Jeff Wells

When “The Indian Fighter” Opened at Mayfair in 1955…

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The Indian Fighter (United Artists, 12.21.55) was a passable-but-no-great-shakes western, starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Andre de Toth. It served the usual brawny action stuff in eye-filling CinemaScope, but the main hook was the sexual rapport between the 39-year-old Douglas and the 20 year-old Elsa Martinelli, a native of Tuscany and a fashion model, playing a willing Sioux squaw.

Douglas was a legendary hound, of course, and given the fact that (a) he hired Martinelli after seeing her photo on a European magazine cover, and (b) his company, Bryna Productions, produced The Indian Fighter, you can guess what happened off-screen.

12.22.55 N.Y. Times review excerpt: “Douglas’s Johnny Hawks, a free soul, thinks nothing of detouring a wagon train he is leading towards Oregon in order to keep a nocturnal tryst with the chief’s comely daughter; and only one reel before he nearly had succumbed to the blandishments of an equally beauteous widow.

“It must be noted of course, that the script by Ben Hecht and Frank Davis has a fair sense of humor, and that the forests and mountains of Oregon, where this fiction was filmed, are sweeping and picturesque in color and CinemaScope.

“In the brunette Elsa Martinelli, who plays the Indian lass with a minimum of words and a maximum of feline grace, Mr. Douglas has come up with a pretty photogenic newcomer.

“Eduard Franz as Chief Red Cloud, Walter Matthau and Lon Chaney as the bad men of this escapade, Diana Douglas as the marriage-minded widow and cavalry officer Walter Abel do not contribute spectacular performances.

“But Mr. Douglas’ characterization is properly muscular. As a hard though not faultless gent, he sits a horse well, looks great in buckskins and sometimes gives the impression that he could take over a pioneer’s chores. Mr. Douglas has not blazed a cinema trail with The Indian Fighter, but he has come up with a sturdy entertainment that should please the action fans.”

But what would Ken Burns say?

Wee Bit Bored by Ken Burns’ Revolutionary War Series, And Yet…

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I was watching Ken Burns The American Revolution, his epic-length PBS series about the Revolutionary War, and I don’t know if it was me or the series but something felt vaguely off. After a half-hour or so I began saying to myself, “This feels staid…Burns’ Civil War series (35 years ago) felt more alive and engaging on some level…this doesn’t seem to have much in the way of primal forward thrust.”

That said, I don’t see what’s so woke or twisted or threatening about Burns suggesting that the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of six Indian tribes or nations in New York state, influenced the structural thinking behind the U.S. Constitution.

Narrator Peter Coyote: “Long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States,” the Iroquois had “a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee — a democracy that had flourished for centuries.”

The legend is that Benjamin Franklin was so taken with the Iroquois Confederacy that in 1754, he suggested that the 13 colonies should form a similar union, which became known as The Albany Plan. The plan was rejected but was a forerunner for the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution.

Canassatego, a leader and spokesman of the Iroquois Confederacy in the 1740s. In 1744 he urged that the British colonies emulate the Iroquois by forming a confederacy.

What’s so terrible about passing this verified history along?

Iroquois Wiki excerpthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Confederacy: “When Europeans first arrived in North America, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois League to the French, Five Nations to the British) were based in what is now central and west New York State including the Finger Lakes region, occupying large areas north to the St. Lawrence River, east to Montreal and the Hudson River, and south into what is today northwestern Pennsylvania.

“At its peak around 1700, Iroquois power extended from what is today New York State, north into present-day Ontario and Quebec along the lower Great Lakes–upper St. Lawrence, and south on both sides of the Allegheny Mountains into present-day Virginia and Kentucky and into the Ohio Valley. From east to west, the League was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nations.

“In 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora joined the League, and thereafter the Iroquois League become known as the Six Nations.”

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What’s With The Chalamet Geek-Out?

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Shaved head, horrific wardrobe choices…mystifying.

@nssmagazine Can Timothée Chalamet fake a Scouse accent? #esdeekid #timotheechalamet #timothéechalamet ♬ lv sandals x little dark age – mc cece

@chloeefromtiktok seeing adam sandler and timothee chalamet play basketball with josh safdie sitting courtside literally at my old high school felt like a fever dream. insane. #timotheechalamet #adamsandler #fairfaxhighschool #martysupreme #joshsafdie ♬ Pure Imagination (from "Wonka") – Timothée Chalamet

“Right Cohorts, Good At Sports,” etc.

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Exquisite vocals elevating HE’s Thanksgiving Day mood. Thanks, bruhs! Perfect harmonic accompaniment for the crooning, commanding Jeff Goldblum from National Anthem guy Anthony Gargiula and pop singer Jonathan Tilkin.

But I hate, hate, HATE Gargiula’s black cutoffs, white socks and black hat. Plus he’s a ginger…Jesus! If only Anthony had a decent dress sense, but of course he doesn’t.

