Month: February 2020

HAPPY RETURNS: RECENT BOX OFFICE HITS IN CHINA AND KOREA

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February 12, 2013

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While the first quarter of the year has generally been a quiet time for Hollywood’s coffers, the rest of the world has been packing them in to their local multiplexes. Two of the bigger recent international successes are receiving limited U.S. releases, China’s Lost in Thailand (2012) and Korea’s The Berlin File (2013). Lost in Thailand has already become the highest grossing film in China’s history after only two months in release. An amiable odd couple road movie made for a reported $4.8 million, it has made an astounding $215 million domestically, and snuck into a NYC theater in time for the Chinese New Year. The Berlin File was more groomed for success, with a relatively large $10 million funding four big stars in an international spy thriller, with the talented director Ryoo Seung-wan (The Unjust) at the helm. It had the third highest opening weekend on record in Korea (from 2/1 – 2/3), and arrives stateside in a limited release this Friday.

Ryoo has ranged through many genres, from the male weepie Crying Fist (2005) to the amped up action of City of Violence (2006) to the savage corruption drama The Unjust (2010), but he applies his sharp social criticism and pulsating rhythmic sense to all of them.  His characters are either economically disadvantaged or on the make, the action arising from their guilt or underclass rage. Ryoo wrote and directed The Berlin File, but it’s the first that feels like a purely commercial venture – an impersonal technical exercise set to capitalize on the success of the first Korean spy blockbuster, Shiri (1999). It’s a cold war nostalgia piece that swaps the U.S. and Russia for South and North Korea (Ryoo too clearly tips his hand with a close-up of a John le Carre novel). Jong-seong (Ha Jung-woo) is a North Korean agent in Berlin who gets stranded in an arms deal gone bad. Suspected of being a double agent, DPRK spook Myung-soo  (the director’s brother Ryoo Seung-bum) is sent to test Jong-seong and his wife’s loyalty.  All are under investigation by South Korean intelligence chief Jin-soo (Han Suk-kyu), who tries to puzzle out their movements with the help of the CIA.

Ryoo Seung-wan’s  script gets bogged down in plot mechanic minutiae, with almost an hour of stop-start exposition before the nut of the conflict becomes clear. Part of the problem is in trying to make the film English friendly. His stars are visibly strained when they are asked to speak the language, and the Anglo actors he has hired to play Mossad and CIA agents are a couple of smirking stiffs. This throws off the ping-pong beats of his usual scene-building, and doesn’t pick up again until the movie gets monolingual. Then Ryoo is able to display his prodigious talent – including a crisply shot  apartment shootout that ends with Jong-seong wrapped up in electrical cords and bouncing through space like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. Ha plays him with blank professionalism, trained within an inch of his life, while Ryoo Seung-bum gets to have all the fun as grinning sociopath Myung-soo, gleefully torturing his way through Berlin. This is no jingoistic anti-North Korean job though, since Ryoo again displays his disgust for his own government as well, the South a craven profit machine, betraying its principles as quickly as any DPRK agent. With tensions at the DMZ ratcheting up due to the reported North Korean nuclear test, though, it will be interesting to see if the film gets any blowback.

Lost in Thailand has no such claim to current events, although it has become something of an event in itself. It re-teams  the comedy duo of Xu Zheng and Wang Baoqiang from their 2010 hit Lost On Journey. Xu is the white-collar straight man, an impeccably groomed account manager for a scientific research firm, who is desperate to run the account for their new “petroleum enhancer”. In order to close the deal, he has to track down his boss, who is on retreat in Thailand. With no first-class seats available, he is forced to fly in coach, where he meets Wang. With his shaggy bowl cut, disturbingly childlike naivete and fighting skill, Wang is an unholy mix of Jerry Lewis and Mo from the Three Stooges. Xu and Wang have hit on a team up of high and low class that clearly appeals to vast swathes of the Chinese population, comparable to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ appeal in the 40s and 50s. Although the film has been frequently compared to The Hangover, there is little of that film’s macho gross-out.

Like Lewis, Wang is a force of chaos, constantly destroying Xu’s plans, usually through his ignorance of technology. He pours water on a computer, tosses a flash drive out a window, and deletes the map to the boss’s temple. He’s a retrograde force, one the film condescendingly positions to be pitied, although of course his simple truths have much to teach the work-obsessed Xu. The film is much more fun when Wang is destroying than when Xu is learning, whether it’s giving a literally backbreaking massage or kicking gangsters in the face, but the film covers all its demographic bases, so we get maudlin scenes of a weepy Xu calling his estranged wife as well. Despite all the cliches, Xu and Wang have a prickly income inequality love-hate rapport that generates enough laughs to make me want to see more. And with those grosses, they’ll have plenty of opportunities to work on their schtick.

SEITER HOUSE RULES: MOVIETOWN BABY GROWS UP

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On July 13th, 1934 the madcap RKO comedy We’re Rich Again was released, the sixth collaboration between director William A. Seiter and star Marian Nixon.  They married soon after, and five years later they collaborated in the birth of Jessica Seiter (now Jessica Seiter Niblo), whose Movietown Baby Grows Up is a breezily entertaining memoir of her upbringing in Hollywood. Published at an Espresso Book Machine at her local bookstore, it was intended as a gift for her family, but she is also selling it through Facebook for those interested in the careers and personalities of her talented parents.  Seiter Niblo has a warm conversational tone, relating her parents’ romantic foibles and career bumps as if she were flipping the pages of a family album with you over a mug of Irish coffee.

William A. Seiter was the heir to a silver, crystal and china shop in NYC before he found his first wife in bed with another man, whereupon he “flew out the door, onto a train, and headed for Los Angeles to start life anew.”  He paid the bills as a Western stuntman and a Keystone cop in Mack Sennett comedies before working his way up the ladder, directing his first silent feature, The Kentucky Colonel, in 1920. Seiter Niblo relates that “Bill’s private life moved along at a reckless pace, trying marriage again with Jill (I was never informed of her last name) who chased him around their cottage with a meat cleaver.” Maybe that harrowing slapstick experience informed the movies  he would later make with comedy teams Wheeler and Woolsey and Laurel and Hardy.

Following the more amicable split with third wife Laura LaPlante, Seiter tied the knot for an even number with Nixon, who at the time was dubbed “The Nicest Girl in Hollywood”. She was born in Wisconsin “in a year she would never reveal – but most likely 1904″, to a family of poor Finnish immigrants, and showed a talent for dance, taking lessons in ballet and tap. She joined a touring group at a young age, and was abandoned in L.A. when tour director Paisley Noone absconded with “some handsome young man in Hollywood.” Nixon refused to return home, and tried her hand at acting, getting her first break with a casting director noticed her “threading a needle with ‘notable vigor’”. She earned her first leading role in the Buck Jones Western Big Dan (1923) directed by a young William Wellman.nixon

Nixon had her own lovesick blues, with a short-lived marriage to boxer Joe Benjamin, who made the gossip rags by popping two bullets into Nixon’s home after a spat. She climbed the social ladder for her second marriage, to Chicago department store heir Edward Hillman, Jr., who never held down a job, but simply “drinks and plays polo”.  His alcoholism cracks up the marriage, and Seiter and Nixon get hitched mere days after both their divorces are finalized.

This one sticks, and a family sprouts up. Seiter Niblo relays the whirl of being a Hollywood brat, moving from house to house ten times according to the curve of her Dad’s career. As a 2-year-old she sings “Dearly Beloved” to Jerome Kern, and Delmer Daves gives her a book of his calligraphy. Nixon curtails her acting in order to raise a family, but remains fascinated with the business, sending her daughter Mike Connolly’s column from the Hollywood Reporter every week through Jessica’s four years at Stanford. Nixon is essential to maintaining the loose community Seiter created on set, delivering “personal Christmas gifts from my father to his ‘staff’, especially Glen Tryon and Sam Mintz, his right hand men.”

