Pod Insights The Big Picture The Robert Duvall Hall of Fame About this episode Sean is joined by Tracy Letts to honor the monumental work of legendary actor Robert Duvall. They celebrate the star’s illustrious career, share their personal relationships with his work, and build his Hall of Fame.
Host: Sean Fennessey
Guest: Tracy Letts
Producer: Jack Sanders
Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh and Sarah Reddy
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 29,850 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:15 Sean Fennessey? I'm Sean Finacy and this is the Big Pictureate Conversation Show about Robert Duvall. Today on the show, we are building a Hall of Fame for the "American Olivier", an actor whose body of work is so vast, I was still catching up with his movies at 1 a.m. last night. I'm here with playwright, actor, bon vivant, the king of physical media, Tracy Letts. We're gonna honor Robert Duvall in this episode. It's all coming up right after this.
0:39 Speaker 01 I'm pro Football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carry sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story.
1:05 Speaker 02 Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caplyta lumateperone.
1:16 Speaker 03 I needed more from my antidepressant, so my doctor added Caplyta lumateperone, proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone, building on my progress without starting over. Caplyta is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common.
1:37 Speaker 02 Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Caplyta is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal. Monitoring is recommended. Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, feeling tired, and diarrhea. These aren't all the side effects.
2:03 Speaker 03 Ask your doctor about Caplyta. Learn more at caplyta.com or call 888-252-4824.
2:09 Sean Fennessey? This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with the big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.
2:35 Sean Fennessey? Okay, Tracy, hello.
2:36 Speaker 04 Hi.
2:37 Sean Fennessey? Are you excited about this endeavor? You raised your hand for this, did you not?
2:41 Speaker 04 I did. Yeah, I'm excited about it, sure. I love Robert Duvall. You know, when he died,
2:49 Speaker 04 he died right around the same time as Frederick Wiseman. They died the same day or maybe a day apart.
2:57 Speaker 04 And my first thought was,
3:00 Speaker 04 well, we've lost our greatest actor and our greatest documentarian at the same time. And then I thought, well, I'm given the superlative. Maybe that's not the case. Maybe, uh, maybe I should say my favorite actor or one of my favorite actors, because people value different things in their actors. Some people love a movie star. Most people love a movie star. And Duvall was a movie star, but he was also a character actor and a, and a that guy. And, uh, he could be the lead in movies, but more often than not, a supporting player.
3:37 Speaker 04 And, uh, I realized that when I thought of him as our greatest actor, what I was thinking of, he's the kind of actor that I especially admire. He exemplified, for me, what great screen acting is. That's what I, when you mention a great screen actor, he's one of the first people I think of.
3:59 Sean Fennessey? Well, what is that, though? Then what does that mean?
4:01 Speaker 04 Well...
4:04 Speaker 04 It means emotional access, right? That you can easily access, bring to the surface, any number of emotions, which is one of the first jobs any actor does. It means a facility with language, which he had. And for me, perhaps most importantly, in terms of Duval, it means a certain transformational ability. You know, movie stars, for the most part, bring you some version of themselves and they perform that version of themselves over and over. And Duval was certainly capable of doing that, did that a lot. But he was also capable of, you know, if you sit in a place that is, this is essentially me, and then you're sort of fiddle with the dials,
4:48 Speaker 04 you know, you might get some range. But with Duval, you got a lot of range. You got a tremendous flexibility and very facile transformational quality that he could play. Low status, high status, verbal, non-verbal, smart, dumb, rural and urban, especially with him, it was a big swing. And so, and occasionally just uncork something way out of what you would think is his comfort zone.
5:32 Speaker 04 That for me is not only what great acting is, it's what makes acting fun. It's why I think anybody would want to be an actor, to be able to be different people in different circumstances. And for me, Duval was the best example of that. Hard to find a comp, I'm sure we'll talk about that, but it's hard to find a comp.
5:55 Sean Fennessey? No, there's not, there's, between the vast body of work, the range that you're describing, the thing that I think of with him is, and this was underlined by going back to some of the films. Could do volcanic as well as anyone and could also do quiet. Like you mentioned verbal and nonverbal, but he could be monosyllabic or have no dialogue whatsoever in his performance, as he does in one very notable one, and convey the same level of power in the performance, whether yelling or not speaking at all. I mean, who are even actors who have that skill? You know, like even beyond movie star looks and movie star charisma, just that sort
6:37 Sean Fennessey? of range in terms of the kind of characters that you can play is very rare. And I don't think that there's anyone who quite has his career, in part because he was born at the right time, given his skill set and given the kinds of movies he got a chance to be a part of.
6:53 Speaker 04 Right. Well, I mean, if the movies are essentially, what, 120 years old? He's the last 60 years of it.
7:02 Sean Fennessey? He really is.
7:03 Speaker 04 He really encompasses a lot. His longevity goes a long way. Not just longevity, not just living a long time, but that he could stay vital and continue to explore for such a large part of his career.
7:16 Sean Fennessey? He gave screen performances in his 90s. I mean, that's extremely rare for someone to do that, and especially someone who started so early and worked so consistently. He made so many movies. He also appeared in dozens of episodes of television. He appeared in some of the most legendary television mini-series of all time. He worked on the stage pretty consistently at the beginning of his career. He wrote films, produced films, directed films. He made a documentary. His body of work, I think it's a little underrated, just in terms of its scope and how interested he was in all the different phases, because he did not have that kind of, the last time you were here for a Hall of Fame, that Red Fortian world-building reputation,
7:58 Sean Fennessey? where he had a ski resort that he turned into a film festival and ecological preservation site, and he was a very political figure. Duval, he had his point of view on the world, but so much of his time is spent on the work. And it was honestly hard trying to, I feel like I've seen everything. And there were a lot of movies I'd never even heard of that he made, some of which I thought were terrific. So, part of the fun of these exercises is to try to say like, okay, what matters, right? What are like the ten signal movies that you have to see and you have to put and canonize? But also, when we look back at the movies, half of them are going to say, eh, you know, take it or leave it. But maybe a third or a quarter of them say like, this is worth your time and you should,
8:40 Sean Fennessey? you should rappel into the cave and check it out.
8:44 Speaker 04 Well, in addition to being good, he also had taste, right? And he continually associated himself with good projects. Now, again, it's hard to make good movies. And so there are some, some that don't quite make the grade in here. But for the most part, I mean, he might, he worked so steadily, he put up such big numbers, right? He could, he could put out a few movies that weren't great, only to then hit one out of the park. Well, what about you? Why do you love Robert Duvall?
9:14 Sean Fennessey? Well, I think he was kind of given to me because he is a part of so many legendary and historic movies. The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, MASH. There's a handful of critical 1970s movies that if you're educating yourself and you're, you're born after those movies come out, you have to watch them. So when, when he's in somewhere between five and 10 of the 100 most historic American movies, he's part, he's part of the scenery. Like you have to accept him. And so I don't know that I necessarily appreciated him as much as I should have until I got a little bit older into my teens and I started seeing him doing interesting and good work in mainstream movies in the 90s. Like not great films, like A Civil Action.
9:58 Sean Fennessey? I don't know if you watched A Civil Action for this. Which is, you know, not a movie I, I really love, but I can see him doing something a little bit different in that film and bringing a different energy and gravitas to that movie that otherwise might not have had. It might've seemed a little shiny, a little Hollywood, if he's not there doing what he's doing. And also I obviously have a fetish for that guy's in character actors and the idea that someone could transcend in such a way and become such a genuine star. Like he wasn't a guy who had like a moment. He was getting recognized for Academy Awards over a 30 year period. You know, he was getting cast consistently by people for 50 plus years.
10:38 Sean Fennessey? He also had something that I just really like, which is when somebody has a public reputation.
10:46 Sean Fennessey? As extremely successful, but they have passion projects that are really hard to get off the ground and they have decades long journey of trying to get those things made. It really humanizes the iconography to me. So there's a couple of movies that he made in the later stages of his life that are these fascinating subjects and one in particular, The Apostle, was, came out right as I was kind of getting wise to independent cinema, the awards game.
11:12 Speaker 04 Right.
11:13 Sean Fennessey? You know, independent film studios entering the world of studio operations and that movie, which he got a lot of recognition for, kind of confounded me in a good way.
11:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:25 Sean Fennessey? It's a real seventies movie in 1997.
11:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:28 Sean Fennessey? And so I think that that was a big entry point for me, just beyond seeing him as Tom Hagen and Kilgore. So I'm very excited to do this with you.
11:39 Speaker 04 I think American Olivier, I think Vincent Canby was the one who came up with that. I don't get it. I mean, I, or rather I do get it, I just think it's maybe not right. In that, I think what Canby is referring to is that transformational quality. But the truth is, Laurence Olivier was a romantic lead for 20 plus years. He was married to Scarlett O'Hara, he was Heathcliff, he was Maxim de Winter. Duval did not, not to mention a lifetime on stage, which Duval did not have, right? Early, early stage work and then he went back a couple of times, but not consistently. So I don't think of him as an Olivier type. He's more workman like than that, right?
12:23 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
12:24 Speaker 04 He, he, he's a grinder. He really is.
12:28 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
12:30 Speaker 04 The period between Godfather and Godfather Part Two is two years, right? Seventy-two and seventy-four, it's two years. Al Pacino makes two movies between those two. Uh, I think James Caan makes three movies between those two. How many movies did Robert Duvall make between those two?
12:46 Sean Fennessey? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
12:50 Speaker 04 Seven movies. And a couple of leads in there as well. So, again, the comp is hard to come by. In some ways, the comp would, would be closer to, uh, Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep. In, in the kind of variety of roles that they were asked to play, allowed to play, wanted to play. But again, they're, they're leads. They were never character. They're, they were leads with a kind of character actor sensibility, but they're leading, leading men and women. And Duvall was rarely that.
13:23 Sean Fennessey? I think that the American Olivier assignation is about a kind of commitment over a long period of time to the kind of work that he was doing. You know, where Olivier represents something about the British acting style and this kind of like representational force who could do Shakespeare, who could do some modern work, who would pop up in American thrillers and things like that. And I think because of the time, like what Olivier represents to not just the stage, but British filmmaking, especially those Shakespearean adaptations that he made. And the role that Duvall plays in seventies American cinema and this big transformation that's happening there, him kind of being the glue, like, I think you can make the case that he is the binding that happens at that period of time because of all the directors
14:07 Sean Fennessey? that he works with and the huge Best Picture nominees that he's a part of. But I agree, like, they're, they're obviously completely different kinds of actors. The other reason he's able to make seven movies in that time is though he is in some leads, there's other movies where he shows up for three or four scenes. And he brings that intensity that he's famous for, and then he leaves. Um, but yeah, he did work a lot.
14:26 Speaker 04 Maybe what can be meant was simply England's greatest actor, America's greatest actor.
14:31 Sean Fennessey? Do you think that that's something, like an idea that was held for a long period of time? Set aside your own personal interests and appreciation for him. Like, was that how he was understood? Cause like, to me, Pacino, De Niro, maybe a couple of other people, Nicholson.
14:45 Speaker 04 I think people came to that. They, they came to it gradually, just the way his career developed so gradually. I think people finally realized. They started to do the math. They started to go, wait a minute. He's Ned Pepper. He's Frank Burns. He's Tom Hagen. He's the great Santi, right? They started to put all of the math of that together. You know, well, he may, maybe he's the best. Maybe he's the best out of all of them. I mean, it's sad to say Philip Seymour Hoffman might have been the comp, but this, the longevity issue is, is sadly really the issue. I mean, by the time Duval makes Apocalypse Now, he's older than Phil was when he died.
15:27 Sean Fennessey? Wow.
15:28 Speaker 04 Right? And Duval's got another 40 plus years of a career after that.
15:32 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's just heartbreaking to think about, but those two actors, they, at least in that, in terms of that quiet and that explosive quality, they both shared that. They both, they could go all the way to 11 and then come all the way back down. They could be incredibly vulnerable and sad. And they could also be kind of rageful and shielding themselves. Like they, they did have similar qualities.
15:52 Speaker 04 And again, a kind of dawning awareness of the actor on the part of the audience, right? People, it's not like Philip Seymour Hoffman sort of exploded on the scene. It was a guy where you kind of looked back and you went, oh, wait a minute. He was this, he was that, he was this, he was that.
16:07 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. I hadn't compared them. I have thought a lot about Philip Seymour Hoffman in my time. I've often said he's my favorite actor. So that makes, maybe that's one more reason why we're here today talking about him. You know, he, he just passed away earlier this year and he was 95 years old. He was born in 1931 in San Diego, California, though it seems as though he lived most of his life in Maryland and Virginia and identified himself a little bit more with the American South. His father was in the service and they moved around a little bit and he began acting at 21, 1952.
16:40 Sean Fennessey? His first gigs were in summer plays at the Gateway Playhouse in Belleport, Long Island, which is where I'll be this summer and is not far from where I grew up.
16:47 Speaker 04 Does that playhouse still exist?
16:49 Sean Fennessey? I don't know the answer to that. Belleport is a very artistic community though, and there are many a theater dweller and, and, and folks who have performed on the stage who live there to this day. I believe Isabella Rossellini lives there right now. So very quickly, kind of takes off in off-Broadway productions and eventually makes his way to Broadway. And across the 1950s, accumulates a body of work, eventually transitions to television in the late 50s and 1960s. Kind of a similar trajectory to a couple of people we've talked about on this show who've passed away in the last few years. It's very similar to Robert Altman's trajectory over the years.
17:30 Sean Fennessey? Get some of these TV gigs on The Twilight Zone, on Route 66, on a lot of these kind of serialized, single-story programs. Did you go back and look at any of that stuff?
17:39 Speaker 04 I did. So 60 to 62, he's on the Robert Horage Theater, two episodes of Armstrong Circle Theater, Playhouse 90, John Brown's Raid, which was a TV movie, great Ghost Tales, The Defenders, Kane's Hundred, Shannon, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, four episodes of The Naked City. I watched his Alfred Hitchcock Presents, called ironically Bad Actor, written by Robert Bloch.
18:06 Sean Fennessey? Oh, sure.
18:07 Speaker 04 And he was the lead in that show. And a grisly little tale about an actor who cuts off a rival's head and hides it in an ice bucket. And it's pretty standard angry young man stuff for TV. There's not much to it.
18:23 Sean Fennessey? What is it? Does that resonate with you as an actor?
18:27 Speaker 04 Sure. There's a lot of ice buckets in my house.
18:30 Sean Fennessey? I didn't look at much of the TV stuff, though. You could see that that's a place where he really made his bones. His acting style, there's a, when you go back and read about it and the way that he operated on sets, it seemed as though he was interested in the method, if not a full-blown practitioner. And he worked with Meisner. And he seemed to understand a lot of the kind of... Intellectual components, but he would, he didn't really intellectualize the approach whenever he talked about it. I don't know if you spent much time researching any of that.
19:07 Speaker 04 You know, we'll talk about it more perhaps when we get to The Godfather, but all these people worshipped at the altar of Brando, right? I mean, Brando was the icon for all those young, all of his sons in The Godfather movies, although Duval's only seven years younger than Brando. So he's a little older vintage than those other dudes. But the same trajectory of acting classes in New York, trying to book TV gigs, doing some theater. He knew Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. They all knew each other. They were all coming up
19:47 Speaker 04 together at the same time. And yeah, the approach, you know, I heard Mr. Duval in his Howard Stern interview, when Howard Stern was trying to kind of knock Brando for his, for this business of reading cue cards. There's the photograph you've probably seen of Duval with Brando's lines taped to his chest. And Duval was quick to say, yeah, partly lazy and partly not. I mean, there was in fact, a method to that madness. There was an idea behind it. Brando didn't want to learn the lines too well because he wanted it to seem very fresh. And Howard Stern asked him, said, did you ever do that? He said, I tried it.
20:28 Speaker 04 It didn't work for me. I actually tried, he tried to do what Brando was doing and he couldn't make it work. He had to learn the lines, the good old traditional way. Though you'll see in a lot of Duval performances, there's, there are little ad-libs here and there that, you know, which are making that his own. But he definitely knew the lines. But yeah, there is a. There's an immersive quality to the performances, but not so immersive that it seems that, you know, couldn't have a conversation with you.
20:55 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, he could also, he could transform but not disappear.
20:58 Speaker 04 Right.
20:59 Sean Fennessey? That's an odd thing that not everyone is capable of. Sometimes disappearing is helpful. Sometimes it's not in terms of your iconography or memorability. But I was reading a piece that Scott Cooper, the writer director who worked with Duval a couple of times, wrote for The Guardian after Duval passed. And he told a story about visiting his library at his home in Virginia. And he had two letters framed in his home. And one of them was from Brando. And in the letter, he writes to Duval that you are the greatest American actor. That's the compliment that he paid to him. And that that was the most impactful, like kindest thing that had ever happened to him because of the way that he revered Brando, which I thought was really interesting, given that they had worked together and, you know,
21:40 Sean Fennessey? not exactly contemporaries, but more or less contemporaries. And Brando was a huge star when he was still trying to book television gigs.
21:47 Speaker 04 Right.
21:47 Sean Fennessey? Despite that.
21:48 Speaker 04 They all felt that way about Brando. I mean, I heard Duval tell a story about Gene Hackman running into Brando in Manhattan, just ran into him, didn't know who he, they didn't know each other personally. And they and ran into him and Hackman almost burst into tears, he told Duval. So tremendous meaning in in the way he approached the work, the way they all approached the work, the way they learned to approach the work. And so, yeah, putting all that stuff into place, but also, you're, you're making TV. He's making TV shows. You've got a schedule. You've got a director who's not going to ask you for a lot of nuance. You're going to get two takes and then you're going to move on to the next thing. Learning how to work is, is part of the job. You have to learn how to work.
22:32 Sean Fennessey? I've been thinking a bit about the recurring creative partnerships that some of these historic figures have over the years. Duval has a couple.
22:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:40 Sean Fennessey? He's got, he's got Coppola, of course, where I think, has he made six films with Coppola over the years? One, two, three, four, five films over the years.
22:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:46 Sean Fennessey? Two with Altman, two with Philip Kaufman, sort of, two with Walter Hill, two with Billy Bob Thornton. And he also appeared in another film that Billy Bob Thornton wrote, two with Cooper. And but I would say that he is not the most important creative force that he's aligned with over the years. My, my theory is that it's Horton Foot.
23:06 Speaker 04 Horton Foot.
23:07 Sean Fennessey? So who is Horton Foot as playwright that you are?
23:09 Speaker 04 Well, he was a great, great playwright and a great playwright and a great screenwriter. And he had a A community of some family and some actors who had done his work, both in New York and elsewhere. His daughters were both involved in the business and their husbands. Peter Masterson, who we'll talk about, was Horton Foot's first cousin. He's the father of Mary Stuart Masterson and Peter Masterson was a directed one of these Horton Foot pieces and directed Trip to Bountiful, which Mr. Duval is not in. But yeah, that association was great. And I remember hearing Mr. Duval say that if
23:53 Speaker 04 his career was only comprised of his collaborations with Horton Foot, he would have considered it a successful career. I think, is it five, five films written by Horton Foot?
24:05 Sean Fennessey? That's right.
24:06 Speaker 04 But they're, they're, they're pretty key. A couple of them will wind up in our Hall of Fame, I'm sure.
24:11 Sean Fennessey? I think so too. One of them is very, was very interesting to me and I had not seen it before. Should, should, I mean, the other one thing I'll say before we dig into this.
24:22 Sean Fennessey? One other thing about the American Olivier title is maybe it's because Duval was very comfortable playing historic figures in the same way that Olivier did. In his time, Duval played Eisenhower, Jesse James, Stalin, Robert E. Lee, Eichmann and Joseph Pulitzer. There's probably a few more in there that I didn't remember, but he didn't mind taking on well-known figures and sometimes he could transform into them. And sometimes he sort of had a Duval doing them quality.
24:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:52 Sean Fennessey? Some of those were TV movies, some of them were, were, were feature films. But I think that that might also be a part of it where you could say, well, Olivier has a critical Richard III. He has a critical Henry V, a kind of definitional for the, what those characters look like on, on, on movie screens. Seven Academy Award nominations over the years. He the rare actor who had one in the seventies, eighties, nineties and 2000s.
25:19 Sean Fennessey? 90 features. He also directed five films.
25:23 Speaker 04 And produced a few too.
25:25 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
25:27 Sean Fennessey? I, what are your thoughts on slightly widening the parameters of the Hall of Fame? To include some things that are not strictly theatrically released films?
25:39 Speaker 04 Didn't you guys put Nicole Kidman, uh, limited series in her Hall of Fame?
25:47 Sean Fennessey? Which limited series? And I can't, candidly do not remember. It's possible. I feel like we've made, we've made some allowances.
25:53 Speaker 04 What's the one in, uh, what's the one in the beach with the women with the, the mystery, uh, what am I thinking of?
26:02 Sean Fennessey? Big Little Lies?
26:03 Speaker 04 Yes. Is that what it's called?
26:04 Sean Fennessey? Did we put Big Little Lies in?
26:05 Speaker 04 I think you did.
26:06 Sean Fennessey? Don't recall. We did do that. Thumbs up from Sarah and Lucas. Uh, sure. Okay. So then the, the answer is yes. You feel comfortable with that idea?
26:13 Speaker 04 I'm saying that I think precedent has been established.
26:15 Sean Fennessey? And are you up on the blue category that there can be one film that you can choose?
26:19 Speaker 04 I think we did this for the Redford Hall of Fame, but remind me.
26:23 Sean Fennessey? Well, so we have reds, greens and yellows here on the Hall of Fame. Red is a film that is not in. Yellow is a film that we will hold and we will revisit and see if we should go forward or go backward and put it in red. Green, of course, is going in. Blue indicates that it is outside of the 10 critical films that go into the Hall of Fame. But it's something that we like. It's something that we have a personal connection to, that we can make a case for its relevance. It's emotional importance to us.
