By John Exshaw
Being
reports of certain events which would have appeared earlier, had fate and the
need to earn a buck not intervened.
Western Season
Irish Film Institute,
24-28 August 2011
Waiting
at the station for the 3:10 to Tara Street, I was feeling good – deep down
good, the way a man can feel when he’s got a bunch of Westerns to watch and a
passel of press passes in his pocket. Leaving the Iron Horse at Westland Row, I
cut across Grafton Street (no sign of them pesky Rykers) and on down to the
Irish Film Institute, where they were about to let rip with a four-day,
eight-film season called ‘The Western: Meanwhile Back at the Revolution ... The
Western As Political Allegory’. Well, I reckoned they could use all them fancy
five-dollar words and dress it up whatever they damn well liked, long as it
meant seeing some real Westerns on the big screen. As Randy Scott would’ve
said, “There’s some things a man can’t ride around—but Cowboys & Aliens ain’t one of them.†Ride clear of Diablo,
hell, ride clear of dumb CGI special effects movies is more like it . . .
Anyhow,
I figured not only was this a chance to see some Westerns the way they were
meant to be seen but also an opportunity to have my say on films which wouldn’t
normally fit into the Cinema Retro
corral, being as they were made before 1960. Not that this is either the time
or the place for what you might call in-depth chin-stroking and
head-scratching—more like a chance to throw out some thoughts and see where they
go.
First
up, perhaps predictably enough, was High
Noon (1952), described in the programme notes by season curator Declan
Clarke as “a commentary on the McCarthy witch-hunt and the failure of U.S.
intellectuals to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee.†This,
of course, has become pretty much the standard interpretation of High Noon but it would be interesting to
know to what extent it was perceived that way on its initial release; the
British critic Robin Wood has recalled that he was completely unaware of any
political subtext when he first saw the film, and it seems rather doubtful that
many citizens of Main Street, U.S.A., came out of their local cinemas saying,
“Gee, honey, that sure was one in the eye for Joe McCarthy!â€
Although,
generally speaking, I prefer to see something of the West in my Westerns (even
if it’s AlmerÃa, west of Rome), High Noon
remains one of the best “town Westerns†ever made, notable as much for its
characterisation as for its celebrated manipulation of real time to build
suspense. In particular, one is struck by the refreshingly adult depiction of
Helen RamÃrez (Katy Jurado), a “woman with a past†who is required neither to
apologise for that past nor to expiate her supposed sins by catching one of
those stray “moral†bullets which usually account for such characters (e.g.,
Linda Darnell’s Chihuahua in Ford’s My
Darling Clementine, 1946). Other details I’d forgotten include the church
scene in which Thomas Mitchell appears to be lending his support to Marshal Kane
only to end up giving him the shaft, Howland Chamberlin’s nasty-minded hotel
clerk, and Harry Morgan urging his wife to tell Kane that he’s not in, that
he’s gone to church.
If
one had to make criticisms of High Noon,
one might point out the rather intrusive use of Dimitri Tiomkin’s theme song in
the scene between Kane and Helen, and the fact that although Kane refers to
Frank Miller as crazy, he actually seems entirely rational in his single-minded
pursuit of vengeance. Making Grace Kelly’s Amy an Eastern Quaker in order to
provide a conflict with Kane’s Western ethics may seem rather unsubtle but, in
the context of an 85-minute film, it’s an acceptable form of character
shorthand. But these are fairly minor gripes – hell, even Gary Cooper is good in
High Noon. This may seem a somewhat
heretical thing to say about one of the Western greats but the fact is that
while I can appreciate Cooper’s status as a Western icon, I’ve never thought
much of his Westerns as Westerns. The Virginian (1929) is certainly of
historical interest, but films like The
Plainsman (1936), North West Mounted
Police (1940) and Unconquered
(1947) mainly serve to demonstrate that Cecil B. De Mille should have stuck to
bashing the Bible. William Wyler’s The
Westerner (1940) certainly has its moments (though the majority of them
belong to Walter Brennan’s Judge Roy Bean), but I find it almost impossible to
watch Cooper’s post-war Western performances without an acute sense of
embarrassment, as Old Slowpoke mumbles and shuffles his way through a series of
often unsuitable roles, all requiring a vigour which, due to a combination of
age and ill-health, was by then quite clearly beyond him. In Marshal Will Kane,
however, Cooper finally found a character which fitted the role to the man, rather
than forcing the man into the role, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Next
up in the shooting gallery, both inevitably and fittingly, was Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), frequently cited as “a
conservative riposte†or even “the right wing answer†to High Noon – a viewpoint which, as Robin Wood has remarked,
presupposes that the latter was definitely of the left (or, at any rate,
liberal) in intent, a suggestion not immediately obvious from the film itself.