Dave Kehr discusses this communal spirit in his Film Comment essay (Jan/Feb 2012) on William A. Seiter, which is re-printed in the back of the book. He emphasizes that “the thrust of his work is not to dominate his performers but to enframe and enhance them”. He uses Ginger Rogers as an example, as her non-nonsense persona is perfected from Professional Sweetheart (1933) through In Person (1935).  Seiter Niblo has learned to do the same for her family, letting their lives and personality emerge through her tough and loving portrait of two charismatic Hollywood talents.

As she proudly notes, her children have continued the family’s string of success in Hollywood. Ted Griffin is a screenwriter whose worked on everything from the cannibal thriller Ravenous (1999, a personal favorite) to the broad Brett Ratner comedy Tower Heist (2011). He collaborated with his brother Nick on Matchstick Men (2003) and the short-lived but much loved TV drama Terriers. So while the Seiter name has long been absent from silver screens, his family still knows how to entertain.

AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR ROBERT DAY

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January 29, 2013

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At the age of 90, British director Robert Day has seen it all. Starting as a London clapper boy in the 1940s, he became a highly sought after camera operator in the 50s, before settling into a long and varied directing career starting with The Green Man (1956). Working on everything from Boris Karloff monster movies to Peter Sellers comedies, he was a jack of all trades before love brought him to Hollywood in the late ’60s, where he became a prolific television director through the 1980s. I was able to have a telephone chat with the gregarious craftsman, where we touched on the different phases of his wildly productive life.

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What was your childhood like in London? Did you get into movies at a young age?

RD: My Dad was a scientist  and my mom took care of the kids. The first movie I remember watching was one with Charlie Chaplin, a talkie, it gave me a throbbing headache

From your time as a camera operator, you worked on the great film noir They Made Me A Fugitive (1947). It paints post-war London as a foggy and nightmarish place. How did you and director of photography Otto Heller create this atmosphere?

RD: It was all in the lighting. I did over 20 movies with Otto. He came from Czechoslovakia and I was the first one to work with him in Britain.

You also worked with directors Carol Reed and Edward Dmytryk as a camera operator. What did you learn from these two that aided your own career as a director?

RD I learned a lot of technical things from both Carol Reed and  Edward Dmytryk. They liked me so they helped me a lot.

You worked with Dmytryk in the UK soon after he was blacklisted in Hollywood. What was your opinion of the blacklist, and were you politically involved in this period?

RD  The blacklist was awful. I was working so much I didn’t have time for politics.

How did you land your first directing job on The Green Man?

RD: Well, I was working as a cameraman with Sidney Gilliat, the director. I talked with him about directing a movie myself, and he said maybe one of these days you will. And sure enough, months later, I had this offer from him.

Were you nervous?

RD: I was overwhelmed – flabbergasted. Alistair Sim, the star of the movie, offered suggestions. He was a very erudite man and helped me a lot.

Later you worked on two horror movies with Boris Karloff (The Haunted Strangler and Corridors of Blood, both 1958), produced by Richard and Alex Gordon. How was it working with Karloff?

RD: A wonderful man, very low key. He was always willing to take advice about anything. He always did what I wanted! We remained friends forever. When Boris was working he was really into the film. He was always prepared.

 Now you had a different experience with Peter Sellers on Two Way Stretch (1960)

RD: I didn’t like him very much as a man. I had various arguments with him, but I always got my way, through various tricks. I would bring him around to my way of thinking. Sometimes very difficult. But I always got my way and wouldn’t relax until I did. Peter Sellers was extremely neurotic and at the core very insecure. He was really best at impersonating characters, rather than being a good actor. Two Way Stretch was really early in his working career. Halfway through the movie he was given a “star” complex. The film people felt he was up and coming.

At what point he refused to come to the set?

RD: Yes, because of one of the arguments we had. He kept me waiting four days.

What did you have to do to convince him?

RD: Wait. Just wait. I was chewing my nails. But eventually he came around. I wouldn’t give in. He had this cadre of people around him that would say one thing, and I was advising him to go in another direction. And finally he came around.

Did you ever work with him again?

RD: I would never work with him again. But he didn’t seem to hold anything against me. I couldn’t go through that drama again.

 What attracted you to the TARZAN series, which you made four of?

RD: Opportunity, I thought the films would broaden my experiences.

 What made you leave the UK for the U.S.?

RD:  I was working on a Tarzan film and Terry Thomas, an old friend from The Green Man, brought the American actress Dorothy Provine to the set. She had just finished an Italian film called Kiss the Girls and Make them Die (1966). She came to my set, and we enjoyed each other’s company so much, we then decided to get married. It was a wonderful relationship I had with her. We were married for 43 years.

What were the differences between working in U.S. and the U.K.?

RD: Things moved faster in America. Much faster. I preferred it. I really enjoyed working that way much more. But I think films at the time had a little more substance in the UK.

One of your telefilms is The Initiation of Sarah (1978), seemingly influenced by Carrie (1976). Were you aware conscious of Carrie’s influence, and what do you recall of the production?

RD: Regarding Carrie, I am not sure. Working with Shelley Winters was tough and not very rewarding, although it was late in her career.

One of your last movies was Higher Ground (1988) with John Denver. How did you decide which projects to take on at this stage in your career?

RD: I thoroughly liked working with John Denver.  For me making films was always about the people, the cultures, and the environment.

 

THE YOUNG ADVENTURES OF JOHN WAYNE

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Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

January 22, 2013

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Marion Morrison had to work hard to become John Wayne. His earth-straddling lope and taffy-stretched line readings were not invented by John Ford or Howard Hawks, only finely exploited by them. The flood of Republic Pictures movies released on Blu-Ray by Olive Films illustrates this fact, filling in the blanks of the evolution of one of the screen’s most indelible personalities. Following the box-office failure of the Raoul Walsh masterpiece The Big Trail (1930), Wayne would have to wait nearly a decade before his delayed acceptance as part of Hollywood’s firmament in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). The period in between shows him sliding into obscurity, from Columbia and Warners down to the resourceful Poverty Row studios Mascot, Monogram and the slightly more reputable Republic. Olive has so far transferred sparkling editions of seven of the Republics, most of which finds him stepping in to play Stony Brooke, the leader of the long-running Western trio The Three Mesquiteers (he already played in a modern dress Three Musketeers for a 1933 Mascot serial – endless remakes are nothing new). Stony Brooke is lithe and quick where the classic John Wayne figures are slow-moving monuments, visible in Olive’s gorgeous 4K scan of The Quiet Man, out today on Blu-ray, but his Mesquiteers voice exudes the chummy warmth and presence of Wayne-ness, not yet weighed down with history.

The Mesquiteers films were Wayne’s second go-round at Republic, after a series of low-cost A action films at Universal failed to ignite audience interest. He told Maurice Zolotow that “the exhibitors wouldn’t touch a John Wayne movie with a ten-foot projector”, so when his Universal contract expired, he returned to Republic at a lowered salary. He considered his return the lowest point of his career, and was suitably dismissive of his work in this period, saying “Christ, they were awful. They were kids’ movies.” Secretary Mary St. John recalled that Wayne looked like a “wounded puppy — sad, frustrated and unhappy. He felt like his career has bottomed out.” Yet these are marvelously entertaining works, with spectacular stunts directed with speed and clarity by George Sherman, Joe Kane, and other Republic craftsmen. Wayne may have been in a depressive funk, but on film he registers with his lighthearted, almost lilting delivery, emitting from a powerfully angular frame knifing through the wilderness.

While John Ford’s Waynes are always haunted by the past, his step slowed to allow his pained memories to emerge around him, the Republic Wayne is engaged in the perpetual now of a chase. Stony is without past or future, each Mesquiteers film a new beginning. Paired mostly with fellow upright gent Tucson Smith (Ray Corrigan) and comic ventriloquist sidekick Lullaby Joslin (Max Terhune), these three earnest cowhands inevitably get roped in to save their community from evil land developers of one shade or another. These quickies are strongly pro-New Deal, pitting the Mesquiteers against a parade of oily land speculators and tin-pot dictators. In this series Wayne is, above all else, a community organizer.

