Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Fighting aliens in Old West, Bond brings out best in Indiana Jones
By J.D.
Jon Favreau has certainly come a long way since his independent film roots with Swingers (1996), the film he wrote and starred in. Over the years, he’s increasingly spent more time behind the camera than in front of it, directing Made (2001). The modest success of that film transitioned him to studio films with larger budgets such as Elf (2003) and Zathura (2005). Then came Iron Man (2008), his most ambitious effort to that point, and he rolled the dice on casting Robert Downey Jr. as his leading man. The gamble paid off and the film was a massive success, paving the way for the inevitable sequel. Rushed into production, the end result was a commercial success but a critical failure, which upped the stakes for his next film, Cowboys & Aliens (2011), an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.
The premise is an intriguing hybrid of the science fiction and Western genres with an alien invasion set in 1873 New Mexico. To hedge his bets, Favreau corralled Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford to headline his film, which caused epic seismic ripples through the fanboy community at the prospects of seeing the actors who played James Bond and Indiana Jones in the same film together. As a result, expectations were understandably high. Could Favreau and company deliver the goods or would this be another Wild Wild West (1999)?
A man wakes up in the middle of nowhere wounded and with a strange futuristic device strapped to his wrist. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. Three men on horseback show up assuming he’s an escape convict and try to take him in. He quickly and brutally dispatches them, taking their gear and heading towards the nearest town — the former mining colony of Absolution. He eventually learns that his name is Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), a notorious outlaw wanted by the law for a variety of offences. One of which was robbing local cattle baron Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) of his gold. When he learns that Lonergan is in Absolution, Dolarhyde and him men intend to lynch the outlaw in retribution.
However, a strange light appears in the sky just as Dolarhyde arrives into town. The device on Lonergan’s wrist activates and the light turns out to be several alien spacecraft that proceed to blast the town to smithereens and kidnap several of its townsfolk. Lonergan discovers that his wrist device is a weapon, which he uses to take down one of the alien craft. The film sets up Dolarhyde as a mean son of a bitch while Lonergan is a no-nonsense criminal. They represent two unstoppable forces of nature and one of the pleasures of this film is when they have to put aside their differences, repel the alien invaders and rescue the kidnapped townsfolk.
For years, Harrison Ford has made bad choices in the films he’s decided to be in and phoned in one-note performances, playing the same gruff character, but with Cowboys & Aliens acting against someone like Daniel Craig has inspired him to bring his A-game. Ford actually looks interested and engaged in the material and the role. It’s great to see him go up against Craig and their scenes together crackle with intensity and tension. Best of all, Ford has two scenes that expose his character’s gruff exterior and reveal a more vulnerable side. They are poignant and heartfelt because we’ve become invested in these characters by this point. This is the best Ford has been in years and reminds one when he used to play characters we cared about.
Craig adds another impressive man of action to his roster. He excels at playing edgy tough guys and is well cast as the enigmatic outlaw. Favreau does a good job of surrounding Craig and Ford with a solid ensemble cast of character actors. You’ve got Clancy Brown as the upstanding town preacher Meachum, Sam Rockwell as Doc, the mild-mannered saloon owner, Keith Carradine as Sheriff John Taggart, the always watchable Adam Beach as Nat Colorado, Dolarhyde’s right-hand man, and Olivia Wilde as a mysterious woman named Ella whose exotic beauty gives her an almost otherworldly aura. Hell, Favreau even throws Walt Goggins in for good measure as a member of Lonergan’s gang.
Favreau has all the traditional Western iconography down cold and the fun of Cowboys & Aliens is seeing these motifs clash with the science fiction elements. So, we see cowboys on horseback being chased by fast-moving alien spacecraft. This film doesn’t stray from the conventions of either genre or try to reinvent them but instead merges and fulfills them in a crowd-pleasing way. Cowboys & Aliens has impressive special effects, nasty-looking aliens, several exciting action sequences, and two cool heroes to root for. This may not be the classic that people were hoping for but it is a very entertaining film in its own right and sometimes that’s enough.
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Labels: 10s, Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, K. Carradine, Robert Downey Jr., Sam Rockwell
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Monday, July 18, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Hume Cronyn Part II
Hume Cronyn
By Edward Copeland
We continue our tribute to Hume Cronyn as the decade turns to the 1950s. If you started here by mistake and missed Part I, click here. Cronyn continued to appear steadily on the various live theatrical programs on TV but only two feature films the entire decade. He definitely turned his focus to the stage, especially behind-the-scenes work. In March 1950, he directed his first Broadway play, the original comedy Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep whose cast included Fredric March. In November, he and his wife did their first New York stage collaboration when he directed her as the title character in the original drama Hilda Crane. In April 1951, he helped produce The Little Blue Light which reunited him with Burgess Meredith and had Melvyn Douglas in the cast. In August, his sole feature film of the year was released: the underrated Joseph L. Mankiewicz gem People Will Talk starring Cary Grant. Grant and Cronyn play professors at a medical school with diametrically opposed views on just about everything and Cronyn's character leads a crusade to get Grant removed from the faculty because of his unorthodox views.
