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| Joe Vitus |
 Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 10:03 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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Another movie to add to my "I really misjudged it the first time around" category: The Left-Handed Gun. When I watched it back in the early 90's (solely because of Kael's reference to it in her Bonnie and Clyde essay), I was more or less bored. If I recall, I thought it was essentially plotless, meandering and uninteresting with a few good moments. Watching it again last night, I thought it was a superb western. The action sequences are really good (even the first time around, I'd liked the way the diagram of the first shootout on the steamed window above the town faded into the actual event) and the psychology is interesting: Billy the Kid as an illiterate near-psychopath with his brainless sidekicks who don't know what their in for. Obviously this sets up a lot of what would come to be in Bonnie and Clyde.
Newman is way too James Dean, especially early on. It's not just that as a second-rate Dean he's a third-rate performer. It's that Dean's hurt-innocent-natural boy manner is completely wrong for how the movie delineates the character (even though Dean's characters in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause were "bad" it was not because of their inherent natures, it was "society's" fault. This is not the case with Billy the Kid as the script defines him; come to think of it, this is also not the case with Dean in Giant, making me wonder if Dean himself might have broken away from his standard persona, had he lived to play this role).
His performance improves as it goes along, and the scenes of him held for execution are among my favorites of Newman, ever. I liked everyone in the movie, even James Best who has essentially become a butt of pop culture derision due to his role as Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard (he was really good on the show, and played the role just as he should, but since it was a one-dimensional, childish show, there's no credit for doing the part right).
For what it's worth, contrary to legend, Billy the Kid was right-handed. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 11:11 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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Interesting take on Newman. He was playing around early in his career with Brando and Dean ripoffs, but around the time of Hud and The Hustler he became his own man and never looked back, paving the way for a great screen career of his own.
He never became a great stage actor, however. Fascinating. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 11:29 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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Well, after Brando, I think a generation of actors turned their back on the theater, deciding there was more going on in the movies than on Broadway. Considering this was the Inge era, I can't really blame them.
I don't know what I think about Newman. Sometimes he seems so self-congratulatory and self-impressed I can't stand him (see: the Newman-Redford movies, or Blaze). At other times, he knocks my socks off. I like him a lot in Hud, and should probably watch The Long, Hot Summer.
To this day I have not seen The Hustler. I'm kinda afraid to. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 11:39 am |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
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Location: SF Bay Area
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billyweeds wrote: Newman... never became a great stage actor, however. Fascinating. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 11:41 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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Joe Vitus wrote:
To this day I have not seen The Hustler. I'm kinda afraid to.
Why are you afraid? It's an absolutely stunning movie, with four--count 'em, four--simply amazing performances by Newman, Laurie, Gleason, and Scott. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 11:47 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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| Because it's such an entrenched classic that if I don't like it, I will be very frustrated. And I've heard it praised for so long, it's probably going to be impossible for me not to be disappointed. I would have been much better off happening upon it accidentally when I was 16 or something. Don't know if my argument makes any sense or not. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 2:15 pm |
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Funny, the comments about Newman trying to be Dean in The Left Handed Gun (which I've never seen).
I first saw Newman in what I think was his first film, The Silver Chalice, on it's first run. In the lobby after the movie I ran into my friend David Steinberg and he asked me if Newman were the actor that was supposed to be the next Brando. I told him no, that was James Dean. Rebel Without A Cause hadn't opened yet. And to take this anecdote farther, Steinberg would become a friend of Newman. I phoned him at a comedy club in Greenwich Village years later for an interview. He was on stage so I left my number and name. He called me back about an hour later and asked who I was. I told him, Marantz. He said, "Oh, they told me someone called and left the name Moron. I thought it was Paul Newman because when he calls me he always uses some ridiculous name."
I never did ask him if he remembered the question he asked me after we saw The Silver Chalice. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 3:02 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| Gary Six Degrees--DIdn't know you were a friend of Steinberg's, or if I knew I forgot. Admire his talent. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2010 4:07 pm |
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| I thought everyone on here knew that. I'd mentioned it many times, but probably back in the NYTFF days. We grew up in the same part of town and in the same extended crowd but he was a year or two younger than I. When we were in our teens and on we were not close friend but we were friends. The last time I saw him was when he was playing at the Las Vegas hotel where I was staying. This would have been around '80. Went to see his show and he even used me as a straight man (in the audience) during one of his bits. Not sure I help out very much. When he was finished he motioned to me to come back to his dressing room. My date (a dealer at black jack), and I went back to see him. That's when I met Susan Sarandon. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 8:50 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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Watching James Cagney in The West Point Story is a special treat. The black-and-white 1950 musical is nothing special, with not-great tunes by the great Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn and indifferent performances by Gordon MacRae and Doris Day, but Cagney's singing and dancing is committed, delightful, and kinetic. The flick also features a great dance routine by Gene Nelson and a rare chance to see Virginia Mayo dancing, something she does quite nicely.
Also interesting for Cagney's chemistry with Day, with whom he would team more interestingly a few years later in Love Me or Leave Me, and with Mayo, whose relationship with him here is way different from the one in 1949's White Heat. |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 3:01 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Manhattan
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:48 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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| I often sit through credits to confirm or find out what songs have been use in the soundtrack. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 6:44 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12929
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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How’s this for the opening narration of a film: “Here, the earth rocks when you walk. The water table’s high here, you see. When it rains, the fields turn into a giant swamp. That’s when the cattle sink in and have to be hauled out with chains. Once a cow sank so deep into the mud, it vanished. Six months later it turned up again, inflated like a balloon. It gave birth to a two-headed calf with a calf’s head and a human head. You’ve got to keep such a freak out of sight. Everyone knows that. Still, the farmer kept it. Soon after, the cattle got mad cows disease—and the women lost their unborn children and their minds. The men gathered at the bar, and one morning they dumped the beast in the bog—where it sank with a wretched roar. Since then, there hasn’t been any fuss with neither cattle nor woman.”
Then we get the title card “This story is based on actual events”. Eh, right.
The film is Terribly Happy a Danish thriller that reminds me strongly of Blood Simple, Insomnia and "The Twilight Zone." Robert is a young cop recovering from a nervous breakdown during which he pointed his gun at his wife and her lover, so he is posted to a quiet rural town to get his nerves together. But things there are ... strange. For instance, the man who opened a new bicycle shop has disappeared and nobody seems all that anxious to find him. The proper way to treat young shoplifters is for the marshal to slap them hard across the face (at the suggestion of the shopkeeper). Clothes on the clothesline must be properly ordered with socks paired, shirts in a line, etc.
The town bully is beating his wife and nobody seems willing to do anything. After all, she's an outsider and quite probably unstable, and her husband is very big. (She also is quite ready to start an affair with the new marshal.) It's much simpler to sit in the bar, act happy and play cards while her daughter wheels a carriage around the street so the husband can beat his wife in peace.
You just know that bog is going to come in handy.
Pretty good film, strongly influenced by the brothers Coen. That title card is likely intended as a homage to Fargo, and the film begins with landscape shots like several of the Coen films. The "hero" reminds me of the male leads in Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men, sometimes showing the incompetence of Ray in the former film. His nemesis is hardly of the same caliber of the villains in those films. In fact, there are hints that some of the wife's injuries may be self-inflicted we know she has also injured her husband.
If you haven't caught on that this is sort of a Danish Western, the town bully wears a ten-gallon hat. A white one. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 8:14 pm |
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| Sounds delightfully ridiculous. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 9:49 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| I've been meaning to see Terribly Happy. Now I think I will do it soon. |
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