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The Fugitive (1947, John Ford)
While filming Citizen Kane, Orson Welles screened John Ford’s Stagecoach every night. He said everything one could do in film was done in Stagecoach. Maybe Ford heard about it, because The Fugitive looks like an Orson Welles film… and it’s not just the foreign (Mexico) shooting location with American actors surrounded by non-English speaking extras. The Fugitive is Ford’s oddest sound picture. Large portions of it don’t even need sound, just ambient music and noises. There are long sequences without any necessary speech, there’s even moments where dialogue is muted, overpowered by street music. During the scenes filmed in the Mexican city… you’d think it was Touch of Evil.
However, Ford is not the same kind of director as Welles. What works for Welles does not work for Ford. The Fugitive is arranged as a series of vignettes, but Ford can’t get enough oomph going to distinguish one from the other. Sure, there’s the change in sound design, but the storytelling focus doesn’t change. It’s easily Ford’s most experimental work–it’s easily one of the most experimental works I’ve seen from a Hollywood director–but the script works against it, particularly in the end, when the film’s finally turning around.
The Fugitive is set in a newly Fascist South American country where Catholic priests are hunted and executed. Henry Fonda–playing a native alongside Mexican actors–is less than stellar in the lead. First, Fonda’s a straightforward actor and The Fugitive attempts to veer. Second, and more, the fugitive is the subject of The Fugitive, not the protagonist. It’s about a handful of characters who encounter this fugitive priest, not the story of a fugitive priest encountering and reencountering a bunch of people. As far as these people go, obviously, Ward Bond is the best. He’s the only American playing an American and he’s got some great moments as a fellow fugitive. Robert Armstrong, not playing an American, is good in a blink-and-you-miss it role–his part made me think most of Welles’ style of handling cameos. The worst–in the film–is easily J. Carrol Naish, who’s in full makeup as an Indian. He’s irritating beyond belief and silly on top of it. I think he was under contract at RKO at the time. Of the Mexican actors, Pedro Armendáriz is the best, but the script fails him time and again. More than anyone else, The Fugitive is about Armendáriz and someone missed it. The other lead, Dolores del Rio, is all right, but Ford gives her these loving shots and… I don’t know, it’s hard to take her seriously with all that soft light.
Even with all the problems–it’s boring on top of it all; Ford did not know how to carry long sequences without dialogue or action–it’s still worth a look. Oddly enough, a film professor once told me it was Ford’s favorite of his films.
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Westward the Women (1951, William A. Wellman)
Robert Taylor leads over a hundred women from Missouri to California. It’s set in 1851, so California is the other side of world. I thought it was going to be cute from that description. Taylor’s films were often aware of being Robert Taylor films, but of those 100+ women, only one thinks Taylor’s good-looking, so Westward the Women isn’t one of those Taylor films. It’s a rough film. It has cute moments and funny moments, heart-warming moments too, I suppose–but it’s rough. It might even be mean. I’m not sure to what degree the filmmakers realized how mean the film was getting.
Some of Taylor’s work in the film is his best. At a certain point, the film runs out of things for him to do and concentrates on the romance, which is fine, but he ceases to be the focus. The rest of the performances are all right (except Taylor’s love interest, once the romance starts), but the script betrays the two best supporting ones. Hope Emerson is excellent in the role of a New Englander who talks exaggerated ship-speak for everything. There’s a poor Japanese guy–played by Henry Nakamura, who did little else–who’s got the worst stereotypical dialogue, but a rather important role in the film. Again, his character loses steam in the last part.
The romance shares the second half’s focus with the more interesting aspect of Westward the Women. At a certain point, the women are left alone with Taylor and have to toughen up for the journey. There’s a great scene–I can think of a good adjective for it–when a woman is in labor in a wagon and a wheel breaks off. A group of the other women hold up the wagon while she gives birth, which would not be an easy task, and then proceed to fawn over the newborn. There’s another great, similar scene at the end, but I can’t give that away.
When I said before the film was mean–it kills characters left and right. The only sympathetic character it doesn’t kill is the dog. In addition to showing the difficulty in crossing the country, it throws the audience off guard. You never know if a character is going to make it or not. Even with this tension, however, the film ambles a little too much. It’s got a long present action–at least four months, but it might be more like seven–and since only a handful of the women are realized, the film is mostly in summary. But it’s real pretty summary. Wellman’s direction of the desert landscape is wonderful. Not only is the scenery incorporated into the story (unlike the frequent Monument Valley backdrops) but his camera angles take full advantage of them.
However, the film doesn’t take place entirely in the desert, only thirty minutes of it does. So, you have those twenty or thirty minutes of great direction, an hour or so of a great Taylor performance, a half hour of the great relationship between Taylor and the Japanese guy, and Emerson only getting rid of the lame seafarer dialogue at the end. Still, it’s a good film–it might be the only widescreen academy ratio film I can think of.
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Libeled Lady (1936, Jack Conway)
Libeled Lady suffers from a few things, but it’s hard to pinpoint what doesn’t work about the film because there are so many things working well. There’s a great William Powell slapstick fishing scene in the film, there’s a great wedding scene where the husband gets a peck and the best man gets a passionate kiss, there’s even a nice courtship between Powell and Myrna Loy, except Powell’s married to Jean Harlow and Loy is suing Harlow’s boyfriend, played by Spencer Tracy. The problem stems from not knowing what to do with Harlow. Libeled Lady is a ninety-eight minute comedy with four major stars, it having focusing problems isn’t even in question….
