SCFZ poll: Arthur Penn

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Polling the films of Arthur Penn

The rules:

- your list can include no more than half* of the Penn films you've seen, up to a maximum of 8. So if you've seen 6 films, you can vote for 3, and if you've seen 20, you can vote for up to 8.

* If you've seen an odd number, you can round up when deciding the length of your ballot -- e.g if you've seen 7, you can vote for 4, and if you've seen 15, you can vote for the maximum of 8.

- i'll assume ballots are ranked unless you tell me otherwise. unranked ballots are fine.

- deadline for ballots: next Tuesday, in seven days, whatever day that is

umbugbene created an index on letterboxd of all of our previous polls here: letterboxd.com/umbugbene/list/index-of-all-scfz-director-polls/

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we didn't have a nom for today so i just used a random number generator

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Night Moves
Bonnie and Clyde
Penn and Teller Get Killed

seen five

[brian d]

seen 2

bonnie and clyde

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Seen 3

Night Moves

[Silga]

Seen 2

Night Moves

[ofrene]

Seen 3

The Chase
Night Moves

[---]

seen 5

Mickey One
The Left Handed Gun
Bonnie and Clyde

[wba]

wonderful director

too bad I can't vote for more, as I've seen so few.

01. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
02. The Missouri Breaks (1976)
03. Little Big Man (1970)

Penn seen: 6

[oscarwerner]

Seen 11.
Can`t believe we haven`t done him.
1. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
2. Night Moves (1975)
3. Mickey One (1965)
4. The Left-Handed Gun (1958)
5. The Chase (1966)

[nrh]

seen 5

Missouri Breaks

[greennui]

3.

Night Moves

[rischka]

i have 5 and wasn't gonna vote but a couple of them had a big effect on a budding cinephile

little big man
bonnie and clyde

[...]

Night Moves
The Left Handed Gun
The Miracle Worker
The Chase
Penn and Teller Get Killed
The Missouri Breaks
Four Friends

It's funny how much I've come to kinda dislike Penn's use of actors, given how important they are to his films, but other than Night Moves and The Miracle Worker, the star thing is glaring. It's workable in Left Handed Gun, from memory, but it can overpower some of the best elements of the others, except for Four Friends which has a perverse lingering effect because in that case the actors are treated like they're Beattys and Dunaways or whoever, but they really really are not that at all, but it has a weird offtaste appeal for that. Penn and Teller Get Killed actually does pretty well with it conceptually, for a movie that really has such little reason to exist as a star vehicle, but Penn Gillette just bugs me for being himself, so it loses some points for that. It doesn't detract from Dead of Winter and Target either, but that's because there isn't much else there. I suppose Brando and Nicholson kinda make it work, but maybe to the effect of getting the rest of the movie kinda knotted up around them.

[mesnalty]

Seen 3:

1. Night Moves
2. The Miracle Worker

[nrh]

I suppose Brando and Nicholson kinda make it work, but maybe to the effect of getting the rest of the movie kinda knotted up around them.

the wild thing about missouri breaks is you can totally imagine that mcguane script (which i think is genuinely great) with like jeff bridges and warren oates or even fonda instead of the totally strange performances we got in the film. but then maybe i'm just saying i wish someone besides penn directed it.

[...]

maybe i'm just saying i wish someone besides penn directed it.

Not a fan eh? I kinda thought that mighta been the deal when you only voted for one. I kinda think Penn is more important than really good, maybe as much for being at the right place at the right time, but I think he has some real talent too, just doesn't always keep it in balance. But still think Night Moves is pretty great, Hackman and the low level cast keep it in check. I would have liked to see Missouri Breaks without any name stars and where Penn let the material speak for itself more rather than thinking more is needed to differentiate his films from the squares of old Hollywood. The attitude about change was necessary and maybe it wouldn't have had the impact it did had it been toned down a little, but in the long run? I'm ambivalent.

[nrh]

i think bonnie and clyde was right movie at the right time, otherwise penn seems to be in the slightly overwrought ny theater tradition of lumet and pre-alcoholism frankenheimer. left handed gun is the most risible of the "psychological" '50s westerns, and little big man is the most risible of the "revisionist" '70s westerns. forgot i'd seen alice's restaurant, a terrible movie but it's nice to see him work with a non-actor.

maybe george roy hill is a better comparison?

[...]

left handed gun is the most risible of the "psychological" '50s westerns, and little big man is the most risible of the "revisionist" '70s westerns

Heh, I get where you're coming from, but "most" in either case is a pretty high bar to clear as those depths were mined extensively to, um, questionable effect during the respective eras.

You're of course right that Bonnie and Clyde is the major direct influence Penn had, he'd be less remembered than Ritt or Rosenberg absent that, but the style he was playing with seems to me to be something of a notable precursor or at least solidification of what Hollywood was looking for as the old system died and a new one was needed. Roy Hill is a fair example of how that developed, though I think Hal Ashby is maybe the more exact comp and HIll more the stabilized end result, where the sort of systemic rot films of the sixties were probing is converted into a different kind of individualist celebration of the kind that's so important to the US film industry, the corruption is there, but now there are "new heroes" that thrive by eliding it, and not the Aldrich type vicious male who thrives on the chaos, but someone more along the lines of the traditional hero, but hip to the new way of thinking.

Penn seems to be trying to follow the Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan line of actor centered films about "rebels", but with less angst and strained through European "art movie" influences, leading to a sort of confused blankness to the central characters that the actors fill as they wish, scene by scene sometimes. He isn't all that far removed from the path Altman would take, but Altman stayed more focused on the overarching "system" within which his characters acted providing a constraining force that gives sense to the characters as they are part of a society and/or tied to a subgroup responding to forces beyond them. Penn seems to take that societal force as a given, sketching it in rough outline sometimes, but rarely giving it any sense of film reality. I think his films worked so well for a lot of critics and audiences at the time because they were just reading them as responding to their "now" and didn't need the movies to define anything more specific than that because they were felt as "different" to the movies immediately preceding them. This doesn't really age well though as the times change and influences are absorbed, but I think it can still be sorta felt in thinking of the movies in era context or when looked at from even greater distance from Hollywood, a bit like I suspect watching some, say, Japanese films may read differently to an audience outside Japan than they do from within. But that's only a guess of course...

[deepbluefunk]

seen 3

bonnie and clyde
little big man

[Joks Trois]

He was caught between two stools and never developed a truly singular style, but he made some really good films. Seen 8.

Bonnie and Clyde
The Chase
Mickey One

This is also the only place where George Roy Hill is taken seriously I think.

[Flakotaso]

seen 4

Night Moves

[flip]

ignoring shorts, tv movies, and obscurities, only one penn feature from before the 1980s failed to get a vote -- alice's restaurant. penn's post-1980 work did not fare well -- of the four features he made in the '80s, two got no support at all (dead of winter, target) and the other two finished at the bottom of our list.

results
1. Night Moves (1975) — 19 pts
2. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — 18 pts
3. The Left Handed Gun (1958) — 8 pts
4. Mickey One (1965) — 7 pts
4. The Chase (1966) — 7 pts
6. The Miracle Worker (1962) — 4 pts
6. Little Big Man (1970) — 4 pts
8. The Missouri Breaks (1976) — 3.5 pts
9. Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989) — 2 pts
10. Four Friends (1981) — 0.3 pts

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posted to letterboxd:

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