Category Archives: Movies

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

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[Warning — a few plot spoilers here.]

Movie Westerns are about the spectacle of the Old West, of course, about the history of the frontier and America's collective memory of it — but none of these these things quite sums up, much less defines, the genre.  The genre has always been a vehicle for showcasing, reviewing, sometimes redirecting but always celebrating American values.  It's not concerned with sociology — dispassionately analyzing the actual values Americans have lived by — but with moral aspiration, with stories that endorse the values we think we ought to live by . . . in a form that says, accurately or not, “We have always lived by these values, these values have made us what we are.”

Westerns which don't do this may, like The Ox-Bow Incident, from 1943, look very much like regular Westerns, they may deal with the same themes and feature the same iconography, but they don't feel right.  They don't feel like Westerns, and people who like Westerns won't go see them.



The Ox-Bow Incident is a very well-made film, with a compelling drama.  But it's based on a novel which offered a kind of critique of the Old West and its values, a critique of frontier justice.  Written in the late 1930s, it had a contemporary agenda — it wanted to warn Americans of the dangers of fascism, then rampaging through Europe, and to condemn lynching in other American contexts than the Old West.

It tells the tale of a successful lynching, and shows how decent men can become a party to such a thing.  It shows cowboy hero types as complicit in socially sanctioned murder.



These are all valid things to do in the context of a period film, but when they're done in the context of a Western, they disorient audiences.  Lynching is a common theme in Westerns, and almost always condemned, but condemned through the medium of the lone hero who stands up to the angry mob and stops it.  It may be more powerful, and in some ways more honest and realistic, to make us identify with the hero who can't stop it — to implicate us in his failure.  But this is not how Westerns typically work.



Audiences of 1943 stayed away from The Ox-Bow Incident in droves, despite glowing reviews and several Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture, and despite Henry Fonda in the starring role, giving one of his best performances.

The post-WWII, noir-inflected Western showed that authentic Westerns could get very dark indeed and still redeem even a neurotic hero who managed somehow to rise to the occasion at the end and behave nobly.  Audiences had no problem embracing these more nuanced and complex and troubling variants of the formula.  But with the rise of the anti-Western in the 1960s — Westerns which denied the reality, the validity of traditional American values, which grew cynical about the code of the hero — audiences reacted just as they had reacted to The Ox-Bow Incident in 1943.  After an initial bout of enthusiasm, fueled by the novelty of the thing, the frisson of transgression, they stayed away in droves.



They're always ready to come back, however, when an authentic Western appears on the horizon — as the Coen brothers' True Grit recently proved.  It's not a hard phenomenon to understand — except, apparently, in Hollywood.  The extraordinary commercial success of the new True Grit — now closing in on a quarter billion dollars in international grosses — will undoubtedly lure someone else in Hollywood to try another Western.  It will, most likely, be a Western that cynically challenges traditional American values — because that's the hip thing to do.  When it flops at the box office, Hollywood will say, “Well, we were right all along.  People don't like Westerns.  True Grit was a fluke.”

But the success of True Grit wasn't a fluke, anymore than the failure of The Ox-Bow Incident was a fluke.  It's all about what Westerns are, what people want them to be — need them to be.

NOTABLE FILM NERDS OF 1966

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Paul Zahl, on the left, and myself — possibly just after completing principal photography on The Fruit At the Bottom Of the Bowl, our unauthorized 8mm adaptation of the Ray Bradbury short story.  Paul played a debonair seducer who gets his just desserts, even as the wronged husband who delivers the revenge is plunged into madness.  I directed and had a bit part as a police detective.  We always thought it was important to choose film subjects drawn from our own life experiences.

BREEZY

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How do you portray a convincing love story between an 18 year-old woman and a 50-something man — one that isn’t totally creepy?  Somehow Clint Eastwood pulled it off in Breezy, the third film he directed, in 1973.

It helps if the 50-something man is played by William Holden, still in good shape at 55, devilishly handsome and charming, and the woman is played with impeccable intelligence and poise by Kay Lenz, 20 when the film was made.



