These are such fun to make: 
When Burt’s whole body isn’t sprawled out as spectacle to encompass a widescreen frame, ie when he attempts ‘serious’ acting in ‘serious’ drama, as in Inge’s ‘Come Back, Little Sheba’, he goes all Greer Garson prim and buttons up even his pyjamas:
Burt and Jean Peters in the kind of blackface no one seemed to have any problem with in 1954. His is the body on display throughout, and displayed as spectacle as you can see here, thought without the delightfully buffoonish obviousness of Schwarzenegger film of the mid 1980s. I understand Apache was shot in 1.37 and cropped to create a wide-screen image. I don’t think accommodating the sprawl of Burt’s body was the primary consideration.
Film was shot in 1.37 and cropped to create a 1.85 image.
This was originally published as: Arroyo, José.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 7, Iss. 2, (Feb 1997): 40-41,3.
Burt Lancaster became a star in 1946 with The Killers. He began producing his own films in 1948 with Kiss The Blood Off My Hands (1948). Lancaster continued to star in films for another forty years. His success as a producer was so extensive that he is considered central to the relaunch of UA in the 1950s. The profits of Apache, Vera Cruz and The Kentuckian officially launched the new UA in the 1950s, and according to David Shipman, the decisive factor in its rise to affluence was Burt Lancaster. It is significant that he would never direct solo again (He’s credited as co-director with Roland Kibbee on The Midnight Man (1974).
The Kentuckian tells the story of Elias Wakefield (Burt Lancaster) caught up in a feud back home who wants to get to Texas with his son to be free and lead an independent life in the 1820s, gets waylaid into a life of business with his brother Zach (John McIntire), caught between two women, a schoolteacher (Diana Lynn) and an indentured servant (Dianne Foster) who knows how to use a gun, all the while being hunted down by the From Brothers from back home. It’s not bad but it’s really not good. Particularly terrible is the direction of the actors. The more inexperienced, the more they suffer: Donald MacDonald as the son is particularly terrible. It’s only more expert or experienced actors such as Una Merkel and John Carradine who come off well. Walter Matthau, whose first appearance on film this is, already knew enough to accuse Lancaster of ‘not knowing what the hell you’re talking about (Burford, loc 2715).
As a director, Lancaster’s got no sense of composition, of where to place the camera in relation to the actors. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, accused the director of lacking consistency of pace and tone and letting the whole thing run wild. ‘It is evident that Mr. Lancaster was almost exclusively concerned with the pleasure and effectiveness of his performance, whether he was aware of it or no’. I agree about the pace and tone but disagree about Lancaster being concerned only with his own perfomance. As you can see in the only scene from the film people seem to remember — the one where Walter Matthau whips him — Lancaster the director does no favours to Lancaster the star.
Lancaster who is grace itself in motion directs what amount to a set piece with almost little tension, little evoked through framing, composition or movement. He places the camera under the cart for what initially seems like no reason, and remains little reason other than a foreshadowing, an his strength, his body, his agility, are given short shrift by himself. It’s now awful but one can’t help but think what Aldrich or Tourneur would have done with him in the scene.
It’s perhaps telling that it took me six hours to watch the film, watch a little, get bored, go online, watch a little more, make breakfast, watch a little more….it’s not awful, and it was a success in its time, but it’s far from primo Lancaster.
The film’s greatest legacy is perhaps the painting Lancaster commissioned from Thomas Hart Benton to publicise the film (above).
José Arroyo
Caught The Rainmaker on TPTV last night, one of those 1950s film adaptations of not very good Broadway plays then considered ´significant´and ‘important´ and filmed with so little skill and imagination they now have the virtue of conveying what the Broadway production might have been like. Anyway, I digress, the main reason for posting is that I was just bowled over by Katharine Hepburn, charming and touching in a really embarrassingly conceived role. The play is a about the tensions between accepting reality and using fantasy and imagination to escape it. And the theme is played out over the figure of Lizzie, who does´t conform to then dominant notions of femininity. The play keeps asking ´what is a woman’ and assumes a female can only be a ´real woman´if she´s with a man. Burt Lancaster is athletic, a little over the top, but rather poetic with it as well. His Starbuck is not just a huckster but a dreamer and the performance is a dynamic dry run for his Elmer Gantry of a few years later. Pauline Kael called the casting, ´just about perfect’ even though Hepburn is about twenty years old for the part. ´Hepburn is stringy and tomboyish, believably plain and magnetically beautiful’ (p. 483, 5001 Nights).
