James Toback on Fingers

The French import from director Jacques Audiard, The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arete) is a good film. But Fingers, the 1977 James Toback film that Audiard based his movie on, is an excellent film. Fingers ranks alongside Taxi Driver as one of the key films of that era. An argument could be made that Finger’s star Harvey Keitel is an essential part of a trilogy of New York’s seamy side made up of Mean Streets, Fingers, and The Bad Lieutenant.
Free Press Houston spoke with Toback by phone last week regarding his significant debut film. “Make a right turn at Madison and 92nd,” Toback says to a cab driver, as he answers questions on his cell phone while running errands around upper Manhattan.
Both Fingers and The Beat That My Heart Skipped deal with the dichotomy of a character’s psyche. In each film the lead character is divided between violent criminal behavior and the artistic ambition of being a concert pianist. Toback explores Jimmy Fingers’ (Keitel) through the “fundamental patterns of different worlds.”
There is an emphasis in Fingers on diegetic sound or the sound of Jimmy Fingers’ environment. When we see Jimmy play classic rock songs on his portable cassette (like The Jamies’ “Summertime, Summertime” or the Inez and Charlie Foxx standard “Mockingbird”) that is the soundtrack music. Normally in a film, say, Mean Streets, classic songs propel the narrative but as sounds separate from the character’s milieu.
Exploring man’s dual nature is a trait that runs throughout Toback’s films. (Two Girls & A Guy, the psychedelic The Harvard Man, and philosophical docu The Big Bang are standouts among Toback’s films.) So it comes as no surprise when Toback explains how he went from the prestige marriage as the husband of the granddaughter of the Duke of Marlborough to living the wild life at the house of football great Jim Brown. Brown who also appears in Fingers was the subject of Toback’s 1971 book Jim. Toback mentions that “Fingers was the only script that didn’t change,” from completion to production whereas his script for The Pick-Up Artist went through 15 drafts. Toback did delete a scene from Fingers that shows Keitel having a homosexual encounter before filming began.
Audiard’s film follows the template of Fingers but varies slightly in two aspects. Instead of immersing the protag Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris, of L’Auberge Espagnole) in mob politics he is a corrupt real estate mogul. Additionally a pivotal scene where Jimmy Fingers shoots a mobster to avenge the death of his father is changed in Beat That My Heart Skipped to Seyr deciding not to kill.
“That would never happen like that,” notes Toback. “You wouldn’t stick a gun in a Russian mobster’s mouth and then not kill him, because then you would be dead in two days.”
The Beat That My Heart Skipped currently unspools exclusively at the Angelika Film Center. Fingers is available as a DVD release, complete with a commentary track featuring Toback plus a conversation on indie film between Toback and Keitel. Also a documentary about Toback making the film Black and White, The Outsider by Nicholas Jarecki, can currently be seen making the rounds at film festivals.