Cary Grant intuited the basic strategy when he starred, at the age of59, opposite Audrey Hepburn, 34, in the film Charade.  Grant insisted that the script be rewritten, based on that casting, so that he never at any point was seen to be chasing after the Hepburn character.  Every
romantic or sexual move had to be initiated by her.  Grant couldn’t chase, but he could be caught, if it was clear that the woman was in charge every step of the way.



This is not how a romantic leading man normally wants to be portrayed in a love story, but in this case Grant felt it would be crucial to selling the relationship.  It required Grant to substitute a delicate wit in the place of virile aggression, in deflecting her advances, and it required Hepburn to substitute a bolder kind of wit in the place of seductive elusiveness.

This is the dynamic employed in Breezy.  The young woman, Breezy, is the seducer — the older man resists.  It becomes a battle of wits, with high stakes — character and soul.



Breezy goes Charade one better, though, by making the young woman far more mature, emotionally, than the older man.  Part of her seduction lies in exposing his puerile defenses against feeling, against emotional commitment.  In the process, everything gets turned on its
head.

The woman stays in charge, but the man seduces her in return by his appreciation of and respect for her wisdom.  This is closer to what is probably the typical dynamic of a love affair than most films ever get, but in Hollywood it seems to happen only when the man has the built-in power advantage of age, so that his sensitivity doesn’t unman him.



Watching a film like Breezy, where the age difference between the lovers is actually unsettling, makes you realize how cavalierly Hollywood takes the older-man/younger-woman model when the age difference isn’t so extreme.  It’s normally all about the fantasies of older men, in which women are the trophies of power.  As it happened, the executives at Universal, which made Breezy, didn’t like the film Eastwood delivered and dumped it without any promotion.  It never found an audience — and maybe there wasn’t one.  Maybe nobody wanted to see a film in which the price of some young tail was so high.



Breezy offers her older man sex up front, but she also makes him want to be worthy of her, sending him on a journey of self-discovery that is difficult and painful.  She knows exactly what she’s asking, too, and she asks it because she sees something in him that he doesn’t see or has lost . . . and she trusts him to find it, trusts him to grow up.

By an unusual and improbable route, Breezy becomes a real love story — not the self-congratulatory male fantasy the Universal executives probably thought they were buying.

PAGLIA ON TAYLOR

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In an appreciation of Elizabeth Taylor at salon.com, on the occasion of her death, Camille Paglia had some valuable things to say about screen acting:

. . . both Ava[Gardner] and Elizabeth [Taylor] at the beginning of
their careers didn't have command of basic technical skills,
particularly dialogue.  That's what people laud Meryl Streep for —
“Oh, her accents are so great; oh, her articulation is so perfect.” 
But she doesn't really live in her characters, she merely costumes
them.  Meryl Streep is always doing drag.  But it's so superficial.  It
all comes from the brain, not the heart or body.  Richard Burton, who
was supposed to become the next great Shakespearean actor after
Laurence Olivier, used to say how much he had learned from Elizabeth
about how to work with the camera.  Cinematic acting is extremely
understated.  The slightest little flick of an eyelid says an enormous
amount, and that's where Elizabeth Taylor was far superior to Meryl
Streep.  Streep is always cranking it and cranking it, working it and
working it, demanding that the audience bow down and “See what I”m
going through!  See what I'm doing for you!”  Streep is an intelligent,
good actress, but she doesn't come anywhere near Elizabeth Taylor on
the screen.  Because she wasn't a trained stage actress like Streep,
Taylor has vocal weaknesses — at high pitch, she can get a bit
screechy — which is perfect for Martha in “Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf” but not so good for Cleopatra.



Vocal technique can be learned, but the kind of instinctive knowledge about how to present oneself on screen, which Taylor had, seems to be innate.  If you look at early performances in bit roles by Grace Kelly, or at Audrey Hepburn's screen tests for Roman Holiday, you will note deficiencies in vocal technique which brand the actors as inexperienced in their craft, but you just don't care.  They are already stars.  John Ford saw it when he cast Kelly in Mogambo (below), her first important leading role in a film.  William Wyler saw it when he cast Hepburn in Roman Holiday (above), her first role of any kind in a film.



