Kidnapping as a Way to Land a Bride… Plus Catwoman

Before I watched it, all I knew about Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was that it was a musical (in fact, I thought it was originally a Broadway play). In my mind, the action took place in a Jewish New York neighborhood, for some reason. Imagine my surprise when it opened… it’s a Western!

As a 1950s musical, it’s pretty much innocuous all the way through. Bright colors and songs about love, combined with a few comic misunderstandings. It’s a film that, as it entertains you, also lulls you into a false sense that you’re not going to witness anything more than some virtuoso acrobatic dancing and perfectly normal musical comedy.

And then the six unmarried brothers decide to kidnap six unmarried girls and marry them. Now, this is softened by the fact that the girls actually ARE interested the brothers.

What, one might ask, is the rationale behind this insane bit of caveman-like behavior? Well, apparently, the book the film is based on was inspired by the rape of the Sabine women.

Who the hell writes a COMEDY based on the rape of the Sabine women (well, other than the Romans, of course…)?

Modern audiences will likely be either offended or amused by the whole thing. For my own part, I’m never offended by stuff that happened before I was born, but I still found it jaw-dropping. Sure, the fifties were a different time, but I never thought they were THAT different. Weirdly, no reviewers found anything unusual about a bunch of lumbering redheaded farmers abducting a huge number of women.

Of course, abduction is as far as things go, and the film ends on a happy note with a half-dozen shotgun marriages in which everyone is delighted to get hitched.

One of the hight notes for me is that Julie Newmar, the best Catwoman ever, by a huge margin, is one of the brides. To be honest, I didn’t recognize her… but then again, the bride characters are a lot less memorable than Catwoman.

Starting with Newmar who is still with us, this film featured quite a long-lived cast. Russ Tamblyn, Ruta Lee and Jane Powell are also up and about, and we take this moment to thank them for an enjoyable (if strange) film on the extremely slim chance they might be reading.

I still think Johnny Guitar is weirder… but it’s a close-run thing. I guess, like the noir formula before it, by 1954 Hollywood was running out of fresh ideas for Westerns and were really stretching it to stay surprising. And if surprise was the idea, they succeeded here…

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose own work is A) almost never set in the old west and B) absolutely never set to music. However, it is often unusual, sometimes downright weird, and collected in a book entitled Off the Beaten Path, which you can check out here.

A Haunting Japanese Tale: Ugetsu

I always learn new things when I watch films on the 1001 movies list. For example, did you know that the 1950s are considered the golden age of Japanese film? I didn’t, but it makes complete sense, considering how many Japanese films that have been appearing on this one lately. Good examples of enjoyable ones are here and here.

I also knew absolutely nothing about Ugetsu before watching it. The (only) cool thing about not speaking Japanese and not having been immersed in the culture is that each of these movies comes as a surprise to me. Had I known that the word ugestu translates (according to google) as “pale and mysterious moon after a rain”, I might have had an inkling of what I was getting into.

But I didn’t, so the movie began looking like a typical war film–peasant farmers profiting from the war or trying to join the armies.

And that’s the way things go until about halfway through the film, when it pulls a From Dusk Til Dawn switcheroo. It goes from a realist film to a dreamy ghost story without really showing a break in the narrative. Like Roshomon, the film shows an acceptance of the existence of the spirit world which may be reflective of Japanese spirituality as a whole–meaning audiences would accept it–or, at least that of the director (someday I hope to learn enough about Japan to know which).

And the dreamlike central sequence is the one that viewers will remember forever. It’s as good as anything in the western canon and, at some points, it reminded me of the best French weirdness of the era.

This one is good, but it might not be for everybody. The pace is measured and might lose some modern viewers, accustomed to faster-paced action, in the process. So use your discretion.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina. His latest story collection is entitled Off the Beaten Path. Like Ugetsu, it takes place just on the far side of reality in places that aren’t the typical North American and Western European settings.