Beginning Oct. 24, 1951, Cronyn and Tandy appeared on Broadway together for the first time in a play that became such a hit, that it managed to be spun off into radio, TV and movie versions with Cronyn and Tandy starring in all but the movie version because they were still enjoying the successful Broadway run at the time. The original comedy The Fourposter by Jan De Hartog is a two-character play where spouses Michael and Agnes re-enact their marriage around their four-poster bed and took place between 1890 and 1925. José
Ferrer directed the production and both he and De Hartog won Tonys (meaning it won best play). Since Cronyn and Tandy stayed with the play until May 1953, their roles in the 1952 film version directed by Irving Reis went to Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer. Its only Oscar nomination was for black-and-white cinematography. When Cronyn and Tandy finished their run in the play, Cronyn produced an NBC radio sitcom version of the play, changing the title to The Marriage, the characters' names to Ben and Liz and losing the period element. While they worked on this during the play's run, the radio show didn't begin airing until October 1953. A total of 26 episodes aired and then The Marriage made history, albeit short-lived. It moved to NBC TV where it became the first sitcom broadcast in color, though it only lasted eight episodes when, tragically, Tandy suffered a miscarriage and live broadcasts ceased never to start again. The Fourposter would come back throughout Cronyn and Tandy's careers though in the form of revivals and tours (including a 15-performance Broadway revival in 1955). In fact, in the summer of 1955, Cronyn and Tandy performed The Fourposter on an episode of Producers' Showcase and Tandy received her first Emmy nomination for actress in a single performance.Throughout the 1950s, movies didn't see much of Cronyn as he kept busy with productions on TV and the stage. Other than People Will Talk, the only other feature film IMDb lists for that decade is something called Crowded Paradise in 1956 of which IMDb contains the bare minimum of information. Part of the reason for this may have been that Hume Cronyn may have been one of the few people in this country's sordid history of the blacklist to keep himself busy so constantly that he didn't know he'd been blacklisted. Another reason was that it seemed inconceivable to him since he was never very active politically, never called before HUAC or ever attended any "suspect" meetings. It turned out eventually that his particularly puzzling blacklisting was because he had hired people who were blacklisted, not that he knew or even if he did he would have cared. Cronyn didn't suffer too much because by the time he became aware of his status, others had started breaking the blacklist anyway by doing what got him on the list in the first place.
In December 1953, he and Norman Lloyd inaugurated The Phoenix Theatre by co-directing and co-starring in Madam, Will You Walk? which also featured Tandy. Interestingly, the play with the same opening and closing dates is listed in both the Internet Broadway Database and the Internet Off-Broadway Database and I can find nothing in a quick look to settle where it belongs — not even number of seats or an address. Cronyn didn't spend all his stage time in New York though, he started doing a lot of tours, including a series of concert readings with Tandy in 1954 called Face to Face which were later turned into a recording. In 1955, Cronyn hit The Great White Way with Tandy twice: the aforementioned short revival of The Fourposter and an original farce by Roald Dahl called The Honeys. Sometime that year he had time to act in A Day By The Sea at the American National Theatre and Academy Theatre — and that's not counting 13 TV acting jobs between 1953 and 1955.
The remainder of the decade was even more dominated by work on television, to the exclusion of actual stage work in 1956 though he did make the first of two appearances (the second coming in 1958) on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He returned to Broadway in 1957 to direct longtime friend Karl Malden in The Egghead. Cronyn and Tandy also toured several cities across the U.S. in 1957 with the new comedy The Man in the Dog Suit ahead of its Broadway premiere in 1958. Cronyn followed the same pattern in 1958, touring with Tandy and other actors in a production he both starred in and directed called Triple Play that consisted of three one-act plays and a monologue, which was considered an original one act play when it opened on Broadway in 1959, though it was written by the long dead Anton Chekhov. The one acts were Tennessee Williams' Portrait of a Madonna, two by Sean O'Casey: A Pound on Demand and Bedtime Story, and the Chekhov monologue which Cronyn performed Some Comments on the Harmful Effects of Tobacco. Cronyn and Tandy closed out the 1950s with a television movie adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence with a cast led by Laurence Olivier and featuring Judith Anderson, Denholm Elliott, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Jean Marsh. IMDb actually had a link to the original Time magazine review of it.
