Director: Bill Elverman
Stars: Stephanie Johnson, Bill Elverman and Heath Sweatman
Up in the wild winds of Wisconsin, Liz is chopping wood with a black eye when Mike shows up trying to find Sam, her significant other and his best friend. He hasn't shown up for work, he isn't in any of the usual places he goes on a drunk and nobody seems to know where he could have got to. Liz knows though and what she shows Mike (and how he reacts) comprises our plot.
This is an intriguing little film. It's only 24 minutes long, which makes it a decent length for a short, plenty of time to throw out an idea and let things unfold. We find out pretty quickly what's happened but we're still left in suspense wondering where it's all going. We're not sure who's telling the truth and so we try to figure out whether there are any clues in the dialogue. What we know more than anything is that we don't know everything.
It's an intriguing little film, written and directed by Bill Elverman, who also plays Mike. He's best known as an actor, obviously in demand given the string of credits to his name: he made what could well be seven feature films in 2008 alone. Given that this is very much his work I'm really interested to seeing what else he's getting up to. There are a couple of his short films linked from IMDb and I'll definitely follow up by watching those.
This isn't perfect, though it's a neat little picture. The composition of frame is particularly excellent for a small scale film but the camerawork is shaky, especially when it's trying to track. The lighting is a little dim and the sound is inconsistent. I think the crew are working beyond the level that their equipment can take them. I hope they get the budget and equipment to be able to take it all to that next level.
Monday, 22 February 2010
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Child Bride (1938)
Director: Harry J Revier
Stars: Shirley Mills and Bob Bollinger
I knew that Manos: The Hands of Fate had been referenced by many people in the know as the real worst film of all time, including the writers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 who had effectively rescued it from cinematic oblivion. However when researching that film I found tantalising snippets about another movie that they declined to screen on their show, one that they once threw out in answer to a convention Q&A question as to whether they had seen anything worse. That movie was 1938's Child Bride, so naturally I had to add it to my Cinematic Hell viewing list. It was a US government funded movie intended to be shown as an educational piece in the Ozarks and other areas of the American deep south where it was seen as acceptable for grown men to marry young girls. And by young, I don't mean seventeen. This is a film that's in the public domain, available on cheap box sets everywhere but is still categorised at Wikipedia under 'films with a pedophile theme'. Be warned.
'Here is a page from the Book of Life...' begins the introduction, just to emphasise how down to earth this purports but utterly fails to be. It tells us that it's based on real 'back yonder' folk living 'deep in the heart of Thunderhead Mountain', so presumably they're all hobbits or trolls or some such. Given what some of the actors look like I wouldn't be too surprised to find some truth in that, even though they don't have round doors and I couldn't get enough of a look at their feet to see how hairy they are. I kept looking out for a balrog but I don't think they had the CGI budget in 1938. That's a real shame because a balrog could have made all the difference for this film.
The introduction also points out that the filmmakers 'aim neither to ridicule nor to defend their mode of living', but have one aim: to abolish the institution of child marriage. In other words, these 'back yonder' folk can do anything they like as long as they like, because it's their right as citizens of the Shire, I mean Thunderhead Mountain, just so long as they don't get up to any of those child marriage shenanigans. That might sound good to begin with but remember that well when you find out what else these 'back yonder' folk get up to. Apparently, for instance, it's OK to be an alcoholic wifebeating bootlegger or to kill people in cold blood in front of already traumatised children as long as you're against child marriage. If only this textbook on ethics could have told us whether or not it's OK to download a Metallica album from the internet we'd be set for life. Perhaps one thing at a time is enough and they were waiting for the sequel to handle peer to peer filesharing.
The central family in the story, the Coltons, apparently don't believe in child marriage either as they own a book called Child Marriage: A Crime that's rather conveniently placed in the frame as we begin. However they have a rather strange approach to demonstrating their opposition: they dress their little twelve year old girl in the skimpiest outfit they possibly can, one conveniently ripped up the front just to highlight that she isn't wearing anything underneath, and let her frolic off to the pigpen in it. She's Jennie Colton and beyond yawning expressively and showing us she doesn't wear any underwear she also gets to sprawl in the mud and indulge in a water fight with her friend Freddie Nulty within the first two minutes of the movie. Are you paying attention? Horseplay with your half naked twelve year old neighbour is fine, just no child marriage.
Fortunately she gets changed before heading out to school with Freddie, because while the Coltons obviously can't afford underwear for little Jennie they can afford a decent outfit for school and another for funerals. Priorities are important in moralistic movies of the thirties, I guess, but it really isn't good when a bad movie gets uncomfortable too and within thirty seconds of the end of the opening credits to boot. Oh, and it gets worse, a lot worse. At least the next uncomfortable scene has less to do with looking up Jennie's short dress and more to do with a pigeon crapping in Alex Cross's textbook. At least this highlights that Thunderhead Mountain must be a really affluent 'back yonder' community, because they have more textbooks than they do in West Phoenix.
Before the pigeon poop incident Freddie's dad gets shot but apparently that's no big deal. It's a through and through so he'll be fine but he's promptly ignored for the rest of the movie anyway. He's apparently only there so that Miss Carol, the uppity schoolteacher, can summon Jennie and Freddie to the front of the class to establish her decency by not bitching them out for being late. She only does that when Freddie can't spell 'milking'. Miss Carol is a local girl made good, claiming to be utterly a mountain girl even though she wears posh frills and make up and practices emotional blackmail on her man Charles, who is now the local assistant district attorney. Yes, he's made good but she won't leave Thunderhead Mountain to be with him because she's devoted her life to changing the local attitude to child marriage and, hey, he'd let her stay if he really loves her. Amazingly that works. Ethics check: emotional blackmail is good, child marriage is bad.
So Miss Carol wanders around trying to instil morality into the local women, telling them that they'll be old at 25 and that they must obey nature's laws, but none of them pay attention. Their menfolk do, but they don't like any of it, so they robe up and kidnap her by torchlight so they can tar and feather her at Spooky Hollow. Now my personal code of exploitation movie ethics says that it's not OK to discover that twelve year old girls don't wear underwear thirty seconds into a movie while it should be compulsory to have cute female teachers tarred and feathered at places called Spooky Hollow, but this movie has it all backwards. The robed menfolk of Thunderhead Mountain get interrupted and stopped before we see any more of Miss Carol than her naked back, but twelve year old Jennie gets her own three hour skinny dipping scene.
Well it feels that long anyway. I told you it was going to get worse, right? Well apparently the best way to persuade dirty old men to stop marrying twelve year old girls is to let them see them naked, swimming around in the buff like this was a naturist movie. At least Jennie won't let Freddie go skinny dipping with her any more because Miss Carol says that's not OK any more. After all, they're not what they used to be and she'd put bad ideas into his head, so while he can carry on kissing her, he can only do it when she has her clothes on. Are you keeping up with these ethics? Twelve year old boys can't go skinny dipping with twelve year old girls but we can watch them for what feels like forever because this is an anti-child marriage movie.
I should point out that we have a villain in this story, who is naturally smitten by Jennie, our prepubescent heroine, after watching her swim naked. He's Jake Bolby and he's her father's partner in his backwoods still business. Ira Colton is a fine upstanding bootlegger, an equal opportunities employer too given that his entire staff seems to consist of Angelo the dwarf, Happy the retard and Jake Bolby the villain of the piece, but Jake is one step too far. After he tosses Happy into the creek and beats up Angelo for his money, Ira beats him up in return and sends him packing. That just leaves the three of them, but they're enough to save Miss Carol, after Angelo hears her screams from the bed he shares with Happy. Remember that one: the mentally handicapped and the physically challenged of the same sex can share a single bed but tarring and feathering teachers is beyond the pale.
Anyway Jake doesn't take kindly to Ira beating him up twice, once for robbing his hired dwarf and then a second time for being one of those robed kidnappers, so he mounts a dastardly plan for revenge. When Ira staggers through town drunk one day, Jake has his buddies plant a seed of distrust in his head, letting him overhear how his wife Flora has been cheating on him with Jake. They know that when he's not being an equal opportunities employer he's an alcoholic wifebeater, you see, so off he goes to his shack to knock his wife senseless and collapse in a drunken stupor on the floor. Jake promptly stabs him to death and even more promptly appears when Flora and her daughter discover the corpse to blackmail her into giving him Jennie as a wife.
This film is something of a nightmare, not just because it peppers its supposedly moral story with exploitative child nudity but because it seems to follow a rather twisted chain of nightmarish logic. You might expect a story with an unabashed moral message to polarise its characters into the good guys and the bad guys, you know, to avoid confusion or something, but it gives up on that entirely about halfway through to paint everyone as bad guys and leave us wondering just who we're supposed to be cheering for. Writer and director Harry J Revier doesn't seem to be sure.
For instance, he establishes the Coltons as good people from moment one. Ira saves the life of Freddie's father who has been shot and left for dead, fights for the honour of his lesser able employees when assaulted by an able bodied man, even saves the damsel in distress when she's abducted by cowardly kidnappers with hidden faces. What a hero! Ah, but no, he's really just an alcoholic who beats his wife. His wife Flora did her part too, but then we find out she did the partner before she got married, spends most of the film showing everyone her cleavage and eventually gives her daughter up to save her own neck. She comes very close to falling out of her rag of a dress on more than a few occasions.
Even Miss Carol, the saintly schoolteacher who puts the moral health of these backwoods hicks before her own marriage and future wellbeing, changes between appearances. She's all righteous and self sacrificing early on but then disappears until the end of the movie, by which time she seems to forget things rather conveniently. She'll do anything she can to stop Jake marrying Jennie but there just isn't anything she can do. Why even try? When her boyfriend finally makes her dream come true by persuading the governor to sign a law banning child marriage, she's happy of course, but can't even be bothered to go save Jennie from being ravaged in the matrimonial bed given that she just got hitched that very same night under threat of blackmail.
By the time we get to the end, there's nobody left to root for, except the dwarf who saves the day in an act of cold blooded murder. From behind. Without warning. While hidden behind a rock. Just because he threw him ruthlessly to the ground earlier on in the story. Wait, we're supposed to be rooting for this guy? Cold blooded murder is fine and dandy but marrying a child when the law says it's OK is not. Yeah, OK. Way to teach us a moral lesson, Harry J Revier. What were you thinking? Why not just make these folks believable people with minor character flaws and then win out at the last moment with the whole changing the law concept? Would that have been difficult? Wow, what went on in your brain? How old was your wife when you got hitched? No wonder this was your last film.
What's most amazing here is not that Harry Revier didn't make any more films, it's that Shirley Mills did. She was twelve years old when she got to strip buck naked for this movie, her film debut, but she was apparently fine with the concept and looks back on the experience as a positive one. Her website talks about the public being horrified by news of grown men marrying girls as young as nine in Appalachia and that the Production Code prohibited Hollywood from addressing the issue. It took an independent filmmaker working outside of the confines of that code to make such a film and take it on the road to educate the public. Mills explains that children were far more innocent in those days than now but it's not clear whether she was talking about the child brides themselves or her appearance in this movie. Whichever, she ends her notes by saying that 'yes, I was proud to appear in that film.'
It certainly got her noticed. Two years later she was the young daughter of the Joad family in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, and she'd work for many of the other great names of the era including Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor and Michael Curtiz. That makes her one of the few names here to have a career in the industry. Most of them had never acted on screen before and never would again, including Bob Bollinger and George Humphreys, who played Freddie and Ira Colton respectively. The same went for Diana Durrell (Miss Carol) or Dorothy Carrol (Flora Colton), even though they had connections. Carrol was the wife of the director, Harry Revier, and Durrell was the fiancée of Raymond Friedgen, the producer.
The only other names that really had careers as actors were Angelo Rossitto and Warner Richmond. Richmond, the villain of the piece here, was usually a good guy and had a long run as such in movies going as far back as 1912 and continuing almost up until his death in 1948. Rossitto, bizarrely credited as Don Barrett but playing a character with his own name, Angelo the dwarf, had a career that spanned seven decades from the tail end of the silent era to the late eighties. You've seen his memorable 2'11" frame many times, I'm sure, whether you remember him best from Freaks, from Pufnstuf or from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. He made 62 movies and I've now seen almost half of them.
The other name worth mentioning is that of Kroger Babb. He was one of the most legendary showmen in exploitation film history, right up there with David Friedman, getting wild exploitation films made then taking them on the road, hawking them like the barker in a medicine show. This was the first film he exhibited, under one of its reissue titles, Dust to Dust, surprisingly far less overt a title than Child Bride or Child Bride of the Ozarks. I'll leave the final word to his wife, Mildred Horn, who wrote his most successful title, Mom and Dad, a morality story about teenage pregnancy that cost $62,000 to make and may have grossed $100m. She called this film, 'the most atrocious thing I ever saw.' Manos: The Hands of Fate is definitely worse, but this is more atrocious. I can totally see why the MST:3K guys didn't screen it.
Stars: Shirley Mills and Bob Bollinger
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 | I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good. |
I knew that Manos: The Hands of Fate had been referenced by many people in the know as the real worst film of all time, including the writers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 who had effectively rescued it from cinematic oblivion. However when researching that film I found tantalising snippets about another movie that they declined to screen on their show, one that they once threw out in answer to a convention Q&A question as to whether they had seen anything worse. That movie was 1938's Child Bride, so naturally I had to add it to my Cinematic Hell viewing list. It was a US government funded movie intended to be shown as an educational piece in the Ozarks and other areas of the American deep south where it was seen as acceptable for grown men to marry young girls. And by young, I don't mean seventeen. This is a film that's in the public domain, available on cheap box sets everywhere but is still categorised at Wikipedia under 'films with a pedophile theme'. Be warned.
'Here is a page from the Book of Life...' begins the introduction, just to emphasise how down to earth this purports but utterly fails to be. It tells us that it's based on real 'back yonder' folk living 'deep in the heart of Thunderhead Mountain', so presumably they're all hobbits or trolls or some such. Given what some of the actors look like I wouldn't be too surprised to find some truth in that, even though they don't have round doors and I couldn't get enough of a look at their feet to see how hairy they are. I kept looking out for a balrog but I don't think they had the CGI budget in 1938. That's a real shame because a balrog could have made all the difference for this film.
The introduction also points out that the filmmakers 'aim neither to ridicule nor to defend their mode of living', but have one aim: to abolish the institution of child marriage. In other words, these 'back yonder' folk can do anything they like as long as they like, because it's their right as citizens of the Shire, I mean Thunderhead Mountain, just so long as they don't get up to any of those child marriage shenanigans. That might sound good to begin with but remember that well when you find out what else these 'back yonder' folk get up to. Apparently, for instance, it's OK to be an alcoholic wifebeating bootlegger or to kill people in cold blood in front of already traumatised children as long as you're against child marriage. If only this textbook on ethics could have told us whether or not it's OK to download a Metallica album from the internet we'd be set for life. Perhaps one thing at a time is enough and they were waiting for the sequel to handle peer to peer filesharing.
The central family in the story, the Coltons, apparently don't believe in child marriage either as they own a book called Child Marriage: A Crime that's rather conveniently placed in the frame as we begin. However they have a rather strange approach to demonstrating their opposition: they dress their little twelve year old girl in the skimpiest outfit they possibly can, one conveniently ripped up the front just to highlight that she isn't wearing anything underneath, and let her frolic off to the pigpen in it. She's Jennie Colton and beyond yawning expressively and showing us she doesn't wear any underwear she also gets to sprawl in the mud and indulge in a water fight with her friend Freddie Nulty within the first two minutes of the movie. Are you paying attention? Horseplay with your half naked twelve year old neighbour is fine, just no child marriage.
