Sullivan's Travels (1942)

****
Country: US
Director: Preston Sturges

When making out my ballot for the Comedy Countdown at Wonders in the Dark, the biggest dilemma I faced was deciding just what was a comedy and what wasn't. As I worked on the list, several films whose overall tone I was uncertain of fell off the list. A few of these eventually found their way back on. One of the films I went back and forth on was Sullivan's Travels, which I eventually placed at #5, right after my two favorite silent comedies—one by Chaplin and one by Keaton—and my two favorite screwball comedies. The dilemma I faced in classifying Sullivan's Travels is that it doesn't fit comfortably into either the "comedy/ha-ha" or the "comedy/not tragedy" modes of humor. Tonally, the film is a real paradox, a movie where gravity and humor exist side-by-side, a tragicomic picture whose subject is comedy and whose premise is a serious one—that a movie which aims to do no more than make people laugh is as important as one that makes them think.

Joel McCrea plays film director John L. Sullivan, Hollywood's Caliph of Comedy, who decides that he's tired of making frivolous movies, no matter how popular they are, and wants to direct a film that makes a serious statement about contemporary socioeconomic conditions. Because Sullivan has no first-hand experience of the grinding poverty he wants to depict onscreen, he decides to research the subject by disguising himself as a tramp and going out on the road. No matter where he heads, though, circumstances invariably take him right back to Hollywood. During one of these false starts he acquires a traveling companion, an aspiring actress who has given up on Hollywood and is on her way back to Kansas when she meets Sullivan at a diner. (Called simply The Girl, she is played by Veronica Lake in her first starring role. She was never again this natural or this good.) It's fully two-thirds of the way through the film before the pair finally manage to get on the road and gather the knowledge Sullivan needs to give his new picture authenticity. When he decides to go back on the road one last time alone, the film's comic tone, already sobered by what he and The Girl have experienced of life on the skids, turns tragic.

Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake at a rescue mission in the "Poverty Montage"

Preston Sturges's film career was one of the most curious of all the major American directors of the studio era. A slow decade-long rise during the 1930s as a sceenwriter led to overnight success and a screenwriting Oscar in 1940 for his first film as director, the political satire The Great McGinty. (Could that be Sturges's own Oscar for McGinty in one of the montage scenes near the end of Sullivan's Travels?) Several years at Paramount as one of the most highly regarded directors in Hollywood followed, then a sudden and precipitous decline in the mid-1940s and years of obscurity before being rediscovered by auteurist critics like Andrew Sarris, who called him "the complete writer-director . . . the brightest comedy director of the forties."

Sullivan's Travels is Preston Sturges's masterpiece, yet in many ways it is his least typical film (if you discount The Great Moment, his one failure during his heyday, a film he disowned after Paramount re-edited it). Sturges abhorred homiletic message-mongering and pomposity of any kind, skewering them in his films as often and as acerbically as possible. The French critic André Bazin went so far as to call him "the anti-Capra" for his penchant for turning humor into irony, yet Sullivan's Travels is the closest he ever came to a Capraesque irony-free message movie. In seeking to answer the question What is the true value of comedy in film? Sturges cannily devises a plot in which he can have his cake and eat it too, in which he can present the message that in movies, messages are less important than humor—an anti-message-movie message movie.

To counterbalance the seriousness of the film, Sturges includes a fair amount of the broad physical comedy he delighted in—a fast-motion car chase, a sequence shot like a silent comedy of Sullivan escaping from a predatory farm widow by climbing out of his second-floor bedroom window, another speeded-up scene with The Girl racing across the studio lot in period costume bumping into everyone in sight, and even Sturges's beloved pratfalls with McCrea and Lake falling into Sullivan's swimming pool not once but twice in less than five minutes. "Like most effective comedy directors, he depended more on the pacing of action and dialogue than on visual texture and composition," Andrew Sarris writes of Sturges, and it's true that Sullivan's Travels is filled with the long takes Sturges favored so as not to distract from his brilliantly crafted dialogue. There's no camera or editing virtuosity here. As usual, Sturges prefers to plant his camera in front of the actors or have it follow them as they walk, and simply observe as that witty, articulate dialogue pours forth.