Ostensibly a Western series, the constant need for stories (Wayne made 8 in less than two years) incorporated all manners of cliffhanging dramatics, from the crime procedural of Red River Range (where Stony impersonates a gangster) to the surreal circus comedy of Three Texas Steers. By the end of the Mesquiteers’ time-folding run, they were fighting Nazis. The most elaborately strange of the Wayne Republics would have to be The Night Riders (1939), which imports a Mexican revolution narrative onto the Western U.S. A disgraced cardsharp is convinced to impersonate a Spanish nobleman in order to claim a “Western Empire” of 13 million acres from forged land grants. So what starts as a riverboat gambling brawler ends up as a revolutionary war drama, complete with the Mesquiteers donning masks as a violent protest group, redistributing wealth with the verve of a 99-percenter. The vigilante trio even stumbles into the bedroom of a slumbering President Garfield, who can only offer back channel support against the Western Empire dictator, his hands tied by the isolationist mood of the government. Screenwriters Betty Burbridge and Stanley Roberts stole not only from pulp novels but from the headlines, as FDR was battling isolationist sentiments even as Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia in March ’39. The Night Riders was released on April 12th.

Wayne’s career was at a standstill until his friend John Ford cast him in Stagecoach. Eager for the chance to star in an A picture, he accepted the part of Ringo Kid for the low salary of $3,000, barely above his Republic pay. In comparison, the female lead, Claire Trevor, would receive $15,000. Republic agreed to release him to film the project in return for $600 a week. Herbert Yates had no expectations that the film would raise Wayne’s standing. In fact, by the time Stagecoach was released in March of 1939, Wayne was already back making the Mesquiteers quickies Three Texas Steers, Wyoming Outlaw and New Frontier. But eventually the film’s overwhelming success, both critically and at the box office, made Wayne a valuable commodity, and he became their A feature star, for the one or two big budget features they produced each year. Dark Command (1940), one of the first results of this new contract, reunited Wayne with director Raoul Walsh, who had tapped him for stardom ten years previously in The Big Trail.

Wayne’s performances, perhaps chastened by the incessant insults Ford would throw at him on set, became more deliberate and thoughtful, as if he weighed each word before letting it loose. This makes Wayne’s characters seem haunted from the first frame in Ford’s works, even in the sprightly Irish romance The Quiet Man, in which Wayne is dogged by an accidental murder in his past. Winston Hoch’s luminous cinematography, which elaborates an endless palette of greens, can do nothing to prettify the striding husk of Wayne, who drags his violent history along with him into every frame. When he sees Maureen O’Hara emerge like a flame-haired ghost in the open plain though, some of that Mesquiteers lightness returns.

THE DEVIL INSIDE: THE FILMS OF KIM JEE-WOON

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January 15, 2013

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For the past decade Korea has produced the most innovative genre films in the world, with directors Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Jee-woon reinvigorating revenge thrillers, police procedurals and westerns. This year Hollywood is playing catch-up, commissioning remakes of recent Korean hits and importing that influential trio to make their English language debuts. Spike Lee is shooting his version of Park’s seminal Oldboy, and Allen Hughes has signed on to redo Kim’s A Bittersweet Life (2005, and whose Tale of Two Sisters was Americanized in 2009 as The Uninvited). Bong is finishing up production on his dystopic sci-fi film Snowpiercer, starring Chris Evans, while Park’s psychological horror film Stoker, featuring Nicole Kidman, will be released on March 1st. The first out of the gate will be Kim’s action movie The Last Stand, opening this Friday, which marks the post-gubernatorial screen return of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Kim is a restless genre tweaker, using traditional templates and then pushing them to extremes. His style varies from the antic energy of his “kimchi Western” The Good, The Bad, The Weird to the elegant control of his criminal revenge saga A Bittersweet Life, but his films insistently return to the theme of self-destructive violence that pulses just below the surface of the human psyche.

Kim Jee-woon was born in Seoul in 1964. He studied at the Seoul Institute Of the Arts, but dropped out to pursue a career in the theater. He worked as an actor before moving into directing, credited with helming the productions of Hot Sea (1994) and Movie Movie (1995). Details are slim about this period of his career, but eventually he began submitting screenplays to local competitions. His first script, Wonderful Seasons, won the best screenplay award at the Premiere Scenario contest in 1997, while later that year The Quiet Familywon the 1st Cine21 Scenario Public Subscription Contest. The Quiet Family would be Kim’s first film, and he would write all of his scripts up until I Saw the Devil (2010). As Jinhee Choi writes in The South Korean Film Renaissance, he benefited from a shift in the industry. The Asian economic crisis of 1997-1998 made large corporations like Samsung skittish about investing in film production, while Daewoo sold off its theatre chains. Venture capitalists filled the void, with Ilshin Investment Co. funding 5-6 productions a year. Simply needing to fill their slate, untested directors like Kim got their shot.

The Quiet Family (1998) is a black farce about an isolated lodge and the loosely knit family who operates it. When their first customer commits suicide, they decide to hide it for fear of bad publicity. The cover up is worse than the crime, as bodies pile up with no end in sight (it was loosely re-made by Takashi Miike in his musical The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)). Kim trawls through the halls in steadicam shots, providing blueprints of the lodge’s geography, orienting shots of normality soon to be spattered with blood. The film glides by on the charm of Song Kang-ho and Choi Min-sik, two icons early in their careers. Song was trained in improvisation for the theater, and he is already a magnetic, unpredictable presence, a menacing doofus who can whip his gangly appendages into a fighting stance at the slightest insult. Choi plays Song’s schlubby uncle, softening his bulldog face into one of resigned pliability. The whole family finds easy rationalizations for murder, and with each death they come easier and easier. Played for laughs, this quick and destructive slide into violence will pop up in the rest of his features, modulated according to his chosen genre’s mood.

He plays it for pathos in his follow-up, The Foul King (2000), in which sad sack bank employee Dae-Ho (Song Kang-ho) turns to pro wrestling to restore his dignity. An enormous hit in Korea with over 2 million ticket sales, it tapped into the angst of white collar salary slaves, where even karaoke becomes a matter of routine business.  Song Kang-ho again plays a deadbeat energized by violence, although this time the blows are choreographed, and he is a rumpled white collar rather than a live wire blue. While The Quiet Family is cartoonishly decimated by their violent actions, The Foul King is awakened by his pro wrestling performance, as if it were a male ritual needed to survive office life. Kim takes the inspirational sports movie and pushes it into Fight Club territory, with Dae-Ho feeling most alive only when going off script and bludgeoning his opponent. The cure, as in The Quiet Family, seems worse than the disease.

Kim took three years before making his next feature, workshopping his approach to the horror genre in short films. His entry in Three Extremes 2 (2002), “Memories”,  is his attempt to imitate the Japanese ghost stories that were still raking in money around the world thanks to Ringu (1998). A simple story of a husband haunted by his dead wife, Kim used it to experiment with POV, using jump cuts and flash backs to represent his main character’s troubled mind. He used these lessons in A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), melding the creepy Japanese ghost girl cliche and incorporating it into a classical Korean fairy tale, Janghwa Hongryeon. Two girls return to their country home after being discharged from a mental hospital, and are tormented by their stepmother and an unseen presence. Kim uses a gliding steadicam again to outline the geography of the house, and uses bird’s eye views to pin the girls to the ground as their self-deluding secrets come to light. Set design becomes more important – this house is far more detailed and alive than the one in The Quiet Family, with its blooming wallpaper and blood-red rugs, the house itself seems to be veined with blood.