Fortunately she gets changed before heading out to school with Freddie, because while the Coltons obviously can't afford underwear for little Jennie they can afford a decent outfit for school and another for funerals. Priorities are important in moralistic movies of the thirties, I guess, but it really isn't good when a bad movie gets uncomfortable too and within thirty seconds of the end of the opening credits to boot. Oh, and it gets worse, a lot worse. At least the next uncomfortable scene has less to do with looking up Jennie's short dress and more to do with a pigeon crapping in Alex Cross's textbook. At least this highlights that Thunderhead Mountain must be a really affluent 'back yonder' community, because they have more textbooks than they do in West Phoenix.
Before the pigeon poop incident Freddie's dad gets shot but apparently that's no big deal. It's a through and through so he'll be fine but he's promptly ignored for the rest of the movie anyway. He's apparently only there so that Miss Carol, the uppity schoolteacher, can summon Jennie and Freddie to the front of the class to establish her decency by not bitching them out for being late. She only does that when Freddie can't spell 'milking'. Miss Carol is a local girl made good, claiming to be utterly a mountain girl even though she wears posh frills and make up and practices emotional blackmail on her man Charles, who is now the local assistant district attorney. Yes, he's made good but she won't leave Thunderhead Mountain to be with him because she's devoted her life to changing the local attitude to child marriage and, hey, he'd let her stay if he really loves her. Amazingly that works. Ethics check: emotional blackmail is good, child marriage is bad.
So Miss Carol wanders around trying to instil morality into the local women, telling them that they'll be old at 25 and that they must obey nature's laws, but none of them pay attention. Their menfolk do, but they don't like any of it, so they robe up and kidnap her by torchlight so they can tar and feather her at Spooky Hollow. Now my personal code of exploitation movie ethics says that it's not OK to discover that twelve year old girls don't wear underwear thirty seconds into a movie while it should be compulsory to have cute female teachers tarred and feathered at places called Spooky Hollow, but this movie has it all backwards. The robed menfolk of Thunderhead Mountain get interrupted and stopped before we see any more of Miss Carol than her naked back, but twelve year old Jennie gets her own three hour skinny dipping scene.
Well it feels that long anyway. I told you it was going to get worse, right? Well apparently the best way to persuade dirty old men to stop marrying twelve year old girls is to let them see them naked, swimming around in the buff like this was a naturist movie. At least Jennie won't let Freddie go skinny dipping with her any more because Miss Carol says that's not OK any more. After all, they're not what they used to be and she'd put bad ideas into his head, so while he can carry on kissing her, he can only do it when she has her clothes on. Are you keeping up with these ethics? Twelve year old boys can't go skinny dipping with twelve year old girls but we can watch them for what feels like forever because this is an anti-child marriage movie.
I should point out that we have a villain in this story, who is naturally smitten by Jennie, our prepubescent heroine, after watching her swim naked. He's Jake Bolby and he's her father's partner in his backwoods still business. Ira Colton is a fine upstanding bootlegger, an equal opportunities employer too given that his entire staff seems to consist of Angelo the dwarf, Happy the retard and Jake Bolby the villain of the piece, but Jake is one step too far. After he tosses Happy into the creek and beats up Angelo for his money, Ira beats him up in return and sends him packing. That just leaves the three of them, but they're enough to save Miss Carol, after Angelo hears her screams from the bed he shares with Happy. Remember that one: the mentally handicapped and the physically challenged of the same sex can share a single bed but tarring and feathering teachers is beyond the pale.
Anyway Jake doesn't take kindly to Ira beating him up twice, once for robbing his hired dwarf and then a second time for being one of those robed kidnappers, so he mounts a dastardly plan for revenge. When Ira staggers through town drunk one day, Jake has his buddies plant a seed of distrust in his head, letting him overhear how his wife Flora has been cheating on him with Jake. They know that when he's not being an equal opportunities employer he's an alcoholic wifebeater, you see, so off he goes to his shack to knock his wife senseless and collapse in a drunken stupor on the floor. Jake promptly stabs him to death and even more promptly appears when Flora and her daughter discover the corpse to blackmail her into giving him Jennie as a wife.
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For instance, he establishes the Coltons as good people from moment one. Ira saves the life of Freddie's father who has been shot and left for dead, fights for the honour of his lesser able employees when assaulted by an able bodied man, even saves the damsel in distress when she's abducted by cowardly kidnappers with hidden faces. What a hero! Ah, but no, he's really just an alcoholic who beats his wife. His wife Flora did her part too, but then we find out she did the partner before she got married, spends most of the film showing everyone her cleavage and eventually gives her daughter up to save her own neck. She comes very close to falling out of her rag of a dress on more than a few occasions.
Even Miss Carol, the saintly schoolteacher who puts the moral health of these backwoods hicks before her own marriage and future wellbeing, changes between appearances. She's all righteous and self sacrificing early on but then disappears until the end of the movie, by which time she seems to forget things rather conveniently. She'll do anything she can to stop Jake marrying Jennie but there just isn't anything she can do. Why even try? When her boyfriend finally makes her dream come true by persuading the governor to sign a law banning child marriage, she's happy of course, but can't even be bothered to go save Jennie from being ravaged in the matrimonial bed given that she just got hitched that very same night under threat of blackmail.
By the time we get to the end, there's nobody left to root for, except the dwarf who saves the day in an act of cold blooded murder. From behind. Without warning. While hidden behind a rock. Just because he threw him ruthlessly to the ground earlier on in the story. Wait, we're supposed to be rooting for this guy? Cold blooded murder is fine and dandy but marrying a child when the law says it's OK is not. Yeah, OK. Way to teach us a moral lesson, Harry J Revier. What were you thinking? Why not just make these folks believable people with minor character flaws and then win out at the last moment with the whole changing the law concept? Would that have been difficult? Wow, what went on in your brain? How old was your wife when you got hitched? No wonder this was your last film.
What's most amazing here is not that Harry Revier didn't make any more films, it's that Shirley Mills did. She was twelve years old when she got to strip buck naked for this movie, her film debut, but she was apparently fine with the concept and looks back on the experience as a positive one. Her website talks about the public being horrified by news of grown men marrying girls as young as nine in Appalachia and that the Production Code prohibited Hollywood from addressing the issue. It took an independent filmmaker working outside of the confines of that code to make such a film and take it on the road to educate the public. Mills explains that children were far more innocent in those days than now but it's not clear whether she was talking about the child brides themselves or her appearance in this movie. Whichever, she ends her notes by saying that 'yes, I was proud to appear in that film.'
It certainly got her noticed. Two years later she was the young daughter of the Joad family in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, and she'd work for many of the other great names of the era including Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor and Michael Curtiz. That makes her one of the few names here to have a career in the industry. Most of them had never acted on screen before and never would again, including Bob Bollinger and George Humphreys, who played Freddie and Ira Colton respectively. The same went for Diana Durrell (Miss Carol) or Dorothy Carrol (Flora Colton), even though they had connections. Carrol was the wife of the director, Harry Revier, and Durrell was the fiancée of Raymond Friedgen, the producer.
The only other names that really had careers as actors were Angelo Rossitto and Warner Richmond. Richmond, the villain of the piece here, was usually a good guy and had a long run as such in movies going as far back as 1912 and continuing almost up until his death in 1948. Rossitto, bizarrely credited as Don Barrett but playing a character with his own name, Angelo the dwarf, had a career that spanned seven decades from the tail end of the silent era to the late eighties. You've seen his memorable 2'11" frame many times, I'm sure, whether you remember him best from Freaks, from Pufnstuf or from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. He made 62 movies and I've now seen almost half of them.
The other name worth mentioning is that of Kroger Babb. He was one of the most legendary showmen in exploitation film history, right up there with David Friedman, getting wild exploitation films made then taking them on the road, hawking them like the barker in a medicine show. This was the first film he exhibited, under one of its reissue titles, Dust to Dust, surprisingly far less overt a title than Child Bride or Child Bride of the Ozarks. I'll leave the final word to his wife, Mildred Horn, who wrote his most successful title, Mom and Dad, a morality story about teenage pregnancy that cost $62,000 to make and may have grossed $100m. She called this film, 'the most atrocious thing I ever saw.' Manos: The Hands of Fate is definitely worse, but this is more atrocious. I can totally see why the MST:3K guys didn't screen it.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Director: Arthur Penn
Stars: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
It might sound strange for me to say that Bonnie and Clyde reminded me a lot of Gone with the Wind but it's true nonetheless and for quite a few reasons. Both grabbed my attention from moment one: the one underlining its overt epic feel by beginning with an overture, the other with a host of photo snaps with unignorable sounds to match. Both are period pieces set far enough back that my parents hadn't even become glimpses themselves yet, let alone me. Both are notably important and innovative films that have resonated down the years to audiences and critics alike. But most of all I couldn't find anything in either of them to care about or identify with. This film definitely warranted a second viewing to see if it improved any to someone with the cultural distance I have from its initial release.
There's a scene early on that sums up in no uncertain terms what Bonnie and Clyde is about. Clyde is teaching Bonnie how to shoot, behind an empty and foreclosed house, only to be interrupted by the former owner, Otis Harris. There's no violence, no fuss, just that sort of purest matter of factness than only a certain era of rural Americans seemed to have. 'Bank took it,' says Otis. 'Well, that's a pitiful shame,' says Bonnie. So Clyde shoots the house, then passes the gun to Otis so he can shoot the house as well. Over wanders Davis, the black labourer who worked the farm with Otis and he shoots it too. Everyone introduces themselves like they're at a tea party at the vicarage. And as they split up, Clyde memorably adds, 'We rob banks'.
It's a great scene and I wonder how people saw it on original release. The real Bonnie and Clyde worked their violent trade during the Great Depression when banks were often real bad guys, and this movie version of their exploits was released just as the counterculture was reaching its peak. As raging against the machine was almost required behaviour in 1967, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow thus became great and timely anti-heroes, especially given the way they rob banks. During one robbery we see, Clyde lets a customer keep his money because it's his not the bank's; and after it's over and the press start interviewing everyone involved, even the security guards get to be heroes. Everyone wins and even the banks are insured, right?
The catch is that I don't live in either of those eras and as much as I can happily rail against banks today (except the one I work for, naturally), I can't identify in the slightest with Bonnie or Clyde or any of their gang. It isn't that they're bad people, because I'm all for watching good anti-heroes. It isn't that they're badly written, because the script is clever and everyone is well defined, even the language used being thoroughly believable, in its mix of slang and half illiterate American. It isn't that they're badly played, because the acting is top notch, every one of the five names at the top of the cast really breathing life and depth into their characters. It's just that they're frickin' annoying, all of them.
Clyde Barrow is a small time thief whose only aim in life appears to be to become a bigger time thief, the two years he served for armed robbery not slowing him down none. His bad English rubs off on us, full of double and triple negatives. He has an idiot grin, which apparently charms the socks off his Bonnie, but he can't do anything once she's charmed because as even he points out, he's no loverboy. Quite why Warren Beatty felt so drawn to play an impotent moron, I really don't know, but he did. He had much to do with getting the film made, acting as the film's producer as well as its leading man; and he had much to do with its success too, promoting it tirelessly after Warner Brothers started it out with a limited B picture run. They had so little faith in it that they offered Beatty 40% of the gross instead of a minimal fee.
Faye Dunaway starts the film naked, which can hardly be a bad thing, but she spends much of the rest of it getting more and more repressed. Bonnie Parker gets excited just watching Clyde getting ready to steal her mother's car and by the time he takes her into town and robs a grocery store in front of her, she's so hot and bothered that I'm seriously impressed Clyde keeps the car on the road. She's all over him, literally, only to find that it won't get her anywhere. She provides much of the real character of the film, writing the notes that they send to the newspapers and posing for photographs with captured Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. If only there had been more of that and less of her getting more and more upset at the mere presence of Buck Barrow's wife Blanche, there would be more actual enjoyment in the film.
Buck is Clyde's elder brother, who had also served time before we meet him, and who is played to great effect by a young Gene Hackman. He's probably the brightest of the bunch, which doesn't say much, but he has precisely one joke and he's a little too fond of it. 'Son, whatever you do, don't sell that cow!' Yeah, we got you first time, Buck. He's magnetism personified compared to his wife though, because we're just as annoyed at Blanche as Bonnie is. Like everyone else, Estelle Parsons plays her role with panache, but especially given that Blanche is a preacher's daughter, we can't help but pray for her to go away. Far away. I'm truly stunned that she won the Oscar that year for Best Supporting Actress. The last of the bunch is Michael J Pollard as C W Moss, who I actually thought was retarded for a while. He's really a conglomeration of all the lesser gang members along with a few other associated gangsters too like John Dillinger, though he's not really any less accurate than most of the portrayals this film boasts.
Only two members of the Barrow Gang were still alive when this film was made. Blanche was one and Beatty actually showed her the script, which she approved of. By the time she went to see it in theatres with her third husband though, it had been changed more than a little, which left her more than a little embarrassed to see herself portrayed as what she aptly described as 'a screaming horse's ass'. W D Jones, one of the gangsters who was bundled up into the character of C W Moss, even sued Warner Brothers for maligning his character, though he never collected. Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who Bonnie and Clyde so memorably toy with here, was real but never actually met them until the successful ambush at the end of the film. His wife and son won an out of court settlement for defamation of character.
Most tellingly, when Jean-Luc Godard, who was approached to direct the film when François Truffaut, the initial choice as director, passed in order to make Fahrenheit 451, saw the film, he said it was, 'Great! Now let's go make Bonnie and Clyde.' In fact it's these two names that perhaps ring truest when talking about the film, even though they had very little if anything to do with the finished product, Truffaut merely making some early contributions to the script before moving on. This doesn't feel in any way like a Hollywood movie, fitting far more comfortably in the style of the French New Wave. The editing is choppy, the tone ever changing and the underlying feel an upbeat, almost jovial one even when things get all brutal and bloody.
This was deliberate, the aim being to show the violence in a comic way, almost like a cartoon or a slapstick movie, then switch abruptly to realism. You can't get much more comic than the way Bonnie and Clyde go about their business. They're really not bright and they wouldn't know what a plan was if it was painted on the inside of their eyelids. They merely waltz into whatever bank or store happens to be around, without anything to hide their faces, and announce that they're robbing it. As time goes by, they even begin introducing themselves during their holdups. It's as if they're not really robbing banks at all, they're just out for kicks. I couldn't help wondering what they'd do if they came across one of those old ladies who hang around by the door nowadays to check receipts. They'd probably go back and get one just to give her job satisfaction.
And then it all gets brutal. During one inept getaway in which C W gets them stuck up in traffic, a man jumps onto the running board and Clyde shoots him in the face. This has been cited as the first time a Hollywood film showed both the firing of a gun and the consequences of it having fired in the same shot. While the Production Code technically stayed in effect until 1968, a year after this film was released, it was dying on its feet by 1964, increasingly out of touch with reality. This film would not have been possible in the States only a few years earlier, at least from one of the major studios, but in 1967 it became another prominent nail in the Code's coffin. It made extensive use of squibs, tiny explosive blood packets detonated inside clothing to give the effect of being hit by bullets. It goes for full out overkill in that final, justifiably memorable, ambush scene. Less overt but still obvious is the substitution of violence for sex, made blatant early on by Bonnie even stroking Clyde's gun, the only real manhood he has.
I should add that while this must have been something of a wake up call in 1967, it was hardly alone. The violence of Bonnie and Clyde certainly wasn't the only big change that the Academy had to deal with in 1967. Two of the other four films up for Best Picture were racially driven films, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and yet another, The Graduate, dealt with changing attitudes to youth and sex. There was plenty of important work going on in 1967 and this doesn't have a monopoly on that. The question that always arises with important films is whether they stand up to posterity. In the Heat of the Night remains amazingly powerful today, while both Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Bonnie and Clyde feel somewhat dated.
