Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, and Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (dir. Sidney Lumet, 2007).

It's to Sidney Lumet's credit that I got all the way to the end of this before I realized how bad it was, and why. The film looks great, the cast is phenomenal (well, except for Ethan Hawke), and Lumet treats the material like it's worthy of his and our attention for some reason. The end result is a feeling of being profoundly cheated out of what this cast and crew (minus screenwriter Kelly Masterson, who has got to be some producer's kid or something), might have done if they had had a decent script to work with. The tremendously talented Amy Ryan is treated the most unconscionably by the script: all her lines are some variation on "Pay your fucking child support." Even Albert Finney's heroic attempt to express pain at the loss of his character's wife is compromised by the flat dialogue he's forced to recite.

One of the many problems with said script is that it begins with the premise that people behave heartlessly towards each other, which is a fine first step, and then goes absolutely nowhere beyond that. The premise stops being a premise and becomes just a stunted point of view. Nothing anyone says in the film suggests the smallest grain of moral awareness. Which is the same as saying that when one of them is cruel to another, we neither believe in their cruelty, nor in the pain others feel as a result of it. Nor is there any wit--any--to counteract the unwavering sourness. Some critics have called the film nihilistic, but this is giving it too much credit; the characters' depthlessness evinces not a world view, but simple writerly ineptitude.

Marisa Tomei is the most telling register of the story's bankruptcy. I'm not sure whether she can really act or not, and this has never kept her from being one of my favorite actors. But this movie forces her to express feelings that aren't there to be felt, and you can see her sniffing around for them like a deer in the forest, finally giving up and resorting to a series of pouts and nose-wrinkling maneuvers. Those will be what I remember most about this film, for better or worse.

Viridiana

Silvia Pinal and Fernando Rey in Viridiana (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1961).



Carnality vs. spiritual devotion.



A perversion of the Last Supper.

Buñuel's Viridiana astounds on many levels, one of the most surprising of which is its restraint: from scene to scene, the narrative movement is almost entirely conventional. It's only cumulatively that the progression of events takes on its most strikingly surreal dimensions (as opposed to the minor surrealism of individual shots or tableaus, such as Silvia Pinal's hand reaching for a cow's teats, or the Rabelaisian beggars trashing their benefactor's mansion in the manner of profane apostles). The plot summary at IMDB ("spoiler" alert), supplied by a Swedish viewer, manages to capture the obliquity of the total plot trajectory:

Don Jaime lives alone in his manor. His wife died from a heart attack on the wedding night. He has paid the gift and education so that his wife's niece Viridiana could become a nun, and wants her to visit him for a few days before she takes her final vow. She strikingly resembles her aunt and is persuaded to take on her wedding dress. Then he asks her to marry him. When she refuses, sleeping pills are put in her coffee. Jaime only decently fondles her. One the next day she leaves but is brought back by the police. Jaime had made a trap that might lead to another marriage. He acknowledges his "bastard" son Jorge, writes a will making his manor the common property of him and Viridiana, and hangs himself. Jorge starts modernising agricultural methods. Viridana gives free food and housing to many beggars. When Jorge and Viridiana must go away to see a lawyer, the beggars succeed in entering the locked great house. They make a banquet, but eventually beat asunder many things. When the owners return, most beggars leave the house forever. But one of them binds Jorge to a wall-cupboard and tries to rape Viridiana. Jorge promises another beggar money if he kills the rapist. He does so. One later evening when all is calm Viridiana goes to Jorge.

Somehow this description is all the more accurate by virtue of its English-as-second-language-ness.

Silvia Pinal glides through the film in the title role with the aloof, static blondness of a Hitchcock heroine: in particular, the thin layer of non-responsiveness and repulsion she continually threatens to rupture makes me think of Tippi Hedren in The Birds or Marnie (which came out around the same time or a little after). The closing sequence gave me that feeling I occasionally get of excited emotional collusion with the director: "is he going to end the movie here? yes, yes, do it, end it here! he did it! he's ending it here!"

