Another Year

 Another Year (2010) is a two-hour film by Mike Leigh, the celebrated British director.  In recent years, Leigh has specialized in comedies of humours, that is, dramas in which the director illustrates with didactic vigor the way in which people afflicted with a temperament governed by anger, or melancholy, or manic joy interact.  Although Leigh's urban Brits don't think in terms of black bile or excess of blood (if you are sanguine), they act under the influence of these humours even in the context of efforts of modern-day counseling and psychoanalysis. In Happy-go-Lucky (2008), Leigh shows a woman in the grip of manic exuberance; everything makes her happy, including events that are disastrous.  Hard Truths (2024) shows us the inverse case -- the heroine in that film is afflicted with anxiety and interprets everything as a personal insult.  Naked (1993) shows us a case of intellectual logorrhea with a co-morbidity of sexual sadism.  Life is Sweet (1990) is about an existence dominated by an eating disorder.  Another Year follows the seasons on their diurnal round:  a couple who are phlegmatic and sanguine (nothing troubles them much) interact with characters who are doomed to desperate, unremitting sadness.  I have called these films "comedies" because the extremity of monomania shown in the pictures is grotesquely comic -- but the pictures are mostly about very unhappy people.

Tom and Gerri are a happily married couple who have been together for 37 years.  They have one son, Joe, who is a lawyer or paralegal with a legal aid society.  Tom is a geologist who assesses the soil conditions for tunneling projects.  We see him inspecting core samples with a jeweler's loupe.  Gerri is a psychologist and counselor.  (In the first scene, we see her meeting with a gloomy insomniac played by Imelda Staunton -- she was the protagonist in Leigh's Vera Drake.  The woman is hostile and sullen and we are given the clear impression that nothing can be done to help her.  She is invested in her misery.)  Gerri's secretary is named Mary.  Mary is an attractive woman in her late forties.  She is desperately needy, searching for a boyfriend.  She drinks too much, becomes morose, and throws herself at men who aren't interested in her.  Tom's friend, Ken, is a fat alcoholic who smokes too much and is also hopelessly miserable -- he seems like a heart attack waiting to happen and he is also desperately searching for companionship.  Although Ken is interested in Mary, she is repulsed by him and, when he tries to embrace her, she beats him off and tells him that they can't even be friends.  The film has little plot.  The picture basically chronicles Tom and Gerri's interactions with their friends, particularly, the morose Mary and poor Ken.  Mary flirts with Joe; he is certainly much too young and cheerful for her.  Midway through the film, Joe turns up with a pretty, vivacious girlfriend.  This torments Mary who is overtly cruel to the young woman.  In the film's last third, Tom's older brother, Ronnie, loses his wife.  We see the funeral service of Ronnie's wife, whom he seems to have mistreated, and, then, a catastrophic encounter with Ronnie's son who is enraged by his father and, in general, mad at everyone.  Ronnie is too grief-stricken to care for himself and, so, the ever- generous Tom and Gerri take him into their comfortable London home.  While Tom and Gerri are cleaning up the tools and harvesting the last vegetables at their allotment, Mary appears at their home.  Mary has previously been neatly dressed and attractively made-up.  Something terrible has happened to her and she wears no make-up, seems pale as a ghost, and, since it is winter-time, is half-frozen, trembling with the cold.  Ronnie is suspicious of Mary, but warms to her slightly when they smoke outside the house.  Tom and Gerri return to find Mary desperately flirting with Ronnie who remains half-comatose with grief.  Tom is outraged at Mary's impudence at showing up at their house uninvited.  Apparently, there has been some sort of falling out with her, although we don't know exactly what has happened.  Nonetheless, Tom and Gerri make food for Ronnie and Mary and, then, Joe and his girlfriend appear as well.  The film ends with happy banter at the dinner table while the camera focuses on Mary who seems miserable to the point of suicide, grimacing in agony as she sits with her glass of wine and her food before her.  In many of Leigh's pictures, the characters are given an enterprise as a subplot that exemplifies their emotional dilemma -- most notably, in Life is Sweet about bulimia, there is a subplot involving a character's attempt to start an upscale restaurant; Timothy Spall plays the grotesque restauranteur whose business fails hopelessly.  In Another Year, Mary scrapes together all her resources to buy a car.  But she has purchased the car from two crooks and the vehicle doesn't work and her efforts at upkeep of the vehicle destroy her.  By the end of the movie, she has sold the car for the cost of towing and twenty quid; thieves have broken into the car and she is emotionally ruined by the experience.

The melancholy events in the story are moderated by the wisdom and nonchalance of Tom and Gerri and the happiness of the couple, Joe and his girlfriend.  Leigh's longtime D.P., Dick Pope shoots the movie unobtrusively.  The film is exceedingly subtle and, I think, would repay several viewings.  One aspect of the film's sadness involves the inevitable round of the seasons and how the passage of time is reflected in the activities of the gardeners at the allotment.  Tom and Gerri, and Ronnie together with Ken are all at the ends of their lives.  Tom, reading in bed with Gerri, says that, when he was younger, he never cared much for history but now history interests him.  Gerri says that this is because they are becoming "historical".  We have the sense that Tom denies his interest in history when he was younger to make a point about time passing -- actually, he probably was always interested in history.  Gerri is attuned to his sadness and makes explicit what he has implied.  I highly recommend this movie but it's not for all tastes -- nothing happens and the film ends without any sort of climax or, even, resolution.  That's the essence of most lives and their tragedy:  nothing much happens. 

Shy People

 Director Andrei Konchalovsky has made films in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Russia.  He is highly respected but, with a few exceptions, seems to never have achieved the excellence to which he aspires.  In the United States, he was largely the victim of low budgets and bad scripts.  However, his 1987 film, Shy People is based on his own screenplay and seems to represent on film his intentions.  (The movie was conceived years earlier when Konchalovsky was directing his magnum opus, the Siberiade in the Soviet Union.)  The film's somewhat primitive and simple-minded premise is that of a City Mouse (played by Jill Clayburgh) visiting her Country Mouse cousin (Barbara Hershey); the contrivances required to set the plot in motion don't really work and many aspects of the film are implausible -- but the situation is sufficiently rich for Konchalovsky to engineer a compelling, if histrionic, story that allows for its actors to deliver "over-the-top" performances.  The film bears certain resemblances to one of Konchalovsky's masterpieces Runaway Train (1985), an action film based on a similarly ludicrous and overwrought script by no less than Akira Kurosawa.  Both movies exploit a ridiculous premise executed with no irony and total conviction -- both movies feature an exotic location (Louisiana bayous in Shy People and the Alaskan wilderness in Runaway Train -- and both films end with a final quote somewhat pretentiously displayed before ending credits.  

In Shy People, a pampered lady journalist (she writes for Cosmopolitan) contrives a trip to the remote bayous of Louisiana to write a story about her country cousins.  (Her grandfather was brother to the grandfather who is the progenitor of the primitive clan in the swamps.)  The journalist, named Diane, has a daughter who is about 17 and a spoiled brat.  The daughter uses cocaine and flaunts her promiscuity -- her boyfriend is a forty-year old junkie with whom the Diane may have had a fling.  Diane is surprised that her daughter Grace is willing to make the trip (it involves flying first class) to Louisiana to visit the country cousins.  It's obvious to the viewer that Grace is a ticking time-bomb.

In Louisiana, Diane hires a backwoods boatman to ferry her into the swamps to place where her cousin's wife lives -- a large Victorian house nicely appointed on a levee in the middle of nowhere.  There was once a town around the house but a flood has swept everything away but the big, airy manse.  The family living in the house is an example of the Southern Gothic carried to a hysterical extreme:  Ma, Ruth, was a 12-year old bride to the sinister Joe, a patriarch of the kind that Burl Ives used to play in his vicious villain mode.  Joe has vanished, but not before brutalizing everyone in the family.  Ruth has four sons:  one of them Mike runs a strip club and bar in the nearby town, a nasty place dependent on trade from oil rig roughnecks -- he has a pencil moustache and looks like smarmy small-town used car dealer.  Mark has his own child bride, the plump and pregnant Candy.  He's a swamp rat, fishing for crabs and shrimp in the muddy backwaters of the bayou.  Tommy is some kind of psychopath that Ma keeps locked in a shed.  He's handsome and friendly but something is wrong with him and he seems to be glad to remain out of trouble in his barred cell out in the yard.  The youngest son, Pauly, is a half-wit, the product of his father, Joe's well-placed punch (or two punches) to his mother's belly during the flood that swept away the town around the house.  Pauly is slavishly loyal to his mother and the baby of the family.  Joe has fled from the revenuers into the inaccessible swamps and is either dead or a malign spirit hiding in the lagoons; he is represented in the movie by a lurid surreal portrait showing his glaring white face emerging from the black canvas.  The portrait hangs over his empty chair at the dinner table that is kept vacant for him.  Joe had the habit of hanging ma upside down and beating the hell out of her and the sons, needless to say, are a bit ambivalent about him.   

