Sorry to hear about the passing of talented filmmaker George Armitage. He was 83.
Armitage’s legacy comes down to two films, both shot in the ‘90s; the unmistakably entertaining “Miami Blues” (1990) which features Alex Baldwin’s greatest performance — Baldwin’s work in 2003’s “The Cooler” is a close runner-up.
The second Armitage keeper is also his most popular film, the darkly comic hitman flick “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1997) starring John Cusack as an assassin who returns to his hometown to attend a high school reunion.
Armitage’s career was abruptly derailed twice. Firstly, the terrible reception and commercial failure that greeted 1976’s “Vigilante Force” earned poor Armitage a 14-year stint in director’s jail. He admitted to writing dozens of screenplays in the ‘80s with none of them being greenlit by a studio. It was only “Miami Blues” that got him out of this purgatory.
No second comeback came after 2004’s “The Big Bounce,” which earned mediocre reviews and only managed to gross $6M against a $50M budget. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, Armitage’s original cut was rated NC-17, but producer Steven Bing inexplicably took control of the film and released an audience friendly PG-13 version.
In a 2021 Interview with Film Comment, Armitage spoke about the pain of seeing his film’s “destruction” by way of Bing’s interference, and additionally implied that he was still screening his own director’s cut of the film to friends, a version he described as “a far, far better film.”
So, that’s Armitage’s career in a nutshell. He was one of Roger Corman’s many protégés who, despite some massive lows, and a full decade of blacklisting, managed to break through the cinematic zeitgeist twice in the ‘90s. Not too shabby.