Buñuel, as was often his custom, cast people off the street in the roles of the beggars, including one mentally deranged man who gives a shatteringly disturbing performance. Bunuel's treatment of these dissheveled, incapacitated poor is entirely unsentimental, if not downright cynical: their disenfranchisement has rendered them incapable of ethical agency (whether the more privileged characters possess such agency is, of course, one of the film's provocative opacities). This is my favorite thing about Buñuel's artistic-political sensibility, actually: its conflictedness. In the interview included with the Criterion DVD, he more than once mentions his guilty love for American conveniences, for clean streets and modern amenities. If his leftism were not so often compromised by his weakness for material comfort--and its aesthetic pleasures, which he takes pains to distance himself from, but does not fool anyone--he would not be such a compelling artist. Watching him talk with his interviewer, I felt something like the affective glow of deep friendship, intermingled with a mild bemusement that can never turn into contempt, but only makes the glow burn a little brighter.

Street Kings

Keanu Reeves in Street Kings (dir. David Ayer, 2008).

Street Kings seems to be doing pretty good box office, despite being mostly trashed by the critics. This in itself is no big deal--the same could be said for, say, 10,000 BC or Scary Movie 7 or what have you. But in this case, since it's not the sort of movie that pleases crowds by sheer spectacle or soothing idiocy or star appeal (Keanu Reeves can't really bring in that many viewers on his own now, can he?), I think the critics have missed something. There's no doubt that the dialogue is sometimes outrageously cliched and stilted. Reeves still can't really act (though age is giving his face some interesting gravity). The plot is so predictable they might as well have started with the ending and worked back. And yet, rather than sinking the film, I think all these things actually contribute to its appeal. It all feels like a 50's B-movie, full of square jaws and sincere speeches and cut-rate action. Reeves is perfect for this sort of hackery, and James Ellroy knows what he's doing (up to a point) with his mannered script. He works with the genre conventions so literally and flatly that they effectively become pastiche.

I say "effectively" because in truth I'm not entirely convinced Ellroy knows what he's doing, here or in his novels. Part of what I find interesting about his work is just how repressed and lacking in true self-knowledge he comes off as, despite all his autobiographical mythologizing in both his fiction and memoirs. For example, I honestly have no idea whether he's conscious of the homoerotic strains in his work. And I don't just mean homosocial, I mean homoerotic. I mean big guy buddy or old boss daddy guy takes in young guy wonder-hungry rookie as charge and shows him the he-male ropes or betrays him like cruel stud horse-breaker and there's also always some younger smooth Adonis kid who's just a hunk of heartbreak. All it would take to make any Ellroy story into queer niche-fiction is the addition of a few explicit guy-on-guy scenes. They could replace the rare, unconvincing hetero sex scenes, which always suggest that Ellroy has never been in the same room with a woman, let alone had any fleshly interest in one. The bizarre cartoon hound-dog noises he makes in interviews when the subject of attractive actresses comes up do little to hurt my case here. I'm sorry, is this all turning very ad hominem? I'm just trying to get at what makes Ellroy such a distinctively odd writer, and again, interesting.

So, as in the books, Ellroy's world in Street Kings is one of smothered drives, urgent sublimations, confounding blindnesses of personal motivation. It's very compelling, and whether it's intentional that it's all dressed in a bad-movie suit or not, the semblance of ironic distance thus obtained is palpable. Ellroy knows what he's doing on one level of pacing, scene-setting, all that craft stuff. But it's the combination of this skill with all those elements he doesn't know what he's doing with that's fascinating, that's disorienting, that smells like art.

Joy Ride

Steve Zahn and Paul Walker in Joy Ride (dir. John Dahl, 2001).



Roadside graves.



"Caaandy Cane...."

John Dahl is one of the notable torch-bearers of neo-noir in the last twenty years, though he's had only a couple of totally solid genre successes. Joy Ride is Dahl well after falling from his peak, having a little resurgence of inspiration. It's not particularly inspired inspiration--the best moments are almost still shots, showing Dahl's considerable feel for atmosphere and framing. Part of what these moments drive home is that even at his best, in films like Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, Dahl's noirish vision was that of a talented student: once he got the form down, he had no ideas of his own where to go with it. Thus he became yet another creator of competent but forgettable Hollywood not-quite-thrillers like Rounders. Joy Ride does deliver some real scares, however, especially in its first half; after that, the formulaic turns come too routinely, and the comfortable conventions of the buddy movie defuse the dread that's been built up. The DVD's special features contain about a billion alternate endings, all of which are exactly the same despite their elaborate differences.

Breakheart Pass

Charles Bronson and Archie Moore in Breakheart Pass (dir. Tom Gries, 1975).

