Blog O’ Leaps

THE WARRIORS (1979)

In the extras for this director Walter Hill describes this as essentially a comic book in live action form, which it is, and a good one too. He also says that it’s based on an incident from ancient Greek history. * I have some doubts that even now they’d be trotting this one out to show high school classes to help bring the subject of history to life, but Walter’s apparently right on the money there too.

Comic books, like myths and legends, tend to be about archetypes, and work on a broad brush-stroke kind of level. The concept of hero and villain, and the basics of the story are more vital to the enterprise than finer shadings, painstakingly detailed plot development and a lot of furrowed-brow committee meetings on the subject of plausibility. In other words, the combination of the two areas is a natural, in the unlikely motion picture event that you’ve got someone in charge of the project who knows what they’re doing, and the even more unlikely event that they are surrounded by people who are sympathetic to their goal.

Anyway, that’s what happens in The Warriors. The dialogue is craptastic throughout, the acting mostly comes in various flavours of balsa wood, and, in combination they routinely hit notes that sound like a xylophone with various keys replaced at random by old steel beer cans. None of this matters. All that’s allowed to matter is The Story, The Form, and The Pacing. The Form is epic, man. The Form is a real city shot and lit to look like a parody of a real city constructed out of the wilder samples in a paint company’s brochure. The Form is your classic case of a group of outnumbered heroes beset by absolutely everything else in the picture that isn’t bathroom fittings or asphalt.

The Pacing has one gear, which is non-stop.

The Story is that there are a number of highly unlikely costumed and themed gangs in New York City, all constantly at each others’ throats over turf wars, and possibly the constant arguments over where to buy the best pizza. A kind of council meeting is called by the largest and best organised of the gangs, The Riffs. (I guess Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore are associate members.) The leader of the Riffs is shot, and the blame is put on our hee-roes, The Warriors. They then have to make their way back to their own Coney Island turf, not only pursued by The Riffs, and the police, but by every other gang in the city.

That’s the whole deal, and it’s all you need. The thing just goes, and the thing just works and that’s all there is to it. A whole movie of pure surface tension.

Just as well too, because so much of The Warriors is pure cheese, which is another of its considerable pleasures. Those gangs. Those outfits. At the big council of war deal near the start, there are some real pearlers for the speedy of eye. There’s apparently a gang who dress up as Marcel Marceau. I guess they’re the Walking Into Imaginary Wind gang, or maybe the Men Trapped Inside Invisible Telephone Booths. There’s the frightening mob who all wear bright yellow matching silk-look baseball jackets – presumably the Closet Gay Gang Who Doesn’t Know It Yet. In the body of the picture, the most unforgettable are the guys in full baseball outfits with mis-applied KISS make-up, or as I prefer to think of them, the “I Want to Home Run All Nite (and Bunt Every Day)” Gang. But not to be underrated are the guys in roller skates who wear overalls and have British soccer player 70s hair. You can imagine how much of an advantage roller skates would give you in a street fight. Who wears overalls as leisure-wear anyway? Well, yeah, I know, but what GUYS wear overalls as leisure-wear?

The dialogue appears to veer in and out of the 1950s and 1960s, give or take some swearing and kneecap-obvious sexual references. This is even strangely appropriate, in a cloth-eared variant on genre (and era)-hopping synchronicity. In a lot of ways, in tone, The Warriors is a juvenile delinquent picture from the 50s, and a lot of the rest of it is West Side Story minus the music. Actually it’s probably at least as much a musical without people singing and dancing on screen as it is Greek tragedy-gone-gang movie. The singing stays on the soundtrack and off the screen, and the dancing is enacted by way of modified movie kung fu involving bats, knives, and metal pipes, but the smell of Broadway pervades the nostrils nonetheless.

I don’t know what to say about the acting in this, at least when any can be detected. By conventional standards a lot of it reeks of stinkitude, but the dialogue would have stymied an Olivier, and given that conventional standards of dialogue and acting have nothing whatsoever to do with what makes this movie work, it’s not anything worth losing sleep over. More importantly it’s nothing you’ll gain sleep over.

Deborah Van Valkenburgh, as the love interest who blows in for no apparent reason about 20 minutes into the picture, does some major eye and lip work in putting a little flesh on the bones of her character against all likely odds. David Patrick Kelly steals any acting side of the movie as the degenerate, insane leader of the main heel group, The Rogues. You haven’t seen a winningly demented performance like this since Sam Neill starred in that famous advertising campaign for red meat, including him peering through suburban lounge-room windows and manifesting himself up a tree. Mercedes Ruehl has a small bit in there, and is effective as usual. James Remar plays the malcontent in The Warriors gang like a somewhat surlier version of Reggie from The Archies. Some of you folks also may have seen him do some acting in the TV show Dexter, where he plays Dexter’s adoptive dad. Actually he’s less cardboard-flavoured than most of The Warriors troupe.

Of the latter it must be said that a girlier group of street fightin’ cummerbunds would be difficult to imagine. Between the fluting voices, the general knees-a-knockin’ attitude to any threat of violent activity and the whining and moping they get up to throughout, you’d figure that most under-age netball teams could give them a fair run for their money in a knockdown, drag-out brawl. It’s a considerable tribute to Walter Hill’s skill as director that we continue to care about The Warriors as a gang. Particularly because, on a character by character basis, they give up personality points to the anonymous kids who used to sit up the back in Welcome Back, Kotter. In fact they could have had the Sweathogs from that show play The Warriors, and the only difference anyone would have noticed was the improvement, and Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington saying “Hi there” a lot, out of context.

In some ways, it’s a cheesy action-movie of the period, with more than accidental similarities to the general feel and iconography of the kung fu movies of the 70s. (Have a gander at the wide shots of The Riffs in their home cavern/basement thingo, and also what the more senior Riffs guys are wearing – it’s multi-coloured Dimmey’s silk dressing downs for everybody. Not to mention the fairly hilariously cack-handed fighting styles on display in the action scenes. This is not so much kung fu, as it is what Benny Hill so frequently summarised as: “It’s not egg, it’s not young, it’s just foo.”)

What makes it transcend generic limitations is that, in spite of the story’s origins in Greek history/legend, and the avowed comic book sensibility, it’s one of the moviest movies that ever movied. It really couldn’t have worked in any other medium anywhere near as well. By an effort of will, and single-minded belief in his concept (well, and talent to execute it as conceived) Hill transforms drek into myth, and a cheese-platter into pure movie. The result isn’t a great picture, but it’s a one-off, and distinctive and memorable, and it’s kind of a great achievement anyway.

Just one other little sourball to break up the general love-in here. For some reason – certainly not readily apparent to the viewer of the finished product – the sequences are framed by a visual device which literally uses comic book imagery as transitions. That is, panels, borders, narrative and dialogue balloons, and images kind of stationary-rotoscoped which transform live-action to drawings and back again. It’s kind of neat looking, and completely intrusive. It knocks the viewer out of the movie time and again, and as it isn’t really intended as ironic commentary – at least it doesn’t work that way – it’s difficult to work out what it was intended to achieve. Basically, if the viewer gets it’s kind of comic-booky, they already know that, and if they don’t, why dwell on it? As the great popular culture analyst Daffy Duck once so eloquently put it: “Don’t be so danged literal.” **

However, The Warriors sucks you in all the way (maybe a slight slackening of the girdle of tension during the last ten minutes or so, but still), and between the howlingly empty streetscape, only populated by colour-coordinated gang members, and the intermittently annoying and thoroughly dated synthesiser score that nonetheless, still keeps the tension itching away at the skull, it has a breathless, airless, eerie feel that will stay with you. It’s dated but timeless, it’s trash but great trash, and it took me nearly thirty years to see it, but I’m telling you not to wait so long.

(9 out of 11 Margaret Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap)

* (The version I’m talking about is a 2005 “Director’s Cut” reissue.)

** (I have no idea where the comic book style visual insertions were in the originally-released version, or whether it’s something Hill always intended that were inserted into his “Ultimate Director’s Cut” version at a later date. Other than the introductory illustration and narration (Hill’s voice if I’m not mistaken), as far as Unca Leapster is concerned, they could have left the lot out and only improved the picture.)

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THE MONDAY NIGHT WAR (2004)

If you owned a pro wrestling company, and you released a DVD about the greatest threat to its existence that company had ever faced, how complimentary would you be about the opponent in that struggle, and how even-handedly would the events be documented? Logically, the answers would be “Not at all” and “Not at all” respectively. Clearly you and I have never owned a pro wrestling company, and in particular World Wrestling Entertainment, where logic is often the last quality to enter into any argument.

Of course, logic is often a non-starter in any enterprise involving any entertainment company. And that’s what this DVD really is – a tale of a specific competitive situation involving two entertainment companies – the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) * and World Championship Wrestling (WCW).

From the mid-90s into the early years of this decade, the two wrestling promotions had a bitter, and often hilariously dirty, struggle for dominance of US pro wrestling – a struggle which, due to the salutary effects of direct competition, and a resultant change in the nature and direction of the product in both organisations’ cases, also led to a concurrent struggle for hearts, minds, dollars, and ratings points of a proportion of a mainstream, previously non-pro wrestling audience for a period. **

The battle’s fulcrum was “The Monday Night War” – the head-to-head programming of the promotion’s two flagship shows, WWF’s RAW and WCW’s Nitro, on Monday nights. Each was to garner some of cable’s biggest ratings. Each became a cable mainstay. Both broke the mold of what pro wrestling had been, and both discovered new audiences in doing so. Only one survived, and the story told in The Monday Night War is, purportedly, how and why.

A lot of people would struggle with, if not outright refute, the possibility of a valid documentary on such a struggle being produced by one of the participants in it. History is written by the victors, and all that stuff. Others would dispute the description of this as a movie – it was never released to cinemas, and made specifically for home video release – or as a documentary. There’d be a school of thought that the idea of a commercial business documenting its own activities with anything resembling impartiality is a complete nonsense, let alone the matter of the depiction of its former deadly rival.

And those are valid considerations to say the least. Unfortunately, for all the valid reasons anyone could come up with for refuting the possibilities of its existence, the only problem is that the monster exists, in living breathing colour, and The Monday Night War is that monster. ***

Despite some usefully illustrative (and fun) extras from the vaults of both TV shows, the meat of The Monday Night War is the documentary feature, clocking in at a shade under 95 minutes, in which a mix of TV footage, interviews with key (and some not-so-key) personnel, and one of those expensive-sounding movie trailer style voice-over guys illuminates on-camera, backstage, and corporate-level developments in the two companies’ struggle for dominance, which became a struggle for survival.

If one had to name a single factor which epitomised the change in approach which, for a time, allowed both promotions to catch fire, it pretty much has to be that the backstage bled through on camera, i.e. that both tensions within the companies, between the companies, between individuals working for one company, and the real-life personalities of the stars playing the characters, were encouraged to come to the fore. In a tailored way, yes, most often, in a scripted way, well, sometimes, but what was previously kept tucked away well behind the curtain was now part of the entertainment package, in a way that fans were ready for, that non-wrestling fans had never seen before and found intriguing, and that virtually no other type of television show or entertainment enterprise could do, or would even consider trying, at least to that point.

