What a treat to return to a movie like Charley Varrick, which I so enjoyed just over 50 years ago at the venerable Kilburn Grange Cinema, a 1914 2,000 seater, closed less than two years later in 1975. The Grange was originally a Gaumont and always presumably took the less prestigious films in deference to the even more enormous Kilburn Gaumont State just a short distance away. Charley Varrick was one of the many films of Don Siegel made as a Hollywood veteran (he was born in 1912) between 1968 and his last film in 1982. In that period he made thirteen features, all released in cinemas. I saw five of those films on release and three others on TV or 16mm, including several with Clint Eastwood before I finally got fed up with Eastwood’s politics in the 1980s. Siegel died in 1991 aged 78.
Siegel was an intriguing figure. Cambridge-educated in the 1930s he also briefly studied in Paris. His first Hollywood job eventually found him as head of the montage department at Warner Bros. After a long apprenticeship (he liked making montages and it gave him a freedom to try many different techniques), he finally made his first feature film aged 33. The Verdict (1946) is a historical crime mystery set in Victorian England. Siegel would go on to make many tough genre pictures, mostly crime films but also Westerns, war combat films, adventure films etc. Early in his career he also made romances and dramas and one of his most renowned films was the science fiction classic, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956). By the 1970s, after several diversions into TV films and series, he became known as one of two ‘go to’ directors of what were then seen as ‘action pictures’ – alongside Robert Aldrich who had a similar background to Siegel.
Why focus on Charley Varrick now? I’m grateful to Eddie Harrison aka ‘Film Authority‘ for pointing to a restoration of the film in 4K. I found a copy of the film online and started to watch it late one night. Gripped throughout, I finished it and went to bed, still buzzing at around 3 a.m. I’ll try and explain why this fairly straight genre picture is an important example of a particular period of Hollywood history. First though, let’s consider the salient aspects of the film’s background. Siegel had at this point made four films with Clint Eastwood, Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sarah (1970), The Beguiled (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971). Charley Varrick was lined up to be the fifth but Eastwood passed on it. Reportedly, Eastwood couldn’t see the worth of the titular character. I’d like to say Walter Matthau embraced the role wholeheartedly but some reports say he didn’t really understand the film. It didn’t prevent him winning a BAFTA for the role though. Matthau plays Charley, a one-time stunt flyer who has become a small-time bank robber of small town banks while purportedly running a business as a crop sprayer with his own aircraft.
The narrative begins with a bank raid in ‘Tres Cruces’, New Mexico which ends badly in a shootout with passing cops but Charley and his younger partner escape with two bags of loot. (The film is adapted from a novel, titled The Looters by John Reese.) Unfortunately the loot was deposited by a gangster’s banker as money to be laundered. Now Charley will be hunted by the state police and the mobster hitman, Molly (Joe Don Baker). Is Charley clever enough to outwit both? You bet. He is, after all, ‘The Last of the Independents’, the title Siegel wanted for the film. It’s this tag that I remembered most of all from my original viewing, because it seemed to fit the philosophy of the period.
Without spoiling the narrative if you don’t know the film, I’ll just try to give a flavour of what’s on offer. Charley is a very canny criminal and although the action is pretty relentless with careful build-ups to moments of brutal violence, there is also time to watch Charley prepare for what he expects to happen. Molly is a formidable opponent and the reach of the mob’s network of informers is daunting. But there is a weak link. John Vernon, a prolific actor (200 plus credits), plays Maynard Boyle the banker in Reno who hides the dirty money in the small bank in New Mexico. Through him, Charley hopes to lure Molly into a trap. Writers Howard Rodman and Dean Reisner enable a tightly plotted script with snappy dialogue. Rodman was a veteran TV writer, winning Writers’ Guild prizes and Reisner also moved from TV into films with Siegel and Eastwood.
