Sequential Viewing Unit

by Zach

The British Invasion hit SVU this week, and we were only mildly impressed. The two most iconic British imports of the 1960’s, James Bond and the Beatles, suffered most, I suspect, from a phenomenon we have seen previously in SVU: too much success. The formulae that Goldfinger and A Hard Day’s Night either established or played off of have become so well known because of their respective movies’ successes that whatever freshness they may have had to begin with is gone. A Hard Day’s Night’s signature blend of music videos and absurdist comedy is de rigueur by now for any young, hot musical act, so much so that it has been co-opted by the Disney Channel’s tween star-making machine, just as the TV experiment that was The Monkees used the formula just a few years after A Hard Day’s Night’s debut. And I’m not sure how many original viewers—even this early in the series and coming just a few years after Psycho made it thinkable for a leading character to be offed like this—actually expected James Bond to die, as Auric Goldfinger so famously predicted midway through the movie, but I certainly didn’t. The only surprise I had coming, despite this being my first viewing of a Bond film, was that the main Bond girl didn’t die at the end—although the rest of the movie was riddled with at least two Bond girl corpses that I remember.

One of the most peculiar aspects of Goldfinger—and perhaps the James Bond mythos’s unique genius—is that it resets the criteria for winning the war of espionage. James Bond does not win because he is morally superior to Auric Goldfinger—whether the country/organization he works for is morally superior or not is beside the point, and fodder for a more thoughtful move than this one—nor does he win because he is more cunning or ruthless or cruel, all traits one might expect to be useful in the espionage game, and all traits that both Bond and Goldfinger possess in spades.

No, James Bond wins because he can out-seduce Goldfinger.

From the beginning, when Bond catches Goldfinger cheating with the aid of a voluptuous Shirley Eaton and promptly foils his plans and steals her away from him (setting up the inciting incident for whatever small emotional impetus the story might have when Goldfinger has her laminated in gold paint) to the ending, when (in a very uncomfortable scene) Bond forces his attentions on an equally voluptuous Honor Blackman and she proves to be the key figure in foiling the Fort Knox caper, James Bond consistently one-ups Goldfinger primarily through his ability to succeed romantically where Goldfinger cannot.

It is, on the surface of it, a completely ridiculous and extremely Darwinian way to frame the struggle of power, but it works in the context of the film. Similarly, Goldfinger’s plan to ruin the American monetary system and increase the value of his own stockpile of gold is also completely ridiculous (since when has any modernized monetary system operated on anything but faith?) and extremely Malthusian. Indeed, the campiness of the entire picture should be unbearable given its sheer absurdity and instability, but somehow it manages to get a viewer to meet it halfway on its own terms. I did not watch it with the same tongue-in-cheek amusement that I would have while watching, say, SVU’s entry for 1966, the Adam West Batman motion picture. And part of that, I think comes from the tremendous amount of time and money put into the picture, no matter how ridiculous it is. Just as Goldfinger seems to have, with complete self-seriousness, gone to tremendous expense of time and resources (when will he ever again have a practical opportunity to use that game room/Fort Knox shrine/gas chamber?) in service to his completely ridiculous heist plot, Broccoli and Saltzman seem to have, with complete self-seriousness, gone to tremendous expense of time and resources in service to Ian Fleming’s absurd spy plot.

The primary theory I have heard proposed for the Bond series’ success is wish fulfillment: men live vicariously through Bond. If this is the case, it does not speak well for the males of our species. James Bond is a morally repugnant character. This is one of the more profound if not original observations of the mythos that Fleming set up, and it’s one that’s consistently reiterated in almost any examination of espionage: spying (fictional or real) is a dirty business built on deceit. Bond, as the arrogant, self-conceited, cruel man that he is, is well-suited for it. Sean Connery’s personal charisma (and don’t sell that short—the Bond franchise has carefully selected its Bond portrayers for good reason) helps to conceal the gaping flaws in Bond’s character, or make them more palatable, or something, but the fact remains that at times any viewer with a modern western moral basis has to condemn Bond’s actions, if not outright hate the guy.

I mentioned earlier the scene in the stable where Connery’s character forces his attentions on Blackman’s character. It’s something I find greatly disturbing, particularly in light of the cavalier attitude and seeming approval (given its results) that the film seems to take toward the action. It seems to be the movie’s apotheosis of Bond’s promiscuity and casual violence.

