Happy Birthday, Burt Reynolds

Considering I just devoted a blogathon to him, I would be remiss in not wishing a happy 75th birthday to Burt Reynolds. In honor of the occasion, here’s an anecdote from Deadwood’s W. Earl Brown on working with Burt and the power of Burt’s “silly movies.” And one of my own: a nurse’s aide who used to work with my mother drove a Trans Am identical to Burt’s in Smokey and the Bandit. So moved was she by this film that she would only answer to the name “Bandit,” even in her professional capacity. A man who has that powerful an impact on a health care worker must be celebrated.

Some of Burt’s work is now available via Netflix Instant, including my all-time favorite of his performances. In 1989’s Breaking In, written by John Sayles and directed by Bill Forsyth (Local Hero), Burt is an aging burglar trying to teach his trade to eager young kid Casey Siemaszko. He plays a role that strikes a bit close to home in the uneven The Hollywood Sign: a fading actor and stuntman planning a caper. At his lowest ebb, his character puts in a videotape of one of his old westerns. The camera stays on Reynolds, his face altered by multiple plastic surgeries, as he watches his impossibly handsome younger self on TV and weeps. One of Burt’s finest moments.

Or you could watch Smokey and the Bandit, and let it serve as a reminder to read people’s nametags.

Burt With a Badge: Physical Evidence (1989)

Physical Evidence is a unique film in that I have been accused more than once of making it up. “No, seriously. Michael Crichton directed Burt Reynolds in a courtroom thriller. Honest.” High time, then, that I saw it.

We’re back in Boston, where this blogathon began. A sad sack stops his car in the middle of the Tobin Bridge, hangs a noose and a sign reading “Happy Now?” around his neck, and climbs down to kill himself – only to find a corpse already in the spot he’s chosen. It’s a grabber of an opening that harks back to Crichton’s early days writing paperbacks as John Lange. But as executed the scene doesn’t live up to its potential. That’s the problem with Physical Evidence as a whole. It knows the moves but can’t stick the landing.

What follows owes way too much to Jagged Edge, which as the ads trumpeted was from the same producer. The stiff was the enemy of Burt’s Joe Paris, a cop on suspension for beating up his own partner. Theresa Russell plays the rich woman public defender who angrily lobbies for the case and then butts heads with her client while trying to clear his name.

The legal maneuverings are reasonably accurate and served straight up. Crichton doesn’t give Burt’s Deliverance co-star Ned Beatty much scenery to chew as the prosecuting attorney, but the actor makes a nice box lunch of what there is. There’s no plot gigantism here, no conspiracy that goes to the all the way to the top, just human-scaled emotions. But the movie is too low-key and choppy to gain any traction. And at times it’s simply sloppy, like when a Boston police car rolls past a box selling copies of the New York Post.

Burt may be first billed but he’s playing a supporting role here. It’s Russell’s movie. Her monotone doesn’t help in the courtroom scenes, and she’s actively sabotaged by a wardrobe department that put her in a series of severe suits. I initially thought of them as mannish but decided the term was too harsh. Then Jenny’s frat boy swain (Ted McGinley in the Ted McGinley role) unleashes that very word in their final big blow-out. More baffling is Russell’s favorite aeronautical pin that makes it look like a biplane is bursting out of her chest en route to the Empire State Building to wing King Kong. Naturally, Joe and Jenny fall for each other, prompting this immortal exchange as they near their first clinch.

Jenny: No way, Jose.
Joe: I ain’t Jose.

In Mexico, Joe, you would be.

Thus do we come to the close of the Burt With a Badge blogathon. No, I’m not going to watch 1993’s Cop and a Half. I’m doing this for free, people. Would that I could end on a better note, but Burt would do OK. He’d go back to television, first on B.L. Stryker (Florida-based shamus living on a boat – you see? He could have been Travis McGee!) then taking home an Emmy for Evening Shade. A few years later he’d get his first Academy Award nomination for Boogie Nights. Because Burt, like the Dude, abides.

Burt With a Badge: Rent-A-Cop (1987)

Apologies to those who may have been expecting 1984’s City Heat next. But Burt Reynolds plays an ex-cop in that film, and I hew to a rigorous if arbitrary standard. Plus I swore I’d never sit through that turkey again. (Yes, Burt does play a sheriff in 1982’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Musicals are exempt. Again, my rules.)

Burt surrenders his shield a mere twelve minutes into Rent-A-Cop, but it still counts. By the twenty minute mark he’s not even a rent-a-cop anymore, so who’s the idiot now?

Whole chunks of the film were shot in Rome but it’s set in Chicago, a fact we never forget because Burt’s Tony Church is always seen wearing or standing close to some item of Bears paraphernalia. Again the action opens with a botched drug bust, the mayhem courtesy of a bargain basement Boba Fett in a motorcycle helmet. For the third straight movie a call girl is part of the plot; Liza Minnelli, equipped with heart of gold, got a glimpse of the shooter and now he’s gunning for her. She casts Burt as her white knight, glomming onto him and not letting go.

