Film – Ash Clifton, Writer

Movies I Loved as a Kid: “Rollerball”

It still amazes me that Norman Jewison, the same guy that directed Moonstruck, also directed Rollerball. I can’t imagine two films that are more different in content, genre, style, and tone. Moonstruck is a rom-com (imho, the best ever made); Rollerball is a dystopian sci-fi movie. Moonstruck is a comedy; Rollerball is a violent, brutal drama.

And yet, when one thinks about it, the twinning of these two movies under Jewison’s visionary eye kind of makes sense. Both are about an individual seeking personal freedom—self-actualization, as the shrinks say. The main difference is that, in Moonstruck, the obstacle is the protagonist’s own self-doubt and traumatized soul, while in Rollerball, it’s an oppressive, corporatist state.

Moonstruck is the better film, by far. But, as a kid, I absolutely loved Rollerball. It came out fifty years ago, in 1975, and it’s hard to describe how incredibly cool it was among the 11-to-14-year-old boy demographic. It checked all the teenage-boy boxes: sci-fi, sports, violence, motorcycles, and sex.

And then there was the novelty of the game itself, a nightmarish blend of NFL football, roller derby, motocross, and MMA. Of these, football seemed to be the primary influence, with the protagonist coming off very much like one of the celebrity quarterbacks of the era (think Joe Namath or Snake Stabler).

So, basically you had a futuristic, ultra-violent sport where Joe Namath got to kill people! How cool is that??? The film also had the appeal of forbidden fruit. A “hard R”-rated movie, its violence was deemed shocking, even transgressive, at the time. This was especially true considering the film’s A-list imprimatur; it was released by a major Hollywood studio (United Artists) with a major star (James Caan) and a major director (Jewison).

In retrospect, the fact that Rollerball was made at all seems a bit miraculous. It’s a good movie, and there is still much to love about it. Set on a near-future Earth where huge mega-corporations have replaced governments, it tells the story of an elite athlete, Jonathan E., who plays the violent, gladiatorial sport of Rollerball. Jonathan is so good that, after ten years in the sport, he is its oldest living practitioner, as well as its best. He is beloved and famous—so famous, in fact, that he worries the reigning cabal of corporate bosses, who use the game as a kind of panem et circenses form of mass entertainment, giving the oppressed masses an outlet for their (potentially revolutionary) rage.

Mr. Bartholomew, the CEO of the corporation that owns Jonathan’s team (and, it is implied, Jonathan himself, bodily, as a kind of company chattel), is especially concerned. He orders the aging star to announce his retirement. Jonathan refuses. Bartholomew orders him again. Jonathan refuses, again. Unfortunately, Jonathan is too famous to arrest or kill, so Bartholomew contrives to make the next few Rollerball matches so absurdly violent, even by the standards of the game, that Jonathan will change his mind, get injured, or get killed.

If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Rollerball essentially invented the extreme-sports-of-the-future sub-genre of sci-fi, beginning with Death Race 2000 and continuing all the way up to The Hunger Games series. It also anticipated cyberpunk, in which evil corporations have taken over all aspects of modern life, creating an authoritarian hellscape of haves vs have-nots.

In our current, CGI-corrupted age of cinema, Rollerball is especially impressive for its great, practical stunts. Supposedly, the stuntmen got so adept at the titular game that they would play matches amongst themselves between shooting sessions. And the acting is great, too. James Caan’s understated, nuanced performance as Jonathan is one of his best. He was bashed by some film critics for seeming “checked-out” in the role, but I think they were wrong. He’s playing a somewhat inarticulate but courageous character who is trying to make sense of his plight—and find a way to win.

Now that I have said all those good things about Rollerball, it’s time for me to add that it is also an extremely dated film. Alas, it suffers from much of the garishness of the 1970s, as well as a whiff of misogyny that even the patriarchal/fascist setting cannot quite explain. But if you can get past these flaws, it’s a good movie.

Check it out. It’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Why Do Movies Get Remakes, but Books Don’t?

If you’re a liberal-arts nerd like me who thinks about culture all the time, you have probably pondered this question: why do people remake movies, but not books?

