John Ford’s Indian Summer… September 23, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, About John Ford, Westerns , 5 commentsSergeant Rutledge & Cheyenne Autumn
Like the man, John Ford’s politics are…complicated. Just when you think you have Pappy pegged as a left-leaning liberal, then you read of his backing for politicians with the most venal right wing policies. How do you square that with many of his films? How could the author of The Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr Lincoln, The Prisoner of Shark Island, Steamboat Round The Bend, Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn vote for Goldwater and Nixon?
This man, capable of great art, could also be capable of great cruelty; Sergeant Rutledge might be a piece of liberal cinema, but it didn’t stop Ford from telling his lead actor to go and ‘eat with the niggers’ during a filming break.
What was the point? Was it a typically offensive put-down, or was Ford trying to get his company of actors, and Woody Strode in particular, into the right frame of mind with a piece of calculated, nasty, but all too real, racism. As said, like his politics, Ford was a complex human being.
After having viewed Sergeant Rutledge, the story of a black cavalry sergeant on trial for his life, for the first time in, well, God knows how long, and the first time in OAR, I’m still trying to make sense of what I saw, and I’ll probably have to watch it again before I can express anything anywhere near coherent about it. But I’m struggling - really struggling - to come to terms with that last shot in the courtroom.
Without giving the game away to anyone who has yet to see it, what I’d seen to that point was a frankly amazing piece of work, not just given the director, but the times in which it was made. Woody Strode is immense, in every sense, striding the film like the ‘Captain Buffalo’ he is. Quoting from Strode’s autobiography, Ford biographer Joe McBride describes the genuine emotions Strode expresses during his cross-examination scene, and indeed the electricity of these emotions are there for all to see and feel, transmitted across every single frame, enough to make our muscles tense and, for this viewer, to sob out loud with him. It’s not acting; Strode is living the part, and he wasn’t even nominated for Oscar. For shame.
Essentially a courtroom drama, Sergeant Rutledge doesn’t make any great use of the Monument Valley exterior locations, and the framing seems to be a little cramped at times (the transfer on the Warners R1 is also a mite flat, but I can live with it), perhaps Ford was looking for claustrophobia in his film, or maybe it’s those vistas from The Searchers that make it pale by comparison. Unlike that film, and Cheyenne Autumn, the Valley isn’t there to give a sense of great vastness, of the magnitude of Ethan’s task, the isolation of the settlers, or the march through a desolate landscape of a people who were alone and virtually friendless in a country that had been theirs, and theirs alone, for centuries
Sergeant Rutledge is a film with a great moral core, topped with a massively dignified central performance from Strode and his fellow black actors. The rest of the cast, Jeffrey Hunter in particular, barely put a foot wrong…until the wonderful Billie Burke (her final screen role) is given that fatal last courtroom line, and like the mistimed comedy ending of Two Rode Together, my jaw drops open, and my head whirls with a mix of emotions. I must watch it again, and soon.
Cheyenne Autumn has been described as Ford’s apology to the American Indian. The old man himself proffered it as the first western he had filmed from their perspective, but Ford had long been sympathetic to them; from his early days filming in Monument Valley, he had made many friends among the indigenous Navajo and employed them - to their amusement - playing a variety of tribes, and (legend has it) telling dirty jokes whenever a character was required to speak ‘Comanche’, ‘Apache’ or ‘Cheyenne’. Ford and the Navajo embraced each other to the extent that during one hard winter, the old man, dubbed Natani Nez (’Tall Leader’) by the tribe, organised air drops of food and supplies.
In Fort Apache, the slaughter of the cavalry is undertaken reluctantly by Cochise, his shoulders slumping when Owen Thursday gives him no other option. Nathan Brittles is a paternal figure both to his men and the Indians in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, an old man unwilling to shed any blood, and in Rio Grande, the Indians are off the reservation on the warpath after being whipped up into a ‘holy war’ by aggressive tribal leaders (what they are being aggressive about we can only guess, however). In The Searchers, Scar is given just as much justification for his hatred of whites as Ethan is for his psychotic hatred of all Indians.
But in Cheyenne Autumn, Ford’s last western, we finally see history from the Indians’ point of view; just why they were unwilling to share their land with the greedy, lying, money grabbing, racist white settlers, why they couldn’t trust the word of men who broke treaty after treaty, who embraced a policy of genocide, both overtly and covertly, standing by the sidelines as famine and disease achieved what lance, sabre and the bullet could not.
Cheyenne Autumn was panned on release as being overlong and dull. Watching it now, it stands as being one of Ford’s crown jewels. Filmed by Bill Clothier in glorious Super Panavision, the Monument Valley locations are simply stunning (and you can have fun spotting the sites where the old man had planted his cameras many times before).
The story - a ‘footnote in history’ Widmark’s Captain Thomas Archer chides us at the start of his narration - is simple. Based on real tragedies, and Mari Sandoz’s novel, the Cheyenne endure a 1,500 miles march from their south west desert reservation - where nearly three-quarters of the original 1,000 men, women and children had died - in a bid to return to their lushly verdant, traditional hunting grounds at Yellowstone. Ford shows this immensely proud warrior tribe preferring death on a Trail of Tears rather than a lingering annihilation from lack of food and decent medical care.
In reality it was Cherokee who were force marched by the authorities on the actual Trail of Tears, in 1838, 40 years earlier than the setting of the film; some 4,000 died. And the real Dull Knife and Little Wolf, their villages caught up in the brutal retaliation following Little Big Horn, did precipitate a Cheyenne break for freedom similar to that portrayed in Cheyenne Autumn. The former was captured and mercilessly killed, alongside his braves and their squaws, who, it is said, held up their little ones to be shot, at the Fort Robinson massacre. As for the latter, though he did lead the authorities on a merry dance, his story had no real happy ending; it wasn’t a time for such. Nor was it indeed, by the way, for minorities in the America of 1964, a fact Ford was very well aware of. No matter how unpalatable Cheyenne Autumn may be for those that simply want to ‘print the legend’, history, as always, proves more sordid.
Cheyenne Autumn is a picture that stands comparison with the famous ‘Cavalry Trilogy’ movies; indeed, it belongs squarely in their company (moreso than The Horse Soldiers) and it is a fitting and proper valediction. Both ‘Dobe’ Carey and Ben Johnson are back playing virtually the same saddle-sore trooper roles they were given 14 years earlier (and uncredited though he is, Johnson back in the stock company after blotting his copybook with the old man), Mike Mazurki fills Vic McLaglan’s boots as the hard drinking First Sergeant (he’s of Polish extraction, rather than Irish, and given a marvellous speech comparing the Cavalry with murderous Cossacks), and George O’Brien - who starred in Ford’s The Iron Horse - is the fort Commander, though much less benevolent than in previous incarnations.
Indeed, while Ford doesn’t entirely destroy his mythic Cavalry, he doesn’t go out of his way to portray them as ‘the good guys’. O’Brien couldn’t give a damn about the Cheyenne under his care, Patrick Wayne’s vengeful Second Lieutenant just wants them dead, and Karl Malden’s Prussian born Captain is a plain and simple Nazi; he’s only obeying orders he says, as he herds the Cheyenne into their concentration camp like internment, cutting off food and water as a punishment. There’s a streak of melancholy cynicism that runs like a vein of gold through the whole piece and as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford takes a good, firm grip on the western mythos, and pulls it inside out.
Only Widmark’s Archer comes out of this with his hands clean, initially he views the Cheyenne simply as a foe to be fought - ‘We put on this blue uniform and then we’re soldiers; Cheyenne are soldiers the moment they’re born’ - but he has a streak of humanity that won’t allow them to be butchered - as Cossacks butchered Poles, or treated as sub-humans.
As if realising this was his last hurrah for the western, Ford casts as many old faces as he can, including many familiar faces as ‘Cheyenne’; among them, uncredited, wearing Chiefs’ Eagle Feathers is Chief Dan George. There has been criticism of Warner’s decision to use Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Roland as the Cheyenne leaders ‘Little Wolf’ and ‘Dull Knife’ - Ford at first wanted Navajo which would indeed have leant a little more verisimilitude, but, given that they were cast, that’s nonsense, surely, and any arguments should have died when they signed their contracts. In the first instance they are excellent actors, doing what thespians have done for centuries - dressing up and pretending to be someone else. In the second, as Mexicans, it’s possible - probable - that the blood of an ancient Native American race flows through their veins, that of the Aztecs. And I won’t hear a word against Victor Jory - he’s magnificent as the old Chief who prefers to expire on the trail rather than ‘in this place of death’.
I’ll say a word too for the ‘Dodge City’ interval, which detractors claim is out of place in the movie. It’s a typical Ford comedy interlude, which leavens an otherwise gloomy tale. It gives the audience time to draw breath and gird their loins for another hour of the grim reality of past misdeeds. I’ve no problems with this, or indeed many of these comedy scenes in Ford films (other than the exceptions quoted above). Ford himself said it was in place of an intermission (though the film was shown in some cinemas with such, and indeed is featured on the DVD presentation), and that no-one did better intermission than James Stewart. Stewart plays a short sighted Wyatt Earp, playing cards with Doc Holliday (Arthur Kennedy) and John Carradine, giving us another version of the card sharp first seen in Stagecoach. Earp gets tangled in the panic caused by the Cheyenne’s march home - ‘Savages murder Settlers!’ yells a newspaper seller with much relish (the whole fourth estate takes a pretty savage beating) - and, to the audience’s delight, first shoots Ken Curtis’s human turd Joe in the foot then hacks out the bullet with a dirty knife.
As he settles back to his card game he asks the Doc that why it is always he that has to perform surgery. ‘You forget that I’m a doctor of dentistry’ says Holliday ‘Now if you’d shot him in the teeth…’ It might be amusing, but at the same time, Ford is underlining his cynicism, and it should be noted that he’s using figures he previously enshrined in My Darling Clementine.
The only real bum note in the whole piece comes with the appearance of Edward G. Robinson as a beleaguered Secretary of the Interior towards the end. Nothing to do with the great Mr Robinson (apart from the fact that his character is a very obvious deux ex machina), but he appears in Monument Valley before a process screen, which is more than a little jarring, considering the otherwise extensive use of the location. Apparently this was to do with Spencer Tracy, Ford’s first choice, having a heart attack during production; whether Robinson was unwilling to fly out to Utah, or it was simply a matter of time, I know not. Thankfully, it’s not fatal (nor was Mr Tracy’s heart attack by the way).
It’s a big film in every sense, with a beautiful and memorable Alex North score, Ford’s most expensive, and one which will reward with multiple viewings, but, as with all Ford films, it’s the little touches which makes one smile - the Remington bronze used in the titles, Robinson’s politician, under siege from the forces of capital, turning to a picture of Lincoln and imploring his ‘old friend’ for advice, the shot against an eye-watering Monument Valley sunset at the end. It might lack the narrative cohesion of some of the old man’s greatest work, it might lack a truly great script, it might lack the authority of a director at the height of his powers, but the stamp of the great visual poet is still there.
McBride urges us to watch Cheyenne Autumn, not for what might have been, but for what it is. And what it is, is a picture that many other directors would have given their soul to include in the filmography. Warners current R1 DVD, like ‘Rutledge’ part of their John Ford Collection, is quite beautifully rendered with strong lush colours and a crystal clear soundtrack.
Both Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn were made when John Ford was deep into his 60s, when many considered his best years behind him. But both these films - capped by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance of course - show that for Ford still had much to offer in what was proving to be an Indian Summer, and not the winter, of his life in the director’s chair.
Dead End (1937) September 15, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, Humphrey Bogart, Crime / Noir / Thriller , add a commentFirst published in another form at The DVD Forums.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be Humphrey Bogart, possibly the only thing Woody Allen and I have in common. That and the specs (plus the neuroses).
Who wouldn’t want to be the hard-bitten Rick Blaine, the resourceful Philip Marlowe or the quintessential noir detective Sam Spade? Who wouldn’t want to sweep Ilsa Lund off her feet, slap Joel Cairo around, or trade zingers with Vivian Sternwood Rutledge?
Well, ‘nobody wouldn’t’ is the simple, if clumsy, answer; these are characters as strong as, in reality, we are weak. They are desirable to women, unbeatable, implacable, always carrying a sharp wit and a loaded gat - and they are all, most definitely, Humphrey Bogart. Even in my pre-teens, I quoted him, practiced the famous lisp, pulled an imaginary snap-brimmed Fedora over my eye, his picture on my bedroom wall, next to la Dietrich, Karloff, Cagney and George Best. Here’s looking at you kids…
For Bogie, the road to stardom was a marathon, not a sprint; from his first screen bit part to the breakthrough of The Petrified Forest - a role he won only because of the stubborn intransigence of Leslie Howard, for which Bogart was forever grateful - took 16 years, time he spent playing ‘anyone for tennis’ types on stage, scratching around. Even then, Duke Mantee seemed to have typecast him as the heavy, sneering and catching bullets for the next few years in the final reel, usually from Jimmy Cagney or Eddie Robinson.
It wasn’t until Bogart took the part of Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle in High Sierra, made the public weep for a doomed criminal, and got rave reviews, that audiences - and more importantly Jack Warner - at last began to see Bogart as something other than the guy they always booed. The following year came the wonderfully cynical Sam Spade, the chase for the black bird, and a film that made this intelligent middle-class New Yorker one of the biggest stars in the Hollywood firmament - at nearly 42 years old.
At the heart of Bogie’s ‘bad guy’ period, came the 1937 Samuel Goldwyn production of Dead End, but Bogart wasn’t just on show here as mere cannon fodder; he was beginning to flex his quite considerable acting muscles (the apogee of which is arguably seen in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Nicholas Ray’s sublime In a Lonely Place) and Hugh ’Baby Face’ Martin gave him the opportunity to do just that.
Made the year before Angels With Dirty Faces, the film spawned the ‘Dead End’ kids (aka the ‘Bowery Boys’) and there are indeed some similarities between the two movies. We have a group of no-hope kids, living dirt poor, stealing, thumbing their noses at authority, who respect and emulate those that came from the same environment and who are now full blown hoodlums. But in ‘Angels’ Cagney - even while he blazing away at the forces of law and order - was always the hero figure; he wasn’t evil, just, well, just ‘a kid who couldn’t run fast enough.’ Obviously Warner, never one to miss the main chance, spotted the potential in simply tweaking the story for his studio’s massively successful gangster series, while knocking off some of its harder edges.
If Rocky Sullivan was just a good kid who took a wrong turn (and who shoots the occasional cop), Bogart’s ‘Baby Face’ Martin is scum; a cold-hearted stiletto wielding killer in a $150 hand made suit, who, with some relish, advises kids to use broken bottles, rocks and knives in a street fight.
Ostensibly, director William Wyler’s film stars lovers Sylvia Sidney and Joel McCrea and their attempts at finding happiness in the hell’s kitchen of New York’s Lower East Side. But there is little doubt that while Bogart, rapidly climbing the ladder to real stardom, is on screen, he’s the real focal point. He is little short of brilliant; and this is another part (the others being the aforementioned High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon) that Bogart won after George Raft turned it down. Raft thought the part was unsympathetic and was shocked at the scene where Martin’s mother cracks him in the chops. There’s even a Warners memo, by the way, considering Raft for Casablanca, though, in truth, the role of Rick was always going to be Bogie’s; who else could have brought that part to such vivid life? I’d love to have been a fly on the wall, however, when Raft visited his agent…
The story; Martin (Bogart) has returned to his old haunt to look up his aging ma (Marjorie Main, who specialised in such) and an old flame, tart with a heart Francey (Claire Trevor - she too rather cornered the market here didn’t she). Gangster Martin, a killer of eight men, is on the run, having just had plastic surgery. He thinks he’ll find some kind of valediction by returning home, but he’s rejected by his horrified mother and disgusted that his one time girl is now a disease ridden prostitute.
He bumps into the next generation of hoodlums, the local tenement street gang, gives them advice on street warfare but is warned off by one of his dockside contemporaries, Dave (McCrea), local guy trying to make good, who can’t make his mind up between Drina (Sidney), sister of the gang leader Tommy (Billy Halop), or the upmarket Kay Burton (Wendy Barrie).
The deeply disappointed Martin comes up with a ’slash and burn’ scheme to kidnap Kay’s younger brother, and Dave, who knows that mixing it with the gangster could mean a knife in the belly, determines to stop him. Meanwhile Tommy seems to be on the inexorable slide towards Reform School; can anyone save him?
Based on Sidney Kingsley’s successful stage play (he also wrote the play Detective Story that Wyler filmed so memorably in 1951) and adapted for the screen by the redoubtable Lillian Hellman, Dead End is a raw slice of social realism, that must have shocked Broadway theatre-goers. With it’s crowded, cockroach infested, tenements filled with rotting garbage, abusive and drunken parents and lawless, filthy children in rags, it pulls no punches.
There’s no doubt about the film’s political sympathies - in the ’30s it was still possible for those on stage and screen to hold liberal views without being tagged a ‘Red’, or, at least, not find yourself on someone’s blacklist - when Drina displays a handsome bruise given to her by a policeman while she was on a strike picket line. Meanwhile, literally looking down on this squalor are the newly built waterfront apartment blocks, filled with dance music from the party going rich, that seem to belong to another world. It’s no fun, need I make the point, being poor.
Nominated for four Oscars, there’s plenty to admire in Wyler’s film; fine acting all round, a sharp script, a quite ferocious Bogart, who, it must be admitted, saves the movie from at times from slipping into mere melodrama, and a noble McCrea (a part, in lesser hands, that could quite easily have slipped into ‘pompous’). There’s an admirable set design from Richard Day and Julia Heron, and some super cinematography by the legendary Gregg Toland, who bookends the film with trademark shots that descend from the skies above New York into the greasy tenements, and back again. At times, it might seem a little stagebound, betraying its roots, but it adds, rather than detracts, to the charm of the piece.
A word too, for some of the more minor cast members - you’ll catch Ford punch-bag Ward Bond as a doorman, Thomas E. Jackson from Public Enemy and Allen Jenkins (the voice of ‘Officer Dibble’) as Martin’s hang dog sidekick Hunk. It’s a taut 92 minute movie; exciting (there is a gun battle of extraordinary viciousness), intelligent, funny and entertaining.
MGM’s transfer of the film on R1 DVD (it’s also available quite cheaply in R2) is quite excellent. There’s hardly a mark or blemish to be seen and it’s beautifully clear; the original elements must be in remarkable condition. If I were to be picky I’d ask for a little more contrast, but, honestly, this is jaw-dropping, top-drawer stuff for a film coming up for 68-years-old. Of course, there are no extras, and subtitles are available in English, Spanish or French. Highly recommend.
…One of Our Aircraft is Missing September 12, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, War Films , 5 commentsBefore the main feature, a short story…
It was at my father’s wake, nearly 16-years-ago now, that Albert, his eldest brother, recounted what I thought was - is - a brilliant wartime tale.
Albert was a mid-upper turret gunner and wireless operator serving in a Halifax squadron out of Lincolnshire. The old man of the crew (he was nicknamed ‘grandad’; he had just celebrated his 29th birthday), he was responsible for a pre-sortie ritual that the boys - in true RAF fashion - were loathe to break.
Some months earlier, Albert had been caught short just before clambering on board and despite his many layers of clothing - several centimetres from his bulky sheepskin flying jacket to his electrically heated undersuit - had taken a leak on the mighty four-engined bomber’s starboard wheel. The raid was hell, the squadron copped a blizzard of flak outbound and on return…but Albert’s ‘plane didn’t boast so much as a scratch. It was obvious to all why. The pre-flight piss was now on the superstitious crew’s check-list, because the first time they didn’t do it…well, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.
So, the armourers are making final adjustments to the bomb load, the last glimmers of a blinding sun on a frosty, crisp, autumn evening, just disappearing below the copse of trees at the far end of the runway. A picture postcard English scene, save for the entire crew standing round the larger than man-sized wheel and hosing it down, the golden showers sending up great wafts of steam from the centre of the circle.
Mid-flow, and to the side, there is a tremendous thud, and the ground gives a ponderous shudder. One of the 500lb weapons has just fallen from the bomb bay, slammed into the tarmac, and is rolling threateningly towards them, a villainous looking grey cylinder filled with volatile high explosives. What kind of fuse has been fitted to this damn thing? They don’t hang around to find out.
They run. Well, they waddle. Swiftly.
Eight men, each clad as the ‘Michelin Man’, bounding, across the airfield pan, their flies undone, pants around their hips, their tackle flapping, the boys well and truly out of the barracks. The crew careered into the long grass at the edge of the tarmac, tried to bury themselves into the cool Lincolnshire earth and clamped their hands over heads. Eyes squeezed tightly shut, they waited for an explosion that would leave a crater the size of Grantham and hurl them, far, far into the air like so many loose limbed stunt dummies.
Of course, it didn’t go off. But that was the end of that particular irrationality.
That was the only story Albert, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross (subsequently stolen) when he stayed in his turret and nearly froze to death after his heated suit packed in, told me. I suspect his other memories of flying over a hostile Europe, while below him simply millions of Axis troops were trying to kill him, weren’t as much fun as nearly being blown to kingdom come by his own deadly pay load.
Albert is one of the reasons I’m drawn to wartime flying films, and in particular the film reviewed here. From the ‘posh’ end of the family, I didn’t have much contact with him as a child, but I was deeply impressed by him as a person though he didn’t know it. He’s heading into the sunset now, 93-years-old next month, unaware that he’s one of my heroes. Bless him.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had made four films together when they came to 1942’s …One of Our Aircraft is Missing, and it’s the first picture, jointly produced with J. Arthur Rank’s British National, they made under the banner of their own company The Archers.
A propaganda film intended to stiffen the backbone, …One of Our Aircraft is Missing is a reversal of the previous year’s 49th Parallel, with ’our’ boys trying to make it home across enemy territory instead of a German U-Boat crew in Canada. It’s also a love letter both to Bomber Command - whose losses were piling up - and to the people of occupied Holland, made at a time when those backbones were still most firmly against the wall. While it may be a flag-waver, the piece also displays a fierce intelligence and deftness of touch for which The Archers became almost universally admired.
The inspiration for the story is revealed at the start of the film; the execution of Dutch farm workers by the Herrenvolk for helping downed RAF crews, and the title itself, a phrase familiar to radio listeners at the time when the BBC would end news of nightly raids with the words‘one (or more) of our aircraft is missing’.
The narrative is very simple; the crew of an RAF Wellington, call-signed ‘B’ for Bertie, fly to bomb Stuttgart. After completing their mission, they are hit by flak and limp home on one engine. When that too starts to stutter and fail, they abandon the aircraft and the six crewmen bail out, 30 miles from the Dutch coast, the enemy all around them. They have to escape back to England…somehow.
The crew is representative of Britain, or at least what Britain should be; fighting back, fearless, indomitable, cheerful under fire. Lead by their young, fresh-faced pilot John (Hugh Burdon), there’s also bluff Yorkshireman and co-pilot Tom (Eric Portman, getting a rare chance to employ the accent of his native Halifax), Welshman Bob (former footballer Emrys Jones), actor Frank (Hugh Williams given an opportunity for some theatrical in-jokes, and to dress up as a woman), West Countryman Geof (Bernard Miles with his ’simple man’ schtick) and the sage Sir George, the elder statesman of the crew (in truth, too old to fly) played by the always excellent Godfrey Tearle.
In typical Archers fashion the Germans themselves are not demonised per se. They are, at one point sympathised with as ’an unhappy people’ and flying out to bomb the city, the crew discuss their happier memories of Stuttgart and its inhabitants (Pressburger was educated at the University there), but that still doesn’t stop Tom dropping a bottle of warm urine out of the hatch from which he’s just bombarded the Germans with propaganda leaflets. When the boys of ‘Bertie’ hit the deck, it’s a different story - taken in by sympathetic Dutch, they find the Germans are, unsurprisingly, hated by the occupied Hollanders.
Robert Helpmann has the thankless task of being the only Dutch villain, a dandified quisling, who gets his just desserts. Polyglot Peter Ustinov shows off his Dutch playing the church padre (his first screen role), look out in the same scene for Alec Clunes (father of Martin and the very spitting image…) as the organist who plays with fire, taking the rise out of a menacing Nazi. You’ll also spot Powell himself, by the way, as the airfield despatcher, orchestrating the raid as well as the film.
But the glue that holds the film together is the escape itself; two key Dutch underground strands lead by two actresses, first Pamela Brown as the spirited ‘Else Meertens’, then Googie Withers as ‘Jo de Vries’, all shoulder pads and attitude. These are strong, independent women, of a type that a war in which the menfolk, by necessity, desert the household, produced by the bucket load, but also which the Archers relished in portraying.
Says Else, with as much defiance as she can muster: ‘Do you think that we Hollanders who threw the sea out of our country will let the Germans have it? Better the sea.’
Pressburger gives Jo another speech, one which must have given some comfort to those at home that gave thought to the fact that we were actually bombing these occupied countries, and that midst the ruins must lie the bodies of innocents as well as the enemy. As the engines of another Bomber Command raid thrum overhead, Jo points out of the window to the streets below: ‘You see? That’s what you’re doing for us. Can you hear them running for shelter? Can you understand what that means to all the occupied countries? To enslaved people, having it drummed into their ears that the Germans are masters of the Earth. Seeing these masters running for shelter, seeing them crouching under tables. And hearing that steady hum night after night. That noise which is oil for the burning fire in our hearts.’
It’s stirring stuff now, but must have fired the spirits of cinema audiences in blacked-out and blitzed Britain. The ‘Boys Own’ escape is nicely handled, with a mixture of tension, high drama and light comedy, the democracy the crew forms in adversity a counterpoint to the dictatorship on display previously in 49th Parallel. All in all, a very neat package put together by a team that would go on to become cinema giants; not just P&P themselves, but David Lean in the editing room (where the foundations of his genius lay), and Ronald Neame handling cinematography.
There are some blissfully beautiful shots - the setting sun glinting off the skin of the Wellington’s sturdy geodetic frame, the little row boat gliding up the harbour ‘neath a bomber’s moon. A word too for the production design and special effects - the bombing scenes, the crash of ‘B’ Bertie and the locations; Lincolnshire successfully disguised as the Netherlands - all wonderfully well done.
Legend has it that Noel Coward visited the set during filming and was so impressed that he plundered members of the production team - most famously Lean and Neame - for In Which We Serve.
There’s no score by the way, not a note, save for the incidental music (the triumphal playing of the Dutch national anthem, Frank listening to his wife singing on the radio, etc.), and the rhythm of those aircraft engines.
Universal’s recent R2 DVD of the film is really quite good. While not perfect, the print used is in pretty good shape and the transfer is detailed with excellent contrast. The mono English soundtrack (no other track is available) is also similarly decent. Typically for Universal, there are no extras.
…One of Our Aircraft is Missing may not be regarded as front rank Powell and Pressburger, but even second class P&P rates higher than most. Highly recommended.
Cause For More Celebration September 4, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : DVD News & Info, British Film , add a commentSince my post Cause for Celebration?, the new releases, or re-releases, of British films has never, it seems, ceased. It is either a happy coincidence, or I have influence hitherto thought beyond mere mortal man (or blogger). The former is a safe bet.
The only slightly bad news is the removal from the Network website of their Things to Come SE (which we discovered, thanks to that post, was not to be the work of TLE Films), though it is still available from DD Home Entertainment. Let’s hope it is a temporary setback.
So, newly discovered, at various e-tailers - a David Lean Box Set (coming, we now know, from ITV DVD formerly Granada Ventures), containing The Sound Barrier (1952), Hobsons Choice (1954), Blithe Spirit (1945), Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Madeleine (1950), The Passionate Friends (1949), This Happy Breed (1944), and one would hope, a raft of interesting extra features.
ITV DVD is also behind the new Powell and Pressburger Box - The Tales of Hoffman (1951), Black Narcissus (1946), A Matter of Life & Death (1946), The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I am Going (1945), 49th Parallel (1941), The Battle of the River Plate (1956), Ill Met By Moonlight (1957), They’re A Weird Mob (1966), The Red Shoes (1948). It beats the previous Carlton box with the inclusion of the first two named titles, and the new Black Narcissus is truly gorgeous, but at a penny shy of £60, the box will have to be stacked with new extras and, in some cases, new transfers.
Optimum’s re-release of Don’t Look Now is to be a Special Edition; no details, but here’s hoping it is something more than just the previous brief Nic Roeg interview, and that they fix the audio problems evident on the Warners / Studio Canal disc. Also from Optimum is The Ultimate Carry On Box Set (30 Discs), which brings together both previous extras stacked Carlton releases and the Warners / Studio Canal titles, which will now have extra features included. Look out too for a four disc St. Trinians Box Set, and a 12 disc British Comedy Collection Box Set - Porridge (Dir. Dick Clement, 1979), Rising Damp (Dir. Joseph McGrath, 1980), Bless This House (Dir. Gerald Thomas, 1972), Steptoe And Son (Dir. Cliff Owen, 1972), Steptoe And Son Ride Again (Dir. Peter Sykes, 1973), Ooh, You Are Awful (Dir. Cliff Owen, 1972), Love Thy Neighbour (Dir. John Robins, 1973), Till Death Do Us Part (Dir. Norman Cohen, 1969), The Likely Lads (Dir. Michael Tuchner, 1976), Are You Being Served? (Dir. Bob Kellett, 1977), On The Buses (Dir. Harry Booth, 1971), Holiday On The Buses (Dir. Harry Booth, 1972) / Mutiny On The Buses (Dir. Bryan Izzard, 1973)
Paramount is releasing Oh, What a Lovely War! in both R1 and R2, featuring Sir Richard Attenborough’s first ever DVD commentary, plus featurettes - looking forward immensely to that in October. In much the same vein, look out for the allegorical The Shooting Party, set on the eve of World War 1 and the great James Mason’s last film, also due for release in both regions and again featuring some interesting extras.
