the wolfman: alas, poor benicio

SPOILER ALERT

It's easy to understand why they thought of Benicio Del Toro when they wanted to remake the Wolfman; he's got that wonderful sort of feral cast to his features. And the transitions into beastliness are indeed a joy to behold, as is watching the monster in action, with its great, loping, superfast run. There's a lovely climactic battle between father and son werewolves amidst the symbolic inferno of the blazing family manor-house, and Anthony Hopkins does a superb job of creating a whole new character, by which I mean something rather different from what we've seen from him before (which seems impossible, since we've all seen him in 5,000 different things) (and, now I think of it, it may be only a personal effect, as I made a decision to stop watching his films some time hence), communicating his character well through broad but interesting brushstrokes. Anthony Sher is on hand to play a petty tyrant of a doctor who gets his own alongside a whole uber-talented cast of British journeymen character actors (sort of equivalent to having the Wrecking Crew backing you up on your record back in the sixties), including that guy with the great face from American Werewolf in London, the dart-thrower who says, "You made me miss. I've never missed that board before." He, also, meets a bloody but photographically interesting fate.

This, however, is just one further illustration of the rule against mixing Yanks and Brits in a single cast. The subrule is that Brits can meld into an American cast, but the opposite is rarely true. Yes, it's been done, sometimes with some success, but you must take very great care, because acting is like football: the Brits do it better than we do. Anyway, there's a certain kind of acting that we do better, but that's not the kind in play in this movie. Benicio is a huge talent, one of our best, but his skills lie in underplaying, eccentric humour, and improvisational naturalism. Here, those skills lie pinned and squirming beneath the combined weight of a massively stodgy script and an overweening production design. He's playing a successful stage actor born in England but raised in America, and from his first line, which, unfortunately, is, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio...", it's apparent that he's in trouble: either out of his depth or in over his head, I'm uncertain which metaphor is apter.

The production design is a direct descendant from Coppola's Dracula, which is a film that I loved when I saw it the first time, completely abhorred when I saw it the second time, laughed at and enjoyed when I saw it again, et al, ad nauseam: the roller coaster never ends. Its flaws and achievements are all so bold that there is no tepid response possible, and it all depends much on one's sense of humour at the time of watching. Anyway, that one had an eerie sensuousness that was so over-the-top as to be occasionally magnificent (also it had Tom Waits eating flies; Coppola knows what we want), whereas this lacks anything so attention-grabbing. If anything, the sheer density of its arty atmosphere, that flag-waving, look-over-here insistence of it, makes you feel suspiciously like someone's trying to deflect your attention from the puniness of the storyline or possibly the dreariness of the dialogue.

Still, I am devoutly of the opinion that there can never be too many werewolf movies, and I applaud the effort to make the old-style, pre-Underworld, pre-Twilight, Lycanthropy-Is-A-Curse-Not-A-Form-Of-Sex-Appeal kind of howler.

some final thoughts on ward bond

Alright, look: the parameters of the Bondfest have stretched way beyond what I cover in these posts. I've now seen sixty-eight Ward Bond films and two television appearances, all but seven of them watched (or happily re-watched) since I began the film festival four months ago. That includes movies like Chained, a little shipboard love story with Clark Gable and Joan Crawford from 1934 in which Bond has one scene, about five seconds long, as a ship's steward, and one line, and you see him only from the back with a tiny bit of profile, and if his physique and voice and movements were not so distinctive I'd never have known he was in it. The only one in which I haven't been able to find him is the Big House, a prison thing with the young Robert Montgomery (in a fabulous performance as a rich kid jailed for vehicular manslaughter who turns out to have a yellow streak a mile wide) and a burly Wallace Beery. I went back to IMDB and it says he plays Convict Holding Flowers, but I swear that's not Ward Bond. I'd put money on it.

I've seen so many that I no longer know what to write about them. He has become personal, sunk into my underconscious, so that he shows up now in my dreams. I had one the other night: I went to some sort of a hippie rally dressed in a flowing white skirt and blouse, and they slapped white paint across my face to mark me as one of theirs. Ward Bond was a soldier in civilian clothes, wearing the spectacles from Tall in the Saddle and with his hair greyed, but falsely-greyed, from a spray-can, like they do in theatre. He was wearing jeans and I remember thinking his ass and legs looked wrong, too skinny, undernourished.

After awhile your mind no longer experiences the films one at a time, but sorts them into bunches. Lately I've been seeing parallels. What are the chances that one man would be in two films about warring logging camps (Park Avenue Logger, Conflict) in the space of two years? Or there's Operation Pacific and Mr. Roberts, which share a nearly identical scene in which naval crews wreak havoc during their shore leave on a tropical island and it's all played for giggles, like it's fun and games when the white boys tear up your party and terrorize your girls.

