Jane Campion's The Piano

Re-watching this masterpiece today.  I'd forgotten just how bewitchingly beautiful and haunting this film really is--as are so many of Jane Campion's films.  Her most recent film, Bright Star, was one of the most moving love stories I've ever seen.

Warlock (1959)

I love Westerns, but I wasn't always so fond of the genre.  As a child, I sat glued to the tube watching the exploits of James West and Artemis Gordon in The Wild, Wild West--but that show was a campy masterpiece, actually more akin to Star Trek and Batman, than the traditional Western.  My dad watched Gunsmoke religiously; a show which I found insidiously boring at the time.  He was also an avid John Wayne fan, and that just seemed to confirm his "old man" taste to my young mind.  Of course, Wayne was a political lightning rod back then; and although the Vietnam War was very far from my consciousness, Wayne still seemed to be part of an old world that had little relevance to me.  Until I saw True Grit.  I fell in love with Duke after that.  True Grit, and I mean the FIRST True Grit, was a rough and cantankerous kind of a film.  It had a special lovable seaminess to it.  After that, I saw a whole series of what were known as revisionist Westerns: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Jeremiah Johnson, Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse.  They were all wonderful; but again, very much different from what my mind understood by the term "Western".  I think I had some idea that a Western was a simple black and white melodrama with yodeling cowboys, and Snidely Whiplash type villains--and undoubtedly there were many, many Westerns that fell under that description.  As a young adult, I had no time for such silliness; unless, of course, it WAS genuine silliness, like Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.  So I stayed away from Westerns for a good, long time.

Sometime in my college years I discovered the treasures of the Golden Age: John Ford's many wonderful Wayne vehicles--especially Fort Apache, Howard Hawks' Red River, George Marshall's Destry Rides Again, John Sturges' Magnificent Seven, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon.  I started to realize that the Western was a great genre, not because it simplified moral truths, but rather because it focused one's thoughts upon the complexity of moral truths by simplifying the stage of their performance.  Every rich and complex sentiment has been carefully and thoroughly catalogued in this genre; and the very best Westerns remain poised in the tensions of moral ambiguity, leaving their audiences with as many questions as answers.

It amazes me that after 47 years of avid film consumption, I still manage to find again and again masterpieces that I've never viewed before.  Edward Dmytryk's Warlock is a great example.  Made in 1959, Warlock features Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, and Richard Widmark all pulling in some of their finest performances.  The story is clearly a loose re-adaption of the famous gunfight at O. K. Corral.  A rancher and his band of rowdy cowboys is filling the citizens of Warlock, Utah with fear for there homes, lives, and businesses.  They form a citizens' committee and agree to bring in big guns-for-hire, Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda) and Tom Morgan (Anthony Quinn), to clean up the town and bring back order.  But it becomes immediately clear that the new guns represent a threat to law themselves.  One disaffected cowboy, Johnny Gannon (Richard Widmark), breaks with his hoodlum friends, and bravely takes on a deputy's star--thus, effectively putting himself squarely in the middle of the fight.  So, who now represents justice in Warlock?  The dialogue is rich, thought-provoking, and mature.  The characters are multi-faceted, ambiguous.

 I'll finish this tomorrow evening!

Warlock 1959

Sorcerer - Le convoi de la peur - 1977

This is an astonishing sequence from William Friedkin's Sorcerer, a pretty amazing remake of Clouzot's Wages of Fear.  I'd really love to know how they filmed this!

The Wages Of Fear - trailer (Le salaire de la peur )

My friend Brook told me he saw this film on cable the other night.  It is one of the greatest and darkest adventure films ever made.  Henri-Georges Clouzot created many masterpieces, but this is the one that resonates the most deeply with me.   Four lost souls driving two trucks loaded with unstable dynamite down a crumbling jungle road to put out an oil well fire.  Gut-wrenchingly bleak and breathtakingly tense.  Unforgettable.

Ten Seriously Great But Overlooked (Except by Filmbuffs) Films

An interesting shot from Mr. Arkadin

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success

1. Odd Man Out (1947, Carol Reed)  A notorious Irish resistance leader is shot during a botched bank robbery. Abandoned by his comrades he wanders the darkening streets of an unnamed city, steered by a panoply of allies and adversaries toward his final fate.
2. Mr. Arkadin, or A Confidential Report (1955, Orson Welles) A would-be blackmailer is hired by his victim, a mysterious tycoon, to uncover the tycoon's presumably forgotten past.  Every person he questions ends up a corpse, as he suspects he may become one soon himself.
3. The Day of the Locust (1975, John Schlesinger)  An aspiring artist in Depression Era Hollywood cynically discovers the fastest way to the top, and loses his ideals along the way.
4. Slaughterhouse Five (1972, George Roy Hill)  A man "unstuck" in time jumps back and forth between a WWII German prison camp, Fifties suburban America, and an extraterrestrial zoo.
5. Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)  Trench warfare in France during WWI.  A squadron turns back from an impossible assault and three men are court-martialed to set an example.  Their colonel defends them, but unsuccessfully.
6. Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio de Sica)  An elderly pensioner and his beloved dog are turned out onto the streets by a heartless landlady.  The old man searches for someone to adopt his pet, but finds no one trustworthy enough.
7. Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander MacKendrick)  A slick press agent is blackmailed by a powerful gossip columnist to break up a relationship between his overprotected sister and a rising jazz guitarist. Degradation ensues.
8. Oscar and Lucinda (1997, Gillian Armstrong)  Two gamblers in turn-of-the-century Australia, a minister and a glassworks heiress, form an unique bond of friendship.  The minister sacrifices everything for her, transporting a glass church across the Outback.
9. Slither (1973, Howard Zieff)  A parolee joins forces with his former cellmate's partner-in-crime to recover their hidden plunder.  Strangers in mysterious souped-up black vans are in hot pursuit.
10. Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer)  A bored banker exchanges his drab life for a new identity in a revamped body. It turns out to be a Faustian bargain he can never step back from.

Trailers

My friend, Julie, left a comment on facebook about The Pit and the Pendulum trailer I posted.  It got me thinking about trailers: how some are magnificent little films in themselves, sometimes better than the actual movies they're made for; or how sometimes they deceive, and manipulate in creative ways to frame our expectations of a film.  Julie mentioned the quote in TPATP trailer about John Kerr, "..in a challenging role." Well, if you've seen the film, the most challenging thing for John Kerr was probably the blade of the pendulum swooshing over his body, and I'm willing to bet it was done with an extra and some special effects.  So, yes: a wonderfully unintentional bit of humor there.  I've posted two of my favorite trailers of all time--tried to post a few more, but youtube wouldn't let me.  These two trailers got my teenage imagination overwrought with excitement for the movies themselves. I wanted to post the one for Being John Malkovich which conspicuously contained a very memorable piece of the soundtrack from the movie Brazil.  Did the movie marketers want us to make a subconscious connection between the two films?  What trailers stick in your memory, and why?