The Screengrab : citizen kane

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "Million Dollar Legs" (1933)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Mysteriously absent from any of the DVD packages of W. C. Fields films, including the two mighty useful but uneven five-disc Comedy Collection sets, the 1932 Million Dollar Legs is a compendium of golden shtick. The producer, Herman Mankiewicz, and the director, Edward Cline, who started out in the business as a Keystone comedian, were happy to make the most of the new sound technology that finally made it possible for Fields to cut loose on-camera, but they also included shout-outs to the silent era: Ben Turpin, the silent comic whose entire persona was his perpetual cock-eyed expression, slithers about as a spy, throwing his black cloak in front of his face like Dracula to subtly telegraph that he may be up to no good. Fields plays the president of Klopstokia, where all the women are named Angela and all the men are named George, and where all the inhabitants are master athletes. This pointedly includes both Fields and his arch rival, played by vaudeville veteran Hugh Herbert; the two of them routinely arm wrestle for control of the government, even though both men look as if the only way to get them from one end of a race track to the other would be to set the last beers in creation at the finish line. The film's romantic lead is Jack Oakie, the comic who is perhaps best for his Mussolini parody in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and who looked a little like a young, housebroken Jonathan Winters. "Isn't he handsome, father?" coos Fields's daughter, Angela. (See above.) "Yeah," replies Fields, "but I'll fix that."

The plot involves Oakie, a master brush salesman, winning over his prospective father-in-law by arranging to bring the athletically advanced Klopstokians to the Olympics, where they can win every event and save their faltering economy. Herbert and his traitorous mob try to thwart him by having the ultry-sultry Mata Machree (Lyda Roberti) distract the athletes and seduce the pure at heart Oakie; I'll risk a flood of "spoiler alert" complaints by revealing that things turn out all right. Million Dollar Legs is a true feat of a very rare kind, a comedy that achieves and sustains a cloudborne, homegrown-surreal tone with nary a Marx Brother in sight. Herman Mankiewicz wrote Citizen Kane, you know. If the market for Fields collections is stalled and the Jack Oakie box set just ain't gonna happen, why doesn't some genius stick these 64 minutes on the next Kane re-issue as the world's funniest Easter egg?

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Albert Finney in BIG FISH (2003)

How powerful is Albert Finney’s death scene in Tim Burton’s tall tale of a man with larger-than-life recollections of his own personal history? Well, let’s put it this way: according to New York magazine, “The last his family saw of [monologist Spalding Gray] was Saturday, January 10, [2004] when he took the kids to see Big Fish, the story of a dying father’s relationship with his son, at the Loews Village on Third Avenue and 11th Street. After the movie, Gray wept.” And then, 24 hours later, he tossed himself off the Staten Island ferry into the East River. Perhaps the special power of the movie for Gray (and creative types in general, myself included) is best captured in the final line, after Finney (as Edward Bloom, a character played in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) inspires his son (Billy Crudup) to mitigate the tragedy of death through art and fantasy: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” And, frankly, isn’t reimagining the world and hoping for some existence beyond it (in Heaven and/or in films, novels, scientific discoveries, progeny, blog entries, etc.) more or less the heart of human existence? For me, the greatest terror is thinking my consciousness and memories (not to mention the existence of my friends, relatives...even acquaintances and pets) will be erased forever at death. In particular, I dread the eventual demise of my parents and cling to hopes and fantasies that somehow there’s more than an empty void at the end of our road after all the fun and struggle of life...and so Burton’s film (about a father’s death transformed by flights of fancy) hit me like a 2x4, unleashing an unexpected, uncontrollable torrent of emotion unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at the movies (or maybe it was just the cameo by Miley Cyrus, in her feature film debut, back when she was known as “Destiny"). (AO)

Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Hauer’s Roy Batty is one of the screen’s most nuanced villains; while he’s a ruthless killer who’s not above playing with his victims the way a cat does a gutted rat, he’s also got a higher purpose. Roy is a replicant – an artificial life-form programmed to live only a short time so his intellect and emotions won’t develop to a human level – but in his case, it’s too late: he reaches a near-total self-awareness before his time is up. At the end of this science-fiction masterpiece, Roy toys with Detective Rick Deckard, who has wiped out most of his friends; he brutalizes him while taunting his own moral superiority: “Aren’t you the good man?” But nothing can be done; Roy knows he’s on the way out, and his last act isn’t to kill, but to save Deckard’s life. As he fades out into nonexistence, he drives home the film’s central question of what it means to be human, reminding Deckard that when he dies, his unique mind and irreplaceable memories will be gone forever, “like tears in the rain.” It’s a philosophically deep and emotionally powerful ending in a genre that rarely sees the two combined. (LP)

Duane Jones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

The zombie movie has reached its oversaturation point and is now just kind of annoying, but the movie that started it all, George Romero’s low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead, still holds the power to chill, and its final scene – extremely massive spoiler alert, for those of you who have somehow missed out on seeing this over the last forty years – is a real gut-punch. Level-headed, competent Ben (played by Duane Jones in what was at the time a controversial casting decision, placing an African-American actor in the lead against a group of whites) has managed to fend off seemingly endless onslaughts of flesh-hungry zombies, conquering threats from without and within, over the course of a nightmarish day when his life was constantly in danger. Finally securing a measure of peace, he beds down in the abandoned farmhouse for the night, plotting how he will make his escape the following morning; when he awakens, without foreshadowing and without fanfare, he is fatally shot by a passing sheriff’s posse who mistake him for one of the living dead he’s spent the entire rest of the movie fighting. It’s an inspired, if exceptionally cruel, ending, and it gives us the first glimpse of the nasty social commentary that would feature in Romero’s later work. (LP)

Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

The demise of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker at the end of Arthur Penn’s paradigm-busting gangster epic shouldn’t have come as any kind of surprise; after all, anyone who knew the history of the two criminals knew how they met their end, and had probably seen the photos of their car, pierced with hundreds of bullet holes. What Penn’s unforgettable death scene accomplishes, then, isn’t shock because of what happens, but rather how it’s depicted; refusing to take the easy way out, Penn forces us to watch Bonnie and Clyde (with whom we’ve spend the entire movie being forced into a bizarre sympathy) die the way they likely did in real life: in a horrible, convulsing, twitching, gory, pitiful mass of blood and gore. Different people took the ending in different ways, from the straights who saw it as a long-overdue comeuppance to the heads who felt it was another example of rebel heroes dying at the hands of the Man; but no one who saw it forgot it easily, and it substantially upped the ante for violence in Hollywood. From then on, no death would be simple and bloodless and abstracted; over the next two decades, the town would be drowned in gore from movies that picked up the gauntlet that Bonnie and Clyde threw down. (LP)

Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Orson Welles was already a restless, experimental genius at the astonishingly young age of 26 when he brought Citizen Kane to the screen. It’s widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for good reasons, many of which stem from Welles’ desire to rewrite the rules of filmmaking and start fresh from the ground up; and he doesn’t waste any time, putting the central character’s dramatic death scene at the beginning of the movie and working back from there to solve the mystery. At the top of the film, we see Charles Foster Kane as a bedridden old man, and before we even know who this man surrounded by opulent treasures is, he expires, letting a snow globe crash to the floor, and with his last breath, hissing the word ‘Rosebud’ – the key to the rest of the story. Welles later expressed dissatisfaction with this scene, saying he never quite felt right about it and writing off ‘Rosebud’ as a cheap Freudian gimmick, but its power has remained: it’s still counted as one of the most remembered death scenes in cinema, ‘Rosebud’ is at the top of the list of cinematic famous last words, and the whole sequence has been parodied thousands of times in dozens of media. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

3. THE GODFATHER (1972)

4. DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

As I discussed in my entry about Dr. Strangelove this past Thanksgiving, when we listed the movies we were most thankful for, it does the world the eternal service of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “comedy” and “masterpiece” need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, there’s a reason that most comedies aren’t great films: focusing on good jokes usually means ignoring things like extremely skillful direction and design, and staffing your cast with comedians usually means sacrificing the possibility of great acting. None of that applies here: Stanley Kubrick is at the very top of his game, applying his masterful sense of pace and visual keenness to the proceedings, and he brings just the right mix of actors to this pitch-black story of nuclear paranoia. By anchoring the film with a stunning triple-role by Peter Sellers, then the funniest man alive, and then coaxing master-class comic performances out of non-comic actors like George C. Scott, he managed to create a movie that was as brilliant as it was brilliantly funny. And good grief, is it funny: Terry Southern, the century’s finest portrayer of inappropriate behavior in high places, had a field day, coughing up at least a half-dozen of the funniest scenes in movie history. If the phone call to the Soviet premier, the scenes between Sellers and Sterling Hayden, or Slim Pickens’ loopy speechifying don’t crack you up, maybe humor just isn’t your thing.

