Logical Meme

Score: 4/5

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965) is director Martin Ritt’s beautifully shot, b/w adaptation of John Le Carre’s Cold War spy thriller. It features a terrific Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, a jaded, alcoholic MI6 double agent ultimately working for the British. Oskar Werner is very good as Fiedler, a zealous (almost puritanical), Jewish, communist agent working for Moscow who believes he is facilitating a genuine defection to the East by Leamas. Claire Bloom plays Nan Perry, a naive British Communist whom Leamas uses as part of his mission to ‘defect’ to the Eastern bloc, but with whom he ultimately falls in love with, against his ‘better judgment’. (Leamas is portrayed as a perpetual loner. “I have no friends,” he says at one point in the film.)

Le Carre’s novels often have clever symbolism within prosaic dialogue or events. There is some interesting and mainly indirect commentary on Jewish radicalism within this film. For instance, Wikipedia notes:

“One exception [from the novel] is that the name of the principal female character in the novel, Liz Gold, is changed to Nan Perry in the film, reputedly because the producers were worried about the potential confusion in the media with Burton’s then wife, Elizabeth Taylor.”

Given that the Liz Gold / Nan Perry character is a young, idealistic, British Communist, ideologically committed to Stalin’s Soviet Union, I would contend that the name change was to remove the character’s Jewishness.

Of Fiedler — the East German Mundt’s second in command, who despises Mundt (and vice versa), Control (who heads MI6) tells Leamas:

Fiedler’s a Jew, of course, and Mundt’s quite the other thing. Believe me, my dear Alec, Fiedler is the acolyte who one day will stab the high priest in the back.

Later, towards the end of the film, Leamas tells Liz/Nan:

We’re witnessing the lousy end to a filthy, lousy operation to save Mundt’s skin… to save him from a clever little Jew in Mundt’s own department… who had begun to suspect the truth. London made us kill him… kill the Jew. Now you know.

Within this same conversation is a great bit of dialogue from the world-weary Leamas to the naïve and idealistic Liz/Nan, which obliquely condemns totalizing ideologies and idealist moralizing, whether religious or secular:

“What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing “Cowboys and Indians” to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong? Yesterday I would have killed Mundt because I thought him evil and an enemy. But not today. Today he is evil and my friend.”

The ending of the film is quite powerful and unexpected, with Leamas’ final act signifying a quixotic gesture against the nihilism his life has become.

Score: 4/5

Terrific hidden gem, B-movie thriller made by Standard Productions and directed by Lewis R. Foster. A cross-genre film, with some parallels to Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Prison breakout film, w film starting at the point of breakout. The great William Bendix plays Van Duff, the thuggish and ruthless con who organized the whole breakout and escape plan, but who has been shot badly in the shoulder during the escape. The six cons meet in the designated hiding spot (a cave with a small opening). Each of the cons is played by an effective character actor: William Talman is terrific as the sociopathic Luther Remsen (aka Swanee Rawlins aka Rev. Remington), a former priest, now with vacant eyes, who follows every command of Van Duff. Luther Adler plays Mendoza, a loud braggadocio always playing card tricks with his constant companion deck-of-cards; Gene Evans (an actor who is stunningly good as the lead in The Steel Helmet isn’t given many lines in this film, but is passable as Monk Collins; Marshall Thompson plays Billy Lang, the young, 20-something con, who has a softer side; Arthur Kennedy is very good as Joe Quinn, who was not invited to the breakout attempt, and whom Van Duff has never liked (probably because Quinn was only in for robbery, while the others were in for murder), but is now Van Duff’s weary accomplice.

Part of Van Duff’s plan, which he is adamant the others stick to, is to wait in the cave for 3 days (with no food, but a water supply), so that the guards will have long moved on to other areas of the mountain range they are at the base of. In order to convince the remaining cons to not leave him behind, the wounded Van Duff promises them all an even split of $80,000 in bank robbery money he has stashed in the mountains. They all agree, except Quinn, who is skeptical that Van Duff is being honest about the amount he has stashed. Van Duff relents and then says it is actually $180,000. Quinn is now onboard.

A long-ish but effective opening scene in the cave possesses a stage play’s interpersonal dynamics, but then gives way to action and movement throughout the rest of film. Van Duff orders two of the men to find him a doctor. They break into a nearby remote gas station, closed for the day, and use the phone, asking the operator to send a doctor, under the pretense that a garage mechanic has had a jack fall on him. The doctor arrives, and they force him into the cave to mend Van Duff. They tie him up, but Quinn objects, noting that the doctor treated them fairly, etc. Van Duff says we’ll call his wife tomorrow and tell her where he is. The men all leave the cave, and when the others are out of earshot, Van Duff tells the Reverend to kill the doctor, who we then see pick up large stone the size of a football and re-enter the cave.

