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Archive for the ‘Psychological Western’ Category

Nevada Smith

26 Apr

Nevada Smith – directed by Henry Hathaway. Western. 128 minutes Color 1966.
★★★
The Story: A young man lives his life to revenge the murder of his parents.
~
Steve McQueen aged 31 is asked to play a boy of 16. He is too beat up to do it, and it was not within his range as an actor anyhow. Otherwise the hole in his dirty shirt is the only actually authentic object in the picture and, you might say, his authenticity is a function of that. Indeed, McQueen plays here what he always played, a man without a code.

Does authenticity hold true for anyone else? The Indians are pristine in their feathers. So are the sluts. So is the excellent Brian Keith who plays McQueen’s mentor after two rough weeks on the trail with a shirt straight from the dry cleaners. Keith, Arthur Kennedy and Pat Hingle, Martin Landau, fine actors all, are Jim-dandy as McQueen’s challenges. But the costuming demotes everyone who appears, and the believability of the film suffers from it.

Of course, this is the way things were done in Westerns of this era. Perhaps McQueen started to question the sort of material he was appearing in. His interests were car collecting, motor cycles, and gang-bangs, McQueen always the first off with his britches. The film as a whole doesn’t ring true. Partly because McQueen is asked to play a man with a code, and his code does not extend beyond what promotes his already seductive masculinity.

This is too bad, because the material has merit. McQueen’s search takes him to various parts of the country, among which is a state prison in a swamp, a setting striking in its perils. Also too bad because Karl Malden plays the main object of his revenge, and Malden is wonderful, all the way through to the insane, surprising finale.

Henry Hathaway, a hardline, highly experienced director of male-oriented pictures, directed. Hathaway directed so many Westerns he may have become petrified in the production values that prevailed then. He was associated with huge male stars –Tyrone Power, John Wayne, Gary Cooper – and his stories display a high degree of testosterone, culminating in Richard Widmark’s Johnny Udo in Kiss Of Death shoving Mildred Dunnock in her wheelchair down a flight of stairs, and in the various rotters, here played by Hingle, Landau, Malden, and Kennedy. It’s a world blinded by its formulas to even the possibility of other stories, other resolutions, other energies.

One of the difficulties of Westerns in the 50s being filmed in color is in real life, they were lived out in sepia. Color in Westerns is good for the outdoors, not for close-ups, not interiors, to which it adds distracting interest, and certainly not to costumes which, particularly in females, delivers a gaudiness that adds nothing verifiable to their characters use in stories.

McQueen has an eventful face. With its folds, creases, muscles. Gable did too; so did James Dean. A lot could happen in such a face, and Gable had the ability to play comedy with it, which is to say, he was willing to look like a sap. McQueen is never willing to do that, is never funny, but, while serious to the point of solemnity, instead always seethes with sex. One always wants to take him under one’s wing and reform him, forgetting that his allure lies in his impenitent self-absorption.

The picture takes McQueen to various ages and various locales over 15 years – all the while holding revenge in mind. Malden would play the same target for it in One Eyed Jacks. But the most unusual locale involves Cajun girls who harvest the rice crop while the prisoners break rocks, and then come to the prisoners at night and everyone gets laid. Suzanne Pleshette plays the principal slut well, leading McQueen out of the swamp in a dugout, until she cops that he’s more interested in the dugout than in her.

McQueen was a crafty actor who stole scenes by underselling them. Watch him closely as he does this. He is able to draw all the energy in the room to himself, as James Dean did, by exuding and at the same time withholding a sensuality all the more tantalizing because it promised something that he would snicker you away from if you got serious. A number of actors of that era – Brad Davis, Alain Delon, Christopher Jones, Dean Stockwell – had this. It was very sellable.

Who has it now? Brad Pitt, who is a better actor than McQueen, with a wider range, and Pitt can be very very funny, a thing which McQueen was too full of himself to attempt.

Steven McQueen was a poor man’s poor man. He may get into a vest, tie, and Rolls for The Thomas Crown Affair, but he’s trailer-trash – which is his value to the silver screen – the underlying drama always being can his beauty surmount his origins?

Still I seek out McQueen’s movies. I have to admit it’s fun to see that rare someone for whom animal magnetism is so easy. A cute guy who could write his own ticket to Timbuktu and back. I watch out of envy and delight – and interest in his exercise of his small, fascinating, and undeniable talent.

 

Seven Men From Now

27 Mar

Seven Men From Now — directed by Budd Boettecher. Western. A widower on a mission of retaliation. 78 minutes Black and White 1956.

