Vamos, will ya!

The Big Steal 1949 RKO (72 minutes) directed by Don Siegel, written by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) and Gerald Drayson Adams.

This is a classic romantic comedy wrapped in a road movie inside in a film noir plot directed by Don Siegel, who went on to make Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry.

The lively back-and-forth between the sexes competes with humor relating to cultural differences and language miscommunication between everyday Mexicans and their inscrutable Americano neighbors—and high speed car chases made the more hair-raising when the cars career wildly on screeching tires through tilting back projections.

The plot goes something like this:

Lieutenant Duke Halliday (Robert Mitchum) is a U.S. Army payroll officer trying to catch Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles), who fled the United States for Veracruz with a $300,000 payroll he stole from Halliday. Halliday is after Fiske to clear his name, because the Army apparently thinks Halliday stole the money himself.

The ham-handed Captain Vincent Blake (William Bendix), Halliday’s Army superior, is after Halliday, trying to recover the money that Blake thinks Halliday stole. 

Joan Graham (Jane Greer), the sweetheart Fiske jilted in Miami, also is trying to catch up with Fiske to recover $2000 she loaned him before he absconded to Veracruz. Graham has a map from Fiske which shows a route marked from Veracruz to Tehuacán, a regional town to the southwest.

None of this makes much sense under closer scrutiny, but it puts Halliday and Graham together to catch Fiske, with Blake in hot pursuit, monitored and trailed by Veracruz City’s Inspector-General Ortega (Ramon Navarro) and his deputy, Lieutenant Ruiz (Don Alvarado), who ‘let the little mouse go so that later he could follow the little mouse into a group of other little mouses—mice,’ as Ortega explains to his deputy.

Mitchum and Greer are fun to watch—apparently a bit too much fun for the Hayes Office, which made Siegel cut some of the racier parts. But Navarro, as the courtly and amused Ortega, is the film’s secret weapon.

Don Alvarado, Ramon Navarro, Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in The Big Steal

Ortega knows that some of these people are up to no good, and seems to bet that Halliday and Graham are on the level. But he watches and engages with everyone, figuring that the mystery will resolve if he allows it time to play out—and besides, it gives him ‘Such a well chance to practice my English.’

Gumshoed Seoul

추격자 Chu-gyeok-ja (The Chaser) 2008 South Korea (125 minutes) directed and cowritten by Na Hong-jin.

This is a satisfying, fast-paced, hard-hitting, contemporary film noir from South Korea. The omniscient viewer looks on like a bemused god, knowing everything except what result the interplay of human folly and fortune will produce.

Eom Joong-ho (Kim Yook-seok), fired from the police force for unethical conduct, runs call girls from a small office in a candy-colored neon-bright part of Seoul with a faithful but hapless associate he calls ‘Meathead’—Oh-jot (Koo Bon-woong).

Joong-ho keeps in touch with old police colleagues and it becomes clear from their banter that though his firing probably was justified, his colleagues and higher-ups engage in similar activities as a matter of course. Joong-ho fell afoul of the system because he did not play the game.

His problem now is that he borrowed money to advance to several of his call girls whose serial disappearance puts him in a hole. He first suspects that they ran off with his money or are working with another pimp. Joong-ho notices that each went to a client with the same cell phone number who met the women in a public place and took them back to his house.

Police then call Joong-ho to report that his Jaguar, in which he sent one employee on a job, is parked improperly on a street in the Seoul district Mangwon collecting sex trade flyers and evidently abandoned. Another pimp has a similar problem—and a client with the identical cell phone number.

The more reliable Kim Min-ji (Seo Yeong-hee), a call girl sent to the same cell phone user-client with instructions to text Joong-ho the client’s address, also disappears in Mangwon. Joong-ho senses that there may be a darker game going on.

He tries to get help from his friends on the force, but they are detailed to provide security for the South Korean president who makes a surprise visit to a covered food market. A lone protester who splatters the president with feces becomes the focus of police operations citywide.

Then, driving around Mangwon, Joong-ho literally runs into his quarry. The viewer already knows that Ji Yeong-min (Ha Jeong-woo) is the serial killer, handy with a hammer and chisel. Joong-ho caused the fender bender; he is surprised when the driver of the other car wants only to get away quickly from the scene. Then he notices blood on Yeong-min’s shirt and, when he keys the mystery number on his cell phone, Yeong-min’s telephone rings. 

He catches Yeong-min after a foot chase, but this is just the beginning. The problem becomes how to link Yeong-min to the missing women, where the missing women are, and whether they still are alive. 