5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

Film noir is far and away my favorite genre of film, so it’s curious that the one I choose as part of my ten greatest movies of all time is arguably not of the genre at all. The stellar adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel has plenty of noir trappings, but its focus on the lawman rather than the criminal, its traditional mystery structure, and its optimistic outcome puts it far more in the vein of a standard detective story than a true film noir. But for all that, it still captures the look and feel of post-war crime dramas like nothing before or since, and its masterful evocation of Chandler’s L.A. is unparalleled – quite a feat considering most of it was shot on studio back lots. Its brilliance is unquestionably the result of the collaboration of four men at the peak of their creative powers: Chandler, who created the unforgettable source material; novelist William Faulkner, whose script captured Marlowe under glass and then gave him a jolt of dangerous sexual electricity; Humphrey Bogart, who is simply as good as he can be in a role that seemed written just for him (though it wasn’t, not even close); and director Howard Hawks, who applies his professional approach to make the impenetrable narrative walk a razor’s edge. But the contribution of three women to this masculine film should never be ignored: Lauren Bacall, young and sexy and confident as hell, playing Marlowe’s lover/foil; Martha Vickers, as Bacall’s sister, who accomplishes the astonishing feat of stealing the film out from under her; and co-writer Leigh Brackett, one of Hollywood’s unsung heroines, who kept Faulkner’s contributions from getting too excessive and tightened the script until it rang. Simply amazing.

6. WEEKEND (1962)

7. PSYCHO (1960)

It seems equally strange that I’d count as one of my favorites a movie that more or less buried the noir genre. By shifting the focus of the killer from a dangerous badman on a doomed but comprehensible mission to an unpredictable psychopath who couldn’t be reasoned with, let alone understood, Alfred Hitchcock set a precedent for movie villains that later proved to be a disaster; but in his hands, it was a triumph. It was a major departure for Hitchcock, but shifting the emphasis from suspense to shock proved to be surprisingly simple for someone of his talents. As in all great films, every element comes together: from Hitchcock’s incredibly taut direction to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score to Saul Bass’ memorable credits to terrific performances from Anthony Hopkins and Janet Leigh (in one of the motion picture industry’s all-time greatest fake-outs), the great things about the movie totally overwhelm the viewer and leave you with the unmistakable confidence that you’ve witnessed greatness. It’s been a running gag here for years that Psycho can more or less be placed on any list we happen to put together; that’s a testament not to how much we love the flick, but to how much greatness it contains.

8. RAGING BULL (1980)
9. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
10. THE CONFORMIST (1970)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)

Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

8. Double feature: JULES AND JIM (1962) & BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)

The intellectual wild men of the French New Wave, in revolt against their country's "tradition of quality" and taking sustenance from the grungier products of the Hollywood dream factory, took their cameras to the streets and proved that, so long as they were left alone to get their movies made as best they could, the improvisational high spirits and smarts and humor and excitement and heady romance of their finest work would remain ever fresh. Then, after a few masterpieces, one of these directors settled down and practically turned into a one-man Tradition of Quality, while the other dependably went him own way, albeit with a destination pass that was frequently stamped "CRAZYTOWN." The fact that it all somehow resulted in an American movie culture where a movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis made for eight and a half million dollars could count as a triumph for independent filmmaking is actually one of pop culture history's better jokes.

9. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Apocalypse now, and then some.

10. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)

By the time Buster Keaton hit Hollywood, he had been performing in vaudeville since he was three, the son of comics who incorporated him into their act. No man has, by his very example, provided a more stirring argument against the child labor laws. Keaton was a simple sort of man for a great artist: he just happened to be someone who, by the time he grew to adulthood, had mastered every skill that might be helpful to the creation of physical comedy and then, having taught himself the mechanics of filmmaking, turned out to have as strong an eye as anyone who's ever lived at staging physical comedy for maximum effectiveness on camera. It is dizzying to imagine what he might have achieved--on top of what he did achieve, which make no mistake about it, was a titanic body of work--if there had been no studio to get in his way.

11. Double feature: CITIZEN KANE (1941) & CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1967)

People call Citizen Kane, the debut film that Orson Welles directed when he was 25, a young man's movie, and it is, though in a way that not everybody may fully appreciate. It is an exercise in high-spirited flamboyance, but it is also, crucially, a movie made by a man who doesn't care about burning his bridges behind him, a self-styled "man of the theater" who, as a lark and a fund-raising expedition, decided to take a movie studio up on its offer of "creative control" and make one of those talking picture dealies, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that he'd generate a lot of publicity and a wad of cash that he could then plow into the stage career that he did care about. It is a movie made by a man who thought he'd be spending his life and doing his real work elsewhere, and so whose attitude towards the faded press baron whose face he was dunking in mud, and the scaredy-cat old studio heads who so dreaded what the press baron might still be able to do to them that they tried to pool their resources to buy and burn the film, was: Bring it on. Chimes at Midnight, made a little more than 25 years and many, many lifetimes later, is a movie made by a man who, in the course of burning those bridges, fell so completely in love with the medium that he would do anything to make another one, patching a film together with whatever spindly resources he could pull together. Strange as it may be that the cocky young bastard and the inspired old wizard were the same guy, we were lucky to have ever had either one.

12. Double feature: ERASERHEAD (1977) & BLUE VELVET (1986)

David Lynch arrived just as the American moviemaking renaissance of the 1970s was winding down, with a $20,000 movie that he'd been working on, off and on, over the course of some five years and that looked as if he'd been quietly reinventing moviemaking, starting with the period of silent experimental film and moving on from there, in blissful innocence of anything else going on in the world. Almost a decade later, everybody's favorite homegrown Surrealist achieved his apotheosis with a movie that was released at a time when indie filmmakers were asking to be congratulated on keeping things safely small and lo-fi and film geeks were catching up on what had come before through the miracle of VCRs hooked to small screens, and served notice that some dreams demand to be appreciated on the biggest screens available, with Dennis Hopper's heavy breathing tickling your ear in Dolby while the lushest nightmare on record unfolded before your eyes. Nowadays, David checks in from time to time via his website, and has responded to the digital information age with Inland Empire, which loses nothing when viewed as a YouTube video, and in fact practically demands to be seen that way. Time for somebody else to step up.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

7. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

I could go into (a little bit of) detail about how Leone simultaneously anticipates the "demythologized" Westerns of the 1970s and beyond and blows them all out of the water, but to do so would be pigeonholing the film's achievement. This film isn't just the greatest Western of all time -- it's one of the all-time great experiences one can have in a movie theatre. Sergio Leone's command of iconography is second to none, and his juxtaposition of pore-baring closeups and expansive landscapes is justifiably legendary. Many have called this film "operatic," and for good reason; this is an epic story told on a grand scale, with wonderfully archetypal characters who linger on and on in the mind. Much credit is due to the great Ennio Morricone, whose score defines the film's characters by their respective musical themes (love the way Henry Fonda's acid-guitar theme and Charles Bronson's guitar noodling mesh, suggesting their shared fate). One of the greatest pleasures for a filmgoer is finding a timeless scene -- a "Moment Out of Time," as it were. Once Upon a Time in the West is so assured and startling that it contains one Moment Out of Time after another, adding up to a peerless entertainment -- tense, moving, funny, artful, exciting as all hell, and above all the very cinematic definition of "iconic." (PC)

6. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Yes, I know that including Citizen Kane on a “best movies ever” list is something of a cliché. But I’m not including it out of obligation -- I’m including it because it’s awesome. And while much of that has to do with the storytelling innovations of Orson Welles and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, the movie would feel like a cinematic bran muffin if not for the showman’s flair with which Welles infused every frame. Newly arrived in Hollywood after a stint as the wunderkind of stage and radio, Welles made the most of his shot at the big time, flush with the brashness of youth -- twenty-five years old, folks! -- while perhaps realizing he might never get a gig this sweet again (he didn’t, of course). So rather than playing it cool and keeping an eye on his long-term career, Welles poured every bit of inspiration he had into Kane, using every trick in the cinema’s arsenal, including some that were still in their infancy. But it’s Welles’ gusto -- and not incidentally, his genius -- that comes through most clearly, and even though his ideas have been co-opted and warmed over by thousands of films since, almost none has mustered up the same magic. (PC)

5. THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

Here’s the criteria I tried to abide by while picking the top ten best movies of all time: I wouldn’t list my ten favorite films, because I have a personal connection to some movies that I can’t possibly justify as all-time greats. And I didn’t want to go the "I've been told a thousand times that Grand Illusion is the best movie ever, so I better include it or I'll look like a schmuck" route, either. So I asked myself, “Self, gun to your head, no time to think, what is the greatest movie of all time?” The “gun to your head” part made it an easy choice – The Godfather, Part II. A bajillion gallons of ink have already been spilled praising its complex, large canvas storytelling, timeless themes, masterfully executed set pieces and brilliant performances, so I won’t pretend I have anything new to add. I’ll just mention a few images that come to mind: Robert De Niro running across a Depression-era New York rooftop, breaking a gun down into pieces and disposing of them as the sounds of a street festival waft up from below; Lee Strasberg dismissively passing a solid gold telephone around a table; Francis Coppola’s camera tracking through the Corleone compound as autumn leaves swirl around the yard. And if every masterpiece must have a flaw, well, we’ll always have Diane Keaton screaming “It was an ABORTION!” (Oh, and that first Godfather movie? That one’s pretty good, too.) (SVD)

4. THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & LA GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

Two masterpieces in two years (with La Bête Humaine, a near masterpiece, in between). La Grande Illusion was the rarest of war movies, a film that never showed a battle but focused on the aftermath, a film that argued that war is inhuman in every sense of the word, which could devolve into a bumper sticker (such as the ubiquitous "war is bad for children and other living beings") but miraculously doesn't. Jean Renoir's humanism can never be underestimated. All of his characters are three-dimensional, and all -- even the sad, flawed German Captain von Rauffenstein (played by Erich Von Stroheim) -- are deserving of your sympathy. La Règle du jeu has the same commitment to the saving grace of underlying humanity, even as it explodes the Edwardian upstairs-downstairs upper-crust comedy of manners. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributors: Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

Reviews By Request: How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

After last week’s Reviews By Request poll resulted in a tie, I decided to watch and write up the first of the two “requested” films, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, in advance of this weekend’s Oscar ceremony. My review of the second film, Tom Jones, will run two weeks from today.

Among many film lovers, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley has gotten something of a bad rap as the movie that bested Citizen Kane for the 1941 Best Picture Oscar. And while Valley isn’t the film Kane is, we might say the same of nearly any other film ever made, which makes the comparison a little unfair. Moreover, it makes perfect sense that the Hollywood establishment would prefer the elegiac Valley to the scathing Kane, especially when you consider that both films were made during World War II, when national and pro-Allied sentiment were at their peak. But today, these concerns are incidental, and the most important thing is this- How Green Was My Valley is still a pretty terrific film.

How Green With My Valley, based on a best-selling novel by Richard Lewellyn, tells the story of the Morgans, a Welsh family living in a mining community around the turn of the century. The Morgans aren’t rich, but they seem to be pretty blessed- patriarch Gwyllim (Oscar-winner Donald Crisp) works in the coal mine alongside his five eldest sons, mother Beth (Sara Allgood) cares for the house with their only daughter Angharad (Maureen O’Hara), and the youngest boy Huw (Roddy McDowall) is bright and full of potential.

However, the family’s troubles begin soon enough. The closing of mines in neighboring valleys lead to a surplus of workers in the area, leading to lower wages and job loss. Two of the sons leave home to seek work overseas, later followed by two others. Angharad, despite her feelings for the local preacher Gryffudd (Walter Pidgeon), marries the son of the mine’s owner, a marriage that takes her overseas as well. And the mine claims both the family’s eldest son Ivor and, eventually, Gwyllim.

But although How Green Was My Valley is undeniably a story filled with loss, it’s anything but a slog. That’s because Ford, Lewellyn, and screenwriter Philip Dunne infuse the film with a warm nostalgia for the long-gone world of the film. The story is narrated by the now-grown Huw, and he remembers his childhood with fondness, and even when things didn’t go so well, he learned from his experiences and survived to tell the tale. Heck, look at the title. Not only does it emphasize the “was,” thereby implying that it’s no longer so green, but it’s also “my valley”, implying that it’s the valley of Huw’s memories.

Consequently, the storytelling is characterized by broad narrative strokes rather than minute detail. The circumstances of a miners’ strike are sketchy, as they would have been to a young boy (this is a far cry from the grimness of Ford’s last film The Grapes of Wrath). Huw’s memories of the strike consist mostly of talk of unionization, and the gloom that settles over the town during the months when the men aren’t work. Most of the film is like this, with adults’ affairs observed as if from a distance, although Huw’s own experiences seem more vivid. The only (small) objection I have to the film’s storytelling is that it occasionally brings out Ford’s somewhat awkward sense of low comedy. I for one could have done without the antics of a pair of drunken brawlers who are tasked to teach young Huw how to fight.

But such objections are small compared with achievements of How Green Was My Valley. Supposedly, the film was originally intended to be a massive Technicolor extravaganza in the vein of Gone With the Wind, but when the war began Fox had to move shooting from Wales to California, trim the running time in half, and shoot in black and white. I can’t say for sure, but I think the film benefited from this smaller scale- the travails of the Morgans probably couldn’t withstand the epic treatment. And while shooting in black and white was a practical decision that allowed the hills of California to convincingly double as the Welsh countryside, it also enhances the nostalgic vibe given off by the film in a way that the flashier Technicolor couldn’t have managed.

And if nothing else, it’s that nostalgia that makes How Green Was My Valley work even today. The chief pleasures of the film don’t come from the story but rather from the portrayal of the community itself, a community that, if it didn’t already belong to the past when the film was made, surely does now. Perhaps most important are the old Welsh songs that fill the soundtrack. Ivor is the leader of a chorus in town (he gets invited to perform for the Queen), but even the miners sing hearty tunes as they come down the hill after a long day’s work. “Singing is in my people as sight is in the eye,” observes the adult Huw, and this music extends even to the spoken dialogue. When Angharad gets engaged, Gryffudd’s heart is broken, but he buries his own feelings in the interest of her future. As he tells her, “I think I would start to kill if I saw the white come to your hair twenty years before its time.” Who talks like this anymore, if in fact anyone ever did? Exactly.

Set Your DVR!: November 17 - 24, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

My infant daughter has been sick this weekend, and I'm not feeling too great myself. So this may be the most slapdashed, pithy-free column yet. Keep those expectations low! Adam Christ asked last week about setting up an online movie discussion based on one of the flicks I mention in this column. I don't have an answer for him, but I promise to figure it out soon. Anyway, here's what I like this week. As always, be sure to mention any glaring omissions in the comments thread and I'll edit the column to add your recommendation.

Mon, Nov 17:

6/7 pm: Restoration on IFC.

8:30/9:30 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the Charles Laughton version.

10:15/11:15 pm: The New World on IFC (repeat on 11/18 at 2:45/3:45 am). By god, what a great movie.

Tues, Nov 18:

3:30/4:30 am: The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit on AMC. Quite a contrast from Mad Men, but it should provide a little something to help tide us over.

5:05/6:05 am: Incident at Loch Ness on IFC (repeat at 10:15/11:15 am and 3:25/4:25 pm). This is not a great or even good movie. But it is rather fun to watch Werner Herzog parody himself.

5:15/6:15 pm: Ride The High Country on TCM. One of my all-time favorite films, this is the first movie Sam Peckinpah directed that's really a Peckinpah movie. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, two actors a little past their sell-by date, are perfectly cast as Old West gunfighters in a similar autumnal period of their lives. There's a fascinating shift in tone about halfway into the movie. I don't mean to detract from the first half when I say that it has that slight remove from reality that's not too unfamiliar to fans of earlier Westerns, especially those of John Ford and Anthony Mann. The cowboys may be tough, but they're pretty clean and well-spoken. At the halfway point, the action moves to a rough mining camp, which shepherds a more realistic look at the past: grimy, ugly, amoral. Westerns would never be the same.

7/8 pm: To Have And Have Not on TCM. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone loves Bogey & Bacall.

10:30/11:30 pm: Top Hat on TCM. Astaire. Rogers. You know the score.

Wed, Nov 19:

5/6 am Burden of Dreams on IFC (repeat at 12:35/1:35 pm). Brilliant documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo.

9:15/10:15 am: Picnic at Hanging Rock on IFC (repeat at 3:45/4:45 pm).

5:35/6:35 pm: Ride With The Devil on IFC (repeat 11/20 at 4/5 am).

10:05/11:05 pm: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat on 11/20 at 2:05/3:05 am).

Thurs, Nov 20:

12:45/1:45 am: Sunrise on TCM. One of the greatest film of the silent era. I was fortunate enough a few weeks ago to catch a showing of this in a friend's film class with a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20s. I was a little worried that some of the kookier silent movie tropes would lose the audience, but I was dead wrong. They loved it. It's a loveable movie.

8/9 am: Duel on CHILLER (repeat on 11/21 at 2/3 am). Spielberg's first film.

9:45/10:45 am: The Cars That Ate Paris (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). An oddball film from early in Peter Weir's career about a town that bolsters its income by causing horrendous car accidents.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) on TCM. This is the Lon Chaney version.

Fri, Nov 21:

1/2 am: Citizen Kane on TCM. I don't know if you've ever heard of this film, but it apparently has some sort of reputation.

3:15/4:15 am: The Stranger on TCM. Orson Welles' most conventionally-directed movie.

8:45/9:45 am: High and Low on IFC (repeat at 3/4 pm). Kurosawa and Mifune do crime drama. Their best movie that doesn't involve samurais.

11 am/12 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC.

Sat, Nov 22:

3:45/4:45 am: Die, Monster, Die! on TCM. In Germany, this is The Monster, The!

7/8 am: The Sword of Doom on IFC. One of the finest samurai movies that wasn't directed by Akira Kurosawa.

4:45/5:45 pm: Vertigo on TCM. I'm breaking my no-Hitchcock rule again. But no matter however long it's been since you last saw this, it's been too long.

Sun, Nov 23:

5/6 am: Bend of the River on AMC. Mann/Stewart Western.

5/6 am: A Night In Casablanca on TCM. Marx Brothers.

1/2 pm: The Thomas Crown Affair on TCM. Steve McQueen!

Mon, Nov 24:

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat 11/25 at 12/1 am). John Hillcoat's Aussie Western.

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Gabriel Over the White House" (1933)

Phil Nugent — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: Directed by Gregory La Cava and based on a novel by T. F. Tweed, it stars Walter Huston as Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, an affable glad-hander and crooked hack politician who becomes a compromise candidate for president at his party's deadlocked convention. Hammond's election would seem to augur a quiet, complacent time in his country's history, but while driving himself through the streets of D.C., the Prez does his James Dean impression and winds up in a coma. He is not expected to survive, but he soon rises from his bed of pain, and when he does, he's a new man, fiercely committed to using the power of his office to fix what needs fixing and no longer interested in the sweet fleshy charms of his personal assistant and mistress, Pendie Malloy (Karen Morley). Fending off an attempt by the appalled jackals in Congress to impeach his newly honest ass, Judd gathers support from The People, threatens to declare martial law, and cloaks himself in powers that abolish the checks and balances system, making him answerable to no man.

Thus equipped, he takes charge of the banks and creates new work programs before turning his attention to the real problem vexing our nation: Da Mob. Judd abolishes Prohibition and then, in private communication with the criminal kingpin Nick Diamond, who's in charge of everything bad, suggests that he make plans to return to the land of his fathers, since he's just lost the raison d'etre for his bootlegging business and, besides, we don't cotton to foreigners in these parts. Diamond offers his counter proposal in the form of an attempted mob hit on the White House that leaves Pendie in the hospital and Judd in a state of high dudgeon. Taking the gloves off, he has all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed by firing squad in view of the Statue of Liberty. For his last trick, Judd gathers all the ambassadors from other lands aboard a yacht, informs them that he is rejecting the universally agreed upon limitations on naval power, oversees the bombing of a couple of abandoned American battleships as a demonstration of the power of American military might, and then muses that if all these jaspers could persuade their governments to immediately repay their mountainous war debts to the United States, which would destabilize their own national budgets to such a degree that Judd would have no need to fear that they'd be upgrading their own armies anytime soon, it sure would get them on his good side. Having threatened his way to guaranteed world peace, Judd collapses and, this time, finally cashes in his chips for good. The suggestion is made that perhaps he never really recovered from his accident but has been possessed by the spirit of a heavenly agent working through him to restore God's country to full strength.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It is clinically insane.

WHY, FOR SOME PEOPLE, IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: Gabriel Over the White House was perhaps the most ambitious attempt by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to use the movies as an extension of his abilities to shape public opinion. To movie nuts, Hearst is best remembered as the target of Citizen Kane, and also as the man who destroyed the movie career of his charming and talented longtime mistress, Marion Davies, by taking charge of her film career. (Davies was a gifted comedian, but Hearst wanted to showcase her as a noble romantic goddess, and he spent a fortune producing movies that were tributes to his wrong-headed idea of how she ought to appear and publicizing them in his papers.) But Hearst was also a genuine power broker who was interested in using all the latest tools of the mass media at his disposal. Hearst felt that his support had put Franklin Roosevelt on the path to victory at the 1932 Democratic convention and ultimately to the White House, and Gabriel, which went into production during the election and opened a couple of months after FDR was sworn in as president, was meant to be taken as his instruction manual for the new president, a list of helpful suggestions.