26:47 Speaker 04 Is that different than, I think this should be in the Hall of Fame and you don't?
26:51 Sean Fennessey? Well, let's not drill down too hard.
26:56 Sean Fennessey? Do you want to start since we were talking about Horton Foot?
26:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, sure. I will throw in a couple of other TV things as we go that I've seen, but, uh, I think we can absolutely start.
27:04 Sean Fennessey? Okay. In 1962, he is cast on the recommendation of Horton Foot, who wrote the screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Richard Mulligan. And he plays-
27:14 Speaker 04 Robert Mulligan.
27:15 Sean Fennessey? Sorry. What, who did I say?
27:16 Speaker 04 You said Richard.
27:17 Sean Fennessey? Who's Richard Mulligan?
27:18 Speaker 04 I have no idea.
27:19 Sean Fennessey? He's the star of Empty Nest. He's an actor.
27:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, he was on Soap.
27:22 Sean Fennessey? That's right.
27:24 Sean Fennessey? Robert Mulligan.
27:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:26 Sean Fennessey? Um, and he was Boo Radley in the film.
27:28 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:29 Sean Fennessey? And he has no lines of dialogue.
27:31 Speaker 04 Right.
27:31 Sean Fennessey? But he is a critical character. And I'm fond of including the breakthrough-
27:38 Speaker 04 Oh, it's-
27:38 Sean Fennessey? in the Hall of Fame.
27:39 Speaker 04 Definitely green.
27:40 Sean Fennessey? I think it has to be, right?
27:41 Speaker 04 It has to be green.
27:42 Sean Fennessey? A critical American movie. Um, terrific movie. Still holds up very well.
27:46 Speaker 04 Here's the thing. It's, if it's not the great American novel, it's certainly one of the great American novels. It's a beautiful, sort of pitch-perfect rendition of the great American novel. And if he were just one of the townspeople, maybe we wouldn't make a case for Hall of Fame. But he plays a very crucial role, and he's great. I've seen To Kill a Mockingbird onstage a couple of times. Boo Radley's hard, deceptively hard. He doesn't have any lines. He doesn't have to show up until the very end. But you've got a lot of responsibility as Boo Radley. You have to convey a lot in a short amount of time with no lines, and he's great in it.
28:29 Sean Fennessey? He's so haunted in this part. And I think he's never really looked that way in any other movie. He has almost like this white pallor and this, it's like a shock of white hair almost. He never really looked like that again. He looks like a ghost. And I think it has to go into, now if Amanda were here, she'd be like, alright, you're like, shooting your load too soon, you know? Don't, you can't just pick the first one. You've got 89 more movies.
28:54 Speaker 04 I think Amanda would put To Kill a Mockingbird in Robert Duvall.
28:57 Sean Fennessey? I don't want to misrepresent her point of view. Now, 1963 Captain Newman M.D. I haven't seen the film.
29:01 Speaker 04 I'm gonna jump in here with some TV. The Untouchables, three episodes of Route 66, The Twilight Zone, The Virginian, Stoney Burke, Arrest and Trial. And he, The Twilight Zone, directed by Walter Graham and teleplayed by Charles Beaumont, who was a great sci-fi writer. And he's the lead in that Twilight Zone. I didn't get a chance to watch it. Yes, Captain Newman M.D. is the next movie.
29:25 Sean Fennessey? Did you watch this movie?
29:26 Speaker 04 I did, did you?
29:26 Sean Fennessey? I did not.
29:27 Speaker 04 Directed by David Miller. It's David Miller's first movie after Lonely Are the Brave, which is an absolutely great movie.
29:33 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
29:34 Speaker 04 It's Gregory Peck's first movie after To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's Robert Duvall's first movie after To Kill a Mockingbird.
29:39 Sean Fennessey? Is that how he got the gig? Did Gregory Peck?
29:42 Speaker 04 I don't know. I don't know.
29:43 Sean Fennessey? Nudge them on this one?
29:44 Speaker 04 He's also kind of being asked to do something very similar to Boo Radley. The movie is about... An army mental hospital and Gregory Peck is a psychiatrist who's running this hospital and so it follows the few case studies of some of these guys who come back from battle. It's pretty bad in that the attitude toward mental illness has really changed a lot since this movie was made. And so Eddie Albert and Bobby Darin, who were both good actors, are asked to perform a kind of mental illness that feels very
30:25 Speaker 04 theatrical and ham bone. Duval escaped some of that because his character is suffering from PTSD or shell shock, probably they called it at the time. And so he's nonverbal. So again, it's kind of a similarity to Boo Radley. He's this nonverbal character who's come back from battle. He's good in the film. Gregory Peck is great in the film. The movie does not hold up.
30:47 Sean Fennessey? That sounds like a red to me. There's going to be a few spots where you're filling in my blank spots because I know you worked so avidly to prepare for this episode, since this is your job.
30:56 Speaker 04 Let me throw in some more TV after this. The lieutenant craft suspense theater, three episodes of The Outer Limits, three episodes of The Fugitive, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I did watch his Outer Limits episode called The Chameleon. Well, he did three Outer Limits episodes, but he did one called The Chameleon. Notable because teleplay by Robert Town.
31:22 Sean Fennessey? Wow.
31:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:23 Sean Fennessey? Wonderful. How was it?
31:25 Speaker 04 It's not very good.
31:25 Sean Fennessey? Okay. That's the problem with doing what you've done is sometime, you know, there's only so many 23 minute intervals in the day where you can check in on old television and then you're a bit heartbroken when you get to the end of an episode and you're like, well, it didn't work out and I don't know why I did that. That wasn't a good use of my time. I appreciate all of your hard work. There's a two year gap where he films all that television and then he appears briefly in Nightmare on the Sun as a motorcyclist. Not much to say about this, right?
31:53 Speaker 04 Did you watch it?
31:53 Sean Fennessey? I watched some of it.
31:55 Speaker 04 I watched it. Directed by Mark Lawrence. Who was a bastard who sang like a bird in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Uh, so to hell with him. Uh, it's very much like that. What's the Oliver Stone movie with, uh, with Sean Penn where he, he's in the little desert town, little noir?
32:14 Sean Fennessey? U-turn.
32:15 Speaker 04 U-turn. It's, it's basically the plot of U-turn. John Derek is in the Sean Penn role.
32:21 Sean Fennessey? Ursula Endress.
32:22 Speaker 04 Ursula Endress, who was John Derek's wife at the time. Apparently there was a promise made that John Derek was going to get her naked for the movie, but that didn't wind up happening. Not sure why, since she certainly was not shy about taking off her clothes in movies later on, but.
32:38 Sean Fennessey? Thanks to her for that.
32:39 Speaker 04 Duval and Richard Jakes will show up as these motorcycle guys who are trying to, uh, capture, uh, John Derek. Uh, but they're motorcycle guys who are both like balding blond haired guys in cardigan sweaters. It's very strange.
32:56 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. Um, I don't know what accounts for that.
33:00 Speaker 04 And then there's a scene where Duval whips his motorcycle with a length of chain in a fit of impotent rage. It's not a good movie.
33:09 Sean Fennessey? Uh, that's a red as well for Nightmare in the Sun. 1966, a film we've already discussed.
33:14 Speaker 04 We discussed it on the Robert Redford.
33:15 Sean Fennessey? The chase, which you were a fan of.
33:18 Speaker 04 I liked it better than you guys.
33:19 Sean Fennessey? I was a little less, Amanda and I both were a little less intrigued.
33:23 Sean Fennessey? Fascinating cast in that film. Duval's got a, it's got a relevant part.
33:27 Speaker 04 Written by Horton Foot.
33:28 Sean Fennessey? Indeed.
33:29 Speaker 04 It's a relevant part, but here he is, one of the townspeople. That really is the part he's playing here. Uh, no, it's not going in his Hall of Fame.
33:38 Sean Fennessey? Two more years go by.
33:39 Speaker 04 Oh, wait a minute. I got some more TV.
33:40 Sean Fennessey? And there's, there's the TV.
33:42 Speaker 04 Bob Hope presents the Chrysler Theater. Hawk, The Felony Squad, Shane, and a TV movie called Fame is the Name of the Game. Did you watch this?
33:52 Sean Fennessey? No.
33:54 Speaker 04 Directed by Stuart Rosenberg.
33:55 Sean Fennessey? Oh, sure.
33:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, and stars Tony Franciosa, Jill St. John, and Susan St. James. Maybe the only time the Saint, the
34:02 Sean Fennessey? Jill St. John and Susan St. James.
34:05 Speaker 04 Yes.
34:06 Sean Fennessey? It's like the Avengers.
34:07 Speaker 04 It was advertised on NBC as the first made-for-television movie, which is just flatly not true. I don't know how they got away with advertising that. Tony Franciosa is the lead, and he is a features writer for a magazine
34:22 Sean Fennessey? Oh, sure.
34:23 Speaker 04 called Fame
34:24 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
34:24 Speaker 04 in Los Angeles. You should see it just to see his office. Just to see the features writer's office. It's palatial, it has a magnificent view, it's got its own bathroom, and he has a personal secretary, played by Susan St. James, working in the office. It was such a popular TV movie, they turned it into a series.
34:43 Sean Fennessey? Oh.
34:44 Speaker 04 With Tony Franciosa.
34:46 Sean Fennessey? I guess, I guess there is a, there is a theme song that rings out in my mind. Fame is the name of the game. It must be from that series.
34:53 Speaker 04 It was the, it was kind of a backdoor pilot.
34:56 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
34:57 Speaker 04 And Duval does not have a big part in it, but Stuart Rosenberg is somebody who would come back later in his career, so.
35:06 Sean Fennessey? Yes, for sure. We spoke about him quite a bit during our Paul Newman episode, actually.
35:10 Speaker 04 Oh, even before we get to the next movie. Two episodes of The Time Tunnel, two episodes of T H E Cat,
35:17 Sean Fennessey? Uh huh.
35:18 Speaker 04 and an episode of Combat. Do you know what T H E Cat was?
35:22 Sean Fennessey? I don't.
35:22 Speaker 04 Well, it was about a cat burglar who's, who's initials spelled T H E, T H E Cat, anyway, played by Robert Loggia. I thought you'd appreciate that.
35:33 Sean Fennessey? I do love Loggia. Now, it's notable that you mentioned Combat, because I do believe Combat is where Robert Duvall met Robert Altman.
35:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:41 Sean Fennessey? And his next feature film, 1967, is Countdown, which is Robert Altman's debut feature, I guess technically his second feature film, but his first in the studio system for Warner Brothers. And it's a
35:54 Sean Fennessey? Spaceman movie, a movie about NASA, about aspiring astronauts and their countdown to liftoff.
36:00 Speaker 04 It's the early version of Apollo 13 and Robert Duvall is playing the Gary Sinise part from Apollo 13.
36:06 Sean Fennessey? He certainly is. Have you revisited this recently? Did you watch it for this?
36:10 Speaker 04 I did. It wasn't a revisit for me. I'd never seen it.
36:13 Sean Fennessey? You've never seen it? Oh, interesting. James Conn also in this film. Fascinating movie. I think a bit stiff, but you can feel Altman trying to inject the movie with his style, his overlapping dialogue, his attempts to kind of move the camera in a way that was unusual during that period of time and create a little bit of depth of character in a movie that otherwise would have been, I think, a little stiffer with a different kind of filmmaker. Duvall's pretty good in this movie, I think.
36:37 Speaker 04 Yes, he's quite good. He's very rarely are we gonna say he's not good in this.
36:42 Sean Fennessey? I think this is the first movie of his, though, where I see his, that, that lack of fear to be abrasive as a character, you know, to be confrontational, to be a little bit loud, to lose his cool a little bit, seems to emerge here.
36:57 Speaker 04 I agree, but I think it's red.
37:00 Sean Fennessey? It's red. 1968, The Detective.
37:03 Speaker 04 Oh, sorry, gotta jump in here. Cimarron strip, the wild, wild west, flesh and blood, run for your life, jut for the defense. Yeah, okay, The Detective. Directed by Gordon Douglas, written by Abby Mann.
37:14 Sean Fennessey? Yes. Curious feature film. Stars Frank Sinatra as the titular detective. Duvall is one of his colleagues, is also a police detective. I would say relatively modest supporting part. The milieu of the movie is quite something. It's around the murder of a gay man and it tries to explore the gay lifestyle at this time through the eyes of police detectives who don't really understand it. And I think maybe for its time, it thought it was being sensitive. It now seems a bit outmoded and outdated.
37:47 Sean Fennessey? A bit of an odd Sinatra performance. If anyone has seemed less like a cop to me, and I don't know if Frank Sinatra is one of them. He's just miscast.
37:56 Speaker 04 You know, I'm just exhausted by Frank Sinatra.
37:59 Sean Fennessey? Really?
37:59 Speaker 04 He just, I'm just, I don't know what to make of him. It's like, yeah, you're a great singer and you're a pretty good actor, but you're also this Vegas guy and you're, are you mopped up? You're a bully, you're a Democrat, but you're a friend with Ronald Reagan. I don't know what's going on. It's just exhausting.
38:18 Sean Fennessey? Okay. Have you, did you have a chance to meet the man?
38:21 Speaker 04 No, God, no. I used to have a-
38:22 Sean Fennessey? He would have punched you right in the nose for saying that.
38:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. I did have a nightmare where he beat me up in an elevator.
38:27 Sean Fennessey? No kidding?
38:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, and nobody helped me. They were all cheering Frank on.
38:31 Sean Fennessey? I think that was a common occurrence, honestly. He did have men who would beat you up, though. He wouldn't do it himself. The detective is definitely red. It's an interesting artifact. Popped in my Twilight Time Blu-ray for this.
38:41 Speaker 04 As did I.
38:42 Sean Fennessey? 1968 Bullet. So I didn't revisit Bullet, and I couldn't quite remember the context of Duval's character. So fill me in. Is he, is this, is he the cab driver in this?
38:52 Speaker 04 He is the cab driver.
38:53 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
38:54 Speaker 04 He, he takes the mobster around, and then later Bullet finds him and asks him to retrace his steps, and he has a pretty good memory about where the mobster went and what the mobster did. It's really very functionary.
39:09 Sean Fennessey? A small, a small part, and it's such an interesting thing that he could be a, play a critical role in To Kill a Mockingbird. Five years later, he's got a leading role in a Warner Brothers astronaut drama. And then, one year later, he's got a ninth build speaking part in Bullet? So interesting, the way that he just chose parts and picked projects or hoped to get hired for things while we're doing all of this television.
39:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:36 Sean Fennessey? I don't know, maybe help me understand this as somebody, you know, you get offered a lot of things, you don't do everything, but sometimes there's something that you really want, like the psychology.
39:42 Speaker 04 And sometimes you go, oh, I've got the time, and I like Peter Yates, and I'd like to be in a Steve McQueen movie, and I'll have scenes with McQueen, and- Oh, get me out to San Francisco for a week? Uh, yeah, I've got the time. I can do that.
39:55 Sean Fennessey? You think that's what it was?
39:56 Speaker 04 You know, you've all married, uh, four times, no children. So as we get into some of the more workaholic, uh, ways, it's like the kids will put a real crimp in those plans.
40:07 Sean Fennessey? Ain't that the truth? Uh, it's funny that you say that too. He was pretty open about this in the later part of his life, said, I tried many times as women I was married to and women I was not married to. Yeah. Guess I must be shooting blanks. But I think that that might contribute at least in part to the fact that, look, I mean, every single year through in this 1970s, he's got multiple projects. It's amazing how frequently he worked. And so Bullet, while it is a legendary film, I don't think his work in it is legendary for the purposes of this exercise.
40:34 Speaker 04 No.
40:34 Sean Fennessey? Red, 1969, True Grit.
40:36 Speaker 04 Hold on, I've got to jump in here with CBS Playhouse, The Mod Squad, and five episodes of the FBI. I pointed out because now it stops with True Grit, it stops. So it's almost as if he is making a, a, a real career decision here. I've done enough of this TV. He had done 30 or some episodes of television and he said, that's enough. And I want to make movies now. And his stock was starting to rise a bit, uh, in the movie world. And so he, uh, he calls it quits. And yeah, makes True Grit in 69.
41:09 Sean Fennessey? So he plays Ned Pepper, a very memorable part.
41:12 Speaker 04 Not a big part.
41:13 Sean Fennessey? Not a big part.
41:16 Sean Fennessey? Famously, infamously hated Henry Hathaway. They hated each other in this movie. But gets a good performance out of him. Um, I think this movie is a little bit stiff. It's best known for being the film that got John Wayne his best actor Oscar.
41:28 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:29 Sean Fennessey? Um, after so many years, love the novel. Think the novel is one of the, the, the absolute classics of the 20th century.
41:35 Speaker 04 Well, and the screenplay by Marguerite Roberts hews very closely to the Charles Portis book, as does the Coens adaptation. I mean, there are a lot of lines, just, you know, why would you go in and screw with that unbelievable dialogue? I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man, right? That's Duval's line. It's just great stuff.
41:54 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. I don't know that it's necessarily worthy of the hall, but he keeps finding himself in these movies, in these parts, like, you know, he's showing up in Bullets, showing up in True Grit. This is how you start to amass this like. That quality of, if I don't know his name, I know that face.
42:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
42:11 Sean Fennessey? And then you start to situate yourself with common, common moviegoers. And then every time you show up in something, you represent a standard of quality, I think, in addition to these reams and reams of TV that you just listed. And you said you watched all of it, right? You saw every single episode of television?
42:26 Speaker 04 I did not see every single episode.
42:28 Sean Fennessey? Good. True grit, in?
42:30 Speaker 04 No.
42:31 Sean Fennessey? True grit's red. 1969, The Rain People. This part was originally meant for Rip Torn. And Rip Torn couldn't make it. He was cast in Francis Ford Coppola's film, opposite James Caan. He plays a, remind me, what is he? Is he a man who's picked up on the side of the road?
42:51 Speaker 04 The Duval character?
42:52 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, he's the father.
42:53 Speaker 04 No, he's a cop.
42:54 Sean Fennessey? He's a highway patrolman.
42:55 Speaker 04 He's the highway patrolman.
42:56 Sean Fennessey? That's what it is. He's the highway patrolman who picks them up and brings them back to his house.
43:00 Speaker 04 And by the way, it's a little more, there's a little more to the story than Rip Torn couldn't make it. Do you know this story?
43:05 Sean Fennessey? Share it.
43:07 Speaker 04 So Rip Torn, Shirley Knight, and James Caan rehearse for weeks in New York with Francis Ford Coppola. And then Coppola takes Shirley Knight and James Caan out. They're gonna go out on the road and they're gonna shoot essentially sequentially. The cop doesn't show up until the last third of the movie. So they're going out on the road and Coppola has decided, we're gonna shoot. And, and I'm gonna remain somewhat improvisatory about this. If I see something interesting, we're gonna go there.
43:40 Speaker 04 If we, if we, we don't have a definitive calendar, but we'll see you in O'Gallala down the road in a month. And they leave Rip Torn with the motorcycle, because he's playing a motorcycle cop.
43:55 Speaker 04 So they leave the motorcycle with Rip Torn in New York. And they tell him to learn how to ride the motorcycle. Well, the motorcycle gets stolen from out in front of Ripton's, Riptorn's house. And Riptorn says, it's in my deal. You have to provide me with a motorcycle to learn. And Coppola says, well, we can't, you know, it's a low budget movie. We can't actually get you another, we can get you a like a, we can get you a second, you know, a secondhand motorcycle that you can learn on. And Torrance mad about it and he says, that wasn't the deal. And then they reach out to him and they wanted him to, they wanted him to get his shoe and calf
44:40 Speaker 04 measured for the boots that he had to wear. And Torrance said, that's it and quit. So they're out on the road filming the movie and suddenly the guy they've been rehearsing with for weeks can't appear. James Caan recommends Robert Duvall because they had worked together on Countdown and Shirley Knight had done an episode of Naked City with Robert Duvall. So they both had associations with them and they tell Coppola, you should hire Robert Duvall. And they changed the history of movies, really. I mean, that's the first time Coppola meets Duvall is working on this film.
45:18 Sean Fennessey? We will get to their reunion. The Rain People is an interesting movie. His performances, I remember, what I remember most about the performance is the bad dad quality that that character has, which is something he would return to in his time as a, as a film actor. And he's very effective and very menacing in this movie. I don't think it's one of his best performances or one of the most critical performances of all time.
45:40 Speaker 04 Nor do I.
45:41 Sean Fennessey? I would consider a yellow for this performance because of it becoming the first union with Coppola.
45:47 Speaker 04 We can yellow it.
45:48 Sean Fennessey? We're gonna yellow it. 1970 Mash. This is his second film with Altman and he plays Frank Burns, who is the detestable Frank Burns. I mean, immediately identified at the beginning of the film as the enemy to the two surgeons who come in in this movie. Interesting, I didn't play a lot of characters like this.
46:08 Speaker 04 Right.
46:09 Sean Fennessey? Like the unlikable kind of squirrely heel who also gets the girl weirdly in Hot Lips. Perfectly fine performance.
46:19 Speaker 04 I think Frank Burns wouldn't mean anything to us were not for the TV show. I think the TV show kind of solidifies Frank Burns, Larry Linville, who was great as Frank Burns, overtly comic performance on the TV show. But I think he's what cements Frank Burns in the public mind.
46:37 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
46:39 Speaker 04 In a way that had the TV show never happened, I don't think Frank Burns, the name would have any meaning for us. And the performance, let's face it, it's not a big part of the film.
46:48 Sean Fennessey? No.
46:48 Speaker 04 It's very much a part of an ensemble.
46:50 Sean Fennessey? It's weird because the film itself is so full of ridiculousness. And Duval very rarely played that note as an actor. It was hard for him to not be dignified. And so to me, I say this is red.
