January 28, 2011

#43: Midnight Cowboy

I just got back from a couple days with family on South Padre Island in southern Texas, so the opening strains of John Schlesinger's 1969 film Midnight Cowboy seemed familiar to me. As it went on, it became less familiar (thank God), but it grew into a film I did not expect.

Company: I might just stop listing Company if I don't have any. This is getting depressing. Although I'm planning a get-together for the next film on the list, so I'm reaching out! It's just that a lot of these movies are a hard sell.

Cuisine: coffee, and about halfway through, bacon and tomato macaroni and cheese with Frank's Red Hot. Seriously. SO good. Try it.

The film opens by zooming out from a dilapidated (that word took spell check to spell) drive-in movie theater somewhere in Texas, seemingly the kind of place not too far from the small town of Anarene in The Last Picture Show. This is probably exactly the reason why our hero, Joe Buck (Oscar nominee Jon Voight), wants out -- he's a young man with a pretty face and not much else, and he figures he's outgrown his tiny existence. So he quits his job, gives Texas the finger and hops on a bus for New York City in hopes of becoming... a hustler. Not huge aspirations, but as he admits, lovin' is the only thing he's ever been good at.

He sticks out like a sore thumb in the crowded streets of Manhattan, fringe jacket, cowboy boots and John Wayne hat. (Voight actually lost the Oscar to John Wayne this year, for the original True Grit.) He comes looking for sex, for companionship, for fun ... but no one seems interested. What could possibly be wrong? The crowds are depicted as not just unfeeling, but perhaps just unaware of anything around them. In a moving moment, Joe sees a man literally face down on the pavement, and while some passers-by take notice, they don't dare help. When Joe finally manages to get into a woman's pants, the woman (a fantastic, short Oscar-nominated performance by Sylvia Miles) scoffs when he asks her for money, since she was going to ask him the same thing. But still, not bad for a first try ... right?

Things aren't really going his way -- he can't find women who want to sleep with him, he can't pay his rent at the hotel he's staying at, and he's lonely -- until he's enlightened by a third-rate con man named Ratso (Oscar nominee Dustin Hoffman), a skeeze with a leg crippled by polio. Ratso tells Joe that his problem is the get-up -- cowboys are out, out, out! I thought to myself, "all right, well, change your look" ... but it's like Don Cheadle's character in Boogie Nights, similarly unwilling to give up the cowboy look. It makes him feel good. It reminds him of who he is, and in this increasingly unfriendly city, Joe needs to keep feeling good somehow.

But things go from bad to worse, and soon Joe steps into the gay scene to make some cash. In a horrifying and touching scene, a young kid from Chicago (a very young Bob Balaban!) elicits him for oral sex in a movie theater and then admits to having no money to pay him. "What are you gonna do to me?" he asks like a timid mouse in the bathroom, maybe having suspected all along that he would be beaten to a pulp. I had to keep in mind that this was 1969, babies -- scenes like this did not happen in movies! This film was released in theaters literally weeks before the Stonewall Riots. Historical perspective. It happens.

Anyway, Joe is troubled by this incident, and would take it out on Ratso if Ratso wasn't the only friend he had in the whole city. Ratso, whose cough gets worse by the day, has no one and Joe has no one. In a relationship that goes beyond stud and pimp, they bond, and dream of Miami, where the girls are plentiful and Ratso's cough might not be so bad.

These dream sequences are also spliced by haunting images from Joe's past: a grandmother who raised him, a traumatic baptism in a river he didn't understand, and a brutal scene where he and his girlfriend, formerly promiscuous but now faithful to Joe, are raped by a bunch of guys who preferred her being a slut. Yikes. If I was haunted by all that, I'd want out too. Schlesinger's direction seems so contemporary, even today, the way he uses imagery to tell a story is truly remarkable.

Ratso's got a past, too. His father was an illiterate shoe shiner who hunched over and inhaled shoe polish day in and day out until it finally killed him. Joe and Ratso are united in their longing to escape their pasts and find some way out, some companionship that could bring them happiness ... but I think they're looking in the wrong places. There's an overarching theme of loneliness throughout the film -- hustling by its definition brings two people together, but without a real emotional connection, which I think keeps Joe, who's maybe too dim to fully understand that, from finding what he thought he'd find in New York.

