The Remembrance of Tom Past

There are some films which have a particular significance in my memory – not necessarily because they are especially good, or poor, or interesting, but just because they came along at a particular time in my life and burned their way into my memory. For instance, there was once a time when I did not – mutatis mutandis – go to the cinema once or twice a week. I went along now and then, when there was a film that looked particularly interesting, but I didn’t actively seek out things to go and watch. (I suppose this is how normal people approach going to the cinema.)  This didn’t change overnight, but there were a number of times when I recall it dawning on me that going to see a film I didn’t know much about could actually be a really great and rewarding trip out.

I feel obliged to make clear that Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible is not such a film. Well, not exactly. Here’s what was happening: it was the summer of 1996, and relations between your correspondent and the people he was living with were at a bit of a nadir. I had taken to going out of the house very early and staying out all day, simply to avoid them, until the university term ended and they all left. Friday, the day before the great departure, finally rolled around, and unable to face another marathon stint in the library or the bar I went to into town and decided to go to the cinema. I’d always enjoyed the legerdemaine in the plotting of the old Mission: Impossible TV show, and I expect I would have seen it eventually, but as it happened it had just opened that day: seeing a film on its day of release was a new experience for me then, but one which seemed rather agreeable.

De Palma’s film opens with a deliberately misleading set of titles, evoking the style of the TV show very nicely (needless to say, Lalo Schifrin’s immortal theme blasts out too). We encounter Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), head of the CIA’s Impossible Mission clever-tricks squad, receiving an exploding cassette on a plane. It seems that a rogue CIA agent is about to steal a very important Maguffin from the US embassy in Prague, and Phelps and his team are to nab the miscreant in the act.

Phelps’ team includes his wife Claire (Emmanuelle Beart), technical bod Jack (an uncredited Emilio Estevez), posh Brit Sarah (Kristin Scott Thomas), a slightly nondescript character played by Ingeborg Dapkunaite, and (in the old Martin Landau master-of-disguise role) Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). There is a lot of sneaking into the embassy, wearing of rubber masks, the deployment of clever gadgets, and – rather subtly – establishing the rapport between the various members of team.

This is significant, because after a smooth start, the mission begins to go pear-shaped in a very terminal way: one by one, the Impossible Missionaries are crushed, shot, stabbed and blown up. The important Maguffin is nicked, and the only survivors of the carnage, it would seem, are Hunt and Claire Phelps. It transpires the whole mission was part of a bigger, more devious scheme: CIA director Kittridge (Henry Czerny) believes there is a traitor in the IMF, and all that has gone before has been an attempt to flush out the mole. As Hunt seems to be the last man standing, he looks somewhat compromised.

However, this is not the kind of thing Hunt is wont to take lying down, and – for the first time, but absolutely not the last – he goes on the run from his own people in an attempt to identify who the traitor who killed his friends is. Some slightly knotty exposition ensues (well-handled by the script and direction), with the following results: he does a deal with arms dealer Max (Vanessa Redgrave), whereby she will manufacture a meeting with the mole, in exchange for him breaking into CIA headquarters and stealing another copy of the same Maguffin as earlier.

This all enables a rather pleasing structure to the film, which is essentially built around three big set-pieces done in the style of the original TV show – the initial shenanigans at the embassy, the raid on the CIA, and finally some fairly unlikely goings-on in and around the Channel Tunnel as Hunt finally confronts the bad guys. The second of these provides the film’s most iconic image – after scrambling through the (surprisingly capacious) air vents at the CIA with Jean Reno, Cruise ends up operating a computer workstation while dangling on a wire from the ceiling – while the third sends the film for the first time off into more generic Hollywood action movie territory – Reno ends up flying a helicopter down the (equally surprisingly capacious) Channel Tunnel, with Cruise hanging off one of the skids.

I think it gets the balance between being like the TV show and being cinematic just about spot-on, although others had a different opinion: amongst them Peter Graves and the other original members of the TV show cast, who were invited back (to get killed off). I suppose I can understand the source of their chagrin – in the end, it’s hardly reverent towards the characterisation of the source material, even if it gets the substance pretty much right.

Yet it also felt very contemporary back in 1996. Nowadays, it’s not exactly dated, but the film’s near-fixation with computer hacking and the internet does feel very much of its time. It also serves fairly well as a snapshot of actors who had recently made an impression in other successful films – Reno was fresh off Leon, Scott Thomas had recently done Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Ving Rhames (who’s gone on to appear opposite Cruise in all the subsequent films in the franchise) had played a key role in Pulp Fiction.

In the end I think this is an extremely efficient and polished movie, rather than a truly great one: it has that slickness one often finds in Tom Cruise projects, and Brian De Palma seems relatively restrained: there are hardly any of the bravura touches or outrageous bits of showing-off that sometimes characterises his work. And yet I remain extremely fond of it – I saw it twice more that summer, and remember listening to the soundtrack endlessly, as well. I suppose I remember it so warmly because it marked a point, more or less, at which things lightened up for me – and also because, immediately afterwards, I was in such a good mood I hung around in town and saw Wayne Wang’s Smoke, one of my first real art-house experiences (or so I recall, anyway). Another time, another life – but still pleasant to recall.

