Summer Time, and the Movie Is Silly“Forgive me for being profound, but it’s good to be alive,” mumbles Troy Donahue to his date, Suzanne Pleshette, as Italian singer Emilio Pericoli warbles the reverberating “Al-Di-La,” in Rome Adventure (1962-Delmer Daves). Well, forgive me for being a goof, but this girl’s fancy, (and questionable taste) finds such fare pretty irresistible as the days are getting longer and Spring melts into Summer. Besides, this movie, filmed in Roma, Firenze, and Lago Maggiore is a cheap, vicarious way of visiting Italy without having to stand in line at the airport or mispronouncing this beautiful language myself. The fact that it also features two actresses I’ve always loved–Suzanne Pleshette and Constance Ford–was icing on this Italian ciambella. Ride, Vaquero! (1953): We both know how this will endThis is an MGM Movie?
In the rousing opening scene of Ride, Vaquero! (1953), a half-drunken bandido leader called José Esqueda (Anthony Quinn), announces to his ragtag, brawling followers that the Civil War has ended. The Americans, he explains, will turn their violent attentions to the Indians and gangs like theirs, moving into their territory along the Rio Grande border. To counter this threat, José Esqueda (Quinn), self-described as “the strongest and most cunning of them all,” promises that they will now burn all the newcomers’ ranchos as soon as they build them.This bit of desperado theater may seem to be performed for the animalistic men and women who populate the squalid lair of Esqueda, but it is soon clear that his real capering is reserved for an audience of one–his intense, soft-spoken right hand man Rio (Robert Taylor), who privately questions the logic of this promised action while he carefully cleans his gun. Their relationship is a study in contrasts. Esqueda is the personification of every human appetite on two legs, filthy, effusively violent, shooting a man who dares to drink from his bottle. He’s also illogically generous, sending Rio to town to give a priest some of his booty for orphans. Esqueda even indulges in a bit of wood carving sculpture in his off-hours. However, when faced with Rio, Esqueda is confronting his beloved opposite, a man he calls brother, though they are not related in a traditional sense. Rio, encased in a black moodiness as dark as his clothing, has a self-possessed, lethally quiet manner and an unsettling detachment from life that frustrates Esqueda. Alternately threatening Rio and cajoling him, the garrulous Esqueda thinks that the other man relies on his fondness for him to keep him from killing him.
Giving his companion a cold, knowing glare after he is threatened, Rio asks “Why do you talk to me this way? You wouldn’t kill anything…unless it was alive.” My Month With the HapsburgsNow that Spring is here, I can look back on this event with amusement as I recall Daniel Webster’s comment that there “is nothing so powerful as truth—and often nothing so strange” Ain’t it the truth?:
The Real and the Imaginary Elisabeth of Bavaria (1837-1898)
The Scene: My Living Room The Time: The Late Winter Doldrums The Occasion: An Intervention The Participants: My Loved Ones What prompted this intervention by my family? Shuffling into the living room, none of my near and dear ones seemed to want to meet my eye. As they gently explained, it was time to remember that I’m an American living in the 21st century. “Chuck this new-found interest in moldy royalty, and, well, get back to reality.” Sure, sure, I knew they were right, but still… The Macomber Affair (1947), Ernie and the MoviesErnest Hemingway may have loathed most of the translations of his own stories to film, and sometimes with good reason. Happy endings were tacked on to many of his stories. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) a conflicted hero lived, despite a touch of systemic septicemia, a gangrenous leg, and a heckuva death wish. (The author fumed and called it ‘The Snows of Zanuck’ in private). Political realities were sometimes lost. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) does not seem to have a commie in sight and only one mention of a fascist is made, at least by name. Evocative situations were embellished. The Killers (1946) left Hemingway’s terse masterpiece behind after the first superb fifteen minutes, but the author expressed some liking for that one despite this amplification, (his acceptance of the film may have been partly due to the presence of Ava Gardner and the likability of the producer, Mark Hellinger). “A fat actor”–in Hemingway’s words–played one of his best characters when an aging Spencer Tracy took the lead in The Old Man and the Sea (1958) a novella that led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the writer in 1954. Other, lesser known adaptations of Hemingway stories fared a bit better, with glimmers of the writer’s elusive style in A Farewell to Arms (1932), and The Breaking Point (1950). Of course, Ernie wasn’t allergic to the money the studios tossed in his lap for these tales, though he was miffed when he learned what some of them eventually earned after he sold the rights to the books to filmmakers. He reportedly didn’t speak to Howard Hawks for six months after he challenged the director to make a movie from what Hawks called “his worst book”; only to have To Have and To Have Not become a giant hit, even though the story had little to do with the original novel. Nor did he disdain the company of the beautiful and the gifted people who sometimes took roles in these movies. Who can blame him for feeling the pull of the glamorous company of his hunting buddy Gary Cooper, beautiful Ava Gardner or the glorious Ingrid Bergman, among others? The Silent Robin: A Tonic for the Soul
So, who were these people who came out to see this 87 year old film version of the English bandit’s adventures? Among the crowd at this movie were a few who might have been just old enough to have seen a later Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. film in a movie theater, a generous sprinkling of younger cinephiles, middle aged academics, and a delightful gaggle of children of about nine years of age in the audience that Saturday. Once thought lost until it was rediscovered in the 1960s, this film’s “premiere” was a highlight of the seventh biennial conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies at the University of Rochester, where the historical and literary permutations of the appealing errant figure of lore were analyzed and, frankly, reveled in by the participants. Accredited scholars and hard core Robin buffs from around the world spent three days discussing the evergreen legend of this “Robin Hood: Media Creature”, trying to discern if the 700 year old hero of Sherwood Forest even existed, while enjoying an extravaganza of multi-media exhibits (including Douglas Fairbanks boots, seen below), early manuscripts, songs, and presentations discussing all aspects of the tale. Seeing in the Dark: Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948)
“This gift, which I never asked for and don’t understand, has brought me only unhappiness!” ~ Edward G. Robinson as a fake mentalist who is cursed with the power of second sight in Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) Have you ever wished you could see into the future? A kind of cautionary tale about the unpredictable nature of such a dubious gift is told in this movie. It begins at night, naturally. The first striking image seen, amid a swirl of steam, reveals an enormous locomotive, bearing down on the camera like blind, arbitrary fate itself. As the veil of billowing smoke fades, the next sight shows a young man (John Lund) stumbling across a rail yard, picking up a trail of dropped objects, beginning with a glove, and leading to a compact, purse and watch, which he checks to see if it is still keeping time. Frantically, he spots a young woman (Gail Russell) on a catwalk above the tracks, just as another train is entering the yard. Just in time, he pulls her back. Murmuring “Why did you stop me?”, she is led away by the man while she tells him “that the stars…they keep watching, like a thousand eyes…” Stopping at a cafe, the pair are met by a strange man, who, the young man has explained, told him where to find the suicidal young woman–a bit of information that he had no way of knowing other than psychically. There follows a flashback of some considerable length, even for a film noir, in which it is revealed that Russell is the daughter of Robinson’s former fellow vaudevillians, played by Jerome Cowan and Virginia Bruce. “Knowledge itself is power” observed the Elizabethan Sir Francis Bacon, but he never met the 20th century author and father of noir fiction, Cornell Woolrich. In the reclusive Woolrich‘s fascinating if romantically bleak view of life, consciousness and the irony-laden knowledge of the past, present and future made his characters painfully aware of a lonely existence and its likely end. This author refashioned themes around this central problem with an obsessive, luridly poetic skill, and never more so than in his ambitious novel, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, published under the name of “George Hopley” in 1945. The film of Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) would explore these themes centering around the life of a fake mentalist who is chagrined to discover he really does have second sight, allowing him to see the future, even when it affects those loves. The adaptation of Woolrich‘s longest novel into an 80 minute “B” movie at Paramount by director John Farrow, (who has been discussed at some length here in a previous blog about Alias, Nick Beal), and his collaborators, writer Barré Lyndon and frequent scenarist Jonathan Latimer, apparently required changing many of the characters and the circumstances of the story. Despite this streamlining, much of the book’s mood of fatalistic suspense remains . Woolrich‘s prodigious output of dark tales had often led Hollywood to his stories of characters who are searching for solutions to their existential dilemmas. In the process, they often learn more than they wanted to know about life’s quixotic and cruel twists as well as their own character. Bad Movies I Love: Kings of the Sun (1963)
Happily, I’m here to report that no attacks of narcolepsy occurred while discovering the utterly delightful, nearly unknown Yul Brynner movie, Kings of the Sun (1963) recently. That 108 minute movie, shot in richly textured hues of De Luxe Color, is one of those being aired today, August 26th at 1:30PM EDT on TCM as part of Yul‘s moment in the Summer Under the Stars annual August event. An audacious movie–befitting an American financed re-imagining of the rise of a hypothetical ancient Mayan culture—was crafted with enormous professionalism in every frame, from the gorgeous cinematography of Joseph MacDonald to the rousing score from Elmer Bernstein and a cast of Oscar honorees and an industrious troupe of artists and craftsmen. The only problem is the script, darn it! The Duke vs. The Dust Bowl
Above: A WPA image of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s A certain influential Mr. Turner–no–not the estimable Ted, but Frederick Jackson Turner the American historian, once pointed out that “the forging of the unique and rugged American identity had to occur precisely at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness. The dynamic of these oppositional conditions engendered a process by which citizens were made, citizens with the power to tame the wild and upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality.” That was at the end of the 19th century, just as the American Western frontier was closing, but the impact of that view of America still has resonance today. Watching the distinctly different Three Faces West (1940-Bernard Vorhaus) as part of the John Wayne Day for Summer Under the Stars celebration on TCM, the scholarly Turner’s sometimes controversial ideas came back to me out of the blur of my increasingly distant undergraduate days (or is it daze?). This Republic studios movie is among the least known of Wayne‘s movies, but one of the more interesting–since it came at a time when he was just beginning his ascent to a plane somewhere between a movie star and a force of nature. It incorporates ideas old and new, some of them still contentious, in the course of a brief 79 minute story that effectively portrays the savagery of that wilderness as it affected the lives of Midwesterners in the Depression era. Hell Harbor: A Forgotten Film from an Overlooked Director
Like others on the list, including Borzage, Allan Dwan, and Clarence Brown, King started his career in the silent era. At first an actor, King began to make films in the mid-teens, eventually directing over 60 silent movies by the time the sound era arrived. In 1930, Fox placed the experienced director under contract, and he worked for that studio (later 20th Century Fox) until the end of his career in 1962, when he finished almost 50 years as a Hollywood moviemaker with Tender Is the Night. King became one of Darryl F. Zanuck’s most trusted directors, and through the years, he gave Fox a number of Golden Age classics in a variety of genres, including In Old Chicago (1938), Song of Bernadette (1943), Twelve O’Clock High (1949), The Gunfighter (1950), and Carousel (1956). Toward the end of his career, his status as a notable veteran was indicated by the assignments he was entrusted with, particularly films based on American literary works such as Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and The Sun Also Rises (1957). Insomniac Theatre: Open All Night
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