JEREMY STRONG
This essay outlines the key features of a narrative formula that I have termed elsewhere the ‘team film’ (see Strong 2006, 2008). In particular it addresses aspects of dialogue that enact the motifs of the team film; though the formula is constituted not only in what is said but in visual, structural and other dimensions of the texts under consideration.
A necessary point of departure for this discussion is to acknowledge that whilst team films may be understood as a grouping defined by a set of shared characteristics they may, in addition, be approached in terms of difference; that is, they also enjoy other memberships to a range of movie genres. The films I will examine as examples of the team formula may also claim affiliation to such disparate groupings as the war film, the western, the caper movie, the sports film, the comedy and the action movie. What they share is a) an insistence upon a team or group as the means by which a difficult goal will be attempted, and b) a high degree of adherence to a recognisable system of narrative phases and recurring elements that may be discerned notwithstanding their other genre affiliations.
Although the concept of the team film is not yet to be found widely circulating in film studies, as an interpretive framework it is one that the films themselves suggest very readily. Consider how The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Usual Suspects (1995) invoke the team in their titles. The Italian Job (1969 & 2003), The Great Escape (1963) and Mission: Impossible (1996) reference the task that the team will take on; while other titles foreground the team’s leader, for example Ocean’s Eleven (1960), the Soderbergh Ocean’s trilogy (2001, 2004, 2007) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970). Identified here as ‘Proposition’, ‘Gathering’, ‘Heterogeneous Team’, ‘Professionals’, ‘Line-up’, ‘Misfits’, ‘Preparation’, ‘First-run/Main-event’ and ‘Coda’ and considered with a particular emphasis on their realisation through dialogue, are the salient attributes of the team film.
The statement of a principal goal or objective forms a key early stage of the team film. The task will invariably be extremely difficult, involving long odds and a high degree of risk. It is generally the nature and constituent elements of the task that establish the necessary characteristics of the yet-to-be-formed group. In The Magnificent Seven the talents of the out-of-work gunfighters who will defend the Mexican village are broadly the same, though they are strongly differentiated in other ways; all are, or in one case wish to be, highly competent men at arms. Conversely, in Ocean’s Eleven the task requires the individual team members to have very different skills that will cohere in the execution of a multi-faceted task. In The Dirty Dozen the proposition is delivered to Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) in the form of a written order read out to him by a senior officer:
Select twelve General Prisoners convicted and sentenced to death or to serve lengthy prison terms for murder, rape, robbery and other crimes of violence; train and qualify them in as much of the business of behind-the-lines operations as they can absorb in a brief but unspecified time; and then deliver them secretly into the European mainland just prior to the invasion and attack and destroy the target … specified overleaf.
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In terms of effecting a clear statement to the audience of what the film’s principal business will be, the fact that this is prose rendered as dialogue is particularly effective. As a written military communication it has the properties of being formal, direct and unequivocal. Its starkness allows the difficulty of Reisman’s role – constituted principally in the ostensible mismatch between ‘elite’ task and highly problematic team – to sink in. In this instance, the exact nature of the objective is also left open; the target ‘overleaf’ is not revealed until later. In the case of The Magnificent Seven, one of the group, Harry Luck (Brad Dexter), persists in believing that the nature of the proposition is radically different to the low-pay/high-risk truth; he repeatedly asks the villagers questions about ‘gold’ and ‘jewels’ believing that the leader, Chris (Yul Brynner), would only be involved if there were an additional, lucrative, motivation. The bold proposition of The Great Escape is fully articulated in the first meeting of the escape committee; to get out ‘two hundred and fifty men’, rather than the small groups or individual endeavours of prior attempts. The statement of this inconceivably ambitious aim produces a collective gasp from the assembled group of prisoners of war.
In Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, the first iteration of the proposition takes the form of a conversation between Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and Rusty (Brad Pitt) that commences over coffee in a deli then switches to an architect’s office where they make a clandestine review of the design of a casino vault. Right at the outset, Danny links task and team by stressing the necessity of a ‘large crew’.
Rather than directly positing what the job will be, Danny seeks to hook Rusty by emphasising the financial reward, delaying the revelation of the enormous difficulty and risk involved. In so doing, the film simultaneously teases the viewer by temporarily withholding the statement of its proposition.
