The Cameraman's Revenge

The Matrimaniac (1916): I often talk about the economy of storytelling in older films, and how much less time they usually take to set themselves up and get going. This is a comparatively extreme example, though; clocking in at just 46 minutes (barely feature-length even by 1916 standards), it quite literally cuts to the chase. I’d almost swear it was missing an opening reel to establish the characters, but no, apparently it does just begin in apparent mid-story. Here, Doug is the young man eloping with the love of his life—in broad daylight through the front door of the house, no less—in the face of opposition from her father and another suitor. Quite what Doug has done to offend the old man (apart from merely existing, perhaps) is never explained; we simply begin kind of in medias res with Doug deflating the tyres on the old boy’s car so he can’t chase them once they begin their flight. Still, he’s not going to let a minor thing like that stop him from interfering in his daughter’s happiness. Fun (I particularly enjoyed the scenes where Doug and the hapless minister he’s roped in to perform the ceremonial duties are hamstrung by an unhelpful mule), although hard not to feel there wasn’t something missing. Like motivation for the plot.

Wild and Woolly (1917): Again, Fairbanks plays a part I could easily imagine Harold Lloyd having done in the following decade. He’s the son of a New York-based railroad magnate who’s grown rich off sending his railroads out west, and the son has accordingly grown up a fanatic for the old west. When a business opportunity in Arizona pops up, Doug finally gets his chance to actually head west for the first time in his life, and the folks running the place decide the best way to get him on side is to dress the place up like the 1880s frontier town it stopped being long ago so it lives up to his fantasy of the old west. Little do they all realise some real wild west business is about to go down. Given the film’s intention as a spoof of the “eastern westerner” story, and the way it’s about the distance between the old west and the “modern” world, it’s worth remembering just how far the early movie era overlapped with the old west; Buffalo Bill Cody, after all, died only a couple of months before this appeared, and he did a fair bit towards packaging the idea of the “wild west” as a performance of the sort the townsfolk stage here. By now Fairbanks himself had moved from Triangle, under the aegis of D.W. Griffith, to his own production company, but he obviously retained some lessons from Griffith; the climax of the film plays out not unlike one of his films (maybe if The Battle at Elderbush Gulch had been funnier. We’ll say nothing of how the two films treat their Indians). Apparently this was one of Fairbanks’ favourites, and I can see why; his character may be a bit of a buffoon living a bit of a fantasy, but he can turn on actual heroics when required.

Oh god/dess, that fucking dialogue. I think I’ve managed to establish myself as generally not being a Coen Brothers fan, and accordingly I didn’t really have great expectations of this one by them (one of those films I’ve seen mainly cos it was generally widely acclaimed, and it’s on an assortment of ICheckMovies lists). I’d say those low expectations were kind of met, although I was less appalled by the whole thing than Rex Reed seems to have been… I’ve actually never seen the 1969 version with John Wayne, so I’m not invested in it in the way other folk might be and had no particular beef with the idea of it being remade (whereas I did resent the Coens for remaking The Ladykillers). Anyway, I recall them insisting it wasn’t really a remake but a new adaptation of the novel, so whatever… brother Rex seems to find this part of the problem, preferring the earlier film’s “whittling” of the book (even though the new film is actually shorter), although I think what he says about not much going on isn’t far off the mark; the material seemed kind of thin when I was watching it, and a tighter 80-90 minute film could’ve been better. But we’d still have the dialogue to contend with. Mostly taken straight from Charles Portis’ novel, it is teeth-grinding shit that I literally couldn’t believe a word of. It has the feeling of being translated from another language entirely into the sort of formalised written English someone might learn at school as opposed to the sort of language people actually speak (the child Mattie gets some of the worst lines, although none of the characters are well served by the rubbish they have to say), and it presented a frankly insuperable barrier to my actually engaging with the film. Not that I normally feel engaged by the Coens, but this time I was even less swept up than usual…

It’s a misconception that older films are necessarily “better” than newer ones (even if one personally prefers the classics); it’s just that the crap of the past has mostly settled so that only the good stuff retains its prominence, whereas the crap of our age has yet to fall into its similarly just oblivion. This film (screened on TVS tonight) is proof positive that age is no guarantee of quality; the best that I could say for it was that at least TVS showed a decent print of it. Although Jane Russell was all over the advertising back then (still is), she’s actually secondary at best; people expecting a film about Jane Russell’s tits may be disappointed that it’s really about Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. Phil Hall seems oddly indignant in his Bootleg Files piece about the homoerotic readings some make about the relationship between the three, and I can kind of understand his argument against the “bromance”, but come on, it’s hard not to look at the film that way, especially not in the climactic showdown when Garrett whines about young Bill Bonney having come between him and Doc. (Funny how when Jane’s tits… sorry, her character comes between Billy and Doc, they get over that a lot better…) Anyway, the film has some historical interest as the first film to be exhibited without a Production Code Seal of Approval after they became mandatory, though much of the film’s censorship trouble seems to have been mainly whipped up for publicity’s sake by Howard Hughes, producer and director… Howard Hawks did at least some of the film, and I’m inclined to think he handled the pursuit by the Indians, purely because it’s the only effective thing in the whole film. Otherwise, the script is crap, the acting is crap, the music is crap, and even Jane’s tits aren’t used half as effectively in the film as they were in the advertising. I’ve said for years that films like this which form the heart of censorship controversies tend to be shit, and The Outlaw merely demonstrates this is not a new phenomenon…

It’s interesting how perspectives change over time. Consider this review from 2006 of In Old Arizona, which condemns the film for (among other things) the technical limitations of its sound recording, notably how it apparently couldn’t pick up sounds that were too far from the microphone (like this isn’t a problem now?), then consider this review from January 1929 (just after the film went into wide release after opening at Christmas 1928) which praises the film for the very same thing as a realistic detail. As for me, I just had to overcome my perplexity at an all-talking film from 1928 (it’s my own peculiarity for which I have no rational explanation; I find 1929 talkies easy to accept but the very idea of a 1928 talkie seems odd to me, even though this isn’t the first such film I’ve seen), and the accents. In Old Arizona is historic for having been the first all-talking western and the first all-talking film to have been shot outdoors, and Warner Baxter won the second-ever Best Actor Oscar for his turn as the Cisco Kid… but what material he had to work with. Nothing wrong with the story—Cisco Kid is a Mexican (?) bandit out west being pursued by a not overly bright sergeant from out east; Cisco Kid’s girl Tonia Maria comes between them, etc—and the film isn’t really hobbled by early sound film limitations than most other early talkies I’ve seen, less so perhaps in some respects, but there’s just something about the dialogue and the Hispanic accents I found off-putting. They seemed even more obviously fake than they might normally do coming from obviously non-Hispanic performers for some reason. Plus there’s an uncertainty of tone throughout, from the comparative comedy of some scenes to the grimness of the ending, that’s also kind of distracting. Still, it’s not really a bad film as such, even if it might’ve been better had it been made a few years later, and given that original director and star Raoul Walsh had to bow out of the production after losing an eye in an accident in mid-production, it’s probably remarkable that it even got finished in the first place…

Douglas Sirk is one of those filmmakers who I know are widely admired by critics and all that, but who I’ve somehow never really been able to summon up enough interest to actually explore, and my one prior attempt to engage with him (Written on the Wind) was not a particularly happy one. Still, I’ve got some of his films from the library, and I thought I’d start with what is arguably his most atypical film (albeit the film he once claimed was his favourite), i.e. his only western… a 3D western at that. Obviously the DVD I watched tonight was flat, but it was easy enough to imagine in 3D, I could see quite easily what the gimmick shots were (though they’re not too offensively “out there”). As for the story, well, Cochise had a son called Taza and that’s where the film’s historical accuracy seems to end; in the film Taza pursues his late old man’s policy of peace with the white man, to the extent of wearing the white army’s uniform as part of his “reservation police” duties, but faces resistance from his brother Naiche (who’s still all about fighting the power) and the mistrust of some of his white “superiors”. When the infamous Geronimo is captured and left on the Apache reservation, it can only mean further trouble, which it does in short order. Curious film, which I wouldn’t call “reactionary” like one IMDB commenter does, it’s not really anti-Indian, yet its sympathies for the latter do seem limited to Taza, who is, after all, on “our” side. The DVD transfer was also fairly middling, which didn’t help it much; obviously it’s atypical Sirk, like I said, but it could’ve been an interesting look at how he used all-natural locations and colour rather than studio artifice if only you could’ve seen them better. A pretty ho-hum experience, all things considered.

Much to my own surprise, Silent Sunday returns for its second epic week (though I’m thinking after this I may reserve it mainly for rewatches rather than first viewings, since I have a fair bit of unwatched stuff that I don’t want to drag out over weeks and months, though we’ll see how that goes; at the moment I’m just impressed I’ve stuck to it into a second week. This idea might actually work). Continuing, therefore, with the second disc of Kino’s selection of David Wark’s early work…

Read the rest of this entry »

I have to say the western isn’t really a favourite genre of mine, I don’t normally go and make a point of hunting them down in the way I do with, say, horror films. And the western all’Italiana has always baffled me a bit, cos I’ve never entirely understood exactly what really set Euro-horse operas apart from their American fellows (cf. my previously expressed puzzlement over the giallo). This may be because I’ve just never actually seen enough of the things, of course, compared with my many forays into the horror genre; at any rate, I see this film described in various other reviews as being more “American” in style than most spaghetti westerns, so I am no further enlightened. Franco Nero is the Texan sheriff (I still can’t tell if his name is meant to be Bert, Burt or even Bart) who heads south into Spain… sorry, Mexico to track down the man who killed his father years ago and bring him to justice; this latter has become something of a potentate in this region and the ordinary folk live in some not unjustified fear of him. Bert, or whatever his name is, is accompanied on this mission by his younger brother, who is definitely called Jim but whose only real purpose in the narrative seems to be to serve as a plot twist around two-thirds of the way through the film. It’s reasonably rootin’ and tootin’, I suppose, although when I notice the editing of some of the fight scenes is decidedly strange then you know it’s got problems, and the big gunfight near the end when the ordinary folk take up arms against their oppressor is nice but it doesn’t actually do anything really. The whole film certainly looks nice but I can’t say I was exactly blown away by it. Still, like I said, maybe I’m just not familiar enough with the genre or something…

Lucio Fulci in soft-focus spaghetti western shocker! Actually, the most shocking thing about this film is the soft-focus score, a string of very light soft rock tunes with lyrics (and bloody awful lyrics) about the film’s characters, probably meant to recall Pink Floyd’s late 60s/early 70s More and Obscured by Clouds soundtrack albums (plus the music they did for Zabriskie Point) while not being anywhere near as good. Four of the Apocalypse has other problems, it should be said, but none quite so fatal as the music. Fulci only made a handful of westerns and I’d not seen any before, so I wanted to check this out. After a pretty rip-roaring intro in which a vigilante gang basically massacres an entire town apart from four people the sheriff’s got in his jailhouse to apparently spare their lives for some reason, he then dispatches them on a wagon to wherever; eventually a gunman called Chaco joins the party and proves to be, well, bad company. Apart from the opening business, Chaco being Chaco and a bit of longpig consumption, the film is otherwise remarkably free of unpleasantness and almost comes across as Fulci trying to be subtle, which quality I don’t think he’s otherwise known for; quite a few of the reviews I’ve seen describe the film as a kind of character study. Except it doesn’t really work, cos Fulci only really seems interested in Chaco, Fabio Testi’s smooth gambler and, to a lesser extent, Lynne Frederick’s not especially believable prostitute (the childbirth business is icky, but not in the way Fulci’s films usually are). A more straightforward, much tighter revenge narrative might’ve worked better, so might a few more explanations (who are those other guys we later see Chaco with?), a bit more cohesiveness… actually a bit more of anything happening might’ve helped. And certainly less of THAT FUCKING MUSIC. Apparently one of Fulci’s own favourites of all his films, though I’m afraid I don’t exactly share the love.

Fuck me dead, could this have been any more predictable? I mean, yeah, to some extent most stories are on some level or another, even at the most basic level of “good guy wins, bad guy loses”; you have at least some idea of how a story will broadly unfold, especially in a film where you know who the actors are and what side of the good/evil divide they’re on, and consequently how far into the film they will last. Normally this doesn’t bother me too much, that sort of predictability is one of those conventions we’ve accepted for centuries. For some reason it irritated the boiling fuck out of me when I was watching The Quick and the Dead; you know the way the film sets up four particular characters—Sharon Stone’s avenging angel, Russell Crowe’s preacher (parenthetically, isn’t it funny how he’s left out of the film’s trailer? A reminder of how he wasn’t a star once), Leonardo DiCaprio’s overconfident Kid and Gene Hackman’s nasty old cunt—and the way the story is built around a quick-draw contest, you know those four are going to come together in the penultimate round; hell, when you remember DiCaprio is playing Hackman’s son, you know it’ll be them in particular  that get together (with Stone and Crowe even more obviously meeting in their match). Plus we know Stone is there to kill someone, and again it’s no prizes for guessing who. Plus, frankly, the style kind of shitted me as well, Raimi opting for lots of imposing slow-motion bits and odd angles of an aggressively attention-seeking kind; the film screams at you to look at it like a spoiled demanding child, and is about as tiresome. Alas, Stone herself is kind of the final nail in the coffin with her performance getting the whole “enigmatic” thing wrong and only reaching for “empty” instead. I don’t know, maybe I’m being more harsh than the film really deserves, but god/dess it rubbed me the wrong way…

19th century Australia was a pretty heinous place to live in some respects; the landscape was unforgiving towards the white folks who’d come—or, in most cases, been summarily dispatched—from across the sea to build a shiny new civilisation, and the people were just about as unforgiving, neither towards their coloured cousins nor towards each other. This seems to have been especially true of our fine upstanding constabulary, who receive a particularly unflattering depiction (not just the rather jaw-dropping final scene) in this film about Australia’s other major bushranger… a film whose reputation has, I suspect, always preceded it; even back in the day tales of Dennis Hopper’s lack of professionalism (which really is the only polite way to describe his behaviour throughout the film) were already legend while the film was still in production, and they’ve only been revived thanks to Not Quite Hollywood. They’re good stories, of course, but they do perhaps get in the way of the film itself, which is pretty intriguing stuff on its own. It’s home to one of the most jaw-dropping stunt scenes ever filmed (Grant Page leaping “out” of the water on fire), and there’s spectacular landscape work, but Hopper is the drawcard, obviously. Pissed as a newt throughout the film whether or not the story required him to be, his Method madness resulted in some startling moments on screen as well as off; there’s some improv scenes which have a really uneasy edge to them, a sense that things really weren’t totally under control. Philippe Mora tells the story in a fashion that’s less episodic than it is fragmented, lots of shortish scenes that don’t really flow, and it takes about as much getting used to as Hopper’s Irish accent, but once I did I found it added up to a quite fascinating film.