Marshal Kane, for instance, is not a representative of the people: he is a
figure of authority, whose special skills set him apart from the common herd.
The good folk of Hadleyville are revealed to be a cowardly bunch of hypocrites,
unwilling and incapable of acting together for the common good. Indeed, Wood
concludes that the film not only “appears quite untainted by socialism†but
that, in one respect, “it is clearly right wing, namely the issue of capital
punishment: the whole plot (and Will Kane’s dilemma) hinges on the fact that
the jury failed to hang Frank Miller.â€
In
fact, the only satisfying way of seeing High
Noon as a political allegory is as a dramatisation of the personal position
of scriptwriter Carl Foreman, who was being investigated by HUAC during the
course of writing the film, and who found himself identifying more and more
with Kane, as former friends disowned him and his avowedly liberal producer
Stanley Kramer moved (successfully) to have him taken off the picture. (Nor
should it be forgotten that, in the Foreman-as-Kane scenario, it was John Wayne
and his cronies in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American
Ideals who played the part of Frank Miller and his gang.)
Hawks’
objections to High Noon seem founded
more on his own notions of proper professional conduct than on any political
reaction (indeed, the idea of Hawks as a political polemicist will seem
ridiculous to anyone even vaguely familiar with his career). In short, he
objected to the fact that Kane is reduced to asking the townspeople for help,
something he felt a real professional would never do. This, on the face of it,
is a rather odd notion: in the historical West, as opposed to Hollywood’s
version, no one would have though it out-of-place for a lawman, faced with a
similar situation, to attempt to recruit a posse. In Hollywood, however, the
rules of the genre dictate that a lawman only relies on a posse if he is a
secondary character; if he is the hero, he must, of course, face down the
baddies all on his lonesome. Hawks’ rather woolly thinking on this point is
further illustrated by the fact that while John T. Chance in Rio Bravo may reject help from
non-professionals, the fact is that he does have four other characters ready to
back him up – unlike Kane (at least until Amy does what a Western hero’s wife
has gotta do), he is not a man alone.
Well,
so much for that, what of the film itself? At the risk of relieving myself on
certain people’s cherished cabbage-patch, the fact is I found Rio Bravo to be an excruciating
experience, barely deserving the description of a Western, never mind its
unwarranted reputation as one of the great
Westerns. My objections, in no particular order, are as follows. Firstly, even
by the standards of a “town Westernâ€, this is a film which demonstrates no
interest whatsoever in either the West as an historical entity or in the
Western as a genre; Hawks’ sole interest is in his characters, none of whom I
believe in, and all of whom spend the majority of what is a chronically
overlong film engaged in a never-ending round of mutual self-congratulation,
expressed in the most bogus and cringe-inducing dialogue you’re ever likely to
hear. Much (far too much) has been made of the fact that the opening sequence
is largely silent – if only the rest of the film had followed this example; in
fact it’s about the talkingest “Western†I’ve ever had the misfortune to listen
to.
Everything,
absolutely everything, in Rio Bravo
is subordinate to Hawks’ fixation with his main characters. The town itself may
as well be uninhabited. The baddies are not characters, merely ciphers; Joe
Burdette (Claude Akins) is nothing more than a plot device with a shit-eating
grin who becomes irrelevant as soon as he’s locked up for his (entirely
unmotivated) killing. Nathan Burdette (John Russell) is given the bare minimum
of screen time and absolutely nothing by way of character development. Even the
showdown at the end is more concerned with the squabbling and bickering between
Wayne and Walter Brennan than in providing a dramatically satisfying settling
of accounts (and while we’re at it, if Stumpy can actually throw the dynamite
all the way to the Burdettes’ stronghold, what’s the point in having Chance
shoot the sticks in mid-air? It’s just mindless bang-bang, spectacle for the
sake of spectacle). Robin Wood has praised “the strikingly naturalistic
background†of the saloon in the opening sequence, but such attention to detail
does not stretch to the costuming of the minor characters, all of whom (and in
particular the baddie who trips up Chance in the hotel) look like they’ve come
straight from the discount section of the Western Costume Company.
And
what of the main characters? John T. Chance strikes me as the first instance of
John Wayne playing ‘John Wayne’, that bragging, swaggering, and lazy self-caricature
that characterised most of the actor’s later output. Dean Martin (surely one of
the most unlikely of Western stars) gives a good performance as Dude, and
Walter Brennan does his loveable old coot turn as only he could. Angie
Dickinson as Feathers somehow manages to retain her dignity despite being
required to deliver some of the most god-awful dialogue ever written, while
Ricky Nelson as ‘Colorado’ gives new meaning to the term ‘lightweight’. But,
just to be clear, the problems I have with Rio
Bravo lie not in the performances (despite reservations about that of
Wayne) but in the characters themselves, their interaction, and the situations
in which they’re placed.