Some of the component parts of the film do stand up. The visuals are wonderful and it isn't surprising that Burnett Guffey's cinematography picked up the Oscar that year. The script won a New York Film Critics Award for writers David Newman and Robert Benton and I can understand that too, especially given the timing. This was the first mainstream film to include the sort of violence and mayhem that exploitation cinema had been working with for some time, and it changed the face of movies for ever. For my part, I'd seen many of those exploitation films before watching this and to my mind they stand up better, perhaps partly because they weren't mainstream releases but also because they have a character to them that came out of the exploitation genre that feels more magnetic to me.
Exploitation master Roger Corman made a few of the sort of films Bonnie and Clyde took its cue from, and his then minor league cast and crew cut their teeth on these movies before going on to greatness elsewhere. In the same year that Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde, Corman made The St Valentine's Day Massacre with a stunning performance by Jason Robards as Al Capone, in my humble opinon a much better film than this. Probably the closest film Corman made to Bonnie and Clyde is 1970's Bloody Mama, the true story of Ma Barker with such future heavyweight actors as Shelley Winters, Bruce Dern, Don Stroud and Robert de Niro. It's just as nihilistic as Bonnie and Clyde and even more brutal and violent, but Corman succeeds where Penn fails. He makes us care about the Barker gang even as he makes us despise them.
Another example made two years earlier is Russ Meyer's cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! While this was shot in black and white and while the violence wasn't as explicit as that in Bonnie and Clyde, it was just as shocking, perhaps more so given that it was meted out by women rather than men. There's something of a controversy among gangster nuts about whether Bonnie Parker ever used a gun or whether she merely loaded them really fast during shootouts for the guys to use. Whichever is true, she tends to leave the violence in Bonnie and Clyde to the men. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, however, is centred around powerful women who are more than happy to mete out sex and violence themselves. Tura Satana's character, Varla, is at once more womanly than Bonnie and more manly than Clyde.
In fact I'd even suggest that the world is starting to realise the importance of some of these neglected exploitation names. Love him or hate him, Russ Meyer was a true auteur and his films remain unique and highly distinctive to this day. You can't say that about Arthur Penn, regardless how great some of his movies are. The importance of Roger Corman to modern American film cannot be underplayed and he's about to receive a long overdue honorary Oscar this year. Perhaps most tellingly, I doubt I'll ever come back to Bonnie and Clyde again, after two viewings, but I'll certainly return to Corman and Meyer movies frequently. In fact I'm far more likely to return to a movie that Bonnie and Clyde watch at one point during this film, Gold Diggers of 1933, even though it's a musical. After all it had all the exuberance of classic Hollywood and the insane genius of Busby Berkeley. It had Warren William and Joan Blondell. And Guy Kibbee. And Ginger Rogers. There just isn't a comparison.
Stars: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
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 | I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here. |
It might sound strange for me to say that Bonnie and Clyde reminded me a lot of Gone with the Wind but it's true nonetheless and for quite a few reasons. Both grabbed my attention from moment one: the one underlining its overt epic feel by beginning with an overture, the other with a host of photo snaps with unignorable sounds to match. Both are period pieces set far enough back that my parents hadn't even become glimpses themselves yet, let alone me. Both are notably important and innovative films that have resonated down the years to audiences and critics alike. But most of all I couldn't find anything in either of them to care about or identify with. This film definitely warranted a second viewing to see if it improved any to someone with the cultural distance I have from its initial release.
There's a scene early on that sums up in no uncertain terms what Bonnie and Clyde is about. Clyde is teaching Bonnie how to shoot, behind an empty and foreclosed house, only to be interrupted by the former owner, Otis Harris. There's no violence, no fuss, just that sort of purest matter of factness than only a certain era of rural Americans seemed to have. 'Bank took it,' says Otis. 'Well, that's a pitiful shame,' says Bonnie. So Clyde shoots the house, then passes the gun to Otis so he can shoot the house as well. Over wanders Davis, the black labourer who worked the farm with Otis and he shoots it too. Everyone introduces themselves like they're at a tea party at the vicarage. And as they split up, Clyde memorably adds, 'We rob banks'.
It's a great scene and I wonder how people saw it on original release. The real Bonnie and Clyde worked their violent trade during the Great Depression when banks were often real bad guys, and this movie version of their exploits was released just as the counterculture was reaching its peak. As raging against the machine was almost required behaviour in 1967, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow thus became great and timely anti-heroes, especially given the way they rob banks. During one robbery we see, Clyde lets a customer keep his money because it's his not the bank's; and after it's over and the press start interviewing everyone involved, even the security guards get to be heroes. Everyone wins and even the banks are insured, right?
The catch is that I don't live in either of those eras and as much as I can happily rail against banks today (except the one I work for, naturally), I can't identify in the slightest with Bonnie or Clyde or any of their gang. It isn't that they're bad people, because I'm all for watching good anti-heroes. It isn't that they're badly written, because the script is clever and everyone is well defined, even the language used being thoroughly believable, in its mix of slang and half illiterate American. It isn't that they're badly played, because the acting is top notch, every one of the five names at the top of the cast really breathing life and depth into their characters. It's just that they're frickin' annoying, all of them.
Clyde Barrow is a small time thief whose only aim in life appears to be to become a bigger time thief, the two years he served for armed robbery not slowing him down none. His bad English rubs off on us, full of double and triple negatives. He has an idiot grin, which apparently charms the socks off his Bonnie, but he can't do anything once she's charmed because as even he points out, he's no loverboy. Quite why Warren Beatty felt so drawn to play an impotent moron, I really don't know, but he did. He had much to do with getting the film made, acting as the film's producer as well as its leading man; and he had much to do with its success too, promoting it tirelessly after Warner Brothers started it out with a limited B picture run. They had so little faith in it that they offered Beatty 40% of the gross instead of a minimal fee.
Faye Dunaway starts the film naked, which can hardly be a bad thing, but she spends much of the rest of it getting more and more repressed. Bonnie Parker gets excited just watching Clyde getting ready to steal her mother's car and by the time he takes her into town and robs a grocery store in front of her, she's so hot and bothered that I'm seriously impressed Clyde keeps the car on the road. She's all over him, literally, only to find that it won't get her anywhere. She provides much of the real character of the film, writing the notes that they send to the newspapers and posing for photographs with captured Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. If only there had been more of that and less of her getting more and more upset at the mere presence of Buck Barrow's wife Blanche, there would be more actual enjoyment in the film.
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Only two members of the Barrow Gang were still alive when this film was made. Blanche was one and Beatty actually showed her the script, which she approved of. By the time she went to see it in theatres with her third husband though, it had been changed more than a little, which left her more than a little embarrassed to see herself portrayed as what she aptly described as 'a screaming horse's ass'. W D Jones, one of the gangsters who was bundled up into the character of C W Moss, even sued Warner Brothers for maligning his character, though he never collected. Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who Bonnie and Clyde so memorably toy with here, was real but never actually met them until the successful ambush at the end of the film. His wife and son won an out of court settlement for defamation of character.
Most tellingly, when Jean-Luc Godard, who was approached to direct the film when François Truffaut, the initial choice as director, passed in order to make Fahrenheit 451, saw the film, he said it was, 'Great! Now let's go make Bonnie and Clyde.' In fact it's these two names that perhaps ring truest when talking about the film, even though they had very little if anything to do with the finished product, Truffaut merely making some early contributions to the script before moving on. This doesn't feel in any way like a Hollywood movie, fitting far more comfortably in the style of the French New Wave. The editing is choppy, the tone ever changing and the underlying feel an upbeat, almost jovial one even when things get all brutal and bloody.
This was deliberate, the aim being to show the violence in a comic way, almost like a cartoon or a slapstick movie, then switch abruptly to realism. You can't get much more comic than the way Bonnie and Clyde go about their business. They're really not bright and they wouldn't know what a plan was if it was painted on the inside of their eyelids. They merely waltz into whatever bank or store happens to be around, without anything to hide their faces, and announce that they're robbing it. As time goes by, they even begin introducing themselves during their holdups. It's as if they're not really robbing banks at all, they're just out for kicks. I couldn't help wondering what they'd do if they came across one of those old ladies who hang around by the door nowadays to check receipts. They'd probably go back and get one just to give her job satisfaction.
And then it all gets brutal. During one inept getaway in which C W gets them stuck up in traffic, a man jumps onto the running board and Clyde shoots him in the face. This has been cited as the first time a Hollywood film showed both the firing of a gun and the consequences of it having fired in the same shot. While the Production Code technically stayed in effect until 1968, a year after this film was released, it was dying on its feet by 1964, increasingly out of touch with reality. This film would not have been possible in the States only a few years earlier, at least from one of the major studios, but in 1967 it became another prominent nail in the Code's coffin. It made extensive use of squibs, tiny explosive blood packets detonated inside clothing to give the effect of being hit by bullets. It goes for full out overkill in that final, justifiably memorable, ambush scene. Less overt but still obvious is the substitution of violence for sex, made blatant early on by Bonnie even stroking Clyde's gun, the only real manhood he has.
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Some of the component parts of the film do stand up. The visuals are wonderful and it isn't surprising that Burnett Guffey's cinematography picked up the Oscar that year. The script won a New York Film Critics Award for writers David Newman and Robert Benton and I can understand that too, especially given the timing. This was the first mainstream film to include the sort of violence and mayhem that exploitation cinema had been working with for some time, and it changed the face of movies for ever. For my part, I'd seen many of those exploitation films before watching this and to my mind they stand up better, perhaps partly because they weren't mainstream releases but also because they have a character to them that came out of the exploitation genre that feels more magnetic to me.
Exploitation master Roger Corman made a few of the sort of films Bonnie and Clyde took its cue from, and his then minor league cast and crew cut their teeth on these movies before going on to greatness elsewhere. In the same year that Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde, Corman made The St Valentine's Day Massacre with a stunning performance by Jason Robards as Al Capone, in my humble opinon a much better film than this. Probably the closest film Corman made to Bonnie and Clyde is 1970's Bloody Mama, the true story of Ma Barker with such future heavyweight actors as Shelley Winters, Bruce Dern, Don Stroud and Robert de Niro. It's just as nihilistic as Bonnie and Clyde and even more brutal and violent, but Corman succeeds where Penn fails. He makes us care about the Barker gang even as he makes us despise them.
Another example made two years earlier is Russ Meyer's cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! While this was shot in black and white and while the violence wasn't as explicit as that in Bonnie and Clyde, it was just as shocking, perhaps more so given that it was meted out by women rather than men. There's something of a controversy among gangster nuts about whether Bonnie Parker ever used a gun or whether she merely loaded them really fast during shootouts for the guys to use. Whichever is true, she tends to leave the violence in Bonnie and Clyde to the men. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, however, is centred around powerful women who are more than happy to mete out sex and violence themselves. Tura Satana's character, Varla, is at once more womanly than Bonnie and more manly than Clyde.
In fact I'd even suggest that the world is starting to realise the importance of some of these neglected exploitation names. Love him or hate him, Russ Meyer was a true auteur and his films remain unique and highly distinctive to this day. You can't say that about Arthur Penn, regardless how great some of his movies are. The importance of Roger Corman to modern American film cannot be underplayed and he's about to receive a long overdue honorary Oscar this year. Perhaps most tellingly, I doubt I'll ever come back to Bonnie and Clyde again, after two viewings, but I'll certainly return to Corman and Meyer movies frequently. In fact I'm far more likely to return to a movie that Bonnie and Clyde watch at one point during this film, Gold Diggers of 1933, even though it's a musical. After all it had all the exuberance of classic Hollywood and the insane genius of Busby Berkeley. It had Warren William and Joan Blondell. And Guy Kibbee. And Ginger Rogers. There just isn't a comparison.
Stalag 17 (1953)
Director: Billy Wilder
Actors: William Holden, Don Taylor and Otto Preminger
I hadn't the faintest idea what to expect from Stalag 17. It sounded pretty tough with a title like that and it had an Academy Award under its belt, so I thought it was most likely to be some hard as nails Nazi prison camp drama. Certainly the opening shot of a Nazi soldier walking his guard dog between twin barbed wire fences reinforced that. It's in black and white and we soon discover that the 630 American airmen in this particular part of this particular stalag are all sergeants, so they're hardly going to be treated with the courtesy that the officers got in The Great Escape. It begins with an escape too, Manfredi and Johnson trying it on the longest night of the year. It's the week before Christmas in 1944 so my granddad had a few days left to live but Manfredi and Johnson don't have that much because the Nazis are waiting for them with machine guns.
Well, how wrong could I be? It turns out to be a drama with plenty of comedy that seems like the chief inspiration for Hogan's Heroes. Apparently a court case proved otherwise but I don't believe that in the slightest. For a start there's a Sgt Schultz in both and he's not far off being the same character. I'm sure the film M*A*S*H picked up a few ideas here too about how people use comedy to relieve the tension in a nasty environment and pretty much anyone else who wanted to lighten a war story too. It's fifties humour, so it's real hit and miss stuff. 'Sprechen sie Deutsch?' Shapiro asks Sgt Schultz. 'Then droppen sie dead!' No, this isn't exactly the height of intellectual wit, but then to be fair it's a bunch of sergeants in a prison camp. What do you expect? The only thing not realistic is the PG language.
At least I wasn't alone in my ignorance. Leading man William Holden had seen half of the source play on Broadway but he walked out before the end of the first act. He certainly didn't want the lead role of Sgt J J Sefton, who he saw as a selfish and cynical character without much interest at all, but the studio didn't give him a choice. Only after he was stuck with the part and he read the whole script did he realise what a versatile role it really was and it went on to win him his only Oscar. His acceptance speech was apparently the shortest in Academy history up until that point, though it was hardly his choice. The broadcast was running long so he only had time for two words. 'Thank you,' was all he said, but he took out a personal ad in the trade papers to thank everyone he didn't get the opportunity to thank on the night.
The real Stalag 17B was in Austria and two of the prisoners of war who reluctantly spent some time there were Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski. They turned their experiences into a play, which ran for 472 performances on Broadway and became this film. Trzcinski even made a cameo appearance, a very touching one as a soldier who gets a letter from his wife to say she's mysteriously found a baby on her doorstep, one that looks like her. 'I believe it,' may just be his only other line, but we hear it a lot because he's trying to convince himself. It's these little things that are most heartfelt. Shapiro, one of the barracks clowns, gets more letters than anyone else but they're all from a finance company requesting payments on his Plymouth. There's even one for Joey from his dad, asking if he's going to go back to law school when he gets home. Unfortunately Joey hasn't been quite all there since his colleagues were killed in front of his eyes.
The narrator is a prisoner called Cookie, played by Gil Stratton. He laments the fact that there were never any films about POWs, although I've seen a few that predate both this and the war, and then proceeds to tell his own story about a spy in Stalag 17. It's been obvious that there's a spy from moment one, given that the Germans were waiting for Manfredi and Johnson and know every other thing that happens without any apparent methodology. Sefton's problem is that there's only one apparent candidate for stool pigeon and it's him, because he's making money off everyone, or what passes for currency in a prisoner of war camp, namely cigarettes and anything else that anyone might conceivably want but generally can't get. He's a real character, albeit as selfish and cynical as Holden believed from the first half of the play that he saw because he's entirely out for number one, only Cookie really benefitting too because he's his assistant.
Sefton is a hustler, a scrounger and an entrepreneur. He brews his own attempt at schnapps from old potato peels and string, he runs horse races every week with rats and even sets up what he calls the Observatory, a telescope that points right at the delousing shack in the Russian women's compound. He has footlockers full of loot and keeps them because he greases the guards with 10% of the take. He even has his own personal bar of soap which doesn't make him popular but what really does it is the stack of cigarettes he makes betting against Manfredi and Johnson. That's a harsh bet to make, however well he was playing the odds, and from the moment he wins those cigarettes nobody really believes the stoolie is anyone other than Sefton.
