Cloudland Revisited

Warner Archive Collection #1: The Last Run

2012-01-18T19:02:00.000-08:00

George C. Scott is The Mechanic…or at least, he is a mechanic, as we see in the first scene of this 1971 thriller, released a year before the classic Charles Bronson vehicle of that title. First seen through the undercarriage of his beloved BMW, Scott’s character, retired getaway driver Harry Garmes, makes an entrance about as far removed from his majestic first appearance in the previous year’s Patton as you can get. Resigned to his quiet life in an out-of-the-way Portuguese fishing village, his non-automotive emotional interactions largely limited to local fisherman Miguel (Aldo Sambrell) and local whore Monique (Colleen Dewhurst), Harry acts as if he’s an extension of his vehicle’s garage-bound existence. Unlike a crime film such as Thief (1981), the titular “one last job” isn’t driven by the need for money, but by Harry’s need to prove he, and his car, can still be of use. The Last Run does fits squarely into the niche carved out by Thief, and countless other depictions of the American professional criminal, in that it’s a paean to hoods the way they used to be, when they were allowed to do their jobs the way they saw fit, and not the way of some young punk or middle manager.

This movie’s regard for old-fashioned professionalism seems doubly meaningful now that it’s finally been made available to Region 1 DVD buyers, all through the good graces of the Warner Archive MOD line of discs. Having this very solidly constructed, Academy Award Winner-starring studio movie finally available to legally own, if not to easily rent (I managed to find a copy at a local library), doesn’t reveal an all-time classic of the genre or period. It does, however, uncover something of a flawed gem from an era already overpopulated with masterpieces. At least as shot by director Richard Fleischer, the script by Alan Sharp, one of the early 1970s’ great screenwriting talents, doesn’t quite stand up to his best work from this era. Harry’s new mission, to ferry prison escapee Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and Rickard’s girlfriend Claudie Scherrer (Trish Van Devere), always feels like the plot of a crime movie, and one that you’ve seen before. It’s not as haunting as the mystery Sharp wouldn’t allow Night Moves’ (1974) private detective to solve, or as forceful as the hard truths spoken about warfare and terrorism by Burt Lancaster’s Indian scout in the Western Ulzana’s Raid (1972).

If original director John Huston hadn’t walked off the project, maybe The Last Run would have been welcomed to home video earlier, and with a little more fanfare. Maybe not, though, considering how slow and difficult the process of getting all of Huston’s vast filmography onto DVD has been. It also might have been stronger, but then admittedly the director of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Fat City (1972) was as capable of phoning in his work as any studio contract director. Certainly it’s hard to imagine Fleischer, his replacement on the film, doing an appreciably worse or more soulless job with the likes of Annie (1982), the pinnacle of Huston paycheck gigs. If the kind of gossip I’ve come across in Hollywood bios is to be believed, the great man had little use for Scott personally anyway after working with him on The List of Adrian Messenger (1965). Fleischer, on the other hand, reunited with Scott the following year for the Joseph Wambaugh adaptation The New Centurions, which if nothing else suggests a better working experience with the famously difficult actor. Word of Wambaugh’s dislike for the movie dissuaded me from seeking it out and watching it, but I may have to change that now that I’ve seen The Last Run.

There’s nothing to do about the looming shadow cast by George St. Patton, and that towering American flag, over everything else Scott did, before and after, in his career, but there’s also nothing wrong about this follow-up performance. Though not literally impotent like the doctor he played that same year in The Hospital, he’s still far diminished from the military glory and rigidly erect bearing of his most famous role. Crouching under his car, or slouching against walls in black leather jacket while putting up with Musante, this movie’s designated young punk, Scott instead plays to the full effect of his battered appearance. Sven Nyvkist’s cinematography, his first for Hollywood, certainly seems attuned to the project’s straightforward nature, but in some of Scott’s close-ups finds a certain desolate beauty in the man’s ruined face that digs a little deeper than all of the picturesque location photography.

Not that there’s anything wrong with picturesque location photography, or Richard Fleischer’s brand of straightforward filmmaking. Like his fellow studio pro directors Robert Wise and Mark Robson, before graduating to the glossy likes of Dr. Dolittle (1967), or The Sound of Music (1965), or Valley of the Dolls (1967), Fleischer had cut his teeth on tough, terse post-WWII genre fare, the kind now preferred by many movie fans to Hollywood’s spectacles. The Last Run doesn’t have the cold-shower shock of Fleischer’s career-making The Narrow Margin (1952), which hit Hollywood and its audiences in the early ‘50s with the same impact as Dirty Harry and The French Connection in the same year as this film. Instead, from that moody opening shot of Scott readying his car, and first bars of Jerry Goldsmith’s jazzy score, the director keeps a reassuringly steady hand at the controls. He doesn’t push his solid craftsmanship with new areas, which he’d done earlier with the interesting but questionably motivated split-screens in The Boston Strangler (1968). He does give us a thriller that’s as linear and confident as Harry Garmes’ journey. If this movie’s Old Hollywood roots show at all, it’s in the fakey, postsynched-sounding dialogue for the European characters, quite unlike how naturally Coppola would handle his Sicilian actors in The Godfather (1972).

It may not quite be the best ‘70s crime film you’ve never seen, but The Last Run can at least holds its own in that section of your DVD shelf for an ending as uncompromised and blunt as a classic like Get Carter (1971) or The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1974). In a sense, not the one I firstreferred to, it can be seen as George C. Scott’s The Mechanic, pitting Tony Musante’s somewhat overly callow young killer against the experience of his old crook, just as that Michael Winner movie contrasted Jan-Michael Vincent to Charles Bronson. Off-screen, The Last Run played out as Scott’s version of The Getaway (1972), which of course resulted in Steve McQueen ending his first marriage and beginning a new one, to his leading lady Ali McGraw. Scott actually managed the not inconsiderable feat of doing McQueen one better, beginning production married to one of his co-stars, Colleen Dewhurst, and ending it married to another of his, Trish Van Devere. If Scott’s nowhere nearly as convincing an outlaw as Bronson or McQueen, it’s because he always seemed too naturally authoritarian, comfortable in uniform and bellowing orders at people, to represent much of a menace to society. His character here, who doesn’t even like to carry a gun on his jobs, functions more as an adjunct to the underworld than a full-fledged member of it. In the same way, The Last Run may always be something of an outlier to the great crime films of the 1970s, but viewed today, up against such young punks as The American (2010) and Drive (2011), it’s a tough little movie that, like Harry Garmes, didn’t deserve its long exile in obscurity.

Went the Day Well?

2011-06-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

It’s such a strange notion, to mark Memorial Day by watching war movies. Not that I can begrudge TCM’s programmers their scheduling the likes of VON RYAN’S EXPRESS and THE GREEN BERETS, but it all seems so in line with the inevitable decline of anniversaries into holidays. Several weeks on from our most recent Day of Remembrance, I’ve been thinking back on a war movie which did mark the start of my Memorial Day weekend movie-watching. What I’ve mentioned was not on my mind when I made the selection; rather, it was the chance to catch the film, Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1942 British propaganda piece WENT THE DAY WELL?, on its last day showing at Film Forum. A movie which turns civilians into soldiers and an ongoing war into fiction, in its own incongruous, nightmarish way it feels apt for this country’s experience of wartime, at this point in time and for the last seven years.

WENT THE DAY WELL? begins, like good, honest propaganda, by letting the audience know what they are about to see. The camera finds actor Mervyn Johns (Glynis’ father) standing in a churchyard in the rural English village of Bramley End, among tombstones which bear, he informs us, the names of German soldiers who came to this serene outpost from the war disguised as “ordinary British tommies.” By spoiling its own plot, the film provides its first sign that, for all of the entertainment value which it offers, it will operate differently from how a similar story might have been treated before 1938 or after 1945. All that it leaves for us to discover is how its cast of characters, including a priggish vicar’s daughter (Valerie Taylor), a boozy old poacher (Edward Rigby), and an assortment of green Home Guard recruits, could possibly hope to shepherd those invaders into their graves.

The screenwriting team, of John Dighton, Angus MacPhail, and Diana Morgan, answer this question differently than did their source material, Graham Greene’s short story ‘The Lieutenant Died Last.’ Their script marks the second consecutive Greene adaptation that I’ve reviewed here, after Fritz Lang’s 1944 MINISTRY OF FEAR, which doesn’t indicate any further series of posts I’m planning, but simply the kind of coincidence which can occur when you neglect a site for as long as I have. As did Lang’s film, WENT THE DAY WELL? retools Greene’s story to accord with what was deemed more prudent to tell wartime viewers. Greene told the story of a single man, a social outcast from the life of his village, who defends it single-handedly from an advance unit of German paratroopers and receives almost no gratitude in return. The screenplay adaptation completely reverses this notion, showing how nearly every person in that village is prepared to the death to defend it, even those characters you wouldn’t immediately pigeonhole as guerrilla fighters in waiting. It also adds an unsettling note of its own, alongside the juxtaposition of bucolic English countryside with partisan warfare, in the form of those apparent defenders of Bramley End becoming its occupiers. Though in most respects WENT THE DAY WELL? seems to be absolutely of its time, this particular element seems to look forward to the lack of certainty and the paranoia of the 1950s and the Cold War, finding an echo in then-unmade sci-fi movies like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.

