The Screengrab : gone with the wind

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

Steven Spielberg comes in for his knocks on the "worst endings" part of this list: given all the resources in the film world, the poor guy just has trouble knowing when to stop. That makes it especially worth mentioning that, when he was young and desperate and trying to piece his first blockbuster together with spit and Scotch tape, he had the instincts and confidence and chops to tee up a daring high shot and make a hole in one. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, liked to recall the conversation he had in which he explained to Spielberg that the scene was physically impossible, and Spielberg replied that it didn't matter, saying that if he had the audience with him for the first couple of hours, he could sell them anything he wanted in the last five minutes, and as Benchley would admit, the kid was right. (PN)

MELVIN AND HOWARD (1976)

Jonathan Demme's version of the meeting of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) and Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) begins with a beauty of a long opening sequence, with Melvin giving the broken-down derelict Hughes a ride in his truck after picking him up in the desert in the middle of the night and gradually melting away his surly, defensive paranoia with the warmth of his cornball, middle American sincerity. The movie ends with a lovely little dream that finds the two of them back in the truck, with Howard taking the wheel from the exhausted, put-upon Melvin. Dennis Potter must have seen it and liked it, because he wrote a variation of it into the ending of his own 1985 film Dreamchild, with Lewis Carroll and the old woman who'd once served as the basis for his Alice standing in for Howard and Melvin, and it killed there, too. (PN)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

When I first saw Apocalypse Now on VHS in the late '80s, the finale left me breathless. Willard terminated Kurtz with extreme prejudice, took Lance down to the boat, and then, after they crept away down the river, the promised airstrike fulfilled Kurtz's final instruction and exterminated them all. In the above clip, over the footage that floored the teenaged me, Francis Ford Coppola himself explains why this was not his intended interpretation. But what does he know? Coppola, who would later go on to direct such gems as The Godfather Part III and the Robin Williams vehicle Jack, thought that what the film really needed was another hour dealing with French imperialism in Southeast Asia. Although Saturday Night Live cut to the quick in their satire of the ending (Martin Sheen played a man hired by the studios to travel up river and shut down the production, and Coppola, out of ideas, blew everything up), the explosion of the set and murder of the people who worshipped Kurtz like a god is a better fit for the themes: the destructive clash of Western imperialism and other cultures, Willard becoming as hollow as Kurtz, and the fucking horror, the horror. The Coppola-approved ending is below (some of it has been translated to another language, but the visuals are what's important at the end), and while the juxtaposition of Willard's face and the statue is beautiful, luster is lacking compared to the deep reds, yellows, and whites of the airstrike. (HC)

THE BIRDS(1963)

End of the world. You expect it to come from someplace obvious, like a nuclear blast or a plague or a monster from the deep. But instead nature has turned on us, and nothing's ever going to be the same. The clip above discusses the ending that Evan Hunter intended in the script. His version had more gore, but the visual implication in the actual ending of the movie is much more unsettling, the birds covering every surface, the horrible sound of their cooing and calls, the sky dark and ominous as the car slowly starts to twist along the road. End of the world. (HC)

And, of course, we certainly couldn't forget...

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

CASABLANCA (1942)

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

...but if we DID forget any of your favorites, then hopefully these two guys can pick up the slack...

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "The Grey Fox" (1982)

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

The release of Wolverine has inspired a number of reviews and even studies of the Marvel Comics character written by people who could not resist the temptation to make light of the seemingly incongruous fact that this superheroic berserker figure is supposed to be Canadian, and therefore a product of what is widely, if unfairly, stereotyped as the dullest, most mild-mannered, phlegmatic society on Earth. It's true that Wolverine himself found life in the Great White North so unexciting that he ran off and got involved in the American Civil War. But at least one glamorous American antihero found the Canadian climate perfectly to his liking when he set about disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's notorious line about there being no second acts in American lives. This was Bill Miner, the famously charming "gentleman bandit" who, in the course of making a name for himself as a stagecoach robber, is credited with having invented the pithy and hard-to-misconstrue phrase, "Hands up!" Miner is played by the 61-year-old Richard Farnsworth in The Grey Fox, which opens with our hero's release from prison. At first it appears that changing times have rendered him an honest man whether he likes it or not: the jail doors swing open to usher him into a post-stagecoach universe. For a time, he attempts to adjust to the practice of honest labor, with dispiriting results. Then he finds out about these neat things called trains.

It's the conceit of The Grey Fox, which was written by John Hunter and marked the feature directing debut of the twenty-seven-year-old Phillip Borsos, that Miner was inspired to start holding up trains after seeing a movie, the famous, early silent Western The Great Train Robbery (1903). (This is a fanciful bit of conjecture, and in fact, the botched Silverdale train robbery credited to him here is a matter of dispute among some historians; some don't think Miner was involved, and some disagree with the contention that it was Canada's first train robbery. That said, we don't cotton to spoilsports here at the Screengrab.) Shot by Frank Tidy, The Grey Fox has a beautiful look that ties in with its awareness of the movie past, and also with the West that was preserved in early photography. Most self-consciously arty Westerns of the past forty to fifty years--the period since the Western has been officially considered all but dead--are doomy, blood soaked affairs that look as if they were staged in the world's largest mud puddle and shot in natural light during a solar eclipse. The Grey Fox is steeped in a quality almost unknown to art Westerns: charm.

Farnsworth deserves much of the credit for this. He broke into movies in 1937 thanks to his skill with horses, and did stunt work and bit parts in scores of Westerns and other films (including Red River, Gunga Din, Gone with the Wind and Spartacus before he began to get speaking parts in the 1960s. He was still doing stunt work into the mid-1970s, before getting a major break as a past-his-prime cowpoke in Comes a Horseman (1978), for which he got an Academy Award nomination. That led to a run of steady work until his death in 2000, but The Grey Fox is your one chance to see the man having a fling at playing a romantic lead. His amused pleasure at the unlikeliness of it all is contagious, and he's perfectly believable both as a relic from an earlier time and a man so naturally courtly that you'd be hard put to remain sore at him for a little thing like robbing you at gunpoint. (Farnsworth's "natural" acting style--the manner of a man who picked it up over the course of forty-five years in front of the camera--sets him apart from the other trained actors in the cast in a way that passes for the self-contained oddness of a man who sat out the turn of the century in a four-by-five cell.) He even gets a girlfriend, in the form of Jackie Burroughs as a proto-feminist who herself is a practitioner of the new art of photography. There's a nicely underplayed in-joke when she admires the planes of his face and tells him that he'd photograph well.

The year before he died, Farnsworth had one other major starring role, in David Lynch's The Straight Story, for which the actor reeled in one more Oscar nomination. Phillip Borsos was not so lucky; though he burst out of the gate early, he was never able to follow up The Grey Fox with a comparable success. His eye stayed good, but his subsequent Hollywood films, The Mean Season and One Magic Christmas, were blighted by ill-conceived scripts and some questionable strokes of casting (such as Harry Dean Stanton as a guardian angel), and his Canadian biopic, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, was reportedly a fiasco. He died of leukemia, at the age of 41, in 1995, the same year as the release of his final film, Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog. Given the acclaim lavished on his first and best feature and the pleasure it's given people over the years, its absence from American DVD shelves doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. Here's hoping that somebody busts it out of distribution limbo before the century turns again.

Reviews By Request: Tom Jones (1963, Tony Richardson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Due to some difficulty I had in getting my hands on Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, I was unable to post this review last week as promised. Sorry about that. As usual, to vote for the next Reviews By Request selection, see the poll at the end of this review.

In a survey of the Oscar winners for Best Picture, Tony Richardson’s 1963 film Tom Jones is one of the more intriguing titles. Sure, it’s an adaptation of the classic novel by Henry Fielding, but this is hardly the kind of reverent literary epic that usually gets the Academy to take notice. But beyond its bawdy comedy, it’s also a stylistic departure from the usual period pieces, with Richardson employing the techniques of the French New Wave to take the wind out of the wigs-and-horses period setting. On paper, Tom Jones is just the kind of movie that ought to be recognized more often by the Academy- a film that boldly tweaks cinematic convention in an attempt to entertain audiences in a unique way. But the trouble with judging a movie on paper is that sooner or later one must actually see it to get the whole story, and in the case of Tom Jones, the whole story is that it doesn’t live up to its potential.

I knew I was in for a long sit during the opening sequence, in which Richardson establishes the circumstances of Tom’s birth. Rather than portraying it in a more conventional way- say, through narration or montage- Richardson turns it into a silent movie, complete with intertitles. Now, I’m sure most of you would agree that this is an interesting and unexpected twist on the usual style of the genre. However, with the actors’ hyper-exaggerated mannerisms and John Addison’s manic harpsichord score, the scene comes off more cutesy than bold. By the time the opening titles have hit the screen, Richardson has already dug himself into a hole that he never manages to escape.

Richardson drops the silent-movie pastiche after the opening credits, thankfully, but he still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve- jump cuts, cheeky narration, and more. In one of the more glaringly out-of-place bits, there’s a scene in which the adult Tom (Albert Finney) evades a jealous husband in which Richardson speeds up the film like an old slapstick comedy (think the Keystone Kops). There’s also a handful of moments in which Finney breaks the fourth wall, as when he asks the audience for support when a female innkeeper accuses him of trying to weasel his way out of paying his bill. It takes an inspired film to pull off moments like these, and Tom Jones is not that movie.

It’s a shame, because Finney cuts a fine figure as Tom. At its heart, this is the story about a man who’s torn between his good nature and his base impulses, which lead him into trouble. Tom’s loyalty invites others to take advantage of him, and his dashing good looks bring him the kind of female attention he would be wise to avoid. Despite the film’s period trappings, Tom bears more than a passing resemblance to Arthur Seaton, Finney’s breakthrough role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, who was unable to reconcile his desires to have fun with his need to do right by his single-mother girlfriend. With these two films, Finney announced to the world that he was a major actor, and he effortlessly holds his own here opposite an impressive cast, including Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Joyce Redman (with whom he shares the film’s most famous scene), and the great Joan Greenwood, who had one of the great voices in cinema.

One key directorial decision that I appreciated was Richardson’s unwillingness to lend the usual glamour to his period setting. Most historical and literary films tend to be showcases for the art directors and costume designers, who spare no expense in re-creating the trappings of period luxury. By contrast, Richardson’s portrayal of country gentility in the early 1700s is hardly luxurious. Meals consist of copious amounts of wine and freshly-killed meat eaten with the hands, and interiors are dusty and dark, lit only by a handful of candles. Practically the only form of entertainment was the hunt, which Richardson portrays as scores of dogs and men on horseback pursuing a stag- hardly very sporting. To accentuate the less charming aspects of this world, Richardson and cinematographer Walter Lassally shoot the film in anemic-looking tones and with a mostly handheld camera. When it comes to epic splendor, Gone With the Wind this isn’t.

Richardson’s de-glamorization of his period setting is such a refreshing change of pace from what one normally expects from a movie of this kind that it seems a shame that he feels the need to goose it with his arsenal of New Wave tricks. Unlike most Oscar-winning films, which seem to have little on their minds besides taking home rafts filled with awards, Tom Jones is rather more ambitious- in the end, too ambitious to be successful. In the end, the film must be labeled a noble failure, and although one can’t help but admire Richardson’s desire to step outside the well-trod path for literary adaptations, that doesn’t mean I look forward to seeing Tom Jones again anytime in the near future.

Now that Oscar season is over, we can get back to some more diverse and, uh, interesting choices for Reviews By Request. As promised, we’ll kick off things with a poll devoted to reader requests. So, which of these will it be? A seventies SF thriller from the director of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three? A documentary about two children who were switched at birth? An infamous horror film about evil children? A thriller starring Alain Delon? Or will it be the long-shelved seventies exploitation title that was immortalized by Patton Oswalt? It’s your call, folks:

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As usual, the comments section is open, particularly for those who would like to suggest future titles for consideration. See you in two weeks!

