things i've been watching: august 2010

Ghost Writer: (2010. dir: Roman Polanski) Another sly masterwork from that genius of claustrophobic paranoia, a man who can say more convincingly than most that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Ghost Writer fits right into the natural curve of his oeuvre alongside Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, the Tenant, Bitter Moon and the Ninth Gate. Ewan MacGregor plays an unnamed hack hired to ghost the memoirs of a disgraced ex-Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the original ghostwriter dies under mysterious circumstances. As in most Polanski, the world into which the slightly naive protagonist steps is both unfathomably dark and deceptively attractive, with hidden depths just beyond his ability to plumb; and as in most Polanski, it feels from the first like a slow noose tightening around his doomed neck. Although the earlier films were more brilliant, Polanski has developed over the years a light, whimsical touch which makes the newer ones easier to enjoy, less entirely devastating. His storytelling is satiny smooth, without a wrinkle or blemish, without any flirting with the hackneyed or banal. Even when a plot-point seems obvious, he tells it from an unexpected angle or in an image that feels new.



Winter's Bone: (2010. dir: Debra Granik) It's based on a book by Daniel Woodrell, and it plays like a cross between a Kem Nunn story sans the surfing and Donna Tartt's the Little Friend. It's a small world in the wooded mountains of the modern-day Ozarks, a world bounded by poverty and drug-fueled paranoia, and Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) has to track her father down or lose the house he's signed over for his bond. Although everyone in the area seems to be vaguely related to everyone else, the code of silence among them takes precedence over blood-ties and she's in danger just by walking into a yard and asking a question. These actors, with a few cannily-chosen exceptions (Garret Dillahunt will forever be heartily welcome in my DVD player), have the leathery faces and worn-out voices of real people with hard lives, and there's no Hollywood lighting or makeup to interfere between the camera and the sense of realism.

And then there's John Hawkes, who is my hero now, after this. Like many, I noticed him first as Sol Starr in Deadwood although he'd been working for twenty years already by then. (I extolled his virtues to my mother, who's a big LOST-head, and she looked at me like I was a little tetched; so either Lost is so filled with brilliant performances that a genius like Hawkes' is just another pebble in the cinder-pit, or maybe he was uninspired by it. Despite the zealous testimony from the converted, I haven't got the faith and mustardseed to trudge through all the various seasons just to find the scattered gems from loved ones like Hawkes and Kiele Sanchez, Jeremy Davies and Terry O'Quinn. Maybe someday.) In any case, the naturalism of the world created in Winter's Bone is so entirely unimpeded that when Hawkes' character (a near-tragic bad-ass called Teardrop) walks to the back of his truck and takes out an axe in the middle of a parking lot where it can only be used for ill, the shock is far more frightening than had it been accompanied by suspenseful music and fancy camera-work. The ending, and Teardrop's last exit, is one of the great underplayed scenes of the decade.



The Last Days of Pompeii: (1935. dir: Ernest B. Schoedsack) Did you know that Vesuvius erupted to devastate Pompeii specifically because a fellow had a chance to to try and save Jesus' life and didn't? Yup, a direct result. Fellow called Marcus, used to be a gladiator until he lost a fight to Ward Bond and went into slave- and horse-trading instead. This feels like a silent DeMille epic that maybe got its budget slashed and sound accidentally added. Basil Rathbone shows us his Ponderous Thespian side as Pontius Pilate.



The Falcon Takes Over: (1942. dir: Irving Reis) One of my favorite moments in the history of literature is in Farewell, My Lovely when Moose Malloy steps out of the shadows and says to the girl he's been obsessively and ruthlessly tracking, "Hiya, baby. Long time no see." Moose is one of the great enigmatic characters of all time: big as a truck, just broken out of jail after having taken a fall for his boss, completely amoral in his relentless search for the beautiful showgirl who promised to wait for him, he leaves a trail of bodies behind him but never sways from true love for his elusive Velma.

For your wartime enjoyment, the studio has bowdlerized the great novel to make a comic vehicle for George Sanders, and almost all of the beauty and punch of it are gone. The one great thing that remains from the grand opus is that haunted, Ahab-esque quality that Ward Bond brings to his Moose Malloy. It's perfect casting, and George Sanders isn't actually bad as a sort of leering, playboy version of Philip Marlowe, but he's fighting a middlin' script and a good deal of cornpone. For my money, the 1975 Robert Mitchum/Charlotte Rampling remake, flawed as it is, remains the go-to version, with Mitchum's deadpan voiceovers and world-weary visage providing just the right stuff. The original (Murder, My Sweet) capsizes beneath the insurmountable weight of an uncharismatic Marlowe (Dick Powell?! Was he somebody's son-in-law or something?) and I'm flummoxed as to why this perfect story hasn't been remade for every generation, like Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet and Robin Hood.

more things i've been watching: july 2010

Salt: (2010. dir: Phillip Noyce)
SPOILER ALERT
We all know there are two reasons to see summer blockbusters: either you're a 12-year-old boy or you have no air conditioning. Had this come out in the more reasonable month of April I never would have ventured out; that understood, it turns out to be far more enjoyable than I ever imagined. Had there been a man in the lead as initially planned, it'd have been a rehash of myriad things of old. With Jolie soaking up and dealing out the damage, it's intriguing. It turns out there's something oddly gratifying about watching a gorgeous, psychopathic woman (are all action heroes psychopaths these days? I suspect they are. Remember in the old West when you knew the good guy because he would never shoot a guy in the back? Huh. Bunch of wusses) peeling open a ferocious can of whoop-ass on a good portion of the male population. I HATE the Bourne Method of editing fight scenes (such fast cuts and dubious angles that one is forced to take it on faith that there's an actual fight in progress); in this context, however, when you have an eighty-pound woman taking on whole rooms full of armed and trained 200-lb gorillas, not seeing too much is a boon and helps you to take it all with the necessary load of, well, salt.

The thing this movie did right was to let us just far enough into the heroine's head that we know she truly loves her husband; further than that, it keeps us guessing. Jolie's got that great, stoical ice-face and she knows very well how to use it, when to emote and when to hold back. She gets the crap kicked out of her by the Koreans, the Russians AND the Americans, but she REEKS of toughness, takes it all as part of the job and gives out better than she gets. I love her line deliveries. I love it when she's got trapped by the Feds against a car, guns pointed at her from all sides, men encroaching, shouts that she should drop to the ground, and she says with a perfect blend of aplomb and stubborn petulance, "I didn't do anything wrong," and rolls into one of those perfect action-movie escapes that are just barely possible enough that even though nobody you or I have ever met could ever do it, we'll buy it now and then onscreen because we've gladly accepted our load of, well, salt.

There are absurd plot points, but not too many laws of physics get broken (as in, say, the Dark Knight movies), and the stunts look unrehearsed, by which I mean that when she's jumping from one moving truck to another it doesn't look easy, and, although I have no personal experience from which to draw, I'm fair certain it wouldn't be. The final scene is badly written (poor Chiwetel Ejiofor has taken on a thankless role; at least he's one of the few who doesn't get his ass kicked) and afterwards when the screen flashed to black and credits I was outraged. I felt like I'd only seen half a film. My boyfriend pointed out that it'd been two hours, and she'd killed all the bad guys and saved the world, and what else did I want? I guess that speaks well for it, the fact that I was ready to sit through another two hours, and speaks badly against it that it lacked the satisfactory denouement which would have sent me back into the heat of the day with a cathartic sense of time well spent.



the Charge of the Light Brigade: (1936. dir: Michael Curtiz) Ultimately unsuccessful but enjoyable historical/patriotic hash with some nice visuals (an Indian soiree communicated through exotic shadows against a wall, David Niven avoiding the moonlight to crawl out of a fortress unseen) and an easy, loping pace punctuated by exciting battles. But what it comes down to is this: Olivia de Havilland spurns the love of Errol Flynn for some milquetoast boy. And who can countenance such nonsense?



Sanjuro: (1962. dir: Akira Kurosawa) The great thing about having deprived oneself of the classics in one's youth is the chance to see them for the first time as an adult. The stream flowing with camellias! The night that Sanjuro kills a whole roomful of guards alone, like Old Boy in the parking garage basement. Toshiro Mifune is huge! Bigger than life. The humor! The characters! That last, awesome showdown: the silence. The stillness. The proximity. The sudden geyser of blood! Just awesome. Five stars; no qualms. Completely enjoyable in every respect.



Black Book: (2006.dir: Paul Verhoeven) Graceless and inadequate string of absurd coincidences and overt melodrama in Nazi-occupied Holland. It all LOOKS great, and Carice van Houten is very good as the Jewish flirt who uses smarts and looks to play both sides, resistance and invaders. In a bid to surprise us about who the bad guy is (well, the OTHER bad guy, besides all the SS), Verhoeven stretches his plot into incredible and, more importantly, unsatisfying shapes.

inception: three levels and philip k dick

Straight off, my prejudice: I'm a Nolan fan from way back. The care he takes with detail, story and psychological exploration (Memento, Insomnia, the Prestige) seems fascinating to me and possibly unmatched among working directors.

WARNING: TONS OF SPOILERS AHEAD

Here's a basic summary of the plot: Cobb (DiCaprio) is a specialist in the art of entering a person's subconscious through their dreams to extract information. He does this for a living, but he's on the run from some vague, disgruntled ex-client and wants out. Extraction is not a feat which can be achieved alone; an extractor needs a team: he has a right-hand man (in this case, the lovely Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a dream-architect who builds the details of the dream-world, a chemist and a forger (who doesn't forge papers; rather, he morphs his appearance to impersonate someone else in the dream-world, perhaps an intimate of the subject's). Saito (the intriguing Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb not to extract but to implant an idea deep in a dreamer's mind: for vague but convincing ethical reasons, the son and heir (the wonderful Cillian Murphy) to a mega-billionaire (the underused Pete Postlethwaite) must be convinced to break up his father's empire. In return, Saito will give Cobb the one thing he truly desires: reunion with his children, from whom he has been banished since he was set up by his suicidal wife (Marion Cotillard, playing the same tense, neurotic beauty she did in Public Enemies) to look like he murdered her. In order to implant the idea, the team has to go three levels deep into the fellow's subconscious; in order to do THAT, they induce a group-dreaming using sedatives and a fancy machine, then in the dreamstate induce another, using sedatives and a fancy machine... you get the idea. Why do sedatives and machines work on a dream-level as they do in reality, when you and I both know that if you dream of sitting at a computer trying to work, the mouse and keyboard seem not hooked up and any words which appear are nothing like what you're trying to type, and if you swallow poison, chances are good you'll continue unharmed? That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked it. Let's put it on hold for a minute and come back to it. Also, notice how often I'm using the word "vague". It's important, and we'll come back to it.

A crucial thing to know about existence on these particular dream-levels is that if you are killed on a shallow level you wake up; if you are killed on, say, the third level down, your consciousness is lost and you spend a near-eternity wandering confused in the ramblings of your underconscious world, having forgotten that it is not reality. Another important thing to remember is that although the dream- architect is ostensibly the one who designs the world down to each detail (how? and how do the others manage to curb their own impulsively creative tendencies? well, it's vague), powerful emotional content buried in another person's subconscious can wreak havoc there, as Cobb's does, conjuring freight trains that barrel down the center of city streets and a dead wife who follows him from one dream to another specifically to louse up any plans he might have. Why is Cobb the only one whose subconscious wreaks any havoc? Yes, he's sicker than your average pup, but everyone's got submerged crap. Why doesn't anyone else's undealt-with psyche-stuff show up, even in small ways? That is a very good question, and I'm glad you asked it. We'll set it aside and come back to it later.

Meanwhile, through the unfolding of a visually stunning and ambitiously innovative story, the team navigates the three levels of non-reality while managing to solve Cobb's problems with his dead wife and successfully plant the idea which will, ostensibly, save the world. Then, they escape back into reality. Or do they?

I'm not being glib about this. This movie is a lot of fun. During a good half of it, granted, Nolan is wearing his Action-Guy hat and that makes me yawn some, but it's an old problem between us, a not-unheard-of dynamic between me and old Chris (I find Batman Begins a big snooze-fest, apart from the sound of Christian Bale's voice, which exercises some kind of eerie mystical power over me). But even in the Action Movie part lay things I loved: specifically, Gordon-Levitt's fistfights in zero gravity, which were delightful.

And let's dismiss right now all the moaning back and forth you'll hear about the Matrix: "it's a cheap rip-off; it's nowhere as good"... Whatever, dude. The only thing it's got in common with the Matrix is a mutual fascination with Philip K Dick and his exploration of the various levels of existence channeled through the medium of the action film. In fact, the movie it's most like is Shutter Island, since both tell the same story: a man, traumatized by the tragic loss of his family due to a devastating action by his wife, goes to intense psychological lengths in attempt to keep at bay the devastating truth and halt his own creeping sense of guilt. The rest is window-dressing.

My absolutely, no-question, full-on favorite thing about this film is the ambivalent ending. IS the top wobbling? WILL it fall? Has the word "reality" been stripped so clean of meaning by the time the top is set in motion that the question itself has no relevance? This is exactly why I love Christopher Nolan.

That said, I have a few beefs. A big one is aural. What's with the bombastic soundtrack almost constantly intruding? Had there been silence, or ambient noise... Think of the possibilities! The soundtrack of dreams! Think of the soundwork that Gus Van Sant has done in recent years (Last Days!) and imagine if Nolan had used something like that... a different tonal register for each different level of dream, perhaps? Ah! How eerie it might have been. Instead, he focuses (very well, very ably indeed, there is no question) on the visual, and the sound is tossed to the overweening composer guy, as it so often is these days in action films. It happens all the time, and every time I'm hugely disappointed. I tell you, hardly a day goes by that I don't long for the deep silences and natural sound of early-'70s cinema. Ou sont les neiges d'antan, you know?

My other big whinge is that the dream levels are far too stable. Yes, they can be manipulated by external forces (the lack of gravity when the van in another level in falling into the water) and by conscious choice (the dream-architect's job), but never once during the film did I think, "Yes! That's like in my dreams!", as I have in David Lynch works, for instance, or in that final episode of Buffy season four, when the scoobies are haunted in their dreams by the First Slayer. Personally, my dreams are constantly shifting. Even when I have a tentative grip of lucidity and consciously cause a change -- like making myself fly, for instance,-- the change never lasts, but turns into something new. The one constant is a shifting ground. If I try and read a book, the words shift in front of my eyes. If I'm waiting at a bus-stop and the thought occurs to me that I'm at the wrong corner, you can be damn sure the bus is about to pull up to a different corner and I'm going to be running after it. A single thought changes everything. Although I wholeheartedly subscribe to the notion that dreams are filled with messages from not only underconscious but superconscious and extra-conscious sources, the truest words I can use to sum up my dream-life are CONSTANT RANDOM SHIFTS. In short, my biggest disappointment about this movie was that I never believed I was exploring various dream-lives of various characters...

And that brings me nicely round to my main point, which is that I think (although I am open to discussion on the matter) that the only way the story ultimately makes sense is if it's ALL happening inside Cobb's head, from beginning to end, from before the opening shot, the whole shebang, the entirety of the enchilada. As in, he's already stuck in that lowest level of the dream-life when we come in on his story. It reminds me of Alex Garland's novel Coma, a short book tracing the mental meanderings of a comatose guy, which were a chillingly convincing semi-circular interaction with memories, overheard snippets from the doctors and nurses by his bed, and hallucinations in which he is driven, sometimes desperately, towards a vague but important goal which is continually frustrated and confused. Maybe the story we're seeing is Cobb's and Cobb's alone. He is like a man in a coma, and we are stuck in the widening circles of his hallucinations, his memories and his strivings. Perhaps its apparent stability comes from the closed nature of the world; the dream is an endless loop, without hope of waking. My theory is that every person in Inception is a projection from Cobb's subconscious as he fights to find his way up to a reality which has retreated so far away that he might no longer recognize it if he saw it. The only piece of true memory we see is that blurry, slow-motion, recurring image of the kids playing with their faces averted from him.

Think about it. It explains why nobody else's subconscious projections matter: they have none, being Cobb's own projections. It explains why the physical laws of one level of reality apply on each deeper level of non-reality: because it's all the same level, really, all happening on the endless racetrack of Cobb's unstill mind. It explains the vagueness of so many of the plot-points: the details are not, at last, the point for the man who is desperately combing his own mental labyrinths for a lucrative escape route. And it explains the question at the end about whether we are, in fact, in reality. We are not. The escape is illusory; he is trapped, but perhaps it has ceased to matter. Perhaps he can find joy anyway.

Philip K Dick, master-philosopher and godfather of multiple levels of experienced reality, returned to a pattern of three basics in his works: the Seen, the Is, and the Ought. The Seen (in his novels, as well as in life itself) is always illusory, and must be stripped away in pieces before one finds the Is. Only when one comprehends the true Is can one begin to contemplate changes necessary to create the Ought. In Inception, eveything we see is illusion. The entire action of the movie is Cobb's ongoing attempt to strip the Seen away and find the Is. It's the only way I can convince the story to hold together properly, and it's too enjoyable a story to reject just because the ends are too slippery to stay tied.

what i've been watching: july 2010

the Stendhal Syndrome: (1996. dir: Dario Argento) Is there a father in the world who's put his daughter through anything like what Dario does to Asia? It's almost beyond abuse. In this one, Asia plays an unconvincing policewoman trying to catch a rapist at the Uffizi and who, it turns out, suffers from the Stendhal Syndrome: a sort of aesthetic hysteria which causes her to be overwhelmed by the power of great art. The rapist (the redoubtable Thomas Kretschmann in an early but assured turn) uses her weakness to toy with her; on the plus side, it keeps him from killing her as he does his other victims. Argento films are never soft and cuddly, their roots firmly in the giallos from whence they sprang, but this one is very brutal indeed, featuring several cruel rapes and killings, including some moments of extreme ferocity by Asia herself. Although the story is weak and creaky at the hinges, Dario shows his masterful hand in structure and realization (he has another, less masterful hand, which turns up onscreen occasionally but thankfully not this time). The dreamlike quality of the first half gives the nightmare extra teeth by lulling the viewer into a trancelike state. Certainly it's not to be taken on if you're feeling at all sensitive. As I was switching off the TV, a sordid and inexplicable thought crossed my mind: that this was just the sort of movie a demon might use as a gateway if it had a notion to take up lodging in your soul.



the Burrowers: (2008. dir: JT Petty) There's an attack on a farmhouse; women go missing. A posse rides out, expecting to find them kidnapped by Indians, but life is not nearly so simple in this impressive horror/western amalgam, possibly inspired by Ravenous. It's not got the downright brilliance of that one, and its central metaphor is not as satisfying, but it's still a very fine horror film with wonderful production values: first-rate acting, dialogue and photography make up for its lapses in story and pacing. And then, at the end, Tom Waits sings an awesomely creepy "All the Pretty Horses" over the roll of credits.



Joan of Arc: (1948. dir: Victor Fleming) Hagiography can be so damned ponderous, don't you find? Although it's written partly by Maxwell Anderson, one of those playwrights (along with Eliot, Fry, Anouilh, et al) who masterminded the mid-20th century rage for historical drama written in poetry (if you can even imagine that such a thing ever happened), this has no poetry in it, nor does it have any moment of beauty or of truth, either in the historical or in the broader, all-encompassingly human sense. It was Fleming's last film and maybe he was exhausted. It plods lifelessly from one Disneyland-colored set-piece to another. Jose Ferrer is rather good as the spineless and amoral Dauphin; Fleming cuts out the character of Gilles de Rais entirely, probably not wanting to deal with the repercussions of having Bluebeard running around; Ingrid Bergman seems as uninspired as she is uninspiring. I watched it, naturally, because Ward Bond is in it, wildly miscast as a Frenchman. (If I wanted to show you a picture to illustrate the words "absolute opposite of Frenchman", I would show you a picture of Ward Bond.) Still, he has one thing going for him here: due to his years of strenuous training under Ford, he can carry off the most mouth-coatingly, gag-reflex-inducingly sentimental lines with aplomb.

Let me amend a previous statement: there is one moment of beauty in it, a late shot of Bergman's face while her voices are speaking. Therein may lie the key to the movie's dismal failure: focusing on the external events instead of showing us the gorgeous internal world of a girl who talks with gods.



Big Hand for the Little Lady: (1966. dir: Fielder Cook) I haven't looked it up, and I'm not going to waste time doing it, but I'd put good money on it that this was a play before it was a movie. You can tell because the dialogue is false and mostly filler, the exposition is stiff and delivered woodenly, and because the production style feels like musical theatre. Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward, Kevin McCarthy, Burgess Meredith and Jason Robards all comport themselves well, but this is a fluff-piece, without weight and without any true enjoyment. It exists solely as a vehicle for its trick ending, a trick which also leaves me with a vaguely sour musical-theatre taste in my mouth: tastes like treacle, this, treacle and fluff.

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.