In Memoriam: James Foley

The great American Greek tragedy of real estate hucksters, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” is considered an actor’s movie, I suppose, because it originated on the stage, which is why it’s also considered a writer’s movie, written by David Mamet, and therefore bursting with unrelentingly rhythmic profanity. In adapting his play for the screen, Mamet included a new scene with a new character (named Blake, though that name is never said and he feels nameless) played by Alec Baldwin who calls out the raggedy sales force right to its faces, a scene so famous that in the current remounting of the play on Broadway they have now updated the original play to include the scene that was only in the cinematic adaptation, a real through the looking glass kind of moment. (Watch the scene here but, for God’s sake, remember, it’s not safe for work.) That scene was one of many ways in which director James Foley provided a stage adaptation “cinematic value,” as Glenn Kenny noted in his Decider obituary of Foley who died on May 6th at 71 from brain cancer. The acting was extraordinary, that goes without saying, and the writing next level, you know that, but Foley’s direction is so much more than functional, using the camera and camera placement to evoke how Baldwin’s character is an apex predator in a pond of all these hapless little fishes.

Kenny’s obituary also reminded me just how many Foley movies I had seen and enjoyed. (I did not see his two contributions to the “Fifty Shades” series.) “After Dark, My Sweet” was an entertaining neo-noir that Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series pointed me to, and I enjoyed another Foley neo-noir “Confidence,” possibly because I saw it the way it was meant to be seen, on a weeknight on the big screen as a respite from one more long workweek. He brought great gusto to an entry in one of our most important movie genres, John Grisham-based middling thrillers, with “The Chamber” in 1996, and he directed Madonna in “Who’s That Girl” for which, like Kenny, I have a soft spot. And speaking of Madonna, he directed “At Close Range,” a sizzling crime drama in which he helped turn a scene of product placement – Chrisopher Walken saying “You want some Corn Flakes?” – into something truly terrifying, no mean feat.

I say speaking of Madonna because she was married to Sean Penn, star of “At Close Range,” and helped bring Patrick Leonard’s indelible score from another failed movie project to Foley’s instead, a score that would become the chassis for her greatest ballad, “Live to Tell.” Even more memorable than “Live to Tell,” however, and that’s saying something, is the slower instrumental version of it used over “At Close Range’s” opening credits, among the best opening credits sequences in movie history, one of my all-time favorites, at least. This sequence, in a sense, is nothing. It’s just Sean Penn driving around. But that’s the magic. “At Close Range” is set in Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic, so not the Midwest, where I grew up, but driving around on rural backroads by yourself on a hot, lonely summer night is a universal feeling. And through nothing more than aesthetic, Foley brings that feeling to life, music and mood and keeping the camera tight on Penn the whole time to evince how such aimless driving is not about what’s around you but getting lost inside your own mind. It’s the essence of a Springsteen song conjured; it’s pure cinema; it’s what only the movies can do. RIP.