The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik, 2007).



At the showing of the body.



Zooey Deschanel.

Andrew Dominik's only directing credit prior to Assassination is 2000's excellent Chopper with Eric Bana, another outlaw story. Neither film either glorifies or condemns its characters, though it would not be entirely accurate to say that it doesn't romanticize them--and a good thing too, because a western that is completely without romanticization has nothing to offer beyond trite "debunking" gestures. But more to the point, can you name a single western that truly does this in the first place? Could there be anything more "romantic" than The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or Unforgiven? Altman said he hated westerns, and one can see how films like McCabe were attempts to destroy the genre, but in the end the actors and locations overcome such attempts.

One reason Assassination works so beautifully is that it leaves it consistently up to the viewer to gauge the ironic or nonironic valences of the title. The relationship between Jesse James and Robert Ford never resolves into either outright antipathy or deep friendship: they dance around each other with multiple, sometimes conflicting attitudes for the duration of their acquaintance. When the inevitable occurs, it cannot be classified simply as a betrayal, but it's not quite honorable either. Affleck's measured portrayal of Ford forces you to revise your estimation of him at every turn, but without resorting to facile tropes of ethical redemption or transcendence. Pitt's nervous, magnetic Jesse seems always on the verge of coming into focus as a person, but finally remains a cipher on the order of Jay Gatsby: he exists even to himself only as a set of fragile loyalties and unmanageable threats. Both actors are mesmerizing.

Also mesmerizing is the fluid, languorous camerawork, which indulges in picturesque tableaus so sparingly that it's not only forgiveable, but disruptive of a subtlety that otherwise might threaten to turn into blandness. My only regret is that Zooey Deschanel was not given at least as much screen time as Barbara Britton had with the equivalent character in Sam Fuller's I Shot Jesse James (which I recommend watching in a double feature with Dominik's film).

Sorcerer

Roy Scheider in Sorcerer (dir. William Friedkin, 1977).

Here is yet another film I became aware of years ago through its soundtrack, but did not see until now. The music in this case is by Tangerine Dream, and it plays permanently in a small, dark area of my consciousness. No movie could ever live up to the one I had imagined for it: a swirling, poisonous odyssey of hallucination and peril, a radioactive rain forest in hell. Some of Friedkin's footage does actually approach this "ideal," although there is disappointingly little of the full soundtrack in the film itself. Disappointing, because little else in it is fully realized, though Friedkin has said in interviews that of all his projects, it is the one that comes the closest to realizing his starting vision (although he also ungraciously blamed Roy Scheider for its failure at the box office, claiming that he was not capable of pulling off a strong leading role). It is certainly not in the same league with the original The Wages of Fear. Friedkin adds a ton of backstory that does absolutely nothing but delay the main narrative. A lot of fuss has been made over the elaborate car crash scene in the Philadelphia sequence, but please. It's a car crash.

There is still enough effective moviemaking here to make it a crime that the DVD is only available in full screen (Friedkin has been promising a new edition for years, but I haven't heard anything concrete about when it's coming out, if ever). The South American scenes are sometimes so nightmarish that they place an obligation on the rest of the picture to follow through on their gravity--an obligation it simply can't meet. And Friedkin was wrong about Scheider. He is really just right for this role, precisely because he embodies a particular strain of weakness-in-ruggedness, of corrupted masculine confidence.

Le salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear]

Le salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear] (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953).



Véra Clouzot.



Charles Vanel.

From the first frame, for just about every second of footage, Clouzot's The Wages of Fear realizes the potential of narrative cinema at least as powerfully as any other examples I can call to mind, and I'm trying very hard to resist the temptation to say that it surpasses them. Does it have flaws? Yes, of course, both technical and moral. But they are flaws that one can read like the illogicalities of myth, or the stylistic aporiae of classical tragedy.

Four men must drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerine through 300 miles of treacherous South American terrain. A pretty basic premise, with its existential power virtually built in. The men are fugitives and castouts, removed from the contexts that would allow us to identify them as "sympathetic" or "unlikeable": they are the perfect noir protagonists, their civilized codes and sensibilities stripped away to make space for subtler, instinctual drives that have their own ethical dimensions. Neither they nor the audience know what these dimensions are until the moments of their realization, and the suspense lies as much in this as in the bumpy roads and rickety bridges (and there's plenty there to begin with).

