The Big Lebowski

By Richard Corliss | September 22, 2011 | +

Director: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Year Released: 1998

Cast: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston

America’s most popular participatory sport, bowling is also the only one whose spectators are often in better shape than the athletes. Joel and Ethan Coen, in their tribute to tenpins, recognized that the game is not so much an exercise opportunity as a social event — where beer is an essential accoutrement, like tobacco chaw to a baseball player; bringing a Pomeranian to the alley can risk sundering a friendship; and disputes on such issues as the one-toe-over-the-line rule are resolved with a show of firepower. Jeff Bridges is Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski (a character based on larger-than-life indie film promoter Jeff Dowd), John Goodman and Steve Buscemi are his teammates, and John Turturro plays the fiery, purple-suited competitor Jesus Quintana, who prepares for each competition by applying brisk foreplay to his ball, then licking it the moment before release.

The movie ornaments its plot with a few nonbowling issues, like mistaken identity and “interactive erotic software.” And if swearing were a competitive sport, Lebowski would be the world champ. (A YouTube short compiles all the unprintable four-letter words in two-plus minutes.) But the Coens’ visual rhapsodies focus on the ominous grace of a black ball rolling down a lane toward its seismic demolition of 10 pacifist pins. When the rest of the world has gone to hell — when, as the movie’s sagebrush narrator (Sam Elliott) tells us, “darkness washed over the Dude, darker ‘n a black steer’s tuchus on a moonless prairie night” — there’s just one option left for these hapless musketeers. “F— it, Dude,” Goodman says. “Let’s go bowling.”

Next: Body and Soul

Related Topics: Bowling, Comedy, Crime, The Big Lebowski

Body and Soul

By Richard Corliss | September 22, 2011 | +

Director: Robert Rossen

Year Released: 1947

Cast: John Garfield, Lilli Palmer, Hazel Brooks

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Call it the sweet science or legalized manslaughter, but boxing has spawned more great movies than any other sport (maybe more than all other sports). Three terrific ones came out in the first years after World War II — Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul with John Garfield and, two years later, Robert Wise’s The Set-Up with Robert Ryan and Mark Robson’s Champion with Kirk Douglas — possibly as metaphors for warriors who had returned home and needed a domestic form of combat.

Garfield’s Charlie Davis is a working-class striver who, after his father dies, literally has to fight to support his family. “I want money, money, MONEY!” he tells his righteous mother (Anne Revere). And when she spits out, “Better you go buy a gun and shoot yourself,” he snaps back, “You need money to buy a gun!” Screenwriter Abraham Polonsky sees boxing and, indeed, all capitalism as lethal activities: you kill somebody, one way or another, to get money; then somebody kills you to get yours. Even being on top doesn’t last forever; nature makes way for the next hungry youngster. A cocky contender appraises Charlie the complacent champ and snorts, “All fat: nightclub fat, whiskey fat, 35-year-old fat.”

There’s a claustrophobic concentration of mood and dialogue, of characters and performances, that makes Body and Soul not only the bleakest — and, perversely, the most exhilarating — of postwar fight movies but also one of the best and blackest examples of film noir. The climactic bout, which cinematographer James Wong Howe shot by circling the boxers on roller skates, is so exciting and involving that it explains our hero’s fascination with “the game” and nearly makes us regret that he has to give it up. After the fight, Charlie tells the crime boss who has Svengalied his career that “everybody dies” — a declaration of independence for a tough guy who had to put his body on the line before he could pick up the chips of his soul.

Next: Breaking Away

Related Topics: Body and Soul, Boxing, Drama, Film Noir