The Screengrab : the searchers

Set Your DVR!: May 27, 2009 - the foreseeable future

Hayden Childs — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

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

Wednesday, May 27
On Wednesday, the best bet is Errol Morris's documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which is playing on IFC at 12:15 pm central/1:15 pm eastern (and sorry for the late notice!). Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is an impressive attempt to impose order into the chaos of the interviews, which is reflected in the subjects' chosen careers. Overnight, TCM is showing It Happened One Night at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern.

Thursday, May 28
Thursday has John Sayles's Lone Star on TCM at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. That's one of the best Sayles movie, but I don't really need to tell you this, do I, dear Screengrab reader?

Friday, May 29
Starting at 5:30 am central/6:30 am eastern, Friday has six, count 'em, six, flicks worth a watch. First up is Amarcord, Fellini's last great movie, on IFC at the aforementioned time and again at 11:35 am central/12:35 pm eastern. Then TCM has The Blue Dahlia, the only movie based on a screenplay by Raymond Chandler, at 7:45 am central/8:45 am eastern. It's not the best film noir, but The Blue Dahlia has quite a lot going for it. In the afternoon, TCM is running Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. That's a great movie despite the ludicrous accent Welles sports throughout. In the evening, Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern. Ovation keeps the aspect ratio of the films it runs, but it does cut for commercials frequently and sometimes bleeps adult language in racier movies. There's no adult language in The Triplets of Belleville, though. If something darker is more your style, IFC is showing Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden at 7:15 pm central/8:15 pm eastern and again overnight at 12:30 am central/1:30 am eastern. Also overnight is the Jamaican crime flick that made Jimmy Cliff an international star, The Harder They Come, on TCM at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern.

Saturday, May 30
Saturday is always a good day for cable movies. The first one I want to mention is New World Order, as discussed by my esteemed colleague Mr. Scott Von Doviak, which is playing on IFC at 9 am central/10 am eastern. That's awfully early for conspiracy theories! I guess they have to get moving early on Saturday before the Military-Industrial-Fast Food-Big Oil-Computertronic-Cell Phone-Google-Movie Critic Complex gets its coffee. Unfortunately, IFC is also showing it at 3 pm central/4 pm eastern, which is all part of their plan, man! I also want to mention The Searchers on AMC at 11:30 am central/12:30 pm eastern. Don't watch good movies on AMC. They cut 'em down to 4:3 aspect, and then pan-&-scan them. It should be a crime to show The Searchers in anything other than widescreen. So skip it on AMC and get the DVD instead. Saturday afternoon is more promising. Ovation is showing Waking Life at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Not everyone loves or likes that movie, but I thought it was striving mightily towards something, and it deserves points for that. TCM is showing (in the correct widescreen aspect and uncut) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at 4 pm central/5 pm eastern. If you missed The Triplets of Belleville on Friday, Ovation is showing it again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 11 pm central/midnight eastern.

Sunday, May 31
Peter Weir's The Last Wave is one of those movies that I have a hard time rating. On one hand, it has a spooky ambience and haunting conceit that it doggedly maintains throughout. It features the only performance by Richard Chamberlain that could conceivably be called "acting" that anyone ever caught on film. On the other hand, the ending is profoundly silly, especially after all the dread leading up to it. With that caveat, I recommend that you take in a viewing if you haven't seen it. It's on IFC at 7 am central/8 am eastern and again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern. Ovation is also running Crumb at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. Also recommended: since Sunday, May 31 is the ostensible last day of the Screengrab, spend your day perusing our archives!

Monday, June 1
There's funny and there's John Ford. The funny is Duck Soup on TCM at 1:30 pm central/2:30 pm eastern, then The Awful Truth on TCM at 5:15 pm central/6:15 pm eastern, and finally Young Frankenstein on Fox Movie Channel at 8:30 pm central/9:30 pm eastern. But TCM is running a John Ford film festival overnight starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with Directed By John Ford, a documentary about the man as narrated by Orson Welles. Then there's Stagecoach (9 pm central/10 pm eastern), which is the movie Orson Welles watched to learn how to make movies, then The Horse Soldiers (10:45 pm central/11:45 pm eastern), The Quiet Man (1 am central/2 am eastern), and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (3:15 am central/4:15 am eastern). That's a lot of horse opera (with an Irish interlude), but it's well worth it. Be sure to keep an eye on TCM this month, because they're running blocks of movies by great directors through all of June, sometimes two a day.

Tuesday, June 2
Ovation has the neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (aka Bicycle Thieves) at 2 pm central/3 pm eastern and again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and overnight at 1 am central/2 am eastern. Thrill to the despair of a family man clinging to existence in post-war Rome! At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, TCM is showing It Happened One Night, the first in a Frank Capra film festival running overnight. At the same time, Fox Movie Channel has Vanishing Point. But I recommend that you catch Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey on Ovation at that time (although it's playing again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern). It's a fairly obscure documentary about the electronic musical instrument and its inventor that packs a surprising story and an emotional punch.

Wednesday, June 3
Nothing today, sorry (if he's your thing, TCM has a King Vidor film festival this evening, so check it out). Perhaps you could spend your day weeping for the lost Screengrab and cursing the cruel economy?

Thursday, June 4
TCM is running an Ingmar Bergman film fest starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with an appearance by the director on the Dick Cavett Show from 1971. Then there's The Seventh Seal (8 pm central/9 pm eastern), Wild Strawberries (9:45 pm central/10:45 pm eastern), Persona (11:30 pm central/12:30 am eastern), Hour Of The Wolf (1 am central/2 am eastern), and The Passion of Anna (2:45 am central/3:45 am eastern). The first three in particular are necessary viewing for film geeks.

Friday, June 5
IFC has Before Sunrise at 4:15 pm central/5:15 pm eastern, but TCM is running Carol Reed movies all day and Steven Spielberg movies all night. Check out the schedule. Of course, I especially recommend The Third Man at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern.

And this is as far out as I'm going with specific recommendations. But watch TCM for Fritz Lang Day on June 8, Preston Sturges Night on June 10, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa on June 11, Jacques Tourneur on June 12, and... I should really cut this off here. It's been fun! Thanks for reading!

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

3. THE GODFATHER (1972)

4. DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

As I discussed in my entry about Dr. Strangelove this past Thanksgiving, when we listed the movies we were most thankful for, it does the world the eternal service of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “comedy” and “masterpiece” need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, there’s a reason that most comedies aren’t great films: focusing on good jokes usually means ignoring things like extremely skillful direction and design, and staffing your cast with comedians usually means sacrificing the possibility of great acting. None of that applies here: Stanley Kubrick is at the very top of his game, applying his masterful sense of pace and visual keenness to the proceedings, and he brings just the right mix of actors to this pitch-black story of nuclear paranoia. By anchoring the film with a stunning triple-role by Peter Sellers, then the funniest man alive, and then coaxing master-class comic performances out of non-comic actors like George C. Scott, he managed to create a movie that was as brilliant as it was brilliantly funny. And good grief, is it funny: Terry Southern, the century’s finest portrayer of inappropriate behavior in high places, had a field day, coughing up at least a half-dozen of the funniest scenes in movie history. If the phone call to the Soviet premier, the scenes between Sellers and Sterling Hayden, or Slim Pickens’ loopy speechifying don’t crack you up, maybe humor just isn’t your thing.

5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

Film noir is far and away my favorite genre of film, so it’s curious that the one I choose as part of my ten greatest movies of all time is arguably not of the genre at all. The stellar adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel has plenty of noir trappings, but its focus on the lawman rather than the criminal, its traditional mystery structure, and its optimistic outcome puts it far more in the vein of a standard detective story than a true film noir. But for all that, it still captures the look and feel of post-war crime dramas like nothing before or since, and its masterful evocation of Chandler’s L.A. is unparalleled – quite a feat considering most of it was shot on studio back lots. Its brilliance is unquestionably the result of the collaboration of four men at the peak of their creative powers: Chandler, who created the unforgettable source material; novelist William Faulkner, whose script captured Marlowe under glass and then gave him a jolt of dangerous sexual electricity; Humphrey Bogart, who is simply as good as he can be in a role that seemed written just for him (though it wasn’t, not even close); and director Howard Hawks, who applies his professional approach to make the impenetrable narrative walk a razor’s edge. But the contribution of three women to this masculine film should never be ignored: Lauren Bacall, young and sexy and confident as hell, playing Marlowe’s lover/foil; Martha Vickers, as Bacall’s sister, who accomplishes the astonishing feat of stealing the film out from under her; and co-writer Leigh Brackett, one of Hollywood’s unsung heroines, who kept Faulkner’s contributions from getting too excessive and tightened the script until it rang. Simply amazing.

