By Scott Ross
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Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) I was not bored watching the two hours and twenty-five minutes of this historical pageant, but half an hour after it was over I had to concentrate to remember any particular scene or performance in it. Perhaps if I gave more of a damn about the dynastic ruling families of Great Britain the story of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII might have more resonance, but I’m less interested in the private lives of these types than I am in the damage they do to others, and to the world at large. This is especially true of “royal families,” who whatever their current disguises, believe in the absolute, divine right of monarchy: We do as we please because we are ennobled by God. In Henry’s case, this extended to deciding what the official religion of his kingdom was to be, once the previous edition stood in the way of his rutting as he liked. I will grant that, as these things go, he was right to be concerned that, without a male heir, England would likely be plunged into dynastic wars again following his death, but I have no sympathy with the Tudors or the Stuarts or their imperial Hanovarian successors and especially not their rotten descendants, the Saxe-Coburg line that laughingly anglicizes itself as Windsor and thinks the world doesn’t know they’re Germans.
The movie, produced by the venerable Hal Wallis, was based on a play by Maxwell Anderson I have neither read nor seen, but the picture is reasonably literate (the screenplay was by Bridget Boland and John Hale) and handsomely appointed in art direction (Maurice Carter), set decoration (Lionel Couch and Patrick McLoughlin) and, especially, in costume design (Margaret Furse). Still, it’s astounding to reflect that such a middling affair as Anne of the Thousand Days was in its time up for ten Academy Awards, until you discover that Universal followed its screenings for Academy members with champagne and filet mignon dinners. Too bad there wasn’t an award that year for Best Bribe. The movie does boast an impressive cast, headed by Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold, although Burton never really convinces you he’s Henry. He would have made a good Henry V, when he was younger, but he lacks the size and dimension for Henry VIII and the script in any case lets him down, seldom hinting at the king’s dangerous irrationality as Robert Bolt did with his Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons. Bujold, in her first important screen role, is in many ways remarkable but her Anne Boylen becomes a bit of a bore and even a pompous, demanding shrew, because that’s how she’s been written. (I’m curious as to whose bright idea it was for Anne to demand the head of Sir Thomas More, a barbarism for which there is no historical evidence.) Anthony Quayle is far more successful as Cardinal Wolsey, quietly scheming away while protesting that he’s doing no such thing. Indeed, much of the supporting cast is splendid: Irene Papas, hurt yet unyielding as Queen Catherine; John Colicos as a duplicitous Thomas Cromwell, toadying obsequiously yet plotting behind everyone’s back; Michael Hordern as Anne’s timid, avaricious father; and Peter Jeffrey as a nasty, snarling Norfolk. As More, William Squire seems to be imitating Paul Scofield, and it should be noted that, at least as far as his official portraiture is concerned, More most closely resembled neither Squire nor Scofield, but John Colicos.
The most tragic figure in the piece is poor Mark Smeaton, the royal music teacher who was one of many falsely accused of adultery with Boylen and broken by torture, particularly as played by the heartbreaking Gary Bond. His story would almost certainly have made a more involving and emotionally resonant movie than this one.
Rio Bravo (1959) Arguably the single movie directed by Howard Hawks that most neatly encapsulizes his interests as a filmmaker, and the wry humor with which he explicated them. It’s also one of the most engaging of all Hollywood movies. Hawks is one of those figures, like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, who while never taking a writing credit on one of his pictures was their chief animating agent, shaping every scene and even, at times, every line, in a way directors-for-hire never do. The recurrent Hawksian themes are here: Of group endeavors among professionals, anxiety over whether one is “good enough,” romance between laconic men and sharp, funny women and intense masculine friendship bordering on the homoerotic, coupled with teasing humor, periodic bursts of effective violent action and a pace that, while deliberate, seldom drags. (And speaking of the homoerotic, there’s sometimes a very good-looking boy in the Hawksian mix, such as Montgomery Clift in Red River. Here it’s Ricky Martin, unfortunately required to reprise that annoying finger-against-the-nose gesture Clift imitates Wayne doing.) It also has, in Angie Dickinson’s drily passionate “Feathers,” the most perfect example of the idealized Hawksian woman after Lauren Bacall’s Marie in To Have and Have Not. In some ways Feathers is Marie’s superior as a character in that she is warmer and her emotions are closer to the surface, which as she slyly pursues John Wayne’s John T. Chance makes her an even more appealing figure.
The 4K UHD edition burnishes Russell Harlan’s already luscious Eastmancolor images, especially the night exteriors, making it the best-looking of all of Hawks’ color pictures in a home-video format.
