Storytelling of all kinds can influence authors and essayists. These are the films that influenced me most and why, listed by release date. The first four I saw originally on TV in my parents’ walk-up in Hoboken.
“Double Indemnity” (1944) – In high school, I was hooked by Cain and Chandler, among other masters of hardboiled crime fiction, and here was a film based on a Cain novel adapted by Chandler and director Billy Wilder. Chandler and Wilder quarreled but tightened the story and their staccato dialogue sings. Superbly sinister, Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyliss Dietrichson won’t defeat relentless Edward G. Robinson’s Barton Keyes – or will she? Trivia note: Chandler makes a very brief cameo in the film.
“Call Northside 777” (1948) – My attraction to the world of journalism may have begun with seeing this film told in documentary style. Prodded by his editor played by Lee J. Cobb, Jimmy Stewart’s wry, cynical P.J. McNeal looks into case in which a working-class mother believes her son, portrayed by Richard Conte (born one town over in Jersey City), hasn’t committed the murder for which he’s been in prison for more than a decade. The story turns on Stewart’s conversion to believer and the application of a new technology – transmitting a photograph over a telephone wire.
“From Here to Eternity” (1953) – Mandatory viewing for Hoboken residents as Frank Sinatra returned to prominence as Private Maggio, the subject of ethnic prejudice in Hawaii just prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. How Maggio was treated confirmed what I had suspected: People scorned us because we were Italian-Americans. With Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster and Ernst Borgnine. And what a revelation for a TV-watching boy to see Donna Reed, prim housewife on her own show, in a role as an alluring, disillusioned B-girl.
“On the Waterfront” (1954) – Filmed in my hometown in the year of my birth; my mother brought me in a stroller to watch filming at a nearby park. This film taught me the difference between fact and truth in fiction, as did Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy, Lee J. Cobb’s Johnny Friendly and Rod Steiger’s Charley the Gent. Never mind “I could have been a contender.” The knockout line: “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you.” No film has had a biggest influence on my career as a novelist.
“In Cold Blood” (1967) Written and directed by Richard Brooks. Score by Quincy Jones. As Paul Stewart, in the well-disguised role of Truman Capote, says: “A violent, unknown force destroys a decent, ordinary family…Makes us all feel frightened, vulnerable.” The terrifying realism gave me the sense that anyone could be the victim of a random murder in one’s own home. I was 14 when I saw it in a theater and I swear my childhood ended before the film did. A memorable appearance by Charles McGraw.
“Woodstock” (1970) I wanted to become a sportswriter until I saw this film. From that moment on, I consumed all the popular music I could and committed to becoming a rock-and-pop critic. A highly selective documentary, it gives the impression that the music was exemplary – and it took me many, many years to discover how mediocre a festival it was. But even now when I stumble across parts of it – Roger Daltry in slo-mo, Stephen Stills’ “Tell ‘em who we are,” Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice” – I time travel back four decades and relive the life-changing thrill it gave me.
“The Godfather” (1972) The rare film that’s superior to the source material. Decades later, I used some of the same research as did novelist Mario Puzo – Norman Lewis’s “The Honored Society: The Mafia Conspiracy Observed” and “In Sicily” – for my “Narrows Gate” and “The Mayor of Polk Street” but it was Francis Ford Coppola’s scope and gritty lyricism I sought to capture. A series of flawless set pieces build to a climax in which the Corleones’ veneer of stoic elegance explodes, revealing that the family is as vile as its rivals. Score by Nino Rota, sepia-toned cinematography for Gordon Willis.
“Talk to Her” (2002) Pedro Almodóvar’s surreal story, by turns heartbreaking and bizarrely comedic, of two loosely defined couples whose men are incapable of looking beyond themselves to understand the women to whom they are temporarily attached. He pushes the metaphor – both women are in comas; the relationships exist in the men’s minds. In flashback, the women are wonderfully alive. Of course, they deserve better. Almodóvar won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Music is essential to the film, not only Alberto Iglesias’s orchestral score but in dance pieces and a cameo by Caetano Veloso.
“The Great Beauty” (2013) As he turns 65, journalist Jep Gambardella, once a promising author, realizes he’s forsaken his talent and integrity for intellectual pretense and hedonism. Played brilliantly by Toni Servillo, he’s repellent, comical and, as he begins to experience echoes of a life he hadn’t lived, sympathetic. Traveling throughout the Rome he’s missed or ignored, he notices what is cherished and what is cast aside: He understands that one day soon it will be as if he had never existed. Paolo Sorrentino’s exceptional film won countless awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Luca Bigazzi’s cinematography is a lovely bouquet to the Eternal City.
“Clouds of Sils Maria” (2014) A middle-aged actress who began her career as the scheming ingenue in a two-character play is now offered the opposing role of the older woman. Her life complicated by the death of her mentor who wrote the play and by her attraction to her Gen X assistant, she must confront the realities of a changing culture seemingly designed only for the young. Juliette Binoche is typically luminous and layered, Chloë Grace Moretz nasty and self-consumed as the provocative upstart actress. As the assistant, Kristin Stewart all but steals the picture as she transforms from subordinate into a woman of her own mind. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, the film reminds us that time travels only in one direction and wisdom is earned, not granted. Much like “Talk to Her” and “The Great Beauty,” “Clouds of Sils Maria” seemed to usher me into the current stage of my life.
