The Screengrab : john wayne

DVD Digest for May 19, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the same old stuff you always get from DVD Digest. Also, a new Steven Seagal movie!

For some people reading this column, the news that the recent releases Valkyrie (MGM, also Blu-Ray), Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and My Bloody Valentine 3D (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) will be more important than anything else. But we’re looking out for the rest of you as well. And if none of these titles quicken your pulse- and I perfectly understand if they don’t- there’s always the latest from movie-star-turned-musician-turned-energy-drink-magnate (take that, Billy Bob Thornton!) Steven Seagal, Driven to Kill (Fox, also Blu-Ray). On the other side of things, the artsy and fartsy out there should be salivating over the release of John Gianvito’s excellent Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (E1 Entertainment). In other words, something for everybody!

And what would a DVD Digest be without the classics section, for those of you who aren’t all uptight about black-and-white, subtitles, Academy ratio, and long-dead movie stars. Devotees of the Criterion Collection no doubt already know about the dynamic duo of DVDs hitting streets today. First, Peter Yates' great Boston crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion) makes its long-awaited DVD debut. Or if you’re in the mood for something more, uh, Eastern, check out Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura (Criterion)- includes The Insect Woman, Pigs and Battleships, Intentions of Murder. Fans of old Hollywood would be advised to pick up two John Wayne favorites, El Dorado Centennial Edition (Paramount) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Centennial Edition (Paramount). And by some happy coincidence, today’s release of Fritz Lang’s Nazi-hunting thriller Man Hunt (Fox) is timed perfectly with the release of the aforementioned Valkyrie. Funny how that worked out, dontcha find?

Fans of TV on DVD should find something to enjoy among this week’s releases, which include the ever-popular 24 Season 7 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Alan Ball’s vampire saga True Blood (HBO, also Blu-Ray), and the no-longer-surprising-in-its-awesomeness Friday Night Lights Season 3 (Universal).

Finally, if you’ve a Blu-Ray player, you’re in luck! Today’s a big one for Blu-Ray only releases, highlighted by the Batman 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray Book (Warner), which includes a Batmobile full of extras, documentaries, and other cool stuff. For the kids, A Bug’s Life (Disney) hits stores to capitalize on the upcoming Pixar release Up, while those who are looking forward to the latest Terminator blockbuster will no doubt pick up Terminator 2 Skynet Edition (Lionsgate). The political drama Lions for Lambs (Fox) is coming out for fans of political speechifying. Finally, Paramount’s got a whole slew of new Blu-Ray only releases hitting stores today, including Three Days of the Condor, Changing Lanes, Enemy at the Gates, Paycheck, and The Machinist.

53 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Finding "The Searchers"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[It's been ninety years since Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., D. W. Griffith, Frank Capra, Ben Hecht, Louise Brooks, and Roscoe Arbuckle met at an open-air press conference to announce that they were combining their resources to produce a new film journal called "the Screengrab". And while it's true that the "open-air press conference" was technically a conversation between the founders and some vice cops who discovered them out in a field at 2 A.M. with 68 gallons of bathtub gin, eight underage girls, and a ram named Ulysses, and that many people think they were just stalling until their lawyers arrived, Chaplin, a man of his word, ordered his manservant to buy a printing press as soon as he was released from custody and his hangover had dimmed enough that he could once again operate his mouth. As the Screengrab approaches yet another signal moment in its ongoing evolutionary history, we are proud to reach back into our archives and reprint some rarely seen features from our illustrious past.[

1956: At 62, John Ford has the impressive, stolid quality of a small mountain who figures that either Mohammad can damn well come to him or they can both get along without each other. You don't expect a man Ford's age to be spending his days camping out in Monument Valley, but by now, this venerable Western location must feel like home to Ford--and if it didn't, Ford keeps himself surrounded by enough of his living personal history to make anyplace feel like home. The set of The Searchers, the movie he's about to wrap, is populated by crew members and technicians and actors from many earlier Ford productions, including Ward Bond, Harry Carey. Jr., Hank Worden, John Qualen--and the picture's star. John Wayne, making his ninth feature with Ford since the director guided him to his breakthrough performance in Stagecoach, seventeen years ago. (Wayne's son Patrick, who appeared in Mister Roberts and had uncredited bit parts in four other Ford films, is also in it, in the small, comic role of an eager young lieutenant.) In The Searchers, Wayne plays a former Confederate soldier who devotes years of his life to tracking down the niece who was abducted as a child by Comanches. Ford's temper is famously fiery and notoriously unpredictable. It's with no small degree of trepidation that one suggests to him that it must be hard finding a way to freshen what must seem like very familiar material to him, especially working with collaborators he knows so well.

Surprisingly, a trace of a smile spreads across Ford's face. "I imagine a lot of people will go in expecting to see something they've seen before. 'Let's go admire the old boy's craftmanship, see what he can do with his hundredth cowboy movie', like that. Well...we'll see. It's just possible they'll find something in this one that opens the form out a little."

Now, relaxed after his lunch and a few questions from the dumbass representatives of the press, Ford settles into his chair and prepares to shoot the final location scene. You can sense people snapping back to attention: it's time to go back to work. "Action!" Ford yells. Natalie Wood, who plays the niece grown to young womanhood, come running past the camera, running as if her very life depended on it. Wayne charges up behind her, on horseback. Suddenly, he reaches down and lovingly scoops her up into his arms. "Let's go home, Debbie," he says.

Suddenly, Ford explodes. Red-faced, he springs up from his chair. "Cut, fucking cut!!" he screams. Wayne sets Wood back down, and she shyly edges away from him, her face turning to ash. Wayne looks down at his feet. Everyone seems unsure what to do.

In the time it's taken him to walk to where Wayne is standing, Ford's fury seems to have turned to bewilderment and shock. "What...what was that?" he asks. "Do you...during lunch, did you..."

Wayne is uncharacteristically abashed. "I'm sorry, sir. I just...

"You've read the script?"

Wayne's face tightens, as if he were starting to get angry, but his respect for, and maybe his fear of, the older man tamps that down. "Of course, sir. I know what the scene..."

"Why!? Why did you do that? Why did you say that!?"

Wayne no longer hangs his head to look down at Ford. He stiffens to his full height, as if posing for a statue. "I wasn't planning to do that," he says. "I was going to do it like it says in the script, but when I got close to her--what I did, sir, it was instinct. Because it's what felt right!"

Ford stares at Wayne. You can almost hear the crickets chirping. Finally he says, "For Roy Rogers, maybe! You're playing Ethan Edwards! You're a deranged killer! A psychotic racist! You fought for fucking slavery, goddammit, and that was before you lost your mind! This girl, this last remaining trace of your family, the blood of your blood, has been living with the Comanches. She's been sleeping with the Comanches! She has become a Comanche."

Wayne kicks a clod of dirt with the heel of his boot. "I know, sir," he says, in a little boys voice.

Ford is in shock. He sounds as if he's trying to explain how a light switch works to his adult son, whose basic intelligence he has never doubted up to that moment. "There's no way your character could ever be reconciled to that. It couldn't happen! Certainly not...not at that moment, that way, just like that! It would turn the movie into a joke. That's why, when you catch up to her, you grab her, you throw her down, you smash her head with that rock, then you take your knife and slit her throat, you make another incision straight down the front of her, and when Martin runs up and finds you, you're sitting there grunting like the caveman you've always been one step away from regressing to, eating her raw liver. You understand?"

Wayne is looking everywhere but at Ford's face. "Yes, sir."

Ford stares at him for a minute, then gives him a conciliatory punch to the arm. "I know it's a big stretch for you. We're gonna shake 'em up with this one, John. Now get back on your horse and get back into place. Were gonna go again and this time you do it like the stunt choreographers have been showing you all week, right?"

Wayne nods and climbs back onto his horse.

Ford returns to his chair. "Action!" he yells. Wood comes running past again, Wayne comes galloping up behind her, and again, he grabs her and sweeps her up into his arms. "Let's go home, Debbie."

"Cut!"

Ken Curtis, standing just out of range of Ford's hearing, looks at Wayne and emits a low, admiring whistle. "Man," he whispers to nobody in particular, "I didn't know they grew death wishes that tall."

"Sir," Wayne says to Ford, who's still seated in his chair, "I'd like to talk about the scene. Something inside me says to me..."

"Gosh, Mar-i-on," says Ford between gritted teeth, "there's nothing I'd like more than to have a good long chat about the scene that you agreed to do as written and that we've been preparing to do these past few months, but there's thing that we in the motion picture business refer to as "losing the light", and I'm afraid that's going to happen to us if we get embroiled in a stimulating exchange of ideas. So here's my idea, seeing as how it's my picture and all; why don't we shoot the scene, as written, Mar-i-on, and then we can talk about all the better ways we could have done, without regard to whether or not they would have rendered the preceding two hours of movie utterly meaningless and preposterous, all the walk back to Los Angeles. Is that acceptable to you, Mar-i-on?"

Wayne stares at Ford long and hard. "Yes, sir," he says, and climbs back onto his horse.

Soon, he and Wood are back in their starting places. "Action!" yells Ford. Wood comes running across the set, Wayne comes riding up behind her, scoops her up in his arms, says, "Let's go home, Debbie."

You can hear a pin drop. "Cut," Ford says, almost lackadaisically. "Not quite the right approach. Let's go again. Natalie, let me go if you need to take a break to let your legs rest." He leans his head towards his assistant and murmurs, "Start brewing up some iced tea, would you?" Wayne and Wood are back at their places. Ford looks in my direction, the first time he's acknowledged my presence since beginning work on the scene. "It happens," he whispers with a shrug. "In a situation like this, the only thing to do is to just keep shooting it over and over. Eventually, one of us is going to break. And I think Mr. Wayne is in for a surprise as to which of us it's going to be."