There's 1938's Prison Break and the old Richard Barthelmess Heroes for Sale, both political statements: the first about how we as a society don't give ex-cons an even shake, the second about how we don't give reformed drug addicts an even shake. Bond just shows up for a few lines in a few scenes in the second one, as a railroad hobo called Red, and if you don't know the sound of his voice you'd think he wasn't in it. The movie itself is interesting, though. It begins with a great shot of soldiers pouring out of a WWI trench on a suicide mission, filmed from above. He gets greater play as the heavy in Prison Break, in which he's playing against Barton MacLane, an actor he'll be paired with in several films, including the Maltese Falcon and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Sometimes he's playing the same role. There's Waterfront Lady and Slightly Dangerous, in which he plays the same dapper, loyal bodyguard tasked to stand guard over a beautiful woman for a rich guy. Slightly Dangerous, a lightweight Lana Turner Cinderella story with an even lighter-weight Robert Young as her leading man, has a good gag where Bond keeps taking Young out with a sock to the gut, but the third time Young is ready with a cutting-board stuffed inside his jacket. (Good times!) He's played a lot of morally shallow bullies; I've seen probably ten in the last month alone, and (despite the class differences) you can find similarities between Tim Dorson in Swamp Water and John Palmer Cass in Young Mr Lincoln, but Honey Bragg in Canyon Passage is unlike any other. There's not a false note in it. I love the time Bragg takes between his lines. Bond convinces us that he's both mentally slow and malevolently sly. The choices he makes in every conversation with Dana Andrews are absolutely true to character and full in ways that might be missed on a cursory viewing. It's possible that you have to watch a number of Bond films back-to-back to glean truly the extraordinary measure of its worth and beauty, this performance, but I'd have given him an Oscar for it, without hesitation.

Which brings me to another rather wonderful point: the way his fist-fighting technique alters from role to role. First, you have the class distinctions: is the boxer a gentleman or a hillbilly? Is he trained in the manly art of self-defence, or is his fighting style rough and self-invented? Gus "Knockout" Carrigan from Conflict might be an early version of John L Sullivan in Gentleman Jim, both heavily trained and hard-hitting but slower than their opponents. Wash Gibbs, the Duke's backwoods cousin from Shepherd of the Hills, is heavy but quick, Honey Bragg is unbelievably heavy-hitting but slow and lumbering, for all the world like the last of the dinosaurs. In the Long Gray Line, Captain Kohler is both highly-trained and very quick when he boxes against the untrained younger Tyrone Powers who will become his life-long protege. Then look at his two Mr Moto films (this is a series cashing in on the popularity of Charlie Chan in which Peter Lorre plays an unassuming Asian professor of criminology who travels the world solving crimes): heavyweight Biff Moran in Mr Moto's Gamble is a slick professional, while the wrestler Sailor Sam, in Mr Moto on Danger Island, is clumsy and slapdash.

Although he has as good a claim as anyone to being in a vaster number of important films than any other actor, part of that is sheer heft of resume. Certainly most of these films are not at all momentous, and many of the roles are tiny, like his hired-thug hockey-player in Times Square Lady, a Robert Taylor picture. He's got one murder, a few lines; extra points given for shirtlessness. Some of the films I'm fondest of are not what you'd call memorable except that Bond has a single good scene in them: as a Nazi bully in This Mortal Storm, a reluctant pilot in Made For Each Other (a depressing slice of marital bliss that not even Stewart and Lombard could make palatable), an unfortunate player in a poker game-turned-interrogation in the rollicking 1939 Western Dodge City.

But let's get back to Gentleman Jim, an Errol Flynn picture loosely based on the life of boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett. I'm no fan of biodrama. I don't like it these days when they at least make a stab at historical accuracy, and back then they didn't bother. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this for a Ford film because of the saccharine-sweet and feisty-cute Irish family. (One thing my Bondfest is doing for me is shortening my patience for that cute, hard-drinking, fighting Irish thing.) Bond gives one of his greatest turns as John L. Sullivan, though. This is one of those rare cases in which a role exists that really can only be played by a single person (like, for instance, the Viggo Mortensen role in Cronenberg's History of Violence). Someone else might have done the fighting and the braggodaccio, both of which he pulls off beautifully, but it's that last scene that's the killer: the one after he's lost his crown to Flynn's Corbett and he shows up alone and late and heavily bruised to the triumphal party and resigns his championship status in a very moving conversation. Another actor might have done it, of course, but not like this. Bond carries with him throughout the scene a numinous glow, the kind of thing you'd conjure up if you were playing a saint, a man who's just seen God on the road to Damascus, and the effect is breathtaking. In that single moment of space following their exchange, when Sullivan turns to leave and the crowd parts dumbly before him out of respect for this strange grace he's carrying, he does not see them at all, but pauses to put on his hat and walks out to face his future, a future empty now that his lifework is done; it's a heartbreaking thing. It's a perfect piece of film, and it's all Ward Bond. And, yes, I'd have given him a second Oscar, no question.