The Bigamist was a Great Film… Except for the Title

I suppose the fact that the title spoils one of the ‘Aha!’ moments of the 1953 film The Bigamist, should bother me less than it does. But even though this reveal comes early in the film, audiences already knew it was coming… and it would have been a wonderful moment.

I suspect that this bad decision was caused by either the marketing folk sacrificing a delightful moment for a lot of box-office prurient interest (the film was on shaky financial footing pre-release) or the director wanting to stop the shock of the reveal from becoming the most important part of the film so audiences could focus on the human interest story behind it. Whatever the reason, it led to my main disappointment with this one. I would have loved to be shocked by the discovery that the main character was a bigamist instead of knowing exactly why he was worried in the first scene before it was revealed.

The other disappointment was knowing it would end badly. The Hays Code (which we hate) meant there could be no unambiguous (miraculous, seeing the mess this dude was in) happy ending allowing people to leave theaters uplifted. I don’t mind unhappy endings, but I prefer not to know it’s coming from the off. When that happens, it weighs on me all the way through the movie, the dread of bad news to come.

And the prophecy comes to pass, even if the ending isn’t as awful as some of the crime movies where everyone ends up dead.

Joan Fontaine is utterly charming in this one–an actress in her mid-thirties who was much more attractive than she herself was in her twenties, unusual as that may sound.

Anyway, you already know what the guy’s crime is, and you know it won’t end all that well… but watch it anyway. It’s a good psychological study which goes right to the heart of human emotion and is just as relevant today (perhaps more in our alienated world) as it was in 1953.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose own look at human emotion is a book entitled Love and Death, a novel told in short story form following a cast of characters whose lives, unknowingly intertwined, form a single coherent narrative. I won’t tell you whether it has a happy ending, but you can check it out here.

The Golden Coach and Renoir Weirdness – in English

The Golden Coach (1952) is a gorgeous film. The color, the acting, the homage to the theater… it’s all wonderful. And make no mistake, this is an homage, unlike All About Eve’s colder, more realistic take on life on the stage.

I use the word “romp” quite a bit, but I don’t use it lightly. So many of the films that stay alive are ones that entertain in a somewhat over-the-top way that they can’t really be described any other way.

Well, this one is a romp. It concerns a fascinating actress, the headliner of a troupe that travels to a South American capital in early colonial times only to find that… well, they’ve traveled to a colony that is far from being a European capital of the time.

That, of course, doesn’t stop this actress from obtaining three different suitors, each of which exerts a different kind of fascination. It ends about as well as situations of that kind do, but we’re never heartbroken because the color and the action are much more farcical than dramatic. It’s a fun film as well as being gorgeous (it’s easily as beautiful as The Red Shoes, except with no serious dance).

Other than the film, what I found most interesting was that the only version I was able to track down was in English when I was expecting a French film befitting director Jean Renoir. In the end, I settled for the English-language version, thinking how well dubbed it had been… I only learned that it had originally been filmed in English when researching it for this post. Interesting.

I recommend this one. Watch it without expectations and you’ll be entertained in parts, and delighted in others.

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer whose latest book, Test Site Horror, is also a romp, but one with monsters and Russian special forces soldiers in it. Whether that makes it better or worse than The Golden Coach is a question left to the reader. But you can check it out here.

Umberto D., or the Redemption of Vittorio De Sica

After suffering through the awful, political Ladri de Bicicletti, I’m actually quite grateful that I only learned that today’s subject, Umberto D. was directed by the same man after I watched it.

If I’d known they were both directed by Vittorio De Sicca, I would probably have suffered through Umberto D’, waiting for something unspeakably awful to happen to one of the two sympathetic characters (or to the dog).

But if you go in blind, the film feels strangely positive. Despite the suffering of the old man (the film’s main character) and the pregnant teenage maid who knows she will lose her position and income once her patroness learns about her condition (the film’s most sympathetic character, even if she isn’t the smartest), it somehow feels like everything will be all right in the end for some reason. There’s a certain fatalistic determination to be as happy as the situation permits and not to brood on the troubles that lifts this one above the usual socially conscious films of the time… and makes it enjoyable.