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ last RKO picture is also their most unusual: A “biopic” celebrating the first great, and most influential, ballroom dance team in America. Astaire’s approach to the dancing was so scrupulous (Vernon Castle was one of his youthful idols) that aficionados of Astaire and Rogers may be disappointed because they are dancing in character, and keeping to the style that made the Castles household names in the period between 1912 and 1918, especially their wildly popular “Castle Walk.” Astaire and Rogers were far better-looking than the Castles, and their teaming, still fresh on this, their ninth collaboration, makes their Vernon and Irene the most romantic pair imaginable. The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is not, thankfully, a musical biography — no phony, Cole Porter-being-inspired-to-compose-“Night and Day”-by-raindrops moments here. The music is made up almost entirely of period instrumentals that accompany the Castles as they dance. There is only one original song (“Only When You’re in My Arms” by Con Conrad, Herman Ruby and Bert Kalmar), and it’s used as a diegetic source, Vernon singing the lyric as he works up the nerve to propose to Irene Foote. I’m always a little annoyed when I see the picture that the Foote’s family retainer was changed to a white man and played by Walter Brennan, although given the prevailing tendency in Hollywood to depict black men and women as “coons” for comic relief, it’s probably just as well that Walter Ash was written white.
This is the only RKO “Fred & Ginger” in which the pair portray a married couple (they’re also married in The Barkleys of Broadway, but that was 10 years later, at MGM) and while there is some tension between Vernon and Irene early on in their story, the typical screwball courting elements are, obviously, absent. Similarly, although the Castles’ eventual agent is played by the wry, eccentric Edna May Oliver and she becomes a genial confidante to the pair, she isn’t a full-blown zany like Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick or Alice Brady in the earlier Astaire-Rogers pictures. She’s only mildly zany. (Speaking of zanies: You may recognize Leonid Kinskey as the artist in Paris whom Oliver patronizes from his appearance as the bartender Sasha in Casablanca, ardent for Madeline Lebeau.) The movie is pleasantly directed by H. C. Potter, Robert de Grasse provided rich, warm photography, and there are some striking visual effects by Vernon L. Walker, particularly the sequence where the couple dances across a map of the United States. However, the affecting grief of the scene in which Walter breaks the news of Vernon’s shocking death to Irene, and Rogers’ fine acting of it, is almost canceled out by the terrible dialogue Brennan is given to speak. Astaire is engaging, as he nearly always is, yet in some ways Vernon and Irene Castle is a showcase for Rogers, from her hilariously overblown rendition of “The Yama-Yama Man” to the moment, late in the picture, when Irene unexpectedly meets Vernon, an RAF volunteer, in a nightclub and as he embraces her she whispers, “Oh, Vernon” in a way that in its emotion and anxiety seems to anticipate her husband’s later needless death. Rogers gives a beautiful performance in what Arlene Croce in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book rightly calls “a very dear film.”
For the record, the screenplay was by Richard Sherman, Oscar Hammerstein II and Dorothy Yost. The movie is often referred to as a flop. It wasn’t — it was popular with the public — but its budget (approximately $1,196,000) meant that even its high gross ($1,825,000) did not allow it to break even.
“10” (1979) Seeing this Blake Edwards sex-comedy when it was new left me curiously dissatisfied, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Watching it again 44 years later I think I know why my nearly-19-year-old self was discomfited. The picture is bifurcated, in an odd fashion: The hilarious first half doesn’t quite line up with the more reflective second. The characters and the basic situation are the same — the successful middle-aged composer George Webber (Dudley Moore) seeks to relieve his male-menopausal sense of vague dissatisfaction by perusing an idealized woman (Bo Derek) he’s seen for a brief moment while driving — and when George flies off to Mexico after the girl, the tone is largely different… yet somehow it all feels like the same movie. I think too that at 18 I hadn’t anything like the experience of life required to empathize with Moore’s character; he seemed like a stereotype of the middle-aged letch seeking renewal in the arms of a hot young moron. Being older now than George was then, I can see both George and Jenny, Derek’s character, more clearly, and while I still think he’s crazy to risk his relationship with Julie Andrews’ warm and responsive Samantha, I no longer think Jenny is an idiot. She’s shallow, and her values are vastly different from George’s (she’s newly married, yet perfectly happy to jump in the sack with George while her young husband is recuperating in the hospital) but that doesn’t make her stupid, although her insistence on re-starting her record of the Ravel “Bolero” every time she and George are interrupted, to time it so they climax when it does, renders her exasperating. Life isn’t that canned, and certainly sex isn’t; Jenny’s single-mindedness risks turning erotic expression into nothing but an act of deliberate mechanism.
