The Screengrab : high noon

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I was a younger man, summer vacations seemed to last 100 years and every day was at least 24 hours long.

Now, as an old geezer, I can’t help but notice how time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future at an alarming rate. Summers, at best, tend to flash by in a matter of days -- and my days, like everything else, have apparently been downsized...

...or at least that’s how it feels here beneath the mountain of overdue assignments, unfinished projects and blown deadlines I find myself tunneling through of late, with less than a week remaining to file that damn “married filing jointly” 1040 form I haven’t even started yet...

...tick...tick...tick...

...but even as the clock ticks down to the April 15th tax deadline (not to mention the end of the Mayan calendar -- AND THE WORLD!!!!! -- in 2012), we here at the Screengrab figured we could spare a few seconds to salute THE BEST RACE AGAINST TIME FLICKS OF ALL...uh...TIME!

D.O.A. (1950)

This sweaty, 83-minute noir is pretty much all gimmick, but it's the ultimate in race-against-time gimmicks. Edmund O'Brien, who barks out his lines as if trying to reach the pork chop hanging around his neck, plays an accountant who hits San Francisco for a working vacation and discovers that he's been slipped a dose of a "luminous poison" for which there is no antidote. Given no more than a few days to live, O'Brien blows off the guided tour of Alcatraz and tears around the city, doing his unsubtle best to solve his own impending murder and wreak vengeance on his murderer before it's tag-on-the-toe time. The 1988 sequel, directed by Max Headroom creators Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and starring Dennis Quaid, feels padded at 93 minutes, but it does have a couple of witty strokes in relocating the action to the world of academia -- Quaid plays a lapsed novelist and college professor whose motto of "publish or perish" is used against him by someone who has taken it a little too literally -- and setting it on a sweltering Texas college campus at Christmas time, thus giving Quaid an excuse to sweat even more profusely than Edmund O'Brien even with holiday decorations in the background. (PN)

HIGH NOON (1952)

Fred Zinnemann takes all the suspense out of the race against time; there’s no question of escaping the consequences, only of how they’re going to be dealt with. No one doubts that a gang of badmen are going to arrive in town at high noon, and that they’re going to call out Gary Cooper’s marshal, Will Kane, and seek revenge for him sending them up. Everyone knows what’s going to happen. So why is it one of the most tense Westerns ever made? That’s a testament to Zinnemann’s skill as a director: he manages to work endless amounts of tension, suspense and discomfort out of something we all know is going to happen. The only question is: will the townsfolk stand with Kane, who has protected them before, or will they abandon him in hopes of safety? That’s what makes the passage of time so excruciating in High Noon, and nowhere is it more explicit than in the famous scene where the clock ticks down, inexorably, in a stunning montage accompanied by Dmitri Tiomkin’s pitiless score, and the thing we all knew was going to happen finally happens. It’s one of the best examples in classic Hollywood of wrenching tension out of the inevitable. (LP)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

Many years and many outbreaks of paranoia later, John Frankenheimer's satirical yet stirring Cold War thriller is still the gold standard for political-assassination fantasies. Among its other virtues, it remains one of the most blackly funny movies ever to come out of Hollywood, but the laughter dies as the noose tightens and Frank Sinatra, losing faith that things will work out, races through the traffic-clogged streets to arrive at the convention hall, just in time to see Laurence Harvey finally earn his Medal of Honor. (PN)

RUN LOLA RUN (1999)

Run Lola Run, about Lola’s (Franka Potente) efforts to save her boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu) from death by procuring 100,000 deutschmarks in 20 minutes, is a tour de force of blistering kineticism that predictably achieved cult canon status the moment it hit theaters in 1999. Yet what elevates Tom Tykwer’s debut above so many other beat-the-clock sagas is its aesthetic flair and inventiveness, its storytelling and visual intricacy, and its deft use of its unique style in the service of a subtly thoughtful meditation on time and fate. Segmented into three sections, each of which finds Lola attempting to achieve her goal, Run Lola Run’s race-against-time narrative presents a free will-vs.-determinism debate in the guise of a frenzied videogame, one in which Lola must use her allotted three lives to figure out how to complete her mission. Playfully philosophical without being pretentious, and excessively flashy without being shallow, Tykwer’s film delivers edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster thrills as well as enough sly substance to warrant coming back for a return ride. (NS)