RUSTY: Tell me.
DANNY: It’s tricky. It’s never been done before. It’s going to need planning … and a large crew.
RUSTY: Guns?
DANNY: Not exactly. There’s a lot of security. But the take…
RUSTY: What’s the target?
DANNY: Eight figures each.
RUSTY: What’s the target?
DANNY: When’s the last time you were in Vegas?
RUSTY: What? You wanna knock over a casino?
At this juncture Danny smiles and, breaking the pattern of purely verbal disclosure, lifts three fingers, indicating three casinos; a revelation that prompts a surprised ‘Ooh’ from Rusty. His ‘Ooh’ is repeated at the start of the next scene where the pair scrutinise the blueprints, emphasising Rusty’s sense of the huge ambition of the proposal. Diagrams, models and sketches feature heavily in team films, and are usually the occasion for dialogue which centres on issues of the scale or near impossibility of the intended operation, or on the subdivision of the job into elements linked to individual roles.
DANNY (cont.): The vault at the Bellagio.
RUSTY: If I’m reading this right – and I think that I am – this I probably the least accessible vault ever designed.
DANNY: Yep.
This version of Ocean’s Eleven also features a self-conscious exchange between the pair at the conclusion of this first discussion about the technical aspects of the proposition. Rusty indicates that, besides the money, he needs a further incentive to participate.
Danny’s reply invokes an often-repeated aspect of team films; the notion that team members have sunk or otherwise gravitated to employment that does not utilise their talents or which avoids the recognition of their true vocation. In The Magnificent Seven, for example, Vin (Steve McQueen) ruefully observes that the grocery-store owner has advised him that he could ‘make a crackerjack clerk. Crackerjack!’ In Rusty’s case, this descent has meant ‘colddecking Teenbeat coverboys’; teaching poker to inept young movie stars rather than participating in high-stakes criminal scams. Danny’s answer is framed in terms of the language of cards and gambling, calculated to appeal to his confederate:
DANNY: Because the house always wins. You play long enough, never changing stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that special hand comes around, you bet big. And then you take the house.
Having introduced this almost-philosophical dimension, the film comically punctures any seriousness that has accrued and draws attention to the formal, scripted, nature of this and all propositions by having Rusty ask whether Danny has practiced the speech. Danny admits this and then compounds the scene’s reflexivity by asking Rusty’s view of his delivery: ‘Did I rush it? It felt like I rushed it.’
THE GATHERING
There is an early phase in each team film where a group is formed, re-formed, or gathered. This develops through scenes devoted to individual team members that convey to the audience key insights into characters’ talents and temperaments. These displays or discussions of skills – often matched with shortcomings – and insights into personal histories are generally initiated or witnessed by the character who assumes leadership for the team.
The Great Escape weaves a variation on this pattern by showing a succession of hastily improvised escape attempts prior to the arrival of the man who will conceive the audacious plan of the film’s title. Bartlett (Richard Attenborough), also known by the moniker ‘Big X’ in recognition of his lead role in planning escape attempts, is a late arrival to a newly-created camp for captured Allied airmen with a history of prior escapes. As he observes to his commanding officer, by virtue of bringing together such characters, the Germans have unwittingly performed the role of delivering the gathering:
BARTLETT: The men are here to do it. The goons have put every escape artist in Germany in this camp.
Just as Danny finds the right words to persuade Rusty to join the Ocean’s team, in The Usual Suspects, Verbal (Kevin Spacey) is sent by other team members to convince Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). Again, the persuasion centres on the options available to the potential team member; in this case a crooked former cop whom the authorities will never cease to pursue, ruining his prospects of honest employment. Verbal argues that: ‘They’re never going to stop with us, you know that. As clean as you can ever get they’ll never let you go. Now, this way, we can hit the cops where it hurts and we get well in the meantime.’ Interestingly, Christopher McQuarrie’s original script expresses this archetypal team film logic even more directly than the dialogue used in the eventual film, having Verbal argue: ‘You can’t go legit any more than I can’; and ‘You can’t be good and stay true to yourself. It’s in your blood, same as the rest of us’ (McQuarrie 2000: 53).
