The Legend of Zorro (2005)
½*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Rufus Sewell, Nick Chinlund
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Martin Campbell
The Reivers (1969) + Tom Horn (1980) – DVDs
THE REIVERS
*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel by William Faulkner
directed by Mark Rydell
TOM HORN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Billy Green Bush
screenplay by Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake
directed by William Wiard
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The oldest, most tired story to beguile the male artist is the Moment at Which Innocence is Irretrievably Lost. Most writers try their hand at it at some point, and I really wish they wouldn't: it suggests they'd rather be stupidly oblivious to not just the pains but also the rewards of adulthood. It's a boring default trauma, but at least when William Faulkner did it (in The Reivers), it was a boring default trauma with genius digressions that occasionally distracted from the emptiness of the narrative line. Not so Mark Rydell's big-screen adaptation of The Reivers, from which all of Faulkner's background about the landscape and the history and his characters' desperate lives has been excised, leaving the innocence-losing adventures to hog the spotlight and make you wish you were watching something that aspired to dissipation for a change.
The Cincinnati Kid (1965); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Junior Bonner (1972) [Western Legends] – DVDs
THE CINCINNATI KID
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Terry Southern
directed by Norman Jewison
THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston
written by Alan R. Trustman
directed by Norman Jewison
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I imagine our American readers are astonished to learn that Norman Jewison is lionized in English Canada. Rest assured, it's not because we think his films are better than flimsy liberal mush (even if we pretend otherwise)–it's because for the longest time, he was the biggest fish in our cinematic pond. Until the rise of Cronenberg and his many disciples, Jewison was, expat or not, the highest-profile Canuck director in the game, and our nation's disbelief at his success has allowed him to seem more important than he actually is. Though he's good at nice-guy friendliness rendered with a modicum of craft, anything more ambitious comes off a little strained. Thus, his downplaying of the grim parts of The Cincinnati Kid makes the film a tolerable entertainment, while his self-consciously "creative" The Thomas Crown Affair wears out its welcome pretty fast.
Broken Lance (1954) – DVD
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+
starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richard Widmark
screenplay by Richard Murphy, based on the novel by by Philip Yordan
directed by Edward Dmytryk
by Walter Chaw Released the same year as his better-known The Caine Mutiny, disgraced director Edward Dmytryk's melancholic Broken Lance completes a double-pronged apologia for naming names before the HUAC. With the former film, Dmytryk sees himself possessed by madness; with the latter, he sees himself at the mercy of a world obsessed with rituals emptied of their meaning–and all the things he loves betrayed by his dogged fidelity to an older code of ethics. Though Broken Lance is often compared to "King Lear", it's more accurate to call it a run at the kind of end-of-the-trail film that would crop up a lot more in the western genre during the 1960s (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ride the High Country, Cimarron, and so on). But the film is the death knell for one man's–Dmytryk's–idealism, and what's fascinating is the extent to which the passing of a single man's hope registers in nearly the same key as the passing of the Old West as a genre. The saga of masculinity as it's embedded in the western clarifies itself with just this one, small, eloquent example.
The Hunting Party (1971) – DVD
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Oliver Reed, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Simon Oakland
screenplay by William Norton and Gilbert Alexander & Lou Morheim
directed by Don Medford
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pity poor Candice Bergen. First, her rich and brutal husband (Gene Hackman) rapes her before heading off to work, then she's kidnapped by Oliver Reed's gang and nearly raped by L.Q. Jones. Later, Reed rapes her, though she's strangely not upset on her second go-round. Still, she has plenty of opportunity to get worked up when Jones tries to rape her again. Hackman is clearly annoyed–if anyone's going to be raping anyone, it ought to be him, and the gauche competition so challenges his manhood that he sets out to shoot the (ahem) nice-guy rapist and his would-be rapist gang. I sure hope Bergen was well-compensated for her time, though I can't imagine what could compensate for sitting through the result.