There is a lot of rain, hard rain. The rain reflects the pessimistic atmosphere and underscores the futility of what those working under it are trying to accomplish—such as police sent much later to search outside at night in a wooded park for traces of the serial killer and his victims as the rain beats down on them.

What makes this a classic noir tale is that a disgraced policeman who plays by his own rules does the detective grunt work that a large, well-trained police force appears powerless to do. The police are so caught up in their own politics, procedures, deference to higher-ups and the way things look, that they barely can get out of their own way: far too many police usually turn up way too late. The steady focus on this deeper kind of corruption and its Keystone Kops effect would make a social or political comment.

Joong-ho’s former colleagues help him when they can—and he can handle suspects in ways they cannot—and should not. They know and trust Joong-ho, but the story comes down to this ‘chaser,’ on his own, tagging along Meathead and Eun-ji (Kim Yoo-jeong), Min-ji’s five-year-old daughter, racing against time to find Min-ji alive—if they can.

A liberal education

Un Prophète (A Prophet) 2009 France (155 minutes) directed and cowritten by Jacques Audiard.

Jacques Audiard’s two-and-a-half hour epic is about what Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a smart French North African teenager with a 4th grade reading level, managed to learn and achieve while doing six years in an adult prison.

Malik starts with reading and economics, adding a little applied political science and psychology for seasoning; a smidgen of Corsican dialect comes in handy if the people running things are the Corsican mob, especially if they like to talk and assume that the North African kid hanging around sweeping the floor and making the coffee is an idiot.

From this core curriculum, Malik advances to a graduate practicum in psychology, sociology and political science. Along with this, he parlays an offer he cannot refuse—kill or be killed—into a relationship of trust with César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), a Corsican version of John Gotti Sr. Malik watches closely how Luciani does business and handles people, then makes his move in his own good time.

The ghost of his first victim, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), a North African criminal who had been in protective custody as a witness against the Corsicans before his untimely demise, guides Malik through these treacherous waters. Reyeb is one of the surprisingly good things about this movie: a great piece of character acting by an actor who has not been in many movies but has the energy, presence and imagination to play larger roles. 

Another unusual thing about this film and its protagonist is that neither seem the least interested in being, acting or looking ‘cool’. Malik is interested in understanding how this world he has been sucked into works, what he needs to do to survive in it and to make it work for him. The film follows him as he does this.

As in the Baltimore crime series The Wire—and evidently in real life—being behind bars does not appear to have much effect on the day-to-day operations of criminal enterprises, more like an occupational inconvenience or lateral career move. And prosecutors, law enforcement officials and lawyers—besides the bent ones, several of which this movie has—seem almost as far from this world as the ordinary, law-abiding viewer. 

Life in the land of the Yankees I: Skinning the silver fox

Ladrón que roba a ladrón (It Takes a Thief to Rob a Thief) 2007 U.S. (100 minutes) directed by Joe Menendez.

A hip Latin duo use a team of amateur immigrants to get even with a smooth, silver-haired ‘infomercial guru’ who has made a fortune selling snake oil to poor Latin American immigrants.

The infomercial guru they target is Moctezuma Valdez (Saúl Lisazo), who is originally from Argentina but changed his named from Claudio Silvestrini for marketing purposes, to take optimum advantage of the Mexican immigrant community (Moctezuma, also Montezuma, a popular Mexican man’s name, was the name of an Aztec emperor).

Emilio (Miguel Varoni), a pony-tailed Columbian former associate of Valdez, and Alejandro (Fernando Colunga), a charming Mexican-American who tells people he is a movie distributor—he sells bootleg movie DVDs from a folding table on the streets of Los Angeles—assemble a team of appealing oddballs, each with his or her own specialty, to get into the vault where Valdez keeps his purportedly ill-gotten gains on the premises of his Hollywood celebrity mansion.

The ‘bad guy’ in this film actually seems to be more the idea of a certain type of overbearing Latin male authority figure, the bullying ‘jefes’ and ‘padrones’ that exploit their own people through boringly predictable but effective intimidation techniques.

One senses a lot of nudging and winking geared toward an immigrant audience that would require a good handle on this particular language and culture fully to appreciate. White Americans turn up in the background as clueless working stiff stereotypes in lower level management or security guards, portrayed presumably as they appear to immigrants —flabby, stupid and non-Spanish speaking.

Still, this is a lively, well-told entertainment with a heart and an appealing cast.

Nowhere Man in the Land of the Sopranos

Blast of Silence 1961 Universal-International (77 minutes) written, directed and starring Allen Baron.

This low budget film noir made early in the rainbow dawn of the 1960s is an odd Meadowlands duck à l’orange basted with mood, roasted in atmosphere, and served cold. 

The story is simple: Frankie Bono (Allen Baron), a middle-aged professional sociopath from Cleveland, travels to the New York metropolitan area to do a contract hit for the Mob on one of its own, a certain ‘Troiano’, during the Christmas holidays. Such schemes seldom turn out as planned—in life or the movies. This one is no different.

While waiting for a venal middleman named ‘Big Ralph’ (Larry Tucker), to procure his silenced pistol for the job, Frankie coincidentally runs into Petey (Danny Meehan), with whom he grew up in an orphanage, and Petey’s sister, Lori (Molly McCarthy), who was Frankie’s school-age girlfriend. These characters feed and water Frankie’s paranoia and complicate the plot, but they do not compromise the job: they have no idea what business he is in, much less that he spends his days talking to himself in a monotone, shadowing a mobster so that he can pick the best time and place to kill him.

This movie does not have in the dramatic studio lighting and veteran contract players and direction of the classic B movies that the major studios produced in the 1940s and early 1950s. But it more than makes up for this in inventive camera angles and a stylized, hardboiled existential dead-end atmosphere. In this, director Allen Baron came away from the American and French film noir classics with the same things as the French New Wave directors. So it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.

However, Baron does not just tell a story in pictures. His camera distorts space like a funhouse mirror—space, but not its subjects. It looks up and down at characters, it lies flat on the sidewalk looking up inclined streets and makes them tower like mountains, and it does a kind of visual salmon-leap up and down narrow stairways and through lateral space.

He also builds his shots nicely. It would be impossible for a wall-mounted fire axe prominently framed in a shot not to end up getting used—and not for a fire. And there is something disconcerting and spooky about seeing a Teddy bear with black rings around its eyes suddenly bouncing up a staircase upside down when there someone with a silenced pistol waiting in the shadows above—nearly as foreboding as seeing the helium bear balloon caught in an overhead telephone line in Fritz Lang’s M. 

Baron creates atmosphere in images of The City and a paranoid, fatalist, second-person singular voiceover that on the one hand sounds way too arty to be real, yet in which one can recognize the voice of those of the ‘Greatest Generation’ who never really made it all the way back from The War. The voiceover at times sounds like what could be a man of that generation talking in his sleep. Of course, men of that generation wrote these films.

But Frankie is one of the characters one would see only in the background of The Godfather or one of the Mafia epics that followed; it is even more likely that he would be just a trench-coated shoulder, the lowered brim of a hat and a gloved hand wielding a pistol or sap. He may be closer to what people in this world really are like, but his character is not colorful or charismatic enough for a big role in one of those later films—he has no bada-bing and could care less about the cannolis.

Yet the later movies are set in this time and place, and the canvas is the same. Frankie comes into Newark on the train; he meets a contact on the Staten Island Ferry; he drives in and out of Manhattan across the New Jersey Meadowlands on Pulaski Skyway. He follows Troiano to his suburban home—what he calls ‘a nice little home, quiet suburban community, an hour out in the suburbs,’ which easily could be Tony Soprano’s Caldwell, N.J. The last lyric sequence of shots, like something straight out of a Jean-Pierre Melville gangster movie, occurs on an overcast, windy day in a place that looks a lot like the Hackensack River in the Meadowlands—that ideal place for sleeping with the fishes (but evidently it was shot on Long Island).

In this movie, The City is the main malevolent character—The City as Gomorrah. ‘You come into the city by dark whatever time of day it is,’ the voiceover growls in the beginning. The City here is mostly but not always an overcast or nighttime midtown Manhattan, with a little Harlem and the Chelsea docks and the West Village thrown in, and what looks and feels like parts of downtown Newark.

The War may have informed the nature of the men of film noir, but here it is The City that has annealed Frankie, the little we find out about him besides his existential outlook in the voiceover. It is a place where a greasy sensualist obtains a silenced pistol for a contract killer and keeps sewer rats in cages in a seedy prepaid room hidden from view by a nicotine-stained roll-up blind, where gangsters whose families live in the lily-white suburbs keep their girlfriends, where bad people like Frankie come to do worse things.

It’s all atmosphere.

