Alexander Jacobs: A Bastard Made of Concrete

The adventures of the screenwriter's screenwriter.

(Howdy - this is a revised version of a piece that originally popped up at NeoText.)

In 1965, The Dave Clark Five were officially The Next Big Thing. They’d made their American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show only weeks after The Beatles blew the roof off, and they’d reached the top of the US chart with a cover of Bobby Day’s “Over and Over”. They were ready for their own Hard Day’s Night: an oddball brew of anti-establishment ennui and bouncy pop called Catch Us If You Can.

There was just one problem: Dave Clark. Clark had performed in a handful of mostly uncredited roles and claimed to have been a stuntman before embarking on his music career, but director John Boorman had his doubts, saying “there was nothing light-hearted about him, nothing youthful, nothing graceful or rhythmical.” When Boorman tried to lighten the film by focusing on lead actress and former fashion model Barbara Ferris, Clark’s mood darkened further and he made the rookie mistake of taking out his frustrations on costume designer Sally Jacobs, who just happened to be married to the producer’s volatile assistant, Alex.

“Alex flew into a rage,” said Boorman. “It was a terrifying sight. He frothed at the mouth. He smashed his fist into Dave’s face.” The shoot was postponed while Clark’s face healed and Jacobs was banished from the set with one final parting shot: “Sow’s ears never really make silk purses.” Luckily for Boorman, the audience weren’t much interested in silk purses: Catch Us If You Can did well in the UK before slouching into American cinemas and enjoying some critical acclaim. It was Boorman’s passport to Hollywood. As for Jacobs, he had an appointment in Lovecraft Country.

The Shuttered Room aka Blood Island (1967) was Alexander Jacobs’s first screenwriting credit, shared with prolific television writer Nathaniel Tanchuck and D.B. Ledrov. The film is nominally an adaptation of the 1959 short story of the same name, one of those August Derleth tales based on Lovecraft’s notes. Much like Corman’s Poe adaptations, The Shuttered Room jettisons most of the original story and does it own thing; unlike Corman’s Poe adaptations, that thing isn’t worth doing. Initially mooted as Ken Russell’s feature debut, directorial duties ultimately fell to David Greene, a veteran television director who – according to star Carol Lynley – “had been living in Rome and dropping acid for several years” and who promptly tossed the script, telling Lynley and her co-star Gig Young to make it up as they went along.

The resulting film is a jumble of hereditary curses, chewy New England accents (attempted by a primarily British cast) and the odd karate chop thrown in for good measure. Lynley makes the most of her dual role and strenuously attempts some kind of chemistry with a much older and clearly bored out of his mind Gig Young, but the most notable performance (outside of a bizarre dub cameo by Donald Sutherland) comes from Oliver Reed, whose turn as the local inbred thug echoes his performance in Joseph Losey’s The Damned  (1961) with its liberal dashes of man-child eccentricity. Like a lot of Reed’s performances, it was undoubtedly seasoned with his perpetual inebriation – Reed would later admit that The Shuttered Room was the “most plastered” he’d been on any shoot. It was an inauspicious start to Jacobs’s screenwriting career, the very definition of a sow’s ear that still had the whiff of the trough about it, but his next job would reunite him with Boorman and famously bring a European sensibility to the American crime thriller.

The script for Point Blank (1967) is justly revered as Jacobs’s most famous work. The film itself has already been discussed extensively, to the point where I’m not sure there’s anything new to say about it, but the story of Boorman and Jacobs coming together to turn Rafe and David Newhouse’s potboiler adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter into the king of avant-garde American crime movies still tends to underplay Jacobs’s contribution. It was here that Jacobs honed what would be his signature style, terse prose prickled with barely-suppressed emotion. In his memoir Adventures of a Suburban Boy, Boorman paints Jacobs as the quintessential writer-producer, the ideas man who could wow a room and get right to the meat of a story: “When they had a project with intractable problems they would send for Alex. He would demolish a script, reduce it to rubble, then when everyone was in despair, he would rebuild it into a potential masterpiece … He knew how to cut through to the quick, to what was essential, as he did on Point Blank.”

