Here, then, is our list of the greatest lost films, featuring work that’s fallen off the radar by such fabled directors as Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, Lindsay Anderson, Orson Welles, John Huston and Jean-Luc Godard. This being Uncut, even Bob Dylan has made ...
9 DRIVE HE SAID
Director: Jack Nicholson
Starring: William Tepper, Karen Black (USA, 1971)
Nicholson made his name as an actor in low-budget quickies before Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces made him a star. He’d also written four screenplays and harboured ambitions, too, to direct. He adapted Drive, He Said, from Jeremy Larner’s novel about a college star baseball player who’s having an affair with the wife of a campus’ professor (with, it’s rumoured, uncredited script polishes from Terrence Malick and Chinatown’s Robert Towne). In smaller roles, Nicholson drew on many of his cronies – Henry Jaglom, Bruce Dern and Towne himself. As Hector, his inarticulate, troubled lead, he cast William Tepper, who all but disappeared from movies after this. Although the film played at the Cannes Film Festival, it flopped at the box office, which perhaps explains its absence on DVD; though Sony planned to release it as part of a New Hollywood boxset last September, showcasing seven films from Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider’s storied BBS production stable, including Easy Rider and Head. The set was postponed so Rafelson could spend more time preparing the DVD Extras.
Expect to pay: More funny-looking Spanish imports, we’re afraid. £30?
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8 OTLEY
Director: Dick Clement
Starring: Tom Courtenay, Romy Schneider, Freddie Jones (GB, 1968)
From The Likely Lads to Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are known primarily for their TV work. But the late ’60s saw them working heavily in features, and, following the success of their debut foray – a breezy screenplay for Michael Winner’s crime-comedy The Jokers – the duo were given creative control on this swinging spy caper, Clement’s first engagement as director. He delivered a film distinguished by a very British, small-screen contrariness, which owed as much to kitchen-sink drama as the Bond movies it looked to parody. A parade of shining cameos kept the slapstick flowing – including Leonard Rossiter as a hitman peculiarly skilled in the art of making tea. But Clement’s version of ‘60s London offered some dirt under the fingernails, exemplified by Tom Courtenay’s superb central turn as a petty thief caught up in events he cannot hope to understand. A sole ’80s VHS release is scant testament, and Otley remains as difficult to source as Stanley (The Deer Hunter) Myers’ score, whose disarming blend of baroque strings and gentle psychedelia is a perfect fit.
Expect to pay: The VHS is cheap – but it has been on screened on terrestrial fairly recently!
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7 FINGERS
Director: James Toback
Starring: Harvey Keitel, Michael V Gazzo, Jim Brown (USA 1978)
“He’s a nice guy who can be insanely violent,” someone says of Harvey Keitel’s Jimmy Fingers in Toback’s raw, often unsettling debut, and they’re not kidding. Keitel, in his first leading role since Mean Streets, is the film’s eponymous central character, an aspiring concert pianist who doubles as an often fearsome enforcer for his mobster father. Fingers was in large part an uncompromising examination of lurid machismo and Keitel’s performance hinted at the dark places he would go in films as extreme as Bad Lieutenant. Toback went on to write the screenplay for Bugsy, starring his friend and fellow-womaniser Warren Beatty and also directed the ludicrous Exposed, a thriller about international terrorists starring Rudolph Nureyev, as well as Black And White, an unlikely hook-up with The Wu-Tang Clan.
Expect to pay: The deleted 2002 US DVD is cheap, at £5
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6 FAT CITY
Director: John Huston
Starring: Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrrell (USA, 1972)
This poetic adaptation of Leonard Gardner’s novel is the most human of all Huston’s films, remains one of the greatest boxing movies, and has one of the most memorable closing sequences in all cinema. Why, then, has it been so poorly serviced on DVD, with its 2002 Region 1 and 2 incarnations long since sold out? Fat City focuses on a pair of bottom-rung, mirror-image boxers: Keach, brilliant as a washed-up boozer, dreaming about a comeback; and Bridges, a fresh-faced young up-and-comer, headed in exactly the same direction. As barfly Oma, Tyrrell is brilliant too, as acknowledged by an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Filmed around the skid row of Stockton, California, Huston’s film is about, in his words, “people who are beaten before they start, but never stop dreaming.” Prior to movies, Huston had, in the early ’20s, been a boxer himself on the Californian club-circuit: several of the beaten faces on the peripheries of the film are fighters he had known during this period. His deep understanding of, and affection for the scene permeated every frame.
Expect to pay: £20 should secure you a copy