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 Wore a Yellow Ribbon

This bullshit. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a jingoistic, nonsensical film that is beautifully shot but terribly scripted and annoyingly directed. It's a film that pretends to be about wanting peace and making peace, about an old man, about to retire, who has seen that war is not the answer. This sexagenarian is played by John Wayne who, at the time, was barely 41 years old. (Listening him croak about how he's given forty years of his life to the cavalry is very silly.) But worse, it's a young man's movie. It's not a film about regret or wisdom or any such thing. Old men should stop wars, he tells his friend Pony That Walks, but the film doesn't believe that at all, and neither does the main character. 

This movie gives us numerous scenes of the carnage wreaked by the Arapaho and the Cheyenne but very little action. There is almost no fighting in this movie – a couple of great chase sequences – but battle sequences are nowhere to be found. In this way, the film is able to create the Indian alliance as a vicious and terrible enemy (complete with the orphaned children they've left crying and alone), but avoid any question of the violence and greed of the U.S. Even worse, the film seems to love, not the United States, but the Confederate States... it's a film from 1949, but the movie tips its hat to Robert E. Lee, and when one soldier dies the unmistakable sound of "Dixie" blends into the score.

Honestly, though, the worst thing about this movie is that it is mostly unclear what is going on for a majority of its running time. It's almost impossible to figure out why anyone does anything they do, and then in the film's third act, before the big (non-battle) finale, which involves hundreds of horses that appear out of thin air, there is an extended – I'm talking 15-minute – comic sequence involving pratfalls, comic punches, and drunk soldiers that's straight out of vaudeville. One might ask how a sequence like this fits in what is primarily a warmongering melodrama, but of course melodramas all need comic relief, and what this film takes seriously are its dumb sentiments like "bravery" and "trusting your gut" and the love of the military, so the fraternal silliness in act three is really just this same silly masculine posturing in a different key. (Ford movies frequently have dumb comic sequences like this – think of the extended comic bit with Arthur Kennedy and Jimmy Stewart in the middle of Cheyenne Autumn.)

Anyway, fuck this movie. I hated it.

Visions from 1964: Part Four

J. Lee Thompson's What a Way to Go! is a very strange fantasy film indeed. This is obviously a vehicle for Shirley MacLaine, and she is lovely and hilarious, so that makes perfect sense. It is also a star-studded extravaganza of nonsense. In it, MacLaine marries four different men all of whom are impossibly, insanely wealthy – Dick Van Dyke, then Paul Newman, then Dean Martin, then Gene Kelly. All of this is ridiculously silly, but charming enough. And the art direction and costumes are fittingly over the top and inventive. Extra points for Paul Newman, who appears shirtless for most of his scenes in the movie.

Here, Newman conducts his painting machines before being killed. You had to be there.

* * *

The Fall of the Roman Empire is pretty much garbage from start to finish. It is a disastrous, epic mess lasting three hours and forty minutes and not making a bit of sense. This is an Anthony Mann movie, but it is really a Samuel Bronston movie – the guy behind King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963) – and so it is obsessed with grandeur and pageantry. In one of the opening sequences, we watch two dozen different kings from all over the Roman Empire come pay their respects to Marcus Aurelius, who isn't even in Rome but is in some Gothic outpost that is basically an overgrown hunting lodge. The idea is absurd and it goes on for like twenty minutes. This is whatshisname, King of Cappadocia, and now here is the ruler of Armenia, and oh here is the King of Nubia. Are you kidding me? Who cares? I guess if I want to look at a parade of horses and costumes this is worth something, but mostly not. The Fall of the Roman Empire actually has several sequences like this. Obviously in 220 minutes they have time to work in a lot of stuff, but the plot itself is excruciatingly boring. We alternate between absurd fight sequences, pageant sequences, and then scenes of quite, "very important" drama.

Sophia Loren is in this (she was, apparently, in three Oscar-nominated films in 1964), as is Stephen Boyd, who played Messala in Ben-Hur, and Christopher Plummer, who plays the Emperor Commodus. And while we are on Ben-Hur, this film wishes it were Ben-Hur, and wishes that so much that it has a chariot race sequence with Stephen Boyd! It is a total rip off of the legendary chariot race in William Wyler's film. I will say that the one thing for which this nonsense was nominated is its score, which is an amazingly gorgeous achievement by Dimitri Tiomkin. This has a great cast, but it is an epic mess in the tradition of giant epic sword-and-sandals messes like The Greatest Story Ever Told and Quo Vadis? Awful.