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.

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

In 1939 dollars, Gone With The Wind is still the highest-grossing picture of all time, and it's certainly epic and iconic, what with the burning of Atlanta and Vivien Leigh’s mother of all Oscar clip lines, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” (not to mention Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler not giving a damn and Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy not knowin’ nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies). But lawzy me, what a stupid movie. For one thing, Scarlett O’Hara is easily one of the most annoying characters in cinema history – hardly the sort of person you’d want to spend 222 minutes with (or 238 minutes with overture, entr’act and exit music...thanks, Wikipedia)! Gable’s a hoot, of course...but there are plenty of other, better Gable movies that don’t require the audience to giggle at date rape and cheer the Confederacy. Even setting aside the fact that, as a Yankee (and a heterosexual male), I may not exactly be the film’s target audience, there’s still the issue of the production’s relentless over-the-top Cheez Whiz melodrama. Sure, acting styles have changed over the years, but Of Mice & Men, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Stagecoach were all nominated the same year, so it’s not as if Leigh’s proto-drag queen scenery chewing only looks goofy from a modern perspective: I’m pretty sure the movie was stupid in 1939, too.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)

Widely cited as the worst movie ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, the circus-corn epic The Greatest Show On Earth may have benefited from the political tenor of the times. Its main competition was High Noon, a vastly superior film that nonetheless made AMPAS voters nervous because of its barely disguised anti-McCarthyite message and blacklisted screenwriter. Whatever the reason for its win, there’s no denying that The Greatest Show On Earth is a big load of elephant shit. Even if Cecil B. DeMille hadn’t made it a good 25 years past his own personal expiration date as a filmmaker, it was leagues out of his comfort zone: used to coaching actors in sweeping Biblical and historical epics, he didn’t take to the tawdry, small love triangle under the big top, and no wonder. The dialogue is pure hokum, and the performances range from overblown (Cornel Wilde as an acrobat) to comatose (Charlton Heston as the circus manager). The central romance has as much heat as a paper safely match, and every subplot – and there’s plenty of them in its bloated two and a half hours – is as predictable as it is uninteresting. Even the presence of Jimmy Stewart does nothing to salvage the movie, since his role, as a clown with a dark secret, is telegraphed from the first frame. There’s lots of phony reaction shots of local yokels gasping at the wondrous sights and sounds of the circus, but it’s often unclear what they’re watching; it sure ain’t this movie.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)

The fact that this musical trip to the deep freeze that is Julie Andrews' soul was the biggest box-office sensation of the mid-1960s and held onto the title of Number One Hit of All Time for seven years until it was dislodged by, of all things, The Godfather, just goes to prove that you never know. Critics like to imagine that movies tell us something about the times in which they were made, but when you consider what was going on in the world between 1965 and 1972, all you can surmise from this movie's success is that people must have been desperate to escape reality as thoroughly as they could without barricading themselves inside an isolation tank. If you look at the reviews it received at the time, you see that even polite mainstream critics saw it as a potential menace that would lay waste to the culture like some species of plague, but looking at it with forty years of hindsight, the funniest thing about the movie is that it seems to have come and gone without leaving any progeny. It did inspired the studios to plow millions upon millions of dollars into "family musicals" (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, etc.), all of which are now best remembered for providing an education in just how little return it is possible to get on a major investment. Subsequent attempts to squeeze another nickel out of Andrews' screen image proved largely unsuccessful. (The 1968 musical Star! -- her reunion with The Sound of Music director Robert Wise -- was one of the great financial disasters of the era.) The closest the movie has come to being positively re-evaluated came in the 1990s, when it attracted a cult that attended screenings in fancy dress and talked back to the screen, Rocky Horror-style. For the first time ever, Christopher Plummer's Dracula-like performance as Baron Von Trapp actually made sense.

ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)

Had anyone else been behind the cameras for Ordinary People, it would have come and gone with no great comment -- and perhaps even a modest amount of praise, for the quiet family drama isn’t terrible by any stretch -- but certainly without much hoopla, and definitely without a Best Picture nomination, let alone a win. But because Robert Redford was its director, and Hollywood has always been dismayingly overimpressed with actors who don’t completely embarrass themselves in the director’s chair, it ended up being praised far beyond its virtues. It’s hard to pick out any element about it that’s rotten; the performances are generally adept, the story is competent enough, and the direction is inoffensive. It’s a lot like a small literary novel that comes and goes without much comment. But just as there’s nothing much to damn it with, there’s also nothing much to recommend it. The Best Picture victory of the movie a lot of wise-asses immediately dubbed Ordinary Movie wouldn’t be such a sore thumb if it wasn’t for the competition it bested; not only did it triumph over Coal Miner’s Daughter, which covered much of the same ground only better, but it also beat out The Elephant Man and, shockingly, Raging Bull, both of which, unlike Redford’s directorial debut, went on to be numbered with the greatest films of the decade. Once it became clear what kind of filmmaker Redford really was, the Academy stopped embarrassing themselves by nominating him for big awards; if only they’d figured it out sooner.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