As the 1960s began, movies began to enter Cronyn's life again and television receded a bit, mainly because the popularity of programs that televised plays were on the wane. Theater maintained its prominence in his life, and he started to see some award recognition for it. In the fall of 1960, he played Louis Howe to Ralph Bellamy's FDR and Greer Garson's Eleanor when Sunrise at Campobello was released. In early 1961, Cronyn opened on Broadway as Jimmie Luton, the main character of the new farce Big Fish, Little Fish by Hugh Wheeler, his first work on Broadway though he'd go on to write the books for A Little Night Music, Candide and Sweeney Todd, winning a Tony for all three. Cronyn was directed in Big Fish, Little Fish by John Gielgud, who won the Tony for best direction in a play. Cronyn received his first Tony nomination as actor in a play and the cast included Jason Robards, George Grizzard (Tony nominee for featured actor in a play) and Martin Gabel (Tony winner for featured actor in a play). The show proved to be such a success that
the following year Cronyn made his London stage debut when he played Jimmie Luton again when Big Fish, Little Fish opened at the Duke of York's Theatre. While overseas he helped his friend Joe Mankiewicz by taking the part of Sosigenes in the out-of-control Cleopatra, which finally opened in 1963. When he was back in the U.S. in 1963, he helped inaugurate the premiere season of the Tyrone Guthrie's Minnesota Theatre Company at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis by appearing in three productions: Harpagon in Moliere's The Miser, Tchebutkin in Chekhov's The Three Sisters and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In 1964, Cronyn scored a coup — playing Polonious in a Broadway production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton and nearly stealing the show from the melancholy Dane. Directed by Gielgud as if the company were in rehearsal clothes, it also was filmed and aired on TV the same year. Cronyn's performance won him a Tony for featured actor in a play. Here is a YouTube clip of Cronyn and Burton at work.A few months after his triumph in Hamlet, Cronyn returned to the Broadway stage with Tandy in tow in The Physicists opposite Robert Shaw. Two days after that show closed, Cronyn was one of the producers of the play Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, which earned Cronyn his third Tony nomination, his first as producer of a best play nominee. In late 1966, Cronyn and Tandy created the roles of Tobias and Agnes in a bona fide classic: Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance and Cronyn received another Tony nomination as actor in a play as Tobias. In 1967, Cronyn took A Delicate Balance on tour. He stayed on the road performing in productions in L.A. and Ontario in 1968 and 1969. He squeezed out two films in 1969: Elia Kazan's adaptation of his own novel The Arrangement and Norman Jewison's comedy Gaily, Gaily starring Beau Bridges. Somehow, in this busiest of schedules, Cronyn also had to recover from a bout of cancer that cost him one of his eyes in 1969 and left him with a glass eye for the rest of his life.
Now, we do draw near the end of the theatrical careers of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, but Cronyn wraps it up very actively and the couple will follow it up with prolific television and film work. First in 1977, Cronyn co-produced with Mike Nichols the two-person play The Gin Game for he and Tandy to star in and Nichols to direct. After an initial tryout in Long Wharf, Conn., they moved to Broadway to much success, running 517 performances. Cronyn received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for both best actor and best play while Tandy won both those awards for best actress. The play's author, D.L. Coburn, won the Pulitzer. Nichols received play and directing nominations from both groups. Cronyn and Tandy then took The Gin Game on tour, not just in the United States but throughout Canada, the United
Kingdom and some cities in the Soviet Union as well through 1979. Then, they made a television version of the play that aired in a version made for Showtime in 1981. During this time period, dating back to 1977, Cronyn also was collaborating with writer Susan Cooper on what would become Cronyn and Tandy's penultimate stage project. Before they got to that, Cronyn managed to return to feature films three times and took Tandy along on two of them. They had small parts in the odd ensemble assembled for John Schlesinger's wacky satire Honky Tonk Freeway, Cronyn re-teamed alone with his Parallax View director Alan J. Pakula for an economic thriller called Rollover starring Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson and then he and Tandy had brief roles as the parents of the one-of-a-kind Jenny Fields (Glenn Close) in the movie adaptation of The World According to Garp.Susan Cooper also hailed from England, but came to the U.S. when she married an American, though the marriage didn't work out. She primarily wrote novels and children's books until she developed an interest in
playwriting and somehow began collaboration with Cronyn a long-gestating work called Foxfire about the end of an Appalachian family's way of life. It added to Cronyn's resume because not only was he co-author of the play, he, Cooper and Jonathan Holtzman wrote lyrics for songs for which Holtzman wrote the music, though it wasn't strictly a musical. After debuting first at The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario and The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, it opened on Broadway in November 1982. Playing Cronyn and Tandy's characters' son in the play was Keith Carradine. Tandy won both the Tony and the Drama Desk awards for best actress in a play. Five years later, it aired on CBS where Tandy again won outstanding actress, this time in a miniseries or special. Cronyn was nominated as outstanding actor and he and Cooper received a solo writing nomination. The movie itself was nominated as outstanding drama or comedy special and John Denver took Carradine's role. Below is a YouTube clip of the TV movie.After having seen Foxfire, Cronyn's co-star in Rollover, Jane Fonda, asked if he and Susan Cooper would adapt the novel The Dollmaker into a script for a TV movie for her. They did and received Emmy nominations for writing the 1984 telefilm and Fonda won outstanding actress in a miniseries or special for it. It was (and remains) only the second time Fonda appeared in a TV production, the previous one being when she was just starting out in 1961. Cronyn started heading back to the cinema in the 1984 thriller Impulse and Richard Pryor's surprise relative who gives him the challenge of spending $30 million in 30 days if he wants to inherit his vast fortune of $300 million in the umpteenth remake of Brewster's Millions in 1985. However, Cronyn, with Tandy beside him, had another 1985 release that really made the veteran actors stars to an entirely new generation.
Joining Cronyn and Tandy as the leads of Ron Howard's Cocoon were Wilford Brimley, Maureen Stapleton, Gwen Verdon, Jack Gilford, Herta Ware and Don Ameche, who took home an Oscar for supporting actor for
the film even though he wasn't even the best supporting actor in the film. A sci-fi comedy and meditation on aging and dying, it was made when Big Blue was a swimming pool loaded with extra-terrestrial magic making the seniors horny instead of a pill for erectile dysfunction. Cronyn and Tandy had particularly good moments as the pool awakened his character's libido and his wandering eye, reminding his wife of his younger days when he was far from faithful. Of course, they had to make an awful sequel, but to have that a big a hit with that many older actors as leads was quite something. It's not like Steve Guttenberg was the draw. The following year, 1986, Cronyn and Tandy were honored together as that year's batch of Kennedy Center honorees alongside Lucille Ball, Ray Charles, Yehudi Menuhin and Antony Tudor. Cronyn and Tandy would appear in two more feature films togethers (three counting the Cocoon sequel): 1987's *batteries not included and 1994's Camilla, Tandy's final film released after her death. Among the many televison and feature films we won't still talk about that Cronyn would go on to make the most notable were The Pelican Brief and Marvin's Room.
In 1986, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy appeared in their last Broadway show, fittingly together. The Petition was a two-person play and earned each of them Tony nominations. In 1994, they received the very first Tony Awards ever given for lifetime achievement. It was just a few months before Tandy's death. Though their stage work considerably lessened and Broadway work ceased, movie and TV worked soared. Cronyn became a regular presence at the Emmys, being nominated five times between 1990 and 1998 and winning three times. He won lead actor for HBO's Age-Old Friends, which allowed him to act opposite daughter Tandy Cronyn. He won that, his first Emmy, the same year that Tandy won the best actress Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy. During this time, the pair went on 60 Minutes and had fun putting Mike Wallace on.
Cronyn earned two 1992 Emmy nominations, one for lead actor in a miniseries or special in Christmas on Division Street and one for supporting actor in a miniseries or special for Neil Simon's Broadway Bound, which he won. His third win was bittersweet. Written by Susan Cooper, To Dance With the White Dog co-starred Tandy who also was nominated, and dealt with a widower working through the grief over the loss of his wife. The awards ceremony took place shortly after Tandy's death. Cronyn's final Emmy nomination came for supporting actor in a miniseries or special for Showtime's version of 12 Angry Men in 1998. Two years after Tandy's death, Cronyn married Susan Cooper who remained his wife until his death in 2003. The only other writing project they worked on together was a screenplay adaptation of Anne Tyler's novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which they didn't complete. Cronyn completed one other bit of writing: his memoir A Terrible Liar which was published in 1991. Hume Cronyn only missed his own centennial by eight years, but with as much as he accomplished, he might as well have lived 200 years. It helps when you have a partner as simpatico to you as Jessica Tandy was to him.
SOURCES: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy: A Register of Their Papers in the Library of Congress,, The Digital Deli Too, thelostland.com, film reference.com, Internet Accuracy Project, Superiorpics.com, Wikipedia, Lortel Archives: Internet Off-Broadway Database, The Internet Broadway Database and the Internet Movie Database.
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Labels: Albee, Beau Bridges, Bellamy, blacklist, Burgess Meredith, Cary, Ferrer, Fredric March, Garson, Gielgud, Glenn Close, J. Fonda, Jewison, K. Carradine, Kazan, Malden, Mankiewicz, Nichols, Olivier, Robards
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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.
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Labels: 70s, Altman, Arthur Penn, Brando, Deadwood, HBO, Julie Christie, K. Carradine, Kael, Milch, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Television, W. Beatty
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Friday, September 03, 2010
Trying to build a better killer
The following post will contain spoilers for the first four seasons of the series Dexter, so if you haven't seen it and plan to some day, best not to read any further.
By Edward Copeland
When I was a kid, I could truly call myself a child of television. The day each year when TV Guide's Fall Preview would arrive in the mailbox felt like Christmas as I'd anxiously plan which shows I'd be watching each night of the week, hoping there'd be no conflicts, something that was remedied once my family won a Sony Betamax in a $3 raffle in third grade.