Still, as amusing and seductively clever as these comic sections are, it's the quietly haunting serious passages in the last half hour of Sullivan's Travels—scenes that for once do rely on visual texture and composition, on artful camerawork and editing—that are more likely to stay with you. After Sullivan and The Girl finally manage to escape Hollywood on a freight train, their experience living homeless and penniless is shown in a tour de force nine-minute long wordless "Poverty Montage" that is remarkable for both its grimness and its visual fluidity. Here Sturges goes beyond anything in a Capra movie, taking us along with Sullivan and The Girl as they immerse themselves in the bleak existence of the dysfunctional and dispossessed. Sullivan's last road trip contains another bravura wordless sequence, a nocturnal montage that concludes in a deserted rail yard, a sequence that wouldn't look out of place in a film noir from later in the decade. (The cinematographer is the great John F. Seitz, who shot several of Billy Wilder's most noirish films including Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd.) And the entire last section of the film, when the amnesiac Sullivan is jailed in a Southern chain-gang camp that might have served as a model for the one in Cool Hand Luke, is steeped in a visual atmosphere of swamp water, Spanish moss, degrading physical brutality, and almost nightmarish disconnection from the rest of the world. Nothing like these passages is found anywhere else in the films of Sturges.

In John L. Sullivan, Sturges hands Joel McCrea the role of his career. A naturalistic actor in the vein of James Stewart and Henry Fonda, McCrea is today probably best remembered for the many Westerns he made. His stoic, humorless, at times even priggish screen persona made him a natural for Westerns, but he seldom appeared in comedy films. Sturges, however, saw that in the right context McCrea's humorlessness was its own kind of funny and was able to tap into McCrea's deadpan style in the two comedies they made together (the other is The Palm Beach Story, which I wrote on a few months ago) to bring the film back down to Earth when the outlandish situations Sturges concocted and the surrounding gallery of oddball characters threatened to unmoor it. McCrea's seriousness might make him seem a quirky choice to play a successful director of comedy films. But this is a deliberate and brilliant piece of casting, and McCrea is utterly believable as the frustrated, serious-minded director of assembly-line studio movies who chafes at giving the public what they want rather than what is good for them, and longs to direct something of greater importance than the fluff that has made him rich and famous. 

The catch in Sullivan's "deep dish" aspirations is that, insulated from the real world by his wealth and his job in a movie fantasy factory, he has little grasp of the lives or problems of ordinary people. When he attends a movie with that sexually aggressive farm widow, he seems bewildered, as if he has never before seen a movie in a real theater with a real audience and has no idea what these people hope to gain from the experience. This is repeated later in the film when Sullivan, now an amnesiac inmate, attends a movie with his fellow prisoners in a black church. The movie is the Disney cartoon "Playful Pluto" (the one where flypaper gets stuck on Pluto and he can't get it off), and the reaction of the prisoners and the impoverished black congregation to the humor in the cartoon transforms Sullivan. When he finds himself responding to Pluto's antics with laughter, he's caught off-guard. His face suddenly freezes in disbelief, he looks around him at all the other people laughing uproariously, then turns to the convict next to him and asks, "Hey. Am I laughing?"

Joel McCrea (left) and Sturges regular Jimmy Conlin at the movies

This is the key scene in the picture, the one and only time in the film we see Sullivan laugh. It's an epiphanic moment that, when he is finally restored to his rightful place in Hollywood, causes him to abandon plans for a serious motion picture and make the film's famous declaration of principles in favor of comedy: "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing."

This post was written as part of the ongoing Comedy Countdown at Wonders in the Dark, where Sullivan's Travels came in at #10. Be sure to check out all the great films being covered in the countdown, which runs through late December 2012.

They Shall Have Music

“They Shall Have Music” (1939) is an odd but endearing mixture of juvenile delinquency drama and classical music. It’s a Samuel Goldwyn production and watching it, one can see the footprints of two 1937 films, his own production of “Dead End” and Universal’s monster hit “100 Men and a Girl.”

“Dead End” had been a huge hit for Goldwyn, and he was eager to replicate its success.  Ever since his big budget musical smorgasbord “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938), Goldwyn had wanted to put the violinist Jascha Heifetz, considered one of the century’s finest musicians, in the movies, but couldn’t find the right project.

I’m just surmising here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Goldwyn examined the grosses of “100 Men and a Girl”, which deals with Deanna Durbin and her ceaseless attempts to have Leopold Stokowski conduct an orchestra of musicians put out of work by the Depression. What could work for Stokowski could easily work for Heifetz.

Put Heifetz in a slum setting with underprivileged youth, include lots of classical music and watch the profits roll in.

Alas, “They Shall Have Music” was roasted by the critics and proved one of Goldwyn’s biggest bombs. It’s schmaltz, to be sure, but the music is wonderful and like so many movies of the era, it moves along and there’s lots of memorable sequences to make this well worth watching.

The film is centered on a music school for slum children, run by Professor Lawson (Walter Brennan) and his daughter Ann (Andrea Leeds, one year before her self-imposed retirement from films). The school is constantly scraping for money, and is continually one step ahead of the creditors, especially Mr. Flowers (Porter Hall, at his most obnoxious).

