I watched The French Connection the other day, first time in several years. I like it better than any of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry films, but I can't bring myself to believe it's a classic of American cinema. I think the ending stinks. Mostly, though, what gets me is that cheap, too small, crumpled up, pork pie hat that Gene Hackman wears. The very first time I saw him put it on, I thought "That's exactly the type of hat I'd expect some chump from New York (detective or civilian) to wear." And he wore it into a night club. Jeeze. In a local bar, okay, but not in a class place (which one must assume the place to have been by Big Apple standards, as it had a table full of junior mafiosi and their dates). Even in the old Jockey Club in East Chicago, Indiana (owned by family friend Nick Dallas), he'd have been stopped at the door and asked to remove the thing.
Which brings up another sort of regional bias. I can watch or listen to interviews with William Friedkin (director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, as well as the lesser-known Sorcerer) and William Goldman (screenwriter of, among other things, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride) and everything's fine. I have no problem with the accent, the phrasing, the intonation, no problem with what they say or how they say it. Why? Because both are from Chicago and I grew up listening to people who speak that way. Hell, I speak that way. We could be in a booth in a local watering hole, a short order "family dining" greasy spoon, or at the piano bar in The Jockey Club. The same would go for Kurt Vonnegut, though he was from Indianapolis, Indiana. But as he pointed out in A Man Without A Country, we would all be considered Great Lakes people, denizens of a fresh water area, without any of the distractions or climatic annoyances that come with living next to an ocean. We might get a foot and a half of snow overnight, but we'd never have to deal with sharks, surfers, tsunamis, or rising tides due to global warming.
But someone like James Cameron or Quentin Tarantino? I don't know where they're from, but I don't even want to be in the same time zone with those guys. Too caught up in their own image and perceived greatness. I've got my own ego to tend to.
Yes, there's no denying it. People from The Big Apple and The City of Angels are welcome to think they're all that and a bag a chips and call everything in between "fly-over country." Just as long as they stay their asses out of The Heartland.
I heard Calumet on the Weather Channel last night and thought of you!
Good rant, by the way,