As time went on, that changed and I watched less and less. Today, I watch very few shows and it takes great coaxing or some sort of inspiration to get me to sample new ones and when I do, it is often late in a series' run. So, if it weren't for Netflix's instant viewing program, I probably would never have found myself sampling Showtime's Dexter. What I found even more surprising is that rare series that actually has produced seasons that exceeded the previous ones in quality in its four aired seasons.
The only other three series I can think of that pulled off the continued climb in quality is AMC's Breaking Bad (which, after all, had a short first season and only two additional full seasons so far) and The Wire (which admittedly dropped off slightly in its fifth and final season, thanks to HBO only giving it a 10-episode order) and Deadwood, which had its plug pulled prematurely after three seasons so we'll never know if David Milch's complete vision would have kept ascending. It's also very important to note that while Dexter is good and getting better, it doesn't come close to approaching any of those three series in greatness.
Once I decided to try Netflix's instant program, which I would use on my laptop, I decided I wanted to try something short instead of a feature length film. I noticed that the first two seasons of Dexter were both available, so I started with those since they'd be quick to watch when I was between discs. While I thought the first season was fine, I found it awfully predictable, spotting who the Ice Truck Killer was the first moment the actor appeared and figuring out his connection to Dexter as well. It also made it fairly obvious how things would play out.
Still, Michael C. Hall was good enough, as was the rest of the cast, that it encouraged me to continue on to Season 2. (I have to admit that it took me well into the first season to figure out that Julie Benz, the actress playing Dexter's girlfriend Rita, was the same actress who played the vampire Darla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
I'm glad I continued because Season 2 was a marked improvement over the first season, telling a story where there really wasn't a villain but it was more a tale of police blood splatter expert Dexter Morgan trying to keep secret his moonlighting as a vigilante serial killer, something made much more complicated by the stalking of homicide detective Sgt. James Doakes (Erik King), a hothead who seems to be the only person in the police department who notices something odd about Dexter, and the arrival of FBI Special Agent Frank Lundy (Keith Carradine) who specializes in serial killers and arrives in Miami when Dexter's favorite body disposal spot gets accidentally discovered.
Though Season 2's quality rose greatly over Season 1, it still suffered in the predictability department, especially with the introduction of the unstable Brit Lila Tourney (Jaime Murray) whom Dexter meets when he's forced to lie that he has a drug addiction to cover his tracks and she becomes his sponsor and mistress. It then becomes pretty easy to see how things will play out since Dexter's code would prevent him from ever killing Doakes, who is an innocent, even if he's a threat, you know that Lila will end up doing it and Dexter will take her out.
It's also in this season where the character of Rita really started to get on my nerves. Dexter basically chose to date the single mother of two to try to give his life a semblance of normalcy to give further cover to his serial killer hobby. However, I really began to wish he'd picked someone less annoying.
With Lila, Season 2 started to make even clearer the series' main theme: Dexter's desire to find someone who understands who he is and why he is the way he is, the way his late adopted father (James Remar) did as he spotted his traits early and instructed Dexter on the code, realizing his adopted son would be a killer but trying to build him into one who would only harm those who deserved it because they'd taken the lives of the innocent. There were hints of that with his surprise brother (Christian Camargo) in Season 1 who played a teasing little game with him as the Ice Truck Killer until it got out of hand and he started dating Dexter's cop sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter).
Season 3 spelled this theme out in the clearest way possible and did so with stories that weren't easy to predict and did come complete with red herrings, thanks to the season long special guest star Jimmy Smits as powerful and popular District Attorney Miguel Prado, who ends up becoming Dexter's best friend.
That would seem unlikely at the season's outset as Dexter, out to rid the world of a killer who escaped the justice system, accidentally killed Prado's brother who happened to be in the hideout where Dexter expected to find the bad guy and attacked Dexter with a knife, giving Dexter no choice but to defend himself.
Eventually, Dexter does find his original target, but Miguel happens to be stalking the man as well and catches Dexter after the deed. Instead of turning him in, Miguel is grateful and wants to join Dexter as part of a vigilante team. Dexter believes he's finally found a true kindred spirit, especially as he's learned unsettling things about his adoptive father over the years. Unfortunately, he also comes to realize that Miguel's code is broader than his: He'll let innocent people go to jail and murder attorneys he feels are getting the guilty off. Obviously, a conflict is coming.
However, because Miguel is such a public figure and has information on Dexter, he's not as easy to dispatch as Dexter's other kills. There's also another serial killer terrorizing Miami, seeking money from the original bad guy, unaware that he's dead. To further toss confusion into the season's mix, Debra gets a new homicide detective partner Quinn (Desmond Harrington) who may or may not be a crooked cop. Dexter's domestic life gets complicated as well as Rita finds herself pregnant and she and Dexter plan to wed. The entire season does a good job at keeping you guessing as to how things will be resolved.
