2. The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet, 1971)

There has been quite a lot of brouhaha in my country Holland recently: we have an annual children’s celebration centered around a figure called ‘Sinterklaas’, who is pretty similar to Santa Claus (for obvious reasons), but with a crucial difference in that Sinterklaas is assisted by helpers called Zwarte Piet who may or may not resemble white people in blackface. This has been interpreted by an increasing number of people as racist and there has been more and more pressure to have the tradition changed to make Zwarte Piet more neutral and less offensive. To put it bluntly, I’ve always believed all the criticism a bunch of crap and my little analysis of ‘The Anderson Tapes’ will make perfectly clear why: because when we are going to change everything that’s possibly offensive very soon we’re with very little left and we would live in exactly the kind of sterile world ‘The Anderson Tapes’ so vividly portrays. Racism is completely wrong of course, let me be clear on that, but there’s a crucial difference between actual racism and possible racist characterization. When someone loses a job because he or she is black, that is true racism and should be fought against nail and tooth. But I have very little patience and understanding for people who claim to feel offended by racist portrayal (I don’t doubt the fact they feel offended, but I do doubt the validity of their feelings), because ultimately it doesn’t really hurt anybody and it does bring a certain diversity into this world that’s more necessary than some idea of political correctness.

At the beginning of the movie ‘The Anderson Tapes’ Sean Connery starts sprouting how the stock market is nothing but a fixed horse race and how marriage is really just socially accepted rape, remarks that will set the general tone of the rest of the movie. ‘The Anderson Tapes’ depicts a rather frightening world with surveillance pervading even our homes, cold business transactions everywhere and humanity completely gone (at one point a telephone operator is asked ‘are you a recording?’, thereby violently conflating technology and humans). Of course it also places the whole movie right in the middle of the paranoid (political) thriller genre that thrived in the seventies, which was adept at creating a general sense of moral ambiguity where lines between good and evil aren’t really so sharply drawn anymore. When Connery says to the old guy who has been sent away for 40 years “the Depression, World War II, Korea –  you lucky bastard, you missed everything”, the movie more or less implies that the horrors of the world outside prison walls are perhaps even more frightening than the relatively safe world inside. This erosion of moral categories also creates a dazzlingly complex web of intrigue where everybody’s has something on somebody else: the cops watch Anderson, the mob watches Anderson and orders him to kill one of their own guys, the mob gets watched by the cops… and Anderson trying to pull off an old-fashioned heist in the middle of all this. 

‘The Anderson Tapes’ shares with a film like ‘The Godfather’ the idea that criminals have to change along with their times, but in this case they are unfortunately not very successful at it. Since Anderson’s been away in prison, he doesn’t quite realize the extent the outside world has changed and he certainly doesn’t realize his criminal plans are really doomed from the start because the police is already on to him before he even himself knew what his plans were. It pervades the whole movie with a profound sense of futility, something the movie itself humorously comments upon in the delightful moment when Connery and Walken are almost arrested in the bus station right after they are released from prison. Because Anderson and his mates are, without realizing, trapped like rats in a surveillance maze right from the start, it  really takes all the good old fun out of criminality. Not that criminality should pay of course, but Lumet laments rather playfully things were a lot more interesting back in the days when police and criminals were a better match. It’s made abundantly clear several times Anderson is extremely good at what he does – unfortunately he is still hasn’t got a chance in the world against the police with all the technology at their disposal. Not only are crime itself and the fighting of it changing, as a direct result the whole crime film genre also has to change along with it, a fact Lumet seems very much aware of; in a way the whole movie could be seen as his sly homage to the old type of criminal (picture) which is being forced out of this world.

Typical for the times that are a-changin’ is moment when Connery sees his girlfriend again after ten years of prison. In a cold and mechanical matter they immediately proceed to have sex, but the camera zooms to the phone line reminding us that what should have been a private and intimate moment is immediately destroyed by surveillance and a total lack of privacy. After the sex it gets even worse: the girlfriend phones some guy named Werner, the man she apparently has been seeing when Anderson was away and in the most cold and matter of factly manner (which makes it strangely funny) she makes it clear she’s leaving him because she just likes Anderson better. It is a world completely sapped of humanity, where not only everybody get’s watched all the time, but where the coldness of our technology has pervaded every aspect of life so thoroughly as to make it completely sterile.

When writing this, one could easily be reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, especially since both portray a rather nightmarish vision of the future (strictly speaking, ‘Tapes’ isn’t really futuristic as it plays in the then present, but it could be so considered thematically). It is a illuminating comparison because it not only explains the similarities between the two movies, but the differences even more. The more I see the Kubrick, the less comfortable I feel in watching it. Despite all its obvious brilliance I have an increasingly hard time accepting Kubrick’s well-known pessimistic vision of humanity, to the point one wonders if Tarkovsky wasn’t right in calling ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ a cold movie after all. Where Kubrick always stresses the coldness and sterility, Lumet goes the opposite route, so you could say that if ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is Catherine Deneuve, ‘Tapes’ is Ann-Margret. The world Lumet depicts is also cold and forbidding, but with the crucial difference he peoples it with warm human beings, thereby creating an fascinating balance of coldness and warmth. The combination of opposites that’s so crucial to this movie also gets a very nice reflection in the music of Quincy Jones (whose presence as composer was another welcome surprise for me, as I have been very much immersed in his wonderful ‘The ABC/Mercury Big Band Jazz Sessions’ lately, which comes highly recommended). His soundtrack for ‘The Anderson Tapes’ is an interesting combination of harsh electronic sounds and warm funky music with the music serving as an aural reinforcement of the movie’s main theme.

