Tag Archives: Western

WHITY (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1971)

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I found WHITY a riveting film to see but a difficult one to process. The first of Fassbinder’s films I’ve seen, and this was his tenth feature, that I found amateurish, no, worse: dilettanteish. It was shot in one of Sergio Leone’s old sets in Almeria and is itself a combination of spaghetti western and half-penny Brecht/Weill imitation, Southern Gothic and Grand Guignol. The film is set in 1878, after emancipation. It was ostensibly inspired by Raoul Walsh’s BAND OF ANGELS where Yvonne De Carlo is a mulatto raised by her white father as an ante-bellum Southern Belle, only to find upon his bankruptcy and death that she’s to be sold off as chattel. The French title – L’ESCLAVE LIBRE is interesting to contemplate as Whity (Günther Kaufmann) is the opposite of that, he too is mixed race and living with his father but he’s been brought up as a slave, and the ideological forces of family and society keep him one longer after the law has freed him.

The film begins with the head of a fish being cut off, pans to a caged bird, clearly a symbol for Whity, who then enters the scene in the red livery of a house servant, and tells the cook that the pudding hasn’t been to their taste. ‘Lots of things aren’t to their taste’, says the cook, who looks like she’s in blackface. ‘You don’t understand me. I want them to like everything we do for them,’ he says. When he later berates the cook for singing black music, she spits in his face and calls him, ‘Whity!’

We’ll later learn that the cook, Marpessa (Elaine Baker) is his mother. His father is Ben Nicholson, the master of the house and one of the richest, most powerful and most crooked men in Texas. His father has a new young wife Katherine (Katrine  Schaake) who’s eager for him to die so she can collect his money and is already cheating on him. Whity has two half brothers from his father’s previous marriage, Frank (Ulli Lommel) a nasty piece of work who likes wearing garters and women’s lingerie to bed, and Davy (Harry Baer), who’s lacking most of his marbles and looks like Nosferatu’s sidekick. Like the Terence Stamp character in TEOREMA, Whity is happy to serve and service them all, even his father who gets off on whipping Whity. Whity who has selflessly offered to take Davy’s punishment, is clearly getting off on it as well. Whity is the figure upon whom all the other characters social, sexual and racial fantasies converge. His own desire is for Hanna (Hanna Shygulla) the local hooker/ saloon singer, who desires him also and who want to run off with him, something he can’t do until the end. A sexual masochism pervades the whole film.

The film is a work of cinephilia, with shots lifted directly from Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and Josef von Sternberg’s MOROCCO, amongst many others. It also has two dazzling scenes, innovatively filmed by Michael Ballhaus: the reading of the will, and the descent of Hanna (Hannah Schygulla) and Whity into the saloon where Hanna, in good voice, gets to sing two quite forgettable songs in one shot.

Reading of the Will (above)

Descent into saloon (above)

It’s also clear that Fassbinder learned how to use mirrors, frames within frames, etc – how to make images beautiful and expressive through carefully composed mise-en-scène — way before his Damascene encounter with Sirk ‘s work (see above). But much of the rest seems slapdash, amateurish and chaotic (see the scene where Fassbinder as a sadistic cowboy makes a grab for Hannah, below).

What remains startling in the film is the way that it dramatizes and visualises race, links its oppression to sex and the family as well as other socio-economic hierarchies, and goes into areas American cinema still doesn’t dare to, though it would be interesting to compare this to the nearly contemporaneous Sweet Sweetback’s Baadaass Song (Mario Van Peebles, 1971) and Buck and The Preacher (Sidney Poitier/ Joseph Sargeant, 1972). The shoot had so many problems, some of them caused by Fassbinder’s unreciprocated desire for Kaufmann, that it became the source material for BEWARE THE HOLY WHORE. The film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival but remained unreleased and largely unseen until it began to crop up in television in the 80s. It was still quite difficult to get a hold of a copy and I had to order it from the US. It’s a film I’d like to read more on rather than see again.

