Jubal: (1956. dir: Delmer Daves) I've had it up to here with the fifties and that decade's crazy crush on psychobabble replacing action, especially in a Western. This one has no action at all, just talk, talk, talk, which sometimes results in violence, but which doesn't feel like action, just childish acting-out.
There are two women: a Virgin (Felicia Farr), impossibly innocent and virtuous, and a Whore (Valerie French), impossibly wicked in her apocalypse-inducing lust. There's a cadre of fellows, mostly ranch-hands working for the affable and gregarious Shep (Ernest Borgnine), who is married to the Whore. Rod Steiger plays Curly from Of Mice and Men, and does it badly, all hyperventilation and scenery-chewing. Into this cauldron is thrown Glenn Ford's Jubal Troop, just the right mix of hero and outlaw to stir up a whole mess of broiling emotion, winding up in the cauterizing of a long-festering communal wound via death and restructuring.
Wikipedia says this movie is "notable as a reworking of Othello." Maybe in the sense that it's about jealousy, but that's where the resemblance ends. Also, Shakespeare could write very well. This script is the kind of thing a mediocre playwright writes when he doesn't have anything to write about but is too proud to sit and not write for awhile until he gets a decent idea.
It's too bad. Charles Bronson is good in his throwaway sidekick role, Ford and Borgnine do their usual good work. In addition to its other badness, it staggers beneath the ancillary burden of being one of those Mega Cinemascope Panoramic Epic pictures, so that every time Jubal has to walk from the corral to the house, we watch every step so that the cinematographer can show us how magnificently well the mountains behind him look on the big screen.
If it was a book, I'd have thrown it repeatedly against the wall every time I tried to finish a chapter.
Some Came Running: (1958. dir: Vincente Minnelli) And again, with the psychobabble. Talk, talk, talk. This movie is like poor-man's William Inge, and how much Inge really translates beyond the barrier of these many decades?
There are two good things, -- no, strike that: great things, -- about this movie. The first is Shirley MacLaine, who from the earliest age possessed a preternatural ability to attack even a badly-written role with such charisma, vivacity, and heart that she could physically drag a two-dimensional character kicking and screaming into a full, well-rounded third dimension. Anyone else, and I mean anyone, doing the bit in the nightclub where her Ginny drunkenly stumbles into the spotlight to sing, would have come off as an embarrassment. She is stupefyingly good, and not only in this outre kind of scene, but later, more quietly, confronting the teacher, and then finally convincing her beloved Dave (Sinatra) that her kind of love, however flawed, is true.
As for everyone else, it's all crap. Dino and Frank are, chillingly, Dino and Frank. Supposed to be a charming drunk, Dino cutely refers to the women he uses as "pigs", even when sober. Frank's Dave, supposed to be a very sensitive writer (we know because the scriptwriter has an objective and trustworthy character describe him so early on, not because Frank convinces us he is so), ostensibly falls in love with a teacher (Martha Hyer, wooden not like a tree, which has life and movement, but like a dimestore Indian, which has eyes and nose and mouth, but no animation at all), but, again, we only know it because he keeps protesting his love, not because we actually see any convincing evidence of it.
In fact, for all this film's ostensible obsession with uncovering its characters' psychological underpinnings, the psychology is crap. A guy like Sinatra (and, sorry, that's what he's playing: not a sensitive writer, but a guy like Sinatra) does not keep hangdogging around a prudish woman's door protesting his love. (Again, here, see that? Virgin and Whore. Just like the Western. There's even a scene where Sinatra "saves" his teenaged niece from life "as a tramp" because she's reacted to the knowledge of her father's infidelity by going out on the town with a stranger. There's only two ways, baby: virgin or whore, and one wrong move decides it forever. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it. What was WRONG with the fifties? And how can anyone -- I'm looking at you, Ronald Reagan,-- romanticize that crap?) I'm not saying no man would ever do that; I'm saying this is Sinatra we're talking about, and it pulls the rug out from under the whole, already stupid story.
And the Arthur Kennedy subplot? Forget about it. Next time, it winds up on the cutting-room floor.
There is one other great thing, though: that last carnival sequence. As written, it's nothing. The gunman is a mere plot device, a sort of Diabolus-ex-Machina, ridiculous, but the greatness is in the way it's filmed. It's like a number from West Side Story; Minnelli has filmed it in a slow-building whirl of dance-like motion and lights and color. A man with a gun pursuing a newlywed couple through a carnival crowd and another man trying to warn them becomes a whirling dance, gorgeously staged, shot and edited, so that every frame builds up tension, tension which has been entirely lacking for the rest of the goddamn film, I might add. So Minnelli manages to make a film that plods and sucks for two full hours, then caps it off with a climax of some full-on genius. Amazing. Not necessarily in a good way. I take my hat off, but only partly. Let's say I tip my hat without removing it fully from my head, alright?
Not that I'm blaming Minnelli. He started with a bad story, and there's no real escape from that. James Jones wrote the book, and this got made in the midst of a post-Eternity Jones-and-Sinatra-mania. Nowadays we make bad sequels to hit movies; back then, they made movies from books, and when they hit on a blockbuster, they raided the author's closets and drawers and garbage cans for further material. It's almost sweet, the idea is so innocent: giving the writer the credit for a good story. Trouble is, so many writers have only one or two, and then they start imitating Thomas Wolfe or William Inge or whoever the hell is the hipster god that year.
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