1950s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[domino harvey]

Band of Angels (1957) - I seem to recall somebody (probably domino) recommending this as a fascinatingly lurid curio, and they were right.

It probably was me, as it's glorious trash of the finest order. I don't know if any Walsh from this decade has much of a chance of making my list (Show me anyone who thinks fluff like King and Four Queens merits placement and I'll show you someone who needs to see more movies), but this comes closest

[Shrew]

Re: Ride Lonesome
While it's not the most progressive film, I don't think it's rampantly misogynist. Not every woman can be Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns. This and Comanche Station give us a look into the plight of what might be a more "average" woman in the West, lacking the skills to quickly adapt to the deadly new environment and therefore left at the mercy of the often less-than-kind and greedy men around them. Karen Steele does her best to defend herself and stand on her own, but the film keeps ratcheting it up against her so she ends up failing because she can't help but fail against such odds, not because she's a woman. Every time she gets a handle on things, a new complication arises: for example, she handles herself fine against the Indian threat right up until her husband's horse shows up and throws her for a loop. Boone, the voice of most of the nasty rhetoric, keeps attributing that failure to her femininity, but that's cause he's a bastard, not cause he's right.

Can't really defend the Indians though. At least they're implied not to be monolithic and are given their due motives for destruction.

[matrixschmatrix]

Hmm- I didn't get the feeling that the ideas about women we see were limited to Boone- he was the most outspoken about it, but there's never a point at which either another character or the movie itself seems to contradict him. It's possibly worth distinguishing between a philosophically misogynistic movie and a movie that just so happens to have all the characters acting like jerks towards a woman and the woman going along with it, but it's certainly something that detracts from my enjoyment of the thing one way or the other.

I just watched The Tall T last night, and it was on the one hand a bit more complex, and on the other more filled with problematic ideas, as far as gender goes. The negotiation of loneliness and capital implied in the backstory between Maureen O'Sullivan and her husband has some interesting facets to it, but one's he's gone and she starts getting romanced by Randolph Scott things get really unpleasant- particularly as her character arc climaxes with her making herself available for sexual assault, with the implication that if only she believed in herself she could always make men want to jump her. Delightful.

I liked it less than Ride Lonesome overall, though I do like the sort of Reservoir Dogs moment of honor where the villain feels he must enact his villain's role properly and get himself shot in the end- the problem, for me, is that most of the rest of the movie was both less entertaining and more unpleasant than the other. It's really bizarre to me to give the sadistic henchman a tragic backstory (shot his father to stop him attacking his mother at the age of 12) and then use that to prove that he's actually pure evil- it seems as though it's designed to give 'Chink' (honestly, come on) a bit of pathos, but it felt like the movie expects us to agree when Richard Boone finishes his story by calling the man an animal.

Randolph Scott is sort of an interesting hero, because he's not really darkened- the villains are like him, but we never really see him do anything that's villainous within the code of the movie- and he's meant to be a sort of silent Gary Cooper type, but I also find him to be as much an asshole as John Wayne's characters at their most annoying, without the sense that the movie's making fun of him (or at least distancing itself from his viewpoint) that Ford and Hawks tended to have with Wayne. Ride Lonesome at least set up a contrasting way of being that wasn't simply a failed version of Scott- The Tall T has Scott, failed Scott, an embarrassingly characterized woman, and a couple of henchmen whom, unlike James Coburn in the later film, not even their boss can stand. The only person we really have to react to is Scott, and my reactions just aren't that positive.

[Shrew]

The film also does nothing to affirm his stances. In fact, it offers several different possible reasons for her failures (grief, loneliness, inexperience) but doesn't favor any one of them. (Also, paralleling this, each man views her in a different way but none has a complete understanding of her: Billy John in a "chivalric" purity of femininity, Boone as an object of lust, and Brigade as the specter of his wife). They simply all exist, posited by various characters but never really confirmed. Which is part of the wonder of these films. Boetticher has a detachment which allows him to introduce several archetypal binaries but then muddy them until the moral quandaries have no clear answers and the "right" decisions still have terrible consequences. And I like how that bleeds into the color palette, where each character often has a delineated scheme, but without necessarily symbolizing anything like moral authority.

