R.I.P. Sydney Pollack

I was watching Anne of the Thousand Days on Saturday -- a film based on a Maxwell Anderson play. As I do so often when watching movies from that period of the 1960's just before Bonnie and Clyde came along and changed American cinema, I was noting how stagy and actorish it seemed, even in a film like this that because of its subject matter has held up better than most films of the age. It really wasn't until the 1970's that characters in movies really started sounding like real people and actors weren't, as Jon Lovitz used to say, "AC-ting!" That's not to say that there were no good movies prior to 1970, but there is a marked difference in style between what came before and the immediacy that characterized the films of the late Vietnam era.

For all that Scorsese and Coppola are the 800-pound gorillas of 1970's cinema, you can't talk about that decade in movies without talking about Sydney Pollack, and few directors made the transition more seamlessly: Jeremiah Johnson. Three Days of the Condor. Bobby Deerfield. Out of Africa. Havana. The Firm. Not all of them great films, but in their own way characteristic of their time. But for my money, Pollack's best film was Tootsie. And my dirty little secret is that I always liked Pollack's work in FRONT of the camera better than his work behind it. This is one of my favorite scenes from Tootsie: