ecarle — 9 years ago(February 02, 2017 10:23 PM)

"Hard Contract" doesn't get shown much.
But I've got this book of Harlan Ellison reviews I've been reading off and on for a few months, and, back in 1969, Ellison gave it a rave review and noted that it had "lines around the block" at the flagship Bruin Theater in West LA, near the UCLA campus and where all sorts of big movies got their big debuts for a few decadesfrom Some Like It Hot to The Exorcist.
Hard Contract wasn't in THEIR league. But it was on cable the other night(it rarely is)and I found it a fascinating example of how Hollywood studios just sort of lost their bearings in the late sixties.
1969 and 1970 were interesting years in Hollywood. Whereas the cusp of 1959 into 1960 found filmmakers like Hitchcock, Wilder, Hawks, Huston and Preminger at the top of their form, the cusp of 1969 into 1970 found them floundering, old in flesh and old in their filmmaking. Sherlock Holmes, Topaz, Rio Lobo, The Kremlin Letter, Tell Me That You Love Me Julie Moon this was not top drawer work.
And Hollywood hadn't really found a full replacement group for them yet.
The biggest hit of 1969 was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." It didn't get a lot of great reviews then, really, and it doesn't feel that great now. Newman and Redford never looked better, and were a great team, and had great one-liners(and a great scene on a cliff overlooking a waterfall) but..the movie as a whole seems glib and dull and very empty and that whole middle chase by the Super-posse is downright dull.
The Wild Bunch was a masterpiece, but a gory one and one that didn't get much box office traction.
Films I really liked THEN like True Grit and On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Italian Job look a bit constrained and cheapjack now(well, not OMMSS, but it IS overlong).
Now, those were actually the successful films. But Hard Contract is one of those floundering films of a new filmmaker. Its over-hip and WAY over-talky and hellbent to sound profound when it actually often sounds obtuse.
I found it fascinating.
Its from 20th Century Fox and I found it rather like a Fox movie from the next year that I really like The Kremlin Letter(by John Huston with Richard Boone and Patrick O'Neal.) Both films are ostensibly thrillers, but they don't particularly thrill. Its like "the wheels were coming off" traditional studio screenwriting, and both Hard Contract and The Kremlin Letter feel like movies where fine actors were gathered to do great work in the service of nothing much. All I could think watching both movies - is how Hitchcock used to tell stories SO much better than this. These new guys didn't know how to do it.
They were just waiting for Coppola and Scorsese and Lucas and Spielberg to arrive.
Also like "The Kremlin Letter," "Hard Contract" is happy that the "R" rating is here and so everybody can be as amoral as they want to be.
James Coburn had a Fox contract. Interesting: he turned down the Patrick O'Neal role in The Kremlin Letter(perhaps he saw that Boone would steal it) and he was turned down to play Sundance.
Instead around the same timehe took this Fox "thriller". And thus found himself sacrificing his potential stardom to a weird hip potboiler.
Coburn's a hit man, though the film makes a point of not showing HOW he kills his victims. They just turn up dead. (No, wait he throws one out a window.)
To match his cold killing job, Coburn has sex only with hookers, and he doesn't kiss them, and he literally doesn't sleep with them they have to leave("I like doing things with other people in bed when I'm awakeI like to sleep alone.") Karen Black(hey, a Hitchcockian!) in an early role is the first hooker we see him with. Its pleasant, she's nice, he's nicebut his rules apply.
Burgess Meredith has a field day using that bizarre Penguin-voice of his to deliver pages and pages of obscure exposition as "the Boss Man" about how Coburn must execute a "hard contract" kill three men in Europe in one month, with only two of them identified at first. Its fine "set up" stuff(think Gavin Elster briefing Scottie) butit sets up nothing.
Off to Europe Coburn goes and waiting there for a "meet cute and sexy" is Lee Remick, as a loose American woman who realizes that Coburn has mistaken her for a hooker. She takes the pay and does the workand when Coburn finds out that he has slept with a NON-hooker for the first time in his life everything changes. Its love, baby.
There ain't much more to say about Hard Contract except that once in Europe, Coburn meets his Third Target and itsSterling Hayden, that fascinating B-actor who kept turning up in A movies(The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfatherand Spielberg wanted Hayden for Quint in Jaws.)
Coburn and Hayden have a long, long long dialogue sequence near the end in a "North by Northwest" cornfield, near a thresherwhich is pseudo-intellectual on the one hand and goofy on the other. But I LIKED itthese are two macho men sizing each other up and offering life lessons to o