April 19, 2010

A great film artist named Dede Allen died this past Saturday night, at the age of 86. You may not immediately recognize Allen’s name, but if you’re any kind of motion picture fan, you’ve surely been stirred at one time or another by her talent. Allen was a film editor whose audacious work on Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” helped usher in a golden age of American filmmaking in which famous directors were actually expected to take risks with form and content.

Allen's work on “Bonnie and Clyde” was considered so significant she became the first editor to ever receive a solo screen credit for her trouble. She would then go on to cut such pictures as Sidney Lumet’s hard-hitting New York narratives, “Serpico” and "Dog Day Afternoon", and Warren Beatty’s defiantly left-leaning epic, “Reds,” to name just three.

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Film editors are probably the least properly understood of all the key craftsmen working on motion pictures. By now, decades of film viewing - and, of course, film making - have led audiences to expect scenes to unfold in an established manner. Generally speaking, these little sequences of information set up the physical and emotional relationships between actors, or familiarize the viewer with the setting in which a scene is taking place.

If you don’t know where two actors are standing in relation to each other in a fight scene, for instance, or if their surroundings aren’t clearly delineated, the ensuing brawl can resemble nothing more than a confused flurry of thrashing body parts (see the vast majority of modern action movies for perfectly horrendous examples.) Even basic dialogue scenes can be ruined by poorly timed cuts or mis-matched shots.

Editors (usually in conjunction with a film’s director, but not always) select the best shots for a scene, then piece them together in carefully honed sequences that can generate a broad range of emotions, depending on the specifics of the cuts. The length of a shot, and the number of shots spliced into a given expanse of screen time, also effects the way you, the viewer, perceive what’s taking place. It’s an exacting, time-consuming process that can make or break both performances and screenplays; there’s a multitude of ways to either get it right or royally screw it up.

As Allen herself once said in an interview, "To find out what isn't working is much harder than putting it together in the first place: Changing and reshaping is more difficult. Maybe to get it to work you have to enter a scene differently. Or leave it differently. It's usually not a matter of tempo, or snapping it up. That I can do in my sleep. It's a matter of not (showing) the right person at the right moment, or hanging on a moment with another character.”

I’ve never heard anybody say it before, but I think it should be a truism that great directors always work with great editors, or they don’t make great movies. Editing is that important to the filmmaking process.

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Many of the visual moves Allen utilized on “Bonnie and Clyde” were welded closely to sound, to a much more significant degree than had been the case in American films prior to 1967. Although the practice had already been introduced into the cinematic lexicon by the French New Wave in the early 1960s, Allen was one of the first American editors to pick up the pace of a picture by starting the sound from an upcoming scene seconds before the current scene had ended. This is now such an accepted practice, most viewers don’t even notice it’s happening.

Penn and Allen, however, had the guts to employ such theoretically drastic procedures as jump cuts, slow-motion shots, and cutting on purely audio cues in a commercial film containing an actual movie star (Beatty again, who produced “Bonnie and Clyde” and worked had-in-hand with his fellow revolutionaries.) As Penn pointed out when commenting on Allen’s passing, the two of them were essentially, “developing a rhythm for the film so that it has the complexity of music.” Then the results were screened for cigar-chomping, old-school studio executives who must have felt like the floor was dropping out from under them while the picture unfurled before their startled eyes.

Few American viewers had ever seen a movie like “Bonnie and Clyde” before. Here was a love story in which the two gorgeous leads were murderers. The picture tumbled along in a folksy, almost ramshackle manner, full of take-out hamburgers and bad jokes, until those moments when guns were pulled, and blood splattered. Actors don’t just grab their stomachs and crumple over when they take a bullet in “Bonnie and Clyde”— clothing explodes and blood flies.

Penn and Beatty decided, quite rightly, that to get at a new truth in American filmmaking, audiences would have to see the same flow of blood that filled TV screens every evening through news footage of the Vietnam conflict. “Bonnie and Clyde”’s bloodshed was meant to be shocking exactly because Americans had suddenly grown so accustomed to the real thing. And if you weren’t shocked, the point was made just as readily.

The sequence in which Bonnie and Clyde receive their deadly comeuppance is one of the most famous in all of American cinema, and it’s very much Dede Allen’s handiwork.

Notice how the initial shots are relatively lengthy and relaxed; at this point, Bonnie and Clyde have no clue they’re in trouble. When Clyde leaves the car, we get a shot from Bonnie’s point of view, which establishes where she is in relation to the other characters. Immediately following that, the shots come much more rapidly, thus generating a sense of confusion and anticipation; it seems for several seconds that the world is somehow spinning out of control. Then, in one of the more extraordinary images I’ve ever seen in a genre picture, the two lovers’ eyes meet at the exact moment they realize they’re about to be mowed down.

That slightly extended shot of Bonnie tilting her head in pity for what she and Clyde have become is so tender you could cry. But then the bullets fly, and, for the first time in American movie history, we get a very real sense of what bullets do to human beings.

Movies don’t make themselves folks, especially movies this good. And Dede Allen helped create some truly remarkable ones. Her skill and sensitivity are well worth remembering.

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And now, as a little bonus, here's a clip from another picture cut by Allen— George Roy Hill’s heroically impolite hockey comedy, “Slapshot.” There’s nothing too elaborate going on here, it’s just funny as hell, and even laughs can be goosed by establishing a playing field, then moving in for a series of wham-bam cuts.

I always love that apoplectic referee. I actually met the actor at a party once, and he couldn't believe I recognized him.

Paul Tatara