Reviews by
Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net
Guarantee: all reviews contain spoilers
Film noir is my favorite genre, with
its low budgets, black and white film, ugly but charismatic character actors,
and especially the light slanting through venetian blinds. It adds to the
interest that almost every film noir, by definition, is a moral fable, about
how to do the right thing, or the consequences of doing the wrong thing, in a
conflicted, ambiguous world.
“The
Frightened City”(1961), directed by John Lemont, is an energetic and
unusually humorous British entry in which, despite the shadows and incipient
violence, the characters all seem to be thoroughly amused by their situation.
It is rare to see a portrayal of gangsters who so enjoy their work. In a genre known for snappy dialog, this film
stands out; the bad guys’ nemesis is even a laughing policeman, whose repartee
is so finely-tooled its amazing he has time to do investigative work. Sean
Connery, pre-James Bond, is an enforcer who preserves a fragile peace between
formerly competing extortion gangs. The film arrives at the usual final act,
when people start selling each other out, and the characters possibly turn on
one another a little too easily with too little at stake. Also, by today’s
standards, the movie seems almost naïve; when one of the bosses breaks from the
coalition, another shoots him in front of a dozen witnesses, with one small
caliber shot to the belly, and then gloats about it as if there has never been
a mob hit before. I know from watching the fifty years of movies which
followed, that every shot to the body is followed up by a second one to the
head; how come he didn’t? One other interesting feature of the movie: before
the opening credits, a frightened man is pursued and run down by a car. This
scene is never explained or even mentioned again in the movie; it could almost
have been some excess footage which didn’t get used in something else.
“The
Big Clock”(1948), directed by John Farrow, is an almost-noir; it has the right title, set up, and villain,
but the hero and outcome are a little too sunny to qualify. Ray Milland is a magazine editor who
unwisely spends an evening drinking with his boss’ mistress, who gets murdered,
by the boss, Charles Laughton, later in the night. He then spends the next 36 hours or so racing around trying to
prove his boss did it, and trying to protect himself against the inevitable
frame-up which will ensue when the boss discovers he was the mystery man who spent
her last evening with the victim. It’s a good noir premise, populated with
great supporting characters: a washed up, alcoholic radio actor; a ditsy
painter who saw Ray Milland and is asked to supply a sketch (a great walk on by
Elsa Lanchester). Milland’s character, however, is happily married and has no
real darkness to him; the fact that he foolishly spent an evening drinking with
another woman makes him interesting, but the effect dissipates because he’s
just Too Nice a Guy. More disturbingly, the big clock which supplies the title
is tangential to the movie. It is the boss’ toy and hobby, a large clock which
tells world time set in the lobby of their building, and the hero spends some
time inside it—but, very surprisingly, the denouement takes place elsewhere.
The ending of Orson Welles’“The
Stranger”should have been the conclusion of this movie: there the final
confrontation is inside a large clock, and the villain is impaled on its moving
parts.
“X-men
Origins: Wolverine”(2009), directed by Gavin Hood, is a reasonably
satisfying comic based movie. I am not a comics fan and can’t get involved in
debates about authenticity or fidelity.
As an action movie, with science fiction elements, and without higher aspirations,
it works fairly well. I found it much more tolerable than the movies about much
more “iconic” superheroes like Superman and Batman, as those tend to be fairly
pretentious. This one proves that if you start with a good actor (Hugh
Jackman), add some decent fantasy elements and plot twists (human girlfriend
turns out to be a mutant), and compelling action sequences (leap shown in the
trailer from a motorcycle to a helicopter), you can make the modern equivalent
of a B movie which doesn’t feel like an empty waste of time.
I am slogging through Jeff Noon’s “Vurt” (1993), which strikes me so far
as an incoherent “Neuromancer” retread with characters who are simultaneously
cardboard and unlikeable: there is a general air of dirtiness, masochism and
incest which makes me not want to spend time with these people. Noon has some
enjoyable concepts, none of which so far is entirely original, like
meta-virtual realities (worlds you must already be inside another virtual
reality to enter).
William Gibson was a porcupine, in
Isaiah Berlin’s language: he knew how to do only one thing, but he did it
really well. His wounded men and women, navigating wearily through real and
unreal noir worlds, were believable and sympathetic. After “Neuromancer”came the flattery of
hundreds of lesser imitations. I am not sure why “Vurt” won awards or was
thought in any way to be a revelation.
“Terminator: Salvation”(2009), directed by McG, is, like
“Wolverine”, a moderately satisfying movie which could have been much better.
It’s titling, not any more relevant to this post-Apocalyptic epic than to
hundreds of others, raises the question of why science fiction movies are
marketed these days with religious overtones (“Alien Resurrection”).
The movie is a slick, well-edited
effort with clever special effects: tall, Transformer-like terminators topple
over; the protagonists are attacked by sentient motorcycles; because of the
richness of detail, the continual explosions are not as tedious as in more
realistic movies.
What
makes it potentially more interesting than most—a potential it fails to
fulfill—is the theme of the definition of the human, worked out through the
metaphor of a resurrected killer who does not realize he is a cyborg. When he
finds out, he discovers that he has free will, and can overcome his programming.
This is a powerful trope, also intelligently examined in the “Battlestar
Galactica” and “Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles” series, in which machines
conceive powerful desires to be human, fall in love with humans, fight on their
side and are accepted by them. A movie, which must resolve its story line in
two hours, cannot compare to a series, which can do so over five or seven
years; “Terminator” states its theme, then goes right on with the posturing and
explosions. At the end, in a relatively improbable twist, the cyborg offers to
donate his human heart to save the hero, John Connor, though he must die to do
so; what is worse is that the humans cheerily accept the offer, thus choosing
to murder a living thing to save their leader.
I felt sorry that Sarah Connor was
written out of the third movie, and is seen in this one as a tattered photo and
an elderly voice on tape. In the second film, and in the television series, her
strength and her borderline insanity made her interesting. John Connor, as a
character, has multiple disadvantages. He has been played by a different actor
in every one of the three movies in which he appeared. And Christian Bale, the
new go-to actor for rugged masculinity, does him no service. Bale has reached
the stage of icon-hood where, once you have cast him, there is no need to write
the movie: just point a camera at him and let him drag his attitude, his
exhaustion, his three day growth of beard across the screen. As a result, John
Connor is a vacuum at the movie’s center, where Sarah Connor never was.
The two most powerful themes in
science fiction are the desire to be human, and the opposing wish, no longer to
be. The first is getting a lot of airtime in a world in which thousands of
people, suicide bombers, have essentially functioned as cyborgs, programmed to
destroy themselves while killing others, devoid of any compassion or
self-preservation. The second meme is neglected, though it received some
interesting consideration in “Watchmen”,
where Dr. Manhattan, in refuge on Mars, spoke of his desire to forget his
humanity and the human race.
“White
Squall”(1996), directed by Ridley Scott, is a movie about responsibility
and community, which is finally overwhelmed by sentiment. Jeff Bridges plays a
stern captain who runs a sailing ship program for troubled teens (all boys).
Against beautiful ocean and island backgrounds, he wields them into a crew,
helping each boy to overcome his own phobias and deficits. After an hour and
forty minutes of bucolic surroundings, vomiting, and boy bonding, the ship is
overturned by a white squall. The captain’s wife drowns—there are disturbing
shots of her, drowning or drowned, gazing at her helpless husband through a
window as he tries but fails to smash the glass. The camera returns three or
four times to her apparently lifeless body, completely immersed; at the end of
each such shot, just as we are dissolving to the next, the actress appears to
move her head, creating an eerie, horror movie effect.
The last half hour of the movie is a
trial at which the authorities try to take his captain’s license for
negligence. The boys defend him in an
“I am Spartacus” moment, and he retains his “ticket”. I had tears in my eyes
but was angry; I knew I was being manipulated. I vividly remember a succession
of “Wonderful World of Disney” features shown on Sunday nights in my early
childhood. There was always someone like a boy in a wheelchair, and he always
had something like a pet pigeon. At the end the pigeon was menaced by something
like a fox, and the boy rose from his wheelchair and went staggering to rescue
it. A well-made and interesting film plunges into kitsch at the end.
Julian Barnes’ “Staring at the Sun” (1986) is a literary novel which is an almost
complete failure. A young woman of mediocre intelligence spends some time with
a frightened pilot boarded with her British family during World War Ii, marries
the local policeman, leaves him thirty years later, and reminisces about
identity, gender and love in a trite near future in which Barnes generically,
yet inaccurately, predicts the Internet. There is nothing about the character
that grips us or leaps from the page, and mainstream novelists would be well
advised to avoid futures in which there are omnipotent computers—unless they
have read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”
and think they can do better.
“On
Beauty”(2005), by Zadie Smith, is a novel about an older male professor
committing adultery, with a couple of elements that differentiate it from the
boring norm. It is by a young woman and essentially told from the point of view
of, with great sympathy for, the wife and children who are the victims of
infidelity. So it lacks the obliviousness and self-pity of novels written by
male adulterers. It also has a lot to say about race and class in America. The
professor, white and English, is married to an African American woman and they
have three children together. Two of the kids are comfortable being upper
middle class American, and perceive little real difference, cultural,
psychological or otherwise, between themselves and the Caucasians around them
in the fictional college town of Wellington. The third child, a son, is drawn
to the inner city and doesn’t like to tell his new friends where he is really
from.
There
are a couple of other interesting elements; the professor’s first affair is
with a colleague, and old friend, a few years older than his wife, though a
little later the usual nubile 19 year old student starts sending him nude
cell-phone photos of herself. What is most enjoyable about the novel is not the
adultery, but the mildly satiric tone in which it is written, and the complete
lack of arrogance or entitlement in the author’s own voice. The details about
the academic world are familiar: the professor has been at the institution ten
years and is still hoping for tenure, but is too post-modern for the aging
historians on the committee. Some of the details about being a student,
however, are fresh and enjoyable. The author introduces a young white girl from
the Midwest for a single page, to give us a quick view into the fact that the
professor’s mindset and teaching vocabulary are frightening to a highly
intelligent person with a lack of cultural referents. And there is a memorable
riff about a popular student metaphor where each class is described in terms of
tomatoes: You can’t define the tomato without referring to the tomato; the
tomato cannot be understood without uncovering its suppressed Herstory; etc.
Poignantly, the protagonist’s art history class is described as “Do not like
the tomato.”
In
a perfect world we are supposed to evaluate the work without reference to the
identity of the artist, but what I appreciate about Zadie Smith is how
completely she is the antithesis of Philip Roth, in gender, race, age and
sensibility. And that identity flows through into the work. However, the novel
is also a bit shapeless, and doesn’t have a conclusive ending. Characters of great interest, such as the
old friend with whom the professor has the affair, are introduced and then
vanish along the way. I found the working class black characters to be the
least persuasive in the book. A sad, but realistic element is that they are
exploited and then dropped, even by the upper middle class black people in the
novel, and at the end, are nowhere to be found, having sunk back into the
difficult environment they emerged from at the beginning.
“Unknown Man No. 89” (1978), by Elmore Leonard, is one of
many by this author which prove that popular genre novels can be well written,
striking and contain believable characters. Leonard’s novels follow a formula
but he always finds ways to make the characters sympathetic and situations
real. Here you have a semi-alcoholic process server, a woman he wants to save
who paints whales, and two gangsters from New Orleans who like to eat southern
cuisine and can’t find it anywhere in Michigan. Leonard keeps the prose out of
the way, which is much harder than it seems, avoiding the wooden clackiness of
most genre writers and the purple pretension of some others. I would rather
spend an airplane ride with Elmore Leonard than anyone else I know.
The
new “Star Trek”(2009), directed by
J.J. Abrams, is a creditable reboot of the unkillable series, which I have been
watching avidly, and angrily, since 1966. I have seen every movie and every
episode of every TV series except the last one, “Enterprise”, which slipped
seriously in credibility below the already uneven standards of its
predecessors.
I
enjoyed this film and it disappointed me in about equal measure. To its credit,
the young actors stepping into the familiar roles—Kirk, Spock, Bones and
Scotty—are charismatic, and bear at least some slight resemblance to the
familiar faces (in one case, Zachary Quinto who plays Spock, an uncanny
resemblance). The plot is fast moving, with lots of action and humor, and many
tips of the hat to what went before (Kirk seducing a green-skinned classmate at
the Academy, Bones beginning a sentence “I’m a doctor, not a….”, chit-chat
about Uhura’s mysterious first name; even an extended scene of the famed,
oft-referred to Kobayashi Maru simulation).
On
the other hand, the story is almost completely incoherent. Star Trek
through-out was near its worst whenever it dealt with time travel; the later
shows also hit their nadir with stories about the Borg and the holodeck. (“First Contact”, one of the “Next
Generation” movies, mixed all three elements.) Thankfully, the Borg and
holodeck don’t exist yet in this “origins” story, but the plot relies heavily
on time travel, even bringing in Leonard Nimoy to play an older version of
Spock returned from the future.
