GOLDEN GRAHAMS

THIS MONTH City of Hope and Lone Star

Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham unearths underrated classics…

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THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1940 The Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and dying dreams: John Ford magnificently captures John Steinbeck’s stark social drama.

TOUCH OF EVIL 1958 Sayles says that Orson Welles’ sin-soaked tale set in a Mexican border town was a big influence on him.

NASHVILLE 1975 Those country roads are a-windin’… Spread over five days, Robert Altman’s multi-stranded story leads up to a political convention.

THE WIRE 2002-2008 David Simon’s brick-by-brick construction of rundown, crime-ridden Baltimore rises out of City of Hope.

Back in the 90s, writer-director John Sayles was a big deal. For cinephiles, at least. Building on the string of quality, genre-hopping titles he’d made in the 80s – Return of the Secaucus 7, Lianna, Baby It’s You, The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out – he’d reached a point where each new release was an event. Respected magazines such as Time Out would salivate over the arrival of his fiercely independent films, and esteemed critic Geoff Andrew, the film editor of Time Out, penned Stranger Than Paradise, an excellent book dedicated to the figureheads of recent US indie cinema: Hartley, Haynes, Jarmusch, Linklater, Lee, the Coens, Soderbergh, Lynch, Wang, Tarantino and, naturally, Sayles.

Now, oddly, Sayles is hardly talked about, even on Twitter where other 80s and 90s filmmakers, whose work faded this century, are often celebrated. The aforementioned titles, all first-rate, rarely blip, and such notable 90s films as Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish and Limbo also go unmentioned.

But the biggest crime of all is the lack of attention granted to Sayles’ two finest movies of the 90s, City of Hope and Lone Star.

Film critic David Thomson called Sayles ‘a connoisseur of extended groups and variegated perspectives’, and both of these dramas support that notion. City of Hope is a portrait of a fictional city in New Jersey, intersecting the lives of 36 characters via the nexus of an old apartment block the city wants demolished: urban renewal means big bucks. The idealism suggested by the (somewhat ironic) title is present, not least in the rallying cries of lead character Nick (Vincent Spano), whose father is a contractor. But it’s forever quashed by greed, deceit, bribery, compromise and despair. From the mayor and DA to the cops and councilmen to the property developers and plain old residents – be they law-abiding citizens, or drug dealers and street thugs – all are coated in the stench of open-sewer corruption.

Lone Star, meanwhile, is set in a Tex-Mex border town where the discovery of a skeleton buried in the desert leads to Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) reopening a 40-year-old murder case involving Sam’s legendary father, Sheriff Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), and ‘bribes and bullets’ lawman Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson). Slipping between dual timelines, Sayles again latches onto the everyday rhythms and interactions of a living, working community, building a socially conscious drama that never feels like homework. How could it, given its gripping scenarios, magnetic performances and vivid dialogue?

As well as sharing actors (Cooper, Joe Morton, Stephen Mendillo), both films deal with class and racial tensions – themes that can also be found in Sayles’ work as a screenwriter of such gnarly monster movies as Piranha, Alligator and The Howling. And both movies are constructed and edited with real fluency – watch how he gracefully transitions between past and present in Lone Star, and how he slides between characters in City of Hope, its structure owing as much to Richard Linklater’s ever-mobile Slacker as the mosaic-movies of Robert Altman.

With both City of Hope and Lone Star currently unavailable on DVD or Blu-ray in the UK, it’s time for bells-and-whistles editions. Or better still, an exhaustive Sayles boxset. Maybe then he’ll again get the respect he so richly deserves.

JAMIE WILL RETURN NEXT ISSUE… FOR MORE RECOMMENDATIONS, FOLLOW @JAMIE_GRAHAM9 ON TWITTER/X.