A poacher named Jake has assaulted Mark in the spectral swamp, draped in fog and vines and with stumps standing in water like tombstones.  Ma is encouraged to make a complaint to the law in a nearby town.  With Diane and restive, discontent daughter-in-law, Ruth makes a trip to town, using her boat's outboard motor to power her way through a vast colonnade of opposing concrete columns -- it's the underpinning of an enormously long bridge crossing a tidal lake: the image of the boat making its way between the columns, lit by slanting sunlight is the film's signature image, a scene that illumines the rather squalid proceedings with classical splendor -- it's as if we are seeing a Greek myth unfold.  In town, a hellscape of trash, men toting alligators like sacks of potatoes over their shoulders, detritus of beer cans and candy wrappers and junked cars inexplicably being dumped in the lagoon, Ma reluctantly appeals to the sheriff.  He refuses to do anything for her.  So, while the daughter-in-law and Diane are shopping for a battery-powered TV, Ruth goes to the local strip club, a decaying barn-like building, and shoots off Jake's hand.  The strip club is run by her son, Mike, and, when he remonstrates with her, she goes berserk, becomes a temperance crusader, and trashes his bottles of booze, terrorizing the hapless strippers.  Meanwhile back at the ranch, Grace has twisted through the bars to Tommy's cage and seduced him.  Pauly reports the transgression to Mark.  Mark is enraged and threatens both Tommy and Grace.  So Grace decides to soothe the savage breast with copious doses of cocaine offered to all three  boys.  This leads to what Maurice Sendak called "a wild rumpus" including Mark's rape of Grace in thick puddle of spilled honey.  (Konchalovsky goes for supersize effects.)  There's lots of fighting, grunting and shouting and Grace departs from the orgy in a canoe which gradually sinks in the alligator-filled swamp.  Ma returns and tells Mark to discipline Tommy with some kind of iron rod.  Tommy is beaten to a pulp and ends up comatose.  Now, Diane, horrified at the enormity of the "wild rumpus", flees the compound and also ends up marooned in the swamp with her pontoon boat spinning around in forlorn circles.

It all turns out okay once the two women learn life-lessons from one another.  Diane learns that she needs to discipline Grace, albeit not with an iron rod, and become her mother and not her best friend.  (Konchalovsky, like most Russians, I think is very conservative as to family and domestic matters.)  Ruth comes to terms with the malign influence of the ghostly Joe, who has been hanging around and watching the affray through the fog.  The movie is lurid nonsense but beautifully made and effectively acted.  Konchalovsky wrote the script for Andrei Tarkovsky's first movie, Ivan's Childhood, and much of the imagery from that film has seeped into Shy People -- most spectacularly, the wilderness of water and forest in which there seems to be no solid ground and people and objects appear to float in the misty chaos.  (This is the landscape where the boy-soldier, Ivan, spends his hellish childhood.)  The swamp in Shy People has an enormous foggy menace and Konchalovsky suggests that his "shy people" (a local euphemism for wild critters who engage in murderous blood feuds) are formed by the chaotic watery soup in which they live.  The movie has a strange moral that makes no sense to me, but I'm not a Russian.  In the Book of Revelations, the Messiah says that he will save those who are hot and cold but will renounce those who are lukewarm.  Being hot and cold here means possessing strong and savage emotions of love and hate.  The film suggests that true humanity resides in the passions and that reason and civilization are merely veneers that we use to persuade ourselves that we are not nothing more than beasts.   

The Yellow Canary

 Not all films that have been lovingly restored are worth the effort.  Consider The Yellow Canary (1963), a low-budget crime movie directed by Buzz Kulik, carefully restored under the auspices of Eddie Mueller's film noir foundation.  The movie sounds promising and had gone missing until a camera negative was discovered about a year ago -- in 2024 or 2025.  The film stars Pat Boone, the crooning pop star from the late fifties and early sixties, the epitome of straight Christian virtue and as far from the burgeoning hippie and beatnik scene as imaginable.  (There's a rumor that is said to be true that Pat Boone baptized Bob Dylan in his Hollywood swimming pool --reported in the New York Post in February 1979).  Boone is playing a misanthropic cad, again acting against the wholesome type that his publicity projected, a crooner very much similar to the star himself but meaner and more callous and sexually unfaithful to his wife, a thankless role acted by Barbara Eden.  (She was later to disport herself in a harem slave costume on the TV show I Dream of Jeannie.)  What's more, the movie was written by Rod Sterling, the reliably cynical and ingeniously effective creator of the Twilight Zone and the author of a number of respectable film noir including Requiem for a Heavy Weight.  With this kind of cast, a director who proved himself later in the TV market, and Rod Serling as screenwriter, The Yellow Canary was optimistically imagined as a lost masterpiece.  It's nothing of the kind and has nothing, except novelty, to recommend it.  Furthermore, the movie was made cheap and looks cheap.  In fact, the money ran out and Pat Boone, who hoped the vehicle would be his ticket to serious roles in Hollywood, had to finance the completion of the film with his own money -- the weird credit telling the audience that Cooca Mooga Productions made the film is a cover for the fact that "Cooca Mooga" is really just Pat Boone funding the movie with his own money.  

Pat Boone playing a glorified lounge singer, Andy Paxton, is a bad man.  He despises his thousands of teenage girl fans, cheats on his luscious wife, and ignores his infant son.  He bullies his assistant, Bate, a weakling with whom he grew up, and, even, taunts his muscular bodyguard, Hub, who, in turn, despises him.  At a show, Paxton is planning to cheat on his wife, but, when she attends, with his 11-month baby boy, someone snatches the child, killing the infant's nursemaid.  Paxton is asked to pony-up $200,000 for return of the kidnapped infant.  A detective, well played by Jack Klugman, is assigned to the case.  There are various poorly staged twists and turns as Paxton tries to figure out who has snatched his child.  (Klugman is left with very few things to do other than to bemoan Paxton's refusal to cooperate with the cops.) It turns out that the kidnapping is an inside job.  The long-suffering Bate gets strangled and, then, picturesquely hanged from the back wall of Paxton's Hollywood mansion.  A money-launderer who has nothing to do with the kidnapping has to be found.  The loathsome Hub, the muscle man, tortures a prostitute to find the money-launderer.  But when Paxton and the cop go to the man's apartment, he has been stabbed to death.  (Why? he had nothing to do with the kidnapping plot.  And by whom?)  Paxton finally figures out what the audience grasped about two reels before the climax.  The crooner is spectacularly dim-witted and his wife is even worse.  The crooner rescues the baby and tosses the kid to his waiting wife.  Then, the script (or the script girl responsible for continuity) forget all about the baby who mysteriously vanishes from the end of the movie -- kidnapped again?  The happy ending is Paxton whispering sweet nothings to his wife and shaking hands, at last, with Jack Klugman's dogged, but ineffectual, detective.

The movie is cheap and its economy shows.  Things go to hell about 10 minutes into the movie when there is very long scene, all dialogue, and staged as a motionless master shot in which all the characters are visible.  The scene is horribly dull.  When something goes wrong with the shot, Kulik cuts away to an optically printed close-up from the master shot.   The movie is made in cinemascope black and white, and the inserted shot isn't adjusted for the anamorphic lens -- the image doesn't even remotely match the scene in which it's embedded and seems oddly squeezed in dimension.  Sets are flimsy and seem ready ready to fall over.  A juke box is made of cardboard and when Pat Boone brushes against it, the thing almost topples.  Boone slips and falls or trips himself about four times in the movie but the errors are not corrected.  Barbara Eden has next to nothing to do other than loudly wail and bitch at her useless husband -- her part is severely underwritten.  With the exception of a few hardboiled lines and exchanges, Serling's script is awful -- it starts out okay but collapses in the long scene, presumably shot after the movie lost funding, in one continuous, if botched, take.  The acting is very bad.  Boone himself has no idea what he is doing and can't even hit his marks without stumbling over his own feet.  The only bonus to the film is that we do get to see the performance by Boone of a couple of songs, morose tough guy ballads, that sound like Frank Sinatra as sung by a twerp.  Boone has a pretty voice and his singing in the mode of a callow punk Sinatra is the best thing in the movie.  In film noir, there's always a scene in which a tough guy is thrown in jail to cool his heels until someone bails him out so that he can continue to get used as a punching bag by the bad guys.  These jail shots are characteristically showy, filmed with moody bars shadowing the imprisoned man.  The cameraman in The Yellow Canary can't figure out how to light the jail scene and its falls completely flat.  Indeed, the whole movie is shot in the sourceless, slightly surreal and indistinct white light that characterizes TV shows from the early sixties -- somehow, light, which is the agent and protagonist in film noir has been stripped of its glamor.   

