Friday, August 03, 2012
Edward Copeland's Top 100 of 2012 (40-21)
Fritz Lang made a lot of good movies, but nothing equaled this tale told in his native language. Peter Lorre made his mark as the hunted child killer in a film filled with atmosphere, suspense and thought.
Kept from the public for years after its initial release, the one plus to its exile was that I experienced this masterpiece of a political thriller — 50 years old this year — for the first time on the big screen in a crisp, black-and-white print. I hope that Jonathan Demme’s misguided idea of trying to remake this classic didn’t sour the original or scare younger viewers away from seeking out Frankenheimer’s version. The 1962 Manchurian Candidate contains many attributes that make it worth recommending, but every film lover must witness Angela Lansbury’s portrayal of Mrs. Iselin, a contender for the top 10 screen villains of all time.
My much-missed dog Leland Palmer Copeland didn’t usually watch TV, but whenever this classic came on, she was drawn to it. One time, Leland even seemed to sit on the couch and watch it from beginning to end. Maybe it was the music, maybe it was the colors. The sad side effect of Leland’s affection for this film that no one truly ever outgrows is that now that she isn’t here to watch it Dorothy and her friends with me any longer, Oz sometimes proves too painful for me to revisit.
No one gives this film the credit for its darkness that it really deserves. This isn't sappy sentimental drivel; this is about a man who feels as if he's been pissed on all his life and finally reaches the end of his rope. James Stewart's talent, Capra's gifts and the script by Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett make George Bailey's journey plausible and touching. Only a Mr. Potter could hate this film.
Howard Hawks directed John Wayne to his second-greatest performance in this thrilling tale of a cattle drive and bitter rivalries. It also contains the perfect example of a Hawksian woman as Joanne Dru keeps talking, even with an arrow protruding from her body. I feel as if Hawks has slipped some in esteem among the old masters as far as the younger critics out there go. This master of nearly all genres seems long overdue for resurgence.
I wrote in my 2007 list that The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde constantly swap slots for my choice as the best film of 1967 and damn if they haven’t done it again five years later. One of the many great lines in 2009’s (500) Days of Summer comes when the narrator, in describing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, says that an early exposure to sad British pop music and a misreading of The Graduate led him to believe that the search for love always leads to The One. (If I’m still around to make another top 100 in 2019, I suspect you’ll find (500) Days of Summer there — after multiple viewings I believe it’s the 21st century Annie Hall.) Back to The Graduate itself, Nichols’ direction looks better with each viewing and the cast remains remarkable. It’s just that my reaction to the story itself that waxes and wanes. It’s never bad – it’s just that sometimes I find myself loving it a bit less than the last time.
The history of movies doesn’t lack for great teamings of directors and actors and the man who more or less made John Wayne an icon with the way he introduced him as The Ringo Kid in Stagecoach also directed the Duke to his best acting performance here. Wayne always worked as a good guy, but he proved his acting chops when someone inserted an element of darkness into his characters. The Searchers also has proved to be a useful template for many other films, most notably Taxi Driver and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. Ford brought a lot of great imagery to this story and it arguably contains the greatest closing shot of his long career.
As I foretold a couple notches back when writing about The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde holds the higher esteem in my heart in this snapshot in time. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the journey I took through Penn’s entire filmography following his death, but it’s a great film regardless. Each time I watch it again I become more convinced — harrowing moments of violence aside — this truly plays as much as a comedy as The Graduate. At the time I re-visited it, watching how the Depression-era bank robbers became folk heroes to the masses, the resonance with the destruction 21st century Wall Street bankers wreaked on our nation’s economy was easier to identify with than ever before.
In the 1927-28 contest for "Artistic Quality of Production" at the Oscars, this film faced off against Sunrise and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. While Sunrise won and I wouldn’t argue against its status as a superb film (It’s not that far back on this list after all), I admit to preferring Vidor's film and its tale of striving to succeed as everything in the world appears to conspire to keep you down.
There's a good reason that so many cite Robert Towne's screenplay as one of the great examples of writing for film. If only all scripts (including some of Towne’s) were this superb. It remains one of the best examples of a modern noir, filmed in color, as well as Polanski’s best work. Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes came in his unbelievable and unforgettable run of great 1970s performances that began with 1969’s Easy Rider. It also gives us one of the sickest screen villains in Noah Cross, played so well by John Huston. Chinatown always will live on in the pantheon of film’s with last lines so memorable even people who’ve never seen it know the words.
You know 1950 was a great year for movies released in the United States when a picture as great as All About Eve only finishes third on my list for that year (behind The Third Man and Sunset Blvd.). That takes nothing away from All About Eve though with its brittle and brilliant dialogue and multiple great performances, including Bette Davis’ best, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter and, most especially, George Sanders as Addison DeWitt.
Death comes in large doses in The Wild Bunch, but its violence, despite Peckinpah turning the carnage into quasi-ballet-like imagery, isn’t what makes the film so remarkable. The film delivers its true eulogy not for its human characters but for the death of an era and a way of life. As with so many of Peckinpah’s great films, too many misunderstood the film’s intent but The Wild Bunch only grows more evocative and timeless with age, thanks in large part to its ensemble of acting veterans who display the film’s themes through every crease and line on their faces. With the recent death of Ernest Borgnine, Jaime Sanchez (Angel) remains the last living actor who belonged to the bunch.
Billy Wilder (like Howard Hawks) had the talent to soar in almost any genre and this quintessential film noir is a supreme example. How it lost the Oscar to Going My Way and Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson failed to get nominations still puzzles me. Wait — no it doesn't. The Academy picks wrong much more often than they pick right. Barbara Stanwyck gave a lot of great performances, but Phyllis Dietrichson may have topped them all — and if she didn’t, the others better look out.
Kurosawa gets routinely mentioned by many as a master (and deservedly so), thanks mainly to his great sword-laden epics, but for me this "modern" film stands high as one of his strongest, telling the sad story of a long suffering bureaucrat who seeks meaning in life when he's diagnosed with terminal cancer. A truly touching, remarkable film.
Has there ever been a more touching image placed on film that the ending of this silent film, made well after silent films were dead, when the newly sighted blind girl realizes her benefactor was a little tramp? I don't think so either.
The film that marked Woody’s leap from pure comedy to something more still stands as one of his very best 35 years later. With a structure that deserves comparisons to Citizen Kane in that you’re never quite sure what comes next that guarantees a perpetual freshness no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Allen threw almost every trick he could think of into Annie Hall — animated sequences, subtitles to translate what characters really thought, split screens (even if they actually filmed scenes in a room with a divider — and produced an instant classic. Diane Keaton delights as the title character, the film overflows with priceless lines and timeless sequences and the first great Christopher Walken monologue.
It's almost become shorthand to argue that Part II bests Part I in The Godfather trilogy, but I disagree. The original still takes the top spot in my book. I don't think the crosscutting of Michael and young Vito ever quite meshes and instead interrupts the rhythm of Part II. No such problem in the original, an example of making a movie masterpiece out of a pulpy novel. Examining the film more closely again earlier this year for its 40th anniversary while I enjoyed and admired it as much as ever, for the first time I had to acknowledge that unlike later mob classics such as Goodfellas or TV’s Sopranos, The Godfather does romanticize the Corleones. You never see innocents suffer from their line of work — Vito even denies they’re killers. It doesn’t change the film’s status as a fine piece of cinematic art, but it did make me think harder about it than I had before.
Many directors deliver great one-two punches in terms of brilliant consecutive films and Lumet pulled off one of the best of them in 1975 and 1976, beginning with this masterpiece based on a true bank robbery. Al Pacino delivers what may be one of his top two or three performances. It also contains the best work of the sadly too brief career of John Cazale and a peerless ensemble. Lumet’s direction aided by the editing of Dede Allen produced one of the most re-watchable films of all time. If I run across it on TV, even cut up, I stay glued to the end.