He's certainly not the only unpopular character but all the rest are Germans and we get to know two of them. Otto Preminger plays the Nazi Colonel in charge of the camp, Col von Scherbach, even though he was actually Jewish, and he's more than happy to crack inappropriate jokes while those two failed escapees lie dead in the mud. Preminger relishes his role as the bad guy without ever becoming a stereotypical villain, although he does wear rather stereotypical boots which he keeps in pristine condition by having his men lay down boards before him in the mud wherever he goes. Preminger wasn't known as an actor, instead being a highly regarded film director. In 1953, the year he played Col von Scherbach in this film, he also directed William Holden in The Moon is Blue, though it's remembered more nowadays for David Niven. He'd been Oscar nominated himself as Best Director for Laura almost a decade earlier and he had two more nominations to come, for Anatomy of a Murder and The Cardinal.
Backing him up as the guard assigned to barracks four is Sgt Johann Sebastian Schultz, in the able form of Sig Ruman, who had served in the German army in the First but not the Second World War. He was a regular for both Ernst Lubitsch and with the Marx Brothers, which highlights his versatile talent for comedy. He's a little brighter than the equivalent Sgt Schultz in Hogan's Heroes though he doesn't seem to be most of the time, because he pretends friendship and jokes along with the prisoners as if he was one of them. It's a good role because while he's certainly the enemy he's an infectious one who is easy to sympathise with. When the sergeants in barracks four all put on Hitler moustaches as a gag, he replies, 'Bah! One Führer is enough!'
Perhaps William Holden's work here is so great because even while I'm sure you won't be surprised to find he isn't the bad guy, he manages to successfully appear to be for most of the film, not a simple enemy but apparently a more complex traitor to his own people. I can see why he didn't want the part after only seeing half the play as it isn't until over halfway through that his character becomes really interesting. Just over an hour in he manages to trade his way over to the Russian women's compound on the very same night that Schultz confiscates their hidden radio, yet another emphatic reminder that there's a spy in the barracks at the very same time that the character most obviously benefitting from something lands a real prize. So he gets the crap beaten out of him by his compatriots and he realises that the only way to get out from under the accusations is to find the real spy. The last third of the movie follows his quest.
I really don't know if Holden should have won that Oscar or not, but he does do a good job. So do the rest of the men in his barracks, played by names like Don Taylor, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, even Robinson Stone who never speaks as Joey, given that his brain turned to mush. It's the clowns that are most obvious, of course, Harry Shapiro and Stanislas Kasava, better known as Animal. Shapiro is played by Harvey Lembeck, probably best known to most as Cpl Barbella in The Phil Silvers Show but to me as the stunningly annoying Eric von Zipper in the Frankie and Annette beach movies of the sixties. 'These Nazis ain't kosher,' he says, as if he doesn't even see the joke. He even dresses up as Betty Grable for Christmas, which certainly gets Animal's attention. Robert Strauss was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Animal, but like Lembeck he knew the role backwards because he'd come to it from the original Broadway production.
This may well be the funniest serious film ever made, well, after Dr Strangelove of course, and the chief success of the film is really its use of humour to relieve tension, presumably courtesy of both the original writers as well as Edwin Blum and director Billy Wilder, who adapted it into a screenplay. The story is a tough and dramatic one but it's constantly draped with humour so that the characters can alleviate the monotony and depressing nature of their situation. They host pinochle championships, throw horseshoes and race sailboats at the cesspool. Everyone rushes out to see when there are new arrivals in the Russian women's compound. At one point the clowns paint a white line throughout the camp just to get in there and amazingly it works.
This is an excellent film, touching and serious, yet light hearted and funny, hardly surprising to hindsight given that it's a Billy Wilder movie, the man who gave us Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and One, Two, Three. Yet when it was released there was a little more surprise, mostly due to the fact that it was a comedy set in a prisoner of war camp but also because all those great Billy Wilder comedies were still to come. Wilder had made his name through more serious films like Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard. His previous film was Ace in the Hole aka The Big Carnival which is a biting attack on manipulation by media and his earlier comedies are far less known.
There's a biting attack to be found here, at least behind the scenes. Rumour has it that a Paramount executive wanted to improve the film's chances in West Germany by suggesting to Billy Wilder that he make the guards at Stalag 17 Poles instead of Germans. Wilder, a Polish Jew, though his birthplace was in Austria-Hungary at the time, lost both his mother and his stepfather to the Nazis at Auschwitz. Naturally he refused such a suggestion, probably rather emphatically, and demanded an apology, refusing to extend his contract at Paramount when it proved not to be forthcoming. Perhaps it's more believable that he didn't extend because the studio accountants subtracted the losses of Ace in the Hole from his salary for this film, but who knows. This was Hollywood.
It was William Holden rather than Billy Wilder who stood out to me when I first watched this back in 2004. It wasn't necessarily because of his performance, though a repeat viewing in 2010 underlined how capable that was. It was because he seemed to epitomise what I was trying to achieve by working through the entire IMDb Top 250 in an attempt to give myself a grounding in the history of film by watching what mattered. I'd heard of Holden but I hadn't the faintest idea who he was or what he had done. I saw him in films as a kid but didn't remember anything about him at all. I certainly didn't remotely think of him as one of the greatest names of the screen, if I even thought about him at all. He was just an actor.
Yet the more I travel through the world of film, the more his name comes up. While many others get far longer biographies wherever such things are written, he seems to counter that with his work. He stars in five films in this list, a sizable number given that major names I knew about like Gary Cooper, Bette Davis or Edward G Robinson only managed one each. No less a star than James Cagney didn't make it at all. What's most notable though is the variety of his roles. The other four films of Holden's in the list (Sunset Boulevard, Bridge on the River Kwai, Network and The Wild Bunch) are as utterly different from each other as they are from this: a violent western, a film noir about Hollywood and a modern drama about television ratings. Even the other film set in a POW camp is utterly unlike Stalag 17 and most certainly wasn't a comedy. Add in further acclaimed films like The Towering Inferno, Sabrina and The Bridges at Toko-Ri and you'll see that he was obviously a major and versatile name for a long while indeed.
Actors: William Holden, Don Taylor and Otto Preminger
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| I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here. |
I hadn't the faintest idea what to expect from Stalag 17. It sounded pretty tough with a title like that and it had an Academy Award under its belt, so I thought it was most likely to be some hard as nails Nazi prison camp drama. Certainly the opening shot of a Nazi soldier walking his guard dog between twin barbed wire fences reinforced that. It's in black and white and we soon discover that the 630 American airmen in this particular part of this particular stalag are all sergeants, so they're hardly going to be treated with the courtesy that the officers got in The Great Escape. It begins with an escape too, Manfredi and Johnson trying it on the longest night of the year. It's the week before Christmas in 1944 so my granddad had a few days left to live but Manfredi and Johnson don't have that much because the Nazis are waiting for them with machine guns.
Well, how wrong could I be? It turns out to be a drama with plenty of comedy that seems like the chief inspiration for Hogan's Heroes. Apparently a court case proved otherwise but I don't believe that in the slightest. For a start there's a Sgt Schultz in both and he's not far off being the same character. I'm sure the film M*A*S*H picked up a few ideas here too about how people use comedy to relieve the tension in a nasty environment and pretty much anyone else who wanted to lighten a war story too. It's fifties humour, so it's real hit and miss stuff. 'Sprechen sie Deutsch?' Shapiro asks Sgt Schultz. 'Then droppen sie dead!' No, this isn't exactly the height of intellectual wit, but then to be fair it's a bunch of sergeants in a prison camp. What do you expect? The only thing not realistic is the PG language.
At least I wasn't alone in my ignorance. Leading man William Holden had seen half of the source play on Broadway but he walked out before the end of the first act. He certainly didn't want the lead role of Sgt J J Sefton, who he saw as a selfish and cynical character without much interest at all, but the studio didn't give him a choice. Only after he was stuck with the part and he read the whole script did he realise what a versatile role it really was and it went on to win him his only Oscar. His acceptance speech was apparently the shortest in Academy history up until that point, though it was hardly his choice. The broadcast was running long so he only had time for two words. 'Thank you,' was all he said, but he took out a personal ad in the trade papers to thank everyone he didn't get the opportunity to thank on the night.
The real Stalag 17B was in Austria and two of the prisoners of war who reluctantly spent some time there were Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski. They turned their experiences into a play, which ran for 472 performances on Broadway and became this film. Trzcinski even made a cameo appearance, a very touching one as a soldier who gets a letter from his wife to say she's mysteriously found a baby on her doorstep, one that looks like her. 'I believe it,' may just be his only other line, but we hear it a lot because he's trying to convince himself. It's these little things that are most heartfelt. Shapiro, one of the barracks clowns, gets more letters than anyone else but they're all from a finance company requesting payments on his Plymouth. There's even one for Joey from his dad, asking if he's going to go back to law school when he gets home. Unfortunately Joey hasn't been quite all there since his colleagues were killed in front of his eyes.
The narrator is a prisoner called Cookie, played by Gil Stratton. He laments the fact that there were never any films about POWs, although I've seen a few that predate both this and the war, and then proceeds to tell his own story about a spy in Stalag 17. It's been obvious that there's a spy from moment one, given that the Germans were waiting for Manfredi and Johnson and know every other thing that happens without any apparent methodology. Sefton's problem is that there's only one apparent candidate for stool pigeon and it's him, because he's making money off everyone, or what passes for currency in a prisoner of war camp, namely cigarettes and anything else that anyone might conceivably want but generally can't get. He's a real character, albeit as selfish and cynical as Holden believed from the first half of the play that he saw because he's entirely out for number one, only Cookie really benefitting too because he's his assistant.
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He's certainly not the only unpopular character but all the rest are Germans and we get to know two of them. Otto Preminger plays the Nazi Colonel in charge of the camp, Col von Scherbach, even though he was actually Jewish, and he's more than happy to crack inappropriate jokes while those two failed escapees lie dead in the mud. Preminger relishes his role as the bad guy without ever becoming a stereotypical villain, although he does wear rather stereotypical boots which he keeps in pristine condition by having his men lay down boards before him in the mud wherever he goes. Preminger wasn't known as an actor, instead being a highly regarded film director. In 1953, the year he played Col von Scherbach in this film, he also directed William Holden in The Moon is Blue, though it's remembered more nowadays for David Niven. He'd been Oscar nominated himself as Best Director for Laura almost a decade earlier and he had two more nominations to come, for Anatomy of a Murder and The Cardinal.
Backing him up as the guard assigned to barracks four is Sgt Johann Sebastian Schultz, in the able form of Sig Ruman, who had served in the German army in the First but not the Second World War. He was a regular for both Ernst Lubitsch and with the Marx Brothers, which highlights his versatile talent for comedy. He's a little brighter than the equivalent Sgt Schultz in Hogan's Heroes though he doesn't seem to be most of the time, because he pretends friendship and jokes along with the prisoners as if he was one of them. It's a good role because while he's certainly the enemy he's an infectious one who is easy to sympathise with. When the sergeants in barracks four all put on Hitler moustaches as a gag, he replies, 'Bah! One Führer is enough!'
Perhaps William Holden's work here is so great because even while I'm sure you won't be surprised to find he isn't the bad guy, he manages to successfully appear to be for most of the film, not a simple enemy but apparently a more complex traitor to his own people. I can see why he didn't want the part after only seeing half the play as it isn't until over halfway through that his character becomes really interesting. Just over an hour in he manages to trade his way over to the Russian women's compound on the very same night that Schultz confiscates their hidden radio, yet another emphatic reminder that there's a spy in the barracks at the very same time that the character most obviously benefitting from something lands a real prize. So he gets the crap beaten out of him by his compatriots and he realises that the only way to get out from under the accusations is to find the real spy. The last third of the movie follows his quest.
I really don't know if Holden should have won that Oscar or not, but he does do a good job. So do the rest of the men in his barracks, played by names like Don Taylor, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, even Robinson Stone who never speaks as Joey, given that his brain turned to mush. It's the clowns that are most obvious, of course, Harry Shapiro and Stanislas Kasava, better known as Animal. Shapiro is played by Harvey Lembeck, probably best known to most as Cpl Barbella in The Phil Silvers Show but to me as the stunningly annoying Eric von Zipper in the Frankie and Annette beach movies of the sixties. 'These Nazis ain't kosher,' he says, as if he doesn't even see the joke. He even dresses up as Betty Grable for Christmas, which certainly gets Animal's attention. Robert Strauss was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Animal, but like Lembeck he knew the role backwards because he'd come to it from the original Broadway production.
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This is an excellent film, touching and serious, yet light hearted and funny, hardly surprising to hindsight given that it's a Billy Wilder movie, the man who gave us Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and One, Two, Three. Yet when it was released there was a little more surprise, mostly due to the fact that it was a comedy set in a prisoner of war camp but also because all those great Billy Wilder comedies were still to come. Wilder had made his name through more serious films like Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard. His previous film was Ace in the Hole aka The Big Carnival which is a biting attack on manipulation by media and his earlier comedies are far less known.
There's a biting attack to be found here, at least behind the scenes. Rumour has it that a Paramount executive wanted to improve the film's chances in West Germany by suggesting to Billy Wilder that he make the guards at Stalag 17 Poles instead of Germans. Wilder, a Polish Jew, though his birthplace was in Austria-Hungary at the time, lost both his mother and his stepfather to the Nazis at Auschwitz. Naturally he refused such a suggestion, probably rather emphatically, and demanded an apology, refusing to extend his contract at Paramount when it proved not to be forthcoming. Perhaps it's more believable that he didn't extend because the studio accountants subtracted the losses of Ace in the Hole from his salary for this film, but who knows. This was Hollywood.
It was William Holden rather than Billy Wilder who stood out to me when I first watched this back in 2004. It wasn't necessarily because of his performance, though a repeat viewing in 2010 underlined how capable that was. It was because he seemed to epitomise what I was trying to achieve by working through the entire IMDb Top 250 in an attempt to give myself a grounding in the history of film by watching what mattered. I'd heard of Holden but I hadn't the faintest idea who he was or what he had done. I saw him in films as a kid but didn't remember anything about him at all. I certainly didn't remotely think of him as one of the greatest names of the screen, if I even thought about him at all. He was just an actor.
Yet the more I travel through the world of film, the more his name comes up. While many others get far longer biographies wherever such things are written, he seems to counter that with his work. He stars in five films in this list, a sizable number given that major names I knew about like Gary Cooper, Bette Davis or Edward G Robinson only managed one each. No less a star than James Cagney didn't make it at all. What's most notable though is the variety of his roles. The other four films of Holden's in the list (Sunset Boulevard, Bridge on the River Kwai, Network and The Wild Bunch) are as utterly different from each other as they are from this: a violent western, a film noir about Hollywood and a modern drama about television ratings. Even the other film set in a POW camp is utterly unlike Stalag 17 and most certainly wasn't a comedy. Add in further acclaimed films like The Towering Inferno, Sabrina and The Bridges at Toko-Ri and you'll see that he was obviously a major and versatile name for a long while indeed.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Director: John Ford
Stars: John Wayne and James Stewart
There are parts of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance where legends fill the screen. One in particular has Lee Marvin causing trouble for Jimmy Stewart, with John Wayne interfering and Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef looking on. That's a heck of a lot of talent to fit into a single shot but it both works so well and feels so natural that the film seems to automatically warrant classic status. At least so I thought when I first saw this latter day John Ford western back in 2004. Since then I've seen Duel in the Sun, the biggest waste of a truly amazing cast I can comfortably imagine, so I know full well that just a cast is not necessarily enough. Fortunately this one has John Ford to put everything together and he was more than an experienced hand at such things by the time 1962 rolled around.
