Monday, November 21, 2011
The Last Stand
By Eddie Selover
They Died With Their Boots On, which premiered 70 years ago today, is the eighth and final pairing of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. It's not as famous as some of the others — for example, the pirate swashbuckler Captain Blood or the bejeweled Technicolor storybook Adventures of Robin Hood — but it deserves to be. Those are happy, exuberant movies; this is a tragedy of slowly unfolding power that leaves you unsettled and upset. It's the rare adventure movie that gets under your skin; it achieves its epic qualities through emotion rather than action. The movie is based on the story of George Armstrong Custer, the general whose command of 500 cavalrymen was overwhelmed by ten times as many Native Americans in 1876. Never were the words "based on" more of a euphemism. As history, Boots On bears only a passing resemblance to actual events — in fact the more you know about Custer, the more outrageous the film's portrait becomes. Virtually every event is twisted almost 180 degrees in order to turn a vainglorious and highly flawed man into a noble figure.
Yet even as the film moves toward its barroom-painting view of Custer and his men staging their heroic last stand surrounded by savages, it has to explain how he got there. It does so by setting him up as vain, callow, physically daring but reckless and prone to troublemaking. Cleverly, the filmmakers play the first half of the movie as a light comedy, in which Custer gets himself into one mess after another and strikes ludicrous poses trying to act like a bigger man than he is. We see him making mistakes and extricating himself through charm and luck; instinctively we know it's only a matter of time before that luck runs out.
The fact that the same thing was true of Flynn in real life gives the movie an unusual resonance. He was at least as vain as Custer, and easily as reckless; his road to fame and success was just as fast and fortunate, and left him just as unprepared to deal with real challenges. During the making of this movie, Flynn had a couple of underage girls on his yacht, an escapade that led to a long and embarrassing trial for statutory rape that turned him into a public joke after the premiere — particularly after it was revealed in court that Flynn made love with his socks on. His pre-movie life of adventure had left him with an assortment of
chronic maladies that resulted in his being declared 4-F and ineligible for the draft. Because Warner Bros. hushed this up, the public thought him a slacker for not serving in World War II as other stars did. Personal and professional disasters came faster and faster, and his drinking and drug use kept pace. Eventually booze, narcotics and dissipation made him a puffy, slurring, dead-eyed zombie before they finally killed him at the age of 50. Some presentiment of this terrible fate seems to hang over Flynn throughout Boots On. He gives one of his most sensitive and aware performances. His eyes often look wide with fright and he seems more attuned to other actors than usual. Often he pauses and hesitates before taking action, as if genuinely unsure of himself, and when he does act, it's always a shade too swiftly. He's as dashing as ever, but often he dashes right into a brick wall. Some of the credit for this must go to the great Raoul Walsh, here directing Flynn for the first time, after the actor had quarreled with his usual director, Michael Curtiz (the fact that the much-younger Flynn was married to Curtiz's ex-wife Lili Damita is strangely never mentioned in accounts of the poisonously bad relationship between the two men). Curtiz had directed Flynn like a toy action figure, throwing him into the middle of clanging swords and galloping horses and trusting him to sail above it all. Walsh's action scenes were rougher than Curtiz's, less choreographed and clever, and always suggestive of real threat — as you might expect of a man who had lost an eye in an accident.At this point in her career, de Havilland had developed some serious ambitions and no longer wanted to be the clinging heroine of Flynn's boys-own-adventure movies. She only made the film at Flynn's express request, after they had cleared the air of several years of misunderstanding. By all accounts, including hers, they were seriously in love, but their relationship was undermined continually by his
immaturity and instability. Boots On is the only one of their films in which their characters have a real arc, moving from youthful high spirits into a serious relationship, into marriage and ultimately the tragedy of his death. To sweeten the deal for de Havilland, the producer Hal Wallis brought in the fine screenwriter Lenore Coffee for rewrites that rounded out the character of Libby Custer and made her a flesh-and-blood woman rather than a cardboard cutout. De Havilland responds with one of her best and most consistent performances. In their final scene, she helps him prepare for the battle of Little Big Horn. Both know he's not coming back, and they can barely look at each other while mouthing cheery sentiments they clearly don't believe for a second. They're almost getting away with it when he finds her diary and begins reading it aloud. In it, she confesses her terror over unshakable premonitions of his death. I must have written that every time you left for battle, she says. "Of course," he murmurs softly. They say their goodbyes and he leaves; she's rigid against a wall for support. The camera pulls in suddenly on her and she faints from the accumulated tension. Fainting in movies usually is phony as hell, but this time we've been holding our breaths too, and it feels like a natural reaction. In real life, de Havilland knew she'd never work with Flynn again, and she felt that he knew it as well. The scene is almost unbearable in its poignancy, for both the characters and the actors. Such is its enduring power that at a screening 40 years later, de Havilland, then about 65, walked out in the middle of it. She went to the lobby, sat down and began to cry.
Tweet
Labels: 40s, Curtiz, de Havilland, Erroll Flynn, Walsh
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Let's talk about the black bird
By Edward Copeland
In 1941, one man's directing debut wowed the world — and with good reason — but Orson Welles' Citizen Kane wasn't the only impressive directing debut that year. Granted, John Huston grew up around movie sets as the son of actor Walter Huston and had a decade of screenwriting experience before he helmed his first feature, but it certainly could be argued that while The Maltese Falcon isn't as groundbreaking as Kane, it did launch a far more consistent directing career for Huston than Kane did for Welles. More importantly, Falcon served as the key film that transitioned Humphrey Bogart from the criminals and thugs that stereotyped his acting career into everybody's favorite antihero and a more multifaceted range of roles. Anyone who has read much of my writing or seen my comments in various venues know my typical disdain for remakes and my simple rule: Only remake movies that were flawed in the first place. Until recently, Huston's Maltese Falcon, marking its 70th anniversary today, happened to be the only film version of Dashiell Hammett's story that I'd seen. To be fair, I felt that I needed to watch director Roy Del Ruth's 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon. Boy, did my adage hold up. So much so that I'm running a separate review tomorrow of the 1931 film adaptation of Hammett's tale, which began as a five-part serial between September 1929 and January 1930 in the magazine Black Mask before being published as a hardback novel in February 1930.
to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a golden falcon
encrusted from beak to claw with the rarest jewels -----
but pirates seized the galley carrying the priceless token
and the fate of the Maltese Falcon
remains a mystery to this day ---
After this brief written prologue crawls up the screen following the opening credits, we get a panoramic shot of where our story takes place along with the superimposed words SAN FRANCISCO. Soon, we are inside the offices of SPADE AND ARCHER. Private detective Sam
Spade (Bogart) sits behind his desk fiddling with a tea bag and trying to roll his own cigarette when his faithful secretary Effie (Lee Patrick) comes in and tells him that there's a girl who wants to see him. "Her name's Wonderly," Effie adds. "A customer?" Spade asks. "I guess so. You'll want to see her anyway. She's a knockout," Effie tells him. Sam says to send her in. Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor) shares with Spade her concerns about her sister Corinne, who has hooked up with a no-good guy named Floyd Thursby. She wants to take her sister back home to New York. She has spoken with Thursby, but he won't tell her with Corinne is and 
claims her sister doesn't want to speak with her. This Thursby frightens Miss Wonderly, the woman admits. As she spins her tale, Spade's partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), enters, practically salivating over their new client. He and Sam both agree that they should be able to handle Thursby and Miss Wonderly lays down two $100 bills for their services. When she leaves, Miles tells Sam, "Oh, she's sweet. Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first." Never mind that Miles is married, especially since Sam and Miles' wife Iva (Gladys George) have been having an affair, which Spade very much has tried to sever. In a very interesting and foreshadowing shot, after Miles stakes his claim in the lustful pursuit of Miss Wonderly, the sun through the windows form a shadow of the SPADE AND ARCHER sign on the carpet of their office so that it resembles a tombstone. The very next scene happens to be the only one in the entire film in which Sam Spade isn't present. In a dark setting, a smiling Miles approaches someone who pulls a gun and shoots the private eye who then tumbles down the side of a cliff.
So begins the film's mystery and its first corpse, but as of yet there has been no mention of the fabled Maltese Falcon. I've never read Hammett's story to see how closely Huston's film, which he wrote as well as directed, follows it, though some reports I've read say it follows Hammett's work nearly scene for scene and line for line except for a couple of notable changes. In discussing the The Maltese Falcon, worrying about spelling out the plot or spilling its secrets hardly seems to matter because neither the story nor its resolution strengthens the spine of what makes this movie — pardon my French, but no more accurate way exists to describe it — what makes this movie so fucking great 70 years after its release. Since I've now seen the terrible 1931 film version which shares some of the same dialogue as Huston's film, I'm guessing those lines originated with Hammett, though in some cases it's clear how Huston took some words out of either the 1931 script or the Hammett story and rewrote them to make them better. The dialogue practically sparkles when you only read it. When it's placed in the mouths of the talented cast that was assembled for Huston's movie, it sings. In addition to the five performers that I would name as the principals — Bogart, Astor, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr. and, in his Oscar-nominated performance and, believe it or not, his film debut, the 61-year-old Sydney Greenstreet — The Maltese Falcon's ensemble boasted the aforementioned Lee Patrick, Gladys George and Jerome Cowan, Ward Bond, Barton McClane and, in a wordless cameo as the dying Captain Jacoby dumping the falcon at Sam's office before expiring, none other than John Huston's father Walter himself.
