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.

Electra (1962)

This adaptation of Euripides' play Electra (Ηλέκτρα) – the least enjoyable of the three ancient Athenian plays that cover this plot (the others are Sophocles' Electra and Æschylus' Libation Bearers) – is slow and ponderous and contains almost no plot whatsoever. For some reason, too, the film avoids staging some of the violence in the story but then adds a bunch that doesn't appear in the original play. 

The score is the worst thing about this, though. It's a series of drones and drums, and it makes the mood of the entire film strange. 

The worst part of all is that no one in this movie behaves anything like a real person. It's all good and well to answer that by saying, Well it is an Athenian tragedy from the 5th century BCE. Indeed, you would be right. But it's not like this was performed in any way approaching how it would have been performed in the 5th century, so why then must it be performed this way, with all of the slow, ponderous droning and hysteria? No thanks.

Cacoyannis's Electra was nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture, and, strangely enough, it's available on YouTube.

Victim: the Most Surprising Film from 1961

What a stunning movie this is! I've just watched Basil Dearden's Victim for the first time and I'm just bowled over.

Incidentally, I have had Victim in my queue for years as something I needed to see – important gay cinema and all that – but I only just watched it because I recently watched another Dearden movie (Khartoum) and thought it was well directed, so I looked up other movies I'd seen of his and remembered that I'd thought his direction of Saraband for Dead Lovers in 1948 was also quite good, and then I saw on his filmography that he directed Victim. In any case, I moved it up in the queue, and I'm certainly glad I did.

In the first place, Victim is a superbly made film noir: it's a crime film that follows several different people, creating a web of intrigue. In fact, it begins with a man fleeing the police for a crime we the audience knows nothing about and which the filmmaker keeps hidden from us. We know next to nothing about what is going on for the first fifteen minutes of the film. It's intensely interesting. We meet many of the film's major characters in this first fifteen minutes, but we are unable to make sense of almost any of it.

The plot of Victim, once this first act is over, is a kind of detective story, in which a man who has been wronged attempts to solve a mystery. This part of the film is intriguing and exciting, and trying to beat the con-artists and murderers is a satisfying narrative.

Sylvia Sims & Dirk Bogarde

But Victim is also a film that is invested in a pro-homosexual point of view: in 1961 when sodomy was still illegal in Britain. At least five times – and maybe more – the film makes the case that the anti-sodomy laws in Britain need to be changed, that they are simply a reward for blackmailers and thieves. There is a great sequence when a police detective tells his subordinate that he should be less prejudiced – Protestantism used to be illegal in Britain too, he informs the lieutenant drily. We also see people's ugly prejudices, and the film exposes them as relying only on disgust and not on any real basis of morality.

The central role is played by Dirk Bogarde (who may have been a closeted gay man himself), and Bogarde is insanely good in the role. It's a performance of powerful nuances. But, of course, he has an excellent script to work with, and Dearden's direction is honestly perfect. I really loved this film.

* * *

There is one thing I need to ponder for a little longer. Twice in the movie a character uses the phrase flourish like the green bay tree to refer to the idea that a homosexual might live a life of freedom. Both times the phrase is uttered contemptuously – first by the prejudiced cop and later by one of the blackmailers. The phrase is originally from the book of Psalms, chapter 37 verse 35. The King James Version reads:

I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

I am intrigued by this usage of the phrase. I was not aware of this, but clearly the phrase had, by 1961, become a kind of code for homosexual. A little Googling has turned up a use in Agatha Christie's 1952 novel Mrs. McGinty's Dead in which a character says that a character in a play she's co-writing can't be gay: "But you can't have him a pansy, darling", she says. "Not for this sort of play. I mean it's not green bay trees or anything like that. It's thrills and murders and clean open-air fun." This passage in Mrs. McGinty's Dead heavily implies that Christie's famous detective Hercule Poirot is a "pansy", but I'll leave that be for the moment, because I'm trying to follow up on this green bay tree business.