In any case, it has to end, my Bondfest, although I'm nowhere near the end of his CV. I've about exhausted Netflix, my local video store has liquidated all its old videos except for Oscar-winners (selfish, selfish bastards), and I can't keep buying movies off Ebay. TCM, it seems, shows some six to ten of his movies per month, so that'll keep me for a spell, but let's face it, it can't last. It has, however, been a gloriously fruitful animus projection. My God, the movies I've seen that I never would have otherwise. I've seen more Cagney, Crawford, Flynn, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan in the past months than in my previous life together. I thought I disliked Lana Turner and Joan Crawford and Robert Taylor. Jury's still out on all three counts but I know now that I like them more than I'd thought. Actors I'd never heard of, people like George O'Brien, Barton MacLane and Nat Pendleton are becoming old friends, all because of Ward.

I'm going to miss him, but the timing is right: it's time for World Cup 2010 to kick off, so I can't watch any movies for the next month, anyway. I'll be back here in July, once the football madness has ended. Meanwhile, come visit A Pretty Move if you'd like to follow the action and hysteria alongside us.

ward bond filmfest evening five: two completely insane john ford films

The more Ford I watch, the more I get it that he's one strange cat. That clunky, unaccountably pedestrian sense of humor, particularly as it involves women, is just one element of it. (And it's not just Jane Darwell who gets repeatedly humbled. Maureen O'Hara must have been a really swell sport to put up with Coach so long. See for example the scene in the Long Gray Line where she finally offers herself up to Tyrone Power for a kiss. Ford gives her such awkward and unfunny comic business that it's no wonder she's come down to us as a second-rater. Nobody could pull that stuff off gracefully, not even a Glenda Jackson or Cate Blanchett.)

His romantic fixation on the armed forces, specifically focused on the familial clannishness of groups of men gathered around one paternal authority figure (Wayne's Spig Wead in Wings of Eagles, Powers' Marty Mahar in Long Gray Line, Robert Montgomery's Brickley in They Were Expendable, not to mention the similar dynamic in both the cavalry movies and the shape of his own little stable of actors and companions in life) bemuses me, but his work is so unified by this aspect of his vision that I can't fault it.

The way he throws himself headlong into unabashed sentimentality is both virtue and vice: it works like gangbusters when he balances it, as in the Searchers, with darkness, and cloys and gags until you feel like you're choking on treacle and lace doilies when he doesn't (Three Godfathers. Yes, there is death in it, but highly romanticized death, and it has not one character -- except an already-dead no-good brother-in-law -- who is not good-hearted, optimistic, and trustworthy. Which is not to say there is nothing worth seeing in the film. There is, if you can defend yourself successfully against the treacle and lace doilies).

I've seen some John Ford films that struck me as failures, some as brilliant failures, and others that are just downright brilliant, no caveats or addenda required. And now I can honestly say that I've seen two John Ford films that are unutterably, unequivocally insane.


The first is Salute!, an early comic tribute to the annual Army/Navy football game. The script, the gags, the acting and everything are so mannered and over-stylized that, even adjusting for an eighty-year shift in consciousness, nothing in it bears any resemblance at all to real life. Strike that: one thing in it feels like it came out of real life, and that's the very young John Wayne in his first speaking role. It's a small role, as Ward Bond's sidekick, of all things. Bond plays a tough upper-classman at the naval academy who bullies the younger boys... but not really; not in any way that makes any sense, anyhow.

The crazy stuff aside, though, it's sort of wonderful to see how easy and natural Duke is in front of the camera already, and that Bond has already formed more than just the rudiments of his own later persona. You wonder if this was a moment in time when it looked like Bond was being groomed to be the star, and Wayne might spend his career as second man through the door. Probably there was a moment like that, at least in Bond's mind, but even then you could see how much Ford liked looking at Wayne; he shows up in the background of every third group-shot.

Other than that, the football game is kind of fun, and George O'Brien is always easy to hang around with, but the rest of it is simultaneously insane and dull, like a schizophrenic in the corner reciting an endless Fibonacci sequence. Part of it, admittedly, is culture-shock: this is the first time I've seen Stepin Fetchit, which is a pail of cold water into the politically-correct face. He squires a goat around and has long, blandly horrifying comic routines, which I assume Ford thought were funny.