On the other hand, we see the magnificent Rockefeller Center Christmas tree from Fifth Avenue, a series of splendid Fifth Avenue windows turned out in full holiday dress, and some of midtown Manhattan’s distinct landmarks at night, like Lever House and the Seagram’s Building.

In fact, if you rub your eyes and take a long back step into the daylight, all the pulp fiction turns out to be just a city in the eyes of a morbidly self-absorbed beholder.

After all, fresh-faced Petey and Lori live in the city. Who’s to say that the cleaning lady in the train station isn’t putting a son or daughter through college, or that the singer in the Village Gate (Dean Sheldon) accompanying himself on the bongos and singing ‘Dressed in Black all the Time’ and ‘Torrid Town’ isn’t an up-and-coming Tommy Smothers? Couldn’t the men and women we see darkly through Frankie’s narrowed glance just be you or me or someone we know on no more fraught a mission than going to lunch or picking up the dry cleaning on the way home from work?

Best to suspend disbelief, enjoy the pulp rococo, and watch the things Baron does with a camera.

Mad about Jerry

The King of Comedy 1982 (109 minutes) directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Paul D. Zimmerman.

Here’s a proposition: if comedy is a means for conveying insight by converting the heat of anger into the light of humor, cast an actor noted for angry roles as a wannabe comedian desperate for celebrity.

Voila! Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver becomes Rupert Pupkin, self-crowned King of Comedy, whose every misbegotten, self-absorbed line is a hostile self-laceration: ‘Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.’

But that’s not all. Cast a genuine king of comedy—Jerry Lewis—as Jerry Langford, the comedian whom Pupkin idolizes and wants to be. Take this old pro and throw him in a pot with De Niro the intense method actor and an equally intense and aggressively offensive comedienne—Sandra Bernhard—and see who lives to tell the tale.

It’s that rough. But seriously, folks, the result is funny, and scary, at times outrageous, and about as mad as a hatter gets.

The plot is straightforward: a star-struck fan will do nearly anything to appear on a national television show.

Pupkin succeeds through dogged and aggressive persistence to speak privately with Langford for several minutes about appearing on Langford’s nationally broadcast nightly celebrity talk show: ‘My name is Rupert Pupkin. I know that doesn’t mean much to you but it means an awful lot to me.’

Langford as though takes a breath in pause. He then calmly explains to Pupkin that entertainment may be a ‘crazy business’, but that it has ‘ground rules’ like other businesses and that ‘you don’t walk on to a national show without experience.’ Then he says several insincere and noncommittal things to brush off the stranger groupie who forced his way into Langford’s limousine.

But Pupkin’s initial presumption takes on grandiose proportions in his own mind concerning his ability and his relationship with Langford, in part due to the inability of Langford and his staff simply to give Pupkin a direct ‘no’. The rejections Pupkin gets through Langford’s staff invariably are dressed in upbeat but insincere encouragement, which only fuels Pupkin’s delusions, and takes him out to Langford’s home in a leafy, affluent suburb of New York City in one of the films many memorable scenes. 

Pupkin lands at Langford’s country villa with Rita Keane (Diahnne Abbott) a woman he knew from high school whom he is trying to impress. He tells Rita that Jerry invited them to spend the weekend with him and ‘other guests', and that he and Jerry are going to work on material for his appearance on Jerry’s show. Pupkin invites himself in and makes himself at home, ‘freshening up’ and pouring drinks for himself and Rita before the panicked eyes of a household staff trying frantically to reach Langford on a golf course in the days before cell phones to find out who Pupkin is and what he is doing there.

Lewis is a great comedian; he is not a great actor. As a director of method actors, Scorsese reportedly left Lewis in the dark about a lot of what was going on in order to try to capture the real irritation and aggravation a celebrity like Lewis—or anyone—would feel were this an actual situation. It is hard to say what conveys Langford’s outrage and anger so well in this and other scenes. For one, it’s visceral, beyond acting. The look in his eyes and gestures could be acting. Maybe it’s the uncomfortably longish pauses in which one can sense his heartbeat race or feel the hair rise on the back of his neck, though the pauses could be just editing. Whatever it is, it works well.

At the same time, Langford/Lewis manages to keep his cool, which is interesting; self control is the only power that this man used to being in charge has in a situation that is not just intensely hostile or offensive, but entirely out of his control.

Frank Sinatra reportedly was considered for the Langford role. Sinatra was a good actor, though it may be a good thing it was Lewis instead.