Fortunately this approach informs the manner of the documentary’s construction, which is why it’s not just a shill job for the surviving company. You get to hear plenty from the people who were there on both sides of the war. It’s not like they never soften things from the WWF perspective, and it’s not like some points aren’t a little fudged, but the key issues and highpoints are all there. It’s a story that was easy for the current WWE to tell straight, or straight-ish, in a sense, because ultimately most of the key blunders were on the other side’s tab, but WWF pulled their share of what industry analyst Rock Hudson once termed “35-foot wieners” as well, and most of them are present, correct and acknowledged right here.

Essentially, as told here, the war was between Vince McMahon’s previously all-conquering WWF and its one remaining serious opposition, the Ted Turner-owned and Eric Bischoff-administered WCW. Bischoff had Turner’s money, a competitive streak at least equal to Vince’s, and the great good fortune not to be over-burdened with anything resembling ethics. McMahon had the one business, years of experience in it, a track record of previously trampling over all traditional regional opposition, but didn’t have Turner’s bottomless wallet, and had never experienced a direct challenge like this on his home turf.

Bischoff started by signing up past stars that Vince had created, (or at least helped elevate to a level of some mainstream consciousness), including Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage, then turned the heat way up in signing a couple of uncontracted current WWF players, in Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. This was where he changed the direction. Previously major wrestling companies had either barely acknowledged the opposition, and then briefly and dismissively (the WCW policy) or refused to acknowledge them at all (long-standing Vince McMahon/WWF approach).

Bischoff put Nash and Hall (and soon Hogan) on camera as invaders from another federation, - initially dubbed “The Outsiders” and then trademarked as the “nWo” – established as opposition to the WCW mainstream. They didn’t talk like traditional pro wrestlers, they didn’t respect the company’s traditions, and they offered the possibility of “inter-promotional” rivalry without the inconvenience of having to come to a creative and financial agreement with another promotion, let alone split the profits.

Bischoff went further, too. Knowing his show was live but the opposition’s taped, he reflects with undiminished glee on this DVD on how he went to the Turner execs and arranged to get Nitro to air three minutes before the hour so he could go right on air and give the opposition’s entire match results for the evening before RAW had even rolled the opening credits.

Between not knowing what Hall or Nash might say or do at any juncture, or what cracked viewpoint might be espoused about opposition programming, both committed wrestling fans and more casual viewers soon had ample reason to want to tune in to the WCW show.

When the ratings war went WCW’s way, it went that way hard, and it stayed that way for a long time. It’s freely admitted here how close Vince McMahon’s company came close to the wire during that period.

The story of how and why that turned around is an instructive one that will probably never be learned in any portion of the worldwide entertainment industry – the vast majority of which is apparently dedicated to proving continuously, in ironclad fashion yet, that “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

It’s a multi-faceted one, but the elements are clear enough as depicted in The Monday Night Warкомпютри. The market leaders, WCW, became complacent. Backstage politicking by the stars prevented shining younger talent from moving up and having their run at the top, thus blocking the possibility of freshening up the star mix, and opening a backdoor for the WWF, where said young talent, the minute it was contractually possible ran straight over to the opposition. Many of said younger talent became stars for Vince McMahon. Competition made him both create new stars (Steve Austin, Mick Foley, The Rock) and make his product more edgy, rude, violent, and black-humoured – the WWF “Attitude” Era, as it was dubbed – and Bischoff in his money-padded ivory tower, missed the threat. Bischoff was a great guy for initial concepts, but had no idea for how to develop those concepts, and past the first rush of ideas, the cupboard was bare.

One major factor barely hinted at but not really nailed here is that both “owners” put themselves on air, and the difference in how they did so was ultimately a telling signifier of the difference between the two companies. McMahon, who had stumbled into a negative perception by the fans via circumstances depicted briefly, slightly misleadingly but clearly enough in the documentary, marched on camera with gusto in a hugely enjoyable caricature of corporate arrogance and swagger, made all the more enjoyable by the degrading come-uppances he would ultimately submit himself to on-camera. Bischoff came over (completely convincingly, it must be said, although that may fall short of being a compliment) as a greasy, smug, corporate bully type – a midlife crisis guy desperately trying to be “cool” – who never battled his enormous ego in check long enough to get any come-uppance that stuck. One apparently abused on-camera time for his own gratification, and the other made himself one of his promotion’s greatest assets as entertainer and a lead heel character. It’s not the whole story of who won and why – and no individual point emerges as such, in a well-told but complicated story – but it’s a key, and particularly indicative, factor in the WWF’s ultimate victory, and surprising that it’s not signposted more clearly as such, given the source of this release.

Bischoff features extensively in the interview material of this movie, and McMahon less so. McMahon comes across measured, considered, and revealing as to his emotions and thoughts during the struggle. Bischoff portrays himself as a largely unrepentant, unbelievably weaselly, manipulator and viciously competitive executive who enjoyed the exercise of corporate power to a degree which probably falls several feet to the other side of the line of carnality. The trap for those who aren’t familiar with this era of pro wrestling history – or any pro wrestling for that matter – would be to assume that Vince is being frank and open, and Bischoff isn’t.

From experience with the documentary features in other World Wrestling Entertainment DVD releases, and from knowledge of reliably reported history **** of the events of the time, and since, and documented reports of the personalities involved, it’s fairly safe to assume here that Vince McMahon is, at least to a significant degree, playing a role, and Eric Bischoff, as unlikely – let alone unpalatable – as it may seem, is being largely open and honest. Believe it or don’t, that’s just how he is, apparently.

The most telling comment, unsurprisingly, comes from the wrestlers who worked for both companies during the relevant period, in particular Mick Foley and Chris Jericho. What might be surprising for non wrestling fans is both how frank and how articulate they are, but thanks to them, a great deal of light is shed on the subject, and a perspective gained that The Monday Night War definitely would have otherwise lacked.

While the interviewee choices are a good mix – with the exception of at least one too many WWE corporate shill touting the company line presumably so that Vince McMahon didn’t have to carry the whole of that can – there are obvious omissions in key talent on both sides as well, and the keen mind will no doubt extrapolate for itself that the reasons for such absence involved money and/or business politics. The keen mind can give itself a gold elephant stamp, because it will be dead right too.

The reason I’ve reviewed The Monday Night War here rather than corralling it off in the wrestling section of this blobsite as I normally do, is, because on viewing it in full for yet a third time, yet, it struck me that this had some potential to entertain those who were not exclusively pro wrestling fans, yet it would probably never reach any of them, owing to being largely, if not exclusively, marketed to wrestling fans. It’s not the only one of the documentary features on the WWE home video releases which has this potential, and not even the only one that speaks, with some (perhaps unexpected) eloquence to greater verities in many matters of the entertainment industry, and competition therein, but it’s the stand-out example.

The Monday Night War is a well-constructed, ridiculously compelling, somewhat fudged and sometimes jaw-droppingly frank documentary on a fascinating minor chapter in entertainment history. It’s also about pro wrestling. If the latter doesn’t completely cancel out the former for you, you might well surprise yourself by enjoying it. It never won any documentary prize at any film festival in the world, and it never will, but there are probably plenty worse which have.

(9 out of 11 MPHOAH)

* (In, I believe, the early 2000’s, the World Wrestling Federation finally lost a pitched, extended international court battle with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature over the WWF acronym - as one Federation exec memorably summarised, “The panda had its paw raised” – and since then has changed its trading name to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and in an enforced fit of historical revisionism, rebranded all past WWF references to WWE as well. Since it was known as WWF for the vast majority of the time-frame concerned here, that’s what it’s referred to above.)

** (In terms of, but not limited to, widespread merchandise placement and sales, perception of the teen audience at least as being part of the then-current console game/’cool TV show of the minute’/current hit movie/hit-band-of-right-now media mix, and the memorably indicative week in media history when the venerable TV Guide publication sported four different covers – all wrestlers, two from each of WWF and WCW – there was a sustained but ultimately temporary window in the late 90s to early 2000s when both companies’ product crossed over to a mainstream audience, that hadn’t been previously identifiable as either regular, semi-regular or even casual wrestling fans. That this was as a direct result of “spirited” if not downright venomous competition, is a suggestion backed up by viewing figures from that time compared to since, and the effective withdrawal of the subsequent WWE to a more definable ‘wrestling market’, lacking any comparable degree of mainstream crossover, no matter how profitable it may well have remained.)

*** (As mentioned earlier in the review, wrestling companies don’t necessarily think like regular companies or other human beings to start with, let alone one controlled by Vincent K McMahon. As also hinted at, it was good business to be somewhat more frank and backstage-transparent during this era of pro wrestling, and at the time of this title’s release, while the ongoing television WWE product had pulled back from this approach, the thinking for DVD product was apparently that it was pitched at hardcore wrestling fans who wanted all the ‘reality’ detail possible, and that it was thus good business to give it to them. While they have since demonstrably also retreated from that position, the DVD releases still tend to be somewhat more frank and open in their approach to material than the flagship TV programmes now, but generally not as much as the titles from a few years ago, such as this one.)

**** (Mostly derived from Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, a weekly subscription news service of impeccable journalistic integrity, which can be fairly described as both the Variety magazine and New York Times of pro wrestling – graphical qualities notwithstanding – in that it is effectively both the industry journal and newspaper of record. I can hear the scoffing of the wrestling-challenged from here, but all I can say is, within its parameters of subject matter, there is not one publication of any nature on the planet that I trust more than the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, nor any journalist I can think of more painstaking, demonstrably fair, and diligent than Dave Meltzer. His achievement in remaining so over three decades of involvement with a tight, narrow business largely dedicated to – if not predicated on – lying and flim-flamming as a matter of course, and in which everyone knows everyone else and a lot of them aren’t especially keen on any concept of frank disclosure, substantially dwarfs any, or all, of the Twelve Labours of Hercules. In the words of the otherwise unrelated old Robert Johnson blues song, Meltzer may well be “The Last Fair Deal Gone Down”.)

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DYNAMITE (1929)

This one kicks off, and just about kicks the bucket, with an antediluvian courtroom scene of Richter Scale-destroying emotion, acted substantially slower than real time, and with a sense of legal procedure apparently derived from a close study of the famous novels of Lewis Carroll. This could well be the granddaddy of all movie cliché courtroom scenes, and they don’t miss a trick, unfortunately. All you need to know is that a taciturn miner – who sure talks a lot for a tight-lipped kind of guy, and slowly – gets convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and sentenced to death. That’s Charles Bickford, and we’ll be getting back to him later in the picture.

