February 2020 – Page 12 – R. Emmet Sweeney

DREAMLIFE: SHATTERED IMAGE (1998)

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August 25 2015

It has been four years since the Chilean director/mesmerist Raul Ruiz left this mortal coil, but it will take eternities to assess his work, comprising over one hundred features and shorts of labyrinthine, shape-shifting narratives. Of all of his oddball projects Shattered Image (1998) might be the oddest. It was his first film made with American producers, a dreamlike erotic thriller starring William Baldwin and Anne Parillaud (playing off her La Femme Nikita image). The production, which shot in Vancouver and Jamaica, was reportedly fraught, with Ruiz and DP Robby Muller clashing with the rest of the crew, who were used to the formula of TV movie productions. The resulting film is a curious mix of Ruiz-ian reverie and the gauzy softcore sleaze you’d find on late night Cinemax. Though not a movie with the same oneiric pull as Ruiz’s City of Pirates (1983), it remains stubbornly representative of his work, combining as it does the pulp narratives he loved as a child with the dream logic central to all of his films. As J. Hoberman wrote upon its opening in the prestige picture season of 1998 (against A Bug’s Life and the Psycho remake), “part of the movie’s pleasure is imagining an entire multiplex audience looking around at each other and wondering, “What the f**k?”

Shattered Image was a Seven Arts/Schroeder Hoffmann production, in association with Fireworks Entertainment. Thirteen producers are credited on the project, including director Barbet Schroeder. In short, it was a complicated project to get made, and there were a whole raft of interests that Ruiz had to satisfy. In an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum Ruiz describes it as, “this American accident, Shattered Image, I fought to make, and I now have a film about what it means to make a film in America — why American movies are the way they are.” So, per the Jacques Rivette line, he considers the film a documentary of its own making, reflective of the limitations imposed on him by the lower reaches of the Hollywood production chain. In his book Poetics of Cinema Ruiz had described the Hollywood narrative system as premised on what he coined to be “central conflict theory”, in short, “someone wants something and someone else doesn’t want them to have it. From this point on […] all the elements of the story are arranged around this central conflict”. Ruiz was clearly frustrated by the experience, but if someone wanted to pick a Hollywood film of 1998 that represented central conflict theory, Shattered Image would be at the bottom of the list. It remains, miraculously, a Ruiz film through and through.

The script was written by Duane Poole, though I would have thought it a Ruiz pseudonym if not for Poole’s lengthy track record, including two other TV movies in 1998: I’ve Been Waiting For You and I Married a Monster. The dual narrative follows two Anne Parillauds, both named Jessie. The first is an ascetic assassin hired to kill the lightly tousled blackmailer Brian (William Baldwin), and she tries to fulfill her assignment despite her growing attraction to him. The second Jessie is on a honeymoon in Jamaica as Brian’s wife, though she soon suspects he is trying to kill her. The assassin dreams the story of the newlywed, and the newlywed dreams the story of the assassin. Both believe their life to be “real” and the other’s a figment of their unconscious. Ruiz leaves the truth opaque, instead preferring to run through a series of paranoid plots as if Jessie were simply at home flipping TV channels, projecting herself into every story on screen. She is an action star, a scream queen, a voracious lover, a chaste wife, a comatose depressive and a rape-revenge killer. As it ends up Jessie doesn’t even know what’s real or fake, she is as unknowable to herself as she is to us, just a ghost in a mirror grasping for a form she may never discover, caught in an endless narrative loop.

Anne Parrillaud is a sleek, mysterious presence, while Baldwin seems adrift, a cardboard cutout of sub-Keanu mumblings. His struggle, his failure to tap into the Ruiz-verse lends the film a direct-to-video stiffness, as if he was reading the script phonetically. He is most effective as a visual – and he is most often the subject of her gaze. The morning after Assassin Jessie sleeps with Brian, she gifts him with the kiss off: “You’re not the reason I couldn’t care less about you.” He is an absence that she continually cycles around, a void she is tempted to disappear into. His embrace for both Jessies means a different kind of death.

Though Ruiz was restrained by the limitations of his crew, there are still some Ruizian flourishes, including diopter shots and those constructed from impossible angles. Brian’s wife hires Assassin Jessie to kill Brian, and in this sequence Ruiz whips out the diopter, joining two shots into one to create the illusion of extreme focus shifts. In one shot-countershot, we see Jessie’s hand clutching a cigarette, with the wife in the background – then a cut to Jessie putting the cig in her mouth, with the wife’s lips seeming to yearn for that same cigarette on the right of the screen. These impossible perspectives seem to combine Jessie and the wife into one person – and Jessie will soon take on the role of vengeful spouse. Another Ruiz specialty is the impossible angle. In City of Pirates there is one from inside a man’s mouth – here it is less extravagant, but a shot from underneath a cup of tea peers up at Newlywed Jessie as if through an aquarium (the site of Assassin Jessie’s first tryst with Brian). Then there is the disorientingly surreal sequence where Newlywed Jessie wanders lost into the Jamaican woods and stumbles into an abandoned home overrun with crabs, ending up dangling of a cliff, like the moment in dream right before you wake up. Instead of wakefulness, she gets Brian helping her up off the precipice. But even with these flourishes, it is one of his more “traditional” looking features. Ruiz explained why to Rosenbaum:

The idea that I decided where to put the camera was new to them. The editor was the director, and not the cameraman. It seems to me most were coming from TV. Normally, the director does nothing, as the camera is placed by the cameraman, and the director looks when everything is ready, and then the actors are directed by the coach. There is no connection, and you are supposed to cover the scene. I was always arguing with the script girl, who said I didn’t cover the scene. And people would say where is the [covering shot, where is] the master shot? This was a film about dreams, and there were two dreams, so it was only mental images, and once you make an establishing shot you are disturbing the oneiric feeling. This is easy to understand. And they understood, of course, but they were still disturbed by the idea that there was no master shot or establishing shot. The idea that you had to convince people to do this and not that was new to me, and it was completely normal for an Anglo-Saxon mentality that you have to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing.

For Ruiz, all the explaining that needs doing is in the film itself. In watching Shattered Image, I didn’t glean any answers, but can feel its mysteries deepening around me as I type.

WAY DOWN EAST: HOUSE OF BAMBOO (1955)

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August 18, 2015

For his last film under contract at Twentieth Century-Fox, Sam Fuller directed House of Bamboo (1955), a film noir relocated to Japan. Daryl Zanuck took Harry Kleiner’s screenplay for The Street With No Name (’48) and dropped it in Fuller’s lap, inviting him to remake it on location in Tokyo. Shot in CinemaScope and Deluxe color, it is Fuller’s most beautiful film, and the new Blu-ray from Twilight Time (available for purchase at Screen Archives) looks flawless. Clearly inspired by his surroundings, and backed by an A-picture budget, Fuller works variations on the slashing lines of slatted bamboo curtains, sliding doors, and the increasingly vertical Tokyo cityscape, ending in a justifiably famous rooftop amusement park ride, a deadly trip around Saturn’s rings.

Fox promoted House of Bamboo as the first Hollywood feature shot in Japan, but that was all just ballyhoo. In 1951 RKO produced their anti-commie drama Tokyo File 212 on location, complete with approval from Douglas MacArthur, who was then Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan. Four years later the pressure to produce propaganda was lessened, and Fuller sneaks some subversive elements into the film’s double-agent drama. The film follows a military cop (Robert Stack) who goes undercover, using the identity of the dishonorably discharged Eddie Spanier. As Spanier, he worms his way into a growing Tokyo gang led by Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), who use a string of pachinko parlors as a front. Spanier gets close with Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), whose husband was a member of Dawson’s crew until he was killed in a heist-gone-wrong. Together they help destabilize Dawson’s group from within, with assists handed out by the Japanese police’s Inspector Kito (Sessue Hayakawa, the first Asian star in Hollywood – he starred in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat in 1915) and the American Captain Hanson (Brad Dexter).

