Richard Stanley is a horror film director famous mostly because he was fired from the one great prestige picture on which he was employed. Now 25 years ago, Stanley, regarded as a promising genre film maker was hired to direct The Island of Dr. Moreau, a big-budget studio picture with A-list actors. Things went horribly wrong. Stanley couldn't get the effects that he was attempting to achieve and kept pouring money into the picture in an effort to correct problems that were, apparently, irremediable. He was dismissed from the film which was completed, inadequately, by another director. As with Terry Gillian's efforts to make Don Quixote, a documentary was produced about the debacle, an indictment of economics of making movies that is more famous now than the rather poorly received science fiction picture itself. (The documentary is called Lost Soul: the doomed journey of Richard Stanley's The Isle of Dr. Moreau released in 2014.). Like Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim, Stanley has the reputation of an auteur too uncompromising to work within the system -- a cinema poet maudit. Therefore, horror film devotees were excited when Stanley directed and released 2019 a film called The Color out of Space starring Nicholas Cage and based, loosely it appears, on H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story. On the evidence of the film, Stanley's reputation is better than his work -- we are more impressed by his legend, I think, than his talent. (It's interesting that Stanley, who is from South Africa, is a direct descendant of the famous explorer of the same name who was rescued by Dr. Livingston.)
The Color out of Space is very standard stuff. An eccentric family lives in big Victorian mansion in the middle of a wild, gloomy forest. (This is supposed to be some place in Massachusetts, but the locations were shot in Sintra, Portugal -- a place where you can hire first-rate film craftsmen without paying Hollywood Union salaries.) Dad is a dreamer who has devoted himself to raising alpacas. In the first, and best part of the film, there's a priceless scene in which Cage milks an alpaca much to the bemusement of a visiting hydrologist. Although the film botches the narrative, from watching deleted scenes, I understand now that the entire gloomy forest is at risk. A big dam is going to be built that will ultimately drown the hero's estate and the various monstrosities spawned there. (Stanley is so slipshod with his plot that he doesn't really explain this in the theatrical version of the film.) One night, a meteor lands at the mansion's front step, a few yards from a spooky ancient well. The meteor smells bad and pretty soon the water in the aquifer is contaminated. The meteor glows hot pink and exhales picturesque purple and pink fumes that everyone inhales. Odd flowers sprout on the lawn and foot long praying mantises emerge from their chrysalises to fly around the premises. The sky glows with an unearthly neon-pink. The last two-thirds of the picture feature, as one might expect, the characters making a series of increasingly bad decisions. First, when mom dreamily amputates a bunch of her fingers, dad takes her to the hospital in Arkham about an hour away and on the other side of the dense impenetrable woods. He leaves his daughter and two sons at the family manor -- this turns out to be a bad idea since monsters are now roaming around causing people to melt into flayed, oozing blobs with terrible agonized faces. When dad comes back, things get even worse -- mom is fused with her five-year old son and melts into a lump of bloody blubber. This is before she sprouts eight-foot-long spider legs and with her son's face embedded in her furry back prances around the attic where dad has confined her -- presumably in the hope that she'll get better somehow. (The sorts of changes that she suffers seem irreversible as far as I can see.) The alpacas get turned into another pustulent blob of goo, albeit with horribly scalded looking alpaca heads braying at the camera. A squatter on the premises, played memorably by the pot-head Tommy Chong (a vigorous and amusing 83 when the film was produced) uses a reel-to-reel tape recorder to cut a few tracks of the monsters whining and howling underground. The teenage daughter, a devotee of the Necronimicon (which has nothing to do with the movie), mutilates herself while chanting weird incantations inside of a bloody pentagram. Oddly enough this seems to protect her from the evil forces that have now turned the whole lawn into a carnival of monstrous insects and bloody-looking scarlet flowers. Her brother decides to crawl down into the well to retrieve the family dog who has also been turned into one of the pulpy goo-monsters. This also is a very bad decision. Finally, Dad has had enough, gets out his shotgun, and decides to finish off some of his family members who, by this time, are in a very bad way. A visiting deputy gets yanked up into a tentacle tree and constrictored to death. The visiting hydrologist finds himself sprawled on the law which is now sprouting innumerable pale white fingers. And so on and so on.
Cage is funny and has some amusing understated lines. Of course, he also gets to go berserk and stick his daughter, who has used a razor to slice pentagrams into her skin everywhere, up in the attic with mom, now metamorphosed into a kind of gory-looking tarantula. By and large, the film is adequate, but not memorable. Some of the creature effects are okay, but Stanley shoots the critters in bad light and in very close shots as if a little embarrassed by his monsters. The film is reasonably creepy, but I scare easily. It's all obviously derived from the really alarming and horrific gold standard in this kind of horror -- John Carpenter's version of The Thing from Outer Space. If you want to see a movie of this kind, and one that is actually very intelligent, well-scripted, and beautifully made, see Carpenter's film and avoid this picture. That is, unless you want to hear, Cage talking about how his wife's breast cancer has, somehow, made her more attractive to him, a nasty subplot in the film, and, then, later deliver these immortal lines: "It's the cancer smell, Like when my father died. The cancer ward. The rotting milk smell. (addressing this to his wife) But you would know this better than anyone." Repeatedly, Cage says: "Don't worry. Everything will be okay." And also a variation on what Trump has said about the coronavirus: 'Everything's under control." Well...not really.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Unseen Cinema -- the Mechanized Eye
Unseen Cinema -- the Mechanized Eye is a compilation of about 15 short films, loosely designated as avant-garde. Ostensibly, the 100 minute film is part of seven DVD package, restorations released through the Library of Congress. The package of films shown on Turner Classic Movies doesn't match play-lists on individual DVDs in the set and, so, I'm not sure how the sequence of short pictures as shoqn on the network relate to the actual discs in the the series.
As one might expect, the group of films is a mixed bag, some of them fascinating and others utterly dull. The first samples shown are simply very old movies, moving pictures that date back to 1894 and, also, just before the turn of the last century. As is always the case, when watching these pictures, you have sense of straining your vision very hard because the images are rarities, street scenes in some cases that show a world that no one living can recall. Even damaged ancient films like these have a certain authority and mystery. A German strong man filmed by Edison in 1894 grimaces as he poses almost naked for the camera -- the pictures have an intense sculptural quality. In Paris, around 1900, just about everyone seems to have carried a parasol against the sun. Some of the pictures of the Eiffel tower are distorted by damage and look like black and white paintings by Derain. The more "artistic stuff" on the program is generally dull. There's a picturesquely shot one-reeler of a young poet who falls in love with a dyad, that is a tree-nymph who is the spirit of a cedar on what seems to be the Monterrey coast. Scored to Debussy, it's pretty much insufferable. A dynamically edited collage of skyscraper shots is similarly dull and there's a ten minute homage to oil that represents industrial film-making at its absolute worst -- it's a failure as a documentary, dull as cinematic poetry, and, more or less, inexcusable. (I don't know why this picture was conserved -- it's terrible.) An abstract color film by Norman McLaren features schematic spooks and goblins flying around in time to music -- it is, in fact, an early music video and was shown for years as a kind of Entr'acte at the music hall where the Rockettes performed. It's interesting and has a certain brazen elan but a little bit of this kind of stuff goes a long way. A bizarre collage by Joseph Cornell pieced together between 1930 and 1970 contains snippets of big cats, flying birds, an old Melies peep-show with figures vanishing and reappearing and a cartoon that is printed to run both in its normal aspect and upside down in a single frame. It's interesting but the movie is only as good as its archival sources -- Cornell has picked out some strange footage and its very interesting, but what he does with it seems, more or less, random; for the most part, he just splices the disparate stuff together and supplies a rinky-tink sound track: the film is called Thimble Theater. A very early one-reel "comedy" shows a man fitted with a prosthetic arm that seems to have a life of its own -- the thing wriggles away from him and steals things from people. The picture made around 1910 is very convincing, essentially a record of magic tricks involving the artificial arm, but its both macabre and funny at the same time. After World War One, Douglas Fairbanks made a series of ineffably weird two-reelers. Some of them feature special effects that are supposed to simulate drug trips -- apparently marijuana and cocaine were both popular after the Great War. In the film shown in the program, Fairbanks is sadistically fed horrible food and, then, experiences nightmares due to indisgestion.. The nightmares include a fiend shot through a distorting lens who is genuinely creepy and, then, a bunch of acrobatic running and leaping by the immensely athletic and powerful-looking actor. One scene in which the hero walks up walls and, then, strolls upside-down on the ceiling is fantastically effective -- and I have no idea how this seamless effect was achieved. Some montages by SlavkoVorkapich, who later worked in mainstream films producing the same sort of hallucinatory short sequences, are shown --they're interesting but nothing special. A city-scape shot with distorting lens, the work of a "loony cameraman" is also interesting and has some very disturbing images of distorted faces. It's supposed to be funny but the disfigured heads are monstrous and some of them look like mutilated war veterans. Charles Vidor's The Bridge is an early adaptation (1920) of the famous story by Ambrose Bierce Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge -- it's very good, intense,and the plain style in which the movie is executed adds to its success. The real find in the program is Orson Welles' juvenile effort, Heart of Age. Welles made the short film when he was 19 or 20 -- it's shot at a Boy's Academy in Woodstock, Illinois that Welles attended. The picture is an imitation of expressionistic cinema -- made in 1934, Welles later claimed that he made the movie as a joke, to imitate Werner Krauss in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Be that as it may, the film is very spooky and enigmatic. Welles appears as a figure in a topcoat and wearing an pretentious hat -- he's obviously intended as a grotesque of the kind one might encounter in E.T.A. Hoffmann and his stark make-up is alarmingly hideous. In fact, Welles seems to have hopped right over The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to dive into its source material, the macabre grotesque of the German Romantics, particularly Hoffmann. The movie is dream-like and ambitious -- Welles prints some of the footage in negative and,even, I think solarizes some the shots. An old woman, her face literally lined with age, squats on a big bell and by rocking her hips causes it to toll. (The rather plain-looking young woman made-up as a crone was Welles' first wife.) The bell's tolling is over-determined since a man in black face also is tugging at a rope and causing a bell (another or the same?) to toll as well. The woman's movements as she straddles the bell are unmistakably sexual and the whole thing is distinctly kinky, a bizarre mix of sexual innuendo and surrealism. Welles pretended to be ashamed of the film, but I think this was an act -- the little picture is memorable and the best thing on the program.