* * *

Larry Peerce's One Potato, Two Potato is not nearly as bad as The Fall of the Roman Empire, but it is also a very different movie. This is a story of a legal battle that doesn't know it's the story of a legal battle. The director apparently thought One Potato, Two Potato was something of a comedy, and its title seems to think so too. The movie is comedy length and staged like a romantic comedy for a good two thirds of its running time. But then stuff gets really serious.

The plot of One Potato, Two Potato is that a young white woman's husband abandons her and their small child. She asks for a divorce and he is, like, off in Brazil and never comes back. She, meanwhile, falls in love with a black man and they decide to marry (against the advice of his parents; hers are maybe dead? I forget). Things are going well, for the most part, and they have a kid and the original kid is doing great, loves her grandparents, etc. But then husband number 1 comes back and decides that he wants the kid back. Now, this is clearly a case where the father completely abandoned the kid, but the court actually is interested in hearing this man's case – get this – because the new father is black and so somehow the environment is not healthy for the kid. See what I mean? Very serious, actually for 1964. And the last five minutes of the movie are actually very powerful drama. But that emotional power is not earned and so it doesn't land. The film hasn't treated things seriously enough for this actually to work. It's a bit of a failure, though its heart is in the right place.

* * *

And then there's Cheyenne Autumn, which is a John Ford movie about the killing of many many Native Americans. Ford tries to take the native side in this movie, after having done precisely the opposite for the previous 25 years, but this movie is an epic, bloated, self-important mess. And then there are these other complaints that I had:

• All of the Indians are played by Latinos and Italians. Justifiable, perhaps, in 1964, but... actually no, never mind. It isn't justifiable. It might be different if they looked at all like Native Americans, but they all just look like uncomfortable white folks in Indian drag.
• There is this twenty minute sequence right before the intermission, in which Arthur Kennedy and Jimmy Stewart show up (even though they are not in the rest of the movie) to play a series of cartoony scenes showing how silly white people were out west when it came to Indians. This is an absurd sequence only tangentially related to the movie, and because it comes right before intermission it seems important. It isn't. But it is so typical Ford.
• It just keeps going. This mess was 154 minutes long.
• ...And actually it's all about the white people after all. Richard Widmark has a lot of feelings and so do Caroll Baker and Karl Malden and Patrick Wayne and Edward G. Robinson. It may be that the Indians in the film make serious decisions and struggle to make the decisions they make, but if they do, we don't really see it. It is all filtered through the white folks.

* * *

While we're being racist, there's also George Pal's 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, which is actually pretty hard to dislike. It's a charming little fable that I really found delightful. At the center of the film, of course, is a mysterious Chinese "doctor", played by Tony Randall in a typical yellowface costume. So there's that. But I am here to report that this movie is actually not terrible, despite the racist portrayal at its center.

Honestly, why does he need to be a mysterious Asian character in the first place? Like, since when do all mysteries need to come from the "East"? Are there no mysterious white people for Tony Randall to play? Can he not just play your typical American charlatan, coming into town to cause trouble and bring people together? The film sort of plays with this idea, I suppose. For one, Dr. Lao always pronounces his own name "Dr. Loh" (rhyming with dough), and everyone else in the movie calls him "Dr. Lao" (rhyming with cow). And then in the middle of the movie, in conversations with (the beautiful) John Ericson, Dr. Lao stops speaking with his Chinese accent and speaks in a perfect mid-Atlantic dialect like any good New York actor from the period. In other words, the film doesn't need its racist construction, so why it uses it is sort of baffling.

The rest of the film is just plain delightful. There is a silly plot about a town and having faith in the town or some such. And then Barbara Eden falls in love with John Ericson (very sensible of her, I might add). I was into it.

* * *

Are we done yet? (We're not.) Four more.

Mister Roberts

I had been avoiding this film for years thinking it was going to be a bunch of Jack Lemmon silliness. (He's just not my thing. I recently, for example, watched Blake Edwards' The Great Race and was completely annoyed by the Lemmon idiocy at its twinned center.) But Mister Roberts was nothing of the kind: Just an old school, sentimental, whimsical Hollywood picture, co-directed by Mervyn LeRoy and John Ford.

My favorite bit of dialogue in the film:

Henry Fonda: Ok, ok. Any minute now you'll start quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson.
William Powell: That's a lousy thing to say!

I found this thoroughly enjoyable.

BATAAN - A Movie as Big as Its Name

Finally got to see Tay Garnett's Bataan, a WWII movie that Metro released in 1943. It is famous for its brutal portrayals of violence in the 1940s. Although because of the code, films were not usually allowed to show certain things: an excess of blood as well as sounds of violence, including screams of pain, were usually not allowed.

Bataan has everything. It's almost shocking how violent this is for 1943 Hollywood. The film is worth a watch simply for that. The film stars Robert Taylor as a hard-bitten sergeant. His right-hand man is the great character actor Thomas Mitchell. And there are great performances from George Murphy, Kenneth Spencer, Lee Bowman, Desi Arnaz, and especially Robert Walker. Taylor, the shiny movie star of later big-budget features like Ivanhoe and Quo Vadis? is incredible here: contained, strong, and curt, never the grandiloquent performer he is in those giant '50s movies.

Mr. Mitchell as Feingold

Garnett's movie is based on John Ford's 1934 WWI movie The Lost Patrol, or if it isn't, it is surely indebted to it. The films work the same structurally, but whereas The Lost Patrol feels frustrating and futile, Bataan feels like a creepy film noir made in the middle of the jungle. The sound stage on which it is filmed comes to feel claustrophobic, madness-inducing, and the performances are just stellar.

Mr. Walker as the Sailor

The violence is the main show, here, but there are also some superb explosion effects, and the ending is absolutely perfect. Even better, Garnett has at least three sequences in the film where the soldiers simply wait for things to happen. He tells the audience what is going to happen and then he allows time just to run. We watch and wait and wait and wait, and the tension that the director is able to create with these sequences is absolutely extraordinary. I was on the edge of my seat.



This film is superb. A gem of a war movie from the 1940s that never got its due.

Fifty Shades of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln, as you probably know, is the second Abraham Lincoln movie to come out in 2012, and while I suspect that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter will garner a lot less awards-buzz this season, it remains in my heart. I want to note in passing, as well, that there were some truly awesome things in AL:VH.

1. Harriet Tubman is in the movie for no apparent reason, but it got a huge laugh in the theatre when I saw it.
2. Zombies and vampires are apparently interchangeable for Timur Bekmambetov.
3. The USAmerican Civil War was a fight between the living and the undead where the entire Confederate Army was made up of legions of vampires.
4. My main problem with AL:VH was that the vampires were so gross and awful. The truth is, that for me (and given the widespread Twilight obsession I suspect I am not alone) vampires are kind of fabulous. They live forever; they kill people in the most intimate and erotic of ways; they're creatures of the night; and they're usually dressed very well. So why would you want someone (even Abraham Lincoln) out there hunting them
5. Dominic Cooper is still really really hot.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, we can talk about Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner's new movie Lincoln. I suspect you have probably already seen it. And unlike their last collaboration, I really loved Lincoln. It's just really well done. Great acting – the juicy roles are played by Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, and Sally Field: look for them all at Awards time. But the smaller roles are beautifully played as well. It's an excellent company including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, David Strathairn, Tim Blake Nelson, James Spader, John Hawkes, Hal Holbrook, Bruce McGill (how I love that man), Gloria Rueben, Lee Pace, David Costabile, S. Epatha Merkerson, Adam Driver, Julie White, and so many more.

The standout here, however, is Kushner himself. The writing is just gorgeous. The film is filled with exquisite turns of phrase and superb verbal flourishes. It captures the time period beautifully, while feeling familiar and intimate, treading the fine line of ironic hindsight while allowing us the pleasure of re-living a drama the filmmakers know that we all probably know very well. As beautiful as the performances are, it is Kushner's writing that made me love this movie. And (unlike other filmmakers with recent films about USAmerican history *cough* J. Edgar *cough*) Kushner's writing doesn't feel bloated or stagey; the script never grandstands.