The
Romulans show up, with a laser drill that makes a hole in a planet’s core so
they can drop a black hole down it. This is really ridiculous; the black hole
itself would make a better drill than the laser. The whole point is to have a
platform hanging in the upper atmosphere with a convenient surface for Kirk and
other characters to have sword and fistfights on. For that matter, the laser itself could be fired from the
Romulan ship itself, instead of a hanging platform. This is the worst designed
technology in science fiction since the Deathstar was built with an external
vent leading right to the nuclear core.
Worst
of all, rather than adapting “Star Trek” to the 21st century, the
writers have chosen to give us a version of the ‘60’s vision with better
special effects. This means, most offensively, that female crew members are
wearing miniskirts; that there is only one main female character, Uhura, and
that, exactly like 40 years ago, she is still a glorified telephone operator.
The choice to bring back the original captain, Christopher Pike, from the
original television pilot, as Kirk’s first commander, is interesting; but the
writers have forgotten that the original Pike had a tough, smart, highly
competent female second in command, who is nowhere to be seen in the re-make.
Subsequent series such as “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” had women who wore
pants, carried phasers and knew how to kick ass; why roll the new movie so far
back as to lose those elements?
The
major problem I have with this, and all the prior “Star Trek” movies, is that
they are mere entertainments, where the shows could take the time, however
primitively, to deal with real social and cultural issues such as war, racism,
madness, otherness, etc. More recent science fiction shows have decisively used
their story-telling as a platform for expression of ideas, without becoming
didactic or overwhelming the plot. One of the single best television episodes I
ever saw of any show was one of “Babylon
Five”, which introduced five
soldiers, male and female, staging at the station for an attack on a nearby
planet. The last shot of the show panned across the battlefield, showing us
every one of these soldiers lying dead in a heap. It was stunning television,
of the kind that more realistic, contemporary shows are frightened to do. More recently, “Battlestar Galactica”spoke to us about maintaining democracy
under extreme pressure, moral compromises, and even the self-righteousness and
potential murderousness brought on by monotheism. “Galactica”is “Star Trek” for the 21st century; so
there was really no need to reboot the latter, except for the nostalgia.
“The
Enforcer”(1951), directed by Bretaigne Windust, is a late, lesser-known
Humphrey Bogart film, based on the Murder Inc. trials. It is a little bit
quaint today to hear a district attorney perplexed by a new vocabulary of
“contracts” and “hits”; fifty-eight years later, we have a movie genre of
lonely, unfulfilled, poetic, even tango-dancing hit men. But the movie itself
is a strong noir contender, told mainly in flashback, with quirky, vivid
performances by character actors playing the gangsters (including a young Zero Mostel). Bogart doesn’t have much to do
except look strong-jawed, but the seamy, small time criminal world in which it is set more than compensates. There
is a last act reveal which is very satisfying. Over-all, this is better late
Bogart than some of his others, such as the preachy “The Harder They Fall”, his last.
“A
Far Cry From Kensington”(1988), by Muriel Spark, is a minor gem of a novel
which starts off like a barely disguised autobiography but evolves into
something very different. In the 1950’s, plump Mrs. Hawkins works in publishing
in London. She is a war widow who barely knew her husband, whom she married as
a teenager and who was killed in the European war days afterwards. She is
sensible, intelligent, organized and highly valued by her employer and friends;
but her bulk makes everyone around her see her as an aunt-like, nonsexual
being. The book is filled with the usual quirky, endearing portraits of
literary people as well as the less elevated but equally interesting people who
share the boarding house where she lives.
A hack writer named Hector Bartlett
appears, and Mrs. Hawkins and the novel become interesting because she has an
almost unreasonable dislike of him, hissing the first time he asks for an
introduction to her boss that he is a “pisseur de copie” (urinator of copious
amounts of worthless prose). Every time his name comes up after that, she
utters the same dictum, losing several prized publishing jobs over the next
couple of years because he is the protégé of a famed novelist, Emma Loy, who
has tired of Hector and wants to get rid of him, but won’t tolerate any
mistreatment of him in the meantime. Despite her serial unemployment, Mrs.
