Slow Players #16: "Help in the Building" (Badham, Casavettes, Sayles)

Recently, Sam and I took my daughter to the movies. She was home for a few weeks, back from school, and wanted to go to the New Beverly, so we scanned the schedule and zeroed in on Saturday Night Fever, something I hadn’t seen since its original release. If you haven’t seen it lately, you should: it’s fantastic, and infinitely tougher than its reputation. Seen on a big screen, especially, its dance sequences—and its lead performance—remain electric, but its story is satisfyingly down and dirty, much closer to, say, Mean Streets than it is to Grease. It’s a drama about working class people, in other words, and its complete lack of both sentimentality and condescension toward such people was utterly arresting.

At some point, Hollywood stopped making movies about working class people—or rather, it started making them as sentimental fables about upward mobility during the Reagan era, and then more or less dispensed with them altogether—and while the reasons for this are obvious (there’s no better way to bulldoze a people than to pretend they don’t exist), the fact remains that American cinema’s decline arguably starts here: with the studios’ abandonment of class as a meaningful aspect of storytelling. It’s something I’ve grown attentive to, in any case. Watching A Woman Under the Influence last weekend, with Sam, both of us were struck by the fact that Peter Falk’s blue-collar municipal worker could afford to live in a two-story, five-bedroom house—with three children, no less—in Hollywood, supporting his wife and family on a construction worker’s salary. Cassavetes spent a lot of time searching out that location, making certain that the house (which was an actual location, not a set) would correspond with the Longhettis’ economic reality. One can only suppose it did, but the same house (which last sold in 1979, for $44,000) would cost nearly $2 million today. This, by itself, tells you almost all you need to know.

When James Earl Jones died last week, I found myself ticking back through his memorable performances and then, when I landed on Matewan, thinking of John Sayles. Sayles hasn’t made a feature since 2018, but there was a time when Sayles’ movies, like Cassavetes’ in fact, occupied a modest if meaningful slot in American culture. His were genuinely independent films made outside the studio system, well before the term “independent cinema” was coopted by the likes of New Line, Miramax, etc. His 1980 debut, The Return of the Secaucus 7, was widely credited with inspiring The Big Chill a few years later, and he’d later go on to score modest hits with films like Eight Men Out (1988) and Lone Star (1995). The truth is, Sayles has had a fascinating, and rangy career—not too many Hollywood directors have won a MacArthur grant (1983), published a handful of novels (it’s been a long minute since I read it, but I recall 1991’s Los Gusanos, in particular, as being pretty good) *and* written a bunch of exploitation movies (The Howling, Piranha, etc) to keep the lights on—but I hadn’t watched any of his movies in quite some time. I remembered them as sort of workmanlike: solid, intelligent, and politically on-point, but lacking the intensity of direction and performance that (again) a Cassavetes or a Charles Burnett were able to achieve with comparable resources. The best of the lot, as I remembered it, was 1991’s City of Hope, a film that, generic title aside, managed a large cast and a broad canvas into something I recalled (I was twenty-five when I last saw it) as striking and moving. For a long time it was tough to see, but it’s rentable now in a number of the usual places (Amazon, AppleTV, etc), and free-with-ads for those who prefer it that way (I wouldn’t) on Pluto**, so we pulled it up a few nights ago for a viewing.

It holds up. In fact, better than “holds up,” as the film feels like a dry run for The Wire in miniature, with multiple storylines intersecting—that of a corrupt property developer and his son; a local alderman and his Nation of Islam constituents; a meek college professor falsely accused of sexual assault after a botched mugging—to excellent effect. If the film lacks the galvanizing irony of Robert Altman (Sayles’s most obvious influence here), it’s deft and assured, and the direction I once would’ve considered merely workmanlike seems confident and sharp, if never flashy. The cast (among others, David Strathairn, Lawrence Tierney, a young Angela Bassett, and Vincent Spano) is uniformly excellent as well. You might check it out if you haven’t seen it lately, or ever. It’s every bit as fresh—fresher, even—as it was in 1991.

I talked a bit more about class and Los Angeles with an English journalist named Samuel McIlhagga recently in a conversation that was published earlier this week, one I enjoyed as it strays a little from my usual interview beat.

Check out my conversation with McIlhagga for Protean Magazine here.

And if you happen to be in New York on September 23rd, I’ll be doing a panel discussion with Stacey Schiff and Roxana Robinson, and the actress Emily Mortimer, on the great, great Shirley Hazzard.

Tickets to the event are available here. It’s gonna be a great one, I promise.

Until soon,

Matthew

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