Kim returns to a hyper-masculine world in A Bittersweet Life (2005), his first with high cheek-boned heartthrob Lee Byung-hun. Still interested in a kind of genre purity, this crime thriller, like A Tale of Two Sisters, is a classic genre narrative told without filigree. Lee plays Sun-woo, an enforcer at a luxury hotel for a local gang boss. Like the Quiet Family or Dae-ho, he has an unfulfilling job. An ascetic physical specimen who should be a Le Samourai style hitman, instead he’s tasked with rousting rival gang members from the bar and tailing his boss’ mistress. He is instructed to kill her if she is caught sleeping around, and his refusal sets in motion a series of bloody reprisals. Kim’s langorously tracking camera follows Sun-woo through his glimmering glass and steel universe, one exhausted of possibility, revealing only reflections. Lee is as drained of selfhood as the institutionalized Sisters, his motivation for revenge one of inertia. Neither Sun-woo or his boss can articulate why they are killing each other or why they can’t stop, only that it has started so it must end.

Later in 2005 Kim was a resident in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, marking a tonal shift in his work, his films regainng the self-reflexivity and jokiness of his first two features. The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) is a cartoonish spaghetti western spectacle that would make a good double feature with Django Unchained. Song Kang-ho returns to the fold as “The Weird”, a thief who steals a treasure map also valued by the Japanese army, a bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung) and an outlaw (Lee Byung-hun). The film opens with a fist pounding on a map of Manchuria, and the film is a bloody satire on the absurd lengths men will go to defend and seek words on those maps. In the bravura opening train robbery sequence, Kim’s camera follows behind Song walks in a merchant’s disguise towards the safe car, passengers and guards ignoring him along the way. But when a man yells out, “Indpendence for Korea!” he is immediately flogged and tossed off. As the bounty hunter says, “if you have no country, you still gotta have money”, so the cynical trio circle each other, fighting over a map that leads to an unknown treasure. Any time one of the three places trust in another, there are double and triple crosses, each man out for himself and his own plot of land. Kim amps up the pacing and his cutting rate – it moves much faster than his previous films, and is filled with slashing diagonals of the three competitors crashing into the frame.

Kim’s first Hollywood deal was delayed by a year, and in the interim Choi Min-sik brought him a script by Park Hoon-jung: I Saw the Devil. It is the first film that Kim directed but did not write, although it fits snugly into his preoccupations. It takes the usual serial killer movie cliche, that the detective has to think like him in order to find him, to its logical endpoint. That is, the law in this film becomes just as sadistically violent as the serial killer, and the two engage in a grand guignol game of brinksmanship in which both try to inflict as much pain on the other without inducing death. Because dying would end their fun. Tying together various strands of his work, with its deluded protagonists, fairy tale haunted house (of cannibals) and self-destructive violence, it stands as a mid-career summing up, a transition to whatever this post-Hollywood phase brings.

The Last Stand, which I have not yet seen, is about a gang speeding on an escape route to Mexico. The only people capable to stop them are a small border-town sheriff and his deputies. It sounds like a natural extension of The Good, The Bad, The Weird, with its proto-Western scenario and focus on permeable borders. I’ve heard mixed reactions, to the film so far, but it doesn’t sound like Kim will ever be eager to return to the states. He told Korea JoongAng Daily that:

I found I was just another foreign worker here. [Laughs] I don’t have a lot of friends here and all I did was work, so in a way, I felt empathy toward foreign workers. I felt myself getting stronger when I set the goal for myself not to give up and to endure this loneliness.

He has already started development on his next Korean project, a live-action remake of Oshii Mamoru’s anime, Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade. A version of the red riding hood tale set in an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II and Japan is a totalitarian state, it would appear Kim is returning to his comfort zone, pushing folk tales and traditional genres to the brink of self-annihilation.

ALEKSANDR SOKUROV’S GHOST STORIES

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January 8, 2013

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Aleksandr Sokurov’s Soviet Elegy (1989) begins with a tour of tombstones, the camera floating down rows of Communist phantoms. In the next sequence, Boris Yeltsin is shown stalking down a hallway, another kind of ghost, one aware of his coming obsolescence. Sokurov’s work is a series of elegies, in which ghosts of history mourn for themselves. Cinema Guild has illustrated this development in their three-disc box set of Sokurov: Early Masterworks. It contains the three features Save and Protect (1990, DVD), Stone (1992, DVD) and Whispering Pages (1994, Blu-Ray), plus three of his shorts, including Soviet Elegy. Each displays his increasingly idiosyncratic visual sense, in which he uses distorting lenses to produce stretched figures akin to El Greco saints, yearning for a God who doesn’t respond. Sokurov is often compared to Andrei Tarkovsky, the previous Russian spiritual guide/director. But while Tarkovsky often offers the possibility of transcendence, there is no such hope in Sokurov, just figures circling a void.

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These are demanding, deeply eccentric works, and none are more so than his Madame Bovary adaptation, Save and Protect. Sokurov focuses on Emma Bovary’s illict affairs, and cuts out her husband Charles almost entirely. He casts the skeletal Cecile Zervudacki as Emma, her recessed eyes and slender frame giving her the aura of an underfed zombie. Instead of brains its sex she’s after, feeding on the libidos of a series of romance-novel handsome beaus. Never satisfied, she wanders the Siberian steppe for 133 minutes in an aimless pursuit of a lasting human connection. Sokurov introduces anachronisms into the 19th century scene, as when the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” starts playing over an unseen radio, suggesting that Emma’s Sisyphean task will take multiple lifetimes.

Named by Susan Sontag as one of the greatest films of the 1990s, Stone takes Sokurov’s interest in the undead and applies his increasingly distorted visual scheme to it. It presents the claustrophobic scenario of a museum attendant at the Chekhov Musuem who spends all his time with a mysterious bearded stranger – the unsettled ghost of Chekhov himself. Almost entirely restricted to the interiors of the musuem, and shot in grainy B&W with image-stretching lenses that round the frame edge, the film has the constrained feel of a nightmare taking place in a snow globe, or that one is walking inside Sokurov’s own head. Of the realist writers of the late 19th century (Flaubert, Chekhov, Dickens, Tolstoy), he told Cineaste that, “This is the kind of literary world within which I could exist eternally.” With Save and Protect and Stone he attempts to. With even less narrative thread than Save and Protect, Stone presents the attendant and his ghostly pal in scenes of uncanny silence, the soundtrack a melange of breathing, ambient noise and Mahler. When the two wander outside they are rendered as two silhouettes separated from the landscape, as if they were just shadows against a wall.

Whispering Pages is another elegy for and escape into realist literature, this time of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment stripped of narrative. Sokurov’s Raskolnikov is not named, nor does he act. He simply skulks around the whitish-gray black and white, which occasionally dissolves into lifeless color, of the decaying city. It is a wet city, as damp as the village in Stalker, except there is no Room which promises escape. Sokurov’s elongated figures, often shot at low angles, seem to reach toward the sky, but fail to ever touch it, or reach it. Instead they trundle through film grain and dust motes and rain, an endless array of obstacles placed in front of them. All of these elements work on erasing people from the landscape, like the way the apartments are falling apart at the seams. In one disorienting shot, the camera peers up from the ground, towards Raskolnikov at right, and a tower straight ahead. People are jumping off, down past the camera and presumably towards their death. Nothing is shown or explained, just nature reclaiming some of its own. He exchanges some glances with a neighborhood girl, but entropy takes them all. In the sodden resignation of the final shot, Raskolnikov sits at the foot of a lion statue, the giant paw obscuring his head. Eventually the human figure disappears. All that’s left is a manmade object, with no one left to admire it.

The Soviet Elegy also contains a long reading of names of Russian leaders, a cinematic memorial to the builders of the Soviet state that was now ending. This micro-portrait of Yeltsin foretells not only his Tetralogy of Power, wherein he made films on the Hitler, Lenin, Hirohito and Faust, but also these early features, in which the undead hold more sway than the living. Sokurov’s films are dreams of memories, or memories of dreams, in which the writers, characters and leaders that formed his consciousness awake and wander, and find us wanting.