Lullaby of Broadway (1951) + Calamity Jane (1953) – DVDs
LULLABY OF BROADWAY
*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Doris Day, Gene Nelson, S.Z. Sakall, Billy DeWolfe
screenplay by Earl Baldwin
directed by David Butler
CALAMITY JANE
**½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn McLerie, Philip Carey
screenplay by James O'Hanlon
directed by David Butler
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a pseudo-indie movie whose title escapes me that thought it would get an easy laugh by having a pretentious film theory major call her paper "Doris Day as Feminist Warrior." The joke was bad not because it was too exaggerated–as it happens, it wasn't much of an exaggeration at all. Doris Day was such a cottage industry for '90s pop-cult studies that she was (distantly) second only to Madonna as an item for rescue and reclamation, making such a title not only plausible but also inevitable. It's easy to see why: while the "legendary" screen goddesses stood around waiting to be claimed by the hero, Day was going ahead with a career or obliviously transgressing some other gender rule–not enough to topple Hollywood patriarchy, but enough to give clear-eyed individuals fugitive moments of pleasure.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994) – DVD
***/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS)
starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, Angie Dickinson, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the novel by Tom Robbins
directed by Gus Van Sant
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover From its disastrous premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (which prompted a hasty re-edit) to the unanimous critical drubbing it received a short while later, few films have had harder luck than Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The reviews were at best vague, alluding to some thing in the theatre that defied description as much as it discouraged it, while those brave souls not scared off by the word-of-mouth–even fans of Tom Robbins's 1973 source novel, people who could at least be said to have known what they were in for–came away hostile and perplexed. But anything that inspires this kind of uncomprehending panic is a special sort of film–that's right, I'm one of those lonely few who actually liked Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And analyzing its successful failure is hugely instructive, specifically in showing how certain social forces, then as now, unfairly shape what is considered aesthetic treason.
The Alamo (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound A Extras C+
starring Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson
screenplay by Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan and John Lee Hancock
directed by John Lee Hancock
by Walter Chaw There's an old joke from "Hee Haw" about crossing a potato with a sponge: "It didn't taste too good, but boy did it soak up the gravy!" In John Lee Hancock's appalling and sidesplitting The Alamo, Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett tells a gruesome variation on that punchline, only as an actor's moment (and with the "grease" off of slaughtered and incinerating Indians substituted for gravy). "Now, when someone passes me the potatoes, I just pass them right on." An interesting lesson taught about genocide and cannibalism: it's not the commission of atrocity to be mourned, it's the loss for a taste for French fries that's really the tragedy. The Alamo is essentially how "Hee Haw" saved the world–every time Davy pops his head above the titular fort's ramparts, visions of Roy Clark and Buck Owens popping out of a cornfield dance in your head. There are moments when, I kid you not, I looked to see if there was a price tag dangling, Minnie Pearl-style, from Jim Bowie's (Jason Patric) hat.
The Alamo (1960) – DVD
**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Frankie Avalon
screenplay by James Edward Grant
directed by John Wayne
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I freely admit that the prospect of a conservative historical epic directed by John Wayne initially sent a wave of panic rippling through my body. Having endured his offensive and tedious Vietnam opus The Green Berets, I was fearful of another impoverished mise-en-scène serving as the frame for Wayne's patented all-American bellicosity. (Unlike those crack commandoes, liberal critics can only stand so much.) So I was relieved to discover that The Alamo was at once more abstract and better-looking than The Green Berets and therefore more tolerable to sensitive lefty eyes–the film assumes that you're red-blooded enough to root for some American heroes, thus leaving the dubious reasons why unmentioned. Still, it lacks the articulateness to bring its jingoistic fervour to life, and it's sufficiently sluggish and monotonous to test the patience of all but the most uncritical super-patriots.
Zachariah (1971) – DVD
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Rubinstein, Pat Quinn, Don Johnson, Country Joe and the Fish
screenplay by Joe Massot and Philip Austin and Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor (known as Firesign Theatre)
directed by George Englund
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Think back with me, for a moment, to a bygone era when rock was strange: a hippie-descending, proto-glam period when the buzz was off the love generation but a bumbling mystic energy remained–when record producers were getting into bed with the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mick Jagger could be seen in the gender-bending gangster drama Performance. It was a self-aggrandizing, frequently ridiculous time, but it had a tolerance for eccentricity that's impossible to find in our Britneyfied MTV age and for which I can only be wistfully nostalgic. Lacking both the money and the conceptual force to fully realize its acid-western ambitions, Zachariah isn't even close to being the quintessential flashback to those days (it may in fact simply be cashing in on a trend), but its half-flubbed attempts at pop-surrealism seem a tonic now that the mainstream pop landscape is largely imagined by accountants.
Home on the Range (2004) – DVD
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Will Finn & John Sanford
by Walter Chaw It opens with a musical number and a rabbit with a peg leg–and what feels like days later, Home on the Range ends with an ear-splitting action sequence featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. typecast as an over-animated pack animal. Meanwhile, a crass two-dimensional cow is typecast as Roseanne, her prize heifer Maggie introduced onscreen udder-first: "Yeah, they're real, quit staring." Real nice. And the intrigue, such as it is, revolves around yodeling cattle rustler Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid) narrowing his sights on the bucolic Patch of Heaven ranch, no-kill home of stock chickens ("It's a chick thing," hardy har har), a duck, a goat, and some swine.
