Points of Contact (6/13/13)

Sarah / Mary

The Shepherd of the Hills (Henry Hathaway, 1941)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949)

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 Speaking of non-Ford Fordian movies (which Shepherd is most definitely; in addition to the above, Harry Carey plays Wayne's father (!), and Wayne and Ward Bond have an all-out brawl in front of everyone), I'll throw a quick plug in for another fine example that's found reason to be brought up in certain cinephile corners lately, George Marshall's Pillars of the Sky (1956). It's one of five films on the recently released TCM DVD box set Western Horizons: Universal Westerns of the 1950's, surely one of the essential home video releases of the year. I was initially attracted to the set due to the presence of George Sherman's Dawn at Socorro (1954) - I've been watching lately as much of Sherman's marvelous Universal-International output as I've been able to get my hands on and this was one of his most obscure and highly thought of from the period - but every one here is great, with maybe the biggest surprise for me being John Sturges' tough, taut, cerebral Backlash (1956), a truly incredible western. A highly recommended purchase.

Points of Contact (3/18/13)

Flaming Star (Don Siegel, 1960)

Flaming Star (Don Siegel, 1960)

Flaming Star (Don Siegel, 1960)

Flaming Star (Don Siegel, 1960)

Christina's World (Andrew Wyeth, 1948)

Saddle Tramp

It's only little more than a month into 2013, and though there's still a lot of time to go in the year it'd surprise me if I came across many films better than Hugo Fregonese's brilliant Civil War western The Raid. Released in 1954, it came a few years after what is probably Fregonese's other best known western today, the very fine Apache Drums (1951), notable for being the last film produced by Val Lewton before his untimely death. Going back one year even further to the director's previous film Saddle Tramp (1950) gives an indication, in an early sequence, of what may have caught Lewton's eye.

Joel McCrea plays the drifting title character en route to visiting an old friend who, as it turns out, has lost a wife and gained a few sons in the years since McCrea has last seen him. That night McCrea and the boys fall asleep by the lantern light while his old friend rides a horse off into a raging storm. McCrea awakens and traces the missing man's path, arriving at a slain body splayed in a ditch. Not a terribly unique premise in and of itself, but the manner in which it is filmed - as a repeated series of mysterious actions captured at a remove, with acute attention paid to the unstable atmosphere and a strong sense menace lurking just beyond the frame - is particularly oneiric for a fifties western, and is absolutely in line with the brand of suggestive horror Lewton's name is normally associated with.

For better or worse, the promises inherent in that unusually moody setup are never allowed fruition, and so develops what is basically a gentle story about a drifter suddenly saddled with responsibility in the form of abandoned children, albeit a gentle story occasionally splashed with the unusually surreal or violent touch. (One scene where the children beat a defenseless man repeatedly in the head with shovels over a lighthearted musical theme is a prime, merged example of both.) In the midst of McCrea's attempts at negotiating his freewheeling ways with his newfound position helming a family unit, peripheral characters and storylines crop up on both sides threatening to make the movie their own (conflicts over stolen cattle, the hunt for a runaway.) But, similar to The Raid, the narrative of Saddle Tramp - grounded by Fregonese's sturdy visual touch and clear-headed sense of spatial arrangement (very reminiscent of Boetticher) - is essentially a straight line movement towards an all-in commitment, rippled with ambivalence and nudged in all directions but resolutely staying on course.

Sharp ('34 - '13)

Saturated with blue-faced bedlam over the positively shocking occurrence of Rex Reed being a jackass, the daily discourse, at least if my Twitter feed is to be believed (my god those words), seemed all too content eliding over the death of writer Alan Sharp, whose small yet astonishingly high quality run of original screenplays in the early 70s produced three major wonders of the period: Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (1971), Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid (1972), and Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975). (I've yet to see the Fleischer/Huston co-directed The Last Run, but I've heard it's very good.)

I would argue that, in the latter two examples at least, his tight and intricate hand brought out the best in those great directors. Unfortunately his career in films seemed to peter out in the following decades, with only a few theatrical features (Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend and the Liam Neeson swashbuckler Rob Roy being the most notable) and a modest slew of TV movies to his name. But that exciting mini-body of work from that most exciting time in Hollywood will remain and fascinate as long as cinema remains and fascinates, and even if I'm only kidding myself to think that this post, in which I've said basically nothing, could be the teeniest of correctives to the latest Dumb Critic Quote Swarmfest, then at least that brief, immortal exchange from Night Moves at top has excuse to grab a few more seconds.