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Cool

Yves Montand

My Week of Movie Watching

3:10 To Yuma – The original, that is. Liked it quite a bit, too. Glenn Ford is quite good as the smugly confident bad guy trying to talk Van Heflin into not risking his life for $200. Heflin is the antithesis of his Shane role. Here he’s reluctant – VERY reluctant to get involved in this mess, but needs the money. It was also nice to see the rich stagecoach owner (Robert Emhardt) not be a caricature for a change.

Spider Man 3 – This is my least favorite of the three Spidey flicks, but it’s still a hoot. I liked Thomas Haden Churchs’ Sandman, but thought the film could have done with a story line or two less.

Charley Varrick – Walter Matthau as a small time hood who picks the absolute worst bank to rob. The first 15 minutes of this set a pretty high standard, but the film never wavers. A great cast of 70’s icons including Joe Don Baker, John Vernon, and Andy Robinson (He was the psycho in Dirty Harry). I had no idea where this film was going, and I love that.

On this Date

Ward Bond, born April 9, 1903

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Eyes Without a Face, 1960

On Location

Charles Laughton checks out "Brother Left Hand" on the set of Night of the Hunter.

The Naked Spur

James Stewart’s most well-known screen persona is of the decent, soft-spoken everyman, as personified by roles like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. That’s only part of the Stewart legacy, however. In the fifties, he collaborated with director Anthony Mann on a series of hard-edged Westerns that changed the genre forever. Stewart’s characters in Mann westerns like Winchester 73 and The Man from Laramie were obsessive, revenge driven men with all the warmth of a fistful of ball bearings. Mann had done a lot of Film Noir in the forties, and he brought a lot of Noir’s morally ambiguous sensibility to the Western. As a result, Mann’s westerns are the jumping off point for stuff like John Ford’s The Searchers, and the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.

1953’s The Naked Spur is one of the greatest of the Mann-Stewart westerns, and it follows the formula mentioned above. Howard Kemp (Stewart) is on the trail of a killer and when we first meet him, he approaches an elderly prospector (Millard Mitchell) with gun drawn. His first instinct is that this man is not to be trusted, and even after he’s convinced that the guy is OK, he doesn’t let down his guard one iota. He enlists the prospector to help him track the guy, and they meet another stranger on the trail, a Cavalry officer named Roy (Ralph Meeker). The Roy character is interesting. He’s been dishonorably discharged from the army, and gives off a strong vibe that he shouldn’t be trusted.

The three soon encounter and capture the killer (Robert Ryan) and his girlfriend Lina (Janet Leigh), and the film settles down into its groove. Westerns always gave us a black and white world. Heroes were valiant and true, and villains were black-heated scoundrels. This movie mocks those conventions. Kemp is the ostensible hero, but he is cold and blunt. Ryan is the villain, but he’s jovial. Both the prospector and the Cavalryman have called Kemp “Marshal” early in the film, and when one of them does it again in front of Ryan he says “Did he tell you he was a lawman?” Kemp is simply a bounty hunter, and his not fessing up casts a shadow on his character. Early in the film, Kemp has shown the prospector the wanted poster of the man he is tracking. When Ryan is captured, he shows the same poster to the group, and we notice that there is a sizable reward. Kemp had torn that part off his copy. Again, seeds of mistrust creep in about him.

Ryan’s Ben has murdered a lawman – shot him in the back, but from the beginning, it’s hard to reconcile that act with the man himself. He professes his innocence, and is friendly and engaging, so it’s easy to begin to like him somewhat. Lina is also is still devoted to him, and she doesn’t come across as a naïve moll. Is it possible that Kemp is hounding an innocent man for reward money?

A small window into Kemp’s anger is opened one night as he sleeps. He talks in his sleep about “Mary”, and it is revealed that she was a woman that he was going to marry, but she sold his farm out from under him while he was away in the war. He wants the reward in order to buy back his land.

