The art of the argument

With the release of John Patrick Shanley's taut two-hander 'Doubt', in which Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman go head-to-head, Time Out looks at some of cinema's other big bust-ups

Big Night (1995)
Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci's comic drama of bickering restaurateur brothers
Like every successful two-hander – be it ‘Waiting for Godot’, ‘Frost/Nixon’ or ‘Steptoe and Son’ – ‘Big Night’ deals with the eternal struggle between the ego and the id. Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci play squabbling American-Italian brothers Primo and Secondo, respectively chef and manager of a struggling restaurant in 1950s New Jersey. Acrimony, hostility and bile are ladled out as Primo clings to the highest aspirations of his art while Secondo seeks to remind his brother of the harsh realities of the marketplace. The ‘big night’ itself ends in tears of realisation and regret, but you just know they’re going to be at it again in the morning…

The War of the Roses (1989)
Danny DeVito proves his worth as a director with this black, black comedy
Possibly the most gleefully unhinged and dark-hearted mainstream film to have ever been served up as a comedy by a major Hollywood studio, Danny DeVito’s hymn to marital dilapidation is singular in the depths of splenetic fury and gallows humour to which it descends. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner are the Roses, an outwardly sickeningly perfect couple of upscale yuppie drones. Behind closed doors, however, there’s big trouble in paradise. As a portrait of brinkmanship, resentment and pure unalloyed spite it remains unmatched to this day, with the irreversible chemical burn of the Roses’ marriage providing fuel for some of Tinseltown’s most caustic zingers.

The In-Laws (1979)
Seventies screwball classic directed by Arthur 'Love Story' Hiller
‘King of the Kvetchers’ Alan Arkin co-starred with James Caan in quibble classic ‘Freebie and the Bean’ (1974) and held his own in the screen adaptation of David Mamet’s potty-mouthed hate-fest ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ (1992). But towering over both of these testaments to tetchiness is his terminally browned-off turn in Arthur Hiller’s absurdist CIA satire. On the eve of his daughter’s marriage to undercover Agency burn-out Peter Falk’s son, Arkin’s timorous Jewish dentist finds himself a patsy in the removal of a banana republic dictator. Throughout the mounting lunacy, he and his future in-law bicker and fuss like a pair of old maids.

The Exorcist III (1989)
Original 'Exorcist' scribe William Peter Blatty takes the helm
The first ‘Exorcist’ movie proved that even a demonic hell-beast can’t resist the lure of a good verbal squabble. But author William Peter Blatty took things a step further with his ‘official’ sequel. One of the most linguistically exacting of all Hollywood screenwriters (check out his bizarre, verbose mental-institution drama ‘The Ninth Configuration’), Blatty’s intricate and philosophically challenging script turned ‘Exorcist 3’ into something more than the horror cash-in its producers were doubtless expecting. The film is essentially constructed as two riveting religious dialogues, the first between George C Scott’s grouchy cop Kinderman and his benevolent old ecclesiastical sidekick Father Dyer, then between Kinderman and a far darker man of the cloth: expired exorcist Father Karras, now possessed by the soul of a serial killer.

It Happened One Night (1934)
Capra's charming, zinger-filled road movie with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert
The great depression was a boon for bickerers, as traditions were upheaved and social change swept America. In Hollywood, the shifting status of women provided ample material for a series of combative culture-clash comedies: ‘Bringing up Baby’, ‘His Girl Friday’ and this crackling Capra classic, in which devil-may-care journo cad Clark Gable and airhead heiress Claudette Colbert find themselves thrown together on an all-night bus journey, and rancour gradually turns to romance.

The Mother and the Whore (1973)
Post-New Wave masterpiece from French director Jean Eustache
The jewel of French director Jean Eustache’s tragically undersized oeuvre remains this hip and brilliantly verbose 1973 ménage à trois between Jean-Pierre Léaud’s poised-but-sensitive city slicker and flat-sharing duo Bernadette Lafont (the ‘mother’) and Françoise Lebrun (the ‘whore’). Its vast run-time (the UK version clocks in at 215 mins) belies the fact that the film remains fully engaging from start to finish, locking you tightly into the minds of its characters and offering a masterclass in realist, intellectually savvy dialogue. The closing hour contains one of the most beautiful and poetic monologues committed to film.

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Powell and Preddburger's brilliant follow-up to 1944's 'A Canterbury Tale'
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger gave the knockabout comedy a Gaelic twist with this witty and wistful Highland romance. Forthright English maid Wendy Hiller sallies to the remote Hebridean island of Kiloran with her sights set on marriage, but finds herself trapped on the mainland in the company of Roger Livesey’s equally outspoken Laird. Three days of scrappy, good-natured banter culminate in a gripping seafaring finale steeped in Powell’s customary rustic mysticism.

Heat (1995)
Two of Hollywood's most revered male leads go mano-a-mano
It was the pairing the world had been waiting for, and in 1995 Robert De Niro and Al Pacino could be seen sharing the same screen – for the first, but not the last time ever (see last year’s calamitous 'Righteous Kill’) – in Michael Mann’s magisterial drama, ‘Heat. In its slow and detailed build-up we’re introduced to Pacino’s world-weary, always-gets-his-man cop and De Niro’s jaded, one-last-job robber as they go head-to-head with the intention of getting a last-minute advantage over each other. The film’s centrepiece is the famous coffee shop scene where the pair meet for the first time, swap some severe words, then go their separate ways; for two guys who supposedly each detest what the other stands for, there’s a lot of love in that room.

Midnight Run (1988)
De Niro shows his comic side in this big-budget buddy road movie
It’s De Niro again, this time the up-tight foil to underused funnyman Charles Grodin in this 1988 road comedy from Richard Donner. The set-up is gloriously simple: De Niro is the mercenary sent to New York to apprehend fast-talking fraudster Grodin and return him to a bondsman in LA before the mob whack him. The scenes of exploding helicopters and urban shoot-outs are top-drawer, but it’s the catty rapport between the two leads that gives the film its enduring fizz. See also ’48 Hours’.

Interview (2007)
Steve Buscemi's taut two-hander based on a scrip by assassinated Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh
Top-notch quarreller Steve Buscemi is a past master of the Bicker Flick. Not only did he steal the show with his constantly complaining Mr Pink in ‘Reservoir Dogs’ (1992), but managed to squabble with the virtually mute Peter Stormare in the Coen brothers’ crime caper ‘Fargo’ (1996). He recently returned to the genre with ‘Interview’, a gauche and impenetrable dissection of celebrity in which he and Sienna Miller are at each other’s throat for the longest 90 minutes in cinema history. Not even during their abortive sexual shenanigans or bouts of drunken, actorly soul-searching do their conjoined streams of vitriol dry up.

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