THE HETEROGENEOUS TEAM
Strong differentiation between individual team members is a key motif of the team film. Many of the elements that facilitate this differentiation are visual, for example physical size and clothing, but aspects of dialogue are often among the strands that facilitate ease of recognition among multiple characters and signpost likely directions for character interactions. In
The Dirty Dozen the fanatical Maggot’s (Telly Savalas) heavy Southern drawl connects to his racist contempt for Jefferson (Jim Brown), in turn notable for the deep identifiably ‘black’ timbre of his voice. Maggot’s early remark, ‘Do we have to eat with niggers?’, prompts a brawl that can be heard off-screen, necessitating Reisman’s comically understated explanation to the M.P.s outside:
REISMAN: The gentleman from the South asked something about the dining arrangements and his colored colleague is explaining the place cards to him.
This antipathy finds its resolution at a critical stage during the dozen’s secret mission when Maggot’s madness jeopardises the operation and Jefferson must kill him. In The Great Escape, alongside an array of different uniforms, a mixture of national and regional accents are in evidence, some mapping onto the actors’ nationalities and natural accents, others not; Hilts (Steve McQueen) and Hendley (James Garner) are American, Danny (Charles Bronson) is Polish, Sedgwick (James Coburn) is an unconvincing Australian, Ives (Angus Lennie) and Mack (Gordon Jackson) are Scottish, while Bartlett, Ramsay (James Donald) and Ashley-Pitt (David McCallum) are strongly coded as upper-class English. In the Soderbergh Ocean’s pictures Don Cheadle plays the character ‘Basher’ with a British – specifically London – accent, and the same is true of Jason Statham’s character ‘Handsome Rob’ in the re-make of The Italian Job (2003).
Jeanine Basinger identifies the ‘group of mixed ethnic types’ as a key characteristic of the World War II combat film, an important antecedent strand in the development of the team film (2003: 15). She cites the movies
Desperate Journey (1942) and
Bataan (1943) as important texts in the establishment of this recurring motif, arguing for the team as a ‘microcosm of American types’ (2003: 85). This perspective certainly applies to
The Dirty Dozen which features a now familiar roster of types, names and associated properties of speech that covers a representative spread of the United States; Southern, Hispanic, Italian-American, black and so on. The Soderbergh
Ocean’s teams similarly deploy a recognisable rubric of (mostly American) diversity in their particular shuffling of the heterogeneous deck; assembling a team that includes blacks, whites, Jews and Mormons. The speech of aging confidence trickster Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner) is one of the aspects that signal, in cadence and content, his Jewish identity. When Rusty visits him at the racetrack to persuade him to join the crew, Saul’s summary of his present, ostensibly contented, life is a near-parody of the quotidian suburban existence proper to his years and situation:
SAUL: I got a duplex now. I got wall-to-wall and a goldfish. I’m seeing a nice lady who works the unmentionables counter at Macy’s.
As a team member, however, he must role-play a quite different Jewish identity, that of mysterious arms-dealer and casino high-roller, Lyman Zerga. Saul begins developing the persona as he is measured for the expensive silk suit that he will wear in the scam. Facing the mirror he repeats his critically important introduction: ‘My name is Lyman Zerga.’ Testing variations of pace and pitch he gradually shifts from his own more friendly sound to a deeper register suggestive of power and controlled malevolence. When the image-track shifts to Saul undertaking the part for real, his tailored suit now complete, the signature line has been practiced to perfection; the voice is authoritative, hinting at a powerful man’s impatience never far beneath the surface, while the accent is appropriately hard to place for a man in his line of work, possibly Central or Eastern European.