As one might expect, the group of films is a mixed bag, some of them fascinating and others utterly dull. The first samples shown are simply very old movies, moving pictures that date back to 1894 and, also, just before the turn of the last century. As is always the case, when watching these pictures, you have sense of straining your vision very hard because the images are rarities, street scenes in some cases that show a world that no one living can recall. Even damaged ancient films like these have a certain authority and mystery. A German strong man filmed by Edison in 1894 grimaces as he poses almost naked for the camera -- the pictures have an intense sculptural quality. In Paris, around 1900, just about everyone seems to have carried a parasol against the sun. Some of the pictures of the Eiffel tower are distorted by damage and look like black and white paintings by Derain. The more "artistic stuff" on the program is generally dull. There's a picturesquely shot one-reeler of a young poet who falls in love with a dyad, that is a tree-nymph who is the spirit of a cedar on what seems to be the Monterrey coast. Scored to Debussy, it's pretty much insufferable. A dynamically edited collage of skyscraper shots is similarly dull and there's a ten minute homage to oil that represents industrial film-making at its absolute worst -- it's a failure as a documentary, dull as cinematic poetry, and, more or less, inexcusable. (I don't know why this picture was conserved -- it's terrible.) An abstract color film by Norman McLaren features schematic spooks and goblins flying around in time to music -- it is, in fact, an early music video and was shown for years as a kind of Entr'acte at the music hall where the Rockettes performed. It's interesting and has a certain brazen elan but a little bit of this kind of stuff goes a long way. A bizarre collage by Joseph Cornell pieced together between 1930 and 1970 contains snippets of big cats, flying birds, an old Melies peep-show with figures vanishing and reappearing and a cartoon that is printed to run both in its normal aspect and upside down in a single frame. It's interesting but the movie is only as good as its archival sources -- Cornell has picked out some strange footage and its very interesting, but what he does with it seems, more or less, random; for the most part, he just splices the disparate stuff together and supplies a rinky-tink sound track: the film is called Thimble Theater. A very early one-reel "comedy" shows a man fitted with a prosthetic arm that seems to have a life of its own -- the thing wriggles away from him and steals things from people. The picture made around 1910 is very convincing, essentially a record of magic tricks involving the artificial arm, but its both macabre and funny at the same time. After World War One, Douglas Fairbanks made a series of ineffably weird two-reelers. Some of them feature special effects that are supposed to simulate drug trips -- apparently marijuana and cocaine were both popular after the Great War. In the film shown in the program, Fairbanks is sadistically fed horrible food and, then, experiences nightmares due to indisgestion.. The nightmares include a fiend shot through a distorting lens who is genuinely creepy and, then, a bunch of acrobatic running and leaping by the immensely athletic and powerful-looking actor. One scene in which the hero walks up walls and, then, strolls upside-down on the ceiling is fantastically effective -- and I have no idea how this seamless effect was achieved. Some montages by SlavkoVorkapich, who later worked in mainstream films producing the same sort of hallucinatory short sequences, are shown --they're interesting but nothing special. A city-scape shot with distorting lens, the work of a "loony cameraman" is also interesting and has some very disturbing images of distorted faces. It's supposed to be funny but the disfigured heads are monstrous and some of them look like mutilated war veterans. Charles Vidor's The Bridge is an early adaptation (1920) of the famous story by Ambrose Bierce Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge -- it's very good, intense,and the plain style in which the movie is executed adds to its success. The real find in the program is Orson Welles' juvenile effort, Heart of Age. Welles made the short film when he was 19 or 20 -- it's shot at a Boy's Academy in Woodstock, Illinois that Welles attended. The picture is an imitation of expressionistic cinema -- made in 1934, Welles later claimed that he made the movie as a joke, to imitate Werner Krauss in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Be that as it may, the film is very spooky and enigmatic. Welles appears as a figure in a topcoat and wearing an pretentious hat -- he's obviously intended as a grotesque of the kind one might encounter in E.T.A. Hoffmann and his stark make-up is alarmingly hideous. In fact, Welles seems to have hopped right over The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to dive into its source material, the macabre grotesque of the German Romantics, particularly Hoffmann. The movie is dream-like and ambitious -- Welles prints some of the footage in negative and,even, I think solarizes some the shots. An old woman, her face literally lined with age, squats on a big bell and by rocking her hips causes it to toll. (The rather plain-looking young woman made-up as a crone was Welles' first wife.) The bell's tolling is over-determined since a man in black face also is tugging at a rope and causing a bell (another or the same?) to toll as well. The woman's movements as she straddles the bell are unmistakably sexual and the whole thing is distinctly kinky, a bizarre mix of sexual innuendo and surrealism. Welles pretended to be ashamed of the film, but I think this was an act -- the little picture is memorable and the best thing on the program.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Cry of the City
A two-bit wise guy from Marty Scorsese's old neighborhood at Mott and Vine lies in the hospital, riddled with bullet wounds. He's gunned down a cop and will certainly be sent to the electric chair. A beautiful young girl visits him just before surgery and pledges her love. A couple of homicide detectives badger the wounded man -- they want him to confess to the torture and murder of an old woman named de Grazie; she was killed for her cache of jewelry. The cop-killer (Richard Conte) is lots of things, all of them bad, but he doesn't torture and kill old ladies and so he indignantly denies the rap. After his surgery, the cop-killer is released to a prison-hospital. He escapes, although his wounds torment him and, periodically, cause him to pass out. (He's limping on a leg that's festered and rotting.) The hoodlum is searching for the girl who kissed hlm before his surgery and, in a desultory way, trying to clear his bad name with respect to the torture-murder. A virtuous cop from the same Italian neighborhood, Candella (Victor Mature), fanatically pursues the escaped killer -- he's appalled that the wise-guy is admired in the old neighborhood and runs the risk of corrupting kids living there. In particular, the cop-killer's kid brother admires the older man as a kind of Robin Hood. The film tours the underworld for about 90 minutes exhibiting some vivid supporting players. Like the wounded IRA man in Carol Reed's The Informer, no one really wants to hide the badly injured criminal on the lam -- he bounces from one villain to another, becoming increasingly delirious and desperate. In the end, the obsessed Candella gets shot, but, he too escapes from the hospital to hunt down the bad guy with an obligatory scene in a Catholic Church where the girl appears (and won't flee with the wise-guy) and where the wounded cop confronts the equally wounded criminal with predictable consequences. Thus, the premise for Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City a 1948 film noir with an intelligent and complex script, good acting and, generally, forgettable.
Siodmak shot the picture on location in Little Italy, but most of the scenes (with a couple notable exceptions) could have been produced on a Hollywood back lot. In fact, once I toured Paramount's soundstages and outdoor sets and there is, in fact, a city alley and street ensemble that looks like most of the movie. (Exceptions are a couple of grandiose city-scapes with streets slanting into neon-lit intersections and the climax in the church and, then, the street oozing with mist where the final shoot-out occurs.) There are semi-documentary style subway scenes and some interesting interiors of tenements in Little Italy dripping with religious icons and memorabilia, but. by and large, the scene-setting isn't too memorable. Siodmak, a alumnus of the late phases of German expressionism, directs capably, but, except for a couple of brilliant set-piece suspense scenes, most of his work is perfunctory. He doesn't use shadows for expressionist effects, but instead deploys them as part of the narrative -- shadow-images actually advance the plot. The two best sequences in the film are a thrilling if low-key escape from the prison hospital full of false starts and apparent perils and a scene in which the cop-killer menaces a seedy lawyer and ends up stabbing him death (and, also, participating in the shooting of the man's secretary -- it's the attorney's gun that goes off). The film is populated by a savage rogue's gallery of crooks -- the nasty lawyer stands out as does a pathetic Viennese or German doctor who can't practice medicine (he has no license) but, nonetheless, offers his services to the wounded criminal. This guy, with his poached- egg eyes is particularly memorable -- it's the kind of part that Udo Kier would have been given in a quarter of a century later -- and the corrupt doctor, who has a sick wife at home is both sleazy and sympathetic. (Apparently, New York was full of European doctors without licenses after World War Two providing abortions, I suppose, and other useful services -- the cops know them all and round them up as "the usual suspects" in the film.) A giantess, a hulking ugly masseuse, is particularly startling -- she's the woman who, in fact, tortured the old woman and delivers an excellent speech about her detestation for her elderly, wealthy female clients. The vicious masseuse, the terrifying Hope Emerson, is twice the size of the poor cop-killer and three times as brutal. Siodmak stages her first appearance with real flare: the wounded hoodlum rings her doorbell and she approaches, moving toward the door through about four different glass ante-rooms, each time looming larger and larger - it's an ineffably weird and scary visual effect. I have no idea why the shot is staged in this way -- each anteroom is differently lit and so we see the monstrous Amazon in different ways as she approaches -- but it's really remarkable and the best thing in the movie. The picture has a nightmarish aspect and it works a subtle kind of ju-jitsu on the viewer -- at first, we admire the brazen arrogance of the criminal and are rooting for him to makes his escape. But, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the man is vicious and that the true hero is the indefatigable (literally, many scenes take place early in the morning at diners and on the empty streets) Candella His partner says: "This is becoming a vendetta for you" -- and it's obvious that Candella is dangerously obsessed with the chase, becoming, in a way, a mirror for the wounded criminal. At the film's climax, both characters are so badly hurt they can barely stand. Mature generally played bad guys until this feature and his heavy-lidded eyes make him odd-looking -- he blinks at the camera like a drowsy iguana but he's good in the film. Siodmak detested filming on location: "you've got no control," he lamented. Shelley Winters has a small, but pivotal, role as a dame who procures the services of the corrupt doctor -- this was her first Hollywood role.
