Kinematoscope

It's been a long time since we've done a Western, hasn't it? Today we finally graduate from John Ford's more traditional The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and slightly subversive The Searchers to the revisionist, wandering, lyrical, and all-around bloodbath The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah's 1969 squib-packet opus.

The Key Players:

While Peckinpah's legacy as a blood and bullets pioneer is justly deserved, he rose to fame making more conventional tv westerns, and his most successful film was the straightforward Steve McQueen thriller The Getaway. But it's the gritty violence of The Wild Bunch the controversial misogynism of Straw Dogs, and the macabre black comedy of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia that live on.

William Holden is starting to become a pretty familiar face around here. He and Ernest Borgnine (an Oscar winner for Marty) lead a large ensemble that includes Robert Ryan (The Dirty Dozen) and Edmond O'Brien (The Barefoot Contessa).



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The Story:

The Wild Bunch was at one point rushed to beat Butch Cassidy into production because of certain superficial similarities in plot. And while they do both loosely follow outlaws to a grisly finish in Mexico, Peckinpah's influence assured that the two stories couldn't be more different.

This story opens with a quiet town in the WWI-era remnants of the wild west, where the banks need to hire inept posses of gunhands for protection and the children amuse themselves by feeding scorpions to ants.

Pike (Holden) and his gang of outlaws (Borgnine's his number two, Dutch) are disguised as soldiers and hit up a railroad office for a huge silver payload. A former associate of Holden's turned straight named Thorton (Ryan) knows about the raid, however, and sets up a rooftop ambush.

This leads to a very lengthy, bloody shootout, wherein several outlaws, viglantes, and innocent townspeople are shot to death. Ultimately five members of the gang survive: Pike, Dutch, the brothers Lyle and Tector Gorch, and Angel (the lone Mexican member). They rendevous with Sykes (O'Brien), Pike's old mentor of sorts, only to discover that they stole several bags of common washers, not silver. A set up!

The railroad empresarios, who employ Thorton under threat of jail, give him a thirty day ultimatum to bring Pike in, and so the chase through Mexico is on.

What follows are many long, slow scenes taking in the Mexican sites, enjoying Mexican brothels, and planning the gang's next move. Eventually they make a deal with a ruthless general named Mapache to steal arms from a US Army train for him (after a slight hiccup in which Angel shoots the general's mistress, a former girlfriend of his).

They successfully rob the train (and send Thorton and his inept posse down the river via booby-trap in the process), but Angel is captured by Mapache after stealing some of the guns to help his opressed village fight the general's corrupt local influence.

Will the gang come to his rescue, or look out for themselves? I bet you can guess.

The Artistry:

There are plenty of things to enjoy in The Wild Bunch, but man it was loooong. It sort of makes The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford seem like a nikelodeon short by comparison.

After the opening thrill of the railroad station heist, and it is thrilling in its chaotic violence, I was amazed how bogged down the film got in specific moments in Mexico- there's a scene following the outlaws out of town on horseback that must take five minutes alone, just for the townsfolk to wave goodbye.

Maybe it wouldn't be as jarring after the innovative, influential action sequence, though. Peckinpah's rapid editing, occasional slow-motion for emphasis, and fondness for blood-filled squib packets are all things that revolutionized action films- following the briefer taste of what audiences were willing to sit through in 67's Bonnie and Clyde, of course. Both films are often mentioned as a dual turning point in the overall screen violence pervasiveness many percieve in cinema as a whole.

Anyway, the performances are all fine, if a bit lost in the ensemble nature of The Wild Bunch and the wandering focus. Holden has some awkwardly introduced flashbacks that attempt to lend depth to his past with Ryan, and the woman he onced loved. But neither angle really comes up again, and the simmering resentment between the gang and Mapache is the only very comelling character drama.

The Wild Bunch's other major influence is its revisionist, realist take on the wild west, with the influence specifically on the "wild." Being a thug and a robber back then didn't mean you were some sort of dust-strewn Robin Hood, and no one in The Wild Bunch acts noble whatsoever- they frequent prostitutes and show no remorse about killing. Sure they have moments, but only that: Angel wants to help his village, but he'll gun down his old flame in a rage. Holden seems to live by a code of some kind, but it's a code that includes using bystanders as human shields during a shootout.

Hell, before the march for a the big final showdown, two of the gang remind us of their natures by stiffing a prositute by ten pesos (she said "doce," not "dos").

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

After Mapache has some fun dragging Angel around tied to the back of a car, the gang slow-marches over to his courtyard and asks for their friend back. He says sure, and promptly cuts Angel's throat. Enraged, Holden draws down, and the next ten minutes are likely the bloodiest in Western movie history- Mapache and all his highest generals get it, along with several dozen of the Mexican Army in tow (there's an automatic machine-gun thing involved). Of course, the four remaining outlaws (Thorton's gang wounded Sykes, the old man, some time before, so he was left behind) get theirs too, but not before taking out many times their number.

Later, Thorton looks on at his rival's corpse somewhat bittersweetly, and declines to go with the posse as they start to haul them back to the railroad for the bounty. Of course, Sykes and a new gang of local "puro Indio" indigenous take them out, and Thorton joins them to make the most of his remaining time in the dissappearing West.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Points for ground-breaking, but maybe slighly lower. There's a specific vision to it, sure, but that's no reason it couldn't have been more linear, less indulgent, and maybe forty minutes shorter.

The Legacy:

The Wild Bunch was nominated for two Oscars, Screenplay and Score, but lost both to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It's also in the NFR, and ranked as the sixth best Western of all time by the AFI.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Opening shootout! Count the bullets at home!



Leftover Thoughts:

-There's a lot of characters laughing hysterically for long periods of time in The Wild Bunch, which also seemed off-tone to me. Nothing they're laughing about is all that funny, even in context.

-Sometimes I wish I could grow a mustache. Sigh...

Coming Up...

183. The Killing

182. Judgment at Nuremberg

181. The Incredibles

We break the 200 barrier with the rarely seen prisoner-of-war comedy subgenre, 1953's Stalag 17. "Dramedy" might be a better term, though- we wouldn't want to confuse the tone of such a classic with "Hogan's Heroes."

I mean, sure, there's cross-dressing, near-ubiquitous cross-eyed mugging, and easy laughs, but sometimes people get shot.

The Key Players:

Nice to see you again, Billy Wilder. First alcoholism, now WWII- where will you take us next?

Academy Award-winning star William Holden also appeared on this blog two years and twenty three years later ago, if that makes any sense.

Noted director Otto Preminger takes a rare turn in front of the camera in support, along with the late Peter Graves ("Mission: Impossible") among many others.



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The Story:

Based on the hugely successful play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski (who cameos in the film), Stalag 17 is the story of inmates in a German POW camp somewhere on the blue Danube river. It opens in December 1944, right during the middle of the Battle of the Bulge- from the German side of the line, it sounds like the tides are turning against the Allies.

Barracks 4 mounts an escape attempt, sending two men out with fake papers and civlian clothes through an underground tunnel, but unlike the "Hogan's Heroes" tunnels (which were endless in number and always lead to safety), this one leads the men to gunfire before they even reach the forest.

Holden, a cynical, caustic grifter, callously wagers cigarettes with the other POWs on this very outcome, and cleans up when the shots start firing. The next day, the smirking Stalag commandant (Preminger) orders the men to fill in the tunnel, and takes away the wood stove that covered the entrance- information that had yet to be discovered.

Talk of a mole quickly starts, and suspicion immediately falls on Holden, who brazenly fries an egg for breakfast that he's bartered with the German guards for. He's built up a surplus of cigarrettes and other goods by setting up a distillery, taking bets on literal rat-races, and improvising a telescope to peek at the nearby Russian women prisoner's camp.

In coming days, the mole provides information that gets the barracks' secret radio confiscated, and gets a recently arrived-Lieutenant arrested as a sabateour after he mentions blowing up a German artillery train. Sefton maintains innocence, but the prisoners rough him up in frustration.

Even Holden's friend and assistant Cookie (also our narrator) starts to wonder who the mole might really be...

The Artistry:

There are a lot of broad comedy bits in Stalag 17 that don't really work for me, most of them involving either Sig Ruman Sergeant Schultz (the German guard) or Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck reprising their stage roles as an antic comic duo of POWs (an oaf and a wiseguy, respectively). It might be because things like "M*A*S*H" would have the time to do wartime silliness with more restraint, though- and I did enjoy some parts, like Strauss's gravely exchange of "At ease!" with a whiny voiced messenger.

But everything with Holden jumps off the screen- he plays a classic antihero, and does it to a T. Holden reportedly turned down the part initially because it wasn't very sympathetic- he begged Wilder to give him a line about how much he hates the Nazis, to no avail.

Preminger plays the sort of classic smiling and cruel Nazi that everyone went gaga over Christoph Waltz putting a new spin on- flashy and simmeringly particular. I loved the part when he puts on his boots to call his superiors in Berlin on the phone.

The decision to reveal the traitor with 40 minutes (out of two hours) to go works very well for the pace, as ambiguious intrigue gives way to full-on dramatic tension.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

After sussing out the mole's message system of a hollowed-out chess piece (and a light bulb cord as a signal), Holden discovers that a man named Price (Graves) is a German-born spy posing as a G.I. from Cleveland. He'd been elected security chief of the barracks, and had all of the sensitive information necessary to tip off the guards.

This leaves him in a quandary- if Price gets wise that he's been made, he'll just leave and be sent to spy on another Barracks somewhere. If he kills him, the Nazis might retaliate by killig everyone.

Things come to a head when the Lieutenant accused of sabotage is about to be marched off to be executed. The prisoners hatch a plan to hide him from the guards- to make sure Price can't interfere, Holden cannily argues that the security chief should stay behind to guard him, to make sure that Holden (the suspected mole) doesn't give them away.

Finally, Holden breaks Price in front of everyone by grilling him on his fake American past, and catches him when Price claims he was eating dinner when Pearl Harbor was attacked (It was lunchtime in the states, dinnertime in Berlin).

Holden goes to escape with the lieutenant to safety, while the rest push Price out of the barracks as a distraction (the guards shoot him, as they do anyone out after dark).

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I think higher, on the whole. As far as the silly parts go, they amplify the impact of the dead-serious moments rather well. Holden holds it all together in a classic lead role.

The Legacy:

Strauss and Wilder also earned Oscar nominations, and Stalag is one of the definitive WWII POW films along with The Great Escape and The Bridge On The River Kwai.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Not too many clips, but the beginning of this clip has my favorite Holden vs. the rest scene. "You've put 2 and 2 together and it comes out 4, only it ain't 4!"



Leftover Thoughts:

-A lot of lipservice is paid to the Geneva Conventions in this movie. Remember when people cared about those dusty old things? Good times.

-Did prisoners of war really get mail delivered? This seems dubious to me.

-"One more word. If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner... just let's pretend we never met before."

Coming Up...

198. Kill Bill Vol. 2

197. Shadow Of A Doubt

196. Sleuth (1972)

Hello, everybody. Do you feel the urge to yell at thunderstorms? Are you plagued by an irrational desire to spontaneously embark on long soliloquies about how mad you are (perhaps especially when you’re mad as hell?) ? Then Network may be the 1976 movie for you.

The Key Players:

Sidney Lumet, a multiple award winner and director of classic things that we will get to later like 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon (but also the director of The Wiz). He works from a script by screenwriter and playwright Paddy Chayefsky.

William Holden, the star of Sunset Boulevard and Oscar-winning star of Stalag 17 acts as our audience surrogate, an old-timer network news producer that’s getting to old for this proverbial shiznit. He mostly frowns and then lectures people.

Peter Finch is the iconic news castor that flips out on air when told of his impending retirement. After his death while promoting the film of a heart attack in January 1977, he became the only Australian and dead guy to win an Academy Award the next month. He mostly freaks out and then lectures people.

Faye Dunaway, from Bonnie and Clyde and doubtlessly a bunch of other things, is the hotshot entertainment producer that wants to sleaze-ify the news for a bigger share. She mostly lectures people about how important ratings are.

Elsewhere, Robert Duvall angrily lectures people about profits or something, Beatrice Straight lectures Holden as his wife, and Ned Beatty drops in for a fiery guest lecture about economics (spoiler alert! I found this film a little preachy!).



The Story:

So there’s a fictional network called UBS (BS, get it?), and it has a floundering news program with a floundering old anchor named Howard Beale (Finch). It falls to longtime friend and producer Holden to tell a whacked out Finch that he’s being asked to resign in two weeks time.

Finch naturally goes on air and announces that he’s planning to shoot himself on the air the following Tuesday. This causes of course an uproar with the bigwigs, with Duvall’s proxy for the parent company among them. Finch is fired, but then appears to come to his senses and asks to make an apology on air, to go out with dignity. Instead he goes on a rant about how he’s run out of bullshit (oh my goodness he made a swear!), and the network flips out again but the public loves it.

