The Western May 30, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films , 6 commentsI’ve been thinking about the Western genre quite a bit these last few days. Watching The Professionals last week in a beautiful widescreen print probably set my mind in motion. I had never seen the film before, a wonderful late era Western directed and written for the screen by Richard Brooks. The film literally looked like it had been made the day before the screening, with a brilliant and crisp picture quality that superbly showcased both the performances and the cinematography by Conrad Hall. Not that I needed reminding, but seeing The Professionals with a packed house in a breathtaking format affirmed my substantial love for movies. For two hours, it seemed like what I imagined 1966 felt like in a theater, when Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan were gracing screens and making films people could still get excited about forty years after the fact.
In The Professionals, it was a line delivered by Lancaster that hit me and made me think about the Western genre, as well as America itself, I suppose. “Maybe there’s been one revolution since the beginning - the good guys versus the bad guys. The question is - who are the good guys?” I’ve thought a lot about this simple statement since seeing the film. Immediately, I thought of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in the theater, a film where the line between good and bad is deliberately blurred and we’re left with protagonists who’ve done unspeakable things in the past trying to do the right thing for once and maintain the honor of a fallen comrade. It’s nearly impossible for film lovers not to think about Peckinpah’s elegiac western when watching The Professionals, I’d think. Made only three years prior to The Wild Bunch, Brooks’ film plays like a less violent, less daring version of Peckinpah’s grimy epic.
Both films involve a team of men on a mission with Mexico as the primary setting and feature Robert Ryan, creator of roles frequently vicious and unredeeming, as the most tender, relateable character therein. If The Wild Bunch is going to be hailed as a landmark, upper echelon Western responsible for the shift from what we’d previously seen from John Ford into a more realistic, less romantic view of cowboys then surely The Professionals deserves an inkling of praise as well. It perfectly bridges the gap between the clear cut heroes the genre had often thrown at its audience into the questionably worthy lead characters we end up with in the 1970s and beyond.
Every character in The Professionals is essentially a criminal, and the pack of heroes chosen by Ralph Bellamy is a ragtag group of mercenaries eager to capture Bellamy’s “kidnapped” wife from a man they have reason to trust much more than their benefactor. So who are the ”good guys?” The cold hard truth, most likely, is that the Western genre had no business broaching such a question in the first place. If you kept a six-shooter strapped to your hip then there’s a good possibility that you’re not one of the “good guys” regardless of who you’re murdering or what town you’ve landed in under the auspices of maintaining law and order. Is there any doubt, then, that the Western’s demise was as inevitable as it was prolonged?
Eager to explore more of the evolution of the Western, I plunged into a couple of the Anthony Mann-James Stewart pictures from the 1950s - The Man from Laramie and Bend of the River. Never having seen either film (and I call myself a Jimmy Stewart fan!), I was struck by the building blocks laid forth by Mann in both movies, as well as the other three films he made starring Stewart, whereas the main character immediately possesses an air of mystery about his past, his intentions, and his future. The audience, familiar with the collaborations between these two seemingly opposite men, may have a good inclination of what the Stewart character is looking for, but the other characters are always unsure of his purpose. Stewart is an outsider, frequently after revenge and given the opportunity to seek it but emotionally torn between his primal desire to complete his cycle of vengeance and maintain the goodwill he’s gained in his time with those who’ve crossed his path.
Not only is this a completely different side of Stewart than we’ve ever seen, or ever would see in his film career, but it’s also a new kind of Western hero, a man on the edge of sanity whose innermost needs to avenge a wrong must battle with his ultimate decency in every film. We identify with the character because of the actor playing the role and his everyman quality, but we’re taken to an unexpected place where the good guy briefly drifts into the realm of the villain. There are no white hats and black hats to help us identify who’s in the right. It’s all moral ambiguity and psychological question marks. In Bend of the River, Stewart says, “You’ll be seeing me. Everytime you bed down for the night, you’ll look back to the darkness and wonder if I’m there. And some night, I will be. You’ll be seeing me.” It’s a haunting, frightening line, perhaps the best in the entire Mann-Stewart series, and it’s delivered by the good guy.
The great thing about these Mann Westerns is we never see exactly what happens to the Stewart character that makes him so determined to reap vengeance. We eventually find out, in Stewart’s words, but we never see for ourselves. The audience is forced to trust Stewart, with the belief that he’s not a raving lunatic, even if he inevitably becomes violently unwound at some point in every picture. This is not the John Ford-John Wayne traditional Westerns from the previous two decades. The separation between hero and villain is tenuous at best, greatly influenced by casting and the narrative. Perhaps in response, Ford countered with his own unorthodox protagonist, Ethan Edwards, a man arguably devoid of redeeming features and certainly far removed from the usual frontier heroes.
Released in 1956, after all five Mann-Stewart films had already been produced, The Searchers came four years after Ford’s previous collaboration with Wayne, The Quiet Man. There’s little to prepare audiences for the intense questions of racism against Indians/Native Americans in the Ford-Wayne collaborations prior to The Searchers. Regardless of Ford’s personal contrition, the film still paints the Indians as the villains, with Wayne’s character coming across as the de facto hero to most viewers. Ethan Edwards is a racist, a criminal and a murderer but he’s still the protagonist and it’s hard to believe that the majority of 21st century viewers will recognize his shortcomings in relation to his ultimate triumph. If The Searchers is the greatest Western of all time (not my opinion, but a popular one), does that make Ethan Edwards a role model? I’d say of course not, but my opinion only accounts for one vote and John Wayne’s enduring popularity makes me question how others see the film. Is his bigotry justified by his final (seeming) redemption? Again, I can’t imagine how Wayne’s character serves as the epitome of anything but a solitary, pathetic racist, but the most popular Hollywood star in history surely deflects criticism from many admirers regardless of the role.
I like the underlying message we get from The Searchers, that racism and bigotry are wrong, but I can’t wholeheartedly agree with the method Ford uses to achieve his tenet. The Indians are still the bad guys, impossible to understand and savagely unrefined. It’s nice to see Ford with an open mind towards the frequent antagonists of his Westerns, but he still fails to portray them as human or anything but violent, homicidal animals. Should we be comforted that Ethan Edwards, a vile, murderous man seemingly without virtue is juxtaposed with Scar, the Comanche leader who’s scalped numerous whites, including Edwards’ love? There are no easy answers in The Searchers, another aspect I admire, and we’re forced to confront our own prejudices through Edwards’ bigotry.
Thus, we’re left with vengeful, murderous, bigoted criminals as protagonists in these Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s. After pushing the limits of the genre, both through this kind of main character and the various films set during the fading era of the West, where did it have to go to seem fresh and relevant? Apparently, there were few places left to be explored given the dearth of successful Westerns the past three decades. Kevin Costner had his epic Oscar winner Dances with Wolves and Clint Eastwood countered with his own awards magnet Unforgiven, which, for the record, is my favorite Western, but otherwise the genre has sputtered and faded. It’s not like other types of film have been banished into financial obscurity, so why the Western?
Looking at the progression from Ford and Hawks into Mann and Peckinpah, the answer sort of comes into focus. The early Westerns eschewed blood and guts for heroic daring and easily defined lines between good and evil. As the genre moved forward and filmmakers tired of a repetitive lack of realism, we began to see messy, blood-soaked battles and an uneasy distinction between right and wrong. The Western was destroyed only to be rebuilt into a new, less lasting product adhering closer to what really happened. With that drastic change in temperament, the older, romanticized version of the Old West seemed like a relic in comparison. Audiences no longer wished to see the clear-cut, bloodless depiction of good versus evil.
The problem therefore manifested itself with showing how the West was really won, an expensive proposition that few modern directors were interested in exploring. When classical Western heroes were given big screen treatments, such as Walter Hill’s Wild Bill or the dueling Wyatt Earp biopics Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, audiences were already too uninterested in the slow, drawn out pace necessary to depict these historical figures. Action heroes were now indestructible he-men in the form of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis, not encumbered by pistols and horses. Audiences instead demanded assault weapons and cool cars, anomalies of the earlier decades where John Wayne, James Stewart and Gary Cooper reigned supreme at the box office.
So, it seems that we’ve outgrown the Western genre, pushed to its limits and unable to rebound. Television attempted to revive it through the ultra-profane Deadwood, and perhaps an envelope-pushing modernization complete with slick violence and hyperkinetic jumpcuts could manage to succeed in today’s depressingly youth-oriented culture. Then again, maybe all that’s lacking is a good enough story, exemplified in Eastwood’s Unforgiven a full fifteen years ago now, to revitalize the once-dominant Western genre. It just seems like every nook and cranny has been peered into and capitalized on at this point, leaving precious little left to draw upon. Do audiences want to watch films of a certain type so foreign and unidentifiable in regards to the current social climate? The answer remains unclear, waiting for the right movie with the right pedigree, but we’ve been given little reason to believe enough people still care about the Western genre to make it a viable route of exploration in the current, increasingly frustrating marketplace.
Hell in the Pacific May 23, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1960s , 1 comment so far
Marvin. Lee Marvin.
