Saturday, April 29 | 6 Films
Let’s hear it for the “little movie,” which is an ironic designation as these more modestly-scaled films often leave the biggest impressions. One such film—2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once—earned seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, this year.
TCM’s month-long tribute to Warner Bros. devotes a night to five non-genre character-driven films in which the emphasis is on indelible relationships. Each takes place within a specific milieu or culture, but the stories they tell are universal and continue to resonate decades later.
The evening begins with a rare broadcast of Bill Forsyth’s cherished Local Hero (1983), starring Peter Riegert as Mac, an “extra normal” Texas oil company rep who falls under the spell of the Scottish fishing village he has been dispatched to buy to make way for a refinery.
This year marks Local Hero’s 40th anniversary and very much in keeping with this understated charmer, there has been no fuss or theatrical re-release to mark the occasion. But to see it is to be enraptured by it. Anecdotally, I know of one viewer so swept up by the film that they made a beeline for the payphone in the theater lobby to call several people urging them to see it (okay; it was me).
Forsyth’s previous film, Gregory’s Girl (1980), a sleeper hit, gave him some juice within the industry. David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning producer of Chariots of Fire (1981), told Forsyth that he could raise money for a film set in Scotland if Forsyth would incorporate American characters into the story.
Riegert, at the time best known for National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), had yet to carry a film, and Warner Bros. initially lobbied for a more A-list name to star, such as Henry Winkler, Robin Williams or Michael Douglas. But Forsyth assured Riegert that without him, there would be no Local Hero.
"I thought it was the best screenplay I had ever read," Riegert told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2011. "I called my agent and said, 'Get me into this meeting yesterday.’"
What adds considerable flavor to Local Hero are the colorful characters who inhabit it: Oldsen (Peter Capaldi), Mac’s Scottish liaison, ethereal oceanographer Marina (Jenny Seagrove), Urquhart (Denis Lawson), the village’s charmingly resourceful innkeeper/town solicitor and Victor (Christopher Rozycki), a hearty visiting Russian who tells Mac the facts of life when he finds that the locals are all too willing to sell out: “You can’t eat scenery.”
Forsyth wrote the small, but pivotal role of eccentric star-(and comet) struck Texas oil magnate Happer with Burt Lancaster in mind. He told Jonathan Melville, author of “Local Hero: Making a Scottish Classic,” “I imagined him saying the words, and I suppose once you get that locked in your head you start to write for that voice.”
Local Hero is enchanting, but not enchanted like the fanciful Brigadoon (1954). It may be to Scotland what John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) is to Ireland, inspiring pilgrimages to its shooting locations. The village of Pennan and its now-iconic red phone box, which Mac uses to relay updates to Happer, and figures prominently in the devastating final shot, is a popular tourist destination.
A coda to Local Hero’s story is a characteristic testament to its off-center magic. Forsyth was a Best Director winner at the 1984 BAFTA ceremony. In the Sun-Times story, Forsyth shared: "After the ceremony, I found myself walking through London with Martin Scorsese and Paul Zimmerman [who won the BAFTA that year for his screenplay for Scorsese’s The King of Comedy]. We were high on the evening, and to cap it, Paul and I exchanged statues. So, I have his King of Comedy award, and he took my Local Hero award. It seemed like the thing to do at the time."
Little movies can lead to big things for actors who have limited or more narrow casting opportunities in bigger budgeted studio releases. Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey (1988) was Riegert’s first as a romantic leading man, and he is the heart of this charming love story set in Brooklyn’s Jewish community.
Amy Irving stars as Isabelle, a thirty-something Brooklyn woman from a close-knit Jewish family. She is torn between her family culture of the Lower East side and the Upper West Side, where she works in an upscale bookstore. “Get off your high horse, Miss Universe,” her grandmother (Yiddish theater star Reizl Bozyk) tells her. She weighs two men: a self-possessed poet (Jeroen Krabbé) from the intellectual set and Riegert’s Sam, a decent, honest, and hardworking purveyor of pickles from the neighborhood who has “good romantic energy.”
As the old joke goes, you don’t have to be Jewish to love Crossing Delancey. It’s an immersive rom-com whose keenly observed depiction of Jewish traditions, attitudes and familial relationships will ring true for any ethnic family member navigating the old world vs. new world tightrope.
Set against the backdrop of 70s era New York, Paul Bogart’s Torch Song Trilogy (1988), based on Harvey Fierstein’s Tony Award-winning play, is a benchmark in gay representation, a marked progression from “the same old tired fairies” in Mart Crowley’s game changing The Boys in the Band. To quote the song from one of Warner Bros.’ greatest achievements, “It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory.”
Fierstein’s Arnold is a wisecracking female impersonator, who is unapologetically queer and here. “There's one more thing you better understand,” he tells his disapproving mother (Anne Bancroft). “I have taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing, build furniture. I can even pat myself on the back when necessary, all so I don't have to ask anyone for anything. There's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect and anyone who can't give me those two things has no place in my life.”
fraught families are the center of the final two films being featured in TCM’s night of intimate stories. Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), likewise, gives two esteemed character actors, Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch (a nominee for 2022’s The Fablemans), rich leading roles as Annie and Arthur Pope, a married couple in constant flight from their past as ‘60s radicals, who unwittingly maimed an innocent bystander during a violent act of protest against the Vietnam War.
After 15 years of changing towns and identities, the family has come to a crisis point: their oldest son (River Phoenix), a gifted pianist, has an opportunity to attend Julliard, but at what cost? Arthur is still a true believer. “Make a difference,” he ultimately tells his son. “Your mother and I tried. And don't let anyone tell you any different.”
But Annie is faced with the agonizing decision on whether to allow her son to have a future. “What are we doing to these kids?” she protests. “They've been running their whole lives like criminals, and they didn't do anything!”
Running on Empty earned Oscar nominations for Naomi Foner (Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal’s mother) for her screenplay and for Phoenix for Best Supporting Actor. Akira Kurosawa ranked it among his 100 favorite films (between The Whales of August, 1987 and My Neighbor Totoro, 1988). It resists the conventional beats of anticipated chases, gun battles and trumped-up action to focus on the family dynamics and the futility of running from one’s past.
The evening concludes with The Great Santini (1979), a little film about a larger-than-life personality, ace Marine Corps. fighter pilot Bull Meechum (Robert Duvall in one of his signature roles). “When I say something,” he commands to his men, “pretend it came from the Burning Bush. I kid you not, this is the eye of the storm.”
He treats his family much the same way. To his wisecracking younger daughter, her father is like something out of the movies: Godzilla.
The year is 1962. Meechum and his family are relocated to a Marine Air Station in a South Carolina small town. He is a man without a war, but he becomes locked in battle with Ben, his more sensitive 18-year-old son (a pre-Caddyshack Michael O’Keefe), as in perhaps the film’s most famous scene, a game of one-on-one basketball in which Ben defeats him for the first time. His father does not take it well.
Many of these so-called little films find it hard to get a conventional theatrical release. And, so it was with The Great Santini, which basically had its premiere as an in-flight movie, where it played under the title “The Ace.” But a producer rescued it and it played in New York City under its original title. The reviews were strong and the film went on to be nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Actor for Duvall and Best Supporting Actor for O’Keefe.
In his four-star review, Roger Ebert eloquently touched on the discreet charms of the intimate story. “Like almost all of my favorite films,” he wrote, “The Great Santini is about people more than it's about a story.” Santini, he urged—and the same could be said about all five of these intimate stories—are movies “to seek out and treasure.”