The fourth season though puts the previous three to shame, thanks in no small part to season-long guest star John Lithgow as a serial killer (he just won an Emmy for the role) and the return of Carradine's Frank Lundy.
Lundy, retired from the FBI, has returned to Miami because he believes that a serial killer he could never get the bureau to believe existed has started a new cycle there and he'd like the help of both Morgans — Dexter, the splatter expert, and Debra, the homicide detective and his former lover — to catch his great white whale.
Meanwhile, Debra's squad busies itself working on a spree killer that has earned the name The Honeymoon Killer because he kills and robs couples, which leads to them fending off (and in the case of Quinn, unsuccessfully) a persistent newspaper crime reporter Christine Hill (Courtney Hill) who wants to keep breaking details of the various investigations.
The fourth season proves to be the best by far at springing surprises on the audience and also the best in developing Dexter's character and giving Hall a truly worthy acting sparring partner in Lithgow. For so long now, Lithgow has been associated with comedy that people forget he can be a particularly good villain, from the relatively harmless kind in Footloose to the ruthless in Brian De Palma's Blow Out or the over-the-top in De Palma's Raising Cain or the awful Cliffhanger.
Dexter really gives Hall a chance to grow as a character in a way Six Feet Under never did, since that series basically resolved his character's arc in its first season (hell, it resolved everyone's) and the show just got worse after that as it kept tossing pointless character changes to perpetuate the show. The only character who stayed consistent in that series was Frances Conroy's Ruth. I digress.
In a way though, Dexter is a cheat. It's not truly a show about a serial killer because all of his victims deserve it, so it's really just a particularly twisted variation on Charles Bronson's Death Wish vigilante. However, twice now Dexter has slipped up and accidentally killed innocent people, so that has to weigh on him at some point.
Furthermore, in the surprise fourth season ending, his cat-and-mouse game with Lithgow's character (as he delayed killing him, hoping to learn how to balance family life and murder) resulted in the murder of Rita. How Dexter will cope with his activities and being a working single father of three creates new problems, though I must admit it was a relief to see Rita gone. Every time she called Dex on his cell phone during season four I'd think to myself, "Not Rita again. Leave him alone. He's got work to do."
One thing that doesn't bode well for the fifth season continuing the trend of getting better each year (and I won't know for a long time since I don't have Showtime and season 5 begins Sept. 26) is the addition to the cast of the one-note actress Julia Stiles. I'm not sure who her character will be, but she's never appealed to me in anything so odds are she won't help the series.
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Labels: 00s, 10s, Breaking Bad, De Palma, Deadwood, HBO, K. Carradine, Lithgow, Milch, Netflix, Television, The Wire
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Sunday, March 22, 2009
Welcome to f**king Deadwood. Can be combative.
By Edward Copeland
Five years ago March 21, HBO premiered a new Western series created by David Milch, but it was unlike any Western I'd ever seen. I wasn't into it at first, but I kept coming back. It took about four episodes until I was in tune to the rhythms of Deadwood. Having just rewatched the entire series in the great DVD box set that came out in December, it's even better than I remember. Illness prevented me from posting this on the actual date, but Sunday always was HBO night anyway. Illness also forced me to write in haste and haze, so if you spot any errors, please let me know by e-mail or in comments so I can fix them. I've already found a bunch.
Having seen the entire series before, I didn't have to
adjust to the beats of the dialogue. Much as the killing of Keith Carradine's Wild Bill Hickock changed the show's trajectory, it was from that moment that I was definitely hooked. Looking back, I think that may have been why I was slow to warm to the series. I knew Hickok's days were numbered and since Jack McCall (Garret Dillahunt) was portrayed in much the same way he was presented by David Arquette in Walter Hill's 1995 film Wild Bill, which happened to have Carradine as Buffalo Bill. So, since Wild Bill loomed over the beginning of the series, I wasn't able to really enjoy the entire cast because I was waiting for the killing. Now, some characters were impossible to ignore from the beginning. Ian McShane's Al Swearengen demands your attention. Robin Weigert's Calamity Jane originally was like nails on a chalkboard to me, but then she grew on me. Rewatching the entire series, I liked her from the beginning and it is a bit amazing to see and hear Weigert in street clothes and realize that Jane emanates from this woman. It's also sad to see the scene where for all her drunken bluster, she falls apart when confronted with powerful men such as Al or Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe).Going back through all the episodes and extras, it's amazing how Deadwood just got better and better. It also caused me to make a realization: I've held The Sopranos in too high esteem. Don't get me wrong, but it is one of the best, but it had a lot of bad episodes and it went on longer than it should have. I'd already rated The Wire higher, but it wasn't until after I rewatched Deadwood, that I had to say HBO's two great dramas were Deadwood and The Wire. I'm
proud of myself. I got quite a ways through this piece without writing cocksucker. Beyond the elegance of its language and vulgarity, what really becomes clear on repeat viewings is how there doesn't seem to be a weak link in the cast. In the commentary tracks I learned what is probably old news to others. The extras volunteered for specific merchant roles and most kept them for then entire run of the series. Ralph Richeson, who played Farnum's abused, horn-worshipping slave Richardson got started that way, One day, David Milch decide to give him a line and the part grew from there. You could almost write a separate essay on most of the denizens of Deadwood, but I feel I know them a little better the more time I spend with them. Of course, my memory was one of loving Al, but I'd forgotten how downright villainous he was in the first episodes. It wasn't really OK to like him until Cy arrived. By the end of the series' truncated run, they were both shown what true villainy was by the arrival of George Hearst (Gerald
