Cop

During the 1980’s, actor James Woods had a fantastic run of diverse, low-budget genre films that included Salvador (1986), Best Seller (1987), True Believer (1989), and Cop (1988), perhaps the most under-appreciated one of them all. It is a fast and loose adaptation of James Ellroy’s crime novel Blood on the Moon and features Woods playing another abrasive, unlikable character but it is the actor’s riveting performance that keeps us invested in the film. Unfortunately, not many people thought so as they were probably put off by the film’s rather negative view of women. Cop was given a limited release and what critics saw it were not impressed. Yet, it is Woods’ uncompromising performance, matched by writer/director James B. Harris’ willingness to fully immerse us in a homicide detective’s grim world that makes this a compelling film.


We meet Lloyd Hopkins (James Woods) in his element – going through several open cases with a clueless underling. In a matter of minutes he has told his subordinate what to do on each of them before answering a call about a homicide. He’s the first to arrive on the scene and Harris sets quite a tense mood as we don’t know what Hopkins is going to find. We dread that it’s going to be something gruesome and the film doesn’t disappoint: a woman has been brutally murdered. We see Hopkins methodically look around for clues and Woods shows how quickly this case has gotten a hold on his character. The actor also shows Hopkins thinking about what he’s seen and how he’s already contemplating his next move.

Harris juxtaposes this grim scene with a lighter moment as Hopkins returns home to say goodnight to his wise-beyond-her-years eight-year-old little girl (she can instantly tell he’s had a bad day). Quite surprisingly, he doesn’t sugarcoat things, telling the child (Vicki Wauchope) that the world is a “shit storm” and that she has to “develop claws to fight it.” She begs him to tell her a bedtime story and he gleefully tells her about a series of drug robberies he helped bust like he was telling her a child’s fairy tale. At one point she even says, “Tell me how you got the scumbag, daddy.” It’s a hilariously darkly comic scene that is sweet and disturbing simultaneously. When Hopkins’ wife (Jan McGill) chastises him for corrupting their child, he goes on an impressive rant about how he’s preparing her for the harsh, cruel world full of disappointment and where “innocence kills” as he puts it so succinctly. She replies with what most of us are probably thinking, “Lloyd, I think you’re a very sick man.” Hopkins is obviously a cop that takes his work home with him and one has to kind of admire his decision not to sugarcoat things for his daughter but on the other hand maybe he could’ve waited a couple of years.

After his wife goes off in disgust, Hopkins gets a call about a robbery suspect. He enlists the help of his old partner Dutch (Charles Durning) and is absolutely giddy at the prospect of busting a crook rather than stay home. He’s one of those guys obsessed with his work. However, ethics aren’t high on the man’s list of virtues as he’s not above having sex with women he meets on cases he’s investigating. Everything, including his family, who leaves him, takes a backseat to catching a serial killer. The film shows Hopkins doing the legwork required – tracking down leads, questioning known associates, analyzing evidence, going through unsolved cases, and so on. He finally gets a break, finding a poem sent to the murder victim from the killer that implies he’s killed before. However, Hopkins’ boss (Raymond J. Barry) isn’t convinced about his serial killer theory and rightly so as all the detective has is a gut feeling and a pretty wild but convincing theory but he’s going to need some hard evidence. Hopkins’ research leads him to the owner (Lesley Ann Warren) of a feminist bookstore. She seems standoffish at first but once the detective works his charms he’s taking her to a party at Dutch’s house, which is full of cops. She ends becoming an integral component in the case and to uncovering the identity of the killer.

Woods brings his trademark intensity to the role. Hopkins is someone who only cares about what people can do for him. He uses both men and women – the former to help him and the latter for sex. For example, he uses Dutch to grease the political wheels with his clout and doesn’t give him anything back in return except for trouble from their boss. Hopkins is estranged from his wife and it becomes readily apparent that all he has is his work and that doesn’t seem to bother him in the least. For example, he hardly reacts to his family leaving him and quickly dives back into the case he’s investigating. Ever the fearless actor, Woods doesn’t shy away from Hopkins’ unsavory aspects but really tries to show us what motivates this guy. He’s just as obsessed with women as the serial killer only he wants to protect them whereas the killer wants to destroy them. It is this aspect that is perhaps the most troubling thing about Cop – its negative portrayal of women. For example, it takes Lesley Ann Warren’s strong feminist character and by the end reduces her to a teary victim. Women like his wife are merely obstacles that get in Hopkins’ way or there to be used, which, in some respects, makes him no better than the killer.

Not surprisingly, Cop received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and wrote, “They might think this is simply a violent, sick, contrived exploitation picture, and that would certainly be an accurate description of its surfaces. But Woods operates in this movie almost as if he were writing his own footnotes. He uses his personality, his voice and his quirky sense of humor to undermine the material and comment on it, until Cop becomes an essay on this whole genre of movie.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised James Wood’s performance: “Far and away the best thing about it is Mr. Woods, who served as co-producer and demonstrates a clear understanding of what makes great movie detectives great. Even in less-than-sparkling surroundings, he can talk tough with the best of them.” The London Times’ David Robinson wrote, “The script is taut and sharp and the casting exemplary.”