Next we’re in the jazz age, with flappers and floppers and possibly even a flat-foot floogie with a floy-floy, somewhere up the back of one of the more debauched ensemble scenes. This is where you become more keenly aware that our directorial host is none other than Cecil B. “Ready when you are, Mr” DeMille, who before he got around to making his famously vulgar epic movies sanctified by Biblical references apparently used to have a pretty snappy line in cheerily dirty movies of “marital complications” sanctified by a bit of sleight of hand moralisation in the tail end of the closing innings. *

We meet our outstandingly feckless heroine (Kay Johnson) as she is light-heartedly devastating the hopes of the three grim old vultures who are the executors of the trust left to her by her departed father, who must have sensed the loop-de-loop direction her life was heading in, or maybe he just marked the gin bottles at home. The vultures want her to settle down and approximate a regular human being, a point on which Fey Kay is only too keen to disillusion them, her chief ammunition being that the guy she’s in love with is already inconveniently married to someone else. We leave the old birds to fizz and pop like bottles of home-brewed beer, but not before they’ve subtly dropped a 200 kilo anchor of plot development that if KJ doesn’t get married by a certain (and, unsurprisingly, imminent) date, she loses her whole inheritance, which will go to a shelter for mad cats, or institute of advanced gopher research, or something disappointing along those lines.

We then whiz along with Kay to someone or other’s palatial estate, where we meet the straying hubby, a dashing moustachioed breadstick played by Conrad Nagel, who looks like a Conrad Nagel, and even sounds like a Conrad Nagel. But don’t ring now – there’s more. We also meet the wife (Julia Faye), a fellow society dingbat – and what a dingbat – who doesn’t seem to care that her polo-jockey hubby is fooling around with Fey Kay in plain sight, and it turns out there’s a reason for that. She’s got her own branch-line relationship, with a young hunk played by a very young Joel McCrea with his chest thrust out and an anxious air suggesting that all these society hijinx aren’t quite his area, and he’s looking around for the helmet and football field he’s misplaced.

All this fierce modernity is getting a little wearing, so Cec does the only thing that makes sense under the circumstances and cranks it up five or six notches. We meet the whole society rent-a-crowd who seem to spend most of their on-screen time urgently flouting prohibition and drinking most of the eastern seaboard dry. Every possible readymade character template is religiously exploited, right down to the comedy relief guy whose character name is actually “Life of the Party” right there in the credits.

Conrad, who is no oil painting between his high forehead and soup-strainer moustache, has such a “Top Hole! What Fun! Awfully good sport, old man!” approach to absolutely everything that he inadvertently becomes the comedy hero of the picture. However he has morals, apparently, and won’t park his polo pony in Kay Johnson’s well-maintained stable until his marriage is officially kaput. His wife – zesty and mildly insane little funster that she is – is a little flighty over putting an end-date on the pantomime marriage, so while Nagel is temporarily detained elsewhere – possibly conducting scientific tests to determine the tightest polo shirt which can be worn by human males without crushing the chest to the consistency of laundry powder – the two she-wolves calmly barter a cash price to determine his freedom, in a scene which seemingly takes us from breezy-moralled ultra-modernity into the vague area of white slavery.

Meanwhile, back in the Big House, Charles Bickford is cooling his heels, waiting patiently for the gallows to be manufactured, an activity which is being inconsiderately conducted at irritating volume directly outside his barred window. Just his luck to get sent to a prison which had never executed anyone before, and had to knock up a gallows from scratch, I guess. Even worse, there’s a guy in a nearby cell who plays guitar and sings, and just wait till you hear the dilly of a song he’s singing. If I was Bickford, I’d have asked to be put on work detail on the scaffold just to get the thing up quicker and get away from the guitar guy.

Soon Kay Johnson turns up so we can eventually weld the two halves of the movie together, and that’s probably about as much thought as went into the enterprise. She has to get married to someone who won’t stick around and get in the way, Bickford needs money so his kid sister won’t get thrown into an orphanage after his neck gets stretched, and soon we’re joined by a priest and a watchful warden and the two protagonists are hitched. This is a sequence more harrowing than virtually any in a legitimate horror picture in movie history. While Dynamite is technologically pretty advanced for an early-ish sound movie, the one problem they clearly hadn’t nailed was how to mix sound from various sources. All the sound in any scene is quite audible, but it’s all equally audible, whether it’s a vague waft of background atmosphere or featured dialogue.** So in this scene, you have a nightmarish aural tableau consisting of the two featured players, the unfortunately ultra-realistic droning tones of the priest, Guitar George nasally brutalising his way through possibly the most punishingly dreary song ever committed to film, and the relentless hammering of the unseen Keystone Kops Konstruction Krew directly outside the window – all at precisely the same level, which is, if absolutely nothing else, loud. You could conceivably use this soundtrack today, on a tape loop, to torture suspected spies into a willing and detailed confession in record time, whether or not they’d actually committed the acts of which they were accused. It may be the longest five minutes in a non art-movie, outside of the scene in The Bellboy where Jerry Lewis endlessly fumbles around with a few ice-cubes and pulls faces into the camera while character actors the calibre of Peter Lorre and Hans Conried have to stand around in the background trying not to look bored.

The very next day, via a sub-plot so blatantly, and cackhandedly, inserted purely for the purposes of advancing the otherwise unrelated action that the viewer may feel the need for recourse to a neck-brace, the real murderer is discovered and Bickford is set free. This initiates the odd problem for Kay Johnson, in particular that the husband she’s got isn’t one she wants, and the husband she wants is still technically someone else’s.

It also initiates the odd problem for us, in that we’re still only about one third of the way into the picture, and it turns out there’s still roughly two completely different movies to work our way through before we’re shot of the whole business.

Basically these break down into the fish-out-of-water movie where to fulfil the terms of her inheritance – there’s a late-breaking scenario development where it’s revealed that it’s not enough she was married by a certain date, she also has to be living with the guy on that date, which is around the time your suspicions are confirmed that they’re pretty much making up this tune as they’re humming along – Fey Kay has to park her hold-all in Bickford’s house in his mining hometown, and cook, clean etc for a week for a reliable, and not noticeably unpredictable, barrel of “society girl roughs it as a regular housewife” type laughs. You’ll be even less shocked when I tell you that they start to develop feelings for each other.

Then there’s movie number three, which involves all kinds of suspense, thrills, and any number of kitchen sinks as the legal team of Bickford, Johnson, and Nagel (the latter not exactly one to miss a big shindig) wind up stuck down the mine with too little oxygen, too many love interests, and the age-old problem of having plenty of dynamite to blast their way out, but a complete absence of blasting caps to set the stuff off. Hey, don’t laugh – imagine how irritating this would be if it happened to you. Anyway it’s a situation which seems entirely in place in a movie which contains a jail which has a death-row, and executes people, but inconveniently lacks a gallows with which to do so, thus requiring that one be built at the last minute. Not to mention a mine which has perpetual gas-leaks on level five and leaves a large box of dynamite down there to keep them company. And security sufficiently lax to allow two society loafers to hop the elevator down there whenever they feel like it. After a while, you get the impression that the tuxedo-clowns gargling gallons of cheap hooch in the jazz age debauch scenes weren’t the only ones on the set – apparently whoever fashioned the screenplay may also have discovered the key to the firewater cabinet.

Anyway, you’ll be relieved to know that with a bit of good ol’ American ungenuity, they hit on a solution to the dilemma, which involves hitting as the solution – someone has to take a sledgehammer and belt the dynamite, thus achieving freedom for two, and a much roomier pair of pants for the designated hitter. You get a romantic triangle, much heightened drama, a definitive resolution, and an almost impossible task left for the plucky embalmers.

Against pretty much all the odds, Dynamite is pretty giddy fun for almost the whole ramshackle ride give or take the opening mortuary of a court scene, the stuff in the prison, and yet another wayward subplot, this one concerning a young boy’s life or death struggle for survival after being run over, in which affair the results of putting the matter to a vote with modern-day viewers might be less than savoury, given the already substantial length of the artefact, and the inescapable feeling that we’ve already got quite enough subplots, if not separate movies, to be going on with.

For a 1929 movie that runs a reel or so over the two-hour mark, it moves along quite dashingly, and mostly holds the attention, sometimes out of sheer audacity in manifesting plot turns like a conjurer producing flora and fauna from various sleeves, props and trouser legs. On the subject of trouser-legs, this is a defiantly “pre-Code” movie, which means it contains concepts, and visual demonstrations thereof, racy enough to beat the band, with enough left over to also beat the orchestra leader and any music copyists in the vicinity. *** Those of a firm belief that movies of this degree of antiquity necessarily have a certain neck-to-knee prim quaintness built in may find themselves having to call Mr Antenna to retrieve their eyebrows from the roof.

Of all Mr DeMille’s many quintessential epic movie moments, recited like incantations by buffs and critics alike down lo these many, many years, none may be more epic than the somewhat less-famous featured set-piece from Dynamite, which pits a number of young ladies against each other in a unique race, consisting of them revolving, spread-eagled, while bound in some form of giant metal wheel, and wearing what looks for all the world like elaborate, matching underwear. You can have your Ben Hur chariot race and your Moses parting the waters and all that old rope – where else can you get rotating ladies on a big lawn in multi-layered lingerie? Dynamite – that’s where.

The good news for the be-cabled is that Dynamite turns up once in a blue polo chukka on Turner Classic Movies, in a print of inexplicable crispness given the passing of eight decades and any real audience for this sort of beer-bubble polka, all the better to enjoy Conrad Nagel’s moustache and the complete absence of anything resembling sound mixing. I strongly recommend that you see this bizarre entertainment given the opportunity – it brings new life and complete meaning to the adjective “sprawling”. It’s a little like a heartfelt, genuine utterance at a glittering awards show – there’s every chance you’ve never seen anything like it.

(8 out of 11 MPHOAH)

* Posterity, and a wayward sense of humour, demands yet another explanatory retelling of perhaps the greatest of all determinedly apocryphal showbiz tales. Cecil B. DeMille was filming one of his famous epics, let’s say the silent version of the The Ten Commandments. There was one scene of a particular expansive and complicated nature involving horses, chariots, and thousands of tons of human extras. DeMille lined his cameramen up and explained carefully that because of the elaborate nature of the business within the scene, the epic scale, and particularly because the ending of said sequence involved the destruction of a large portion of the main set, that there was only one opportunity to film the thing, and it was imperative that it be successfully recorded first time, or the entire film would come to naught. Having drilled all talent involved, and with three cameramen all recording the action from different angles, DeMille retired with reasonable confidence to the director’s chair and called action. Amazingly, all went to perfection. Soldiers battled, chariots rumbled, the multitudes ran, those who were meant to tumble, fall, die or whatever, did so impeccably on cue, and the set was blasted completely according to plans. As the dust died down, DeMille called cut and strode to the first of the cameramen to get the post-mortem. “Did you get it?” asked the screen great, and Cameraman #1 responded, “I’m sorry Mr DeMille, with all the sand kicked up by the horses, some got in the shutter-gate, and the film was ruined. DeMille was a little shaken, but he had two other cameras rolling, and soon recovered his stride. Heading up to the next shooter, he asked “Did you get it?”, and Cameraman #2 said with a sad shake of his head, “Sorry Mr DeMille, but a stone kicked up cracked the lens and I didn’t get any of it.”
DeMille is pretty worried by now, and runs the whole distance of the set up to the third guy. He gets there panting, and gasps to the guy “You’re my last chance. The entire film stands or falls on what’s in your camera. Now tell me, did you get it?” And Cameraman #3 turns beaming to face his boss, and pipes brightly: “Ready when you are, Mr DeMille!”

This one has been told more than some of the more popular Bible stories down the years, and has seen many variations, including to what film it pertains, let alone which sequence. Often it is referred to either the silent or sound versions of Ben Hur. The chariot race in either would appear to be a natural fit for the story, but this theory still presents something of a conundrum being that neither of them were directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It would be nice to think there’s a grain of truth in it somewhere. Regardless, it is undeniably true that as a signatory definition of the application of Murphy’s Law to showbiz (or indeed any workplace, and so many other instances in everyday life), as witnessed on a daily, if not hourly basis to this day, the principle of “Ready when you are, Mr DeMille” has long since ascended to a Greater Truth than any mere documentable fact.

** Anyone who’s ever tried to record an interview with a condenser microphone only later to discover phones ringing/workmen hammering/rain falling in the background recorded in blistering clarity but the interviewee’s voice somewhat anaemically twittering away semi-audibly in the ruck is familiar with the kind of sound-scape routinely captured with breathtaking alacrity in Dynamite. One potential claim to fame for this film should be more closely examined by movie historians: DeMille may have been the first to invent the use of over-lapping dialogue, some four decades before it was generally thought to have first achieved currency. A perfectly valid, though perhaps somewhat churlish question would be whether he MEANT to invent overlapping dialogue here, or whether it arose inevitably from the limitations of the technology. I say overlapping dialogue is overlapping dialogue, and it’s seldom been heard since with such a rigorous lack of clarity.

*** Since the term “pre-Code” still turns up a bit in scholarly, if not Eton-collared, film literature – and the Leonard Maltin movie guides – and the term itself may as well be considered IN code at this late juncture, a brief explanation may be necessary. When the film industry was copping considerable flak on account of its licentious ways on screen, not to mention off, a do-gooder and power-broker called Will Hays concocted something called the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930. It was a self-policing pre-release censorship method akin to the in-house “Standards and Practices” boards run by the major US television networks some years down the track. The idea was to get in first, and get the wowsers off the movie industry’s backs, before they could arouse popular sentiment against Hollywood and do some real damage in the box-office area. It wasn’t a purely cosmetic affair however. It was a real code, set out in some detail, which proscribed the inclusion of certain depictions, material and even approaches to characterisation. (For example, criminals couldn’t be heroes of a picture, and had to be shown to have bad things happen to them.)

It was rigorously applied from around the middle of 1934, and whatever salutary effects it may have had in building Hollywood into the world-straddling entertainment monolith it became and protecting profits from potential ravaging by God-botherers – and at least in its early years of application it did arguably assist in achieving these goals – it also, to a degree, locked Hollywood movies into a pre-pubescent “One leg on the floor next to the billiard table” approach to sexuality and many other subjects for more than 40 years, until the Code came a-tumbling down in the mid-60s, right on time to join the splintering of the old studio system into greater independence, and independents, and the fresh-air stampede of “new attitude” US movies of the late 60s and early 70s.

So ‘pre-Code’ is generally used to mean the early sound pictures made before the Motion Picture Production Code came into effect. (Though it would logically also apply to silent pictures.) For those previously unexposed to this kind of early Hollywood material, there’s a lot more lawlessness, flesh, and florid displays of underwear and kink-flavoured immorality than might be expected from the period. Once again, Turner Classic Movies seems to be the one organisation on the face of the planet whose avowed mission is to disseminate this kind of salty, fruity, three kinds o’ nuts, material, and even then, not all that frequently. But when one of these strange, unsung pre-Code beer-barrel Bacchanals turns up, you’re strongly advised from this corner to give it a burl. It’s like Hollywood made horny-handed dirty “We’re all adults here” pictures for a few years, took forty years off, and then started exactly where they’d left off. Well there was a lot more swearing in the 70s movies, but other than that, it was a case of the less things changed, the more they’d stayed the same.

Just by way of further definition, the term ‘Hays Code’ was used interchangeably with ‘Motion Picture Production Code’ and ‘The Hays Office’ was a reference to the organisation he headed on behalf of the Hollywood studios, the MPPDA - Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. Hays regime ended in 1945. The Code stayed in place until 1966. By way of further clarification, lest any eager young researchers fall pants over toupee into the obvious trap here, Will Hay (singular) was a British farce comedian who made movies in the 1930s and 40s, and had no interest one way or the other in controlling the exposure of feminine underwear in American movies. Being a British comedian his only conceivable interest in the subject matter would have been from the point of view of one of his male cast members possibly wearing it for mildly ribald comic effect.

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3:10 TO YUMA (2007)

I attended this movie with, if not at the behest of (presuming I knew what behest meant) my long-time movie going tag-team partner, Brett Duck. Brett is a stentorian cineaste (cf. “behest”) whose sly but amazed obsessive befuddlement at the more overtly lunatic elements of the careers of Brian De Palma and Ken Russell has given me a lot of honest belly-laughs over the years.

Our mutual movie-attending exploits have yielded generally sterling but somewhat chequered results. From the heights of Dick Tracy (still underrated comic-book revisionism – be the first on your block to rediscover this screw-loose, imaginative bottler) to the lows of Congo (pongo) and the desperation-inclined Australian Tarantino-wannabe Two Hands (for beginners). It was during the latter epic, about one hour into proceedings, as the eyelids slowly lost their battle against the combined forces of the movie-makers and gravity, that Brett uttered perhaps the most telling eight-word film review in motion picture history – “Do you want to go grab a drink?”

As previously indicated, 3:10 to Yuma was Brett’s choice, and I have to admit that even as the trailers slowly oozed by, my hand was already convulsing in a claw-like gesture, in full anticipation of grabbing an early beer.

I should never have doubted a mind sturdy enough to survive the ravages of more than a dozen Ken Russell movies more or less intact.

If you like Westerns, 3:10 to Yuma is an absolute pleasure. Bear in mind that the first four words of the previous sentence are arguably as vital to the full meaning of the whole as any four words ever to hit imaginary electronic paper. I mean, you could conceivably see Brokeback Mountain, not like Westerns very much at all, and still enjoy it. That might not say anything definitive about your sexuality, although it would almost certainly do so for your taste in movies. Not to mention an attention-span considerably more brawny, if not ironclad, than mine. Anyway, if you’re not into Westerns at all, you may as well skip 3:10 entirely, and go straight to the bar.

For those in love with classic cinema prairie-dust, and particularly the mutation of it from the 1950s, when the classic western form was maintained, but they injected a psychological strain to the genetic mix, there will be no barriers to your enjoyment of this movie, trust me. I was amazed, and you can be too.

There’s a farmsteader type guy (Christian Bale) with wife, kid, poverty and the whole 8½ yards, and to sum him up in a brief epigram, He Needs Money. Also in town is a captured leader of a particularly desperado gang (Russell Crowe), and they need someone to escort him to the timetable-meat of the title, a train which will whisk him away to the iron stockade, or whatever they called jails back then. Can you guess who joins the escort party, and the answer isn’t Don Knotts. The only problem is that Crowe’s gang is still free, not to mention soiled in perhaps all but one possible moral and physical senses of the term, and everyone knows they’ll be intervening at multiple gunpoint attempting to interrupt delivery of said boss to said public transportation.

Adding to the general porridge of interest is that the level-speaking, intelligent Crowe character is adept at psychological manipulation of his captors, the townspeople and authority figures aren’t exactly filling you to the brim with confidence about their mental fortitude, and you’re still trying to work out whether Bale is really doing this for the money (which he’d have every excuse to do – at least a new pair of pants must be at the back of his mind), or out of some irrepressible urge towards moral rectitude at any cost.

The tensions thus set up are pretty fully explored – it’s a current movie, so there’s plenty of time, of course – and it’s a satisfying movie on that score, mostly.

Those up for a little action on their western-themed pizza probably won’t have much to complain about either, although in terms of where and how everything happens when it explodes into gunplay, I have to say director James Mangold left me plenty marooned, pardner. I can understand what he was going for, in terms of a subjective character’s-eye view of how confusing and disorienting a gunfight would be in such cramped streets and buildings, but the climactic tension was logically in establishing the difficulty of Bale/Crowe traversing the small township to the station, and for a lot of that journey - much like many a classic long family car trip - we just don’t know exactly where we are, much less how far, or where, we have to go. The staging of many action scenes could have been blocked out a lot more clearly, rather than blocking the paying patrons out.

The other deficiencies are relatively minor. There’s an occasional tendency towards Roger Moore/James Bondisms in dialogue – that curse of the modern-day megaplex movie. It’s just not a “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”-friendly environment, and stupid answers to sappy questions don’t seem that much of a bargain either. There’s the introduction of a third party of ne’er-do-wells in a sub-plot-via-freeway extension that seems wholly calculated to add nothing but length to the enterprise. Some characters are purely, if not ruthlessly, “types” but that isn’t much of a problem, because they’re not the characters we’re interested in anyway, and the latter are thoroughly explored. There are shades of grey in the character-development of the major players, and they may be black-and-whitish shades of grey, but they certainly hold the interest.

WHAT FOLLOWS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS A MINOR “SPOILER”

One character undergoes a fundamental moral makeover in the final reel which is difficult to credit in the face of absolutely every piece of information we’ve been given about him earlier. It makes sense in terms of overall dramatic structure, but we’re not given the information to make it credible, on either an emotional or analytical level. To put it less in less high-falutin’ terminology, it’s a lovely looking pill, Doc, but I think it was made for a horse, not for humans. The movie has enough goodwill going for it by this point that you’re willing to choke it down, but essentially, your heart says “Go” but your head says “No”.

END “SPOILER” INTERLUDE

I continue to find Russell Crowe as good in movies as I find him mind-fraying in his occasional interactions with real life. Christian Bale provides everything the part of the rancher needs. Peter Fonda is perfect in a relatively minor role. You’ll remember Ben Foster as the blackest of the blackhearts, although I did find him somewhat Kraftwerk-fan looking for a western setting initially.

3:10 to Yuma is what it is, which is an old-school western, which picked up a touch of the Sergio Leone’s (particularly in the sound-alike score) on its travels down the Way-Back Machine drive-thru lane to the present. If that sounds like fun, you won’t find the fun-potential misrepresented here, on the ol’ prairie Fun-O-Meter. If it doesn’t, then you know where to head, and the drinks are on you.

(9 out of 11 on the internationally-celebrated MPHOAH scale)

(There are no comparisons with the original 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma here for the not-particularly-startling reason that I’ve never seen it.)

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or

HOW 100+ YEARS’ WORTH OF TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT, CRAFTSMANSHIP, CREATIVITY AND GENIUS LED INEXORABLY TO THE INVENTION OF NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE

News travels slow in Leapsternet land.

Just the other day I stumbled across the fact that in 2004 a certain broadsheet of record had released a book entitled “The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made”.

(As opposed to the greatest 1000 movies never made, presumably – a more innovative concept for a book, but difficult to get picture material on.)

You can see a partial list of these movies at:

New York Times Best 1000 Movies List

What I liked about it straight away was that with 1000 movies to play with, the critics evidently felt there was enough free-range stretching room to include a number of vivid, idiosyncratic, full-blooded movies that never get within parking distance of a mention on the usual, brain-squelchingly conventional “100 Greatest Movies of All Time” lists. (Such as the annual, and annually slightly depressing American Film Institute selection.)