It's a measure of how powerful Hearst still was at this time that Roosevelt reportedly humored him by agreeing to take a look at the script and jotting some notes on it before returning it to the film crew. This became a point of pride with Hearst, and some feeble-minded but excitable historians even wonder how much of the New Deal might have been inspired by Judd Hammond's efforts to spread the wealth around, but it's hard to imagine that the man who had just inherited Herbert Hoover's problems really had all that much interest in pitching in on Walter Huston's latest. In any case, FDR failed to either whack Al Capone or tell his own mistress to take a hike, and within a couple of years, Hearst had soured on the president he'd once regarded fondly as his own creation. ("For forty years appeared in Kane newsprint, no public issue on which Kane papers took no stand. No public man whom Kane himself did not support or denounce - often support, then denounce!") But Gabriel briefly re-entered the national conversation a few years ago when Mississippi historian Robert S. McElvaine conjectured that it might have predicted, Nostradamus-like, the coming of another American president whose achievements are on the far opposite side of the scale than Roosevelt's.

Yesterday's Hits: The Carpetbaggers (1964, Edward Dmytryk)

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Carpetbaggers a hit?: Americans have long been fascinated with the lifestyles and misadventures of the filthy rich. While the wealthy and powerful may have the same urges and appetites we do, their affluence allows them to exert these on a much grander and more ambitious scale, and in more lavish settings. It was this idea that drove the lurid, sex-soaked novels of Harold Robbins, one of the most popular novelists of the 1950s and 1960s. And for The Carpetbaggers he took his inspiration from perhaps the most famous millionaire of the day, Howard Hughes. Even more than in real life, the book’s Hughes surrogate Jonas Cord Jr. collected companies by day and female conquests by night, with no regard for the damage he caused. And while few readers would want to know Cord in real life, many of them enjoyed his exploits on the page, and the book would end up being the most-read novel of Robbins’ career.

When Hollywood came calling in 1964, it was only natural that some of the book’s racier elements would have to go. But while the scenes depicting brutal murders and such then-abnormal sexual practices as fellatio ended up being cut en route to the big screen, Edward Dmytryk’s film version was still decadent by the standards of the time. After all, the story more or less begins with Cord putting the moves on his father's widow. With its combination of upper-class soap opera and Hollywood story, The Carpetbaggers proved almost as irresistible to moviegoers as it did to readers. The film (sold with the tagline, “this is adult entertainment!”) was one of the top grossers of 1964, becoming Paramount’s biggest hit in nearly a decade. To quote another famously over-the-top film, “nothing exceeds like excess.”

What happened?: In both printed and cinematic form, The Carpetbaggers was distinguished primarily by virtue of its outrageousness. Trouble is, by the end of the 1960s, the qualities that once titillated audiences of the movie seemed positively quaint. With the fall of the Production Code, it was no longer particularly exciting for a movie to imply sexuality, not when people could see explicit nudity in a number of big-budget Hollywood releases. Decades later, the formula Robbins had perfected for literary success had mostly been co-opted by television dramas like Dallas and Dynasty. Most tellingly, before the film’s 2003 DVD release, Paramount submitted The Carpetbaggers to the MPAA for a rating, and the much-ballyhooed “adult entertainment” hit of 1964 earned a family-friendly PG.

Does The Carpetbaggers still work?: Not really. Oh sure, the sets and costumes look great, but the movie’s little more than a soulless product. Part of the problem is the direction by Dmytryk, a longtime studio director long past his prime. Dmytryk’s primarily concern when making The Carpetbaggers appears to have been to utilize the ‘Scope frame to bring out every bit of possible opulence from his settings. But he did so at the expense of any possible drama in the story. It’s never a good sign when two of the film’s principal characters are sharing an important moment and your eyes are too busy looking at the beautiful paintings and ornate statues to care what’s being said.

Not helping matters is the film’s conception of Cord as a blinkered, ego-driven monster. Throughout almost the entire 2 ½ hour running time, Cord’s actions are motivated almost entirely by his desire to keep the upper hand, to maintain his advantage over the rest of the world. George Peppard’s performance is just fine- he plays the role more or less as written, and plays it pretty well. The trouble is that there’s never anything underneath. He wants his life to be lived by his rules, and damn the consequences. As he tells his wife Monica (Elizabeth Ashley), “what I need is the most freedom and the fewest responsibilities.”

Consequently, when the movie finally does try to explain what makes Cord tick in its final five minutes, it feels like a cheat. To pin Cord’s psychological issues on a single trauma from childhood is the kind of horribly reductive Freudianism that afflicted far too many films during the period. Consider what Citizen Kane would have been like had Welles meant for the audience to take Rosebud as a genuine insight into the title character and you’ll have an idea how laughable the psychological aspect of The Carpetbaggers really is. Follow this with an eye-rolling final scene, in which the sensationalism of what’s come before is countered with a reassertion of family and morality, and you’ll see the central problem with The Carpetbaggers- not only is it not nearly as outrageous as it thinks it is, but it doesn’t even have the conviction to follow through to the end.

The Carpetbaggers isn’t a worthless movie. The production values are handsome, and the Hollywood material is fairly entertaining, especially when one tries to figure out which real-life figures are being represented in the story. A handful of supporting performances also work, in particular Alan Ladd (in his final big-screen performance) as Cord’s friend/conscience Nevada Smith, and Carroll Baker, who made for such an effective stand-in for Jean Harlow that Paramount cast her as the real thing in a biopic that was made the following year. But ultimately, The Carpetbaggers just isn’t much of a movie. The history of Hollywood’s blockbusters is chock full of movies like this, that made a splash in their time, but just haven’t endured over the years. Yet they remain out there, waiting to be rediscovered by folks like me who are curious to see what moviegoers enjoyed way back when.

OST: "Jailhouse Rock"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Lest we forget, Elvis Presley was once a movie star. In fact, as malicious movie writer Joe Queenan put it, Elvis -- in his spare time from being the biggest rock and roll star in the history of the world -- also made dozens of the world movies of all time. Elvis' movie work was noteworthy not only for its poor quality as film (honestly, folks, he turned out one stinkeroo after another; he made thirty-one movies as an actor, and maybe three of them are even remotely worth watching), but for their poor quality as soundtracks. Considering that almost all of his movies were musicals -- because, believe me, nobody was hiring the guy for his acting chops -- they produced very few good songs. Elvis had tons of great singles, but hardly any of them came from his movies. Jailhouse Rock was a notable exception.

Made in 1957 with workmanlike pro Richard Thorpe at the helm, Jailhouse Rock was Elvis' third movie as a leading man, and one of his only tolerable ones. He plays Vince Everett, a sneering yet charming hillbilly who serves a stint in the joint for involuntary manslaughter. While there, he writes the title song, invents a hot dance craze to go along with it, and gets out of jail just in time to romance snooty society dame Judy Tyler. It's pretty standard fare, and plenty hokey at that, but it's at least snappy and enjoyable instead of a joyless slog like most of his movies. (It also had a tragic dimension -- Elvis' co-star Tyler died in a car wreck only three days after the film wrapped, and he refused to see it out of respect for her, thus ensuring he never got to see one of his only decent big-screen appearances.) As Queenan has astutely noted, it's not as if we were particularly robbed of a bunch of great performances by the rotten scripts Colonel Tom Parker foisted on Elvis, but in the early days at least, he was occasionally cast in roles that played to his strengths as a rockabilly performer and allowed him to have fun with his roles. Elvis also choreographed the dance number, basing it not on the formal dance routine called for in the script but his own hip-swinging moves of the day. Citizen Kane it ain't, but if you insist on seeing an Elvis movie, you could do worse. Boy, could you do worse.

But the soundtrack is the real strength here. There are lots of reasons why; first of all, it was written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, the two premier hitmakers of the day, who holed up in a hotel room for a week to crank out the tunes on time. Second, rather than releasing the soundtrack as a full-length album -- thus making it susceptible to the kind of bloat that characterized the albums made from his later films -- RCA put it out as a lean, mean five-song EP that left no room for duds. And perhaps most importantly, Jailhouse Rock is one of the only films in which Elvis is backed by the razor-sharp musicians (guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and drummer D.J. Fontana, with Stoller providing the piano licks) that played for him live, instead of a group of passionless studio hacks. That element alone makes it sound like a real record instead of a collection of cash-ins.