Newsweek magazine’s Jack Kroll wrote, “But Cop's worst malefaction is a ‘feminist’ character played by Lesley Ann Warren. Poor Warren, a stylish, witty actress, can do nothing at all with what just be the most embarrassingly inane female character in recent screen history.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Rick Groen wrote, “Speaking of cheap tricks, what about that serial killer stuff? Well, stalled in second gear, the plot gets pushed forward by a helpful gang of wild coincidences. And when even that fails, it simply lumbers on in logic-defying lurches.”

One has to admire Harris and Woods for refusing to water down Hopkins one iota. He’s a prickly, confident amoral cop who is also smart and driven. Harris got his start producing films for a young Stanley Kubrick and applies the no-nonsense approach of those early films to Cop. His meat and potatoes style of direction works well with this stripped-down police procedural and this includes the equally direct (and generic) title of the film. What could have been a standard thriller is transformed into a study about obsession, both the killer and the cop pursuing him. Harris’ screenplay really captures how one imagines cops talk and act around each other in a way that feels authentic. Cop delves into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles with unflinching honesty – think of this as the west coast answer to Sidney Lumet’s New York City police procedurals. Harris and Woods have created an engrossing thriller about twisted obsession and its destructive effects. What could have been a typical loose cannon cop character is transformed into something else by Woods who is not afraid to go to dark places and make no excuses for a flawed character that takes the Dirty Harry archetype to extremes. Cop is a grimy B-movie that is refreshingly free of compromise, right down to a memorable punchline ending during the climactic showdown between Hopkins and the killer that helps elevate it from most generic thrillers.

John Carpenter Week: Vampires

With his self-professed love for westerns and his reputation for making legendary horror films during the 1970s and 1980s, anticipation was high when it was announced that John Carpenter would be directing a western-flavored vampire film. Based loosely on John Steakley’s novel of the same name, Vampires (1998) tears down and stomps all over the brooding gothic bloodsucker cliché in order to portray them as vicious killers hunted by men who aren’t that much better. Even though the film takes place in a contemporary setting – the American southwest – it looks and feels like a western right down to James Woods as a no-nonsense gunslinger-type vampire hunter. Vampires turned out to be one of Carpenter’s most commercially successful films in years despite the mixed critical reaction. To be fair, the film has its flaws, as a lot of later of his work does, but Woods’ ferocious performance, unapologetic politically incorrectness and the use of vampirism to expose the hypocrisy of organized religion, makes Vampires an entertaining horror film.


The film starts off promisingly as Carpenter’s brooding score plays over a montage of desolate New Mexico landscapes before the camera swoops over an abandoned farmhouse. Observing it from afar is Jack Crow (James Woods) and his right-hand man Montoya (Daniel Baldwin). They assess the situation and deduce that the house is a nest for vampires. Carpenter’s heavy, twangy spaghetti western-flavored score kicks in as Jack and his group of badass vampire hunters move in. The director sets just the right no-nonsense tone as we see this heavily armed motley crew get ready to wipe out a nest of bloodsuckers like an exterminator would take out a hive of troublesome insects.

The build up and then actual extermination of said nest has a The Wild Bunch (1969) by way of Walter Hill vibe to it as Carpenter shows professional men of action plying their trade. This scene not only establishes Jack and his team’s tough guy credentials but also presents the vampires as very strong, almost feral creatures. There is nothing elegant or romantic about these bloodsuckers. More importantly, we also see the efficient way Team Crow works: one by one the vampires are dragged out into sunlight where they burst into flames. In the end, nine vamps, or goons, as they are referred to by Jack, are destroyed but they don’t find the master, the leader who always protects its nest.

Team Crow not only works hard but they also play hard, taking over a motel loaded up with alcohol and hookers. Yet the lack of a master still gnaws away at Jack, that is, until a beautiful prostitute named Katrina (Sheryl Lee) distracts him with an invitation for sex. While he gets her a beer she waits for him in his room. However, a master vampire is already waiting in what is probably the film’s most striking visual as the camera pans up to show the bloodsucker hovering at the height of the ceiling, unbeknownst to Katrina. He quickly seduces and bites her on the inner thigh in a very sexually-charged scene. The master then proceeds to crash the party and kill Jack’s entire team. His assault starts off promisingly as he brutally splits one hapless vampire hunter (Mark Boone Jr.) in half! But then Carpenter makes the unconventional choice of depicting the hotel room massacre through a series of dissolves, which robs the sequence of its visceral impact. We are supposed to be awed by this master’s power as he easily dispatches Team Crow but much more of an impact could have come from quick edits and hand-held camerawork to convey the chaos of the scene, not a montage of dissolves which lessens the shock of the vampire’s attack.

Fortunately, Carpenter recovers in the next scene as Jack and Montoya with Katrina in tow make a break for it in a pick-up truck. Despite flooring the accelerator, the master vampire amazingly catches up to them with scary ferocity. However, they manage to distract him, by shooting him in the face, long enough to get away. Jack decides to keep Katrina around because now that she’s been bitten by a master she will develop a telepathic link with him which will allow them to find him. More troubling, however, is that the vampire knew who Jack was. Someone must’ve set them up, but who?

Backed by the Vatican no less, Jack meets with his superior, Cardinal Alba (Maximilian Schell) who assigns him church archivist Father Adam Guiteau (Tim Guinee), a well-intentioned if not hopelessly inexperienced priest. Father Adam tells Jack that the master who wiped out Team Crow is named Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), a 600-year-old vampire – the first and most powerful, accidentally created by the Catholic Church.

Jack grudgingly takes Father Adam along and quickly lays down the law with the young priest as he gives him a crash course in vampires: “First of all, they’re not romantic. It’s not like they’re a bunch of fags hopping around in rented formal wear and seducing everybody in sight with cheesy Euro-trash accents. Forget whatever you’ve seen in movies.” This doesn’t just apply to Father Adam but to the audience as well. Carpenter is saying that the bloodsuckers in Vampires aren’t going to be the angst-ridden vampires we see in films like Interview with a Vampire (1994) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Woods delivers this monologue with the consummate skill of a pro but with the enthusiasm of an actor having fun with the role as he can’t resist adding a little zinger in the end which causes Father Adam to get flustered. Being a fan of both Woods and Carpenter for years, this is a dream pairing and it is great to see the actor playing a man of action. Woods is known for playing pragmatic protagonists and his portrayal of Jack Crow is a great addition to Carpenter’s roster of uncompromising heroes.

James Woods plays Jack Crow as a tough-as-nails vampire hunter not above beheading and burying his slaughtered teammates and the hookers that were unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire. Carpenter uses the dissolve montage technique here again only much more effectively. And to show what a tough guy Jack truly is, he torches the motel for good measure and Woods looks cool as he fulfills and tried and true action film cliché of walking away from a gigantic explosion. Woods displays intense steely-eyed determination, especially after his team is killed as he makes it his mission to find out why it happened and track down the vampire responsible.

Carpenter also sets up the mercurial Howard Hawksian relationship between Jack and Montoya who doesn’t approve of his boss burying the team on his own. You can see Carpenter trying to set up the same kind volatile thing that we saw in previous male-dominated films like The Thing (1982) and They Live (1988) but he’s just not as successful here because in those films you really felt that those guys were a legitimate threat to each other. In Vampires, you never get the impression that Montoya would really truly challenge Jack and so their friction, at times, feels forced, or in one scene where they are actually about to get into it, Carpenter pulls things back. Daniel Baldwin brings a beefy physicality to the role of Montoya and acts a decent foil to Woods’ hard-nosed head vampire slayer. He has the look and demeanor of a classic Hollywood tough guy.

Tim Guinee is also well cast as the by-the-book Father Adam who attempts (not too successfully) to keep Jack in line. He has a good scene with Woods in a hotel bathroom where Jack forces Father Adam to reveal Valek’s true intentions. He is looking for an ancient relic known as the Cross of Berziers that will allow him, through a ritual, to live in the daylight. Carpenter is so good at filming scenes with expositional dialogue and this is because of good writing and the right actor saying the words (think of Donald Pleasence in Halloween or Dennis Dun in Big Trouble in Little China). Guinee does a wonderful job imparting this crucial information in an engaging way that takes us deeper into the film’s mythos.

Carpenter is less successful at depicting the relationship that develops between Montoya and Katrina. It starts off very antagonistic as he views her as nothing more than a tool, an end towards a means, but I just don’t buy how, over time, he begins to care for her. This aspect of the film is one of the things that makes it unapologetically politically incorrect. Katrina is thrown around by Jack and Montoya like a rag doll. When Montoya and her take refuge in a hotel, he bounds and gags her naked to a bed. I understand the restraints – so she doesn’t escape – but naked? I certainly don’t have a problem with Sheryl Lee’s gorgeous body but it doesn’t make much sense. The actress doesn’t have much to do initially as she gets slapped around by Woods and Baldwin, but once Katrina develops a telepathic link with Valek she becomes an important conduit of information. However, it’s not until the climactic showdown when Katrina finally becomes a vampire that Lee gets to cut loose and have some fun with the role.