This corresponds to others who knew Jacobs well, but still diminishes his contribution. Yes, he was an essentialist by design, but while he cut his scripts down to the gleaming bone, there was still marrow within. Just as William Goldman revolutionised screenwriting with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s bantering asides, Jacobs took the screenplay form and turned it into haiku, pushing the story and image making to the fore while allowing interpretation to flourish in the space between the lines. His work on Point Blank is never simplistic, never empty minimalism – all that white space allows the rumble of emotion to be heard. The film succeeds because of the tension between Boorman’s cold-blooded aestheticism and Jacobs’s psychodrama – or, as Jacobs puts it, the friction between “Anglo-Saxon and non-Anglo-Saxon attitudes” to art.

Jacobs might have found a talented sparring partner in Boorman, but their working relationship would be short-lived. Hell in the Pacific (1968), a largely dialogue-free World War II fable in which a pair of stranded soldiers, one American (Lee Marvin_ and one Japanese (Toshiro Mifune) face off in a microcosm of war, would be their final collaboration.

“Hell in the Pacific silenced him,” said Boorman. “Alex’s face was heavily scarred from the accident he suffered on the Tour de France, but he was so animated that his personality overwhelmed those old wounds. Now, he suddenly contracted Bell’s palsy, which made one side of his face, the good side, go slack and lifeless … The dead side of his face felt like a metaphor for our script. It was as blank as the paper before us.” At this point, Boorman says that Jacobs became “tetchy” and unreasonable, exacerbated by his exclusion from a Palau location scouting trip. According to Boorman, Jacobs then quit and was replaced by Eric Bercovici and an uncredited Shinobu Hashimoto.

Jacobs remains on the opening credits for Hell in the Pacific and, despite Boorman’s reluctance to credit him in interviews, the action- and image-driven script feels very much like Jacobs’s work. Early drafts suggest the relationship between the two soldiers evolved at a more considered pace, only to be fragmented by Boorman later on. But it is difficult to consider Jacobs’s contribution in any meaningful way because replacement screenwriter Bercovici shares some Jacobs-like tendencies, not least the belief in the sophistication of the audience – Mifune’s dialogue remained untranslated for the English-speaking viewer, something Bercovici would do again in his 1980 miniseries adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun. Either way, Jacobs appears to have dodged a bullet: the Hell in the Pacific shoot was not a happy one. A remote location, a couple of dipsomaniac leads, and producers breathing down Boorman’s neck all threatened to make this Boorman’s last Hollywood movie.

And then there was the ending. After the two soldiers escape the island, they wash up at a bombed-out military base, where they find provisions (including a massive bottle of sake) and begin to enjoy the comforts of civilisation once more. What happened next was anyone’s guess. Akira Kurosawa suggested (probably jokingly) that the two former enemies “meet a girl”. Another proposed ending had two Japanese soldiers decapitating Marvin, prompting Mifune to take revenge for his fallen comrade. Yet another – and Boorman’s preference – saw the two men confronted with the “emblems of their enmity” before they parted ways. But the ending that made most American prints – added by executive producer Henry Saperstein after lacklustre box office – had both men blown to bits by an errant mortar shell. Boorman would later reinstate his “emblems” ending, but for its original release, Hell in the Pacific ended on an irrevocably bleak note. Boorman retreated to London to make Leo the Last (1970), while Alexander Jacobs would embark on a trio of crime thrillers that would be the very definition of hardboiled.

By 1972, Oliver Reed’s star was already hurtling to the ground. After a moderately successful early turn in Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), he chewed the scenery as Bill Sikes in Oliver! (1969), and found a sympatico director in Ken Russell and critical acclaim in Russell’s films Women in Love (1969) and The Devils (1971), but his brawling boozer persona made him difficult to cast¹, and he was soon relegated to character parts and low-budget thrillers. Easily the best of the latter is Sitting Target (1972), Alexander Jacobs’s brutal adaptation of Laurence Henderson’s 1970 novel, which takes Henderson’s basic premise – violent thug Harry Lomart breaks out of prison to wreak revenge on his wayward wife and her mysterious lover – and turns the nasty up to eleven.