Billed here, with eye-catching concision, simply as ‘Cavalcanti,’ the director makes his mark with the story’s gradual progression in tone, and with ominous low-angled shots when one of the most unlikely members of the cast goes on a rampage against the Germans. This scene may be one of the few that I can place in any kind of directorial context, since my previous experience with his large body of work is limited to the two entries he contributed to the famous horror anthology film, DEAD OF NIGHT, one year later, including its concluding and best-known segment, about a ventriloquist tormented by his dummy. Coming up with an image, in the scene mentioned before, which can’t help but now bring to mind some of Kathy Bates in MISERY, Cavalcanti looks forward to his work in the genre by turning a scene of anti-Nazi resistance into horror, and a patriotic insurgent into a monster. WENT THE DAY WELL? touches on other notes you wouldn’t expect from a war film, from the hint of noir in the camerawork and paranoid atmosphere to the definite strain of comedy in the script and performances, seemingly containing most of the genres, which did not include war films, which Cavalcanti would go on to tackle in his British feature-directing career, which began here after a prolific output of documentaries in the country. From what I’ve read, these included the noir of THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE and the comedy of his music hall biopic CHAMPAGNE CHARLIE, but decent copies of his movies on video are still fairly hard to track down. Born in Brazil, from which he later exiled for being a Communist, and at different times also based out of France, Cavalcanti passed a peripatetic career, often without much attention or even without any official credit. Without more of his work being readily available, it’s hard for me to comment more on how he placed his own stamp on this project, except in the almost literal sense of that one-name directorial credit’s appearance over a sedate English countryside. Contrasting with the later, casual use of an anti-Italian ethnic slur by one of the good guys, it’s enough to suggest that we’re watching this story through the eyes of an outsider.

Until I’m more familiar with his work, the auteur of WENT THE DAY WELL? I can most readily identify is not Cavalcanti but his employer, the legendary Ealing Studios. This film’s mysteriously invincible English yeomen could have come from the same gene pool as the indestructible landlady of THE LADYKILLERS and the entrenched management and labor factions of THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, while its mixture of cozy Englishness with industrious violence strikes the same note as KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. When several unlikely chains of coincidence occur around the midpoint of the story to prevent Bramley End’s inhabitants from warning the rest of England, WENT THE DAY WELL? becomes a guerrilla warfare story identifiably from the same company which made THE LAVENDER HILL MOB.

That whimsical sense of humor exists alongside ruthless violence, both on the part of the characters and of the film toward them, which reminded me most of the 1982 THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS in how unceremoniously characters we’re attached to can fall in combat. Again, it’s something which seems to differ from more traditional war movies, like those late ‘60s examples of the genre I mentioned at the start of this review. For all that WENT THE DAY WELL? is a very untraditional war film, it works very well as one, in that uneasy but unavoidable way in which a catastrophic event like World War II is turned into uplifting entertainment and an inspirational object lesson. In fact, Cavalcanti’s movie takes that tendency to transmute real-life tragedy into fiction, which in something like Howard Hawks’ flag-waver AIR FORCE had wartime audiences hearing that Japanese-Americans took part in the Pearl Harbor attack by land, and takes it another step. That opening narration by Mervyn Johns assumes, like a deadly serious version of the “Dewey defeats Truman” joke, that a land invasion like the one prepared for by the story’s villains will happen, and occurs from a point in time where it has already been defeated. Not unlike INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, this movie creates its own alternate universe version of how Hitler was defeated.

Part of what’s so strange about WENT THE DAY WELL?, as entertainment and as propaganda, might come from Greene’s original story. Despite having been directly written and published in the U.S., in Collier’s, as an assignment from British intelligence to win over American support, Greene couldn’t resist complicating the message. His German invaders don’t disguise themselves as English soldiers, and when they shoot at a boy from the village, Greene tells us that they “humanely” aim at his legs, very unlike the all-out massacre shown in WENT THE DAY WELL? As much as paranoia over Nazis gaining a foothold in England, what you take away from ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’ is the main character’s lingering, to him inexplicable guilt over having killed a lot of people to defend his homeland. The German leaders in WENT THE DAY WELL? include Leslie Banks (also the hero of the original THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and Chorus in Olivier’s HENRY V), filmed to emphasize the scars the actor received in World War I combat service, and David Farrar, the darkly handsome Powell & Pressburger regular, and are as vile and duplicitous as you would want movie Nazis to be. As a result, there’s none of Greene’s sense of regret at the deaths of “honorable” enemies, but the movie does give off a sense of unease at how readily and gleefully its heroes turn into killers.

Along with some of the other most memorable British movies of World War II, like HENRY V or THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, WENT THE DAY WELL? tries to show qualities of England which makes it worth preserving for reasons which don’t have to do with how efficiently it can dispose of its enemies. When one of the villagers, in the sniping scene often used for the movie’s artwork, is briefly reluctant to pick off German soldiers, it could be seen as an insincere moment of hand-wringing, a little concession to the one-time pacifists in the audience. Having liked and enjoyed WENT THE DAY WELL? as much as I did, however, I suppose I’d prefer to see it as another example of the movie’s divided nature; produced as propaganda, under the pressure of a real threat of invasion, it’s a mutant, through-the-looking-glass flag-waving war movie, an Ealing comedy which tranforms into THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. It’s the sort of film where corny provincial humor involving alcoholic poachers and dithery upper-class ladies can exist alongside, late in the story, one of the most heart-stopping moments of sacrifice you could ever hope to see in a movie like this. If nothing else, it should forever supplant the bedraggled “international coproduction” of 1976, THE EAGLE HAS LANDED, which told close to the same story without anything close to the same panache and subversive spark. As I wrote before, it’s open to debate whether watching movies is any way to remember wars or honor their memorials, but WENT THE DAY WELL? may be one of the more weirdly apt films you could watch on such a day, one which is, appropriately, stirring and unsettling at the same time.

Bronson Inaction

2011-03-10T18:55:00.000-08:00

There are some things you just would never expect to see together; people you can't imagine seeing in the same room or at the same table; books or DVDs that wouldn't seem comfortable resting alongside each other on the same shelf. It might not mean much to others, but for me another of those unexpected pairings consists of the images above and below. The two very familiar sights of Charles Bronson's carved-from-granite face and The New Yorker's title typeface seem as potentially combustible crowded together in the same frame as any of the explosives that Bronson's character, Arthur Bishop, uses against his gangland assassination targets over the course of THE MECHANIC (1972). Compared to other filmmakers, director Michael Winner never seemed to hesitate before putting up on screen images which common sense or good taste might dictate against: just look at the finale of THE SENTINEL (1977). With this far more tastefully unexpected combination of elements, Winner creates a brief respite from the unspoken but mounting tension between Bishop and fellow assassin Steve McKenna (Jan-Michael Vincent) while the two are in the air and en route to a hit in Naples. It also puts the stamp of unlikelihood on the threat posed by Bronson, one thing which might set him apart from the generation of action stars who took up his mantle in the '80s. Sometimes, for instance here, as well as in DEATH WISH (1974), Bronson could appear too gentlemanly and well-mannered to be capable of ruthless assassinations or righteous vengeance. Elsewhere, the same could hold true because of how initially beaten-down or humble his characters at first seem, as in BREAKHEART PASS (1975), HARD TIMES (1975), or even ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968). To that quality is added, it goes without saying, is the absolutely convincing authenticity of Bronson's non-steroid enhanced physical presence. In any case, even if THE MECHANIC didn't have that brilliantly protracted 15-minute stretch at the start, or that just as brilliantly abrupt ending, it would still deserve a place in my heart for just possibly being the only place where you could catch Charles Bronson in the act of reading Pauline Kael.

Second World War Noir

2011-02-15T19:04:00.000-08:00

As the film begins, the main character, played by Ray Milland, is sitting alone in a dark room, watching the hands of a clock slowly move toward the point where he can be released from the mental asylum where he has spent the last two years. When another man does come in to tell him that the desired time has come, he urges him to stay away from the cities for a while, to remain in small towns like the one where the institution is located. Milland’s character, Stephen Neale, differs with his former keeper, however stating that after a long period of enforced peacefulness he’d like to get back to the energy and noise of London.
Something of the spell cast by Fritz Lang's 1944 film MINISTRY OF FEAR comes from the fact that Neale never quite manages to reach his stated goal of metropolitan hustle-and-bustle, which no doubt would have been of the kind that could be so lovingly depicted by Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s. Though he manages to reach London by train, surviving a bombing run by the Luftwaffe squadrons then besieging England, the city appears almost marginally less deserted than the little village and the asylum from which he’s come. The darkly lighted Hollywood soundstages used to represent London here do irretrievably close this thriller off from any kind of convincing portrayal of Blitz-era London, as does Neale's unaccountable eagerness to return to the beleaguered city, but the air of unreality gives this World War II espionage thriller an intriguingly dreamlike, uniquely noirish atmosphere.
It came as the third of four such anti-Nazi thrillers directed by Lang, which began with MAN HUNT (1941), scripted by John Ford collaborator Dudley Nichols, and HANGMEN ALSO DIE!, co-written by Bertolt Brecht, and concluded with the Gary Cooper-starring CLOAK AND DAGGER (1946). As anyone who’s seen Lang’s appearance in Godard’s CONTEMPT (1963) might remember, the Austrian-born, one-time Berlin-based filmmaker liked to portray his experiences with the Third Reich as something of an espionage thriller in its own right. In 1933, or so the director said, soon after his THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE had been banned in Germany, Goebbels presented him with a Faustian pact of complete control over the German film industry, in return for unstinting loyalty to Hitler, to which Lang responded by fleeing for Paris by train that night. An oft-told story that’s been questioned by some, including Lang biographer Patrick McMilligan (“The Nature of the Beast,” 1997), it’s at the very least of interest in how it corresponds with the movies Lang made once he was safely ensconced in Hollywood, movies with the cumulative effect of taunting the men who nearly became his masters.

