Sunday, June 26, 2011
Comic Training, Sir!
By J.D.
Watching Stripes (1981) again after all these years makes me nostalgic for the early comedies of the first generation of Saturday Night Live cast members: Animal House (1978), Caddyshack (1980), Fletch (1984) and so on. They were goofy and silly but they also had an engaging, anarchistic attitude that is so much fun to watch. This is definitely the case with Stripes, released 30 years ago today, a film that pits a “lost and restless generation,” as the film’s main protagonist puts it at one point, against rigid authority only interested in producing, lean, mean, killing machines, to paraphrase another character. Much of the film’s humor comes from the clash of these two ideologies.
After losing his job, his girlfriend, and his apartment all in one morning (“You still have your health,” deadpans his best friend), John Winger (Bill Murray) decides to enlist in the Army and straighten out his life. He convinces his best friend Russell Zisky (Harold Ramis) to enlist as well (“If I get killed, my blood is on your hands,” he says, to which John replies, “Just don’t get it on my shoes.”). Once they arrive at the base and meet their no-nonsense drill instructor, Sergeant Hulka (the perfectly cast Warren Oates), John and Russell realize that it’s not going to be as easy as they imagined.
Stripes settles into a classic fish-out-of-water formula as John and his misfit platoon (with the likes of John Candy and Judge Reinhold) gradually become efficient soldiers despite their complete ineptitude and perchance for breaking all the rules. The gang of misfits fulfills all the requisite stereotypes: “Cruiser” (John Diehl) is the dumb guy, “Ox” (John Candy) is the lovable oversized oaf, “Psycho” (Conrad Dunn) is the crazy guy, and, of course, John is the group joker and self-proclaimed leader. Other conventions include casual nudity (Ox wrestles three strippers in a mud wrestling contest) and the obligatory love interests as John and Russell get involved with two cute, female MPs (P.J. Soles and Sean Young). This template would prove to be so successful that it was exploited in films such as Police Academy (1984), PCU (1994) and countless others.
On his way to the premiere of Meatballs (1979), director Ivan Reitman thought up the idea for a film: “Cheech and Chong Join the Army.” At the premiere, he pitched it to Paramount Pictures and, incredibly, they greenlit the project that day. Len Blum and Dan Goldberg wrote the screenplay in Toronto and would read it to Reitman (who was in Los Angeles) over the phone. He would, in turn, give them notes. The director gave the script to Cheech and Chong’s manager and he read it and thought it was very funny. He gave it to the comedians but they wanted complete control. Reitman then suggested to Goldberg that they change the two main characters to ones suited more for Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, figuring that if they could get Ramis interested in it and let him tailor the script for the two of them that Murray would be interested in doing the film. It worked and Murray signed on to do Stripes.
Ramis already had co-written Animal House and Meatballs but was unknown as an actor. He screen-tested for Columbia Pictures, who hated his audition but Reitman told the studio that he was hiring him anyway. Judge Reinhold’s character, Elmo, ended up with a collection of all the best jokes from the Cheech and Chong version of the film. Before filming he thought that he had a handle on his character but once filming started, he was “petrified” because this was his first big studio film. The casting agent picked Sean Young based on how she looked and P.J. Soles tested with Ramis and they got along very well together. John Diehl had never auditioned before and this was his first paying acting job. Goldberg knew John Candy from Toronto and told Reitman that he should be in the film. He didn’t even have to audition.
One of the reasons why Stripes is my favorite Bill Murray comedy is the little touches that he adds to a scene making it that much funnier. For example, in the first scene where John goes to pay a guy after getting a shoe shine, Murray turns his back to the man so that he won’t see how much of a tip he’s going to give him. It’s an odd, idiosyncratic choice that no one else would’ve thought to make but it enriches the scene ever so slightly. The next scene demonstrates Murray’s gift for physical comedy when he loads a snotty rich lady’s luggage into the trunk of his cab and accidentally bags himself. It’s an obvious gag to be sure but Murray still makes it funny.
