come back, lee marvin...we miss you (pt 1)

Lee Marvin could not have chosen a more fortuitous time to start a career in motion pictures than the early 1950s. Before the war, Hollywood movies were primarily built around female stars; it’s hard to maintain even a 3 to 1 ratio when compiling a list of 20’s and 30’s stars along gender lines. It was after the end of World War Two when the male star finally came in to his own; suddenly it was his name the marketing department exploited to promote a movie, his face across the posters and magazines. Part of the reason actresses suddenly found themselves, with few exceptions, marginalized in 1950’s Hollywood is a refection of the culture of repression and infantilization imposed upon the general female population that had experienced far too much freedom during the war, and needed a ‘retraining’ in subservience and domesticity; there is also the basic fact that the kind of movies being made in the post-war years simply didn’t need women. Rising from the silly Singing Cowboy fare it had been, the American Western found its’ language of mythology during that period, in large part through the work of John Ford. Westerns, along with war movies, rarely have choice parts for actresses, other than as damsels in distress-endangered virgins whose rescue provides a mettle proving opportunity for the hero. Even Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 “Paths Of Glory”, a subversion and condemnation of the romanticizing of war, is painted with an all-male cast, excluding the final scene, when a terrified German girl is forced to sing for her captors (it is, to be fair, the pivotal moment in the film-the only glimmer of beauty or humanity in an otherwise bleak and hopeless world).
During this same period the other cinematic celebration of masculinity, the crime drama, at its’ creative peak, and it was here that Lee Marvin made his first impression. Arriving from the New York stage, Marvin kicked around with bit parts on television and in now-forgotten movies (all westerns or war films), but it was as Vince Stone in Fritz Lang’s 1953 thriller “The Big Heat” that the public was formally introduced to his scene stealing talents. With surprising dexterity, Marvin manages to transform his considerable height from menacing sadist in one scene, to cringing coward in the next. In one of the most brutal acts of 1950’s cinema, he throws a pot of boiling coffee in his (loose-lipped) girlfriend’s face, hideously disfiguring her. Later, when she corners him with her own pot, he writhes and cowers, as loathsome in his weakness as he was earlier in his cruelty. While only a supporting role, this movie would be the beginning of Lee Marvin’s decade long apprenticeship.

Hollywood still had in place an elaborate set of rules for ascending to star status, involving a long series of parts that slowly increased in importance. It is perfectly common these days to have someone with little experience acting suddenly sucked up into the vortex superstardom, but into the studio system collapsed in the mid-1960’s, performers were expected to ‘pay their dues’ with a series of supporting and character roles. This was certainly true with the generation of tough guy actors who started in the 50’s; James Colburn, Steve McQueen, Warren Oates, Robert Mitchum, Sterling Hayden, Ben Johnson and slightly later, Clint Eastwood, all climbed the rungs of supporting roles and b-movies (consider McQueen in “The Blob”). Some of the two-fisted actors of this period never rose above villain roles (Jack Palance), b-movie purgatory (Charles Bronson and Lee Van Cleef) or where quickly transformed into lovable box-office heartthrobs (William Holden and Paul Newman). But regardless of what level of success they achieved, what they all had in common was an authenticity of masculinity. These were men who looked believable mounted on a horse or machine-gunning nazis. Unlike action heroes today, these men were not muscular idealizations of manhood-none of them would have made a very impressive superhero, nor could any of them believably kick and judo their way through feats of superhuman strength. But what they did offer, that is woefully lacking in today’s current heroes, is a genuine rawness, a manhood based less on prettiness (most of these men were actually quite homely) and more on rugged understatement.