Yeah, I know. On the surface, this seems like a silly and even naive question. Movies, after all, are a popular medium. They belong primarily in the category of the performing arts, like theater and ballet and classical music. And, as we all understand, no one over ever gives the “final” performance of Hamlet or Don Giovanni or The Jupiter Symphony. Yes, there are certainly “classic” performances of all these works—some of them, made in the past century, have been recorded for the ages—but none is ever the last performance. Each generation must have its own Hamlet, Don Giovanni, etc.

Okay, so we’ve settled that question.

Or have we?

Why Modern Movies Feel “Flat” (Literally)

I was surfing the YouTube this morning when I stumbled upon this really cool video essay about the (diminished) immersive experience of modern films as opposed to old, classic ones. The author echoes some of the ideas I sketched out in a similar post from a few years ago called Whatever Happened to Open-Form Films?

Please check-out the video and the post if you are interested.

Ten Things I Love About “The Day the Earth Stood Still”

Well, over a week has passed since Halloween, and I’m still working through the classic horror and sci-fi movies that I rewatch every year around this time. One of my favorites (heck, one of everybody’s favorites, as far as I can tell, assuming that everybody is a nerd of a certain age) is Roger Wise’s 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (henceforth, TDTESS). Here are ten things I love about it….

1.) The Opening

This movie doesn’t dick around. It opens with the frantic calls of radar operators across the globe tracking an ultra-fast UAP as it enters the earth’s atmosphere. Word leaks out to press, generating a world-wide media frenzy—the “media,” in this case, being radio. Wise cast several then-famous, real-life radio broadcasters to play themselves, and I simply love hearing their great, precise modulated voices as they simultaneously try to inform the public without causing panic. It’s hard to believe there was ever such a time when journalists were so revered and appreciated, with good reason.

2.) The Music

From the title sequence onward, the film makes great use of Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant score. Hermann notably employed electronic instruments, including a kind of stone-age synthesizer called a theremin. It’s the theremin that gives the score that haunting, weird quality that has since become synonymous with atomic-era sci-fi movies.

Speaking of atomic-era stuff, this leads me to my next item…

3.) Analog technology

I don’t know why, but I am fascinated by how the movie gives the viewer a glimpse—almost a cross-section, really—of the analog technology of the day. We see radio transmitters, of course, but also phone switch boards with dozens of (women) operators frantically switching lines, and people yelling into telephones. And, of course, we have all the accoutrements of World War II, which was still a recent event: tanks, jeeps, motorcycles, rifles (yes, rifles). There is something soothing about all this old-fashioned stuff, especially when it is contrasted with….

4.) Singularity Technology

When the UAP finally lands (in Washington D.C., naturally, near the Capitol), we see that it represents a kind of futuristic tech that is the diametrical opposite of the local analog, atomic-era tech. The ship is all smooth silver metal until a seam appears, and the seam opens smoothly to allow a ramp to extend. A door forms in the same way, and the alien pilot Klaatu (Michael Renne) emerges, dressed in a silver suit and a helmet that, one assumes, is made of the same silver metal. All of this seems magical, even now, and also presages the later sci-fi tropes of nanotechnology, lasers, force-fields, atomic energy, computers, etc. etc.

Of course, Klaatu’s most impressive piece of tech is….

5.) Gort

Why is Gort so damned cool? Because he’s terrifying. As a giant, lumbering robot, he evokes the golem myth of implacable, supernatural force that has no emotions and no fear. And, with his single, death-ray emitting eye, he also reminds us of another mythic archetype—the cyclops. And in the way he suggests enormous power, barely held in check, he anticipates The Terminator films of three decades later.

6.) Michael Rennie

As with most classic, once-in-a-lifetime performances, Michael Rennie’s portrayal of Klaatu is so good that it’s now impossible to imagine anyone else doing it. With his smiling, gentle, athletic demeanor, he projects a firm but benevolent presence. He genuinely wants to help humanity escape its seemingly inevitable fate (i.e., being destroyed, either at its own hand or that of Gort). Also, he seems genuinely curious and likeable, especially in…

7.) Klaatu’s Interactions with Danny

I love the scenes where Klaatu and Danny, the little boy whose boarding house Klaatu finds himself in, go on a site-seeing tour of Washington D.C. They are the emotional core of the movie. After all, in our world, Klaatu is very much like a little boy himself. His sense of wonder is almost as strong as Danny’s.