Nine days after John Steakley submitted his book Vampire$ to his publisher, the film rights were sold in January 1990. Several directors were attached to the project over the years where it languished John Carpenter was approached. He had just finished making Escape from L.A. (1996) and was contemplating quitting the movie business for a while because “it stopped being fun.” However, Largo Entertainment offered him with the project. They had two screenplays, one written by Don Jakoby and the other by Dan Mazur. Carpenter took the book, the two scripts and read them. Afterwards, he thought, “it’s going to be set in the American Southwest and it’s a Western – Howard Hawks.” For years, he had thought about vampire films but never wanted to make one because he didn’t think there was a new way to do it: “They’re just such generic creatures, and they’ve been done so many times.” He was drawn to the western elements in Steakley’s novel: “I’ve always loved westerns and one of the reasons I’m doing this movie is that this is the closest I’ve come to being able to do a western.” He ended up combining the two scripts, utilizing elements from both, a little bit from the book, and some of his own stuff.

In casting Team Crow, producer Sandy King “tried to cast men who have a certain kind of charisma.” Actor James Woods concurred: “These are really dangerous vampires, and you like to know that they’re hiring real men for the parts – not the sort of ‘Hollywood’ version of men out hunting vampires.” He was drawn to the film because it gave him the opportunity to play an action hero. When the actor accepted the role, he told Carpenter, “I want to make this hero the baddest guy ever.” Woods has a reputation for being difficult to work with but Carpenter had an agreement with him that he could improvise a take if he did another one as it was written in the script. Carpenter had not seen Daniel Baldwin’s television work (he had been on Homicide: Life on the Street) but when they met, he “loved his whole nature and personality.” The director cast Sheryl Lee based on her work on Twin Peaks while Thomas Ian Griffith was chosen based on several action films he had done, including one called Excessive Force (1993).

The production shot on location in New Mexico over eight weeks and utilized authentic pueblos, a 200-year-old mission and a small western town where the filmmakers took over a square city block to build an old adobe prison. Production designer Tomas Walsh and his team built the interiors of the farmhouse, jail, hotel, motel, and the jail elevator shaft on soundstages at Garson Studios in Santa Fe.

Carpenter’s keen visual sense is still as strong as ever in Vampires. There’s a great shot of Valek and seven master vampires coming out of the ground, like zombies, at dusk. The lighting and Carpenter’s minimalist score create just the right atmosphere of dread. For this scene, the actors were buried under about a foot of sand and had to wait until they were called to rise from their graves. Stunt coordinator Jeff Imada devised a breathing system whereby each actor used a small box placed over their mouth to provide a short supply of air as they waited to be called to rise from the ground.

Not surprisingly, Vampires was not well-received by critics – par for the course for a Carpenter film. In his review for The New York Times, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote, “ridiculous without being awful enough to be hilarious, Vampires is chock full of exhausted lines.” USA Today gave the film one-and-a-half stars and wrote, “making a cowboy yarn should mean more than just setting the carnage amid adobe buildings.” In his review for the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan wrote, “the story itself can’t seem to decide whether it’s Rio Bravo or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, “The movie is not scary, and the plot is just one gory showdown after another.” Sight and Sound magazine’s Kim Newman addressed the film’s treatment of women: “The treatment of women – we only see whores and vampires, and the ‘heroine’ gets to be both – is especially reprehensible.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C-“ rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “After a promising opening … this gummy mix of fake-Catholic mumbo jumbo and teeth-in-neck horror goes limp.” The lone dissenting voice came from the Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey who gave it three out of four stars. He said it was, “deliciously twisted throughout, adding some fresh kinks to a well-worn old movie fetish.”

Vampires expertly cruises towards the inevitable showdown between Jack and Valek where we find out just how culpable and complicit the Church is in all of this. Towards the end it feels almost like Carpenter ran out of steam or money or both as the finale is strangely anticlimactic. He leaves the antagonistic relationship between Jack and Montoya tantalizingly unresolved in a tribute to Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), begging for a sequel that was eventually made but without Carpenter’s direct involvement and with it the film’s stars as well. Vampires is certainly not without its flaws and not up to par with his classic films from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but the film does have its merits. Over the years I enjoy it more with every subsequent viewing.

 

Best Seller

Best Seller (1987) is an example of an odd convergence of talent with a screenplay penned by B-movie schlockmeister Larry (It’s Alive) Cohen, directed by journeyman crime film director John (Rolling Thunder) Flynn, and starring A-list talent like James Woods and Brian Dennehy. The key to enjoying this film is if you can swallow Cohen’s pulpy B-movie nonsense: a slick, corporate hitman convinces a hard-boiled police detective, and sometimes author, to write his memoirs. Once you get past this rather odd premise, Best Seller is quite enjoyable to watch, especially the interplay between the two lead actors who do their best to sell the film’s set-up.

Flynn’s no-nonsense, self-assured direction quickly establishes itself in the film’s prologue set in Los Angeles circa 1972 with an ill-fated bank heist. There are some nice touches in this sequence, like the lone bum sleeping on the steps of the building that is about to be robbed, and all of the crooks wearing Richard Nixon masks (anticipating the Ex-Presidents in Point Break). A cop named Dennis Meechum (Brian Dennehy) barely survives the heist (although, a couple of his fellow officers aren’t so lucky) and goes on to write a best-selling book about the incident.

