Tonight!

At 6:45 & 9:20

Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, The Wild Bunch

Top 5 Westerns:

1. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
2. Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
3. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
4. Once Upon A Time In The West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
5. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)


Top 5 William Holden Films:

1. Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954)
2. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
3. Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)
4. The Bridge On The River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)
5. The Horse Soldiers (John Ford, 1959)


Top 5 Robert Ryan Films:

1. The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)
2. The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949)
3. The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967)
4. On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
5. Bad Day At Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955)



Top 5 Sam Peckinpah Films I Haven't Seen Yet:

1. The Getaway (1972)
2. Straw Dogs (1971)
3. The Ballad Of Cable Hogue (1970)
4. Cross Of Iron (1977)
5. Junior Bonner (1972)


Top 5 Films Of 1969:

1. A Touch Of Zen (King Hu)
2. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill)
3. Army Of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville)
4. Age Of Consent (Michael Powell)
5. The Sorrow And The Pity (Marcel Ophuls)

A Short History Of The Western Genre, And Why The Wild Bunch Was Ahead Of Its Time

Pre-Classical:

Almost as long as there's been narrative cinema, there have been Westerns. The first is generally agreed to be Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery in 1903, a short film in which bandits, well, rob a train. It's one of the earliest examples of cross-cutting, location shooting and camera movement in film, and features one of the most iconic images in film history, the above shot of a gunfighter firing directly into the camera.

Classical:

Throughout the silent era, Westerns were generally cheap action movies and serials, with stars like Harry Carey, Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Good guys wore white hats and defended weak and innocent townspeople and women from black-hatted outlaws or wild Indians, tropes taken from popular Western fiction novels. Rowdy saloons, gunfights at high noon, wagon trains and stagecoaches under attack were standard. Actual Wild West figures popped up from time to time in Hollywood during the period: Hart was friends with both Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Some of the best films of this period were directed by John Ford and were first released on DVD a couple of years ago. The Iron Horse (1924) is a sprawling epic about the building of the transcontinental railroad starring George O'Brien (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans); it was one of the biggest hits of the decade. 3 Bad Men (1926) is about a group of honorable outlaws who protect a young girl from bad guys during the Dakota land rush.

During the 1930s, as sound was adopted and the studio system solidified, Westerns became a reliable source of B-movie programming. John Wayne, after appearing in Raoul Walsh's experimental widescreen film The Big Trail, starred in dozens of these cheap, formulaic films. Westerns occasionally got the prestige treatment: Cimarron, a melodrama set amidst the Oklahoma land rush (a sequence of which Ron Howard copies in Far And Away) directed by Wesley Ruggles and starring Richard Dix. won the Best Picture Oscar for 1931, it was the first Western to do so - there wouldn't be a second until 1990. Generally speaking though, the genre characteristics that had formed during the silent era were codified, run into the ground and made cliche in hundreds of pretty bad movies in the 1930s.


In 1939, however, John Ford returned to the genre for the first time since 3 Bad Men and made Stagecoach, one of the most perfect films ever made. Ford assembled all the character types familiar from so many other films (drunken doctor, innocent housewife, gold-hearted prostitute, noble outlaw, Southern gambler, etc), shoved them all in one stagecoach and drove them across the magnificent landscapes of Monument Valley, Arizona. There are bandits and thieves and saloons and an Indian attack complete with cavalry charge. Stagecoach is a summarizing film: it takes all the innovations and ideas and formulas a style of filmmaking has developed over a period of years and mixes them all together in a way that defines a genre, one that is new and fresh without adding anything new: it's greater than the some of it's cliches. The film was a big hit, it received five Oscar nominations and it freed John Wayne from B-movie hell and made him a major star with his iconic performance as The Ringo Kid.

Stagecoach was followed closely by several other prestige Westerns: Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn made Dodge City, Virginia City (1939) and Santa Fe Trail (1940), Raoul Walsh made Dark Command (1940) with Wayne and Claire Trevor, Gene Tierney starred in the terrible Belle Starr: The Bandit Queen (1941), James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich starred in Destry Rides Again (1939), in which Stewart takes a uniquely non-violent, almost Zen-like approach to cleaning up a dusty, outlaw-ridden town. William Wellman directed Henry Fonda in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), an anti-lynching film set in the West, think 12 Angry Men with horses. In 1946, Ford made his second sound Western, My Darling Clementine, with Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in the story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The film codifies what was becoming an obsessive Fordian theme, and by extension came to be a fundamental theme of the Western genre: how civilization came to be formed out of the chaos of the Wild West. Ford had already approached this in Stagecoach (what with its civilization in microcosm approach to character types), but it's given its fullest classical expression in Clementine, where the sheriff seems more interested in building a town than avenging the death of his brother and the film spends more time with the town's celebratory dance than the movie's climatic gunfight.