Of course, the message is still there, but as we always say here: there’s nothing wrong with a message, the problem is when the message is ham-fistedly delivered (if you want to learn about ham-fisted messaging, you can look here or, conversely, pick up any diversity-politics-obsessed science fiction book from the 21st century. You won’t enjoy it, but I did warn you.

This one is done well, however, and is easy to enjoy. Just let yourself be transported to postwar Italy and let your mind wander and just enjoy the texture of the place. The plot is simple enough that you won’t miss much. I linked to the film on YouTube above (that one has English subtitles). I recommend it.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a wild romp through the Ural mountains pursued by monsters. Genetically modified dinosaurs, mutant giant arachnids and monsters in human form make it a deadly adventure. You can check out Test Site Horror here.

At Least it had Marilyn in it

After a couple of truly ground-breaking films, the 1001 movies list delivered a bit of a dud.  A reasonable caper film which, however, felt like a throwback to an earlier era.

OK, so calling The Asphalt Jungle a dud may seem a little bit unfair.  After all, this one was directed by John Huston, spawned a TV series and was nominated for four Oscars.  And yet, it felt like a dud in the context of the 1001 films and in 1950.  It might have been awesome in 1940.  It might have been an unforgettable classic in the pre-Code era.

We’ve been watching Code-impaired crime flicks for a while now, so we know the drill: all the interesting characters either die or go to jail at the end.  Objectively speaking, the only thing in any way special about this one was how detailed the heist planning was.  That made the movie interesting.

But other than that, it was pretty much standard fare, mixing elements of film noir in with neo-realism to create something that is neither, but isn’t particularly new.  It’s a decent Code-era crime flick, entertaining and well-paced but with the limitations of the genre.  You will never know how much you love not being able to guess how a film ends until you watch a few Code-era crime films in a row in which the main characters are criminals.  You spend the entire movie getting to know them, all the while knowing they are doomed.  An exercise in futility.

This one, however, does have one redeeming feature.

Yep, that’s Marilyn herself, playing a minor but notable part, in one of her breakout roles before her trademark look was quite perfected and looking young and innocent–although her role as one of the character’s kept women was anything but innocuous.  It’s the one thing that gives this film a link to the future as well as countless ties to the past.  Say what you want about Huston’s miss on the screenplay, but he sure knew how to pick aspiring actresses for supporting roles.

Well, at least once, anyway.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a creature feature with an utterly unpredictable ending entitled Jungle Lab Terror.  Buy it here!

 

Greatness that Smacks You Right Between the Eyes

Greatness often isn’t recognized in its own time.  Think of all the memorable films that didn’t even garner an Oscar nomination while the Best Picture winner languished in obscurity after a couple of years*.

Other films (the same can be said of books, of course) are slow-burning, becoming classics long after their first run bombed or otherwise made little impact.  A literary example illustrates this beautifully: HP Lovecraft.  He was a minor writer in the literary landscape of the 1920s and 30s, who was recognized after his death as the unrivalled master of a particular brand of fiction.  Hell, as a writer, I’m not entirely certain if we’re allowed to write the word “eldritch” unless we’re doing a Lovecraft pastiche.

But some just hit you between the eyes and you have no question that it’s a great one.  In the Noir Era, The Big Sleep is one that stands out.  There is no doubt that, perhaps without breaking any new ground, it brings a certain type of film to a supremely high level.  I have yet to watch one that I think is better.

Today’s subject is one of those.

Brilliant from the outset, The Third Man is an atmospheric study of postwar morality and the awful realities of a terrible time but, unlike The Bicycle Thief, it treats the subject matter as a way to tell a great story as opposed to using it as a political canvas.

And the story holds up its side of the film.  This isn’t just an atmospheric crime movie–and it most definitely isn’t noir–but a well-blended mix of high-quality ingredients.  Acting, setting, story and darkness combine to put you in Vienna in 1947.  It is utterly perfect, and quite possibly the film that best uses the fact that it’s black and white… ever–I still have a few of the greats to watch, but color was making strong inroads by the time this one was released in 1949–because it is one of those movies which would have lost a lot if they’d been in color.

