come back, lee marvin...we miss you (pt 5)

lee's final role

By the end of the 1970s, studios had had enough of the way movies were being made. For more than a decade, American cinema had been dominated by directors committed to some delusional belief that personal vision or something as obscene as ‘art’ had any place in selling popcorn. The studios helplessly suffered this ‘auteur’ madness for years, until two movies- “Jaws” and “Star Wars” (released in 1975 and 1977, respectively)- offered a light to guide them out of the serious cinema tunnel. The formula was simple; instead of investing in twenty small films that would only appeal to the niche audience of educated adults, sink that same amount in a single picture-making it so large and expensive looking that the audience would quickly find the ‘cheapness’ of small movies too amateur-looking to bother with. Also, invest more than a medium sized movie’s entire budget into marketing, so that the public cannot help but be constantly reminded of your product. This is a particularly sinister twist, because it creates such a hype before the release of your movie, that it will be such part of the movie-goer’s landscape that they are committing a social faux-pas by not being part of the communal excitement. This cynical exploitation of the publics’ lemming instinct rarely fails to deliver the significant profit margins stock-holders crave, and even when it does (“Snakes On A Plane” anyone?), all you have to do is engage in another advertising blitzkrieg for the home video and cable markets to rewrite the red ink of your investment in black. There would be no further need of movies like "Brewster McCloud" (1970; Altman), "Vanishing Point" (1971; Sarafian), "Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia" (1974; Peckinpah) or "The Last Detail" (1973; Ashby)...why make art when you've got "Goonies" and "Iron Eagle"?
It’s not a coincidence that three of the five best American movies of the 1980s were projects begun in the 1970s ; it’s also not a coincidence that these three movies would be either mercilessly butchered or quickly shelved by Hollywood studios no longer interested in selling important movies to adults. “Once Upon A Time In America” (1983; Leone), “The Stunt Man” (1980; Rush) and “The Big Red One” (1980; Fuller) were all grossly mishandled works, and are all now seen universally as the few bright lights in the otherwise bleakest hours of American cinema(the other two are “Blue Velvet” (1986; Lynch) and “Paris, Texas” (1984; Wenders). What is particularly heart-breaking in the case of “The Big Red One” is that both its’ director and its’ star (Lee Marvin) would be long dead before critics and audiences discovered what the masterpiece they had made.
Legendary director Sam Fuller had almost worked with Lee Marvin once before, on the forgettable (and forgotten) 1974 film “The Klansman”. Fuller had written the screenplay and was slated to direct, when the studio suddenly got cold feet about the complexity of its’ ideas about race, and ordered a new script along the safe (and dated) lines of “Heat Of The Night” (1967; Jewison). Fuller quit in disgust, and Marvin tried to join him, but had already signed his contract. It retrospect, it was a good move on Marvin’s part to meet his contractual obligation, since he would continue to make movies, while Fuller did not get another chance to direct until “The Big Red One” six years later. As much as it might have been nice to have that earlier film been improved by Fuller’s direction, it could never have risen to the level that this movie does, could never have carved out such a vital place in the American canon.
Sam Fuller had written and directed World War Two films before this, just as Lee Marvin had acted in several, but neither would ever participate in a project as committed to telling the truth about the war both had fought in. “The Big Red One” is stripped of the grand heroism that mars most ‘classic’ war features, while rising above the sneering cynicism of Altman, Nichols or Kubrick. This film avoids both the glory and the folly of warfare, choosing instead to simply tell its’ reality. The great American essayist (and, like Marvin, a former Marine who fought in the Pacific) Gore Vidal once wrote that the feeling at the conclusion of WW II was not one of ecstatic victory, but rather of relief…that the newspaper headlines did not blare “We Won!”, like our male fantasies tell us, but rather “It’s Over”…a nation finally at the end of a long, dark journey it had no choice but to make. The four young soldiers in this movie (under the command of Marvin’s sergeant) don’t concern themselves with the “why” of their actions-they even admit that they barely even remember the “before” of their lives prior to the war. They wander through the nightmare of a ravaged continent, reduced to the acting and reacting that war requires. There are moments in this film that loan themselves to interpretation as “strange” or “surreal”… but are they really? The scene where they infiltrate an insane asylum seems bizarre, but later, after they’ve entered a concentration camp, the madness of the mental patients seems quaint. It is there that the formerly pacifistic Private Griff (a surprisingly good Mark Hamill) momentarily loses his sanity. Searching through the crematoria, he finds a German soldier hiding among the charred remains. The German’s gun malfunctions, and Griff shoots him…over and over again. Slowly, methodically, Griff pulls back the bolt on his rifle and fires another round into the (now dead) German. Hearing the steady rhythm of the rifle being fired and reloaded, the Sergeant investigates. He watches for a minute while his soldier continues bullet after bullet into the pulpy corpse. Griff had been “our” voice in the movie- the only one questioning the morality of killing and war…but now the horror has come home and he continues to fire until he runs out of ammunition. We expect his Sergeant to now move in, offering reassuring words to draw him back into sanity. Instead, he hands Griff another clip of bullets, then walks away. Sam Fuller’s war is a strange and interesting place, where the personal and moral priorities of those involved on all sides may not line up with what we expect (or want) them to. The soldiers can be fairly blasé about their fallen comrades, while angered by the difficulty of finding a prostitute who will fulfill the final wish of one of the dead soldiers (to hold her large, bare bottom against a cold window until it freezes). This isn’t the story Hollywood wanted to tell (the film would be horribly butchered before its’ release, with an added narration Fuller had not intended or liked). And sadly, it was the kind of story Americans didn’t want to be told.
At the same time, Hollywood studios were destroying the Weimar Republic that was ‘70s film, a former b-picture star was rising from the Right, declaring it the ominous-sounding “Morning In America”. Ronald Reagan, who spent the war fighting the good fight on studio soundstages, didn’t offer room in his new mythology for anything as unpleasant as doubt or honesty. Like all chicken-hawks, Reagan spoke passionately about the nobility of war, the eternal bravery of our fighting men in their sacrifice to our Blessed City On A Hill. This reverence for war (war ideally fought by others) cannot stomach any mention of brutality or wasted lives, or certainly questions about the validity of the cause. This Hero exists in a vacuum (and when played by Reagan, wearing a tailored uniform from the costume department), a vacuum defined and limited by the morality of a black and white universe. Hollywood was only too eager to adapt its’ product to match this moral absolutism, reducing all the stories it told to struggle (and inevitable victory) of superheroes over purely evil villains. Much has been made about the censorious Hayes office, and how its’ Production Code had crippled American cinema for decades. But much worse than its’ restriction of sexuality or violence, was the Production Code’s demand of cinematic justice; that all villains (or even just immoral characters) suffer their due fate by the end of the film. This restriction meant that, no matter what happens, and no matter how little it reflects real life, evil will always, always be defeated in the end by good. At the onset of the 1980s, Hollywood willingly chose to reshackle itself with this preposterous limitation, while still enjoying the post-Code freedom of foul language, swearing and tit shots. Remember, at the end of the first “Rocky” film (1976) he loses the fight, but wins the battle, since the victory is in the trying. In the subsequent four sequels, however, the only victory possible for the hero is complete and total annihilation of his opponent-an opponent who would become a greater caricature of evil with each successive movie.
Once Hollywood had developed their new formula for making and marketing movies, a major problem quickly arose; since they were primarily making movies for children and adolescents (or adults with children’s minds), the old action stars simply would not do. Conveniently, death stepped in and helped clear the deck of a lot of the old leading men: in the matter of only a few years, many of the best of the old leading men would die. Steve McQueen, Warren Oates, William Holden, John Wayne, Robert Shaw, Burt Lancaster, Gig Young, John Cassevettes, Robert Ryan, Lee Van Cleef, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens and Henry Fonda would all die in a matter of a couple of years. Others didn’t die, but nor did they survive. Glenn Ford, Marlon Brando, Ben Johnson, Jason Robards, Paul Newman, James Colburn, Clu Gulager, Rod Stieger and Jack Warden opted for varying degrees of retirement, only appearing in films occasionally, and in small parts. Only James Colburn would eventually return to full time acting, enjoying a renewed popularity the final ten years of his life. Still others, because of mismanagement of money or because they simply couldn’t accept their obsolescence, continued working, in increasingly wretched parts. It’s heartbreaking to look at a chronological list of Charles Bronson’s or Telly Savalas’ work, and mutely witness the squandering of so much talent. There was a time once, I swear, when Ernest Borgnine wasn’t the shameless, over-acting hack that most viewers now remember him as. Aside from Clint Eastwood, who flourished during the 1980s, the only other Hollywood tough guy to survive the decade was Harry Dean Stanton- who became such a favorite actor of cult directors that some of his finest work sprung out of the barren soil of the 1980s.