An odd thought, but can you imagine Lee Marvin as James Bond? Ignoring the accent, he would have been incredible, bringing the sadistic and amoral side to Bond that Daniel Craig has adopted in Casino Royale. Marvin is one of those actors that make me question the auteur theory. I normally write about films in the context of the director and/or the screenwriter as most responsible for what’s on screen, but there are a few actors who’ve been able to bring something special to almost every role they’ve played. Marvin’s steely coolness dominates the films he appeared in, making mediocre movies worthwhile and good movies even better. He worked with fine directors, such as Aldrich, Ritchie, Boorman and Siegel among others, but Lee Marvin is the real reason to see Emperor of the North Pole, Prime Cut, Point Blank and The Killers. Even his supporting turns in films like Attack, Ship of Fools and Seven Men from Now are completely memorable and make the viewer anxious for the next time Marvin appears on screen.
The Film Society at Lincoln Center in New York has devoted over two weeks worth of films to Marvin, including those mentioned above, with his widow Pamela Marvin and director John Boorman participating. It’s been a great chance to become reacquainted with one of the most unique and accomplished film presences in movie history. To encourage people to attend instead of popping in their DVDs, the FSLC offered a special series pass for $40 that enabled patrons to see up to 8 films, a significant savings from the regular $11 ticket price. I took advantage of the offer, seeing some things for the first time while revisiting others that I’d seen before on a much smaller screen. Two of my favorites are the two films directed by Boorman, the anamorphic classics Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific, both begging to be seen in a theater. Film Comment, the bimonthly magazine published by the FSLC, also celebrated the retrospective (appropriately titled Lee Marvin: The Coolest Lethal Weapon) with a lengthy article on Marvin, available in its entirety online. (Attached below are my ticket stubs, the program guide, etc. Click to enlarge.)
In Marvin’s second collaboration with Boorman, Hell in the Pacific
The film begins with Mifune already on the island, in full beard. He’s adapted to the stranded existence by setting traps for fish and preserving rainwater. Mifune and the audience see Marvin for the first time together, a thirsty, stubbled face soldier whose life raft has wandered ashore leaving the American in the brush of the jungle. As the film progresses, each character gains the upper hand on the other, but only before losing again. Marvin teases and enrages Mifune, but is then captured and shackled by vine. Upon escape, Marvin gives Mifune the same punishment before realizing that the two men really have no issue with one another. When Marvin reads a military manual instructing soldiers to kill enemies when captured on an island, he’s instead prompted to cut Mifune free. With Marvin’s gesture in defying expectations of war, after Mifune could have previously killed him also, the film quietly reminds us of the human cost of battle. Enemies are more than faceless killing machines, regardless of the language they speak or country they were raised. Sometimes it takes a vacuum, such as the deserted island in Hell in the Pacific, to realize it.
Boorman’s film is an oddity, especially considering its 1968 release. Set during World War II, but like many other military pictures of the time, it’s obviously intended to provoke thoughts of the Vietnam conflict, opposed by both director and actor. The postcard cinematography by the brilliant Conrad Hall makes sure to give the audience a look at the spectacular beauty offered by the Pacific Ocean locale. When the men successfully build a raft and make their way to another piece of land, we see remnants of more tropical paradise, only now bombed out and destroyed by war. It’s certainly not unthinkable to wonder if Boorman intended Western audiences to pause and ask what’s the point of it all. Together Marvin and Mifune set aside their differences and left the island, but when the outside world once again interfered the two men resumed their unintelligible bickering.
Though I think Hell in the Pacific has aged quite well, especially in these days of Cast Away, Survivor, and Lost, the ending found on the DVD release and the theatrical print I saw has not and now seems too sudden, almost comically so. I’m referring to the abrupt explosion that concludes the film, which probably never played very popularly with the audience, but now comes across as ridiculous to boot. Why exactly would a bomb drop on the already obliterated area where Marvin and Mifune are drunkenly quarreling? The only halfway sensible explanation I’ve read was that perhaps their fire had been spotted, but even this seems to suspend reality a little too much for my liking. In fact, John Boorman never approved this ending and it was imposed by the producer after the director had finished the film. The final scene as shot, shown as an alternate ending on the DVD, had been thought up by Marvin and consisted of the two men simply parting ways in anger. Still abrupt but much more appropriate and consistent.
I recently had the chance to ask John Boorman, a very nice man possessing the brio to wear red pants with a green shirt in May, about Hell in the Pacific and what it must have been like to juggle Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune in the Palau Islands. Even now, roughly forty years after the fact, it was obvious that Boorman was still frustrated over shooting the film. (So much so I wish I hadn’t asked actually.) With the idea of maintaining a high degree of authenticity, Boorman had two writers working on the script, an American for Marvin’s character and Rashomon scribe Shinobu Hashimoto on the Mifune part. Hashimoto went off and returned a couple of weeks later with his reworking, wherein Mifune’s character was comedically drawn as a buffoon.
When production began, the actor had erroneously been told this update would be the shooting version and proceeded with his performance in this manner. Even though Boorman never intended to use these alterations, Mifune had been given Hashimoto’s rewrites and was embarassed when the director tried to correct him during filming. The preeminent Japanese actor felt disrespected and publicly humiliated. Relations were never completely mended on the set, though Mifune still kept Boorman from being fired by the studio, and the mostly Japanese crew probably heightened the tension. Even reading Boorman’s words about the ordeal, from a transcript of a conversation between John Hurt and the director (here), one can intuit the lasting hurt he still harbors.
Regardless of the filming process, the final product remains a daringly captivating experience. Marvin, at his leading man peak, once again proved to be an enthralling actor and there’s thankfully little evidence of Hashimoto’s characterization in Mifune’s performance. Viewers familiar with both actors are probably more likely to appreciate and enjoy the film, but it still works far better than conventional wisdom would have you believe. Mostly wordless throughout, Hell in the Pacific instead relies on a compelling story and two extremely charismatic actors giving superb performances. Aside from the ending, this is just about as good a film imaginable about the realistic problems faced by two men who do not share a common language, yet are stuck together alone on an island. Granted that’s a miniscule subgenre, but many of the themes explored here are universally situated in all our lives.
Point Blank May 18, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1960s , add a comment
Click, clack. Click, clack. Click, clack.
Clad in a sharp grey suit, Walker pounds his way down a fluorescent-lit airport hallway. For the entirety of Point Blank
Briefly, the plot involves Walker’s determined pursuit of the $93,000 that was his share in a robbery committed with his wife and his old Navy buddy, Reese. All three went to prison at Alcatraz, but Reese and Walker’s wife escaped, shooting Walker repeatedly and leaving him for dead in his cell. In the beginning of the film, we see Walker swim off the island where Alcatraz is located and, through innovatively fragmented editing, return on a boat tour where he meets a mysterious man (Keenan Wynn) looking to bring down the Organization, a faceless entity of crime where Reese now works. The man gives Walker his wife’s current address, says Reese lives there too, and more dynamic editing takes us to her via the Los Angeles airport. The wife answers questions no one asks and a stoic Walker sets his plan to retrieve his cut of the money in motion.
Though you’ll often hear Point Blank categorized as a noir or a neo-noir, those terms really don’t interest me here. Walker is so far removed from classic noir heroes that I can’t make that connection. Lee Marvin plays him literally like an automaton seemingly without humanlike qualities. On the surface, the film plays out like a noir plot, but it never emits that feeling of doom, dread and the wrong side of fate that exemplifies those kind of films. Instead, Point Blank seems like a dreamy psychedelic peak through the looking glass. The entire film situates itself on the brink of reality, teetering precisely between what may be real and what could be imagined. It does a remarkable job of toeing this line and resists any concrete determinations of whether Walker is dead or alive, lucid or dreaming.
As a result, I (and many, many others) can’t help but wondering if everything we see Walker do after he’s shot by Reese in Alcatraz is actually occurring or if it’s in his mind somehow. I like that Boorman never gives any reason to think Walker isn’t either in some alternate existence or that he really is dreaming it all. Prior to being shot, Walker seems very timid in the flashbacks involving his wife and Reese, much different than the animalistic near-psychotic we see throughout the picture. Towards the end of the film, when Carroll O’Connor is talking to Walker, he appears to again become the unsure, more deliberate person we see in the flashbacks. Yet, there’s never any way for the viewer to definitively know if we’re seeing movie reality or the delirious dreams of a man shot by his co-conspirator. No matter how many times you watch the film, it’s impossible to figure out whether Walker is really taking down the Organization or if it’s an elaborate fantasy.
Furthermore, dreaming or not, is Walker even really still alive? More than one person in the film remarks that they thought he was dead and it’s entirely conceivable to think a man shot and left for dead would struggle to exit Alcatraz, much less swim across the ocean to San Francisco. Then there’s the passing of time between Walker’s escape and our first real-time meeting when he’s on the tourist boat. His hair seems greyer, his personality has calcified, and we’re never told why he’d be taking this boat tour in the first place. If he’s so interested in the money owed him (which is a question in its own right, considering the ending), what’s he been doing since his escape? We’re never told and the mystery of Walker is completely shrouded in uncertainty and question upon question. Trying to determine Walker’s existence can be a maddening exercise in futility, with no right or wrong answer.
Other characters in the film seem to either help Walker for unknown reasons or fear him. Keenan Wynn emerges from the shadows repeatedly, popping up at just the right moment to provide pieces of information and encouragement. Again, though, is this character real or part of Walker’s imagined revenge fantasy? The ending suggests he plays an integral part in the plot, but that’s assuming we’re dealing with reality when we may not be. Angie Dickinson, playing Walker’s ex-sister-in-law, goes to great lengths to provide help, later on attacks him violently, and ultimately is still unable to resist him. If Walker was dreaming the story as a fantasy, every piece fits exactly in place. In Point Blank, it’s possible to question everything from multiple angles and the only answers you’ll find will be rooted somewhere inside your own subjective head. I don’t know if I can recall another film so ambiguous without going over the deep end of belief.
Then again, that’s part of the charm in Point Blank. While it has a straightforward plot that’s fairly easy to follow, involving Walker’s efforts to disrupt the Organization and receive his $93,000, the film also has enough weird, open to interpretation moments to tide over the arthouse crowd. Boorman’s splendid direction, made even more remarkable considering his only previous feature starred the Dave Clark Five, adds layers of headscratching wonders mixed with stand-out colors marked by a palette that changes tones with Marvin’s suits. The DVD commentary, a conversation between Boorman and Steven Soderbergh, particularly made me appreciate the change in color and monochromatic detail prevalent in scenes such as Walker’s visit to his wife when, still wearing the grey suit, he sits on a grey couch with grey pillows in front of a backdrop of grey curtains and walls.
Instead of giving us a typical crime drama revenge story, Boorman turned Point Blank into an existential action film littered with ellipses. Whereas some directors, namely David Lynch, revel in fractured narratives challenging the viewer to put the pieces together, confidently telling the audience that there is an answer and “everything makes perfect sense,” Boorman’s film goes the opposite route. Instead of making sense only after repeatedly watching and deciphering, Point Blank superficially makes sense with little reflection. It’s only after closely examining the editing and, especially, the recurring flashbacks that we’re left in a daze of confusion. Thrillingly, the audience never gets its answer to many of the questions about Walker, as he almost dematerializes in the end. Somehow the film is both open-ended and straightforward, a major accomplishment in simmering late 1960s Hollywood.
The Bridesmaid May 11, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Modern Films, 2000s , add a comment
Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid
Based on a novel by British writer Ruth Rendell (whose book A Judgment in Stone was turned into La Cérémonie), Chabrol’s film is a thriller much more concerned with atmosphere and uneasiness than the things that go bump in the night. The thriller or suspense genre might be my favorite kind of film, but too often these types of movies are terrible, manipulative trash. At best, they’re usually formulaic and, at worst, they’re almost unwatchable. Cursed by the hovering spectre of Hitchcock, most elite directors don’t even try to make films within the thriller/suspense parameters. Sixteen years after its release, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs remains perhaps the only completely successful example of the genre in the past two decades of English language attempts. Though the thrills are much more subtle in The Bridesmaid than many of the psychosexual entries in recent years, its impact is more significant than the stale cliches usually forced upon us.
The film’s title is almost unfortunate because the titular character doesn’t appear onscreen until nearly half an hour has passed. This early portion sets up the main character, Philippe (Benoît Magimel, from The Piano Teacher), and his family dynamic living with two younger sisters and their mother (Aurore Clément). The oldest sister is set to marry and the younger one has entered a phase of teenage rebellion. Meanwhile, the mother is dating an older man and Philippe is skeptical and protective of her. In fact, there are hints that he’s possibly a little too attached to his mother. It’s clear that he disagrees with his mother’s decision to give away a garden sculpture, named Flora, to this new suitor. The man had apparently told Philippe’s mother that the female face resembled her, though he carelessly leaves it at his old house when he moves (without telling her). Philippe discovers the abandoned bust and takes it home, concealing it in a closet in his bedroom.
Soon afterwards, Philippe spots an attractive bridesmaid (played by Laura Smet) at his sister’s wedding. It’s the groom’s cousin Senta, whom Philippe had previously been warned about as an eccentric whose given name was Stephanie. Passion and loneliness ignite into a male fantasy when Senta, soaking wet from a rainstorm, knocks on Philippe’s door after the wedding and aggressively pursues the man she’d just seen for the first time. Like other too good to be true sexual cautionary tales we’ve seen in movies, the film quickly lets us know Senta has some quirks, not the least of which are her ways of determining true love. The film spirals in and out of predictability with Senta, nicely tying up loose ends from the very beginning, and still manages to end with both question marks and exclamation points.
That ending, as well as Philippe’s slide to meet Senta past the halfway point of her dementia, must be handled ever so delicately to retain the audience’s confidence and believability. By establishing Philippe as a likeable and ordinary main character, the film smartly plays on the viewer’s normal attempt to relate to a film’s protagonist before stretching the boundaries of what we’re prepared to go along with or accept from Philippe. To get away with such leaps of logic, the casting should be effectively brilliant, as it is here. Having the agreeable Magimel play the lead smartly allows the actor to use his natural charm and the enchanting Laura Smet is a perfect choice to make us believe someone like Philippe would act as he does throughout the film. It’s essential that Magimel make us identify with Philippe and eagerly be on his side, just as Senta must come across as a mysterious, complicated young woman worthy of Philippe’s sacrifices and desires. Anything less, or in the hands of the wrong actors, and the movie is easily ruined.
It’s a testament, then, to Chabrol’s film that nothing ever feels distractingly off about the whole thing. The director mentions in a text interview included on the DVD that he is more concerned with the characters than the requisite murder and plot. This may seem antithetical to a murder mystery, but it’s also probably the reason The Bridesmaid succeeds both within and outside its genre. The young female victim whose plight is revealed on a newscast at the film’s beginning is hardly even a secondary character so there’s no particular sympathetic feelings an audience has for her. Her fate is essentially meaningless, and we instead turn our attention to Philippe and Senta, not knowing what roles they may play in the girl’s disappearance. Otherwise, there’s little mystery involved and the film becomes a character study delving into the consequences of obsession.
The obsession Senta strangely has with Philippe directly leads to his obsession with her. Coming out of a failed relationship, Philippe understandably enjoys the attention of the highly sexual Senta. Her seemingly exaggerated stories appear to be innocent fibs, easy enough to tolerate from someone who’s fawning over him. When she suggests less healthy escalations in the affair to prove their love, Philippe tries to break free of Senta. After only a short time apart, he realizes the obsession has become mutual and that he must have her back. The bust of Flora, transformed from his mother into Senta, becomes an inadequate substitute. He now needs her as much as she needs him and will do whatever it takes, even if it’s appeasing her perverse need of proof, to be with her.
It’s certainly a thin line Chabrol walks between keeping the audience from being disgusted with the characters and empathizing with Philippe. Viewers who can’t cross over, even briefly, with the protagonist’s choices may be left disappointed or unfulfilled. I don’t think the film requires its audience to agree with everything that takes place, but it is necessary to understand why Philippe acts as he does. As the film progresses, we pick up bits and pieces about his character and his actions ultimately remain consistent with what we learn. It’s a fascinating and engrossing dive into the nature of compulsion, vulnerability and sexual attraction told by a master filmmaker confident in his abilities to stir an audience without cheap stunts.
I wish that First Run Features, the company responsible for the R1 DVD, had the same abilities in presenting their release of The Bridesmaid. It’s obviously nice to have the film on DVD regardless of presentation, but First Run really should have done a more thorough job here. They’ve committed the egregious error of improper PAL to NTSC conversion, leaving behind significant combing and digital artifacts. Much of the film is incredibly dark, seemingly more so than intended. The R2 CineFile UK release apparently shares the darkness factor (reviewed by DVD Beaver here), but I’d be curious as to whether it’s as extremely dark as the R1. There’s also a French two-disc release that one would think might be the best of the lot. Additionally, the First Run has burned-in subtitles that are not removable and which seem rather large. Extra features are highlighted by a 12-minute making-of featurette and the aforementioned text interview with Chabrol. The lackluster effort from First Run, especially retailing for $30, is a disappointment. It’s a very good film that would have been better served by an improved release.
In a Lonely Place May 1, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Nicholas Ray, Gloria Grahame , 5 comments
I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.
I can’t even pretend to feign objectivity when discussing Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place
Ray’s best and most characteristic film (edging out Johnny Guitar by a small margin) begins with Bogart as Dixon Steele driving through the Los Angeles area, his reflection captured in the car’s rearview mirror. When he comes to a stop, a female passenger of another car begins talking to him about a movie he had written, but he doesn’t recognize her, the film’s leading actress, because he’s never seen the filmed version of what he wrote. Steele is ready to erupt after the actress’s male companion chides him for harassing his lady even though she had begun the conversation, but the car drives away. We soon learn Steele is a screenwriter of dwindling commercial success and attempting to retain his creative integrity. His new project is to adapt a bestseller, one that’s destined to become an epic - “a picture that’s real long and has lots of things going on,” according to Mildred Atkinson, the ill-fated hat-check girl who’s read the book. Since Dix doesn’t seem too interested in reading his source material, he persuades the girl to relay the story at his apartment. Mildred initially balks because she has a date, but the lure of celebrity is overwhelming and she relents.
When Dix is bringing Mildred into his apartment he runs into Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), his new neighbor. Instantly, Dix seems more interested in her than Mildred, but he sticks with the latter. At his apartment, the hat-check girl enthusiastically tells Dix the novel’s plot, but he’s turned off by her childishness. He sends her on her way with two ten dollar bills for cab fare, not even walking her to the nearby taxi stand. Ray then cuts to police Det. Brub Nicolai knocking on Steele’s door at five o’clock in the morning. Dix had served as the cop’s commanding officer during the war, but he soon realizes it’s not a social visit. Mildred was found dead on the side of the road, “in a lonely place,” and Dix was the last known person to see her alive. He’s taken into questioning, but released when Laurel provides his alibi. She thinks Dix has an interesting face and he’s intrigued.
The burgeoning love story between these two lost souls is cinema of the highest level. Bogart somehow abandons any lingering artifacts of Sam Spade, Rick Blaine or Philip Marlowe. He is Dixon Steele, one of the essential characters in film history. I’m always impressed by Bogart’s performance each time I see it. The frighteningly real and dangerous portrait of a man constantly on the brink of unbridled violence was a daring choice for Bogart at this stage of his career. It came not long after he left Warner Bros. and formed his own production company, Santana, which produced In a Lonely Place and the Ray-directed Knock on Any Door. Bogart deserves credit for taking risky, unsympathetic roles which often yielded his best performances like Dixon Steele, Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the demented Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
Certainly even Bogart’s signature roles, such as Blaine or Spade, were unconventional heroes, but they’re still undeniably heroes. Their flaws are movie character flaws. Dixon Steele, by contrast, is a controlling, unstable man whose problems are fleshed out or alluded to without apology. While Cooper, Wayne, Grant, Tracy, etc. were, for the most part, retreading their personas in film after film, Bogart was inhabiting these flawed men who often bordered on madness. If pressed on his best performance, I might give the edge to Dobbs, but Dix Steele is a much more complex, difficult character and Bogart makes you think he’s not acting. Just watch the scene where he’s describing how Mildred may have been killed as he insists Det. Nicolai and his wife re-create the killing (in their own home) to be convinced of Bogart’s brilliance.
Steele starts off the film as a cynical, extremely bitter man who seems completely unfazed to learn that the young woman who had been at his apartment the night before has been brutally murdered. Even photographs of the corpse stir no emotion. The question is not whether he committed this unspeakable act, only whether he was capable of it. His guardian angel is Laurel Gray (whose last name surely represents the purgatory she treads between Steele’s violent aggression and her own empathetic curiosity), a new neighbor who happened to see Steele when Mildred was still at his apartment. She lies and tells the police she saw Steele after Mildred left to provide him with an alibi. He then pursues her romantically, resulting in a fruitful relationship eventually tainted by the screenwriter’s inability to overcome his unchained violent behavior.
It’s not the plot, though, that makes In a Lonely Place so hypnotically mesmerizing. The characters Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt give us are terrifically flawed individuals doomed by their own fates. Steele is controlling, paranoid and unabashedly vicious, but Grahame’s character somehow tames him for a brief period. As the line that Dix wants to work into his screenplay goes, quoted here at the beginning, Laurel has given him new reason to live and work and blossom. His creativity peaks when she enters his life, even if it’s while working on a script he’s not incredibly proud of writing. She’s the best thing to ever happen to him and he likewise becomes a source for her happiness during their few weeks together. The stars only briefly align though, and he manages to sabotage their relationship through his savage violence while driving home on a road similar to the one where Mildred Atkinson was murdered. Suddenly, Laurel is no longer sure if Dix is innocent and it becomes clear that he was capable of the crime regardless of whether he actually did it.
Like other films directed by Nicholas Ray, In a Lonely Place works on many different levels. There’s the romance between Dix and Laurel, ill-fated but fleetingly happy prior to Steele’s inevitable self-destruction. We also have a scathing look at the superficiality of Hollywood, exemplified by Mildred’s mothlike attraction to Steele’s “fame” that directly leads to her murder. It’s also frequently categorized as film noir, and the murder investigation, with Dix remaining a prime candidate despite Laurel’s alibi, is constantly lingering in the background. Laurel’s confidence in Dix steadily erodes and she begins to fear what he’s capable of and what he might do to her. Like other great noir protagonists, Dix Steele is unable to overcome his fatal flaw and adapt to the outside world. More atypical is that it’s not death or imprisonment that Steele must face, but loneliness after knowing and feeling the happiness that a change of temperament could have yielded.