After more than 70 years, John Huston’s directing debut still sizzles. Watching Bogart embrace his first real role as a good guy exhilarates the viewer as he thrusts and parries with the delightful supporting cast of Mary Astor, Ward Bond, Elisha Cook Jr., Gladys George, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Barton McClane and Lee Patrick. What many forget about the film comes in that unforgettable climax that basically consists of five characters talking to each other for nearly 30 minutes — and it’s riveting.
The film that really put Spielberg on the pop culture map remains to me his greatest accomplishment. Two distinct and perfect halves: Terror on the beach followed by the brilliance of three men on a boat. It's also an example of how sometimes trashy novels can be turned into true works of film art in a way great novels usually miss the mark in translation (though Peter Benchley's novel at least killed Hooper off as well leaving nonexpert waterphobe Brody as the victor and sole survivor, which would have made for a slightly better ending but I'm nitpicking).
Tweet
Labels: Arthur Penn, Capra, Chaplin, Coppola, Hawks, John Ford, kinpah, Kurosawa, Lang, Lists, Lumet, Mankiewicz, Nichols, Polanski, Schrader, Spielberg, Towne, Wilder, Woody
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Just when you thought you were out…
"If a team of assassins planned to ambush their target at a tollbooth, would it really be deemed necessary that the killers
wear their finest suits and fedoras while hiding before they perform the task? Did murder in the 1940s
require a dress code?" — Edward Copeland
By Edward Copeland
Some movies you love so much, have seen so many times in whole or in part, that when you stop to watch the film with a purpose (such as writing this post as well as the two previous ones, "America's first family" and "Merging art and commerce," to mark the 40th anniversary of The Godfather), you discover things you never noticed before and ideas occur to you for the first time. I still love The Godfather, but haven't watched it this closely in a long time — probably since viewing it in that Midtown Manhattan theater in 1997. When I saw it then, Goodfellas already existed in my life, but the sheer size of Coppola's images filtered through Gordon Willis' magnificent cinematography overwhelmed me so Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, albeit the greater film, didn't intrude on my thoughts then. This time though, I watched The Godfather on DVD on my TV — twice really, once for the movie, once for Coppola's commentary. This screening of rapt attention not only took place semi-horizontally at home, it also marked my first time observing The Godfather closely and in its entirety since The Sopranos entered the world. Because I have a lot to say, this will be a two-part post unlike the first two, which could stand alone. I plan, theoretically, for this final post to flow as a single piece even though I've divided it in half. To be a tease, I'm saving my new observations until the last section of this piece.
This reunion with the Corleones didn't change one aspect that amazed me the first time I viewed the film in a single, uncut setting: its miraculous pacing. Only a few minutes shy of three hours, The Godfather holds its length incredibly well. It never lags and you falsely sense that you've just settled in to the tale when, before you know it, the end credits roll. Coppola and his editing team of William
Reynolds and Peter Zinner accomplish this without making the movie seem rushed either. While I knew the film incredibly well before I watched it again, the obvious never stood out until I heard what Coppola said on the commentary that I quoted in the first Godfather-related post, "America's first family," when he talked about seeing The French Connection during editing and thinking, "Compared to that, The Godfather is going to be this dark, boring, long movie with a lot of guys sitting around in chairs talking." On the commentary, Coppola follows that with the quote I put at the top of this post. Of course, the director's stress coughed up the adjective boring, but the film indeed does contain many scenes involving men sitting around talking. When you think about The Godfather, what usually springs to mind involves the masterfully choreographed sequences of violence such as the ending baptism montage or other memorable scenes such as the opening "I believe in America" monologue by the undertaker Bonsasera (Salvatore Corsitto). Those scenes with men talking play perfectly well, but you don't think about it. Not when the film containz scenes such as James Caan's Sonny being assassinated at the tollbooth, which Coppola freely acknowledges as his homage to Arthur Penn's finale in Bonnie and Clyde. "Like my dad always said, 'Steal from the best,'" Coppola says. The reason all those "talking scenes" work corresponds with the reason all those stylized scenes of violence work: great dialogue. Coppola didn't invent this. From the beginning of the torch Hollywood (and moviegoers) carried for gangsters and the mob, the genre's best examples always brought with them some of the most memorable line in movie history stretching back almost to the beginning of film. Literally, the list extends too long to name all the precursors. Of course, as the years went by, the country allowed more freedom of content in its movies. The Godfather debuted early in the process of those changes, becoming the first gangster film to truly benefit. As you'd expect, the prudes whined about moral decay then — just as many do now. (Those who yell loudest about losing their freedom inevitably also want to take it away from anyone who doesn't believe as they do.) Coppola addresses the issue of violence on the DVD. "The thing about violence in a film like this is you have to try to make every moment be in some way eccentric or have some unusual or memorable aspect so it's not just a bludgeoning or just violence but…there is some sort of context that singles it out," Coppola says. Wwile the big names get the lion's share of praise (deservedly) for their acting in The Godfather, not enough gets said about those in the
smaller roles because on top of its other positive attributes, The Godfather, despite Coppola's fights with Paramount, turned out to be an exceptionally well-cast movie. Richard Conte not only performs well as the oily and duplicitous rival boss Barzini, his presence provides a crucial link to the history of the genre, as did several other actors, through films such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz's House of Strangers, The Brothers Rico and Jules Dassin's great Thieves' Highway, which includes a memorable truck crash whose shot of rolling apples echoes the strewn oranges when Marlon Brando's Don Vito gets shot in The Godfather. Another link to past noirs come through Sterling Hayden's turn as the crooked cop Capt. McCluskey after roles in classics such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Leaving his mark, sadly an all too brief one, was Al
Lettieri as Sollozzo, the Sicilian who wanted to bring narcotics into the city. Lettieri's acting success came late, appearing first on TV in 1957 at 29 but not making a movie until 1965. 1972 truly turned out to be his breakout year, appearing not only in The Godfather but in Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway. He died of a heart attack three years later at 47. One final connection, in a way, to noirs and gangsters of old came in the brief but fun performance of John Marley as movie studio President Jack Woltz with the unfortunate horse. Marley worked since the 1940s, mostly on
television, but included uncredited work in Kiss of Death and The Naked City and a small credited role in 1951's The Mob. Still, Marley remained one of those familiar faces that no one could name. It wasn't until the 1960s that he began to gain notice with parts in films such as Cat Ballou, a well-received starring role in John Cassavetes' Faces and a 1970 supporting actor nomination as Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. Woltz's role didn't take up much screentime, but Marley made the most of it, paired mostly with the sublime Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen. The dinner scene between the two men delights every time. Coppola says that Duvall usually only needed a couple of takes to nail a scene, but I don't know how he couldn't crack up since the meal consists mostly of Marley's monologue about why he
hates Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) and wants to run him out of the business How Duvall sat there and ate without cracking up constantly I can't fathom. His spite stems because Fontane stole a girl that Woltz had from him, so that's why the studio chief seems determined not to give the singer the part in the movie he desires. "She was the greatest piece of ass I ever had — and I've had 'en all over the world," Woltz yells at Tom. This leads to the famous scene of Woltz waking up the next morning to find the head of his prized $400,000 thoroughbred in his bed, That wasn't a fake head either. Part of the crew went to a dog food company and looked over the horses they planned to kill eventually to turn into Fido's fixings. They selected the horse they liked and had the company save the head in dry ice and send it to them when they slaughtered the animal. Needless to say, many people went ballistic, Coppola said. He always thought it was fascinating how upset people got that they used the head of an already dead horse but the film's many human killings didn't bug many. As for Marley, years later he appeared on SCTV Network when they did their spoof of The Godfather with Joe Flaherty's station owner Guy Caballero as the title character, only Marley played Leonard Bernstein.