Divided Heaven

 "When lovers are separated, they promise to fix their eyes on one star each night so that they will be united, at least, in their vision.

"The Heavens can not be divided.

"To the contrary, the heavens are the first thing to be divided."

Thus, dialogue in Konrad Wolf's 1964 The Divided Heaven and film based on Christa Wolf's famous East German novel of the same name.  (When I was in College, German majors were required to read this sober, earnest East German book -- considered to be diagnostic of East Germany's aspirations as a political system and, also, a feminist novel to boot.  I never read the book because I wasn't really a German major and didn't feel I needed to know anything about the DDR.  As usual, I regret that arrogant and presumptuous opinion, but now 50 years too late.)  Wolf was the best of the East German filmmakers and he has a staggering visual gift -- his movies look stunning and they are incisively constructed with excellent acting. The Divided Heaven (Der Geteilte Himmel) is a dogmatic and partisan film disguised as an exercise in anomie influenced by the pictures of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard.  Godard and Antonioni were Leftist film directors (Godard was a pretend Maoist); Konrad Wolf is the real McCoy, a committed German Communist of the Old School given big budgets by DEFA to produce and direct movies espousing East German ideals half-concealed by advanced film technique in prestige pictures designed for the Film Festival circuit at Cannes, Berlin, and Moscow.  There's no doubt that Konrad Wolf is a great director; there's also no doubt that this picture, at least, is tendentious, irritating, and, quite possibly, evil.  It's inferior to Wolf's later picture Solo Sunny but, nonetheless, worth a look, if only for its graphic beauty and stylish trappings.

A naive young woman, Rita, lives in some soulless East German city, possibly Leipzig or Dresden -- the town has an impressive cathedral-like tower with two spires and a dam that looks like the place where St. Anthony Falls cascades over the Corps of Engineers concrete apron in Minneapolis.  There is also a very high aqueduct like bridge with soaring masonry arches over which tiny trains pass to and fro.  These images are visual motifs to which Wolf refers again and again and seem to be correlates for the love affair between Rita and her boyfriend, the chemist, Manfred.  Rita is admitted to a teacher's college but drops out for some reason that I wasn't able to understand.  She, then, joins the proletariat as a worker in a factory that makes train cars.  East German factories are not heavily automated and Rita with her comrades literally screws the train cars together with torque wrenches and powered screw drivers.  The factory is organized like a unit of the army and Rita works with the famous Ermisch brigade, a collective of laborers who are famously productive.  When a comrade shows that you can assemble one-frame (a unit of production in the train passenger cars) in a mere 17 minutes, the boss increases the production quota to reflect this innovation -- an increase in production that the movie seems to applaud.  Everyone agrees that building more trains more quickly is a good thing for the East German worker's republic.  The increase in production leads to some sort of controversy in the workplace -- whatever it is, remained unclear to me.  (I don't think that Wolf wanted to suggest openly  that workers might be disgruntled about quota increases -- the dispute is postured as a power struggle.)  One of the foremen crosses over to West Germany hampering the plant's efficiency.  The movie, although released in 1964 portrays a period before the border between the divided Germanys was closed, particularly in Berlin by the Wall.)  Rita goes back to teacher's school, possibly under pressure because she backed the wrong boss in the train factory.  (The story is told very elliptically with flashbacks and flashforwards and it would require a second viewing to figure out exactly what is going in the narrative.)  Rita is sleeping with the chemist, Manfred, and lives with him in the garret of his parent's luxurious house -- his father is some kind of retired director of an East German business.  Manfred has developed a wonderful chemical process of great commercial value -- we are never told exactly how it works or what it is.  Rita has a friend named Sigrid whose father has left East Germany for the West.  She is back in teacher's school where a dogmatic Marxist teacher, Mangold, persecutes her and Sigrid for the father's defection to the West -- the guy seems to teach a class in Marxist dialectics and he is the movie's villain.  Pushed out of teacher's school for the second time, Rita returns to the factory, building trains.  Manfred's chemical process is not adopted by the local industrial concern, apparently due to a cabal of conspirators who want to entrench their chemical procedures in the industry.  This upsets Manfred and, with his lab assistant, Martin, he defects to the West.  Rita is torn and doesn't know whether she should accompany her boyfriend or stay in dear, dirty old East Germany.  Manfred comes back for a visit and goes with Rita on a test drive of one of the trains that she and her comrades have constructed.  The train's emergency brake is pulled on the tracks in the country and it fails to pass specifications which are rigorous and exacting and enforced by the dignified older boss at the factory, a hero of East German productivity called Meternagel.  Someone announces enthusiastically that the Soviets have put a man in orbit.  There is a quote that the cosmonaut was a farmer's son who sees the blackness of outer space as a furrowed field where seed corn is scattered like the stars in the sky.  (The movie responds to this with bombastic snatches of music, played as if in a Godard film in disconnected fragments, accompanying shots of the cloudy sky overhanging the level fields of the Brandenberg Mark -- it's an impressive sequence.) Rita is tempted and goes with Manfred to West Germany (West Berlin) where there are lots of people scurrying around in a square to a sound track of blaring traffic horns.  The traffic is never shown and Wolf subscribes to the idea that the less he shows of West Germany, the better.  Standing, ala Godard, next to a huge Persil advertisement covering a whole city wall, the two lovers debate the situation.  Rita isn't impressed by West Berlin which she describes as shiny with lots of cellophane, but, also, very warm.  She returns to East Germany where the noble Meternagel is dying, all worn out by decades of hard labor.  Rita has a nervous breakdown at the factory and falls supine onto the railroad tracks as a locomotive is approaching.  She is picked up and taken to a sanitarium where she recovers.  The film ends with melancholy shots of the great masonry bridge with its soaring arches, the church or fortress with its proudly separate twin towers, and the dam on the river, an empty frame after the manner of Ozu, in that the two lovers who previously frequented this place are no longer present.

The movie is very dogmatic and seems to be an apology justifying the construction of the Berlin Wall and the closing of the border.  The people with deep heart and souls opt to stay in East Germany despite the hardships and the fact that everyone, as shown by the movie, is informing on everyone else,  West Germany is portrayed as overcrowded, possibly due to a surfeit of East German defectors -- there's one really absurd scene with the young lovers in the foreground and five people to the rear of the shot comically pressing themselves together on a single bench; it's clearly intended to be farcical but I don't know the director's intention as to this gag.  The acting is good, if Brechtian in it schematic and abstract quality -- the good people are really good, the bad people (including the Party apparatchik Mangold) are really bad.  It's hard to make a successful movie with a purely passive protagonist.  Rita is a doormat and you root for her to depart for a real life in West Germany, an emotion that the director certainly didn't want to induce.  But she's too passive to do much of anything and can't really carry the movie.  The elliptical style feels unnecessary to the relatively clear story that I have narrated sequentially -- the movie fragments the story into bits and pieces and presents them, more or less, randomly.  In fact, the elliptical aspect of the movie feels dishonest as if Wolf is trying to hide scenes that might stir up problems for the movie with the East German censors -- and, in fact, the movie was repressed from time-to-time, particularly during the waning years of the regime.  It's a deeply irritating movie but has the courage of (some) of its convictions:  at one point, someone says that the "people of the future depend upon countless people now alive" -- a true statement, as far as I see, and, perhaps, something important to keep in mind.  

Things Change

 Shel Silverstein and David Mamet wrote the script for Things Change, a sweet-tempered 1988 movie that Mamet also directed.  The film is a fairy tale that, once its premise is established, is wholly predictable although in a satisfying way.  The picture stars Mamet's surrogate and stand-in, Joe Mantegna, and Don Ameche, playing against type as a humble, dim-witted shoeshine man who speaks with a vaudeville Italian accent so broad and stylized as to be marginally offensive.  Ameche's dignified appearance, contrasted with his caricatured speech, is perfect for the part, the role of an unassuming urban peasant who is taken for the capo of capos in the Chicago mob.  