Revisionist:

I'd argue the Revisionist Western period starts soon after, with the first film in Ford's trilogy about the US Cavalry: Fort Apache (1948). If the Pre-Classical period is when the genre's types are created and the Classical when those types are codified, then the Revisionist period is when those types are subverted. With Fort Apache, Ford presents the cavalry as at much, if not more at fault for the ongoing Indian wars as the Indians themselves, subverting one of the genre's key traditions. Henry Fonda plays a Custer-esque Cavalry commander who plunges heedlessly into war with the Apache, a battle he cannot possibly win, against the advice of his experienced second-in-command, John Wayne, who speaks Apache and argues for treating the Indians with honor and justice. After Fonda's disastrous charge, Wayne is interviewed by the newspapers and we see inside the mythmaking process, how the stories we've been told about the West have been used to cover up incompetence and justify imperialism. The later films in the cavalry trilogy back away a bit from the harshness of the critique, but never again did Ford present Indians or the Army, good or evil, in as black and white terms as in Stagecoach.

Also in 1948 was Howard Hawks's first Western, Red River, with Wayne playing against type as a sadistic trail boss on a cattle drive who is overthrown by his adopted son, Montgomery Clift. The film provides an origin story for the capitalist expansion of the late 19th Century (factory workers need beef), and its sublimely disconcerting happy ending fails to overcome what the film has been telling us: that that capitalism was driven by ruthless, murderous men.


In 1950, James Stewart began making a series of Westerns with director Anthony Mann. In each of the movies, Stewart plays against his all-American everyman image as a loner, tortured by his past and relentlessly seeking revenge. Films like The Naked Spur (1953), Bend Of The River (1952), and The Far Country (1954) gave Stewart some of the darkest, and richest roles of his career. Mann had been mostly known as a director of films noirs, and he brought some of that genre's psychological complexity to the Western. Mann also directed Devil's Doorway (1950), one of the most honest and sympathetic films about the Indian experience in the West, told through the eyes of a Shoshone Civil War veteran who is run off his land by an angry mob of white settlers. In 1954, Nicolas Ray directed one of the most twisted of all Westerns, Johnny Guitar, with Mercedes McCambridge as the nice girl in town seeking bloody vengeance on Joan Crawford's bar owner in what appears to be some expression of psychotic sexuality. The film, along with Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns (1957) with Barbara Stanwyck, is unusual in that its main protagonists are women.

Not all Westerns made during this period were, of course, revisionist. George Stevens's Shane (1953) follows the classical formula almost slavishly; while Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952) does as well. That film, wherein Gary Cooper stands alone against a gang of outlaws while all the members of his community abandon him, so incensed Howard Hawks that he made Rio Bravo (1959), his greatest Western, as a counter to it. In Hawks's view, a sheriff's job is to police the community and defend it from outlaws, not run whining to the civilians every time there's a job to do. Hawks respected professionalism above most other virtues, and in his version, Sheriff John Wayne is offered and rejects the help from the community that Gary Cooper was so desperate to get. Hawks liked the story so much, he made it two more times with El Dorado (1966) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970).


John Ford continued to make Westerns throughout the 1950s. His Wagon Master (1950) is a minor masterpiece of classical filmmaking, with a couple of cowboys helping a Mormon wagon train navigate their way West through bad terrain and murderous outlaws. The Searchers (1956), though, is revisionist through and through: a harrowing look at the racism that pervaded the West, as John Wayne's psychotic hero Ethan Edwards hunts down the Comanche tribe that kidnapped his niece, the film exposes both the nihilism of the Wayne hero (in the end he can never be a part of the community he is necessary to create) and the casual racism of the white settlers as a whole. Two Rode Together, which Ford made five years later with James Stewart and Richard Widmark, is an even blunter examination of this same theme, with the settlers, whipped into a frenzy, actually lynching Indians. Perhaps Ford's most revisionist film, however, and one that summarizes much of his life's work, is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where the role of mythmaking in the perpetuation of lies about the West is laid bare, as John Wayne's gunfighter hero, Tom Doniphon, loses both the girl and the community to James Stewart's future Senator. The ironic tagline: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Also during this period, the influence of the Western genre spread beyond the US. The most famous and successful director to dabble in the genre was Akira Kurosawa, who transposed it to medieval Japan in films like Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961) and The Hidden Fortress (1958). Seven Samurai was then remade by John Sturges in the US as a Western, The Magnificent Seven (1960), while Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), which made Clint Eastwood a star and launched a cycle of Italian Westerns, set in the US and filmed mostly in Spain with an international cast of actors (Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Eastwood, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski, among others). These were generally noted for their graphic violence, amoral anti-heroes, Ennio Morricone scores and bad dubbing. Leone and Eastwood made two other films together, For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly (1966), each of which pushed the limit of what was acceptable in terms of violence and morality in the genre. As production codes were winding down worldwide, audience's appetite for more realistic gunfighting seemed unquenchable. But still, these films held out some kind of hope for the future. Eastwood's heroes may have been outlaws, but they still retain the kind of code of honor that made civilization possible. Leone's greatest film, Once Upon A Time In The West, is a kind of fusion of the Spaghetti Western's playful violence with the Fordian theme of building civilization out of chaos. In the end, Charles Bronson gets his bloody revenge on Henry Fonda, but more importantly, Claudia Cardinale brings water to the men building the railroad that will ultimately make those gunfighters obsolete.


At the same time, Sam Peckinpah made his first Western, Ride The High Country (1962). It was from a script intended to be directed by Budd Boetcher, who had made a string of very good, low-budget psychological Westerns with Randolph Scott in the 1950s (The Tall T (1957), Seven Men From Now (1956), etc). It's very similar to the kind of film Boetticher made, but Peckinpah was gradually moving in a more visceral direction. With The Wild Bunch (1969), Peckinpah let the violence loose on a scale rarely seen in mainstream film to that point. But not only that, the film is suffused with such a pervading sense of the apocalyptic End Of The West as to eliminate all possibility of future civilization. Where Ford and Leone saw community-building rising from the actions of those who would then be passed by that community, Peckinpah saw only an endless cycle of death and murder. It would be another 20+ years before another director would take this approach to the genre, and then only rarely.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, revisionism reigned as the genre's popularity waned to almost nothing. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) presented a sanitized, comical view of the West from an Indian's point of view. George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969) pioneered the buddy movie, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford as a pair of charming thieves that don't really want to kill anyone. Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) shows how a frontier community is built on the twin industries of liquor and prostitution, and ultimately taken down by larger, more ruthless capitalists. Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973) was a darkly comical retelling of Yojimbo, with his gunfighter this time burning the sadistic town to the ground before moving on. Eastwood made his own community-building story with the great The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as his titular gunfighter can't help but attract a following of helpless people who need defending. In 1985, Lawrence Kasdan made Silverado, a fine film notable for Danny Glover's fine performance as one of the genre's rare major African-American characters. In 1990, Dances With Wolves swept the Oscars with its revisionist telling of the plight of the Sioux Indians. Seen through the eyes of Kevin Costner's white Civil War soldier, the film comes perilously close (some would say goes well over the line) of condescending to the Indians, presenting them as idyllic "noble savages".


Apocalyptic:

In 1992, 23 years after The Wild Bunch, Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, a brutally violent story of a gunfighter, William Munny who comes out of retirement to hunt down and kill a pair of cowboys who attacked a whore in a hellish town run by a psychotic sheriff (Gene Hackman). This was the first Western to pick up on Peckinpah's thread of the nihilism and endlessness of violence (even his own Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973) was more melancholy than hopeless). It goes about as far as one can go in showing just how horrible a place the pre-civilizing West actually was, and presents little hope about it ever getting any better. Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man takes a trippier approach to just as miserable a world, with Johnny Depp's William Blake shuffled backwards in time and Westwards in space to his final Pacific resting place accompanied only by an Indian named Nobody and Neil Young's haunting score. John Hillcoat's Australian Western The Proposition (2005) continues in this vein, but with even more violence and less hope.

The HBO series Deadwood, however, provides a near-perfect fusion of the muddy violence of these apocalyptic Westerns with the Fordian theme of community building. Creator David Milch fills his fictional town with all the classical character types (saloonkeepers, lawmen, drunk doctors, greedy capitalists, innocent rich women, and so on) and then makes them even darker (the rich woman is actually an opium addict, the sheriff a borderline sociopath, the hotelier a venal toady, etc). Who holds the community together is Al Swearengen, one of the great characters in all of fiction. He begins the series as a scam artist, stealing what money he can from the clueless, organizing the bandits who attack people in the hillsides, stirring up violence against the neighboring Sioux, and not beneath knifing anyone who gets in his way. By the end of the series though, he is the lone force standing in opposition to the greater cruelty of George Hearst's mining operation, a brutal expression of pure capitalism that chews up any community in its path. Deadwood, in a sense, takes Ethan Edwards and William Munny and not only brings them inside the community, but makes them its leading citizen. In this way, he redeems the nihilism that Peckinpah and Eastwood saw in the violent men of the genre by making them merely shades darker than The Man With No Name, Tom Doniphon or The Ringo Kid.

Links: The Wild Bunch

Roger Ebert tackles the Wild Bunch in his Great Movies series.

The Guardian takes a close look at director Sam Peckinpah's body of work.

The previous Peckinpah Metro Classic, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, gets analyzed alongside the Wild Bunch courtesy of Associated Content.

Giddy-up.

There Will Be Blood

Act I: Setting the Scene

Act II: Do It Yourself

Act III: Glorious Basterd

Finale: The Masters 

Coming Attractions: The Wild Bunch

Wednesday, September 9th at 6:45 & 9:15.

Giveaways: The Ballad of Cable Hogue DVD and a gift certificate for Rain City Video, respectively.

See you there!

Tonight!

At 6:45 & 9:15

Links: The Sting

The original Variety review from December 12th, 1973.

An early draft of the screenplay is available at awesomefilm.com.

Episode #259 0f Filmspotting includes the Sting on their Top 5 Con Movies.

Partake.

The (Restless) Entertainer: Scott Joplin's Treemonisha

I wish I were Alex Ross.  That way I could write about classical music with some semblance of knowledge and authority.  Unfortunately I am about as well versed on this topic as I am with Nascar (or any other organized sport.)  With the help of Mr. Ross and his wonderful book, The Rest is Noise, which details classical music trends throughout the 20th century, I have been able to guide my untrained ear to certain artists and pieces within the field that tickle my particular fancy, like the atonal work of Bela Bartok.  But beyond that I'm pretty hopeless.

Whilst conducting a little research into a planned biographical sketch of ragtime composer Scott Joplin to coincide with this week's screening of the Sting where his music plays an Oscar-winning part, I discovered that Joplin was not only the preeminent writer of rags but also a composer of operas.  Who knew? 

 

About that biographical sketch:

Born outside Texarkana in the late 1860's to a laundress and her railroad laborer husband, an ex-slave who soon ran off with another woman, Scott was an industrious, studious child.  To keep the young boy and his five siblings occupied during the hours she worked, their mother Florence encouraged the use of her employer's piano.  Scott took to the instrument quickly and with the help of a German music teacher, steeped himself in the artform.  In the 1890's he relocated to Missouri and began playing piano in black gentlemen clubs, one of which was called the Maple Leaf, the name of Joplin's first and biggest hit.   Despite writing the best works in the ragtime field, Joplin never attained stardom during his lifetime. He toiled away composing pieces until his death at the Manhattan State Hospital in 1917 from complications related to schizophrenia brought on by syphilis.

With the rise of jazz, ragtime's popularity quickly waned and Joplin struggled to remain artistically relevant.  He had already been experimenting for some time.  The same year that he composed his first ragtime hit, "Maple Leaf Rag", Joplin created "Ragtime Dance", a six-minute theatrical work.  Four years later he wrote his first opera A Guest of Honor, all traces of which are unfortunately lost.  In 1907, as a last ditch effort to achieve artistic acceptance, Joplin threw all of his energy into creating Treemonisha, a semi-autobiographical opera set in the South in the late 1800's.  It follows the titular character, an educated and independent woman, in her attempts to steer her small town away from superstition and toward rationalism and enlightenment.  Joplin languished over the work for years, lavishing it with hints of ragtime, spirituals and folk songs, which along with its libretto's rendering of uneducated, Southern dialects and its all-black cast, makes Treemonisha akin to George Gershwin's celebrated Porgy and Bess.

Unfortunately Treemonisha, with its intellectual feminist hero, its blend of European traditions and American popular song, and its occasionally impenetrable dialect, was far ahead of its time.  Unable to find financial backing to mount a production, Joplin invested his own money to perform the opera one night at a Harlem rehearsal space in a piano-and-vocal-only format.  The production was a terrible disaster with a threadbare set and unpolished performances.  Many of the audience walked out before the opera's conclusion.  Bankrupt and emotionally crushed, Joplin soon spiraled into the depression that resulted in his hospitalization.  Subsequently Treemonisha disappeared for fifty years until ragtime's unlikely resurgence (thanks in part to the Sting), when the opera was rediscovered and performed to rave reviews in Atlanta in 1972.  Later performances from around the world finally solidified the genius of Joplin's masterwork, which resulted in a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 1976.

And how do I, classical novice that I am, find the piece???  I really like it.  Opera's still somewhat a struggle for me, but I think that's why I gravitate to pieces like this that throw in familiar popular forms to give me some common ground.  It's fun to hear the familiar ragtime stylings as an undercurrent to the grand performance.  Plus it's got dancing bears!  

Coincidentally this post took me almost the exact length of the opera to compose.  I type this sentence as the last minute of Treemonisha's joyous closer, "A Real Slow Drag" plays out. 

Completely unrelated post-script: As I am editing and affixing photos I'm listening to Harold Budd and Brian Eno's Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror.  Has anyone else noticed how Radiohead completely ripped off "Not Yet Remembered" for "Videotape" on In Rainbows???

Coming Attractions: The Sting

Wednesday, September 2nd at 6:45 & 9:15.

Giveaways: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid DVD and a gift certificate for Rain City Video, respectively.

See you there!

Tonight!

At 6:45 & 9:00

Movie Year Showdown: 1938 vs. 1939

The year 1939 is generally regarded as the greatest year in film history. But 1938, the year of this week's Metro Classic The Adventures Of Robin Hood, was a pretty great year for film as well. Let's see how these two great years matchup in our inaugural Movie Year Showdown (A top o' the hat to Bill Simmons, The Sports Guy, for the format, by the way):

Best Picture Winner: Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You won the award in 1938, an amiable, sprawling comedy with James Stewart as a stuffy capitalist's son who wants to marry Jean Arthur, the daughter of an eccentric bohemian family. The resulting culture clash teaches everyone valuable lessons about life. In 1939, the award went to Gone With The Wind, one of the most enduringly-popular films of all-time, a classic melodrama about a headstrong and spoiled woman who manipulates and exploits everyone and everything around her in a single-minded quest for material comfort and the mustachioed man she can't ever really admit to loving until it's too late. The Capra film isn't as good as some of his other work in the period, and while Gone With the Wind is a bit overrated, it's use of Technicolor was revolutionary and the crane shot over the bodies littering the streets of Atlanta in the wake of Sherman's attack is far better than any image in You Can't Take It With You. EDGE: Frankly my dear, the Oscars got both these years wrong. 1939.


Swashbuckling-Adventure Films: 1938 features, of course, Michael Curtiz's The Adventures Of Robin Hood, wherein Errol Flynn leads a band of the poor, oppressed ethnic Anglo-Saxons against the villainous, foreign power Norman aristocracy. There is also Sergei Eisenstein's epic Alexander Nevsky, about the medieval Russian ruler who unites his country to oppose the invading Teutonic Knights in a none-too subtle foreshadowing of the WW2 fight between the USSR and Nazi Germany. 1939 has a trio of pro-imperialist adventures: Gunga Din and The Four Feathers (celebrating the British military's expeditions in India and The Sudan, respectively) and Beau Geste, starring Gary Cooper as a British ex-patriate in the French Foreign Legion during their wars in North Africa. EDGE: Fight The Power with 1938.


Anarchic Screwball Comedies: Bringing Up Baby heads the list for 1938, with Katherine Hepburn as the lunatic socialite driving Cary Grant's mild-mannered paleontologist totally insane, and there are leopards. Howard Hawks's film is one of the greatest (and certainly zaniest) comedies of all-time. 1938 also features You Can't Take It With You, which is less crazy and gets a bit bogged down by it's self-important social message. Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, with Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper and directed by Ernst Lubitsch is also a fine film. 1939 features Lubitsch's great Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo as a Soviet bureaucrat who melts and falls in love under the influence of decadent Paris and Melvyn Douglas. Claudette Colbert also stars in Midnight, directed by Mitchell Leisen, which is one of the finest and least well-known comedies of the era. EDGE: "I can't give you anything but love, Baby." 1938.


Foreign-Language Films: 1938 features the above-mentioned Alexander Nevsky, arguably Eisenstein's greatest sound film which features a rousing score by Sergei Prokofiev and a ground-breaking battle sequence on an imploding ice floe. There are also a number of highly regarded French films I haven't had a chance to see yet: Jean Renoir's La bête humaine and La marseillaise and Marcel Carné's Le quai des brumes (Port Of Shadows) and Hôtel du Nord; along with Leni Reifenstahl's Nazi-epic Olympia. 1939, though, has Renoir's The Rules Of The Game, one of my all-time favorite films, Carné's bittersweet proto-noir Le jour se lève with Jean Gabin and one of Kenji Mizoguchi's finest films, The Story Of The Late Chrysanthemums. EDGE: "The terrible thing is: everyone has his reasons." 1939.


British Spy Films: Alfred Hitchcock's last, and arguably best, British film was released in 1938, the spy comedy The Lady Vanishes, about, well, a lady who vanishes on a train and the one girl who remembers her and wonders where she disappeared to. 1939 features the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, one of the greatest filmmaking teams of all-time with The Spy In Black, a film I, unfortunately, haven't seen yet. EDGE: "I don't see how a thing like cricket can make you forget seeing people." 1938.


Gangster Films: 1938 features the apotheosis of the Warner Bros. gangster genre with James Cagney (giving one of his finest performances), Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids in Michael Curtiz's Angels With Dirty Faces. 1939 tried to repeat the same formula, absent the kids, but with a larger historical scope and more romance in Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties and failed to top it. EDGE: "Whadda ya hear! Whadda ya say!" 1938.


Tearjerkers: 1938 has Bette Davis sacrificing herself to take care of Henry Fonda on a yellow fever quarantine island to make up for her unforgivable sin of wearing a red dress to a ball in Jezebel, Margaret Sullavan valiantly killing herself after all her friends sold all their worldly possessions to pay for her life-saving operation in Frank Borzage's Three Comrades and Cagney giving up his dignity on the way to the electric chair for the sake of the Dead End Kids in Angels With Dirty Faces. 1939 has Irenne Dunne not quite making it to the Empire State Building to meet Charles Boyer in Leo McCarey's Love Affair, Thomas Mitchell, Cary Grant and Richard Barthelmess risking life and limb to deliver the mail in Only Angels Have Wings, Charles Laughton made-up as the Ugliest Man Of All-Time rescuing Maureen O'Hara's Prettiest Girl Of All-Time from a Parisian mob in The Hunchback Of Notre-Dame, Jean Renoir and Jean Gabin's lifetimes of regrets in The Rules Of The Game and Le jour se lève, respectively, Robert Donat's brilliant performance as a schoolteacher who cares in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Laurence Olivier trying desperately to rise above his class in Wuthering Heights and Bette Davis sacrificing herself in Dark Victory and the love of her daughter in The Old Maid. 1939 also boasts two films the endings of which never fail to make me cry: the "You're a better man than I am" reading from Gunga Din and James Stewart's Lost Causes speech from Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, my pick for the greatest film speech of all-time and greatest performance of all-time. EDGE: Our tear ducts will never go hungry again. 1939.


Overworked Actors: Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn team-up twice in 1938 (Bringing Up Baby and Holiday). Claude Rains stars in four films from 1938 and five in 1939. Bette Davis stars in four 1939 films. Errol Flynn stars in four in 1938. Henry Fonda stars in five films each year. John Wayne is in four films in 1938 and six in 1939. James Stewart has four films from 1938 and five from 1939. EDGE: 1939 might be the busiest movie year ever.


Overworked Directors: Jean Renoir has two 1938 films, Marcel Carné two in 1939. Michael Curtiz has five in 1938 with six in 1939. John Ford directed three films each year, but his 1939 output is as good a year as any director has ever had: Young Mr. Lincoln, Stagecoach and Drums Along The Mohawk. EDGE: Always take Ford over Curtiz. 1939.


Musicals: 1938 features one of the last Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films, the bizarre psychaitry comedy Carefree, which is their film with the fewest musical sequences. 1939 features a pair of great Judy Garland films: former Metro Classic The Wizard Of Oz and one of her best films with Mickey Rooney, Busby Berkeley's Babes In Arms. EDGE: it's almost unfair: 1939.


Westerns: In 1938, the genre was firmly entrenched in the B movie and cheap serial world. With Ford's 1939 Stagecoach, it became one of the premiere American genres for the next 30 years and John Wayne became one of the two or three most iconic movie stars in film history. Add to the fact that 1939 also features the great James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich Zen Western Destry Rides Again, and the EDGE: is unquestionably 1939.

Final Verdict: 1938 gave it a good shot, but 1939 pulled away at the end to win 7-4. Maybe next year!

Links: The Adventures of Robin Hood

A look into the making of The Adventures of Robin Hood comes from errolflynn.net.

An in-depth review of the movie courtesy of The DVD Journal.

Roger Ebert salutes the film in his wonderful series, Great Movies.

Huzzah.

Classic Comic for the Day

Click to enlarge

From the Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch

Walt Disney's Robin Hood Revisited

My most distinct memory of Walt Disney's Robin Hood does not actually involve the film.  On my first trip to Disneyland when I was five years old, I stood by dumbfounded as a costumed Friar Tuck ran into the women's restroom in Fantasyland.  I was too young to realize that the vast majority of the costumed employees were female, nor did I know how forbidden that emergency restroom visit was.  To maintain the meticulously crafted illusion, Disneyland stresses that employees in costume cannot, under any circumstances, break character when in the public's purview.  If you're going to puke or pass out, do it with the head attached. Something must have been seriously wrong with that fleeing Friar.

My impressions of the film itself are hazy.  I remember the archery competition and a tedious imprisonment scene but that's about it.  I haven't seen the film in at least two decades and I wondered how it would fare, particularly since my recent conversion to obsessive Disney nutcase (classic Disney films and Disneyland exclusively; I'm not vouching for Hannah Montana or G-Force.)  In honor of this week's Metro Classic, I decided it was time I took a trip back to the animated Nottingham.

Well, it's no Pinocchio.  It's not even an Adventure with Ichabod and Mr Toad (which is ridiculously underrated by the way.)  It's not that the film is bad, it's just kind of boring.  Robin Hood was the second feature made after Walt's death in 1966 and his absence is overwhelmingly apparent.  Throughout his career Walt Disney strived to create work that was fresh, exciting and new.  He quickly grew bored with doing things the same way twice.  Robin Hood feels like a patchwork of previous Disney films, which in certain respects it was.  The most obvious example is that of the character Little John who is a veritable Xerox of Baloo the Bear from the Jungle Book, the last film that Walt had input on.  The character is not only an identical visual reproduction but he also is voiced by the same man, Mr. Phil Harris.  Robin Hood also reuses animation from previous films, most noticeably during the "Phony King of England" dance sequence which borrows movements from the Jungle Book, Snow White, and the Aristocats. 

All of this repetition was a necessity of sorts because Robin Hood was given an egregiously low budget by the studio, another mistake Walt would never have made.  He continually put the studio on the precipice of bankruptcy to realize his dreams, whether it was producing the first animated short with sound, the first feature-length animated film, or constructing a theme park amidst miles of orange groves.  Even when he was following up these landmarks with more of the same, he experimented with storytelling (Fantasia) and picture (the majestic Cinemascope world of Sleeping Beauty.) These risks eventually paid off because Walt had a distinct vision and that is ultimately what derails Robin Hood.  The film feels altogether too safe.

There are some nice moments in the film.  I actually enjoyed the prison sequence this time around (which it turns out runs all of about forty seconds; I must have been a fidgety child) where the minstrel rooster plays a Kris Kristofferson-like ballad, "Not in Nottingham".  His song "Whistle-Stop" which opens the film is another nice tune.  I found the morbid prospect of hanging Friar Tuck refreshingly dark for a G-rated kids' movie.  And the final showdown, which involves a massive prison break and a Bandidas-esque (to coin a phrase) robbery, is exciting and fun.  Too bad there was an hour of meandering preceding it.

For the most part though the characters are one-note, the plot achingly repetitive and the animation threadbare.  There just doesn't seem to be much fun at the heart of Disney's Robin Hood, which is unfortunate for that is the one trait the titular hero personifies.

Coming Attractions: The Adventures of Robin Hood

Wednesday, August 26th at 6:45 & 9:00.

Giveaways: Captain Blood DVD and a gift certificate for Rain City Video, respectively.

See you there!

Others (Pre-Game Double Feature)