cowboys and aliens: what's not to love?

I was chomping at the bit to see this from the first moment I heard about it. Then it hit the cinemas and I chickened out. Not chickened out; I lost my faith, which is a different thing. I suffered an attack of accidie, perhaps the most insidious of the Seven Deadly Sins, and certainly the one to which I am most vulnerable.

I was already gun-shy of Jon Favreau after the Iron Man 2 debacle, and then the reviews were mostly in a scoffing or, at best, genial in a reluctant, embarrassed tone. Had I been feeling more myself I'd have known that it was the unabashed wallow in genre-crossing which was making the critics blush at their enjoyment of the thing. The same genre-shame used to happen back at the bookstore: people would come in, throw a mystery (or sci-fi, or horror) book on the counter and actually apologize for not buying something off the "serious lit" shelf. Again and again we would explain that there's at least as much brilliance on the genre shelves as there is sitting in stalwart arrogance on the "serious" shelf. Same thing, only Cowboys and Aliens is shamelessly indulging in two genres simultaneously, an exercise in fulsome opulence which makes me want to stand up and cheer. All is forgiven! Favreau has washed himself clean of the taints of skewed perspective and shiftless laxity which so ruined the second Iron Man film.

First of all, this cast is splendid. In practically every scene I was jumping up and down, recognizing an old favorite of whom I'd seen too little in recent times. Toby Huss! Keith Carradine! Walton Goggins, that shining genius from Justified! Paul Dano, giving us his best Jeremy Davies impression! Sam Rockwell, back in form! Clancy Brown in a perfect performance as an old West preacher! And, honestly, speaking as someone who's traditionally felt a sort of tepid benevolence rather than enthusiasm towards Harrison Ford even in my most zealous Star Wars days, who can't appreciate the beauty of his playing the Big-Bad-Black-Hat-Cattle-Baron who turns out to have a heart of gold?

Then there's Craig. Who doesn't love Daniel Craig? No one, that's who. If I was to host a Daniel Craig film festival in the privacy of my own home, I'd be watching roles as disparate as a lower-class police detective who falls for a lesbian in the Icehouse, an evil Jesuit in Elizabeth, Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen, Ted Hughes in Sylvia, and of course the guy with the martinis, shaken, not stirred. He also did, and this slipped beneath the range of most radar detectors, a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Nicole Kidman, Jeremy Northam, Jeffrey Wright and Veronica Cartwright, and that cast alone ought to send you running to your Netflix to give it a go.

Beyond the cast, the story is damn well told. The script has some lovely moments, like when Craig's Jake Lonnergan wakes amnesiac in the desert with a wound in his belly, and stumbles into Clancy Brown's Preacher's house to clean it.

Preacher: There's two kind of men get shot, criminals and victims.
Which are you?
Jake: I don't know.
Preacher: You got a name?
Jake: I don't know that either.
Preacher: What do you know?
Jake: English.

The photography is fine and unobtrusive to boot, and the editing is good. It leans pretty far out over that edge into the overblown side of things, but it's a spectacle, damnit, and it works well as such, far better, I'd say, than that last Indiana Jones thing. The story is simple, but with turns that keep you guessing, and characters well-developed with simple strokes. It's got many of the tropes you look for in Westerns, often playfully used to good effect: it's got a dog named Dog, for a start. It's got cattle-roping, except this time it's aliens roping humans from their passing ships. It's got the tenderfoot doctor who has to learn gunmanship and the honest sheriff at odds with a powerful rancher who has a no-good son.

And it's got the lonesome hero, haunted by his past. He rides in alone, faces some of his demons, makes the town a better place to live, then rides out alone into the desert. I tell you, it gives me shivers just pondering on it.

a robert ryan double feature

Day of the Outlaw: (1959. dir: Andre De Toth) This is one of greats; certainly it's one of De Toth's best. A Western with a difference, it takes the old Rancher vs Farmer conflict and sets it in a tiny, isolated town amidst vast, snowy expanses of wilderness. Underwritten in a good way, like one of those old Monte Hellman Westerns, it's got inspired moments which stay with you: my favorite is when Ryan's rancher shows down alone against three farmers inside a tiny barroom. He has his drunken friend roll a bottle down the bar on the understanding that when it hits the floor everyone will draw and the reckoning will be had. The bottle never gets there, but that's another story; it's one of the tensest moments I've seen in a long time.

Ryan reteams with the impossibly luscious Tina Louise after the mutual chemistry of God's Little Acre, this time as estranged lovers stuck in the awkwardness of a small town. Only when Burl Ives and his men enter, soldier-criminals on the run from a tragedy which seems to be the Mountain Meadows Massacre, does the plot shift, the townsfolk forget their differences and band together to try and save their women and their honor. It's got some terrible casting: Ricky Nelson's older brother David holds his own as the male ingenue, but the girl has got to have been somebody's niece or something, because she's no actress by any stretch. Even Ives is ultimately disappointing as the dying leader haunted by his sins. I kept asking myself, now, why are these men so loyal to him? why are they scared of him, again? Which may be a result of having grown up thinking of him as the snowman in Rudolph, but a really fine performance, I'd like to think, would have overcome that preconception.

Anyway, it's still one of the best Westerns I've seen in a long time, with a great feeling of space, and Ryan could play this role blindfolded.


God's Little Acre: (1958. dir: Anthony Mann) Yet another chronicle of southern white trash from the pen of Erskine Caldwell, the crazy person who brought you Tobacco Road. This family, the Waldens, poor in money and common sense but rich in land, much the same as Tobacco's shiftless Lesters, certainly films better than the other, and that has a great deal to do with Anthony Mann, who takes the near-impossible material on boldly and does not cringe from its challenges as John Ford had before him.

And those challenges are daunting: the story is equal parts satire and dead-serious, and Mann finds just about the right balance. Robert Ryan proves he runs with the stars in this one; we already knew how well he played the bad guy, but in this, he gives a magnificent and canny performance as the wily, good-natured patriarch who is blind to his own shortcomings but steadfastly loyal to family ties. There are some good comic moments and a relaxed attitude towards Caldwell's usual pornographic slant, which is emphasized by the strange fact that Tina Louise is practically pornographic just by walking around being Tina Louise.

The trouble lies inside the material itself: it's a schizophrenic story, half Faulkner and half Eugene O'Neill, and the mix is not felicitous. The O'Neill part, a subplot in which a drunken son-in-law (played by Aldo Ray) is desperate to re-open the local mill, a grand and empty gesture which he ultimately makes and for which he pays the ultimate price with absolutely no good coming from it, does not resonate well with the main, "Faulkner" part, in which Ryan's gold-digging dreamer ruins the farm by turning it into a wasteland of holes and piles of dirt. There's some kind of sly brilliance in the repeated refrain Caldwell gives him ("What in the pluperfect hell is going on here?"), as he, and his entire family, are caught in some purgatorial overlapping place between past and present, with one foot in each and no foot necessarily in the real world at all.

Somehow they pull it off, this film, helped immeasurably by fantastic camera-work from Ernest Haller, who shot the original Richard Barthelmess Dawn Patrol, Captain Blood, Dark Victory, a couple of little things called Gone With the Wind and Rebel Without a Cause, and, more importantly, that early episode of the original Star Trek, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the strange one with an overwrought Sally Kellerman and Gary Lockwood metamorphosing into silver-eyed gods.

a triple dose of westerns

Terror in a Texas Town: (1958. dir: Joseph H Lewis) I preface this review with the following observation: after watching this and the Long Voyage Home, I conclude that it's impossible to be sexy or badassed while faking a Swedish accent. Even John Wayne and Sterling Hayden come across like the Muppets' Swedish Chef, and how thrilling can that be, ultimately?

Regardless, this is a crazy good film, veering drunkenly between flights of mad brilliance and weaselfaced-in-the-gutter badness. (Even the music does it: there'll be a dissonant jazz-like guitar behind a scene of rising tension and you'll just be thinking WOW when it launches into some overblown bad-tv stock cliche.) Written behind a front by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, it feels like a televised play with its forays into sleazy melodrama and set-bound longiloquence, but how can you not love it when a guy brings a whaling harpoon to a climactic gunfight? Also, let us pause to give the DP heartfelt thanks for some fantastic and inspired framing, without which the movie would not have escaped its clumsy, earthbound shackles. He's Ray Rennahan, the fellow who manned the camera for Drums Along the Mohawk and Duel in the Sun, among about a hundred others, which explains his easy mastery.

I'm growing to love Sterling Hayden. Scarred and manly and so often wooden in performance, his efforts are valiant, and in the end he overcomes all obstacles to give at least three performances which touch on greatness in later years. Who can forget his fluoride-obsessed and apocalypse-instigating General Ripper in Dr Strangelove, or his sublime moment in the otherwise scruffy the Long Goodbye? or, of course, one of the great death-scenes of all time, still threatening as hell as he sputters and chokes on his own blood at the hands of a shaking-in-his-boots Michael Corleone in the first Godfather film?