Those two wily old veterans knew that what these actors had was magic, the kind that can't be acquired by any amount of training or experience.



In the studio era, new female acting prospects were put immediately into vocal training classes.  The techniques they learned were simple.  Young, inexperienced female actors have a tendency to speak in too high a register and don't know how to project when speaking softly, tending to swallow their words when trying to convey intimacy.  Lowering the voice and developing the capacity to project an intimate tone are tricks which almost anyone can learn.



Knowing how to move in cinematic space in a way that conveys character, knowing how to project thought (or just the illusion of thought) through the eyes — these are things an actor either has or doesn't have.  Vocal proficiency, as Paglia suggests, is the criterion many people use to judge acting, but it's other qualities that determine the ultimate effectiveness of a screen actor, and make actors stars.

JEAN-LUC GODARD TAPPED TO HELM NEW “SUPERMAN” REMAKE

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Disappointed by the box-office performance of his latest film Sucker Punch, Warner Brothers executives have quietly moved to replace Zack Snyder as the director of the new remake of Superman, which will star Amy Adams as Lois Lane.  Insiders at the the studio report that a deal is close to finalization which will bring Jean-Luc Godard aboard as director of the film.  Superman would be the first major Hollywood assignment for the New Wave legend, who is reported to be thrilled by the prospect.

“I have worked outside the mainstream for too long,” Godard says.  “Now I am ready to cash in.  My whole career in cinema has been a prelude to this.  I am very excited about meeting Amy Adams and using CGI to place her in thrilling situations on screen.”

A FREDERIC REMINGTON FOR TODAY

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The Fight For the Water Hole — a narrative image that became a staple in Western movies.  The painting dates from 1903, the year of the wildly popular short film The Great Train Robbery, a Western, which helped establish the story film as the dominant genre of cinema.  This was the era when the mythic iconography of the Old West was becoming codified.  Coincidentally or not, the coda of the Coen brothers' True Grit is set in 1903.

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS — PLOT VERSUS THEME

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The hinge of the plot of Splendor In the Grass — two young lovers all but destroyed by socially enforced sexual repression — wouldn't work today.  That kind of sexual repression no longer exists.  I'm a little surprised that the plot device worked in 1961, when the film was made.  Though the film is set in the 1920s, its tale of misunderstood teens was meant to speak to audiences of its time, and it did.

1961 was just before the sexual revolution, but it was hardly the Victorian era.  Yet the film is on one level a passionate tirade against Victorian sexual mores, which are viewed as pathological, anti-life.  This was a common modernist narrative, but it had sort of made its point by 1961, even if it had not been universally endorsed by the mainstream culture.

Was the film exaggerating the sense of sexual repression felt by
young people in 1961?  I suspect so.  But why?

William Inge, the author of the
screenplay, was a gay man tormented by his gayness.  Surely his view of
the repression of heterosexual passion was influenced by his rage
against the repression of homosexual passion — so much stronger in
1961 than we can easily imagine today.  Kazan, when he directed the
film, was living a double life — as a married man with a family and as a
libertine engaged in a series of sexual adventures outside of
his marriage.  From the evidence of his autobiography, he was angered by
the guilt he felt about this — seeing it as something imposed
on him from the outside by an overly rigid society.

There is an element of special pleading in the film — a sense that Inge and Kazan are addressing personal issues indirectly through their sympathy with the tormented teens.

Curiously, neither this undertow of dishonesty nor the antiquated plot device diminishes the power of the drama in the 21st Century.  Victorian sexual repression is just a premise, like the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues — it works today like a Maguffin.  What's central is the confusion of youth and the brutal insensitivity of adults.  The film is about the destruction of dreams, and surviving the destruction of dreams.

Those are timeless themes, of course, and the film makes us feel them on a deep level.  Are kids today, in an era of sexual license, any less confused by life and sex than Bud and Deanie?  Are adults any more sensitive to their anguish?  I doubt it very much.  That's why the film still speaks to us.