Technical notes: Save and Protect and Stone were transferred from what looks like old release prints, and contain persistent flecks and scratches, as well as end of reel markings. The original negative for Whispering Pages was “completely unusable”, according to the disc, so the pleasing HD transfer was made from a negative found in Germany. No apparent digital restoration was done, so there are still plentiful flecks and scratches, but it looks the best out of the bunch. Considering the rarity of these titles, we should be grateful we can see these in any form.

“FIRST LOOK” AT THE MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

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January 1, 2013

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The beginning of the New Year means it’s time to catch up with the old. For the second year running the “First Look” series at the Museum of the Moving Image (January 4 – 13) provides an invaluable showcase for undistributed international cinema. Programmers Rachael Rakes, Dennis Lim and David Schwartz pluck adventurous work from festivals around the world, tracking developments in documentary form, the Berlin School, Korean indies and the continuing vibrancy of Portuguese film culture. In a clue as to the series’ disregard of commercial impulses, the series’ opening night film is Hors Satan, the latest by the divisive arthouse provocateur Bruno Dumont. Operating as a relatively youthful version of the New York Film Festival, First Look is an attempt to clue its audiences in to the possible future of the medium.

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If you’re looking for a crime flick alternative to Jack Reacher, you should seek out Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows, a terse heist film worthy of both Jean-Pierre Melville  and Donald Westlake. Released in Germany in 2010, it has never been shown in the U.S. aside from sparse festival screenings. Arslan has been grouped in the “Berlin School” of filmmakers along with Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec, as they all attended the German Film and Television Academy in the early 1990s under the tutelage of Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki (for more on the Berlin School read Marco Abel in Cineaste). Their style tends toward coolly observational reworkings of traditional genres, as last year’s “First Look” selection from the Berlin School, Christoph Hochhausler’s The City Below, rethought the corporate thriller. For In the Shadows, Arslan wrote an original script but is clearly channeling the stoic Melville hero from Le Samourai. The lead actor Misel Maticevic has more than a passing resemblance to Alain Delon, and plays a similar figure of blank professionalism. Known only as “Trojan”, Maticevic stalks through a glimmering Berlin of glass and chrome after being released from jail. Arslan often frames him in the corners of cafe windows, always watching and waiting for a lucrative gig to come his way. If the character is pure Melville the plot is straight from Westlake’s Parker novels, obsessed with the process of executing lucrative small time crimes. Trojan is constantly forming and reforming plans, covering for every contingency, sticking wedges of paper in hotel doors as a makeshift alarm systems and knifing through fights to leave as little evidence of his presence as possible. Arslan would be the ideal candidate to direct Jason Statham in the forthcoming Parker movie, but instead he’s moving on to recast another genre. This year Gold will premiere, his Klondike gold rush Western starring that brilliant blonde axiom of the Berlin School group, Nina Hoss (Barbara).

Another title for Jang Kun-jae’s Sleepless Night could be This is 30. A slender 65 minute reverie about a young married couple, this is a deceptively slight film that trembles with unspoken terrors. An unexceptional couple, the man a factory worker, the woman a yoga instructor, spend their days and nights together as one extended embrace. Actors Kim Soo-hyun and Kim Joo-ryeong ooze pheremonal attraction, each gaze and gentle graze positioned so they fit together like puzzle pieces.  The film uses the standard static camera/long take strategy of too many festival films, but these actors justify the strategy, their movements more than making up for the camera’s lack. The couple’s perennial youth must fade, however, and a hilariously picky post-dinner party argument introduces a fissure in their bond that both soon wish to ignore. The change is registered in their bodies, made clear in a final shot in which the wife looks at the husband, and he is looking at the stars.

Sleepless Night is so lived in, and such a reflection of my own life at this stage, that it feels like a documentary, whereas the actual documentaries on display are more composed and choreographed.  Inori is Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s follow-up to his gorgeous family drama on a Mexican coral reef Alamar, and it continues his ethnographic fascination with outsider communities. This time he follows a shrinking mountain village in Japan in which only the elderly remain. The school has turned into a walk-in clinic and the main occupation is decorating memorial shrines, with the residents seeming sanguine about the prospects of nature retaking their once bustling home. The film is a patient one that simply looks and listens, a recording of the dying light. The HD images are gorgeous, but I could have done without the overdetermined symbolism of one of the final shots – a woman’s face reflected in a ticking clock. Arraianos is Eloy Enciso’s more experimental take on the same material. He also filmed an aging community, this time on the Galicia-Portugal border. Along with documenting their traditional farming techniques and asking them to sing old folk songs, he has the villagers act out scenes from the play “The Forest” by Galician writer Jenaro Marinhas del Valle. These recitations in the forest and bars recalls the quotation heavy late works of Straub-Huillet, but with none of their wit.

One who could never be decried for his lack of wit is Thom Andersen, whose latest filmic essay Reconversion (Reconversao) examines the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. It is an education and a delightful one. Andersen’s fastidious work goes project-by-project through Souto de Moura’s career, traveling to each site as it looks today, providing historical context along with liberal quotes from the highly quotable architect. Souto de Moura is obsessed with the concept of ruins, which he considers the “natural state of the work, a work that comes to an end.” The series excavates another ruin with Xavier (1991/2001), an independent feature started in 1991, completed in 2001, and rarely screened afterward. Director Manuel Mozos was a friend and mentor to director Miguel Gomes, whose miraculous Tabu continues to wend its way across the U.S., and Gomes returned the favor by programming a series of Mozos’ work at last year’s Viennale (Vienna Film Festival). A melancholy no-budget drama about being young and lost, it follows the title character (Pedro Hestnes) as he returns from the army to a life of short-term jobs and shorter-term relationships. Abandoned by his mentally absent mother as a child, Xavier’s impulse is to drift instead of connect. A supreme hangout movie, Mozos shoots on the streets of Lisbon as Xavier and his fuckup pals kill time in cafes and bars, waiting for their lives to begin.

The most indelible entries in the shorts program, Mati Diop’s Snow Canon and Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Eletrodomestica, convey a similar atmosphere of waiting, of the in-between moments that define lives. Diop, best known for acting in Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, is also a born filmmaker (her uncle is the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty). Snow Canon is a uniquely tactile coming-of-age film, set in a cabin in a French Alps resort. Structured around a pattern of inside/outside, a young girl stares idly at the mountaintops out her window, while building an erotic life inside her head. First it is a cute male babysitter, but he is replaced by an American girl, who suffers a breakup and leaves her emotionally raw. Connecting through dress-up and fantasy, the two build an erotic tension that is only made manifest when both step into the fresh air outside, and their dreams briefly come true. Mendonca Filho’s film is a dry run for his stunning debut feature Neighboring Sounds, a rhythmically cut day-in-the-life of a middle class housewife in Recife, Brazil. Satiric where Neighboring Sounds is more observational, Eletrodomestica shows a household that worships technology to the point of absurdity, using it to cook, clean, do homework, and even self-pleasure. The First Look series is nothing if not pleasurable, a refreshingly hype-free and forward-looking fest that has the added benefit of making you look smart when one of these immensely talented filmmakers makes the next festival hit.

Man of the West: Booklet Essay

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Man of the West is riven with pain. Made in 1958 during the twilight of the Western genre, it is reflective and interiorized, mapping twisted psychological landscapes over the flattened physical ones. Director Anthony Mann was obsessed with transposing King Lear into the Western, with Lear figures appearing in The Furies (1950), The Man From Laramie (1955), and Man of the West. Mann had dreams of making a more faithful Western adaptation of Lear, and would pursue it the rest of his life. He was working on a version simply titled The King at the time of his death in 1967.

In The Furies and The Man From Laramie these dissipated patriarchs are corrupted cattle barons, while in Man of the West it is a sociopathic dementia-addled bandit named Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb) – who has three sons instead of Lear’s daughters. Gary Cooper plays Dock’s nephew Link, who was once in murderous thrall to Dock, but has since reformed and married. After a thwarted train robbery Link is absorbed back into Dock’s orbit, and is forced to confront the sins of his youth.