Of the larger supporting roles in The Godfather, the actor and character I come away admiring and enjoying more each time I see the film in whole or in part continues to be Richard Castellano as Pete Clemenza, one of Don Corleone's capos and best killers. He also happens to be the funniest character in the movie. If any of the creations in The Godfather universe reminds me of someone who could turn up working on Tony Soprano's crew, Clemenza would be the one. Castellano gets so many classic bits, whether he's teasing Michael (Al Pacino) about not being able to tell Kay (Diane Keaton) he loves her on the phone in the kitchen full of Corleone soldiers. "Mikey, why don't you tell that nice girl you love her? I love you with all-a my heart, if I don't see-a you again soon, I'm-a gonna die," Clemenza needles him with a mock girl's voice while he makes a huge pot of "gravy." Among Clemenza's other duties, he teaches well. Not only does he try to pass on the recipe to Michael, he's the one who instructs him how to pull off the hit on Sollozzo and McCluskey. Castellano worked wonders grabbing a laugh before or after whacking someone. When Carlo (Gianni Russo), the no-good husband of Corleone sister Connie (Talia Shire), gets in a car, believing Michael when he says that he's only exiling him to Vegas and kicking him out of the family business as punishment for
setting up Sonny, Clemenza sounds perfectly friendly as he greets him with, "Hello Carlo" from the back seat before throttling him to death. According to Coppola, Castellano also improvised his most famous line (and one of the most repeated from the film as well). After a brief scene where Clemenza leaves his house to head to work, his wife (Adelle Sheridan) yells to him to remember to pick up cannolis. The top item on Clemenza's work schedule that day, by Sonny's orders, involvee killing Paulie (John Martino), the don's usual driver/bodyguard who conveniently was out ill the day before when Vito was ambushed. As Paulie drives Clemenza and Rocco (Tom Rosqui), one of
Clemenza's crew, Clemenza asks Paulie to pull over so he can take a piss. As Clemenza gets out of the car, Rocco kills Paulie. Clemenza returns and utters those immortal words that Castellano improvised, "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." Later, in that kitchen scene where Clemenza cooks and ribs Michael, Sonny comes in and asks him simply, "How's Paulie?" "Oh, Paulie…won't see him no more," Clemenza states matter-of-factly, never pausing in his stirring of the sauce. One thing I noticed this time that slipped by me before is that Clemenza actually supplied me with the origin of the phrase "going to the mattresses." It's so obvious in meaning I don't know how it escaped me, especially since Tony and his men did exactly that in the penultimate Sopranos episode. In the Godfather sequel, Bruno Kirby played the young Clemenza, but Castellano's presence was sorely missed. They couldn't reach a deal on a contract. In a rarity, the issue had nothing to do with pay. Castellano insisted that a friend of his had to be hired to write all his dialogue personally for The Godfather Part II. That request proved way too easy for Coppola to refuse and that's how Michael V. Gazzo's character of Frank Pentangeli got created for Part II, earning Gazzo a supporting actor Oscar nomination. Castellano received a supporting actor nomination, but not for The Godfather. His came for the 1970 comedy Lovers and Other Strangers. The actor died in 1988.
Another good supporting performance brings with it a great story. As I mentioned before, throughout his DVD commentary Coppola offers advice to new directors. One tip he gives repeatedly, actually he suggests it for directors at all levels of experience: Always hold at least a day or two of open auditions. He did this on The Godfather and filled several roles this way, but his best find (according to Coppola and I agree) turned out to be Abe Vigoda as Sal Tessio, Corleone's other main capo. Vigoda turned in a great performance, especially at the end when it's figured out that Tessio betrayed the Corleones and he knows he's being taken off to his death and makes a quiet plea to Duvall's Hagen to get him out of it "for old time's sake." Vigoda went on to become such a cult figure after playing Fish on Barney Miller and his short-lived spinoff Fish to getting much mileage out of premature reports of his death, especially through frequent appearances on Late Night With Conan O'Brien. Vigoda continues to work, having turned 91 in February and, according to the Inaccurate Movie Database, in pre-production for a feature comedy called The Mobster Movie co-starring Alice Cooper to be released next year. Vigoda's final moment in The Godfather should be a lesson to all directors to hold at least a day or two of open auditions because "you never know who is out there," Coppola said.
Tweet
Labels: 70s, Arthur Penn, Brando, Caan, Cassavetes, Coppola, Dassin, Diane Keaton, Duvall, Huston, Kubrick, Mankiewicz, Movie Tributes, Pacino, Peckinpah, Scorsese, The Sopranos
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
How do you solve a problem like J. Edgar?
By Edward Copeland
After watching J. Edgar, I prepared to write my usual review, assessing the film overall for its direction, writing, performances and other technical qualities, but something kept sticking in my mind, preventing me from focusing on those aspects. My brain kept drifting back to a different question, one that has puzzled me in many movies for a long time but that reared its ugly head — literally — once again as I watched J. Edgar. Why in the 21st century, with all of the advancements that have been made in visual effects, does old age makeup still turn up so often looking so laughably bad as it does? It does such a disservice to the performers trying to act beneath the horrible messes slapped upon their visages. How can you concentrate on the performances of Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Naomi Watts in their characters' later years when their faces have been marred by such silly appliances? It doesn't always hurt — Jennifer Connelly won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind despite the awful makeup that covered her at the end of that movie (or, more recently, Kate Winslet's awful aging in The Reader). What's more mystifying is when you look back at a film such as Arthur Penn's Little Big Man in 1970 and how great the old-age makeup on Dustin Hoffman was in that film. Enough on that subject. With that off my chest, I believe I'm ready to discuss the rest of J. Edgar now, truly a mixed bag of a movie if ever there were one.
John Edgar Hoover served as the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an agency whose creation he spearheaded in 1935 after leading its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, since 1924. Between the two bureaus, Hoover held the top job for nearly 50 years and in eight presidential administrations from Coolidge to Nixon. Hoover truly defined what it meant to be a man of contradictions. He led the way in modernizing many crucial techniques in criminal investigations such as fingerprinting and forensics but also frequently stepped outside the law to amass information on perceived enemies, either to himself or the country. His private life contained its own secrets, namely his close, perhaps gay, relationship with top assistant Clyde Tolson. At least as the movie portrays it, Hoover's paranoia about being gay stemmed from his mother, who once told him, "I would rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son."
To compress a life full full of such huge historical events alongside the inner life of a man would be a challenge for any screenwriter and any director. While Dustin Lance Black (Oscar-winning writer of Milk) and two-time Oscar-winning director Clint Eastwood give it the old college try in J. Edgar, the sheer weight of all those years and all that material crushes them, leaving the film somewhat rudderless despite good performances.
Black's screenplay structures Hoover's life around the premise of a 1960s era Hoover (well-played by Leonardo DiCaprio, even beneath the hideous makeup) dictating his version of the events of his life to the first of several young agents, embellishing as he did in real life how much credit he deserved for various FBI triumphs. He practically claims to have shot and killed John Dillinger outside the movie theater himself, though he omits how in a pique he punished the agent who actually ended the '30s era bank robber's crime spree. Hoover, so closed-up and concerned about how he was perceived, would be a difficult role for any actor to pull off, so I don't think everyone realizes what a great job DiCaprio accomplishes here outside of those few rare moments of faint tenderness he allows himself to share with Clyde Tolson (equally well-played by Armie Hammer, so good as the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher's brilliant The Social Network.)
Because so much happened in U.S. history between 1924 and 1972, it would be damn near impossible to hit on everything that Hoover touched so the film concentrates on Communist radicals in the U.S. following the Russian Revolution, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the war on the criminals such as Dillinger in the 1930s. It also hits upon Hoover's efforts to form the FBI in the first place.
The uncertainty of his relationship with Tolson gives the film some heart. There's one scene where after a dinner together when the two men ride off together, Hoover nervously places his hand on Tolson's that's reminiscent of scenes in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence.
