Irving Kershner and The Luck of Ginger Coffey

It must have been around thirty years ago that I first saw The Luck of Ginger Coffey. At the time, so early on in my experience with the world of cinema, I thought it was an extraordinary film. As I saw more movies, I thought, perhaps, it was not perfect as I imagined but it never fell from my top ten of the best working class dramas of the sixties. It is an excellent film with a commanding performance by Robert Shaw at its center. But its look, its feel, its pacing and its just right touch of pathos and humor can be credited to one man who time and time again exhibited the kind of skill and talent that made several more popular movies work but for which he rarely got noticed. That man, director Irvin Kershner, died on November 27, 2010 and the world of cinema may not quite realize just how great a director it lost.



Kershner wasn't working on any current films so the loss isn't one of immediate impact. There won't be any unfinished work that can't go on without him. The loss is that there is now no time left to honor a director that the world of cinema should have honored a long time ago. Of course, his films will continue to honor him but I would have liked to have seen the man himself share in that honor that seemed to constantly elude him.

On the obituaries you see all over the internet right now, from the major media outlets, three movies are listed front and center by which to remember Kershner: The Empire Strikes Back, Robocop 2 and Never Say Never Again. And I understand, too. Popular titles dealing with franchises such as Star Wars, Robocop and James Bond should not be ignored and if that gets people to notice him, more power to them. Certainly his turn with the Star Wars Saga was the best of the series and took an already excellent screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, and through his expert choices in framing and editing, added layers of depth unknown to any other movie in the Star Wars Universe.

But he did more, so much more, and the pinnacle of his other achievements was The Luck of Ginger Coffey and the impact it had on me cannot be overestimated. When I first saw it, on TBS back in the very early eighties, I was in the opening stages of advanced cinephilia. I had checked out all the classics, from Rules of the Game to Citizen Kane to 8 1/2 to Chinatown, and was steadily taking in more every week. When Ginger Coffey popped up on the schedule I had never heard of it. None of my many "History of the Movies" books had so much as mentioned the title. Kershner wasn't mentioned either, anywhere. So, I watched it with little expectations of anything more than a run-of-the-mill drama, directed by, as it turns out, that guy who did the last Star Wars movie.

Then I saw it, and everything changed. I was floored by how good it was and amazed it wasn't mentioned anywhere. And then, at that moment, I learned my first life lesson of cinephilia: Movie books, critics and historians lean heavily on a select few works, what might be called "the canon", and rarely venture outside of that safety zone. If you want to be a cinephile, you've got to stop relying on the movie books to guide you and make your own way.

It's a lesson movie blogs have really driven home with me, as in the last nearly four years of blogging I have discovered so many great films, films that I would easily rank alongside the canonical ones, that I hadn't even heard of until some adventurous blogger sought it out and wrote it up. It doesn't mean those films in the canon aren't worthy, they are. It simply means there is so much more that's been ignored or overlooked that deserves our attention. The Luck of Ginger Coffey is one of those films for me. In fact, it was one of the first reviews I did on Cinema Styles, something I didn't do often then and still don't but something I wanted to do to call attention to such a good film. It's a review I don't think too much of now, heavily relying on plot description more than anything else, but there it is anyway, one of only four reviews listed on IMDB's "external reviews" for the film, a sad testament to how undervalued it is.

Irvin Kershner died on Saturday and took with him a talent and skill for character in drama that made films like The Empire Strikes Back stand out from the rest of the series and made dramas like Ginger Coffey that much more resonant. He will be missed.

But How Strange the Change From Major to Minor

A lot can change in 27 years. That's how long it's been since the original Raiders of the Lost Ark and it's been nearly two decades since the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Look at it this way: Two of the biggest adventure hits of 1954 were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Naked Jungle. Now imagine Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston making sequels to those movies in 1981, 27 years later. By 1981 the movie landscape was decidedly different than it was in 1954 and 2008 is decidedly different than 1981. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't sense the excitement about a new Indiana Jones film like I did in the eighties. When the other two sequels were released they, like the Star Wars sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, were the summer movies to see. Now Indiana Jones is practically lost in the shuffle. Iron Man and the next installment of Batman have generated far greater buzz and even Speed Racer has it's share of enthusiastic defenders.

One could sense the change with the release of Revenge of the Sith in 2005. It was the biggest money maker of the year to be sure but was it exciting? Was it an event? Was it the movie to see? No. And not because of any standard of quality (although full disclosure: I was underwhelmed in the extreme with all three later episodes and could live another 1,000 years without a desire to watch them again) but because there was too much competition. Among the top ten moneymakers of 2005 that could be considered direct competition with Revenge of the Sith were The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, War of the Worlds, King Kong and Batman Begins. Two decades earlier and any one of those would have been the movie event of the summer but now there's an event every other weekend.

And quite frankly, with the possible exception of Batman Begins, I don't believe any of those films have had the lingering sense of fan devotion that the original Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies did, and part of it is simply because there's a new blockbuster each week. And that's fine, I'm not making a judgment call. If the summer audiences want one special effects popcorn flick after another and the studios can provide them it makes perfect business sense to me to give the ticket buyers what they want. It's just that the blockbuster has lost its luster, so to speak (there's a rhyming couplet to be had with those two words but I don't feel like figuring it out).