47:04 Speaker 04 I agree.
47:05 Sean Fennessey? 1970, The Revolutionary. Now, I had never seen this movie. Speaking of Long Island, this comes from Paul Williams, a filmmaker, only made a handful of films. And what an interesting movie this is.
47:16 Speaker 04 It really is.
47:16 Sean Fennessey? Not entirely successful, I would say.
47:18 Speaker 04 I agree.
47:19 Sean Fennessey? But quite an interesting portrait of a revolutionary played by John Voight at the end of the 1960s, who goes on a kind of journey of exploration in terms of what kind of revolutionary he wants to be, what kind of action he wants to take, what kind of community he wants to be a part of. And it's kind of this like roving journey movie where he moves from place to place. And he does eventually make a connection with Duval's character, who is this sort of zealot, you know, sort of like hard, seemingly far-left figure attempting to, you know, incite true revolution. I found Duval's performance to be a little anonymous in this movie because it's very much in the psychology of John Voight, who's somewhere between hyper-intellectualized and also wishy-washy at the same time movie.
48:02 Speaker 04 Right.
48:03 Sean Fennessey? Interesting comment on the vagueness of the movements in that time.
48:07 Speaker 04 Right.
48:09 Sean Fennessey? I'm glad I watched it.
48:10 Speaker 04 I am too. I was surprised that I didn't know anything about it. It's like, how does a movie with John Voight and Robert Duvall? That's not terrible. How does it just have no footprint at all? It's not a terrible movie. It's a, it's kind of interesting. John Voight's very good in it.
48:28 Sean Fennessey? He is very good.
48:29 Speaker 04 And Duvall, uh, playing this character of Despard, uh, yeah, he's set up as a kind of, as a bit of a revolutionary guru, only to find that maybe he's also, uh, having to play the game to a certain extent. Yeah, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a green, but, uh, I'm glad I watched it.
48:49 Sean Fennessey? I am too. I want to see the rest of Williams's movies. Um, Tarantino and Cinema Speculation wrote a bit about Paul Williams and how his filmography is a bit overlooked or not really preserved in the way that it should be. But, um, he made his previous movie, Out of It, also features John Voight, one of his first film performances, I guess the same year as Midnight Cowboy. And Dealing, or The Berkeley to Boston Forty Brick Lost Bag Blues, was this film that came out two years later, stars Michael Douglas, based on a Michael Crichton novel. I'm not seeing those films. I'd like to check them out.
49:19 Speaker 04 I've seen Dealing though, a long time. I should, uh, try to search that out again.
49:24 Sean Fennessey? Revolutionary, probably red.
49:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:27 Sean Fennessey? This is an interesting one. THX 1138. I-
49:31 Speaker 04 Isn't Lawman first?
49:34 Sean Fennessey? I have, I have THX here, but we can do, you want to talk Lawman?
49:37 Speaker 04 Sure. It's terrible. Michael Winter's a terrible director.
49:40 Sean Fennessey? Yes, from The Visionary Who Brought You Death Wish comes, uh, a West, a bad Western.
49:45 Speaker 04 He was terrible then. He was always terrible and apparently a terrible person too.
49:49 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, people say he was not a nice man.
49:50 Speaker 04 Uh, written by Gerald Wilson, who wrote some pretty good thrillers from that period, as I recall, uh, novels with Burt Lancaster and Lee J. Cobb. I gotta tell you, I'm out on Lee J. Cobb.
50:01 Sean Fennessey? No kidding?
50:02 Speaker 04 I'm kinda out on Lee J. Cobb. It's pretty, pretty ham bone.
50:06 Sean Fennessey? Good lord.
50:07 Speaker 04 It's a terrible movie. Uh, and, uh, and it's just like, Michael Winter didn't get the memo of that something interesting was happening in Hollywood at the time. Because in a lot of ways, it feels like a movie from nineteen-
50:19 Sean Fennessey? It is old fashioned, but you can see him trying to do things with the camera that you can feel him performing the act of tourism. You know, all these insane zooms like throughout the movie that feel very modern, but he doesn't know how to use them to psychologize the characters. He's just doing them because he thinks they look cool, which is the one kind of tactic in the film that makes it feel not like a Kirk Douglas movie from 1955. I agree. It's not very good. It's definitely not going in. So let's talk about THX. He's the titular THX. This is George Lucas's first movie. This is a
50:54 Speaker 04 That's right.
50:55 Sean Fennessey? Critical movie in the history of science fiction.
50:57 Speaker 04 You see THX up on the screen. I don't guess you see that anymore, but you're used to for a while. See THX on the screen. Robert Duvall was THX.
51:04 Sean Fennessey? He literally was.
51:07 Speaker 04 And he had met George Lucas because George Lucas was making a documentary about the making of the Rain People.
51:14 Sean Fennessey? Of course.
51:14 Speaker 04 Again, if Rip Torn
51:17 Sean Fennessey? Wow.
51:18 Speaker 04 Doesn't show up. It was, it was Duval's introduction to Coppola and Lucas.
51:26 Sean Fennessey? Is this Robert Duvall's only science fiction film?
51:29 Speaker 04 I think so. No, The Sixth Day with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
51:34 Sean Fennessey? That's right. Of course. I also did not revisit that, but good shout on that one. I mean, technically he, he's in, in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but
51:42 Speaker 04 That's right.
51:42 Sean Fennessey? You know.
51:43 Speaker 04 But this is real sci-fi. I mean, this is kind of hardcore sci-fi.
51:46 Sean Fennessey? Yes. I mean, a very interesting movie, a very important movie, I think, in To the New Hollywood in a lot of ways. A bit dull now when I, when I look back at it, I didn't re-watch it in full for this.
51:56 Speaker 04 I did. You did. I did re-watch it for this. Yeah.
51:59 Sean Fennessey? Very different performance from him, as I recall too, you know, because he also is a very internal, very quiet, very measured.
52:04 Speaker 04 First lead.
52:04 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
52:05 Speaker 04 The first leading role he's played on film. And yeah, it's I mean, I just admire its experimental nature. It's an experimental movie, right? He had made it originally. Lucas had made it as a, as his thesis project when he was at USC. And so then somebody gave him some money to turn it into a, into a feature. But there are, I mean, obviously borrowing liberally from 2001, some of the elliptical things that are, that are happening in this film. And I had only ever seen it in like bad tube, you know, late night TV or VHS.
52:45 Speaker 04 So to see it now on the blue, on the big screen is like, oh, that's, it's really something. Well, it's Lucas's best film.
52:54 Sean Fennessey? You think it's Lucas's best film? Take. So not American Graffiti, not in the conversation either. Despite, we know your, we know your stance on Star Wars and you can, you can leave that.
53:06 Speaker 04 I love Star Wars. Leave me alone.
53:08 Sean Fennessey? Okay. Have you gotten feedback on that?
53:10 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:11 Sean Fennessey? What's it been like?
53:12 Speaker 04 Uh, I gotta say, you know, split.
53:16 Sean Fennessey? Oh, really?
53:17 Speaker 04 Oh, there's a real split.
53:18 Sean Fennessey? You've got, you've got Trench Run haters who've joined your side.
53:22 Speaker 04 I've got a lot of support for my take on the Trench Run. A lot of support.
53:27 Sean Fennessey? Well, so are these prominent figures in the industry who are calling you up and saying, Tracy, sir, thank you for your fearlessness, your courage in the face of big Trench Run?
53:36 Speaker 04 Let's say yes. Let's say yes, they are. Uh, THX, uh, screenplay by George Lucas and Walter Murch.
53:45 Sean Fennessey? Indeed.
53:46 Speaker 04 Who was a sound man and the soundscape in THX is wild.
53:53 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
53:53 Speaker 04 You can just.
53:54 Sean Fennessey? I need to rewatch this.
53:55 Speaker 04 You should just listen to it. The soundscape is really something.
53:59 Sean Fennessey? Hmm. I'm waiting on the 4K for this, to be honest with you. Where is that?
54:03 Speaker 04 Uh, I don't know where the 4K is. I actually had to replace my, my disk was corrupted. I had to get a new disk. Something was wrong with it.
54:11 Sean Fennessey? That's THXian.
54:12 Speaker 04 Uh, there you go. Uh, extras in THX played by, uh,
54:18 Speaker 04 Members of the cult Synanon. Synanon was a very violent cult. Eventually got into a lot of trouble in San Francisco. A lot of people went to prison and they put a derattled rattlesnake in the mailbox of the district attorney and he actually got bit by the rattlesnake. I mean, Synanon has an ugly history, but there are the extras in THX.
54:43 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, there was a documentary about Synanon, but a couple of years ago on HBX called The Synanon Fix. Upsetting stuff. Good to know George Lucas got them paid. Is this yellow?
54:54 Speaker 04 Sure.
54:55 Sean Fennessey? Okay. 1972, The Godfather. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's one of the most critical American works of art of the last 200 years. And he plays Tom Hagen, who was my emotional entry point as a slightly taciturn, emotionally inert Irish man. I'm German Irish, one of my favorite line readings in movie history. I love, I love Tom Hagen. I think Tom Hagen is such a necessary part of this story.
55:27 Speaker 04 Essential.
55:28 Sean Fennessey? And, you know, I think that for an actor who could be so explosive, the choice to play Tom in this way throughout both of these movies is very shrewd because he's up against so many powerhouses and not just, you know, Vito and Sonny, but Clemenza and Tessio and, you know, obviously Michael, these like explosive performers, huge charisma machines. And for him to just withdraw in the way that he does is so great. And he's the, really the metronome of the movie.
56:02 Speaker 04 But he's used so brilliantly by Coppola throughout the two films, the,
56:10 Speaker 04 The times that he steps forward, the times that suddenly the scene is about him. I mean, I was thinking of this, I rewatched both Godfathers for this draft. I rewatched them with Carrie and I was thinking about the horse's head. And I, I actually paused the movie and I turned to Carrie and I said, who, whose idea was that? I mean, was it Tom's idea? Does Tom go to the Don and say, he's not gonna budge? And the Don says, cut off the horse's head and put it in his bed? I don't think so. I think it's Tom.
56:45 Sean Fennessey? I've never described that level of malevolence to Tom.
56:49 Speaker 04 Who's making that call?
56:51 Sean Fennessey? This is the kind of thing-
56:51 Speaker 04 That's a big move.
56:53 Sean Fennessey? To me, my, my reading of that scene is always, that scene that we never see is that Vito says, what does he care about? What matters to him? And Tom knows, he can tell him, well, we had this encounter in the stables and I saw the affection that he showed to Khartoum.
57:11 Speaker 04 I think there's another way to read it, which is that Vito sends him out and says, take care of it.
57:15 Sean Fennessey? Could be.
57:16 Speaker 04 And Tom-
57:17 Sean Fennessey? Could be. And John Marley says, "Oh, oh!" The best.
57:24 Speaker 04 When Sonny dies, the choice, this is a screenwriter's choice, that Tom is the one to tell the Don.
57:31 Sean Fennessey? Right.
57:31 Speaker 04 Brilliant. The choice that the Don comforts Tom and not the other way around. Now, I don't know if that's screenwriting, or if that's directing, or if that's the actor, but it's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant.
57:51 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, there's something, there's an unspoken vulnerability in Tom as a character who's brought into that world, who is adopted into it, and who is made to feel like he belongs to something and yet is still on the outside in some way. It's a very, very psychologically complicated character who never really gets to talk about that. And if this, if that character were in a movie today- You'd get the origin story, you'd get, well, we knew his mother and she was a drug addict, or, you know, he was a good friend of his and we brought him in because he was good at book learning, or, there would have been more.
58:26 Speaker 04 Right.
58:26 Sean Fennessey? There's not a lot there in the movie. I think there's more in the book. I've not read the book.
58:30 Speaker 04 It's not good.
58:31 Sean Fennessey? One of the reasons I haven't read it is I hear that over and over again. But I'm happy to not know about it. I think, obviously, Tom Hagen is going into the Hall of Fame in some form or fashion. The question is, once, twice? I don't know.
58:44 Speaker 04 Uh, he's absolutely going. Do you want to have a whole Godfather discussion now?
58:49 Sean Fennessey? There's a lot of work between two, so why don't we just talk two now?
58:53 Speaker 04 Okay. I'm a little out on two.
58:57 Sean Fennessey? Oh, I just said this on a show. I just said this on a recent Star Wars episode. I was like, two has flaws.
59:03 Speaker 04 I'm a little out on two. For one thing, so I watched both of these with Carrie. Can I tell you the story?
59:10 Sean Fennessey? This is a good place to do it, yeah.
59:12 Speaker 04 I first saw The Godfather, the first time I saw it was when it was on TV as, what was it called? The Godfather Saga, the entire novel on screen or something. Francis Ford Coppola put the two movies together. He put them in chronological order. So we start with De Niro in the Old Country, then we move to the Godfather film, then we move to the Michael section.
59:35 Sean Fennessey? The first time you saw it. You saw it in that way. Oh, interesting.
59:37 Speaker 04 It was 1977, so I would have been 12 years old.
59:41 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
59:41 Speaker 04 He also added an hour's worth of footage. I mean, from the time The Godfather first appeared, they were like, how the hell are we going to put this on TV? It was the biggest movie in history, and it was rated R. How the hell are we going to get it on TV without just hacking it up? Coppola wasn't going to let them go in and just hack it up. So he puts this together and played like a mini-series over three nights. That's the first time I saw it. And I remember even then, I really enjoyed the Italian section with De Niro and Bruno Kirby and Gaston, what's the name of the guy who plays Finucci? He was a great actor. He was also in The Conformist, great Italian actor.
1:00:24 Speaker 04 I really love that section of the movie. I found that very compelling. And then The Godfather starts. Then we go to the wedding.
1:00:31 Sean Fennessey? Mm hmm.
1:00:32 Speaker 04 And I Believe in America, and we watch The Godfather. And when I Believe in America starts, even then, you had a sense of, oh, now this is really special. It was good before, but now this is especially good. This is really special. And you get The Godfather. And then you go to Michael's story in The Godfather Part Two.
1:00:53 Speaker 04 And then when I watched with Carrie, first of all, Carrie and I had watched earlier, during the pandemic, we watched The Godfather movies. So I put on The Godfather here recently, and she was like, we're watching The Godfather? And I said, well, I'm doing the Duval draft. I want to revisit it. We watched The Godfather, and we got about, maybe about where Johnny Fontaine arrives at the wedding. And Carrie said, I've never seen The Godfather before. And I said, you watched it with me during the pandemic? And she said, I remember absolutely nothing. I don't remember any of the characters. I don't remember the milieu. I don't remember the times. I don't remember nothing.
1:01:26 Sean Fennessey? Oh, man.
1:01:27 Speaker 04 So, you know, I need to get Carrie in to get some testing.
1:01:30 Sean Fennessey? Well, but the pandemic did do that to us.
1:01:33 Speaker 04 That's right.
1:01:33 Sean Fennessey? There are things that happened in that time that I don't remember either.
1:01:35 Speaker 04 So we watched The Godfather, and the next night, we watched The Godfather Part Two. And we were both a little lukewarm on Godfather Part Two.
1:01:44 Sean Fennessey? Can I, well, let me just say something. I think it's actually not helpful to watch them in close succession. I think it's nice to watch them as their own separate artifacts and think about what it was like to see it in seventy-two and then to wait two years to see Part Two and to be brought back into that feeling. Because I think narratively, it just, it does not feel as strong as Part One does. It does not feel as essential to understanding that world.
1:02:09 Speaker 04 Right.
1:02:10 Sean Fennessey? It feels like a lot of the magnitude of Michael's crisis is a somewhat iterative to his crisis in one. It's just an elevation of that crisis. And I just, I have never really had the strongest affinity for the De Niro sections of Part Two. I acknowledge its total mastery from a filmmaking perspective and a performance perspective. I think it's a great film. I'm not saying that Godfather Two is bad. But I definitely, if I had to choose, I would choose one over two any day of the week.
1:02:37 Speaker 04 And I, I'm, I like the De Niro section more than the Michael section in Part Two. Because I just don't find, following Michael's Joyless, churning through his job.
1:02:50 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:02:51 Speaker 04 Any fun?
1:02:51 Sean Fennessey? Well, it's a true descent into evil, though. That's, I mean, it is.
1:02:54 Speaker 04 I don't know how much of a descent it is. He seems kind of there when the movie starts.
1:02:58 Sean Fennessey? That's fair. That's, well, I mean, what he does to Fredo is the.
1:03:01 Speaker 04 Fredo is.
1:03:02 Sean Fennessey? Totalizing.
1:03:03 Speaker 04 And here's, here's something that'll piss off everybody I know. I don't think Lee Strasberg's that good.
1:03:09 Sean Fennessey? Oh, really?
1:03:10 Speaker 04 I, I, I, I don't think he's that.
1:03:12 Sean Fennessey? Oh, that I can't agree with. I, I really like him in the film.
1:03:14 Speaker 04 Here's another thing. I gotta say, I'm watching with my wife. I can't help but watch a little bit through her eyes.
1:03:19 Sean Fennessey? Uh huh.
1:03:20 Speaker 04 Man, there's not much for the ladies in these movies.
1:03:22 Sean Fennessey? Well, that's a fact.
1:03:23 Speaker 04 That, you know, the truth is, do you know how many scenes involve a guy telling the ladies, please leave the room? Or you shut up? Or don't interrupt? Or?
1:03:34 Sean Fennessey? It's not wrong, but I would argue that that's a key theme of the movie.
1:03:38 Speaker 04 I, I, I don't deny it. I recognize that it's part of the film. But still, when Michael shuts the door in Kay's face, I felt like he was shutting the door in Carrie's face. It was just like, I'm sorry, you just don't get to be a part of this.
1:03:54 Sean Fennessey? You're not wrong. So you're saying we should delete the Godfather films? No one should see them? They're terrible?
1:03:59 Speaker 04 I love, first of all, I'm not submitting to your tyranny of these questions. I know all about this. Second of all, I love the Godfather movies. I recognize how great Godfather Part Two is. I do recognize it's an absolute great movie. And there's a mastery of the film language there that's just undeniable.
1:04:16 Sean Fennessey? Yep.
1:04:16 Speaker 04 John Cozal, for me, is MVP in that, in Part Two. And if you want to green Duval for God, The Godfathers, can we do that? We just, we'll give him a green for Tom Hagen?
1:04:34 Sean Fennessey? What does Tom say? I was always loyal to you, Michael. You know, when he.
1:04:37 Speaker 04 It's the best thing he has in two. For the most part, he's just sitting there telling Kay to, you know, chill out.
1:04:42 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. That, but that moment is so very powerful.
1:04:44 Speaker 04 It's great.
1:04:46 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, I would, I would choose one over two. If I had to choose, both because I love the movie more. And I think he has a little bit more to do. He has a little bit more complexity. You've mentioned he gets that scene where he gets to talk to the Don. So I'll, I'll say we'll do two.
1:05:00 Sean Fennessey? As the green, but if you want to count it as the saga, and then, you know, we can also talk about the fact that he's not in three.
1:05:05 Speaker 04 See, that's the thing. I think we should also put three in his Hall of Fame. Because
1:05:10 Sean Fennessey? His absence.
1:05:11 Speaker 04 His absence.
1:05:13 Sean Fennessey? I agree.
1:05:13 Speaker 04 I mean, it's pure director hubris. I've seen it in storefront theater in Chicago. When a director suddenly gets to a point, they go, it doesn't matter. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make, this is gonna be great. It doesn't matter who it is. It's like, actually, it does matter. And you've killed off James Ca- you, right, you've killed off so many of the energetic, uh, characters from the first two movies. Pay the money. Pay him the goddamn money and get Duval on set.
1:05:40 Sean Fennessey? So famously, Duval felt that he was not getting the quote he should have gotten to appear in Godfather 3, especially relative to his, uh, co-star Al Pacino. So he didn't take the part and he, the part was rewritten and recast with George Hamilton. And that is also one of the reasons why. They're just two very different kinds of actors, two different kinds of-
1:05:58 Speaker 04 That's another part of my problem with two, by the way. The, the, uh, Richard Castellano not coming back. Uh, Clemenza is so- no, Caso's great.
1:06:08 Sean Fennessey? I love, I love Pentangeli, though. That's one of my favorite characters.
1:06:11 Speaker 04 But it's so clearly, when you see the writing of, uh, the, the De Niro section with Clemenza, it's, he's so clearly meant to be-
1:06:18 Sean Fennessey? I know, I know.
1:06:19 Speaker 04 An echo of that in the later scenes. It's real, I mean, I, I understand, maybe that wasn't, uh, Coppola's hubris. Maybe that was Richard Castellano's hubris.
1:06:28 Sean Fennessey? Based on what we know about him, it does seem like he asked for the moon and the stars. I, I, I, I think that that's one of those rare blessing in disguise. I, I'm, I, I really think what, uh, what Frankie Five Angels does is, is really special in that movie. Anyhow, um, we'll put, we'll put the, put the Godfather in as an experience, but it counts as one.
1:06:46 Speaker 04 Great.
1:07:21 Sean Fennessey? The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, which is the feature film debut of Philip Kaufman.
1:07:27 Speaker 04 San Francisco filmmaker. Again, we're in with the San Francisco guys.
1:07:31 Sean Fennessey? Yes, and this is an old west heist movie starring Duval as Jesse James. Now, I haven't seen this in a minute.
1:07:41 Speaker 04 I watched it.
1:07:42 Sean Fennessey? Was it the first time, your first time seeing it?
1:07:44 Speaker 04 It was.
1:07:45 Sean Fennessey? What'd you think?
1:07:46 Speaker 04 Uh, one of those hippie westerns, you know? Just like, we don't need to cut these guys' hair. That's how they would have worn it in the old west.
1:07:54 Sean Fennessey? He gets a lot of work in the revisionist westerns in the seventies.