John continues to antagonize the lady (Fran Ryan) during the ride to the airport but in a deadpan, sardonic way. At one point she says, “I’ve never gone this way before,” to which he replies, “I’m sure there’s a lot of ways that I’ve gone that you haven’t,” implying that she’s square and conservative while he’s hip and liberated, thereby establishing a clear generational gap. The rich lady insults John and so instead of getting angry at her he decides to mess with her, including one memorable bit where he starts driving fast. Suddenly alarmed, she says, “Aren’t you going too fast?” He replies, intentionally slurring his words, “Oh, it’s not the speed, really so much, I just wish I hadn’t drunk all that cough syrup.” John proceeds to give the lady a little scare but when she calls him a bum, he’s had enough and quits right in the middle of a bridge, throwing his car keys in a river and leaving her stranded.
It’s not until almost eight minutes into the film that Elmer Bernstein’s first musical cue appears and it is a slightly sad, whimsical tune. The scene where John’s girlfriend Anita (Roberta Leighton) leaves him is interesting because it straddles the line between comedy and drama. She is clearly unhappy with their relationship and he tries to deflect her complaints with humor before half-heartedly saying, “I’m part of a lost and restless generation,” and follows this up asking her a rhetorical question, “What do you want me to do, run for the Senate?” This scene underlines John’s dilemma — he lacks direction and any kind of motivation. Interestingly, no music plays during this scene so that the gravitas of the scene, if you will, is not undermined by manipulative music. Bernstein’s whimsical score only returns when Russell arrives and the two banter back and forth about John’s sorry state of affairs.
The chemistry between Bill Murray and Harold Ramis is excellent. Ramis is the perfect straight man to Murray’s smart-ass slacker. They had been friends and worked together for some years and play well off each other as evident in the scene where Russell bets John that he can’t do five push-ups. It is in this scene that John realizes that he’s in crap physical shape and that the army is his only hope in turning his life around. Every scene had some element of improvisation and this was due in large part to Murray and Ramis who suggested things for him to say and this spread to the other cast members. Stripes is quite possibly Murray’s best comedy. He was well on his way to becoming a big movie star (he had already conquered T.V. with Saturday Night Live and a scene-stealing turn in Caddyshack) and applied the comedic chops he honed on T.V. to this role. Murray has a way of delivering dialogue and being able to give certain lines a sarcastic delivery or add a look or a facial expression that makes what he says so funny.
Reitman was a fan of Westerns that Warren Oates had been in and wanted someone who was strong and that everyone respected to control the misfit platoon. Reinhold said that during filming, Oates would tell everyone stories about working on films like The Wild Bunch (1969) and they would be enthralled. The casting of Oates, the veteran of many Sam Peckinpah films, gives Stripes a dose of gravitas and provides a certain amount of tension in some of the scenes he has with Murray. Sgt. Hulka is the ideal antagonist for the anti-authoritative John and their scene together in the barracks’ washroom, where Hulka finally asserts his authority, is filled with a palpable tension — unusual for a comedy but it works. Reitman wanted “a little bit of weight in the center,” and have a real argument between Hulka and Winger. It wasn’t played for laughs and allowed Murray to do something he hadn’t done before.
However, the improvisational nature of Reitman and some of the cast did not impress an old school actor like Oates. During one of the days of filming the obstacle course scenes, Reitman told the actors to grab Oates and drag him into the mud without telling the veteran actor about it in order to see what would happen in the hopes of getting a genuine reaction. Oates’ chipped his front tooth and was understandably pissed at Reitman, yelling at the director for what he did.
If Stripes has any weaknesses it is in the last third of the movie where the platoon, fresh from a successful graduation parade, is trapped in an Eastern Bloc country (remember, the Cold War still was in full swing at this point) looking for John and Russell after they took off with the army’s top secret armored recreational vehicle (the uber Winnebago). This part of the film feels forced and tacked on. It just isn’t as strong or as funny as everything that came before it. However, the first two thirds of the Stripes are so good that not even this hurts the picture all that much.
