by ·Comments Off on Winchester ’73 (1950, Anthony Mann)

Another tough, superb movie from Anthony Mann, who might be my favorite Mann this year (based on early reviews of Blackhat). We saw some plot threads coming a mile away: the baddie James Stewart has tracked for years is his brother, who killed their father over some greedy business. We’re told during a shooting competition overseen by Wyatt Earp himself (Will Geer, train conductor in The Tall Target) that they’ve got the same training. That day in Dodge, Jimmy wins himself the rare and valuable rifle of the film’s title, and his brother Dutch Henry (Stephen McNally of Criss Cross) immediately steals it and rides off.

America in the 1870’s was populated mainly by horrible drunk murderous gamblers, and we meet a procession of them. Dutch loses the rifle to a trader (John McIntire, sheriff of Psycho) in a card game, who is later (deservedly) murdered for it by Indian chief Rock Hudson – yes! Jimmy teams up with Millard Mitchell (ol’ prospector of The Naked Spur), later kills Chief Rock during an Indian battle vs. the cavalry led by Jay Flippen (who played an Indian himself in Run of the Arrow). The rifle is handed off to the shitty Steve (Charles Drake of All That Heaven Allows) to protect his fiancee Shelley Winters (not recognizable from The Tenant). Steve lasts all of one more scene, seeking refuge at the same house where criminal Waco Johnny (Dan Duryea, the Scarlet Street pimp) decides to have a police shootout with his men. Waco kills Steve, takes the rifle and the girl to his planned meeting with Dutch Henry (Jimmy Stewart’s evil brother, remember?). Jockeying to outdo each other in the bad guy department, Waco and Dutch hit a bank, followed closely by Jimmy Stewart, who kills Waco then chases Dutch into the mountains, finally killing him too, earning himself back the rifle and probably the girl.

I guess Tony Curtis played one of Dutch’s men, not that we noticed. Wikipedia claims it was supposed to be a Fritz Lang project with a different story, Stewart more obsessed with the rifle.

by ·Comments Off on Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch)

Kind of a dark movie, as Depp moves west towards nothing good, becoming a killer of white men before/after being killed by one. But it’s also possibly Jarmusch’s funniest and most beautiful movie, with great music.

Nobody: Gary Farmer (how did I miss him in Adaptation?)

Thel: Mili Avital, whose film career didn’t take off after Stargate

This was possibly Robert Mitchum’s final film:

Two Marshalls named Lee and Marvin:

The Kid: Eugene Byrd, a regular on Bones
Conway: Michael Wincott of Alien Resurrection and Basquiat

Benmont Tench (at right): Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol

Crispin Glover played Andy Warhol in The Doors. This movie has two Andy Warhols!

Whahappan:

by ·Comments Off on Serenity (2005, Joss Whedon)

That Firefly movie exploring the secret origins of super-weapon-girl River who’s being hunted by sword-toting government agent Chiwetel Ejiofor, and the secret origins of the Reavers. Hmmm, Rivers and Reavers.

Some main characters from the show (which I still haven’t watched all the way through) are killed. Sweet long traveling shot at the start shows off the entire ship and all the main characters.

Where’d they all go? Mal (Nathan Fillion) stars on Castle, River (Summer Glau) was on The Cape and Sarah Connor Chronicles, her brother Simon (Sean Maher) is in Much Ado, Jayne (Adam Baldwin) was on Chuck, Zoe (Gina Torres) is on Suits, pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk) did Dollhouse, played King Candy and is on Suburgatory, Kaylee (Jewel Staite) was on a Stargate series and The Killing, love interest Inara (Morena Baccarin) starred on Homeland and V, Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) was in Lakeview Terrace and one-man-NSA Mr. Universe (David Krumholtz) stars on Numb3rs.

Also watched Cabin in the Woods for a third time with dad – and this is a couple weeks after Katy and I saw Much Ado About Nothing, so it’s been a very Whedon month.

by ·Comments Off on Run of the Arrow (1957, Samuel Fuller)

One of Fuller’s final-shot ruminations – that the moment a war ends, killing turns from a heroic act into a criminal one. Feeling oppressed by the North and betrayed by his own losing side, an Irish-Confederate soldier (Rod Steiger, warmonger general of Mars Attacks!) joins a Sioux tribe against all whites. He gets guidance from doomed scout Walking Coyote (Jay Flippen, father-figure crook in The Killing), falls for a girl called Yellow Mocassin (Spanish superstar Sara Montiel, overdubbed by Angie Dickinson), and tricks suspicious Sioux warrior Crazy Wolf. A bunch of whites-vs-natives twists and betrayals later, Steiger and Moccasin leave the tribe, deciding to try their hand with the new USA instead.

Kiss Me Deadly star Ralph Meeker plays the Union officer shot twice by the same bullet (long story), and “newcomer Charles Bronson” plays a Sioux chief. There were actual Sioux players in the film, but relegated to smaller roles.

Sam:

The boys at RKO loved my yarn and gave me a green light to produce the picture the way I wanted. Indians would be depicted as a community of people with their own rules and rituals, not – as in most studio movies – like a pack of marauding killers. .. I think [Rod Steiger] earned more on that picture than I did. After all, I was only the writer, director and coproducer.

by ·Comments Off on Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino)

Sure sure, I can slightly, vaguely, ever-so-minimally agree with some specific charges of political incorrectness and racial insensitivity I’ve read from online critics who would apparently prefer that Richard Gere make more movies instead of Tarantino. But Django Unchained was so awesome that even Katy loved it. Seems looser and less purposeful at times than his other movies, but that’s hard to say without having seen most of them in a long time.

Bounty Hunter Christoph Waltz (giving just as delicious a performance as in Inglorious Basterds, but this time as a good guy), the only non-racist in the slavery-era American south, frees Jamie “Django” Foxx from slave traders so Foxx can help identify and kill the Brittle Brothers. I figured from the trailer that they’d be more important, but they’re killed off a few scenes later with barely an introduction. Django stays on with Waltz, learning new strategies for killing villainous white men, until they come up with a plan to rescue D’s wife Kerry Washington from the estate of Leonardo DiCaprio. Many monologues follow, and when Leo gets wise to the scam, Waltz kills him (“I couldn’t resist”), leaving turncoat house-slave Samuel L. Jackson (the movie’s most hilarious performance) for Django to finish off. QT cameos as a doomed Australian.

A couple of quotes contradicting anything negative I said in the first paragraph:

Slant:

[Samuel L. Jackson] reveals himself as the film’s true enemy, a totally indoctrinated subordinate whose slave-subject mentality is so deeply inscribed that he acts out his master’s cruelty and viciousness even in his absence. He hints at the more complicated idea that the kind of violence Django trots out with decadent aplomb in the film’s finale is learned from white folks, a notion implied with more subtlety in the relationship between Django and Schultz. In visiting the film’s most protracted, and ultimately fulfilling, scenes of vengeance against a black man, Tarantino stumbled into his most intriguing social-historical corrective: a full-on reconsideration of classically defined algebra of Civil War antagonism, a counterintuitive take on the well-worn rivalry that pitted “brother against brother.”

A. Nayman:

Once again, in this deceptively baggy, ultimately precisely structured movie, the surface effect belies what’s going on underneath. The sight of two black men locked in a battle to the death at the behest of a white overseer is a tip-off to script’s true conflict. The expression of hatred on Jackson’s face as Django rides up to the inevitably named Candieland transcends the jokey Spaghetti Western posturing — it’s genuinely unnerving.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Sky (1952, Howard Hawks)

Kinda like Rio Bravo in the sense that you’ve got good, tough characters who team up against serious odds, but the ending leaves me less with the sense that I’ve seen an epic drama or action flick than a buddy comedy. It’s too darned happy to be a Western, gives the same sense of companionable fulfillment as a Renoir movie.

Bigetsu Skyogatari:

Colorfully narrated (“Jim seed somethin’ in the trees, and Jim were the curious sort”) by elder fur trapper Zeb (Arthur Hunnicutt, baddie in The Tall T), who we don’t even meet for twenty minutes. Starting in 1832 Kentucky, the movie mainly follows Jim (Kirk Douglas, year after Ace in the Hole) and Jim’s new buddy/Zeb’s nephew Boone (Dewey Martin of a couple other Hawks movies). They’re both going west, searching for freedom and profit, Jim more aimless and easygoing, Boone seeking his uncle and hoping to revenge his brother’s death by bagging a few native Blackfoot.

Jim, Boone, Zeb:

The three men meet in jail after a bar brawl, then join an ambitious trapper named Frenchy (Steven Geray of Verboten!), who hopes to bypass the monopolistic fur company headed by frilly-shirted top-hatted MacMasters (voiceover man Paul Frees). Frenchy’s secret to being able to trade with the Blackfoot, who won’t deal with MacMasters’s people, is that Frenchy has one of the chief’s daughters Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt, in her only film), is escorting her home. After we’re introduced to the strong, stereotype-defying Teal Eye, the movie compensates by hiring along the drunk, buffoonish Poordevil (Hank Worden, a marshall in Forty Guns).

Noble Indian:

Nutty Indian:

I think it takes months to go up the river, the men mostly pulling the boat upstream with ropes. MacMasters’s muscle man Streak kills a couple men, and more are killed by the Blackfoot’s rival Crow tribe hired by Streak, but Jim, Zeb and Boone, hired for the trading group’s protection, finally wipe out the lot of the sneaky sonsobitches. Meanwhile, both of the younger guns have fallen for Teal Eye, and there’s some drama over that. Zeb was once in the same situation, left a girl behind and she killed herself – and he was lying to Boone about the whole murdered brother thing. Boone is told none of this, because apparently it’s better for a man to make his own uninformed decisions, but opts to stay behind with the Blackfoot at the end anyhow.

My new favorite method of torture: having a strong fellow squeeze two baddies’ heads together

Tag G.: “Action is only an extension in character, and character, like the action it ignites, is biological, zoological. Vast events in many Hawks films are pushed by character.” So he analyzes their characters, answering why Zeb is telling his story about Jim instead of about himself or his own nephew Boone, when Jim gets lost and injured, has no particular goals, and doesn’t get the girl. Jim and Zeb are men of talk and whiskey, while Boone is a man of action. At the end of the trip, Frenchy and Boone have destinations – Jim and Zeb just have each other.

The first major studio film in the sound era to be shot all on location – I watched the long/original version, not the contentiously cut-down theatrical release.

by ·Comments Off on Man of the West (1958, Anthony Mann)

I watched this and The Naked Spur building up to Emory’s 35mm screening of Mann’s T-Men, which I then missed. Oh well. These were excellent, so I’ll have to catch up with T-Men and the others eventually.

A perhaps less-wooden-than-usual Gary Cooper gets a train ticket, is asked his name and destination by two different people and gives them different answers. So we know something is up (turns out he’s a still-wanted ex-badman). But Gary has reformed, is now the inordinately earnest Gary we all know and love, so he’s not lying to talky card-shark Arthur O’Connell when he says he’s headed to Fort Worth with cash raised by an entire town to hire a schoolteacher. Arthur introduces him to saloon singer Julie London, says she’d make a fine teacher, but then the train is robbed, Gary’s money is stolen, and Gary, Julie and Arthur find themselves on foot.

Julie and Arthur in happier times:

Fortunately, this all took place a short walk away from Gary’s old hideout, where his half-crazy uncle Lee Cobb (baddie of Thieves’ Highway) still reigns over a crude bunch of dangerous dimwits, including Gary’s real asshole cousin Jack Lord. Gary is treated as a prisoner/possible-accomplice, Julie as a sex slave, and Arthur is finally just shot (so is Jack Lord).

Cooper, trapped by Lord (left) and Dano:

Gary talks his way into helping with a bank heist, but mute Royal Dano (the Kid’s henchman in Johnny Guitar, later Gramps in House II) comes along and gets himself killed – so now Gary’s got to pick off the rest of the gang as they come for him (that’d be John Dehner, who played Pat Garrett to Paul Newman’s Kid the same year, and Robert Wilke, the foreman in Days of Heaven) before facing off against his uncle Cobb, who I’m surprised was able to leave the house and ride into town.

Cooper vs. Cobb:

Gary’s got his money back, and rides off with Julie London. But besides the money and the schoolteacher plan, Gary was also not lying about having a wife and kids back home. So they can’t be together, but Julie says she’s happy with the unrequited thing, and they get their unique doomed-romance version of the ride-into-sunset.

J. Rosenbaum:

Man of the West is shot in CinemaScope, yet it’s initially hampered by the shallow dramatic space associated with television. This effect is made worse by the casting, which pairs the stagiest of stage actors (Cobb) with the most cinematic of movie actors (Cooper). But Mann is canny enough to turn these limitations to his advantage whenever he can, offering sly notations about Link’s physical discomfort on the train and using a long, tense scene inside the farmhouse to create claustrophobia before sending the characters outdoors for virtually the remainder of the picture. Once again, the hero is a dialectical contradiction, both regressing toward an unbearable past and making an anguished effort to break free from it — the struggle ultimately engendering hatred, violence, pain, and humiliation, and revealing boundless evil.

Royal Dano vs. the ghost town:

by ·Comments Off on The Naked Spur (1953, Anthony Mann)

Great, tense western thriller with just a few (white) characters and an unusual philosophical ending. “He’s not dead if you take him back. He’ll never be dead for you.” Shot by William Mellor (Giant) in academy-ratio color. I noticed some cool secret-revealing camera moves – from a quick one during the opening titles to a slow traveling shot later on showing a guy hiding behind a rock. Overall great performances except that I wished Jesse Tate had been played by Rio Bravo‘s Walter Brennan – Millard’s voice wasn’t quite right.

Jimmy:

Jimmy Stewart (the year before Rear Window) comes at friendly ol’ prospector Jesse (Millard Mitchell of Thieves’ Highway and Winchester ’73), says he’s looking for lawman-slayer Robert Ryan. Jesse hasn’t seen Ryan since Clash By Night, so offers his assistance. In wanders Kiss Me Deadly star Ralph Meeker as a disgraced ex-soldier, and between them, the men take down Robert Ryan over the protest of his gal Janet Leigh (four years after Holiday Affair).

Everyone but Jimmy:

But Ryan pretty easily turns the men against each other by revealing that he’s got quite a bounty on his head, and Stewart is after him for the money, not as a lawman. This works better than Janet Leigh’s appeals that poor Ryan is innocent – and if we’d ever considered believing her, Ryan loses all sympathy when he wears down the men to the point that he’s allowed to escape, then he shoots ol’ Jesse. Meeker goes down next, but takes Ryan with him, and Stewart recovers the body. But apparently Janet Leigh can make a man fall in love with her pretty much instantly, so…

B. Lucas:

Howard drags Ben’s body to his horse in a final paroxysm of fury, but then turns to Lina and sees in her face the light of unconditional love and a new beginning, and at last relents. The tears and cracking voice of Stewart in close shot are a high moment of this great actor’s career, perfectly complemented by the softer yet no less vibrant playing of Leigh. . . As the camera moves up into the sky, then follows a dissolve to come back to the two characters moving through dead trees within an open expanse, one sees in these images that there is a spiritual rhythm within life, and that “choosing a way to live” can happen even in the roughest passage.

Another look at the face that turned Jimmy’s life around:

Bonus: lots of Indian-slaying and horse-injuring action when Meeker declares war on a passing tribe, and some Jimmy Stewart backstory, narrated to Leigh while he’s injured and raving. Jimmy uses his spur to help climb a cliff at the end (then throws it in Robert Ryan’s face), which I guess is where the weird title came from.

by ·Comments Off on Red River (1948, Howard Hawks)

Another rockin’ John Wayne/Walter Brennan movie, although this one seems more Westerny than Rio Bravo, what with the cattle drives and Indian attacks. Wayne is a Texas rancher who builds a cattle empire after losing his sweetie to Indians while crossing the Red River years earlier. Now he and his young protege Monty Clift (his first year in Hollywood, five years before From Here To Eternity) take a long, difficult drive north since cattle prices have crashed down south, hoping they’ll hit a railroad town before they hit bandits or Indians. The men mutiny when Wayne becomes a slavemaster, Clift takes over, and there’s a pretty badass showdown between the two at the end, culminating in a happy reconciliation.

Harry Carey Jr. (in one of his first movies) makes the mistake of talking about his lovely wife waiting at home, so he gets killed in a stampede brought on by some idiot who steals sugar from chef Brennan – the movie’s way of saying that life is meaningless. Harry Carey Sr. (in one of his last movies) plays the happy-ending cattle buyer at their destination town. And John Ireland (the coward Robert Ford in I Shot Jesse James) is set up as Clift’s big rival, then his plot thread fizzles out. IMDB says Hawks wanted Cary Grant for the part – I guess Ireland wasn’t an exciting enough player to justify adding another twenty minutes to the film. Remade in the 80’s with James Arness, Ray Walston and LQ Jones.

As usual after we watch a Hawks movie, Katy and I shared an uneasy conversation about auteurism. She accused me of being a Hawksian auteurist, but I still can’t tell a Hawks movie from, say, a Billy Wilder or William Wellman movie. I just tend to like them is all.

I shouldn’t have to look up web articles about this movie since I have the BFI Film Classics book, but it turned out to be way boring. Senses of Cinema talks up Wayne’s oedipal relationship with Clift, then Intl. Cinema Review compares Clift’s and Ireland’s competitive gunfight to an orgasm, so apparently the movie was all about sex and Katy and I didn’t realize.