You know you’re in trouble when a baby-faced Michael Rooker is given a single line – and it’s dubbed by someone else. The entire enterprise is exhausted, the screenplay consisting solely of placeholder dialogue. After the initial bloodbath one of the brass (John P. Ryan) is about to lay into Church when he’s told, “Take it easy on him. Those six guys we lost were his friends.” Ryan’s response: “Oh yeah? So what?” Things swiftly reach a point of no return when Liza harasses Burt at his new gig busting department store shoplifters while dressed as Santa. The one marginally decent joke, about Flower Drum Song, is naturally repeated. The villain, played by esteemed badass James Remar, is known as Dancer because ... he’s a dancer, although his terpsichorean efforts consist mainly of rhythmic arm flails while barefoot and shirtless in front of a mirror. The film’s high point comes when a transvestite disarms Liza at a disco by saying, “I love your muff.”

Burt and Liza were both nominated for Razzies for their performances. They don’t have much chemistry and are ten years too old for their roles. Liza is forced to toddle around in fake furs and gaudy high heels as if she were working a lounge in 1974 Atlantic City. But she’s game, God love her. Burt wisely keeps it minimalist and tries not to bump into the furniture.

Honestly? I’d have been better off watching City Heat again.

Burt With A Badge: Sharky’s Machine (1981)

Going into this movie I knew one thing, which I’d heard from a classmate who’d watched it on cable. At some point, a guy has a piece of glass shoved into his mouth and is then punched repeatedly in the face. The scene was described to me in such detail that I remembered it lo these many years later.

Like so much I learned on the schoolyard, this is completely untrue. Nothing even close to it occurs. On the other hand a ninja is shot with a spear gun, which I chalk up as a considerable improvement.

Burt Reynolds directs as well as stars in this adaptation of a novel by William Diehl. A drug buy arranged by Atlanta narcotics cop Tom Sharky goes chaotically wrong in the opening sequence, which includes some of the loudest gunshots I’ve ever heard in a movie. For his sins Sharky is cast into the department’s lowest circle, literally and figuratively: the vice squad, made up of misfits and short-timers. They’re content to bust streetwalkers, but Sharky has his sights set on a slick operator (Vittorio Gassman) with ties to the department and local power brokers. Soon the titular apparatus is running multiple off-the-books wiretaps and Sharky finds himself obsessed with Gassman’s pride, the lovely Dominoe (Rachel Ward).

That the apparent misspelling of her name is not only deliberate but a plot point is an indication of the kind of movie Sharky’s Machine is. Occasionally sloppy and coarse, but on the whole surprisingly effective. It’s the find of this utterly unmotivated one-man blogathon.

Burt fills the movie with his pals, old pros he worked with repeatedly like Charles Durning, Brian Keith and Henry Silva. His smartest casting decision was the then-unknown but wholly beguiling Ward. (Granted, I am susceptible to tall, regal, husky-voiced brunettes.) Yes, the Reynolds/Ward scenes borrow liberally from Laura. But if you’re going to borrow, why not do so from the best?

ASIDE: After watching the film I found the site for Rachel Ward’s production company. She expresses amazement “that anyone could want any information beyond the breasts and pouts ... so readily available on Google” and includes information on her latest film Beautiful Kate, which she wrote and directed from a novel by Newton Thornburg (Cutter and Bone). It stars her husband Bryan Brown and Ben Mendelsohn, so electric as Uncle Pope in Animal Kingdom.

As a director, Burt makes smart use of the Atlanta locations. And there’s a relaxed rhythm to his storytelling that makes room for compelling, off-beat material like Bernie Casey’s description of his Zen reaction to almost getting shot in the line of duty. Sharky’s Machine bears out what Burt’s two previous police dramas have shown: that in his prime he wasn’t interested in supercop heroics but the bonds between lawmen, the moments when things go awry. His detectives are more Barney Miller than John McClane.

Burt With A Badge: Hustle (1975)

Fair warning: I’m hanging a SPOILER ALERT up top. Because shortly I will give away the ending of this movie. And not in broad strokes either.

A year after scoring a massive commercial hit with The Longest Yard, Burt Reynolds and director Robert Aldrich reteamed for Hustle. Burt is LAPD detective Phil Gaines, savvy and cynical. His relationship with high-priced call girl Catherine Deneuve an open secret, Phil’s got no interest in rocking any boats. So he’s inclined to ignore both his partner (Paul Winfield) and the grieving father (Ben Johnson) who insist that a stripper was murdered by politically connected types. But the father mounts his own investigation, and Phil’s got to react.

When the 1970s died, this movie is where they were buried. Burt fires up mood music on an 8-track and takes Deneuve to see A Man and a Woman. Comic Jack Carter plays a strip club MC who “blew some leaf.” A grandfatherly Eddie Albert speaks of balling.