The speech of Ocean’s Eleven’s Frank Catton (Bernie Mac) similarly links aspects of the character’s identity with his contribution to the team. Sent to purchase second-hand vans for the heist, Frank intimidates a redneck car dealer into giving him a low price. Having seemingly failed to reach agreement Frank takes the dealer’s hand to shake goodbye and observes with a smooth purr: ‘Man, you’ve got some lovely hands here. Do you moisturize?’ Not releasing the hand, Frank embarks on a comic monologue about moisturisers that, in conjunction with his powerful grip, makes the dealer profoundly uncomfortable and serves to manoeuvre him into a generous discount. Capitalising on Mac’s existing reputation for verbal dexterity as a stand-up comedian, the scene uses intersecting dimensions of race, culture and language. The dealer, ‘Billy Bob’, is coded by name and Southern accent as a type likely to be rendered ill at ease by closeness and conversational intimacy with a black man, especially when coupled with the suggestion of physical force. Recognising this, Frank prolongs and magnifies those factors; moving closer, maintaining the grip, stressing his distinctive timbre, and moving the topic to one calculated to make the dealer even more eager to bring the meeting to an end: Frank’s sex life – or, as he puts it with a lubricious smile – his ‘social agenda’.
PROFESSIONALS
A fundamental property of the team film is that the team members have, develop or re-acquire particular skills that are necessary to perform the required task. In Ocean’s Eleven Rusty and Danny use an obscure criminal argot to discuss the series of complicated cons and manoeuvres that will form the plan:
RUSTY: You’d need at least a dozen guys, doing a combination of cons.
DANNY: Like what, you think?
RUSTY: Well, off the top of my head, I’d say you’re looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros, and a Leon Spinks. Oh, and lest we forget: the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever.
The exact meaning of these terms will never be explained, though subsequent scenes do detail a succession of skills and operations. Rather, the very inaccessibility of the terminology conjures an impression of the distinct specialist realm in which the characters operate, as, for example, in Rusty’s analysis of the explosive device Basher has used to access a bank vault: ‘Let me venture a guess. A simple G4 mainliner, double-coil, backwound, quick fuse with a drag under 20 feet.’ Sarah Kozloff observes of the gangster film that ‘some of the dialogue relies so heavily on crime jargon, foreign accents, or even foreign languages that it may be more or less incomprehensible to the eavesdropping moviegoer’ (2000: 215). A related process appears to be at work in Ocean’s Eleven; one that emphasises the team as a closed unit, its own universe in many senses, including the linguistic, in that members are connected by a semantic universality that allows them to share meaning but which forecloses on the possibility of key meanings being decoded outside the group.
In The Professionals (1967), the wealthy railroad boss Grant (Ralph Bellamy) summarises the key qualities and credentials of the men he has gathered together: Rico (Lee Marvin) who will lead the team is ‘a weapons expert and tactician’; Ehrengard (Robert Ryan) is an ‘ex-cavalryman, cattle boss, wrangler, bullwhacker, packmaster’; and Jacob Sharp (Woody Strode) is a ‘specialist with rifle, rope and longbow; most dependable scout and tracker in the territory’. It is Rico who asserts that a fourth team member is needed, an ‘equalizer’ who brings an additional talent; this will be Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), ‘a dynamiter, a man with a delicate touch to blow out a candle without putting a dent in the candle-holder’. The Magnificent Seven also uses dialogue to establish the competence of team members; while Chris and Vin demonstrate their skills through action in the Boot Hill scene, the talents of O’Reilly (Charles Bronson) are initially conveyed through a dialogue with Chris as part of the team’s gathering. Chris is evidently aware of O’Reilly’s trackrecord as a gunman, saying, ‘Harry tells me you faced bigger odds in the Travis County War’, and ‘He also said you wrapped up Salinas single-handed in less than a month’.
In
The Usual Suspects, Verbal describes in voice-over the credentials of the men with whom he has been gathered: ‘It didn’t make any sense that I’d be there. I mean, these guys were hard-core hijackers, but there I was … I got to make like I was notorious.’ Of course, the account Verbal provides his interviewer, Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), proves deeply disingenuous as it finally emerges – too late – that he is in fact the criminal mastermind Keyser Soze. At this early stage in the narrative, however, audiences are inclined to accept his representation of himself as a minor-league criminal compared to the other team members: McManus (Stephen Baldwin), a ‘top-notch entry man’; Fenster (Benicio Del Toro) who ‘always worked with McManus. He was a real tight-ass, but when it came to the job, he was right on. A smart man’; and Kevin Pollak’s character, ‘Todd Hockney. Good with explosives. Without a doubt the one guy who didn’t give a fuck about anybody.’