 

Frankie (Gene Reynolds) is basically a good kid who discovers the power of music when he finds some discarded tickets to a Heifetz concert. Thinking Heifetz is some sort of magician, instead he’s transfixed by the sight and sound of Heifetz performing the “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” by Saint-Saens. For those of us who are film music fans, we get the added pleasure of seeing Alfred Newman play the conductor in this piece, and he looks very natty in his white-trousered conductor threads.

 

Frankie finds a violin in his basement and takes lesson at the Lawson’s school. But the school is on the brink of foreclosure, and Frankie hatches the idea of having Heifetz perform at the school’s concert. With the determination of Deanna Durbin stalking Stokowski, Frankie, through a series of adventures, attracts the attention of Heifetz to the concert.

Playing a similar idealistic role in “Dead End” Joel McCrea is back as the love interest to Ann. I’m very fond of Joel McCrea, but this may be one of his most colorless roles. He can’t do a thing with it, and it’s not his fault.

Marjorie Main plays Frankie’s mom, and she’s a far different mother than her shattering scene in “Dead End.” Frankie runs away from his abusive father, but his mom is very supportive of her son.

 

Porter Hall is at his most despicable here, even more so than shooting Gary Cooper’s Wild Bill Hickok in the back in “The Plainsman” (1936). In “They Shall Have Music” Hall tries to take back the kid’s instruments, even as they are onstage for the concert! He doesn’t even wait for the concert to be over. The scenes leading up to the concert are very entertaining, as the neighborhood mothers stand firm in front of the school’s entrance, blocking the police and re-possessors from entering the building.

For Heifetz fans, the film is a joy. He gets five solos in the film, and it’s a pleasure to watch a film like this with minimal cutting so we can concentrate on the music. The finale finds him performing the final movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto accompanied by the school orchestra. Said orchestra members are played by The Pete Meremblum California Junior Symphony Orchestra, a group made up of young musicians. I have a dim memory of reading somewhere that, outside of his film duties, Alfred Newman was one of the orchestra’s conductors, but I can’t find the citation in any of my books. .

 

 Heifetz was no stranger to Hollywood. An earlier Hollywood connection was his 1928 marriage to actress Florence Vidor, ex-wife of the director King Vidor. Later, on he would commission glorious violin concertos from Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Miklos Rozsa.

Alfred Newman was nominated for his music director duties here in the Best Score category. It was one of Newman’s four nominations that year. His other nomination in the Best Score category was for “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and in the Best Original Score category he was nominated for “The Rains Came” and “Wuthering Heights.”

I think the Best Score category was for scores that were adaptations of pre-existing music, but that doesn’t explain the nomination for the Hunchback or Korngold’s nomination for “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex”, both of which are substantially original scores. To further muddy the waters, Aaron Copland’s score for “Of Mice and Men” was nominated twice, once in both categories. Strange are the ways of the Academy Awards. (Newman lost that year to “Stagecoach” in the Best Score category).

I watched “They Shall Have Music” on a VHS tape, and with the news that the Samuel Goldwyn film catalog will be released on DVD and Blu Ray next year, this film may be one I would gladly update for. It’s corny, to be sure, but its heart is in the right place and the music can’t be beat. Just lower your expectations if you’re a Joel McCrea fan.

CMBA Comedy Classics Blogathon: The Palm Beach Story (1942)

****
Country: US
Director: Preston Sturges

"Sex always has something to do with it," Geraldine Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) says in exasperation to her husband Thomas (Joel McCrea) in writer-director Preston Sturges's 1942 screwball comedy The Palm Beach Story. She is trying to explain to the suspicious Thomas why she has just been given several hundred dollars by a perfect stranger, an elderly millionaire calling himself the Wienie King of Texas, who took pity on her after learning she was about to be evicted from their Park Avenue apartment for not being able to pay the rent. Thomas is having a hard time believing there isn't more to the unlikely tale than Geraldine is telling, and she has been trying to convince him that nothing improper happened. Like The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, those other audacious Sturges sex comedies of the 1940s, The Palm Beach Story pushed the strictures of the Production Code to the limit with its sexual innuendo. But then it had to, for the entire film might have been designed to illustrate the truth of Gerry's observation that the tangled relations between men and women are always in some way governed by sex.

The film begins with a mystery. In a silent, stop-and-start slapstick sequence, we see Claudette Colbert rushing out of an apartment in a wedding dress. At the same time, she appears—through the cinematic sleight of hand of crosscutting—to be locked in a closet in the apartment, bound and gagged, while a maid has hysterics and finally faints at the sight of the wedding-gowned Colbert. The meaning of this paradoxical sequence won't be revealed until the last scene in the picture, when it becomes the device used to resolve the plot's multiple sexual entanglements. By that point, though, so much else has happened in this frantically paced movie that most viewers probably won't even remember its puzzling opening.