The film’s 2nd act moves along at a swift clip, with two budding-romance interludes (which might easily have turned saccharine in less competent directorial hands) actually unfolding as mini-tragedies, as both women reveal their own backstories to be ones of sadness and misfortune. Over the course of the movie, one-by-one, the escaped cons meet deadly fates.

The 3rd act finds us down to just 3 men left: Van Duff, Quinn, and the Reverend. Van Duff leads them — on foot and during a snow storm — up a mountain pass to where the money is buried. Quinn is quite a bit ahead of them in going up the mountain, leaving Van Duff and the Reverend walking together a bit behind. They get into an argument, which culminates in the Reverend screaming at Van Duff: “It’s you! YOU are the Devil!” Van Duff shoots and kills him, and lies to Quinn, telling him that the Reverend went crazy and tried to kill him.

The still-injured Van Duff guides Quinn to where the money is buried and has Quinn dig it up, which he does. Quinn opens the small trunk to reveal wads and wads of bundled cash. “This is it!” yells Quinn. “Yes,” Van Duff says, pulling out his gun and aiming it at Quinn, “this is it.” However, when Van Duff pulls the trigger, it turns out he’s out of bullets. The two then struggle, with Van Duff getting the better of Quinn, knocking him unconscious by hitting him over the head with the small trunk.

When Quinn comes to, he staggers over a rise, to find Van Duff lying dead, the case of money next to him. Quinn ignores the trunk full of cash, the last shot being him walking through the snow blizzard alone, to an uncertain fate.

SCORE: 4/5

Loosely based on Elmore Leonard’s far leaner 1953 short story, 3:10 to Yuma (1957) is a superb adaptation directed by Delmer Daves. Shot gorgeously in crisp black and white, Director of Photography Charles Lawton Jr. effectively deploys Tolland/Wellesian-styled deep-focus cinematography for a near perfect western. Both Van Heflin (Dan Evans) and Glenn Ford (Ben Wade) are at the top of their game, the psycho-drama of their exchanges the work of a superb screenplay by Halstead Welles, who greatly expands the story’s characterization as well as moral terrain. The casting choices here are terrific, as the grizzled weariness of Van Heflin’s face perfectly matches his character’s Job-like difficulties in life, while the smooth handsomeness of Glenn Ford (playing against type) aptly reflects his character’s sociopathic powers of effortless seduction and psychological manipulation. Felicia Farr (Emmy Evans) delivers an effective performance as Dan’s loving but long suffering ranch wife.

It is hard to find a more compelling and complex Western character than Ben Wade, the leader of a 12 man criminal gang, ruthless and effective in his trade, but who displays a surprising and bizarre code of ethics when it comes to Dan Evans, his wife, and two sons. Wade is like the proverbial snake in the garden, a Satanic like figure who offers Dan huge sums of money to let him escape.

It is the arc of Van Heflin’s character, however, that drives this film’s morality play. Dan’s financial duress (a long drought is putting his small ranch at risk of complete failure), coupled with his looming doubts about his worth as a man, lead him to a potentially tragic path of desperation. Tortured by the financial temptations that Ben Wade dangles before him, Dan’s stoicism and Christian underpinning (his sons are named Matthew and Mark) prevail, even though rationality clearly dictates he will ultimately be killed by Wade’s gang.

I loved James Mangold’s 5-star 2007 remake, with a substantially revised script written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, which featured Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, and a scene-stealing breakout role for Ben Foster. The tragic ending sequence of this remake is, dare I say, far superior to the relatively ‘happy ending’ of the 1957 original, especially given the arc and honor-at-all-costs element of the Dan Evans character, although this 1957 version does have a terrific and almost biblical final shot of Dan (on the train with Wade) seeing his wife in the distance: without words, both of them simply look at each other, then look up to the sky and smile at the down-pouring rain which has just begun.

SCORE: 3.5/5

How the West Was Won (1962) was a big budget, ‘5-part’ Western was co-directed by Henry Hathaway, John Ford, & George Marshall. Its all-star cast includes James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Debbie Reynolds, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, and Richard Widmark.

The film is an unapologetic celebration of Western expansionism and, as such, would never get made today. Spencer Tracey provides voiceover narration which connects the 5 separate vignettes, each of which do have continuity overlap with each other. Overall, none of the stories is very gripping. The vignette directed by Ford is hokey and disappointing. The best vignettes are the last two, especially “The Railroad” (directed by Marshall), with Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark, followed by “The Outlaws” (directed by Hathaway), with Lee J. Cobb as the representative voice of newly established law struggling for replacement of the previous, anarchic frontier justice. In this last vignette, Eli Wallach is particularly good, in a performance that anticipates, and likely led to his being cast as, ‘Tuco’ in Leone’s immortal The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

The stunning Metrocolor print is hampered by the gimmicky, 146° arc, Cinerama technology, which distorts close-ups, and forced directors to use center-focused, medium- & long-shots only (looking for the Cinerama ‘sweet spot’). Cinerama was a short-lived technique which involved filming with 3 synchronized cameras (correlated to 3 vertical planes of the picture’s content). The finished film was then projected onto special, curved, theater screens, to minimize bleeding between the 3 separate, synchronized projectors to simultaneously projected the film. Despite the no-doubt careful job transferring this to a clean, 2.89:1 aspect ratio for Blu Ray release, the annoying aspects of Cinerama (which do occasionally account for a stunning shot) are distracting.