The source material for MINISTRY OF FEAR came from a novel by Graham Greene, the third of his to be adapted for the screen, after ORIENT EXPRESS (in 1934) and THIS GUN FOR HIRE (in 1941, from “This Gun for Sale”). Film might have seemed like a natural fit for the novelist, who admitted to picking up cinematic techniques for his thrillers, which he termed “entertainments,” and had also drawn attention, both good and bad, to himself as a film critic with his willfully provocative opinions, including attacks on Hitchcock’s directorial skills and the claim that Shirley Temple, at nine years old, represented a sex symbol to some in her audience- that last assertion sparked litigation. That same cynical view on life was hard for cautious film producers to digest, however, as with MINISTRY’s producer, Seton I. Miller, who also adapted Greene’s novel, written just the year before. Despite the author’s interest in the medium, he found Miller’s adaptation to be altogether too movie-like for his tastes, marking an early low point for the author in the long arc of his direct involvement with the film world. Of course, his three collaborations with Carol Reed, including THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), OUR MAN IN HAVANA (1959), and one of the best movies of all time, THE THIRD MAN (1949), later helped to make for this. Lang felt disappointed by his own film, and is even said to have apologized to Greene for it when they later met, claiming that the studio, Paramount, had tied his hands.
Certainly, the movie is more frivolous in its depiction of the war than some of Lang's other movies on the same subject. Anyone looking for a serious depiction of wartime England would be better off with the Michael Powell and Emertic Pressburger drama THE SMALL BACK ROOM (1949). That being said, MINISTRY's lack of political weight isn't completely inapt, given the hero’s isolation from the unfolding conflict. As he enters a newly war-torn world, he's as disoriented as Elliot Gould's Philip Marlowe at the beginning of THE LONG GOODBYE (1973), awakening from a dream into a seedy downtown Los Angeles. Though MINISTRY begins with its hero leaving a mental asylum, the world outside seems as fragmented and irrational as his own interior landscape. Greene’s story, perhaps partly inspired by the thrillers he’d seen as a critic, traps Neale in an intentionally unlikely, even ridiculous network of intrigue. As he waits to catch a train back to London, the hero catches sight of a fair across the road from the station, being given by a charity organization of middle-aged women calling themselves “The Mothers of the Free Nations.” Ushered into a “psychic’s” tent, Neale is told by the turban-wearing, middle-aged woman within how to guess on the weight of a cake being given as a prize. As he leaves the fair, the cake clutched under his arm, to catch his train, a car pulls up and everyone’s favorite 1940s movie villain, Dan Duryea, gets out. In fact, the cake had been earmarked for his character, whom Milland’s hero had been mistaken for. So Greene’s entertainment is set in motion, with the Mothers of the Free Nations in pursuit of Ray Milland, all on account of one of the most absurd McGuffins ever concocted.
The fact that the movie’s main plot device can be designated by this famous Hitchcock coinage might indicate one reason why Greene and Lang were unhappy with its final results. Just as Greene had not been a supporter of Hitchcock during the director's earlier English phase, so Lang sometimes hinted at a sense of jealousy toward Hitchcock's Hollywood career, which may have resembled what Lang had initially envisioned for himself while settling into his American exile. As Neale investigates the Mothers and, later, goes on the run from the police for his suspected involvement in the Duryea character’s murder, it’s hard not to think of Hitchcock’s many wrongly pursued heroes, from Robert Donat in THE 39 STEPS (1935) to Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST.

The heroine chosen to accompany Neale during his odyssey provides one clue as to why Lang remained a neophyte at these kinds of man-on-the-run films next to Hitchcock. Attempting to understand the roots of his persecution, Milland’s hero goes to the London headquarters of the charity organization, which he finds being run by a brother and sister (Carol Esmond and Marjorie Reynolds) who, like Lang, are Viennese refugees from Hitler. At least at first, they seem happy to help Neale in his investigation, bringing him to a seance being held at the home of the Mothers’ wealthy benefactress, where he encounters Duryea again. As the story progresses, Neale inevitably uncovers cracks in the facade of their apparent trustworthiness, but until that point the movie tries to divert us with the inevitable development of romantic feelings between Reynolds’ and Milland’s characters.
Hitchcock was always happy to stress sexual tension over intrigue in his espionage thrillers. By contrast, for this project Lang seems to have unenthusiastically accepted the studio-mandated romantic subplot and casting of Marjorie Reynolds as a matter of commercial calculation, taking his marching orders as acquiescently as Justin Theroux in MULHOLLAND DR. Next to the gallery of indelible heroines, as played by actresses ranging from Madeleine Carroll to Eva Marie Saint, who accompanied Hitchcock's heroes in their escape from the law, the radiantly blond, pretty Reynolds makes little impression in the movie, and in her subsequent career which the studio, Paramount, apparently hoped for from her. Her inoffensive character is also a poor fit with the very dark storyline as it was originally created by Greene, and her presence leads Miller’s script to one of the more ludicrously happy Hollywood-concocted endings you could ever hope to see. Lang directs the scene as though determined to move it off the screen as quickly as possible.
It’s all the more inappropriate because the adaptation does not remove the book's main revelation, which consists of the main character's reason for having been in that insane asylum in the first place. It does temper the severity of that reason, and largely ignores Greene’s original point of contrasting an individual’s understandable, even sympathetic but nonetheless criminal impulses with the impersonal carnage of large-scale warfare. Milland’s inherently dapper, self-assured nature, which here seems born to a tailored suit, also acts against the credibility of his character having spent the last two years in a mental asylum.

All the same, MINISTRY hands its star a harder task than portraying someone, as Humphrey Bogart did in CASABLANCA, with a merely checkered past, easily forgotten and forgiven by virtue of joining the fight against Nazi aggression. Neale is closer to the antiheroes of full-blown film noir, like Tom Neal’s Al Roberts in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poverty Row classic DETOUR (1945), or to Henry Fonda’s Eddie Taylor in Lang’s own, pre-war crime film YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937), singled out by a combination of fate and their own dark natures. For this reason, as well as for Henry Sharp’s superbly set-bound cinematography, MINISTRY OF FEAR feels more of a piece with movies made before or after World War II, or at least outside its narrative context, in presenting a main character who cannot fully share in the unanimity of wartime effort. Noir sometimes presents characters who had shared in that effort, as with Burt Lancaster in CRISS CROSS (1949) or Robert Ryan in ACT OF VIOLENCE (1948), but nonetheless wind up outside of society, looking in. If MINISTRY’s studio and producers felt obligated, with Lang’s passive assent, to insist on a more optimistic conclusion for their hero, the movie’s initial atmosphere of a dream, and its suggestion that Neale, like Sam Lowry in BRAZIL, has never really left the confines of his own mind, undercuts that saccharine ending.
The echoes of other films present in MINISTRY OF FEAR stretch back in time as well as forward. Even if Lang made the film without much confidence in the material’s quality, as he later claimed in interviews, there are scenes and images in the film that suggest the director returning to his earlier heyday in Germany making thrillers like DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922), SPIES (1927), and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1932). When Neale attends a seance sponsored by the Mothers of the Free Nations, for instance, it's hard to imagine Lang wasn't thinking of the similar scenes in DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER. Where the earlier German films have been retrospectively interpreted as looking forward to or commenting on the country's eventual descent into darkness, this later effort might be looking at that comparatively innocent, carefree era in onscreen images of intrigue.
For the product of a novelist who had lived through the Blitz and a director who’d escaped from Hitler, MINISTRY OF FEAR certainly feels rather cut off from any immediate experience of World War II. That being said, the movie does deserve better than it's gotten, such as the condemnation of the people who made it, or the film's present unavailability on Region 1 DVD. By most estimations a minor work, whether considered as a Graham Greene adaptation, a Fritz Lang film, or a World War II film, MINISTRY is still worthwhile as an example of all three, and as an entry in an otherwise uninvented genre: Second World War noir.

Rebels and Conformists

2010-07-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

One of the most memorable moments in The Conformist (1970), Bernardo Bertolucci’s seductively beautiful study of Fascism, comes early in the film, as the titular antihero’s fiancée, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), dances for him in her Rome apartment. As the camera turns to follow Giulia’s movements, music plays on a phonograph and light streams in from the lowered venetian blinds, casting askew patterns onto the walls which match the plunging black-and-white diagonals of her dress. These several seconds of film stand out as just one of the most vivid examples of the tone that Bertolucci and his key collaborators, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Fernando Scarfiotti, managed to create throughout The Conformist. Essentially, their achievement is a sense of a total integration of design, a total fusion of filmmaking elements that today, after several decades’ worth of heavily designed spectacles, impresses all the more with its grace and slightly chilly detachment.