There are three main classes of persons around whom the action circulates: the transient, largely European expatriates who find odd jobs and crooked deals where they can, spending the rest of their time drinking and loafing in the cantina; the American oil company that has come in to rip up the earth and exploit cheap labor; and the impoverished locals and indigenous peoples who get variously swept up (or trampled) in the influx. There are no heroes, and the only clear villain is a kind of generalized greed, manifested most frighteningly in the callous policies of the Americans, but supported at all levels by the meanest small-time players. The indigenous tribespeople and poor villagers are portrayed as naked, innocent, childlike--a treatment that skirts condescension by its insistence on a raw, presentational realism.

The 2005 Criterion DVD edition restores the film's original ending, which apparently was radically edited in the only version seen by many for years.

Satan Met a Lady

"Would you mind taking off your hat in the presence of a lady--with a gun?" Bette Davis in Satan Met a Lady (dir. William Dieterle, 1936).

The second filmed version of The Maltese Falcon is actually a farcical synthesis of that story and Hammett's other hit book-movie crossover, The Thin Man (The Continental Op has never fared as successfully on the screen--someday someone at HBO or somewhere will get it right as a truly hard-boiled cable series). Now the falcon is a ram's horn, and Sam Spade is "Ted Shane," a dapper dick with a barbed outlook. It's alternately painful and amusing to watch. Though the whole is a train wreck, the parts are mostly a delight, especially Marie Wilson as absurdist secretary "Miss Murgatroyd." Wilson's high voice and erratic bodily movements are alarming at first: she always looks like she's about to start crying and go into a seizure. Once you adjust to the strangeness, however, it's endearing. Arthur Treacher, later of Merv Griffin and fish & chips fame, gives good droll in a British variation on the Joel Cairo role, and Alison Skipworth as "Madame Barrabas," the female equivalent of Casper Gutman, is both funny and menacing. William Warren as Shane is probably the biggest misfire. It's not his fault--he does the decadent sophisticate thing quite well. The problem is the very concept of making the Spade-based character a cocktail-sipping clothes horse. There's more than enough farcical potential in the original story, and going that extra step to work in the Thin Man elements just makes a muddle of things.

Now I wish I could find a DVD copy of 1975's The Black Bird, with George Segal as Sam Spade's son. I saw it upon its first theatrical release, and remember it being funny. On the other hand, I was twelve.

The Maltese Falcon

Una Merkel and Ricardo Cortez in The Maltese Falcon (dir. Roy Del Ruth, 1931).

You'd have to be nuts to prefer this first cinematic version of The Maltese Falcon over the 1941 John Huston version with Bogart and Astor, but in its own way it conveys some of Hammett's tone even more successfully. Part of this is because the film code hadn't kicked in yet, and the sleaze level is accordingly high. The hardest part to accept is Ricardo Cortez's Sam Spade, who grins like a baboon all the time for no apparent reason. Other than that, he's pretty good. The whole cast dives into the material with gusto--especially fun to watch are Una Merkel as Spade's secretary Effie, Dwight Frye as the sociopathic boy toy Wilma Cook, and Otto Matieson as Dr. Cairo.

Side Street

Farley Granger in Side Street (dir. Anthony Mann, 1950).

Granger and O'Donnell team up again for another small classic. O'Donnell doesn't have quite as much to do here as in They Live By Night, but she's still in top form, and Granger seizes his chance to shine: he is an absolutely sympathetic anti-hero, whose increasing sense of fear and desperation drives him to make ethical decisions that prove equally as disastrous as his unethical ones.

Mann is one of the pioneers of location shooting in the noir mode, and Side Street is nearly as impressive in this regard as Dassin's Naked City. A liberal application of aerial shots emphasizes the characters' haplessness and alienation as they skulk and speed down the endless maze of side streets framed by absurdly tall structures, scrambling like rats over a stolen and re-stolen bag of already-stolen money. Jean Hagen enters the film late in the action, but totally takes it over as a poetry-loving nightclub singer ("Oh, my love's like a red, red rose," she intones dreamily over a shabby little flower, shortly before playing Farley Granger for a sucker, and then getting played for a sucker herself).

They Live By Night

Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger in They Live By Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1948).



Howard Da Silva and Farley Granger.



Helen Craig.

Nicholas Ray infuses this low-budget crime melodrama with about ten kilotons of passion and style. Everything feels full of brooding and danger, even when there's not much going on, which is often the case. There are few actual set pieces, and the movement of the story overall is languid to the point of inertia. When it arrives at its inevitable climax, however, you feel the weight of everything that's led up to it, and it all takes on a poignant shapeliness. Granger and O'Donnell exude haunted magnetism, especially O'Donnell, who moves through the shadows (there are always shadows) like a grim and lovely wraith. Howard Da Silva and Jay C. Flippen (as characters named "One-Eye" and "T-Dub," respectively) are both outstanding as the criminals with whom Granger's "Bowie" is codependent, and Helen Craig plays the moll Mattie Mansfield like an understated Medea: she seethes with restrained bitterness that occasionally flares into bursts of physical anger.