Of all the problems with our culture, what is the single most destructive and indefensible? Gosh, there's so many to choose from, but I'm gonna have to go with the enduringly popular notion that mental retardation and moral goodness are closely linked, to such a degree that one may not be fully possible without the other. Even in politics, the candidate who does the worst job of concealing the breadth of his intelligence is likely to be tagged as a know-it-all elitist and silver-tongued devil, and the one least ashamed of coming across as a dumbass is touted as being a tribune of the people who has the moral certitude that comes from being too dumb to know internal conflict. Forrest Gump isn't a movie about a hero who makes the right choices but the story of someone who does the right thing because he's such a dope that he doesn't know he has any other options. (Forrest's smarter friends, his lifelong love Jenny and his commanding officer in Vietnam, go down self-destructive paths that Forrest is too good to even know are there.) I think that a movie like this must have a special sick appeal in Hollywood, which is full of cynical, morally compromised people who find such nonsense comforting because it can be taken as a reassuring message to slimeballs everywhere: only the stupid can be truly good, so if you're not as good as you might like, it's not your fault: you just had the mixed fortune of being smart. The director, Robert Zemeckis, knows a lot about cynicism and moral compromise; he used to satirize it in movies like his great 1980 comedy Used Cars, and he found out that satire doesn't pay the bills. But even he may have been surprised to discover just how profitable sentimentalizing stupidity can be. Compared to this thing, Pulp Fiction, which it beat out for Best Picture, is as innocent as a newly born kitten on Christmas morning.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

New Film Books: Michael Sragow on Victor Fleming, Glenn Lovell on John Sturges

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

There have been a number of interesting movie books published this season, and two new volumes, both of them singled out for praise by Michael Fox, flesh out the careers of Hollywood directors who had important careers with major films to their credit but whose names generally don't make it onto the established lists of great filmmakers. Victor Fleming, the subject of Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, has the distinction of being the credited director what might be seen as the most iconic American movie classics of the early color era, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz--both of which were released in 1939, and both of which were huge productions that Fleming was brought in to complete after other hands had started filming. (Fleming's was still working on Oz when Clark Gable decreed that he would only continue in the role of Rhett Butler if Fleming was brought in to replace George Cukor, who had also done some labors on Oz. King Vidor wrapped up Oz while Fleming made his way to the GWTW set. Sam Wood also worked on GWTW for a few weeks while Fleming was recovering from exhaustion.) Fleming, whose other credits include Red Dust, Bombshell, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous, broke into movies as a camera assistant, much valued for his mechanical prowess, before moving up to directing silent action films. Fox writes that "Sragow’s great accomplishment... is effortlessly weaving together the various film-book genres. His digressions to illuminate the careers and characters of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are meaty and delicious, while the making-of chapters...brim with well-chosen behind-the-scenes details that illuminate the bigger picture of Fleming as a fearless pro. Sragow also gives a strong sense of the dynamics of the studio system, while dropping in any number of contemporary references and critical assessments without slowing the narrative a whit." Fleming combined a sensitive side with the man's man aura that made someone like Gable so comfortable about putting his career in his hands. And whatever one thinks of Sragow's efforts to sell him as an artist on the level of, say, Howard Hawks, he certainly got a lot done with the time given to him. He died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 59; his last film was Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, the last of a long string of leading ladies with whom he'd been enjoying an affair during their off-hours.

Glenn Lovell's Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges makes the case for a director of some of the best-loved action epics of the latter half of the twentieth century, especially The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. Those pictures, and such smaller genre classics as Escape from Fort Bravo, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Bad Day at Black Rock--probably the most critically respected of Sturges's films, because it doubles as a socially conscious expose about the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II--lack the depth and explosiveness of the work of someone like Sam Peckinpah or the flamboyant showmanship of Hawks, but they stand out among the run of routine action movies for the craftsmanlike precision that Sturges learned during his studio apprenticeship as an editor, and as a director working on training films during the war. Sturges might be better remembered today if he hadn't lasted as long; he ran out of gas after The Great Escape yet continued to plow on, grinding out sadly lifeless shoot-'em-ups such as The Satan Bug, Ice Station Zebra, Marooned, and the dreaded McQ, in which John Wayne, making a mad, eleventh-hour stab at playing his version of Dirty Harry, looked as if he might collapse during the chase scenes and attempt to lasso the villains with his varicose veins. And Sturges, like Fleming, might have done his work for the studios a little too well: Rhett and Scarlet and Dorothy and the Wicked Witch now seem always to have been with us, to such a degree that it seems weird to imagine that somebody directed them. Just as Sturges's two biggest hits helped to create so many action stars--Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, James Garner, just to skim the cream off the top-- that the fellow behind the camera got lost in the crowd.

Yesterday's Hits, Veteran's Day Edition: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

World War II was the first major war that was extensively documented by Hollywood. Even as it was in progress, hundreds of newsreels and documentaries helped to increase awareness of how and why we were fighting, including works by major filmmakers like Frank Capra, John Ford and Howard Hawks. But after the war was over, no one was really telling the stories of the men who were coming home and trying to resume their lives again. Sensing the need for this story to be told, producer Samuel Goldwyn commissioned Robert E. Sherwood, who had served as the head of the Office of War Information, to write a screenplay based on the novel Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor, which tackled this subject.

As befitting the importance of the subject matter, Goldwyn then proceeded to assemble an A-list cast and crew for the project. To direct, Goldwyn chose William Wyler, one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers. He then hand-picked an A-list cast, led by Oscar-winning actor Frederic March and popular leading man Dana Andrews as two of the returning soldiers, and Hollywood’s top female box-office draw Myrna Loy as March’s loving wife. In perhaps his biggest gamble, Goldwyn cast in the key role of the disabled Navy veteran Homer Parrish a non-actor named Harold Russell, an actual vet who’d lost both of his hands in battle.

Like all of the risks Goldwyn took in bringing The Best Years of Our Lives to the screen, this one paid off magnificently. Prior to the film’s release, he famously stated, "I don't care if the film doesn't make a nickel. I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it." And while there were at least a handful of people who didn’t see the film, it nonetheless became a massive hit, reportedly the biggest to coming out of Hollywood since Gone With the Wind. On top of that, it also took home seven competitive Academy Awards including Best Picture, best director for Wyler, acting Oscars for March and Russell, and a second honorary award for Russell, “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.”

For years, The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the most acclaimed and beloved of all Hollywood movies. But while the patriotic sentiment that was stirred up by the memory of World War II had helped to make the film one of the biggest blockbusters of its time, subsequent conflicts made war- and the movies based on it- more controversial in the minds of the public. For most movies about war and its consequences, it was no longer enough to matter-of-factly tell the stories of the people who fought and those they left behind. Especially in the wake of Vietnam, war became a political issue, and most directors of war movies wore their own politics (whether they were for it or against) on their sleeves.