A similar scene occurs about twenty minutes into a movie made two decades later, Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990). Up to this point, the film has followed its young protagonist, Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), in his amorous adventures, seducing first a shy waitress, Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), and then a nightclub dancer, Leung Fung-ying (Carina Lau). At this moment, however, the camera observes Yuddy, alone in his dark, cluttered apartment as he starts to dance, following him with the same kind of sinuous movement as in The Conformist, and to the musical accompaniment of a similar flavor of tropical-flavored pop. The affinity between the two scenes doesn’t come simply from their content, which is not so unusual, but from the similar, stylishly languorous notes that they strike.
I don’t know that Wong Kar-Wai has ever acknowledged Bertolucci as an influence, and I’ve never heard or read any other comparison between these two movies. Certainly, the peak of The Conformist’s acknowledged influence was in early 1980s Hollywood, when glossy stylishness had become newly fashionable, and directors liked to draw on Storaro’s Wellesian, noirish visuals and their Fascistic associations to invoke an ominous, decadent mood. In Blade Runner, for instance, Ridley Scott and his cameraman, the late great Jordan Cronenweth, used those same bars of filtered light for Harrison Ford and Sean Young’s love scene. Paul Schrader, meanwhile, practically imported The Conformist wholesale by bringing Fernando Scarfiotti out to L.A. for American Gigolo. Days of Being Wild’s citation of the Italian film, if it is one, is less brazen. Where it more fully evokes The Conformist, intentionally or not, is in that same sense of removed nostalgia, a tone which novels commonly evoke but which appears less often in the movies.
Wong Kar-Wai’s nostalgia is for early 1960s Hong Kong, which he depicts in Days of Being Wild and in the later In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) as a lost world, more elegant and ritualized than our present. The characters of these films are like refugees from the classic Hollywood melodramas and “women’s pictures” of the forties and fifties, more devoted both to the trappings of the good life and to the constraints of social convention. His films about contemporary Hong Kong and its inhabitants, meanwhile, seem closer in spirit to the New Wave films actually being made in the 1960s. The people in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together are just as romantic and obsessed with past heartbreak as those in Kar-Wai’s lush period pieces, but in a very nineties context of cultural free-fall, apparently porous national and personal identities and constant restlessness. Kar-Wai did return to the present in 2007’s My Blueberry Nights, his disappointingly conventional English-language debut, but otherwise his interests have seemed, since the start of the new millennium, more directed towards the past. In addition to Wong Kar-Wai’s 1960s films, in recent years he’s released a revised cut of his 1994 wuxia martial-arts epic Ashes of Time and has been working on a new film, The Grand Master, about Bruce Lee’s mentor in the 1950s.
Wong Kar-Wai’s romantic view of the pre-1968 world is hardly unique among filmmakers, who are frequently drawn to the idea that this time was, if not more innocent, less self-conscious. What’s more unusual and compelling is the personal quality of his fascination. He moved to Hong Kong with his parents in 1963, when he was only five, and it’s easy to imagine that the dreamlike images of his movies about that period could have started with a child’s hazy impressions of his unfamiliar new home.
I don’t find all of Wong Kar-Wai’s work equally compelling. Ashes of Time, I am ashamed to admit, defeated my efforts to sit through it, and as a general rule his mannered style and obsession with lost love and lost time can be difficult to work your way into, if always easy to admire as the work of talented people. Days of Being Wild is not as highly finished as most of his later movies and, in the grainy DVD mastering which I was able to see, is certainly not as pretty. Despite all of that, it might also be my favorite among his films, with a sense of freshness and discovery in how boldly and directly it drops the viewer into its imagined past world.
The movie begins without any scene-setting or fanfare. The camera keeps pace behind Yuddy as he walks down an otherwise empty hallway, on his way to seduce Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) at the stadium concession stand where she works. These early scenes could almost be from a more average, conventional “coming-of-age” story, as is suggested by the origins of the title, which was first used for the Chinese-language release of Rebel without a Cause (1955). One of the first signs that the movie will be about more than “the summer they could never forget” comes when Yuddy decides to make the girl his “one-minute friend.” This scene is better seen than described, but, suffice to say, it’s a typical Wong Kar-Wai moment, combining the grave and the whimsical, finding something permanent in the ephemeral.

That the movie has little interest in presenting a feel-good story of personal growth becomes clear as we learn more about its protagonist. As played by the late Leslie Cheung, Yuddy is effortlessly charming and charismatic, with a sense of boyish vulnerability like that of Montgomery Clift, but with an underlying coldness that seems distantly related to the raging, predatory character David Thewlis would play three years later in Naked. It seems clear that something’s off with Yuddy after he abruptly rejects the gorgeous Maggie Cheung, moving on to Carina Lau’s dancer. The script doesn’t try to make much of a Rosebud out of the character’s emotional problems, revealing early that Yuddy was abandoned by his birth mother, who went on to live in the Philippines, and was raised by a former call girl (Rebecca Pan), who did not hide that her interest in him came primarily from the reward she was paid in return. At heart, he’s a little lost boy, and the character’s quest is, theoretically, to be reunited with his absent mother, but Wong Kar-Wai treats this in an offhand way. His characters are rarely goal-driven in the way generally dictated by commercial filmmaking.
As with Wong Kar-Wai’s later movies, the storyline of Days of Being Wild is far from the most interesting or significant thing about it. There’s a danger in working this way, as became clear in My Blueberry Nights, where the road-movie format closes in on itself in a loop without ever going to any particularly interesting places. When thinking back on Days of Being Wild, what I remember is the dreamlike, almost eerie picture it creates of Hong Kong. Wong and his great cinematographer Christopher Doyle render the city with a stifling, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. For much of the time, it seems emptied out of people, without the bustling crowds and elaborate production design typically used in period films. This decision may have come in part from budgetary limitations, but it also helps to suggest that Wong Kar-Wai is not showing much more than what his characters, who are mostly in their twenties, remember seeing from that time. In the Mood for Love and 2046 embrace more brilliant, varied color schemes, and boast more elaborate costume and set designs, but Days of Being Wild is beautiful and hypnotic in its own right. In the absence of an overabundance of period detail, Christopher Doyle bathes many of the scenes in a green glow, a simple but effective way of suggesting the idea of “the past.”
One of the odd things about that affinity between The Conformist and Days of Being Wild, if there is anything to it, is that Wong Kar-Wai’s movie takes place closer to when The Conformist was shot than to when it was set. This kind of mix-up of chronology seems appropriate for a director who would later, in 2046, confuse whether the number represented a hotel room where lovers could meet or the year in the future when they could be reunited. It may also contain a clue as to why, at the same time as Wong Kar-Wai so shamelessly and egregiously fetishizes the past, he can also transcend what might have been no more than an indulgence. That the same languid atmosphere and moody visuals could evoke such different eras and places so well suggests that, ultimately, the films are less about a particular time that happens to be past than it is about the process of memory. So, for that matter, is the fact that one of the defining obsessions for an artist could be nostalgia for a time and place that he could not, in fact, remember.

Platinum Blonde

2010-04-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

The Front Page, the 1928 play by the great writing partnership of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, provided the basis for two two films of that same title, the first in the early 1930s with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien as the lovably cutthroat journalist heroes and the second in the 1970s, a late Billy Wilder project starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in the same roles. Newly christened, the original play took a new form in 1940 in one of the best movies ever made, just about the only film that I can imagine being selected as an all-time favorite by both Leonard Maltin and Quentin Tarantino. That film is, of course, His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Hawks and with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant now playing the heroes. Considering the unlikelihood of my saying anything new about that film, I thought I'd instead talk about another, not undeservedly lesser-known film, but one which just might be another Front Page spin-off, at least if you choose to believe its director.
Platinum Blonde (1931) came at a fairly early point in Frank Capra's career, as he was still proving himself Columbia's star director and mogul Harry Cohn's best and brightest hope for elevating the studio from its Poverty Row origins to a place up among the town's major players. The writing credits are up to Hollywood's typically convoluted standard, separately citing "story by," "adaptation," and "dialogue." The last is assigned to Robert Riskin, who wrote the original draft and would go on to serve as Capra's main writing collaborator for most of the 1930s, arguably doing as much as Capra to set the unique Capra stamp. According to Joseph McBride's Capra biography The Catastrophe of Success, when the director later spoke about Platinum Blonde, he underplayed its role as the start of a creative partnership, rather claiming to have nicked the story from the Hecht-MacArthur classic.

It's a convincing enough claim at first glance, considering the shared focus on the boozy, smoke-filled world of city newsrooms and the lovably cynical, scrappy hacks who fill them. Robert Williams' Stew Smith isn't too far removed from Walter Burns, Cary Grant's conniving editor in His Girl Friday. By the same measure, Stew's slow-burning romance with his colleague and best pal Gallagher (Loretta Young) seems like a less tempestuous version of the relationship in His Girl Friday between Grant's character and Rosalind Russell's Hildy Johnson, his former wife and subordinate at the paper.
If there's a problem with Capra's reminiscences, it's that the love-hate male-female relationship of His Girl Friday was a new addition, incorporated according to legend after Howard Hawks noticed how well it worked when his "continuity girl" read one of the two primary, both originally male roles, converting platonic male bonding and feuding into sexual warfare. Capra could not very well have stolen an element from The Front Page that had not yet been introduced to it. If anything, he was anticipating His Girl Friday, if only in the rather simple peg on which he hangs his tale. What's distinctive about Platinum Blonde is less it's own qualities, though those are present, than how it looks ahead to careers and films yet to come, and in one case to an actor's promise which was never fulfilled.
As accurately as the title, for instance, might describe lead Jean Harlow's radiantly bleached mane, it otherwise conveys little about what the movie is actually like. Like Capra, Harlow was in the process of becoming a star when she appeared in the film, and she was able to seize on the project for advancing her image, which the title just about sums up perfectly. What's less than perfectly suited to Harlow is the role itself, which has her playing a genteel, blue-blood Park Avenue princess whose unsuitability as a match for the reporter hero is meant to provide the story's engine. It's hard to imagine why anyone at Columbia thought this character would make for a neat fit with Harlow, whose appeal derived from her combination of an urban, working-class manner which must have rung bells of recognition in much of her Depression-era audience, and a sense of voluptuous sexuality which rang bells of a very different kind. Having appeared the year before as the moll to James Cagney's strutting bantam of a mobster in The Public Enemy, she does just about as well as anyone could have expected or demanded, but the performance is more a tamped-down version of her usual persona than a credible Gotham heiress. The odd thing is that the film does contain a potentially better role for Harlow, in a character who's mentioned but never seen. Probably a vestigial remnant of an earlier draft of the script, this figure is the showgirl whose short-lived marriage to Harlow's playboy, Brilliantine-haired brother has been annulled before the film begins. It's to investigate the prospect of scandal among New York's upper-crust that Stew Smith shows up at the family's door in the beginning, but this part of the plot is soon forgotten. It's easy to imagine a different comedy in which Harlow played the discarded showgirl and Williams her savior, and tempting to wonder if Capra, Harlow, or anyone else on the production ever wondered if they were not making the wrong film.