We begin with a United States senator, Ransom Stoddard, arriving in the town of Shinbone by train with his wife. He's news, of course, especially as nobody except former town marshal Link Appleyard seems to know he's coming, so he's quickly nabbed by young upstart journalist Charlie Hasbrouck to give an interview. Meanwhile Appleyard takes Mrs Stoddard out to a ramshackle old place in the desert, without needing to be told where to go. It's obvious that there's a story here but the folks at the Star are blissfully unaware what it is, just asking the senator about politics. It's only when Appleyard brings his wife back and he's about to leave that they get round to asking him why he's there. He's in town to go to a funeral, he says, but the editor of the paper is merely puzzled. 'Who's dead?' he asks, and the answer is our story.
Most of it's told in one long flashback that begins with a much younger Stoddard arriving in the very same place in a very different way. This time he's a young lawyer following Horace Greeley's advice to go west but he finds himself stuck in the town of Shinbone being cared back to health by Nora Ericson's spiked coffee. His stage had been held up, you see, just outside of town, and he was severely beaten by Liberty Valance, gunfighter, highwayman and all around heel, in the suitably swaggering form of Lee Marvin. He was beaten because he's an idealist, who believes strongly in the law over the gun and thus made a stand against oppression. Naturally he lost and he soon discovers that the entire town is scared stiff of Liberty Valance, with the exception of perennial hero John Wayne, playing Tom Donophon.
There are a few threads here, but the most obvious one is the transition from the old west to the new west, but from a very different angle to Once Upon a Time in the West. Ransom Stoddard and Tom Donophon are both tough men, but in utterly different ways and there's a great exchange early on in the film that highlights just how many. Even while he can hardly stand, Stoddard explains that he has something to do, something to do with Liberty Valance. Doniphon tells him he ought to carry a handgun, because that's the only law in Shinbone. Stoddard doesn't want to kill him, he wants to put him in jail. But the jail only has one cell, the lock's broken and Marshal Appleyard sleeps in it. With every comeback, the new west of law and order looks harder and harder to achieve but Stoddard is a determined man.
He's an irascible one, getting far angrier than I'm used to Jimmy Stewart being, even now. He's a hardworking one, paying his keep by washing dishes at Peter's Place, the town restaurant, working for Dutton Peabody at the Shinbone Star and even teaching whoever is willing to learn the rudiments of reading, writing and the Constitution of the United States. He's a stubborn one too, hanging his shingle on the Star's front porch even though he knows Valance will be back to shoot holes in it. He refuses to leave town even in the face of the harshest opposition, a hired gun who swaggers through Shinbone doing whatever he pleases without ever a care in the world. He even learns how to shoot, though he's terrible at it, and he meets Valance out on the street in a showdown.
However he's in the right place at the right time. The winds of change are blowing, bringing not just Ransom Stoddard, attorney at law, in on the stage but also bringing peace, education and a free press. The railroad is coming and it leads all the way to Washington, figuratively as well as literally because there's a Territorial Convention coming that will pit the big ranchers who want to keep the territory open against the townsfolk who want the benefits that statehood will bring. Sure enough, Stoddard, who we know from moment one ends up a senator, is picked to represent Shinbone and the rest is history. At least the rest is the history that the folks at the Shinbone Star know about.
We watch this progress through the rituals of the west that Ford was so fond of depicting. We see the new rituals, the rituals of law and order and the power of the people. We see the rather old kindergarten in Stoddard's class reciting their ABCs and the discovery that grown adults can't read and write. We see the town election where Stoddard closes the bar for the duration and Peter Ericson proudly shows his citizenship papers to get in. We even witness John Carradine's purple oratory to set up flamboyant political grandstanding and showboating at the Territorial Convention. It's impressive too, though due as much to a very well behaved horse as to Carradine.
We see the old rituals too, the rituals of the gun and the wild west. We listen to Lee Marvin call everyone dude and John Wayne call them pilgrim. We watch the women order everyone around, because even though they can't read and they don't know to put the fork on the left of the plate, they're still in charge indoors. We see the insanely large meals, steaks that would be eating contests nowadays. We watch the slow courtship of Tom Doniphon and Hallie, the waitress at Peter's Place. And of course we see the power of threat and violence, which ends with Stoddard and Valance out in the street in an attempt to find out who can draw quickest.
This may well have been my first John Ford, back in 2004. If it isn't then I saw the rest as a kid and didn't remember a thing about any of them. Ford is one of the greatest Hollywood directors of them all, the one who tends to get namedropped the most when talking about influence because he was around early on and he stayed around for a long while, turning out movie after movie that became definitions and reference points, not least when talking about westerns. In my reviews for both Once Upon a Time in the West and Yojimbo, I talked about Sergio Leone being directly influenced by Akira Kurosawa, but both were influenced by John Ford and they were both happy to admit it. Leone said that this was his favourite Ford picture. Western filmmakers in the States drank his movies straight and turned out whatever imitations they could while under that influence.
He's represented in the IMDb Top 250 by four movies, three of which are westerns, dating back to 1939's Stagecoach which both revitalised and reshaped the genre and made a star out of John Wayne in the process. This one came late on though, made after Ford had earned no less than four Oscars as Best Director, though curiously only one of those four, The Grapes of Wrath, appears in this list. When he made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford had 45 years as a Hollywood director under his belt and three more working his way up to the director's chair. While there were a few more movies to come, this is his last truly great film.
He wasn't the only experienced hand here, most of the actors being well and truly established by 1962. James Stewart had already appeared in six films on this list before making this one, and had earned his Oscar over two decades ago too, for The Philadelphia Story in 1940, often regarded as a consolation for losing out for Mr Smith Goes to Washington in Hollywood's greatest year. He was a huge star and this was a rare occasion that his name didn't come first in the opening credits, though he got top spot on the posters instead. He had to take second spot on the screen behind John Wayne, who may have been still waiting for the Academy to honour him, which they finally did in 1969 for True Grit, but at 55 years of age he had already reached iconic status as the epitome of stubborn American heroism. This was a deep and surprising role for him, given that he doesn't end up with the girl and he doesn't end up the hero, at least not overtly.
Only Lee Marvin was still building his career, being a generation behind his two fellow stars and with only a decade of films behind him, but that still included a number of key parts. While I knew Wayne and Stewart from films made before this one, I knew Marvin from Cat Ballou, The Dirty Dozen and Paint Your Wagon, all of which came later. Only since watching this have I caught up with earlier gems like Bad Day at Black Rock, The Big Heat and The Wild One. All three stars are memorable here. Jimmy Stewart has the hardest role, hating guns yet being forced to learn how to use one, teaching people to read yet being constantly interrupted, standing up for the rule of law in a town with an incredibly weak marshal. Lee Marvin is in full swaggering effect as the bad guy who feels untouchable and John Wayne is just as tough as he's ever been, though his age was beginning to show.
They're far from the only people in the film, as this really is an ensemble cast worthy of note. Vera Miles, for whom Hitchcock had written Vertigo, is the love interest, both for Stewart and Wayne. She has her own depth as a young woman who recognises a kindred spirit in Ransom Stoddard, learns how to read and write and moves on up from being a waitress in Shinbone to being a senator's wife. The difference between the young and old Hallie is as much as anything the story of this film, because the two are vastly different but you can see the future lady in Peter's Place and you can see the Shinbone waitress in the elegant Mrs Stoddard.
Edmond O'Brien, a highly underrated actor who I first noticed in the original DOA, plays the local alcohol sodden newspaper editor who gets to make a stand in his own way against Liberty Valance, a worthy addition to the long honour role of great drunken Hollywood pressmen. 'I'm your conscience. I'm the small voice that thunders in the night. I'm your watchdog who howls against the wolves. I'm your father confessor! I'm... what else am I?' he orates while protesting his own nomination to the Territorial Convention. 'Town drunk,' adds Tom Donophon. O'Brien is one of those names that slips by far too often along with his face, which changes from film to film, but he's always worth focusing in on and paying attention to.
John Carradine, father of four Hollywood stars, was himself a star long before I saw him in many B-rated horror movies late in his career. He had worked with Ford before, in Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath, and he joyously channels the Bard here as Maj Cassius Starbuckle, his oratory living up to the grandeur of his character's name. Woody Strode is here again, as Donophon's sidekick Pompey, but at least he lives through this one to bear witness to the change of the west; he only lasted long enough in Once Upon a Time in the West to meet Charles Bronson and take a bullet. Denver Pyle appears long before he won the hearts of many as Uncle Jesse in The Dukes of Hazzard and before he got hijacked by Bonnie and Clyde.
Strother Martin is a weasel of a sidekick to Liberty Valance, so much so that the folks who made Who Framed Roger Rabbit must surely have taken notice. There's just no way Floyd wasn't a key influence for the weasels who accompany Judge Doom. By comparison his fellow henchman Lee Van Cleef doesn't stand out too much. He hadn't quite grown into himself yet and he gets very little to work with. Finally there's Andy Devine, who I'd never heard of at the time I saw this but who plays a very weak marshal with a particularly memorable voice and a rather ample frame. Since watching this I can't miss that voice every time I hear it and I get plenty of opportunity given that he was a prolific character actor with roles going back to 1926.
All of these actors get plenty of opportunity to shine, except Van Cleef, but we know where they're all going to end up because we see the ones who are left as much older folks at the beginning of the film. This whole story is one long flashback, as Sen Stoddard tells his tale of why he and his wife are back in Shinbone without any fuss or fanfare, just to pay tribute to Tom Doniphon by visiting his body. This framing story makes it utterly clear how the west changed, the fortunes of the people changing alongside the fortunes of the land.
In open country it's Doniphon who is dominant, rescuing Stoddard at the outset, getting him back on his feet and consistently being the one man who can stand against Liberty Valance and the cattle barons. Once that open country wins statehood and joins civilisation though, it's Stoddard who rises and Doniphon retreats so far into obscurity that the new Shinbone Star editor initially can't understand why someone as important as a Senator would come to his funeral. The long flashback is the explanation, but when Stoddard explains and the film's seemingly clumsy but actually rather deep title becomes clear, this editor rips up his story and demonstrates to us in no uncertain terms how we see the west. 'When the legend becomes fact,' he says, 'print the legend.'
Stars: John Wayne and James Stewart
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| I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here. |
There are parts of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance where legends fill the screen. One in particular has Lee Marvin causing trouble for Jimmy Stewart, with John Wayne interfering and Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef looking on. That's a heck of a lot of talent to fit into a single shot but it both works so well and feels so natural that the film seems to automatically warrant classic status. At least so I thought when I first saw this latter day John Ford western back in 2004. Since then I've seen Duel in the Sun, the biggest waste of a truly amazing cast I can comfortably imagine, so I know full well that just a cast is not necessarily enough. Fortunately this one has John Ford to put everything together and he was more than an experienced hand at such things by the time 1962 rolled around.
We begin with a United States senator, Ransom Stoddard, arriving in the town of Shinbone by train with his wife. He's news, of course, especially as nobody except former town marshal Link Appleyard seems to know he's coming, so he's quickly nabbed by young upstart journalist Charlie Hasbrouck to give an interview. Meanwhile Appleyard takes Mrs Stoddard out to a ramshackle old place in the desert, without needing to be told where to go. It's obvious that there's a story here but the folks at the Star are blissfully unaware what it is, just asking the senator about politics. It's only when Appleyard brings his wife back and he's about to leave that they get round to asking him why he's there. He's in town to go to a funeral, he says, but the editor of the paper is merely puzzled. 'Who's dead?' he asks, and the answer is our story.
Most of it's told in one long flashback that begins with a much younger Stoddard arriving in the very same place in a very different way. This time he's a young lawyer following Horace Greeley's advice to go west but he finds himself stuck in the town of Shinbone being cared back to health by Nora Ericson's spiked coffee. His stage had been held up, you see, just outside of town, and he was severely beaten by Liberty Valance, gunfighter, highwayman and all around heel, in the suitably swaggering form of Lee Marvin. He was beaten because he's an idealist, who believes strongly in the law over the gun and thus made a stand against oppression. Naturally he lost and he soon discovers that the entire town is scared stiff of Liberty Valance, with the exception of perennial hero John Wayne, playing Tom Donophon.
There are a few threads here, but the most obvious one is the transition from the old west to the new west, but from a very different angle to Once Upon a Time in the West. Ransom Stoddard and Tom Donophon are both tough men, but in utterly different ways and there's a great exchange early on in the film that highlights just how many. Even while he can hardly stand, Stoddard explains that he has something to do, something to do with Liberty Valance. Doniphon tells him he ought to carry a handgun, because that's the only law in Shinbone. Stoddard doesn't want to kill him, he wants to put him in jail. But the jail only has one cell, the lock's broken and Marshal Appleyard sleeps in it. With every comeback, the new west of law and order looks harder and harder to achieve but Stoddard is a determined man.
He's an irascible one, getting far angrier than I'm used to Jimmy Stewart being, even now. He's a hardworking one, paying his keep by washing dishes at Peter's Place, the town restaurant, working for Dutton Peabody at the Shinbone Star and even teaching whoever is willing to learn the rudiments of reading, writing and the Constitution of the United States. He's a stubborn one too, hanging his shingle on the Star's front porch even though he knows Valance will be back to shoot holes in it. He refuses to leave town even in the face of the harshest opposition, a hired gun who swaggers through Shinbone doing whatever he pleases without ever a care in the world. He even learns how to shoot, though he's terrible at it, and he meets Valance out on the street in a showdown.
However he's in the right place at the right time. The winds of change are blowing, bringing not just Ransom Stoddard, attorney at law, in on the stage but also bringing peace, education and a free press. The railroad is coming and it leads all the way to Washington, figuratively as well as literally because there's a Territorial Convention coming that will pit the big ranchers who want to keep the territory open against the townsfolk who want the benefits that statehood will bring. Sure enough, Stoddard, who we know from moment one ends up a senator, is picked to represent Shinbone and the rest is history. At least the rest is the history that the folks at the Shinbone Star know about.
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We see the old rituals too, the rituals of the gun and the wild west. We listen to Lee Marvin call everyone dude and John Wayne call them pilgrim. We watch the women order everyone around, because even though they can't read and they don't know to put the fork on the left of the plate, they're still in charge indoors. We see the insanely large meals, steaks that would be eating contests nowadays. We watch the slow courtship of Tom Doniphon and Hallie, the waitress at Peter's Place. And of course we see the power of threat and violence, which ends with Stoddard and Valance out in the street in an attempt to find out who can draw quickest.
This may well have been my first John Ford, back in 2004. If it isn't then I saw the rest as a kid and didn't remember a thing about any of them. Ford is one of the greatest Hollywood directors of them all, the one who tends to get namedropped the most when talking about influence because he was around early on and he stayed around for a long while, turning out movie after movie that became definitions and reference points, not least when talking about westerns. In my reviews for both Once Upon a Time in the West and Yojimbo, I talked about Sergio Leone being directly influenced by Akira Kurosawa, but both were influenced by John Ford and they were both happy to admit it. Leone said that this was his favourite Ford picture. Western filmmakers in the States drank his movies straight and turned out whatever imitations they could while under that influence.
He's represented in the IMDb Top 250 by four movies, three of which are westerns, dating back to 1939's Stagecoach which both revitalised and reshaped the genre and made a star out of John Wayne in the process. This one came late on though, made after Ford had earned no less than four Oscars as Best Director, though curiously only one of those four, The Grapes of Wrath, appears in this list. When he made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford had 45 years as a Hollywood director under his belt and three more working his way up to the director's chair. While there were a few more movies to come, this is his last truly great film.