Fuller describes his additions to the script: “I moved the entire shebang to Tokyo, added stuff about Japanese contemporary life, threw in some sexual exploitation and interracial romance, and then, for some unexpected pizzazz, wrote a violent love scene between two hardened criminals.” The Dawson character is in a veiled relationship with his top lieutenant Griff, whom he calls “Ichiban”. Their bond is destroyed by the arrival of the cute Spanier, who Dawson begins to favor. At a post-heist party, Dawson seats Spanier next to him, which causes Griff to to have a drunken blow-up at his descending rank. Essentially Griff is upset at where Dawson positions him in the film’s mise-en-scene. This leads to the “violent love scene” to which Fuller refers, a brilliantly designed assassination in which a bathtub is plugged full of holes, life draining out along with the water. It plays as a scorned lover revenge killing, filled with rage and tenderness.

The pecking order of Dawson’s gang is established introductory scene in the movie. While trying to prove his underworld bona fides, Spanier attempts to shakedown Tokyo pachinko parlors for protection money. On his second attempt he is coldcocked by Griff (Cameron Mitchell), crashes through a sliding door and into a backroom where Dawson’s crew is arranged in a semicircle around him, with Robert Ryan seated king-like on a riser in the center. This sequence not only establishes the power structure of Dawson’s crew – the farther you radiate out from the center, the weaker the hold – but it establishes Japan as a kind of Russian nesting doll of facades. As each character is hiding secret identities and desires, so the city itself has rooms within rooms, frames within frames.

One thing Fuller hid from view was the resentment the Japanese people had towards the continuing American presence in their country, and the wide latitude granted to them in the Security Treaty signed in 1951. The relationship between the Japanese and U.S. military police is depicted as open and honest, as Inspector Kito and Captain Hanson exchange information freely in their investigation into Dawson’s gang. But while Fuller was filming, protesters would gather and “chanted anti-American slogans, trying to ruin the scene as best they could.” Fuller intended to use them as background footage – but once DP Joe MacDonald turned the camera on them, they dispersed, likely not wanting to have their faces caught on film.

Traversing these labyrinthine spaces are Robert Stack and Robert Ryan. Fuller claims he wanted Gary Cooper for the Spanier role, but realized that location shooting would be impossible with such a huge star – any street shooting would be immediately mobbed by fans. So instead he went with Stack, who was recommended to him by his friend Budd Boetticher, for whom Stack starred in Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). Stack brings a wiry, wary quality to the role, a hopped up paranoia that works well in this film of double and triple crosses. Robert Ryan was recommended by producer Buddy Adler, and his lank, louche performance is as relaxed as Stack’s is wound up. They are matched opposites who end up chasing each other through the modernizing Tokyo streets. What starts at a luxe pearl dealership ends at the elaborate rooftop playground at the Matsuma department store. Fuller and MacDonald have fun with the possibilities, at one point sticking the camera on a children’s train ride, following Dawson as he stumbles through the crowd. All the dissembling and hiding in cataracts of secret rooms ends on an amusement park ride, a replica of Saturn with rotating rings. Dawson is chased up there like a treed cat, though with the advantage of having a gun and knowing how to use it. The ride looks rusty and is set at an angle, so the camera takes a canted look at the final movement, and it seems Stack, Ryan and the cameraman are in as much danger as Dawson and Spanier. But they complete the precipitous sequence, and Dawson is left dangling, having run out of hiding places.

INVISIBLE INTRUDER: THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN (1960)

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August 11, 2015

In April of 1959 Edgar G. Ulmer was given an impossible task. Toiling in Dallas for Miller Consolidated Pictures, a short-lived B-picture studio, he was assigned to shoot two features in eleven days. These turned into Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) and The Amazing Transparent Man (1960). Most of the limited time and money was spent on Beyond, since its leap into the future required more elaborate set design and a larger cast. What remained for him to use for The Amazing Transparent Man was a house on a hill, five actors, and an improbable tale of a mad Major experimenting with nuclear radiation to create an army of invisible warriors. From these meager resources Ulmer spun a dark, despairing tale of Atomic Age breakdown. Each character nurses a private tragedy, egged onward to self-annihilation. For most of its life the film has been an object of scorn — it was the subject of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode — but seeing a 16mm print projected at Anthology Film Archives (in their series on American International Pictures) was something of a revelation.

Miller Consolidated Pictures, led by John Miller, Mike Miller and Robert Madden, was a fly by night operation targeting the seedier side of the B-picture market, hiring exploitation publicity legend Kroger Babb as Vice President. He likely came up with the prime ballyhoo on the poster about how the Transparent Man will “appear invisibly IN PERSON at every performance.” The Amazing Transparent Man could be included in Anthology’s AIP series because Miller Consolidated Pictures (MCP) went belly up soon after the film was given a limited release in 1960, finishing its run with three films to its name (Date With Death (’59) and the two Ulmers). AIP snapped up the rights to Amazing Transparent Man and gave it a national rollout in 1961 as the top half of a double bill with the British Godzilla knockoff GORGO. In the dual review in the New York Times Howard Thompson raved about GORGO (“the best outright monster shocker since King Kong“), leaving only one withering sentence for the Ulmer film: “The word for The Amazing Transparent Man is pitiful.”

This “pitiful” production seemed doomed from the start. Edgar Ulmer’s daughter Arianne acted in Beyond the Time Barrier, but bailed before shooting on the Transparent Man was completed (Ulmer was working on both simultaneously). “The reason I left”, she recalled to Tom Weaver (Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks), “was because the two-story motel where the whole crew was living burned to the ground.” Hence the reason each actor seems so hollowed out and exhausted. The pulpy script was by Jack Lewis, a former Marine and founder of Gun World magazine who self-described as a “reporter, drunk, editor and hobo.” Whether he was drunk or vagrant during his creation of the script is unknown, but Lewis was mainly a writer of Westerns, with Transparent Man the only science-fiction yarn he ever filmed.

Major Paul Krenner (James Griffith) and Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman (Spy Smasher), in her final film) help ace safecracker Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) bust out of prison. In return for his freedom, the Major wants Faust to break into a government facility to steal fissile materials. This will allow Dr. Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault) to continue his invisibility experiments, which has thus far only successfully been executed on guinea pigs. With no way out, Faust agrees to the deal, becoming Ulof’s first human trial – only a transparent man could break into the vault containing nuclear material. The Major’s goal is to create an entire army of invisible men, but Faust isn’t keen on his crackpot scheme, and instead goes into business on his own, convincing Laura to help him rob a bank and flee Krenner’s control. But the invisibility treatment starts to wear of, he is identified, and everyone’s plans begin to crumble. As everyone scrambles to save their lives, Ulof’s lab becomes a ticking time bomb.

Invisible man stories are creative opportunities for the budget-minded director (see also: Edward L. Cahn’s Invisible Invaders), because you can shoot an empty room and the viewer’s mind creates the illusion of action. Ulmer takes advantage of this throughout, training his camera on nothing. Bare tables and floors become axes of tension, and the director relies on his actors as reactors, their expressions investing the void with dread. Lewis’s script posits the past as another void, with each character wishing for it to disappear. Dr. Peter Ulof, a European refugee, confesses to Faust that he was forced to become a doctor for the Nazis, performing experiments on hooded prisoners in concentration camps. Each patient was anonymous, so Ulof could not tell that one of his “patients” was his own wife, who died under his hand on the operating table. Ulof has been forced to work for Krenner because his daughter Maria is being held hostage, and if he quits, she dies. Krenner is also manipulating one of his guards, Julian (Red Morgan), by convincing him his son has been jailed in Europe, and that Krenner can set him free (this turns out to be a lie). Laura’s motivation is simply money and power, and she gravitates to Faust’s plan for a quick score at the local bank. Though he is named Faust, the deal he makes with Krenner is not a selling of a soul, for Faust has none. He’s a craven criminal with nothing but the basest self-interest.

