Monday, March 27, 2017

Up

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Ages Ago

Perhaps the greatest dramatic cut from Sinatra and Capitol.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Great Scott


This month marks the 30th anniversary of the death of one of classical Hollywood’s great figures, Randolph Scott. How to describe what made him great? That he is the center of all happenings in his movies made with director Budd Boetticher (and others) ~ all flowing to and from Scott. That he is the human and character embodiment of everything Boetticher cinema cherishes: quiet, fanatical moralism, separation, longing for communion, no division between man and nature, directness.

Scott's great because he is one of the best examples we have of the essence of movie character and movie performance, and of what these essences are not. They are not biography or resume, they are not materialism or possessions, not economies or politics, and most emphatically not social psychology. They are thematic and emotional states personified by the performer, states which change shape throughout, however subtly. Scott’s persona is most subtle. That is where the mysteries and dramas of movies live; not in “story beats” or three-act structures. Scott at his best contains the art of film within himself: hidden, secret, very difficult to get at, always elusive – until it’s not. He is anti-Method, anti-theory, unexplained. And a beautiful subject, as beautiful as the horses he rides with such elegance, as beautiful as the dust and land and water he moves across. As do others, Scott proves that great movie personas are born, not formed by the Yale Drama School or ambition or the difficulties of life. The miracle of Scott and Boetticher (or Peckinpah in Ride the High Country, Scott's last work) is a film artist’s marriage with a performer who ideally lives the director’s heart, mind, and soul on-screen.

He is big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders and arms too long in bloused sleeves. His hands, swinging curve-fingered by his sides, are big and veiny. His hair is blonde-brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a bad toupee about to fly loose. His mouth is a quick stroke, bloodless. His face a chipped chunk of concrete, with amber, wounded eyes. Yet his presence is astonishingly intimate, almost feminine, as he draws us in and forces us to pay attention to gesture and to the silence between words. And his voice is a beautiful instrument. Inside the West Texas twang, it is warm, dark, hushed, and sad.



He is not afraid of being shamed or beaten. In Decision at Sundown (1957), the bad guy (John Carroll) is “bad” because he had a rollicking affair with Scott’s loose wife – one of many such affairs for the wife. She kills herself (presumably under the pressure of Scott’s rage) so he decides to track down her last lover and kill him. But at the end, the bad guy remains alive, leaving town with the sexiest and most loving girl in the movie – while Scott’s vengeance causes his best friend (Noah Berry Jr.) to be murdered, and Scott himself more alone with his demons than ever, on the road to alcoholic death.

He is always looking for a home, one he will never find. ‘Though tortured by lost or non-existent wives (in Ride Lonesome [1959] – a masterpiece – the lost wife has been hanged by Lee Van Cleef), and while women clearly respond to him sexually, Scott never sends out signals of attraction or need. Seven Men from Now (1956) is the first pairing between Scott and Boetticher. Like all their movies, it is under 80 minutes. Again what moves the story is a dead wife, this time murdered because of Scott’s pride (booted out of a Sheriff's job by rigged votes, Scott broods, forcing the wife to take work in a post office: one in which she's killed by robbers, the "seven men" of the title). He makes us quickly forget the story, as we move from one intense moment of human exposure to another. (Although the wagon being the stolen-gold transport is an awesome twist.) So many wonderful moments in such a short time: Lee Marvin (stealing the movie beyond Scott’s presence) “accidentally” almost smacking the weak husband (Walter Reed) in the face with his coffee tin; Scott peeking over his horse to see Gail Russell’s reaction to their near-kiss as he leaves her; Scott initially refusing to speak to Russell about his dead wife, then saying everything necessary in about 20 words. Due to Scott’s command throughout, there is more tension in the pauses between lines here than in all of Eastwood’s neo-Western humbug.

Seven Men from Now.

Monday, March 20, 2017

Master on Master


Great film artist Hou Hsiao-hsien explained by great film teacher David Bordwell.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Word(s)

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

End Game

Patrick Martin on the final days of our four-decades campaign: the destruction of the 1960s.

Monday, March 13, 2017

My Kind of Guy

“Another serious challenge to our identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.

“The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.

“What else but the loss of the ability to self-reproduce could act as the greatest testimony of the moral crisis facing a human society? Today almost all developed nations are no longer able to reproduce themselves, even with the help of migration. Without the values embedded in Christianity and other world religions, without the standards of morality that have taken shape over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. We consider it natural and right to defend these values . One must respect every minority’s right to be different, but the rights of the majority must not be put into question.

“At the same time we see attempts to somehow revive a standardised model of a unipolar world and to blur the institutions of international law and national sovereignty. Such a unipolar, standardised world does not require sovereign states; it requires vassals. In a historical sense this amounts to a rejection of one’s own identity, of the God-given diversity of the world.

“We agree with those who believe that key decisions should be worked out on a collective basis, rather than at the discretion of and in the interests of certain countries or groups of countries. We believe that international law, not the right of the strong, must apply. And we believe that every country, every nation is not exceptional, but unique, original and benefits from equal rights, including the right to independently choose their own development path.”