The other one, Tobacco Road, is not just divorced from reality, but entirely bughouse whacked. Not having read the book, I sat slack-jawed with wonder and confusion, wondering what the hell was going on, then ran to the library next day and I'm here to tell you what the movie left out: all the Southern Gothic, all the twisted darkness, all the death and most of the pornography (everything's gone except that famous shot of Gene Tierney, half-clad and seductively pushing herself through the dirt toward Ward Bond). Then it added a nice whitebread deus ex machina in the Dana Andrews character.

In the movie, nobody has facial deformities: Sister Bessie has lost her boneless shotgun-nose and Ellie May, instead of being frightfully ugly with her extreme wound-like hare-lip, looks like, well, Gene Tierney, for God's sake. The first scene in the film, when the Lesters steal the turnips away from Lov (Ward Bond), is crazy mad and makes no sense, since Ward Bond is strong enough to whip them all if he wants to. In the book it works because Ellie May has her way with him right there in the courtyard, with Ada and Grandma standing by to hit him over the head with boards if he tries to disengage, and that gives Jeeter the opportunity to steal the bag away. The writing is subtly pornographic and leaves one with the unsettling impression that Ellie May's brother Dude takes advantage of her prone nakedness there in the courtyard after everyone else has scattered. The movie, being all cleaned up, begins to suggest the seduction then leaves off with the three women fighting Lov into submission, which is the first wrong note in a long film full of unintentional discordance.

In the book, there's a lot of lust and savage hatred (everyone hates Grandma, who never speaks but skulks around the edges scavaging food when she can, and nobody really notices when she crawls away and dies) and some crack-brained theodical noodling, and it all culminates in big fiery death for the mater and pater. None of that is in the film. All the darkness is transmuted into madcap highjinks. Dude is constantly yelling, which kind of sticks your finger to the fast-forward button, and Sister Bessie is constantly singing hymns. There are a few laughs: Ada computing the number of her children in terms of "head" like cattle, Lov flipping the car over as an afterthought to belting Dude. The one thing the movie really has going for it is the photography. Ford uses layers of broken-down fences to give depth and texture to shots of the road and the homestead; he'll do a similar thing later in My Darling Clementine at the OK Corral. He also uses thick swirlings of autumn leaves for texture, and tilted camera angles to give us an appropriate sense of the off-kilter, and that's all gorgeous and satisfying.

But, ultimately, what is this movie aiming to be? A swan-song for the old South, or a burlesque sketch sending it up? It's never clear, and it works as neither. It feels like a meth-head fable without a moral, like the Beverly Hillbillies on crack. There is a disclaimer at the beginning suggesting it was based not so much on the book as on the Broadway production, which was wildly popular: to this day, Tobacco Road reigns as the second longest-running nonmusical in Broadway history. Reading the plot synopsis, though, the play still kept its darkness, its harelips and panicking underaged brides and terrible, wasteful deaths. It looks like the buck stops either with Ford or the studio in my search for whatever fellow squeezed the ugliness out of it and tried vainly to whip it into prettiness with a sugary coating. In an interview with the St Petersburg Times in 1940, Ford said, "We have no dirt in the picture. We've eliminated the horrible details and what we've got left is a nice dramatic story. It's a tear-jerker, with some comic relief. What we're aiming at is to have our customers sympathize with our people and not feel disgusted."

Aha. Nice dramatic story, my ass. Ford got this job because of his brilliance with handling the poor folks in the Grapes of Wrath, but anyone with hindsight can see how ill-suited he is for the project. He harbored a horror of the dysfunctional family, the wife/mother who is anything but loving and strong, the father who abdicates the role. This incestuous den of cannibals to whom blood-ties mean nothing short of a savage prison sentence would have given him nightmares. It's no wonder he came up with a wacky mess. I have a mental image of him with his dark glasses and navy cap and pipe, his face pinched and pruned with maiden-auntish distaste, trying to sop up all the generations of the Lesters' dirt and viciousness with one of those famous handkerchiefs he used to chew on, and to no avail.

things I've been watching: may 2010

An Education: (2009. dir: Lone Scherfig) As per the hype, Carey Mulligan is indeed both skilled and adorable. The cast at large is highly satisfying. The appeal is not so much in the story, which is an old and simple one (young girl nearly throws away her future when swept away by an affable roue), but in the easy, charming way it's put together. Scherfig and his team manage to avoid those sucking fens of sentiment and cliche, realizing a place and time (suburban London in the early '60s) truly and without ostentation.

