Nicholas Ray Triple Feature: Bigger than Life (1956) / Johnny Guitar (1954) / Wind Across the Everglades (1958)

Nicholas Ray never won an Oscar or a lifetime achievement award, worked in Hollywood for little more than a decade, and directed only a few canonized classics. His most famous film, Rebel Without A Cause, is remembered for James Dean's iconic performance rather than Ray's direction. Surprising, then, that this was the man whose career launched the auteur theory. François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard sang his praises in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, seeing in his work the possibilities of a newly personal cinema, in which the director was the true author of the movie. When these same critics became filmmakers themselves, and the leaders of the French New Wave, they continually cited Ray as a formative influence. Godard even dedicated his film Made in U.S.A. to Ray, and once declared, in typically hyperbolic fashion, "The cinema is Nicholas Ray!" All this while Ray was ignored in his native land.

What, exactly, makes Nicholas Ray an "auteur?" Upon first glance, he might seem merely a workmanlike, efficient Hollywood director. Unlike his French admirers, Ray was never really an independent filmmaker, rather working under the confines of the studio system. Neither did he specialize in a particular genre, but rather dabbled in film noir, Westerns, Biblical epics, socially conscious dramas, adventure films, and more. But Ray's triumph was to make deeply personal films with popular appeal. Each of his films, no matter the genre, is graced with the same qualities: a dynamic and expressionistic visual style, and a thematic concern for the lonely and isolated. Ray's films also address societal issues like suburbanization, the Communist witch hunts, and environmentalism - themes that were overlooked at the time but which only make his movies more fascinating as time goes by.

Bigger than Life (1956) is perhaps Ray's masterpiece. The story could almost be an after school special: a suburban father begins taking an experimental drug, which dramatically transforms his personality and nearly destroys his family. In the end, though, he recovers, repents, and the happy family is reconciled. Under another director, Bigger than Life could have been an insufferable message movie. Instead, though, Ray uses this plot to launch a freewheeling critique of American society in the 50s. We begin to understand that Ed Avery, the main character played by James Mason, is not fundamentally changed by the drug - it merely unleashes his suppressed feelings about his life, his family, and his culture. The failings of American education, the obsession of consumerism, the banality of suburban life, the superficial distinctions of class, the realities of a loveless marriage - all are targeted in Bigger than Life.

Part of what makes Ray a great director is his ability to dramatize his themes visually, and Bigger than Life is perhaps the best example. The film is shot in the aspect ratio of 2.55:1, an extremely wide format that allows Ray to fill the frame with revealing details. Consider the way Ray films Avery's house. The house is a typical specimen of suburbia, and would not be out of place in Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. As the film progresses, though, the house becomes a visual representation of Avery's character, an extension of his psyche. The walls of the house are plastered with posters of European cities that Avery will never visit. A deflated football on the mantelpiece is a sad reminder of his fading college football days. The spacious interiors and separation of rooms suggest the estrangement that Avery feels from his family.

Ray, who made some of the great film noirs, is certainly no stranger to shadows. In Bigger than Life, they are everywhere. Initially, most of the interiors are shot with muted colors and low light, but Ray ups the contrast later in the film, setting bright colors against dark shadows. Consider the shot below, in which Avery looms over his son, pressuring him to finish a math problem. So many themes of the movie are present in that one shot: the impossible expectations Avery sets for his son, the God complex that the use of cortisone has given him, the ugly demons that overtake his personality. And perhaps above all, Richie, the son, isolated in the foreground, overwhelmed and silently crying.

Richie, in fact, may be the key to the film. Upon a second viewing, it struck me that the viewer's sympathies - and certainly Ray's - lie almost entirely with this little boy. Richie is the wisest character in the film - the first to notice the effect of the drug on his father, the first to question his father's newfound obsession with spending money, and ultimately the one to call the doctor and make his father stop taking the pills. But Richie's mother dismisses his concerns, and his father considers him a failure. "Childhood is a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it," Avery says at one point. In the end, Avery gives up on even this cynical mantra, deciding to sacrifice his son in an imitation of Abraham slaughtering Isaac. Until a deus ex machina appears, of course, saving Richie and delivering a happy Hollywood ending.

Despite this obvious compromise, Bigger than Life remains perhaps Ray's greatest film: a social satire posing as a domestic melodrama that becomes something of a horror film. It is a movie of ideas, but these ideas never overtake the film's emotional center - Richie. He stands for his entire generation, I think, and he shares some affinities with the hero of Ray's previous film - James Dean's Jimmy Stark. It is easy to see how Richie, too, could become a rebel without a cause.

How to describe Johnny Guitar (1954)? François Truffaut put it this way: "It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western...Johnny Guitar is the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream. The cowboys vanish and die with the grace of ballerinas." That oft-quoted description comes close to capturing the film's wonderful strangeness, its bizarre remove from its own genre. Here is a Western where the gunslinger is a mopey, laid-back guitar player who hardly influences the action at all. The real drama, and indeed the final shootout, is between two women: Joan Crawford's Vienna, a saloon owner who is being run out of town, and Mercedes McCambridge's Emma, a Puritanical cattle rancher who wants her gone. The ostensible cause of the women's enmity is the love of a man, but the film is rife with barely concealed lesbian tension. "I never met a woman that was more man," a bartender says of Vienna, and Emma seems oblivious of all men in her quest to bring down Vienna.

The plot is patently ridiculous, the colors are outlandish, and the film has few of the traditional pleasures of the Western. It's easy to see, then, how Johnny Guitar has become something of a cult classic; it's also easy to see how it could be dismissed as little more than an eccentric example of genre revisionism. But the movie is better than that. Despite all of its ludicrous trappings, the true story of Johnny Guitar is a sincere, affecting one. It reiterates Ray's perpetual themes of loners and outsiders. Vienna is a woman hardened by life and unrequited love, who builds her saloon as a kind of haven. Johnny is a wanderer who returns to his ex-lover, Vienna, for a few days of happiness before Emma's posse descends on the saloon and ruins their paradise.

Johnny Guitar is also an unapologetic commentary on McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. About halfway through the film, Sheriff McIvers (Ward Bond) is desperate to frame someone for the robbery of a stagecoach, and his gang try to make townspeople testify against each other - a clear parallel to the House Un-American Activities Committee and their attempts to root out suspected Communists. The issue would certainly have had personal significance to Ray. His political views leaned towards the left, and many of his closest collaborators - among them Johnny Guitar's screenwriter Ben Maddow, and Humphrey Bogart - had been targeted by HUAC. Ray dresses the sheriff's gang in matching black, and arranges them in diagonal formations that suggest their gang mentality.

What emerges from Johnny Guitar most clearly, though, apart from these political overtones, is a sense of doomed romanticism. Ray's vivid use of color and space, the melancholic score, and the script's surprisingly moving romantic exchanges do indeed create a dreamlike quality, as suggested by Truffaut. This is not a hard-hitting Western, but a sensitive, passionate one, in which the characters all seem to be wounded and yearning for love.

Wind Across the Everglades (1958) is obscure even by Ray's standards. It was never released on VHS, let alone DVD, and its two main stars were hardly A-listers: Burl Ives and Christopher Plummer. What's more, it has to be asked if it is a Nicholas Ray film at all. The movie was the brainchild of screenwriter Budd Schulberg, and was produced by his brother Stuart; when they were unhappy with Ray's style, they fired him and Budd directed the rest of the film. The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has described it as "a kind of litmus test for auteurists," and from that perspective it is a fascinating case study.

Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, the movie itself is somewhat choppy. Schulberg so resented Ray that he threw away much of his footage, and the narrative is not easy to follow. The story is set in early 19th century Florida, and concerns a game warden (Christopher Plummer) who comes to enforce conservation laws and goes up against a violent bird poacher (Burl Ives). There is also a romantic subplot that goes nowhere.

Wind Across the Everglades plays like a rough draft of a film that, if polished, could have become something much greater. Nonetheless, the movie is not without interest. For a 1958 film, it is curiously modern in its depiction of the environment. The opening scene depicts, in a documentarylike fashion, how the whims of women's fashion nearly decimated the population of birds in Florida. The main character, moreover, is a strident conservationist who pits himself against a ruthless hunter. The relationship between these two men is the core of the film. Both men are, in their own way, outcasts from society. Despite their professional differences, the two men unite over a drinking game, in an extended scene that seems spontaneous and improvised. Alas, such improvisational techniques are what got Ray fired from the film.

Wind Across the Everglades is less than the sum of its parts, but in some scenes Ray's brilliance is clearly evident. Ray's visual gifts are on full display, though this time he largely trains his camera on beautiful wildife exteriors, as opposed to the interiors of Bigger than Life and Johnny Guitar. A subplot involving a Native American is a classic example of Ray's outsider theme, and the performances he coaxes from the actors are uniformly strong. One only wishes that Ray had been allowed to see his vision through from beginning to end.

What makes a great director? For the famous critic Andrew Sarris, it was the presence of a theme. For Orson Welles and the New Wave critics, it was the extent to which the work represented the man who made it. Others might point to style, or influence. Whatever the criteria, Nicholas Ray seems to have it all.

Apologies for the delay with this post! When I saw these films in July at the Harvard Film Archive, I never expected that it would take 5 months to write the blog post on them. Hopefully, with my college apps almost done, I will have more time for blogging in the future.

7 Women (1966)

Few directors loom larger in American cinema than John Ford, and few directors are so commonly oversimplified. I make no pretensions of being a Ford scholar, but as I have explored his films over the past few months, I have not been satisfied with any of the generalizations typically applied to him. It has been said that he is primarily a director of Westerns. True, Ford's Westerns are the best-remembered of his films, but his filmography extends far beyond that genre. It has been said that he was a workmanlike director, who saw directing as a job rather than an art. That is certainly the impression that Ford conveyed in his interviews, yet his films are graced with an undeniable artistry, in his painterly compositions and the themes that repeatedly express themselves in his work. It has been said that he was a stoutly conservative man, who could even be backwards in his depictions of race, yet socially conscious films like The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and later Westerns like Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) contradict this theory. In short, Ford remains something of an enigma to me. Although he is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors, I can never quite pin him down.

Case in point: 7 Women (1966). Ford's final film was derided upon its release, as was much of his later work, as being the work of a man past his prime. A few film critics and Ford scholars have challenged that consensus, but the film still doesn't hold much of a reputation - meaning, inevitably, that it is unavailable on DVD and remains something of an obscurity. That is a shame, because 7 Women is one of Ford's most fascinating films: imperfect, yes, but distinguished by subtleties of character, a claustrophobic visual style, and a harsh cynicism that masks a kind of humanism.

In its broadest outlines, 7 Women could almost pass for a Western: in the middle of the wilderness, a group of bandits descends on an isolated outpost of civilization. However, the setting is 1935 China, the bandits are Mongolian warriors, and the outpost isn't a stagecoach or a frontier town but a Christian mission. The mission is run by Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton), a rigidly pious woman who betrays almost no warmth, except to Emma (Sue Lyon), a teenage girl whom she has taken under her wing. The other missionaries include a pregnant middle-aged woman, her husband, and several refugees from other missions who seek shelter after theirs is destroyed by the bandits.

This uneasy mixture is thrown into further distress upon the arrival of Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), a cynical and atheistic doctor who outspokenly challenges the beliefs and values of the missionaries. Much of the early drama of the film is psychological, as Cartwright wins the admiration of Emma and brings forth the repressed emotions of the women. Later, the drama becomes more pronounced, as a cholera epidemic rages through the mission and the bandits arrive.

It is curious that Ford, whose films are so populated with strong masculine characters, should choose as his last film a movie with an almost entirely female cast. What is more curious about 7 Women is its tone. Even in Ford's more "serious" films, like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is quite a bit of comic relief, usually in the form of Andy Devine or John Qualen. But in 7 Women, the mood is consistently somber and ominous. There is a line early on that sets the mood for the rest of the film, as the frenzied Florrie Pethers shrieks out, "This is the last place on Earth!"

That kind of apocalyptic foreboding is well matched with Ford's visual style. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 7 Women was shot largely on studio sets rather than on location. Gone are the panoramic vistas of The Searchers and Ford's other Westerns. Instead, the movie has a decidedly artificial feel. The characters hardly ever leave the confines of the missionary; when they do, they merely stand outside the gates and muse about an outside world over which they have no control. As such, there is a palpable sense of confinement. Ford's use of color, too, is quite atypical. In contrast to the bright hues of, say, The Quiet Man, 7 Women is dark. Muddy browns, dirty greys, and dark purples are ever present.


With all of these anomalies, it can be difficult to look at 7 Women from an auteurist perspective. It doesn't really feel like a John Ford film. With the pronounced and dramatic use of interior space and the lesbian undertones of one relationship, it could almost pass for a Nicholas Ray movie.* Yet upon closer examination, the movie betrays several of Ford's recurring themes. One is the idea of community and tradition. In movies like The Quiet Man (set in rural Ireland) and The Sun Shines Bright (set in the American South), Ford explores the dynamics of fixed communities and their responses to change. His point of view is usually mixed: a combination of affection towards their traditions and criticism regarding their somewhat backwards ways. 7 Women illustrates this principle. Many of the missionaries - the self-described "soldiers in the army of the Lord" - are admirable characters that elicit our sympathies. But Miss Andrews is depicted in a rather unflattering light, as an unthinkingly stubborn adherent to an outdated form of Christianity. In the end, she is doomed to irrelevance, as all of the other missionaries come to reject and ignore her.

The real hero of 7 Women is Cartwright, the atheist. It seems odd that Ford, a devout Catholic, would celebrate her, but then again Cartwright is in many ways the embodiment of the Fordian hero - an outsider, tough, outspoken, brave, and yet compassionate. In the final scenes of the film, Cartwright must sacrifice herself to save the other women. This decision is not revealed with any teary speeches, but simply as the resolve of a woman who knows what she must do. The final moments of the movie are all the more moving because they seem so distanced and cold. There is no sentimentality, and the way Ford chooses to end the movie is brilliant - jarring, disturbing, and not easy to forget.

What, then, can explain the movie's negative reception, and its current obscurity? For one, several of the performances - particularly the supporting ones - are quite simply bad. Sue Lyon is wooden and bland; Betty Field is shrill and irritating. The script showcases some truly bizarre dialogue. And the portrayal of the bandits as a bunch of greasy, brawny musclemen randomly given to fits of uncontrollable laughter is more unintentionally funny than frightening.

Still, these are ultimately minor shortcomings in one of Ford's richest and strangest movies. It is telling that he himself considered it one of his best, and was deeply disappointed by the public's lack of interest. After 7 Women, plans for at least one more film fell through, and Ford retired from filmmaking. But it is a fitting capstone to his career, and the final scene takes on greater significance in this context. "So long, ya bastard!" Cartwright exclaims in a final act of defiance, and we are reminded of that gruff Irishman whose film this was, uncompromising to the end.

*About Ray - I initially planned to make the next post about him. But I saw "7 Women" and felt compelled to write about it. The next entry will be about three Nicholas Ray films, though - "Bigger than Life," "Johnny Guitar," and "Wind Across the Everglades."