SCORE: 4/5

Directed by Martin Ritt, with great leads and a solid supporting cast. Based on the real-life, Irish immigrants who were an extension of Ireland’s secret-society ‘Molly Maguires’, this extension being present in Pennsylvania’s coal-mining towns of the 1870s. Pro-union and anti-exploitation in orientation, the group partook in violent, ‘eye for an eye’ reprisals, kidnappings, and mine sabotage, for which 20 of them were ultimately hanged, which this film is a fictionalization of.

Sean Connery & Richard Harris are at the height of their powers here, with Harris playing Pinkerton detective, and Irish native, James McParland, who goes to great lengths (both in terms of personal risk and in willingly partaking in some of the Maguires’ violent acts) in order to infiltrate the group and gain their trust.

James Wong Howe’s gritty and grimy cinematography conveys the misery of Coal Region life, where children begin their lives working in unimaginably harsh and dangerous conditions, at disturbingly young ages. Surprisingly, the film is a poignant allegory for today, where the idealistic promises of neoliberalism are quickly morphing into a neo-feudalism, with new incarnations of the exploitative ‘factory towns’ of old.

Of his own work in the movies, Lonely Are the Brave (1962) was Kirk Douglas’s favorite film, and for good reason. Douglas secured the rights to the film after reading the source novel, The Brave Cowboy (1956) by Edward Abbey, and proceeded to make the film through his own production company, Joel Productions, after making a production deal with Universal Pictures.

A couple of years earlier, Douglas, as the production force behind Spartacus (1960), hired blacklisted communist sympathizer Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay, and effectively ‘broke’ this blacklist by having Trumbo’s name, rather than a pseudonym, placed in the movie’s credits. After the success of that film, Douglas hired Trumbo to pen a screenplay for Lonely Are the Brave. In the source novel, the Paul Bondi character is sentenced to 2 years in prison for refusing to register for the draft, while in this movie adaptation, Trumbo changes the reason to Bondi having aided some illegal immigrants from Mexico. Despite this, and the screenplay’s romantic symbolism of borders being ‘against’ man’s nature, etc (which would normally get me to knock off at least a half-star from my score of the film), Trumbo’s raw talent as a wordsmith makes up for it.

The film is wonderfully directed by David Miller (whose spotty career has only the noir classic Sudden Fear (1952) as another high point), with crisp, black & white cinematography by Philip H. Lathrop, and a terrific soundtrack by the legendary Jerry Goldsmith. With both its theme of modernity eclipsing the way of the cowboy, and its overall aesthetic, Lonely Are the Brave has several similarities with Peter Bogdanovich’s excellent film The Last Picture Show (1971).

In his performance as cowhand drifter and loner Jack Burns, Kirk Douglas gives arguably his greatest, and certainly his most nuanced, performance of his career. Much of his performance here consists of the non-verbal: through body language and facial expressions. But Douglas also gets to deliver fantastic lines such as (to the police), saying glibly and with a carefree smile: “I don’t need [identification] cards to figure out who I am, I already know,” or, to his old flame Jerri Bondi (a young Gena Rowlands):

Jack Burns: I didn’t want a house. I didn’t want all those pots and pans. I didn’t want anything but you. It’s God’s own blessing I didn’t get you.

Jerri Bondi: Why?

Jack Burns: ‘Cause I’m a loner clear down deep to my guts. Know what a loner is? He’s a born cripple. He’s a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself. It’s his life, the way he wants to live. It’s all for him. A guy like that, he’d kill a woman like you. Because he couldn’t love you, not the way you are loved.

Rounding out the primary cast is Michael Cane as Paul Bondi; the always-terrific Walter Matthau, perfectly cast as a seasoned, gum-chewing sheriff; a menacing George Kennedy as a sadistic jailhouse deputy; and Carol O’Connor as the weary ‘cowboy’ of the modern world, living an arduous and lonely life on the road behind an 18-wheeler.

Unfolding at a languorous pace, Lonely Are the Brave is a movie I know I’ll reflect upon for years to come, and that I’ll surely re-watch in the future.

The last moments of this movie, with Jack Burns unable to speak, and expressing worry about the condition of his horse solely through his eyes, got me teary-eyed myself.

SCORE: 4.5/5