The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)

Most people know The Awful Truth as the screwball comedy that helped make Cary Grant a star. To my lovely wife, it's the movie with a scene where a cute dog hides its eyes to play hide-and-seek. Of course, my wife, owner of two good eyes, is also a fan of Cary Grant. But it was Mr. Smith (Asta from the Thin Man movies -- so huge he has his own fan site) who won the lady's heart. 

Now, she happens to be working on a book that's a romantic comedy that also includes a dog playing a prominent role, so I thought she might have some pithy comments or cogent analysis after we finished watching the movie tonight -- we had to break it up into two nights, since being eight months pregnant is apparently "tiring" or something like that. Instead, this is what she gave me: "I liked Mr. Smith." A combination of pregnancy brain and inveterate love of dogs produced a kindergarten thesis from my English major wife. Oh well -- classic Hollywood screwballs are one of the few genres we'll willingly sit in the same room for, which explains why there will probably be a blog post in the near future on Mamma Mia!

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

While everyone seems to acknowledge the impact of Easy Rider, it doesn't seem like many people actually think it's a great movie. It helped make Jack Nicholson a star, it helped create the New Hollyood movement, but beyond that, I guess it's more likely to be buried in a time capsule to represent the '60s, much like Wall Street for the '80s or Reality Bites for the '90s. I think Roger Ebert nailed it pretty well in his Great Movies essay on it, acknowledging its lasting power, but having some fun at the expense of some of the more dated and obvious scenes:

One of their bikes needs work, and they borrow tools at a ranch, leading to a labored visual juxtaposition of wheel-changing and horse-shoeing. Then they have dinner with the weathered rancher and his Mexican-American brood, and Fonda delivers the first of many quasi-profound lines he will dole out during the movie: "It's not every man who can live off the land, you know. You can be proud." (The rancher, who might understandably have replied, "Who the hell asked you?" nods gratefully.)

So much of the movie defies the usual narrative conventions of Hollywood, it was a shame to see the hippies v. rednecks plot play such a huge role -- the southerners in this movie make Larry the Cable Guy look Socratic. Of course, that conflict was necessary to bring about the tragic end of Captain America and Billy, and I think their seeming martyrdom is what turns a lot of people off about the film, especially to those who are tired of hearing about the wonderful idealism of the '60s. Ebert cites Pauline Kael's review of the film in which she says

the movie's sentimental paranoia obviously rang true to a large, young audience's vision. In the late '60s, it was cool to feel that you couldn't win, that everything was rigged and hopeless.

But you also have to take into account Fonda's cryptic line, "We blew it" the night before they're killed. Apparently, Hopper has said that line referred to Captain America's feelings about their ill-gotten money, obtained through a cocaine deal at the beginning of the film. That, I think, at least makes the heroes culpable (and at least one of them is aware that they are culpable), and as Ebert pointed out in his original review in 1969, these supposedly anti-establishment heroes actually sold out by trying to get rich quick and base a lifestyle around money, even if they don't look the type. Taking that into account, the movie reads less like a tragic love letter to the '60s counterculture than a well-deserved nail in the coffin for it (the bad acid trip in the cemetery also supports that reading, I think).

One last observation: I liked Nicholson in the movie for the most part, except for his Very Important Speech about why "normal" people feel threatened by Captain America and Billy (again: another reason why you can understand people thinking the movie is too sympathetic to the hippies). Also, I didn't find his ramblings about aliens while stoned very funny, either. Maybe it's because I liked this version so much better, almost 25 years later:

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

By law, any synopsis or review of Network must include one or all of the following phrases: "prescient," "crystal ball," "prophecy." I'm sorry, but predicting that TV would grow increasingly more sensationalistic, corporate-driven and vacuous doesn't exactly count as master soothsaying. That doesn't mean it's not a message worth conveying -- it's the method of conveyance that matters. For example, 1995's The Net accurately predicted the problem of identity theft over the interwebs, but no one seems to be hailing its visionary qualities or lamenting why we didn't heed the clarion call of Sandra Bullock and Dennis Miller. That's because the message was conveyed to the audience mostly through car chases.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Network, which conveys its message primarily through  endless preaching and speechifying. I wanted to like this movie, really -- it's one of many classics I'm embarrassed not to have seen, and I'm not averse to satires of TV (I absolutely love The Truman Show). Also, I have no problem with dialogue that's considered "unrealistic" -- hell, I even defended (parts of) Juno. But my God, screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky is in love with his typewriter. Here's an excerpt of a monologue by Beatrice Straight, which basically won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, even though this was essentially her only scene: 

This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk?

The question isn't whether or not characters actually talk like that -- the question is, simply, do you want to listen to characters talk like that? I don't. But, I do want to hear characters talk like Walter and Phyllis in Double Indemnity, even though their patter is equally far-fetched.

Also, several of the characters are nothing but symbols. Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), for example, is television incarnate. How I can say this with such certainty? Because another character CALLS HER THOSE EXACT WORDS. Actually, I don't have a problem with characters being symbols, but the audience figured this out about Diana in her first scene. The whole relationship between Max (William Holden) and Diana, in fact, is just an excuse for Chayevsky to set up new-school TV seducing old-school TV and then letting old-school tell off new-school at the end. Blah.

The stuff that I liked was the Howard Beale subplot and the whole "I'm mad as hell" bit. The rambling monologues actually fit Beale's character since he was spiraling into insanity. Unfortunately, the other characters didn't have this excuse. 

Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)

Sometimes I think I like the idea of a Sam Fuller movie more than his actual movies. My problem, I guess, comes from trying to analyze them like literature -- some of his dialogue is overwrought and his storytelling ham-fisted (for example, the "love" story in Park Row is pretty ridiculous). I did love the visual style of the film, though, with its eye-catching deep focus compositions, lighting, and (especially) peripatetic camera -- the standout example of this is the scene in which Mitch gets into three or four fistfights in the street before marching into The Star.

As it turns out, I guess I had a similar reaction to Fuller as Andrew Sarris, who wrote in 1968:

Fuller is an authentic American primitive whose works have to be seen to be understood. Seen, not heard or synopsized...Fuller's ideas are undoubtedly too broad and over-simplified for any serious analysis, but it is the artistic force with which his ideas are expressed that makes his career so fascinating to critics who can rise above their political prejudices...It is time the cinema followed the other arts in honoring its primitives. Fuller belongs to thecinema, and not to literature and sociology.

But what the hell, I'll try to talk about Fuller's ideas a little anyway. As most people familiar with Fuller know, he became a newspaper crime reporter at 17, and Park Row is his paean to the ink-stained wretches he knew and loved. He fashions the story as a classic underdog tale, with the feisty, upstart Globe led by Phineas Mitchell trying to avoid the flyswatter of the Wal-Mart of newspapers, The Star, whose bitch-goddess editor fired Mitchell for not toeing the company line, which includes telling outright lies to sell papers. Throughout the film Mitch is extolled as a "true newspaperman," a goal so noble to aim for that when 75-year-old reporter Mr. Davenport feels that Mitch has attained it, Davenport can die peacefully knowing he's lived to see the the fire of true journalism burn on.

What wasn't clear to me for awhile was why Mitch was considered such a great newspaperman -- his first story, after all, came from him turning in Brodie, the Brooklyn Bridge jumper, just so he could publicize the arrest, then get even more attention later when The Globe freed him. I guess what it comes down to is Fuller wants journalism to follow the "first, do no harm" dictum of medicine. It's OK to have an agenda and manipulate the truth, but not to tell outright lies like the ones that apparently led to the execution of an innocent man, the incident that spurred Mitch to rebel against The Star.