Although its parts vary they don’t cancel each other out, and “10” remains an exceptionally intelligent and entertaining comedy; the physical indignities into which George’s erotic obsessions invariably lead him are cannily conceived by the writer-director, and perfectly executed by him, with that patient, almost Classical, application of the best means of photographing comedy to the most surprising effects of physical humor. When this marriage works, as it does throughout the picture, few things are funnier. Dudley Moore, previously noted as almost purely a sketch comic,* proved a remarkable adept at this, particularly given his physical limitations (he was born with club feet and even after many childhood surgeries one leg remained both twisted and withered) and he plays the more serious second half with sensitivity and real feeling. As his song-writing partner, Robert Webber plays a gay man without the slightest acknowledgement of stereotype save his character keeping a younger man (Walter George Allen) who eventually leaves him; I can’t tell you what a relief that characterization, both as written by Edwards and as played by Webber, was when I was 18. Derek of course was half the reason the picture grossed $107 million and she’s rather good, although I found those cornrows unappealing then, and I still do, whether they’re on a white or a black head; granted I am far from the ideal judge of feminine pulchritude, I don’t enjoy seeing that much exposed scalp on anyone. Dee Wallace has a lovely role as a woman who can’t get a sexual break, Brian Dennehy a beautiful one as a sympathetic bartender, John Hancock is charming as George’s psychiatrist, and Max Showalter has one of the best scenes in the movie, as a minister with a passion for writing terrible songs. Frank Stanley provided superb cinematography, beautifully lit and photographed, especially in the movie’s many nighttime interiors which have a rich, burnished look.
Prime Cut (1972) A tough cult thriller that is almost a parody of pulp sagas, with several nasty contemporary flourishes that must make it a favorite aid to masturbation in the Tarantino household. These include the villain’s preferred method of disposing of would-be assassins, turning them into sausages in his meat-processing plant; his auctioning off drugged, naked girls like cattle; and a clever, frightening encounter by Lee Marvin and Sissy Spacek with a harvesting combiner. (That last item appears to be a nod to the crop-dusting sequence in North by Northwest.) Marvin, in a typically terse performance, plays a mob assassin whose objective is the murder of the cheerfully venal meat-packager “Mary Ann” (Gene Hackman) making Prime Cut the sort of picture in which the hero you root for is a hired killer and which tells you something about how appalling Hackman’s character is. Spacek, in her first credited role, is one of the young sex-slaves, rescued on an outraged whim by Marvin, and she has a remarkable, slightly dazed, mien. Previously an orphan, she doesn’t seem to have any experience of the world that might give her a sense of what is appropriate, as when Marvin buys her a whole new trousseau and she comes down to dinner in their three-star hotel wearing no brassiere. Hackman, coming off The French Connection, plays Mary Ann with a genial coldness that does little to mask his psychopathy, and as his bizarre, dangerous brother “Weenie,” Gregory Walcott is a genuinely unsettling presence, a rich weirdo who lives in a cheap flop-house with flimsy partitions rather than actual rooms. Some have said the odd relationship between the brothers suggests a homosexual liaison, but the behavior of the characters is so bizarre almost any interpretation would do.
Robert Dillon wrote the pitch-black seriocomic script (he was, with his wife, later credited with the story for the underrated French Connection II) and Michael Ritchie directed efficiently. Gene Polito’s widescreen cinematography has exceptional richness, with Calgary exteriors subbing for Kansas City and environs. The atmospheric score is by Lalo Schifrin.
Rooster Cogburn (1975) A wholly unnecessary sequel to True Grit done for what I assume were entirely mercenary reasons and with maximal borrowings from elsewhere but which has many compensations, not least of which is the once-surprising teaming of John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.
El Dorado (1966) Leigh Brackett claimed of her screen adaptation of the Harry Brown novel The Stars in Their Courses, placing The Iliad in the old West, that it was the best script she ever wrote. Coming from the woman who also wrote Hatari! and who co-authored The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Rio Lobo and The Empire Strikes Back, those are words to conjure with. Unfortunately, the tragic nature of the material made Howard Hawks nervous, which I suspect was largely due to his having had two flops in a row and needing a more sure thing. Hence El Dorado, a loose demi-remake of Rio Bravo. The repetition disturbed Brackett: “The more we got into doing Rio Bravo over again,” she noted later, “the sicker I got, because I hate doing things over again. And I kept saying to Howard I did that, and he’d say it was okay, we could do it over again.” Hawks’ lack of compunction about repeating himself is one of his most dismaying flaws as a filmmaker, along with his blindness to the recurring homoeroticism between his male characters and his rich-boy’s indifference to spending other people’s money, which often resulted in his best pictures making less at the box-office than they should have because their negative cost was so great.