By contrast, it’s hard to tell how the makers of The Best Years of Our Lives felt about World War II just by watching the film. But then, it doesn’t really matter. The Best Years of Our Lives is not a pro-war or anti-war story, but one that accepts the war as a fact of like. Al (March), Fred (Andrews), and Homer (Russell) fought in World War II, and now that it’s over they have to deal with what happened while they re-acclimatize themselves to life at home. The film is about how the war affected them and those who love them- no more, no less.

One of the most significant decisions made by Wyler and Goldwyn was that the film would be a character study. Key to this effect is the film’s running time, ten minutes shy of three hours, which affords the audience plenty of time to get to know the three returning men and observe their lives. This extra time makes a difference- rather than trying to pare down the characters’ trajectories in order to make a tight two-hour movie, Wyler and Goldwyn let the stories play out at an unhurried pace. Instead of feeling like a handful of vignettes, the characters in The Best Years of Our Lives are given time to think and change, to make mistakes and learn from them, and ultimately to grow into their new lives.

Each of the three returning men does so in a unique way. Ever since losing his hands, Homer has had trouble with how others treat him, although it's a credit to the film that don't treat him poorly, just... differently. Homer’s story is the simplest, and the most poignant, due in no small part to the directness and un-faked sincerity of Russell’s acting. Al’s storyline is the subtlest of the three, in large part because he’s the one who seems to have his act together. He comes back from the war to a loving family and a successful job in a bank. However, his war experiences begin to manifest themselves in small but recognizable ways. When he gives a loan to a returning serviceman, his boss tells him he should pay more attention to the applicant’s collateral than to his character. He hardly recognizes his kids, who’ve grown up in his absence. And he begins display an increased eagerness to drink, which doesn’t go unnoticed by his wife Millie. Loy is just right as a woman who loves her man enough to forgive him his misdeeds, but would like some way to understand what’s making him do them.

Yet in many ways, it’s Frank who is at the center of the film. Frank, who came from wrong side of the tracks, went to war and became a hero, winning a number of medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross. But his accomplishments mean nothing in the civilian world without the work experience to back them up, and he finds himself working at his old job in a drugstore. And having wooed his wife Marie (Virginia Mayo) with his slick looks in a uniform and his generous Army salary, she’s naturally not too happy to have to live off a soda jerk’s salary. Meanwhile, Frank finds himself falling for Al’s daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), much to Al’s dismay.

The biggest reason why The Best Years of Our Lives has endured as a classic is because its characters are completely human-sized. While the cast is filled with popular stars of the day, they’re always convincing as complicated everyday people instead of the fantasy archetypes who normally inhabit high-profile Hollywood films. In making the film, Goldwyn, Wyler, and the rest of the cast and crew showed a real respect for the bankers, the soda jerks, the disabled, the nurses, the housewives, the children, and everyone else who’s been affected by war. The title refers to “our lives,” and the filmmakers understand this. And that, more than anything, is why it still works.

Yesterday's Hits: Duel in the Sun (1946, King Vidor)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Duel in the Sun a hit?: David O. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1930s, a decade that concluded with his production of Hollywood’s biggest hit of all time, Gone With the Wind. After that film’s runaway success, Selznick could pretty much write his own ticket, and he used his clout to make his dream project, a mega-budgeted adaptation of Niven Busch’s novel Duel in the Sun. Selznick spared no expense- the budget topped out at a then-unprecedented $6 million- to bring this Wild West melodrama to the screen in “Glorious Technicolor”, going through more than half a dozen directors (including Josef von Sternberg) before handing the directorial reins over to Hollywood veteran King Vidor.

In the film’s principal roles, Selznick cast a pair of hot young stars- Gregory Peck, fresh off his breakout role in the Selznick production of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and Jennifer Jones, a recent Oscar-winner for The Song of Bernadette, who took over the role for the pregnant Teresa Wright. He then backed them with a stellar supporting cast, including Joseph Cotten, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Herbert Marshall, and Lillian Gish. But perhaps the biggest factor in the film’s success was its unabashedly lurid story about a “half-breed” woman who was irresistibly drawn to a bad-boy rancher. Combining a horse opera with a soap opera and filling the atmosphere with liberal amounts of (implied) sex, Duel in the Sun stirred up no small amounts of controversy. Yet the hubbub surrounding the film (quickly nicknamed “Lust in the Dust”) ended up helping its box-office performance, and Duel became one of the biggest hits of 1946, bringing in more than $11 million.

What happened?: While Duel in the Sun was a hit with moviegoers, reviews were decidedly mixed, praising the film’s production values while criticizing its script (credited to Selznick himself) and performances. And in spite of the fact that the film eventually made money, Selznick found it increasingly difficult to make films in light of the movie’s runaway budget and extravagant (upwards of $2 million) advertising campaign. Selznick continued to work in Hollywood, but his once-prodigious output slowed considerably in the years after Duel in the Sun. On the positive side, the movie continued Gregory Peck’s steady ascent to leading-man stardom, and three years after the film’s release, Selznick married Jones, a marriage that continued until his death in 1965.

Does Duel in the Sun still work?: Not really. For such a popular genre, melodrama is difficult to pull off on film, especially in a way that ages well. Part of the problem is that melodramas were sometimes the only way to deal with risqué material under the Production Code. But while there was no shortage of controversy surrounding Duel in the Sun, most of the elements of the film that were once controversial edgy- particularly the “half-breed” background of heroine Pearl Chavez (played by Jones) and the “bad girl” urges she feels toward Peck- are dealt with in a hamfisted and uninspired manner.

