RIP David Bordwell

Above is a cut-out David Bordwell I made so we could slide him into shot in my latest-but-one video essay, on a film DB admired and wrote about, King Hu’s THE VALIANT ONES.

And here he is in situ. I dedicated the piece to him. DB’s writing on King Hu (like this piece) was an enormous help to me in finding stuff to say in the six pieces I’ve now made on the Chinese master.

When I belatedly discovered DB through his amazing blog, it was his combination of close analysis with enthusiasm and wonder for the medium that caught my eye. He would get specific about technique and position it in practical terms, as problem-solving, without forgetting to be amazed and amused. That’s quite a rare combination. I remember getting frustrated that Bazin, for instance, who was ground-breaking in the attention he paid to deep focus, expressing his dissatisfaction with STAGECOACH for the way it relied on cutting more than long takes. Which ignores the problem of filming a bunch of characters talking in a coach, a problem which necessitates a lot of cheating with space but also a lot of editing if you want to see the actors’ faces as they talk to one another. Bordwell always struck me as the kind of guy who would notice the specific problem and how it relates to the chosen solutions.

And then he’d write extensively about filmmakers who are fundamentally irreducible to problem-solving exercises, like Ozu, whose apparent minimalism is complicated by little stylistic fillips which don’t seem to be solving any noticeable problem but are unutterably charming. Bordwell is duly charmed.

I met DB a couple of times in Bologna and *I* was charmed. He was as smart and delightful as his writing, and he will be missed.

Five Came Back, Three Came Home, Two still Unaccounted For

So, we watched that film about the people whose plane crashes in the Andes and are forced to take extreme measures to survive. Yes, we watched FIVE CAME BACK.

(We also watched SOCIETY OF THE SNOW. It’s very very good.)

We didn’t actually watch THREE CAME HOME.

FIVE CAME back deposits such people as Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, John Carradine, Allen Jenkins and C. Aubrey Smith in a headhunter-infested jungle and watches them struggle to survive. Best of all is Joseph Calleia as a murderous anarchist on his way to be executed — for him, this idyll is a new lease of life.

The script is by Dalton Trumbo and Nathaniel West, FFS. (Plus Jerome Cady, Richard Carroll.) Director John Farrow noticed that this was above and beyond the usual B-movie fodder he’d been dealing with, and fought hard for quality, even after budget cuts saw the A-listers replaced with (very capable) lesser stars. He got extra foliage, was the result of his struggle. The RKO jungle backdrops are reminiscent of KING KONG’s, and it would be interesting to see if any of Mario Larrinaga’s scenic art was repurposed here. Or did he only do matte paintings?

(The model shots in this are pretty impressive, considering.)

John Carradine starts this one off underplaying beautifully, but then his hardboiled detective has to get drunk and demented and so of course JC plays it to the back rows of some imaginary theatre. A pity.

Lucy underplays throughout and is excellent. The fact that she’s coded as a sex worker and initially despised by her fellow travellers clues us in that this proto-disaster movie may be indebted to STAGECOACH, though that was released just four months earlier. I know they worked FAST in B-pictures, but is that kind of speedy influence possible? I guess STAGECOACH had a source story Carroll may have read, and that source story had a (sort-of) source story of its own, Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif. What this all means is that maybe STAGECOACH is the model group jeopardy film. Though I guess another influence here is DeMille’s jungle survival yarn FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE, a remake of his earlier MALE AND FEMALE, which would mean that J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton is the ur-text of group jeopardy movies. In a contorted sort of way.

Strong writing and performances elevate this one, and the camerawork is beautiful — the great Nicholas Musuraca shot it and Farrow delivers some of his intricate narrative camerawork, moving from character to character, relay-style, always nicely motivated by someone’s movement.

(Car pulls out and Carradine and Calleia emerge. Move with them until we discover rich elopers Wendy Barrie and Patric Knowles. They move off and lead us to elderly prof Smith and wife Elisabeth Risden. They head off likewise (everyone is embarking) which leads us to Lucy. And her move leftwards brings us all the way back to Carradine and Calleia for a characterful exchange (LB: “I don’t talk to cops.”) with Chester Morris thrown in.

The movie stands as a counter-argument, in a way, to the “genius of the system” theory — here, everything was set up to make a forgettable piece of product, and because the writing was better than it needed to be, a talented cast and crew were able to pick it up and run with it and the result was — well, still minor, but admirable. You could say that yes the system through all these hardy survivors together. But the result is what the individual talents made of it.

Cox’s Orange Pippins: Ringo Stars

Lots of spaghetti westerns on YouTube!

Above are A PISTOL FOR RINGO and THE RETURN OF RINGO, Duccio Tessari’s two RINGO movies with Giuliano Gemma and his five hundred Joan Crawford teeth as “Montgomery Wood” as Ringo. The Ringo Kid, of course, was John Wayne’s protag in STAGECOACH, and just as everybody and his nephew rushed to make Django knock-offs using the character name without permission, this can be seen as Italians claim-jumping a piece of established mental real estate, though nobody was likely to believe that these films had any official connection to Ford’s classic.

Tessari, one of Leone’s writing team on A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, apparently wasn’t interested here in using the hardboiled YOJIMBO model to upend Western movie morality, as the Sergios had done. His films tend to be nicer — even his gialli have sympathetic characters sometimes.

I just acquired The Pocket Essential Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes (not that one), who traces Tessari’s influences to Hollywood B-pictures and serials, though mercifully his cowboys do not sing (but both these movies have a lugubrious balladeer warbling saccharine over the Morricone title themes). Leone, feeling the need to shore up his intellectual credentials with some smart references, claimed he was influenced by silent cinema and neo-realism, and that the western was fundamentally European because Homer invented it. But Tessari’s second Ringo flick (which, as is the way of these things, enjoys zero continuity with the first) really IS a Civil War version of the Odyssey, or the last section of it anyway, the homecoming. (It’s the RETURN of Ringo not in the sense of his being recognizably the same character, but in the sense that this Ringo incarnation returns home after an absence.)

I do like the jokey start of the first film — check it out.