I can’t unsee this Psycho set photo, and particularly John Gavin’s man-toes and especially those hush-puppy slip-ons. I’m sorry but the man’s stock has just dropped a few points, and I mean eternally.
BTW: This was shot during filming of the Phoenix hotel room scene, and Janet Leigh’s satin or silk bathrobe is the same one that “Marion Crane” wore just prior to taking a shower in cabin #1 at the Bates Motel.
I’ve watched and re-watched The Big Country since it hit Bluray in 2011, and especially since the much improved KL Studio Classic version was released in ‘18. I know this film cold, every scene and line and Technirama shot, every bridge and stanza in Jerome Moross’s score, etc.
But until last night, I hadn’t noticed a very glaring element in the final shot, the one in which Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons and Alfonso Bedoya ride down a rugged mountain trail and into a large valley below.
Throughout the entire film the dominant outdoor color (aside from the sky) is pale straw…the landscape is seemingly under-watered and parched as far as the camera can see, the dry prairie grass covering the plains and hills in every direction.
And then in the final shot and for the first time in the film, the entire valley is covered in green.
Was this a visual metaphor that director William Wyler decided upon, signifying health and ample water and a happy ending as far as human nature allowed? Or had nature simply shifted gears or seasons by sprouting fresh grass toward the end of principal photography?
I know that I can’t recall another outdoor film, western or not, in which an entire eye-filling landscape changes its mind so completely at the very last moment.
Imagine being so clueless, so bottom-of-the-barrel and perverse in your movie brain that when somebody asks “favorite Gene Hackman film?”, you actually respond “Superman”!
In no particular order: Crimson Tide, The Firm, Hoosiers, Night Moves, All Night Long, Downhill Racer, The French Connection (Friedkin & Frankenheimer), The Conversation, Bonnie and Clyde, Another Woman, Young Frankenstein, Mississippi Burning.
…but wearing a chickenshit mask?
All my professional life I’ve regarded Amy Taubin as a first-rate, tart-tongued Manhattan film critic and essayist. So it came as a mild surprise to read the other day that (a) she was once a fledgling, semi-noteworthy actress/filmmaker, such that (b) casting director Lynn Stalmaster included her among a list of possibles to play Elaine Robinson in The Graduate.
I’ve just read Adriane Quinlan’s 4.7 “Curbed” piece about Paul Schrader’s life these days at The Coterie, a pricey (at least $15K monthly) luxury high-rise for interesting (read: fairly loaded) seniors. It’s called “Paul Schrader’s Very Paul Schrader Days in Assisted Living.”
This is a dry, well-written observational that almost reminded me at times of Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.” But unlike his well-tended wife Marybeth, Paul doesn’t seem to be living “in” assisted living, or at least not according to my limited understanding of that term.
Living in The Coterie is easy and luxurious, sure, but with Paul churning out screenplays, planning to shoot a kind of Ivan Ilyich-type drama with Richard Gere later this year and thinking about visiting a Manhattan dive bar in order to counter-balance a feeling of too much sterility and perhaps keep in touch with the hurlyburly to some degree, he seems to be living in a fashion that’s more adjacent to assisted living (out of necessity for his wife) than “in” it.
I’m hearing that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (6.30.23) is “another Top Gun: Maverick in that it’s a love letter to a bygone moviegoing experience.”
Director James Mangold, I’m told, is “very deft in mining the same turf as Rocky Balboa, depicting an aged actor and character taking a valedictory lap. Harrison Ford brings the goods, but it’s Phoebe Waller Bridge who truly ups the game, playing her part like a young Diana Rigg. Audiences will love her character and performance. The film will pack theaters.”
Fine, I said, but I don’t trust Mangold AT ALL. The trailer tells me they’re recycling old jokes and old bits. It looks like a slick franchise tribute and that’s all.
Reply: “Once again, Phoebe Waller Bridge is the key to the film. She gives it heart and soul and wit.
“Contrasting the proverbial disgruntled and grumpy older Ford against hippies in the 60s is what works. He’s an old man yelling at clouds and kids to get off his lawn, but he’s the only one that perceives the dangers of the assimilated enemies working for the American government at NASA.
“Mads Mikkelsen‘s villain is a former Nazi scientist like a Werner von Braun, now working for NASA. Basically a sardonic and philosophical Doctor Strangelove type. Mikkelsen uses a little Peter Lorre-styled menace laced with sinister humor.”
Letter to N.Y. Times from Barbara Barran of Brooklyn: “During President Biden’s State of the Union speech, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert repeatedly interrupted him, with Ms. Greene screaming, ‘Liar!’ Both women are still members of Congress.
“But let two Black representatives in Tennessee — Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis — protest the lack of gun control legislation after children were massacred, and they are thrown out of office by the Republicans.
“What a travesty! What a terrible place this country has come to!”
I’ve always loved this “explaining The Searchers” scene from Martin Scorsese‘s Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (’68). Filmed in ’65, the 26-year-old Harvey Keitel is trying to make Zina Bethune, 20, with his knowledge of and passion for John Ford‘s The Searchers (5.16.56).
It’s really Scorsese talking, of course. You’re left with a presumption, in fact, that Scorsese probably attempted any number of seductions along these lines.
Over the decades many people have proclaimed their knowledge of and passion for The Searchers. The first significant “we need to take a fresh look” piece was written in ’79 by New York contributor Stuart Byron. His money phrase was calling it the “Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood,” and that certainly stirred the pot for a lot of folks.
On 8.9.11 the late Peter Bogdanovich sought to re-start the engine with an IndieWire piece in which he The Searchers “not only among the very best, but also among the final Western masterworks of the movies’ golden age.”
Largely for the sake of obstinacy I posted a counterpunch piece a couple of days later (“Hard-To-Love Searchers“) and I was mostly hated on for doing so. You’re worthless, stupid…kill yourself! Sure thing.
And then on 3.18.13 Scorsese himself posted a conflicted, yes-and-no Searchers love essay in The Hollywood Reporter.
That was ten years ago, and I think that as time moves on it’s going to be less and less dangerous or dicey to assess The Searchers in less-than-glowing or semi-religious terms. Scorsese’s wisest observation in the THR piece was that director John Ford personally related to John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, the gruff, scowling, racist-minded loner at the heart of this 1956 film. This is precisely why the present-tense viewers are considerably less enamored (if in fact they ever were enamored) of this rather thorny and at times cruel-hearted film.
Scorsese’s basic thought is that while The Searchers has some unfortunate or irritating aspects, it’s nonetheless a great film and has seemed deeper, more troubling and more layered the older he’s become. Which is well and good but you always have to take Scorsese’s praise with a grain of salt, I think. A lifelong Film Catholic, Scorsese has always been a gentle, generous, big-hearted critic. Show him almost any mediocre film by a semi-respected director and nine times out of ten he’ll look on the bright side and turn the other cheek. Has he ever written anything even the least bit mean or cutting or dismissive?
My basic view of The Searchers, as I wrote in ’07 or thereabouts, is that “for a great film it takes an awful lot of work to get through it. I don’t know how to enjoy The Searchers any more except by wearing aesthetic blinders — by ignoring all the stuff that drives me up the wall in order to savor the beautiful heartbreaking stuff (the opening and closing shot, Wayne’s look of fear when he senses danger for his brother’s family, his picking up Natalie Wood at the finale).
That said I can’t help but worship Winston C. Hoch‘s VistaVision photography for its own virtues. And speaking of the lush lensing, the last and only Searchers Bluray popped 16 and 1/3 years ago (12.8.06). It’s well past time to issue a remastered 4K version.
Julius Avery‘s The Pope’s Exorcist is obviously garbage, but HE admires the final paragraph in Guy Lodge‘s Variety review.
“A sloshed Chet Huntley speaking to an equally hammered David Brinkley during New Year’s Eve coverage in 1966: “You know, David…sometimes I wish I was single. I’m fairly wealthy, I’m famous and there are all these women around. I’m telling you it’s a tragedy. And my wife and I…all right, I won’t go there. But God, would I love to sow a few wild oats before it’s too late! I mean, let’s face it, David…we’re both gonna be dead some day.” — from HE’s 1.1.17 coverage of Don Lemon’s inebriated New Year’s Eve coverage in New Orleans.