This sort of picture reminds me of Ozu's string of domestic melodramas, films with names like Early Summer, Late Spring, An Autumn Afternoon -- the names are all alike becomes the films are all closely similar. Cry of the City is just a place-holder name; all of these late forties film noir are essentially the same -- they're all mildly entertaining but without a scorecard you can't tell them apart and they're uniformly lurid, but abstract names don't help in distinguishing them.
Siodmak shot the picture on location in Little Italy, but most of the scenes (with a couple notable exceptions) could have been produced on a Hollywood back lot. In fact, once I toured Paramount's soundstages and outdoor sets and there is, in fact, a city alley and street ensemble that looks like most of the movie. (Exceptions are a couple of grandiose city-scapes with streets slanting into neon-lit intersections and the climax in the church and, then, the street oozing with mist where the final shoot-out occurs.) There are semi-documentary style subway scenes and some interesting interiors of tenements in Little Italy dripping with religious icons and memorabilia, but. by and large, the scene-setting isn't too memorable. Siodmak, a alumnus of the late phases of German expressionism, directs capably, but, except for a couple of brilliant set-piece suspense scenes, most of his work is perfunctory. He doesn't use shadows for expressionist effects, but instead deploys them as part of the narrative -- shadow-images actually advance the plot. The two best sequences in the film are a thrilling if low-key escape from the prison hospital full of false starts and apparent perils and a scene in which the cop-killer menaces a seedy lawyer and ends up stabbing him death (and, also, participating in the shooting of the man's secretary -- it's the attorney's gun that goes off). The film is populated by a savage rogue's gallery of crooks -- the nasty lawyer stands out as does a pathetic Viennese or German doctor who can't practice medicine (he has no license) but, nonetheless, offers his services to the wounded criminal. This guy, with his poached- egg eyes is particularly memorable -- it's the kind of part that Udo Kier would have been given in a quarter of a century later -- and the corrupt doctor, who has a sick wife at home is both sleazy and sympathetic. (Apparently, New York was full of European doctors without licenses after World War Two providing abortions, I suppose, and other useful services -- the cops know them all and round them up as "the usual suspects" in the film.) A giantess, a hulking ugly masseuse, is particularly startling -- she's the woman who, in fact, tortured the old woman and delivers an excellent speech about her detestation for her elderly, wealthy female clients. The vicious masseuse, the terrifying Hope Emerson, is twice the size of the poor cop-killer and three times as brutal. Siodmak stages her first appearance with real flare: the wounded hoodlum rings her doorbell and she approaches, moving toward the door through about four different glass ante-rooms, each time looming larger and larger - it's an ineffably weird and scary visual effect. I have no idea why the shot is staged in this way -- each anteroom is differently lit and so we see the monstrous Amazon in different ways as she approaches -- but it's really remarkable and the best thing in the movie. The picture has a nightmarish aspect and it works a subtle kind of ju-jitsu on the viewer -- at first, we admire the brazen arrogance of the criminal and are rooting for him to makes his escape. But, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the man is vicious and that the true hero is the indefatigable (literally, many scenes take place early in the morning at diners and on the empty streets) Candella His partner says: "This is becoming a vendetta for you" -- and it's obvious that Candella is dangerously obsessed with the chase, becoming, in a way, a mirror for the wounded criminal. At the film's climax, both characters are so badly hurt they can barely stand. Mature generally played bad guys until this feature and his heavy-lidded eyes make him odd-looking -- he blinks at the camera like a drowsy iguana but he's good in the film. Siodmak detested filming on location: "you've got no control," he lamented. Shelley Winters has a small, but pivotal, role as a dame who procures the services of the corrupt doctor -- this was her first Hollywood role.
This sort of picture reminds me of Ozu's string of domestic melodramas, films with names like Early Summer, Late Spring, An Autumn Afternoon -- the names are all alike becomes the films are all closely similar. Cry of the City is just a place-holder name; all of these late forties film noir are essentially the same -- they're all mildly entertaining but without a scorecard you can't tell them apart and they're uniformly lurid, but abstract names don't help in distinguishing them.
Sunday, April 5, 2020
The Seven Year Itch
Many years ago, I drove onto Manhattan island in the late summer during a heat wave. The city was suffocating, like a sauna in which the red hot stones had also been used to cook cabbage. The entries to the subways were infernal and, when I looked upward I expected to see the skyscrapers melting like tallow candles. It's this sort of heat that drives the negligible plot of Billy Wilder's 1954 comedy, The Seven Year Itch.
An uninteresting Everyman played by Tom Ewell deposits his wife and son at the train station. They are fleeing the heat of the Summer for Maine. A prologue to the film shows the Indians on the island also engaging in the custom of exiling wife and children to the cooler north woods and the movie purports to be sociology -- this is what inevitably happens when married men are set free during the height of the summer heat. Ewall's character is the editor of books sold by their salacious covers. (His firm's version of Little Women shows half-naked damsels on the cover and purports to be the truth about life in "a women's dormitory.") Ewell is assigned to edit a copy of something like the Psychopathia Sexualis written by Kraft-Ebbing and, alone at home, he imagines all sorts of liaisons with sexy anonymous women. His upstairs neighbor turns out to be Marilyn Monroe in a role so archetypal and suggestive that she doesn't even get a name. Ewell meets Monroe's character when she drops a tomato plant in an iron pot and almost kills him on his back terrace. She comes down to his apartment and he haphazardly tries to impress her -- he's too abashed to make any attempt at real seduction. She's friendly and the relationship develops into something that looks to the world like spectacular adultery, but is really chaste. Meanwhile, Ewell, also, fantasizes that his wife is having an affair with the hunky Tab Hunter-like, Tom McKenzie. Monroe's character moves into Ewell's house to take advantage of his air-conditioning. More comical misunderstandings ensue, although the film really isn't very funny. When Tom McKenzie shows up, he can't believe that the feckless and dull hero has a beautiful woman living in his house: "What do you want me to believe?" he sneers. "That you got Marilyn Monroe in your kitchen." In fact, Marilyn is in the kitchen making cinnamon toast. Ewell, suspecting his friend of seducing his wife, sucker-punches the man and knocks him unconscious and, then, flees the seductress for the Maine woods, departing with such alacrity that he forgets his shoes.
There's nothing to the movie and it lags seriously. The film was based on a Broadway play by George Axelrod and it's obvious in the mise-en-scene. The picture seems claustrophobic and the two leading characters (the show must have been a "two-hander" on Broadway) are caricatures that strike only one note and that repeatedly. Everything about the film is prosaic and limited -- even the famous scene where Miss Monroe has her skirts blown over her head by a subway train passing under a grate doesn't really work in the movie. Viewers will recall the scene from an iconic promotional photograph -- the image doesn't look that way in the film and the actress is shot from an angle in which her upper body is not visible. Indeed, the sequence looks anonymous in the movie, leading to the surmise that a body double has been used and we're not even seeing Monroe's real knees and thighs. (The promotional shot is much more revealing.) The picture works on your imagination, fraudulently seeming to be more salacious than what we're actually shown. The girl refers to a photo-shoot in which we imagine her to be naked. In fact, when we're shown the picture, it's nothing special -- Monroe is wearing a bathing suit. Similarly, Monroe tells a story about getting her toe caught in the bathtub drain while bathing (in icy water because of the heat). For some reason,
Wilder inserts a shot showing the actress in the bath tub, but she's chastely posed with bubbles covering her entire body -- an image that's inconsistent with the account of the ice-water in the bath. Monroe is beautiful, but what she promises throughout the film's 90 minute running time is inaccessible and, certainly, unfilmable. If she were to really embrace the sad sack Ewell (who looks a little like Art Carney), the film would combust and the movie would melt before our eyes. So it's all tease with no follow-through. Ewell (who played similar roles with Jayne Mansfield) is wholly without any kind of charisma. He's supposed to be impersonating every horny husband suffering the titular "seven year itch", but the man is dysfunctional as a romantic lead, dull, and without a trace of comic instinct. He's simply not equal to Monroe's breathy cream-colored apparition is silk pajamas or slinky evening gown and, so, as if by perverse design, the film can't go anywhere interesting. Monroe is playing against a homely mannequin and, although she can do lots of things, she can't kiss the life into Tom Ewell. Imagine how great the film would be if Ewell's part were played by an actor like the middle-aged Buster Keaton or, even, the man proposed for the part the young Walter Matthau. It's like a forcing Monroe into a romantic role with Karl Malden.
An uninteresting Everyman played by Tom Ewell deposits his wife and son at the train station. They are fleeing the heat of the Summer for Maine. A prologue to the film shows the Indians on the island also engaging in the custom of exiling wife and children to the cooler north woods and the movie purports to be sociology -- this is what inevitably happens when married men are set free during the height of the summer heat. Ewall's character is the editor of books sold by their salacious covers. (His firm's version of Little Women shows half-naked damsels on the cover and purports to be the truth about life in "a women's dormitory.") Ewell is assigned to edit a copy of something like the Psychopathia Sexualis written by Kraft-Ebbing and, alone at home, he imagines all sorts of liaisons with sexy anonymous women. His upstairs neighbor turns out to be Marilyn Monroe in a role so archetypal and suggestive that she doesn't even get a name. Ewell meets Monroe's character when she drops a tomato plant in an iron pot and almost kills him on his back terrace. She comes down to his apartment and he haphazardly tries to impress her -- he's too abashed to make any attempt at real seduction. She's friendly and the relationship develops into something that looks to the world like spectacular adultery, but is really chaste. Meanwhile, Ewell, also, fantasizes that his wife is having an affair with the hunky Tab Hunter-like, Tom McKenzie. Monroe's character moves into Ewell's house to take advantage of his air-conditioning. More comical misunderstandings ensue, although the film really isn't very funny. When Tom McKenzie shows up, he can't believe that the feckless and dull hero has a beautiful woman living in his house: "What do you want me to believe?" he sneers. "That you got Marilyn Monroe in your kitchen." In fact, Marilyn is in the kitchen making cinnamon toast. Ewell, suspecting his friend of seducing his wife, sucker-punches the man and knocks him unconscious and, then, flees the seductress for the Maine woods, departing with such alacrity that he forgets his shoes.
