By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: writer, producer and director James B. Harris, who helmed The Bedford Incident, Fast-Walking and Cop.
As we broached in our discussion of Unsung Auteur Anthony Harvey, there is perhaps no greater cinematic enigma or towering figure than the late Stanley Kubrick, a director with a rabid, adoring fan base of near-acolytes who see meaning and message in practically every frame of film he ever touched. This powerful presence has also seen his frequent collaborators gifted a strange kind of status all of their own, with the likes of cinematographer John Alcott and the aforementioned Anthony Harvey discussed almost solely for the work they did with Kubrick above pretty much all else despite their raft of other achievements.
This is particularly so with producer, screenwriter and director James B. Harris, whose name is usually followed by his producing credits on three early Stanley Kubrick stone-cold masterwork classics in The Killing (1956), Paths Of Glory (1957) and Lolita (1962). Friends as well as collaborators, Harris and Kubrick amicably dissolved their creative partnership when they disagreed over the tone of their adaptation of Peter George’s book Red Alert, which would eventually become Kubrick’s absurdist satire masterpiece Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb. Harris pushed to maintain the gritty Cold War thriller elements of the novel, while Kubrick wanted to take the project in a whole other direction. Kubrick obviously won out, but the pair stayed close friends until the director’s death in 1999.
Though his place amongst the myth-making of the continuing idolatry of Stanley Kubrick is well-deserved and more-than-appropriate, James B. Harris has done some truly fascinating work outside of the films he made with Kubrick. That said, however, it was actually Kubrick himself who suggested that Harris make the move from producing to directing. “He not only gave me advice,” Harris has said somewhat unsurprisingly of Kubrick’s continuing influence, “he wrote down things for me like I was a kid he was sending to school.” Perhaps uncoincidentally, Harris made his directorial debut in 1965 with The Bedford Incident, a tight, economic, propulsive Cold War thriller that appeared to feature most of the things Harris would have liked Dr. Strangelove to be. Something of a microcosm of The Cold War itself, this little gem of a flick stars a powerfully on-form Richard Widmark as an icy, hardened Destroyer captain who becomes obsessed with tracking down a Russian submarine that has made its way into US protected waters. Sidney Poitier forms an excellent counterpoint as a reporter who happened to be on the Destroyer at exactly the right – or wrong – time.
Though a Cold War relic, The Bedford Incident showcases Harris as a director with a real knack for pacing, performance and on-screen intensity…all of which he happily attributes to Kubrick, whose influence can certainly be felt in this striking debut. “I did not have dreams of directing when I first met Stanley,” Harris told The DGA Quarterly. “My directing was totally impressed and influenced by his directing. When you see terrific athletes perform, they make an impossible thing look easy. You don’t realize the degree of difficulty that exists when a master performs. When I became a director, I was rudely awakened. You’re working with human beings. You have to be a combination of psychiatrist, Dutch uncle, genius, and leader. You can’t show weakness. You’ve got to supervise everybody, and answer all the questions from every department. It seemed so easy for Stanley.”
After directing The Bedford Incident, Harris only got behind the camera intermittently. His second film was the little seen 1973 bizarro sex comedy Some Call It Loving, a film very much of its time starring Zalman King (who would go on to produced 91/2 Weeks, and direct sexy potboilers like Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid and The Red Shoe Diaries), Richard Pryor, Tisa Farrow and hip Brit import Carol White (Poor Cow). Harris didn’t direct again until 1982 with Fast-Walking, a little-known film deserving of at least a decent-sized cult considering its deliriously peculiar collection of performers. James Woods is at his sleaziest, amoral, snappy-delivery best as the eponymous corrupt (and then some) prison guard who gets up to his bleary eyeballs in a plot to kill a black prisoner. Seamy, funny, unapologetically exploitative and wonderfully authentic, Fast-Walking is also an eye-popping performance showcase for some great character actors in Kay Lenz (a great actress who has never received her appropriate due), M. Emmett Walsh, Sydney Lassick, Timothy Carey, Susan fucking Tyrell and the scene stealing Tim McIntire. Why this cracking little prison flick remains so injuriously unloved is anyone’s idea…though Woods’ currently on-the-nose position in Hollywood could have something to do with it.
Woods’ Hollywood pariah status has also likely infected the already near non-existent reputation of Harris’ excellent (if largely unfaithful) adaptation of James Ellroy’s brutally brilliant novel Blood On The Moon. Disappointingly retitled Cop, this 1988 cracker features a physically-all-wrong but spiritually-on-point James Woods as “Big” Lloyd Hopkins, Ellroy’s recurring and wilfully unhinged LA cop character. Woods is gritty, sleazy, manic, weird and funny (y’know, James Woods) in this cinder-black slab of perverse noir which sees Hopkins relentlessly pursuing a serial killer through LA’s underbelly while interacting with brilliant character actor greats like Charles Durning, Lesley Ann Warren, Charles Haid, Raymond J. Barry and even Dennis Stewart aka Craterface from Grease.
Though now wholly forgotten, Cop is a terrific thriller drenched in the kind of perversity that seeps off every page in James Ellroy’s grimly hilarious oeuvre. Though LA Confidential certainly remains the gold standard when it comes to adaptations, Cop is certainly up there. “It was Ellroy’s first film, and I don’t think he knew how to handle it when he first saw it,” Harris told Film Comment. “He said he didn’t care for the film when he first saw it. But later he said everybody told him that the picture was terrific, and he went back and reevaluated it and said he liked it now. In fact, I think he took the film on a tour to England, through several cities, and he screened the film as an example of a good adaptation.” It most certainly is.
Now aged 96 and retired, James B. Harris’ final film as a director (he produced Brian De Palma’s so-so Ellory adaptation The Black Dahlia in 2006) would be the slightly disappointing 1993 thriller Boiling Point with Wesley Snipes. Based on the novel Money Men by former U.S. Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich (author and co-screenwriter of the great To Live And Die In LA), who co-wrote the screenplay with Harris, Boiling Point boasts an impressively unusual plot and characters (played by a Harris trademark crew of wonderful character actors in Dennis Hopper, Viggo Mortensen, Valerie Perrine, Lolita Davidovich, Seymour Cassel, Dan Hedaya, Tony Lo Bianco, Paul Gleason, Jonathan Banks and James Tolkan), but suffers a little from the hit-and-miss nature of its mercurial leading man. Harris has also claimed that Boiling Point was also tampered with by its backing studio to align it more with Snipes’ previous (and dreadful) action hit, Passenger 57…which certainly makes sense.
A filmmaker with a rare gift for casting and working with actors, and a finely tuned sense for the corruption and desperation that lies within compromised men, James B. Harris is an enjoyably uncompromising filmmaker deserving of much, much more love and attention.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