It doesn’t help that Jones is all wrong for the part. Setting aside the now-politically incorrect use of “brown-face” that was utilized to make the lily-white Jones look the part, she’s simply too prim and polished to be convincing. Jones’ idea of speaking like a half-Mexican, half-Native American woman is to lower her vocal register while droppin’ the occasional “g” from the ends of words. And when even Pearl turns into a lusty, unbridled “bad girl” after falling for Peck’s Lewt McCanlies, Jones’ performance becomes almost laughable, consisting mainly of striking sultry poses and making goo-goo eyes at Peck. Jones never seems comfortable in the role she’s given, and this discomfort comes through in her performance.

Another factor was, to put it bluntly, that there were simply too many cooks. It takes a firm hand on the directorial wheel to pull off a lurid story like this one, but after going through more than half a dozen directors, Vidor was little more than a hired gun, lorded over by Selznick. But rather than allowing the story to dictate the style, Selznick overwhelmed it with production values, in a clear attempt to turn it into Gone With the Wind Goes West. Admittedly, Duel in the Sun is gorgeous, with plenty of sweeping vistas and deep orange sunsets to please the eye. However, the story becomes bogged down by the weight of the production, and many of the more emotional moments get lost in the scenery. The result is a movie that’s tamer and more bloated than any good melodrama should be. Compared to another popular melodrama of the period, John M. Stahl’s still-effective Leave Her to Heaven, Duel in the Sun is little more than an overstuffed curiosity.

That said, the one element of the movie that still works is Gregory Peck’s performance as the strapping Lewt. Later in his career, Peck became associated with playing heroes- not least in his iconic turn in To Kill a Mockingbird- so it’s fascinating to see the traits that made him such a perfect good guy used in service of an unsavory character. It helps that Peck was convincingly tall in the saddle to play a cowboy, all the better to turn the cowboy archetype- morally uncomplicated, decisive, solving problems through action- on its ear. Peck treads a thin line here, giving a performance that’s just dark enough to make the character work in this context, while simultaneously suggesting that Lewt might’ve been the hero under different circumstances. If nothing else, Duel in the Sun showed moviegoers just how commanding a performer Peck could be, even if the movie itself ultimately let him down.

Yesterday's Hits: Exodus (1960, Otto Preminger)

Paul Clark — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, we paid tribute to the life and career of Paul Newman with a list of our picks for his greatest performances. And looking back, it’s easy to see the Newman made quite a few movies that were not only very good, but eventually became acknowledged as classics. But for this week’s installment of Yesterday’s Hits, I’d like to explore one of Newman’s films that was incredibly popular in its day but hasn’t endured quite like his best films- 1960’s Exodus.

What made Exodus a hit?: It seems strange now, but there was a time when the majority of box office hits were based on bestselling novels. People would read the latest literary blockbuster, then flock to the movies to see the cinematic version of the story. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, historical fiction was in vogue, and one of the most popular books of the time was Leon Uris’ 1956 novel Exodus. A dramatization of the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, Exodus captivated readers who enjoyed the way Uris interspersed a recent historical event with invented and composited characters. By the time Exodus became America’s biggest bestseller since Gone With the Wind, it was inevitable that it would be headed for the big screen.

Knowing the value of the property (Uris sold the rights even before the book hit bookstore shelves) MGM pulled out all the stops to make Exodus a major, A-list production. Tapped to direct was Otto Preminger, one of Hollywood’s best-known and boldest filmmakers, and himself of Jewish descent. In turn, Preminger hired the previously blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to handle screenwriting duties, which along with Trumbo’s work on Spartacus effectively ended the blacklist. The film was to be shot entirely on location in Cyprus and Israel, where the book had also been set. And the casting befitted a production of this scale. The cast was led by Newman, one of Hollywood’s hottest leading men, and also included Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint, Oscar nominees Lee J. Cobb, Ralph Richardson, and Sal Mineo, and up-and-comer Peter Lawford. As expected, the film was a big hit, bringing in more than $8 million domestically to become one of the top grossers of 1960.

What happened?: As with anything else, tastes change. To begin with, readers are a fickle bunch, and the popular taste for historical fiction was supplanted by other genres. Moviegoing audiences soon followed suit, and the historical epics that loomed large over the box office in the early 1960 soon gave way to hits that were more visceral or fanciful. Today, in a time when the only three-hour blockbusters are fantasy stories, Exodus would most likely be relegated to the Oscar-bait pile, given a limited release in late December before going wider in mid-January.

Does Exodus still work?: Almost, but not quite. It begins very well, with the famous incident in which hundreds of Jewish refugees attempted to escape their captivity on the island of Cyprus and sail to Palestine. In this section of the film, Preminger does a very good job at capturing the event in a way that does justice to those who lived it and while also being narratively compelling. These scenes aren’t particularly complex from a moral standpoint- the British are trying to block the Jews from their freedom, so they rebel by staging a hunger strike- but they have a clarity of purpose that gets the movie off on the right foot.

However, once the story gets to Palestine, much of the focus is lost, and despite a stirring score by Ernest Gold, the film begins to seriously drag. The cast of characters, previously united by the escape attempt, splinters the story into a number of different plot strands that are meant to encompass the difficult birthing process for the state of Israel. For example, Newman’s Ari Ben Canaan works with his father (Cobb) to establish the nation in a peaceful manner, whereas Dov Landau (Mineo) joins up with a group of resistance fighters. These stories are only as effective as the characters who inhabit them, and unfortunately, the quality of character development varies greatly.

Given particularly short shrift are the women. The American nurse Kitty Fremont (Saint) is clearly meant to function as the audience surrogate in the drama, gradually coming to an understanding of the ongoing plight- and enduring humanity- of the Jewish people. But as a character, she’s kind of a non-starter, carried along by the demands of the plot instead of by her own strongly defined nature. Even more sketchy is the character of Karen, played by newcomer Jill Haworth. In the course of the film, Karen reveals herself as a symbol of the fortunes of the Jewish people in Palestine. At the beginning of the story, she’s full of hope and promise, only to grow increasingly disillusioned once she arrives. By the time the film turns her into an innocent martyr in the final reel- buried alongside a sympathetic Arab, no less- the symbol has become far too belabored for its own good.

