Diving Into Classic Hollywood
Notes from a few months deep in the catalogues of Mann, Coppola, De Palma, and going beyond consensus
Most people don’t actually know movies. They know the last Oscar cycle, whatever Marvel thing their friends texted about, and whichever release got hyped in a media cycle this year. That’s roughly it. I know because I was doing vaguely the same thing a few months ago. I had opinions. I was grasping at straws and calling it taste.
Then I began real film study. Worked through catalogues. Pick a director, pick a star, pick a studio, and run through the filmography until you understand what they were actually doing.
In the process I’ve realized modern mainstream rap is to 90s hip-hop what modern studio cinema is to American film from roughly 1967 through the early 2000s. Turn on the Billboard Hot 100 today and most of the rap is variations on the same Atlanta-derived template: trap hi-hats, 808s laid a little too loud, sing-song hooks engineered for a fifteen-second TikTok loop. The regional texture is mostly gone. The lyricism is mostly decorative. Then go back and put on Illmatic, Enter the Wu-Tang, or Aquemini. Suddenly you can hear what the modern stuff is descended from, what it borrowed, and what it stripped out. DJ Premier digging through record crates for a soul sample is doing the same kind of physical, hands-on craft that Michael Mann does when he scouts Los Angeles at 3 AM looking for the exact parking garage for a shootout. Both require you to work with the real.
Golden-age hip-hop had regional identities so distinct you could place a beat in Queens or Compton or Memphis after four bars. American cinema used to work the same way. Michael Mann’s Los Angeles doesn’t look like Scorsese’s New York, which doesn’t look like the Coens’ Minnesota, which doesn’t look like De Palma’s Chicago. Now a huge percentage of studio films share the same bland color grade, the same blurred drone shots of interchangeable cities, the same soundstage-lit interiors that could be anywhere. Practical effects used to be non-negotiable because digital replacements didn’t exist. Now they’ve become a selling point reserved for filmmakers who insist on them, and audiences can feel the difference even when they can’t articulate it.
I don’t want to turn this into a rant about how it all got ruined. Plenty of great films are still being made. But there’s a reason the classics are the classics.
Growing up, I treated directors like a pantheon. You had your Mount Rushmore: Kubrick, Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan. Maybe you swapped one out for Kurosawa or Hitchcock depending on who you were trying to impress. The goal was to see every film by the greatest directors who ever lived, in order, and build a taste that matched the canon. That was the game.
I don’t play it anymore. Actors curate careers too. The great ones read scripts, pick collaborators, and shape their filmographies with the same intention a director brings to a shot list. A Daniel Day-Lewis filmography is a body of work. A Denzel filmography is a body of work. Tom Cruise picks projects like a producer who happens to star in them. That’s a kind of authorship, and it took me too long to see it.
And once you start looking past the pantheon, the field opens up. There are filmmakers with strange, specific visions who never made the Rushmore cut and never will. Cinematographers whose images you remember when you’ve forgotten the plot. Composers who scored three perfect films and then vanished. Editors who shaped the meta of an era. The ‘consensus’ canon of great filmmakers is merely a starting point.
With that being said, here’s everywhere the last few months have taken me.
Tom Cruise
I’ve already written way too much about Cruise, so I’ll keep this short. The thing that keeps getting overlooked in the discourse around him is that the man can act. Jerry Maguire was a great performance. The “show me the money” scene is peak comedy. But the romance beats hit hard. Rain Man holds up. Hoffman gets all the attention for obvious reasons, but Cruise is the emotional spine. He has to play a believable but evolving jerk, and he pulls it off. The Firm is vintage paranoid thriller material, and he carries it. And I haven’t even seen Magnolia or A Few Good Men. Before the stunts, the acting was already there.
John Grisham and the 90s Legal Thriller
In the 90s, John Grisham was functionally his own genre. He was the bestselling novelist in America for most of the decade, and Hollywood adapted his books at a ridiculous clip: The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, Runaway Jury. Every major studio wanted one. Every A-list star ended up in one. They’re all variations on the same engine: a young lawyer with too much conscience runs into a corporate, political, or criminal machine with no conscience at all, and the whole film is the sound of that collision playing out in courtrooms and motel rooms and parking garages.
The Firm was exceptional. A legal thriller with noir undertones where the world tightens around Cruise, and the supporting cast is stacked to an embarrassing degree: Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter.
The Rainmaker is, weirdly, one of the best Matt Damon performances nobody ever talks about. Coppola directs it like a small TV drama that accidentally got a theatrical release, and Damon plays a kid lawyer with little experience but morally grounded instincts. Jon Voight has rarely been better. One of the all time great movies.