I have my gripes, of course: mostly with Spielberg. Lincoln has three endings; Spielberg can't handle ending a film only once. He has to end it repeatedly. When Lincoln said "It seems it's time to go, though I'd much rather stay" (or something like that) and walked down that hallway in one of Janusz Kaminski's rich shots, I thought (as I inevitably always do in a Spielberg movie) end it here; end it here. But I knew he wouldn't. I knew that was only Ending #1. The man is good at endings, I admit, but we really don't need them all. The first ending is almost always the best ending.

In truth, the whole film is a kind of exercise in Spielbergian dramaturgy. I mean, we know from the get-go that the Thirteenth Amendment is going to pass and that the Civil War is going to end (Rebecca Schneider's book notwithstanding). And so the entirety of Lincoln – if we remain on the level of plot – is a kind of buildup to something terrible that ends up being benign after all, just like Embeth Davitz's shower in Schindler's List that really was water after all.

But this is a film about politics and not a film about surprises or cliffhangers. Spielberg can do this, too, of course, and indeed his considerable skill at suspense makes a film about passing a piece of legislation into a true nail-biter, even though we already know it is going to pass. In a way, what I am talking about is truly genius-level filmmaking.

Of course, a part of what Kushner & Spielberg are doing here is making another film about Lincoln within a cinematic history of Lincoln. On the Colbert Report this week Kushner said that the last important film about Lincoln was John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda. That is clearly false (I'm not actually sure why he would say such a thing) because John Cromwell's Abe Lincoln in Illinois starring Raymond Massey (who is absolutely amazing as Lincoln) was released some 8 months after Ford's film.

I am not trying to chart a history of representations of Abe Lincoln in cinema, but I think it is significant that each of these films attempts to do a different thing with Lincoln. For starters, each of these films chooses a specific plotline to follow: a small section of Lincoln's life. Only Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter attempts to tell the whole story of Abraham Lincoln; the others choose a small aspect of the Lincoln story and focus in on it. Young Mr. Lincoln follows a court case in which Lincoln is basically a kind of down-home criminal lawyer, solving a case in order to free two young men falsely charge of murder. Fonda plays Lincoln like a young Matlock, solving crimes and reminiscing about his mother in down-home drawl. Abe Lincoln in Illinois follows Lincoln's love affair (and tempestuous rows) with Mary Todd, as well as his rise to power in the United States government and his election as president. Abe is a film about Lincoln's anti-slavery politics.

All of these films – including the one about the vampires – are hagiographic.

I want to say a bit more about politics, because to me Lincoln is a movie about Barack Obama. Here Dr. Schneider's book again deserves mention because although Lincoln's Abraham Lincoln is clearly not Obama, he's not not Obama.

2012's Lincoln focuses on Lincoln the politician – as he tries to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed through the U.S. House of Representatives. But instead of working to establish Lincoln as a saint, Kushner and Spielberg take his sainthood for granted, expecting his sainthood to confer its good will onto the political process itself. There is an entire section of the film in which Lincoln attempts to convince Tommy Lee Jones's Thaddeus Stevens to be less radical, to rein it in in order to get this legislation passed. The film argues that we need to be concerned about the present just a bit more than we ought to be concerned for our idealistic principles. In other words, politics – which is, for Kushner, the way we get (good) things done in this world – are infinitely more important than being right about what it is that we believe.

In the old saying "He'd rather be right than president", Kushner (I think correctly) thinks it is better to be president. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but Lincoln read to me like an apology for the conservatism of Barack Obama's first four years as the U.S. President. Lincoln says that in order to get things done, blood must be shed. Lincoln doesn't really believe in revolution but rather in slow progress, gradual inevitable change made possible by great men and women who sacrifice their own lives (literally) in order to open up spaces for such change. And Lincoln believes in this change with all of its heart. It is a film filled with hope, filled with the articulation of such possibilities. Lincoln is an excellent film because – like all of Kushner's texts – it is profoundly ambivalent about the principles in which it believes. Further (and thankfully), Lincoln is not particularly interested in convincing me that its own point of view is the correct one, but it is interested rather in asking me to imagine the same possibilities imagined by its protagonists.