Pupkin’s mounting frustration at his increasingly hostile and unsuccessful attempts to contact his new friend ultimately lead him and Masha (Bernhard), a creepy celebrity stalker, to snatch Langford off the street and hold him hostage in Masha’s apartment in order to get Pupkin on the show.

‘Why didn’t you just listen to the tape when I asked you to?’ Pupkin remonstrates with Langford. ‘I mean, it wasn’t that hard, was it? A few minutes of your time to listen to something I’ve worked on my whole life?’

This and Pupkin’s other lines would convey something completely different, were the actor delivering them an actor like Tom Hanks. The character’s inner decency and goodness would shine forth and make a stony-faced pro reconsider and give him a single shot that would turn in to a life-affirming moment and not leave a dry eye in the house. But this is not Hanks and Spielberg; it is De Niro and Scorsese.

Bernhard’s scene in her taper-lit apartment with the ‘tied-up’ Jerry is in the same vein—about three parts mad desperation masquerading as star-struck lunacy to four parts intense hostility pretending to be comedy improvisation, which includes taunting and haranguing Jerry, crooning ‘Come rain or come shine,’ and taking off her dress.

‘Celebrity’ used to be much harder to achieve, especially when one had to negotiate a system run by people like Langford. These days, YouTube is clogged with those who would pull practically any stunt to win instant celebrity. This is the only sense in which this movie is dated.

Say ‘Cheese!’

Whisky 2004 Uruguay (94 minutes) directed by Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, who co-wrote the story with Gonzalo Delgado.

Whisky is surprisingly good as a sweetly offbeat, ironic, well-made character study of three faces of melancholy that rises nicely with good acting and a leaven of deadpan humor.

Two long-estranged brothers reunite in the town where they grew up. The brother who is a lifelong bachelor has a woman from work stand in as his wife. The unforeseen consequences this occasions offer each character opportunities for a second chance.

Jacobo Köller (Andrés Pazo­­) is a dour, stingy, distracted more than unfriendly, middle-aged bachelor faithfully married to the family sock business he inherited and operates in Montevideo, Uruguay. Marta Acuña (Mirella Pascual) is his ‘work wife,’ an unmarried middle-aged woman who dutifully oversees his shop and two employees. Herman Köller (Jorge Bolan), Jacobo’s younger brother, left Montevideo as a young man for Brazil, where he opened his own successful sock business, married and had two daughters; Herman is easier-going than Jacobo, slightly vain though self-effacing, and as much absorbed in his business as his brother.

Herman returns to Montevideo for the first time in 20 years for their mother’s matzevah, the Jewish tombstone-dedicating ceremony, in response to an impersonal nine-word summons that Jacobo faxed to him.

Jacobo lives in the apartment where he and Herman grew up, which looks like a once well-appointed place that has gone slowly to seed in the years since his mother became too ill to see to its maintenance. The brothers are lifelong competitors. It seems most likely due to this—Herman is married and Jacobo is not—that Jacobo asks Marta to pose as his wife for the duration of Herman’s visit.

Jacobo has no romantic or sexual interest in Marta. She is a faithful employee he trusts, and it does not seem to occur to him that her standing in as his wife could entail more than renting a tuxedo for a wedding. It is as simple as taking his parents’ gold wedding bands from a manila envelope, giving Marta his mother’s ring, which is too big for her, and putting on his father’s ring.

Nor does Marta seem to have any romantic ideas about her employer. She dutifully agrees, declining Jacobo’s offer to pay her extra for her services. She helpfully suggests that they have a ‘wedding picture’ taken to display in the apartment she never has seen to support this pose: ‘Whisky!’ is what the photographer says to get subjects to smile for the camera.

The illusion of what look like genuine smiles in this posed photograph is the engine that sets the story in motion.

Prior to the photo, Marta has her hair done—her first transformative step—which the two other women employees notice right away, but Jacobo not at all; he is more grateful that she is there to push his car so he can roll-start it when it won’t turn over the first evening he takes her to the apartment. We don’t need Marta’s eyes to see that this apartment, filled with the detritus of bachelorhood and a former long-term invalid’s medical devices and accessories, is going to need a miracle to pass muster. 

Jacobo goes to the airport alone to meet his brother, spending the day with him to attend their mother’s tombstone dedication and later to take in a local football game. Meanwhile, Marta whips the place into shape, even pushing together the twin beds in the master bedroom. Despite eyebrows raised behind his brother’s back when he discovers the top-to-bottom makeover of his world, Jacobo realizes that it all had to happen.

