The Screengrab : walter huston

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

President Obama is two weeks away from the end of his first 100 days as Commander-In-Chief, and it’s been a wild ride so far, what with all the pirates, puppies and Queen-touching...but naturally, the administration’s main focus has been moving heaven and earth to ensure that nothing will prevent Bank of America executives from receiving my tax money while they charge me 24% interest on my credit card debt, thus ensuring I’ll never be able to afford any of the hundreds of empty, overpriced luxury condos in my neighborhood...because, as we all know, if the day ever comes when bankers and real estate developers make less than a zillion percent profit every second of the day, no matter how badly or unethically they run their businesses, then the terrorists win! (Or something like that...frankly, I’m just happy gas isn’t four dollars a gallon anymore. Hooray, bad economy!)

Anyway, the point is, now that Bernie Madoff has all the world’s money buried in a treasure chest somewhere on Skull Island, Americans have finally realized that money can’t buy happiness, and at long last we’re no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but instead living within our means, valuing the simple pleasures of life and judging people on their character, rather than the size of their wallets or the labels on their clothes.

Nah, just kidding: in truth, we’re all still cheating on our taxes, begging for bailouts and building bigger and better Ponzi schemes, because in the words of Danny Devito’s crooked fence in David Mamet’s Heist, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” And so, in that altruistic spirit, your pals here at the Screengrab hereby present our very own economic stimulus package: THE BEST & WORST GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES IN CINEMA HISTORY!

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

By the time Mike Judge’s half-brilliant Office Space gets around to its get-rich-quick scheme, its best moments are behind it. It starts out so well, with the story of a chronically bored office drone (Ron Livingston) who finds himself – after an accidental dose of post-hypnotic suggestion – completely incapable of giving a shit about his job. This is Office Space at its best, a note-perfect satire of cubicle life enlightened hugely by the appearance of a character who upends the whole idea of consequence and thus makes for some of the most viciously barbed gags of its day. Once it gets around to Livingston and his colleagues hatching a Superman III-inspired, computer-aided plan to steal millions by shaving half-pennies off of every transaction, it becomes more or less a goofy caper comedy, which, while well-executed, can’t hold a candle to its truly inspired first half. Still, as get-rich-quick schemes go, it’s a classic, and damned if it doesn’t almost work. (LP)

HEAT (1995)

Heat famously brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together on-screen – if only for one diner conversation and a climactic chase sequence – yet it’s Michael Mann’s direction that elevates this cat-and-mouse saga to near-greatness. The story revolves around the efforts of Pacino’s cop to catch De Niro’s crook, two kindred warriors on opposite sides of the law. Though this dynamic is, to put it mildly, hackneyed, Mann’s film is an energized, invigorated work that recalls Jean-Pierre Melville’s noirs, which also focused on peerlessly cool lawmen and thieves whose dedication to customs, habits and ethical codes leaves them isolated. As the criminal struggling to reconcile personal desires for happiness with instincts that warn against being something he’s not, De Niro delivers his last great performance. Pacino’s trademark quiet-screaming overacting and a few too many narrative diversions prove occasionally aggravating, but De Niro’s superb turn helps offset these slight missteps, as does the thrilling in-broad-daylight centerpiece robbery that cements Heat’s status in the pantheon of heist films. (NS)

OCEAN’S 11, 12, 13… (1960, 2001, etc.)

The original 1960 Ocean’s 11’s best get-rich quick scheme didn’t take place onscreen; it was the Rat Pack’s all night, every night ring-a-ding-ding showcase at the Sands while shooting the film on location in Las Vegas. Sure, knocking over five casinos during a blackout on New Year’s Eve has a certain flair to it, but there’s nothing like working 22 hours a day for six straight weeks to really fatten the wallet. In 2001, a Frat Pack led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt staged their own Vegas heist, lifting $150 million from the Bellagio vault with the help of a Chinese acrobat, a Cockney explosives expert mysteriously played by Don Cheadle, and the always indispensible Elliott Gould. The remake took in even more than $150 million at the box office, which led to two further get-rich-quick schemes: the winky, self-referential Ocean’s 12, a sort of spiritual cousin to The Cannonball Run II, and Ocean’s 13, which proved once again that the death knell of a franchise sounds a lot like Al Pacino yelling. (SVD)