This midseventies Charles Bronson vehicle feels greater than the sum of its parts to me, maybe partly because I remember seeing it when it first came out, and how it completely satisfied on that popcorn matinee level of midseventies Charles Bronson vehicles. Ben Johnson has so much presence that it's easy to overlook how fundamentally uninteresting his character is. Robert Tessier is a terrifying villain, but he's only in the film for a few minutes total. All I really remembered from my first viewing--what stuck with me over the years--was the train (as well as the fight on top of it) and the northwest locations. The constant shots of the train barreling toward its destination, a prosaic sense of snowy danger and stock costumes.

The Long Night

Henry Fonda and Barbara Bel Geddes in The Long Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1947).



Vincent Price.



Henry Fonda.

I haven't seen more than a couple of clips from Marcel Carné's 1939 Le jour se lève, but I've seen enough to determine that The Long Night is damned to American remake purgatory (can one be "damned" to purgatory? you know what I mean). One's knowledge of the inevitable compromises and dilutions made by Litvak's film diminishes its real uniqueness and power. Contemporary viewers and critics didn't appreciate the stylized sets and striking use of background miniatures to create illusions of distance and scope. They just thought it all looked fake. And I'm sure they had no idea what to make of Vincent Price's lizard-like performance as Maximilian the magician. American audiences in the forties weren't ready for their melodrama to turn a conscious eye on its own latent surreal neuroses, though it tried now and then (Welles' Lady from Shanghai is another piece of evidence).

I'm not claiming that The Long Night is a masterpiece, or without serious flaws. There is some dissonant casting (Fonda, particularly, though he gives it all he's got, never quite finds his character's violently jealous pulse), and it's clear that the climactic logic required by the story is betrayed for the sake of studio approval. It has a look all its own, however, and it gets at that compelling pseudo-occult seediness I associate with the stage-magic industry of midcentury: a kind of two-bit theatrical perversion without a clear audience, half hermeticism, half con game, somewhere between Satanism and door-to-door vacuum sales.

Ann Dvorak is a peach-in-the-rough as Price's disgruntled assistant, and Elisha Cook Jr. and Charles McGraw appear too briefly in too-small roles.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Title frame from the trailer for Robinson Crusoe on Mars (dir. Byron Haskin, 1964).



A monkey and Paul Mantee.



Victor Lundin and Paul Mantee.

Best thought of as a pretext for the engaging display of a series of vivid matte shots with bits of live-action motion thrown in here and there as seasoning. It's almost exhilarating to witness what look like the extreme lengths the filmmakers went to in order to ensure that the special effects not look convincing. Haskin even recycles the spaceship design from his War of the Worlds: these alien crafts "dart around" by means of a rapid succession of still cartoon shots. I fumble to articulate a schema according to which such minimalistic spectacularity is an extension of the movie's general ideological blandness, the way the whole thing might as well have been a Soviet production.

Beyond that, the monkey is a nice touch (though it has surprisingly little personality), and there is a charm to the perpetually clean-crewcutness of Mantee as the Crusoe figure, matched by the Friday figure Lundin's perfectly neat pageboy do. It seems hair never grows on Mars. Adam West makes a brief appearance, two years before becoming TV's Batman.

Oh, and how many other movies can you think of that are "based on" a novel (Defoe is even given partial writing credit), but the novel in question is mentioned explicitly by one of the characters? There seems to be some violation of fictive logic there.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons

Akihiro Tomikawa as Daigoro in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons.

I was just barely following the plot in this, the fifth of the six Lone Wolf and Cub films. Ogami Itto has to assassinate an abbot delivering a scroll, intercept the scroll, and make sure it gets to a certain person, except that person may or may not be the right person, and in addition he has to kill some more people, something something something. Early on there is an entirely detachable episode in which little Daigoro gets involved in a pickpocket's escape, and has to be flogged publicly in an attempt to shame the pickpocket into confessing--while his father watches impassively from the crowd! Daigoro's a tough little junior assassin, and takes it like a man.

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The DVD "extras" feature has trailers for several other samurai films, including Lady Snowblood (1973), which looks like a must-see. Check out the inventive subtitling here:

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril

The hands of Tomisaburo Wakayama and Akihiro Tomikawa in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril (dir. Buichi Saito, 1972).

As exciting and visually striking as they are, these movies sort of run together after a while. What sets this one apart is the assassin who defeats her enemies by flashing her tattooed breasts at them. That and the little song about raindrops that plays when Daigoro goes off wandering.

Two more to go.