Lincoln is, after all, a film about having faith in democracy and in the people themselves. It is a profoundly hopeful film that wants to believe that giving people the freedom to make decisions about their own lives is the best and only ethical way to govern.

A Not-so-brief Update

I am almost finished with my big project for the weekend, which was cataloguing all of my books into my home library database. It took me quite a while (I have a lot of books), but now I will be able to search all of my books to see whether I have something or not. This will also make referencing things much, much easier. I am going to be in school for another three years or so, so I needed to start this now before I amass another three years worth of books.

In other news, my second six-week summer session started today. I am teaching Introduction to Theatre for Non-majors with another grad student. We had 80 seats in the class and every single one of them filled up. I think the dean was expecting about fifty, but the class is evidently popular. It should be fun. It is mostly (i.e. 80%) filled with kids who will be freshmen in the Fall. They take a summer class before their first real semester and so they get acclimated to campus life and get a headstart on coursework. These kids are the best students ever. I had them last summer, too. They work hard and are on their best behavior. And they want to participate.

I've been watching a lot of movies, too. I just haven't felt like writing about them. I will be brief about most of them. Actually, for the less cinematically inclined among you, I will start with the high-interest stuff and move toward the obscure so you can tune out when you get bored:

Okay, so call me crazy (or cynical or bitter) (and maybe I need to see it again) but I was not head over heels for Andrew Stanton's WALL·E, the latest from Pixar. I know everyone else is nuts about it and all that, but... well. Let me start at the beginning. At the beginning, I loved it. The opening seconds are pure genius, with a shot of outer space and then Michael Crawford's voice ringing out loud and clear "Out There... there's a world outside of Yonkers!" I laughed out loud and couldn't stop. Why is this movie beginning with a clip from Hello, Dolly!? WALL·E is really sort of brilliant in that moment. It stays brilliant for a long time, too. But then our loveable robot takes a trip into space following his lady-love (do robots have genders? they do in this film). I started to get bored when the humans on the spaceship Axiom started to show up. They are these blobby humans living a Matrix-like existence, spending their whole lives tapped into the internet and laying around on moving recliners. The movie by this time became a kind of action movie that didn't have any more jokes left in it, only plot points. The movie's politics are questionable, too. I am not sure I even understand them. Does the film want us to all be farmers? Still, WALL·E is brilliant for at least half of its running time and its second half is harmless if less than stellar.

But I loved Tarsem Singh's new movie The Fall. Tarsem previously made the bizarre but visually stunning film The Cell. Remember that? If you do remember it, you remember that the film's subject matter was dark and dirty, but the art direction was eye-popping and unforgettable. The Fall is just as stunning, maybe more so. The story is told from the point of view of a little girl (Catinca Untaru) in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s. She befriends a movie star (Lee Pace) who has lost feeling in his feet because of a mysterious fall. The beautiful cinematic pictures that Tarsem creates are products of the young girl's imgination as the hospitalized man tells a story. It's an extraordinary film with tons of heart, but it's also very, very smart. The people in the film are real characters with faults and unhappinesses. I found it incredibly moving and astoundingly beautiful. Young Catinca Untaru is the cutest thing ever and the relationship between the young girl and the injured man becomes really powerful.

I also really liked David Schwimmer's silly comedy Run Fatboy Run. It's not very smart, but it's quite funny. It's another in the long line of men-who-learn-how-to-grow-up films for which Judd Apatow is now so famous. Still, Schwimmer's touch is light and the humor is often dry and clever rather than overtly silly. Best of all, Run Fatboy Run doesn't need to get cheap laughs from puke jokes or disability humor. Run Fatboy Run is totally worth watching. And I love that Simon Pegg.

So is it ridiculous that I've never seen James Cameron's 1984 movie The Terminator? Yes, yes it is. I haven't seen Part 2, either, but it is on its way from Netflix. Well, I ought to be forgiven for this oversight since I was very heavily into church at the time the movie came out and had no time for Linda Hamilton or killers from the future or naked men who travel through time. Anyway, I quite liked the movie, of course. It's really fun in a kind of horror-film-meets-sci-fi-film-meets-action-film kind of way. I am excited for Part 2.