Or could it be his repressed sexuality? After being invited at random to a psychedelic party, where Joe gets drunk and high, he ends up at the apartment of Shirley (Brenda Vaccaro). He's temporarily impotent, until she challenges his heterosexuality ... and that really does the trick. Voight does a spectacular job of keeping this ambiguous for us -- we never really get an answer about him, but it's quite possible in this age that he's actually homosexual. That would at least account for his isolation and possible budding love for Ratso.

The film ends on a bittersweet note, without a clear answer about the future of our hero, but it's certainly a fascinating meditation on repression, isolation, sex, love, commitment, fear and longing, told through the experiences of a ambiguously sexual hustler in late-60's New York. This time in movie making, with the French New Wave and the early stages of independent cinema, is really fascinating to me. I'm finding that more and more as I go through this blog. Hmm.

Next up: another from this same time period. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway shoot 'em up in Bonnie & Clyde.

January 16, 2011

#44: The Philadelphia Story

Cary Grant! Katharine Hepburn! Jimmy Stewart! All directed by George Cukor! The pedigree of stars along should make The Philadelphia Story a thrill -- it should snap, crackle and pop ... but it underwhelmed me. I suppose when I go back to this time period and I watch a comedy, I expect it to sizzle, either in the slapstick vein of Bringing Up Baby or in the wacky chaos of the Marx Brothers. Is my palette for classic comedy too limited?

Company: just me again. Gotta involve some friends soon. Gettin' lonely.

Cuisine: Diet Cherry 7Up (with antioxidants!), Wheat Thins and garlic/tomato/basil hummus

Well, the film begins with this amazing moment.

After palming Kate the Great's face, how can one go up? This brief, wordless prologue introduces us to the chemistry between recently divorced C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and Tracy Lord (Oscar nominee Katharine Hepburn, her third of 12 noms), and the rest of the film chronicles how they end up back together. Tracy is a rich socialite, ready to re-marry George Kittredge (John Howard) ...

... but a tabloid publisher, eager to gain exclusive coverage of the wedding, blackmails Dexter to introduce two reporters (Ruth Hussey and Oscar winner Jimmy Stewart), who are undercover as distant relatives. Tracy sees through this plot, but hesitantly allows media coverage as it will stop the tabloid from publishing an incriminating article about her adulterous father (John Halliday). It's enough intrigue for a weekend in the country.

As is pretty typical in a romantic comedy, more and more men start to fall for Tracy, and at any given moment she has at least three men dying to be with her. I suppose if that's how it's going to be, you'd better get Hepburn. She's not at her most daffy or versatile here -- in fact, the role asks little of her -- but her great warmth and wit makes Tracy Lord a three-dimensional human being. At one point, Dexter says of her: "you'll never be a first class human being or a first class woman until you learn to have some regard for human frailty." A woman who holds men to extraordinary standards? No one better than Kate to play this part. She's got that great compassion under the stony surface that's just right for the character. And Mr. Stewart, the Oscar winner here, actually felt like he was given a statue for this to make up for being snubbed for his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (#26 on this list). But he's very charming, and makes for a convincing drunk.

Needless to say, the story centers around Tracy's troubles with picking just one man to spend her life with. They're all so dashing, and there's only one of her! What to do!? Booze, Tracy.

"The course of true love..." "--gathers no moss!"

Things go awry, misunderstandings spin out of control, Tracy's heart wants what it wants and then some ...

... but she can't have it all. Perhaps my indifference towards this movie stems from my indifference towards what happens to Tracy. She'll end up marrying someone, and whether it's George, Dexter or Mike, does it really make that much of a difference? Maybe that's the trouble -- I don't see the real differences in the mens' performances. In Tracy's relationships with them? Yes. She shines far above her scene partners, maybe because their characters are not as interesting as hers (and that's even saying something, considering the fact that I don't think Tracy is all that interesting, even with Katharine Hepburn playing her).

It's not that I didn't like the film. I just felt indifferent toward it. Maybe I kept waiting for it to be something else? Maybe as I continue through this blog, that's a part of the curse -- that I'll continually relate and compare these films to each other... even though that was sort of the idea. Whatever. No one said I had to like all these movies, but when they're on a list like this, I like to have concrete reasons for disliking them other than "I liked Bringing Up Baby better!"

Ultimately, my conclusion seems to be that The Philadelphia Story is asking its audience to believe it's zany and screwball when really it takes itself too seriously to be very much fun. Ask me again in five years and maybe I'd feel differently, but for now that's my two cents.

Next up: another I haven't seen -- the X-rated Midnight Cowboy.

