THE DEAD - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written in 2009 for DVDTalk.com.

 

Legendary director John Huston's last film, The Dead, was a family affair. His son Tony adapted the script from a short story by James Joyce, and his daughter Anjelica has one of the two main roles in the picture. This is as it should be, as the film is one that centers on family. The Dead is a movie about remembering times past and the connections that bring us together, as well as the secrets that we hold that keep us apart.

The Dead takes place in Dublin, Ireland, on Christmas Eve 1904. Three sisters (played by Helena Carroll, Cathleen Delany, and Ingrid Craigie) are hosting a dinner for family and friends. The guests come, they enjoy a little song, and then they partake of a goose feast. Amongst the guests is Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), the nephew of the two older hostesses, and his wife, Greta (Huston). Throughout the meal, the many attendees share their love of music and their memories of favorite singers, discuss religion, and largely get on well. There is some witty interplay between the two drunks, the good-natured Freddy (Donal Donnelly) and the self-centered Mr. Browne (Dan O'Herlihy), a flirt who judges the younger man but fails to see that he's just as pickled. There is also honor paid to the ladies who have done so much to gather everyone together.

Following the dinner, and after most of the guests have gone, one of the lingerers, a professional singer (Frank Patterson), gives a private performance, and his sad song inspires a melancholy in Greta. The moment marks a seismic shift, taking The Dead from a story about communal nostalgia and celebration to an intimate coupling and private sadness. Gabriel senses his wife's distance, and when they are back at their hotel, gets her to open up. She tells the story of a young man who sang her that song when she was a teenage girl and how he died from his love for her. The implication is that she died with him, at least emotionally. It's a wonderful scene, the bravura moment for Anjelica Huston. Her monologue is a powerful recounting of lost passion, a heartbreaking display of sorrow that is so exhausting for Greta, she immediately passes out, disappearing into slumber.

Here The Dead shifts again, getting even more intimate. The final scene of the movie is another monologue, but this time an inner monologue. Gabriel watches the snow fall outside his window, and he contemplates his wife's story, laments the lack of feeling in his own life, and also ponders the fate that awaits them all, the one that found his wife's true love at such a young age. Though the whole of the finale passes without Donal McCann opening his mouth, his performance here is no less memorable than Huston's. There is a subtle juxtaposition between the woman who is unafraid to feel, who lets her emotions pour out, and the man who can never find the same courage.

The Dead was nominated for an Oscar for Dorothy Jeakins' costume designs, and a large part of why this film works so well is the meticulous attention to detail paid by Jeakins, as well as production designers Stephen Grimes and Dennis Washington. The clothes and the sets are elaborate without being ostentatious. They make the story believable without ever overshadowing it. The whole of The Dead is understated in a way that makes it all the more realistic. It is not as attention grabbing as most costume dramas are, John Huston prefers the focus to be on the writing and the people and not the setting. His is a quiet film, one that grows quieter the longer it runs, from the sounds of a party all the way to silence. The final image is of snow falling in the sky, no words, only accompanied by plaintive music that hangs on to the very end, then stopping for a breath, the sky turning to nothing.

John Huston passed away in August of 1987, and The Dead was released that December. I can't think of a more perfect finish for a versatile filmmaker. Huston had debuted as a director in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon [review], a movie that almost literally starts with a bang. What, then, could be more fitting than a final fadeout that echoes with such poignancy without ever making a sound.

FAT CITY - CRITERION CHANNEL

 This review was originally written in 2012 for DVDTalk.com.

The 1972 boxing picture Fat City is one of those films that may not make sense to you right away. Truth be told, it took me all the way to the perfectly composed, heartbreaking final scene to understand exactly what it was I had just watched. This isn't your standard sports story; it is not a rise-and-fall narrative. Rather, it's one where the fortunes of its characters gather steam, stand up, and crash repeatedly, like waves on the ocean. It is a movie about carrying on, about finding reasons to get up in the morning, about how men seek pursuits where they can imagine themselves happy.

Fat City was directed by veteran filmmaker John Huston, whose credits already included The Maltese Falcon [review] and The Misfits [review], and who would go on to an old age of poignant movies about the end of life like Under the Volcano [review] and The Dead [review]. Fat City finds the cinema pioneer fully embracing the times. It is not a throwback to the Golden Age of Hollywood, but is in step with the maverick artistic aspirations of 1970s American moviemaking. Based on a book by Leonard Gardner (who also wrote the script), it stars Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges as two boxers, one an old has-been and the other a young could-be. The tale traces their intersecting paths. Keach's Tully randomly encounters Bridges' Ernie at an empty gym. Seeing something in the kid, he recommends Ernie go see his old manager (Nicholas Colasanto, best known as "Coach" from Cheers). Ernie gets a few fights while Tully works as a day laborer. Tully has a drinking problem and shacks up with a barfly (Susan Tyrrell, Cry-Baby); Ernie knocks up his girlfriend (Candy Clark, American Graffiti) and has to get serious about earning a wage. Both men eventually find themselves in the same place again.