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

Many Happy Returns, and a Couple of Not-So-Happy Ones: Vin Diesel and the Movie Brotherhood of Those Who Have Come Crawling Back

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It actually wasn't that long ago that Vin Diesel was being touted as a potentially major, breakout star, capable of both carrying a commercial genre movie (Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious) and lending a hand to more nuanced dramatic roles (Boiler Room). It probably feels like a long enough time ago to Diesel, which presumably accounts for his presence in the new Fast & Furious. In 2003, Diesel explained his absence from the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious by saying that he had one foot in three movies--Pitch Black, a lively little B movie that led to the far more expensive sequel The Chronicles of Riddick, and the extreme-007 movie XXX, as well as The Fast and the Furious--with serious franchise potential, and rather then spread himself too thin, he had to decide which two were likeliest to be the most successful in the long term. Five years after Riddick belly-flopped and the failure of the XXX sequel, in which Diesel wound up being replaced by Ice Cube, it's no small wonder that he wants a do-over. (In between the two Fast/Furious films co-starring Diesel and Paul Walker, there was a Diesel-free sequel starring Walker and a Walker-free third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to which Diesel contributed a cameo. The new movie basically reconstitutes the cast of the first film--reuniting Diesel with Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster--making it somewhere between a remake, a sequel, and a "reboot.") Given the dismissive, somewhat lordly attitude that the amply franchised Diesel once showed towards the role of hot-car king Dominic Toretto, it would only make sense for him to have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, given the reception that Diesel has gotten for the movies he's made since XXX and Riddick--The Pacifier, Find Me Guilty, and the disowned-by-its-own-director Babylon A.D.--he might just be happy to be somewhere he's wanted.

He can, at least, take comfort in knowing that he's not the only movie actor ever to take stock of his own career and concluded that his best move might be to hit the "reset" button. In fact, he's practically part of a long tradition:

Peter Sellers/Inspector Clouseau

Sellers was set on the path to living legend status in England by his work on The Goon Show, and his appearances in such British comedies as I'm All Right, Jack, The Smallest Show on Earth, The Wrong Arm of the Law, and Only Two Can Play and the Stanley Kubrick films Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) made him a favorite in the United States with the art-house audience. But it was his creation of the bumbling French police detective Clouseau in Blake Edwards's 1963 The Pink Panther that put him across with the mass audience. In that movie, Sellers was a supporting player to the top-billed David Niven, and he only landed the role because Peter Ustinov dropped out days before he was to begin filming. But so much of the movie's enormous success was so clearly the result of the slapstick aplomb that Sellers brought to his thinly written part that Edwards brought him back to star as Clouseau in 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Although this was the movie that introduced the actors and characters who would become the standard Clouseau supporting cast--including Herbert Lom as Clouseau's seething, tic-ridden boss Dreyfus (who would here establish a pattern of trying to kill Clouseau after the detective's incompetence had driven him to hysterical madness) and Bert Kwouk as Clouseau's houseboy Kato--the script was actually based on a Broadway play that had in turn been based on a French play by Marcel Archard, called L'Idiot. The screenwriters, Edwards and William Peter Blatty, simply inserted the Clouseau character into the comic-murder mystery set-up, and allowed Sellers to go to town with it. Not the least remarkable thing about the movie is that, by casting the delectable Elke Sommer as a ditsy heroine in need of a savior--she plays a woman who's been falsely accused of murder--Edwards actually managed to turn Clouseau into a romantic hero while intensifying his physical and mental incompetence.

A Shot in the Dark, the only Clouseau film that doesn't have the character's name or a reference to the Pink Panther in the title, was probably the funniest of all the Edwards-Sellers collaborations(including the non-Clouseau The Party), and perhaps they should have folded Clouseau up and filed him away after that. So far as Sellers was concerned at the time, that's just what they were going to do, and when United Artists wanted to bring the character back in 1968, they had to make do with Alan Arkin for the ill-fated Inspector Clouseau. But by 1975, Sellers had suffered through an unrelenting string of flops that he later described as "my bad patch", and Edwards had gone down in flames with the big-budget disaster Darling Lili (1970) and a string of smaller but no more successful films. They paddled back to safe land with the 1975 The Return of the Pink Panther, in which Sellers adopted the costume style that Arkin had used in his one turn as the character and introduced the rubbery, incomprehensible accent that some French critics would never forgive him for. Sellers would dutifuly report for work on The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and then The Curse of the Pink Panther (1978), only those with calloused eyeballs could fail to see that this accomplished actor wasn't exactly thrilled to be going through the same old paces again and again. The prodigiously imaginative Sellers was trapped in a role that had gotten smaller over time; no longer a layered if farcical character, the Clousesu of the later films is simply a dolt who is consistently wrong about everything and keeps falling over things yet somehow manages to end in triumph. Yet Sellers was also a famously insecure man who seems to have decided that only as Clouseau could he still star in hit movies. When Sellers died in the summer of 1980, just months after racking up an Academy Award nomination and a Time magazine cover story for his starring role in Being There, he was preparing to reprise the role yet again for The Romance of the Pink Panther. Edwards, who seemed ready to sap the tree until the whole forest was gone, managed to squeeze out one last Sellers-as-Clouseau film--Trail of the Pink Panther, released two years after Sellers's death--using old clips and previously unseen footage, before moving on to such dubious replacements as Ted Wass and Robert Benigni.

Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates

The role of Norman Bates, motel manager, taxidermist, and mother's boy, took Perkins's movie career to another level, but it also got him typecast playing villains and loonies, which became more of a problem as the gifted, intelligent actor's style became more mannered and self-consciously neurosthenic over the years. His leading man days seemed to be over for good when Universal Pictures declared its interest in making a sequel to Psycho with Perkins reprising his role. Directed by the late Richard Franklin (Road Games, Cloak & Dagger), the movie had no input from Robert Bloch, who created the character or Norman in his original novel (and who cashed in on the publicity by writing his own Psycho II novel), nor from Joseph Stefano, who adapted it for the screenplay, and Alfred Hitchcock had been dead for two years. Perkins himself turned down the offer when it was first presented to him, but then, after it became clear that the studio intended to go ahead with or without him, but with another actor playing Norman, he began to feel proprietorial about his best-known role. When you consider that the movie was always going to be something of a travesty, the finished product isn't that awful. In the most effective moments, Franklin had the grace to play the violent set pieces--which include a climactic scene involving a woman who identifies herself as Norman's real mother and a well-timed blow to the head with a shovel--as black slapstick comedy, treating what everyone in the audience knows about Norman's past and his proclivities as a shared dirty joke.

The movie was given a handsome promotional campaign that aimed to tap into nostalgic fans of the original while also reaching out to younger moviegoers who were advised that Norman Bates was the granddaddy of such slasher-movie icons as the boogeymen of the Halloween and Friday the 13th series. In the end, Psycho II, the movie whose title suggested a Saturday Night Live spoof, was a big enough hit that the studio wanted more. And once Perkins had played Norman again, he couldn't seem to get him out of his system. He not only agreed to return for Psycho III (1986), but he also signed on to use it as his movie directing debut. Pyscho III, which began with a sequence that almost could have passed as the opening of Vertigo II and ended with Norman once again headed for the nutbin, was in turn followed by Psycho IV: The Beginning, a 1990 cable TV film, written by Joseph Stefano, in which Perkins co-starred with E.T.'s playmate, Henry Thomas, as the young Norman, and Olivia Hussey, twenty-two yeara after she'd starred in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, as Norman's mother. The film ended with the birth of Norman's son, who may or may not carry the hereditary psycho-killer gene, setting up the potential for a "Norman, Jr." franchise that has yet to be realized. Perkins died in 1992, six years before Gus Van Sant's official (and infamous) "shot-by-shot" remake starring a glassy-eyed and miscast Vince Vaughan as Norman.

Sean Connery/James Bond

Connery renounced and returned to the role that made him a star on two separate occasions. After Connery sat out On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), the sixth film in the official Bond franchise, United artists lured him back for the 1971 Diamonds Are Forever with a deal that included a wheelbarrow full of money and the studio's agreeing to finance The Offense, a movie Connery wanted to make with director Sidney Lumet. Connery's performance in Diamonds is probably the best-acted Bond of his career, but so much of what surrounded him in the movie was tacky and played-out that he must have left the set feeling confirmed in his decision to leave the role of Bond to whoever wanted him. So it was a shock when it as announced, thirteen years later, that the now 53-year-old Connery had agreed to return the role. Hitting the interview circuit, Connery coyly insisted that he'd always said that he'd be happy to do another Bond film if he was presented with a wow of a script, and he also hinted that the new movie would make great, subversive use of his advanced age.

In fact, the new film Never Say Never Again, had its roots not in a brilliant screenplay with a daring new take on the character but in the conclusion of a legal battle between the producer Kevin McClory and the producers of the Bond franchise, which left McClory with the remake rights to Thunderball. The resulting film is mostly a tired action flick that looks as if the director, Irvin Kershner (whose 1966 A Fine Madness boasts one of the best of Connery's early performances), hadn't recharged since his previous job, The Empire Strikes Back. Connery moves through it gamely, despite being subjected to such indignities as an ill-fitting hairpiece and a glaring edit where you can see him disappear from the frame and a stunt double reappear in his place. Under the circumstances, he seems understandably happy to leave the film to be stolen by the actors playing the villains, Klaus Maria Brandaeur and Barbara Carrera. Originally, plans were announced to release the movie in the summer so that it could go head to head against the latest "real" Bond movie starring Roger Moore, Octopussy. In the end, the studio blinked, and Never Say Never Again opened later in the fall. Despite its lack of sparkle, it was a huge hit. At this stage in his career, four years away from his Oscar-winning turn in The Untouchables, Connery was pretty much bulletproof, and his decision to break his vow, and his having so little to show for it, did his reputation no real harm. Presumably he walked away feeling that the project was worth doing so long as it had succeeded in its real mission--i.e., to give the Bond franchise owners who he felt had underpaid him throughout the '60s a little agita.