Primal Fear is next on my list, along with The Pelican Brief and A Time to Kill. The old school, courtroom cinematic energy and thrill of these films is simply incredible.
Paramount Classics
A pattern I didn’t notice at first: Paramount’s late-90s and early-2000s output is its own kind of miniature golden age. Face/Off is John Woo at his most delirious, and watching it alongside Mission Impossible 2 was a funny education in how much of Woo’s signature he kept in every project: the slow-motion use, the Mexican standoffs, the two-handed pistol choreography. The premise of Face/Off is goofy beyond description, and the movie works anyway because Cage and Travolta kill it.
No Country for Old Men is the opposite end of the spectrum. The Coens strip out the music, strip out the flash, and let silence carry the story. I’ve only seen a handful of Coen films. True Grit is next. They seem to have an almost religious commitment to specific American places. Minnesota in Fargo. West Texas in No Country.
The Talented Mr. Ripley wrecked me. One of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Matt Damon is dominant. Jude Law is magnetic in a way he’s never quite been on camera. The Amalfi Coast has never looked better. It’s GOAT-tier. I can’t take movie ‘ratings’ or reviews seriously anymore with this one rarely showing up in the pantheon in any cursory search and getting a meager 7.4 on IMDB. The average person’s rating must be so far removed from reality for this to be the case. Consensus means nothing. What else have I been missing this whole time?
Michael Mann
After rewatching Heat recently I realized Mann is a savant like few others. It’s one thing to hear Christopher Nolan rave about Mann, but another thing to become a Mann superfan. His world-building is unparalleled.
Mann gets his actors to live the roles they film. Pacino and the Heat crew spent time with real LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives before filming, and De Niro's crew studied with actual thieves so the heists looked like muscle memory instead of choreography. Val Kilmer reloading the gun is shown in military training to this day. Daniel Day-Lewis learned to load, clean, and fire his Mohicans flintlock from a running start, and tracked animals through the Carolinas until he could field-dress one on camera. Tom Cruise worked FedEx shifts in a Los Angeles distribution center for weeks before Collateral so Vincent's anonymity in the city would read as lived-in rather than performed. Will Smith trained with boxing coaches for over a year for Ali, gaining close to forty pounds of muscle and learning the actual Ali footwork until he moved like the man. For Ferrari put Adam Driver and the rest of the cast through high-speed driving programs on the exact circuits the film depicts, because he will not let a close-up of a driver's face lie about what the car is doing under him. It's the same philosophy in every project. You can't fake competence with a gun. You can't fake the small adjustments a professional makes without thinking, because they only emerge after the body has done the thing a thousand times. Unconscious competence. Mann builds that groundwork into the budget and the schedule. That's why his films feel like documentaries that happen to have plots. Then, he throws in gorgeous soundtrack remixes and visual aesthetics to dial the style all the way up, until you have a singular blend of style and substance.
Thief is where the style starts. Synths, neon, rain, a man doing precise professional work in the middle of the night. Chicago. Incredible aesthetics. Beautiful soundtrack.
Manhunter is the original Hannibal adaptation.
Heat was way better on rewatch than I remembered. The diner scene between De Niro and Pacino is legendary. De Niro’s acting is absolutely unbelievable. His accent, aura, line delivery.
“Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner” — Neil McCauley, Heat
Miami Vice is wildly underrated. I will fight people about this. Mann shot it on early digital in a way that made critics call it ugly at the time, but it looks gorgeous. Collateral is an all time great. The way Mann gets actors fully inside a role is one of the under-discussed wonders of American direction.
Public Enemies and Last of the Mohicans are next on my agenda. Tokyo Vice, the show he produced and directed the pilot for, is also on the list. I love the realism and style combination of Mann’s work.
I’m glad Heat 2 is getting its full 200 million dollar budget from Amazon MGM after Warner Brothers balked. It’s a positive sign for Hollywood. Mann movies are not always profitable, but they are essential to our culture. These are the sort of movies Amazon and Apple can afford to pickup.
Sam Mendes
Road to Perdition is one of the most beautiful-looking period films I’ve ever seen. Conrad Hall shot it right before he died, and you can tell every frame mattered to him. Rain on black coats. Headlights cutting through Illinois winter. Paul Newman’s face in a lamplit bar. The movie itself is one of Mendes’ best. I enjoyed it a lot more than American Beauty. Skyfall was iconic as well.
1917 sounds exciting. I’ve been saving it. Roger Deakins shooting a one-take war film with Thomas Newman scoring it.
Matt Damon
The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Rainmaker in the same stretch of 90s work is one of the best two-film runs a young actor has ever put together. He morphs into any role completely without playing himself. It’s wild that he was doing all this before he turned thirty. Truly one of the greatest acting careers.