All that time on sets paid off for John Huston, who managed to include a lot of interesting touches the first time he got his chance to sit in the director's chair. I love the way he films Sam in his seedy apartment receiving the news of Miles' death. He goes directly from the darkness of Archer's tumble to a dark room where you can only see the outline of a phone on a bedside table because of a little light coming through the open window. The telephone rings and we simply see an arm extend into the shot to pick up the receiver and take it back out of the frame again. That's followed by Bogart's familiar voice saying, "Miles Archer — dead." After telling the cop on the other end of the line he'll be there soon, then Spade sits up and turns on the bedside lamp so he can call Effie to give her the news and assign her the task of informing
the widow Archer so he doesn't have to face Iva. Another visual moment I love comes late in the film when Gutman's henchman Wilmer (Cook) comes to after being knocked out by the principals when they've sequestered themselves in a hotel room all night to keep an eye on one another. Wilmer's head still spins so he awakes to distorted close-ups of Spade, Gutman (Greenstreet) and Cairo (Lorre). Huston gave great thought to how the entire film would go. After he wrote the screenplay, Huston storyboarded the entire film to prepare for the composition of scenes and the movement of the camera. He also rehearsed for two days. As I wrote earlier, so many of the lines were nearly the same as the 1931 version but turned out better here, either Huston improved on Hammett or the 1931 screenplay by Maude Hulton (who wrote the titles on John Barrymore's silent Don Juan) & Brown Holmes (who would go on to co-write I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang as well as the other pre-Huston Maltese Falcon adaptation, 1936's Satan Met a Lady with Bette Davis) with uncredited help by Lucien Hubbard (whose most famous film work also went uncredited — editing and production work on Wings).
Now I don't know if Huston proved to be particularly gifted when it came to working with actors or he just lucked out in the casting or how big a part he played in the casting, but the film got stellar performances out of almost all of the players, even though some such as Lorre had given career-best performances elsewhere (in Fritz Lang's M). Though Elisha Cook Jr. had been acting on stage since he was 14 and full-time in movies since 1936, Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon truly proved to be the
breakthrough role for the man who had a career in film and television that lasted until the late 1980s. Ward Bond and Barton McClane, who played the two police detectives always questioning Spade about his possible role in the murders of Archer and Thursby, both had careers that put them in ruts of sorts. Despite his police work here, Bond mainly would be recognized for his work in Westerns such as My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, Johnny Guitar, The Searchers, Rio Bravo and the TV series Wagon Train, though he did go back on the beat as Bert the cop in It's a Wonderful Life. McClane did his share of Westerns, but he got to go to war a lot as well such as in The Glenn Miller Story. He worked with Bogart, director Huston and his dad again in Treasure of the Sierra Madre and thanks to reruns may be best known these days for his recurring role as General Peterson on I Dream of Jeannie. Lee Patrick worked steadily in roles such as Bert Pierce's mistress Maggie Biederhof in Mildred Pierce and did lots of TV work, most notably as Henrietta Topper in the 1950s sitcom version of Topper. Patrick and Cook also were the only original Falcon cast members to appear in the 1975 spoof The Black Bird starring George Segal as Sam Spade Jr.
Speaking of spoofs, though Gladys George's part as Iva Archer, widow of Miles and scorned lover of Sam Spade, isn't that large in Huston's version, if you've ever seen The Cheap Detective, it's hard not to envision
Marsha Mason's Georgia Merkle, especially when Gladys George's Iva wears her full mourning gear. It doesn't help that Sam doesn't take Iva seriously in the Falcon when she enters in that outfit either. The scene, where Iva comes in and basically asks Sam if he killed Miles so they could be together and he lashes out because she acts as if she hopes he did, is a joy because of the way Bogart plays it. Bogie claps his hands and says to her, "You killed my husband. Be kind to me." For those unfamiliar with The Cheap Detective, it was the second parody that Neil Simon wrote directly for the screen that featured Peter Falk playing Bogart. The more famous (and better) film, Murder By Death, had him as Sam Diamond and he was part of an ensemble of "the world's greatest detectives." Falk's performance was so hysterical they built The Cheap Detective around him doing Bogart again, only as a spoof of all Bogie movies with Falk's character named Lou Peckinpaugh. Gladys George's career dated back to the silent era and she made some other notable films including The Hard Way with Ida Lupino, The Best Years of Our Lives and Detective Story. She also earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actress in 1936 for Valiant Is the Word for Carrie.Though now (and with good reason), Bogart would be considered the biggest name in The Maltese Falcon (and he did receive top billing), at the time Mary Astor probably had the most star wattage in the cast. Astor begin working as an actress in silent films in 1921 and was one of the fortunate ones who had a voice and talent that allowed her to make the transfer to sound pictures easily. Astor also wrote the
often used line (just change the name) that there are five stages in the career of an actor: "Who's Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who's Mary Astor?" One of her silent vehicles included that John Barrymore Don Juan whose title writer co-wrote the 1931 Maltese Falcon. In the sound era, she went a little crazy on a rubber plantation with Gable and Harlow in Red Dust; joined Walter Huston in the underrated classic Dodsworth; and showed her penchant for comedy as well in the Billy Wilder/Charles Bracket scripted Midnight. Her career would continue in film and television for another 23 years after The Maltese Falcon and include reteaming with Bogart, Greenstreet and Huston as director the following year in Across the Pacific; Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story; Meet Me in St. Louis; Act of Violence; and her final film, Robert Aldrich's Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte in 1964. She actually won the Oscar for supporting actress for 1941, but not for The Maltese Falcon but for the melodrama The Great Lie starring Bette Davis. The award was very much deserved, but that in no way diminishes her work as Miss Wonderly alias Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Astor proves superb at balancing the seductive side of Brigid with the admittedly deadly side. Yes, she's a killer and it isn't a sister she's after, it's the black bird. Some of the conversations between her and Spade just mesmerize.(When Sam first learns of some of her lies and she tries to keep him on her side.)
BRIGID: I've got nobody to help me if you won't help me. Be generous, Mr. Spade. You're brave, you're strong. You can share some of that courage and strength. Help me, Mr. Spade. I need help so badly. I have no right to ask you, I know I haven't…
SAM: You won't need much of anybody's help. You're good. It's chiefly your eyes I think, and that throb you get in your voice. When you say things like, 'Be generous, Mr. Spade.'
BRIGID: I deserved that, but the lie was in the way I said it, not in the words. It's my own fault you can't trust me now.
SAM: Now you are dangerous.
Once Spade deduces that it was Brigid who killed his partner Miles in a botched plan where she thought that either he or Miles would kill Thursby or Thursby would kill one of them and she could send him to jail to get rid of him. Unfortunately, Thursby ended up being murdered by Wilmer before she could set him up. When Sam lets her know that he plans to turn her in for Miles' murder, Brigid can't believe her feminine wiles didn't win him over and Sam responds, quite cruelly at times.
SAM: I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over. The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you.
BRIGID: (trying to laugh) Don't, Sam. Don't say it even in fun. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, I was frightened for a minute. I really thought … You do such wild and unpredictable things.
SAM: Don't be silly. You're taking the fall.
BRIGID: You've been playing with me. Just pretending you care to trap me like this. You didn't care at all. You don't love me!
SAM: I won't play the sap for you!
…
BRIGID: You know down deep in your heart and in spite of anything I've done I love you…How can you do this to me, Sam? Surely, Mr. Archer wasn't so much to you as…(crying)
SAM: When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's — it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.
Outside of Spade, Sydney Greenstreet's Kaspar Gutman grabs the lion's share of memorable dialogue, often while conversing with Sam. As I mentioned earlier, the movie amazingly was Greenstreet's film debut at 61. He's spent considerable time in the theater, mostly on the English stage, but it's miraculous that he found his way to Hollywood. At one point, Gutman says of Spade, "By gad, sir, you are a character. There's never any telling what you'll say or do next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing." That applies to Greenstreet as well. He shows up in U.S. movies at 61-years-old, weighing around 300 pounds, earns an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for his film debut, makes 22 more films in the next eight years and dies 1ess than 13 years later. When his health prevented him from acting in film or television, he spent two years starring as Rex Stout's famous sleuth in "The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe" on NBC Radio. In his 23 movies, he made three that Huston directed, six that starred Bogart and nine that co-starred Lorre.
"I do like a man who tells you right out he's looking for himself. I do not trust a man who tells you he's not."
"I distrust a closed-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong kind of things. I'll tell youright now I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk."
"There are other means of persuasion other than killing or threats of killing."
"I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, it's possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon."
"I distrust a man who says 'when.' If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does."
"Seventeen years I've wanted that little item and I've been trying to get it. If we must spend another year on the quest…well, sir, it will be an additional expenditure in time of only…five and fifteen seventeenths percent."
"That's an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. 'Cause as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away."
Before discussing the most important ingredient in The Maltese Falcon, a few more quick general points about the movie. One aspect that slips my mind between viewings of the film concerns its structure. Now, as I wrote at the outset, the puzzle and the plot hardly
matters but what's so unique for a detective story, especially one that many like to claim as the start date for film noir, it sets up its denouement almost like an Agatha Christie novel with all the central characters gathered in one room. What separates The Maltese Falcon from that type of mystery resolution is that Sam Spade in no way functions like a Hercule Poirot or a Miss Marple. What makes it daring in terms of filmmaking is that Falcon runs about one hour and 40 minutes long and nearly the last 30 minutes consists of Spade, Brigid, Gutman, Cairo and Wilmer all in the same room, explaining what happened and keeping an eye on each other until the bird gets delivered by Effie the next morning. It never loses the viewer during that time as it switches tones several times such as when Spade tries to convince the crooks that they need a fall guy to pin the murders on to an angry Wilmer who Sam teases that his associates plan to sell out and Gutman playing games, trying to make it look as if Brigid stole some cash. There's humor, suspense and, of course, the payoff — when the long-sought Maltese Falcon arrives and turns out to be a lead-based fake.