The Marx Brothers Collection – DVD
by Walter Chaw Hand in hand with their release of "The Tarzan Collection", Warner issues seven Marx Bros. films on five DVDs in a box set commemorating the comedy team's MGM output. Diving into the films in this collection, one finds the Marx Bros. in clear decline and willing--because the failure of their final picture at Paramount, Duck Soup, neutered a lot of their courage--to have Hollywood narratives foisted on their unrestrained chaos. A Night at the Opera is the last near-great Marx Bros. film, and it was their first at MGM; A Day at the Races followed before they…
Wyatt Earp (1994) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, Jeff Fahey
screenplay by Dan Gordon and Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Lawrence Kasdan
by Walter Chaw It seemed like a good idea at the time: Kevin Costner–still a hot commodity just four years removed from Dances with Wolves, fresh from what might be the most important film of his career (A Perfect World), and not yet stigmatized by Waterworld–reteaming with his Silverado director Lawrence Kasdan, then one of the best genre writers in Hollywood, for a biopic of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp. Unfortunately, Wyatt Earp flopped like Kurt Rambis in the paint. It was too long, too prosaic, and in what appears in retrospect to be a pathological lack of pretense, too pretentious by half. It was the first real nail in Costner's career coffin–a product of his having way too much power and way too little savvy in a cynical America that had outgrown his kind of aw-shucks long about Gary Cooper. Costner's still shouting, but it's hard to hear him from all the way back there in 1940.
Bandolero! (1968); Myra Breckinridge (1970); Mother, Jugs & Speed (1975); One Million Years B.C. (1966) – DVDs
BANDOLERO!
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring James Stewart, Dean Martin, Raquel Welch, George Kennedy
screenplay by James Lee Barrett
directed by Andrew V. Mc Laglen
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Mae West, John Huston, Raquel Welch, Rex Reed
screenplay by Michael Sarne and David Giler
directed by Michael Sarne
MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, Harvey Keitel, Allen Garfield
screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz
directed by Peter Yates
by Walter Chaw Very much the product of its time, Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero!, the last of the three westerns the director made with Jimmy Stewart, appeared in 1968, the same year as the end of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western cycle (Once Upon a Time in the West) and alongside such seminal generational discomfort flicks as Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead. And while it's not nearly so good as McLaglen/Stewart's devastating Civil War idyll Shenandoah, Bandolero! is still better than it probably should be, saved by its above-the-line talent. With Raquel Welch as a freshly widowed Mexican woman ("I was a whore when I was 12–my family never went hungry"–and so it went in Welch's career) and a good, if woefully miscast Dean Martin as Stewart's no-account, bank-robbin' outlaw brother, the picture is a border film, the basis in many ways for Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and one that contents itself with tepid character melodrama unfolding at a snail's pace along the road to Ensenada.
Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Steve Coogan, Robert Fyfe, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by David Titcher and David Benullo & David Andrew Goldstein, based on the novel by Jules Verne
directed by Frank Coraci
Posse (1975) – DVD
*½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Kirk Douglas, Bruce Dern, Bo Hopkins, James Stacy
screenplay by William Roberts and Christopher Knopf
directed by Kirk Douglas
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Posse performs the not-inconsiderable feat of taking the iconoclastic spirit of '70s cinema and rendering it completely banal, going through the motions without believing in any of them and repeating gestures it fails to completely understand. Whether this is due to it being the directorial debut of star Kirk Douglas–who doesn't exactly belong to the Film Generation his film mechanically apes–is unclear, but Posse's simple inversion of authority and criminality is so inadequate as a genre critique that it spits more in the eye of the audience than in that of its limply-invoked Man. What remains is a series of blunt narrative events lacking in formal resonance to the extent that they seem to have been communicated through tin cans linked by string.
Ned Kelly (1970) – DVD
*/**** | Image B- Sound C
starring Mick Jagger, Clarissa Kaye-Mason, Mark McManus, Ken Goodlet
screenplay by Tony Richardson and Ian Jones
directed by Tony Richardson
by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the islets of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, just off the coast of Performance and Mad Dog Morgan, floats Tony Richardson's less visited, incomprehensible, woefully miscalculated Ned Kelly. Edited with a cheese grater and scored with bizarre faux-Aussie folk by strange bedfellows Shel Silverstein and Waylon Jennings, all while giving lie to David Mamet-as-director's claims to originality in dispensing with exposition in favour of oblique, impenetrable dialogue and stilted performances, Ned Kelly is also home to one of the worst performances by a rock star in a world that knows Graffiti Bridge and Glitter. Really just the kissing cousin of such of its contemporary counter-cultural misfires as Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the panicked 1970 policy of giving the kids what they want, whatever that might be, is filtered here through the disturbing prism of a 42-year-old Englishman's perspective. (Admittedly, as angry young men go, Mick Jagger is a better choice than Breckinridge's Rex Reed.) Curiously though, as it so often does, the rare convergence of everything gone wrong makes for pretty compulsive viewing.