Bourne is the obvious next stop for me. People talk about Bourne as a straightforward spy franchise, but the editing revolution it kicked off in the early 2000s reshaped how American action films look for a decade, for better and worse. Good Will Hunting is sitting on my list too. I also need to watch the movie De Niro directed with Damon The Good Shepherd. It’s not rated the highest, but as discussed before, that might just be indicative of it being a banger. De Niro only directed 2 feature films. The first, The Bronx Tale was fire. Why wouldn’t this be good?
I’m trying to build a full picture before the Odyssey, which will undoubtedly be among his best performances.
Brian De Palma
De Palma is the great Hitchcock disciple of American cinema, and you can feel it in every frame he’s ever shot. He’s obsessed with watching. Every one of his films is about someone observing something they shouldn’t, and the camera becomes the second observer: stalking through rooms, drifting overhead, following characters down hallways in long unbroken takes that make you feel like you’re breathing on their neck. His signature moves are a whole vocabulary. The split-diopter shot, where two planes of action stay in sharp focus at the same time. The overhead God’s-eye view that turns a scene into a diagram. The slow-motion climax, where time stretches and violence becomes choreography. The long Steadicam oner that refuses to cut even when every instinct says it should.
I was put on De Palma from Mission Impossible 1. That movie has such a distinct flavor compared to the rest of the franchise. Wish he came back for more.
The Untouchables was the next surprise for me. A gorgeous Chicago era gangster movie with an incredible ensemble and De Niro as Al Capone. MI1 made De Palma’s fingerprints obvious. I love De Palma’s color grading and use of black and noir looks.
Blow Out and Scarface are waiting for me. Blow Out is supposedly his masterpiece: a sound technician (Travolta) accidentally records a political assassination. Scarface is the one everyone quotes with Pacino’s iconic performance. I can’t wait for both.
Francis Ford Coppola
Coppola directed a handful of the most important American films ever made. I mistakenly saw The Godfather growing up without subtitles, which is a whole story in itself, and I’m only now learning to go through the rest of his catalogue after The Rainmaker pulled me in. The Conversation is apparently a phenomenal paranoid thriller. Apocalypse Now’s reputation precedes it. I love how Coppola lets the frame hold with slow takes. He’d rather stage a long take with actors who know what they’re doing than cut their performance into pieces.
I picked up on this watching The Rainmaker. There are long shots in that film I didn’t expect from a late-career studio legal thriller, where Coppola just lets Damon walk through a scene in a single unbroken take, the camera moving with him instead of cutting around him, full of props and extras and lighting that took careful preparation. Most directors today would chop those same scenes into ten pieces. Coppola treats the actor like a dancer. There’s a poetic quality to his long takes. The Rainmaker had some of the best cinematography ever.
I also need to watch the one Tom Cruise and Coppola collaboration, The Outsiders.
Robert De Niro
Rewatching Heat reminded me about Michael Mann, but also about Robert De Niro. The guy’s aura and acting are top notch. Though, Mann’s approach to Heat certainly got more out of him than most of his work.
Ronin was insane. John Frankenheimer shot the car chases through real European streets with real camera cars at real speeds, and it shows. De Niro plays an aging mysterious operative who has catalogued every exit in every room before he sits down.
He’s also the best Al Capone ever committed to film. I can’t say I was as big a fan of Once Upon A Time In America but there’s a reason Scorsese keeps calling him back. There’s a reason young actors study him. He’s still the reference point.
I need to watch The Bronx Tale, Mean Streets, Angel Heart, Limitless and everything else he’s ever been in.
Still On Deck
Denzel is the big blind spot, and I’m going to run his catalogue properly. Training Day, Malcolm X, He Got Game, Man on Fire, Inside Man. Philip Seymour Hoffman is another one; I discovered him through Mission Impossible: 3. Reading about his career since, it’s clear I’ve got one of the great supporting-actor runs of the last thirty years waiting for me: Magnolia, Almost Famous, Capote, The Master, Synecdoche New York. That’s a murderer’s row.
Ridley Scott’s Black Rain was visual and aesthetic genius. I need to go through more of his work. And his brother, Tony Scott, recommended by Jarod Hector. Brad Pitt’s body of work awaits at the end of all of this, waiting patiently.
Lastly, I need to finish watching all racing genre movies. Rush was amazing.
Closing
Great cinema runs deeper than any top 10 list will admit. Most of what people call great is just consensus, and consensus is a lazy way to decide what matters. Many true all-timers slip through the cracks because nobody made the case for them loud enough.