In spite of its shortcomings, watch this movie.



*SPOILER ALERT*

Two Rode Together: (1961. dir: John Ford) Here we find the best and the dreariest of Ford. The easy, rambling pace and likable characters alongside the lame attempts at humor. The relaxed rapport between Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark, especially in the ten-minute conversation by the river, one of the best scenes ever shot, in which Ford lets the camera sit still in a two-shot while they talk without cuts and we enjoy their company. Shirley Jones, on the other hand, gives the kind of spirited, one-dimensional performance one expects from musical-theatre folk.

As in all Ford, it's the dark edges which fascinate: the character of Stone Calf, the murder of the white woman by the boy raised Comanche and his subsequent lynching, or Jimmy Stewart's terrible drunken tirade at Shirley Jones about how her lost, towheaded brother would be a Comanche warrior now, and more than happy to rape her then share her with "the other bucks."


Ulzana's Raid: (1972. dir: Robert Aldrich) Even Hollywood Westerns got brutal in the '70s. This one, about cavalrymen and a grizzled scout pursuing a relentless Apache who soaks power from his victims as he tortures them to death, feels like it's less about Indians than it is somehow about Viet Nam and America's troubling new suspicions that our boys might be just as barbaric as The Hated Other.

In any case, this is a good one, with fresh-faced Bruce Davison learning life and death from Burt Lancaster and his Apache compadre, rather wonderfully played by Jorge Luke. The violence is hard, and hard questions are, if not answered, at least not shirked, and the Indians, most importantly, look like real Indians.

errol flynn double feature: silver river and san antonio

*SPOILER ALERT BOTH FILMS*



Silver River: (1948. dir: Raoul Walsh) I am often struck by the loping, easy pace of Errol Flynn Westerns. I used to think it was intimately connected with Michael Curtiz's direction, but this is one of Raoul Walsh's, and it moves at the same amble, from one set-piece to another in the life of the old-West equivalent of a Citizen Kane, winningly (when is he not winning?) played by Flynn.

He is Michael McComb, gambling tycoon, silver tycoon, banking tycoon. We begin with the great formative experience of his adult life: charged with guarding a Union payroll wagon outside Gettysburg and under attack by Jeb Stuart's men, he chooses to burn the money rather than see it fall into Rebel hands, an action which sees him court-martialed and cashiered out of the armed forces, leaving him with cynical views of both money and authority. We cross the years with him, watching his meteoric rise into wealth and power and his plummeting fall into bankruptcy and disgrace, brought low largely by his single most dastardly crime, which is also the only one he ever committed for love.

Thomas Mitchell is in wonderful form as the steadfastly loyal, drunken lawyer who becomes the crumbling face of McComb's own betrayed conscience. There are exciting stunts: when McComb and his crony overtake the runaway payroll wagon in the beginning, it smacks of a Yakima Canutt kind of joy and masterful timing. The end-battle, when the miners at last rise up against the bad guy (Barton MacLane) who has boldly gunned down Thomas Mitchell during his stand for senator, it's well-edited and enjoyable.

In the end, though, a Flynn movie stands or falls by Flynn himself, and this time he gives us a cynical character who nonetheless wins our hearts through his genuine, boyish joy whenever he looks on his beloved wife (Ann Sheridan), and that makes it a good film.



San Antonio: (1945. dir: David Butler) This is a vast, color-saturated showboat of a Western which lets itself amble over sweeping vistas of the insides of dance-halls rather than across the open plains, with which it has little concern. The conflict is between wildly successful cattle-rustlers and the once-powerful cattle-barons whose herds have been drastically diminished by organized mobs who stampede the beasts across into Mexico then sell them back north. Flynn is Clay Hardin, one of these victimized ranchers. We first meet him in Mexico where he has gone to find proof that his arch-nemesis and saloon-owner Roy Stuart (Paul Kelly) is El Rustler Supremo. He's found it in the very convenient and easy-to-carry form of a "tally-book" Stuart sloppily left with a ranch-hand who got himself shot in the larcenous act. Following the tally-book instigates much of the ensuing action.

But like most Flynn Westerns, the real story is about the town, about how a frontier town keeps its principles of freedom and integrity while cleaning up lawlessness. The other kind of Western, about a man alone facing bad hombres and moving on once he's done his bit, is for other stars. Flynn's cowboy heroes always tend to settle at the end, with a ranch, a job as marshall, a girl and a lot of money in hand. Because Flynn is a social creature, isn't he, and it's hard to imagine his characters existing in solitude. Think of John Wayne or Randolph Scott or, God knows, Clint Eastwood, living a whole year in the wild without contact outside of the odd mountain man or wildcat, and it's just conceivable, but who can picture Flynn in that scenario? He's a townie, Flynn is, charming and insoucient, and whatever grudges he holds against mankind, he'll work them out in and amongst his fellow man.