In his review for Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1973, Tom Milne makes two interesting comments about Charley Varrick in what is generally a very positive review. First, he links the film’s tone to that of the 1940s films adapted from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, suggesting that the beautifully-executed opening sequence and the later shocks are one aspect of this. In addition Charley in his ‘genial disillusionment’ and ‘deadpan enjoyment’ of the eccentrics who cross his path resembles a Hammet/Marlowe figure. I can see this argument has merit but it has also been used to help categorise films like this as ‘neo-noir’ which I find much more problematic. I do agree with Milne’s reference to eccentric characters and the treatment of a recognisable world (i.e. rather than the more fantastical settings of some Hollywood films of the period). Charley Varrick takes place mainly in small towns and the scrubland and low hills of Nevada masquerading as New Mexico. The ‘eccentric characters’ here include Marjorie Bennett as Mrs Taft, a woman in her mid-70s who has a stationary trailer overlooking the trailer park where Charley lives (which is called Reese River Mobile Home Park – there is a Reese River in Nevada). She is interested in everything and imagines the worst when the phone ring – “Oh dear!, it’s probably an obscene phone call”.
My main source on Don Siegel is the booklet, Don Siegel, American Cinema by Alan Lovell (British Film Institute 1975). There isn’t a great deal about Charley Varrick in the booklet, mainly I assume because it was completed soon after the film came out. Lovell sees the film as having charm and humour and a brilliant opening section but says that it loses its way in the middle of the narrative because of complications produced by the different strands of the narrative. I don’t agree but I am intrigued by comments he makes about Siegel’s films overall and these later films in the 1970s in particular, some of which are directly relevant to Charley Varrick. Lovell defines Siegel’s career through the concept of professional craftmanship that he learned from the beginning of his time at Warner Bros. in the 1930s. When the studio system finally crumbled in the early 1960s directors like Siegel adjusted to the new ecology of American filmmaking but only marginally so. Siegel was still making the action pictures with stripped down narratives that were his forte in the 1940s and 1950s but the central character was slightly more complex and the ideological work of the central role was more suspect in the 1970s. Lovell notes in particular that as genre films always engage with changes in society, there is a challenge to the traditional action hero in the form of ‘hippy culture’ or what was also generally termed ‘counter-culture’ in the early 1970s. This is a major problem in the presentation of Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry but not so much in Charley Varrick. Matthau was known more for comedy and dramatic roles and Charley combines action with what Lovell refers to as ‘manipulation’. He’s an individualist but not somebody obviously opposed to other people’s ideas. It’s worth noting that 1973 also saw Robert Altman’s re-working of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye in which Elliot Gould’s Marlowe engages with the new culture in interesting ways.
Mention of Altman returns me to why Siegel and Charley Varrick epitomise aspects worth celebrating in early 1970s Hollywood. Too often the ‘New Hollywood’ is seen as being constructed around the new young directors such as Scorsese and Lucas and the slightly older Coppola and Friedkin. I’d argue that two other groups of directors are equally important in this period. One comprises the survivors of ‘studio Hollywood’ like Siegel and Aldrich who had to adjust to the new ecology. The other comprises the generation of directors who learned their trade in the 1950s mainly in television and sometimes theatre which provided different working conditions and arguably a different sense of ‘freedom’ for directors. This group included Altman, Peckinpah, Pakula, Penn, Ritt, Frankenheimer and Lumet. What was important for these directors was that they were ‘outsiders’ in Hollywood. In fact many of them came from television in New York. The ones who were closest to Hollywood in the 1950s struggled most against studio control (e.g. Peckinpah who began as a dialogue director for Siegel before establishing himself as a writer for TV Westerns). These three groups from different generations were producing entertainment films in the 1970s, many with something interesting to say but all with adult sensibilities geared to adult audiences. Every week in the early 1970s a film by one of these directors would be available at a local circuit cinema. That’s why many of us revered early 1970s Hollywood.
One last thought. The personal politics/politics of identity of this period are certainly problematic for contemporary audiences. All the directors I’ve listed above are white men. Charley Varrick offers an interesting comparison between Matthau’s Charley and Joe Don Baker’s Molly in the ways that they both seek time with women the night before their conventional climactic showdown. Is this an example of the sexism of the period or are either of the two female characters more rounded in their characterisation? There were too films in the period that did begin to tell the stories of African-Americans and Native Americans. As Lovell terms it, the ‘unstable’ Hollywood of the 1960s and 1970s enabled a whole series of developments. Does the instability of the current filmed entertainment industry offer as much?
Though I enjoyed Charley Varrick in 1973 it wasn’t particularly successful at the box office. I’m pleased to see that it is now one of Siegel’s most highly-rated films on IMDb. It’s available on Blu-ray in both the US and UK and on streamers. I hope to return at some point to consider more of Siegel’s work.
The Case for Global Film 