Not all unexpected reunions in movies are between actors and characters. Some are between actors and directors, such as the infamously difficult relationship between Henry Hathaway and Dennis Hopper. Early in Hopper's career, Hathaway cast him in his 1958 Western From Hell to Texas. Then in 1966, he used him again in the John Wayne picture The Sons of Katie Elder. In a story that became legendary after Hopper repeated it again to interviewers during his post-Blue Velvet comeback, Hopper was reluctant to give a particular line reading that the director was insistent on, so Hathaway had Hopper do take after take until the broken actor finally did just as he was told--after which Hathaway declared his intention to have the already shaky actor driven out of the business. Three years later, Hathaway hired Hopper for a small but memorable part in True Grit, the movie that would win Wayne an Academy Award for Best Actor. Hopper has speculated that Hathaway decided to make this magnanimous gesture because Hopper had married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Margaret Sullavan and the producer Leland Hayward, and thought that the young man deserved to be given the chance to support his new family. If anything like that did go through Hathaway's mind, the joke was on him: Hopper had been using his time off from banging on casting office doors to get his own directorial debut made. The movie, Easy Rider, which made it clear that there was a wide audience for a "youth cinema" that identified itself as part of the counterculture, was released in the summer of 1969, the same time that True Grit was playing to audiences who saw it as an antidote to new-fangled ideas and strobe-happy trip sequences. Both movies established themselves as zeitgeist hits and cleaned up, but Hopper and Hayward's marriage wouldn't survive to the end of that year.

"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.

Morning Deal Report: Coen Brothers Show True Grit

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:30:00 GMT

SXSW has shut down for another year and we now resume your regularly scheduled Morning Deal Report with the surprising news that Knowing topped the weekend box office charts. Its $24.8 million haul would seem to indicate that those of us who think Nicolas Cage makes nothing but crap these days are in the minority, but how can that be? I Love You, Man took the second spot with a slightly disappointing $18 million, while the Julia Roberts/Clive Owen caper Duplicity finished third with $14.4 million.

The Coen Brothers are back in the remake business – sort of. Ethan and Joel Coen will bring a new adaptation of the Charles Portis novel True Grit to the screen, but it won’t be a reprise of the 1969 John Wayne version. “Portis' novel is about a 14-year-old girl who, along with an aging U.S. marshal and another lawman, tracks her father's killer in hostile Indian territory. But while the original film was a showcase for Wayne, the Coens' version will tell the tale from the girl's p.o.v.” And as only Variety would put it, “Pic will be their first period Oater.”

More bad news for Aquaman: Brian Grazer will produce the romantic comedy Merman for Universal. “Story follows a merman who comes to land so he can win back his mermaid fiancée, who has left him for a real man.” So what are they saying? Real men don’t have gills?

Related:
Coen Brothers Get Serious
This Is Not Like the Penis on the Little Mermaid Poster

21 Stars We Hate (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SEAN PENN

Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High? Classic. Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking? Harrowing. Emmett Ray in Sweet and Lowdown? Hilarious. Milk? Looks great. And nobody’s better at playing sketchy, fidgety weasels like the coked-out traitor in The Falcon and The Snowman, the coked-out lawyer in Carlito’s Way and, uh, the incredibly annoying coked-out movie producer in Hurlyburly. But, ugh...it’s amazing how a guy capable of sporadically fantastic character performances can be such a humorless, pretentious tool in real life. I’m guessing he’s calmed down a lot since the Shanghai Surprise days when (as observed by Christopher Ciccone in his book Life With My Sister Madonna) the middle class white boy from the comfortable home enjoyed presenting himself as a tough street kid, trashing hotel rooms, assaulting paparazzi and hanging out with Charles Bukowski. But Penn still can’t take a joke, as evidenced by his humorless retort to Chris Rock’s joke about the low-wattage stardom of Jude Law during the 2005 Academy Awards, not to mention the stereotypical "serious artist" grim=quality aesthetic he brings to his directorial work (i.e., two films about dead children, one about feuding brothers and one about a completely egocentric guy who dies moronically ‘cuz he’s just gotta be free, man). Even when the actor pokes fun at his own self-serious image, it’s hard to believe it’s all just for laughs: his recent cameo in What Just Happened? paints him as the kind of actor who equates depressing bummers with integrity and...well, something tells me Penn takes that characterization as a compliment. As the old saying goes, it’s hard to make people laugh, but drama’s easy: just kill a puppy and you’ll get a reaction...which more or less describes Penn’s m.o. If you dare to mock his maudlin, manipulative performance as the mentally-challenged protagonist of I Am Sam, that just means you’re insensitive, dude (so many thanks to Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr. for doing it for me in Tropic Thunder). If you’d prefer not to drag yourself through the boring slog of 21 Grams, it’s just that you don’t “get” it. And if you laughed out loud during Mystic River when Penn’s character discovers the latest dead child in his oeuvre, then screams “NOOOO!!!!” to the heavens in the type of overblown “ACTING!” moment that was already a parody of itself years before the movie was released...well, maybe you just can’t handle “serious” art.

MICHAEL DOUGLAS

Michael Douglas was born to be a movie star. Which is too bad, because he sucks at it. His father, Kirk Douglas, was an actor of limited talents, and too often prone to gassy overplaying, but he was also fortunate enough to work with a lot of great directors and get a handful of great scripts. No such luck for Michael: though he made tens of millions of dollars in his career and appeared in tons of hit films in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they tend to be forgettable (The Star Chamber), obnoxious (Wall Street), dated (The Jewel of the Nile), or downright terrible (The Game). Which, really, is only appropriate, since all those adjectives apply equally to Douglas himself, who resembles his father less as an actor than he does Charlton Heston. His personality and his performances also tend to be forgettable (surely no one remembers Basic Instinct because he was in it), terrible (he was the world’s least convincing action hero as Jack Colton), dated (who on earth isn’t deeply ashamed to watch Falling Down nowadays?), and, especially, obnoxious. Unless we know him – and hey, give the guy credit, he’s nailing Catherine Zeta-Jones and we’re not – we can never be sure if he just happened to pick about a hundred scripts in a row where he plays an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk, or if he just happens to be an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk who brings those qualities to every role he plays. But that’s not really the kind of micro-fine distinction you want to hang a career on.

JOHN WAYNE

Since I’m going to hell anyway, I might as well take this one. “Hey,” some of you asked when we posted our list of the all-time great leading men a few weeks back, “how come John Wayne didn’t even make the top 25?” Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. or Ms. Screengrab Reader: it’s because John Wayne was a miserable actor. While there’s no denying Wayne’s importance in Hollywood history, and without minimizing his role as a film icon, the fact remains that he was really bad at the thing he did for a living. He basically only played one role in every movie he ever made, and it wasn’t a very interesting one. It’s a role that could have been played better by any number of other actors, many of whom were appearing with him in those very films. And in his case, you can’t blame a short career or an inability to get good scripts: Wayne lived a long time, and by all accounts showed almost zero interest in playing anything outside his war/western tough-guy métier. By the end of his life, he was getting offered roles that would have allowed him to slightly redefine his image, but instead chose ones that let him stretch about a centimeter in every direction. He was either a miserable judge of scripts or had the world’s worst agents; for someone who made almost 175 movies, he sure didn’t make that many good ones. While I’m willing to concede that Wayne was an effective movie star, the distance between what he did on screen and what I think of as acting is abyssal; I remember getting into an argument with a friend that concluded with me saying that if John Wayne was a good actor, I obviously didn’t understand what acting means.

JAMES DEAN

We don't want to spend too much time here talking shit about the dead. Just because we Screengrab people are barely human doesn't mean we're vultures. But after more than fifty years, the upward trajectory of Dean's posthumous reputation is long overdue for a course correction. In his first two (of three) starring movie roles, Dean had the mixed fortune to play desperately troubled teenagers in material pitched directly at a teen audience that liked to project itself onto stories of the tragically misunderstood, under the guidance of directors (Nicholas Ray on Rebel Without a Cause and Elia Kazan on East of Eden) who never saw an emotional flourish they didn't like and would have been reluctant to declare a performance over the top even if the fallout from it brought about nuclear winter. Dean's unrestrained, sometimes apparently uncontrolled exploration of the wronged-and-unloved theme made him a legend and a cult hero, but it also meant that what he left behind in the way of an acting legacy is very heavy on him breaking down into a shivering mess and howling, "You're tearing me apart!" For some of us, a little of this sort of thing goes a very long way, which makes it that much more remarkable that Dean's most devoted fans have watched those movies scores if not hundreds of times: we can barely believe that we made it throught them once. To Dean's credit, he seemed very ready to move on to new things if his last film, Giant, is any indication: there, as a cocky poor boy who becomes a self-made asshole, he's better-controlled, more winning, more resilient and funnier than he ever had a chance to be in a movie released during his lifetime. This is especially true because the movie, in which Dean has only a supporting role, is in a traditional-boring-prestige-epic mode that can just barely accommodate Dean's Method style, and the actor serves the same function in it that his character serves in the story. It's not just about Jett Rink getting up in the face of Jordan Benedict, Jr., and weirding him out with a scary taste of a new world in which he'll be an anachronism, but also about James Dean doing that to Rock Hudson.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Hopkins was in his early fifties and had been acting, and even sometimes starring in, movies since 1967, when Jonathan Demme made him a household name with The Silence of the Lambs. This was not a case of genius being discovered late. Hopkins is talented and hard-working and had already given a number of excellent performances, such as his sensitive but restrained Dr. Merrick in David Lynch's The Elephant Man. But he was always more meticulous than exciting onscreen, and when he was cast at the center of a movie, whether it was a popcorn horror flick like Magic (1978) or a serious contemporary drama like the British film The Good Father (1987), he tended to veer so heavily into depressiveness that watching him could be like talking somebody in off a ledge. He had already been smoked in the Hannibal Lecter role before Lambs even came out: as all true connoisseurs of character acting know, Brian Cox's brief performance as Hannibal in the 1986 Manhunter had a rich, convincing creepiness that sank into viewers' bones. By contrast, Demme spoon-fed viewers Hopkins' Hannibal with frozen close-ups of his face held in a jack-o-lantern gaze, with just a suggestion of the raging ham behind his features. The results somehow passed for realistic, but there was enough camp in the recipe that it's no wonder the monstrous Lecter ultimately struck audiences as so enjoyable as to be strangely endearing, to the point that Hopkins would not only reprise the role in Hannibal, the movie version of the sequel that author Thomas Harris felt obliged to write in response to the success of the Lambs picture, but in a paralyzingly unnecessary remake of Manhunter (filmed under Harris' original title, Red Dragon), in which, adding insult to injury, he had more screen time than Brian Cox did back in 1986. By then, Hopkins had become Hollywood's go-to guy for a leading role as a classy middle-aged or older male in a prestige film, be it Nixon or Picasso or Van Helsing or (in The Human Stain) an African-American professor passing for white. But Hopkins had never had the range this kind of resume suggests, and he could still be a dull lump when he was too much at the center of things and wasn't cast just right. (And, having been richly rewarded for having laid it on thick as Hannibal, he was now as much in touch with his inner ham as William Shatner.) He's still an ingenious actor who has his moments, and after his long apprenticeship, it feels churlish not to wish him well. But after he and Antonio Banderas co-starred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1998's The Mask of Zorro, the young Zeta-Jones informed a TV interviewer that she couldn't decide for sure which of her two leading men was sexier. And by God, that shit ain't right.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Set Your DVR!: October 20 - October 28, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

What a great time of year for movies! If you're a fan of vintage horror, that is. Here's the DVR-worthy flicks on cable in the upcoming week.

Mon, Oct 20:

1:30/2:30 pm: The Haunting on TCM. Again, this is the 1963 Robert Wise version.

Tues, Oct 21:

11/12 am: Rio Grande on TCM. Classic John Wayne/John Ford Western.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Public Enemy on TCM. Buncha dirty rats doin' low-down dirty-rat bidness.

Wed Oct 22:

6:45/7:45 am: Batman on AMC. The 1966 version. Shark repellent, my friends. Need I say more?

8:20/9:20 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). I'm not always going to repeat prior recommendations, but man, I like this movie.

3:30/4:30 pm: The Enchanted Cottage on TCM. I've never seen this, but it is apparently a much-loved, hard-to-see romance between an injured soldier and a lady who isn't much to look at. Unreleased on DVD.

6:15/7:15 pm: Last Days on IFC (repeat 10/23 at 2:00 am).

7/8 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the one with Charles Laughton.

Thur, Oct 23:

Start the day (or previous night) with a Val Lewton film festival on TCM!

12:45/1:45 am: Cat People on TCM. The first collaboration between director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton (the king of no-budget atmospheric eerieness). Not exactly horror, but not exactly anything else.

2/3 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Not just a killer Roky Erickson song, this is another Tourneur/Lewton collaboration.

3:15/4:15 am: Isle of the Dead on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff.

4:30/5:30 am: The Body Snatcher on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff AND Bela Lugosi, directed by Robert Wise, and based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story, of all things.

5:45/6:45 am: Shattered Glass on IFC. Some people missed this 2003 film in which Hayden Christiansen plays a character who is - get this - supposed to be wooden. Based on the true events around the fantasist Stephen Glass's deception of The New Republic

7:35/8:35 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat at 1:35/2:35 pm). Lars von Trier's follow-up to Dogville is about a Southern plantation in the 1930s that has never freed its slaves. Do you like von Trier? Then you'll probably like this.

2:15/3:15 pm: D.O.A. on TCM. Film noir classic.

UPDATE: 8 pm (not sure of the time zone): Red Sun on Retroplex (free on Comcast Digital). This is a Western starring Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, Alain Delon, and Toshiro Mifune. Whoa! Thanks to Janet for the hat tip.

Fri, Oct 24:

4:15/5:15 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat).

Sat, Oct 25:

2:45/3:45 am: 200 Motels on TCM. Frank Zappa's wacky movie. Are you a fan of Zappa? No? Then you'll hate it. Unreleased on DVD.

5:15/6:15 am: The Curse of Frankenstein on AMC. Classic Frankenstein movie starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

7/8 am: Kiru on IFC (repeat at 1:50/2:50 pm). Samurai comedy! Yep.

8/9 am: Night of the Living Dead on SCIFI. Oh, you know this one already? You must have brains. Braaaaaaains.

11:30 pm/12:30 am: Catwoman on OXYGEN. Perhaps the scariest movie of the Halloween season. This movie has Halle Berry in the lead! (BWA-HA-HA!) And she’s trying to be sexy/sultry/non-robotic! (AAAAAAAH!) Actually, this is far too scary for anyone to view.

Sun, Oct 26:

12:45/1:45 am: The Honeymoon Killers on TCM. Brilliant and utterly repellent movie based on the true story of the Lonely Hearts Killers, who preyed on divorced women in the late 40s. Between this and Mad Men, you get the feeling that the mid-20th century wasn't such a great time to be an independent women.

7/8 am: The Ghost of Yotsuya on IFC. Ghosts! Samurais! Spurned Wives! Revenge!

10:00/11:00 am: The Flower of Evil on IFC. Directed by the Hitchcock-influenced Claude Chabrol. I haven't seen this one, but I run hot and cold on Chabrol movies.

1/2 pm: Kiss of Death on FMC. Fantastic film noir.

2:30/3:30 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. This isn't a great movie, but it has a few great - I'd go as far as "iconic" - scenes, most notably David Naughton's transformation into the title monster. Does AMC cut for content? I often skip movies showing on AMC because I hate watching commercials during films. And I don't know if the movies are running uncut with commercials or cut down for size. Let me know in comments if you have a better idea about what AMC is doing.

Mon, Oct 27 (ze spillover from Sunday):

1:30/2:30 am: Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Grey on TCM. Now this is a great movie, Dreyer’s 1932 vampire epic. One of the greatest vampire movies ever made, in fact, up there with Nosferatu. I don't know how it will look in this cut, but I believe that time and neglect have left all existing prints somewhat faded.

3/4 am: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte on AMC. Horror film starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, and Agnes Moorehead. Sounds like a recipe for overheated Southern goth to me, but it's pretty highly rated, so what do I know?

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Men of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:00:00 GMT

DUSTIN HOFFMAN (1937 - )

He isn't on this list so much for his work in the later years, though Ishtar definitely gets honorable mention. It is more for the deliciously anti-leading man stuff he did way back when. He redefined the romantic hero in The Graduate: "Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?" So lost and confused, so attractive. No wonder he gets the girl (and her mother). Then there's more heroes against the odds: Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, the somewhat psychotic-seeming protagonist of Marathon Man and, well, Tootsie. Here's to you Dustin Hoffman.

JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO (1933 - )

How goes the plot of Breathless again? Can't remember? Well maybe that is because you were distracted by the dreaminess of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Seriously, the man took the Humphrey Bogart cigarette thing and improved upon it. How many actors can do that? He made this film nerdess get a Jean Seberg haircut and take up a Gauloises Blondes habit when she was sixteen. Unfortunatly she never ended up with Jean Paul in a hotel room. Oh well. At least Pierrot Le Fou is coming up on my Netflix list.

JOHNNY DEPP (1963 - )

There's no sense beating around the bush: for a long, long time, we remained steadfastly resistant to Depp's charms. He was very pretty. He seemed to mean well. It was sweet that Marlon Brando seemed to see something in there that was worth encouraging. We were glad that we did not personally own any of the hotels that he stayed in and that subsequently needed extensive reconstruction. But he had a penchant for moist, self-pitying whimsey, and an unfortunate ability to seem to bring it out of others, as in his first starring role for Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands. He often looked lost, whether in sausage movies like Nick of Time or meatier fare such as Ed Wood, where he mostly smiled a lot. And when he tried for deeper emotions, as in Donnie Brasco, he sometimes seemed to be dipping his bucket into an empty well. But by 2003, the year that he let Captain Jack Sparrow out of the bottle and appeared in Robert Rodriguez's mostly uninspired, messy Once Upon a Time in Mexico, apparently starring in some livelier, stranger film that he was making in his head, the lad had won us over. Depp may still look a bit like a teen pin-up, but his ambitions as an actor clearly have less to do with romancing or charming audiences than with bringing us images from a different dimension, and after more than twenty years of practice, he's harnessed enough mastery of his physical instrument to his boundless imagination that he does whatever it is he's doing pretty darned well, even if what it is that he thinks he's doing sometimes remains an open question. He puts on as good a show now as any actor of his generation. It's not clear that he can play a straight role and invest in with real emotional power, but the dark, deep tones of his Sweeney Todd -- in many ways his greatest breakthrough yet -- suggest that he's only begun to realize his full promise.

JOHN WAYNE (1907-1979)

Like it or not, the man born Marion Morrison is the face of the cinematic take on American history. He rarely stepped outside his comfort zone of Westerns and war movies, where Man struggled and fought with Otherness and Nature in morality plays writ as large as the myth of American exceptionalism. He had 171 movies under his belt when he died, and most of them aren't great or even good. A lot of them espouse a distinctly conservative political viewpoint. And a handful are absolutely stunning. Let's start with Stagecoach, the movie that Orson Welles used as a template for how to make movies when he was getting ready to make Citizen Kane. John Ford brilliantly used the Monument Valley location to emphasize how tiny the people in Stagecoach were in their environment, and it fell to Wayne, the outlaw-with-a-heart-of-gold, to save everyone from their fates. Now look to Rio Bravo and The Searchers. In the former, Wayne is the tough sheriff intent on standing alone against corrupt power. In the latter, Wayne plays a damaged, obsessive, creepy loner who spends the bulk of the movie on the hunt for his little niece so that he can do her the honor of mercy-killing her after her defilement (or so he imagines) at the hands of Native Americans. That's about as ugly as a plot can be, but it's a testament to Wayne's iconography that he can play both parts without changing the John Wayne-ness of the roles. It's rare to see John Wayne lose, which made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that much more meaningful. There's plenty of other great iconic Wayne movies: Red River, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon are among the best. You may hear some ugly words spoken unironically in many of his movies but, well, it's important to remember that the westward expansion in American history isn't just about triumph, but triumph at the expense of someone else. It's possible, maybe even necessary, to appreciate both of these points at the same time.

RICHARD BURTON (1925-1984)

Richard Burton arrived in Hollywood in the late 1940s as the heir apparent to Laurence Olivier, blessed with blazing intelligence, a stern handsomeness, crazy Shakespearean chops, and one of the greatest voices in cinema history. Yet it took years for Burton to find his niche in Hollywood, his gifts mostly wasted in cookie-cutter roles in movies like The Robe and Alexander the Great. But if youth didn’t become him onscreen, middle age sure did. Whereas Burton was ill at ease with uncomplicated heroism, he excelled playing more compromised characters, often opposite his two-time wife Elizabeth Taylor. Night of the Iguana showed him as the ideal antihero for both John Huston and Tennessee Williams, while his work as the dissolute academic George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? afforded him his best co-starring vehicle with Taylor, who according to Burton brought out the best in him as an actor. But best of all is the aging agent Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, in which Burton plays the washed-up operative with a dissolute grace that makes the character unimaginable in anyone else’s hands. In his later career, Burton took an alarming number of “paycheck roles,” primarily to cover the debt he’d incurred from both of his divorces from Liz Taylor. But even then, despite being deep into alcohol issues, he was still capable of the old Burton magic, as in the film adaptation of Equus or his final big-screen appearance in 1984. His career was mired in subpar movies, gossip, and booze -- “a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter,” he called himself -- but Richard Burton also touched genius in a way that few actors could manage.

WARREN BEATTY (1937 - )

Usually, Warren Beatty is lumped in with the generation of movie stars who emerged during the 1970s -- Pacino, Nicholson, DeNiro, Hoffman. But unlike those men, Beatty’s stardom predates the period: he came of age during the late 1960s, as the classical period of Hollywood was drawing to an end. Perhaps that explains why Beatty was so uniquely able to fit in roles both classical and contemporary. But while Beatty’s rakish charm and lothario reputation might have helped to make him a star, it was his adventurous spirit that kept him there. By 1967, he had acquired enough clout to produce a violent crime drama that became one of the seminal films of the era, Bonnie and Clyde. From there, Beatty worked selectively, collaborating with his equally gifted friends and some of the most talented filmmakers of the day, including Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in which Beatty gave perhaps his finest performance. Beatty served as producer on many of his films, and writer/director on four of them. Yet these productions were rarely vanity projects -- Shampoo found a dramatic context in which Beatty could wrestle with his public image, while the notorious flop Ishtar memorably cast him against type as the shy songwriting partner of ladies’ man Dustin Hoffman. All the while, Beatty has never shied away from his passions, particularly for liberal politics. Who else would have not only made a film about Communist John Reed at the height of the Cold War but would have taken home an Oscar for it as well? Who else would have taken a story of a Senator who finds his political voice in hip-hop culture? Beatty has laid low since 2001’s misbegotten Town and Country -- far too long an absence for a star as vital as this one. Come back, Warren. All is forgiven.

GREGORY PECK (1916-2003)

With his tall, un-fussy presence, it’s easy to think that Gregory Peck was all about heroes. Certainly, his serene masculinity was well-suited to such manly genres as Westerns and war movies. But if all Peck did in his career was to play the good guy over and over, he wouldn’t be worth mentioning here. Consider the way Hitchcock cast him against type in 1945’s Spellbound -- with a more obviously “crazy” actor in the part it would be easy to dismiss the character as a nutjob, but because it’s Peck we root for him to beat his demons. Similarly, he made a most unlikely Captain Ahab, but after seeing him tied to the side of the white whale, it’s hard to imagine another actor doing it better. Peck was one of those rare stars who could do damn near anything, be it the foreign correspondent who romances runaway princess Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, the besieged lawyer of Cape Fear, even Dr. Joseph Mengele in The Boys From Brazil. But the film that defined him for future generations was To Kill a Mockingbird. As an embodiment of fifties-era manliness, Peck was something of an inspired choice to play the bookish, bespectacled Atticus Finch. And while many of his more conventionally heroic characters are respected by virtue of their strength, Peck imbues Atticus with a forthright goodness that is no less commanding of respect. Other movie heroes may buckle swashes or save the day on the battlefield, but Peck makes Atticus a good guy to whom we can all relate -- the father we had, or wish we had, or wish we were.

And finally, yes...

MEL GIBSON (1956 - )

It may be hard to remember now, but there was a time not too long ago when Mel Gibson -- better known of late for his drunken, anti-Semitic rants and strange directorial inclinations -- was one of Hollywood’s most effortlessly likable leading men. He demonstrated his intensity early in his career, as the enigmatic postapocalyptic hero of the Mad Max trilogy. But it was the Lethal Weapon franchise that propelled Gibson to international superstardom, providing him a mainstream context for his slightly off-kilter presence while affording the breathless women in the audience a good long look at his ass. In the decade to come, Gibson demonstrated his appeal across numerous genres including a solid effort in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Hamlet. And even when the film itself was unworthy, he rose to the occasion all the same. Look at his work in 1997’s Conspiracy Theory, in which he distinguished an otherwise ordinary thriller with his unhinged performance. Better yet, check out 2000’s What Women Want, which after more than twenty years in the business marked his first lead role in a romantic comedy. The movie’s premise (a male chauvinist pig starts to hear women’s thoughts) is too gimmicky by half, but Gibson singlehandedly salvaged it by making his character more or less the last guy you’d expect to be the center of a romantic comedy -- which, of course, makes it all the more satisfying when he reveal his more sensitive side. Lately, Gibson has taken a break from acting, directing two epics that were shot in dead languages. But we’re happy to see that Gibson is once against stepping in front of the camera, since it’s pretty clear there are many more facets of his talent that he hasn’t shown us yet.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

Spike Lee's Next "Miracle"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the release next week of Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee's first movie since his biggest hit, the atypically good Inside Man, John Colapinto profiles the director in The New Yorker. [Not available online] Colapinto notes that Lee has made eighteen feature films, "three of which (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X) have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race." That count seems a little soft: for instance, it's hard to think of any reason besides an obsession with race for making Bamboozled, and even the movie that Lee clearly intended as a showcase for his warmer, fuzzier side, Crooklyn, included a subplot about the foul odor emitted by the film's token white man, played by David Patrick Kelly in outrageous honky drag. After scoring a great success with an ingenious genre picture that required him to mostly give it a rest, Lee's new movie, "the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers" in World War II, gives him a chance to climb back on his hobbyhorse and also to issue the public proclamations that have sometimes seemed to be his real art, which his movies are only intended to promote. As Colapinto writes, the film is meant "as redress not only for [Clint] Eastwood's Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie The Longest Day--and before." It will be remembered that Lee instigated a vicious back-and-forth between himself and Eastwood by complaining about the absence of black soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima; after Eastwood invited the younger filmmaker to shut the fuck up, Lee called him "an angry old man" and advised Dirty Harry that "we're not on a plantation either." That stroke was standard operating procedure for Lee, who has a history of shutting down discussions by accusing his attackers of racism, a move that has traditionally left them sputtering defensively. The down side of this tactic that it's left Lee with a public image that he may now regret, if only because it may have overshadowed his reputation as a moviemaker. "People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage," he told Colapinto. This misperception makes Lee very angry, and the article describes a man who, because of that, is walking around in a constant state of rage.

One reason he has for being ticked off--even when he has access to Colapinto, a writer who is so much on his side that he even seems to like Summer of Sam and the godforsaken color dance interlude in Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It--is that getting funding isn't as easy for him as it used to be. Lee would probably argue that it's never been easy for him, but a lot of filmmakers before Lee wanted to make a biopic about Malcolm X, and Lee was the one who got to bitch in the press about not being given a big enough budget after the epic production was given the green light. (One of the other filmmakers who wanted to make it was Norman Jewison, who was almost ready to go, with Lee's star Denzel Washington in the lead role, when Lee nudged him aside by making a public stink about how wrong it would be for a white director to be entrusted with Malcolm's story.) Miracle at St. Anna wasn't Lee's first choice for a follow-up to Inside Man; it was what he could get funded after he discovered that the box-office cachet he had picked up from that movie wasn't enough to get studios interested in his other dream projects, a James Brown biopic and a movie about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (St. Anna didn't make the studios salivate, either; Touchtone Pictures signed on to distribute it only after European companies ponied up the money.) It'll be interesting to see whether an historical drama benefits from some of the gravity that Lee has acquired in recent years, seen best not in Inside Man but in his documentaries 4 Little Girls, whose title refers to the victims of a racially motivated church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, and the Katrina epic When the Levees Broke. Stanley Crouch, who wrote a searing attack on Lee back in 1989, believes that his nonfiction-film work has had a strong, salutary effect on Lee: "There was something about the dignity of those people he encountered when he was making 4 Little Girls that had a very deep impact on him, and in some way they seemed to help him grow up. When you got kids yourself and you're talking to the father of someone whose child was blown up by the kind of people who blew those kids up, and you see that this person is not ranting and raving in some kind of theatrical purported rage of the sort that you see in Do the Right Thing." Miracle at St. Anna opens on September 26.

Related stories: Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face

Video of the Day: Gremlins 2.5

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

One of the most memorable scenes in Gremlins 2 -- the underrated followup to the '80s classic that's only recently found the audience for its subversive satire -- is a cleverly done meta-joke where the marauding creatures actually take over the projection booth and insert themselves into the movie. (For the home video release, they broke the videotape and wreaked havoc until stopped by a piece of John Wayne footage.)

In this delightful little YouTube fan film, Sacha Feiner projects the gag forward 18 years, into the digital age -- both literally (with his digital manipulation of the monster footage) and figuratively (with the conceit adapted to the digital On-Demand era).

Related Posts:

Video of the Day: The New Batman Movie?

Video of the Day: 'Requiem for a Day Off'

Yesterday's Hits: The Longest Day (1962, Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki)

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Longest Day a hit?: In 1962, World War II was still fresh in the minds of the American people, most of whom were alive when it was being fought. In the intervening years, movies about the war became popular, but seventeen years after the war was over, super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided the time was right to make the biggest war movie of all, focusing on one of the turning points of the war- D-Day. Zanuck called upon Cornelius Ryan to adapt his exhaustive book, which approached the battle through many different perspectives, from the top brass on both sides to the men on the ground, and Zanuck even went so far as to have the French and German soldiers speak their own languages for the film rather than having everyone speak English.

In addition, Zanuck enlisted an impressive cast- one that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Curt Jürgens, Jean-Louis Barrault, Red Buttons, and an up-and-comer named Sean Connery- to help him pay tribute to the men who fought and died to help turn the tide for the Allied forces. It worked, and The Longest Day became one of the biggest hits of 1962, grossing almost $40 million domestically, trailing only another pair of super-productions- How the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia- at the yearly box office.

What happened?: While the American people saw World War II as both a military and a moral victory, the country was soon to enter into a conflict that wasn’t nearly so simple- Vietnam. As our involvement in Vietnam dragged on for years with no victory in sight, both the soldiers and the people at home were souring on the idea of war, especially as images of various atrocities began showing up on television. After Vietnam, war meant something very different to many Americans than it did after World War II, and the war movies that came out of Hollywood reflected this. The morality of these movies became more complex, with less cut-and-dried heroism and more characters questioning the validity of war. This coincided with the fall of the Production Code, and consequently battle scenes became much bloodier and more chaotic. 1998 brought the most violent mainstream war movie of all, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, whose brutal take on D-Day quickly replaced The Longest Day’s comparatively tame recreation of the battle in the minds of most moviegoers.

Does The Longest Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Having been raised on violent, gritty anti-war movies, I expected a star-studded classically-styled movie about Normandy to come off as quaint. But it actually holds up pretty well. Much of this has to do with how its story is told- instead of re-creating the battle from one perspective, we see it from many angles- the Allied generals who planned it, the Germans who didn’t quite anticipate it going down like this, the paratroopers who were dropped inland, the men on the beach, the Resistance fighters, even the residents of the surrounding towns. Because of this, The Longest Day becomes less about morality than it does about tactics and strategy- hardly a contemporary approach to the war movie, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Even the star-studded cast worked better for me than I’d anticipated. Often, casting so many stars can be distracting, with the familiar faces taking the audience right out of the action. But here it’s almost necessary to keep all of the different plot strands straight. It helps that most of the big names are playing officers, so we can remember that Mitchum is leading the boys on Omaha Beach, Fonda heading the charge on Utah, Wayne commanding the paratroopers, and so on. Wayne’s presence is key here- he never fought in World War II himself, but he appeared in so many war movies both during and after the war that he fit the Hollywood mold of a soldier more than most of the stars who actually did fight.

One could make a similar claim for The Longest Day- it didn’t exactly look like war, but the classical Hollywood image of what war ought to look like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of changing times. At one point in his career, Zanuck famously quipped, “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic.” The Longest Day fudged a number of details about D-Day (for example, a key battle takes place at an abandoned casino that hadn’t even been built yet in real life), but from a dramatic standpoint it works. And although it doesn’t correspond to our contemporary idea of what a war movie should be, it’s fascinating as an example of what was once the prevailing popular view of war, from a time when it was easier for us to feel that way.

DVD Roundup for August 26, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s bumper crop of Westerns necessitates a temporary name change for this column.

DVD of the Week: 1962’s How the West Was Won may not have been the greatest classic Western ever made, but it was almost certainly the biggest, boasting three directors (Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall) and an all-star cast (led by John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, and Richard Widmark) to tell a Western family saga spanning half a century. In addition, the film boasting some stunning Western vistas designed to fully exploit the three-screen Cinerama process- this was one of only two narrative features to be exhibited using honest-to-goodness Cinerama. The biggest advantage of this week’s new Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray) of the film is that it comes closer than any DVD edition to date to replicating the look of Cinerama in digital form. Instead of the “join lines” and standard 2.35:1 ‘Scope framing of previous editions, this new edition of the film features a new technology that effectively unifies the three Cinerama frames into the original aspect ratio of 2.89:1. There are also a number of special features, notably the 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure that explores the famed camera process, as well as a trailer, archival featurette, audio commentary, and plenty of collectible memorabilia about the film and its stars. Nothing will be quite like watching How the West Was Won in Cinerama, but this new edition makes the home viewing experience better than ever.

In other oater news, this week also brings the Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection, which includes the 1960 remake Cimarron, Escape From Fort Bravo, Many Rivers to Cross, Saddle the Wind, The Law and Jake Wade, and The Stalking Moon, with each film also sold individually. In addition, Warner is also releasing the Errol Flynn Westerns Box Set (Warner), which contains Montana, Rocky Mountain, San Antonio, and Virginia City. And don’t overlook the Blu-Ray only release of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (Warner).

Meanwhile, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas (Fox, also Blu-Ray); David Mamet MMA drama Redbelt (Sony, also Blu-Ray); the acclaimed documentary Chicago 10 (Paramount), Lynch (Ryko Entertainment), a documentary about the ever-popular David Lynch; Uwe Boll’s must-see Postal (Universal Music & Video Distribution), costarring former DVD Digest contributor David Huddleston; and the latest release from our pals at Benten Films, Team Picture.

Other classics coming to DVD this week include: a new pressing of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Criterion); the Henry Selick-directed The Nightmare Before Christmas Collector’s Edition (Disney); Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen Special Edition (First Look); and Monica Bellucci’s nude body transforming into a rolling landscape for your enjoyment in Brotherhood of the Wolf: Director’s Cut (Universal).

In TV on DVD, there’s Entourage Season 4 (HBO), Everybody Hates Chris Season 3 (Warner), Heroes Season 2 (Universal, also Blu-Ray), NCIS Season 5 (Paramount), and The Shield Season 6 (Sony).

Finally, this week’s action-packed lineup of Blu-Ray only releases includes: Errol Flynn (again) in The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner); Gov. Schwarzenegger fighting Satan in End of Days (Universal); the first season of NBC’s Heroes (Universal); Crockett and Tubbs hitting the big screen in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal), and the submarine thriller U-571 (Universal).

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We recently asked YOU what Top Tens you’d like to see here on The Screengrab and, among the many fine suggestions, “Other Matt” proposed the Top Ten Ignominious Exits (i.e., “...films of an actor that are less than glorious and not [fitting] the last time we see them on celluloid”)... a list we’ll actually tackle NEXT week, since THIS week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s final completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we've decided to examine the other side of the Two-Face coin: actors and directors who managed to fade to black with a fitting and/or memorable cinematic swan song.

Robert Altman's A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006)

When this project was first announced, it was a real head-scratcher for many: the sensibilities of Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor would seem to blend together about as well as bourbon and buttermilk. While no one in their right mind would ever equate A Prairie Home Companion with one of Altman's masterpieces, the result is a genial slice of faux-Americana that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The wisp of a plot concerns the closing of the theater that has served as the long-time home of Keillor's homespun radio program, spurring the cast and crew to put on one last show for the folks at home. The specter of death hovers over the proceedings, but Companion is never morbid – how could it be when said specter is embodied by sweet-tempered Virginia Madsen? The backstage shenanigans and onstage farewells lend Companion the highly appropriate aura of a curtain call for a great American master – the icing on one of our culture's richest cakes.

John Wayne in THE SHOOTIST (1976)

After winning his Academy Award for the 1969 Western True Grit, a movie that gave him the chance to make fun of his anachronistic image and his physical decline yet still emerge heroic, John Wayne didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He spent most of the 1970s alternately starring in stale cowboy flicks (Rio Lobo, The Cowboys, Chisum) that tried to deny that he, or the movies, had changed, and embarrassing himself in imitations of the new bullying cop movies that had displaced the Western (McQ, Brannigan), like some combination of Clint Eastwood and a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a bad rug. He rallied, though, for his last film, in which he played a character specially tooled to provide a send-off for Wayne's screen image. He's J.B. Books, a legendary gunfighter who rides in from the plains to take a room in a small town and wait to die of cancer. The movie itself is sentimental and uneven, but Wayne, fitter-looking than in True Grit and dandified with a moustache, performs with more dignity and grace than he'd demonstrated onscreen in years. He must have suspected that this would be his last chance to tone up the tail end of his filmography, and he didn't let himself down. Although Wayne would live another three years, The Shootist was his last film, and 1977 would be the first year in which he didn't appear in a movie since his film debut in 1926.

Edward G. Robinson in SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Soylent Green is a cheesy camp landmark of a dystopian sci-fi picture, but it has greatness in it, in the form of Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the ancient researcher who is partner and roommate to Charlton Heston' tough-cop hero. As someone old enough to remember the planet before overpopulation, global warming, and the depletion of its natural resources turned it into a sweltering hellscape, Robinson's character is an emissary from another world, and so was Robinson, who began his career in movies before talkies and became a star in 1931 when he landed the title role in Little Caesar. He and Heston have an old-married-couple rapport that gives the movie its bit of heart; theirs is the only human relationship we see, maybe the last one left in a world that turns people into scavengers and victims. (Heston and Robinson had almost played together in the first of Heston's future shock films, Planet of the Apes, but after playing Dr. Zaius in a test scene, Robinson concluded that he wasn't hale enough to endure wearing the ape makeup for long stretches of time.) To its credit, Soylent Green gives him a beauty of a send-off, gazing wistfully at old nature footage while waiting for his lethal shot to kick in at a euthanasia clinic; it renders the famous "Soylent Green is made from people!" finale an anticlimax. Robinson died in January, 1973, four months before his last picture was released.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE (1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a masterpiece by any yardstick, a beautiful, uncompromising meditation on the encroaching apocalypse and one man’s attempts to stop it in order to protect his family. Yet if one considers that Tarkovsky was suffering from lung cancer -- the disease that eventually claimed his life -- while making the film, it takes on a poignant new layer of significance. Once, in an interview, Tarkovsky stated “the only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.” Having built up one of the most acclaimed bodies of work of any filmmaker of his generation, Tarkovsky might have been forgiven for retiring from filmmaking and living out the rest of his days in peace. But Tarkovsky, scarcely 53 years old at the time, wasn’t about to pass away without making one more offering to the gods of cinema. So when the film’s hero (played by Erland Josephson) lays down his life to spare those he loves, it’s impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself, making one final effort to better the art form he loved so passionately and uncompromisingly. Fittingly, The Sacrifice was one of Tarkovsky’s most celebrated films, not only as a tribute to a major work by a master filmmaker, but also as the final film from an artist who had, as always, raged against the dying of the light.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

