a case that Ford's character is so dogged he could be considered quilty of harassment, and that, although the two do indeed have a lot in common, they're the least likely pair, then, to fall in love and have an affair.
And yet that's what the screenplay (by Darryl Ponicsan and Kurt Luedtke) has them do. Although both characters have opposite ways of dealing with the loss and betrayal, we're led to believe that they "need" each other during the grieving process. And the closest explanation the writers give us is when they have Chandler explain "we were more than friends; we were survivors." The property had been in development for 15 years, first with Dustin Hoffman, and then with James L. Brooks and Kevin Costner and it just goes to show you that sometimes intriguing ideas have an expiration date with the social zeitgeist (not unlike Bobby Deerfield) and although things have been contemporized from the 1984 Warren Adler novel on which it's based, it still feels horribly dated. Some nice acting though from the principals as well as Charles S. Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Dylan Baker, Dennis Haysbert, Richard Jenkins, Lynne Thigpen and Pollack himself, who's alarmingly convincing as a political media consultant.
The Interpreter (2005) After years of designing films for how they'd look on pan-sand-scan broadcasts of television, Pollack aggressively embraced the wide-screen format (that had come back into fashion with wide-screen TV's, DVD letter-boxing and acceptance of the originally intended aspect ratio) to make this film set in the United Nations amidst a cowardly new world of terrorism. Nicole Kidman plays Silvia Broome, a UN interpreter from the South African country of Matobo, now being run by a rebel leader turned autocratic dictator. His regime has become involved with ethnic cleansing, the elimination of all political rivals (resulting in the deaths of Broome's entire family) and the General assembly is debating indicting the leader for war crimes. The country's head, Zuwanie (played by the great Earl Cameron), is traveling to the UN to plead his case and the Secret Service is charged with his protection. One of the investigators is Tobin Keller (Sean Penn), who zeroes in on Broome as a person of interest because of her family and past history with Zuwanie's foes. Sure enough, rumblings of an assassination attempt on Zuwanie start to become known and, somehow, Broome is awfully close to some suspicious incidents. It's an above average thriller with some great location work—they were allowed to shoot in the U.N., the first time for a fiction film—and Pollack with a wide-screen to work with is far more artful than before.
Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005) "That is so stupid-looking, it's great!" Frank Gehry chuckles at a cardboard cut-out of a building that he is in the process of designing. It starts as a squiggle, a rat's nest of charcoal lines. And then the modelling starts—cardboard, wood, wire, plastic—and the changes start with all the nuanced little details. The discussion of materials, the physics of the thing, the practicality of it—will it fall down, will it leak—and the aesthetics of it in how the form reflects function. And the light. Does it use light inside and does it reflect light and life outside? Where does the plumbing go? Pollack follows Gehry around his work-spaces, the workshop and a construction site and just talks about the process and the individual feelings he goes through while he's designing—the clearing off of the desk, the fear, the procrastination, the spark. Then the process of changing it for however long it takes. Years, at least. Gehry says he can't look at a building of his for at least a year to appreciate it. Then, he might find some objectivity. Maybe. Made for PBS' "American Masters" series, it's Pollack's last film and a fascinating look at a guy who just has fun doing what he likes to do and seeing how he can stretch it.
"Look at the influence it has, look at the economics it commands, look at the preoccupation in all cultures of the world, look at its power to spread ideas, look at it as a political tool, look at it as entertainment, no matter what point of view you look at it from it would be hard, other than the Internet, let's say, to find something that's changed and affected the world strongly. I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form."
* The truth is Johnson died in 1900 (after a subsequent stint in the Cavalry and serving as both a deputy sheriff and town marshal in Montana) at the estimated age of 76 in a Santa Monica rest-home (not unlike Jack Crabbe in the earlier Little Big Man) and buried in a veterans' cemetery. After the movie came out, a campaign by students led to Johnson's disinterment and new burial spot located in the "Old Trail Town" in Cody, Wyoming in 1974. One of the pallbearers at the re-burial ceremony was Robert Redford.
I like the way the Italian release of the film makes it look like a violent "spaghetti western"—the title translates as "Red Crow You Will Not Have My Scalp!"
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