Fifteen years later, Meechum has graduated to undercover work, despite being a high-profile author in his spare time (?!), busting bad guys. During one case he’s almost killed if not for the last minute intervention by an enigmatic stranger. We are given a little insight into this cop. He’s a widower raising a teenage daughter (Allison Balson), facing lots of unpaid bills, and has missed the last four deadlines on his latest book. He’s not quite the burn-out cop that Nick Nolte was known for playing in the 1980s but he’s stuck in a rut.

Meechum finally meets the mystery man known as Cleve (James Woods) who proceeds to pitch an idea for a new book about his life and the dirty work he did for tycoon David Madlock (David Shenar) and his company Kappa International. During one of their meetings, Cleve lays it all out for a skeptical Meechum: “Corporations deal in two things, period: assets and liabilities. I removed the liabilities and I provided some assets.” It turns out that Cleve was in on the bank heist back in ’72 and helped Madlock get his start. However, he’s had a falling out with the businessman and wants to expose his corrupt enterprise with Meechum’s help. And so, Cleve and Meechum form an uneasy partnership that is volatile at best as the hitman attempts to back-up his wild claims to the understandably wary cop.

James Woods had quite a run in the ‘80s with intense performances in films like Salvador (1986), Cop (1987) and True Believer (1989). He’s in fine form here as an ultra-confident killer. His best moments are when he tries to convince Brian Dennehy’s cop of some of the people he murdered for Kappa International. Woods brings his customary intensity to these scenes and a certain reptilian charm as a corporate assassin. Cleve really isn’t a nice guy – in fact’s he’s an arrogant prick – but Woods manages to get us to like him anyways because the actor is so charismatic in his own right.

Woods plays well off of Dennehy’s variation of the cop he portrayed in F/X (1986). He’s not as rumpled and still has his issues but there’s the same sharp intellect. Meechum plans to string Cleve along until he gives him enough evidence to bust him and get some much deserved payback for the ’72 bank job. While Woods is all wiry intensity, Dennehy is a solid, imposing figure with his stocky figure. Most of the film’s best scenes involve watching these two top notch actors bounce off each other.

This is evident in a scene where Cleve tries to pick up a woman at a bar and gets into it with her date only for the guy to be put in his place by Meechum. Just one look by Dennehy makes the man back down. I know I wouldn’t want to mess with someone like Dennehy. Cleve demonstrates his considerable willpower (and threshold for pain) and, in doing so, reveals a part of his past that sets off Meechum. The tension between the two characters in this scene is tangible and ups the ante in their relationship.

Cleve’s crusade against his former corporate handlers is Larry Cohen’s blatant attack on corporate greed so prevalent in the “Greed is good” decade. Cohen wrote the screenplay, reportedly based loosely on Los Angeles cop Joseph Wambaugh, who tried to remain on the police force after several of his novels became best-sellers, in 1981 for Columbia Pictures but it was stuck in development hell due to a change in management. Orion Pictures eventually picked it up. Flynn rewrote Cohen’s script but was unable to get credit because he failed to prove to the Writers Guild of America that he had written 51% of it. The film was originally called Hard Cover but was changed to Best Seller in post-production as the former title didn’t test well with preview audiences. At the time of the film’s release, Cohen said, “I think the idea of being a killer for a major corporation was a little bizarre seven years ago. But time has caught up with the story when we’re reading all these stories about corruption in big business and corruption in Wall Street and the craziness in Washington.” Cleve’s ruthless tactics for Kappa International are meant to show just how far corporations are willing to go to exert their influence and power. It is this commentary that elevates Best Seller above your typical crime thriller – that, and the performances of Woods and Dennehy.

Best Seller was not well-received by critics to say the least. Chief among them was Roger Ebert who felt that the film was “light on plot, real light. It doesn’t have a compelling story at its center ... This is a case of a movie that has too much content, but not enough subject.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe found that the film’s premise was “flimsy” and only existed to support Wood’s “trademark intensity. He flits about the screen like an edgy sprite in search of a story.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby was particularly harsh in his assessment of the film and felt that the filmmakers worked hard to create a “movie totally without suspense, humor, plausibility, charm, excitement, wit and substance.” The Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen was a little more forgiving in his review: “Thanks to a couple of gifted saviors, Best Seller is alive if not well; it breathes but doesn’t thrive.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen was even more generous in his review as he wrote, “watching Woods and Dennehy work out their tense, kinky love-hate relationship is a treat. An adroit, sardonic little thriller.”

Best Seller was backed by Orion, an independent studio that pushed through all sorts of fascinating cinematic gems in the ‘80s, from efforts by auteurs like Woody Allen, to genre fare like RoboCop (1987). None of the major studios would’ve touched pulpy material like this and it’s a shame because a film like this has become scarce in the 2000s. The film does a good job delivering the requisite genre conventions under John Flynn’s workman-like direction and the television cop show production values only add to the tawdry B-movie vibe. Best Seller is certainly no masterpiece but it is a solid piece of entertainment and one of those underappreciated gems from the ‘80s waiting to be rediscovered.