10,000 BC

CGI elephant chasing guy with dreadlocks in 10,000 BC (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2008).

Did you know that some people are upset because of the "BC" in this film's title? Excuse me, some people, may I laugh at you? In the world of this film--a world where people can talk to tigers (I mean, I guess people can talk to tigers in our world too, but in this movie, the tigers understand), where old medicine women can tell the future and telepathically heal arrow wounds, and where seven-foot-tall malevolent albinos enlist not only human slaves but wooly mammoths to build huge golden-tipped pyramids--I think it's fair to entertain more than just the possibility that the as-yet-unborn Jesus Christ is a legitimate holy savior worthy of having all the years subsequent to his birth named after him; in this world, he could very well be an electric-banjo-playing international porn star who's able to shoot laser beams from his tongue.

I think what I like best about 10,000 BC is that the three main characters are named D'Leh, Evolet, and Tic'Tic. Their language must be derived from backwards Journey lyrics or something. For the audience, of course, it's English, which is fine; but why, when people in movies are supposed to be speaking another language, are they given those stupid accents? They don't have accents when they speak however they "actually" speak in their language, do they? So why should they have accents in "translation"? And why is it so important that the English used to represent their speech never contain any contractions? And I'm sorry--did I really hear someone say "many moons"?

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

John Pearce and Robert Duvall as Frank and Jesse James in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1972).

The biggest problem with this movie is its inability to tell the difference between satire and farce. For a certain sensibility, that's also part of what makes it interesting. The gee-whiz voiceover that begins the film gushes enthusiastically about the heroic qualities of Jesse James and his fellow outlaws, and what follows for the rest of the film is designed to show us, in incrementally stronger doses, what a load of horseshit all that is. But then there are bizarrely "comic" sequences like the Northfield baseball game, or more generally, the entire treatment of Cole Younger, played by Cliff Robertson. Cole is "the guy you like." He's curious, compassionate, good-natured--basically, a teddy bear. He shows the kids the bullet holes in his protective leather vest, and he fixes the calliope guy's calliope (much to his later regret). Jesse (Robert Duvall), by contrast, is a slobbering fiend, a cracker zealot, a murderous big bad wolf. But this contrast doesn't go anywhere, so we're left in a divided state of attention that finally seems beside the point. One could argue that there's some kind of irony in the realization that, at a crucial climactic moment, Jesse makes a decision that turns out to be strategically "right," whereas Cole's humanitarian instincts prove to be ill-considered. Sort of like the central argument between Mr. Cooper and Ben in Night of the Living Dead. This film, however, doesn't deliver its nihilism with the same brutal confidence as Romero's.

The film is still saturated with an idiot vitality that makes it well worth watching. Duvall is blood-curdling, especially from the moment when he says "She's a Yankee too" to the end of the film. The Northfield scenes are very colorfully and interestingly shot (they were actually filmed in Jacksonville, Oregon, a few miles away from me). When a big steam-engine proto-automobile thing comes chugging down the main street like a dinosaur, Cole's mouth drops ("Now, that's a wonderment"), and the other outlaws take a step back, momentarily frozen in terror. A pretty Scandinavian whore sings a beautiful song in the town brothel. Elisha Cook Jr. has a small role (too small) as a bank employee. And there's some good dialogue. A couple of the outlaws are arguing over whether a ring around the moon means it's going to rain, and one says that don't mean anything, it's just an old wives' tale, and the other says it don't have to mean anything if it's true.

The Prisoner of Shark Island

Warner Baxter and (barely visible, on the right) Ernest Whitman in The Prisoner of Shark Island (dir. John Ford, 1936).



John Carradine.



Frank McGlynn Sr.

The story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, wrongly accused of complicity in the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Ford's immersion in the milieu of silent film is still very evident here, not only in the mechanics of blocking and framing and such, but in his Griffith-like treatment of the north vs. south theme, complete with repeated scenes in which negroes are depicted as alternately childlike and animalistic. Although, supposedly, Ford actually toned down the racism of Nunnally Johnson's screenplay quite a bit during shooting. Ernest Whitman does manage to infuse the character of ex-slave "Buck" (what else?) with some dignity, despite being required to jump up and down every so often and shout "Ah do declare." (Whitman played "Pinkie" in Jesse James, also scripted by Johnson: "A darkie named Pinkie on a mule named Stinkie.")