If you take in El Dorado without undue expectations you’ll likely find it an engaging, somewhat enervated, comic Western enlivened by its trio of central actors. John Wayne as a gun-for-hire with a conscience does little he hasn’t done before, but as usual with him, it’s the way he does it that registers. Wayne had been in pictures long enough that he knew how little he had to do, how small his gestures needed to be, to make an impact and the pauses he takes between words are always surprising, even if (as one suspects) he often did so because he was groping for the next part of a line. Other actors point at an object; Wayne stabs the air slowly and snaps his hand back in a single, flowing gesture and you’re never in doubt of the importance of what he’s saying, or less than delighted by the economy with which he says it. Robert Mitchum essentially plays the same drunken sheriff role Dean Martin assayed in Rio Bravo, and while I’ve always liked Martin in that picture, Mitchum shows you how much more effecting the part might have been with a real screen actor playing it. When, after enduring the crude insults of the heavies he returns to the jail with a bottle of whiskey, the tears in Mitchum’s eyes as he tells Wayne, “They laughed at me,” and the disbelieving hurt in his voice, make all the difference between a good moment and a great one. As the untested but enthusiastic tryo, the young James Caan brings a welcome freshness to a role that is largely a re-tread of Ricky Nelson’s in Rio Bravo. (He’s even called “Mississippi,” the way Nelson was nicknamed “Colorado.”) Caan is such a pleasant addition he almost gets you past the movie’s worst, and ugliest, moment: When against all likelihood he gets away with a patently phony disguise by pretending to be a gibbering Chinese. This “comic” bit would have fallen flat in 1930; for 1967 it’s practically obscene.
While Arthur Hunnicutt is not as memorable as Walter Brennan in the role that echoes Brennan’s he’s quite amiable, as is Paul Fix as a sympathetic physician and Christopher George as Wayne’s knife-scarred rival. Ed Asner makes a quietly hissable villain, Charlene Holt is very fine in an abbreviated version of “the Hawksian woman,” Johnny Crawford is effecting as a dying boy whose fate, for which he is unavoidably responsible, shakes Wayne’s character to the core and Michele Carey is as sexy a tomboy as you’ll ever see. Nelson Riddle’s music, while not a patch on Dmitri Tiomkin’s for El Dorado‘s predecessor, and much more modern-sounding, is full of good things and may make you wish he’d been offered more movies to score, or in any case had been less busy arranging for Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and thus able to accept more such offers. El Dorado was shot in Utah and at the Old Tucson Studios in Arizona by the veteran cinematographer Harold Rosson whose Technicolor imagery is mouth-watering, especially in his night sequences and the glorious purple sunset farewell between Wayne and Holt.
The Journey of Natty Gann (1985) An amiable period road-movie from the era in which Disney was attempting to attract a more adult audience with items like The Black Hole, Never Cry Wolf, and the misbegotten Something Wicked This Way Comes. There is actually little to shield a child from here aside from a few relatively mild oaths (“shit” is the most frequent curse) and one brief, unsettling scene in which the heroine is menaced by a man who gives her a ride in his pickup, predictably foiled by an attack from her pet wolf. That sentence is less risible than it sounds since Natty (Meredith Salenger) frees the wolf from a dog-fighting ring early on and it attaches itself to her as a consequence. It’s a Depression story, in which a widowed father (the excellent Ray Wise) reluctantly leaves his daughter in the care of a Chicago hotlier (Lainie Kazan) when work on the West Coast presents itself. As the girl’s life there becomes more and more insupportable she takes off to follow her father, encountering railroad-riders, a gang of young hoods, an orphanage out of Little Orphan Annie and other travails. The outcome is never really in doubt, although the screenwriter (Jeanne Rosenberg) places obstacles in the paths of both father and daughter that occasionally cause you to wonder, or to try second-guessing. (I was convinced that someone, human or animal, was going to die before the end.) With its indomitable tomboy heroine, it’s a picture young girls ought to love, but that boys would also respond to, especially with that wonderful Canis lupus companion played by Jed, the wolf-Malamute mix who later starred in the 1991 Disney adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang.
