the ward bond film festival continues

the Long Voyage Home: (1940. dir: John Ford) My God, what Gregg Toland and John Ford can do together. The space that Ford gives his actors to move around in, he gives that to Toland as well; he doesn't clutter the images up with words without a decent reason. Let's be clear: this is a b&w seagoing adventure pulled together from several short plays by Eugene O'Neill, and I have a short temper where O'Neill is concerned. I like him, and I'd watch all six hours of Mourning Becomes Electra if given the chance (and it looks like I never will be), but I have no patience for any of his myriad plays about people whose only joys come in drunkenness and their only problems from an inability to walk out of a bar. It's probably one of those things like the Grateful Dead or smoking cigarettes: either you get it or you don't. Personally, I never got the Grateful Dead, and listening to O'Neill's characters mewl and puke about how they've had to give up everything for the bottle makes me drum my fingers and yawn and look at my watch.

Luckily, O'Neill is not why you watch this. Officially, it's a John Wayne film, the Ford/Wayne follow-up to Stagecoach, but really it's an ensemble piece spearheaded by Thomas Mitchell's customary cute-but-clever Drunken Irishman. Wayne has never been more gorgeous or more sensuously photographed, but it's a pretty-boy role, it's got no heft to it, and he's hobbled by a fairly awful Swedish accent. But none of that is why you watch it, either.

The movie starts with a ship in harbor. Everything is still, stagnant, except on the island shore, where native women writhe in heat while their mysterious native drums beat. There's a beautiful shot of a sailor silhouetted atop the massive dark hulk of ship lighting a cigarette, then we go in close to see it's Ward Bond, blowing smoke rings and gazing to shore. Duke joins him for a moment, then stretches in good-humored frustration and goes away to lie across a bulkhead and look at the stars. It's a beautiful, strange opening, setting up shipboard existence as a sort of anti-life, a suspended animation into which these sailors keep placing themselves because they haven't got the stones to rejoin the world, spoken of warily as "the Land". When on The Land, although they talk wildly of escaping the harsh and fruitless imprisonment at sea, they go immediately into a bar until they've drunk up their money, then use that as an excuse to escape back to sea.

But you don't watch this movie for O'Neill's insights into life or suffering or even drunkenness. You watch it for the artistry of its making. Look at that gorgeous framing, shot by shot. Fan as I am of a strong narrative flow, I have to admire that Ford seems to make his pictures first and foremost to give us a taste of living Someplace Other: in a Northeastern farming community during the Revolution in Drums Along the Mohawk, or in the heat and dirt of the Depression in Grapes of Wrath, or, in this, on a dark fortress of a steamer caught all around by ocean. Even in those films of his which employ the strongest narrative line, it's never the greatest thing. The greatest thing is his love of these worlds of his own creation, and his patience in showing us their beauties and darknesses.



On Dangerous Ground: (1952. dir: Nicholas Ray) I'm gazing across the shifting ground of time to another era entirely, which tends to obscure one's clarity of vision, but it seems to me this must have felt truly edgy and dangerous when it came out. Like most Ray movies, it's got a cheese factor, and hip teen patois rarely ages well, but it's half in love with its own darkness, and by the standards of its day it may have been the fastest paced noir yet.

The first half follows three cops on their beat around one of the ugliest noir-cities you've ever seen, and Robert Ryan, with moments of true Lawrence-Tierney kind of bad-assed mofo, is so attracted and repulsed by the streets he walks that he's going over to the dark side, slowly petrifying into a being other than human, something made out of rock or maybe cruelty. About halfway through he gets sent north into a rural area to help solve the murder of a young girl, and ends up accompanying the shotgun-wielding, vengeance-fixated father (played by Bond) on a search for the killer. Ida Lupino is the killer's blind sister who winds up melting the ice that's been mucking up the workings of Ryan's heart, but the two of them play hard enough against mawkishness that even I was not opposed to the sentiment of it. I think it's the best performance I've seen from Ryan.



Canyon Passage: (1946. dir: Jacques Tourneur) My love for this movie is inordinate; it licks right up over the edges of reason. First off, it gets some billing as a musical, which I hasten to assure you it is not. Hoagy Carmichael sings three songs is all, and it's got none of that Bustin'-into-Song-as-Soliloquy nonsense; he's just a strange character who walks around town with a mandolin and likes to sing, and folks put up with him. Possibly I love it in part because it was set and filmed in my neck of the woods (Jacksonville, officially, and you can see weird old Mt Thielsen crooked in the background of the cabin-raising scene, and when the Indians are on the war-path, the war-path goes right along the rim of Crater Lake). It opens in Portland, back when it was a dirt-laned port-town. "1000 people and raining," the Dana Andrews character describes it. If you step off the ramp in the street, you fall waist-high into mud.

