The one Harvey Keitel movie he needs everyone to see: “I just want to recommend it to you”
Rather like those late greats Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, Harvey Keitel is a veteran actor with a frighteningly accomplished library of films behind him who has never quite received the star billing or appreciation his performances have deserved.
Because, especially in the New Hollywood era, as Keitel and his close friends Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro changed cinema forever in their 20s with some of the best films ever made, he was there at the start, a menacing, engrossing presence from Scorsese’s debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in 1967 onwards.
Keitel would go on to make six films with Scorsese, including classics like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and The Irishman, all three of which also starred De Niro, an actor Keitel said he could never say no to. But outside of his partnership with the great director, Keitel has also made a career in starring in films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction for Quentin Tarantino, put in superb supporting shifts in movies including Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and picked up an Academy Award nomination for Warren Beatty’s Bugsy.
In fact, the paucity of awards and nominations in Keitel’s career is genuinely surprising, just one Golden Globe shout and one Oscar nod in a more than 50-year career in some stand-out titles, including the crime drama he made in 1992, in which he left nothing out on the field, Bad Lieutenant. His performance in that film, directed by Abel Ferrara, is one of complete commitment, Keitel playing a corrupt, drug-taking, sex obsessed New York police lieutenant whose life is spiralling out of control.
His old confident Scorsese called it one of the best films of the decade, and yet Keitel wasn’t rewarded for his work with any major industry awards, something that was repeated just a year later when he was snubbed for his part in Jane Campion’s The Piano, which picked up eight Oscar nominations, including wins for Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin.
Keitel worked consistently for the next 25 years, often making smaller appearances in movies but rarely on a title that anyone would describe as a big box office hit. In 2019, the same year he made The Irishman in fact, Keitel made a Czech film that was a truly harrowing watch, a war drama set in WW2 that followed a young Jewish boy seeking refuge from the Holocaust.
Asked by Awards Daily to pick out his own favourite films from his back catalogue, Keitel replied: “I might recommend to you that you see the movie I made based on Jerzy Kosinski’s book The Painted Bird. It’s one of my favourite films. I just want to recommend it to you to see it. (Director) Vaclav Marhoul did a wonderful job writing it and filming that movie. I can’t understand why that movie was never done before.”
While it proved a hit with critics, The Painted Bird was anything but an easy watch; many early screenings at film festivals prompted walk outs due to the brutality depicted on screen, while the Guardian, in awarding it five stars, described it as a “savage, searing three hour tour of hell”. It made a considerable loss at the box office, bringing in just over half a million dollars against a production budget of more than $7m.
Keitel’s most recent film was released just a couple of weeks ago, the action thriller Hellfire, with Don’t Breathe’s Stephen Lang, and he has four more new movies on the way despite now reaching the age of 86.