There's nothing to the movie and it lags seriously. The film was based on a Broadway play by George Axelrod and it's obvious in the mise-en-scene. The picture seems claustrophobic and the two leading characters (the show must have been a "two-hander" on Broadway) are caricatures that strike only one note and that repeatedly. Everything about the film is prosaic and limited -- even the famous scene where Miss Monroe has her skirts blown over her head by a subway train passing under a grate doesn't really work in the movie. Viewers will recall the scene from an iconic promotional photograph -- the image doesn't look that way in the film and the actress is shot from an angle in which her upper body is not visible. Indeed, the sequence looks anonymous in the movie, leading to the surmise that a body double has been used and we're not even seeing Monroe's real knees and thighs. (The promotional shot is much more revealing.) The picture works on your imagination, fraudulently seeming to be more salacious than what we're actually shown. The girl refers to a photo-shoot in which we imagine her to be naked. In fact, when we're shown the picture, it's nothing special -- Monroe is wearing a bathing suit. Similarly, Monroe tells a story about getting her toe caught in the bathtub drain while bathing (in icy water because of the heat). For some reason,
Wilder inserts a shot showing the actress in the bath tub, but she's chastely posed with bubbles covering her entire body -- an image that's inconsistent with the account of the ice-water in the bath. Monroe is beautiful, but what she promises throughout the film's 90 minute running time is inaccessible and, certainly, unfilmable. If she were to really embrace the sad sack Ewell (who looks a little like Art Carney), the film would combust and the movie would melt before our eyes. So it's all tease with no follow-through. Ewell (who played similar roles with Jayne Mansfield) is wholly without any kind of charisma. He's supposed to be impersonating every horny husband suffering the titular "seven year itch", but the man is dysfunctional as a romantic lead, dull, and without a trace of comic instinct. He's simply not equal to Monroe's breathy cream-colored apparition is silk pajamas or slinky evening gown and, so, as if by perverse design, the film can't go anywhere interesting. Monroe is playing against a homely mannequin and, although she can do lots of things, she can't kiss the life into Tom Ewell. Imagine how great the film would be if Ewell's part were played by an actor like the middle-aged Buster Keaton or, even, the man proposed for the part the young Walter Matthau. It's like a forcing Monroe into a romantic role with Karl Malden.
Targets
By far the scariest thing in Peter Bogdonovich's maiden film, Targets, is the interior decorating. A product of the late sixties, the film's characters live in rooms painted faint purple, strange tones of aquamarine and baby-shit yellow. The rooms are sparse, but adorned with lights shaped like the coronavirus (balls studded with weird wart-like protuberances) and the color of marigolds. In the master bedroom, the blue sheet on the bed matches a blue lampshade. In the kitchen, where the formica is spotless, the roll of paper towels is also a kleenex-blue color. Even the home of the wealthy hero, Byron Orlock (played by the elderly Boris Karloff) is a kingdom of schlock with pink coral highlights and awful kitschy furnishings. At one point, Bogdonovich, imitating Hitchcock, aims his camera at a nasty-looking beige carpet, full of mismatched seams, and, then, tracks for a half-dozen yards finally tilting up to expose a madman's note, typed in red print. The note is less alarming than the carpet and this seems to be the point of the showy shot. This trash aesthetic extends to the exteriors: when Orlock rides to a public appearance at an outdoor movie theater in Reseda, the car traverses a Hades of new and used car lots, one after another on a gruesome commercial strip. The camera surveys the carnage as Orlock exclaims "God, what an ugly town this has become!" (The scenery reminds me of old Highway 12 west of Minneapolis where the road passed several miles of up-scale car dealerships before reaching the Pompeii-red and round as a storage tank Cooper Cinerama -- a neighborhood that my peckish German teacher at College described as "quintessentially American.)
Bogdonovich, who began his career working for Roger Corman's American International, a purveyor of low-budget horror films as well as bikini girl and motorcycle pictures, was told by the boss to make a picture that used Karloff (under contract to the studio) for two days. Other than that there were no constraints except for budget, which by the look of things, was microscopic.-- Bogdonovich mostly shoots on location without much in the way of professional lighting. The scenes at the drive-in movie theater are very, very dark -- he didn't have the benefit of modern film stock or digital processing that allows today for realistic tones and contrasts in night shots. Bogdonovich cast himself as Sammy, a young director working for a studio like American International -- when he was about 25, Bogdonovich was just about handsome enough to make a convincing leading man. The film is wonderfully efficient and well-crafted, indeed, an enjoyable minor classic with some indelible images. There's a double-plot that comes together at the climax; it's absurdly contrived but filmed with such conviction that you don't notice the deficiencies until after the closing credits. Corman also told Bogdonovich that he was supposed to intercut footage from Karloff's previous movie for the studio, a ghastly thing appropriately called The Terror. Targets begins with Karloff/Orlock stalking around in one of the studio's cardboard dungeons -- there's a young girl who has swooned and is scantily clad, a surfer-boy hero, and a flood that rips down walls while the scene keeps cutting away to a raven flying through the sky. The film-within-a-film ends --"The End" the titles tell us -- and, then, Bogdonovich's picture begins. We're in a screening room. Orlock (Karloff) announces that he's retiring. (He was 79 or 80 when the film was made.) This upsets Sammy who has written a script just for the old man -- in it, Orlock gets to play himself. (Presumably, the script is Targets). Orlock has an Asian-American secretary who is having an affair with Sammy -- the stuff about Chinese proverbs and the girl teaching Orlock Chinese has not aged well. Orlock, who is playing Karloff, is the "monster man", famous for his portrayals of monsters and maniacs in horror movies. Of course, he's a polite old English gentleman with a taste for Scotch whiskey. Orlock is humiliated that he has to appear at a drive-in in Reseda to promote The Terror and he tells his secretary to book a flight to New York and a boat trip to London -- he's going home after thirty-five years in Hollywood. Meanwhile, a spookily polite young man named Bobbie is buying guns and ammunition. He's not doing well -- with his pretty wife, the young man lives with his parents. Whenever, he addresses his father he calls him "Sir." The young man is like Beaver from Leave it to Beaver! grown up and armed to the teeth. When he and his father go out target shooting (the kid is an ace), he trains the gun on his domineering father and almost shoots him -- when the older man turns his face to his son, the young man is cowed. Sammy and Orlock get drunk after watching Howard Hawk's 1931 The Criminal Code -- in that film, Karloff plays a menacing figure. "My first big role," Karloff says. Sammy, as a cineaste like Bogdonovich, praises Hawks' ability to tell a story with pictures. Karloff tells a story with words, delivering a spectacular rendition of the old chestnut "Appointment at Samarra". Across town, the young man shoots his wife and everyone in his family and, then, buying more ammunition goes out to tank farm, a facility with big fifty-foot high white cylindrical tanks. He takes a sniper position atop the tallest tank and murders a half-dozen motorists driving by on the freeway. (While laying out his arsenal atop the tank, he nonchalantly sips on a coca-cola and eats a Twinkie -- in those days, Coke came in 8 ounce bottles that you had to open with an opener and was something that you didn't gulp, but demurely sipped.) After a police chase, the kid hides inside the screen of the outdoor movie theater, poking a hole through the white canvas so he can slaughter the people in their cars come to see Orlock and the picture. Orlock is a trouper and has decided to make his appearance at the theater. Thus, the film has contrived to hinge-together the two plots with a dramatic confrontation at the outdoor movie drive-in. In the final scene, we see the drive-in lot at dawn -- everyone has gone except for the killer's car still parked alone in the big field of posts for the speakers and parking lots.
Bogdonovich stages the sniper scenes with exciting aplomb and relishes the chaos at the out door movie theater. The picture has an excellent sense for time -- we can measure the sun setting and air turning blue and, then, dark at the outdoor drive-in. There are fascinating and poetic documentary style shots at the Drive-in -- we see the peculiar sociology of these places, now almost entirely extinct: the playgrounds, the projection booth, the kids necking in cars, the concession stand, all of these things are lyrically represented. In an early shot, the camera pointlessly tracks with Bobbie as he walks from his car into the family house. You wonder if Bogdonovich hasn't yet learned that you can edit out footage that doesn't communicate anything much -- but there's a method to his madness: later, during the massacre of the family, Bogdonovich relentlessly tracks the killer in long takes and, then, ends the sequence with bravura survey of the carpet. The camera's obsessive focus on the sniper (modeled on Charles Whitman, the University of Texas killer) is signified by this seemingly meaningless extended tracking shot early in the film.
The famous film critic, Manny Farber described "termite art" as low-budget, unassuming entertainment that inadvertently documents the era in which it was made. "Termite Art" can't afford to create a seamless imaginary world but, instead, continuously allows the surrounding reality to seep into the picture. Targets is a classic of Termite Art.
(Bogdonovich supplied commentary on the showing of Targets that I watched on TCM on April 4. He doesn't look well. His trademark goggles looked as if they were smeared with vaseline and he was wearing some kind of soft brace or cast on one of his forearms. He appeared by Skype and, when asked by Joe Mankiewicz about his father's reaction to Targets, began to weep.)