8.) Patricia Neal

Instead of casting some bombshell scream-queen in the role of Helen, Danny’s mother, Wise chose the formidable and mesmerizing Patrica Neal. She was a great actress who would later hold her own against Paul Newman in 1963’s Hud. As Helen, she exudes an intelligence and moral strength that not only saves Klaatu from capture and death; she saves the entire planet.

9.) How Much you Don’t See

I could write an entire post on the paradox of old thriller movies whose lack of CGI effects (TDTESS was made thirty-three years before Jurassic Park), was actually an advantage. The film is actually made stronger by how much Wise doesn’t show on-screen. That is, we don’t see how Klaatu stops all electrical stuff from working on the titular day. We don’t see Gort walking across D.C. on his way to liberate Klaatu’s body from its jail cell. You know, stuff that would be easy to render in the CGI era (and which would also be rather boring). After all, the ultimate special effect is the human imagination, which happily fills in the blanks better than any whiz-bang effect.

My favorite example of this in the film is when Danny secretly follows Klaatu to his spaceship one night. He watches as Klaatu uses a flashlight to wake-up Gort, who then knocks-out the two G.I. ‘s guarding the ship. The genius of this scene is that we don’t actually see Gort do this. We just see him lumber over to the two dudes. Then, at the last moment, the camera switches back to Danny’s horrified face as he watches the moment of (rather mild) violence. Then, the camera switches back to Gort as he stands over the crumpled, unconscious bodies of the soldiers on the ground. Brilliant.

10.) Multiculturalism

It’s important to remember that TDTESS is a cold-war era movie, produced at the very height of the Red Scare and its attendant paranoia and xenophobia. It also came out just a few years before the start of the American Civil Rights movie. So, I am always amazed, and even a bit moved, by how progressive Wise’s vision is. In the opening scenes, we see people from other countries—France, India, China, and even Russia—depicted in a sympathetic light, human light. At least once in the film, Wise goes out of his way to show some genuine, actual Black people in the crowd watching Klaatu’s spaceship land. (This might seem trivial, now, but it was momentous decision back then.) And, of course, the climax of the movie comes with a miniature U.N. assembly, arranged by Professor Barnhardt (wonderfully played by the great Sam Jaffe, incidentally), full of people of all ethnicities and cultures. The message is clear—it’s only by cooperation and friendship that humanity can survive. And it’s a message that is just as relevant now as it was back then, perhaps even more so.

See also this cool post from another blogger (from whom I stole one of the screenshots above)…

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951): 70 years later, and still standing… – Musings of a Middle-Aged Geek

Perfect Films: Tár

Author’s Note: I first posted this essay a few years ago. I’ve decided to repost it now due to some recent interest.

When I finally watched Todd Field’s 2022 movie Tár, starring Cate Blanchett. I really didn’t know much about the film, except that it had been well received (Blanchett received an Oscar nomination) and that it was about a female orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár. From this scant information, I assumed it would be a worthy but standard drama about a woman artist’s struggle to thrive in a male-dominated world.

Boy, was I wrong! Tár is a great movie. So great, in fact, that I became temporarily obsessed with it, so much so that I tried to figure out what the name Tár means. I ran it through Google translate and got a hit: tár is Icelandic for tear (the verb, as in “to tear to shreds”). I don’t know if this was Field’s intention, but it fits well—Lydia rips everything and everyone around her to shreds. And in the last part of the film, she faces an almost literal tear in the fabric of reality.

Put simply, Tár is a monster movie. Lydia is the monster.

French intellectual Charlotte Aïssé is credited with saying, “No man is a hero to his valet.” This is certainly true for the character of Francesca (Noémie Merlant), Lydia’s apprentice conductor, personal assistant, a general factotem. As one would expect, Francesca knows all the skeletons in Lydia’s closet. And there are a lot of them. Lydia Tár, we soon learn, is a bit of a sexual predator, in the Harvey Weinstein model. She uses her influence and fame to seduce young women in her orchestra, then keeps them silent with threats. When one of her former conquests, Krista, commits suicide (she was depressed because she couldn’t get another orchestra job; Lydia made sure of this by writing bad recommendations for her), Lydia orders Francesca to delete all their emails regarding the matter. Thus begins the intrigue that will constitute the main action of the film.

