Some Came Running

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, sidebar; "A Hound For Trouble," directed by Chuck Jones

As we work on the ninth film blurbed by the man in his "'Best Films' of 1951" piece, recently re-reprinted in the fabulous volume Farber on Film (number 8 is here),we take a slight mental health break by checking out one of the honorable mentions listed at the piece's end. The final one, to be precise. Here's Manny:

"And, for want of further space, six-inch Emanuels to the following also-rans: The Tall Target, Against the Gun, No Highway in the Sky, Happiest Days of Your Life, Rawhide, Skelton's Excuse My Dust, The Enforcer, Force of Arms, The Wooden Horse, Night Into Morning, Payment on Demand, Cry Danger, and a Chuck Jones animated cartoon—the name escapes me—about a crass, earnest, herky-jerky dog that knocks its brains out trying to win a job in a Pisa pizza joint."

Farber's mentions feature at least two bonafide underground classics: the tension-filled process film No Highway, and Anthony Mann's great account of a foiled Lincoln assassination plot, The Tall Target (not to be confused with Boetticher's The Tall T, and now available via Warner Archives). Many of the others constitute Subjects For Further Research. As for the Chuck Jones cartoon, we've got its number. And title. It's A Hound For Trouble, and it's an extra on the Warner DVD of the Doris Day flick On Moonlight Bay. (Farber on Day: "Cute.")

The hound in question is, of course, Charlie Dog, whom I"ve always considered one of Chuck Jones most convincing and disturbing creations. Yes, Jones' character was based on a dog actually conceived by the great Bob Clampett, but Jones took the mutt places that most Looney Tunes never visited. In a sense, Charlie was as subversively off-putting as Tex Avery's Screwball Squirrel, and hence almost as short-lived (Charlie starred in five shorts.) Whoever wrote the WIkipedia entry on Charlie really nails the guy: "[He is] defined by one desire: to find a master. To this end, Charlie is willing to pull out all the stops, from pulling the 'big soulful eyes routine' to boasting of his pedigree [...] though in reality he is just a slick-talking mutt who rarely realizes that his own aggressive obnoxiousness is sabotaging his appeal to any potential guardian."

Indeed. Hound begins with Charlie getting kicked off of a boat he's stowed away on, and finding himself in a land where no one "capeches" his slick rap. Here he is in both calculating (confiding in the audience) and "soulful-eyed" (wooing a potential master) modes:

 

Farber says that Charlie "beats his brains out," but what he really does, hoping to impress potential master Pasquale while the restaurateur steps out for a break, is screw up royally. So royally, and aggressively, that you get the idea he's doing it on purpose. As when he stomps on a bunch of grapes and proudly proffers the resulting liquid to an understandably repulsed customer.

 

Charlie's particular brand of sociopathy—because, you know, it seems as though he really really DOES want a master—is all the more terrifying AND plausible for the way it's exaggerated in the Jones cartoons, which is part of what makes the cartoons almost more terrifying than they are hilarious. At the end of the cartoon, Pasquale takes advantage of Charlie's unfamiliarity with Italian architectural landscapes, and tests his mettle as man's best friend, resulting in this rather anti-lyrical closing image:

 

...but we all know Charlie will live to hound another unfortunate, another day.

UPDATE: My pal Joseph Failla, a longtime student of Termite Terrace, has some interesting thoughts:

I think Chuck Jones has fans for all stages of his career, from his lushly colorful, storybook beginnings (I still admit to being a Sniffles fan), to his more stylized abstractions, later on. It's really a classic journey that many artists undergo during their lifetime, if they're lucky enough to have such a long career. One of the most interesting processes in Looney Tunes, is watching Jones' finely detailed Road Runner backgrounds disintegrate into linear designs that merely suggest their southwest desert settings. Sometimes having your budget cut out from under you, can be a creative boon. 

It's true as Jones came into his own, the Looney Tunes stable of characters grew more engaging, since any number of his creations (or those he inherited) would qualify for a lifetime of psychoanalysis. Although I'm not so sure I don't prefer Bob Clampett's physically zany Daffy, to Jones' more neurotic one. Surely, Clampett's version must have been more fun to animate (DUCK AMUCK notwithstanding), but half the task of animation is fully developing a character's personality, as an actor would thoroughly research his role. So with Jones, Daffy's persona was so distinctly defined, that the animators knew where the next drawing was headed well before they put pencil to paper.