The movie is more about The Globe's fight for survival against an immoral and corrupt enemy that's trying to drive it out of business than it is about the fight for social justice -- this ain't All the President's Men. The climax of the movie comes when The Globe fights impossible odds (including pipe bombs) to get out an edition that exposes the truth about its hateful neighbor down the street, The Star, not a story exposing police or political corruption. Even His Girl Friday paid lip service to the importance of that function of journalism in its climax.

These aren't really meant as criticisms -- and, to be fair, Davenport does question Mitch a couple of times about his intentions, showing that at least someone was thinking about this issue. I just kind of wish that Fuller either

a) held Mitch's feet to the fire a bit more (think about what happens to Charles Foster Kane after his idealistic beginnings), or

b) dropped some of the pretensions of aspiring to the highest ideal -- some of Davenport's eloquent obituary, for example, elevate Mitch to a status I don't think he attained. Then again, he's way more of a newspaperman than anyone at the all-powerful Star, so maybe that was Fuller's point. Mitch is a stubborn underdog, fighter and survivor -- just like Fuller.

And dammit, it was still a fun movie to watch and (most of the time) listen to. And I did like some of the not-so-subtle metaphors that Fuller lent a certain gusto, like Mitch putting what he thinks is the last edition of The Globe on the "obituaries" peg, or ending the movie not with "The End" but with "Thirty." Even if it should have been written like this:

--30--

Buchanan Rides Alone (Budd Boetticher, 1958)

After watching Decision at Sundown, a movie that seemed to try to explain everything to the audience, it was quite a treat to watch this one, which didn't do a whole lot of explaining of anything, including:

1) why the hero would get himself involved in a fistfight with the local law enforcement on behalf of someone who he had never met (and, by the way, had just committed murder), and

2)how three brothers could be so callous toward each other -- their only concern surrounding the death of one of the brother's sons revolves around money, and they constantly try to sell each other out to try to snag it.

Here's what I wrote about it on criterionforum.org:

This has to be the most underrated of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns, and if I had to venture a guess as to why, I think it's because of the black comedy aspects [an astute poster] mentioned. It's a very different beast compared to the more psychological bent of Seven Men from Now, Ride Lonesome, etc. Here, you have a family that's so irredeemably evil that you just have to laugh -- Boetticher and screenwriter Charles Lang (and/or the uncredited Kennedy) wisely forego any kind of explanation as to why they're so corrupt -- they just are. I know this was a few years before Yojimbo, but I see connections between the two (besides the obvious synergy between Western and samurai) -- the corruption of the entire town that's fueled by greed, the disdain for family members, and again, the black comedy.

I thought the movie was going to get serious once, when Pecos, one of the corrupt deputies, has a last-minute change of heart, and shoots his partner instead of letting Buchanan die. At first, I thought Pecos did that because he didn't want Buchanan to die thinking he had anything to do with his death since they were friendly earlier. But in his post-mortem conversation with his partner, Pecos said he only did it because Buchanan, like Pecos, was from west Texas. Buchanan gives a noticeable eye-roll to that, acknowledging the absurdity of the situation.

And really, the whole movie is absurd, but I mean that in the best possible way -- the movie acknowledges this, especially in the title, since other than the opening scene Buchanan is pretty much always riding with someone and is hardly the taciturn loner of his other Westerns with Boetticher. The only one of the three wretched brothers who's alive at the end of the film is Amos, the big dumb guy who spends most of the film lurching between his hotel, the sheriff's office, and the judge's estate, clutching his heart, which is located barely above his hiked-up overalls. When he's not sure where he's supposed to go next, the camera lingers on him as he stops in the middle of the street and looks around, confused about who he's supposed to be screwing over. The last line of the film is from Carbo, a real bastard who the movie paints as almost a good guy because he was loyal to the judge until the end (come to think of it, that's why Pecos, who actually wasn't a bad guy, got killed -- lack of loyalty to one side). He says to Amos, who's looking at his two dead brothers, "Well, don't just stand there -- get a shovel." It's not a cruel line at all, because Amos (just like his two dead brothers) didn't give a rat's ass about their well-being while they were alive. Sadly, that's what makes it so funny.

I've now seen all the Ranown Westerns, and can't wait for the DVD's, which are allegedly coming from Columbia by the end of this year.

Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

Although she can keep unwatched episodes of Best Week Ever and The Hills on our DVR indefinitely with no repercussions, my wife still expresses surprise and/or disgust when I freak out if she suggests erasing some of the movies I recorded off Turner Classic Movies. Unbelievably, she doesn't seem to appreciate the historical significance of the Ranown cycle, the seven westerns director Budd Boetticher made in the late '50s with star Randolph Scott. Either that, or she didn't like the fact they'd been on the DVR for almost a year. Whatever.

I'd already seen four of the Ranown films (Seven Men from Now, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station). Seven Men from Now is the only one of these out on DVD -- the others I saw on VHS tapes I ordered from Comet Video, a little operation that has to this to say about watching Westerns with pals and a root beer: "That's livin!" That's awesome.

Anyway, I finally sat down to watch Decision at Sundown, sans pals or root beer, to see if it could measure up to the first four Ranown films I'd seen, all of which I'd liked a lot (especially Ride Lonesome). Unfortunately, I was a wee bit disappointed. I shall quote myself, from over at criterionforum.org:

I'm not sure what to think. On the one hand, I liked the concept of the revenge-bent hero fighting for the wrong cause, who Scott played extremely well, and I thought the against-the-grain ending was brilliant. On the other, a lot of the dialogue made me realize how dependent Boetticher was on Burt Kennedy for the other Ranown films (imdb has him as an uncredited writer on Buchanan Rides Alone, which is the only one of the Ranown cycle I haven't seen [sic: I haven't seen Westbound either]). Any scene involving Doc was painful, and, though I'm not a huge fan of High Noon, at least the townspeople's behavior was consistent and believable. Here, after some preachiness from Doc, suddenly the entire town grows balls and stands up to Kimbrough, whose pernicious impact on the town is never effectively conveyed. I wonder if Kennedy would've done better with this story, but then again, all his scripts for Boetticher were set in the harsh landscape of the West instead of in towns, where people can mess up a good Western by talking.

This had the potential to be a great psychological Western, with Scott realizing too late he was seeking vengeance for no good reason and having his quest thwarted when Ruby shoots Kimbrough in the shoulder, prematurely ending the showdown. The real kick to the nuts comes in the next scene, as Kimbrough, the bad guy, and Ruby, the whore, ride off together, to live happily ever after, I guess, while Scott gets loaded at the bar. The irony (besides the good guy failing and the bad guy winning) is that Ruby is a whore and Kimbrough doesn't care, whereas Scott's wife was a whore (not officially, but in practice, we're told) and he was blind to it -- that misperception of his wife's purity is what led him on his fruitless mission of revenge in the first place. The image of him riding out of town, pulling one empty horse, reminding us of his partner's senseless murder, is a potentially devastating one. Unfortunately the last bit of dialogue from the film is some lame business from Doc about how glad the town was that Scott came to town and helped them come to their senses. As if these yokels learning their lesson and standing up to the class bully is really what the movie is all about. The problem is, that last scene didn't come out of nowhere -- that kind of bad dialogue, poor acting and misplaced, heavy-handed thematic statement had permeated the film up to that point anyway. To be honest, I was kind of waiting for that ending to be ruined. This is why I missed Burt Kennedy, the screenwriter of the other Ranown films I've seen -- I think he would've kept the conflict centered on just the main characters, and we would've felt Scott's pain much more.

Backlash and Congratu-lash

Other than doing occasional work in heels, ex-stripper/Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and cross-dresser/Z-movie director Ed Wood don't really have much in common, but both have been occupying the same part of my brain lately. I saw Juno a few weeks ago, and I recently plowed through three Ed Wood films in preparation for showing Tim Burton's Ed Wood in my film class.