So Lee Marvin served his apprenticeship, usually either as a villain’s henchman, hero’s buddy or as comedic relief. While these parts offered limited screen time, Marvin became a master of stealing scenes. Marlon Brando’s pouting mumble-mouthed Johnny in “The Wild One” has become a camp-culture icon; the homoerotic tight leather and teeny cap jauntily placed on his head as he sits on his motorcycle, fondling the trophy he’s strapped to his handlebars…the power of this image has long since surpassed the mediocrity of the film it appears in. But the reason the Brando image from “The Wild One” has become a household saint, while Marvin’s hasn’t, it’s because Lee Marvin is so utterly strange, so completely off the wall as Chino, that we lack the language to even define his performance. Looking like a post-apocalyptic pirate, Marvin literally throws himself across the screen, constantly falling to the ground or flying from one side of the screen to the other, his Chino, while trapped in the (confusing) sub-plot about the rival gang, explodes in manic delight every time the camera focuses on him.
His Meatball in “Caine Mutiny” (1954) was almost identical to his Chino a year before, but less noteworthy only because Humphrey Bogart (the father of all hard-livin’ tough guy actors) delivered the most bizarre character study of his career. Further supporting roles and television work followed, including “Bad Day At Black Rock” (1955) and as the quickly dispatched title character of John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962). It wasn’t until 1964 that Lee Marvin was offered a lead role in a major motion picture, Don Siegel’s remake of “The Killers”. Remake is the key word here, because this film has always suffered in the shadow of the 1946 Robert Siodmak original (Criterion is so cruel as to package them as set, offering a poor contrast). But while the second version paled in comparison (not helped by the soon to retire from acting Ronald Reagan, who plays the villain with such obvious boredom and discomfort that it's difficult for the veiwer not to feel the same two emotions every time he's on screen), Lee Marvin shined all the brighter, earning a BAFTA for his performance. Even though Clu Gulager has almost as much screen time as Marvin (and John Cassevettes more), Lee Marvin is the star of this film, a deserved top-billing. And while another villain role (and the last of his career), Marvin uses this film to refine the image that would serve him through the peak years of his career. Gone was the frantic energy of his earlier films; his newly developed screen presence was economical in both movement and speech, a silver-haired panther silently waiting, ready to spring at any moment. Marvin's Charlie Strom watches impassively as Clu Gulager smacks first Claude Akins and later Angie Dickinson around. But it is when Marvin is finally rises and threatens them (going so far as to dangle Dickinson out a window) that they readily share their information. He moves through this movie like the Grim Reaper, slowly marching toward an inevitable armageddon. One of the great tradgedies of American film is that Lee Marvin never worked with director Sam Peckinpah; they both shared a belief that there is no such thing as a too elaborately choreographed death scene-the more ambitious the death, the more memorable the character. Having dispatched both Reagan and Dickinson, a fatally wounded Marvin staggers out of the house, flailing on the front doorstep. He stumbles several times, losing his gun but retaining the briefcase of money that had been his single obsession all along. When the police arrive, Marvin aims at them with his finger, 'firing' at them with his empty hand. He then all but flips backward, collapsing on the ground dead (like the blind children playing 'cops and robbers' in the opening scene). Although a flawed film, it is in "The Killers" that Lee Marvin matures into the weary, chainsaw-voiced wanderer locked into a specific purpose, neither understanding nor caring about the world beyond his fixation on the singular goal. It was a shift in persona that couldn’t have come at a better time.

The major transformation America was going through during the 1960’s has been addressed so endlessly, with such exacting detail, that it would be a redundant waste of space to reexamine that period here. But what is worth mention is how those transformations affected Hollywood movies. By the mid-60’s the motion picture industry could no longer ignore the changing world beyond its’ gates. The era of grand heroism had passed, and the image of a noble John Wayne marching into battle had become an over-weight old man railing insanely against progress. Through the lenses of directors like Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman (and even the later work of John Ford) the American Western was no longer a vehicle to codify a particular set of values, but rather a forum to question those very same values. American audiences were increasingly suspect of movies that promoted the glories of war, the honor implicit in bloody sacrifice and blind obedience. These issues were not new to Hollywood, or even new as subject matter for masculine consideration (Ford’s “The Searchers” from 1957 touched on the dangers of machismo years before it came into vogue). While there still was a market for reactionary ideas in the south and amongst the middle-aged, Hollywood needed desperately to transform itself into a current, socially relevant industry. Lee Marvin's best work served as a vital bridge between the classic screen image of manhood, and the 'new' self-doubting men who would dominate 70's cinema, like Warren Beaty, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Marvin's masculinity is completely stripped of grandiose speeches and self-rightous posing typical of a John Wayne or Clark Gable performance. His presentation of manhood is such a blank, such a void, that the viewer can easily fill it with his or her own prejudices-a male totem that can either signify a wholesome commitment to duty and sacrifice, or a man beaten down and betrayed by the society that demands he sacrifice himself for some obscure and obsolete reason. It seems more than coincidental that the five years his name appeared on the "Top 10 stars of the year" list (1967-1971) were also the years the Vietnam conflict was at its' most bloody and controversial. A nation ideologically split down the middle found in Lee Marvin and the projects he chose a blank slate on which to inscribe their personal moral, political and social beliefs.