★★★★★

A really extraordinary piece, beautifully directed and filmed in the Alabama Hills of California with their astounding rock formations and bosky river and desert and stupendous views of the Sierras, all of which adds the frame of indifferent nature to the stark story. Randolph Scott, a vision of rectitude and reticence almost psychopathic, meets up with a couple on their way to California. Both parties have their mission, but neither know what it is. The secret is revealed as the journey progresses through a landscape which no one registers and which influences everything. Lee Marvin is brilliant as the antagonist who meets up with these three. His confidence as an actor is amazing, and watch for the bit of business he executes after he shoots his last man down. The heart of the picture lies with Gail Russell, a wonderful actor of great beauty, so soft and endearing; no actress of her day had a more natural appeal. The simplicity of the material and the economical handling of the story and the wit of the writing and the consistently imaginative narration of the photographer and the great skill of the performers make it one of the best Westerns ever made. Be prepared for a pleasant surprise as you watch it. Suitable for the whole family, as films were in those days. (The additional material is excellent. too.)

 

Forty Guns

14 Oct

Forty Guns – Directed and Written by Sam Fuller. Western. A cattle baroness with her 40 henchmen holds her own against it all, including love. 79 minutes Black and White 1957.

* * * * *

As Barbara Stanwyck aged, her hair grew grey, so they never made color pictures with her, for in black and white her hair appeared blond, and her face didn’t age. She kept her figure, and she was an experienced horsewoman, so one of the treats of this picture is to see her seat in a saddle. Another treat is to see her dragged a very long stance with her foot caught in a stirrup by a charging panicked horse. She was physically strong, and it shows in all she does. Fascinating scenes with very interesting and unusual writing. It’s also interesting to see her leading man, Barry Sullivan, the local sheriff, a man of peace, who never rides a horse but always drives a wagon, as an equally strong screen presence. I had no idea he was a good actor, but he was. These two are well matched and well supported by Dean Jagger and others. Filmed by Oscar winner Joseph Biroc, an interesting and unusual western by a famously maverick director.

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Duel In The Sun

17 Sep

Duel In The Sun. Directed by King Vidor and William Dieterle. A half-breed girl is taken into a King Ranch type family in Texas and drives the boys wild. 2 hours 28 minutes Color 1946.

* * * *

It isn’t beautiful but it is gorgeous. Never have you seen Technicolor used so lavishly, or actors throw themselves, not exactly into their roles but all around their roles. You would think Gregory Peck would be miscast as a sexy male, and he is, but he’s surprisingly good as a prick. And Pearl Chavez, played by producer David O. Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones, you would think would be written shrewder, but she’s not, she’s just dopey. She throws herself around like a bag of onions and never really proves to the watching world why she was so sexy that Selznick ran off with her into the chaparral. So we take the lickerousness for granted, although she does convincingly writhe on the floor in an agony of sexual conflict. Lionel Barrymore consumes scenery by the platter, and he’s really wonderful as the grandee rancher because the character is so rude, but Lillian Gish as his wife is unable to overcome the character’s failure to get Pearl out of those slouching blouses and into a proper dress, which would have ended the picture right there. I saw it when it came out. I thought it was going to be a dirty movie, but it was just silly. Of course it’s greatly silly. And not sexy, because Lewt is mean, which Peck does well, and Pearl is stupid, which Jones probably was. The film is supposed to vindicate the itch between them, and so achieve a Phaedra-like stature, but its lust falls in the dust flat. Joseph Cotton’s easy-come-easy-go style as the good brother provides no sexual competition for Peck’s bad brother. Charles Bickford is touching as one of Pearl’s swains. Walter Huston makes hay of the fire and brimstone preacher (Huston is sexy, though old, because sexuality seethes through him; Peck isn’t because it doesn’t.). And Herbert Marshall is lovely as Pearl’s doomed father. The film is written like a Perils Of Pauline serial, in chapters and chunks, none which liaison into each other. It proceeds with a very badly written scene of misidentification, which is beautifully directed and shot, and so it goes, with one badly written scene after another beautifully presented. Selznick was so intrusive, reshooting everything, such that the film cost a lot more than his Gone With The Wind (Butterfly McQueen has a much larger part here); Selznick even has his name as the sole screen credit. So King Vidor quit when it was three quarters done, and the film was finished by commonplace director William Dieterle. But never have you seen such sunsets, as though the sun were having the duel with itself. King Vidor’s strong sense of things puts it on all four burners and a pot bellied stove besides. Why are you holding back? You must see it. It is the greatest bad movie ever made.

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The Furies

05 Sep

The Furies – Directed by Anthony Mann. Western Melodrama. An aging cattle baron and his baroness daughter clash over their mates, their land, and some squatters. 109 minutes Black and White 1950.

