FRIENDLY PERSUASION (1956)

In 1957, William Wyler's comedy-drama FRIENDLY PERSUASION won the Palm d'Or, one of those inexplicable lapses of judgement that help to demonstrate the true worthlessness of movie awards. (That it beat out Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL only helps to make this point starker still.) It's a film that I'm fascinated with in large part because of my undying love of its star, Gary Cooper, but the film itself is a muddled mess. It is of interest today to Cooper fans like myself, but in most other respects it has aged poorly. For its director, it is a long, long way from the triumph of THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES in 1946.

Watching it again recently (because it was included in a new set of Cooper films I got for Christmas), I'm struck by the film's lack of a point-of-view. The film tells the story of the Birdwell family, a 1800s Indiana Quaker clan led by a stern-if-loving mother, Eliza (Dorothy McGuire) and a taciturn-if-mischievous father, Jess, played by Cooper. They have three children, the eldest of which is a son, Josh (Anthony Perkins) who longs to go fight in the Civil War. Eventually, the war comes to Indiana and the Birdwells have to decide what to do. 

I use the word "eventually" advisedly because FRIENDLY PERSUASION takes a long leisurely amble to get to its central conflict. The war doesn't come home to the Birdwells until the final thirty minutes of the film, which means that the better part of an hour and a half is spent focusing on things like the light comedy of Cooper's attempt to get to church faster than his neighbor and an uninvolving romance for the Birdwells' teenaged daughter. These scenes are meant to establish the Quaker idyll that will soon (or eventually) be shattered by the war.

Here's the problem, though: even in these scenes of gentle pastoral comedy, Wyler and his writer Michael Wilson (whose name was taken off the picture after he was blacklisted) struggle to figure out how to present the Birdwells. The problem, as one might expect, is religious. Wyler and Wilson just don't know what to do with Quakerism. For example, one subplot involves Jess buying an organ to play in the house despite Eliza's stern opposition, in keeping with the doctrine of their faith, to the instrument. After much to do, the Birdwells end up keeping the organ, and then have to hide it in the attic to keep it from the eyes of their church. At the end of the film, the organ's been moved downstairs. What are we to make of this? Are the Birdwells ready to tell the church that the doctrine is wrong? If so, why? The truth is that the filmmakers don't care about the religious implications. The whole subplot is one extended joke, a comedy that springs from the bemusement of the filmmakers. 

This disconnect carries over to the main conflict of the film once it finally arrives. Perkins wants to go fight, though his reasons for wanting to fight and the way he relates to the conflict don't seem to have any practical foundation in the life the character would have lived up to that point. Likewise, his younger brother regards the war the way a kid who's seen a lot of TV westerns might regard the war. Neither of them seem to have grown up in Quaker house their whole lives.

FRIENDLY PERSUASION is an excellent example of what we mean when we say a film is dated. Though it purports to unfold in 1862, it feels always and in all ways like something created in 1956. It's reflexively pro-war despite the fact it takes place among lifelong pacifists. Perkins goes to war, his little brother is casually bloodthirsty, and Cooper rides off with a gun to save his son -- all against Eliza's wishes and reprimands. By the end of the film, in fact, the concept of pacifism seems like little more than Eliza's annoying pet project. Eventually, she rejects it herself when she beats a rebel soldier for trying to kill the family goose, a moment that is played for laughs. The staunchest pacifist portrayed in the picture is a member of their church who is presented as a self-righteous hypocrite who throws off the constraints of his faith as soon as the Confederates show up.

I've been interested in how religion is portrayed onscreen for a long time, and it's been on my mind even more of late. FRIENDLY PERSUASION is something of a companion piece to 1941's SERGEANT YORK, which also presented Cooper as pacifist during a time of war. YORK is pure war propaganda, but at least it goes about its task more or less directly. FRIENDLY PERSUASION, on the other hand, wants to have things both ways. It is a film of gentle contempt for its subject.

PS: A quick word about Coop. He's easily the best thing about the picture. While Perkins (in his first leading role in a movie) is too Method for his own good here, Cooper controls the screen with quiet authority. The film came at an odd time in his career when, despite the fact he was in his mid-fifties, he was still resistant to, you know, acting like it. He didn't want to play a father onscreen, and although McGuire was 15 years his junior, by this point he was used to playing with even younger leading ladies. (His next film was the romance LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON in which he played opposite Audrey Hepburn, who was 30 years his junior--younger than the actress who played his daughter in FRIENDLY PERSUASION.) He also didn't like that his character wasn't roused to action sooner, and roused to much more forceful action. Despite all of this, the film gives us an unmistakable hint at the kind of performance Cooper could have given in a good movie dealing with the same subject matter. He's not dated so much as he seems to have come from a previous era, which, indeed, he had. 

THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH (1926) and The Making of Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper was 25 years old when he made Henry King's THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH. He's the third name down in the credits, behind stars Velma Banky and Ronald Coleman. The story is a romantic triangle and (spoiler alert) Coop doesn't get the girl. What he got instead, was a career as a movie star. After this movie, he was on the fast track to becoming an American icon. Before long, his name moved above the title and Cooper started a decades-long career of making movies where he always got the girl. 

THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH was one of the first great westerns--it's a film of magnificent vistas, compelling performances, and great spirit--yet it's not a genre piece in the way that we normally regard westerns. It actually takes as its subject the settlement of California's Salton Sink in the early 1900s and the dirty politics behind the bringing of water to the parched valley. It's suspicious of "soulless corporations" and fat cat financiers. In some respects, it plays like a precursor to CHINATOWN.

While I love so much about the movie (including the wonderful performances of Velma Banky and Ronald Coleman), I really want to talk about Gary Cooper.

One of the most compelling elements of silent films is the way they predated a lot of gender stereotypes. In the silent era, androgyny was hot. Cooper was one of the few stars to make the transition from silents to talkies, and along the way his image became more stoic and explicitly masculine. Though he rarely did macho, by the time you get to the 1950s Coop was the living embodiment of the strong and silent type. But there was always something else about him, something that he carried through his Capra films and his screwball comedies--a certain halting shyness. You see this most explicitly in his silent films.

We first see him in BARBARA WORTH as a cowboy. From the very start, though he is almost unbelievably handsome. 

Paired with old codger Paul McAllister, Cooper is both authentic as a figure of the western but also unblemished and beautiful. He both fits the scene and stands apart from it, which might be a good description of "movie star charisma."

Despite some heroic derring-do later in the film (he gets to shoot some bad guys), I would argue that his real starmaking moment comes in a quiet moment when Coop spots Banky and Coleman together. His reaction shots here capture the unheroic essence that always balanced out the more heroic aspects of his later screen image.

Here you have a sequence of emotions -- longing, joy, disappointment, resignation -- in a brief space, demonstrating that the same guy who looks natural on a horse (Coop was born and raised in Montana) could play it soft and sweet. It was this tension between the various, and seemingly contradictory, parts of his own personality that made Gary Cooper pop off the screen and become a great star. 

A certain vulnerability would always be a part of his DNA as an actor. Unlike John Wayne, and even more than Stewart or Fonda, Cooper could be wounded. This quality finds its most masterful expression, of course, in his greatest western, 1952's HIGH NOON, a movie that hinges around social rejection and emotional isolation.

Of course, Cooper almost always played heroes, and he made plenty of wholly conventional entertainments where he functioned as little more than a tall tower of masculine power. His best work, however, remains a fascinating example of how innate aspects of an actor's personality inform and shade his portrayals in subtle ways.

MOROCCO (1930)

If you want to understand the mystery of the movies, then you should take a long look at Josef von Sternberg's MOROCCO.

I use the term "take a long look" deliberately here because looking is, after all, the primary act of moviegoing. MOROCCO tells the story of a romance between a saloon singer played by Marlene Dietrich and a Legionnaire played by Gary Cooper. You don't really need to know more about the plot because the film isn't about the plot. It's about looking at these two people, particularly Dietrich.

There was a period there in the twenties and thirties where American moviegoers had a collective crush on exotic foreign beauties like Garbo and Dietrich. I hesitate to call it a fad--because Garbo and Dietrich were great stars--but it's fair to say that American audiences soon moved on to more wholesome American girls. (Ingrid Bergman was a great foreign beauty, of course, but she wasn't exotic. She was the girl next door by way of Stockholm. That explains why Americans turned on her after her sex scandal in the fifties. No one would have been scandalized to find out that Dietrich had gotten pregnant from an affair.) Dietrich fell out of fashion around about the time Americans as a whole became exhausted by events in Europe, especially from her native Germany.

But look at MOROCCO and you can see the cultural moment that made Dietrich a sensation. The movie itself watches her, lingers on her. 1930 was early into the era of talkies, and it's important to keep that in mind as you watch the film. Von Sternberg paces things slowly, deliberately. He expects you to look at pictures he gives you, almost as if you were staring at a photograph or a painting. There are many moments where the primary thing happening onscreen is the play of light and shadow, or a wisp of smoke, or a face.

The most famous scene in the movie is the musical number that Marlene sings while dressed in a tux and top hat. This is pure 1930 sexual androgyny, before the Production Code came in and sanitized everything. Marlene struts around and takes a flower from a pretty girl and gives her a kiss. And not a peck on the lips either. A kiss. The crowd roars its approval. Steamy stuff.

What's interesting, though, is that the strutting confident performer of the musical number is a contrast to the touchingly vulnerable woman Dietrich gives us in the rest of the movie. In her best roles, Dietrich always combined that hard, sexy exterior with a sense of the wounded soul underneath.

Gary Cooper gets less attention from his director than his costar does, but the camera loves him, nevertheless. Not yet thirty when he made this film, Cooper was in the glory of his youth and beauty. The older he got, he would take on outsized importance as an American symbol--and, of course, his best remembered role would come in HIGH NOON when he was 51--but as a young man Cooper cut a dashing, transcontinental figure. Always distinctly American, he was nevertheless a man of the world. His lithe body and fine-boned face were a perfect fit for the delicate mood play that is MOROCCO. He's already got that jittery aversion to words which would only deepen as he got older, but he's beautiful enough and inaccessible enough to be a perfect fit for Dietrich.

The mystery of the movies is the looking. Looking at human beings who don't look back, who let themselves be observed, who are projected tall and wide on a wall in the dark in shimmering silver light. The more I see MOROCCO the more I see this mystery at play.   

Coop's Last Ride: THE HANGING TREE (1959)

I'm starting a new series of articles over at Criminal Element called The Cowboy Rides Away. I'll look at the final Western of each of the great stars of the genre. First up, my favorite cowboy of them all, the great Gary Cooper.

I've written about Coop before, but this is the first time I've written about his final oater, the dark and interesting THE HANGING TREE, directed by (the quite underrated) Delmer Daves. 

Give it a read and let me know what you think. 

High Noon At 60

In a new essay at Criminal Element, I take stock of Fred Zinnemann's HIGH NOON. At 60 years old, it's an acknowledged classic, but its reputation has always been marked by controversy.

For a director who was wildly successful, Zinnemann doesn't much love from film historians. Take a look at HIGH NOON again, though, and you'll see a nuanced piece of work. Then look at his other films, like the noir masterpiece ACT OF VIOLENCE, and you'll find a gifted artist who deserves a lot more credit than he gets.

Click here to read my essay on HIGH NOON.

Fritz Lang Retrospective

above: Coop kicks Nazi ass.

The New York Times ran a good piece last Sunday on director Fritiz Lang in advance of a new series, FRITZ LANG IN HOLLYWOOD, running at the Film Forum from January 28 to February 10. I'm happy the article singled out the often overlooked Lang spy film CLOAK AND DAGGER, which provides our only chance to see Gary Cooper as a physics professor who dukes it out with Nazis. You read that last part right. Coop's a two-fisted physics professor. The movie is no one's idea of a masterpiece, but it's more fun than your average Lang film (which tended to come in shades of dark and darker).

The series is showing THE BIG HEAT and HUMAN DESIRE, Lang's two films with stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The first one is more famous and highly regarded, but I've always rather preferred the second film's bitter take on, well, human desire. The series also features both of Lang's films with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and SCARLETT STREET. Both are well worth seeing, but for my money SCARLET STREET is the best film Lang ever made and one of the indispensable noirs.

For more on the series, including a complete list of films they're showing, read here.

Read the Times article here.

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943)

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a dated movie, dated in that way people mean when they say, "They don't make 'em like that anymore." It's a museum piece in a certain sense because it does indeed feel like a movie from a previous generation. It's a huge production with an overture and intermission, big love scenes and bigger action sequences, with a score that never lets you forget you're watching an epic. If you like that kind of thing, this is a movie not to overlook.

The film is an adaptation of Hemingway's 1940 novel about an American named Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper) fighting against the fascist forces in Spain in the thirties. Jordan meets up with a band of Loyalist fighters hiding in the mountains. His mission is to destroy a pivotal bridge before a major republican offensive, but he comes into conflict with Pablo (Akim Tamiroff), the drunken leader of the ragtag mountain fighters. Pablo's woman, the imposing Pilar (Katina Paxinou), sides with Jordan, and they become the de facto leaders of the group. Jordan also meets a beautiful but traumatized young girl named Maria (Ingrid Bergman). Jordan and Maria have only a few days together before the big battle, a battle so improbable it verges on a suicide mission.

