Brains Vs Bronco

“I’ve got a strong back and a weak mind,” says Robert Mitchum near the start of Nick Ray’s THE LUSTY MEN. Later, asked “You a thinking man?” he replies “I can get out of the rain, that’s about it,” thereby establishing his smarts — listeners who focus on what he says rather than how he says it will derive a different impression, but we know.

Rumours of the film’s scriptlessness appear to be exaggerated (see Bernard Eisenschitz’s excellent Ray bio for backstory) but they did start with an unfinished scenario and Mitchum did contribute dialogue of his own. I’d love to think these lines are his.

Elsewhere, Arthur Hunnicutt in the Walter Brennan part gets all the funny lines. Despite her dislike of westerns and her deep suspicion of this “rodeo film,” our friend Nicola really enjoyed him.

The objection she raised to the greater part of the film had to do with the romantic triangle between Robert Mitchum, Susan Hayward and Arthur Kennedy, which seems at first unfairly weighted — overwhelmingly so — in favour of Mitchum. But Kennedy is married to Wayward Hayward, so the Hays Code determines that Mitch must be relegate to the role of Romantic Rival Who Tests and Ultimately Strengthens the Bonds of Marriage. Which is fine in narrative terms, but not something we actually root for because Mitch is lovable, melancholic and mucho manly, and Kennedy is basically a weasel — good actor, and he applies all of his weaselly equipment to the role, having a particularly good time with the stuff where his character, drunk on his success as rodeo star (and also drunk on drink) behaves like an asshole.

He also has an appalling jacket, the broadest checks I’ve ever seen on a living human being. It’s like he was standing by the window when they dropped the atom bomb.

So the film’s happy ending isn’t really happy, and indeed it’s played for all the lack of conviction you could ever wish for, in the time-honoured fashion of Hollywood endings disliked by the director. But the scene before that works as tragedy — all that matters is the story of Mitchum the broken-down bronco buster, in love with a woman he can’t have, destroying himself over it, perhaps without even properly realizing why. His last scene is like the Beast’s farewell in Cocteau.

When Charlton Heston was contemplating doing 55 DAYS AT PEKING for Ray, he asked a buddy who had previous experience of the director.

“Good director. Good with actors. Good with the camera. But Chuck, I’ve played poker with him. And Chuck, he’s a loser.”

I always disliked the American concept of “loser” — which doesn’t really exist so much elsewhere in the world — which presupposes a character type, the person who will lose, as if it were a choice or an attribute rather than a combination of such things with the workings of chance (was Rockefeller a winner? He’s dead, isn’t he, and I’m alive, typing this in my Homer Simpson shorts). But in the case of Ray and various of his characters, losing is a choice, taken more or less consciously, by someone who rejects the terms of the contest or who wishes to be punished and thus redeemed.

Sleepwalkies

I confess to being underwhelmed by Hannibal (TV version) despite hearing rave reports. One Facebook admirer diagnosed the show’s problem as “the FBI is stupid and everyone’s a serial killer,” which is about right. The FBI part is a bigger problem. I’m at episode 11. There’s a character who was missing for several years, presumed dead. Then that character’s severed arm turns up (it’s that kind of show). Nobody is surprised that the arm is apparently still fresh, nobody thinks to check if it has been frozen, nobody speculates that the arm’s owner might still be alive. I’m betting that the arm’s owner is still alive, but I’ll be annoyed either way.

But apart from shoddy thinking — a show about an FBI agent who can think like a serial killer, whose writers can’t even think like an FBI agent — the show’s problems are hard to diagnose. Fiona complains of a lack of humour, and while it’s true that for a series with one of The Kids in the Hall playing a pathologist and Eddie Izzard as a murderer, it isn’t very funny,but  there are dashes here and there. It obviously owes a debt to The X Files, which borrowed the typed-on place name subtitles from SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (and Hannibal borrows Gillian Anderson), but X Files, even outside of the remarkable episodes written by Darin Morgan, had a streak of dry wit just below the surface.

Hugh Dancy is a more vulnerable Will Graham that William Petersen was in MANHUNTER, despite not being tiny and wee with bandy legs. Mads Mikkelsen is a very good Lecter — while Brian Cox played it casual, which was very effective (he spoke of Michael Mann cutting different takes together so that the character’s intensity fluctuated in an unpredictable way), Mikkelsen underplays to the point of coma, his stillness adding creep factor — if the show could afford to slow down, he would really register.

Despite the oceans of gore, we’re not scared — we’re tired of serial killers and their art installations. When they graduated from making corpses into angels with their flayed backs spread out as wings, to assembling a giant totem pole of body parts  on a deserted beach, Fiona’s reaction was hilarity, which I don’t think tells you something scary about her, though I may be biased.

Hannibal himself reminds me irrestistibly of the guy from Electric Six.

One thing that really charmed me, however, was the scene where Hugh/Will goes sleepwalking, and one of his adopted stray dogs tags along. Sleepwalkies! It’s a good idea. I liked owning a dog, but I got tired of standing in the rain waiting for it to poop. You never met charming girls and got your leashes tangled (another area in which the movies lied to me). But if you could walk them in your sleep… and if your dog was trained as a guide dog so it could keep you out of the path of traffic…

Nice that a show in which the serial killers outnumber the non-serial-killers should offer such a quaint and useful lifestyle tip.

The scariest thing on Hannibal is this silent, smiling Lilliputian throng, advertising America’s Got Talent. The latest in unobtrusive advertising.

 

Mabel Bodied

More Mabel Normand over at Mubi, as The Notebook presents this fortnight’s edition of The Forgotten.

The kid getting fresh is Gordon Griffith, the screen’s first Tarzan. Although Elmo Lincoln played the King of the Apes in 1918, little GG played his younger self, thus preceding Elmo to the role by minutes. Here, he gets some practice in with a “Me Gordon, you Mabel,” routine. From century-old Keystone knockabout THE FATAL MALLET.