Merriam-Webster: The meaning of JOURNEYMAN is a worker who has learned a trade and works for another person, usually by the day.
Ted Kotcheff was the epitome of the journeyman director. No one would ever accuse the Canadian filmmaker of being an auteur, but for an impressive eighteen-year run (1971-1989), Kotcheff’s professionalism resulted in several impressive films and, arguably, two classics. Before Kotcheff’s cinematic breakthrough, he paid fifteen years of dues in episodic television and the occasional less-than-memorable feature. All that time spent learning his craft came together in the disturbing and genuinely shocking 1971 Aussie horror-thriller Wake in Fright.
The premise of Wake in Fright is simple enough: A young schoolteacher named John Grant (played with zero vanity by Gary Bond) heads out to meet his girlfriend to go on holiday. He stops over in a small town, and in one booze-infused evening, he gambles away all of his money and ends up stuck in this outback hovel with a group of bizarre and threatening locals. Grant descends into depravity as the figurative roadblocks in his way of escape become more menacing. Wake in Fright is a hard film to watch (especially if you love kangaroos), but its uncompromising delivery makes it at least a one-time watch necessity for horror fans and cinephiles.
Unfortunately, after making its premiere at Cannes (where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or) under the name Outback, the film sat on the shelf for ages, unavailable on VHS, DVD, or cable TV. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Wake in Fright saw the light of day (and this time under its proper name) when it was re-released in Australia to great critical acclaim. Wake in Fright isn’t for the faint of heart, but is it ever effective? While still not the easiest film to locate for viewing purposes, it’s at least possible now (I caught it on the Criterion Channel, and Amazon Prime has carried it previously).
The fact that Wake in Fright disappeared from view so quickly didn’t give Kotcheff the boost he might have otherwise received. However, after more than a decade and a half behind the camera, he’d built enough of a reputation to move forward with higher quality productions. The terribly titled Western Billy Two Hats followed with the great Gregory Peck in the lead as a Scottish immigrant (Peck struggles mightily with the brogue) making his way across the American plains after robbing a bank, in an unusually thoughtful–in regards to Native Americans–and beautifully shot film that also came and went without much notice.
Kotcheff’s next film, 1975’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, may not have been a huge hit, but it earned strong critical notices and is considered a film of great importance in the history of Canadian filmmaking. Starring Richard Dreyfuss as an underachieving son in Montreal out to impress his dismissive father, the comedic drama about a man (Duddy/Dreyfuss) attempting to scheme his way to success with underwhelming results helped put Canadian cinema on the map. The film’s screenplay received an Oscar nomination and won the Writer’s Guild award for best adapted screenplay. It also won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, was nominated for a Golden Globe award in the Best Foreign Film category, and Dreyfuss tied with Gene Hackman (The Conversation) for best actor when the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle announced their awards.
Kotcheff finally married critical success with commercial success with 1977’s Fun With Dick and Jane (remade in 2005 with Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni in the leads), starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as a married couple who turn to armed robbery after Dick (Segal) loses his job, and the two see no other way out of their sudden financial ruin. While at surface level, the film works quite well as a comedy, there can be no mistaking the biting satire that lies just beneath the surface regarding the American way of life and the weakness of this country’s social safety net as it relates to unemployment. Fun With Dick and Jane more than quadrupled its budget at the box office, earning nearly $75 million when adjusted for inflation.
Kotcheff scored another hit the next year with the dark comedic murder mystery Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? The film (also with George Segal as the lead), about a series of murders of famous chefs who are killed in a fashion that relates to their signature dishes, received Golden Globe nominations for supporting actors Robert Morley and Jacqueline Bissett. While Kotcheff may not have been a stylist behind the camera, his greatest strength was his facility with dark comedy. Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? was another (but not final) example of his skill in what I’d call one of the most challenging genres to master: satire.
His follow-up to Chefs would lean on his prowess with biting satire and produce the greatest film of his career, the pro football skewering classic, North Dallas Forty.
Way back before Any Given Sunday, Friday Night Lights, and Concussion, North Dallas Forty was spilling the beans in 1979 about “toughing it out,” “rub some dirt on it,” the excessive use of painkillers in the sport that often leads the athletes who play the game nursing serious injuries, and in far too many cases dying young due to the punishing nature and win-at-all-costs nature of professional football. Nick Nolte gives what may be the best performance of his excellent career as Phill Elliott, a rebellious wide receiver whose body is breaking down on him. The film begins with Elliott waking to evidence of a nosebleed he has somehow slept through. It’s an opening that doesn’t feel far too removed from one of David Cronenberg’s body horror films, and that’s just how the film starts.
Nolte’s primary co-star in the film is Mac Davis, who in the ‘70s was a crossover country music star (“Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” being his most memorable hit) and a ubiquitous presence on the airwaves of television and radio. Davis is terrific as the star quarterback of the fictional North Dallas Forty Bulls (it’s not hard to see why the NFL wouldn’t license their brand with the film), and his more complicated than it initially appears relationship with Nolte’s character is the film’s core. Still, this is Nick Nolte’s show, and boy, does he ever deliver. As we follow Nolte’s Phil Elliott through the business of football, we are walked through the misogyny, toxic masculinity, and almost firefighter-like mentality the game brings out of those who play it. There is a constant undercurrent of anxiety built around those whose occupation is unusually temporary and could end on any play. Many of the players (especially the veterans) self-medicate with weed, booze, and pills when not receiving risky, pain-numbing shots to afflicted areas of their bodies so they can perform on the field.
A young rising star on the team lightly chastises Elliott for receiving pain-relieving injections, telling the scarred-up wide receiver, “I have respect for my body.” Elliott’s response, perfectly delivered in an almost throwaway fashion, “You’ll get past that.” Elliott is correct, and the consequences of the young man’s change of heart are horrific.
At one point, Elliott states, “I’ve been ignoring the fact that I’m falling apart.” A statement that is only partially true, considering how self-aware Nolte’s character is. The truth is, Elliott isn’t just addicted to painkillers and marijuana; he’s addicted to football, and as he finds out in the film’s climax, being addicted to a profession that can suddenly see you as disposable can lead to a grievous and unfair outcome. As he tells the owner, general manager, and Bible-quoting coach (a ruthless and even wicked GD Spradlin) during the film’s climactic scene, “We’re not the team…we’re the equipment.”
North Dallas Forty was a critical success and one of the biggest hits of Kotcheff’s career (earning nearly $120 million when adjusted for inflation), but more than that, it was prescient. Kotcheff’s film speaks bluntly to the negative impacts that playing a collision sport for a living has on the human body. The desperation to keep your career alive, the knowledge that in no other way can you make this much money in your life, and the repression of the long-term effects professional football will have on your cognitive and physical health are laid out here, long before CTE became a far too common diagnosis for retired NFL athletes. It’s one hell of a film.
Three years would pass before Kotcheff directed another film, another sports-related drama called Split Image, with Michael O’Keefe playing a talented collegiate gymnast who falls in love with a woman (a terrific Karen Allen) who lures the young athlete into a cult. While Split Image may not be on the level of his best films, it’s a more than solid entry on his resume. Unfortunately, the film’s studio (Orion) showed no faith in the movie, and Split Image was barely released (although it is available to rent on Amazon).
Kotcheff’s luck improved mightily with his next film (released in 1982, the same year as Split Image), the action drama First Blood, starring Sylvester Stallone as the iconic John Rambo. When thinking of First Blood, it’s helpful to view it as a stand-alone film and not allow the four cartoonish sequels to enter your mind. I know that’s a heavy lift, but having viewed First Blood within the last year (for the first time in ages), it’s a legitimately sincere B-movie action film that takes the plight of Vietnam veterans, who came home feeling like failures, pretty seriously, and it Kotcheff also coaxes the last genuinely vulnerable performance out of Stallone until 1997’s Cop Land. The action sequences are gritty and realistic, at least by movie standards.
There is also a surprisingly emotional scene late in the film where Rambo laments the war’s impact on him after his return to civilian life. Stallone delivers this painful message to his former superior officer (played by Richard Crenna), who is trying to talk his broken soldier into turning himself in after laying siege to a group of overzealous small-town police officers who treated Stallone’s drifter with excessive force. I can still recall the scene and how effectively it landed with my dad, who saw combat as a Marine in Vietnam. Stallone has often shortchanged his talents, but he gives it his all in that moment with Crenna, resulting in one of the actor’s finest moments on film. While First Blood led to a rash of diminishing returns and right-wing follow-ups, it deserves a better fate and can be given one when viewed apart from the nonsense that came after.
1983 would find Kotcheff returning to another Vietnam-related film, Uncommon Valor, which was led by Gene Hackman and boasted a pre-Ghost and Dirty Dancing Patrick Swayze in support. Uncommon Valor plays like a better version of the Chuck Norris hit, Missing in Action, although that’s pretty faint praise. Hackman leads a group of soldiers on a mission to retrieve American POWs held in captivity in Laos after Vietnam. Uncommon Valor was a solid success at the box office, and I know a lot of action film fans and Vietnam vets who love it, but it was critically butchered upon release. Having rewatched it recently, you can sometimes see a better movie trying to break out, but it never happens, and the hamfisted screenplay didn’t do Kotcheff (or the actors) any favors. Still, a hit is a hit, and Uncommon Valor was a hit.
Two years later, Kotcheff delivered the tender comedic drama Joshua Then and Now, with James Woods playing the title character, a Jewish writer from Montreal who we follow from his life as a young boy to a man struggling to deal with the complexities of adult life. It’s another “lost film” on Kotcheff’s CV, one without a commercial hook, and despite strong reviews, and Kotcheff’s second film to receive a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes, the film did not find an audience. It’s another title of his worthy of discovery.
After two underwhelming films in a row (Switching Channels with Burt Reynolds and Winter People with Kurt Russell), Kotcheff scored the final hit film of his career, 1989’s Weekend at Bernie’s. The critically reviled slapstick comedy starring Andrew McCarthy and Johnathan Silverman as two employees whose boss (Bernie, played by Terry Kiser) dies when they visit his home in the Hamptons, the two young men, fearing that they might be implicated in their mob-connected boss’s violent death, hatch a plot to make Bernie seem to be alive until they can escape the their dilemma. I know many people who love it, and some credit has to be given to Kiser’s performance, which often requires him to be the equivalent of a human marionette, but let’s just say that the film looks even worse in the rearview than it did at the time. But once again, a hit is a hit. Weekend at Bernie’s was a hit and has sustained a sizable cult following.
Kotcheff worked as a director for nearly three more decades before retiring. I want to say there are some gems among the projects he was attached to that followed, but I can’t. What I can say is that a nearly two-decade stretch of (mostly) quality films is no small feat. Kotcheff started making films of importance in the auteur era of the ‘70s. While no one will confuse his output with Coppola’s or Scorsese’s, respect must be paid to a filmmaker who used his tools well and wisely for a very long time.
Far too often, the label “journeyman” is used as a pejorative. That would be unfair in Kotcheff’s case. A true journeyman is a quality professional who does reliably good work. Hollywood, then and now, could use more Ted Kotcheffs, not less.
Ted Kotcheff died on April 10, 2025. He was 94 years old.
