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."

Perhaps it all comes down to Walton Goggins

Boyd Crowder changes hiI'

I'm not the first person to notice that Walton Goggins is the most palpable link between the most fêted films of the current Oscar season, Lincoln (2012) and Django Unchained.  But maybe Mr. Goggins's progress from unrepentant scoundrel Billy Crash, through the ambiguously wicked Boyd Crowder in Justified through the conflicted Clay Hutchins is itself a microcosm of good and evil in the morally compromised landscape of American history.  (And, incidentally, am I unjustified in suspecting that an actor named Walton Goggins who has a certain unpredictable quality will never play a character named Bob Johnson or Tom Smith?)

As portrayed in Tony Kushner's screenplay, Hutchins is swayed to vote in favor of the 13th Amendment by a promise of employment as a postmaster, given that his re-election prospects were virtually nil.  (A Democrat in post-Civil War Ohio was virtually a non-person.)  There has been a lot of harrumphing written about the horse-trading involved in getting slavery outlawed, as if Doris Goodwin or Tony Kushner had invented corruption in the 19th century, when everyone was obviously more pure and good than they are now.  (Which is why they had slavery and child labor and oppression of women and minorities and no labor or product safety regulation.  'Cause folks used to be good and we didn't need all them pesky laws.)  Much of the pleasure of the film is observing the amount and manner of deals that must be made in order to get mediocre people to do great things, a fact confined neither to history nor to the present moment. It is all very well for great people to lead us, but they are going to have to appeal to the desires of the mediocre.

And Clay Hutchins, at least as portrayed here, is no better than mediocre.  So Mr. Goggins, over the past year of his work, moved from the straightforward sadism (probably rooted in self-hatred) of slavemaster Billy Crash, through the amoral Boyd Crowder, who cares nothing for others, but is uninterested in cruelty for its own sake, to the wavering Clay Hutchins, who is willing to do the right thing if there's something in it for himself as well.  Perhaps this is the most accurate representation of the ways in which a democracy moves toward the moral light, through the historical odyssey of Walton Goggins.

Before I go, a couple of random observations about both theatrical features. 

One of the most admirable aspects of Spielberg's Lincoln is how little it looks like a Spielberg film.  I see him as the master of camera movement and manipulation, and it is amazing how quiet and calm the camera is in Lincoln -- even more than it was in Schindler's List.   Evidently, Spielberg discerned that a text this dense was going to require some stillness so that the audience would absorb the words and not be distracted by shifting images.  It's not static by any means, and the shenanigans of Mr. Bilbo are especially entertaining.  (Despite the uniqueness of that patronimic, I can find no connection between William Bilbo and Theodore Bilbo, the odious white supremacist Senator of the 20th century.)

Does anybody else think this is the darkest Spielberg movie yet?  Not in mood or philosophical outlook, but literally low in footcandles?  Good thing we don't have drive-ins any more.  The film does make it clear what a shabby and ramshackle place the Executive Mansion was and how dark most places were after sunset.  Spielberg has called on cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to be quite a chameleon over the course of their work together, and in this film he impersonates Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness.

And one bit of trivia about Django.  This is a measure of exactly how big a movie geek Quentin Tarantino is.  The lettering of the opening titles, is not just old-timey-Western sort of lettering.  It references a specific period of late 50s-early 60s B Westerns released by Columbia.  The specific shade of red, the splintered-log style letters, all shout "late Randolph Scott (mostly, but not always directed by Budd Boetticher)!"  This is the definition of Too Hip (or Too Lame, depending on how you want to see it) For The Room.  It's mostly of interest because the critics have only referenced spaghetti Westerns, but of course Django is no dish of spaghetti.  For one thing, it's way, way too talky for a non-English-language Western (not to mention that the lips are synchronized with the sound, which is not true in Italian and German Westerns).  And the talk is interesting and tasty and probably dominates the visuals, which is odd for a Western.  Which takes us right back to Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher and The Tall T, a Western which, for about two-thirds of its running time takes place in a small circle around a campfire.

So what will it take to get Mr. Tarantino to write for the stage?

Way out there in the blue

Looks like Scar had a white daddy, or at least grandpaw...

This blog has been quiet for a while, partly because I've been preoccupied with launching a new film-oriented course, that is, Social Justice and the Media.  This week, we've just finished looking at The Searchers (1956) and I assigned my students to write a reflection on how a visual device or idea is used to support or explicate a theme in the film.  These sorts of ideas are new to my students, so I created a model, and although The Searchers is one of the most written-about films ever mind, I thought I'd share my hair-brained little ideas with you, my friends here.

The overriding theme of The Searchers is a racism which accepts without discussion that European whites and Native North Americans cannot co-exist on the same vast continent, let alone the same home and hearth. (This belief proceeds from both sides.)  The separation among them must be absolute, and any suggestion of crossing the line between those groups brings expressions of anger, contempt and disgrace.

