“ON NOT STRAINING FOR SIGNIFICANCE: STRIKING A BARGAIN WITH ‘RAW DEAL’” (BY ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO)
In the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” documentary The Privilege of Rank: Making Chain of Command, actor Ronny Cox explains that since the early days of his career, when he appeared in films as diverse as Deliverance, Bound for Glory, The Onion Field, and Taps, audiences didn’t recognize the real him. He recounts that a producer in Houston once told Cox that he wasn’t Ronny Cox because the producer knew who he’d hired and it wasn’t him! “At first it sort of bothered me a little bit that people thought that,” Cox confesses, “but then I got to thinking about it. It’s actually the biggest compliment that a character actor can have.”
Think of your favorite character actors, and Cox’s words likely apply.
Casual audiences simply don’t track these chameleons from picture to picture as they inhabit a suite of wildly different voices, mannerisms, gaits, and overall appearances.
Savvy audiences, on the other hand, make a sport of it, relishing the chance to spot their chosen dramaturgical shapeshifters as they disappear into yet another storytelling skin.
But there’s a different type of protean performer, a breed even rarer than the character actor, who tends to go incognito even among pop culture aficionados.
I’m talking about character directors.
Consider Norman Jewison, who moved from the racial tensions of In the Heat of the Night to the exuberance of Fiddler on the Roof, the dystopian violence of Rollerball, and the romantic comedy of Moonstruck. Or a favorite of mine, Michael Apted, who smoothly shifted between Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist, Nell, the James Bond outing The World Is Not Enough, and the Up documentaries, just to name a few. How many people watching one of the most famous car chases in cinema history, that of Bullitt, connected the name Peter Yates to Breaking Away, a small-town coming-of-age story that won a best screenplay Oscar®, or the sword-and-sorcery spectacle Krull, or the Cher-and-Dennis-Quaid courtroom drama Suspect? The question “What does a Peter Yates film look like?” has no obvious answer.
The résumé of a director of this ilk reads like the work of several different people. These directors place the material over their own voices.
Case in point: John Irvin.
Within a single decade, Irvin directed the BBC television version of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979); the mercenary thriller The Dogs of War (1980); the supernatural Peter Straub-inspired chiller Ghost Story (1981); the biopic Champions (1984); the quiet, intimate literary adaptation of a Russell Hoban novel, Turtle Diary (1985); and the gritty Vietnam flick Hamburger Hill (1987).
And in 1986, right in between those last two, he made the Arnold Schwarzenegger undercover mob action picture Raw Deal.
Irvin has shared that an important part of his decision-making process in moving forward with Raw Deal was his frustration at the lack of distribution of Turtle Diary, which boasts two compelling performances by Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley, and a sophisticated screenplay by Harold Pinter. None of that mattered when the film received little support from the distributor. With Martha De Laurentiis (credited as Martha Schumacher) and Schwarzenegger involved in Raw Deal, Irvin was confident that, if nothing else, people would at the very least hear about his next movie.
The plot is a delectable combination of straightforward yet strangely convoluted. Mark Kaminsky (Schwarzenegger), an unfairly disgraced ex-FBI agent reduced to playing sheriff in a sleepy North Carolina town, is lured back into action by former colleague and senior agent Harry Shannon (Darren McGavin). Kaminsky fakes his own death, claims a new identity as an ex-con named Joseph P. Brenner, and travels to Chicago in an off-the-books mission to infiltrate a mob family at the behest of Shannon, who wants revenge for the death of his son and knows that the Bureau won’t condone his actions. Scene zips to scene in a linear, direct way that spells out the trajectory of an arrow, but it’s only after taking a step back that you realize the arc is a parabola rather than a straight line.
The story credit goes to Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati, who were regular Sergio Leone collaborators, explaining some of the splashes of spaghetti-Western melodrama. Irvin brought on Gary DeVore, whose previous credits included Irvin’s own The Dogs of War (a surprisingly mature picture), along with Running Scared, and Norman Wexler, known for Joe and Serpico, to hammer out the screenplay.
