Edward A. Grainger on Wyatt Earp

Western powerhouse Edward A. Grainger, aka David Cranmer, has a new piece over at Criminal Element called "All My Earps: The Many Film Faces Of Wyatt Earp." It's a smart, idiosyncratic overview of perhaps the most famous lawman of the old west. 

I differ on only a couple of points on the list. First, I've never been a big fan of TOMBSTONE. Despite the almost universally high regard in which that film is held, it's always left me a little cold. (I've always preferred the widely derided Costner/Quaid epic WYATT EARP which was released around the same time.) And I'm a far bigger fan of MY DARLING CLEMENTINE--which is on my shortlist of favorite John Ford movies--than Cranmer appears to be.

But disagreeing on the finer points of these things is half the fun. Check out Cranmer's list. Then go check out some Earp flicks.

Monument Valley

Check out my new essay about visiting Monument Valley, Utah.

Directed By John Ford (1971/2006)

I want to begin this look at Peter Bogdanovich's excellent reworking of his 1971 documentary DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD with a grim observation followed by an even more despairing prediction. The observation: John Ford's reputation has been greatly diminished by the passage of time. The prediction: I don't think it's coming back.

One of the interesting oversights of Bogdanovich's fascinating documentary is its failure to deal with the reality that for new generations of filmmakers John Ford is more of a historical footnote than an inspiration. The Western genre--once the unquestionable champ of the box office--is all but washed up, replaced by science fiction. The myth of the American frontier has been replaced by the superhero narrative and the space opera. With the Western goes much of Ford's appeal to new audiences.

Watching DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD you wouldn't know that his reputation, and the future of his work, stands in such peril. Bogdanovich originally made the film in 1971 when a generation of up and coming directors (including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and, of course, Bogdanovich himself) considered Ford to be the grand master of American films. The new reworking of the film mixes new interviews with Scorsese, Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, and Walter Hill along with older interviews with John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Jimmy Stewart.

If that description makes the film sound like a glorified DVD extra (like the excruciatingly fawning "documentary" that accompanied the DVD of THE SEARCHERS) it shouldn't. Bogdanovich has made a real documentary, one of the best I've seen in fact, on the art of directing film. He avoids the usual talking head platitudes and focuses instead on the creation of scenes, such as a riverside dialog scene between Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark in TWO RODE TOGETHER. He includes Spielberg's funny anecdote of meeting Ford and receiving a gruff lesson in how to frame a shot. Ford's advice to the young director about where to put the horizon is unromantic, practical, and brilliant.

As good as the material on directing is, the material on Ford the man is just as interesting. Something about Ford that is easily overlooked given his stoic reputation is that he was, in many ways, a very weird guy. He dressed like a bum, walked around chewing a handkerchief, and picked out random people for vicious public humiliations. This film gives you a sense of the man's oddness. And while several Ford biographies over the years have reported an affair between the director and Katherine Hepburn, Bogdanovich provides a remarkable artifact: a piece of audio accidentally recorded between Ford and Hepburn in private during their last meeting. You almost feel wrong listening to something so obviously personal.

Bogdanovich has long been a personal favorite of mine. THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, WHAT'S UP, DOC? and SAINT JACK are three tremendous films, and PAPER MOON is, frankly, one of great joys of my movie-watching life. It's comfort food, a film I can keep going back to, again and again, like TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, NOTORIOUS, THE TRIAL, or OUT OF THE PAST. Bogdanovich was right to go back and rework his earlier version of DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD--though I wish the two films would come packaged together. We can be happy we have this look at Ford's career.

Which of course brings us back to the man and his movies. One thing Bogdanovich's film makes clear is that Ford was a master of the movie visual. His images pop with vitality, even though he rarely moved his camera unnecessarily. I had always considered Ford a master craftsman, but I didn't really appreciate his direction until I saw STAGECOACH and THE SEARCHERS at the Film Forum in New York a few years ago. You simply have to see Ford's films on the big screen. He was thinking in terms far, far bigger than a television screen. Monument Valley looks pretty on TV, but on the big screen, in THE SEARCHERS, it becomes a barren landscape of mausoleums, the great emptiness swallowing the puny echo of gunshots. Human emotions, so hot and uncontrollable, are ultimately placed into a historical framework that renders them tragic in their uselessness.

So, yes, Ford was a great director, but he was a far more flawed director than Bogdanovich's documentary would seem to indicate. He was an unabashed militarist for one thing, and his films--with some notable exceptions--undeniably glorify combat and war. His treatment of Native peoples is, by and large, pretty terrible. Native Americans in Ford's films come in three varieties a) inhuman targets, b) comic simpletons, or c) noble savages. His one attempt to deal with them as people--CHEYENNE AUTUMN--is a few days late and quite a few dollars short. Moreover, Ford was a sentimentalist. Whitewashing violence and then doting on virginal mother figures, Ford can be, in the worst sense of the word, archaic. After all, it's a good thing that films seldom treat war like a knee-slappin good time anymore. And it's a good thing when films give women more to do than keep the homes fires burning while the boys go out and booze and bond. John Ford was a director of massive, undeniable skill. His eye for composition was impeccable. He gave us moments and movies that should be seen and treasured. But his work is aging, aging faster than the work of Welles or Hitchcock or Hawks, because it has a fidelity to a discredited myth. We've moved on in many ways, leaving much of Ford's life's labors to sit in the sun like the spires of Monument Valley.

***

Directed By John Ford is available on Netflix.

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Here's a brief clip from the film. I don't know why there are subtitles in the clip. Subtitles don't appear on the DVD version.

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I've written briefly about Ford and The Searchers before.

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Here's an overview of Ford's career at Senses Of Cinema. They have have a nice career overview of Bogdanovich as well.

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.

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*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.

Talking During The Movie

Unless you live in a big city with access to a good repertory theater, or you are independently wealthy, you probably experience most older films (and many newer films) for the first time on DVD. This presents all manner of problems, of course. For most of cinema history, movies were specifically created to be projected on a huge screen in the dark. To watch them on the small screen, or on a computer, is a fundamentally misleading way to experience the intentions of the filmmakers.

But this isn't a lamentation about the loss of the romantic culture of arthouse theaters. You gotta work with what you got, and I've seen more great movies on DVD than on big screens. The quality of DVDs vary, of course, but for the hardcore movie geeks the DVD offers one exceptional benefit: the commentary track.

Now, I'm guessing most hardcore movie geeks already like commentaries, but I know that many people (especially casual movie fans) are less inclined to sit and listen to people talking about a movie.

In the right hands, however, the commentary isn't simply an addendum to a DVD package, it provides an entirely separate experience involving the film. I once heard Christopher Hitchens say that you never read the same book twice because you are always different when you come back to the text. This is doubly true of the DVD commentary. The commentary track makes you not only watch the film again, it gives you a guide who directs your eye or distracts your attention at any given moment. The film ceases to affect you as a story and becomes instead an object of study. It's the difference between reading a book on your couch and studying the book in class with a teacher. If the home viewing experience robs us of the communal enjoyment of watching a film with other people, the commentary, if done well, can give us an experience quite unlike any we're likely to have at a theater.

Of course, as with the picture itself, quality varies. There are certain things of which to be leery when it comes to commentaries:

1. Actors. I love actors as much as the next geek. I fall in love, hard, with actors and actresses. I see them in my dreams at night. But they rarely add much to a discussion of a film's qualities. There are exceptions to this: Willem Defoe adds interesting insights to The Last Temptation Of Christ, and Brad Pitt is straight up funny on Ocean's Eleven. Most actors, however, just don't have much to say.

2. A crowd of commentators. When you see that a commentary track has twelve people listed, it usually means that you're going to have to endure some banal anecdotes from the technical folks on the crew. I've never heard a sound editor add anything to a discussion of a film. I'm not saying these people aren't important; I'm saying they're dull. Moreover, they are usually telling you something you don't care about. On the commentary for Castaway, for instance, a sound guy talks over the reconciliation scene between Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt. It's a fine scene, delicately written, directed and acted--and the commentary track is literally a monologue about the level of hum coming from the refrigerator. Another example of overkill is LA Confidential. There's no good reason they shouldn't have simply let Ellroy and Hanson do the whole thing.

3. The brilliant but clueless academic. I love Peter Cowie's writing on the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, but his commentaries for the director's films usually involve him describing what's happening onscreen.

4. Restorationists. Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is one of the two or three best movies I've ever seen, but the commentary for the DVD is taken up with a discussion of the restoration process. Don't get me wrong, these guys are heroes. But I want to hear a discussion of the movie itself, not a discussion of how dirt is removed from celluloid.

Having sent up those white flags, here are a few of my favorite commentaries:

Crime Wave: James Ellroy and Eddie Muller watch the great De Toth noir together. Muller knows more about noir than anyone alive and Ellroy is Ellroy--profane, funny and brilliant. After listening to them talk about this movie, you'll want to go out drinking with these guys.

Eddie Muller is, in fact, the best man around talking about noir. If you see his name on a commentary track, it'll be worth a listen. Even when he's watching a stinker like The Racket, he's a wealth of information. He's also, importantly, an affable and lively guide. His commentary on Wise's Born To Kill is splendid--and his story about almost being decked by an elderly-but-still-crazy Lawrence Tierney is priceless. See also: Somewhere In The Night and Where The Sidewalk Ends.

Citizen Kane: Roger Ebert is another tour guide who is a winning combination of affability and knowledge. Citizen Kane is the rare movie which has something interesting to note every ten seconds and Ebert does a fine job of catching most of it. The DVD also has a commentary by Peter Bogdanovich which is less professorial and energetic but which has the added virtue of Bogdanovich's friendship with Welles. Ebert watches the film like an obsessed fan, and Bogdanovich watches it like a friend. See also: Ebert's track on Casablanca and Bogdanovich's track on The Lady From Shanghai.

The Last Temptation of Christ: Scorsese, Schrader, Defoe, and Jay Cocks all weigh in on their controversial adaptation of the Kazantzakis novel. The result is a fascinating discussion of the themes of the film rather than the usual here's-where-we-put-the-camera.