The opening is pure Jacobs imagery: a sweat-drenched Lomart (Reed) exercises in a gloomy prison cell, cluttered with dogeared reminders of the outside world, before spit hits a piss pot and he is revealed suspended from the ceiling performing calisthenics by way of Gregor Samsa. He is a caged animal serving a fifteen-year stretch for killing a security guard during an armed robbery. The only thing keeping him sane is the thought of returning to his wife Pat (Jill St. John), but a long-anticipated visit ends in violence. When she tells him she’s pregnant with another man’s child, he goes berserk, smashing through the visiting-room partition and attempting to throttle her before he’s dogpiled by screws and tossed, straitjacketed and frothing at the mouth, into solitary confinement. There he obsesses, calcifying his pain into rock-hard vengeance. Once out of the hole, he enlists the help of fellow lag Birdy (Ian McShane) to break out, whereupon he gets himself a gun (a much-fetishised Mauser Schnellfeuer) and begins to stalk his wife, now under police protection courtesy of Inspector Wilson (Edward Woodward), the man who put Lomart away.

At first glance, Sitting Target is a grotty, hyperviolent retread of Point Blank, but Lomart is more complicated than Walker, at once a feral monster and broken-hearted simpleton. He is almost child-like at times – a brief bath-time interlude has Lomart sculpting himself a lovely bubble beard – and his explosions of violence are more tantrum-like than considered, his murderous urges an outward representation of intolerable pain. Lomart’s psychosis is almost quaint compared to Birdy, who is initially presented as a submissive sidekick before his insidious nature bubbles up, or Pat, who is apparently manipulating Inspector Wilson’s protective instincts to her own ends. This is rich territory for Jacobs, who turns Henderson’s action yarn into a decidedly Jim Thompson-flavoured psychodrama and switches out the book’s ending for a more emotional, if nihilistic, conclusion.

In his Film Quarterly interview, Jacobs alludes to “craftsmen-like” directors and their need for a different kind of script, implying that these directors require a bit more inspiration on the page. While it would be unfair to dismiss Sitting Target director Douglas Hickox as a hack² – his use of split diopters, canny claustrophobic framing and his talent for an action scene say otherwise – he was arguably more artisan than artist, more likely to shoot what was presented, and therefore in greater need of a solid script than someone like Boorman. Sitting Target would be mildly successful in the UK, despite its dubious honour of being the first British film to be rated X purely for violence, but it suffered in the US as an incongruous second feature to One is a Lonely Number (1972), a drama about a young woman struggling with life after divorce, and would last only a week in cinemas before it was unceremoniously pulled. It was an ignominious end for what remains a startling and deeply unsettling movie.

When NYPD detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso began surveillance on Pasquale Fuca based on little more than a hunch, they had no idea they would uncover a massive transatlantic drug-trafficking operation, make a record-breaking heroin bust, and become the inspiration for one of the most revered crime thrillers of the ‘70s. The commercial and critical success of The French Connection (1971) prompted further fictionalisations of the Egan/Grosso casebook, including Robert Duvall as Egan in Badge 373 (1973) and Grosso’s official alter-ego Roy Scheider in The Seven-Ups (1973).

The Seven-Ups – the title is ersatz police slang for sentences of seven-plus years that await major felons – was based on a story Grosso told French Connection producer Philip D’Antoni about “the kidnapping of cops who were not really cops.” D’Antoni wanted to direct; Fox wanted another French Connection-sized hit. They kept the production in the family, including Scheider, composer Don Ellis, and legendary stunt driver Bill Hickman. But D’Antoni was missing a screenwriter – French Connection writer Ernest Tidyman was busy with sequels to his other 1971 hit, Shaft – so, after enlisting the help of Albert Ruben, a seasoned television writer and producer, he brought in one of the original writers of The French Connection, one whose script didn’t pass muster with Friedkin or the suits: Alexander Jacobs.

