Tag Archives: Hugo Fregonese

Saddle Tramp (Hugo Fregonese, USA, 1950)

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A Western that comes across as quite amiable and genial, funny and cheerful, in spite of dealing with quite dark material. Joel McCrea stars as a saddle tramp who in his own words, at the very start of the film, and in first-person narration, tells us, ‘Earth and sky and a horse…what more could a man want?’ Well that’s all he wants but that is precisely what the narrative will deprive him of.

At the start of the film, he goes visit an old friend of his, a widower with four children who instantly gets killed in an accident after borrowing McCrea’s horse – a rodeo horse who tends to buck at the sound of gunshot — and so our saddle tramp gets saddled with four young boys. In order to feed them, McCrea goes to work in a ranch. But the rancher won’t hire anyone with children so the kids have to hide out in a camp. They are soon joined by a young girl, an orphan who’s run away from her uncle’s because – and it’s as clear as Hollywood film of that era can show – he’s been sexually abusing her. There are other strands to the narrative, the rancher who MaCrea works for is involved in a dispute with his Mexican neighbouring rancher (played by Antonio Moreno, the silent film star) over the theft of cattle; the developing romance between the runaway orphan, who conveniently turns out to be nineteen, and McCrea; all get resolved in the end.

Ehsan Khoshbakht, in his write-up on the film for the Ritrovato catalogue offers several insights into the film: it’s a rare example of first-person voice-over in a Western; it belongs to a small cycle of westerns in which the cowboy’s time in the blissful presence of children chimes with the end of the frontier and the beginning of settlement (3 Godfathers); the way the McCrea’s horse functions in the film as a source of comedy and tragedy.

For me, what makes Saddle Tramp stand-out from a run-of-the mill B Western is  how a film full of so much darkness – a death that leaves four children orphaned, an orphan that has to run away from home due to sexual abuse, racial hatreds between whites and Mexicans that blame each other for something caused by someone else; and ultimately the hero’s choice of responsibility and resultant loss of freedom – can all result in something so cheerful, so likeable, so amiable. Therein lies Fregonese’s art.  And MaCrea’s, who must surely be amongst the most amiable and genial leading men of the Classic period. How the film’s ending finesses the loss of American culture’s most prized quality –Liberty – and how that’s contextualised with a continued longing for it that puts in tension with sex, education, home, civilisation, the past and the future – all aspects of a pursuit of happiness —  and this at the height of the McCarthy era, is worth an essay in itself.

José Arroyo

A note on the trailer for Man in the Attic (Hugo Fregonese, 1953)

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I love watching trailers and sometimes find them more interesting than the films they promote:

I love the bombast in the trailer for Man in the Attic:

I like how trailers often contain the most interesting (and often the most expensive) shots in the film:

The promise trailers make of the pleasures audiences may expect (and which the films need not keep): here to be shocked and terrorised, thrilled and turned on, the combination of sex and death potently conveyed:

There is no mention that this is a story that has already been filmed several times and better (e.g. Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927).

In trailers one also finds historical records not only of what was but what might have been, what was hoped, wished for, desired …that didn’t quite pan out. In this case the expectation or the hope that Jack Palance, already prominent due to Shane (George Stevens, 1953) and his Oscar nominated performance in Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952) would become the great new star of tomorrow, hopefully due to Man in the Attic, the trailer promoting that potential stardom as a way of promoting the film.:

Jack Palance continued to be a name in cinema until the day he died but he never quite became the big Hollywood star this trailer promised with such certainty and a decade later he was working mainly in Europe, often in films that became classics, such as Godard’s Contempt (1963)….but in supporting roles.

A fascinating trailer for a film that holds all kinds of interest, not the least Palance’s performance. Needless to say, the film sadly doesn’t quite live up to the promises of the trailer, which can be seen in full below:

José Arroyo

 

Thinking Aloud About Film on Hugo Fregonese from Ritrovato 2022

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Thinking Aloud About Film explores the work of Hugo Fregonese, a director who worked mainly in Hollywood B-movies or international genre films, a choice of films excellently curated and programmed by Ehsan Khoshbacht, and a major discovery at this year’s Cinema Ritrovato. Films discussed include APENAS UN DELINCUENTE, BLOWING WILD, THE RAID, APACHE DRUMS, THE MAN IN THE ATTIC, BLACK TUESDAY…and others. The video includes images, trailers and clips from some of the films to illustrate the discussion.