Caged

Eleanor Parker in Caged (dir. John Cromwell, 1950).

Don't be put off by the lurid stigma of the "women in prison" genre: this is a superbly crafted, unsettling drama, nearly in the same class with films like Brute Force and A Man Escaped. Eleanor Parker plays a young woman convicted as an accessory to a robbery in which her husband, the main perpetrator, was shot and killed by the police. She enters prison scared and naive, and must gradually adjust her entire ethical world view in order not just to survive, but to retain whatever personal power she has left. Agnes Moorehead is a sympathetic but impotent warden, and Hope Emerson is a loathsomely evil "matron" (guard). Jan Sterling, from Mystery Street, instills her character "Smoochie" with a level of dyke chic I would wager the screen had not thitherto seen.

The Far Country

Walter Brennan, Corinne Calvet, and Jimmy Stewart in The Far Country (dir. Anthony Mann, 1954).

RENEE [Corinne Calvet]: It arrived today: a piano.
BEN [Walter Brennan]: A pie-anny? Why couldn't that old walrus pack in a pig, or a sheep, or a goat, or a--
RENEE: You can't play a goat!

There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007).

The projector at my local theater had a bad lens, so all throughout my viewing of There Will Be Blood, various parts of the screen were out of focus. Sometimes, as a result of the staff's ongoing but futile attempts to correct the problem, the entire screen was also skewed slightly counter-clockwise. All this left me with a much worse headache than the carefully controlled handheldness of Cloverfield. Nevertheless, because I am a person who draws eccentric connections between mechanical accident and artistic structure, this optical torture helped alert me to the film's deft management of composition in the frame (particularly the use of complex depth-of-field arrangements), and made me all the more aware of these techniques' function as a stylistic correlative to the drama of human distances and barriers at the heart of the story.

When multiple subjects share the frame, they do so in often oblique ways. Again, this is the case on the levels of both composition and camera focus. Sometimes two or more figures occupy positions that parallel each other, even as they emphasise relations of mutual alienation. For example, in one scene Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the man who has recently presented himself as his hitherto-unknown "brother from a different mother" Henry (Kevin J. Connor) sit side by side on the beach, each clasping his knees in profile, but with Day-Lewis on the far side of Connor from us, and to the right in the frame. It is at this moment that Daniel lands on a way not to have to assume the hardship of a brotherly relationship with Henry, and even before we know fully what this means, the schism is broadcast by the vivid way in which their similar postures belie a deeper difference between them. At other times, figures in the background refuse to come into focus with figures in the foreground, or vice versa (sometimes it is more complicated than a simple background/foreground contrast). This is particularly the case when Daniel has interactions with men of more privilege, wealth, and power than himself (the scene in the restaurant where he places the napkin over his face is a signal instance), or with persons who make claims on his loyalty and affections that are impossible for him (i.e., any and all such claims). The entire movie is a series of rejections, exclusions, and estrangements, depicted in an assortment of physically realized ways. Day-Lewis's snarling speech on "drainage" in the film's final scenes is exemplary, as is the mad bowling-lane fracas that follows it.

It's an exceptionally stimulating film in all kinds of ways. It reminds me more than anything else of those "flawed masterpieces" of the seventies and eighties, sprawling historical epics like Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America or Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate: films, that is, in which the directors' ambitions ran up against the limited pocketbooks and patience of the studios, so that the "finished" products were clearly truncated fragments, full of frustrating gaps. Anderson, however, seems to have cultivated this effect intentionally, perhaps partly as a nod to what is for him an especially formative part of his cinematic upbringing, but also as a way of messing with our expectations around the American historical genre. Whereas Leone, Cimino, and others arguably were aiming for an impossible epic ideal and inevitably falling short, Anderson acknowledges this impossibility and turns it into an acerbic anti-narrative gesture. As with the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, or with Frank Darabont's The Mist, it is not until the final frame that you realize exactly how off the mark your guess at the kind of movie you've been watching has been (just as those around Daniel Plainview have never had what they believed they had with him, either materially or emotionally). Anderson's subversion of expectations is subtler, but in its own way nastier. It risks contempt not just for generic convention, but for narrative itself. The risk pays off because, to a degree that surpasses No Country and The Mist, we come closer to being convinced successfully that the story we expected was not necessarily the story we really wanted.