So everything comes together beautifully, and the semi-twist ending (I won’t give any spoilers here, even though both film and book are well known, as many people will have forgotten how it ends), as well as Orson Welles’ few onscreen minutes, almost, if not quite, a cameo, make it about as close to the perfect movie as I’ve ever seen.

Also, the book is quite good as well, if I remember correctly (it was assigned reading in the eighth grade, so it’s probably high time I reread that one).  A Graham Greene Classic.

If I had to watch one movie from the forties, and one movie dealing with the effects of WW2, I admit I’d probably go with Casablanca over and over again.

But this one comes dangerously close.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is Jungle Lab Terror (just released–you could be one of the first readers!).  You can buy it here.

 

 

*Which, in the current “politics matter more than quality” climate, will actually happen more often.  I shudder to think of how future generations will laugh at the current Oscar dynamics.

Powerful and Linear – White Heat is a Gangster Rush

In the late 1940s, it’s unusual to find a straight gangster movie in the old-style tradition.  Most of the crime flicks of the era incorporate noir influences in an obvious way (Gun Crazy is a good example).  White Heat, in my opinion, owes much more to earlier films such as Scarface (1932), Little Caesar and The Public Enemy than to anything with Bogart in it.

In that sense, casting James Cagney as the gangster in question was inevitable, wasn’t it?

The plot focuses on a gangster with no regrets, a man who isn’t worried about how to escape from the life, but whose sensibilities have to do with the next score and the next piece of vengeance.  His wife is amoral and sensual, ready to betray anyone to the highest bidder, and suits him perfectly.

No regular Joe getting dragged in above his head for this one.  It’s a straight take on how a homicidal maniac would respond in particular circumstances related to his chosen line of business.

As such, it’s extremely fun to watch.  The action doesn’t slow down to show you the emotional struggle of the doomed man, it just barrels forward at breakneck speed to its inevitable conclusion and ends with a climax that will never again allow you to hear the trite phrase “On top of the world” without thinking of the final scene.

Another interesting aspect of the film is how law enforcement uses cutting edge (for the day) technology to track the criminals and communicate.  Things that seem quaint to us today, but would have looked futuristic to audiences of the day.

It might not be a classic in the critical sense of the word.  It doesn’t delve deeply into philosophical questions, but that just makes this particular movie even better as entertainment.  I’m delighted that this one was part of the 1001 movies to watch before you die because, once in a while, it’s fun to be able to say: watch this film to pass an hour and a half while being entertained.

I enjoyed this one without reservation.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose thriller Timeless is a fast-paced crime novel.  You can buy it here.

Lonely Are the Eighteen Material Witnesses

Stacy Danielle Stephens, author and editor and frequent Classically Educated contributor returns this week with a second review of a film dealing with the JFK assassination (for last week’s review of JFK, see here).  

When the DVD sleeve liner says, “written for the screen by Dalton Trumbo,” you’re hoping for something like Spartacus, or at least Exodus, but when you watch Executive Action, you’ll remember that most of Trumbo’s screenwriting was done for the sort of studio Termite Terrace parodied by having Porky Pig crank a sausage grinder in place of a camera. This is not to say Executive Action is a bad movie, only that it is the sort of movie most people watched for the first time on television, after the local news, in the days before cable. It can hold your interest, although you might check out pro wresting at the commercial break. It’s the sort of movie you’d expect to find in a four-movie TCM collection featuring Burt Lancaster.

David Miller had directed popular hits like Captain Newman, M. D. and Flying Tigers, and following on the heels of The Day of the Jackal, Executive Action, the first cinematic treatment of the JFK assassination as a conspiracy, should have been a blockbuster, and even more so for being not only controversial, but introducing that very controversy to the American movie audience. Yet somehow, Miller and Trumbo went very wrong in how they presented what they presented.

