When Raoul Walsh remade his 1940 gangster flick HIGH SIERRA almost twenty years later as the Western COLORADO TERRITORY, he improved on the story. Today, the Western isn't as well known as the gangster story. I suspect this has everything to do with the fact that the original movie starred Humphrey Bogart, while the remake starred Joel McCrea.
Today, Bogart is one of only a handful of golden age movie stars still remembered by the public at large. We like to talk about stars as immortal figures, but the truth is that we're only now entering the second century of filmmaking and most of us have already forgotten most of the last century's biggest stars. Don't believe me? Take a poll of the people under thirty and ask them if they know who Bette Davis was. Ask them if they can name a Gary Cooper movie. Go back further. How many have any clue who Pearl White was?
This isn't a lament. Nor is it a "what's wrong with these kids these days." Movie stardom is, relatively speaking, still a new phenomenon. Maybe this is just what happens to movie stars. Nobody really gets to live forever.
Just look at Joel McCrea. This guy was an enormous movie star. Westerns, comedies, dramas--he did it all. Today, outside a few movie geeks, he's been forgotten.
But he made some great stuff. Movie buffs probably know him best for SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (a direct inspiration for O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?) and the Peckinpah Western RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. He was an easy, likable screen presence. If he wasn't as distinctive a presence as someone like John Wayne, he was in many ways a more natural actor. Even among fabled Everymen like Cooper and Stewart and Fonda, McCrea was a laidback performer. Watching him today, it's almost a wonder that he was a star in the forties. That era was full of people who filled the screen. McCrea always seems lifesized. Always and at all times, he just sorta seems like a regular guy. My theory is that audiences liked him because he seemed so much like them. He was the Harry Truman of movie stars.
COLORADO TERRITORY is one of his best films. A fast-paced story about a bank robber named Wes McQueen (McCrea) who busts out of the joint and joins up with an outlaw gang for a big train robbery, the film improves on HIGH SIERRA in a couple of important ways. For one thing, the script by the Western vet John Twist and the versatile Edmund North sidesteps the maudlin subplot that marred the gangster picture. Whereas Bogart was committing his crimes to pay for the surgery (and win the love) of a sweet young girl with a clubfoot, McCrea is in love with the selfish Julie Ann (Dorothy Malone). And while in both films the outlaw eventually falls in love with an fellow outcast like himself (Ida Lupino in the earlier picture), in this film the leading lady, Virgina Mayo's mixed race Colorado, is more proactive. She's less of a sideline spectator. No one would hold up this film as a feminist classic, but both of these changes strengthen the female characters.
The film as a whole is a stronger affair than the earlier picture. The cinematography by Sidney Hickox has lovely noir shadings, and Walsh's direction is superb. HIGH SIERRA is a good picture, but I've always thought it was overlong and its conclusion felt a little drawn out. COLORADO TERRITORY, however, moves at a good clip throughout. It also features one of the best train robberies I've ever seen. (And I've seen a lot of trains get robbed.) Moreover, the climax that unfolds in an ancient cliffside Indian village makes for a strangely haunting end to a Western.
Track down COLORADO TERRITORY. It's not as well known as the earlier film, but it's the better picture.
I had a fantastic time reading at Noir At The Bar: Los Angeles, and I'm excited as all hell to be reading at N@TB: St. Louis with the likes of Jed Ayres, J. David Osborne and the great Scott Phillips. I've never met any of these degenerates in person and I can't wait.
If you're around St. Louis on the 7th, come around and hear some great crime fiction, shake some hands, buy some books, compare some facial hair, and have what promises to be a great time.
I've been a big of fan of Jason Starr for about a decade now. To my mind, he's one of the smartest, most compelling crime writers of the last quarter century. His books HARD FEELINGS and TWISTED CITY, in particular, have had a huge influence on me. (The day I found out that my publisher had talked Starr into reading my first novel and that he had liked it enough to blurb it for me...well, that was one of my best days as a writer.)
The writer Mike Monson has a great interview with Starr up at his website. Check it out here.
Linda Darnell had one of Hollywood's most famous faces, but she also had one of its saddest stories. I have a new piece about her life and cinematic legacy in a new piece over at Criminal Element.
I have an essay up at Tor about the 25th anniversary of the landmark graphic novel V FOR VENDETTA. You can read that here.