It was nice to see “Sleeper”, W.C. Fields’ “It’s a Gift”, “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein”, “Dawn of the Dead”, “The Sweet Smell of Success”, “This is Spinal Tap”, “What’s Up Doc?”, a classically tough boxing picture of the 40s, like “The Set-Up”, “Goldfinger” (Why not? – a very near perfect ‘Big Entertainment’ type picture with unforgettable set-pieces, leavening black humour and a ton of style), “Cabaret”, “Dead of Night” and the early Sam Peckinpah movie “Ride the High Country” ushered in from the critical cold for a change. And the compilers at least deserve some credit for bravery in attempting the resurrection one of Ralph Bakshi’s 1970s animated pictures (“Heavy Traffic”). Not to mention a medal for someone finally getting around to rescuing “The King of Marvin Gardens” with Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern.

The first five Disney animated features are in there, and they probably should be too – not just because of technical and artistic considerations, or pioneering work in feature-length animation, but because they are all outstanding examples of involving motion picture storytelling taken to the point of near-hypnosis. (Well, “Fantasia” isn’t, but “Fantasia” had a range of other charms, attributes and effects working for it, as it still does.) The usual “100 Greatest” list doesn’t have room for all of them, and the usual routine of handling this is just to insert “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and just let it stand for the rest of the Disney features in code.

The downsides of the selection – well break out a deckchair and a preferred beverage and I’ll sing you an extended Bob Dylan style 63-verse ballad of emotional pain and gastric discomfort, in electrified print.

Basically this breaks down into three categories.

(1) The USUAL SUSPECTS

Not the movie of that title, although, astoundingly, it’s on the list, much to my crusty, gavel-wielding, Lifesavers-smashing chagrin.

Of course, what I’m referring to is all the ‘usual suspects’ movies that inevitably turn up on all the standard-issue, “We already printed the forms so why change the stationery now?” critical lists of “All-Time Great Movies”. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the site, (in the review of “Edge of the City”), you get the impression with some of the more superannuated items that nobody’s bothered to take a look at some of these babies in about four or five decades, because if anyone had, they wouldn’t be coming within a basketballer’s femur’s distance of any list that wasn’t headed: “Return to Store, Insisting on Full Refund”.

I guess there are still people who think that, for example, “The African Queen”, “Bringing Up Baby”, “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” (Homer Simpson-flavoured revulsion-shudder on that last one) play like the greatest movies of all time NOW, but you’d have to picture most of them in nursing homes. They’re all good and memorable movies (well, three of them are) but time hasn’t been conspicuously kind to any of them, and after their robotic inclusion on every single list of this type in mortal history, you get to resent the equally valid or better choices that the sheer bloat of the kneejerk choices force out of contention.

“Key Largo” is arguably a better Bogart picture than “African Queen” – actually it’s arguably better than all these movies. It’s also not on this list. Any number of routinely greatest list-proof Marx Bros and W.C. Fields pictures of the 30s and 40s may well play much funnier to audiences now than the frenzied ‘takes’, mannered rhythms, and gimmick dialogue of “Bringing Up Baby” and its generic screwball ilk. (“Animal Crackers”, “Monkey Business”, “Horsefeathers”, and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” all omitted – the latter one of the greatest comedy movies ever made.) “Bad Day at Black Rock” is a powerful but powerfully dated ‘issue’ picture. “The Best Years of Our Lives” is soap, and not that good at it either. Anyone that would put “Marty” in a list of “greatest movies” hasn’t seen it recently. The not dissimilarly-themed “Requiem for a Heavyweight” plays a lot tougher, truer and tighter now, but will never make “Best x-hundred movie” consideration, presumably because of the ‘TV-stink’ of being derived from Rod Serling’s teleplay.

“The Apartment”, even as a 1960 comedy, now seems like such an antediluvean conception of comedic sexual sophistication, that you suspect it probably starts with a crank. And it’s right there on the New York Times list, dead on schedule.
Etc etc

(2) TOO NEW FOR SCHOOL

The end-product of all these types of lists, right across popular culture, but with a particular eye to both movies and pop/rock/contemporary music, has long since convinced me that the practice of sporting halls of fame should be followed, and contemporary movies/albums/whatever should be barred from consideration until they’ve survived some sort of test of time. Perspective is not like instant coffee – you just can’t add water and gargle the finished product right away. Attempts to ignore this most basic of precepts invariably result in choices whose only possible merit abides in the considerable face-flushing embarrassment they must later inflict on the nurks who included them, not to mention the generous hilarity afforded to all onlookers. About a 15 year moratorium sounds right to me, although you can probably whittle me down to 10 in a good mood.

Selections which strongly suggest the NYT 1000 list might have benefitted from this policy, in terms of raw sanity, include but are not limited to:

“The Usual Suspects”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Apollo 13”, “The Full Monty”, “Gangs of New York”, “Ghost World”, “Groundhog Day”, “L.A. Confidential”, “The Hours”, “The Man Who Wasn’t There”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “Shakespeare in Love”, “Amelie”, “Hamlet” (2000), “Chicago”, “Adaptation”, and I view with the greatest suspicion any movie listed from 2000 on, including the ones I haven’t seen, because of that little matter of perspective – what hits the cerebral sweet-spot for one reviewer right now might look like last century’s fruit platter in just a couple of years’ time. It’s amazing how often that is exactly the case. I even liked some of those movies, but none of them struck me as undeniably “Pick me! Pick me!” indelible ink choices as great films when I saw them. As light sparkling mineral water entertainments, “Groundhog Day” or “Shakespeare in Love”, might have legs, but let’s give them an extra 5-10 years to prove it, presuming they ever do. (And I’m struggling mightily with the notion that there haven’t been one thousand better films made in movie history than “Groundhog Day”. Or 5,000 for that matter.) Charlie Kaufman’s pictures are fun, gimmicked up, rollercoasters for smarter children in the class, (well “Malkovich” was fun) but for me right now, that’s about the extent of the sandwich. I’d like to see who’s talking about them in 20 years’ time. Also, some of these are just plain old generic-wrapper El Crappo choices. Which brings us to…

(3) WHAT ARE YOU, INSANE?

The way the NYT 1000 Greatest Movies list breaks down for me goes approximately a lot like this. A bunch of people get together for a long, long lunch that lasts several weeks, and they’re movie critics, so there’s a lot of talking with their mouths full, tuna/onion bagel breath, and resultant food stains on clothing and all surrounding staff and draperies. They had the usual 100 movies that always go on these lists, and they rubber-stamped those right in there. Then there was the 100 other movies they could all kind of agree on and tickle each other to giggling point about how daring they were, what with putting 100 movies in there that aren’t in the official, time-capsule, “No Earthquake Can Shift This” regular 100 list.

Then they did some solid and exhaustive circle work with a ‘J’, where they all gave in with varying degrees of ill-tempered bemusement to each other’s more bizarre choices, and each squeezed in about two or three Professor Weirdstein choices apiece, while they all congratulated themselves on the thoroughgoing eclecticism of their collective choice, awarded each other sundry doctorates and academic tenure, and accidentally spat flecks of beetroot in everyone’s eyes.

That left them around 700 movies short, which was when they gave up entirely, hit the Leonard Maltin Movie Guide, and started frantically grabbing at anything on display where the book fell open to make up the numbers, with the chief critical guiding principle that they wanted to get out of the meeting before the baseball season was over. That’s as near as I can read it anyway.

It’s also the only way to explain some of the inclusions on this list. Let me dance you through a few fistfuls of examples:

“Amadeus” – a nice movie. Has anyone (and I mean on the planet) watched this since it won the Best Picture Oscar?

“Back to the Future” – One presumes that at least two of the National Lampoon “Vacation” pictures were also shortlisted.

“Beetlejuice” – Loved it all those years ago. Imaginative design, entertaining picture. Shouldn’t be here in a million years.

“Being There” – Not then, not now, not ever. Whoever put it in should be required by law to sit down and watch it now, all the way through, with no breaks for entertainment.

“Beverly Hills Cop” – I liked it, but its listing here is the funniest thing about this picture by a long chalk.

“The Big Chill” – Much like when a Warner Bros cartoon character turns on a washing machine, the result was a mess of soap. Smug, sloppy, soppy, half-cocked and fully drab. Great soundtrack though. The good version of this movie was called “Return of the Secaucus Seven” and I wouldn’t put that in a top 1000 movies either.

“The Big Red One” – They’ve now gone nuts on Sam Fuller pictures – there must be half his career on the list – but I’ve seen this one, and though it’s good, and game, it’s not one of the 1000 best pictures ever made.

“Blue Velvet” – cult suck-up movie of the time, well made and modishly sick, but who watches it now? “Eraserhead” as weird as it is, is the David Lynch movie with the courage of its convictions – the rest – at least of the early ones – look pretty mannered now.

“Body Heat” – Lawrence Kasdan. Really?

“Boogie Nights” – I doubt it.

“Breaker Morant” – Your superior BBC drama-like thoughtful, respectable dramatic entertainment, which is all fine and dandy right up to the point where you try and force that kind of square-block into this round-hole-oriented greatest MOVIES type of list.

“The Breakfast Club” – Ah, the magic of time and place. This is a more interesting choice than some of the others though.

“California Suite” – Ok, someone was really desperate to get home and pay the babysitter.

“Chariots of Fire” – See “Breaker Morant”.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – Yes, I had one with the insides of my eyelids. Portentous, ominous, voluminous sleepwear.

“Crumb” – Hi-impact documentary on a subject both worthy (Robert Crumb) and jaw-droppingly discombooberating (Robert Crumb and his family), but one of the all-time great documentaries? Who knows. Another decade’s worth of fermentation in the common movie gene-pool would give us a lot better idea.

“The Crying Game” – right, does this hold true for every viewer after 1992, who all, by definition, are aware of the trick ending?

“Dead Calm” – At least one half of this movie’s title was spot on the money. Had to read a synopsis to remind me that this profoundly suspense-resistant thriller was kind of a mini-“Cape Fear” set on a fairly small boat. As I remember, Nicole Kidman was too young for the part but not horrible, Sam Neill has been less starchy almost everywhere else, and Billy Zane probably would like to wipe this one off the resume – if he’d have had two more legs and a coat of varnish, he could have passed for a table. A flat-out bad movie from a good director (Phil Noyce), and one of the most inexplicable brain-explosions on the New York Times Best 1000 movie list.

“Dead End” – No, not now. Skid row soap that plays around gingerly with gangster elements, and less gingerly with what they used to call “bathos” and highly predictable bathos at that. For this they left out both versions of “Scarface”?

“Dead Ringers” – I like Cronenberg, particularly doing horror, but I think they’re stretching here.

“Diary of a Chambermaid” – A lot of Bunuel’s pictures are overrated, some aren’t, and this one takes the cake and entire bakery. Long-winded, labours like a draft-horse, and to me is evidently inferior to the equally bizarre but a lot shorter Renoir version of the same material.

