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.