I was going to say that how you react to this movie depends on how you feel about Peter Sarsgaard, the rotter in question, and to a large extent I stick to that. If you don't like him, you won't like the movie. He's got the most difficult role because we never really get inside his head; we see him from the outside, through the eyes of others. On the other hand, I've always liked Sarsgaard; I'll go out of my way to see a movie if he's in it; and I think he's missed something crucial in this role. Having said that triggers a flag in my head and I go back to the last time I mentioned him in a post (reviewing In the Electric Mist) and by gum if I didn't say pretty close to the same thing about his performance in that. My reluctant conclusion is that he's one of those lazy actors who ignores the problem aspects of a character, glosses past them trusting charm and enigmatic smiles to carry him through instead of tackling and solving them, as, say, Glenda Jackson or Daniel Day-Lewis might do. It's not the worst thing that can be said about an actor. He's in good company. Henry Fonda comes to mind in that respect. More than once I've seen Fonda go kind of blank and stoical when a sticky corner of a character or a problem line presents itself (see, for instance, There Was a Crooked Man). And who doesn't still love Fonda? In any case, charming as he is, Sarsgaard is the potentially weak link in the cast. And, by God, I still like him.

Alfred Molina gets much of the buzz for his turn as The Father, and he is, as always, very good, but it's Rosamund Pike who turned my head as the decidedly unclever beauty dating the cad's business partner and best friend. Most actresses would play her lines for the laughs for which I think they were written, but she avoids that easy way. Every thick thing she says is completely frank, often tinged with that panic experienced by those who are highly intuitive about people but completely without intellectual prowess and who discomfitingly find themselves surrounded by clever people.




the China Syndrome: (1979. dir: James Bridges) Nuclear power scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Driving past Hanford on the way home from Seattle used to give me a badassed case of the creeps. This is the place where the plutonium was manufactured for the bomb we threw at Nagasaki. The tower is fat and squat and has an evil dome like something Saruman would have built.

I remember seeing this movie at the drive-in. It's got an anti-nuclear message and Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and it might have been self-righteous and awful except that it was made right at that cusp, just before the hideousness of the eighties was brought to bear on filmmaking, while there was still a use of quiet and verisimilitude. The instigating scene, in which there is a panic at the nuclear plant caused by a faulty gauge and secretly filmed by a team of news reporters there to do a fluff piece, is a wonderful thing. The combination of Jack Lemmon and Wilfrid Brimley is lovely. The suspense is allowed to build unforced by music or fancy camera nonsense, just through a decent script and some damn fine acting. There is some oversimplification, I assume for the sake of the drama, in which the nuclear muckymucks wear blacker than is perhaps believable hats, killing without conscience; or maybe I'm a little Pollyanna, I don't know. Anyway, good vs evil are suspiciously pat here, which brings us back to the first law of learning your history from Hollywood, which is: don't do it.

The best part is the directing: simple, straightforward, the telling of a story. I miss the seventies. I miss silence over rolling credits. I miss little things like Jane Fonda carrying a tortoise inside when she walks into her house, a tortoise that she never talks to or about, that never gets explained or addressed; you just know it's part of her life and that suggests that there are many parts of her life you know nothing about which suggests that her life stretches beyond the boundaries of the screen in all directions, which is never a bad thing in filmmaking, and doesn't happen enough anymore in these literal times.




Junior Bonner: (1972. dir: Sam Peckinpah) A peculiarly sweet and endearing ode to rodeo -- peculiarly sweet for Peckinpah, especially. Steve McQueen and Robert Preston make an easy and likable father-son team. I've never been a Preston fan -- he's a little too musical-theatre for me,-- but in this role as a hard-drinking, hard-riding, jovial storyteller of a man who always pleases his audience, it works. The really extraordinary part comes from Ida Lupino, though. Never in all my years have I seen a female character in any Peckinpah film given the opportunity for depth and sympathy that Lupino's is here, and she doesn't waste it. Plus (bonus!) there's Ben Johnson, always a good thing.




The Sun Also Rises: (1957. dir: Henry King) Picaresque Lost Generation ramble from bar to bar, drink to drink, diversion to diversion. No one ever writes or works at all, except bartenders and bullfighters. It reads better than it plays because the writer had a certain talent. Twenty years later or made in Europe, it'd've been edited more dynamically; as it stands, there's a dull, repeating sequence in which they walk into a bar, remove their wraps, order their drinks, over and over. Instead of pulling in and making it personal, the filmmakers pulled out and made it epic, which is sometimes pretty but mostly a bore. Tyrone Power is alright and Ava Gardner is gorgeous. The bullfighter is played by the very young Robert Evans, which is kind of a kick, but the only real attraction is Errol Flynn as an aging, drunken roue watching himself fade into impotency and unimportance but still able to laugh at himself. It's fascinating and true and unutterably sad, and I'd have given him an Oscar for it.