Let's start with Cody. By now, pretty much everyone who's aware of Juno is either cognizant of, participating in, or defending it from the backlash that has honed in on Cody's dialogue, described as "hipster," "quirky," "twee," and every other term that's been used to denigrate films like Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, and anything Wes Anderson has ever done. This, after the film drew rapt praise at the Toronto film festival and earned an impressive 81 rating on Metacritic.

The swift contrarian reaction can be attributed to several factors, including film bloggers who didn't write about Juno until after it had been reviewed in most print publications, Internet discussion boards (which I realize get blamed for everything), and the sneaking suspicion that this was yet another "indie" film that was actually financed by a major studio, then released and marketed in such a way so that it appeared to come out of nowhere. Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has provided the most well-thought out and reasoned critique of the film, even if naming it his worst film of 2007 is not reasonable.

Juno is almost a lock to get nominated for the Oscar for best picture, and I will become a stripper if Cody isn't nominated for best screenplay; nonetheless, there are scads of people out there who are convinced that Cody is a fraud, and that she is wholly undeserving of the attention she's gotten for Juno, which has led to, among other things, a column in Entertainment Weekly. She's the best-known screenwriter who doesn't direct besides Charlie Kaufman (and his directorial debut comes out this year), and plenty of people claim (rightly, probably) that she wouldn't be getting anything close to this sort of fame if it weren't for her saucy background and her unlikely break in the movie business.

Unlike Cody, Ed Wood inspired no initial reaction to his work. He was pretty much ignored by audiences and critics in the 1950s when he wrote and directed his schlocky movies, many of them with an aging (or, in the case of Plan 9 from Outer Space, a dead) Bela Lugosi, and died a penniless porn-producing alcoholic in 1978. He wasn't resurrected as an important artist until shortly after his death, when he was named the worst director of all time (and Plan 9 the worst film of all time) in a book called The Golden Turkeys. That's where the similarity with Cody comes in -- the swift contrarian reaction (not backlash, but maybe "congratu-lash?" "acc-lash-ation?"). The Ed Wood revival was on. Suddenly, people actually wanted to see his films, which were rescued from oblivion and shown at revival houses so people could laugh at how bad they actually were. In 1994, Burton made his biopic of Wood. In it (and the film stays pretty close to the truth, according to real-life interviews of those who knew him), Wood comes across as the classic underdog, striving to get noticed doing what he loves, but constantly being repelled by more powerful forces. Wood clearly has no aptitude for filmmaking, which the film does not try to hide, but he is nonetheless likable because of his amiability and perseverance. That personality clearly shows through in his films -- if they were mean-spirted and ugly, no one would have wanted to see them, even after he became famous after his death. There wasn't anyone watching his films saying, "God, I hate Ed Wood." Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, puts it well in his review of a Wood documentary called The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.:

It's been said that Ed Wood's films are too watchable to be the worst ever made, which is true. But they are still the foundation for a cult that seems to want to celebrate failure and despair.

So basically, what we have here is a recently annointed superstar generating a flood of negativity, and a hack generating oodles of goodwill. Do either of them deserve the "aftershock" effect each has gotten? For the most part, I think the answer is no.

It's true that Cody's dialogue doesn't always work. I'll be the umpteenth person to say that the scenes with Rainn Wilson ("home-skillet") and any scene involving Juno's best friend ("honest to blog," etc.) are awful and made me hear Cody's chortling as she typed them. There's also a scene where Juno's step-mom excoriates a snotty ultrasound tech well beyond the appropriate indignation level that made me uncomfortable (Cozzalio is the only other person I've read who feels this way). But here's the thing -- everything else in the screenplay works well. The dialogue does have a lot of great lines (Juno's lines about Chinese shooting babies out of T-shirt guns, "not taking a dump since Wednesday ... morning," and anything Michael Cera says). One of Cozzalio's (and he's far from alone) chief complaints is that no one, certainly not a teenager, actually talks like these characters, which I think misses the point. My friend KC made an apt comparison by saying Juno's dialogue is like that of The Gilmore Girls -- it's stylized and not for everyone. Likewise, no one in real life talks like characters written by Tarantino, David Mamet, or Raymond Chandler, either. The bottom line isn't whether anyone actually talks like these characters, it's whether anyone should talk like these characters -- the dialogue either works for you or it doesn't. As for the argument that everyone in the film talks like this, well, Hemingway didn't have any long-winded talkers and Philip Roth doesn't have any concise ones, and no one is calling them hacks because their characters tend to all sound the same.