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #8: "The Man Who Cheated Himself," directed by Felix Feist

After a one-week engagement at The Auteurs', this soon-to-be-concluded feature returns to its home. (Now's as good a time as any to beg, once again, any readers with a line on Appointment To Danger to help me out if they can.)

Farber: "A lightweight, O'Henry-type story about a cop who hoists himself on his own petard; heavyweight acting by Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt; as a consequence, the only film this year to take a moderate, morally fair stand on moderately suave and immoral Americans, aged about forty. An effortlessly paced story, impressionistically coated with San Francisco's oatmeal-gray atmosphere; at the end, it wanders into an abandoned fort or prison and shows Hitchcock and Carol Reed how to sidestep hokum in a corny architectural monstrosity. Cobb packs more psychological truths about joyless American promiscuity into one ironic stare, one drag on a cigarette, or one uninterested kiss more than all the Mankiewicz heroes put together."

 

Mankiewicz had by this time made enough pictures to have forged a particular signature, and the prior year saw his first real masterwork, All About Eve. While Eve's not usually noted for its male characters just a year before, and while the movie wasn't unusually notable for its male characters, there is some interesting contrast to be seen between, say, Cobb's reaction to being made putty in the hands of Wyatt's not-quite-femme-fatale, and Gary Merrill's self-loathing resignation at Bette Davis' machinations in Eve. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Manny on "Earth"

The lovely folks at The Auteurs' Notebook are hosting a wonderful series of pieces commemorating the publication of the splendid volume of Manny Farber's film writings, Farber on Film. Regular followers of this blog know that I've been doing a retrospective series examining Farber's "best films" of 1951; this week, I move the series over to The Auteurs' to look at a pick that's become an immortal classic, Robert Wise's wonderful The Day The Earth Stood Still, theremin-laden score by Bernard Herrmann. The piece is here. And by all means do check out the other pieces in the Farber category, including David Phelps's wickedly brilliant "Outside-In" and appreciations of the critic by Library of America editor and spellbinding film writer Geoffrey O'Brien, and the all-time great Phillip Lopate. Very nice company to find myself in, I have to say. 

In moderately related news, I am compelled to report that whenever I do a Google Image search on The Day The Earth Stood Still, the image reproduced at right is invariably the fourth in the top row on the very first page. I had long thought that the 2008 remake of Earth was a completely unjustified travesty, but I understand now that it very well may have been of some moderate usefulness after all. Just goes to show, I suppose.

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #6: "The People Against O'Hara," directed by John Sturges

Last week's installment, #5, here. Follow the links at that post to access the other prior films in the series.

Farber: "An adroit, scholarly example of sound storytelling that every Message Boy should be made to study as an example of how good you can get when you neither slant nor oversimplify. Also highly enjoyable for its concern about a 'static" subject—the legal profession as such—and the complete authority with which it handles soft-pedaled insights into things like the structure and routine of law offices; the politics of conviviality between cops, DA's, judges, attorneys; the influence of bar associations; the solemn manner of memorializing the wrench caused by the death of a colleague; the painful 'homework' of committing to memory the endless ramifications of your case, as well as the words you are going to feed the jury in the morning."

Yes; this picture works quite nicely as what you might call a "process film," a kind of sub-genre that achieved its apex with 2007's Zodiac (and I wonder, did Farber see that picture, and if so, what did he and his wife and critical partner Patricia Patterson think of it?). Beyond that, it's also a first-rate character study. Spencer Tracy plays James Curtayne, a veteran lawyer who's kicked both booze and criminal cases in the hopes of setting up a cozy dotage with civil work. His daughter Virginia (Diana Lynn) is living with him and keeping him in line, putting off a promising marriage to look after the patriarch. Curtayne's plans for a placid life get scrambled when clients from the old hardscrabble days appeal for help. The old O'Hara's (Arthur Shields and Louise Lorimer), a working-class couple of a particular Manhattan vintage, practically beg Curtayne to defend their son Johnny (James Arness, who appears in another Farber 1951 fave, The Thing From Another World, here playing an all-too-human dumb lug rather than a hulking interplanetary vegetable), who's been in and out of trouble all his life, from a charge that could well end his life: murder.