BEST TRACKS: As noted, with only five songs on the EP, there isn't a bad song to be found on the Jailhouse Rock soundtrack. (Beware later versions, which add as many as 20 more songs and are typically bloated and tired.) Of course, the title track is a monster, one of Elvis' greatest hits ever, with a killer vocal performance that played to his ripping rockabilly snarl and featured some great performances by Fontana and Moore; and "I Want to Be Free" was a minor hit with a memorable riff from Stoller's piano. But the two tracks not written by the Lieber/Stoller team -- "Young and Beautiful" and "Don't Leave Me Now", both by Aaron Schroeder -- are fine songs, with the latter becoming a regular in Elvis' live repertoire, and the last song on the album is the hugely enjoyable "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care", which was a hit not only for Elvis, but for Buddy Holly, Cliff Richard, and -- decades later -- Brian Setzer as well. The EP doesn't contain another song from the movie that proved to be a big hit ("Treat Me Nice"), but it's still an essential piece of the Elvis experience.

Related Posts:

OST: This is Spinal Tap

OST: Repo Man

OST: "Psycho"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time. One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered. He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last). But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho. The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels: with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s. Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so. Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily. He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way. Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score: the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

Luckily for generations of moviegoers, Bernard Herrmann chose to completely disregard this directive, and, when Hitchcock raised a stink, Herrmann insisted that he view the scene with the music he'd written intact. If Hitchcock didn't agree that the music improved the scene instead of distracting from it, then he'd relent. Hitchcock agreed, and, as has been every one of the tens of millions who have seen Psycho since then, he was blown away by how perfect was the juxtaposition of music and visuals. Since then, it's become one of the true classics in the history of movie scoring; Herrmann's brilliant decision to use only the string section of his orchestra for the music, with the only low-end being provided by bass and cello, was inspired and set the standard for high-pitched, shrieking instrumentation as the default for horror films. It also spawned hosts of imitators and 'tributes' over the years (and none proved more determined than Brian De Palma, who, mirroring his own obsession with Hitchcock, used subtle variants of the music in both Carrie and Dressed to Kill). Very few soundtracks in motion picture history so reflect the personality of their creator than does Bernard Herrmann's work -- unnerving, brilliant, raw, and determined -- than does Psycho.

BEST TRACKS: It's impossible to even discuss Psycho -- the movie or the soundtrack -- without discussing the music from the notorious shower scene. (It's called "The Murder", by the way.) As other critics have mentioned, it's almost unfair to call it a piece of music; it's just the sound made by every string section in every orchestra in the world as they warm up. And yet by placing it in context, Herrmann transforms this ordinary sound into one of the most chilling pieces of music in history, and sets the tone for hundreds, maybe thousands, of future citematic murders. Not bad for a piece of music that's barely a minute long; and it's even more astonishing when you consider that, on an album of dozens of short pieces, it virtually defines the score's less-is-more aesthetic by being one of the longer pieces on the album! Still, this wouldn't be one of the greatest film scores of all time if it was simply one minute-long piece of genius; there's much more to love here, including the memorable title track ("Prelude", in which eerie swirls of strings leap and tangle with one another over the unforgettable Saul Bass title sequence), which is so well-loved that Stuart Gordon lifted it wholesale for the opening to Re-Animator. Other strong tracks include the tragic, melancholy "The Body"; the creepy, tense "Cabin 10", and the wailing, cacaphonous avant-gardeism of "The Cellar". A must-have score from a movie where almost all participants were at the tops of their games.

Sun Rises In East, Independent Film Industry Doomed

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs. Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for The Dark Knight, and everybody has a good laugh. This time around, it's National Public Radio's turn to sound the doom bell for our favorite art form.

"Chicken Little was right", screams the headline to Kim Masters' article on the last days of indie film, placing into evidence the testimony of one Mark Johnson, a big-time studio producer (Chronicles of Narnia) who also dabbles in the independents. Unable to find a distributor for his small-budget southern gothic Ballast, he and director Lance Hammer are now taking it from city to city, screening it in front of whatever audiences will pay attention. "I thought that, at the end of the day, quality would win. We would like to think that if something is made well, it ought to be able to pay for itself," says the producer, who apparently has never ever paid any attention to any aspect of our culture. Art-house executive Mark Gill points out that independent films now have a 99% chance of failure (which, we're guessing, is up from the 98% of a few years ago, or the 100% of most of Hollywood history), and warns that "You have to be very good, or great, or you will die," which should come as exciting news to all the people who made great movies and failed anyway as well as reassuring every failure in the industry that they just aren't good enough.

Don't get us wrong -- no one is more sympathetic to the Sisyphean struggle of the independent filmmaker than we are, and no one would love to see a true meritocracy in film, where Charles Burnett gets to make any movie he wants while Michael Bay has to work double shifts at the car wash to afford a new fisheye lens. But all this weeping and gnashing and grinding of teeth every few years about how this time, indie film is really and truly doomed, and if you don't make Citizen Kane the first time you step behind a camera you might as well go back behind the counter at Taco Bell not only ignores the reality that determined artists have always found new and innovative ways to get their movies made, but does a disservice to aspiring filmmakers by making things seem even more dire than they actually are.

OST: "The Pink Panther"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film. In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come. Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants: a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers. While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed. It's not Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch. Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration. He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention. Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound. If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese. He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

While the soundtrack to The Pink Panther is a mighty fine listen on its own -- cue it up at your next swingin' bachelor pad party and offer everone a round of pink squirrels, you wannabe -- it works best in the context of the film, where, as a unified whole, the combination of music and visual creates an absolutely perfect evocation of Europe at the tail end of the Swingin' Sixties. Listening to it in full, as the immediately remembered but somehow never overworn main theme swings its way into your soul, lets you forget about what comes next and remember the days when Peter Sellers was young, alive and full of prome, Henry Mancini wasn't a shadow of his former self grinding out TV hackwork for the paychekc, and Blake Edwards actually knew how to direct funny movies. Doesn't seem that long ago now, does it?

BEST TRACKS: Of course, "The Pink Panther Theme" -- signifying on screen the appearance not of Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, but of David Niven's infamous jewel thief, the Phantom -- is one of the certified classics of cinema soundtracks. Its slow, sinister build into a rip-roaring lounge jazz number is unforgettable from the first time you hear it, and seems to lose not an ounce from repetition. But there's more here than just that famous number: take a listen for "Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight)", a swinging vocal number with a Continental feel written for young starlet Fran Jeffries, which went on to be a big hit for crooner (and frequent Mancini collaborator) Johnny Mercer. There's also the oddly named "Shades of Sennett", a rollicking piano number used in the movie's final chase number, that conjures British comedies and American honky-tonk blues -- but rarely the silent movie era it seems to predict in the title!

Related Posts:

OST: Fight Club

OST: Blade Runner

Reviews by Request: Three on a Meathook (1972, William Girdler)

Paul Clark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Cameron for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

I only have myself to blame. When I first came up with Reviews By Request, I did so in the hope that some loyal Screengrab readers would be recommend some treasures I hadn’t yet seen. However, there was always that fear that I’d left myself open for someone to come along and request something really terrible, and I would be committed to it by my word. And now, sure enough, it’s happened. I can’t begin to guess why reader Cameron might recommend William Girdler’s Three on a Meathook. Perhaps he legitimately likes the movie, or maybe he wanted to shake up the format a bit by recommending something crappy. Perhaps he’s one of those democratic souls who believe that every movie deserves a fair shake. Whatever the reason, I’ll honor his request. I’ve given my word, and I’ll be damned if Three on a Meathook is the movie that’s going to make me break my word.