 

José 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

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 335 – The Power of the Dog

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

We talk subverted expectations, how an artificial performance makes sense on a character who’s pretending to be something he’s not, the way in which forty years of oppression eats into a person’s soul, rejection of familial expectations and the performance of unspoken fraternal duty, and more, in our discussion of Jane Campion’s fascinating, complex, and beautiful drama, The Power of the Dog.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 285 – Nomadland

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Frances McDormand and a cast of non-professional, real-life nomads unite to explore the life of the modern American itinerant in Nomadland. We consider the line between fiction and reality, the non-professionals who appear bringing their real experiences and stories with them, and discuss what drives a person to their way of life. Like director Chloé Zhao’s previous feature, The Rider, Nomadland is a textural, contemplative film, and perhaps one that grows in stature upon reflection – while José loved every moment, Mike was bored by the tempo, but finds much to praise nonetheless. A film worth taking the time to sink into.

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 277 – News of the World

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Why this film was made… is rather beyond us. News of the World invokes the era of fake news in name only, its premise – following the Civil War, a former Confederate captain travels the American south reading out newspapers for a living – interesting in principle but almost entirely ignored in favour of a by-the-numbers, surrogate father-daughter road movie. Paul Greengrass’ direction, eschewing the style and energy that made him famous, is barely an impersonation of that of classic Westerns, full of landscapes and sunsets, signifying nothing; Tom Hanks is as tediously noble and upstanding as ever, his character’s supposedly shady past alluded to rather than detailed, allowing us to feel pleased for his redemption without ever having to dislike him for what he needs to be redeemed for. Helena Zengel, the German youngster who plays Hanks’ mysterious companion, is a highlight, a presence you can’t take your eyes off – though her character is as thinly sketched as everything else.

News of the World is bad, but not offensively so. It’s an unending stampede of clichés and tropes, unthinkingly employed and uncreatively executed. We don’t like to advise people stay away from films, but if this is next on your list, we assume you have already seen every other film ever made.

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Cattle Annie and Little Britches (Lamont Johnson, USA, 1981)

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Cattle Anie poster

In the early 80s, pushing 70, But Lancaster top-lines and gets a star entrance in Cattle Annie and Little Britches. The film, based on a true story, is about Cattle Annie (Amanda Plummer) and Little Britches (Diane Lane) but Burt’s Bob Dooley is the legend, the lodestar, who they want to emulate and with whom they want to join. He’s no longer the romantic lead, but the film’s protagonists have their own non-sexual romance of and with him, and so does the film.

 

 

Mannerisms in actors are usually seen as a negative. That an actor resorts to old tricks and lacks the imagination to inhabit character in different ways. But what if those gestures of body and face, those stances that indicate bursts of energy are part of what audiences love and look forward to in an actor’s performance? In Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Burt’s mannerisms bring up whole eras of audience affection, evoke authority, and are shortcuts to character and a base with which to create something new. He’s too old in the film to play the romantic leading man but the film has its own romance with him, his stardom and his own legend that feeds into that of his character’s. And displaying his body is still part of what he does as an actor and a star, even if pushing 70, it’s now filmed through mist (Pauline Kael said he looked like an old water buffalo). Perhaps that’s why he was still top-billed and headlining in vehicles guided by intelligence and social purpose into his 70s and almost right through the 1980s.

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One of the reasons I pay no attention to all the Kael haters is that I vividly remember Kael’s review forty years after I read it, and this was a movie I’d never been able to see up to now. And now that I have seen it and re-read it, I agree with so much of what she says. And she’s so funny saying it. On Rod Steiger: ‘Rod Steiger is probably more contained than he has been in years. The last time I saw him—doing his padre number in “The Amityville Horror”—his spiritual agony was enough to shatter the camera lens.’