6. WEEKEND (1962)

7. PSYCHO (1960)

It seems equally strange that I’d count as one of my favorites a movie that more or less buried the noir genre. By shifting the focus of the killer from a dangerous badman on a doomed but comprehensible mission to an unpredictable psychopath who couldn’t be reasoned with, let alone understood, Alfred Hitchcock set a precedent for movie villains that later proved to be a disaster; but in his hands, it was a triumph. It was a major departure for Hitchcock, but shifting the emphasis from suspense to shock proved to be surprisingly simple for someone of his talents. As in all great films, every element comes together: from Hitchcock’s incredibly taut direction to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score to Saul Bass’ memorable credits to terrific performances from Anthony Hopkins and Janet Leigh (in one of the motion picture industry’s all-time greatest fake-outs), the great things about the movie totally overwhelm the viewer and leave you with the unmistakable confidence that you’ve witnessed greatness. It’s been a running gag here for years that Psycho can more or less be placed on any list we happen to put together; that’s a testament not to how much we love the flick, but to how much greatness it contains.

8. RAGING BULL (1980)
9. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
10. THE CONFORMIST (1970)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

Although I listed The Wild Bunch in the first spot, this one is equally deserving. Perhaps more. The story is simple: poor peasant villagers, beset by marauding bandits, hire a group of down-on-their-luck samurai to defend them. But this is storytelling at its finest: lyrical, universal, and profound. Akira Kurosawa was a great fan of John Ford, and the epic sweep of Ford's Westerns added to the majesty of The Seven Samurai. Look, I can hardly talk about this movie. It's just too much.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

4. BADLANDS (1973) & DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick's first two films are wondrous. I mean this in the sense that they contain wonders to behold and that they are themselves wonders. For one thing, they shouldn't work. Both movies are narrated by girls on the cusp of becoming young women, and both often suppress dialogue to emphasize through voiceover the inner lives of their narrators. Badlands recasts the story of serial killer Charles Starkweather into an insular fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm story about murderous innocence. Days Of Heaven is like an Andrew Wyeth painting given life, and like that other famous artwork that springs to life, Pinnochio, it's a much darker story with breathtaking beauty and sudden horror. (HC)

5. GRAND ILLUSION (1937) & THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939)

6. THE SEARCHERS (1956)

The Searchers is such a strange film, veering wildly between the unholy obsession, the blanket condemnation of racism, the anti-hero who might well be the hero, the cornpone humor, the score that screams of American exceptionalism even as the movie shows itself deeply ambivalent about America's past. This multifaceted approach is offputting at first, but utterly compelling over multiple viewings. John Ford and John Wayne made a hell of a lot of Westerns together, but this is the greatest. (HC)

7. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)

8. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) & THE LADY EVE (1941)

9. VERTIGO (1958) & LA JETEE (1962)

Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's finest film, an echo chamber of fetishistic obsession with an almost indescribably weird plot. La Jetee is Chris Marker's most accessible movie, a short film captured almost entirely in still shots with a voiceover explaining key plot points. The plot revolves around an obsessive remembrance of an event from the protagonist's youth. One of the major scenes echoes a scene in Vertigo. In his film Sans Soliel, which almost made this list, Marker explains how obsessed he became with Vertigo, wanting to copy it as a means of understanding and possessing it. The embedded video below contains all 26 minutes of La Jetee in its totality. (HC)

10. COCKFIGHTER (1974)

Monte Hellman made some heady no-budget movies in his heyday, but this one, in which Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence, is the headiest (sorry, Two-Lane Blacktop, but you're second in my heart). Let me be clear: cockfighting is one of the ugliest, most vulgar and inhumane sports known to man, and I find it reprehensible. Hellman looks at it without flinching and finds the beauty within. Oates is one of my favorite actors, and never is he better than here, a movie in which he has maybe five lines of dialogue, although he is in every scene. (HC)

11. TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) & YOJIMBO (1961)

Both of these movies make art out of sheer pulp. By almost any standard, Touch Of Evil should be unbelievably bad, but it's astonishingly great, better, I dare say, than Citizen Kane. It's a police procedural where the killing and killer are completely irrelevant to the plot. It's a movie about a corrupt cop who is always right about his suspect even when he plants evidence (and unlike, say, 24, the film doesn't condone police corruption). It's a movie with an unhealthy amount of cheese and ham - Charlton Heston as a Mexican cop!, a biker gang all addled on weed who abduct Janet Leigh!, Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy fortune teller! Orson Welles in a fat suit (or should that be an even fatter suit?)! - that somehow turns it all into the finest cinematic cuisine. Yojimbo also starts with a pulp premise, in this case a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and finds a way to frame it all into a stunning battle royale. (HC)

12. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)

What the first thing an actor learns? The show must go on!

Here's several other movies that ought to be on this list, and would have been if I'd figured out a way to stretch the idea of Top Ten any further:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)
Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
Ride The High Country (Peckinpah, 1962)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
Week End (Godard, 1967)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Hayden Childs

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 2-8, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Mr. Sulu! Set a course for the nearest multiplex, warp factor five! I’ve read Nick’s Take and Scott’s Take, and I…must…see Star Trek right away! What, you thought I’d be bitter? You thought the Shat Man would be upset that he wasn’t asked to even contribute a cameo, much less assume the captain’s chair that is his birthright? Oh, please. You sound like that paranoid George Takei!

I’m perfectly thrilled that everybody loves this new Trek adventure, even as we all know in our hearts it can’t hold a candle to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I’m even happy that Chris Pine Gets His Kirk On. Let the kid have his fun! We all know who put the T in Tiberius.

One place I was thrilled not to see my name mentioned was in The Screengrab’s Top Ten Worst…Movies…Ever!!! (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten) Believe it or not, some people have had unkind things to say about The Devil’s Rain, and I feared the good people of the Screengrab would fall into the same trap. Since they didn’t, I was happy to read the rest of these fine posts:

Reviews: Outrage, Rudo y Cursi, Adoration

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

The Less Than Triumphant Return of Mad Max

Scarlett Johansson: The Unkindest Cut

Not on DVD: "The Grey Fox" (1982)

Precursors: Mission: Impossible III (2006)

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."

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Endings and (especially) middles are hard, but there’s something liberating about the instant rush and hit-the-ground momentum of beginnings, which is why so many great (and even not-so-great) directors are often inspired to make big, bold “HERE I AM!” statements in the first few minutes of films that frequently can’t compete with their own opening sequences. But Spike Lee, after two previous good-but-not-great at-bats with She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze, finally knocked one out of the park with Do The Right Thing, which exploded onto movie screens with the sex-and-violence one-two punch of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” and Rosie Perez’s fly-girl attack during the opening credits, then jolted audiences again with an alarm clock and the fast-talking “WAKE UP!” morning rap of Samuel L. Jackson’s dee-jay Mister Señor Love Daddy, who keeps the pace and sets the scene, letting us know in no uncertain terms that it’s HOT and about to get hotter as Lee takes us on a tour of his beloved Bed-Stuy neighborhood, introducing us in quick succession to most of the major players in a world as instantly distinctive as John Ford’s Monument Valley...or even Woody Allen’s Manhattan. (AO)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Rarely has a film’s initial moments set the forthcoming tone as immediately and evocatively as those of Apocalypse Now with its protracted shot of the Vietnamese jungle. From silence comes the sound of helicopter blades, then the airborne choppers themselves, and then the sparse electric guitar notes of The Doors’ “The End.” When Jim Morrison’s voice croons “This is the end” and bursts of napalm decimate the lush forest, the film fully enters into the realm of the hallucinatory, with Francis Ford Coppola’s pan through the smoke and fire soon integrating the superimposed image of Martin Sheen’s upside-down face, his head on a pillow facing a ceiling fan. Dream and reality coalesce in a woozy, hazy blend of longing, fear and self-inflicted violence (symbolized by a gun lying beside Sheen on the bed) that result, per the Lizard King, in “a wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane.” Table-setters don’t get much more exquisite than this. (NS)

BARBARELLA (1968)

This is more of an excuse for showing Jane Fonda naked than anything else, but the same could be said of the entire movie. An astronaut clad in a rather community theatre-looking metallic space suit floats weightlessly above a yellow shag carpet. Elevator muzak plays in the background and piece by piece, the suit comes off, revealing the astronaut to be a comely blonde, naked beneath the suit. Soon we have Barbarella floating around with her ass in the air to the tones of 1960s muzak. Cute and sexy for sure, but also disturbingly fetus-like. (SCS)

LA DOLCE VITA (1960)

La Dolce Vita has its fair share of famous scenes. The opening in which Jesus dangles from a helicopter flying low over Rome beats Anita Ekberg in the fountain by a mile. Fellini knows that any good opening needs to be odd and enjoyable besides hinting at what's to come. Here we have religion, sexy rich women, poor street boys, modern technology and ruins. And Paparazzo taking photos of it all while Marcello Mastroianni's character quietly eggs him on. (SCS)