The "play" of which the character is thinking is, of course The Green Bay Tree by Mourdant Shairp from 1933 – a gloomy piece about a homosexual and his young protégé that ends in murder. The play avoided censorship by never making this completely explicit, and the author denied it, but everyone knew what the play was about, and if one didn't understand the play's subject matter to be homosexuality, The Green Bay Tree wouldn't make a bit of sense.

There is a Louis Bromfield novel called The Green Bay Tree, as well – this novel is not about homosexuality, and so this is likely not the source of this meaning being laid on the phrase.

Intriguingly, the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the phrase this way: to develop vigorously in a congenial environment, whether or not this is deserved. There is no hint in this definition that the phrase should be linked with homosexuality.

Similarly, the early 20th century theosophist Gottfried de Purucker uses the phrase without any inference of homosexual meaning in his essay "The Great Heresy of Separateness". In 2002, M.C. Beaton also used the phrase (apparently) without this homosexual inference in one of her Hamish Macbeth mystery novels, Death of a Celebrity.

But Christie's use in 1952 and Victim's double-use in 1961 seem to demonstrate that the phrase was widely understood in mid-century Britain as the vigorous development (to quote the Oxford Dictionary) of a certain kind of person.

Helden (Heroes) (1958)

Helden is very funny. It's based on Shaw's play Arms and the Man and works very well. It has much of Shaw's moralism, but is way more fun than his usually talky comedies. Franz Peter Wirth's adaptation is filmic through and through - there are almost no traces of staginess.

Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960)

I loved Shoot the Piano Player, and I'm not even a huge Truffaut fan. In fact, I often say that I don't really get the Nouvelle Vague, but this was really a good time. I adored Charles Aznavour in the lead role, and his character Charlie is scripted beautifully by Truffaut. The movie itself is a kind of tribute to American movies, but it's also sexy and fun and funny at times, while winding up being quite serious and sad in a typical crime–melodrama sort of way. I was really into it.

The Important Man (1961)

This is a strange movie in many ways, perhaps mostly because Toshirō Mifune is playing the movie's protagonist. Animas Trujano is a Steinbeckian sort of tale, and it is, in many ways, indebted to Roberto Gavaldón's Macario, which came out the year before this film. Indeed, Mexican cinema, in the early '60s (at the end of the Época de Oro) was fascinating, and Animas Trujano, like Macario and Tlayucan, which would come out a year later, is about poverty and wealth, village honor, the meddling of the church, and a protagonist who can't quite get his shit together. Tlayucan is definitely the best of these three films, but Animas is worth a watch, for Mifune as well as for Columba Domínguez, who plays Animas's longsuffering wife Juana.

IMDB says that actor and director Narciso Busquets dubbed the voice of Toshirō Mifune. The syncing is really perfect. It is easy to forget that Mifune didn't speak Spanish and that he learned his lines phonetically.

Tlayucan (1962)

According to imdb, this movie concerns a man who becomes a thief out of desperation. If his identity becomes known, his neighbors might lynch him. The only friendly face in town is the local priest.

So... none of this is really true except that a man does steal something. And though it doesn't look like it from the poster, Tlayucan is a comedy, and quite a very good one. Furthermore, it is more of a Chekhovian story of the village itself (which is called Tlayucan) than it is a story of one man's desperation.

Indeed, as with so many movies from non-U.S. countries from this period, Tlayucan is a movie about cooperation in a real Marxist vein. So much so that the priest is, in fact, the butt of all the jokes, hardly a friendly face.

Of course, it didn't ever have a proper release in the U.S.

But this movie is delightful. I loved it.

David and Lisa

I think the Perrys are good filmmakers, but I hated David and Lisa. Its subject matter is juvenile, its ideas about psychology are facile, its treatment of disability is offensive. Furthermore, it's a character study obsessed with plot instead of character, and the two main characters are truly and annoyingly unwatchable.