He wasn't the only experienced hand here, most of the actors being well and truly established by 1962. James Stewart had already appeared in six films on this list before making this one, and had earned his Oscar over two decades ago too, for The Philadelphia Story in 1940, often regarded as a consolation for losing out for Mr Smith Goes to Washington in Hollywood's greatest year. He was a huge star and this was a rare occasion that his name didn't come first in the opening credits, though he got top spot on the posters instead. He had to take second spot on the screen behind John Wayne, who may have been still waiting for the Academy to honour him, which they finally did in 1969 for True Grit, but at 55 years of age he had already reached iconic status as the epitome of stubborn American heroism. This was a deep and surprising role for him, given that he doesn't end up with the girl and he doesn't end up the hero, at least not overtly.
Only Lee Marvin was still building his career, being a generation behind his two fellow stars and with only a decade of films behind him, but that still included a number of key parts. While I knew Wayne and Stewart from films made before this one, I knew Marvin from Cat Ballou, The Dirty Dozen and Paint Your Wagon, all of which came later. Only since watching this have I caught up with earlier gems like Bad Day at Black Rock, The Big Heat and The Wild One. All three stars are memorable here. Jimmy Stewart has the hardest role, hating guns yet being forced to learn how to use one, teaching people to read yet being constantly interrupted, standing up for the rule of law in a town with an incredibly weak marshal. Lee Marvin is in full swaggering effect as the bad guy who feels untouchable and John Wayne is just as tough as he's ever been, though his age was beginning to show.
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Edmond O'Brien, a highly underrated actor who I first noticed in the original DOA, plays the local alcohol sodden newspaper editor who gets to make a stand in his own way against Liberty Valance, a worthy addition to the long honour role of great drunken Hollywood pressmen. 'I'm your conscience. I'm the small voice that thunders in the night. I'm your watchdog who howls against the wolves. I'm your father confessor! I'm... what else am I?' he orates while protesting his own nomination to the Territorial Convention. 'Town drunk,' adds Tom Donophon. O'Brien is one of those names that slips by far too often along with his face, which changes from film to film, but he's always worth focusing in on and paying attention to.
John Carradine, father of four Hollywood stars, was himself a star long before I saw him in many B-rated horror movies late in his career. He had worked with Ford before, in Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath, and he joyously channels the Bard here as Maj Cassius Starbuckle, his oratory living up to the grandeur of his character's name. Woody Strode is here again, as Donophon's sidekick Pompey, but at least he lives through this one to bear witness to the change of the west; he only lasted long enough in Once Upon a Time in the West to meet Charles Bronson and take a bullet. Denver Pyle appears long before he won the hearts of many as Uncle Jesse in The Dukes of Hazzard and before he got hijacked by Bonnie and Clyde.
Strother Martin is a weasel of a sidekick to Liberty Valance, so much so that the folks who made Who Framed Roger Rabbit must surely have taken notice. There's just no way Floyd wasn't a key influence for the weasels who accompany Judge Doom. By comparison his fellow henchman Lee Van Cleef doesn't stand out too much. He hadn't quite grown into himself yet and he gets very little to work with. Finally there's Andy Devine, who I'd never heard of at the time I saw this but who plays a very weak marshal with a particularly memorable voice and a rather ample frame. Since watching this I can't miss that voice every time I hear it and I get plenty of opportunity given that he was a prolific character actor with roles going back to 1926.
All of these actors get plenty of opportunity to shine, except Van Cleef, but we know where they're all going to end up because we see the ones who are left as much older folks at the beginning of the film. This whole story is one long flashback, as Sen Stoddard tells his tale of why he and his wife are back in Shinbone without any fuss or fanfare, just to pay tribute to Tom Doniphon by visiting his body. This framing story makes it utterly clear how the west changed, the fortunes of the people changing alongside the fortunes of the land.
In open country it's Doniphon who is dominant, rescuing Stoddard at the outset, getting him back on his feet and consistently being the one man who can stand against Liberty Valance and the cattle barons. Once that open country wins statehood and joins civilisation though, it's Stoddard who rises and Doniphon retreats so far into obscurity that the new Shinbone Star editor initially can't understand why someone as important as a Senator would come to his funeral. The long flashback is the explanation, but when Stoddard explains and the film's seemingly clumsy but actually rather deep title becomes clear, this editor rips up his story and demonstrates to us in no uncertain terms how we see the west. 'When the legend becomes fact,' he says, 'print the legend.'
Yojimbo (1961)
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Star: Toshiro Mifune
Akira Kurosawa and Japanese film as a whole exploded onto the international film scene when Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. He consolidated that position by turning out some of the greatest and most infuential films of all time during the decade to come, including Ikiru, The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress. Other Japanese filmmakers took advantage of their newfound attention: Yasujiro Ozu with Tokyo Story, Kon Ichikawa with The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, Teinosuke Kinugasa with Gate of Hell and Kenjo Mizoguchi with The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. It was an amazing time for Japanese cinema which was far from new but which went through something of a rebirth after Rashomon, one 1954 film even sparking a whole new genre, Ishiro Honda's Gojira. A decade later Kurosawa gave birth to another new genre, though not in any way he might have expected.
Yojimbo, which simply means The Bodyguard, was a more overtly American influenced film than his previous movies. While it's a Tokugawa era samurai drama, it plays out utterly like an American western with a heavy dose of the gangster film added in for good measure, actually sourced from novels by Dashiell Hammett, including Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Yet while these influences are obvious, he created something new out of them and the Italians paid serious attention. In 1964 Sergio Leone remade this film almost shot for shot as A Fistful of Dollars, the first spaghetti western. Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name began as Toshiro Mifune's Man with No Name. He does provide one when asked, Kuwabatake Sanjuro, but that merely means Thirty Year Old Mulberry Field. 'As names go, it's good enough,' he says. The rest is history.
It's 1860 and the Tokugawa dynasty is failing, leaving Toshiro Mifune's character one of many masterless samurai or ronin, the bleak landscape of constantly swirling dust echoing their hopes. Such ronin have only their wits and their swords to live by, wandering the countryside hiring themselves out to whoever will pay. He's obviously bound for no place special, as he even tosses a stick in the air when he reaches a fork in the road to determine which way he's going to take. He ends up in a town that is more like a war zone with two bickering gangs of gamblers who have hired every cutthroat, gangster and escaped convict around. The merchants can't make a trade, the only man really earning a living being the coffin maker.
All this chaos sprang out of a prospective inheritance, as the innkeeper explains to Sanjuro. One gambler, Seibei Manome, who runs a brothel at one end of town, wanted his son to have all his territory, but his right hand man, Ushi-Tora Shinden, wouldn't agree to it and so set up his own faction instead. The conflict only grew over time, but while the innkeeper bemoans this as the death of the town, Sanjuro sees instead the potential profit margin. He plays both sides against each other for his own gain like a true anti-hero. 'I like it here. I'll stay a while,' he says. 'I'll get paid for killing and this town is full of men who deserve to die.' This is a rather simple concept but it's a strange one. Really he's the only person we could conceivably care about and he's hardly a nice guy, although Toshiro Mifune's performance is so infectious that it's impossible not to root for him throughout.
Part of the reason the film doesn't fail on its feet is that there's more than a minor element of comedy in how things unfold, not highbrow comedy but something much closer to slapstick, as in both Yojimbo and Sanjuro, the sequel released a year later, Kurosawa had Mifune frequently deal with realistic idiots. In Yojimbo he climbs up the bell tower and watches, laughing, as the two sides fumble their way towards each other in an inept depiction of attempted battle. Even when they're drunk they could hardly be funnier but they still try. In Sanjuro, he becomes by necessity leader of a bunch of well intentioned but not very clued in good guys. A more serious recurring theme is that while these characters know what they want to do, good or bad, they often have no real idea how to do so and so flounder along doing as best they can. The family that Mifune reunites in Yojimbo have great difficulty in even believing their new found freedom, leading him to announce 'I hate pathetic people. I'll kill you if you cry.'
It's also hilarious, in an extremely dry manner, watching Sanjuro play both ends against the middle. He uses his sword, of course, but he uses his wits even more. His grand plan is a constant work in progress and he keeps having to rewrite it to accommodate changes caused by others, not least Unosuke, Ushi-Tora's younger brother, who returns from a trip away with a gun, or even divert from it to tie up a few loose ends for other people in the process. Up until this point, Mifune has been beyond challenge, except by numbers, but the introduction of Tatsuya Nakadai as Unosuke raises everything up a notch. Not only do we see a character who can one up Sanjuro but we see an actor who can challenge Mifune too, as he would later in their respective careers.
In fact all three of the actors that Kurosawa frequently worked with are present here. This was Mifune's era, but he'd inherited that position from Takashi Shimura and he later passed it onto Nakadai after a major feud with Kurosawa. Nakadai makes his presence felt here with some great scenes and some memorable wild eyes. Unosuke is the one character who seems to have anywhere near the wits that Sanjuro has. Shimura has a smaller role as Tokuemon, the sake brewer. However this time out it's Mifune's show, both as the confident samurai of the first half and the beaten and bloody wild haired mess that he becomes later. He's very believably damaged in the second half of the film, the undertaker telling him that he doesn't look alive and he's right. He looks far more like a white faced Japanese ghost.
Ryuzo Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa didn't receive any credit for A Fistful of Dollars, but it's obviously their script for Yojimbo that Sergio Leone adapted to his own ends, just as it's been remade again since as Last Man Standing and Lucky Number Slevin. It isn't as simple as Toshiro Mifune becoming Clint Eastwood, Japan becoming Mexico and swords becoming guns. It all goes far deeper than that to the supporting characters, every dynamic of the plot and even the grim humour of the piece. Mifune's portrayal is more complex than Eastwood's and more savage. Perhaps that partially has to do with the more personal nature of the sword against the gun but I think it's deeper than that. Perhaps Mifune instilled his character with more depth because he'd been building up to the role over a number of films while Eastwood was only beginning his exploration of the equivalent character.
Even the details are recognisable. When Eastwood enters town in A Fistful of Dollars he passes a man on a horse going the other way. His eyes are closed and there's a sign on his back reading 'Adios Amigo'. When Mifune enters town in Yojimbo, it's a dog that passes him with a man's hand in his mouth. The famous coffins quote is little changed. Unosuke brings a new level to the conflict in Yojimbo by bringing home a gun, just as Leone upped the ante in A Fistful of Dollars by use of a military chain gun. The imagery and the cultures are completely different but the message is precisely the same. In fact these cultural changes are fascinating in themselves, with only the undertaker being precisely consistent between the two films. Then again nothing is certain except death and taxes, right?
When I began exploring the IMDb Top 250 in 2004, I was new to Kurosawa, to Mifune and to samurai drama as a whole, a genre known as chambara or swordplay, part of a wider genre called jidaigeki or period drama. Previously my experience with Asian cinema had been with more modern martial arts, horror and gangster movies made in Hong Kong and with anime. The Seven Samurai was a big eye opener, one that I couldn't get my head around on first viewing. Yojimbo was far more recognisable and fathomable, not least because I'd seen A Fistful of Dollars a number of times and was reasonably well acquainted with spaghetti westerns generally. After this one I searched for all the chambara I could find, IFC treating me with their Samurai Saturdays that introduced me to much of the Zatoichi series as well as Gate of Hell, Samurai Rebellion and Kill!, just to name a few early examples.
There's a lot of top notch chambara out there, though much of it is unfairly neglected and I'm still scratching the surface. Kurosawa is definitely a great starting place and Yojimbo probably the best beginner's guide. After this you can work through Sanjuro, Rashomon and The Seven Samurai and then work sideways through the names you'll start to recognise, not just the cast but the crew too, to directors like Kihachi Okamoto (The Sword of Doom and Kill!), Hideo Gosha (Three Outlaw Samurai and Sword of the Beast) and Masaka Kobayashi (Samurai Rebellion). By that time you're off and running. Kenji Misumi will lead you to Shintaro Katsu and Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. Kobayashi will lead you to Kwaidan and classic Japanese horror. Then it'll be Onibaba and Ugetsu, then Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu and by that time you'll be hooked on one of the richest of national cinemas. Yojimbo is a great gateway drug to classic Japanese film.
Star: Toshiro Mifune
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| I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here. |
Akira Kurosawa and Japanese film as a whole exploded onto the international film scene when Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. He consolidated that position by turning out some of the greatest and most infuential films of all time during the decade to come, including Ikiru, The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress. Other Japanese filmmakers took advantage of their newfound attention: Yasujiro Ozu with Tokyo Story, Kon Ichikawa with The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, Teinosuke Kinugasa with Gate of Hell and Kenjo Mizoguchi with The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. It was an amazing time for Japanese cinema which was far from new but which went through something of a rebirth after Rashomon, one 1954 film even sparking a whole new genre, Ishiro Honda's Gojira. A decade later Kurosawa gave birth to another new genre, though not in any way he might have expected.
Yojimbo, which simply means The Bodyguard, was a more overtly American influenced film than his previous movies. While it's a Tokugawa era samurai drama, it plays out utterly like an American western with a heavy dose of the gangster film added in for good measure, actually sourced from novels by Dashiell Hammett, including Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Yet while these influences are obvious, he created something new out of them and the Italians paid serious attention. In 1964 Sergio Leone remade this film almost shot for shot as A Fistful of Dollars, the first spaghetti western. Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name began as Toshiro Mifune's Man with No Name. He does provide one when asked, Kuwabatake Sanjuro, but that merely means Thirty Year Old Mulberry Field. 'As names go, it's good enough,' he says. The rest is history.
It's 1860 and the Tokugawa dynasty is failing, leaving Toshiro Mifune's character one of many masterless samurai or ronin, the bleak landscape of constantly swirling dust echoing their hopes. Such ronin have only their wits and their swords to live by, wandering the countryside hiring themselves out to whoever will pay. He's obviously bound for no place special, as he even tosses a stick in the air when he reaches a fork in the road to determine which way he's going to take. He ends up in a town that is more like a war zone with two bickering gangs of gamblers who have hired every cutthroat, gangster and escaped convict around. The merchants can't make a trade, the only man really earning a living being the coffin maker.
All this chaos sprang out of a prospective inheritance, as the innkeeper explains to Sanjuro. One gambler, Seibei Manome, who runs a brothel at one end of town, wanted his son to have all his territory, but his right hand man, Ushi-Tora Shinden, wouldn't agree to it and so set up his own faction instead. The conflict only grew over time, but while the innkeeper bemoans this as the death of the town, Sanjuro sees instead the potential profit margin. He plays both sides against each other for his own gain like a true anti-hero. 'I like it here. I'll stay a while,' he says. 'I'll get paid for killing and this town is full of men who deserve to die.' This is a rather simple concept but it's a strange one. Really he's the only person we could conceivably care about and he's hardly a nice guy, although Toshiro Mifune's performance is so infectious that it's impossible not to root for him throughout.
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It's also hilarious, in an extremely dry manner, watching Sanjuro play both ends against the middle. He uses his sword, of course, but he uses his wits even more. His grand plan is a constant work in progress and he keeps having to rewrite it to accommodate changes caused by others, not least Unosuke, Ushi-Tora's younger brother, who returns from a trip away with a gun, or even divert from it to tie up a few loose ends for other people in the process. Up until this point, Mifune has been beyond challenge, except by numbers, but the introduction of Tatsuya Nakadai as Unosuke raises everything up a notch. Not only do we see a character who can one up Sanjuro but we see an actor who can challenge Mifune too, as he would later in their respective careers.
In fact all three of the actors that Kurosawa frequently worked with are present here. This was Mifune's era, but he'd inherited that position from Takashi Shimura and he later passed it onto Nakadai after a major feud with Kurosawa. Nakadai makes his presence felt here with some great scenes and some memorable wild eyes. Unosuke is the one character who seems to have anywhere near the wits that Sanjuro has. Shimura has a smaller role as Tokuemon, the sake brewer. However this time out it's Mifune's show, both as the confident samurai of the first half and the beaten and bloody wild haired mess that he becomes later. He's very believably damaged in the second half of the film, the undertaker telling him that he doesn't look alive and he's right. He looks far more like a white faced Japanese ghost.