Bogdonovich, who began his career working for Roger Corman's American International, a purveyor of low-budget horror films as well as bikini girl and motorcycle pictures, was told by the boss to make a picture that used Karloff (under contract to the studio) for two days. Other than that there were no constraints except for budget, which by the look of things, was microscopic.-- Bogdonovich mostly shoots on location without much in the way of professional lighting. The scenes at the drive-in movie theater are very, very dark -- he didn't have the benefit of modern film stock or digital processing that allows today for realistic tones and contrasts in night shots. Bogdonovich cast himself as Sammy, a young director working for a studio like American International -- when he was about 25, Bogdonovich was just about handsome enough to make a convincing leading man. The film is wonderfully efficient and well-crafted, indeed, an enjoyable minor classic with some indelible images. There's a double-plot that comes together at the climax; it's absurdly contrived but filmed with such conviction that you don't notice the deficiencies until after the closing credits. Corman also told Bogdonovich that he was supposed to intercut footage from Karloff's previous movie for the studio, a ghastly thing appropriately called The Terror. Targets begins with Karloff/Orlock stalking around in one of the studio's cardboard dungeons -- there's a young girl who has swooned and is scantily clad, a surfer-boy hero, and a flood that rips down walls while the scene keeps cutting away to a raven flying through the sky. The film-within-a-film ends --"The End" the titles tell us -- and, then, Bogdonovich's picture begins. We're in a screening room. Orlock (Karloff) announces that he's retiring. (He was 79 or 80 when the film was made.) This upsets Sammy who has written a script just for the old man -- in it, Orlock gets to play himself. (Presumably, the script is Targets). Orlock has an Asian-American secretary who is having an affair with Sammy -- the stuff about Chinese proverbs and the girl teaching Orlock Chinese has not aged well. Orlock, who is playing Karloff, is the "monster man", famous for his portrayals of monsters and maniacs in horror movies. Of course, he's a polite old English gentleman with a taste for Scotch whiskey. Orlock is humiliated that he has to appear at a drive-in in Reseda to promote The Terror and he tells his secretary to book a flight to New York and a boat trip to London -- he's going home after thirty-five years in Hollywood. Meanwhile, a spookily polite young man named Bobbie is buying guns and ammunition. He's not doing well -- with his pretty wife, the young man lives with his parents. Whenever, he addresses his father he calls him "Sir." The young man is like Beaver from Leave it to Beaver! grown up and armed to the teeth. When he and his father go out target shooting (the kid is an ace), he trains the gun on his domineering father and almost shoots him -- when the older man turns his face to his son, the young man is cowed. Sammy and Orlock get drunk after watching Howard Hawk's 1931 The Criminal Code -- in that film, Karloff plays a menacing figure. "My first big role," Karloff says. Sammy, as a cineaste like Bogdonovich, praises Hawks' ability to tell a story with pictures. Karloff tells a story with words, delivering a spectacular rendition of the old chestnut "Appointment at Samarra". Across town, the young man shoots his wife and everyone in his family and, then, buying more ammunition goes out to tank farm, a facility with big fifty-foot high white cylindrical tanks. He takes a sniper position atop the tallest tank and murders a half-dozen motorists driving by on the freeway. (While laying out his arsenal atop the tank, he nonchalantly sips on a coca-cola and eats a Twinkie -- in those days, Coke came in 8 ounce bottles that you had to open with an opener and was something that you didn't gulp, but demurely sipped.) After a police chase, the kid hides inside the screen of the outdoor movie theater, poking a hole through the white canvas so he can slaughter the people in their cars come to see Orlock and the picture. Orlock is a trouper and has decided to make his appearance at the theater. Thus, the film has contrived to hinge-together the two plots with a dramatic confrontation at the outdoor movie drive-in. In the final scene, we see the drive-in lot at dawn -- everyone has gone except for the killer's car still parked alone in the big field of posts for the speakers and parking lots.
Bogdonovich stages the sniper scenes with exciting aplomb and relishes the chaos at the out door movie theater. The picture has an excellent sense for time -- we can measure the sun setting and air turning blue and, then, dark at the outdoor drive-in. There are fascinating and poetic documentary style shots at the Drive-in -- we see the peculiar sociology of these places, now almost entirely extinct: the playgrounds, the projection booth, the kids necking in cars, the concession stand, all of these things are lyrically represented. In an early shot, the camera pointlessly tracks with Bobbie as he walks from his car into the family house. You wonder if Bogdonovich hasn't yet learned that you can edit out footage that doesn't communicate anything much -- but there's a method to his madness: later, during the massacre of the family, Bogdonovich relentlessly tracks the killer in long takes and, then, ends the sequence with bravura survey of the carpet. The camera's obsessive focus on the sniper (modeled on Charles Whitman, the University of Texas killer) is signified by this seemingly meaningless extended tracking shot early in the film.
The famous film critic, Manny Farber described "termite art" as low-budget, unassuming entertainment that inadvertently documents the era in which it was made. "Termite Art" can't afford to create a seamless imaginary world but, instead, continuously allows the surrounding reality to seep into the picture. Targets is a classic of Termite Art.
(Bogdonovich supplied commentary on the showing of Targets that I watched on TCM on April 4. He doesn't look well. His trademark goggles looked as if they were smeared with vaseline and he was wearing some kind of soft brace or cast on one of his forearms. He appeared by Skype and, when asked by Joe Mankiewicz about his father's reaction to Targets, began to weep.)
Saturday, April 4, 2020
Show Boat
Show Boat is one of those rude beasts that lie at the center of American popular culture. (And does America have any culture other than the "popular"?) Edna Ferber's novel, a blockbuster in the twenties, was adapted into a musical and then, made and remade as a film three times. It's as if Hollywood was struggling to get it right, but whatever was wrong about Show Boat was too irremediably wrong to ever be put right. The film is about race even when the Black folk are pushed to the side and mostly invisible, as during the movie's second half. People "pass" for White in the movie until it's necessary to speak (or sing) from the heart or entertain the public. Then, you can "cork up" and be a "coon-shouter" like Al Jolson. The 1936 film version is the most raw, and, therefore, the most true version of an archetypal American story, a heart-breaking collision between profound empathy for the Other and the crudest sort of racism. The director, James Whale, knew about "passing" -- he was a gay man in ostensibly straight Hollywood and, although he never concealed his sexual orientation, he lived among those who did. The messages in Show Boat are so incredibly mixed that the film threatens to collapse into chaos. But Whale was a great director and, somehow, the material coheres in the 1936 version. Both the 1929 and 1951 versions lacked Whale's courage -- both of them duck the theme of miscegenation central to the material. In Whale's film, someone declares that a "drop of black blood" in your body makes you a Negro. By this criterion, the film shows that we are all Negroes -- our culture throbs with Black blood as does the body politic. Early in the film, a couple performing in the melodramas that the showboat peddles to its paying customers is accused of miscegenation, a crime in Natchez where the paddle-wheeler is docked, When the sheriff comes to arrest the couple, the White husband of an octoroon, passing for Caucasian, draws a knife and slits the finger of his wife. Then, he sucks some of her blood. The scowling sheriff makes his accusation and the man replies: "I can swear on a Bible that I have black blood inside of me." The witnesses to his act swear to this as well. By this stratagem, obviously conceived in advance of the accusation, the White man has made himself Black. Later, the heroine smears black soot on her face, paints her lips zinc-white, and performs a minstrel song. But it doesn't work -- she's singing the lyrics to the tune, "Galivantin'" in a warbling contralto, the timbre used in operetta, not the Blues. The heroine, like the man sucking Negro blood, has made herself Black -- but it's a sinister transformation, not homage but something like vampirism. In the economy of the film, real Blacks are sacrificed so that the White folks can prosper -- but it is the Black characters who ultimately understand the meaning of the sprawling epic in which everyone is trapped. This is dramatized by the musical's them, "Ole Man River", a song about the pain and tragedy of existence -- life is a great muddy river that just keeps rolling along, indifferent to our suffering and sorrow. In
Show Boat, in obedience to the song, (the film's last shot is great expanse of the river in moonlight), even ostensibly happy endings are profoundly problematic.