Ricky Jay, a fixture in all Mamet's movies, summons the shoeshine man to a meeting with a Chicago gangster.  The gangster promises to buy a fishing boat for the shoeshine man (Ameche) if he will agree to take the fall for a gangland shooting and serve three-years in prison for the crime.  The shoeshine man, reluctantly, agrees and gives his word to accept the frame-up the next Monday after a weekend.  Joe Mantegna, playing a minor thug who is on probation for bungling an assignment, is told to keep the shoeshine man in his company for the whole weekend so he doesn't back out of the gig.  The gangster has the civilian sign a confession and leaves him under Mantegna's supervision.  Mantegna, feeling sorry for the man, decides that they will spend the weekend in Lake Tahoe.  And, so, they fly out to Reno.  While checking into a Tahoe resort, another apprentice gangster played by the great William Macy, mistakes Ameche for the big boss in gangland Chicago.  The odd couple, Mantegna and Ameche, are lodged on the Criterion floor of the resort in palatial surroundings with the lodge's promise that "(their) money is no good in the establishment."  They gamble and Ameche wins $30,000 in a fixed game, but, then, loses in the next game that is not fixed.  They gambol with some showgirls who are touched by Ameche's grandfatherly gravitas.  Ameche and Mantegna are invited to the mansion of the Vegas boss where the shoe-shine man and the crime-lord, played effectively by the fearsome Bob Proskey, bond over drinks and cigars.  Everything that Ameche says is interpreted in light of his presumed status as the big Boss from Chicago.  In fact, Ameche doesn't have much of actual interest to say -- he utters gnomic remarks about shining shoes which are taken as profound apothegms from a terrifying organized-crime boss.  (The film bears more than a passing resemblance to Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film in which Peter Sellers as a moronic gardener is accepted as a political wise man, his statements about weeding and planting and pruning all interpreted as oracular wisdom.)  There are some close calls and misunderstandings, but this being a fairy tale we anticipate that everything will be worked-out in the end.  When Mantegna and Ameche miss their plane back to Chicago, they hijack a car and drive to the Windy City, apparently in one night -- by this point, the fairy-tale aspects of the story are obvious.  The attentive reader will be able to guess the innocuous plot twists engineered by Silverstein and Mamet for the climax.

Things Change is minor Mamet, an amusing exercise in the writer's extreme stoicism transplanted into the narrative machinery of a Maerchen.  The dialogue is characteristically clipped, laconic, and repetitive.  The picture is droll, but, not really funny.  The film's ending is satisfying.  Ameche's performance as an honorable dullard is notable and the rest of the cast is excellent as well.  The film is a successful divertissement.

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds

 Co-directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, Fireball:  Visitors from Darker Worlds is a bit like an essay by Montaigne.  The ostensible topic of the documentary, meteors and meteorites (called "meteoroids" often in the film) quickly is absorbed into a larger, discursive context that strays, as in a stream of consciousness, far afield.  The structure of the movie is associative -- one thing leads to another.  Ultimately, the picture ends on an ecstatic and somber note:  the subject seems to be death and man's accommodation to that fact.  Here death is viewed both individually as well as collectively, that is, the fate of each of us and the fate of the world as well.  The movie is Wunderkammer filmed as rhapsody, with lush and ominous choral music and astonishing visuals.

Herzog met Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist, in Antarctica when he shot a documentary in that place.  In this film, Oppenheimer stands in for Herzog as interviewer and enraptured witness to the various things on display.  Herzog contributes, off-screen, his characteristically dead-pan, acerbic, and witty narration and, in one instance, his voice is heard off-camera making a mild joke -- something about being from Bavaria (I didn't exactly catch it).  The movie begins with indigenous people in Mexico juggling balls of fire for a Day of the Dead ritual, then, shows us a dash-cam footage of a fireball blazing across the skies somewhere in Russia -- the fireball bleaches the screen white and yellow.  We see pictures of a woman actually hit by a meteoroid -- it left a loaf-sized bruise on her upper thigh.  In the black-and-white photographs we see her staring in a baffled way at the camera.  There is a Norwegian jazz musician (we meet him strumming his guitar on the roof of a stadium amphitheater where he collects micro-meteorites with a magnet in the sandy detritus in the gutters.  Viewed under magnification, the micro-meteorites are beautiful, like collages of stained glass.  There are meteoroids stored in cabinets in Arizona -- I've seen the display in Tucson of some of these objects.  (The barren wastes of deserts are good places to collect meteorites.) Various talking heads opine and Herzog lingers on their faces after they have ceased talking for uncomfortable lengths of time -- it's as if the camera is seeking the essence of the person speaking in some transcendental way.  (This technique is typical of all of Herzog's documentaries dating back, at least, to Brother Huey's Sermon).  Herzog and company travel to a place in the Yucatan where an immense meteor blew open the Caribbean Sea, created the Gulf of Mexico, and, incidentally, slaughtered the dinosaurs making room in the world for the small, gnawing rodents that then existed. (The town marking the location of the surmised meteor impact is so "forlorn it makes you want to cry", Herzog says, showing us a desolate set of scarcely inhabited ruins on a desolate stretch of beach.  There are two mangy dogs sniffing a third that may be dead but is probably just sleeping:  Herzog says the "dogs are too stupid to understand what happened here."  In Australia, Herzog's drone flies over a huge, sinister impact crater, the hole at Wolf Creek, and, then, we meet an indigenous woman who is an artist and who features the crater, although in a highly abstract way, in her paintings.   Meteors are both the destroyers and givers of life:  Herzog reviews the "panspermia" thesis that meteoroids "seeded" life on earth.  He tours a temple in India where a meteor fell although no one knew this until recently -- the temple is sacred to Shiva.  He reproduces footage of a scrum of pilgrims in Mecca at the Kaaba, fighting one another to plant their lips on plexiglass over a black meteor in the corner of the house-high square monument.  In Antarctica, Oppenheimer and five men march in a line across the level ice of a high plateau looking for rocks fallen from the sky.  Oppenheimer finds a large meteoroid, about the size of his fist and the Japanese leader of the expedition goes into an ecstasy of joy, falling onto the snow and flailing around -- this is the sort of ecstatic image that motivates Herzog's documentary movies.  We see children painted as eerie skeletons marching in a parade for the Day of the Dead, clips from Deep Impact that Herzog praises as "very well done" showing a meteor smashing into the sea and raising a tsunami two-thousand feet high and the picture ends on a beach in Papua or some island in Oceania where indigenous men are relearning an ancient ritual to release the souls of the dead.  They beat torches together while dancing and intoning a song and the sparks, which represent dead people's souls, burst upward into the sky, the whole thing filmed at the golden hour with the sun elegiacally setting into the sea.  

The movie is as good as documentaries get.  It's the sort of film that you mourn a little when the closing titles appear.  

Sam Fuller and Run of the Arrow (film group essay)

 Sam Fuller’s Run of the Arrow

“It’s been said that if you don’t like the Rolling Stones, then, you just don’t like rock and roll.  By the same token, I think that if you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema.  Or, at least, you don’t understand it.”

Martin Scorsese

Ferdinand: “I’ve always want to know exactly what film is?”

Sam Fuller (playing himself): “Film is like a battleground: Love, hate, action, violence, death – in one word:  Emotion!”

Pierrot le Fou directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Iconic visuals and cartoon dialogue...

J. Hoberman

1.

A heresy: For some reason I have never been able to warm to Samuel Fuller’s films.  Among the Europeans,  at least, Sam Fuller is considered one of America’s greatest auteurs, the proprietor of an uniquely kinetic directorial style used to punctuate truths about the United States with the pictorial equivalent of bold-face exclamation points.  I think this high regard is based in the fact that English although well understood and grammatically spoken in France, Germany, and Italy is not a native tongue – and for that reason Europeans IMHO (‘in my humble opinion’) are deaf to Fuller’s tin ear when it comes to dialogue: they regard Fuller’s preachy scripts and ridiculous-sounding aphorisms as true to the way that American’s speak – of course, this is sheer imagination and wish fulfilment as well.  I can admire Fuller’s propulsive editing and aggressively cartoonish mise-en-scene but whenever a character opens his or her mouth, I wince.  There are differing degrees of trash, I suppose, and Fuller, IMHO, represents trash of a high order.  