He's at his most charming in this one, and funny, to boot. Some of the humor is over-the-top forced, as embodied in the English-impaired SZ Sakall character; it often feels like the director would rather be making a farce or a musical. There is, though, clever dialogue (Alexis Smith as an eastern singer hired by Stuart: "Is it a Western custom to push yourself in on other people?" Hardin: "Yes, ma'am. That's how the West was settled,") and much of the funny comes of Flynn and the others, even the director, just enjoying themselves. There's a bit I've seen bad-mouthed but that cracked me right up where bad-guy Stuart is standing at his own bar when a cat walks across it and starts lapping up his drink. Stuart: "Get that drunken cat off the bar." Barman (examining cat): "He is a little drunk, isn't he?" It leads to nothing, it's apropos of nothing, but it's the kind of little indulgence you get when the pace is easy and the budget is unlimited.

Poor Alexis Smith has to wear some of the most excruciating costumes you'll ever see (what kind of a person gets up in the morning, worried that her lover thinks she conspired to have him killed, and before she goes out into the streets -- streets in front of the Alamo, remember,-- in search of him she puts on a hat with a clump of cherries on top of it?) (That was going to be a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer it: nobody. Nobody has ever done that, not in the whole long history of the earth.) She comes across as petulant and stiff most of the time, but she and Flynn always play easily enough together, and she doesn't ruin anything. (I mean, she might have ruined the songs, I don't know, because I generally fast-forward through those, unless it's Mae West or Marlene Dietrich or someone I know will be interesting.)

The shootout scenes are almost hysterically over-played, with stuntmen diving into great, swooping, balletic death-throes, but the climactic stalking scene, in which Hardin stalks one villain who stalks another through the moonlit ruins of the Alamo, is beautifully lit and satisfying.

pity oscar, aged and weary

Each year there are many paths for Oscar to take to wind up in a jungle of utter lameness and ineptitude. Last year it was his lust for a fountain of youth, personified by the insanely unbalanced duo of Franco & Hathaway, which was the hubris opening him to ridicule, contempt and bad ratings. This year, I predict, the path will be one of Attempted Return To Our Glory Days, always a mistake for high school football players, beauty queens, and, I assure you, for Oscar.

This time, borscht belt favorite Billy Crystal will be hosting once again, because he's safe, and Oscar is old and tired. This year we will be travelling back in time as The Artist and Hugo sweep one category after another in the Academy's fierce campaign to remind us how beautiful and simple things were in the old days. (Because Oscar is old, and he's tired.) Nothing against these movies; I like them both very much. I object only because it is not their beauty or skill which is attracting Oscar, but their cuddly, easy-chair comfort, and their shameless flattery of his realm, the Cinema of Olden Times.

In honour of that campaign, Oscar has tipped the scales in using that old safety device of nominating actors for the party-trick called Best Impersonation of a Famous Person. Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams and Ken Branagh, no slouches, to be sure, all benefit from this slickest, easiest road to winning Oscar's attention. (No, wait, I misspoke: it's the second easiest. The easiest is to be a beautiful woman and make yourself ugly by putting on weight or a fake nose. The masculine equivalent is to de-glamorize yourself playing a severe mental or physical handicap.)

And I'm not even going to talk about the Best Actor nominations. No, wait, you're right, I am. This is who ought to be there: Michael Shannon, Michael Fassbender, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt but not for Moneyball, a role for which he didn't even have to break a sweat, but for the strange, sublime, controversial Tree of Life. We can let Clooney stick around; I haven't seen the Descendants yet but I'll be surprised if he doesn't nail the role just right.