Flash forward five years. The former bride and groom, Tom and Gerry, are having serious problems in the two areas this movie dwells on—money and sex. Tom, an engineer-inventor, is having trouble raising the capital to finance a demonstration project of his new invention, a stressed-cable mesh airport stretched across skyscraper rooftops. (Is this idea intended to be as loony as it sounds?) Not only are the couple broke and about to become homeless, but the pizazz has gone from their marriage—at least for Gerry, who tells Tom, "We don't love each other the way we used to." When Tom seems reluctant to believe her story about the Wienie King's largesse, it's the last straw and she heads for Palm Beach to get a divorce. Tom, however, isn't ready to give up on the marriage and takes off in pursuit to change Gerry's mind.

On her journey to Palm Beach, Gerry takes the viewer along on what can only be described as a frenetic spree, with one hilarious episode after another coming at a furious pace. Gerry starts her journey with no money, no luggage, no train ticket, nothing but the clothes she is wearing, and before long she has lost even those, showing up for breakfast in the train's dining car wearing a Pullman blanket for a skirt and the top of borrowed pajamas as a blouse, with the pajama pants wrapped around her head as an impromptu turban. This gal is nothing if not inventive. She manages to inveigle her way aboard a Florida-bound train, where she is adopted as a female mascot by the wacky Ale and Quail club, hooks up with a millionaire, J. D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), acquires an expensive new designer wardrobe and a diamond and ruby bracelet, is wined and dined aboard Hackensacker's yacht for the final leg of the journey, and arrives in Palm Beach engaged to him.

Gerry being serenaded by the Ale and Quail Club

The plot of The Palm Beach Story seems not so much to unfold deliberately as to be improvised as we watch the film. From an initial premise, the picture keeps evolving in unexpected ways, snowballing from one episode to the next, not with any conventional causality, but with its own delirious narrative momentum. If you haven't seen this movie before, trying to predict what will come next is a futile exercise that will only end up keeping you flummoxed. All you can do is surrender yourself to the frenzy of Sturges's relentless comic invention and hold on to your seat for the duration of the ride. One farcical situation seems to follow another spontaneously, in the tradition of sublime narrative anarchy found in the great silent comedies, the Marx Brothers, and the zaniest screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby. It's only in retrospect that it becomes apparent how carefully engineered the entire edifice is, held together by its own self-generated narrative logic.

In addition to its hilarious situations and frequent physical comedy ("I happen to love pratfalls," Sturges writes in his autobiography), the film is propelled by its clever dialogue and its characters. Sturges, who began as a playwright and later turned to writing movies, knew the value of dialogue and loaded the picture with rapid-fire conversations generously spiked with quips, bons mots, and witticisms. And as the writer as well as the director of the picture, he made sure to get the maximum effect from his expertly crafted dialogue, using long takes and being careful to avoid distracting the viewer with gratuitous directorial flourishes. This, of course, requires the expertise of actors perfectly attuned to Sturges's approach, and in The Palm Beach Story he has assembled a cast that might contain some surprising choices but would be difficult to improve on.

Preston Sturges flanked by his stars

As well as his regular character actors like William Demarest and Franklin Pangborn in smaller roles, mostly as members of the Ale and Quail club, Sturges casts Rudy Vallee as the stodgy, sexually naive millionaire Gerry becomes engaged to. The colorless and rather enervated Vallee is an inspired choice for the boyish J. D. Hackensacker III. Standing in complete contrast is his unconventional sister, the manic, wisecracking Maude, the Princess Centimillia. Married and divorced five times and clearly possessing a powerful sex drive, Maude sets her sights on Tom, by this point masquerading as Gerry's brother, the moment she sees him. Mary Astor, cast against melodramatic type, plays the man-hungry Princess with a superb comic flair I haven't seen her display in any other picture.

As the on-again, off-again Tom and Gerry, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert are a great team. He's single-minded, humorless, and sexually possessive, the straight man to Colbert's Gerry. It's a great role for the usually laid-back McCrea, who plays Tom with the same intensity as he played the movie director in Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, released earlier the same year. But the film really belongs to Claudette Colbert. Her Gerry is a woman with a clear and realistic view of herself and others, a woman who makes no bones about her mercenary nature, a great improviser who lives by her wits, using in a benign way what Sturges has described as "the aristocracy of beauty"—in other words, the power of her sexual attractiveness to men—to get by.

Yet there doesn't seem to be anything manipulative about her, beyond the fact that she knows what she wants and is uncommonly shrewd about how to get it. For Gerry, her sex appeal is merely a practical way to navigate her way through life. She's no guileful seductress; she doesn't go out of her way to vamp men. Nor is she a child-woman, playing dumb and pandering to helpless little-girl male fantasies, but a mature, intelligent, and unaffected woman. When men respond to her attractiveness, she simply goes along with it as a serendipitous opportunity.