But Tár is not just a clever twist on the #MeToo movement narrative, or a meditation on the corrosive effects of fame. Rather, it’s more like a descent into hell, albeit a coldly beautiful version. Filmed in desaturated grays and blues, the first two acts reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, in its brutal, almost clinical exploration of intellectual high culture (transposed from Manhattan in Kubrick’s movie to Berlin in this one). Lydia is shown as an ultimately tragic character, a female MacBeth—brilliant, gifted, and strong but hopelessly in thrall to her ambition and darker impulses.

In other words, she is a nasty piece of work, sadistic to her enemies and overbearing to her friends. (And that’s without even considering her sexual predations.)

But it’s in the final act that the movie really becomes something otherworldly. When Lydia’s misdeeds finally catch up to her, and her carefully controlled world of power and influence begins to unravel (to tear apart, as it were), the film’s tone and pacing becomes less like Eyes Wide Shut and more like Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Both films climax when the main character locks eyes with an even greater monster (literal, in Roeg’s horror masterpiece; metaphorical in Tár), one that manifests the hitherto unseen evil of the story.

In fact, the last third of the film can be read as a supernatural horror tale, complete with ghosts, as Dan Kois does in his excellent essay for Slate. I would go even further and suggest that the entire move is best interpreted as a David Lynch-style surrealist nightmare. A descent into hell.

I’ve often thought that if hell exists, it’s probably not eternal, and it’s probably not a lake of fire. My bet is that hell looks almost exactly like earth, and the people trapped there do not know they’re in hell. Instead, they are forced to re-commit their sins over and over, but with a twist: this time, the victims get revenge.

Regardless of how you interpret it, Tár is a great movie. Check it out, if you dare…

R.I.P. Diane Keaton

One indication of Diane Keaton’s greatness is the simple fact that two of the most iconic of the 1970s end with her face. That is, with her face literally filling their final frames, as she looks straight at the viewer. These films are, of course, The Godfather (1972) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). In the former, her character, Kay, gives a stricken expression as she watches her young husband, Michael Corleone, go over to the Dark Side of the Force to become, at last, the new godfather of his crime family. In the Looking for Mr. Goodbar, her character, Theresa, lies on the floor in her darkened apartment, dying. She has just been fatally stabbed by a psycho guy she picked up at a bar. The guy runs off, and the camera stays fixed on her face as she breathes her last breath, alone.

I’m not sure which ending is more disturbing. In both cases, her character dies a kind of death (spiritual, in The Godfather; literal in Looking for Mr. Goodbar). And this death is brought on, directly or indirectly, by a man’s act of evil. This might seem ironic, given the fact that Keaton, more than other female star, best embodied the spirit of the New Woman, especially the second-wave version that swept the culture in the 60s and 70s. In fact, it’s not ironic at all. In both films, she becomes a kind of casualty-of-war, defiant but ultimately destroyed by a male-centered (if not actually misogynistic) culture.

No, I am not trying to define Keaton’s long, brilliant career through the single lens of feminism-vs-toxic-masculinity. But you can’t talk about Diane Keaton without considering how important a symbol she was for both boys and girls watching movies when I was growing up. From the moment she appeared on-screen at the titular character in Woody Allen’s masterpiece, Annie Hall, she captured the heart of a generation. Dressed in men’s clothing, she was beautiful, elegant, and breath-takingly feminine. With her goofy demeanor, mixed with her sharp-as-a-whip intellect, she was the gawky, A-student who all the smart, gawky, A-student girls in the audience could look up to (and who all the A-student guys secretly fell in love with.)

As with any movie star of any gender, it is impossible to separate Keaton’s appeal from her physiognomy. She was, of course, beautiful, but in a more muted, subtle way than someone like Jacqueline Bisset, Britt Ekland, Jill St. John, or any other of the “off-the-charts-sexy” actresses of her generation. (On my list of 15 Hollywood Archetypes, Keaton would sit firmly in the “Goddess Next Door” bucket.) To me, the most remarkable thing about Keaton was the way she always seemed to glow. She was literally luminous, in all her films, an attribute that a cynic might write-off as a testament to good genetics (i.e., good skin), or perhaps expert lighting.