Stripes actually was fairly well-received by critics. Roger Ebert praised the film as "an anarchic slob movie, a celebration of all that is irreverent, reckless, foolhardy, undisciplined, and occasionally scatological. It's a lot of fun." The New York Times’ Janet Maslin called it "a lazy but amiable comedy," and praised Murray for achieving "a sardonically exaggerated calm that can be very entertaining.” However, in his review for the Washington Post, Gary Arnold wrote, "Stripes squanders at least an hour belaboring situations contradicted from the outset by Murray's personality. The premise and star remain out of whack until the rambling, diffuse screenplay finally struggles beyond basic training."
Only during a time when the United States wasn’t at war with anyone (unless you count the Cold War), does joining the Army to improve your life seem like an option if you’re reasonably educated as John and Russell are in Stripes. One gets the feeling that they could have easily had a productive life in almost any career if they only applied themselves. Joining the Army on a whim doesn’t seem that funny in our current climate which does date the film somewhat. Regardless, the script is filled with tons of witty dialogue and funny gags, the cast is uniformly excellent, and Murray and Ramis have never been better. At the risk of falling back on an old cliché, they just don’t make comedies like this anymore.
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Labels: 80s, Ebert, Movie Tributes, Murray, Oates, Peckinpah, Ramis, Television
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Thursday, June 18, 2009
Your word isn't what counts, it's who you give it to
By Edward Copeland
You know a film is powerful when it's controversial when it opens and when a restored version is planned for re-release 25 years later, an MPAA ratings dispute over its violent images delays the re-release until it was 26 years old. Now 40 years old, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch not only retains its power, the film grows in magnificence. If re-watching it evokes anything negative, it's the sadness that great films such as this hardly ever get re-releases anymore, affording movie fans the chance to see movies made before their time in a theater. As theaters move toward digital, it's probably sadly passed. Still, DVD and a good home setup keep The Wild Bunch vibrantly alive, if not ideally viewed.
You can't begin any conversation about The Wild Bunch (or Sam Peckinpah) without inevitably hitting the topic of violence and whether or not the film glorifies it or not but watching it again, it's beyond me how
anyone can see it that way. In fact, this time it seemed to me that Peckinpah builds the violence in the film to the crescendo of its finale. There is some use of slow-motion in the film's earlier gunbattles, the killings are quicker, more typical of what audiences are used to seeing in normal Westerns, without lingering on the wounds or carnage. Each subsequent encounter ups the ante leading to the famous finale, where the bloodshed contains the most meaning because the fight has the most meaning. When the bunch goes out in their blaze of glory, they aren't involved in a theft or running from a heist or a quick act of revenge, they are doing it because morally it's the correct thing for them to do, no matter that it is a suicide mission. That final melee is where you see the agony, the anguish and the pain. It's the way Peckinpah has set it up and the way it had to go because it needs to unfold this way for the characters to become flesh-and-blood people the audience cares about instead of just outlaws of a dying breed trying to hang on to a dying lifestyle in a fast-changing era.As The Wild Bunch opens, the viewer can't really be certain what time period they are in. The military uniforms that the bunch are wearing seem to
be early 20th century Army issue, but everything else seems to be from any Old West time period. It isn't until nearly an hour into the film when the would-be Mexican despot arrives in a fancy automobile and the bunch reacts with amazement and speak of reports of vehicles like birds that might be used in the next war that you realize we are several years into the 20th century and the Western lifestyle the bunch has enjoyed is passing the aging men by. Pike Bishop (William Holden), the group's leader admits that they aren't getting any younger and it's time they start "thinking beyond their guns." The impetus for this reappraisal of their lifework comes after the gang's latest assault on their favorite archenemy, the railroad. Peckinpah's opening setpiece really gets the movie galloping as we are introduced to the ruthlessness of the gang, taking the railroad's office as well as the equal ruthlessness of the railroad, who have staged a setup involving a team of bounty hunters in place to take out the bunch once and for all. There is no easy route taken of making the violent gang likable protagonists from the beginning. They are willing to leave an accomplice behind to almost certain death and kill another one with emotionless efficiency. This is their job and fun times come later. The fly in the ointment turns out to be the unexpected temperance union parade by a local church. When the siege is over, there are far more dead civilians than there are crooks or bounty