The film was directed by a fellow named Sam Wood, an interesting figure in Hollywood history. Wood was a hardcore rightwinger who served as the president of an organization called Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (a group which included both Cooper and John Wayne, and which helped launch the political career of Ronald Reagan). Wood was instrumental in bringing the House Committee's investigation of "Un-American Activities" to Hollywood in the late forties, and he would very likely have pushed through a "loyalty oath" at the Director's Guild of America had it not been for the objection of notable artists with unimpeachable "patriotic" credentials, chief among them being John Ford*.

All of this makes it ironic that Wood helmed the adaptation of Hemingway's unabashed liberal novel, a novel in which the hero is fighting on the side of Communists. Of course, since the movie was made in 1943, it made for good wartime propaganda. Wood and his adaptors stripped the movie of any overt political content (aside from a few digs at Germany's and Italy's fascists). They focused instead on the stuff of big scale movie making: romance, comedy, action, and drama.

In terms of craft, the film isn't exactly perfect. There's some truly awful use of back projection, which is especially jarring in such a high dollar production. And the comedy, mostly coming in the form of a buffoonish Gypsy character played by Mikhail Rasumny, wears thin. As with many movies of the time, the "ethnic" characters here are played by actors from a variety of backgrounds. This is nowhere more apparent than the casting of the Swedish goddess Bergman as a 19 year old Spanish girl.

And yet for all those faults, For Whom The Bell Tolls strikes me as a triumph of old school movie making. For one thing, for all its grandiosity, the film is really about the gentle romance at its center. Cooper was never better as a leading man than here. A quiet, Montana-born outdoorsman, Cooper was perfectly cast** as the laconic Robert Jordan (and is it me, or does his look in the film--fedora, leather jacket, work clothes--seem like a forerunner to Indiana Jones?). At the same time that he cuts a dashing figure, however, Cooper's greatest attribute in the role is his slightly androgynous quality. Never as aggressively masculine as Wayne, there was something intrinsically gentle about Gary Cooper***. His pairing here with the exquisite Bergman is a cinematic gem.

As for Ingrid Bergman, there are times when I'm pretty sure she was the greatest movie star who ever lived. At other times, I am absolutely certain she was. It is very nearly impossible to write about her without talking about her beauty, but what of it? Movies are largely an excuse to stare at people for two hours. Who wouldn't want to stare at Bergman? She wasn't simply beautiful, she was also the best actress of her era, a performer who's face communicated every confusion and thought to the camera. She's miscast here only in the sense that she is in no way believable as a 19 year old Spanish girl. (But the classic Hollywood film always performed a weird magic, wiping away ethnic demarcations, translating the story and characters into the American idiom. For instance, the characters all speak English even though they're Spanish. Yet at one point, they have a discussion in which they make clear they're 'speaking' in Spanish. This is a hokey device, I suppose, but I'm not sure the implications of it have really been examined.) At any rate, Bergman's performance isn't about portraying a certain age or a certain ethnicity. She plays the character's fear and exuberance, her love for this man and her scars from the past. The scene where she tells Cooper about the atrocities committed against her by a group of soldiers is masterfully handled (and surprisingly candid for its time). When she tells him she's afraid he won't love her anymore, and tearfully promises him "but I was telling the truth when I said I never kissed anyone before you" Bergman is heartbreakingly vulnerable. Cooper's response to her is simply beautiful. This was the finest scene either of them ever played.

In addition to Cooper and Bergman, the film features pitch perfect performances from Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou. Its final act is a terrific extended action sequence (where the special effects hold up remarkably well nearly seventy years later), and the action depends on constantly evolving characters. Tamiroff's drunken, murdering Pablo, for instance, is an unfolding mystery of a man right up until the end.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a old fashioned epic full of big, sweeping emotions. It's not for everyone, but if you're in the market for a stirringly heroic story of love and sacrifice, it a prime specimen.

***

*To read a little about the fight between Sam Wood and John Ford over the loyalty oath--a fight in which Ford made pointed references to the leftist politics of Hemingway's story--read Joseph McBride's fascinating article, The Convoluted Politics of John Ford.

**Hemingway selected Cooper himself. The two were close friends, and some writers maintain that Hemingway even based aspects of Robert Jordan on the actor. A new documentary examines their friendship. View a trailer for it here.

***I've written before about this gentle quality in Cooper. Read here.

One final note: Wood reteamed with Cooper and Bergman two years later for a big budget rip-off of Gone With The Wind called Saratoga Trunk. It is, I'm sad to report, simply awful. Some biographers have maintained that the actors only made the movie in order to continue an affair they'd begun on FWTBT. I hope the sex was great, because the movie is dreadful.