Anyone who has seen JFK will recognize several scenes in Executive Action, particularly scenes involving Oswald. This apparent plagiarism is permissible because these depicted events are documented occurrences, with only some of the speeches in each film being invented by an author. It is in these scenes that both the failure and the reason for it become clear. James MacColl, impersonating Oswald, isn’t convincing to anyone but the used car dealer, target shooter, and gunsmith he’s been hired to deceive in order to frame Oswald as the patsy. Ironically, MacColl, who is technically playing himself rather than Oswald, gives the only impassioned performances of the film, other than the car dealer and target shooter whom he angers. Theirs are the only convincing performances, but even their dialogue is not compelling. They convey feeling, but cannot effectively draw anyone into that feeling.

So why would anyone give up ninety-one minutes to watch a failed effort which became Late Show fodder and ended as an also ran in a lesser collection of alleged classics? Well, throughout the history of television, there have been beer commercials, and a recurring trope in these is the empty glass being filled with beer. Anyone who enjoys beer will visualize just how refreshing the brand being advertised really is. And that is the main reason for watching Executive Action; it reveals how well Oliver Stone filled the aching emptiness of November 22, 1963.

Because Reading the Warren Commission Report Is Like Drowning

Our star contributor Stacy Danielle Stephens is back.  Today, she brings us her look at Oliver Stone’s JFK.  As always, her eye for history and analysis brings the subject to life.

On November 22nd, 1963, that bright shining moment which was Camelot abruptly faded to black.  In an amazingly similar way, when we look back at December 20th, 1991, we see that this big blue ball we know as the earth, after several centuries of spinning and moving just as Galileo insisted it did, began to go flat.  With the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK, an adroit concatenation of details became more convincing than a rational evaluation of what those details added up to, because it succeeded where David Miller’s Executive Action (1973) failed.  As Roger Ebert concluded, in JFK, Oliver Stone was able to “marshal the anger… gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche.”

It should be noted in passing that contrary to what has been said for more than fifty years, more than one hunter using the same model rifle and same ammunition attributed to Oswald has managed to replicate the allegedly impossible, putting three shots, and not just two, into a moving target at the same angle and distance; experienced crime scene investigators using precise laser measurements have digitally reconstructed the details of Dealey Plaza and recreated the events of that historic day; without resorting to magic, ballistics experts using a bullet identical to the one found on the gurney have replicated its assumed performance in simulated human bodies placed in the position of the president and Governor Connally; and experienced forensic pathologists have evaluated the skull fragments, concluding that those grisly moments revealed in the Zapruder film are the consequences of two bullets, both fired from behind, with the first shattering the skull in a manner familiar to pathologists who conduct examinations of fatal gunshots to the human head.  None of this, or even all of it taken together, gives any indication of any shooter other than Oswald, but of course, it doesn’t prove that Oswald was the shooter, or that one shooter acted alone.  If one believes there was a conspiracy, one cannot be convinced by the available evidence that there was no conspiracy, yet if one wishes to dismiss any possibility of a conspiracy, one is hard pressed to ignore the myriad coincidences surrounding this assassination.  And this is the strength of Oliver Stone’s JFK.

Stone does not fail to marshal facts, but he uses them for emotional impact rather than for their factual value, just as one collecting bricks need not build a wall with them, but might choose instead to hurl them for impact.  “The film hurtles,” (Ebert again) “for 188 minutes through a sea of information and conjecture, and never falters…”  This is not to say his collection of facts is complete, or that the facts themselves have all been, or even could be, verified beyond question.  Stone himself conceded, perhaps disingenuously, that JFK was an “alternative myth”.

The impact of his impeccably crafted myth is all the greater for its cast of mythic proportions.  Donald Sutherland, Edward Asner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Kevin Bacon, and John Candy are all cast in minor roles.  Joe Pesci is cast in one of his best supporting roles, and Tommy Lee Jones, as Clay Shaw, plays one of his most unusual roles impeccably well, effectively giving the devil his understated due as a foil to Costner’s equally impeccable presentation of a District Attorney caught up in something surely beyond his jurisdiction, and yet falling somehow squarely within it.