Curtayne doesn't want to do it, because, among other things, he tends to get too invested in such cases. They wear him down. They put him in a place of self-doubt that makes the bottle look like a mighty good fortifier. And sure enough, at a crucial point in the case, he opens up the liquor cabinet. It's a pretty staggering moment that I suppose carries extra resonance with those who know about Tracy's own real-life struggles with alcoholism.

 

Tracy plays the moment beautifully, neither soft-soaping nor overdoing it. Eventually Curtayne re-embraces the bottle fully, and the picture presents a very pithy example of how booze can be the father of all bad ideas, as when Curtayne gets the bright notion to try to bribe a venal witness (the usually reliable Jay C. Flippen, here forced to put on a rather ridiculous "Scandanavian" accent). After this—and after he blows the case as a result—the death of a colleague forces Curtayne to rediscover his purpose and his skill. But the picture doesn't turn into a sappy redemption tale as a result. Rather, it digs in its heels and becomes an ace detective story, filled with ever-more convincing detail. Here's Curtayne eying a bit of evidence he's gonna need a court order to get his hands on.

 

Later, Curtayne confronts a mobster who once expressed a particular interest in the case; although he's straightened out his act by this point, Curtayne has a drink with "Knuckles" Lanzetta (Eduardo Cianelli) to give the hood the impression that Curtayne is, yup, just a washed-up sot mouthpiece. There's a frankness in their washroom banter that's pretty raw and honest by studio standards of the time. (The picture was an MGM production.)

 

Screenwriter John Monks, Jr. adapted the picture from a novel by Eleazer Lipsky, who also wrote the source material for the 1947 classic Kiss of Death. It's no accident that what goes on in this picture feels almost as authentic as what you'd get in a George V. Higgins novel; like Higgins, Lipsky was a longtime practitioner of the law, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan in the 1940s. Director Sturges was one of the most reliable journeymen of the day. Cinematographer John Alton doesn't walk on the same high-wire here that he did for his noirs with Anthony Mann, but he gives the picture a look of deceptively plain realism. And Tracy delivers one of his very best performances. The combination of these talents yields a film of remarkable solidity and briskness, and the ending is one of the most compellingly bleak of any film from any era. The People Against O'Hara isn't yet available on DVD, but it does tend to turn up on TCM with some regularity. Catch it when you can; it's a really special piece of work.

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #5: "The Prowler," directed by Joseph Losey

Last week's installment, including links to previous weeks, here.

Farber: "A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, out of Cain by Joe Losey, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who, finding the attentions of her disc-jockey husband beginning to pall, takes up with an amoral rookie cop (nicely hammed up by Van Heflin). Sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well, the potentially explosive boredom of the childless, uneducated, well-to-do housewife with too much time on her hands."

This too-little-seen picture still packs something like a scorpion's sting—for all the sensationalism of its content, it's too nuanced overall to wallop the viewer. The setting is not just "suburbia;" it's Los Angeles' suburbia, which is one reason the picture struck such a resonant chord with crime novelist James Ellroy, who calls this "a masterpiece of sexual creepiness, institutional corruption and suffocating, ugly passion." Indeed. What weird power the film retains; that creepiness seems to practically ooze out of the cuts, leaving a weirdly metallic psychic residue, and some might note that it is remarkable that Losey achieved such mastery of this unique tone with just his third feature. 

Farber's typically idiosyncratic listing of its highlights is also typically on the money. "Athletic nostalgia?" Well, yes, it's reflected in the creepy narcissism of Heflin's character, a one-time football hero who's now a cop and who spends his off-hours in a shabby single room with his firing-range souvenir and a bunch of muscle magazines. 

And there he shaves himself in grim, weird satisfaction, waiting from the call he just knows is gonna come from Keyes' aforementioned dumb, hot, average American babe. For the film's first half, their assignations are at the big hacienda-style house her husband bought for the couple—the house she stays cooped up in every night, listening to said husband's radio show, while Heflin's cop moves in more and more bluntly. When he really clinches the deal, Losey's camera pans to this image of Heflin's police hat sitting atop the radio and the Hi-Fi housing briefcase on which Hubby listens to acetates of his own show—a pithy and distasteful visual metaphor of the sort that Losey would continue to hone throughout his career.