And, no, the Frenchman must go, I'm sorry. I was charmed, I admit it, along with about half the rest of the world (the other half is probably grinding its teeth in curmudgeonly resentment at such blatant display of froth and emotional manipulation via carefully exact doses of whipping cream and cute dog tricks). Despite his suavity and amiable charm, the Frenchman, I'm sorry, must go. I will confess that I am generally harder on the French, cinematically speaking, than I am on most of the world, it's a prejudice of mine, and in particular on French actors. To be a French actor and win me, you almost have to be Vincent Cassel, a man who's probably appalling to spend time with in real life, but he works harder than anyone else in service to each role he plays, and who can resist that? Also, I suspect he has a very clear self-image, which is going to work like gangbusters in A Dangerous Method where he plays Otto Gross, a brilliant and crazy pioneer of psychotherapy who, for one insidious and important evening, held sway over Carl Jung as a sort of evil genius. And, yes, I realize many of you have already seen this film, for which I've been yearning for several months to the point of languishing, chalking little marks up on my cell-wall to count the days, hoping that this will magically bring it manifest at my local cinema, but I live, alas, in a sort of cultural dark-zone where the folks who book the movies do so by communicating with Satan and following his directions precisely in hopes that the human race will soon be dumbed down to the point that we'll all vote Republican.

But back to Oscar and his guest-list: Michael Shannon is not on it, because he's strange and somehow forbidding, and the little gold man wants no hint of approaching midnight to spoil his nice night of glittering nostalgia. With all his great good work this year, it is an absolute crime that Fassbender is absent, but how can Oscar countenance such Stygian sexual shenanigans as one finds in both Shame and A Dangerous Method? He is far too timorous a little statuette for that. "Not this year," I can hear him protesting in a feeble voice, punctuated by little coughs. "Perhaps another year, but this year I could not bear it." He is old, his gold plating is feeling thin and flaky, and the cold comes through so much more easily than it once did. The only hint of crepuscule he has invited to his little party is in the form of Rooney Mara, and she is included on the strict understanding that she is, in truth, a very nice girl, with no piercings whatsoever, and only convincing as an iconoclast outlaw because she is so very talented. In future, he trusts, as she ages, she will use this talent in nice ways, possibly giving spot-on imitations of Katharine Hepburn or Leslie Caron.

I would love it if Oldman won. You've got to love Oldman, the audacious and thankless choices he's made all these years in his continuing and perspicacious quest to make good art. His Smiley is bold, subtle, perfectly thought-out, absolutely controlled. It is a glamourless role, and so requires both courage and quashing of personal vanity. On the other hand, it is a glamourless role, so Oscar will not countenance accompanying him home.

Let's be frank: Oscar's going home with the Frenchman. That guy's going to get up there, do a little soft-shoe, he'll bring the dog out, it'll do that little playing-dead trick and everyone, including me, will go awwwwwww! He'll smile his Douglas Fairbanks smile, his eyes warm as comfortable toast, and we'll all think it's so adorable that he can't really speak any English, can you imagine such a thing in this day and age? Quaint!

And I'll bet you Streep's taking the other one home, because, genius as she is, she's proven herself safe across these many years by both winning and losing with grace and fortitude and never missing a ceremony, always bowing humbly to the gold man's choice whenever he averts his face. As for Best Supporting, I'm guessing Branagh's taking one home for his aping of Oscar-fave Olivier and Viola Davis, an excellent actress who maybe should have won for her powerhouse ten minutes in Doubt, will make everything politically correct by taking the other. I'm not saying she doesn't deserve it; maybe she does, I haven't seen it. Point is, she'll get it whether she deserves it or not because Oscar is playing it nice and easy this year. No waves, no rocking boat. Everyone's happy; no feathers ruffled. We can all go home and have a nice cup of tea. Oscar can wrap up in a down comforter and doze for another year, his conscience strangely untroubled by his lily-livered, chicken-hearted, yellow-bellied choices.

************

POSTSCRIPT: Alright, I finally watched the ceremony (I tape it, so I can fast-forward through the speeches and the jokes and the musical numbers) and I apologize to Viola Davis for not realizing she was up for Best Actress. As such, she had no chance of winning against La Streep in her powerhouse year, not so long as there was another black woman up for a Best Supporting Role who could allow Oscar to mark the Political Correctness box on his feeble mental checklist and put it out of his mind. Also, I like to think if I'd realized that Christopher Plummer was up for the Best Supporting Actor I'd have known that he'd wrest the Sentimental Long-time Achievement Award for Hard-Working Theatre-Trained British Actor easily away from Branagh's fist, but hindsight is convenient, and next year I'll pay closer attention. Or, alternatively, maybe none at all.

On the upside, the ceremony was nice and short, wasn't it? At least, it is when you fast-forward through the speeches and jokes, a practice which I heartily recommend. And I love that they don't have songs now! Ye gods, how I always hated the songs. Remember when you had to listen to the Celine Dion music from the Titanic in between those episodes of continued indignity involving James Cameron winning all the awards? That was a bad year. For all its inocuousness, the best I can say about this one is that it was better.