In
fact, I don’t mind confessing that I found watching Rio Bravo again such a dispiriting experience that I even began to
question Hawks’ reputation as a director, and certainly as a director of
Westerns. So I went back and took a look at Red
River (1948) in an attempt to restore my faith. Well, it worked – up to a
point. There’s no doubt that it’s superior to Rio Bravo in almost all respects, even if it does go horribly wrong
in the last quarter or so. For a start, it’s a Western with something to say
about the men who inhabited the West, and John Wayne gives a real performance,
rather than something verging on self-parody. Chance’s relationship with Stumpy
clearly has its beginnings in that between Wayne’s Dunson and Brennan’s Groot,
but because the film is so much darker in tone, their squabbling and bickering
has a real weight to it, as opposed to being little more than a tiresome comedy
routine.
The
rot, however, sets in with the first appearance of Joanne Dru’s Tess Millay,
another example of what we have been conditioned to call the Hawksian heroine.
Unbelievably, Hawks has Tess and Montgomery Clift’s Matt Garth meet up in the
middle of an all-out Indian attack on a wagon train. There’s Monty, doing his
best to save the day, when all of a sudden Tess starts spouting that
excruciating, cod-cool guff that got handed to every Hawksian heroine after To Have and Have Not (1944). And so we
find Hawks placing what Billy Wilder called a “meet-cute†right
slap-in-the-middle of an action sequence, thereby displaying the first sign of
either his disinterest in, or contempt for, the Western as a form, an attitude
which, I would contend, reaches its ultimate expression in Rio Bravo. As for Red River,
the whole film, down to its ludicrous cop-out ending, goes right off the trail
from that point on.
Now,
of course I’m aware that all directors have a tendency to repeat themselves
over time, and that in Hawks’ day, no director could have imagined that his
entire oeuvre would be subjected to
the sort of scrutiny possible today, but nonetheless one has to ask to what
extent such repetition constitutes what the auteur crowd would call “a
consistent visionâ€, as opposed to what the less charitably-inclined might term
mere laziness or even creative bankruptcy. Hawks, in effect, reproduced the
same heroine over and over again, seemingly oblivious to the fact that what
worked, dialogue-wise, in 1940s’ contemporary thrillers might seem wildly
out-of-place in a different setting, in this case the Western. Of course, some
may say that, after all, Rio Bravo is
only an entertainment, and that there is much to enjoy in Feathers’ verbal
taunting of the otherwise impregnable John T. Hey, it’s only a movie, man, so
chill out. But if one can’t believe in a film’s characters as human beings with
some connection, however basic, to a recognisable human reality, then one is
already on the path to the sort of films which dominate in mainstream Hollywood
today, peopled by characters who are little more than empty ciphers, signifying
nothing. Or to put it another way, and to bring it back to Hawks, has anyone
ever met a woman in real life who talks and acts like a Hawksian heroine? Of
course not; Feathers and all her forebears are fantasy figures, and it’s
doubtful, at the very least, that real art (as opposed to real entertainment)
can emerge via characters who themselves are patently unreal.
The
more one learns about Hawks’ films – or at any rate, the two under discussion
here – the more one comes to question not only the whole auteur persona created
around him, but also his judgment. Did Hawks seriously believe that Red River would have worked (in so far
as it does) had he been able to follow his original inclination to cast Gary
Cooper as Dunson and Cary Grant as gunman Cherry Valance? Just stop and think about that for a
moment. And let’s not forget those awful songs in Rio Bravo, which even its staunchest defenders find difficult to
justify. Would it make any difference to the cultists – who like to maintain
that the sequence in question is another example of the bonding process
essential to the Hawksian principle of group loyalty – to know that the only
reason the damn things are in the film is because Jack Warner told Hawks that
both Dean Martin’s and Ricky Nelson’s contracts called for them to warble at
least once before the end credits? Or to point out what looks suspiciously like
an early example of product placement with the inclusion of the
prominently-named Hotel Alamo and the ‘No Quarter’ degüello from the famous siege, both of which just happened to
appear in a John Wayne film released the year before the Duke attempted to
convince all good Americans that it was their patriotic duty to see him wearing
a coonskin hat in The Alamo? Well,
probably not, but it should.
