By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: writer/director James Bridges, who helmed The China Syndrome, The Paper Chase and Urban Cowboy.
There are a few likely reasons for director James Bridges’ status as an Unsung Auteur. The first and most obvious one is that the profoundly gifted writer and director passed away tragically and way too early at the age of just 57, leaving behind only eight feature films as a director, along with a few others solely as a writer. Some of these eight films are truly superb, and all are at the very least fascinating and relevant on some level. If Bridges had not been taken away from the world of cinema so prematurely, he would have undoubtedly made many more films, and would perhaps be lauded and appreciated today on a similar level to, say, Sidney Lumet or Hal Ashby.
Secondly, James Bridges was gay (his decades-long life partner was actor and producer Jack Larson), but because his films only touched on the subject of homosexuality tangentially, Bridges was never given his due as a quiet pioneer in a world often prejudiced against him. Thirdly, Bridges was a reluctant interviewee (sometimes even described as reclusive), so there’s not a lot of material out there on him, and he was never one to loudly sing his own praises. “He said the films speak for themselves,” Jack Larson said of Bridges in 2011. A master of rich characterisation, truthful dialogue, and topical storytelling, James Bridges was a filmmaker of prodigious talent, and one who should be discussed with far greater enthusiasm and frequency today.
James Bridges was born in 1936, in Little Rock, Arkansas and grew up in Paris, Arkansas. His first creative impulse was toward acting. As a young man, Bridges made his way to Hollywood, where he appeared in a number of TV series and feature films, while also working in various capacities in the theatre. Bridges, however, soon became more attracted to writing, and eventually got his start on the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents after catching the attention of producer Norman Lloyd. Bridges’ episodes for the show were highly regarded, which led to further TV work. This eventually took Bridges onto the big screen, first as a co-adaptor on the low-key 1966 western The Appaloosa, directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring Marlon Brando, and then on the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project. Though both are solid flicks, neither really served as proper indication of where Bridges was headed creatively and thematically.
That didn’t happen until 1970’s The Baby Maker, which Bridges both wrote and directed. Like many of his films, this is a beautifully realised meld of topicality, humanism and deeply personal storytelling. An incredibly assured piece of work, the plot of this sensitively handled drama would be provocative even by today’s standards. The luminous and ever underrated Barbara Hershey is perfectly cast as a freewheeling hippy chick who opts to play surrogate to a middle-class couple (Collin Wilcox-Patton and Sam Groom) desperate to have a child. Unsurprisingly, this arrangement very quickly becomes emotionally fraught, and Bridges handles it all with extraordinary compassion and an admirable lack of judgement. Both a colourful time capsule of the era and a complex take on a difficult issue, The Baby Maker marked a highly impressive debut for James Bridges.
The nascent filmmaker backed up the promise of his first film with his equally impressive follow-up. Expertly adapted by Bridges from John Jay Osborn Jr.’s 1971 novel, 1973’s The Paper Chase is one of the best studies you’ll see on academic life and the American education system, sitting comfortably alongside more recent takes on the subject like The Holdovers and Good Will Hunting. 1970s mainstay Timothy Bottoms is excellent as a first-year Harvard law student whose complex and compelling coming-of-age unfurls largely in opposition to a fiercely demanding professor, played with extraordinary wit and gravitas by John Houseman, who more or less made his screen debut here after decades in the theatre. It was a casting masterstroke from Bridges (who had initially envisioned James Mason in the role), and it won Houseman a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Warm, punchy, authentic and strongly performed, The Paper Chase scored Bridges his first Oscar nod for his adapted screenplay, and was later repurposed as a TV series by the director, with Houseman again featuring.
Bridges’ empathy for his youthful characters was again on display in his next film, 1977’s September 30, 1955, a brooding, thoughtful look that the effect of screen superstar James Dean’s early death has on a group of teens. The focus is on Richard Thomas’ Dean-obsessed Jimmy, who is crushed by the loss, though the film also takes in the experiences of his friends, played by Dennis Quaid, Tom Hulce, Dennis Christopher and Lisa Blount in excellent early-career performances. A small, interior, deeply cerebral drama about personal loss and the cult of celebrity rich with angst and high emotion, September 30, 1955 is that rare film which really treats its teenage characters with care, respect and compassion.