McRaney). It seemed an odd casting choice. This was Major Dad and half of Simon & Simon. Milch knew what he was doing because McRaney was amazing How he didn't get nominated for an Emmy and win one is beyond me, but then again the Emmys in general are beyond me. They are almost to the point of becoming even more irrelevant than the Grammys. The even bigger case in point, one of the all-time biggest cases in point, I present to you Exhibit A: Ian McShane as Al Swearengen. Eligible three times, nominated once, never won. Emmy hoople-heads. McShane was great from the beginning, but what's even more impressive is Swearengen's growth, which comes about at a pace so slowly that it still can take you almost by surprise when he commits acts of nobility. Of course, Al is a brutal man, quick with a blade (though he regrets never having learned to handle a gun) and who routinely fakes Indian attacks to loot travelers or tries to scam gold-seekers with dry claims. However, as time went on, some of those unseemly Swearengen aspects seemed to vanish and the others seemed to be less evidence of venality than of pragmatism. Deadwood is Al's community and he wants to 
make sure he's in on its progress. Contrast that to Tolliver, who's just plain mean or vengeful, or Hearst, whose pragmatism warped into evil in pursuit of the "color." Al also was just pretty damn funny a lot of the time, though he'd always deny it. In the first season, Swearengen said of himself, "I'm stupidest when I try to be funny." I have to believe that Swearengen is lying about that because no one can something like this without intending to get a laugh: "Here's what to understand about the fucking specialists — they pay a premium and they never make fucking trouble. Sometimes I imagine in my declining years running a small joint in Manchester England catering to the specialists exclusive — to let them know they're amongst their own maybe I'll operate from the corner hanging upside down like a fucking bat." His changes came in many ways: from reluctantly forming a government, realizing when the old ways were no longer viable, being physically defeated by Hearst, yet still able to fool him and take away his guardian and overcoming a nasty bout of bladder stones. Let me add that, as someone who recently had surgery to remove bladder stones, I'm damn glad it didn't happen to me in 1877.Al's various relationships with many of the characters on the show also bring out different aspects of him. It's
clear that he loves Trixie (the great Paula Malcomson), but he treats her like a whore and calls her a whore, though he allows her to work at Sol and Seth's goods store and learn accounting under the pretense of spying. He even lets her move up to the Deadwood Bank when Alma opens it later. It's clear Al wants her to have a chance to escape her life. He treats each of his employees distinctly. Johnny (Sean Bridgers) is pretty much treated as an idiot, which is probably fair, but some of Al's softly mean-spirited humor toward Johnny does betray some affection: "So many put the Yellowstone atop the natural wonders Johnny — for me there's only you." Adams (Titus Welliver) is the newest member of the Swearengen conclave and though he's bred jealousy in Al's right-hand man Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown,
whose performance gets better each time you see it), you always get the sense that Al hasn't completely trusted him yet. Another note, on Welliver alone on the DVD, many on the commentaries mentioned that Welliver was a master mimic and there is an extra where Welliver plays Milch auditioning several well-known actors for the role of Al Swearengen. It's very funny. Now, getting back to Dority. He's not so quick to adapt to change as Al is, but them have stood together through so much, they will always be by one another's side. In an interesting way, watching it this time, I sort of viewed Dan as the bridge between Seth (Timothy Olyphant) and Al. By that I mean, Al is pragmatic and tries to think things through while Seth, like Dan, can be a hothead and say things he shouldn't have before he realizes it was a bad idea. In Deadwood, the sheriff has the itchy trigger finger, though fortunately it's seldom actually on the trigger of a gun. That's not quite the same case with Dan, though he's good with many weapons and with his bare fists. His third season street brawl with Hearst's protector Captain Turner (Allan Graf) that made Tony and Ralph's fatal brawl on The Sopranos look like a game of slaps. The aftermath 
for Dan was in many ways worse. Dority had much blood on his hand, but this killing was so intimate and personal, he couldn't help but be affected and Brown got to give some his best moments of the entire series
out of this. W. Earl Brown was no one trick pony either. He also wrote one of season three's most eventful episodes "A Constant Throb" when Al leaped off his balcony to whisk Alma to safety in The Gem as Hearst's goons take shots at her. The last of Al's employees of note is Jewel, played by actress-comedienne Geri Jewell who has cerebral palsy. They never say what Jewel's affliction is on the show and I personally don't know when they started diagnosing cerebral palsy. (Hell, I have multiple sclerosis and I don't even know when it was first diagnosed.) Al doesn't seem to cut her any slack for her condition (she can never get a bloodstain out of the floor to Al's satisfaction. Jewel gives as good as she gets too. When she goes to visit Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif) with an idea that he can build her a boot that will help her walk better, upon her return to The Gem when Al asks of her whereabouts and she mentions the doc she tells him that she's "knocked up." Why would a tough hombre such as Al Swearengen employ someone like Jewel? Milch speculates in interviews and commentaries that almost everything about Al can be traced back to his time in an orphanage and odds are that he found Jewel in one, likely being mistreated, and rescued her.
