Just two guys hanging around being guys. Except they’re pretty shitty guys.
I had a tough time with this one. I feel like the evidence is mounting that I just am not a huge fan of the visual style of this type of movie. What I mean is the movie that shows you gritty, 70s New York or some other American city. I don’t really appreciate the camera work of the intimate close ups, I dislike the amount of contrasty darkness that obscures what I can see. And I think I dislike the “real people” genre when it’s a couple of mugs who are just shitty in their existence.
This was a suggestion from ConanNeutron for Letterboxd Roulette, and I appreciate it. This movie was on my watchlist, but would likely have been neglected for a few years. Despite not feeling as high on it as others, my thoughts on Peter Falk and John Cassavetes are a bit different. They both played the hell out of this. I came away knowing these two dudes. Yeah, they sucked, but I hated them pretty well due to the performances.
A review I read mentioned that the idea of a gangster movie where the focus is on characters rather than crime and action being a good one, but that this doesn’t quite get there. I kind of agree with that. I knew these dudes were mobsters or whatever they were, but I really didn’t think of this as a mob movie until it hit me real hard at the end. Nothing seemed real with these characters, I guess. They seemed like a couple of dipshits who just couldn’t pull their lives together. To have done something bad enough to get a death sentence from the mob suggest quite a bit otherwise. The awful pleading at the door with Mikey inside knowing that he was responsible for this death. Brutal.
The bus scene with M. Emmet Walsh was tremendous, though.
This probably won’t make it onto my rewatch lists or any best-ofs. I did appreciate what it was doing, but I am starting to realize that what it was doing isn’t in my wheelhouse.