In The Great Escape the prisoners of war have, in addition to their expertise as pilots and aircrew, a combination of talents and responsibilities germane to the escape effort. In the first meeting of the escape team Bartlett assigns roles to those present, based on the functions they have performed and skills they have developed through previous escape attempts:
BARTLETT: Willie, you and Danny will be Tunnel Kings. Danny, you’ll be in charge of traps and I’ll work out the exact location with you tomorrow. Cedric, manufacturer. Griff, as I said, tailor. Nimmo and Haynes, diversions. Mack, of course, will take care of intelligence. Hendley, we haven’t met … scrounger?
HENDLEY: Right.
BARTLETT: Dennis, maps and surveys. Colin, you’ll take your usual job. Eric, have you thought how you’ll get rid of this dirt?
The reference to the undisclosed role of Colin (Donald Pleasance) sets up Hendley’s and the audience’s curiosity to discover the nature of his particular skill. Colin explains that he worked in photographic interpretation but Hendley emphasises that he didn’t mean his prior military occupation but rather his place in the escape effort; Colin’s answer – ‘Oh, I’m the forger’ – cements the impression that, for the purposes of The Great Escape, these subsequent roles will be the ones that matter.
THE LINE-UP
Team films abound with images of the group together at significant junctures in the film, for example at the first moment of team assembly, or prior to embarking upon a mission. Static compositions (facilitated by the widescreen ratios that became the norm by the 1960s), dolly shots and pans involving the horizontal arrangement of the team in a formal line-up or parade are frequently deployed and signposted as important. In
The Dirty Dozen, several minutes into the film, Sergeant Bowren’s (Richard Jaekel) order, ‘Prisoners; Fall in!’, causes the reluctant dozen to form a rank. This is signalled as a notable moment by the commencement of the film’s signature theme and the opening titles. Reisman pauses by each prisoner in turn as Bowren reads the sentence given to each: ‘Franko. V. R. Death by hanging. (pause) Jefferson. R. T. Death by hanging. (pause) Pinkley. V. L. Thirty years’ imprisonment’, and so on. Reisman’s order: ‘Alright, Sergeant. Have them fall in according to height, right to left’ helps emphasise the physical and ethnic heterogeneity of the team. Of those team members who will have the most significant roles in the events to come, the enormous Samson Posey (Clint Walker) and the gangly Pinkley (Donald Sutherland) stand at the tall end while Franko (John Cassavetes) is nearly at the other extremity. His truculently shouted ‘Eleven!’ when the rank is ordered to sound off is an early indicator of his wilful nonconformity.
The Usual Suspects used the tagline ‘Five Criminals. One Line Up. No Coincidence’ and made the line-up the defining image of its release campaign. The film locates this scene between the sequences of the team-in-waiting being arrested individually and the interviews that lead into the holding-cell discussion of a possible team job. Only the most attentive viewer is likely to notice or impute significance to the absence of the narrating Verbal from the arrests and questioning sequences. It is the very pleasure of watching a particular convention enacted – the introduction to the talents and idiosyncrasies of a particular team – that distracts us from this crucial elision. How the individual team members read the line-up phrase, ‘Hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker!’, provides an early hint to their character traits; Hockney and Fenster both play it cool, though Fenster’s garbled accent and diction are also a source of comedy; McManus’ wild-eyed variation on the phrase suggests a powder-keg personality; Keaton finds the process and his part in it beneath contempt; Verbal is quietly spoken but his strangely gentle intonation is also suggestive of controlled malice.
