The best era of American cinema, according to Ben Affleck: “The great years”
It’s difficult to know whether or not Ben Affleck is OK most of the time.
Presumably, thanks to being a film star and an acclaimed director of some repute, he is mostly alright with plenty of cash to throw about. But whenever you see him in public, albeit via the press, he constantly looks like he’s either 1) exhausted or 2) stressed as fuck or 3) needs a cigarette even when he’s in the middle of smoking one.
Whether any of that has to do with his seemingly never-ending hokey-cokey relationship with Jennifer Lopez is anyone’s guess, but it would appear to be given whenever they’re together, there are lots of pictures of them seemingly in the midst of saying something like ‘what the hell are you on about’ before slamming a car door.
It’s a shame, really, because Affleck is an undeniable talent; anybody who can co-write a movie as impressive as 1997’s Good Will Hunting at the ripe old age of 24 has a unique ability to say the least, let alone star in it as well. And in the almost 30 years since, he has shown that not only is he a very accomplished actor, able to don batsuits, play assassins and do comedy just as well as drama, but also a director to be reckoned with.
That was made clear with 2012’s Argo, the unbearably tense CIA action thriller based in Iran that he took home the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar for, amidst two other wins and seven nominations. It was a movie that paid homage to some of the greatest paranoid seat-grippers of cinema, films from the New Hollywood age that featured unrelenting fast-cuts, handheld cameras and sparse music to put people right on the inside of what was unfolding on-screen; indeed, the climactic airport escape and the initial Embassy invasion are two of the most engrossing pieces of moviemaking in recent years.
Affleck evidently is a student of that era and of the incredibly talented directors who either worked within it or used it as a launchpad to become household names. They include Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, all of whom made landmark films including Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation, Mean Streets and many more.
The movement also served to document the gritty reality of life in some of the US’s major cities at the time, including in Affleck’s native Boston, with a mob movie directed by Peter Yates that would prove to be a huge influence on the young filmmaker.
He told the movie blog JoBlo about being a ‘70’s style director, saying, “That’s so true that it’s starting to make me self-conscious. I’m sure I can make a movie that doesn’t feel like a ’70s movie! But the truth is, that’s my favourite era in American filmmaking. To me, those were the great years. The Friends of Eddie Coyle was a movie that I, well, copied, whatever, was inspired by, for The Town. The Verdict was the poster I had on the wall during [Affleck’s 2007 directorial debut] Gone Baby Gone.”
While The Verdict was in fact an early-1980s Paul Newman movie directed by Lumet, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a little-known 1973 neo-noir featuring the former western hero Robert Mitchum in the lead role, playing a small-time lifelong criminal trying to rob banks around Boston. Made on a budget of $3million, a lot of which went to Mitchum, it wasn’t a success on release but has since been reappraised as one of the best examples of the lesser-known ‘70s crime movies, alongside The Seven-Ups and Across 110th Street.