Films discussed include:

The video, including images, trailers and clips may be seen here:

José has written on:

Savage Pampas

Apache Drums

and Apenas un Delincuente, and if you are interested in reading more, just click on the link:

The video may also be listened to as a podcast (with the sound of all film clips removed) here below:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Martin Stollery has written very interestingly on the British Prisoner of War Film, with (brief) reference to Seven Thunders, in a way that relates it to Adorno and Auschwitz here: The Hideous Difficulty of Recreating Nazism at War escaping from Europe in The Wooden Horse 1950 and the British Prisoner of War Film

José Arroyo

 

Apenas un delincuente (Hugo Fregonese, Argentina 1949)

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A superb noir, fast-moving, by someone who’s seen and loved all the 30s Warners gangster films; and knows and can deploy every stylistic device:

chase scenes that turn into newspaper headlines:

voice-over montages that focus on the hero and instigate the rationale for a crime:

dream montages that show the sexy lure of what the culture deprives ordinary people of:

 

We also get flashbacks to childhood, prison escapes, etc. It’s all here but now set in Buenos Aires and the surrounding countryside in Argentina. And much as I love Hollywood, the underside of its imperialism is that it deprived us of many sights and sounds seen here, many films such as this one.

The film is based on two separate real-life events dramatised together:  An employee bilking his workplace of half a million pesos and a prison escape. José Moran (Jorge Salcedo) likes the good things in life, nice suits, nightclubs, things and places he can’t afford. He’s in love with a young student who loves him back;  they once went around shopping for bedroom sets they’d buy after they got married. But he’s given up now. He’s got a bit of gambling problem, is only receiving 150 of his 250 monthly salary because he’s already paying off advances; money lenders are after him; he can barely afford to support his mother and his younger brother on what he takes home. He’s already seeing his illusions ground down they after day – it’s what killed his father – and once he realises that the maximum sentence for stealing is sixty years and that legally there’s no difference whether you take 1000 pesos are 500, 000, he does the math. It would take him 166 years to earn 500, 000. So what if he has to sacrifice 6 years of prison in order to get it? It’s less than the life the job is robbing him of.

It’s a brilliant logic in the film. But since the film starts with an unsuccessful escape, we also know that our hero’s every attempt to save himself will end in failure. It’s another brilliant element of the film; how the beginning sets up failure in every attempt at escape or survival. Apenas un delincuente is about a non-conformist, a man at odds with the culture around him, who schemes, resists, fails; his life a feverish dreams of a life the culture won’t permit him to have.

 

The film dynamically sets up its themes. Life in the big city which has everything but not for everybody. Male pride versus family shame. A workplace whose regimentation is filmed not too differently than the prison. The hero sees himself as no better than a slave and is driven by a kind of rage which the film suggests is also a kind of sexual frustration; the good university lawyer who loves him but whom he can’t afford to marry; the provocative dancing girls on display that he doesn’t have money to have. The film gets its title from the last line of the film, José wasn’t a criminal, he was barely a delinquent, an ordinary young man, maybe a bit selfish and impatient, someone who wanted too much too fast. But the implication here is also that the problem is a system that promises much more than it can deliver to so many young men like José. All of this is brilliantly visualised, in angles and shapes that cage and enclose, with tantalising images of the high life, rendered even more alive by being shaped via Jose’s bitter gaze. Though the film does not have a documentary feel — it’s too fast moving for that – it was ostensibly all filmed in real locations; and it does represent and evoke what Buenos Aires was like in that period; and also through the neighbourhoods, rooms, décor; a document of the ways of life available to people then. It’s the intersection of document and exciting noir elements that help make the film great. And great it undeniably is.

Ehsan Khoshbakht writes tellingly in the Ritrovato catalogue: ‘Though American-style gangster films had existed in Argentine cinema as early as 1937, this was not a pastiche but an attack on the idea of economic progress under President Juan Perón….. Apenas un delincuente could only be realised at all because of the interventionist politics of the Perón government. Ironically it was the US that contributed to the end of cinema’s golden age by imposing a politically motivated film-stock embargo, forcing Fregonese back to drift back to the place where he had failed before; this time, in a double irony, to make a film called One Way Street.(pp.262-263)

Part of the cycle of Hugo Fregonese films shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022

José Arroyo

 

 

If you speak Spanish, this is a very informative review of the film, linking it to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and Nueve reinas (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000)

and two discussions from the Filmoteca in Argentina that may also be of interest:

…this one focussing on how the film was restored:

