Assorted RIPs

Three more screen legends passed away this week.

First was Gloria Stuart. This talented actress had a prolific career in the '30s (The Invisible Man, The Prisoner of Shark Island) and was one of the founders of the Screen Actors' Guild, but largely vanished from the scene for decades afterwards. She had a nice cameo in My Favorite Year, dancing up a storm with Peter O'Toole. However, she'll probably always be remembered for her endearing, Oscar-nominated role in Titanic as Old Rose.

Next came director Arthur Penn, the enfant terrible and icon of New Hollywood. Readers of this blog will know that I'm no great fan of Penn's anti-Establishment posturing and puerile "criminals are just misunderstood" worldview, though I'll certainly concede he was a skilled stylist. Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man are good but flawed films, The Left-Handed Gun mediocre, and The Chase overwrought garbage. Still, his films were highly influential and the best have a lasting appeal beyond my griping.

Then was Tony Curtis. Never an especially great actor, he nonetheless gave solid performances when cast in the right film: Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones, Spartacus. His career highpoint is unquestionably his hilarious turn in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959) opposite Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.

RIP to all three of these legends; they'll be missed, but their work lives on.

The Left-Handed Gun

Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun (1958) repackages the Billy the Kid legend as a typical '50s "psychological Western." Based on a play by Gore Vidal (!), it presents Penn's usual hobby horse, as perfected in Bonnie and Clyde: criminals are just misunderstood outcasts. Add in a weakly-plotted story and a weird performance by Paul Newman, and you've got a very problematic film.

William Bonney (Paul Newman) is a young drifter in New Mexico Territory, hired by kindly English cattle baron Tunstall (Colin Keith-Jackson). When Tunstall is murdered by rival Morton (Robert Griffin), the crooked Sheriff Brady (Robert Foulk) and two others, Billy and his confederates Tom Folliard (James Best) and Charlie Bowdre (James Congdon) , seek revenge, making them wanted men. Tracking them down is Pat Garrett (John Dehner), a former friend of Billy's turned reluctant Marshal.

Most Westerns are guilty of grafting modern sensibilities into the Old West, but few more egregiously than The Left-Handed Gun. It portrays Billy and his gang as very '50s juvenile delinquents, misunderstood, misanthropic misfits who seemed to have wandered in from Rebel Without a Cause, scuffling with soldiers and breaking up Garrett's wedding. Their primary crime, the film implies, is being young and from the wrong side of the tracks. It wouldn't occur to Penn that maybe their killing people is the real problem.

Billy embodies most of the genre tropes: confused, looking for a father figure, illiterate, uncomprehending, aimlessly violent. Billy even "rocks out" to The Battle Cry of Freedom, much to the consternation of older patrons. Billy strikes a Christ-like pose when surrendering to Pat's posse, and like Plato in Rebel, he's gunned down while unarmed: a martyr for teen rebellion. It's not as offensive as Robert Redford's similar fate in Penn's The Chase, but it is rather jarring in a Western context.

The movie has other problems than anachronism. The story is pretty aimless: there's something of a plot, but the narrative development is frequently short-changed in favor of the "psychological" angle, with lots of time devoted to carousing and sidetracks. The Billy-Pat friendship, a keystone of this film, is left curiously underdeveloped, and a romance between Billy and Mexican girl Celsa (Lita Milan) is poorly-handled. Paul Newman's odd performance doesn't help either: he's much more Method-heavy than his later, better works. A boring supporting cast doesn't help much, either.

The movie's biggest saving grace is Arthur Penn's solid direction. He makes excellent use of J. Peverell Marley's foreboding black-and-white photography, and there are many strong individual set-pieces, including Billy's escape from jail. Sam Peckinpah would recycle key scenes wholesale in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: the jailbreak in particular is almost shot-for-shot.

The Left-Handed Gun is a confused, curious Western, heavy on the "psychology" and often short on the Western. If the psychology were more interesting it might be better, but treating Billy like the James Dean of the 1880s isn't very fruitful.

The Chase

After the monumental success of Lawrence of Arabia, Sam Spiegel could never quite recapture his old magic, releasing films that were both box-office thuds and critical bombs. While The Night of the Generals and Nicholas and Alexandra are interesting if flawed films, The Chase (1966) is a complete misfire, an obnoxious, one-note social message film playing with a stacked-deck and an inflated sense of self-importance. It really has no message beyond saying that America is a violent, nasty place, an idea conveyed in many films better and more subtle than this.