Mainly the movie is ugly, visually and spiritually. Johnson is forced to watch his dead daughter in a porn film by the cops who want him to buzz off, in an unpleasant sequence ripping off a far better one in Get Carter. (A pre-Dukes of Hazzard Catherine Bach is the porn film’s clothed co-star.) There’s a quarter-assed endorsement of vigilantism. And a bogus nihilistic ending that thinks it’s significant.

This might be a good time to repeat that SPOILER ALERT.

Because I’m turning all the cards over now.

As the movie was winding down, I said to myself: Burt’s gonna die. Cheaply and randomly. You know why? Because shit happens, man.

This kind of ending can be appropriate in a cop movie. Joseph Wambaugh used it with great effectiveness. Routine calls go wrong on a dime, and officers die. But Hustle’s not interested in making a comment about the treacheries of the job. It wants to tell you the world sucks. Offing its main character is its juvenile bid to appear meaningful. You know, like the first cut of Clerks.

My premonition of the ending was quite specific. Burt will make peace with his woman. He will offer to take her away somewhere. He will stop to buy her a gift. And he will be gunned down by some punk committing a robbery.

What amazed me was calling this detail: Burt’s killer will be a then-unknown actor who later became famous, just to throw the proceedings completely out of whack.

San Francisco, a bottle of wine, Robert Englund. Sometimes I even frighten myself.

Burt has an impossible task in this movie. His dynamic with Deneuve makes absolutely no sense. And yet he almost pulls it off. He’s at home in the role, tossing off lousy lines so that they sound like wisdom, playing the crap comedy without sacrificing his strength. And then it hit me.

Burt Reynolds as Travis McGee.

He would have been perfect on the deck of the Busted Flush. He had the attitude, the presence. He even grew up in Florida, for Christ’s sake. Why didn’t you see that, ‘70s Hollywood?

Burt With A Badge: Fuzz (1972)

The problem with making something seem effortless is that people may start to resent you. It could look like you’re not trying; paying audiences occasionally want you to suffer for your art, or at the very least show your work. Conversely, there are times when familiarity truly does breed contempt, when a talent comes so readily to a performer that they begin going through the motions. It’s a tough line to walk, ease versus laziness.

Which brings us to Burt Reynolds.

Burt was once as big as stars got; at the time William Goldman wrote Adventures in the Screen Trade, he was the world’s top box-office draw for four years running and about to claim a fifth. What’s more he was accessible, appearing regularly on talk shows and even guest hosting The Tonight Show at the height of his fame. Burt possessed something that can’t be taught, the ability to be completely relaxed in his own skin. That repose and his casual physical grace have led to his undervaluing as an actor. (Doubters, watch Deliverance again.) But Burt’s bonhomie is also directly responsible for Cannonball Run and other movies in which he and his pals are having a blast, but we’re not. It’s those films that overshadow his strengths.

I’m watching several films from throughout Burt’s career in which he plays a cop. Why? Because I’m a Burt Reynolds fan. Why a cop? Because I thought of the title for this one-man blogathon. Catchy, isn’t it?

Fuzz is the only movie of the bunch I’d already seen. Let us pause to admire the poster in all its busy, Age of Aquarius glory, complete with nod to Burt’s Cosmopolitan centerfold.

Fuzz transplants Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct to the streets of Boston. McBain adapted the book himself under his own name, Evan Hunter. The Precinct’s regular nemesis The Deaf Man (Yul Brynner) launches a Zodiac Killer-style rampage against city officials as part of a larger scheme, and can’t helping taunting the cops he regards as inept. Other crimes are investigated as well, and this being McBain there are also two guys from Public Works Maintenance and Repair who will allow nothing to stop their efforts to paint the squad room apple green.

The movie’s an uneasy mix of procedural and black comedy influenced by M*A*S*H, with the two films sharing a cast member in Tom Skerritt. The humor is too broad, as evidenced by the scene in which Burt goes on a stakeout dressed as a nun with a full ‘stache. The violence strikes a jarring note and generated a degree of infamy when, after a TV airing, some kids set a woman on fire and claimed they were recreating a scene from the film. Raquel Welch’s storyline goes nowhere and could be easily excised, but then we wouldn’t see Raquel Welch. Director Richard A. Colla, who would be back in Boston directing multiple episodes of Spenser For Hire, can’t nail down the tone necessary to sell McBain’s ending, when all plot threads converge and Brynner’s plan is foiled by circumstance and dumb luck, which Jack Weston’s Detective Meyer Meyer describes as “good police work.”

There’s some great ‘70s detail on display in a porn shop sequence and a system of plastic punch cards used to dial a phone. The best thing in Fuzz? Burt as Steve Carella. He’s got an unforced camaraderie with his cohorts, and has a lovely scene with his wife Teddy in the hospital after he’s injured in the line of duty. Even better is the moment when Weston asks him if he feels weird about their adversary being deaf like Reynolds’ wife, and Reynolds marvels that he never made that connection. Both Burt and McBain deserved better.