Where Harlow's performance does work is in the scenes where Capra is able to achieve an unforced, natural feeling to her scenes with Robert Williams. Even if the material in the script isn't up to the mark which Capra would start consistently hitting within just a few films, the handling of the camera and cast is always impressive, particularly in mind of how early this movie comes in Hollywood's transition to sound. I'm thinking in particular of some lovely individual shots, one of Harlow and William's first kiss, in a gazebo in her family estate's garden, which have the same gauzy, lusciously romantic tone which Capra would later allow to run wild in the underrated masterpiece The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). Considering the ramshackle quality of the script, the extent to which Capra was able to almost pull off the whole daft enterprise must have been a mark in his favor with Columbia's bosses.
As thin as the script is, there's a certain interest in seeing both Capra and the Hollywood screwball comedy taking some early, tentative steps in Platinum Blonde toward the more accomplished movies that would arrive later in the decade. Capra's favorite, often ambivalently fascination with relations between the rich and the poor, expressed both in populist celebration of the "common people" and an attraction toward power and privilege, is dealt with more straightforwardly here, as Stew Smith enters into the world of the New York elite and then quickly decides that they are not for him. Harlow pulling Williams into the upper class is not unlike Carole Lombard selecting William Powell in My Man Godfrey (1936), except that Platinum Blonde imagines its upper-class characters with rather less verve, restricting the fun to be had in the movie to its working-class journalists. Compounding the weakness of the rich-poor theme, the casting of Loretta Young as Stew Smith's "Girl Friday" and supposedly more proletarian alternative to his platinum blonde wife jars with the fact that Harlow seems more genuinely working-class.
Actually, the Stew Smith-Gallagher subplot is less reminiscent, even preemptively, of His Girl Friday than of another 1940 movie adapted from a Broadway play, one not really in the screwball tradition though made with much of its energy, The Philadelphia Story. I'm thinking in particular of the subplot involving the relationship between James Stewart's reporter and his photographer, played by Ruth Hussey, which remains platonic long enough for Stewart's dalliance with Katherine Hepburn's heiress and becomes romantic in time for Stewart's rejection by Hepburn, which frees her up for the more socially acceptable option of her former husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant).

The 1930s comedies more truly deserving the screwball appellation were less circumspect about violating America's class boundaries on-screen, as Capra and Robert Riskin would do in It Happened One Night. Perhaps it couldn't be said to amount to serious social commentary; actually, it almost certainly did not have much to do with the real world, but the imaginative social transgressions made by those films were one source of their vitality and power. Another was their ability to allow men and women to be equally funny on screen, even while in love with each other, which is surprisingly rare in American comedy. Platinum Blonde makes some tentative moves in that direction by insisting that Gallagher is "just one of the boys," but still reserves for the boys the ability to actually be funny.
The one promise made by Platinum Blonde which went unfulfilled is that of Robert Williams' career. A known Broadway performer, Williams received his first big role in this film, and what he does with it is easily the most impressive thing onscreen. Within minutes of his brash and confident performance, I was wondering why I'd never before heard of Robert Williams before or noticed his other work playing on TCM. As some cursory research revealed, Williams' career, and life, came to an abrupt end after Platinum Blonde. Within four days of the movie's release, the actor had suffered an attack of appendicitis and died, only thirty three years old. we're lucky to have this one performance of his, and if initially the film was conceived and received, down to its title, as one long advertisement for Jean Harlow, today it seems more valuable as a vehicle for that performance. Taken as a whole, Platinum Blonde might not be such a treasure, but the world of film might well have been all the poorer if it had never been made.

Six Flags Revisited

2010-03-11T13:28:00.000-08:00

This site’s title has not, so far, had much of a direct bearing on the movies I’ve chosen to review. I borrowed, or stole, it from S.J. Perelman, a great humor writer responsible for the screenplays to several Marx Brothers films and countless short pieces published in The New Yorker. In the “Cloudland Revisited” essays he describes making return trips to the books and movies that had obsessed him at a younger age, invariably finding that in the interim the bloom had come off. This is a common enough mode of writing today, but, when coming from the Underwood of someone who was born in 1904, is intriguingly unfamiliar in including such subjects as J.M. Barrie’s "The Admirable Crichton," the novel of Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik, and Erich von Stroheim’s scandal-mongering silent melodrama Foolish Wives (1922), all from what now looks like the dawn of modern pop culture.
Going back to the 1970s disaster movie Rollercoaster is not exactly like revisiting Cloudland for me, since even on my first viewing it seemed decidedly unimpressive. What can’t be denied, much as I might wish to, is that for a time my obsession with the movie rivaled anything Pereleman describes. I certainly didn’t have his excuse of being caught up in universal enthusiasms. This saga of mad bombers and amusement parks was never a flavor of the month, even when it came out in the July of 1977. Just a short time after Star Wars’ release, this was an especially inauspicious moment for a movie that must have looked as instantly dated as yesteryear’s leisure suit. Certainly by the era of VHS, it was largely forgotten, hardly a staple of the era’s mom-and-pop video stores. Inexplicably, however, this insignificant blip of a movie received four-and-a-half stars in the consumer video guide my family owned, not Leonard Maltin’s book, but the lesser-known, annually released “Video Movie Guide” by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter. Somehow, reading that Rollercoaster featured “great action, crisp dialogue and a brilliant, nail-biting climax” (yes, I still have a copy of the Guide) convinced my grade-school aged self that this was a great movie, sure to become my favorite movie, if only I could get a chance to see it. Eventually, my father found a copy at the old Tower Records on Route 17 in New Jersey, the one used as the location for the gym in Burn After Reading. I can still remember the excitement of tearing away wrapping paper from the cassette box, and, swiftly following after, the mingled disappointment, embarrassment and denial of watching the tape, my school friends all gathered around, and realizing, “This is terrible.”
Rollercoaster shares the basic template of its plot with one of the best popcorn films to come out of Hollywood during the 1970s or, for that matter, in any other decade, Jaws (1975). That’s not surprising in that both movies came out of Universal, famously one of the more conservative studios of that atypically risk-embracing era of Hollywood history. The shared narrative hook is to begin with showing people at leisure, and then put them in the way of some improbable but formidable threat: a great white shark haunting beaches in Jaws, a deranged but intelligent psychopath (Timothy Bottoms) blowing up amusement parks in Rollercoaster. Then, you introduce an ostentatiously average, ordinary guy to combat the threat. George Segal's performance of this role for Rollercoaster, as Harry Calder, a safety inspector who catches onto the mad bomber’s plan, is no challenge to Roy Scheider’s iconic turn in Jawsas Chief Brody, but it’s still the most pleasing, and pleasantly ‘70s, aspect of the movie, setting it apart from the smug condescension that 1980s comedies and thrillers often displayed through their alpha-male heroes.
Rollercoaster is not, however, much of an argument for the virtues of ‘70s cinema. If anything, it suggests why so many audiences preferred the kind of slick B-movies, pioneered by 1970s “Movie Brats” like Lucas, Spielberg and Friedkin, that filled theaters through the next decade. The early 1970s equivalent to those films was the disaster movies, like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), a genre to which Rollercoaster was a late addition. Universal carried over the gimmick of Sensurround, the enhanced sound system it had developed for Earthquake (1974), and later used in Midway (1976). After figuring out these technical specs, and securing the cooperation of amusement parks to use as shooting locations, the filmmakers behind Rollercoaster seem to have decided their job was essentially done. For a supposed thriller, it’s a remarkably slow-paced and uneventful, parceling out small portions of suspense and action to the audience like the workhouse cook in "Oliver Twist" ladling out soup to the orphans. As a kid, I imagined scenes like the mine tunnel chase in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , the hero and villain battling each other atop a speeding rollercoaster, only to discover that the “production value” on display in the film mainly consisted of documentary footage of rollercoasters. It seems intended mostly as an audiovisual substitute for the actual experience of riding on one, presumably for people who’ve never had such an opportunity but do happen to notice Rollercoaster playing at the local theater.
Re-watching the film recently, I could better appreciate that it was geared toward slow-burning suspense rather than the “adrenaline-packed thrill ride” of something like Speed. Even taken on this level, however, it doesn’t really work. After an opening, ghastly scene of Timothy Bottoms derailing a rollercoaster at Ocean View Park, the movie settles into a rhythm that’s less quietly tense than somnolent. On those infrequent occasions when the villain does threaten the other characters, Rollercoaster suggests a daytime TV show trying to rouse itself from a late afternoon nap. Not surprisingly, many of the people who worked on the movie were either coming from or going back to television careers. Director James Goldstone worked on some notable early "Star Trek" episodes and innumerable other shows, as well as theatrical assignments like the Jimmy Breslin adaptation The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, with an early De Niro role, and the Irwin Allen-produced flop When Time Ran Out… that failed to raise him above the level of a director for hire. Screenwriters Richard Levinson and William Link share between them several hundred writing credits on my grandmother’s favorite show, "Murder, She Wrote," which might say something about why this movie isn't as good as The Conversation (1974) or The Parallax View (1974). Cinematographer David M. Walsh’s name, meanwhile, appears on many other seventies films, from Silver Streak (1976) to California Suite (1978), all sporting the same flatly shot, drearily TV-like visual style.
My sense of Rollercoaster as an ill-fated artifact of a period in Hollywood about to be swept away by the brighter, faster work of the Movie Brats is lent credence by its casting. This is one of George Segal’s last appearances as a functioning movie star (Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe (1978) being another), after which he vanished from theater screens for most of the eighties. Though far inferior to the material he had in movies like Irvin Kershner’s Loving (1970) and California Split (1974), his role here gives a good sense of the warmly likeable, understated presence that made him a star. Timothy Bottoms, who’d become a star with the great The Last Picture Show (1970), was about to experience a similar professional vanishing act, taking on lower-profile roles before resurfacing recently with a startlingly convincing impersonation of the motivational speaker George W. Bush. His mad bomber sticks closely and convincingly, if unsurprisingly, to the Norman Bates model of the well-mannered, quiet psychopath.
Though the story, such as it is, consists of the contest between the two men, Rollercoaster fills out its cast enough to qualify as a “box” movie, the kind that would showcase the stars’ faces lined up in little portraits at the bottom of the poster or the video box cover. Henry Fonda’s appearance here is the most obviously gratuitous, playing Segal’s boss in several scenes too brief for him to do anything but play Henry Fonda. Richard Widmark has the larger role of the FBI agent who supervises the investigation into the mad bomber, in which he generally seems stiff. Susan Strasberg, as Segal’s girlfriend, and a young Helen Hunt, as his kid, appear to be serving the thankless function of being placed in peril for his sake, but then are not even afforded that dubious distinction.