“Die Hard” – Dunno. Not convinced it belongs.

“Diva” – another cult-sucker timepiece. The chocolate box was lovely, and the contents seemed mostly like chocolate flavoured air. I doubt time has been kind.

“Down by Law” – more cult-sucking material. Probably dates better than the others cited, but I’m still struggling.

“Dracula” – love this, Bela Lugosi is my boy, but it’s half a great movie and half a fabulous night’s sleep. Horror movies of that time like “The Black Cat” and “Island of Lost Souls” play a lot better now, and weren’t included on the list. Has undoubted and inestimable historical value, but historical value is another list entirely.

“Driving Miss Daisy” – Are you sure?

“The Elephant Man” – See “Breaker Morant” and “Chariots of Fire” and factor in a memorable lead performance and suave manipulation of German expressionist silent movie iconography (and a great shooting job by Freddie Francis) and you still don’t have a great movie.

“The Entertainer” – Love the showbiz-gone-sour theme and the tatty British seaside setting, but didn’t quite get there as a whole movie for me. Kind of had that grittier-than-usual upmarket telly play feel to me, and I thought the actual later telemovie version with Jack Lemmon wasn’t that far off this. Not the worst choice on the list though.

“ET – The Extraterrestrial” – Well, it’s a better choice than “Close Encounters”. Actually as a piece of pure Spielberg storytelling and manipulation with a touch of the old-school Disneys, I never really had a problem with it. I put it here, because I think some other people might. Maybe the last flowering of Spielberg form and good judgement, ahead of grabbing hold of the helium tank of grimly serious subject matter, and pumping himself full of it. The Spielberg movie that should be on here is “Duel”.

“Fatal Attraction” – It certainly provided convenient memorable iconography for cheating men who are scared of women, and definitely did us the service of introducing the clinical expression ‘bunny-boiler’ to the language. And give or take Glenn Close being an excellent actress, which she pretty much always is, what else has it done for anyone lately? Or ever. Sometimes the right movie hits the right previously unexposed nerve at the right time, provoking widespread knee-jerks. This is a no-doubt invaluable medical service but has got very little of anything to do with being a great movie.

“The Fisher King” – Gilliam’s conventional feel-good picture, which was his worst right up until he went out of his way the last five or ten years to make every new film his worst. Aging badly as we speak.

“The Fly” (original) – Well it stood the test of time and it’s entertaining, but there must be one or two hundred better horror movies than this.

“The Fortune Cookie” – Theme remains contemporary, great comedy cast, all-time great director, and nothing funny going on in the city.

“Frenzy” – Later Hitchcock with keynote moments, that probably plays way too loose in the crotch these days.

“Full Metal Jacket” – can think of two Vietnam War movies of the time that were a lot more well-rounded, atmospheric and complete as movies than this. It’s good, but might struggle to make Kubrick’s top five pictures.

“The Full Monty” – Everyone likes a lolly now and then, but you wouldn’t necessary take up plate-space with one when ordering your last meal.

“Gallipolli” – I’m going with the “Breaker Morant” deal again on this one.

“GoodFellas” – Does it hold the attention? Does it fold, spindle and mutilate the attention for that matter? Big-time yes on all counts. With major stunt-performances to stake a career on. But Scorsese has made a lot better movies than this. “Casino” should be on the list. “GoodFellas” to me was always over-rated, and I’ll wear the extreme-minority opinion tag on that with beaming, well-meaning equanimity. He raised the bar, or at least laid the foundations and completed the remodelling on updating the “Godfather” model of crime family depiction to the modern-day template (“Sopranos” et al) and that’s significant, but significant doesn’t necessarily make a great movie. A great show-reel maybe. Kind of your extended gangster MTV music video.

“The Graduate” – Maybe the whole older sexy woman as a potential shag thing was more of a revelation back then, in the halcyon swingin’ sixties days of a previous century. In the context of more modern popular culture/real life “Everybody shags everything” values, this seems quaint. Beyond that, there’s not enough funny in the comedy.

“The Grapes of Wrath” – As long as I don’t have to watch it. Influential, important in its time, and both book and particularly movie seem grindingly pious, long-winded and backdated now.

“The Grifters” – Everyone dressed up nice for the occasion, and there’s some appealing players there, the only problem is, it just was never that good.

“Hair” – I’m presuming that while everyone was on a toilet break, someone slipped this in as a joke. One of the worst movies ever made – musical or viewable – worth seeing as inadvertent comedy now, with a resoundingly salami-like lead performance by Treat Williams that will leave no thigh unslapped. Even his name is funny.

“Hannah and Her Sisters” – One of the ‘acceptably serious’ Woody Allen later-middle-stretch zzzz-friendly pictures that coffee-table intellects with no sense of humour seemed to find more trustworthy than his earlier, funnier pictures. Most of these are messy, pretentious, laugh-resistant and dull, no matter the quality of performance and craftsmanship, and this is emphatically no exception. Five minutes of small-scale Woody comedies like “Zelig” or “Radio Days” are worth 58 movies like this. Let alone his earlier, funnier films.

“Henry Fool” – With most people they’d probably get away with slipping this one in quietly, but unfortunately I saw it. Unlike most of the cult-suckers, had a theme (and an intriguing one too, on the subject of creativity), some actual content as opposed to picturesque sleaze and cool people in offbeat clothing, substituted a good dose of gloom for the usual conceptual post-modern arse-bargling about, and Parker Posey. And diddled around forever before falling away into the usual cess-hole of general death and depression. Not entirely valueless, but pretty much your standard issue art-house mess in the end. Not a great picture’s arsehole.

“Husbands and Wives” – AKA “The Year My Brittle Dialogue Broke”. Woody Allen runs out of ideas and funny, and rotates through every verbal, plot and stylistic cliché of his “We’re all grown up now so let’s talk dysfunctional relationships in an exceptionally dull manner” period to the point where it becomes like a comedy sketch parodying Woody Allen, thus providing the only entertainment value of the enterprise. What he was thinking with the early 60s Godard like camera/editing jiggery-pokery will forever remain a secret between Woody and his shrink, but it’s no bargain on our side of the screen. A complete mess. I can no longer remember if I actually walked out on this, or just fantasised about it in a catatonic state with my mouth and eyebrows frozen in the classic, disbelieving Skipper-reacting-to-Gilligan arrangement throughout. He’s made films nearly as dull (most of the ones without him in them) and he’s made movies that were at least as much of a brutally ill-conceived luncheon spill (“Hollywood Ending” comes roaring to mind) but he may never have combined both qualities on the one pizza like this. Was, should and will be remembered solely for Judy Davis giving one of the greatest performances ever seen in a cripplingly shitty movie. Seriously, if a scientist could create a scale that goes low enough and is finely enough calibrated, it might be possible to prove that this movie is even worse than “Hair”.

“I Know Where I’m Going!” – Lovely, warm-hearted, atmospheric and it has Wendy Hiller in it, one of the most joyously playful and idiosyncratic female leads in movie history – but it’s probably bound to come over as long, repetitive, predictable, and sentimental now. Patronising in its attitude to the headstrong female main character too, which won’t make it play any better. It’s the Paddle Pop that hits the spot on a summer walk, rather than the sit-down Beef Wellington you look for in an all-time great banquet.

“Jailhouse Rock” – Great movie? Or they wanted to get one Elvis picture in there. Probably a better choice than “Fun in Acapulco”..

“The Jazz Singer” (1927) – Other than seeing Al Jolson in some facsimile of his stage heyday (and possibly including that) the value here is exclusively historical, and as mentioned before, that’s a different list.

“Jerry Maguire” – Maybe, I don’t think so, and I’d prefer to give it another ten years and then suck it and see.

“The Killing Fields” – No. See “Breaker Morant” scenario above and add in a budget.

“Kramer vs Kramer” – Thought it was upmarket soap then in its Oscars-destroying heyday, and who’s watched it since?

“National Lampoon’s Animal House” – What in the name of God and John Belushi were they thinking? If you’re going to put a gross-out-heavy teen comedy in there, which is all this is, prototype or not, “Caddyshack” was more varied, inventive, had a better array of comic talent, and was funnier. And that probably shouldn’t be in here either.

“The Pink Panther” – As hysterical a performer as Sellers was, and as emblematic of its times (or the aspirations of certain people within those times) as this movie was, someone really ought to take a look at it now. Long dull stretches of plot obscuring the comedy movie, too much David Niven, far from the funniest Pink Panther movie.

“Playtime” – The two other Jacques Tati movies on the NY Times list (“M. Hulot’s Holiday”, “Mon Oncle”) absolutely belong there. As much as I love the character, as good as some moments are, this unravels under pressure of exceptionally slow pacing, and doesn’t deliver enough by way of pay-off to justify that. He was a great movie-maker who made two great feature films.

“Poltergeist” – A proficient entertainment, and that’s all she wrote.

“The Purple Rose of Cairo” – Woody Allen’s extended, soft-hearted and headed fudge-around with territory Buster Keaton already nailed decades earlier in “Sherlock Jr”. Even a lot of his light, middling kind of pictures (which are really only ‘middling’ by the giddily high standards of his best stuff anyway) , like “Broadway Danny Rose” have a lot more guts and laughs than this. It’s a less atrocious choice than the ones mentioned above, but “Radio Days” and “Zelig”, not to mention “Bananas”, “Take the Money and Run”, “Play It Again, Sam”, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” and “Stardust Memories” should all have been in way ahead of this. (And are all missing in action. “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” surprisingly made the cut, as did the obvious choices that followed those movies. The non-Allen directed (but Allen-starring) “The Front” is an insane omission – just the kind of thing that leads to spontaneous conflagration of the dander in comparison to some of the frankly idiotic choices that did make the cut.

“Quadrophenia” – The only problem there is that the original double-album is a better movie than the movie version. Well, that’s not the only problem, as atmospheric as “Quadrophenia” was in certain moments. Again, this is probably one of those “time and place” type selections.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark” – The only part that stood out for me, in terms of the guy making it really working up a lather, was the weird, angry Old Testament stuff about the Nazis. Otherwise you might as well put in an old Flash Gordon movie serial.

“Re-Animator” – Liked it a lot (in a slightly disgusted sort of way) and Stuart Gordon is or was a pretty interesting talent, but no, not really. If you’re picking a Stuart Gordon picture, it’s his version of “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and that even deserves to be on this list, even if no-one has heard of it. Even Oliver Reed, late in his career, was good in it.

“Repo Man” – Modish cult-sucker of the day with better torque than most of the species. Can’t see it not being dated now. Don’t know of too many who do see it now.

“Robocop” – I’m struggling with it in this context.

“Saturday Night Fever” – Where is the queue for people who weren’t marks for disco?

“Saving Private Ryan” – Plot contrivances up the wazoo and some hilariously stereotyped storytelling contrivances. I’ll never forget my stomach skipping the down elevator and plummeting 37 floors in freefall with that scene with the war-ravaged French town, the soldiers lounging around the patios, and the gramophone someone finds and cranks up with that frikking Edith Piaf song. Spielberg’s natural storytelling facility surfaces fitfully, attached to absolutely nothing of any significance. One of the most over-rated films of all time – the WWII equivalent of the equally shifty, slimy and hopelessly cliché-infested “Platoon” .