So
there you have it. High Noon,
whatever the claims made for it as political allegory, attempts to tell a story
about real people in as realistic a way as possible, given the demands imposed
by its narrative structure. Rio Bravo
is a film peopled with unreal characters, with unreal names, acting implausibly
in an unreal situation. As Old Slowpoke himself apparently put it (according to
an annoyingly unattributed quote on the IMDb), Hawks’ film was “so phony,
nobody believes in itâ€. Helen RamÃrez or Feathers, the choice is yours. But, to
quote another film in the IFI season, “Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s
raining.â€
Much
as I might like to delve in some detail into the other films included in the season, the fact is this column has
to reach Sedalia at some point in time, and as I reckon we’ve been on the trail
quite long enough, I’ll confine myself to a few brief remarks on the remainder,
namely, Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a
non-Western, entertaining in an off-the-wall, Monty Python-kind-of-way, mainly
thanks to Ed Harris’ hilariously unhinged central performance. Then, due to a
programme clash, I was faced with a choice between The Searchers (1956) and Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General (Quien
sabe?, 1966), the latter shown as an example of the political Spaghetti
Westerns of the mid- to late-1960s, and followed by a discussion between Declan
Clarke and author, Austin Fisher. Much as I admire Damiani’s film (despite his
insistence that it is not a Western),
and much as I instinctively dislike John Ford, I went with The Searchers, not least because it was being shown in a new DCP
print on the big screen in Cinema 1, whereas Bullet was being projected from DVD on a small screen in Cinema 3.
Well, love Ford or hate him, The
Searchers is one of the great films, one which just seems to get better and
more rewarding with each viewing. Monumental.
The
1964 Czech film Lemonade Joe (Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská Opera),
directed by Oldřich Lipský, is a surprisingly gentle, if totally deranged,
satire on Westerns and capitalism that might best be described as a live-action
cartoon. At 99 minutes, it proved to be about twenty minutes too long, but was
certainly an experience one is unlikely to forget in a hurry. The closing day’s
films were Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw
Josey Wales (1976), which remains as impressive as ever, and Nicholas Ray’s
Johnny Guitar (1954), another alleged
classic that I’ve never been able to stomach. Before and in between the latter
films, I had a brief chat with Declan Clarke, who kindly explained the
reasoning behind his choice of films, and with Austin Fisher, whose claim to be
lecturing on film to an entire class, none of whom had ever seen a Western, I found even more alarming and depressing than
the IFI’s assertion that this had been their first ever Western season. With
ticket sales of over 600 for the five-day event considered quite satisfactory,
it is to be hoped that the powers-that-be will once more take the metaphorical
bit between their teeth and ride like the wind! [A review of Austin Fisher’s Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western:
Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, published this year by I.B.
Tauris, will appear in this column in due course.]
40th.
Anniversary Screening of A Fistful of
Dynamite
Irish Film Institute, 1
November 2011
Since
its initial proposal in September of last year, it was with a distinct feeling
of relief that I strode manfully towards my scheduled showdown with Sir
Christopher Frayling, ahead of his appearance that evening to introduce the
40th. anniversary screening of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dynamite (Giù la
testa, 1971) at the IFI. The time, of course, high noon; the place, the
front gate of Trinity College (because, as Christopher likes to quip, Trinity
Is Still My Name). But I digress; the event, though confirmed since February,
had only recently – and I do mean recently – been guaranteed by the arrival of
a new Digibeta transfer of the restored version of Dynamite. Prior to that, I had twice been dragged out of bed at
some unearthly hour in order to view the two 35mm prints supplied by the
British distributor, Park Circus.
The
first, most surprisingly, was the original American print, complete with the
original ghastly title of Duck, You
Sucker. What this was doing in Park Circus’ vaults was anyone’s guess. In
one respect, the print was in excellent condition: no scratches, no breaks at
the joins; on the other hand, having presumably sat undisturbed in the same
rusty can since 1971, the whole film had turned a horrible orange colour.
Clearly, this would not do. And so onto the British print, under the Dynamite title, which I strongly
suspected would be the same beat-up copy I’d seen in London back in the
Eighties. And so it proved to be – though in even worse condition than I
remembered. If one were a connoisseur of scratches, this was the print to
choose. This one had it all – vertical scratches, horizontal scratches, thin
ones, thick ones, green ones, you name it. Even the scratches had scratches.
The colour, at least, was an improvement on the U.S. print but it was clearly a
non-starter unless the IFI chose to bill the evening as a genuine, retro Seventies’
fleapit experience.
