Treat Williams Represented Both Sides of the American Character: The Violent Dreamer and The Handsome Rogue

A man wakes from a nightmare in the first moments of Sidney Lumet’s towering Prince of the City (1981). He worries that he’s left the door open, that there are bad men after him and his family. His wife tells him everything is going to be okay but nothing will ever be okay again. Treat Williams is the man, narcotics detective Danny Ciello of the NYPD’s “Special Investigative Unit,” riddled with guilt for wearing a wire to catch crooked cops on the take in a system that has made them into beings pretending to be better than ordinary cops, even better than mere men, rather warrior princes providing protection for the crumbling kingdom of No Wave New York at the end of the 1970s. So what if they skim some drugs here and there, pocket a few ill-got funds? His nightmare is the manifestation of all his sins coming home to roost, a grim tide unstemmable by latches on windows and locks on doors, and the film is the kind of masterpiece that goes undiscovered as such for longer than it should because it’s so grim about our prospects, so uncompromising about our doom. It joins other films from one of the last great years of the New American Cinema like Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way, Warren Beatty’s Reds, Michael Mann’s Thief, Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven and Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort as sharp, incisive, and nihilistic prophecy for the trials to come. On some days, I think it’s the best of them.

When Danny wakes from his nightmare to find himself in the labyrinth of misdeed he’s built that he can’t escape from, he is the conscience of our country, the tatters of our idealism. He is what’s left of the soul of the United States after a paranoid decade that sprung from the deaths of every progressive leader at the end of the 1960s, the shame of Watergate and atrocity of Vietnam… “it’s a fucking nightmare and it never stops,” Danny shouts about halfway through as a parade of prosecutors take their turn trying to milk some information out of Danny to provide the missing pieces to close their open cases. I take it as a warning unheeded that our police force is out of control, our justice system woefully unequipped and uninterested in dealing with it, and as the moment Williams would have become the next Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro, had it not dropped here at the beginning of the Blockbuster era where his extraordinary authenticity was valued less than a glistening physique and gift for snappy one-liners. There’s a scene early on when Danny finally decides to work with a task force seeking out bad cops where, in the middle of the night, he’s tasked to beat up and rob a junkie to provide a fix for a different junkie who’s working for him as an informant. It’s pathetic. The work, the beating, the cries of pain and pleading, the vomit and the blood and then the transference of Danny’s violence to every aspect of his victim’s sad life. It’s etched in Williams’ face: his revulsion not at the fluids he wipes off his quarry’s mouth, but at himself as the cause of so much suffering. Lumet didn’t want to cast a “known” actor for Prince of the City because he didn’t want to waste time for audiences to detach themselves from their expectations. I think he cast Williams because he saw what we see when we look at him: we see ourselves. 

Williams was off by about a decade to be the kind of A-list legend he was meant to be and after an extraordinary turn as a possibly literally infernal pederast in Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk (1985) found his roles increasingly relegated to genre gigs that took advantage of his leading man good looks and easy relatability. The first movie I saw him in, in fact, is a VHS classic called Dead Heat (1988) that I rented on the strength of it being a zombie movie starring SNL alum-cum-steroid freak Joe Piscapo. In it, Williams is another detective, Roger Mortis, who after the murder and zombification of his partner Doug (Piscapo), uncovers a plot by an evil corporation to manufacture eternal life or, failing that, at least an endlessly replicable workforce. I still love this movie in all its goofiness and gore, but I wonder if I would so much were it not for Williams’ absolute commitment to it. He never lets on that he’s in a jokey bit of slapstick action exploitation – he plays it straight and, in hindsight, I think he approached it just like he approached his Detective Danny Ciello: as if these people he was animating were things with value and dignity. I don’t hesitate to admit that the way Roger expresses his grief over a loved one’s death still brings a tear to my eye. That the road from Prince of the City to Dead Heat, though, no matter my genuine affection for the latter, was only seven years long says a lot about the brutality of timing and how small the window is during which planets might align.

Williams’ big break was as hippie leader Bergen in Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of Hair (1979). The tragic hero of the piece, Bergen represents the good times, countercultural shadow to square Claude Hooper Bukowski (John Savage), appointing himself as Bukowski’s means of escape from the shackles of spiritual and physical (military) conformity. Bergen’s the most complex figure in the piece, the representative for an entire nation’s dismay at the kind of conservatism that has metastasized now into a resurgence of white nationalism into the public sphere. If Hair is a hippie telling of the crucifixion, Bergen is its martyr, standing for his principles even as they lead him to his death.

That same year, 1979, Williams was cast as bellicose Cpl Chuck Sitarski om Steven Spielberg’s perhaps overly-hated 1941. Sitarski is the exact inverse of Bergen, a hawk stationed in California when a false report of a Japanese landing during WWII throws the region into chaos and interrupting a USO dance competition. About halfway through, the band really wailing and an entire dancehall afire with the jitterbug, Spielberg does an extended crane shot into a closeup of a seething Sitarski, standing by himself after spotting his arch-enemy, civilian Wally (Bobby Di Cicco) from across the room. Backlit now by a flickering light installation of an American Flag, Sitarski rears back and delivers a haymaker. In just two films, this theater brat’s one-two introduction in grand, expensive big screen productions, find Treat Williams as two-fisted action hero, and before that Treat Williams as moony-eyed guru. He is both sides of the American character: the violent dreamer, the handsome rogue.

