Gunny

I was blown away by THE GUNFIGHTER. I missed it in Bologna a few years back, but enjoyed Henry King’s STATE FAIR and OVER THE HILL, also shown. Of the other Gregory Peck vehicles, I found TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH fairly impressive and THE BRAVADOS was going OK until Peck decided to ruin it by smiling at the end. Can’t think of another film so categorically betrayed by a single facial expression. I think Peck’s niceness worked against him, his eggy moments onscreen tend to be motivated by unwonted injections of pleasantry. There’s that disgraceful moment in GUNS OF NAVARONE where Peck and Quinn share a joke about a woman, despite hating each other over a woman…

Well, THE GUNFIGHTER is amazingly uncompromising. There’s two bits of Hollywood bullshit — the first is Peck shooting a gun out of a man’s hand (nobody can do that — something I learned as a kid from some TV movie with Stuart Whitman or somebody — he was a cop and he said “We can’t shoot the gun out of his hand, you know,” and I was like, wow. Obviously Tarantino never saw that one since he did an interview about Black Lives Matter where he seriously pondered why cops didn’t do that). The second is a dead character riding off into the sunset, one of those faux happy endings like the superimposed Flynn at the end of THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON. It’s just decoration, not really a cop-out.

Otherwise the film is pure noir. Nobody is all good but many are all bad. (I use “good” the way old Hollywood thought of it — so the women aren’t pure, but they’re morally positive.) It has a HIGH NOON hook two years before that film was made — the clock is ticking and the action is almost real time after the first couple of scenes. Peck, the fastest gun west of the Gregory Pecos, is in town to see his estranged wife. He waits in the saloon. But his fame as gunfighter makes him a target for every young punk with a pistol, there’s a vengeful father aiming at him with a rifle from across the street and three vengeful brothers riding after him. He really needs to get out of Dodge but circs keep delaying him. I hope fingernails are good for you because we’re chewing them to the quick.

Speaking of quick — Peck demonstrates his skill early on, and seals his fate, executing a young Richard Jaeckel who provokes a duel. King’s presentation of this is stunning — we see Peck at the bar, glass in hand. Jaeckel draws on him, and is shot — we never see Peck draw or fire, we just cut back to him after, gun in his free hand. He’s so fast the camera can’t see it, is the implication.

Of course this gag gets exaggerated into a great bit in BLAZING SADDLES, and Gene Wilder’s backstory in that film seems drawn from this one too.

Cinematographer Arthur C. Miller delivers a number of stunning wide shots using single-source light from windows bouncing off wooden floors or ceilings.

Peck is really good in this. Cinema’s paragon of stiffness is credible as an outlaw since the film doesn’t go into great detail about his wild past. Impossible to imagine him being like Jaeckel, ever, or like Skip Homeier, memorably repulsive as the film’s other psycho-squirt. In MAN OF THE WEST there’s some powerfully nasty talk about Gary Gooper’s criminal activities, and the result is cognitive dissonance — you can’t square Coop’s persona with the stuff he’s supposed to have done. Discretion helps GUNFIGHTER get over this hurdle.

Andre De Toth co-wrote the film — I own two books on De Toth but am unable to learn why he didn’t direct also. King steps in and does an excellent job — now I have to see JESSE JAMES. Feels like he did one great film with Peck and Ty Power apiece, then kept using them, with diminishing returns.

Millard Mitchell is outstanding as the town marshall, a former crony of Peck’s. Who’s the kid? He’s good. IMDb has a huge list of cast members, down to the smallest extra, but nothing on him.

THE GUNFIGHTER stars Atticus Finch; R.F. Simpson; Cobweb; Kitty O’Day; Sheriff Dad Longworth; Melakon / Sevrin; Big Ed Williams (uncredited); Fairy Godmother; Grandma Walton; Sheriff Kip McKinney; Eggs; Cojo; Skipper Jonas Grumby; The Dear One; Pee Wee; Kane’s father; Dr. Walter Coley; and Capt. Patrick Hendry.

After the Fox

Yes indeed, there’s some interesting stuff in Henry King’s swashbuckler, even if the drama itself isn’t always that engaging. Tyrone Power does his usual bad-boy-turns-good thing. Orson has a spectacular first scene, with some extraordinary expressions playing across his massive mug, then normalizes a bit into just a good Welles villain role. Rewriting the script on location he bolstered Everett Sloane’s role…

…with this feather.

