Raoul Walsh | They Died with Their Books On / 1941

hell and glory

by Douglas Messerli

 

Æneas MacKenzie, Wally Kline, and Leonore J. Coffee (screenplay), Raoul Walsh (director) They Died with Their Boots On / 1941

 

Until the last couple of decades, it is well to remember, no one in their right mind would have thought to remind Hollywood filmmakers that their films should “speak the truth.” Like the early American newspapers, each film contained its own version of reality based on the principles and intentions of its creators. Raoul Walsh was, in fact, one of the most adventurous of early 20th century Hollywood directors, in his youth contemplating a career as a sailor before learning to ride and rope steers, being involved in a scandalous relationship with a mistress of a Mexican general, and traveling to Montana with a trainload of horses.

    And when he came to be involved with cinema, his works such as The Thief of Bagdad, Sadie Thomas, and The Loves of Carmen, mostly dealt with a series of romantic and/or swashbuckling adventures, ladled out, as in the case of his The Bowery, with heavy spoonfuls of sentiment. Yet he could also present battle scenes—as in one of his greatest works, What Price Glory?—with an enormous sense of realism. In 1941 alone Walsh served up nostalgic sentiment in The Strawberry Blonde (with James Cagney), a high tension marital battle in Manpower (with George Raft, Edward G. Robinson and Marlene Dietrich), a disillusioned gangster film in High Sierra (with Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart), and an dashingly heroic send-up of George Armstrong Custer (with the always flamboyant Errol Flynn).

 

     The latter film has little to do with reality. Yes, Flynn as Custer is presented in his early West Point days, quite accurately, as a vainglorious, self-enchanted, prankster who graduated the very last in his class; but once he gets to Washington during the early days of the Civil War, all attempts at accuracy are thrown away, as the young, handsome poseur immediately sweeps his future wife, Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland), off her feet, wins over the affections of General Winfield Scott (wonderfully played by Sydney Greenstreet) with a dish of boiled onions, and plots to visit his beloved girlfriend with the willing allay of her maid (Hattie McDaniel, far more clever and  independently-minded here that down in the plantation at Tara).   

     While Custer is still presented as a braggart, a liar, and a publicity-seeking manipulator of the bungling militarists around him, he is also loveable, blustering, hero who only Flynn can properly convey. We love him for his mad rushes into harm’s way. My only wish is that Walsh might have actually portrayed a true event from the Custer history, that when then captain Custer overheard his commander, about to cross the Chickahominy River, mutter “I wish I knew how deep it is,” the captain rushed into the middle of the stream, shouting out “That’s how deep it is, Mr. General!”

     In the film, unlike in reality, Custer is made Brigadier General quite by accident—a bit like the invitation of the incompetent actor Hrundi V. Bakshi is invited to The Party—when a secretary is asked list down Custer for reprimand, and his name is mistakenly attached to another command to reassign the soldier to the position of General. Of course, he wins the battle and is there with Grant (with whom he would later do political battle) at Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

      Apparently, the real Custer did fall into a sort of drunken idleness back in civilian life, and was saved by his reassignment to the military—in the film through the intervention of his wife. In They Died with their Boots On, Walsh suddenly burnishes up Custer’s reputation through his abilities to transform a group of drunken rowdies he finds at the Dakota Territory outpost into a sober band of compatriots who march forth into battles singing the Irish ditty “Garyowen.” Although he defeats the Dakota leader Crazy Horse (performed with howlingly garbled English syntax by Anthony Quinn), he is portrayed as a supporter of the Indian demand that the Black Hills, a world sacred to them, be spared from White habitation, a reality the screenwriters might have cooked up on the basis that the real Custer had had a child with the Cheyenne squaw Mo-nah-se-tah, daughter of Little Rock.

      The evil-doers in this delightful fabrication are the same men—including Custer’s nemesis from West Point, Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy)—who had previously attempted to entice him to lend his name to their crooked attempts to bring trains, guns, liquor, and other bad habits into the wild west. Forget the fact that, in “real” life, it was Custer himself who spread the prevarication that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, which brought thousands of speculators and would-be miners to the “sacred” land. In this fiction, Custer is outraged by the lie spread by these same evil men, and returns to Washington to report to the authorities about their evil-doings; as one might expect, the congressional committee finds no reason to believe him, and Custer is forced to return home, destined alas to fight a war of all the area Indian tribes gathered together to their last stand in the Battle of Little Big Horn.

     Custer’s determination to do his duty, while knowing the odds against him, allows the filmmakers to create a lovely and touching scene of marital love between Havilland and Flynn, with composter Max Steiner tuning up his violins enough to bring tears to our eyes. The men march forward with “Garyowen” to fight a battle of hell and glory as exciting as only Walsh could create. For revenge Custer kidnaps his arch-enemy Ned Sharp, forcing him to join in the doomed battle. In the actual filming, several of extras the director used were unable to ride a horse or even stay on one; one fell and broke his neck. Another extra, insisting he carry a real sabre into the fray, fell to impale himself.  A stuntman died of a heart attack.

   If Custer and his soldiers, just as in real life, all die in this testimony to a more romantic reality, it is difficult even today—while I watched the movie on Turner Movie Classics—not to applaud, just the audiences surely did in 1941, when the film became one of the top-grossing movies of the year.

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).

Akira Kurosawa | 生きものの記録 (Ikimono no kiroku) (I Live in Fear) / 1955

going too far

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Fumio Hayasaka, and Hideo Oguni (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director) 生きものの記録 (Ikimono no kiroku) (I Live in Fear) / 1955

 

In many respects Akira Kurosawa’s Ikimono no kiroku (I Live in Fear) is his most Japanese film, simply because it recounts the horrific fear that most Japanese must have suffered during the Cold War of the 1950s, particularly after being the homeland of the only two major atomic bombings on ordinary citizens in history. Every character in this complex work does, indeed, have fears of nuclear annihilation (as did numerous citizens around the world; as a child I was one of them).           

 

    Yet foundry owner Kiichi Nakajima (the always wonderful Toshiro Mifune) has, as most of his family perceives, gone a bit too far, first attempting to build a nuclear bunker at considerable expense in the south of Japan, but upon discovering information that if there was another bomb the residue would probably move from the north to the south, becomes determined to move his very large and urban family to a plantation in Brazil.

     Almost from the beginning of the film, as the family has gathered in a domestic court to air their grievances—Nakajima’s wife has flinchingly filed, with the help of her sons and daughters, a petition to that court to declare her husband mentally incompetent—and a local dentist, Dr. Harada (Takashi Shimura) has been asked to join two other judges in hearing their case.

     It is clearly a highly contentious one, with family members exciting the hearing room to each utter their anger and pronouncements, while inside sits the resolute and stubborn father, flapping his fan endlessly in torture and anger, convinced that is family— including his immediate children and those he has fathered from an illicit relationship, all of whom we gradually come to perceive as a fractious and ungrateful lot, desperate to keep up their own financial support proffered them by this terrified industrialist.

      If at first, we might certainly side with the family members, who perceive their father’s concerns, despite their own private fears, as “going too far” and as do two of the judges, through the careful and deep-thinking of Dr. Harada we begin to realize just how deeply embedded are his fears in the society at large. Might not everyone, to a certain degree, silently and less explosively be suffering the same fears? Even Harada’s son admits to such inclinations, but what can one do, he argues.

       "Everybody has to die," Nakajima counters, "but I won't be murdered."

      Ultimately Harada feels that if this man is indeed cantankerous, a danger for this contentious and selfish family, he is certainly not mentally insane simply to fear the worst, and, after all, it is his money with which he can to do what he wants.

      The careful and caring Harada, in the end, is done in by the angry and impetuous businessman, who attempts to quickly work around the family and their financial restraints which the court eventually applies, by attempting to buy up property in Brazil and force his family to join him. But, in the end, his anger does him in, and he is left simply as an old man in a kind of fever, ready to die before his time. Even Harada’s attempts to meet and talk with him have been to no avail. The fear, in which he lives, dominates everything else.

     He is not even willing to discuss how this deathly “anxiety,” which poet W. H. Auden described a problem of the decade in his phrase “The Age of Anxiety,” has come about. Had he witnessed or imagined the Hiroshima or Nagasaki attacks? Or had he simply worried so much about his own country’s history that, despite his great financial success—working as, strangely enough, a kind of Hephaestus, a forger of war in the underground—he has become obsessed with nuclear destruction. If his family members are petty and selfish, so too has he himself been in his various affairs and business activities. Are his feelings of absolute terror a result of his own terrorizing of others, his absolute control over his sons and daughters?

 

    In the end, I realized this film was far more Western and international in its subjects than merely representing a post-war Japanese statement of angst. It reminded me more than any other film of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful The Sacrifice, a movie wherein another family leader, terrifyingly fearful of nuclear war, is equally committed to saving his family and his society from the inevitable, in this case by burning down the house which he and his contentious family so loved. Nakajima also burns down his own “house,” so to speak, in destroying his factory, leaving not only his family but his loyal employees without any possible means of survival.

     Perhaps in the process his has destroyed his own past connections with the capitalism that made nuclear warfare possible, or perhaps, just as in Tarkovsky’s films, it simply represents those acts of a kind of madness, of a man who has “gone too far” in his own thinking to retreat into rationality, the possibility of which composer Fumio Hayasaka (who died shortly after composing the music for this film, and a man who created some of the greatest of movie music through the years) eerily conveys through his combination of jazz music and Theremin.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2018).

Louis Malle | L’Inde Fantôme (Phantom India) / 1969

not on any map

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Malle L’Inde Fantôme (Phantom India) / 1969

 

 Having recently gone through a divorce and very mixed reviews of his 1967 film, The Thief of Paris, Louis Malle determined to take a break in order to reevaluate his life. A planned short trip to India became a stay of two months and led to a fascination with that country that would result in his personal investment in a six-hour documentary, L’Inde Fantôme (Phantom India) which, after the editing of over 30 hours of original footage, was released in France as a seven-episode TV documentary.

       As I’ve expressed several times throughout these pages, over the years I have grown to see the works of this former “wunderkind,” much beloved by many film-viewers, as films that I find quite problematic. It’s not that Malle is not a great director, it’s simply in how he chooses to tell his tales and how he focuses his films on outsiders and voyeurs that, I feel, weaken his cinema. In his various tellings of thieves, young disenchanted boys, and unhappy housewives, Malle often turns to the sentimental as opposed to the wry wit of Truffaut and Godard.

       The overlong Phantom India has many of the same problems. Yet, because the director openly admits that his views of India are precisely his own, and because he makes it so very obvious that this variation of the cinéma vérité is a “film of chance encounters,” the film becomes not only one of his most personal works, and also one of his most fascinating directorial pieces.

       The film is divided into sections titled:

 

Episode 1: “The Impossible Camera”

Episode 2: “Things Seen in Madras”

Episode 3: “The Indians and the Sacred”

Episode 4: “Dream and Reality”

Episode 5: “A Look at Castes”

Episode 6: “On the Fringes of Indian Society”

Episode 7: “Bombay”

 

      And even here we can immediately see that Malle’s India is not India’s notion of itself, even in the time before (1969) their economic revolution. Instead of visiting the major cities (although both Madras and Bombay are visited), Malle stays primarily in the more sectarian and less developed south, seeking out areas which he, as narrator, describes as places where “time has disappeared,” where “life can be dizzying,” and where people are perceived as “fanatics of the absolute.” No Taj Mahal or shining Indian sites are depicted in his film, nor even the joyful and colorful festivals that seem to dominate much of Indian life. In Malle’s world “conditions are always too hot or too cold, which influences the mindset.” And nearly everyone portrayed in his living portraits, many of whom are highly skeptical of his camera and face it, most often, head on, as if challenging it to turn them into something they are not, are, in one way or another, outsiders. As Malle himself describes it, even the wealthy and dominate Brahmins “are outcasts,” “Shiva regulates the cosmic order and sexuality.”

     In Malle’s highly romanticized vision of the country, everything is like a dream, a kind of feral world where it becomes simply an amazing thing to survive. He quotes Mark Twain: “The Ganges is so dirty that even germs cannot survive.”

      Malle’s India is a world of outcasts: the Bondo tribe, which speaks a language utterly separate from any of the numerous other India languages and live their lives, almost naked, literally raking the fields for eatable leftover, their women buying metal rings to encircle their necks; the Toda tribe, which accepts an open sexuality for their youth, and has no sexual hierarchies; and the Iranian-born Parsis of Bombay, or the Bombay Jews, who, with their dwindling populations are living on “borrowed time.”

      If nothing else, Malle’s film might almost be seen as putting a series of disappearing people on the map, in a way that anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss might (and probably did) appreciate.  And the people and scenes the director captures in his cinematic frames are often beautiful and always fascinating. The film draws you into his outsider vision, while recognizing that it is just that, the view of an outsider imposing his own perspectives onto other worlds. There surely can be nothing wrong with such an honest admission of what any serious director does in the process of making a film, or writer, poet, and artist does in creating their art. If nothing else, this film is monumental in its love of the Indian landscape that we seldom see.

       But even in 1969 the Indian government was furious about Malle’s very personal picture of a much broader and developing culture. Today his work, given the great changes within that country, seems a bit like a film that might have been created if a Frenchman had visited the US and concentrated his efforts on the small, dying Shaker communities, or the Amish farms, American Indian reservations, or cult groups in Montana and Wyoming. It all might be fascinating, but it surely would not be a recognizable vision of the mixed-up people we truly are. Yet, this is, to give Malle credit, a “phantom” country, not truly anywhere on the map, filmed, as he puts it, by chance. And it is that casual and accidental relationship with the people and their lives that makes the production so fascinating, a bit like a visit to a forbidden world where we know we are unlikely to ever enter in any other way.

      Yet, here again his Malle’s voyeurism, his preference for the outcasts of societies rather than those who survive within the walls of a culture’s general behavior. And, once again, in taking his camera into these partially forbidden worlds, one has to ask whether Malle also has helped to destroy them. Do the Bondos and Todas still exist today? Surely some of the castes he describes are gradually disappearing. If we don’t really need picturesque snapshots of India’s many beautiful tourist sites, it might still be nice to have a more nuanced view of the culture, a kind of mix of Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir as opposed to a view of that country as all awkward angles, like the adolescent youths that Malle also portrayed. But then, some would argue that’s a very white western view, just as romantic as Malle’s vision—or even a Bollywood movie!

 

Los Angeles, April 27, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2019).

Felipe Vara de Rey | Independencia (Independence) / 2010

information is power, but don’t tell mama

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Mas and Felipe Vara de Rey (screenplay), Felipe Vara de Rey (director) Independencia (Independence) / 2010 [4 minutes]

 

Two brothers (Antonio de Cos and Hugo Mas) of the 19th century, involved on opposite sides of a war, are sitting in the square discussing the meaning of the enterprise, their local congress, philosophy, and various other topics in this remarkable witty quick comedy by Spanish director Felipe Vara de Rey.

 

     José begins with Rosseau, arguing that “In the future our ages controversies will see just as odd as the past ones look to us.” He tells Jacinto that the way they are fighting is insane. “Debt is going to shoot up and there will be no government able to the fight the budget deficient.” Their fighting, he argues, is just a temporary thing.

     His brother agrees, he sees no value fighting and dying for Spain. What Jacinto does object to, however, is brother’s reading of the Gazette, which “does nothing but drop poison!”

     “But don’t you see that we are in the era of mass communication?” argues the first brother. “The press has transformed the way we understand the world.” Information flows, leaks out to all people of the world. “Jacinto, information is power.”

      Jacinto is of another opinion: “All they do these swine hack writers if fill the Spanish language with foreign words.”

      Miguel argues that “linguistic purity no longer makes any sense. Spelling rules change, languages are contaminated.” We are a global community, he proclaims.

      He returns to Rosseau to make his point that it is ridiculous that the Spaniards of fighting.

      But Jacinto knows better. “This think of yours has nothing to do with war, or with the Frogs,

or with the clumsy fellows in Cádiz or with the bloody Bourbon.” It is because of the bookseller, Ezequiel, Jacinto argues. “The queer.”

    

      José suddenly rises, with his musket at the ready.

      Jacinto continues, however, arguing that Ezequiel has put these ideas into his brother’s head.

      Calming down, José rather sheepishly asks, “Does mother know?’

      “I don’t think so,” Jacinto answers, turn his face away. “Are you going to desert to go with him?”

      José, biting his lower lip, nods his head in assent.  

      “Fuck me and the Poem of the Cid!”

      “I swear, I thought it would be a passing affair,” José admits.

      “We live in times of much lugubriousity,” responds Jacinto has he puts his hand on his brother’s should and in the background Edith Piaf’s "Non, je ne regrette rien."

    Rosseau may have been right about some aspects of war, but if this lovely comic gem is to be believed, many things never change, and we recognize immediately that each generation believes it lives in the saddest of times. War is one thing, but as for love and sex, what can you do about them?

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

 

Pedro Suárez | Pretty Things / 2019

let me entertain you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Suárez and Pepe Yapur (screenplay), Pedro Suárez (director) Pretty Things / 2019 [16 minutes]

 

Pretty Things begins with a heavily bearded man still asleep, awakened by the sound of the TV playing the “Little Lulu” theme, watched by his young daughter at the end of his bed. The father, Ollie (Jaime Scott Gordon) almost immediately joins in with the song’s unforgettable lyrics:

 

“Little Lulu, Little Lulu with freckles on your chin

Always in and out of trouble but mostly always in

Oh, the clock says 7:30 it’s really after 10

Looks like Lulu’s been repairing it again

Little Lulu, I love you, Lu, just the same, the same.

Little Lulu, I love you, Lu, just the same.”

 

     His daughter Buffy (Elspeth Archer) refuses most of his suggestions for breakfast or even brunch, which include “egg pizza” and a “Bloody Mary.” She’s had her cereal. He tries a bottle of beer but can’t find the opener (we later discover that Buffy has hidden it), but spots a can of beer hidden away in the refrigerator, which he quickly slurps up.

     It’s clear that Buffy is a bit skeptical about his ability to properly parent her. But he does sit down to chat with her for a moment, asking about her school experiences. Her teacher has told her she can’t do “spells” anymore, “like turning invisible.” We soon discover that Buffy is also into magic. Ollie reminds her that the magic stuff is something she should keep at home, since “other people don’t really get it.”

     Buffy carefully feeds her gold fish (we later discover it is named “Goldie Hawn”), parenting it with the words, “No brunch pizza for you either.”

     Meanwhile, Ollie, in the bathroom, is busy on his cellphone attempting to find a hookup for the day.

     Buffy can’t find her “watermelon” dress, which her father hasn’t apparently taken out of the drier. She insists upon wearing it, nonetheless, with the wrinkles remaining.

     It’s clear that she feels the need to parent all those in Ollie’s house, her fish, herself, even her father, since her “other” father, Marcus (Toussaint Meghie), provides her with an entirely different vision of what a father should be. Totally responsible and highly skeptical of his former husband’s ability to even take care of himself, Marcus soon arrives to pick her up. It’s his day, apparently, to spend with Buffy.

     Alone, Ollie closes the blinds and lays down on the couch to watch a movie with Goldie Hawn (the fish). Again, he picks up a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, to be reminded that he can’t find the bottle opener. But in search of the opener he instead discovers a cockroach, which, terrified, he captures and throws outside, going on an amazing cleaning up process of the entire house, washing the dishes, scrubbing the tub, vacuuming, dusting, doing the clothes, and discovering under a coverlet laid over a bench his three bottle openers, obviously hidden there by Buffy in a private attempt to diminish his intake of alcohol.

      Disheartened by the realization that he has perhaps not been a good father, Ollie spots his daughter’s little plastic make-up kit and, unable to control himself, makes himself up as the drag queen (which we again discover later in the plot) he used to be. Marcus and Buffy return early to find him still prancing around in front of the mirror.

      Marcus orders Buffy to her room and challenges his ex with the question: “You still doing this shit?”

      Ollie responds, “You’re early.”

      “I told you I had that thing tonight”

      Marcus scolds him for possibly doing drag in front of his daughter. “Didn’t you see how uncomfortable it made her?” Ollie insists that any reaction she may have had is because she’s never seen it before. He hasn’t done it in years.

      But already we sense the child’s discomfort had more to do with Marcus’ immediate reaction than with her own probable amazement. And we wonder if these few short hours during the week are all that the apparent business man Marcus can devote to his daughter.

      Something has changed, however, as Buffy barely picks at her carry-in chicken wings, describing them as too spicy.

       Perhaps it’s time finally to show her some “pretty things.” He has only one red sequined dress and a wig left from his drag days, but he pulls it out to show it to her, explaining that he was once a drag queen.

       Buffy asks, “Do you wish you were a woman?

       He answers, “No. That’s something else. Some people are born in the wrong body. Like a boy that was born in a girl’s body or a girl that was born in a boy’s body. But drag queens dress up to perform. It’s pretend, like your magic spells. It’s fun to pretend, isn’t it? You know that, sometimes girls don’t like to wear dresses. That’s okay too.”

       “I like dresses,” Buffy interjects.

       “So do I.”

       When they discover Goldie Hawn dead, even Ollie finally breaks down into tears, realizing that he has perhaps failed his beloved daughter. Buffy attempts to bring her fish back to life, but fails and, practical being she is, flushes it down the toilet. Trying to bring her father out of his funk, she dabs on some of her makeup upon her face, trying to make him pretty again. This time she shows some curiosity about his past, asking “What was you lady name?

       “Ruby,” he replies, “Ruby Sangria.” For a moment he goes into his old campy routine, “Because I am sweet, intoxicating, and no stranger to having fruits inside me, if you know what I mean?”

       She does not know what he means.

       It’s time, Ollie determines to cheer things up, to show his daughter the power of drag. Rushing into the bathroom he shaves off his beard, puts on his makeup, and returns some time later, his pink fingernails opening the bathroom door to bring a total smile of joy upon his usually sullen daughter’s face.

       We never see the transformation, but we have learned by now a great deal not only about why Ollie and Marcus broke up, but why it’s sometimes better to have a far more imaginative and entertaining father than a busy if far more straight-thinking one.

        I can almost imagine Pedro Suárez’s short film expanded to be a longer play or even a series in the manner of Herb Gardner’s 1962 play and the later 1965 movie, A Thousand Clowns.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2024).