James Horner’s score, as was the case so often with him, is so imitative I thought at first I was hearing the work of Georges Delerue, whose music for Something Wicked was tossed out the year before and replaced by a lesser but effective one by Horner. (I had forgotten that Natty Gann‘s original composer, Elmer Bernstein, was, like Delerue, replaced, and some of the music I was hearing and attributing to Horner ripping Bernstein off, was actually his.)† As Natty, Meredith Salenger makes a most appealing champion, personable but determined, and despite her youth, nobody’s fool. Her androgyny and her masculine attire also help her blend in with such wild boys of the road as John Cusack, playing a young homeless man Natty befriends. Cusack is an asset as are, in smaller roles, Scatman Crothers, Barry Miller, Zachary Ainsley, Verna Bloom, John Finnegan, Bruce M. Fischer, Hannah Cutrona and Sheelah Megill. The director, Jeremy Kagan, who had previously made the enormously likeable 1970s private-detective variation The Big Fix, has a nice eye for detail and a fine sense of pace, but the most impressive aspect of The Journey of Natty Gann is its sumptuous photography by Dick Bush. The picture was shot in Vancouver, and the vivid images Bush captured of its lush, verdant wildernesses pop off the screen.
The War Wagon (1967) An enjoyable Western comedy, directed with flair and a quickened pace by the veteran Burt Kennedy and based by Clair Huffaker, who also wrote The Comancheros and 100 Rifles, on his novel Badman. That word is interesting, in that John Wayne plays an ex-con conniving to get his hands on a cache of gold that should have been his. Granted he was innocent and railroaded into prison by the venal mining boss played by Bruce Cabot in a successful attempt to legally steal what belonged to Taw Jackson, Wayne’s character. But if there are Wayne roles, aside from the Ringo Kid in the John Ford Stagecoach and one of the 3 Godfathers, also for Ford, in which he played even an alleged criminal, I’m not aware of them. Not that this is a serious matter; The War Wagon is an escapade, and a largely merry one. Wayne’s antagonist and reluctant partner in his revenge against Cabot is Kirk Douglas, a happy heterosexual but because the actor chose to wear a large ring over one gloved finger, one that made Wayne predictably nervous. (John Wayne was nauseated that Douglas chose to play Van Gogh, so one can well imagine his reaction to that ring.) Along for the ride are a cheerfully cynical Howard Keel as a thoroughly Anglicized Indian, Robert Walker Jr. as a young explosives expert with a drinking problem, Keenan Wynn as a despicable petty thief, Valora Noland as his resigned child-bride, Joanna Barnes as one of Douglas’ playmates, Gene Evans as an excitable deputy sheriff, Marco Antonio as a belligerent chief and, in smaller roles, Bruce Dern and Sheb Wooley. The splendid William H. Clothier provided the excellent widescreen cinematography, and Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, which pretends to take the whole business seriously, is a peach, with a title song whose wonderfully silly Ned Washington lyrics are performed with brio by that other notable Caucasian Indian of the 1960s, Ed Ames.
in any of his other pictures. Not that this is a serious matter; The War Wagon is an escapade, and a largely merry one. Wayne’s antagonist and reluctant partner in his revenge against Cabot is Kirk Douglas, a happy heterosexual but because the actor chose to wear a large ring over one gloved finger, one that made Wayne predictably nervous. (John Wayne was nauseated that Douglas chose to play Van Gogh, so one can well imagine his reaction to that ring.) Along for the ride are a cheerfully cynical Howard Keel as a thoroughly Anglicized Indian, Robert Walker Jr. as a young explosives expert with a drinking problem, Keenan Wynn as a despicable petty thief, Valora Noland as his resigned child-bride, Joanna Barnes as one of Douglas’ playmates, Gene Evans as an excitable deputy sheriff, Marco Antonio as a belligerent chief and, in smaller roles, Bruce Dern and Sheb Wooley. The splendid William H. Clothier provided the excellent widescreen cinematography, and Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, which pretends to take the whole business seriously, is a peach, with a title song whose wonderfully silly Ned Washington lyrics are performed with brio by that other notable Caucasian Indian of the 1960s, Ed Ames.
*With his comedy partner, Peter Cook. Both were alumni, alongside Jonathan Miller and the brilliant future playwright Alan Bennett (and, later, when Miller left, Paxton Whitehead) of the Beyond the Fringe stage show. Cook and Moore also wrote and starred in the amusing, if ultimately labored, Faust variation Bedazzled, cobbled up dozens of brilliant sketches and, in occasionally inebriated ad-lib sessions, recorded the genuinely foul, obscene, and frequently hilarious “Derek and Clive” albums.
†Bernstein’s music for Natty Gann was later part of a boxed set released by Varèse Sarabande and that also included his rejected scores for Gangs of New York and The Scarlet Letter. Parlor game: Name a single movie that was substantially improved by its desperate producers throwing out one score and replacing it with another. This is what people do when they don’t know what else to do.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 