Late in the film, the couple are forced to live as outcasts from civilization, and their dancing takes on a more surreal tinge. It's bizarre, for sure, but nothing in The Prowler ever feels forced; the script, partially by an uncredited Dalton Trumbo, sneaks in a convincing rationale for their ghost-town exile early on. It's a marvelous construction all around. Farber mentions "the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well," and Losey, in Tom Milne's book-length interview, mentions that he and production designer John Hubley "spent a good deal of time trying to find the right sort of horror for the Spanish house...[and] reducing and particularizing the horror." 

 

The director credits the producer Sam Spiegel—here credited under his frequent pseudonym "S.P. Eagle"—with giving him both the means and latitude to take the proper pains with the picture. "[He] was a marvelous producer. His attitude was, 'You're right for this, but you're not very experienced. I'll give you the best cameraman in Hollywood, the best technicians, the best first assistant. I don't care what I pay, and you do it any way you want to.' This was extraordinary." The proof is in the credits: the DP was Arthur Miller (How Green Was My Valley), the production designer Boris Leven, the assistant director Robert Aldrich. According to biographer David Caute, this was the Hollywood film of which Losey was most proud. 

It is also the first film in which the theme that would help establish his auteur status resonates so cleanly. "The feminine role in Losey's world is strictly subordinate because of the histrionic hysteria of his actors," Andrew Sarris notes in his entry on Losey in The American Cinema. "Men simply cannot cope with their lives and social institutions, and they crack up with very lyrical results."  Yes. In several respects Heflin's Webb Garwood, who seems to have been cracking up before he has even been introduced to the viewer, is a direct antecedent to Stanley Baker's ruinous Tyvian Jones in Losey's 1962's Eve. To name just one other fragile/brittle male Losey creation.

This is a remarkably rich film on so many levels; hence, it pains me to report it's not yet available on commercial DVD. I owe my latest viewing of it to the kindness of a collector. Varied rumors abound on the interet about the wherefores of its status, but nothing to indicate an imminent release. One hopes this situation changes soon. 

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #4: 'The Thing From Another World," directed (it is said) by Christian Nyby

Previous installments here, here, and here.

Farber: "Howard Hawks's science-fiction quickie directed by Christian Nyby; fast, crisp and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atomic age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that cry for human blood as human babies cry for milk); Kenneth Tobey's fine, unpolished performance as a nice, clean, lecherous American air-force officer; well-cast story, as raw and ferocious as Hawks' Scarface, about a battle of wits near the North Pole between a screaming banshee of a vegetable and an air-force crew that jabbers away as sharply and sporadically as Jimmy Cagney moves."

Those plants are still pretty unsettling.

I presume that this film needs no introduction. And I'm hardly the first person to note what an exhilaration it is to go through Farber on Film and read his smart, plain, piety-free analyses of future classics—stuff that became the building blocks not just of auteurism but of film studies in general. And stuff that's still crisp and enjoyable. The Thing From Another World remains one of the most engaging and watchable pictures of its kind. A lot of it has to do with the atmosphere. While Hawks is credited only as producer here, and never attempted to wrest any credit from director Nyby in interviews, that atmosphere has Hawks' stamp all over it. There are stretches here that make this, like the previously discussed His Kind of Woman, something of a great "hangout picture." The weather outside may be frightful at the Arctic outpost where most of the picture takes place, but inside there's cards and booze and banter (the sharp jabbering Farber evokes) and a very warm stove. The group dynamic remains pretty cozy even as the tension generated by the film's murderous alien visitor ratchets up. (It's interesting to that when Hawks idolizer John Carpenter essayed his own version of this story, that warmth was pretty much sucked out of the scenario straight away.)

One might expect that the one-girl-for-every-ten-or-so-boys ratio at the camp might generate some discontent, but no. The primary male-female relationship in the picture is between Tobey's Captain Hendry (as superb as Farber says) and Margaret Sheridan's Nikki, secretary to science crew chief Dr. Carrington. Their flirtation leads to the above bit, really a legendary episode in the Hawksian saga of the battle of the sexes, in which Nikki tries to elude Hendry's wandering hands by tying them behind his back before making cocktails for two. The open secret that is this relationship does little more than elicit some good-natured ribbing of Hendry from his men. 

 

What splits the group up is...ideoogy. "The central conflict in The Thing is not between humanity and a destructive invader, but between two opposed concepts of value embodied in the two opposed groups whose clash the Thing precipitates." But by the picture's end it's Hendry's tough-minded pragmatism that wins the day and reunites the group, with only head scientist Carrington still insisting that there's too much to learn from the Thing to allow its destruction. His final pleading with the brutish being really makes him look like one of the cinema's Great Simps, but the film sorta/kinda forgives him—key line: "Good for you, Scotty."

