The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Well, I finally watched John Ford's 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and... I had more problems with it than I usually have with Ford's movies. Liberty Valance is billed as the first time Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne are together in a film, and they play their usual archetypes. Wayne is a short-tempered, confident gunslinger who has no time for law and order but somehow at the same time, like, just really loves "America". Stewart plays a law-and-order-loving attorney who comes west for no reason I can really understand. He apparently followed Horace Greeley's advice to go west young man and all that. The violent man and the peacenik inevitably come into conflict. 

I've noted this before, but there's a trend in films at this time in which a man who is opposed to violence comes to the west and teaches everyone that there are better ways than violence to deal with problems (The Violent Men, Friendly Persuasion). But of course, this same person must also be violent in order to get anything done. Violence is only good when used by the right people, and when it's used by the right people, it's the best thing in the world. This ideological approach is the perfect narrative sleight of hand for USAmerican democracy – violence is bad and no one should commit it except the state. The state upholds its own monopoly on violence and justifies its own use of force while pretending that it disapproves of violence on a large scale. One is reminded of George W. Bush's famous phrase "When we talk about war, we're really talking about peace".

This was my chief political problem with Liberty Valance, but this movie is also just really dumb. It wants to be taken very seriously for a while, and it begins in a very somber mood – with a weepy and aged Vera Miles – but then once we go back in time to hear the story of Liberty Valance, almost every single scene is a cartoon. Edmond O'Brien, who is doing good work, plays the town newspaperman and town drunk, but the script is written so that the whole thing is just silly. No opportunity for a joke is skipped. It's constant! And I actually don't really understand why. The main part of the film feels phony from start to finish. One or two examples will suffice, I think. At one point, Ransom Stoddard, Stewart's character, starts a school in order to teach some folks how to read and write. Once we see the school, no one is learning how to read and write. Instead, Stoddard is teaching them about the U.S. constitution. Everyone behaves earnestly, pretending that some scene like this could actually happen, with adult people pushing other adult people to remember the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and encouraging each other earnestly, while miming eager listening. It's an insane scene. It is made even more bizarre when Denver Pyle, who was 42 in 1962, enters dragging his wayward teenage son played by O.Z. Whitehead, who was 51! There is a later scene in which this character is licking a lollipop, and another in which John Wayne lifts Whitehead off of a bar and says get out of here. You're too young to vote. Excuse me, that is literally an old man.

This very weird approach to age was especially colorable in Liberty Valance, but it can also be seen in almost all Jimmy Stewart films from this period. Well into his fifties Stewart was constantly playing young men in their twenties. It always looks so weird to me. He is never believable as a twentysomething. This is not only true of John Ford movies, but a whole host of Stewart's films in the '50s and '60s. It has always bothered me.

I will say that I did like the very strange ending to the film, in which Stewart's relationship with Vera Miles is shown to be not quite as satisfying as it seemed in the cartoon part of the movie, and in which we glimpse that she may really have loved John Wayne's character all along. Stewart is playing a character his own age there, and his approach is filled with regret and indecision. It's much more interesting than his faux-youthful performance in the larger film. 

But I guess I just don't really know what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is supposed to be about. The last long act of the film is about a nomination scene in which a whole bunch of men yell in a totally phony-looking election scene because – as in so many of Ford's films – this is really a movie about USAmerican politics. And Ford's white supremacist and imperialist opinions about USAmerican politics are of no interest to me.

War and Peace

Sergei Bondarchuk's 7-hour epic is a stunning, incredible achievement, and I loved it.

Bondarchuk's film emphasizes poetry over story. Flashback, nuance, dreams, and the sheer phenomenological experience of wonder take priority over historical facts. And this is all to the good. Rather than feeling as though we can always make sense of something, we instead feel overwhelmed by Tolstoy's world – and deeply a part of it.

Obsession (1976)

I felt like the timing in De Palma's Obsession was really off. But... well, this is just a weird movie all around. Cliff Robertson is the star, and though he's very attractive, he gives a very strange, wooden, almost amateurish performance.

John Lithgow is also in this – he is the villain in De Palma's Blow Out too, and is creepy as ever here – doing a questionable southern accent. Geneviève Bujold is great, as always – I will never understand why she wasn't a bigger star. And Bernard Hermann's final (or almost final) score is... insistent and very Bernard Hermann. Obsession's most important intertext is Hitchcock's Vertigo, which Hermann also scored. 

This was my selection this week for my unseen movie club, and we all thought it was a very silly, unintentionally campy movie. De Palma makes some very strange choices, although they're not all his fault. The script is by Paul Schrader. (Both Schrader and Hermann will work on Taxi Driver this same year.)

Bond 25

I recognize that for many, the long-term storylines of the five Daniel Craig Bond films have been one of the series' assets, but this long-term structure doesn't really work for me. I know these actors have been in Bond films before, but I'm looking at Léa Seydoux and Christoph Waltz and Jeffrey Wright (and Eva Green's picture), and if I'm honest, I can't remember who any of them is. James, Moneypenny, Q: these people are people I know. The rest of these characters? No clue. Of course, they're archetypes too, just as much as Moneypenny and Q are. The woman Bond loves, the friend he trusts, the woman he gave up, the supervillain. I think the weird thing for me is that Cary Joji Fukunaga's film just behaves as though I have feelings about all of these characters, and I don't have a single feeling about any one of them.

No Time to Die is a long business. And there are way too many feelings in it for my taste (I had the same problem with Casino Royale if I recall correctly). I like my Bond movies high tech and shallow with a cool villain who wants to destroy the world in an intriguing way. (The destruction of the world in this film is plotted in an intriguing way, to be fair.) But mostly this film just sort of plods along. There is a very exciting sequence with Ana de Armas in Santiago de Cuba. I enjoyed that a lot. And the first sequence in the Mediterranean was also very fun. Pio Amato (from A Ciambra and Mediterranea – both brilliant films) even makes an extended appearance! It's still a Bond film, and some of it is very cool.

But this film's villain is Rami Malek, and he is boring. He's a sad, lonely man who just wants to be loved. He's not really nefarious and evil, just sort of pathetic. It isn't even fun to hope Bond beats him; he's already such a loser.

Faces (1968)

Faces is tough. It feels cool and fresh – certainly it is unlike most of the other movies from the 1968 season. The acting is excellent; the script is great. But... I can't say I enjoyed myself very much. Cassavetes' work here is hard to love. The camera follows these characters around closely; it gets into their faces. And everyone is miserable. I think I just wish there were a little more time to breathe. This felt frenetic and sad.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

I love that this movie opens with a frame in which Elsa Lanchester, who will eventually appear as the eponymous bride, plays Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It's delightful. Also, this movie is better than the original. It has some lovely moments – especially the long sequence with the blind man in the hut who teaches the monster to speak. The end, too, is quite moving. As for the "bride" herself, the poster pretends as if she is going to be somehow scary. She is not.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

It's weird. I loved this novel so much, but it seems like director Robert Ellis Miller and screenwriter Thomas C. Ryan thought the novel was about something much different than I thought it was. In the first place – and most strangely – they cast Sondra Locke in the role of Mick, which really transforms the part from someone who doesn't fit in and can't make sense of her world into something else... a girl who's gonna be alright. The whole thing felt sort of weird. This is a novel about longing and dissatisfaction and frustration. But the screenplay eliminates two of the central characters early on, and spends its time focused on (what the movie figures as) a poor, white straight girl. Sigh. It's a giant missed opportunity, and I suppose it might one day be made into a good movie or tv series. 

Alan Arkin, to be fair, is great. Even more, Laurinda Barrett is excellent, and so is Cicely Tyson, but of course the film's focus is on Sondra Locke, who is terribly miscast. It throws off the whole picture.

The Great Caruso (1951)

Watching The Great Caruso is a sad business now, knowing that its wonderful star, Mario Lanza, died – just like Enrico Caruso – long ahead of his time. This movie was the highest grossing film of 1951, but it's hard to see why: it's a standard, even sub-standard, biopic, with no really deep emotional moments and not much of a narrative at all. Caruso doesn't struggle with alcoholism... or anything, really. So what we get instead are great performances of famous arias by the wonderful USAmerican tenor Mario Lanza. The storytelling is a little wonky. We don't really know what causes Caruso's death in the movie, and the film doesn't lead up to it at all or explain anything that's happening as Caruso becomes ill. All of a sudden, he's just sick. 

But I'm not complaining, really. This is a Hollywood jukebox musical designed around great tenor arias, and they are performed beautifully. There's no reason to gripe, but I can't say it's that interesting, really.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

I'm not sure what I was expecting of the original Planet of the Apes, but I sure as hell wasn't expecting this philosophical meditation on humane behavior. This is a kind of Marivaux experiment in which the author reverses the world. On this planet, the apes are in charge, and humans are treated as animals. This allows for all sorts of philosophical meditations on what it means to be humane, how we treat non-humans, and – most importantly – how we let religious conviction stand in the way of scientific truth and real research.

But Franklin Schaffner's film is not very much fun. It's very, very talky, and there just isn't as much action as I had hoped for. Jerry Goldsmith's score is incredible, though. It feels very ahead of its time.

The Enemy Below (1957)

I don't really understand the politics of The Enemy Below. It's a film about a U.S. Navy captain battling it out with a Nazi submarine captain. Their battle is one of strategy and cleverness, and the two men fight until they are both destroyed, although technically the U.S. Americans win. 

And then the two men, like, toast one another and share a cigarette. This doesn't seem related to a kind of shared humanity, though. It seems, instead, as though they share something else – white masculinity, perhaps? I'm opposed to war, and it appears as though the two men at the center of The Enemy Below are also opposed to war. Instead, they both really understand what they're doing as a kind of job. It's their job to kill one another, to try to destroy each other. The film doesn't wave the American flag – it actually doesn't appear in the movie, and neither does the German flag – so this isn't a movie about American exceptionalism or military power. It's rather a jaded view of things.

But, then... the score is rousing and filled with brass and actually feels quite old fashioned. This feels like a late 1950s military movie trapped inside a mid-1940s military movie. Thankfully, Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens are both very cool. Mitchum is given none of the film's dumb lines about hope and the future. Those are all given to Russell Collins, who plays the ship's doctor. He dutifully says them, but they ring hollow as Mitchum gives him a withering stare and says only maybe. 

In any case, this is a weird movie. It's shot in beautiful Cinescope, but in many ways it needn't be. We're stuck on these two ships and the camera never really pans out for wide shots except for when Mitchum's ship is bombing the hell out of Jürgens. These are The Enemy Below's best moments, and the special effects needed to make them happen are worth the watch, even if its politics are weird.