1:07:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:07:58 Sean Fennessey? Um, it's all right.
1:07:59 Speaker 04 It's all right.
1:08:00 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:08:01 Speaker 04 His take on Jesse James is, uh, well, he plays him like pretty ignorant, right? Pretty ignorant type, uh, which is, you know, probably.
1:08:12 Sean Fennessey? I feel like that's the accurate.
1:08:14 Speaker 04 I think that's probably true.
1:08:15 Sean Fennessey? Historical reading of the character, even though he sometimes his portrait is much slicker and more, um, debonair in a way. Yeah, I think the movie is kind of interesting. It's fascinating that he, that this run of movies that he makes in 1973. I don't know how much time we can spend on all of them, but I will say Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid is red. 1973 Tomorrow, complete discovery for me. Had never heard of this movie.
1:08:37 Speaker 04 Ah.
1:08:38 Sean Fennessey? Uh, this is, uh, Horton Foote wrote it and.
1:08:42 Speaker 04 Based on a William Faulkner story.
1:08:44 Sean Fennessey? I had not, which I had not read and Duval plays a, a, a, a poor migrant farmer, who comes to meet a pregnant woman and they form a bond. And this is like a very complex, quiet, independent film that clearly only exists because Horton Foote and Robert Duvall wanted it to seemingly.
1:09:08 Speaker 04 I think they had worked on a stage version of it in New York. I know that Horton Foote had it. I don't know that Duval was part of it. He might've been.
1:09:16 Sean Fennessey? I watched this on Tubi. Tubi was a two, might've been Canopy.
1:09:20 Speaker 04 Canopy.
1:09:21 Sean Fennessey? Canopy. Um, and I, I was, it felt like him channeling Boo Radley in some ways, even though he is, you know, extremely uneducated in this movie, the character that he plays. But I thought a very special performance in a very special kind of movie, an unusual movie in terms of its pacing and what the story is. And very theatrical, like not terribly cinematic, um, given its scope, but I liked it.
1:09:48 Speaker 04 I think it's a great movie. I think it's a great performance. We talk sometimes that sometimes he takes a big swing and this is a big swing in terms of the accent work that he's doing. Clearly it's a Billy Bob Thornton likes to tell the story of the character of Sling Blade came to him while he was shaving in the mirror. Well, he was shaving in the mirror after watching the movie Tomorrow because it's very clear that his character in Sling Blade takes something from Jackson Fentry, the character that Duval plays here. You know, this was Duval's favorite of all his movies. This was his favorite. I think it's superb and I think more people should know it.
1:10:28 Sean Fennessey? Now, do you think this is, I'd like to put a discovery in, you know?
1:10:33 Speaker 04 I think it's green.
1:10:35 Sean Fennessey? I'm gonna say yellow for the time being.
1:10:36 Speaker 04 Fair enough.
1:10:37 Sean Fennessey? I don't know how many truly legendary parts he has.
1:10:41 Speaker 04 Actually, and in my, I don't know why our timelines are a little different. What I had was Godfather 72 followed by Tomorrow 72. And if his first act after the hit of The Godfather, and by the way, they knew the, you know, that they knew they had something with The Godfather, right? While they were making it. He talked about that as well. For him to follow up The Godfather by going down south and playing this character in this black and white independent thing. By the way, Peter Masterson, Horton Foote's first cousin is in the movie. He plays the lawyer in the framing, framing device of the court case. Yeah. He's the, he's the attorney.
1:11:25 Sean Fennessey? So this movie, it says was released April 9, 1972, but it only played 32 dates. It was not open very long and did not play in very many movie theaters. So it's a little bit hard to know, but it was, it is, it says 72.
1:11:39 Speaker 04 It was pretty obscure. I had seen it before. I think maybe facets had a pretty hard to watch VHS that I, which is where I had seen it before, or maybe I'd just seen it on regular TV, but I revisited on Can- Canopy. It's a good quality transfer on Canopy.
1:11:55 Sean Fennessey? It looked good.
1:11:55 Speaker 04 If you guys haven't seen this, you should check it out. It's really good.
1:11:59 Sean Fennessey? 1973 Joe Kidd. This is.
1:12:04 Sean Fennessey? Clint Eastwood's first Western after Dirty Harry and also a kind of sort of revisionist Western directed by John Sturgis. Duval plays-
1:12:14 Speaker 04 Written by Elmore Leonard.
1:12:15 Sean Fennessey? That's right, based on his novel, right?
1:12:16 Speaker 04 I don't know that it is. It may be-
1:12:18 Sean Fennessey? Is it just an original screenplay?
1:12:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:12:22 Sean Fennessey? Harland, Frank Harland, the character that Duval plays is a wealthy landowner who wants to get a native man off of his land and assassinated effectively-
1:12:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:12:33 Sean Fennessey? So that he can pause the reclamation movement that he's trying to organize. Clint Eastwood plays a bounty hunter who's hired by Harland and that sounds like a complex and interesting material, but I find the movie just turns into a little bit of a shoot them up and doesn't really have any-
1:12:50 Speaker 04 Everything about it is a little surprising that it's not better than it is.
1:12:53 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:12:54 Speaker 04 That you've got Eastwood as the hero and Duval as the bad guy and written by Elmore Leonard and directed by John Sturgis, who'd certainly made a lot of great movies.
1:13:02 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:13:02 Speaker 04 Now, maybe he's at the end of his run here. I know that Sturgis and Eastwood fought terribly and-
1:13:07 Sean Fennessey? Is that true?
1:13:08 Speaker 04 Sturgis was perhaps drunk on set a lot. Yeah, I watched some of the extras.
1:13:11 Sean Fennessey? It's only a few years after Magnificent Seven, though.
1:13:14 Speaker 04 I know.
1:13:14 Sean Fennessey? It's not that long.
1:13:15 Speaker 04 I know.
1:13:15 Sean Fennessey? And, you know, I don't know, it's funny that it just felt real flabby to me.
1:13:20 Speaker 04 Don Stroud, who's in the movie, I saw an interview with him talking about the film and he said, he said Clint should have directed the film. We would have all been better off if Clint had directed the film. But it certainly doesn't take off in any way.
1:13:34 Sean Fennessey? Interesting. And this is in the aftermath of Play Misty for me. He had started making film and he makes Breezy one year later. Um, so he's gotten-
1:13:39 Speaker 04 Well, and he was gonna fire Philip Kaufman off of Outlaw Josie Wales a couple of years after this.
1:13:44 Sean Fennessey? That's right.
1:13:44 Speaker 04 So clearly Eastwood had gotten to the point where he was particular about the way these things were being put together.
1:13:50 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, so Joe Kid is not going in. Let's, let's talk about The Outfit. A film that came up in a recent discussion we had on Physical Media episode because it's being reissued just on Blu-ray, right? Not on 4K?
1:14:03 Speaker 04 I think it's 4K.
1:14:04 Sean Fennessey? Is it 4K?
1:14:05 Speaker 04 I hope.
1:14:06 Sean Fennessey? From the director, John Flynn, written by Flynn, but with a polish by Walter Hill, who'll come up, will come up again here and is based on a Richard Stark novel. It's a Parker movie and is it the best Parker movie?
1:14:18 Speaker 04 No, it's maybe not the best.
1:14:21 Sean Fennessey? Using Point Blank?
1:14:22 Speaker 04 I'm gonna say Point Blank is, well, look, they're-
1:14:25 Sean Fennessey? It's not Parker, it's Earl Macklin, but it is Parker.
1:14:28 Speaker 04 Two sides of the same coin, right? Point Blank's after something very different in terms of its architecture and, right, the way it's shot, the kind of prismatic nature of the way that movie is put together. It's very different than The Outfit, which is just kind of down and dirty, almost like a drive-in movie.
1:14:46 Sean Fennessey? Yes, it's a, it's a, it's a fussy exploitation movie. And, but it's really good.
1:14:52 Speaker 04 I was, I was knocked out. I was knocked out by The Outfit. I was really, really thrilled with The Outfit.
1:14:58 Sean Fennessey? Very engaging. I think he's extremely well cast in this part, Duval. And, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a movie star part. It's a tough guy part and he's, he's very convincing. He's basically on a, kind of like a revenge tour to get back the money that he feels he's owed in the aftermath of, is it a heist?
1:15:12 Speaker 04 Isn't that what Parker's always doing?
1:15:14 Sean Fennessey? That is what he's always doing. Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Timothy Carey, really great cast in the movie. I, this is an interesting one where like, I'll recommend this to anybody who likes this podcast and just be like, this is a really good 70s crime movie.
1:15:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:15:25 Sean Fennessey? Is it a Hall of Fame movie? I don't really know. I don't, in terms of the, the act that we're doing here.
1:15:30 Speaker 04 I watched it with the nanny. I mentioned the nanny to you. She was just totally transported.
1:15:37 Sean Fennessey? Oh, good.
1:15:37 Speaker 04 She was thrilled by the movie. You're like, that's fantastic.
1:15:39 Sean Fennessey? Was this before or after in the realm of the senses?
1:15:41 Speaker 04 It was before, so maybe, maybe that has curdled.
1:15:45 Sean Fennessey? Primed her for, yeah, what was coming next. Uh, I'll, I'll yellow it just because I got affection for this movie. You, you thinking green?
1:15:52 Speaker 04 I'm thinking green, but let's-
1:15:53 Sean Fennessey? You went into this act thinking we're gonna make The Outfit green?
1:15:56 Speaker 04 I didn't, no, no, no, no, no. I, I didn't, I tried, you know, I tried to stay supple.
1:16:00 Sean Fennessey? Okay, you sure do. Once again, 1973 Badge 373. This is another crime movie from the perspective of a retired cop who is very clearly based on Eddie Egan, the same character who, uh, Gene Hackman more or less portrays as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. And this is a nasty bit of business, this movie.
1:16:23 Speaker 04 And Eddie Egan's in both movies, too.
1:16:25 Sean Fennessey? He is indeed. Legendary slash infamous New York City cop who had unkind words for everybody. I really wanted to like this more. I think it has all the pieces for things that I'm interested in. And I think Duval's good. I think, I think it's a good performance, but the movie is felt a bit uneven to me.
1:16:46 Speaker 04 Not to mention the racism. I mean, it had accusations of racism at the time. And then you watch it, you're like, oh, no, it's really racist.
1:16:55 Sean Fennessey? It sure is. You know, if in terms of like authenticity, it seems like it's getting pretty close to what Eddie Egan represented in the world.
1:17:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, perhaps.
1:17:03 Sean Fennessey? And maybe the way that he moved through it and the way that he saw it. I'm not sure that that does it any favors in the revisit.
1:17:09 Speaker 04 But it's also just not as, I mean, there's the set piece with Duval in the bus, trying to escape the, the, the gang members who are coming after him. And that's a pretty good action set piece in a movie like this, especially for its period. But the movie itself, I don't know, I, the, give me the, the fact that it's also made so close to the outfit. I'm just like, give me the outfit 10 times out of 10.
1:17:33 Sean Fennessey? Well, that's how I feel. This is read, by the way. This is how I feel about Lady Ice as well, which is another very odd film.
1:17:39 Speaker 04 This starts his collaboration with Tom Greys. He worked with Tom Greys several times. I would argue they both did better work elsewhere. It says something about Lady Ice that I watched this not for this draft, but I watched it for the first time, maybe two years ago. I'd picked up the Blu-ray from Kino. I mean, here's Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall. And I was like, oh, a couple of my favorite actors in this movie. It says something that two years later, I can't tell you anything about Lady Ice. I don't even really remember Duval in it, or barely remember him in it.
1:18:12 Sean Fennessey? Very strange movie about like an insurance investigator slash detective figure who gets roped in some sort of jewel scam. And there's a femme fatale who finds her way into the story. I was watching the movie trying to make sense of what the plot was. And you know, sometimes that happens. A movie just doesn't really connect in any way. Very dull for the, I mean, this period of time, this, these films, this is my favorite thing. In the known universe, crime movies in the 1970s, that's it.
1:18:46 Sean Fennessey? This movie stinks.
1:18:47 Speaker 04 Tom Griese, the father, by the way, of John Griese.
1:18:51 Sean Fennessey? Great actor, yes.
1:18:52 Speaker 04 Who we know from The White Lotus and other things as well. So he starts a collaboration with Duval that extends over a few movies. So clearly they were buddies. And like I say, I just think they both did better work elsewhere.
1:19:06 Sean Fennessey? In 1974, he has a very small part, but a critical part in The Conversation, where he plays, quote, "the director," a person who receives some critical information near the end of the film.
1:19:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:19:19 Sean Fennessey? Quite chilling.
1:19:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:19:22 Sean Fennessey? You know, a perfect movie? I'm not sure it's like necessary to the canon of Duval.
1:19:28 Speaker 04 Oh, no, it's a purely, purely a cameo.
1:19:31 Sean Fennessey? A favor, yeah, yeah. So we can, we can read The Conversation. The Godfather Part Two has a, has a green of sorts.
1:19:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:19:40 Sean Fennessey? An honorary green. 1975 Killer Elite. I haven't seen The Killer Elite in a minute. This is a Sam Peckinpah movie in which he is reunited with James Caan. And as I recall, this is an extremely violent, cynical, mean movie.
1:19:52 Speaker 04 Written by Mark Norman and Sterling Silifant. Sterling Silifant, who wrote In the Heat of the Night, as well as creating a couple of great TV series. It's terrible. It's really not a good film at all. And I think, we, I think we've talked about this before, that I think it's really the demarcation point for Peckinpah. It's like he kind of falls off a...
1:20:13 Sean Fennessey? Well, he was really struggling at this time in his life. A lot of, a lot of drink and drugs at this time.
1:20:17 Speaker 04 It's not a, not a strong movie.
1:20:19 Sean Fennessey? No. It was remade in the 2010s in a similarly mean spirited vehicle, which I think featured Jason Statham? Does that sound right?
1:20:30 Speaker 04 Clive Owen, Robert De Niro?
1:20:32 Sean Fennessey? Is Robert De Niro in the Killer Elite remake?
1:20:34 Speaker 04 I believe he is.
1:20:35 Sean Fennessey? Okay. That's red. 1975 Breakout.
1:20:39 Speaker 04 This is the first time I ever saw Robert Duvall.
1:20:42 Sean Fennessey? Really?
1:20:42 Speaker 04 In a movie theater.
1:20:44 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
1:20:44 Speaker 04 I was 10 years old.
1:20:46 Sean Fennessey? Interesting, interesting way to be introduced.
1:20:47 Speaker 04 I went to see Breakout. I went to see the Charles Bronson movie. I didn't know who Robert Duvall was, again, in the sort of that guy way, probably only did I know who he was a couple of years later, when The Godfather saga played on television and I watched it. So this would have been the first time I saw it, saw him.
1:21:07 Speaker 04 Kind of a notable movie in that it's the first film ever to use the saturation strategy of release that would be used later the same year for Jaws.
1:21:18 Sean Fennessey? Hmm, I did not know that.
1:21:19 Speaker 04 There was a big marketing campaign, we're gonna put it in 1500, we're just gonna clobber them on the first weekend and then we'll let him sort out the bodies after that. And apparently, Breakout was the first movie to ever do that.
1:21:32 Sean Fennessey? It seemed to do okay, it made 16 million dollars in 1975.
1:21:36 Speaker 04 Bronson was still a big star.
1:21:37 Sean Fennessey? He was a big star, he's, um, of course, opposite his wife, Jill Ireland, and...
1:21:42 Speaker 04 He always was.
1:21:43 Sean Fennessey? Yes, and Duval, I believe that was in every contract that he signed from henceforth.
1:21:47 Speaker 04 Directed by Tom Greys.
1:21:48 Sean Fennessey? That's right, in Reunion with Greys, and Duval plays a wrongfully imprisoned man in Mexico, um, and a CIA operation that attempts to extract him from this, and, um, kind of a weird movie, I, tonally, like Bronson is cracking a lot of jokes.
1:22:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's some weird, like, comic aside, it's just strange to try to put him in a little more comic.
1:22:08 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, that's not really his speed.
1:22:10 Speaker 04 But I have to say, as a 10-year-old, there's a moment where Duval is, believes that he's being smuggled out of the prison in a coffin, only to then be put in a hole and have some dirt thrown on him, and as a 10-year-old, it scared the hell out of me.
1:22:24 Sean Fennessey? I, I've often wondered if Tarantino was citing this in the Kill Bill sequence where the bride is buried.
1:22:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:22:29 Sean Fennessey? Um, Breakout is red.
1:22:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:22:31 Sean Fennessey? 1976, The Eagle has landed, Robert Duvall plays Colonel Rattle, who is a leader, uh, for the Third Reich, and he plays-
1:22:38 Speaker 04 Big swing, here we go, another big swing.
1:22:40 Sean Fennessey? A Nazi doing a German accent.
1:22:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, German accent, eye patch.
1:22:44 Sean Fennessey? Eye patch, that's right. I don't believe any other actors are attempting a German accent in the film.
1:22:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is a bit strange.
1:22:51 Sean Fennessey? Every other actor in the film is British, using their natural accent.
1:22:53 Speaker 04 I get, Brits are allowed to be Brits, I guess, but we have to do a German accent.
1:22:57 Sean Fennessey? I get a huge kick out of that. Uh, this one's a little disappointing, I hadn't seen this before, and I fired it up, I think maybe the night that he passed, um, and wanted a little more from it, appreciated what, what he was doing. I felt like this is a real going for the gusto kind of villainous part, and he's kind of an orchestrator of some of the actions in the movie.
1:23:16 Speaker 04 It's interesting, too, in that it's directed by John Sturges, and so if what Don Stroud had said was accurate, why does Duval want to go back and work with John Sturges again? Uh, screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz, who was part of the Mankiewicz family, based on the book by Jack Higgins, uh, it's a, it's a-
1:23:35 Speaker 04 Fun watch in a sense.
1:23:37 Sean Fennessey? And World War Two programmer.
1:23:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:23:40 Sean Fennessey? Great cast.
1:23:41 Speaker 04 Great cast and yeah, Duval's up for it. He, you know, the German accent is, he's not embarrassing himself with the accent. It's, he's, he's viable in the film.
1:23:52 Sean Fennessey? How do you feel about Donald Sutherland's Irish accent?
1:23:55 Speaker 04 Uh, less sure of myself, but God bless him.
1:23:59 Sean Fennessey? Nice to see Jenny Agutter here.
1:24:00 Speaker 04 Sure.
1:24:01 Sean Fennessey? Always nice to see her.
1:24:02 Speaker 04 Always nice.
1:24:03 Sean Fennessey? Uh, that's Red, the eagle has landed. The 7% Solution, a movie I've always wanted to see. Had been for years, one of those movies. I was like, one of these days I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop this in and I'm gonna love it. And I wish that I loved it and I didn't love it.
1:24:17 Speaker 04 No, it's not. It's not great. It was such a big hit. I mean, it was a real, I mean, the, the, the book was such a big bestseller. It was really an airport book.
1:24:27 Sean Fennessey? Was it his book?
1:24:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was Nicholas Meyer's book and it was a big, like the, one of the books you pick up in the airport and it was a really successful book and they rushed it in production like, we're gonna capitalize off of the success of this book. The casting of Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson is unexpected. Uh, it's Nicole Williamson's movie. I mean, as it should be, it should be Holmes's movie and Nicole Williamson is an interesting Holmes, I think.
1:24:55 Sean Fennessey? He is. I, I, I think Duval is fine in the film.
1:24:58 Speaker 04 I do too.
1:24:59 Sean Fennessey? Um, to me, it's really more of a pacing and, and story issue.
1:25:02 Speaker 04 It, it looks gorgeous. Ken Adam was a production designer and the production design is all the stained glass and stuff in this movie. It's really great.
1:25:09 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. Um, it, it's an odd one. You know, Alan Arkin plays Sigmund Freud in the film. Vanessa Redgrave is in the movie. Olivier is in the movie as Moriarty?
1:25:20 Speaker 04 Yeah. And then Olivier's in there as Moriarty and Holmes is obsessed with Moriarty thinking he's up to something bad and they're all like, no, it's the cocaine. And so you assume, no, Holmes is right. Something is up with Moriarty and it's gonna turn out that he's the big bad and he's just not.
1:25:35 Sean Fennessey? No, and he keeps protesting that he's not and he's not. Samantha Egger, my, my beloved, oh my God, I had such a crush on her. She plays, uh, um, Duval's wife, Mary. It, this should've been my favorite movie.
1:25:49 Speaker 04 It's, you know, sometimes it just doesn't fire up.
1:25:53 Sean Fennessey? Red for the 7% Solution. 1976, the same year, network.
1:25:58 Sean Fennessey? Duval plays Frank Hackett.
1:25:59 Speaker 04 Instant green, of course.
1:26:01 Sean Fennessey? Of course. Uh, just one of my single favorite performances in movie history. As the hatchet man for the network corporate division.
1:26:11 Speaker 04 Have you read Dave Itzkoff's book?
1:26:13 Sean Fennessey? Sure have.
1:26:14 Speaker 04 It's, uh, it's a really good read. Uh, it's funny how little Duval is in it. Which just goes to show you, I think, something about, I mean, he, he could be famously grouchy, especially in later years. And there were some directors he really didn't like working with. But sometimes I think he showed up, he knew the lines, he did the job, he got the hell out. Nothing notable about it. When you watch the special features and you hear Lumet's commentary, he has a kind of chuckling thing about Duval being in the movie, kind of like, can you believe this? Robert Duvall?
