sensitive tough guys: a double feature

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit: (2014. dir: Kenneth Branagh) This ought to have been a success. Chris Pine is good, Keira Knightley is good, Branagh is good as the Russian heavy facing his mortality, Costner is good in his mentor role. There are some lovely images: Branagh's Cheverin contemplating the Russian cavalry taking the French eagle at Austerlitz is a beautiful moment. When Pine's Ryan barely escapes a brutal assassination attempt and meets Costner for debriefing at a bus-stop, Costner's sad gentleness is sublime. And, after a convincing flirtation between Knightley and Branagh, the moment when he realizes he's been played, the expression into which his face falls, like a man turning into a stone golem, is one for the ages. Cheverin's moment of death is played out gracefully, too. It's almost as if Branagh wanted to direct the film because his interest lay in the poetry of this one character, this one mass of contradictions, poet and killer. It comes off, though, as if he didn't get to make the film he wanted to, only succeeding in vague, melancholy gestures towards what might have been.

That's not the biggest reason, though, that this is a failed project. It fails because it follows The Formula. As usual, you've got the vapid teal and orange color-scheme. You've got the shaky cam, which is always more annoying for me when the acting is good, when you're fair certain that if the camera were sitting still and showing you what the actors were doing, it might be quite interesting, but you'll never know for sure. There are extreme plot-turns and, more distancingly, such narrow windows of time in which the characters may accomplish their ridiculously impossible tasks that you subconsciously stop caring, since it doesn't have anything to do with the real world. You've got the requisite chase scenes: there he goes on a motorcycle, there he goes in a police van. Bet he'll end up in the river. Sorry. Did I give something away?

the Watcher: (2000. dir: Joe Charbinic) Another of those cerebral duels between a serial killer and his hunter. (If they happened half as often in life as they do on our screens, the world would be impossible to live in.) James Spader digs deep and finds gold as the disintegrating cop who has abandoned the dance to dissolve in the acid of his own guilt and remorse; Keanu Reeves is ridiculously miscast as the whimsical maniac. A scene to which the director returns, as if he wants it to be a centerpiece, is one in which Reeves does a sort of dark victory dance at the site of his final hurrah, and it is fatally marred because (one assumes) Reeves can't dance, and therefore the camera and the editor must skirt around its edges, draining away any emotional punch it might have carried.

Charbinic would have ruined it, anyway. He is one of those musical-montage directors; I suspect what he really wanted was to direct music videos, as that's the cheap aesthetic he brings to the piece. When we are watching through the killer's eyes, all brightness is drained from the colors, and he breathes like Darth Vader. There is also a sort of stop-motion effect Charbinic tosses into the mix, sometimes during chase scenes, probably meant to lend a hypnotic air, but instead resulting in a strobe-like distancing, and the last thing we need is further emotional distance, believe me. We have plenty already.

Spader is the one good thing about this movie. Oh, and Chris Ellis as the sidekick cop, an excellent secondary role, and he takes it to town.

tough guys: a triple feature

Thief: (1981. dir: Michael Mann) There is magic in this. Mann somehow makes even the darkness bright and shiny; it's hypnotically beautiful without feeling contrived (contrived ala Miami Vice, I mean). The cinematography is breathtaking. Who will ever forget the angle of perspective when Robert Prosky is giving his last, terrifying, damning tirade at the prone Caan? or the mesmeric force of the sparks from the machinery as the heists are performed?

I can't fault the performances, either, but the weakness of the film is that I don't give a crap about any of these people. Caan's courtship of Tuesday Weld is supposed to be endearing in its ultra-toughness, I suppose, but it's only absurd. Weld gives it a game try but her character is a plot device, a mere symbol of a single aspect of the American Dream, as is the baby, purchased like a commodity, a baby silent and trouble-free. When Caan orders Weld to set out on her new life without packing anything, I wanted to laugh. With a newborn child? Have you ever tried to go ANYWHERE with a baby, even just up the street, without packing anything?

So the downside is that I didn't give a crap about these folks; the upside is that even in spite of that, I was electrified by the finale, when Caan reboots his inner robot and takes ruthless control. There's a shot of Prosky, waiting half-hidden behind furniture with a gun in his hand, silent and ready, that was just about as perfect as a shot can be.