MISFITS
Within the team film corpus there may be recognised a misfit tradition, appearing both as a distinct sub-set – for example, Major League (1989) and Cool Runnings (1993) – and as a more diluted tendency inflecting a great many texts. Basinger describes the team in Bataan as a ‘collection of misfits who will be assembled into a coherent fighting group’ (2003: 45). Will Wright identifies in certain later westerns what he terms the ‘professional plot’ which features ‘a group of heroes, each with special fighting ability, who combine for the battle’ (1977: 85). Alongside the World War II combat film, this aspect of the professional plot evidently feeds into the genealogy of the team film formula. Wright cites Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1957), a film that also has a pronounced misfit flavour, as an example of the professional plot; Chance (John Wayne) is derided for the weakness of his team: ‘A game-legged old man and a drunk. That’s all you got?’ The drunk Dude (Dean Martin) is, however, a former lawman and one-time crack-shot, reduced to ignominy by a failed love affair. The events of Rio Bravo give him an opportunity to sober up and redeem himself; such redemption or ‘last chance’ being itself a common motif of the team film for one or more team members. The game-legged old man, Stumpy (Walter Brennan), proves his worth through unwavering loyalty and the team is completed by the addition of Colorado (Ricky Nelson), a talented young quick-draw specialist who is initially reluctant to become involved.
The team who comprise
Ocean’s Eleven are finely balanced between high-level competence and a (frequently comic) misfit dimension. As their backer Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) observes to Danny and Rusty: ‘You’re gonna need a crew as nuts as you are.’ Although the gathering phase involves several displays of great talent, it also introduces several characters in terms of quirks and foibles that may militate against successful completion of the job. Our first encounter with electronics expert Livingstone Dell (Eddie Jamison) is prefaced by Danny and Rusty’s discussion of the state of his nerves. We see Dell working for the FBI as part of a surveillance operation and are quickly given an insight into how strung out and twitchy he is; stuttering ‘D… D… D… Don’t touch that!’ to an agent about to interfere with his carefully-arranged equipment. Dell’s anxiety will later cause a near-miss for the team when critical directions he has written upon the palm of his hand are erased as he wipes his heavily sweating brow. Similarly, the competitive tensions between the Malloy Twins (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan) are conveyed at the audience’s first encounter with the duo through their quick-fire bickering before a race.
In The Dirty Dozen the misfit component is central to the film’s narrative premise, though it will emerge that, for most of the men, the reasons for their incarceration (violence, dishonesty, cunning) prove relevant skills in their training and on the mission, while a couple of the others are the victims of circumstance rather than outright felons. A misfit streak is also evident in the dozen’s leader, Reisman, as General Worden (Ernest Borgnine) discerns from his file:
GENERAL: I’ve got your service record here, Major. Lot of fireworks. Lot of transfers. One tough scrape after another. Very short on discipline. (pause) Very short on discipline.
Hence, there is a fundamental aptness to Reisman’s assignment to this mission. It is, as the General observes, ‘made for someone like you’. However, Reisman is at first highly reluctant to participate (as, indeed, Lee Marvin as Rico is initially reluctant to join and lead The Professionals!). He asserts that the plan is the work of ‘a raving lunatic’ and that the fundamental problem is the ‘twelve deadheads’ whom he is supposed to train:
REISMAN: These men are, by definition, incapable of taking any kind of discipline or authority; much less intensive training!
Established at an early stage of the film, the misfit theme of The Dirty Dozen forms a central plank of its narrative premise and one that bears upon the improbability of the proposition being successfully realised from the very start.
PREPARATION
Scenes of the group involved in preparatory activities appear in most team movies. These may take the form of a concentration on the acquisition and development of individual skills and readiness or, in instances where team members are already sufficiently skilled, of application to particular tasks. In
The Magnificent Seven preparations involve the construction of walls in the village in order to funnel the attacking bandits towards a planned point, as well as training the villagers in the use of firearms. This last element forms a comic exchange between O’Reilly and an over-eager villager who just cannot follow O’Reilly’s repeated instructions: ‘Slow now. Slow. Squeeze it. Squeeze it. Slow.’ This culminates in the exasperated O’Reilly recommending that the villager simply take the gun ‘and use it like a club!’
In Ocean’s Eleven, voice-over features heavily in the preparatory scenes; Danny’s voice and instructions carry over from the earlier scene where he outlines his plan to the later vignettes where we see those instructions being carried out:
DANNY (v.o.): Alright. Here’s how we begin. First task; reconnaissance. I want to know everything that’s going on in all three casinos … From the rotation of the dealers to the path of every cash cart. I want to know everything about every guard, every watcher, anyone with a security pass….