gearhead existentialism

Two-Lane Blacktop: (1971. dir: Monte Hellman) Part of that extraordinary canon of existential masterpieces (including Vanishing Point, the Parallax View, the Passenger, High Plains Drifter, and Hellman's own the Shooting, among others) appearing in about a ten-year period rounding out the sixties and starting up the seventies, Two-Lane Blacktop is poetry, and that's no exaggeration. "That Plymouth had a hemi with a torque flight," the Driver says to explain why he was able to pull in front during a race once he hit fourth gear. It's all like that, like listening to poetry in another language, one you know just well enough to catch a few words, an image or two. James Taylor is The Driver, Dennis Wilson The Mechanic. The Mechanic performs magical rituals on the car: at one point he synchronizes the ignition timing using a sort of strobe-wand or timing light. He's readjusting the distributor, apparently, so the spark plugs fire at just the right instant. I watch him do it, then my boyfriend says, "pause it," and explains to me what I'd just seen, and it's STILL Greek to me, or, rather, magical, in the sense that it seemed both an important and a preternatural action.

Casting rock stars in your movie was not unusual by the turn of the seventies, but casting in lead roles so far against type was. They're used to being looked at, lusted after and photographed, rock stars, but they don't have actorly habits that give them a falseness before the camera. There's something about the awkwardness of using non-actors that emphasizes the existential angst of the piece. On the other hand, they don't have actorly chops to get them through the rough spots, so it's a general wash, except that Warren Oates is there to pick up the pace and hit the right marks. Nobody in the world played the creepy guy with more endearing vulnerability than Warren Oates did, and this one is some kind of acme, some kind of Everest he's topped.



Vanishing Point: (1971. dir: Richard C. Sarafian)

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"The rebel himself wants to be 'all' ... or 'nothing'; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him. As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom." Camus, the Rebel
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The vanishing point is that place on the horizon where all roads converge into the sky. It's where everything disappears from view, where being turns into nothingness. You reach it, you dissipate into the universe.

Vanishing Point is the story of Kowalski (just Kowalski; no first name, following halfway in the tradition of the Man With No Name, played to perfection by Barry Newman): ex-soldier, ex-racer, ex-cop, and speedfreak, in more than one sense of the word. He works delivering souped-up muscle-cars back and forth across the country. His current task: to drive a white 1970 Dodge Challenger halfway across the country over a weekend. He insists on the assignment (his employer begs him to take some time, get some sleep first), then insists he will complete it in less than half the alotted time. Although from the outside the decision seems random and unmotivated, Kowalski makes it clear that, internally, he has no choice. "I gotta be in Frisco three o'clock tomorrow afternoon," he tells his dealer, who says he must be joking, to which Kowalski replies, "I wish to God I was." We never get a clearer reason, and that's one indication of the greatness of this film.

Super Soul (played with grace and sphinxlike intelligence by Cleavon Little) is the DJ of a tiny but ultrahip radio station in an armpit backwater burg somewhere in Nevada. He is handsome, dark-skinned, smooth-voiced, and, in the ancient tradition of prophets the world over, blind. Tapping illicitly onto police wavelengths, he hears about the ongoing interstate pursuit of the Challenger and becomes obsessed with it, sensing both a deeper importance in Kowalski's gesture of rebellion and perhaps an intertwining of their own personal destinies as well. Throughout the film, he speaks to Kowalski across the airwaves and somehow hears his responses.

Everyone knows this film, whether they know it or not. (Tarantino's Death Proof is a sort of ode to it, or the second half is.) Believe it or not, it was remade in 1997 with our beloved Viggo in the lead, and with all that makes it great and subtle stripped clean away. In this one, Kowalski's enigmatic gesture of defiance becomes a race across country to join his wife in a life-threatening childbirth: that catch-all, feel-good, old family-values reason. Scapegoated by a wicked FBI agent out to make a name for himself, "Jimmy" Kowalski becomes a hero for the Ted Nugent/Ruby Ridge crowd when his progress is reported by an anti-government, don't-tread-on-me, taxation-is-thievery DJ in a baseball cap played by the extraordinarily whitebread Jason Priestley. Believe me, not even Viggo or a cameo by John Doe can make this one interesting.

The original, though, is a true American classic. Newman's smile just before he makes that final decision is one of the real Mona Lisa moments in film-making history: why does he smile? what is he thinking? Somewhere on the cutting-room floor there lies a telling scene: Kowalski has picked up a beautiful hitch-hiker (Charlotte Rampling). She gets him high (the only time in the film he accepts any drug other than speed), tells him she's been waiting for him forever then disappears into the night. In commentary and interviews with actor and director, it seems accepted that this encounter was to be a metaphor for approaching death. Does that clarify the smile? What are we to make of the fact that it was excised, then?

