The First...for now...

Pee Wee Reese shows his Kentucky family who he is.

First of all, baseball movies virtually always work, at least on a minute-to-minute level for the same reason that courtroom dramas always work at the same level.  The events are constructed perfectly for drama, and especially drama to be picked up and assembled from multiple perspectives.

In courtroom drama, you get to ask a person a whole lot of questions and they're not allowed to storm out of the room in a huff.  They can refuse to answer, but that refusal is drama (and tactics) in itself.

Baseball has all the stakes of any athletic contest, with two important differences.  One is the starts and stops that many deplore about baseball, but which we aficionados appreciate as time to contemplate, meditate, consider the multiple directions the moments immediately before us can take.  For the screenplay writer, those pauses give plenty of time to build tension, conflict, multiple points of view and even to crank up the inspirational music on the soundtrack.  Second is the fact that anything can happen in a split second.  Sure, that's true in any sport.  Even soccer football must surely have its astonishing reversals (I've never stayed awake through an entire game to tell you).  But generally in those long continuous games-- football, hockey, basketball, things continue the way they started.  Unless the teams are closely matched, the outcome is readily forseeable from the outset.

But in baseball, the best team can lose and often does.  Baseball is for people who love underdogs, long shots and outcasts.  Nobody makes movies about the Yankees.  Why bother?  A bunch of overpaid arrogant jerks whose pinstripes ought to be on corporate-type suits with diamond stickpins and wing-tipped shoes.  That's not drama.  But Dem Bums is always a story waiting to be told, a story that often ends "Wait till next year."

42 (2013) is at least the fourth major go-round with the Jackie Robinson story, including the film starring Robinson, a musical called The First and a television movie, not to mention a major portion of Episode 6 of the Ken Burns series Baseball.  I must admit that I took pleasure in remembering and recognizing the story points in a tale I had heard so many times. And 42 offers up many, many movie-movie pleasures.  Ford's quirky Branch Rickey, Boseman's burning intensity, the prodigious warmth and intelligence of Nichole Beharie as Rachel Robinson, the give and take of the play on the field and the cheers and taunts of the crowd, John C. McGinley doing an excellent Red Barber, Hamish Linklater as the good-natured Ralph Branca, some old-time high-key cinematography by Don Burgess, the extremely satisfying scene illustrated above between Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese and Boseman's Robinson--underwritten and underplayed to perfection, the brilliant use of a young Black fan as point-of-view--a character who has his own story, as we learn at the end.  If nothing else, 42 is an immensely satisfying popcorn movie.

But this begs the question. Why tell the story again?  Why now?  Why in 2013 do we need this reminder of a partnership in courage between a member of the ruling elite of capitalism and of the underclass?

Well, I can't be the first person to have thought of it, but to me 42 read like an allegory of the Obama era.  Obama, like Robinson is The First; and, presumably, like Robinson, only the first of many.  (Can you imagine the first Female Latin President.  She would tell you What's What!)   The most important point 42 makes is that putting Robinson on the team was ONLY THE BEGINNING.  It was not enough to send him up to the majors.  The long, difficult journey had only begun.  Robinson had to demonstrate his skills, win the respect and ultimately, the loyalty, of his teammates, resist the natural desire to defend himself and to use his fists (or his mouth).  It also emphasizes that even a great hero like Robinson needs a team behind him.  In this case, not the Dodgers, but manager Rickey, writer Wendell Smith (presumably standing in for a network of African American opinion makers and fixers) and most importantly, his wife Rachel Robinson, who read and approved the script of this film.

The President and another hero, Rachel Robinson

I hope I don't offend anyone, but I was and am a supporter of President Obama.  But although I volunteered and contributed to the 2008 campaign, like a lot of his supporters, we figured getting him into office would create the usual wave of goodwill that envelops a new president and things would Start To Pop.  We were naive fools.  Getting him elected was only the beginning.  And like Robinson, Obama had to be three times as good and keep his mouth shut when being provoked by redneck morons, even (or especially) when one of the redneck morons is the minority leader of the Senate.