Whale's version of the film begins with the show boat docking in a squalid-looking Southern river-town, Natchez. There's a parade, but the show people, who proclaim themselves to be "one happy family" are quarreling and discontented. Julie the leading lady who is passing as White, is unhappy with her Caucasian husband and may have had an affair. For reasons that seem unclear in the film, the spurned lover tells the sheriff about her race, triggering an accusation of miscegenation. After the blood-sucking incident, Julie and her husband depart from the company -- the good folks of Mississippi will not authorize Black performers to share the stage with White actors. Captain Andy, the proprietor of the showboat needs to find another couple to headline the primitive melodrama performed on the boat. His daughter, Magnolia, has played piano for the company and knows the show and so, notwithstanding the objections of his comically monstrous harridan wife, Parthenia, he gives the girl the role of the heroine. Hence, we see at the outset that a Black woman, Julie, is displaced by a White ingenue, Nola. as Magnolia is called. A handsome riverboat gambler, Gaylord Ravenal is passing through town. He sees Nola on the boat, wants to seduce her, and so joins the company as the leading man --dissembling is easy for him and acting is just another form of lying. The inevitable romance follows and Nola is successful on-stage. Against the objections of her mother, Parthenia, Nola marries the riverboat gambler now her leading man. She gets pregnant and, when the baby is born, the raffish, irresponsible Gaylord Ravenal, her husband, is playing poker on shore. There's a tremendous storm and the loyal Black servant risks his life in the tempest to find a doctor to attend to the laboring woman. A baby girl is born. The spat between Gaylord and Parthenia is terrible and the couple, with their small child, move to Chicago. There they take a room at the grand Palmer House and live far beyond their means. The child. little Kim, is sent to a convent to be educated. (Although this is unclear from the film, apparently, Nola and Gaylord are living off proceeds paid to the wife as her share in the showboat.) When the money runs out, the feckless Gaylord simply decamps, after saying goodbye to his little girl, in a painfully moving scene. Nola, abandoned by her husband, is without resources. However, a couple who performed on the Cotton Queen, as the showboat is named, coincidentally encounter Nola as she is being evicted. (The little girl remains at the Convent on the last of the family's money.) The couple, who have a comedy routine and are hoofers, are performing at the Trocadero and they suggest that Nola, who can sing like an angel, seek employment on-stage with them. At the Trocadero, the octoroon, Julie (now also alone) is the revue's prima donna and has become an alcoholic, but she can still sing. She croons a song and, then, retires to her dressing room with a bottle of rum. Nola sings to audition for a role but she's rejected by the mean, strutting impresario. Julie recognizes Nola's voice and learns of her situation from a cynical Black janitor, a wise-guy whose got the number of all the people around him. Julie, recognizing that she's washed-up, and that Nola is desperate for the job, walks away from the Trocadero never to be seen again -- it's the second time, Julie is sacrificed in favor of Nola. The vulgar impresario listens reluctantly to an African-American song performed by Julie and says that she can perform in his revue as a "coon-shouter" -- that is in Black-face. On New Year's Eve, Captain Andy has come to Chicago with his wife -- they don't yet know about the reversal of fortunes that has made Nola homeless. Parthenia goes to bed with a headache and Captain Andy, giddy in the company of three prostitutes, goes to the Trocadero. There Nola is singing a heavily vibrato version of "After the Ball" and the revelers aren't impressed -- they are hooting and mocking her. Captain Andy recognizes her voice and, then, her face and stands up in the drunken crowd directing her performance with tears in his eyes. (The film is fantastically effective as a melodrama). Nola rallies and complete the song to a standing ovation. Emboldened by this success, she goes onto to become a great Broadway chanteuse and actress. Her career takes her all around the Globe. By this time, Nola's daughter, Kim is grown. Nola trains her to become an actress and she too is soon famous on Broadway -- by this time, twenty years, at least, have passed, although Captain Andy and Parthenia who seem to have been born old, don't really age. Nola is visibly older; her hair is grey and she has retired from the stage. Captain Andy, Parthenia, and Nola attend a musical in which Kim stars. (Curiously, in a sort of mise en abyme, the musical is about the ante-bellum South featuring plantation ladies in crinoline and dancing darkies, something akin to the musical Show Boat from which the film derives.) Gaylord Ravenal, now old and sick, is working as a stage-door manager at the theater so that he can be close to his daughter, Kim, who doesn't recognize him. He hears Kim singing and creeps up to the corridor outside the fancy boxes to spy on the stage. Nola sees Gaylord, recognizes the erring husband, now absent for a quarter of a century, and invites him into their box overlooking the stage. Kim, taking her bows, calls for her mother to sing with her. Nola begins to sing one of the film's saccharine operetta numbers and Gaylord joins with her -- then, Kim also begins to sing on stage as well. It's the film's end and there's not a dry eye in the house -- except that, viewed in a cool retrospective light, this isn't really a convincingly happy ending. Julie is gone, presumably dead from alcoholism, the Black folk are still impoverished and oppressed, and there's not much hope that Gaylord will really be forgiven for taking a powder and deserting his family for 25 years - this seems just a wee bit implausible. If the characters, Nola and Kim, can forgive him, the film's audience can not.
Readers will notice that the plot summary doesn't really mention the two pivotal characters in the film, Jim and Queenie (Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniels). The Black characters, although integral to the film's first half, are fundamentally marginal -- they don't figure in the picture's second half and are invisible at Show Boat's denouement. But emotionally, Jim and Queenie cast a shadow over the whole film and they are most present, in fact, when absent from the movie. Jim and Queenie represent the sole happy marriage in the film and are exemplars of the way that people should behave toward one another -- they aren't idealized and bicker incessantly but they seem to love one another and are forgiving of each other's flaws. The film's greatest technical defect (which it shares with the musical) is that the best number is in the first act, and, indeed, only about ten minutes into the action. This is the show-stopper "Ole Man River", a transcendent bass song, that is both enormously effective and, also, profoundly racist -- in Mozart's time, noble voices sang high, even in the range of the countertenor, and the lowest register was reserved for old men and buffoons. Similarly, the deep and low notes in "Ole Man River" are stereotypically reserved for the big buck Negro -- it's a pernicious caricature that persisted through the deep voices in Amos 'n Andy and remains today, for instance, in the basso profundo tones of the spokesman for Allstate on Tv commercials. But what Whale does with the song is astonishing. He recognizes that the number is the emotional center of the film, that the score will play variations on the tune throughout the movie, and that he has to make the performance indelible. So Whale audaciously rotates the camera in a tight circle around Robeson who is sitting on a dock, then, swoops in for a close-up -- then, he cuts away to stylized expressionistic shots of Black men toting enormous bales of cotton or rhythmically hoeing in fields, reverting to vignettes of Robeson drunk or confined in jail. The song continues as a chorus of shabby, bedraggled Black singers assembles with Robeson and comes to a thunderous conclusion in which the show tune is elaborated into both an anthem and lament for lost freedom. The effect is tremendous, shattering and there is nothing approaching the emotional power of this scene in the rest of the film. In a very real sense, Robeson's performance and Whale's majestic camera movements have seized the film, dismissed its melodrama, and rendered the plight of the African-American characters central, marginalizing, as it were, the White performers. This is evident from the way that the blood-sucking scene is staged -- as the loathsome White sheriff accuses Julie of miscegenation, Jim stands high overhead and the action cuts away to show him looking down on the scene as somehow superior to it, both a witness and a judge. The ebb and flow of life in the sprawling film (it encompasses three generations) is embodied in the image of the Mississippi, the film's old man, and Robeson's performance, with that of Hattie McDaniels anchors the film and provides its subtext even when the plot moves to Chicago and leaves the African-American characters behind.
Thematically, Whale constructs the film around dichotomies. The romance sequences are coded: when the camera is facing the river, shown in luminous moonlit rear projection, the theme is love and the style is poetic. The reverse shot showing the river town is conventionally prosaic and realistic. The Blues tunes, which are brilliant, collide with whiter-than-white operetta numbers -- this happens sometimes in the same song ("Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly", for instance, rendered in various styles, as an opera song and, then, ragtime.) In one of the film's most startling numbers, Julie is singing a blues tune and Nola begins to dance -- she writhes and undulates in a spooky wa; it's like a kind of seizure.. Of course, this is a staid white woman, Parthenia's daughter, imitating Black dance. It doesn't work and looks foolish, even disturbing, but you can't look away and when Nola emerges on the deck of the paddlewheeler still dancing with Hattie McDaniels behind her and waving the palms of her hands in the air like Al Jolson singing "Mammie" we're in some dark and vicious place that, somehow, also represents the divided soul of American culture and the best that we can ever do.
Show Boat, in obedience to the song, (the film's last shot is great expanse of the river in moonlight), even ostensibly happy endings are profoundly problematic.
Whale's version of the film begins with the show boat docking in a squalid-looking Southern river-town, Natchez. There's a parade, but the show people, who proclaim themselves to be "one happy family" are quarreling and discontented. Julie the leading lady who is passing as White, is unhappy with her Caucasian husband and may have had an affair. For reasons that seem unclear in the film, the spurned lover tells the sheriff about her race, triggering an accusation of miscegenation. After the blood-sucking incident, Julie and her husband depart from the company -- the good folks of Mississippi will not authorize Black performers to share the stage with White actors. Captain Andy, the proprietor of the showboat needs to find another couple to headline the primitive melodrama performed on the boat. His daughter, Magnolia, has played piano for the company and knows the show and so, notwithstanding the objections of his comically monstrous harridan wife, Parthenia, he gives the girl the role of the heroine. Hence, we see at the outset that a Black woman, Julie, is displaced by a White ingenue, Nola. as Magnolia is called. A handsome riverboat gambler, Gaylord Ravenal is passing through town. He sees Nola on the boat, wants to seduce her, and so joins the company as the leading man --dissembling is easy for him and acting is just another form of lying. The inevitable romance follows and Nola is successful on-stage. Against the objections of her mother, Parthenia, Nola marries the riverboat gambler now her leading man. She gets pregnant and, when the baby is born, the raffish, irresponsible Gaylord Ravenal, her husband, is playing poker on shore. There's a tremendous storm and the loyal Black servant risks his life in the tempest to find a doctor to attend to the laboring woman. A baby girl is born. The spat between Gaylord and Parthenia is terrible and the couple, with their small child, move to Chicago. There they take a room at the grand Palmer House and live far beyond their means. The child. little Kim, is sent to a convent to be educated. (Although this is unclear from the film, apparently, Nola and Gaylord are living off proceeds paid to the wife as her share in the showboat.) When the money runs out, the feckless Gaylord simply decamps, after saying goodbye to his little girl, in a painfully moving scene. Nola, abandoned by her husband, is without resources. However, a couple who performed on the Cotton Queen, as the showboat is named, coincidentally encounter Nola as she is being evicted. (The little girl remains at the Convent on the last of the family's money.) The couple, who have a comedy routine and are hoofers, are performing at the Trocadero and they suggest that Nola, who can sing like an angel, seek employment on-stage with them. At the Trocadero, the octoroon, Julie (now also alone) is the revue's prima donna and has become an alcoholic, but she can still sing. She croons a song and, then, retires to her dressing room with a bottle of rum. Nola sings to audition for a role but she's rejected by the mean, strutting impresario. Julie recognizes Nola's voice and learns of her situation from a cynical Black janitor, a wise-guy whose got the number of all the people around him. Julie, recognizing that she's washed-up, and that Nola is desperate for the job, walks away from the Trocadero never to be seen again -- it's the second time, Julie is sacrificed in favor of Nola. The vulgar impresario listens reluctantly to an African-American song performed by Julie and says that she can perform in his revue as a "coon-shouter" -- that is in Black-face. On New Year's Eve, Captain Andy has come to Chicago with his wife -- they don't yet know about the reversal of fortunes that has made Nola homeless. Parthenia goes to bed with a headache and Captain Andy, giddy in the company of three prostitutes, goes to the Trocadero. There Nola is singing a heavily vibrato version of "After the Ball" and the revelers aren't impressed -- they are hooting and mocking her. Captain Andy recognizes her voice and, then, her face and stands up in the drunken crowd directing her performance with tears in his eyes. (The film is fantastically effective as a melodrama). Nola rallies and complete the song to a standing ovation. Emboldened by this success, she goes onto to become a great Broadway chanteuse and actress. Her career takes her all around the Globe. By this time, Nola's daughter, Kim is grown. Nola trains her to become an actress and she too is soon famous on Broadway -- by this time, twenty years, at least, have passed, although Captain Andy and Parthenia who seem to have been born old, don't really age. Nola is visibly older; her hair is grey and she has retired from the stage. Captain Andy, Parthenia, and Nola attend a musical in which Kim stars. (Curiously, in a sort of mise en abyme, the musical is about the ante-bellum South featuring plantation ladies in crinoline and dancing darkies, something akin to the musical Show Boat from which the film derives.) Gaylord Ravenal, now old and sick, is working as a stage-door manager at the theater so that he can be close to his daughter, Kim, who doesn't recognize him. He hears Kim singing and creeps up to the corridor outside the fancy boxes to spy on the stage. Nola sees Gaylord, recognizes the erring husband, now absent for a quarter of a century, and invites him into their box overlooking the stage. Kim, taking her bows, calls for her mother to sing with her. Nola begins to sing one of the film's saccharine operetta numbers and Gaylord joins with her -- then, Kim also begins to sing on stage as well. It's the film's end and there's not a dry eye in the house -- except that, viewed in a cool retrospective light, this isn't really a convincingly happy ending. Julie is gone, presumably dead from alcoholism, the Black folk are still impoverished and oppressed, and there's not much hope that Gaylord will really be forgiven for taking a powder and deserting his family for 25 years - this seems just a wee bit implausible. If the characters, Nola and Kim, can forgive him, the film's audience can not.