Watching The Rainmaker last night made me wonder if any star´s reputation has altered so much as Hepburn´s in my lifetime. When I was a teenager in the 70s, she was the biggest and most influential star of the classic era, still getting leading roles in prestige productions, and in the late sixties being ranked higher as a box office star than she´d ever been in her whole career, plus winning Academy Awards, starring in hit musicals on Broadway, prestige adaptations on television that were seen nationwide by huge audiences (Love Among the Ruins, The Glass Menagerie). Books were published to satiate and fan demand, Charles Higham´s biography in 1975, Garson Kanin´s memoir, Tracey and Hepburn in 1970. She was a feminist role model, often cited as the most admired woman in America in the 1970s. Andrew Britton published one of the key early monographs on stardom through an analysis of her personal in 1984: Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist. Now….
It seems that what used to grate with audiences before (the voice, the mannerisms, the dreamy floweriness of her style) grate now. The feminism that then seemed so daring (Sylvia Scarlett but I´m thinking particularly Woman of the Year, how it seems less so now, and the ending of the latter is often used against her, forgetting all that leads up to it). Her great films (e.g. Holiday) are still greatly admired. But as a star, has lost some of the lustre she had in the 70s. And she didn´t even beat her daughter with a wire hanger to lose her lustre.
She doesn´t inspire worship the way Crawford, Bergman, Davis and others do. As an actress, Stanwyck is the one who´s most in fashion now. Hepburn was too uninterested in the things that inspire gay cults (glamour, clothes, jewels) and she has certainly been the victim of the viciousness of queens (Cecil Beaton´s diaries are particularly nasty). Of course her need to be the centre of attention in her quite old age, the awful tv movies near the end that seemed to get worse and worse, the extreme ego-centrism of her autobiography, Me, none of that has helped….
..But then one sees her charm, and shine and daring in even something so second-rate as The Rainmaker, something so second rate that is nonetheless still seen for what Lancaster and she bring to it, and one thinks, well, these things are cycles, and the evidence of the work, she´ll be back in fashion again soon.
José Arroyo
The significance of the credits:
When I saw the above at the opening of Rope of Sand (1949), I immediately assumed I´d be watching a Warners film. That´s where the combination of Henreid, Rains and Lorre would normally be seen in a 40s films, as you might recognise from Casablanca. But it´s not: Rope of Sand is a Paramount film.
This led to two thoughts. The first is that in all the current talk of ‘world-building’ in cinema we should recognised that the studio system offered a short-cut to such worlds. Of course, in a sense, each film creates its own world, like but unlike hours. Yet there´s also a sense that an MGM world is very different in the 40s from a Paramount or Universal one. And it´s not just that they had their own set of distinctive designers, cameramen, processing etc. but also that they had a distinctive grouping of supporting players that peopled those sets, wore those customs, took the different types of light in different ways. Lorre in the 40s was Warners just as William Demarest was Paramount
The second thought is that Burt Lancaster´s career is key to an understanding of changes in Hollywood brought on by the 1948´s Paramount decree and the coming of television. He was under contract to Hall Wallis at Paramount from 1946, became a star in his first picture — The Killers –at the height of the studio system. Yet in the years from 1946 to 1951, he starred in Paramount Pictures through his Wallis Contract (Desert Fury, 1947; Variety Girl, 1947, I Walk Alone, 1947; Sorry Wrong Number, 1948; Rope of Sand, 1949) in Universal Pictures through his Mark Hellinger contract (The Killers,1946;, Brute Force, 1947;, All My Sons, 1948; Criss Cross, 1949). He also starred for Warner Brothers (The Flame and the Arrow, 1950; Twentieth Century Fox Films (Mister 880, 1950);MGM Vengeance Valley, 1951); Columbia (Ten Tall Men). And he´d already produced his own film, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948).