Nixon

Oliver Stone’s film, Nixon (1995) portrays the American political process as an unpredictable system that politicians have no hope of ever fully controlling. The best they can do is keep it in check most of the time. This theory can be seen in its embryonic stage in JFK (1991) with President John F. Kennedy being assassinated by shadowy forces within the political system, but it was not until Nixon that Stone was able to fully articulate it. As film critic Gavin Smith observed, “Nixon is a historical drama about the constructing and recording of history, assembled as we watch.” Stone has created a unique version of the historical biopic that combines fact and speculation with a cinematic style that blends various film stocks in a seamlessly layered, complex narrative. This fractured, overtly stylized approach draws attention to the fact that we are watching a film. As Stone has said in an interview, “I don’t pretend that it is reality.” This, in turn, allows him to deliver his message with absolute clarity.

Like Citizen Kane (1941) before it, Nixon traces the dramatic rise and fall of a historical figure who tried so hard to be loved by all but ended up being infamous and misunderstood. While Orson Welles’ film was a thinly-veiled attack on newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, Stone paints an almost sympathetic portrayal of Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins). Stone may not like Nixon personally, but he does try to explore what motivated the man’s actions and really get inside his head. The director even throws in a stylistic nod to Kane as part of the opening credits play over a shot of a dark and stormy night at the White House. The camera moves through the fence in a way that evokes the opening of Welles’ film with Kane’s imposing estate. And like Welles’ film, Nixon employs a flashback device as Nixon listens to the Watergate tapes and reflects on his life, from his tough childhood in Whittier, California, to his beleaguered political career that culminates with his tumultuous stint in the White House.

The first real indication of Stone’s thesis of the political system as a wild, untamable animal comes when Nixon talks to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Bob Hoskins) at a horse race about running for President. There are all kinds of shots of horses snorting wildly – the first hint, visually, of what Stone is trying to get at. Hoover makes it known that he will support Nixon if he, in turn, supports him, and is willing to supply him with dirt on Robert Kennedy to help the cause. Hoover makes an intriguing comment when he tells Nixon, “I look at it from the point of view that the system can only take so much abuse. It adjusts itself eventually ... But there are times there are savage outbursts.” He cites Martin Luther King’s promiscuity and continues, “Sometimes the system comes very close to cracking.” The implication in this scene is that Hoover is a significant cog in the United States political machine and one that Nixon must respect and work with.

The second significant example where Stone gives support to his thesis is when Nixon meets with Richard Helms (Sam Waterston), director of the CIA. Like Hoover, Helms is a powerful man within the system because he knows and protects so many of its dirty little secrets. They get to talking about Cuba and Nixon’s involvement to assassinate Fidel Castro, which Helms has evidence of via memos. He refers to it as “not an operation so much as an organic phenomenon. It grew. It changed shape. It developed appetites.” Helms is fiercely protective of his position and of the CIA, resisting Nixon’s request for incriminating documents. Where Hoover is portrayed as gruff and obvious, Helms is elusive and distant, played with icy intensity by Sam Waterston.

The third and most important example occurs when Nixon spontaneously meets with war protesters on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This is where Stone lays it all out and the film features a fascinating exchange between the President and a female protester (Joanna Going):

Protester: You can’t stop it can you? Even if you wanted to. ‘Cause it’s not

you, it’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.

Nixon: There’s more at stake here then what you want or what I want.

Protester: Then what’s the point? What’s the point of being President?

You’re powerless!

Nixon: No. No, I’m not powerless. ‘Cause I understand the system. I

believe I can control it. Maybe not control it totally but tame it

enough to do some good.

Protester: Sounds like you’re talking about a wild animal.

Nixon: Maybe I am.

Of this scene, Stone has said that Nixon realizes that the system is “more powerful than he is. We can’t get into it that much, but we hint at it so many times – the military-industrial complex, the forces of money.” Stone’s film argues that Nixon really did want to institute change and make a difference in the world, but his own shortcomings, coupled with the complex infrastructure that is the United States political system, ultimately led to his downfall. Stone and the screenwriters conceived of the concept of the political system as “the beast,” which one of the film’s screenwriters Christopher Wilkinson described as “a headless monster that lurches through postwar history,” and served as a metaphor for a system of dark forces that resulted in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and the Vietnam War, as well as helping Nixon’s rise to power and his fall from it. In an interview, Stone elaborated further. He saw “the beast” as a “system ... which grinds the individual down ... it’s a system of checks and balances that drives itself off: 1) the power of money and markets; 2) state power, government power; 3) corporate power, which is probably greater than state power; 4) the political process, or election through money, which is therefore in tow to the system; and 5) the media, which mostly protects the status quo and their ownership’s interests.”