Open Range (2003) + Northfork (2003)|Open Range – DVD
OPEN RANGE
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner, Annette Bening, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Craig Storper, based on the novel The Open Range Men by Lauran Paine
directed by Kevin Costner
NORTHFORK
**½/****
starring James Woods, Nick Nolte, Claire Forlani, Duel Farnes
screenplay by Mark Polish & Michael Polish
directed by Michael Polish
The Red Pony (1949) – DVD
**½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, Shepperd Strudwick, Peter Miles
screenplay by John Steinbeck, based on his short story collection Red Pony
directed by Lewis Milestone
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In the simplest possible terms, The Red Pony is a Disney true-life adventure with a literary pedigree. As far as Disney true-life adventures go, it’s a superior one, thanks largely to competent direction by Lewis Milestone and a screenplay by John Steinbeck. But even the reasonably A-list personnel on hand can’t lift it above the lowliness of the genre–largely because what you see is what you get. There’s nothing to read between the lines of its tale of a boy and his pony, and despite some peripheral interest involving the boy’s parents and a stableman, the film fails completely to evoke the spaces between their words and the tension in their relationships, making it come and go with little rhyme or reason.
The Long, Hot Summer (1958) + Hud (1963) – DVD
THE LONG, HOT SUMMER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the William Faulkner stories "Barn Burning" and "The Spotted Horses"
directed by Martin Ritt
by Walter Chaw The Long, Hot Summer is a classic example of Hollywood trying to have it both ways: it combines the seriousness of a literary property and some young Method talent with the lurid garishness of a dime-store novel. Seizing upon the exploitable elements–all that decadent behaviour and sexual dysfunction–of William Faulkner's work, the film pushes them to the fore, giving the cast the opportunity to sex things up in bare-shirted, post-Brando fashion. As a result, the film resembles soapy melodrama much more than Faulkner ("NOT SINCE PEYTON PLACE!" screams the trailer), but it's melodrama with the strength of its fetid convictions that makes for lively entertainment, whatever its shortcomings.
Destry Rides Again (1939) + The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) – DVDs
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Brian Donlevy, Charles Winninger
screenplay by Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell and Henry Mayers, based on the novel by Max Brand
directed by George Marshall
THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
***/**** Image A- Sound A
starring James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Kruger
screenplay by Lukas Heller, from the novel by Elleston Trevor
directed by Robert Aldrich
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The word "clever" can be used as a compliment or an insult–it's either a means of saying how ingenious you are, or a way of showing how far you are from being "intelligent." The same goes for the star rating, which can be used to mark a sleeper that shows some real talent or to warn you that something is "only entertainment"–when is three stars just right, and when is it not enough? This is the conundrum that faces me in reviewing Destry Rides Again and The Flight of the Phoenix, two films completely separate in time and subject matter, but which both rate about the same in terms of their achievement. But despite their equal entertainment value, I have a better feeling about Phoenix than I do about Destry: it's more creative and resourceful, even if it doesn't come off perfectly. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see Destry, though it is an indication that you shouldn't raise your hopes too high for it–and that you might be surprised by the lesser-known Phoenix.
The Missing (2003)
*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd
screenplay by Ken Kaufman, based on the novel The Last Ride by Thomas Edison
directed by Ron Howard
Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)
***/****
starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Reggie Bannister, Bob Ivy
screenplay by Don Coscarelli, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Don Coscarelli
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson
screenplay by Sergio Donati and Sergio Leone and Mickey Knox
directed by Sergio Leone
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – DVD
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Henry Morgan
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
directed by William A. Wellman
by Bill Chambers William A. Wellman's 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident is so brave and piercing that you can overlook its gawky title. That star Henry Fonda had a knack for picking westerns goes without saying, but The Ox-Bow Incident has more gothic qualities than do most oaters made prior to the dawn of Europe staking its genre claim: it's the scene in cowboy flicks where a bunch of guys cheer on an unceremonious hanging expanded to feature-length. The movie has such definitive–and perhaps, given the climate, urgent–things to say about mob mentality, the sour side of fraternity, that the Navy-enlisted Fonda deferred his tour of duty in order to appear in it. What makes this doubly noble is that, despite his lead billing, he's really not The Ox-Bow Incident's leading man. With a cast of dozens granted comparable screen time, no one is.