Time to unveil the trio of titles that are joining the selection of 4xblu’s online store: Philip D’Antoni’s “The Seven-Ups,” David Cronenberg’s “Shivers,” and “The Marriage of Maria Braun” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Prior to calling the shots on a trio of movies that featured some of the most iconic car chases in film history, Philip D’Antoni got his start at CBS, where he literally worked his way up from the mailroom to serving as a producer on a string of documentaries where locations such as London and Rome provided the backdrops for glamorous actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, and Melina Mercouri. After another documentary series, 1966’s “This Proud Land” (which was comprised of six hourlong episodes, each spotlighting a different region of America), D’Antoni hit the silver screen with his first feature, the Steve McQueen-starring “Bullitt.” The film’s centerpiece was a car chase that would become the stuff of legend, in spite of technical advisor Randy Jurgensen’s assessment that it’s “bland” because there was nobody on the streets while it was being shot.
For his next film, D’Antoni chose “The French Connection,” a gritty New York cop drama that was based on a book recounting the exploits of real-life cops Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. The movie was a huge success, becoming the first R-rated film to win an Oscar for Best Picture, but when 20th Century Fox set about making a sequel they had to do it without D’Antoni or Egan and Grosso (who’d served as technical advisors on the original), since they’d opted to do “The Seven-Ups” instead. Though often thought of as a sequel to “The French Connection,” the fact is that the story that is the basis for the film is from a different period in Egan’s career and Roy Scheider, who’d played the Russo character in “The French Connection,” reprised the role in name only, as his character in “The Seven-Ups” is in fact based on Egan.
Unfortunately, “The Seven-Ups” got lost in the shuffle as a flurry of cop movies got released in the wake of “The French Connection.” D’Antoni would produce a tv show about truckers, “Movin’ On,” and sign a deal for a half-dozen TV movies, but after “The Seven-Ups” that was pretty much it. As D’Antoni put it, “I took a week off after ‘The Seven-Ups’ and I thought it was great. I thought I’d give it a year off, take a year off, I had enough money and I had to take a year off, and the year off turned into 37 or 38 or 44 now, I think… I don’t miss anything.”