 

This is all quite fascinating, and kudos to Charles Lederer's tight, unobtrusively smart script for evoking pretty complex philosophical/existential dilemmas so deftly. The sensationalism of the "frying" of the Thing at the end tends to make one forget about all the intellectual stuff (the special effects are simplicity itself, and yet it's still a striking, one-of-a-kind sequence). But don't forget that the film ends not on a note of triumphalism but with an admonition: "Keep watching the skies!" No, not exactly "progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness." (Jeez, can you imagine what a Mark Steyn could come up with if somebody reminded him of this film's existence?)

 

In the "You Know You're Old When..." department, you know you're old when you watch this film and you look at the guy above left and the phrase "Say the secret word" pops into your head. DIscuss in comments. The guy above right, by the way, is Paul Frees—second week in a row he's turned up in this Farber series!

The picture's available, for a ridiculously low price, in a good-looking but extras-free DVD from Warner. 

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #3: 'His Kind of Woman," directed (sort of) by John Farrow

Parts #1 and #2: Here and here. 

Farber: "Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense, exploiting the expressive dead-pans of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, a young man and a young woman who would probably enjoy doing in real life what they have to do here for RKO. Vincent Price is superb in his one right role—that of a ham actor thrown suddenly into a situation calling for high melodramatic courage. Russell's petulant, toneless rendition of 'Five Little Miles from San Berdoo' is high art of a sort."

That pretty much nails it, although it says something interesting about what one might call Farber's critical ecumenism that he could deem this both "nonsense" and a "best film" of the year.  It is a thoroughly enjoyable picture, and its enjoyable qualities stem in no small part from its being something of a mess—more nonsensical than your average bit of studio nonsense. Blame then-RKO-head Howard Hughes, whose obsession with his discovery Russell compelled him to micro-manage the production, firing original director Farrow and bringing in RIchard Fleischer to preside over a grueling series of re-shoots, during which the principle actors took the liberty of revising their own dialogue. 

The plot setup is pure convoluted hokum, involving a Luciano-esque Italian mobster (Raymond Burr) rotting in exile who contrives to re-enter the U.S. by assuming the identity of drifting gambler Milner (Mitchum), who, it's assumed, will take his multi-thousand-dollar bribe and loll around the strange Mexican resort that's their rendezvous point for a year or more. "It's not the place, it's the people," resort owner Jose Morro (a thoroughly robotic Phillip Van Zandt) boasts to Milner after the possible sucker rolls in (Mitchum looks, of course, like they just peeled him out of bed, only moreso than usual). And for the next 40 minutes or so, HKOW is what Quentin Tarantino would call "a great hangout movie." Not much goes on. The sleepily sensuous Russell tries to pin down boyfriend Price, magnificently self-obsessed until the wife Russell's character didn't know he had shows up. Milner tries to figure out where his contact's at, and shows a little Rick Blaine nobility by using his card-sharp chops to benefit a young couple about to fall into ruin at the hands of a predatory gambler played by Jim Backus. After Tim Holt turns up, the plot somehow feels obliged to kick into gear. And then Russell stops by Mitchum's cabin wearing one of those numbers that makes you go "What the?" followed by (if you're me) "homina homina homina..."

 

And then the picture gets really weird; were I feeling highfalutin I would say it bifurcates. Actually, that's almost entirely accurate. After Mitchum's character is taken hostage by the bad guys, the picture hones in on Price's character, a hack and a ham and a moral coward who, handed a gun by Russell, sees an opportunity to do something real for once. "You go back to Hollywood...while I go on to real-life triumphs...or a glorious death!" he sincerely charges his puling wife and spineless lawyer (or agent, or whatever—it's hard to actually tell).

 

And off he goes, quoting Shakespeare all the way. Upon being wounded, he notes, "Tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church door," the almost-last-lines of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Even a throwaway line like "I must rid all the sea of pirates" turns out to be from Antony and Cleopatra. The film reaches a near-sublime note of silliness when it throws in what amounts to a silent-movie gag involving a leaky boat commandeered by Price. And all the while, Mitchum's Milner, when he's shown at all, is completely ineffectual, a temporary plaything that Burr's sadistic gangster is eager to be rid of...