Readers will notice that the plot summary doesn't really mention the two pivotal characters in the film, Jim and Queenie (Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniels). The Black characters, although integral to the film's first half, are fundamentally marginal -- they don't figure in the picture's second half and are invisible at Show Boat's denouement. But emotionally, Jim and Queenie cast a shadow over the whole film and they are most present, in fact, when absent from the movie. Jim and Queenie represent the sole happy marriage in the film and are exemplars of the way that people should behave toward one another -- they aren't idealized and bicker incessantly but they seem to love one another and are forgiving of each other's flaws. The film's greatest technical defect (which it shares with the musical) is that the best number is in the first act, and, indeed, only about ten minutes into the action. This is the show-stopper "Ole Man River", a transcendent bass song, that is both enormously effective and, also, profoundly racist -- in Mozart's time, noble voices sang high, even in the range of the countertenor, and the lowest register was reserved for old men and buffoons. Similarly, the deep and low notes in "Ole Man River" are stereotypically reserved for the big buck Negro -- it's a pernicious caricature that persisted through the deep voices in Amos 'n Andy and remains today, for instance, in the basso profundo tones of the spokesman for Allstate on Tv commercials. But what Whale does with the song is astonishing. He recognizes that the number is the emotional center of the film, that the score will play variations on the tune throughout the movie, and that he has to make the performance indelible. So Whale audaciously rotates the camera in a tight circle around Robeson who is sitting on a dock, then, swoops in for a close-up -- then, he cuts away to stylized expressionistic shots of Black men toting enormous bales of cotton or rhythmically hoeing in fields, reverting to vignettes of Robeson drunk or confined in jail. The song continues as a chorus of shabby, bedraggled Black singers assembles with Robeson and comes to a thunderous conclusion in which the show tune is elaborated into both an anthem and lament for lost freedom. The effect is tremendous, shattering and there is nothing approaching the emotional power of this scene in the rest of the film. In a very real sense, Robeson's performance and Whale's majestic camera movements have seized the film, dismissed its melodrama, and rendered the plight of the African-American characters central, marginalizing, as it were, the White performers. This is evident from the way that the blood-sucking scene is staged -- as the loathsome White sheriff accuses Julie of miscegenation, Jim stands high overhead and the action cuts away to show him looking down on the scene as somehow superior to it, both a witness and a judge. The ebb and flow of life in the sprawling film (it encompasses three generations) is embodied in the image of the Mississippi, the film's old man, and Robeson's performance, with that of Hattie McDaniels anchors the film and provides its subtext even when the plot moves to Chicago and leaves the African-American characters behind.
Thematically, Whale constructs the film around dichotomies. The romance sequences are coded: when the camera is facing the river, shown in luminous moonlit rear projection, the theme is love and the style is poetic. The reverse shot showing the river town is conventionally prosaic and realistic. The Blues tunes, which are brilliant, collide with whiter-than-white operetta numbers -- this happens sometimes in the same song ("Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly", for instance, rendered in various styles, as an opera song and, then, ragtime.) In one of the film's most startling numbers, Julie is singing a blues tune and Nola begins to dance -- she writhes and undulates in a spooky wa; it's like a kind of seizure.. Of course, this is a staid white woman, Parthenia's daughter, imitating Black dance. It doesn't work and looks foolish, even disturbing, but you can't look away and when Nola emerges on the deck of the paddlewheeler still dancing with Hattie McDaniels behind her and waving the palms of her hands in the air like Al Jolson singing "Mammie" we're in some dark and vicious place that, somehow, also represents the divided soul of American culture and the best that we can ever do.
Thursday, April 2, 2020
The Lusty Men
Nick Ray's family had a bad reputation in LaCrosse, Wisconsin -- Ray (born Raymond Kienzle, Jr.) said he was raised "under the scourge of alcoholism"; his father was a building contractor andmean drunk. Ray fled his unhappy upbringing, first to Chicago, then to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, then, further, to New York and, ultimately, Hollywood where his demons caught up with him. Motifs of flight from poverty and alcoholic squalor are dominant in many of Ray's films. In his first movie, They Live by Night (1947 -- released 1949) the doomed lovers, Bowie and Keechie, are running from the law: he's a fugitive from Mississippi chain gang and she's the pregnant daughter of a gas station attendant. In Ray's 1952 The Lusty Men, the characters are all fugitives, although in a more subtle sense: the ambitious cow-hand, Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) is married to Louise (Susan Haywood), a woman that he rescued from a "two-bit tamale joint" somewhere in the Southwest. Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum) the film's catalyst for its plot, comes from a family impoverished and reputed by all in the neighborhood to be simply "no good." Wes is not satisfied working as a cowpuncher and flees that life for a dangerous, transient existence as a rodeo competitor. The film depicts the rodeo milieu in loving detail and reveals that the men who choose this sort of life are all fugitives from something, if only from the gnawing fear that they feel each time saddle-up. One of the rodeo-wives, condemned to endless travel with men increasingly debilitated by injury and alcoholism says that the competitors are "drunk, dirty and scared." Fear of injury and failure motivates the men to seek refuge in booze, floozies, and self-destructive gambling. The rodeo riders are trapped within a lethal code of machismo that ultimately dooms them all.
Mitchum's character, Jeff McCloud, is a washed-up rodeo star, a man who once made $25,000 in one day, but now can barely walk because of the injuries that he has sustained. After being gored by a
Brahma bull, Mitchum staggers away from the deserted rodeo arena while a wind whips paper trash across the dirt corral -- the shot is uniquely poetic and establishes from the outset the film's introspective tone; although rodeos are flamboyant, full of Indians in full regalia and commencing with the ritual "serpentine" ride, men and horses following an undulating column through the arena-corral,the film's principal action is all interior -- fears and desires that motivate the characters. McCloud goes to a seemingly abandoned shack where he has hidden a toy gun and a box containing two nickels under the floor-boards. When we see him pull the gun from the hiding place (he put it there when he was a boy), we expect the film to go in a certain direction -- crime, perhaps, people getting shot. And, in fact, a nasty codger points a scatter-gun at McCloud when he eases himself out of the spider-hole under the shack. But this is an indirection -- it turns out that the two nickels are symbolically more important than the wrecked gun. One calamity that everyone is fleeing is poverty.
The ruinous shack was where McCloud was born -- it's the family home for his disreputable clan. A young couple, Wes and Louise drive up in a jeep. Wes works as a cow-hand at the neighboring farm. He and his wife want to buy the house and ranch to start their own enterprise. But they don't have any money. Wes admires McCloud for his fame on the rodeo circuit. After McCloud works for a while at the nearby ranch, roping and branding cows with Wes, the two men decide to leave cowpunching and pursue their fortune rodeoing (to use the term that the characters employ). Louise is skeptical --she sees McCloud, accurately, as a "saddle-tramp" who has lost every penny that he ever earned. But she reluctantly agrees to accompany the men on the circuit. Wes will ride and take the risk of injury managed by Jeff who will advise him in exchange for 50% of the take -- an arrangement that turns out to be a matter of contention. Wes is highly successful as a rodeo competitor and they make a lot of money. But the rodeo circuit corrupts Wes -- he starts to become more and more like his mentor, Jeff. Finally, when there's enough money in the bank to buy the ranch in Texas, Wes balks -- he's now addicted to the fame and fortune attendant upon his success as a rodeo contestant. Jeff makes a play for Wes' wife. When she rejects him, Jeff has to prove his manhood somehow and so he pays the entry fee for a number of dangerous events at the Pendleton rodeo in Oregon -- notwithstanding the fact that he hasn't competed for a year and has serious disabilities that make his participation dangerous. He gets thrown from a bronco, entangled in the stirrups and dragged. When Jeff dies of a punctured lung, Wes sees the sees the error of his ways and with Louise departs the rodeo circuit, flush with cash to buy the ranch back in Texas.