Sunrise (1927)

Quick trivia question: what was the first Academy Award winner for Best Picture? The official answer is 1927's Wings, directed by William A. Wellman. But in fact, there were two winners that year: Wings won for "Best Production" but F.W. Murnau's Sunrise won for "Unique and Artistic Production." Over time, the dichotomy between those two films has grown even sharper: Wings, a romantic, expensive World War I spectacle, has all but receded from memory - or to be more accurate, is more remembered in name than for its artistic merits. Sunrise, on the other hand, was largely ignored by audiences upon its initial release, but has since become a film school staple and is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Indeed, the greatness of Sunrise lies not only in its importance to film history - for combining the sensibilities of German and American filmmaking, and for its array of innovative visual and aural effects - but also in its sheer beauty. This is not a stuffy old silent film, but one of the most ravishing and lyrical films I know.

To summarize Sunrise is to trivialize it. The film involves three main characters: The Man (George O'Brien), The Wife (Janet Gaynor), and The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). The Man is a farmer who begins an affair with The Woman, who then convinces him to drown his wife. The Man brings his wife out on a boat to do the deed, but cannot go through with it. The rest of the film concerns The Man's attempt to repair and renew his relationship with The Wife.

Right down to the lack of character names, Sunrise has the potential for a simplistic, treacly allegory. That it is something more is above all a tribute to F.W. Murnau. Murnau was one of the most significant pioneers of German Expressionism - a bold, exaggerated style that utilized high contrast cinematography, oblique angles, and shadows to great effect. It was a style most famously used in horror (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and sci-fi (Metropolis); it also provided part of the inspiration for American film noir. Sunrise does not sound like it would need this kind of treatment. But Murnau uses it to explore the dark side of its protagonist's heart.

Murnau's visual style in the opening and closing scenes - looming shadows, canted angles, and dimly lit shots - reflect The Man's estrangement from his wife, and his tortured sense of guilt. At the beginning of the movie, this estrangement is out of choice; The Man chooses to abandon his wife to elope with another woman. By the end of the movie, the two have reconciled, but after a fateful storm, The Man believes he has lost his wife forever. In shots like the one below, Murnau seems to suggest that without his wife, The Man is quite literally a shadow of his former self.Murnau's visual mastery also extends to his use of superimpositions. Several times throughout the film, Murnau uses these layered images to explore the characters' dreams, hopes, feelings, fears, and nightmares. This kind of effect could be cooked up easily today, but in Murnau's time, it was a painstaking process. Whatever the limitations of the technology, though, the superimpositions still hold up today as evocative, sensuous, telling images.
I've barely scratched the surface of Murnau's innovations. I could also point to his roving camera, in an era when cameras were bulky and usually kept stationary. I could mention his use of Movietone, an early soundtrack system, to include not only a classical film score but also numerous sound effects. But the real genius of Murnau's film is how seamlessly these techniques are woven into the fabric of the story. His direction is never intrusive or distracting, and he knows when to simply pull back and observe. During the long reconciliation scene, Murnau leaves most of the heavy lifting to his wonderful, expressive actors.

I'm reluctant to call any film perfect, but Sunrise comes as close as any film I've seen. The movie was initially overshadowed by movies like Wings as well as The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, released the same year. Within a few years, silent films would be all but obsolete in Hollywood. Yet Sunrise reveals all the possibilities of that medium, and achieves a level of purity and simplicity that few films can claim. With silent films as great as this, who needs sound anyway?

Coming soon to the blog: a trio of Nicholas Ray films!

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)

Upon first glance, Make Way For Tomorrow looks like an awfully treacly, didactic melodrama. The movie opens with a shot of the sky, a bombastic music cue, and a title card outlining the major themes of the movie - the "painful gap" between "the aged and the young." The whole thing caps off with "the ancient words of a very wise man - HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER." Thankfully, though, this well-meaning but rather overstated opening is hardly indicative of the film that follows. On the contrary - Make Way for Tomorrow is a remarkably subtle film, full of quiet observational grace. It regards its characters honestly, objectively, in all their faults and failings. And yet the movie balances this objectivity with deeply felt empathy. Though the film is 73 years old and tells a simple story of an elderly couple cast out of their home, it is universal in the way that it shows how we all live our lives.

As the film begins, the elderly Lucy (Beulah Bondi) and her husband Bark (Victor Moore) gather their children to make an announcement: they have lost their home to a bank, and need to move out in a few days. None of the children claim to have the resources to support both parents, so as a "temporary measure" Lucy stays with their son Robert (Thomas Mitchell), while Bark goes with their daughter Cora. The children assure their parents that everything will work out, but as Bark is quick to mention, "It never has worked for any one else."

The film picks up with the parallel stories of Lucy and Bark trying to cope with their new separate lives. Robert, ever the devoted son, looks kindly after his mother, but his wife Anita (Fay Bainter) and daughter Rhoda (Barbara Read) see her as little more than a nuisance. Bark, meanwhile, makes friends with a local Jewish storekeeper (Maurice Moscovitch), but otherwise feels neglected by his own family.

And so Make Way for Tomorrow proceeds - moment by moment, dealing in insightful observations rather than dramatic revelations. The story may sound slight, but the film's profundity lies in its details - in the embarrassed looks exchanged by the children in regards to their parents, in the way that Bark and Lucy withhold their emotions from their children, in the way actress Beulah Bondi delivers simple lines like "Don't worry about me" while suggesting so much more. Every scene of this film is full of such moments - details of family life that are so honest and observant that they can be painful.

The cast (largely unknown, but uniformly strong) and the writers certainly deserve praise, but at least equally important is the man behind the camera: Leo McCarey. McCarey is not remembered today; perhaps he worked in too many genres to be easily pinned down as an auteur. Moreover, McCarey follows the classical Hollywood tradition of invisible style: the camera shows only what needs to be shown, and the style never draws attention to itself. Still, this is surely one of the film's assets. Not a shot is wasted, and the whole movie unfolds with economy and precision. McCarey always knows where to place the camera. Consider an early scene, when Lucy loudly talks on the phone to Bark, interrupting the bridge game of Robert, Anita, and friends. For most of the scene, McCarey uses two camera set-ups, cutting back and forth between the two. The first shows Lucy in the foreground, with the scowling bridge players in the background. The second is a reverse-shot, isolating Lucy in the background while placing the others in the foreground.Those two shots are deceptively simple. McCarey is actually breaking one of the fundamental principles of continuity editing: the 18o degree rule. In doing so, McCarey creates a tone of awkward embarassment, revealing how oblivious Lucy is to her surroundings. But he also allows us, literally and emotionally, to see both sides of the scene. In the shot of Lucy in the foreground, we see Lucy's excited expressions, hear the happiness in her voice, and as a result empathize with her. In the second shot, we realize just how loud Lucy is, and how she is disrupting the game, and thus empathize with the bridge players. That seemingly simple camera setup is really a microcosm of what makes the film great: an ability to be objective about the story, to understand multiple sides of an issue.

As mentioned earlier, McCarey largely adheres to the invisible style of Hollywood filmmaking. But within the boundaries of that tradition, his shots are often rife with meaning. This ironic shot shows Lucy and Bark gazing at a window display with the advice, "Save While You Are Young" - exactly what they both failed to do.


That shot takes place near the end of the film, when Lucy and Bark are reunited in New York. They spend a few precious hours together - walking in parks, going to restaurants, visiting a hotel they both stayed at, talking about the past - before Bark must leave on a train for California. He is to move in with another son there; Lucy will be sent to a rest home in New York. It is in this final passage that all of the movie's themes become clear. "I figure that everyone is entitled to just so much happiness in life," Lucy tells Bark. "Some get in the beginning, and some in the middle, and others at the end. And there are those who have it spread thin all through the years." Lucy and Bark get one last day of happiness together, and then Bark leaves. In the final shot, Lucy gazes after the departing train, watches it go, and turns to leave the frame as it fades to black.

