Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
I fucking love sniper movies. I love sniping in war games like CALL OF DUTY and even GEARS OF WAR and HALO. The idea of being so far removed from your target while at the same time being incredibly intimate with him/her/it…. I don’t know. Maybe I’m a voyeur and I don’t know it. I’ve never been a peeper, like George McFly up in trees, or anything, but that’d help explain why I love these kinds of stories so much.
Maybe it’s my love of cinema, which in a strange way is very much like being a sniper, observing people going about their lives not aware they’re being watched. That could be part of it, too.
Whatever the reason, I love sniper movies. And I love ‘70s event movies. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, EARTHQUAKE, THE TOWERING INFERNO, etc. Big casts, big spectacle… Love ‘em. So, I was radically predisposed to love this film.
The film takes place during a big championship game at the LA Memorial Coliseum, which, if memory serves, was the location for one of the early 24 season finales, also involving a sniper. We follow a dozen different people, most of them attendees watching the game. We also follow the sniper himself, but never get a good look at him. We know him by inserts, essentially. We see shots of him working his gun, eating Baby Ruth’s, we see his feet, and many-pocketed jacket, but not his face. Not until the end of the movie and even then we never get a good, clean look at the guy.
What I love about the way director Larry Peerce (A SEPARATE PEACE) shot the sniper is just how much character he gave him without seeing any of his features clearly. It’s all in the little details, like how meticulous he wipes down his gun and small things like a fucked up, bruised and chipped thumbnail.
The way we drop in and out of the many characters’ stories is also very inventive. At the beginning we get a little set-up with all the main characters. We meet an older couple (Gena Rowlands and David Janssen) getting off a plane, we meet the quarterback for the Los Angeles team (played by real life quarterback Joe Kapp), a pickpocket duo of a cute young woman (Juli Bridges) and respectable-looking old guy (the great Walter Pidgeon), a young father (Beau Bridges) and his family, a police captain (Charlton Heston), Martin Balsam’s head of security at the coliseum, John Cassavetes’ SWAT leader (we first see them taking down an abusive man in a domestic situation and his crew is all decked out in what could have been the leftover wardrobe from Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD!) and, of course, the sniper himself.
In fact, we start with him lining up a shot out of a hotel window. I figured they were going to show him testing his rifle and scope, maybe dry-firing at the nice-looking couple riding their bikes and minding their own business. But then the man’s chest explodes with a squib that would give Paul Verhoeven a rape-boner.
Right off the bat the violence is intense, graphic… sure, it’s ‘70s red paint blood, but damn if it doesn’t look real in the context of the movie.
We follow the sniper from the hotel, after he breaks down his weapon and conceals it in the many pockets of his jacket, to the car and to the coliseum, where he sneaks up into a perfect out of sight spot just above the scoreboard.
There are dozens of likely targets. If he’s a professional, he could be after the Mayor who is in the stands, he could be after the gambler who is in deep with the bookies, he could even be after the President of the United States, who is supposed to give a speech at half time.
While the sniper takes aim at the crowd below, we assume to scope out the territory and make final adjustments to his weapon, we drop in and out of these characters’ day. For instance, the sniper will look down at Jack Klugman, who is the gambler deep in debt, everything he has riding on this game and we’ll get to spend some time with Klugman as he chats up the priest (Mitchell Ryan) sitting next to him, asking to have a good word put in for Los Angeles to win by more than 2 points. If this bet doesn’t pay off, he’s going to get killed.
Then the sniper will turn and look down at Gena Rowlands and David Janssen. I’m not exactly sure what their story is, just that Rowlands is in love with Janssen and keeps pressing him to show any sort of feelings for her. You can tell he likes her, but he’s also kind of dismissive of her. They’re in to root for Baltimore.
Beau Bridges is credited ratherly highly for his character, who does very little. He’s kind of an asshole in the movie, to tell the truth. He starts out as a likable father, taking his wife and two sons to the big game, but when one of his kids wants a hat from a vendor in the park he gets a backhand to the face for telling the vendor that his daddy was fired and doesn’t have any money. Bridges then buys the hats and gives them to the kid and everything is supposed to be alright again, I guess.
