Blogs in Focus: Editors Blog

Last time I wrote in this space, I was discussing the Dennis Hopper movie Catchfire (aka Backtrack) which also starred Dean Stockwell, and posted the video to Gnarls Barkley's 'Smiley Faces,' which features both those actors.

For this entry, I was determined to post something about Dean Stockwell as he is, like Hopper, one of those great actors whose presence can make any movie better. (A case in point is the wonderfully trashy Naked Souls, which briefly features Stockwell and also has the fantastic David Warner playing a shady, wheelchair-bound scientist.) I really wanted to find a great Stockwell video to post and considered a number of options – including a clip of young Dean as Nick Charles Jr. in the final Thin Man movie, Song of the Thin Man (1947) – but nothing seemed quite right.

In the end, I caved in and ended up opting to move on to a clip that does not feature Stockwell but comes from a film in which he appears. When we're talking about the opening sequence from The Player with its seven-and-a-half minute tracking shot, frankly I'll take any excuse to post it. The word "Altmanesque" strictly means having the qualities of a Robert Altman film but, at least to me, it means more specifically having a large and diverse cast of characters whose stories are seamlessly interwoven (as in, say, Nashville, Short Cuts or Gosford Park). This opening sequence from The Player is that idea in miniature, as the camera fluidly moves around the studio lot, introducing us to the cast of this scathing Hollywood satire in short, telling snippets. It's completely ingenious and never becomes just a gimmick as Altman is always progressing the plot forward and maintaining the film's momentum. There are multiple hat-tips here to Touch of Evil, the first film to turn the credit sequence tracking shot into art so, as a treat, I'm also posting that scene as well.