Don Siegel, B movie director who rose to studio genre ranks, born October 26, 1912

tough!

Charley Varrick is really good.

I saw Rough Cut (Burt Reynolds) as a teenager and man, he shoulda quit before that one.

Still haven't seen Two Mules for Sister Sara and The Beguiled among the Clints. Might go Body Snatchers, The Lineup, C Varrick, The Shootist, Alcatraz, The Killers, D Harry, in order. Been too long since Riot in Cell Block 11.

Supposedly Mickey Rooney gives a solid psycho performance as Baby Face Nelson!

The Killers not a patch on the original and D Harry is garbage despite great SF 70s background.

dirty harry's a million times better than the likes of charley varrick, which is a solid little flick but nothing to write home about.

Some killer scores on these, esp 2 Mules which may be my all-time fave Morricone western score. Schifrin for Dirty Harry of course, the quirky-ass stuff E. Bernstein did for The Shootist, and I have quite a fondness for the bizarre title song to Flaming Star.

Have been noting 2 Mules on NF Streaming for a while, opinions 'preciated.

I'll take a solid little flick over whatever Dirty Harry is.

im probably underselling varrick... it's pretty sweet actually, and often overlooked. but dirty h is my shit too. also coogan's bluff

The Line-Up is awesome.

dirty harry or coogan's bluff for me

Body Snatchers perhaps with Dirty Harry and The Beguiled close behind and The Killers in the mix for a place.

everything i've seen has been great, but nothing beats 'dirty harry' -- maybe a perfect film.

The Beguiled is way underrated, 'cause not a lot of people have seen it. Surprisingly creepy. Might get my vote, though there are a lot of candidates here - Siegel is like a less insane Sam Fuller, a genre director who mostly stayed inside the lines but was still capable of terrific work.

can't imagine any of the ones I haven't seen being better than Charlie Varrick so that

otoh Body Snatchers

I haven't many of these, only the big ones.

Body Snatchers is so, so good. (Just ignore the framing story crap.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0Yei2sAbE

^^^ love that scene

I've been meaning to see more, but I enjoyed the Killers and Hell Is for Heroes. Both had great casts, and the latter's production problems almost seem to work in its favour.

Exactly what he did to the Soviets and exactly what Obama did to Osama. Here's to STRONG leadership!

TheChrisDoes 1 month ago

HUGE HUGE fave, madigan's the only one of my faves that hasn't been mentioned yet so i voted that. prefer his killers to the lancaster one tbh.

are lorre and greenstreet in the verdict morbs or are you talking about siegel's work on casablanca?

balls just beat me to madigan, which is the one i watched most recently, a beautiful looking dvd, definitive proof of what a great composer of images/sequences sigel was, especially when working in color, with reasonably gd budgets and casts, in the late 60s/early 70s.

death of a gunfighter is the first alan smithee?

ok so lorre and greenstreet are in the verdict. i should try to do a film fest some weekend of movies where they just tried to recreate the cast of the maltese falcon.

Across the Pacific quite high then

I keep picturing Madigan as being like the Simpson's Dirty Harry spoof even though I've seen it and I'm pretty sure it's not.

alex is yr problem w/ dirty harry the fascism or something else?

I count only six of these that I've seen. Body Snatchers, even though I'm a bigger fan of the first remake.

alex is yr problem w/ dirty harry the fascism or something else?
--balls

No it's just not a good movie. A major part of it is Eastwood's "acting" but it comes off as a very silly.

man i'd never even heard of the black windmill until now - michael caine spy thriller, roy budd soundtrack - anyone seen it?

Big Steal.

varrick easy

though i've only seen five, so hey

Except for a prolonged Cassavetes-Dickinson meet-cute and courtship, the remake of The Killers is the equal of the original in its own terse way. Reagan was a surprise.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I caught up with a lot of these films. Two Mules for Sister Sara is quite amusing, The Big Steal a muddle although not an enervated one (it's Across the Pacific to Out of the Past's The Maltese Falcon), and The Beguiled as savvy about moral compromise as any modern cop show.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

happy 100th Donald

i heart the morricone-penned two mules for sister sara theme song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl6DA1YDGcc

though i would've voted for invasion of the body snatchers lest man-faced dog hunt me down:

http://d2tq98mqfjyz2l.cloudfront.net/image_cache/1337560422909390.jpg

not his verzhin

the original is better, definitely. but the siegel version is pretty damn fine, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSFO50Gk1YI

the original is better, definitely. but the siegel version is pretty damn fine, too.

his is the original

oh duh, u right.

watched 'dirty harry' for the first time - is kinda iconic but def not better than charley varrick imo

watched 'the beguiled' for the first time - really does a lot of things well, alternatively mannered, mean, creepy - 4/5 classic imo

Screened Madigan the other night. A fine film, but good grief do the Henry Fonda bits drown in soap.