And I think that distance extends to Scott, who is admittedly unlikeable, which is of course what makes me like him. He's a stoic like Gary Cooper, only even more so, such that he rarely bothers to correct what others think about him, and he lacks Cooper's innnate likeability. And he doesn't reveal his anger or faults as much as Wayne, which makes him harder to read. In Ride Lonesome that stoicism makes him the villain driving everyone into danger until his motives are finally revealed. Even then, Scott's motives often justify the ends but not fully the means. It's that holding back or willfully enigmatic silence which makes Scott, and by extension Boetticher's detached treatment of him, interesting.

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, furthering this discussion, I just watched The Naked Spur, and it totally blew me away.

The plot has some similarities to Ride Lonesome- a captive, a woman, and three partners in an uneasy alliance, with a lead who seems a poor fit for a bounty hunter- but where Boetticher is deliberately unpsychological, Mann's movie slides into a sort of Treasure of the Sierra Madre area, and for me is much richer because of it.

Part of the appeal is that Mann is consistently better about both gender and racial politics: the Indians in Naked Spur aren't just 'Indians', they're Blackfeet, with a specific reason for being there and a justification that's entirely justified. It's tragic when they're killed, even if the characters largely don't recognize it, and there's a clear recognition of the humanity of the woman Meeker's character apparently raped and of the justice in pursuing him for it. His sneak attack on the Blackfeet, precipitating their slaughter, is the moment that we in the audience lose all sympathy for him, and the movie never really expects us to regain it.

With gender, too, it's nicely complex- though Janet Leigh is still a bit ineffectual (her slapfighting attack on Ryan at the end is sort of embarassing), and bears an unfortunate resemblance to Harpo, she's got a real inner life, and her viewpoint is the pivot on which the movie turns. The characters steal treat her shittily fairly often, but to me it feels as though the movie doesn't expect us to grin and go along with it, and her romance with Stewart seems to come out of a place of real emotion rather than force or of her being impressed at how good at killing people he is. It's not Stanwyck in Forty Guns or Crawford Johnny Guitar, but it is a fairly full role, and it doesn't feel to me as though Leigh's reactions to everything are based on gender essentialized notions of how women react to violence or whatever.

Of course, the meat of the story is the main appeal, and it's absolutely killer- Ryan's smiling manipulator manages to get on the viewer's side just enough to make clear the horror of having him killed for money, without making it at all difficult to believe he's the sociopath he proves himself to be. The alliance between the three partners always seems to be Meeker and Stewart with Millard Mitchell in the middle, so it comes as something of a twist when Mitchell is the one whom Ryan seduces- but the politicking that leads up to it bears up the Noir part of the Noir Western idea, as the constant changes in who is doing what for whom sometimes pushes the film from Sierra Madre into The Maltese Falcon- and Stewart's edgy, nervous iteration of the Jimmy Stewart character gradually comes out of the hell into which he's allowed himself to sink. It's a movie that has a real sense of what scummy work bounty hunting is, and the ending fits perfectly the feeling that's grown the whole movie.

Boetticher movies seem to deal largely in archetypes, characters who exist specifically within the Movie Western- there's a mythic power to that, and I respect it. But Mann's movies have an emotional intensity matched only by Nicholas Ray, and they become claustrophobic studies of the landscape inside the characters' minds- that works for me, and The Naked Spur displaces The Furies as the movie that best exemplifies it of those I've seen.

[Mr Sausage]

Matrix, have you seen The Man From Laramie, yet? If not, you really ought to see it next; it gives Naked Spur a real run for the best example of a "claustrophobic stud[y] of the landscape inside the characters' minds" (great description by the way, and post in general).

[Gregory]

I'd say that do-not-miss viewing for the decade includes all five Mann-Stewart films (Winchester '73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country, and The Man from Laramie), possibly then followed by Mann's masterwork of the '50s, Man of the West. The latter, a long-gestating creative project for Mann, grapples with many of the same concerns and tensions as in Stewart films, in ways that arguably made it appropriately his last statement in the genre. It's fascinating to see all the ways the Stewart character becomes complicated, the ways his "good" is related to an "evil" counterpart, the (semi-)happy endings turning out more or less unconvincing or ambivalent in light of everything that's happened in the course of events preceding them.
For me, this is one of the great cycles ever produced by Hollywood in the era when the western was at its artistic pinnacle. Man of the West will place highest on my list, but I'm having trouble deciding how to handle the films with Stewart, as they seem like such a consistent and interrelated unit that it's difficult for me to separate and counterpose the films in order to pick favorites (a problem I'm sidestepping with the Apu Trilogy by listing all three films in order in a row somewhere on my list).
I think I'll toss aside some of my other planned viewing and revisit all of these in order.