In one of the film’s most elaborate optical effects, Faust’s body starts reappearing during the bank robbery, his head popping back into view, and then his legs, before his whole body reconstitutes itself. He is disappointed when he gets his body back – the only happiness in the film appears in Faust’s voice when he is invisible, when he can revel in his insubstantiality. But being cured of his visibility is going to kill him – the doc gives him only a few weeks to live. Characters don’t die in The Amazing Transparent Man, though, they just to crumple and dissipate. When Julian is informed that his son was dead, he slumps down onto a chair and simply shuts down. He is never seen or heard from again, as if the illusion of his son’s existence was the only thing tying him to this earthly plane. The ending is suitably apocalyptic, bringing the atom bomb to middle America. This catastrophic event is something the characters seem to yearn for, to have their individual cells fission along with the nuclear material, to wholly disappear into the bright, white light.

HYPER HYPOCHONDIRA: FEEL MY PULSE (1928)

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August 4, 2015

Bebe Daniels was a born performer. She debuted on film at the age of nine as Dorothy Gale in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910, a Selig Polyscope short), and went on to a long and varied career, from co-starring in Harold Lloyd comedy shorts to headlining Cecil B. Demille bodice rippers, before settling in England as a popular radio personality. In 1928 she was in the middle of an interesting run at Paramount/Famous Players Lasky, making subversive comedies in which she was taking on traditionally male roles (as Fritzi Kramer has noted at Movies Silently). She was the lead in Miss Brewster’s Millions (1926), re-booting the George Barr McCutcheon novel with a female lead, a Zorro-figure in Senorita (1927), and takes on a Valentino-esque persona in She’s a Sheik (1927). In 1928 the cast of She’s a Sheik (Daniels, Richard Arlen, and William Powell) was brought back together for Feel My Pulse (1928), a madcap hypochondriac comedy directed by the up and coming Gregory La Cava. La Cava was a cartoonist who was hired by William Randolph Hearst’s International Film Service to oversee their animations. After that business went kaput, he entered live action two-reelers and features, finally making his way to Bebe Daniels and Feel My Pulse. Anthology Film Archives recently screened a beautiful print preserved by the Library of Congress, which is 63 minutes of gags, a showcase for Daniels’ effervescent personality and La Cava’s comic strip punchlines.

The story is prime nonsense. Barbara Manning (Daniels) is the heir to a family fortune, but her late, wildly eccentric father stipulated in his will that she be kept in a germ-free environment until she was 21. Her mild-mannered Uncle Edgar (George Irving) is to watch over her until that day. As the movie begins, Barbara could be knocked over by a feather, constantly ministered to by a flock of nurses. At the slightest cough she needs to lubricate her larynx with various tonics. But the destined birthday is around the corner, at which point her Texan Uncle Wilberforce (Melbourne MacDowell) is to take over the guardianship. Wilberforce is a cigar chomping Yosemite Sam type who tries to shock Barbara out of her passivity by shooting off his revolver into the ceiling. In order to escape this uncouth germ carrier, Barbara decides to decamp to an island sanitarium that is to be part of her inheritance. But the nuthouse has been taken over by a gang of rum runners led by Todd (William Powell) and his new protege Wallace Roberts (Richard Arlen). They spend their days battling hijackers and shuffling casks of booze in and out of the former rest home. Wanting to keep their operation a secret from Barbara, they pretend to be running the sanitarium, with Todd the head doctor and the other gang members acting as patients. The absurdities build up as they desperately keep their illegal secret, and as Barbara hides out from her Uncle.

The basic setup for Daniels’ performance is that Barbara believes herself to be a delicate flower, when in reality she has a physical prowess that reveals itself in moments of high stress. When Wilberforce shoots off his revolvers, she leaps to the ground with alacrity, and when her medicines fall out of a speeding car, she hurls herself down to the road and chases after them with the spring of an Olympic vaulter. She doesn’t know the power of her own body, or how to relate to the world outside. Most of the gags are built off of her alienation from the world. She doesn’t know how cars work, and drinks rum as if it were a new healing tonic. One of the funniest bits involves her sitting with an old drunk, trading belts of hooch, while they mangle the lyrics to “Sweet Adeline” (i.e. “You are the hower of my flart”).

While at first Todd seems like a lovable kind of criminal, he reveals himself to be a ruthless and abusive operator. William Powell, in a fetching curly moptop and bushy ‘stache, uses his natural charisma to hide the grim calculus going on inside his head. On one late night, under the ruse of a regular checkup of Barbara’s health, he proves himself to be a predator, Powell raising his lips to reveal his incisors in a vulture-like grin. Barbara has not yet recognized her own physical strength, so she lets Wallace bail her out of that threatening situation. Wallace is the sympathetic rum runner, with a gentle All-American corn-fed handsomeness (he has a Tom Brady thing going on).

The film builds to a fever pitch when hijackers attack the sanitarium just as Barbara realizes the truth about her hosts. An enormous brawl of non-stop pratfalls erupts, as if the Keystone Kops were drafted into Upstate New York bootlegging wars. It is here, finally, where the body and mind of Barbara align, and she begins to realize her own power. In the aftermath of the fight, Barbara is being chased by the remnants of Todd’s gang, whereupon she flips out. Her body turns into a weapon, a flailing, whirling dervish of pain that knocks out the entire rum gang. She knocks them out with their own barrels of booze, as well as a handy bottle of chloroform she finds on a shelf. In the most brilliant gag in the film, she smashes the chloroform on Todd’s head, and La Cava uses extreme slow-motion to represent the gang’s slow descent into oblivion. It is so slow that is acts as an analytic breakdown of a pratfall, as each man collapses in a ballet of unconsciousness. One man does a header towards the camera, while Powell does a controlled, slow slide down, suave even while blacked out.

Barbara’s Uncles then come rumbling up the stairs with some cops, only to encounter Barbara’s still roiling defense mechanisms. After she has expended her energies smashing a few officers, the film gets down to business of wrapping up the Barbara-Wallace romance and send the audience home happy (which I most certainly was). What would make me happier was greater access to Bebe Daniels’ silents. Also in 1928 she acted in The Fifty-Fifty Girl, which the New York Times wrote involved a man and woman jointly owning a mine, and as “Kathleen has ideas about the equality of woman with man, so our two friends make an agreement that she is to do the leading, he is to follow with all ‘the courtesies’ ordinarily given to the fairer sex.” Though this feature is said to end with the man regaining control, Bebe Daniels is clearly cultivating an image of New Womanhood in this period, testing boundaries before bowing to the conventions of the period. Along with Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks, Daniels was redefining the image of women onscreen in the 1920s.

UGLY AMERICAN: RUN OF THE ARROW (1957)

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July 28, 2015

In the summer of 1956, Sam Fuller took a 50% stake in Globe Enterprises, an independent production company that would strike deals with RKO, Twentieth-Century Fox, and Columbia for financing and distribution. He received creative control over his projects, and though this setup only lasted through 1961, he made six strong films with Globe: Run of the Arrow, China Gate, Forty Guns, Verboten!, The Crimson Kimono, and Underworld U.S.A. His first Globe production, Run of the Arrow (’57), is now available on a long-overdue DVD from the Warner Archive, and reflects the unusual freedom Fuller secured himself in this period. It is a prickly, jumpy Western in which a post-Civil War Confederate loyalist named O’Meara (Rod Steiger) joins the Sioux in order to fight against the United States. It depicts America as a land of perpetual warfare, one in which race and cultural hatreds are reconfigured to justify the current battle, whether without or within. It is a film of jagged rhythms, its chase scenes broken into extreme long shots and close-ups, which are then followed by minutes-long takes of two-shot conversations. At no point does one feel settled or comfortable regarding a character’s motivations or their position in space, and that is how Fuller wanted it.