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Part of the point of John Huston's classic is that prospecting for gold isn't actually an easy or quick way to strike it rich at all, but once you've laid out for the tools and traveled all the way out into the middle of the Mexican desert and gotten used to the sight of Walter Huston jeering at you without his dentures, you're more than likely to stick with it until you've got something to show for it. After that, all you have to worry about is whether your paranoid, half-mad partner is going to be able to convince himself that you're plotting to steal his share of the "goods" so that he can feel justified in knocking you off and helping himself to your share. Whatever moral and practical defects can be found in Bogart's plan, it has to be said that he's a sage and a prince compared to the hippopotamus-toothed bandit played by the immortal Alfonso Bedoya, whose master plan involves decapitating Bogart and stealing his burros, after he's thrown away those saddlebags filled with the funny yellow powder that's weighing them down. (PN)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Reviews By Request, Oscar-Nominated Edition: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As usual, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the subject for the second of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

It’s practically become a running joke that biopics are catnip to Oscar voters. It’s not difficult to see the reasons why- the historical setting gives affords technicians plenty of chances to show off, while audiences enjoy seeing the lives of their heroes brought to life through movie magic. Most of all, playing historical figures often gives actors an opportunity to show facets of their talent that aren’t normally on display. Nowhere is this more apparent than in biographies of musicians or other live performances, in which actors get the chance to not only portray real-life characters but also perform their work- in character, anyway. And of all the acclaimed showbiz biopic performances out there, few are more beloved than James Cagney’s Oscar-winning turn as George M. Cohan in Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy.

As showbiz biopics go, Yankee Doodle Dandy has a pretty standard trajectory. We follow Cohan from his birth through his early days on the road, performing in vaudeville shows with his parents and sister as “The Four Cohans.” By the time he’s a teenager, young George has become good enough that he gets cocky; and despite his undeniable talent he’s been largely blackballed from the business by the time he’s hit adulthood. It’s only by composing his own material- combined with a lot of luck- that George makes a name for himself on Broadway, eventually becoming its biggest star. And all the while, he sticks by his family (including his dad, played by Walter Huston), and in turn his loving wife Mary (Joan Leslie) sticks by him.

And yet, compared to most movies of this sort, Yankee Doodle Dandy has almost no interest in the darker undercurrents of its protagonist. There’s a very good reason for this- made in the early years of World War II, the filmmakers wanted to tell the rousing story of a homefront hero, a patriot who served his country not with a gun but with songs like the World War I anthem “Over There.” This comes through clearest in the movie’s (supposedly apocryphal) framing device, in which Cohan is called to the White House late one night so that FDR can personally present him with the Congressional Gold Medal. And while this makes the film pretty hopeless as biography- as Cohan himself allegedly quipped after the premiere, “It was a good movie. Who was it about?”- it’s rousing entertainment all the same. In light of the tendency of many contemporary biopics to air out their protagonists’ dirty laundry, the film’s refusal to do so is perhaps its most refreshing aspect. Yankee Doodle Dandy is content to let its hero be a hero.

But the film would be nothing without Cagney’s infectious performance. Like many moviegoers of the time, I mostly knew Cagney through his hard-boiled gangster roles, combined his great late-period turns in films like Billy Wilder’s awesome One, Two, Three. But while I always knew he was an energetic actor, I wasn’t prepared for the high spirits he would bring to the role of George M. Cohan. The role had been turned down by the likes of Fred Astaire, and while Cagney wasn’t the dancer Astaire was (or the singer, for that matter- Cagney probably speak-sings half his lyrics), he throws himself so completely into the role that it scarcely matters. Cagney’s irrepressible desire to entertain is matched only by his inventiveness, as in the scene in which he first meets his eventual wife while covered in old-age makeup. It’s an irresistible performance, and one I dare say the Academy would’ve been hard-pressed to overlook even if it wasn’t based on a real person.

Yankee Doodle Dandy isn’t a movie about the life of George M. Cohan so much as it is about the myth of George M. Cohan. Consequently, it scarcely matters that Cohan was actually born on July 3rd, that the movie’s “Mary” was actually his second wife, or that the circumstances under which he received his Congressional Gold Medal were somewhat different than they are in the film. What matters is that, like its hero, it’s filled to the brim with an unabashed flag-waving spirit, and anchored with Cagney’s timeless, inspired performance. Yankee Doodle Dandy is cornball to be sure, but it’s the kind of movie that gives cornball a grand old name.

For the second Oscar-themed Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Best Picture-winning films I’ve never seen. So, which will it be?

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

OUT OF SIGHT

Most people remember Stephen Soderbergh’s 1998 Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight as the start (and, essentially, end) of J.Lo®’s serious acting career, and also the movie where George Clooney traded in the training wheels and became an official movie star. Yet, while the hunk-in-the-trunk romance between Lopez’s cop (Federal Marshal Karen Sisco) and the Cloon’s robber, Jack Foley, may be the heart of the story, the prison (and eventual jailbreak) scenes are the muscle. Doing time in the Lompoc federal pen, Foley protects a weasely businessman (the ever-great Albert Brooks) from the unwanted attentions of scarier convicts like the part-time pugilist, full-time sociopath Maurice “Snoopy” Miller (played to the scary hilt by Don Cheadle, a full 180 degrees away from his loveable porn star performance the previous year in Boogie Nights). When the men are eventually released back into the real world, Foley visits Brooks’ character in search of legitimate employment, only to be offered a lousy security guard job and a condescending pep talk: “You’re a bank robber. This is not a marketable skill...show me that you’re really willing to change and we’ll talk about something better.” Foley is not pleased, reminding his would-be benefactor, “Back in prison, guy like you, place like that, you were ice cream for freaks...I saved your ass.” And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Out of Sight one of the great modern prison flicks: in addition to all the endlessly quotable exchanges, the Leonard story (and screenplay by Scott Frank) is memorable for its depiction of jail as a funhouse mirror, reflecting back a distorted version of society where definitions of decency, morality and manhood get all wiggly and reversed.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)

Howard Hawks' famous dictum about a good movie being nothing more than three good scenes and no bad ones gets its purest expression here, because that's all this is. Idealistic warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston) gets a new prison and proceeds to shake things up. There's a real plot — the script is exceptionally clever, building in a more-than-usually-convincing happy ending with a clever plant, making both audiences and the production code happy — and also young Boris Karloff, but as usual Hawks doesn't seem terribly invested in the mechanics. The three great scenes: an opening bit where cops debate the finer points of a card game while inspecting a crime scene (beating The Wire by some 70 years; it's just as sophisticated), Walter Huston walking through and staring down an entire prison yard through sheer force of will, and Karloff intentionally getting himself sent into solitary confinement by announcing to the first guard unlucky enough to pass him, "Hey! I don't like you!" None of these scenes are available on video (or DVD, for that matter), so enjoy as best you can the above context-free clip of dubious quality with Italian subtitles, which still gives you a feel for Huston's masterful underacting. Here, as in Capra's American Madness a year later, Huston was way ahead of the naturalistic curve.

RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (1954)

The first of Don Siegel's two archetypal prison movies, Riot In Cell Block 11 is better as a social document than a movie. Character actors (Neville Brand! Frank Faylen!) wait the minimum amount of time before everything explodes into a frenzy. It's strong stuff, if not particularly revelatory or fun; still, Siegel got there way before Attica and made it fairly plausible. There are no clips on YouTube, so here's a completely context-free excerpt from Private Hell 36, the frankly superior noir he made the same year. Siegel would have the clout and confidence to increase the overt stylization in his movies as he made more films; here, he's still working in a fairly traditional '50s-problem-film/exploitation potboiler mode.

LE TROU (1960)

Jacques Becker's brilliantly terse prison-break movie is longer than A Man Escaped, and hence inevitably somehow even more oppressive and claustrophobic; Bresson is concerned with transcendence, while Becker shoots down that possibility entirely. (Becker has more in common with Jean-Pierre Melville's fatalistic male cameraderie.) They're both invested in physical actions speaking much louder than words, though; the highlight is a riveting one-shot of the men pounding through the floor of their jail cell in a go-for-broke one-chance-only action. Becker's film is a notch below — wince in pain at symbolic spider-webs — but it's still a classic of the genre. Here's an amazingly long trailer in unsubtitled French; after decades of bootlegs, though, this was recently made available by Criterion, in another selfless act of public service.

THE ROUND-UP (1966)

This isn't really a prison movie; it's a prison-camp movie, which might conceivably make a difference to someone. Ruthless formalist Miklos Jancso (Bela Tarr's stylistic father) is trying to make a movie about oppression by the state; what he comes up with is an open-air equivalent to Kafka, reducing concrete political problems to a grimly amusing all-purpose absurdism. Prisoners are herded from one part of the open-to-the-sky grounds to another, without any discernible point or rhyme, except to serve as compositional elements for Jancso's immaculate tracking shots. [MAJOR SPOILER] Our ostensible protagonist is killed with half-an-hour to go, which makes the point better than any overt speech could've. There's no clips available from this film on YouTube, so here's a clip from the previous year's The Red And The White, which is stylistically pretty much the exact same movie.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Dead"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff. We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy. And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead. Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas. And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.

The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life. Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill. Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life. His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica. Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany. The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.

The action of The Dead, such as it is, revolves around a celebration of the Feast of Epihany in the company of Professor Gabriel Conroy (movingly played by Donal McCann, heading an almost all-Irish cast) and his wife Gretta (a stellar job by Anjelica Huston). The course of the evening's conversations -- and that's all there is to The Dead, conversation and memory and observation and realization -- will reveal a young love of Gretta's which has, through the course of her marriage and her entire life, lingered like an unquiet ghost between her and her husband. As they pass the hours at the home of Gabriel's aunts Julia and Kate, played with lovely grace and competence by Cathleen Delany and Helena Carroll, the professor will realize, in a stunning display of what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls the solidarity of irony, that he is capable of feeling intense affection and regret for someone he has never met, a long-dead rival for his wife's affections: and that because of that, he is capable of loving his wife all the more.

Joyce's work carries an emotional power that is often entirely internal -- its great revelations and transformations take place not in the world we can see, but in the much vaster world that exists inside our heads. The Dead is no exception, and presented John Huston with the challenge of showing us in a visual medium what is actually happening where no eyes can see; but he succeeds admirably by use of a deeply sensitive script and a more than capable cast. The Dead is filled with melancholy and even sadness, but in the purest spirit of the holidays, it's a sadness that binds, that brings together, that makes more human. In the rhythms of the Epiphany feast, in the stories told a thousand times, in the familiar songs sung, the predictable jokes laughed at, and the great sorrows of the past recalled, John Huston -- living out the very story he was filming -- reminded us of why shared unhappiness is just as vital as shared happiness: because it is shared. It is the snow that falls on the living and the dead alike.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A hearty Irish 11 pipers piping. If The Dead isn't a perfect holiday film, it's an intensely felt and enormously moving one, and one of the few that both fits into the mood and spirit of Christmas and is removed enough from it to be a film worth seeing at any time of year.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Gabriel Over the White House" (1933)

Phil Nugent — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: Directed by Gregory La Cava and based on a novel by T. F. Tweed, it stars Walter Huston as Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, an affable glad-hander and crooked hack politician who becomes a compromise candidate for president at his party's deadlocked convention. Hammond's election would seem to augur a quiet, complacent time in his country's history, but while driving himself through the streets of D.C., the Prez does his James Dean impression and winds up in a coma. He is not expected to survive, but he soon rises from his bed of pain, and when he does, he's a new man, fiercely committed to using the power of his office to fix what needs fixing and no longer interested in the sweet fleshy charms of his personal assistant and mistress, Pendie Malloy (Karen Morley). Fending off an attempt by the appalled jackals in Congress to impeach his newly honest ass, Judd gathers support from The People, threatens to declare martial law, and cloaks himself in powers that abolish the checks and balances system, making him answerable to no man.

Thus equipped, he takes charge of the banks and creates new work programs before turning his attention to the real problem vexing our nation: Da Mob. Judd abolishes Prohibition and then, in private communication with the criminal kingpin Nick Diamond, who's in charge of everything bad, suggests that he make plans to return to the land of his fathers, since he's just lost the raison d'etre for his bootlegging business and, besides, we don't cotton to foreigners in these parts. Diamond offers his counter proposal in the form of an attempted mob hit on the White House that leaves Pendie in the hospital and Judd in a state of high dudgeon. Taking the gloves off, he has all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed by firing squad in view of the Statue of Liberty. For his last trick, Judd gathers all the ambassadors from other lands aboard a yacht, informs them that he is rejecting the universally agreed upon limitations on naval power, oversees the bombing of a couple of abandoned American battleships as a demonstration of the power of American military might, and then muses that if all these jaspers could persuade their governments to immediately repay their mountainous war debts to the United States, which would destabilize their own national budgets to such a degree that Judd would have no need to fear that they'd be upgrading their own armies anytime soon, it sure would get them on his good side. Having threatened his way to guaranteed world peace, Judd collapses and, this time, finally cashes in his chips for good. The suggestion is made that perhaps he never really recovered from his accident but has been possessed by the spirit of a heavenly agent working through him to restore God's country to full strength.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It is clinically insane.

WHY, FOR SOME PEOPLE, IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: Gabriel Over the White House was perhaps the most ambitious attempt by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to use the movies as an extension of his abilities to shape public opinion. To movie nuts, Hearst is best remembered as the target of Citizen Kane, and also as the man who destroyed the movie career of his charming and talented longtime mistress, Marion Davies, by taking charge of her film career. (Davies was a gifted comedian, but Hearst wanted to showcase her as a noble romantic goddess, and he spent a fortune producing movies that were tributes to his wrong-headed idea of how she ought to appear and publicizing them in his papers.) But Hearst was also a genuine power broker who was interested in using all the latest tools of the mass media at his disposal. Hearst felt that his support had put Franklin Roosevelt on the path to victory at the 1932 Democratic convention and ultimately to the White House, and Gabriel, which went into production during the election and opened a couple of months after FDR was sworn in as president, was meant to be taken as his instruction manual for the new president, a list of helpful suggestions.

It's a measure of how powerful Hearst still was at this time that Roosevelt reportedly humored him by agreeing to take a look at the script and jotting some notes on it before returning it to the film crew. This became a point of pride with Hearst, and some feeble-minded but excitable historians even wonder how much of the New Deal might have been inspired by Judd Hammond's efforts to spread the wealth around, but it's hard to imagine that the man who had just inherited Herbert Hoover's problems really had all that much interest in pitching in on Walter Huston's latest. In any case, FDR failed to either whack Al Capone or tell his own mistress to take a hike, and within a couple of years, Hearst had soured on the president he'd once regarded fondly as his own creation. ("For forty years appeared in Kane newsprint, no public issue on which Kane papers took no stand. No public man whom Kane himself did not support or denounce - often support, then denounce!") But Gabriel briefly re-entered the national conversation a few years ago when Mississippi historian Robert S. McElvaine conjectured that it might have predicted, Nostradamus-like, the coming of another American president whose achievements are on the far opposite side of the scale than Roosevelt's.

Yesterday's Hits: Duel in the Sun (1946, King Vidor)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Duel in the Sun a hit?: David O. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1930s, a decade that concluded with his production of Hollywood’s biggest hit of all time, Gone With the Wind. After that film’s runaway success, Selznick could pretty much write his own ticket, and he used his clout to make his dream project, a mega-budgeted adaptation of Niven Busch’s novel Duel in the Sun. Selznick spared no expense- the budget topped out at a then-unprecedented $6 million- to bring this Wild West melodrama to the screen in “Glorious Technicolor”, going through more than half a dozen directors (including Josef von Sternberg) before handing the directorial reins over to Hollywood veteran King Vidor.

In the film’s principal roles, Selznick cast a pair of hot young stars- Gregory Peck, fresh off his breakout role in the Selznick production of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and Jennifer Jones, a recent Oscar-winner for The Song of Bernadette, who took over the role for the pregnant Teresa Wright. He then backed them with a stellar supporting cast, including Joseph Cotten, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Herbert Marshall, and Lillian Gish. But perhaps the biggest factor in the film’s success was its unabashedly lurid story about a “half-breed” woman who was irresistibly drawn to a bad-boy rancher. Combining a horse opera with a soap opera and filling the atmosphere with liberal amounts of (implied) sex, Duel in the Sun stirred up no small amounts of controversy. Yet the hubbub surrounding the film (quickly nicknamed “Lust in the Dust”) ended up helping its box-office performance, and Duel became one of the biggest hits of 1946, bringing in more than $11 million.

What happened?: While Duel in the Sun was a hit with moviegoers, reviews were decidedly mixed, praising the film’s production values while criticizing its script (credited to Selznick himself) and performances. And in spite of the fact that the film eventually made money, Selznick found it increasingly difficult to make films in light of the movie’s runaway budget and extravagant (upwards of $2 million) advertising campaign. Selznick continued to work in Hollywood, but his once-prodigious output slowed considerably in the years after Duel in the Sun. On the positive side, the movie continued Gregory Peck’s steady ascent to leading-man stardom, and three years after the film’s release, Selznick married Jones, a marriage that continued until his death in 1965.

Does Duel in the Sun still work?: Not really. For such a popular genre, melodrama is difficult to pull off on film, especially in a way that ages well. Part of the problem is that melodramas were sometimes the only way to deal with risqué material under the Production Code. But while there was no shortage of controversy surrounding Duel in the Sun, most of the elements of the film that were once controversial edgy- particularly the “half-breed” background of heroine Pearl Chavez (played by Jones) and the “bad girl” urges she feels toward Peck- are dealt with in a hamfisted and uninspired manner.

It doesn’t help that Jones is all wrong for the part. Setting aside the now-politically incorrect use of “brown-face” that was utilized to make the lily-white Jones look the part, she’s simply too prim and polished to be convincing. Jones’ idea of speaking like a half-Mexican, half-Native American woman is to lower her vocal register while droppin’ the occasional “g” from the ends of words. And when even Pearl turns into a lusty, unbridled “bad girl” after falling for Peck’s Lewt McCanlies, Jones’ performance becomes almost laughable, consisting mainly of striking sultry poses and making goo-goo eyes at Peck. Jones never seems comfortable in the role she’s given, and this discomfort comes through in her performance.

Another factor was, to put it bluntly, that there were simply too many cooks. It takes a firm hand on the directorial wheel to pull off a lurid story like this one, but after going through more than half a dozen directors, Vidor was little more than a hired gun, lorded over by Selznick. But rather than allowing the story to dictate the style, Selznick overwhelmed it with production values, in a clear attempt to turn it into Gone With the Wind Goes West. Admittedly, Duel in the Sun is gorgeous, with plenty of sweeping vistas and deep orange sunsets to please the eye. However, the story becomes bogged down by the weight of the production, and many of the more emotional moments get lost in the scenery. The result is a movie that’s tamer and more bloated than any good melodrama should be. Compared to another popular melodrama of the period, John M. Stahl’s still-effective Leave Her to Heaven, Duel in the Sun is little more than an overstuffed curiosity.

That said, the one element of the movie that still works is Gregory Peck’s performance as the strapping Lewt. Later in his career, Peck became associated with playing heroes- not least in his iconic turn in To Kill a Mockingbird- so it’s fascinating to see the traits that made him such a perfect good guy used in service of an unsavory character. It helps that Peck was convincingly tall in the saddle to play a cowboy, all the better to turn the cowboy archetype- morally uncomplicated, decisive, solving problems through action- on its ear. Peck treads a thin line here, giving a performance that’s just dark enough to make the character work in this context, while simultaneously suggesting that Lewt might’ve been the hero under different circumstances. If nothing else, Duel in the Sun showed moviegoers just how commanding a performer Peck could be, even if the movie itself ultimately let him down.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film sticks made-up names on the teenage rock journalist at its center (i.e., Crowe's stand-in) and the rock band he has his big Life-Changing Experience while covering, but Crowe puts Bangs, the legendary editor of Creem, on-screen under his own name, and Hoffman incarnates every loving thing ever written or said about Bangs and makes it look easy. Part of the fascination of Almost Famous is that Crowe presents Bangs as the voice of hard-earned wisdom, and has him share that wisdom with his surrogate out of a spirit of pure generosity, yet the kid violates every rule that Bangs lays down for him, and the way the movie sees it, this all works out great for him. At the time, it must have seemed that this had worked out pretty great for Crowe; as a reporter, he really did cozy up to the rock stars he covered and wrote flatteringly about them (out of what seemed to be real awe for his subjects, rather than opportunism), and the connections he forged couldn't have done him any harm on his path to becoming a big Hollywood writer-director. But resisting Bangs's advice that he learn to temper his sweet enthusiasm with some distance and skepticism--to care more about his art than about others' feelings--he may have done some harm to his ability to extend his range as a filmmaker. In fact, after Crowe's last couple of movies, and the last couple of anthologies with Bangs's material in them, Bangs's career is probably the healthier one now, and he's been dead since 1982.

Howard (Walter Huston), THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Howard, the ancient prospector (and proto-ecologist--witness his speech about leaving the Earth "the way we found it"), suggests Yoda crossed with Gabby Hayes, and may be the platonic ideal of the figure of the Western codger who sometimes seems half-mad but has great stores of wiliness and gumption. Drafted by a couple of tenderfeet to bring his experience to a gold-mining venture, he makes his pupils rich, while adhering to the rule that defines so many movie mentor figures: namely, his sage advice does him more good than the people to whom he offers it. When last seen, the old man is preparing to return to the Indian village where he can live out his golden years receiving the royal treatment in exchange for serving as the locals' "medicine man." Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs, the malcontent who scorns fair treatment for his mentor, makes his fortune but gets his lead lopped off before he can haul it back to civilization, while Tim Holt, who treats Howard with the respect that is his due, stays alive but loses his riches and has no recourse but to go back to being Tim Holt.

