A week ago today, McQuarrie discussed one of Czerny's big scenes from De Palma's film in a tweeted response to Tom Gregory. "DePalma," wrote McQuarrie, "while he certainly has flair, doesn't do anything in Mission just for show. His low angles in the fish restaurant, for example, create an intense sense of pressure and keep the fish tank above them in the story. He's not showing off. He's setting up. He let the scene and location tell him where to put the camera and when to cut. He understands that a scene is not just a series of lines, but a series of emotional impulses. The *visuals* tell the story. The dialogue is merely score. Watch the scene again without sound."

On a side note, I love this response McQuarrie tweeted earlier this morning to someone asking him how he avoids plot holes: "Avoid plot."

De Palma’s ultraviolent, ultra-quotable, ultra-colorful, ultra everything remake of Howard Hawks’s gangster classic is the crass flipside to The Godfather, a massively deranged and gleefully disreputable tale of the rise and plunging downfall of a Cuban immigrant turned Miami drug kingpin. Al Pacino throws himself into the title role with the fury of an angry Rottweiler, while Michelle Pfeiffer glowers gorgeously in her breakthrough role as his trophy wife. Featuring cinema’s second most shocking shower scene, and a script by Oliver Stone, Scarface is the film of the Reagan eighties.

It’s telling, perhaps, that the movies associated with the Iraq War have less of an aesthetic legacy than those associated with World War I or II or even Vietnam. In 2005’s Jarhead, Mendes even deferred to Francis Ford Coppola by showing Marines watching Apocalypse Now for inspiration, conceding to the older film’s (and older conflict’s) hold on the collective imagination. For the most part, post-9/11 American war movies have been more attuned to politics and aftermath, with spectacle either miniaturized—as in the tense, horror-movie-like bomb-defusing sequences in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker—or else eliminated altogether. The most formally innovative Iraq War movie, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, avoids the battlefield altogether, focusing instead on a panoply of multimedia perspectives to get across themes of division and disinformation; where his 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War favored a dreamlike, lyrical detachment evincing distance from its subject matter, Redacted’s surveillance-style textures and artful integration of documentary material were evidence that the director was trying to speak to the here and now.

In the enthralling BLOW OUT, brilliantly crafted by Brian De Palma, John Travolta gives one of his greatest performances, as a movie sound-effects man who believes he has accidentally recorded a political assassination. He enlists the help of a possible eyewitness to the crime (Nancy Allen), who may be in danger herself, to uncover the truth. With its jolting stylistic flourishes, intricate plot, profoundly felt characterizations, and gritty evocation of early-1980s Philadelphia, BLOW OUT is an American paranoia thriller unlike any other, as well as a devilish reflection on moviemaking.

McQuarrie, responding via two tweets, wrote back, "DePalma, while he certainly has flair, doesn't do anything in Mission just for show. His low angles in the fish restaurant, for example, create an intense sense of pressure and keep the fish tank above them in the story. He's not showing off. He's setting up. He let the scene and location tell him where to put the camera and when to cut. He understands that a scene is not just a series of lines, but a series of emotional impulses. The *visuals* tell the story. The dialogue is merely score. Watch the scene again without sound."

In the 1970s and beyond, Kehoe ran in the same circles as Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jill Clayburgh, and others. Before The Untouchables, Kehoe and De Niro had also both been part of the cast of James Goldstone's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. A year after The Untouchables, Kehoe appeared in Martin Brest's Midnight Run, which starred De Niro. Kehoe had also appeared in an early Art Linson production, Car Wash, in 1976.

From Mike Barnes' Hollywood Reporter article:

In '70s cult classics, Kehoe portrayed Scruggs, the cowboy who pumps gas, in Car Wash (1976) and the marksman "Set Shot" Buford in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979). His résumé also included Melvin and Howard (1980), Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984).

In the best picture Oscar winner The Sting (1973), directed by George Roy Hill, Kehoe portrayed the Erie Kid, the grifter who participates in the con game with Paul Newman and Robert Redford's characters to bring down Robert Shaw's crime boss.

He also was memorable that year as Tom Keough, one of the cops on the take, in Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973), and he reteamed with Al Pacino on Broadway in 1977 in David Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.

Kehoe played Al Capone's (Robert De Niro) bookkeeper, Payne, in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Joe Pantoliano's two-timing employee, Jerry Geisler, in Midnight Run (1988).

Born on Nov. 21, 1934, in the Astoria section of Queens, Kehoe enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and spent three years with the 101st Airborne Division.

After the service, he studied with famed acting teacher Stella Adler and appeared on Broadway in 1963 in Edward Albee's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and in off-Broadway productions of Bertolt Brecht's Drums in the Night in 1967 and Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1968.

Kehoe made his big-screen debut as the bartender in Jimmy Breslin's The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971) and followed that with a role in Peter Yates' The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

He appeared on television in the '80s reboot of The Twilight Zone, Miami Vice and Murder, She Wrote and in films including The Star Chamber (1983), D.O.A. (1988), Young Guns II (1990), Falling Down (1993), The Paper (1994), Gospel According to Harry (1994) and The Game (1997), his final onscreen appearance.

Kehoe chose not to work as often as others in the business.

"How much money does one person need in this life? How many cars can you own? How many houses can you live in?" he asked in a 1974 story in New York magazine. "I saw those TV series stars out on the coast riding around in their sports cars like kids with a ten-thousand-dollar toy, crashing into trees and driving off the edges of mountains because they're bored. They're not using themselves as actors anymore, and it all become about making money."