Rounding out the cast are Kathryn Harrold as Monique, the love interest, Sam Wanamaker as Luigi “Lou” Patrovita, the primary mob boss, Paul Shenar as Paulo Rocca, Patrovita’s key lieutenant, and Ed Lauter as Detective Baker, another supporting antagonist who nevertheless is slyly sympathetic to Kaminsky’s unique way of handling business.
As Raw Deal opens, it’s immediately clear that Irvin brings a knowing quality to the material with his directorial choices.
The movie’s first major line, following a dazzling montage of various means of transportation and several rapid-fire murders, is: “How many times was John Wayne nominated for an Academy Award®?” Which promptly receives the following response: “Probably not enough.”
That’s an effective way of letting us know that Irvin isn’t so much looking down on his material but rather joyfully seeing through it and trusting us to do the same while still enjoying the ride. Another display of Irvin’s slightly mischievous touch is the playful edit that sees us cut to the title card right after Kaminsky’s vehicle scrapes against a bridge girder in a shower of sparks. As if to say: we may be confined by the unyielding guardrails of formula here, but we can still relish pyrotechnics along the way.
About fifteen minutes after the John Wayne reference, Schwarzenegger utters the following words on learning of his extracurricular assignment: “Who do you think I look like? Dirty Harry?”
This beat is funny because, on the one hand, Schwarzenegger clearly looks nothing like Dirty Harry, but more significantly, because, as with the John Wayne reference, Irvin is gently poking fun at macho stereotypes. He’s clear on the type of movie that’s expected of him, and he’s going to deliver, but also not exactly.
The movie’s strand of humor becomes almost abstract as it goes. Some thirty-four minutes in, Detective Baker, after observing a number of suspicious characters walk by his vehicle and disappear into the shadows, drolly quips, “If any more guys duck down that alley, we’re gonna start selling tickets.” To share one more: “If you’re the best there is, the wheel would have never been invented.”
Not high wit, perhaps, but nevertheless effective in disarming us by reminding us that this isn’t a cynical cash-grab but rather an affectionately crafted riff on commercial tropes.
As a character director, Irvin keeps his visual language restrained, but it is precise in subtle ways that reward attention. For instance, an opening shot of a center-framed oncoming train anticipates a later center-framed shot of Schwarzenegger driving a vehicle headfirst into an establishment.
The action sequences, including an early motorcycle chase, are consistently good: cleanly framed, well-paced, crisply edited, and delineated with a clarity that only enhances their energy. A scene where a car gets its top sheared off remains exciting today, and explosions are first-caliber throughout.
Perhaps the movie’s least innovative element is the music by Cinemascore (Tom Bahler, Albhy Galuten, Chris Boardman), which gleefully indulges in every 1980s rock cliché and in my estimation represents a step down from the more daring compositions Geoffrey Burgon had provided for Irvin on The Dogs of War and Turtle Diary.
The film’s shoot, which lasted from October to December of 1985, used locations in Chicago, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Budgeted at about $8.5 million, Raw Deal ended up grossing about $16.2 million. Another trait of character directors: they may not typically set the box office on fire, but they also don’t tend to break the bank.
Working titles during production included Let’s Make a Deal and Triple Identity. While on the surface it might be tempting to think of Raw Deal as a somewhat rote Schwarzenegger actioner, admittedly elevated by Irvin’s intelligence, the truth is more interesting, and it’s unintentionally captured in that second title, Triple Identity.
Clearly, the film owes a debt to the world of Italian Eurocrime cinema. Its hyper-violent tone, a rogue cop protagonist, and a cynical view of institutional justice are all par for the course in this type of genre outing, as can be seen, for instance, in Marino Girolami’s Violent Rome (Roma violenta, 1975) or Umberto Lenzi’s Rome Armed to the Teeth (Roma a mano armata, 1976).
A second influence is the narrative niche of undercover officers. Cop or Hood (Flic ou voyou, 1979) well showcases the specific mechanic of an undercover lawman causing chaotic gang wars from the inside. Also, we can’t dismiss the fact that the public knew an agent had successfully faked an identity to climb the Mafia hierarchy, as revealed in Operation Donnie Brasco, a reality that made the fictional scenario more plausible.