There’s a new 16 title Will Hay Box Set on the way: The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942), Dandy Dick (1935), The Ghost of St Michaels (1941), The Goost Steps Out (1942), My Learned Friend (1943), Radio Parade of 1935 (1934), Those Were the Days (1934), Oh Mr Porter (1937), Convict 99 (1938), Windbag The Saiilor (1936), Ask A Policeman (1938), Boys Will Be Boys (1935), Old Bones of the River (1938), Where There’s a Will (1936), Good Morning, Boys (1937), Hey! Hey! USA! (1938). This will outdo the previous set, not only in terms of quantity, but also quality - Val Guest took part in the recording of extras before his death earlier this year.*
Not British films but coming from an excellent British company, in Eureka’s Master of Cinema range. The Complete Buster Keaton Short Films Collection 1917-1923 Box Set (4 Discs), is a lip-smacking propect considering the quality of the previous MoC range. The blurb:
Containing 32 films - with a running time of over 700 minutes - this collection documents Buster Keaton’s short films between 1917-1923. Capturing Keaton’s first steps in front of a camera this box set charts his early association with ex-Keystone Kop Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle through to headlining, starring in, and directing his own box office smash hits. Using Chaplin’s old Hollywood studios in 1920, Keaton’s sophisticated technical inventiveness coupled with his haunted-yet-handsome “Stone Face” persona, created a succession of the most timeless, classic comedy shorts ever realised. The Masters Of Cinema series presents the following films in a four-disc box set, with audio commentary by Joseph McBride on six of the films, and a 212-page book:
The Butcher Boy (1917), The Rough House (1917), His Wedding Night (1917), Oh, Doctor! (1917), Coney Island (1917), Out West (1918), The Bell Boy (1918), Moonshine (1918), Good Night Nurse (1918), The Cook (1918), Backstage (1919), The Hayseed (1919), The Garage (1919), The “High Sign”* (finished 1920, released 1921), One Week* (1920), Convict 13* (1920), The Scarecrow (1920), Neighbors (1920), The Haunted House (1921), Hard Luck (1921), The Goat (1921), The Playhouse* (1921), The Boat* (1921), The Paleface (1922), Cops* (1922), My Wife’s Relations (1922), The Blacksmith (1922), The Frozen North (1922), Daydreams (1922), The Electric House (1922), The Balloonatic (1923), The Love Nest (1923) (*features audio commentary)
*A little note on the Will Hay Box Set; since posting this, I now learn that not only is there some doubt as to Val Guest’s participation in any extras, but on the future of this new set - which is up for pre-order on several websites - itself. Watch this space…
And I can use this edit to add a few titles - coming this month from DDHE: The Card, Charley’s Aunt (though that box art seems to be a mix of both the US and UK versions), Conquest of The Air, Hotel Sahara. In October: Man of Aran, Sailor Beware!
No More Heroes..? September 2, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, War Films , 7 commentsThe news of a remake of The Dam Busters makes me shudder at the possibilities; there are so many obstacles to any potential success, that it defies belief that anyone would attempt such a project.
First, it’s a European and Commonwealth story; in the main, the all-important American audience may simply not care and stay away in droves (unless, that is, 617 Squadron suddenly becomes the 93rd Bomber group). Secondly, are film makers just too far removed from the event to actually recreate it with any semblance of reality? And, lastly, disregarding how the Americans receive the story, is the core modern movie audience itself too far removed to actually give a damn about history that isn’t quite ancient enough?
I watched A Bridge Too Far the other night, directed by a Briton, from a script written by an anglophile American. Viewing it for the first time in many a moon, it comes across as exactly the kind of product designed to make money by the barrow load; as a vehicle for a largely British action, Attenborough’s film was made to ‘play in Peoria.’
The sneering Germans are by turns cynical or cowardly, the tea slurping Brits (they run short of ammo, but tea? Not on your life…), snobby, incredibly stupid or chirpy cannon fodder, the ‘go get ‘em’ Americans - their involvement in actual events bolstered to increase overseas returns (it was ever thus) - totally heroic. That also extends to Gene Hackman’s Polish Maj. Gen. Stanislaw Sosabowski, an American by proxy, and the glorification of the offscreen General George S. Patton at the expense of the equally unseen Montgomery. It’s ever so slightly stomach turning, that amongst the main characters, it’s Dirk Bogarde’s apparently casually uncaring Lt. Gen. ’Boy’ Browning that shoulders the blame for the failure of Operation Market Garden - but then, Browning was conveniently dead at the time the film was made.
In other words, the stereotypes are securely in place, as is box office success - it might work as a piece of cinema (and oddly, despite my vilification, I think it does at times), but as an attempt to accurately portray historical events and the people that took part in them, for the most part, it stinks. But then, this a movie, not a documentary…
British war movies are a bit of a mixed bag. Barged aside by the American war machine, both on film and in reality it seems, there are relatively few pictures made here that attempt a real dissection of men at war, that look at what makes them cowards (or indeed, what exactly is a coward) or gives them courage - what drives them to do what they do? Our home grown efforts take a handful of stereotypes, shake ‘em up and pull them out of a steel helmet - the cool middle class commanders, the cheeky Cock-er-nee chappies, the stoic civvies who endure the bombing but keep the lie alive that ‘Britain Can Take It’ (people booed and threw stones at Churchill as he made his photo opportunisitic tours of blitzed London). During wartime itself, there was an obvious need for producers to keep the spirits up and portray a mythic Britain, where everything would turn out alright in the end, that sacrifice in the name of the nation was needed, that we had to keep those upper lips stiff..and, of course, everyone knew their place.
After the war, in this country, it was films made by the middle classes, written by the middle classes and acted by the middle classes that for the most part kept these myths alive; in fact most successful British war films are told from the perspective of men who know what’s best for the ‘chaps’, or who die quietly without too much fuss, without messing up the nice white bed linen. Colditz, for example, still immensely entertaining, is portrayed as some sort of lunatic extension of an Oxbridge University, complete with footlights revue. Reach For The Sky features the courageous, egotistical, self-obsessed Douglas Bader; ‘gor blimey’ working class characters are reduced to packing bags or cleaning the boots of their flying officers.
There are films, of course, that do break free of this straitjacket. As time moved on, so did the films and so did their attitudes; The Long and The Short and The Tall almost wholly focuses on the poor bloody British infantry, trapped in a war they don’t want to fight, in a country of which they know little. The Hill, another ‘war’ film in which the working stiff is the central to the narrative, an examination of the sheer madness of the military mind. It’s odd (well, not so odd) that another American, Joe Losey, directed the very underrated and very British King & Country, its story of alleged cowardice now part of current events (there are DVDs out in both R1 and R2 I would appreciate opinions of if anyone has them, by the way). I’ve only ever seen Stuart Cooper’s Overlord (apparently on Criterion’s slate) once, but if we are to value films for their accurate portrayal of men at war, placed precisely in a given time, it’s got to come high up the list. Devastating stuff.
I’m moving pretty far from modern warfare, but if I’m discussing the British working man at war I must give a nod to Zulu; James Booth’s Henry Hook is a shirking, thieving, drunken layabout with a proper sense of the value of his own neck. And he wins the Victoria Cross. Go on ‘enry! Let us not forget either Tony Richardson’s The Charge of The Light Brigade…I digress (again).
Right now, the second world war film seems to be moving back into vogue and it’s here, in the 21st century, that the question begs to be asked; are we not too far removed now from actual events to give them any sense of veracity? It’s one thing to portray, say, 19th century warfare and 19th century people inaccurately, but World War Two is within touching distance of most of us, who must know someone, still, of the right vintage.
And it’s here I wonder what they’ll do with The Dam Busters. If I was to, once again, state the bleedin’ obvious, it’s that people have changed in the last 60 odd years; whether it’s to do with diet, exercise or grooming - or central casting - but every time I watch a period piece now, everything seems wrong. Hair styles, teeth, body toning, speech patterns, skin colour (nobody tanned in the ’40s, except the rich and even then…), the actual basic shape of people has changed. Check out the average cast of a war film made in the ’40s or ’50s; look at the faces, particularly the faces of those a little down the cast list, and you’ll see what I mean.
We also seem to insist on slapping modern sensibilities on to people who, even at this short distance, might as well have come from Mars. Basic attitudes, dress, behaviour, moral code - what would have made the young men of seven decades ago blush bright red, even in the tap room of their local, is now the stuff of childrens TV. I think of my own family, my father, my uncles, who went to war, some that didn’t come back, some that came home broken, others who tucked the memories away in a private place, never to be shared. Real, plain, ordinary men, never portayed, in my experience, properly on film.
Just prior to World War Two, my current home town of Bolton was part of a ‘Mass Observation’ project, a snapshot of Britain in the late ’30s. It revealed, among other things, that despite the very recent memory of having been ‘lions led by donkeys’, the average man was eager to go to war. He would defend his home, his country and his loved ones. Many feared their wives and sweethearts would be raped by the invading Hun. I wonder, now, what a similar survey would turn up? I wonder…
Can the new The Dam Busters be sold if we present these men the way they were shown in Michael Anderson’s stirring film? Courageous boys - and they were all very young men - out to ‘do their duty for King and country’? Richard Todd, for intance must have brought his own experience to the table (he was involved in the taking of Pegasus Bridge on D-Day, and played his own commander in the admirable The Longest Day) and thus, brought a truth to his performance that would be difficult to replicate. Or will these more cynical times demand that the raid’s consequences, the killing of German civilians, and the actual failure of the Dam Busters raid to halt the German war machine, be scrutinised more closely? Does the war film now demand an explicit anti-war text (Barnes Wallice did agonise over what his bombs had wrought and what the raid cost in human terms)? Have we no time - has, indeed, the time passed - for heroes, especially British heroes?
Another question that hangs heavy is what will they do with Gibson’s beloved labrador ‘Nigger’, also, famously, the codeword for successfully delivering the bouncing bombs? Do we excise the word with a deference to modern sensibilities (as it has been in some TV showings of the film), do we pretend it was never so. And in so doing, as Spike Lee said, ‘…if we don’t show these things, how is anybody going to know that they really happened?’ I’m not that old (honestly I’m not), but I do remember my grandfather owning a shoe polish that was ’Nigger Brown’; that’s where Gibson’s affectionate name comes from, the name of a colour, a little piece of casual, unknowing racisim from a time when the whole world was fabricated from such. Times have changed; we know better now. I also hope we know better than to cover it up.
We shouldn’t forget. If we intend to portray ‘real’ people (even ‘real’ people in fictionalised events), then we must not shirk from doing so. Real people, in real situations reacting as they would have, behaving in a contemporaneous manner. But I’m possibly asking too much of Peter Jackson and his production team; I certainly hope not. I fear a CGI bombing fest, a ‘cartoon’ film, in all possible meanings of the word. ‘Feel the force, Guy’, a ghostly voice may intone, ‘feel the force…’ At least we’ll get to see an accurate representation of the bomb itself, still on the ‘top secret’ list when the original film was made, and, comically, still on the same list when I made my first ‘Airfix’ scale model of a 617 Squadron Lancaster. The bomb design was accurate on that too, however.
It’s a lasting regret that no film has been made of Len Deighton’s coruscating examination of a British 1000 bomber raid on Germany. In the marvellous novel Bomber, there are no heroes, no villains, no winners, just losers. It is, as Jack Hawkins says in The Cruel Sea, ‘…it’s just the war…this bloody war.’
Indeed. But I return to thoughts (as I often do these days) of the men I know - knew - personally who fought, who saw things that nobody who wants to retain their sanity should. Who came home and, in that, oh, so English way, got on with it. Ordinary men you wouldn’t look twice at, queuing for their pensions, shuffling unsteadily down the streets, numbers dwindling fast.
And they are heroes still; every one.