Westerns

I prepared this list of the most remarkable westerns for a lecture series.

B.P.

    A History of the Cowboy Movie : Barrie Pattison.

Selected Titles.

Tom Mix

Cripple Creek Ballroom Wm. Dickson 1898, The Great Train Robbery - Porter for Edison with W.S. Anderson 1903, Broncho Bill & the Baby W.S. Anderson (series begins) 1908, Le Railway de la mort Jean Durand with Joë Hamman 1912,  The Battle of Elderbush Gulch D.W. Griffith with Lillian Gish 1913, The Squaw Man Cecil B. de Mille & Oscar Apfel with Dustin Farnham 1914, Birth of a Nation D.W. Griffith, The Virginian Cecil B. De Mille with Farnham 1915, Hell's Hinges William S. Hart, Charles Swickard & Clifford Smith for Ince 1916, The Narrow Trail Wm. S. Hart 1917, The Lady of the Dugout W.S. Van Dyke with Al Jennings, 1918, The Last & the Mohicans Maurice Tourneur & Clarence L. Brown 1920, Sky High Lynn Reynolds with Tom Mix 1922, Wild Bill Hickock Smith with Hart 1923, To the Last Man Victor Fleming with Richard Dix, Covered Wagon 1923 with J. Warren Kerrigan & The Pony Express with Ricardo Cortez, James Cruze 1925, Tumbleweeds Clarence Badger with Hart 1925, The Vanishing American George B. Seitz with Dix 1925, 3 Bad Men John Ford with George O'Brien 1926, The Great K & A Train Robbery Lew Seiler with Mix 1926, Whispering Smith George Melford with H.B. Warner 1927, The Virginian Fleming with Gary Cooper 1929, Big Trail Raoul Walsh with John Wayne 1930, Cimarron Wesley Ruggles with Dix 1930,

Cimarron : Irene Dunne & Dix

  Branded  D. Ross Lederman with Buck Jones 1931, Law & Order Edward L. Cahn with Walter Huston 1933, Massacre Alan Crosland snr. with Richard Barthelmess 1934, Hop-a-long Cassidy for Harry Sherman with William Boyd, (series begins), 1935, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine Henry Hathaway with Henry Fonda, 1936, Sergeant Berry Herbert Selpin with Hans Albers 1938, Stagecoach John Ford with John Wayne 1939, Destry Rides Again George Marshall with James Stewart 1939, Union Pacific Cecil B. De Mille with Joel McCrea 1939, Jesse James Henry King with Tyrone Power, Fonda 1939,  North West Mounted Police De Mille with Cooper 1940, Northwest Passage King Vidor with Spencer Tracy 1940, When the Daltons Rode George Marshall with Broderick Crawford 1940, Dodge City & Virginia City 1940 & Santa Fe Trail 1941 Michael Curtiz with Errol Flynn, Western Union Fritz Lang with Randolph Scott 1941, Texas Marshall with Wm. Holden, Glenn Ford 1941, The Spoilers Ray Enright for Frank Lloyd with Scott & Wayne, Apache Trail Richard Thorpe & Richard Rosson with Lloyd Nolan 1942. The Oxbow Incident William A. Wellman with Fonda 1942, San Antonio David Butler (& Robert Flory & Walsh) with Flynn 1945, California 1946 & Copper Canyon 1950 John Farrow with Ray Milland, My Darling Clemantine Ford with Fonda 1946, Canyon Passage Jacques Tourneur with Dana Andrews 1946, Under the Tonto Rim Lew Landers with Tim Holt 1947, Pursued Walsh with Robert Mitchum 1947, Whispering Smith Leslie Fenton with Alan Ladd 1947, Ramrod André De Toth with McCrea 1947, The Plunderers Joseph Kane with Rod Cameron 1948, Aizona Ranger John Rawlins Tim Holt 1948, Relentless George Sherman with Robert Young 1948, Albuquerque (Silver City) Ray Enright with Scott 1948, Ambush Sam Wood with Robert Taylor 1949, Fighting Man of the Plains Edwin L. Marin with Scott 1949,The Furies Anthony Mann with Walter Huston 1950, The Outriders Roy Roland with McCrea 1950, The Gunfighter King with Gregory Peck 1950, Stars in My Crown Tourneur with McCrea 1950, Broken Arrow Delmer Daves with Stewart 1950, Bend of the River (Where the River Bends) Mann with Stewart 1950, Apache Drums Hugo Fregonese with Stephen McNally 1951, Only the Valiant Gordon Douglas with Gregory Peck 1951, The Big Sky Howard Hawks 1952, Distant Drums Walsh with Cooper 1951, The Iron Mistress Douglas with Ladd 1952, Naked Spur Mann with Stewart 1953, Shane George Stevens with Ladd 1953, Thunder Over the Plains De Toth with Scott 1953, Vera Cruz Robert Aldrich with Burt Lancaster & Cooper 1954, The Raid Fregonese with Van Heflin 1954, Drum Beat Daves with Ladd 1954, Bad Day at Black Rock John Sturges with Tracy 1954, Wichita Tourneur with McCrea 1954, The Man from Laramie Mann with Stewart 1955, The Last Frontier Mann with Victor Mature 1955, Gunsmoke TV series with James Arness begins, Seven Men from Now Bud Boetticher with Scott 1956 Last Wagon Daves with Richard Widmark l956, Searchers Ford with Wayne 1956, Gunfight at the OK Corral Sturges with Lancaster & Kirk Doulas 1957, Three Ten to Yuma Daves with Ford 1957, The Tin Star Mann with Fonda 1957, Cowboy Daves with Ford & Jack Lemmon 1958, The Big Country William Wyler with Peck & Charlton Heston 1958, Man of the West Mann with Cooper, 1958, The Law and Jake Wade Sturges with Taylor & Widmark 1958, From Hell to Texas (Manhunt) Henry Hathaway with Don Murray 1958, Gunman’s Walk Phil Karlson with Heflin 1958, Terror in a Texas Town Joseph H. Lewis with Sterling Hayden 1958, Rio Bravo Howard Hawks with Wayne 1959, No Name on the Bullet Jack Arnold with Audie Murphy, Ride Lonesome 1959 & Comanche Station 1960 Boetticher with Scott, The Magnificent Seven Sturges with Yul Brynner 1960, The Unforgiven John Huston with Burt Lancaster, Flaming Star Don Seigle with Elvis Presley, A Thunder of Drums Joseph M. Newman with George Hamilton  1961,  The Posse from Hell  Herbert Coleman with Murphy 1961, Ride

Ride the High Country - Scott & McCrea

the High Coutry / Guns in the Afternoon Sam Peckinpah with Scott & McCrea 1962, One Eyed Jacks Marlon Brando 1963, Per un pugno di dollari starts Dollars trilogy - Sergio Leone with Clint Eastwood, 1964, How the West Was Won  Ford-Hathaway- Marshall 1964, Cheyenne Autumn Ford with Widmark 1964, Cat Ballou Elliot Silverstein with Jane Fonda 1965, The Sons of Katie Elder Hathaway with Wayne 1965, Django Sergio Corbucci with Franco Nero 1966, El Dorado Hawks with Wayne & Mitchum 1966, Duel at Diabolo Ralph Nelson with James Garner, Sidney Poitier 1966, The Professionals Richard Brooks with Lancaster & Lee Marvin 1966, Hombre Martin Ritt with Paul Newman 1967, Oggi a me... domani a te! / Today It's Me... Tomorrow It's You! Tonino Cervi with Budd Spencer 1968, Il Mercenario/ A Professional Gun 1968 & Vamos a matar, compañeros (Companeros) 1970 Corbucci with Nero, Stalking Moon Robert Mulligan with Peck, 1969,

Django - Nero

Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid George Roy Hill with Newman & Robert Redford 1969, True Grit Hathaway with Wayne 1969, The Wild Bunch Peckinpah with Holden 1969, Soldier Blue Nelson with Candice Bergen 1970, Ulzana’s Raid Aldrich with Lancaster 1972, Dirty Little Billy Stan Dragoti With Michael J. Pollard 1972, The Shootist Seigle with Wayne 1972, Bite the Bullet Richard Brooks with James Coburn 1975,The Outlaw Josey Wales Eastwood 1976, The Long Riders Walter Hill with the Carradines 1980, Heaven’s Gate Michael Cimino with Chris Kristoferson 1980, The Grey Fox Philip Boros with Richard Farnsworth 1982, Silverado Lawrence Kasdan with Kevin Kline 1986, Sunset Blake Edwards with Garner, Bruce Willis 1988, Dances with Wolves Kevin Costner 1990, Unforgiven Eastwood with Gene Hackman 1992, Wyatt Earp Kasdan with Costner 1994, The Avenging Angel Craig R. Baxley With Tom Berenger 1995, Ochocientas balas / 800 Bullets Álex de la Iglesia with Sancho Gracia 2002, Open Range Costner with Robert Duvall 2003, The Missing Ron Howard with Tommy Lee Jones 2003, 3:10 to Yuma James Mangold with Chrstian Bale 2007, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Andrew Dominik with Brad Pitt 2007, Appaloosa Ed Harris 2008. Blackthorn Mateo Gil 2011, Bone Tomahawk Craig Zahler 2015,  The Sisters Brothers Jacques Audiard 2018.

The Searchers

 

Sergeant Berry - Hans Albers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warners and the Great Depression.

There’s a special quality to the films that Warner Brothers (and First National) made in the first years of sound, when Daryl Zanuck was head of production.

At that stage the studio pay roll  had a large slice of the directors who would dominate the so called Golden Years of Hollywood - William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz and William Dieterle not to mention Busby Berkley. Most had already proved they could handle major projects and were keeping their motors running with program fillers waiting for the big budget projects to come back after The Depression.  Surprisingly, people who would ultimately prove lesser talents were keeping pace with them - Merven Le Roy (Little Caesar), Alfred E. Green (Parachute Jumper), Archy Mayo (Petrified Forest), Loyd Bacon (42nd Street) and particularly Roy Del Ruth (Taxi) who Michael Powell admired.

My viewing these films has spread over a life time. Choice pieces in the early years of Australian television - the 1931 Ricardo Cortez Maltese Falcon / Danerous Female, Jimmy Cagney and Loretta Young in 1931’s Taxi, Ruby Keeler in the 1933 42nd Street or Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1934 Hollywood stop over for A Modern Hero - were followed by filling gaps with a London NFT season and decades later again picking my way through Amalgamated’s six hundred sixteen millimeter copies before they went into landfill and I’m not done yet. You Tube keeps on coughing up surprises.

Warners made operettas, society dramas and comedies. Le Roy’s Joe E. Brown vehicles were surprisingly lively. However Zanuck’s taste ran to the so called Social Movies, blue collar drama about disadvantage. Le Roy’s 1932 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is supposed to have started the ball rolling but it’s easy to see that one as another in the studio’s already established prison movie cycle.

I’ve already discussed the 1929 Frank Lloyd - Richard Barthelmess Weary River but even more obscure is 1930’s  Numbered Men directed by Le Roy. It can be seen as a further stage in the Warner prison movie cycle following Weary River and anticipating I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Each Dawn I Die, Invisible Stripes and the rest.

Not much of a movie but an interesting step towards the more substantial films, Numbered Men has William Holden (Mark I) playing the warden as he did in Weary River. He has contempt for Hard Man prisoner Ralph Ince. “Callaghan doesn’t even possess the honour that’s supposed to exist among thieves.” Young Raymond Hacket (in the Ruth Chatterton Madam X) longs for red head sweetie Bernice Claire (Broadway’s “No No Nanette”) whose picture he carries. Forger Conrad Nagel (“Better than some now who are walking around”) relaxes in the privilege room and predicts the dismal outcome of young Hacket’s romance. George Cooper plays  harmonica. Ivan Linow is going stir crazy. 

Claire and Hacket

Best passage is the opening establishing Stoneyhurst State Penitentiary’s numbered inmates deprived even of the humanity that using their names offers. We get a few interesting opticals like the marching prisoners visible through the defused gap in the bars, anticipating Byron Haskin’s great titles for 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Villainous Maurice Black’s face is supered on the dialogue describing him.

The trustworthy inmates get access to the library and become eligible for the road gang where there are only a few guards and prisoners work in the open. Incentives include their doughnut nights at Blanche Friderici’s farm kitchen.

Ince engineers a prison riot which is a brief highlight - starting in a real machine shop and having shots of prisoners stampeding in one direction while those seen through windows behind them are running back. This halts as the rioters come up against the wall of steel bars.

Garbo with Corrad Nagel : The Kiss

Plausibility is completely shot when Hacket’s fiancée turns up working at the farm. Villain Black, escapees Ince and Linow and road gang members Nagel, Hacket and Cooper all converge there where “the keester man” explosive expert stores a case of dynamite - which doesn’t get to fill its promise. However farmer rustic Tully Marshall  is hunting a chicken hawk with a rifle which will get into the final action as the warden arms the trustees to go out and get Ince who has locked Claire in the cupboard threatening “I’ll knock ya to Jersey if ya double cross me.”

This one has come to terms with early sound film form but it’s plot and handling don’t convince or involve. Nagel, star of the first dramatic sound film, Curtiz' Tenderloin, was considered to have the ideal speaking voice for early sound. He is the only one who can read the awful dialogue with conviction.

Warner streetscape :Under 18

A year later (1931 released ‘32) and the rapid growth of the studio’s film making is instantly visible in Archy Mayo’s Under 18. The house style is  fully developed. Their bustling urban ambiance registers in the film’s first few shots of the the working class wedding spilling into the street from a tenement flat in Maude Eburne’s rooming house. Marian Marsh (quite appealing - she claimed to be nineteen) is wearing the bride’s veil but it’s borrowed from her sister Anita Page (Broadway Melody of 1929) who is pairing with pool hall champ Norman Foster - later to direct the 1943 Welles Journey into Fear. Marian works as a seamstress in Paul Porcasi’s Ritz Fashion Salon and is sparking grocery truck driver Regis Toomey.

Under 18 : Wedding day - Page and Marsh

Comes the depression - three shot montage including dad J. Farrel McDonald’s grave marker and the young couple are arguing in the night heat, sitting on the trash can outside her family tenement block, when the well turned out mistress living there gets into her car. The film is determinedly Pre-Code, offering yet another of those familiar dressing room sequences, with lots of glamorously presented women getting in and out of their scanties, and lead Marsh’s endangered virtue the is central plot dynamic.

Like Nancy Carroll in Personal Maid or a squad of other Pre-Code worker heroines, Marian is on about “I’m sick of being poor.” She’s saving ten dollars a week so she can get somewhere better for mum Emma Dunn to live. Things deteriorate when sister Page comes back home with a baby and her out of work husband who shows no interest in the job adds. After he blacks her eye, Page wants a divorce but lawyer Clarence Wilson demands two hundred dollars to get her name down before they close the quarter’s court ticket.

William and Marsh

 

 

 

 

The kept girl mannequins at the show room can’t help. They only have furs and jewels, not money they could spend on boys, and boss Porcasi is more interested in his own tootsie. Marian sees only one way out. Rich customer Warren William’s attention picked up when Porcasi had her model a fur coat while the regular girls were at lunch and she retrieved the orchid corsage his partner discarded to take home to her mum.  Marian is resolved to offer herself to Warren. She quits Regis and heads for Williams’ extravagantly art directed sky scraper pent house where a wild pool party is in progress.  A rejected playboy throws into the water the pearls that his fed up squeeze hurled back at him, for the swimmers to dive for.

Warren has a wardrobe full of bathing suits - all her size like Zachary Scott’s Monte Berrigan in Mildred Pierce. He and Marian are negotiating. This is the point where the film develops genuine tension. Regis has followed her and, punching low, decks Warren who is found on the floor apparently dead. The police arrive but Marian manages to beat them to the thirty floor elevator and puts in a call to warn Regis.

From these cascading calamities they manage to generate a happy ending.

Marsh  keeps on getting big glamor close ups in the belief that she had star potential but she

and long serving Toomey (best as the glimpsed motif common man character in the Capra Meet John Doe) are just going through the motions while Williams’ relaxed study in seedy charm has real authority.  A couple of the support players make their walk-ons register - attentive butler Murray Kinnell and the Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein’s Edward Van Sloan as a scornful fashion house flunky. They show up the limits of the romantic lead duo whose careers will fade. The tenement people are just grotesques.

Marsh in scanties, Van Sloan and Porcasi.

It is interesting that the rich buying sex in these films are not condemned. Genders are reversed in the 1933 Curtiz-Dieterle-Wellman Warner Female where Ruth Chatterton rewards proto body builder Phillip Reed with a spot in Paris while lesser escorts are shipped to Melbourne - they got that right. These anticipate John Baxter's 1941 Love on the Dole, 1976’s Claude Sautet Mado or 1990’s Pretty Woman. The practice among the less well off is associated with criminality and degradation as in the post WW2 exploitation cycles. What this tells you about film makers is speculative.

These two Depression era films are minor examples of the Warner contemporary cycle, not the work of their best film makers. Le Roy would shift into the manufactured gloss of MGM, though he did turn his working relationship with Robert Taylor into one of it’s best examples with Johnny Eager in 1941 and Mayo emerged honorably from the opportunity 1936's The Petrified Forest offered him.

Petrified Forest - Leslie Howard, Dick Foran, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart.

I think it’s significant that after a lifetime of mining this material I’m still finding unfamiliar titles that I enjoy. There’s a Warner Archive DVD of  Numbered Men. The  You Tube copy is soso but their Under 18 is nice.

Barrie Pattison 2020

Rule Britania -Boultings begin

Rule Britania! 

For someone who the virus has made desperate and has to see anything, how about the Boultings’ first feature? I found it on You Tube under The Films of Alistair Sim - who has no connection with it. Shot in twelve days to the demands of a British quota quickie, Trunk Crime / Design for Murder is by any objective standard a dreadful movie. Though made in 1939, it anticipates the nastiness of the Leslie Arliss films of the forties and the shoddiness of the British support fillers of the fifties but it still has all sorts of claims on our curiosity.

The Boultings

Graduate Manning Whiley is about to go down from his un-named university. A suspect case this one. He wouldn’t go out for games at school, has voice over nightmares about being buried alive and keeps bella donna in his rooms.  A group of revolting undergraduates burst in and wreck his space. Boy is he mad!

So much so that when their leader comes down to apologize and make good any damage (“That’s decent of you!”) Whiley poisons him and stuffs him in the trunk he’s taking back to his rural home.

At least his village is less hostile than his college. The local bobby minds the rail station while the porter delivers Whiley’s locked trunk. However Whiley’s tenant Barbara Everest loves his home (“The whole marsh is so intriguing!”) and she’s still hanging about with her also revoltingly debby daughter and the girl’s fiancé Thorley Walters (a familiar face at last). Worse, they crash their car into the (off screen) dyke and have to carry the daughter back for care while comic yokel Hay Petrie keeps on popping up draining Whiley’s whiskey in the room where he’s keeping the body in the trunk.

Though it reeks of the smell of the greasepaint, (“Even as a child I had to turn inwards. I had dark thoughts”) the film does hold attention till a ridiculous anti climax.  We’re not too far from “Rope” or “Night Must Fall.” The production values though limited are quite effective, mainly playing in under lit interiors with just two brief out of doors shots to set up the railway journey. There are a couple of awkward edits but close-ups like the eye dropper or the recovered key are telling. Shooting on film gives it an edge on the TV dramas it resembles.

Put it up against early works of the Boltings' British peer directors like Michael Powell’s 1932  Rynox or John Guillermin’s 1950 Torment  eg. and this one isn’t disgraced.

Barrie Pattison 2020

Tom Mix

The Legend of Tom Mix.

Under lock down, it was a sure thing that I’d get around to Tom Mix sooner than later. I did try that nice copy of La Voleuse on You Tube, figuring that anything with Romy Schneider and Michel Piccoli would hold my attention but Marguerite Duras’ script credit should have been a warning light. I lasted a quarter hour.

Tom Mix

Snapping back into character, I fired up the Tom Mix 1927 Zane Grey adaptation The Last Trail. This one could represent the past of Richard Dix’ character in It Happened in Hollywood, like the TV package of fifties cowboy movies Tarantino fronted to suggest the back story for Leonardo di Caprio's movie star lead in his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Filmed nearly a decade after the Mix film, It Happened in Hollywood pivots on the then enormous nostalgia for silent movie cowboy juvenilia of which The Last Trail is a perfect example. Time for a double feature of them.

Both films incidentally feature William B. Davidson, a busy actor who became a recognisable element of Hollywood iconography, registering in films where he only had an uncredited walk-on but also showing that he  could sustain a substantial role, as in W.S. Van Dyke’s 1934 Laughing Boy or here as the bad guy. His black bow tie is a give away. Tom Mix should have worked out who the secret gang leader was  from that alone.

The film opens with Mix riding hell for leather on Tony, double up with his friend’s wife across the saddle but still outdistancing the pursuit of marauding Indians. No sooner is he through the fort gate and the woman back in the arms of spouse Lee Shumway than Tom is on the parapet blazing away. No question who’s the hero here.

A ten year later letter from Shumway, now Carson City sheriff, calls Tom back to see the little boy they named after him. Shumway’s driving the express coach carrying the area’s gold, the city’s lifeline under constant threat from stage robbers. Carmelita Geraghty (Jordan Baker to Warner Baxter’s Jay Gatsby) is busy trying to get Shumway’s motherless child Jerry Madden to take a bath at his cabin and hears gunfire as the bandits shoot up the coach - a great chase scene exchanging fire and racing through the steep rock cañon and onto the plains at full gallop. Carmelita  saddles up to ride to the rescue - now there’s a switch. Young Madden trails after them dragging a long gun. “Where’s all the injuns.”

However Tom in his big white hat has arrived and sees the confrontation distant. He charges in, scattering the bandits. Carmelita gets the wrong idea and lets off a couple of rounds at him. Mortally wounded Shumway passes his tin star and little black note book to Tom. (“Keep my badge. You’re the man to wear it!”) Businessman Davidson notes this with concern. 

Tom makes his presence felt worrying the outlaw gang. “Hold-ups ain’t safe with that gun totin’ cyclone on horseback actin’ as Sheriff.”  However he’s a hit with Madden and Carmelita who bakes him a coconut cake. Davidson has his eye on her but Tom sends him on his way. “If there wasn’t a lady present I’d clean up this town’s mangiest coyote right now.”

The concerned Express Company owner makes it clear that he plans on re-assigning the franchise that Carmelita’s dad Oliver Eckhardt runs and sets up a stage coach race to establish the new operator. Davidson hires all the drivers to work for him - a list corresponding to Shumway’s book. Finding Eckhardt unable to get a driver for his entry,Tom steps up.

After a failed attempt by the heavies to take Tom down, our hero makes it to the race as the starting pistol is raised. Davidson, still not reaching the limit of his infamy, has Tom’s reins cut. 

The actual race is a great set piece with Mix clearly really doing some of the dangerous stunting - diving down among the pounding hooves to retrieve the slashed reins in the best Yakima Cannutt style and driving flat out among over-turning coaches as the nasties try to box him in. The date this was filmed falls between shooting the land rush scenes in William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds and the Richard Dix Cimarron (and later the Cagney Oklahoma Kid) and suggests that the same stunt people were involved. Last Trail is not disgraced in this impressive company. 

It’s simple minded but has enormous energy in a good naturedly sadistic way. It works a whole lot better than more serious and better known Mix-Zane Gray film, Lynn Reynolds’ 1925 Riders of the Purple Sage which incidentally is the prototype of The Searchers via an Alan Le May novel. Last Trail intriguingly compares favorably with the surviving John Ford silent cowboy movies.

Some of the western comedy of the Selig-Mix shorts persists - trying to lasoo the kid and roping Geraghty instead. Director Lewis Seiler’s handing is spot on, as with his Mix The Great K&A Train Robbery. It’s not a little sad to know that Seiler would spend the bulk of his career on drab potboilers, though the 1942 Humphrey Bogart The Big Shot does have the old spark.

Most movie enthusiasts now don’t realise the enormous public profile Tom Mix had in the twenties. Later vault fires at Fox destroyed the bulk of his best work and, outside the beautiful copy of Just Tony, this is now represented, if at all, by murky dupes. Even the great action footage in these doesn’t seem to have made its way into use as stock in later films. Fox in the Zanuck era showed minimal interest in preserving the celebrity of the stars which created the studio - Theda Bara, Buck Jones and Mix prominent among them. 

However hints do emerge. Daryl (“The Last Detail”) Ponicsan’s 1975 “Tom Mix Died for Our Sins” is on the way to being my favorite movie biography, endearingly offering Mix' macho pride and involvement with western lore along with his fallibility as he dealt with a success no one could have predicted. Carlos García Agraz’ 1992 Mexican film Mi querido Tom Mix comes close to catching the star’s heroic twenties presence and Sunset, the Blake Edwards 1988 movie account of the fictional partnership of Mix and Wyatt Earp, has Bruce Willis’ Mix bridling at the suggestion that he play Earp saying “I didn’t get where I am by being other people.” (Mix was a pall bearer at Earp’s 1929 funeral) That one’s the best of the director's later films, surprisingly after Edwards' slack earlier cowboy movie Wild Rovers.

The appearance of Sunset may have deep-sixed Oliver Stone’s proposed filming Clifford ("Fake") Irving’s novel about Mix and Pancho Villa. I ran into Stone, when he was considering that. and nominated Mix as the great lost movie star. He had to look at me sideways and ask whether I was serious.

Barrie Pattison 2020.

Columbia and Hollywood.

 Columbia Studios were always pretty slack about showing their early movies. You got the  impression that Frank Capra was the only director they had pre WW2. Jean Arthur, Jack Holt, Carol Lombard, Fay Wray and Victor Jory  have always been under-represented in my viewing, though a few collector copies and TV prints did slip through. Fortunately the company appears to have looked after the master materials and now some items are showing up on DVD and You Tube in beautiful copies. Bad news is that so far they have been uninspiring.

It Happened in Hollywood - Dix & Wray.

Harry Lachman’s 1937 It Happened in Hollywood however does have a number of claims on our attention. It appears to be Sam Fuller’s first screen credit - as the last name among the writers - not that his input is recognisable. More significantly it is probably the most revealing of those Hollywood accounts of the silent to sound period, again promoting the myth of the stars destroyed by recording. This keeps on surfacing in movies -  the Star Is Borns, Hollywood Cavalcade, Singing the Rain, You’re My Everything and of course Sunset Boulevard, The Buster Keaton Story and The Artist. Hard to quantify these things but the drop out rate seems to be greater among the Broadway imports of the early sound years ... Robert Ames, Talulah Bankhead, Osgood Perkins, Helen Morgan?

It Happened in Hollywood has probably the best coverage of that transition filmed, notably the crane round the studio where they are working with a dialogue director, two cameras in sound proof booths, number board and clap sticks. Throw in exterior shooting of a tracking shot walking with a hand held microphone and canvas & timber camera blimp or the always splendid William B. Davidson as a director peering at a miniature of the set using a viewfinder.

We see a board for one of the films within the film with "R. Maté" on it. A character in a beret steps up with a filter and I thought we might be getting treated to a glimpse of the cameraman of European films by Dreyer and Clair. One Cyril Ring is credited in the part.

Particularly notable here is the contribution of  lead Richard Dix, a powerhouse of the silent period (To the Last Man, Vanishing American) whose stardom carried on into sound with his Nothing But The Truth and Cimarron. In this one he gets to do the show piece scene, playing the awkward silent cowboy star in his Tuxedoed screen test with glamorous Fay Wray, where his delivery of the dialogue is so stilted that speech coach Franklin Pangborn (no less) playing perfectly straight, steps into the glamor decor wearing his business suit and repeats the lines more convincingly using the delivery of early sound films. Later in a nice scene alone with Wray on the sunny, flower covered hillside, Dix does this passage with his own phrasing making it sound sincere and touching. This detail alone, which most wouldn’t notice, gives the film some interest. No longer the giant of the movies he had been, Dix never the less owns this one.

Pangborn, Wray and Dix

It Happened in Hollywood starts with a fakey silent western with Dix & Wray, which proves to be being shown in a children’s hospital ward where young orphan Bill Burrud is about to be wheeled off for his operation. Dix the kid’s visiting cowboy hero,  bucks him up with the suggestion that he should come see him in the movie capital - Oh, Oh!

A man of integrity, Dix ignores the opportunity for publicity “I’m not gonna use cripples and orphans to get my name in the paper” and goes off on his personal appearance montage.

However sound arrives and, after seeing his test, studio head Granville Bates lets our hero go. “They’re not making outdoor pictures anymore.” This means that Dix has to sell the nineteen acre ranch, where he planned on setting up a boys’ camp, to nasty Edgar Dearing. Fay’s test was a hit so Richard bows out of her life though still smitten.

Outside the studio he gets into a punch up with Dearing while the cafe pianola plays and director Davidson watches and has an idea. “Cagney and Robinson - even Gable - are playing gangsters.” He cast Richard as a bank robber in Faye’s picture. When the script is modified however our hero walks, though they are behind schedule and losing the light (indoors!). Mindful of his fan base, he rejects the character of “low down, cop shootin’ gutter rat”. Faye, always gorgeous, even if she could never master the business of acting with sound, tells him “You’d have let me down if you’d played it.”

Our hero decides “When a cowboy can’t feed his horse, it’s time to move on.” However who should arrive in the rain that night but young Burrud run away from the orphanage.

The plot redemes the maudlin material with a curious and agreeable development where bungalow court neighbor and Mae Robson lookalike Zeffie Tilbury suggests they simulate a Hollywood celebrity gathering by having all the movie stars’ stand ins turn up in character at the hired ranch. Some of these are actually impersonators who appear only in this one film. They’ve got a Chaplin, a Harold Lloyd, a Joe E. Brown and a W.C. Fields. William Powell’s real stand-in does the star. The less convincing ones get to walk through and some get sustained scenes. His brother Arthur in a Captain Flagg uniform has Victor McLaglen down pat. Virginia Rendell, a convincing Mae West, vamps Dearing and Earl Haddon, their Bing Crosby, breaks out in a number. This is more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Burrud and Joe E. Brown impersonator Charles Dow Clark

The venture however fails to raise the money needed to care for the Burrud so we swerve into crime movie - pouring rain, shoot out & car crash and Dix emerges as a hero signed for a new movie where he’ll again share the screen with Wray, whose own stardom had been fading. The ranch is made over for a boys camp - happy end.

More a curiosity than a success this one is beautifully filmed by Lachman who (rather like John Farrow) had a life more interesting than his films. He was a cartoonist who became a serious painter (Mary Meerson assured me he had a canvas in the Louvre) He moved to designer for Rex Ingram and into directing in Europe and the U.S. working through a string of B movies, including Charlie Chans. This is one of his better efforts.

Exploring old Hollywood  is  pastime that's seen me through a lifetime. Sometimes it pays off.

 

Barrie Pattison 2020.

French Film Fesitval 2020 Preview

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2020

A few notes on included titles I’ve managed to see.

Le mystère Henri Pick - Luchini, Cottin.

Director Rémi Bezançon’s Le mystère Henri Pick  / The Mystery of Henri Pick is one of those ultra civilised French movies with a couple of recognisable stars and picturesque scenery all aimed at an audience not unlike the women’s book club that becomes part of the onscreen action.

Arts TV personality Fabrice Luchini (think Waldo Lydecker without the murders) humiliates author Henri Pick’s widow on air when he says that the book they are considering couldn’t have been written by her semi literate pizza cook husband. Fired over this, he sets out for Crozon in  distant Finisterre to prove his claim and encounters the dead cook’s daughter Camille Cottin. “You turn a blind eye to the beauty of things.” They partner in his search with examination of clues like the new ribbon in Pick’s preserved typewriter and some subdued will they or won’t they. This leads to a museum of rejected manuscripts base on an actual Quebec institution.

A feature production, charming people, rugged locations and sophisticated motivation - the whole art cinema package, even to having Hanna Schygulla bit parting. It’s delivered agreeably enough.

The combination of the always admirable Roschdy Zem (also in Rebecca Ziotowki’s  Les Sauvages included in the event) and director Arnaud Desplechin looked promising. A departure for Desplechin, Roubaix, une lumière (Oh Mercy!) is a nocturnal policier set in his home town, the grubby city between Lille and the Franco-Belgian border, the poorest commune in France, with 45 per cent of its population living under the poverty line. There  Algerian Commissaire Roschdy in his element investigating a Xmas Eve slate of crimes and non crimes.

Roubaix - Zem.

Derived from a TV documentary, the piece takes its time (two hours worth) dissecting a racist insurance scam which it’s perpetrator brings into the station, a girl runaway, arson and rape in with a visit to Rochdy’s home community (“Your uncle was a prince” he’s reminded) to wade through before attention settles on the murder of an old woman which takes him to the run down home of lesbian couple Lea Sedoux and Sara Forestier.

Instead of shoot outs and chases it features Rochdy’s interrogations with side kick Lieutenant Antoine Reinartz having to keep up with his more experienced superior. It’s convincing. Performances are superior and cars prowling round the orange sodium lamp streetscape give atmosphere but the film is finally only passably involving.

Director Bertrand Bonello is maturing and with Zombi Child and his Nocturama he’s moving into a characteristically French cycle - the cinema of outrage. Think  Clouzot’s Le Courbeau, Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes and the Gaspar Noé Seul contre tous / I Stand Alone,  though Bonello’s films are as different from those as they are from one another.

There is a narrative buried in Zombi Child but more importantly it’s the most substantial study of voodoo that the movies have come up with. Separate stories merge into something

which is of a piece though it doesn’t follow any familiar pattern.