This happens time and again—with the Wienie King, the cab driver who takes a shine to her and drives her to Penn Station for free, the rowdy Ale and Quail Club, J. D. Hackensacker. It is exactly this quality in Gerry's personality, her guilt-free willingness to use her natural advantages to get results, that maddens Tom and arouses his jealously. I can't think of a more appropriate choice to play such an original character as Gerry—with her combination of femininity, brains, and playfulness—than Claudette Colbert. For me it's her best role and her most delightful performance.

As a director, Sturges had a brief but illustrious run. Remarkably, he produced his two greatest films in the space of just one year: Sullivan's Travels, which makes a serious statement on the subject of humor, and The Palm Beach Story, which takes the serious subject of sex and makes it as funny as it's ever been in a movie.

This post is part of the Comedy Classics Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. The event runs January 22-27. For a complete list of participants and to learn more, click here.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 4

An Elegy for the Western

The fifth American masterpiece of 1962 is another Western, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (which I wrote about in Part 3 of this series), this is a movie that emphasizes theme more strongly than the traditional Western, and that theme is strikingly revealed in its very first scenes. The movie opens with Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) ambling down what seems to be the typical street of a town in a typical Western movie. But Judd, gazing intently all around him, is clearly puzzled, for something is wrong here. The street is deserted; there is no traffic on it, no horses, wagons, or people. The sidewalks, though, are crowded with people expectantly watching the street, and the buildings are festooned with flags and bunting. It almost looks as though the whole town has turned out to welcome Judd.

Suddenly a uniformed policeman hurries up to Judd, shouting, "Get out of the way, old man. Can't you see you're in the way?" And a few moments later a camel bearing a cowboy comes thundering down the street, followed by several more cowboys on horses. The circus—or in this case, the Wild West show—is in town and Judd has just witnessed the end of a race between a camel rider from the show and a group of local cowboys. When Judd is then nearly run down by a primitive automobile, the point of the movie becomes clear: This is not a movie glorifying the Old West, but a lament for its passing; what for Judd is a way of life has become for everyone else a sideshow. Ride the High Country is not just another Western, but an elegy for a movie genre that has lost its relevance.

Judd, a retired U. S. Marshall, has come to town to do a job. He has been hired by the local bank to travel to Coarsegold, a mining camp in the Sierras and bring back $250,000 worth of gold bullion from the miners there. But he needs help to do that, and he finds it in an unexpected place. While visiting the Wild West show, he encounters an old friend, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who is performing as a sort of imitation-Buffalo Bill Cody sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid. Westrum volunteers himself and his young friend and fellow performer (he was the camel rider) Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to accompany Judd on his mission to the Gold Country.

When we next see Westrum, he looks completely different. Gone are the long hair and beard he wore in the show. Has he gotten a haircut and shaved? Or, which seems more likely, has he simply shed a long-haired wig and false beard along with the elaborate buckskin costume and stage make-up he was obviously wearing when we first saw him? Either way Westrum's whole Wild West persona was plainly just a disguise used while performing as part of a nostalgic Wild West fantasy. This pretense seems an appropriate touch, for it is quickly revealed that Westrum and Longtree plan to rob Judd on the way back and take the gold for themselves.

Within fifteen minutes of the first scene, the men are on their way. From that point on, the movie follows a classic structure dating back to Greek mythology: the two-part, mirror-image division into a journey in and a journey back, like Orpheus descending to hell and returning. When the men spend their first night in the barn of a ranch, they unexpectedly pick up a traveling companion, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), the ranch owner's young daughter, who wants to escape her puritanical and overly protective father to join her fiancé, who lives near Coarsegold.

Arrival in Coarsegold reveals that nothing is what the travelers anticipated. It is clear that Elsa's fiancé and his brothers are a family of lascivious degenerates who plan to share Elsa and use her essentially as a sex slave. Coarsegold itself is a hellish place, a tent city run by the owner/madam of the local saloon/brothel, Kate, and her crony, the alcoholic Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan, who is terrific). And the expected $250,000 in gold turns out to be only $11,000 worth.

The "marriage" ceremony the drunken judge performs for Elsa is a surreal farce, taking place in the scarlet-walled saloon/brothel with Kate as Elsa's "bridesmaid" and the prostitutes as her "flower girls." Judd, Westrum, and young Longtree (who has developed a crush on Elsa) cannot allow the sham marriage to be consummated. Judd coerces the judge into invalidating the marriage, and the three men and Elsa leave Coarsegold, pursued by the angry bridegroom and his brothers, and begin their return journey, passing the same landmarks they had encountered previously.