The studio tried to impose a happy ending, but McCarey refused. As it is, the ending is devastating but perfect. A happy ending would have been a betrayal of the movie's themes. It is a movie that contains great love and joyous moments, but more importantly it is about life's little disappointments, about how bad things can happen to good people for no reason. The title, I think, is ironic. This is not a cautionary tale about preparing for the future. In fact, the movie seems to say that we cannot prepare for what will happen. Tomorrow makes way for itself.

After years of being unavailable on video, Make Way for Tomorrow was released on DVD earlier this year as part of The Criterion Collection. It's certainly well worth your time to catch up with this neglected classic.

Nashville (1975)

A minor controversy arose in the online film scene this past October, when Richard Schickel, film historian and critic for Time magazine, launched a scathing critique of Robert Altman in the LA Times. The occasion was a new book, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, but Schickel spent most of the article denouncing Altman's personal failings, in addition to spouting out pithy attacks on his films ("To make sure the audience never quite understood what was going on, he overlapped dialogue..."). Schickel concludes that Altman's films are hopelessly dated, and will not "survive as anything more than historical curiosities."

A film like Nashville is undoubtedly emblematic of its times - what with the long hair, the hippies, the drugs, and the music. But what Altman manages to do is create a sardonic commentary on the times posing as a celebration of them. For a director whose films supposedly resemble "someone else's not-very-interesting drug haze," as Schickel claims, Nashville is quite critical of the 70s generation, revealing the hypocrisies that lie beneath the world of politics and the entertainment industry.

In describing Nashville, I am reminded of Mark Twain's preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Like many of Altman's films, Nashville is essentially a series of character sketches and vignettes loosely tied to a main idea. The film follows no fewer than 24 major characters - a motley crew of hippies, folk singers, housewives, country stars, reporters, and political campaigners - as they descend on Nashville for a benefit concert. The candidate is Hal Phillip Walker of the "Replacement Party" - never seen, though his voice can be heard delivering speeches from his seemingly omnipresent van.

Using the campaign as a springboard, Altman paints a huge, sprawling canvas of American life. Altman follows dozens of storylines and fills each of his widescreen compositions with detail. His camera is fluid, constantly shifting perspective and revealing new details, making us an active observer. Aside from its technical feats, though, Nashville has grand thematic ambitions. The film is essentially an ironic response to Watergate; Altman contrasts the patriotic American ideals celebrated in the upcoming bicentennial with their seeming irrelevance in a disillusioned America. The whole tone of the film is set by the first song, a patriotic anthem sung by country star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) that includes the not-so-inspiring chorus "We must be doing something right to last 200 years."

That song is the first of many in the film; Altman has even classified Nashville as a musical. Certainly the songs are central to the film, helping to establish mood and develop character. (Almost all of the songs were written by the actors specifically for their roles). One of the most famous is Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy," sung in one of the film's greatest scenes. Carradine's character, a womanizing folk singer named Tom Frank, takes the stage at a local bar and dedicates the song to "someone special who just might be here tonight." Three women - Tom's habitual fling, Mary (Cristina Raines), Geraldine Chaplin's kooky BBC reporter, and a groupie played by Shelley Duvall - all think that the song is about them. But Tom is actually playing to Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin), a housewife and gospel singer that caught his eye at a recording studio a few days ago. They go to bed, of course, but Linnea decides that the affair must go no further, and she returns to her family. Tom tries to incite jealousy by calling another woman, but Linnea remains strong and leaves with dignity. That scene alone, so rich with restrained emotion and subtle characterization, reveals what a terrific director of actors Altman was.

And it is moments like that which make Nashville so rewarding. For all of his cynical commentary on hypocrisy, Altman makes us genuinely care for his characters. So many of them seem adrift - the lonely old man with the dying wife; the waitress who wants to be a singer but can't sing; the country star's son, who manages his father's career but has no life of his own. In many ways, Nashville is about the ways that these characters envelop themselves in patriotic ideals, in country music - in anything - to make themselves feel better. That theme is there in the first song, and it's there in the last one. After an assassination occurs at the benefit concert, a wannabe country singer takes the stage to lead the crowd in a song called "It Don't Worry Me." "You might say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me," they all sing.

Is that song a stirring hymn of unity, or a feeble attempt to cover up a sad reality? Altman doesn't tell us what to think, and the film's ambiguity is what makes it so fascinating - and so frustrating to viewers like Schickel. Since seeing Nashville last month, I have read a number of reviews and essays concerning the film, but I am still far from penetrating its mystery. Altman once said that it depressed him when people told him they had seen one of his films, when what they meant was that they had seen it once. Coming from the man who made Nashville, you can see why.

****/****

Triple Feature: Taxi Driver (1976) / Goodfellas (1990) / The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese is widely hailed as one of the great American directors, yet before I began this blog I had only seen three Scorsese films, and abnormal ones at that – The Last Waltz, No Direction Home, and The Aviator. I have never been particularly attracted by his films’ subject matter, which often tends toward the extremely and unpleasantly violent. But after seeing the astonishing work of filmmaking that is Raging Bull, I decided to catch up with three Scorsese classics. Taxi Driver, which has been called by some the best film of the 70s, is a psychological thriller from the point of view of a mentally unstable cab driver. Goodfellas is Scorsese’s widely praised drama about life in the mob over the course of three decades. And The Departed, the film for which Scorsese finally won an Oscar, is a crime drama about an Irish mob and corruption in the Boston police department.

Taxi Driver is the oldest of the three films, and certainly the most daring. Goodfellas and The Departed, for all their merits, are basically genre films, but Taxi Driver is a bold, unconventional portrait of a man losing his grip on reality. Robert DeNiro, in one of his most famous performances, plays Travis Bickle, a war veteran who is now a taxi driver in New York City. Suffering from insomnia, he spends his sleepless nights shuttling people across the city, always repulsed by what he sees. “All the animals come out at night,” Bickle declares, describing the whores, drug dealers, and addicts he sees every night. “Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. “ Bickle sees a glimpse of hope in his miserable life when he meets a beautiful young campaign worker (Cybil Shepherd), but their relationship soon backfires. He also gets involved in the life of a 12 year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster), whom he tries to save before it is too late. In the end, alienated by society, Bickle resorts to shocking violence.

When I sat down to watch Taxi Driver, I expected to see a violent revenge movie more than anything else. But the film is deeper than that. It is a contemplative, brooding film about loneliness and alienation. Everything is seen from Bickle’s perspective, and the driving scenes perfectly emphasize his isolation from the rest of society – separated by that little plastic window, mired in shadow, and ignored by his customers, we begin to understand Bickle’s frustration – although the film wisely never tries to explain Bickle’s actions. Rather, it relies on the strength of DeNiro’s performance, who makes the whole thing seem believable.

Yet for all its strengths, I cannot pretend that I walked away from Taxi Driver with any lasting impression, or real insight. There is nothing particularly wrong with the film – DeNiro’s performance is excellent, Bernard Herrmann’s eerie score is memorable, and the cinematography is remarkable. But for all of its efforts to delve into Bickle’s psyche, I never became invested in the character – I always remained emotionally aloof, like Bickle himself.

I was less impressed with Goodfellas, one of Scorsese’s most popular and critically acclaimed films. The film, as its tagline declares, depicts three decades of life in the Mafia. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) grows up in the 50s in Brookyln, and as a teenager becomes attracted to the allure of Mafia life – the cars, the money, the privileges. Much to the concern of his parents, Henry begins working for the local family, led by Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino), and the notoriously violent Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro). Soon, Henry quits school and becomes part of the mob full time. Despite initial happiness, Henry’s lifestyle eventually leads him to a drug addiction, jail time, and an unhappy marriage, before he winds up in FBI Witness Protection limbo, where he still longs to return to the life of a “Goodfella.”

Goodfellas has often been compared to The Godfather, but for me there is no comparison. I will concede that Goodfellas is no doubt the more realistic mob movie – for all of its artistry, The Godfather is somewhat romanticized, the violence buried under slick montages and swelling music. Scorsese doesn’t fall for that – the violence is frequent, graphic, sudden, and often quite shocking. His movie is certainly an accurate portrait of the Mafia in America, and the performances all ring true. The dialogue always seems realistic and spontaneous, never rehearsed. Scorsese also does a suitable job of depicting the allure of Mafia life. The early scenes are at times playful and fun, reflecting Henry’s naïve perspective on the Mafia. “We were treated like movie stars with muscle,” Henry’s narration tells us, “we had it all just for the asking.” This at first glorious life is depicted with great flair in a long tracking shot where Henry and a date skip the line at an expensive restaurant, make their way through the kitchen, and find their seats while everyone else is standing outside in the cold. Of course, Henry’s lifestyle soon backfires into a hopelessly violent and amoral one.

But after a while, it seems like that is all Goodfellas has to offer – a series of violent, unpleasant incidents. The film lacks any basic sense of humanity, like The Godfather had. None of the characters are relatable. None of the characters are remorseful. And the film lacks any sense of elegance or grace. That may seem an odd complaint for a Mafia movie, but compare it to Taxi Driver. Both films deal with violent, disturbing material, but Taxi Driver uses violence sparingly, and does have a certain elegance about it. Goodfellas is just coarse, and in the end Scorsese relies too heavily on gratuitous violence to make his point – and there doesn’t seem to be much of a point anyway.

I will probably sound like a hypocrite for praising The Departed, because it suffers from many of the same flaws as Goodfellas – overlength, excessive violence, an over-reliance on four-letter words. But I found The Departed totally gripping from its first frame. The film begins with a narration by Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), who declares, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” In an opening prologue set to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” Scorsese masterfully sets the scene, depicting Costello’s game – bribing kids off the streets of Boston, pulling them away from the Church and indoctrinating them into his mob. Flash forward many years later, and one such mobster, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) has become a mole in the Special Investigations Unit of the Massachusetts State Police. At the same time, the SIU sends its own mole, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) into Costello’s gang. Of course, both sides soon become aware of an intruder, and a bloody cat-and-mouse game ensues.

As I mentioned earlier, The Departed is essentially a genre film, a basic crime story– Scorsese isn’t really experimenting here, he’s playing it safe with familiar material. But what a crime movie it is! The whole film crackles along at a galloping pace, propelled by strong performances. Part of the joy of watching The Departed is to see the giants of 70s cinema – actors like Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen – matched with some of the most talented actors of today, like DiCaprio, Damon, and Mark Wahlberg. The cast is uniformly solid, particularly Nicholson, who is a genuinely frightening presence. The film also has a tremendous sense of location, making full use of its Boston setting. I was skeptical about The Departed – despite its Best Picture win, I had heard criticisms that it was excessively violent, warmed-over Scorsese. Yet all of these criticisms were trampled by the film’s narrative drive, and the sheer talent of all the players involved.

Taxi Driver: B+
GoodFellas: B
The Departed: A-

Double Feature: Grand Illusion (1937) / Paths of Glory (1957)

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” - Samuel Johnson

That line is quoted early on in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, a brilliant World War I film about a risky mission gone wrong. But it might have just as well belonged in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, an influential French film that deals with the relationships between a group of French officers in a German war camp. Although the films were made two decades apart and in different countries, the similarities are striking. Both are black-and-white World War I films about the French army, and both have strong anti-war messages. The two films tackle different realities of war, though – Paths of Glory deplores military corruption, while Grand Illusion laments the way war tears apart human relationships.

Grand Illusion is a war film without the war. There is never a single battle sequence in the film, nor should there be. The story focuses on a group of French officers who are taken as prisoners of war in a German prison camp. Among the captives are Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), a wealthy aristocrat, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), a middle-class soldier, and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a Jewish banker. The men spend every night digging an underground tunnel to escape, but they are deported to another camp before they get the chance. At the new camp, the supposedly inescapable Wintersborn, they meet up with the German Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), who first shot down Boeldieu’s plane. At Wintersborn, the men eventually pull off a somewhat successful escape, but not without the cost of one man’s life.

I spent much of the first half of Grand Illusion puzzled at its supposedly pacifist message. I suppose I was used to films like Saving Private Ryan, which depicts horrible conditions and sickeningly violent battles to push its message that war is hell. In contrast, the prison camp in Grand Illusion seems downright cheery. The prisoners are treated well, given large quarters, seem fairly happy, and even put on a musical show. But I began to understand that Renoir was not interested in depicting the physical horrors of war. Renoir wrote that the film was “a story about human relationships,” and it is exactly that.

The key relationship in the film is the one between Captain de Boeldieu and Captain von Rauffenstein. Von Rauffenstein is a hospitable captor – after he shoots down the plane, he invites Boeldieu to lunch before he is sent to the camp. The two captains immediately get on, discussing a mutual friend in Berlin. Later, when Boeldieu is reunited with von Rauffenstein at Wintersborg, they seem glad to see each other again, and have a conversation about what will come about after the war. It has been said that World War I was the most literary war; it was led by well-educated aristocrats. That idea runs throughout Grand Illusion, especially in the scenes with the two captains. They discuss how the age of the aristocrat is ending, and von Rauffenstein speaks of having to go on leading a “futile existence” after the war. The scenes between the two men have great poignancy, and the acting is tremendous. Apparently Erich von Stroheim spoke almost no German and struggled through his lines, but he conveys the essence of his character with facial expressions. Von Stroheim was himself a silent movie director, and no doubt realized the power of facial acting.

Another important relationship is introduced near the end of the film. Maréchal and Rosenthal have escaped, and stay with a German widow named Elsa (Dita Parlo) in the countryside. A romance blossoms between Maréchal and Elsa, even though neither can speak the other’s language. But the two soldiers have to leave for Switzerland, and Elsa breaks down crying, telling Maréchal how she has been alone for so long. These two relationships (von Rauffenstein and Boeldieu, Maréchal and Elsa) reveal the essential tragedy of Grand Illusion. Outside of war, these characters would be best friends, but war dictates that they cannot be.

If aristocratic French officers are the heroes of Grand Illusion, they are the villains in Paths of Glory. Kirk Douglas is Colonel Dax, just about the only sympathetic officer in the film. Dax’s corrupt superior officer, General Mireau (George Macready) is ordered by his superior, General George Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) to lead an attack on a well-fortified German hill. Dax insists that it is a suicide mission, but Mireau insists on the attack – mainly for the possibility of promotion. When the attack inevitably fails, Mireau blames it on cowardice, and orders 3 men to be tried under penalty of death. The trial is a sham, and despite Dax’s noblest efforts, the three innocent men are ordered to die.

Paths of Glory is a very cynical film, exposing the inherent corruption in the high ranks of the army. The battle scenes are grim, and probably more harrowing than most films of the time, but the most terrifying scenes occur “behind the scenes,” so to speak – in offices and courts. After the mission inevitably fails, Mireau calls a meeting with Colonel Dax and General Broulard. Mireau, who prides himself on being a principled patriot, initially calls for one hundred men to be killed. Broulard calms him down, eventually working the number down to three, much to Mireau’s disappointment.

The scene is disturbing because it becomes clear how cold and distant these generals are. They feel no guilt in sentencing three innocent men to death and then genially making lunch plans. Dax, meanwhile, is caught in the middle, working his best to defend the innocent men. Douglas may be more of a movie star than a great actor, but his performance in Paths of Glory is very effective. Dax is appalled at the situation, but must contain his anger during the trial. The whole film is a very quiet one. For the most part, there are no impassioned monologues, no tirades against injustice – until the penultimate scene in the film. After the execution, Broulard offers Dax Mireau’s job, implying that Dax has been aiming for promotion all along. Dax, who feels like he has been used, finally explodes, calling Broulard a “degenerate, sadistic old man” and refuses to apologize. The scene is cathartic for both Dax and the audience.

Kubrick adds an interesting tag to the end of the film. The soldiers are gathered in a bar, where a captured German woman is brought onstage to sing a folk song. The men cheer and whistle, but when she starts singing the whole place falls silent. Everyone is clearly affected, and several of the men visibly weep. It’s not clear why - maybe they are thinking of their sweethearts back home, or maybe they are just wondering how this poor woman found herself so far from home. But for a moment, the German woman and the French soldiers, so different superficially, are united in song. It is a very emotional scene, and would not have felt out of place in Grand Illusion. Indeed, I wonder if Kubrick was inspired by Renoir’s film.

Both Grand Illusion and Paths of Glory are incredibly accomplished films. Grand Illusion is by far more influential, and is widely praised as one of the greats of French cinema. But Paths of Glory is a wonderful example of studio filmmaking by a true auteur who would soon transcend it. Grand Illusion shows that a bond can exist between people who should have nothing to do with each other. In the same way, two directors from different backgrounds and countries here made two separate masterworks about the follies of war.

Grand Illusion: A
Paths of Glory: A

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

The Shawshank Redemption has enjoyed quite a popular revival in the years since its 1994 release. It opened initially to mediocre box office, and was largely ignored in a year dominated by Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction. Ironically, it has now gained status as a modern classic, and currently sits in the number one position on IMDb's Top 250, which ranks the public's highest-rated films. Yes, according to thousands of voters, The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest film of all time. I find it absurd to think any such thing exists, and even more absurd to think that this film tops the likes of The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and countless others. Still, all hyperbole aside, The Shawshank Redemption is a beautifully constructed and inspiring piece of entertainment.

The story concerns Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a mild-mannered banker who is convicted on circumstantial evidence of killing his wife and her lover. He is then sent to Shawshank Prison for two life sentences. Andy makes friends with Red (Morgan Freeman), an inmate who is known throughout the prison as the man who "knows how to get things." The film chronicles 20 years in Andy's life, depicting the friendships that form between the prisoners and the corruption of the prison system.

From the very beginning, The Shawshank Redemption presents a very intimate portrayal of prison life. Almost the entire film is set within the walls of Shawshank, and over the course of the story’s two decades, we begin to understand the characters and their traditions. During the first scene at the prison, we jump in on the middle of such a tradition. As the convicts watch the new arrivals shuffle in from a bus, they place bets on who will be the first to break down crying. Red bets on Andy. There is a certain macabre formality about that scene. We realize that the inmates have seen bus after bus pull in to Shawshank over the years, knowing full well that prison will break some men.

But much to Red’s disappointment, it does not break Andy, who remains silent all through his first night. Andy soon emerges as something of an oddity at Shawshank. His walk is a carefree stroll, and he does not seem to be terribly perturbed to be in prison (although it is quickly established that he is innocent). Robbins plays the character as something of an enigma; he talks rarely, and we never fully understand him. Yet he quickly earns the respect of everyone at the prison – even the warden (Bob Gunton), who enlists Andy to handle prison finances.

Red, Morgan Freeman’s character, is the other primary protagonist of the film. Freeman is as always a likable actor, but he may be too likable here. After all, Red is a convicted murderer, but like many of the other prisoners, we never see that side of his personality. This illustrates the main problem with the movie – the prison seems too nice, too friendly, too warm. There are exceptions, of course. In several scenes, Andy is raped by a gang of men, and the prison guards are always violent and nasty. But the movie is severely lacking in moral ambiguity. With few exceptions, the prisoners are all good and the guards and warden are evil.

Still, The Shawshank Redemption is rather brilliant in the way it shows the long-term effects of prison. In one scene, an old convict named Brooks (James Whitmore) is finally released on parole. He stumbles alone through 1950s America, staring at strange cars and working a menial job at a grocery store. The tragedy is that in prison, Brooks was somebody – everyone knew and respected him as the librarian. In the real world, he is just a lonely old man.

The Shawshank Redemption is also beautiful to look at, though never too showy. For the majority of the film, the color scheme is muted, and everything seems realistic. This stylistic choice seems to fit with the oppression of the prison setting. The one major exception is a triumphant moment near the end of the film, which is simply gorgeous in its imagery. I won’t describe it, as it reveals a key plot point. But it is the most memorable scene in the film, and it really exemplifies what The Shawshank Redemption is all about. A few weeks ago I wrote about Cool Hand Luke, another prison movie, saying it was “a stirring affirmation of the human spirit in the face of adversity.” The same can be said of this particular scene, and of The Shawshank Redemption in general. “I guess it comes down to a simple choice,” Andy tells Red. “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”

Verdict: A-

The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)

Robert Wise's 1951 film The Day The Earth Stood Still is an acknowledged classic, a stirring sci-fi parable of Cold War paranoia. It was responsible for the creation of the iconic silver-steeled robot Gort, and the phrase "Klaatu barada nikto," one of the most recognizable quotes in movie history. Director Scott Derrickson's 2008 remake updates the story to the present day, and focuses on an environmental message. Needless to say, any remake faces quite high expectations from the original's legions of admirers. I must admit I feared the worst when I saw the trailer, which emphasized shots of massive computer-generated destruction more than the characters. Would the original's personal, human story be compromised for special effects? Well, the answer is yes...and no. There is a human element to the film, and talented actors like Jennifer Connelly and Kathy Bates give the film some weight. But in the end The Day The Earth Stood Still turns into a rather predictable - and boring - sci-fi disaster movie.

Jennifer Connelly is Helen Benson, an esteemed scientist who is part of a team called in to investigate an alien aircraft that is about to land in Manhattan. It arrives in Central Park in the form of a giant luminous sphere, and out comes a massive metallic robot, and an alien named Klaatu. GORT, as he is so nicknamed by the military, is detained, while Klaatu is taken to a hospital where he sheds his alien outer layer to become, well, Keanu Reeves. Although he asks to speak to the United Nations, Klaatu's request is denied. He eventually escapes, along with Helen and her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith), and they spend the rest of the film on the run from the military. Soon, Klaatu's message becomes clear: his race will exterminate the humans to preserve the planet's capacity for sustaining life.

The cast of The Day The Earth Stood Still deserves far better than the film's script gives them. Jennifer Connelly's leading lady looks have served her well in movies like Dark City and Hulk, but she is above all an extremely talented actress. Her role in The Day The Earth Stood Still is surprisingly unglamorous - her Helen is a weary widow striving to make ends meet, and I believed every minute of it. Kathy Bates and John Cleese also show up - Cleese is mostly wasted in a cameo as a Nobel Prize winning scientist, but Bates gives an entertaining performance as a very commanding Secretary of Defense. As for Reeves, the best I can say is that he doesn't embarrass himself - most of the time. The performance calls for being emotionless, and to that extent Reeves succeeds. But not surprisingly, it is quite a dull performance.

The film is technically well-made - visually appealing, with a few outstanding setpieces. The first sequence, set in 1928, is intriguing and mysterious and captured my attention immediately. I was also impressed with the first arrival of the sphere in New York - a faithful, atmospheric recreation of the scene from the 1951 film. But the filmmakers don't know how to handle Gort, perhaps the most memorable character from the original. In the original, he was played by a man in a suit; in the remake he is a Godzilla-sized, computer-generated creation. The effect is not convincing, and the scenes with Gort are often unintentionally laughable - as are the military attack scenes, which interrupt the storyline and seem to belong in another film entirely.

Still, I must respect the film for keeping the main focus on the characters, as the 1951 version did. They may not be the most interesting characters - Jacob, Helen's stepson, is a particularly contrived and annoying character - but the cast does their best with the material. Only in the last half-hour or so does the film lose the human focus, as the director indulges in special effects extravaganzas showing buildings and stadiums being destroyed.

And then there is the message. I have no problem with an environmental message - my favorite film of 2008, Wall-E, had a strong environmental message but displayed it in an intelligent and elegant manner. In contrast, the message of The Day The Earth Stood Still is cumbersome to the story as well as being downright silly. The 1951 film was very humanistic, calling for an end to war and violence. The 2008 version seems to suggest that if we compromise the existence of other species on the planet, we deserve to die. I also find some hypocrisy in a movie that advocates environmental awareness but has blatant product placement for McDonalds.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is a competent but misguided remake of a classic. Despite the efforts of an able cast, and a few memorable sequences, the film ultimately falls on its face, with a preachy message and far too much emphasis on action. It is not a terrible film by any means, and might stand up better if not compared to the original. But any remake has to be compared to the original, and there really is no comparison. The main problem plaguing this version of The Day The Earth Stood Still is that it has no earthly reason to exist.

Verdict: B -

My Darling Clementine (1946)

There is a certain old-fashioned sensibility about John Ford's My Darling Clementine that is charming in this day and age. The few modern Westerns that do exist tend to be grim and serious and violent, but My Darling Clementine is an entirely different beast. It is an almost genteel film, where the characters and comedic moments take precedence over the violence. I mean this only as a compliment; John Ford wrote the book on how to make Westerns, and by all accounts this is one of his finest. While not as serious or artful a work as The Searchers, the movie is a near-perfect example of studio film-making by one of the great American directors.

Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, who along with his three brothers is hustling cattle to California. They decide to stop at a small town named Tombstone for the night, leaving behind the youngest brother, James, to watch the cattle. Upon their return, the Earp brothers find James dead and the cattle stolen. Wyatt decides to take the job of marshall in Tombstone, in an attempt to bring law to the untamed town and to avenge his brother's death. Soon enough, though, he runs into trouble with the local powers, like Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) and Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan), both of whom Wyatt suspects might have been involved in James' death.

Intercut with all of this is the love story between Wyatt and Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), a schoolteacher from Boston who arrives in Tombstone chasing her old flame Doc Holliday. Clementine, though, has deceptively little screen time in the film that is named after her. She arrives almost 40 minutes into the film, and shares very few scenes with Fonda. Still, her presence is key. Her shy, sweet character is contrasted with the saucy yet disloyal Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), a saloon singer and Holliday's current plaything. Clementine also gives the film its emotional center, and despite little screen time, provides the film with one of its most memorable scenes. At a community dance, Wyatt seems unsure whether to ask Clementine to dance, but eventually sums up the courage, tossing aside his hat in resolve and bringing her to the floor. What is at first a stiff and awkward dance turns into a dance of joy as the town's residents cheer on the marshall and his "lady fair." It is a simple and joyous scene, the kind that would never be found in today's Westerns.

My Darling Clementine tells an essentially violent story of revenge and corruption, though, and there are many of the typical Western conventions - bar fights, shootouts, riots, and wonderfully politically incorrect dialogue ("What kind of town is this anyway, selling liquor to Indians?"). But still, Ford is more interested in the characters than in any conventions or setpieces. The climatic gunfight at the OK Corral is over quickly, and rather forgettable. Rather, the most memorable moments in My Darling Clementine are the simplest ones - like the dance scene, or the scene where an actor drunkenly recites from Hamlet in a bar, or Wyatt's farewell to Clementine at the end of the film. The beautiful vistas of Monument Valley, as photographed by Joseph MacDonald, are also impressive.

The story of Wyatt Earp has been retold numerous times in various films. Ford's was not even the first one - that distinction goes to 1939's Frontier Marshall. Since then, films like Gunfight at the OK Corral, Tombstone, Doc, and Wyatt Earp have all been versions of the same tale. From what I gather, these films are more historically accurate than Ford's version. But I would be surprised if any is as effective and enjoyable a piece of cinema as My Darling Clementine. The movie is lush, gorgeously photographed, joyful, and entertaining from beginning to end. Is it a fictionalized, inaccurate, sentimental piece of romanticism? Absolutely. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Verdict: A

Raging Bull (1980)

We all know the classic underdog story - a young, up-and-coming athlete with a troubled past upsets a formidable opponent to be crowned the new champion. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull turns this formula on its head, depicting a talented boxer who wins the championship but alienates his friends and family, eventually becoming a fat drunkard who performs terrible nightclub acts. Raging Bull is a biopic, telling the true story of Jake LaMotta, but it is so much more than a simple memoir. It is a story about failure to communicate, and about sexism, and about family. It is also a textbook example of acting, editing, and cinematography - all in service of a deeply human story.

After a brief scene in 1964, in which LaMotta (Robert De Niro) rehearses his nightclub routine, the film cuts to a fight in 1941 between LaMotta and Jimmy Reeves. Immediately we can see that Scorsese is not interested in toning down the violence. The fights in the film are brutal - blood flies, sweat drips, smoke drifts, and lightbulbs flash. At times, unconventional sound effects like swooping birds are used as LaMotta closes in on his prey. Slow-motion is used to great effect, and the sheer violence is striking - not only for the combatants, but for the fight's audience as well. After a controversial decision in the first fight, a brawl erupts in the audience that culminates in several women being trampled by men. In another fight, LaMotta throws a punch that sends blood splattering into several spectators' faces. But even in their brutality, many of the images in the fight scenes have a certain beauty to them. In one slo-mo shot, water is poured over LaMotta and it gently cascades downward. In another shot, the rope boundaries of the ring literally drip with blood. These masterful, unrelenting sequences lose little of their effectiveness today, even though they have been aped countless times in other films.

Soon after the first fight, Jake's brother and manager Joey (Joe Pesci) introduces him to Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), a beautiful 15 year-old whom Jake becomes infatuated with, despite having a wife at home. Jake's relationship with his wife is abusive - he screams at her for overcooking his steak, throws tables around the house, and threatens her. His relationship with Vickie is downright gentle compared to his abusive relationship with his wife. It is only when he actually marries Vickie that his attitude changes. Jake expects Vickie to obey him blindly - to fetch him coffee and be a nice little housewife with no social life of her own. When his brother Joey asks Jake to apologize to Vickie, Jake can't do it. He doesn't understand that Vickie feels like a prisoner, and instead of apologizing he just starts making out with her. To Jake Vickie is just an object, a disposable pleasure rather than a serious partner. Needless to say, the marriage turns to distrust, abuse, and eventually separation by the end of the movie.

Another pivotal relationship in the film is the one between Jake and his brother Joey. On the surface, the two are very similar, with hot tempers and loud mouths. But Joey is fundamentally different from his brother. He cares more deeply about his family and is far more reasonable than Jake. At one point, though, Joey's temper gets the better of him, and he gets into a huge bar brawl with a man he suspects of sleeping with Vickie. It is abundantly clear that Joey deeply loves his brother, but it seems that the only way he can express this love is through blind rage. The same is true of Jake. In one scene, Jake has the preposterous idea that Joey slept with Vickie, and he barges into his house to fight him. When Vickie later urges Jake to apologize for this misunderstanding, Jake can't do it - even over the phone. There is a real inability to communicate between these two characters, and by the end of the film Jake has completely alienated Joey.

De Niro is fascinating to watch in the scenes that depict Jake's later years. It is well-known cinematic lore that De Niro put on a significant amount of weight to play this role, but the performance goes beyond physical transformation. De Niro perfectly expresses a sort of phoned-in happiness that masks a layer of sorrow. In his later years, Jake fools himself into believing that he is happy, when it is clear to everyone else that he is not. We first see the older Jake in 1956 Miami being photographed for a newspaper. He sits by a pool, explaining why he is happiest in retirement - how he doesn't have to worry about weight and can spend more time with his family. Minutes later, of course, we see a drunken Jake telling unfunny jokes at his nightclub, we see Vickie finally announce that she will leave him, and we see Jake thrown into a jail cell, where he smashes his head against the wall, screaming "Why? Why? Why?" And in the final scene, before he goes on stage, he addresses himself in the mirror: "Go get 'em, champ." He still thinks he's a champion, even when no one else does.

