The Films of Arthur Penn

Night Moves: The Films of Arthur Penn

March 24, 2011 – April 6, 2011

TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto

TIFF marks the passing of one of American cinema’s finest auteurs, Arthur Penn (1922–2010), with a select retrospective, which spans his career from his fine fifties western The Left Handed Gun (1958) to its elegiac counterpart two decades later, The Missouri Breaks (1976). Often credited with igniting the New American Cinema and for preparing the way for such directors as Coppola, Friedkin, Schrader, and Scorsese with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Penn was an innovator from the outset. The Left Handed Gun replaced the mythic with the intensely psychological, and Mickey One (1965), his still astounding dark comedy from the mid-sixties, drew on the audacity of the French New Wave in its heady mixture of tone and genre.

Penn was many things, all of them admirable: a severe critic of American values, a generous chronicler of moral dissent, a maverick who helped disassemble the studio system, and, perhaps above all, an actor’s director. The list of actors who found new freedom and gave among their best performances in Penn’s cinema runs to well over a dozen, including Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman and Gene Hackman.

Night Moves: The Films of Arthur Penn

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Thursday, March 24 at 6:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 26 at 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, April 6 at 6:30 p.m.

“The most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate” - Pauline Kael

Penn’s zeitgeist-altering masterpiece—sharply written by Robert Benton, David Newman and an uncredited Robert Towne—transfigures the exploits of the famed Depression-era outlaws into a stylized commentary on the sociopolitical unrest gripping America and much of the world at the end of the 1960s. Ushering in a new style with boundary-stretching force, it shattered the glass ceiling on movie sex and violence and established Beatty as the most important producer-star of the era.

Little Big Man (1970)

Friday, March 25 at 6:30 p.m.

Dustin Hoffman ages from seventeen to 121 as the eponymous protagonist of Penn’s picaresque, politically pointed Western adventure. A white man raised by Cheyenne Indians, Hoffman’s Jack Crabb traverses a century of American history, serving variously as a gunslinger, medicine show huckster, and scout for General Custer (of whose famous “last stand” he claims to be the only survivor). Along the way, he toggles between his white and Indian identities as it suits the occasion, bearing firsthand witness to the genocidal tendencies of men of all creeds and colors. Hoffman is in peak form, matched scene-for-scene by the magnificent Chief Dan George in an Academy Award®-nominated turn as Crabb’s surrogate Cheyenne father, Old Lodge Skins.

Mickey One (1965)

Saturday, March 26 at 5:00 p.m.

Friday, April 1 at 8:30 p.m.

“[Mickey One is] Arthur Penn’s most extravagant and ambitious movie” - Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Penn’s jazzy riff on Kafka’s The Trial follows Warren Beatty’s eponymous nightclub comic as he finds himself on the run from a shadowy underworld organization or, just maybe, the shadow cast by his own celebrity. Working from Alan M. Surgal’s wildly inventive script, Penn offers evidence of what would become the New Hollywood’s dominant concerns: disillusionment with success, deep suspicion of authority, and the quest for unattainable freedom.

The Left Handed Gun (1958)

Sunday, March 27 at 6:30 p.m.

Paul Newman replaced James Dean in Penn’s first feature, which French critics celebrated as a fresh, inventive reworking of the western genre. Penn conceived William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, as the first incarnation of his many misunderstood outcasts, but Newman’s intense, unnerving psychological portrait dared to make the illiterate killer into a character who verges on the unlikable. After Billy’s friend and mentor, a cattle rancher known as “The Englishman,” is murdered, the desperado wreaks vengeance with his “left handed gun,” a mission that turns into something of a spree.

The Miracle Worker (1962)

Sunday, March 27 at 3:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 2 at 5:00 p.m.

Penn’s electrifying screen adaptation of his 1959 Broadway success garnered Academy Awards® for both of its mesmerizing leads, Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft, and remains a masterful study of language, communication, and human will. In depicting the physically and emotionally violent clashes of the young Helen Keller (Duke) and her teacher Annie Sullivan (Bancroft), Penn eschews the cheap sentimentality of so many triumph-over-adversity stories in favor of a near-documentary realism achieved through stillness and long takes.

The Missouri Breaks (1976)

Monday, March 28 at 6:30 p.m.