Dunaway gets the bright idea to retool the entire program into a farcical variety news show with a mystic and a long segment of Finch ranting for a while to a zombie-like, salivating populace which adores him for ranting like a lunatic.

Holden, who was forced out when he let Finch start ranting in the first place, then brought back, then fired again when Duvall gets more power, meanwhile leaves his wife (Straight) to embark on a stilted and inexplicable affair with Dunaway.

Eventually Finch starts to rant in a near-populist bent that angers the overlords once again. And everyone has to choose between ratings and integrity, and nobody chooses the latter. Also there’s a bit with a faux Vietnamese Liberation Army and a mob heiress or something.

The Artisticness:

Visually this film is pretty straightforward- there’s some business with a big bank of TV monitors, but otherwise I can’t remember a single memorable shot.

But damn if you can’t tell Chayefsky’s a playwright- somebody shut the hell up already!

I’m not going to lie to you people- I’m pretty pretentious, most of the time, and I think on occasion about the fine line between intelligence and condescension- Lumet and Chayefsky more or less obliterate it with this story.

Actual lines from this Academy Award winning screenplay:

“I hurt. Don't you understand that? I hurt badly.”

“Howard Beale is processed instant God.”

“And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day.”

Do you know how many of those reflect actual human speech? None of them! None! This is not a cardinal sin- it would be more than forgivable in a satire if any of it were, you know, at all funny. Let’s move on.

The theme, such as it is, is a pretty clear dissemination on the bastardization of journalistic integrity for gimmicky ratings stunts. From Edward Murrow to that show where strippers read the news. And by “dissemination” I mean brutal, constant bludgeoning over the head with the idea.

THE ENDING! IS EVEN THE PLOT SMUG?

Yes it is- Ned Beatty, basically the head of all the head honchos, gets royally pissed at Finch when his ranting disrupts a buyout by a Middle Eastern company. So he hauls him into his office, and yells at him about the free market economy and the idea that there are no nations, just an interconnected series of corporations and dollars until Finch converts to the cause and stops preaching dissention on the air.

Naturally then his ratings start to go south, but Beatty won’t let him be taken off the air. So Duvall, Dunaway and company decide to have him assassinated. On air. Which he is, in a ridiculously artificial final scene to the film, and then because we haven’t had enough people explaining things to our feeble little minds, the narrator comes on and says “This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because of lousy ratings.”

Thanks, chotch. Didn’t catch that one on my own. Oh also Holden and Dunaway end their relationship with a whole lot of terrible television-centric clichés. Yawn.

END SPOILERS

Overall- Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Can you tell I didn’t enjoy this very much, at all? Lower, definitely lower. I’m not arguing that the acting here isn’t fine, and the writing accomplished if insufferable. But there’s clearly a fundamental disconnect with the entire emphasis for me.

Is it because the idea that the network news isn’t a paragon of virtue is nothing remotely shocking or risqué to me? That’s probably part of it, yeah. I’m one of the young degenerates that gets my news online or from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart because it’s just as good a source as any.

But characters with more than one dimension might have helped. Finch was a nonsensical zealot, but the kind of zealot that’s easily swayed. Holden was a bland righteous old fart, who didn’t even have an explanation for his attraction to Dunaway (other than the plot required it). Dunaway was pretty shrill, sorry.

I did like Duvall, who always plays mean pretty well. But mostly this hit a bunch of bum notes for me.

The Legacy:

But I’m in the vast minority on that one. This won four Oscars out of ten nominations- Screenplay, Finch, as well as Leading Actress for Dunaway, and an inexplicable Supporting Actress statue for Straight (who chewed scenery for a full 5 minutes and 40 seconds).

And it’s number 64 or so on the AFI list. Um, okay?

I’m just throwing this out there- I’m a bigger fan of the ten second part of the scene in the trunk in Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight where George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez randomly talk about and Clooney gets the line mostly wrong. I enjoyed that ten seconds more than this whole film.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Just out of spite, the Out Of Sight Trunk scene instead. I make the rules around here.



Leftover Thoughts:

• I was supposed to laugh during this film, right? Because I didn’t. Holden tells the same joke twice that has everyone in hysterics, but it’s pretty lame the first time.
• Is Peter Finch Albert Finney’s dad? Are they related? Did Sidney Lumet’s dad have a deep, craggy voice like those two, because Finney was just in Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (which also misfired for me).