In a truly-lived existentialism, one creates one's own rules, one's own code, seeking honour and freedom from within, completely independent of the predominant (and often crippling) paradigm. In America, we tend reflexively to picture freedom as a long, solitary drive in a fast car along a desert highway. These two movies can be watched as a visual essay about the pursuit of existential freedom in that particular moment when the sixties had just become the seventies, hippie optimism was hardening into a more cynical stoicism, and the rebel was really and truly without a cause, without allies, without hope, more so than ever before in cinematic history. Pending films like The Parallax View and Chinatown, both from 1974, would take these themes and colours and darken them further, almost into hellishness.

ward bond film festival: evening four

The Maltese Falcon: (1941. dir: John Huston) The thing about this film --other than the extraordinary fact that this masterpiece of nastiness marks Huston's debut in the director's chair-- is the claustrophobia of it. Much of it plays out in crowded little rooms: Spade's seedy office, Gutman's rich, overstuffed living room where Spade gets slipped the old mickey, and then everyone squeezes for the night into Spade's coldwater flat to await the delivery of the rara avis and to strip metaphorical pieces of flesh off one another. Huston's camera angles add greatly to the air of suffocation and vileness. Rarely do we look straight across at someone: it's up or down, giving a sinister feel of distortion, and groups of threes tend to be cramped together and hunched over, like caged beasts.

As a kid I disliked the film because of Mary Astor, who seemed to me about as fatale as the overworked waitress down at the corner bakery. She gets announced in the first breath of the film as "a knockout", but instead this pinched, nearsighted woman with hair simultaneously mousy and insane walks in and proceeds to hyperventilate and overemote for two hours. In retrospect, I can see that the character herself never once relaxes, never stops acting; that we never do see a moment that we're certain is the real girl beneath the masks. I'm willing to concede that it may be quite a feat, and I may owe Astor an apology; I'll get back to you when I'm certain.

Bond is Detective Tom Polhaus, the benevolent half of the Good Cop/Bad Cop plaguing Spade, and he gets photographed mostly from the side or back so we watch Bogart instead, but I'm fond of this character. I love the low-key delivery, the solidity of this man amid the jackal-pack of crooks and half-crooks, a decent man in a place where no one ever says exactly what they mean unless they know it will hurt someone. I love the optimism of him, as when he says of the dead Archer, "It's tough him gettin' it like that, ain't it? Miles had his faults like any of the rest of us, but I guess he must have had some good points, too, huh?" To which Spade can only grimace, hesitate, and reply, "I guess so," in a tone that really says, "No, and I knew him as well as anyone did."



Hitler -- Dead or Alive: (1943. dir: Nick Grinde) Whoa! Buckle up for a wacky, hamfisted little war-time film about gangsters fresh from Alcatraz who hijack a plane into Germany to assassinate the little guy with the moustache for a million dollar reward. A lot less fun than Inglourious Basterds while every bit as bughouse-unbelievable in its plot-turns, it does boast a more satisfying means of offing the Fuehrer, but very little else. Bond is the head gangster and gives a strangely over-the-top performance, like he's imitating a Cagney mobster, missing what's good about it and just skimming the cheese off the top. He's got a few satisfying scenes, like teaching the newbie prison etiquette or (my favorite) the time the Countess turns on the ice when she hears he's just doing it for money and he comes back with, "Is it a crime for a guy to make a couple of quarters?"



Dakota: (1945. dir: Joseph Kane) Walter Brennan has one funny moment in this decidedly unfunny comedy/action oater. He's trying to deny that two people have been murdered: "Maybe it's one of them suicide pacts where one person says to the other, 'Hold on a minute while I blow your head off.'" Doesn't really look funny on the page, but he makes it so, and that's about it for the humour. John Wayne and Vera Ralston are nobody's George and Gracie, and in fact the script plods every time Ralston walks onscreen. It's hard to say who's more annoying: Vera herself or her character, a ditzy blond who brings trouble with every decision she makes. I suppose she was supposed to be in the tradition of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, but the two names shouldn't be spoken in the same sentence. Ward Bond is entirely in his element as a smooth land-grabber out to cheat everyone in Fargo, but we never get to see him fight the Duke, always a disappointment for me.