A small Texas town turns upside down when Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), a good-hearted local convict, escapes from jail. Various townspeople go ape, from oil tycoon Val Rodgers (E.G. Marshall) and a trio of bigoted thugs (Richard Bradford, Clifton James, Steve Ihnat) to a meek banker (Robert Duvall) who shares a past with Bubber, to Reeves' ex-wife (Jane Fonda) and former pal (James Fox), also Rodgers' son. In the middle of all this is Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando), disliked by pretty much everyone; he tries to keep his head and prevent bloodshed as Bubber arrives in town, but finds his position increasingly difficult.

With Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) directing, a script by Lillian Hellman (The Children's Hour), and a cast of hot '60s talent and fine character actors, The Chase has all the trappings of a great film. But all this talent essentially goes to waste in a dull, overlong film that makes its point early and then beats us over the head with it. Early on we get that our characters are unlikeable, sleazy racist slugs waiting for an excuse to kill someone, but to pad out the run-time, we get interminable party and conversation scenes. The plot proper doesn't start for about an hour, and for at least half the film, we've nothing to do but hang out with redneck scum. Once the story gets underway, as the film seems satisfied with condescending hatred rather than a thoughtful examination of violence and bigotry.

The way Hellman and Penn sell the message and characters is beyond obnoxious. The film takes place in a typical Small Town as Envisioned By Guilty Hollywood Liberals, populated by completely one-dimensional vermin. The trio of thugs goes around leering at teenaged girls, brandishing guns, beating up the Sheriff, and just we know they're really bad, harass a pair of random black men. Few of the others are better, from the slutty, drunken women to the eccentric old loonies to the henpecked bank VP. Calder is passive and uninteresting, lacking motivation or depth, and is never a satisfactory protagonist. Bubber, in keeping with Penn's The Left-Handed Gun and Bonnie and Clyde, is a good-hearted, misunderstood crook, who has improbably spent his whole life taking the fall for others.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that we never understand why Bubber is so feared. The movie leans towards individual hatred mixing with mass hysteria, but this doesn't jive. Bubber is so virtuous and non-threatening that the film's conceit is ludicrous, and marks the characters as pawns of the ridiculous plot. The rigged drama is completely unsatisfactory, sacrificing logic or drama for the sake of demonizing its characters. The climactic lynch mob scene is well-staged but ridiculous, and the crude restaging of Jack Ruby's slaying of Lee Harvey Oswald at the climax adds insult to injury. The ultimate message of The Chase is that people are no damned good, an unhelpful, intellectually bankrupt message reeking of smugness.

Penn's direction is fine, handling his large cast and location shooting well. The set-pieces are generally well-staged, but Penn can do little to alleviate Hellman's stinker script. John Barry contributes a fine score, his first for a Hollywood film. No one can complain about Spiegel's lavish production values, but his attempts to recreate the biting social commentary of On the Waterfront fall dramatically flat.

Marlon Brando, in the middle of his mid '60s slump, plays Calder as a passive, boring lead. His mumbly Texas accent put this viewer in mind of Boomhauer from King of the Hill, not a good thing in a "serious" social drama. Jane Fonda successfully transitions from comedy star (Cat Ballou) to serious actress, but a pre-superstar Robert Redford is an inert martyr. James Fox (A Passage to India) gives a fine turn with a remarkable Texas accent. The rest of the cast does well: Robert Duvall (The Godfather Part II), E.G. Marshall (Twelve Angry Men), Angela Lansbury (The Manchurian Candidate), Janice Rule (Invitation to a Gunfighter), Richard Bradford (The Untouchables), Clifton James (Live and Let Die), Miriam Hopkins (The Children's Hour), Bruce Cabot (King Kong).

The Chase is a top-notch production, well-made by a fine array of Hollywood talent. All the fine acting and technical skills, however, are at the service of a lame, skewed and mean story. When you stack the dramatic deck this much, you can advocate pretty much anything imaginable, and everything about it rings false. Far from being an overlooked classic, as some have suggested, The Chase is a dated film that's best left forgotten.