Fuller’s 1957 cowboys and Indians Western, The Run of the Arrow, is one of his best films.  I can tolerate this movie better that some of his more pulpy pictures (for instance, Underworld USA and The Naked Kiss) because it is a Western – this means that the dialogue is necessarily stylized to represent the way people spoke a hundred years before the movie was made.  Furthermore, on one level, the picture is a war movie.  Fuller knew a lot about war.  He fought with “the Big Red One” across Europe and into Berlin in World War Two, was shot at and shot Germans himself; many of his buddies died.  Therefore, Fuller’s pulp instincts are harnessed to an understanding of the realities of war that he, often, portrays unflinchingly on the screen – Fuller’s best reviewed later film, in fact, is called The Big Red One, and autobiographically represents his experiences in the European theater of war.  (American critics judging Fuller’s pictures in real time – and without the influence of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd in Paris – were generally dismissive of his movies.)  To the extent that The Run of the Arrow is a war movie, it plays to Fuller’s advantage. 

My problems with Fuller may originate in my decidedly middle-brow approach to movies.  Fuller’s pictures are very low budget: in Hollywood parlance, they are B pictures.  The Run of the Arrow was made when Fuller had supporters in the Hollywood studios and was accorded reasonable budgets.  Although not lavish, The Run of the Arrow has several A-list actors and was made with a large enough budget to stage some impressive battle scenes.  I’m probably disclosing my middle-brow prejudices but, IMHO, Run of the Arrow just looks better and is more competently acted than many of Fuller’s later films.  

2. 

Samuel Fuller was born in Massachusetts in 1912.  His parents were Jewish (renamed from Rabinowitz after Samuel Fuller, a New England pilgrim who came to America on Mayflower).  After his father died when Sam was 12, the family moved to New York City.  At age 17, Fuller got a job reporting on the crime and scandal beat for a tabloid, The New York Gazette.  (He was a good, tenacious reporter and became well-known in the tabloid community for first breaking the story of the heroin, booze, and chloral hydrate death of a faded silent movie star, Jeanne Eagels.)  In addition to his reporting, Fuller wrote pulp novels, at least one of them, The Dark Page picked-up by Hollywood and adapted into a motion picture.  Fuller liked writing and said that he would have preferred to stay a reporter but for the money – a director, he said, “makes a thousand dollars an hour.”  The names of some of Fuller’s novels, all released in paperback with garish noir covers (half-naked dames in mortal peril), are Burn, Baby, Burn, Test-tube Baby, and Make Up and Kiss.  

In 1941, Fuller volunteered for military service in World War One.  He fought as an infantryman in North Africa, was in Sicily and at Anzio, and, then, battled his way across Europe to Berlin as a soldier in the Big Red One.  (Fuller’s most acclaimed film is his autobiographical picture about his wartime experiences, entitled The Big Red One – Fuller tried to get this movie financed for the better part of 25 years and, finally, shot the movie for release 1982.  The Big Red One was a critical success in a two hour version; Fuller had shot a version that was four-and-a-half hours long and, later, released a director’s cut that is 162 minutes in length.  The film stars Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill.)  Fuller was one of the grunts who liberated the concentration camp at Falkenau where he shot 16 mm. footage later incorporated into a documentary about the place.  (Falkenau is at Floessenburg on the Bavarian border with Czechoslovakia.)  Fuller was awarded many medals for valor: the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and the Purple Heart.

Before the War, Fuller wrote scripts for Hollywood.  His first script actually produced was for Hat’s Off released in 1936.  Upon returning for Europe, Fuller went to Hollywood as a screenwriter and, beginning in 1949, directed films.  His first two films were I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Baron of Arizona (with Vincent Price, 1950).  These were low budget pictures: the more expensive of the two, The Baron of Arizona, cost less than $100,000.  Fuller’s third film, Steel Helmet, was the first picture made about the Korean War – the War had been raging for only six months when Fuller made the combat picture.  The movie was well-received and a critical success.  On the strength of this picture, also relatively low budget, Fuller was hired to direct at Fox Studios.                           

3.

Between 1951 and 1956, Fuller made movies for Fox.  He was a studio director, not entrusted with A list movies and stars, but given considerable freedom to make B genre pictures.  Fuller was generally successful with the pictures he made at Fox and was granted bigger budgets with respect to his later films for that studio.  In 1954, Fox released Fuller’s submarine warfare drama, Hell and High Water with Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell.  The movie was a box-office success and made a profit.  Fuller was, then, sent to Japan to film House of Bamboo, a technicolor cinemascope movie, on location in Tokyo.  (Fox was hoping to market the film noir in Japan and internationally.)  This 1955 picture starring Robert Stack and Robert Ryan (both, then, A-list stars) was an artistic success but only barely broke even.  Nonetheless, Fuller remained in the studio’s good graces and his next film, Tigrero, was slated to star John Wayne.  Fuller went to Brazil to scout locations in the Amazon.  He shot a considerable amount of location footage, demonstrating an ability to film under difficult circumstances.  (This footage can be seen in Mika Kaurasmaki’s 1994 documentary, Tigrero, A Film that was Never Made.)  When Fuller returned from the Brazilian rain forests, he learned that production of Tigrero had been indefinitely postponed because of trouble securing sufficient insurance coverage for work in the Amazonian jungle.  Fuller, then, jumped ship, giving notice to Fox and briefly agreeing to a contract with Columbia.  

Fuller founded his own production company in 1955, Globe Enterprises in which he held a 50% share.  Globe, of course, accorded complete artistic freedom to Fuller.  Fuller’s Globe Enterprises, then, entered into distribution contracts with Twentieth-Century Fox and Columbia.  The two big studios agreed to provide funding for Fuller’s independently made movies.  The first, and best funded product of this business arrangement was Run of the Arrow, released in 1957.  Run of the Arrow cost one million dollars and starred Rod Steiger, Brian Keith, and Ralph Meeker, a reasonably prestigious cast.

Fuller had written the screenplay a few years earlier and pitched the product to Fox.  Fox producers passed on the movie, possibly because of its violence.  Fuller next pitched the project to RKO while he was still employed by Fox as a studio director.  Fox producers wanted to cast Gary Cooper in the principal role of O’Meara, the unregenerate Confederate soldier.  Fuller wanted Rod Steiger, a lesser known star, but one whose stock was rapidly rising after his triumph in On the Waterfront.  Fuller said that Steiger’s “bitter face” would be better for the part than the noble, chiseled features of Gary Cooper.  Fuller’s cast was reluctantly green-lit by RKO; however, RKO was “on the ropes” at that time and Run of the Arrow was the last picture financed by that studio – ultimately, the film was distributed by Universal on behalf of RKO which was no longer making movies at the time that the picture was released in 1957.  (My source for business information as to Run of the Arrow is an excellent book by Lisa Dombrowski in the Wesleyan Film Series, The Films of Sam Fuller: If you die, I’ll kill you! (2008); Dombrowski studied with Jeanine Basinger, a professor of film at Wesleyan University, and the author of a book on Anthony Mann.  It is evident to me that Dombrowski’s text represents her Ph.d treatise, repackaged as a book and written under Basinger’s supervision.  Also assisting Dombrowski on the book as mentor was the redoubtable David Bordwell at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  Dombrowski’s writing is powerfully influenced by Bordwell’s academic work which includes tallies of average shot length, close scrutiny on a shot-by-shot basis of films under discussion, and a mastery of intricate business aspects of motion film production.  In keeping with the tabloid nature of Fuller’s work, Dombrowski’s author portrait poses her as a femme fatale in black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline showing lots of skin.) 

4.

In Run of the Arrow, Fuller transposes some events in Red Cloud’s War (the War on the Powder River) from Wyoming and Montana to the desert Southwest.  Run of the Arrow was shot in Utah near St. George in the high desert close to Zion National Park and the Virgin River Gorge in Arizona; interiors were shot at Universal Studios in Hollywood – principal photography began in July 1956.  As far as the Lakota Sioux lore presented in the movie, the film is, more or less, ethnographically accurate: for instance, the Lakota were divided into Seven Lodges or Councils each independently led and the Lakota religion was monotheistic.  The film references the Fetterman Massacre, Red Cloud, and the Treaty of 1868 (also known as the Treaty of Laramie).  From information in the film, we can construe the action as occurring between 1866 and 1868 – this makes it plausible that O’Meara would still be riding the Union cavalry horse from which Driscoll was shot on the last day of the Civil War.  