The whole film looks beautiful, thanks to stunning Italian locations and Leon Shamroy’s cinematography, which raises my estimation of him even higher. (In THE BRAVADOS he showcases his usual Deluxe Color palette, with orange light and blue shadows, sometimes ignoring logic and light sources altogether, just routinely doing what he does, so that the imagery so stunning in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN came to seem slightly tired.)

Was Orson whispering suggestions to King? He had dominated the experienced Robert Stevens on JANE AYRE, and he still had the vestiges of Hollywood stardom to give him clout. I commend to you, at the very least, the film’s second scene (commencing 2.47).

There are low angles: when Welles mounts the podium, we view him from below, like a member of his entourage, but the reactions shots of them are taken EVEN LOWER. There’s a tracking shot running counter to the movement of Welles as he sweeps in. Those shots of the reacting listeners, at around 4.55, with the camera sweeping from one face to another in fast pans and pushy track-ins, are really extraordinary. It feels like Welles exerts more influence here than anywhere else, but it’s perhaps not PURE Welles.

The restlessness of the camera, not quite in sync with story values, driven purely by its own enthusiasm, has an early thirties vibe to me. And King hasn’t indulged in this kind of brio SINCE the early thirties. He’s back at the Fox Film Corporation, channeling the house style with youthful enthusiasm, prodded along impatiently by his Cesare Borgia…

PRINCE OF FOXES features Leonard Vole; Hank Quinlan; Pila; Pilar; Polonius: Flavia; Mr. Bernstein; and Dr. Satan.

Giovedi 27

So, yesterday, as I mentioned yesterday, I got up late and saw INDISCREET — it was a close-run thing, though. One gets used to being able to squeeze into any screening, even nabbing the last seats in the house (we haven’t been forced to stand this year, and in the current heatwave it’s doubtful we could pull it off). But there was a big crowd gathered outside the Arlecchino and it seemed all to possible that the audience for MOULIN ROUGE, the previous screening, might all stay in their seats rather than brave the solar barrage. But it was OK.

The movie was slow going at first — what seemed like an hour of expository set-up of the “After all, you’re a famous actress!” variety, a rather stodgy play opened out, rendering it stodgier. But then the plot kicks in and the laughs start coming thick and fast, and anyway, we have Cary and Ingrid to look at. Cary’s entrance is a good bit of “female gaze” filmmaking, with the camera simply feasting its eyes on him while the music soars. And we get Maurice Binder titles, too, though without the customary nude silhouettes cavorting.

We once asked the great Bond film production designer about Binder. “Maurice Binder was a very nice man, who liked, very much, to photograph naked women in silhouette,” he said.

On to THE BRAVADOS, in an incredibly pristine Cinemascope print — it started and I thought it was a DCP, and then the projectionist had to adjust the framing. A vivid blue Technicolor day-for-night sky with a silhouetted Gregory Peckory riding against it and slashed red titles superimposed.

Fantastic Mexican locations and you can see where Leone nicked some of his ideas for FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (also playing in Bologna) — Lee Van Cleef even plays a major-ish role. Peck is good early on, his natural stoicism turned into a more interesting noirish intransigence. At the end, having taken a revenge which didn’t satisfy and left him morally compromised, he visits the spiritual laundromat — a nice big Mexican church, and emerges SMILING, an appalling choice by Peck which confirms his tendency — demonstrated also in PORK CHOP HILL — to screw up endings with banal, platitudinous decisions. A well-poisoner.

We stayed in our seats — the sweltering heat was such we’d have had trouble leaving them — and saw COLLEGE, beautifully accompanied by Neil Brand on the piano, the only thing in the room capable of being upright. Fiona thought she’d never seen it before, and relished all the footage of Buster in shorts.

Then we ate and dragged our sodden carcasses to the Piazza Maggiore to see THE CIRCUS, which I don’t believe I’d ever seen from beginning to end, and certainly not in such a magnificent restoration — watch for a Blu-ray soon — in such a setting, under the stars. Timothy Brock conducted Chaplin’s score, and afterwards we all discussed our favourite bits over ice-cream. It wasn’t elevated film criticism, it was just “The monkeys!” and “The piglets!” and “The lion — and the little dog!”

A better film than I’d expected, even as a Chaplin fan — I’d been too influenced by Walter Kerr, who objected to the premise of the accidental clown. I think perhaps the true significance of the tramp’s success in the ring is that he’s only funny when his clowning HAS NARRATIVE CONTEXT.