I realize that questioning the sex and violence in Bond films is hardly an original stance to take, and an emphasis on cartoonish sex and violence is something that is ubiquitous in mass media (Tex Avery comes to mind), but Goldfinger shifts the game a little bit, and I’m not sure I can place my finger on how with much surety. The closest I can come to it is what I have already touched on obliquely: Goldfinger reframes the playing field of life so that violence is the way that the game is played and sex is the way to keep score (again, a very Darwinian way to look at things). Whether or how this is better, worse, or different than other fictional worlds I cannot say, but the Bond films have been imitated enough, both by other movies and by their future incarnations within the franchise, that the early ones that set the formula deserve careful examination as to what exactly they were doing.

As for A Hard Day’s Night, it’s surprisingly mild given the cultural upheaval that was the Beatles. There may be some mean-spiritedness to the way that the movie mocks anything and everything, especially the establishment, but what satire there is doesn’t nearly have the teeth or the directionless acerbity of much modern comedy. The rapid-fire pace and cutting techniques that this movie popularized are so widespread now that they do not come across as worth comment at all, despite their not having appeared in any previous SVU entries. Wilfrid Brambell (Not to be confused with Wilford Brimley) very nearly steals the show as Paul’s impish other grandfather – although I was disappointed to learn that the recurring “clean old man” description was a cultural reference rather than the amusing non sequitur I thought it was. It’s an easy-to-take, entertaining ninety minutes of Beatles music and (mostly) nonsense. A Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) touch can be seen in the workings of the film, which makes sense given the revival that the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre was seeing in the 1960s.

By Zach

In The Nutty Professor, Jerry Lewis is at his most Jerry Lewis-ian and also at his least Jerry Lewis-ian. I’m not sure, but I think this may account for its relative notoriety.

First of all, the character that Lewis is most identified with—the flamboyant, squeaky-voiced lunatic of the Martin and Lewis vehicles, The Patsy, The Errand Boy, and most of the Tashlin movies—is nowhere to be seen in this movie. Also distinctly un-Jerry Lewis is the fact that this movie has a somewhat linear plot. While the aforementioned Tashlin movies (some of the best stuff Lewis did) all had plots—or rather cartoon scenarios, because Tashlin, being a former Warner Brothers animator, did nothing more than place Jerry Lewis in a live-action Tex Avery cartoon (complete, unfortunately with sexist representations of buxom females)(another aside: I contend that Tashlin’s Who’s Minding The Store is a variation on the Twelve Labors of Hercules—so it’s educational for you!)—Lewis as a writer-director tended to write plot openings and then forget that he intended to do something with them… if, indeed, he ever did intend to. The Bellboy is an example of this sort of thing at its best, because Lewis comes right out at the start and admits he’s not telling a story. He’s just playing with what sort of gags can be done on film and with his sort of characters. Other movies (The Ladies’ Man, The Patsy, etc…) tend to open with set-ups that don’t really go anywhere until the very end, if they ever go anywhere at all. Somehow that unresolved tension, rather than improving the movie, distracts from it, making it worse.

Jerry Lewis was a master technician. I mean that as a backhanded compliment. Unfortunately, that was all he was: a master technician. Jerry Lewis knew about the technical aspects of filmmaking (he invented video assist), and he was a master craftsman of the sort of gags he did—which are admittedly an acquired taste. That may have been Lewis’s problem. He was so fascinated with the gag as an entity to itself that he completely disregarded its place in the narrative. When it came to servicing gags to a story, Jerry Lewis either had no ability or no interest. This is what makes The Nutty Professor so abnormal for Lewis. Whether it’s the source material or the setting or the era or the psychological conflict, Jerry Lewis got as close as he ever came to actually plotting out one of the movies he wrote and directed. Of course, there are significant detours—the Kelp at the gym sequence, for example—but even they are more significant to the plot than the completely irrelevant detours Lewis takes in other movies. In other Lewis movies, plots and characters don’t feel real. They’re artificial constructs placed in a setting so Lewis can play with the limits of how far he can take a joke. In The Nutty Professor, you still get the feeling that Lewis is stretching his narrative and characters to accommodate his jokes, but you also get the feeling that both entities exist.