Whisky! The place looks like an apartment shared by the well-to-do middle-aged couple smiling in the picture on the living room credenza.

The brothers’ interaction is uncomfortable. Jacobo seems to tolerate Herman’s visit less than he tolerates Marta in his space; Herman is overeager to please because he is guilty for having left Jacobo to care for their ill, elderly parents and the family business. Marta’s attentions and small talk put Herman at ease. He proposes that the three of them spend the rest of his visit together at Pirápolis, an old-fashioned oceanside resort town outside Montevideo where the brothers vacationed with their parents as children.

At a grand old hotel in Pirápolis, Jacobo and his ‘wife’ get a room with a single queen-sized bed—there are no others available, and that’s not a problem is it, sir? Behind the closed door, Jacobo sleeps uncomfortably on a couch too small for him giving Marta the whole bed to herself; but he places a glass of water on her bed table—something he does for himself, and for her when she tells him she likes it too. When the three are together, Marta makes it easier for Herman to assert himself while deferring to his brother; she is in a sense courted by both brothers. She buys herself a bathing suit and goes to the hotel pool where her too-big wedding band slips off, but Herman and a pair of honeymooners help her find it.

One senses Marta’s influence when Jacobo looks over at a lovely young woman in the hotel dining room while Herman and Marta are talking. And Herman seems in turns to be too vain or too charmed to notice the ragged edges that don’t meet up. Alone together, Herman persuades Jacobo to take a brick of money he has brought out of his guilt for not being there for their mother, which the habitually parsimonious Jacobo later uncharacteristically takes to the resort casino… In an odd way, while the three are in Pirápolis together, together they seem as much alone. They have a photo taken together: Whisky!

This sketchy outline is like a clothes hanger, in that says little about the items it supports—much less of the surprising and delightful moments that make this movie worth seeing. It is a pleasure also to watch these three actors work together, challenging and drawing the best from each other, shaping each other’s characters, and finding seams of humor in work they clearly enjoy. They show a lot more than they tell, and their smallest gestures are often the most telling.

Pascual does an exemplary job of giving color and body to a ‘given’, a woman ‘always there’, a dutiful fixture in a small business and another of countless anonymous middle-aged faces on a rush hour train, revealing this character as she resolves from the background toward a surprising and satisfying ending.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuPjUQiQLs&feature=related

TV is the thing this year!

A Face in the Crowd 1957 Warner Brothers (125 minutes) directed by Elia Kazan; story and screenplay by Budd Schulberg.

            One of the great American classic movies, A Face in the Crowd is prescient in its take on the awesome power of television to use charisma and sex to sell everything from energy pills to presidential candidates in the moment before it became the dominant medium.

The plot is simple: country boy makes good, his success leads to the hubris which precedes his fall.

Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a Smith-trained musicologist who works at her uncle’s radio station in Pickett, Arkansas, discovers Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a charismatic, gui-tar-pickin’ backwoods bad boy, in Tomahawk County Jail while recording stories and music for her weekly radio show, ‘A Face in the Crowd’. When Marcia invites Lonesome to participate, he asks, ‘What do I get out of this? Mr. Me, Myself and I?’ with a mock sullen challenge that he knows will hook her, and that tells viewers that he may not be the ‘simple country boy’ he tricks himself out to be.

What he does get starts with an early release from jail; it then parlays his talent for connecting with people, especially women, into a popular radio show in Pickett, then a television show in Memphis where he attracts the notice of Joseph ‘Joey’ De Palma (Anthony Franciosa), an ethically challenged office boy who dreams of becoming a big-time agent.

A New York advertising agency is in a quandary over the eroding market share of one of its big accounts. A research chemist tells company management and its advertiser that the problem with Vitajex, an energy pill concocted mostly of sugar, with ‘a few grains of aspirin’ and a little caffeine, is that ‘we’ve got nothing to sell.’ A ‘dignified’ message is needed, a corporate yes-man tells owner General Haynesworth (Percy Waram).

Enter Lonesome, whom De Palma talked the advertisers into bringing to the New York meeting: ‘Back where I come from, a fella looks too dignified, we figure he’s lookin’ to steal your watch.’ Lonesome turns on his charisma, first enthusing over the product with a folksy energy, then theatrically chasing first one attractive young woman, then another, around the conference room; any sense of dignity quickly makes way for an Arkansas satyr and girls in bathing suits who instantly reinvigorate Vitajex sales.