Summarized, the plot seems simple-minded. In fact, the film is astonishingly intelligent. The motives of characters are very intricate. A case-in-point is the decision by Jeff to take part in the final rodeo -- Jeff and Wes have just had a fistfight in which Wes accuses his manager of living off him and taking too large a percentage of his earnings. Jeff has also attempted to seduce Louise, who, despite Wes' erring ways (he has reneged on the deal to quit rodeoing when they have enough money to buy the ranch and seems about to take up with a floozy, a kind of rodeo groupie), rejects Jeff's opportunistic proposal. So Jeff has to prove to himself that he's not a parasite, that he can still make money on the rodeo circuit; he has to show Louise that he's still a man, notwithstanding her rejection; and he has to atone, perhaps, for his cynical disloyalty in exploiting the marital problems between Wes and Louise. Wes is the closest thing that Jeff has to a friend -- Mitchum's character is a loner with no attachments to anyone. And he has betrayed Wes by trying to seduce his vulnerable wife. Throughout the film, the picture of life that is presented is similarly realistic, and intricately detailed, The film has a semi-documentary aspect -- it seems that most of the performers are real rodeo competitors and the details all ring true: we are shown the sordid trailer parks where the performers live, learn about stock contractors (they supply the animals for the show), and get glimpses of the inner workings of the rodeo profession. (At one party, the forever transient rodeo cowboys have stacked up suitcases to make an impromptu bar -- just one of many details that enliven the film.) The acting by Mitchum and the other professionals is superlative -- Mitchum, for instance, doesn't know that he is in love with Louise and, only acts to seduce her, when another broken down former rodeo star says that "you never hung around long except to gamble or for a woman." Mitchum doesn't try to sweeten his character -- Jeff is a cynical scoundrel, attractive but dangerous. Ray was homosexual and the two most poignant and moving close-ups in the film show Wes wishing Jeff good luck before his fatal bout with the bucking bronco. Arthur Kennedy, a perennial side-kick in movies like this, is perfectly cast as the ambitious, but non-charismatic Wes. (In a key scene, Louise tells him that she had smarter, richer, tougher, and "prettier" suitors, but chose him because he shared her ethos that hard work leads to good fortune.) Susan Haywood also couldn't be better. The supporting cast of rodeo cowboys is also excellent. Many of the men are marked with gruesome injuries. The film has a gorgeous cowboy score by Roy Webb.
The dialogue is superb: On marriage: Mitchum say that he never got married notwithstanding his loneliness because "Marriage is lonely but it ain't private." He says to Louise: "They tell me anything's better than working in a tamale joint, even marriage." On the rodeo circuit: "It's chicken today, feathers tomorrow." Jeff tells Louise that she has to forgive her husband because "that's a wife's professin, forgivin' her husband." Before Jeff rides for the last time, Louise says: "You think the more bones you break, the bigger man you'll be." The floozy at the party says that she's going to put her brand on Wes and bites his arm hard. Louise insults her, mocking her slinky attire "I can't figure out if you're inside your dress and trying to get out or outside and trying to get in."
I saw this film a couple times twenty years ago and, first, watched some scenes from the movie as clips in Wim Wenders documentary about Ray's protracted death Lightning over Water. For some reason, I alway imagine Mitchum limping out of the deserted corral to the left. In fact, he walks to the right, that is, the direction of the future and the narrative. However, when we see him next at the family ranch, he walks to the left -- that is, against the direction we read and into the past.
Mitchum's character, Jeff McCloud, is a washed-up rodeo star, a man who once made $25,000 in one day, but now can barely walk because of the injuries that he has sustained. After being gored by a
Brahma bull, Mitchum staggers away from the deserted rodeo arena while a wind whips paper trash across the dirt corral -- the shot is uniquely poetic and establishes from the outset the film's introspective tone; although rodeos are flamboyant, full of Indians in full regalia and commencing with the ritual "serpentine" ride, men and horses following an undulating column through the arena-corral,the film's principal action is all interior -- fears and desires that motivate the characters. McCloud goes to a seemingly abandoned shack where he has hidden a toy gun and a box containing two nickels under the floor-boards. When we see him pull the gun from the hiding place (he put it there when he was a boy), we expect the film to go in a certain direction -- crime, perhaps, people getting shot. And, in fact, a nasty codger points a scatter-gun at McCloud when he eases himself out of the spider-hole under the shack. But this is an indirection -- it turns out that the two nickels are symbolically more important than the wrecked gun. One calamity that everyone is fleeing is poverty.
The ruinous shack was where McCloud was born -- it's the family home for his disreputable clan. A young couple, Wes and Louise drive up in a jeep. Wes works as a cow-hand at the neighboring farm. He and his wife want to buy the house and ranch to start their own enterprise. But they don't have any money. Wes admires McCloud for his fame on the rodeo circuit. After McCloud works for a while at the nearby ranch, roping and branding cows with Wes, the two men decide to leave cowpunching and pursue their fortune rodeoing (to use the term that the characters employ). Louise is skeptical --she sees McCloud, accurately, as a "saddle-tramp" who has lost every penny that he ever earned. But she reluctantly agrees to accompany the men on the circuit. Wes will ride and take the risk of injury managed by Jeff who will advise him in exchange for 50% of the take -- an arrangement that turns out to be a matter of contention. Wes is highly successful as a rodeo competitor and they make a lot of money. But the rodeo circuit corrupts Wes -- he starts to become more and more like his mentor, Jeff. Finally, when there's enough money in the bank to buy the ranch in Texas, Wes balks -- he's now addicted to the fame and fortune attendant upon his success as a rodeo contestant. Jeff makes a play for Wes' wife. When she rejects him, Jeff has to prove his manhood somehow and so he pays the entry fee for a number of dangerous events at the Pendleton rodeo in Oregon -- notwithstanding the fact that he hasn't competed for a year and has serious disabilities that make his participation dangerous. He gets thrown from a bronco, entangled in the stirrups and dragged. When Jeff dies of a punctured lung, Wes sees the sees the error of his ways and with Louise departs the rodeo circuit, flush with cash to buy the ranch back in Texas.
Summarized, the plot seems simple-minded. In fact, the film is astonishingly intelligent. The motives of characters are very intricate. A case-in-point is the decision by Jeff to take part in the final rodeo -- Jeff and Wes have just had a fistfight in which Wes accuses his manager of living off him and taking too large a percentage of his earnings. Jeff has also attempted to seduce Louise, who, despite Wes' erring ways (he has reneged on the deal to quit rodeoing when they have enough money to buy the ranch and seems about to take up with a floozy, a kind of rodeo groupie), rejects Jeff's opportunistic proposal. So Jeff has to prove to himself that he's not a parasite, that he can still make money on the rodeo circuit; he has to show Louise that he's still a man, notwithstanding her rejection; and he has to atone, perhaps, for his cynical disloyalty in exploiting the marital problems between Wes and Louise. Wes is the closest thing that Jeff has to a friend -- Mitchum's character is a loner with no attachments to anyone. And he has betrayed Wes by trying to seduce his vulnerable wife. Throughout the film, the picture of life that is presented is similarly realistic, and intricately detailed, The film has a semi-documentary aspect -- it seems that most of the performers are real rodeo competitors and the details all ring true: we are shown the sordid trailer parks where the performers live, learn about stock contractors (they supply the animals for the show), and get glimpses of the inner workings of the rodeo profession. (At one party, the forever transient rodeo cowboys have stacked up suitcases to make an impromptu bar -- just one of many details that enliven the film.) The acting by Mitchum and the other professionals is superlative -- Mitchum, for instance, doesn't know that he is in love with Louise and, only acts to seduce her, when another broken down former rodeo star says that "you never hung around long except to gamble or for a woman." Mitchum doesn't try to sweeten his character -- Jeff is a cynical scoundrel, attractive but dangerous. Ray was homosexual and the two most poignant and moving close-ups in the film show Wes wishing Jeff good luck before his fatal bout with the bucking bronco. Arthur Kennedy, a perennial side-kick in movies like this, is perfectly cast as the ambitious, but non-charismatic Wes. (In a key scene, Louise tells him that she had smarter, richer, tougher, and "prettier" suitors, but chose him because he shared her ethos that hard work leads to good fortune.) Susan Haywood also couldn't be better. The supporting cast of rodeo cowboys is also excellent. Many of the men are marked with gruesome injuries. The film has a gorgeous cowboy score by Roy Webb.
The dialogue is superb: On marriage: Mitchum say that he never got married notwithstanding his loneliness because "Marriage is lonely but it ain't private." He says to Louise: "They tell me anything's better than working in a tamale joint, even marriage." On the rodeo circuit: "It's chicken today, feathers tomorrow." Jeff tells Louise that she has to forgive her husband because "that's a wife's professin, forgivin' her husband." Before Jeff rides for the last time, Louise says: "You think the more bones you break, the bigger man you'll be." The floozy at the party says that she's going to put her brand on Wes and bites his arm hard. Louise insults her, mocking her slinky attire "I can't figure out if you're inside your dress and trying to get out or outside and trying to get in."
I saw this film a couple times twenty years ago and, first, watched some scenes from the movie as clips in Wim Wenders documentary about Ray's protracted death Lightning over Water. For some reason, I alway imagine Mitchum limping out of the deserted corral to the left. In fact, he walks to the right, that is, the direction of the future and the narrative. However, when we see him next at the family ranch, he walks to the left -- that is, against the direction we read and into the past.
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