Cody also has a deft touch with character. She subverts first impressions skillfully during the first meeting between Juno and the prospective adoptive parents. Up to this point, Juno has seemed so wise beyond her years (pregancy notwithstanding, of course) that she seems bulletproof to the audience -- we are completely behind her (and maybe annoyed that we're made to feel this is what we're supposed to feel). Likewise, the Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman characters are painted as typical yuppies. But then, as Juno is talking about the physical discomfort of her pregnancy, she says to Garner something along the lines of, "Be glad it's not you." Then we cut to (and I hope this was in Cody's script, because I'm giving her credit here) a reaction shot of Garner, who has to avert her eyes to hide her anguish. That moment establishes Juno as someone who can be incredibly insensitive because of her wiseassery, and Garner as a sympathetic figure who has a real desire to be a loving mother. That ambivalence toward the characters (and Bateman's character is more complex than he seems at first, too) made the rest of the film much more enjoyable to watch because I didn't feel like I would be talked down to. I don't agree with Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris that it's the best film of the year, but I won't be too upset when it gets nominated for an Oscar later this month. Cody is hardly deserving of the vitriol being hurled her way lately.

Which brings us to Ed Wood, who probably doesn't deserve all the attention he's gotten since his death. First of all, it's unfair to him to be labelled the worst director of all time for the reason Erickson cites -- his films are far from unwatchable. The hubcaps visibly suspended by strings, the stock footage integrated so awkwardly it looks like the characters on screen are actually looking at a different movie offscreen, the terrible acting, etc., of Plan 9 (and this is just the first 20 minutes) -- all of this makes for a film that is too surreal and good-natured to make it the worst film ever. Like a car crash -- but not Paul Haggis' Crash, which is terrible in a way Plan 9 cannot approximate -- you can't look away. Not that this makes him, necessarily, an admirable figure. Again, here's Erickson on the Wood doc:

No matter how much the facts emphasize that Wood was a marginal nobody, or an artist without talent, the presumption here is that he was some kind of misunderstood genius who deserved the rewards Hollywood refused him. The truth is that Wood as a pitiful loser almost all of the time. He didn't deserve to do better, at least not based on the quality of his work. And the most you can say for him is that his enthusiasm and charm must have been backed up with other good qualities, or he would never have kept such a loyal group of friends for so long. That's what the Tim Burton movie communicates in spades - like George Bailey, even hopeless Ed was not a failure because he had friends.

I should note that while I agree with Erickson on his feelings about Wood, I think Burton's film is terrific. It doesn't pull any punches on the essential awfulness of Wood's work, focusing more on his enthusiasm and the friendship between him and Lugosi. On the DVD commentary track, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski said their goal was not to make fun of Wood but to give him dignity. They also said Burton fell in love with Wood's character. Burton backs up that claim on the commentary by saying he completely identified with Wood's delusional qualities -- that you have to believe you're making the best film ever while you're working on it, or you'll never get through the process.

All that being said, in a perfect world, Ed Wood wouldn't have to have been made to give Ed back his dignity. Unlike the reanimated corpses in Plan 9, he should've been allowed to rest in peace.

So what's the lesson here? I don't know if there is one since it was complete chance that I encountered these artists when I did. Maybe it's that even though sometimes the initial reaction to an artist might be slightly exaggerated, the ensuing corrective reaction is even farther off-base.