But a national television program and commercials are just the start for Lonesome and Haynesworth, his self-appointed ‘adoptive father’.

The general reminds a black-tie after dinner group discussing the campaign strategy of its stuffed shirt presidential candidate, Senator Worthington Fuller (Marshall Neilan), that ‘the mass has to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite,’ adding ‘in television, we have the greatest instrument for mass persuasion in the history of the world.’ The public doesn’t want ‘long-winded debates over the issues’, Lonesome chimes in. ‘We’ve got to find 35 million buyers for the product “Worthington Fuller”.’

Fuller appears on Lonesome’s television show to ‘talk to folks’ about the issues, starting with Social Security, reviled by Republicans since President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law 22 years before. Fuller tells Lonesome’s viewers that Social Security is about ‘coddling from the cradle to the grave. I say that weakens moral fiber. Daniel Boone wasn’t looking for unemployment insurance and a pension. All he needed was his axe and his gun and a chance to hue a living out of the forest with his own hands.’

On a parallel track, Lonesome’s bad boy appeal for women and his attraction to them shows clearly through the film. The most remarkable scene comes when this hound dog flush with success judges a baton-twirling contest to decide the Miss Arkansas Drum Majorette of 1957.

Tanned and bright-eyed Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick) right away catches his eye and clearly is on his mind as he declares the entire field a ‘fine representative body of wholesome young American womanhood.’ Fine indeed: the baton-twirling is dynamic, and the images of this mass of nubile, lightly clad teenaged females arrayed before Lonesome’s lupine eyes is truly wondrous. Within a week the 17-year-old Miss Fleckum is the second Mrs. Lonesome Rhodes. Lonesome’s fall comes at the hands of Marcia, his long-suffering advisor and confidante, in love with him but too sophisticated and threatening for him to marry.

Goaded by conscience and Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), a cerebral skeptic whom she hired as a staff writer, Marcia turns on the broadcast switch while the credits are rolling at the end of Lonesome’s show while he is sharing his cynical opinion of his audience with his cronies on the show, unaware that he is back on the air.

His fall is depicted in a dramatic montage in which descending floor numbers light in quick succession on a panel in a falling elevator car while calls of outrage overload the network’s switchboard. But it is also a fall not without the possibility of redemption.

The film’s studio lighting gives this black and white film a richness and depth that makes the drama dreamlike and heightens the actors’ good looks. It captures Griffith’s charisma and Remick is strikingly pretty, but the camera loves Neal; there is nothing quite like seeing her emerge from shadows at the corner of a bar dressed in black with white jewelry.
There also are cameo appearances by prominent people in early television and broadcasting, such as Walter Winchell, John Cameron Swayze, Mike Wallace, Burl Ives, Bennett Cerf, Betty Furness, Sam Levenson, Virginia Graham and many others.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4740dqLktqE

Marvelous Misfits

The Misfits 1961 United Artists (124 minutes) directed by John Huston; written by Arthur Miller.

This film befits its title as a marvelous oddity. It is a movie buff’s ‘dream team’ but, unlike a sports fan’s fantasy league confection, plays like a charm.  

John Huston’s black and white Western takes place in mid-twentieth century Nevada. It casts Clark Gable, a legendary leading man of Hollywood’s golden age, with three great method actors, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach, and the great character actress Thelma Ritter. The story was written for Monroe by her soon-to-be ex-spouse, playwright Arthur Miller.

Roslyn Taber (Monroe, in the last film she finished before she died) is in Reno for her divorce. She is boarding with Isabelle Steers (Ritter) when she meets Guido (Wallach) and his cowboy friend Gay Langland (Gable, in the last film he made).

Roslyn is not sure as to what to do with her life after her divorce. Isabelle, Guido and Gay persuade her to stay in Nevada. She ends up living with Gay in the unfinished home that Guido built for himself and his wife before his wife died late in her first pregnancy.

Gay, Guido and Isabelle take Roslyn to a rodeo. Gay wants to find another cowboy to help them round up wild horses in the mountains. He and the others need the money and he assures Roslyn that the mavericks are ‘nothing but misfit horses.’ On the way to the rodeo, they run across Perce Howland (Clift), a simple, easy-going, cowboy acquaintance of Guido and Gay, who right away finds a special affinity with Roslyn.

