Dead Man's Hand

Ethan and Joel Coen’s Ballad of Buster Scruggs may be the perfect movie for those who enjoyed Eric Idle leading his crucified companions in ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ in the finale of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. 

The Coens’ come naturally by tall tales, oddball characters and gallows humor. In fact, a man in this film about to be hanged asks another blubbering next to him: ‘First time?’ They show in this film that tall tales and dark humor helped to make bearable the unrelenting discomfort of living and downright horror of dying in America’s Old West to our forebears, the oddballs, misfits and outcasts that peopled it. The Indians did not have a chance.

The film’s six ‘chapters’ are six unrelated narratives of the Old West told in different styles, from a kitsch movie singing cowboy to a gothic ghost yarn.

Six faces of unrelenting discomfort and the horror of dying in America’s Old West.

 

The MP’s only spoiler will be to note that the film opens with a movie dude cowpoke warbling the Roy Rogers standard ‘Cool Water’ with his horse Old Dan practically skipping along as the orchestrated music reverberates from within the guitar box to echo off the rimrock. This is Tim Blake Nelson, one of the Soggy Bottom Boys of the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, as the warbling, guitar-strumming pistolero Buster Scruggs the San Saba Songbird.

Tim Blake Nelson as the pistolero Buster Scruggs, the San Saba Songbird.

Cool and clear as the water he sings of, Buster cheerfully wisecracks his way around a succession of rugged customers, in one instance easily topping a Quentin Tarentino-like action trope and then seasoning it with: ‘I am not a devious man by nature. But when you are unarmed, your tactics might have to be downright Archimedean.’

If anything, this work is a tribute to American storytelling. As a character comments: ‘You know the story, but people can’t get enough of them, like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially.’

As in the Coens’ True Grit, the American characters speak the earnest formal English they learned from schoolmarms, avoiding the chronic Western movie cliché that makes frontier women sound like Shakers and the menfolk like modern football coaches and those selling trucks and tires on television.  

The Coens’ writing, direction, editing, cinematography, casting and music selections make their films stand out. But the way Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks speaks for what a joy this project must have been for the art and production people who wrestle with the thousands of devilish details. There is so much to see!


The cover of Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The ‘book’ the movie is based on looks like a nineteenth century original but was created wholly for the movie, from the cover design, page layout and typeface to the text and captioned color illustrations that introduce each movie chapter: it is perfect, and perfectly beautiful.

Captioned illustration of ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’ in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The sets go from natural to traditional Western to expressionist and are filled with fascinating details. The costuming is a marvel. Production designer Jess Gonchor, art director Steve Christensen, costumier Mary Zophres and their skilled staffs have done outstanding work here.

The narrative consists of six unrelated chapters from the book told as vignettes. The title story ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ features the singing Tim Blake Nelson, Willie Watson as The Kid, and a large supporting cast of saloon barflies, baddies and townspeople. David Lynch could not have dreamed up a wilder ending.

James Franco as a hard-luck cowboy in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

‘Near Algodones’ features James Franco as a hard-luck cowboy, Stephen Root as a half-crazed pans-wearing banker, and a large supporting cast of cowboy posses, Indians and townspeople.

Harry Melling, the ‘Meal Ticket’ performer in Ballad of Buster Scruggs

‘Meal Ticket’, features Liam Neeson as the Impresario of a wagon-borne theatrical show, Harry Melling, his Meal Ticket, an armless and legless theatrical performer; Paul Rae is a Chicken Impresario, and there are other performers and people watching the shows. The Meal Ticket’s act follows accounts of this kind of frontier entertainment, such as Mark Twain’s Duke and Dauphin in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He opens with a dramatic recitation of Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and includes a biblical passage, Shakespeare excerpts and the Gettysburg Address.

Tom Waits prospects The Big Country in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

‘All Gold Canyon’, based on a Jack London story, features Tom Waits as a singing prospector looking for ‘Mr. Pocket’, whose rendition of ‘Mother Macree’ chases nature away; Sam Dillon is a predatory interloper.

Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’, from a Stewart Edward White story, is a nineteenth-century romance set in an Oregon-bound ox-drawn wagon train, with Bill Heck and Grainger Hines as train masters William ‘Billy’ Knapp and Mr. Arthur. Zoe Kazan and Jefferson Mays play the sister and brother Alice and Gilbert Longabaugh, with Gilbert’s terrier President Pierce and a large cast of settlers, Indians and oxen. This vignette drags a little, though it may have been the most difficult, time-consuming and expensive to make, judging from the Coens’ interview with Terry Gross. Having heard the interview, it is funny to see that the barking dog is principal animal.

Frenchman (Saul Rubinek), Lady (Tyne Daly) and Trapper (Chelcie Ross).

‘The Mortal Remains’ is a gothic ghost story performed as an ensemble piece by five stagecoach passengers. Tyne Daly plays Lady, Jonjo O’Neill and Brendan Gleeson are English and Irish singing ‘bounty hunters’, Saul Rubinek is René, a Frenchman, and Chelcie Ross is a trapper ‘unused to social discourse’. Gleeson’s singing of ‘The Unfortunate Lad’ is a natural beauty; the air works as a theme similar to ‘I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow’ in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Jonjo O’Neill and Brendan Gleeson as English and Irish singing ‘bounty hunters’.

MP is fortunate to have seen this film made for television and currently in limited theatrical release. We hope that it will be rereleased more widely so that those who love Westerns and the Coen brothers’ films in particular will be able to enjoy this entertaining gem on cinema screens everywhere.

‘You seen ‘em, you play ‘em,’ sneered the hard man.

Ballad of Buster Scruggs 2018 U.S. (133 minutes) Netflix. Written, directed and edited (as Roderick James) by Ethan and Joel Coen; music by Carter Burwell; cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel; casting by Ellen Chenoweth; production design by Jess Gonchor; art direction by Steve Christensen; costumes by Mary Zophres.

Goebbels’s dog whistle

A child or unsophisticated viewer might see in Jud Süß, Joseph Goebbels’s notorious anti-Jew costume drama, a fairy tale in which a clever fellow from a funny-looking tribe fools a simple-minded ruler.

Tibi dabo: Süss (Ferdinand Marian) and Duke (Heinrich George) in Jud Süß (1940).

The clever fellow is Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (Ferdinand Marian), a Jewish moneylender. The simple-minded ruler is Karl Alexander (Heinrich George), Duke of Württemberg, an old fool of a military man hankering after The Good Life. The duke, used to people following his orders, is ignorant of government and law. We see the duchy’s coat of arms dissolve into a sign in Hebrew letters on Süss’s shop which a subtitle translates ‘Coins and Jewelry’. Within, a genteel courtier bargains with the dowdy Süss on the duke’s behalf for a suitable gift for the duchess.

A genteel courtier bargains with the ‘devil’ in Jud Süß (1940).

Karl Alexander’s governing council bores him. It does not follow his orders. This makes him all the more delighted to discover that a cleaned-up Süss can make The Good Life happen. Gold coins become whirling ballerinas and Süss’s wheedling words make delightful music in the duke’s ears. Granting this splendid fellow favors seems the least the duke can do, and the duke’s word is law.

Gold coins become whirling ballerinas in Jud Süß (1940).

Better yet, the duke can pay off the debt he creates simply by ‘privatization’— leasing Süss the duchy’s roads to collect tolls—and letting these ridiculous people live within Stuttgart’s city walls (Jews were not permitted to enter German cities at this time). Süss and his right hand Levy (Werner Krauss, who doubles as Rabbi Loew) rub their hands with glee and lose no time in taking full advantage of this bonanza. But Good Germans do not sit idly by.

Süss (Ferdinand Marian) and Levy (Werner Krauss) in Jud Süß (1940).

The story comes from a footnote in history. In the early 1700s, Württemberg’s Duke Karl Alexander retained Oppenheimer, a successful Jewish banker in Frankfurt, as a financial advisor. The duke borrowed heavily from Oppenheimer. He satisfied the debt by granting Oppenheimer control over the collection of Württemberg’s taxes and tolls. This and the banker’s subsequent actions led, after the duke died, to a popular revolt and Oppenheimer’s hanging in 1738.

Good Germans do not stand idly by in Jud Süß (1940).

Jud Süß first appeared in literature in an 1827 novella by the German fairy-tale writer Wilhelm Hauff. In 1925, German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger published Jud Süß (Jew Suess), a novel which explored the complexities of the situation and the banker’s character and was a bestseller in Germany and abroad (translated in English as Power). Banned by the Nazis in 1933, it was the basis for a British costume drama, Jew Süss (1934) directed by Lothar Mendes and released in the US as Power. Conrad Veidt, later Casablanca’s Major Heinrich Strasser, played Süss in the British version.