There’s a delicious moment near the end of the movie when one of the cops tries to slide to another building on a rope but clumsily lands against the wall. It’s a completely throwaway moment which can easily be overlooked, but just the fact such ‘mistakes’ are normally edited out of a movie should already point to its importance. Thus it becomes a highly significant moment, because it clearly reminds us we’re not watching some perfect movie characters, but human beings instead with all their foibles and mistakes. What the movie wants to tell us then, is that although we may live in an increasingly cold, business-like technology-driven world, as long as we remains people of flesh and blood we will pull through all this somehow. The world outside may have become a technological prison, as long as we are capable of recognizing the inherent humanness of our fellow man and as long as we’re able to laugh at ourselves and others, we will always be able to deal with all the coldness surrounding us.

The moment we realize this, we are suddenly able to understand why there is so much emphasis on the quirkiness of all the characters. Because what differentiates ‘Tapes’ from similar movies, like ‘Big Deal on Madonna Street’ or ‘Crackers’  where a couple of bumbling criminals try to pull off a heist is precisely this: it doesn’t just use its strange characters to get some laughs, but organically uses their presence to make its thematic points. Sure, the fact that Margaret Hamilton of all people gets accused of reading ‘The Story of O’ is hilariously funny in itself, but there’s more to it than a few laughs. One could very well say it is this outrageousness our humanity ultimately depends on. And the movie also goes much further than mere jokes, as in the Val Avery character who is abundantly racist: when he is sent to come along with the robbers, he isn’t able to hide his racist feelings when he sees some of the other criminals are black: clearly just being in the same room with them makes him want to puke. Obviously, the movie doesn’t really approve of this, but significantly it doesn’t condemn it either. The Avery character may be completely obnoxious (and the movie is rather clear on this), he is also a human being and his humanity lies precisely in the fact he is so racist – a computer may not recognize color or discriminate, but that is exactly the problem here, because as Ma Rainey sings in her song “call me anything, but call me”. Avery may not win any prizes for his racist remarks, but even with all his problems he’s still preferable to a perfect computer.

It is because of this the casting of this movie is so crucial – without the inherent likability of the actors the movie simply wouldn’t have worked as well. The casting of Sean Connery is the first stroke of genius of course, as few actors have been so adept at playing crooked but still so utterly charming and captivating characters. The rest of the cast is also topnotch, with Dyan Cannon, Christopher Walken, Margaret Hamilton, Val Avery and even Ralph Meeker all putting in highly memorable performances. But the movie virtually coheres around the presence of Martin Balsam. I had seen his name during the credits, so I knew he was going to be in it, but when he finally strode into view, it took me a while to let it sink in it was him. Never in my wildest dreams I would’ve thought to see Martin Balsam play a raving fag to such perfection! He’s plays the part to the hilt with all the stereotypical trimmings of homosexuality in full swing. I was so much impressed by the sheer ebullience of Balsam’s performance it was only much later that I realized quite a lot of people would probably find his portrayal offensive as we are gradually progressing (or descending) towards a world where such stereotypes are considered backwards. Which is of course the whole point of the movie, because it doesn’t even try to gloss over it and get away with such politically incorrect characterization: his homosexuality actually becomes a running gag. Balsam’s is the only character in the whole movie who is constantly being described by others and without fail they mention his queerness: ‘fag’, ‘homosexual’ and – my own favorite – ‘a man of sexual deviance’ are some of the descriptions. Again, as with Avery’s racism, they may not be nice things to say about another human being, but as long as we maintain the ability to laugh at ourselves and our own little idiosyncrasies, at least we keep our world warm and alive with feeling. We keep it from becoming Catharine Deneuve.

At the end of ‘The Anderson Tapes’ (with masks obscuring their faces to rob the criminals of their last bit of humanity) the actual robbery is juxtaposed with scenes of the police questioning the people who got robbed. This creates an effect that seems to consciously evoke Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, where both criminals and police act with similarly cold precision and the parallel editing evokes the impression that criminals and police are indeed very similar. But where Lang is much more interested in destroying a complacent bourgeois sense of moral simplicity, Lumet stresses the idea of futility, as he had done all through the rest of the movie. This idea is of course clinched with the erasing of the tapes of the title, which really makes everything Anderson has done pointless, since not only has he failed, all the records of his attempts have also been destroyed. But just because the criminals never had a real chance the running gag of Balsam’s fag becomes so crucial because it makes this sterile technological world alive and breathing with eccentric humanity. My boyfriend and I could easily have been offended by Balsam’s stereotypical gay portrayal, but we took to it like a fish to water and really not because we’re two perfect creatures. In fact, precisely the recognition our own imperfectness is what makes us human. Clint Eastwood hit the nail on the head when he said:

"People have lost their sense of humor. In former times we constantly made jokes about different races. You can only tell them today with one hand over your mouth or you will be insulted as a racist. I find that ridiculous. In those earlier days every friendly clique had a 'Sam the Jew' or 'Jose the Mexican' - but we didn't think anything of it or have a racist thought. It was just normal that we made jokes based on our nationality or ethnicity. That was never a problem. I don't want to be politically correct. We're all spending too much time and energy trying to be politically correct about everything".

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