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Even the details are recognisable. When Eastwood enters town in A Fistful of Dollars he passes a man on a horse going the other way. His eyes are closed and there's a sign on his back reading 'Adios Amigo'. When Mifune enters town in Yojimbo, it's a dog that passes him with a man's hand in his mouth. The famous coffins quote is little changed. Unosuke brings a new level to the conflict in Yojimbo by bringing home a gun, just as Leone upped the ante in A Fistful of Dollars by use of a military chain gun. The imagery and the cultures are completely different but the message is precisely the same. In fact these cultural changes are fascinating in themselves, with only the undertaker being precisely consistent between the two films. Then again nothing is certain except death and taxes, right?
When I began exploring the IMDb Top 250 in 2004, I was new to Kurosawa, to Mifune and to samurai drama as a whole, a genre known as chambara or swordplay, part of a wider genre called jidaigeki or period drama. Previously my experience with Asian cinema had been with more modern martial arts, horror and gangster movies made in Hong Kong and with anime. The Seven Samurai was a big eye opener, one that I couldn't get my head around on first viewing. Yojimbo was far more recognisable and fathomable, not least because I'd seen A Fistful of Dollars a number of times and was reasonably well acquainted with spaghetti westerns generally. After this one I searched for all the chambara I could find, IFC treating me with their Samurai Saturdays that introduced me to much of the Zatoichi series as well as Gate of Hell, Samurai Rebellion and Kill!, just to name a few early examples.
There's a lot of top notch chambara out there, though much of it is unfairly neglected and I'm still scratching the surface. Kurosawa is definitely a great starting place and Yojimbo probably the best beginner's guide. After this you can work through Sanjuro, Rashomon and The Seven Samurai and then work sideways through the names you'll start to recognise, not just the cast but the crew too, to directors like Kihachi Okamoto (The Sword of Doom and Kill!), Hideo Gosha (Three Outlaw Samurai and Sword of the Beast) and Masaka Kobayashi (Samurai Rebellion). By that time you're off and running. Kenji Misumi will lead you to Shintaro Katsu and Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. Kobayashi will lead you to Kwaidan and classic Japanese horror. Then it'll be Onibaba and Ugetsu, then Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu and by that time you'll be hooked on one of the richest of national cinemas. Yojimbo is a great gateway drug to classic Japanese film.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Director: Sergio Leone
Stars: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzetti and Paolo Stoppa
For most of my life the western has been a dead genre, occasional revivals by stars like Clint Eastwood or Kevin Costner notwithstanding. This is reflected well by the fact that there are a bunch of westerns in the IMDb Top 250, but Eastwood's Unforgiven aside, the newest of them is The Wild Bunch which was made in 1969, two years before I was born and thus hardly new. Sam Peckinpah, who directed The Wild Bunch, spent most of his life lamenting the final demise of the old west and his westerns obviously reflect that. This does no less, highlighting the reasons for the beginning of that demise and the consequent transition from the old west to the new west, not least through the railroad which brought connection, communication and speed.
The thing is that the genre in film declined along with its real life subject matter. While people two or three generations before mine flocked to westerns to watch the great stars like John Wayne, Gary Cooper or even Hopalong Cassidy, my parents' generation only got to see their last hurrahs. As a good example, Sam Peckinpah directed a wonderful film in 1962 called Ride the High Country that starred two great western legends, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. It may have been a great movie but it was McCrea's last and Scott's last but one. By the time I came along most of these names were dead or at least retired from the screen. I just saw the revivals.
The strange thing is that when these legends started to die out, westerns stopped being made by Americans and started being made by Italians, something that makes almost as little sense as the fact that the Italians took their influences from the west via the east. While the American western was dying, the spaghetti western was being born out of the Japanese samurai saga, itself influenced by the old American western. The first was A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone's 1964 remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Kurosawa was the greatest name in his field but he frequently acknowledged John Ford as a key influence. Leone went on in turn to become the greatest name in his, one of the three Sergios (Leone, Corbucci, and Sollima) who dominated spaghetti westerns. Three Leone films can be found in this list, two of which are westerns, and he even appears once more as an actor, in a small role in Vittorio di Sica's The Bicycle Thief.
I know and appreciate Leone from his famous Man with No Name trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), but he also directed two epics that I hadn't yet seen until I caught up with at least this one in 2004. Both are long tributes to traditional American story forms, the western and the gangster movie, and both appear in this list. As befits the enormity of their scope, they go by grand titles: Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. I still haven't caught up with the latter but I've worked through the former twice, once back in 2004 and then again in 2010. There's a lot to say about Once Upon a Time in the West, but the first thing that leapt out at me was the sound, something I can't ever recall happening before, at least not like this and probably not again until I saw Fritz Lang's M.
It caught my attention at the very beginning of the film which opens with a few rough looking types waiting for a train at Cattle Corner, three men sent to kill the mysterious gunman who it will bring. Waits are by definition inherently boring affairs and thus usually avoided by directors, especially at the beginning of movies, but Leone uses sound to keep our interest here. There's no music to begin with, just sounds. We listen to the rhythmic creakings of a swinging seat and the blades of a windmill, chalk on a blackboard and a tickertape machine. Al Mulock makes strange noises to a caged bird. Woody Strode finds himself under a leak in the roof and instead of moving just puts his hat on so we listen to the water dropping onto it. Jack Elam tries to shift a fly off his face with the least effort possible, eventually catching it with his gun and listening to it buzz inside the barrel.
Of course we hear the train before we see it too, first its whistle then its wheels, and when it finally arrives, a bell tolls, the credits finish and it sits there breathing at us. We're fifteen minutes in and we've only heard a handful of lines of dialogue and even those are sparse. 'Looks like we're shy one horse,' says Snaky. 'You brought two too many,' replies Harmonica. To be fair, that isn't the only dialogue thus far but it's not far off. Once Upon a Time in the West really aims at depicting the vastness of the old west through the inherent lack of anything but natural sound and the introduction of the new west through the introduction of the overt sounds of civilisation. It does a magnificent job. As if to highlight the fact that civilisation will bring order to the wild west, we also quickly learn that when sounds stop, people get nervous and things happen, usually bad ones.
This is emphasised by the next scene after Harmonica, that mysterious gunman at Cattle Corner, disposes of the three men who have been waiting for him. We watch Frank, the man who sent them, massacre Brett McBain and his family, even though McBain obviously pays a lot of attention every time the background noises stop. Only when everyone outside is dead and the youngest McBain runs out of the house does Ennio Morricone's music really kick in, with all his trademark bells and whistles, literally. Only when it stops does Frank shoot the kid dead too.
Morricone scored most, if not all, of Leone's westerns and it's an understatement to suggest that he's both distinctive and accomplished. One of the most imitated composers in cinematic history, his whistle from For a Few Dollars More probably as iconic as the shark theme from Jaws by John Williams or Bernard Herrmann's shrieking knife from the shower scene in Psycho. His wailing harmonica here is merely one of many memorable themes he's composed. Leone had so much respect for Morricone that he directed much of this film around the soundtrack rather than the other way around.
Brett McBain dies quickly but he's the reason this story exists. He's a canny Irishman who knows that the railroad will run on from Flagstone so buys up the only land in its way that has a water supply that can feed the engines, calling it Sweetwater. Water is our McGuffin and it's as prevalent in our story as it's absent from most of the land around Flagstone. McBain makes all the right decisions but he dies for them too. His dream is carried on by his wife Jill, who arrives alive that day from New Orleans, because Frank didn't even know about her. She's played by top credited Claudia Cardinale, who portrays both aspects of her character well: the lady that McBain is expecting and the prostitute that she was in New Orleans. She's certainly a strong lead but she has plenty of backing from the rest of the cast.
Frank is Henry Fonda, apparently Sergio Leone's favourite actor, so much so that he flew to New York to persuade him to take this role after he initially turned it down. This was a real change of tone for him, having been a perennial hero for a few decades in films like The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident and 12 Angry Men, but he obviously relished the villainy and did it well. He apparently looked back at this as one of his favourite roles. He's a blistering villain, his vivid blue eyes highly memorable. Leone's decision to ditch the brown contacts and facial hair Fonda arrived with was definitely a good one.
He works for Morton, a crippled railroad baron played by Gabriele Ferzetti, who lives in his luxurious railroad car pressing ever west in a dream to connect the two oceans by rail across the country before he dies. When he's out of his train, Frank calls him 'like a turtle out of his shell.' They get a few memorable exchanges. 'I only told you to scare them,' points out Morton after hearing about the McBain massacre. 'People scare better when they're dying,' says Frank. In their way the characters also represent the changing times. Morton is the future, the businessman. Frank is the past, the gunman, though he does attempt to change with the times, albeit not successfully.
As Frank is unable to change, Harmonica is able, though he generally chooses not to do so. Throughout the film he recognises what's coming and the reasons for it far quicker than anyone else. While he remains true to himself he deliberately aids those who are changing the times without any need for financial recompense. He's played by Charles Bronson, who here epitomises the quiet and inscrutable tough guy he'd been playing for over a decade, not only in westerns. The sixties were a great decade for him, beginning with The Magnificent Seven and also including The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen. Harmonica is the mysterious character who obviously has a very deliberate purpose in being in Flagstone but who plays his games while everyone else tries to work that out. We never even learn his name, though he throws a bunch of fake ones out to tease Frank.
Finally, there's Jason Robards as an outlaw called Cheyenne, certainly the lest known of th actors at the time. He knew the old American story forms though, having come to this film from playing the best Al Capone I've ever seen in Roger Corman's The St Valentine's Day Massacre, as well as Doc Holliday alongside James Garner's Wyatt Earp in Hour of the Gun. He's a highly versatile and frequently underrated actor who is one of the real discoveries in American film. Rather than use each further film to consolidate our expectation of his characters, he used them to add something new and he has the most flexible of the lead roles here. We're introduced to him through a gunfight that we never see. We're in a bar watching the reactions to the shots outside, only for Cheyenne to burst through the door and ask for a jug. It's only when he lifts his hands to drink that we realise that he's handcuffed and so shot his way out of a trip to jail.
As much as I think about sound in Once Upon a Time in the West, the visuals are just as good. There are so many scenes like this one where the camera pans and we discover something. The first view we have of Flagstone is from a crane shot moving up over the station and it's majestic: the music sweeps, the dust blows and we can't help but be caught up in the passion of the thing, even though we're following Jill, who's about to find out that her husband and new family have all been murdered. When she finally gets to Sweetwater, she sees a funeral party which we pan along all the way to the four bodies laid out on tables. Cheyenne's back story is eventually told, of course, and that ties to a truly great discovery shot that only gets better the more the camera moves away.
The buildings are great, not just the apparently rickety construction of the things, but also the way light plays into them. All the faces are memorable, with many of them highlighted in frequent closeups, usually facing straight at the camera as if they're facing us down. We haven't a chance against the poker faces of people like Fonda and Bronson, let alone when the camera zooms in to depict nothing but Harmonica's eyes. The scale is powerful even on a big screen TV; I'd love to see the immensity of it on a theatre screen. The scenery is impeccable, not just what was shot in Monument Valley, so recognisable from no end of John Ford movies, but also what was shot in Spain, the usual filming location for most spaghetti westerns, even though they were generally made by Italians.
The story is a great and iconic one, as befits such a grand title, and the names behind it are surprising. Leone, already well established after his Man with No Name trilogy, hired two men best known at that time as film critics to collaborate with on the script. Both went on to be highly successful directors themselves. Bernardo Bertolucci had made a few films already but his best known ones were all still to come, not least The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor. Dario Argento wasn't entirely inexperienced but he wouldn't begin his acclaimed directorial career for another two years, going on to make some of the most memorable giallo movies of them all, beginning with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and going on to films like Deep Red, Suspiria and Inferno.
To create this script they spent most of a year at Leone's house watching and discussing what seems like every American western they could find, to deconstruct the genre and build it back up into a conglomeration of all the great western stories, iconic themes and reminiscent details. Many films are obvious influences, not least High Noon, The Searchers and Shane, but there are recognisable details from a whole string of others, right down to the time on the Flagstone station clock when Jill looks up at it, wondering why nobody is there to meet her. It's 10.40am, the time Will Kane gets married in High Noon, beginning the hour and twenty minutes until his showdown with the bad guys.
Even though so much of this film was obviously sourced from (Wikipedia reads 'made up almost entirely of references to') the body of classic American westerns, it was not initially a success in the States, either commercially or critically. Without critical praise at its original length of 165 minutes, Paramount chopped out twenty minutes for its theatrical run but this fared no better with the public. Only later did it build a cult reputation that grew into something much more, as major directors talked about its influence on them during the late sixties and seventies. Perhaps its substantial length, its generally slow pace and the fact that there are deceptive periods where little seems to happen contributed to its failure on initial American release. Conversely, those are some of the key reasons why it's so memorable and so highly regarded today.
Stars: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzetti and Paolo Stoppa
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| I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here. |
For most of my life the western has been a dead genre, occasional revivals by stars like Clint Eastwood or Kevin Costner notwithstanding. This is reflected well by the fact that there are a bunch of westerns in the IMDb Top 250, but Eastwood's Unforgiven aside, the newest of them is The Wild Bunch which was made in 1969, two years before I was born and thus hardly new. Sam Peckinpah, who directed The Wild Bunch, spent most of his life lamenting the final demise of the old west and his westerns obviously reflect that. This does no less, highlighting the reasons for the beginning of that demise and the consequent transition from the old west to the new west, not least through the railroad which brought connection, communication and speed.
The thing is that the genre in film declined along with its real life subject matter. While people two or three generations before mine flocked to westerns to watch the great stars like John Wayne, Gary Cooper or even Hopalong Cassidy, my parents' generation only got to see their last hurrahs. As a good example, Sam Peckinpah directed a wonderful film in 1962 called Ride the High Country that starred two great western legends, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. It may have been a great movie but it was McCrea's last and Scott's last but one. By the time I came along most of these names were dead or at least retired from the screen. I just saw the revivals.
The strange thing is that when these legends started to die out, westerns stopped being made by Americans and started being made by Italians, something that makes almost as little sense as the fact that the Italians took their influences from the west via the east. While the American western was dying, the spaghetti western was being born out of the Japanese samurai saga, itself influenced by the old American western. The first was A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone's 1964 remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Kurosawa was the greatest name in his field but he frequently acknowledged John Ford as a key influence. Leone went on in turn to become the greatest name in his, one of the three Sergios (Leone, Corbucci, and Sollima) who dominated spaghetti westerns. Three Leone films can be found in this list, two of which are westerns, and he even appears once more as an actor, in a small role in Vittorio di Sica's The Bicycle Thief.
I know and appreciate Leone from his famous Man with No Name trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), but he also directed two epics that I hadn't yet seen until I caught up with at least this one in 2004. Both are long tributes to traditional American story forms, the western and the gangster movie, and both appear in this list. As befits the enormity of their scope, they go by grand titles: Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. I still haven't caught up with the latter but I've worked through the former twice, once back in 2004 and then again in 2010. There's a lot to say about Once Upon a Time in the West, but the first thing that leapt out at me was the sound, something I can't ever recall happening before, at least not like this and probably not again until I saw Fritz Lang's M.
It caught my attention at the very beginning of the film which opens with a few rough looking types waiting for a train at Cattle Corner, three men sent to kill the mysterious gunman who it will bring. Waits are by definition inherently boring affairs and thus usually avoided by directors, especially at the beginning of movies, but Leone uses sound to keep our interest here. There's no music to begin with, just sounds. We listen to the rhythmic creakings of a swinging seat and the blades of a windmill, chalk on a blackboard and a tickertape machine. Al Mulock makes strange noises to a caged bird. Woody Strode finds himself under a leak in the roof and instead of moving just puts his hat on so we listen to the water dropping onto it. Jack Elam tries to shift a fly off his face with the least effort possible, eventually catching it with his gun and listening to it buzz inside the barrel.