What's the difference between this and Ben Chapman
shouting "Nigger nigger nigger" at Jackie Robinson?

Listen, I get it that it is necessary and desirable to have a wide range of political opinion in our country. Our Constitution is designed to force people to acknowledge each others' points of view and to hammer out solutions that provide positive outcomes for as many people as possible.  Anyone who says compromise is un-American is an illiterate jackass who does not understand the Constitution or the temper of the Founders.  And vigorous abuse has a long history in our country.  Abraham Lincoln was called an ape, and a US Representative beat a Senator with a stick on the floor of the Senate.

But what we have today is different. I am up for debate based on the facts (not the facts you make up yourself, but actual verifiable-by-multiple-independent-sources-facts), history and logic.  But that is not what much of the opposition to Obama is about.  It's about ignorant, atavistic fear, the tribal fear that "our group" will not have enough resources to withstand assault from the "other group."

Well, they're still playing baseball.  Black, white, Latin, Asian and every possible combination and permutation thereof.  And the sport is making more money than ever.  American will similarly survive President Obama and both his principled and his racist opponents.  But 42 reminds us that the fight is long and hard, and we never get to declare the battle over.  Not if we're still battling idiot racism 66 years after Robinson came up to The Big Show.

Michele Obama asked it herself at the White House screening of 42: "You're left just asking yourselves, how on Earth did they live through that?  How did they do it?"  Just what we tell our students (I teach high school in the inner city, if you didn't know).  Perseverance.  Character.  Courage. Grit.  42 is much more than a biopic and much much more than a baseball picture.  It is our Beowulf our Iliad, the warrior who slays the monster, who slays the thousands of enemy troops, who represents our best, the person for whom we create the word "hero."

Homer on the range

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Coen Brothers' version of True Grit (2010) is that the film is utterly classical, completely un-ironic and un-modern, and that it has grossed well over $100 million domestically at this writing, and will probably reach $150 million theatrically before it stops being tracked, which suggests that it will do at least $200 million overseas, where filmgoers are less averse to Westerns.

And this is a Western. Not a comment on a Western or a parody of Western or a deconstruction of a Western. It is the really and truly thing in a way not seen since perhaps the early 1970s. The last breakout hit Western was Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, which, in typical Eastwood fashion, was out to explode the myths of the West. Well, it evidently did its job, because the bloody entrails of the American Western film have been lying around for a decade and a half now waiting for someone to at least give them a respectful burial. (Robert Duval and Kevin Costner kept trying without much effect).

So how surprising to find the Coens stripped of their absurdism, their slapstick, even their short lenses and shock cuts, rendering a film that would cause Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher to weep in recognition. No, True Grit doesn't advance the Western, but it restores it to the place of honor in American culture that it deserves.

Because the creators of the Western are our Homers and Virgils. It is as foolish to expect historical precision from John Ford as it would be to expect it from The Iliad. These narratives are after bigger game -- the central truths of human existence, once we have taken away the trappings of society, family, culture, and set Man out alone in the landscape.

The central idea of this version of True Grit is found in one of the few passages not taken from Charles Portis's novel, an exchange in which Rooster, LeBoeuf and Mattie are discussing the distinction between malum prohibitum and malum in se (a dialogue exchange reportedly written for and cut from The Big Lebowski). Can you get more elemental than this, a consideration of the nature and classification of evil? And Mattie and Rooster are bonus in se. Sure, Rooster has done some prohibitum, but like the bad-goodmen in Westerns going back to William S. Hart, through John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Shane.

And in case you think I'm pasting this mythic framework onto the movie that isn't there 'cause I'm so kind of pointy-headed academic, consider this: in order to catch the villain, the bête noire, the McGuffin of the piece, it is necessary to pass out of known territory ACROSS A RIVER in the company of a one-eyed man, a cyclops, to land that is unknown. There she meets a half-man, half-animal (the doctor in the bearskin) and a dead man flying through the air (the man hung high). In capturing Tom Chaney, it is important to recapture a talisman of her father -- his gold pieces, as it is to bring the villain to justice. And the moment Mattie performs her one act of evil -- taking vengeance and killing a man, she immediately FALLS INTO A PIT. And in the pet THERE ARE SNAKES. And the snake BITES HER. And Rooster carries out of the wilderness (riding a rather magic beast Little Blackie, who must die to save Mattie) into civilization and safety and is thereafter NEVER SEEN AGAIN (by us filmgoers). And from the snakebite, Mattie loses an arm, an instrumentality of that evil. Nonetheless, her final quest is, like Antigone, to bury the body of the warrior, Rooster, who by carrying her and saving her life has become a spiritual father or brother.