Mystery Street

Jan Sterling in Mystery Street (dir. John Sturges, 1950).



Ricardo Montalban.



The skull beneath Jan Sterling's skin.

Top three things that make this movie really good:

1. John Alton's cinematography. Check out the matching highlights on Sterling's décolletage and the little hula dancer on the lamp. Or Montalban in the handball court: way to work the deep focus.
2. Elsa Lanchester as the landlady, Mrs. Smerrling (yes, Smerrling). Maybe her best role ever. She's stupidly clever, charmingly slimy, farcically tragic. Her roomer Jackie, played by Betsy Blair, provides an effective foil with her closed-up savvy and streetwise dignity.
3. Jan Sterling. Even though she's got a small part, she's the soul--or ghost--of the film in a way. She makes walking downstairs into an artform. Side note: I was trying to think why she looked so familiar, and then I realized that Avon Books used a still of her and Marshall Thompson from this film for the cover of the 1999 paperback edition of James Ellroy's 1982 novel Clandestine.

Fitzcarraldo

Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo (dir. Werner Herzog, 1982).

The clanging, histrionic swelling of the Popol Vuh score is my first point of reference for this film, which I watched for the first time last week. Back in 1982 I became very familiar with the soundtrack, as my brother played it obsessively (when he died four years ago, it was one of the small handful of his LPs that I set aside to keep, even though I don't have a record player). Perhaps partly for this reason, the music was absolutely central to me upon finally seeing the movie. The slow, steady progression up to and including the dragging of the steamboat over the mountain feels itself like an excruciating symphonic movement, a largely impressionistic set of vague symbols in increasingly massive relation to each other. Kinski's face provides the perfect register of this movement's emotional intricacy, in both his spectatorial capacity as enthusiastic opera buff, and his composer-like role as Herzog's surrogate. The music seems like a wild, irrational emanation of his soul--and not just as an abstract representation of what he feels, but what he imagines causing concretely to be heard.

The story's resolution flies in the face of conventional expectations around narrative tension, but yields its own organic integrity and surprising shapeliness: a blithe subversion of inevitability, culminating in a space of blank epiphany that can be experienced as either statically existential or dynamically joyous.

Cloverfield

Some actors whose names I'm not bothering to look up in Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves, 2008).

It is kind of scary. But then, so are thunderstorms. And big trucks driving by at night on the road outside your house. If you're me.

I'm not sure how to feel about the obviously 9/11-derived imagery (fireballs, skyscrapers collapsing, huge clouds of smoke billowing toward the camera between concrete corridors, pedestrians stumbling around coated with dust). I think it may be in bad taste or something. Or a pretentious stab at commentary on the way in which the media has conditioned our responses. Or both. I was too busy holding my breath to evaluate it carefully. Did I mention it was kind of scary?

Oh, in case you hadn't heard, it's about a huge squid-looking thing attacking Manhattan, filmed Blair-Witch style by a group of twentysomethings.

Act of Violence

Van Heflin in Act of Violence (dir. Fred Zinneman, 1948).



Robert Ryan.



Van Heflin, Mary Astor, and Berry Kroeger.

Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a solid citizen: a war vet and a successful contractor with a beautiful, adoring wife (Janet Leigh). Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) is an old army buddy who remembers all too well that Frank's history has some blemishes in it. Now Joe is on a near-maniacal vendetta, having traveled across the continent to see justice done--his way (tagline: "the manhunt no woman could stop"). The two leads offset each other nicely: each is sympathetic in his way, but both are just screwed up enough to make you consider rooting for the other guy. When the showdown finally comes, it's a rehearsal for Zinneman's later masterpiece High Noon, clock and all.

Heflin and Ryan are both in top form, but the real revelation here is Mary Astor as Pat, a hooker with a heart of thin gold plate ("You're unhappy? There's no law says you've got to be happy"). If you only know her from The Maltese Falcon, you may be stunned at her range upon watching this. Also riveting is Berry Kroeger (billed as Barry Kroeger), playing a hit man with a terrifying smile and the personality of a scorpion.

Excellent cinematography by Robert Surtees and score by Bronislau Kaper.

Leave Her to Heaven

Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (dir. John M. Stahl, 1945).



Cornel Wilde.



Jeanne Crain.