 

It seems a bit unfair, then, that Mitchum's character gets to pull off the film's ultimate bit of derring-do, but them's the rules, I guess. HKOW's often-bizarre variations on convention could only be carried so far. 

By the way—two things. Among its other pleasures the movie also features a relatively rare in-the-flesh appearance from voice-over legend Paul Frees; it's always a kick to match that voice to a face. Also, our Mr. Farber was all of five months the senior of "young man" Mitchum at the time he wrote the above-cited piece!

UPDATE: My friend Mr. Joseph Failla has some particularly apposite notes to add:

"Even though Robert Mitchum received top billing, I always considered HIS KIND OF WOMAN, first and foremost, one of Vincent Price's most notable films. He dominates the proceedings so well, you forget the crime thriller you began to watch and become totally caught up with the Price character's newly found heroics. In fact, I'd rate his work here practically on a par with my favorite Price performance as a critically maligned Shakespearian actor in THEATRE OF BLOOD. I've often rejected the notion that Price was a ham; he's done much to prove otherwise. The problem was, he may have been at his best when he was portraying one.

If I remember correctly, very little of the film Farrow shot remains. I believe the opening scene with Burr is his;  it seems to be played somewhat straighter than any of the other sequences he appears in. But once the comedy relief begins, we're probably firmly within Fleischer's re-shoots. The bulk of the film even looks different from the opening footage, making clearer how extensive the revisions were. I suppose it shouldn't be any surprise that another troubled Hughes production, MACAO, which also featured Mitchum and Jane Russell, switched directors too. Officially begun by Von Sternberg, it was completed by Nicholas Ray without credit. That alone makes viewing a must.

But I admit, I enjoy the lengths to which HKOW is willing to take its B movie theatrics. While other films would be satisfied with just roughing Mitchum up, this one continues to up the ante, especially during the extended climax on the villain's boat. Heightening the suspense by any means necessary (including that silent movie gag), the movie shows us Mitchum sweating and suffering much longer than we're used to seeing, as he's set upon almost endlessly by murderous thugs and a sinister doctor with a deadly hypodermic needle.

Oh, if you really want a good look at Paul Frees (in color yet), check out JET PILOT again. He's the Russian officer who goes for a very rough ride when he activates his ejector seat from an aircraft while still on the ground."

"Check out Jet Pilot again." Always good advice, sez I.

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #2: "Fixed Bayonets!," directed by Samuel Fuller

For context, see here. 

Farber: "Sam Fuller's jagged, suspenseful, off-beat variant of the Mauldin cartoon, expanded into a full-length Korean battle movie without benefit of the usual newsreel clips. Funny, morbid—the best war movie since Bataan. I wouldn't mind seeing it seven times."

 

Tay Garnett's Bataan, with Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Thomas Mitchell and Lloyd Nolan, was all the way back in '43. Farber was pretty picky about his war movies—his praise for They Were Expendable, for instance, was measured, and fleeting—but there's no denying that this one, Fuller's second Korean foray after the triumph of The Steel Helmet, is something pretty special.

It's a variant of a Bill Mauldin cartoon, to be sure, but also of The Red Badge of Courage. Richard Basehart's Corporal Denno is a self-hating, self doubting soldier in what seems to him the worst position imaginable. That is, he may have to assume leadership duties at any minute. Under normal circumstances this wouldn't seem entirely likely, as there are three, count 'em three, officers above him. Except his platoon's been picked for a rear-guard action in order to fool the enemy that their division isn't backing out but quick. Talk about expendable. "In this case it's 48 men—unlucky men, maybe—giving 15,000 men a break," notes a Colonel Taylor. Gee, thanks for the testimonial.

As the other men take consolation in every form of tobacco imaginable—cigarette, pipe, cigar, chewing—and one hoards some dry socks that he hopes his band of brothers won't find out about, Denno frets and sweats and can't even bring himself to take down a sitting duck of a Chinese soldier. In the meantime his superior officers fall, not quite like dominoes, but just as inexorably.

 

Unlike Marquis' Little Big Horn, which mostly eschewed close-ups, this picture is full of them, medium close-ups for the most part. Fuller loves the looks of his foot soldiers, the "dogfaces," and in particular he loves dogface, that of Gene Evans' Sergeant Rock, who's the final officer between Denno and leadership, and who delights in practically taunting Denno about it. I'd love to read an interpretation of this picture positing Rock as its Christ figure, but I'm not about to write one. 

 

Evans, so fantastic in The Steel Helmet, is maybe even better here—gruff, funny, convincingly philosophical. There's a mass foot-rubbing bit of business in the cave where the soldier's take shelter that kind of undercuts the machismo of the character, which, despite the film's endgame celebration of battlefield ingenuity, is part of the whole point. "The primary motive for all the action..." Fuller insists in his autobiography, A Third Face, "is survival, not heroism. I wanted to underscore the futility of battle and the tragic human waste."

The Steel Helmet's success got Fuller on Fox head Daryl Zanuck's good side, and he made the picture under relatively cozy circumstances. "We shot the movie in twenty days, twice as much time as I'd ever had on a movie set." And a pretty impressive set it was. For much of the film the dogfaces are camped in a cave at the side of what's practically a cliff-face, a snow covered one at that. There's a spectacular single take in which a soldier scurries down from the cave to bayonet a Chinese soldier and scurries back up again, beautifully fluid camerawork from Lucien Ballard. Still, like mast Fuller movies, this is a picture where more is derived from less, as in the furious fast-cutting montages of mortar fire. 

Fixed Bayonets! is often cited as James Dean's first film appearance, and the ever-great storyteller Fuller commemorates it thusly in A Third Face: "To convey the isolation in Fixed Bayonets!, a soldier yells out 'Who goes there?' and all he hears is his own voice echoing over and over. The actor we cast for that part was a young, sensitive kid in his first movie, James Dean. Dean had just come out to Hollywood to find work after having studied at the Actor's Studio. I liked his face and gave him a crack. I hopder it would bring him luck."

Cue "print the legend" observations and such. If you go looking for Dean going by Fuller's description, you won't quite find him. His appearance comes very close to the end of the picture, as the rear guard pulls out, their mission accomplished, in search of their comrades. They get to the river that had been designated as a rendezvous point. Across the river, other American soldiers stand guard. One of them hears something, and rushes to notify his commander. That's Dean. Here he is, rushing. 

 

Hell, I think that's Dean, don't you? In any event, he reaches his commander, and it's he who shouts "Who's out there?" to be greeted with, not an echo, but words he didn't necessarily expect to hear: "The rear guard."

FIxed Bayonets! is out in a very good-looking DVD from Fox Home Entertainment. It's certainly put me in the mood for more Fuller. Good for us that Columbia's long-awaited Fuller collection is streeting soon. 

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #1: "Little Big Horn," directed by Charles Marquis Warren

 

Nobody refers to 1951 as an annus mirabilis for Hollywood film, world cinema, or anything else for that matter. Which isn't to say that the year didn't see the release of some noteworthy, groundbreaking, or even classic films: '51 was the year of An American In Paris, A Place In The Sun, Strangers On A Train, and A Streetcar Named Desire, to name but a few American movies. (Quo Vadis was the year's box-office champ.) Our friends overseas gave us the likes of Tales of Hoffman and Rashomon.

And none of those pictures are even mentioned in Manny Farber's article " 'Best Films' of 1951," published in the January 5, 1952 number of The Nation. "Let Stevens and Kazan win their Oscars," Farber announces right off the bat; "The Nation's Emanuel—a life-size drip celluloid statue of Kirk Douglas, ranting and disintegrating in the vengeful throes of death—goes to the man or men responsible for each of the following unheralded productions of 1951." After this tongue-in-cheek (or was it? so hard to tell nowadays...) intro, Farber more-or-less soberly extols the virtues of a very interesting crop of genre pieces.

In celebration of Farber, and of the recent Library of America publication of Farber on Film, in which the above-cited piece is reprinted, I figured it would be fun, and perhaps even illuminating, to have a look at the pictures Farber praises therein. One a week, in order of citation, until we get to the end. And so we start with the Robert-Lippert-produced B Western Little Big Horn.

Pleasures Of The Farber

Joseph Wiseman demonstrates the "palms up" gesture for Kirk Douglas and William Bendix in William Wyler's Detective Story, 1951; Michael Strong, behind Wiseman, is clearly impressed. 

