sucking in the fifties: virgin vs whore

Jubal: (1956. dir: Delmer Daves) I've had it up to here with the fifties and that decade's crazy crush on psychobabble replacing action, especially in a Western. This one has no action at all, just talk, talk, talk, which sometimes results in violence, but which doesn't feel like action, just childish acting-out.

There are two women: a Virgin (Felicia Farr), impossibly innocent and virtuous, and a Whore (Valerie French), impossibly wicked in her apocalypse-inducing lust. There's a cadre of fellows, mostly ranch-hands working for the affable and gregarious Shep (Ernest Borgnine), who is married to the Whore. Rod Steiger plays Curly from Of Mice and Men, and does it badly, all hyperventilation and scenery-chewing. Into this cauldron is thrown Glenn Ford's Jubal Troop, just the right mix of hero and outlaw to stir up a whole mess of broiling emotion, winding up in the cauterizing of a long-festering communal wound via death and restructuring.

Wikipedia says this movie is "notable as a reworking of Othello." Maybe in the sense that it's about jealousy, but that's where the resemblance ends. Also, Shakespeare could write very well. This script is the kind of thing a mediocre playwright writes when he doesn't have anything to write about but is too proud to sit and not write for awhile until he gets a decent idea.

It's too bad. Charles Bronson is good in his throwaway sidekick role, Ford and Borgnine do their usual good work. In addition to its other badness, it staggers beneath the ancillary burden of being one of those Mega Cinemascope Panoramic Epic pictures, so that every time Jubal has to walk from the corral to the house, we watch every step so that the cinematographer can show us how magnificently well the mountains behind him look on the big screen.

If it was a book, I'd have thrown it repeatedly against the wall every time I tried to finish a chapter.

Some Came Running: (1958. dir: Vincente Minnelli) And again, with the psychobabble. Talk, talk, talk. This movie is like poor-man's William Inge, and how much Inge really translates beyond the barrier of these many decades?

There are two good things, -- no, strike that: great things, -- about this movie. The first is Shirley MacLaine, who from the earliest age possessed a preternatural ability to attack even a badly-written role with such charisma, vivacity, and heart that she could physically drag a two-dimensional character kicking and screaming into a full, well-rounded third dimension. Anyone else, and I mean anyone, doing the bit in the nightclub where her Ginny drunkenly stumbles into the spotlight to sing, would have come off as an embarrassment. She is stupefyingly good, and not only in this outre kind of scene, but later, more quietly, confronting the teacher, and then finally convincing her beloved Dave (Sinatra) that her kind of love, however flawed, is true.

As for everyone else, it's all crap. Dino and Frank are, chillingly, Dino and Frank. Supposed to be a charming drunk, Dino cutely refers to the women he uses as "pigs", even when sober. Frank's Dave, supposed to be a very sensitive writer (we know because the scriptwriter has an objective and trustworthy character describe him so early on, not because Frank convinces us he is so), ostensibly falls in love with a teacher (Martha Hyer, wooden not like a tree, which has life and movement, but like a dimestore Indian, which has eyes and nose and mouth, but no animation at all), but, again, we only know it because he keeps protesting his love, not because we actually see any convincing evidence of it.

In fact, for all this film's ostensible obsession with uncovering its characters' psychological underpinnings, the psychology is crap. A guy like Sinatra (and, sorry, that's what he's playing: not a sensitive writer, but a guy like Sinatra) does not keep hangdogging around a prudish woman's door protesting his love. (Again, here, see that? Virgin and Whore. Just like the Western. There's even a scene where Sinatra "saves" his teenaged niece from life "as a tramp" because she's reacted to the knowledge of her father's infidelity by going out on the town with a stranger. There's only two ways, baby: virgin or whore, and one wrong move decides it forever. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it. What was WRONG with the fifties? And how can anyone -- I'm looking at you, Ronald Reagan,-- romanticize that crap?) I'm not saying no man would ever do that; I'm saying this is Sinatra we're talking about, and it pulls the rug out from under the whole, already stupid story.

And the Arthur Kennedy subplot? Forget about it. Next time, it winds up on the cutting-room floor.