1:26:48 Sean Fennessey? He loves him though. He loves him. He's, or at least he loves that performance. Um, the book that you're referring to is called Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies. It's a wonderful book if you like Network. The, you know, Ruddy Doesn't Count Anymore scene, you know, the big sequence with William Holden and Fade Dunaway and Duval in Duval's office after we get the ratings for, um, Howard Beale. I just, I could watch it a hundred times in a row. Uh, his, his performance, his glee and rage and energy and bewilderment, everything that he is doing in that, it's big, you know? And it is showy and it is, it is performative of the Tchaikovsky dialogue. You kind of have to,
1:27:33 Sean Fennessey? if you're gonna be in one of these movies, one of this writer's movies, you need to chew on the scenes. And he fucking eats that scene up. I, I love it so much.
1:27:40 Speaker 04 It's fantastic. It's, uh, it's fantastic. It's just great. It's just right in the pocket. And-
1:27:49 Speaker 04 He's playing a corporate head, right? He's got a facility with language. He's got a facility with, he's, he's got money. It's again, it's just, you consider the character he plays in Tomorrow.
1:28:02 Sean Fennessey? Mm hmm.
1:28:03 Speaker 04 It's just.
1:28:04 Sean Fennessey? How is it the same guy?
1:28:05 Speaker 04 Opposites.
1:28:06 Sean Fennessey? Totally. He's, he does some of the best paper acting I've ever seen where he's handed a piece of paper and he starts hitting the piece of paper. All these little choices that he makes in that scene. I love so much. Network definitely agreed. 1977, the greatest. Been aware of this for a while. I only watched Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall's scenes in this movie.
1:28:23 Speaker 04 Well, then you didn't watch much. He's not in it.
1:28:25 Sean Fennessey? He's not in it very much. Um, this is Muhammad Ali making his very own biopic about his own life. And.
1:28:32 Speaker 04 So bizarre. It's such a bizarre artifact. It's really weird.
1:28:36 Sean Fennessey? Would you ever do this for yourself?
1:28:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, looking exactly like this because one of the weird things about it is that, I mean, Ali's playing himself as a 20 year old.
1:28:46 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:28:46 Speaker 04 And he's 35 and he's already a little punchy, right?
1:28:50 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:28:50 Speaker 04 And you could.
1:28:51 Sean Fennessey? In his line delivery.
1:28:53 Speaker 04 It's almost like right before the yell action, he says, I went something like this. It, it, it's not like he's really in it.
1:29:02 Sean Fennessey? So he's remembering a story that happened to him.
1:29:04 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:29:04 Sean Fennessey? It's a very odd movie. Um, is this Tom Cries as well?
1:29:08 Speaker 04 It is.
1:29:09 Sean Fennessey? So.
1:29:10 Speaker 04 Screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr., who wrote Mash.
1:29:13 Sean Fennessey? That's right. Uh, he, have Duvall plays Bill McDonald, who was a promoter and he promoted, it was the first listen fight.
1:29:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:29:20 Sean Fennessey? And there was some controversy around that because Ali in particular wanted to be able to speak publicly about his conversion to Islam and his faith and the nation of Islam. And Bill McDonald did not want that. And they needed a man, I think, an actor of some gravitas. And so they brought in Duvall for one scene where he fights back against Ali. And then in one scene later, he decides, ah, actually it'll be all right. Just do it, do it, do it this way. And that, there's something very untruthful to me about how all that part of the movie plays out. Um, that's red.
1:29:50 Speaker 04 Also notable because the song, The Greatest Love of All.
1:29:55 Speaker 04 Was written for this movie, sung a couple of times on the soundtrack by George Benson. And then it was only brought back by Whitney Houston for The Bodyguard and where, of course, became a massive hit.
1:30:09 Sean Fennessey? You big Whitney Houston guy?
1:30:10 Speaker 04 Sure. Who didn't like Whitney Houston?
1:30:12 Sean Fennessey? Agreed. 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a reunion with Philip Kaufman. He shows up for one scene.
1:30:17 Speaker 04 Should we? Where does Where Not the Jet Set come in?
1:30:21 Sean Fennessey? Well, good point. Let's talk about that. I haven't seen it.
1:30:25 Speaker 04 You can't see it.
1:30:25 Sean Fennessey? I assumed that. So Where Not the Jet Set is the first film that Duval directs. It's a documentary about rodeo men?
1:30:34 Speaker 04 So when he and James Caan were in Ogallala making The Rain People, they became friends with this family of rodeo folk. And he stayed friends with them and he went back over some years continuing to shoot them. He said, he claimed that he was shooting him in the style of a Ken Loach movie. So he was aware of Ken Loach.
1:30:56 Sean Fennessey? He has talked about Ken Loach over the years. I saw him cite him multiple times.
1:30:59 Speaker 04 Yeah. So that's, and it took him years to do. He was doing it with his wife at the time. They eventually put this movie together. And then he and his wife got divorced and she took the movie and it hasn't been seen since.
1:31:16 Sean Fennessey? Wow.
1:31:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:31:17 Sean Fennessey? Well, that's too bad. I would really like to see it.
1:31:18 Speaker 04 Apparently it's pretty good.
1:31:20 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, that's a shame. Hopefully they find a way to put that back out in the world. That's not going to go in though, because we haven't seen it. In 78, he does make Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He's in one scene. He has no lines of dialogue. He plays a priest swinging on a swing set. And it is one of the eeriest moments in this very eerie movie. And what a cool little thing to have happened in the movie is to have shown up to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Robert Duvall shows up for 30 seconds and then vanishes.
1:31:45 Speaker 04 They had decided, Philip Kaufman had decided that he was the first, that the character you're seeing is the first snatched body.
1:31:55 Sean Fennessey? Yes. Something so perfect too about an actor who's known for his intensity and his explosiveness, playing a priest who has been turned into a plant alien.
1:32:03 Speaker 04 Right.
1:32:04 Sean Fennessey? Uh, that's red though. 1978 The Betsy, I'd never seen it before. Bored to tears, Tracy.
1:32:09 Speaker 04 So terrible.
1:32:10 Sean Fennessey? Bored to tears.
1:32:11 Speaker 04 I was really kind of looking forward to it. I thought it was going to be like camp, like a, like a.
1:32:20 Speaker 04 Like a Russ Meyer, Valley of the Dolls. I think there was gonna, I thought there was gonna be kind of a camp.
1:32:27 Sean Fennessey? It does kind of have some of those qualities. You know, it's directed by Daniel Petrie, who made our beloved Life Cards a few years earlier.
1:32:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:32:33 Sean Fennessey? And yeah, it's based on Harold Robbins' novel.
1:32:39 Sean Fennessey? You know, there's some beautiful dames in this movie. There's some, there's some sexiness to it, and yet it's like really boring.
1:32:45 Speaker 04 Early Tommy Lee Jones.
1:32:46 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:32:47 Speaker 04 Laurence Olivier.
1:32:47 Sean Fennessey? A little miscast, I think, Tommy Lee Jones.
1:32:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. Laurence Olivier and Duval chopping it up.
1:32:53 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. Jane Alexander, Catherine Ross.
1:32:55 Speaker 04 So boring, so hard to watch.
1:32:57 Sean Fennessey? Anyway, it's red.
1:33:00 Speaker 03 Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms? Don't pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Trifia. Guselkamap. Trifia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible. Or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Trifia and visit trifiaradio.com.
1:33:44 Sean Fennessey? This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture.
1:34:27 Sean Fennessey? That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply.
1:34:33 Sean Fennessey? 1979 Apocalypse Now.
1:34:35 Speaker 04 Hold on, we gotta jump in with Ike, The War Years. He goes back to TV for the first time.
1:34:40 Sean Fennessey? Did you watch this?
1:34:40 Speaker 04 I did not watch it. You can't.
1:34:42 Sean Fennessey? It's not available. I couldn't find it either. I would like to see this.
1:34:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, directed by Boris Segal and Melville Shavelson, who also wrote the screenplay. And I guess it's about Eisenhower's relationship to the secretary. I'm talking out my ass. The character played by Lee Remick.
1:35:09 Speaker 04 But I don't know. I haven't seen it.
1:35:10 Sean Fennessey? A Remick reunion after The Detective.
1:35:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, right.
1:35:12 Sean Fennessey? God loved Lee Remick in The Detective. 1979 Apocalypse Now. He plays Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore.
1:35:22 Sean Fennessey? A similarly electrifying scene.
1:35:24 Speaker 04 It's fantastic. I've never understood what... Duval had a problem with it, right? The scene, he felt some stuff was cut out.
1:35:34 Sean Fennessey? Well, isn't that the story of Apocalypse Now? I mean, how much was cut out of that film?
1:35:38 Speaker 04 But he felt it was cut out for quote unquote, "political reasons." That he had tried to give a performance a more nuanced character. And that Coppola had cut it and just left in kind of the cartoon stuff.
1:35:51 Sean Fennessey? I don't read it that way at all.
1:35:54 Speaker 04 He admired the movie, but he was always a little angry about the cut.
1:35:58 Sean Fennessey? I think that character is fascinating. About a person who has deluded himself into imagining that he is part of some mystical conquering story. But that last line of dialogue that he has in the film, "Someday this war is gonna end." And then he just walks off screen?
1:36:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:36:15 Sean Fennessey? I think is such a brilliant choice. I just saw it last, Chris and I saw it last year on 70 at the Egyptian. And we were, I was 14 all over again, man. I was, I'm blown away by it. And I think what that character does, the kind of delusional rock and roll energy that he brings to it, with the surfing and the taking his jacket and shirt off, and he pulls the neckerchief off. Very, very...
1:36:42 Sean Fennessey? Grand and theatrical acting style too. And he doesn't usually do that. And the pauses that he takes between those lines of dialogue. I love it, man. To me, I think this goes in for one and a half scenes.
1:36:51 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
1:36:52 Sean Fennessey? So.
1:36:52 Speaker 04 Totally agree.
1:36:53 Sean Fennessey? Uh, green. Let's just do a quick green check here. How many greens we got? One, two, three, four, probably five. There's five now, probably six, actually, given some of the yellows that you seem fond of. We only have 50 more movies to go, so we gotta move a little quicker through this.
1:37:07 Speaker 04 All right.
1:37:08 Sean Fennessey? 1979, The Great Santini.
1:37:14 Speaker 04 Directed and written by Louis John Carlino, based on a book by the great Pat Conroy.
1:37:18 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
1:37:19 Speaker 04 I rewatched it for this. It's a great performance. Anybody who's ever had a father relates to this movie.
1:37:28 Sean Fennessey? Sure does.
1:37:30 Speaker 04 The performances by the other members of the family, Blythe Danner, Michael O'Keefe, Lisa Jane Persky are great. They're really important because the way they they play against him is really important. He's not just a monster. He's not just a tyrant. He's a loving dad and they all seem to recognize that. And he has to do less to scare them, right? The the way they portray that moment that they realize a line is being crossed with dad. They're great performances. I mean, it's always been true, though. The beef story kind of kills it as a movie a little bit.
1:38:04 Sean Fennessey? Utterly bizarre.
1:38:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:38:06 Sean Fennessey? Where Michael O'Keefe's character has a sort of, you know, a secondary experience of a friend played. What's the actor's name who he's?
1:38:13 Speaker 04 Stan Shaw.
1:38:14 Sean Fennessey? Stan Shaw. Who's a good actor, but that character is a little oddly written.
1:38:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:38:18 Sean Fennessey? And even the way that that part of the film is shot, where it has this sort of like halo quality to it and everything else is so raw and intense with um, with Duval's character. Two sequences, the the one on one game with Michael O'Keefe and the actual basketball game that O'Keefe plays in where his father instructs him to take out one of his competitors. As powerful today as the first time I saw it. Very real shit. If you had a domineering father, I had a very domineering father. I really understand this movie.
1:38:44 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:38:46 Sean Fennessey? I think it's, I think it should go in.
1:38:47 Speaker 04 Great.
1:38:47 Sean Fennessey? It's one of his legendary performances.
1:38:49 Speaker 04 Great.
1:38:50 Sean Fennessey? The Great Santini is in the lexicon as like a, this is what tough dads do. 1981 True Confessions, yet another film I would love to love. Never totally found a place in my heart. Is it Ulu Grosspart? Is he the director?
1:39:03 Speaker 04 It is.
1:39:03 Sean Fennessey? With Rob, is it Robert De Niro?
1:39:06 Speaker 04 John Gregory Dunn and Joan Didion.
1:39:08 Sean Fennessey? That's right.
1:39:08 Speaker 04 Based on Dunn's book.
1:39:09 Sean Fennessey? Yes. Well, is it, is it their first screenplay together?
1:39:12 Speaker 04 I don't know. Schrader was gonna take a pass at this at one point and direct and kicked out. I don't know why.
1:39:17 Sean Fennessey? Now, that, that version probably would have spoken to me a little bit more.
1:39:22 Speaker 04 I've always had a little, I've always had some affection for it. I think Duval's very good in the movie. I think Duval's kind of the, the best thing about the movie. I always think an anti-mystery is better the next time you watch it. You go in with a kind of expectation that, oh, this is gonna be James Elroy. This is gonna be the Black Dahlia. And then you find out, oh, it's not really even about that. That's kind of the backdrop against which the drama is playing out. I watched it again with Carrie. Yeah, it's a little dull. It's a little slow. It doesn't go in. But at the time, there was a real feature in like, I think De Niro and Duval were held up as like, these are our two best work in these days.
1:40:02 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, it's, I think it's a movie that I probably watched with a lot of anticipation and never revisited. I'll say it's a red.
1:40:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:40:08 Sean Fennessey? The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, loosely based on the true story of D.B. Cooper, the airplane hijacker who vanished into the thin air. Treat Williams plays D.B. Cooper. Robert Duvall plays, is he a police officer or an investigator? An insurance investigator?
1:40:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:40:22 Sean Fennessey? Seeking out D.B. Cooper.
1:40:25 Speaker 04 Catherine Harold.
1:40:26 Sean Fennessey? Whom I love.
1:40:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:40:27 Sean Fennessey? And is very good in this, actually. And she and Duval are quite good together in their scenes.
1:40:31 Speaker 04 Did you revisit this?
1:40:31 Sean Fennessey? I did.
1:40:32 Speaker 04 Yeah. So let me tell you quickly some tortured history about this movie. Robert Mulligan, the original director, who directed, of course,
1:40:40 Sean Fennessey? To Kill a Mockingbird.
1:40:41 Speaker 04 To Kill a Mockingbird.
1:40:42 Sean Fennessey? Not Richard Mulligan.
1:40:42 Speaker 04 It, it took him seven days to film a chase scene in the rapids and he got fired off the, off the set. John Frankenheimer was brought in. He shot one sequence and then he was replaced by Buzz Kulik, who finished the film. They brought in Roger Spottiswood to edit the film and to shoot one stunt. And he said, this movie is doomed unless I can shoot new scenes written by Ron Shelton. And apparently the movie we're seeing is 70% Spottiswood and Shelton and 30% whatever that mishmash was that goes before. So it's a real, it's, you can kind of feel the jumble as you're watching it.
1:41:25 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
1:41:26 Speaker 04 The stunts are spectacular. Whatever Mulligan was doing, that rapid scene is fantastic. It's really good.
1:41:34 Sean Fennessey? I agree. I, um, it's funny, we didn't mention this when we spoke with a gambler on yesterday's pod, but Spottiswood also edited that movie. He edited Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. You know, he went on to be, you know, a very successful film director, but, um, Ron Shelton has a very conspicuous associate producer credit in the opening of this film. And when I saw that, I was like, what's that? There are no other producers credited in that fashion. It came like right before the director credit. Um, and so that's not surprising to hear that there is some, some stuff going on there. Always liked Tree Williams, always wanted a little bit more for Tree Williams. I think he's a very talented actor.
1:42:08 Speaker 04 I agree entirely.
1:42:09 Sean Fennessey? Um, but this is red, unfortunately. 1983 Tender Mercies. This is the film for which Duval won his only Academy Award, Best Actor portraying the aging country singer Max Sledge, who's on kind of the downside of his life. One of the quietest and most sensitive, uh, films and performances that, uh, Duval ever gave. And I think is a, is, is one of two or three movies you probably show when you say, who was this person as an actor? Would you agree with that?
1:42:40 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Totally green. Absolutely. And great movie. In fact, you guys did that episode recently where you played your Oscar swapo game.
1:42:48 Sean Fennessey? Oh, yeah.
1:42:49 Speaker 04 I'm going to play one here.
1:42:50 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
1:42:51 Speaker 04 I'm gonna, uh, give the Academy Award for Best Picture to Tender Mercies over Terms of Endearment.
1:42:59 Sean Fennessey? I can't argue with it. I just looked at it again this week. It's a very beautiful movie, and I don't have a lot of time for Bruce Beresford's filmography, to be honest with you, but this movie I like quite a bit. And you know, Duval insisted on singing all the songs himself, and good that he did. It gives the movie a lot more texture and authenticity. It's a very good film. Um, we've got a lot of greens here. We've got a lot of movies to go. Now, there's a couple here that I haven't seen. You're gonna have to hold my hand through the 1980s, okay?
1:43:26 Speaker 04 Here we go.
1:43:27 Sean Fennessey? 1984, The Stone Boy. What's that?
1:43:29 Speaker 04 The Stone Boy is directed by Christopher Kane, who is Dean Cain's father. Dean Cain plays a teenager who is shot and killed accidentally by his younger brother. And the younger brother is, goes into shock and is unable to process what he's done. And Duval and Glenn Close play the parents of these boys. And Duval's wife at the time, Gail Youngs, who was John Savage's, who is John Savage's sister, and he, Duval, had done American Buffalo on Broadway with John Savage, so there's a relationship there. Gail Youngs is also in the movie. The Stone Boy is close
1:44:13 Speaker 04 to something really good. I don't think it gets there. It's, it's, it's got some thematic challenges, but it's close to something good. And really, with Tender Mercy, now it starts earlier than that, of course, with Tomorrow, or something along those lines, but with Tender Mercies, you start to enter a period where the rural Duval starts to make really regular appearances. And movies like Tender Mercies and The Stone Boy, there was a kind of rural or country, domestic drama that we used to make in this country a lot, and that we stopped making. And I don't know where they went. Did they go to?
1:44:57 Speaker 04 Hallmark, did they go to Netflix? Did they go, they're, they're playing.
1:45:01 Sean Fennessey? I think so. I mean, I think, I think Taylor Sheridan is operating in that space.
1:45:05 Speaker 04 Very much operating in that space. I think it's a real shame and I, I don't want to, as a good old hearty, lefty liberal, don't want to take the blame for the divide in this country. But I think that the fact that we stopped telling those stories is, hasn't been great.
1:45:24 Sean Fennessey? I think, yeah, the movie's for sure. And you're an Oklahoman, so you know from what you speak. And Duval played Texans and, and men from Louisiana, and he was very well known for that. He kind of leaned into it a lot in the, in the last 20 years of his career, to the point of maybe a little bit of parody, I think, at times, but.
1:45:41 Speaker 04 And yet this family is Montana or Wyoming. And so he's a rural guy, he's wearing a gimme cap and he drives a tractor, but he's not doing that hardcore Texas accent. He's just a guy who lives and works in the country.
1:45:54 Sean Fennessey? Okay, well, maybe I should check it out. I assume it's not going in here.
1:45:57 Speaker 04 Not going in.
1:45:58 Sean Fennessey? He's in The Natural in 1984.
1:46:00 Speaker 04 I think we've skipped Angelo, My Love.
1:46:03 Sean Fennessey? We have. He, I'm only going through acting performances, but this is his fir-, Angelo, My Love is the first film that he directed, um, that is, that is a scripted feature and it's about the.
1:46:14 Speaker 04 Well, scripted.
1:46:15 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, yeah. I guess largely improvised.
1:46:19 Speaker 04 Largely improvised.
1:46:20 Sean Fennessey? But, but, but narrative.
1:46:23 Sean Fennessey? And it's about the, uh, is it the, uh, Romani people?
1:46:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:46:30 Sean Fennessey? And I, I'm fascinated by why he wanted to make this movie.
1:46:34 Speaker 04 He apparently overheard a conversation. He was working in New York and he overheard a conversation, a lover's quarrel. And then he looks over and he finds that the guy engaged in the lover's quarrel is an eight-year-old boy. And he became interested in this boy. He was working, it was while he was rehearsing American Buffalo. And he would see this boy regularly and he started engaging him in conversation. It's Angelo. He's the kid who's the lead in this movie. And Duval got to know him and got to know his family and got to know the community and put all these people to work, uh, on this movie. Have you seen it? I haven't. It's worth seeing.
1:47:08 Sean Fennessey? It's just such an, I mean, every 10 years, he's like, I'm gonna do something different.
1:47:13 Speaker 04 A really idiosyncratic choice.
1:47:15 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:47:16 Speaker 04 But it is a very watchable movie. I don't know how the Romani community feels about Robert Duvall being the one who's essentially telling their story, but, and there are some Romani directors of note who would probably like to have the kind of imprint that Robert Duvall has, but it's, it's not a bad movie.
1:47:37 Sean Fennessey? Was it, where was it available? Where'd you see it?
1:47:40 Speaker 04 I, it was a rewatch for me.
1:47:42 Sean Fennessey? Oh, wow.
1:47:42 Speaker 04 I had actually seen it when it first came out back, back then in 83. Where did I find it? Maybe YouTube. Maybe I found it on YouTube.
1:47:51 Sean Fennessey? Okay, I'll have to dig into that.
1:47:52 Speaker 04 Uh, I don't think it's going in.
1:47:54 Sean Fennessey? I agree with you. 1984, The Natural. He plays Max Mercy, the sports writer who's darned curious about Hobbs's past. Good performance, good movie.
1:48:05 Speaker 04 I think I mentioned when we did the Redford draft about Duvall going on Letterman and Letterman's suggesting this was a great movie and Duvall kind of shrugged and said, "Cute at best."
1:48:16 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, I mean, we, we mentioned it then too. Never one of my personal favorites.
1:48:20 Speaker 04 Biggest box office hit he had had since Apocalypse Now.
1:48:23 Sean Fennessey? Right. Notable, but, but a very supporting part.