Some of the more unsavory sides of Hoover's nature get short shrift such as his plans to sabotage Martin Luther King with stories of infidelity and Communist associates thinking it will get King to refuse his Nobel Peace Prize. He gets one scene with Robert Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan) where he shows him evidence of sexual excess he has on his brother but nothing more comes of it until he hears of JFK's assassination, call his brother and tells him the president has been shot and hangs up.
Judi Dench and Naomi Watts turn in solid performances as the two important women in Hoover's life. Dench plays his mother whom Hoover lived with until her death and you see where most of his psychological blocks formed. Watts gives a subtle turn as Helen Gandy, Hoover's lifelong secretary who has as little interest in men or a family life as Hoover does in women. The film also shows her shredding Hoover's secret files upon his death while Nixon's men search frantically for them.
Aside for the dreadful makeup, J. Edgar looks exquisite in terms of cinematography, costumes and production design. Eastwood does his best trying to keep the film moving as it bounces between the various time periods, but the flaws with J. Edgar run deeper. The film lacks a compass, moral or otherwise, and desperately needs a point of view about Hoover. Imagine if this were an Oliver Stone film. Granted, his one brief touch on Hoover in Nixon had Bob Hoskins portraying him French-kissing Wilson Cruz as a pool boy, but that film itself was a surprisingly well-rounded look at Nixon himself.
J. Edgar, while DiCaprio turns in a very good performance in spite of the constraints, doesn't present a well-rounded Hoover. Everything the film has to say about the man seems drawn from quick pencil sketches on a napkin. DiCaprio manages to bring a depth to Hoover that the screenplay itself doesn't supply. In fact, based on the script's portrait, J. Edgar Hoover comes off as a smart but paranoid Forrest Gump who happened to be present at many of the key moments of the U.S. in the 20th century. Someone as consequential and important as he was, for both good and ill, needed a treatment that went beyond a Cliffs Notes version.
Tweet
Labels: 10s, Arthur Penn, Dench, DiCaprio, Dustin Hoffman, Eastwood, Fincher, Jennifer Connelly, Naomi Watts, Oliver Stone, Scorsese, Winslet
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Re-fighting the Cold War
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This piece originally posted Jan. 3, 2007. I'm re-running it today to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of the movie Reds.
By Edward Copeland
It was with trepidation that I decided to use the occasion of its 25th anniversary DVD release to face off again with one of my old cinematic archenemies, namely Warren Beatty's 1981 film Reds. I'd known for a long time this day would come because through those two-and-a-half decades, I'd carried the scars of enduring the film and it had remained as one of the most boredom-inducing experiences of my filmgoing life. However, I also knew that it probably wasn't fair to the film. I saw Reds in its initial release — when my Oscar obsession was blossoming in seventh grade and deep down, I knew that perhaps a 12-year-old wasn't the movie's ideal audience and I needed to give the film another chance, to watch it with fresh, adult eyes.
Could the Reds I watched again in 2006 possibly be the same Reds that felt like as if a dentist were performing a root canal on me when I saw it decades ago — or is the real truth that the film remains the same but I'm not a different moviewatcher than I was back then? I think the answer is clear — and it would probably be plain stubborness on my part not to acknowledge that conditions must truly be correct for an individual to appreciate some films and a three hour-plus account of early socialists and the Russian revolution isn't really the best material for someone who at the time worshipped the reels Raiders of the Lost Ark unspooled from, especially since over the years Raiders has diminished in my eyes. Re-watching Reds, which initially to me seemed to move slower than Heinz ketchup, surprised the hell out of me when I realized that its pacing seemed exceptional for such a long movie. Sure, no Nazi faces were melting, but Reds' richness finally has become apparent to me. It's also worth noting that in the period between my initial seventh-grade viewing of Reds and my second encounter in 2006, one of my favorite courses at college was called Era of Russian Revolutions.
In many ways, Reds not only plays as a great film to me today in a way it didn't back in the 1980s, it also works as a far more relevant one as well. When you watch as the idealism of those who felt socialism was the answer to capitalism's wrongs inevitably gives way to cynicism as the communists in Russia begin using their power to deny the people rather than to give them a stronger voice, it's hard not
to see the parallels. Ideology by necessity almost always gives way to disillusionment as true believers, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, realize that the people whom they've trusted and believed in to realize their ideal dreams either have something else in mind or lack the essential ability to implement their goals. Reds also plays more clearly to me today as a story of the battle between art and politics as Jack Reed (Beatty) tries to balance his love of writing with his political sensibilities. He wants to help fight for his cause, but he still bristles when anyone tries to change his words. Deep down, even if he didn't admit it, he was more writer than revolutionary. Of course, the love that really lies at the heart of Reds is that between Reed and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Keaton's performance resonates much more strongly for me now than it did when I was a bored adolescent. Perhaps, as much as I love Annie Hall, this might be Keaton's best performance as an often-fickle woman whose political views often drift as often as her interest in the men in her life. One of the things that annoyed me the most in junior high were the witness scenes, where the talking heads against the black backgrounds recounted their experiences with Reed and Bryant. I never appreciated the contradictions their stories presented at the time, but they shine through now, especially in the case of Bryant who remains a bit of an enigma.
Keaton hardly is the only actor who comes off even better than I remember from my first viewing. While Oscar winner Maureen Stapleton was my favorite part of the movie at the time, her great work as Emma Goldman actually is a much smaller role than I recalled. The other performance that plays even better now than it did
then is Jack Nicholson's work as Louise's sometime lover, playwright Eugene O'Neill. It may well be Nicholson's most quiet and reserved work on film ever. I love Jack — and I love when he goes over the top, but there isn't any sign of that Nicholson here. Nicholson's O'Neill is smart, quiet and bitter over his treatment by Louise though still willing to help her in a pinch when she needs it. In the featurettes included on the 25th anniversary DVD, Nicholson recalls asking Beatty why he wanted him for this part and Beatty replied that he wanted someone who could conceivably steal Louise from Jack Reed and Nicholson certainly fills that bill. As for Beatty's work, you almost have to divide it into the four roles he served on the film. As producer, getting Reds made truly seems an impressive accomplishment in hindsight. As co-writer with Trevor Griffiths, his script plays much better than it did for the 12-year-old Edward Copeland. As director, his Oscar win seems deserved to me now, though I might still opt for Spielberg's work on Raiders in a pinch.
Then there is Beatty the actor. Beatty is never bad, but when you really get down to it, most of his performances come off sounding like the same person. The exceptions would be his earlier work as Clyde Barrow for Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde and especially as John McCabe for Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Close your eyes and listen to Heaven Can Wait's Joe Pendleton, Reds' Jack Reed or Bugsy's Bugsy Siegel, and aside from subject matter, they all sound the same. Even Bulworth to some extent falls prey to this. Perhaps it has something to do with when Beatty directs himself, even though Buck Henry co-directed him in Heaven Can Wait and Barry Levinson helmed Bugsy. Beatty reminds me much of Robert Redford — more star than actor. His range is limited and his directing output has been so scarce, I can't help but wonder if he'd moved more toward Clint Eastwood's later career and did less work in front of the camera and more behind, his film reputation might be held in higher esteem.
Reds as a whole plays as such a great movie to me now (even at 12, I recognized how great Oscar-winning Vittorio Storaro's cinematography was, though it's embarrassing to admit that I wasn't familiar with the movie's composer, a man named Sondheim), and Beatty's role in its success is so essential, that I won't begrudge him scoring high in only three of his four jobs on the film. Critics don't like to admit they were wrong — but I was, but at least I can blame it on my young age at the time. In one of the anecdotes on the great featurettes on the DVD, Beatty admits that when he offered to show Reds to his 13-year-old daughter she seemed completely disinterested, though he claims she saw it and liked it anyway, but would a young teen really want to tell her famous father what she really thought? Besides, even if she were lying, she likely will grow to admire it as she ages.