Looking at the roster of great and lesser talents that contributed to Rollercoaster, it’s hard to imagine that any of them ever expected so much of the film as I did. Viewed now, years after my original disappointment, Rollercoaster doesn’t seem crushingly awful so much as utterly disposable. The dated qualities that prevented my younger self from enjoying it now seem almost endearing, in the way of something that could have only been made at a particular time. It’s as charmingly awkward as the clothing and hairstyles in your parents’ prom photos. Bad movies like this one have their own part, however little their makers may have recognized it at the time, to play in the love of film.

This is the North

2010-02-13T12:58:00.000-08:00

The Red Riding Trilogy, an adaptation of David Peace’s four-book crime epic about northern England, is one of the bolder projects in storytelling to appear on small and large screens for some time. In terms of its narrative ambitions for what usually constitutes the lurid, routine material of TV cop shows and paperback novels, the series can best be compared to the film of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, with its array of morally compromised heroes and atmosphere of pervasive corruption. Red Riding spreads the pulpy material of crime fiction over the even wider canvas, however, of three distinct films, each shot by a different director, and the narrative span of nine years, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It’s also much grimmer, closer to the original James Ellroy novel in its sense of a world where any sense of right and wrong has been almost totally upended. Shown initially last year on British television and now being presented at various U.S. theaters and through IFC On-Demand, Red Riding may prove bracingly unexpected to American audiences in its setting of Yorkshire, a part of the world more generally associated by outsiders with the Bronte sisters and football leagues than lurid crime. In fact, though, the story is based in a real event which colored, and poisoned, life in the county all through the seventies, the murder spree of the long-uncaught “Yorkshire Ripper.” David Peace remembered childhood fears that his mother might prove the next victim, or his father the killer himself, and wrote the original four “Red Riding” novels as nightmarish extrapolation of the era’s collective mood. As adapted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) into three screenplays, the series retains a feeling of being as much a chronicle of a time and place as a whodunit, titling each entry after the year in which it’s set: 1974, 1980, and 1983. This choice makes the trilogy all the more powerful in the sinking note of dread it sustains for five hours of running time, as well as disturbing in its relentlessly pessimistic worldview.

Peace’s writing plays with narrative voice, repetition, even typography, to suggest prose and style breaking down under the weight of the subjects he describes. His experimentation take its cue from Ellroy’s jagged, fragmented White Jazz, but, rather than the Angeleno’s colloquial, riffing style, reads with an incantatory rhythm, suggesting occult, mythic undertones to the squalid modern-day crimes he describes. As it is, the filmed trilogy largely dispenses with Peace’s voice, save in a few snatches of sing-songy voice-over heard in the first and third entries. The directors who were chosen to helm the project, Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker, settle for the more conventional approach of referencing 1940s film noir and, more closely, 1970s conspiracy movies, with a murky color palette and off-kilter camera angles. Each installment applies this approach with different tools, from grainy 16mm in 1974, 35mm in 1980, and the digital Red One Camera in 1983, to consequently varied visual effect.
After watching the first installment, a friend remarked, “I didn’t know the’70s were ever that…’70s.” Julian Jarrold fills practically every interior space seen in the film in thick clouds of cigarette smoke, a choice which is probably more poetically evocative than literally accurate, but helps to establish the story’s hazy, fever-dream quality. As in a nightmare, the young protagonist, newly appointed Yorkshire Post crime correspondent Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) can look on at terrible events but can seemingly do nothing to stop them. Assigned to cover the recent disappearance of a schoolgirl, he discovers similar cases from the last few years but has difficulty convincing senior police officials “Badger” Bill Molloy (Warren Clarke) and Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) They seem more interested in protecting their “special relationship” to local, politically connected construction magnate John Dawson (Sean Bean), even after the corpse of the missing girl is discovered on one of his building sites, severed swans’ wings stitched to her body.

First seen as the lonely, endlessly rolling moors that Eddie drives through on the way to his new job, 1974’s Yorkshire looks like a distant outpost of what little was left of the British Empire in that era, a Wild North where, like Chinatown’s L.A., the right man with the right connections can do pretty much everything he wants, and get away with it. “This is the North- we do what we want!” is the gleeful, hateful, refrain of the villains and the series’ reply to Chinatown’s famous, resigned “Forget it Jake…” Jarrold makes his fever-dream vision of England seem even more distant and alien than the early 19th and 20th century versions he recreated much more decorously in his previous projects Becoming Jane and Brideshead Revisited. He and cinematographer Rob Hardy send the camera prowling through darkened spaces, sometimes losing focus as if to mirror the main character’s difficulty in processing what he sees. It’s the most stylishly potent filmmaking of the trilogy, as well as the most potentially off-putting for viewers in its foregrounding of the theme of violence against children. If there’s a basic flaw to this installment’s construction, it’s that the story is more straightforward than the moody visuals and slow pacing suggest. Grisoni’s script takes its time in examining interrelationships between the police, press, and big business, and Eddie’s doomed romance with the mother of one of the missing girls, Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall), but at the expense of some of the sense and artful tangle of the novel’s plotting. For a crime story with a genuine sense of moral and narrative ambiguity, you’d be better off with the early ‘80s California noir Cutter’s Way, which acknowledges that its amateur sleuth heroes want to discover the worst about the rich and powerful man they suspect of murder.
That said, 1974 still leaves plenty of questions unanswered. The next installment, 1980, only begins to address them, but does best achieve the trilogy’s ambitions for narrative complexity and ambiguity. Clearing away the first movie’s clouded, murky atmosphere, director James Marsh brings a cleaner, harder-edged widescreen look and a procedural tone reminiscent of the English series Prime Suspect or a movie released a year after the titular date, Sidney Lumet’s expose of NYPD corruption, Prince of the City. Like the trilogy’s other directors, Marsh is best known for work with a much sunnier tone, in his case the Oscar-nominated documentary Man on Wire, but a look at his filmography’s more obscure titles reveals more precedent for Red Riding, in Wisconsin Death Trip, a bizarre “documentary” reconstruction of morbid photos and news clippings from the late 19th century, and The King, a contemporary Southern Gothic take on the Prodigal Son story.

Marsh brings his documentary background and taste for the macabre to the film, which begins like a news report from occupied territory. The Yorkshire Ripper has been terrorizing the women of the region for four years, and the government has dispatched an outsider, senior Manchester detective Peter Hunter, played by the greatPaddy Considine, to find out why the Yorkshire police are unable to end the murders. Considine, an aggressively masculine presence in such earlier roles as his Joy Division manager in 24 Hour Party People and revenging veteran in Dead Man’s Shoes, here tones down his usual persona to play a “squeaky clean,” somewhat officious bureaucrat. Hunter is a scrupulous, essentially decent man, but one of limited imagination and tormented by his wife’s inability to have a child and guilt over an affair with a subordinate detective (Maxine Peake). In this, he contrasts all the more with the appalling thugs he meets among the Yorkshire constabulary, particularly the skin-crawlingly creepy Bob Craven, played by Sean Harris in one of the most memorable of a whole array of memorable performances.
There’s nothing quite so awful in 1980 as 1974’s grisly play on the image of “fallen angels.” The tone is less feverishly gothic because the crimes at the heart of the story are no longer being concealed, but are out in the open, and have become a feature of daily life, a shared nightmare. Time and again the characters must descend into the depths of the police station to go into an interrogation room they call “the belly,” as in, “of the beast;” Marsh’s direction and the cast’s playing give a palpable sense that everyone in the story has been living down there for years.

