The Screengrab : charles taylor

Democracy in the Western: Charles Taylor on "Rio Bravo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

"To the left, Wayne has always been close to a comic-book version of American power in all its swaggering crudeness. That his screen persona was neither swaggering nor crude hardly mattered." So writes Charles Taylor in the latest issue of the pinko-liberal publication Dissent. While the above statement can be taken as definitive proof that Taylor has never seen McQ, it'll stand for the performances that Taylor cites as among Wayne's best, such as those in Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, and the one he's here to preach about tonight: Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. As Taylor writes, "The inspiration for Rio Bravo came from perhaps the most praised of Westerns, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon. High-Minded Noon it might have been called. Existing for no other reason than to impart a lesson in good citizenship, High Noon was a transparent metaphor for the failure of Americans to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Hawks hated it. Narratively, Hawks felt it made no sense for Gary Cooper’s sheriff to spend the movie soliciting the townspeople’s help to fend off the killers coming for him only to prove, in the end, that he didn’t need help. Hawks was offended by the idea that a sheriff would endanger the lives of the people he was meant to protect by trying to recruit them to save his skin. So Hawks made a movie in which Wayne’s sheriff turns down the help offered him, and needs it at every turn... Part of the beauty of Wayne’s performance here is the way, even when Chance is refusing help, he never undervalues others. When Chance’s friend, the cattleman Wheeler (the inevitable Ward Bond), derides his deputies by asking, 'A bum-legged old man and a drunk—that’s all you’ve got?' Chance answers, 'That’s what I’ve got.' It’s the single best line reading of Wayne’s career. There’s a world of respect in the weight he puts on that one word, 'what,' an irreducible sense of people’s worth as individuals."

Rio Bravo's open affection for its characters--characters that we, the viewer, spend a lot of time cooped up with in small, confining spaces--helps to account for its status as, in Quentin Tarantino's terminology, one of the greatest hang-out movies of all time. Wayne's John T. Chance "is the heroic figure whose self-sufficiency inspires the others to rise above their shortcomings. But because this is a celebration of democracy, the result isn’t a race of isolated heroes but a community in which the strength of each individual buoys up everyone else. Even Chance, the strongest person in the movie, can’t do without those people." Indeed, because without Dean Martin fumbling with the last shreds of his self-respect, Walter Brennan lurching and gabbing, and Rick Nelson leading the camp sing-along, there woule nothing to watch except for Claude Akins complaining about the quality of the jail food until Wayne went back to his cell to bludgeon him to sleep, not that this wouldn't have been something to watch. As it is, it is a film that, in Taylor's eyes, "justif[ies] the idea of America." It is good to know that a film that justifies the idea of America has a scene in which Angie Dickinson appears wearing fishnet stockings.

Tribeca Film Festival Reviews: "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"; "Fire Under the Snow"; "Milosovic on Trial"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Some of the documentaries at Tribeca this year feel like messages in a bottle sent from the recent past, efforts at preserving material that will be useful to those who eventually write the definitive histories. Pray to Send the Devil Back to Hell is a mixture of old news footage and fresh interviews dealing with the fifteen years of chaos and carnage that followed the declaration of civil war in Liberia in 1989. Ragged as the movie is, it makes for an inspiring viewing experience, and its tribute to the "women's peace movement" of Liberia succeeds in taking something that, at the time, may have seemed like a footnote to the big events and making the case that it was instrumental in bringing about many of the happier developments in this story. The women's peace movement grew out of the escalating sense of hopelessness that developed as President Charles Taylor and the "warlords" jockeying to replace him both used violent terror as their main tool in their battle for power. Things finally got bas enough that the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia, for the first time in their history, joined forces to campaign for peace through public protests and more intimate strategies, such as what one of them calls "sex strikes." The campaigners betray no hesitation in declaring themselves the representatives of peace by virtue of their gender, and united as a group against men, who they regard as "guilty" of supporting violence "either by commission or omission." As they see it, the men are the ones with the power in their society, and if they didn't want the bloodshed to continue, they could do something to stop it. Instead, they've used their power to bring war--and to approve the use of rape as a weapon in warfare.

Eventually, the popular support their movement picked up forced Taylor and the warlords to the bargaining table and helped set in motion the chain of events that eventually landed Taylor in U.N. custody, where he's currently being tried for war crimes. In his absence, the warlords gathered to hammer out a peace agreement, though some began to feel that the proceedings were being needlessly prolonged because the participants enjoyed the hotel accommodations they were given after years of sleeping on the ground in a war zone. Finally, Leymah Gbowee, the co-ordinator of the women's peace movement, marched her troops into the hallways and kick-started the process by having a tearful, screaming fit. The movie has its share of horror stories about what went on during the war, but nothing else so dramatically conveys what it must have been like to live in Liberia during that time as the sight of Leymah Gbowee, who is radiant and serenely composed in the new interview footage, having an angry, sobbing meltdown--the last desperate resort of someone who's already done so much against such insurmountable odds that this last stupid roadblock has her ready to pop her cork and spew lava. Always slow to recognize an invaluable resource when it's fallen into their laps, the male security forces first asked the women to leave, then asked if some of them could help them tackle the delegates who had started trying to escape the premises by jumping out the windows. The film ends with a jubilant sense of accomplishment. "We campaigned until the end of the night," recalls one smiling woman. "We campaigned until we forgot that we could be raped!"