In the June 24, 1956 issue of the New York Times, Sam Fuller talked to Oscar Godbout about his new production, then called “Arrow”: “This is a post-Civil War frontier story that will contain, according to Mr. Fuller, parallels between that period and the difficult social transition now roiling the South. He will be disappointed if it does not provide thinking material for the intellectually committed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.” From the beginning Fuller conceived it as a story about Southern Whites, and their violent reactions against threats to their power. In the film O’Meara fires the last shot of the Civil War, which just misses the heart of Union Lt. Driscoll (Ralph Meeker). While his family encourages him to return home and accept the Confederate defeat, O’Meara wants to fight on. He figures the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so he heads West into Sioux territory, where he befriends the returning Indian scout Walking Coyote (Jay C. Flippen). They are captured by renegade Sioux warrior Crazy Wolf (H.M. Wynant), and in order to avoid execution, agree to try the (invented by Fuller) “Run of the Arrow”. It is a barefooted chase where they receive a head start based on the distance of an arrow shot by the pursuers. O’Meara survives through the help of Yellow Moccasin (Sarita Montiel, who’s voice is dubbed by Angie Dickinson), the inevitably beautiful young Sioux who falls in love with him. For surviving the run, he is granted safe passage by Chief Blue Buffalo (a bronzed Charles Bronson), but instead O’Meara chooses to stay with the tribe and become a member of their society, taking Yellow Moccasin as his wife and the orphaned mute kid Silent Tongue (Billy Miller) as his son. But the U.S. Army wants to build a fort in Sioux territory, and they send Lt. Driscoll to protect U.S. interests. O’Meara is sent as the Sioux emissary, to guide Driscoll to build on neutral ground. But Driscoll is an irritable, racist warmonger, and rattles his saber until he gets the fight he was begging for.

The head of RKO, William Dozier, was an admirer of Fuller’s newspaper drama Park Row, and gave him the green light to make the project. These were the last days of RKO as a producer/distributor, and by the time Run of the Arrow was ready for release, it was Universal-International that handled it. While Fuller had control of his script, he needed Dozier’s approval for the cast. They had a stark disagreement for the lead actor. Dozier wanted Gary Cooper, while Fuller argued strenuously for the young method actor Rod Steiger. Steiger had made an impression in supporting roles in On the Waterfront and a slew of television dramas, and Fuller felt he was perfect for the part: “I need the opposite of Cooper. The character’s hateful, a misfit. I want this newcomer, Steiger. He’s got a sour face and a fat ass. He’ll look awkward, especially when he climbs up on a horse. See, my yarn’s about a sore loser, not a gallant hero” (from Fuller’s autobio, A Third Face). Dozier caved, and Steiger got his first starring role. Fuller had a tense relationship with his leading man, who, the director noted, “tended to overact”. And one’s opinion of the film can hinge on the reaction Steiger’s performance, which is mannered, mumbly and admirably off-putting.

One of the more remarkable sequences occurs about an hour in, a conversation between O’Meara and Captain Clark (Brian Keith), who is leading the Army engineers to build a new fort. In an unbroken shot that lasts 4 minutes and 25 seconds, DP Joseph Biroc captures a relatively simple two-shot in which the formerly warring duo discusses the future of their country. It begins with everyday concerns, Clark complaining about his saddle, and tracks a few feet to a rest area with covered wagons and a table. “You’re not the only Johnny Reb fighting a one-man war against the United States, you know. Some of them went down to South America.”, Clark says, as he stares down into a few coffee mugs, tossing the old brew out of a few before he finds a clean one. He sits at the right edge of the frame. O’Meara standing off to the left, claims that this part of the country isn’t part of the United States, and sits down with the words, “we had a right to fight for our rights”, while accepting a cup from Clark. The camera pushes in as O’Meara inveighs “The Union be damned, the Union be damned…we don’t like you makin’ up laws…We’ll go down like a free, White, Christian country.” Clark laughs, “Free, white and Christian, eh. Burning crosses and hiding under pillowcases and terrorizing families. Free, white and Christian!” Brian Keith delivers that devastating line with a smirk, eyeing Steiger to his right. Steiger clenches up, raises both hands to his cup and says, as if a chastened child, “I don’t know anything about that, sir.” Clark sarcastically responds with, “It’s always the other guy.”

The word “black” or “slave” is never uttered, but the righteous fire briefly dims in Steiger’s eyes, quickly acknowledging and then repressing what underlies a white Southerner’s freedom in post-Civil War America. Or a Northerner’s, for that matter. Captain Clark doesn’t last long, and Lt. Driscoll takes over. If Clark is dreaming of a better Union, Driscoll dreams only of colonization and subjugation. Every power structure in the film is split, internal battles spilling out into exterior ones. The Sioux are riven with dissension between the pragmatic Red Cloud (Frank de Kova) and the warlike Crazy Wolf, and the South has O’Meara’s mother preaching reconciliation with the North, while her son is a staunch separatist. These coalitions are repeatedly jumbled until alliances become meaningless, and all that’s left are the hatreds left undissipated by years of war and bloodshed. Fuller ends the film with the on-screen exhortation, “The end of this story can only be written by you!” Looking back at race relations in the United States in the 58 years since the film’s release, it now reads like an accusation.

MARTIAL ART: PEDICAB DRIVER AND THE GOLDEN HARVEST LIBRARY ON WARNER ARCHIVE INSTANT

February 26, 2020December 21, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

July 14, 2015

Last week Warner Archive snuck out a minor announcement with major implications. Six martial arts films from Golden Harvest studios were made available in HD on their Instant streaming service, in their original language and aspect ratios. Golden Harvest was the proving ground for Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Jet Li, producing some of the most enduring kung fu films from the 1970s through the ’90s. These days Golden Harvest has segued from production to exhibition, and their classic titles remain frustratingly hard to see in decent transfers. Warner Brothers owns the U.S. rights to part of their catalog, and the initial six titles are only the beginning. On their Twitter feed Warner Archive promised, “we’re just starting to tackle the domestically unreleased Golden Harvest library”. Available now to stream on Warner Archive Instant are: Downtown Torpedoes (1997), Big Bullet (1996) , The Blade (1995), Blade of Fury (1993), Pedicab Driver (1989) & Terracotta Warrior (1989). While many of these titles are far overdue for release on DVD and Blu-ray, the fact that WB is preparing HD masters of these films is reason for optimism. I started the month-long free trial of their Instant service to check out Sammo Hung’s Pedicab Driver, an irresistible showcase for his knockabout acrobatics that packs in a public transit war, human trafficking, and Triad gangs into its 90-odd minutes.