The film opens with Harlow and Tracy and it stays with Tracy for a bit, introducing Powell in a great way, but up until that introduction (and even immediately following) Libeled Lady is a newspaper comedy. This genre has disappeared, but it was prevalent in the 1930s. I’ve read the early talkie screenwriters were newspaper reporters, explaining the newspaper office as a frequent setting and the reporter as a dedicated hero. But then it turns and becomes an odd Myrna Loy-William Powell comedy, one where you really miss W.S. Van Dyke behind the camera. When Tracy and Harlow return to the film, Harlow has become superfluous. It’s not a traditional comedy–there are different expectations and responsibilities. It’s a little more serious. The audience comes to like Loy (or Loy warms to Powell and the audience warms to Loy while Powell in conflict). But, Powell never reveals the full extent of his subterfuge to Loy when the audience gets to see (again turning the film’s focus to Harlow and Tracy). There isn’t a scene because it doesn’t work with that returning focus to Harlow’s side of the story.
It’s a lot of fun, and Tracy is really good in the opening. He and Powell have a good repartee going too, but we only get to see it once. Harlow and Powell were together at the time and the chemistry cares over to celluloid, but it’s also a Powell and Loy film, which causes a disconnect. I think it’s in Myrna Loy’s biography–when Loy had a cameo in The Senator Was Indiscreet as Powell’s long-unseen wife, it wasn’t even a question for audiences she would be the wife–it was expected. It doesn’t help the film perturbs Harlow’s character arc to fit that clean ending or makes Tracy so ineffectual in the second half–though the scene with him running across a foyer is delightful. It’s in an awkward part of the film, but Tracy’s fun translates well.
It’s good. It is. It’s just the problems are more visible then they should be….
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Dark Star (1974, John Carpenter)
Dark Star is probably John Carpenter’s second finest film (after The Thing). It’s the John Carpenter film I’ve always been saying he should make–a funny one. I have seen Dark Star before, probably nine years ago, back when it was somewhat rare (it got picked up, a year after I saw it, by a video distributor who’s kept it in print). The first time I saw it, it struck me how much Dan O’Bannon used again in Alien. In Dark Star, O’Bannon–who makes the film, he should have been an actor, he’s hilarious–hunts a tomato-shaped alien through the bowels of the spaceship. He used that hunt again in his script for Alien. Well, this time, I noticed some of Carpenter’s shot compositions of the spaceship against the planet are identical to Ridley Scott’s set-ups for Alien… Scott just had more money….
The film is pure delight, from O’Bannon’s bickering with his crew mates to the commander rambling about surfing. The humor’s actually a little smarter than I expected, but it’s hard to believe Carpenter and O’Bannon were just students when they made this film. The budget isn’t quite there–it looks about the same as an episode of the original “Star Trek”–but Carpenter always spends his money well. It’s one of his trademarks.
I’m having problems with this post because the film’s only sixty-eight minutes long and it’s a comedy. I’ve already said O’Bannon’s great, I’ve already mentioned some of the funny stuff… but it’s not without some depth too. The film’s present action is short, maybe a few hours, and while the specifics of these characters’ longings are comedic, their existence is not. I just read someone call Dark Star a parody of 2001 but it’s not… The end of Dark Star is touching and more humane–if incredibly short (three minutes at the most)–then the rest of Carpenter’s filmography combined. Seeing Dark Star in 1974, I’m not sure it would connect with the Carpenter who made They Live. I just remembered Starman (as an example of Carpenter’s humaneness, but Dark Star has it beat). It’s a great film.
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Yesterday Once More (2004, Johnnie To)
The event romantic comedy is a familiar genre, but not one with frequent entries. With the exception of Julia Roberts (and maybe Sandra Bullock), the genre in American cinema does not exist anymore. The hardships of making these films is finding a project the stars jibe with–I mean, people actually like Runaway Bride. Two Weeks Notice, which I thought was a huge bomb, was actually a hit. It’s just a hard genre because these films are about the audience’s affection for the actor, not the character she’s playing. I say “she,” of course, because there isn’t–currently–a male event romantic comedy star. Though Hugh Grant tries, it only works when Julia Roberts is part of the equation.
Yesterday Once More is a Hong Kong event romantic comedy, pairing Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng as a pair of divorced (but still, of course, in love) professional thieves. As I understand it from my cursory research, Lau and Cheng did a couple other romantic comedies (as well as some dramas, I guess) and a pairing is a big deal. I’ve seen Lau in Days of Being Wild, but I don’t remember him and I’ve never seen Cheng in anything. I’m not hip on my Hong Kong offerings anymore. I used to watch John Woo stuff, but now I don’t and unless it’s a Wong Kar-Wai, I just queue a Chinese-language film, I don’t rush to see it. An event romantic comedy has a specific target audience (albeit, in theory, a large part of the moviegoing audience) and I am not part of Yesterday Once More’s demographic. But I got it.
For the first forty minutes of the Yesterday, there’s nicely shot, nicely scored montage after montage. First the divorce, then a proposal to Cheng, then a heist, then a trip to Italy. I had to pause it to see what the time was when the film finally slowed down for a scene. Since Yesterday is supposed to be purely entertaining, it has to do very little. It has to be charming. Well, Yesterday pits Cheng against a kleptomaniac mother-in-law to-be, has a couple private investigators who worry about each other’s cholesterol intake. The heists are even cute. Yesterday works because it keeps it simple–besides the couple, there’s a mother-in-law to-be and a few supporting characters, really supporting. When I started watching it, not remembering why I’d queued it in the first place, I realized as long as they kept the character count low, the film would work.
While Lau is good, he’s not the protagonist–he is the character the audience has to identify with, however. Cheng is the one who actually has to act in Yesterday and she brings a semblance of depth to an easy character. Ultimately, the film stumbles because it doesn’t want to embrace its levity. Out of nowhere, in the last half hour, it actually wants to say something, which it can’t. But even those false steps can’t defeat the film’s charm.
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