When Westrum and Longtree make their move to seize the gold, Judd overpowers them and now has to contend not only with the vengeful pursuers but with two prisoners as well. After one shootout with the pursuers, they manage to make it back to Elsa's ranch, only to find that the surviving pursuers have reached it first, killed Elsa's father, and are waiting to ambush them. Westrum uses his sharpshooting skills to help Judd overcome the remaining pursuers and redeems himself by promising the dying Judd, who has been wounded in the shootout, to complete their mission and deliver the gold to the bank.

Ride the High Country was hardly the first anti-romantic Western. The demythologizing of the Old West in movies began at least as early as 1948 with John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (although admittedly that film is set in Mexico). This reappraisal of the genre continued with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns and the Budd Boeticcher-Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s. These were tough, cynical movies whose main characters were no longer unambiguously heroic, but had paradoxical and sometimes outright undesirable qualities and motivations. Happy endings in which unequivocally good people defeated unequivocally evil people were no longer a given of the genre. Desirable outcomes, if they occurred at all, came at a high price and were balanced by sacrifice and loss. And sometimes, even when bad people were overcome, the victory was a hollow one that left an unpleasant aftertaste.

In John Ford's Westerns most people are decent and peaceful. Ford doesn't deny the existence of villains like Liberty Valance who seek to victimize these decent people, but the villains are the exception and are subject to control by the collective resistance of ordinary people and the heroic actions of extraordinary people like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Mann and Boetticher Westerns begin to blur the distinction between hero and villain, with each of these opposing forces sharing some traits of the other. The villains have their own warped code of honor while the heroes are ruthlessly dedicated to achieving their aims at any cost, and ordinary people are often unfortunately caught in the middle of this conflict.

In Ride the High Country Peckinpah takes the concept of the Old West as idealized myth and gives it his own slant. He darkens the Western genre even further than Mann and Boetticher by superimposing on the traditional formulas of the John Ford-style Western his own unrelentingly bleak view of humanity, in which people are almost without exception driven by their most ignoble qualities. His characters are motivated by greed, revenge, the desire to exploit others, or just plain self-interest rather than conscience, a sense of right and wrong, or a belief in justice, as Ford's characters are. He doesn't seem to be denying altogether that idealistic people and selfless actions existed in the Old West, but rather that they were the rare exception. In Ride the High Country there are precious few morally neutral people. Judd and the innocent Elsa are the only unalloyed forces of honor and truth in the entire movie. Everyone else is, if not openly corrupt, then false and covertly corrupt. And Peckinpah seems to be saying that the force of their corruption makes them juggernauts able to smash nearly everything in their path.

Peckinpah also seems to be suggesting that in addition to the baser human motivations, time and change are destructive forces as well, a theme he further explored in 1969's The Wild Bunch. Judd is a man out of time, a noble but quixotic figure whose adherence to a code of honor makes him an anachronism. In his Westerns Peckinpah's brand of cynicism is expressed in the belief that any potential for good in the Old West was swept aside by the passage of time before it was able to be fulfilled. This strikes me as the cynicism not of the born nihilist, but of the disillusioned idealist. Perhaps that explains the one bit of hope he allows in this dismal view of humanity: the rare instance when someone like Westrum is inspired by the example and self-sacrifice of someone like Judd to undergo a transformation for the better and, at least temporarily, master his most unethical instincts and impulses.

---

Next week I'll be concluding my series on the year 1962 in American films.

Ride the High Country

“Ride the High Country” (1962) is one of the greatest westerns ever made, which means it’s also one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s a glorious film that works on many levels, and is arguably director Sam Peckinpah’s best film.

Peckinpah is one of those directors I’ve always admired more than liked. “The Wild Bunch” (1969) is an undoubted masterpiece, but it’s not an easy film to sit though. “Major Dundee” (1965) has some marvelous visuals, but a disjointed narrative, even in the restored version which recently came out on DVD.

A maverick personality, in the best and worst senses, Peckinpah was in many ways his own worst enemy. But that was the future.

“Ride the High Country” is a beautifully elegiac film, teaming two legendary stars, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott for the first and only time. This film gives Scott a wonderful final screen appearance that ranks up there with the final films of John Wayne in “The Shootist” (1976) and Humphrey Bogart in “The Harder They Fall” (1956) as worthy screen goodbyes.

Joel McCrea plays Steve Judd, an ex-lawman who is hired to transport gold from the mines. Needing help, he runs into his old partner Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) to help him. Gil brings along his partner Heck (Ron Starr, don’t know what ever happened to him) to help. It’s established early on that while Gil and Steve are friends, there’s some tenseness there. Judd is a straight shooter, interested in living a dignified, honest life while Gil has more than a touch of larceny in him. Indeed, he and Heck plan to steal the gold for themselves and make off with it.