Tweet
Labels: 80s, Altman, Arthur Penn, B. Levinson, Buck Henry, Diane Keaton, Eastwood, Nicholson, O'Neill, Oscars, Redford, Sondheim, Spielberg, W. Beatty
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Sunday, August 07, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Nicholas Ray, Part 1
"My heroes are no more neurotic than the audience. Unless you can feel that a hero is just as fucked up as you are, that you would make the same mistakes that he would make, you can have no satisfaction when he does commit a heroic act. Because then you can say, ‘Hell, I could have done that too.’ And that’s the obligation of the filmmaker — of the theater-worker — to give a heightened sense of experience to the people who pay to come see his work."
By Kevin J. Olson
When I think of consistency in the cinema, Nicholas Ray is a name that always comes to mind. In fact, I struggle greatly finding a film of his that I really, truly dislike. Some of his later films were flawed, sure, but I've never had an unpleasant experience watching one of his movies. What I think of more than the man’s consistency, is how Ray always was a director ahead of his time creating the type of characters described in the quote above — characters that were flawed, misunderstood outcasts. It’s because of this that I’ve always been drawn to Ray’s films and continue to revisit them.
What I remember most from his films was his propensity for making films about solitary social misfits. Whether it was Joan Crawford’s saloon owner in the brilliant Johnny Guitar (the film that acted as the catalyst for Godard’s remark that, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.”), James Dean’s angsty teenage outsider in Rebel Without a Cause, or Bogey’s screenwriter from In a Lonely Place, Ray loved the theme of solitude and was better at it than perhaps any of his contemporaries. Like the quote above, Ray wasn’t interested in the status quo; he was a filmmaker who enjoyed existing in the margins, who wanted to push the viewer out of their comfort zone as it pertained to how they understood the role of the hero in film. He did the same for the actors with whom he worked. In almost all of his masterpieces (which pretty much encapsulates every film he made between 1949– 1958), Ray was able to exorcise whatever bad habits hammy actors had a tendency for in that era (just look at the differences between Dean’s performance in East of Eden versus Rebel) and elicited genuinely strong and poignant performances out of the most unlikely of actors; he definitely pulled what are arguably the best performances out of such screen icons as Humphrey Bogart (In a Lonely Place) and Robert Mitchum (The Lusty Men). It’s not just his themes or the fact that he could get a great performance from unexpected sources, but it was in the way that from that golden age of his career, he so rarely erred.
An antagonist by nature, I can’t think of another filmmaker who has had that kind of run in Hollywood while simultaneously feeling so un-Hollywood; Ray was an iconoclast. He often used his films to explicate the kind of themes that not only interested him but were the kind of themes that allowed him to try and make sense of the chaos and isolation he felt in his own life as he often made films filled with themes and motifs that mirrored his bisexuality, marginalization, and increasing impatience from Hollywood producers. It is why, I think, he was able to elicit such great performances from his young actors — he connected with them. But Ray’s legacy rises above all of that to leave a lasting mark on cinema. I can think of only a handful of directors (Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder to name a few) that, for me, define the 1950s American cinema more than Nicholas Ray.
John Houseman financed Ray’s first picture (after giving Ray a copy of the source material to read; the two fell in love with it) for RKO in 1947, They Live by Night, which wouldn’t be released until 1949. The story is as simple and cut-and-dried as a noir can be, and I mean that as a compliment. Ray, for a first time filmmaker, has incredible control of the film from beginning to end (he had complete creative control of the film). They Live by Night is an excellent precursor to Bonnie and Clyde — the kind of doomed-love-affair/bank heist picture that Arthur Penn popularized. From the opening tracking shot (shot from a helicopter) to the immediacy of a POV from inside a getaway car, Ray’s aesthetic for his debut film fits the noir genre perfectly. However, as is the case with most of Ray’s films, They Live by Night is not your usual noir crime story.
At its heart is a story we would see fleshed out with Ray’s subsequent projects. The mismatched, doomed lovers who just don’t seem to fit in a way that society says two people in love should fit is nothing new to the genre; however, the film is filled with great, quiet moments (music and sound are used brilliantly throughout)
between its two leads Farley Granger (Bowie, a bank robber who has just escaped from prison) and Catherine O’Donnell (Keechie, a gas station owner’s daughter) who give the film’s central (doomed) love story an added weight that a lot of noirs don’t slow down for. There’s a beautiful moment on their honeymoon (look and admire the way Ray lights the scene, incredible for a first time filmmaker) that showcases the deftness in which Ray handles young, idealized (and, again, doomed) love. The scene is when Keechie and Bowie are in a cabin talking about what they want to do in the future; it has a nice tinge of tragic irony as they try to fashion out a little domestic life for themselves on the run (they even go and get married on the cheap at a small chapel). Bowie has yet to see how the real world works as he’s still convinced that he and Keechie can escape and live happily ever after just as long as he can get enough money to get a lawyer to get him off the hook for a murder. What makes the scene so great is that it isn’t just the big dreams (Bowie wanting to escape the life to have a legitimate marriage) that they have or the brooding nature of the romance (before it became cliché, mind you, as Ray had a great sense of what makes brooding young people tick), it’s in the small, little things, like going to a movie and holding hands in the theater, they know they can’t do because he’s being pursued by the law. It’s in moments like this that make They Live by Night one of my favorite of Ray's early films; he would only expand on these themes in subsequent films, making them more tragic.
After seeing and being impressed with They Live by Night, Humphrey Bogart called up Ray to see if he wanted to direct him in his next project (and first for the actor’s Santana production company), the 1949 courtroom noir, Knock on Any Door. The film would be remembered as yet another example of Ray tapping into the disenfranchised youth with lines such as, “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” which, of course, would be a similar credo for a generation that identified with his most popular “teenage outsider” film, Rebel Without a Cause. This isn’t one of Ray’s best efforts (it’s too heavy-handed), but it’s an interesting addition and memorable because of how it acts as a sort of precursor to Rebel as well as further establishing the themes and character types that drew Ray's empathy.
After a so-so noir starring Maureen O’Hara (A Woman’s Secret) and a failed attempt to save a sinking-ship of a film (Roseanna McCoy), Ray returned with what is arguably his best film (it’s at least an easy candidate for top three). In a Lonely Place is the story of out-of-control, cynical screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart, who draws from his own feelings of loneliness to create his greatest performance) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame, Ray’s ex-wife, although people on the set were unaware of their separation) and their doomed love affair that exists in the cruel world of showbiz that would be more popularized in two films released the same year, Sunset Blvd. and All About Eve. Even though those other two films are rightfully hailed and firmly entrenched as two of the best films ever about the entertainment industry, In a Lonely Place more than holds its own.
