This is the last time I’ll write one of these columns (unless, of course, someone wants to hire me to do so), but I just wanted to mention how much fun it has been.  I know that I haven’t been doing these as frequently as I should.  My real job has been taking precedence, and now that I actually will have some time, there ain’t gonna be no Screengrab no more.  So, since we are near the end, I wanted to write a super-deluxe column.  Luckily, cable tv has made that easy by scheduling a ridiculous number of great movies in the near future!

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LEONARD PIERCE IS THANKFUL FOR:

BARTON FINK (1991)



It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself agreeing with the French, and it wouldn’t be the last. But when this richly layered film by the Coen Brothers swept the major awards at Cannes, it was, for me, a confirmation that what I had only previously suspected was indeed true: Joel and Ethan Coen were not just good directors, not just great directors, but the greatest living American filmmakers. Barton Fink, to this day, is not one of the Coens’ best-loved films; it tends to be very divisive, and while its greatness isn’t frequently in question, where it belongs in their filmography is hotly disputed. For me, even in the wake of later triumphs like Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country for Old Men, it seems obvious that it’s one of their greatest movies, and likely their best altogether. For a movie that was apparently scratched out during the making of Miller’s Crossing to help the Coens overcome a bad case of writer’s block, it’s astonishingly deep and complex, a deft blend of satirical comedy, character-driven drama and existential horror that seems all along to be about one thing and ends up being very profoundly about another. Not even The Big Lebowski equals Barton Fink as an evocation of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and its intricate, dreadful set design surpasses anything the Coens have ever done. And to top it all off, it’s one of the few cinematic evocations of the process of writing that isn’t an embarrassment. The day I saw Barton Fink is the day I finally realized that the greatness of Hollywood films wasn’t a thing of the past: it was something I was living through.

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When we started Summerfest '08 a few weeks ago, our goals were simple:  identify a handful of movies with the word 'summer' in the title; figure out which ones were worth popping on to your DVD player while waiting for your watermelon to fully saturate with vodka; make a couple of snotty comments about them; and carry on with the knowledge that we have helped keep you cool for a few hours.  This week's picture, though, falls rather short of that final goal.  Whether you're watching it from a hammock in your backyard or a clean, sleek love seat in the basement, 1958's The Long Hot Summer won't cool you down.  It'll make you hot:  hot like a sweaty southern summer.  Hot like a repressed debutante.  Hot like Paul Newman in an undershirt before his face became synonymous with upscale salad dressings and organic Orio knockoffs.  Reading (and with good reason) like a bizarre mash-up of Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, The Long Hot Summer lives up to its name like no movie before or sense, and if you weren't sweating before you started watching it, you will be afterwards.  Hell, you don't even have to watch it -- although we don't know why anyone would deny themselves the pleasure of watching Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick looking like wilted hothouse flowers, all you have to do is listen to the overblown hotbox noir dialogue in this picture to positively swoon from the torridness of it all.

So mop your face with a handkerchief, push your hat back on your head, order up a tall mint julep, and get ready for The Long Hot Summer.

THE ACTION:  In what is, surprisingly, not the beginning of a porn movie, a young stud named Ben Quick hitches a ride into  a town called Frenchman's Bend, in rural Mississippi.  Ben has a reputation for barn-burning, which is the sort of thing people did for kicks back then while waitig for a new farmgirl to seduce.  Most people are none too happy to see Ben come to town -- most especially Clara and Eula Varner, played by Woodward and Remick, but town patriarch Will Varner sees a youthful reflection of himself in the sweaty hothead.  He also sees a number of qualities lacking in his son Jody (Tony Franciosa), who, this being the 1950s and all, the movie is not allowed to say is  a homosexual.  Gaudy, sexually charged patter ensues.  Eventually, everyone in town erupts in an explosion of damp clothing and meaningful looks, and the barns of Frenchman's Bend will never be the same again.

THE PLAYERS:  The Long Hot Summer is directed by Martin Ritt, a longtime Hollywood pro who directed dozens of pretty decent movies without ever having developed much of a reputation for anything other than reliability.  He does have to his credit the fact that, according to Hollywood legend, during filming of this movie, he became the only person to get the notoriously implacable Orson Welles to behave by driving the great man out to the middle of the Louisiana swamp and threatening to abandon him there if he didn't shape up and start making nice.  While the movie is based on three short stories by William Faulkner ("Spotted Horses", "The Hamlet", and "Barn Burning"), it's written in high noir style by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, a duo mostly noted for their work in westerns, and plays like Tennessee Willliams if he liked girls as much as he liked decadence.  The entire cast, including a shockingly smokin' Angela Lansbury as Welles' mistress, absolutely swelters in the crushing heat.

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Jim Thompson was tailor-made for Hollywood success.  He worked there for some time, and found early success with no less august a personage than Stanley Kubrick; he worked on the screenplay for Kubrick's terrific late-period noir The Killing and wrote the stunning war movie Paths of Glory in its entirety.  Later on, a number of very fine films would be made from his novels, including two different versions of The Getaway of differing success, as well as The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, and Coup de Torchon, Bertrand Tavernier's masterful adaptation of his Pop. 1280.  Thompson's books carried a bleak criminal sensibility that was perfect for the noir era, and he wrote terrific, snappy dialogue that sounds great coming out of actors who have a feel for his work.  Due to a combination of bad luck (many of his projects were prematurely scuttled by studio interference or money problems), politics (he was blacklisted in the McCarthy era due to his leftist leanings), and his own personal demons (he was plagued by alcoholism and innumerable other issues), Thompson never became the motion picture legend he could have been.  Though critics have rediscovered his work, previously relegated to pulp status, and he's undergoing a similar reassessment to Raymond Chandler, many of his best books remain unadopted for the big screen.  That's a shame, but not as bad as the fact that what's arguably his greatest accomplishment -- the nasty but near-perfect noir novel The Killer Inside Me -- actually did get made into a movie, but a movie that's been almost entirely forgotten, and with good reason.

With The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson created one of the most chilling portraits of pure psychotic evil ever committed to paper, but it's not just a bloody thrill-ride trash novel the way that serial killer novels developed in later years.  Lou Ford, the novel's main character, is a man of surprising depth, and Thompson's unfolding of the character is a psychological portrait that transcends its pulp origins and becomes something worthy of Dostoevsky.  Ford is the sheriff in a small mining town in Montana, trusted by everyone; he's such a folksy character, straight out of cowboy art, that even his fellow townsfolk, hearing the endless cliches and banal observations he spouts, think of him as somewhat simple-minded.  But Lou Ford has a secret:  a twisted mind and a history of dark childhood abuses by his physician father have turned him into a monster.  He's far more intelligent than he lets on, putting up his stupidity as a show to allay suspicion from his grim hobbies.  As he puts it, "When things get a little rough, I go out and kill a fewpeople, that's all."  In fact, part of his downfall is that he assumes everyone else is as stupid as they think he is.  Ford is under no illusions about his future:  he describes himself as "waiting to be split down the middle", the inevitable result of the double life he's committed to lead.  But in the meantime, a lot of people are going to get hurt by the man Lou Ford is, and the man people think he is.  In 1976, Western veteran Burt Kennedy (Welcome to Hard Times, Support Your Local Sheriff) brought Thompson's greatest novel to the screen.  

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The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are often considered the two greatest acheivements of detective noir prior to the post-war era.  It's by no means incidental to their reputation that both starred the pitch-perfect Humphrey Bogart, nor that in both films, he portrayed a classic private eye created by one of the standout pulp witers of the previous decade.  Though both have been rescued from dime-novel oblivion by later critics who were able to pick out their substantial literary talents from the low-level hackwork that comprised much of 1930s pulp, Raymond Chandler's reputation has outstripped Dashiell Hammett's, and rightfully so; Hammett was an outstanding technician and a keen drawer of character, but he lacked Chandler's transcendent style, his keen psychological insight, and his stunning sense of place and time.  Still, he shared with Philip Marlowe's creator a love of language, and he was by far Chandler's superior in terms of complex, inventive plot, which made his books natural fodder for movie adaptations.

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