1:48:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:48:27 Sean Fennessey? I'll say Red to The Natural. What do you say?
1:48:29 Speaker 04 I say Red.
1:48:30 Sean Fennessey? Let's Get Harry sounded good, but I didn't see it.
1:48:33 Speaker 04 Well, that's funny. It feels in some ways like a, like a Ringer, a movie The Ringer might like. The, when it starts with these guys and one of their, one of their people has been, one of their friends has been kidnapped in a South American country.
1:48:53 Speaker 04 And the friends are all kind of bemoaning it and then they decide they're gonna go get Harry. Those early scenes are so bad. You're like, what the hell is going on? And then Gary Busey shows up. He's a car dealer in the town who's gonna finance their trip to get Harry and then he decides, he's a bit of a gun nut and he decides he wants to go along.
1:49:12 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
1:49:12 Speaker 04 And then they, they advertise for a mercenary who's gonna help them and Duvall shows up as the mercenary and he's the real deal. He's a badass. And then you realize, oh, this is a total drive-in movie.
1:49:24 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:49:25 Speaker 04 Made a little after the days of the drive in. But it's great fun. I mean, Bucy and Duval are both great. This is about a year before Bucy, you know, has this accident and scrambles his scrambles his eggs, but he's still really good. And of course, the drive ins were done in 1986.
1:49:47 Sean Fennessey? Well, it seems to be trying to play in that kind of missing in action zone.
1:49:50 Speaker 04 Very much.
1:49:51 Sean Fennessey? Invasion USA.
1:49:52 Speaker 04 Big hit in the video stores.
1:49:54 Sean Fennessey? Okay, because it's box office is $140,000, which ain't very good. But it's a Stuart Rosenberg movie. It's got to.
1:50:00 Speaker 04 He took his name off it. Rosenberg took his name off it. It's directed by Alan Smithy.
1:50:05 Sean Fennessey? No kidding?
1:50:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:50:06 Sean Fennessey? That's so interesting. Um, you know, who wrote the story of this movie? Sam Fuller.
1:50:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right. Sam Fuller wrote the story. Also notable that one of the guys going down to get Harry is Glenn Fry.
1:50:18 Sean Fennessey? Oh, sure. Eagles fame. Also, Thomas F. Wilson from Back to the Future, Biff, and Rick Rossovich coming off of Top Gun. I don't know. It's kind of an, Mark Harmon? Anyway, I haven't seen Let's Get Harry. It's not going in. Belitzaire, the Cajun?
1:50:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, Belitzaire, the Cajun. Belitzaire.
1:50:35 Sean Fennessey? Belitzaire.
1:50:36 Speaker 04 Yeah. Directed by a Cajun director, Glenn Petrie. It was developed at Sundance. And in fact, the movie begins with a graphic saying, this movie, before any credits roll, this movie would not be possible without the contributions of Robert Redford and Robert Duvall. They are both put up in front and center. So Duval helped develop this or helped get it to screen.
1:50:58 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
1:50:58 Speaker 04 He has one scene as a preacher. It's totally a cameo. His wife, Gail Youngs, at the time, his wife at the time, Gail Youngs, is the female lead in the movie. Belitzaire is pretty good. It's a, you wish there was a bit more Cajun representation in front of the camera. Will Patton and Armand Desanti doing some accents. But it's nice that Belitzaire isn't an ass kicker. It's not like Armand Desanti is like this ass kicking action hero. He's more like a Brer Rabbit character. He's the medicine man locally. It's not bad. I wish it looked better. I wish they'd had a little more budget. The way it's shot, it looks a little like an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.
1:51:43 Speaker 04 But it's not going in.
1:51:47 Speaker 04 It was a rewatch for me, too. I watched that back in the day.
1:51:49 Sean Fennessey? Look at you.
1:51:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. You.
1:51:52 Sean Fennessey? What will you famously not watch? Anything. You'll watch Belize or the Cajun for a second
1:51:56 Speaker 04 We're gonna get to something I will not watch.
1:51:58 Sean Fennessey? Okay, interesting. 1986, The Lightship. Also missed out on this one.
1:52:02 Speaker 04 Also a rewatch, saw it in the movie theaters in 1986. Uh, directed by Yerzy Skolomowski, the great Polish director.
1:52:11 Sean Fennessey? Oh, of course.
1:52:11 Speaker 04 Screenplay by William My and David Taylor, based on a German novella by Siegfried Lenz. The poster for this movie said, "Good versus evil, life versus death, Robert Duvall versus Klaus Maria Brandauer." That's how they advertised the movie.
1:52:30 Sean Fennessey? And as you mentioned, one of your, one of your favorites there.
1:52:32 Speaker 04 I mean, that's how esteemed he was, you know, as an actor, that they, that that was gonna be a feature. It was the last feature film made by CBS Theatrical Films. CBS had its own division of movie releases. So it was abandoned and picked up a year later by Castle Hill Productions. So it made absolutely no money. Uh, Duvall is taking a big swing here. He's playing this southern character. He's got this kind of sonorous tone that he speaks when he's doing the, it does not work.
1:53:03 Sean Fennessey? I like you doing some voice work there. Thank you for that.
1:53:05 Speaker 04 Uh, early performances from William Forsythe and Arliss Howard playing. Uh, Duvall's character shows up on this lightship, which is a ship that doesn't sail. It's a stationary ship for mining purposes, I think. And they're, they show up on a, on a boat. They've lost their, their ship, uh, Duvall and his two accomplices. And it turns out they're criminals and they, their criminal things happen. It's, it's not a good film.
1:53:36 Sean Fennessey? Can I tell you something?
1:53:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:53:37 Sean Fennessey? You're as sharp as ever. I don't know how the hell you remember all these details. And this is what I do for a living.
1:53:43 Sean Fennessey? The light ship is red. Hotel Colonial, I did dip my toes into this story.
1:53:47 Speaker 04 Oh my god.
1:53:48 Sean Fennessey? What in God's name is this film?
1:53:49 Speaker 04 Okay, directed by Sinzia T H Torini, screenplay by Enzo Montalioni, Sinzia T H Torini, Robert Katz and Ira Barmack is totally batshit movie.
1:54:01 Sean Fennessey? Insane.
1:54:02 Speaker 04 I'm actually gonna quote from my own letter boxed comments.
1:54:05 Sean Fennessey? Please do.
1:54:06 Speaker 04 John Savage, wearing white khakis, explores the slums, rivers and jungles of Colombia, looking for his brother. Robert Duvall is a Colombian drug lord, sporting a gorgeous George hairpiece, an ascot and a sleeveless shirt. He handles an alligator, two parrots, a falcon and an anaconda. He massacres spider monkeys with a pump shotgun set to a Pinot Denagio score. It's a totally batshit movie. I do not know what anybody was thinking when they made this thing.
1:54:37 Sean Fennessey? As you mentioned, John Savage, obviously, uh, related to Duvall's wife at the time.
1:54:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:54:43 Sean Fennessey? And, um, giving a very bewildered performance, I'll say. He's got one emotion the entire film. Duvall having the time of his life.
1:54:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:54:53 Sean Fennessey? Um, not sure I would have cast him as an Argentinian man again.
1:54:57 Speaker 04 You maybe didn't see the twist at the end.
1:54:59 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
1:54:59 Speaker 04 There's a twist and it, when it happens, it's, the only reason you didn't see it coming is because it's so stupid. You're like, they couldn't possibly expect me to swallow this. It's not, not good. Not going in.
1:55:11 Sean Fennessey? That's red. 1988's Color's. Interesting movie. Uh, directed by Dennis Hopper and about two police officers working in South Central Los Angeles. Uh, Duvall is the veteran opposite rookie Sean Penn. Um, a movie that I like, don't love. I think Duvall's performance is very good. There's a very famous scene in the movie, the two bulls story that he tells that is oft repeated. Um, I wouldn't say it's among the most hallowed of the Duvall performances, but it's good. I think Dennis Hopper directed several other better movies, personally.
1:55:46 Speaker 04 Uh, shot by Haskell Wechsler, uh, which is notable. Yeah, no, I don't think it's going in. I, I don't know, man. There's not a lot of, uh,
1:55:57 Speaker 04 There's not a lot of accountability for the LAPD in this movie. And we've seen in the years since that LAPD could have used a little more scrutiny, perhaps.
1:56:07 Sean Fennessey? When you think about the timing when this was released. I mean, I think there's some intentionality there. You know, it's not like the film doesn't realize specifically what it's showing. But yeah, colors is a no. I did not see a show of force.
1:56:20 Speaker 04 I did.
1:56:22 Sean Fennessey? It's an excellent title for a film.
1:56:23 Speaker 04 It is. It's not a very good movie. It's directed by Bruno Beretto, who was a Brazilian filmmaker who made, I think he made Donna Flora and her two husbands. He was married to Amy Irving at the time, who lives in my little town where I live in New York.
1:56:37 Sean Fennessey? Oh, nice.
1:56:38 Speaker 04 And they made this movie together. Andy Garcia, Lou Diamond Phillips, early fat Kevin Spacey.
1:56:44 Sean Fennessey? Careful.
1:56:47 Speaker 04 It's thrill. What?
1:56:49 Sean Fennessey? I'm coming at you.
1:56:50 Speaker 04 Kevin Matt. It's a thriller based on a real life case in which undercover American agents framed Puerto Rican political activists as terrorists, then murdered them. So it's based on a true story. She's a TV reporter and Duval is her TV news editor. Almost all of his scenes take place in the news office. It's, it's, it's not, it's not great. Duval's doing some pretty standard stuff here.
1:57:16 Sean Fennessey? Got it. Let's make that red. 1990 Days of Thunder. I think this will be the film that many people who listen to this podcast first saw Robert Duval in.
1:57:25 Speaker 04 Have we skipped The Handmaid's Tale?
1:57:28 Sean Fennessey? I had that coming right after Days of Thunder.
1:57:30 Speaker 04 Have we skipped Lonesome Dove?
1:57:31 Sean Fennessey? We have. You want, let's talk about Lonesome Dove.
1:57:33 Speaker 04 It's in. It's green.
1:57:35 Sean Fennessey? I agree that it's green. This is the rare, is Lonesome Dove the greatest mini-series in the history of television?
1:57:42 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:57:43 Sean Fennessey? Is there more you want to say about Gus and what Duval does in that series?
1:57:47 Speaker 04 He's spectacular. He elevates the art form of television acting. It's, it's a remarkable performance. Sometimes the mini-series itself does not transcend its TV-bound.
1:58:01 Sean Fennessey? Production style.
1:58:02 Speaker 04 Production style. Certainly the casting of Frederick Forrest. Blue Duck is just an embarrassment. And I think maybe only five years later would not have happened that way.
1:58:13 Sean Fennessey? Yep.
1:58:13 Speaker 04 So that's, that's too bad. But the performances, there's a lot of good performances in it, but Duval is really something.
1:58:22 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, he and Tommy Lee together, there's, Duval's final scene is one of the great scenes in the history of television. And his performance is just tremendously real. And if you've ever been with someone near the end of their life, it is bizarrely real how sincere and great that is. Okay, Lonesome Dove is in, we're getting very low on greens here, my friend. We got one, two, three, four, five.
1:58:45 Speaker 04 How much time do we have? How are we on time?
1:58:47 Sean Fennessey? Not very good. We have eight greens. We have like 50 movies. We're gonna go more quickly. Days of Thunder, you know, not one of my Tony Scott movies. I'm a Tony Scott aficionado. I'm a huge fan of his work.
1:58:59 Speaker 04 Feels like a mascot movie for this.
1:59:02 Sean Fennessey? Very much, The Ringer loves this film. I was not on the Rewatchables episode of this movie. Also a Tom Cruise aficionado. I think it's perfectly fine. Cole Trickle, wonderful name from Eagle Rock, California, not far from where I live right now.
1:59:15 Sean Fennessey? Duval plays kind of the leader of the pit crew, the coach, the sage figure in Cole's life. He's good, is Harry, you know?
1:59:28 Speaker 04 Paycheck.
1:59:29 Sean Fennessey? Paycheck, okay, red.
1:59:30 Speaker 04 I mean, right, I think it's maybe, when you look over his filmography, I think maybe it's his first big paycheck. Big, big paycheck.
1:59:38 Sean Fennessey? Interesting. I mean, that makes sense. Right, it's Simpson-Bruckheimer, they're doing top dollar for everything. They needed to confer a level of dignity.
1:59:47 Speaker 04 I watched it for the first time for this.
1:59:48 Sean Fennessey? No kidding?
1:59:49 Speaker 04 It's not my.
1:59:49 Sean Fennessey? Didn't like it?
1:59:50 Speaker 04 It's fine. It's not my flavor.
1:59:52 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, okay, 1990 The Handmaid's Tale.
1:59:54 Speaker 04 F1 sure owes a lot to Days of Thunder.
1:59:56 Sean Fennessey? Oh, no kidding. I mean, it knows, yeah. I mean, Jerry Bruckheimer. Same producer. 1990 The Handmaid's Tale.
2:00:05 Speaker 04 It's a turkey.
2:00:09 Speaker 04 Carol Reese Rice was developing the script with Harold Pinter. Then they wouldn't allow Carol Reese to shoot the big crowd scenes he wanted to shoot. So he quit. And so Volker Schlandorf came on as director and wanted Harold Pinter to make some changes. And Pinter, by that point, had been working on it for a long time and got exhausted by it. It was like, go to Margaret Atwood and have her make the changes.
2:00:34 Sean Fennessey? Oh, interesting.
2:00:35 Speaker 04 Anyway, it just wound up in a whole kind of script hell. It's, it's, it's a mess. It's just a mess. It's a shame.
2:00:42 Sean Fennessey? It's fascinating because no one will ever watch it now because it has been adapted into an acclaimed and long running television show. But it's the same Handmaid's Tale that we know, but it's red. He just played Commander, a critical character in that film.
2:00:57 Speaker 04 And he's good. Again, he's always good. It's a mess of a movie.
2:01:00 Sean Fennessey? 1991, Martha Coolidge's Rambling Rose.
2:01:04 Speaker 04 Really good. Have you seen it?
2:01:05 Sean Fennessey? I have seen it. Is Laura Dern's first true star part? I was trying to think about that.
2:01:11 Speaker 04 I think it's after Smooth Talk.
2:01:13 Sean Fennessey? You're right. It is after Smooth Talk. But one of her best performances, Duval is also terrific in this movie, is a kind of patriarch. I think his character's name is Daddy.
2:01:22 Speaker 04 And Diane Ladd, who was-
2:01:25 Sean Fennessey? Real life mother.
2:01:26 Speaker 04 Real life mother. And they were the first mother daughter nominated for Oscars in the same year for this.
2:01:32 Sean Fennessey? It would, it would probably go in the Laura Dern Hall of Fame. I don't know if it would go in the Robert Durn, Robert Duvall Hall of Fame.
2:01:37 Speaker 04 I agree. Written by Calder Willingham, who wrote The Graduate.
2:01:41 Sean Fennessey? Oh.
2:01:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:01:42 Sean Fennessey? I did not know that.
2:01:42 Speaker 04 Yeah. Based on a novel of his.
2:01:44 Sean Fennessey? I recommend this movie, but not for the Duvall Hall. 91 convicts haven't seen it.
2:01:49 Speaker 04 Horton Foot, Horton Foot joint. Robert Duvall, James Earl Jones, Lucas Haas. Really good. Doesn't, it's, origins are in the theater. It's directed by Peter Masterson.
2:02:08 Speaker 04 And it feels like a theater piece, but Duval doing a cantankerous southern guy, finds some new colors is like, he's not just trotting out standard issue cantankerous southern guy. He finds some colors in there that he doesn't normally. James Earl Jones, always great. It's worth a watch.
2:02:31 Sean Fennessey? Won't be the last time they come together.
2:02:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:02:33 Sean Fennessey? Uh, that's gonna be a red. 1992 Newsies.
2:02:36 Speaker 04 You finally hit on one I haven't seen.
2:02:38 Sean Fennessey? No kidding.
2:02:39 Speaker 04 Never seen Newsies.
2:02:40 Sean Fennessey? You know, I've been thinking about whether or not I should show this one to my, my, my kid. It's um, it's a Disney musical.
2:02:46 Speaker 04 Right.
2:02:47 Sean Fennessey? Perhaps best known for launching Christian Bale into the public, more wider consciousness after Empire of the Sun. Um, it's about newspaper boys and it's a very vivacious movie, a movie that much loved by many millennials and.
2:03:02 Speaker 04 A bomb at the time, right?
2:03:03 Sean Fennessey? Not a hit, but a movie that got a lot of burn on VHS and video stores and on the Disney Channel when I was a kid for sure. Um, he plays Pulitzer, the famed journalist. And, um, it's not going in. I don't, maybe your kids would like it.
2:03:22 Speaker 04 Okay.
2:03:22 Sean Fennessey? It's got energy. It's got, it's got zest. 1992, The Plague. I haven't seen this film. Another Argentinian production.
2:03:30 Speaker 04 Yeah. Uh, directed by Luis Puenzo, who just died yesterday, day before, uh, director of The Official Story, which is a great movie. Uh, it just doesn't work. It's, it's such.
2:03:45 Sean Fennessey? Did you watch this?
2:03:46 Speaker 04 I did. Such a serious slog. Uh, there's a lot of like wailing on the soundtrack.
2:03:52 Sean Fennessey? Oh.
2:03:52 Speaker 04 It's very hyper serious.
2:03:54 Sean Fennessey? Self-serious, yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:03:56 Speaker 04 William Hurt, uh, Raoul Julia, uh, reunited from Kiss the Spider Woman, Sandrine Bonner, who was William Hurt's wife at the time. Duval, uh, uh, it's, and a lot of like restatement of Camus philosophy, uh, doesn't work.
2:04:14 Sean Fennessey? Red. 1993 Falling Down.
2:04:17 Speaker 04 You're skipping Stalin, 1992.
2:04:21 Sean Fennessey? TV movie.
2:04:22 Speaker 04 I watched it, TV mini-series.
2:04:24 Sean Fennessey? This was watched in my home when I was a child. And it was on, I don't think I was paying direct attention to the entire thing, but I remember my parents watching this.
2:04:33 Speaker 04 It's not nothing.
2:04:34 Sean Fennessey? Yep.
2:04:34 Speaker 04 It's directed by Ivan Passer. It is written by Paul Monash, who wrote our beloved Friends of Eddie Coyle. It's shot by Vilmos Zigmund.
2:04:47 Speaker 04 And co-stars Julia Orman, Joan Plaurit, Jerome Crabbe, if that's how you say his name. Made for HBO, first thing ever filmed in the Kremlin.
2:04:58 Speaker 04 As part of Gorbachev's.
2:05:01 Speaker 04 He decided that it would be allowed, so they filmed in the Kremlin.
2:05:04 Sean Fennessey? Very important for America to tell Stalin's story.
2:05:07 Speaker 04 Duval was very proud of this performance. Now, the movie itself is a bit of Stalin for dummies, or Russia for dummies. And I don't know that it always focuses on the thing it should be focused on. Some of the palace intrigue and shit, it's like, really? Are we, we're really gonna get bogged down in this stuff? Duval's really extraordinary in it. Unfortunately, he's been fitted with a kind of a mask, a cowl, which hides the upper half of his face. And it's really too bad because his, the accent sounds good, the, you know, the, he's, he's working his ass off and he, and he was proud of it. And the Russians apparently found the whole movie laughable. But they loved Duval in it and Duval got asked to play a lot of Russian characters after
2:05:52 Sean Fennessey? Really?
2:05:53 Speaker 04 he did it. He's, he's very good in it. You wish the whole enterprise were better. It's worth a watch.
2:06:01 Sean Fennessey? I don't know when I'm gonna watch that, but I'm gonna think about it. It's not going in.
2:06:06 Speaker 04 No.
2:06:07 Sean Fennessey? 1993 Falling Down.
2:06:09 Speaker 04 I watched this for the first time in preparation for this draft.
2:06:13 Sean Fennessey? Film I've seen at least a dozen times in my life.
2:06:16 Speaker 04 Wow.
2:06:16 Sean Fennessey? It was on cable all the time when I was a kid. And to a young mind, very transgressive work of art. Looking back, kind of a dumb movie.
2:06:26 Speaker 04 Kind of dumb, right? I mean, there's some interesting ideas, I think, in the early part of the movie, but it just kind of descends into. I don't know why, just like a cop show by the end of it, it's.
2:06:38 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, I mean, in no small part because of Duval's character who plays, it's kind of the most ordinary thing about the movie.
2:06:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's great.
2:06:46 Sean Fennessey? He's very good. And as like a, once again, playing a kind of weathered LAPD detective. The opening moments of the movie, I think are like fascinating and electrifying, where a man who is a middle-class, you know, pocket protector grunt gets fed up with traffic and just exits his car and leaves his car in the middle of the road and sets upon a journey across Los Angeles on one very hot and unpleasant day. And it kind of shows like a man at his breaking point, Michael Douglas doing something very off type for him. But a lot of the episodes that he experiences as he goes through the world just feel like very stupid 101 psychology or sociology about how communities operate.
2:07:31 Sean Fennessey? It's also like, why is this movie being seen through the eyes of like a middle-aged white guy? But I've seen it many times.
2:07:36 Speaker 04 Not to mention, you've got Lois Smith.
2:07:40 Sean Fennessey? Carter Forrest.
2:07:40 Speaker 04 Barbara Hershey, Amy Morton, Rachel T. Coating, you've got these great actors, actresses in this thing, and they're given nothing to, Barbara Hershey's given nothing to do.
2:07:50 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, didn't even remember she was in it. Falling Down to Red, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, never seen it.
2:07:56 Speaker 04 I've seen it. Starts in association with Randa Haynes, which she produced a couple of other things he's in. It's the, again, is odd period of casting where he could play a Cuban man.