“Shaft” – Good entertainment, and holds up as such, but there were better blaxploitation pictures than this. “Across 110th Street” seems like the obvious omission here.

“A Shot in the Dark” – Funny, but the 70s yielded two funnier Pink Panther movies, and “The Party” is an inexcusable omission from the list.

“Stop Making Sense” – I think they just did. Well, I guess yesteryear’s art-school grad crowd got their licks in, what with this and “Henry Fool”.

“10” – OK, clearly we’ve changed the premise of the list now. Going by the Kevin Kline movie from earlier and this one, the criterion is now movies featuring one or two big boobs.

“Tootsie” – If Americans had lived through all those “Carry On” movies presumably they wouldn’t have got quite this worked up about a pretty routine drag comedy with a tediously drill-pressed message. At least it wasn’t “Mrs Doubtfire”.

“Total Recall” – Interesting choice, but no. Not even close really. “Blade Runner” you could have made a case for.

“The Trouble with Harry” – The black comedy odd-one-out from Hitchcock’s “golden” total-control US period. It’s long-winded, tediously arch and not funny. Anyone who’d actually troubled to look at it in the last 50 years could have worked that out for themselves.

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” – Whatever the technological achievements, whatever the historical value of reviving classic Hollywood characters in full animation (and in unprecedented teamings of those characters), whatever its value in returning theatrical feature cartoons to the production mainstream, it pimped on the characters it purported to love, and sublimated them (in a way that perverted the gleeful unfettered anarchy of those great comedy archetypes) to a morbid, third-rate and thoroughly annoying crime story. The degree to which it misunderstood the vintage characters it exploited was the only thing about the movie which was epic. The only place it flirted with greatness was in the animated Roger Rabbit short that opened the movie, and was at about the level of a decent Tom & Jerry MGM theatrical cartoon. That’s no insult, unlike the rest of this overrated clod-heap.

“Woodstock” – As a greatest MOVIE? Again, the historical and musical value of what’s in it (and even how it was shot) is incomparable, but I’ve never thought of it as a great movie as such. How do you compare it to something like “The Conversation”, or “The Wizard of Oz”? Great documentary? Well, hmmm, with an extra mmmm. It’s a music movie, isn’t it? I’m not sure concert movies should be in there at all. I found “Gimme Shelter” just as odd a choice.

And that ought to about do her for now.

Those who check out the New York Times list via the above link will see that there were plenty more inclusions worth questioning, but I left out the ones I hadn’t seen, or had only partially seen, or couldn’t remember clearly. Also I covered the bases on the most gorge-raising, risible choices, and left even the more ropey of the partially defensible ones alone.

Another time I might go into some detail on the movies which, amazingly, with a thousand places going begging, somehow managed to fly under that particular radar, but for now, it’s “Kirk Out”.

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(One thing I noticed when first reading the NY Times list, which I decided not to include in the blather above for simplicity’s sake, but now feel that I should mention, for clarity, and because it indicates a specific, and large, exclusion zone within the NYT “Best 1000 Movies” parameters that is implicit but not specifically mentioned at the website reference given above (although the preface to the NYT book that you can access at the same interweb address does mention it in passing) - the list includes no movies from the silent era at all. Everything prior to “The Jazz Singer” is excluded. That certainly will kick around the potential parameters for a “greatest movies” list, if you head in that direction. Since the book was a collection of old New York Times movie reviews, maybe they just didn’t have a comprehensive selection of reviews from those days, or at least nothing they wanted to reprint in 2004.

It still seems like a peculiar way to go about the enterprise. It’s difficult not to feel that for every D.W Griffith, Chaplin or Keaton picture on there, there would have been at least been one “Hair” or “National Lampoon’s Animal House” squeezed out. It’s also ignoring a fairly substantial chunk of movie history, and formative history at that. One possible assumption is that silent movies were omitted with an eye to making the end-product more commercially viable. Since I didn’t see any other explanation in the preface or introduction available on-line - and it may very well be in the book (well, you’d hope) - I can’t readily conjure up any better reason.)

THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH (1947)

Sometimes credits give you more information about a movie than you might have expected, and possibly more of a “Mr Wisdom’s Whopper”-style puzzle than you’d packed a lunch for.

For example, in The Woman on the Beach, there’s a credit for a “Dialogue Director”. The perfectly logical question which may well hiccup to mind is: “Why does a movie which already has a perfectly good director and an assistant director also need a dialogue director?” Not only is this not such a dumb question, but as it happens the answer to it may well stumble across the reason why this is such a nuthatch of a movie. *

The director of The Woman on the Beach was Jean Renoir, who as you may well surmise, was by way of being French. Accounts of his degree of facility with the English language during his Hollywood days vary, ** and at this distance, it’s probably impossible to determine how fluent he was in English, whether reading, writing or whatever.

However there are two strong pieces of evidence highly pertinent to The Woman on the Beach. One is that it had a dialogue director. The other is that Renoir co-wrote the script, and the dialogue is 250 kilos of exploding lunatic soup. It sounds like something two clinically addled teenagers came up with on a brief tram ride after sniffing paint.

Considering how painstaking other aspects of the production are, you get the impression Renoir had very little idea how the dialogue sounded, or he would have done something to fix it. Burning the script and then dancing frenziedly on the smouldering ashes comes to mind.

The other possibility – and one not entirely mutually exclusive of the previous one – is that Renoir didn’t CARE about the dialogue.

(Actually you wonder whether the dialogue coach cared about the dialogue. Given the raw material on hand, and the evidence on screen, you figure they really might as well have got in a football coach.)

RKO’s The Woman on the Beach is a pure mood piece, of the exact kind that every Hollywood studio including RKO would have run hundreds of miles over splintered hardened bagels to avoid at the time.

It’s a sustained, brooding contemplation on the subjects of love, fear, ensnarement by the past, and the balance of good and evil in human personality. (Clearly they would have struggled to get a musical-comedy starring Esther Williams out of this material.)

That’s how Renoir rigorously lays it out, and that’s what he’s interested in, to the clear exclusion of such considerations as sane dialogue, incidental storytelling detail, or conventional plot; to the point where it’s something of a shock when a woman actually turns up on the beach, just like in the title.

Robert Ryan plays a commanding officer in the United States Coast Guard, Mounted Division. (Yeah, on horses – who knew?) He’s a mainly manly kind of man, but mentally toe-stubbed by a terrible event in his past – being on a ship that was blown up, apparently – resulting in highly psycherligical nightmares.

He’s got a fine gal (Nan Leslie) who is not only regulation Hollywood beeyoodiful, but she’s so down-home that she wears checked shirts and does woodwork for a living. (Well, we see her cut a piece of wood in two using a bandsaw while looking nervous, and even then Robert Ryan takes the pieces over to the shelf for her, but it’s all the evidence of master carpentry I needed.)

But then he meets a Woman on the Beach (Joan Bennett). She is a similarly damaged soul, affected by some (as yet unrevealed) tragedy in the past. They share an instant (and I mean INSTANT) mutual understanding that you have to give the actors all the credit in the world for conveying, in the face of halting, lurching and thoroughly intermittent dialogue which suggest that every so often someone would drop a few pages of the script, they’d blow away, and then nobody would bother to replace them.

Unfortunately, there is a Mr Woman on the Beach – a blind, embittered former artist, if all of that doesn’t involve a tremendous amount of tautology. There probably aren’t a ton of uproariously happy blind former painters kicking around, when you think about it.

Thus begins the triangle of love, morphing characters and shifting power relationships which so steadfastly haunt this determinedly gloomy picture. Todd the painter, (Charles Bickford), lonely and bereft of mental stimulation, aggressively seeks to befriend Scott the lieutenant. Scott the lieutenant is getting the idea that he’d very much like to befriend Peggy the mysterious woman, only not in exactly the same way. Peggy the mysterious woman, even though she’s apparently had about two gutfuls of Todd the painter, seems torn on more or less an even-money basis on whether she should get a good befriending (and stimulation) from Scott the lieutenant. Eve, the sunny-bright girlfriend, eventually gets an inkling that she better step out from behind the particle board and jigsaw and do some marital befriending of her own, lest her lieutenant slip through to the proverbial ‘keeper.

All this seems the stuff of roaring, splattered eggplant high melodrama, which is almost exactly what this film isn’t. It’s a kind of fatalistic, brooding pageant of interwoven internal struggles – something that is almost film noir without the crime element. However even crime-less noir requires plot – in the sense of a story where things happen, and personal reactions result from those things. This movie doesn’t do that stuff, it does the reverse. All events just seem to happen, purely as a function of what the characters are. It’s not so much a case of patchwork continuity, or poor continuity, as continuity apparently not having been even a remote consideration.

To put it more plainly, it’s like when a young kid tells you a story, and since where the story is going is much more important to them than the paltry details of how it got there, they kind of skip most of the transitional detail out. You know, “Princess, Frog, Kiss, Castle, Happily Ever After – Now let’s go and play on the swings.” The dialogue in The Woman on the Beach is approached in exactly the same way. Who cares if it makes sense, or even if it’s all there – let’s just get that frog into the fershlugginer castle.

One result of this is some of the most dizzyingly clunky dialogue ever committed to film, accompanied by rampant dementia of the plotline. Another is, almost, a very brave and successful movie tone-poem about an inherent tendency of love toward misery, and the deep-rooted flaws in even the best of human nature, sustained as a pure mood piece, with a story told purely in terms of characterisation.

“Almost” because of a hilariously obvious tacked-on happy ending, which jolts at a tangent from every straight-line conclusion the director has been driving towards to deliver a concluding shot of a previously mutually homicidal couple gaily walking arm in arm into the sunset like school-chums. If you can ignore this boldly cavalier slash of apparent studio tailoring, and keep your liver internalised during some of the more uproariously idiotic dialogue, there’s plenty worth watching in this picture, especially in the main performances.

Stuff to watch out for:

- My personal favourite piece of script-malpractice occurs during a scene where the blind painter guy is unwell, and Robert Ryan waits outside with a fellow member of the Coast Guard. The young guy starts a touching little story about how when he was at school, the local schoolteacher explained gently to the kids that even though the famous painter was now blind, he was a very gifted man, and over time he would find another way to communicate his unique vision to the world. Apart from being a nice piece of background detail on the local town, and adding a bit of shading to a minor character, this is poignant to us and Robert Ryan, because we have seen that Todd the blind painter is a bitter man, locked in the past, who has never been able to break free and find another creative outlet. And it’s right there that the kid blurts: “Gee, I hope he isn’t dead!” This kind of thing happens all through the picture.

- Mr and Mrs Woman on the Beach live in near-poverty in a tumbledown shack right on the water, big enough only to contain them, a few items of tatty furniture, and apparently thousands of dollars worth of the latest in spotless billowing-sleeved Hollywood couture, since the missus turns up in a different shimmering outfit in pretty much every change of scene.

- Even as ear-cloutingly obvious studio process shots go, the big fight on the fishing boat between Ryan and Bickford is a lulu. They may as well have had the studio hands who were tilting the boat and throwing buckets of water in the air come right into shot, and saved wear and tear on the cinematographer.