Hurry!!!! Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

"Rio Bravo" Turns Fifty

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

"Most cult films are too hip to be popular," Allen Barra writes in The Wall Street Journal, "and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But Rio Bravo is that rarest of films -- both popular and hip." This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Howard Hawks's Western, which Barra argues "may be the most popular cult film ever made...[which] was shot in glorious Technicolor and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history", John Wayne, and kudos to him for keeping in an eye on the calendar so as to be sure and catch this. One critic, Robin Wood, has written that "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo." Another, David Thomson, recently asked, "Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time?" Quentin Tarantino, who once listed it as one of his three favorite movies of all time, introduced a screening of it at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and informed the room that whenever he starts seeing a woman for the first time, he always wants to show her Rio Bravo. If the woman doesn't like it, it is not his opinion of the movie that he proceeds to re-evaluate.

Rio Bravo, Barra writes, "was designed as an Alamo story in which the besieged Texans win. In case viewers don't get the message, the hotel Wayne's sheriff lives in is called "The Alamo," and the outlaw boss hires a Mexican trumpeter to play "El Deguello," supposedly the song that Santa Anna had played for the Alamo's garrison. (Actually, the piece was written by the film's composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Wayne liked it so much that he used it in his 1960 film called The Alamo.)" Hawks and Wayne liked to tell interviewers that the movie was designed as a fuck-you to Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winning High Noon, which was written by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman. In that movie, the townspeople are too cowardly to help sheriff Gary Cooper when word arrives that four vengeful gunman are on their way to shoot it out with him; in the end, Coop mows them all down and throws his badge away in disgust. Oddly, what seems to have rankled Hawks about this wasn't that the townspeople were gutless but that Cooper was, as the director saw it, so unmanly as to stoop to asking for anyone's help. ""I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help," he said. So Wayne, in a town that barely seems to have any townspeople except for the staff at the hotel, faces down a much larger force than Cooper had to contend with, backed up by a drunk (Dean Martin), a crippled old man (Walter Brennan), and a suburban-rockabilly show biz kid moonlighting as a cow hand (Rick Nelson). "The odds," Barra notes wryly, "are about the same for the good guys in both films."

The fact is that most people couldn't care less about whatever political message the people behind either film imagined they were peddling at the time. Tarantino summed up Bravo's enduring appeal to a great degree when he called it the greatest "hang-out movie" of all time, a term, he explained, refers to movies that hold up under repeated viewings just because the people onscreen are so damned pleasurable to spend time with. Barra refers to Rio Bravo's longish running time (two hours, twenty minutes) and measured pacing, with a time out from the plot for such digressions as a musical interlude in the jail, as evidence of Hawks's "daring", but they play to what Tarantino perceives as the film's strength; the audience, enjoying the unlikely mix of personalities onscreen (which also includes Angie Dickinson, in her breakout role as a seductive lady gambler named Feathers), cares less about suspense and action than in kicking back with them and forgetting about the clock.

This was indeed a gamble on Hawks's part, but he had the elements to make it work. This is all the more remarkable considering how he had gone about casting the picture. Most people assume that the casting of Nelson, who then had one foot in the music charts and one on the set of his parents' The Ozzie and Harriet Show, was a sop to the youth audience and TV watchers, and they are not wrong. (His role was originally written for an older man, and Hawks considered such leathery faces as Robert Mitchum and Jack Palance before deciding to look for a pretty boy. He apparently toyed with the idea of using Michael Landon, then best known as the star of I Was a Teenage Werewolf< before deciding that it would be nice for Dean Martin to have a singing partner.) Surpringly, Walter Brennan, who had worked for Hawks in five earlier movies and won an Oscar for one of them, Come and Get It, was also asked aboard in part because he was, thanks to his series The Real McCoys, now a TV star. According to Todd McCarthy's 1997 biography of Hawks, this would in fact cause the only real tension on the set, when Hawks discovered that Brennan was locked into the lovable, folksy old duffer act he'd been doing on TV and had to scream at his old reliable for a spell before Brennan became sufficiently pissed off to become the picture of a "crabby, evil, nasty old man" that the director had in mind.

Perhaps because some of the things that make the movie seem downright lovable today struck some critics as the time as something between facetiousness and blasphemous, Rio Bravo, despite being a great international success and the second-biggest box office hit of Hawks's career, it won no Oscar nominations, which seems an even more remarkable feat when you consider that Wayne's unfortunate The Alamo racked up seven of them. But we can guess at Hawks's estimation of it from the fact that, for the rest of his career, he continued to rifle it for spare parts. For some of us fans, Rio Bravo stands as the director's last hurrah. He worked for another dozen years, but the slow pace that feels so right here would come to see ever duller and more meandering, especially in the two additional Westerns he made with Wayne, El Dorado (1967) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970). Both borrow heavily from Rio Bravo for their stories and characters, but at least El Dorado made back its costs. In 1975, when John Wayne walked out onto the stage at the Academy Awards show to present Hawks with a special lifetime achievement Oscar, the star of Red River and Hatari! told the crowd that he and Howard Hawks had made four pictures together. Everyone who knew that the real total was five knew that the one they wanted to forget was Rio Lobo.

DVD Digest for June 10, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The run-up to Father’s Day continues with more dad-friendly DVDs, including a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008 to date.

DVD of the Week: After last week’s wide selection of testosterone-heavy actioners, this week finally brings a DVD for the thinking dad- HBO’s critically-feted seven-part miniseries John Adams. Based on the book by David McCullough and starring Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, John Adams is a prestige project through and through. But the big surprise is how exhaustive and complex a portrait of the man and his time this really is. Some highly unpleasant events take place on the way to revolution, and the film doesn’t shy away from this reality. Likewise, in addition to Giamatti and Linney’s accomplished turns as John and Abigail, the film also boasts some note-perfect supporting work from the likes of David Morse as George Washington and Tom Wilkinson as Ben Franklin. As far as founding fathers go, Adams has long taken a backseat in popularity to these two men as well as Thomas Jefferson, but if nothing else, John Adams is invaluable in helping to pin down his importance in the history of this nation.

Other new releases this week include: Doug Liman’s Jumper (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in Meathead’s The Bucket List (Warner, also Blu-Ray); 2007’s Funny Games (Warner), the film so nice Michael Haneke made it twice; Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in the historical bodice-ripper The Other Boleyn Girl (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days (IFC Films); the Exquisite Corpse-styled indie thriller The Signal (Magnolia); and of course, the best-reviewed theatrical release of 2008, Larry the Cable Guy in Witless Protection (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray).

In classics on DVD, this week’s big news is Lionsgate’s High Noon Two-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which brings the guy-movie favorite back to DVD with a number of new features. Included among these are a number of documentaries and featurettes, along with a video of Tex Ritter performing his Oscar-winning song from the film. But if dad’s tastes run more to looking at babelicious European actresses of yore, Lionsgate’s got that covered too, with the Catherine Deneuve 5-Film Collection (including Le Sauvage, Hôtel des Amériques, Manon 70, Le Choc and Fort Saganne) and the Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection (which includes I Girasoli, Carosello Napoletano, Attila, and Madame Sans-Gene).

Finally, being released this week exclusively in Blu-Ray: Broken Trail (Sony), Natural Born Killers (Warner), and The Professionals (Sony).

Take Five: Arizona

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:15:00 GMT

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer gets its limited-release debut this Friday, after two years of lingering on the festival circuit without a distributor. Although some critics have praised its good-natured look at sexuality and overall sunny demeanor, it's likely that the real reason Georgina Riedel's feature-length debut is finally seeing the light of day is the newfound TV stardom of its lead actress, America Ferrara. Still, the reason I want to see it is simple: it's set in Arizona. I was born and raised in Phoenix, at a time when everyone from there was from somewhere else, and while I don't really miss the place, I still have that hokey boosterism that makes me raise an eyebrow whenever I hear a movie or television show is set there or filming there. During the early days of Hollywood, the movie business was obsessed with the 48th state -- largely because it had only recently become a state. It was the last of the frontier, the final remnant of the proud plains and deserts of the New West, and while the vast majority of the western shoot-'em-ups set in Arizona were really made on a back lot five blocks from La Cienega Boulevard, there's still plenty of movies out there claiming Arizonan provenance. As the state has morphed into Southern California's bedroom annex, with all the strip malls and chain stores that implies, there's continued to be a few standout films that use the Grand Canyon State as their setting; here's five of them.

IN OLD ARIZONA (1929)

The filming of this early classic western didn't get within 300 miles of Arizona, but like a lot of early cowboy pictures, it's set there. In Old Arizona has a lot of the corny qualities that modern audiences associate with this era of filmmaking, but it's worth seeing -- and historically significant -- for a number of reasons. The first full-length talkie ever released by 20th Century Fox, it was also the first talking picture to be filmed outdoors. Director Raoul Walsh was set to play the lead himself, but a car accident robbed him of the chance, and cost him an eye, leading to the eyepatch that became his tradmark in later years; his replacement was Warner Baxter, who won only the second Best Actor Oscar in history for his performance as the Cisco Kid. Finally, the movie has a memorable twist ending that sets it apart -- courtesy of the original story, by O. Henry.

3:10 TO YUMA (1957)

We'd love to include the remake here, but it was filmed entirely in New Mexico, Arizona's glory-hogging next door neighbor. But the original is just as good in many ways; it's based on the same wildly popular pulp novella (by a young Elmore Leonard!) that spawned the reboot 50 years later, and the overall look, feel, and plot are the same. There's also a handful of swell performances, especially by leads Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, both playing against type. Often compared to its superior contemporary High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma simply isn't in that class, but it's still a tight, claustrophobic little western thriller, worth seeing until it sort of falls apart at the end. It's also about all the big-screen fame that Yuma, AZ -- a dodgy little town on the California border, best known for its ungodly temperatures in the summer -- would ever get.

PSYCHO (1960)

Very little of Alfred Hitchcock's slasher masterpiece was actually filmed in Phoenix, Arizona -- mostly just a few establishing shots and street scenes. But for some moviegoers, seeing the name of the town at the tail end of the movie's memorable opening credits would be their first recognizable experience of Arizona even existing outside of old-time westerns, and their first clue that the state capitol was actually a bustling modern city, not a frontier outpost constantly besieged by bands of Apache. (Even in the '70s, when I was growing up, people from out of state would ask me if living in Phoenix was like growing up in a Western.) The action shifts pretty early on to California, the home of the Bates Motel, but really, I just included it on this list to test my theory that no matter what 'best movie featuring _____' theme you come up with, you can fit Psycho into it.

REAL LIFE (1979)

Albert Brooks' first full-length film as a director is absolutely fantastic. It establishes his winning comedic persona as a shallow, self-centered Hollywood phony; it satirizes reality television a good twenty years before anyone else was doing it; it features one of Charles Grodin's finest big-screen performances, and a hilarious relief role for That Guy! J.A. Preston; and it's probably the funniest and most successful film that Brooks ever did. But for me, there was an extra kick: it was set, and partially filmed, in my hometown of Phoenix, and it's the very first time I can consciously remember seeing places in a movie that I'd actually been to in real life. When I first saw, at age 10, local newscaster Carlos Jurado removed from my living room TV and being featured on the silver screen, I gained an understanding of the power of movies I'd never really had before.

RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

Although the entirety of the Coen Brothers' first comic masterpiece was filmed in various locations around central Arizona, you wouldn't know it from the script. The place names are gibberish, the filming locations don't synch up with the places mentioned on screen, and the entire movie seems set less in any recognizable version of the Grand Canyon State than it is in some kind of rural fantasia that's half Wild West and half Appalachian hillbilly country. Roger Ebert actually got really bent out of shape about this, giving the film a disapproving review because of the ridiculous quasi-southern accents everyone sported and the nebulous redneck paradise it seemed to be set in, but Rog was really missing the point. I still lived in Arizona when this came out, and everyone I knew there loved it; it's not like we were expecting social realism out of the thing. The Coens are perfectly capable of verisimilitude when they want to be (see Fargo and The Big Lebowski for examples); here, Arizona was just a hook on which to hang the film's lunatic comedic sensibilities, with no more need for accuracy than Freedonia in Duck Soup.

Democracy in the Western: Charles Taylor on "Rio Bravo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

"To the left, Wayne has always been close to a comic-book version of American power in all its swaggering crudeness. That his screen persona was neither swaggering nor crude hardly mattered." So writes Charles Taylor in the latest issue of the pinko-liberal publication Dissent. While the above statement can be taken as definitive proof that Taylor has never seen McQ, it'll stand for the performances that Taylor cites as among Wayne's best, such as those in Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, and the one he's here to preach about tonight: Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. As Taylor writes, "The inspiration for Rio Bravo came from perhaps the most praised of Westerns, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon. High-Minded Noon it might have been called. Existing for no other reason than to impart a lesson in good citizenship, High Noon was a transparent metaphor for the failure of Americans to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Hawks hated it. Narratively, Hawks felt it made no sense for Gary Cooper’s sheriff to spend the movie soliciting the townspeople’s help to fend off the killers coming for him only to prove, in the end, that he didn’t need help. Hawks was offended by the idea that a sheriff would endanger the lives of the people he was meant to protect by trying to recruit them to save his skin. So Hawks made a movie in which Wayne’s sheriff turns down the help offered him, and needs it at every turn... Part of the beauty of Wayne’s performance here is the way, even when Chance is refusing help, he never undervalues others. When Chance’s friend, the cattleman Wheeler (the inevitable Ward Bond), derides his deputies by asking, 'A bum-legged old man and a drunk—that’s all you’ve got?' Chance answers, 'That’s what I’ve got.' It’s the single best line reading of Wayne’s career. There’s a world of respect in the weight he puts on that one word, 'what,' an irreducible sense of people’s worth as individuals."

Rio Bravo's open affection for its characters--characters that we, the viewer, spend a lot of time cooped up with in small, confining spaces--helps to account for its status as, in Quentin Tarantino's terminology, one of the greatest hang-out movies of all time. Wayne's John T. Chance "is the heroic figure whose self-sufficiency inspires the others to rise above their shortcomings. But because this is a celebration of democracy, the result isn’t a race of isolated heroes but a community in which the strength of each individual buoys up everyone else. Even Chance, the strongest person in the movie, can’t do without those people." Indeed, because without Dean Martin fumbling with the last shreds of his self-respect, Walter Brennan lurching and gabbing, and Rick Nelson leading the camp sing-along, there woule nothing to watch except for Claude Akins complaining about the quality of the jail food until Wayne went back to his cell to bludgeon him to sleep, not that this wouldn't have been something to watch. As it is, it is a film that, in Taylor's eyes, "justif[ies] the idea of America." It is good to know that a film that justifies the idea of America has a scene in which Angie Dickinson appears wearing fishnet stockings.

Morning Deal Report: Boooooooooring

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Jennifer Connolly has joined the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. But what they really need is Alex Winter as Gort.

Meanwhile, a remake of High Noon is in the works.

Guy Pearce may be replacing Viggo Mortensen in the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Woo. What a slow news day! Get back to work, you freeloaders — I need more remake announcements!

— Peter Smith