2:08:08 Sean Fennessey? That's right. He's Latino for sure.
2:08:13 Speaker 04 It's Richard Harris's movie. It's a shame too, because of the brown face, the movie won't be considered. And I understand that. Richard Harris is doing some good work. He's got, Richard Harris has a couple of really heartbreaking scenes in Wrestling Ernest. I didn't re-watch it for this. I remember from original, but not going in.
2:08:32 Sean Fennessey? That's right. Geronimo, an American legend. He plays Al Seber, a kind of unfortunate figure in American history. I didn't re-watch this movie. I have seen it. Walter Hill's portrait of the Native American hero and resister. I don't, for Duval purposes, you know, I'm not sure. It's an interesting movie. It's a.
2:08:58 Sean Fennessey? It's not terribly insensitive, as I recall, to the legend of Geronimo.
2:09:02 Speaker 04 It's not insensitive, but they sure make claims that it's somewhat the story of Geronimo seen from Geronimo's perspective. It's like, it's not really.
2:09:11 Sean Fennessey? A lot of white guys, yeah.
2:09:12 Speaker 04 There's a lot of Jason Patrick and Matt Damon talking about stuff.
2:09:16 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, and it was sold on that, too. I mean, despite the poster, like, if you look at the trailer of the movie, you'll see they want you to come see the white guys talk about the fighting the Native American hero. That's red. 1994 is the paper. A lot of people are gonna fight for this movie. A lot of people like this movie. I never got it. I never was interested in it. I always thought it was just absolute poppycock. But I know it's a comfort movie for a lot of people, also a lot of people who work here who are very fond of it. I do think Duval's very good in it, though.
2:09:44 Speaker 04 There are likable things about this movie, some likable performances, screenplay by the Keps, David and Steven. But there's also like a physical fight between Michael Keaton and Glenn Close. It's like, this is stupid.
2:10:00 Sean Fennessey? The ending of the movie I find very silly. But as the kind of worn down but very world-weary newspaper editor Bernie White, he's like a very credible New York figure for a guy who's playing these rural southerners or, you know, folks from 300 years ago. You pretty much buy him as somebody running the New York Post or running the New York Daily News.
2:10:21 Speaker 04 There is so much in the paper that is lifted from the front page, and no credit is paid to the front page. That's a shame.
2:10:27 Sean Fennessey? It's too bad. Okay, that's red. 95, something to talk about. Supporting part in this Julia Roberts dramedy about a woman experiencing significant change in her life. It's a fine movie. Great theme song.
2:10:40 Speaker 04 Based on, right, the, they wrote the movie after the song was a hit.
2:10:50 Speaker 04 I saw it at the time. It made no impression on me whatsoever.
2:10:53 Sean Fennessey? Red. The Stars Fell on Henrietta. I haven't seen this one.
2:10:56 Speaker 04 I watched this one for the draft. It's a sweet movie. It's got a sweet disposition, directed by James Keach, written by Philip Railsback. Maybe the first time that Billy Bob and Duval worked together. That becomes an important collaboration.
2:11:14 Speaker 04 It's not bad. Duval is doing something, again, he's finding a slightly different color. There's, this character is a bit of a trickster. There's something a bit more whimsical going on with this guy. It's certainly red.
2:11:26 Sean Fennessey? 1995, The Scarlet Letter. I saw that you watched this for the first time.
2:11:31 Speaker 04 Just yesterday.
2:11:32 Sean Fennessey? This movie is directed by Roland Joffe and stars at a very critical time in her career, Demi Moore.
2:11:39 Speaker 04 And it has the line, "God, how I've wanted to poke you." Which is, I don't think, in the book.
2:11:48 Sean Fennessey? Well, we've got Hawthorne here. Let's bring him in.
2:11:53 Sean Fennessey? Nathaniel, was that in the, was that in the original text?
2:11:55 Speaker 04 I've seen that Gary Oldman has stepped out in some defense of this movie, saying, "Yeah, I know it was a big bomb, but there's some, there's some good work in there."
2:12:05 Sean Fennessey? I watched it. I watched it when it was released. It's incredibly dull and overdrawn.
2:12:10 Speaker 04 You know, good people, good artists, great artists, come together with the best of intentions, and sometimes it doesn't happen. It's hard to make a great movie.
2:12:21 Sean Fennessey? That's right. Just look at this episode, you know, we're doing our best.
2:12:26 Speaker 04 Exactly.
2:12:28 Sean Fennessey? The Scarlet Letter's red, Sling Blade. Now, you mentioned the, the influence that Tomorrow had on this movie. This, like a few other films here, it's pretty influential in me getting interested in films outside of the standard summer blockbusters that were easy for kids to get interested in. And this movie was a huge story at the time. The emergence of a new voice, a writer-director star, Academy Award nominated, Duval plays a critical part. He, he had a kind of... It seemed like a Godfather kind of relationship with Billy Bob.
2:13:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:13:06 Sean Fennessey? I didn't revisit for this episode, but I remember him having like a critical but modest part in the movie, right?
2:13:11 Speaker 04 That's my recollection.
2:13:12 Sean Fennessey? As Carl's dad. I don't think it's going in the Hall of Fame.
2:13:14 Speaker 04 I don't either.
2:13:16 Sean Fennessey? 1996, a family thing.
2:13:17 Speaker 04 I watched that just the other night for this.
2:13:19 Sean Fennessey? I saw this when it came out.
2:13:22 Speaker 04 There's some intriguing ideas. It's fun to watch Duval. Again, we talked about high status, low status. He's definitely the lower status character when he's with James Earl Jones. There's some good acting going on in here. James Earl Jones is great.
2:13:35 Sean Fennessey? Richard Pierce?
2:13:36 Speaker 04 Irma P. Hall, yeah. And written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson.
2:13:40 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
2:13:42 Speaker 04 It gets a little impatient or something midway through and the plot-y things start happening and characters don't always behave in a way that seems true to them.
2:13:54 Speaker 04 It's not a bad time. I enjoyed it. It's not a Hall of Fame.
2:13:57 Sean Fennessey? Family thing is red. 1996 phenomenon?
2:13:59 Speaker 04 Didn't see it, haven't seen it. We're gonna start to hit patch here pretty soon where I haven't seen much.
2:14:05 Sean Fennessey? I mean, I didn't revisit this movie. I saw this movie in movie theaters when it was released. It was in the re-boom of John Travolta, where he plays a man who is touched with extraordinary intelligence and telekinesis and all of these extraordinary powers. Duval in the movie plays Doc, who was sort of like a father figure to him and kind of protects him and believes him through this big change of this happening in this small town, kind of trading on some of his folksy appeal, directed by John Turtle Todd, probably best known for the National Treasure movies. It's definitely not going in. 1997, The Apostle. I think there's a case for this one.
2:14:42 Speaker 04 Before we get to The Apostle, 1996, The Man Who Captured Eichmann.
2:14:46 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
2:14:47 Speaker 04 I watched that.
2:14:47 Sean Fennessey? HBO film?
2:14:49 Speaker 04 I think TNT.
2:14:51 Sean Fennessey? TNT. Okay.
2:14:55 Speaker 04 Directed by William Graham, written by Lionel Chetwind.
2:14:59 Sean Fennessey? Where are you at on Eichmann? Pro? Anti?
2:15:02 Speaker 04 I'm not submitting to the tyranny of your questions.
2:15:06 Speaker 04 Duval plays Eichmann and Arlis Howard plays the Mossad agent who captures Eichmann. And most of the movie, 70% of the movie, is the two of them in a room after Eichmann's been captured, as the Israelis are waiting to find a way to get him out of the country.
2:15:25 Speaker 04 Most of it is a dialogue between the two of them. It's very good. It's very good. It's very interesting dialogue. You know, when Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil, it's Eichmann that she's talking about. And so that idea is being explored. Is he, he was trying to position himself as not only just following orders, but he's trying to say, I was following the law. What I was doing was just following the laws of my country. And Arlis Howard, who has lost a relative in the Holocaust, is engaged, he's not even supposed to talk to him, but he winds up engaging him in this discussion.
2:16:06 Speaker 04 And the movie sort of plays with the line of, is, is, does, is he just a civil servant? Or in fact, was he a virulent racist anti Semite? Asks that question. It's a compelling watch and Duval's great. He's great at it.
2:16:25 Sean Fennessey? Where did you watch this?
2:16:27 Speaker 04 Apple TV, paid for it on Apple TV?
2:16:29 Sean Fennessey? That's nice that you patronize that fine company.
2:16:34 Speaker 04 Spotify will be getting my receipt.
2:16:36 Sean Fennessey? 1997, The Apostle. He was the writer, director and producer of this movie about a preacher who loses control.
2:16:46 Sean Fennessey? Does something terrible and then disappears and moves to a new community and effectively launches a new mission, a new church where he is in the anonymous preacher EF, the Apostle EF. Amazing movie. I just looked at it again yesterday. You know, imperfect for sure. Longtime passion project of his. I think he wrote the screenplay first in 1983 and had been trying to get it off the ground for years and years. And he paid for it himself. He financed the movie. It sounds like he financed, at least in part, the other two previous films that he had worked on as well. And he really put his money where his mouth was on a lot of these things. But this one kind of rose to the surface a bit more and
2:17:27 Sean Fennessey? got a lot of attention. He was Oscar nominated for his performance in it. I think it's a really fascinating and clearly very personal story about good people doing bad things. And then how do you live with yourself? And I think it's interesting.
2:17:41 Speaker 04 It's green for me.
2:17:42 Sean Fennessey? Okay. Well, that makes it pretty easy. 1998, The Gingerbread Man. I've seen this movie. Robert Altman directed it. It's an adaptation of a John Grisham novel. Cannot remember Robert Duvall even being in it.
2:17:52 Speaker 04 It's so weird. It just doesn't even feel like an Altman movie. I don't know.
2:17:56 Sean Fennessey? No. That was, this is a paycheck movie.
2:17:58 Speaker 04 It's very strange. And I did hear on the special features here when I watched it, Altman saying that he'd been trying to get Duvall back since they had made MASH. But Duvall was just always booked. He wanted him to be in Nashville, but Duvall was just always booked. Couldn't get him.
2:18:14 Sean Fennessey? Wow. Who does he play in Nashville? That's interesting.
2:18:16 Speaker 04 I don't know.
2:18:18 Sean Fennessey? That's a game I'll play with myself tonight. The Gingerbread Man is not going in. 1998, A Civil Action. Also Oscar nominated for this performance. He plays opposing counsel in a case, a civil suit from a group of families who have been affected by what seems like the drinking water due to a corporation that has been polluting in their community. And...
2:18:47 Sean Fennessey? Duval is like a practical evil, you know? That's sort of like plaintive, plain spoken, here's how things are kind of character opposite John Travolta. Again, they just worked together two years earlier. And John Travolta is a little bit miscast in this movie. Where he's supposed to be kind of like a slick personal injury lawyer. But there's a little bit too much inherent decency in John Travolta that you never buy the first half of the movie.
2:19:11 Speaker 04 There's a real lack of specificity about Travolta's character. It's an odd thing, an odd choice.
2:19:16 Sean Fennessey? Especially what happened, given what happens to him in the movie.
2:19:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's an odd choice that Zellian has made to not have more information about just who that guy is. Because by the end of the movie, it was like, oh, we were supposed to be tracking the changes in him? But he doesn't seem like the thing. Duval does something really interesting here. I mean, this character of the opposing counsel, right? Oh, he's the angel of death. He's the one who's gonna... We know that character so well, James Mason. Billy Bob Thornton in The Judge coming out, right? He's always... George C. Scott in...
2:19:51 Sean Fennessey? In Her at the Wind?
2:19:52 Speaker 04 No, no, no. George C. Scott with Jimmy Stewart in...
2:19:56 Sean Fennessey? Oh, Anatomy of Murder?
2:19:58 Speaker 04 Anatomy of a Murder, right? That... And yet, Duval plays against all those types, right? He's this idiosyncratic guy who steals a croissant from the breakfast table, steals a pen.
2:20:10 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, that's why I say practical. There's something small about what he's supposed to represent there. It's one of the few things about the movie that I think is unique. Although, the whole structure, the movie's very strange. Because of what happens to the Travolta character and the case itself. That feels kind of brave in its way, but also makes the movie feel very small. This is a huge Christmas movie produced by Scott Rudin. It was a big old fancy thing that has slipped away completely from the culture.
2:20:35 Speaker 04 It was hard to find. I had to buy it on Apple TV again. I couldn't find it.
2:20:39 Sean Fennessey? Okay, it's red. Deep Impact?
2:20:42 Speaker 04 Watched that for the first time. It's not my... It's not my flavor.
2:20:48 Sean Fennessey? Deep Impact is best known as the other film that wasn't Armageddon from 1998. The other apocalyptic, world-ending saga. I've always found Deep Impact to be pretty solid, honestly.
2:20:57 Speaker 04 It's well done. It's well done.
2:21:00 Sean Fennessey? It's very sincere. It takes the material seriously, I think, in a way that a lot of these movies didn't. And I liked Armageddon as a teenager. And now, I watched Deep Impact maybe like 10 years ago with my wife. And we were like, because we'd skipped it when we were kids.
2:21:14 Sean Fennessey? I don't know. I think we both felt like it wasn't bad.
2:21:16 Speaker 04 My favorite scene in the movie is Duval with
2:21:22 Speaker 04 our blind astronaut, the astronaut who's lost his sight. Oh, come on. See, we've gotten late enough. I haven't had enough protein.
2:21:33 Speaker 04 I'm starting to lose my proper nouns. And Duval sits with the blind astronaut and starts to read him Moby Dick. It's a very gentle scene between the two of them. It's my favorite scene in the movie. It's really good. Who's the lead? Who's the lead?
2:21:47 Sean Fennessey? Is it Ron Eldar?
2:21:48 Speaker 04 Ron Eldar. Thank you. Sorry, Ron. Couldn't think of your name.
2:21:51 Sean Fennessey? Sorry, Ron. Deep Impact's not going in. I'll tell you what Gone in 60 Seconds is also not going in.
2:21:56 Speaker 04 Never seen it. I saw the original. Haven't seen the remake.
2:21:59 Sean Fennessey? Stylish, kind of fun, heist action movie from Dominic Sena starring Nicolas Cage.
2:22:06 Sean Fennessey? Once again, Duval playing kind of like the old guy who hangs out in the, you know, he's like the mechanic who's, you know, their part of the team, but not actually on the cases. Um, it's not going in. The Sixth Day, you watched it. I don't remember seeing this. I'm sure I saw it back in the day as an Arnold fan.
2:22:22 Speaker 04 It's not good. You know, you take this high concept of,
2:22:26 Speaker 04 there's a great scene where it's about cloning, right? The concept has to do with cloning and Arnold shows up at his house and it's his birthday and he looks in the window and he sees himself celebrating his birthday with his family. And he realizes he's been cloned and this guy is the guy who's replaced him. It's an intriguing concept. And then the chase is on. It's just with the concept kind of gets thrown out the window and suddenly everybody's just chasing each other and shooting at each other. It's like, well, what did you even need the original concept for?
2:22:56 Sean Fennessey? You know who made this movie? Roger Spotters.
2:22:58 Speaker 04 Roger Spotters would back in the saddle. Tony Goldwyn, by the way, playing the exact same character he plays in One Battle After Another, except it's 25 years earlier and he hasn't changed a bit. It's just like he walked from the set of The Sixth Day on the set of One Battle After Another. How's it possible? Damn it, Tony.
2:23:19 Sean Fennessey? That's part of what makes him great. He's never aging, always sort of malevolent in a way. Six Days not going in. I don't know what A Shot at Glory is.
2:23:27 Speaker 04 A Shot at Glory is a story about Scottish football.
2:23:33 Sean Fennessey? Oh.
2:23:33 Speaker 04 And it was apparently a a real pet project of Duval's for a long time. And he plays a Scottish football manager.
2:23:44 Speaker 04 And now, I don't know anything about Scottish football. Apparently, there are some football stars in this movie. I don't know who the hell they are. I kind of enjoyed it.
2:23:53 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
2:23:54 Speaker 04 It's kind of, it's a real, it's about as gentle a sports movie as you'll ever find. Michael Keaton is also in the movie. He plays the owner of the team. And
2:24:08 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, Brian Cox, Cole Hauser. Pretty good.
2:24:11 Speaker 04 Really good time.
2:24:12 Sean Fennessey? He looks good in that shepoe.
2:24:14 Speaker 04 And, you know, on the Letterboxd, some people were bitching about his accent. And I gotta say, go to hell.
2:24:19 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
2:24:20 Speaker 04 Because
2:24:20 Sean Fennessey? Let's hear some of your Scottish accent.
2:24:22 Speaker 04 You're not only not gonna hear it, I will tell you that it's hard to do. And it's certainly hard to do when you have to do it in Scotland on a set with 200 Scottish people gathered around you. And you're gonna make a speech in their dialect, an emotional speech in their dialect.
2:24:39 Sean Fennessey? Have you considered this? Don't take the part.
2:24:41 Speaker 04 Well, that's just it. Gene Hackman's not taking the part. There are a lot of actors of Duval's stature and time period who would not take on something like that. Or Stalin, or a lot of the other things.
2:24:56 Sean Fennessey? It's a great point. He was pretty fearless in terms of the range that he was pursuing. Shadak Looney's not going in. 2002, another cop in another emotional drama, John Q.
2:25:07 Speaker 04 Never seen it.
2:25:08 Sean Fennessey? Denzel Washington movie.
2:25:11 Sean Fennessey? I think about a man who takes a hospital hostage because they can't get treatment for his son, as I recall. Haven't seen this in a while. Nick Cassavetes, John Cassavetes' son directed the movie. Not a, not a bad drama, but not going in the Hall of Fame. 2002, another film that he directed, wrote and produced, Assassination Tango.
2:25:29 Speaker 04 You watched this?
2:25:30 Sean Fennessey? I did watch this last night. Curious film, some interesting stuff. I didn't see this upon release. Duval was, got married a fourth time to, is it an Argentinian woman? Was Luciano Parrazo and Pedrazo? And he fell in love with the tango.
2:25:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:25:49 Sean Fennessey? And so he wrote this movie about a hitman who finds himself in Argentina and kind of falls in love with the tango. Very curious. He really followed his light.
2:25:59 Speaker 04 He did. You wish at some point the, the two stories intersected.
2:26:06 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
2:26:06 Speaker 04 They just sort of travel down parallel channels. There's the Tango story and there's the Assassin story. And they never, they never cross over.
2:26:15 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
2:26:15 Speaker 04 Which is, I think maybe a just mistake.
2:26:18 Sean Fennessey? It's a, as opposed to The Apostle, which is kind of expansive, but not shaggy. This is a very shaggy movie.
2:26:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:26:25 Sean Fennessey? A lot of scenes where you're like, they're playing it very loose. Um, even the camera is a little shaky when you're watching it. But anyway, I'm glad I saw it. 2000.
2:26:32 Speaker 04 I love that scene where the guy makes a comment, the cop makes a comment about his face. About the.
2:26:39 Sean Fennessey? He goes back, cuts back to him. He's like, what do you say? I'm old?
2:26:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:26:41 Sean Fennessey? Does he got wrinkles? It's great stuff.
2:26:44 Speaker 04 Really good.
2:26:45 Sean Fennessey? Um, 2003 Gods and Generals. Now, I did watch this when it came out.
2:26:50 Speaker 04 This is one I won't watch.
2:26:52 Sean Fennessey? Because you feel this is Ted Turner polishing Confederate history?
2:26:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:26:57 Sean Fennessey? Okay, understood.
2:26:58 Speaker 04 And I don't have time for your revisionist trash.
2:27:03 Sean Fennessey? Mine?
2:27:03 Speaker 04 Not yours. Ted Turner's are the people who made these movies.
2:27:07 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
2:27:07 Speaker 04 I don't want to watch these Confederate losers doing anything.
2:27:11 Sean Fennessey? This is kind of a sequel to Gettysburg. Um, and he plays Robert E. Lee.
2:27:15 Speaker 04 Get the hell out of here.
2:27:16 Sean Fennessey? Okay, it's red. 2003 Secondhand Lions, uh, is a movie about a 13 year old boy who goes to state with two great uncles, played by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine. And Haley Joel Osment plays the 14 year old boy coming off of an extraordinary run of The Sixth Sense and AI.
2:27:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:27:35 Sean Fennessey? And, um, I remember this movie being perfectly charming, perfectly fine.
2:27:38 Speaker 04 It's perfectly charming. There's a scene at the end with Josh Lucas, who I believe is the little boy grown up, right?
2:27:47 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
2:27:47 Speaker 04 And then he's the little boy grown up and he has an interaction with the sheriff, played by Dennis Letts.
2:27:54 Sean Fennessey? No kidding.
2:27:55 Speaker 04 My dad is in the movie Secondhand Lions. There you go. Small part. Deep player.
2:28:00 Sean Fennessey? Wow, did he ever meet Duval?
2:28:01 Speaker 04 He didn't.
2:28:02 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
2:28:02 Speaker 04 He was sad about that.
2:28:04 Sean Fennessey? 2003 Open Range, now we're talking.
2:28:06 Speaker 04 Um. What an ass kicker.
2:28:09 Sean Fennessey? Yeah.
2:28:09 Speaker 04 Just great. I was, ah, just great.
2:28:13 Sean Fennessey? I know. If ever you doubted whether or not Costner had some juice.
2:28:17 Speaker 04 And just, I won't do it for you here, but just go look at the IMDb or the Letterboxd, at the like, two, three things he did before this, or two or three things he did after this. And this sits at the middle. Uh, I mean, it's just a gem. It's just great.
2:28:32 Sean Fennessey? Terrific western, um, you know, late period for both of them in many ways, but the final 40 minutes of this movie is just riveting western action. Um, really well staged. A good Duval performance, playing a similar kind of mode of like, the older hand who's helping the younger hand through whatever the showdown is gonna be. Um, I don't know if it's going in, but it's a darn good movie.