Thus in five short years, Burt Lancaster had inhabited the various world associated with most of the major studios and created his own production company, something unthinkable just a few years before. Starring for different studios would become the norm for stars in the following decades but by then, even as movies kept being produced, often by the stars themselves, studios slowly ceased to connote distinctive´worlds’ .
José Arroyo
Burt get propositioned again, this time in I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1947). Night-club singer Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott), Dink Turner’s (Kirk Douglas) main squeeze, has been ordered to be sweet to Frankie Madison (Burt Lancaster. But Mrs. Alexis Richardson (Kristine Miller), the woman Dink plans to marry, catches Frankie from the corner of her eye and makes a move: ‘I’m on base,’ he tells her ‘you’re doing the pitching’.
José Arroyo
It´s extraordinary how often Burt Lancaster´s looks are referred to in his early films, even at moments when he´s not visualised as an object of desire for viewers, such as in a bar scene in the clip below from Criss Cross where Steve Thompson, the character he plays is referred to as a ´swell-looking, well-built man’:
or even by Steve´s own mother, though here admittedly to drive home to her son that he can do better than Yvonne De Carlo. It´s a fascinating recurring trope in his late forties films and beyond, particularly so since he is often also depicted as the subject and one the audience is encouraged to identify with. The femme fatale, be it Ava Gardner in The Killers or Yvonne De Carlo in Criss Cross, is the objects of desire to such an extent that even swell-looking, well-built men will long for and be made to weep over them.
José Arroyo
Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.
We visit another Melville, 1963’s Le Doulos, about a network of criminals searching for an informer in their midst. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays his thief with such assuredly French swagger that it’s no wonder why Quentin Tarantino names this film as a significant influence, though we also pick up on the story’s similarity to Reservoir Dogs, in particular the botched robbery and snitch mystery.
The film has clearly been preserved beautifully, the crispness of the images on Mubi’s stream simply breathtaking. As with Un flic, we consider the characters’ alienation, emphasised here through composition and framing, and their decisions, including the idea that all these men try to do the right thing by their particular code.
Despite looking for things to like, Mike is ultimately nonplussed and a little bored by Le Doulos, preferring, on reflection, Un flic, while José, as ever the spirit of sunshine, beams with praise for it. We can at least agree that it looks fabulous.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
I´ve been making a lot of gifs recently. And some friends have been taking the piss. However, it´s a fascinating form with many uses. I´d like to draw you attention to this great video essay by Leigh Singer (below), partly because several of my gifs feature from about 4’47 — so two fingers to those who´ve been sneering — partly because it is a truly illuminating exploration of the form that itself plays with form (the trailing voice-over) and made me want to try different things with it:
José Arroyo
Another great Burt Lancaster stunt, this one from His Majesty O’Keefe (Byron Haskin, 1954), a South Sea Adventure film, quite yikey in its representation of race but a goldmine to anyone interested in exploring questions of empire, colonialism and how America saw itself in relation to the world at the height of its powers in the middle of the last century:
Slowing it down so you see the drama of that figure descending and then seeing it really IS Burt Lancaster doing the stunt:
José Aroyo
Mary Astor, delicious as Fritzi, drinking her liquor and puffing away her tensions to keep her gambling joint open and her daughter (Lizabeth Scott) safe. She has a proposition for Burt Lancaster. But it´s not for herself: ‘Stop acting as if you were about to be ruined. Now if only I were ten years younger…. But since i´m not you can call me mother.´ However, he´s so attractive, in every way, that she´s willing to spend a fortune on a vast and completely stocked ranch if he´d agree to marry her daughter. Will he be bought?
Burt Lancaster not only can ‘bear the burden of sexual objectification’ but he gets propositioned all the time in cinema, even when it´s for nefarious purposes such as Corinne Calvet´s here. Note how he´s lit,to maximise what Calvet and the audience might see in him, and note how he insists on his retirement, the focus on his desirability unusual, even in a leading man, the assertion of his ´retirement´an insistence and return to rigid gender roles. :
Incredible shot from The Train. Burt at over 50 and, according to John Frankenheimer, still his own best stuntman:
