Broken Trail March 5, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , 2 commentsPrentice Ritter: I get rousted out of my sleep sometimes when Nature calls. I find there’s something frightenin’ ’bout that hour of the night ’cause there ain’t no foolin’ yourself ’bout what you done or what you hadn’t done with your life.
The western, the genre that spawned the very first narrative film, has fallen on hard times. Critics have been writing the western’s obituary for around the past four decades, but while it’s taken an arrow, and is hurt bad, it’s not quite ready for Boot Hill yet.
Just when you’re ready to whistle up a coffin (or maybe make that three…), along comes an Unforgiven, an Open Range or a The Proposition, and there’s much talk of a dramatic revival. One that never really comes to pass.
What makes some great westerns so is seemingly, sadly, unfashionable for today’s Cineplex audiences - the comfortable longueurs of something that sprawls across the screen like Once Upon a Time In The West, the fresh-scrubbed, golden hued mythos of a Stagecoach or a Shane, the subtlety of male relationships that is the bedrock of a Red River or a Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.
In the decades that westerns were produced by their 100s, they covered practically every situation one can think of, and cross pollinated into other genres - musicals, comedies, noir, westerns that took their lead from Shakespeare, from contemporary events, there are psychological westerns, graphically violent westerns, westerns that deconstruct the myths they themselves espoused at cinema’s dawn.
And when cinema-goers fell out of love with the cattle drives, the saloon bars and the dusty, wooden fronted, frontier towns, westerns took off into other settings, into outer space, for instance, with blasters replacing six guns, special effects usually in place of literate scripts…
The common thread of this most malleable of genres - an individual, or a group of men, pitted against an adversary where only courage and muscle, their wits and a six-gun will bail them out - has endured, though the location, the untamed America of the late 19th century, seemingly no longer strikes a chord with the vast majority of modern audiences, or at least enough to make the western the sure fire hit it once was.
Ironically television, once the western film’s - indeed, the movies as a whole - mortal enemy in the small screen boom of the 1950s, looks to be riding to the rescue. Over the past decade there have been several decent westerns on TV, some of them suffering slightly by being evidently underfunded (the sheer scale of the battle got away from the makers of Gettysburg, a huge army of 1000s of extras being beyond their pockets). But big screen values are now trickling down to the small. Leading the charge is Robert Duvall and Walter Hill, an acolyte of Sam Peckinpah, and both self-confessed lifelong fans of horse operas.
Hill gave us three aces with The Long Riders, Wild Bill and Geronimo, and westerns in all but name - Southern Comfort, Trespass and Extreme Prejudice. The big, burly Californian also directed the pilot episode and was consulting producer of HBO’s Deadwood, an exhilarating spittoon of a series; a foul-mouthed, entertaining, if ephemeral, hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Last year Hill was in the chair for Broken Trail, a terrific three-hour two-parter, the very first made specifically for the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel, produced by and starring the quite fabulous Robert Duvall, for whom this was the third part of his own western trilogy, following the hugely successful adaptation of Larry McMurty’s (he of the excellent Brokeback Mountain) Lonesome Dove for TV, and Kevin Costner’s admirable Fordian western movie, Open Range.
The latter was another of those films that was going to make the western fashionable again, but Costner’s follow up in the same genre appears to have stalled. The big screen turned it’s face from the traditional style and story of Open Range, and the best we’ve had, in recent years, has been the hard nosed, fly-blown and bloody Australian frontier of The Proposition, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, less of a western I suppose - despite it’s tedious ‘gay cowboy’ tag - more of a tragic love story, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones’ ‘Peckinpah-esque’ Tex-Mex chilli pepper of a modern day western.
It has been down to Duvall’s production company, Butcher’s Run Films, to give us what is the real Open Range successor in the shape of Broken Trail, a small-screen project with those aforementioned lush big screen values.
Like Open Range, I can’t think of a better description for Broken Trail than a ’good old fashioned western’, an elegiac ‘end of trail’ story of good versus evil. These events take place with the west on the cusp of the 20th century, and the death of a way of life and maybe of a whole set of values that, had they not been commonplace, is more satisfying to imagine that they should have been so. For if the men that built the west were wholly otherwise, is not an entire nation constructed on the most questionable foundations? Print the legend - it’s easier on the eye, and the heart.
Thus, Broken Trail gives us both good guys and bad, no anti-heroes here, no blurring of the lines. The good are straight and true, the bad are just plain nasty and the ugly, well, she runs the whorehouse…
A ‘broken trail’ is one that, through natural disaster, human intervention or just plain lack of use, runs no place. Broken Trail deals with a number of lives that, mostly through happenstance, come together, some going nowhere, others that are damaged through circumstance or the intervention of evil-doers. How these ‘trails’ are made whole again and put back on the map, or wiped off it, is the essence of Alan Geoffrion’s script.
The year is 1898 and Prentice ‘Print’ Ritter (Robert Duvall) invites his estranged nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Hayden Church) to join him driving 500 head of horses from Oregon to Wyoming, animals desperately needed by both the British Army for their war against the Boers, and by the United States Cavalry for the Spanish American conflict.
Print, tired after a life in the saddle and gambling all on this hazardous journey, tells the drifting Tom that his mother has died and effectively disowned him in her Will, leaving the family ranch to her brother rather than the son who left home under a cloud several years earlier. Print is offering Tom a chance not only to earn some real hard cash, but to make something of his wasted life at last along the tough Oregon Trail.
On their journey, Print and Tom pick up a number of waifs and strays; Henry ‘Heck’ Gilpin (Scott Cooper) is faded Southern aristocracy, who eschewed the comfortable life back home for the adventure of exploring the west. They take on five Chinese girls, sold into slavery by their poverty stricken families, and bound for a life of prostitution at ‘Big Rump’ Kate’s (Rusty Schwimmer) cat house. In freeing them, Tom has to mete out some rough frontier justice to ‘Captain’ Billy Fender (James Russo), an act wholeheartedly approved of by Print - ‘You didn’t blink; you did what was right - that’s good…’
Kate doesn’t take too kindly to her goods being bushwhacked, and offers ex-con ’Big Ears’ (Chris Mulkey) and his boys a reward to get them back, a job he takes on with some relish when he realises that Nola Johns (Greta Scacchi) is with them…and running off that herd for his own will be a useful bonus. Nola is a 50 cent hooker, a fading beauty on her way down the food chain of the human cattle market, and who lives in fear of the violent thug Big Ears. When she escapes his clutches, she too sees her chance of redemption.
The story is getting a little complicated at this point, unnecessarily so, with the sheer weight of characters that have joined a horse drive started by just two people, an aging ranch hand and his nephew. Whether they will make Oregon with their nags is the issue, but now we’re talking two cowboys, a down on his luck Southerner, five Chinese girls, a terrified good time gal and, as good fortune would have it for a party desperately in need of a translator and something other than beans, a Chinese cook.
Thankfully, with three hours to play with, none of this gets to be too confining and the compensations are Duvall stealing all the best lines for himself and the most breathtaking cinematography that really does do justice to the stunning Canadian locations, as in Open Range, shot in and around Calgary.
Hill has long used Lloyd Ahern as his photographer, and it’s easy to see why here; the camera’s eye resting easy on the snowcapped mountain ranges, rivers snaking between the passes, the camp bathed in the golden glow of blissful sunsets. Painterly compositions, unbelievably beautiful and not a CGI shot in sight. If the locations themselves deserve star billing, then surely so does the herd itself. 500 head of horses, muscular and sinuous, driving pell mell along the meadows like ‘Billy Bejiggered’ is one hell of a sight, and Broken Trail makes the very most of them.
Along the drive, Print reveals more and more of himself to his nephew and his companions, and though he’s the catalyst for all these characters to redeem themselves, and so mend their own broken trails, it becomes clear that Print’s own path was damaged irreparably by a tragedy many years previously. Thus, why he’s so concerned for the welfare of his dead sister’s boy, why he wants to reassure himself that he is - and to help him become - a decent man that would have made his momma proud.
Some of Geoffrion’s dialogue for Print amounts to nothing more than gentle cracker barrel philosophy - ‘We’re all travellers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth ’til death. We travel between the eternities’ - some of it heart-breaking and deeply personal, but all of it is delivered with a quiet and utterly convincing veracity by Duvall, who shrugs off his 75 years with another bravura performance that is central to the success of Broken Trail. Duvall is easy in the saddle, and out of it, looking as if he’d spent all his life breaking horses, branding cattle, riding the range.
The rest of the cast usually just stands back and admires his work, though Thomas Haden Church - who I’d only seen previously in Sideways - is wonderfully understated as Tom, a reworking of the tactiturn ’Woodrow F. Call’ to a latterday take by Duvall on ‘Gus McCrae’. He also gets to wear a spanking stetson.
Sony’s R1 double-disc set (as said, the film is in two parts) comes with one meagre extra, a making of featurette, but no matter, the high-definition 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer is absolutely jaw-dropping. Fine detail was never finer, colour never more beautifully represented. Time and again, scenes materialised in front of my disbelieving eyes and I craned my neck forward to drink in the images. It really is that good.
The 5.1 soundtrack is also a delight, with a beautifully subtle design, the thunder of hoofs putting you right in amongst the galloping herd, wagons making circuitous journeys across your viewing room. David Mansfield and Van Dyke Park’s score, which makes great use of contemporary folk themes and instruments is similarly pleasing. Broken Trail is also bound for release in the U.K. soon - look out for it.
Like Open Range, Broken Trail is by no means a perfect film but, produced by exceptional professionals with a love of their subject, it is very, very good indeed, and certainly several steps above the usual ‘made for TV’ fare. It’s not just the filming and acting that earn my admiration; for set design, makeup (at last, folk who look as if they’ve had their hair cut using a bowl and a dull knife), costumes (as alluded, western fans will be in hat nirvana), wrangling, location scouting, this film gets top marks.
Time catching up with him, this could be Bobby Duvall’s last western round-up, but it’s not a bad way to sign off, and western fans will surely want to tip their hats to all concerned.
Pleasing Some Of The People, Some Of The Time… March 1, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : DVD News & Info, Film & DVD Reviews, Historical Drama , add a commentThere’s a story from the mid-’60s, possibly apocryphal, about the legendary Lotus cars boss Colin Chapman, whose new sleek and sexy Elan - sales figures soaring courtesy of Emma Peel’s shapely rear - was taking the motoring world by storm.
Chapman was emerging from a meeting with his new head of PR and as they hit the pavement, he was instantly recognised by one of his many legions of fans. Chapman smiled as he was glad-handed by the happy Lotus owner, nodded gravely as the fan made a couple of suggestions that would improve dashboard ergonomics, and finally - finally - wrenched himself loose with a cheery wave goodbye, and into the rear of a waiting Jaguar.
The PR man was bubbling. Told Chapman that it was an indication of just how the Elan was grabbing the public consciousness, and wasn’t it just fab that their customers were so happy? But his contentment was short lived - he looked into his boss’s eyes and saw a mask of rage. ‘It’s your job’ said a puce faced Chapman ‘to keep those bastards away from me…’
Giving the public what they want, or what they think they want, or worse, what you think they want, has been the dance of commerce since the first beads were exchanged for a handful of grain. The movie industry as a whole has long relied on the dreaded focus groups, perhaps as close to the great unwashed as Hollywood has wished to get, other than to get into their wallets
But, while others maintain a mostly stony silence in the Home Entertainment sector, Warners (I’m referring to the U.S., arm, not their seemingly inept U.K. equivalent) has been playing that particular market like a Stradivarias for some time now. They appear happy to emerge from their Burbank headquarters to engage the enemy (aka you and I, gentle reader) in a number of battlefield theatres, albeit strictly on their terms. And for their back catalogue of classic titles in particular, the strategy seems to be paying off.
While other studios seem content to play guessing games with the public based on sales alone (Fox and Universal), haven’t got a clue what to do (Sony), or couldn’t give a toss (Paramount), Warners is so far ahead in the game of public relations that they might as well be on a different planet, possibly one that is a member of the Ferengi Alliance.
The brothers Warner realised some time ago that there is ‘gold in them thar vaults’, vaults containing some of the finest films Hollywood ever produced - all they had to do was get in there and mine it. That meant, in the first instance, coming up with the goods in terms of film restorations, transfers to a digital medium and releases chock full of interesting, but commercial extras. Job done, as their blitzkrieg tactics, generaled by chaps that actually knew their classic films, were spearheaded by super weapons other studios just didn’t possess - Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Gone With The Wind et al.
Further to that, they then came with with a policy of attrition. Drip feeding their favoured press - printed and electronic media - snippets of mouth-watering detail, sometimes long before the first bytes are committed to the little shiny discs, playing up just how good this or that release is going to look, how they have ’scoured the world for the finest source materials’, how such and such will be this year’s ‘must have’ release. King Kong was the prime example. By the time it hit the streets, the perception was that it was going to be a super-clean restoration of Casablanca proportions. The fact that it wasn’t, and that they had actually stated so in the immediate run-up to release, hardly seemed to matter.
Come the time of the official announcement, most fans are sold anyway, not even waiting for reviews. Warners has played the game of asking the public what they want directly, urging them to vote for titles in association with TCM or Amazon. Am I being a tad cynical in believing that these ‘elections’ are rigged before they start? Should anyone be surprised by that? Should anyone be concerned? Well, frankly no. It’s simply more (clever) marketing.
They even, bless ‘em, are prepared to come out, blinking into the sunlight, to explain the sometimes controversial releases, such as last year’s The Searchers, which surprised many by not boasting the trademark Technicolor hues that were unique to the VistaVision process.
And then there are the live on-line ‘chats’ that Warners holds with members of the Home Theater Forum with whom they have long had a ’special relationship’. There was a time when the HTF held ‘chats’ with representatives of other DVD distributors, and their forums were visited regularly by officials of other studios who seemed quite willing to join in discussion with those that bought their product.
Now, it seems, the field is clear for Warners; we are told that the studio’s representatives are regular visitors to the HTF (another piece of information that shows them in a positive light; even if other studio folk visit, they don’t make it known), though they don’t join in everyday discussions, and that they take note of what is said. Like Colin Chapman, they are possibly terrified, on occasion, by the sheer intensity of fandom, the howls of anguish that emit when a film is released and somebody, somewhere sees something not to their liking.
Oft times, the breast beating can be justified, other times it comes on as clearly demonstrative of a small, but burgeoning, psychosis. Too much ‘red’, not enough ‘red’ (or blue, or yellow, or, well, you get the drift) in a transfer can produce a veritable thesis of invective, and woe betide any film that has even so much as millimetre shaved from the frame. Some of it beggars this reader’s belief. And this reader has seen movies projected on stained screens, with curtains draping into the projection area, and sound that might have been bettered had it been transmitted between two cans attached by a piece of knicker elastic.
Though the ‘chats’ are strictly moderated (the HTF is quite rightly jealous of the blessing that Warners has pressed to its forehead), it is to their merit that Warners is willing to do them in the first place. Yes, it is yet another example of a marketing machine that knows its public, and first and foremost it is there to push product.
But it does give those whose shelves are not quite yet groaning in agony an idea of the deluge of releases coming their way over the next couple of years. And this year’s ‘chat’ did tell us as much about 2008 as it did about the coming months.
You can access the full ‘chat’ transcript here, and it demonstrates that Warners does indeed have much more gold to mine; box sets for John Garfield, Eleanor Powell and the John Wayne centenary, special releases for Greed, The Jazz Singer, How The West Was Won and more pre-code Forbidden Hollywood. The list goes on.
Some of the post ‘chat’ comments, on various fora, are interesting too. Warners should have done this or that, ‘oh why couldn’t they…’, ‘whatever happened to…’, ‘I’m not buying unless…’ No, indeed. You cannot please all the people all the time.
The difference is, that unlike the other studios, Warners are a constant source of comment by the internet’s chattering classes. Which must keep their accountants warm at night…
That Thing They Did
I wrote, a few posts ago, that Universal U.K. (they hold the rights to RKO releases this side of The Pond), was set to release Nyby/Hawks’ The Thing From Another World complete with a John Carpenter commentary and I stated then I’d let you know what I thought when I’d purchased it. Well, no sale.
No, it wasn’t the fact that a few pre-release screen grabs showed it to be, if anything, a poorer transfer than Warners extant R1. It was the horrifying prospect that the two-disc set also contained a ‘colorized’ version, in much the same manner than Universal released their piss-poor King Kong set last year. Now, I know I’m not obliged to watch the bloody thing, but just buying it means that I’m giving my tacit approval to such a practice and, no, dammit, I will not. I’m blazing that Universal has released a number of distinctly sub-par transfers of film noir titles in the UK, including a ‘colorized’ (no black and white alternative here) version of The Big Steal, and I’ll be hanged before my purchase gives them the okay to carry on regardless.
Universal; just put the crayons away will you?
Sir Thomas More: God made the angels to show Him splendour, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity.
But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. If He suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and, yes, Meg, then we can clamour like champions, if we have the spittle for it.
But it’s God’s part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping…
Oscar season, and a quick peek at a film that picked up eight nominations and six golden statuettes at the 1966 Academy Awards.
Robert Bolt’s Thomas More is too good to be true. A man of strict unbendable principle, and high in the court of the most powerful man on earth (the French may argue; let them), he is incorruptible, straight and honest as the day is long. A believer in justice and God, he will not sway from all that he trusts, though to deny those core principles might save his head.
He will not lie even to please his King, a playground bully writ large, an intemperate, spoilt brat that would crush him as easily as wipe his hands, and with just as little thought. No, Bolt’s More of A Man For All Seasons will not speak to save himself, will not speak at all…and in doing so proves to be the loudest voice of condemnation of all in Henry VIII’s kingdom.
And he literally is too good to be true; the real More was most vociferous on the subject of the King’s divorce, a divorce not only from his current barren wife, but eventually from the Catholic Church as a whole. More put quill to parchment as often as he could, decrying his King to anyone that would dare listen. But as said previously, if you want history, then don’t go to the movies. On the other hand if you want a beautifully staged production, stripped of the usual po-faced period nonsense, with a witty and intelligent screenplay, deftly directed by Fred Zinnemann (who picked up two Oscars for the film; Best Picture, Best Director), and featuring some of the finest contemporary acting talent, look no further than A Man For All Seasons.
Orson Welles is imperious as the, pallid, dying ‘Cardinal Wolsey’, Leo McKern steely eyed as the jackal ‘Thomas Cromwell’, John Hurt excellent as the increasingly well attired ‘Richard Rich’, the ever admirable and Oscar nominated Robert Shaw as ‘Henry’. Equally good are Nigel Davenport as the no-nonsense ‘Duke of Norfolk’, Wendy Hiller (also nominated) as ‘Alice More’, Colin Blakely as ‘Matthew’ and Susannah York as as the pert ‘Margaret More’.
But it is Paul Scofield who bestrides the film with a quiet, towering dignity as ‘Sir Thomas More’, fending off the wily old fox Wolsey (their opening scene is delivered with a lip-smacking relish, Welles jousting with Scofield), inadvertently making an enemy of a boy who will be his undoing, delivering the final speech before the Commons, his words ringing loud and clear with anger, defiance and moral outrage. That such men existed in public office today…
Much of what made the piece a hit stage play remains in Bolt’s Oscar winning screenplay, a balance of the serious core narrative and humour; Matthew’s blazing anger that his master lets him go. It’s what he wants, but he’s disoriented that he feels a loyalty to a class not his own. Bolt’s marriage, of what we can perceive to have been an approximation of contemporary language - though it obviously was not - without becoming the least bit pompous (’betoken’ - beautiful word), and modern idiom sounds perfect, with not a false note to jolt us out of the story. And writing of notes, Georges Delerue’s sparely used score is simply magnficent. It is quite a treat to hear such thrilling music, yet it is never allowed, for a moment, to dominate or manipulate the on-screen action.
The Thames locations are used to beautiful effect, the size of the barges denoting the status of those that glide along its surface. Henry has two very large, gilded vessels, packed to the gunwhales with fawning courtiers; 16th century ‘yes men’. Despite the Oscar haul, Hollywood must have been preening itself at the film’s success, salaries aside, it probably cost peanuts to film, a large slice of the budget otherwise going on those award winning costume designs.
Sony’s latest iteration of the film on DVD is given ‘Special Edition’ status, but there little difference from the previous release. The 15 minute featurette gives us the historians’ view of the events in the film, it’s short but nonetheless interesting. The transfer is pretty good, the veteran Ted Moore’s Oscar winning cinematography lush and true. It’s slightly different to the old transfer, which on occasion had a slightly pinkish hue, and this also seems to cope better with the scenes in darkness or shadow.
Paul Scofield made few films, he felt he wasn’t truly successful before the camera and was more comfortable on stage. It is really our loss, for in A Man For All All Seasons Scofield gives a performance that received - and richly deserved - a Best Actor Academy Award.