Being a bit of mystical, woo-hoo type, I would call it the emanation of her sublime, inner being, filtering out into our mortal plane…

She carried this luminous quality into old age. Alas, though she was 79, she left us too soon.

Godspeed, Ms. Keaton!

R.I.P. Robert Redford

The great scholar Joseph Campbell once explained that every time we go into a cinema and see a movie star—Tom Cruise, for example—up on the screen, some part of our brains is aware that the real person, the actor Tom Cruise, is alive somewhere else in that same, exact moment. This ability to exist in two places at once, Campbell said, is an aspect of a God, a living divinity.

Our subconscious perception of actors as gods is one reason we are always surprised by the death of a movie star, especially one who has been around since we, ourselves, were kids. How could they ever die? They seem to occupy a higher plane of reality, immortal, always youthful if not actually young.

Robert Redford was surely one of the greatest movie stars of my youth, and he starred in two of my favorite films of all time, All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor, both of which I have written about on this blog. What made him interesting was that weird dichotomy of blond, athletic, all-American good-looks combined with a reserved, wary intelligence. (On my list of Hollywood Archetypes, he fits squarely in the “Dark Prince” slot.) He was a very smart man, who did a lot of amazing things both on-screen and off-. Among the most notable of these was his founding of the Sundance Film Festival, which has come to rival Cannes as the preferred venue for indie-film directors to premiere their movies.

The fact that Redford would create an alternative festival for “the little guys” in the film industry was typical. He was, in some ways, the most counter-cultural movie star of the last fifty years—even more so than Easy Rider himself, Peter Fonda—in that he made movies about men fighting some vast, evil establishment. Often, this was the military-industrial complex in either its actual (All the President’s Men) or its fantasy (Three Days of the Condor) form. In his later years, when Redford could no longer play the lead, he took on the role of the villain who represents this evil empire, as in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

As a kid, I always found something soothing about Robert Redford, even in movies filled with threats and violence. I suspect that, in my mind, he represented the best spirit of my parents’ generation (he was roughly the same age as my father). That is, the young adults of the 1960s and 70s. Post-hippie, but very hip. World-weary, but not broken. Brave, but not foolhardy. Idealistic, but not naïve.

And, above all, ready to fight the system.

Godspeed, Mr. Redford…

What I’m Reading: “The Future Was Now”

In the summer of 1982, I was a very unhappy boy. Being a nerd in an upper-class high school full of preppies and jocks, I didn’t fit in very well. I hated most of my classes. I had a few good, close friends (including some jocks), but that was it. As one would expect, I spent a lot of time in my room reading sci-fi novels and typing short stories on the typewriter my mother had bought me.

The only thing that kept me sane was movies. Fortunately, 1982 turned out to be the most incredible time in cinematic history to be a nerd. A string of classics came out that summer including Blade Runner, The Thing, The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Max Max II), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, Tron, Conan the Barbarian, and (the 800-pound gorilla) E.T. Even at the time, I was cognizant that this bumper crop of cool films, all coming out within a few weeks of each other, was a very unusual, almost magical development. I spent many hours on the bus with my friends going to and from the local cineplex, where we watched many of these films over and over.

For forty years, I labored under the delusion that this rapid series of classics was just a lucky coincidence. But while reading Chris Nashawaty’s fine nonfiction book, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, I learned otherwise. A good historian will reveal that any event, no matter how seemingly incredible or unlikely, actually emerges logically from previous events. That is, the seeds were planted years or even decades before. And in 1982, main seed was a little film called Star Wars. As Nashawaty explains:

There’s an unwritten rule for reporters and trendwatchers who cover Hollywood that if you want to know why a movie—or a particular group of movies—was made, all you need to do is look back and see what was a hit at the box office five years earlier since that’s the typical gestation period for studio executives to spot a trend, develop and green-light an imitator, push it into production, and usher it into theaters. And the summer of 1982 would prove no exception, coming exactly five years after Star Wars. What seemed underreported, however, was how this new wave of sci-fi titles had been conceived and carried out. It is a wave that we’re still feeling the aftereffects of, for better and worse, today.