Bridges spots the sniper before anybody, catching a glimpse of him through his binoculars, but it’s only a glimpse and when he looks back there’s nothing there.
The guys in the control room, shouting orders to all the different cameras, are the ones who spot the sniper first, thanks to a camera on the Goodyear blimp catching him from above. Heston is called in and, in turn, calls in Cassavetes to set his guys up to be ready to take this dude out at a moment’s notice.
The idea is to quietly get the likely targets out of harm’s way and not cause a panic with the 90,000+ people in the crowd, so Heston keeps a lid on things, allowing Cassavetes’ guys to get in place for the greenlight to take the sniper out. He says he’ll hand over control of the situation at the two minute warning of the game, being played throughout the whole movie.
Much like yesterday’s John Cassavetes movie MIKEY & NICKY, this film couldn’t be made today. I don’t know of anybody with the patience and confidence to tell a story where we don’t know the motives of the killer and the plot isn’t convoluted and filled with unlikely inside moves and backstabbing.
TWO MINUTE WARNING is a simple story told with much ambiguity and that’s what I ultimately grabbed on to. The ending is crazy, lots of death and mayhem. In fact the movie got an R-rating for violence alone. A lot of the characters we have been following get nailed and we never find out if this nut was targeting anyone specific or just creating mayhem. I love that! Because after you get to know some of these people, there is enough mystery left to them and their circumstances that you could reasonably assume they’d be a target.
The character economy is pretty great for a movie this big. A lot of that success is due to casting great, great character actors that can give you the image of a person without a whole movie’s worth of screentime to build them up. Take Brock Peters as the head of maintenance… he only has 2 or 3 scenes, but he spends them screaming at Martin Balsam and Charlton Heston, defending his job. He makes an immediate impression.
Now, I heard that there was a weird TV cut of this film… and upon investigation it seems that the censors had to cut something like 45 minutes out of the movie (not sure what they’d cut outside of some bloody bullet-hits and some gaping wounds) and didn’t like the tone, so they asked the studio to shoot some filler that explained everything. Peerce took his name off this cut, which showed that the sniper was really there to distract the cops from an art robbery of some sort. Lame. Glad that version’s not the one on the DVD because I think removing the ambiguity would kill this movie.
It’d be easy to recommend a double feature for this one… the obvious one would be BLACK SUNDAY, with Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern. That’s also set during a big football game. But I’d say stick with the sniper angle and seek out Peter Bogdanovich’s first movie, TARGETS, featuring Boris Karloff and a sniper modeled after Charles Whitman (UT Tower).
Final Thoughts: Tons of gore, fun characters, a catchy yet creepy score by Charles Fox, Merv Griffith singing the National Anthem, Heston grimacing for an hour and a half and Cassavetes coasting on pure machismo charisma all add up to make this an incredibly entertaining and fun movie. I wasn’t looking forward to it, getting to the film really late in the night (hence the early morning posting… hopefully I’ll be able to get some pre-BNAT errands run before I crash and burn for the day), but it raced by. The unexpected ambiguity really pushes this one over the top. It’s not Citizen Kane, but if you like to be entertained and think most of today’s thrillers are over-complicated castrated PG-13 nightmares, then you’ll get a big kick out of this one. I know I did.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Monday, December 8th: THE SENTINEL (1976)
Tuesday, December 9th: HOW TO STEAL A MILLION (1966)
Wednesday, December 10th: WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)
Thursday, December 11th: BEING THERE (1979)
Friday, December 12th: THE PARTY (1968)
Saturday, December 13th: CASINO ROYALE (1967)
Sunday, December 14th: THE STRANGER (1946)
Only a couple of movies to go before our Peter Sellers Marathon! Can’t wait, but I’m also very much looking forward to the next couple movies, including tomorrow’s THE SENTINEL, a horror movie with a huge awesome cast. We’ll be following Martin Balsam over. See you folks for that soon!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