"Subway Ghost" (Vincent Schiavelli), GHOST (1990(

Lanky at six feet four, with a thick shock of untamed dark hair surrounding a bald pate and a long face like melted ice cream, Schiavelli (who died in 2005) was often cast for the shock effect of his appearance, whether he was playing an asylum inmate in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or a high school teacher in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (where the news that he has a hot-looking wife is good for a laugh). His role as a nameless and very touching spectre in Ghost gave him the chance to play an uncharacteristically direct and fiery character, and he rose to the occasion so fully that, for a few scenes, he actually brought something wholly unearthly to a movie that's mostly about comforting the audience by showing it that death is just another stage of life. Schiavelli seems to know different: being stranded among the living has turned him into the most alienated figure imaginable, and after he's consented to help the hero master his abilities, he abruptly takes his leave, as if he'd just remembered that the movie he's in is meant for those who are sweeter-natured than he has any interest in being.

John (Bruce Dern), THE TRIP (1967)

Never slow to jump on a trend, Roger Corman was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the late 60s, casting Peter Fonda as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. This is like buying the parenting manual by Lynne "mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn" Spears. Nonetheless, Groves agrees to take the drug under the supervision of Dern's unnerving weird-beard character John, and off we go into the lava lamp school of druggy filmmaking — pretty colors and shapes, strobe lights and colored gels. At this point, your more responsible LSD guide would put on some trippy tunes and maybe show you some groovy album covers, but John just sort of snivels and grins and makes Groves feel even more nervous and paranoid with his "hey, it's just a normal ol' chair, buddy" routine. It's even possible that Corman meant John to be a comforting presence, but happened to be out shooting second unit footage for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters the day the casting director learned Dern was willing to work for a sleeping bag and a couple of tuna fish sandwiches. Anyway, Groves' trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he's killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. Then he proves to be an even worse judge of character than we'd previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. Just say no, kids.

Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), REPO MAN (1984)

"Not many people got a code to live by anymore," says Bud, the veteran repo man embodied in all his shambling, world-weary glory by Harry Dean Stanton, who schools our young anti-hero Otto in the tricks of the trade. Bud does have a code, though, and in a movie that ranks among the most quotable of the last three decades, he is a veritable font of direct and concise street-level wisdom. In other words, fuck Yoda. Here are the five elements of the Repo Code we've chosen to live by, and we learned them all from Bud.

5. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

4. It helps if you dress like a detective. Detectives dress kinda square. If you look like a detective people are gonna think you're packing something.

3. Look at 'em – ordinary fucking people, I hate 'em. An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.

2. Only an asshole gets killed for a car.

1. Repo man's got all night, every night.

--Phil Nugent; Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains opens this week, and while it isn't really about Carter the President so much as about Carter the Ex-President, it got us thinking about the Oval Office and the movies. Depicting Presidents is always a dicey proposition on film. In contemporary films, there are fewer ways to take your audience out of a movie than to show the President of the United States and have it not be the actual current President of the United States (another reason why Crimson Tide, with its CNN-generated Bill Clinton cameo, is so awesome). In films set in the future, it's hard to show the President and have it not feel like a ham-handed attempt at instant dystopianism. (Funny how those silly people in the future rarely elect somebody halfway decent to the office.) Our list this week focuses on Great Fictional Movie Presidents. But you'll notice that we've included two sorta-not-fictional Honorable Mentions. You may also notice that we've avoided some movie Presidents (coughMichaelDouglascough) who irritate the hell out of us.

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Of all the roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, none leaves an impression quite like President Merkin Muffley. (The dual vagina references in the name are as sure a sign as any that anarchic comic author Terry Southern was behind the screenplay.) Allegedly based on fussy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Muffley's role as the sole voice of reason and practicality in a film full of powerful madmen anchors the entire movie — and, on occasion, such as in the legendary and hilarious telephone conversation with the Soviet premier (much of which, like a good deal of Sellers' dialogue, was originally improvised by the actor himself), provides some of Dr. Strangelove's funniest moments. Muffley wasn't always meant to be the film's unflappable straight man; Southern originally wrote him as an extremely loopy collection of tics and affectations, including a severe head cold and an obvious and stereotypical homosexual demeanor; the former was so effective that it basically prevented anyone from playing off of him, and the latter, in rehearsal, was felt by both actor and director, to be too broad. Instead, Sellers played Muffley as almost preternaturally bland, which made his occasional forays into hysteria all the more effective.