[knives]

That's a great idea. When I did that some months ago (with bonus viewing of Man of the West of course) I was blown away how Mann builds and destroys Stewart until the point where it is hard to say where his character stands morally. I find The Naked Spur as the center of all of this stands strongest by allowing him to be pitch black as a more than Vertigo villain protagonist (the subsequent two wind this down until he's just ugly in his heroics rather than absolutely morally compromised). All six also seem to predict Pechinpah with their sense of pure violence (even though content is weaker I'll admit there are moments I cringe at more in the Mann films than in Pechinpah's). Masculinity and the ego derived from it becomes the real villain which anyone can have (even women as shown in the wonderfully undderated The Far Country). In this case A Dandy in Aspic is an appropriate end to his career.

[Tommaso]

There's No Peace Under the Olive Tree (Giuseppe de Santis, Italy 1950)
This may be one of my major discoveries of the last months. It's the last part of de Santis' postwar trilogy dealing with everyday life, popular culture and social conflicts in late 1940s Italy and a somewhat hybrid example of late Neorealism, as it's not only star-driven (Raf Vallone and Lucia Bose play the main roles), but also aesthetically rather hybrid merging elements of Hollywood Westerns etc. with elements of Socialist Realism, and has already been somewhat dated when it came out, as it's obviously been made in anticipation of the victory of the Italian leftist movement, though premiered only after its electoral defeat. It's set in Ciociaria, a mountainous rural region in Central Italy, and portrays the landscapes as well as the customs and social conflicts between its inhabitants who mostly live from shepherding. If you have any interest in Neorealism or in the early works of the British historian Eric Hobsbawm you will definitely want to hunt this film down; there's only a non-subbed Italian disc available but subtitles seem to be floating around the web. Here's a little Youtube excerpt without subtitles which features a short conversation between two lovers, who according to de Santis follow local customs in their somewhat strange behaviour, and which gives a pretty good example of the film's aesthetic design.

A very fine film, but I simply can't see how this would fit into either neorealism or Hollywood styles. While the social conflicts may be apparent, much more important are the visuals, which are extremely stylized. Fascinating close-ups, fine editing and the like. With its semi-mythical tone and its reliance on professional actors, the closest comparisons I can think of are some of the early, pre-50s examples of German 'heimatfilm' perhaps, and of course some of the Soviet silents. I couldn't help thinking of Riefenstahl's "Tiefland" and (considering the very 'male-ish' main character) Trenker's "Der Rebell", either. Not a very modern film, but that doesn't work against it, I think. And of course Lucia Bosè is a knockout, but I'd probably say that about every film she was in from that period....

[the preacher]

If you're working on Giuseppe De Santis, don't miss "Roma ore 11". Quintaessential neorealist film (in fact based on a real story), perhaps the greatest of them all, with a rich gallery of female characters, successful balance between passion and ideology, perfect script and unforgettable score. It's high on my list...

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

The Naked Spur will be my highest ranking western, though hopefully several other Mann films will make my list. For this list, I decided to re-watch every film before ranking it, just to brush away the mental cobwebs and have the freshest possible perspective. After I view a film, I rank it on a spreadsheet. Despite it currently ranking in 25th place, I'm using Man of the West as an unofficial end-of-list marker considering I still have twenty-some films left on my re-watch list that I think will rank in the top twenty. I've watched 15 films for the first time for this project, taking several of your recommendations to heart. The highest one currently in 22nd place, but I've enjoyed all of them.

I hope I'll have room for Winchester '73, but I doubt the other mentioned Mann films will make my list, despite the Stewart/Mann collaboration being one of my favorites in 50s cinema.

[swo17]

For this list, I decided to re-watch every film before ranking it, just to brush away the mental cobwebs and have the freshest possible perspective.

Not that this is required or anything, but that's one of my own personal "rules" for including anything on my list. The other is that I have to watch any film that I've only just seen for the first time at least once more before listing it. These rewatchings often surprise me, knocking off films I might have otherwise considered shoo-ins (which naturally provides the welcome consolation of leaving space to feature new discoveries). Conversely, maybe a quarter of my provisional '50s list consists of films that grew considerably in my estimation only rewatching them now, with the avalanche of other '50s films I'm watching perhaps providing the necessary context. Frankly, I don't know how I'd manage ranking all these films without them being at least somewhat fresh in my mind. (Perhaps I could rank them objectively? )

[knives]

I just knock off films arbitrarily really with only a handful must haves. I hadn't realized until yesterday for example that I had knocked from my provisional list a certain film that I had thought I put in my top ten.

[matrixschmatrix]

Man, I always feel like I don't watch enough movies for these projects, and now I feel that even more strongly- my excuse hitherto was always that I assumed you guys had seen a lot of this stuff years ago, and therefore had more time for seeking out new things. I feel impressed with myself if I can watch one movie a day, and average maybe twenty five for list purposes in a really solid month- how many are you guys watching?

[knives]

Across this list (this is about 70% shorts) I've seen about 300 or 400 films not counting rewatches and the like.

[matrixschmatrix]

Good lord. I think I may have managed 75, added to a pool of maybe 75 worth remembering which I had seen before the project.

[knives]

Like I said mostly shorts and I spent the first two or three months only watching '50s films.

[swo17]

I think I'm in knives territory too (or worse) but then again, I am a bad father. (Which is not to say that knives is a bad father, if he indeed is one.) Um... 8-[

To backtrack a little, I'd just like to stress that there is no requirement that anyone watch 100 films a month or anything to feel worthy of participating in the project. In fact, if 75 is what you've seen for this project, matrix, then your post-to-watch ratio is very high, which is probably much more beneficial to the project than all of the films that I secretly watch, love, and keep to myself. (Though all will eventually be revealed!)

[knives]

It helps I have almost no one to hang with (past month not counting). Though I figure if you have at least 100 films (preferably with half of that being ones you care about) there's no farts to the wind about it all. Nobody is going to see all of the eligible films and if my experiences mean anything in some cases you're better off not watching the Liberace film.

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

The other is that I have to watch any film that I've only just seen for the first time at least once more before listing it.

That's a fantastic idea. It's entirely too late for me to put it into practice, but I see the logic behind it. I've had an impossible time keeping my first-timers stationary, while my revisited films are more or less emotionally etched in stone.

300 to 400?! Hats off. I might get to a hundred if I work hard at not working hard on anything else, which I hope to do.

[matrixschmatrix]

I actually try to post about every movie I watch for the project, both because I hope to talk about them with other board members and as a sort of personal movie journal- I never feel as though I know how I feel about something until I try to explain it to someone else. I haven't kept up as well as I'd like, actually, as I didn't wind up saying anything about quite a few of the things I've watched lately- namely Fanfan la Tulipe,, The Baron of Arizona, Miss Julie, Sansho the Bailiff, Written on the Wind, The Hidden Fortress, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Bob le Flambeur, Les Enfants Terribles,and A Face in the Crowd. Which bothers me, as several of them really deserve discussion, but I'm so goddamn tired lately that I feel as though I'm choosing between watching a movie and talking about one.

A Face in the Crowd is a pretty fascinating one, though- one the one hand, it's got the striking imagery and cynical viewpoint of a Sweet Smell of Success, and it's a totally engrossing movie, but on the other hand it's so accurate in what it predicts that a lot of its dire warnings seem fairly quaint now. A presidential candidate being groomed to come across well on TV? Quel horreur! There's something subtly unpleasant, too, about the way Patricia Neal's terribly likable performance is undercut by the film's need to keep her bound at the hip to Griffith, without her ever seeming to like him all that much, nor giving much reason why she would love him- all we get, really, is that she feels responsible for him, and is afraid of what he'll become without her influence. That her choice is not between Griffith and herself but between Griffith and an unusually unlikable Walter Matthau doesn't help much.

Griffith's performance, on the other hand, does. He's astonishing, particularly after a lifetime of lowkey likability- Kazan forces some of the extreme angles and so forth on him, but he bears it remarkably well. And up until the Cracker Barrel starts, you can see his show being totally worth watching, too. He's got a magnetism, and the fact that his persona is built on celebrating his vices makes it hard to believe his audience would be all that bothered by his abuse- though it's also hard to believe they'd mindlessly swallow his political perspective. It's also a bit hard to understand why the movie seems to continually insist that he's losing his soul, as it seemed fairly clear that he didn't have one to begin with. It's part of what makes the characterization fun.

[Sloper]

Good write-up on Face in the Crowd. I think part of the problem is that Griffith's performance is so magnetic, while Neal's and Matthau's parts are so underwritten (she ends up being a bit of a cipher, and he's one of those embarrassing 'authorial mouthpiece' roles; such a shame that these two are wasted like this). The film is bent on demonising Lonesome and everything he stands for, but it always feels to me like he's been manoeuvred into this position by forces he has little control over - Anthony Franciosa, over-acting like crazy: 'You're in bed with me, Larry - in bed!' When Matthau gloats over him at the end, all my sympathies are with Larry, and the whole thing just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Still a great, compulsively watchable and prophetic film, but the central character is a straw man, and the film's attitude towards him feels beady-eyed and smug.

[Wu.Qinghua]

A very fine film, but I simply can't see how this would fit into either neorealism or Hollywood styles.

Well, I do consider this movie to be a part of the neorealist cycle, because it not only portrays a region, its landscape and its inhabitants focussing on the subordinate classes, that is the shepherds of the Ciociaria, and describes customs as well as sociopolitical living conditions, but also because it provides a strong, though maybe because of its form (socialist realist aesthetics, folk-tale narrative etc.) somewhat oldfashioned critique of the Italian postwar situation and aims at empowering said subordinate classes.

[matrixschmatrix]

The Hitch-hiker

In a lot of ways this seems like more of a thriller than a noir- though the shadows and moral murkiness of the whole thing make it an obvious relative of the noir cycle, there isn't the normal noirish feeling of induction into a darker world, or of the helplessness of the official forces. In fact, the official forces save the day here, and behave pretty efficiently throughout, while the people who seem like our heroes accomplish basically nothing.

That seemed like a narrative flaw at first- normally, you expect it to be part of well written fiction that the resolution is motivated by something the heroes actually do, rather than having them essentially just cyphers in a plot that could work without them. In Lupino's movie, though, I feel as though that's the point: they're weak, and they're cowed, and though they make the occasional attempt to escape they're essentially without power to alter the course of events. When one of the them (and it may say something that I can't remember either of their names ten hours later) starts beating on the villain while he is cuffed at the end, it doesn't feel like an endorsement of brutality against the helpless, it feels like he is enraged at his own impotence, beating against a sense of fate that won't even let him be the hero in his own story.

The villain, on the other hand, has an attractive power to him- he's obviously not a bright man, and there is a Richard III sense of a man fighting against a world that brought him in already damaged, a man whose sense of the world is no quarter asked and no quarter given. It never gets particularly fascist, though the villain's actions occasionally move from the practical to the sadistic- we're not asked to worship or admire the man for his will to power, simply to accept that he is a larger and more interesting character than his captives are, perhaps sort of failed Christ figure as in Flannery O'Connor's The Misfit. It seems to me that if he were in the front seat, he would not be so easily cowed that he would passively accept the situation for so long, nor allow himself to be recaptured so easily when he did something about it- not because he's better or smarter, but because he's got a better sense of risk and reward.

The other two more or less walk willingly into their tombs, because they're so afraid of a small risk that they accept a far larger and more deadly one. They're saved by a deus ex machina, but that doesn't change their decision making. The tension of the movie comes from wondering all the while when they will see and sieze their chance- are they counting the rounds fired from the hitcher's revolver? Are they planning on picking up a rock to throw at him, or working out a plan for one to distract him while the other attacks? Nope. The actions they do take are weak and indecisive- temporizing with the radio, disabling the car, running away from rather than towards the danger in the night. They accomplish nothing, even when doing nothing means death (for themselves and perhaps for others) and doing something means only the risk of that same death. I'm not sure if Lupino is indicting anything in particular, but there are all sorts of metaphors to draw- WWII comes to mind- but there's something deviously clever about a movie wherein the twist is that the gun never goes off.

[swo17]

Let the obnoxious clues begin?

There is currently a vicious 5-way tie for 12th place between five films, each from a different country and all of which have been released at one time or another by Criterion.