Bigger and more successful movies followed. “Cat Ballou” and “Ship Of Fools” both came out in ’65, and while neither is particularly good, that didn’t keep the public from embracing them. “The Professionals” in ’66 brought him back into westerns, and “The Dirty Dozen” the following year returned him to the war genre (although now as commanding officer and star). But it was the movie he chose as follow-up to the box-office success of “The Dirty Dozen” that Lee Marvin would make his greatest contribution to American cinema…the movie that would over shadow everything else he did his remaining twenty years of life...to be continued

rethinking how we watch european film

At the mention of European cinema, most people think of the rich, masterful story-telling tradition that includes Bergman, Truffaut, Renoir, Visconti, Fassbinder and Godard. One may even flash forward to current European filmmakers like Lars Van Trier, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the Home Movies As Art crowd also known as Dogme 95. The perception is that European cinema equals not just art, but serious art. With masochistic reverence American intellectuals have for ages clung to the belief that European cinema must be ingested with the same humble awe that one would show knelling in an ancient cathedral to receive the Host. Even when confronted by the more playful or obscene elements of foreign film, the guilt-ridden American intellectual assures us that while it may at times seem strange or humorous or outright goofy, there is always some somber, important subtext that we’re failing to grasp. Hence, the endless parade of circus clowns that pass through Fellini means something infinitely more complex than clowns could ever mean here, the joyous scatological blasphemy of Luis Bunuel should never, ever be mistaken as anything less somber than important political commentary. This penitent’s reverence has defined (and limited) the present film theory offered in publications and universities.
The official party line is that European cinema is serious, important art exploring the political and social issues of our day, while American movies have never risen above the cheap sentimentality and special effects exhibitions. This is why, I suspect most ‘indie’ movies are so utterly dull and unwatchable-a generation of young filmmakers has been taught the superiority of European masterworks in contrast with the lowest of American pop culture. It is not uncommon to encounter film students intimate with “A Bout De Souffle (Breathless) and “Bande A Part (Band Of Outsiders)”, while wholly ignorant of the American film noir classics Godard was paying tribute to. Aside from the risk of creating filmmakers so discouraged by the unlikelihood of Americans making interesting, intelligent movies that they simply give up and make formulaic tripe for Hollywood (the Criterion release of Kurosawa’s 1958 “The Hidden Fortress” includes an introduction by George Lucas, where he identifies that film and the 1952 release “Ikiru” as the two movies that really fueled his drive to become a director), there’s something deeply dishonest about this take on European cinema, and the movies cherry-picked for American audiences.



There is another European cinema, one that is either ignored or dismissed by cinemaphiles, as being too ‘populist’ for serious consideration. I’m not suggesting that directors like Argento, Franco, Carbucci, Damiani or Leone should replace the existing canon of European cinema, but I do think their work deserves to be elevated out of the ghetto of ‘cult’. It’s easy to dismiss these directors because of the fact they seem to have sometimes released movies with an eye toward a quick cash-in (excluding Sergio Leone, who’s body of work is smaller than Orson Welles). Yes, Radley Metzger’s “Little Mother” (1971), a soft-core retelling of the Evita Peron legend, does seem a little hurried, but have you seen Fellini’s “Ginger And Fred”, or “The Clowns”? Certainly Jess Franco output sometimes reaches a Roger Corman-like level gimmickry, but is that so bad? Like Corman, Franco has an implicit understanding of what makes for enjoyable viewing, using the spaces between the audience gratifications for brief passages of inspired genius. And anyway, ask yourself, honestly, how many decades have passed since Jean-Luc Godard made a movie you actually thought was worthwhile? “Masculin Feminin” is undeniably a masterpiece, but what about “Hail Mary”, or “In Praise Of Love”?
There is, I suspect, an element to critical attitudes regarding European movies that they need to be difficult viewing; like the bitter taste of medicine, the uncomfortable suffering is an essential part of the healing experience. This attitude reflects something maybe a little disturbing about how we as Americans view high art. There is an implicit agreement between intellectuals and the rabble about how anything challenging, anything smacking of ‘culture’ needs to be dull and alienating to earn the title ‘art’. That even when confronted by an enjoyably goofy work of high art like “8 ½” or “Belle De Jour” we need to translate them with the drab language of importance and subtext. God forbid any discussion of the “I Am Curious” movies suggest that there is anything as base, as popular, as eroticism in the endless scenes of Lena Nyman naked or getting porked. This is the same lie they told us as children when they took us to the art museum; all those nude bodies of classical art certainly had nothing to do with sexuality or arousal-it was all about studying the human form, or examinations of light’s patterning. Only the dirty-minded sees a nude figure as naked.
Until we develop a new way of seeing, we will never have a new cinema. Until we smash the ghettoizing of genre-thought we will never have an honest canon of film, one that admits Sergio Leone’s “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” is a better spent three hours than Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard”. Until we stop romanticizing Europe as the sole generator of legitimate cinema, we will never understand the accomplishments (or possibilities) of our own. The great irony of all this is that while selection of widely released and critically analyzed European film skews toward the finest and most prestigious of their productions, we respond by only exporting only the most banal and embarrassing of American crap. What deep sense of self-loathing is expressed by the fact that we limit the world’s understanding of the American Voice to the formulaic bombast of “Titanic” and “Oceans 11”?

9/11 and the limits of film

Another September Eleventh has come and gone, the fifth since the United States was attacked. But unlike the first four anniversaries, we were assisted this time in our observance by two motion pictures, one cable movie, and a mini-series; all released within the last six months. The initial response to this sudden glut of 9/11 thrillers is to assume a motive of cynical greed in the filmmakers, that these four productions (And the doubtless others just around the corner) were made simply to profit off of a recent tragedy. But while filling their coffers was certainly included in the agenda, I don’t think this is the sole motivation. Realistically, if one were looking to make a fast buck in Hollywood today, the safest bet would be to license a comic book hero, digitally animate animals or household objects…or put a black man in a dress. These are the movies-with the breakfast cereal and fast food promotions- that fill producers’ swimming pools with cocaine and nubile teenaged girls. The motion picture industry has always been risk-adverse in its’ choices, and it’s surprising that anyone would have green-lighted any project that so openly invited the public’s (righteous) anger and disgust. No, what’s driving these movies isn’t greed, but a far worse human failing: egotistical self-importance.

It is not unheard of for artists to respond with immediacy to the events around them, translating communal horror into personal statement. As his native Spain was drowning in civil war, Picasso answered with the twisted, tortured forms of his “Guernica”. While interned in a German prison camp at the beginning of the second World War, Olivier Messiaen composed his “Quartet For The End Of Time”. Freshly liberated from Auschwitz, the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski sat down and wrote his masterpiece, “This Way For The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen”, an unrelentingly bleak account of just how quickly people can adjust to the inhuman torture and murder of others (the author then made his point about the disposability of life by promptly ending his own). There is a great tradition of artists responding to the events around them, offering their voices as a vital dissent from the generals, politicians and academics. The question is, then, when did big-budget Hollywood movies become the canvasses of art?

We are a nation at war. It is immaterial to the issue of 9/11 movies whether that war started in 2001 or in 1948. It also doesn’t matter when discussing this whether the war in Iraq, where we are investing the bulk or our resources and attention, is a valid response to the attack, or if it’s Cambodia-style sideshow unnecessarily complicating our struggle to keep our nation safe. What does matter, is that we are actively engaged in fighting a foreign enemy committed to causing as many American deaths as possible. As such, any motion picture dealing with the events that led to this situation (or alerted us to it, depending on your political fancy) cannot be anything but propaganda for this war effort, automatically excluding them from consideration as art. Setting aside the absurd ABC mini-series, which had as it’s main goal the laying of all blame on the Clinton administration (because he was bogged down in the Lewinski business…no mention though of the lunatic right-wing fringe that had forced the issue down America’s throat as part of it’s eight year campaign to ruin the presidency), there is no way these films can be watched without raising the audience’s blood lust for revenge. Oliver Stone may talk a big game, mumbling vague recollections of a film school memories of “The Battle Of Algiers” (1966), but his current “World Trade Center” owes more to the World War Two movies Ronald Reagan and John Wayne used to make. Hollywood’s contribution to the war effort, with clockwork, herky-jerky Germans and simian Japanese, these movies were made expressly with the purpose of reminding the audience of the enemy’s inhumanity and ‘our boys’ brave sacrifices. Watching the hero (or at least his best friend, played as ever by a loyal Reagan) give his life to slow the life-destroying Niponesse or Teutonic tide threatening our shores. The dead hero returns at the end, beaming down from the clouds with pride over a life well-sacrificed, his Christlike benevolence counter pointed by the large legend demanding we “buy war bonds”.
Can we really expect Hollywood to handle the New York firefighters or the passengers of flight 93 with anything resembling tack or understatement? This is the same motion picture industry that handles the “unlikely athlete succeeds against the odds” formula as though it’s the Greatest Story Ever Told. Oliver Stone, to make the heroism even more nakedly obvious, casts Nicolas Cage as one of his trapped firefighters, an actor less capable of delivering a subtle performance than Adam Sandler after drinking three Red Bulls. It’s certainly a humbling thing to know those people on flight 93 had the courage, the balls, to overtake the terrorists and crash the plane rather than allow it to be used as another weapon…but does that give us the right to convert this act into an hour and a half entertainment? Not once, but twice now this story has been rendered for mass consumption, under the rationale of paying tribute to their sacrifice. The makers of these films seem to think their public so lack imagination that we’re incapable of grasping these events without their guidance, without seeing well-paid actors running around a set pretending to overtake other actors, these in turbans and covered with bronzer. This is both what I suspect is the true motive behind this glut of 9/11 movies, and also what I find most galling about them; that without their help, without them showing us with exacting detail what exactly happened, we’re too stupid and dull to grasp the enormity of what took place. Suffering the hubris of self-importance, they scratch their names into the base of the monument of Remembrance, casting themselves as the official transcribers of our time.
Aside from their lack of taste or sensitivity, aside from their reflections of their creators’ misguided sense of artistry, aside from their potentially damaging effects on the political climate, what makes these deserving of our dismissal is their overwhelming sense of laziness. There is nothing more lazy, more creatively bankrupt than telling a story your audience already has an emotional attachment to. Excluding the Amish, it’s hard to believe there are many Americans who do not have vivid memories relating to that day, or many Americans who did not experience some sort of emotion watching three thousand of their fellow citizens burning, falling or being crushed to death. What a cheap short-cut to audience response it is then to tap into those recent feelings, to simply turn on the camera and film specific cues to trigger that response. The fact is, a 9/11 movie doesn’t have to be good in the conventional sense of film making, all it has to provide is a canvass on which the audience can write their own feelings. I could make the sloppiest, most boring movie imaginable about the falling of the World Trade Center, but as long as I include certain reminders of that day, I will be guaranteed an audience moved to tears by their recent memories. This is not art, this is pornography, and lousy pornography at that. Consider: Oliver Stone chose to include in his movie the office works that jumped to their deaths rather than suffer the torture of fire. As his well-fed actors approach the towers in their firefighter costumes, digitally generated bodies rain down from the sky, followed by post-production inclusion of the wet thud as they strike the pavement. As much as we want to laugh at the image of Nicolas Cage’s vein attempts to express horror or fear at what’s supposed to be happening on the green screen he’s flailing in front of, we are reminded of the very real, very not Hollywood magic of watching that really happen five years ago. Once, those weren’t rubber bodies being tossed around a set by Teamsters, once, they weren’t pixels arranged by computer nerds…once, those were real people jumping to their deaths before your eyes. And whatever emotion you experience remembering that sight, Oliver Stone and his ilk believe they have provided.
To end on a final cheap shot: obviously Oliver Stone is an uneven, over-blown hack, whose contributions to the American film canon include such vital works as “Alexander” and “Natural Born Killers”, speaks volumes about who is telling our stories. Cyrus Nowrasteh, the author of “Path To 9/11”, spent the 1980’s honing his craft as head writer on the television series “Falcon Crest”. Even more impressive, Peter Markle, nominated for an Emmy for his direction of “Flight 93”, has a wide and diverse list of directing credits, including tv shows like “CSI”, “Las Vegas”, and “Jack And Bobby”. But least you think him limited to the small screen, the versatile Mr. Markle has directed numerous major motion pictures, including the posthumous John Candy vehicle “Wagons East” (tagline: “they came, the saw, they changed their minds). He also brought to the screen-and our hearts- that singular work of vision, “Hot Dog…The Movie” (two taglines: “taste the sauce in…Hot Dog The Movie”, plus “there’s more to do in the snow than ski”).

WELCOME!

Hi, and welcome to my e-zine. I’m calling it an e-zine, rather than a blog, because the purpose of this site is to post articles about underrated movies and music, not to recount the minutia of my daily activities. It’s not that I think I’m wholly without interesting qualities (quite the contrary, in fact), it’s not that I’m so self-delusional to think these qualities are of any interest to you, the reader. Also, having been the unwelcome subject of others’ on-line journals, I have no desire to victimize the people in my life with the kind of self-serving distortions inherent to this kind of endeavor. And again, aside from any issue of respecting my loved ones’ privacy, does the world really need another live journal or blog constantly updated with two or three sentence blurbs about mean bosses, lost childhood toys and what was eaten for dinner the night before? Who reads these damn things, aside from other ‘bloggers’ looking to get linked?
So while I have no interest recounting (or inventing) issues relating to my sex-life, diet or bowel movements, I do want to share my deep passion for movies and music with others. There are some wonderful, wild and often weird movies laying about waiting to be discovered. It is not my contention that we have to watch these films out of some reverent sense of duty, like they way ‘classics’ are treated in school…medicine you should take because it’s “good for you”. No, the reason you should watch these movies is because they’re often quite good, and always at least interesting. The reason I’d rather watch a Klaus Kinski movie instead of a Russell Crowe one isn’t because Kinski is dead and largely forgotten, it’s because even in his worst movies (which there are quite a few), he always delivers an unexpected performance that threatens to derail the whole production with its’ bizarre intensity. Crowe, on the other hand, is an alcohol-bloated blow hard, who seems to stagger from movie to movie, barely interested in-or even aware of- the dialogue he’s alternately mumbling or shouting before the green screen the CGI scene will later be applied to.
You don’t have to watch a movie that’s identical to the last movie you had placed before you. You don’t have to listen to the same limited variety of music over and over again. There’s a seemingly bottomless well of music from the 1960’s; not only are they constantly reissuing garage bands never heard beyond their local market, psychedelic bands that were lost in the flood, and the general oddities that have surfaced from seemingly nowhere, there’s even become a cottage industry around the early rock music from Latin America, Asia and Africa. So why limit yourself to the same six, seven hours of Woodstock/Vietnam soundtrack in endless rotation on “classic rock” stations? Not everything has to sanctified by Time-Life…
We live in an odd time; we find ourselves with all this new, wonderful technology for listening to music and watching movies. Not only has the selection of what’s generally available increased astronomically in just the past few years, the internet and burners have made it incredibly easy to either purchase, copy or share all these wonderful discoveries. But how does the entertainment industry respond to the resurrection of masterpieces like “Seconds” or “The Big Red One”? Remakes of “The Wicker Man” and “The Manchurian Candidate”!
My argument (and my reason for starting this site) is not that these old movies deserve to be watched, deserve an audience, but that you deserve to watch something more meaningful, more challenging, more original than remakes, sequels and adaptations of crappy old sitcoms. If you’re going to surrender two hours to listen to someone’s story, shouldn’t it be a story you haven’t already heard?