Boardwalk (1979)

          A grim story about the everyday humiliations of getting old, cowriter-director Stephen Verona’s Boardwalk leavens its darker aspects by celebrating the love that keeps two people connected after 50 years of marriage. Very much a showcase for the celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who enjoyed a burst of fame following his memorable appearance in The Godfather: Part II (1974), Boardwalk offers a peculiar mixture of caricature and understatement. The film’s broadest element is its depiction of a street gang as a group of one-dimensional maniacs wreaking pointless havoc on a once-peaceful neighborhood surrounding the Coney Island boardwalk. Nearly every other aspect of the picture is executed with soft-spoken intimacy, so the tension between the gang scenes and the rest of the film can be jarring at times. Yet to Verona’s credit, he integrates the gang element early and keeps it humming throughout the storyline until it becomes crucial to the climax, so one never gets the sense that the narrative has spun out of control. Somewhat like the messy lives it depicts, the narrative of Boardwalk goes where it goes, even if the trajectory sometimes seems capricious and cruel.

          David Rosen (Strasberg) operates a cafeteria near the boardwalk, and his middle-aged kids, three sons and a daughter, all work there. David’s wife, Becky (Ruth Gordon), teaches piano lessons out of the home they’ve shared for half a century. But Coney is changing, mostly for the worse. Muggings and robberies are commonplace, graffiti is everywhere, and seniors are moving out in droves because they don’t feel safe anymore. David stubbornly resists the temptation to flee, partially because he remembers leaving his European homeland as a young man and doesn’t want to get pushed off his turf a second time. His resolve is tested as criminal activity edges closer and closer to his front door, and another complication arises when Becky develops health problems.

          At its core, Boardwalk is about one man looking for dignity in a world that seems determined to strip him of everything he loves, so there’s a powerful individual-vs.-society statement in here somewhere. Other threads, which add tonal variety but not much weight, involve the romantic travails of David’s daughter, Florence (Janet Leigh), and the career woes of her adult son, an up-and-coming musician named Peter (Michael Ayr). Like the gang scenes, these subplots are awkward, but they eventually yield important moments.

          It’s evident that Verona knows his locations well, so whether he’s going wide to use street art as a painterly backdrop or going close to focus on the well-loved tchotchkes inside Jewish homes, he employs the camera artfully. Verona also does a fine job balancing different types of performance energy, juxtaposing, for instance, Strasberg’s quiet resilience with Gordon’s singular mixture of fragility and raunchiness. Withholding background music from many scenes represents another strong creative choice, pulling viewers into the worlds of the movie’s characters. So while Boardwalk is far from masterful, it’s idiosyncratic and impassioned, all the way through to the startling final scene.

Boardwalk: GROOVY

. . . And Justice for All (1979)

          After a spectacular run in the early ’70s, Al Pacino slid into a long period of mediocrity beginning with 1977’s racecar-themed dud Bobby Deerfield and continuing with this chaotic comedy-drama. Although Justice did okay at the box office and earned two Oscar nominations (including one for Pacino), it’s a perplexing mixture of farce and social commentary. Pacino plays Arthur Kirkland, a Baltimore lawyer described by everyone around him as both an exceptional litigator and a paragon of legal ethics. Yet we never actually see Kirkland do his job well—instead, he regularly breaks confidentiality, fights with judges, and loses cases. In striving to define Kirkland as a moral island in a sea of corruption, screenwriters Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson ended up treating the character as a symbol of righteous indignation rather than a flesh-and-blood person. Worse, their narrative is contrived and overstuffed.

          The story proper begins when a hard-driving judge, Henry Fleming (John Forsythe), is accused of rape. For convoluted reasons, Fleming asks Kirkland to represent him, even though they’re bitter enemies. Kirkland takes the case because he needs a favorable ruling from Fleming in order to exonerate a wrongly imprisoned client. Other plot elements include a judge contemplating suicide, a lawyer going insane because he helped a killer avoid prosecution, and a transvestite living in terror at the prospect of prison. Funny stuff, right? The fact that Curtin and Levinson treat this dark material with sitcom-style dialogue feels cheap and distasteful, especially since the film’s dramatic scenes work so much better than the comedy bits.

          In particular, the interaction between Forsythe and Pacino, two actors with completely different styles, is surprisingly interesting: Forsythe infuses his customary elegant reserve with an undercurrent of hateful menace, so Pacino’s exasperation in Forsythe’s presence is believable. In fact, all of the movie’s performances are good, with Christine Lahti, Lee Strasberg, and especially Jeffrey Tambor giving formulaic characters a degree of flesh-and-blood reality. However, the great Jack Warden is underused as the suicidal judge, because he’s mostly stuck performing stupid comedy like a wild helicopter ride that, one presumes, was meant to be outrageously funny.

          Director Norman Jewison handles individual scenes with his usual skill, but no filmmaker could stitch these discordant pieces together into a coherent whole. Plus, among its myriad other flaws, Justice is arguably the movie that introduced the world to Screamin’ Al, the latter-day Pacino performance style distinguished by vein-popping volume. “Out of order? You’re out of order!” Indeed you are, sir.

. . . And Justice for All: FUNKY

Going in Style (1979)

          Matching a whimsical premise with a pitch-perfect cast and a skilled writer-director hungry to show off his comedy chops, Going in Style is a charmer from start to finish. The plotting is a bit on the predictable side, and some might find the picture’s juxtaposition of melancholy elements with a frivolous story jarring, but the movie overflows with what used to be called, in less cynical times, “heart.”
          Joe (George Burns), Al (Art Carney), and Willie (Lee Strasberg) are three seniors sharing expenses by living together in New York City. They fritter away their days feeding pigeons from park benches, and they’re all close to going stir crazy from the monotony of their eventless lives. One day, Joe gets a wild idea: Why not rob a bank? Watching the three men debate and plan their crime is a hoot, since none can muster a good argument against becoming criminals; the threat of life in prison, for instance, isn’t much of a deterrent for men already facing death in the near future, and the idea that bank deposits are federally insured convinces them nobody will get hurt.

          Al pilfers pistols from his sweet nephew, Pete (Charles Hallahan), a working stiff who collects antique guns, and the seniors pick out novel disguises for the big heist—they wear Groucho glasses. Offering a reasonable explanation for why the trio gets away with their crime, writer-director Martin Brest (working from a story by Edward Cannon) plays up the idea that bank employees are stunned by the sight of gray-haired bandits with shuffling gaits and stooped shoulders. After the heist, Brest sweetly illustrates the new spring each man has in his step; the point is not that the men have become callous law-breakers, but that they’ve recaptured what it feels like to be alive.

          The movie takes some colorful turns after the robbery, leading to a bittersweet finale that’s quite satisfying, and Brest walks a fine line by balancing fun narrative contrivances with more realistic considerations. (His deft approach to character-driven crime comedies delivered blockbuster results in the ’80s, when he made Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run.) Each of the leading performances is lively and warm, with Burns putting a deadpan capper onto his amazing run of ’70s comeback roles, and Carney relishing a substantial part at a point when his own ’70s comeback was starting to run out of gas. As for Strasberg, the revered acting teacher best known for playing Jewish gangster Hyman Roth in The Godfather: Part II (1974), he counters his showier costars with a gently touching performance distinguished by expressive wordless moments.

Going in Style: GROOVY