Little Big Man

Arthur Penn's (Bonnie and Clyde) Little Big Man (1970) is yet another entry in the spate of revisionist Westerns of the late '60s/early '70s, which challenged the old-fashioned triumphalist views of the Old West. Think Forrest Gump meets Dances With Wolves, filtered through Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and you have a good idea of the kind of film this is. It's certainly well-made and entertaining, but dated and only sporadically successful in making its point.

The 122-year old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), "the last white survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn", tells his story to an obnoxious historian (William Hickey). Crabb and his sister (Carol Androsky) were orphaned when their parents were killed by bloodthirsty Pawnee Indians, and they were rescued and raised by a tribe of Cheyenne led by Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George). Crabb is captured by US Cavalrymen, adopted into wife society by the Bible beating Reverend Pendrake (Thayer David) and his lascivious wife (Faye Dunaway), works with conman (Martin Balsam), undertakes a gunslinging career which leads to several encounters with Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey), and ends up a scout with the 7th Cavalry led by the vainglorious George Armstrong Custer (Richard Mulligan), who stupidly leads his regiment into a massacre.

Little Big Man is a mediation on Western myth-making. Jack Crabb is the ultimate unreliable narrator, an ancient codger telling tall tales into a microphone, and right off the bat it's clear we should take him with a grain of salt. As such, it's hard to fault the film for its historical inaccuracies, from its Vietnam-informed portrayal of Custer and the 7th Cavalry to the unlikely number of historical personages (Custer, Hickok, Buffalo Bill) Crabb encounters to his masturbatory encounter with a trio of Indian widows. However, the film's falling back on cliches of all sorts, from the lecherous, hypocritical Christians to the murderous cavalry and noble Indians, is more problematic.

The film thematically bears a curious resemblance to John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1973), another revisionist film. Little Big Man's episodic plot is certainly better-structured and more consistent than Bean's, its scenes and plot being somewhat coherent, but it suffers from the same oft-overbearing irreverence and smugness as Huston. The humor is often broad and self-serving, not funny so much as mocking, particularly its bizarre portrayal of Custer as an insane, stupid egomaniac, giving a speech while his troopers are slaughtered around him. In this regard, along with the Pocahontas-esque noble Indians, the film goes a bit too far in correcitng the ledger. The movie is much better in its serious moments; the snow-driven Washita Massacre is a truly harrowing sequence, and the scenes of Crabb adjusting to Indian life are strong scenes. For all its good scenes, however, the film never truly transcends the mythos of the early '70s.

Penn's direction is assured, handling the action scenes well and wonderfully capturing the gorgeous Montana landscapes. The movie has strong set pieces throughout - the battle scenes, particularly the aforementioned Washita scene, are generally well-handled, though the Little Big Horn climax is a bit of a let-down. The movie handles the Natives fairly well, aside from an occasionally over-eloquent speech and a bizarre homosexual Indian (Robert Little Star) who is anachronistic and probably in bad taste, though the American characters are mostly cartoons. John Hammond's catchy blue grass music score is wonderful.

Dustin Hoffman's casting in the title role is highly problematic, to say the least. The talented Method star of The Graduate, Straw Dogs and All the President's Men, at the peak of his stardom, is simply not cut out to play an adopted Indian/Indian fighter/hermit/gunslinger/Old Man; his attempts at a corn-poned Southern accent, mixing with his usual New York deadpan, result in perhaps the most bizarre accent outside of Anthony Hopkins' Texas Leprechaun voice as Richard Nixon. It's not that Hoffman's performance is bad per se, but that he's miscast beyond all hope.

The supporting cast fares better. Faye Dunaway has an extended cameo as the sultry, sensual Mrs. Pendrake, who believably goes from bored preacher's wife to whore. Martin Balsam and Jeff Corey contribute fun cameos as larger-than-life Westerners. The Indian cast is solid, save Little Star's character; particular honors goes to Chief Dan George (The Outlaw Josey Wales), the perfect mixture of sagely wisdom and down-to-earth wit and humor. Richard Mulligan's caricature Custer is beyond absurd, and is too ridiculous to draw the laughs it's designed to.

Little Big Man is a fun, irreverent Western that perhaps goes too far in its efforts. It's certainly worth a look for Western fans, but it's far from the classic its reputation suggests.

Bonnie and Clyde

"We rob banks." SFW?