I also really liked Grigori Chukhrai's 1959 film Ballad of a Soldier, which follows a nineteen-year-old Russian soldier in World War II as he travels back to his mother on a six-day leave. On his way he meets all sort of people and sees the effect of the war on the people of the Soviet Union. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking film, and the young man who plays the lead and the young lady who plays his girlfriend are truly lovely to watch.

John Ford's Arrowsmith (from 1931) has a lot of problems. It is one of the first films to portray black people in roles other than slave or servant roles, but it's still not a very good film. The movie stars Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes. Netflix says that it also stars Myrna Loy, but don't believe them. She is in it for about three minutes altogether. Arrowsmith follows a doctor named (conveniently) Arrowsmith and his wife as Arrowsmith invents and experiments and tries to cure cancer. He doesn't (naturally) but he does come up with some pretty good antibacterial stuff, and then he travels to the Caribbean to help people there who are suffering from the plague. Still, there isn't much to this movie, and it isn't very well made, either, although one can see the germs of what will be John Ford's greatness in some of the photography on the island.

We don't really need to talk about Walter Lang's Can-Can, either. It stars Frank Sinatra, Shirley Maclaine, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan and I quite liked it, but it is a fluffy musical with very cute costumes but not much for either memorable music or memorable characters.

What else? I thought Tony Richardson's film The Entertainer, based on the play by John Osborne, was quite good. I know I am often hard on Laurence Olivier and his boring Shakespeare performances, but he is great in this film.

I also really liked Hal Ashby's biopic of folk singer Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory. David Carradine is the film's star and he's quite compelling as Guthrie. I dug the film's politics and its free spirit, too.

Lastly, I just watched the Hong Kong musical (which is more of a Hollywood film than anything else) Perhaps Love. All I can say is Perhaps Not. I rented this film, of course, because it stars the most gorgeous creature to ever walk on two legs: Takeshi Kaneshiro, but the film is a total mess. It operates on three levels. The present: on the film set of a big Honk Kong musical; in fantasy: in the musical itself; and in the past of the film's stars. Kaneshiro is beautiful, but the movie doesn't work at all and I was awfully bored. Perhaps Love was also never released in theatres in the U.S. and this shows in the subtitles used for the DVD release I watched. The English has obviously never been tried on English-speakers before. I don't speak Mandarin, but the English used for the subtitles was at times incomprehensible. This may be one of the reasons I liked this movie so little, but mostly I think it's because the movie was boring.

The Departed

I saw Martin Scorsese's new movie The Departed last night very late. Yes, I finally made time to go to a movie. The Departed is a remake of the Honk Kong thriller Infernal Affais, which starred Andy Lau and Tony Leung. Let me first say that I loved the original film. It's a taut, wonderfully acted action movie with some lovely poetic moments as well.

The Departed stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, Mark Wahlberg, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin, and a whole host of other people. (Kind of like The Aviator and Gangs of New York before it.) Let me say that while I liked The Departed, it's not quite Infernal Affairs. It doesn't have the tension and the poetry that Andrew Lau's movie had. It makes up for that by raising the level of the violence in the film. But the thing that was so brilliant about Infernal Affairs was its questions about being a criminal/cop and what the difference between the two men is. Affairs also had this amazing father/son throughline where both men treated both the chief of police and the head gangster as father-figures. The emotional connections between the men was so much more powerful in Affairs than in Departed.

Departed's focus is much more on the lone woman in the cast. I don't want to sound too negative about the film. As I said, I liked it. The script is absolutely superb. It zings along with audacious remarks and its portrait of macho behavior, violence and homophobia inside both criminal circles and law enforcement do a lot to erase the lines between the two. Almost as though they are two gangs, roaming the streets for territory. The Departed also has some of the best acting I've seen this year. All of the performances are fantastic. Leonardo DiCaprio is especially great as the cop turned gangster, but Matt Damon's performance is also excellent. Jack Nicholson is his usual Jack self, though less ironic than usual. He's, obviously fun to watch, but I found myself occasionally shaking my head and rolling my eyes. Alec Baldwin is great as usual (It's not a surprise anymore when he's good. The man is a great character actor. I think we can all just say that now.) My favorite performance, of course, is from Mark Wahlberg who lights up the creen every time he's there. His is an assured, unpredictable performance with an enigma at its center. His character is the most flamboyant in the film (of the normal characters: I'm not counting Jack of course) but the performance is an absolute joy to watch. It rivals my affection for his wonderful performance in I ♥ Huckabees.