 

 

Pauline Kael is worth quoting at length: ‘here are some remarkable performances—Lancaster’s and Diane Lane’s, and, especially, the unheralded, prodigious screen début of Amanda Plummer. (Actually, everything about this picture is unheralded. It was finished over a year ago, but nobody wanted to release it, because a couple of other Westerns had failed. It wasn’t really released: it was just dropped into a Broadway theatre for a week, to plug up a hole before “Outland” arrived.) As Bill Doolin, Lancaster (who made this film before “Atlantic City”) is a gent surrounded by louts—a charmer. When he talks to his gang, he uses the lithe movements and the rhythmic, courtly delivery that his Crimson Pirate of 1952 had when he told his boys to gather ‘round. The great thing about Lancaster is that you can see the face of a stubborn, difficult man—a man who isn’t easy to get along with. He has so much determination that charm doesn’t diminish him. In his scenes with Diane Lane, the child actress who appeared in New York in several of Andrei Serban’s stage productions and who, single-handed, made the film “A Little Romance” almost worth seeing, Lancaster has an easy tenderness that is never overdone, and she is completely inside Jenny’s childish dependency. And when he’s by himself, naked, soaking at the hot springs (where the marshal traps him), he’s a magnificent, sagging old buffalo. Lancaster looks happy in this movie and still looks tough: it’s an unbeatable combination’.

The film itself is charming and a bit ramshackle. It’s unusual to see a film about women’s desires to be outlaws, one set in a period where those dreams were being shut down along with the frontier, and yet the film doesn’t makes those desires as central to the narrative as it should, constantly cutting to the bigger stars, Lancaster himself of course, but also Rod Steiger and Jon Savage — whatever happened to him? He seemed to be everywhere in this period — and even Scott Glenn (why didn’t he become a bigger star? He’s sexy, charismatic and so good here and in practically everything he did in this period). And the questions I ask above in relation to Savage and Glenn are even more worth asking regarding Amanda Plummer, a debut to compare to Hepburn’s writes Kael, and yet it seems American cinema of this period did not have the space for such an electric and original presence. Its loss. But this is a film that allows us to enjoy and mourn the magnitude of that loss.

According to Kate Burford, ‘critics would note that Larry Pizer’s cinematography glowed like a Frederick Remington vision’ (loc 2903), except for the clip of Burt’s entrance I’ve extracted above, where one can barely see anything.

 

In her extraordinary book on Lancaster, Kate Buford includes excerpts from a truly illuminating interview with Amanda Plummer on Lancaster’s acting in Cattle Annie that is worth extracting here in its entirety:

A bit of trivia: Steven Ford, son of the American President Gerald, appears in a small role as a man of the law and is very good.

José Arroyo

A note and gif on The Scalphunters (Sidney Pollack, 1968)

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The Scalphunters

 

The Scalphunters is anti-racist Western directed by Sidney Pollack. Burt Lancaster is the trapper whose furs, a whole winter’s work, get stolen first by Apaches, then by a gang of scalphunters led by Telly Savallas. Ossie Davis is the runaway house-slave hoping to get to Mexico and freedom. They have great chemistry and are very funny together. The film begins with Burt rescuing Ossie but planning to sell him, to them after a fight, encased in a mud that metaphorically erases their colour differences, sharing a horse and continuing in their quest to get the furs back. Shelley Winters plays the Western equivalent of a gangster’s moll, a completely stereotypical part, and is rather miraculous with it: nothing has dated about her performance except her hairdo. This gif, your daily Burt, is from near the end of the film:

 

Burt-and-Ossie

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 219 – Bacurau

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Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

A political parable, satire, thriller, high-concept actioner, horror, and Western all at once, 2019 Cannes Jury Prize winner Bacurau is a wild experience and well worth your time. Set in a tiny, remote village in a near-future Brazil, we’re given a portrait of life within an open, tolerant community under the thumb of a distant but powerful mayor, and shortly after the funeral of one of the town’s elders, things start going awry.

To say more would be to spoil the surprises, and we encourage you to check the film out knowing as little as possible. As a fable, it’s a potent piece of work – themes of political abuses, the ownership and withholding of water conferring power, and the value of community and the knowledge of history are all made manifest as Bacurau straddles its genres and provides its thrills. It’s a film that’s as open to interpretation as it is clear about what it thinks – its clunkiness in this respect a positive for Mike while occasionally a little overegged for José. But quibbles here and there pale in significance to Bacurau‘s boldness and intelligence, and you should see it.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1946)

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An atmospheric Western, almost a noir. Whilst watching it, I asked myself ‘is it still possible to watch Westerns today’? Here, ‘Indians’ are treated with more sympathy than usual. Honey Bragg (Ward Bond), with his lack of ethics and rampant desires, is the real villain of the piece. But we still see the natives as barbaric, anonymous, and vengefully mowing down beautiful blonde women with adorable babies. If one can put that to the side, and the film is unusual in giving the natives cause — this is a retaliation — or abstract it into symbolism that can stand for something else, Canyon Passage offers deep pleasures of composition and lighting, a world where the sublime natural beauty of Oregon’s mountains, forests and rivers is at the same time a shadowy backdrop to all-too human failings: doubt, desire, greed, want, weakness.  Dana Andrews, looking like a sourer version of Mel Gibson in his youth, plays the hero, Logan Stuart. Lucy Overmire (Susan Hayward) is who he ends up with. Brian Donlevy plays George Camrose, the genial but morally weak friend who keeps getting the hero in trouble. I’d never seen Hoagy Carmichael in colour before and he looks unusually handsome warbling his tunes. A very blond Lloyd Bridges is surprisingly lithe and sexy as a moral anchor of dubious reliability. Patricia Roc is Susan Haward’s rival for Dana’s affections. They all play a game of ‘want vs should’ in beautiful world so wild and densely forested that even the light that manages to seep through is itself the source of a shadows. It’s a world filled with danger, death, and in which moral dilemmas get played out in turn by each of the protagonists in ways that shape their fate. ‘. This can now be seen in a glisteningly gorgeous print on MUBI.

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Oregon bound

In an incisive introduction to Chris Fujiwarara´s excellent Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (London: McFarlane and Compnay, 1998), Martin Scorcese writes,

Tourneur was an artist of atmospheres. For many directors, an atmosphere is something that is ‘established´, setting the stage for the action to follow. For Tourneur it is the movie, and each of his films boasts a distinctive atmosphere, with a profound sensitivity to light and shadows, and a very unusual relationship between characters and environment — the way people move through space in Tourneur movies, the way they simply handle objects, is always special, different from other films….Canyon Passage (is) an example of the short-lived but very interesting sub-genre of the ´noir western´and a picture that´s very special to me. It´s one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the the western genre ever made. When you think of ´westerns´you immediately picture the plains or the desert , vast spaces that stretch on and for miles. But this film, Tourneur´s first in color, is set in a small town in the mountains of Oregon, and it is lush, green, muted, and rainy (one of the first scenes in the movie shows the cramped main street of Portland turned into a muddy bog by a downpour). Even the open spaces in this movie are just small clearings. If you study Canyon Passage carefully you´ll see that Tourneur constantly composes diagonally into small spaces, showing people walking up or down inclines, and it gives you the feeling that this is a real settler´s town….There are some beautiful set pieces in Canyon Passage like the Indian attack and the barnraising, but the overall tone is so carefully controlled that every small variation or nuance has an impact. That´s what makes Tourneur´s films so unsettling, this strange undercurrent that runs through every scene but that somehow enhances the dramatic impact of the whole film.

José Arroyo

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Ward Bond framed by dying leaves, and with not too long to live himself
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Hoagy Carmichael, for once handsomely lit.
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Where Jeff must have gotten it from: a very blonde, lithe and sexy Lloyd Bridges makes an impression.