John Ford | My Darling Clementine / 1946

passing by

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller (screenplay, from a story by Sam Hellman, based on the book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, by Stuart N. Lake), John Ford (director) My Darling Clementine / 1946

 

I had good memories of John Ford’s 1946 film about the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, yet, watching it again yesterday, it almost caught be by surprise in its intense character studies and the hundreds of details the director inserted into this basically simple tale about a man seeking revenge, Wyatt Earp (wonderfully portrayed by Henry Fonda), for the death of his young brother, Virgil (Tim Holt) and the rustling of the Earp’s herd of cattle by the evil Clanton family (headed by Walter Brennan).

     The Tombstone of Ford’s remarkable Arizona desert landscape is a one-street affair, with what appears to be primarily saloons, a hotel, and a barbershop. Where all the church-goers live, who later suddenly appear out of nowhere, is never quite explained. But we get the idea, this is a town still in the making, a wild outpost filled with passing gamblers and cowboys, momentary travelers, native Indians, Mexicans, and even an iterant actor, Granville Thorndyke (Alan Mawbray) poised to quote Shakespeare—quite badly, but heartfelt—at the first trickle of any alcohol. Even the town’s major figure, the somewhat mysterious Doc Holliday (a mature Victor Mature), seems to come and go without explanation. The sheriff and deputies resign early in the movie, leaving the job open to Earp, who has previously, so it is suggested, brought order to another frontier town. Only the saloon singer, Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) and other chorus girls seem to be permanent Tombstone dwellers, but she also is on the move, in another manner—from man to man, bedding down with one of the Clanton boys the moment Doc leaves town. Except for those suddenly-appearing church-loving citizens in the middle of the work, no one in Tombstone seems to have permanent ties to the place.

     So too does Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) “drop in,” so to speak, on the search for her former lover, Doc. And is prepared to leave again the moment Doc makes it apparent that the man she once loved in Boston is no longer who he was. It is only when her would-rival Chihuahua is shot, that Clementine, playing nurse to Doc’s surgeon, determines that she may stay around. And at the same moment, it appears that Wyatt may also remain in town, even when he rids the area of the evil Clantons. His dance with Clementine at the church hoedown hints at his readiness to leave the world of the range for a solid bourgeois life. 

     We know, however, how it will end. And despite Ford’s apparently more open ending (where we were to see Earp back at his brother’s grave, a visitation he had promised earlier in the film), the studio would have it no other way. After the inevitable shootout (this at the memorable corral) in which Doc Holliday is shot and killed before the tuberculosis from which he suffers does the job, Earp leaves town—although hinting that he may be back to look in on Clementine, even if the edited version’s kiss was only a weak handshake in Ford’s earlier edit.

     Not until High Noon could a Western hero be the “marrying kind” (and even in that work the hero almost loses his wife). While Earp seems smitten by Clementine, the central relationship of the film is between Doc and Wyatt, the latter of whom even comments, upon his first glimpse of Doc, that Holliday is a handsome man. Fonda, moreover, makes it clear through his laconic performance, that Earp, even if he spiffs up considerably by the end of the film, is a kind of wild loner, a man, somewhat like Doc, on the run. Both men, despite some tense moments, clearly admire one another, and Earp is particularly friendly with Doc when he discovers that the saloon-owner can also quote Hamlet. Ford, in fact, proffers up far more time for that cultural event, which the two men attend together, than with the heterosexual-bonding hoedown, making it clear that the theater-going occasion helps to forge a bond between them. 

      Throughout Ford’s film both men appear on the lookout—for trouble, of course—but also for something less specific. Early in the film Earp orders a crazed Indian to leave town; soon after Doc demands the same of a noted gambler. In short, without overstating the fact, Ford makes it clear that the two are similarly focused in a kind of unspoken duel, a battle of wits for an order they celebrate with Doc’s champagne (a drink seldom served up in the Westerns I’ve seen). If Doc scans his customers from the bar, Earp daily scans the street, sitting, memorably, on a precariously balanced chair in front of the hotel. Without implying that there is any sexual suggestions in the act—he is, after all, on the lookout for the arrival of the Clantons—one might almost describe the act as “cruising,” checking out the people who pass through town, each day growing more and more like a well-trimmed and perfumed dandy, a fact that Ford uses to comic effect when people, describing various pleasant smells, are answered by Earp: “That’s me.”

       With Doc’s death, accordingly, there is really no reason for Earp to remain in Tombstone, despite his attraction to Clem. And she remains for him, as the song “My Darling Clementine” suggests, a kind of temporary distraction, a beautiful someone to be left in distance.      

 

      While in the 1946 release version of the film, that song swells up loudly to become almost a hymn of love and devotion, in Ford’s pre-release original (the version I watched this time around) that song and others were played at a low pitch, sometimes just suggesting rather than emphatically reiterating Clementine’s existence. The result is that the film remains much quieter and more ruminative, more open to suggestion, than a straight-out statement. Love, heroism, and almost everything else in Tombstone is ephemeral and unpredictable. Only death, where Ford wanted to end his great picture, is certain. 

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2014).

Josef von Sternberg | Underworld / 1927

that special hour

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Furthman and Robert N. Lee (writers, based on a story by Ben Hecht), George Marion, Jr. (titles), Josef von Sternberg (director) Underworld / 1927

 

Only the second film entirely directed by von Sternberg, Underworld, commentators have often declared, was the first of the “gangster” films. Although Underworld certainly does have many of the tropes of the genre, I would argue that von Sternberg’s work is far less dark and much more comic than were later major gangster films.

      Indeed, from the very beginning the film takes on a sort comic tone, commenting on “Bull” Weed’s (George Bancroft) “personal loan,” as a nearby bank vault blows up. The event, witnessed by “Rolls Royce” Wensel (Clive Brook), a former lawyer who is now a down-and-out alcoholic, is suddenly involved in Weed’s life as the gangster kidnaps him to keep him silent. But even this early in the film, we realize that although Weed may be a tough, even a coarse man, he truly has a “heart of gold,” not unlike the more comic branch of the gangster tales best represented by the filmed stories and novels of Damon Runyon (in fact, Ben Hecht, who won an Oscar for his writing on this film, later co-wrote the screenplay of one of the most successful of Runyon works, Guys and Dolls). When challenged about his trustworthiness, “Rolls Royce” quips “I run quiet,” while Weed, after giving him a chance to prove it, adds his own metaphoric layer: “Look at Him. Cost me a thousand. Looks like a million.” Even Weed’s girl, “Feathers” (Evelyn Brent) gets in on the punning act: “How long since you had the body and washed and polished?”

     In short, the director seems, from the very beginning, more interested in a witty language than in the dark actions of robbery and murder. Only “Buck” Mulligan (Fred Kohler) seems truly mean, rolling up a ten-dollar bill and throwing it into a spittoon while demanding “Rolls Royce,” now working as a cleaning man in the gangster’s club, pick it up. When “Rolls Royce” refuses and is struck by Mulligan, the relationship between him and Weed becomes even closer, as “Bull” pays for his bodily cleanup, taking him on almost as a kind of protective butler. In a hideout lined with books—another of von Sternberg’s humorous vamps—“Rolls Royce” sits quietly reading as his new sponsor proudly points out, “He likes to read!”

      Fascinated by the now handsome man whom her boyfriend has brought into her life, “Feathers” sits alone with “Rolls Royce” in the hideout, as Weed speeds off to steal some jewels his girl has eyed through a shop window. But after several steamy stares and a new layer of makeup, “Feathers” is, at least temporarily, put in her place, as “Rolls Royce” remarks, “I’m not interested in women.”

     Despite this obviously “homosexual” confession, however, given the way the two have visually assessed each other over the edges of their books, we are not completely convinced. But there is something in Weed’s quick acquisition of his new friend and his pride in his cleaned-up appearance that is not sufficiently explained in the story—which will matter a great deal at film’s end.

     The director, accordingly, has set up a story that early on seems more comic and sexually-inclined than the future films portraying hard-boiled, brutal thugs that culminated, ultimately, in film noir. In a few moments later, moreover, von Sternberg transports us into a world that is even more bizarre than most later gangster films, adroitly moving his camera through confetti-strewn rooms, spinning up and down stairs, and in and out of focus like a drunken participant in the Mobster’s ball (a kind of surreal-like take on France’s “anything goes” Artist’s ball later presented in the film musical “An American in Paris”). The scene is almost a signature event in the oeuvre of a director who loves to move his lens in and out of nets, the tendrils of trees, veils and other claustrophobic-creating intrusions of nature and space. In such a world, gravity prevails, as one by one the ball’s celebrants falls to the floor drunk, while Mulligan entraps “Feathers” in back room and attempts to rape her—another way of laying people flat.

    Even though this affair ends in the murder of Mulligan by Weed in “Buck’s” flower shop (a store featuring, in another slightly comic wink, floral wreaths), resulting in “Bull’s” arrest, trial, and imprisonment, it is still hard to think of von Sternberg’s world as seriously dark. If nothing else, it clears the way for the simmering romance between “Rolls Royce” and “Feathers.” As they embrace, moving toward their first on-screen kiss, however, “Rolls Royce,” always the gentleman (and perhaps truly not interested in women), refuses to betray his boss, while “Feathers” simultaneously backs off: “You taught me how to be decent.” Together the two hatch a plot to help Weed escape before he is executed that same night.

       The plan goes bad, however, and, now suspicious of their relationship and feeling betrayed, Weed makes his own escape, returning to the hideout where the couple also meet up. Convinced his friends have intended to betray him all from the beginning, Weed blocks the exits and begins a wild shoot out with the cops, as they try to convince him of their loyalty. Finally recognizing his mistake, Weed, his lover, and friend briefly are framed by von Sternberg in a scene that immediately calls up what we have subliminally recognized all along: their relationship has been a kind of ménage a trois (clearly played out in the image in the court room, where Weed’s shadow hovers over the couple watching the trial). Weed closes the door to the escape route on himself, freeing the other two and surrendering himself to the police.

     When the police captain sarcastically suggests that all that escape has provided Weed was another hour, Weed replies: “That hour was to me worth more than my whole life.” For Weed, apparently, has discovered in the selfless acts of both “Rolls Royce” and “Feathers” that he was still loved. Weed’s execution thus seems to be more redemptive than judicially educative. In von Sternberg’s slightly cynical and perverse world, it is almost possible that “crime does pay.”

 

Los Angeles, October 2, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2013).

W. S. Van Dyke | The Thin Man / 1934

 

catching up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (screenplay), W. S. Van Dyke (director) The Thin Man / 1934

Early on in W. S. Van Dyke’s comic The Thin Man, Nora Charles follows her dog Asta into a posh nightclub where her husband, Nick has been drinking. As he generally does, he immediately orders her a drink, as they sit down to talk. Nora (Mina Loy) asks Nick (William Powell) how many drinks he’s already had, and he answers, this is my sixth, in response to which, she immediately orders another five drinks to be lined up for consumption. She is, as she explains, intent on “catching up.” In fact, throughout this film Nora is determined to “catch up” with her new husband, to discover his past affairs, to meet his rather eccentric criminal friends, and to attempt to catch up on his exploits concerning an odd inventor who goes missing and is soon sought out for murder.

     The film follows the adventures of the inventor Gilbert Wynant (William Henry), his greedy ex-wife, his current double-timing mistress, his perversely psychologist-reading son, and his rather ordinary and charming daughter, all of whom, along with others, are swept up into a series of crimes and murders, which more and more draws ex-detective Nick into its vortex as he attempts to uncover the actual murderer, which does only by inviting all of the possible suspects to his home for dinner. 

     Except for the inventor’s daughter, and her mild-mannered lover, almost all of the suspects are a brutal bunch, so it hardly matters when Nick actually solves the crime by perceiving that the body they have discovered is actually the inventor who has been killed by one of his associates. The crime, as Alfred Hitchcock would have described it, is merely the MacGuffin, the device which keeps the action moving. What is truly important about Van Dyke’s version of Dashiell Hammett’s work, is the relationship between Nick and Nora, a kind of wise-cracking child’s play. Since his wife has all the money, Nick hardly needs to work and prefers it that way, perfectly happy spend his days in an eternal martini hour and to play with the toys Nora was bought him and the dog. And even though it’s dreadfully warm in this New York apartment, Nora is perfectly happy to stay draped in the new mink coat Nick and bought her. It’s the perfect relationship, she slightly mocking him just as he does her as they continue down the path of a completely blasé acceptance of their married state.

       Their married state, in fact, is now California, and there is something almost mythologically fulfilling in the couple’s return east for the Christmas Holiday, whereby solving the outrageous mystery, they allow Dorothy Wynant (Maureen O’Sullivan) to marry her lover and travel back West with them to a world that obviously represented, in 1934, the year this film was made, as a new golden world unencumbered with the nefarious relationships of New York City. I can see the Charles’ now, on their pool-side terrace, serving platters of fresh martinis to the beautifully tanned friends so unlike the blubbering and slightly confused Damyon Runyon-like chaps sitting in Nick and Nora’s cramped New York digs. Finally Nora can just sit back and relax without the need to “catch up” with her husband’s alcoholic consumption and crime-book hunches!

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April 2014).

Shane Black | Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang / 2005

harmony

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shane Black (screenplay and direction) Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang / 2005

 

Roger Ebert’s on-line review of Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang describes the film genre as “Action, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Thriller,” which perhaps says it all about this frothy confection whipped up in a blender in order to be consumed by absolutely anyone and everyone. Ebert goes on to somewhat begrudgingly complain: “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang contains a lot of comedy and invention, but doesn’t much benefit from its clever style. The characters and plot are so promising that maybe Black should have backed off and the told the story deadpan, instead of mugging so shamelessly for laughs. It could still be a comedy, but it would always be digging its elbow into ribs. I kept wanting to add my own subtitles: ‘I get it! I get!’” And, in large part, I find myself agreeing with him.

      Yet, from its credits on, this film is so stylishly directed, wittily conceived, and well-acted—particularly by the petty, East Coast thief, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.) and the seasoned gay detective, Gay Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer playing “Gay Paris,” get it?)—that it almost seems mean-spirited to throw a dose of cynicism into this brew, particularly since Black himself has laced his creation with a camp cynicism just so that nothing, not even the character’s youthful history played out in a Norman Rockwell-like Indiana, tastes too sweet. All right, the plot makes absolutely no sense, and is so convoluted that even an attentive reader like me, armed with a Wikipedia cheat sheet, can still not make it out. But then a film that models itself on Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake—which Time Out Film Guide describes as a “loopy” piece—predictably, perhaps, argues that the film might intentionally not make much sense. I’ve seen The Big Sleep dozens of times, but still don’t completely understand its “story.” And just like that brilliant film noir what matters more here is the chemistry between its characters and their clever dialogue.

      It’s almost as if writer and director Black were betting with that devil, Pauline Kael, that he could make a movie based on the action formula that might still be highly entertaining. Even if in his attempt to do so he goes, at times, far over the top, even over the edge, I think, ultimately, he succeeds.

      It’s also, purportedly, the first time a major film action character was gay. Kilmer is not great actor, despite his own estimation of himself, but in his puffy good looks he is near perfect as the hard-core, experienced gumshoe, Perry, enlisted to give newcomer, would-be actor Harry a taste of the underworld life. “Rule number 1….This business. Real life, boring.” If nothing else, Perry knows who and what he is.

 

     Harry, on the other hand, who, after attempting to rob a toy store has stumbled into an audition, convincingly acting out what has just happened in “real” life (the auditioners are convinced he is a brilliant method actor), is a naïve as they come. At his first Hollywood party he attempts to protect a sleeping woman, Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), challenging the would-be “intruder” to a fight, only to be severely beaten. Throughout the film, he is beaten again several times, even by women, is shot, loses a finger, and is tortured with electricity in his crotch. Convinced he is in love with Harmony—who, it turns out, in this coincidence-packed movie, is his high school sweetheart (albeit the only male in his class with whom she did not have sex)—yet even as an adult who momentarily shares her bed, he does not “score,” although, what Harmony says of another girl might equally apply to herself, “She’s been fucked more times than she’s had a hot meal.”

      Despite his seemingly heterosexual proclivities, Harry gets nowhere with the women (is even voted out of a bar by the women within), as he keeps coming back and back to Gay Perry, despite Perry’s dismissal of him. And the only real kiss he gets—in this “kiss kiss” tale—is when Perry, in order to evade the police, embraces him for a long mouth to mouth munch. After he crawls into Harmony’s bed, the scene ends with him arguing with her concerning her admission that she had slept with his best high school friend—the only male, other than himself, that he thought she had not had sex! Was that friend so special, one has to ask.

      If Harmony and her dead sister, Jenna, along with the body of Veronica Dexter, keep showing up in his life, it is because they are needy or dead, not in love with Harry. As he himself hints, the women with whom he communes are either perverted or deceased: “I mean, it’s literally like someone took America by the East Coast and ‘shook’ it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.” Certainly, his relationships with women are not ever “harmonious.”

     In the end, it is only Perry who is truly honest with him, explaining not only the ways of the world but revealing the painful truth that Harry has been lured to Hollywood as a ploy to get another actor to play the part for cheap. And it is Perry who perhaps perceives how things stand:

 

                                   Perry: Merry Christmas, sorry I fucked you over.

                                   Harry: No problem. Don’t quit your gay job.

 

And later:

 

                                    Harry: Hey, hey, hey! It’s Christmas, where’s my present,

                                               Slick?

                                    Perry: Your fucking present is you’re not in jail, fag-hag.

 

      Harry’s telling of the story, as the voice-over narrator of the piece, begins badly as he forgets to tell important elements of the tale, including the somewhat meaningless intrusion of an actor dressed as a robot entering Harmony’s apartment. So, it immediately becomes clear, the story we witness may not be the whole story. Certainly by film’s end, when Perry survives his apparent murder (an event which Black mocks by having all the previously killed actors of the piece, including President Lincoln, enter Harry’s hospital room, only to be hurried out by the nurse), we recognize that his notion of Harmony being “the one who got away” is a kind of hallucination, particularly when we discern that Jenna is not Harmony’s sister, but her daughter through incest—which brings us closer to Chinatown, perhaps, than Woman in the Lake or The Big Sleep. 

     It should come as no surprise, accordingly, that Harry admits, at film’s closing, that he now works for Perry, with Perry, to close down the film, putting his hand over Harry’s mouth as if to shut down any possible new confessions. Perry, always the realist, even apologizes “to all you good people in the Midwest, sorry we said fuck so much.” But then that is truly what this film is all about, and it is nearly impossible to imagine Harry going on without his rhyming-named friend. Harmony has finally been achieved.*

 

*I might also mention that this film fits perfectly into the genre I have described as “Los Angeles” films, movies that take place in the city, to which outsiders are attracted, feeling themselves, a first, as alien before they come to recognize that, as outsiders, they completely belong.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2013              

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2013).

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Teorema (Theorem) / 1968

redeeming family: an unexpected visitor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay and director) Teorema (Theorem) / 1968

 

       It is somewhat interesting to compare Pasolini’s tale of a family with George’s Steven’s 1953 family visited suddenly by a stranger. If in Stevens’ tale the family is at the center of life, crucial for the survival of his pioneers, the Italian director’s utterly bourgeois family life has delimited and thwarted the desires and personalities of its members.

       As in Shane, the “visitor” (Terence Stamp) seems to come out of nowhere. But in Pasolini’s work he is proceeded by a kind of comic angel, an arm-flapping postman (the same bird-flapping figure from Pasolini’s previous The Hawks and the Sparrows, with Ninetto Davoli) bringing the family a note of the Visitor’s arrival. The family accepts him readily, almost as if they were expecting him, and are delighted by the handsome “boy’s” appearance. Pasolini’s camera almost makes love to him, zooming into his crotch time and again. And almost before anyone can get their bearings, the angelic visitor saves their suicidal maid (Laura Betti) and beds her.

      As other guests arrive at the villa, the family’s son (Andres Jose Cruz Soublette) must sleep with the stranger in his childhood bedroom. Unable to sleep with the beautiful being lying in the very next bed, the son, almost like Joey in Shane, can hardly keep his eyes off of him, attempting to view his naked body as the Visitor appears to sleep. When the Visitor suddenly opens his eyes, the son goes scrambling back into his own bed, pleading “excuse me, excuse me!” The Visitor joins the young boy in his bed, comforting him and, presumably, engaging in sex.

 

     Observing the stranger’s pants and underwear laid out on couch, the bourgeois mother of this brood (Silvano Mangano) undresses and lies down out on the balcony to await the return of the Visitor, momentarily at play with their dog. She too gets what she seeks.

     Their daughter (Anne Wiazemsky) is the next to seek his charms and is finally awakened in the process to her own sexuality.

       When the father (Massimo Girotti) cannot sleep because of his daily pains, he rises early and on his return the bedroom cannot resist opening the door to his son’s bedroom only to witness the two sleeping together in the same bed. Even the vision of their coupling sends him into a psychological tizzy, returning to his wife and requesting, despite the fact that she is still sleeping, sex, which she refuses at that early hour. Ill in bed the next day, the Husband is also visited by the angelic beauty, who carefully brings the older man’s legs to his shoulders, peering down upon his with his lovely blue eyes. The father almost immediately feels better and is cured. The next day the two go on a drive before turning off into an empty field were they, too, have sex, the father suddenly abandoning all he has previously believed about his own sexuality.

       Soon after the Visitor has provided each of these insular individuals the love they apparently needed; the angel-postman returns to announce the Visitor’s departure. And over the few hours each of the family members reveal to the stranger how he has utterly changed them.

       The “theorem” of Pasolini’s title has been, clearly, that love changes everything; but how it changes each of them remains the subject of the second half of the director’s film.

        As I have already suggested, unlike in Shane, the stranger’s presence does not bring the family even closer, but frees them to leave family life, some faring better, others worse depending upon their own abilities or inabilities to face the past, present, and future.

        The Maid, the most backward looking of the group, returns to her rustic peasant village where she sits on a bench, eating only nettles, before accomplishing several miracles (curing a young child’s facial disfigurations and hovering in the air over one of the village buildings) before burying herself.

        The Daughter—who now claims she has nothing to look forward too since the very best thing has happened to her has been the Visitor’s encounter with her in the past—becomes catatonic and his carried off to an institution, clearly having no further reason to live.

      The Son, now completely involved in the present, becomes a painter, trying again and again to create abstract paintings on glass that reflect his experience with the Visitor, hoping to reflect the radical nature and power of his experience.

     The mother, freed from her near-frigid and meaningless bourgeois life, drives off to seek sex with handsome young men, apparently, having sex with two pick-ups in the same day.

      The Husband, completely transformed by his sexual revelation, seems to be the only one who entirely embraces a future. Giving away his large factory to his employees, he catches the eye of a young good-looking man before stripping off his clothes in the middle of a train station, and, metaphorically speaking, voyages into a lava desert, a new world in which he cannot imagine what he might find and in which may not even survive.

      The dissolution of the family brings these individuals similar pleasures to Shane’s removal of the threats to family life in the Hollywood work.

         

Los Angeles, June 8, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2016).