Aside from all that, and in spite of the usual historical distortions, it's a compelling story about government manipulation of due legal process, complete with chilling analogues to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Especially freaky are the pointed hoods placed over the heads of the accused conspirators during the "trial" scene.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter

John Lupton and Cal Bolder in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (dir. William Beaudine, 1966).



Narda Onyx experiencing perverse electrical pleasures ordinary persons can't even dream of.



Estelita Rodriguez taking careful aim.

This rendition of the Jesse James legend includes some notable episodes of the outlaw's life that are omitted by most other films, such as the time Jesse's muscle-builder friend had his real brain removed by a lady mad scientist and replaced with an "artificial brain." The great William "One-Shot" Beaudine's last film (you may remember that I reviewed his modern cattle-rustling yarn Tough Assignment here a while back). The Joe Bob Briggs commentary on the DVD is a blast (and contains some substantive info on Beaudine's career, the actors, etc.).

A minor point, perhaps, but I want to say in response to all those critics who have complained that the Maria Frankenstein character is not actually Frankenstein's daughter, as the title proclaims, but his granddaughter: think about it. Frankenstein's son is a Frankenstein too, thereby making the son's daughter Frankenstein's daughter. No problem.

The Bank Job

Jason Statham, Stephen Campbell Moore, James Faulkner, Alki David, and Daniel Mays in The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008).

Roger Donaldson would probably have been more at home, and more frequently successful, in the old Hollywood. He makes highly conventional, story-driven movies according to formula, and is often very resourceful within those limitations. The Bank Job showcases his talents to their best advantage. Casting Jason Statham strictly according to type, for example, is hardly imaginative, but it's practical, and gets a certain dimension of audience expectation securely in place and therefore out of the way. Donaldson also has the restraint (or lack of range?) to avoid milking the early seventies English setting for its retro-groovy factor: this is not a hip ironic heist film, it's just a heist film. And as such, it's got the right moves. There's the inexhaustible Rififi-esque routine of painstakingly tunneling into the vault area, the mazy network of double- and triple-crosses, the brotherhood of thieves and their fragile code of honor.... And nothing new beyond that. This is just solid, workmanlike genre fodder. And if there were crime movies this solid and workmanlike at the theater every week, I'd be in heaven.

Dead Calm

Billy Zane in Dead Calm (Dir. Phillip Noyce, 1989).

In my discussion of James Foley's adaptation of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet a few posts back, I talked about how being too faithful to a novel can be bad for a film. Phillip Noyce's treatment of Charles Williams's 1963 Dead Calm takes many more liberties with its source, some successful and others not so much. The basic plot remains intact: a man (Sam Neill) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) sailing alone on their yacht (the Saracen) in the middle of the ocean pick up a man (Billy Zane) leaving his own ship (the Orpheus) on a small dinghy. The ship is filling up with water, he tells them, and furthermore everyone else on it is dead from food poisoning. While the apparently distraught man in resting in the cabin, Neill's character (John) takes the dinghy over to the other ship and finds that things are not quite as Zane's character (Hughie) has made them out to be. While he's gone, Hughie overpowers Kidman's character (Rae) and takes over her and John's yacht. For most of the rest of the film, John must try to keep the floundering Orpheus afloat, and Rae must try to figure out a way to overpower her abductor and get back to John.

Most of the changes from the book can't be discussed in depth without giving away crucial turns of plot, but there are two which are especially striking: one concerning the number of major characters, and one concerning the extent of Hughie's sociopathy. With regard to the latter, let's just say that whereas in the book Hughie is a troubled and potentially dangerous young man, in the film he's a murderous psycho. The problem is that although we see graphic evidence of his lethality, Hughie is still written pretty much the same way he is in the novel: it never quite makes sense that he is supposed to be a total monster, especially as the interaction between him and Rae depends on us accepting a certain naively trusting quality in his personality that feels out of sync with the aforementioned changes in his character. It's not hard to see why the filmmakers would want to make these changes: the Hughie of the book is just not that scary in and of himself. Aside from the obvious race against time with the sinking boat and all, the tension comes from the relationship between Hughie and the other characters who don't make it all the way into the film. This leaves Noyce nothing to work with but standard mad-killer suspense tactics, and as I've said, Hughie still seems more like a spoiled, unstable kid making a big mess of things than a true cold-blooded slasher. These uneven elements lead the story into all the predictable cliches of the genre, which is too bad, because the movie has an overall feel that really works at times.

Here, then, in abandoning crucial story elements from the book, Dead Calm may seem to make the opposite mistake from the one made by After Dark, My Sweet; but from another perspective, the mistake is the same: that of retaining elements from the book that it can't make work cinematically. Billy Zane makes a very good Hughie, but he's playing the Hughie of the novel, not the Hughie they forgot to write for the film.

Someday maybe someone will release however much was completed of Orson Welles' late sixties version with Laurence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau, The Deep (no relation to the Peter Benchley novel/ Peter Yates movie), before Harvey died near the end of shooting.

The True Story of Jesse James

Robert Wagner in The True Story of Jesse James (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1957).

An engaging enough remake of King's 1939 Jesse James. Not only is it based on Nunnally Johnson's original screenplay, but some of the shots from the earlier film are directly recreated, such as the bandits scurrying across the top of the train at night with its interior all lit up, or the horses leaping off the cliff into the water (I just don't like to see that).

Wagner tries to give James an ambivalent, dangerous edge, but he's even more fundamentally clean-cut than Tyrone Power. Jeffrey Hunter is almost too believable as his brother Frank--that is, sometimes I had to strain to tell them apart. Other admirable cast members include Agnes Moorehead, Hope Lange, John Carradine (who played Robert Ford in the 1939 film, here a preacher), Frank Gorshin, and Alan Hale, Jr. Despite all this talent, and despite a story that combines generic elements of two of Ray's best films--They Live By Night and Johnny Guitar--Ray only infuses it with his distinctive directorial aura here and there, in an isolated shot or exchange. The lead-up to the inevitable "picture-straightening" scene is a beautiful superimposition of 50s suburbia onto the western past, complete with picket fence and children playing outlaw in the front yard. This too, however, was already set in place by King's film.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

Akihiro Tomikawa and Tomisaburo Wakayama in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

More literally, "Perambulator Against the Winds of Death." I really don't know what to say about these Baby Cart movies. They're masterfully put together, and always gripping, but the codes--both filmic and ethical--are often opaque to me. Sometimes I get caught up in the unflagging emphasis on samurai honor before it occurs to me that this honor is depicted in an utterly incoherent way. Sometimes Ogami Itto steps in and does chivalrous things for damsels in distress (mostly prostitutes), and sometimes he just stands there with that sour, blank expression on his face (yes, it's both sour and blank) and watches the bad guys raping and killing innocent women. And there's just so much rape. Rape, rape, rape. Rape and killing. Lots of killing. Killing and honor. Every once in a while, when there's a lull in the carnage, li'l Daigoro looks around in wonder at scenes of natural serenity and beauty. At least I think it's wonder; his gaze is as blank and pitiless as his father's.

The Return of Frank James

Henry Fonda in The Return of Frank James (dir. Fritz Lang, 1940).

It's a disappointment that Fritz Lang's first western is not quite as good as the film it is a sequel to (Henry King's Jesse James). Not as good, that is, at being the kind of film the first was: a big romantic crowd pleaser with lots of action and glamor. This would be fine if it were as good as other Fritz Lang films, but that's not the case either, although there are some attractive visual arrangements in which you can spot his emotive signature of brooding and dread. Henry Fonda reprises his performance as Frank James, and he's good, but he never delivers fully on the promise of wraithlike sternness he showed just standing in front of the camera in Jesse. Gene Tierney doesn't make much of her movie debut: all she gets to do is be a perky kid reporter and make a few concerned noises. John Carradine is a pleasure to watch as Robert Ford, but here as in the first film, he has sadly little screen time. The Jackie Cooper character (gung-ho kid tagging along after Frank) is useless. The color is dramatically more muted than in the first film, and that would make sense if Lang were consistently true to his downbeat aesthetic, but the screen captures I've posted above nearly exhaust the moments when this is the case, so a lot of the time things just look dull. There's a brief but mildly inspired scene where Frank walks in on the Ford brothers doing a heinously false cabaret "reenactment" of Jesse's murder, with the delightful help of career extra Barbara Pepper as Nellie Blane, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the West."

Jesse James

I am a fugitive from a James gang: Tyrone Power as Jesse in Jesse James (dir. Henry King, 1939).