Ben quietly sets to work undermining the trust amongst the others. He slyly suggests that “The reward splits better 2 ways.’ He’s not coming right out and saying that they should murder one another, but there’s no mistaking his intent either. Meeker’s Roy has already been established as a shady womanizer, and the thought of getting all of the reward seems to take a tenuous hold on him. To top it off, he also wants Lina. There’s a marvelous scene in a cave where all the mistrust bubbles to the surface, and the prospector exclaims “I don’t know who I should be pointing the gun at!!!”

The prospector seems at first to be the only wholly good character, but that turns out not to be the case, either. He has mined for gold all around the area, finding nothing. Ben keeps mentioning a friend who struck it rich in these parts, and the prospector finally arrives at the conclusion that Ben himself is the friend. He gets a proposal – Ben’s freedom in exchange for the claim. Had he looked at things with a clear mind, he might have realized he was being duped, but the lure of the gold overcomes him, and he makes a fatal error.

If I have a quibble with this film, it’s over the Janet Leigh character. She is supposed to be Ben’s woman, but we really don’t believe that they belong together. Her role falls into the Hollywood tradition of only being there for the hero to fall in love with. Were they to ever remake this film (and I think it would be a great remake), her character could easily be written out.

The other film I thought about while watching TNS was John Huston’s great Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Both films are meditations on the destructive consequences of unbridled greed. The Huston film takes a harder line on it, as Fred C Dobbs’ avarice leads to his destruction. Stewarts’ Kemp goes right to the precipice, and then thinks better of it. He can have his reward, but it would come at the cost of his soul.

Sex 101

Dana Wynter

Maurice Jarre 1924-2009

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Coming soon...

On Location

Jean Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard at work on Pierrot Le Fou.

The Newsstand

Blow Out

Brian DePalma goes far and wide for the inspirations for his 1981 thriller Blow Out. A cursory glance reveals the JFK assassination, the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick affair, Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and Coppola’s The Conversation. DePalma’s critics have always cited him as a rip-off artist, and this is true, but it’s hardly the point. Dismiss this film for all its admittedly obvious homages, and you are passing up on a great piece of craftsmanship.

Like the Antonioni and Copolla films, this one revolves around a crime witnessed by someone who doesn’t at first comprehend what has happened. In this case it’s movie sound man Jack Terry (John Travolta). It’s pure chance that has him recording nighttime sounds when he hears a loud bang, followed by a car careening of a bridge and into deep water. Terry tries, but is only able to save one of the cars two passengers, a girl named Sally (Nancy Allen).

Ah, but this is no ordinary accident. The dead man is a high profile presidential contender, and Sally is NOT his wife. Terry starts to suspect something is amiss at the hospital when one of the dead mans aides pulls him aside and basically tells him to forget that there was a girl in the car. The lie is proposed as a way to avoid embarrassment for the family, but Terry suspects that there’s more to it. He heard a shot, after all….

The trail leads to a shady photographer, who also happened to be at the scene (with camera), and to a named Burke, played with icy malice by John Lithgow. When the photog’s pictures make it into a news magazine, Terry hits on the inspired idea of piecing the photos together with his recording to create a crude film of the accident. This virtuoso sequence is the centerpiece of Blow Out, as he recreates the crime from scraps, and we see, conclusively, that there was a gunshot. In the Antonioni film, there is the very real possibility that the crime involved never happened. In The Conversation, there is only the suggestion that something MAY happen. When it does, it’s not what we expect. Blow Out is much more a straightforward thriller that the other two. The reconstruction confirms what Jack already knows.

The Burke character mentioned above is the wild card in all this. He was the one with the gun that night, and as the true nature of the events threaten to become public, he takes things into his own hands. There is the suggestion early on that the blackmail attempt was sanctioned by the President himself, or at least by a close advisor. Burke tells this advisor that “I was forced to exceed the parameters” of the original plan. This involves creating a serial killer scare, complete with a couple of innocent victims. The second of these murders, committed in a public restroom, is likely the most memorable moment in the film, as we see only the victim’s thrashing feet as Burke garrotes her.

