Three Films Make A Post: Blood-curdling giant fly creature runs amuck!!!

Le Saut de l’ange (1971): This is a grim, rather cynical revenge movie by Yves Boisset about a bloody election in Marseille, or rather Jean Yanne coming back from a self-imposed Thai exile to take revenge for his wife and kid who are (quite uselessly) killed for reasons of politics and money he doesn’t actually have anything to do with anymore. In Boisset’s hands, it is a somewhat dry, deliberately paced crime movie with jabs of intense, sharp violence, a basic feeling of hopelessness, and a sense of barely repressed political anger. It is, as they say, quite a good film if you like that sort of thing, which I do, particularly when it includes the handful of moments of brilliant filmmaking this one does, moments when the film stops being dry completely and somehow turns its quite down-to-earth idea of how horrible violence works mythical without actually changing its posture at all. Call it alchemy.

Because Boisset is a director of taste, the film also features fan (that would be me) favourites Gordon Mitchell, Senta Berger and Sterling Hayden.

Espion, lève-toi (1982): Speaking of Yves Boisset, there’s also this spy movie with Lino Ventura as a French sleeper agent situated in Switzerland who finds himself reactivated only to stumble through a business so labyrinthine, he doesn’t even know if the people who tell him he’s working for them are actually who they say they are. On the pacing level, this is also rather slow, but it is again a sure-handed slowness the film needs to get to breathe. It’s less overtly violent than the older movie but that’s because it is really much more useful for the film’s goal of having its audience share its protagonist’s feeling of alienation and confusion to keep the violence off-screen and ambiguous.

If you’re the type to enjoy films that are structured like a peculiarly nasty kind of chess – abstract until they become all too personal – like I sometimes do, this is a pretty perfect example of it. Parts of the film are really about what very abstract strategic goals do to the people who are part of the strategy, the moment when the blind and indifferent forces of politics turn against you, or rather, use your personal loyalties, your humanity, to make you their chess piece until its time for you to disappear forever.

Breakout (1975): If there’s a place in your heart for middling 70s action movies, that’s where Tom Gries’s film probably lives. It’s not a bad film at all, but one that doesn’t make enough use of a great cast (Charles Bronson! Robert Duvall! Randy Quaid! Jill Ireland!), and could do quite a bit more with the basic set-up of a charming rogue (surprisingly enough Bronson) trying to get an innocent rich American (Duvall) out of jail because he’s rather fond of the rich man’s wife (Ireland). And money. I know, it’s “based on a true story” but when has that ever stopped a movie from changing the truth into something more entertaining?

Despite its lack of depth, it’s still a fun enough film, if only because it provides an opportunity to witness Bronson smile and emote and wisecrack.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,action,thriller,spies,yves boisset,jean yanne,gordon mitchell,senta berger,sterling hayden,lino ventura,charles bronson,robert duvall,jill ireland,randy quaid

Shotgun (1955)

Former outlaw and now Deputy Marshal Clay Hardin (Sterling Hayden) is bound to leave his job for the – cosy, it seems – position of Indian Commissioner and marry his fiancée. That is, until his mentor and best friend Marshal Fletcher (Lane Chandler) is gunned down with a shotgun by outlaw Ben Thompson (Guy Prescott).

Now, he’s leaving behind his fiancée and probably his career to ride out into the Arizona territories for vengeance, though, given the last scene between him and her, not marrying is definitely better for everyone involved. Clay’s hunt for Thompson is dangerous indeed, for the man doesn’t just have a few stupid men willing to attempt to kill Clay for him but is also delivering weapons to the renegade/freedom fighting Apache war chief Delgadito (Paul Marion), who does feel obliged to give Thompson a hand from time to time, even though he does have his doubts about his business partner. Revolutionary needs must.

On his hunt, Clay falls in with former saloon girl Abby (Yvonne De Carlo), out for a better life in California, and sleazy bounty hunter Reb Carlton (Zachary Scott), out to find backs with a bounty on them to shoot, which will complicate things further on but also might promise a better future for at least some of the people involved, if they are willing to take the steps necessary.

By the time he made Shotgun, director Lesley Selander was already a veteran with an insane number of B-Westerns on his résumé (and with quite a bit of TV work on shows like Lassie and Laramie in the future). The handful of them I’ve seen are decent and workmanlike in their approach, though given the sheer number of films he made, and the quality of the film at hand, I might just have been plain unlucky with them and dozens of gems might still be hiding in his filmography.

As it stands, Shotgun at first looks like quite the straightforward film, with a 50s asshole protagonist, a woman who just needs the right man to slap her around and will die virtuously for him because women with a past aren’t allowed happiness in Hollywood, and a bunch of Evil Injuns™. In short, a thing with the potential to rivet and become exciting by virtue of its sheer unpleasantness – a lot like a Mike Hammer novel, if you’re looking at a different genre for a minute.

But then interesting things begin to happen: Clay turns out to be a much more complicated character than he at first appears to be, a man whose gruffness hides doubts and actual human feelings, with a past he isn’t proud of yet can’t escape fully no matter how much he tries. At that point, the film also starts showing its hand of not agreeing with all of the frontier hardness its characters demonstrate yet showing it nonetheless because anything else would be dishonest; there’s also the suggestion that some of this hardness really is just that – a demonstration and defensive shell made to keep danger – of the physical as well as of the emotional kind – away.

More surprising still, Abby is actually allowed to live and ride off into what might just be a happy end with Clay (if you for one minute assume these two people can provide a happy ending to each other, or at least a happy life), the attraction between her and Clay having turned something much more human than your usual 50s romance on the way, into that of two people who learn they have quite similar backgrounds and begin actually understanding each other from there. There’s also the more practical point that, while she’s never going to win this week’s Strong Female Character prize (because they have to be flawless ass-kickers without feelings, yet also at the same time role models to satisfy some I sometimes suspect), Abby does have quite a bit of agency and isn’t treated like a child by the film. Why, Selander (or perhaps rather Clarke Reynolds’s and Rory Calhoun’s script?) even suggests that in case of a large scale Apache attack on your camp, you’ll want to give the woman a gun too, without even making a point of it.

Another surprise element is the short yet effective characterisation of Delgadito, which falls neither in the trap of the Noble Savage nor in that of the Bloodthirsty Savage, and shows more sympathy with his situation and position than you’d expect of a random B-Western. As the film shows him, Delgadito is an intelligent man who clearly knows that he’s going to be crushed by our old enemy, the Wheels of History, and that he’s damned if he does and damned if he don’t.

This, and even a bit more, Selander provides in a highly economical way, while also demonstrating a mastership of the kind of scenes a film of its genre and time just needs to have, realized in a nearly off-handed way that makes tight, complicated scenes look easy. Given all this, I’d not be too surprised if Shotgun were actually Selander’s best film; it’s difficult to imagine how he still could have improved on the model.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,western,lesley selander,sterling hayden,yvonne de carlo,zachary scott,guy prescott

Terror In A Texas Town (1958)

While the name of the little town Prairie in Texas shows a distinct lack of imagination, what is going on in it is has certain aspects of a fever dream.

Once a peaceful place, Prairie is now on the brink of the special brand of lawlessness the laws of capitalism bring. A certain McNeill (Sebastian Cabot) has somehow finagled himself into possession of the land grants for most of the outlying farms around town, never mind that the so-called squatters have been living there for decades. Now, McNeill wouldn't like to be called unnecessarily cruel, so he pays off the farmers to make them leave and lets his men burn down a farm or two if their owners aren't compliant.

That's not enough to get rid of the core of the local farmers, especially the Swedish immigrant Hansen (Ted Stanhope) and his friend and neighbor Pepe Mirada (Eugene Martin), so McNeill decides that it's necessary to make an example out of someone.

He hires an old acquaintance, the run-down gunman Johnny Crale (Ned Young) to do the deed. Crale himself is at the end of his own line. Psychotic, bitter and nearly made obsolete by the the changing times, he obviously sees McNeill's job as a last chance, but as a last chance to what is never really clear. It could be dying, or it could be getting rich, and I don't think Crale himself knows. The gunman is traveling with his girlfriend Molly (Carol Kelly), who loves him as much as she hates him and herself and would like nothing more than see her man give up on the outlaw business once and for all, but he is never going to listen to her.

Crale kills Hansen without much trouble. The old man tries to defend himself with the harpoon he used in his earlier life as a whaler, but to no avail. Without Crale's knowledge, there were witnesses to the murder. Mirada and his little son have seen everything. They have also found out why it is that McNeill is willing to pay people off instead of just driving them away - there's oil on the land!

Mirada's pregnant wife convinces him to keep his mouth shut about everything he has seen. She prefers to have a living father for her baby.

A week or so later, Hansen's son George (Sterling Hayden) arrives in town. He's just coming to visit his father, but when he hears of the old man's death, and sees how little the sheriff - who is of course owned by McNeill - or the other locals do about the murder, he decides to stay. At first, the inquiries of the somewhat slow seeming stranger don't lead to much, yet his stubbornness and honesty do finally lead him on the right track. McNeill tries to pay him off, but he could as well try to stop a train with his little finger.

In the end, there will be another duel between harpoon and gun.

In an earlier review, I called Joseph H. Lewis a director who had obvious talent, but didn't manage to use that talent well enough to actually make completely satisfying movies with it. After seeing Terror In A Texas Town, his last film, I have to take that back.

Based on a pseudonymous screenplay by the black-listed Dalton Trumbo, Terror is as good as a film in the B-Western sub-genre of the High-Noon-alike gets. As someone who is less than enthusiastic about the original, I'd even say it surpasses High Noon effortlessly. But I would say that, wouldn't I?

Terror removes the whininess and the loud moralizing inherent in the High Noon formula and replaces them with characterization of surprising depth. It's not just that the characters are psychologically sound, which is certainly nice and all, but also potentially boring, it's that they all are highly interesting, dragging some of the more beloved cardboard character types of the Western into the third dimension. The lack of moralizing here is just exceptional, giving a sympathetic view not only of the film's hero, but also of the sadistic monster that is Crale and the Western's favorite victim, "the fallen woman".

Additionally there's the human and decidedly non-racist portrayal of non-Anglo Americans, usually characters at best degraded to comic relief or ignored. You could start to believe America was built by a bunch of immigrants.

All of this is made even better by the fact how just plain peculiar the film dares to be, in small plot details like Crale's non-metaphorical iron fist as well as in bigger ways like its deconstruction of the High Noon formula that is less trying to be cynical than to put the emphasis on the character types who usually don't have a voice.

On the visual side, Lewis applies every camera trick he can afford, using everything from close-up shots of sweating people that prefigure the Spaghetti Western to unusual camera positions to make his film a slightly disorienting experience - at least seen in context of a more typical American B-Western style.

For once, everyone in the cast seems to be in on the sort of film they are doing, and acts as if his or her life depended on it. You could probably criticize Sterling Hayden's Swedish accent, but I don't think that's of too much importance for the big picture.

"The big picture" being this: Terror In A Texas Town is a brilliant, one of a kind film.

 

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