Man of the West was initiated by producer Walter C. Mirisch, who had moved his independent production unit from Allied Artists over to United Artists. He had an affection for aging, totemic Western stars, but tried to pair them with more “adult”, and violent, subject matter. Mirisch’s first production for UA was Fort Massacre (1958), a siege Western starring Joel McCrea. McCrea played a cavalry commander pushed to madness by his hatred of the Apache. The next star Mirisch wanted to dirty up was Cooper. So he sent him the novel The Border Jumpers by Will C. Brown, which Cooper approved. Instead of handing script duties to a genre veteran, Mirisch gave the job to Reginald Rose, who came out of high-toned television dramas, and who had written the popular film adaptation of 12 Angry Men (1957).

The script was a hard and violent character study, so Mirisch then brought on Anthony Mann to bring out its psychological subtleties. Mann had recently completed a remarkable series of five Westerns with James Stewart, ending with The Man From Laramie. In Laramie Stewart wandered into the Oedipal anxieties of a power hungry cattle family, the Western landscape a battleground of macho neuroses. The family unit in Man of the West is even more perverse, an all-male gang of thieves led by a half-mad old coot.

Dock Tobin seems to have cracked since Link’s departure, his crew a sloppy bunch of thugs and idiots, including a sweaty mute (Royal Dano) and a jumpy pervert (Jack Lord) Unlike Lear, there is no one left to inherit his ramshackle kingdom (an isolated ranch).  The re-appearance of Link ignites his old dreams, and so the old man ranting in a rocking chair flails to life, scheming a big bank job. He immediately begins remembering their past exploits: ”God forgive us we painted their walls with blood that time”.  But the bank no longer exists — it’s just another figment of past glories swirling in Dock’s head.

This is one of Mann’s most precisely choreographed films, with figures constantly activating each quadrant of the CinemaScope frame. The extended night sequence set at Dock’s ranch shows his command of composition. Link, along with two civilians, have been stranded by a botched train heist. The only home within walking distance is Dock’s, so LInk plays along with Dock’s delusion until he can figure a way out. At their first meeting in the ranch house the Tobin gang and Link stand stock still as Dock weaves his way between them, as if Dock had stopped time through his reminiscences. As the evening progresses it moves from Dock’s dreams to a living nightmare. The stillness of the Tobin gang remains (Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared these compositions to Antonioni), but the threat of violence ratchets up when Billie (Julie London) enters the room. Mann begins to utilize low-angle, looming close-ups, while the flickering of the lamplight captured by DP Ernest Haller gives the room an infernal feel. Eventually Link is held at knifepoint as Billie is forced to strip. It only stops when Dock asserts his newfound virility and orders everyone out, emptying out the frame. The whole sequence is a series of constricting horizontals, a visual template that reappears in the final shootout, done in between the floor slats of crumbling ghost town homes.

The whole film feels like an ending. For Westerns at large, for Anthony Mann’s artistic peak , and for the career of Gary Cooper. It is one of Cooper’s greatest performances, borne out of intense physical debility. At the time of shooting Cooper was almost sixty, and suffering from intense back pain, which he blamed on an old hip injury. For him the production was a test of how much pain he could endure. Mirisch marveled at his professionalism: “That particular day, I saw that Coop was very upset. When I asked him what the trouble was, he told me his back pain was just excruciating. …He told me that the pain of riding his horse down that street was almost unendurable. I could see it in his face. I suggested to him that he let his double…do the ride in a long shot. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He said, ‘No, I have to do it. You have to be close on me.’ And he did do the ride down that street himself.” It is unclear if his poor health was related to the prostate cancer that ultimately killed him in 1961, but his body was failing him. His performance is heroic – one of tensed, grimacing fragility, his reformed outlaw clinging to life out of sheer will.

Though he does not portray the Lear role, he conveys its complicated emotions more than Lee J. Cobb’s more straightforward, harrumphing villainy. Cooper is conflicted, violent, and obsolete, introduced gawking at the new railroad carving through the West. He recoils from the smoke belched out by these iron leviathans. He has to board the beast, and these opening sequences are almost slapstick, as Cooper fumbles with his seat and repeatedly lunges into the passenger ahead of him. He only regains his authority by entering into Tobin’s demented dream of their shared violent past. Cooper forces his body into its familiar ramrod posture to once again face down the bad guys, with his mortality pressing down on every frame.

THE LOOK OF LOVE: THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S (1945)

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Originally published in a booklet for the 2013 Olive Films Blu-ray release.

As WWII was winding down, the most popular character in America was the singing priest Chuck O’Malley. As portrayed by Bing Crosby, O’Malley was an amiable reformist, trying to bring Catholicism out of the cathedral and onto the streets. Created in collaboration with director Leo McCarey, Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) were the highest grossing films of their year, and amassed ten Academy Awards between them. Adjusted for inflation, The Bells of St. Mary’s made more money domestically than The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Father O’Malley is a kind of Catholic superhero, trying to modernize the religion before it lapses into irrelevancy.

Following Going My Way, McCarey was one of the highest paid men in America, and he could call his own shots. He formed a production company, Rainbow, and started planning the sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s, which he sold to RKO (Going My Way was distributed through Paramount). He developed the story with screenwriter Dudley Nichols, which focuses on the efforts of Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) to acquire a new building for her crumbling school, which will soon be shut down because of code violations. Father O’Malley is the new parish priest who must try and corral her ambition.

Bergman was under contract with David O. Selznick, so RKO had to pay him $175,000 to borrow her services, as well as sell him the rights to Little Women and A Bill of Divorcement. Bergman recalled how Selznick attempted to dissuade her from accepting the role, arguing that she “would just be a stooge for Bing Crosby’s singing.” She was enraptured by McCarey’s energy, though, and felt that, “If you didn’t like him, there was something wrong with you.” It was a hefty sum for RKO to pay, but Bergman had just won the Best Actress Oscar for Gaslight, and teaming her up with Crosby was the safest box office bet in town. Crosby was an altar boy as a teenager, and attended a Jesuit secondary school, but dropped out of Gonzaga to pursue a career in music. Conversant with both laissez-faire parishioners and strict observers, he was the ideal personality to bridge the gap between the traditionalist and progressive wings of the Catholic church.

While the episodic Going My Way has a tendency to meander, The Bells of St. Mary’s is anchored by the bubbling rapport between Crosby and Bergman. In a reversal of traditional gender roles, O’Malley is presented as a tender nurturer, while Sister Mary is strict and assertive, even teaching a young boy how to box. Crosby is introduced to St. Mary’s school through a series of humiliations. He is chastised by the maid (Una O’Connor), who clucks “I see you don’t know what it means to be up to your neck in nuns”. In Going My Way he owns every room he’s in with his laid back charm, whereas when he lays back here, he accidentally hits a buzzer and rouses the whole convent. Upon entering the conclave, he proceeds to sit down on a shrieking kitten. And when he gives his welcome address to the nuns, another cat toys with a straw hat behind him, causing the sisters to erupt in laughter.

Despite these indignities, Father O’Malley is still eager to assert his masculinity, so after two kids end up in a brawl, he expresses pride that they stood up for themselves. He tells Sister Mary, “On the outside, it’s a man’s world.” Mary replies, “How are they doing, father?” Their shifting power relations are expressed through the direction of their gaze. Mary begins her retort with modesty, eyes looking down, but by the end of her pointed phrase they drift up and stare straight off-screen at O’Malley, with the edges of her mouth curling into a grin. In his reaction shot O’Malley exhales and looks down, mumbling, “not doing too good” under his breath. This oblique reference to the horrors of WWII is also a decisive moment in their relationship. From here on out they exchange roles – Mary will exert aggression, and O’Malley compassion, accepting his subordinate role in the school’s pecking order.   He becomes a matchmaker for an estranged husband and wife whose daughter attends the school, while Sister Mary teaches her kids how to swing a baseball bat and throw a punch.

McCarey modeled Bergman’s character after his aunt, also named Sister Mary Benedict, a member of the Immaculate Heart Convent in Hollywood. Bergman portrays her with impish exuberance, an admitted tomboy who still finds pleasure in upsetting the expectations of how a nun is supposed to act. Bergman is very loose and inventive, and contributed eagerly to the improvisations that McCarey encouraged. Off-hand gestures, like how she flips a baseball off her wrist in a sporting goods store, or exaggerates her footwork during a boxing lesson, were made possible by McCarey’s improvisatory process. During down time, the director would sit at a piano and spitball ideas with the cast, encouraging acts of wild spontaneity. Bergman was already feeling free, not having to worry about her figure since she was clothed in a nun’s habit for the entire feature. “I was like a child with money”, she recalled, “and in the country of the greatest ice cream.”

McCarey put this improvisatory process on the screen with the Christmas Play, which Sister Mary is overseeing. She lets the children write it themselves, and informs O’Malley that, “Every time they do it, the dialogue is different.” The children are clearly making it up as they go along, as Bobby (the son of musical director Robert Emmett Dolan) hems and haws his way through the story of the birth of Jesus, ending in a tableaux of golf-club wielding shepherds. Instead of closing with “O Holy Night”, the kids sing “Happy Birthday”. Despite being set at a Catholic school, The Bells of St. Mary’s is quite secular, presenting the church as more of a social services organization than a religious one.

This is made explicit with the subplot of Patsy Gallagher (Joan Carroll), whose single mother pays the bills through prostitution. O’Malley takes her in as a student without asking questions, and tracks down her errant pianist father. This whole section plays like canned melodrama, a staid commercial for the value of church in the community. It almost seems as if McCarey included these scenes so he could get away with the more subversive antics of the rest of the movie.

One of the next turning points in the film occurs during a secular song. Sister Mary is singing a traditional Swedish folk tune by the piano with the nuns gathered all around her. O’Malley is attracted to the scene by her lilting soprano. He steps towards the circle, and McCarey cuts into a shot from his POV. It is the most artful composition in this otherwise classically framed film, in which two black habits join in the foreground to make a “V” shape, with Sister Mary’s face centered in the middle, as if in a cameo necklace. It is a devotional image, but this is not a religious psalm, but a love song.

Her eyes are shaded downward as she trills the lyrics, which roughly translate to: “Spring breezes whisper and caress loving couples/Streams rush by/But they are not as swift as my heart”. As she winds the song to a close, her voice lowers. But she inches up her head and finally sees O’Malley, which makes her voice fly up the scale to hit her highest note, which breaks up into a chuckle and a grin: “Oh, Father O’Malley!” In recognizing his gaze, she breaks the spell, but the tenor of their relationship has changed.

Their reciprocal glances continue to build in intensity, as word comes down that Mary will be transferred to another convent out West. It is ordered by her doctor, but O’Malley has to pretend it was his decision. This betrayal of trust triggers her shift from secular to spirtual, folk song to prayer. Before her departure, she kneels in in the chapel. Her eyes are directed upwards as she pleads,“Dear Lord, remove all bitterness from my heart”. It is a rare acknowledgment of God’s presence in a film otherwise occupied with the physical. As she passes by O’Malley outside the doors of the convent, her stare is unwavering, as she searches for some flicker of regret in his face. But there is none.

As she is about to depart, her prayer is answered. O’Malley calls her back, and gives her the truth. He did not order her re-assignment. Sister Mary closes her eyes in ecstasy, a beaming smile lighting up her face. She simply says, “Thank you, father. You’ve made me very happy.” They hold each other with their gazes, neither breaking away. For the first time their looks are equal. This is as close as they can come to a declaration of love.

Aware of the erotic tension of this goodbye, Ingrid Bergman planned a practical joke on the final day of shooting. In one of the last takes she threw her arms around a stunned Crosby and kissed him passionately on the lips. Reportedly one of the priests on the set jumped up and yelled, “You can’t use that!” McCarey didn’t, but this missing negative should be as sought after as the original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. Something else to pray for.

John Ford: A Biography

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I wrote this biography of John Ford for TCM’s DVD box set John Ford: The Columbia Films Collection (2013)

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In 1967 Kenneth Tynan asked Orson Welles which directors he most admired. Welles responded: “The old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” In the short history of moving images, John Ford occupies a uniquely revered position. He won a record four Best Director Oscars while remaining as popular with moviegoers as critics. His films were rousing entertainments that also picked at the contradictions of American life, of individual freedom vs. community, civilization vs. wilderness. These contradictions settle in the person of John Wayne, who forges a new society in Stagecoach (1939), violently holds it together in The Searchers (1956), and exposes the lies of its construction in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Ford’s films are as American as apple pie and armed aggression, and Ford is a great enough artist to encompass both.

John Martin Feeney was born in 1894 in a two-story farmhouse in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to his mother Barbara and father John. He was their tenth child, but only the sixth to survive. Both of his parents had emigrated to the United States from Spiddal, Ireland. John Sr. worked for the gas company, and made extra cash by selling bootleg whiskey to sailors and dockworkers. He eventually saved up enough money to purchase what would become Feeney’s Saloon, the new family business. John Jr. was a poor student but a devotee of the Nickelodeon theaters, and found his way into the movies when he discovered his wayward brother Francis had changed his surname to “Ford” and become a successful actor and director. After graduating high school, he briefly attended the University of Maine in the school of agriculture. He quickly decided dredging pig slop wasn’t for him, and sent his brother a wire asking for a job at Universal. He left for Southern California by train in July 1914.

His first job was as a studio ditchdigger, but he pitched in wherever he could. He was a stuntman, prop wrangler, camera operator, assistant director and actor, learning the whole business from the ground up. He even nabbed a bit part in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) as a hooded member of the Ku Klux Klan. He made his directorial debut on the two-reel Western The Tornado (1917), credited with his nickname, “Jack Ford”. The majority of the 40-plus films he directed for Universal have been lost. The greatest losses were the 24 films he made with Harry Carey, only one of which survives (Straight Shooting (1917)). Carey was known as the “Bronx Cowboy”, a rough-and-ready hero more realistic than the spic-and-span Tom Mix. Ford described the Carey persona as, “sort of a bum, a saddle tramp, instead of a great bold gunfighting hero.” The director would look back fondly on these films, dedicating 3 Godfathers (1948) to Harry Carey, and making Carey’s son Harry Carey, Jr. part of his stock company of actors. John Wayne would pay his own homage at the end of The Searchers (1956), by mimicking Carey’s famed gesture of gripping his right elbow with his left hand.

In 1920 Universal agreed to lend Ford’s services to Fox, the studio for whom he would make more than 50 features over 30 years. In another milestone that year, he would wed Mary McBryde Smith, a North Carolina native of Scottish and Irish descent. Their marriage was a rocky one, but like a good Catholic he never divorced. Together they had two children, Barbara and Patrick.

Ford’s first film for Fox was the lyrical small town comedy Just Pals (1920), and the last the WWI comedy What Price Glory (1952). As Harry Carey’s star waned in 1921, Ford left Universal for good and signed a long-term contract with Fox. The Iron Horse (1924) was his first big-budget spectacular, an epic  re-telling of the construction of the transcontinental railroad that movingly conveys the immigrant experience (it was inspired by John’s Irish uncle Mike). 3 Bad Men (1926) is a less triumphal version of American expansionism, an intimate tragicomedy about three outlaws who escort a grieving daughter to her land claim. Darkened with chiaroscuro lighting by DP George Schneiderman, it reckons with the price paid in blood by the push Westward. As the popularity of the genre sunk, Ford wouldn’t make another Western until Stagecoach (1939).

