Last night I hopped on the R train (Times Square to Steinway) in order to visit the nominally pleasant but architecturally dreary neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. Talk about your ethnic downmarket vibe. I took a couple of snaps (SAMO graffiti, a guy openly taking a leak) as I wondered how and why anyone would want to live in this kind of vaguely shitty neighborhood.
The precise destination was the Museum of the Moving Image, where the highly touted 70mm restoration of John Ford’s wildly over-praised The Searchers unspooled at 7:30 pm.
The MOMI host told us we were in for a real treat — a 70mm replication of a genuine, bonafide VistaVision version of a luscious color film (shot by Winston C. Hoch) that very few popcorn-munching Average Joes saw in ‘56.
What I saw last night looked like a nice but unexceptional 35mm print that could have played in my home town of Westfield, New Jersey.
“Bullshit!”, I muttered to myself as I sat in my third-row seat. “I’ve been took, tricked, scammed, duped, deceived, flim-flammed, led down the garden path, fooled, boondoggled, lied to, taken to the cleaners, sold a bill of goods”, etc.
Immediately my eyes were telling me that the 70mm restoration is some kind of reverent con job, and that ticket-buying schmoes like myself were being gaslit. “This?” I was angrily saying to myself. “Where’s the enhancement? Where’s the extra-exacting detail that a ‘straight from the original VisaVision negative’ 70mm print would presumably yield?”
The MOMI theatre is seemingly a technically first-rate operation with a nice big screen, but what a fuming experience I had. No “bump” at all over the versions I’ve watched on various formats over the years. No bump whatsoever, fuckers! Plus some shots looked overly shadowed, and some looked a tad bleachy.
Technically sophisticated friendo who knows his stuff: “In order to present a film print properly — especially 70mm — more things must come together than you might imagine in your worst nightmare.”
Thanks, powers-that-be! Thanks for lying right through your teeth!
Have you ever been to Monument Valley? It’s kinda like the moon. Beautiful but barren. No water, no nutritious soil, no grass for cattle to eat, nothing at all to sustain life. It’s a completely ridiculous notion that anyone would have settled there.
Where did Ethan’s canteen water come from? How did anyone clean themselves or wash their clothes, much less take a bath? How did the families “attend to business” in any sort of half-sanitary fashion without an outhouse, much less toilet paper? No one had any perfumes or colognes or deodorants. They all stunk to high heaven.
The racism in this film is beyond odious. It’s appalling how Ford depicted Native Americans as bloodthirsty simpletons…savage, murderous, sub-human. Those shots of captured white women whom Ethan dismisses with disgust (‘They ain’t white!’), howling and shrieking like young witches whose brains had been removed….a ghastly moment.
Plus Scar (played by Henry Brandon, the blue-eyed gay actor who turned up 20 years later in Assault on Precinct 13) surely began to sexually enjoy Natalie Wood’s “Debbie” in her early teens, and she didn’t have children?
Why did Ford never shoot during magic hour? The natural glaring sunlight seems to overwhelm the wonderful brownish-red clay colors in the powdery soil. The only interesting dusky compositions were shot inside a sound stage.
On top of which the toupee-wearing John Wayne had begun his descent into overweight-ness. He was a much slimmer fellow when he made “Hondo.”
I finally couldn’t stand it. I left around the 85-minute mark and forlornly strolled across a mostly vacant 36th Street to Tacuba Cantina Mexicana and ordered some unexceptional grub.