Treat Williams is both sides of the American character: the violent dreamer, the handsome rogue.

Before he was done with his early run, he’d be legendary boxer Jack Dempsey and a very fine Stanley Kowalski in a pair of television movies; union leader Jimmy O’Donnell in Sergio Leone’s epic masterwork Once Upon a Time in America (1984); and a border patrol agent paired with Kris Kristofferson, fighting corruption in his unit while trying to transition into a 1980s Tristar home video star in the not great but fun programmer Flashpoint (1984). Williams has a speech in Flashpoint where he chews out a scumbag Mexican lawyer for selling out his own people by protecting the opportunistic “coyotes” exploiting refugees trying to make it across America’s southern border. He delivers it with conviction and outrage. The movie’s starts as nothing special, but Williams is real and his righteousness is unforced.Add a score by Tangerine Dream, a sun-baked Kristofferson, Rip Torn as a cop who’s seen too much, and something about the JFK assassination, and Flashpoint is begging for rediscovery.

I love his three “The Substitute” pictures, too, taking the baton from Tom Berenger in the first The Substitute (1996) as an undercover mercenary pretending to be a substitute teacher while really only teaching his tough, disadvantaged, cartoonishly vile charges the real meaning of social engineering. A riff on Mark Lester’s exploitation classic Class of 1984 (1982), I don’t know that Adam Winguard’s The Guest (2014) is a thing without Williams’ mini-franchise.

I think Williams’ best film, though, if it’s not Prince of the City, is Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk (1985). In it, Williams’ natural charm, his instant-likeability, how easy it is to identify with his desire to do the right thing while struggling with the difficulties of moral certitude in a morally uncertain world, is employed as the sweet liquid bait in the maw of a carnivorous plant. Based loosely on a short story called “Where Are You Going. Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, it follows precocious fifteen-year-old Connie (Laura Dern), aflame in the first bloom of her sexual awakening and given to spending her days at the beach and the local mall with her friends, flirting with boys, and getting in trouble. She meets handsome, mysterious, much older man Arnold Friend one night at a burger shack and is flattered, and disconcerted, by his directness. Something happens between Connie and Friend one day when he talks her out of her house and into his clutches, and she’s essentially, irrevocably changed.

I tend to lump Smooth Talk in with Boaz Davidson’s The Last American Virgin (1982) as male and female tellings of the same awkward, often terrifying, journey from childhood into sexual maturity. Friend is the Serpent in the Garden of Connie’s innocence. He spots Connie in a flashy halter top and, when she walks past him, coos “I’m watching you” from behind dark sunglasses while he points at her with a finger drawing coils tight around her in the air. He has been watching her, reciting the names of her friends and family and offering what seems like a supernatural knowledge of her comings and goings, reciting her fear and desire while flat on his back across the trunk of his customized puke green 1966 Pontiac LeMans. “I know everybody,” he says, and Williams’ warmth and natural charm curdles now into poisonous insinuation. “I’ll hold you so nice and tight you won’t need to think about anything or pretend anything. You won’t even want to get away. Even if you’re scared.” He’s as awful, as hungry in Smooth Talk as Robert Mitchum is in Night of the Hunter (1955)

The downward arc of their awful interaction is the template for Robert De Niro’s and Juliette Lewis’ dynamic in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) just as Williams’ performance in Prince of the City seems a great deal like the inspiration for Michael J. Fox’s performance in Casualties of War (1989). He was an actor’s actor and no role was too small for him. He was always working and, in that work, nailing the tenor and vibe of whatever he was asked to do. He’s tremendous as hair-trigger “Critical” Bill in Gary Fleder’s Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995), a gangster asked by his buddy Jimmy (Andy Garcia) to imitate a cop in a romantic plot gone terribly wrong when “Critical” Bill absolutely loses his mind. He’s wonderful as a different kind of villain altogether in Simon Wincer’s underestimated The Phantom (1996) as unctuous archvillain Xander Drax: all carefully-oiled privilege masking, imperfectly, his reptilian rapaciousness. In Stephen Sommers’ aquatic creature feature Deep Rising (1998) he’s completely different again as hale Captain John, trying to save his crew from a giant, tentacled monstrosity with a rollicking, comedic exasperation; and then he’s grieving father Pat in Ulu Grosbard’s The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) trying to hold things together with his wife Beth (Michelle Pfeiffer) when their son who’s been missing for nine years shows up on their suburban doorstep, offering to mow their lawn. I’ll revisit him in all of these roles and more – for his professionalism and craft, certainly, but in things like his widowed brain surgeon Dr. Brown in his four-season run on the WB’s Everwood set in a fictional town in my home state of Colorado, – in things like “Everwood, I’ll visit him for his warmth and easiness.

Treat Williams died in a motorcycle crash June 12, 2023 an hour or so after posting a short video of mowing grass captioned “What a real Vermonter does” to his social media. It’s everything he was to us from the start to the end in five words and 43 seconds: genuine, relatable, with an artist’s ability to articulate a moment and then invite us into it to share it with him. This saloon gets closer to closing time every day. G’bye, Treat Williams. See you in Everwood.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.