Walter Huston as President Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)

This 1933 picture, which opened during Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president, was directed by Gregory La Cava, but the real driving force behind the production was William Randolph Hearst, who intended it as a primer designed to show FDR how he ought to go about solving the country's problems. President Hammond is a compromise candidate, a cynical party hack who couldn't care less about his country's citizens or its future. But then he's injured in a car accident and slips into a coma, and when he comes out of it, he's a changed man, and he rolls up his sleeves and begins to do whatever it takes to make things right. His methods include firing his whole cabinet, threatening to declare martial law until Congress lets him do whatever he wants, and having all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed. His reign of righteous terror climaxes with a scene where he gathers all the ambassadors of the world's nations onto a yacht and treats them to a show of American military power that convinces them that they have no choice but to disarm and quickly fork over the money they owe the U.S. from the first World War. Having rendered the United States prosperous, crime-free and dominant, President Hammond contentedly drops dead; the movie leaves open the possibility that he's been dead since the car crash and that his body has been serving as an earthly conduit for the Lord. FDR wound up being a disappointment to Hearst, not taking much from the Hammond playbook, but some historians think that the movie may have actually prophesied the administration of a much later American president.

Donald Pleasance as The President of the United States, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

You know, sometimes you really feel sorry for Donald Pleasance. The poor guy survived the Blitz, fought in the Second World War, and went on to become President of the United States despite the constitutional hindrance of having been born in England. And what does it get him after forty years of struggle? Some mouthy stewardess blows up Air Force One and leaves him stranded in New York (which just happens to be a maximum security penitentiary, peopled with murderers, drug lords, and assorted human scum — nothing like it is in real life, of course), where he is continually menaced by the guy who sang "Grazing in the Grass." U.S. presidents in action movies tend to break down pretty cleanly into one of two categories — the Fightin' President, who punches people and shoots down alien warships, and the Frightened President, who cowers in a corner and waits for a real tough-guy he-man to come rescue him. For most of Escape from New York's run time, Pleasance's unnamed President is decidedly the latter, and we're clearly meant to feel some degree of sympathy towards him as he awaits rescue (like Nixon, he apparently has a secret plan to end the war). Still, it's hard not to come away feeling a bit of sympathy for the terrorists — after all, the guy did turn Manhattan into a prison. Won't somebody think of the restaurants?

Terry Crews as President Camacho, IDIOCRACY (2006)

Postponed for over a year before getting a blink-and-you-missed-it release last fall, Mike Judge's cult-classic-in-the-making imagined a future in which the morons have inherited the Earth. In a world where Starbucks sells both lattes and handjobs and crops are watered with Brawndo™ Energy Drinks, it only makes sense that the President of the United States would be a trash-talking, hard-partying ex-porn star and five-time Ultimate Smackdown Champion. President Camacho, played with great comic relish by ex-NFL defensive lineman Terry Crews, is the kind of fearless leader who sports a tank top and American-flag warmup pants at Presidential functions, brandishes a machine gun during his State of the Union address, and rides a four-wheeler everywhere he goes, national security be damned. But his actual leadership skills are limited to making the country's smartest man his new Secretary of the Interior and tasking him to solve the nation's famine problem in one week, or else he'll get thrown into the ring during a nationally-televised monster truck rally. A few decades ago, it might have been tempting to read Judge's vision of the presidency 500 years from now as a dystopian satire conceived by a former high-school outcast sick of seeing the dumb jocks get all the glory. But nowadays, when having a significant speaking role in Predator is as accurate an indicator of electability as any previous public office, one can't help but wonder whether it'll even take five centuries to place us squarely in the political climate imagined by Idiocracy.

Charles During as President David Stevens, TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977)

Charles Durning's President Stevens is a squat, foul-mouthed sign of the post-Nixonian times. On the one hand, it's doubtful a pre-Nixon president would have been allowed to drink and curse this much on-screen: Stevens has a "fuck" for every occasion. But he's also made directly responsible for the U.S.'s post-Vietnam fallout, blackmailed by Burt Lancaster into promising to reveal — on national TV! — our cynical, soldier-killing true reasons for entering the war. Impressively naive, Stevens is forced to condemn the administrations preceding him: he retains Nixon's profanity but none of his attitude.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov