LOS ANGELES NOIR

My hatred of modern-day “L. A.” (as some people like to call it) is equaled only by my love of Los Angeles (with a hard ‘g’ please) before my time, the 1950s and earlier.

From Bryan Castañeda comes a link to the wonderful footage above, apparently filmed to be used as process shots for the 1948 movie Shockproof, directed by Douglas Sirk.

In the early days of cinema, itinerant cameramen would have collected footage like this as “actualities” for exhibition to audiences spellbound by the sheer beauty and fascination of tracking shots depicting their own or distant cities. By 1948, the spell of such shots was broken, at least as a stand-alone commercial product, relegated to material for back-screen projections, but the footage recorded is just as beautiful and fascinating as that collected by the cinematographers of the Edwardian era.

OVERLAND STAGE RAIDERS

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Loving B-Westerns is a kind of disease, and probably incurable. It’s not the worst malady in the world to suffer from, however — B-Westerns have a good deal of redeeming aesthetic value.

The acting in them is often indifferent, the plots are a messy combination of the formulaic and the preposterous, but they’re usually shot brilliantly in beautiful locations and feature extended episodes of superb horsemanship.

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What this means is that B-Westerns yield up their treasures best in first-rate prints — although they’re usually available only in really terrible prints. Hence my praise for Olive Films, which is issuing a series of B-Westerns in excellent Blu-ray editions, which allow one to savor the virtuosity of the horsebackers, the cameramen and the directors who made these delightful genre pieces.

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A case in point is the Olive Blu-ray edition of Overland Stage Raiders, a film that’s interesting on several counts.  It’s from Republic’s Three Mesquiteers series, from the time, in the late 1930s, when John Wayne was playing one of the mesquiteers.  It also features Louise Brooks in her last screen appearance as Wayne’s romantic interest.  She’s fascinating as always, mainly for her reserve and distance.  She doesn’t seem unhappy to be appearing in such a film — she just doesn’t seem to be all there.

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Sadly, she never gets to ride a horse in Overland Stage Raiders, which is a modern-day Western about a bus-line and an airline competing for business in a remote Western region.

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The mesquiteers do a lot of horseback riding, of course, protecting the good guys and rounding up the bad ones.  Silly as the story is, the film is mesmerizing visually — simply thrilling to watch in the Blu-ray edition.

The Olive Blu-ray Westerns are overpriced, but if you suffer from the B-Western malady, you’ll pay up and like it.

ESSENTIAL

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Forty years (!) after its release, after a deluge of explicit pornography has washed across and nearly drowned our culture, this film has lost its capacity to shock as it once shocked, with its sexual frankness embedded a well-made film starring a Hollywood icon.

What still startles and unsettles is the emotional nakedness of the performances by Brando and Schneider, the conceptual daring of Bertollucci, questioning the very possibility of portraying an authentic and humane erotic love in movies . . . assuming such a thing is even possible anymore in real life, perverted as real life has become by the diseased clichés of movies.

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It’s one of the most interesting, not to mention one of the greatest, films ever made, and one of the most beautifully shot — which is why it joins that list of films which justify buying a Blu-ray player just to be able to watch it in that format.