As the posting time for this post draws farther away from its initial intention and the post itself grows longer, I'm going to have to start wrapping this up and try to get in as much as I wanted to. As I mentioned earlier, it's truly amazing how this cast didn't have any weak links. In first viewings, it was sometimes difficult to notice standing in the shadow of a powerhouse such as Ian McShane. I also noticed that some of the characters I didn't like as well as others I liked more when they were interacting with certain other characters. Even watching again, I can't really warm up to Alma Garret (Molly Parker) except when she acts opposite two actors: one obvious, one probably not so obvious. Once the noble Ellsworth (the great Jim Beaver) entered her life on a more permanent basis, she came a bit more to life and she gave him his best scene of the entire series. She's resumed her laudunum habit and under the influence tries to seduce Ellsworth. Even though he is her husband, though he knows it wasn't a marriage of love, he recognizes her altered state and sadly resists
her advances and tells her he'll get his things and move out. The other actor is the irrepressible William Sanderson as E.B. Farnum. Farnum is always funny, so it's probably purely by osmosis that in the scenes between E.B. and Alma, he manages to make her funny as well. As long as I'm being slightly critical of a show in a post that so far has been a massive lovefest, I feel I should be honest and say that the love affair between Seth and Alma was one of the most passionless romances. You see the passion between Sol (John Hawkes) and Trixie. I've only been mentioning Seth Bullock here and there so far and it was nothing against Olyphant, but I just found Seth dull for a long time until you really got to see how he could fly off the handle and watch the dychotomy develop between him and Swearengen. As I wrote earlier, first-time around, it took a long time for Weigert's Calamity Jane to grow on me, but that was definitely a case of the performance. With Olyphant, it was the character. Second
time around, I started watching with those problems already fixed. Back to performances I loved from the start, in no particular order, there was Leon Rippy as Tom Nuttall, owner of the saloon where Hickok met his fate, in love with his new bike until it's involved tangentially in a tragedy; Brad Dourif as the ever-eccentric Doc Cochran keeping the whores clean and fixing the gun and knife wounds in between body snatching for medical study. Dourif is great and he did manage to garner one nomination out of the Emmy hoople-heads, but of course he lost; Garret Dillahunt's brilliance probably wouldn't have been noticed quite as clearly if it hadn't come in two parts. He was great as the loutish kook Jack McCall who offs Hickok and even though I knew going in to season 2 this time that amazingly it was the same actor who was playing Hearst's well-dressed geologist, the first time I was watching season two I literally did not know that until I read it somewhere. Reminded me of my fellow Twin Peaks fan who nailed Piper Laurie under the Japanese garb as Tojamura in the very first appearance, and they even went to the trouble of creating a fake actor's name. Deadwood didn't even try to fake me out; Then there's the marvelous Dayton Callie as Charlie Utter, Hickok's sidekick turned parcel post/deputy sheriff and, according to several commentaries, a damn good sax player in real life; Kim Dickens as Joanie Stubbs one of the several portraits of how there really
weren't many easy lives in the Old West. She began when we met her as the handler of the whores at the Bella Luna, with a determination to start out on her own. Tolliver even supports her idea, promising to back her, but Joanie isn't as strong as she seems, especially when Cy forces her to kill one of the two teens trying to rip them off (played by Kristen Bell). Later, Eddie (Ricky Jay) offers to be Joanie's backers, telling her he's planning to rip off Cy. This is the one storyline that was never explained well because Ricky Jay vanished after season 1, though in season 2, Joanie made a reference to him finding the place for the Chez Ami for her and helping her out, yet she also gives Cy a cut of her take. I got off track, which is Kim Dickens who handled what really is a slow degradation in her character caused by an uncertain future and unresolved demon and a tenative lurch at love (with Jane no less). I hope I haven't forgotten anyone, though I know I must of because there are too damn many of you and I know I didn't get all my points or things I've learned in, or talk enough about its technical aspects (God bless James Glennon who filmed most of the episodes and was responsible for its wonderful look) and other behind-the-scenes-craftsmanship but I'll end this with a shout-out to Keone Young.
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