There is one other great thing, though: that last carnival sequence. As written, it's nothing. The gunman is a mere plot device, a sort of Diabolus-ex-Machina, ridiculous, but the greatness is in the way it's filmed. It's like a number from West Side Story; Minnelli has filmed it in a slow-building whirl of dance-like motion and lights and color. A man with a gun pursuing a newlywed couple through a carnival crowd and another man trying to warn them becomes a whirling dance, gorgeously staged, shot and edited, so that every frame builds up tension, tension which has been entirely lacking for the rest of the goddamn film, I might add. So Minnelli manages to make a film that plods and sucks for two full hours, then caps it off with a climax of some full-on genius. Amazing. Not necessarily in a good way. I take my hat off, but only partly. Let's say I tip my hat without removing it fully from my head, alright?

Not that I'm blaming Minnelli. He started with a bad story, and there's no real escape from that. James Jones wrote the book, and this got made in the midst of a post-Eternity Jones-and-Sinatra-mania. Nowadays we make bad sequels to hit movies; back then, they made movies from books, and when they hit on a blockbuster, they raided the author's closets and drawers and garbage cans for further material. It's almost sweet, the idea is so innocent: giving the writer the credit for a good story. Trouble is, so many writers have only one or two, and then they start imitating Thomas Wolfe or William Inge or whoever the hell is the hipster god that year.

ancient tragedy in both the old west and the modern world, and a spaghetti western without the spaghetti

Dead Man's Burden: (2012. dir: Jared Moshe) God, how I love a Western that's like a Greek Tragedy (the Furies!), and this one is, like the Oresteia, only the war which has decimated the land is the Civil War and the family homestead is on the border of New Mexico. The curse on this low-rent House of Atreus involves the sins of the father, brother, sister, and interlopers, and blood must be paid for with blood. It's a great story and a decent script, the acting is good enough, although I salivate to imagine what someone like Fassbender would have done in the role of the husband, and to what heights a dose of charisma might have hauled this movie up.

It's good, but, sadly, it might have been great. I lay the fault down to the pacing, which has partly to do with dragging-places in the script but more fully, I think, to the bulk of it being set more by the sometimes intrusive orchestral score than by trusting the editor. There are other greenhorn glitches: creative camera angles counterintuitive to the scene (a showdown between potentially deadly enemies is shot from knee-height), a confusion about when to use close-up or medium shot.

I'd like to see this film remade with a heftier budget and a second party overlooking the script (Moshe, a long-time producer specializing in documentaries, wrote his own), along with the Stalking Moon.

Shotgun Stories: (2007. dir: Jeff Nichols) And speaking of Greek Tragedy transported forward in time...

Michael Shannon is often something spectacular to watch, as he is in this independent film about two feuding sides of one family. Jeff Nichols began with this quiet near-triumph, then went on to work again with Shannon on the breathtaking strangeness of Take Shelter. His latest is this year's Mud, which I have yet to see but from which I expect great things.

Like Take Shelter, Shotgun is not an easy ride; Nichols is a director who demands your full attention. The really fascinating writing is in the trickster called Shampoo (G. Allen Wilkins), sort of a Thersites character: not a family member, but it is he who keeps feeding a war which might otherwise smoulder down and lapse into attrition. It is he who first goads Kid (Barlow Jacobs) with news of his half-brother's taunts, then later rats out the same half-brother as the killer of a beloved dog. It is he who informs Son (Shannon) that the younger half-brothers were also involved in his brother's death, and he who shows Boy (Douglas Ligon) how to use a shotgun.

The mother is woefully miscast. There's a bold scene in which Son confronts her about her wrongdoing in raising them full of patricidal hatred, a scene during which she refuses to respond, does not speak at all. It might have been a wonderful piece de resistance had the actress communicated the kind of ice-cold and hot-with-hatred fury which would power such a lifelong vendetta, but all she brings to the table is a sort of bemused silence.

Still, Nichols and Shannon combined create a massive presence. Shotgun is, at its weakest, arresting, and occasionally ventures into low-budget magnificence, a bellwether pointing to brilliance to come from both men.

the Last Hard Men: (1976. dir: Andrew McLaglen)