“Using a conventional Western outline, Penn invests it with quirky history and a gang of originals. It is his most relaxed, digressive movie, with time for Tristram Shandy, urgent set pieces, an idiosyncratic girl, a running debate between order and freedom, and a Marlon Brando who manages to make every odd tangent believable and personal.”—David Thomson

Plotting revenge on the wealthy land baron who murdered a member of his gang, cattle thief Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson, direct from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) buys a ranch near to his intended victim, only to enter into an affair with the baron’s rebellious daughter. Meanwhile, her father has put a price on Logan’s head, and the most flamboyant bounty hunter this side of the Mississippi (Marlon Brando, in a wild succession of hats and accents) aims to cash in.  This lyrical comic western (scripted by novelist Thomas McGuane) more than stands the test of time: it now seems like one of the last triumphs of New Hollywood iconoclasm at the dawn of the blockbuster era.

Alice’s Restaurant (1969)

Tuesday, March 29 at 9:00 p.m.

A sweet-natured counterpart to the contemporaneous Easy Rider and Penn’s follow-up to his epochal Bonnie and Clyde, the film employs Arlo Guthrie’s song as narration and features the pale, baby-faced singer playing himself as a long-haired interloper in Stockbridge, Massachusetts who runs up against “the Man” when his attempt to dump a bag of garbage goes awry. Hunted, jailed, and then drafted into the army to be shipped to Vietnam, the hapless hippie must rely on his community of often stoned friends to save him from the recruiting board. Both time capsule and epitaph for a generation, Alice’s Restaurant earned Penn his third Academy Award® nomination for Best Director.

Night Moves (1975)

Thursday, March 31 at 6:30 p.m.

“One of his best psychological thrillers in a long time…It has an ending that comes not only as a complete surprise - which would be easy enough - but that also pulls together in a new way, one we hadn’t thought of before, one that’s almost unbearably poignant. [Night Moves] is the work of a master.” - Roger Ebert

Penn’s second conspiratorial thriller set against the world of show biz (after Mickey One) stars Gene Hackman as an ex-football star turned private eye, whose dogged investigation of a possible murder leads him to a boat called the Point of View and the belated realization that some mysteries are best left unsolved. It joins Chinatown, The Long Goodbye and The Conversation as one of the decade’s great bottomed-out neo-noirs—those Watergate-era detective fictions in which unravelling the mystery is hardly worth the bother, for corruption is everywhere and nobody is immune.

Four Friends (1981)

Sunday, April 3 at 3:30 p.m.

“This movie brings the almost unbelievable contradictions of that decade into sharp relief, not as nostalgia or as a re-creation of times past, but as a reliving of all of the agony and freedom of the weirdest ten years any of us is likely to witness.”—Roger Ebert

“The best film yet made about the ’60s.”—Vincent Canby, The New York Times

From an autobiographical script by Oscar-winner Steve Tesich (Breaking Away), Penn’s last great film traces the social upheavals of the 1960s through a tight-knit quartet of high school friends: Danilo (Craig Wasson), the working-class son of Yugoslavian immigrants; Tom (Jim Metzler), a handsome WASP jock; overweight Jewish momma’s boy David (Michael Huddleston); and the beautiful aspiring dancer Georgia (Jodi Thelen), for whom the other three collectively pine. A veritable primer in how to make the political personal (and vice versa), Four Friends is Penn’s elegiac grace note to the decade that fuelled his creative fervour.

The Chase (1966)

Sunday, April 3 at 6:30 p.m.

Wednesday, April 6 at 9:00 p.m.

Marlon Brando plays Sheriff Calder, supposedly the puppet of local oil patch patriarch Val Rogers but really his own man. The news that “Bubber” Reeves, one of Penn’s soulful renegades (Robert Redford), has broken out of prison and is headed home to his wife (Jane Fonda) drives a backwater Texan town, festering in avarice and envy, into a frenzy of accusation and mob violence. Masterfully cutting between three parties that descend into drunken chaos and carnage, an aimless Saturday night turned boozy Götterdämmerung, The Chase indicts the values of mid-sixties America, revelling in the tawdry spectacle of its own undoing. The amazing ensemble includes Robert Duvall, Miriam Hopkins, and Angie Dickinson.