better days

So who did Hollywood replace the old tough guy actors with? Because they were now blatantly marketing movies to children (easier tie-in with breakfast cereal, toys and fast food restaurants), producers chose heroes that best fit the fantasies of young boys. As such, the screen hero of the 1980s is either a blank, indestructible killing machine like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris or their endless army of clones (Jean-Claude Van Damme, Stephan Segal and Dolph Lundgren, to name a few). There’s a disturbing similarity between the expressionless face Stallone wears in the “Rambo” pictures, or Schwarzenegger maintains in the “Terminator” series, and the masked, silent butchers in the “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” movies. The appeal of these stars, aside from their complete interchangeability, is that both the studio and viewer knows full well that they can barely speak,-let alone act- so there’s never the least threat of the performer wanting to branch out and experiment with roles more demanding than looking serious while the death toll mounts. The other type of male hero that blossomed out of this era, perhaps even more repellent that the Automaton Killer just mentioned, was the Arrested Adolescent in a Man’s Body. This type, while killing just freely and remorselessly as the other, isn’t a deadened slab of meat, but rather a hyperactive, preening child that jokes and mugs for the camera during the slaughter. Although reaching its’ zenith in the profound character studies Bruce Willis brought to the “Die Hard” movies, there are others subscribers to this screen style, all equally repellent. The appeal of Mel Gibson’s frantic arm-waving, eye-rolling screen persona always eluded me, until his recent arrest revealed that he is actually a master of autobiographical acting (“sugar-tits!!!”). His complete failure at understatement is particularly evident in the “Lethal Weapon” movies (note how many of these are plural- the sequel a sure sign of a movie aimed at the television-trained audience); it’s like watching a fourteen year-old act out his most perversely violent fantasies. Tom Cruise relies on this same childlike mania, augmented by his matching tiny magical sprite body. The performances these over-grown men bring to the screen are not heroic, they’re not even human…they’re live-action cartoons with a high kill ratio- Woody Woodpecker with a gun.
The studios did not want to offer, nor did the public wish to receive, images of everyday men fighting for survival. There was to be nothing ‘normal’, nothing human in the presentation of manhood. Gone were the world-weary faces of tough guys who smoked and drank too much. Instead, the screen would become the perverse mirror for vain, pretty men to admire their own beauty. As a people grow to hate themselves, they elevate the unobtainable to god-like status, morbidly wallowing in cheap fantasies offered by the ideal physique of a Stallone or Swayze. In this warpped ideology, where what makes a hero a hero (and ergo a man) is his cheek bones or pectorals, where manhood is measured by beauty and not accomplishment, the passive viewer (who is presumably not nearly as attractive as the slab of meat being showcased up on the screen) does not need to feel any regret or shame for their own weakness and failings. All that's expected of us is to sit back and enjoy the homoerotic ride. If the goal of the State and the Boss is to reduce us to helpless children, they could not find a better tool to convince us of our inadequacies than the motion picture heroes of the last quarter century.

There was no room for Lee Marvin in this new world of violent children’s movies, and so he died. It would take seven years for his body to join him- it was occupied with being dragged through five more films, all of them atrocious. It’s depressing to watch his corpse be dragged across the screen for the television sequel to “Dirty Dozen”, or it’s final violation, being used as a prop in a piece of Chuck Norris trash called “Delta Force”. But I have to remember, that’s not Lee Marvin, looking tired and regretful, interacting with his wig-wearing costar, it’s only his earthly remains. The real Lee Marvin died at the completion of “The Big Red One”, a movie that validated and legitimized his career.
At that movie’s end, the company having liberated the death camp, Lee Marvin finds a weak and dying young boy. He tries to feed the child, but he is too far gone to even chew. The Sergeant carries him out side, where they sit under a tree by a creek. After a while, he heads back to the camp. Either because he is so weak, or because they both crave some simple human contact, Marvin hoists the child onto his shoulders, carrying him around the compound. It is with this image that I choose to end the life and career of Lee Marvin.
the end

rest in peace, lee marvin

come back, lee marvin...we miss you (pt 4)

in peak form

(WARNING: If you've not seen the movie "Prime Cut", but intend to, this article discusses it in a manner that reveals major plot points. Also, many of the text links lead to nude photographs. Proceed with caution.)

The one 70s film that does rise to Marvin’s level, that does offer a strange and wonderful venue to match his unique persona. As a lover of odd, unexpected gems, even I had trouble believing what was on screen the first time I saw “Prime Cut” (1972; Michael Ritchie). In a nut shell: the Kansas City syndicate is in a power struggle with the Chicago mob, refusing to pay an outstanding debt. When a bagman is sent down there to demand moneys owed, evil crime-boss Mary Ann (Gene Hackman) has him killed, then ground into sausages…a particularly sacrilegious act, when considering the reverence with which Chicagoans hold hot dogs and bratwurst in our choked artery hearts. The Chicago mob hires semi-retired muscle Nick Devlin (Marvin), and he and a crew of young Irish thugs pile into a big black Lincoln and drive out into corn country. Once there, Nick quickly tracks down Mary Ann at a cattle auction. But the livestock pens do not contain animals, but nude teenage girls, passively (they’re drugged) allowing the potential shoppers to examine the merchandise. Mary Ann calmly explains to Nick that he doesn’t need to repay the debt, because “Chicago is dead” (this was, not coincidentally, just a few years after the closing of the infamous Stockyards, removing Chicago’s reign as “hog butcher to the world). Nick is so disgusted by what he sees (while still avoiding a confrontation with the Kansas hoods) that he grabs one of the girls and steals her (Sissy Spacek, in her screen debut).

Back at their hotel, the girl, Poppy, comes out of her drug stupor and excitedly tears into the packages of clothing Nick has bought her. Once dressed (in a see-through evening gown), she tells her sad story; an orphan, she was raised in a foster home that is in reality a training farm for young girls to be prepared for a future of white slavery. All Poppy wants now that she is free is to be reunited with her one friend and fellow pen-mate, Violet (presumably, all the girls had their original identities stolen, rechristened with flower names, to conjure simultaneously a sense of purity and the image of the opening vagina). Nick takes her to a fancy restaurant, where, when he’s not staring down any patrons eyeing the exposure of Poppy’s breasts afforded by the dress he purchased, he starts to fall for the awkward, naïve girl-child. Later, he brings her along on a second attempt to shake down Mary Ann, who’s a judge at the county fair. Once there, Nick and his men discover that the Kansas City crime-boss’ control over the local population is complete, that they are equally in danger with the hayseed public as they are with the professional hoods. It’s also there that Nick discovers his former wife, the grotesque Clarabelle, is now married to Mary Ann, playing hostess to visiting dignitaries (or whatever you call an honored guest of a Kansas county fair).
Once Mary Ann gives the signal, his henchmen and the locals turn on Nick, giving chase. One of Nick’s young goons, O’Brien (who had earlier forced Nick to meet his proud family before he would leave Chicago) is gunned down, and the others flee. A morbidly obese farmer chases Nick and Poppy with his thresher, until the remaining members of the Chicago crew arrive and stop him by sacrificing the limousine to the thresher’s blades. Later on, while Nick is visiting his former wife, the Kansas City mob hits their hotel room, killing another of the Irish boys and kidnapping Poppy. Nick goes to the flophouse where Mary Ann’s retarded, sadist brother Weenie lives, hoping to get some information. Instead, he finds Poppy’s friend Violet, semi-nude and trembling in a corner, surrounded by a mob of drunk and lecherous bums. Earlier, she had been Weenie’s personal plaything, forced to wear a red dress and dance with him in his brother’s greenhouse. But Weenie has grown bored with her (perhaps because his attention is now focused on Poppy), and he’s sold her to the flophouse bums, five cents a go. In what might be the most deliciously tasteless moment in a Hollywood movie since Erich Von Stroheim was driven out, Nick forcefully pulls Violet’s clenched fist from her chest, and about six dollars in nickels falls to the floor.
Through out the film, Shaughnessy had been offering Nick his choice of guns from the suitcase they had brought along. Each time he had passed, hoping to persuade Mary Ann with words rather than violence. But seeing poor little Violet, and her fistful of hard-earned coinage, he finally opens the case and starts preparing for the final battle (while real storm clouds and thunder appear on the horizon). Down to his last Irish boy, Shaughnessy, and trusty chauffeur Shay, Nick approaches Mary Ann’s compound, through a field of sunflowers. His two companions are quickly wounded and side-lined, Nick penetrates Mary Ann’s defenses, single-handedly bringing down the entire Kansas City mob…and freeing a menaced but still virginal Poppy. At the film’s end, Nick, Poppy, the wounded but surviving Shay and Shaughnessy and Violet (who appears to now be Shaughnessy’s girl), visit the foster-home/girl-farm. Poppy knocks out the madam who had raised them to be sex-slaves, then liberates all the (presumably flower named) young girls from the evil witch and the degradation their futures promised.

poppy blossoms

This movie is genuinely bizarre and over the top…which is why I love it so much. It boggles the mind to think that any studio would finance such a twisted, bleak vision… or that such talented stars as Marvin, Spacek and Hackman would have such a sordid affair on their resumes. On a certain level this feels like a b-movie aimed at the drive-in demographic, but it seems unlikely that the mainly rural audience that feeds on cheap thrillers would connect with a movie that seems committed to mocking them. It’s taken as a given in this movie that rural America is populated solely with ugly, ignorant sadists, contrasted with the humanism, wit and decency of the urban gangster. In the film’s opening sequence, Weenie kills and grinds up the bagman sent from Chicago. The movie then cuts to a tour of Michigan Avenue (Chicago at night is one of the most beautiful sites mankind has created), where a Dixieland band serenades the people from the back of a fire truck. Once the hoods leave the city, the scenery transforms into either the colorless wasteland of wheat fields, or the ugly squalor of Kansas City. If the inherent superiority of the city over the country isn’t understood by that point, the filmmakers make it even more clear by contrasting the cleanly dressed, wholesome Irish boys (all with proper, solid names like Delany and O’Brien) against the bare-foot slobs in overalls (with emasculated names like Mary Ann and Weenie). The significance of clothes plays an important role in “Prime Cut”: when Nick Devlin (who is also the only character with both a first and last name) first sees Poppy- she like all the imprisoned sex-slaves- is naked. He wraps her in his coat and carries her away, like a child. It is only once she’s clothed in the elegant green dress he buys her that he begins to appreciate her adult body, through the transparent fabric. At the same time, Weenie forces the naked Violet to put on a red dress before he will fondle her, that she needs to first be dressed before he can strip and rape her. Later, at the county fair, both of the women are dressed in more wholesome garb- Poppy in a virginal white gown, and Violet as a milk maid.
There’s maybe something a little perverse about this strange, little film. While he certainly is offering her a better life by freeing her from slavery, it’s still a little creepy when Nick alternates in his treatment (and dressing) of Poppy between woman and child. In real life, Marvin had a solid quarter century on Sissy Spacek, but the way she plays her part, it feels like an even greater age difference than that. Equally, it’s obvious from the first time Shaughnessy sees Violet at the fair that he’s smitten, and while it’s certainly noble that he ends up with her despite all that she’s been through, I can’t help but wonder if her helplessness isn’t the motivation to his attraction. Until they’re seen embracing each other at the film’s close, the two never meet other than when she is either doped into near catatonia or just after a night of being gang-raped by drunken derelicts. And what of all the little girls set free by Poppy? After the evil foster mother falls to the ground unconscious, the captive little girls break free from the house, no longer facing the certain future degradation as sex-slaves. And while it’s a relief to see the thirteen and fourteen year-old orphans running away from their state of bondage, the movie doesn’t bother to ask where exactly this pack of defenseless little girls is going. Content that they can fend for themselves, the surviving gangsters, with the addition of Poppy and Violet, get in their car and drive off, presumably heading back to the safety and civilization of Chicago. One can only hope these children find themselves their own middle-aged, Irish gangsters to protect them and dress them up in pretty (or sexy) outfits. to be concluded...

nick and shaughnessy earn their flowers

come back, lee marvin...we miss you (pt 3)

looking cool as ever...

During the period between the middle of the 1960s through the late 70s, American filmmakers found a voice they had never imagined possible. The old Hollywood studios had collapsed, taking with them the censorship of the Production Code, and producers, conceding that the “Big Movie” colossus was an extinct dinosaur whose corpse was stinking up the box-office (“Ryan’s Daughter”, “Hello Dolly”, “The Adventurers” anyone?), and realizing that no matter how much they tried, they could not turn back the hands of the clock and force the public to passively accept the kind of mediocre pap they had swallowed for decades, they handed the studio keys over to the directors; in effect, allowing the inmates the run of the asylum. Looking back, it boggles the mind to think that major studios released movies like “Seconds” (1965;Frankenheimer), “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?” (1969;Pollack) and “Johnny Got His Gun” (1971-written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, who had less than twenty years earlier been imprisoned and blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten). For one brief moment in time, American cinema would rise above the conformity and conservatism that had crippled it for decades, and produce interesting movies that would demand something dangerous from American audiences: adulthood. But scanning through this veritable renaissance of American filmmaking, the question lingers- where was Lee Marvin?
Much has been made about the new actors whose stars rose during this period (and then faded at its’ end), and certainly their more naturalistic, sensitive performances greatly defined the current style. Exceptionally talented young actors like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Robert De Niro and Bruce Dern (and the less talented but even more successful Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal and Robert Redford) were the official faces of this new Hollywood, they were not the only actors reaping the creative harvest of a (comparatively) free motion picture industry. During the Free Hollywood period, actors who had toiled in character parts or seen their careers stall suddenly came into their own, enjoying the best work of their lives. Actors like William Holden, Robert Duvall, James Colburn, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates suddenly found an opportunity in these new movies to explore a depth of character their earlier roles could never have provided. Even Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood, while relative stars already, only really blossomed as serious actors once the movies had matured beyond simply exploiting their prettiness. It would be, for most of these actors named, a decade of their most important, accomplished work.
Which is not to say there weren’t some pretty serious casualties, older actors who simply could not find a place amongst these new and interesting films. Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef and Jack Palance would wallow miserably in the b-movie purgatory- Bronson in particular seems to have been engaged in a shame spiral of increasingly dreadful vehicles. More tragically, some formerly established stars just couldn’t find the right role to make the transition; who remembers (or cares to remember) the post golden age work of such great actors as Rod Steiger, Jack Warden or Glenn Ford? But this list didn’t have to include Lee Marvin: buried amongst the forgotten dross he starred in through out his final two decades are a few exceptional films, not enough to satisfy, but just enough to tease us with what might have been.

In 1968 Marvin reunited with John Boorman, to film the brilliant “Hell In The Pacific”. Even though the lousy title (suggesting an eastern front version of the 1962 classic “Hell Is For Heroes”) promises yet another of the tedious WW II movies Hollywood was still inflicting on the public; it wasn’t. There are no heroic scenes of battle, no great or noble deeds, just Lee Marvin stranded on an island with Japanese superstar Toshiro Mifune. It’s a strange form of therapy, watching these two interact; both were real-life WW II veterans (obviously, on opposing sides), and both, at their best, were the great scene stealing hams of their respective nation’s cinemas. Wisely, Boorman risks the alienation of the audience by having neither (unnamed) character speak a word of the other’s language; the standard in Hollywood movies would be to have one of them prove to be such a linguistic genius that he almost instantly develops a command of the other’s tongue (the tongue mastered, of course, being english). Aside from any greater sense of realism their failure to communicate may provide, more importantly, it has the benefit of giving the actors the opportunity to engage in the manic flailing both were the undisputed masters of. At one point, Marvin having bested Mifune and now being the captor, he tries to teach his bound prisoner how to play fetch. Marvin throws the stick, then runs and picks it up in his mouth, hoping to show Mifune the (humiliating) game he wants to play. Mifune just silently watches, rolling his eyes and mumbling about how insane the American is every time Marvin runs to the shore to retrieve the stick. Regrettably, the one thing that could have made this ham jamboree complete didn’t occur to the filmmakers; including the sinking of a German ship, washing ashore the sole survivor, Klaus Kinski. But even with this holy triptych of the masculine screen left unrealized, “Hell In The Pacific” still manages to be a sad, beautiful little film. Side note-if you watch it on DVD, not only can you choose to add subtitles to Mifune (in the theatrical version, there were none), but you can also watch the original, far superior ending. In one of the few instances of Hollywood trying to impose a downer ending, the producers deleted the final scene of the two on them, now dressed in the uniforms of their respective countries, eyeing each other as enemies then parting. In the theatrical version, a sudden and abrupt explosion is superimposed over a frozen exterior shot – a lame, desperate attempt to attract a more youthful (and anti-war) audience.

battling the evil that is Borgnine

“Fuck scripts. You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this fucking business, and the next forty years trying to get out.”
Lee Marvin, from his infamous 1970 Esquire interview

Marvin chose to follow-up the poetic beauty of “Hell In the Pacific” by costarring (with Clint Eastwood) in the three hour musical/western/comedy “Paint Your Wagon” (1969; Logan)- a choice that suggests the above quote may not have been made in jest. Listening to these two whisper/speak their way through songs like “Wand’rin Star” and “I Talk To The Trees” one can’t help but wonder who it was that thought there is an audience for this, that America was ready for singing and dancing cowboys? Reading the IMDb synopsis, I also can’t help but ask- considering how unenjoyable Lee Marvin’s bored mumbling and Clint Eastwood’s barely audible whispering is, just how bad a singer must poor Jean Seberg have been that they would have to dub her?
It’s difficult to pass judgement on Marvin’s later work, mainly because so little of it is available. Maybe the intriguingly titled “The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday” (1976;Taylor) is an undiscovered classic (it does offer the only on screen pairing of Marvin and fellow alcoholic scene-stealer Oliver Reed); but until it’s released on DVD, it will remain undiscovered for those of us too young to have seen its’ theatrical run. Equally, I wouldn’t expect much from a movie called “Avalanche Express” (1979; Robson), but who knows? No one, at least until its’ reentered into general circulation.
What I do know is that, as uneven as his surviving 70s work may be, the unevenness is in the material, not Lee Marvin’s performances. For instance, “Emperor Of The North Pole” (1973; Aldrich) and “The Klansman” (1974; Young) were both built around ideas already dated by the mid-70s- both feel like movies that would have been far more important if they had been released ten years earlier. In “Emperor Of The North Pole”, A No. 1 (Marvin) is a veteran hobo, who reluctantly takes an obnoxious protégé (Keith Carradine) under his wing, and along for a ride on the forbidden train of evil conductor Shack (played with surprising fury by Ernest Borgnine). While the film was beautifully shot, and ends with an exciting fight sequence (on the moving train), the movie doesn’t bother to address why it is so important that the two hobos successfully bum a ride on this specific train- why the death of one person and the hideous disfigurement of an other is a reasonable price to pay just to earn the title “king of the road”. Perhaps if the original director slated for this project, Sam Peckinpah, had made the film, he probably would have developed the idea that A No. 1 and Shack are interchangeable, that they are both equally imprisoned by a type of egotistical masculinity that would rather face death than admit defeat. Under Peckinpah, the film might have even played with the generational difference between Marvin and Carradine – Marvin represents the modest, careful expertise of the WW II work ethic (even though a hobo, A No. 1 puts a considerable amount of work into the bumming of rides), whereas Carradine’s character Cigarette is a self-centered braggart who habitually lies through out the film to make himself seem more impressive than he is, and has the inflated sense of entitlement and disinterest in tradition and respect that largely defines the Baby Boomer generation. But Sam Peckinpah was lost in the booze and coke haze that would be his ultimate destruction, so in less subtle hands of Robert Aldrich, “Emperor Of The North Pole” never rises above the Hollywood simplicity of good versus evil, Villain ultimately defeated by Hero. The brilliant performances and beautiful cinematography deserved better than this. to be continued...




good lord!

come back, lee marvin...we miss you (pt 2)

It’s not that Lee Marvin didn’t appear in some incredible projects prior to “Point Blank” (1967, dir. John Boorman), nor that all of his subsequent films were that inferior in comparison; it’s just that this one movie is a work of such perfectly realized synthesis of story, performance and production that should it be the work by either Marvin or Boorman that survives one hundred years from now, both of them will still be assured a place in the film canon. When considered in the context of his career arch, this is an odd movie for Marvin to have chosen at that particular time: the phenomenal success of the just released “The Dirty Dozen” offered him a very comfortable career path, making the kind of over-blown epics that Hollywood was still desperately trying to convince the American public mattered. But while Lee Marvin could have easily slid into the kind of roles a now rapidly aging John Wayne could no longer play, he instead chose this strange little project about a -possibly dead- loner fixated on retrieving the ninety-three thousand dollars stolen from him. Because he proved to be reticent about his acting in interviews (usually dismissing the whole business with a few gruff barks about money and dames), we’ll never know for sure why he chose this movie; did he sense the direction motion pictures were heading, that the big, CinemaScope colossus was a doomed creature, a dinosaur of old Hollywood already extinct (at least until it would be resurrected ten years later as the special effects spectacle)? Or was Lee Marvin revealing an interest in his craft, and an instinct about seeking out quality work, well beyond what we give him credit for? He’s usually categorized amongst those actors who, while stumbling on good roles now and then, typically accepted roles based solely on immediate (monetary) gains. While this could sadly be said of his last films, the choice of “Point Blank” as follow-up to “The Dirty Dozen” was a bold move, one that could have easily turned out to be a damaging one.
A lot of the reason this was such a bold move on Lee Marvin’s part, was the director. Whereas “The Dirty Dozen” was directed by the legendary –if sometimes hackish- veteran Robert Aldrich, whose body of work included such essential movies as “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?”(1962) and “Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte(1964), “Point Blank” would be directed by an untested English newcomer. While he would go on to give us such brilliant (if perhaps slightly goofy) movies as “Deliverance” (1972), “Zardoz” (1974) and “Excaliber” (1981), the only major motion picture John Boorman had directed at that point was “Catch Us If You Can” (1965)- a vehicle built around those forgettable (and forgotten) scalawags of Mersey Beat, the Dave Clark Five. But there was something about the young (he was thirty at the time) man that was appealing, and Marvin agreed to work with him. What Lee Marvin didn’t find appealing though, was the original script. Told countless times over the years, Boorman has recounted how Marvin, growling “this is shit” threw the original draft out the hotel window, into the rainy London night. Interestingly, that first version, that both the star and director thought lacked the energy and originality the project demanded, would survive on a shelf somewhere, waiting for its’ chance to bring cinematic banality to the screen. More than thirty years later, when part-time actor/director and full-time alcoholic/anti-semite Mel Gibson would be searching for another project best suited to inflict his unique brand of bland charisma on the viewing public, he would find that original (rejected) script, and shoot it under the name of “Payback”. According to a highly amused Boorman, that more recent production, though devoutly loyal to the first script (except for the timely addition of shits and fucks to the dialogue), proves that what is hackneyed and flat in 1967, isn’t going to get any better with age.
While it is ostensively a revenge story (and the marketing packaged it as such), the film actually subverts that expectation. Much has been written about the possibility that Lee Marvin’s character Walker dies from the gun shots received by his betraying partner and wife in the film’s opening, and that everything that occurs after is either the revenge fantasy of a dying man, or that he’s actually returned from the grave to haunt those who turned on him. As he swims from Alcatraz, his body riddled with bullets, Walker’s voice-over asks, “Did it happen? A Dream? A Dream.” The film then cuts (with no explaination) to the tour boat, where he meets Yost (Keenan Wynn), while over their conversation, the tour guide tells the story of all the failed escape attempts made from the prison. There are other examples, too many to recount here. Aside from ‘blowing our minds’, what’s exciting about the possibility that Walker is actually dead is that it’s never explicitly stated, addressed or resolved. Too many filmmakers today credit their audience with too little intelligence, so that someone like a M. Night Shyamalan or a movie like “Hostel” waste the final reel carefully explaining to the viewer exactly what we’ve been watching and what it all means. There was a time, all but forgotten, when filmmakers expected their audience to pay attention and participate in the movie experience, that we were capable of understanding complex, intelligent ideas buried beneath the surface of a story. The insult implicit in movies like “The Village”, “Eyes Wide Shut” and “War Of The Worlds” is that we are such dull-witted, easily distracted children that we are incapable of understanding anything more subtle than a large, neon arrow guiding us to the point.


While I’ve come across a lot of writing theorizing about Walker imagining the whole thing as he bleeds out on the cell floor, what I haven’t found is anyone who suggests that if he is, it’s not a peaceful or happy fantasy he’s having. Regardless of what the posters and trailer promise, this is not a Lee Marvin kicks ass movie (the original tagline: “There are two kinds of people in his up-tight world: his victims and his women. And sometimes you can't tell them apart”). Not only does he fail to ever lay hands on the ninety-three thousand he’s fixated on, Walker never even gets the satisfaction of revenge. Despite the fact that the image of him holding a gun dominates this movie, Walker only fires it once, emptying it into his soiled and empty marital bed. At every turn, Walker is robbed of his chance of revenge: his adulterous wife kills herself, taking an overdose of pills on the same mattress he had earlier unloaded his (impotent?) rage into. Mel Reese (played with brilliant loathsomeness by John Veron), the former partner who not only betrayed him and left him for dead, but also stole his wife, falls to his death just as Walker’s elaborate plan to capture him succeeds. At each step up the Organization’s ladder, Walker is beaten. Carter kills Big John, and is then killed himself by Brewster’s hitman. At the film’s climax (back at Alcatraz), Brewster is then dispatched by Fairfax, who turns out to have been Walker’s guide throughout the film, Yost. This, the movie where Lee Marvin is at his masculine peak, is, in reality, his most emasculated role. Walker is a tough guy, certainly, one of the most rugged tough guys in film history. He’s so tough he barely speaks, and when he does, it’s limited to either the demanding of his money, or bluntly informing them that he will kill them if they fail to pay up. He never asks his wife or Mel why they betrayed him, is so stoic it’s hard to tell if he even cares anymore. In one of Boorman’s more inspired choices, he has the wife both ask and answer the questions Walker should be asking, instead of just staring silently at the floor. He doesn’t speak at all during the entire scene at her house, until after she’s dead and he threatens Big John’s courier-people only exist for Walker when they posses information pertaining to his money. Walker is both the ultimate idealization of manhood, and that very same manhood rendered impotent. If, as many theorize, the movie is Walker’s dying fantasy, then it is a fantasy built out of helplessness and castration-anxiety. If, as others have suggested, Walker is already dead, then his travels are the travels of a damned soul, suffering the torture of a customized hell.
For those of us who have experienced the cinematic sludge that the ‘thriller’ has been reduced to over the last quarter century, it’s always a jolt to be reminded that the visual tone of a film used to be more than establishment shots and close-ups used for (cheap) emotional triggers. The craftsmanship of “Point Blank”, both in its’ look and its’ use of sound, is impressive, especially for an inexperienced director. Each stage of Walker’s journey has its’ own signature color (his wife’s house is in all grays, Carter’s office in green, Reese’s penthouse reds, Brewster’s orange). The Movie House, the club owned by Chris (Angie Dickinson), provided probably the movie’s most cinematic moment, when Walker is fighting two of Big John’s thugs behind the movie screen (so that the projected image is reversed), while the performing soul singer screams louder and louder (for a bizarrely stiff and formal audience of middle-aged white men). Even something as potentially mundane as Walker arriving from the airport is treated with significance, the steady, determined stomp of Marvin’s over-sized feet keeping tempo on the soundtrack for just a minute of screen time. This could easily bore or alienate the audience (listening to a man walk), but very, very slowly, Boorman turns up the volume and reduces the echo, building the anticipation. The beat of Walker walking (hey!) stops, not when he leaves the airport, but when he suddenly bursts through his wife’s door, pinning her to the floor and assuming a defensive position with his gun drawn.







It is hard to say this movie is the best performance Lee Marvin ever gave: there certainly are others that he instilled with a far richer humanity and realism. But it is the performance in “Point Blank” that Lee Marvin is his most…Lee Marvin like. Whereas he defined characters like Chino and Meatball with an almost psychotic level of energy, he so understates Walker, so successfully hides from us what his character is thinking, that we are left with one of the screen’s great enigmas. Walker is constantly fighting exhaustion; during his wife’s monologue and then later as Brewster explains to him how the Organization works, Walker is collapsed on a couch, obviously struggling against the desire to lay down and sleep. Having broken into Brewster’s home, Walker and Chris get into an argument, until she finally snaps, pounding on him with all her strength. Rather than fight back, or even defend himself, Walker just stands there mutely, barely noticing as she continues to hit him until she wears herself out. He then calmly walks over to the couch, where he sits down and resumes drinking his beer. This particular point, that Walker is exerting all of his energy just to stay awake, is effectively counter-pointed in the film’s two flashback scenes, first at the beginning, when he meets Reese at the class reunion, then later during the wife’s monologue, when we watch their courtship acted out. In both of these flashbacks we see a vibrant, playful Walker interacting with two people he loves. Both of those loves turned to ash by betrayal, the Walker we watch during the ‘present’ of the movie is an empty shell, a corpse brought back to life to accomplish its’ one goal (which, again, it fails to do).
I appreciate that the use of labels like “genius” or “masterpiece” are dangerous, especially when talking about a genre work like this. Amongst many of the people who comprise the serious film world, the laurels of such lofty titles are limited to angst-riddled explorations of existential malaise and identity crisis, ideally shot with a stationary camera and ideally by a northern European. But I have no such qualms about giving this film its’ due; “Point Blank” is an exceptional example of American filmmaking, a thriller that both defines and subverts the limits of its’ own genre. An integral part of American film is succeeding at functioning on multiple levels, movies that can feed the gut, mind and soul in one passing. This is why the best westerns of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah are infinitely more than ‘mere’ westerns, why the crime films of Coppola, Scorsese, Siegel and Kubrick are so much more than crime films. Even an over-looked genre like horror can achieve so much more when handled by a Romero, Whale, Cronenberg or even a Roger Corman (when he tries). I offer no apologies, no qualifiers; “Point Blank” is a masterpiece.
For Lee Marvin, career-defining masterpiece under his belt, the next twenty years (with several note-worthy exceptions) would be a steady and consistent decline into hack-work and irrelevance. to be continued...

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