Frantic
negotiations ensued between the IFI and Park Circus, eventually leading to an
offer to strike the afore-mentioned Digibeta print, for a tidy sum guaranteed
to ensure the whole event ended up in the red even before it had started. At
which point, Angela Tangianu, director of the Italian Institute of Culture in
Dublin, weighed in with a fistful of euro which more or less covered the cost
of the transfer. Back in the black again, just about. Now, with only five days
to go, it was a matter of publicising the damn thing in order to get as many
bums on seats as possible. Trouble was, the Leone show was scheduled for the
day after the end of the annual Horrorthon film festival, run by my good
friend, the legendary Ed King, and unfortunately, the type of crowd that might
turn up for a Leone-Frayling event was the not the sort who were currently
rushing the box-office for their yearly dose of gore, guts, and things that go
bump in the night (before cutting people to pieces with a chainsaw). And anyone
of a squeamish disposition was likely to steer well clear of the IFI until Ed’s
army of the living dead had removed themselves from the vicinity.
Nonetheless
(and for reasons I’ve never quite understood), the show must go on, so on it
went. Christopher duly reined in early to do a sound and image check, John
Boorman rode in from the wilds of Wicklow, as did special-effects guru, Gerry
Johnston. And off we went! Kevin Coyne of the IFI, who had to wade through
enormous heaps of bullshit in order to make it all happen, stood up and thanked
those who needed to be thanked, and then introduced me (or at any rate, “John
Exshaw of Retro Cinemaâ€, which I guess was near enough). I stood up and babbled
something incoherent before handing over to Christopher. And Christopher
launched into his specially-prepared talk as only he can, leaving the 106
paying customers hanging on his every word. He then hosted a discussion on
Leone and the film with John and Gerry, the former providing his customary wry
but illuminating comments, the latter recalling how he was forced to strip to
the waist in Toner’s Pub to demonstrate on his own person the harmless effects
of a bullet squib, in order to provide reassurance for an actor of a decidedly
yellow disposition.
And
then, the house lights dimmed, Rod Steiger started pissing on an ants’ nest and
the Irish première of the restored version of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dynamite was finally under
way. At which long-dreamed-for moment, I found myself being shunted out of the
cinema in order to have dinner with Christopher, Gerry, Angela, Kevin, and IFI
programmer, Pete Walsh (John Boorman, no doubt wisely, opted to ride like the
wind back to Wicklow). As it suddenly dawned on me that, having finally got the
afore-mentioned première up there on the big screen where it belonged, I wasn’t
actually going to see it, I’m afraid something inside me just snapped. I’m told
it wasn’t a pretty sight, and that Pete is still receiving anti-tetanus
injections for the bite in his thigh. I’m told my language would’ve made even
Tuco blush – or at least break out in applause. I’m told all these things
because I have absolutely no recollection of them myself, and that, so I’m
told, is because at the point where I tried to climb into the projection booth
in order to strangle the projectionist, Kevin hit me from behind with the U.S.
print of Leone’s film, still in its tin. Guess nobody warned me to duck, you
sucker!
Christopher Lee at T.C.D.
9 November 2011
In
early November, it seemed as if it was virtually impossible to move around
Dublin without bumping into at least two varieties of Sir Christophers, neither
of whom require any introduction to readers of Cinema Retro. On the ninth of
the month, and some 140 years after Bram Stoker held the Presidency of the
University Philosophical Society of Trinity College, Dublin, Sir Christopher
Lee, the most renowned living interpreter of the Irish author’s most famous
character arrived in the same Graduates’ Memorial Building to be presented with
the Bram Stoker Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage. The 89-year-old actor, who
recently reprised his role of Saruman for Peter Jackson’s forthcoming version
of The Hobbit, appeared in good form
and, after giving a scholarly discourse on the origins of the name Dracula, was
soon providing detailed and entertaining answers to questions posed first by
the current President of The Phil, Eoin O’Liatháin, and then by members of the
200-strong audience.
While
those expecting Lee to hold forth on the Socratic Method or Kant’s Categorical
Imperative may have been disappointed by the irredeemably low-brow nature of
the questions, those expecting anecdotes from Lee’s still flourishing career
were amply rewarded. Lee even found time to recount an episode from his war service
with the Gurkhas in Italy before mentioning, not entirely convincingly, “But
I’m not allowed to talk about that . . .†Lee was also presented with a copy of
the Collected Ghost Stories of M.R.
James (Oxford University Press), by the book’s editor, and current Head of
Trinity’s Department of English, Dr. Darryl Jones, which prompted a
recollection of Lee’s own meeting with James, during a scholarship interview
for Eton in the 1930s. Not long after, Lee, accompanied by his wife, Lady
Gitte, disappeared, if not in a cloud of smoke then at least in a puff of
exhaust fumes as a black limousine whisked him away to the airport.