Beautiful people made of breathing wax live in a technicolor country of sleepy lakes and impossibly huge swimming pools, falling in love and freaking each other out and succumbing to crippling ennui. On the surface, it looks very much like a Sirk film, but Sirk's people are always straining after an ethical ideal that is ever so close to being actually grounded in the real world and its material conflicts. They burst their hearts open with glamorous social relevance. Stahl's players are oblivious to things like racial injustice and oppressive labor conditions. There is no working class. There is little evidence of any kind of work, beyond that performed smilingly and voluntarily by placid extras who cease to exist once they have added their small flourishes to the general human decor. What there is is an awful lot of water. Even the indoor scenes have a strange liquid quality, as if at any minute all the characters and their problems and their pretty houses might sink into a spreading ocean of bad consciousness. Gorgeous to look at, but arid, trite, and depressing overall.

The Crimson Pirate

Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat aggressively embodying their unfettered masculinity in The Crimson Pirate (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1952)...



...as a corrective to having severely compromised it in this scene.

Tourneur's The Flame and the Arrow was a hit, and for the follow-up (not a sequel--the characters are virtually identical, but this one takes place in the eighteenth century), another noir giant, Robert Siodmak, switches genres to take the directorial reins. The Crimson Pirate is much more conventionally robust and action-packed than its predecessor, and in truth, considerably more (mindless) fun to watch, even if the images don't linger in the mind as long afterward. You can see much of the spirit that inspired the Pirates of the Carribean franchise here, and even some specific character models, I would guess. Tell me, for example, if the pirate who gets his pegleg caught in the ship's grate during the climactic fight scene doesn't prefigure the guy with the wooden eyeball in the Verbinski films.

The Flame and the Arrow

Virginia Mayo in The Flame and the Arrow (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1950).

Swashbuckler set in medieval Spain, starring Burt Lancaster and his long-time acrobatic sidekick Nick Cravat. A charming piece of lusty folderol, with the added novelty that someone seems to have instructed the actors not to speak like they were doing Shakespeare (an annoying affectation in historical film to this day). The result, as I recall is also the case in Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, is that the movie gains in familiar intimacy what it loses in high-church solemnity. Nevertheless, Cravat's Brooklyn accent was apparently a little too much, so they made his character a mute (as in The Crimson Pirate two years later, also with Lancaster). Scorsese had no such qualms with his actors in Temptation.

Tourneur is not working at the height of his powers here: there's not enough darkness and gentle eeriness, though at times these qualities peer through, as in the semi-tragic figure of the hero's ex-wife (Lynn Baggett), or the wryly melancholic troubadour Apollo (Norman Lloyd). And as in Tourneur's Canyon Passage, the technicolor is vivid, but just muted enough to lend an air of storybook fadedness. Look for a funny cameo by Philip Van Zandt as a disgruntled dance instructor.

I'm Not There

Cate Blanchett as a Dylan doppelganger and David Cross as Allen Ginsberg in I'm Not There (dir. Todd Haynes, 2007).

I loved Safe and Far from Heaven, but this almost makes me detest Todd Haynes. The "postmodern" structure is embarrassingly dated--people were doing lots of fractured storyline stuff like this in the nineties, and it wasn't much more interesting then. Two hours and fifteen minutes feels much longer. Christian Bale is particularly embarrassing to watch. Actually, almost everyone is embarrassing except the astounding Cate Blanchett, who deserves more than an Oscar. She deserves her own country or something.

A lot of the music is very good. I especially liked the Calexico cover of "Going to Acapulco."

The Darjeeling Limited

Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody (upside down) in The Darjeeling Limited (dir. Wes Anderson, 2007).

It's great until about halfway through: the three leads play off each other wittily, and the constraint of confining the action to the train (with a few short station stops) provides a formally pleasing compactness. Then they get kicked off and everything goes slack. Anderson feels compelled to adhere to his formula of injecting a poignant dollop of tragedy, which snuffs out the comic spark that glimmers so consistently up to that moment. From then on, the narrative flops around like a pregnant elephant. During the last half hour, the film could have ended at any of about twenty moments and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

Illegal

Edward G. Robinson (and two pieces from his collection of Impressionist paintings, on loan to Warner Bros.) in Illegal (dir. Lewis Allen, 1955).

Ambitious DA accidentally sends wrong man to the chair (DeForest Kelley of Star Trek in a very small part) and switches to being a mouthpiece for criminals. Best part is the DVD commentary by star Nina Foch, now in her eighties, who remarks every few seconds on how stiff and dead everyone looks in the film, and how much better movies are now that technology has improved and we have learned the lessons of psychoanalysis.