The most important element of The Maltese Falcon though has to be its impact on Humphrey Bogart's career. Brought to Hollywood to re-create his bad guy role in the film version of The Petrified Forest, Bogart had long been frustrated when his Warner Bros. contract stuck him in the rut of second-string hoods, often getting the roles George Raft refused. He knew he could do more and he wanted to do more. Through some chicanery on his part (and some help from John Huston who wrote the screenplay and may well be the person who wrote best for Bogart), Bogie started his transition earlier in 1941 by playing Roy "Mad Dog" Earle in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra. Earle may have been a lifetime crook just out of prison, but he planned a final job so he could go straight but finds his heart broken by a handicapped young woman who chooses to help. For the first time, he got to play a killer that was undeniably human, whose heart could break. Later that year, when Huston got his chance to direct, Bogart got to play Sam Spade (though Huston first sough Raft) and a world-class antihero was born. Bogart enjoys the chance to break the shackles of his stereotype so much, he literally leaps off the screen in The Maltese Falcon. It may have been Huston's directing debut and Greenstreet's film debut, but it might as well have been Bogart's introduction to the public as well because watching him as Sam Spade, he looks as if he is someone that has just been discovered. Bogart made fortysomething films prior to The Maltese Falcon, but Falcon may as well have been his start. I despise the phrase, since in its proper use it means something has gone terribly wrong with your computer, but the movie gave Bogart's film acting career one helluva reboot.
Bogart's Sam Spade lives and breathes cool and witty — or at least that's the image he projects. It's great to watch as he blows up at his first meeting with Gutman because he's not getting the answers he wants and storms out of his hotel room in a rage. Once he's in the hall though, he breaks into an immediate grin and claps his hands, practically skipping to the elevator. However, the meeting did get to him because when he reaches out to push the button, he sees that his hand has the shakes — yet he laughs at that. I've mentioned his sarcastic retorts to Iva and Brigid, but he gives it to everyone. When he's hauled in by the district attorney, hia assistant and a stenographer to answer questions, he unleashes a long and fast spiel, ranting, "Now, both you and the police have as much as accused me of being mixed up in the other night's murders. Well, I've had trouble with both of you before. And as far as I can see my best chance of clearing myself of the trouble you're trying to make for me, is by bringing in the murderers all tied up. And the only chance I've got of catching them, and tying them up, and bringing them in, is by staying as far away as possible from you and the police, because you'd only gum up the works." He then pauses and turns to the stenographer. "You getting this all right, son, or am I goin' too fast for ya?" he asks the stenographer. "No, sir, I'm getting it all right," the man answers. "Good work," Sam replies.
Of course, many of the funniest moments lie in Sam's run-ins with Wilmer, the tiniest, weakest tough guy in movie history. Spade always disarms him, knocks him around or belittles him. It's no wonder that Gutman is willing to sell him out at the end even though he thinks of him as a "son" and it's implied that he may be Gutman's gay lover. When Sam shows up for a meeting and Wilmer is waiting, he needles him as usual. "Keep on riding me and they're gonna be picking iron out of your liver," Wilmer threatens. "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, huh?" Sam responds. That's one change Huston made from Hammett's story: Wilmer still sneaks out but in the story, he kills Gutman out on the street. Another change concerns the film's famous closing line. When the cops ask Sam what the black bird is, he says, "The stuff that dreams are made of." Neither Hammett nor Huston wrote that, but Bogart improvised that reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest. In his book The Films in My Life, Francois Truffaut best summed up how big an impact this film had on Bogie's career. "Now the outlaw became private eye, with a police ID in his pocket just in case. He made the switch and added up the balance: in just under 40 films, he had died a dozen times in the electric chair, and had totaled more than 800 years at hard labor. Before, the only thing that spoke was his gun. Now, he spoke." Now look what we had to look forward to from Bogart: Casablanca, Sahara, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, In a Lonely Place, The African Queen, Beat the Devil, The Caine Mutiny and Sabrina, to name but a few.
John Huston's career went on even longer (and included some overlap) and acted as well as directed. The asterisks indicate films in which he acted only. Some examples: Across the Pacific, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, Moulin Rouge, Beat the Devil, The Misfits, Freud, The List of Adrian Messenger, The Cardinal*, The Night of the Iguana, Myra Breckenridge*, Fat City, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Chinatown*, Breakout*, The Man Who Would Be King, The Wind and the Lion*, Wise Blood, Winter Kills*, Lovesick*, Under the Volcano, Prizzi's Honor and The Dead.
At 70, The Maltese Falcon remains as great as ever and it created one of the great acting-directing teams in John Huston and Humphrey Bogart. Most of their films truly were the stuff that dreams are made of.
Tweet
Labels: 40s, Aldrich, Bette, Bogart, Falk, Harlow, Huston, Lorre, Lupino, Mary Astor, Movie Tributes, Neil Simon, P. Sturges, Raft, Remakes, Shakespeare, Truffaut, W. Huston, Walsh, Welles
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Cliff Robertson 1923-2011
Ordinarily, when someone with as long and as illustrious a career as Cliff Robertson passes away, I would try to be as comprehensive as possible in my appreciation. Unfortunately, because I've been so underwater in projects, I didn't receive the news until much later than I should have and the due dates of the projects require that I can't take myself away from them for too long a stretch. Before I write my short look at the career of Mr. Robertson, who died Saturday one day after his 88th birthday, I'd like to express regret for not finding a better photo of him as the slimy and manipulative presidential candidate Ben Cantwell in the 1964 film adaptation of Gore Vidal's play The Best Man. His at-any-costs maneuvers to wrestle the nomination away from Henry Fonda's William Russell, for me at least, was the best work Robertson ever did on screen.
Tweet
Labels: Aldrich, Crawford, De Palma, DeVito, Fosse, H. Fonda, John Carpenter, Mailer, Mankiewicz, Obituary, Oscars, Raimi, Redford, Television, Tennessee Williams, Theater, Vidal, Walken, Walsh
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Friday, July 01, 2011
We gave them virtue, they want vice
there lived a very successful motion picture producer named Felix Farmer.
He owned three beautiful houses, he had two lovely children and he was married to a gorgeous movie star. The people who ran the studio where he worked loved and admired him because he had never made
a movie that had lost money. Then one day he produced the biggest most expensive motion picture
of his career…and it flopped. The people who ran the studio were very angry at Felix
because they lost millions of dollars…
and Felix lost his mind.
By Edward Copeland
We see that title crawl after brief credits run while Julie Andrews as actress Sally Miles plays Gillian West in her producer husband Felix Farmer's multimillion extravaganza Night Wind. That photo above doesn't do justice to how garish that set is as Sally as Gillian cavorts with life-size toys dancing and singing "Polly Wolly Doodle" (There are even singing balloons and a Jack in the Box). It has to be seen. Click here. You can believe from that scene alone that Night Wind truly stinks as much as they say it does, though how they could calculate on its opening weekend that it's "the lowest-grossing film of all time," seems a bit suspect. I would imagine films that never open would have lower grosses. Maybe the biggest money loser in relation to cost? Oh, who cares? We're not here to be serious or particularly realistic. We're here to pay tribute to the 30th anniversary of writer-director Blake Edwards' mad spoof of the movie business. Blessed with an unbelievably large and talented cast, S.O.B. isn't as sophisticated as Robert Altman's The Player would be a little more than a decade later and its satire isn't as sharp as Sidney Lumet's film of Paddy Chayefsky's take on the television industry was in Network a mere five years earlier, but it was and remains damn funny.
That crawl scrolls against the blue sky over Malibu beach where a man (Stiffe Tanney) jogs with his dog (Troubles). He suddenly suffers a heart attack and though he manages to crawl toward the deck of a large beachhouse and the dog barks up a storm, no one notices his emergency and he collapses. It sets the tone for an underlying theme that afflicts most of the film's characters: obliviousness, mostly stemming from self-absorption. As a result, a man drops dead on a beach with his dog barking loudly even though people keep coming and going on the deck a few feet above where a catatonic Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) sits among the trades reporting Night Wind's failure.
(A smaller headline in Variety reads N.Y. Critics Break 'Wind' — Edwards' humor doesn't always aim for the highbrow. Though from the descriptive crawl, you'd think that Felix is the film's main character. While S.O.B., which does not stand for what you think it does, revolves around him and his movie, the film truly stands as an ensemble piece. No character really serves as lead even though Andrews and William Holden as the film's director Tim Culley get top billing, all the other significant characters are listed alphabetically. In fact, Felix remains in his non-speaking state of depressed madness for a long time. When he does snap out of it and taks 44 minutes into the film, Mulligan at first does it in a way very reminiscent of reactions his character of Burt Campbell on television's Soap sometimes did.While S.O.B. retains its power to make me laugh decades after I first saw the movie, I have to admit that re-watching it for the first time in a long time, I found more problems than before, but not as an entertainment rather in how it chooses to take its shots at the always worthy target of movie studios. I first saw S.O.B. on cable when I was a teenager but as I've grown up, not only have my tastes grown more refined, so has my knowledge of how the film industry works. S.O.B. works on many comic levels, but this time the ludicrous nature of its story took me out of the movie at times. The crawl set up the basic premise, but it's more complicated than that. Even though Night Wind has opened to terrible reviews and
worse box office, Capitol Studios President David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) desperately tries to get his top executive Dick Benson (Larry Hagman, taking the relatively minor role when he was white hot as J.R. on Dallas, having just finished the season that resolved "Who Shot J.R.?") to talk to Felix so they can jerk the film out of theaters and do a major editing job on it which they can't do because of Farmer's ironclad contract that only allows him to make changes. Sure, there was a re-edited version of Leone's Once Upon a Time in America a few years later, but that wasn't a wide release. Blackman himself has been getting pressure from the chairman of the corporation that owns Capitol Studios, Harry Sandler, played by longtime dependable Hollywood character actor Paul Stewart whose first credited film role was the butler Raymond in Citizen Kane. Now, the studio and everyone involved in Night Wind had to know it was a turkey before it opened, so why didn't they try to get him to re-edit it before it opened? You can't tell me they didn't hold test screenings. He might have had a contract that stopped anyone else from making changes, but I doubt it required Capitol Studios to give it a wide release.While that part of the movie doesn't pass the credibility test, even for a farce, other aspects do. Sally and her team worry about damage to her career and Sally would like to exit the marriage. She gets conflicting advice from her attorney Herb (Robert Loggia), her press agent Ben Coogan (Robert Webber) and her agent Eva Brown (Shelley
Winters). While Loggia wants to help extricate her from the marriage, the agents advise against it. Eva in particular reminds her client that her image couldn't withstand a divorce or even a separation, especially now. "You know this town, sweetie. You can smoke dope and end up going steady with your Afghan and you're one of the gang, but you — you're Peter Pan," Eva tells her. Winters is a riot as is just about everyone in this sparkling cast and the cast makes the film overcome its weaknesses. There also are many hints of autobiography and inside jokes sprinkled throughout. Andrews never really played Peter Pan, but she did have that Mary Poppins/Maria von Trapp image. In real life, Edwards did cope with serious depression and supposedly studio interference on Darling Lili inspired S.O.B. Ironically, Hagman's mother Mary Martin originated the roles of both Peter Pan and Maria von Trapp when the characters made their stage musical debuts.The studio finally dispatches his good friend and the film's director Culley (Holden) to the beachhouse to keep watch on him and see if he can pull Farmer back to the real world. Culley is a hard-drinking womanizer. Culley, always on the lookout for young women to decorate his surroundings, picks up
two hitchhikers on the way, Lila and Babs (Jennifer Edwards, Blake's daughter; and Rosanna Arquette in a very early role). At Farmer's house, the servants and the man who mows the yard are so oblivious to what goes on around them that they don't notice when Felix heads to the garage, starts the Cadillac and closes the garage door again. The gardener (Bert Rosario) doesn't get an inkling until he finds a dead rat. When the gardener puts the mower up, he smells the carbon monoxide and sees Felix's red eyes staring at him through the car's rear window. "Not such a good idea to sit in here with the motor running," he tells Felix as he reaches inside to try to cut the engine. Instead, he shifts it into drive and the Caddy crashes through the back of the garage, down the beach and into the ocean, just in time for Culley, Lila and Babs to stare in disbelief.