Karl Alexander (Heinrich George), the Duke of Württemberg in Jud Süß (1940).

But Goebbels, Hitler’s film-obsessed Reichsminister for Propaganda, rubbed his hands like his own Süss and Levy when he saw the chance for a Nazi spin on this tale. By this time the Third Reich controlled Germany’s film industry. Many of the country’s top directors, stars and technicians had fled to Hollywood. Jud Süß was one of three anti-Jew films released in 1940; the two other were Die Rothschilds and Der ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew). David Stewart Hall, author of Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema 1933-1945 (University of California Press, 1969), wrote that these films formed part of a strategy to sell the German public the Nazis’ ‘solution’ of the Jewish Problem.
Goebbels produced Jud Süß and reportedly revised the screenplay. He did not miss a single opportunity to gore the audience with the full range of negative stereotypes for ‘Jews’, to an extent that makes the film difficult viewing today. One can imagine how heavy-handed and even silly this looks. But a German cinema audience primed by eight years of the Nazis’ anti-Jew ideology clearly heard the officially-sanctioned dog whistle energetically and frequently blown.

Good Germans confront Süss (Ferdinand Marian) in Jud Süß (1940).

Like the NRA’s ‘guns don’t kill people’, words and films don’t kill people either. But leaders’ dog whistles pull triggers. Many ‘good Germans’ squared their jaws and fell in line like their movie counterparts. Hall wrote that Jud Süß, banned for viewers under fourteen, provoked some teenagers who saw the movie to assault Jewish citizens. Heinrich Himmler made it mandatory viewing for the military, the SS and the police. Hall cited Joseph Wulf, a German source who wrote from personal experience that the film was shown to ‘Aryan’ populations, ‘especially in the East, when “resettlements” for the death camps were imminent… It is certain that the film was shown in order to incense in this way the “Aryan” population against Jews in the respective countries, and thus to nip in the bud any possible help to them on the part of the people…’

Motley Jewish ‘caravan’ enters Stuttgart city walls in Jud Süß (1940).

Hall also noted in 1969 this film’s strange afterlife in the Middle East, ‘where Arabic-dubbed prints were still circulating in the 1960s’.

Members of an odd-looking tribe in Jud Süß (1940).

Our unsophisticated viewer might scratch his head over Goebbels’s logic. The duke’s subjects do not give him what he wants, so he seeks the help of an outsider, a member of a demonstrably ridiculous, immoral, and weak minority. The outsider and his associates make the duke’s wishes come true and benefit from concessions he grants in return. But rather than hold the duke accountable and restore the status quo ante, the solution is to eliminate the minority.  
 

Jud Süß (Jew Süss) 1940 Germany (95 minutes) Terra Filmkunst/International Historic Films. Directed by Veit Harlan; written by Harlan, Ludwig Metzger and Wolfgang Eberhart Möller; cinematography by Bruno Mondi; music by Wolfgang Zeller; produced by Joseph Goebbels.
 

Cool jazz Othello

Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, John Dankworth and a dozen of their contemporaries play original music in this cool jazz Othello set during an after-hours jam session in London.

Paul Harris as Aurelius Rex (Othello) in Basil Dearden’s All Night Long (1962).

Othello in this story is Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris). Rex is a regal bandleader modelled after Duke Ellington (the musicians play their own music; Rex sits down to In a Sentimental Mood and Mood Indigo on a piano). Rodney ‘Rod’ Hamilton (Richard Attenborough as Roderigo), a wealthy jazz enthusiast, throws a surprise first wedding anniversary party for Rex and his wife Delia Lane (Marti Stevens as Desdemona) in his spacious warehouse loft.

Delia was a jazz singer, but she agreed to give up her career when she married the jealous Rex. American drummer Johnny Cousin (Patrick McGoohan as a tea-smoking Iago) wants to restart his stalled career by cutting a record with Delia on vocals. Johnny’s scheme implicates Cass Michaels (Keith Michell as a Cassio), Rex’s alto sax player, faithful friend and business manager; Rod’s party gives Johnny the excuse to invite booking agent Lou Berger (Bernard Braden) to hear Delia’s ‘comeback’ song. As Johnny tells Cass: ‘Maybe you want to blow sideman for the rest of your life while somebody else takes the bows and the loot. I’m 35 years old and I’m nowhere.’

