In Durango, Mexico, during the filming of Major Dundee, Ben Johnson, on the left, plays cards with stuntman Carl Pitt while cast member Liz Palacios catches some rays.
With thanks to Paula Vitaris, who hosts a terrific Ben Johnson site here.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Vintage magazine illustrations like this feel like scenes from really cool movies of the sort they don’t make anymore.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Click on the image to enlarge.
I finally got around to watching Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan — which has at last been made available on DVD by The Warner Archive. It’s not a great film but Jean Seberg’s performance in it is stunning, pitch-perfect — she never makes a wrong move.
This was shocking to me, because the performance was universally reviled when the film came out — the reviews she got for it, along with the reviews she got for her second film, Bonjour Tristesse, all but ended Seberg’s Hollywood career.
What on earth were the critics thinking — what were they seeing?
Seberg was 19 when she made the film. Her only previous acting experience had been a season of summer stock. Preminger made a big to-do over his search for a Joan, and over the fact that Seberg had been plucked from obscurity for the plum role. I guess this was a set-up too tempting to overlook — how delicious to report that the little nobody had fallen on her face.
In truth her emotional commitment to the role and her riveting cinematic presence added up to a triumph. She blows all the veteran actors she was surrounded with off the screen.
Many of them were trained British stage actors, and the American star Richard Widmark gives a highly theatrical (though amusing) performance as the dithering Dauphin. But it’s all pasteboard stuff compared to Seberg’s natural charisma in front of a camera.
Critics love to devalue this sort of acting, even though it requires a special sort of intuitive genius. John Wayne had it, as did Marilyn Monroe, but that never got them very far with the critics of their own time.
It’s infuriating, especially when you see how a Wayne performance or a Monroe performance holds up over time, still seems fresh and new, while the performances of the prestige stage-oriented actors feel increasingly dated.
Once you’ve seen Olivier’s Hamlet, you’ve seen Olivier’s Hamlet. You can watch the performance over and over again and relish the craft of it each time but you will never find anything new in it. By contrast, however many times you watch John Wayne’s performance in The Searchers, or Marilyn Monroe’s performance in Bus Stop, they feel as though they’re being created from scratch, coming into being for the first time in front of your eyes. Because they were created primarily out of intuition and instinct, rather than craft, they are, like all really great art, permanently surprising.
Maybe Preminger was wrong to try and mix the styles of the acting in Saint Joan — that’s one of the reasons the film feels disjointed — but he couldn’t have been more right about Seberg. She was the real thing.
Shaw’s play, from which the film was adapted, is as stylized as most of the acting, very self-consciously literary, but intelligent and witty, too. It abounds in twisting ironies and is invested with sympathy for all its characters. It’s very entertaining stuff. But Seberg takes it somewhere beyond its ambitions. Her Joan can be ironic and clear-eyed, too, in the Shavian way, but you never lose sight of her unwavering faith in herself, in France and in her guiding saints. It’s a portrayal of conviction that can make you cry.
Preminger was a great filmmaker — even his failures have brilliant and startling elements that make the films worth studying closely. He never brought to the screen anything more brilliant and startling than Seberg’s performance in Saint Joan.
You can click on most of the images above to enlarge them.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Click on the image to enlarge.
This is a really cool film. The coolness starts with the first chords of Duke Ellington’s quirky and brilliant score, which plays over Saul Bass’s famous credit sequence of bold animated graphics — coolness on top of coolness.
Ellington even makes a cameo appearance in the film:
Otto Preminger is not considered as cool as he was when the director-critics of the French New Wave touted him as one of the great masters of cinema, but his reputation will revive in time because he is one of the great masters of cinema.
He shot Anatomy Of A Murder entirely on location up in Michigan — there isn’t a studio or process shot in the film — mostly in the extended, elegantly choreographed takes he specialized in, and the result is a work of extraordinary visual appeal.
As Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch points out, the many scenes in the courtroom sections of the film required more cutting than Preminger preferred, but he cuts only for expositional logic, never for dramatic emphasis. He creates images that the audience has time to enter imaginatively, with a choice of things to notice, which makes the audience a collaborator in creating the meaning of the film.
The story of Anatomy Of A Murder is pure melodrama, but of a very high caliber. Most of the characters are complex, morally ambiguous — the only truly noble protagonist in the film is the American legal system itself, presented here with all its flaws in full sight, which only makes its structural genius more impressive.
It’s easy, and getting easier, to forget how beautiful American studio films used to look. Those of us who grew up watching fine prints of classic Hollywood films on big screens are getting old. Younger folks have mostly watched classic Hollywood films on TV — in theaters they’ve been subjected to ugly modern films with their trendy but tiresome teal-and-orange palettes and their hysterical MTV cutting, which add up to an avalanche of visual mush.
Blu-ray technology applied to classic films, played on big HDTV sets, reminds us of what we’ve lost and brings a surprising amount of it back. The sheer virtuosity of the technicians of Hollywood’s golden age, accessible once again in good Blu-ray transfers, can make even a second-rate film absorbing and exciting. It can make a first-rate film like Anatomy Of A Murder exhilarating.
You can click on most of the images above to enlarge them.
1957
Click on the image to expose larger size.
Before they teamed up with Budd Boetticher to make some of the greatest Westerns of all time, Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown made a lot of very good Westerns with other, lesser directors. They featured interesting characters and situations and superb location shooting — a cut above the usual B-Western fare. The Nevadan, now available from the Warner Archive, is one of the best of them. Its cast includes a very vexing Dorothy Malone in one of her earliest leading roles. Her character gets the hots for Scott’s character when she sees how he handles a half-broken horse he’s tricked into riding — which is, as they say west of the Pecos, comme il faut.
If you’re a fan of Westerns, ignore the poster, one of the ugliest ever used to promote a film, and check this one out.
One of the coolest movie posters in decades, even if it is just a teaser.
I’m kind of excited about this.
The first three shots in the trailer were made in Lone Pine, California, where Barbara Stanwyck’s ashes were scattered and where Budd Boetticher shot most of the Westerns he made with Randolph Scott. In short, it’s sacred ground.
SKINNER #3 ( I want… ) from jae song on Vimeo.
An exceptionally cool film installation by Jae Song. Two sixteen-millimeter projectors talk to each other.