Felix's attempt at suicide introduces us to the greatest asset that S.O.B. has — Robert Preston as physician to the stars, Dr. Irving Finegarten. Blake Edwards wrote Preston the part of Toddy for his next film, Victor/Victoria, and earned Preston his only Oscar nomination, but as great as he is there, I think his Irving Finegarten is even better. Once he joins the film, he enlivens every scene he's in. When Robert Webber's character Ben, though he works for Sally, starts feeling guilty and spends most of his time hanging out with Irving and Culley, a comic troika for the ages forms. Irving mildly sedates Felix and they sit around the bar. Ben has turned into a wreck. Irving suggests giving Ben a vitamin shot. As he removes bottle after bottle from his medical bag, Dr. Finegarten has second thoughts. "Come to think of it, why should I give you a vitamin shot? I'm the one with the hangover," Irving declares.
Before I forget, when Felix's car ended up in the ocean, it did attract police interest and they did discover the poor dead man and, after subduing the dog, retrieved the corpse who was identified as veteran character actor Burgess Webster. The dog escaped and continued to hang out on the beach. Irving didn't give Felix that strong a dose apparently because he wanders downstairs and that obliviousness theme continues as Ben follows him, trying to talk, not noticing as Felix sticks his head in the oven or scrounges successfully for rope and returns upstairs. Ben soon panics with the arrival of gossip columnist Polly Reed (Loretta Swit) at the front door. Everyone tries to ignore her, but then they can hear she's sneaking in the back. Irving whispers, "This reminds me of a scene in The Thing when a terrible monster is just on the other side of a door" which only sets Ben off more. Polly comes in cooing for Felix while he's upstairs trying to hang himself. The beam doen't hold and he crashes through the floor, landing on Polly below. She ends up in the hospital in traction with multiple injuries. Irving gives him a stronger dose this time and Culley sits beside him and gives him a speech that seems especially prophetic, knowing what fate awaits Holden so soon after the film's release. It's spooky, since we know that a little more than four months later, Holden would get drunk alone at home, fall, hit his head on the corner of a nightstand and bleed to death. This was his last film.
"Felix, for the last 40 years I've lived a life of dedicated debauchery. I've consumed enough booze to destroy a dozen healthy livers. I've filled my lungs with enough nicotine to poison the entire population of Orange County. I've engaged in sexual excesses that make Caligula look like a celibate monk. I have, in fact, conscientiously, day in and day out, for more years than you've been in this best of all possible worlds, tried to kill myself and I've never felt better in my life. So, if you're really going to end it all, I can show you at least a half-dozen better ways to do it."
This being Hollywood, everyone is sleeping with everyone else and cheating as one might expect. David Blackman's girlfriend Mavis (Marisa Berenson) also is seeing an up-and-coming young actor Sam Marshall (David Young) on the side. When Culley takes Lila to the store, they run into Sam who invites Culley to a party he's having in Malibu that night. Culley regretfully declines, but hits upon the idea that perhaps a party will lift Felix's spirits so Sam agrees to move the party there. It's really the key scene in the movie with most of the film's character's there. It reminds me of Blake Edwards' 1968 film The Party with Peter Sellers, which I never was that big a fan of, but it has that sort of feel with the wacky orgiastic vibe that occurs — only he could do a lot more in a R-rated 1981 film than a pre-rating system 1968 one. Lots of sex, drugs and punchlines a-plenty. Even the cops who came earlier when Felix's car ended up in the ocean, come back for the party (and one of them is Joe Penny, whom some might remember from TV's Riptide).
Also showing up at the party are studio exec Dick Benson (Hagman), Polly Reed's henpecked husband Willard (Craig Stevens), who is supposed to do the spying for his wife, and loads of hot young men and women eager to engage in scenes that would seem more at home in the "free love" era than the
beginning of the 1980s. Felix eventually awakens from Dr. Finegarten's magic medicine and as he walks, he's too out of it to remember that there's a hole in the bedroom floor that has been covered with a rug and he steps on it and glides rather easily to the party below. He does notice that one of the partying cops took off his holster and left his gun on the bar. Felix takes the gun and returns to the refuge beneath the rug, trying to point feel the barrel so while he's covered and he can shoot himself through the rug. Before he can, a topless young woman crawls under the rug and presumably
a different gun goes off because soon Felix has fired the gun in the air a couple of times until he appears, pants down in that Burt-esque moment I alluded to earlier shouting, "Woohoo. I've got it!" The next thing we know, Felix, who hasn't said a word and who we've only seen as slow-moving, glum and silent has transformed into a ball of energy. He bursts into a bedroom where Culley is enjoying the company of a young lady and bellows, "Sex, Culley! That's the answer. We'll give 'em a $40 million pornographic epic." Having been preoccupied at the time and not accustomed to seeing Felix up and around lately, Culley expresses a bit of understandable confusion. Felix explains that the times have passed them by. People don't want the goody-goody stuff they've fed them for years, so they'll re-shoot it. Gillian West's dream will no longer be of childhood good times but of repressed fantasies. The world wants sex. David Blackman, Dick Benson (wearing a cast from an injury he sustained at the party; it's a recurring gag that almost everyone ends up in a cast — Polly's husband Willard got hurt as well and ends up in the same hospital room), and two other execs (John Pleshette, John Lawlor) wait impatiently for Farmer. They begin to
think it's a put-on until they begin to hear his voice over the speakers singing "Polly Wolly Doodle" and describing the Night Wind that they know — "But we blew it!" Felix shouts through a megaphone as he appears from behind the Jack in the Box. "Because dying fathers and lying mothers are a dime a dozen these days. Home and family have become civilization's antiques along with the flag, Sunday school, Girl Scout cookies, C.B. de Mille and virginity," Felix tells them. "We gave them virtue, they want vice. We sold them schmaltz, they prefer sadomasochism. Instead of the American dream, it should have been the American wet dream." What's funny is that, to some extent, the situation has reversed in 30 years. Movies made for adults — and I don't mean porn, but subject matter — almost have become an endangered species. Films that earn an R because they aren't for the younger set seem to be a rare breed. Live Free or Die Hard mumbled Bruce
Willis' signature line as John McClane so it could get that all-important PG-13. The King's Speech never deserved an R for its single scene where Colin Firth unleashes a string of fucks, but when it started winning awards Harvey Weinstein cut that scene just to get a PG-13 so it would earn more money. Excuse me. Back to S.O.B. Felix explains his plan to re-shoot parts of Night Wind to change it from a woman's dream of childhood to her Freudian nightmare. Turn Gillian West into a nymphomaniac businesswoman. He just needs a few million for a re-shoot. Blackman doesn't seem to be listening, but he does pull out his pages for suggestions they have for cuts that can be made to the current version. "Cutting won't help," Felix teases. Blackman yells about how much he went overbudget and Farmer rightfully goes back at him saying he didn't go to his office and hold a gun to his head and demand more money. They approved the script and the budget. Blackman is firm and is ready to walk out — until Felix offers to buy Night Wind back. The execs whisper and then they agree to sell the movie back to Farmer. Apparently, Felix has been very good with his money, though he still has to do some asset shuffling to get the funds ready to shoot. Felix must fend off someone who isn't very happy with him right now: His wife. Several million dollars of that money that Felix put together to fund the Night Wind re-shoot rightfully belongs to Sally. Felix tries to explain his plan to her, including having her do a nude scene. "Peter Pan is dead. Long live Gillian West, nymphomaniac executive," he tells her. Sally seeks the advice of her attorney Herb and her agent Eva. Herb agrees that she has plenty of grounds to sue to try to get her money back but Eva, who admits she's always there to protect Sally's image, has to ask, "What if Felix is right?" Maybe it's not a bad idea for Sally to take the chance and go against her image and possibly get a lot of money out of the deal. If it doesn't work, she always can sue him for everything later. Sally reluctantly agrees that she'll film the revised Night Wind.
Of course, getting Sally to that point is easier said than done, even if she has agreed to do it. She's too nervous. Everyone wants to be there on the set to see what happens that day. Polly Reed makes them take her by ambulance but a guard that Felix has hired named Harold Harrigan (Ken Swofford) refuses to let her in. Blackman and his toadies show up in a golf cart and Harrigan tells them to shove off as well. Blackman tells
Harrigan he won't work in Hollywood again. Felix may have control of the set, but it does reside on Capitol Studio's lot, so Blackman does succeed in having Harrigan tossed off. When Ben hears that Polly lurks, he lets her in and the two ambulance attendants are forced to hold her upright to watch. In her dressing room, nothing Felix, Culley or anyone can say can convince her to do the scene. Thankfully, Dr. Irving and his bag of tricks are on the scene (play clip above) to help and an artificially high Sally is ready to film the scene. Culley escorts her back to the set. "You know you are sexually notorious," Sally tells Culley. "A semi-fraudulent reputation which I do everything I can to encourage," Culley admits. Sally asks why he does that. "Because it's the best way for an old man to compete in a young man's world," Cully replies. Polly waves at Sally, trying to get her attention. Sally finally recognizes her, then asks, "Did you come to see my boobies?"When S.O.B. opened, reviews varied, but it was hard to hear them above the noise about Julie Andrews baring her breasts in a film for the first time. That trumped everything else about the movie. It doesn't help that the way it happens in the movie-within-the-movie makes it all about Sally Miles baring her breasts. It's not as if it comes in a Gillian West love scene, nymphomaniac or not, but it just comes at the end of a new dark dream sequence (Jack in the Box is now Jock in the Box and a stalker). As Jock chases Gillian through a maze and she enters the devil's mouth, the music builds to a crescendo, she holds out her hand for Jock to stop and simply pulls down the front of her dress and unveils her breasts. (To see something completely bizarre, here is a YouTube clip where you can see a great deal of the sequence except it has been set to the Chris de Burgh song "Lady in Red." I recommend hitting mute and just looking at the images.) Everyone present applauds, including the ambulance attendants who drop Polly as a result. Sally smiles gratefully and covers herself, before collapsing. However, this is Hollywood and scheming usually is going on. Sally's personal secretary Gary (Stuart Margolin) never has been trustworthy but he's been talking to Eva behind Sally's back in hopes of getting a career of his own. Now that Capitol Studios has no part of Night Wind, all the buzz that has been building has made the corporate boss bug Blackman about why they don't have a piece of it in case it turns into a hit. As a result, the studio has been using Eva who has been dangling a job in front of Gary in exchange for him putting the idea in Sally's head that since she technically owns half the film, she should sell distribution rights to Capitol since Felix can't very well distribute it himself. Sally agrees to do it and a judge backs up her right to do it. Felix, however, doesn't learn of it until after he screens a final cut of it with Cully and the lights come up in the screening room to reveal Blackman and his toadies. Blackman shows him the legal documents which basically means Night Wind has been stolen from him. Since his original contract was voided, they can do what they want. Blackman asks what the running time is. When he's told 164 minutes, he says they'll have to cut that.
Felix drives like a maniac, first going to his other house looking for Sally, but she's gone somewhere in the Far East to visit some kind of swami. He does see his kids briefly who want to play with daddy and squirt him with a squirt gun, which he takes. He even plows a car through the kitchen of the Malibu home. Because he's been speeding and driving recklessly, police have been pursuing him, but somehow he's able to switch cars and escape. He drives to the office where the original negative is stored in a vault. When he gets in the building, a friendly voice surprises him: It's Harrigan. He's working security there now. Felix is too preoccupied for small talk. He goes to the office of a Mr. Lipschitz (Hamilton Camp) and makes him take him to the film at "gunpoint." As Felix leads Lipschitz and the reels to the lobby, the squirt gun aimed at Lipschitz's head, Harrigan tries to calm him since by then a lot of armed police have arrived. Some distraction makes Felix aim the gun toward the cops and he gets hit by a fusillade of bullets. Harrigan leans over the dying producer. "I'm sorry, Mr. Farmer," Harrigan says. "It's alright, Harrigan. It'll mean another $10 million at the box office," Farmer tells him before he dies.
At this point, the film divides half into Hollywood hypocrisy, half into the funniest part of the film as the three characters most disgusted by Felix's treatment band together on a bender: Culley, Irving and Ben. It begins at a bar where Sinatra's "All the Way" begins playing and Culley informs them that he just put $6 of Sinatra into the jukebox. Ben, having worked for Sally, who they feel stabbed Felix in the back, feels the worst and tries to convince Culley to beat the shit out of him in the hope it will make him feel better. It's in this scene that we learn that the S.O.B. of the title stands for Standard Operational Bullshit, according to Ben. Culley agrees, lamenting that there are "so few people in this town with a conscience." Meanwhile, the rest of the industry plans a huge memorial service where Sally plans to sing and they all will pretend they treated him decently. The drunken trio, who christen themselves The Three Muscatels at one point, all agree they won't take part in the sham, which will be presided over by the guru Sally met in the Far East (Larry Storch). Sall also will sing. The triumvirate decides that they are going to give Felix the memorial he deserves and set out to steal Felix's body from the funeral home. Apparently, this is based on a Hollywood legend that director Raoul Walsh stole John Barrymore's corpse after he died and propped him up to scare Errol Flynn, but what the fictional characters do with Felix is a bit more elaborate.
When they get to the funeral home, the first coffin they check is no one they know. The next contains the late character actor Burgess Webster. The third time turns out to be the charm and they find Felix. Feeling that Webster's death hasn't received the attention it deserved, when they remove Felix, they put Webster in
his coffin and the other guy in Webster's. Upstairs, the couple (Byron Kane, Virginia Gregg) that owns the funeral parlor salivate over how much business the Farmer funeral will bring them when they hear a noise downstairs. They find the empty coffin but locate the body in Webster's place and Webster in Farmer's. The husband is beside himself: Their cash cow is gone. His wife slams the lid on Farmer's coffin, now holding Webster. "Who's to know?" On the streets, after initial difficulty bending Felix into the car, they make Ben sit in the back with him because he's been having a bad night of bodily functions and as Irving points out Felix is the only one who won't mind. They stick some sunglasses on Felix and proceed to drive him back to Culley's where they drink and play cards with Felix as guest. It was funny for a time when I'd see the movie because from the years 1989-2000, the only actor in these scenes who was still alive was Richard Mulligan, who was playing the corpse. As they wonder what they should do with Felix, Culley fetches something from another room and places it on Felix's head. It's a Viking helmet for a Viking funeral.The next morning, the men take Felix out to sea on his boat to prepare for their salute. At the same time, the rest of the industry begins gathering on a soundstage at the Capitol Studio lot for Felix's funeral. The
occasion doesn't stop anyone from continuing their deals or their affairs. Blackman congratulates Sam Harris on his new role and whispers to Mavis that he better be worth it, not noticing that Sam's hand is up Mavis' skirt. Gary and Eva finalize their deal. All the people with various injuries wheel in. Sally tells Gary that she doesn't know if she'll be able to sing. "You have to — it's the only reason everybody came," Gary says. Her guru sits up on the stage looking as if he can barely stay awake. Finally, he's roused and stands to give his eulogy. Is it full of Eastern philosophy? Not hardly. It's as show bizzy as it can be. This is where some of the unreality takes over again. Felix was shot and killed before the film was released and still in the funeral home, yet the guru gives new box office reports on the revised Night Wind. Farmer also was supposed to have had a record of nothing but hits prior to the first version of Night Wind, but when the guru reads off the list of his film titles they all sound ridiculous. Here is a clip of the eulogy so you can see what I mean.
As Culley drives the boat, Irving and Ben sit on deck with Felix in the fisherman's seat, complete with rod and reel in hand. Ben wonders what happens if he should catch something. Back at the other memorial, Sally finally rises and sings "Oh Promise Me." Irving reads the inscription on the Viking helmet which reads "From the cast and crew of The Pagan Plunder." "I don't think I saw that one," Irving says. "Terrible reviews," Ben tells him. "Grossed a fortune." Once Culley feels they've gone far enough out, they load Felix into a little wooden craft, cover him in blankets, soak it with gasoline and then Irving lights a match and drops it and Culley pulls the boat away as it starts burning. "So long pal," Culley says as they watch Felix and the little boat burn. Back on the beach, Burgess Webster's dog can see the smoke and wags his tail. Then a final crawl scrolls across the screen.
in motion picture history and Sally won another Academy Award and the people who ran the studio made
a ton of money and they all lived happily ever after…
until the next movie!
S.O.B. isn't the finest Hollywood satire ever made, but it's likely to put a smile on your face thanks to its great cast, most especially Robert Preston who I really can't say enough about here.
Tweet
Labels: 80s, Altman, Blake Edwards, Chayefsky, Colin Firth, Erroll Flynn, H. Weinstein, Holden, Julie Andrews, K. Douglas, Leone, Lumet, Movie Tributes, R. Preston, Richard Mulligan, Shelley Winters, Sinatra, Walsh, Willis
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Bernard Herrmann Part II
By Edward Copeland
So I had to divide this tribute to Bernard Herrmann in two parts. If somehow you started here and want to backtrack, click here. We pick up still in 1956 and I wanted to use two clips from Hitchcock's 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much, but YouTube has removed both since I wrote this and I could find no good substitute.
A Hatful of Rain (1957) directed by Fred Zinnemann; Scene: Turning Johnny in
Have Gun — Will Travel was one of the most popular TV Westerns of its time starring Richard Boone as Paladin, a West Point grad turned gunfighter after the Civil War. It ran from 1957-1963. It managed to have two themes: the instrumental one that Herrmann wrote for its opening credits and a song "The Ballad of Paladin" that played over the closing credits. We, of course, are only interested in Herrmann's contribution.
1958 brings us back to Vertigo, whose opening credit sequence I used as the opening to Part I simply because I felt it was one of if not his greatest. Thankfully, it is not one of the movies. Unfortunately, another clip I planned to use from it from YouTube also disappeared that I wanted to include to show how his score worked within the context of the Hitchcock masterpiece, but most did not so I got to use one to top Part II and another for after this graf. There are so many choices because frankly I don't believe Vertigo would be as great as it is without Herrmann's contribution. I could have selected the opening rooftop chase, the first time Scottie sees Madeleine at Scotty's restaurant with those beautiful, vivid reds (which I took up top), the museum scene, or many others. I had settled on the scene where Scottie tails Madeleine and saves her after she jumps into the bay but that disappeared, so I went with the museum
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) directed by Nathan Juran; Piece: Skeleton fight
North by Northwest (1959) directed by Hitchcock; Piece: Title sequence
On Oct. 2, 1959, one of the most iconic television series of all times premiered on CBS: Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. Bernard Herrmann wrote the show's theme, though not the famous one when you're familiar with and you could mimic right now. His intro music was only used for the first season, though he scored many individual episodes.
Here we have an interesting comparison of a Bernard Herrmann score that later is evoked in another composer's score either as homage or something else. You be the judge. First, listen to part of Herrmann's score for director Henry Levin's 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth. Then, listen to its echoes present in Danny Elfman's main title music for Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. Next in 1960, Herrmann and Hitch teamed again for the memorable Psycho. If I had my preference, I'd embed a clip of the Saul Bass title sequence with the score, but it's been disabled, so you'll have to click to hear it. However, I was able to embed the shower scene.
Tender Is the Night (1962) directed by Henry King; Pieces: 3 tracks
Here is one of the more interesting comparisons. First, we have Herrmann's original main theme for J. Lee Thompson's 1962 Cape Fear (but unfortunately not actual footage from the movie) and then we have Elmer Bernstein's adaptation of Herrmann's score for Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of the film — complete with Saul Bass title sequence.
Marnie (1964) directed by Hitchcock; Piece: Prelude
Fahrenheit 411 (1966) directed by Francois Truffaut; Piece: Prelude
The Virginian TV series Episode: "The Reckoning (9/13/67); Piece: Title credits
What's next is something special. First, we have sequences from Truffaut's 1968 film The Bride Wore Black without dialogue, only Herrmann's score. After that, we have Herrmann himself discussing his work on the score of the film against scenes from it.
Director Roy Boulting made a thriller in 1968 called Twisted Nerve for which Herrmann composed a frightening, whistle for the film's killer to use. It has taken on a popularity greater than the film itself. So here are three takes on it. First, we have the whistle as it is emanates from Hywel Bennett as the killer in the movie. Second, we have how Herrmann incorporated the whistle into the movie's score. Lastly, we have Quentin Tarantino's homage to it in a scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1.
In 1974, Herrmann scored the schlocky horror film It's Alive, but I could find no samples of his work from that film. On Dec. 24, 1975, Bernard Herrmann died of a heart attack at the age of 64, but he left two scores behind, both of which received his final two Oscar nominations in 1976: Brian De Palma's Obsession and one of his greatest, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Both nominations lost to Jerry Goldsmith's score for The Omen.
First, from Obsession
Of course, it's nearly impossible to keep a clip from a Scorsese film up for long, but we've got the masterful Taxi Driver score, if not the images that go with them.
Ironic in a way, that Bernard Herrmann's film scoring career began with the ultimately lonely Charles Foster Kane and ended with the God's lonely man Travis Bickle. What range. What talent. Imagine if he had lived longer.
Tweet
Labels: De Niro, De Palma, Doris Day, Herrmann, Hitchcock, J. Stewart, Music, Oscars, Scorsese, Tarantino, Television, Tim Burton, Walsh
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Requiem for a lifestyle
By Edward Copeland
As much as an icon as Humphrey Bogart has been and for as long as he's held that status, it's hard to believe that he already was 40 years old before he became a true movie star and that his career as a legend lasted a mere 15 years. The film that gave him his first starring role and launched him into the celebrity stratosphere, High Sierra, was released 70 years ago today.
Bogart had been kicking around the Warner Bros. studio system in supporting gangster roles since he made his big impression repeating his Broadway role as Duke Mantee in the 1936 film version of The Petrified Forest. Bogart would never have received that break if the star of the play and the movie, Leslie Howard, hadn't insisted that Bogart must repeat the part on film. Warners had gained a reputation as "Murderers Row" with its success in the gangster genre and its stable of famous crime movie stars such as James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft and Paul Muni. The studio didn't see the need for bringing out a New York actor for the part, but Howard and Bogie won out. Bogart got a contract with the studio out of the deal, but his career seemed stuck in neutral.
W.R. Burnett, who wrote the novel Little Caesar, whose film version just happened to premiere 80 years ago today, penned the novel High Sierra and Warners snapped up the rights two weeks after publication, envisioning it as a vehicle for Muni. They gave the book to one of their young writers, John Huston, to turn
into a screenplay and he produced a script that followed the book fairly faithfully, but Muni rejected it. The studio brought Burnett in to work with Huston on another draft, but Muni nixed that one too. In the meantime, Bogart had seen the High Sierra script and knew he had to play Roy Earle, seeing in him a part that could lift him to the next level of Hollywood actors. The studio pursued Raft, who happened to ask Bogart his opinion of the script. Bogart acted less than enthusiastic, telling Raft that it just seemed like another standard tough guy role who gets shot up in the end. He successfully talked Raft out of it and the studio turned to him, even though Earle is substantially older than Bogie was. They began makeup tests and when those passed muster, the part was his. Raoul Walsh was assigned to direct and Ida Lupino was cast as the girl of one of the criminals. Bogart, Lupino and Walsh had all worked together in They Drive By Night. Since Bogart still wasn't a bankable name and They Drive By Night was considered a big hit for Lupino, she got top billing. High Sierra was the last film Bogart made where his name didn't appear first. High Sierra also launched the friendship that led to one of the all-time great actor-director partnerships between Huston and Bogart, which would premiere later that year with Huston's directing debut, The Maltese Falcon.Walsh opens his film with the credits scrolling up with the Sierra mountain range in the background, foreshadowing its role in the film's climax, before he fades into a shot of the Governor's Mansion. We move inside where we see a man, presumably the governor, as he signs what we see in closeup is an unconditional pardon for Roy Earle. We then see a montage of shots from a prison: Inmates going about their day, the cells,
the guards, etc., until we see its name: Mossmoor Prison and sidle down to the prison gates where a man waits in a car. Then Roy Earle (Bogart), looking sharp in a suit, tie and hat shakes a guard's hand, the gates open and he steps out to freedom. The driver (George Lloyd) gets out and tells Roy he's been waiting more than an hour for him. "I've been waiting too — over eight years," Earle replies. The man who picked up Roy notices his distracted air and asks him if he's OK. "I will be, just as soon as I'm sure that grass is still green and trees are still growing," Roy tells him before heading for a walk in the park where he bypasses a newspaper announcing his release from prison (He's identified as a "Famous Indiana Bank Robber" and people are upset by his early release) to enjoy nature and even toss a baseball back to some kids. That's what separates Roy Earle from the usual gangster you'd find in that movie genre. Sure, he's a tough guy, but he also has a tender, empathetic side as we will see later, a side that will hurt him in a way no bullet ever could.Following his brief sojourn with nature, Roy heads to a house where he expects to find Big Mac. (No, not the sandwich, the crime boss who backs his heists and arranged his pardon.) A man and a woman are waiting for him: the man reading the newspaper and wondering what's keeping him, the blonde (Isabel Jewell) filled with
excitement at the prospect of meeting the infamous Roy "Mad Dog" Earle. The man (Barton MacLane) tells her that when Earle gets there, she needs to lock herself in the bedroom and stay out of sight. She pouts and hears the car indicating Earle's arrival. She dutifully goes to the bedroom, but keeps the door cracked so she can peek, so the man tosses a book at the door to get her to shut it. When Roy enters the house, he wants to know where Mac is and the man introduces himself as Jack Kranmer, whom Earle immediately pegs as a cop, though Jack insists he's an ex-cop. Kranmer tells him that Mac is in California and wants Earle to head that way. He's planning a jewelry caper at a ritzy hotel in the resort town of Tropical Springs. Kranmer rubs Roy the wrong way and Earle expresses suspicions about him, wishing to talk to Mac himself. Kranmer reminds him that Mac spent a fortune springing him from prison so Mac "calls the tune and you dance to it." We finally get to see the tough side of Earle as he gives Kranmer several quick slaps on each side of his face before exiting.
While on the road to California, after a brief stop for a nostalgic look at his childhood farm (this Earle really is a softie at heart), Roy's driving skills save himself and another vehicle from having an accident when the other car swerves wildly when a rabbit darts across the two-lane-highway. Down the road a bit later, Roy stops for some gas and the lonesome attendant chatters away about the sight of the Sierra range ahead and Mount Whitney, the highest point in the U.S. The car that almost collided with Roy happens to pull up and the old man in it (Henry Travers) hops out to extend his gratitude to Roy for saving them from a wreck. He says his granddaughter Velma (Joan Leslie) was driving at the time and she probably had been driving longer than she should have been. He introduces himself and his wife (Elizabeth Risdon). It seems that they have just lost their farm and are heading to California to live with Velma's mom. Roy wishes them luck and departs with a kind smile.
Earle rolls into a lakeside lodging camp where his two caper associates are staying. The place is mostly a site for fishermen and the first person he encounters is a black man named Algernon (Willie Best), who
unfortunately is played as the worst of comic stereotypes of the era. It's really one of the few blights on an otherwise classic film. Algernon tells Roy two men have been expecting him and points out which cabin Roy's staying in and which cabin holds the two men. Roy also meets a scrappy little dog named Pard. (In the opening credits, they get it wrong and say 'Pard' as 'Zero', though it's fixed for the end credits.) Earle compliments Algernon on Pard, but is corrected. Pard isn't his: His original master got killed in an accident there and Pard just never left. Roy asks Algernon to drive his car to his cabin and take his bags inside and he heads up to meet the men who will be his partners in crime. Before he meets the men, he grimaces, because a woman sits outside the cabin, idly stirring the dirt with a twig. He asks her about the men and first Red appears (a very young Arthur Kennedy), followed by Babe (Alan Curtis). They introduce the woman as Marie (Lupino). Earle asks Red if he can speak to him alone. He learns that Babe picked up Marie and Roy tells him to get rid of her, send her away. A woman will just be a distraction.Red returns and shares the news with Babe and Marie. The two men provide a study in contrasts in their assessments of Earle. Red practices a sort of idol worship as far as Roy is concerned, while Babe thinks Earle
looks old and out of touch and doesn't like him giving them orders. Marie adamantly declares that she doesn't want to go. She has no intention of returning to the dime-a-dance joint where she used to work to make a living. She decides that maybe she can change his mind herself, but Red and Babe laugh at her. The next morning, Algernon comes to Roy's cabin with Pard and asks if he can do anything for him. Earle says he can use some breakfast, but Algernon says that Marie already has prepared that for him. He then shows off how smart Pard is by demonstrating some of his tricks. As Roy begins to dine, Pard comes begging. Earle compliments the dog as a born panhandler just as Marie arrives and Algernon excuses himself. Marie eases into the subject, suggesting first that Roy should go outside and get some sun. "Where I was staying, they didn't let me get out in the sun. Afraid I might spoil my girlish complexion," Roy responds. Then Marie brings up the subject of her leaving as gracefully as she can, telling Roy that she hears he wants her to go back to L.A., but she'd prefer to stay. Marie then drops a little bit of information on him. Be wary of Louis Mendoza, she tells him. Mendoza's their inside man at the Tropico hotel, where he's the night manager. Marie tells Roy that Mendoza has a tendency to talk too much. Marie's gambit seems to have worked as Roy tells her she doesn't have to leave immediately. They'll see how things play out first.
Later, Mendoza (Cornel Wilde) drops in for cards with the guys. Earle comes by for a visit and interrupts their game, figuring it's a perfect time to go over the heist plans. The shifty Mendoza makes him nervous. They lay out the floor plan for the hotel to start planning the heist. Red, excitedly, bring out a violin case to show Roy what they've acquired: a trusty submachine gun. Roy takes the opportunity to tell a story about a crew with a similar weapon, a crew convinced they had a rat in their ranks. As that crew sat around, their leader held the gun with his finger on the trigger as they made small talk and watched the suspected rat sweat. The more they talked, the more he perspired. The leader's finger slipped and the gun went off three times — which Earle punctuates with three quick loud taps on the table — and the rat was dead. Just like that, Roy repeats, doing the taps again. He'd made his point: Mendoza was thoroughly intimidated and stood, wiped his brow and told them that they should be ready in a couple nights. Earle similarly excuses himself. Even Babe is impressed at Roy's ability to get his message across.
While waiting for the night of the heist to come, Roy takes an excursion to Los Angeles to meet with Big Mac. On the way, he encounters a traffic jam caused by a wreck. It turns out that the fender bender — a parked car pulled away from the curb without signaling and dented another vehicle — was caused by the same family he met on the road. The driver they hit raises a ruckus, but Earle smooths things over and slips the guy some cash, despite a witness saying that Velma was driving. When she gets out of their car, the witness yells,
"Look! She's a cripple!" For the first time, Earle learns that Velma's problem is a club foot. Roy asks her "Pa" about the foot and he tells him that when she was young a doctor told them she could have it fixed, but nothing came of it. Her grandfather thanks Roy for helping them again and Earle continues his journey to Mac's. When he reunites with Mac (Donald MacBride), he finds that the crime boss isn't well. He's confined to bed, but he's still partaking of plenty of booze, despite doctor's orders. Mac tells Earle how overjoyed he is to see an old pro like him again since he's been forced to work with such screwballs. "All the A-one guys are gone, dead or in Alcatraz," Mac tells Earle. "Times have sure changed." Roy agrees, adding, "Yeah, ain't they? You know, Mac, sometimes I feel like I don't know what it's all about anymore." It's here where High Sierra makes clear what its underlying theme is. This isn't your typical gangster story or even a tale of an aging criminal. High Sierra plays as an elegy for all the gangsters and the type of gangsters movies that made Warner Bros. in the 1930s. There would still be others of course, and some great ones such as White Heat, but, in a way, as war was enveloping Europe and would soon draw in the U.S., High Sierra was composing a sort of requiem for the genre.Mac and Roy hear the arrival of his doctor, so Mac urges Roy to hide the liquor. The doctor turns out to be another old pal, Doc Banton (Henry Hull), who while not a real doctor, has worked with and on Mac and Roy's criminal crews for a long time. Roy's surprised that Doc has moved his operations west as well. "Roy, this is the land of milk and honey for the health racket," Banton says, "Every woman in California thinks she's either
too fat or too thin or too something." After giving Mac the once over and again warning Mac to lay off the booze, Roy asks if he can talk to Doc in the other room. He asks what he knows about club foots and the possibility of fixing them. Doc says it depends on how bad it is, but it is certainly possible, but he couldn't do the surgery himself. Roy asks if he could take a look at Velma for him and Doc agrees, though he advises him that it could be expensive. Roy returns to Mac, who immediately motions for him to bring back the liquor. Earle hesitates, mentioning what Doc said, but Mac brushes him off. Mac says Doc may think that if he doesn't stop drinking, it will kill him, but he's going to die, but he's going to die anyway. "We all are, aren't we?" Mac says. On that subject, Mac gives Roy an envelope. Should something happen to him before he can get the booty from the heist, Roy should open this envelope and follow the instructions inside. It's late when he returns to the cabins, and he finds Marie in his, sitting in the dark. He turns on the lamp and sees the large bruise on her face. He asks if Babe did this and she confirms it, saying that he and Red got into a drunken brawl and she took an errant blow. Roy told her not to fret and proceeds to go talk to his associates about how to behave. Earle's demeanor has softened toward Marie, just as it has toward Velma. He's a hard-bitten criminal, but there's are soft spots inside him, not just for the women either, even for the dog Pard.While a heist motors the plot of High Sierra followed by a man hunt, really this isn't your standard suspense outing in the crime genre. It really does have that wistful feeling about it and thanks to Bogart's starmaking turn, it's really more of a character study than other films you'd find in this realm, one where many of the characters have a nihilistic streak, seeing not only the end of their line of work but of their lives as well. Walsh directs it quite beautifully, knowing when to tease with moments that need the suspense, but also ably handling
the more tender sides. Of course, Walsh would reinvigorate the genre again in White Heat and before High Sierra he'd helmed They Drive By Night and The Roaring Twenties as well as many classics in other genres including Westerns, musicals and comedies and he'd been working since the silent era, including making one of Gloria Swanson's most famous films, Sadie Thompson. In High Sierra, Walsh fills the frame with some gorgeous shots, thanks to cinematographer Tony Gaudio, who makes excellent use of the natural settings that surround the story. Gaudio's name isn't often mentioned when listing the great d.p.'s of that era but he also worked on some other marvelous looking films such as Michael Curtiz and William Keighley's The Adventures or Robin Hood and William Wyler's The Letter. Having never read the novel High Sierra, I can't say for certain how much of the dialogue was lifted directly from it, but just from hearing so much of his other work, I have to believe that John Huston has to get the credit for the majority of memorable lines that run throughout the course of the entire movie. He got his start as a writer and a script doctor and it was his work on this film, on which he spent a lot of time on the set, that finally gave him a chance to sit in the director's chair. How fortuitous, if only for allowing the bonding that took place between him and Bogart. They became one of the greatest actor-director teams in the history of film, alongside the pairings of Kurosawa and Mifune, Ford and Wayne and Scorsese and De Niro. Before High Sierra, Huston's credited work included Jezebel, Juarez, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet and Sergeant York. He also did uncredited work on Wuthering Heights and, years later, on Orson Welles' The Stranger. Huston was a very talented man — and he could act too.By this point in the movie, all the pieces and characters are in place for the various story strands that will lead to Roy Earle's undoing, emotionally and physically. It may seem an odd comparison, but when I wrote on one of my favorite films, Broadcast News, I titled the post "An unrequited love triangle" and that's really what you
have set up in High Sierra. For all Roy's initial warnings to Red that having a dame around while planning a caper would be a distraction, that's exactly the trap that Earle falls into with Velma. He's not just playing good Samaritan in his plan to fix her foot. Despite the huge gap in their ages, he pictures her as his bride once the job is done. Pa thinks Roy would be good for her, though he warns him that she's stuck on a fella back where they used to live. "It seems to me I've been close to Velma for a million years," Roy tells him while Doc is in the other room examining the feasibility of an operation. Everyone is overjoyed when he says that he's seen much worse and he's talked to the best surgeon in L.A. and thinks it can be done. Velma displays much gratitude to Roy, but it's obvious she doesn't share the romantic feelings the older crook has developed. As Doc and Roy drive away, Doc tries to talk sense to Earle, asking him what he thinks is going to happen once Velma and the rest of her family learn what he really does for a living. He tells him that she's not the type of girl for him. He needs someone who can run as fast as he can. "Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you," Doc tells him. "Said you were just rushing toward death." Again, by citing the real-life dead gangster the film keeps its theme alive of the dying of a lifestyle.
Now to have a triangle, you need three points, even if it's an unrequited one, and that third point is Marie. When we met her, we were given the impression that she was Babe's gal, but the film never shows any indication of warmth or affection between the two of them. We also assume that as she warms up to Roy it's more a matter of her wanting to avoid a return to her less than savory lifestyle at the dime-a-dance joint, but as the film develops, you see she's developing a true attachment to him. Part of it is that she recognizes that softer side that he usually hides from his criminal cronies as when they discuss what kept him going in prison and how he would never go back behind bars again. At another point, Marie happens to catch Roy having terrible nightmares while he sleeps. Roy, who was eager to get her out of the lodging camp for fear of complications, comes to
accept her presence, but not for romance or because she's pleasing to the eye, but because he suspects she might be a useful part of the heist crew — and probably more competent than either Red or Babe. When he decides to check out the Tropico himself, he takes Marie along. Unexpectedly, he takes a third member: Pard. The mutt also has grown attached to them, having already lost his previous master, so when he hears Roy's car leaving, Pard furiously chases it, until Roy stops the car and lets the dog hop in and ride in Marie's lap. When the night of the actual heist actually arrives, they pay Algernon to lock Pard up, but the resourceful pup manages to open the cabin window and get out and chase the car again that night. Roy grumbles then that he probably should have shot the dog, though we know he doesn't mean it, and then adds, "Of all the 14 karat saps — starting out on a caper with a woman and a dog."After Roy spends $400 for the surgery to fix Velma's foot (and it's deemed a success), he goes to visit her while she's still recuperating in bed. He's ecstatic and feels it's time to lay his heart out to her and proposes marriage. The question takes the happy Velma aback. She's grateful for all Roy's done to help her, but she tells him that there's someone else back home and now that her foot is fixed, nothing should stand in the way of
her marrying Lon. Bogart's demeanor will break your heart. He plays Roy as being stoic as he can at the news, but you can see that he's been shattered. Nothing really matters to him at this point but the job and if it ends badly for him, so be it. He never says it in words, but the realization that he was stupid to think a man his age (the movie never pins that down, but he's obviously supposed to be older than Bogart's 40 years) could win the heart of a cute young 20-year-old, or was he merely trying to buy it by fixing her foot for her? He makes a hasty exit, though he promises Pa that he'll come back and see her again when she's up and walking, though you know he doesn't want to see her ever again. After he leaves, Pa sits at Velma's bedside. She's upset because she didn't want to hurt Roy after all he's done for her, but, "I'm not crippled anymore Pa and I'm gonna have fun." Her few tears are gone as Velma dreams of dancing with Lon and tells her grandfather she doesn't love Roy and she never could. Her grandfather doesn't say anything, but you can tell he's disappointed in her and sees in her a bit of her trashy, good time gal mother, who we saw briefly in an earlier scene, who annoys her father to no end.
After what seems like an eternity of waiting, the time finally comes for the night of the heist. Roy goes over the plans once more with Red, Babe and Marie (Pard doesn't get specific instructions, since they don't know
he'll be tagging along at this point). As is the usual staple in most movies of this sort, the caper does not go smoothly. Roy will keep the lobby employees at bay (including Mendoza) while Red and Babe break into the security deposit boxes for the jewelry. Marie will sit outside in Roy's car and honk if she sees anyone approaching. It seems to be going OK, with only a waiter to worry about, when a rich couple arrives. Marie gives the signal and Earle herds the pair and the waiter into the sitting area to watch over. Marie has to honk again though when a security guard making his rounds gets suspicious and comes in. Roy gets him to drop his weapon at first, but something startles the woman who screams and Roy ends up killing the guard. Red and Babe return with the booty and the nervous wreck Mendoza insist that he come with them because he didn't realize anyone would get hurt and he knows he'd break. Mendoza joins Red and Babe in their car, Marie, Roy and Pard head off in his. For some reason, Red heads off on the wrong exit and Roy follows them only to see the other car spin out of control, turn over and burst into flames.Roy knows that the wreck means trouble, even if all three perished, so he figures he better head straight to Los Angeles to give the jewelry to Mac, get his cut and hightail it out of town. When he gets to Mac's, he's not
happy to see Kranmer greet him at the door. The news of the heist is all over the news and Kranmer informs him that Red and Babe are both dead but that Mendoza only suffered a broken collarbone. Earle suggests that they show Mac the goods so he can get out of there. Kranmer says Mac had been sleeping, but he'd want to wake up for this. When they enter the bedroom, they realize Mac's not sleeping — he's dead. Kranmer sees it as an opportunity for the two of them to split the bounty themselves, but Roy tells him that Mac anticipated this might happen and left him instructions. He opens the envelope and then calls the name inside and tells the person what happened to Mac. He's preparing to leave, when Kranham pulls a gun and says that he'll be taking the jewels and taking care of Earle as well. He thinks he might get a reward, maybe even reinstatement to the police force. "Like I told Mac," Roy says, "a copper's always a copper." Earle then tosses the box at Kranham, pulls his piece and kills him, but not before Kranham gets a shot off as well, wounding Roy. He grimaces his way to the car with the box and tells Marie she'll have to drive and tells her to take him to Doc's.
Doc says the wound barely missed his heart, but he'll need to take it easy. Roy apologizes that he doesn't have anything to pay him right now, but he's going to get it soon. When he gets back in the car, he tells Marie he has to keep a promise as long as he's in L.A. and he goes to Velma's house. He finds Pa at wit's end because Velma and Lon (John Eldredge) are drinking and dancing with two of Lon's friends. Roy's visit delights Pa, but Velma seems particularly annoyed. Hurting from his wound (both the physical and mental one) and seeing what type of person Lon is, Roy actually asks Velma if Lon is the type of person she wants to spend her life with as says he could give her so much more. He's unaware that Marie has entered the house just as Velma lashes out at Roy and says she could never love someone like him, telling him he's old and practically calling him ugly. Earle has a few choice words for Lon and then rushes out. Pa tells Marie that he hates what just happened because Roy has been so good to them, but Marie says maybe he needed to see and hear it for the truth to finally sink in. Once Roy and Marie are safely out of earshot, Lon says he should have punched him for the way he acted. High Sierra really takes an interesting twist on the usual female roles in the crime pictures. Velma, who seems to be the "good girl," turns out to be the heartless one while Marie, set up as the hardened gangster moll, really has the big heart full of love and caring.
Roy has Marie drive him to the man on the phone to collect his cut and get the hell out of town. Unfortunately, the man tells him it will take a few days for him to unload the jewelry and give him the full
cut. Earle tells him he better not be trying to pull something on him. The man assures him he's not and gives him two options: he can keep the jewelry until the money comes in and risk being caught with it or he can advance him a couple hundred bucks now and wait for the full payment. Earle opts for the cash and leaves the jewelry, though he does take a ring. When he returns to the car, he slides the ring on to Marie's finger. He says it's a gift. She says it's the wrong finger, but she welcomes it anyway. They then head off to find a hotel to hole up in until Roy can get his full $40,000. While there, Marie notices that his wound still is bleeding and she tries to patch it up the best she can. Later, when he goes outside the room to grab a paper, a stranger mentions something that Roy realizes he's been made. He takes the man inside the room at gunpoint.
After knocking the man out and locking him in the closet, he opens the paper and sees his picture with his hated nickname "Mad Dog." He realizes that Mendoza has been talking and regrets not killing him when he followed them out of the hotel. He tells Marie to go the store and get a basket that she can carry Pard in and a suitcase for him. They are going to have to separate. Marie doesn't want to leave him, but he reminds her that he told her that at some point he might have to park her somewhere for her own safety. "Brother, when they hang that No. 1 tag on you, they shoot first and argue afterwards," he tells her. He gives her the money he got and tells her to get on a bus to Las Vegas and he'll try to get there when the heat is off. She protests, but eventually agrees and gets on the bus. Roy, strapped for cash, stops at a drugstore and holds it up for some cash, but is identified. It leads to a chase that takes him to a dead end and forces him to climb the Sierras for refuge. On the bus, Marie hears a radio account of what has happened and asks the driver if there are any buses going the other way and she heads back west to try to help Roy.
The authorities set up camp at the bottom of the mountain and try to communicate with Earle to no avail. They also work at trying to get a sniper into place above him, but are having difficulty in that respect as well. Roy just stays in the rocks, day and night, with his gun. Eventually, they are able to move a marksman into place above him, but not to where he can get a good shot.
The standoff begins to weigh on Earle. He knows he's reached the end of the line and that he's not getting out of this one. As he's starting to face his own mortality, Marie has joined the gathered crowd at the mountain base. She tries to cross the police line and gets pushed back until one of the lawmen notices her basket and asks if she might happen to have a dog in there. He identifies her as the woman with the dog that had been witnessed on the run with Earle and he brings her forward and tries to get her to talk to him, but every time she starts to, she stops, fearing she's being used just to bring about his death.
Unaware that Marie is even there, Roy begins writing a note. It says that he knows that he's not going to make it out of this, but when they find this note on him, he wants the authorities to know that Marie had nothing to do with his criminal activities. At that moment, Pard pops his head out of the basket and barks. Earle recognizes the voice and stands up, the note being blown to the wind at the same time, calling, "Marie."
That's all the marksman needs and he squeezes off the fatal shot that brings about the end of Roy Earle, who tumbles down the mountain. When he lands, Pards runs to him, licking his hand and his face. Another master has been lost. The authorities lead Marie off in tears and Walsh ends the film as he began it, with credits scrolling up over the mountain range. Roy Earle's career as a criminal had come to an end, but Humphrey Bogart's career as a superstar had just been born. As Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1941 New York Times review of High Sierra: "Mr. Bogart plays the leading role with a perfection of hard-boiled vitality." Earle was just the beginning. A few months later, he'd bring us Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and in November of the following year, Rick Blaine in Casablanca. It's not just that they don't make movies like High Sierra anymore, it's that we don't get actors/stars like Bogie anymore either.
Tweet
Labels: 40s, Bogart, Books, Cagney, Curtiz, De Niro, Edward G., Huston, John Ford, Kurosawa, Lupino, Mifune, Movie Tributes, Raft, Scorsese, Walsh, Wayne, Welles, Wyler
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