This Othello retelling is unique in that nearly everyone at the party is a working jazz musician. In addition to the Philip Green’s original theme All Night Long, there are new numbers by Green, Mingus, Brubeck, Dankworth, Tubby Hayes, Kenny Napper and Johnny Scott.

Richard Attenborough hosts Charles Mingus in All Night Long (1962).

A jazz fan’s first treat comes when Rod rushes home to prepare for the party. Mingus is there by himself noodling on his bass with a pipe in one hand against the backdrop of a large wall-sized Abstract Expressionist canvas. Before long, Johnny Scott introduces Scott Free on flute in a set featuring Mingus, Tubby Hayes on vibes, Allan Ganley on drums and Colin Purbrook on piano.

There is fun too. Ganley’s drums find Pop Goes the Weasel as a poncy caterer marches out of the space at the head of four white-jacketed waiters—the last of which flips off the band with a flourish.

John Dankworth and band in Basil Dearden’s All Night Long (1962).

Dankworth and some of his boys show up. ‘Too bad Cleo couldn’t make it,’ Rod says, referring to Dankworth’s wife, the singer Cleo Laine. And then a young Brubeck wanders in by himself when the joint starts to jump. Although Brubeck and the musicians are not always natural actors, they are terrific performers and lose themselves in their music once they get going.  

Dave Brubeck and Allan Ganley, with Ted Scaife on camera in All Night Long (1962).

Brubeck’s first set is his original It’s a Raggy Waltz with Napper on bass; Bert Courtley kicks in on trumpet, Scott on alto sax and Ganley on drums. Cinematographer Ted Scaife is deft at finding ways to shoot musicians; he shoots this set as though he were a band member playing a camera.

 

Rex plays Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood on piano with Keith Christie on trombone, and then he solos a cover of Harold Arlen’s The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea. He later dedicates Mood Indigo to his wife Delia, joined by Scott on alto sax, Ganley on drums and Ray Dempsey on guitar.

Patrick McGoohan as a tea-smoking Iago in All Night Long (1962).

An intense Johnny Cousins drum solo gins up the dramatic tension of the ongoing Othello story in which Delia’s cigarette case of ‘Persian gold with stones on it’, a present from Rex, sits in for Desdemona’s handkerchief.

Marti Stevens does an excellent job singing what is referred to as Delia’s standard All Night Long, as well as the ‘new’ piece I Never Knew I Could Love Anybody Like I’m Loving You (a big band piece by Ray Egan, Roy K. Marsh, Tom Pitts and Paul Whiteman) with Cass on alto sax and Barry Morgan on bongos. 

Marti Stevens’s Desdemona to Keith Michell’s Cassio in All Night Long (1962).

Mingus and Brubeck play a few bars of Mingus’s Peggy’s Blue Skylight before the denouement.

All Night Long is included in the four-DVD Criterion Eclipse collection Basil Dearden’s London Underground with Sapphire (1959), The League of Gentlemen (1960) and Victim (1961).

All Night Long 1962 U.K. (91 minutes) The Rank Organisation. Directed by Basil Dearden; screenplay by Nel King and Peter Achilles; cinematography by Edward Scaife; musical director Philip Green; editing by John D. Guthridge; produced and designed by Michael Relph.

Queen's Counsel

Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) is a British film noir blackmail thriller based on the same criminal offense that sent Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol in 1895.

The drama centers on Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde), a prominent barrister with a gay past who knows he risks his marriage and career if he resolves to bring down a blackmail ring targeting gay men in pre-Beatle London. This write-up contains no spoilers.

Detective Inspector Harris (John Barrie) and Bridie (John Cairney) in Victim (1961).

Detective Inspector Harris (John Barrie) connects incidents involving men of different social backgrounds with blackmailers preying on homosexuals. He is less interested in what adults do amongst themselves in private than in preventing and solving crimes. A law that sends homosexuals to prison practically ‘charters’ blackmailers because it makes it nearly impossible for ‘the unfortunate devils’ to report them to police, he says.
 