That’s not to say I wasn’t tempted to mothball the feature this week. Hell, when I first started playing the DVD, it kept skipping and stopping, so maybe that was a sign. But I forged ahead all the same, cleaning off the disc and using another DVD player. And wouldn’t you know, that did the trick. I settled in to watch this movie which I hadn’t even heard of before Cameron recommended it to me, in the hope that maybe it would be some long-last classic of the horror genre. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, after all.

Then the movie began. I knew I was in for a long sit from the opening shot- a slow, deliberate pan across a cityscape, ending in a zoom into a hotel window. This seemed a bit too familiar. “It’s the opening shot of Psycho,” I thought. I wondered, optimistically perhaps, if Girdler might be wittily paying homage to the Master by beginning his debut feature this way. But as the film continued, I realized that the Three on a Meathook was a ripoff, and a shabby one at that. If Girdler had any talent as a filmmaker when he made this movie, he did a damn fine job keeping it to himself.

There are so many things that are wrong with Three on a Meathook that it’s impossible to know where to begin. Should I mention Girdler’s inability to set, let alone maintain, any sort of tone? His nonexistent sense of pacing, which leads to frequent digressions such as when protagonist Billy (James Pickett) goes into a bar and Pickett essentially stops the movie in order to watch the band American Xpress perform not one, but two songs? How about his godawful editing selections, as when he cuts away from a dinner scene to a completely unmotivated shot of the same scene from outside the house? Or how about those plot twists- one obvious, one nonsensical, both lame?

Possibly the most glaring issue with the movie is that the characters are so stupid. Now, I realize that Three on a Meathook was made in 1972, before the clichés of the slasher genre were long since established. But I’m not talking about characters wandering off alone here. I’m talking about a character who believes he has a problem with murdering young women against his will, yet doesn’t see any problem with picking up a truckload of female hitchhikers or bringing home a young woman he meets in a bar. I’m talking about a killer who doesn’t lock up the evidence when there’s a guest in the house. I’m talking about a woman who discovers a shed where the killer keeps his victims, then promptly runs back into the house where she knows the killer is. Part of what makes a successful horror movies is that we can relate to the characters, and we can imagine ourselves making the same decisions they do. Who could possibly identify with anything these people do?

It also helps when the movie is, you know, scary. And Three on a Meathook definitely isn’t that. Girdler’s chintzy visual style makes it impossible for him to build any atmosphere, and he barely even tries. The movie has plenty of violence and gore, but it’s all makeup and special effects, and even if they were good effects- which they certainly aren’t- gaping wounds and decapitations aren’t scary in and of themselves. Girdler’s only trick to elicit screams from the audience is zooming in quickly on “shocking” imagery, accompanied by dissonant synthesizer chords (Girdler also composed the score). Sorry, but unless you’re two years old and have never seen a movie before, this just doesn’t do the trick.

I’m reminded of a quote from Citizen Kane, in which Joseph Cotten says, “it’s no trick to make a lot of money, if what you want to do is make a lot of money.” Similarly, anyone can make a movie, provided all the person does is want to make a movie. Horror has long been a way for young aspiring filmmakers to create a calling card for themselves, as horror movies can often be made on the cheap and there’s always a market for scary stuff. However, only a chosen few of these movies can reach the heights of Night of the Living Dead, and most attempts to capture that same magic have been closer to Three on a Meathook than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s not a hateful movie, just a useless one.

I suppose that’s what pissed me off about Three on a Meathook, that it was so bad that I couldn’t even feel anything about it except vague annoyance. A great movie transports me, and good ones entertain me and sometimes stimulate my mind. Hell, at least when a movie makes me angry, it at least makes me ponder the reasons for my reaction. But aside from the aforementioned quote from Citizen Kane- surely the only time Welles’ masterpiece and Three on a Meathook would be mentioned in the same breath- all I could think of was how much this movie was wasting my time. There were so many other things I could have done with the 80 minutes it took to watch the film, and the hour it took to write this review. I suppose that faced with a movie like this, all that’s left for me is to remember the words of Willie T. Soke, who sagely said, “they can’t all be winners, kid.” Amen to that, Willie.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Oh, and please- no more William Girdler. I’m pretty much Girdler-ed out for a while, I think. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Vanishing Act: Daniel Waters

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Diablo Cody, take notice. Once upon a time, in a magical land called the 1980s, there was a hip youth-culture screenwriter of the moment named Daniel Waters. He wrote a zeitgeisty movie called Heathers that Variety described as “super-smart black comedy about high school politics and teenage suicide that showcases a host of promising young talents.” Among those talents were Christian Slater, unveiling the Jack Nicholson impression that would sustain his career at least until the release of Kuffs in 1992, future 90210 bad girl Shannen Doherty, and future shoplifter Winona Ryder, who was sort of the Ellen Page of her time. Heathers was a cult hit, and Waters got the lion’s share of the credit. (Director Michael Lehmann’s recent comeback attempt Flakes was described here as a “soggy mess.”)

Waters used his newfound clout to pen two of the most reviled movies (justly or not) of the early 1990s: the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and notorious bomb Hudson Hawk. He managed to reclaim a modicum of respectability by scripting Batman Returns (although much of his work went unused), then did some work on 1993’s Demolition Man before disappearing for eight years. He resurfaced with his debut as a writer-director, Happy Campers, a sort of cross between Heathers and Meatballs that never received a theatrical release.

Another long hiatus followed, but now the L.A. Times catches up with Waters, who has a new movie due in theaters Friday. Sex and Death 101 reunites him with Winona Ryder for the story of a man (Simon Baker) who receives a mysterious email listing all the women he ever has or ever will have sex with. As it happens, Waters has taken up residence in the former home of another man who was no stranger to prolonged vanishing acts, Orson Welles. "I bought the house because I wanted to get that Citizen Kane mojo," says Waters. "Instead I'm getting the end of [Welles'] career, the hanging out with Henry Jaglom, doing wine commercials and magic tricks part of his life. I mean, I enjoy my life, but come on -- where's my Touch of Evil?"

Like Welles before him, Waters also keeps busy “on never-made projects like an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land for Tom Hanks.” Is Sex and Death 101 his Touch of Evil? Here’s the trailer – judge for yourself:

There Will Be Ham: Over the Top with Daniel Day-Lewis

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Now that Daniel Day-Lewis has been anointed the overwhelming front-runner for Best Actor honors on Sunday night, some members of the criterati have decided to rain on his parade before it even gets started. Leading the charge is Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, making the seemingly counterintuitive argument "Too Great to Be Good." Zacharek makes it clear that, while audiences, critics and Academy voters may have fallen for Day-Lewis's obsessed oilman, she feels the actor is peddling nothing but snake oil. "Day-Lewis doesn't so much give a performance as offer a character design, an all-American totem painstakingly whittled from a twisted piece of wood," she writes. "The tragedy of Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood is that it defies the naturalism that made him a great actor — and I use the word ‘great' unequivocally — in the first place, as if he'd decided that naturalism is boring, that it no longer presents a challenge for him."

The debate continues over at MSN Movies, with Jim Emerson coming down more or less on Zacharek's side. Day-Lewis's performance, he says, "consists of the application and accumulation of effects — strips of newspaper, gobs of flour paste, buckets of paint, and bits of tinfoil, carefully layered onto an inflated balloon to make a big fat piñata. Only somebody forgot to stuff it." Kathleen Murphy is having none of it, describing the actor's turn as "authentically terrifying, a radical evocation of an American Aguirre: The Wrath of God. The actor seems to be possessed by Daniel Plainview — as he clearly was by Christy Brown in My Left Foot, for whom he literally sacrificed all physical grace in order to fully inhabit a broken body. . . This takes courage, or a kind of madness, a willingness to act out on the grand scale."