The image-track now shifts from the casino floor to two security technicians on a break in a staff room. The volume of the music reduces and Danny’s voice ceases, allowing us an aural window to hear one technician speak:
TECHNICIAN: There’s this girl Charmaine…
The Technician’s voice recedes and Danny’s voice-over resumes:
DANNY (v.o.): I want to know where they’re from, what their nicknames are, how they take their coffee.
TECHNICIAN: She’s a dancer at the Crazy Horse too. She’s working her way through medical school.
Team member Frank Catton is revealed eavesdropping on the technicians’ conversation. He writes ‘Charmaine’ and ‘Crazy Horse’ onto a crossword he is pretending to complete. In a later scene the dancer at the Crazy Horse will take the technician’s security card and pass it to Rusty to be used in the team’s elaborate plan. Many of the preparation scenes in
Ocean’s Eleven involve this use of voice-over blended with live dialogue from the flash-forward scenes. In tandem with some important elisions regarding how the plan is intended to unfold, this temporally-shifting technique facilitates some misdirection of the audience, allowing us to be fooled initially when elderly team member Saul appears to have a genuine heart attack, and again when it seems as though Danny has been vetoed from further participation in the heist. Such innovations develop from the established tendency for difficulties to be introduced in preparatory and training scenes, heralding likely crisis points in the execution of the mission (such as the propensity of tunnels to collapse in
The Great Escape) and for certain characters to be flagged as weak links. Montage devices are regularly in evidence during the preparation phases of team films; a succession of abbreviated scenes, usually involving repeated actions and conveying a sense of progress and the passage of time. Often overlaid with the film’s theme music, montage scenes may simultaneously address several characters engaged in activities that are physically separate but which cohere in the overall plan, though, if required, the interrupted nature of montage also facilitates the obfuscation of important absences.
FIRST-RUN/MAIN-EVENT
Most team films share a recognisable separation between a preliminary piece of teamwork and a subsequent, paramount, task. The Usual Suspects’ first-run is the heist against the ‘New York’s Finest Taxi Service’ which Verbal describes in voice-over to Kujan, his narrative framing a flashback scene of the team intercepting a police car that is illegally transporting a criminal and his goods:
VERBAL (v.o.): New York’s Finest Taxi Service was not your normal taxi service. It was a ring of corrupt cops in the NYPD that ran a high-profit racket driving smugglers and drug dealers all over the city. For a few hundred dollars a mile, you got your own blue-and-white and a police escort. They even had their own business cards…
Verbal’s voice-over continues; then the flashback scene of the team holding up the police car – including ‘live’ dialogue – unfolds.
VERBAL (v.o. cont.): Keaton made an anonymous phone call. The press was on the scene before the cops were. Strausz and Rizzi were indicted three days later. Within a few weeks, fifty more cops went down with them. Everybody got it right in the ass, from the Chief on down. It was beautiful.
Mission: Impossible is structured around three set-piece tasks: the failed Prague mission which results in the death of several members, necessitating a re-constitution of the team; the Langley mission, where information is taken from a well-protected vault; and the channel tunnel mission in which Ethan (Tom Cruise) unmasks his betrayer and clears his name. In the second of these exercises,
Mission: Impossible demonstrates the propensity for more recent team films to intermingle the planning and execution phases rather than effect a clear temporal separation. Monologue from a briefing scene becomes the voice-over to the operation itself as the image-track switches to the subsequent event. Such asynchronous representations are instrumental in the overall practice of misdirecting and unsettling audiences accustomed to the clearer order of earlier team films, though their repeated deployment ratifies their own place in the system.
In The Dirty Dozen the first-run comprises the team’s successful participation in a military exercise where they outwit and defeat the far larger company commanded by Reisman’s nemesis, Colonel Breed (Robert Ryan). Having to argue for the continuation of the dozen’s training following a breach of camp discipline, Reisman asserts to Breed that ‘any one of mine is worth ten of yours’, and the exercise provides the opportunity to test this assertion as well as testing the team for their eventual goal. In the presence of Reisman and Breed’s commanding officer, Reisman articulates the terms of the challenge:
REISMAN: You let my twelve men act as an independent unit attached to the opposing force and they’ll knock out Breed’s Headquarters and capture his entire staff.