It’s that reason, through the film’s brilliant portrayal of the pangs of loneliness, that the relationship between Dix and Laurel surfaces as the most compelling aspect of Ray’s film. Rarely has Hollywood been able to expose with such painful truth the rollercoaster realities of finding someone to heal our innermost pain. As Dix slices open a grapefruit and tenderly exposes part of his soul to Laurel, whose own feelings have begun to ebb, his words about how Hollywood is always getting love wrong become poignantly ironic. The film’s title thus works simultaneously as a literal description of the place where Mildred Atkinson’s body was discarded and the painful, metaphoric emotional state shared by the two main characters. The common denominator, since Dix is a screenwriter and Laurel a struggling actress, is the equally lonely setting of Hollywood.
Early on, Dix accuses studio men of being “popcorn salesmen,” a brilliantly denigrating truism. Even by 1950 (or 1949, when the film was shot), it’s reasonable to assume that Nicholas Ray didn’t have too fond of an opinion of Hollywood. This was only his fifth film, but the director had already suffered through RKO forcing him to make A Woman’s Secret, a forgettable melodrama that has hardly any of Ray’s fingerprints. He was then eager to work with Bogart and Columbia on Knock on Any Door and the partnership flourished with In a Lonely Place. Given his political persuasion, there’s also little doubt that Ray was very much against the burgeoning Hollywood witch hunt at the time. (Art Smith, who played Steele’s loyal agent Mel Lippman, would soon be blacklisted as one of the names given by his former Group Theatre collaborator Elia Kazan.) Surely it was more than coincidence that Ray modeled the apartment complex where Dix and Laurel live after his own first home in Hollywood.
Regarding the director’s personal life at the time, there’s no indication that any tension stemming from the collapse of Nicholas Ray’s marriage to Gloria Grahame hurt the film. After meeting on the set of A Woman’s Secret, Grahame married her director, but their relationship was, privately, over during the filming of In a Lonely Place. Columbia head Harry Cohn had originally slotted Ginger Rogers to play Laurel, but Ray’s insistence on his then-wife proved right. This might be Grahame’s most accomplished role, an emotionally scarred woman who’s run away from a wealthy lover and finds refuge with a man completely unequipped to protect her. Grahame had a tendency to play less-refined, pouty females, which she did to great effect. Here, though, she’s much more restrained and Laurel is a mature, confident woman who’s still not afraid to make her intentions known. Grahame’s unique speaking voice and habit of raising her right eyebrow are mostly reined in as well, giving the character a natural, reserved effect.
Though Ray is uncredited with the screenplay, and the opening titles list Edmund H. North for the adaptation despite his questionable involvement in the final effort, his stamp is all over the film. The book by Dorothy B. Hughes (who also wrote the source novel for Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse) shows Dixon Steele as a serial killer who repeatedly murders and rapes women in a psychosexual rampage. The first-person narrative of the novel differs significantly from Andrew Solt’s screenplay. In Bernard Eisenschitz’s Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Ray’s personal script notes illustrate his substantial contribution to the finished film and make clear that the director’s impact was critical in turning the writing of Hughes and Solt into what would become the archetypal Nicholas Ray movie.
The poster tagline (”with the surprise finish!”) is nearly laughable for its unintentional accuracy. The real surprise is not what the poster is most likely referring to, Steele’s innocence confirmed by Sgt. Lochner over the telephone, but the utter disintegration of the relationship between Dix and Laurel. Movies are supposed to end happily (or they were in 1950, at least), failed romances conclude on good terms and the characters learn something in the process to make them better persons. Nothing even close to that happens here. Dix is only prevented from probably murdering Laurel when the phone rings. His exit is painful, pronounced and final. He walks out of Laurel’s apartment, not headed for his own home, and the audience is left with no indication of happiness, learning or redemption. It’s over between Laurel and Dix and we’re given no hint as to the future.
The original ending had Grahame’s character, Laurel Gray, not being saved by the telephone and Dixon Steele murdering her. Returning to his script to type out the lines quoted here at the top of the page, Dix was then arrested by Det. Nicolai for the murder. Ray was unhappy with the conclusion that violence was the only way out for the characters and quietly set up the final scene on his own. He cleared the set except for the principal actors and claimed to have improvised what eventually became the ending in the film. It would prove to be much more powerful and sad than the scripted version. An ambiguity now hovers over Dix and Laurel. Instead of a physical prison, Dix is relegated to a lifetime of loneliness. The great, emotionally devastating ending that remains is unrelenting and unsparing.