THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962, d. John Ford) is essential. It’s essential as a work of storytelling art. It’s essential as cinematic text. It’s an essential piece of the careers of its stars, and of that of its director.
This film came towards the end of John Ford’s directing career, and it’s the second-to-last he made with John Wayne. (DONOVAN’S REEF, a lark, was their final collaboration.) This one has incredible symbolic power. Without getting into a more fraught conversation about offscreen politics, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart are two of the stars in cinema history who most clearly represent America. Wayne was the pioneering, swaggering, boistrous side of America, and Stewart represented a more relatable, emotional, idealistic, and valiant side. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is where these two visions of America collide, and where they diverge.
This movie arrived at what was almost exactly the midpoint of American cinema. It’s an explosive elegy for the great films of the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s. From here, the 1960s dawned, and America changed. The genius of this film is how it is about all of these things even while providing a terrific story. The way that the film is bookended by scenes that take place in the character’s old age certainly confirms the historical reading of the film, but it’s certainly also possible to enjoy the film as a purely commercial old-school Western.
Stewart plays a lawyer whose Arrival in a frontier town called Shinbone begins with a brutal assault by the guy in the title, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin!). He’s rescued by the Wayne character, the only man around who isn’t afeared of Liberty Valance. What follows is nothing less than a battle between civilization and frontier justice. Wayne wants to deal with the outlaw gang in the most effective way, while Stewart argues for the more democratic solution. On top of that, both Wayne and Stewart are in love with the same girl (Vera Miles, best known to younger generations for her role in PSYCHO). This movie has an incredible cast, including Ford stock players such as John Qualen and Andy Devine, and Woody Strode and Edmond O’Brien on the side of goodness and decency, and Strother Martin and Lee Motherfucking Van Cleef on the side of lawlessness and nasty-actin’.
And then there’s Lee Marvin, patron saint of shitkickers, who from this role graduated to leading-man parts. He played heels and heavies for years before playing this, quite possibly the nastiest of them all (although he’s pretty fucking ugly in THE BIG HEAT). Lee being Lee, he continued to play bad men, but they were a more likable breed. This was arguably his last straight-up villainous role. After this definitive bad-guy, there was no way to deny that Lee was not on the iconic level of a John Wayne, rather than playing support to him, which is why their next movie, DONOVAN’S REEF, literally isn’t much more than a series of epic slugfests between the two of them.
This movie is necessary in every way. It’s a virtual textbook of masculinity, it’s a profound statement on history and mortality, and it represents some of the best work of all of its bold-faced participants. Fail to see it and fail to have your opinions on film taken seriously.
Daily Grindhouse would be pretty much my favorite website even if I weren’t writing for them, but since I am, here’s a collection of all my work so far. It’s some of my very best stuff. Enjoy!
Make Daily Grindhouse your daily destination for genre movie news, reviews, and interviews — there’s a ton of truly great content over there, beyond just the parts with my name on ‘em.
And follow me on Twitter for updates!: @jonnyabomb
I can’t stand repetition. I certainly don’t like to repeat myself. But I put a lot of work into my thoughts on THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, and I know that some people who follow me on Demon’s Resume might like to have alerts on when I write elsewhere, so I wanted y’all to know about my piece for Daily Grindhouse. I tried hard to make it worth your time!
“They broke in on me, and found me doing an unholy thing.” – Im-Ho-Tep, THE MUMMY.
THE MUMMY arrived a year after the one-two punch of Universal’s DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, both in 1931. It’s a fascinating case, because while it is a major departure from those two films, it also couldn’t exist without them. THE MUMMY has both nothing and everything to do with DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN.
DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN were such massive successes for Universal that the studio started looking around for other intellectual properties to turn into the next great horror character. DRACULA had come from the legendary 1897 novel by Bram Stoker, and FRANKENSTEIN had been the great creation of Mary Shelley in 1818. Universal had seen prior success with 1923′s THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, which was not technically a horror movie but is still to this day a terrific entertainment with a great Lon Chaney performance, and with 1925′s THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, which is most definitely a horror movie and also has a great Lon Chaney performance, but realistically, The Phantom is probably considered by most to be a distant second-stringer behind Frank, Drac, and Im-Ho-Tep.
The inspiration for 1932′s THE MUMMY, unlike all of Universal’s major horror hits up until that time, came not from literature but from actual human history. Ten years earlier, in 1922, the landmark discovery of the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was a national sensation, as big a story to Americans then as Kanye dating Kim is to Americans now. Inspired by the King Tut finding, Universal’s story department (primarily Richard Shayer and Nina Wilcox Putnam) came up with the basic concept from which John Balderston wrote the final script. Balderston reportedly contributed to the scripts of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN also, and THE MUMMY shares not only a writer with those films, but also a cinematographer and a supporting cast (DRACULA) and of course a star (FRANKENSTEIN).
Karl Freund is not generally considered an auteur director, the way DRACULA‘s Tod Browning and FRANKENSTEIN‘s James Whale are, but he’s earned his place at the horror round table. Freund was the cinematographer on DRACULA, and he reportedly took over the director’s chair for scenes where Browning’s alcohol troubles disrupted filming. Freund as a director may not have had the same creativity and affinity for the bizarre that Browning and Whale did, but his acuity with making dark horror scenes stylish as a cameraman is certainly a boon to THE MUMMY. Still, the twin shadows of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN loom large over THE MUMMY.
THE MUMMY begins with a melancholy orchestral cue that sounds awfully familiar. I couldn’t place it until I looked it up: It’s from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. If that doesn’t ring a bell, try this one on for size: It’s the main credits music used in DRACULA. Then, after a title card gives a little pseudo-history on the ancient pharaoh Im-Ho-Tep (sic), the story begins. An archaeological expedition unearths Im-Ho-Tep’s tomb and opens the sarcophagus, revealing this fantastic make-up design by the legendary Jack Pierce:
If Jack Pierce’s masterpiece was the make-up design for FRANKENSTEIN, his work in THE MUMMY must surely be a close second. It’s as thoughtful as the design on the earlier film — though it’s obviously not a strictly realistic take on what a millenium-old mummified human being would look like, it’s a fitting approximation of how most people would imagine one. It’s a figure from our imagination, come alive. It’s a truly striking image. But it can’t have been fun for poor Boris Karloff to slog on every day, so the movie doesn’t linger on this visage of The Mummy for long.
As the story goes, one of the more headstrong adventurers, against the warnings of Dr. Muller (Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing in DRACULA), reads aloud an incantation from the ‘Scroll Of Thoth’ that brings Im-Ho-Tep lumbering back to life. The Mummy strolls out of the sarcophagus, then shuffles his way out the door. The sight of the impossible drives the archaeologist mad, and he begins cackling wildly, maniacally, as The Mummy escapes. It’s an over-the-top capstone to the scene, but one that fits in neatly with both director Karl Freund’s background in German Expressionism and the example of the madman Renfield in DRACULA.
When Im-Ho-Tep re-enters the movie, he’s amped down the Mummy look considerably (perhaps as a concession to Mr. Karloff, who after all was as big a star in 1932 as Channing Tatum is in 2012). Im-Ho-Tep is now cutting a more dapper figure, clad in fine robes and a fez and introducing himself as “Ardeth Bey”, which does makes me think a little bit of how Mos Def is now going by the name “Yasiin Bey“. That’s just how my mind works. Anyhow, Ardeth Bey is much more eloquent than the initial Mummy from the first scene, and the more civilized incarnation of the character gives Karloff the chance to show what he can do with a line like “With your pardon, I dislike to be touched. An Eastern prejudice.” He’s a far better actor, in my opinion, than he gets credit for being. The thing is, Ardeth Bey is a man on a mission, and don’t let his fancy diction fool you, he’s not the greatest guy. Or maybe you can tell just by looking at him.
Honestly, doesn’t he look a bit like Tommy Lee Jones on that HOPE SPRINGS poster?
Mummy Lee Jones.
Since every Tommy Lee Jones needs his Meryl Streep, Im-Ho-Tep searches the entirety of Cairo for his immortal beloved, Ankh-Es-Un-Amon. He finds her at a party, in the person of Helen (Zita Johann), who is also being wooed by Frank (Paul Rudd look-alike David Manners, who played Harker in DRACULA). Frank is the son of one of the archaeologists who exhumed Im-Ho-Tep, and he and Dr. Muller become rightly convinced not only that Ardeth Bey is the returned Im-Ho-Tep, but also that he is after Helen. If this is starting to sound a little dry, that’s appropriate because that’s how it plays. For whatever reason, THE MUMMY lags more than its predecessors (and more than its several sequels). There is a lot of exposition, a lot of scenes of people hunched over scrolls, and not all of it compelling.
There are a few highlights, though. There’s the delightfully over-wrought line, highlighted in the classic trailer, where Ardeth Bey lays out his intentions to Helen, “I shall awaken memories of love and crime and death.” There’s the still-disturbing scene, a flashback to ancient Egypt, where Im-Ho-Tep is captured and wrapped in bandages and buried alive — it’s not shocking by today’s standards, but if you stop to give some thought to how that process might actually feel, you might be able to approximate how frightful such a scene might have been in 1932.
And there’s “The Nubian”, a memorable if somewhat problematic character who is a servant to one of the archaeologists but is compelled by Ardeth Bey to do his bidding. (Like Count Dracula, Im-Ho-Tep has hypnotic abilities.) The Nubian is played by Noble Johnson, a black actor of an unforgettable countenance who was also seen in 1932′s THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (from the team who would next make KING KONG.) Unfortunately, this was long before Hollywood movies figured out how to showcase black actors in any remotely flattering way. So The Nubian is a very physical character, no pushover, but a plot device, a prop, a type, not in any other way delineated. It’s arguably refreshing to have a splash of color in an early horror movie, a genre that is otherwise very very Caucasian, but that may not be saying much.
But back to the story. In the end, Frank, Dr. Muller, and Helen confront Im-Ho-Tep, and since Frank and Dr. Muller are powerless to stop Im-Ho-Tep, it falls to Helen to remember her past life as Ankh-Es-En-Amon and invoke the god Isis to destroy Im-Ho-Tep. (If the movie doesn’t have much for the black character to do, at least the lone female character is the one with the hero moment.) A statue of Isis raises an arm and shoots light at Im-Ho-Tep, who starts aging rapidly — you get to see his skeleton! – before completely disintegrating (off-camera).
And that’s THE MUMMY. Karl Freund only directed a few more movies before returning to his post as cameraman on movies like 1948′s KEY LARGO. The only major player to return to the character was Jack Pierce. While he did return to playing Frankenstein’s Monster (in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN), Karloff never did reprise the role of The Mummy. The character would return in several unofficial sequels, with Lon Chaney Jr. eventually taking over the role. Beyond the Mummy pictures of the 1930s and 1940s, however, the character accumulated in popularity and became a Halloween-time standard. THE MUMMY, taken as a film on its own, may not quite be as timeless as some of the other Universal horror pictures, but the work of Freund, Karloff, Pierce, and their collaborators ensured that The Mummy would become as iconic a figure as Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monsters and his Bride, the Wolfman, and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. He’s a pantheon character, as eerily lovable and oddly romantic as any of them.
This collection has been much-requested and a long time coming. To get at the reviews, just click on the movie poster of your choice. And be sure to bookmark this page, because it’s bound to get updated frequently!
For constant news about updates, follow me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb
And we’re back! Ready for round two. Inspired again by my friend-in-movies at Rupert Pupkin Speaks, I’m re-presenting and reshuffling my top fifty movies of all time. “Reshuffling” sounds a little more extreme than what I’ve done here — most of the titles remain the same, and the order isn’t much different. But there’s a fair amount of new blood, and I’ve updated the links to any movies I’ve written about at length (those are bolded in red.)
This list is absolutely subject to change, so keep watching this space, but while you’re at it, don’t forget to keep watching the skies.
On the poster above, Quentin Tarantino describes MILANO CALIBRO 9 as “Il piu grande noir italiano de tutti i tempi”, which translates roughly to “This movie is fucking incredible.” He also probably threw the N-word in there somewhere, but we try not to do that here.
The point is that Fernando DiLeo’s 1972 crime thriller MILANO CALIBRO 9, also known sometimes more simply as CALIBER 9, is a really, really cool crime flick, in a down-and-dirty and completely under-recognized way. It’s about a career tough-guy who gets out of prison and is pressured by his old gang into revealing the location of money he may or may not know about. The mob doesn’t believe him, the cops don’t believe him, even his fine-ass girlfriend (German actress Barbara Bouchet) doesn’t believe him. Things get ugly. That’s more than you need to know or care about the plot — not that the story isn’t worthwhile, but this movie has plenty else to recommend it besides its scriptwriting, I think. The camerawork by Di Leo’s regular DP Franco Villa is aggressive, visceral, even a little sloppy, which makes the whole enterprise have the feel of a punch to the face in a dive bar. The orchestral score Luis Enríquez Bacalov and the band Osanna is, most notably in the main theme, reminiscent of Morricone but with a bizarrely-awesome prog-rock twist.
It’s somewhere between documentary-style cinema-art and a brash, boistrous knuckle-dragging guy’s guy’s movie. Just check out the opening sequence, which starts on a blatant phallic symbol and progresses into a flurry of slugfests, dynamite. and the least relaxing shave ever:
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You may notice from that sequence that, no offense, but most of the guys in this movie look a lot like like apes. It has a lot to do with Di Leo’s apparent ambition with the picture, to portray crime as it probably should be portrayed – violent and animalistic and not as appealing as most movies paint it.
The lead actor, Gastone Moschin, who plays the excellently-named Ugo Piazza, is like a cross between Steve McQueen and Bruce Willis, but with a brow that weighs a ton. Outside of a role in THE GODFATHER PART 2, he hasn’t been in many movies you’d have heard of, but he’s a very striking-looking dude. Most movies wouldn’t think past casting a guy with this kind of looks (handsome but brutish) as a henchman, but it’s totally refreshing and probably necessary to have him as a protagonist. Pretty-boys have little place in badass crime films — you want a guy who looks like he can scrap.
Mario Adorf plays the gregarious but vicious and explosive Rocco Musco as a kind of proto-Billy Batts. Adorf was apparently Peckinpah’s first choice to play Mapache in THE WILD BUNCH, which tells you all you need to know about what this dude brings to the table. Rocco is loud and obnoxious but oddly charismatic and you sure won’t forget his face. Or his mustache.
Lionel Stander plays the ominous, malevolent crime boss. Stander was an American actor with a long television career, but he played his share of roles in Italian cinema — notably in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. Lionel Stander, like Ernest Borgnine or Willem Dafoe, is the kind of actor who is impossible to imagine was ever a baby.
The cops in this crime flick, the detectives on Ugo’s case, are given almost equal screen time to the cons, although they hardly get to leave the station. They’re still compelling, played as they are by a couple of terrific journeymen actors who are well-remembered by fans of Italian cinema from the era. Luigi Pistilli is probably best known as Tuco’s brother the priest in THE GOOD, THE BAD &THE UGLY, but he also played against Lee Van Cleef in DEATH RIDES A HORSE, had a key role in the unforgettable spaghetti THE GREAT SILENCE, and also starred in the great Enzo Castellari’s EAGLES OVER LONDON. Meanwhile, Frank Wolff was an American who worked with Corman and Hellman before moving to Italy. Like Pistilli, he worked with Sergio Leone (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) and Sergio Corbucci (THE GREAT SILENCE), in the latter movie providing some much-needed sardonic comic relief as he does also in CALIBER 9.