The Coens have visited this territory before, explicitly with O Brother Where Art Thou? and There Will Be Blood, which has a number of mythic echoes. But True Grit wears its mythic duds lightly. Not only are there few Coen-type flourishes (admittedly the mad old doctor is one), but the photography, acting and dialogue are extremely restrained. Roger Deakins as cinematographer and chief operator indulges in no hand-held and minimal traveling shots; the camera is on sticks most of the time, as it would be for Ford or Hawks. The color tampering is minimal (especially compared to most films these days) and the only visible effect is a rather fantastic starry sky over Rooster as he bears Maddie towards civilization. The language is ornate, yes, but not to elicit laughter, but to remind us that this is a different time and place, before irony, sarcasm and indeed self-consciousness of any kind, and even an old drunk like Rooster can understand and uphold honor. Hence the lack of contractions, the use of Biblical language and Latin quotes.

A word about the John Wayne vs. Jeff Bridges thing. I must first admit a prejudice. I like the early, shy John Wayne, the John Wayne of They Were Expendable, Fort Apache and A Lady Takes A Chance, a great romcom the Duke shared with Jean Arthur. Even as late as The Quiet Man, he has that "aw-shucks" quality that is extremely endearing. I don't care for the swaggering bellowing Duke. But there's no doubt that Wayne dominated the first version of True Grit and gave a performance of great power and persuasion. But, for me, that's the problem. True Grit is supposed to be Mattie's story. It didn't help that the 1969 film has the execrable Kim Darby as Mattie, an actress who is to acting what nails on a blackboard is to teaching. Letting True Grit become the Rooster Cogburn Show is akin to the way Marlon Brando (inadvertently) distorted A Streetcar Named Desire, which is clearly Blanche's story, except when the actor playing Stanley obliterates everything else around.

True, Jeff Bridges is not the kind of overwhelming actor that the John Wayne of 1969 was. (Although let's see what he's like when he's 70.) But I would argue that it is not lack of talent, but a desire to keep Mattie in the forefront that explains Bridges's restraint in the role. As it is, the film is nicely balances Mattie as the apex of a triangle between the garrulous LaBeouf and the bibulous Cogburn. (At times I was put in mind of Cat Ballou, with another young woman of the West hiring a man to help her avenge her father's death. If True Grit hadn't been published three years after the release of Cat Ballou, I would suspect the latter of being a side-door parody, what my grandparents called a "spoof.")

I am very happy that True Grit is probably the first Western that millions of Americans will have seen in a movie theater. I hope it whets their appetite for this rich and complex genre, which easily contains and sustains our abiding myths, not just of the American experiment, but of the human experience.

I take my heroes quiet

To begin with, I know you are probably trying to figure out which Western to watch for Christmas, but the answer is obvious: Three Godfathers (1949) directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. In case you're wondering, there are no gangsters, but three saddle tramps who are analogues to the Wise Men of the Christmas story. Yes, it's heavy-handed and sentimental, but isn't that just what a Christmas movie should be?



Now that you mentioned Westerns -- you did mention Westerns, didn't you? Don't get me started; I can talk about them all day. Anyway, I finally got around to the first Randolph Scott-Budd Boetticher collaboration, Seven Men From Now (1956), and I don't think there is a better lesson in narrative economy than this film. What would take three hours today in terms of story and emotion is packed into about an hour-and-a-quarter.*

Look at the beginning of this film. (Sorry, I couldn't find the clip online.) A man dismounts in a punishing rain. He stalks-staggers toward a crevice in a large rock where two other men are huddled over a fire. We see that it is Randolph Scott, who forces an invitation by the fireside. He and the two exchange perhaps 7 or 8 lines about seven men who robbed a gold shipment from a nearby Wells Fargo Station. "Did they find the fellows?" asks one of the strangers. "I found two of them," says Randolph Scott and a moment later they are dead. This is a master class in starting a film. (Screenplay by first-timer Burt Kennedy, beloved director of Support Your Local Sheriff.)