2:28:55 Speaker 04 Yellow.
2:28:56 Sean Fennessey? Okay, yellow. Good idea. 2005 Kicking and Screaming, another movie.
2:29:00 Speaker 04 Haven't seen it.
2:29:00 Sean Fennessey? That I think a lot of people who are listening are like, is Kicking and Screaming going in? Um, this is a soccer comedy, not a Scottish film, starring Will Ferrell. Uh, I think it's fine. To me, this is when the bloom comes off the rose with Ferrell a little bit, you know, like, a little too like, childlike and slapsticky for me. But, uh, I know people like it. I'm gonna say red.
2:29:21 Speaker 04 Okay.
2:29:21 Sean Fennessey? 2005, Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking. I forget, who does Duval play in this? I've certainly seen this movie. You've seen it?
2:29:27 Speaker 04 I've seen it too. I don't, I don't remember Robert Duvall in the movie. Thank you for smoking.
2:29:31 Sean Fennessey? Does he play a key leader in one of the tobacco companies? I feel like he might-
2:29:39 Speaker 04 That sounds right.
2:29:40 Sean Fennessey? If, no, he plays the founder of the Academy for Tobacco Studies. A man named Captain. Um, not going in the Hall of Fame. 2007, Lucky You, on paper should be one of the most important movies in my life.
2:29:55 Sean Fennessey? Set in the world of high stakes poker. Eric Bana plays a character named Huck, clearly somewhat modeled on Huck Seed, who is a, I think modeled on Huck Seed. I assume Huck Seed was playing poker at that time. Why else would you name this character Huck?
2:30:10 Sean Fennessey? Whose father is also a big time poker player, a legendary poker player, played by Robert Duvall. It's like one part romantic drama with Drew Barrymore and one part kind of father, son poker drama. And it's directed by Curtis Hansen and it's loosely based on, um, what's the, what's the Warren Beatty Elizabeth Taylor film? Is The Only Game in Town? Is that what it's called? George Stevens movie from 1970. And, uh, it's like a soft remake of that and it just doesn't, it doesn't work at all. It's a big disappointment.
2:30:43 Speaker 04 Don't know it.
2:30:43 Sean Fennessey? It's out. 2007.
2:30:45 Speaker 04 I think we've skipped Broken Trail.
2:30:47 Sean Fennessey? You're right, we have.
2:30:48 Speaker 04 Made for TNT.
2:30:50 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
2:30:50 Speaker 04 Very good western directed by Walter Hill, uh, Robert Duvall, Thomas Hayden Church. Really good. Really, really good.
2:31:00 Sean Fennessey? Very, very good. Originally conceived as a movie. It's ultimately basically a three hour movie. You can watch it that way. I have it on Blu-ray.
2:31:08 Sean Fennessey? I like it. It was the first movie ever made actually for AMC. The first like official project made and it was quite a big deal made of it and you know, they all got Golden Globe nominations and it was pretty celebrated.
2:31:20 Speaker 04 But if we're giving a western from this period, it's open range.
2:31:23 Sean Fennessey? That's the thing. And what criticism it got was this feels like a little bit of rehashing some of the same territory as Lonesome Dove. 2007, my, my pal James Gray's We Own the Night.
2:31:33 Speaker 04 I think it's my favorite James Gray movie.
2:31:35 Sean Fennessey? It's up there for me too. Um, it's once again playing a kind of patriarch of a family. Is it a couple of cops?
2:31:46 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well.
2:31:47 Sean Fennessey? And he was a cop.
2:31:48 Speaker 04 He's a cop and his son is a cop, but one of the sons is not a cop.
2:31:51 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
2:31:51 Speaker 04 It's the godfather.
2:31:53 Sean Fennessey? In reverse.
2:31:54 Speaker 04 In reverse.
2:31:56 Sean Fennessey? You know, solid Duvall performance. Good work.
2:31:58 Speaker 04 Really good.
2:31:59 Sean Fennessey? Uh, I really like this movie. I don't think it's going in the Hall of Fame. 2008, Four Christmases. You've seen it? Why, why didn't you see it?
2:32:07 Speaker 04 I don't even know what the fuck it is.
2:32:10 Sean Fennessey? The level of detail that you spoke about so many of these other movies that no one will ever see. You had such depth on Show of Force.
2:32:21 Speaker 04 Four Christmases. I mean, the title is not a turn on for me.
2:32:25 Sean Fennessey? Are you in a war against Christmas?
2:32:27 Speaker 04 No, I just, Four Christmases.
2:32:29 Sean Fennessey? I think it means because they go to-
2:32:30 Speaker 04 I'll tell you what, get one Christmas right, then you can make four.
2:32:33 Sean Fennessey? I've been trying all my life. I, uh, I'm not a huge fan of the movie. It's a, it's a, it's a studio comedy starring Vince Vaughn and, uh, Reese Witherspoon.
2:32:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't need to see that.
2:32:43 Sean Fennessey? Robert Duvall plays a, what, you got something against Reese Witherspoon?
2:32:47 Speaker 04 I, I don't have anything against anybody. I just don't need to see it.
2:32:53 Sean Fennessey? You know who likes this movie? Chris Ryan.
2:32:55 Speaker 04 Great.
2:32:57 Sean Fennessey? It's red.
2:32:57 Speaker 04 Did Chris Ryan watch 50 plus Duvall movies? I don't think so.
2:33:03 Sean Fennessey? You're staking your claim once more for third chair to 2009 Crazy Heart. This is a movie that might-
2:33:10 Speaker 04 Just watch. Watched it on the, as I was coming here. Just watched.
2:33:14 Sean Fennessey? In the car?
2:33:15 Speaker 04 Well, basically.
2:33:16 Sean Fennessey? Okay. Uh, I don't know if this movie exists without Robert Duvall, according to Scott Cooper, who was a working actor who met Duvall on the set of Gods and Generals and they struck up a friendship. Duvall brought him under his wing, it sounds like, a little bit, two Virginians and-
2:33:34 Speaker 04 Duvall read all of his scripts, just really mentored Scott Cooper.
2:33:38 Sean Fennessey? And Crazy Heart, in a lot of ways, is a soft remake of Tender Mercies. And so he comes on in a part and to, to support him in this film. Jeff Bridges wins an Academy Award for his role as Bad Blake, which is, you know, I, Scott Cooper seems like a nice guy whose movies I never totally click with, to be honest with you. Couple of them here and there I enjoy, but I always feel like they're a little bit overwrought. But he always gets good performances out of his actors. Um, and he gets them in this movie.
2:34:04 Speaker 04 Both terrific in this.
2:34:04 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. Um, if it were Jeff Bridges' Hall of Fame, it definitely would be going in, but it's not. 2009, The Road.
2:34:11 Speaker 04 Didn't see it.
2:34:12 Sean Fennessey? Really?
2:34:12 Speaker 04 Haven't seen it.
2:34:13 Sean Fennessey? Who are you out on Cormac McCarthy? You care?
2:34:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's not, he's not the top of my pyramid, but sure, I care.
2:34:23 Sean Fennessey? You want to do the top of your pyramid, three hours into this episode?
2:34:25 Speaker 04 I don't.
2:34:26 Sean Fennessey? Okay, uh, the road, he plays the old man, so that's a, you know, modest part.
2:34:30 Speaker 04 The truth is, we're starting now to get into old man territory and, and he just, there's less he can physically do.
2:34:40 Sean Fennessey? Yes.
2:34:41 Speaker 04 He hurt himself on a horse while they were shooting open range. He fell off a horse and hurt himself. And he was mad and he was embarrassed and he didn't want to ride horses so much anymore. And just what you come up, come across is aging, right?
2:34:59 Sean Fennessey? It's a 72 year old man, making open range.
2:35:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:35:01 Sean Fennessey? So, uh, but he really is with Crazy Heart, you start to feel, right?
2:35:05 Speaker 04 I mean, he's, what is he, 80 years old when he makes Crazy Heart?
2:35:09 Sean Fennessey? Just about 78, maybe 79. Get Low is an interesting movie, though. Have you seen that one?
2:35:14 Speaker 04 I saw it this morning.
2:35:15 Sean Fennessey? Okay, pretty good.
2:35:16 Speaker 04 I liked it.
2:35:16 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, I liked it too. I think if you were going to make a case for a late period film, this might be the one you would pick.
2:35:22 Speaker 04 I think it's good. I, I wish it had stuck to the stoic tone. It strikes at the beginning of the movie, throughout the movie.
2:35:30 Sean Fennessey? It's a little goofy.
2:35:31 Speaker 04 It gets a little, uh, and a little, and a little saccharine toward the end. But goddamn, he's great. Bill Murray's great. Sissy Spacek, I always make the case on these podcasts that she's an underrated actress. She's great in the film. Yeah, I liked Get Low quite a bit.
2:35:47 Sean Fennessey? Okay, we'll give Get Low a yellow. Seven Days in Utopia, I haven't seen.
2:35:51 Speaker 04 Didn't see it.
2:35:52 Sean Fennessey? Well, we're gonna skip right over that one. Jane Mansfield's Car.
2:35:55 Speaker 04 Didn't see it.
2:35:55 Sean Fennessey? This is a Billy Bob Thornton film.
2:35:59 Sean Fennessey? Less acclaimed than some of his previous work, but, uh, once again, Duval plays patriarch, Jim Caldwell, I saw this in 2012, I don't have a strong memory of it. I do have a strong memory of seeing Jack Reacher in, in theaters.
2:36:12 Speaker 04 Didn't see it. Haven't seen it.
2:36:14 Sean Fennessey? It's certainly not going in the Robert Duvall Hall of Fame. Kind of an entertaining movie, though.
2:36:17 Speaker 04 I think we skip Hemingway and Gelhorn, which was made for HBO with Clive Owen and...
2:36:23 Sean Fennessey? Who does he play?
2:36:24 Speaker 04 Apparently it's a very small part, like maybe total...
2:36:28 Sean Fennessey? He's listed as Russian general, to your point about being asked by Russian characters.
2:36:34 Sean Fennessey? 2014, A Night in Old Mexico.
2:36:37 Speaker 04 Haven't seen it.
2:36:39 Sean Fennessey? What is a night in Old Mexico? Oh, yes. Okay.
2:36:41 Speaker 04 He has a night in Old Mexico.
2:36:43 Sean Fennessey? He sure does. A financially strapped but proud senior citizen and his estranged grandson find themselves targeted by drug dealers in search of a missing money bag. Hate when that happens. Um, that's not going in. 2014, The Judge. You watched this?
2:36:56 Speaker 04 I did. I had not seen it. I watched it. Uh, there are good things about The Judge. Movies, Hollywood movies at some point entered into a period where I, I, I got skeptical of a lot of Hollywood filmmaking, a lot of tropes of Hollywood filmmaking, but there's good stuff inside The Judge. Uh, I think it's one of my favorite Robert Downey Jr. performances. I really do.
2:37:27 Sean Fennessey? Okay.
2:37:27 Speaker 04 I think Mr. Duval brings out the best in Robert Downey Jr. There are a couple of scenes they have in this movie, uh, when it gets really specific, what's happened between these two characters and they're able to, they're, they're not just archetypes. They're able to access real, uh, information, specific information about who these people are, where they've come from, what they want, what they wanted, how they were disappointed. They're really effective scenes. Uh, I like that Duval was nominated for this movie, uh, because it doesn't feel like just, oh, let's give the old man another nomination. I mean, I think he's really doing something. I think he's giving a real performance here.
2:38:11 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. I wish the movie itself was a little bit better.
2:38:13 Speaker 04 Well, the, the, the courtroom stuff is just, I was like, come on, have you ever spent 30 minutes in a courtroom? If you have, you know, this is all bullshit.
2:38:22 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, it's very dopey. Um, it, it, a little bit of a letdown too, because this was the movie that Duke Downey basically got made. That was like a passion project in the aftermath of so much Marvel success. And it was like this? You know, like he didn't, he hasn't really made a lot of good movies, real movies, non IP movies in the last 20 years. This is one of the precious few and it's okay.
2:38:45 Speaker 04 He's good in the film. I love Vera Farmiga. Uh, Vincent D'Onofrio, very good.
2:38:53 Speaker 04 But oh my God, Jeremy Strong, the playing the autistic character is such a mistake, such a misfire.
2:39:03 Sean Fennessey? These things keep happening.
2:39:04 Speaker 04 Narratively, it's real misfire.
2:39:07 Sean Fennessey? Yeah. 2015, he wrote and directed a film called Wild Horses, which I've not seen.
2:39:11 Speaker 04 Haven't seen it.
2:39:12 Sean Fennessey? Well, we can't speak to it.
2:39:13 Speaker 04 That's a shame.
2:39:14 Sean Fennessey? I haven't seen Indubious Battle either.
2:39:16 Speaker 04 I haven't seen it.
2:39:18 Sean Fennessey? So that's not going to go in. 2018 Widows, you just saw it for the first time.
2:39:21 Speaker 04 I did. My wife is in it. We watched it for the first time.
2:39:24 Sean Fennessey? What'd you think of Duval?
2:39:26 Speaker 04 I thought he was good.
2:39:27 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, couple of scenes, powerful power broker in Chicago, right?
2:39:31 Speaker 04 Powerful old guy.
2:39:33 Sean Fennessey? Not going in the Hall of Fame.
2:39:34 Speaker 04 No.
2:39:35 Sean Fennessey? Twelve Mighty Orphans, have you seen this film?
2:39:37 Speaker 04 I haven't.
2:39:38 Sean Fennessey? I watched this. Pretty sure I watched this during COVID. It's about a football team. It is about a football team. Luke Wilson plays a football coach in Texas during the Great Depression, who inspires and gets his team into shape and they win in exciting and inspiring fashion.
2:39:57 Speaker 04 Right.
2:39:58 Sean Fennessey? Not going in.
2:40:01 Sean Fennessey? 2022 Hustle.
2:40:03 Speaker 04 Didn't see it.
2:40:04 Sean Fennessey? Another sports movie, an Adam Sandler drama that I kind of like about an NBA scout.
2:40:09 Speaker 04 I would see it. I just ran out of time. I saw a lot.
2:40:13 Sean Fennessey? You did the work. His last feature performance is in The Pale Blue Eye.
2:40:18 Speaker 04 I haven't seen it.
2:40:18 Sean Fennessey? Which is Scott Cooper's adaptation of, not an, I don't know if it's an adaptation. It's a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe's life. I think it was based on a novel that is sort of a detective movie featuring Edgar Allan Poe. Christian Bale plays the part. Duval plays Jean Pepe.
2:40:35 Sean Fennessey? It's fine. It's nice to see him on screen at this stage of his life. You know, he's giving a very quiet, croaky performance. It's not going in the Hall of Fame. Let's do some revisiting where we're at, okay?
2:40:46 Speaker 04 I can't wait. Are people still listening?
2:40:49 Sean Fennessey? I'm listening to you.
2:40:52 Sean Fennessey? We have one, two, three, four, five, two, four, six, eight greens. Those greens are To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, one and two, Network, Apocalypse Now, The Great Santini, Tender Mercies, Lonesome Dove, and The Apostle.
2:41:07 Speaker 04 Solid.
2:41:08 Sean Fennessey? Here are the yellows. The Rain People, THX 1138, Tomorrow, The Outfit, Open Range, and Get Low. I feel this could be very easily done by simply putting The Outfit and Tomorrow into the Hall of Fame.
2:41:25 Speaker 04 Read it to me if that's the case.
2:41:28 Sean Fennessey? To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, Tomorrow, The Outfit, Network, Apocalypse Now, The Great Santini, Tender Mercies, Lonesome Dove, and The Apostle. Now, if you want to lean into Get Low or Open Range to get something from the 2000s in there, we can do that.
2:41:46 Speaker 04 I'm very comfortable with that Hall of Fame, and I'm gonna take Open Range as my blue.
2:41:52 Sean Fennessey? Wow. Well, let me just take a quick look at what I want to do blue-wise. There might be something here that I enjoy.
2:42:01 Sean Fennessey? Hmm.
2:42:04 Sean Fennessey? This is when I don't, when I'm not speaking, you have to vamp. This is something you have to learn as the third chair.
2:42:08 Speaker 04 Let me tell you, the traffic out there was really bad.
2:42:11 Sean Fennessey? You could do better than that.
2:42:11 Speaker 04 There was an accident on the 101.
2:42:13 Sean Fennessey? For fuck's sake.
2:42:16 Sean Fennessey? Can't believe you'd do this to me.
2:42:17 Speaker 04 Ah, no, I can vamp, absolutely. You kidding? Oh, Robert Duvall. He was awfully good. I loved him. I did love him. I wonder if I would have liked him personally. He did have a, did have a cantankerous side, I'm told.
2:42:32 Sean Fennessey? I'll take THX 1138 as my blue.
2:42:35 Speaker 04 If you had taken Open Range, I would have taken THX. I think that's a great.
2:42:40 Sean Fennessey? What a healthy set of decisions. So we'll, guys, we'll, we'll green Tomorrow and The Outfit, and we've completed after two and a half hours.
2:42:47 Speaker 04 One more time, let's hear it.
2:42:49 Sean Fennessey? The Greens.
2:42:50 Speaker 04 Let's, let's, what's the Robert Duvall Hall of Fame?
2:42:54 Sean Fennessey? From 1962 to Kill a Mockingbird, from 72 and 74, The Godfather I and II and III, from 1973 Tomorrow, from 1973 The Outfit, from 1976 Network, from 1979 Apocalypse Now, from 1979 The Great Santini, from 1983 Tender Mercies, from 1989 Lonesome Dove, even though it's TV, from 1997 The Apostle. The blue, for me, is THX 1138, and for you?
2:43:23 Speaker 04 Open range.
2:43:25 Sean Fennessey? We've done it.
2:43:26 Speaker 04 We've done it, by God. By God, we've done it.
2:43:30 Sean Fennessey? That was, that was a big one. That was a really large, that was a lot of work.
2:43:34 Speaker 04 I, I'm not gonna be the guy that gets called whenever the old guy dies. Because there's a thing that does happen. The 70s movies are better than the 80s movies, and the 80s movies are better than the 90s movies, and the 90s movies are better than the, than the 21st century, 22nd, 23rd century, is it?
2:43:53 Sean Fennessey? Let's go back to the 80s movies are better than the 90s movies.
2:43:56 Speaker 04 Pretty much across the board.
2:43:58 Sean Fennessey? Okay, well, on that, we shall part. Tracy Lutz, thank you.
2:44:04 Speaker 04 John Finacy.
2:44:05 Sean Fennessey? Yeah, incredible amount of work you put into this.
2:44:07 Speaker 04 That's, you know, this is my job, man. This is my job. I take my responsibilities as professional podcaster and third chair of the Big Pick Podcast very seriously.
2:44:19 Sean Fennessey? Uh huh.
2:44:21 Sean Fennessey? You think you'll write another play?
2:44:23 Speaker 04 Why would I do that?
2:44:26 Sean Fennessey? I'd like to read it.
2:44:27 Speaker 04 That's hard.
2:44:29 Sean Fennessey? You know, writing is hard. It is hard.
2:44:31 Speaker 04 Writing is really hard.
2:44:32 Sean Fennessey? Really hard, yeah. Well, I'd like to say thanks to Jack Sanders for, uh, his work as producer on this show. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh and Sarah Reddy for being in here today, helping us get this episode off the ground. You know, I, I think what's gonna happen is later this week, Chris Ryan and I are gonna talk about Mortal Kombat 2: Obsession, Hokum, and the Future of Horror. Do you know what any of those things are?
2:44:52 Speaker 04 Uh, I know that Mortal Kombat 2 is a sequel to a movie based on a video game.
2:45:00 Sean Fennessey? Oh, sounds like you've been boning up. You want to join us?
2:45:04 Speaker 04 And you're gonna talk about, what was the second part of that?
2:45:06 Sean Fennessey? Obsession, not the Brian De Palma film starring Cliff Robertson.
2:45:11 Speaker 04 Hocum. Hocum is Adam Scott.
2:45:14 Sean Fennessey? That's right. I've seen it.
2:45:16 Speaker 04 Obsession is, oh, obsession is about the guy who makes the, the horror movie about the guy who, who makes the deal with the devil that the girl's gonna fall in love with him.
2:45:25 Sean Fennessey? See, he's been practicing. He's been thinking hard. All you gotta do is move to LA and quit all your other stuff and probably leave your family. What do you think?
2:45:34 Speaker 04 Uh, well, uh.
2:45:36 Sean Fennessey? We'll talk.
2:45:36 Speaker 04 We'll talk.
2:45:38 Sean Fennessey? See you soon.
2:45:58 Speaker 02 This is US Bank's Cozy Cash Formations with your chief financial playmaker, Fernando Mendoza.
2:46:04 Speaker 05 You are worthy of financial security. Budgeting is not restriction, it's freedom. You are smart. You are capable. You are giving your money a purpose. You are learning the language of saving, of growing. Now streaming.
2:46:25 Speaker 02 Member FDIC, copyright 2026 US Bank.
2:46:28 Speaker 04 This episode is brought to by Whole Foods Market. Fall is here and Whole Foods Market has everything you need for cozy meals, seasonal treats, and easy entertaining. Elevate your hearty dishes with tasty bone-in beef short ribs or New York strip steaks with no added growth hormones or antibiotics. And as the fall evenings draw in, why not get ahead of cold season with immunity shots, herbal teas, lozenges, and supplements? Make sure you look for sales throughout the month. Shop fall flavors with higher standards at Whole Foods Market.
Previous The Physical Media High Council Reconvenes! Next The 10 Best Horror Movies of the Year … So Far. Plus: The New Scary Movie Royalty, and ‘Obsession,’ With Curry Barker! Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated