Capsule Reviews, Meta-Hollywood-Style, or "What's the Matter With Right Here?"

Quite coincidentally, I recently watched three films that in their own way, and with varying levels of success, deal with the, as they say, Classic Hollywood Style. Below, you will find capsulized reviews of that shit.

In a Lonely Place (d. Nicholas Ray) - Early on in this noir classic, Humphrey Bogart, as the embittered and potentially violent screewriter Dixon Steele, twice asks the question "Whats the matter with right here?" In both cases, there's some aggression behind the words -- in one case, Steele is literally looking to get into a fight -- because Dixon wants things to remain as they are. Not professionally, because he's treading water, and not in his relationships with women, because he doesn't have any, but in order to fix either problem he'd have to not merely change, but become a better person, and he's too busy feeling superior to every living creature that crosses his path. So what's the matter with right here?

Nicholas Ray's 1950 masterpiece, which has just been released on Blu-ray and DVD by Criterion, is one of the most psychologically devastating noirs ever made, and because of that, in its own way, one of the most narratively unconventional crime films I've seen. It's based on a novel by Dorothy Hughes, a major cult writer who I'm afraid I've never read, but Ray's film resembles more than anything a cross between James M. Cain and Charles Willeford. Both writers (Willeford began writing after In a Lonely Place was released) specialized in creating characters who find themselves thrust into intense situations, but discover that on some level that they sort of don't care. In In a Lonely Place, Bogart's Steele meets a coat-check girl (Martha Stewart) who's read the novel he needs to adapt, and he asks her back to his place to tell him the story, thereby cutting out the middle man. When, the next morning, the girl turns up murdered, Steele is at most bemused to find himself in a police station. There he meets his neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) who witnessed Steele and the victim together (and saw the girl leave without him), with whom he eventually falls in love.

What's rarely acknowledged is that Gray gives even less of a shit about the dead girl than Steele does ("Gray" and "Steele" may be names that weren't chosen at random). In fact, Gray is drawn to Steele precisely because of his associations with a murder case. She's not presented, and Grahame doesn't play her, as a ghoul, but it's not hard to connect the dots. It's only when the couple draws further into domesticity that Gray begins to listen to the warnings from the cops who still suspect that Steele is a killer.

The answer to the question "whodunnit?" isn't hard to land on, but it's also sort of irrelevant, for reasons I'll leave for those who've haven't yet seen In a Lonely Place to discover. But it's not irrelevant in a cold way -- it's somehow irrelevant in a way that specifically remembers that dead coat-check girl. Because you never know.

Gardens of Stone (d. Francis Ford Coppola) - When his 1981 film One From the Heart flopped so notoriously (that it's a great film is, of course, immaterial) that it not only contributed to the death of Hollywood's auteurist phase of the previous decade, but also bankrupted him and put the breaks on his juggernaut of a career, Francis Ford Coppola did what any desperate artist would have done: he politely said "Fuck it" and doubled down on One From the Heart's radical style. This took many forms, and one form, the one I find the strangest and most surprising, involved unironically employing classic Hollywood aesthetics in the aid of new films of the exact type that led to the development of those aesthetics in the first place. See Tucker: The Man and His Dream, his take on the biopic, and, more to the current point, 1987's Gardens of Stone, his mostly forgotten entry into the "war at home" melodrama.

Starring James Caan as Sgt. Clell Hazard, stationed in Fort Meyer in Arlington, VA during the Vietnam War, Gardens of Stone is essentially an anti-war film, but not of the puling sort that by then had become the norm (Clell insists, convincingly, that he's not a pacifist). Instead, it's a sad, funny, weird, inspired, honest, and honorable look at the world of U.S. Army as it functions at home while the war these characters were trained to wage is happening on the other side of the world. And while Clell and his best friend Sgt. Major "Goody" Nelson (James Earl Jones, and the pairing of Caan and Jones is sort of brilliant) seem to be the smartest guys on base, that's not because they, or the film, views the military as corrupt. Though Wyler's film is post-war, Gardens of Stone most resembles The Best Years of Our Lives in its depiction of military life as something only those actually living it can understand, or appreciate.

And Coppola does all this while having his actors pitch their performances at a level that would have been immediately understood and appreciated by the original audience for The Best Years of Our Lives, but less so by audiences who'd just seen Lethal Weapon. But Coppola doesn't believe that cinematic styles "evolve"; to him, the aesthetics of every era exists in the same era, which is to say, the present. It's not a matter of paying homage to what came before -- it's a matter of using whatever tools most inspire him.

On a side note, even though he's one of the most adventurous of all American filmmakers, when you read about Coppola online these days, you're more likely than not going to find some bullshit snark along the lines of "How could the guy who made The Conversation have made Jack???" Never mind how far in the past Jack is now, people still won't shut up about it. In any event, my response to such comments is "How many films as good as The Conversation have you made? Actually, scratch that: how many films as good as The Conversation have you seen?"

Joy (d. David O. Russell) - So, one way to do classic Hollywood is to actually be classic Hollywood. Another way is embrace the style on your own terms, several decades removed. And yet another way is to do it while pretending you're doing something else. Which brings us to David O. Russell, a filmmaker who's been an uninteresting traditionalist since Flirting With Disaster, his second film, and who made his best film (in my view, anyway) with The Fighter, which is the one time he shed any pretensions of "edginess." Since then, it's all been downhill (again), and while his latest, last year's Joy, must count as an improvement over his previous American Hustle, when this film opens with a title card that reads "Inspired By True Stories of Daring Women," you can practically see Russell waiting for the applause.

Based on the true story of Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence), the woman who invented the Miracle Mop -- and I sort of got the feeling that being able to call this movie Joy because in this case that word is multi-layered was the main reason for making it in the first place -- Russell's film turns what could have been unique source material into boilerplate inspiration. Joy struggles, and is beset on all sides, but finally succeeds, don't you know. As usual, Russell is relentless in his use of popular songs, presumably because deep down he knows that he's Martin Scorsese, and, as usual, he's no damn good at it (further proof, if any was needed, that David O. Russell is in fact not Martin Scorsese), playing songs just to play them, or because the brutal obviousness of using "I Feel Free" just appeals to him on some level. Later, when Joy gets a shot at promoting her invention on QVC, Russell wants to convince the audience that QVC is somehow this invigorating environment pulsing with the very juice of life, like an ER or an old-time newsroom. The idea isn't to bring out what's special about Joy Mangano's story, but rather to reduce it down to the kind of film we're comfortable watching.

But Jennifer Lawrence sure is good. Her talents as an actress are as natural and seemingly effortless as any I can think of in modern American films. The suspicion I have that Russell is, at this point, clinging to her desperately is one that persists.

A Heart Can Only Take So Much

In 1937, Edward Anderson published a novel that I am chagrined to say I still haven't read. It's called Thieves Like Us, and while Anderson is not well-known by any means, and in fact only wrote one other novel (Hungry Men in 1933), Thieves Like Us remains a hugely important work of crime fiction, even if only due to its two film adaptations. The second of those films is 1974's Thieves Like Us, directed by Robert Altman. It's a terrific film, one of Altman's best '70s movies, and it plays now -- though I admit that it was almost certainly not conceived as such -- as something of an antidote to Bonnie and Clyde. Altman's film humanizes its criminals as well as their victims, something which almost feels subversive of a certain attitude of the time. But Altman's Thieves Like Us, good as it is, still can't help but feel a little bit like leftovers, because in 1949 Nicholas Ray made his directing debut with an adaptation of Anderson's novel, this time called They Live By Night, a film that, when viewed as a first film, must shatter the morale of any number of bearded, bright-eyed cynics currently studying Ray for film class. It remains a breathtaking piece of work, and certainly one of the most emotionally devastating films of the noir cycle.

They Live By Night doesn't have much to recommend it -- it has everything to recommend it. Most immediately gripping are the performances of Howard DaSilva as the one-eyed Chickamaw and Jay C. Flippen as T-Dub. These are the men, older and professional and mean, with whom the comparatively childlike Bowie (Farley Granger) escaped from prison where Bowie had spent the last seven years, starting when he was 16, for fraternizing with the wrong element, and falling along with them; Chickamaw and T-Dub were there because they deserved to be. DaSilva and Flippen are perfect, easy and clipped in their professional modes, with DaSilva bringing otu Chickamaw's hidden wild side breaking out maybe once or twice too often for Bowie's comfort. But upon obtaining his freedom, Bowie, who hopes to hire a lawyer to get his murder conviction overturned, is young and stupid and therefore willingly hitches his wagon to the two older men, agreeing to assist them in a series of robberies they begin planning right away. This both dooms and damns him, as it damns (if not dooms) Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell), a young woman he meets among the network of family and friends Chickamaw and T-Dub employ to keep them hidden and fed. Bowie and Keechie fall in love, and if ever a more heartbreaking romance has occurred within a cycle of robbery, murder and general criminality, I haven't seen it.

This is the brilliance of They Live By Night. Because look, I'm not one to feel a great deal of sympathy towards criminals in films, because often the pleas for that sympathy is presented (or brayed, usually) by the filmmaker as "Hey, okay, this guy's a criminal, and okay he killed that one guy. But please remember, I've taken great pains to present the police as a bunch of hicks, and anyway my hero would rather not go to prison. He even wants to quit being a criminal, if society would only let him. And remember that scene with his daughter, the one in the diner? Man!" Something like that, anyway. However it might go, I routinely reject it, and my hackles have a tendency to go up if I think a film is trying to court me in that way. Inspire empathy for the criminal? That's one thing. Root for the son of a bitch? That's something else entirely. But They Live By Night is different. You might argue that making Bowie apparently innocent of the crime that landed him in prison is some serious deck-stacking, but it also shows him falling pretty easily into the role of getaway driver for Chickamaw and T-Dub. Not only does he agree to it, he does it almost gleefully. Bowie is an idiot -- that's his tragedy. The film offers no excuses for his criminality, but it's not hard to understand how you can be dumb at 16 and, in the circumstances under which Bowie has been living, come out at 23 just as dumb.

The film contains genuine beauty. Cathy O'Donnell's Keechie has a moment at the end of the film that's as gorgeous in its open-heartedness as the final shot of The Third Man is in its bitterness. In the brief moments when she and Bowie -- and Granger was never better -- are able to tear themselves away from the idiotic and dangerous world they seem lost in, Nicholas Ray actually makes it possible to root for Bowie. His remorse, we see, is genuine, and his simple desire for a normal life not spent robbing people or hiding from cops, evokes actual sadness. When he says to Keechie that he wishes they could go into town and see a movie, and that he's always wanted to hold hands with a girl in a movie theater, Ray basically points out the line dividing sentiment and sap, and how to stay on the right side. There's no pleading, no whining, just a genuine expression of feeling. And later, when Bowie comforts an ailing Keechie, and dreams out loud of a day when they might have a child, and says that children make a man responsible, there is pleading here, but it's a plea from Bowie, masked as reassurance of Keechie, that he will, one day, learn to do the right thing. Even Roy Bean would crumble if faced with that.

That's where They Live By Night achieves greatness, but generations of filmmakers who followed learned his lessons poorly. I suppose they only halfway paid attention. No, where They Live By Night seems at times most influential is in its portrayal of the fringe parts of criminal life. Along with the country roads and farmland that is the often forgotten in favor of urban settings, but still very common backdrop to this sort of story, are the side characters, like the aforementioned network of cohorts. Not quite criminals themselves (though Bowie does, with reason, claim that one of them is a "thief, just like us"), people like Helen Craig's Mattie, or Will Wright's old, drunken Mobley help complete the film's world -- not an underworld, really, but one just off to the side, easily seen if one chooses to, but usually ignored. Diners and gas stations, and nothing nothing but tall grass for miles, before you find another gas station, manned by somebody like Mobley, who has staying with him someone like Chickamaw, or T-Dub, or Bowie. This is closer to James M. Cain's fiction, or James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish. A world that's wide open and barren, rather than closed-in and towering. In the city, if you want to get away, you find there's nowhere to go; there's always something or someone in your way. You can't swing a dead cat. In the country of They Live By Night, meanwhile, you have everywhere to go. That's the problem: the road never ends.

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This post has been a part of the Nicholas Ray blogathon, hosted by Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder.

Blogathon Ahoy!

Boy, it's been a while since we've had one of these, isn't it? Feels that way, at least. Maybe it's just that it's been so long since anybody bothered to tell me about one of these. Okay, I see how it is.

But I'll get my revenge later. For now, it's important to focus on the topic at hand, which is a Nicholas Ray blogathon, hosted by the effervescent Tony Dayoub, of the great blog Cinema Viewfinder. Ray, as I'm sure you're all aware, was one of the giants of mid-century Hollywood filmmaking, and he is as worthy a subject for a blogathon as you'd imagine. So why don't you all take part? Head on over to Tony's place and read the details. You should know, though, that I plan on taking part in this one myself, so don't you go picking the movie I'm going to write about, or else I will punch you so hard.

Cap-Syool Reviews!! Enjoy Them Now!

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Here are some for you to read! Will you!?

Dragonwyck (d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) - This is one of Vincent Price's very early Gothic thriller/melodrama roles (it's also the first film by Mankiewicz). The story is basically that a young woman (Gene Tierney) is overwhelmed by the wealth and smoothness of distant relative and wealthy landowner, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price). Then when she marries him, she finds out he's a crazy asshole. Price is wonderful, as always, and his final breakdown is terrific -- nobody did sweaty, arrogant psychic disintegration quite like Price -- but Mankiewicz seemed a bit too concerned with making his film important -- laying on the plight-of-the-worker stuff a bit too heavy -- and therefore, in his mind (I'm wildly speculating) better than your standard genre film, and the result is that the film sags. There's a terrific efficiency to the best genre films, especially from this era (the film was made in 1946), so that when a film like Dragonwyck makes a transparent attempt to rise above them, it's hard not to see why those other films are so very good.
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Summer Hours (d. Olivier Assayas) - This beautiful and beautifully acted French film, about a wealthy French family, whose matriarch passes away in an early scene, struggling to deal with her estate (consisting mainly of a gorgeous country home, and a sprawling collection of artwork), is not actually about family strife so much as it is about losing your past, and how much more meaningful art can be to the individual than it ever will be as art. Charles Berling, as the eldest son Frederic, gets the top marks, but as I said, everyone is superb. And for a movie with such a small, intimate story, there's an incredible pace to it, of the kind that would utterly confuse your run-of-the-mill contemporary thriller filmmaker. Carried along, no doubt, by those performances. Top shelf.

Johnny Guitar (d. Nicholas Ray) - A quite strange Western from the 1950s, featuring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as the White Hat and the Black Hat, respectively. A lot has been made of this gender twist on the traditional Western, but the film itself doesn't hammer on any particular point: this is just the story, and these are just the characters. Mind you, its tone is less that of a Western than it is a melodrama, or "women's picture", of the kind that Douglas Sirk made at his most bombastic (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Sirk). But if it works, it works, so why complain about bombast, if that's the goal, and the goal is struck dead center? Besides which, any film that features Sterling Hayden and Ernest Borgnine can't be that bad. The fact that Hayden plays the title character who is also the Mysterious Stranger shouldn't confuse one into thinking that Joan Crawford isn't, in fact, the star (she's great, too, as is McCambridge). So what it is, in fact, is a genre mash-up; while that idea tends to yield horror-comedies, or horror-Westerns, or horror-SF, here we have Western-melodrama, which is actually a hybrid with a long history. All of which I suppose to say that I'm a bit curious why so many people think Johnny Guitar is so bizarre.

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Extract (d. Mike Judge) - Each of Mike Judge's live-action films (I'm excluding Beavis and Butthed Do America, because I remember that being a bit of a sensation at the time) has taken its own sweet time finding an audience. Office Space and Idiocracy were both dumped by their studios, and each has gained cult audiences of varying degrees of healthiness. His newest film, Extract, actually got a legitimate theatrical release, and still nobody went. Nobody who did go seemed overly taken with it, and my expectations were therefore low. But I really enjoyed it, as it turns out. It's not as near-perfect as Office Space, or as occasionally riotous as Idiocracy, but unlike that latter film it also doesn't run out of steam in the last third. It's consistently genial and entertaining, bolstered by a terrific cast of outstanding deadpan comic performers -- Jason Bateman, J. K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck, and the inhumanly attractive Mila Kunis, to name a few. Mike Judge knows ordinary people, and he knows what's so funny about them.

The Children (d. Tommy Shankland) - This horror film was primarily striking to me because it plunks a family down as the only possible victims, and then begins killing them. It's quite a bit more complicated, as well as better, than that sounds, but it's still the aspect of the film that stands out most strongly for me. The gist is, over Christmas an extended family gets together to celebrate, but one of the children has contracted some sort of virus, which only seems to be spread through the other children nearby, and which turns them into blank-eyed killers. This is brutal stuff, especially when the adults start fighting back, which you do sort of hope they'll do, but for God's sake look what they're doing! It's that sort of film, with, it would seem, some deeper implications having to do with abortion, but which I haven't quite parsed, and which may not be totally parse-able.

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Dead Snow (d. Tommy Wirkola) - This movie was fun enough, I suppose, but if you're going to make a movie that spoofs other zombie movies, don't get around to the spoofing eventually. Don't play it reasonably straight for half the movie, possibly longer, and then go all zany and madcap all of a sudden. I'd prefer a movie about zombie Nazis in the snow to be played as straight as possible, myself, but if I can't have that I'd at least like a filmmaker who can commit to a tone.

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You know, I think I want to withdraw that "fun enough" comment. It is, in a way, but it's also sort of incompetent, and cheap, and thinly imagined. I'd forgive it a bit more if it had ended with the stirring scene of zombie butchery cut to a Finnish folk spiritual song, but they didn't stop there, and all my goodwill drained off.

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Gamer (d. Neveldine/Taylor) - Well, it's happened. We now live in a world where you can watch a new film and not see the influence of Hitchcock, or Ford, or Welles, or Chaplin, but rather of Tony Scott. And not the Tony Scott of Crimson Tide, but the guy who made Domino and slapped those motherfucking English subtitles of lines already spoken in English by American actors all over Man on Fire. And all in service of what? A remake of The Running Man. And it's worse than the original.

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Take me, Lord. I'm ready. I cannot breathe air with the same people who allowed Gamer to be made. With the two unconscionable bastards who made it, and who joined their last names with a meaningless backslash, Face/Off style, creating in my mind the Hellish image of a bi-headed, quadri-limbed Nether-God, who would thunder its heavy legs across the planet, leaving blasted cities and fallow land in its wake as it tossed back its slavering heads and shrieked its murderous laughter into the cosmos. Such a world is more than my feeble mind can accredit.

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Day 37

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I awake in the middle of the night. A ghastly storm is assaulting my home, throwing back my shuttered windows, the latches all tinfoil and twine to these blustery and soaking hands! The window....the window is open, and inviting.

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Day 38

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The television flickers on, unbidden by my hand or mind. Gamer is on. Michael C. Hall is dancing to "I've Got You Under My Skin" while his henchmen, in time to the music, prepare to attack Gerard Butler.

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The open, flapping window is streaked with the chilled rains. As flaps the window, so flaps the pages of Al-Hazred's Necronomicon. A book I had destroyed. I know I did. I set it alight and flung its blazing, ashy pages into the sea's gaping throat!! How can it be here now!? And now that kid who plays Butler's controller is on the screen again...as through the window I hear the bleating of the dread Neveldine/Taylor rolling over the distant hills...

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The window! The window!!