Golden Harvest was formed in 1970 by Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho, two former employees of the Shaw Brothers studio. Shaw Brothers was then the largest production operation in China, specializing in historical martial arts films like King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) and Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman (1967). Golden Harvest would become their main competitor, poaching director King Hu and most importantly Bruce Lee, who was on the cusp of superstardom. The gargantuan success of Lee’s The Big Boss (1971), The Chinese Connection (’72), The Way of the Dragon (’72) and Enter the Dragon (’73) secured the company’s financial future, allowing them to invest in talents like Sammo Hung. Hung came up through the brutal training of the Peking Opera, enrolling in Yu Zhanyuan’s China Drama Academy at the age of nine, studying acrobatics, martial arts, singing and dancing, along with future co-stars Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao. They endured painful tests like maintaining a handstand on a stool for one hour. Hung’s parents enrolled him, he told the New York Times, because, “I was never good at school and was always fighting in the streets. So they sent me to learn to fight.” He was a senior member of the “Seven Little Fortunes” performing troupe, and became known as “Big Brother” to Biao and Chan. In 1971 Golden Harvest hired him as a martial arts instructor on The Fast Sword, and thus began a two-decade association with the company, where he worked with everyone from King Hu (The Valiant Ones) to Bruce Lee (Enter the Dragon). He directed his first feature in 1977 with The Iron-Fisted Monk, and would gain success by working with Biao and breakout star Chan — directing hits like Winners & Sinners (’83) and Wheels On Meals (’84).

By ’89 Hung’s relationship with Golden Harvest was strained. His films were getting more ambitious and expensive, including the globe-hopping martial arts Western Millionaire’s Express (’86) and the post-Vietnam War commando movie Eastern Condors (’87), but the box office returns were not keeping pace. Pedicab Driver was a back-to-basics fight film set in 1930s Macau involving a group of pedicab operator friends who get mixed up with a Triad gang. There are few sets but plenty of brawling, and the tone ping-pongs from slapstick comedy to dark melodrama and back again, with the whipsawing speed representative of Hong Kong films of this period (and of pre-code Hollywood films). Sammo Hung plays Lo Tung, a leader of the pedicab union who bikes around town in a bowl cut, checked shirt and suspenders. He looks like an overgrown child in lumberjack costume, but when he throws down, his blows land like giant redwoods to the face. He pals around with a driver nicknamed Malted Candy (Max Mok) who thinks he has found his dream girl in Hsiao-Tsui (Fennie Yuen). However, she is paying off her debts to gang leader Master 5 (John Shum) by working at a brothel. When Malted Candy tries to buy Hsiao-Tsui’s freedom, he invokes Master 5′s wrath. Lo Tung, Malted Candy and their friends are faced with a fight for their lives. Approximately five hundred other things happen, including Lo Tung’s romancing of a bakery girl named Ping (Nina Li Chi), but that is the kernel of the digressive story.

Pedicab Driver contains some of the finest fight choreography of Hung’s career, combining Looney Tunes lunacy and more traditional sparring. The absurdity is stacked up front when the pedicab operators get into a brawl with rickshaw drivers in a cavernous restaurant. Hung makes his entrance by leaping over a rail with the ease of a man a fraction his size. There is supposed to be a negotiation, a splitting of work between the two tribes, but it soon devolves into fisticuffs involving Three Stooges-esque eye pokes and Star Wars parodies. At one point Yuen Biao pulls down a long fluorescent bulb from the ceiling and wields it like a lightsaber. His opponent does the same, and a brief saber duel occurs (with requisite sound effects) until both men get electrocuted like Wile E. Coyote at an Acme Electrical Line.

The most thrilling bout in the film has no bearing on the plot. After an intensely dangerous pedicab car chase, Lo Tung and Ping crash into a gambling hall. The managers insist upon recompense until their the den boss (Lau Kar-leung) decides to settle it with a fight. This fight represents a generational battle, between a Shaw Brothers legend in Lau versus the more modern, manic and comical Golden Harvest performer in Sammo Hung. Hung begins with a sneak attack, trying to catch Lau unawares. But Lau has those quick, deep strikes that continually send Hung to the ground. Hung tries clowning for distraction, but is thrown through a wall of strategically placed bamboo. Then there is an intricate battle of dueling staffs that (see above) Hung attempts to use his acrobatic skill to evade. But again he is struck down. Eventually he is pinned with his feet over his head, and admits defeat. But Lau sets him free, admitting respect for Hung’s skill, and that he was the only fighter he ever made him afraid he might lose. It is a sweaty, sweet, passing of the torch.

The streaming video was sharp and clean, aside from some speckling during the slow-motion sequences. The subtitles had their fair share of typos, but nothing to distract from the presentation (be sure to click the CC button to turn them on).

The film shifts into darker territory with Malted Candy and Hsiao-Tsui. Master 5′s operation is built on total control of his rapt criminal network, from his indentured servants (prostitutes, hired thugs) to the addicts and johns that fill his coffers. Malted Candy initially reacts to the news of Hsiao-Tsui’s work with chauvinistic horror – she is a “bitch” for resorting to prostitution. But his friends argue him back to sanity, that it is the male populace who condones and perpetuates the sex worker trade, and that Hsiao-Tsui is just doing what she can to get by. Their brief reunion is thwarted by Master 5, who sends his anonymous top assassin (a lithe, hard-kicking Billy Chow) to erase them from his books. Billy Chow is the real villain here, a quiet psychopath who waits his turn after all the pawns have been cleared from the stage. In the climactic battle at Master 5′s mansion, he sits at a table slurping soup as Lo Tung annihilates what’s left of the hired goons. His patience comes from confidence, and the final bout between him and Lo Tung is a brutal succession of high-impact maneuvers. There is none of the subtlety and grace of the fight with Lau here, this one is all deliberately paced destruction set to the tempo of move/rest/strong move. Lo Tung is victorious of course, a roly-poly hero beaten, bloodied, and exhausted. That’s the state of Sammo Hung after most of his features from this period, leaving it all up on the screen. Hopefully Warner Brothers and the Warner Archive will continue to create HD masters of Sammo Hung’s sacrifices.

APPASSIONATA: I’VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU (1946)

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

July 7, 2015

“The color overshadows the plot.” – Frank Borzage on I’ve Always Loved You (’46)

In 1945 Frank Borzage signed a lavish five-year deal with the penurious Republic Pictures, and it granted him unusual autonomy over his projects. I’ve Always Loved You was the first film he made for Republic, and he invested it with the full force of his religious romanticism, where love is the one true savior. Limited only by the restraints of the Production Code, the film has the barest of plots, its three main characters floating around each other on a plane of pure feeling, their shifting passions expressed through music and color scheme – it was the only film ever shot in three-strip Technicolor for Republic. Set in and around the classical music world of Carnegie Hall, the most impassioned contact occurs during cross-cutting between separate renditions of Rachmaninoff’s “Second Piano Concerto”. If you give yourself over to it (and you can on the Olive Films Blu-ray, out now), the last act miracle achieves an emotional intensity akin to that of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy. French filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet wrote it was “perhaps Borzage’s masterpiece….The excess of insipidness and sentimentality exceeds all allowable limits and annihilates the power of criticism and reflection, giving way to pure beauty.” In Film Comment, Kent Jones described it as an “extreme film brought to the brink of madness.” Beauty and madness are the son and the Holy Spirit in Borzage’s trinity, in which God is love.

Republic Pictures was born as a conglomeration of six smaller Poverty Row studios, making money off of adventure serials and quickie B-pictures that cost little and turned modest profits. But as they grew they experimented with A-features, bringing in top talents for a couple of “Premiere” pictures a year, which were budgeted around $1 million. A few years later John Ford (The Quiet Man) and Orson Welles (Macbeth) would sign with studio head Herbert J. Yates. According to Herve Dumont’s biography Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic, Borzage’s five-year contract called for him to make one Premiere picture a year, “conceived in complete artistic freedom”, with a maximum budget of $1.5 million. He would be given his own production unit, with his choice of actors and technicians (he hired Tony Gaudio as DP, whom he last worked with on 1924′s Secrets), while his brother Lew Borzage was named associate producer. The most amazing part of the deal is that Borzage had an opt-out at the end of each year, so Yates had plenty of incentive to keep him happy. The first project Frank Borzage was attached to was the John Wayne Western Dakota, intended to be filmed in three-strip Technicolor. That project was eventually downsized to B&W and was directed by their “Deluxe”($300,000 budgets) filmmaker Joseph Kane.

Charles Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945), a biography of Frederic Chopin, was a recent hit for Columbia, so Yates and Borzage settled on a story set in the classical milieu. They also trucked $40,000 to Arthur Rubinstein to curate and play every piano performance heard in the film (he is credited as “The World’s Greatest Pianist”). They chose to adapt a short story by Borden Chase, entitled “Concerto”, first published in 1937 for American magazine. A former Brooklyn cab driver, Chase had written some WWII screenplays (The Fighting Seabees) and would go on to write classic Westerns like Red River (’48), so he was an unlikely chronicler of high culture. But it was personal for Chase, as he based the story on his wife, pianist Leah Keith, who had performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of eight. Borzage hired him to adapt his story into a screenplay – his advice was to “make me cry.” Concerto was the working title of the film late into the production, but in October 1945 Borzage and Yates decided to change it because, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the majority of exhibitors polled “were afraid the public wouldn’t know what ‘concerto’ means.”

The story concerns Myra Hassman (Catherine McLeod, plucked from MGM bit players), a beautiful young piano prodigy who is discovered by the revered maestro Leopold Goronoff (Philip Dorn, a pre-WWII star in Germany), who whisks her away from her rural American home to the capitals of Europe with his mother (Maria Ouspenskaya) and assistant Nikolas (a fastidiously hilarious Fritz Feld). Eventually the sexist Goronoff becomes threatened by Hassman’s talent, and humiliates her at her Carnegie Hall debut. She is thrown out of Goronoff’s circle, and she returns home to marry her childhood sweetheart George (William Carter), a sympathetic slab of All-American blonde beef who recognizes that Goronoff – and her professional dreams – will always have a place in her heart. Their daughter Georgette (Vanessa Brown) shows some talent at the keys, and so Myra is thrust back into the classical world, ready for one last duet with Goronoff and a resolution to her divided self.

The majority of action in the film are men and women standing in rooms and auditoriums either standing next to or caressing a piano. When they are not playing the piano they are eyeing it ravenously. It is the only means of communication – in the film it replaces speech as well as sex. Goronoff is entranced by Myra at an audition after she rejects his suggestion to play Rachmaninoff, and performs Beethoven’s “Appassionata” instead. She wears a light blue frock over a white blouse, her attire blending into the similarly colored wall. Their attraction is never stated, but envisioned as a combative creative union on stage, when at Carnegie Hall Goronoff drowns Myra out with his orchestra. He demands submissiveness, and Myra’s brilliant performance challenges his authority. As critic David Phelps noted to me, there is something of Dracula in Philip Dorn’s florid, hypnotic performance (and in the way Nikolas repeatedly refers to him as “Master” in a Renfield-ian manner). In this initial battle Myra is wearing blossoming pink chiffon against a wall of dark green. She literally stands out, and for one night becomes a star. But she still yearns for approval, the sequence a series of desperate close-ups of Myra staring at Goronoff, desperate to know what set off this rage. After her split from Goronoff, his mother says of Myra, “her voice is the piano.” Borzage then cuts back and forth between Goronoff performing the Rachmaninoff Concerto on stage with Myra playing the same composition at home, their two renditions blending into one temporary bliss. That is, until George grabs Myra’s hands, and the link is broken. Goronoff is a shadow who only has power through his art, while George is artless but physically present – in the non-professional William Carter’s performance, he’s almost nailed to the ground.

In the final performance, Myra once again joins Goronoff in the Concerto. Her hair is piled high, setting off her cheekbones, above a pink form-fitting gown. No more girlish chiffon. When Goronoff stares her away, she focuses on her hands or the crowd, communing with the music herself, secure in her own talents for the first time. Goronoff is humbled, and defers to her through his posture and orchestration. The concluding scenes, in which Myra actualizes her pianistic talents and declares her true love are intensely moving. She who could only speak through music, finally finds the words.

TECHNICOLOR DAZE: SCARAMOUCHE, CHAD HANNA, and APACHE DRUMS

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 30, 2015

When I have an empty afternoon to kill, I go to the movies. This past Saturday my hours were filled to bursting with the “Glorious Technicolor: From George Eastman House and Beyond” series at MoMA, which runs through August 5th. The way the schedule fell, my matinees were made up of MGM’s frothy swashbuckler Scaramouche (1952) and the kindly circus folk of 20th Century Fox’s Chad Hanna (1940), with the prime evening slot held by the dark, violent Universal-International Western, Apache Drums (1952). This is a series after my own heart, a 60+ feature cavalcade of movies classic and obscure from 1922 – 1955, all exhibited on film (a rarer and rarer pleasure). My random sampling spanned two decades, three genres, and a variety of approaches to Technicolor. Scaramouche is all gleaming candy colors — you are almost invited to go up and lick the screen. Chad Hanna and Apache Drums are more subdued in their palettes, both making use of darkness and chiaroscuro to capture folds in upstate New York circus tents and candlelight in a Southwestern church under siege, respectively.

Even in 1952, Scaramouche was something of a throwback. It is an adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s 1921 novel, which had been adapted into a 1923 feature by Rex Ingram. Sabatini also provided the source material for Captain Blood (1924 and 1935), and it is the elegant ease of Errol Flynn’s ’35 swashbuckling that the film is trying to channel. It is resoundingly successful at doing so, a buoyant identity-swapping tale set in 18th century France, in which gentleman lover Andre Moreau (Stewart Granger) gets on the wrong side of Queen Marie Antoinette (Nina Foch) because his pal Philippe is spreading pseudonymous pamphlets advocating revolution (Richard Anderson). Moreau is a dashing man on the run, and hides out with a Parisian commedia dell’arte troupe along with his sometime girlfriend Lenore (Eleanor Parker). Moreau also has his eyes on Aline (Janet Leigh, garbed in Easter egg pastels), who is set to marry the Queen’s cousin Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer), a master swordsman and sadist who Moreau is hell-bent on extracting revenge from.

It all moves swiftly under George Sidney’s direction and Charles Rosher’s camera, who mount a number of rousing fight sequences. The capper is a near-7-minute bout inside of a crowded theater. Ferrer and Granger start on a balcony and parry down the lobby staircases and into the still-crowded seats, until they tumble through backstage matte paintings. The fight choreography is superb, and has been built up throughout. Ferrer is the more nimble, more experienced swordsman, and he uses his speed and intelligence to evade Granger’s clumsy lunges. Granger is built like a circus strongman, a double-barreled chest tottering over two spindly legs, while Ferrer moves like a dancer, the sword an extension of himself. All the seats and curtains are deep red, while Granger and Ferrer are costumed by Gile Steele in white and black. Ferrer is white hair/black vest/black pants, while Granger has black hair (with saucy ponytail) with white cape and white pants (with black trim). They are inverses of each other in a carpet of red.

Granger spends the whole movie reining in his aggressiveness until the final duel in the middle of the stage, where he declines to deliver the fatal blow, gaining power in their relationship for the first time. The whole cast sparkles, especially the ferocious Eleanor Parker (a blonde in a gorgeous red wig, dressed in “hot” colors to contrast with Leigh’s cool pastels), who battles Granger up and down the commedia dell’arte stage. There are some wonderful pratfalls in the extended theatre sequences, which taught me the lesson that 18th century French comedy was closer to the Three Stooges than I ever imagined.

Chad Hanna (1940) is more expressly about a performing troupe, this time a traveling circus in upstate New York in the mid-to-late 1800s. It was adapted from the Walter D. Edmonds novel of the same name, and followed the fluctuating fortunes of the troupe as two runaways, Chad Hanna (Henry Fonda) and Caroline Tridd (Linda Darnell), find their way in the world of ballyhoo. This would be the third Edmonds adaptation that Fonda would star in, following The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935, based on the novel Rome Haul) and John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). It’s a strange little coming-of-age tale with lots of local color, as Fonda is supported by Guy Kibbee, Dorothy Lamour and John Carradine. I savor upstate New York town names like Canastota, the backwater town that Chad and Caroline join the circus to get away from. The film follows their tumble into love (and jealousies over Chad’s attraction to Dorothy Lamour’s bareback rider), battles against competing circus thugs, and the joys of owning an elephant. Shot in a nostalgic golden hue by Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan, faces are plucked out and framed like portraits in cameo necklaces, especially in the luminous close-ups of Darnell and Lamour. But Palmer and Rennahan also provide pockets of darkness. Where Scaramouche is entirely visible, Chad Hanna keeps some things hidden.

Apache Drums (1951) is a troubling Western that is shot like a horror movie, where American nightmares emerge from the dark. It is the final film produced by Val Lewton, and exhibits his talent for wrenching scares on the cheap, along with his collaborators, director Hugo Fregonese and DP Charles P. Boyle. At the beginning an off-screen narrator states: “The hunger wolf chews on our strengths. Soon the warriors will be too weak to fight. Then the white man will thrust us away from the earth, and only the empty sky will know the voices of the Mescalero.” Then the scene shifts to the New Mexico town of “Spanish Boot”, where strapping blonde mayor Joe Madden (Willard Parker) is cleaning out the disreputable elements. This means buying out the dance hall and giving card sharp Sam Leeds (Stephen McNally) an ultimatum to get lost. But Leeds is a stubborn sort and in love with local waitress Sally (Coleen Gray). For the Whites in town the Apache tribe that lives outside their county lines is only a rumor, a spectre. But they are dying out there, starving to death, and in their desperation have started attacking stagecoaches running in and out of Spanish Boot, and are working their way towards the town itself. Much like Lewton’s monster movies (The Leopard Man for one), the Apache are kept mostly offscreen, shown only as hands banging drums or arrows hitting burlap. This dehumanizes them, turns them into monsters. In the siege finale, with the villagers cowering inside a church, all the lights out except for a few candles, the Apache, in their war pain, appear out of the gloom like The Leopard Man or The Cat People. They are robbed of their individuality to become ghosts of a lost civilization. The final siege is oneiric, upsetting and unbearably suspenseful. Taking place almost entirely in the dark, with low-light outlining the square openings near the roof, the Apaches clamber through in waves, shot down by the dwindling villagers, made up of Leeds, Madden, a racist Reverend (Arthur Shields) and a sympathetic Lieutenant (James Griffith). It is a sequence of undeniable racism that acknowledges that racism, unspooling like America’s fever dream, trying to snuff out the unending army of its victims.

POSTWAR AMNESIAC BLUES: THE CLAY PIGEON (1949)

February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 23, 2015

After the conclusion of WWII, the subject of the returning soldier became a popular one in B-movies, with the image of a dazed G-man wandering desolate back alleys becoming cinematic shorthand for post-traumatic stress. While the prestige pics explored how the soldiers’ physical toll left psychological scars (The Best Years of Our Lives, Pride of the Marines), the Bs were blunter in opting for amnesiac narratives, in which the veterans have lost all memory of their war efforts, and have to piece it back together, usually in a labyrinthine urban environment (Somewhere in the Night, The Crooked Way). These stories usually find a way to reconstitute these broken men and integrate them back into America. The Clay Pigeon (1949) is a particularly effective film noir of this type, directed by Richard Fleischer from a Carl Foreman script for RKO, soon after Howard Hughes took over. Released by the Warner Archive on DVD this month, its post-war America is one of paranoia and betrayal, where one is guilty until proven innocent.

Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) awakens from a coma in a San Diego hospital to feel a blind man’s hands around his throat. “I just want to find out what a dirty traitor looks like”, the man says, and Jim is thrust into the mystery of his life. He remembers nothing after his internment in a Japanese prison, nor why the staff of the military hospital treats him with disdain. He asks his nurse, “Is the war over?” She responds, “For some people it’ll never be over.” Fletcher is set to be court-martialed for the the torture killing of his friend and fellow-soldier Mark Gregory. Unaware of his own guilt, Fletcher stumbles into an escape, and searches for the truth to his past, dragging along Gregory’s widow Martha (Barbara Hale) and his army buddy Jim Niles (future director Richard Quine). In San Francisco he spots his Japanese prison guard, who seems to be connected to a larger conspiracy fronted by a U.S. business.

Richard Fleischer and Carl Foreman had first collaborated on So This is New York (1948) , the debut film for Stanley Kramer Productions, in which Foreman was a partner. Fleischer was under contract to RKO, having only made two Sharyn Moffett cute-kid moppet movies up until that point. But Kramer had admired the first of those, Child of Divorce (1946), and one of the co-screenwriters, Hubert Baker, was a school friend from Yale. The head of RKO’s B unit, Sid Rogell, had nothing for Fleischer to do after the second Moffett film, Banjo (1947), bombed at the box office. So he lent Fleischer to Kramer to direct their Ring Lardner adaptation, So This is New York. Fleischer describes his relationship with Foreman in his autobiography, Just Tell Me When to Cry:

When So This is New York was finished and I had returned to RKO serfdom, there was a long hiatus for the Kramer Company, and Carl needed a job. He had an idea for an original story called The Clay Pigeon, and I convinced Rogell to hire him to develop it into a screenplay. Carl and I both lived in the San Fernando Valley at that time, so we drove to and from work together every day. It was on one of those drives that Carl came up with an interesting suggestion. He said, “Look, since we have to spend almost two hours a day in the car, why don’t we use that time to develop a story idea I’ve got in mind?” …So over the next eight weeks, Carl and I developed the story and characters for High Noon. When the script of The Clay Pigeon was finished, Rogell called me into his office. “This is pretty poor stuff,” he said…”I don’t think your friend is going to amount to much as a writer.” He then proceeded to replace the future author of such screenplays as High Noon, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone with Lilly Hayward, the author of Banjo. My RKO contract eventually kept me from directing High Noon, although I did get to do The Clay Pigeon. It was not what could be called a good trade-off.

Just Tell Me When to Cry is one of the more self-deprecating director autobiographies you’ll read, as he’s always quick to run down his own career. So though he contextualizes The Clay Pigeon as a stepping stone of Foreman’s way to High Noon, it’s a worthy film in its own right.

Fleischer disorients us from the beginning, opening with a shot of a blind man’s hands ready to grasp Fletcher’s throat. Foreman’s script keeps the audience as equally in the dark as Fletcher – where even a sainted figure as the army nurse is antagonistic. Star Bill Williams still has the baby fat good-boy look of an approved American hero, so it’s jarring to see him as an accused war criminal, shown early on throwing Martha around in an attempt to stifle her screams. He is only trying to quiet her to beg his innocence, but in these early scenes there still exists an edge of danger, proof that extremes of violence do hide inside of him. Bill Williams was an athlete and performer from a young age, a professional swimmer and later an exhibition diver and Vaudeville adagio dancer. He enlisted in the Army and was discharged for medical reasons. He seems unusually stiff in his movements here, betraying his hoofer past, but he had been recovering from a back injury and had not acted in a year (his most enduring role was as the title character of the tv series The Adventures of Kit Carson).

The turning point in Fletcher’s investigation is the appearance of Ken Tokoyama (Richard Loo) in San Francisco, who was the most vicious guard at the prison camp Fletcher and his unit were kept in. His presence triggers Fletcher’s memory and solves the mystery of his own guilt. This could easily have devolved into a racist narrative justifying the internment of Asian-Americans during WWII, but Foreman was a political progressive, at one time a card carrying Communist who would later refuse to testify in front of HUAC, and undercuts it with a moving scene of Japanese-American integrity. As Fletcher is running from both a criminal syndicate and the police, he rushes inside a city apartment, and begs the woman there to hide him. Helen Minoto (Marya Marco) is a Japanese-American war widow, with her decorated late husband’s photo displayed prominently on the mantelpiece. She speaks without the insulting accent of most Asians in Hollywood films, and chooses to hide him because she can tell the thugs outside are not cops. When Fletcher tells her he cannot thank her enough, she simply says, “then don’t try”, and escorts him out. It is a scene that movingly depicts the contributions of Japanese-Americans to the US war effort at the same time they were being persecuted at home.

Fleischer and Foreman might prefer you forget this relatively unknown programmer from 1949, which does indeed end by putting Fletcher together again and thrusting him back into the expected narrative of postwar American life (wife and expected child), but The Clay Pigeon is worth remembering for the steely look on Marya Marco’s face as she directs Bill Williams out the door, a secret smile crawling across her face, treating the tragedies that surround her as one grand, private joke.

OZARK ELEGY: THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS (1941)

February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 16, 2015

After the success of Stagecoach (1939), John Wayne was in demand. While still under contract to poverty row Republic Studios, he was lent out to United Artists for The Long Voyage Home (1940), Universal for Seven Sinners (1940) and Paramount for The Shepherd of the Hills (1941). While still making interesting features for Republic, including Raoul Walsh’s Dark Command (1940), he was positioning himself as prestige-picture ready. Shepherd of the Hills was a prime property adapted from a million-book-selling novel, to be shot in Technicolor by director Henry Hathaway and DPs Charles Lang and W. Howard Greene. Hathaway was an advocate for location shooting, and had already filmed Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) in Technicolor at Big Bear Lake in California, where Shepherd would end up as well. The ongoing “Glorious Technicolor” series at the Museum of Modern Art is screening both Trail of the Lonesome Pine and The Shepherd of the Hills as part of its sixty feature extravaganza. Shepherd is a delicate, strange and mournful drama of the breakdown of an insular Ozark Mountain community, one trapped in a cycle of intergenerational violence. John Wayne stars alongside his childhood Western hero Harry Carey, and the film acts as a series of lessons from Carey to Wayne, on and off screen.

The Shepherd of the Hills is based on the 1907 novel of the same name by Harold Bell Wright, whose book was so popular he gets top billing on the theatrical poster (it was previously adapted to film in 1919 and 1928, and would be again in 1964) . The movie plots out the alignments and resentments of a small Ozark community. The Matthews family is a dark cloud, with matriarch Mollie Matthews (Beulah Bondi) spewing the thunder. Bereft since the death of her sister Sarah, she advocates retribution for any slight, a paranoiac shutting her family up behind their cabin doors guarded by a slobbering hound. The sunshine is let in by the Lanes, Jim (Tom Fadden) and his daughter Sammy (Betty Field), peacemakers who bridge the at times warring town. Sammy is close to Matt Matthews (John Wayne), Sarah’s son and Mollie’s nephew, and his natural gregariousness seems like an opening that could break the Matthews gloom. A stranger, Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey), arrives offering to buy part of the Matthews land, a plot nicknamed “Moaning Meadows” that it is rumored to be haunted by the ghost of Sarah, or at least of the suffocating atmosphere left by her death. Matt is incensed that an outsider might buy this living memorial to his mother, but Daniel’s kindness, which extends to paying for medical bills to restore sight to Granny Becky (Marjorie Main), kindles a tentative friendship. But Daniel is hiding his true identity, the truth of which will force Matt to decide whether to embrace his family’s history of violence, or chart a new path.

Hathaway keeps the color palette muted, using earth tones more than the succulent primary colors associated with Technicolor. The effect is in keeping with the characters. These are not chest-pounding pioneers welcoming civilization to the West, but a truculent group of recluses clinging to their allotted land. They are so isolated they speak in their own backwoods biblical poetry. Jack Pendarvis transcribed Sammy’s monologue about “Moaning Meadow”: “It’s where the haint comes from: frogs as quiet as grave-rocks, light coming from nowhere, and the trees don’t rustle, and the flowers grow big but they don’t have pretty smells.” Betty Field delivers these lines with wide-eyed sincerity, without a hint of irony that would have immediately turned the film into Southern kitsch. Instead it tumbles out as cockeyed truths, the town a bunch of inadvertent animists, worshipful, wary and grateful for each blade of grass that surrounds them.

Folks there talk to animals more often than each other, as one summery evening Matt addresses an owl with, “Evening, brother!” Wayne prefers to sidle up to the knotty dialogue, pushing out the lines towards the end of his breath. When he goes fishing with Harry Carey towards the end of the film, his lines are barely audible, as he fidgets with his rod, dips his head, seemingly wanting to disappear into the dirt. He nearly exhales the lines, “I got no right to love or marry. I gotta forget thinking about Sammy.” John Ford said he didn’t know the son of a bitch could act after watching Howard Hawks’ Red River, but Wayne was already an actor of great subtlety in 1941. This was during a turbulent moment in his personal life, as he was in the middle of an extra-marital affair with Marlene Dietrich, who he had met on the set of Seven Sinners, which wrapped just before Shepherd. Dietrich, after seeing Wayne at the Universal cafeteria, reportedly told director Tay Garnett, “Daddy, buy me that.”

Everything is ritualized in Shepherd of the Hills. Mollie atones for her sins by turning her home into a funeral pyre. And when Daniel reveals his true identity, Matt immediately enters into Matthews manner of vengeance. He silently accepts his role in the Matthews narrative, sullenly grabbing his rifle and stomping to Daniel’s cabin, ready to murder for reasons he doesn’t even believe in. It is in his blood. The showdown is set up in long shots of Wayne stalking forward, emerging from the landscape. His arrival is scored to an ominous two note cello phrase by composer Gerard Carbonara that today sounds like the Jaws theme, appropriate for the carnage that Matt wishes to inflict. But Daniel is wiser and quicker with a gun, wounding Matt as an act of mercy. It is a lesson in failure. Matt has to chip away at his masculine pride to accept his loss, and that losing that pride may allow him to love Sammy. Losing that masculinity may allow him to become a man. On-screen and off, John Wayne was learning from Harry Carey. Harry and his wife Olive treated Wayne like family, and, as Scott Eyman writes in John Wayne: The Life and Legend, “offered something approaching unconditional love.” Wayne remembered:

[Carey] had a style of acting that has now become the way of acting in our business. He tried to play it down a little and be kind of natural. You have to keep things going and try and get your personality through, which is what Harry could do. I loved him, because I’d known him for years, and I was a young man and he was an older man. Anyway, he and his wife were around…and I was talking about how I wanted to play every kind of part. the big hero that did everything, the heavies, everything. I wanted to play it all. And Ollie Carey said, “Well, you big dumb son of a bitch.” I said, what’s the matter?” She said, “Do you really mean what you said? That you’d like to play every kind of part? You think you’re Sydney Carton?” And I said , “Yes, I’d like to get the chance to play all those things.” And Harry was just standing there, and she said, “Do you want Harry Carey to be any different than he is in the movies?” And I said, “No, of course not.” And she said, “The American public [have] decided to take you into their homes and their hearts. They like the man they see. Forget all this other junk. Be like Harry.” That was something I never forgot.