* * * *

Barbara Stanwyck is 43 when she makes this, and she is too old. True, she was a great star, and the best of all the two-dimensional female film actors. She refused Technicolor because her hair was gray, so she does look blond, her face admittedly is unlined, healthy, unchanged, her figure is lithe and trim, her stride is strong, and she looks great on a horse. But everyone who saw this when it came out knew that she was 43, because everyone had grown up with her. There was something older about her anyhow, even when she started in film aged 20 in 1927. The picture is a turgid melodrama, and it is ingenuous to claim it to be anything more. It is not epic, it is not noir, it is not The Eumenides or Greek tragedy. The execution of the film by the director is unremarkable because nothing in it can escape the necessities of turgid melodrama, which means an impenetrable thickness of plot on all levels that must be obeyed. The writing is occasionally witty, but the direction of the performances is questionable. Walter Huston overplays and indeed garbles and miscalculates the role of the rapscallion, domineering, and impractical cattle baron. By “overplays” I mean, when everyone in a story calls you a rogue, the best thing for an actor to do is not to “play The Rogue” but to play the opposite. Even if it was ever supposed to, the tension between Huston and Stanwyck never adds up to an Electra complex, because they both enjoy one another so much in their dash, ego, similarities, and common respect. They have too much sense of humor about one another to be neurotic and too many honest, horn-butting clashes to be unhealthy. Anyhow, while Stanwyck is a two-dimensional actor and therefore is incapable of over-acting, likewise there can be nothing beneath the performance. When Judith Anderson, with her lizard voice, comes in it is not as a sexual rival to Stanwyck but as a rival for her management of the ranch, and when Wendell Corey comes in as Stanwyck’s boyfriend, it is not as a sexual rival to Huston, but simply as a claimant to part of his property. Jannine Basinger in her book on Mann claims that Corey is like Huston and Anderson is like Stanwyck, and there’s something to be said for that, but not enough. The story and its execution is just old Stetson. Gilbert Roland is lovely as a blood brother to Stanwyck (and in love with her), Blanche Yurka is delicious in the Blanche Yurka role of Roland’s bruja mother, and Beulah Bondi commands the screen for our reassurance in both scenes in which she appears. Henry Bumstead deserves great credit for the adobe ranch mansion he made for the set. Otherwise the filming and direction are ordinary. Supposed to be New Mexico, it does not look like New Mexico. Rather like The Old Germany, The Furies is The Old Hollywood.  Its story is unconventional, the treatment of it conventional. It had to be: Stanwyck was starring. Yet, who could have played this part besides Stanwyck? No one. All the younger stars were too goody-goody. Hollywood fell partly because a failure of taste in developing strong-willed female stars to-be. In 1930 there was Crawford, Davis, and Stanwyck. In 1950 there were no young tough ladies on the horizon at all.

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Meek’s Cutoff

11 May

Meek’s Cutoff – Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Western. An 1857 wagon train crossing the barrens of Oregon runs out of water. 194 minutes Color 2011.

* * * * *

Lead by a bunkum guide, this wagon train toils across the badlands of Oregon, a land without respite and without charm, and they are running out of water. The question is not whether they will reach water. The question is by what sort of inner human procedures will they do so, a truth born home as we reach the surprising and requisite ending to the tale. The difference between this and many another Will They Ever Reach Water Movie is that here the means that offer themselves are not Hollywood procedures. This picture is not about the romance of hardship or thirst or endurance. The picture is simply about whose values will you look within yourself to adopt as you undergo a daunting trial. So the characters do not stand out as vivid creations but rather as human instruments forced to choose ways of being. It is not a feminist tract. It is not about heroines. It is not about how women are noble and men are weak, or how women are Democrats and men are Republican.  Pictorially the picture is like none other ever seen. Its tent interiors are particularly well set and designed. It places a high premium on the virtue of tedium to make a setting work. The lack of camber in the film is remarkable. It gives you the flatness of canvas from which nothing deviates to distract. I did not know what was going to happen and I did not know what was going on, and this is what I wanted. The only technical flaw is in the sound recording, which makes Bruce Greenwood and other actors inaudible from time to time. Michele Williams has the principal role, and she certainly has an eye for an interesting vehicle (Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine). So do not come expecting to see a grand old Western about wagon trains. If you want that, there’s a great movie for that subject, Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, of 1930, the first wide-screen movie ever made. There you get the full sense of the activity and technology of a wagon train, the life, the business, the promise, made within living memory of those whose relatives had actually done it. Meek’s Crossing is something quite different and quite stunning.