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The High Cost of Virtue

There’s a danger that the general comprehensive grimness of much of this year will end up eclipsing the fact that there have been positive glimmerings of different kinds, as well. But neither should we let the disaster of the pandemic obscure other regrettable events that we might ordinarily have paid more attention to. Of course, our culture operating in the way that it does, we are approaching the time of year where tributes to some of the people we have lost make convenient and popular material to fill airtime. They showed Brian De Palma’s 1987 film The Untouchables the other night, primarily as a tribute to Sean Connery, but of course it works just as well as a reminder of the gifts of Ennio Morricone.

This is one of those movies I originally ended up watching quite without meaning to. The film got its UK TV premiere back in 1991, when my sister – I hope she will forgive me for revealing this – had a bit of an adolescent crush on Kevin Costner. You can be silly when you’re young, and the fact that she wanted to tape The Untouchables (despite being a few years too young to watch it, strictly speaking) was enough to put me off the idea of seeing it. And yet, for whatever reason, I ended up watching the very beginning of the film, fully intending to switch off.

I learned a couple of important lessons that night: the most obvious one, that it’s possible for people you may have differences of opinion with to still like great movies, but also about the power of a great film soundtrack. Something about the main theme, with its drivingly urgent percussion and strings, hooked me instantly, and gave me the strongest impression that this was a movie made by people who really knew their craft.

Thankfully, the rest of the movie did nothing to dispel this impression. The story takes place in 1930, and concerns itself with the consequences of prohibition: specifically the rise of immensely wealthy and powerful gangsters, and the rise in violent crime accompanying this. One of these men, Al Capone (Robert De Niro) has reached the point where he has essentially become the unelected mayor of Chicago. However, Capone’s organisation is responsible for one atrocity too many and the government appoints Eliot Ness (Costner), an earnest and idealistic young agent of the Treasury, to bring the bootleggers to justice.

However, Ness’ initial operations end farcically, and it soon becomes apparent that the Chicago police department is as corrupt and compromised as the rest of the city’s establishment – well, almost. A disconsolate Ness encounters veteran beat cop Malone (Connery), who does seem – to coin a cliche – like the one honest policeman in the city. Against his better judgment, Malone helps Ness assemble a team including sharpshooting young cop George Stone (Andy Garcia) and accountancy expert Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), and they set about finding a way to bring Capone down…

This is, of course, the film that Sean Connery won an Oscar for. Some would say ‘finally’, although this rather depends on whether you’re of the school of thought that Academy Awards should genuinely reward the best pieces of film acting in a given year, or go to people with lengthy careers and impressive bodies of work as movie stars. I’ve often been quite lukewarm about Connery and his acting – there’s a good deal of potboiling dross on the Connery CV, alongside the undeniable classics – and the baffling accent he deploys as the supposedly Irish-American cop Malone is distracting, to say the least. In theory Connery is doing the same kind of thing as in Highlander a year or two earlier: he’s the wise old mentor, imparting his wisdom to a slightly dull and callow lead before obligingly letting himself be killed off in the second act, in order to allow the hero to have the spotlight to himself for the climax to the film. In Highlander it’s just a big character turn, with Connery at his twinkliest – but here, he manages to bring the film heft and depth, as well as humour. This is certainly one of Connery’s best films outside of the early Bonds, and it’s largely as good as it is because of his performance.

Nevertheless, a classic movie is rarely a one-man-show, and even before Connery appears and after he departs, the rest of the movie is slick and effective: it’s true that Costner initially comes across as a rather bland and insipid hero, but that’s almost the point – the journey here is of a man being blooded, only achieving success at the cost of losing some of his innocence. This finds its apotheosis in the moment when Ness finds Capone’s chief enforcer, the man who has killed many innocents and two of Ness’ friends, and has him at his mercy. The camera does an enormous zoom into mega-close-up on Costner’s eyes, and you can see the conflict in them as he contemplates simply killing the man out of hand: one of Costner’s finest moments, I would say.

Of course, the zoom and the mega-close-up are very obvious directorial effects, but then this is a Brian De Palma film and a degree of show-offishness comes with the territory: this is one of Tarantino’s favourite film-makers, after all. De Palma has lots of fun with long fancy shots and other tricks in the course of the film, but this never becomes downright irritating. He also manages to pull off the bravura sequence with the gunfight on the train-station steps and the lengthy build-up to it: it would almost seem pretentious to drop such an obvious homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin into what is, after all, a studio gangster movie, were it not that De Palma manages to make it work so well.

Understated restraint isn’t really De Palma’s thing, and the way the film ping-pongs between bloody violence and some quite sentimental scenes would usually be tricky to pull off. However, he has Morricone in his corner, and the composer supplies a score which draws the viewer in and manages to smooth the various transitions, as well as being lush and beautiful to listen to. It’s not quite the case that the soundtrack makes the movie, but once again it makes a significant contribution to it.

Film-making is a collaborative exercise, in the end, and the quality of this film is another reminder of that. On paper, it doesn’t sound like anything particularly special – maybe even a bit hackneyed and predictable. But the contributions of De Palma, Morricone, writer David Mamet, Connery, Costner, and the rest of the cast crew result in something which is entertaining, powerful, and even oddly poetic and beautiful in places. This is the kind of film anyone would be happy to be remembered for.

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