the rubber burner

I took a break from work my usual way the other night, by pulling a movie more or less randomly from my shelf. (By the way, when I was a kid, my dream was to have a home movie theatre. In this regard anyway, the future's been okay by me.) It turned out to be a British DVD I bought a few years ago, a 1967 movie called Robbery.

Funny thing is, Robbery was directed by Peter Yates (born in England in 1929), and Mr. Yates is somebody I've given more than a little thought to over the past few years. (Don't ask. That's me.) It began with my modestly epiphanic viewing of Bullitt a few years back. It was probably the fifteenth or so time I'd seen that movie since my father took me (at age ten) back in 1968, but this time something clicked that hadn't before: that movie is all about Steve McQueen's eyes.

It's true. Just watch it. Apart from that monumentally perfect car chase sequence, very little happens in Bullitt. A police-protected mobster appears to be killed at the beginning, and McQueen's Lt. Frank Bullitt ventilates the real mobster at the San Francisco airport at the end. In between, apart from that game-changing Mustang rubber-burner, it's mostly McQueen laying back and looking. No part of McQueen's body moves nearly as much as his eyes, which survey crime scenes, people's faces, the corner store frozen food section, and the road ahead with equal degrees of probing intensity. Yates understands this. Note how much of the movie consists either of close-ups of McQueen or shots where McQueen is standing slightly out of centre just looking on. And here's the thing, at least if you really want to understand why Bullitt is the movie most often cited as the one defining the McQueen Cool or how to direct a movie around a true star's persona: even when he's just looking, even though he may not be saying or doing anything, you can't take your eyes off his. The movie is anchored in the man's silent gravity, the result being that just about anything he does -- and he really doesn't do much more than his job -- becomes a dramatic event of transfixing interest. Everything about him is detached and cool but the eyes: they burn with concentration. The thrill of watching Bullitt is watching McQueen watch.

A year or so after that, I watched Yates' 1973 adaptation of George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a movie I'd seen parts of on TV some years before. It was recently released on DVD courtesy of the dangerously reliable Criterion Collection label, and this time I was welded in place. Once again, not a whole lot really takes place in the movie, at least not if you consider 'action' to consist of events involving objects moving at great velocity toward some kind of collision. Indeed, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is damned talky, and almost Europeanly so: people speak in restaurants, bars and cars, on telephones, street corners and windblown parking lots.

The guy doing the most talking is Robert Mitchum, age 55 at the time of shooting, who plays the title role: a guy out on parole who doesn't want to go back to jail, and who is providing information, in exchange for leniency, to the Boston cops about the wiseguys Eddie is a street-level gunrunner for. So talk is embedded into the ritual and routine: the movie's all about negotiating angles and playing your best game face, trying to lie effectively while reading the lies you're being told. So, once again, Yates is making a movie about faces, and while the movie is packed with some of the period's most seedily expressive -- Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco -- none comes near the creased, leathery elegance of Mitchum's. He's heartbreakingly good. Doomed from the gitgo as you know he must be -- it's 1973, after all -- he slouches from scene to scene with a final-inning, faint hope determination that he might actually thwart the fate he knows in his bones will probably prevail. But it's all he can do.

This is another astutely-directed, 20-20 sharp movie about star persona, but where Bullitt pulled the various strands of prior Steve McQueen-ness into the ultimate expression of the star's singular cool -- something Don Siegel would do, in the same city and with another lone wolf cop, with Eastwood in Dirty Harry -- Eddie Coyle draws from Mitchum's formidable iconic noir gravitas and pours it into the battered existential receptacle of this sadly stale-dated smalltime crook. Watching this guy come to terms with his own impending irrelevancy is almost unbearably sad, and it make you realize how much of the Mitchum aura has always been steeped in doom. Eddie Coyle is another unassumingly stunning movie from Yates, fully in command of its atmospheric eloquence and unspoken undercurrents, and so quiet and seemingly incidental in its execution you barely notice how tightly engineered the damned thing is.

Then comes Robbery -- at least to my attention, it was actually made before Bullitt and Coyle -- and it's very nearly as good. Opening like the other two movies with a crime in process -- a heart-thumping daylight robbery-and-car-chase on London's teemingly crowded mod-era streets -- Robbery then gets down to its real business, which turns out really to be, well, business: how the heisting of a Royal Mail train is planned, architectured and executed by a conspiracy of thieves led by the falcon-eyed Stanley Baker (in another mostly silent, largely glance-based performance) who almost get away with it.

Perhaps because it was based on the notorious 'Great Train Robbery' then so familiar to British audiences, Robbery largely disavows character, context or motivation -- but with that kind of cash, who needs it? -- in favour of pure, methodical process. Like some of the best crime movies of Don Siegel, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Georges Clouzot and Michael Mann, it's really an exercise in observing men at work: how plans turn on intricate processes of concentration and collaboration, and how you can get to made to root for anybody provided you're fully sympathetic with the seriousness of their dedication and skills.

It's interesting that both Robbery and Bullitt were criticized for the seemingly lackadaisical nature of the way they handled their few moments of heterosexual interface. Both feature sequences in which the protagonists go home to their woman (Joanna Pettet and Jacqueline Bisset respectively), only to be implored once again to give up the dangerous life and settle down. These passages have both been dismissed as half-hearted, obligatory and sexist, but there's another way of looking at them: they underscore just how supremely comfortable, in control and natural these guys are when they're working -- the ultimate measure of a certain kind of man's worth -- and how the domestic realm leaves them feeling like strangers in their own skin. If these scenes feel awkward, that may be the point: home is not where men like this belong. But then look at Mitchum's at-home moments with his wife (Helena Carroll), a woman he clearly loves, aches for having hurt and is willing to risk his increasingly worthless life to bring some -- any -- degree of peace and comfort.

Peter Yates, who's now 81 years old, made other kinds of movies than crime dramas -- Breaking Away, The Dresser, The House on Carroll Street -- but his crime dramas were so good you're kind of left wishing that's all he'd made, or wonder what he might've done if he'd come along earlier and, like Siegel, Sam Fuller or Anthony Mann, cut his teeth on hard-as-nails studio B-movies. This trio of crime movies are especially impressive for their restraint, their vivid sense of location, their immense sensitivity to action-as-character, and their formidable respect for the pure getting-done of jobs.

I think that, as much as anything else, is why I love -- L.O.V.E.: love -- a good crime movie. (By that, I include film noir and gangster films.) What compels me is the subtle luring to the dark side: the understanding I can get of men doing things I'd never dream of doing, the sly seduction of my affinities toward solipsistic pragmatism and purely situational ethics. And, if I was compelled -- let's say at gunpoint -- to make a categorical thematic distinction between crime movies and westerns -- my other favourite kind of movie -- it would be this: crime dramas are about ethics, and westerns are about morality. Crime dramas are about the codes of professionalism by which you conduct your business no matter what that business may be, and westerns are about what you're willing to do -- i.e., kill -- in the name of what you think is right.

In their own ways, all of these movies are ultimately about cool. Not so much in the sense of style or attitude as in the sense of doing what must be done and, without compromise or second thought, doing it as best as you can. That's a pretty good description of what McQueen, Mitchum and Stanley Baker are up to in these movies, as well as the approach taken by the guy who's directing them.