The Swindle

I was going to post about what a Big Nothing 2007 has been so far but instead I'm going to focus a little bit on something that caught my attention the other night at American Gangster (yet another disappointment.)

There's a lot wrong with the movie but in some ways the silliest thing I noticed was Ridley Scott's use of Bobby Womack's theme from Across 110th Street. This is silly for a couple of reasons:

1. The song was obviously immortalized by that blaxploitation classic, and

2. The song was re-immortalized by Quentin Tarantino in Jackie Brown. (One would think twice was enough?)

Scott doesn't care, and the choice sums up what's wrong with the rest of the movie. I have an especially short temper for reappropriating movie music (the Star Wars theme in Ferris Bueller, 7min mark, is the only exception) but this seemed an especially domineering statement.

American Gangster makes a couple of obvious attempts to break into the elite class of crime movies that are also American history movies, and always misses the mark (save for the very very last scene.) By this example, Scott is either trying to make the ultimate NYC meta-crime movie (a suspicion exacerbated by the awful line of dialogue, "This must be some of that French Connection dope!") or that American Gangster is simply a worthier depiction of 70s Harlem than Across 110th Street. If neither, then why not leave the song alone? (Of course, there's always the possibility that the soundtrack department didn't do much research.)

Either way, it stinks. Remember that Cole Porter movie De-Lovely? One of the reviewers got it right when they said that the aggressively heterosexual, inaccurate Night and Day - starring Cary Grant, no less - was, via sanitization, a more accurate representation of the songwriter's restrained life than the new, "out" version. Similarly, 70s Harlem comes through better (albeit exaggerated or sanitized) in many legit blaxploitation movies than Ridley Scott's feeble attempt to make a genre apotheosis.

In other words, if you want to understand something, go to the heart of the corresponding cultural conversation, and not some glossy knockoff decades later.

The Assassination of The Assassination of Jesse James

"Advisory: This film contains sexual situations, violence and absolutely no mercy for filmgoers with small bladders." - Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post

"Revisionism is a fine thing, but too much of it makes you long for the vision of old. - Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

"But as a piece of popular entertainment, it's ponderous, repetitive and lacking a single rousing action sequence." - SF Chronicle

Saw Andrew Dominik's much-delayed, painstakingly thorough new western last night. I know it's old hat by now (released two weeks ago) but some of the negative backlash (to be fair: reception is about 30% blissful, 50% tepid-to-bad and 20% awful) left me with a question: Do critics still expect nothing more of the genre than a good time at the movies?

For every 10 standard heroic gunslinger movies, even before the 60s, Hollywood could crank out 1 meta-western, and characters like Jesse James or Billy The Kid (or ciphers like Liberty Valance) provided the greatest case studies. And yet, 100 years on, whenever the genre makes a less than two-fisted appearance at the multiplex, naysayers bitch and moan. The expectation that a western - no matter how proteinous its aims - still has to deliver a sugar high is dumb and archaic. Directors such as Aldrich, Peckinpah, Polonsky and Altman have made it so.

The Assassination of Jesse James is slow-going, but pat: Dominik starts with the dissolving of the James gang, follows the members as they splinter off, the increasingly psychotic James as he recollects them (as it were), Bob Ford's growing disenchantment/obsession with James as the two become intimate, the betrayal, and Ford's subsequent vilification/celebrity. Anyone expecting a straight-up James biopic is in for a disappointment, but it would have taken a moron not to notice the second name on the marquee.

Part of the problem, I think, is that westerns - revisionist, popcorn, or both - are such a rarity these days that the initial thrill of seeing cowboys & train robberies defused by intellectual ambitions (gasp!) has added bitterness for genre fanatics. But this is an issue of taste, not artistic talent; Dominik's (albeit imperfect) film continues a solid tradition of elegy & deconstruction, and WB deserves credit for putting it out there un-shredded.

EDIT: Unfortunately, the studio has seen fit to bury this less-than-crowd pleasing western in a sloppy release schedule. Read!

Through A Gun, Darkly

Rio Bravo notwithstanding, my favorite studio-era westerns are the ones that play like frontier films noirs; I prefer Anthony Mann or Sam Fuller to Raoul Walsh or John Ford. Ford's critics (myself included) concentrate on his bitter aversion to realism and complexity; he is to western clichés as Godard is to art-film stereotypes, and nearly all of his collaborations with John Wayne were obviously cooked up for quick cash. He embodies the old school of westerns, and usually plays it straight for action and melodrama.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the story of Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), a famous senator returning to a dusty frontier hovel to bury an old friend, the unknown Tom Doniphan. Stoddard attracts a considerable amount of attention, and when the perplexed townsfolk demand to know the backstory, the flashback kicks in...

After being roughed up by highwayman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), Stoddard, a greenhorn lawyer, resurfaces in a new town and vows to take Liberty on, through due process. Doniphan, the rugged local enforcer (Wayne), would rather settle things his way. Both men pine for Hallie (Vera Miles), but she's smitten with Stoddard; Doniphan tolerates Stoddard for her sake, but obviously wouldn't give him a tumble otherwise.

This is where the movie gets interesting. Stoddard - a consummate weakling and flop as a gunslinger - gains political prestige and respect in the face of an upcoming cattle war, and Valance encroaches further. Eventually Stoddard is forced to accept the bandit's violent proposition, and goes to work on his marksmanship; when the Final Showdown comes, he quiveringly shoots and, to his - and everybody else's - astonishment, kills Valance. Where was the Duke?

While Stoddard is hailed as a hero, we find out: Doniphan is drunk and heartbroken, stumbling around in the house he built for Hallie - his once-intended fiancee. In a revealing tableaux, Wayne stares directly into the camera, lurches forward and, in a rage, hurls a gaslamp against the wall, torching the place.

So we're back to The Searchers: the heroic cowboy, deep down, is just as weak and angry and childish as anyone else. Strong stuff, but not groundbreaking. Stoddard is catapaulted into politics, geared to take on the endless corruption, to tame the west. During the nomination, his opponent pays a cowboy to ride up onstage to rally the crowd, lasso n' all. Stoddard is propped up for having taken care of Valance, but he can't handle the guilt, and flees out of the room.

Doniphan tracks him down and, in strictest confidence, tells Stoddard (and the audience) that, hidden in the shadows, he really shot Liberty Valance - illegitimizing Stoddard's reputation as a violent hero, but preserving his earnestness as a lawman.

Doniphan knows his idea of integrity in action is already anachronistic. It's more important to him that Stoddard keep the truth inside, make Hallie happy, and go on to reform the frontier, even if it means being his reduced to a drunken nobody - which is, of course, what's happened by the time Stoddard arrives for the funeral. The newspaperman tells Stewart: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

I read this as complementary to (if not defiant of) the antiheroics of The Searchers, to the moral complexity that was growing in popularity even in 1962. Rather than being swallowed whole, alone in the face of the new West, Wayne heroically helps push it into being, sacrificing himself in the process.

Like most Ford/Wayne collaborations, I expected Liberty Valance to be thematic fodder for the scalpels of Robert Altman, Monte Hellman and Sam Peckinpah. But instead, Ford anticipates them: Stoddard (now a legend himself) must live with the ugly underside of his brand of enforcement, the knowledge that Valance's death put him where he is. Can you say Unforgiven? Even if America now has no time for old gunfighters, the country was built by them.