hunters and the clergyman (Dub Taylor) lets the railroadman know it, but he's indifferent as big businessmen continue to be to this day as his interests and bottom line supersede the public's. This "do it on the cheap" mentality extends to the bounty hunters that the railroad hires. The leaders is a former member of the bunch, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who has been promised an end to his prison sentence if he brings them back dead. Unfortunately, as help he's been given a motley group of misfits led by Strother Martin, who aren't above pillaging the corpses of the accidentally slain. Martin proves to be comic relief extraordinaire, especially with his large crucifix hanging around his neck. Ryan's performance as Thornton, the bounty hunter whose heart lies with his prey, grows deeper and better with each viewing. The actors who comprise the bunch are a strong ensemble. Three had won Oscars by the time The Wild
Bunch was made and a fourth would win one two years later. In nearly every case, it's one of the actors' strongest performances and, in one case, I consider it his best. Holden is great as Pike and of course the list of great roles he played are legendary spanning from Sunset Blvd. to Network and many in between. Pike Bishop belongs in that hallowed company as Holden gives him a taciturn strength but isn't afraid to show his vulnerabilities and the toll time has taken on the robber. Often forgotten, since he's not as active in the gang's criminal exploits, is the great Edmond O'Brien as Sykes, who used to ride and kill with the best of them but now basically holds down the fort while the bunch is away. O'Brien is a riot, even if at times he borders on cliche and seems to be channelling Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. More comedy is provided by Warren Oates and
Ben Johnson as the drinkin', whorin' Gorch brothers. (In the DVD commentary, one of the Peckinpah experts mentions that Johnson's wife never let him return to the sites of their Mexican scenes because of the scenes of his character's lechery depicted there. TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer even saluted Oates' character with a vampire bounty hunter with cowboy sensibility named Lyle Gorch on a couple of episodes. The youngest and newest member of the gang, the one who gets them in trouble and helps them find their moral compass, is Angel (Jaime Sanchez), a Mexican who wants to help his people get out from under the thumb of the minidictators who ruled Mexico at the time. Politics is anathema to the others but when they witness the mistreatment that goes on of the poor, eventually even the aging crooks discover there are some fights worth joining. Of course, the
second most important member of the bunch is Dutch (Ernest Borgnine). Though Borgnine has given many good performances, including his Oscar-winning one in Marty, it's clear to me after watching The Wild Bunch again that this is easily his greatest performance. He's always the one who seems to have the smartest take, the most regrets, and Dutch gets the others to realize their obligations when the final battle comes about. The grin that Borgnine lets loose before the gunfire is a sight to behold as are his quieter moments, turning his back when he's afraid to admit something tender to Pike or he's just sitting on a stoop whittling waiting for the others to finish their debauchery.As all conversations about The Wild Bunch inevitably focus on the violence, I think we should end this anniversary discussing those aspects that are too often overlooked. In addition to the performances, not
enough is made of the comic relief (the last images of the bunch are of them laughing at better times) as when the Mexican generale lets a machine gun go wild despite his German visitor's plea that he must place it upon a tripod. There's also the imagery. The kids torturing the scorpions gets cited often, but there also are nice touches such as a shot of a mother breastfeeding her baby while a belt of ammunition hangs across her torso. Finally, there is the suspense. Like all great suspense scenes, no matter how many times you see them, you still wonder what will happen, as when that wagon gets stuck on the bridge that's already set to detonate. I'd also be remiss if I didn't shower some praise on some of the film's other collaborators such as Peckinpah's co-writer Walon Green, the vivid photography of Lucien Ballard, the fine score by Jerry Fielding and the absolutely irreplaceable editing of Lou Lombardo.