It’s a great cast, and a rambunctious, energetic movie overall. The ending in particular strikes like a loud howl and a gut-shot. Quite honestly my comfort zone is Italian westerns and not Italian crime films (outside of VIOLENT CITY, STREET LAW, and REVOLVER, all fantastic), but this one, widely-regarded as a high-water mark of the genre, has compelled me to get my homework done.
MILANO CALIBRO 9 has been screening all month at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn.
This beautiful portrait was taken by @SethKushner.
Hollywood legend Ernest Borgnine passed away Sunday, July 8th, 2012. He was 95, which is not young. But anyone who suggests that his age makes the loss much easier would be mistaken. There are people who are irreplaceable, and this was most certainly one. Ernest Borgnine, or Ernie to his fans, had more than sixty years in the movie business — just think of how many stories he must have had left to relay. Though he gave plenty of great interviews over the years, that probably was only a fraction. With Ernest Borgnine goes a unique and eternally ingratiating talent, and a pivotal bridge that spans Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, and the modern age we’re currently living in. For this post I’ve collected a ton of pictures and posters of the many movies I’ve seen Ernest Borgnine in. I will touch on most of these movies (and maybe more) in the longer appreciative piece I am working on, but in the meantime, please enjoy these movie memories of a true original.
Gus Van Sant’s Milk is screening at MoMA as part of their 10th Anniversary Salute to Focus Features. Milk could arguably be called Van Sant’s Malcolm X, a historical drama of historical importance and a keystone work in the filmography of a fiercely original and occasionally frustrating filmmaker. This is what I wrote about Milk in January 2009. You can take out the reference to Prop 8 in California and swap in a reference to North Carolina’s decision to ban same-sex marriage.
In several ways, Milk might just be the best movie of 2008. For sure, there isn’t an award for which it’s so far collected nominations and wins that it hasn’t absolutely deserved.
Let’s start with Sean Penn: I am a huge admirer of the man’s work, on-screen and off-screen, but seriously now – I don’t think he’s had a role in which he’s given a non-malevolent smile in decades.
In Milk, he beams.
You really do forget you’re watching Sean Penn, broody acting genius, and are persuaded that you are seeing an entirely different persona. Penn makes us care about Harvey Milk, both in his political and his personal lives. The entire ensemble, mostly male, mostly playing gay, is of a piece with Penn’s sympathetic portrayal. James Franco, Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch, the great Victor Garber, and particularly Josh Brolin, as Milk’s probably-closeted, most ferocious nemesis, Dan White, all give canny and bold performances, the strongest possible support to Penn’s textured embodiment of a character very different than his own public persona.
So now Milk performs the remarkable achievements of convincing its audience of Harvey Milk’s positive legacy by helping us understand him as a person; of depicting the senseless tragedy of his assassination – without in any way making a simple monster out of the pathetic, confused Dan White; and in addition to those achievements, inspires one to march right out of the theater and join the continuing struggle against discrimination and hate of all kinds.
No one who sees Milk, other than a bigot who needs to work harder to change, will leave it wanting anything other than seeing that contemptible Proposition 8 in California repealed. I don’t like to bring up politics in this space if I can help it, but at this point, it’s a civil rights issue. Anyone can feel free to disagree on that, but if they manage to get into it with me, they ought to be prepared to have their argument entirely decimated. There is no good reason why gay people should not have the same rights as any other group in America – they love and lose and live and die just the same as the rest of us do – and this movie has the power to show why.
I probably should be doing about 50 other things at this very moment, but I saw this great top-50 list today and was inspired it to immediately answer it. I made my list very, very quickly, so in plenty of ways it’s the most honest form a list like this could ever arrive in. While the numbering is fairly arbitrary (until the top five, where shit gets definite) and while the contents could easily change as soon as five minutes from now, this is still a fairly good representation of what a top fifty movies list from me should look like. Anyway, let’s hit it. Links where they fit. I eagerly await any and all comments you might make!