As with Hell in the Pacific, it’s difficult to ascertain which work belongs to which writer. The script for The Seven-Ups is more traditional, bulked out with plenty of action lines, parentheticals and even a few camera angles here and there, which feels more like Ruben than Jacobs, though this could be a prime example of the kind of script Jacobs produced for “craftsmen-like” directors. This was D’Antoni’s first (and only) feature, after all. It’s worth noting that Jacobs was second writer on the script, so he had plenty of opportunity to make it his own, but clearly didn’t, beyond ditching the documentary trappings of The French Connection and keeping the bone-deep cynicism and tight action sequences. The main action set-piece (and arguably the best thing in the film) is likely the work of that maniac Hickman – the script has the kidnappers run Buddy (Scheider) off the road, his car shuddering to a miserable halt, instead of the film’s death-defying near-decapitation conclusion. Jacobs was good, but he definitely didn’t come up with that one.

The Jacobs-Grosso connection didn’t end with The Seven-Ups. Fox had been in development on a sequel to The French Connection since 1972, but all they had was a star, a title, and the vague idea to set the thing in Marseilles. Friedkin wasn’t interested in a sequel – he was already hard at work tormenting his cast like Pazuzu incarnate – so Fox approached the French-speaking, hit-bereft director John Frankenheimer, whose previous film Call Harry Crown aka 99 and 11/100% Dead! (1974), a piss-poor pop-art take on the crime thriller, had vanished without trace. Unfortunately for Frankenheimer, the first script (and story) for French Connection II came from Robert Dillon, the writer of Call Harry Crown. Dillon was a solid pulpy writer – he’d previously written The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) for Roger Corman, The Old Dark House (1963) for William Castle, and cult favourite Prime Cut (1972) for Michael Ritchie – but Frankenheimer was dubious, so he brought in Jacobs to rewrite.

French Connection II (1975) is a truly bizarre sequel, abandoning everything that made the first film work and refusing to accept that its open ending was a feature not a bug, insisting that Popeye Doyle needs closure. We first encounter Doyle (Hackman again) arriving in Marseilles on April Fool’s Day, decked out in porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirt, unable and unwilling to speak the language yet intent on apprehending his nemesis Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) aka “Frog One”. Doyle ends up offering himself up as bait for Charnier, who abducts him, subjects him to a systematic programme of heroin addiction, then returns him to the police a snivelling junkie. Doyle is then forced to go cold turkey before he’s sober enough to finish what he started.

What Jacobs was presented with is anyone’s guess, though I’d wager Dillon was more concerned with the fish-out-of-water stuff than the torment. Jacobs knew how to dial into an actor’s strengths, and the scenes of addiction and withdrawal become the core of French Connection II, aided by a powerhouse performance from Hackman. The French Connection may not approve of Doyle’s methods, but it does make them dramatically compelling; French Connection II punishes him, portraying him first as a blundering xenophobe, then the same kind of strung-out street rat he previously accused of picking his feet in Poughkeepsie. After his drug-addled ordeal, Doyle’s pursuit of Charnier has a personal, agonised edge; he is just as single-minded, but it is now compromised by vulnerability. Popeye Doyle is no longer hardboiled maverick cop; he is the quintessential Alexander Jacobs anti-hero, damaged and afraid, yet ultimately capable of putting a couple of bullets in the right chest.

Jacobs’s last produced screen credit befits a script doctor and rewrite man: it is an adaptation of an adaptation. The source material was Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, written in 1882 as a direct rebuke to the public and critical disgust he suffered in the wake of his 1881 play Ghosts, which dealt with adultery, syphilis and – perhaps most incendiary of all – the hypocrisy of Norwegian society. An Enemy of the People tells the story of Dr Thomas Stockmann, medical officer of a smalltown spa, who discovers that the waters have been contaminated by a nearby tannery owner by his father-in-law. His attempts to expose the public health crisis are thwarted by his mayor brother, the local paper and eventually the townspeople themselves, who would rather pitch rocks through the doctor’s windows than accept the truth.