- There are some amazing undertones of sexuality in there, at least by the standards of the time. When the Charles Bickford character is talking about the joys of deep-sea fishing, the language chosen suggests fairly emphatically that we’re all going to need a smoke after that particular boat sails back into harbour. Also you might want to keep an eye out for some “inadvertent” “distracted” hand-work Joan Bennett does on a convenient piece of metal tubing during a protracted conversation with Robert Ryan outside the beach-house. Any professional pole-dancer would be highly impressed.

- If you ever wondered what Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies (Irene Ryan) looked like when she was young, you can find out here – she looked like a younger version of Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies. No “amazing undertones of sexuality” to report in this case.

- A chap called Harold Palmer is credited with “Montage” which presumably refers to two unusual dream sequences of the Ryan character. The first is more your typical psycherligical casserole of the time, although not without imaginative visual content. The second is quite something, particularly in the perfectly processed “forming” of Bennett’s face from both fire and water effects. As great highlights in psychopathology on film go, this one may well stick with you.

- The pick of the plot-gulfs probably comes when Ryan suddenly turns up at the beach-house door one morning and asks Bickford’s character to come out fishing with him, because he’s booked a boat for that afternoon. Bickford has already explained earlier on that he wasn’t really into fishing, he just made that stuff up. Nonetheless Bickford says “Yahoo, let’s go” or words to like Shakespearean effect, and insists on setting out right away. Ryan agrees.

Now, he already said he booked the boat for that afternoon, so unless they plan to swim out to the fish, you’d be forgiven for wondering exactly how they’re going to get there. Also, there’s no particular reason for this to happen right there, other than Renoir wants to get the characters out there on that boat, right in front of the process screen. In fact there’s every indication that Ryan only wants to take Bickford out on the boat to kill him, and when they’re out there Bickford even admits that he knew that, although omitting to clearly explain why he then decided to come out for a jolly old day on the water anyway.

That Ryan is trying to kill him now is something we suspect, and is confirmed when we get out on the boat. WHY Ryan is trying to kill him now – when he’d already expressed sorrow over almost killing him by accident (kind of) earlier in the picture – is a motivational question apparently deemed excess to requirements by the scripting consortium.

Just to make officially make all this as clear as egg custard, the weather is rugged, the sea is ugly, Bickford’s character has already stated twice that it’s a terrible day for fishing (even though he knows nothing about fishing by his own prior admission), we’ve been deliberately informed that this unique department of the US Coast Guard OWNS NO BOAT, which even if you accept that piece of passing lunacy makes you wonder – presuming your brain hasn’t boiled to a vapour under the pressure of sheer concentrated inanity – how exactly Robert Ryan found a local so profoundly and clinically knot-headed that he was happy to rent out a boat for fishing on (a) a day when there obviously was no fishing, and (b) a day where the seas were pitched at such insurmountable Noah-friendly levels that he was pretty much London-to-a-brick-on not to get the boat back at all, as well as being responsible for the deaths of two locals in a small community.

Quite frankly this one relatively brief sequence has more implicit plot-holes than most movies have plot. And to suggest this was an isolated example would be a vast-underestimation of the imaginative powers at play in this movie.

.

The usual critical tapdance on Renoir’s Hollywood period is that he was forced by the ee-vill studio mavens to make more conventional pictures, so unlike his pure, untrammelled, Born-Free non-US movies, you can safely ignore these. Since to me this implies a certain strain of movie-going dyslexia, let me say to those critics, I deg to biffer.

I don’t know how you could make a movie more “different” than The Woman on the Beach, at least without running Hot Wheels track through the camera instead of conventional film. It’s not like his version of The Diary of a Chambermaid (containing both Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies and the Penguin) is exactly “Hey Gang, Let’s Put on a Show!”-type conventional Hollywood fare either.

Though any resemblance to a plot-line is purely coincidental, and the dialogue should have come packaged with an antidote, The Woman on the Beach is a monument to fiercely individualistic movie-making, a sustained emotional painting in various shades of brood, and falls only one scene short of being a radical and convincing argument that the fallacy of the human condition resides in the inextricably entwined futility and necessity of love. (Pause for typing breath.)

Or to put it another way, The Woman on the Beach is like a high quality sinus medication – it gets up your nose, works five ways internally and has powerful sustained effects that last for hours.

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(8 out of 11 on the internationally-endorsed MPHOAH scale)

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* (Another credit conundrum from The Woman on the Beach. Hanns Eisler is listed as being responsible for the music, but there’s also a credit for an orchestral arranger, as well a guy called Bakaleinikoff who rejoices in the title “Music Director”. Presuming you were thinking about this kind of stuff as the credits rolled gently by, instead of what you’re more likely to be doing – i.e. wrangling stray choc-top fragments around the pants area, or launching an investigative finger-safari into the wild nostril – you might well wonder there what a “Music Director” would do when there’s already a guy to compose the music, and another guy to blot it neatly out for the orchestra musicians.

Then you might actually listen to the score, and wonder why some bits of it sound like pretty decent minor-league ballet music from the B-Team of Russian composers, Class of circa 1900, while other bits sound like Dvorak on a gypsy kick, and then occasionally the whole orchestra farts in distress like King Kong just walked onto the screen, in a manner that has utterly nothing to do with the rest of the music at all. Then you might think back to the credits and figure that Bakaleinikoff guy probably stuck his oar in on the compositional and maybe arrangement side here and there. If you happen to know that C. Bakaleinikoff - and I’d like to think the “C” stood for “Count” - also got music credits on a lot of movie serials, then you can also probably hazard a reasonable guess as to who dropped the massive orchestral suspense farts in at moments of allegedly high tension, with a cavalier disdain for any conception of the movie’s dramatic tone that may have occurred to the director.)

** (One of those possibly apocryphal Hollywood stories that I prefer to believe is 100% true is that, on his leaving the employ of one studio, they threw Renoir a kind of party. Supposedly in his speech at that event, Jean-boy responded: “I’m very pleased to have worked at 15th Century Fox.” Of course some, including meem, have taken that as a goodbye kick in the teeth to employers who screwed around with his pictures. However supposedly, when later asked about the remark, Renoir said that he was sorry, he’d enjoyed his time at that studio, and that he had misspoken because of his lack of a command of English.
Y’know, I don’t think it’s out of the question that Renoir’s facility with English, even as late as 1947, might have been limited at least to the extent where he couldn’t have separated truly, outstandingly pretzel-spasmoid dialogue from run-of-the-mill scripting that would just about get the job done. I also don’t think that it’s out of the question that, compared to other goals he had in mind for The Woman on the Beach, he just didn’t care that much about the dialogue at all. However I have to pull up at Credibility Gulch at the implication that someone could live and work somewhere for a few years and not have absorbed the necessary lingo to count up to 20. Even an Australian blotnik who spoke very little French and no German – and I am that blotnik – could conceivably count up to 20 in either language without the inconvenience and shipping charges of having lived in either place. Kids have been able to manage that for years, courtesy of Sesame Street. I’m going to take courage in both hands here, and suggest that when Renoir said “15th Century Fox” he meant “15th Century Fox”.)

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THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH (1969)

One of the more puzzling quirks of the movie past, at least looking back with decades’ worth of 20/20 hindsight, is that arguably the best animation department in studio history – the various director-led cartoon units working for Warner Bros – never produced an original feature film in its heyday. That they had the popular characters and the assembled talent to make a viable feature-length cartoon seems reasonably evident. It’s also difficult to believe that Warner Bros studios didn’t have the money, as costly as feature animation production was in the days before you could tickle the whole thing up on computer. *

And yet, in what is not exactly a poorly documented area of Hollywood studio history, I’ve never come across one shred of information to suggest that there was even so much as an abandoned Warners cartoon feature project, or even something that got left marooned at the discussion stage.

There were some reasons for this, not the least of which were probably the two WB cartoon producers of record, Leon Schlesinger and Edward Selzer. **

Some sort of change in the weather was apparent by the mid-60s, when the old studio system was also displaying early cracks in the wall ahead of the wholesale change in Hollywood that was to come a few years later.

Long time Tom & Jerry directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera left MGM, formed their own studio and went off to make sausages for television. Chuck Jones left Warners, taking most of his WB cartoon unit, formed his production company and mostly made sparkling-looking but oddly lifeless Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM. DePatie-Freleng productions took care of whatever reputation Warners animation had left by that stage, supplying a stream of frankly depressing cartoons possibly even more disoriented and eerily anaemic than the Warners-generated cartoons of the early-middle 1960s that had preceded them. ***

Somehow, in the 1960s, Chuck Jones ended up involved with a couple of animated features, without having at his disposal such characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Marvin Martian, either Road Runner or the Coyote, any or all of which could have conceivably been helpful in sustaining audience interest in a feature length cartoon.

The first was a 1962 UPA Studio cartoon musical about love-struck pussycats in Paris, unappetisingly titled Gay Purr-ee, for which Jones merely received co-writer credit, along with his wife and two others. (It was directed by long-time Jones associate Abe Levitow, whose work often resembled Jones’ visually, but not so much in terms of generating energy or laughs.)

The second was 1969’s The Phantom Tollbooth, a presumable labour of love for Jones, based on arguably one of the least-known genuine classic children’s books, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

This time the Jones production company was responsible, in collaboration with MGM, (that major studio’s first ever animated feature), and Jones was on-board as co-adaptor, co-director of the animated material that makes up the bulk of the movie, and overall creative supervisor.

Beyond the contractual non-availabilty of his greatest characters, the other major problem was, Chuck Jones wasn’t Chuck Jones anymore, at least not the Chuck Jones whose Warner Bros cartoons pleasurably bent the heads of so many people in childhood (and way beyond childhood, although not everyone cares to admit it.)

I don’t think it diminishes in any degree the phenomenal contributions Chuck Jones made to cartoons, comedy or motion pictures in general in his long golden period, to suggest that in the mid-1960s (and 70s, and 80s and 90s) with a very few highly honourable exceptions, he just didn’t have it anymore when it came to making funny pictures.

His approach became increasingly arch, tiresomely self-referential, drearily chatty – what once had been briskly punctuated was now dazingly long-winded. The famous Jones extreme character poses which had previously been set-up or punchline were now set adrift in peculiar isolation, apparently intended to generate laughs off their own bat. In crept a kind of ossified intellectualism, accompanied by the creeping preachies, and, increasingly, in both character design and scripted content, a terminal case of the cutes. Boffo gags – seldom detectable.

His films still looked good, not to mention distinctive – every frame seemingly hand-drawn and signed by Chuck Jones, just like in the heyday. But the content – she not there.

The Phantom Tollbooth is not entirely devoid of charm, although it seemingly makes more effort to be so than was entirely necessary. In fact it’s worth a look, mostly because of how it looks. The movie is perhaps most kindly thought of as one of the signature visual creations of Jones long-time Warners layout guy, Maurice Noble, here rightly credited as production designer.

Noble’s astounding design work for cartoons like Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century and some of the Marvin Martian cartoons remains firmly lodge