On their way to the mines they stop off at a ranch owned by a fundamentalist, Bible thumping rancher (R.G. Armstrong) whose daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley, in her film debut) is itching to get clear of the ranch. She leaves the ranch and asks the three to escort her to the gold camp where her fiancé Billy Hammond (James Drury) is mining with his brothers.

The Hammond brothers are pure Peckinpah, dirty and grimy and with the morals of alley cats. They’re played by later Peckinpah favorites Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones. The mining camp is a dinghy, depressing place, but a touch of beauty and grace emerges during Billy and Elsa’s wedding. On their wedding night, Billy gets drunk and passes out and the Hammond brothers decide to take his place in the wedding bed. Her screams bring Steve, Gil and Heck to her rescue, and after a tense stand-off they elect to bring her back with them, along with the latest gold shipment.

The next day the Hammond brothers take after them to bring Elsa back. Gil and Heck steal the gold but Judd stops them, and ties them up. He tries to make his way back through the high country with prisoners in tow and the Hammond brothers right on his trail, with blood lust in their hearts and guns drawn ready to kill.

Like “The Wild Bunch,” “Ride the High Country” deals with western men whose time has passed. The west they’ve known is gone, replaced by a town teeming with automobiles, a Chinese restaurant, and a carnival featuring a race between a camel and a horse. Judd is ordered to clear the streets by the local police, who are dressed like the Keystone Cops.

Judd’s time is over but he’s determined to live the rest of his life with the dignity he’s always possessed. As such, Steve Judd is the perfect role for Joel McCrea.

McCrea was a Hollywood anomaly, a good, decent man. Married to actress Frances Dee for more than 50 years, he lived a quiet life with his family entirely devoid of scandal or rumor. He starred in all kinds of movies in the 1930s and 1940s, including some of Preston Sturges’ best-loved films, but after World War II he made almost exclusively westerns. When not making movies, he was a working rancher, and, as such, was an authentic cowboy.

His career paralleled co-star Randolph Scott’s in a few ways. Like McCrea, Scott appeared in everything from comedies to musicals, to westerns to melodramas in the 1930 and 1940s but after World War II he made nothing but westerns. They both liked making westerns, they knew their fans liked them in westerns, and since both actors were consistent money makers, why rock the boat?

Beginning in 1955 with “Seven Men From Now”, Randolph Scott made a series of tight, B westerns directed by Budd Boetticher that are marvels of tightness, speed, action and Freudian overtones. Check out “The Tall T” (1957) sometime if you ever get the chance.

“Ride the High Country” is the perfect screen coda for them. Their time has come but Steve and Gil, like McCrea and Scott, are going to go out in a blaze of glory. Composer George Bassman contributes a lovely theme which is a perfect complement to the autumnal aspects of the story.

There’s a terrific shoot out scene in the rocks where no music is played, but the lonely sound of the wind makes for an equally effective soundtrack. The final shoot out at the ranch is one of the most melancholy, yet satisfying, in all westerns. Steve’s final words with Gil are poetic in their simplicity and are matched by the haunting final image.

McCrea made three or four cameo in later films and one final film “Mustang Country” (1976). Scott decided to call it quits. A shrewd businessman, he invested wisely and retired a wealthy man. But their films still play and connect with audiences who respond to the values their characters espoused. We will never see their likes again.

Rating for “Ride the High Country”: Four stars.

The Great Moment

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a movie about pretty much every topic.

Interested in the creation of the first news wire service, Reuters? Check out “A Dispatch from Reuters” (1940) starring Edward G. Robinson in a wonderful performance and a terrific Max Steiner score. I hope that title is part of the rumored Edward G. Robinson DVD box set from Warner Home Video.

Interested in the man who found a cure for syphilis? Check out “Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet” (1940) starring Edward G. Robinson in a wonderful performance and a terrific Max Steiner score. I hope that title is part of the rumored Edward G. Robinson DVD box set from Warner Home Video.

But I’m repeating myself.

Those interested in the early days of dentistry and the story of the man who created a working anesthesia for dental surgery will likely enjoy “The Great Moment” (1944). For the rest of us it’s pretty rough going, despite a strong cast and the writing/directing of the usually reliable Preston Sturges. It’s a rare misfire for Sturges, though it may not have been entirely his fault.

Sturges’ favorite leading man Joel McCrea stars as WTG Morton, a dentist experimenting with different types of ethers in hopes of finding one that will knock the person out so surgery can commence without pain. Pretty serious stuff here, though Sturges manages to include some comedy sequences here, mainly Morton’s first unsuccessful attempts at applying the ether or accidentally inhaling too much ether, which causes his wife (Betty Field) to think he’s been drinking too much.