The predictable thing to do here would be to have the boxers fight, young vs. old, the student taking on the master. Luckily, Gardner and Huston avoid such an easy out. The tragedy of Fat City is there is no great victory, neither fighter is anything special, they are just working men struggling to get by. One maybe sees his hope in the other, but they both deny their shared pain. Particularly Tully. He could stare in a mirror and say, "There but for the grace of God go I" and not realize it's his own reflection. Keach plays him masterfully. He is essentially a kind and even tender man, but life's disappointments have buried a rage in him. It comes out in explosive ways every once in a while, but mostly it eats away at him from the inside out. One of the best scenes of the movie is when Tully is chatting up Oma (Tyrrell), listening to her stories and bearing her insults, but eventually he provides an able body for her to lean on as he walks her home. As Fat City rolls on, it's clear no one is going to give Tully a similar break.

Like a good fighter, Fat City is lean and in shape. It dances around its central theme, drawing the punches, using each minute wisely. Huston is creating a naturalistic fight movie here. He wants to show how common life is on the lower end of the profession. The cinematography from Conrad Hall (Cool Hand Luke, Road to Perdition) captures the real scenery--the bars, the onion fields, the rundown gyms--without adding any extra glitz. The texture of the old film stock, and even the somewhat dilapidated DVD transfer, makes Fat City look like a perfectly preserved moment in time. There are no frills, no great sweeping camera movements. The boxing is raw, sometimes confusing and distant, and not at all graceful. It's dirty and cheap, the visual equivalent to the gravel in Kris Kristofferson's voice in the movie's theme.

And so it is that you come to that ending: two generations sitting together and pondering the misery of a third. Each one thinking, "I don't want to be that guy." Which is exactly when it hits you: everyone ends up as "that guy." You survive, you keep breathing, and just hope it turns out to be enough.

ACROSS THE PACIFIC - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally published in 2006 as part of a piece on the second Humphrey Bogart Signature Collection.

This 1942 film is notable as a follow-up of sorts to The Maltese Falcon [review]. Directed by John Huston, Across the Pacific reunites Bogart with Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet in an espionage story set just before WWII. Bogart is Rick, a disgraced soldier who falls in with a bad crowd on a Japanese freighter heading down to the Panama Canal. Greenstreet plays Lorenz, a cold businessman who is looking to make a killing in the Philippines and claims he is against a war with Japan because it will hurt his profit line. The closer they get to the Canal, however, the more Lorenz reveals. He's got something else cooking, and he's willing to pay handsomely for Rick's knowledge of the Canal. To complicate matters is the romance between Rick and Alberta (Astor), who claims to be a hayseed from Canada but may have a backstory that goes deeper. Which, really, they all do--Rick is running a game, too, but he's on the side of the good guys.

Across the Pacific is one of Hollywood's most straightforward war efforts, tickling paranoia about spies hiding among us. Its climax is set the day before Pearl Harbor, and in a weird case of clairvoyance, the original screenplay by Richard Macaulay (from a magazine serial by Robert Carson) initially hinged on the Japense attacking that very spot in Hawaii. When the tragedy really did happen, the script was retooled to climax in a Japanese plot against the Panama Canal, which is something that Bogart could actually be shown stopping. Lorenz and his undercover cronies were hoping to catch America with their pants down, but at least in this pocket of the fictional universe, that wasn't going to happen. Bogart and Astor have more fun in their romantic subplot than in The Maltese Falcon, giving their on-ship banter a sillier spin. Rick's jib is cut similar to Sam Spade's in that much of his swagger swings on him fostering an illusion of self-centered ambivalence. When the chips fall, however, Rick is allowed to be more of a hero, busting heads in the jungle and commandeering a machine gun. Some of the action is a little clunky, possibly down to John Huston leaving before shooting finished to join the war effort (Vincent Sherman took over), but the trio of great actors makes Across the Pacific more than worthwhile.

THE MALTESE FALCON - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally part of a piece on the second Humphrey Bogart Signature Collection for DVDTalk.com in 2006, and covers three different adaptations of the Dashiell Hammett novel.

I've seen the '41 version of The Maltese Falcon more times than I can count and read the Dashiell Hammett novel at least twice; however, I had never seen the other two movie versions before. I thought it would be fun to watch them in order and see how the story climbs up the ladder. How many Sam Spades and bands of thieves does it take to catch a priceless bird?

Sam Spade circa 1931

Sometimes known as Dangerous Female, Roy Del Ruth's 1931 adaptation isn't a bad film, but it does have the clunkiness of early Hollywood. The story is essentially the same as its more famous descendent--private dick Sam Spade is hired by a dazzling dame to chase after a pack of lies, leading him into a nest of crooks all searching for a fabled jewel-encrusted statue of a bird--but without any of the hardbitten dialogue. What really sets the two apart, however, are the actors. Ricardo Cortez, who would also later play Perry Mason in The Case of the Black Cat, doesn't really pull off Sam Spade. He's a little too flip, trading on his sarcastic Cheshire cat grin rather than commanding the room. If he were under the gun with John Huston's villainous 1941 cast, he'd never get out alive.  Thankfully for Cortez, the band of thieves he must contend with aren't nearly as sinister. The only actor who comes close to achieving the same level of menace is Dudley Digges. As Gutman, he manages the arch façade of the criminal mastermind. The homosexual undertones between himself and Wilmer (Dwight Frye, who was Renfield in Dracula) is also easier to read than you'd expect for the time period, as is most of the story's sexuality. The problem is that the film just isn't tough enough, something that is all too evident in the climactic confrontation between Spade and Ruth (Bebe Daniels, 42nd Street). Sam's womanizing is so exaggerated in the early scenes, and his interaction with his partner Archer (Walter Long) so cold, it's hard to believe he would be all that concerned with the man's death, an essential part of the story.

One thing Del Ruth does have that is not in the 1941 film is a coda where Spade visits Ruth one last time. It's actually the one scene where Cortez's take on Sam really works, as he begins the scene with humility and sadness and ends by covering up those emotions with the same rakish smile. It's what he'd been shooting for all along, but unfortunately for him, he only managed to snag it in the last two minutes.

Sam Spade circa 1936

1936's Satan Met A Lady, directed by William Dieterle, shares only a superficial resemblance (and one screenwriter, Brown Holmes) with the previous film. Sam Spade becomes Ted Shayne (Warren Williams, from the 1934 Imitation of Life), a gadabout private detective whose only sleuthing skills are finding gullible marks among rich widows. Run out of the town he had been hanging his shingle in, he returns home to annoy his old partner Ames (Porter Hall) and make woo with the man's wife (Wini Shaw). It's an easy gig until big money comes his way, a wad of cash by the name of Valerie Purvis (Bette Davis). Purvis' trumped-up case gets Ames shot, and when she comes clean, she asks Shayne to find a jewel-filled horn once owned by the legendary French soldier Roland. Competing for this trumpet is a tall Englishman Travers (Arthur Treacher as the stand-in for Cairo) and Madame Barabbas (Alison Skipworth as a female Gutman). The tone here is more comedic, and Hall plays Shayne with a droll wink. It's amusing as it goes, and it features many of the same double-crosses as the more famous adaptations of Hammett's novel, but it's only a slight diversion. Davis comes and goes in the movie, only occasionally showing hints of the talent that earned her reputation. A fun inbetweener, nothing more.

Sam Spade circa 1941

The true classic comes with John Huston's faithful 1941 retelling. Sticking as close as possible to the Hammett text while still translating it to film language, Huston's Maltese Falcon proved to be the breakout role for Humphrey Bogart and one of my favorite all-time films. Much has been said over the years about The Maltese Falcon, and there isn't really more to add. Just know that this movie needs to be in your collection. Its stylish angles, snappy pace, and crisp dialogue brings the story to life in a way few other hardboiled adaptations can match. Only 100 minutes long, you'd swear far more happens than the space can contain, but the editing and the camera keeps the story moving. Bogart does everything with Spade that Ricardo Cortez could not ten years before. He wears his cynicism as casually as his finely tailored suit. He is at once manipulative, humorous, and seductive, and yet beneath it all, he is honorable. Bogart makes Spade the ultimate example of an existential hero in the first half of the 20th century.

Yet, Bogart couldn't do it alone. Huston has cast the picture to give him a supporting cast that is just as interesting as the lead. If we weigh the scales on darkness and eccentricity, then we might even call them more interesting. Peter Lorre is the dandified, oily Cairo, while Sydney Greenstreet makes a formidable film debut at the age of 61 as the malevolent benefactor, Gutman. Mary Astor is both frail and dangerous as the femme fatale, while Elisha Cook Jr. is blood curdling as the quietly explosive Wilmer and Lee Patrick provides a real world counter balance as Spade's longsuffering secretary. Even the most minor of roles is given the utmost attention, ensuring that Huston and Hammett's meticulously constructed underworld is as full and rich as it deserves to be.

THE HARDER THEY FALL - CRITERION CHANNEL

Setting things right, and watching the intended companion in a double-feature with John Huston’s The Misfits [review here, and a part II piece here].

And honestly, I am ashamed of myself for waiting this long to watch Humphrey Bogart’s last picture. Released in 1956, The Harder They Fall features an aging Bogie at his most tenacious, a stand-up guy trying to get through by doing a little wrong. It’s both a tad too late to be classified as a sports-themed noir a la The Set-Up, and a little too early to stand as a symbol of old Hollywood trying to get its licks in with the new generation. Imagine this same movie in the mid-1960s, featuring Bogart tussling with a heavyweight from that era, someone like Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman in the Rod Steiger gangster role, and it would be the classic studio man tearing into the avant garde. This role could have been as iconic for Bogart as a punctuation of a time as Orson Welles’ turn in Touch of Evil [review].

In The Harder They Fall, Bogie plays Eddie Willis, a sports writer who finds himself out of work following the folding of the newspaper where he wrote for nearly two decades. Realizing that the job kept him fed but never gave him enough to start a savings, he throws in with crooked fight promoter Nick Benko (Steiger, Jubal [review]), hoping to earn enough green to never be in this position again. Benko has a South American giant he wants to turn into a North American star, but El Toro (Mike Lane) can neither throw nor take a punch. Only Eddie knows how to work the press to turn this loser into a champion, getting his old pals on the circuit to look the other way when things are dodgy and ignore that the fix is in.

What follows is a long tour of sell-outs, compromises, and lies, as Eddie tries to keep the whole enterprise from going belly up by Toro either finding out the truth about the cheat or getting beaten to a pulp. The audience and some of Eddie’s friends--a television reporter he had a falling out with (Harold J. Stone, Spartacus) and Eddie’s wife (Jan Sterling, Ace in the Hole [review])--see Eddie’s willful ignorance for what it is, even as he doubles-down at every obvious cue to get out. He has to believe that somehow Toro will get his payday, or Eddie will never get his.

The Harder They Fall is directed by Mark Robson (Bedlam [review], The Valley of the Dolls [review]), working from a script by Philip Yordan (God’s Little Acre [review]), who in turn is adapting a novel by Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront). It’s a slick picture, its swift pace held together by a tightly constructed script. The dialogue is terse and the viewpoint resolute in its cynicism. You’re going to really hate the bad guys, more so when they appear so spineless next to Eddie. As a narrative, The Harder They Fall is scrappy studio system efficiency, pulling off ten rounds of drama without ever hitting the canvas. 



Robson treats all the boxing matches as important, be it a quick done-in-one where the chump goes down easy or the finale where Toro has to tussle for real with the champ. In that climactic bout, the camera deftly moves in and out of the ring, giving us both the fighter’s POV and that of the audience. The latter’s pained expressions makes the beating seem all the more harsh. The most brutal match, however, is an earlier exhibition where a particularly proud pugilist (Abel Fernandez, TV’s The Untouchables) has to be given a bloody out. Try not to cringe waiting for Toro to hit the right mark.



Eddie is on par with some of Bogart’s most famous roles--the last good man amongst a whole lot of bad ones. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, he has a moral code that he should not deviate from lest there be consequences. Unlike them, Eddie has thrown that code out, and his arc is all about getting it back. The older actor mines a weariness that serves him well, making it as if Eddie somehow knows he is the last of his kind. When he goes down, all else will follow. Eddie’s relationship with Toro is a bit like a citified Of Mice and Men, with the simple giant never quite grasping how things work. The tragedy here is that he is very nearly self-euthanizing, taking Eddie’s advice that the only way out is by taking it on the chin--again and again and again.

The Harder They Fall is a fitting finish for Bogart. While, sure, he could have done something more grand or obvious before the final bow, it makes more sense to see him go out as he started: playing the toughest guy in the room. Even the very last scene, when he sits down to write, a flipside to In a Lonely Place [review], there is a statement of intent: Bogie will never give in, he’ll always be Bogie. It would have been interesting to see him punch into the next decade. Imagine his collaborations with Godard, or playing an elderly heavy in a Coppola movie. The old hound dog would have certainly taught the young pups a thing or two about a thing or two.

Jean-Paul Belmondo looking at a The Harder They Fall poster in Breathless.

THE HARDER THEY COME - #83

Full disclosure: I’m reviewing this movie by mistake. Not that The Harder They Come isn’t worthy of review, but I uploaded my piece on The Misfits to coincide with the Criterion Channel’s Friday night double feature with the intention of reviewing its companion to go along with it. One reprint, one new review.

Only, about fifteen minutes into Perry Henzell’s 1973 reggae movie, I couldn’t help but think it was a strange companion to John Huston’s western. What was the connection? Having already seen The Harder They Come, it probably should have dawned on me before I even loaded it in, but I didn’t know. There had to be some logic to this thing, some commonality to this pairing.

Because, of course, there is. But you have to have the right film to see it. The movie I should have been watching was The Harder They Fall with Humphrey Bogart. It’s Bogie’s last film, just as The Misfits was Gable and Monroe’s curtain call. Now that made sense.

Which leaves me to write up The Harder They Come all on its lonesome. Apropos of...well, not nothing. I mean, I am supposed to be reviewing Criterion releases, that’s what this site is for. I’d say it’s easily more than ten years since I last watched The Harder They Come, back when I’d have said it wasn’t really my thing, and it took a little time after seeing it for me to eventually come back around to appreciate its legendary soundtrack, because I thought the music really wasn’t my thing and I’d say now with even more years on the calendar, I appreciate the movie a little more, as well.

The Harder They Come was responsible for introducing much of the world to reggae music, and it made a star of singer Jimmy Cliff, who plays Ivan, a country bumpkin turned aspiring singer turned city gangster. Ivan’s entry into Kingston immediately goes wrong: he’s robbed, his mother refuses to let him crash at her pad, and he ends up homeless and starving. When a local preacher (Basil Keane) takes him in and gives him a job, Ivan’s luck turns, but so does his attitude. Now more cynical about the way of things, he starts to take advantage and take what he thinks is his, including stealing a bike and sleeping with Elsa (Janet Bartley), one of the preacher’s adopted daughters (so to speak). After running an errand for the church takes him to a recording studio, Ivan grabs his chance and cuts the movie’s title song, but even that goes wrong for him. His stubborn hustle turns off the label owner (Robert Charlton), and the guy sits on the single. His fame slipping through his fingers, Ivan starts selling drugs, the beginning of a criminal spree that will turn him into a folk hero and make “The Harder They Come” a #1 hit.

For as slick as that plot description sounds, The Harder They Come is not a slick movie. The narrative is rough and choppy, the acting sometimes questionable, and the overall look of it is not at all artful. But then, that’s also the charm of the thing. Henzell’s neorealist approach, shooting on location, using real people, working with the same scrappy fervor as his main character, creates a motion picture with a specific flavor that is altogether different to anything else out there. Henzell--who never made another feature--doesn’t just introduce us to Jamaican music, but to the country itself. The people and the locale really come through, and for as individual as that is, there is, of course, a shared experience we can identify. The themes and tropes of this poverty-stricken community are not all that different from the things we see in blacksploitation pictures or hear about in hip-hop. The Harder They Come has that same dangerous allure.

The film’s lone standout sequence, and one I would call entirely artful, is The Harder They Comes’s final scene. On his first night in town, Ivan gets a friend to take him to the movies, where he watches the original Django. Henzell jumps back and forth from the theater screen to the audience, whose loud reactions overtake everything, much in the same joyous way Sullivan sees the crowd enjoying the Pluto cartoon in Sullivan’s Travels [review]. The director calls back to this in the climax, when Ivan is having his shootout with the police. Between gunshots, we cut back to the movie audience, the people who have not only egged Ivan on with their attention, but also the ones we now see made his infamy possible. Brilliant!

In addition to Jimmy Cliff, who performs the most numbers, the movie’s soundtrack has Toots & the Maytals, Desmond Dekker, and the Melodians (among others). Each offer a slightly different soundscape, but they all sing about their own experience, be it Dekker’s ode to shantytowns or Toots creating a buoyant groove about everyday stress. For me the top numbers, though, are Cliff’s plaintive cry of determination “Many Rivers to Cross” and the Slickers’ outlaw anthem “Johnny Too Bad.” (Again, full disclosure: I might have heard them first as UB40 covers. By which I mean, I did. It took me a while to come around to reggae and dub. I told you it wasn’t my thing....)

If The Harder They Come were made today, the music would probably be more integrated, Henzell and his trio of editors cutting the drama to the rhythm of the tracks. Here, though, they are more a part of the atmosphere, often presented as sourced live, being played by the characters in the scene (be it in the studio or on record), with many of the songs repeated more than once. It’s almost like a cinematic version of the radio, because the repetition means these things stick in your head. The shaggy quality of the whole thing makes for a more authentic experience, too. This is no market-tested compilation roping in the latest passing fad (“Limbo (feat. G-Eazy)”), but a real expression of a people looking to be heard--including one who makes it, and pays the price for doing so.

THE MISFITS - CRITERION CHANNEL

Originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2011:

The quality of John Huston's 1961 drama The Misfits is often eclipsed by its salacious backstory. The final completed film of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, it was written for Monroe by her then-husband Arthur Miller while they were in the grip of a divorce. Shooting was difficult, as both Marilyn and co-star Montgomery Clift suffered from various addictions and mental afflictions. Both Huston and Gable were hard drinkers themselves, but their habits were nothing compared to their younger cohorts. The Misfits even fell into hot water with the studio, who couldn't make heads or tails of the film. If not for Gable, who had final script approval, standing his ground, who knows how the movie might have ended up.

As it stands, The Misfits is a marvelous motion picture, easily one of Huston's best (not an inconsiderable boast). If it was misunderstood in its time, it's because The Misfits was a couple of years ahead of the curve. Its tale of displaced loners looking for meaning in the Nevada desert grappled with the passing of time--and not in the sense of a ticking clock, but historically. These characters represented an age that was ending, a lifestyle that was fading. It was as much a metaphor for the oncoming demise of Old Hollywood as it was the disappearance of 1950s America. The aura of freedom the characters longed for, and the artistic license that Miller and Huston were grasping at, were just around the corner. In two years, Martin Ritt's Hud would be a big hit. Maybe existential cowboys were just easier to take when they were Paul Newman, or maybe 24 months really did make that much of a difference.

The Misfits opens in Reno on the day when Roslyn (Monroe) is going to court to finalize her divorce. Back then, Reno had the easiest divorce laws in the country, and wronged spouses moved to the littlest big city temporarily to establish residency and dissolve their union. (This was perhaps most famously portrayed in Cukor's 1939 production of The Women.) Getting her single life back likely paid off in terms of alimony, but it costs an emotional price for Roslyn, as well. Now that she's alone, she doesn't know what to do with herself.

Enter a cowboy. Gay Langland (Gable) is a rootless roughneck who has a way with the ladies. In his mind, the worst thing in the world is "wages"--that is, a regular job. When Gay meets Roslyn, he's looking to bug out of town and spend some time in the wild with his pal Guido (Eli Wallach), a war veteran and pilot. Guido actually saw Roslyn first, he met her and the woman she's staying with (the great Thelma Ritter) that morning to assess the value of Roslyn's car. That Gay moves in on the curvy blonde causes Guido much consternation. Both men have refused to settle down again since their last marriage--Gay is divorced, Guido a widower--but Roslyn has a way of inspiring men to make exceptions to their principles.

The quartet heads out to Guido's house on the outskirts of town, where they get loaded and flirty. Guido may know how to dance, but Gay wins the day, and Roslyn and he start shacking up at Guido's house. This is essentially Act I. Act II is hitting the rodeo to find a third cowboy to go mustanging. That is when they pick up Perce (Clift), another drunk who rides broncos and bulls. There is some intimation that he maybe has some mental problems, too, though which symptoms are caused by the booze and which by the blows to his skull are up to interpretation. Perce and Roslyn are immediately attracted to one another. If Gay is a kind of stable father figure, then Perce is a kindred spirit, a broken creature just like her. Seeing him tossed around a rodeo ring puts Roslyn on edge. She can't stand a living thing to be hurt. Earlier in the film, she even stops Gay from killing a rabbit who is stealing the lettuce from their garden.

Act III is the mustanging. Roslyn goes with the boys, thinking that they intend to capture the wild horses for riding. This is not the case. Nevada mustangs are rounded up for dog food. Once upon a time, there were thousands of them in the mountains, now the men head out there believing they will find at least fifteen; the actual count is less than half that, calling attention to how pathetic this whole scheme really is. Roslyn, of course, is horrified, and her reaction stokes the testosterone in the group. There is much male posturing. First, it's who will abandon the deadly quest fastest in order to placate her; then, as she rejects different members of the hunting party, who is the bigger man. Gay almost literally wrestles with a horse just to prove no one can tell him what to do. In the frontier days, he might have been applauded for this macho showing off. In the context of The Misfits, you end up sad for him--even if you aren't sure which way your pity should flow. Is it because he is so out of touch with the times, or because the times are so out of touch with him?

Arthur Miller's script for The Misfits is poetic and intelligent. The playwright never condescends to these characters; on the contrary, the writing shows tremendous affection for them. It would have been easy to make them purely comical, but the humorous moments come naturally, they aren't forced or born of ridicule. (The drunk antics when they all return home after the rodeo are as hysterical as the preceding scenes are heartbreaking.) There is a layer of metafiction here that is hard to avoid: these freaks getting boozed up and tearing each other apart out in the middle of nowhere really were a bunch of freaks in real life. The doomed history that follows The Misfits around--Gable died mere days after shooting was completed, Monroe followed within a year, and Clift apparently had his heart attack not long after refusing to watch the film on television in 1966--becomes part and parcel with the narrative. These were cinematic icons whose time was about to pass, working in a genre that had also seen better days. It's possible this is the first revisionist western, leading to the reassessment of the cowboy mythology that would redefine the genre over the next couple of decades. It's a safe bet that Peter Bogdanovich saw The Misfits before he started making The Last Picture Show [review]. John Huston's pioneering cinema style is all over that later film. Huston shoots in the thick of the action; wherever the dust is getting kicked up, he goes. Russell Metty's black-and-white photography is beautiful and gritty, capturing the open spaces of the desert plains and contrasting them with the cramped spaces where humans wall themselves in. The bar scene where Roslyn entertains the cowboys in inadvertent ways while playing with the paddle and ball is marvelously orchestrated; the men are climbing on top of one another, and the camera jockies for such positions, as well.

Just as it's easy to forget the excellence of the scripted drama under the scandal of the off-screen drama, it's also easy to forget that these actors became stars for a reason. The acting here is exceptional, with Marilyn Monroe turning in one of her finest performances as the bruised beauty Roslyn. There is a wonderful scene in The Misfits when Gay comments on how sad Roslyn is, and she is shocked, most men always tell her how happy she seems. He replies, "That's because you make a man feel happy." This one exchange could sum up the whole of Monroe's career, and to her credit, she brings this schism to life in her performance as Roslyn. She creates a complete character, one whose internal sorrow keeps her from ever being subsumed by the things the men in her life project on her. She can play at being happy, but Monroe knows how to do it so that it's clear that it's just for show.

By the shooting of The Misfits, Marilyn had put in time with the Actors Studio. Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach were also purveyors of method acting, and they both bring their naturalistic style to the production. They appear to be living it, not putting it on. (Clift has obviously been living it too much; his handsome features are starting to show signs of age and vice.) Clark Gable somehow manages not to get lost in this. His performance is pure confidence. Perhaps it's the fact that Gay is meant to loom large over the other men working in his favor. He is intended to be different, a misfit amidst the misfits, and so the performance styles end up meshing within the material.

The Misfits is a heavy movie. It's a sad movie. It sets up multiple themes and contends with each, all the while giving proper showcase to the characters and their relationships. It's a movie that isn't afraid to be about something, but it never forgets to be about somebody--or a bunch of somebodies--along the way. It also doesn't skirt the surface or play with clichés; rather, Huston and Miller get right down in the human muck and root around in all the neuroses and foibles, and though they lament how their misfits are losing ground, they also show how these folks do it to themselves. The tide of history drowns those who can't adapt. The glimmer of hope here is that sometimes, when people swim for shore together, they actually find a way to stay afloat.

Part of a recommended Criterion Channel double feature...

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE - #847

Sterling Hayden may be the king of film noir endings. The bitter and tragic finish of The Killing has often been bandied about as the quintessential noir finale, but there is a strong case to be made for the closing of The Asphalt Jungle. It’s brutal, and yet bucolic; the bad man mere feet from salvation, on a farm, surrounded by curious horses, before succumbing to the inevitable. Hayden’s tough guy, Dix Handley, is a victim of his own drive. He nearly had the film noir safe haven of a good woman and a rural retreat, but like so many others, Dix can’t outrun fate. He ends up flat out in the dirt.

The Asphalt Jungle is John Huston’s 1950 heist film. He directed and co-wrote with Ben Maddow, whom he also worked with on The Unforgiven [review]. Maddow would shortly after be blacklisted and find much of his influential work, including scripts for Johnny Guitar and The Wild One [review], credited to another scribe. Their joint script tells the story of a small band of crooks looking to make a big score.  A notorious criminal planner, Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe, The Scarlet Empress), knows where and how to get a million dollars worth of jewels. Backed by the double-crossing lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern, Notorious [review]), Doc puts together a four-man crew, including Hayden’s Dix, a driver (James Whitmore), and a safe cracker (Anthony Caruso). Naturally, Doc’s job works on paper, but unforeseen wrinkles prove to make the aftermath of the crime more difficult than anticipated.

Huston spends a short, but meaningful amount of time on the theft. Thought not as meticulous in his details as, say, Jules Dassin in Rififi [review], there is a similar quiet methodology to how the director stages the crime. The crooks are professional, and so they move carefully, each doing their job as expected. Steel nerves are required as the explosion opening up the vault starts off a chain reaction of burglar alarms everywhere else on the street. With the cops distracted, the boys sneak out undetected, but the dead body they leave behind causes the hunt for them to intensify.

Structurally, The Asphalt Jungle is balanced out pretty evenly between the preamble to the heist, the heist itself, and the resulting escape and manhunt. It’s the opening bits that really set The Asphalt Jungle apart from other such films. Huston is interested in examining the day-to-day lives of the criminal underworld (the original tagline was “The City Under the City”). He approaches their activities with the same sober eye he might turn toward a workplace drama. These are guys just getting by, a slave to their habits, buried by their past choices, and living paycheck to paycheck, even if that next paycheck comes from their next crime. They work in a profession with its own jargon, hierarchy, and consequences. You could get “promoted” and jet to a tropical climate to spend your earnings, or you could get fired, heading off to jail or, worse, the morgue.

Dix is a man a bit down on his luck, a compulsive gambler who funds his habits with petty stick-ups. Yet, there is something solid about the gunman, something that inspires other people to trust him, including the troubled showgirl Doll (Jean Hagen, Singin’ in the Rain) or even Doc, who likes the way Dix stands up for himself. Hayden brings a fair balance of self-loathing and pride to the role. His physical presence says he reliable, yet his spirit seems about to topple at any moment, as if he were ill and holding back a fever. The actor seizes on a moral streak buried in the subtext of the screenplay. Dix takes his work seriously, and he is loyal to his friends. They stick out their neck for him, because he sticks out his neck for them. When writing up The Asphalt Jungle, no reviewer would ever call him the good guy, and yet, at least he stands for something. (Compare this to the troubled, besotted Hayden shown in the 1983 documentary, Pharos of Chaos, included here as a bonus feature. Or, at least, compare as much as you can stomach to watch. I only made it through an hour before turning it off, finding it exploitative and short on context.)

Another notable player in The Asphalt Jungle is Marilyn Monroe. She has two memorable scenes in the movie playing Emmerich’s sidepiece. Though still a couple of years from becoming a true leading lady, 1950 was pivotal for the starlet in that it brought her two of her most memorable bit parts: All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle. Huston could not have cast the role of Angela any better, nor could he have taken greater advantage of Monroe’s natural gifts. Though on screen for a very short time, she is coquettish, judgmental, flirty, and emotional. She presents a seductive front, only to crumble under police pressure. Alluring, yet vulnerable. If only there had been a little bit of comedy, Marilyn could have displayed all of her wonderful talents.

In a way, Angela suffers the same kind of fate as the crooks, including her sugar daddy, in that her downfall springs from her individual desires. One by one, the police discover each member of the gang, all of whom somehow trip themselves up by letting their weaknesses get the better of them. It’s a payoff for all that time that Huston spent stitching their lives together. The fact they are individuals with their own concerns and their own peccadilloes means in some way they can be gotten to. As in many a noir, the one thing a man can’t escape is himself.

Huston straddles the line between noir and serious crime drama. He doesn’t rely heavily on the tropes of the genre, so much as he picks and chooses what he needs. This can be said for the visual storytelling as much as for the narrative storytelling. Working with director of photography Harold Rosson (The Docks of New York [review]), Huston plays around with his environment. His arrangement of characters in a frame can allow for them to appear small in a space that is much larger than them, or cramped in such a way to suggest it can barely contain them. Sometimes the crooks appear to be stacked on top of one another, other times, men who are at odds can appear to be separated by an illusory distance. Objects can loom. A clock in the extreme foreground reminds us that time is running out. The sky can appear so large as to be impossible.

Huston and Rosson indulge in impressionistic shadows when the story demands it--when the crooks escape in the sewer, or when Doc and Dix are trying  to sneak through town undetected--but otherwise the filmmakers approach the locale with a certain normalcy, letting the inkiness grow in a more natural sense, less exaggerated. This is a regular town, and a regular life can be had here. In other words, this Asphalt Jungle might be just across the street from where you live, meaning there is little separation between your life and theirs. “Normal” just happens to depend on your zip code.

SHALLOW GRAVE - #616

Motive, means, opportunity.

