The director Howard Zieff died this past weekend of complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 81. Odds are that the name doesn't mean as much to you as it might. Zieff made his best pictures in the 1970s, but his name simply wasn't one of those that people associated with the glories of that movie era. And he had a special problem, so far as his lingering reputation goes, in that his biggest hits tended to be less distinctive than some of his flops, so that to the degree that he had an image as a director, it may have been as something of a hack. But Zieff, like Michael Ritchie (Smile) and the screenwriter W. D. Richter (who wrote Zieff's first movie, the 1973 Slither), other eccentric talents who left their mark on that period without winning much acclaim for it, he was a smart, funny entertainer with his own peculiar comic sense and a feel for everyday American insanity. He first made his presence felt in the culture with his work in advertising, both as a director of TV commercials and his work in print ads. Zieff was one of the first directors to develop a name for himself as a promising talent based on his ad work: in 1967, when he was 40 years old and still half a dozen years away from his first movie job, he was the subject of a profile in Time magazine, which noted that he had made 200 commercials in six years and called him "the leading practitioner of what the trade calls the indirect sell." (Translation: his ads inspired public affection for the products they touted not because they made such a great case for the products themselves but because the ads were so entertaining.) More recently, Zieff's ad photography was the subject of a 2002 show at a West Coast gallery. Talking about his penchant for using faces, some of which were attached to people he'd spotted on the streets of New York, that were different than the usual blond hair/Colegate smile models that dominated advertising in the Mad Men era, Zieff said of his models, "They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces." When he became a movie director, this lust for great faces--faces that could inspire both laughter and warmth--manifested itself as a love for character actors that sometimes gives his best work an almost Preston Sturges quality. He was devoted to the late Richard B. Schull, a character man with a strangled-sounding yet mellow whine of a voice and a friendly, baggy kisser, who helped get Slither off to a sweet start, celebrating his liberation from prison by singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."
Slither--the recent horror comedy of the same title is not a remake--was a very Watergate-year kind of comedy, a paranoid road movie about a paroled robber and former high school football hero (James Caan) who is wandering around the country trying to find some loot that the Schull character has tried to direct him towards. The key the the movie's charm may be that Caan--who came to the picture after playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, and who gives the performance of someone who's rather enjoying the novelty of finally getting to play the sanest and least assertive person in a movie--seems to just be along for the ride, carrying out this quest because he has absolutely nothing better to do. The cast also includes Peter Boyle and Louise Lasser, who play a married couple and come across as unexpectedly, almost supernaturally right for each other, and Sally Kellerman as an oddly fetching trigger-happy speed freak. The movie's paranoid vibe is established through such devices as a massive black van--it looks like Darth Vader's weekend getaway vehicle-- that follows the heroes everywhere at the pace of a sinister gold cart, accompanied by its own theme song. Yet it has a genuine grunginess to it, a faint scent of summer days spent in cars and motels in the middle of nowhere. (It's the only movie I've ever seen where a character who is involved in violent chicanery gets stopped by a cop and threatened with a citation for driving while barefoot.) The combination of everyday frustrations and baroque dark fantasy (which, in the end, turns out to have some very ordinary roots) makes Slither a very funny excursion into screwball-surreal Americana.
Zieff's second picture, 1975's Hearts of the West, has a more raggedy script (by Rob Thompson) but a richly felt milieu--it's set in Hollywood in the early 1930s, which looks like a factory set-up on Dress Like a Cowboy Day--and a great deal of charm. It stars Jeff Bridges, all of 25 and as convincingly ingenuous as a freshly hatched chick, as Lewis Tater, who goes West in hopes of becoming a Western dime novelist and gets roped into a job acting in cowboy pictures. Besides Bridges, Hearts features especially fine work by Blythe Danner as a script girl named Trout, Alan Arkin as a touchy director, and Andy Griffith as a veteran cowboy type with a handsome, rugged exterior. (He looks exactly like the guy who Central Casting would have sent to play his part, which in a Zieff project is the surest sign that you shouldn't trust him any farther than you could throw him.) The movie also features a collection of Western stuntmen, played by such modern-cowpoke types as Matt Clark and Burton Gilliam, and when Zieff had an excuse to spend time with actors like these playing characters like these, his work had the happy hum of a man being paid for being totally in his element, as much as Michael Bay on a day when all he has to do is blow something up. Neither of these pictures is currently available on DVD, which is something that I, for one, would really like to hear President Obama address in his speech before Congress tonight.
Zieff finally had a couple of hits: the 1978 House Calls, which starred Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson and which was later made into a TV sitcom even though the movie was sort of one already, and the 1980 Goldie Hawn vehicle Private Benjamin, a film that I like to think he made just because, as an old man, he could picture what a terrific poster it would make: Goldie, in her Gomer Pyle drag, pouting. In 1984 he helmed a remake of Preston Sturges's great Unfaithfully Yours, with Dudley Moore in the role originated by Rex Harrison. I have no evidence to support this theory, but nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that he only agreed to do it after studio goons kidnapped his grandchildren. The movie is bad, but not really that bad considering that the whole idea behind it is blasphemous, and does boast a performance by Albert Brooks that true devotees of comic genius will want to savor with one finger on the fast=forward button. Zieff's last films were the 1991 My Girl and its sequel, the 1994 My Girl 2, after which he was forced to retire in the face of the onset of Parkinson's. My own favorite of his later films is 1989's The Dream Team, which is formulaic but likable, and which reunited the director with Peter Boyle, to great effect: he plays an institutionalized dude who thinks he's Jesus, and he would get no argument from me. The movie also boasts excellent performances by Michael Keaton, Lorraine Bracco, and Christopher Lloyd, and also has a few bits, such as a scene in an army-surplus clothing store run by a hard-to-faze dude played by Jack Duffy, that showed that, when he could fit it in, Zieff's genius for faces was still firing on all cylinders.