The background to the Red Cloud War is slightly relevant to the picture.  Prior to the American Civil War, raiding and combat between tribes was endemic to the northern Plains.  In 1820, the Lakota (Sioux) retaliated against the Crow for an attack on a hunting party by destroying a large encampment in the Tongue River Massacre.  This bloodbath established a condition of permanent enmity between the Crow Indians and the Lakota.  (One-hundred years after the massacre, the great Crow leader, Plenty Coups, said that the Tongue River Massacre was the decisive event in Crow history.)  In 1830, the Cheyenne, who were traditionally allies of the Lakota, lost their sacred medicine bundle, the magical Sacred Arrows to the Pawnee (who were allies with the Crow).  This led to 30 years of intermittent combat between the Pawnee and the Northern Cheyenne in which the Cheyenne desperately sought to regain possession of the Arrows – they fought for them, set ambushes and raids, negotiated with the Pawnee, and, even, tried to buy the arrows back.

In 1863, silver and gold were discovered near what is now Helena in Montana territory.  Miners rushed to the gold and silver fields, blazing a trail directly through the contested land claimed by the Lakota, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Arapaho.  This trail, a northern extension of the Oregon trail, crossed the bison hunting territory claimed by the Lakota and their allies, although in constant conflict with the Crow and Pawnee.  Not surprisingly, the Lakota and their allies began to raid wagon trains moving West on the new road, the Bozeman Trail.  The Federal government responded to the raids by building a series of forts along the trail and garrisoning them with cavalry and infantry soldiers.  The forts on Lakota territory exacerbated the conflict between the Sioux and the government.  

Fighting began in earnest in 1866 when the Oglala war chief, Red Cloud, directed sorties against frontier settlements, wagon trains, and besieged the forts along the Bozeman trail.  (Red Cloud was born near modern-day North Platte, Nebraska and was a politically powerful leader of the Oglala council, one of the Lakota Seven Lodges or Councils.)  Lieutenant Henry Carrington was assigned the defense of Fort Phil Kearney built near present-day Buffalo, Wyoming in June of 1866.  Red Cloud’s warriors besieged the fort for many months.  During that siege, Captain William Fetterman commanded a party of 79 men on a raid designed to drive back the Lakota from embattled fort.  This occurred on December 21, 1866.  Fetterman has been unfairly portrayed as brash and impetuous: he is alleged to have said: Give me 80 men and I will ride through the whole Sioux Nation.  Fetterman’s entire command was wiped out by the Lakota in a short affray about two or three miles from the Fort.  His troops were decoyed over a nearby ridge by a small party of Lakota led by Crazy Horse, cut off by overwhelming force on a steep hillside, and slaughtered to the last man.  (Carrington was initially blamed for the catastrophe and court-martialed; in his testimony, he blamed Fetterman who, of course, could not defend himself, claiming that the cavalry commander had violated his orders by pursuing Crazy Horse’s decoy party.  Carrington was a peculiar figure, a professional historian and writer who had attended Yale; his wife was also a professional writer and, after Carrington was acquitted, both of them set to work rehabilitating Carrington’s reputation.  They did so at the expense of Fetterman.  Recent research casts considerable doubt on the claim that Fetterman arrogantly said he could “ride through the whole Sioux nation with 80 men.”  Carrington didn’t mention the boast in his trial testimony during the court martial and the quotation first surfaced in 1904, thirty-eight years after the Fetterman Fight in a book written by Carrington’s second wife, Francis.  The Montana Historical Society has published several articles debunking the idea that Fetterman made this boast – see e.g. Shannon Catli’s essay in Montana: The History of the West, Vol. 54:3, Autumn 2004.)  The Lakota called the Fetterman fight, the battle of “one-hundred-soldiers in hand”.  Before December 1866, Red Cloud consulted a Winkte (“Is like a Woman”), a two-spirit or Lakota homosexual regarded as a powerful prophet.  The Winkte said that he had dreamed that one-hundred soldiers in blue uniforms had fallen into his hands – that is, the Lakota had killed 100 federal soldiers.  Eighty-one were killed in Fetterman Fight.

The Army was unable to capture the perpetrators of the Fetterman massacre and the Lakota, with their northern Cheyenne allies, proved an elusive and dangerous enemy to the three forts on the Bozeman trail and the wagon trains rolling west to the Montana mining camps.  In 1868, government negotiators met with Lakota and Cheyenne leaders at Fort Laramie and negotiated a truce.  The Indians had won the war.  The government ceded to the Lakota and Cheyenne territories claimed by the Crow and Pawnee.  This agreement was contingent on the Indians not harassing the settlers and miners moving west.  The three forts along the Bozeman trail, including embattled Fort Phil Kearney, were abandoned and, later, burned by the Indians. The Crow and Pawnee were outraged at the betrayal of their sovereignty, indignation that led to the Crow’s longstanding alliance with the government against the Lakota and Cheyenne throughout the Wars on the High Plains, conflicts that continued for many years, ending only at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in December of 1890.   

These events can be glimpsed, although remotely in Fuller’s lurid Run of the Arrow.  The Lakota Sioux are at war with the government only a few years after the end of the Civil War.  The war involves the road to Montana (the Bozeman Trail) and incursion into Lakota buffalo-hunting territory.  The situation is complicated by Indians on both sides of the conflict – in the film Walking Coyote, the Sioux scout, has been working for the government.  The humane officer, Captain Clark (played by the incredibly pretty Brian Keith) argues for a negotiated truce or settlement of the conflict before he is killed.  In the end, the fort under construction, said to be “Fort Abraham Lincoln” is destroyed by Indian attack and burned to the ground.  In effect, the Indians win the war.  (Fort Abraham Lincoln is actually near Mandan, North Dakota; it’s the fort from which Custer departed on his way to the Little Big Horn.)  The Fetterman Massacre (or Battle of the Hundred in Hands) is directly referenced and Red Cloud appears as a character.  

5.

The United States is always at war.  After the horrors of the Civil War, a grim internecine conflict, war is generally accounted as an unifying force.  In the imagination of movie directors like John Ford, the antagonisms of the Civil War are reconciled by the wars on the high plains against the Indians.  This theme is exemplified by Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).  The opening shots of Monument Valley are accompanied by a narrative listing battles in the Civil War and ending with the name Appomattox.  When the Cheyenne and Arapaho burn the stagecoach station at Sudro’s Well, the officer entrusted with defending the place is mortally wounded.  He’s an old Confederate and, as he dies, Ford has the soundtrack play a mournful version of “Dixie.”  At the end of the movie, John Wayne, in one of his best performances as the cavalry commander Colonel Brittle, has retired from the service.  As he is riding westward into the setting sun, a former confederate races across Monument Valley to stop him.  Brittle has just received a commission to be leader of the cavalry scouts.  On horseback, he reads the commission and is pleased to see that it is signed by Phil Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Ulysses Simpson Grant – of course, all generals who served with distinction in the Civil War.  Brittle remarks: “I’m holding three aces here,” referring to the luminaries who have signed his commission.  “Shouldn’t you have a ‘full hand’?” the ex-rebel says.  Brittle looks at him quizzically.  “I mean Robert E. Lee”, the former Confederate soldier says.  Ford’s film, the second installment in his famous Cavalry Trilogy (Fort Apache and Rio Grande are the others), is elegiac and almost without discernible plot.  Nonetheless, one of the themes of the film, announced by the narrator in the opening sequence, is that the fighting on the Plains in which former Union and Confederate soldier fought side-by-side reconciles enemies in a war against a common foe.

This theme is evident in a number of Western pictures, often with a harder edge.  For instance, in Shane, the hot-headed former reb played by Elisha Cook, Jr. makes the mistake of going for his sidearm when taunted by Jack Palance by an insult about Robert E. Lee. The ex-rebel has no chance.  Palance’s sinister gunfighter, clad entirely in black, shoots him down, leaving him dead in the mud.  

Of course, Fuller’s approach to this subject matter in Run of the Arrow is characteristically tawdry, sadistic, and uncompromising.

6.

In Richard Slotkin’s 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the United States, the author addresses Westerns as a mirror to American political and ideological concerns.  Prior to World War II, Hollywood studios made films involving derring-do in the British Empire – the paradigm specimen of this kind of movie is 1939's Gunga Din.  These films were popular and made a lot of money.  During the Second World War, the War Office was concerned that pictures featuring heroic Englishmen fighting insurgent Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent would offend Indian where there was a large market for American films and whose assistance as British colonial subjects was required in the Pacific Theater.  Accordingly, studios shifted production to large-scale Westerns in which the role of the rebellious Indians on the subcontinent was taken by Native American Indians.  Slotkin’s thesis is that American Westerns generally reflect the concerns of the period in which they are made.  For instance, Slotkin reads Ford’s cavalry trilogy as allegorically addressing the Korean War with the last film in the series Rio Grande (1950) positing the Rio Grande River (across which the hostiles withdraw) as the Yalu River on the Korean border with China.  (There was disagreement among American military analysts as to whether the U.S. should be authorized to pursue Communist forces across that border into China.)  Westerns, Slotkin argues, present a means of tranferring “ideological concerns” into the “mythic landscape of the American West.”  