He Ran All the Way: (1951. dir: John Berry) My expectations were high for this. It was John Garfield's last picture: blacklisted for his leftist politics, hounded by McCarthy and refusing to turn rat, his heart gave out at the age of 39.

This is the story of a young hood (Garfield is too old for the part, but he excels in boyishness) whose tragedy is that he cannot trust. The beginning is wonderful: we watch as Nick Robey is tormented by nightmares in his tiny brownstone bedroom, then tormented by his blousy, drunken mother (Gladys George). Out on the street, he is accosted by a weaselly bad guy (Norman Lloyd) who conscripts him into a payroll robbery. Robey protests, tries to tell his nightmare, keeps repeating that he knows he has no luck that day, that they should wait. It's a wonderful set-up, like a baleful prophecy, setting the doomed tone for the rest of the picture.

Like clockwork, best-laid plans implode, and in the aftermath of the fouled-up heist Robey ends up getting his hooks into Peggy (Shelly Winters), who takes him home to meet the family. For the next few hours, everything slowly goes south, as southward as possible, as you'd imagine in a John Garfield crime noir. Every mistake he makes, the script makes it clear, is because he does not know when, or, indeed, how to trust. He's been so battered around by everyone in his formative years that he has no firmament on which to stand, and feels he must take everything by force.

The bulk of the picture unfolds in the family's apartment, and it's a decent unfolding. Unfortunately, it's too easy to project what you know of Garfield's real life onto the picture, and feel his paranoia too acutely to enjoy it. It's gorgeously shot, of course, by James Wong Howe: from the early moment when we see Garfield waiting to attack the payroll guard, half his face in shadow, the other sweating in full light, to his last stagger in the water-filled gutter, nobody ever shot anything better than Howe did. Howe and Garfield work beautifully together to show us a boy tormented by doubt, and consequently, by hopes: look at his face in the back as Shelly Winters tells her father she is going away with Robey, a face torn between incredulous hope and cynical dread, or the climactic trip down the staircase, masterfully shot, while Garfield gives in entirely to his lower nature, forcing her at gunpoint before him, barking, "Garbage! Garbage!"

It's a good movie, but hard, in context, to enjoy.

the Lusty Men: (1952. dir: Nicholas Ray) This is Ray's rodeo movie, and it's a good one, if you use it for that purpose. By that I mean that if your heart jumps in anticipation when you read the words "rodeo movie", then you'll like it. It's got a lot of footage of the sport itself, some cameos by real names from the day, and a convincing feel for what the "circuit" might have been like back then.

As far as the women are concerned, it's not just another slog through the misogyny that was the '50s. I mean, it is, but it spends some time examining it. This is a place where Susan Hayward has to settle for being spunky and feisty in her hard-fought stand-by-her-man because she's simply not allowed a second choice. We hear her cooking complimented several times, and we watch her doing housework and fighting a no-account buckle-bunny for rights to her man's attentions. He is a burgeoning rodeo star played by Arthur Kennedy, an actor who somehow manages always to seem a little untrustworthy, no matter how clean they scrub him behind the ears, and the older cowboy who takes him under his wing is the far sexier Robert Mitchum in a role that's just as untrustworthy. (After Hayward opens up to Mitchum --about how she's going to stand by her man, of course, --he watches her go with a certain Mitchum dreamy-eyed quality, then muses to his hoss about why men always prefer a redhead, since they all have such hellion tempers? Gawd.)

Still, Hayward's character is full and real, and she makes it clear that, springing from a family of migrant workers, there was only one choice she was ever allowed in her life, and that was who she'd marry. She took her time and made it carefully, but she was fooled into thinking he really meant what he said when they were courting. There are other women around the rodeo: mostly wives, torn between worrying about their husbands knocking their heads open and where the next day's groceries are coming from. There's one particularly strong and unusual woman: Maria Hart plays a trick-rider who, although locked out of the main competitions, has created her own niche on the circuit.

It's not a bad movie; it's a good one. Even so, I'm grumpy. It's not Ray or this movie I hate; it's the fifties in America. What a godawful time.