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

Much is made of the final scene, where the movie's hero/anti-hero, the racist Ethan Edwards, cannot enter the embrace of the household, and the door slowly shuts on him. The opening scene is a mirror of the end, with Ethan's sister-in-law Martha opening the door and walking from the cool shade of the house into the harsh light of Monument Valley, relocated from Utah to Texas for the purposes of the film. Ethan is riding his horse in through the desert, still a ways off although closer than anything else in the huge landscape. The camera's journey from the dark interior to the brilliant and tremendous exterior emphasizes just how small the ranch is. Ethan's visit is his first in many years, and although the film doesn't say a word about it, it is clear that while his sleazy exploits are one reason he has stayed away for so long, his love for Martha is the primary cause. The whole of the plot revolves around that unspoken love. If you look for it, you can see it from the first moment Martha's face becomes visible, all of the concern and ambiguity that she cannot speak. Unspoken truths are at the heart of The Searchers, and in the gulf between what is said and what is meant is the real history of this country. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Hayden Childs

SXSW Review: "Best Worst Movie"

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Sometime last summer I was at the Alamo Drafthouse enjoying the pre-show and a cold frosty when the strangest promo for an upcoming Rolling Roadshow I'd ever seen appeared on the screen. Usually a Rolling Roadshow consists of a well-known movie screening at an iconic location that figures prominently in the film - The Searchers at Monument Valley, Close Encounters at Devil's Tower, that sort of thing. This particular Rolling Roadshow preview promised a screening of Troll 2 in Nilbog, Utah. At the time, this didn't sound like an event that could possibly appeal to...well, anyone, really, but a friend sitting next to me insisted that no, actually, Troll 2 had developed quite a cult following.

The extent of that following becomes clear in Best Worst Movie, a new documentary by the star of Troll 2, Michael Paul Stephenson. In 1989, at the age of 11, Stephenson played Joshua Waits, a boy forced to do battle with vegetarian goblins bent on turning his family into edible plant people. (For further plot details - and believe me, the preceding description doesn't begin to scratch the surface of this demented tale - check out the latest installment of the Unwatchable series, which just so happens to be Troll 2.) The movie was never released in theaters, and when Stephenson finally got a look at Troll 2 on VHS, he was mortified. It was quite possibly the worst movie ever made.

Stephenson was not alone in his disappointment. His co-star George Hardy, an Alabama dentist who played his father in the movie, had hoped Troll 2 would launch him to stardom. It was not to be - at least, not in the way that he imagined. But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity, as Stephenson learned a few years ago when he was invited to a Troll 2 screening in New York. The film had accumulated a devoted fan base over the years, not because it was any sort of effective sequel to the immortal Sonny Bono vehicle Troll (in fact, it has nothing to do with the original), but because it was simply insane.

Stephenson and Hardy overcame their initial distaste for Troll 2 and learned to embrace it as the beloved cult object it became, but the same can't quite be said for the movie's director, Claudio Fragasso. Fluent in a sort of Italian-English-gibberish, Fragasso believes he has made an important eco-horror film, and while he is delighted to be invited to a screening - believing that, at long last, America has come to appreciate the nuances of his vision - he is shocked and disgusted to discover that his new fans regard his masterpiece as the worst movie ever made. (Not that this dissuades him from announcing plans to proceed with a sequel, to be called, naturally, Troll 2 Part 2.)

Best Worst Movie is a hilarious, affectionate tribute to the movie, the cult, and the cast, most notably Hardy, the world's most affable dentist. A beloved figure almost everywhere he goes (as he learns the hard way, the Troll 2 cult hasn't quite taken over the UK yet), the square-jawed, perpetually upbeat Hardy couldn't be more thrilled with all the newfound attention, and seemingly never tires of repeating his most famous line, "You can't piss on hospitality," even to people who have no idea what he's talking about.

Stephenson's documentary is unexpectedly moving at times, as when he and Hardy pay a visit to their long-lost co-star Margo Prey, now a frail, haunted recluse, or to a depressing Dallas horror convention littered with the dregs of B-movies past. Stephenson offers no definitive explanation for the fragile alchemy that transforms a forgotten no-budget horror sequel into a beloved cult object, mainly because there isn't one. In its own twisted way, Best Worst Movie is a joyous celebration of the continuing mystery and magic of movies.

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

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.

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