Faring much better is Mineo, who was never one of the breakout stars of the Method generation but who was one of its most interesting actors. Dov’s storyline is somewhat awkwardly integrated into the rest of the film, but they work pretty nicely on their own, due in large part to Mineo’s performance. It helps that the Dov Landau storyline contains some of the film’s edgiest material, as when he admits to working as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and more. Preminger, never one to shy away from controversy, changed Dov’s back story from the original novel, so whereas he survived as a forger in Uris’ book, Preminger and Trumbo made his method of survival somewhat more unpleasant. I admit that I was a little shocked that the line, “they used me… like a woman!” passed muster under the Production Code.

As for Newman, it’s not one of his great performances, but he’s fine in a role that makes effective use of his star charisma. And when he’s called on to make an impassioned speech in the film’s final scene, he pulls it off without coming off as sanctimonious. There are a number of elements to the film that just don’t work, or which have dated poorly. However, the sentiments Newman expresses in his final eulogy are as relevant today as ever. The situation between the Jews and Arabs is as uneasy as it ever was, and we’re no closer to a solution than we were half a century ago. And while Exodus doesn’t quite stand the test of time, these lines still hit home:

”The dead always share the Earth in peace- and that’s not enough. It’s time for the living to have a turn. The day will come when Arab and Jew will share in a peaceful life this land that they have always shared in death.”

Poster-Modernism

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The great thing about movie writing is that there's so much to love. Since film is the most intensely collaborative of media, a good move can be appreciated on any number of levels, and even a bad movie might have something to recommend it. That's because a movie isn't one thing, it's dozens: it's a screenplay, a collection of performances by actors, a moving picture, a trailer, a logo, a soundtrack, a trailer, and a dozen other artistic endeavors all assembled into a single production. As you can tell from other Screengrab features like our "OST" soundtrack reviews and Paul Clark's trailer reviews, we love the process of looking at a film not only as a whole, but as the discrete elements that make up that whole. Which is why we're very enthusiastic about "Poster Service", a new feature on the Guardian's film blog.

Enlisting the aid of Paul Rennie, the head of the graphic design department at St. Martins College, the "Poster Service" series takes a look at some famous (their first installment was Gone with the Wind) and not-so-famous (this week features Pink String and Sealing Wax, an Ealing comedy that was a hit in Britain but little-known elsewhere) in an attempt to discern, from a designer's perspective, why some movie posters work and some don't. Referring to the Selznick classic, Rennie observes that "the title of Gone with the Wind immediately communicates an association with the genteel sophistication of the southern U.S. Against a backdrop of the Civil War, the associations of [its] typography alluded to a more luxurious and sensual environment than that of the WASPish north. It's just right for a particular kind of passion romance." Of Pink String and Sealing Wax, he notes, "the Ealing film posters are remarkable on two points. Firstly, and against all the odds, they are recognisable works of art by artists whose work extends beyond the usual concerns of graphic design, cinema and fine art. Secondly, they embrace and give passion to the political dimension of satire and social-realism -- especially rare in cinema."

We're pretty excited to see where Rennie goes from here -- and frankly, we're just as interested, if not more so, in what he judges to be bad poster art than we are the good stuff. What about you, Screengrab readers? What are your favorite, and least favorite, movie posters?

Related Posts:

Screengrab Movie Poster Preview

Back to the Drawing Board

Reviving Richard Fleischer: "Violent Saturday" and "Mandingo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The director Richard Fleischer, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 89, had a long career, an immaculate bloodline (as the son and nephew of Max and Dave Fleischer, the animators behind the great short films starring Betty Boop, Superman, and Popeye), and no critical reputation to speak of. Fleischer's vast filmography is all over the map in terms of subject matter and style, and his name is attached to a number of big commercial disasters (Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) and minor embarassments (Che!, an attempt by 20th-Century Fox to cash in on '60s revolutionary youth, starring Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro; The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond, with Laurence Olivier as his chagrinned poppa; Red Sonja with Brigitte Nielsen) that are unified mainly by their lack of personality. But he's begun to attract defenders, and Dave Kehr, for one, thinks it's surprising that he "still has not been given a major New York retrospective." As it happens, three of Fleisher's movies are enjoying return engagements on the New York revival circuit in the days and weeks to come. Violent Saturday (1955), which plays for a week at Film Forum starting February 29, is one of those odd film noirs where the thugs from the city hit the highway and track their mud all over the clean, open fields of the American heartland. Written by Sidney Boehm, who also did the script for The Big Heat, it serves up Lee Marvin as the nastiest of a trio of bank robbers who impose their bad morals and worse manners on a quiet little town where they may fit in a little than the locals want to admit. It was made the same year as James Sturges' better-known rural thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, where Marvin and Ernest Borgnine both served as muscle for the local forces of darkness. Borgnine is in this one, too, but cast against type as an Amish farmer who has understandable cause to worry that his religious proscription against violence may not be strong enough to survive its encounter with Lee Marvin. The film, which enjoyed a brief period of revival and acclaim in the mid-80s when it was discovered by critics and used as a club against Peter Weir's tonier Witness, is a reminder of how well Fleischer's no-frills filmmaking technique worked when applied to simple but gimmicky thriller material, as in the 1952 The Narrow Margin and Armored Car Robbery, both testaments to the grip of nuts-and-bolts noir and the nut-cracking sturdiness of Charles McGraw's jawline.