*SPOILER ALERT*

Hollywood is trying to import the amoral brutality of the Spaghetti Western without simultaneously bringing its style and panache. Needless to say, the experiment doesn't work. McLaglen seems clumsy and uncertain at the helm, James Coburn and Charlton Heston are playing not humans but characters who never fully come to life, the plot is contrived and meandering. As in Ulzana's Raid and other Hollywood oaters from the time of the war in Viet Nam, the main thrust of the story seems to be the loss of a moral compass. The days when right and wrong were obvious to the man in the white hat are long gone, and no choice is ever entirely good in its repercussions. Barbara Hersey, still in her apprenticeship here, has not yet broken her cultural bindings, and so feels like a hippy amongst the outlaws. Her rape scene is brutal, arguably gratuitous, and because the "message" of the movie is vague, the scene feels filmed with an intent to pander sidelong to a leering, voyeuristic Schadenfreude.

big brother, a barbarian horde, and a search through the red-light district

the Anderson Tapes: (1971. dir: Sidney Lumet) Although no better than a mediocre film itself, it wears the honor of being one of the first of the Paranoia Films of the seventies, emerging in the same year as Klute, the French Connection, and Day of the Jackal, but preceding the other greats of the genre.

Apparently uncertain where to take it, this one was played for laughs, --albeit at a subdued chuckle,-- and it doesn't really work, although Dyan Cannon has a successfully dry and witty delivery. The "heist" parts don't work because of the slow pace, a result of forty ensuing years of ultra-acceleration. More damning is that Sean Connery is utterly miscast; it was a role designed for somebody much schlubbier. The characters as written remind me some of the Hot Rock, do you remember that one? "Afghanistan bananastand"? It seemed rompingly funny and suspenseful when I was a kid, and then a weirdly stubborn non-starter when I saw it again in late adolescence. (Mostly I remember the Mad Magazine satire. A lot of movies from the '70s and late '60s I remember that way. I never saw Love Story, but in the Mad version, the Ali McGraw character dies of a disease only found in Hollywood in which she becomes increasingly gorgeous until her final breath.)

The running "joke" in the Anderson Tapes is that many different private and governmental agencies are monitoring these criminals, with no two communicating with each other, and most of the taps are barely legal, if at all, resulting in more chaos than justice. That's the theme, albeit clumsily done, which keeps it interesting in the long run. Without it, it'd be forgotten as the Hot Rock.

Except that it also boasts Christopher Walken in his film debut, and he already has the skills and Intangible X-factor which set him apart from the rest of the pack.

Conan the Barbarian (2011. dir: Marcus Nispel) Khal Drogo and Daxos from Game of Thrones partner up to wreak Cimmerian vengeance on a father-daughter Axis of Evil (Stephen Lang and Rose McGowan; they're so good) who are determined to conquer the world through sorcery and deviltry. Whether you want to label the movie "epic in scope" or "pedestrian and interminable" will depend largely on whether or not you cared about the books. Although I hold a fond spot eternally in my heart for Arnold's old Conan movie, this one, this guy, Jason Momoa, is Robert E. Howard's warrior. ("I know not. I care not. I live, I love, I slay. I am content." CLASSIC.) Personally, I found the first third, with its backstory (poor Ron Perlman), pretentious narration (Morgan Freeman, naturally, who has officially inherited the Voice-of-God mantle from James Earl Jones), and yawningly predictable roller-coaster through hysterical melodrama, swelly Bombast-Musik and bathos, to be a pretty tough ride. As soon as the Sandmen attacked, though, I was glad I'd stuck with it.

Hardcore: (1979. dir: Paul Schrader) THIS is the follow-up to Taxi Driver? Thematically, sure, with clunky rendundancy. But the same guy wrote this lame-assed script? George C. Scott tosses himself in headlong and mines some nuggets of gold (or, anyway, pyrite) from this story about a religious man who loses his daughter to the Los Angeles porn industry and will burn down the world if that's what it takes to get her back. Mostly it comes across as contrived, removed, and trying to shock us with "truths" about the seedy underbelly of the city, and, like most things about porn, it suffers from an only half-acknowledged sense of the ridiculous. Because porn appeals not to the brain but to the, well, under-brain, its mechanisms always look embarrassing from the outside. One of the great things about Boogie Nights was that this, the main and over-riding "truth" about porn, was fully embraced.

The best part of the script is in fact when Scott's searcher (and he does have something in common with Ethan Edwards) describes the tenets of Calvinism to Season Hubley's "industry worker", then tells her she wouldn't understand, looking in from the outside. She replies, "Anything makes sense from the inside. A pervert one time came that close to convincing me to do it with his German Shepherd." And then, equal parts cynical and forlorn: "At least you get to go to Heaven. What do I get?"