This film, the first in Britain to use the word ‘homosexual’, broke ground in 1961 because at that time the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 criminalized homosexual activity between males. This was the same law used to prosecute Oscar Wilde nearly 70 years before. Sex between consenting males aged 21 and older was legalized only six years later by the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (homosexuals would not gain parity with heterosexuals under the law until 2000). The story is set in London’s then-underground gay community; the pub scenes were shot in The Salisbury, once a gay hangout near Leicester Square in London’s theatre district.

Jack ‘Boy’ Barrett (Peter McEnery) and Eddy Stone (Donald Churchill) in Victim (1961).

The action opens with Jack ‘Boy’ Barrett (Peter McEnery) on the run from police. His mate Eddy Stone (Donald Churchill) recovers a package of material for him steps ahead of them. Barrett then desperately tracks down contacts to help him get out of London and flee the country.

Sylvia Syms and Dirk Bogarde as Mr. and Mrs. Melville Farr in Victim (1961).

Blackmailers pressure Barrett. But they hook a bigger fish in Farr, a high profile barrister and newly appointed Queen’s Counsel (QC), whose wife Laura (Sylvia Syms) is the daughter of a prominent judge. Laura knows of Farr’s gay past: he made a commitment to her not to continue it. Farr’s professional skill and nerve also make him a potentially formidable adversary to criminals.

The QC system injected the British class system into the legal profession by the crown granting special privileges to selected barristers which provided that they get the best cases and could charge higher fees. QCs’ black silk gowns distinguish them from other lawyers, whence the term ‘taking silk’ when they are appointed as ‘Silks’. In more recent times, QC appointments are less exclusive and about status more than privilege.

Taking silk in the 1960s would have been a bigger deal than it is now; Farr’s likely next step would have been a judgeship. But being outed as gay at a time when sex between men was a criminal offense would have ended his legal career.

Derren Nesbitt’s Sandy leans on Henry the Comb (Charles Lloyd Pack) in Victim (1961).

Detective Inspector Harris’s ‘unfortunate devils’ have no incentive to work with the police. Harris suspects that Farr may have a closer connection with them than he lets on. But Farr has the same problem as Harris in finding a victim to come forward. Farr also has his wife to consider. His gay past and details about his present are ambiguous; but Laura, a strong, independent character in her own right, is more to Farr than just a ‘beard’ or a career gambit. Bogarde and Syms’s scenes together make these characters real and their story poignant. Farr knows he puts his marriage and career on the line if he decides to take on the blackmailers.

Fraudsters PH (Hilton Edwards) and Mickey (David Evans) in Victim (1961).

There are many smaller roles that make this film fun to watch, such as Dennis Price (Kind Hearts and Coronets) as the actor ‘Tiny’ Calloway; the fraudster team PH and Mickey (Hilton Edwards and David Evans), Henry the Comb (Charles Lloyd Pack), Madge (Mavis Villiers) and the barman (Frank Pettit) among Salisbury regulars; and bookshop owner Harold Doe (Norman Bird) and his prickly assistant Miss Benham (Margaret Diamond). Career movie bad guy Derren Nesbitt is ideal as the smirking young blackmailer Sandy.

Derren Nesbitt’s smirking blackmailer Sandy in Victim (1961).

And screenwriters Janet Green and John McCormick give Detective Inspector Harris a reliable foil in his Scots assistant Bridie (John Cairney) who scratches his head over what strikes him as gay men’s patent ‘abnormality’.

Harris replies that ‘if the law punished every abnormality, we’d be kept very busy.’

‘Even so, sir, this law was made for a very good reason. If this law were changed, other weaknesses would follow.’

‘I can see you’re a true Puritan, Bridie.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with that, sir.’

‘Well now, there was a time when that was against the law, you know,’ Harris said. (Puritans forced to flee England were among the first settlers of England’s North American colonies.)

Sylvia Syms and Dirk Bogarde as Mr. and Mrs. Melville Farr in Victim (1961).

Victim is included in the four-DVD Criterion Eclipse collection Basil Dearden’s London Underground with Sapphire (1959), The League of Gentlemen (1960) and All Night Long (1962).

Victim 1961 U.K. (100 minutes) Allied Film Makers. Directed by Basil Dearden; screenplay by Janet Green and John McCormick; cinematography by Otto Heller; edited by John D. Guthridge; music by Philip Green; art direction by Alex Vetchinsky; produced by Michael Relph.