January 6, 2011

#45: Shane

I'm not gonna lie: one of the many things I've learned over the course of this blog is that I naturally distrust and dislike westerns. It's not one thing to blame for this -- I've come to accept that as a genre I just can't get behind them. George Stevens' 1952 stab at the genre, Shane, seems to me so similar to the earlier westerns on this list as to render it indistinguishable. I might be totally wrong, but now that I'm through a couple of these, hopefully I can formulate some legitimate opinions.

Company: Kecia was in and out, but mostly out.

Cuisine: a cup of coffee from my new Chemex (thanks Christmas!), then a short break to finish off that seven-layer taco dip from our party last night with the roomie, and then a vodka soda she poured me. Cuisine happens.

So the story goes that all the townspeople fear the bad guys, and then a stranger wanders into town and saves them all, and then he leaves. Sound like any other westerns you know? This stranger's name is Shane (Alan Ladd, with his scrawny frame, floppy hair and high-waisted pants), and he resolves to help a homesteader and his family (Van Heflin, Jean Arthur and 11-year-old Oscar nominee Brandon de Wilde) defeat and drive out the baddies, led by cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer).

These bad guys' approach on horseback is signalled by menacing, melodramatic timpanis. You know, so you know they're the bad guys before they even appear. There's actually a moment later where the score doesn't just sound like "Sleigh Ride" (written four years before this film's release), it actually is "Sleigh Ride." As in, there's no difference between what you're hearing and the melody of "Sleigh Ride" (just hear those sleigh bells ring-a-ling, jing- jing- jing-a-ling tooooooo...) To that I say: huh??

Okay, okay. Back off, Max. I tried this time to step back, and look at the film in a larger context ... but no theme pops out to me that I haven't seen before in all the westerns I've ever seen. I think the inclusion of a child in the story, standing safely out of gunshot and idolizing these gunslingers, is meant to comment on the innocence lost in the old West. Fine. What other western doesn't have a similar longing for a forgotten childhood innocence, regardless of whether or not children are present?

These kinds of films were so popular in this time period, perhaps because of my major problem with them: they were all the same. Is that the key? Themes like the quest for freedom, the receeding frontier, the American dream, and badasses with their own rule books run rampant through this genre, and maybe westerns are just like any other major genre: it has its rules and it succeeds most when it plays by them. Keep it simple, stupid! The good guys are good and the bad guys are sneering, conniving and usually ride black horses. All right, fine. But even so, I have a hard time remembering why I should care about the heroes from these films when they all wear the same clothes, ride the same horse, speak the same dialogue, shoot the same faceless bad guys ... is this an understandable complaint? I only remember this hero's name because it's the title. Otherwise, he might fade into the background like any other.

Life ain't easy in the old West. Yeah. Tell me about it.

Luckily, I don't feel like less of a film fan for claiming little interest in this genre. I can still see a beautiful shot, hear a well-scripted scene, appreciate a thematic triumph on screen ... but maybe with this bias I might have to look a little harder in some cases. There are some legitimate reasons specific to this film, though. For example, the fights here are preposterous. In other westerns I've seen (few though they are), the punches have actually looked like they're hitting someone, and they're aurally synced. Same with the guy playing harmonica at the funeral -- how much was that actor paid to look like he'd never even held a harmonica in his life? I noticed details like that. Did I want the film to fail for me? No. I wanted it to be good. I'd want to like any film, and especially when I want so badly to understand why this genre has so many films on this list (and so many more to go).

Ultimately, even though it may be hard to understand, Joey's mother explains to him that "Shane did what he had to do." But wait, doesn't Shane (and any other hero in this genre) abide by his own rules? Did he have to do what he did, or was he just being a jerk? Shane tells Joey that "a man has to be what he is." Wow. Such vague wisdom that works to justify anything.

I'm guessing many of the voters for this AFI list were probably boys around Joey's age when Shane came to town, and remember the film so fondly that they kept it on the list. Maybe since I didn't grow up with this, I don't have the same fondness for it -- but would I include my childhood favorite on a list like this? Well... maybe. It depends. Jurassic Park? Possibly. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids? Probably not. The Neverending Story? Ha.

It leaves me with much to discuss. How well does this nearly-dead genre hold up? Sure, we have modern westerns -- many of which I've enjoyed -- but I don't see much to compare between this and, say, 3:10 to Yuma or No Country for Old Men. Are these films still truly resonant to a contemporary audience, or are they just relics, antiques we can't bear to sell at our garage sale? Hmm.

Next up: Katharine Hepburn, always a palate cleanser, in The Philadelphia Story.