In this vein, Run of the Arrow can be seen as a reaction to lingering after-effects of the Civil War in the arena of race relations.  The myth of the “lost cause”, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (which arose as a response to Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation), the suppression of Black voting rights in the South, and the glorification of the Old South in movies like Gone with the Wind are all grist for Fuller’s mill – and considered in “200 point tabloid” headline fashion in The Run of the Arrow.

7.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued Brown v. Board of Education declaring unlawful segregation in public schools.  On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a White man on a Montgomery City bus; unrest about segregation led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955.  Rev. Martin Luther King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  In April and May 1956, Southern states sued the NAACP and passed laws designating it a criminal organization.  Many White people joined White Citizen’s Councils to defend their racial perquisites.  In January 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was convened to promote desegregation.  In September 1957, the Little Rock 9 were blocked from entering the Little Rock Central High School.  President Eisenhower dispatched Federal troops to Little Rock.  In September 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.  

Think about Run of the Arrow against its turbulent contemporary background.

8.

Samuel Fuller is a true auteur – that is, he is ultimately the author of all aspects of most of his films.  Generally, his movies begin with a credit that says : Written, Produced, and Directed by Sam Fuller.  These are not studio productions.  They spring entirely from the imagination of Fuller, and, although compromised by low budgets, his movies are the unadulterated results of his creative efforts.  A film like Run of the Arrow accordingly reflects Fuller’s intentions, his filmmaking style, and his sensibility.  So, it is worth considering the nature of this sensibility. 

True to his origins in pulp fiction (dime novels) and the tabloid press, Fuller’s films display various attention-grabbing devices as well as a certain didactic, moralizing tendency.  Attention-grabbing filmic devices are the equivalent of large print tabloid headlines; Fuller’s didactic aspects are the equivalent of rabble-rousing editorials in the yellow (tabloid) press.  

Consider the beginning of Run of the Arrow: the camera tracks right to left showing the carnage of war, dead soldiers amidst battlefield debris.  At first glance, the shot is similar to a lot of mournful establishing shots showing the results of combat.  But first impressions with Fuller are, often, misleading.  The shot is not purely pictorial but turns out to be motivated by a man riding on the horse, prominently marked with a US brand, that will be central to the picture.  The shot is not expressive, but actually a way of reframing, directing the viewer’s attention to Driscoll, the Union officer who is riding the horse and who will seriously wounded by O’Meara in a few seconds.  What seems at first an elegiac and tragic image turns out to be a way of precipitating the viewer into the narrative.  O’Meara shoots Driscoll with the last bullet fired in the war.  (The first bullet fired in the movie, which is the last bullet of the Civil War, turns out to be the last bullet in the movie – the shot that administers the coup de grace to Driscoll at the end of the picture; Fuller’s narratives are usually over-determined and obsessively tidy in construction and this is certainly the case in Run of the Arrow: Driscoll gets shot at the beginning and the end with the same bullet.)  O’Meara approaches.  There’s a lap dissolve and, now, he is beside his target who lies sprawled on the ground.  Fuller tilts the camera so that the horizon is canted.  Apparently, Fuller thought the composition of O’Meara squatting beside Driscoll, callously stealing food from the dying man’s pocket, and, then, using his chest as a table for his meal was uninteresting.  So, as an attention-grabbing way to energize the frame, he tilts the camera creating an off-balance and expressionistic image.  

Several things are worth noticing: Fuller generally leads with a punch to the viewer’s face (sometimes, literally as in The Naked Kiss in which a hooker with a bald head slams her purse right into the camera).  He doesn’t take up time with establishing shots, but typically kicks the narrative into high-gear in the first seconds of the movie.   The reveal that the tracking shot is actually motivated as a sort of POV of the man on US cavalry horse slowly walking to the left is also a cost-saving measure.  A more expensive film would set up tracks and run the tracking shot as an independent establishing image.  Fuller wants to minimize the number of camera setups so he economizes by transforming the establishing shot of casualties on a battlefield by reframing without a cut to focus on the man on the horse – the figure whose fate as a victim of O’Meara will motivate the whole movie.  If possible, Fuller will use one shot where other directors would employ several camera set-ups.  This lets Fuller economize on film and time with respect to repositioning the camera.  Of course, Fuller’s use of one shot for a sequence that might ordinarily be composed in several separate shots puts significant stress on his actors – they have to deliver their line readings accurately without falling back on a second or third take and must also hit their marks at the right time for the single shot to work.  During this era, most directors would block the scene and, then, film it from a single fixed perspective as a master shot.  Then, close-ups would be filmed for insertion into the scene and other details emphasized in separate shots.  Fuller doesn’t do this.  He shoots a master shot and, if its tolerable, uses the master shot in the film.  In many cases, if something is wrong with the master shot, Fuller will optically print the shot with parts of the image enlarged and, then, cut into the master shot to conceal the mistakes and serve as close-ups.  On close inspection, the optically printed shots are somewhat more grainy than the master shot and the quality the image will vary within the scene.  Fuller doesn’t care about this kind of thing.  If the shot is coherent and “reads” for the audience as a vehicle of advancing the narration, he’ll just rely upon a single master shot for the scene.  

Some of Fuller’s allegedly expressive innovations are born from necessity.  Contemporary critics remarked on how Fuller staged the run of the arrow in the first part of the movie by filming a sequence of shots of feet running – the movie cuts in counterpoint between the running bare feet of the prisoners and running moccasin-clad feet of the Indian pursuer.  This was thought to be very clever and imaginative when the movie was first reviewed.  French filmmakers, most particularly Robert Bresson, borrowed this effect; in Bresson’s later films like Mouchette and L’Argent, he films people walking from about ankle level – Bresson repeats the effect so much that it becomes irritating.  Bresson said that “walking involves feet” and the essence of walking is shown by aiming the camera at the feet.   Fuller thought the critics interpretations of the scene were amusingly fanciful.  As it happened, Rod Steiger playing O’Meara had sprained his ankle badly and could barely walk let alone run.  (Steiger moves with a palpable limp in a couple shots as he and Walking Coyote stroll through the desert before beginning the ordeal of their run.)  Fuller shot and edited the scene with the close-ups for running feet intercut with long shots to disguise the fact that Steiger wasn’t in fact running.  The effect of the images of the feet traversing the desert is emphasized with an exclamation point, the sudden quick shot of Walking Coyote’s feet ripped and bloody from crossing the rough and cactus overgrown desert terrain.  In this case, the effect that critics found impressive was purely incidental to Fuller’s need to improvise and economize on location – he couldn’t delay the shooting although Steiger was incapable of executing the scene; instead, he finds a work-around, substituting a close-up of someone else’s feet for Steiger’s. 

Another characteristic of Fuller’s film style is shock cuts between scenes.  The battlefield scene at the beginning ends in a relatively sedate way only to be succeeded by a big close-up of a man’s face bawling out a song as he plays banjo.  This is the shot of the man on the wagon singing “I’m a good old rebel” (Fuller softens the lyrics which are shocking even today).  The sequence in which O’Meara confronts his mother and says that his father and two brothers were killed in battle is staged on a bridge across a little stream.  This is a peculiar location for the pivotal scene in which O’Meara announces his undying hatred for the Union Cause and his intent to go West.  (The last stanza of “I’m a good old Rebel”announces that the singer intends to re-arm himself, opt out of Reconstruction, and continue the War from Mexico.)  One can interpret the staging of the scene on a bridge as signifying that the sequence is transitional, liminal, a pivot that will project the film’s narrative from the South into the West.  But, I don’t think this was Fuller’s intent.  Again, I think the staging of the scene on the bridge is, more or less, incidental to the director’s desire to create a frame around his actors, to enclose them by the masonry walls that force the characters into a confined space and, thereby, amplifies their antagonism.  