Another documentary, Fire Under the Snow, records the heroism of Palder Gyatso, a Tibetan monk who spent 33 years in Chinese custody, enduring starvation and torture until he managed to escape the country in 1992. This one, which draws its quiet power from its subject's on-screen demonstration of same, is moving and ends more or less happily but with an undertone of sad resignation: its hero now lives in India as a free man, but is a living symbol of someone who cannot return home. The title character of Milosovic on Trial, the former Serbian president and, one imagines, possible future roommate of Charles Taylor's, ultimately failed to live long enough to see a verdict delivered in the war crimes trial that he did so much to pointlessly prolong, his death of natural causes in his cell having denied the world to chance to see him bust a move at the end of a rope. Milosovic's trial was a footnote to the story of war and genocide in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century, and Milosovic on Trial, an admirably solid, straightforward, public-television-style summing-up, doesn't pretend to be more than that. It benefits greatly from its footage of Milosovic in the dock, putting in his bid to be remembered as the ideal face of arrogant, rock-stupid-and-proud-of-it institutional villainy. With his thick, smirking face and shock of white hair, he looks like the malignant love child of Archie Bunker and Elmer Fudd, and this does not seem inappropriate to either his character or his place in history. One witness who describes a moment when Milosovic told him that he didn't believe in the existence of the piece of paper that the man was waving in his face at the time says that it was his impression that the top Serb felt that "if he said something, that made it true." Thank God such blind idiot faith in one's own self-serving horseshit is unknown in our own corridors of power. The other big revelation in the film is that all the lawyers who work on war crimes trials appear to have awful-looking teeth. Whatever draws people to this difficult, frustrating line of work, it can't be that the the U.N. has such a terrific dental plan.

Dave Stevens (1955-2008)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The illustrator and comic book artist Dave Stevens died earlier this week at the age of 52 after a long struggle with leukemia. Stevens was best known as the creator of the Rocketeer, an adventure character that first appeared in various titles published by Pacific, a short-lived independent comics company in the early 1980s. (After Pacific went out of business, he jumped to other now-defunct "independent" comics publishers--Eclipse, Comico--before winding up at Dark Horse.) Set in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, the comics centered on Cliff Secord, a scrappy young stunt pilot who battles Nazis and performs other acts of derring-do after stumbling across a portable jet pack that turns him into a two-fisted flying fool. The comics inspired a 1991 movie, directed by Joe Johnston, that worked hard to capture the look of Stevens's comics, and with a cast that included Bill Campbell in the lead, Jennifer Connelly as his girl Betty, and Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton (in a role modeled on Errol Flynn), and Terry O'Quinn, of Lost, as Howard Hughes.

The movie was okay, but Stevens had essentially already made his own Rocketeer movie; he just did it on paper. He didn't turn out many pages of Cliff Secord's adventures, because he put so much painstaking work into them that there were long, long lulls between the appearance of each new short chapter, an effect that was amplified by the fact that his publishing companies kept dying on him. It was worth the effort he put into them. (The film critic Charles Taylor described them as "little pieces of kitsch heaven.") Stevens was really crazy about the pop culture of a certain place and time, and part of what set his work apart was that he was driven to lavish his loving eye and craftsmanship on some very tacky, and even sleazy, love objects. Secord was a carny hanger-on making a buck any way he could, and his beloved Betty was explicitly modeled on the pin-up icon Bettie Page, whose image Stevens did a hell of a lot to resurrect and immortalize. (He also rediscovered, and befriended, the actual Ms. Page, who probably never expected to outlive him.) The "Rocketeer" comics also incorporated a lot of period Hollywood lore, as well as nods to such iconic ephemera as the masked image of the Saturday-matinee hero Commander Cody, Rondo Hatton, and the Doc Savage sidekick Monk Mayfair. Stevens earned his right to slap all this stuff together by giving it a unifying visual dazzle and afectionate spirit. His masterwork is probably one of the best marriages of movies and comics ever brought off.

Bollywood Bonanza: Shah Rukh Khan Breaks Big

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

In the New York Times Book Review, Charles Taylor celebrates Anupama Chopra's new biography of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both for its own virtues and for what its existence may say about the spread of interest in popular Indian cinema to the English-speaking audience. "The larger significance of the book," he writes, "is that a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States. And that is remarkable at a time when newspaper and magazine editors and film distributors are increasingly reluctant to offer readers and viewers what they haven’t already heard about." With more and more movies fighter for fewer and fewer screens in America, and with the international distribution system an erratic mess, it may seem a stretch to suggest that Bollywood is about to take the country by storm. "But in a global economy in which India stands poised to play a bigger part, when the Internet and DVD’s are creating film audiences not bound by borders or by the caprices of film distribution, when some American multiplexes are giving over screens to Bollywood releases in order to lure America’s growing Indian population and when the stagnation of Hollywood sometimes makes the survival of movies as a popular art form seem an iffy proposition, Americans can’t afford to ignore Bollywood much longer." At forty-one, Shah Rukh Khan could well be an important tool in breaking into the Western market; two of his recent movies, Veer-Zaara and Chak! de India (which comes out on DVD next month) are among the rare Bollywood movies that have actually played theaters in the States. Taylor describes him as "part leading man, larger part buoyant goofball" who "represents the confident, successful Indian yuppie, the citizen of the world who is nonetheless recognizably Indian." He definitely has crossover potential. But can he do it in pictures as exotically strange to American tastes as his Bollywood hits? The obvious alternative would be Hollywood-style versions of Bollywood movies, similar to the imitation-Hong Kong action knockoffs that Chow Yun Fat got shoved into when he came to America. The very idea may give migraines to Bollywood-lovers and -haters alike. — Phil Nugent