Perfect Films: “Manhunter”

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

As any old movie buff knows (and many younger ones, too), crime thrillers in 1980s almost constituted their own sub-genre. That is, they had their own special vibe. Slick. Stylish. Erotic. Typically, they boasted good-looking actors with great 80s hair, wearing garish 80s clothes and doing dangerous things. These were exotic and entertaining films, usually set in one of two environments: a dark city landscape (i.e. L.A.) or a gorgeous, sun-drenched beach (i.e. Miami).

And then there was the soundtrack. Synth-heavy, but punctuated with propulsive rock songs from the era—usually something from Genesis or Phil Collins. Take 1984’s Against All Odds, for example, starring Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward. Collins wrote and sang the theme song for that one, garnering him an Oscar nom. (And, yes, that movie was set against a dark L.A. landscape and a gorgeous beach.)

But my absolute favorite 1980s crime thriller, by far, is a movie almost no one remembers: Michael Mann’s 1986 serial killer flick Manhunter. I saw it when it first came out in 1986, and then saw it again, quickly, before it vanished from the cineplexes forever. In the forty years since, the film has gotten almost no respect, except from a few cinephiles like me. (Quinten Tarantino is a famous booster; he put Manhunter on his list of favorite 1980s films.)

I’ve often wondered why Manhunter is so underappreciated. It probably has something to do with its lame title, which the studio forced Mann for reasons too stupid to discuss here. The original working title was, of course, Red Dragon, taken from the source novel by Thomas Harris. I often think that if the studio had stuck with that title, the film would have been a hit. Another reason is that the brilliant soundtrack, which mostly samples great songs from the era but includes great original music from The Reds, was soon deemed as “dated”. (It has actually come back into fashion thanks to the rise of the Synthwave aesthetic.)

R.I.P. Terance Stamp

There is a scene in Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 noir thriller The Limey when the main character, Wilson, a career-criminal and generally scary guy, is questioning a woman in her house about a man named Valentine. Wilson (played with enormous power by Terance Stamp), is looking for the man who killed his daughter, and Valentine is his prime suspect. The woman, naively, offers to give Wilson Valentine’s phone number, at which point Wilson smiles wickedly and says, mostly to himself, “I’ve got his number.”

It’s a great, almost chilling moment. What we, the viewers, know (and the woman doesn’t) is that Wilson has already killed five men to get Valentine’s “number”, every sense of the term. And Stamp’s delivery of this line speaks volumes about Wilson’s character—his steely-eyed determination, his courage, and his constant, barely controlled rage.

It’s a great moment in a great movie, which marked one of several come-backs in Stamp’s long career. His filmography is so great and varied that one must divide not in stages but in ages. First, there was Stamp the movie star, an epically handsome, Angry-Young-Man who got the lead in several fine, gritty films in the 1960s, including William Wyler’s The Collector and Ken Loach’s Poor Cow. But he never really clicked as a leading-man, either in England or in Hollywood, and his next big break didn’t come until 1980’s Superman II, in which he reprised his role as the evil General Zod (a.k.a. the chief of the three baddies whom Superman’s dad banishes to the Phantom Zone in Superman.)

To this day, Stamp is best remembered for this one, silly role, Zod—at least, in America. But film nerds such as myself admired his work in many other small, supporting roles throughout the 80s. My favorite was his scene-stealing cameo in 1987 Wall Street, playing a redoubtable corporate raider who has reformed his ways and stands in opposition to the evil Gordon Gekko.

Then, in the 1990’s, Stamp had his next, and greatest, comeback with his role as transexual woman in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which remains one of my favorite films of all time. Stamp was nominated for a BAFTA for that one, and he should have been nominated for an Oscar, too. But no matter. The role is a classic, and it re-introduced him to American audiences.

This led to Stamp’s last leading role in a major motion picture. This was, of course, The Limey, and it is perhaps his greatest performance, in part because he was able to leverage his own, real-life history as 1960s hipster in the role of Wilson, who was a master thief in 1960s England. Indeed, Soderbergh sampled black-and-white footage of Stamp from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow to use in flashbacks of Wilson’s earlier life—a daring artistic choice which, although done with permission from Loach himself, remains controversial to this day. However one might feel about this cinematic cribbing, though, Soderbergh made one hell of a good movie—a genuine classic—in which Stamp finally got a chance to shine in the lead, one last time.

Terance Stamp passed away on Sunday, at the age of 87. Not bad, for such a hell-raiser. I’ll miss him.