America the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971) & BAADASSSSS! (2003)

In 1971, director Melvin Van Peebles, sick of Hollywood’s portrayal of African Americans, risked everything to present his own version of the black experience where, according to his own manifesto for the project, “niggers could walk out standing tall instead of avoiding each other's eyes.” For White America, the most shocking aspect of Van Peebles’ film was the fact that its hero, falsely-accused murder suspect Sweetback (played by the director himself) not only escapes “The Man,” but also takes out a few white cops along the way and, in the final credits, offers the warning: “Watch out - a baad assss nigger is coming to collect some dues." Unlike the “can’t we all just get along” sentiment of the Civil Rights Movement, Van Peebles’ film dared to publicly acknowledge the black community’s righteous indignation after 300 years of mistreatment at the hands of Caucasians (a still-shocking sentiment, as evidenced by the media’s recent saturation bombing of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America!” soundbite), influencing everything from the blaxploitation genre that followed directly on the heels of Sweetback’s box office success to the politicized rap of N.W.A. and Public Enemy and Mookie’s controversial decision to hurl a garbage can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria in Spike Lee’s iconic Do The Right Thing (1989). But (as the director’s son and Sweetback co-star, Mario, dramatized in his own 2003 biopic, BAADASSSSS!), Van Peebles was more a social crusader than a wild-eyed militant, providing opportunity and experience to minorities both in front of and behind the camera...plus, he gave Earth, Wind & Fire their first big break, which all by itself helped to make America (and the world) a slightly better place to be.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

Barbara Kopple's groundbreaking documentary on a bitterly contested coal miner's strike in Kentucky is widely cited as one of the finest examples of the form. Made in a year when miners' wages were at a then-record low, and mining company profits were at a then-record high, Harlan County U.S.A. not only captures the horrible conditions, dangerous nature (guns are everywhere in the film, a murder takes place, and Kopple is to this day convinced that she was meant to be killed by company blacklegs) and contentious rivalries of the mine work, but also shows the little triumphs, the conviviality, and the never-give-in determination for the people for whom this life is not an entertainment, but a reality. What is most appalling – and most damning of the "dirty capitalist system" bemoaned by coal minders in their century-old union songs – is the fact that now, over 30 years after the movie was completed, things have gotten even worse. The power of the unions, which could barely protect the workers of Harlan County then, would be almost completely shattered in the subsequent decades. The workers of today, now often illegal immigrants or unskilled workers paid barely more than minimum wage, still do some of the most dangerous industrial work imaginable, and there is no one left to protect them. So, watching Harlan County U.S.A. today, one still has to catch one's throat at the terrible injustice being done to the workers of 1976 – and try and comprehend the awful truth that since then, the situation has only continued to decline, and even the simple pride in the face of impossible struggle evidenced by the workers and their wives seems like a relic of an idealized past.

HESTER STREET (1975)

Like a number of entries on this list, Joan Micklin Silver's low-budget, independent hit was made in the 1970s, a time when a great many movies were examining time-honored American values and finding them wanting. Hester Street is a coming-to-America story about Jewish immigrants making new lives for themselves in the Lower East Side of New York in 1896, and what immediately sets it apart from earlier movies of this kind, such as Elia Kazan's America, America, is that it dares to suggest that what some of the newcomers have lost in their passage from the Old World is dearer than what they've gained. The central characters are Yekl, who quickly adopts the name Jake (Stephen Keats) and his wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), and what makes Gitl the heroine is that she, unlike Jake -- who practically welds his derby to his head and takes to making such pronouncement as, "I don't care for nobody, I'm an American fella!" -- recoils from the noise and bustle of the New World and cannot assimilate. Kane's eccentric, almost unearthly qualities, which would eventually make her a tremendous comedienne, are used very tenderly here; the fact that she can't quite fit in with her surroundings is proof of her value, she is rewarded with the attentions of a disgruntled fellow immigrant, Bernstein (Mel Howard), who gives voice to the filmmakers' objections to the crass vulgarity of American materialism, which Jake and his haughty new girlfriend Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh) embody. Gitl and Bernstein find happiness together while remaining too good for the place they've come to.

SERPICO (1973)

At a time when movies like Dirty Harry (and its sequel Magnum Force) were inviting audiences to cheer brutalist cops on the theory that "the system" was too sensitive to the rights of the accused to allow a good, rule-obeying cop to get anything done, this fact-based story (from back in the days when the phrase "inspired by a true story" meant that what you were seeing in the movie bore some actual relation to something that had actually happened in real life) invited the audience to save some of its sympathy for a good cop -- Frank Serpico, a NYPD officer played by Al Pacino -- who just wanted to do his job and stay honest while he did it but was hassled, probably set up to be killed, and ultimately run off the force by all the grafting bullies in the department who were so enthusiastically committed to their lives of corruption that they couldn't see him as anything but a freak, and, worse, a potential snitch. Serpico eventually served as a witness at the Knapp Commission investigating police corruption, though he did so reluctantly; he would have preferred to remain a cop, but it must be a bitch chasing rapists and murderers down dark alleys when you're never sure when the other cops running with you are going to take the opportunity to put a cap in your ass. Although the director, Sidney Lumet, sets a downbeat tone for the ending, Serpico was actually set at what could have been seen as a hopeful moment, with the Watergate hearings mirroring the Knapp Commission and when society seemed to be trying to run the rascals out of the halls of power. Eight years later, when Lumet made Prince of the City, another fact-based story about a corrupt NYPD detective who tries to cleanse his conscious by gathering information on crooked lawyers and judges, the idea that you have to be at least a little bit crooked to function in American society had become so well-accepted that Lumet reported that, well into filming, he and his screenwriter were still arguing about whether their tattletale protagonist deserved to be regarded as some kind of hero or just a dirty rat.

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

This movie, set in Texas in the 1860s and 1970s and starring John Wayne as the unrepentant Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards, is widely regarded as the greatest of all John Ford's Westerns by people who might regard that designation as synonymous with saying that it's the best movie ever made. It's a tribute to the heroic qualities that Wayne embodied, demanding as they do the viewer's respect without flinching from the qualities that went with them -- machismo, racism, and a capacity for sadism, all of them carried to the point, in the phrase used by more than one observer, of borderline psychosis. The Confederate Ethan's attitude towards the enslavement of black people is never made clear, but his searching for the niece who's been kidnapped by Comanches -- a chase fueled by his need to kill her, because by the time he's found her she'll have bedded down with and "become" Comanche herself, which he regards as a fate worse than death -- clearly provides him with the opportunity for a new, one-man race war, a war against the Indians that doesn't end when his enemies lie dead: he shoots out the eyes of a fallen nemesis, because according to the Indian's religion that will prevent him from entering Heaven. Ford, whose relation with Wayne was known to have had its prickly moments, taps into that side of his star who would later tell a Playboy interviewer that the Native Americans deserved to be wiped out for having been so "selfish" as to want to keep their land, and the result is something very strange to see: an apotheosis of a man at his most morally petty. In the end, Ethan returns the girl to civilization and, with all the surviving major characters gathered inside her family's house, is last seen walking away from its entrance. He's an iconic hero without who the American West could never have been tamed...and civilization can't wait until it knows it's seen the last of him.

Click here to read Part One and Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (June 5 --11)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:06:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" (June 6-12) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcases the work of what the programmers see as "a new generation of Italian filmmakers .. defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach but unified through a spirit of independence that has allowed them to break away from old models and genres." It includes Biùtiful Cauntri, an eco-minded drama that is being shown in conjunction with the Film Society's "Green Screens" program, and The Waltz, which tells its multi-character story in a single, continuous ninety-minute shot.

Opening today and running through June 15th: "NewFest 2008: The 20th Anniversary NY LGBT Film Festival". On tap and buzzed about: Affinity, Meadowlark, and the documentary SqueezeBox!, a movie whose accompanying party at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival took no prisoners.

BERKELEY: Through June, Pacific Film Archives presents a quartet of punk concert clips and documentaries just in time for anyone looking to get nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the summer when London punk in particular was in full, frothing snarl mode. The schedule begins tonight with The Blank Generation, which captures such New York bands as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television when they were young, loud, and snotty. Still to come: D.O.A., in which Johnny Rotten does not spend the Sex Pistols' "terminal" American tour desperately looking for the man who's fatally poisoned him, and Penelope Spheeris's first and finest document of noisy West Coast alientation, 1981's The Decline... of Western Civilization.

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.

