Argo

Last night, I caught the recent Iran caper, or Canadian Caper film, Argo, created by Ben Affleck.  It tells the story of a CIA clandestine operation to get six Americans out of Tehran after the U.S. Embassy was stormed, initiating the interminable hostage crisis for the Carter Administration.  The six took secret refuge in the Canadian embassy.  The successful plan involved creating a cover story of a Canadian film crew scouting exotic locations for a tacky sci-fi adventure story with a middle eastern look to it.  A Star Wars rip-off.

The story is basically true, and the film was entertaining and suspenseful.  It was particularly good, I thought, at showing the tension of the six fugitives as they struggled to accept the least bad of a lot of bad choices for getting out of Iran.  It also conveyed the release of the pent-up rage and near hysterical revolutionary fervor (that’s what happens when you keep the lid on people too long) of the Iranians rather well.

Personally, however, although I was entertained, I wasn’t buying it.  The last minute glitches, and their skin-of-the-teeth resolution, the airport getaway finale, the Alan Arkin old-Jewish-guy producer character…it all seemed invented for Hollywood to me.  (Of course, Affleck has to add a deeply personal note at the end, as the main character reconciles with his wife – why, we don’t know…)

As it turns out, a perusal of the Wikipedia article indicates that all those things were invented; dramatic license. There was some undiplomatic bashing of the Brits and other diplomats as well that was resented and refuted by those governments.  And there were some trivial historical manipulations – showing the giant Hollywood sign in ruins (I remember it well) when it was actually repaired in 1978 – I wonder why ‘artists’ do that sort of thing in a film like this, but I’m just a viewer…

I was in Iran for about a week, leaving just a few days before the crisis erupted.  I only spent 45 minutes in Tehran:  as dumb as I was, I knew that was not a city to hang around in then.  We met some soldiers on a train from the north, and they led us by the hand through the streets, filled with enormous packed crowds of men with black beards, all staring at us, until they saw us safely deposited on an express bus to the gorgeous city of Isfahan in the south.  No crowds there.  Just anti-American posters, and a lot of people who told us how much they loved Americans, and hated our government.

Odds Against Tomorrow

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) out of Harry Belafonte’s own production outfit, and directed by Robert Wise, is a late noir with a black man as a lead.  He’s not just a figure in the background: he’s the hinge of the plot.  Not surprising since it’s Harry’s outfit.

The film is a cool heist story, with a smooth jazzy score, and lots of local NYC atmosphere.  Ed Begley plays Burke, a cop gone bad, looking to score a big one so he can live on Easy Street after getting out of the pen.  He’s staked out an upstate bank in New York that looks like an easy target.  Belafonte is Ingram, a nightclub musician with a bad gambling habit and a big, big debt to a polite but violent loan shark.  One of the man’s thugs is an openly gay guy who flirts with Ingram.  As one of the only club women who’s not trying to make time with him says, “That little boy is in big trouble!”

Rounding out the gang of robbers is Robert Ryan as Slater, a WWII veteran who fears getting old and irrelevant.  Shelly Winters stuck by him while he was in stir for killing a man in a rage, but he can’t stomach living on her wages; it makes him feel like a little boy.  Meanwhile, Gloria Grahame plays the weirdo downstairs who just wants to feel her skin crawl as Slater tells her “how he felt when he did it.”  Slater obliges, and makes her feel a whole lot more…

Slater is an out-and-out racist, and Burke has to hold him in line to keep the heist on track.  His bigoted comments are pretty raw for a 1959 film, and his sarcastic filth keeps the tension high.  When they are setting up the job in the small Hudson Valley town of Melton, NY, Ingram has the bad luck to be standing at the corner when there is a car accident.  A cop stops him and asks if he saw anything.  Later, the three men, all nervous, discuss their plan, and Ingram is afraid the cop might have gotten too good of a look at him.  Slater says, “Don’t flatter yourself, Ingram.  You’re just another black spot in Melton, even if you do wear $20 shoes.”

In the heat of the job, Slater loses control and refuses to give the getaway car keys to Ingram.  Because of this, a cop catches them, and a gunfight ensures.  Burke shoots himself after being downed: he won’t endure another stay in the joint.

Slater and Ingram start fighting with each other:  of course Ingram blames Slater for the debacle.  They race off in the night with the police in pursuit.  Ingram chases Slater into an industrial farm with big fuel tanks that is shown in an eerie light that makes it look like a Charles Sheeler realist Precisionist from the 1930s.  There are lots of odd zoom shots as the men run around, and scale ladders trying to get a shot at one another.  Finally, they face off, and va va va voom!  The whole place blows up.

A sardonic conclusion makes the racial equality point again when the clean up workers examine the charred corpses and remark that you can’t tell one from another.

21 Grams – Darwinian Fable?

Click for explanation.

21 Grams (2003), is a tale of the intersection of strangers’ lives, by Alejandro González Iñárritu.  In structure, it is similar to his later film Babel, although in this film, the story does not follow a linear path forward through time.  The actors are great, but I did not find it credible or compelling.

The film left me wondering…is Iñárritu a Darwinian ironist of some sort?  Mr nice-guy architect, married to Naomi Watts, is run over and killed with his two young daughters by del Toro, who is shown above suffering in mental hell for his sins.  Sean Penn, a self-centered jerk,  gets Mr. Nice-guy’s heart as a transplant, and ends up “staying in his house and fucking his wife,” i.e Watts, widow of dead Mr. Nice-guy:  her words.  And in the end, Watts is pregnant again, and Penn’s estranged wife is going to get pregnant by artificial insemination with Penn’s sperm.

So Mr. Nice-guy is dead and gone, along with his biological progeny, while Penn’s character, also dead, lives on in the form of two children to be born with his genetic legacy.

Nice guys do finish last.

Soldier Blue

Solider Blue (1970), another one of those films I heard about when young, but never saw.  It made quite a stir with its depictions of savage violence against the Indians, one of the first ‘revisionist’ westerns, in the line of Little Big Man, Dances with Wolves, etc.  The film has been ruthlessly criticized in these two blogs:  Celluloid Wall; and Nothing is Written.  The second writer went so far as to call it a “tacky piece of filth.”

It’s really not a very good film, it’s true.  Candice Bergen somehow manages to keep her golden hair and white skin despite two years captivity with the Cheyenne, and the middle part is taken up with a silly romantic ‘comedy’ between the escaped soldier and her.  All told from the vantage point of the white man, yes.  Still, calling it “filth” seems extreme.  The writer says the violence at the end, depicting the Sand Creek Massacre is cartoonish and nearly’ laughable.’  Reading historical accounts of the events should dispel that notion.  One reviewer says the gore is ‘nearly exploitative.’  Nearly?  It is, or it isn’t.  Perhaps he meant that it made him uncomfortable, partly because he realized its representation was justified.

The film was  a flop.  The resemblance of the final, climactic atrocities to the recently reported Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam probably didn’t help, but again, it’s mostly of historical interest than an engaging piece of cinema.

How real is real?

Bart: … It’s just that everything’s going so fast. It’s all in such high gear, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like me. Does that make sense?
Laurie:  When do you think all this?
Nights. I wake up sometimes. It’s as if none of it really happened, as if nothing were real anymore.
Next time you wake up, Bart, look over at me lying there beside you. I’m yours, and I’m real.
Yes, but you’re the only thing that is, Laurie. The rest is a nightmare.

Those crazy kids from Gun Crazy (1949).

She only shoots people when she gets really scared, but I think she likes it more than she says.

Dr. Frankenstein, I presume?

I watched another old science-fiction flick from my youth, Colossus:  The Forbin Project (1970), and found it pretty good. And just as I remembered it.  As science fiction goes, it is hackneyed, but as a fable in the Frankenstein mode, to which it refers, it is lively and entertaining.  The story is simple:  Forbin builds a super computer to run the missile defense of the USA with the support of the Kennedyesque president; machine is turned on and notices immediately the existence of another similar machine.  Ooops, another CIA intelligence failure – the USSR has its own about to go online.

The machines do a memory-meld, and take over the world, for the good of man, with the threat of nuclear detonation as the stick to beat humanity into doing what is in its best interest.  Along the way, the machine orders the execution of people who try to sabotage its plans, most memorably, Forbin’s Russian colleague, with whom he plots in a supposedly secret Roman meeting.

The  images that stayed with me through all these years are two: At a nuclear missile silo, the CIA director calmly lights a cigarette as men frantically run around, pointlessly, seconds before the warhead is exploded as punishment for sabotage attempts; Forbin and his pretty assistant in bed, in a ruse that poses them as lovers, secretly passing information on their plots to derail the machine.  Even as a kid, I knew that this was just to spice up the flick: the machine wouldn’t have been so dumb.

The film has a lot of nice touches, such as the T-shirts with the Colossus Project logo that kids wear, even as the machine is announcing its enslavement of the world population – Hey! it looks cool!  I also enjoyed the scene in which the CIA head tries to explain how they missed the Russian project:  Guess it wasn’t a slam-dunk.

I wonder if the executives at Googol know about this film?

Big Eyes, Black Hair, and Out of Her Mind

This is a post about one film, Where Danger Lives (1950), and by extension, all those  femme fatale sisters to Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue) that prey on weak, flawed, emotionally impotent young men.  Oh, and they’re nuts too.  I am thinking of  Ann Savage in Detour, Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and Ann Byth as Veda, the helium voiced neurotic daughter of Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford).

Where Danger Lives was directed by John Farrow, married to Maureen O’Sullivan, who has a small and awful part in the flick, and father to Mia.  The story seems too slow at times, and it almost veers into comedy on a few bits.  What stays with you is Margo’s character, her looks,  and the fantastic scenes with noirish lighting.

Robert Mitchum is Dr. Jeff Cameron, a fine young man who lives to help his patients.  The film starts with his tender ministering to a girl in an iron lung, and a young boy with a neck brace.  His girlfriend Julie (Sullivan) helps, and looks on approvingly. We hardly see her out of her mask.  A young woman is rushed in, an attempted suicide, and Cameron is put on the case.  The big hunk saves the helpless beauty’s life, but who is the strong one?

As she wakes from her stupor, Margo notices the big handsome guy taking her pulse, and she  instantly takes his, so to speak. Clasping his hand, she whispers sultry nonsense while nurse Julie gives Cameron the eye.  She takes off for home before Doc can look in on her next morning, and sends him a telegram, begging him to visit her:  she owes him an explanation.

That cat on the doorstep will be important later on…and not in a good way.  She looks healthy enough; so much so, Cameron forgets all about Julie.    Still, for the moment, he’s just being the doctor, trying to make sure she doesn’t try to kill herself again.  She’s so weak, needs his protection, his help…

Margo refuses to submit to proper care, so Cameron goes for the phone, and grabs her wrist when she tries to interfere.  You can tell by the look on her face that she’s thrilled to have her arm twisted by him.  ”You’re hurting me!”  She says it like an invitation to sex.  The good doctor still has a few wits about him, and he’s thinking, “What’s with this dame?“

We learn later that Cameron is not, repeat not a psychiatrist, so how could he tell that Margo is totally crazy?  Perhaps her eyes distracted him?  He’s a man who is easily diverted from the straight and narrow, a classic noir type.

Next thing we know, Cameron is walking through a club in a very long tracking shot filled with extras coming and going.

He sees Margo’s back, waiting for him in a booth.  Lots of shots with windows and mirrors in this one.  He bends over behind her to greet her…

She turns, and begins to slip the mink stole from her shoulders…

This action, as the mink drops away, is as close to stripping as you can get without actually doing it.

We learn that they have been seeing each other for a week.  She says her father insists that she leave that night for the Bahamas:  she must obey, or she’ll be cut from his will and have nothing!  He only wants her, of course.  Oh, it’s not to be. After a last kiss, he gets drunk, and gets an idea.

A totally drunk Cameron takes a cab to the house to retrieve Margo.  Claude Rains has one scene in this film, and he makes the most of it.  He’s Frederick Lannington, father…er…the husband of Margo, and he wants to tell Cameron what a “long road” he’ll be going down, with “no turning back,” if he runs off with her.  He sees right through Cameron, saying “her clinging vine act makes you want to protect her.”  Margo pulls out the stops, pretending that he bloodied her by ripping an earring off her.  Cameron responds on cue.

A fight ensues, and Lannington beats Cameron with a poker before he’s knocked out with a fist.  Cameron goes to get some water to revive him, but he’s suffering from a concussion.  He’ll be in and out of lucidity for the rest of the picture, a damaged, weakened male, in thrall to la belle dame sans merci.  While Cameron’s out of the room, Margo finishes off  hubby with a pillow

Only in his concussed and lust-besotted state would an intelligent doctor with a thing for helpless people listen to Margo’s pleas and decide to flee with her to the Bahamas.  She’s convinced him that he killed Lannington with his punch, accidentally, of course.

Their escape has several vignettes that border on screwball, and includes a lot of sharp characters and ironic misunderstandings. They flee the airport at the sight of some cops looking for Lannington (Cameron poses as him.) but they are only trying to deliver a bon voyage message.  Later, they narrowly avoid a police blockade, supposedly set up to catch them, but it’s just the agriculture department looking for contraband vegetable imports. They end up in a scruffy border town where they are ‘arrested’ by a bunch of cowboy types who inform them that because they are not wearing whiskers, they must make a donation to the local fire department…or get married.  They choose the latter.

Things don’t go well when they share a room.  Margo rips the power cord out of the radio:  she doesn’t want Jeff to hear the news – he’ll learn that she has a long history of hospitalization for mental illness.  She doesn’t like to be pitied!

When they finally make it to a seedy border town, they are tricked into giving up their last valuables to pay to be smuggled across the border.  Jeff begins to have his doubts, about her, and about whether he’ll survive his head injury.

He tries to talk sense to her after she finally admits that she killed Lannington.  He’s too weak to restrain her as she follows her own ideas, and decides to smother him the way she did hubby.

Margo thinks Jeff is dead, and she goes out to cross the border on her own.  She didn’t do the job right, though, and he follows her. She shoots at him, and is shot by the police.  Cameron gazes pitiably at her dying figure while the cops say he’s the accomplice.

Ha!  A final dollop of scorn from the dangerous woman as she informs the police that he could never kill anyone!  Didn’t even have the sense to know that she had done it!  (Ah…Jeff is in the clear now!)  No way he could ever have given her what she wanted, what she needed.  She loathes him. “Nobody pities me!“  She dies…

Steve recovers from his concussion, and in the last scene, Julie returns to him.  Uh…why?  Because somebody said they needed a happy ending.

I never posted about Mildred Pierce, so here are two images of Veda the Destroyer in all her glory.

Click for the action!

Paradise Lost: the Movie

… so sore
The griding sword with discontinuous wound
Passd through him, but th’ Ethereal substance clos’d
Not long divisible, and from the gash
A stream of Nectarous humor issuing flow’d
Sanguin, such as Celestial Spirits may bleed,
And all his Armour staind ere while so bright.

Satan battles Michael, and Micheal’s sword slices through him, but no matter, he heals right up.  I see CGI effects doing great here. 

[Note:  It seems there has never been a movie treatment of Milton's epic, but somebody in 2007 was thinking of it!  (NYTimes Article).  A web-search today turned up recent news that the project was killed.]

Once Upon a Time in the West

A spaghetti western courtesy of Sergio Leone, made in 1968, after he became known in the USA with his Fistful trilogy and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  Wikipedia reports that Fonda was not sure he should take the job, but his friend Eli Wallach urged him to, saying “You’ll have the time of your life!“  It’s not hard to feel that Fonda and Jason Robards are enjoying themselves, maybe enjoying themselves a little bit too much, as if they’re playing!

I liked the film a lot, the rituals of the violence, the politics, the ‘realism’ of the grungy, beaten-up looking people (not common in westerns in 1968!) and the music too.  It’s like a grand epic opera, without the dramatic punch.  Too much fun, too stylized, too obviously an homage to the great westerns of the past.  It’s almost like a meta-western, the western you would make after studying and researching all the westerns ever made in the USA, which is something I believe Leone did.

Fonda is cast against type as Frank, the villain, a real cold sadist, and his blue eyes and clean-shaven face reflect his sociopathic nature instead of down-home folksiness.  This was radical for the time!  And the film takes a ‘revisionist’ view of the West, although I’m not sure if it was ahead of or just behind the scholarly curve on that.  Instead of a West peopled by self-reliant individualists, we have one developed by rapacious and murderous railroad tycoons.  In one scene, Frank, and his boss, Morton, have a chat in Morton’s opulent rail car.  He’s a cripple, slowly dying of tuberculosis of the bone, and his dream is to build his railroad to the Pacific so he can finally see that ocean.  He finds Frank sitting at his desk, and asks him, “How does it feel to be behind that desk, Frank?“  Frank, a rough character, but a quick study in the ways of capitalism, replies, “As good as holding a gun, but more powerful.“

Frank is pursued by a man known only as Harmonica (he plays one), and the shot below is typical of those establishing tension in the ritualistic gunfights.

Eventually, “on the point of dying,” we learn the mystery of Harmonica, and what drives him on his revenge quest.

Claudia Cardinale is the beautiful widow who knows that a tub of hot water can wash away just about any bad feeling, not to mention the smell of filthy men she has had to sleep with.  Speaking to her, Cheyenne (Robards), delivers the improbable lines, “You remind me of my mother.  She was the biggest whore in Almeida.  Whoever my father was, for an hour, or a month, he must have been very happy.“

Morton, the greedy railroader, had his own ideas of the saving qualities of water, but his dream of the Pacific was ended by his death in a muddy desert puddle after his violent plans to evict the widow from her land went awry.