My feelings exactly

I was on the receiving end of a manic testimonial for Coogan's Bluff in a bar the other night.

and instead you showed him Morbius' Cliff.

v drunk str8 film critic, smarty.

watched 'the shootist' - p fun really w/ some genuine tenderness, wayne as vulnerable, broken down...as much as possible, really;

theres literally a scene btwn wayne & jimmy stewart, followed by wayne w/ lauren bacall, followed by......ron howard w/ scatman crothers. all work tho, it's kinda amazing

An interviewer asked Ron Howard if John Wayne had given him any tips on acting. He said that, during the filming of the final shootout, Wayne took him aside and said he had some advice for him. As Howard eagerly awaited some profound advice, Wayne said "Ron, if you want to look menacing - close your mouth."

i watched Jinxed! - not that bad. a lot of the plot makes no sense but all the individual scenes kinda work; it's more campy than dark humor; didnt realize peckinpah worked on this, uncredited

Sister Sara showing on big screen in NYC tonight... the story is by Budd Boetticher, the script by Albert Maltz of the Hollywood Ten.

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=03&year=2015#showing-43933

Have fun.

as it's not til 9:15, i estimate the chances of my leaving the house again after eating dinner at ~ 56.3%.

Finally caught Two Mules for Sister Sara last night in 35mm (tho it ran 12 mins shorter than listed, no idea why; didn't appear to be a cut-for-content version). Basically a roughed-up African Queen, but the slapstick way Clint and Shirley relate to each other bodily (before the telegraphed twist comes) is a riot. Didn't much care for the pretty conventional last 20 minutes of blow-em-up.

The Beguiled strikes me as the least of the Clint collabs; Geraldine Page's late-career twitchiness has already begun, and perhaps ppl just get off on Eastwood smooching an 11-year-old girl right at the start, and then being treated like Sleeping Beauty by the entire finishing school. Then the dialogue lays the vengeance out for the slow-witted ("You might as well have castrated me!").

The sawing sound of the amputation was nice though.

apparently the picture's misogyny or lack thereof has been debated since '71, but DS said its theme was "the basic desire of women to castrate men".

His The Beguiled is an interesting oddity. I actually liked Page, and the whole stoned early 70s vibe of the whole thing (the occasional bits of internal monologue are jarring in a not un-pleasurable way). I didn't feel that it was misogynistic, necessarily (luckily, I don't always trust artists re: their own work), but it was definitely lacking a firm perspective. I never knew where I was supposed to stand with this story, and I think Siegel's presentation of the material is not so much ambiguous as it is unfocused. Needless to say, though, that if someone was gonna have another go at this material in 2017, it's good that it's a woman.

That said, I'm disappointed, from what I've read about Coppola's decision to elide any hint of race in her remake, that her film will lack any corollary to the earlier one's most interesting character: Mae Mercer's take-no-shit slave. I don't know how others read her being the wisest person in the film, by far (her bit on Eastwood's being as much of a slave as she is was...provocative), but I found her character refreshing.

The Lineup! Aura to burn.

was gonna say Riot in Cell Block 11 is a great movie to watch right, also very short, like 80 minutes. The exchange between the warden and the police chief (?) is perfect... "You think if we treat them better, they'll stop rioting?"

Siegel's first film, Count the Hours!, is worth checking out. One of Teresa Wright's few worthwhile 1950s roles, and a genuinely impressive debut.

Whoa, dunno where I got the idea that Count the Hours was his first film. Had no idea he had like 6 before that

Screened Madigan the other night. A fine film, but good grief do the Henry Fonda bits drown in soap.
― Big Sambola & The Tailspinners (C. Grisso/McCain)

Doesn't get a chapter in the Tarantino book, but it gets mentioned a few times, and I found a cheap copy. Post-Bonnie & Clyde, pre-Wild Bunch, felt like an old-school guy trying to move things along, but still very much an old-school guy. The husbands-and-wives/girlfriends scenes felt really dated; the psycho, the location shooting, and the grubbiness of the detectives point towards the '70s. I liked Fonda's police commissioner better than Grissom in at least a couple of scenes: confronting his friend (James Whitmore) about some shady business, and running into Madigan (Richard Widmark) at a party. Madigan's trying to duck him, and Fonda's blank stoicism plays well off of Widmark's obvious discomfort/panic. By the way, unlike Wikipedia, I don't think you can say with 100% certainty that they had to cheat to launch the TV series.

Charley Varrick is pretty great, it's the only one of Don Siegel's films I've seen so far

Original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a must (though I prefer the '78 remake--with a cameo from Siegel).