I’ve been going to physical therapy a lot lately. The therapist has basically told me to go forth and walk, but the bone doc says slow down and wait another week, so therapist can’t actually tell me to put all of my weight on my right foot without a wink and a nudge. Anyhow, it’s been working pretty well, and I’ve gotten to know the therapists and some of the patients. The therapy is supposed to be for my foot, but sometimes it seems like it’s for my head, too.
Did you know I hate everything? I did, but I don’t remember talking about it. We were talking about 3:10 to Yuma one day, and it was mentioned that in the context of my other opinions, my verdict of “it’s pretty ok” probably meant it was a pretty sweet movie. Megan, the therapist, half-jokingly suggested I be a movie critic. I wonder how you get into a gig like that? Maybe I should look into that for when I give up on these new-fangled computer things. The Internet lets me criticize things now, so let’s try that.
Baltimore Kate suggested a while back that I watch and analyze a chick flick, probably because I watch too many westerns. She didn’t specify which one, though, or even narrow the parameters with a period or theme, so decision presented the first obstacle. This isn’t exactly a well-defined genre, and unlike, say, westerns, I lack the expertise to make an informed choice. I decided to check with the experts. The July 2004 issue of O included a list of the top 50 chick flicks of all time, and if Oprah can’t tell me what to watch, ain’t no one can. Number 1 was Morocco, a 1930 film starring Marlene Dietrich, and that sounds like as good a place to start as any. So I headed over to the store, picked up a copy along with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a bottle of cheap red wine, got out the tissues and settled down on the couch. Here goes.
Let’s start with the premise. So everyone’s in Morocco. Marlene Dietrich is a vaudeville singer trying to escape her past, Gary Cooper is a private in the foreign legion and Adolphe Menjou is a rich layabout who happened to meet Ms. Dietrich on the ship to Morocco from wherever it is she came from. France, I guess. One lady, two dudes, hijinks ensue.
I had trouble getting a feel for the mood right from the start. The opening scene is of a donkey refusing to budge in the middle of the road while a division (or whatever they’re called) of the foreign legion is marching in. I figured it’s a wide, slow shot, and the army is about to clash with the townsfolk, so I know how this is going to work. That donkey is gonna get shot and kicked to the curb. But no, it didn’t get shot, and from there the movie couldn’t seem to make up its mind between crowded bazaars full of exotic women and bleak scenes with sad men wearing overcoats. I couldn’t get a consistent sense of the emotion of the settings, and the emotion of the characters never made any sense.
The dialog wasn’t so good. A lot of the actors were great with their body language but poor at delivering their lines as if they weren’t used to talkies yet. About the only actors I cared for were Ms. Dietrich, Menjou and the club owner, and only one of them could act. The last couldn’t seem to make up his mind between being shrewd and being fabulous, or whether he was a manager or a pimp. Marlene is kind of a crappy singer, but that first act she did in the suit and hat was hott with a capital T, so that was all that mattered about her. Menjou is the charming one but obviously not the target of Dietrich’s affection, so he mostly acts as a voice of reason and exposition for the other characters. Gary Cooper I just don’t get. He’s surrounded by women the whole time, but he isn’t a smooth talker (or at least I didn’t think he was) or even very good looking. He and Marlene hit it off for no apparent reason, and then the obstacles start and the two are forced to consider their love for one another and blah blah blah.
Menjou’s character was the only one I could believe. He had real class and character. He showered Marlene with gifts both just because he could and because he knew deep down that he could never have her and this was his only way to try to keep her. No one else made any damn sense. Maybe I should go back and try number two on that list.
Morocco actually came as part of a five-pack of Dietrich movies, so I took a shot at another one while the Internet was still down. The Devil is a Woman is a much better movie, possibly because it never asked me to believe that Dietrich loved anyone. In this one she plays a gold digger seducing Lionel Atwill, who tells the bulk of the movie to Cesar Romero in the form of flashbacks, and then Cesar falls for her despite the obvious dangers. The theme is simply that men are idiots for a pretty face and women are greedy whores. The movie was pretty melodramatic, but if you don’t have much to say you might as well say it big. I thought it worked.
The crowd scenes in this movie work much better than Morocco. A lot of this movie is packed with people, and the crowds are better at establishing a consistent setting and don’t feel like all of the people only have one or two things that you need to take from the scene. Maybe Josef von Sternberg hung out with de Mille in those five years.
I wouldn’t say that either movie is art, but at least this one was entertaining. Lust and greed are a lot easier to believe than love, the actors could act, and the sets and people were just fun to watch. I think it might be too misogynistic to count as a chick flick, though.
Ok, let’s do a western. I watched the remake of 3:10 to Yuma last weekend. I cheated and saw the original first, so some of my opinions were colored by that. One of the interesting things about westerns is that later films, somewhere after the 60’s or so, all had the same goal: destroy the genre. Cowboy heroes and black-hatted villains gave way to conflicted antiheroes and sympathetic criminals, and several directors had different takes on displaying the violence of the old west. Peckinpah concentrated on the gore, pausing on vicious wounds and filming men falling in slow motion. Leone concentrated on the buildup to the violence, turning shootouts into suspenseful battles of wills such that the shooting hardly even mattered. Clint Eastwood, when he directed Unforgiven, concentrated instead on the aftermath of violence, and I think he was the only one to really damage the romance of the west. The others destroyed one vision only to romanticize another much more brutal. 3:10 to Yuma is filmed more in the Peckinpah style, but in this case it’s a result of viewing the old west through the lens of modern action movies. Movies are more violent all around, and this return to an old idea should reflect that. It’s not trying to introduce any new ideas, and it’s ok with that.
3:10 to Yuma is about a rancher (Christian Bale) who volunteers to transport a likable killer (Russel Crowe) to the prison train to Yuma. Bale is in it for the money and to show his family that he isn’t a coward, and throughout the movie Crowe forces him to consider his motives and whether maybe he’s really trying to do the right thing. Crowe’s character is the interesting one, and he makes the audience consider that criminals can be decent people deep down. The original was more about the tension between the two main characters, and while the remake doesn’t forget that, it tries to bring in a lot more action. It does a beautiful job of it—it’s violent without forgetting the characters, the saturated colors make everything feel big and dusty without going overboard like a Matrix filter, and it keeps a sense of the romantic lawlessness of the old west without being a black and white morality tale—and I think its weaknesses are twofold. It gets talky in parts, and talking about feelings in this kind of a movie would have been better served with showing reactions and consequences. The characters are stoic, and having the rancher break down to talk about his feelings for his son feels inappropriate; we should be able to figure out the emotional element from the rest of the movie. Secondly, the movie fails at times when it remembers too strongly that it’s a remake.
The remake creates a much harsher world than the original, and some of the scenes don’t translate very well. For example, when the rancher was stalling the gangster in the original by asking for money, it was a tense scene but had a comedic quality to it. The humor doesn’t come across here, but it uses the same lines. Glenn Ford’s character in the original was more a thief than a killer, and that gave him a certain charm that Crowe’s character lacked, though some of the scenes still looked for it. In all, it was a fun action movie, but it could stand to lose 30-45 minutes, not because it was too long but because the scenes don’t fit.
Well, crap, I forgot to assign arbitrary ratings. How is that supposed to work? Letters? Numbers? Gold stars for everyone! Except Morocco; that movie sucked.