Boys Don't Cry: This is the single best commentary I've ever heard from a filmmaker. Director Kimberly Peirce sits down and tells you how to make a movie. She's as serious as her film, but her observations are never less than fascinating.

Blue/White/Red: Kieslowski's colors trilogy is dissected with palpable glee by the academic Annette Insdorf. Not for everyone's taste, but if you like the movies to begin with, you'll probably want to hear what Insdorf has to say.

Notorious: Marian Keene's assessment of Hitchcock's romantic masterpiece is academic. Really academic. As Oscar Wilde said, it's the kind of thing you like if you like that kind of thing. I like it, though I must say that I've always longed for the brilliant scholar Robin Wood to do a Hitchcock commentary track. As I mentioned above, Vertigo has never gotten the treatment it deserves. (To digress further: Most Hitchcock films still haven't gotten the five star treatment they deserve. The bulk of his American films appear to still be the property of Universal or the Hitchcock family or some similar controlling authority. Very nice versions of these films have been released, but these films deserve a package along the lines of the Criterion treatment. Whoever controls the Hitchcock films staring with Rope needs to realize what they've got. Go big, people. Movie geeks like me will shell out fat cash for a great package of Rear Window or Marnie or The Birds or Psycho or Vertigo. Bring on the academics and the obsessives. Pat Hitchcock seems like a very nice lady, but I don't think she has a lot to add to a discussion of her father's films.)

Some more movies in need of a good commentary track:

1. Chimes At Midnight-like many of Welles' films this is still waiting for a proper DVD release

2. The Trial-ditto

3. The Magnificent Ambersons/The Immortal Story-ditto/ditto

4. Too Late For Tears/Pitfall-both of these Lizabeth Scott masterpieces need a proper DVD release and someone knowledgeable to talk about them. Bring on Muller!

5. Detour-since this movie is in the public domain it's difficult to get a company to pony up the cash to pay for a decent treatment, but it's an irreplaceable work of art that needs to be honored. Bring on Muller!

6. The Big Sleep-this one baffles me. Everyone loves this movie. Everyone. C'mon, Warner Brothers, do it right. Bring in some Hawks experts and Bogie experts and Chandler experts.

7. High Noon-westerns often get shafted when it comes to commentaries. Right now, High Noon has a boring track featuring the aging children of the stars and crew members. Bring on the movie geeks!

8. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance-an overlooked film in many ways, this deserves the full treatment as well.

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Finally, here are some fun sites that deal with commentaries. I don't agree with everything on them, of course, but they're helpful guides:

RateThatCommentary.com

CommentaryDVD.com


Let me know if I've missed a particularly informative or entertaining commentary.

Actors In Motion: The Art Of Movement and Meaning

This morning's Washington Post has an excellent essay on Cary Grant and the art of physical movement on screen. The author, Sarah Kaufman, posits that the defining difference between new movie stars and classic movie stars is they way they move across the screen. Kaufman argues that today's movie stars don't have the graceful flow of Grant (or, one could add, the rugged integrity of Gary Cooper or the pure sexual power of Marlene Dietrich).

One aspect that Kaufman underplays in her otherwise insightful essay is the way in which modern movies restrict actors. Classic filmmakers like Howard Hawks and John Ford were interested in letting action play out in wide shots. Directors like Orson Welles, John Farrow, and Joseph H. Lewis were famous for shots that lasted five, eight, sometimes ten minutes. This allowed actors the chance to move around the space on screen, to use their entire body in performance. Today, mise en scene is largely a forgotten art. Filmmakers move their cameras in nearly every shot, they edit shots much quicker, and they rely heavily on the close-up. Watch something like The Dark Knight again and notice how short the average shot is. I don't know what to make of this exactly. I like the quick moving film if it's well done, but we lost something when filmmakers gave up on long, wide shots. For one thing, those kinds of set ups demand more out of the audience. We have more of a share in the action on screen, more responsibility to interpret meaning.

Look at an important scene from John Ford's The Searchers. After a long absence, John Wayne has come to his brother's ranch to visit. His brother's family gathers around the breakfast table to eat when a lawman played Ward Bond shows up to recruit men to investigate an Indian attack at another ranch. Wayne gets up to go. His brother's wife, Martha (Dorothy Jordan) gets his coat, stroking it gently for just a moment. Bond, drinking a cup of coffee, sees her but barely reacts. He just takes a deeper pull off his coffee. Wayne gently kisses Martha on the forehead and leaves. This is done in just three shots. What is the relationship between John Wayne and his brother's wife? What does Ward Bond infer from what he's seen? This is a magnificent scene, subtle and rich with meaning (with deeper resonance as the film progresses). Moreover, Ford trusts the viewer to read the action and interpret it. The relationship between Wane and Dorothy Jordan is never underlined in a closeup. Nor is Ward Bond's respect for the intimate and probably unconsummated passion between these two people. Through Ford's blocking--and the exquisite body control of Wayne, Jordan and Bond--we have a three-way psychological exchange full of meaning and subtext.