Scene Slash Video

The death of Sydney Pollack on the 26th May 2008, deprives us of another of the directors who brought a modern, connected, stylish and intelligent approach to Hollywood filmmaking that rescued the industry from its mid-60s decline. Pollack was a half generation older than the Film School graduates (Coppola, Spielberg and Scorsese) and had already made his name in television alongside Sydney Lumet, Arthur Penn and Robert Altman. Penn and Altman shocked audiences with, Bonnie & Clyde and MASH, but Pollack’s They Shoot Horses Don’t They (1969) was a subtler though no less striking assault on aspects of America.

Sydney Pollack began his career as an actor; a friendship with Robert Redford began in 1962 when they met on their first film jobs, War Hunt, and he was always an actor’s director. Couple that with the skill he learnt in television developing and holding stories, and his film career is really about strong stories and great performances.

The original idea for Tootsie came from Dustin Hoffman and, perfectionist that he is (coupled with Pollack’s reputation as the “Script Nazi”) the film had at least seven writers including such uncredited luminaries as Elaine May (Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Primary Colours) and Barry Levinson (Diner, Tin Men). So much for the ‘single voice’ theory of movie writing!

Peter Delaunay

This is the scene that pushes Michael Dorsey into becoming Dorothy Michaels and wonderfully sums up Pollack’s strengths both as director and actor. It’s as complex a piece of writing as you’ll see – two men talking at complete opposites about exactly the same problem. A perfect act one climax, the scene sums up everything we’ve learnt about Hoffman’s character (over emotional, uncompromising, unprofessional, totally dedicated, totally ambitious) and yet the strength of the scene comes from Pollack as Michael’s agent, George Fields. George is virtually firing Michael as his client: Michael has no future, no one will hire him, every avenue is cut off, but the momentum of the story constantly builds, the humour is always there, so that by the end of the scene Michael is left with only one way out – or one way in!

GEORGE: “I can’t even send you up for a commercial. You played a tomato for thirty seconds - they went half a day over schedule because you wouldn’t sit down.
MICHAEL: Yes. It wasn’t logical.
GEORGE: You were a tomato ! A tomato doesn’t have logic. A tomato can’t move.
MICHAEL : That’s what I said, so If he can’t move, how’s he gonna sit down, George. I was a Stand Up Tomato – a juicy, sexy, beefsteak tomato. Nobody does vegetables like me. I did an evening of vegetables off-Broadway. I did the best tomato, the best cucumber, I did an endive salad that knocked the critics on their arse.
GEORGE (breathes, then): Michael, I’m trying to stay calm here. You - are a wonderful actor.
MICHAEL: Thank you.
GEORGE: But…you’re… too…much….trouble. Get some therapy.

According to Pollack no one ever laughed during filming and he once said that if he could have any of his time to live again it would be the 14 months working on Tootsie. Well his loss is our gain. The golden era of Hollywood comedy is said to be the era of 30’s & 40’s Screwball comedies - Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday etc etc etc – but for me Tootsie stands comparison with the best of them.

Once Upon A Time In America swoons in the heady sorrow of nostalgia, every frame aflame with Autumn’s burnished keening, every moment an elegy for the dimming of the day, heaving with the dread sense that  all this must pass, is passing, has already passed, even as the heart holds hopelessly on to the memory of what could be.

Arguably, its most resonant, crystalline scene marks a rare moment of defiance against the passage of time, a Phyrric victory over age’s indomitable armies. Ostensibly a tangential longueur, regarding a peripheral figure, it encapsulates in perfect miniature the film’s bittersweet concerns, and succeeds as a memorable vignette in its own right; a charming, fully-realised story within a story.

We follow, as Patsy – a cub member of the gang, teetering on the cusp of mere adolescence – seeks to lose his virginity, having learnt of a precocious local prostitute who will sell her body for the princely price of a cream cake. Dapper in his Sunday best, Patsy painstakingly chooses the richest, fullest confection from the baker’s lavish display, and waits anxiously on the stairwell outside her tenement apartment for the girl to appear, and his childhood to vanish. Having already caught tantalising sight of the girl’s naked body, her lush, creamy skin, Patsy’s famished gaze turns gradually in the lag of time to the lush, creamy folds of the cake, all trussed in its bodice of bow and ribbon. Unable to resist, he steals a taste; then another; then another; slowly surrendering himself to childish desire, until he has finally devoured the cake whole.

The camera savours the spectacle with an equally deliberate delectation, languidly relishing the moment in a single, lingering shot, Morricone’s wistful score swelling like a fond memory, as the boy – poised poignantly between innocence and experience – momentarily chooses to remain a child, the future held back like a baited breath, all the dubieties of adulthood staved off for a short time yet. Beneath the scene’s sweet icing, there is also possibly a taste of less palatable things to come - the incident providing, as it does, a benign insight into the apprentice gangster’s impatient lust for instant gratification that will ultimately lead Noodles to rape the love of his life – but all of that is in the future. For the time being, like Patsy, we may savour this sweet moment, and leave the worries ahead to themselves.

Walker is the bursting erection of cinema - an upright, tireless fuck of a man. The menacing metronomic intent here is haunting, forged from the elements a strangely ethereal, essential kind of threat. Walker is the disruptor, the restless ghost of his own afterlife. The series of formally askew cuts starts to work into the mind of the viewer, each anxious set-up evocative of a distracted mind, unable to properly order its crippling obsessions. As the fantastic trailer tells us, Walker is "an emotional and primitive man" and Boorman has infused this mesmeric scene the kind of perfect virile aggression that forces the rest of the film into pure focus. There's nothing absent in this scene, it tells us everything that we need to know about Walker: his determination, his inner-turmoil, his unreal passage through time and space, his cruel self-loathing, his absolute targeting of revenge, his warped understanding of being alive. And always, always the clipping click-clack, click-clack of the hard floor - the pounding, fractured beat of vengeance that has replaced his own lost heartthump. He is the ultimate objection. A man living fear.