However daring and successful a first-run may be, it is invariably characterised as a significantly lesser challenge to that constituted by the main-event; a point emphasised by Reisman to his dozen following their victory supper:
REISMAN: But we still have one operation to go. You guys foul up on this one and none of us will ever play the violin again. Because up until now it’s all been a game, but as of tomorrow night it’s going to be the real thing.
THE CODA
A re-gathering of the team at the film’s close is a frequently repeated motif, often effecting a mood of quietude after the pell-mell of the main-event. In her delineation of the archetypal World War II combat film Basinger specifies such a coda, which suggests that the device owes its place in the team film formula to this branch of its ancestry: ‘THE END appears on the screen. (A “rollcall” of the combatants appears, either as cast names or pictures of the actors with their cast names or as a scene in which they march by or fly by or pass by us in some way living and/or dead.) (2003: 69).
The coda re-asserts the significance of the team as a defining aspect of the movie. Structurally speaking, it book-ends the narrative, mirroring the original gathering. At the end of
The Dirty Dozen the three surviving team members – Reisman, Bowren and Wladislaw (Charles Bronson) – are re-gathered in a hospital room, each recovering from injuries sustained on the mission. The visiting General Worden offers Reisman the praise, ‘You did a fine job, Major’, but it is only when the General leaves that the downbeat mood lifts as the coda proper starts. A still image of the dozen’s victory supper appears and their earlier collective laughter after succeeding at the first-run is heard. To the right of the screen the team members’ faces appear in succession and their character names are read out. No longer tied to their crimes and corresponding sentences they have become a glorious rollcall of those lost in action.
The original 1969 version of The Italian Job is unusual in that it leaves the team in the middle of a perilous situation, their bus finely balanced over the edge of a cliffside road, gold at one end and team at the other. Charlie Croker’s (Michael Caine) line, ‘Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea’, forms the film’s last line of dialogue and amounts to a rejection of the coda model – especially to the extent that it has for decades left audiences puzzling over the team’s next possible move. The 2003 remake adopts a more familiar approach; a concluding scene has the victorious team gathered drinking champagne and their leader Charlie (Mark Wahlberg) proposes a toast to their mentor and former leader, killed at an earlier stage. This bitter-sweet reference is the film’s final piece of live action dialogue, followed by light-hearted vignettes – shown in a reduced portion of the screen alongside the end credits – in which Charlie’s voice-over describes how the individual team members go on to enjoy their share of the loot.
Typically, team film codas are marked by the absence of dialogue, though Lewis Milestone’s Ocean’s Eleven uses phases of voice, becoming successively more distant – on-screen to off-screen, diegetic to non-diegetic – to gradually close its narrative and ease the audience’s transit out of what has been, by any standards, an enormously talkative picture. Seated upon a chapel pew, the remaining team members attend the funeral of their dead colleague. An on-screen speaker states that ‘the deceased is being cremated’; devastating news for the team since the coffin contains their loot. At this point the off-screen voice of the minister performing the liturgy is heard, commencing with the ironic words: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’ A left-to-right tracking shot passes the ten disappointed men as the Minister’s words conclude with the compounding irony: ‘…give you peace this day and always.’ There is then a cut to the group outside, walking aimlessly down the street. The end credits roll as the relevant characters are in shot, while a billboard in the background echoes the names of the key Rat Pack players. And the soundtrack to this last scene of a film that consistently invites interpretation in terms of a blurring of filmic and real worlds? It is the voice of the team leader, Frank Sinatra, singing the title track.
note
1 Unless identified otherwise, all citations of dialogue are transcribed from the films.
bibliography
Basinger, J. (2003) The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Kozloff, S. (2000)
Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McQuarrie, C. (2000) The Usual Suspects. London: Faber & Faber.
Strong, J. (2006) ‘Crew, Squads, Sevens, Elevens and Dozens: The Team Film Genre’, Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, 26, 39–54.
____ (2008) ‘Team Films in Adaptation: Remembered Stories and Forgotten Books’, Adaptation, 1, 44–57.
Wright, W. (1977) Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.