Is "Tyrone Power" the best name ever or what? If ever there were a moniker you would think for sure had to be dreamed up by an agent, there it is--but the Powers are actually a venerable old family, and Tyrone was named after a long line of fathers and grandfathers. The next thing you'd think is that this guy was just a cardboard cut-out with a nice physique and smile, but he's convincing as Jesse, especially when he's got a few days' growth of beard to cover over the look of pampered innocence. I really want to believe that the following quote I found attributed to him on IMdB is genuine, but my confidence level is low: "Some day I will show all the motherfuckers who say I was a success just because of my pretty face. Sometimes I wish I'd have a really bad car accident so my face would get smashed up and I'd look like Eddie Constantine."

The movie is pure Hollywood: unrepentant historical distortion, anachronistic hair and makeup, endless schtick of all sorts. It's also a fun ride, and has some nuance here and there. There are even a few moments when the technicolor popcorn-fest darkens to admit some chilling vignettes, as when some neighborhood kids play outlaw in the front yard, pointing sticks at little Jesse Junior and shouting "You're Jesse James! You're dead!" "I'm dead," he agrees quietly, with hands folded across his chest, as his father looks on in consternation--moments before going to live out the scene in earnest himself.

Home from the Hill

"How a man lives": Robert Mitchum in Home from the Hill (dir. Vincente Minelli, 1960).



George Peppard and Luana Patten.



Eleanor Parker.

They don't make them like this anymore. Specifically, the grand genre of Hollywood melodrama is all but extinct, at least in its pure form, although there are decadent vestiges of it in things like As Good as It Gets, The Ice Storm, or even a mess like Crash (Haggis, not Cronenberg). Spike Lee and David Lynch, to name just a couple, still pay visual and structural homage to the genre here and there. Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven is a loving facsimile of high Sirkian melodrama, but in such a self-consciously conspicuous manner that it only reinforces my point: that the genre can exist fully now only as pastiche. It's not just that the codes and conventions of the form now convert instantly into irony; that irony was always there, generating much of the beguiling tension that thrummed beneath the exaggerated color and statuesque human posturings. Part of the irony of the irony then was that the picture would still make hearts swell and break whether the irony were missed or not. Now if it is missed, the drama falls flat, and if it is caught, the drama either falls flat or wasn't meant to stand up in the first place. We have not, in truth, grown more ironic as a culture; we have stopped learning how to integrate our irony with other modes of consciousness. When we single something out as "ironic" now, it often means either that we are being lazy in not accounting more inclusively for the strangely mediated pathos to which we are responding, or--perhaps, sadly, more frequently--that a flat, simplistic travesty of irony is all there is to respond to.

Minelli's luxuriously blighted saga of the Hunnicutt family is brimming with irony, but it is an irony that never hardens into self-negation. Nor does it overwhelm its characters with what is, up to a point, its earnest contempt for their surface glamor and carnality. Robert Mitchum's Wade Hunnicutt is a swaggering, callous rogue, a cheater and neglecter, a bloodthirsty feudal throwback. His lust for life and even love is a sort of grace, but not really a saving one. In the end, we feel close to him without admiring or respecting him. Similarly, his two sons--one (Theron, played by George Hamilton) legitimate and acknowledged but plagued by self-doubt, the other (Rafael or Rafe, played by George Peppard) a bastard swept under the rug but possessed of ambition and vitality--are just out of the reach of our affections. Each is likeable in his own way, but not fully loveable: they are too neurotic, too chained to the repressed agon of their origins. Wade's wife Hannah (Eleanor Parker) has been sexually and emotionally unavailable to him for years, nursing an unwavering resentment of his infidelity. Her passive resistance to his demands for warmth reads at first as frigidity, and her closeness to Theron as manipulative and smothering, but these stereotypical qualities are gradually revealed as surface tics. Theron (the name itself is ironic, at least at first--he starts off as anything but a "wild beast") falls in love with young Libby Halsted (Luana Patten), and for a short time becomes confident in himself as a man, but the weight of his family history intrudes, and Rafe must become his surrogate. It's complicated, as they say on Facebook. But what marks all this as hardcore melodrama is not the convoluted and grotesque web of troubled relationships per se. It is an implied attitude toward these travails, a mood of fatalistic lyricism. The objective correlative to this mood, here as in all great cinematic melodrama, is distributed across the entire mise en scene of the production. It is in the set decor, the lighting, the music, the near-absurdly rich color, the almost exaggeratedly elegant composition in the frame. Life, this look and feel seems to say, is the grandest and most sweeping of hollow spectacles. Its sorrows and sweetnesses are all the sharper for being so easily mocked.