One thing that readers new to Manny Farber ought to understand right off the bat: you are more likely to disagree with him more than any other film critic you will come to respect and love. "A...cavalry film that is like an endless frontier-day pageant, [title temporarily redacted] has the discombobulated effect of a Western dreamt by a kid snoozing at an Esso station in Linden, New Jersey." Said cavalry film also has a "mentally retarded quality" and features, among other non-savory figures, "a screaming little Bowery Boy in braids who's only bearable in the last shot when the camera just shows his legs hanging limply from a lynching tree." Ouch. The film in question is, as it happens, Saint John Ford's 1961 Two Rode Together, one of his problematic but still revered late pictures, and one that this correspondent still regard with affection. Farber's assessment no doubt pleases his fellow Ford sceptic James Wolcott, one of the many luminaries who provide back-cover blurbs for the gargantuan new Library of America collection Farber On Film: The Complete Film Writing Of Manny Farber. But I doubt it finds much favor with fellow blurber Martin Scorsese. Who actually had to lie down for a lot worse, as the Farber newbie will see once he or she gets to an essay co-written with Patricia Patterson entitled "The Power And The Gory" late in the book. Farber's takedown was of course written well before Ford's work was deemed canonical, but feisty would-be critics who want to draw attention to themselves by cocking a snoot at various and sundry putative classics can draw an object lesson from such Farber vitriol in any event: that is, if you can't actually concoct a supportable argument, you should at least try to make up for it with some entertaining writing. 

"Battle or no battle, that the movies are an art is a fact." No one since Vachel Lindsay was as prepared and qualified to argue this position than Farber was, and Farber wrote the above sentence in a 1944 essay called "The Happiness Boys." If you're inclined to mine through this collection piecemeal, it's a good place to start. But on every page there's some vivid reminder that criticism is, pace Jeff Jarvis and the whole "everyone's a critic" crowd, more than just opinion-mongering; that it is a practice and a discipline, and that those facts don't have to inhibit it from also being a lot of raucous fun. And the above-mentioned object lessons almost never stop.

For instance,from his review of Wyler's Detective Story, this great wad of chewy verbiage that also demonstrates the advantage a culturally-engaged New-York based film critic could wield over his less plugged-in peers: "Among this traffic is a string of recent Broadway exiles: Lee Grant as a man-hungry shoplifter with a sinuously unfeminine wiggle, a parrotlike head, and some other not quite hilarious tricks, which she moiders with her East Side dialect; Joseph Wiseman, a degenerate cat-burglar who sweeps into the familiar Jewish palms-up gesture as no man ever did before—yet he seems to have genuine pool-hall cynicism and chilling scorn for the 'artists' with whom he is working; Michael Strong, Wiseman's dumb crony, who crosses the affectations of a slack-jawed delinquent with those of a hep cat, doing this with glib exaggeration that makes actor seem more confused than character." One wonders, today, how many contemporary admirers of, say, Michael Shannon have seen even an iota of his stage work, and could bring their knowledge of it to bear on any characterization of his movie performances.

And the book is of course replete with examples of his kicking critical conventional wisdom.He resisted the knee-jerk condemnations of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, which were rife at the time. Here's his brief take on the film, coming after a lengthy consideration of Irvin Kershner's fantastic Loving: "Slugged by critics, this continuous photographic lyricism shouldn't have been treated as a realistic portrait of America. Among the things excoriated were a non-actress (Daria Halprin) with great legs, tan, and sleeveless sued-colored dress, a dustbowl section with a perfectly chosen location and imaginatively used kids, and  a handsome lyrical view of America right through the fantastically photographed shots of 1970 culture floating and shooting through the air."

I suppose I should here apologize for the truly wretched play on an old Phil Ochs title that gives this post its heading. But I made it not just because I could, but because Farber himself was hardly above such errant punnery. A piece called "The Wizard of Gauze" is followed in this collection by one called "Pish-Tush," an epic excoriation of British actress Rita Tushingham, which makes my own weird fulminations against, say, Jennifer Aniston look like kid's stuff indeed. 

I'm not through with Farber; I'm hoping to do a re-assessment of his top films of 1951 but  am having trouble tracking copies of some down. Anybody with a line on The Prowler, The People Against O'Hara, and Appointment With Danger, if they could please drop me a line on my mac.com account, it would be much appreciated. I'll likely go ahead with the piece even if I can't get hold of those pictures, but it would be better if I could. Thanks.