As with the tilted frame in opening scenes with O’Meara and Driscoll, the shock cut to the close-up of singing man on the wagon is not intended to be expressive of anything – there’s no deeper meaning in the mise-en-scene beyond Fuller’s desire to startle the audience with the effect.  He’s straining to engage the viewer with a shot that is the equivalent of tabloid headline – it’s big, dramatic, and doesn’t have anything to do with the content expressed.  The cut is like an exclamation point.  An exclamation  point isn’t expressive.  It simply underlines and accentuates.  And this is, generally, the case with Fuller’s more spectacular effects – the shots and editing aren’t about their content; they don’t necessarily mirror their subject in some way; rather, they are simply signs reading: LOOK AT ME! For me, IMHO, this is a flaw in Fuller’s direction: he grabs you by the throat but the gesture doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  One could imagine the rendition of “I’m a Good Old Rebel” shot in sinister gloom, with dense chiaroscuro, or, perhaps, the performance could be shot in glaring light against a neutral background; the camera angle could be tilted to reflect the perversity of the song or Fuller could devise an ironic montage to show as a counterpoint to the lyrics.  But he doesn’t opt for any expressive  way of staging the musical sequence but, instead, just slaps the audience in the face with the shock cut to the singer’s open mouth and his dullard’s face.

The other aspect of Fuller’s tabloid sensibility (“Headless body found in Topless Bar”) is his rather vulgar and simplistic moralizing.  Fuller’s films almost always contain a didactic sequence in which one character lectures another (or several) about a topic of social concern.  These harangues aren’t profound or subtle in any way – they are simply sermons that endorse status quo opinions.  For instance, in The Naked Kiss, Fuller pauses the action to have a crusading District Attorney lecture his minions about the evils of prostitution.  The arguments presented in the sermon are simple-minded and superficial – Fuller isn’t concerned with social conditions that make prostitution inevitable; instead, he focuses on the harm to women involved in the trade and the damage that prostitution inflicts on society by undermining the family.  In The Naked Kiss, a woman who was an abused prostitute tries to go straight, finds a perfect potential husband, and, then, learns that her prospective groom is a vicious child molester who needs her as a “beard” to cover his predatory conduct.  We know the former prostitute is virtuous because she has devoted herself to assisting (extremely cute and photogenic) crippled children in learning how to walk.  Consider, Underworld USA: the mob is selling drugs to school kids and recruiting cheerleaders to become prostitutes.  The Federal prosecutor, chairman of something called The Crime Commission, pauses the action to harangue his subordinates.  Standing in front of a wall of military memorabilia (including a Big Red One banner), he explains that organized crime imitates military command structures: there are generals, captains, lieutenants, and whole platoons of foot soldiers in the mob.  (Fuller’s intent here is ambiguous: is he intentionally or, perhaps, inadvertently implying that the military is a criminal organization itself, a structure of command directed toward committing murder?)  Shock Corridor, which is Fuller’s masterpiece, is full of lectures although they are all spoken by madmen: there are extensive discussions of the American Civil War, the effects of racism on African-Americans, and the horrors of nuclear war.  In The Run of the Arrow, O’Meara and Captain Clarke (Brian Keith) discuss the necessity of patriotism and love of country and the film’s embittered protagonist is compared to Philip Nolan, the “man without a country” in Edward Everett Hale’s famous short story of that same name.  Fuller slows the action for Clark to give a precis of the plot of that 1863 story.  Fuller’s didacticism shows him to be a typical Jewish liberal from the East Coast.  The opinions that he presents in his movies are pedestrian, common place verities: Prostitution is bad and results in the exploitation of women; organized crime is bad, particularly when it targets school kids by peddling dope to them and turning them into whores – in Fuller’s moral universe, drug addiction is worse than murder, on par with child molesting (Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss) racial discrimination is bad and African-Americans should be allowed full participation in governmental affairs; schools should be integrated (as argued in Shock Corridor); the Ku Klux Klan is bad (as shown in Run of the Arrow and Shock Corridor); patriotism and rational love of country should be encouraged (cf. Run of the Arrow and Shock Corridor). 

As I have argued elsewhere, an important and fundamental strain in post-World War II popular art as embodied in the TV and the movies is pedagogical.  Films and Tv shows, even sit-coms like The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show mobilize their effects to didactic ends: each episode tells a parable about virtue and makes a moral point.  Fuller exemplifies this characteristic par excellence, a feature of his art that seems inimical to the director’s adulation by French intelligentsia – as I have also argued the French critics imaginatively misunderstand Fuller and are not aware of his “tin-ear” for pedantic dialogue.  (If you don’t know a language as a native speaker, it’s hard to gage defects in tone and diction.)  In Run of the Arrow, Clark who is the voice of moral reason in the film says that the “defeat of the South was the birth of a nation”, anachronistically paraphrasing D. W. Griffith whose 1915 film Birth of a Nation inspired both Woodrow Wilson and the Ku Klux Klan.  But Fuller also argues that the American project is unfinished, that racism still endures as a legacy of the “Lost Cause” and, as the final title in the film tells us: THE END OF THIS STORY CAN ONLY BE WRITTEN BY YOU.

9.

Fuller made a lot of movies and most of them seem to be pretty bad.  However, some of Fuller’s pictures after Run of the Arrow have attained a cult status, particularly Forty Guns from a script Fuller wrote entitled Woman with a Whip, starring Barbara Stanwyck. Run of the Arrow’s disappointing box office performance ham-strung Fuller and he never again worked with A-list stars on a big budget. Fuller made a movie about the “werewolves”, German insurgents who continued fighting after the surrender of Germany.  The film is entitled Verboten! (with an exclamation point).  The film is important, but, virtually, unknown because it illustrates Fuller’s faith in the redemptive power of moving pictures.  The Nazi sympathizers are pacified and atone for their crimes after seeing film footage of concentration camps.  This was Fuller’s last movie produced through Globe, the director’s indie production company.  It was released in 1959 with another film that has cult status, the noir set in Japan called The Crimson Kimono.  Fuller, then, wrote several scripts for TV pilots, mostly Westerns.  The Studios were uninterested.

Fuller made the very low-budget Shock Corridor (1963), an astonishing picture that is his masterpiece so far as I am able to judge (IMHO)  The Naked Kiss (1964) is startling but less remarkable.  Both movies were savaged by the critics and scarcely promoted.  (The Naked Kiss had its premiere in Whitefish, Montana.)  Shark! (another exclamation point) is Jaws (1975) avant la lettre.  The film starred Burt Reynolds and its production was marred by an actual shark attack – a white shark ate Jose Marco, a stunt-diver.  Fuller tried to take his name off the credits but this was refused by the promoters.  Fuller, then, went to Europe where he spent the rest of his life, primarily in Paris where he had a coterie of admirers.  He made a picture for German television’s longstanding series, Tatort (“The Scene of the Crime”) called Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972).  Returning to the United States, he was finally able to accumulate funding necessary to direct The Big Red One, Fuller’s autobiographical picture about his experiences in combat in world War Two.  The film was well-received but very poorly distributed and earned only 2.3 million in rentals; the movie cost over 9 million dollars to produce, a small budget for a war picture – Fuller stages the D-Day landing on a beach with fifty men on a battlefield that is 100 yards long.  Fuller made one more movie in the United States, the disturbing and rarely seen White Dog (1982).  Written with Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential), the movie was described as “Jaws” with paws” or, even more sensationally, as a “racist Jaws with paws.”  The picture is about a racist who trains his dog to attack Black people.  To promote the movie, Fuller gave interviews with his canine star and, even, interviewed the dog several times for the amusement of publicists.  The movie failed at the box office, sinking like stone without a trace.  Paramount, the producer, mistaking subject matter for the director’s personal perspective, claimed the movie was racist and it was simply suppressed.  Fuller, then, went to Europe where he made two movies in French with French producers.  Reportedly, those pictures are inconsequential.

Fuller had a strange “afterlife” in Europe.  The darling of European cineastes, Fuller played cameo roles in movies made by leading directors – his talismanic presence as a hommage is noteworthy in Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark Pierrot le Fou (1965); chomping on a stogey, he appears as a gangster in Wim Wenders noir with Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, The American Friend (1977); he is also featured in Wenders The State of Things (1982), a film about a movie crew stranded in Lisbon when money runs out.  Fuller plays Joe, the cameraman on the location:

Mark: You know I take pictures, photographs but I never really thought in black and white before I saw our rushes.  Do you know what I mean?  You can see the shape of things.

Joe (Fuller): Life is in color but black and white is more realistic.  

In Wender’s script, Fuller is quoting the great French photographer, Henri Alekhan

Fuller lived in France until 1994 when he suffered a stroke.  With his wife, he lived in a small apartment in the 12th Arrondisement.  Fuller returned to Los Angeles and died in Hollywood in October 1997 at 85 years age.