Watching this film, I was stuck by DePalma’s techniques. When we see the original accident, it is drawn out. Kelly records a romantic couple, then a frog croaking, then an owl. The owl abruptly turns it’s head, as if it hears something, then we hear the speeding car approaching. When he reconstructs the events in his lab, and we see them again, the perspectives all change, and this time we see the car a lot earlier. It’s subtle, but it indicates Kelly is imposing his own ideas on what he is hearing. There are a lot of instances where the action is seen or even heard through glass, subtly suggesting that the events are being refracted, or slightly misaligned. DePalma even goes to lengths to show the photographs being put under panes of glass during the reconstruction sequence.

There’s a brief flashback sequence early on where Jack recounts an incident from his time working with the police. In it, an undercover cop lost his life because of an improperly installed wiretap. The sequence doesn’t really draw attention to itself, and its importance only becomes clear at the film’s close, when Jack is once again forced to sit helplessly and listen to someone perish due to his mistake. This idea is sort of another DePalma borrow, in this case from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but it works beautifully here.

It’s difficult to watch Blow Out and not have a strong opinion of how it ends. It returns to the images that opened the movie, and involves the difficulty a film director has finding a female scream effect for a shower scene. Without ruining for anyone, it’s fair to say that the Kelly character does something that could be construed as a supreme act of callousness…or a supreme act of love. In the spirit of the movie, I prefer to think of it as the latter. Let’s call it an homage.

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My 2006 commentary on Accatone can be read here.

The Marquee (Bard Division)

The Movies of my Life

The phrase “The Voodoo of Location” is attributed to Werner Herzog, and it illustrates the German director’s belief that being right there - on site - will infuse a film with a certain magical authenticity that can’t be captured in any other way. Here’s exhibit A - Herzog’s 1972 masterpiece Aguirre: The Wrath of God.

Here, Herzog took his production into the jungles of Peru to tell the story of the doomed expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro. The films opening scene perfectly illustrates Herzog’s voodoo. In it we see a thin line of men making their way along a narrow mountain path to the ethereal, otherworldly music of Popul Vuh . The camera pulls back and we see the magnitude of the undertaking – The line turns out to contain hundreds of men, snaking along the side of the mountain. Could this have been filmed in the Rockies or the Alps, closer to shelter and amenities? Absolutely, but somehow it wouldn’t have been the same.

Have a look at this snippet. This is the expedition’s first foray unto the Amazon on their crude rafts, and it’s a great illustration of the hardships that this shoot encompassed. With the raging, dirty water, and the flecks of moisture on the camera lens, it looks forbidding. The crews are supposed to be a little uneasy here, and they look it.

I can’t go very far into a discussion of this film without mentioning the scenery-chewer extraordinaire, Klaus Kinski. Kinski plays the title role, and his Aguirre never looks like anything short of a lunatic. Watch Kinski muttering ominously in the background as one of his superiors lays out the plan for the expedition. Aguirre is very plainly mad, but he is also a compelling leader, which is how he manages to get so many of the men to join in his mutiny.

Also figuring prominently in things is the elegant Inez, played by Helena Rojo. She is the wife of Ursua, the leader of the expedition, and the man who Aguirre rises up against. From the start she looks out of place with her gowns, and her carriage that has to be carried through the mud, and she is the film’s truly tragic figure. Her husband is her insulation against Aguirre and his madness, and as it becomes plain that Ursua won’t survive, we fear for her as well. One of the most memorable images in the film is of the morning when Aguirre’s men take Ursua away to execute him. The execution is cut with a silent long shot of Inez, sitting with her back to the camera, softly wiping away a tear. It’s a beautiful, sad sequence, and no one who sees this film ever forgets it.

The most memorable image in Aguirre, however is easy to pinpoint. It’s the remarkable closing scene, with Aguirre still planing his empire on a raft filled with dead and dying men - and scores of monkeys. It’s the perfect operatic finale for this film, as Aguirre, now fully insane and crushed by his lofty goals, turns and asks “Who is with me?”

When I started to become, to quote my blogs tagline, an “insufferable film snob” this was my favorite movie. I have many different favorite movies now, depending on my mood, but this one is still number one with me.

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Cool

Delon. Melville.

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Cover Art

Ebony - November 1973

Why these?