But that fascination with gag construction and repetition and variation—that comes across full force in The Nutty Professor. And that is very typical Jerry Lewis. The recitation scene with Del Moore, where he plays the scene and lets it drag on and on, drawing comedic momentum from the duration of the bit, is very typical of Jerry Lewis. The emphasis on combining the wild visual and verbal gags—hitting you over the head with the jokes—that’s very Jerry Lewis too.

The big band soundtrack is also typical Jerry Lewis, as is the awkwardly down key, heartfelt moralizing scene (the confession scene near the end). Only in other Jerry Lewis films, the philosophizing was difficult to relate to the plot. It was a rapid change in pace, which made it hard to take, but it was also like the other bits in the movies—it was only temporally linked on film to the other things that happened, despite Lewis’s attempts to marry it to a plot. In The Nutty Professor, the self-exploration is married to the plot. Lewis’s fascination with how we treat other people and how we want to be treated and how we view ourselves and how we view those around us (oddly enough, a set of interests he shared with Fred Rogers) finally finds a narrative where these topics can be explored through events and characters rather than just through speech.

Lewis’s characters always have an underlying yearning to be liked. Most people do, and hence most movie characters do, but Lewis really exaggerated this quality. With Buddy Love he took it to its negative extreme. Buddy Love demands to be liked. He wants you to like him so much that he’s gone round the cycle back to where he doesn’t really care one way or another if you like him. The poseur, the “I’m-too-cool-to-care” attitude that is such prevalent episodic fodder for preteen and high school dramas (The “cool” guy is actually trying very hard to be liked—does Fonzie apply to this stereotype? I don’t know…), is played for keeps here. Buddy Love wants so hard for people to like him that he made a face like he didn’t really care and it stuck that way. And he understands this about himself. That whole “nothing gives us more pleasure than to be enjoyed” speech is downright creepy. It’s the closest (other than the transformation scene) that this movie gets to its horror story roots, in the same way that most horror stories do it: it takes something that’s true and twists it just enough that it means something else, something terrible.

The Julius Kelp-Stella Purdy romance is made almost as uncomfortable as the Buddy Love-Stella Purdy pairing when you consider their teacher-student relationship.

Oh, and Kathleen Freeman’s in this movie. Hoo-rah!

by Zach

For West Side Story, three more or less unconnected paragraphs:

1. West Side Story has astounding visuals, an iconic score, great performances, a classic melodramatic plot, and cardboard characters. The movie makes a Faustian deal: it makes extremely effective use of dramatic staging, pushing it just about as far as it can go. In return, predictably, it feels staged. The characters feel more like political philosophies personified than actual characters, and the dialogue sounds more like extremely well thought-out words recited off of a written page than actual thoughts spoken by actual characters. It all comes off as very rehearsed, very planned-out, with all the advantages and disadvantages attendant therein.

2. I realize that I’m buying into false gender stereotypes here, but even if they get into knife fights and come perilously close to doing horrible things to Rita Moreno, I still can’t see anyone who dances down the street the way these gang members do as being tough. Real gang members must have seen this movie and couldn’t wait to get to the West Side so they could steal these people’s milk money.

3. West Side Story won ten Academy Awards. As a side note, Rita Moreno—who won best supporting actress for this—is one of ten people (thirteen if you count non-competitive awards) to win all four major entertainment awards (Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy). Name three others without consulting Google for bragging rights (according to Wikipedia, familiarity with the sitcom 30 Rock may help you here, as apparently this accomplishment was used as a plot device several times).

By Zach

Disney has done such a good job of branding itself to little girls that when I think of the classic Disney animated film, I think of the three fairy tale movies: Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White. This week we watched three Disney pieces: the aforementioned Sleeping Beauty (1959), the Donald Duck educational short Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959), and the live-action Absent-Minded Professor (1961).

Sleeping Beauty’s greatest strength is its look. It is a visually stunning movie, an accolade that seems to owe a great deal to Eyvind Earle, who also worked on Disney’s UPA-style shorts in the 1950s. The one visual misstep so far as I was concerned was when this experimental background showed itself too much in some of the sequences involving Maleficent’s minions, who seem a little too abstract and colorless—in short, out-of-place in the lush storybook setting of the movie.

The plot for the film, and much of the music, is derived from Tchaikovsky’s ballet of the same name. While indicative of its time, I found the music appropriate to the mood of the film. I only wish that the visuals and score were used in service of a better story.

Sleeping Beauty is not an emotionally enthralling experience. One problem with the story is that the titular character has very little agency. She is a pawn in the central struggle between the Flora/Fauna/Meriwether triad and Maleficent. Likewise, while Prince Philip takes action, he is goaded into it and enabled to do it by the three fairies. In fact, the story revolves around this one conflict, and while Maleficent is certainly a strong enough villain to carry a seventy-five minute film, the good fairies are cast in the mold of the Disney comic sidekick, a la the seven dwarfs, the mice in Cinderella, or the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. They simply do not carry enough weight to make this a compelling story, which is a shame because hiding behind the basic structure of the plot are multiple philosophical and emotional buttons that do not get pushed. I realize that this is movie is supposed to be fast-paced and intelligible enough to appeal to children, but the best Disney movies manage that without sacrificing entertainment value story-wise.

Entertainment value is one thing The Absent-Minded Professor does not skimp on. It’s a silly, slapstick-filled romp done on the only-slightly-above-normal-TV-value Walt Disney Presents budget. An hour-and-a-half long sitcom that thrives on sight gags, it features two stars of SVU noir offerings from the past—Nancy Olson from Sunset Boulevard and Fred MacMurray from Double Indemnity—as the central couple, who are driven apart by Nancy Olson’s frustration with Fred MacMurray’s titular absent-mindedness. He misses his own wedding for the third time, but this time for a good reason—he has discovered a substance that may or may not defy the laws of nature. He chooses to call the substance flubber, “flying rubber,” and for the purposes of the movie that’s all you need to know about the stuff, although the explanation given is a little more convoluted than that.

Ironically, the movie is at its funniest when MacMurray is at his nastiest: gleefully terrorizing Elliott Reid, remorselessly causing a puny basketball team to cheat without their knowledge, or inducing a couple of thugs to repeatedly ram their heads into a locked door. The movie, like all of Disney’s Medfield college movies, is basically an underdog revenge fantasy with some gentle (and obvious) satire on American institutions thrown in for good measure. This one works best for several reasons: it was released at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, when America was still optimistic enough to enjoy comedy without irony, it features Keenan Wynn as the villain (Joe Flynn could grate after more than two minutes or so), it has some of the best sight gags of the series (as mentioned, sight gags are this movie’s bread and butter), and it features Fred MacMurray, whose likable white bread presence anchors the whole thing in a way that a more skilled comedian’s touch might have ruined.

The sequel, Son of Flubber, also delivers on the sight gags, but basically recycles the same premise and spends its extra fifteen minutes trying to un-resolve the points that were resolved at the end of its predecessor. The extra length shows, and the gimmicks used to keep the couple apart and keep MacMurray at the mercy of Keenan Wynn are even more hackneyed than before, the sort of thing I Dream of Jeannie was doing every other week.

As for Donald in Mathmagic Land, if having Paul Frees explain some of the more entertaining and less complex aspects of geometry to you for half an hour is your idea of a good time, this is for you. It certainly was my idea of a good time.

by Zach

Two important insights were made about Ocean’s Eleven in the post-movie discussion, and neither were made by me. Both of them helped pinpoint why the Rat Pack version of Ocean’s Eleven does not succeed on an emotional level as well as the Clooney/Soderbergh version—making this one of the few movies whose remake was better than the original.

Of course, the Rat Pack Ocean’s Eleven has its own breezy charm, and it trades heavily on it. This is the best, and first, of a series of Rat Pack comedy/action movies with numbers in their titles made throughout the early sixties. The main draw of any of them was the charisma, and depth, of the stable of stars featured in the films, both of which were difficult to match. After all, this was the group with charisma enough to market a Hefner Lite lifestyle to the American public, mainstreaming the Playboy creed of women, booze, and consumerism, and paving the way for the enormous popularity of the Bond movies.

The amorality of these movies is Ocean’s Eleven’s first drawback. It’s about a group of guys who plan to rip off a bunch of Vegas casinos. As another SVU-er pointed out, recent Ocean movies went to great lengths to demonize the victims, and for good reason. The modern movies play out more like an episode of Mission: Impossible, making the characters much easier to care about, even if they are still unjustifiable. The motivating factor in the Rat Pack version, barring Richard Conte’s character, is greed. It’s easy to like these characters, but it’s nigh onto impossible to care about them or whether they get away with the loot. And for at least one moment—the moment when the would-be burglars actually pull the heist and force the guys in the backroom to sing along with the revelers out front—I got a creepy Joker-ish feeling about these people, and really, really wanted to see them taken down. The fact that Cesar Romero (TV’s Joker from the Adam West incarnation of Batman) is the hood who tries to do it is an added level of irony.

A modern viewing of the movie may have dulled some of the original edge—perhaps originally it was much more obvious that the Vegas casino owners had mob connections, and maybe back then that went a long way toward justifying the eleven. There are other in-jokes—for example, in the pool scene, Lawford’s character’s political ambitions and Sammy Davis Jr. name-dropping Little Rock—that would be easy for a modern viewer to miss. All I caught, as a modern viewer, was the history of Vegas with the mob, the fact that the casino owners welcome Romero’s shady character so quickly, and George Raft (an actor notorious for playing mobsters) as the leader of the group.

While the best-scripted of the Rat Pack movies, the Ocean’s Eleven screenplay is basically a creative fifties B-movie which would be of little note to anybody nowadays except Martin Scorcese and Richard Schickel were it not for Sinatra’s involvement. It’s a mash-up of two popular fifties B-noir staples: the caper movie and the platoon movie. As such, it does little to capitalize on one of the hallmarks of both types of movies: the feeling of esprit de corps, dramatized by the specialization of skill of each member of the team. Again, with Richard Conte’s character as an exception, none of the eleven seemed to have a job that only he could do. The demolitions aspect seemed pretty simple, and other than that the two-man teams did the same things. Yet another SVU-er pointed out that the Soderbergh version of Eleven individualized the characters much better, providing each one with a task that he was specially suited for.

However, the plot twist at the end works better because of these seeming shortcomings. I won’t go into detail to avoid spoiling the ending, but it’s really the two plot twists that begin and end the third act of the movie that elevate this above the other Rat Pack forays, which either had too many (and too predictable) or too few plot twists.

by Zach

Field trip! We skipped a year to 1960 and went to see The Magnificent Seven at the Florida Theater in downtown Jacksonville. Movie theater-effect may partially explain the high score, as The Magnificent Seven tied for highest-rated movie we’ve watched yet.

It’s quintessential John Sturges, which means that it’s an action movie with an ensemble cast of mostly men. It’s a formula that Sturges used with varying success, from the brilliant The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape to the very watchable Bad Day at Black Rock and Ice Station Zebra (the movie Howard Hughes purportedly had on continuous loop when he cloistered himself in a hotel room near the end of his life) to the downright campy Marooned and Sergeants 3. Sergeants 3, which Sturges directed a few years after The Magnificent Seven, is a misfire that bears more than a few similarities to the latter.

Besides the numbers in the titles, there’s the Sturges formula set up above: large, male-dominated cast in an action movie. More importantly, both movies rework previous film classics set in Asia—SVU-approved Gunga Din for Sergeants 3 and Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai for The Magnificent Seven—onto a western setting.

The fatal flaw of Sergeants 3 is that it casts the Rat Pack in the leading roles. My old nemesis, Frank Sinatra, ruins yet another potentially good movie. Sinatra starred in another mediocre Sturges potboiler, Never So Few, with The Magnificent Seven co-star Steve McQueen. Being known as they are for their cool, it’s still a bit of a puzzle why the Rat Pack’s style did not mesh with Sturges’, but it didn’t. Sturges shared with Howard Hawks the very specific interest in coolness as professional self-confidence and apathy—the idea of a person being so good at what he or she does that he or she does not have to prove it. The Asiatic connection also seems apropos, as it’s an idea connected to the notion that ancient Asian masters did not advertise their skills, that they had to be sought out—the Yoda effect.

This notion of cool is one that may have reached its apotheosis in The Magnificent Seven. If there’s one thing that Seven does well, it’s that it achieves that Robin Hood/Knights of the Round Table feeling that an elite team is being assembled. From the moment Brynner and McQueen ride up boot hill on the hearse, you know that these are some seriously bad dudes. They’re like white, nineteenth-century versions of Shaft. Recast The Seven Samurai today, and the main Samurai ought to be played by Morgan Freeman. Recast The Magnificent Seven today, and it’s a crime if Samuel L. Jackson’s doesn’t get the part of Brynner’s cool and confident, shiny-headed Chris. And the team is chock full of bad dudes, not least among them being James Coburn’s sleepy knife-slinger.

Sturges’ two best movies, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, were heist capers disguised in other genres. They both reveled in the assemblage of a talented team united in a single goal. Perhaps the talent of the characters is matched only by the charisma of the actors plating them. If there was one directorial skill that set John Sturges apart, it was casting. Even his not-so-good movies, like McQ or Marooned, have cast lists that make you curious to see more. He could spot an up-and-coming actor a mile away. Bad Day at Black Rock features Lee Marvin before he did practically anything, Ernest Borgnine before his Academy Award, and Anne Francis before Forbidden Planet. The Magnificent Seven has Charles Bronson and James Coburn before they reached semi-stardom in exploitation fodder of the 1960s and 1970s, Robert Vaughn before The Man from Uncle, Eli Wallach before he was the Ugly in Leone’s western saga, Yul Brynner in a western before the idea made sense, and Steve McQueen after he was a television star but before he was an icon.

Having watched The Blob the previous week for 1958, McQueen’s growth as an actor is obvious. Granted, the script for The Blob did not give McQueen a great deal to work with, but his acting style resembled nothing so much as Hayden Christiansen in Attack of the Clones. In The Magnificent Seven, he’s still not the stalwart rebel against any and all authority he would become by The Great Escape, but he’s nowhere near playing the likable young WASP who tries to make time with Andy Taylor’s girl in The Blob. Vin is detached from the action, and he and Calvera form opposing sides of a Greek chorus commenting on the action.

Calvera is a very vocal philosopher who thinks that his superior understanding of the Seven makes for a complete understanding of them and finds out to his ultimate chagrin that he is wrong. It might be argued that Calvera is doomed partly because he is not cool in a Hawksian sense. He aggressively cares about the reactions of those around him where the Seven put on an air of apathy until the time comes for action. He questions everything where Vin uses his folksy aphorisms to avoid answering questions. Vin usually recasts the situation in a new light, as if that act got at some profound truth behind it (which reminds me: when does it ever seem like a good time to take of all your clothes and jump in a mess of cactus? Who in his right mind would ever think this was a good idea, no matter what time it was?)… or, more often, silently comments on the action through McQueen’s scene-stealing gestures. Calvera tries to use his questions and self-provided answers to win over those around him, and to some extent he genuinely wants an outside answer to even his most rhetorical questions. Vin just doesn’t care. Even within the group, he stands apart as Chris’s confidante, if not his equal.

Sturges’ movies, being, as I’ve said, usually male-oriented with sprawling casts, were interested in group dynamics. How guys establish or don’t establish hierarchical structure within their communities, and how they collectively come to decisions. This doesn’t come out so much in The Magnificent Seven, but it can be seen in the collective mentoring of Horst Bucholz’s character Chico by the other six, by the way the villagers stand around and discuss how to tackle their bandito problem, and by the way the best gunfighters—Vin excepted—all know Chris without an introduction.
All this being said, there is really one element that sets The Magnificent Seven apart. Without Elmer Bernstein’s score, The Magnificent Seven is enjoyable, even re-watchable, but not particularly captivating. Where The Seven Samurai is stygian, The Magnificent Seven is merely Sturgian. As much lip service as the movie pays to the ideas of a passing way of life and the irony of having a way of life based upon death, this is first and foremost an action picture. A very good one, but nothing remarkable. Bernstein wrote what is perhaps the most memorable score for a western ever, Marlboro man or no Marlboro man. The only score more iconic than this one is Morricone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly soundtrack.

Of course, the only natural reaction to a film like this is to recast the principle actors/characters as the seven dwarfs. So what follows is a list of SVU’s humbly-presented-yet-brilliant choices.

This, of course, makes Eli Wallach the evil queen.

by Zach

Rio Bravo is my favorite movie. Dr. Pepper is my favorite soda. I don’t have a favorite number yet, but I’m working on it.

I’ve read or heard three anecdotes about Rio Bravo that I thought were interesting. The first is that Rio Bravo was apparently a reaction to High Noon. Whereas Gary Cooper’s sheriff-against-the-odds wanders around the town asking for help from just about anyone throughout High Noon, John Wayne’s sheriff-against-the-odds refuses help that he feels would get in the way. Secondly, Rio Bravo stems partly from Howard Hawks’ observation that television series often hooked people not because of the plots, but because people became attached to the characters. A commentator on the DVD compared Rio Bravo to a domestic sitcom in the way it uses character types, and I think that’s an apt comparison.

Rio Bravo was directed by Howard Hawks, who had a penchant for reusing story elements and business from his previous movies. Rio Bravo particularly recycles elements of To Have and Have Not. Dialogue from the romantic scenes is lifted practically verbatim. The dynamics of the romantic relationship as well as the relative age difference of the leads is also similar. The main character’s protective, almost paternal relationship with the Walter Brennan character is carried through as well, although the Walter Brennan character’s alcoholism in To Have and Have Not is transferred to Dean Martin’s character in Rio Bravo and treated more seriously. Both movies concentrate on the relationships of the characters while using a monolithic, rarely-seen villain who controls the town to maintain dramatic tension. Both movies spontaneously feature scenes showcasing musical numbers. Both movies are filmed in English. But maybe I’m getting too broad in my comparison.

The structure of Rio Bravo is strange. You never really wonder if John Wayne and company will bring the Burdettes to justice. That seems a foregone conclusion. The real questions of the movie are: will Dude (Dean Martin’s character) fall off the wagon? Will Chance and Feather’s romance work out? Will Colorodo join the fight against the Burdettes? Will Stumpy ever get out of the back room of the jailhouse? To put it this way, it sounds like a soap opera, but a story at its most basic is, I guess, a soap opera. What interests me, though, is that this over-arcing question of the Burdettes is little more than an inciting incident that puts in motion the real problems of the movie, which have to do with character. Many movies succeed or fail on the quality of their villains. You couldn’t care less about Nathan Burdette or Claude Akins’ psychotic character in the jail cell (he was playing this sort of smiling killer all over the place on TV westerns at the time). You care that the heroes have a difficult task to perform, but you’re not really interested in who’s setting up the task. You want to know how this task will affect the smaller problems that each character is dealing with. Rio Bravo is a movie interested in getting you to care about its characters, more so than most movies. That may help explain its slow pacing, which is one of the most frequent complaints I’ve heard about it. Rio Bravo assumes that you will like these people—or at the very least, be interested in these people—enough to want to spend some time with them.

Rio Bravo was remade by Hawks twice, in 1967 as El Dorado and in 1970 as Rio Lobo, neither of which we will be watching in SVU. Rio Lobo, despite featuring Jack Elam, is not worth watching. El Dorado, while a good movie, is nowhere near as good as Rio Bravo. The most interesting difference is James Caan’s character and his relationship with John Wayne. His state-named young up-and-comer is in many ways more fun to watch than Ricky Nelson’s in Rio Bravo. Ricky Nelson was a performer, and, to my knowledge, never really had to play anyone else but himself. You can tell in Rio Bravo. James Caan was an actor, and played Will Ferrel’s dad in Elf, which has nothing to do with my point. Both characters, Ricky Nelson’s character especially, are variations on the Montgomery Clift character from Red River—an up-and-coming young hotshot trying to prove himself. The character arcs, depending on how you interpret the events of the movies, deal either with learning to take responsibility in society or learning to exact vengeance for fallen comrades (from Hawks’ point of view, I’m not sure if there was a difference). Since Hawks did reuse material throughout his career, it’s not that surprising that this sort of character shows up (it’s a common type in movies in general, not just in the movies of Hawks), but the three portrayals are interesting for their variety. James Caan’s character is comical and breezy, Ricky Nelson’s is earnest and cool-tempered, Montgomery Clift’s is self-contained and with an undertone of coiled-up danger. Clift’s character, the one who plays the biggest part in his movie, is understandably the most compelling. I somehow feel, however, that Rio Bravo is balanced out by its use of Ricky Nelson. The movie didn’t really need a big, showy part here. Dean Martin’s character is really the focal point of the movie, the one whose arc you want to concentrate on. Nelson may not have been the actor that Caan or Clift was, but then they weren’t the singers he was. If some people thing the musical sequence two-thirds of the way through Rio Bravo is embarrassing, just imagine how bad it would be with Caan or Clift strumming the guitar (Did you hear Caan in Elf?).

by Noah

SPOILER ALERT!: The following review reveals a twist ending

It was courtroom drama night at SVU: 12 Angry Men and Witness for the Prosecution. Not only do these movies have a common theme, they also provide an interesting contrast to each other. More on that later.

12 Angry Men is surprisingly good considering its budget. The entire cast was only made up of approximately fifteen or sixteen people. Only twelve, as the name suggests, have very much to do with the plot. Only two sets were used, and only one took up about 90% of screen time. The film follows twelve jury members who are deciding the verdict of a teenager charged with killing his father. The overwhelming evidence against him convinces all but one of the jury that he’s guilty. When the votes are counted, Henry Fonda plays the character who admits to voting innocent. After much debate, the man brings other jurists to his cause, and what seemed like an open and shut case turns into a very long session between 12 angry men. This movie is very well done, hitting the message home that a person is innocent until proven guilty, and he must receive the benefit of the doubt. Quite frankly though, the kind of things they did in that room they would not get away with in an actual trial. They practically had their own separate trial in there.

Witness for the Prosecution is a stark contrast to 12 Angry Men in just about every aspect. It was on a much more normal budget, it took place over a much longer space of time, in a different country, and had nothing to do with the jury whatsoever (probably because they didn’t have juries in the British courtroom). The movie is about Charles Laughton’s antics as he tries to get his fill of brandy and prove that is innocent at the same time. Finally, the greatest difference that sets this movie apart from 12 Angry Men is the twist at the end where it turns out that the witness is actually guilty. Where 12 Angry Men told us to trust humanity, Witness for the Prosecution told us that men and women are deceptive, and even the most seemingly upright can be the most depraved. The movie is very cleverly done, and you don’t see the twist coming at all. If you paid attention to the spoiler alert, and aren’t reading this paragraph, then I highly recommend this one as well as the other.

by Noah

Around this period of time, Jimmy Stewart, an established star of stage and screen, one of the most revered in the history of Hollywood, started getting really interested in westerns, leading to a long string of successful movies of the genre starring him. Jimmy Stewart practically became another John Wayne, though nobody could actually measure up to the duke.

The Far Country is very much like Jimmy Stewart’s other westerns: almost biographical in a way. They tended to cover a great span of time, showing the slow progression of Stewart’s character from one situation to another, all with some link in between to carry the movie to its finale.

The Far Country, for example, starts off with Jimmy Stewart and Walter Brennan, two good friends, shipping cattle on their boat to the far country. From there, he begins to make a life for himself once he’s sold his cows. His character tends to get in the way in all of his relationships, but they all seem to still consider him a friend. As his questionable scruples continue to get in the way, though, he is forced to choose between the logical side, or the right one. Not one of Stewart’s best, but this movie has its ups and downs.

Typically, Disney movies don’t get too philosophical by rule, but they touched the surface with the classic, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. What really sets it apart from most Disney movies is that it didn’t strive very much for comedy, and it didn’t strive very much for musical pieces set to animation, both of which take up quite a bulk of the many historical works from Disney Studios. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is, at its core, a study of, and dedication to one man, Captain Nemo, of the technologically advanced submarine, Nautilus.

Nemo was essentially a cynical pessimist. He was raised in a depraved world, and used his brilliant mind to free himself from that life…only to find an even more depraved world outside of his own. Out of his depression over the endless war emerged the Nautilus, an engineering masterpiece. Building a crew of trusted friends, Nemo adopted the guise of a sea monster to wreak havoc an all warships, and wage a war of his own. One thing he didn’t count on was survivors. When three of his victims find their way onto the Nautilus, Nemo, unsure what else to do, takes them in, restricting access to land, yet offering them the comforts of his home. The movie follows their exploits as the survivors witness Nemo’s eccentricities, brilliance, and over time, even come to befriend him. All this is pulled off excellently by Nemo’s actor, James Mason. SPOILER ALERT!: He dies at the end.

Again, SVU visits the wonderful world of Hitchcock with a movie which has been made and remade, Rear Window. The interesting thing about this movie is its low budget. The entire movie takes place in one room, like 12 Angry Men, except more complicated. Jimmy Stewart plays a traveling man who has been forced into house arrest by an unfortunate leg injury. With nothing else to do, he spends most of the day at his rear window eavesdropping on everyone else’s lives by their own respective rear windows. When he notices one of these residents, portrayed by Raymond Burr, acting suspiciously, he begins to jump to conclusions, and convinces himself that the man has murdered his wife. As he watches a large cast either overcome crises, or fail them, and waits for his leg to heal, he tries to get his friends to help him put a man behind bars who has committed a near perfect murder. As usual with Hitchcock, this movie is wonderfully done, and provides a good, solid couple of hours of suspenseful entertainment.