1983 begins by going back to 1974, showing the roots of the story’s malignant conspiracy being planted at a cop-attended, Godfather-like wedding ceremony. This opening probably provoked Biographical Dictionary of Film author David Thomson’s by now famous pronouncement that Red Riding is better than The Godfather, a bit of provocation that this entry doesn’t bear out particularly well by itself. Less tense and charged than 1974 and 1980, the movie takes place largely in bleary, hung-over light, shot on digital,that suggests a gradual awakening from the nightmares of the first two films. It has to do the hard work of filling up the huge gaps left in the trilogy’s narrative, and dispensing some small measure of justice among its characters. That’s also the task the story assigns to its two protagonists, an incompetent, venal lawyer, John Piggott (Mark Addy), tasked with the appeal for the mentally challenged man imprisoned for the earlier child murders, and senior police officer Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), a supporting character and passive onlooker in the corruption. They’re shaken out of, respectively, sloth and moral paralysis when a young girl vanishes on her way back from school, seemingly the victim of the first story’s killer.

Those intrepid readers who have made their way through all four of David Peace’s Red Riding novels (including 1977, which was cut to keep down the budget) might agree with me that this last film feels the most different from its source material. It’s not that much more is trimmed from the plot than in the other movies, but rather that of the novels Nineteen eighty-three has the least to do with its “present-day” storyline, dwelling instead largely in flashbacks that give a fuller understanding of what was happening in previous books . It’s also the most difficult to read, both for the difficulty of Peace’s language and the bleakness of his worldview, which runs up right to the conclusion with barely a deviation. The film finally does allow us an escape from the story’s horrors, however, and though director Anand Tucker somewhat overplays the moment, it works in counterpoint to all that comes before.
I recall that when I watched Zodiac several months ago with my sister, who hadn’t seen it before and was unfamiliar with the real-life case it’s based on, at some early point turned to me and said, “I bet it’s one of the police who’s the killer.” Those who’ve seen the film will know that its makers offer no such easy out for our indignation or our curiosity, and such manage to make it one of the few crime movies (the similarly themed Korean movie Memories of Murder is another) to combine the genre’s lurid, sensational pleasures with a generous, unfettered sense of that part of life that has nothing to do with crime and punishment (which is to say, most of it). Red Riding evokes the idea of ambiguity by forestalling most of its answers for longer than usual, but it’s a more contrived, less lifelike work, deriving its impact from the artifice of a sense of sinking, paranoid dread where the worst thing you can imagine will probably turn out to be true. If there’s an element of honesty to this project going beyond the paperback novel/TV cop show crime-and-punishment grind, it might be Peace’s suggestion, picked up by Grisoni and the three filmmakers, of how violent crime can act like a black hole on the lives it touches. By the time Red Riding comes to a conclusion, release from the confines of this claustrophobic vision will come to most viewers as a relief, but it stands as a brave attempt to push pulp fiction to its limits that won't soon be forgotten by those who see it.

Yolanda and the Thief

2009-11-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

If nothing else, this 1945 musical must be the strangest thing to emerge out of the nearly twenty year-long partnership between its creators, producer Arthur Freed and director Vincente Minnelli. Appointed as head of MGM’s musical unit after helping produce The Wizard of Oz, Freed did as much as anyone to make the ‘40s and ‘50s the peak period for American film musical. Minnelli directed many of the “Freed unit’s” best films, including Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon and An American in Paris, but few of even the director’s most devoted fans would place Yolanda and the Thief among them. The movie’s basic ingredients, including the paper-thin storyline about rakish conmen and a gullible heiress and the ludicrous faux-Latin American setting, aren’t necessarily the problem; it’s just that Minnelli, Freed and co. fail to whip them up into a suitably frothy confection. Still, even if Yolanda and the Thief can’t be considered among the best musicals of its era, it still bears watching as one of the most visually audacious and experimental (if not successful) efforts of its era, and as a showcase for Technicolor at its most radiant.

Ludwig Bemelmans, the author-illustrator behind the Madeline children’s series, had a hand in the script, which might explain why it begins as a faux-naïve fable, with a Mittel-European schoolteacher lecturing his gaggle of young pupils, against the backdrop of a soundstage sunrise, on the history of “Patria,” their never-never homeland. Like little Madeline, the title character is a daughter of privilege raised by nuns. By the time Yolanda’s ready to leave behind the convent and her young classmates (including four-year old child star Gigi Perreau), however, actress Lucille Bremer looks readier for the Coconut Grove than the von Trapp family. The movie’s campy tone and gaudy visuals look forward to Minnelli’s later The Pirate (1948), in which Gene Kelly's circus acrobat impersonates the title character in order to seduce Judy Garland’s Caribbean debutante. This film takes place further south, on a latitude somewhere between the Pampas and Beverly Hills, but in the same vein of camp exotica, consigning its “dapper rogue” role to Fred Astaire as con-artist Johnny Parkson Riggs, who sets about bilk Yolanda out of her vast family fortune.

There’s something not right about how blithely Bemelmans and Thery’s script reorders the world outside the borders of Hollywood. For all of its aspirations toward weightless fantasy, the script is uncomfortably tethered to the reality of condescension toward the U.S.’s Latin American “good neighbors.” The Pirate has the same attitude, but at least applied it to an unusually multicultural fantasy world for the 1940s. Yolanda and the Thief, however, feels very much like a Yanqui-imperialist act of imagination in its conception of Yolanda’s family business, “Aquaviva,” as a United Fruit-style industrial giant. That said, there’s only so much geopolitical significance that can be imputed to a movie starring Fred Astaire as a con artist named Johnny Parkson Riggs, particularly when the con in question consists of impersonating the mark’s guardian angel, his strategy for exploiting her convent-bred piety.

The creepiness of this meet-cute scenario, more than any faint political overtones, can account for Yolanda and the Thief''s surprisingly sour tone. The 1930s screwball comedies in whose footsteps Yolanda and the Thief followed invariably contained some kind of deception or conflict, but this movie’s conceit is like It Happened One Night by way of David Mamet. Stephen Harvey’s study Directed by Vincente Minnelli points out that Astaire’s performance is “too persuasive for the script’s own good, conveying the doleful avarice of his character so thoroughly that he accentuates how unsavory the plot really is.”

Since this is musical comedy, we can at least rest secure in the knowledge that Riggs will repent of his ploy by the last reel and find true love with his heiress, and the script doesn’t make much effort to keep us in suspense over whether this will happen. Minnelli and his writers seem less interested, however, in the sickly-sweet overtones of religious redemption than in the wicked humor of their heroine discovering her decidedly non-spiritual nature attraction to her supposedly heaven-sent aide. While hardly as subversive as, say, the bourgeoisie-baiting work of Luis Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou, Viridiana), the story is darkly shaded for a 1940s musical and suggests what impelled the creation of the movie’s greatest strength, its luscious and overwrought visuals.

The inventiveness of the sets and breathtaking Technicolor cinematography come to take precedent over the music and dance sequences, more than I would expect when the dancing is by Astaire and songs by Freed (a lyricist in the 1930s and author of, among others, "Singin' in the Rain"). The biography Astaire: the Man, the Dancer, by Bill Thomas, reports that when choreographer Eugene Loring first met with Astaire, the star handed over a can of film containing his five hours’ worth of recorded performances and told him, “Look at this first, and then we’ll go to work. I don’t like to repeat myself.” What Loring came up with does not by any means embarrass Astaire, but it serves less to underline his virtuosity as a dancer than it does to support Minnelli’s decision to take the visuals into uncommonly experimental territory.

TCM.com’s page for Yolanda and the Thief contains a production history, by Frank Miller, that details how, under Minnelli’s direction, Loring and costume designer Irene Sharaff incorporated ideas from Dali paintings and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, pushing the movie’s look into a less genteel realm of the fantastic than that usually favored by MGM. During an extended “dream ballet,” ostensibly showing the hero’s inner conflict, Fred Astaire dances against bare landscapes and mysterious blocky shapes out of a Surrealist painting. Elsewhere he’s confronted by a mysterious, seemingly six-armed man looming out of the darkness like the disembodied arms emerging from the walls of the Beast’s castle in Cocteau. In the later Coffee Time production number, perhaps the film’s high point, Astaire and Bremer twirl across a floor painted with black and white stripes, so that they seem to be ascending up and down a series of marble trenches, a Busby Berkeley image by the way of the carnival funhouse.

Whatever point these delirious visuals are supposed to be making is clearly outstripped by Minnelli and co.’s sheer delight in producing them. The dialogue and story receive comparatively little attention from the filmmakers and doesn’t make much of an impression. The one exception is a bizarre one, a bit of purportedly comic business in which Astaire and his partner-in-crime (played by Frank Morgan, The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain) try to clear an elderly matron out from the hotel lobby where they’ll be working on Yolanda by dropping down on all knees and barking at her. It’s like something David Lynch could have directed more than anything I’ve ever seen in a musical comedy. I can’t imagine why it was ever written, or performed, or kept in the final cut of the movie, except as the result of an escalating series of bets.

Of the cast, Mildred Natwick, an off-and-on member of John Ford’s unofficial stock company, fares best with her enthusiastically camp performance as Yolanda’s “Aunt Amarilla,” but then it’s not difficult for her to steal scenes while playing off Lucille Bremer's brittle hauteur. This quality worked for Bremer's supporting role in Meet Me in St. Louis as Judy Garland’s older sister but here works against her supposedly pious, humble character. Leon Ames, who’d also worked for Minnelli before in Meet Me in St. Louis, and Frank Morgan are appealing in their familiar con-man roles, but with the cast largely limited to the two stars and three supporting actors the movie’s atmosphere tends to feel rather claustrophobic, overly weighed down by the emphasis on production design.