Of course we hear the train before we see it too, first its whistle then its wheels, and when it finally arrives, a bell tolls, the credits finish and it sits there breathing at us. We're fifteen minutes in and we've only heard a handful of lines of dialogue and even those are sparse. 'Looks like we're shy one horse,' says Snaky. 'You brought two too many,' replies Harmonica. To be fair, that isn't the only dialogue thus far but it's not far off. Once Upon a Time in the West really aims at depicting the vastness of the old west through the inherent lack of anything but natural sound and the introduction of the new west through the introduction of the overt sounds of civilisation. It does a magnificent job. As if to highlight the fact that civilisation will bring order to the wild west, we also quickly learn that when sounds stop, people get nervous and things happen, usually bad ones.
This is emphasised by the next scene after Harmonica, that mysterious gunman at Cattle Corner, disposes of the three men who have been waiting for him. We watch Frank, the man who sent them, massacre Brett McBain and his family, even though McBain obviously pays a lot of attention every time the background noises stop. Only when everyone outside is dead and the youngest McBain runs out of the house does Ennio Morricone's music really kick in, with all his trademark bells and whistles, literally. Only when it stops does Frank shoot the kid dead too.
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Brett McBain dies quickly but he's the reason this story exists. He's a canny Irishman who knows that the railroad will run on from Flagstone so buys up the only land in its way that has a water supply that can feed the engines, calling it Sweetwater. Water is our McGuffin and it's as prevalent in our story as it's absent from most of the land around Flagstone. McBain makes all the right decisions but he dies for them too. His dream is carried on by his wife Jill, who arrives alive that day from New Orleans, because Frank didn't even know about her. She's played by top credited Claudia Cardinale, who portrays both aspects of her character well: the lady that McBain is expecting and the prostitute that she was in New Orleans. She's certainly a strong lead but she has plenty of backing from the rest of the cast.
Frank is Henry Fonda, apparently Sergio Leone's favourite actor, so much so that he flew to New York to persuade him to take this role after he initially turned it down. This was a real change of tone for him, having been a perennial hero for a few decades in films like The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident and 12 Angry Men, but he obviously relished the villainy and did it well. He apparently looked back at this as one of his favourite roles. He's a blistering villain, his vivid blue eyes highly memorable. Leone's decision to ditch the brown contacts and facial hair Fonda arrived with was definitely a good one.
He works for Morton, a crippled railroad baron played by Gabriele Ferzetti, who lives in his luxurious railroad car pressing ever west in a dream to connect the two oceans by rail across the country before he dies. When he's out of his train, Frank calls him 'like a turtle out of his shell.' They get a few memorable exchanges. 'I only told you to scare them,' points out Morton after hearing about the McBain massacre. 'People scare better when they're dying,' says Frank. In their way the characters also represent the changing times. Morton is the future, the businessman. Frank is the past, the gunman, though he does attempt to change with the times, albeit not successfully.
As Frank is unable to change, Harmonica is able, though he generally chooses not to do so. Throughout the film he recognises what's coming and the reasons for it far quicker than anyone else. While he remains true to himself he deliberately aids those who are changing the times without any need for financial recompense. He's played by Charles Bronson, who here epitomises the quiet and inscrutable tough guy he'd been playing for over a decade, not only in westerns. The sixties were a great decade for him, beginning with The Magnificent Seven and also including The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen. Harmonica is the mysterious character who obviously has a very deliberate purpose in being in Flagstone but who plays his games while everyone else tries to work that out. We never even learn his name, though he throws a bunch of fake ones out to tease Frank.
Finally, there's Jason Robards as an outlaw called Cheyenne, certainly the lest known of th actors at the time. He knew the old American story forms though, having come to this film from playing the best Al Capone I've ever seen in Roger Corman's The St Valentine's Day Massacre, as well as Doc Holliday alongside James Garner's Wyatt Earp in Hour of the Gun. He's a highly versatile and frequently underrated actor who is one of the real discoveries in American film. Rather than use each further film to consolidate our expectation of his characters, he used them to add something new and he has the most flexible of the lead roles here. We're introduced to him through a gunfight that we never see. We're in a bar watching the reactions to the shots outside, only for Cheyenne to burst through the door and ask for a jug. It's only when he lifts his hands to drink that we realise that he's handcuffed and so shot his way out of a trip to jail.
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The buildings are great, not just the apparently rickety construction of the things, but also the way light plays into them. All the faces are memorable, with many of them highlighted in frequent closeups, usually facing straight at the camera as if they're facing us down. We haven't a chance against the poker faces of people like Fonda and Bronson, let alone when the camera zooms in to depict nothing but Harmonica's eyes. The scale is powerful even on a big screen TV; I'd love to see the immensity of it on a theatre screen. The scenery is impeccable, not just what was shot in Monument Valley, so recognisable from no end of John Ford movies, but also what was shot in Spain, the usual filming location for most spaghetti westerns, even though they were generally made by Italians.
The story is a great and iconic one, as befits such a grand title, and the names behind it are surprising. Leone, already well established after his Man with No Name trilogy, hired two men best known at that time as film critics to collaborate with on the script. Both went on to be highly successful directors themselves. Bernardo Bertolucci had made a few films already but his best known ones were all still to come, not least The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor. Dario Argento wasn't entirely inexperienced but he wouldn't begin his acclaimed directorial career for another two years, going on to make some of the most memorable giallo movies of them all, beginning with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and going on to films like Deep Red, Suspiria and Inferno.
To create this script they spent most of a year at Leone's house watching and discussing what seems like every American western they could find, to deconstruct the genre and build it back up into a conglomeration of all the great western stories, iconic themes and reminiscent details. Many films are obvious influences, not least High Noon, The Searchers and Shane, but there are recognisable details from a whole string of others, right down to the time on the Flagstone station clock when Jill looks up at it, wondering why nobody is there to meet her. It's 10.40am, the time Will Kane gets married in High Noon, beginning the hour and twenty minutes until his showdown with the bad guys.
Even though so much of this film was obviously sourced from (Wikipedia reads 'made up almost entirely of references to') the body of classic American westerns, it was not initially a success in the States, either commercially or critically. Without critical praise at its original length of 165 minutes, Paramount chopped out twenty minutes for its theatrical run but this fared no better with the public. Only later did it build a cult reputation that grew into something much more, as major directors talked about its influence on them during the late sixties and seventies. Perhaps its substantial length, its generally slow pace and the fact that there are deceptive periods where little seems to happen contributed to its failure on initial American release. Conversely, those are some of the key reasons why it's so memorable and so highly regarded today.
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Evil Things (2009)
Director: Dominic Perez
Stars: Laurel Casillo, Morgan Hooper, Ryan Maslyn, Elyssa Mersdorf and Torrey Weiss
Evil Things is a low budget independent horror movie made possible by the economic downturn. Investment banker Dominic Perez had wanted to make a movie for a long while, but only actually did so when the bank he worked for restructured and his position went away. Luckily he had three months of notice to put to use in writing and financing his film, which he wrote and directed. So here's the official proof: good things can come from bad times.
It's a brave film, based on a few intriguing cinematic devices that get used now and again in film with highly variable results. The first is the concept of the film as record, this being not just our feature film but an item of FBI evidence, as reinforced by the clever design of the DVD label and the opening shot of the film, a notch up on the usual found footage logic. The second is the the fact that almost the entire film is shot from the perspective of the video camera owned by one of the principal characters.
Now this point of view concept in particular is a difficult one to really pull off. It worked pretty well for half of Humphrey Bogart's Dark Passage, because of the force of his personality, but far less well in Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, for example. Both these were Hollywood films with large budgets and experienced crews and the camerawork is not designed to be realistic. The realism came later, with films like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, obvious influences here because they combine both the key concepts in use, but with the realism comes deliberately shaky camerawork.
And here's where I have a problem. While I love the concept from a theoretical standpoint and acknowledge how useful a tool it is to the independent filmmaker to slash the budget and give the film in your face realism, it tends to give me motion sickness. It really doesn't help the enjoyment factor of the film when I tend to end up having to stop watching and listen instead. Given the rise in popular culture of reality TV and the decreasing cost and increasing availability of affordable handheld cameras, I'm sure we're going to see it a lot more often which will increase sales of Ibruprofen for me and trips to the bathroom for my better half. Unfortunately this means that Evil Things has a downside for me through no fault of its own. Luckily it has much to make up for it.
The fictional budding filmmaker that real life budding filmmaker Dominic Perez creates is Leo Pugliese. He's one of a group of four friends who go to Grand Central Station to pick up a fifth, then head out for a weekend in the middle of nowhere. It's Miriam's 21st birthday, you see, and her Aunt Gail has this very large country house that will be conveniently empty. We're not sure precisely where this is, but it's in dangerous country: very rural, very snowy and where there's believably next to no cellphone service.
And on the icy roads, a large van starts stalking them: it tailgates them, it overtakes them then stops in front of them on a blind bend, it follows them and reappears every time they think it's gone. This van doesn't look particularly sinister, except through context. We're watching FBI evidence, after all, which speaks to the mass disappearance of our five friends, and someone has delivered this video record anonymously to FBI headquarters. Quite why they did this is one of the questions I'm still pondering.
As the film runs on and they successfully arrive at Aunt Gail's house to drink the evening away, we begin to forget about the van and wonder if it was just there for shock and suspense value like certain other scenes in the film. This is reinforced in the morning when everyone is hung over and not wanting to do anything, because Mark nonetheless drags them all out into the woods to go see some cave paintings or some such, only to get them all notably lost. The van does reappear though, as soon after they make it back to the house, they discover a videotape that has been left for them, showing the true horror that the van represents.
It would be easy to dismiss this film and not just because its title is pointlessly generic. There's really nothing new anywhere in the film, though to be fair I'm not sure that all its disparate elements have ever been put together in one place the way they are here. At heart there's hardly any plot to speak of: five kids get terrorised in an isolated location and that's about it, which hardly elevates it above its competition, competition that trumps it on experience, budget and time to film. It takes us a long while to escalate the fear to its inevitable conclusion, which of course is by default never in doubt. There are also a number of questions left unanswered, some of which smack of plot holes.
But somehow there's a charm to this one. The banter is realistic and rarely gets boring even through the long scenes to build up the tension. Most importantly it never gets annoyingly dumb, which is highly refreshing in a genre full of annoyingly dumb character decisions. We don't want to slap any of these characters and we don't find ourselves rooting for the villain of the piece just to shut up the people we're supposed to care for. They feel like real people not stereotypes. The fear scenes are very well handled, Laurel Casillo and Torrey Weiss especially realistic in their reactions. The infrared scene at the end is very well done indeed, as the pinnacle of a solid climax to all this long buildup.
Most of all I highly respect the decision to not give us an answer. This story is open ended not because Dominic Perez wants to make a sequel but because the concept was about what he describes on the film's excellent website as 'the innate fear of the unknown or the unknowable'. It's about showing us that something's out there, something that we can't see and something that we have precisely no background information on. All we know is it's there and it's freaking us the hell out. Perez isn't introducing a new franchise villain here, so there will be no resin models or Hallowe'en masks coming out of this film. What he gives us is that abiding fear that all those cuddly, reliable and apparently invulnerable franchise monsters don't. That's refreshing and all respect to him for it.
Stars: Laurel Casillo, Morgan Hooper, Ryan Maslyn, Elyssa Mersdorf and Torrey Weiss
 |  |
It's a brave film, based on a few intriguing cinematic devices that get used now and again in film with highly variable results. The first is the concept of the film as record, this being not just our feature film but an item of FBI evidence, as reinforced by the clever design of the DVD label and the opening shot of the film, a notch up on the usual found footage logic. The second is the the fact that almost the entire film is shot from the perspective of the video camera owned by one of the principal characters.
Now this point of view concept in particular is a difficult one to really pull off. It worked pretty well for half of Humphrey Bogart's Dark Passage, because of the force of his personality, but far less well in Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, for example. Both these were Hollywood films with large budgets and experienced crews and the camerawork is not designed to be realistic. The realism came later, with films like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, obvious influences here because they combine both the key concepts in use, but with the realism comes deliberately shaky camerawork.
And here's where I have a problem. While I love the concept from a theoretical standpoint and acknowledge how useful a tool it is to the independent filmmaker to slash the budget and give the film in your face realism, it tends to give me motion sickness. It really doesn't help the enjoyment factor of the film when I tend to end up having to stop watching and listen instead. Given the rise in popular culture of reality TV and the decreasing cost and increasing availability of affordable handheld cameras, I'm sure we're going to see it a lot more often which will increase sales of Ibruprofen for me and trips to the bathroom for my better half. Unfortunately this means that Evil Things has a downside for me through no fault of its own. Luckily it has much to make up for it.
The fictional budding filmmaker that real life budding filmmaker Dominic Perez creates is Leo Pugliese. He's one of a group of four friends who go to Grand Central Station to pick up a fifth, then head out for a weekend in the middle of nowhere. It's Miriam's 21st birthday, you see, and her Aunt Gail has this very large country house that will be conveniently empty. We're not sure precisely where this is, but it's in dangerous country: very rural, very snowy and where there's believably next to no cellphone service.
And on the icy roads, a large van starts stalking them: it tailgates them, it overtakes them then stops in front of them on a blind bend, it follows them and reappears every time they think it's gone. This van doesn't look particularly sinister, except through context. We're watching FBI evidence, after all, which speaks to the mass disappearance of our five friends, and someone has delivered this video record anonymously to FBI headquarters. Quite why they did this is one of the questions I'm still pondering.
As the film runs on and they successfully arrive at Aunt Gail's house to drink the evening away, we begin to forget about the van and wonder if it was just there for shock and suspense value like certain other scenes in the film. This is reinforced in the morning when everyone is hung over and not wanting to do anything, because Mark nonetheless drags them all out into the woods to go see some cave paintings or some such, only to get them all notably lost. The van does reappear though, as soon after they make it back to the house, they discover a videotape that has been left for them, showing the true horror that the van represents.
It would be easy to dismiss this film and not just because its title is pointlessly generic. There's really nothing new anywhere in the film, though to be fair I'm not sure that all its disparate elements have ever been put together in one place the way they are here. At heart there's hardly any plot to speak of: five kids get terrorised in an isolated location and that's about it, which hardly elevates it above its competition, competition that trumps it on experience, budget and time to film. It takes us a long while to escalate the fear to its inevitable conclusion, which of course is by default never in doubt. There are also a number of questions left unanswered, some of which smack of plot holes.
But somehow there's a charm to this one. The banter is realistic and rarely gets boring even through the long scenes to build up the tension. Most importantly it never gets annoyingly dumb, which is highly refreshing in a genre full of annoyingly dumb character decisions. We don't want to slap any of these characters and we don't find ourselves rooting for the villain of the piece just to shut up the people we're supposed to care for. They feel like real people not stereotypes. The fear scenes are very well handled, Laurel Casillo and Torrey Weiss especially realistic in their reactions. The infrared scene at the end is very well done indeed, as the pinnacle of a solid climax to all this long buildup.
Most of all I highly respect the decision to not give us an answer. This story is open ended not because Dominic Perez wants to make a sequel but because the concept was about what he describes on the film's excellent website as 'the innate fear of the unknown or the unknowable'. It's about showing us that something's out there, something that we can't see and something that we have precisely no background information on. All we know is it's there and it's freaking us the hell out. Perez isn't introducing a new franchise villain here, so there will be no resin models or Hallowe'en masks coming out of this film. What he gives us is that abiding fear that all those cuddly, reliable and apparently invulnerable franchise monsters don't. That's refreshing and all respect to him for it.
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