Lola: One of my favorites.

Luis: Ohhh, yeah!

Lola: I mean, you're in a Brian De Palma movie, playing Al Pacino's sidekick!

Luis: You ever meet somebody, and your hands get all cold and sweaty?

Lola: Mmm-hmm...

Luis: And you're trying to be, like, really cool about it...

Lola: [laughing] Yes!

Luis: And stuff like that...

Lola: Yes

Luis: Well, that's what it was like for me to meet Al.

Lola: Now, how did you land this part? Did you have another friend who worked on this movie and set you up?

Luis: No-, no...

Lola: Okay.

Luis: My agent, that guy that I told you I got hooked up with by Richard Aster, sent me to an audition. It was funny, because the night before, my brother-in-law and his cousin found this old beat-up leather jacket in Tompkins Square Park. I put that jacket on, and I'm wearing it to the audition, and I get my first line out, and Brian, Brian De Palma starts cracking up. And then, they go, "Thank you," and I'm, "Aw, dang, he laughed at me, man." And I got home, and the casting director called me directly, at home, to tell me, "You got the part."

Speaking to Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune in 1973, Francois Truffaut made an observation that’s cast a shadow over war movies ever since, even those seemingly opposed to war. Asked why there’s little killing in his films, Truffaut replied, “I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” The evidence often bears him out. In Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir Jarhead, Swofford recalls joining fellow recruits in getting pumped up while watching Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, two of the most famous films about the horrors of war. (On the occasion of the death of R. Lee Ermey, the real-life drill instructor who played the same in Full Metal Jacket, Swofford offered a remembrance in the New York Times with the headline “Full Metal Jacket Seduced My Generation and Sent Us to War.”)

Is it true that movies glamorize whatever they touch, no matter how horrific? And if a war movie isn’t to sound a warning against war, what purpose does it serve? Even if Truffaut’s wrong — and it’s hard to see his observation applying to at least some of the movies on this list — it might be best to remove the burden of making the world a better place from war movies. It’s a lot to ask, especially since war seems to be baked into human existence.

So, like other inescapable elements of the human experience, we tell stories about war, stories that reflect our attitudes toward it, and how they shift over time. War movies reflect the artistic impulses of their creators, but they also reflect the attitudes of the times and places in which they were created. A World War II film made in the midst of the war, for instance, might serve a propagandist purpose than one made after the war ends, when there’s more room for nuance and complexity, but it also might not.

Maybe the ultimate purpose of a war movie is to let others hear the force of these stories. Another director, Sam Fuller, once offered a quote that doesn’t necessarily contradict Truffaut’s observation but better explains the impulse to make war movies: “A war film’s objective, no matter how personal or emotional, is to make a viewer feel war.” The films selected for this list of the genre’s most essential entries often have little in common, but they do share that. Each offers a vision that asks viewers to consider and understand the experience of war, be it in the trenches of World War I, the wilderness skirmishes of Civil War militias, or the still-ongoing conflicts that have helped define 21st-century warfare.

Compiled as Sam Mendes’s stylistically audacious World War I film, 1917, heads to theaters, this list opts for a somewhat narrow definition of a war movie, focusing on films that deal with the experiences of soldiers during wartime. That means no films about the experience of returning from war (Coming Home, The Best Years of Our Lives, First Blood) or of civilian life during wartime (Mrs. Miniver, Forbidden Games, Hope and Glory) or of wartime stories whose action rests far away from the battlefield (Casablanca). It also leaves films primarily about the Holocaust out of consideration, as they seem substantively different from other sorts of war films. Also excluded are films that blur genres, like the military science fiction of Starship Troopers and Aliens (even if the latter does have a lot to say about the Vietnam War). That eliminates many great movies, but it leaves room for many others, starting with a film made at the height of World War II in an attempt to help rally a nation with a story of an operation whose success required secrecy, extensive training, and beating overwhelming odds.

Brian De Palma’s brutal, fact-inspired film about the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese woman didn’t catch on with audiences, helping to end the cycle of ’80s Vietnam War films and sidelining star Michael J. Fox’s attempt to cross over to more dramatic roles. It remains a tough film to watch, in part because De Palma shifts his skills as a creator of tense suspense films to a story of unbearable sadness in which a group of American soldiers (whose ranks include John C. Reilly and John Leguizamo in their film debuts) uses the permission of a violent, charismatic superior (Sean Penn) to engage in barbaric acts. Fox’s casting as the film’s moral center, and a man who suffers for his honesty, feels disorienting at first, but it works. Marty McFly looks out of place in such an awful situation, but that only drives the point home.

Finally there’s Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which helped sharpen my fondness for yet another disreputable filmmaker who deals with lurid pulpy material — only difference being this filmmaker has talent and likes to take vicious jabs at the political establishment, often to his disadvantage. Brian de Palma’s Domino is a mess, but no more so than his other seemingly tossed-off efforts (Body Double, Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars). It’s stylish and funny, with some of its best broadsides aimed at the CIA; there are audacious setpieces and you can debate how successfully they’re executed but De Palma has the balls to dare, and in my book dare well. The filmmaker, alas, has disowned his work, declaring this wasn’t the film he intended; on the plus side you hope (as in the case of Snake Eyes) that a director’s cut will be made available some day.