Why in all conscience should these be the ones to suffer? Children, old people, a young girl at the height of her loveliness. Why these? Are these our soldiers? Are these our fighters? Why should they be sacrificed? I shall tell you why. Because this is not only a war of soldiers in uniform. It is a war of the people, of all the people, and it must be fought not only on the battlefield, but in the cities and in the villages, in the factories and on the farms, in the home, and in the heart of every man, woman, and child who loves freedom! Well, we have buried our dead, but we shall not forget them. Instead they will inspire us with an unbreakable determination to free ourselves and those who come after us from the tyranny and terror that threaten to strike us down. This is the people's war! It is our war! We are the fighters! Fight it then! Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right!

Mrs. Miniver - screenplay by Arthur Wimperis, George Froeshel, James Hilton, and Claudine West

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Groucho

Friends, I'm going to to tell you of the great mysterious wonderful continent known as Africa. Africa, God's country. And he can have it...Well, sir, we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February second. After fifteen days on the water and six on the boat we finally arrived on the shores of Africa.We at once proceded 300 miles into the heart of the jungle where I shot a polar bear. This bear was 6 foot 7 in his stocking feet and had shoes on. This bear was anemic and couldn't stand the cold climate. He was a rich bear and could afford to go away in the winter. From the day of our arrival we led an active life. The first morning saw us up at six, breakfasted, then back in bed at seven. This was our routine for the first three months. We finally got so we were back in bed at six-thirty.One morning I was sitting in front of the cabin smoking some meat There wasn't a cigar store in the neighborhood. As I say, I was sitting in front of the cabin when I bagged six tigers. I bagged them, I bagged them to go away, but they hung around all afternoon. They were the most persistent tigers I've ever seen. The principal animals inhabiting the African jungle are moose, elk and Knights of Pythias.Of course you all know what a moose is, that's big game. The first day I shot two bucks that was the biggest game we had. As I say you all know what a moose is? A moose runs around on the floor, and eats cheese and is chased by the cats. The elks on the other hand live up in the hills, and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come down to the water-hole; and you should see them run when they find it is only water-hole. What they're looking for is a elk-a-hole. One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know. But that is entirely irrelevent to what I was talking about. We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed. But we're going back again in a couple of weeks...

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Cool

Steve McQueen

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On this Date / The Soundtrack

Happy 68th to Tina Turner. Here's her kick-ass "The Acid Queen" from Tommy.

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The Call of the Wild, 1935

The Movies of my Life

There’s never really been any completion for Shane in the pantheon of my favorite Westerns. I saw it early in my life, I’ve seen it many times since, and it still resonates for me after all this time.

More so than almost any other cinematic hero that comes to mind, Shane (Alan Ladd) is a mythical being, more myth than man. When he makes his entrance, riding unto the farm of Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) he’s a mystery – We start out knowing nothing about him, and we don’t know much more at the film’s close.

If Shane were just another Western about a group of farmers battling against an evil cattle baron, it would have been forgotten long ago. The thing that elevates this movie into greatness is the way the characters are twisted just a tiny little bit away from stereotypical.

Take for instance the evil rancher Ryker played by Emile Meyer. Ryker is a bad guy - There’s no question about that, but look at what the film does with him. When Ryker comes to see Starrett, it’s not with threats, but with an offer to come work for him. Ryker gets a great speech about how he was one of the first to settle the land, along with “men who are mostly dead now”, and for a few seconds, we can actually sympathize with him. How many other Westerns have bothered to scratch the surface of a bad guy like this?

How about the “relationship” between Shane and Starrett’s wife Marian (Jean Arthur)? The film doesn’t really develop any sexual tension between the two, but it certainly doesn’t ignore it either. It makes a point of showing her reaction to Shane’s initial arrival, and it doesn’t seem to be just a case of her being fearful of the stranger. There’s a scene where the two dance together, and their body language is noticed by Starrett, who basically gives approval to his wife to take up with this new man if anything should happen to him. Watch Shane in another scene where Marian and her son Joey discuss him from the next room, and you see an unmistakable sense of longing and regret wash over him. Shane is allowed to live with this family, and sort of share in their lives, but he will never be able to have the same thing, and he knows it.

Then there’s the films “stock” character – The hired gun Wilson, played by Jack Palance. Wilson is fairly obviously set up for a showdown with Shane, and he plays the baddie card well, cruelly gunning down one farmer in the mud. Even at that, there’s ….something…. about Wilson. Listen to him as Ryker lays out his last resort plan for Starrett. Ryker says “I’ll kill him if I have to.”, to which Wilson replies with more than a hint of derision “You mean I’LL kill him if you have to.” I take from this Wilson’s quiet distain for those who won’t do their own killing. Wilson is a killer, and makes no apology for it. In his own twisted way, he’s a man of morals.

Here’s a final little treat – the climatic gunfight. This sequence is a marvel of slowly uncoiling tension. (Even the dog gets the hell out of the way!) Notice how Shane is now the one prodding things towards their violent conclusion, after turning the other cheek earlier. Although he takes no joy in it, he is now in his natural element. A man has to be what he is.

The Newsstand

The Sunday Times - The recluse issue.

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Purity of Essence

Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works. I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women...women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake...but I do deny them my essence.

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The Soundtrack

Today's feature is one of my favorite pieces of film music. It's the eerily gorgeous theme from Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, composed by Edward Artemyev. Enjoy.

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Moments of Distinction

The Film – Big Night, dir. Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci

The Set-Up – Well, there is no set-up. This is the final scene of this marvelous little gem of a film. If you’ve seen the movie, you would know it simply as The Omelet Scene. If you haven’t seen it, no amount of explaining could do it justice. It's a beautiful coda to the story of the relationship between two very different individuals – the brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci). So, if you know Big Night, enjoy. If you don’t, try to see it soon, OK?

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Chain Lightning, 1950

This watch

Hello, little man. Boy, I sure heard a bunch about you. See, I was a good friend of your dad's. We were in that Hanoi pit of hell together over five years. Hopefully...you'll never have to experience this yourself, but when two men are in a situation like me and your Dad were, for as long as we were, you take on certain responsibilities of the other. If it had been me who had not made it, Major Coolidge would be talkin' right now to my son Jim. But the way it turned out is I'm talkin' to you, Butch. I got somethin' for you.This watch I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather during the first World War. It was bought in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee. Made by the first company to ever make wrist watches. Up till then people just carried pocket watches. It was bought by private Doughboy Orion Coolidge on the day he set sail for Paris. It was your great-grandfather's war watch and he wore it everyday he was in that war. When he had done his duty, he went home to your great-grandmother, took the watch off, put it an old coffee can, and in that can it stayed 'til your granddad Dane Coolidge was called upon by his country to go overseas and fight the Germans once again. This time they called it World War II. Your great-grandfather gave this watch to your granddad for good luck. Unfortunately, Dane's luck wasn't as good as his old man's. Dane was a Marine and he was killed -- along with the other Marines at the battle of Wake Island. Your granddad was facing death, he knew it. None of those boys had any illusions about ever leavin' that island alive. So three days before the Japanese took the island, your granddad asked a gunner on an Air Force transport name of Winocki, a man he had never met before in his life, to deliver to his infant son, who he'd never seen in the flesh, his gold watch. Three days later, your granddad was dead. But Winocki kept his word. After the war was over, he paid a visit to your grandmother, delivering to your infant father, his Dad's gold watch. This watch. This watch was on your Daddy's wrist when he was shot down over Hanoi. He was captured, put in a Vietnamese prison camp. He knew if the gooks ever saw the watch it'd be confiscated, taken away. The way your Dad looked at it, that watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any slopes were gonna put their greasy yella hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something. His ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. Then he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you.

Pulp Fiction - screenplay by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary

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The Elwy Yost Interviews (Part 2)

Dr. Fassbender

I, uh, decided to follow you here.

If you followed me here, how did you contrive to be here before me?

I followed you... very fast.

What's New Pussycat?

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On Location

Errol Flynn and Brigitte Bardot get acquainted. Does anyone have any idea of where and when this photo may have been taken?

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The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, 1938