But five characters are bound together visually by their distinctly blue eyes, which “pop” in the bright color process of the mid-1950s – the eyes of Ethan, the angry hater; of Martin Pawley, the “half-breed”; of Laurie, Martin’s probable bride, who turns out to be an unthinking racist and therefore more worthy of contempt than Ethan’s knowledgeable fear and loathing; of Debbie, Ethan’s niece, who might have been and might actually be Ethan’s daughter and the eyes of Scar, killer of Debbie’s family and possibly her husband. The suggestion is that Scar himself may have been the result of miscegenation, bringing further contempt from Ethan’s burning eyes. Their can be no question that director John Ford chose to use a non-Native actor not just because he didn't know any Native actors who were right for the part, but because he wanted those blue eyes and almost Aryan appearance. And in the final analysis, these characters form a strange family-- uncle/father – son – bride – husband, each connected to all, directly or indirectly.

Moreover, the blue of those characters' eyes are mirrored by the bright blue Western sky under which so much of the action takes place; even though the events are dark and the seasons are varied, the blue sky remains a near-constant from first shot to last. (Even the winter scenes and night scenes are played in shades of blue.) Thus, blue becomes the color that unites and embraces the universe of The Searchers, and while Ethan begins the film in a red shirt of anger, at the end,wearing a deep blue tunic, he lifts up his niece/daughter, clad in a long skirt of blue (or perhaps that is the blue blanket Marty wrapped her in); the blue of loving eyes, of the long horizon into the future, of the harmony of creation itself, sky and sea, embracing all living things.  

A bit grandiose, perhaps, but the more you watch The Searchers, the more you see the balances and resonances in it.  Time with this film is never wasted.

White by you (get it? bayou? see what I did there?)

  Elia Kazan almost completely dismissed his studio films made prior to Panic In The Streets (1950), but Pinky (1949) deserves better, and certainly is worthy of more attention than the cringe-inducing Gentlemen's Agreement (1948), the plot of which was summarized perfectly by one cynic (I paraphrase):  "Don't be mean to Jews, because they might turn out to be Gregory Peck."

But indoors or out, Kazan put his trust in actors, even when he didn't care for them or their training, and he was almost always repaid for that trust.  Pinky might be the great exception.  In the book-length interview Kazan:  The Master Director Discusses His Films, Kazan talks about his pleasure in working with Ethel Barrymore, how he learned to overcome Ethel Waters's hostility and racism, and his disappointment at the blank quality of Jeanne Crain's performance.*  Crain, a lily-white young woman from Barstow playing a mixed-race woman from a Deep South backwater had neither professional nor personal resources to draw on to create her character.  Kazan is quite right, that her work has a blank quality.  But this is an example of his misapprehension of the quality of film acting.

Kazan liked strong, demonstrative actors like Brando, Dean and Clift.  They give carefully worked-out performances, with explicit psychological through-lines and subtexts.  Contrast them with the Hitchcock, Ford and Hawks actors -- John Wayne, James Stewart, Cary Grant.  We're not talking about charisma and star persona here, I'm talking about acting.  All of these actors have a sense of incompleteness in their acting, of something missing, unexplained, even undefined which is supplied by the audience.  They leave room for the film audience, which a tense and detailed actor like Clift never does.  Many of the best actors in film do work that was undetectable to the people watching them being filmed, that only the camera could see, actors such as Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo and Steve McQueen.

In Pinky, stage vets Barrymore and Waters are acting up a storm.  Paradoxically, Barrymore playing an imperious tyrant is far more charming and loveable than Waters as a sweet Aunt Jemima grandma.  Given that Barrymore was a nice person and Waters was not, this effect might be attributed to film's X-ray qualities.  But in both cases, the actresses are visibly, palpably acting.  Crain simply performs the actions, speaks the word the story requires.  The audience has the opportunity and ability to provide the emotion.  Moreover, it is only logical that a black woman who has spent her adult life passing as white would have developed a mask, a cosmic poker face; she would avoid displaying reactions that would be a telltale giveaway of her identity.  The suppression of her selfhood is the greatest tragedy of her situation.  Acting in the Actors Studio sense of the word would have damaged the film.

Yes, the picture is shot on obvious stages and Joe August's lighting is quite theatrical.  But it suits the folktale nature of the story -- there are aspects, questions of inheritance and the transfer of property that are pre-echoes of Ossie Davis's play Purlie Victorious, which is explicitly meant to ape the modes of folktale and fable.  Pinky may have arrived at that style by inertia and indirection, but that does not make the film's creative choices invalid. 

Pinky ought to be a lot more dated than it is.  I was especially impressed with the character of Pinky's white fiancee, played by William Lundigan, doing some of his best work.  The man is unafraid to be seen embracing and even kissing a woman who is perceived as black in her hometown, but is nonetheless eager to move to another city in which her racial identity can again be secret, and they can live "normal" lives.  The film is remarkably frank that there is no "normal" path for a black person who looks white, and that is, for the most part, as true (if for different reasons) in 2012 as in 1949.
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* Kazan did not cast the film, having taken it over from John Ford as a favor to Darryl Zanuck.  Various reasons have been given for Ford's departure, from his disaffection with the script to clashes with Waters.  It was probably not racism, as Ford was a secret progressive, and made an explicitly anti-racism film, Sergeant Rutledge in 1960.