The film itself can be seen on youtube here in a not too bad copy:

José Arroyo

A Very Brief Note on Harry Black and the Tiger (Hugo Fregonese, 1958)

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Stewart Granger’s handsomeness in his 1940s Gainsborough films is so blinding that one pays attention to little else. As he got older, his looks dazzled less and a certain arrogance, inflexibility and stiffness became more apparent. He seems the type of person whose idea of a sense of humour is to laugh heartily at the misfortune of others. In Harry Black and the Tiger he’s meant to have a metal leg, which he throws around theatrically and which is only a little less expressive than his face. Half-way through the film I began wishing the tiger would stop eating all the Indian villagers, focus its attention on him and bring the film to a close. Not Hugo Fregonese’s best, though there is a superb dialogue-free opening sequence in which a tiger appears in the village and snacks on a mother and child.

José Arroyo

Apache Drums (Hugo Fregonese, 1951)

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An unusual Western, about tolerance and community, spare and beautiful, with gorgeous direction by Hugo Fregonese that makes each of its elements signify in ways that seem visually striking and thematically subtle. It was the last film produced by the legendary Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, etc.), one he was pleased with.

A title card at the beginning informs us that it’s 1880 and the Mecalero Apaches are starving. The creation of a border between Mexico and the US in what until then had been their lands have driven them hungry and with nowhere to go. They’re ready to attack. The good citizens of Spanish Boot know nothing of this yet. Miners from Wales now working a local silver mine, they’re prosperous, want to build up the town, bring in schools and infrastructure and are keen to drive out the prostitutes, gamblers and other riff-raff out so they can get to building their idea of community. As the film unfolds that sense of community will alter, become more inclusive.

This is all beautifully and economically expressed in the clip above. But what I want to direct your attention to there is the direction, the initial shot, simple and economical but creating a dynamism by having the citizens walk one way and the horses in the other, with the dog initially cutting half way through, the camera following the citizens until it rests on the sign ‘Betty Careless Dance Hall: Partners for All’. The purpose of the dance hall couldn’t be clearer.  But what really caught my eye was the cut on Jehu (Clarence Muse) with the door opening throwing a shaft of light around his figure that quickly envelop him in shadows, as if these good citizens will be the destruction of this particular man, which will indeed be the case. This shot foreshadows the scene where he refuses to take his hat off because the dance hall girls have been killed on their way out of town and he’s been scalped; yet he nonetheless urges bad gambler Sam Leeds (Stephen McNally) to be good and return to the town he’s just been kicked out of to warn its citizens of the Apaches.

The film has beautiful, spare compositions, often rhymed. See the two below: first the tranquil sweeping in of the outside of the church, then the running to it from safety, then the church gates itself becoming like the gates of hell.

The action scenes are superbly done. Note below, how we are made aware of the Apache charge before the characters are, then the rhythm of the cuts; and lastly, how the action, exciting as it is, is not an end in itself but a means of dramatising the conflict between churchman and gambler, and setting the grounds for the beginnings of an understanding that will only develop later on.

Note the dramatic use of lighting in the clip below.

…and the beautiful coming together of the community in a song from the homeland below;

 

As the Apaches surround the Church, the Church becomes a furnace and hell-hole, death strikingly visualised as potentially appearing from any window (see below… and note the spare and striking compositions and use of colour). We see very few Apaches, it’s the drums and the open, too-high windows they can’t see out of, that create the sense of entrapment and danger:

Fregonese is brilliant at making use of colour and indeed he uses the green of the dress Sally (Coleen Gray)  wears as the visual anchor for most of the final scenes inside the church (see below):

..and invoking light and symbolism in the compositions (see the light dissolving into the pieta like pose on the woman and child on the left below).

…and the exceptional use of pyramid compositions in 4:3:

There is much more to admire but here I only want  to add that light, framing, and composition do not just make things pretty but symbolise and signifies so that near the end, when the Reverend recognises that the Apaches also have their own Gods, as valuable as his, it becomes a powerful dramatic moment, visualised as below:

The film could easily have become simply a tale of a woman who loves a bad man (Stephen McNally), sees the value of a good one (Willard Parker as Mayor Joe Madden) and the rest of the film is then about how to get rid of her bad love object. But Apache Drums is surprising in all kinds of ways. Fregonese tends to make relationships complicated, people are redeemable, and surprising. And certainly Fregonese surprises. The cliche of the cavalry to the rescue is only seen through a fiery blaze of a ruined church door. The ending image is not the couple embracing, or the town reconstructed, but a donkey feeding on its mother in a church watched over by a Mexican peasant. A gorgeous film.