The film has all the trappings of noir, but like They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place is more interested in the love story which is deeply existential. Once again, the audience gets to see one of Ray’s favorite themes
at play: Dixon is the troubled soul who often retreats to its dark corners, and Laurel is the woman who thinks she can save him. It won’t be the last time that we see Ray use mismatched characters to showcase doomed love. It borders on cliché — the cynical, down-on-his-luck misfit and the good-hearted woman who thinks she can change him — but Bogart’s performance (drawing from his personal life) and Ray’s direction (not to mention the great cinematography from Burnett Guffey who uses the film’s apartment complex location wonderfully to show the isolation and fragmentation of the characters) keeps it from becoming that. The film’s title more than suggests the existential themes Ray loves to explicate in his films, but it also suggests that even the sexiest of places — 1950s Hollywood — can be a lonely place. The film is an interesting precursor to some of the elements Curtis Hanson would eventually use 40-some years later in his masterpiece L.A. Confidential (Hanson had his actors watch this film to prepare for their roles).In a Lonely Place is filled with beautiful images (I love that moment on the beach between Dixon and Laurel, or the scene where Dixon is describing the murder from his script to his two leads…and the way Bogart is lit as
he goes to that dark place) and some of the trademark moments of isolation that we associate with Ray. Even more interesting is how Ray stayed true to his title of iconoclast by switching the ending at the last second. Displeased with how “neatly” they had wrapped up the story, Ray kicked everyone off set with exception of his two leads and Art Smith. With his urging, he and the actors improvised the ending of the film so that it felt more organic — real to life — which is an attribute of Ray’s films where it is apparent he tried really damn hard to get his vision on the screen. Life, and love, is a damn messy thing for Ray, and he respected the audience enough to show them protagonists who weren’t squeaky clean idealists; rather, they felt like real people doing real things with which the audience could identify. It’s why I lead this piece with that quote; it perfectly describes what it is he’s going for with his films, and I’m not sure he did it any better than In a Lonely Place. After making a successful war picture (The Flying Leathernecks); a so-so melodrama starring Joan Fontaine (Born to be Bad); and attempting to save the botched-adventure film Macao, originally helmed by Josef von Sternberg (Howard Hughes fired von Sternberg and hired Ray to finish the movie), Ray went back to his roots with one of my favorite film noirs, On Dangerous Ground. One of Ray’s final films for RKO, this is a great cop flick that shows the energy Ray instilled in his films. David Denby, in his retrospective piece for The New Yorker, offers up a great quote from Jacques Rivette (Ray was a favorite of the New-Wavers) on Ray’s style, and then goes on to say this about Ray’s aesthetic and this film:
As early as 1953, Jacques Rivette identified in Ray a “taste for paroxysm, which imparts something of the feverish and impermanent to the most tranquil of moments.” On Dangerous Ground (1951), a high point of neurosis in film noir, stars Robert Ryan as a cop so tautened by his calling that the simplest act turns savage; in his apartment, he washes and dries his hands as if wringing the neck of an invisible suspect.
That is a great quote from Rivette and a great moment described by Denby, and it’s probably the one I would select as my favorite of the film. I think Rivette’s quote works best for Ray’s later films (specifically Johnny Guitar), but it works, too, on this great little noir, especially in the way Ray innovatively used hand-held camera to capture the immediacy of being a cop (he would again use hand-held in The Lusty Men), specifically in the way he films yet another violent protagonist. I can see why Ray had such an influence on Scorsese. Film noir was always an arena for filmmakers to be more experimental — it’s what made the genre so great — and Ray uses some great expressionistic camera movements in the film as well having his characters go to literal dark places rather than existential ones.
If Curtis Hanson used In a Lonely Place to educate his actors on the correct tone for when they filmed L.A. Confidential, then On Dangerous Ground is definitely the film he showed Russell Crowe for him to get into his character, Bud, for that film. Robert Ryan’s portrayal of Jim Wilson is scary in how quickly he can become unhinged; he has no problems roughing people up in order to get what he wants; however, there’s also
something else lurking beneath the rough exterior (as is the case with most Ray protagonists), and in one scene (a really well done, hand-held chase in an alley) Wilson is accosted by his partner for, again, roughing up a suspect. His reply to his partner’s cries for some decorum is simply, “OK, so I get kicked off the force…what kind of a job is this anyway? Garbage, that’s all we handle, garbage!” It’s this mix of unpredictability and surprising introspection from his misunderstood, violent-tempered protagonist that Ray loved to invert about half-way through his films by introducing a love interest. As has been stated already, most of these romances are doomed from the start, but there’s always a speck of idealized romance that exists in these characters (again, you see this influence in L.A. Confidential where Bud is seemingly one-dimensional, but is looking for something beyond his profession, which he's become disillusioned with despite doing it well). Ray gives Wilson a happy ending at the end of On Dangerous Ground as Wilson has his thoughts played out in voice over acting as the catalyst for taking him back to the cabin where Ida Lupino lives. They embrace and kiss, and it actually feels kind of weird for Ray to give his character such an optimistic ending (he would give a similarly toned happy ending to his similarly dark Bigger Than Life).The immediacy and the down-and-dirty tone of On Dangerous Ground is definitely less subtle than In a Lonely Place, but that’s part of its charms; it’s a great noir film and a natural fit for Ray, who again furthers the themes he was drawn to by making a film where his misfit characters (violent and disturbed and outcasts) seem right at home in the world of film noir. It’s one of my favorites.
I’ve heard (I can’t remember where, but I’m definitely not taking credit for this) somewhere that Nicholas Ray may have been the first existential action filmmaker. I’m assuming wherever I read and whoever said it was referring to The Lusty Men. A Western/rodeo picture on its exterior, it’s in the quiet, contemplative moments where the film has a headlong energy that we just know — knowing what we know about Ray’s tragic heroes — is going to end tragically. That much talked about, great opening shot of Mitchum’s bull-rider solitarily limping out of the emptied rodeo arena is the quintessential Ray shot: encapsulating in one, brief moment everything that characterizes Ray’s heroes and everything that represents the characters found in The Lusty Men who exist in a fast-paced world that chews them up and spits them out (I love the final shot: despite a man’s death, the show must go on) with little regard for their well-being.
Anyone who has seen Ray’s films knows him as the iconoclast that he is; however, when one thinks of such a term to ascribe the auteur, I’m sure their mind does not go towards this small western. Ray, though, loved this film and it shows. It’s one of his most keenly observant psychological profiles, and despite the film’s horrendous title, it’s one of those movies that sneaks up on you with its power.
Like most of Ray’s films, The Lusty Men is a narrative with multiple layers. On the surface, the film looks like a movie about the rodeo, when, in reality, The Lusty Men is a film about what it means to go home — both professionally and personally — and make a home, and the complexities that surround such a journey. Ray loved the idea of love triangles, and the pursuit of happiness despite the situations his characters find themselves in — situations that seem to offer no such reprieve from their depressed and banal reality. This motif would pop up again, most famously, in Rebel Without a Cause with the great scene where the trio of characters from that film obtains a glimmer of happiness while playing “house” in an abandon mansion.
The film contains the typical Ray love triangle, but it’s also typical of the way Ray infused real life problems into melodrama (much like another of my favorites from the ‘50s — and this would be even more apparent in Bigger Than Life — Douglas Sirk), and he has his characters act as unpredictably and honestly as they would in
real life. There’s a great scene where Susan Hayward just has an outstanding moment of acting. It’s toward the end when her husband Wes is fully entrenched in the rodeo circuit. She blames herself for their failing marriage and how she’s no fun anymore (“not like the blonde with the skirt down to her knees” is a line that made me chuckle), but she also is fed up with the role of woman when it’s just the man that gets to do what he wants. Her line, “I’m supposed to sit here waiting for him to come staggering through that door, and then I’m supposed to put my arms around him and make him some black coffee and stick an ice bag on his head and take off his boots and wrap him up warm and put him to bed” is a powerful monologue and a perfect example of how Ray was always looking to throw the customs of the time under a critical microscope. It’s an interesting scene in what is maybe one of Ray’s sneakier message pictures. Obviously there’s dual taming going on here — horses and men — but Ray, ever the one to challenge society's mores, is doing something radical for a film that, on its surface, seems like nothing more than an early ‘50s Western: he’s openly talking about the banality of domesticated life, but he’s speaking from the female perspective.Ray would follow The Lusty Men with the three films that cinephiles everywhere point to as the defining run of his career; three films that would cement Ray's legacy as one of the great auteurs of American cinema.