Sturges claimed the film was taken out of his hands and re-cut, which makes sense because some scenes fade away into nothingness and there’s an odd flashback structure which is never resolved. Sturges was coming off an amazing, unbroken stream of hits which made him the darling of audiences and critics everywhere, but he’s on shaky ground here. Maybe he was reined in by the historical aspects of the story?

Highlights include William Demarest, who is on hand as Morton’s first successful ether-induced patient, and what would a Preston Sturges film be without his presence? Grady Sutton (the immortal Ogg Oggilby from “The Bank Dick”) has a hilarious scene when he goes into fits of uncontrollable laughter during a medical experiment.

All in all though, “The Great Moment” is an odd film, not particularly dramatic when it needs to be and not wholly funny in its comedy scenes.

One oddball aspect of “The Great Moment” is that it contains what I think is the only film representation of our 14th president, Franklin Pierce. Even odder is that he’s portrayed by Porter Hall. I’ve always pictured Pierce as tall and lanky but Hall is short and stubby. Hall was a well-known character actor but was best known for causing boos and hisses across the countryside in 1936 when he played Jack McCall, who shot Wild Bill Hickock (Gary Cooper) in the back in the enormously successful western “The Plainsman” (1936).

How many actors can claim to play one of the greatest cowards in western history and one of our worst presidents?

Rating for “The Great Moment”: Two stars.

The Palm Beach Story

“The Palm Beach Story” (1942) is another delightful piece of cinema courtesy of the great writer/director Preston Sturges. Eccentricity is the norm here, and the film boasts so many delightful sequences, actors and quotable lines that I barely know where to begin. (Word of caution: I’ll be using the word eccentric a lot in this review.)

Geraldine Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) is love with her inventor husband Tom (Joel McCrea), but he cant’ find financing for his inventions, they are behind in their rent, and she yearns for the finer things in life. Showing up to look at their apartment is a bizarre little man with a big hat and a walking stick who calls himself The Wienie King (Robert Dudley, pictured), an eccentric millionaire who takes a great liking to Geraldine and pays off their back rent and gives her some money to get them back on their feet.

Tom is suspicious of their unforeseen windfall and fights with Geraldine. Even though they are still very much in love, they decide to divorce. Geraldine takes off for Palm Beach by train where she is made mascot of a group of eccentric men called the Ale and Quail Club, who think nothing of using their private railroad car as target practice. Ale and Quail Club members include many familiar faces including William Demarest, Jack Norton, Robert Greig, Roscoe Ates, Dewey Robinson and Chester Conklin (contemporary audiences know him as the old-time fire chief who refuses to give up his horse-drawn fire wagons in the Three Stooges short “Flat Foot Stooges” (1938).

Escaping the insanity of the Ale and Quail Club, she meets John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), one of the world’s richest men, when she breaks his glasses (twice) after stepping on his face to climb into an upper berth of the railroad car.

Vallee is hilarious as Hackensacker and it ushered in a whole new career for him after his popularity waned from strong popularity in the early 1930s. (He initiated the singing into the megaphone gimmick). Seemingly oblivious to the insanity around him, he takes Geraldine to Palm Beach where he introduces her to his sister, the five-times divorced Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor) and her latest conquest Toto (Sig Arno), who doesn’t speak a word of English.

Even though Geraldine is seeking a divorce, she still believes in Tom and his inventions and seeks to have Hackensacker loan her $99,000 for his inventions.

In the meantime, Tom has met the Wienie King who convinces him he is still in love with his wife and gives him the funds to fly down to Palm Beach and bring her back. He meets her in Palm Beach while she is with Hackensacker and Centimillia, and shocked to see him, introduces him to them as her brother. Of course Centimillia is smitten with Tom and more complications until the most satisfying, and clever wrap-up.

“The Palm Beach Story” is one of the great pieces of screwball comedy. The opening sequence, which I won’t go into, is very clever, and the Wienie King is a classic character. The Ale and Quail Club sequence is comedy gold.

For me, the one drawback is McCrea. I like McCrea in westerns and even in other dramas, but here he’s Mr. Glum and Gloomy to the point where I never understood what Geraldine saw in Tom. McCrea and Sturges had enjoyed a big success a year earlier with “Sullivan’s Travels” and Sturges liked to work with people he liked, but I’ve always felt McCrea was miscast here.

I can see why he was hired, as both he and Colbert are the models of normalcy while all the insanity ranges about him, but he’s too grouchy. Perhaps Fred MacMurray would have been a better choice here.

“The Palm Beach Story” would normally rate four stars, but because of McCrea’s portrayal, it only gets a still more than respectable three and a half stars.