In order to talk about ALL IS LOST, I have to talk about its ending. This isn't so much a "spoiler alert" as much as a heads up that the following is a discussion of the one aspect of the movie that is in doubt when you enter the theater. If you don't want to know what happens at the end of the film, go see the movie. Then come back here and let's talk about it.
Okay then. Let's talk about it.
What's great about this movie is that it has the strength of its convictions. The filmmakers (star Robert Redford, writer and director J.C. Chandor) set out with a startlingly pure idea for a motion picture: a man on a sinking boat tries to stay alive. They stay locked into this idea with admirable focus. In some respects, ALL IS LOST harkens back to both Hitchcock's idea of "pure cinema" and, even earlier, the era of silent filmmaking. Aside for a brief monologue at the top and some cries for help or curses in the middle, the film simply observes Redford's unnamed protagonist going about his labors. We don't know who he is or why he's on the ocean by himself. Indeed, aside from a general sense of his doggedness and calm in the face of danger, we know nothing about his personality. He is a man on a sinking boat who is trying to stay alive.
As I think back about the movie, I'm left wondering what to make of it. It's engaging to be sure--there's some kind of primal thrill to watching a human being labor to survive. It's a truly existential film. That's an overused word these days, but it applies here with stark precision.
Yet beyond that--beyond the experience of the thing in the moment--I'm unsure what ALL IS LOST is trying to say. In the absence of normal signifiers of meaning (plot, characters, dialog) we're left, it seems to me, with two things: the performance of Redford, and the arc of the story--i.e. the ending.
On the first point, this is where I have to admit that I've never been a Redford fan. That's not to say that I don't like him. That's not to say anything bad about him, in fact. I've just never developed that attachment to him that one develops for certain actors. This adversely affects my viewing of the movie. In such a stripped down film, the actor's symbolic weight (his meaning as a film object) takes on outsized proportions. I think I know, in the abstract, what Redford symbolizes in cinema--but he's just never really symbolized that to me. If Harrison Ford had been on that sinking boat, for instance, I would doubtless have a different view of the film. I just can't read Redford. I don't read emotion into his reserve. He certainly gives a good performance here; it's simply not one that resonated with me, personally.
What that leaves is the ending of the film. Because you've seen it, you know that he is rescued at the last second. All, it turns out, is not lost. What does this mean? Is it a statement of faith? Of faith in what? God? Redford's character, notably, does not pray. Just at the level of realism, this seems odd to me. I'm going to hazard a guess that most people, faced with such perilous circumstances, might well cry out for help to whatever notion of god was at hand. Perhaps the character is an atheist. Fair enough, but if so we are talking about one seriously committed rationalist--one who, even at extremity's edge, does not cry out in any kind of fear, anger, or pleading. I suspect that's a small slice of humanity.
From a storytelling point of view, the argument against having Redford beseech some higher power might well be that his rescue could then be interpreted as a miracle. In the absence of a miracle, his rescue is either a) an ironic twist--so that doomed by chance, he is also saved by chance, b) an acknowledgement that even the most dedicated sad-ending-lovers among us do not want to see him struggle to survive for the better part of two hours only to die at the end, or c) a humanist statement of stunning banality.
We can dispense with option c) pretty quickly. Though the movie's promotional materials encourage us to "never give up" the movie itself makes no such argument. Redford does give up at the end. His salvation does not come from any triumph of the human spirit.
Option b) is simply true--at least it was for me. And I'm a guy who's dedicated his life to noir; I love me some downbeat endings. But at the moment in this film where it looked pretty certain that Redford would die and the credits would roll, I felt apprehension. I don't know how I would feel if he had died. I wanted to see him live. It's human nature. Deep down, we long to see human survival. The cosmic irony, of course, is that, in the end, we all die. A movie with a happy ending is just a movie that ends early.
This leaves us with option a), which seems to me, on reflection, to be the real meaning of the picture. Redford's survival at the end is deeply ironic--and I don't mean "ironic" in any sense to mean cheap or cheeky. I mean that the film is about a man's deliberate, desperate attempts to survive the randomness of the universe. Meaning is found in his striving. His survival at the end, like the accident that initiates this drama, is meaningless.
ALL IS LOST wasn't exactly the movie I thought I was going to see when I walked in theater, but as I think back on it, maybe that's a good thing. It lingers in the mind. It's kept me thinking now for hours. The more I reflect on it, the more I like it.
I'm excited to announce that this fall will see the release of my novella SAINT HOMICIDE from Crime Factory Publications.
More information to come!