Hawkins never compromises, and her repeatedly hissing the words “pisseur de
copie” at inopportune moments becomes the running gag of the novel. In the meantime,
she applies her will power to losing weight, people begin to look at her
differently, a medical student who lives in her rooming house falls in love,
and she never looks back. The literary figures we meet are believers in
astrology or a barely disguised pastiche of Scientology, or are lunatics or
criminal frauds. Mrs. Loy, serene,sympathetic and unflappable, keeps getting
Mrs. Hawkins fired, then expressing sympathy, offering jobs and even trying to
palm Hector off on her, explaining there is a thin line between love and hate.
Muriel Spark, whom I had never read before, has an original comic voice, and
Mrs. Hawkins, with her serenity, didactic rules of life, and undying hatred for
the “pisseur de copie”, is a very
enjoyable personage.
Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl”(2001) is a teenage
sexuality story, with long takes and desultory dialog as an Italian college
student seduces a French 15 year old in a very ordinary way; using love,
promises of commitment, and every imaginable male manipulation to induce her to
consent first to anal, then oral sex, and then intercourse. Meanwhile, her fat
younger sister looks on, argues, weeps, and moons about. The distant mom fails
to connect, allowing her older daughter to float free and invite the boy to her
room unnoticed.
The movie acquires depth in scenes
in which we learn that the sisters, one strikingly beautiful and the other
plain and fat, not only despise but also love one another. In one extended
scene, they lie close to one another in bed, laughing about their day, in a
naturalistic scene which communicates the intensity of their bond.
The vacation ends early, as the
sister’s affair is discovered and reprimanded, and mom is left alone to drive
the two daughters home in a series of similarly extended, ever more
anxiety-provoking takes in which she seems to be on the verge of falling asleep
at the wheel, while huge trucks roar past. She stops in a deserted rest area to
sleep awhile—and the movie takes an abrupt and bizarre turn as a psychotic
looking man breaks the windshield with a sledgehammer, hits the beautiful
sister in the head with it, chokes mom to death, and takes the fat girl into
the nearby woods. As he rapes her, she gazes steadfastly into his eyes, and
puts her arms around him. He finishes and leaves without harming her. As the
police forensics team goes to work on the bodies of the rest of the family, two
constables lead her out of the woods. “She says she wasn’t raped,” they report.
And, in a sense, she wasn’t, because she appeared to consent to it. One is left
with the impression that the killer paid her a compliment and did her a favor
at once, by wanting only her and killing two more beautiful women to get to
her, and by ridding her of her enervating family at the same time. During these
awful few minutes, one keeps thinking it’s a wish fulfillment fantasy, and it
is probably the director’s, but there is no release: it is the real ending of
the film.
A few years ago, I would have been
angered and enraged by this ending. I seem to have been largely desensitized to
movie violence more recently. And this movie, a sort of ghastly shaggy dog
story, reveals a certain cruel sense of humor on the director’s part, and is
funny on her terms. Still, I was glad that I hadn’t watched it with my wife, misled into thinking it was a somewhat sunny
and truthful coming of age story about sisters. The whole point of advertising, marketing, movie posters and
trailers is to let us make choices about what we want to see. This movie sucks
you in so it can bushwhack you; many of the reviews analogized the ending to
the director hitting the audience in the head with a sledgehammer. Imagine
“Dirty Dancing” ending with Baby’s sister and mom being violently murdered.
An afterthought, written a couple
weeks after seeing the movie: The ending of this movie haunted me for a long
time after I saw it, which is certainly what Breillat intends. Whenever I have
written a play which ends in a surprising murder or suicide, I am told that the
violent ending overwhelms the story. The same criticism was leveled at the
assisted death at the end of “Million
Dollar Baby.”In general, we want our movies and novels to affirm life is
meaningful, not that it is nasty, brutish, short and random. Breillat
deliberately breaks the “rule” that art should endorse the meaning of life.
However, I have a problem with “Fat
Girl” which is somewhat separate from the proposition that the mother and
sister come to a violent, meaningless
end. There are hints, in the movie itself and especially in the ending, that we
are in sadomasochistic, “Story of O” territory. These are so subtle that it
took a long time after I saw the movie for me to identify them.
While she is being strangled, the
mom never raises a hand to try to push away the attacker or defend herself.
This isn’t natural, and the fact that it was an intentional effect is
underlined by the fact that Breillat shows us the police bagging the hands of
the two murder victims moments later.