The film's structure resembles Ride Lonesome. Scott is on a journey with an undesired companion, in this case Lee Marvin. The journey is not only to catch the robbers but to avenge the death of his wife, who was the station master. Although Marvin is a villain, he is not one of the killers, and he is happy to help Scott track them down and kill them, because he wants to steal the gold himself. Life, these films seem to imply, is full of these uncomfortable alliances. Marvin threatens to steal not only the gold, but the entire movie, given that he is garrulous and charming and not as embarrassed about his attraction to the married woman they are traveling with as the gentlemanly Scott. In perhaps, the most celebrated scene, using a trope favored by scriptwriter Burt Kennedy, Marvin pretends to tell a story in order to nettle the people he is talking to. Notice how Boetticher uses the relative positions and sizes of the heads in the shots to indicate the relationships among them. This is not a straight shot-reverse shot sequence. And, as usual, Scott does as much or more with a few words than other actors do with many.



Anyone who thinks a Western is nothing but horses and guns ought to see this scene.

Of course, ultimately a great Western is about visual action set against the landscape, which describes the finale of Seven Men From Now, almost a coda to the main action of the film. Marvin and Scott have killed the malefactors. Now Scott must redeem himself from disgrace by retrieving and returning the strongbox of gold. Marvin, naturally wants it. Here they are:



"A man can do that." Again, aspiring screenwriters should be required to copy this dialogue down and study it.

Incidentally, if you haven't seen the Boetticher-Scott (and mostly Burt Kennedy) cycle and you want to, I recommend you start with this film. It's one of the best of the series and it introduces so many of the tropes and themes that will continue to be worked and reworked throughout the seven films.

I hadn't realized until this film how much Randolph Scott resembles Mark Harmon, who really should do some westerns, and the great progenitor of the serious adult western, William S. Hart. Hart's films aren't as available as they ought to be, and until recently I had only seen Hell's Hinges (1917) which is from that wonderful period in American film history just before all the rules were set and the cliches fixed in stone. The Western town looks like a real Western town, not like the movie town we're used to and Hart begins the film as the villain and becomes the hero, without ever becoming a law-abiding "regular citizen."

Tumbleweeds (1925) was his last film, made when he was about the same age Scott was when he made the Boetticher films. Both actors look as if they were carved from a very weathered piece of wood, with a long, somewhat immobile upper lip. Both played characters uncomfortable with emotion-- actually pretty uncomfortable indoors or around other people, other than a single beloved woman. Tumbleweeds is almost plotless, revolving around a cowpoke who realizes he has become too old for the life. There is a lot of atmosphere around the cowboy life and rituals that dominate the first half of the film, and I would have posted clips if the ones I could find weren't so fuzzy and awful-looking, being poorly lifted from a talkie-era reissue of the film. Silent film can look so good that there is no excuse for disseminating some of the awful looking copies around.

Of course, it is impossible to talk of Tumbleweeds without mentioning its most famous sequence, the Cherokee Land Strip Rush. It is purported to be highly authentic, but whether or not it's true, its epic and spectacular in a way that silents often do better than sound. Perhaps because silent films are unhampered by trying to maintain a coherent sound environment that they can cut in such an uninhibited way from one story thread or situation to another. Incidentally, while Hart did not do the pole vaulting stunt (check out the invisible cut there), all the riding is his, on his own horse, Fritz.



It was Hart, the Shakespearean actor who realized that Westerns didn't have to be just for idiot children, and while John Ford was making golly-gee Saturday afternoonkiddy fodder with Harry Carey, Hart was blazing the trail for the Western as a genre and form that could contain real human stories, ideas and emotions.
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* This movie is listed in Leonard Maltin's "150 Best Movies You've Never Seen"

Reluctant heroes

I don't have much to the add to the thousands of barrels of pixels which have been and will doubtless continue to be spilled about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010), so I will limit myself to a few probably very non-unique observations. (The rule of the blog is to write about every film I see.)

When I lived in Scotland in the mid-late 1970s, it was widely deplored that it was too difficult to make a feature film in the beautiful Scottish countryside because (a) the sky was often too dark for good images on a full-size screen and (b) the weather changed so rapidly that over the course of a shooting day it would be too hard to make shots within a single scene or sequence to match. It is my understanding that good chunks of HP7 was shot in Scotland, and those sequences too justice to the gloomy grandeur of the landscape. The problem is that so much digital manipulation is possible in post-production, it is impossible to know if the palette of green-grays that dominate the film are natural or man-made. Nonetheless, one must note that this is the greyest Harry Potter film made, which makes sense as Harry and friends have left Hogwarts to find and destroy the horcruxes (magic thingies that have to be destroyed--that's all you need to know).

This is the first of the series to penetrate Central London to any extent, and I am sorry the sequence is as short as it is. I can imagine all sorts of zany hijinks with Ron Weasley being introduced to the Muggles world, but the film doesn't have much time or space for comedy.

I understand that the film could not be expected to recap the previous films -- who would think of watching a film with "7" in the title without seeing the previous installments? -- but it would have been good to review the bidding and remind the audience what the stakes are, i.e. what exactly will happen if Voldemort succeeds. (I'm pretty sure things would be...bad.)

One of the benefits of splitting the book's story into two films is that there is time for scenes, for acting, for the characters to react to the events, rather than rushing from one situation to another. One of the appeals of the book series is that it is packed. Packed with incident, packed with details of this invented world and connections between the people and the incidents found there. Each book was at least a 7-layer cake of invention, which is rare in any kind of literature today, which so often feels attenuated, where the Potter series is robust.

The challenge for a filmmaker is to get all that story and texture in without making the film feel cramped. By spreading the story over five hours and two films, there is more air in the events, and for the first time (for me) I got the sense that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson in particular could actually act and not just speak lines with conviction, which is the reasonable minimum for childhood actors. And sending the characters across a barren landscape put them in a cinematic environment akin to that of a Western, a sci-fi film or a samurai film; those movie environments in which the characters must create or re-create society where there is none.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that, even though it feels lighter on the special effects than previous installments, HP7 feels more like a "movie-movie" than its predecessors. It's a welcome respite, as grim and dark as it is, before what is undoubtedly going to be a loud, operatic and effect-ridden finale this summer.

Central to the peculiar charm of the series, both book and film, is Harry Potter's reluctance and diffidence to the role of hero which history has thrust upon him. From the moment the he re-entered the wizarding world he was celebrated and feted -- which must have felt good -- for something he had done involuntarily -- not so good -- and for what he is bound to do in the future -- total bummer. To be made the future savior of your race is to live under the shadow of potential failure and disappointment your whole life.

That whole conundrum is neatly side-stepped by the hero (and I use the word advisedly) of When The Last Sword is Drawn (2003) a deliciously existential samurai epic which was inadequately distributed in this country, but which I urge you to seek out.

I must plead a shocking ignorance of the samurai genre, other than classics such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo (both remade as American Westerns). Both are directed by Kurosawa, who was criticized in Japan for being too Western in approach. Reversing the situation, it would be possible to develop an appreciation for the Western by seeing only Stagecoach and The Searchers, but one could not claim to be knowledgeable about the form, nor could one understand a great deal of the context. Genre gains both depth and texture by the accumulation of the prior examples of the genre. And great genres develop sub-genres within themselves, e.g., Westerns can be "sheriff cleaning up the town", "farmers vs. cattlemen", "cattle drive", "Indian fighting" and "good-bad man", "US Cavalry" and many many other variations. A film about recent Civil War veterans is going to be vastly different from, say a "closing of the west" film set at the turn of the 20th century, a generation and a half later. The same is evidently true of samurai films. Last Sword is an example of the Shinsengumi genre, about the samurai organized to defend the Shogun against the Emperor at the close of the Edo period.

But, although it is helpful to have some historical context, which one can pick up from a site such as Asian Media Wiki, like films of other genres, one can enjoy Lost Sword as pure film. And the pleasures are many and varied. There is some wonderful samurai action, both individual and in massed battle, and one of the most stunning special effects I've ever seen in the execution scene near the beginning of the film. There is a wonderful sense of design and color one would expect from a film which is an expression of Japanese culture. There are amusing and complex acting performances. But most of all there is the near-Brechtian character of Yoshimura, played brilliantly by Kiichi Nakai, an actor whose work I am going to seek out.

Yoshimura is like a talented Mother Courage, although possessed of a sense of honor which would be foreign to any Brecht character. Nonetheless, he has built his own value system parallel to that of the society around him, one in which loyalty to wife and children trumps that of the clan and the samurai code. Perversely, both values are extremely Japanese. An older Korean gentleman who was fluent in English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese (he was of the generation in which all those languages were required of students) told me that he preferred to write and speak of family relationships in Japanese, because it had the greatest complexity and subtlety in that area.

Much to the consternation of the warrior culture of which he is part, Yoshimura puts his first priority on the survival of his family, and it makes him very modern, very Western and very Japaneses all at once. In Nakai's performance, Yoshimura is one of the most relatable figures in any Asian film, let alone a samurai film. He is like the early James Stewart, likely to be underestimated because he is humble, self-effacing and almost shy in comparison with the proud men around him, notwithstanding the fact that he may be the best swordsmen of them all.

Accordingly, with all the action and spectacle of the film, the highlight for me is pictured above, when Yoshimura has what turns out to be his final parting with his family, especially his tiny daughter, who bleats out "Papa" (in Japanese) as though she could have known what was happening to them. As a father, I can't be objective at all. Every parent knows the terror of the final parting with a child, and the existential terror of never knowing when that will be.

I know I haven't done much film analysis in this reflection. I'm afraid I found the film to affecting and emotional on first viewing to do so, but I do expect to revisit this movie, whether or not I write about it again.

The best thing is that you don't have to take my word for it. You can watch the entire film here. I envy you seeing it for the first time. (Allow 2-1/4 hours--it will be time well spent. Additional caveat -- there is some advertising.):

Grace under pressure

Leave it to the Germans to make a great Hemingway movie without Hemingway (which is the best way). It is best to get the spoiler out of the way-- North Face (2008) is about the failed effort to scale the north face of the Eiger (the Ogre) in Switzerland on the eve of the Second World War. The people of the time wanted to make this a nationalist phenomenon, but neither the protagonists nor the film are having any part of that claptrap. They want to climb because they want to climb; the film wants to follow them because that's what film wants to do.

Much has been made in the reviews of the authenticity of this film, and it certainly appears that way, but the special features on the DVD reveal just how extensively greenscreen and indoor sets were used ; most probably this is the only way such a brutally physically demanding story could have been told. The mountain has done away with more people than your average serial killer, and it would be inconceivable to work at the actual site, not least because it is always in shadow (hence the constant ice and snow). Nonetheless, almost none of the digital trickery is apparent on first viewing of the film--in fact, the film is too engrossing for the question of how it was accomplished to arise. Perhaps this marks a small moment in the maturity of digital effects--here is a film for which digital effects are a sine qua non, and yet they do not appear to be evident, so thoroughly convincing is the film. Nor would it be termed an "effects film" and yet they are more pervasive here than in many an action film.

Because it's never about the effects. It's about man versus mountain, and mountain wins decisively, but not without man giving a hell of a fight. Admittedly, the men look much the worse for wear, and if they had all survived, one harbors doubts about the quality of each of their lives thereafter. The point is, the film remains gripping and convincing in a way literally impossible just a few years ago. I wonder if we will become more sophisticated about such things, and in time the CGI in this film will look as fake as cheesy rear-projection from the 1940s looks to us now. Better not to wait to find out and appreciate these films now.