The best moment in the whole shebang belongs to Mitchum, naturally. It's his last and it's filmed particularly well.

errol flynn western double feature

Montana (1950. dir: Ray Enright) In Montana, a full-scale war is raging between cattle-herders and sheep-herders, with so much unjust blood spilt on both sides it's come to resemble the Irish Troubles. Luckily, all it takes to make peace is a charming shepherd like Errol Flynn to step in, seduce the chief cattlewoman to his side, and sheep and cows co-exist happily ever after.

This is a silly movie. First of all, as a vegan and a democrat, a conflict between beef-heads and mutton-heads seems as absurd to me as the Star Trek episode where the racial armageddon on the planet springs from one half of the population being black on the left side, the other on the right (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield). Secondly, did anyone ever really LIKE Alexis Smith? or did she just get work because she was one of maybe two actresses in Hollywood (the other being Olivia de Havilland) who didn't hate Flynn?

Like all of Flynn's Westerns, it's not about the outlaw or the man alone, it's about the friendly, clever bloke who's going to tame the West, bring in some culture, throw up some fences, see that folks do their drinking properly on a Saturday night before cleaning up for church the next day. It's the kind of Western in which I have little interest. Some of them are better than others, yes, and this is not one of those. Characters are introduced, coddled, and dropped (like the Lassie-dog. She's the love of his life, she instigates an important plot-twist, and then promptly vanishes), as are relationships (who's that girl kissing Alexis Smith's fiance? is she a plot-point in woman's clothing?)

There is nothing in this movie that doesn't show up in more successful guise in other Flynn Westerns, either Silver River, Virginia City, Dodge City, or San Antonio. Watch those instead, along with Rocky Mountain and Santa Fe Trail, and leave this one to languish on the shelf. San Antonio sports all the same weaknesses this one does, but it has a lovely night-time climax which makes up some for it. This one has a cattle/sheep stampede screen-projected ridiculously behind the heroes and villains as they duke it out in the end, and it resembles a joke more than a climax.

Rocky Mountain: (1950. dir: William Keighley) This is easily my favorite of Flynn's Westerns. He's Captain Lafe Barstow, leading a seedy band of Confederate soldiers to California to muster up troops for Lee in the final plunge of the war. Instead, they find themselves trapped on a rocky outcrop with Yankee prisoners in tow and surrounded by a bellicose band of Shoshone. The rock and nearby canyon are particularly photogenic, and cinematographer Ted McCord uses the land's rich texturing, along with a lovely variance of velvet darknesses, and some of the best, most unpretentious framing you'll see in a Western, to give us a thing of beauty. The plot moves along at a suspenseful pace, and Flynn gives the best performance of his career, I think, at least this side of his heartbreaker in the Sun Also Rises. He doesn't use the dimples; he doesn't force the charm. There is a wonderful, subtle weariness to his delivery, punctuated by the occasional sparkle of optimism. He has gravitas here, a natural force of command not dependent on his usual tricks.

In fact, there's very little wrong with this movie. There's an odd prologue in which a modern-day car drives up and let us read the monument telling us that this is indeed based on truth, and it feels superfluous and television-inspired. The other thing is that the dog has its own jaunty theme-song, which dates the piece pretty badly. And, truth be told, the dog itself is a blatant piece of emotional blackmail. It's as if they didn't trust us to care about a raggedy pack of Johnny Rebs unless a pooch showed us how.

None of that matters. The Indians ride in graceful, intimidating circles in the aftermath of battles, the Rebs are stalwart and, inevitably, lose, but with undeniable honour. It's got people like Slim Whitman, back when he was truly slim, and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams among the soldiers. The script speaks with easy elegance about the strangeness of war. It's a beautiful movie.

This is where Errol Flynn met his last wife. Lauren Bacall was originally slated to play the role, and refused, bringing some contract woes down on her head, but Flynn and Patrice Wymore must have worked well together, because they were still undivorced, albeit separated, at the time of his death nine years later.

fire in the sky: true fortean

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1994. dir: Robert Lieberman) I love this movie. If you clip off the "Hollywood Ending" denouement in which all the loose ends are neatly tied up, just that last five minutes, get rid of that, then you have a True Fortean experience.