While James Bridges’ first three films were all told in a minor key, his fourth – and best known – film exists on a whole other level altogether. Boasting big stars in Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, 1979’s The China Syndrome is a truly major work, though it retains Bridges’ focus on character and small but highly charged emotional moments. Incredibly prescient and still hotly relevant today, the film follows a lightweight television reporter (Fonda) known for her puff pieces who toughens up when she discovers safety coverups at a nuclear power plant. Allied with Michael Douglas’ cocky freelance cameraman and Jack Lemmon’s highly compromised whistleblower, Fonda’s investigations take this gripping dramatic thriller right through to an unforgettable and heartbreaking conclusion. While the nuclear industry excoriated the film upon its release, The China Syndrome proved incredibly prescient: twelve days later, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred in Pennsylvania, disturbingly echoing the events of the film. Social aspects aside, The China Syndrome is a truly great piece of work from James Bridges, and the film boasts a magisterial turn from Jack Lemmon.
The China Syndrome was a big hit and strong presence at the Oscars, and Bridges delivered a nice double-shot when he followed it up with the 1980 box office hit Urban Cowboy. Though best known for its incredible scenes of gifted dancer John Travolta boot scootin’ and line dancing in a rowdy honkytonk in Pasadena, Texas, Urban Cowboy is (much like its Travolta-starring disco antecedent Saturday Night Fever) a far darker and heavier film than its reputation would suggest. The complex relationship that develops between Travolta’s oil worker and Debra Winger’s headstrong bar girl is sexy and emotionally fraught (much like the incredible actress’s on-screen romantic duel with Richard Gere in An Officer And A Gentleman), while the presence of a violent ex-con (played with wonderfully charismatic malevolence by Scott Glenn, who featured in The Baby Maker as Barbara Hershey’s bad-tempered boyfriend) adds to the hothouse atmosphere. Though mostly remembered for popularising country music (Johnny Lee, Bonnie Raitt and Charlie Daniels all appear), line dancing, and mechanical bull riding, Urban Cowboy is much, much more than just a topical slice of Texas life in the early 1980s.
Bridges stuck tight with Debra Winger for his next film, this time putting the frankly amazing actress front and centre with dynamic if disappointingly unheralded results. Winger gives a stunningly natural and engaging performance in 1984’s Mike’s Murder, a curiously forgotten film that stands as one of the decade’s most interesting crime dramas. Also written and produced by Bridges, this tour across LA’s fringes sees Winger drawn into the dark world of the eponymous Mike (Mark Keyloun), a tennis instructor and side hustling drug dealer with whom she enjoys a brief relationship. In the wake of Mike’s death, Winger’s Betty Parrish is hit with a number of revelations that will place her in both emotional and physical danger. Greatly changed by Bridges in post-production and then barely released by Warner Bros, the near-disappearance of Mike’s Murder is one of the true travesties of 1980s cinema, with the film desperately deserving of reappraisal.
Also adding to Bridges’ lack of true recognition is the fact that his final two films failed to measure up to the very high bar that he’d set with his first six highly impressive works. Now something of a camp cinema footnote for its then highly topical story about the US craze for health clubs and aerobics, 1985’s Perfect is referenced today principally for its saucy scenes featuring an incredibly fit and toned Jamie Lee Curtis, whose top-tier fitness instructor clashes with John Travolta’s compromised journalist, who is doing an expose on America’s burgeoning gym culture. Slick and somewhat silly, Perfect is certainly not the disaster that some reviews would suggest, but it’s also very, very far from James Bridges’ best work, and lacks the personal, heartfelt qualities that made his previous films so singular and specific in tone.
James Bridges’ final film ended up being 1988’s Bright Lights, Big City, an adaptation of Jay McInerney’s ennui-heavy zeitgeist novel about a yuppy coke addict. By the time Bridges boarded the project, it had already been through the hands of director Joel Schumacher and Unsung Auteur Joyce Chopra, who was unceremoniously dumped from the project by its backing studio, who weren’t happy with where she was taking the film. With a miscast Michael J. Fox in the lead (his co-star Kiefer Sutherland would have been a far better fit), the somewhat underdone but still highly watchable Bright Lights, Big City failed to connect with audiences, and the film was a major financial disappointment upon release. It’s now little more than a crumpled and forgotten 1980s relic lying on the cinematic nightclub floor alongside the coke-hazed likes of Less Than Zero.
James Bridges passed away on June 6, 1993, at the age of 57 from kidney failure related to intestinal cancer. He was a one-time talent with an artistic sensibility all his own, and he could have been a major American filmmaker if he had the chance to make more movies…
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