Incidentally, “Wiseguy,” which debuted in 1987, one year after Raw Deal, is an early and outstanding television example of the deep undercover nail-biter, and, like Raw Deal, also puts Robert Davi to good use.
Thirdly, there’s the American one-man-army action picture of the ’80s, a descendant of Dirty Harry and Death Wish that traded Eastwood’s squint for bulging biceps, as in Schwarzenegger’s own Commando (1985), the Chicago-set Chuck Norris-led Code of Silence (1985), and, arriving close to Raw Deal, Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra (1986).
While explicitly acknowledging this third strand, Irvin doesn’t let it dominate, instead making it more interesting by harmoniously blending it with the other two trends. Self-awareness goes a long way toward audience forgiveness.
Critic Pauline Kael, who, according to Irvin, had felt that the more artsy Turtle Diary had strained for significance, was more receptive to Raw Deal’s unconventional charms. Writing in the June 30, 1986, issue of The New Yorker, she said she found the film “reprehensible and enjoyable,” essentially a sped-up, lyricism-free, but funnier cousin of Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. She also credited Irvin with sustaining the tone of a put-on, and Schwarzenegger for playing a self-mocking walking brick wall.
“There are autumn days that make you glad to be alive,” begins Walter Wager’s novelization of Raw Deal. “This wasn’t one of them.” By page 8 we’re getting references to a 30.06-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a 25.2-inch-long Uzi submachine gun, four P-15 Browning semiautomatic pistols, etc., and there’s no turning back.
Wager, a prolific crime author who started publishing in the 1950s, including “I Spy” and “Mission: Impossible” tie-ins under the byline of John Tiger, had also written the original novel Telefon, which was adapted by Don Siegel into a 1977 movie starring Charles Bronson, Lee Remick, and Donald Pleasence. And Wager’s book immediately following the Raw Deal novelization turned out to be 58 Minutes, the basis for Renny Harlin’s Die Hard 2 (1990). All of which is by way of underlining that Wager is a great match for this material.
My only quibble with Wager’s literarily lithe rendering relates to music. On page 33, Wager identifies the classical music that Kaminsky’s disgruntled wife, Amy, is blasting at home as “the Haydn symphony,” but it is in fact Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture, which makes the ensuing exchange between the two that much more ironic. Another glimpse of Irvin’s savvy, perhaps? A few pages later, Wager references “Mozart’s Concerto Number 20” when Mark is putting Amy to bed. What we hear in the film is actually Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. To be fair to Wager, these changes may have been made after he submitted his manuscript, not an unusual phenomenon with novelizations.
Prose versions of films can help to isolate variables in the finished film. Without the sensory stimulation of sight and sound, for instance, does the story still work?
The spare-prose pages in Wager’s novelization fly by and capture Raw Deal’s essence with hard-boiled gusto, playing down the few moments of sentimentality, and proving that the screenplay by DeVore and Wexler succeeds as pure narrative. The final scenes in the book and the film do differ, again something that happens quite often based on screenplay revisions and so on, with the movie ending on a more humanistic note.
And that, in the final analysis, may be one of Irvin’s special skills and unifying talents: an emphasis on our experiential commonalities.
Irvin would go on to direct more than a dozen additional feature films after Raw Deal, including the underseen 1991 version of Robin Hood, the critically acclaimed mystery Widows’ Peak (1994), and one that made a lasting impression on me, the neo-noir City of Industry (1997).
“I’ve always admired virtuosity,” Irvin has said, “and I wanted to have a go at practically every genre.” At that he succeeded. He also succeeded in bringing a quality of respect and decency to the projects with which he was involved, approaching each with an open, inquisitive mind and thinking of how best to balance the needs of commerce versus art.
Regardless of his films’ varied budgets, tones, and genres, his underlying character as a director is one of integrity, a virtue that is, in this case, its own kind of virtuosity.