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Labels: 60s, B. Johnson, Borgnine, Dub Taylor, Holden, Movie Tributes, Oates, Peckinpah, Robert Ryan, W. Huston
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
Beware those colorful rogues
By Edward Copeland
As I mentioned yesterday in my tribute to Joseph L. Mankiewicz, There Was a Crooked Man proved to be such a pleasant surprise that I decided to give it a more thorough write-up. While Sleuth was competently directed, it was never one of my favorite films, but Mankiewicz's penultimate film shows that the director still had his skills in the twilight of his career.
Kirk Douglas stars as Paris Pitman Jr., a post-Civil War scoundrel, robbing wherever he can, but doing so with charm and aplomb. The film is a dark comic Western and the first screenplay by Robert Benton and David Newman following Bonnie and Clyde. In many respects, it shares a similar tone with that film, particularly in the opening sequences which create a sort of picaresque version of a Western to introduce all the characters before they are all ensconced in the same location.
The movie's tone is even set by its bouncy credit sequence, which includes a title song by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (the songwriters of Bye Bye Birdie) and sung by Trini Lopez.
We open as Paris and his band of masked marauders, in the most polite way possible, intrude upon a wealthy man (Arthur O'Connell) and his family during dinner and proceed to steal his fortune. Not wanting to be perceived as rude, Paris goes ahead and serves the fried chicken while it is hot as his cohorts scoop up the bounty. Unfortunately, as they make their escape, Paris' entire gang is gunned down, leaving Paris to ride off solo with all that loot.
After the storing the bulk of his ill-gotten gain, Paris proceeds to have a good time. Unfortunately, it leads him to the same brothel frequented by the now destitute O'Connell who recognizes him.
The next series of vignettes introduces other varying degrees of shady characters (Hume Cronyn, John Randolph, Warren Oates) a stalwart sheriff (Henry Fonda) and an unlucky young man who fate earns a
path to the gallows (Michael Blodgett). All the various characters end up in the same frontier prison, incarcerated with an aging legendary outlaw (Burgess Meredith). At the prison, the cast even includes the Skipper, too as Alan Hale plays a prison guard. Mankiewicz moves the action at a brisk pace as Paris befriends his cellmates, woos his wardens and plots to make his break and get reunited with his stolen fortune. Paris is such a good-humored character, it's easy to see how he ingratiates himself with everyone he meets, which makes the ending sort of a surprise. There are plenty of clues along the way that should make it obvious where it's headed, but Paris seduces the audience as well, much in the way many an antihero in film and television history has, making you forget their essential nature. The title of There Was a Crooked Man itself should flash in your brain like a neon sign as to what Paris is really like, but he still fools you into the finale, though an appropriate comeuppance still finds its way to him. Sleuth may be Mankiewicz's official last film, but There Was a Crooked Man is so good and so much fun, that it really deserves to be remembered as his last contribution to features.Tweet
Labels: 70s, Burgess Meredith, Cronyn, H. Fonda, K. Douglas, Mankiewicz, Oates
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Friday, June 22, 2007
Fading in the last leg
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Ambitious Failure Blog-a-Thon being coordinated by William Speruzzi at This Savage Art.
By Wagstaff
Unlike Edward Copeland’s experience with The Cotton Club — liking it as a youngster and then lowering his estimation on a more mature viewing — my encounter with Major Dundee was quite the opposite. The early pan-and-scan VHS version of Dundee, with its grainy print and washed-out colors was almost unwatchable. It was well known that Sam Peckinpah’s vision was butchered beyond repair by producer Jerry Bresler and Columbia Pictures. I had almost written the film off when news of a restored DVD version with additional footage and a new score got me excited again. By this time I was familiar with Peckinpah’s other work and I waited with baited breath for it to arrive from my Netflix queue. I wanted to call Major Dundee a major done deal.
Alas, while it wasn’t the forgotten masterpiece I had hoped for, it still had enough to keep any Peckinpah fan glued to the screen.
Major Dundee was Sam’s first feature after Ride the High Country, and it’s arguably his most ambitious; if not dramatically, then in terms of sheer scale and the logistics of production. I daresay it has more men and horses than any other Peckinpah film. Sure, he got to use a train and blow up a bridge in The Wild Bunch, but Major Dundee makes that film look like a chamber piece. Major Dundee was a grandly imposing yet necessary stumbling block on the road to The Wild Bunch’s greatness.
The story concerns a group of U.S. Cavalry in the Territory of New Mexico led by Maj. Amos Charles Dundee. They set out to destroy the Apache warrior Sierra Charriba, who has raided, sacked, and looted an area three
times the size of Texas. It is during the waning days of the Civil War, and Maj. Dundee is short of men and supplies. He supplements his small group of scouts and army regulars by enlisting the aid of Confederate prisoners jailed under his command at Fort Benlin. He tells potential volunteers, “I need horse soldiers — men who can ride, men who can shoot. In return, I promise you nothing … saddle sores, short rations, maybe a bullet in your belly … and free air to breathe, fair share of tobacco, quarter pay … and my good will and best offices for pardons and paroles when I get back.” He also promises to shoot out of hand any deserters once they’ve signed up.Maj. Dundee plans to avenge an entire company of men that were sent out of Fort Benlin only to be ambushed and massacred at the Rostes ranch. “I am Sierra Charriba! Who you send against me now?” boasts the fiercely cunning warrior. That man would be the equally fierce, but deeply flawed avenging angel, Maj. Dundee. The Apache practice after a raid is to keep the male children and train them to become part of the fighting tribe. Dundee also intends to get these children back. It is the winter of ’64, and Charriba and his gang of 47 warriors are wintering in French controlled Mexico. Maj. Dundee and company travel south to rescue the children and to pursue vengeance.
All this works wonderfully for the first hour or so. We sense Peckinpah doing some heavy lifting, moving large blocks of character and plot into place for something truly special. The acting is fantastic, the dialogue top-notch and rich with the kind
of Western slang you’d expect from Peckinpah. It is replete with lines such as “You are a $70, red-wool, pure-quill military genius, or the biggest damn fool in northern Mexico” and “I want everyone under my command to be drunker than a fiddler’s bitch by nightfall.” (Where did Sam get this stuff?) The film is plenty atmospheric, the sense of time and place expert. Costumes and faces look authentic. The plot’s architectural design is complex and resonates with subtext. The deep divisions of Civil War America feel contentious and real. The racism of both North and South is convincing and honest. A brilliant tapestry of characterizations is woven into something ironic and satisfying. Then … it all falls apart. To borrow a quote from Dundee that could be about the film itself, “You were a rock once, now you’re crumbling like old chalk.” I’ll talk more about the “failure” part of “ambitious failure” in a moment, but first, the cast.
Richard Harris is outstanding as Capt. Benjamin Tyreen, leader of the Confederate prisoners — a man who, in Dundee’s words, is “a would-be cavalier, an Irish potato farmer with a plumed hat fighting for a white-columned plantation house you never had and never will.” Tyreen and Dundee know each other well; they have a history that goes way back. Dundee uses Tyreen’s outdated code of Southern chivalry — the honor of his word — to keep him and his men in line. Capt. Tyreen promises to kill the major, once the Apache are taken or destroyed. James Coburn is excellent as the one-armed scout Samuel Potts. He is knowledgeable and has a natural affinity for the Indians and Mexicans; but he will go with Dundee only so far. I’d wager that his viewpoint is the closest to Peckinpah’s; they even share the same first name. “They all look alike to you, don’t they?” he asks the major.
There is other stellar work from Jim Hutton as the green artillery man, Lt. Graham, who provides several doses of humor, and a slew of Peckinpah regulars such as Slim Pickens, L.Q. Jones, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates, who’s given a monologue and a chance to shine as a Southern deserter who gets executed. There also is sound work from Michael Anderson Jr. as Tim Ryan, the bugler whose journal narrates the movie, and whose loss of virginity gives the boys some sexist laughs.
At the heart of the movie is the mystery of Dundee himself. It is Charlton Heston’s most complex role. He is presented simply at first. “I have only three commands. When I signal you to come, you come. When I signal you to charge, you charge. When I signal you to run – you follow me and run like hell.” Then things get murkier. “Are you pursuing the Apache, Major, or a promotion?” The question is asked more than once, and we never find out the answer. Dundee has been demoted to jailer, something that rankles him no end, after “he tried to fight his own war at Gettysburg.” He secures the safe return of the captured children, but then still presses on deeper into the quagmire of Mexico, his men swamped on all sides by Confederates, Apaches, Mexicans, and the French. He is a man driven, but by what? After he “liberates” a Mexican village that has been previously “liberated” by the French, the peasants throw a fiesta, but Dundee doesn’t seem to enjoy it much. “You don’t have the temperament to be a liberator, Amos,” Tyreen tells him. When Amos and his band leave the village, the sequence becomes a harsher and more arid precursor to the similar sequence in The Wild Bunch where Pike and his gang leave the plush, Eden-like village in a drawn out celebration.
The problems in Major Dundee begin in hour two, just about the time the implausibly beautiful Teresa Santiago (Senta Berger) shows up. A faltering midsection is then followed by a weak to nonexistent third act. I don’t care how much butchering Jerry Bresler did, nothing could have saved a script that was basically unfinished. It’s a damn shame too, because what’s left is sporadically interesting. You get the feeling that Sam Peckinpah’s logistical problems (he scouted locations in Mexico that were too far apart) the problems with the script, and Dundee’s arrow wound and subsequent drinking and moral disintegration, all mirror each other. By the end, even though they have killed Charriba, the best they can hope for is to fight their way across the Rio Grande and return safely to the U.S. The meandering folly of this ambitious failure is, if anything, even more pertinent today than it was in 1965. American idealism, foreign adventurism and a divided country are still with us. In spite of, or maybe even because of its failures, Major Dundee has weighty if deeply ambiguous things to say on these subjects.
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Labels: 60s, B. Johnson, Blog-a-thons, Heston, James Coburn, Netflix, Oates, Peckinpah
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Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Sam sows his wild Oates
By Edward Copeland
Leave it to Peckinpah to fashion a love story between a man and his friend's severed head, but that's exactly what he did with 1974's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. More importantly, he took one of his most dependable character actors, Warren Oates, and lifted him from his usual supporting roles as a heavy and gave him a lead that truly showed the range of which he was capable.
While Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia doesn't quite rise to the level of Peckinpah's greatest works such as The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs, it is quite good. It also seems grittier and dirtier than many of Peckinpah's efforts from this same time period. It's almost as if they took the celluloid and ground it into the mud.
It's not the case of making a DVD from a bad print, it seems very purposeful. Compare it to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid from the previous year, an inferior film to Alfredo Garcia, but which looked great. However, given the tale Peckinpah is telling in Alfredo Garcia, shimmering cinematography would have been wholly inappropriate.
There are some weaknesses — some of Peckinpah's trademark slow-motion violence starts to overstay its welcome here and aside from brief turns by Robert Webber and Gig Young, there isn't much in the way of performances to back up Oates' great work — though there is one helluva great final shot. This is the Warren Oates' show and in this case that is more than enough.
It's a shame he didn't get more opportunities to carry a film, because Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia certainly shows he could.
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Labels: 70s, Movie Tributes, Oates, Peckinpah
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Thursday, April 20, 2006
Riding the trail alone
By Edward Copeland
Sam Peckinpah was 37 when he made Ride the High Country in 1962 after nearly a decade of television work, mostly on Westerns, and one other feature film. Since that is the genre that Peckinpah is most widely identified with, it seems only appropriate that was the genre that gained him cinematic notice. Within Ride the High Country though, you could see themes that would reoccur throughout Peckinpah's filmography aside from the obvious Western touches.