This is ironic, because we know neither of them could possibly have any
of the killer’s DNA under their fingernails. To compound the problem, the
surviving sister hugged the killer as he raped her, but did not defend herself
or scratch him. The only DNA will be his semen inside her—but the last we see
of her, she is defending the murderer by insisting she was not raped.
For much of the movie, the other
sister gives in, step by step, to the manipulations of a boy at least five
years older than her, making her body, her mouth and her vagina available
against her better instincts. Add to this the symbolism of the killer who
smashes the windshield of the car with a sledgehammer (after mom has locked the
door); Breillat’s worldview is that women are forced to make their bodies
available, or even to die, when any passing male wants them to. This is the world of “Story of O”; in one of
the alternate endings to the novel, O asks the man who “owns” her for
permission to kill herself, and it is granted. In the world I live in, people
fight ferociously for their own survival, no matter how overpowered or
outnumbered they are. Breillat’s world makes me feel sick.
“Warlock”(1967), directed by Edward Dmytryk, is an
interesting western with noir elements and a great cast. Henry Fonda is a famed
gunfighter, hired as marshal to clean up the titular town. Anthony Quinn is his disreputable gambler
partner, who protects him against “backshooters” and seems to bear him an
unexpressed love which is expressed in obsession and jealousy. Richard Widmark
is the bad kid gone good who becomes the new sheriff. After that, Widmark,
Quinn and Fonda do a stately dance around one another. Fonda recognizes that it
is incumbent on him to take his legend and leave, permitting Widmark to carry
on. Quinn doesn’t want him to, because Fonda will diminish himself by doing
so. Widmark wants Fonda to depart the
town, but recognizes that trying to force him to do so will probably lead to
his own death. The movie concludes in a series of confrontations: Fonda-Widmark;
Fonda-Quinn; Fonda-Widmark again. The canvass is made even more complex by the
presence of women who love Fonda and Widmark. Widmark gets his woman, and
stays; Fonda leaves his and the town.
There is a wonderful speech, made by
Fonda to Widmark, in which he speaks of following the rules of one’s life, the
peculiar morality of the Western gunslinger that is at the core of all these
movies, that dictates that you walk calmly through the long shadows of the main
street to your own death when the moment comes.
What I love about westerns is that
they are all moral fables, more so than other genres. They are always about
stability and chaos, courage and compromise, diversity and racism, community
and violence. “Warlock”is one of
the better ones, with an ending which is at once sad and hopeful.
Not quite as elemental, but fully as
enjoyable, is “The Far Country”(1955),
directed by Anthony Mann. James Stewart, an actor of cheerful charisma but not
very great range, had a remarkable opportunity to expand in his westerns of the
1950’s. Having always played dapper, madcap, lovable protagonists in mostly
comic movies of the 30’s and 40’s—“It’s
a Wonderful Life”was the classic Stewart role—he now had the opportunity
to be greedy, rageful, and violent, a loner forced by circumstances to recognize
the value of community. Mann (along with Budd Boetticher) was largely
responsible for the creation of the noir western, a development which
transformed the genre. Before, the character s played by John Wayne and
Randolph Scott were all nobility and light, no matter how brusque; early
westerns all portrayed the battle of white-hatted men against black. In his
movies with Anthony Mann, Stewart played men with a dark, violent past, men
whose eyes glowed with cupidity and rage when pushed too far. A third of the way
through these films, there is always a set piece where Stewart declares that he
doesn’t need anyone, doesn’t need the town or the woman who loves him. A little
later the universe slaps him down violently and he discovers that no man is an
island.
“The
Far Country”follows the formula precisely. Stewart, wanted for killing
cattle rustlers, embarks his herd aboard a ship to Alaska, where he can sell
them for an unheard of price. When he reaches the town of Skagway, he is
defrauded of his cattle by the mayor, a laughing, sympathetic, top-hatted rogue
who has the town in an amused death-grip. He winds up even further north, in
the Yukon, where the mayor eventually follows, extorting the citizens’ gold
claims. Stewart declines an offer to be marshal, and attempts to slip away with
his gold, to be shot down and robbed by the mayor’s men. Eventually,
recovering, he will heed the call of community, and walk through the shadows
for a final confrontation with the mayor.
Stewart’s alone-ness is highlighted
by the people around him who love him: Walter Brennan in “old coot” mode as his
partner, the one person Stewart is willing to take care of; and two women, the
bar-owner and madam who, according to the rules, must expiate her immorality by
dying to save him, and the local good girl, who will take him home and marry
him after the action is over (“I am not a freckle face!”).