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS

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I'm working my way through the big DVD box set of Elia Kazan's films, and also through his autobiography.  In both, I'm up to Splendor In the Grass.  In his book, Kazan doesn't have a lot to say about the making of the film, beyond reporting the gossipy stuff, as he always does — he was cheating on his wife with the film's second lead Barbara Loden, Natalie Wood was cheating on her husband Robert Wagner with Warren Beatty.  Yawn.



What he does say about William Inge's original screenplay, though, is fascinating.  “His story had the one essential, an excellent flow of incident to a true conclusion.”  He says that the film was easy to direct — “the scenes Bill wrote were the simplest I'd ever done.  People came together, spoke to each other, a point was made, an issue decided, quietly and meaningfully.  Then they parted and the story went on.  That was Bill's talent.”



In a way, that was Kazan's talent, too — investing each scene with meaning, establishing a narrative momentum, keeping the thing moving, emotionally speaking.  It's why Kazan's films are always entertaining, even when they aren't great.  He developed a good eye for images, though he was rarely capable of creating passages of visual lyricism that lift the spirit.  Even his great films rarely arrive at cathartic climaxes which knit the whole narrative together — one tends to remember moments between the characters rather than the whole sweep of the story.



Kazan seems to see Inge's talent as limited, that of a mere storyteller, yet he admits that the last reel of Splendor In the Grass, the climax, is his favorite of all his last reels.  And he's right to feel that way.  Splendor In the Grass, thanks to Inge's skill as a storyteller, and with some crucial help from Wordsworth, is the most profoundly satisfying of all Kazan's films, because of that ending.



Inge (above) did not have the reputation of Tennessee Williams, who could write dazzling, unforgettable endings that packed a punch, but often in a synthetic way, relying on a great exit line, for example, which seems to say more than it really does.  The ending of Kazan's film of A Streetcar Named Desire doesn't break my heart — its poetic, tragic quality feels too neat.  The ending of Splendor In the Grass does break my heart.  It seems far truer, though certainly less grand and eloquent, than anything Williams ever wrote.

Williams was a better writer than Inge, but Inge was a better storyteller.  We don't often think of making a distinction like this with the work of good dramatists, but it's one that sometimes can be made, and it's one well worth pondering.

[Click here for some extended thoughts on the film's plot and theme.]

ALONG THE RIO GRANDE

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Most B-movie Westerns were done as parts of series featuring a star and
recurring actors in supporting roles, often a comic sidekick but
sometimes a musical sidekick, if the star wasn’t himself a singing
cowboy.  The bad guys and the female romantic leads changed from
picture to picture.

When RKO set Tim Holt up as the star of his own B-Western series in the
early 1940s, they gave him a comic sidekick and a musical sidekick.
Even when a B-Western star didn’t have a musical sidekick, musical
numbers were usually a part of the formula in the 1930s and 1940s, and
they were usually anachronistic — Western Swing numbers written for
the films rather than authentic cowboy songs.



Along the Rio Grande, from 1940, is the first film in the new Tim Holt B-Western
collection from The Warner Archive which features Holt in the starring role.  It was, I believe, the third B-Western in which he starred.  (He had earned his spurs before this playing second leads to more established B-Western stars.)

These early Holt Westerns play like variety shows rather than dramas.
Dramatic exposition and action sequences alternate with musical numbers
and comedy bits in a regular pattern.  In a way they harken back to the
Western arena shows of the 19th Century, which were essentially variety
shows with a Western theme, mixing staged dramatic spectacles — mini-narratives, like the attack on the stagecoach, on the settler’s cabin — with self-contained acts featuring theatrical displays of marksmanship and horsemanship, all knitted together with musical
interludes.



A little something for everybody was the idea in most B-Westerns, too — all of a simple and unsophisticated nature, reflecting the primary audience for these films, kids
everywhere and older folks in the smaller towns and rural areas.

The variety is what keeps the films enjoyable even today.  The
conventional plots and merely serviceable acting couldn’t sustain them
as works of drama, but (as was true in vaudeville, or Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West) you always knew there was going to be a change of pace soon
— another routine by the comic sidekick, another song, another awkward
but charming interchange with the leading lady, another thrilling chase
on horseback.

There’s usually a lot of entertainment packed into these short films —
modest, perhaps, but pleasantly varied.  The horsemanship is always
first-rate, though, and if all else disappoints, you rarely have long
to wait before someone says, “We’ve got to head them off at the pass!”
. . . at which point the screen will explode with beautiful images of
beautiful animals galloping through scenic landscapes, with heroic
figures in the saddle, bent on righting one wrong or another.  If for
nothing else than this, the B-Western remains a delightfully dependable
form of amusement.

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN

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Many people know The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli's classic melodrama about the film business, from 1952, produced by John Houseman and starring Kirk Douglas, with a script by Charles Schnee, based on a story by George Bradshaw.

Ten years later, Minnelli, Houseman, Douglas and Schnee tackled the same subject again, in their adaptation of Irwin Shaw's novel Two Weeks In Another Town.  The second film is much darker, and less well known — it flopped at the box office and was only released on DVD this year, by The Warner Archive.

Long known as a kind of lesser pendant to The Bad and the Beautiful, it has nevertheless found champions among admirers of Minnelli's work, and is by far the greater film — one of Minnelli's masterpieces.



I have written before about my problems with The Bad and the Beautiful (above) — for my views on it click here — but they boil down to my mistrust of the film's self-congratulatory message.  It displays a gallery of glamorous but despicable characters, lets us relish their savaging of each other, but ultimately asks us to admire them as noble monsters for their dedication to the art of film.  The Bad and the Beautiful all but suggests that their egomania and meanness are required attributes for those who serve the celluloid muse.

When artists excuse the bad behavior and character flaws of artists in this way, we have a right to be suspicious of their motives, to resent the self-serving nature of the enterprise, which may be telling us more about the artists who actually made the film than about the nature of artistic creation.



Two Weeks In Another Town is a much more mature and honest work.  It's a descent into the hell that the film business really is — a hell in which personal betrayal and selfishness serve only as tokens of power, not as the means of artistic accomplishment.  It charts the personal cost of the industry's meanness, not to its obvious victims, the system's losers, but to those who exercise their power for show, to demonstrate prestige — in short, to the “winners”.



All the industry professionals featured in the film have shriveled souls, live in a state of existential terror.  As they howl on the margins of nonentity, they look about desperately for one last target, one last peer to hurt and humiliate, as though they might recover their sense of self in the act.

It's truly terrifying, and only two people escape from this version of the wreck of the Pequod — a young actor embarked on a self-destructive binge and the older actor who jerks him out of the whirlpool at the last minute, because he's been there himself and knows what it feels like to drown.



Kirk Douglas, in one of his greatest performances, plays the older actor.  We meet him as he hovers near rock bottom as a man and an artist, his life and his career in shambles.  Finally hitting rock bottom on location in Rome, in a desperate bid to salvage his career, is what saves him.  It's when he gives up on recovering his past that he finds a way to the future.  It's a powerful tale, but not very pleasant, and one can see why audiences rejected this look at the dream factory without illusions.  We really don't want to see too much of that man behind the curtain, especially when he turns out to be a vicious jerk.



Two Weeks In Another Town may be the best movie ever made about the film business, and it's definitely one of Minnelli's most beautifully crafted films, with consistently inventive use of the Cinemascope frame and of lurid colors that mirror the lurid recesses of the Hollywood soul.  The acting is uniformly fine, even from George Hamilton doing a pretty good impersonation of James Dean.  Minnelli got Edward G. Robinson to give a restrained performance, and Cyd Charisse an unrestrained one — extraordinary accomplishments.  Charisse has an episode of hysterics in a speeding car that will chill your blood.

The Bad and the Beautiful is more satisfying, the way a lie can be more satisfying than the truth — for a while, anyway.  The later film is two weeks in another town altogether — the real town of Hollywood, which can't escape itself even when it goes on location in Rome.

THE LAW WEST OF TOMBSTONE

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Of the many pleasures B-Westerns can deliver, not the least of them is incoherence — both narrative incoherence and conceptual incoherence.  These movies were made quickly, to fill out release schedules.  “Elements” — stars, character types, action sequences, themes, locations — were taken from an existing pool and sometimes thrown together illogically, just to get something in the can and out to theaters in time for next Saturday's matinee.

The results can be oddly exhilarating.



A case in point is the second film in the recently released Tim Holt collection from The Warner Archive, The Law West Of Tombstone.  Holt plays the second lead here in a film starring Harry Carey (above).  Carey was a big Western star in the silent era, most famous for his collaborations with John Ford, and he still had enough of a following to allow him to carry a B-Western well into the 1930s, but he was getting too old to play a traditional leading man by the time this film was made, in 1938.



The solution was to make Carey a kind of featured character actor, and to let the much younger and more vital Holt handle the romance and the big action sequences.  It was all part of a process — Carey's name and his reputation as an authentic Western star sold the picture to aging fans of the genre, even as Holt was being groomed as a Western star in his own right, someone who could appeal to the younger fans.



The sequences featuring Carey and the sequences featuring Holt have not been fully integrated with each other.  You get a sense that they were conceived separately and then cobbled together without regard for dramatic consistency.  Carey is introduced in New York, running an improbable scam on a wealthy Easterner, then shuttled back to the West where he's soon sentenced for another scam, and given a reprieve in return for bringing the “Tonto Kid” to justice.



Holt plays the Tonto Kid, and the Carey character has no intention of bringing him to justice — he actually wants him to marry his daughter, who doesn't know she's his daughter.  The daughter is engaged to marry the Tonto Kid's partner in crime, who's a genuine bad guy.  The Tonto Kid kills him in self defense in a bar fight, but the daughter thinks it's a case of murder.  “You killed him!” she screams at Holt.  “Yeah,” Holt says, with a casual “so what?” look on his face.

At this point, the plot transforms itself into the tale of a range war between some local ranchers and a tribe of Indians being manipulated by corrupt agents.  Did I mention that the Carey character has a pet monkey?



It's all quite mad.

In the midst of the muddled melodrama, there's a train robbery, preceded and ended by stunning shots of the robbers, Holt and his partner, boarding and escaping from the train — off of and onto the backs of horses running beside the train.  These are shot from the platform at the back of the train in single takes, without stunt doubles.  The images are incredibly exciting and beautiful, and when you're watching them you just don't give a damn about the plot anymore.  On some level they justify the whole film.



Fans of Josef von Sternberg's silent films will be tickled to see Evelyn Brent, who starred in two of them, featured in The Law West Of Tombstone in a
supporting role as an aging gold-digger, who's an old flame of the Carey character — another nod, perhaps, to the audience's nostalgia for the silent era.  There are echoes within echoes in the Western genre here.  In von Sternberg's film Underworld, Brent plays a character called “Feathers” (above), the nickname given to the Angie Dickinson character in Rio Bravo in homage to the earlier film, from which Hawks also borrowed the spittoon gag in the opening scene with Dean Martin.  And in the last shot of The Searchers, John Wayne delivers one of Carey's signature gestures, grabbing on to his left arm with his right hand, as an homage to the late Western star.  Carey's son Harry Carey, Jr. appears in many Westerns by Ford and other directors, including Hawks, and Carey's widow Olive Borden appears in The Searchers.



If The Law West Of Tombstone had been made last year, we might be tempted to read it as a deconstruction of the B-Western form, and to find the exercise extremely witty and sophisticated, charmingly surreal.  Audiences of the time may have experienced it in much the same way, as an incoherent but delightfully demented compilation of familiar elements — a kind of freewheeling jumble with its own bizarre integrity, like a pile of pieces from a disassembled jigsaw puzzle.  You enjoy each element for what it is, and your enjoyment becomes the film's organizing principle, in the absence of any other.