Jose Arroyo

Savage Pampas (Hugo Fregonese, 1966)

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The Argentine army is trying to conquer the Pampas away from indigenous people. But their soldiers keep deserting because the other side, including not only indigenous peoples but deserters, misfits and criminals of all kinds, will provide a woman for every soldier that joins them; and that in a nutshell is why I imagine this film will be of great interest to feminists.

Initially, women in Savage Pampas are merely a mode of exchange amongst men; they have no say; and their bodies are offered up by men for men to rape in exchange for men providing military service. As the film unfolds, this becomes more subtle as the army proper also brings in women to service these soldiers. But these are professional prostitutes who expect to make a fortune before returning back to Buenos Aires in a few years. These ‘bad’ girls, given some – not too much – depth by being depicted as having smarts, warmth, and humour, stereotypical traits in movie prostitutes, are also in turn contrasted with two  ‘good’ girls; one who has also been sent to the Pampas for not revealing the whereabouts of her brother, a political dissident; and the other an indigenous woman, distinguished by her loyalty, freedom and honour. There’s even, in a brief role, a nun. To paraphrase Laura Mulvey, women in the Western matter not in themselves but in what they structurally represent and symbolise. In American Westerns, ‘civilisation’; the coming of church and schools to the West; here, merely money and sexual release. Even when the old madam is found a husband it’s purely as a form of exchange.

What really distinguishes this film, particularly in this beautiful restoration from Busch Media group, is how it looks and moves; and this is due to Hugo Fregonese’s superb direction. There is terrific use of landscape, in elegant compositions, that permit, people, horses, groups to move fluidly.

low camera in action
lighting
depth of compositions
disribution of composition so everything can be seen
full 70 mm wide framing
the fort reflected
a portion at dusck
the initial move into the fort
the opposition
the framing of the opposition in action
the creation of depth through camera placement and placement of figures

There’s something both contained and explosive in the way that Fregonese films a chase. The run is charged, but the composition keeps everything contained, elegant, with the geography of the action always knowable.

The camera set-ups are varied, there are gorgeous shots with the camera on the ground and with Robert Taylor laid out across the 70mm frame; and in a lovely restoration that brings out the deep blues and reds of the uniforms. This is a film directed by someone with a great feel and knowledge of how visuals can mean, how rhythm is created both by what is shown within the frame and by the cutting between shots.

It would be hard to find a better example of what is valuable in a B film: thematically crude, with a cast led by a waning star and a cast of proficient relative unknowns, that nonetheless is gorgeous to look at, exciting to experience, with a fluid purposeful camera that is knowingly placed to create depth and to offer up space itself as a source of drama. Robert Taylor, is very interesting to see, still handsome, giving a professional performance in terms of body and voice but with something dead behind the eyes that seems more to do with the actor than with the character. A great watch in spite of its many faults.

 

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film talks to Pamela Hutchinson about Ritrovato 2022

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Ritrovato returns, in situ, live….and it was great to be back. Bologna itself, the food, the weather…all were heaven. But the reason we go to Bologna at this time of of the year is the films, the quality of the prints, the restorations, the way they are programmed and projected, and the conversations that take place around the screenings. In this episode, offered as vodcast and podcast, we discuss  the new booking system and the different strands of the programme: 100 Years Ago, Peter Lorre, Sophia Loren, Hugo Fregonese, Weimar Musicals , some of the restorations (El, Ludwig, La Maman et la Putain, Shoeshine,  Nosferatu etc) and — in less detail — Yugoslavian Cinema and Cinema Libero. We couldn’t do it all. We wish we could have. The wonderful Pamela Hutchinson heroically resurfaced from her COVID sickbed to lend us her intelligence, knowledge and good humour and to helps us make sense of a cinephile experience that can easily overwhelm. This is the first of four podcast on Ritrovato. We will return with more extended discussions on Hugo Fregonese, Sophia Loren, Peter Lorre and an extended discussion of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives.

 

The vodcast can be seen here:

 

The podcast can be listened to here:

 

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

Very pleased to have made Ritrovato’s website here: https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/thinking-aloud-about-film-talks-to-pamela-hutchinson-about-ritrovato-2022/

Readers might also be interested Pam’s excellent Bologna overview from a few years ago to give some context for those who’ve never been:

José Arroyo