Charley Varrick (1973)

directed by Don Siegel

Paul Keleris

Of all the movies that also serve as love letters to movies, the one I find the most moving is Joe Dante’s 1993 film Matinee. Here, Dante makes a genuinely stirring case for the William Castle-esque cheapo monster movies of the 1950s, a genre that’s about as abandoned by traditional notions of good cinema as you can get. Matinee argues that the lowbrow nature of these films give them a unique power. The genre requirements for thrills above all else allow directors like Castle to dive into the world of the lurid, capturing a different emotional reality than you might otherwise see in something more prestigious. This is how I feel about the work of Don Siegel: his termitic commitment gives his blunt crime films an honesty about what is required to live comfortably that hits me like a freight train decades after his death. He was one of a precious few filmmakers who understood the volatility of any social system, which I can certainly relate to as someone who’s looking to get into professional screenwriting, an industry where everyone frantically tries to read the mind of an imaginary Mass Audience. Siegel understood the uncertainty of the individual and the institution down to his bones, and therefore he understood me to a frightening extent.

The Lineup (1958)

The conspiracy is simple: Hide the heroin in banal trinkets so unsuspecting tourists will transport the drugs into the States. You and I are a part of this plot, our lives held hostage by sociopathic goons like Eli Wallach’s Dancer, who drives around San Francisco with his nicer but no kinder friend Julian to retrieve these heroin shipments, with the mules winding up dead along the way. It’s upsetting to think that we’d be mere cannon fodder in Don Siegel’s movie world and even more so to come back to reality and realize this is more or less how we live now. Either that or we become Dancer, someone who would tear apart his fellow human beings for people who would do the same to him in a heartbeat. Perhaps I already have a little Dancer in me. I recently started building up a Linkedin profile to network, and what else is networking besides a conspiracy of employment? Like Siegel’s heroin plot, you plant the seeds and hope that the system takes you where you want to be.

It’s a grim landscape Siegel paints, one where goodness is held for ransom, and yet goodness still exists, while the conspiracy tears itself apart. Dancer, for all his psycho bluster, is a guy with a job, and when the job goes bad, he takes out the head of the whole operation (in an amusing bit of hippie forecasting, this character goes by “The Man”) in a desperate bid to stay out of trouble. In this way, Siegel finds a bit of hope. The panic of one mid-level man can ripple across a vast system. The individual can still affect change. It might not be Capra, and you certainly won’t find it on a happy birthday card, but it’s something.

The Killers (1964)

The movie opens with John Cassavetes, an artist who I respect as much as anyone who’s ever picked up a camera, dying at the hand of Lee Marvin, one of the scariest guys I’ve ever seen in my life, so right off the bat this film has a psychic impact on me that few (asides from Cassavetes’ work) can lay claim to. From there, the film expands across two points in time. There’s the past, where Cassavetes’s race car driver Johnny North was still a living being with dreams and hopes. Then there’s the present, where all that remains is Lee Marvin’s hitman Charlie Strom and his sidekick Lee strolling into people’s lives and tormenting them until they tell him where to go next to find the million dollars that’ll get him out of the business. The present day storyline is structured like a treasure hunt: Lee Marvin is here and he beats up someone until he’s told to go there, and once he’s there he’s told to go over there. Don Siegel predicted a more violent form of cold emailing.

Motion is king in Don Siegel’s world, and in Lee Marvin, Siegel found his ideal motion maker. While Cassavetes’ character is hamstrung by the whims of fate (his future as the ultimate director of the desperate yet ineffective gesture is not to be ignored), Marvin is ironically freed by it. He moves as if every step and every touch has already happened, and the action itself is a bit of paperwork to set everything else in motion. As frightening as he is, I can’t help but admire Marvin in this role. I’m fascinated by anyone who feels that comfortable in their words and their deeds, even if they don’t deserve it. Especially if they don’t, if I’m being honest. If they can get there, maybe I can too. It’s fitting for Siegel the anti-sentimentalist that master of the body Lee Marvin wipes out master of the heart John Cassavetes with ease, but as far as I’m concerned they sit side by side in my cinematic pantheon, always in conversation.

Charley Varrick (1973)

Charley Varrick’s wife bleeds out after a bank robbery gone wrong. A couple kisses to send her off and right away Charley readies a bomb to blow her and the getaway car to kingdom come. Exciting action music plays over the scene because there'll be an explosion soon, and in the world of Charley Varrick, the soon is all that matters. Not the now and certainly not the just happened. Charley’s a number of years older than I am, but as I graduate university, I find myself in a similar relationship with time. There’s a lot of talk about potential, and the first few steps towards that potential have all but consumed the present. I’m writing this piece for two purposes: to get some work of mine published and to have a sample to hopefully get a steady writing job somewhere. I find myself thinking more of the latter than the former, which perhaps isn’t fair, but it’s forward momentum. The only real thing is the figure on the horizon (the horizon means squat), so you’d better get there before it’s gone and you’re stuck in the desert. The movie ends with Charley as a free man, driving off into the sunset with his loot. I hope he finds a place where he can be still. Maybe he can give me directions once he gets there.

Paul Keleris is a writer based in Toronto, Ontario. He is a screenwriting graduate of York University. His script "Jeff D." made it to the Second Round of the 2023 Austin Film Festival.