For the record, put me down on Murphy's side of the argument; larger-than-life characters call for larger-than-life performances — Orson Welles wasn't particularly "naturalistic" in Citizen Kane, and there's no reason he should have been. To his credit, Emerson is not necessarily opposed to Big Acting or over-the-top performances, as he notes on his own Scanners blog. "Performances pitched at the balcony, or the moon, always take the risk of falling somewhere between ‘tour-de-force' and ‘trying way too hard,' virtuosity and showboating. And opinions may vary about where they come down." Clearly that's the case, but there's no need to fight about it. Let's all share a milkshake, shall we?

Roy Scheider, 1932-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks. As the land-locked seaside Sheriff Brody, Scheider was the tentpole of a central triumverate that also included Richard Dreyfuss (wisecracking, brainy, Method) and Robert Shaw (macho, demented, classically theatrical). It was Scheider's job to anchor what would become the most successful movie ever made by serving as the likable audience identification figure, he pulled it off with a smooth, pro's grace.

Scheider starred in a number of other movies (including William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Last Embrace, Still of the Night, and Blue Thunder) but never again found himself at the center of anything near as big a blockbuster. He was also forced, by contractual committment, to appear in Jaws 2, which cost him the chance to star in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. He did get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for serving as the director Bob Fosse's alter ego in the 1979 All That Jazz; he didn't want, but his work in that picture will be remembered as among the best performances of his career. However, by the mid-1980s he was only getting big parts in smaller-budgeted pictures (such as 52 Pick-Up, made for Cannon Films) and indie productions (such as 1997's The Myth of Fingerprints) and appearing in smaller parts in such films as Fred Schepisi's The Russia House, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. He also starred in the first season of the TV series SeaQuest DSV and played studio chief George Schaefer in RKO 281, an HBO film about the making of Citizen Kane. He kept working at a furious rate, and in one of his last appearances, as a serial killer on Death Row last year in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, he showed that he was still capable of doing memorable work when the material he was given managed to meet him halfway.

Take Five: We Love The '80s

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

American moviegoers can't get enough of the 1980s, apparently. Those of us who had to live through it the first time remember it primarily as a time of bad metal, worse sitcoms, and waiting around to see what dumb-ass thing Ronald Reagan would say next, but to the generations that followed, it is a time for richly veined cultural nostalgia. From what we can recollect through the haze of drugs and alcohol that coat our memories of the decade, the hallmark of 1980s cinema was very loud explosions punctuated by the occasional car chase or wise-cracking black transvestite. It's not something we thought anyone would be eager to repeat, and yet there have been, in recent memory, new installments of the Die Hard and Rocky franchises; a new TV series based on The Terminator; an upcoming Indiana Jones picture; and, opening all across the country this Friday, a new Rambo movie. Even the Screengrab is getting into the act, with Gabriel Mckee posting his top ten action heroes who deserve a comeback, many of whom hail from the Decade That Time Refuses To Forget. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: so says Take Five as we present a fistful of '80s action movies that we. . . well, we don't love, exactly, but we at least look back on with something less than severe brain trauma.

ROCKY III (1982)

Sure, the first movie had heart and soul. And the second movie had a ruthless determination to capitalize on the first movie's heart and soul. But do you know what they didn't have? Do you know what they lacked, which made the third installment unquestionably the best of all the Rocky movies? That's right: MR. T. They didn't have Mr. T, and as such, they suffered, as do all artistic projects not involving Mr. T. Here's a little secret they don't teach you at film school: sure, Citizen Kane might have been the greatest movie of all time — but it would have been even better if it had been able to feature Mr. T yelling at people. And Rocky III, whatever its other faults — and it had hundreds, from its hamhanded TV-movie direction (by Sly himself) to its predictable storyline — at least gave us Mr. T yelling at people in abundance. When his Clubber Lang (a savage, media-loathing brute allegedly inspired by young George Foreman) wasn't yelling at people, he was beating people up, and Rocky III brings us the double pleasure of seeing Sylvester Stallone clobbered by Clubber and Hulk Hogan as "Thunderlips". Just turn it off halfway through.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

If it wasn't the most exciting or accomplished action movie of the 1980s, it was at least probably the most enjoyable: Big Trouble in Little China was brought to us by an uncharacteristically light-hearted John Carpenter, and worked both as a straight-up pseudo-mystical punch-'em-out and as a loopy parody of same. Carried largely on the back of Kurt Russell's endearing performance as antihero "ol' Jack Burton", a trucker who's chock full of bogus wisdom delivered in a ridiculously over-the-top John Wayne accent. Part of the reason it plays so well as both sincere action and goofy action send-up is because the script was written by W.D. Richter, who originally conceived it as a sequel to his own The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension from two years earlier. Legal and financial issues kept the sequel from being made, but Big Trouble features some of its characteristic touches and clever bits of dialogue. It also features swell performances from a young Kim Cattrall and James Hong, everyone's favorite inscrutable Asian. Besides, how can you not love a movie featuring a wizard named Egg Shen?

ACTION JACKSON (1988)
Where is the love for Sgt. Jericho Jackson, we ask you? Where? This compelling saga of America's forgotten black action hero was released in the same month as Bloodsport, making 1988 — which also brought us Die Hard, Above the Law, Red Heat and They Live — a banner year from cheesy guilty-pleasure action movies. This one had it all: a post-Rocky, pre-Arrested Development Carl Weathers playing a tough Detroit cop who was also an all-American track star and a Harvard-educated attorney; former Prince plaything Vanity making hay while the sun shone as a sex kitten; Sharon Stone, doing the thing that she was best known for doing before everyone all of the sudden decided to take her seriously; and villains Craig T. Nelson and Robert Davi overacting like there was no tomorrow. (Which, for Robert Davi at least, there probably wasn't.) Action Jackson had everything you could have wanted out of a 1980s action flick: a wisecracking tough guy hero, naked dead chicks, tons of explosions, people dying in extremely creative ways, egregious use of narcotics, and a protagonist whose name rhymed! Come back, Carl Weathers, all is forgiven.

BLOODSPORT (1988)

Before Jean-Claude Van Damme was a full-time crazy person, he was America's next big martial arts star. Bloodsport was the movie that put the rubber-groined Belgian on the map, portraying real-life martial arts semi-star Frank Dux. The plot of Bloodsport — well, it's giving it a lot more credit than it deserves to even call it a plot, involving (as does every other martial arts movie ever made) a bunch of well-toned Asians out to kick each other in the face. It's not much for memorable acting, either; Van Damme had already, in his first starring role, perfected the self-satisfied smirk that would carry him through the rest of his career, and while the movie does feature a young Forest Whitaker as a federal agent tasked to stand around looking exasperated, it also features Leah Ayres failing to become America's sweetheart, Donald Gibb trying to make the transition from hooligan to lummox, and Bolo Yeung (the former Bruce Lee nemesis known as Yang Tse) putting in the kind of performance only a trunk full of steroids can deliver. But it does feature some stunning martial arts battles, which is really all you can hope for in a movie like this.

ROAD HOUSE (1989)

In all the calls for a revival of action movie heroes like Rocky, Rambo, Ryan, and Indy, where are the legions of fans clamoring for a return of James Dalton? Patrick Swayze desperately needs something to do, people. Believe it or not, there was once a time when women would line up around the block to get a load of this chunk-headed 'King of the Sleepers' with his shirt off, and nowhere was he more chunk-headed or shirtless than in this deleriously zany action flick about a Zen-influenced tough guy ("Pain don't hurt") who is hired, despite his small stature and philosophy degree from NYU, to act as the bouncer at an out-of-control bar. Directed by a former electrician named Rowdy and co-starring Kelly Lynch at the height of her blondeness, Road House transcends its shortcomings by being so completely indifferent to its own craziness that it chugs along on its own energy with nary a look back. Ben Gazzara is the bad guy in this thing, clearly bombed out of his coconut, and it features the immortal line "I used to fuck guys like you in prison".