The film is a little long. It needs trimming at the beginning and Scorsese spends far more time with Jack than he needs to, but it's still good. It's a shocking, original Hollywood thriller... mostly because it isn't original and it isn't a Hollywood film. Go for the script, the brilliant acting, the excellent cinematography and the awesome soundtrack (with nice additions by Howard Shore.) Hell, go for Marty.

P.S. And if you look closely, you'll see that Scorsese quotes John Ford's The Informer at one point. A nice nod to classic rat cinema about rats.

Four Reviews

After the Thin Man, the sequel to the film classic The Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy sees our two stars return to the screen along with the director of the first, W.S. Van Dyke. The second film also boasts a very good pre-Mr. Smith Goes to Washington performance by Jimmy Stewart. The film is sturdy and silly and exactly what I'd expect from this franchise. It's a little too silly for my taste, but it is what it is and I quite liked the film, particularly the surprise ending. I also love William Powell's Nick character in these films. He's cynical beyond belief and drunk most of the time. It's very fun and I find its casual mood actually rather refreshing.

Mogambo is a fairly stupid love triangle drama about a big game hunter in Africa (Clark Gable), a chanteuse who joins the hunting party by accident (Ava Gardner) and a twenty-something anthropologist (Grace Kelly) with a husband. The plot is ridiculous and the film is cut with wildlife footage that looks nothing like the rest of the film and makes the editing look shoddy. Ava Gardner is absolutely great in the picture, but Clark Gable is slightly past his prime and doesn't quite have the matinee-idol look anymore that would make any woman swoon. Grace Kelly is annoying as Hell (but then, she usually annoys me if I remember correctly.) The script, as I said, is very, very weak, so even though Gardner does stellar work as the lonely, desperate night-club singer, she hasn't hardly anything to work with and the picture feels shallow and over-budgeted.

Snakes on a Plane. I can't even believe I'm talking about this movie. My roommate made me go, so... Suffice it to say that I liked it more than I disliked it, it's plot is laugh-out-loud ludicrous, and it's edited very poorly. There is a lot of squirm-in-your-chair grossness from the whole "snakes on a plane" thing, but the film isn't particularly funny and definitely isn't clever. The male romantic lead gives a terrible performance. Julianna Margulies is beautiful and pretty good in the movie, Samuel L. Jackson is his usual badass self and... well there's nobody else really in the movie, so there isn't much else to say about the performances. Oh yeah, Bobby Cannavale is in it for, like, 10 seconds, too. I love him, but I have nothing to say about his performance in this movie. The plot and the title are the same: snakes on a plane. It's either your thing or it isn't. It isn't particularly my thing. My roommate loved it, though. Bought the sountrack, is going to go see it again. You get the drift. Snakes on a Plane is really a throwback to those old Irwin Allen disaster movies (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Fire!, Flood!) and I think I should just probably have a break from them. One of these concoctions every eighteen months or so is okay and I think I've had my fill for a while.

Olivier Assayas's Clean is a movie about a woman trying to get her life back on track after her rocker-husband overdoses on heroin and she is charged with possession of narcotics and goes off to prison. Maggie Cheung is wonderful in the lead role and Nick Nolte does really superb work as Cheung's father-in-law. Nolte's character is raising Cheung's son (his grandson) and trying to keep it together, teaching the boy about his parents and trying to bring him around to loving his mother as much as he loves his grandparents. They are both excellent performances and the film is sensitive, hard-bitten and feels very honest. It contemplates the life of a troubled artist who can't use drugs if she wants to keep her son: the decisions she makes about her life become the subject of the entire film. What do we choose as artists? When does family take precedence over other things? How much pain can we take? It's a beautiful film. I'll have to rent Irma Vep, Cheung and Assayas's other collaboration, very soon. Recommended.