Thus the five human ‘misfits.’ Roslyn, disappointed in love and marriage, seeks a purpose and something she can believe in. Cowboy Gay, facing late middle age in the less and less wide-open spaces, has to work out what to do with the rest of his life. Perce is a homeless drifter trying to find his way home through the rodeo circuit. Guido is guilty about his role as a bomber pilot in the war and the loss of his pregnant wife. Isabelle, unlucky in love, lives vicariously through her young women boarders in Reno for their divorces.  

But Roslyn is the center of the story. The scriptwriter, director, and four other main characters seem fascinated trying to figure out who she is. Huston several times shows her shapely rear end rolling and everyone comments on her looks, but the main characters each appreciate that there is more to her than that.

‘She’s kind of hard to figure out, you know,’ Guido tells Gay early in the story. ‘One minute she looks kind of dumb and brand new like a kid. And the next minute she… She sure moves, though.’

‘Mmm. She sure is prime,’ Gay says in a tone that conveys the twinkle in Gable’s eye, half-dozing with his hat pulled over his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth.

Towards the end of the film, dismissing Roslyn’s naïve wonder at his book-learning, Guido says, ‘Knowing things don’t matter much. You got something a lot more important.’

‘What?’ Roslyn asks.

‘You care. Whatever happens to anybody happens to you. You’re really hooked into the whole thing, Roslyn. It’s a blessing,’ Guido says.

Monroe speaks in her characteristic breathy whisper, which can be off-putting because it makes much of what she does sound like ‘acting,’ rather than acting such that what she is doing sounds and feels natural. For all this, she makes better sense than most ordinary people do most of the time. Her otherworldly physical beauty is like a disability, in that people focus on it as though they would someone with an unsightly or uncommon physical handicap. But Roslyn doesn’t behave and act like ‘other people’ either. The film and story use carefully selected characters to try to divine the person that inhabits that ‘magnificent torso.’

They drink a lot. They spend a lot of time in motor vehicles in the Nevada desert outside of Reno. They talk and dance—Wallach really can dance—and drink some more. They go to the rodeo and drink a lot more, come home, then go together to round up ‘misfits’ in the nearby mountains.

Roslyn objects when Gay explains to her that they round up the horses to sell to dealers who slaughter them for dog food. Gay tries to mollify her by saying he is doing what he has done all along, but that times have changed and no one needs the maverick ponies for anything but dog food any more.

‘Somehow or other it all got changed around, see. I’m doing the same thing I always did. It’s just that they changed it all around,’ Gay says.

Roslyn insists that this is wrong. It may turn out that by staying with Gay and his friends in Nevada she touches and changes their lives, rather than they guide hers.  

All of this looks easy and effortless under Huston’s direction, contrary to contemporary anecdotes and memoirs of meltdowns behind the scenes, mainly because Huston’s camera loves these five actors.

Huston tends to put his camera in one spot and let scenes play out. The camera finds ambient frames and watches groups of actors work side by side and front to back to front in longer takes. There are about a dozen well-conceived and beautifully played scenes framed by an automobile or truck window—iconic scenes more American than apple pie.

The best of these scenes belongs to Clift’s Perce, the rodeo bum they pick up agreeing to stake him to compete in the rodeo if he rides a round up with them. Roslyn, in the automobile passenger seat, is the reference point, centered in the foreground with Gay, driving, on the right, and Perce, Isabelle and Guido in the back seat. An animated, slightly inebriated Perce comes into the frame from the back seat, leaning forward on the back of the front seat, telling stories while the camera listens to him and watches the action as an observer might. When he sits back laughing after making a joke, Isabelle leans forward into to the frame to speak, then Guido, then Perce again; Roslyn clearly is entertained and Gay, amused but silent, with one hand on the steering wheel, takes slugs from a bottle in the near background. 

Perce may have the movie’s three best scenes: this one in the automobile; a scene after the rodeo in which he took a pair of serious falls, where he sits outside on a car seat in a small yard behind a bar talking with Roslyn with his bandaged head in her lap; and the scene in which he is introduced, in a roadside telephone booth talking long distance with his mother as the other actors watch and listen to him from the car. The last of the three is a small drama itself, of a piece, which Clift reportedly nailed on first take.

Clift’s masterly work in these scenes does not diminish the other actors’ fine performances. These are just three great scenes in a well-written, beautifully shot classic filled with lovely moments and inspired work from each actor.

The biographical details alluded to above are as follow: Gable died of a heart attack two weeks after the shoot finished in November 1960, at age 59; Miller and Monroe were married from June 1956 to January 1961; the film was released in February 1961; Monroe overdosed on sleeping pills in August 1962 at age 36.