Starring Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, who were 64 and 57 respectively when the film premiered, their characters of aging gunslingers foreshadowed the gang Peckinpah would assemble seven years later in his seminal Western, The Wild Bunch. Scott portrayed Gil Westrum, the shadier of the pair, and McCrea played Steve Judd, an ex-marshal committed to his own moral point of view, who team up with young upstart Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to work for a bank paying for gold claims in a California mining town. Along the way to the town, they come across Elsa, a young woman (Mariette Hartley in her film debut) frustrated with life on the ranch of her moralizing father (R.G. Armstrong) and eager to hook up with Billy Hammond (James Drury), a man who promised to marry her and one of a clan of slimy brothers working in the mining town. Needless to say, complications ensue.
On the road to the town, Heck develops a lustful interest in Elsa that nearly leads to rape, but which is nothing compared to what happens when she finally hooks up with Billy and agrees to become his bride, despite the fact he clearly intends on sharing her with her brothers (particularly the odious Henry played by future Peckinpah regular Warren Oates in one of his earliest feature films). The assaults on Elsa foreshadow what Peckinpah will depict in his greatest non-Western, Straw Dogs, in 1971. Gil and Steve see the trouble that Elsa has gotten herself into, but only Gil is willing to bend the law to save the girl as Steve continues to insist that they must be bound by it. On top of that, as they move to return the girl to her home, Gil and Heck have other plans for the bank's money.
With all these story strands, Peckinpah tells the story with amazing efficiency, clocking a running time that is barely more than 90 minutes. He also creates some astounding visual vistas, making his film debut in CinemaScope and failing to blow the chance as some first-timers do.
There also is something interesting in the violence in the film, given that violence is the first word that comes to mind when most people mention Peckinpah. Granted, he couldn't get away with things in 1962 that he'd be able to do later, but he is extremely cautious with it. In fact, one scene of a violent attack occurs completely offscreen where you can hear it, but you don't see it and you never see the end result.
There certainly have been better Westerns than Ride the High Country and Peckinpah would go on to make much greater films, but it's interesting to watch to see parts of the foundation being formed for Peckinpah's later films.
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Labels: 60s, Joel McCrea, Oates, Peckinpah, Television
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Friday, December 02, 2005
From the Vault: The Wild Bunch
In its time, the violence in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch created quite a stir. Though not nearly as shocking today, Peckinpah's poetic blood-soaked ballet still packs a punch. Re-released to mark the 1969's film's 25th anniversary, Peckinpah's elegy to the Old West has been restored for the first time to the director's original vision and justifiably reaffirms its claim as one of the classics of the Western genre.
The 10 minutes of new material doesn't add violence, but subtext and flashbacks explaining the relationship between the Bunch and their chief pursuer. The late, great William Holden stars as Pike Bishop, the Bunch's leader. The actor, his voice raspier and his face craggier than in his youth, brings the necessary grizzled authority to his role as an outlaw who knows its time to start "thinking beyond our guns" but whose personal code of honor requires that he go out shooting.
Supporting Holden are the equally good Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien as well as Warren Oates and Ben Johnson as the Gorch brothers, true worshipers of booze and bordellos.
Revisiting The Wild Bunch, the performer who really stands out is Robert Ryan as Deke Thornton, a former member of the outlaw gang who has been given a deal by a railroad baron — take care of Pike and his gang in 30 days or return to prison in Yuma. Thornton's heart isn't quite in his hunt, especially since he's burdened with a posse of scavengers who "represent the law" at the same time they fleece the dead of guns and clothes, even if the dead include innocent bystanders.
Peckinpah's pacing whisks the action along through its three main set pieces — the opening robbery, a train heist and the shockingly violent climax. Aided by editors Louis Lombardo and Robert L. Wolfe, Peckinpah choreographs each of the sequences memorably, using different film speeds to create a unique visual rhythm to the carnage. For fans of Westerns, great filmmaking, Peckinpah, the actors or any combination of the above, the chance to see The Wild Bunch in its widescreen glory should not be missed.
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Labels: 90s, B. Johnson, Borgnine, Holden, Oates, Peckinpah, Robert Ryan
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