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3:10 To Yuma

01 Mar

3:10 to Yuma  — directed by Delmer Daves – Western. A reluctant farmer chaperones a desperado to jail. 92 minutes black and white 1957.

* * * * *

“Safe! Who knows what’s safe? I knew a man dropped dead from lookin’ at his wife. My own grandmother fought the Indians for sixty years…then choked to death on lemon pie. Do I have two volunteers?” So we have a style of telling dialogue that leads me to suppose that a lot of it was lifted wholesale from the novel by Elmore Leonard from which it comes. For the Leonard brilliance influences everything, and certainly directs the actors’ talent, particularly in the case of Glenn Ford, who gives one of the finest performances of his career as a character lead, a list that includes Teahouse of the August Moon and Gilda. He is fascinating to watch in his civility, calm, and assurance as the gang leader, caught because he lingers to chat with a pretty bartender, played by Felicia Farr. The delightful thing about this interlude is that he is not just using her for a quick lay, but instead really likes women, and really likes this particular one. Ford’s choice in this brings his character to a level of interest which sustains the entire film. He is perfectly cast, unlike Russell Crowe in the remake of recent non-memory, for Ford brings his puppy past to the part, whereas Crowe brings a violent mayhem-maker. Van Heflin plays the rancher in need of the $200 to save his place, and it’s interesting to hear how in some cases a certain actor’s natural speaking voice, because of its very timbre, lends authenticity everything he says. The piece is very well cast, directed, filmed (Charles Lawton) and edited (Al Clark). The plump Robert Emhardt beautifully plays the worthy who is backing Ford’s arrest, and Henry Jones plays the key role of the town drunk who stands by to the very end. Leora Dana plays Heflin’s wife, in a thanklessly written role, but her acting, such as it is, is betrayed by her makeup, for she wears full lipstick. Felicia Farr plays the bartender who, in a brief interlude, sleeps with Ford, and then no more is seen of her, even though she has star billing in the briefer of the two female roles. Ford goes on to seduce Heflin, and almost succeeds. The tension is palpable. It’s a tiptop story, along the lines of High Noon, the Last Detail, They Came To Cordura, but better than any of them. The acting style is the old one of Pick Up Your Cues. It works like all get out.

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Making The Misfits

08 Nov

The Making The Misfits –– directed by Gail Levin –– documentary on the last film of Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift  — 2001 black and white 2001

* * * * *

We who were alive at the time, knew a lot about what was going because Marilyn Monroe was such a photographed figure. Her genius was, in fact, for the still picture not the motion picture –– and Eli Wallach says the same. Monroe, Gable, and Clift all died before the film was released. I remember talking to Celeste Holm about it the week it opened; she’d gone to the Roxy to see it, and she said, “You could shoot moose in there.” Because the movie was a coffin? The theatre was empty when I went too. Holm said that Monroe couldn’t act. That’s probably right. In a sense Monroe was prevented from it by the script which makes of her a marshmallow saint whom everyone loves –– which means there was no inherent character defect or inner conflict in the character, nothing for her to play against, no failing to let us in. The film was remarkably photographed and produced, and the producers and their survivors talk about it. What the actors, such as Kevin McCarthy and Eli Wallach, say about their work is fascinating. John Houston was a gallant director, energetic but also lazy. He loved filming horses. The Misfits has a grainy and horizontal quality to it, and is well worth seeing. Its failure lies with Arthur Miller who wrote it; its failure lies not in its characters or situation but in its story. It would have been far more interesting if Monroe’s capacity for atrocious behavior had been an element in that story. Then you might have had something. Too late now, though. This documentary made years later seizes the world of studio filmmaking at it its richest. Scenes of the crew lying around in the hideous heat of Arizona while the demoralizing Monroe was hours late are a testament to the fortitude of the craftsmen whose skills and devotion brought the good strong films of that era before us.

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The Far Country

24 Oct

The Far Country – directed by Anthony Mann – A Western in which our cranky hero delivers a herd of cattle to the Yukon only to be double crossed. 97 minutes color 1955

* * * * *

Jimmy Stewart plays a self-centered adventurer who lands on his feet in a series of astonishing Canadian Rocky settings outside Jasper. Walter Brennan without his teeth and Jay C. Flippen as a drunken gold-panner play his picturesque sidekicks. The story is episodic, but the episodes are attention-getting. John McIntyre as the law-gone-bad character is a study in self-confidence. The glorious mountains are a mess to negotiate but Ruth Roman’s hairdo is never mussed in the mountains, but that’s Hollywood for ya, idnt it?. One of several strong Westerns Stewart made with director Anthony Mann — always with the same horse, Pie. Worth seeing.

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