I notice that I have spent a lot of time describing the characters and relationships of Raging Bull without critiquing it very much. But there is really not a whole lot to criticize about the movie. My only gripe, perhaps is that the film feels disjointed at times. The storyline skips years at a time without seeming like any time has passed at all. This is particularly problematic for Cathy Moriarty, who plays the crucial role of Vickie. The actress, who was 19 at the time of shooting, seems far older than 15 in the early scenes and far younger than 30 or so in the later scenes. Still, her performance itself cannot be faulted.

Raging Bull is truly a film where all of the elements come together. De Niro is rightly praised for his performance, but the film's success belongs equally to Scorsese, to the other cast members, to the screenwriters, to the editor, and to the cinematographer. It is rightly revered as a masterpiece, and 28 years later it regularly tops lists of the greatest films of all time. Funny, then, to think that Raging Bull nearly never got made. Scorsese repeatedly turned it down, and fell far behind schedule during production. But he prevailed, and delivered a true masterpiece.

Verdict: A

Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Cool Hand Luke is about a young war veteran who is forced into a chain gang for a petty crime. There, he is tormented and abused by the tyrants who run the place. By this description alone, one could safely assume that Cool Hand Luke is a tragic, gritty drama. Yet I found the film strangely optimistic, a stirring affirmation of the human spirit in the face of adversity. And who better to embody such a spirit than Paul Newman, who exudes both a tough manliness and tender humanity in the role of Luke. It is perhaps his most fondly remembered role, and not without reason. Newman is Luke, and to imagine anyone else in the role is nearly impossible.

Lucas Jackson is first arrested at the beginning of the film for cutting off the heads of parking meters (as he explains later, "Small town, not much to do in the evenin'"). For this petty crime, Luke is forced to join a chain gang for two years. His fellow convicts, particularly a character named Dragline (George Kennedy) are at first put off by his status as a war vet and his outspoken attitude. But they begin to admire him for his bravery and free spirit at the same time that the prison wardens begin to punish him for it. "What we have here is...failure to communicate," Strother Martin's Captain famously tells Luke. But what they really have is a clash of wills, a clash of ideals, a clash of attitudes that eventually leads to untold suffering for Luke.

Cool Hand Luke has a strongly anti-authoritarian message. The prison guards are, for the most part, portrayed as sadistic tyrants who are obsessed with rules. One intimidating character, referred to as the "Man with No Eyes," wears reflective sunglasses and carries a shotgun everywhere he goes. He is the symbol of authority in the film. Yet the movie never bashes you over the head with its message, and there is some moral ambiguity. When one guard is forced to put Luke in the dreaded "box" for the night, he confesses that he doesn't want to do it, but is just doing his job. This line shows that the guards may simply be acting on orders, rather than actively trying to make the convicts' lives miserable.

Cool Hand Luke also functions as a Christ metaphor. Subtlety is not the key word here, however. After the egg-eating contest, Luke lies sprawled on a table in the crucified position. Luke refers to God as "Old Man." And like Jesus, Luke is a good person who endures suffering at the hands of those who misunderstand him.

There I go again, making Cool Hand Luke sound far more depressing than it really is. It is true that the story has many tragic elements, and great critics like Roger Ebert have argued that it is a deeply pessimistic movie. But I think they are missing the point. Even the sad, poignant scenes have a strong dose of humor and warmth.

Take, for example, the scene where Luke's mother Arletta (Jo Van Pleet) comes to visit. There are, of course, the moments of regret and sorrow, like when Arletta confesses to Luke how she always wanted to see him have grandchildren. But even though Arletta is close to death, her spirit is fully intact. This is no frail old woman. She sits in the back of a truck, cracking jokes, swearing, and puffing on a cigarette. She never once scolds Luke, but rather tries to enjoy the little remaining time she has with her son. Even on the tender subject of Luke's father, who apparently left years ago, Arletta finds the humor. "Your old man, Luke. He wasn't much good for sticking around, but dammit he made me laugh!"

That sort of optimism pervades the film from the start. When Luke is first arrested, he flashes a drunken grin at the officers. When he is beaten to a bloody pulp by Dragline, he determinedly keeps fighting. When he takes on the sickening challenge of eating 50 eggs in an hour, he fulfills the task with bravado. And even after he has been captured by the prison wardens for the second time, when it seems like his spirit has been broken, he flashes a weak smile. Newman has a sort of quiet strength that carries these scenes. After all that he has suffered, both physically and emotionally, Luke's spirit is intact to the end. It's all summed up perfectly by Dragline at the end of the film - "That old Luke smile. Oh, Luke. He was some boy. Cool Hand Luke. Hell, he's a natural-born world-shaker."

Verdict: A -

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

By all accounts, silent film director D.W. Griffith invented the modern feature-length film. His movies introduced ambitious storylines, editing techniques and camera tricks that had never before been seen. Yet that does not make his films any easier to watch for the modern viewer. The Birth of a Nation, Griffith's 1915 Civil War epic, is on one hand one of the most influential and important films ever made. On the other hand, it is often dry and unengaging. And of course the film is notoriously racist, playing up the worst racial stereotypes and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as the savior of the South. 

The story is split into two halves, with the first covering the Civil War and the second covering the Reconstruction period. These events are seen through the eyes of two families - the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons. The families are close friends, and their relationship provides the film with its structure, as the family members witness famous events such as Lincoln's assassination and the rise of the KKK. 

So just how racist is The Birth of a Nation? Well, the film certainly anticipates its criticism, with a disclaimer at the beginning saying that the story is not supposed to reflect any race of today. And given all that I had read, I was expecting worse during the film's first half. The racism is certainly there - all of the slaves are portrayed as being perfectly happy, and black soldiers are portrayed as mindless followers - but the first half of the film does not actively condemn blacks, preferring to tell its war story. 

However, all of that completely changes in the second half. Part two opens with a quote from Woodrow Wilson that glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, calling it "a veritable empire of the South" that arose "to protect the Southern country." Black characters (most of whom are played by white actors in blackface) are seen as villains who overtook the South and trampled on its great legacy. In one scene at the State House of Representatives, there is an overwhelming majority of blacks, and they are all portrayed as uncivilized and incompetent. A caption card laments the "helpless white minority." In the next scene, Ben Cameron is inspired to create the Ku Klux Klan, who are seen as the film's heroes. In yet another scene, a black character named Gus attempts to rape young Flora Cameron. He is later executed by the KKK. These are just a few examples of the racism in the film. 

So yes, The Birth of a Nation is morally despicable. But is it watchable? For the most part, I found the film to be tedious and overlong. Unlike The Passion of Joan of Arc, another silent film that I reviewed, it does not stand well on its own merits. If one puts aside the racism and the cinematic importance, The Birth of a Nation is simply not very engaging. There are a few notable exceptions, though. The assassination of Lincoln is very suspenseful, and a few battle scenes are exciting. 

Still, how can I possibly hold that against the film? The Birth of a Nation is in many ways the birth of cinema, and it is unfair to criticize its narrative for not being fully developed. It would be like looking back and criticizing Edison's lightbulb for not being bright enough. With that in mind, I begin to see the folly of assigning any sort of rating to this film. Can I possibly judge The Birth of a Nation the same way I would judge, say, Quantum of Solace? Of course not. It may be that I am simply not knowledgeable enough about silent film to fully appreciate the movie. Suffice to say that The Birth of a Nation is not an easy film to watch, due to both its nature as a 3-hour silent film and its outspoken racism. But it is undeniable that it is a film of lasting historical importance, and should be viewed as such.