Mostly, though, my love is roused by Jacques Tourneur. My God, the colors in this thing! Being Tourneur, he uses shadows like a master of the art, but I never knew he was a master of technicolor as well. (It reminds me some of that other masterpiece of colour, Drums Along the Mohawk, in which Ford takes the breath clean out of your lungs with the boldness of his palette. His indoor nocturnal scenes are done up in what I can only describe as Dario Argento reds and blues, emphasized by deep pockets of shadow.) The world he creates is fascinating down to smallest details.

The story is compelling without being extraordinary, but the dialogue stands a rung or two above your average oater, with some psychological depth. It's got the parallel extremes of sweetness and darkness, that crucial factor which separates the stallions from the eunuchs in the Western genre; it's got a solid cast, with Ward Bond giving a note-perfect performance as the town bully, haplessly named Honey Bragg. There's a fight scene in the middle, when Bragg calls Dana Andrews' Logan Stuart out, that is one of the best filmed I've ever seen. Bragg is already waiting at the high-ceilinged bar when the whole town converges, bringing Stuart like a lamb to slaughter ("He had an arm like a chunk of oak," he'd said earlier of Bragg), and you see shadows of their heads fall against the far wall until all the sunlight is blocked out. Once the fighting starts, it's Bond's Bragg who is the focus of both lighting and camera. Lit and shot at extreme close range to emphasize the blood and sweat, his fall is like that of a bull in the ring. It's a vicious fight, relentless, nothing pretty about it. "Yellow dogs," he barks at the cheering townsfolk as he stumbles away, beaten and humiliated, brought to the nadir from which he will single-handedly incite the local Indians to destroy the bulk of the white populace.

There is darkness shot all through this bright, sweet film, like poisoned veins: murders and nihilism and Mammon-worship. Reminiscent of Tourneur's films with Val Lewton, there's a beautiful raven-haired proto-Goth woman. The Brian Donlevy character, a compulsive gambler, is obsessed with her, and she is married to a man in black who owns an ongoing card game and a bad cough and who says he calls friend "...any man who believes like I do that the human race is a horrible mistake." Whenever someone is about to commit a murder, Tourneur shows us their eyes as they decide to do it, then fades out on their mid-sections as they walk toward the camera to commit the act, a remarkably effective technique. Horses get shot down in cold blood, folks get scalped; miners are constantly being reported murdered throughout, we assume for their gold, as is the one we see killed, although it's always the Indians who garner the blame; an Indian girl gets raped (we assume, from the look in Bragg's eye) then murdered. And throughout, there's the nagging sense that just behind the happy community feeling (one new bride gushes at her cabin-raising about how lovely it is that all these people came out to help, and people set her straight: they're doing it because they want new neighbors, and more potential guns against the Indians) there's a rabid crowd ready to turn and string you up, as evidenced by the ongoing incitements from the townsfolk for bloody fights on which they can lay wagers, and on their quickness to jail and plan a lynching for the banker who is accused of killing a miner.

Still, in the end, with the town lying in ashes, farms burned and people slain, there's still a feeling of regeneration in the air. It's the culmination of a cycle, not of the world. Tourneur has balanced the darkness and the light with his usual ease, and somehow pulls off an entirely believable redemptive ending.

second man through the door: ward bond

If you'd said when I was a kid that one day I'd have a crush on Bert the Cop, I'd have said you were nuts. But it happened, somewhere between watching the Big Trail in November and Tall in the Saddle in February, one of those crushes that creeps up and hits you sidelong so you don't see it coming.

Ward Bond, they say, appears in more of AFI's 100 Best Films Ever Made than any other actor, and I believe it. In 1939, he's not in Stagecoach, as you'd expect (rumor has it Andy Devine complained onset that the only reason he got the role was because Ward Bond couldn't drive a six-up), but he shows up that year as a Yankee officer in that other film, the one where Atlanta gets the torch. He's there somewhere in the Maltese Falcon, It Happened One Night, the Grapes of Wrath, Bringing Up Baby, and if you haven't seen him in the Searchers, you're missing a beautiful thing.

Someone ought to write a book. Politically a little to the right of Attila the Hun, he was listed 4-F for the draft in WWII because he was a secret epileptic. This was a man who suffered backlash blacklisting: that is, he was so vociferously involved in the Hollywood anti-communist movement in the forties that in the fifties he could only find work with friends, and it's lucky the ever-powerful Wayne was one such. In the latter fifties he scored the lead in the Wagon Train TV show (I've watched a single ep, which was dreadful, due not to the acting but to a gaggingly awful script) which made him First Man Through the Door for the first time (unless you count Hitler -- Dead or Alive, a strange little propaganda film I haven't been able to find yet, and as far as I can tell the only one in which he ever scored top billing. Even in Wagon Master, the template for the TV show, he got fourth billing after Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru and Harry Carey Jr.). He was a loyal part of John Ford's inner circle from the time he entered the business. He died, after stumping for Nixon, two days before Kennedy took the election in 1960, from a heart attack in Dallas. According to Scott Eyman's Print the Legend, after returning from Bond's funeral, John Ford walked up to Andy Devine and said, "Now YOU'RE the biggest shit I know." I don't know why, but I really hope that story is true.

Only the Valiant: (1951. dir: Gordon Douglas) Gregory Peck is pretty, Gig Young is the embodiment of louche, and Ward Bond is a force of nature in this Ford-like cavalry picture. Had Coach been at the helm, Victor McLaglen would've played Bond's role, and that'd've been too bad, because Bond has a scene at the beginning in which the camera hardly glances away while he whirls around a barracks, talking to the men, sneaking a drink, unseating a fellow from a card game who's holding an enviable hand, delivering exposition in so deft and engaging a manner that it's a pleasure to be in his company. Even the drunken Irishman act doesn't gall me the way it normally would because his chops are so flawless. That is, he's not just any drunken Irishman, but a very particular one; the way he carefully measures out each swallow of the limited whiskey, for instance, makes it feel like we're watching a man whose life extends beyond both ends of the movie rather than a character caught between its frames.

It's not the best cavalry picture ever made, but it's surely one of the more interesting ones. Gregory Peck is unpopular with his men for a variety of reasons, most of them due to an excess of enthusiasm for following orders, but when he's ordered to send his rival in love on a suicide mission he was slated to lead himself, everyone turns against him. He gathers up all the men who hate him most and takes them on another suicidal mission against the Apaches, having to watch his back from all sides as well as the front. There are some great moments: my favorite is the eerie night-time silence while the cavalrymen watch helpless from their fortress as each lantern they've set up in the passageway is shot dark by unseen Apaches. And Lon Chaney plays a mad Arab soldier. Did anyone in those days emote as fully, as unabashedly, as Lon Chaney?

Three Godfathers: (1948. dir: John Ford) This is a tough one. Garry Wills in John Wayne's America (HIGHLY recommend this read) includes it in his list of the best of the Ford/Wayne partnership, but, boy howdy, it's tough. It's shamelessly sentimental, dripping with it, even, and shot right through its very heart with a mawkish Sunday-School religiosity, but the worst of it is that the story is entirely unbelievable on nearly every front. Three barely credible cattle-rustlers turn bank-robber and get chased into the desert by Ward Bond and his posse, where they come upon a woman dying in childbirth who makes them promise to raise her baby as their own. I can only suggest this one to die-hard Ford fans, who'll find the folks they love (Ben Johnson, Dobe Carey, poor Jane Darwell in another of Ford's "let's see how utterly we can humiliate Jane and keep her coming back for more" roles) and some compelling photography. Carey's death-scene is gorgeous, his prone form shot from a sort of Mantegna's-Christ angle while Duke stands holding his hat against the sun to shield the boy's face, and the way the desert storms are shot is the kind of poetry a person can see.

Ward Bond's role as Marshall Buck Sweet is problematic (everything is problematic in this movie), but his first scene (again) involves a truly wonderful bit. The three cowboys have just ridden into town and pause on their way to rob the bank long enough to laugh at the shingle on the fence that reads "B. Sweet". Sweet, a nice guy but a good lawman, senses something ill in their intentions and tries to stall them with neighborliness. When he pulls on his vest with the star pinned to it, they all go quiet and he knows his hunch was right. "I'll be seeing you boys again," he says, still neighborly, but with a serious underscore, "probably." It's not a very well-written scene (it's not a very well-written movie) but Bond gives it just the right turns, just the right inner life. By the rolling of the end credits, his character has faded into two-dimensions, but so has the whole movie, and it's none of his fault.

Tall in the Saddle: (1944. dir: Edwin L. Marin) I love this one, although it suffers from a surfeit of Gabby Hayes (a little bit of Gabby goes a long way indeed, and I think maybe folks had a different sense of humour in those days) and some two-dimensional characterizations. This is a Western in which Duke gets to solve a mystery, which becomes a murder mystery as he goes along. As the big fan of genre-crossing, it's a natural for me. Another thing it's got going for it is the fact that Duke chooses the bad girl over the good one. Bond plays one of the villains, and not his usual unthinking muscleman but a slick, lawyerly type of bad guy. In fact, it took me several scenes longer than it took John Wayne's character to realize that this Judge was trying to cheat a nice girl of her inheritance, since the Bad Judge looked and sounded like Ward Bond and who wouldn't trust Ward Bond if he said sign this paper and I'll take care of everything?

There's some lovely noirish lighting in the night-time scenes, particularly up at the cabin when some unknown foe attacks the Duke unawares while he's (if I remember this correctly) making biscuits. This is also one of those movies where Wayne and Bond have a big knock-down fist-fight (Shepherd of the Hills is another favorite in that respect), and that's always good, because nobody besides Ward Bond ever had both the physical size and personal presence to balance the Duke in a scene. Everyone else seems pale, or emaciated, or just plain dwarfed.

john drew barrymore: an actor without a role

My favorite part of While the City Sleeps, that queer amalgam of jolly Hollywood banter and Fritz Lang creepiness, is a shot of the murderer peering up a staircase, up toward the camera, while his prey goes all unawares into her apartment. His head appears off-center, the framing just off-kilter enough as to be entirely psychologically satisfying. There is something dreamlike about it; it bears something of the silent film's strange grace. The murderer's grimace is something from a nightmare.

The first time I saw it (I missed the credits) I did not know the name of the young actor. In fact, he was the only actor in the thing I DIDN'T know: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino; this is one stellar cast. And then there's this strange-faced young man, pudgier than you expect from an actor of that period and far less handsome, even for a villain. And there's something else missing: a certain vanity. There are moments when he fails, and his style is often embarrassingly hamfisted, but there are other moments which feel truly experienced in that shocking way that Dean and Brando and Clift were teaching us to know and love. In the first moment we see the killer, a delivery boy, experience the rush of bloodlust that will lead to a murder, Barrymore lets his face go slack-jawed, his eyes go blank and devoid of humanity. In a single moment we have seen him turn from a graceless teenager into a killing machine, and there is no question of compunction or self-doubt or second thoughts. We know for a fact that he will work tirelessly until this lust is sated, and we know it without any dialogue.

It's a strange performance in a strange movie, and I thought little more of the actor until I found myself amazed by a Gunsmoke episode, "One Killer On Ice", in which a charming and hard-drinking bounty hunter rides into Dodge and convinces Matt to accompany him in transporting an infamous prisoner. Like most serials of the time, the regular cast is frozen into two dimensions by the very demands of the series: Festus must always be silly, Miss Kitty's heart must always be golden, Matt must never show sign of weakness, Doc must never tire. It's the guests who have the chance to shine, and Barrymore does just that. The hour-long format gives good, relaxed opportunity for character development, and Barrymore's bounty-hunter gets layers of subtle shading. He's the easy lover of women and speaks in an engaging Southern drawl, a man who seems virtuous and fun-loving in the first half hour and becomes increasingly complex as it continues, until Matt has to take him out. It is an utterly self-assured performance; his choices are strong and fascinating. What won me absolutely were the odd and intriguing moments where he chose to laugh, never where you'd expect. This is the performance that has convinced me, in spite of most of the rest of his resume, that he might have been an important actor.

The trouble is, it never seems to have come fully manifest. After Gunsmoke, I punched up Netflix and found some four or five other entries, none of them promising. Barrymore, it is said, was difficult. Originally slated to play the double-character of Lazarus in Star Trek's quirky first-season ep "The Alternative Factor", he failed to show up for shooting and was replaced by Robert Brown. This was apparently not unusual, and while he did a lot of television throughout the fifties, as well as playing roles like the BMOC/drug-pusher in High School Confidential, he fled during the sixties to Italy to make shlock like Rome Against Rome, an ultra-cut-rate zombie flick in which he plays a one-eyed-goddess-worshipping priest who talks in that strange old pseudo-British studio-speak: "terrible" becomes "teddible", "power" becomes "pahr" and "happen" becomes "heppen".

But then there's this curious little entry in his resume: did you know they remade Winchester '73? It's true. For television, starring Tom Tryon in the white hat and John Saxon in the black. Over the years we've seen a slew of cringeworthy television "further adventures" remakes like the Warren Oates/Mariette Hartley African Queen, or the Timothy Dalton/Joanne Whalley Scarlett, but this is a rough duplicate of the classic Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart classic, and so possibly ranks among the most superfluous and ill-advised ventures of all time. Even so, the most misguided projects have happy accidents at their edges and corners, and this one has Barrymore playing one of Saxon's henchmen: gruff-voiced, full-bearded, black-clad and spider-like, he's a preacher sprung from jail. He's also easily the most interesting part of the movie, and has some of the best lines.

But back to While the City Sleeps: perhaps, in retrospect, his most important film. It does not rank among my favorite noirs. Its focus is too scattered, its tone too muddled, and Dana Andrews is certainly not at his shining best in the lead. The parts which do shine are the the parts when Lang can play with the camera: any time there's a staircase, he has a grand time with subtleties of angle and perspective. In the first murder scene, he's put a creak in the landing right outside the victim's door, a small detail, a thing I didn't notice on first viewing, but a lovely one, a builder of subconscious tension. He also knows exactly what to do in the subway: a subway is like a banquet of shadow and light for the likes of him. And for all Barrymore's flaws I know why he was cast: because his crazed expressions are effective pieces of nightmare when suddenly illuminated, and because there's something about his graceful awkwardness of stance which lends itself to Lang's strange angles.

I have a sense, in watching him, that his most important work went into his life and was never captured by a camera. He feels to me like an important actor who never found his important role, or maybe was too drunk or depressed to turn up onset for it.

and more that i've been watching

L'Avventura: (1960. dir: Michelangelo Antonioni) See it for some of the most gorgeous and mesmerizing photography ever, both in use of landscape and in love of the human face. A boatload of healthy, vital, rich and sun-soaked Italian people go for a cruise, and they are like a swarm of little kids: too restless and bored to do anything properly, to take a swim or have some sex or even argue well. One of them gets so bored and restless she disappears into the cosmos, just disintegrates without a trace, like those girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock who implode and vanish out of sheer sexual frustration.

On the surface, this is a movie about relations between the sexes, and I think it wants one hand in Fellini (the absurdity of the whore/crowd sequence) and the other, believe it or not, in Bergman. There's something sweet about watching these bronzed Italians trying to convey despair and being just too damn healthy to convince. You see Liv Ullmann or Max Von Sydow stony-faced on a rock in the North Sea, you see despair; you see Monica Vitti or Gabriele Ferzetti weeping on a similar (but warmer) rock in the Meditteranean, you feel like you're watching a kid with an emotion passing across him before, I don't know, a herd of cows or something distracts him and a wholly new emotion sweeps him away. There's probably a moral in it, and I suspect it is, "Don't fall in love with Italians unless you are one," but these people are so endearing it may be closer to, "Just be in love with your Italians while you're there and make sure to take your heart with you when you go home."

Anyway, the McGuffin is the missing girl, and the search goes on intermittently for some 18 hours or so of screen-time (fear not: I exaggerate), but she's easily forgotten and the time passes hypnotically because what you're looking at (both Vitti's face and the scenery) is so gorgeous. It's a lot like that other 18-hour existential Antonioni travelfest, the Passenger, which has that EXCELLENT long end-pan in which the camera moves slowly, slowly across the room, through the grille, and around the courtyard while Jack Nicholson sleeps his last sleep. I'd suggest you watch them as a double-feature, but that would be heartless: NOBODY has that kind of patience. Do watch them separately, though, when you're in a slow, still mood, and maybe complete this particular film-fest with Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, a film that really does achieve a measure of the narcotic, existential delving into Life and Death And Their Relations To Love in a way that L'Avventura I think wants to but can't because it's just not sufficiently sere and etiolated, not ready to give up living long enough to do it.



Bang the Drum Slowly: (1973. dir: John D. Hancock) I loved this movie when I was a kid, watched it anytime it was on TV, which was a lot. It lent itself well to the small screen because it felt like a movie-of-the-week, and I guess that's why I never thought to revisit it as an adult. Now that I do, who'd have thought it would be not just good but bordering on great? It's got the movie-of-the-week thing, sure... sentiment (baseball player with incurable disease and buddy who sticks by him through thick and thin), swelly music, low budget... but this is the one that every movie-of-the-week ever made WANTS to be, the supreme acme to which they aspire. This is the real mccoy upon which all the cliches which followed were modelled.

For a start, it's got a simplicity of story-telling. There are visual moments that break your heart: the slow-motion final play of the big game in which De Niro (yes! De Niro!) has flipped his catcher's mask off and is trying to find the foul ball while simultaneously fending off the sickness that's been threatening to fell him all day is a thing of beauty. It won't surprise anyone when I say that De Niro gives a brilliant performance, since this was just as he was gearing up to conquer the world, but the egolessness of it is astonishing, its lack of vanity, when you figure that he was young and hungry (Mean Streets came out this same year) and looking to make an impression on the world. The idea that this is the same man who'll show up in Godfather II in a single year is nuts. What did he do with all that charisma?! How do you turn a charisma like that on and off? And yet he does it. And it's not just De Niro. Michael Moriarty is riveting as the star pitcher who takes care of his friend, and if there were nothing else to recommend it, the movie would be worth watching for Vincent Gardenia in perhaps the role of his lifetime as their growling and bear-like coach.

random thoughts on hamlet as he shows up on film

I once set out to watch every filmed Hamlet available. I got through about five, I think, before I got distracted. It's an unending task, happily so, and it doesn't take long before you realize that every production, no matter how halt and lame (I'm looking at you, Ethan Hawke), will have one or two moments of revelation, ways of presenting a line or an action, a thing you've seen a hundred times before, but somehow until that moment never really saw. The Franco Zeferelli/Mel Gibson movie (of which I have seen only pieces) has Glenn Close offering an interesting and workable take on Gertrude by giving her an extraordinarily childlike nature. The Derek Jacobi production is lovely, and has a wonderful "Nymph, in thy orisons" moment when he realizes Ophelia is holding her prayer-book upside-down. Even that infamous Ethan Hawke version (in which he omits a crucial "from" from his "to be or not to be" speech, thereby implying that his metaphorical traveller to the undiscovered country steals its coastline and never gives it back) puts odd curves on things, like scenes played in a laundromat or using old footage of James Dean as inspiration for Hamlet's musings on playacting.

The Olivier film, a sort of diving board from which a whole subsequent generation of Hamlets leapt in various directions, ages surprisingly well. It's filmed with grace, a camera moving in long, easy pans around an airy castle from scene to scene, and I tend to forget (I suppose because of the hype) what a strange and compelling actor Olivier was, always carrying some terrible secret barely restrained beneath those heavy eyelids.

Whatever your opinion of Kenneth Branagh, radical reinterpretation while remaining true to the text is a thing he does better than anyone, and he does it without breaking a sweat. For example, there's a version available of Twelfth Night as done by Branagh's Renaissance Company, always a troubling comedy because of the cruelties wreaked on Malvolio by its supposedly sympathetic buffoon characters. This one has been refigured as a tragedy, or anyway what you might call a Melancholy, with the truly resplendent Anton Lesser as the clown Feste, a role that has been re-placed (without changing any dialogue, mind you) at the epicenter of the piece as its tragic and romantic hero. Once you've seen it, it seems not only remarkably effective but also obviously what Shakespeare meant all along.

The Big Kahuna Dramaturge at the theatre where I work said unequivocally that you'll never see an uncut Hamlet onstage; it's just too damn long. Branagh did it on film, though, in what is the new textbook version from the mid-'90s, giving us four hours' worth of some of the best Shakespeare you'll ever see. He keeps the forward momentum so strong through the first half that it doesn't seem long, then you're hooked by the second and so it still doesn't seem long. He tucks an intermission in between IV.iv and IV.v, way too late in the day for a theatrical production because no modern audience will sit that long (when I was a kid, I swear they did the plays without intermissions at all, and if you left the theatre they wouldn't let you back in), but it's the perfect break in the play. He leaves us with the "I do not know / Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do,'" speech, just as he's leaving Denmark, banished for England, and he runs into the Norwegian army on his way out. Branagh sets the tiny scene on an icy, waste expanse and has the camera pull back, back, into infinity as the speech goes on, until he's just a tiny black speck in a white landscape, shouting these words into the vastness of the sky. He's truly brilliant, this man. AND after seeing Richard Briers' Polonius -- a harsh, relentless, thinking Polonius, -- I will never return easily to the old dunderheaded approach.

A Scottish brogue is one of the sexier things on the planet, and I always harbored an idea that if some Scottish actor (John Hannah, say) were to speak the "what a piece of work is a man" speech softly into one's ear (particularly the "this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" bit), it might inspire a state of ecstatic nirvana profound enough that one might never return from it. You could say, then, that I ventured into the Tony Richardson Hamlet with some unreasonable expectations, since it has a Scot in the lead (Nicol Williamson). This one came out of the late sixties, when theatre (OK, the whole of Western Civilization) was experiencing earthquakes and tidal waves, destroying and reforming itself, and this piece seems to be from the very dark, post-Altamont sixties. You come away from Ophelia's mad scene (played by the ultrahip Marianne Faithfull) with a sense that everyone in the damn court has taken sexual advantage of her, including Laertes and Claudius. Williamson's Hamlet is the most neurotic you'll ever see, wild-eyed and crumpled, his high, nasal monotone (so much for the sexiness of the brogue) running roughshod across all that poetry as if he had no time for it.

You can get the Peter Brook Hamlet on Netflix, too, the 2002 production with Adrian Lester in the lead. Brook, one of a handful of Grand Theatrical Eminences Grises who redefined theatre at the hinge of the seventies, concentrates on graceful, minimalist staging, uses a multi-cultural stable of actors, and encourages his performers to avoid heavy characterization, focusing rather on speaking their lines with truth and simplicity. This can be quite beautiful in a Zen sort of way, but robs the play of much of its zest.

What you CAN'T get on Netflix is the David Tennant production from last year and oh! what I would give to have seen that onstage. They say that Tennant is now the most popular actor in all of England... mostly due to the good doctor, obviously, but across that pond I suspect folks actually take notice when an actor excels at Shakespeare.

A short list of the Dane on film:

Olivier, 1948
Philip Saville, starring Christopher Plummer, 1964
Gielgud & Bill Colleran, starring Richard Burton, 1964
Richardson, starring Nicol Williamson, 1969
David Giles, starring Ian McKellen, 1970
Celestino Coronada, starring Tony & David Meyer, 1976
Rodney Bennett, starring Derek Jacobi, 1980
Zefferelli, starring Mel Gibson, 1990
Kevin Kline, 1990
Branagh, 1996
Michael Almereyda, starring Ethan Hawke, 2000
Campbell Scott, 2000
Brook, starring Adrian Lester, 2002
Alexander Fodor, starring Wilson Belchambers, 2007

what i've been watching: february 2010

Body of Lies: (2008. dir: Ridley Scott) Five full-on stars for Mark Strong; a solid two-and-a-half for the rest of the movie. Without him, it's a decent enough espionage film, well enough acted, well enough put together, that it'd be worth not changing the channel if you ran across it on TV. Throw Mark Strong into the mix as the mysterious head of Jordanian Intelligence, and you have a thing worth seeking out. Earlier this year Strong was the Crowleyesque villain in Sherlock Holmes, but that was a mere two-dimensional foil, the type a man of his skills could play blindfolded and sitting on his hands. In this one, although Scott has given him less screen-time than compadres DiCaprio and Crowe, it's a role he can run with, make something of, and Scott has photographed him remarkably well while he's doing it.



Possessed: (1947. dir: Curtis Bernhardt) Histrionics and psychobabble ensue when Joan Crawford drives herself all the way through crazy and into a coma for the love of Van Heflin. Weirdly, I think this is the first time I've ever watched a full Crawford movie from end to end. Certainly it's the first time I ever saw that she was a little bit pretty: in the beginning she's got no makeup, or very little, and there are nice features there. Later on, when she climbs back into the red-scar-mouth and helmet-haired maquillage/suit of armour, she loses her appeal again, just looking nearsighted and strident. It's a tough role and it needs something extra, something I suspect Barbara Stanwyck might have given it, while Crawford reaches for the obvious choice with every moment.

Raymond Massey is solid and appropriately unassuming as the loyal husband, and it's once again an opportunity for me to marvel at just how great Van Heflin really was. You have only to imagine, say, Robert Taylor or Clark Gable in the role of David Sutton to realize the depth and breadth Heflin gives. Anyone else would've gone too nice, too conflicted, or too cruel in the continued rejection of Crawford's clingy and hysterical Louise Howell.

How about this for a bold position? The undeniable greatness of Spencer Tracy is much ballyhooed, and I'm not denying it, but I can't think of a Tracy role that Heflin couldn't have played as well or better, and I'm including my favorite, that masterful turn in Bad Day at Black Rock. Heflin would have given us a different Macreedy, but one, I suspect, every bit as fascinating. And could Tracy have done as much with Jeff Hartnett in Johnny Eager? or even Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma? I have doubts, but I'm willing to be talked out of them.




>SPOILER ALERT IN EFFECT<

the Man Who Wasn't There: (2001. dir: the Coen brothers) This is what happens when a director is addicted to making films but his creative well has run temporarily dry. Lugubrious and annoying, it's like a short story stretched into novel length. No, strike that: not even a short story. It's a series of ideas, some of them interesting, some not so much, as if somebody leafed through the notepad they keep in their shirt-pocket to scribble down passing notions and chose ten or twelve at random. "We'll use the Roswell thing, and I want to parody my daughter's piano teacher, and... I don't know... oh! that thing about how a barber going to the electric chair, how the last thing he'd be thinking of was the haircuts on the people watching." It has no suspense at all, which is odd, since there are murders for which major characters might easily go down. I believe we're meant to think that conventional suspense has been sacrificed in favor of a certain existential detachment, but that's a load of bull-honky. This was a purely technical exercise, and as such ought to have been left in the desk-drawer.

The only interest it holds at all is due entirely to the Coens' technical ability, that and the high quality of actor they attract. The black-and-white is gorgeous, deep velvet, and perfectly lit, and Billy Bob Thornton's craggy face is an ideal subject for it. The details of the lost era (small-town America in the fifties) are not so much realistic as heightened, and there is a strong internal cohesion to this created world. Tony Shalhoub and Richard Jenkins are stand-outs in their bit roles... and that's about all I can think of to recommend it.

torture, genius, and the witchfinder general

On a glib day I might describe Michael Reeves as the Ian Curtis of horror films. Young, hip, his works deep-stained with a startling pessimism, dead (probably accidentally) by his own hand at a staggeringly young age, leaving the merest nubbin of what might have grown into a career of some genius, he is swathed after all these many post-mortem years in a gothic mantle of possible greatness, tragically unrealized.

He made three films: She-Beast with Barbara Steele, the Sorcerers with Boris Karloff, and the Witchfinder General with Vincent Price, which is considered his masterpiece.

She-Beast employs a tongue-in-cheek, very dark humor, prescient of Sam Raimi. A Carnaby Street hipster-couple is lifted out of their element and placed in danger in Transylvania, which has fallen behind the Iron Curtain but still harbors demons and vampire-hunters. Its playfulness is heavy like concrete: the couple speak self-consciously clever lines, there are over-the-top visual gags (the most famous inolving a hammer and sickle) and a really dreadful Richard-Lester-esque chase scene involving a soviet-bloc version of Keystone Kops, apparently stuck in as an afterthought because the film as it stood was too short. The Sorcerers I have not yet seen, and am currently scrambling across intercontinental Ebay trying to get a copy that doesn't cost a week's pay, but it sounds like She-Beast 's attempts at lightness have vanished and its hard edges of violence and cynicism have darkened and lugubrified into a truly disturbing, low-budget stew of Peeping Tom and Being John Malkovich.

By the time you reach Witchfinder, the darkness becomes impenetrable. The whole film has exactly one moment of humor, a short interchange between the Witchfinder's torturer and Wilfrid Brambell (appropriately enough, Paul's Grandfather from Lester's Hard Day's Night) in which they barter over horses. The rest is a sort of fable using the English countryside in a manner that David Lynch would use American suburbia in Blue Velvet, as a thin facade of apparent loveliness which flips at a touch to reveal a hell, like Sartre's, which is made of other people. God, if there is one, is content to remain a distant watcher of trees growing, birds singing, and men preying like ravening beasts, one upon another. In those rare instances when the heroes get a break, it is followed hard upon by some greater hardship or horror.

Cromwell's revolution has split England and unleashed a sort of chaos through the land which might be used to the advantage of an unscrupulous character like Matthew Hopkins (played by Vincent Price, although Reeves disliked him and fought for Donald Pleasance in the role), soi-disant Witchfinder General, hanger of women and torturer of men. The story begins with Richard (Ian Ogilvy, an actor Reeves used in all his films), a good and honorable soldier fighting on the side of the rebels. He loves Sara (Hilary Dwyer), who lives in a quiet village with her uncle, a papist. When the villagers call the Witchfinder down on the uncle, Sara finds herself in a sort of nightmare into which Richard can only join later on, rather than quelling it, despite his increasingly obsessive attempts to obtain vengeance.

Although the limitations of his budget are apparent, Reeves manages striking moments of innovation: a late-night supper at a long table at which the characters are lit by three intense pools of light succeeds both as a striking visual metaphor of helplessness in the face of impending darkness and a most convincing picture of a pre-gasworks manor house. There's an early scene in which Richard's company is attacked by Royalist snipers and he's left to guard the horses while the rest go hunting. In a conspicuously original take, Reeves stays with Richard as he waits, surrounded by forest sounds punctuated by occasional shouts and gunfire, until the sense of complete isolation and ignorance starts to breed panic, and we as audience long for him to do anything, take any action, rather than keep waiting passively.

There are even hints of a Terrence Malick-ian nature mysticism... just hints, and whereas with Malick one feels that God and Nature and Man are all one vast thing, Reeves leaves us with the uncomfortable sense that while Nature and God are enjoying a pleasant coexistence, fallen-from-the-garden Man is stuck in a hell of his own making, occupying the same space but a whole different dimension. It is most evident in the scene where Hopkins' brutish assistant (or "witch-pricker", played by Robert Russell) has been shot and is stranded alone in the forest, a slug in his shoulder and Cromwellian troops searching for him. We watch him drift in and out of consciousness, and Reeves lets the camera drift into the sleepy rays of sun filtering down through the trees to suggest a lazy passage of time (and, at the same time, a lazy indifference on the part of the universe toward his plight) as he takes his own instrument of torture to his shoulder to dig the metal out, his screams juxtaposed against the pastoral beauty around him.

Witchfinder is best remembered for its darkly horrific ending, truly revolutionary in those days of the Hammer formula (evil is sexy and potent, but good wins and order is restored, at least until Dracula rises again), in which although the bad guy is ultimately taken down with brutal violence, both hero and heroine are so decimated by the ordeals they've endured that they can hardly be said to exist anymore. This was the same year as Night of the Living Dead, it's true, but that masterpiece is cut from such wholly original cloth as to be a sort of mutant prodigy. Witchfinder, with its period costumes and its horror icon, lulls you into a Hammer-film mindset then pulls the rug out.

After Witchfinder, Reeves was attached to several projects that never got past the planning stages. He was set to re-team with Price on the Oblong Box, but it was a project that proved problematic to the point of severe depression for him, and when it eventually did hit the screen, directed by Gordon Hessler (Scream and Scream Again, Murders in the Rue Morgue), it met with a tepid reception. In his last days, he was greenlighted instead by Granada Films to put All the Little Animals onto the screen, a book which was a fad hit in turn-of-the-'70s Britain (it finally made it onto film in 1999 as a pre-American Psycho Christian Bale vehicle, emerging to wildly divergent reviews). This was a project of the heart for him, one which might have lifted him out of the constrictions of his low-budget horror-film corner while leaving his darkness intact. And it is that unflinchingly thick, black-blooded and multi-dimensional darkness which, to this day, gives his small oeuvre its startling sense of importance.