Tweet
Labels: Arthur Penn, Bogart, Crawford, Godard, Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, James Dean, Lupino, Mitchum, N. Ray, Robert Ryan, Russell Crowe, Scorsese, von Sternberg, Wilder
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Friday, June 24, 2011
He was just some Joseph lookin' for a manger
By Edward Copeland
When Robert Altman made a Western, you could be certain it wouldn't be a conventional one. At the same time, when McCabe & Mrs. Miller opened 40 years ago today, it did use genre basics to launch its tale before it ventured on its own idiosyncratic path. The camera opens on the vivid yellow, green and brown foliage that covers the mountains — the lush vision shown in the wide Panavision ratio of 2:35:1 without which you shouldn't see this film — then it pans right as the trees begin to vanish and we see the stranger on horseback appear on the dirt path, pulling another horse behind him. As the camera continues to chart the progress of the man wrapped in a fur coat, yellow credits begin to scroll on screen from right to left in direct opposition to the movement of the man and the camera. Accompanying both on the soundtrack is Leonard Cohen singing "The Stranger Song." The lyrics seem haunting and wholly appropriate, even though they weren't written specifically for this film. "Like he was giving up the holy game of poker." As the stranger finally gets closer to the Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, he loses his coat for his standard black suit and places his black bowler atop his head. We see that it's our film's star, Warren Beatty.
The minute the man stores his horses and steps into Sheehan's Saloon and Tavern, run by Patrick Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois, one of many members of Altman's already growing repertory company present in the film), the film's magnificent interior look, engineered by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, entrances you. The sharp-dressed stranger attracts the attention of everyone present — Sheehan even offers him a bottle of liquor on the house. He hasn't been there too long when he asks if there's a back door and exits through it, puzzling Sheehan and the rest who think he's gone already. However, he's just fetched a blanket from the pack on his horse and returns, clearing off a table and carefully placing the covering over it like a tablecloth so he can engage the locals in a game of cards. He reminds Sheehan of his offer, but Sheehan worries that he's not going to make up for it. "How about we go fifty-fifty then?" the stranger suggests. Sheehan asks if he means he'd share his profits. "You want to share the losses?"
Sheehan points out that he is the one supplying the place for the game. "Yeah, but I think I supply the customers," the new arrival says. "Nobody's bought nothing yet," Sheehan complains. The stranger tells him he'll buy a $2 bottle for the rest of the table, stand on his own profits and Sheehan can make a profit off the whiskey. Sheehan agrees. He proposes five-card stud and since he doesn't know any of them and they don't know him, puts the price at a nickel a game. As Sheehan prepares the drinks at the bar, another patron asks if he realizes who the stranger is. Sheehan does not. The patron says that it's the gunfighter John McCabe who killed Bill Roundtree. When Sheehan returns to the table, he pours him a drink and says, "It's on the house, Mr. McCabe." He thanks him. "You didn't say your name was McCabe when you came in," Sheehan says. "I didn't say it now either. You did," McCabe replies. Sheehan asks if he's a gunfighter. With cigar in his mouth, McCabe answers, "Businessman." As the film will develop, we'll learn that John McCabe isn't much of either, but he isn't one who's about to let a good legend go to waste if it serves his purpose in the short run, even if it will cost him in the end. Most of the time, I've always found Beatty to be a very limited actor — more star than actor. However, revisiting McCabe for the first time in a long time, this may well be the best performance he's ever given. Now, Altman never worshipped at the altar of plot, even when his name appeared as co-writer on a screenplay as it did here. He spoke at length on the subject in the DVD commentary which I wrote about yesterday if you didn't read it. Altman's credited co-writer on the screenplay is Brian McKay, a writer for whom McCabe & Mrs. Miller appears as his sole feature film credit on IMDb and no television writing credits appear after a 1982 episode of Cagney & Lacey. The movie was based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. However, these facts are merely incidental — just as McCabe & Mrs. Miller isn't exactly a Western as most have come to know the term, it's not strictly a character study either. First and foremost, it's a Robert Altman film, one of those times when the late director got a hold of financing, cameras, actors, a crew and the things he needed for what intrigued him at that moment and did his cinematic dance, part strictly thought out, much improvised and lots that came about by happy accident. That style didn't always work throughout his long career that still ended too soon, but when it did, as in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, movie magic resulted. As Pauline Kael wrote in her July 3, 1971, review of the film in The New Yorker, "Though Altman's method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom — as if he simply didn't want to be straightforward about his storytelling.…He can't be straightforward in the old way, because he's improvising meanings and connections, trying to find his movie in the course of making it…"
Writing this 40th anniversary tribute, it isn't easy deciding where to go with it. Even the briefest plot synopsis would seem to be pointless and a disservice to Altman, yet there are bits of dialogue here and there worth repeating that need context. Heaping individual praise on the various artists involved in the work might get repetitive after awhile. I did just cite a long Kael quote, but this should be what I think not what someone else
did or does. For me, watching McCabe & Mrs. Miller again not only was it better than the last time I saw it (each viewing raises it in my estimation), but it also was the first time I watched it post-Deadwood. Back in 2006, The House Next Door, before it became part of Slant Magazine and existed as its own blog, it held a Robert Altman blog-a-thon in honor of the director finally receiving an honorary Oscar. My friend and House founder and editor emeritus Matt Zoller Seitz interviewed Deadwood creator, executive producer and head writer David Milch about the influence of McCabe & Mrs. Miller on his HBO series. I felt like an idiot at the time because the parallels were so obvious I couldn't believe I hadn't picked up on it before. Besides the obvious similarities of communities being formed around dirty little camps, where people seek escape in various vices such as gambling, prostitution, liquor or other substances to bring on highs (opium in McCabe, laudanum in Deadwood), Milch had this to say about the film's title characters and how they explain the film.by the impulse to impress Mrs. Miller, who is herself moved to sort of organize her life upon the embrace
of illusion. These characters pile one illusion upon another illusion and they end up building something bigger than themselves. 'McCabe and Mrs. Miller' presents the agreement upon illusion as the liberation of an energy that is greater than one person can generate."