Arthur Miller retooled the play in 1950, framing it as a response to incipient McCarthyism, condensing five acts into three, replacing Ibsen’s references to “superior human beings” with specific examples of Galileo and Jesus, and adding the parable of an army marching unwittingly to its doom. For Miller, the play was about the truth in the face of overwhelming opposition, and “the question of whether one’s vision of the truth ought to be a source of guilt at a time when the mass of men condemn it as a dangerous and devilish lie.” It proved too much for audiences: while critically acclaimed, the lights went out on his Enemy after only thirty-six performances.

By 1976, Steve McQueen was becoming more famous for the roles he turned down than the ones he accepted³, but spite was a powerful motivator. His rationale for taking on Ibsen appeared to be a combination of proving to then-wife Ali McGraw that he could pull off a serious role and riling up First Artists, whose deal with McQueen’s Solar Productions automatically gave the green light to anything with a budget of $3 million or less. An Enemy of the People was budgeted at $2.5 million. First Artists called McQueen’s bluff.

Just as he had written Point Blank with Lee Marvin in mind, so Jacobs played to McQueen’s strengths as an actor who traded in looks rather than words, Miller had already pared back Ibsen’s dialogue; Jacobs cut to the bone once more, with only Miller’s shortest lines making it through. This Dr Stockmann is gentle and stoic, devoid of the righteous rage that defined Ibsen’s original character. Even Stockmann’s arrival at the town meeting, a scene that usually features a baying mob, is silent. When Stockmann’s wife begs him not to lose his temper, it’s an odd moment: we’ve never seen his temper. He is essentially a martyr in the making, crowned with a thick thatch of saintly hippie hair.

Award-winning television director George Schaefer directs in a reverent, stage-bound manner, giving the production the airless quality of a homework assignment and deadening otherwise fine performances by McQueen, Bibi Andersson and Charles Durning. Miller was ambivalent with his praise – “This was done as well as it could have been done.” – but “McQueen’s folly” was met with a critical drubbing and An Enemy of the People remains the only Steve McQueen movie never to have an official release. After one more attempt at filmed theatre with a proposed adaptation of Harold Pinter’s 1971 play Old Times that would have co-starred Audrey Hepburn and Faye Dunaway, McQueen retreated to the genres he knew best before his early death in 1980.

As for Jacobs, he continued to work even if none of his scripts made it into production. There was a script about the Tour de France, The Yellow Jersey, an adaptation of Alfred Bester’s 1953 novel The Demolished Man, and a treatment and first-draft script for The Godfather Part III in the late ‘70s, which saw Michael Corleone dead and his son Anthony atoning for his father’s sins by selling off the Family’s illicit assets, complicated by Sonny’s boy Tomasso, whose inherited temper sets off a gang war. Only the idea of bought respectability would make it into the final film.

The year after he delivered The Godfather Part III to Paramount, Alexander Jacobs died of cancer, three weeks short of his fifty-second birthday. In his Los Angeles Times obituary, Michael Dempsey paid tribute to Jacobs’s talent: “Many are the upcoming writers who have initially gasped at his notions for, say, Draconian 30-page cuts in their manuscripts or structural overhauls that would fling their opening image all the way to Page 97 – only to discover, on reflection, that the unthinkable change was exactly the right catalyst.” Dempsey goes on to quote the Film Quarterly interview: “To survive, either you sit in the hills like a Bresson and come down once every five years, or else you’ve got to get in the middle and put your talent on the line every day.”

Alexander Jacobs lived up to that principle. Every one of his scripts bears his mark, every one of the finished films reflecting some indelible part of his worldview. He specialised in driven, tormented anti-heroes battling against the system, whether it be criminal, corporate, or society itself. It was as much a recurring character as it was a core part of Jacobs the writer. Dempsey ends up quoting Jacobs as saying, “They don’t deserve to win.” That’s as fitting an epitaph as any.

1. He was also briefly considered for James Bond after Connery’s departure. According to Andrew Rissik, this was “one of the great missed opportunities of post-war British movie history.”

2. To my mind, desperately unfair. The man directed Theatre of Blood (1973), for crying out loud.

3. Including, apparently, McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, and Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. I’m always a bit wary of declaring “could-have-been”s as fact, but McQueen’s name was linked to a lot of movies around this time.