Mann and Cooper and Man Of The West (1958)

Man of the West was Anthony Mann’s last foray into the Old West before he began the third phase of his career. He'd started out as one of the best noir directors of the classic era (Raw Deal, Railroaded!), moved on to a lucrative and artistically successful collaboration with Jimmy Stewart on a cycle of Westerns (The Naked Spur, The Man From Laramie), and ended his career as the force behind a series of epics (The Fall Of The Roman Empire, El Cid). It was an amazing career, one of the best in the history of movies. In fact, it shows the depth of Mann’s work that a masterpiece like Man of the West has been overlooked by so many people.

The film is, in many ways, the best one Mann ever made. It is certainly one of the two or three best Westerns I’ve ever seen (up there with The Searchers and Unforgiven). It’s a dark and violent story about a man named Link Jones (Gary Cooper) who begins the film as an affable everyman traveling by train to find a schoolteacher for his little town of Good Hope. After a botched train robbery, Jones is stranded in the wilderness with a saloon singer named Billie Eillis (Julie London) and a card shark named Beasley (Arthur O’Connell). Together the three of them stumble into the hideout of the train robbers, a rough band led by an old outlaw Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb). Turns out Dock and Link know each other.

At the time Man of the West was made, the Western was at its peak. It had been the dominate genre in Hollywood (and, really the world) since the thirties. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that the Western built Hollywood (after all, the desert is where you shot these horse operas). The genre would remain supreme until the seventies when the combination of Watergate and Star Wars killed it as a viable commercial force. On the one hand, institutional corruption threw the Western’s right-leaning worldview into disrepute. On the other hand, the space opera became the industry’s bread and butter. The frontier moved into outer space. The Western seemed old and hokey. It’s continued, of course, and good Westerns are still produced, but its day has passed.

Chief among the pleasures of the genre is a dark gem like Man of the West. As the film opens, we think we’re in one kind of film, but once Link and Dock square off their confrontation becomes a riveting drama. Mann had always been interested in violence as the result of thwarted masculinity and that theme finds its fullest expression in this film. There’s an extraordinary sequence in which one of Dock’s thugs, a psycho named Coaley (a young Jack Lord), holds a knife to Link’s throat and forces Billie to do a striptease. It’s a horrifying scene of symbolic rape (one aimed, really, at Link), and it is followed by an astonishing scene later in which Link beats Coaley and strips him naked, thus returning the symbolically sexualized assault.

This is dark stuff, but the film is deft in marrying its darkness to the bright form of the traditional Western. Look at the shootout in the ghost town of Lassoo near the end of the film. This sequence works on a richly symbolic level: while Dock thinks the town is a bustling mining community with a fat bank full of cash, it turns out to be an abandoned scattering of shacks. In this ghost town, Dock's hopes for the future are destroyed, and Link is able to confront his violent past. The sequence works as a piece of symbolism, but it also ends in a hell of a great shootout, up there with the gunfights in High Noon, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and Open Range.

You can feel Mann’s presence throughout the film—and his direction was never better—but due credit must be given to the film’s other two main creative forces. The script by Reginald Rose (from the novel The Border Jumpers by Will C. Brown) is simply terrific. Every character has a distinct voice, and Dock Tobin in particular is fun to listen to as he gets excited and gives praise to God for the robbery the gang is about to pull off.

The other major player here is Gary Cooper. He had always been an actor uncommonly comfortable with silence, imbued with the screen actor’s greatest gift: his face registered thought on camera. Orson Welles once explained to Peter Bogdanovich that while Cooper knew nothing of craft, he simply showed up on camera. On the set, Welles explained, Cooper seemed to be doing nothing. Once his performance was projected onscreen, however, it turned out the camera had caught some magic not visible to the naked eye. By the time he made Man of the West, Cooper was nearly at the end of his life. He had pretty much created the Western hero with his performance in The Virginian in 1929, helped Capra define the Everyman in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe (the director once said, “Gary Cooper just looks like America to me”), helped create the screwball comedy with Lubitsch in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, was Hollywood’s biggest male star in the forties, and gave his iconic performance as the beleaguered lawman in Zinnemann’s High Noon in 1952. His career was a towering body of work, and Man of the West is probably the best performance he ever gave. Watch him at the beginning, affable but withdrawn from the other characters, then watch his worry deepen, his inwardness turning dark as the film progresses. This is film acting of the highest caliber.

Cooper has long been one of my favorite actors, up there with Bogart and Mitchum, but he’s something else: he’s my favorite cowboy, more sensitive than Wayne but less neurotic than Stewart. With this film, Anthony Mann and Reginald Rose gave him one last great cowboy part to play.