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Richard Widmark has died at the age of 93. Widmark made a splash with his movie debut in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which he played a sniggering young gangster named Tommy Udo. Widmark shaved his eyebrows off for the role and cultivated a skin-crawling giggle that was all the creepier for the times he employed it: among the things that amused Tommy in the course of the movie were the chance to shove an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs and his own delivery of the line, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over." It was a supporting role, designed as a contrast to the movie's hero--a remorseful, older, family-man hood, played by Victor Mature in what was probably his best performance. Yet Widmark took the picture straight away from him, and Tommy Udo and his giggle entered permanent crime-movie folklore, referenced in the Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and the Kaleidoscope song "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", and reportedly serving as a role model for the New York mobster Joey Gallo. Widmark received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for the new male star of the year. In later years, he would express mixed feelings about the attention the performance got: "It’s a bit rough, priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

His career had its ups and downs, but he is remembered for a bit more than that. Predictably, he came out of Kiss of Death typecast as a hood, but he began to get to play good guys after Elia Kazan cast him in the 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets. And his edgy appeal proved ideal for the good-bad heroes of more offbeat noirs such as Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which he played a career pickpocket named Skip who reaches inside the wrong purse and finds himself in possession of some stolen microfilm coveted by foreign agents, and Jules Dassin's London-set Night and the City (later ineptly made as a vehicle for Robert De Niro); his performance there, as the doomed con man Harry Fabian, is probably the best of his career. As noir died out by the end of the 1950s, Widmark spent more and more time in Westerns; he was cast as Jim Bowie in The Alamo by his ideological arch enemy, John Wayne, whose battles with the actor over both politics and their shared profession were the stuff of Hollywood legend. He also turned producer in order to set up a few projects, including the submarine melodrama The Bedford Incident, in which the studios had little interest. His last big, attention-getting starring role was as the title character of Don Siegel's police drama Madigan (1968), which he later resurrected for a short-lived TV series. In the later stages of his career, he specialized in character turns as authority figures: presidents, politicians, millionaire string-pullers, etc. He retired from acting on- screen after playing a United States Senator in the 1992 True Colors. “The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he once said, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”

The Second (or Third, or Fourth) Coming of the 1970s Movies

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ross Douthat thinks that moviemakers have brought back the '70s, again. But when Tarantino and other filmmakers of a certain age set out to redeem the '70s as a cool decade after all, they fixated on the stylistic tics and mannerisms of gritty urban thrillers and genre hybrids such as blaxsploitation flicks, and what's been brought back now, in direct response to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders in the media, is the paranoid hopelessness of such Vietnam-and-Watergate-era pictures as The Parallax View, The Day of the Condor, and the vigilante genre epitomized by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. This is not how it was supposed to be. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of predictions, both inside the industry and in the press, that audiences would now reject cynicism and violent thrills and embrace the second coming of John Wayne, a simple man with a simple plan to solve all our problems, starting with wiping that smirk off your face, and do me some push-ups, smart boy! (Remember that "irony is dead" horseshit?) But the few overt attempts to play to this "new reality" — say, that remake of The Four Feathers that didn't do anybody any good, or that documentary about "good Americans" that was marketed as a bitch slap to Michael Moore — died a dog's death, and the more cunning of the filmmakers who might have once considered catering to it got with the program. As Douthat points out, after the failure of Tears of the Sun, a 2003 movie about some American special-ops guys in Nigeria who remember what they're really fighting for and who proceed to, well, really fight for it, its director, Antoine Fuqua, was back last year with Shooter, in which a special-ops guy who's back from the Middle East discovers that he's really fighting a conspiracy made up of sleazeball U.S. government guys — plutocrats who disregard the laws, sneer at the common people, and the depth of whose villainy can be accurately gauged according to the degree of their physical resemblance to Dick Cheney. Audience who ate it up may not have been conscious of responding to having their political prejudices stroked, but it was a much bigger hit than Tears of the Sun without being a much better movie. Also instructive: the career of Stephen Gaghan, who made a splash with his screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's (pre-9/11) Traffic, which summed up the war on drugs as a misguided, empty enterprise, but did also allow for the existence of a few good people working inside the system and scoring whatever little victories they could. Since then, Gaghan made his debut as a writer-director with Syriana, commonly referred to as "Traffic with oil instead of drugs," but which has a much more paranoid vibe, and which ends with its most intelligent, good-hearted, and plugged-in characters — its best hopes for positive change — literally blown off the road. It's the difference that makes Syriana feel like a product of the current zeitgeist.

The James Bond of the current era is Jason Bourne, the killing machine who, having lost his identity, starts out knowing nothing except that the world is out to get him. Over the course of three very busy pictures, he's yet to learn anything that might cheer him up. (The closest thing to good news in any of the Bourne pictures is that an amnesiac with a target on his back might still be able to hook up with Franka Potente — but he won't be able to keep her for long.) Even the Napoleon Solo of the current era, 24's Jack Bauer, though regarded by some as a right-wing hero standing almost alone in the liberal fantasyland that is topical-minded Hollywood, is at odds with the pasty-white, Nixonian government leaders who, more often than not, are at the bottom of the latest villainy he has to bust. (Jack's real "ideology" amounts to a bland willingness to do anything to anybody to get his way, in a universe where torture works. Like many a self-identified law-and-order type, he's not a real conservative so much as a barbarian with a cell phone and a muscle shirt.) But because the similarities between the '70s and today have more to do with a shared national mood of fatalistic helplessness than with the specifics giving rise to that mood, the "new '70s" atmosphere works best when the filmmakers skirt the issue of just what it is they're mooning about. So last year's slate of "Iraq war" movies had a beside-the-point feel to them, and even the vigilante-hero template doesn't have the same impact when transferred to contemporary New York — a place that certainly has its problems but that, compared to the city Travis Bickle called home, is relatively bloodless and well-scrubbed. (As Douthat points out, "Jodie Foster’s gun-toting avenger [in The Brave One] alone would have been responsible for more than one percent of the city’s annual killings." The anxieties of the '70s movies were part of something not just huge but pervasive, a societal rot that you couldn't miss — you couldn't leave home or turn on the news without being reminded of it. However bad things seem now, they don't seem out of control — if anything, just the opposite — and most people probably assign most of the blame squarely to one or two powerful people whose guts they hate. So the movies that try to take on society's ills head on feel as if they'd fit all too snugly onto YouTube.

The Rep Report (March 19-25)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:20:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "Thorold Dickinson’s World of Cinema" (March 19-25) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to an important but largely forgotten figure from the early history of the British cinema. The unassuming but movie-mad Dickinson worked his way up from editing jobs and various assignments pitch-hitting behind the camera on various productions before making his official directorial debut with the 1937 thriller The High Command. Dickinson got his chance to go Hollywood after the producer David O. Selznick saw his 1940 melodrama Gaslight; Dickinson turned the offer down, and Selznick showed him that there were no hard feelings by not only remaking Gaslight in slick Hollywood style (with George Cukor directing) but seeing to it that screenings of the original was suppressed in America. Dickinson's other films include the Pushkin adaptation The Queen of Spades, the Disraeli biopic The Prime MInister starring John Gielgud, and Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955), his last film but the first ever produced in Israel. He lived almost another thirty years, which he largely devoted to teaching, as Britain's first university professor of film in 1967. "It's terribly difficult to direct a film you don't want to make," he once said, by way of accounting for his early retirement with a total output of nine features. "That's why I've made so few." The retrospective shares its title with a new book of essays and interviews, edited by Philip Horne and Peter Swaab.

LOS ANGELES: The American Cinematheque dips into the long and varied career of George Stevens between March 20 and March 23. The program includes several of the giant '50s chin-pullers (A Place in the Sun, Shane, and, well, Giant) that kept Stevens in Oscar nominations, though its real charmer may be the opening selection, the modest 1933 comedy Alice Adams, with a barn-burner of a performance by the young Katherine Hepburn. On Easter Sunday, celebrate by getting messed up pre-show time and settling in for the umpteen-hour Biblical film The Greatest Story Ever Told, starring a bemused Max Von Sydow as J.C. Yes, that really is John Wayne in a special cameo appearance as the hungover-looking centurian who looks at Max hanging there and mutters, "Truly this man was the son of God" before wandering off somewhere to tap a kidney. Ed Wynn, Robert Blake, and the professor from Gilligan's Island are supposed to be in in too, but it's a very long movie, and their appearances must be timed to coincide with the little naps I always take at strategic intervals to restoreth my soul.

How the East Was Won: The Soviet Western

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"How," Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?" You could chalk that up to the paradox of being French, but it turns out that even a Godless Russian Communist wasn't sure how to respond to the Duke's charms. According to documentarian Lucy Ash, writing in The New Statesman, "Stalin was both fascinated and infuriated by John Wayne; the American actor's anti-communism so disturbed Uncle Joe that, according to Orson Welles, he once sent the KGB to California to assassinate him." Some of the Soviet leaders who came to power during the post-Stalin thaw were puppies by comparison, reduced to puddles of fanboy mush by far lesser lights. Leonid Brezhnev, it seems, had a jowly man-crush on Chuck Connors. "At a party hosted by President Nixon, Connors presented a delighted Brezhnev with a pair of Colt .45 revolvers. The general secretary returned the favour by allowing the American series [The Rifleman] to be shown on Soviet TV."

But as in all things, the Kremlin really sought to demonstrate their cultural superiority by showing that anything the capitalist swine could do, they could do better. Thus was the Soviet "Western," or "Eastern," born. In these films, "the backdrop is the steppes or Siberia. The Ural Mountains stand in for Monument Valley, the Volga replaces the Rio Grande and the heroes sport civil war-style budyonovka hats or fur-lined shapkas instead of Stetsons." The standard setter for the genre is the 1969 White Sun of the Desert, "set in Russian central Asia during the civil war. The hero, Fyodor Sukhov, is a Red Army soldier who has just been demobbed and is desperate to go home, but gets caught up in a showdown between a Bolshevik cavalry unit and some Basmachis (the Russian name for armed counter-revolutionaries) in the deep south of the USSR. These Islamic Turkic rebels are the bad guys, the equivalent of the Indians in an American western. The arch-villain is Abdulla, a Basmachi warlord fleeing the Reds. He kills a handful of his wives and abandons the remaining eight in the desert, and so the gallant Soviet hero is forced to come to their rescue. The film was originally called Save the Harem." As played by the blond, blue-eyed Anatoli Kuznetsov, Sukhov is "the embodiment of Russian macho cool. . . laconic and unruffled." Ash suggests that one key to the movie's enduring popularity is that it offers contemporary Russian viewers a heroic masculine image at a time when that sort of thing seems to be in short supply. In fact, Russian cosmonauts became so taken with it that they latched onto it and began to watch it as part of their ritual preparations for a space launch. When the Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi became a space tourist and contracted to spend ten days at the International Space Station, the Russians with whom he ferried out made him watch the damn thing first. His stoic verdict? "Not bad for a Soviet movie." — Phil Nugent