Anthony Hopkins’ stunning portrayal of the former President humanizes this historical figure. From the way the film is shot and edited, we are seeing the events of U.S. history through Nixon’s perspective. This approach also helps in creating a sympathetic portrait of the man. Hopkins wisely does not opt for a Rich Little imitation but instead captures the essence and spirit of the man. He shows Nixon’s aggressive side, where he speaks in football metaphors and refers to himself in the third person, and also a vulnerable one in the scenes with his wife, Pat. It’s a wonderfully layered performance that Hopkins hasn’t equaled since because he hasn’t been given material and a director that has challenged him in quite the way that Stone did with Nixon.

Opposite Hopkins is Joan Allen as Pat Nixon. She more than holds her own with the Academy Award-winning thespian, portraying Pat as a long suffering yet incredibly strong-willed wife who has to sit by and watch her husband strive for unattainable goals. There’s a scene where she reacts in private to her husband losing the 1960 Presidential election to John F. Kennedy and she looks visibly upset, wiping away tears while trying to maintain her composure. In the following scene with her husband, Pat tells him about the toll his political career is taking on their family, which comes across as quite touching. Tears well up in Pat’s eyes as she consoles her husband while he looks tired and defeated. It’s a wonderfully intimate moment that humanizes both of them considerably. All of the scenes between Allen and Hopkins crackle with a kind of tangible intensity as we see the toll politics takes on them. This is not one of those token wife roles that is so often seen in these kinds of films. The well-written screenplay and Allen’s performance flesh out Pat Nixon into a three-dimensional character.

As always, Stone’s knack for casting is impeccable. Much like he did with JFK, Stone surrounds his leads with an impressive roster of big names in the supporting roles: James Woods, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Sorvino, Powers Boothe, J.T. Walsh, and, in a restored scene, Sam Waterston delivers a deliciously chilling performance as Richard Helms. These recognizable faces help one keep track of the historical figures that pop up throughout the film.

Originally, Stone had been developing two projects – the musical Evita (1996) and a film about Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. When they both failed to get made, he turned his attention to a biopic about Nixon with the president’s death in April 1994 being a key factor in the director’s decision. The project actually originated with Eric Hamburg, a former speechwriter and staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, after having dinner with Stone. In 1993, Hamburg mentioned the idea to writer Steve Rivele with the concept being that they would incorporate all of Nixon’s misdeeds, both known and speculative. Hamburg encouraged Rivele to write a screenplay with his partner Christopher Wilkinson. They wrote a treatment in November 1993. In it was the concept of the political system as a beast and this is what convinced Stone to get involved. He immersed himself in research with the help of Hamburg.

Stone commissioned the first draft of the film’s screenplay from Rivele and Wilkinson and it was completed on June 17, 1994, the anniversary of the Watergate break-in. The script was based on research from various sources, including documents, transcripts and hours of footage from the Nixon White House. Early on, Rivele and Wilkinson hated Nixon but the longer they worked on the film, and “the more we knew about him, our contempt was slowly eroded to the point where we more than pitied him, we empathized with him.” Stone structured his film into two acts with the first one about Nixon’s loss of power and the second one about Nixon in power only to lose it again.

Stone pitched the project to Warner Bros. but, according to the director, they saw it “as a bunch of unattractive older white men sitting around in suits, with a lot of dialogue and not enough action.” They also didn’t agree with Stone’s choice to play Nixon – Anthony Hopkins. Instead, they wanted Tom Hanks or Jack Nicholson – two of Stone’s original choices and both of whom had passed on the role. Stone even met with Warren Beatty but the actor wanted to make too many changes to the script. Stone went with Hopkins based on his performances in Remains of the Day (1993) and Shadowlands (1993). The director remembered, “the isolation of Tony is what struck me. The loneliness. I felt that was the quality that always marked Nixon.” Upon meeting Stone for the first time, Hopkins saw the director as “one of the great bad boys of American pop culture, and I might be a fool to walk away.” He was convinced that to take on such a challenging role that would require him to “impersonate the soul of Nixon” by the scenes in the film when he talks about his mother and father. “That affected me,” he said. To prepare for the role, Hopkins watched a lot of documentary footage on Nixon. At night, he would go to sleep with footage playing so that it would seep into his subconscious.

Joan Allen auditioned for the role of Pat Nixon over a period of several months. During one of these auditions, she read opposite Beatty when he was briefly interested. After this audition, Beatty told Stone that he had found his Pat Nixon. She learned, through her research, that Pat was a strong person who had a difficult life. Allen based her performance on interviews with former Nixon aides, books about the First Lady and a Barbara Walters interview in the early 1970s. Stone, Hamburg, Hopkins, and Woods flew to Washington, D.C. and interviewed the surviving members of Nixon’s inner circle: lawyer Leonard Garment, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Robert McNamara, a former Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. In addition, Stone hired Alexander Butterfield, a former secretary in the cabinet and special assistant to Nixon and who first revealed the existence of Nixon’s secret tapes of his oval office conversations, John Sears, former deputy White House counsel, and John Dean as consultants. To research their roles, Powers Boothe, David Hyde Pierce and Paul Sorvino met with their real-life counterparts, but J.T. Walsh decided not to contact John Ehrlichman because he threatened to sue the production after reading an early version of the script and was not happy with how he was portrayed.