That's actually as good a segue as any to start talking about Mrs. Miller as played by the incomparable Julie Christie. Beatty and Christie were a real-life couple prior to the making of the film and while Beatty's McCabe was a drunk who let others' mistaken perception of him build a small powerbase in the zinc mining town,
Christie's Constance Miller was an admitted Cockney whore with limitless ambition to succeed and an unfortunate opium habit. From the moment she arrives in Presbyterian Church, when McCabe only has three iffy prostitutes working out of tents, she hits him up with the idea of how things should be. "I'm a whore and I know about whorehouses," she tells him. "I'm talking about a proper whorehouse with class girls and clean linens and proper hygiene." McCabe isn't keen on taking on partners — he's already turned down one from Sheehan — and certainly not entering a partnership with a woman. The feisty Miller eventually walks out on him, saying that she "don't have a lot of time to spend talking to a man who don't see a good proposition when it's put to him." In a typical film, there would eventually be a romance between these two and while they do unite in business and in bed, the carnal coupling comes when she's high and he's paid. When she isn't stoned though, Mrs. Miller
displays far more savvy when it comes to business and other matters than McCabe does. When her whores arrive, in a memorably muddy, rain-drenched sequence, the quality — and the prices go up considerably from the trio of "Bearpaw whores" McCabe had been using out of tents, who then got transferred to other jobs such as cooks and laundresses. Mrs. Miller knows what she's doing, even though McCabe complains about his cost outlays for a bathhouse, transportation, towels, linens, enema bags. "I've paid for things those chippies of yours don't even know how to use," he says to her, to Mrs. Miller's frustration. "You think small because you are afraid to think big," she tells McCabe. She also takes care of the new widow Ida (Shelley Duvall), who arrived as a mail-order bride for miner Bart Coyle (Bert Remsen) who dies in a fight when a man mistakes Ida as one of the whores. With Bart dead, Ida is forced to work for Mrs. Miller. Ida explains that when she had sex with Bart, it was out of duty and she doesn't know if she can do perform as a prostitute. Mrs. Miller spells it out for Ida. "It wasn't your duty. You did it for your room and board. Now, you'll do it for your room and board and get to keep some for yourself after."The other similarity between McCabe and Deadwood really follows more along the lines with the main storyline of Milch's third season, when rich business tycoon George Hearst invades the town and starts pushing his weight around to get a hold of the rich gold mining interests and control of the town itself. John McCabe
and the rest of the inhabitants don't own the zinc mines where most of Presbyterian Church's citizens work, but the mines' owner, the company Harrison Shaughnessy, are anxious to control the small piece of civilization that McCabe has developed. Though when he first arrived, he called himself a businessman, he's not much of one and when two agents for the company (Michael Murphy, Anthony Holland) arrive attempting to buy his holding, the inebriated McCabe sees it as a game, refusing their offer
and giving much higher ones when he's not drunkenly sharing jokes about frogs and eagles and offering them whores on the house. He tells them he'll meet them for breakfast in the morning and talk some more. The younger of the agent, Sears (Murphy) thinks he's just negotiating and is more than willing to stay and talk but the older agent Hollander (Holland) doesn't have his patience, telling Sears that after 17 years doing this, he's too old to be hunting snipe and he's leaving and Sears agrees and exits with him. That night when McCabe tells Mrs. Miller who was there and that he turned them down, but he'll see them in the morning, she's horrified. She warns McCabe that Harrison Shaughnessy would just as soon put a bullet in his back. He laughs her off then, but when he comes down the next morning and realizes they left, he understands that he might have made a fatal error. McCabe visits a lawyer (William Devane) in a nearby town who promises him that they can stop them in court and he'll work in free. They are there to protect the small businessman, the lawyer says, even floating the idea of an eventual dinner with William Jennings Bryan.Mrs. Miller is right and the lawyer won't have any time to get McCabe to court because the company sends three bounty hunters to take care of him: a short-tempered kid (Manfred Schulz), a half-breed (Jace Vander Veen) and their leader Butler (Hugh Millais), who arrives in town wearing a large goat-fur coat, shotgun astride him that makes him slightly resemble the look that Marlon Brando's bounty hunter would have in Arthur
Penn's The Missouri Breaks five years later. Prior to their appearance, McCabe's paranoia makes him suspicious of everyone and everything, such as when a young cowboy (Keith Carradine) rides into town, but he's just looking to get laid. "I heard you had the tastiest whorehouse in these parts. It's been so long since I had a piece of ass," he tells McCabe who gladly shows him to Mrs. Miller's place. Once the cowboy has finished days later having his way with most of the girls, he ends up in one of the film's most memorable sequences as he's trying to cross that rope bridge while the young bounty hunter target practices with a jug on the ice. He asks him to stop so he doesn't get shot, but the kid tricks the dimwitted cowboy, who admits he's a bad shot, into showing him his gun and kills him, leaving his body to float away in the icy creek. Combined with Remsen's death earlier, it displays the idea of sudden, unjustified violence.When the very nervous McCabe first sits down to meet with Butler, he still thinks there's a chance for him to negotiate. Butler asks what his price was and McCabe tells him, but explains it was just a position and starts lowering what he'd accept down to almost what they offered. Butler notes they weren't that far apart, were they? Then he adds, "I don't make deals." McCabe explains that he was under the impression that he worked
for Harrison Shaughnessy and Butler says he has at times, but that's not why he's there. "I came to hunt bear," Butler declares, before changing the conversation around to Bill Roundtree saying that he was the best friend of a friend of his and he'd heard he killed him. McCabe stammers and denies it, saying something about being at a card game where he was killed, but that he didn't do it. Eventually, he gets out of there. Butler pulls Sheehan over and asks him where he got the idea that he killed Roundtree and Sheehan tells him that someone else told him. Butler looks toward the door that McCabe just exited through and says, "That man never killed anyone in his life." McCabe goes back to Mrs. Miller who tells him she fears that, "They'll do something awful to you." McCabe, in a rare moment of courage, tells her, "Comes a time in every man's life when he has to put his hand in the fire and see what he's made of." Indeed, McCabe will see.On the commentary, Altman talks about how stupid it would be for people to in the Old West to face off in the middle of the street in gunfights and that's certainly not how the climax happens in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Instead, we get a hunt in the form of a chase — and not a high speed chase — a slow chase that takes up the last 20 minutes of the film and, eventually, gets counterbalanced by the coming together of the rest of
the community — all races: the majority white Europeans, the black barber, the Chinese — to work together to save the burning church which gave the town its name. Also, this isn't the barren, sunny setting of most Western climaxes: It's the height of winter, with deep banks of snow and more of the white stuff falling from the sky. The blaze starts because of the pursuit of McCabe, who first thinks to climb up to the church's steeple to try to spot the killers' location. Unfortunately, he leaves his shotgun at the foot of the ladder so when he climbs back down, he finds that it has been taken by the wreck of a church's reverend (Corey Fischer) who holds the weapon on him and berates him for bringing it into a house of the lord. McCabe tries to explain that men out there plan to kill him and he needs the gun, but the minister won't give it up so McCabe makes a hasty exit. However, Butler must have seen him enter the church but not exit it. He arrives at the front door, kicks it open and fires, blasting the reverend and knocking over a lantern he'd lit, igniting the fire while McCabe, hiding in back of the building makes haste to another building to find another weapon. He literally crawls his way into McCabe's House of Fortune, because remember he has three men in pursuit of him, not just Butler.
The closing act of the movie, while it is a kill-or-be-killed sequence should be something that you'd describe as suspenseful, but McCabe & Mrs. Miller is nothing if not about mood. Certainly, we have developed a certain affection for John McCabe, but Altman doesn't direct it as your usual edge-of-your-seat action climax — it's just another form of the daily fight for survival in the frequently harsh conditions where they live. As I mentioned in my piece yesterday, Altman said that he thinks it's always better when you see a movie a second time and can relax and stop worrying about what happens, which really defeats any fear about spoiling twists or endings. As clumsily as it happens and unlikely as it would seem, McCabe fares fairly well against his would-be assassins — managing to dispatch both the kid and the half-breed with relative ease and some smart planning as he moves in his circuitous route through practically every building in the town, most of which he built. This life-and-death struggle goes on while almost the entire town stays oblivious, banding together to save the church, though it no longer has a minister and from the brief look we had at its innards, no one had been using it anyway.
Now, McCabe starts making his way through the deep snowbanks, hoping to flee through the woods. It's not exactly the fastest way to run, but he figures it's as good as way to escape as any. However, Butler wasn't exactly lying about hunting bear, because he's still tracking McCabe. When he spots his man taking a break behind some wooden obstacle, Butler aims his rifle and fires and McCabe collapses in the snow. As Butler goes in closer to inspect his kill though, he learns that drunken gamblers can play possum too and just at the right moment, McCabe raises his gun and puts one in Butler's forehead.
The man living off a fake legend has managed to beat the men out to kill him, but he didn't make it out unscathed, he's got a bad belly wound. McCabe still tries to make it back to the town he built up and now calls home. He makes it to the outside of one of his buildings, but he finally collapses in a snow drift and as the white stuff keeps falling from the sky, McCabe gets practically buried. The community is too busy celebrating their victory over the fire to notice McCabe, so he dies there alone. Altman depicts McCabe's frozen death in a slow series of ever closer shots on his snow-covered head.
One citizen of Presbyterian Church wasn't helping with the fire. Constance Miller, out of her own supply and worried about McCabe's fate, and taken her own refuge in the Chinese opium den. Similarly, Altman focuses on her in a series of closer and closer shots as she gazes at the bowl of the opium pipe until it seems to merge with her eyeball and become the universe itself.
While McCabe & Mrs. Miller may take place in 1901 in a Pacific Northwest zinc mining town, there is something universal about it as there is the greatest Altman works, whether they are set in Nashville, the Korean War, Los Angeles or even Hollywood.
Tweet
Labels: 70s, Altman, Arthur Penn, Brando, Deadwood, HBO, Julie Christie, K. Carradine, Kael, Milch, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Television, W. Beatty
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
