Three Films Make A Post: The gun that became the law of the land !

Pickpocket (1959): The arthouse crowd loves to recommend this short crime drama with a prologue scroll explaining it isn’t a crime drama as a comparatively easy in to the world of French director Robert Bresson’s “minimalist, “austere”, “hypnotic” etc style. So I thought to myself, why not try it, for I do find quite a bit in at least a third of the films recommended thusly. It’s certainly easy to see the artfulness of the filmmaking, the intensity and elegance the film comes by exactly because Bresson is so aesthetically focussed. I’m much less sure about the rest of the style: emotionally and intellectually, this does very little for me. Bresson’s moral viewpoint seems completely disinterested in complexity, so is frankly rather boring for my tastes; I also find it hard to emotionally connect to a central character who mostly spouts half-cooked mock-existentialism about the superman. Add to this Bresson’s habit of casting non-actors in the main role to get “authentic” camera performances (or as I call it “the jitters” and monotonous line reading) which is something I absolutely loathe, and I think I’ll pass on Bresson’s films for the next decade or so.

The Mourning Forest aka Mogari no mori (2007): This also arthouse crowd approved tale of what I assume to be a care-giver (Machiko Ono) at some sort of retirement home (the film doesn’t do exposition) getting stranded in a forest for several days with one of their patients (Shigeki Uda) and working through their respective griefs, as directed by Naomi Kawase on the other hand, does quite a lot for me. It does appear rather loose and unfocussed at the beginning, but that’s really Kawase opening up the world of her characters for the audience without comment, opening up an approach to her grieving people’s endless complexities that may make things difficult, and not always obvious, but which also makes it possible to understand much more about them once one has tuned into things in the right way.

Colt .45 (1950): This Edwin L. Marin western with Randolph Scott as a salesmen for new-fangled colts finding himself set against the evil and somewhat perverse Zachary Scott (no relation) is a bit rough around the edges. There are certainly some great moments and ideas in here, but Marin isn’t quite the director to make the most of them.

So expect Scott teaming up with the local native American tribe in a nicely progressive turn, but also expect their portrayal to be even more awkward than typical of the era, and whose problems only start with their Chief being played by Chief Thundercloud, who was no chief of any tribe, and most probably not a Native American. There are huge (these things look as phallic as all get out, so I use the word on purpose) suggestions of the colts’ psychosexual influence particularly on our villain but they never quite gel in the end. Also worth mentioning are a pretty juicy part for Ruth Roman as the wife of a secondary villain (Lloyd Bridges in his young and buff phase) turning to Randolph rather quickly; a corrupt sheriff and other elements that make this unmissable on paper.

In practice, it’s just not that good of a movie (though not a bad one, either).

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

In short: Wings of Danger (1952)

aka Dead on Course

Permanently scowling American Richard Van Ness (Zachary Scott) is working for a small British freight airline mostly operating between Guernsey and the UK main isle as a pilot, hiding away the fact he's having regular blackouts and will someday soon crash and take who knows how many other people with him. Ladies and gentleman, our hero!

The only other person who knows about Richard's little problem is his buddy - and brother of his girlfriend Avril (Naomi Chance) - the womanizing sleazebag (actually, the film pretends he's boyishly charming, but I just don't see that) Nick Talbot (Robert Beatty). Right in the first scene, oh so charming Nick uses this knowledge to blackmail Richard into letting him make a flight to Guernsey despite reports of really bad weather coming up.

Not surprisingly, Nick's plane doesn't survive the contact with said weather and ends up in the ocean, with Nick presumed dead.

Richard isn't completely sure about that, though. The pilot also has questions concerning the reason for Nick's actions. Did Nick risk and lose his life only to deliver some orchids to Alexia LaRoche (Kay Kendall), Guernsey's local femme fatale? Why is a weasely blackmailer now sneaking around Avril? And what does all this have to do with the smuggling and counterfeiting ring Richard's acquaintance Inspector Maxwell (Colin Tapley) is looking for? Richard won't be able to rest until these questions are answered.

Wings of Danger belongs among the number of noir films the UK's Hammer Studios produced before they came upon their Gothic horror gold mine. The film was - like quite a few movies Hammer made at this time - produced in cooperation with US cheap-skate movie mogul Robert Lippert, who provided Hammer with money and the American lead actor supposedly helpful in selling films in the US. What audience, after all, could resist the star power of Zachary Scott?

Not that Scott is doing a bad job here - he's quite good at playing the rude noir hero with the unpleasant voice (the Internet says "gravelly", I say "sounding as if he were permanently berating the people he's talking to"), and does even work the suicidal melancholia the script by John Gilling only hints at yet never develops deeply enough to be really convincing into his performance a little.

In fact, nobody concerned with Wings of Danger's production did a bad job at anything, everything's solid, professional, and well done. Unfortunately, everything is only solid, professional and well done, from Terence Fisher's - who could do so much more when he wanted - direction to the solidly paced script that always stops short of doing something exciting or surprising, leading to a film that is much blander than the sum of its parts should be, and that is disappointingly lacking in the feelings of desperation and nihilism, the free-floating weirdness as well as the heated emotions which make the difference between a mediocre noir and a good or a great one. Emotionally, Wings isn't dishonest, but too polite about everything to excite me.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,terence fisher,zachary scott,kay kendall,noir