I'm going to back-track a bit to last week, when slow Internet made updating somewhat problematic, and review Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). If nothing else, it gives me a frame-of-reference from which to address the idea of the remake with Hilary Duff.

Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) is a bored and dirt-poor Oklahoma girl who runs into the handsome petty crook Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) one day and decides to tag along on a robbery. This leads to the formation of one of the most successful and violent gang of bank robbers of the Great Depression, as they rob bank after bank throughout the Midwest. Bonnie and Clyde covet their fame, following newspaper coverage eagerly and making themselves into glamorous Robin Hood idols, robbing the greedy banks but leaving the poor farm folks - but their reputation eventually catches up with them, and soon they find themselves staring down the barrels of a well-laid police ambush.

While often lauded as a landmark film for a variety of reasons, from its amoral characters to the extreme slow-motion violence (which isn't nearly as bloody or violent as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch just two years later) to its establishment of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as Hollywood idols (and also giving Gene Hackman's career a nice boost), Bonnie and Clyde is, more than anything else, very much a product of its time. That's not to say it isn't an entertaining film; on the contrary, its action, direction and acting are all top-notch. But besides being a decent waste of two hours, there isn't a great deal there, and the movie is remarkably dated in a number of important ways.

The movie is very much a product of the rebellious late '60s, with its depiction of two of the most violent, pathetic and sleazy criminals in American history as glamorous young folks driven into crime by the Depression and the oppressive System. It's easy to see the film's appeal; coming out just as the '60s were beginning to boil over into radicalism, its beautiful, very fashionable young criminals sticking it to the Man and going out in a blaze of glory - a message that undoubtedly appealed to the disaffected youth of the late '60s and the new generation of critics and film makers who would eagerly tap into the soon-to-form counterculture. Seen today, however, they seem extremely dated; scenes where Bonnie tells a farmer to keep his own money during a robbery, or when Clyde helps a ruined landowner shoot a foreclosure sign, seem forced and just don't work. They may have struck a chord at the time, but today they just seem trite and obvious. Maybe in that time and place, one could have seen these guys as heroes, but with hindsight and knowledge of history it's very difficult. The Model T's and other period details are mere decoration; this isn't a period film, but some sort of social commentary.

As a result, the movie has a curious lack of depth. The cast of characters, even our two leads, have a curiously sketched-in quality, and never rise above the level of ciphers. Bonnie and Clyde have a typical rough-and-tumble relationship, and are portrayed somewhat incredibly as mostly good people who happen to be criminals. Even visits with Bonnie's family, the presence of Clyde's brother (Gene Hackman) and annoying sister-in-law (Estelle Parkins), and the inclusion of C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard)'s s dad (the always-welcome Dub Taylor) as a key plot device, don't do a great deal to flesh out their depth. It's hard to see why we should sympathize with these characters, who don't do a great deal to earn our sympathy. Beatty and Dunaway may be glamorous but what exactly makes them compelling protagonists, or even anti-heroes? Again, it's presumably their taking on the establishment with Tommy guns and cool clothes, but that's not much incentive for me - nor is their gloating over being celebrities, which ultimatley gets them killed. Do they rob banks out of any financial need, or just to be cool? Logic dictates the former, but the film seems to push for the second answer.

Still, despite these deficiencies, the film excells on most entertainment levels. Penn's direction in particular is top-notch. He captures the Midwestern countryside in its stark beauty and desolation and handles the action scenes with aplomb. The movie has a number of legendary bits of violence - the murder of a pesky bank clerk, the nighttime ambush of the gang's hideout, and particularly the final ambush of our protagonists - that still hold up today, though their raw power of originality has long since faded. The constant bluegrass score adds immeasuribly to the film's atmosphere; it's the one detail that makes the film seem authentic.

Helping somewhat, too, is the cast. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are good-looking, glamorous and have screen presence to burn, and through sheer force of charisma they make their characters worth watching. They're backed up by an able supporting cast, including Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, Denver Pyle, Dub Taylor, and a young Gene Wilder. Even though their characters are rather poorly drawn, the movie is certainly well-cast and the performers do their best to pull it off.

Bonnie and Clyde is in many ways an important film, and it remains reasonably entertaining, but its historical context is extremely obvious. This doesn't take too much away from the film, but it prevents it from being a must-see classic film.

Rating: 7/10 - Recommended