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Movies & TV

Remembering Arthur Penn

All screenings at TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. West. www.tiff.net


I interviewed Arthur Penn in 1996, when he came to the Toronto Film Festival with what would be his last feature, Inside. The movie was a disposable morality play about prison abuses in apartheid-era South Africa, but Penn cared about it just as much as anything he’d made.

In what turned out to be a very generous interview – the next journalist had cancelled, giving us nearly an hour together – we talked about his career, we talked about his love of actors, and we talked about how hard it was for him to get a movie made lately. It had been seven years since his last theatrical release, Penn & Teller Get Killed though neither of us knew it at the time, Inside would be his final feature-length work. (Penn died last October, the day after his 88th birthday.)

Neither Inside nor Penn & Teller Get Killed is part of the Arthur Penn tribute underway this week at TIFF Cinematheque, which is something of a shame. Both of them did play at TIFF, after all, and neither of them is particularly easy to find these days. Instead, the program focuses primarily on Penn’s work in the late 60s and early 70s – the period that produced Bonnie & Clyde, Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man and Night Moves.

It’s the logical strategy, I guess. These are films that made his reputation as one of the riskiest American filmmakers working – and one of a handful who encouraged actors to use facets of themselves they’d never previously explored. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are better in Bonnie & Clyde than they were in any other film of that period – mercurial and dangerous, noble and misunderstood, simultaneously co-dependent and enabling. Penn finds something in them that no one else could, and their chemistry becomes the engine that drives the action.

You could argue that any smart filmmaker would have done the same thing, but no one else did. Penn understood that intriguing personalities can be far more compelling than the tightest plots or the most ambitious set piece it’s something that’s evident in his earlier films like The Left-Handed Gun – a Billy the Kid programmer starring some kid named Paul Newman – and his screen adaptation of The Miracle Worker, which won Oscars for stars Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.

They’re both included in the retrospective, along with Mickey One, which marks the first time Penn worked with Beatty the 1966 thriller The Chase, starring Robert Redford, Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda the goofy 1975 Western The Missouri Breaks, which reunited Penn with Brando and threw in Jack Nicholson, and 1981’s Four Friends, which looks back at the 1960s through the prism of Steve Tesich’s rather schematic screenplay.

After Four Friends, Penn found himself wandering in the Hollywood wilderness, making generic thrillers like Target and Dead Of Winter and drifting towards the occasional television project. I can understand why those films aren’t part of this retrospective – proficient but undistinguished, they don’t fit the narrative of Penn as a fiercely committed filmmaker. But even so – as Penn told me 15 years ago – they’re part of his trajectory.

“It’s all work,” he said with a smile as I packed up to go. “It’s all from the same guy.”

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