Oh, and it’s pronounced “poppa-you-lur” (four syllables),

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Things That “Hamnet” Has Left Out, Or So I Recall

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I’ll be catching my second viewing of Hamnet fairly soon, but based upon my first viewing I don’t recall many specifics about the demanding, burdensome life of William Shakespeare. Until the film’s final third, I mean, which is when your under-educated Joe and Jane Popcorn viewers begin to understand that he’s doing well as a combination playwright, director and actor.

Maggie O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao‘s script mainly focuses on how things were in Stratford-upon-Avon for Shakespeare’s eight-years-older wife, Agnes Shakespeare (aka Anne Hathaway), and particularly the arduous responsibilities and domestic family strife that Agnes/Anne had to cope with.

But not much is offered about Will, who, for half or two-thirds of the film, is off galavanting in London doing God-knows-what but was actually working on the writing and performing of his plays. This is what an under-educated viewer might gather or infer.

The film offers damn few specifics about Mr. Shakespeare, particularly (a) his living situations in London, (b) his work habits (i.e., did he write most of his plays in Stratford-upon-Avon or in London?…apparently the former but the film is vague), (c) his all-around success as a playwright beginning in the early 1590s (he wrote and produced most of his plays between 1589 and 1613), and (d) Shakespeare becoming wealthy enough to purchase, at age 33, a sizable, bordering-on-grandiose family home in Stratford, known as New Place, which he bought for about 120 pounds in 1597.

Shakespeare purchased New Place roughly a year after the death of his 11-year-old son, Hamnet Shakespeare, who had succumbed to the plague.

If Hamnet acknowledges the purchase of New Place, I missed it due to muttered speech or murky dialogue, or a combination of the two.

London and Stratford-upon-Avon are roughly 100 miles apart. In the 1590s, travel between these cities would take about 2 to 3 days by horse, or 4 to 5 days on foot. For some reason horse-drawn carriages were much slower, taking around 10 days.

A general lack of sanitation caused the bubonic plague and Black Death, which “swept through Asia, Europe, and Africa in the 14th century and killed an estimated 50 million people, including about 25% to 60% of the European population,” the Wikipage says.

London had no working sewer system. Waste was often dumped in streets or rivers, contributing to a general foulness and stench.

Shakespeare’s most notable London residences were in the St. Helen’s parish (near the modern-day Lloyd’s Building) and later on Silver Street, near St. Paul’s Cathedral. He also lived briefly in Southwark near the Globe Theatre. Will purchased his first London home in the Blackfriars area in 1613. He moved back to Stratford-upon-Avon that same year. He died three years later at age 52.

2025 Was Hollywood’s Financial Nadir…Depth of the Pit

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Critical Drinker: “We have peaked in terms of a common pop culture movie current…a shared cultural experience that we can all get invested in. It feels like we just don’t have that any more. As compared to the days when a movie like The Matrix, say, would come out and everyone would talk about it. Because it was [a] cultural event.

“But over the past ten years it’s difficult to think of anything that’s come out that we are all invested in**.. We’ve lost that spontaneity…that occasional occurence when something new and really interesting would come along.

“The general consensus is that woke messaging in films is dying down, but you’re always gonna get a few hold-outs. Something like One Battle After Another is a good example of that. Just a straight-up [left] propaganda movie…extolling the virtues of domestic terrorism, and just all the usual nonsense. It’s hard to believe that a movie like that was greenlit in this day and age.

“But it probably speaks volumes to the fact that it was a massive flop at the box-office, [and a film] that contributed to the worst October at the box-office in 30 years, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation.

“OBAA is the kind of movie that people do not want now. There’s an actual political fatigue that has kicked in….people don’t want political propaganda [coming from] one direction or the other.

** HE’s top ten films of the 2020-2025 period thus far: (1) Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse (which premiered in Europe in late ’19 but wasn’t pirated for U.S. consumption until early ’20), (2) Sean Baker‘s Anora, (3) Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, (4) Steven Zallian‘s Ripley, (5) Edward Berger‘s Conclave, (6) Steve McQueen‘s Mangrove, (7) David Fincher‘s The Killer, (8) Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers, (9) Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard, (10) Tran Anh Hung‘s The Taste of Things (The Pot au Feu).

Second Grouping of Ten: (11) Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant, (12) Joseph Kosinski‘s Top Gun: Maverick, (13) Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, (14) Janicza Bravo’s Zola, (15) Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, (16) Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, (17) Eva Victor’s Sorry Baby, (18) Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, (19) Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro, (20) Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

Best of 2019: The Irishman, Joker, Les Miserables, The Lighthouse, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 1917, Marriage Story, Bombshell, Parasite, The Farewell (10).

Best of 2018: Roma, Green Book, First Reformed, Cold War, Hereditary, Capernaum, Vice, Happy As Lazzaro, Filmworker, First Man, Widows, Sicario — Day of the Soldado. (12).

Best of 2017: Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, The Square, War For The Planet of the Apes, mother!, The Florida Project. (7)

Best of 2016: Manchester By The Sea, A Bigger Splash, La La Land, The Witch, Eye in the Sky, The Confirmation, The Invitation. (6)

Best of 2015: Spotlight, The Revenant; Mad Max: Fury Road; Beasts of No Nation; Love & Mercy, Son of Saul; Brooklyn; Carol, Everest, Ant-Man; The Big Short. (10)

On The Nature of Daylight, Bro…

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I’ve listened to Max Richter‘s “On The Nature of Daylight” so many times in so many films. The note progression is so slow and meditative you almost forget where it’s begun before it ends. Hard to get a handle grip, but you certainly know it when you hear it. It’s more of a vibe than a “melody.”

Hamnet, Stranger than Fiction, Shutter Island, Disconnect, Arrival, The Last of Us, Call Me By Your Name, etc.

So Sharp, Shrewd, Savvy…Has It All Figured Out

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James Cameron‘s 52-minute recitation of most of the creative challenges he faced and solved over the last 40-plus years….I could listen to him prattle on for hours. Why would a guy who knows so much, who’s so good at crafting high-end epics and thrillers…why would a guy this brave and industrious and gifted devote so many years to making five Avatar films? Why? Surely not for the money. He’s bigger than that.

Disturbing News For Larry!

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In a just-posted 11.24 interview with IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio, Eyes Wide Shut dp and Criterion vandal–beast Larry Smith says that with the exception of the large-widescreen-format Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick “only shot in one format, [which was] 1.85…that was his preferred aspect ratio.”

From The Killing to Eyes Wide Shut and (once again) Spartacus and 2001 aside, Kubrick shot every one of his films in 1.37. Some were theatrically cropped to 1.85 (Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket) or 1.66 (Paths of Glory, Lolita, The Shining, Barry Lyndon. Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange), but they were all shot in 1.37 (including Full Metal Jacket).

Larry Smith is a bullshitter. He’s a bad, bad guy.

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The late Leon Vitali to DVD Talk:

Holy-Roller Possession

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Nearly three months ago I reviewed Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee from the Venice Film Festival. “It’s certainly striking and, for what it’s worth, a wackazoid original,” I wrote.

“It’s a regimented, pageant-like, nutbag historical musical about Ann Lee, the eccentric Shakers founder who was into ecstatic God-praising and celibacy and fervent denial of sexuality.”

The title of the review was “Holy-Roller Madness….Indecipherable, Shitty-Looking, Audacious To A Fault.” I’m re-posting because of a recently-released trailer.

Lee was a devoted, shrewish-looking miserabalist who left northwest England, along with a couple of dozen followers, to re-settle in upstate New York (who’s ever even heard of Niskayuna?) and dedicate themselves to unmatched religious fanaticism.

How do you make a film about radical secularists who were into hymn-singing and general shrieking and, one presumes, pissing off the normies? Credit Fastvold, at least, for giving in to the crazy…for surrendering to Lee’s ecstatic mystical whateverisms, and really going for it willy-nilly.

While shooting near Budapest at the cost of a mere $10 million, Fastvold and her cast (Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott, Matthew Beard) and crew went mad with the Shaker spirit, and you have to respect that.

Congrats to composer Daniel Blumberg and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. The madness clearly engulfed them also, and they’ve created otherworldly asylum vibes.

The movie pulsates with extreme this and that — extreme behavior, extreme denial of life, extreme visual murkiness despite being shot in 70mm, the embrace of puritanical madness. All of the terrible spiritual suppressive stuff that has given old-time Christian religion such a bad name for centuries is abundant.

Plus I couldn’t understand a single word of it, and for whatever reason there were no English subtitles, which every Venice Film Festival entry has brandished so far.

I knew early on that The Testament of Ann Lee would almost certainly give me pain because Fastvold cowrote it with husband Brady Corbet, whose direction of The Brutalist made people like myself writhe in agony last year, and whom I regard as a kind of louche anti-Christ of modern cinema. I knew, in short, that the Corbet influence would be bad news, and boy, was it ever!

HE to industry friendo after last night’s press screening: “Fastvold’s Shaker film is mute nostril agony. A journo pally concurs — ‘Awful’. I noticed five to six walkouts, heard a couple of boos when it ended.”

Friendo to HE: “It sounds like this year’s Women Talking.”

HE to friendo: “It’s much, MUCH worse than Women Talking. Somebody has called it The Brutalist: Folie a Deux.”

The real Ann Lee, who lived until age 48, was rather ugly, and Seyfried (who turns 40 in December) is, of course, beautiful, so the film’s realism is lacking in this regard.

And as long as hotness is on the table, 35-year-old Stacy Martin, who plays Jane Wardley, a British born co-founder of the Shakers, is way too attractive to play a woman who’s into a no-sex, God-and-only-God lifestyle…one look at Martin and you’re thinking “what is she doing with this bunch?”

Fastvold: “I thought Ann Lee deserved something grandiose and wonderful. How many stories have we seen about male icons on a grand scale, again and again and again? Can we not see one story about a woman like this?”

Seyfried on her Shaker singing: “A lot of it was animal sounds as opposed to melodic sounds.”