We follow black Haitian student Wislanda Louimat joining a prestige French girls boarding school on the basis that her mum got the Légion d'honneur for her work in oposition to the brutal François "Papa Doc" Duvalier regime. Her pale, uniformed school mates, who sway in rehearsed wave response to the head mistress’ instructions, regard her with some suspicion. However virginal Louise Labéque befriends her and wants her accepted into their secret sorority. Anticipate an exotic Mean Girls or a female Dead Poet’s Society. We feel some concern for the newcomer’s fate among the snobby sisterhood who take candlelight meetings after lights out. Claiming to be the grand daughter of a Haitian Zombie doesn’t seem to fit into this scheme.

Meanwhile we get what prove to be flashbacks to the nineteen sixties and the fate of

Mackenson Bijou drugged and buried alive by a rival - hearing the dirt being thrown on the coffin he is being buried in. Much sobbing and ritual chanting. Bijou makes an unexpected return. You can forget the likes of Black Moon (Roy William Neill 1934), I Walked With a Zombie or Lucio Fulci.

Zombi Child - Louimat & Labéque

The film’s focus however proves to be on Labéque, her desire settled on Sayyid El Alami the shirtless moto riding hunk who has lost interest. She picks up at the news that her chum’s aunt is a “mambo” and starts hitting the cash dispenser. When we get to the (impressive) spirit evocation, the demon proves scornful of all this white bread activity.

The films achieves strange on multiple levels not least by fielding a present day that seems to belong to the past and a period fifty years back that is alarmingly modern. It’s mix of Euro Art movie, horror film and quasi documentary has upset not a few commentators. I was intrigued.

I commented Les hirondelles de Kaboul / The Swallows of Kabul, directed  by animator

Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec and actress  Zabou Breitman when It showed in the Persian Film

Festival and it looks like getting the wider release it deserves.

It offers parched, hand painted images of 1998 Kabul under the Taliban where the streets

fill with Kalash wielding soldiers and blue burka women, Mohsen a young man voiced by

Swann Arlaud passes the stoning of a woman convicted of licentious living. Children are

climbing onto a parked tank to watch and Mohsen finds himself joining in the brutality.

Full of self-reproach he comes back to wife Mussarat (Hiam Abbass no less) desperate at being confined to her home in his absence, drawing on the wall and playing an English language song about burkhas, on the cassette machine. Mohsen warns her that the music can be heard in the street or by their Religious Observant neighbour. Across town there is another homecoming. Hard man jailer Atiq (Simon Abkarian) has limped back to Zunaira  (Zita Hanrot) his  nurse wife who is now dying of cancer. They are aware that the regime they serve is incapable of providing them happiness.

The plot develops into shock value melodrama distanced by being presented in pale water colors and the fact that Afghans are speaking sub-titled French though none of this stops what we are seeing being disturbing. This one registers its indignation - not what you expect from a widely distributed animation. The style alone would get attention, though the undetailed faces don’t stand up to the close-ups they occasionally get. I might watch it again. Don’t ask me what the swallows signify. 

André Téchiné’s Hôtel des Amériques was always a handsomely made film - Bruno Nuytten on camera, Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko design, Philipe Sarde score it now has acquired a nostalgia patina which compensates for it’s conventional Boulevard feature romance plot.

It’s mad love again. When neurotic anesthetist Catherine Deneuve come close to running

down Patrick Dewaere, they end up spending the night together. He decides she’s “la plus

belle dame du monde”,  quite plausible in 198l. However she is still obsessed with the memory of the dead engineer-lover whose house they visit. Patrick gets through to Catherine but but starts neglecting her under the pressure of the gap in their social status.

(“It’s proof love can end”)

This plays parallel to the conversion of the Biarritz beach hotel into a tourist trap.

The films is too long and confused but does have the odd striking moments - the train window view superimposed on the ball room’s painted trees, the striking close-up of the keys still under the step of the dead lover’s house.

Jacques Demy’s Peau d'âne / Donkey Skin is always greeted with affection even though the tireless efforts of wife Agnes Varda to keep their work in the public eye have made it one of the most accessible items in the movie repetoire. I liked her stories of fans trying to make the cake that Catherine Deneuve at her zenith sings the recipe for here. The film is back again hopefully in it’s stereo restoration. There should be more of that.

Peau d’an has Demy’s  personality stamped all over it - fairy tale for grown ups (think the less succesful Pied Piper), all sung film (Parapluies de Cherbourg), distancing adult elements - here the incest plot to go with Jacques Riberolles’ singing serial killer in Demoiselles de Rochefort or Montand’s deadbeat dad in  Trois places pour le 26. Mag Bodard threw a barrel full of money at it and the costumes, jokey colour settings and cast dazzle, backed by one of Michel Legrand’s most humable scores. Even with all this I’ve always felt that fey wasn’t Demy’s best register - not that that’s likely to keep me away.

Also on view Ludovic Bernard’s 10 Jours Sans Maman,  a French version of  Ariel Winograd’s amusing 2017 Mamá se fue de viaje with Frank Dubosc in the Diego Peretti role.

   

Peau d'an - Marais, Deneuve.