Terror in a Texas Town: (1958. dir: Joseph H Lewis) I preface this review with the following observation: after watching this and the Long Voyage Home, I conclude that it's impossible to be sexy or badassed while faking a Swedish accent. Even John Wayne and Sterling Hayden come across like the Muppets' Swedish Chef, and how thrilling can that be, ultimately?
Regardless, this is a crazy good film, veering drunkenly between flights of mad brilliance and weaselfaced-in-the-gutter badness. (Even the music does it: there'll be a dissonant jazz-like guitar behind a scene of rising tension and you'll just be thinking WOW when it launches into some overblown bad-tv stock cliche.) Written behind a front by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, it feels like a televised play with its forays into sleazy melodrama and set-bound longiloquence, but how can you not love it when a guy brings a whaling harpoon to a climactic gunfight? Also, let us pause to give the DP heartfelt thanks for some fantastic and inspired framing, without which the movie would not have escaped its clumsy, earthbound shackles. He's Ray Rennahan, the fellow who manned the camera for Drums Along the Mohawk and Duel in the Sun, among about a hundred others, which explains his easy mastery.
I'm growing to love Sterling Hayden. Scarred and manly and so often wooden in performance, his efforts are valiant, and in the end he overcomes all obstacles to give at least three performances which touch on greatness in later years. Who can forget his fluoride-obsessed and apocalypse-instigating General Ripper in Dr Strangelove, or his sublime moment in the otherwise scruffy the Long Goodbye? or, of course, one of the great death-scenes of all time, still threatening as hell as he sputters and chokes on his own blood at the hands of a shaking-in-his-boots Michael Corleone in the first Godfather film?
In spite of its shortcomings, watch this movie.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Two Rode Together: (1961. dir: John Ford) Here we find the best and the dreariest of Ford. The easy, rambling pace and likable characters alongside the lame attempts at humor. The relaxed rapport between Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark, especially in the ten-minute conversation by the river, one of the best scenes ever shot, in which Ford lets the camera sit still in a two-shot while they talk without cuts and we enjoy their company. Shirley Jones, on the other hand, gives the kind of spirited, one-dimensional performance one expects from musical-theatre folk.
As in all Ford, it's the dark edges which fascinate: the character of Stone Calf, the murder of the white woman by the boy raised Comanche and his subsequent lynching, or Jimmy Stewart's terrible drunken tirade at Shirley Jones about how her lost, towheaded brother would be a Comanche warrior now, and more than happy to rape her then share her with "the other bucks."
Ulzana's Raid: (1972. dir: Robert Aldrich) Even Hollywood Westerns got brutal in the '70s. This one, about cavalrymen and a grizzled scout pursuing a relentless Apache who soaks power from his victims as he tortures them to death, feels like it's less about Indians than it is somehow about Viet Nam and America's troubling new suspicions that our boys might be just as barbaric as The Hated Other.
In any case, this is a good one, with fresh-faced Bruce Davison learning life and death from Burt Lancaster and his Apache compadre, rather wonderfully played by Jorge Luke. The violence is hard, and hard questions are, if not answered, at least not shirked, and the Indians, most importantly, look like real Indians.
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