It just occurred to me that movies
fall into two basic categories, those in which the characters have a plan or
expectation, and those in which they don’t. In the former category are all
heist movies, most war movies, almost all westerns and other genre films. In
the latter, much smaller category, are most road movies and other itinerant
films in which the rather passive characters just wander from encounter to
encounter. You could also define these films as being plotted and plotless;
which leads to a quip I’ve been trying to formulate, that plots and plans are
as closely associated as pots and pans.
Movies about plans break down into
two further categories, those in which the plan is successfully accomplished,
and the ones in which it goes wrong. Almost all film noirs begin with a plan,
usually for a heist, and end with something like a shoot-out in a deserted
warehouse in which the former partners kill one another, or are killed by the
cops or a rival gang. In general, in movies as in Shakespearean tragedy, the
idea “we had a plan but it didn’t work out” is a massive field containing great
poignancy and interest. Human greed and stupidity, chance and the Second Law of
Thermodynamics are the forces which most commonly prevent the plan from being
achieved. Movies where the characters happily accomplish their goals tend to be
more trivial; many of these are “cheer-leading” movies such as those about
sports or the very small genre of films about labor unions.
In stories about failures, the
characters sometimes miss their goals by a mile, sometimes by an inch. In the
former category are some quite interesting stories about self-deluded losers
who never had a chance of accomplishing their dreams. The near miss movies are
closer to my heart. These are the ones in which people just like us conceive
goals which are eminently possible, and which just barely fail, with great
heartbreak for all.
Disney-Pixar’s animated “Up”is half unusual, but the rest is
kitsch. The presence of an elderly man as the protagonist is refreshing, and
his attempt to compensate himself, and re-connect with his late wife, by
pursuing the adventure they could never afford in their lifetime, is enjoyable.
The scenes of his house, hoisted by hundred of helium balloons, breaking free
from its foundations, are liberating. But at the far end of the trip, is a
fairly standard villain with mildly enjoyable talking dog minions. Worse, a
bird, simultaneously the macguffin of the weak story and the comic relief,
appears to have invaded from a different type of cartoon: with its long legs
and tuft of feathers on top, it is a kitschy Saturday morning creation (like
the ridiculous space monkey alien in the movie “Lost in Space”).
“Friday
Foster”(1975), directed by Arthur Marks,
is a fairly amateurish entry in the blaxploitation genre, which stands
out only for Pam Grier’s remarkable poise and beauty. She wasn’t even much of
an actress back then (or perhaps wasn’t permitted to be), but I could watch her
all day long, in anything.
“Drag
Me to Hell”(2009), directed by Sam Raimi, is a chilling, funny horror
flick in which a young bank officer, whose ambition overcomes her compassion,
turns an elderly Romany witch down for an extension on her mortgage, and is
cursed by her. The movie is full of energetic, funny set pieces, and is
extremely well-constructed. The protagonist, played by Alison Lohman, is
surrounded by people who want to save her from the lamia (goat spirit) which
will drag her to hell in three days, and possible solutions are doled out to
her by an Indian-American seer she encounters: sacrifice a small animal;
placate the lamia; seek the protection of a powerful medium; and finally, to
pass the button the witch cursed to someone else, who will be taken by the
lamia in her place. The bank officer sits in a diner for a long evening,
looking at the humanity around her, and
concludes to her credit she cannot damn anyone else, not the nasty waitress or
even her worst enemy at the bank. Instead, she and the seer find a clever
solution, to return the cursed button to the witch, who has since died. In an
extended graveyard scene, she digs up the witch, places the button in her mouth, says the correct words, and
escapes flood waters and falling crosses. We are left vaguely troubled, as we
didn’t see the lamia take the corpse. In a cleverly set up ending—lots of
buried clues but you never see it coming—we find out, in the sunlight, in a train
station, that the object our heroine placed in the corpse’s mouth was not the
cursed button, but an irrelevant coin; two envelopes got switched. And,
startlingly and disturbingly, after all that work, she gets snatched to hell,
and the movie ends. Why don’t we feel more heartbroken for her? Because the
small animal she sacrificed to the lamia early in the movie was her adorable
pet kitten, a crime she has never expiated even as she feels remorse for other
mistakes.