Blowing Wild: (1953. dir: Hugo Fregonese) Love triangle amongst oilmen in Central America. Hard to miss when your triangle consists of Stanwyck, Cooper and Quinn, but this one comes pretty close. The directing feels shabby and loose, and there's no palpable chemistry between the supposedly mutually-obsessed Stanwyck and Cooper. The heat comes from Anthony Quinn on the odd-man-out point of the triangle; he throws himself full-force into the passion as a hot-blooded man in love with his wife and unable to punish his best friend or to live with the truth of it. Stanwyck is a goddess and can play this role hogtied and blindfolded, and she does, she plays it into the ground, but I'm tired of seeing her stuck in this same dead-end role of the woman who's too strong to live. Bond is Cooper's sidekick again, this time kind of a thick and hangdog one, who disappears into the hospital after a half hour and so gives the Cooper character his excuse to stick around town long after he says he wants to leave.

ward bond film festival: evening three

Unconquered: (1947. dir: Cecil B. DeMille) Flat and uninspired frontier epic by that master of the genre who seems to have been tired in this particular year. We all walk into an epic with certain expectations of thrilling grandeur, and in return we are willing to sacrifice certain beloved qualities: subtlety of acting, for instance, and any semblance of historical realism. And those things ARE sacrificed in this, but where's the pay-off? Where's the burning of Atlanta? or the fire hailing against the marble at Yul Brynner's sandaled feet? the eerie green effluvia reaching down to choke the first-born of Egypt? Anne Baxter with her over-chewed but somehow adorable "Moses, Moses"? where's the chariot race, or at least the lepers? Nowhere to be found.

Even the plunge over the great waterfall, which I suspect was meant to be the grand centerpiece of the film, feels rote and decidedly unthrilling, and who among audience-members has ever for a moment bought that particular escape from death? Groans of disbelief all around. The one set-piece that does come off well is when the Indians attack the fort at night with flaming arrows -- always a crowd-pleaser, -- but even that doesn't match up to its counterpart in Drums Along the Mohawk, when the settlers are furiously trying to stop the live immolation of a friend and Ward Bond gets a flaming arrow right in the shoulder. It's a brilliantly vibrant shot, and how in hell did they do it? without actually shooting Ward Bond in the shoulder with a flaming arrow, I mean?

In place of grandeur DeMille's given us lots of colour, and, as anyone who's been reading lately knows, I'm big on bold colour use right now, but this is random. Bright colors randomly placed do not provide the aesthetic pleasure of the well-used palette, so I offer him no cigar for that. The script is incredible both in its plot-turns and in the choices its human characters make. Of course it's politically incorrect as far as the Indians go, that's expected from the time; even worse is the dull use to which they are put. All the Indians are two-dimensional, thick and sanguinary, and wholly fixated on the white man.

Not that the white men are any further fleshed out. Ward Bond is relegated to a maiden-auntish role, fussing over Gary Cooper and doing little else. Paulette Goddard is utterly dreadful and talks though her nose. Is she always this bad? Is it really possible this woman was considered for Scarlett O'Hara? I have to watch the Women; perhaps she's skilled in dark, snarky comedy, but any talent she might have got lost under the sofa cushions at home or something while she was shooting this.

And in what era of history were slaves ever this well treated? When in the history of the world did a guy ever buy a beautiful woman off an auction block, slavering with lust, then say, "I will not force you. I will wait until you come to me of your own free will." PLEASE! There's historically incorrect, and then there's crazy Maybe-On-Some-Distant-Mary-Poppins-Planet la-la-la Pollyannaism.



Park Avenue Logger: (1937. dir: David Howard) Unpretentious, low-budget and badly-preserved little comedy about a rich man sent by his father to learn toughness by helping to deforest Oregon. It's not funny, but it's got a certain charm, and feels ten years older than it really is. The blocking is stage-bound, the sound is bad, and there's a lot of heartbreaking stock footage of really huge trees being ruthlessly downed. Ward Bond is young and handsome and playing the heavy, but one with a conscience. George O'Brien, a strong-man who started in stunts and got his first break when John Ford cast him in the Iron Horse, is easy in front of the camera, the very antithesis of vain.



The Night Key: (1937. dir: Lloyd Corrigan) Unassuming and surprisingly entertaining Boris Karloff piece about an electrical genius whose lifework is stolen by big business, so he teams up with a small-time crook to get his own back. Complications ensue when more serious mobsters get involved; there's a beautiful daughter to be kidnapped, and a handsome security guard to fall in love with her. Karloff may have the most interesting face and the most photogenic eyes in the business, and just contrasting this mild-mannered, nearsighted boffin with the Indian war chief he played in Unconquered is clear testament to his considerable adeptness and flexibility. Bond plays a version of the mobster heavy he came to know so well during his career, but it may be the only time he ends up electrocuted in an easy chair while reading a magazine.