The parameters of the "True Fortean" (or daimonic) experience are that you are, first off, fairly certain that something weird and probably supernatural happened, but you can't ever entirely suss out just how much of the story you're told (or, if you were one of the participants, how much of what you experienced) is truth, half-truth, faulty memory, outright lie, or hallucination, and if it's hallucination, how much of it is shared. In our practical, commonplace life we come to the table with a few expectations, certain demands: one is that the Truth is Out There, that truth is distinct from untruth, that there is always a way to snuffle out what really happened, and if you're not finding it, then somebody's obscuring the way or you're not trying hard enough. In a True Fortean experience, the lines between fact and fiction, real memory and hallucination, nature and supernature, get so blurred that they run together into a wholly new artwork, a sort of subconscious watercolor. All our demands are not only unmet but in so strange a manner that it leaves us speechless, and possibly sleepless, the ground having been pulled from beneath our collective quietude.

The movie was based on a "true" tale from the Fortean vault, the Travis Walton alien abduction. (You can read about it in The Walton Experience by Travis Walton.) In the mid-70s, outside a quiet little Mormon burg in the forested part of Arizona (Snowflake, up near Flagstaff), a man vanishes and five days later reappears, naked, near-feral, and damaged, in a nearby town. The best part about this movie is that you're never exactly certain what kind of story you're watching: is it, in fact, an alien abduction? is it, as the investigating officer believes, a crime with a crazy cover-up story? or a publicity stunt dreamed up and executed by a childlike fantasist? Every time you think you've got your finger on the answer, the story shifts, in some tiny way, so that you doubt again.

I love the way this movie starts. You see a road through a forest at night, and the credits roll over the top of it, with sounds of the occasional owl or night creature finishing a picture of utter peace. Then a pickup truck comes slamming over the hill, its driver in an obvious panic, running into trees, careening off the road. Eventually, barely, its engine smoking, the truck parks in front of a honkytonk and five men, big men, loggers, shaken and in a state of shock, file into the warmth of the place and sit down as their friends and kinfolk watch them, their friendly advances rebuffed. The men talk quietly among themselves, establishing they are going to "stick to the story." Then one of them, the leader, walks into the back, picks up a phone, looks at it as if it is an alien device, and dials a number. Later we learn he is calling the cops to report a missing person.

The story unfolds partly through their telling, but mostly we glean it as the investigating officer (James Garner) does. In his first scene, in which he gets the initial call on his police radio as he's driving, the director gives us a strange moment: we are looking at him through his windshield and we see a string of red lights reflected in the glass lift up and we watch his face as he watches it, the radio in his hand momentarily forgotten. It's a trick: our brains convince us it is a UFO, but when the camera pulls back, we see it is the glowing crossbar at a railroad track lifting. It's a trick, yes, but it's also a clue: hallucinations are more frequent than we think they are, and some are trickier than others.

The first half of the movie, we (along with the federal investigator) think we're watching a crime unfold, and then our expectations get cheated once again. Every time we think we have ahold on what is true, it slips away, and the movie keeps that going, without cheating, nearly until the end, which is the only real cheat. In Lieberman's defense, it would have been a bold filmmaker who could leave the "neat ends tied" version off (like the Coen Brothers, with that amazing Tommy Lee Jones dream-speech at the end of No Country for Old Men, or Kelly Reichardt with the controversial and stunning ending of Meek's Cutoff). It weakens the movie into a mere curiosity; on the upside, Robert Patrick is doing a sort of sexy Norman Reedus kind of thing, so it's not all bad.

This could qualify as a horror film, because once you get to the Climactic Reveal of the abduction sequence, it really is horrifying. The aliens look fantastic, seriously fantastic, the best I've ever seen, and the set-up of the "zoo" of abductees I swear gave the Matrix its vast-human-incubator blueprint. After that, it's one big nightmare, a hideosity constructed from goo, a disconcerting lack of gravity, cringe-worthy needles, and gunk and machinery inserted into orifices. And it's filmed in a way to encourage an unsettling, dream-like experience.

After you watch it, you can decide yourself whether you want to go online and join the debate about whether the "true" story is indeed a fabrication. None of that has any bearing on the film itself.

Once again, for emphasis: I love this movie.