Reel Politique: Directors Project: John Flynn
Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.
Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.
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John Flynn (1932 - 2007)
Ranking: Lightly Likable
The Sergeant (1968); The Jerusalem File (1972); The Outfit (1973); Rolling Thunder (1977); Defiance (1980); Marilyn: The Untold Story (1980 TV movie); Touched (1983); Best Seller (1987); Lock Up (1989); Out for Justice (1991); Nails (1992 TV movie); Scam (1993 TV movie); Brainscan (1994); Absence of the Good (1999 TV movie); Protection (2001)
The recent passing of John Flynn offers an opportunity to both reflect on and honor a director who toiled — during his career, at any rate — in the much derided trenches of genre film without complaint, reward, or recognition. He may never have transcended his genres, but he never abused them, and took his films seriously regardless of their premises, stars, or release prospects.
Like that other masculinist director from Chicago, William Friedkin, he started out making a film with an explicitly gay theme. In The Sergeant , Flynn and writer Richard Goldstone examine the tensions of a military man with an inexplicable crush on a subordinate (Flynn had been in the Coast Guard, before graduating from UCLA with a journalism degree). Told in the gritty quasi-post neo-realist form that is really a descendant of 1950s television, the narrative itself is like an expanded version of a plot thread in Reflections in a Golden Eye, and yet also anticipates the “moral” lesson of the Chris Cooper thread of American Beauty. But after his initial entrance into the higher arena of serious cinema, Flynn never returned to either that kind of serious subject matter, or that Marty level of TVo-realism. Thereafter, he almost exclusively made crime films, and often outstanding ones, from The Outfit , one of the best of the Richard Stark adaptations in the Parker series, to Out for Justice , arguably the best of the Steven Seagal action films (though Under Siege, directed by his fellow Chicagoan Andrew Davis, vies for that title; Flynn’s is certainly the most comical).
Flynn, whether by design or happenstance, gravitated to strong writers, such as Paul Schrader (Rolling Thunder), Larry Cohen ( Best Seller ), novelists such as Norman Mailer ( Marilyn: The Untold Story ), Richard Stark (The Outfit, though here Flynn is credited with the script), and Andrew Kevin Walker (Brainscan). These films usually starred a favored masculine hero of the day, from Jan-Michael Vincent through Brian Dennehy, Joe Don Baker, and Tommy Lee Jones to Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal. It is as if Flynn’s dealings with difficult method actor and scenery-chewer Rod Steiger in The Sergeant scarred him into invulnerability against the difficulties of future thespian egoists. Not even the bizarre demands of a Stallone or movie-ignorance of a Seagal could impede him.
In the scripts and books that came his way Flynn favored complex tales of crime and betrayal, in that regard anticipating the neo-noirs and films soleils of the 1980s and ’90s. But it is also a masculinist world. Scam is unusual for having a female rogue at its heart. Sometimes, though, he was at odds aesthetically with the text. Flynn’s easeful inhabitation of the masculine world clashes with Paul Schrader’s boy-looking-in-through-the-window-at-the-grownups quality in Rolling Thunder , and Flynn’s classic action craftsmanship is hobbled by Schrader’s essentially static Bressonian moralism. Flynn accepted the conventions of action films, instead of exploring them for cracks and blisters.
Flynn made only about as many films as Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, which is less an aesthetic comparison than a note about how the business was changing just as he entered it. Had he been born 40 years earlier, and entered filmmaking in, say, 1928, he might have been another Raoul Walsh or William Wellman, making three films a year and establishing a consistent array of themes and images. In his later post-directorial years, Flynn lived in Pacific Palisades, where he was active in community activism, a far cry from the world where he was likely to put on film some of the screen’s best fight scenes.