Other Minnelli musicals flirt with dark or at least not unreservedly cheerful shadings; Meet Me in St. Louis has the character of the morbid, melancholy little girl played by Margaret O’Brien, The Pirate features an uncomfortably convincing temper tantrum by Judy Garland, and even a movie as otherwise saccharine as Brigadoon has a late setpiece, of one of the characters trying to escape from the titular village, that’s like The Most Dangerous Game by way of Lerner and Loewe. Yolanda and the Thief, however, doesn’t seem to know whether to treat its darker themes as campy humor or defuse it through the affected, fable-like innocence. The story’s religious aspects don’t appear, to put it lightly, to have struck a very deep chord with Minnelli. He invests greater feeling in The Pirate, an equally silly movie but one closer to his experience of the dreams that cause people to become involved with show business and the “traveling players” spirit that enables them to continue. As a storybook fable, Yolanda and the Thief should have stayed on the page; as a film, everything that works about it comes from what Minnelli managed to put up on the screen.

Buried Treasure: Wild River (1960)

2009-11-12T16:33:00.000-08:00

Steve Erickson's novel Zeroville imagines its hero, a man named Vikar, as a kind of cinema savant. A modern-day holy fool fixated on old movies, Vikar passes, Zelig-fashion, through the Easy Riders, Raging Bull milieu of 1970s Hollywood while remaining largely oblivious to its historical significance. At the end of his improbable quest, this fictional character is given credit by his creator for the 1981 discovery of a real-life Holy Grail of filmmaking, 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, squirreled away in a Norwegian mental hospital’s broom closet. Director Carl Dreyer’s original cut had been destroyed soon after its release and for the next fifty-three years had been available only in a collection of outtakes. For anyone who loves movies, this is just one of the unnerving reminders of the medium’s vulnerability to all manner of ill-luck, including but not limited to the censor’s knife, the course of time, and, perhaps most terrifyingly, drawn-out litigation. A Jarndyce v. Jarndyce-like lawsuit laid up the 1973 occult classic The Holy Mountain for decades of courtroom wrangling between its director, self-styled shamanistic visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky, and his producer, the Beatles’ high-powered former manager Allen Klein. Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons remains an undiscovered cinematic grail, with its entire third act still unrecovered from whatever RKO editing-room floor it was left on.

At first glance, Wild River, a 1960 drama about FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority program, seems ill-suited to join the ranks of this lost legion of cinema. It stars two actors with devoted followings, Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick, and was directed by the equally celebrated filmmaker Elia Kazan. The film’s shoot in and around Charleston, Tennessee in October and November 195, seems to have gone as smoothly as any major studio production, even unusually so for one dependent on the erratic Clift. The release was botched and didn’t make any money for the studio, Twentieth Century Fox, but then the same could be said for many films that do not, as Wild River did, go largely unseen for fifty years. In short, there’s no good reason for this movie to be unavailable on Region 1 DVD (there’s currently a disc out from an English company, but plenty of more casual classic-film watchers will probably not have the wherewithal to purchase and be able to watch it). Fortunately, the movie’s status seems now to be improving, with more frequent airings on Fox’s cable movie channel and the recent weeklong run of a restored 35mm print at New York’s Film Forum.

One reason that this is a film to be treasured is that it contains some of the best work of those who helped make it. In his film work, Elia Kazan sometimes struggled against habits he had picked up from his background in theater, such as wordiness and self-consciously “big” acting. There was good reason for this approach of course when the project was in fact derived from a stage play, as in his big-screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire, but even extraordinary films like A Face in the Crowd, On the Waterfront and East of Eden can be marred by that nagging sense of a proscenium arch hidden just above the frame. Wild River stands out in this body of work in part because we can sense its director trying more fully to exploit his medium’s visual qualities.

The scenario actually would probably have been well suited to one of Kazan’s stage productions: a conflict between two figures, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift), an idealistic New Deal bureaucrat clearing the land to be flooded by a new dam, and Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), the elderly Southern matriarch he’s been assigned to buy off the small island she occupies midstream of the Tennessee River. Though her refusal to do so drives forward the story, the verbal confrontations that ensue between the two carry less weight than the landscape surrounding them. As Kazan told biographer Richard Schickel: “Here in this picture you have a brilliant opportunity to do everything very, very pictorially and very much without words…Just have a succession of meaningful events.”

Wild River’s lack of reliance on speech-making points to its mature attitude toward the story’s larger conflict, that between a rooted folk culture and government-directed liberalism. Kazan could empathize with both sides: he had been a high-minded idealist not unlike his hero in the 1930s, a member of the Communist Party and the New York-based radical Group Theater, but he also felt an affinity, according to Schickel, with the traditional mindset of rural Americans, which he found not unlike his own Anatolian Greek background. He’d originally conceived of the project in 1943, while dealing with Department of Agriculture bureaucrats in putting on the pro-rationing propaganda piece It’s Up to You. By the time camera rolled in 1959, Kazan had spent years working off and on the story. In the process he had come to see his hero as a version of his own younger self, cocksure about his ability to change the world, heedless about the damage he might cause to it. For a man whose youthful political dreams had ended in the very public disillusionment of the HUAC hearings, Wild River would be his chance to express some hard-earned wisdom.

If one function the film serves is as Elia Kazan’s personal testament, another is to record one of Montgomery Clift’s last, best performances, just six years before his death at the age of 46. When the actor came to the set, he could not turn in the performance Kazan had originally hoped for, that of an arrogant, “Best and the Brightest”-style technocrat. Clift was too fragile and damaged from years of battling depression and anxiety and feeding addictions to alcohol and drugs. The vulnerability his performances had always been known for came instead to shape the character, who is not a zealot but a man unwilling to defend his own philosophy to the point of disregarding other people. It also makes the contrast with Jo Van Fleet’s performance as Ella Garth, in all her unyielding obstinancy, all the greater.

Only in her fifties when she took on the role, Van Fleet flawlessly inhabits the skin and the speech of a woman who’s spend most of her eighty-some years on the same small patch of land in Tennessee. We don’t really like Ella Garth, especially when we see her lording it over the African-American sharecroppers who live on the island in conditions even more destitute than hers, but Van Fleet shows the strength and fortitude inside her prickly, unpleasant character. Compared to such a detailed, convincing performance, Clift never quite convinces as anyone other than “Montgomery Clift.” His tremulous, twitchy manner occasionally overwhelms the content of his scenes. Despite these waverings, his performance is impossible to look away from, and hard to imagine the film without.

In this sense, the real test of Clift and the film comes not when he’s butting heads with Jo Van Fleet, but in his love scenes with Lee Remick, as Ella’s granddaughter Carol. This dimension of the story is potentially its most hackneyed, since it threatens the familiar Hollywood ploy of reducing thorny political quandaries to the problems of two beautiful people in love. Remick’s piercing blue eyes leave no doubt why Clift, or anyone else, might fall in love with her, but her performance reminds us of the real gaps, in experience and class, that lie between their characters. The two have real- to use a lazy word- “chemistry” in their scenes together, though Clift’s fragile state at the time of shooting meant that playing a Kennedy-era-style dominating male was not an option. In his autobiography, A Life, Kazan relates “In one scene Monty, at the instant of arousal, slumped to the floor. I cursed him under my breath as a limp lover, but then I decided to play the scene as it happened…” For her part, Remick commented that “his character had been written as a far more obviously masculine man, he was incapable of being the dominant partner in a male-female relationship.” The result may not have been what audiences expected to see in 1960, but it carries its own, very present erotic charge, as in the scene that Clift and Remick share in the front of her car, her two small children sleeping in the back seat. It’s an extraordinary “sex” scene, with nary an explicit detail.

Kazan’s ability to get superlative performances out of Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet is laudable but not surprising for a man who had ushered Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller plays into the world; what was new was the quiet assurance with which he sketched in the environment around his actors. As much as their performances, what an audience takes away from Wild River is a sense of the Southern small-town world it creates, expressed in small careful details like the raft with which Chuck gets himself across to Ella’s island. Kazan and cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks evoke a sense that this world will soon vanish with autumnal colors, in Remick’s auburn hair and in the amber-fringed surrounding woods.

Films like A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, and On the Waterfront sometimes channel a sense of hysteria, of overheated emotions bursting from the characters’ repressed psyches or of uncontrollable forces surging to the forefront of American public life. Wild River almost but doesn’t quite go in the same direction with a subplot about Chuck standing up to bigots in the town over his use of a racially integrated workforce. It seems to be turning into a liberal suspense film along the lines of Bad Day in Black Rock, pitting a lone progressive hero against a reactionary mob, but then defuses any sense of melodrama in a siege sequence that turns from terror to absurd comedy (it doesn’t hurt to have Bruce Dern, in his first onscreen role, as one of the racist bullies). In the same vein, Kazan allows Carol’s defiance of Chuck to fade out, rather than blow up, suggesting that his characters are experiencing more than enacting the changes around them. The occasional staginess of Kazan’s direction, which turns On the Waterfront’s Hoboken dockworkers into Soviet agitprop friezes, fits this story’s sense of people stuck in place, waiting for history to happen to them. Like countless movies before and after it, Wild River suggests that the modern world inevitably triumphs over the old; unlike most of them, it doesn’t pick sides.