[Warning: Good Old Days Geezer Alert!]

Back when I was a kid the blockbuster was an event. Each year promised a high profile movie that some studio would sink all their money into and everyone had to see it. Since the success of Star Wars was unanticipated by the movie going crowd (that is, we weren't waiting and waiting for it to be released, it just kind of happened) my first recollection of an anticipatory blockbuster was The Empire Strikes Back. Oh Dear Lord I couldn't wait to see that damn thing. My friend, Chris, had read the Star Wars fiction released in between the two and told me all about Darth Vader falling into a volcano and that's why he had to wear the suit. Wow! How cool was that? Little did I know when I finally saw it happen in 2005 I would be stifling yawns during the climax. And of course the Star Wars fiction made absolutely no mention of Vader's name or who he was so the whole "Father" moment was absolutely flooring (although since Vader actually means 'father' I'm curious why this was not picked up on sooner by the adults seeing the movie. Were people just that un-curious and intellectually lazy back then? Nowadays the 'Vader' thing would've been blown after the first showing of the first movie).

The next E-V-E-N-T was Raiders of the Lost Ark. It came out the following year (nowadays it would have come out the following weekend - Hey, I didn't put that geezer warning up for nothing) and again I was just crazy to see it. But this time something strange occurred: After I saw it, and loved it, I didn't go back. Now with Star Wars and Empire I had gone back multiple times to see them again and again in the theatre. With Raiders, once was enough. Not because of the movie, but because, well, I just didn't feel the need. By 1981 I was knee deep in my early days of cinephilia and the movies I wanted to see again and again were Citizen Kane and anything foreign. We had just gotten a VCR (cost somewhere around $900 - In 1981 dollars!) and I was constantly renting video after video of whatever old or foreign films they had (for the curious, the first video I ever rented was Dr. Strangelove). My days of haunting the theatre to see the newest blockbuster again and again were over, and I hadn't even gotten my first pimple yet. And believe it or not, I'm not just thinking of this for the first time because I'm writing this entry for a blogathon. I have often thought of Raiders of the Lost Ark as the turning point blockbuster for me. It was, through no fault of its own, the first blockbuster I didn't return to in the theatre. When I didn't go back multiple times I knew I had changed. I watched it again on video and later on DVD and enjoyed it immensely. I think it's a great adventure movie and had it occurred just a year or two earlier it probably would have meant a hell of a lot more to me. But it came at just the wrong time for me to fully appreciate it. It came at a time when my obsession with art was in full blossom and I was more interested in torturing my mother with videos of Truffaut and Godard than seeing blockbusters. I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about with Last Year at Marienbad. I wanted to see The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai. I wanted to see Shadow of a Doubt and Vertigo. I wanted to see Nashville. I wanted to see Britannia Hospital and If. I wanted to see so much and I didn't have the time to see them all if I was constantly returning to the theatre to see the same movie again.

That's not to say I don't watch movies repeatedly, I do. I just don't watch them repeatedly with only days or weeks in between the viewings. And because my time is so constricted now I can't even imagine watching the same movie a second time before watching a fresh movie in between. There's still too much I need to see and I'm sure as hell not going to pass up the opportunity to watch a movie I have heard and read about for years but haven't seen yet to see some summer movie again that I just saw a week before. I have stacks of DVDs of highly regarded English and Foreign Language films that I still haven't seen so when I have time I try to watch one of those instead.

And now here it is, 27 years later and I'm knee deep in my cinephilia again. Netflix affords me the opportunity to catch up on so many movies I have missed and the AFI Silver theatre, just 20 minutes walking distance from where I live, is constantly showing highly regarded as well as little known cinema classics, both foreign and domestic. An abundance of choice surrounds me and I am forever grateful. But that abundance, and age, have also diminished my excitement for the new Jones film.

Blockbusters are a dime a dozen these days. Opening weekends are everything and even the biggest money maker of the year won't play more than a few weeks before being pulled in preparation for its DVD release. Which opens up even more choices. It used to be (geezer time again) that if you didn't see the movie in the theatre you were out of luck. Maybe, just maybe, it would be shown on commercial television in three years time and we all now how unsatisfying that is. So you made sure you saw it in the theatre. Besides, the home viewing experience just couldn't compare. Now, it can compare. Sitting six feet from a 70 inch high definition television is the equivalent of sitting in the middle row of a multi-plex. And the differences favor the home viewing experience: No one sits in front of you, you can pause the movie at will for bathroom breaks and no one's breaking your bank account for a drink and a bucket of popcorn. Of course, we don't all have 70 inch sets but still it can be much more relaxing to watch a movie at home. At the same time, there is an excitement of seeing a movie in the theatre that the home experience can't match and many times, it's the blockbusters that generate that sense of communal excitement.

So the new Jones film opens on May 22nd. Even if the series "must-see" status has evolved over the years from major to minor it should still be a big event at the movies. Will I see the new Indiana Jones movie? Of course I will. Will I see it in the theatre? Uh... let me get back to you on that.

*****

This has been a part of the Indiana Jones Blogathon hosted by Cerebral Mastication - Thanks Ali.