Barry Sullivan

Forty Guns

/ Colin McGuigan / 158 Comments

How does one describe the cinema of Samuel Fuller? Words like brash and bold tend to be used, perhaps even overused, when his name is brought up. Nevertheless, those adjectives fit, they capture the essence of his filmmaking, the energy, the almost primal disregard for convention and taste. Fuller didn’t make that many westerns altogether, but they are all interesting and memorable, not least for the way they show a director at work who was in love with that work. Forty Guns (1957) is an invigorating example of Fuller’s filmmaking, pummeling and assaulting the senses right from that famous opening shot; the movie charges at us head-on with fury and passion, a visual and aural challenge that is as neat an example as any of how much breadth and confidence the western genre had attained in the late 1950s.

That opening sequence sets the tone, and indeed the pace for everything that follows, a pounding, intimidating and disorientating sensation that rarely lets up till the movie reaches its shockingly unexpected climax a mere eighty minutes later. One hour and twenty minutes to introduce viewers to Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), a Wyatt Earp style figure who is on his way to Cochise County to arrest a man. He’s accompanied by his two brothers, Wes (Gene Barry) who acts as his backup and Chico (Robert Dix) who is due to be packed off to California and a less hazardous life. The forty guns of the title (or forty thieves as Sullivan later refers to them, evoking the One Thousand and One Nights and thus adding to that fantastic unreality which the film wholeheartedly embraces) are in the employ of Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), the de facto boss of the territory. Brockie (John Ericson) is her younger brother, a spoiled, psychopathic wastrel who uses his sister’s influence and the implied threat of her private army to terrorize women, the town marshal, and frankly anyone who attracts his attention with impunity. Jessica Drummond’s reputation precedes her, her riders have as near as not run the Bonnell brothers off the road, and then her brother’s anarchic spitefulness threatens to lay waste to the whole town. It is here that Griff Bonnell has his hand forced; coolly pistol whipping Brockie into submission and tossing him into jail, he lays down his marker even before riding out to the Drummond ranch with his warrant to arrest one of the hired guns.

It now builds toward a battle for supremacy, both of the heart and the land. The whole setup at the Drummond house continues this theme of the fantastic and if not unreality then perhaps hyperreality. Even if the table is rectangular rather than round, there is something positively Arthurian about the image of Jessica lounging like royalty at the head of that table, flanked on her left by the aggressive and unpredictable Brockie while taking pride of place at her right hand is the soft-spoken but cunning and tragically devoted sheriff Ned Logan (Dean Jagger). In a movie with more than its fair share of visually memorable tableaux, a long tracking shot leads into the kind of double entendre laden conversation one wouldn’t normally expect to find in a western from the 1950s, with an exchange about the potency and volatility of Griff’s weapon. How that got past the censors, I’ll never know.

The whole thing then winds its way through a number of Earp/Clanton allusions towards a conclusion which is not so much a gunfight at the OK Corral as a daring example of Fuller’s characteristic audacity, flipping one of the cardinal conventions of not only the western but cinema in general in a movie which has already stampeded across so many viewer expectations. The director never really lets up in this movie, goading and provoking at every opportunity, painting his picture with the kind of broad brushstrokes that only supreme self-confidence permits, and only a man who lives for making movies would even countenance the kind of risks such an approach runs. Frankly, this is not a movie that will appeal to everyone, it is, perhaps like Fuller himself, too vivid and stylized to gain universal approval. I guess it comes down to this, you either “get” Fuller and his filmmaking or you don’t, and there’s little or no room for equivocation about it. He may be said to have produced a good deal of stylized work but, unlike directors less committed to their art, it was not a case of style over substance. If realism was of little concern to him, then what did matter was getting at the reality of the feelings that dwell at the heart of the movie. That cocksure presentation eschews prosaic realism for a pulpy assertiveness. His demands for the viewer’s attention might seem cartoonish on occasion, but once he has captured that attention there is no doubting the sincerity of the emotion he has been striving to highlight.

That sincerity is apparent on a number of occasions, most notably in the scenes which see Dean Jagger  interacting with Stanwyck. There is his slow departure from the dinner table when Sullivan pays his first visit to the Drummond ranch, a dragging reluctance to leave where Stanwyck’s dismissal and his compliance is achieved without a word being spoken, merely an exchange of glances that express a world of regret. Then there is that final three way scene, part confrontation and part confession that gives Jagger his finest moments in the movie. We get to see a character who has previously traded heavily on the ersatz and the disingenuous coming face to face with the consequences of his longing and loss, and at that moment understanding that the truth he can no longer avoid leads to only one destination.

Late on, there is a funeral scene, following hard on the heels of one of those startling and abrupt instances of violence. The contrast with what preceded it is marked, showing off Fuller’s restraint and Joseph Biroc’s cinematography. The camera tracks sedately from one side to the other against a lead gray sky, broken only by a short close up on Jidge Carroll as he softly sings “God Has His Arms Around Me“, beginning and ending with the widow as she stands motionless and terrible in her dignity and composure.

Forty Guns was the third time Barry Sullivan and Barbara Stanwyck appeared together in a movie and they play off each other well. Sullivan’s confidence matches that of his leading lady and his terse, clipped style of delivery hits the right note for a character who is painfully aware of how his time is running short, how a rapidly changing society is in the process of overtaking him. Stanwyck’s fondness for westerns is well documented; she could tap into the kind of insolence that befits her character, showing off her riding skills as she gallops imperiously over the land she has claimed, as well as having the grit to take on a particularly dangerous looking stunt that sees her horse drag her across rough terrain in the midst of a tornado.

Forty Guns always looked good any time I caught it, and the UK Blu-ray from Eureka, which may now have gone out of print if the prices I’m seeing online are any guide, certainly boasts a fine presentation. There is a lot of Fuller in this movie and that is a plus as far as I am concerned, although those who are less attuned to his style and sensibility will probably get less from a viewing. To my mind, this is a significant addition to Fuller’s credits and to the western genre itself, a film I never tire of revisiting.

Tension

/ Colin McGuigan / 33 Comments

“Everything, everybody’s got a breaking point. And when they get stretched so tight they can’t take it any longer…”

Complexity is one of the hallmarks of film noir. I’ve come across plots so dense it sometimes takes a second or third viewing to untangle just who has been doing what and why. Tension (1949) has plenty of complexity, but not the type that throws the viewer for a loop. No, it’s the lead character who gets wrapped up in the threads of a web he himself has spent some time spinning. The value here comes from watching a man laboriously construct the framework for what he confidently believes will be the perfect crime, only to have fate trip him up and land him right in the middle of his own trap. That is not to say this is some sour exercise in hollow schadenfreude for the protagonist here is not unsympathetic. The tension, from the viewer’s perspective, results from seeing someone driven by frustration into an increasingly perilous situation that it is hoped he can extricate himself from before it is too late.

Warren Quimby (Richard Basehart) is a textbook milquetoast, quiet, unassuming and slow to react to provocation. And provocation might as well be the middle name of his feckless and faithless wife Claire (Audrey Totter). Warren is manager of an all-night drugstore, toiling away and saving to secure a better and more comfortable future not only for himself but for the wife he adores. While he plans and pushes himself, looking forever to a brighter tomorrow, Claire is already bored with making do and yearns for the good life right now. When she’s not raiding the stock for expensive perfumes and treats she is flirting with all comers and parading her infidelity with cavalier disregard for her husband’s feelings. Clearly, this is not a sustainable situation, even Warren’s assistant (Tom D’Andrea) can see this and drops as many broad hints as he can muster. The critical point arrives when Claire heads off with her latest conquest claiming even wild horses couldn’t drag her back to the tedium, the drudgery and the cramped apartment over the drugstore. Thinking he might appeal to her better nature, Warren visits her at the Malibu beach house she’s sharing with her lover, leading to humiliation. Badly beaten, his glasses shattered and with sand literally and figuratively kicked in his face, he gathers what is left of his dignity and heads for home.

The tipping point has been reached. Something tore inside him with that whipping he just took. Chance always features strongly in the world of noir and so it is that a throwaway remark sets in motion the train of thought that will dig Warren into even deeper trouble. He decides to kill the man who shamed him and stole his wife, and thus he sets out to do so in a way that means suspicion will be directed away from him. He will temporarily adopt a different identity, create a character and build up a background for this cypher so that when the murder takes place the police will be on the trail of Paul Sothern and not Warren Quimby. However, there are no perfect crimes, just imperfect people living imperfect lives. Warren’s alter ego proves to be something of a success, romantically at least. He embarks on a relationship with his new neighbor (Cyd Charisse) and then finds that, faced with the cold reality of what he has been planning, he cannot bring himself to take another life. It is here that the tripwires are strung though: Claire decides to return unannounced and uninvited while her lover turns up dead and full of lead, and the police start asking all kinds of awkward questions.

The world of post-war film noir is one drenched in dissatisfaction and disenchantment, frequently though not exclusively seen through the eyes of the returning veterans. It is routinely a world where the expectations built up in the cauldron of conflict are brushed aside as a new order establishes itself. In Tension the label of disenchantment could conveniently be hung on Warren, a man who sees his dreams of idyllic domesticity ruthlessly ground to dust by a wife who frankly despises him. However, the one who is most deeply dissatisfied is that wife. Claire is the epitome of the disillusioned woman, bored and borderline desperate as she contemplates with dread the gradual slipping away of her youth, and with it any slim hope she retains of living in luxury and fulfillment. Claire is indeed a classic femme fatale, driving the men in her life to distraction and to the brink of murder.

Director John Berry was one whose career was seriously derailed by the blacklist and the HUAC hearings. His list of credits is unsurprisingly limited as a result; of his films I’ve only seen John Garfield’s last feature, the wonderfully cramped and claustrophobic He Ran All the Way. Here he creates a suitably noir atmosphere in the starkly overlit drugstore where Warren works, the gloomy apartment above it, as well as the Malibu home where  a tense showdown with Claire’s lover takes place. Of course this is made possible by the cinematography of Harry Stradling, not a man I’d normally associate with film noir although he would go on to shoot Preminger’s masterful Angel Face.

Perhaps none of the main cast members could be said to be at the very top of the heap but all of them were in a good place in terms of career trajectories at this point. Richard Basehart seemed to hit the ground running and he made Tension right in the middle of a succession of very good movies. Some of his early roles had him playing edgy and maladjusted types, men who were not quite right. Warren Quimby is largely meek, but with a taut quality buried somewhere deep. Basehart tapped into that aspect well in the first half of the movie, where his character is being pummeled emotionally and physically. Audrey Totter was something of a noir veteran and peddled a good line in vulgar sensuality, pouting and flirting between mouthfuls of cheap hamburger and apple pie.

If Totter was selling brass, then Cyd Charisse cornered the market in cool and elegant class. The contrast between these two women is marked with the poise and self-possession exhibited by Charisse’s character rubbing hard against Totter’s mercenary trashiness. I have to say, however, that this is another of those movies with an apparently yet inexplicably magnetic lead; I find myself at a bit of a loss to understand exactly what there was that not only drew both of these women to Quimby/Sothern in the first place but kept them coming back. The investigation of the murder is in the hands of Barry Sullivan and William Conrad, the former going by the extravagantly unlikely name of Collier Bonnabel. Sullivan could always put across smugness and assurance most effectively and there is a hint of an aggressive edge just below the surface. He combines nicely with Conrad and it occurred to me as I viewed the movie again the other day how both actors seemed to enjoy collaborating. They were good in Joseph H Lewis’ Cry of the Hunted, appeared in a couple of episodes of Cannon, and Conrad used Sullivan in a major role in one of his directorial efforts My Blood Runs Cold. In the smaller parts, Lloyd Gough is suitably brutish as the temporary object of Totter’s affections, and while Tom D’Andrea may not be quite as memorable as he was in Dark Passage he still scores as the sympathetic drugstore clerk.

Tension got a DVD release many years ago when Warner Brothers included it in one of their film noir sets, paired up on a disc with Where Danger Lives. It is an attractive movie, with a plot that remains twisty without becoming convoluted and a cast packed with people who seemed to feel right at home in film noir.

Cry of the Hunted

/ Colin McGuigan / 47 Comments

It could be argued that every story is at heart a tale of pursuit, a fictional quest where the prize sought might be material (money, treasure, etc) or spiritual (love, contentment, redemption, revenge, and so on), or the quarry might be of the classic, and slipperiest variety: a human being. For the viewer, the race to capture or recapture a fugitive always tends to raise the dramatic stakes, providing scope for shifting sympathies and asking questions about the role of, and indeed the relationship between the hunter and the hunted. Such should be the case with Cry of the Hunted (1953), where both parties involved in this particular game of hide and seek come to realize that their objectives might be different to what they had initially believed. Yet this is only partially fulfilled and the result of it all is that the movie ends up pulling some of its punches.

Speaking of pulling punches, there’s not much of that in the early stages, when Lieutenant Tunner (Barry Sullivan) tries to get convicted getaway driver Jory (Vittorio Gassman) to dish the dirt on his accomplices. The outcome is a bruising and punishing encounter, but one which makes it clear that both men, despite their entrenched positions on opposing sides of the law, have a grudging mutual respect. A traffic accident in downtown Los Angeles affords Jory the chance to escape, making use of the iconic Angels Flight in Bunker Hill, and he grabs his opportunity with both hands. The galled lawmen now have red faces to go with their grey suits and the only way to cool this situation is to arrange for the recapture of the prisoner as soon as possible. Jory is a man of the Bayou, the Louisiana marshland where the alligators aren’t the only threat, and it’s not hard to figure out he will be heading back there, back to his home and his wife. And so it is that Tunner is sent across the country to bring the fugitive back. He’s on top of things soon enough, almost laying Jory by the heels when he intercepts the freight train he is riding, and then tracks him to his shack in the swamps. A shade too much overconfidence is his undoing though, turning his back at the wrong moment leads to a concussion, a bellyful of filthy water, and a stay in hospital. All of this means the trail will need to be picked up once again, this time in the company of a colleague (William Conrad) who is keen to grab his job.

The entire setup here is most promising. The plot has a good deal of potential, the setting offers danger and atmosphere, and Joseph H Lewis as director always holds out the hope of some interesting visual flourishes. Lewis does get some value from the swampy surroundings, and the short sequence involving Sullivan’s fever dream (a shot from which can be seen above) is attractive even if it doesn’t actually add much to the story. However, for all that promise and potential, the finished movie falls a bit short. Now, it is never boring and Lewis keeps the pace up and the running time down, but the development of the plot is rather flat and predictable. Even a low budget effort such as The Ride Back (coincidentally, also featuring William Conrad in a prominent role) flips expectations to an extent by having hunter and hunted virtually changing places and gaining some personal insight as a result. In Cry of the Hunted, however, there is none of that.

Sullivan starts out as a well-meaning and conscientious guy with a hard edge and he never wavers or strays from that path, winding up in essentially the same place as he began. The part is a solid one, playing up the brash needling side of himself that Sullivan often showed and shoring it up with a strong core of decency and humanity. I haven’t seen a lot of Gassman’s work, which probably says much about my limited exposure to Italian cinema, but his character does get to undergo a touch more growth. I emphasize the fact that it is only a touch more though; there’s never really much doubt that his heart is in the right place or that he has it within him to come good. I reckon the writers missed a trick in the last act and should have had Sullivan laid up with an injury and needing to be saved by Gassman rather than the other way around. I seem to be on a bit of a William Conrad kick just now and he is good value as Sullivan’s subordinate and competitor. He seems to have been set to take on a meaner role (goading Gassman in the early stages, beating up a witness) but the script only leads him a short way down that particular path before allowing his better nature to take charge. Polly Bergen (Cape Fear, Escape from Fort Bravo) drifts in and out of the picture in a small role as Sullivan’s wife.

Cry of the Hunted is an MGM production, but it was not one of the studio’s top line pictures. It’s a small affair with some attractive location shooting and a tight, self-contained cast. Even second string movies from such a big studio have a fair bit of polish and it’s interesting to see MGM branching out into this more socially aware material, although it is nowhere near as challenging as it could have been when one takes into account the strong initial premise. I think it is fair to say it never really fires on all cylinders and it feels like a minor work from Lewis. Nevertheless, any opportunity to spend an hour and a quarter or thereabouts in the company of actors like Barry Sullivan and William Conrad is not something I would ever consider a chore. As for availability, it should be easy enough to locate seeing as the Warner Brothers Archive released a good-looking copy a few years ago. So, it’s definitely worth checking out and enjoyable enough as far as it goes, as long as it is approached with realistic expectations.

Planet of the Vampires

/ Colin McGuigan / 24 Comments

Impressions and influences, those are the two items on the agenda today. It wouldn’t be much of a movie that didn’t make some kind of an impression, good or bad, on viewers, and I want to focus on those which I was aware of as I watched Planet of the Vampires (1965), the Sci-Fi chiller from Mario Bava. And then there’s the question of influence, which is something of a two-way street as far as I can tell, and all part of the evolutionary chain running through cinema from its infancy right up to the present day.

Distress signals in Sci-Fi rarely bring anything good, and Planet of the Vampires certainly doesn’t challenge that truism. This is what draws the ill-fated crews of two spacecraft to the planet Aura, and ultimately dooms them. We follow events from the perspective of Captain Markary (Barry Sullivan) as he becomes increasingly aware of some presence on the planet which is capable of influencing the  thoughts and actions of his crew, driving them so far as to attack and kill their own comrades. In itself, that ought to be enough to worry anyone. However, when dead crew members start to reappear looking to add to their number, and the remains of another, clearly alien spaceship, suggest something similar has happened before, well…

For me the standout feature of Planet of the Vampires is the distinctive look. The image of astronauts clad in black leather roaming across a psychedelic technicolor landscape, all the while being stalked by vampire/zombie hybrids, is a striking one. Even when the plot doesn’t always seem to make sense, when the meaningless techno-babble makes one’s head spin and the characters insist on placing themselves in needless danger time and again, those visuals are what help to keep one’s attention focused.

There are plenty of people who will tell you that this movie was a big influence on Alien, which came out 15 years later, and I guess there is a strong case to be made for that. While I’ve not done  much reading up on this myself, I have a hunch it’s been well covered elsewhere so there’s not to be gained from my serving up the same stuff. What I noticed more were the influences it seemed to draw inspiration from, namely Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The whole notion of sleep bringing damnation as opposed to succour is hard to miss. Even if the message about relaxing (one’s vigilance) being potentially fatal loses some of its punch stripped of the paranoid Cold War subtext, it remains potent on an everyday level.

Anyway, there you have it, a much shorter piece than I normally like to post, with a few random musings thrown in there. It’s not down to laziness on my part, or any lack of affinity for the movie in question, but instead the pressure of demands on my time in the run up to the holidays. I doubt I’ll have time to put up anything else between now and Christmas, so I’ll use this (admittedly unseasonal) offering as an opportunity to wish a merry, peaceful and relaxing Christmas to all who stop by here.

The Bad and the Beautiful

/ Colin McGuigan / 63 Comments

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Don’t worry. Some of the best movies are made by people working together who hate each other’s guts.

Seeing as Kirk Douglas celebrates his 100th birthday today I wanted to make a point of featuring one of his movies to mark the occasion. With one of the great movie stars I figured it would be appropriate to choose a movie about movie-making, not only one of the best of that little sub-genre but one of the best Hollywood has produced. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a carefully crafted piece of work, episodic in structure but with an organic, flowing quality that ensures scenes and sequences segue naturally to provide us with a portrait of a man both shaping and simultaneously being shaped by the cinema. Sounds like a perfect role for Douglas, doesn’t it?

If one wanted to be glib, it could be said the film is the story of a phone call. In fact, it  starts with  a series of telephone calls, three to be exact and each one is rejected with something approaching relish. Three calls to three Hollywood figures, all of whom take pleasure in telling the party at the other end of the line to take a running jump. That guy at the other end of the line is Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), once a big-time producer but now reduced to hearing casual brush-offs across a long distance line. So we’ve got a good hook right here, you do tend to wonder why a man should be summarily dismissed in this fashion. Curiosity is such that we want to know what a man like this has to say, and by the end of the picture those on the screen clearly share this feeling too. In the meantime, we have the build-up, where studio executive Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon) tries to persuade the director (Barry Sullivan), the leading lady (Lana Turner) & the writer (Dick Powell) to at least take Shields’ call and give their collective answer on whether or not they are prepared to work with him one more time.  So, this trio gathers in Pebbel’s office while he, through flashbacks, recalls the way their lives and careers became entwined with that of Shields, and why they feel the way they do about him.

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Hollywood thrives on narcissism, it loves to look at itself and can’t resist encouraging us to look at it while it indulges in this introspection. You could say that’s indicative of the all-consuming vanity of the movies, the conviction that audiences will be fascinated by the chance to peek behind the cameras and glimpse the artists and technicians at work and play, that there’s no drama as compelling as the everyday lives of the filmmakers themselves. And I guess they’re right, there’s always been a market for celebrity watching and this has shown no sign of abating any time soon, if anything it’s more intense than ever these days. We sometimes hear about stripping away the glamor but the classic Hollywood exposés didn’t really do that, sure they showed the less savory side of the business and those involved in it but even so they couldn’t help making it look good. As the title of this film suggests, there are some rotten people on screen but they and the world they inhabit remain beautiful and captivating. The Oscar-winning Charles Schnee screenplay focuses on the ruthlessness, the lack of scruples of Shields, the way he’s consistently used and manipulated his colleagues to attain success. Yet, for all that, despite the duplicity and the betrayals, the milieu holds our attention and we’re never allowed to forget that Shields brought success even to those he hurt.

Director Vincente Minnelli clearly enjoyed turning the cameras around since he, and Douglas, would return to the theme 10 years later when they made Two Weeks in Another Town, again scripted by Schnee and produced by John Houseman. He’s always going to be best remembered for his musicals but it has to be said he had a marvelous talent for well-judged melodrama – this movie, the aforementioned Two Weeks in Another Town, Home from the Hill and the dazzling Some Came Running are significant artistic achievements and add up to a highly impressive mini-filmography by themselves.

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Kirk Douglas was second billed in The Bad and the Beautiful behind Lana Turner and earned himself his second Oscar nomination. He didn’t win (losing out to Gary Cooper in High Noon that year) and claims in his autobiography to have been surprised by the nomination, believing his roles in Wyler’s Detective Story or Wilder’s Ace in the Hole were more worthy of such an honor. I think this says something about the way Douglas views his own work, seeming to prefer the more driven and less sympathetic parts. While there is much to dislike about Jonathan Shields, it’s said that Minnelli worked on Douglas to bring out the nicer side of the character and tone down the more explosive and less likeable aspects. Which is not to say he doesn’t explode at any point – he does have two fairly intense, in-your-face scenes opposite Lana Turner, but it probably wouldn’t feel like a proper Kirk Douglas film if they weren’t there.

Lana Turner wasn’t an actress who ever impressed me all that much, meaning she was always someone you noticed in a movie (her looks kind of demand that) but whose roles were frequently less memorable, with a few notable exceptions. I think The Bad and the Beautiful ranks as one such exception. The fact she was playing an insecure, alcohol dependent star was an advantage as it required a degree of fragility and vulnerability that Turner was able to convey successfully. In terms of awards though, the big winner among the actresses was Gloria Grahame, who scooped the Oscar for best supporting actress. Grahame was a terrific screen presence, sexy and credible in just about everything I’ve seen her in. Her part in this film is a small one, confined to the section with Dick Powell, yet she doesn’t waste a moment of the time she has. Powell was fine too as her cynical husband, adding an intellectual spin to the kind of insolence he had down pat by this stage. I generally like Barry Sullivan, he was one of those guys who could be a hero or villain (or even something in between) quite effortlessly. He was good enough as the director who sees his idea stolen but it’s an undemanding and perhaps a bit of a thankless part under the circumstances. And there’s plenty of depth in the cast – Walter Pidgeon, Leo G Carroll, Gilbert Roland and Paul Stewart all make contributions.

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This is a movie where some people like to see if they can pick which cinema personality each of the main characters was based on – Douglas’ lead appears to be a composite of sorts with the characteristics of at least two producers (one of whom is a cult favorite) on view. Of the others, some are pretty obvious (Lana Turner’s part, for example) while others (like Barry Sullivan) are less so. I won’t go naming any names here – it might spoil a little bit of the fun for some and anyway the curious can easily search online for clues/opinions. That’s just trivial stuff though, the movie provides a masterclass in professionalism and polish where there’s next to nothing to fault in the direction, writing, photography (another Oscar there for Robert Surtees) and acting. The Bad and the Beautiful is an extremely smooth and classy piece of filmmaking, Hollywood writing its own lore and having a good time doing it. The film is easy to find and looks good too, at least my old Warner Brothers DVD does. Viewed for the first or the fiftieth time, it still satisfies.

It’s a rare thing to be able to post something on the occasion of the 100th birthday of a living screen legend, a bona fide star of the Golden Age of cinema, and it gives me a real kick to be able to do so on the day Kirk Douglas hits three figures – congratulations to him and may he see many more.

Jeopardy

/ Colin McGuigan / 53 Comments

You’re smart… honest. I like smart women. They got cat in ’em.

Current trends in cinema indicate that audiences prefer ever-increasing running times, or at least the major studios seem to interpret it that way. In terms of minutes spent in front of the screen, you could definitely say you’re getting your money’s worth out of a movie these days. But is it really possible to reduce the worth of a movie, or any piece of art for that matter, to such crude terms? I’m fine with long films if the story or its telling merits the added time. The problem though is that this is rarely the case; simple stories are padded to the point they lose their edge, and true epics no longer as potent. It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time filmmakers knew that quality and quantity were not equal partners, that it was unnecessary to tie them together in a marriage of inconvenience. Today, let’s look at Jeopardy (1953), a movie that does all it needs to do in under seventy minutes.

There’s something wholesome and reassuring about family vacations, especially the hard-earned ones. Doug Stilwin (Barry Sullivan), along with his wife Helen (Barbara Stanwyck) and their young son Bobby (Lee Aaker), are driving south to get away from it all the stresses and strains of life. They’re heading to Mexico, to a deserted fishing cove Doug remembers visiting with an old army buddy, and everything seems right with the world. As they cross the border and move away from the big towns Helen’s narration catches some of the optimistic flavor of the early 50s – there’s an air of domestic contentment, but there’s an edge to her voice at times that warns of a tale which will take a twist before it runs its course. We get the odd hint of an undercurrent of tension  – Doug doesn’t like being told what to do and Helen is obviously not a woman to be undervalued – but the first real sense of danger comes when the family encounters a police roadblock. The reason for the spot check becomes apparent later. For the time being, things couldn’t be better – Doug finds his secluded beach and the family settle down to relax in glorious solitude. However, to borrow from another noir narrator, fate has put its finger on this particular group of people. While exploring the old jetty, Bobby gets his foot stuck in the decaying timbers and his father has to go and free him. It’s at this point that everything, quite literally, falls apart. The upshot is that Doug finds himself trapped in the shallows by a fallen pile, and the tide is rising. With all attempts to extricate him coming to nothing, Doug convinces Helen to drive back to the last settlement they passed in search of help. Reluctantly, she does so, leaving Bobby behind to keep him company. What she encounters though is Lawson (Ralph Meeker), the object of the aforementioned police dragnet. As the water level rises, and Helen’s sense of desperation matches it, we learn exactly how far a woman is prepared to go to save the life of the man she loves.

I’ve commented before on how there’s something very attractive about John Sturges’ work in the 50s, which is not to say I dislike the bigger, and more ambitious films he made in the years to come. I feel he was at his best in the 50s though; there’s a tightness, a kind of taut economy, in his filmmaking during that period. Jeopardy is a straightforward and direct story – there’s no explanation of who Lawson is or what precisely he’s wanted for, but a handful of telling shots let the audience know all that’s necessary about his character and the things he’s capable of. Time is of the essence for the man trapped on the beach, and Sturges never once lets go of that sense of urgency. The almost constant use of motion – the crashing waves, Helen’s chaotic drive to the settlement, and Lawson’s similarly frantic journey back – offer no respite from the tension. Not a moment is wasted, nor a word uttered superfluously. In visual terms, Sturges was as fine an exponent of the wide screen process as it’s been my pleasure to see. While this film was framed for, or at least is presented in, Academy ratio, the director’s spatial awareness and composition is always in evidence. The high, objectifying angles increase the sense of isolation of the characters in a barren and hostile environment, and the close-ups catch every twitch of emotion on their faces.

Barbara Stanwyck was in her mid-40s when she made Jeopardy, and showing few signs of relinquishing her grip on leading roles. By this stage she’d had plenty of experience playing tough broads who knew their way round the world and were capable of giving as good as they got. Unlike similarly strong actresses like Bette Davis or, more especially, Joan Crawford, whom I often find off-putting, Stanwyck retained that toughness without descending into hardness. While she worked in a variety of genres, there was an edge and earthiness which made her a good fit for westerns and thrillers. Jeopardy gave her top billing and plenty to get her teeth into – the painful decisions circumstances have forced her into making are never shied away from and her reactions to them remain entirely credible. Barry Sullivan would go on to make another two movies with Stanwyck – most notably Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns – and he worked well with her on screen. The film has no shortage of high drama and thus needed a strong, stable presence to anchor it all. Sullivan is very good as the man used to taking charge and calling the shots, who’s reduced to helplessness. Even so he’s stoic throughout, and his interaction with Lee Aaker (who also appeared in Hondo the same year) is genuinely touching at times. Just the other day I saw Ralph Meeker described, not at all disparagingly, as “a poor man’s Brando”, and I can see how that could be the case. He had the kind of brutal machismo that made him a terrific and interesting Mike Hammer a few years later in Kiss me Deadly, and he has ample opportunity to show that off here. I think it’s also worth noting that even in a film as lean and pared down as Jeopardy, Meeker’s character still has the chance to earn redemption by the end.

Jeopardy was released on DVD in the US some years ago as part of a Stanwyck box set, and the disc was also available individually. It shares that disc space with To Please a Lady, and the transfer is quite good. The print is generally sharp, clean and without damage. The theatrical trailer is provided as an extra along with the radio adaptation of the story. I’m very partial to sparse, brisk storytelling, even more so nowadays as it seems to have become something of a lost art; men like John Sturges knew how to do it well, and Jeopardy is a solid example of that.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

/ Colin McGuigan / 7 Comments

When I started this series of reviews about a month ago I mentioned that one of the reasons why I’d avoided doing it for a time was the variable quality of the films involved. Being aware that you’re going to have to sit through and then try to express your thoughts on movies that you already know are mediocre can be a little discouraging. What I didn’t mention, however, was the fact that the opposite is also true. When a film has a particularly strong critical reputation it’s equally daunting, though for different reasons of course. You instinctively wonder whether it’s possible to say anything that hasn’t been said before, and probably been said better. In the case of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Sam Peckinpah’s last western, I don’t promise to offer any startling insights but I do hope that I manage to at least express my own personal appreciation of this flawed masterpiece.

The film can, and I think should, be viewed as the death dream of Pat Garrett as he relives the defining events of his life, even as that life is slipping away. I ought to say right now that this view is dependent on the version of the film that’s watched – I’ll explain what I mean later, but for now I will simply say that it does have an impact on the way viewers approach the story. It’s 1909 and an aging and testy Garrett (James Coburn) is riding a wagon through New Mexico. His terse, snappish conversation with his companions is violently interrupted by the crack of a rifle shot. No sooner has the first bullet struck home than Garrett’s escort proceed to empty their own weapons into his mortally wounded body. As the old lawman tumbles towards the earth for the last time the scene is intercut with events of almost 30 years before, in 1881, when we see Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) getting in a bit of target practice by shooting the heads off live chickens. What follows sets up the mood of the rest of the film and explains the motives for the characters subsequent actions. Garrett has sensed that the wind has changed and is pragmatic enough to know that he must go with it or be swept away. He’s thrown in his lot with a shadowy collection of big cattle men and business interests, and has been appointed sheriff. The Kid, on the other hand, resolutely refuses to bow to the march of progress and is bent on continuing as he’s always done. Garrett points out that part of his remit is to ensure the removal, by whatever means are deemed necessary, of the Kid from the territory. This is one of the few times both men share the screen until their final fateful meeting in Fort Sumner, but the movie charts the movements of both as circumstances inexorably draw them to their predetermined positions. That early scene in the cantina where Garrett and the Kid lay their cards on the table and both are aware that they will have to face off sooner or later is full of the melancholy that dominates the picture, and it’s pure Peckinpah. From this point the hunt is on. Garrett brings the Kid in after a bloody shootout at an isolated shack and has him locked up in Lincoln to await execution. This leads to a wonderfully realized sequence in the stark jail room where the Kid’s flippant disregard for authority (both earthly and divine) goads his manic, evangelical guard Ollinger (R G Armstrong) into taunting and threatening him – again depending on which version you watch there’s a killer line that may be missed. When the Kid effects his escape after blasting Ollinger apart with his own shotgun there’s a very human side of him revealed. He swaggers along the main street and orders up a horse to take him out of town. What he’s presented with is a wild animal that promptly bucks him clear and lands him square on his ass. Instead of avenging his bruised dignity on the old Mexican who embarrassed him by offering a horse he couldn’t ride, he simply smiles ruefully, steals another and rides coolly off as befits a legend.

In truth, the whole film could be viewed as a series of memorable scenes. That’s not to say, of course, that there’s a lack of narrative structure; the story follows a very definite line and draws to a completely natural conclusion. What I’m trying to say is that there are certain characteristics that mark it out as a western that transcends the run-of-the-mill and elevate it to something grander. A prime example is the segment with Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado – it moves things forward by showing how Garrett’s pursuit is progressing but that’s not really the point. If anything, like one of Ford’s grace notes, the scene exists for the sake of its own beauty and and poignancy. I’m not going to spoil things for anyone who has yet to see the movie but I will say that it’s gut wrenching stuff and I’ve still never been able to watch it without a lump in my throat. The characters grow and develop as we move along too, especially Garrett. His cynicism and self-loathing increase the closer he comes to his quarry and the further he moves from the man he once was. By the end of the movie he has sold himself completely and his disgust at what he has become is a painful thing to witness. It’s also interesting to compare the portrayal of Garrett’s principal backer, Chisum (Barry Sullivan), to the one John Wayne offered a few years before. This is no heroic defender of the common man, instead he’s a coldly dedicated businessman who feels no sentimental attachment to those who worked for him in the past. This Chisum regards Billy as nothing more than a liability, both financially and politically, who needs to be exterminated. Those hands in his employ are shown to be similarly heartless, and it’s surely clear to Garrett that he’s only being tolerated so long as he has a role to play in Chisum’s schemes. In contrast to Garrett, the character of the Kid undergoes less of a change, perhaps because he’s the one who clings more firmly to the old ways. He starts out grinning, nonchalant and oozing self-confidence, and meets his fate with that attitude virtually intact. However, for all his free spirited charm there’s a hard edge there too. The first time I saw the film I was slightly shocked at the outcome of the duel that the Kid and Alamosa Bill (Jack Elam) are unable to avoid. Having said that, I’ve grown to appreciate that little scene more and more for showing that shootouts in the old west were rarely the kind of honourable and noble standoffs that they’re traditionally portrayed as.

As I stated earlier, this was to be Peckinpah’s last western and it’s another of his ruminations on the passing of the old west and the dawn of the modern era. It was a troubled production, not least because of the director’s increasingly wayward behaviour, and the end product reflects that in the multiple cuts of the movie down the years. For all that though, it remains very much a Peckinpah film. It’s tempting to think that Sam saw something of himself in both the title characters: the Kid as the wild, anti-establishment figure that he encouraged others to see him as, and Garrett as the disillusioned independent trying to strike some kind of working balance between corporate interests and a free soul that was probably closer to the truth. As such, I think it’s Coburn’s performance as Garrett that drives the film and gives it much of its power. In terms of realism or accuracy he was too old for the part, but in terms of characterization he was perfect. He was of an age where you can easily understand a man’s need to seek out some form of security, that point when you realize that the recklessness of the past is no longer a viable option yet a part of you still yearns for it and rails against the advance of time and the compromises that are involved. Coburn’s lived-in features and grey hair help to get the point across, and the expressive eyes that could flash cold steel one minute and sardonic humour the next see that it strikes home. In contrast, Kristofferson plays the Kid as a devil may care adventurer, but one with a deep sense of fatalism. Even in that early scene in the cantina the twinkle in the eyes cannot disguise the fact that the Kid knows there and then, as surely as the grim faced Garrett does, that there can only be one outcome. Awareness is one thing of course, but the real fatalism is evident in the way the Kid only half-heartedly tries to elude his old friend. He heads for Mexico and safety but it’s clear enough that in so doing he’s hoping to find some excuse to return and play that one last card whatever the consequences. The supporting cast is something like a wish list of western character players and it’s another of the film’s great strengths. I don’t know how this works for those who come to the film without a familiarity with the genre, but for someone like myself it’s akin to meeting up again with a group of old acquaintances and simply revelling in their company. It would be impossible to go through all the people who drift in and out of the story and enrich it with their presence but, as I noted earlier, a special mention must be given to Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado who contribute to one of the finest moments in this picture, or any other for that matter. The only casting decision that doesn’t really work for me is the inclusion of Bob Dylan. I love the way his music blends in and complements the images on screen but his appearance as a character in the story is unnecessary in my opinion and is just too conspicuous.

The DVD release of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, not unlike the production itself, has become a source of controversy. Ever since Peckinpah’s clashes with MGM boss James Aubrey led to the movie being taken away from him and hacked down into a theatrical version that he hated there has been no real director’s cut available. The closest thing is the Turner Preview version, derived from Peckinpah’s workprint. The 2-disc DVD from Warners includes both the Turner version and a new 2005 Special Edition that claims to come closer to the director’s wishes. Now the problem is that the 2005 cut adds some material but, most damagingly, removes or alters key scenes and lines of dialogue from the Turner version – the exact changes can easily be found by running an internet search or just sitting down and watching the two cuts to compare for yourself. The fact that both versions are available is good of course, but it should be mentioned that the Turner cut has not undergone restoration whereas the 2005 one has. My own preference is for the Turner version for a variety of reasons, but the strongest one is the fact that the bookending of the story remains intact. Others will have to decide for themselves. Aside from the restoration, or lack of it, the DVD set contains a plethora of supplementary material that’s most welcome. As for the movie, I hope it’s clear that I hold it in high regard. It’s not only a compelling story, but it’s also a study of fading dreams, vanished innocence and bitter regrets. It’s one of Peckinpah’s best and should rate high in any list of top westerns. Very highly recommended.