Fox at that time was under the spell of German master F.W. Murnau, who had come stateside to film Sunrise (1927). His mobile camera and expressionistic lighting deeply affected Ford, whose works in this period bear Murnau’s influence. It is most evident in Four Sons (1928), a WWI melodrama about a Bavarian widow whose children all enlist in the war, and it re-emerges in Pilgrimage (1933) and The Informer (1935). With the Western in eclipse and the emergence of sound, Ford experimented in a variety of genres, including gangster films (Born Reckless, 1930), underwater action (Men Without Women, 1930) and jailhouse comedies (Up the River, 1930). The last featured the debuts of Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart.

His films of the mid-1930s can be split into the “serious” works he made for RKO, like the IRA drama The Informer and WWI morality play The Lost Patrol (1934), and his more commercial films for Fox, like his trilogy of bucolic small town comedies with Will Rogers: Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934) and Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (1935). He netted his first Best Director Oscar for The Informer, but today the Rogers films seem more personal. They are visions of troubled melting pot communities held together by the folksy, open-minded progressiveness of Will Rogers, the kind of society that might have sprung up after the church raising in My Darling Clementine (1946). Ford later re-made Judge Priest as The Sun Shines Bright (1953), and named it the favorite of his films.

John Ford became the John Ford of legend with the release of Stagecoach in 1939. While the number of Westerns being produced was again on an uptick after over a decade of decline, the vast majority were cheap B-pictures. So when Ford started shopping his adaptation of the Ernest Haycox short story “Stage to Lordsburg,” it took him a year and a half to land the picture with Walter Wanger for distribution through United Artists. John Wayne, a former bit player for Ford who was making B-Westerns for Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures, was tapped for the lead. It was the first film that Ford shot at Monument Valley in Utah, the pockmarked moonscape that would become the testing ground of his Western protagonists for decades to come. A swiftly paced adventure that also pokes holes in classist bourgeois values, it helped to kickstart a new cycle of Western films and launched Wayne into the stratosphere. Orson Welles screened it repeatedly to learn film form before making Citizen Kane (1941).

The film’s success led to an astonishing burst of creativity, leading to what is informally known as Ford’s “Americana Trilogy”: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). A mix of Popular Front politics and Ford’s brand of populist patriotism, they span the era from the Revolutionary War to the Dust Bowl, and etch Henry Ford as a symbol of American decency, which, in Drums and Grapes, has revolutionary implications. Ford would go back to his roots for How Green Was My Valley (1941), his melancholy portrait of industrial progress, as a Welsh mining family declines along with the ascent of mechanization. Famous for beating Citizen Kane for the Best Picture Oscar, it is one of Ford’s most emotionally wrenching works, and introduces a skepticism towards “progress” that he returned to throughout his career.

It was his last feature before the onset of WWII, during which he served as a Commander in the U.S. Navy, and led the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, for whom he directed a number of propaganda films, from the syphilis scare flick Sex Hygiene (1942) to the harrowing battle footage of The Battle of Midway (1942). Midway and December 7th (1943) would win Best Documentary Feature and Short awards, respectively, but the bulk of his work for the OSS was secret, filming “guerillas, saboteurs, Resistance outfits.” After being discharged, he built the Field Photo Farm, a decked-out retreat where his Navy pals gathered every Memorial Day, and which had as its centerpiece a chapel in which the names of their deceased colleagues were etched. It remained in use until the end of his life.

His first feature after the war was They Were Expendable (1945), a downbeat portrait of a stretched-thin PT boat crew defending the Philippines from Japanese attack. The elegiac script was written by Ford’s Navy pal Frank “Spig” Wead, whose tragic life he captured in the bio-pic The Wings of Eagles (1957). After Ford’s immersion in the present, the rest of the 1940s find him grappling with the myths of the American West, beginning with Wyatt Earp and My Darling Clementine (1946). Henry Fonda, that paragon of virtue, turns the Earp role into that of a civilizing figure, clearing a path for community to rise in the violent go-it-alone ethos of the frontier. In the “Cavalry Trilogy” that begins with Fort Apache (1948), Fonda plays against type as an uptight martinet who leads his troops into a slaughter. Similar to the “print the legend” decision in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which covers up the real identity of the title’s shooter, Fonda’s folly is hidden and he is recast as a hero. John Wayne plays the scout who buries the truth and prints the legend. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), Wayne is an aging officerat peace with the moral compromises of the job. He is headed for retirement but is wary of the generation that will follow him, clashing with his subordinates and his children. Here again Ford is a skeptic of progress.

Wagon Master (1950) is one of his lesser known Westerns, but perfectly expresses Ford’s vision of community. Starring Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr., it follows a wagon train of Mormons and Medicine Show performers as they head west for the promised land. Ejected from every city they land in, together they create an outsider society of their own. In The Quiet Man (1952), John Wayne runs away from a violent past into the Emerald Isle, shot in eye-popping Technicolor by Winston C. Hoch. One of Ford’s passion projects, he had been trying to get it made since 1935, and finally convinced Republic Pictures’ Herbert Yates to back it after getting Wayne and Maureen O’Hara to accept pay cuts. Filled with knockabout Irish comedy and sweeping romance, it became one of Ford’s most popular pictures, and he won his final Best Director Oscar for his efforts. His other personal project for Republic, the Judge Priest remake The Sun Shines Bright (1953), disappeared quickly from theaters. A profoundly moving tale of tolerance, its plainspoken cornpone honesty did not connect with audiences.

Ford soon proved his box office bona fides with Mogambo (1953), an exotic big game hunting adventure with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. On the shoot in Africa he contracted amoebic dysentery, which eventually led to cataract surgery and the donning of his trademark eyepatch. Always a heavy drinker, his alcoholism became chronic in this period, leading to the chaotic Mister Roberts (1955) production, for which Henry Fonda returned to the screen after eight years on Broadway. The two clashed, and the combination of drink and stress led to a ruptured gall bladder. Mervyn Leroy was called in to finish the production. The film was a hit in spite of itself.

Out of the chaos of Mister Roberts came Ford’s supreme masterpiece, The Searchers. Invigorated by his return to the Western genre and Monument Valley, it is an immersive journey into the dark heart of America. John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, former Confederate soldier and mercenary gun for hire on a vengeful quest into Comanche territory to recover his kidnapped niece, whose parents were slaughtered. He is a virulent racist set on killing the niece sullied by the Comanche—Westward expansion envisioned as genocide. The ending is a miracle and a wish, a conversion into the communal America of My Darling Clementine and The Sun Shines Bright.

After a detour to Ireland and England with The Rising of the Moon (1957) and Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958), Ford returned to America and continued to feel his age, and make films about the process. The Last Hurrah (1958) tells the last days of a Boston politician, played with warmth by Spencer Tracy, and Two Rode Together (1961) is about an aging gunslinger Jimmy Stewart, exhausted and cynical about a town’s plan to recover their kidnapped children. Stewart returned for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a stately B&W memorial to the Western, in which, like Fort Apache, history is re-written to protect our country’s founding myths.

In his final decade Ford was engaging with the Civil Rights movement, reflecting on his own representation of Black and Native Americans (although personally he drifted toward Conservative Republican politics after WWII). Sergeant Rutledge gave Woody Strode a rare leading role in a chamber courtroom drama, playing a cavalry officer unjustly accused of raping a white woman. Cheyenne Autumn (1964) tells the tale of a Cheyenne tribe starved of resources by U.S. Indian Agents, and how they break through their reservation to take back their ancestral hunting grounds. Ford’s final film, 7 Women (1966), has the verve of a pulp adventure novel as Christian missionaries are besieged by Mongolian warriors, with only secular doctor Anne Bancroft to save them. It is like a feminist version of the Cavalry Trilogy, a siege narrative with nuns instead of soldiers (and with Vietnam the unspoken allegory, instead of WWII).

Ford’s health kept deteriorating, and in October of 1971 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. While battling the disease he stayed in touch with his stock company and watched old Westerns on television. He died on August 31st, 1973, with Woody Strode holding his hand.

–by R. Emmet Sweeney