Stone’s producing partner and financier Arnold Milchan had a deal with the director to make any film he wanted up to a budget of $42.5 million but refused to honor their agreement, saying that he would put up no more than $35 million because he felt Nixon was an uncommercial project. Stone refused to make the film with that budget and a week before shooting was to begin he approached Hungarian financier Andrew Vajna who had a co-financing deal with Disney’s Hollywood Pictures. At the time, Vajna was hoping to get some respectability in Hollywood and possibly an Academy Award and agreed to provide the $43 million budget. In order to cut costs, Stone leased the White House sets from The American President (1995).

Reportedly, there was a lot mischievous jokes exchanged between the actors on the set. Early on, Hopkins was intimidated by the amount of dialogue he had to learn, more of which was being added and changed all the time, and then Sorvino told him that “there was room for improvement” and that he would be willing to help him. According to James Woods, Sorvino told Hopkins that he was “doing the whole thing wrong” and that he was an “expert” who could help Hopkins. Sorvino took Hopkins to lunch and then afterwards the British thespian told Stone that he wanted to quit the production. The director managed to convince him to stay on. Hopkins remembered, “there were moments when I wanted to get out, when I wanted to just do a nice Knot’s Landing or something.” Woods also cracked several good natured jokes with Hopkins. He said, “I’d always tell him how great he was in Psycho. I’d call him Lady Perkins all the time instead of Sir Anthony Hopkins.”

What is perhaps most stunning about Nixon is the style of the film. Employing the editing techniques and innovative camerawork he perfected in JFK and Natural Born Killers (1994), Stone created a unique version of the historical biopic that combines actual documentary footage with fictional material and that blends various film stocks in attempt to shed light on a figure most people knew very little about. This fractured, overtly stylized approach suggests that we are seeing historical events through the prism of Nixon’s perspective. The film is not meant to be the definitive word on the man but rather, as Stone said in an interview, the “basis to start reading, to start investigating on your own.”

Stone had his editors in three different rooms with the scenes from the film revolving from one room to another, “depending on how successful they were.” If one editor wasn’t successful with a scene it went to another. Stone said it was “the most intense post- I’ve ever done, even more intense than JFK” because he was screening the film three times a week, making changes in 48 to 72 hours, rescreening the film and then making another 48 hours of changes.

Seven days before Nixon was to be released in theaters, the Nixon family issued a statement calling parts of the film “reprehensible” and that it was designed to “defame and degrade president and Mrs. Nixon’s memories in the mind of the American public.” The statement also criticized Stone’s depiction of Nixon’s private life and that of his childhood and his part in planning the assassination of Castro. This statement was actually issued by the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California on behalf of the Nixon family based on a published copy of the script. Stone responded that his “purpose in making the film Nixon, was neither malicious nor defamatory,” and to attempt “a fuller understanding of the life and career of Richard Nixon – the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies, and the legacy he left his nation and the world.” The attacks didn’t stop there. In a letter to Nixon’s daughters, Walt Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, said that Stone “has committed a grave disservice to your family, to the presidency, and to American history.”

Despite lackluster box office results, Nixon was generally well-received by critics. Roger Ebert praised the film for how it took "on the resonance of classic tragedy. Tragedy requires the fall of a hero, and one of the achievements of Nixon is to show that greatness was within his reach.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin praised Anthony Hopkins' performance and "his character's embattled outlook and stiff, hunched body language with amazing skill.” However, in his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle felt that "the problem here isn't accuracy. It's absurdity. Hopkins' exaggerated portrayal of Nixon is the linchpin of a film that in its conception and presentation consistently veers into camp.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss also had a problem with Hopkins' portrayal: "Hopkins, though, is a failure. He finds neither the timber of Nixon's plummy baritone, with its wonderfully false attempts at intimacy, nor the stature of a career climber who, with raw hands, scaled the mountain and was still not high or big enough."

Nixon is a powerful historical biopic – arguably the last great film Oliver Stone has made to date. It is also, coincidentally (or maybe not), the last film he and regular collaborator Robert Richardson made together. The legendary cinematographer was as much responsible for defining the distinctive style of Stone’s films as the director himself. Stone’s work has never been the same since they parted company. Nixon was also the last time he had enough juice in Hollywood to command such an impressive cast of actors. Admittedly, Hollywood has changed considerably since this film was made and Stone has had to adapt with the times but hopefully he has another great film like Nixon left in him.