The "Film Comments Selects" series at Walter Reade Theater is showing Fleischer's 1971 10 Rillington Place on February 21 and 24, thus giving audiences the chance to see the director of Gandhi, Richard Attenborough, sweat up the screen as a serial killer who strangled eight women and left it to an innocent fellow played by John Hurt to be hanged in his place. But the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here may be the chance to see the 1975 Mandingo (screening on February 23) on a big screen, assuming that no one tears it down before the closing credits roll. This anti-Gone with the Wind, set on a Southern slave-breeding plantation presided over by James Mason, was made in 1975 from a script by Norman Wexler, the ad executive turned wild man screenwriter who wrote Joe and Serpico. (Wexler, who reportedly served as a model for Andy Kaufman's loathsome lounge-singer character Tony Clifton, was notorious for such stunts as blowing off a man trying to make conversation with him on a commercial airplane flight by telling him that he was on his way to assassinate President Nixon. Wexler's seatmate notified a flight attendant, who in turn notified the FBI, and when the plane landed, Wexler wound up having to talk to a lot of people he would rather have not talked to.)

Kehr takes the position that "Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." This is a very interesting take on the picture, though some will feel that it may amount to putting a little too much thought into a movie that climaxes with Perry King reacting to the news that his wife (Susan George) has been having an affair with his prize slave, played by the heavyweight champ Ken Norton--King finds out the hard way, after his wife has given birth--by sticking Norton into a boiling cauldron and jabbing him with a pitchfork. But however seriously you end up taking Mandingo, it's definitely one of a kind, and very entertaining, if you can handle the fact that Eric Cartman would question its political correctness. (I remember that it was briefly on rotation on HBO around the time that my high school buddies first got cable, and for a long time, they were much taken with King's line, "I fancied her, so I bought her! She's gonna be my bed wench!" I can promise you, however, that use of this line in the real world got them no action whatsoever.) Devotees of hambone turns will want to see it just for the great James Mason drawling his lines, sitting with his bare feet on a black kid's tummy (it's supposed to be good for the arthritis), and generally giving the kind of performance that gives one visions of the star constantly asking the director, "Now, that last take, you're just going to show it for laughs at the wrap party and then burn the negative, right?" There was actually a sort of sequel to Mandingo called Drum, and it had a script that Wexler had worked on and a cast headed by Warren Oates, Pam Grier, and Yaphet Kotto, who you might think would raise the stakes a bit from Perry King, Susan George, and Ken Norton, but it had none of the, um, magic of the original, and is beloved by no one. Fleischer didn't direct it. So maybe he's some kind of auteur after all.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Kids love to swear. I'm sorry, parents, but it's true. Your little angel is/has been/will someday soon be a potty-mouth. The first phase of cussing is the most innocent one: you know the words are taboo, but have no idea what most of them mean. You never really think through the implications of calling your best friend a "pussy-eating cocksucker" – you simply don't have all the information you need to understand how wrong it is. The thrill comes from learning and then repeating the words, and for us kids who came of age in the 70s, The Bad News Bears was an invaluable resource. Hearing obnoxious little Tanner describe his teammates as "a bunch of Jews, spicks, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron" was liberating not because we were a bunch of racists, Nazis and boogerphobes, but because we knew we'd just learned some new words our parents would kill us for saying. And there's still no more triumphant sentiment in the history of sports movies than Tanner's final kiss-off: "Hey Yankees – you can take your apology and your trophy and shove 'em straight up your ass!"

FULL METAL JACKET (1997)

The training sequences at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket are so famously vulgar, intense and energetic that once they’re over, the air sort of gets let out of the movie for the entire middle passage and doesn’t pick back up until the end. For this reason, it’s often considered a lesser Stanley Kubrick film, which is somewhat unfair; there’s a lot to like about the movie even once Private Leonard Lawrence and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman exit the stage. But oh, that opening sequence! As Hartman, character actor (and actual Marine Corps sergeant) R. Lee Ermey works in obscenity the way that Picasso worked in paint; so staggeringly awful (and hilariously funny) are his vulgar degradations of his raw recruits that by the time he has his final confrontation with Private Pyle, no one in the audience has any trouble believing that someone would want to shoot him. Although Ermey has tried to claim credit for many of Hartman’s lines, what he really brings to the role is the pitch-perfect delivery; most of the lines are taken directly from Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers, on which the movie is based. There’s a telling moment early in Hartman’s tirade where he singles out Pyle for abuse, after he has committed the crime of laughing at his obscene explosions, but it cuts directly to the heart of the matter: as violent, hateful and repulsive as the sarge’s speeches are, they’re also incredibly amusing. His recruits don’t have the luxury of laughter, but we do.

NETWORK (1976)

In the first on-air flip-out scene by Peter Finch's Howard Beale, the newly fired newsman gazes serenely into the camera and promises to shoot himself on the air because he just can't take "the bullshit" anymore. The real punch line came a couple of years after the movie premiered in theaters, when it was first shown on network TV. CBS, eager to show that they were in on the joke, allowed Beale's supposedly unbroadcastable "bullshits" to go throw uncensored. Bravo! But the scene was followed by one in which the movie's executives gather to discuss what just happened, and they are a foul-mouthed crew. And the soundtrack, on TV, turns into a veritable conga line of bleep!s.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

"You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can come on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, come on her face, man. She get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?"

On one level, it's the world's filthiest sales pitch, a street-corner pimp's patter for the passing johns who want to buy what he's selling. But consider the line that precedes these:

"Man, she's twelve and a half years old."

With those eight simple words, Sport's routine becomes something totally different, and altogether more chilling, thanks in no small part to Harvey Keitel's performance. Screenwriter Paul Schrader originally wrote Sport as African-American, but with Keitel standing in that doorway instead of, say, one of the gentlemen Travis sees at the Belmore Cafeteria, the scene takes on a different tone altogether. What might have been written as a scary, foreboding conversation now comes off as almost genial, with Keitel joking around with Travis' squareness before launching into his prepared monologue. It's an inspired touch by Scorsese and his actors, and one that ultimately makes the scene even creepier. It's not simply that Sport is selling wayyyyyyyyy underage girls to passersby, but that it's no big deal to him. In his mind, he's just catering to demand – after all, if nobody paid for twelve-and-a-half-year old prostitutes (it's the "and a half" that makes the line extra-creepy) he wouldn't need to sell them, right?

– Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent