FREEBIE AND THE BEANPlot In A Nutshell
James Caan and Alan Arkin play feuding San Francisco cops trying to bring down a local crime boss while also preventing him from being killed by an out-of-town hitman in Richard Rush’s 1974 buddy comedy.
Thoughts
I don’t know why I remember this, but in the first film reference book I ever owned — a copy of Steven H. Scheuer’s once-seminal TV room staple Movies on TV — Freebie and the Bean was one of the few movies in that entire 800-page paperback to earn the “BOMB” rating. I don’t know if there’s any significance to that, except as a sign of just how disreputable this movie was considered to be — in his recent review of the film, blogger and ’70s cinema archaeologist Mr. Peel remarked, “Rarely have I seen a film from a major studio that could be considered truly socially irresponsible.”
But Freebie and the Bean kind of qualifies — the amount of wanton destruction of property in this movie is equaled only by the its level of racism, sexism, and homophobia. And yet Caan and Arkin have such chemistry together and the whole thing is executed with such dirty high spirits that the damn thing is kind of a blast. Who could take any of this shit seriously? In one breathtakingly silly scene, Caan and Arkin even drive their car off the road and crash into an old couple’s apartment — the capper comes when Caan gets out of the car, picks up the phone, and tells the precinct to send out a tow truck. “Apartment 304,” he says, after giving the address. “It’s on the third floor.”
Freebie and the Bean is, for me, a classic case of a film where the plot truly does not matter. I barely followed any of it, anyway — perhaps because I was concentrating too hard on Caan and Arkin’s hilarious nonstop bickering. They’re like feuding brothers in the back seat of the car who can’t stop wrestling each other... except they’re grown men, and they’re in the front of the car, trying to strangle each other while conducting a high-speed chase down the San Francisco freeway. Like most ’70s car chases, the chases in Freebie and the Bean are wild and sloppy and callously destructive in a way that you hardly ever see these days — I’m not sure if CGI is the culprit, or if stuntmen have just gotten a lot more sane in the last couple of decades. You get a sense of real damage being left in the cars’ wake in this movie — blocks and blocks of crumpled fenders, destroyed sidewalk stands, and injured pedestrians. They remind me, of all things, of the climax of W.C. Fields’ The Bank Dick, only with the obviously phony back projection replaced by genuine chaos and carnage. I made a snooty point of avoiding Michael Bay’s obviously trashy Bad Boys 2, but it sounds like it’s actually very much in the Freebie and the Bean tradition. Am I missing out on another guilty pleasure?
Stray Observation
I can’t decide if the climactic face-off between James Caan and a skinny guy disguised (very convincingly!) as a woman is homophobic or not. The character is portrayed as an object of disgust; but on the other hand, he nearly beats up Caan without thinking twice — and in high heels to boot.
RATING: 3.5/5
* * * * *
71 FRAGMENTS OF A CHRONOLOGY OF CHANCEPlot In A Nutshell
Michael Haneke’s 1994 ensemble drama, inspired by a true incident, about several unrelated people whose paths all converge at the scene of a violent incident in a Vienna bank.
Thoughts
There’s a massive Michael Haneke retrospective going on here in Edmonton right now, which is giving me the opportunity to catch up with some of his films which I haven’t been able to see until now. First up: the off-puttingly titled 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, which I must confess to finding the most opaque of the Hanekes I’ve seen.
The film is sort of a cross between two other Haneke pictures, The Seventh Continent and Code Unknown. Like The Seventh Continent, it shows us a series of banal scenes of middle-class Austrian life before delivering a climactic sequence of shocking, seemingly unmotivated violence. (Unlike The Seventh Continent, though, the violence does not come as a surprise: Haneke opens the film with a card describing the violent act in question.) And like Code Unknown, 71 Fragments paints a tapestry of life in a large European city, contrasting the lives of its comparatively comfortable citizens with the poor and the immigrants living on the margins. (71 Fragments’ most memorable character is a young Romanian boy living on the streets and forced to steal everything he needs to survive.)
I must confess, though, to being a little baffled by what statement Haneke is making with this picture. Is it that you never know when violence will touch your life? (I rewatched JCVD shortly after seeing 71 Fragments, and now I’m terrified to ever set foot in a European financial institution.) But what does the story of the Romanian kid eating food out of dumpsters and shoplifting comic books have to do with that theme? Or the old man and his estranged daughter? Or all the news reports about Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia, which serve as kind of a Greek chorus on the action? Am I just being obtusely bourgeois here? Why does Haneke repeat the reports about Christmas in Sarajevo and Michael Jackson’s child abuse accusations at the end of the film? (For some reason, it always seems startling when garish pieces pop culture find their way into Haneke’s cerebral universe — the Michael Jackson stuff here is almost as incongruous as that long clip from a televised Meat Loaf concert that you get at the end of The Seventh Continent.)
Still, 71 Fragments contains at least two scenes that I’ll always remember, both of them unbroken single shots, and which rank among Haneke’s best. One is a dinner scene between a husband and a wife — he tells her he loves her, she reacts with suspicion at this out-of-the-blue expression of tenderness, he’s so annoyed with her that he slaps her, she puts her hand on his wrist in a brief, awkward (and guilty?) gesture of apology, and they silently keep on eating. The other is a hilariously protracted shot of a young man (the only who will later shoot up the bank, as it happens) practising for a Ping Pong tournament with the help of a machine that shoots balls at him in rapid succession. He must whack at least 200 balls before Haneke finally cuts away. Like the very long scene in The Seventh Continent of the couple tearing up tens of thousands of dollars and flushing it down the toilet, the scene demonstrates Haneke’s unusual ability to take incredibly (some would say agonizingly) repetitive actions and sustain the viewers' interest in them far past when any rational director would consider the breaking point.
There’s also a strangely beautiful sustained shot of a Vienna highway in early evening: the sight of the blurry white circles of the headlights of the oncoming cars piercing the blue-black light may be one of the few instances of Haneke lingering on an image simply because of its beauty.
RATING: 2.5/5
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