Except all out of order. That’s the way of 1994’s ShallowGrave. It’s backwards. Opportunity provides the means, and hanging onto those means becomes the motive.

An accidental overdose of the fourth and newest roommate in a Scottish flat offers the tight-knit friends sharing the apartment the chance to change their own lives. The three twentysomethings--journalist Alex (Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting), doctor Juliet (Kerry Fox, An Angel at My Table), and accountant David (Christopher Eccleston, eventual star of some television sci-fi medical drama or other)--find a suitcase full of cash in the dead man’s bedroom. He was a drug dealer as well as a user. No one outside of the apartment really knew he lived there, he had just moved in. If they can discard the body undetected, they could keep the cash.

The debut of Danny Boyle, Shallow Grave is darkly comic, almost Hitchcockian, with hints of the cinematic verve (extreme angles, tricky camera moves, songs by Leftfield) that would quickly become his trademark. The ease with which he developed that style, and with which he now cravenly exploits it in humdrum efforts like Trance [review] and Steve Jobs, doesn’t necessarily suggest the cinematic revolution to come, but Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald, and writer John Hodge were on the verge of something big. That they would take off with Trainspotting two years later, only to crash and burn with the unfairly maligned Coen Bros.’ riff A Life Less Ordinary and the exaggerated failings of The Beach is perhaps a defining story of 1990s motion pictures. Frame it as a mini version of the rise and fall of the American auteurs of the 1970s. Like Coppola leapfrogging from The Godfather [review] to One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now (if, you know, everyone hated the latter). We aim so high only to have our excess bring us low.

There isn’t a more 1990s movie than Shallow Grave. It’s not just of its time, but it’s accidentally about its time. Sure, there’s the obvious bad, poorly fitted fashion and the techno soundtrack, but it’s more than the outer trappings, it’s also the characters. Think about the types: the smartass Kurt Cobain wannabe, the independent woman with the short haircut, and the uptight accountant. Give us a Joey and a Phoebe, and you’ve got yourselves an episode of Friends where the Ugly Naked Guy dies in Monica and Rachel’s flat. (Oh, wait, we need a Rachel, too.)  And just like the 1990s, you want to slap that mildly amusing smirk off Shallow Grave’s face by the end. Its deep lesson is about as deep as the title would have you believe. It’s so ’90s, its sequel is John Cusack’s suit in Con Air. To quote Pulp, a band whose rise was contemporary to the folks involved with this picture, “You’re going to like it, but not a lot.”

Part of the problem is that the Juliet, David, and even Alex are all aggressively unlikeable and, even worse, not that interesting--which is usually the way around unlikeability, we want to watch the terrible people doing terrible things. Witty Alex isn’t all that funny, and none of the three appear to be anything other than mediocre at their chosen professions. Hence their need to belittle others and play cruel pranks. While Hodge’s scripts does raise a lot of moral conundrums, with the dead body and the stash of cash proving an apt metaphor for much of the 1990s--does one stay true to oneself or sell-out?--his characters never break out of their types. This means none of their decisions are all that surprising. We can guess that, for instance, the uptight bean counter who initially blanches at the prospect of covering up a death will change his mind after being humiliated at work, and eventually decide he wants to e  a big man and deserves the lion’s share of the treasure. Likewise, we know that there will be other bad guys on the hunt for that money, and the urge to protect it will cause the friends to all turn on each other.

Which, hey, that could quite possibly be a good movie. Think The Treasure of Sierra Madre but in a four-room Edinburgh rental. The cast here is as game as John Huston’s was in 1948. McGregor is fresh-faced and buoyant, his charisma punching holes in the script’s smarm, and Eccleston is predictably tense but without the egotism later directors would exploit to varying effect. The problem here is that Boyle feels often more like an architect and a technician than a storyteller. Shallow Grave predicts the award-winning sheen of his most successful feature, Slumdog Millionaire, and like Slumdog, has the same preoccupation with making the pieces fit a schematic rather than find an organic path to the same conclusion. It’s more Jenga than plot. Have you ever asked yourself how Dev Patel’s character managed to be asked not just the right questions, but in chronological order mirroring the events of his life?

In fact, if you think about Slumdog’s ever-present, Oscar-winning score and how much polish that added to Slumdog, you have another connection. Because the music in Shallow Grave, provided by Simon Boswell (Santa Sangre, Hackers), is cheesy cliché all the way, like a bad television movie that is afraid the dramatic histrionics won’t work well enough on their own, despite how obvious the emotional beats really are. It’s all shortcut.

It’s also pretty easy to watch, and thus pretty easy to give Shallow Grave a pass, despite its considerable flaws. Boyle’s filmmaking is skillful and alluring, and draws the viewer along like a Looney Tunes character who has caught whiff of a savory pie, floating on air, ready to take a bite. Perhaps I’m being harsh on the film, I used to be a fan, and it’s been since the actual 1990s that I likely saw it. It’s funny how things strike you depending on where you are in life, and it is worth remembering how exciting the 1990s could be post-Sex, Lies, &Videotape; however, unlike that movie or, perhaps, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Shallow Grave may be too much of a time capsule, frozen in its era, and less relatable for it.

"Mr. Dead Drug Dealer, you're trying to seduce me."