Palette Cleansers: Canyon Passage

I debut a new feature this week at Movie Mezzanine that elaborates on the use of color in a film in establishing mood, character, narrative, themes, and the like. The feature will be called Palette Cleansers, because puns. Anyway, our first selection is Jacques Tourneur's superb, somewhat neglected Canyon Passage, his first Western and first color film. The film has many qualities worthy of recommendation, from its sparse storytelling that belies a dense plot of character relationships and racial politics to the terrific performances it gets from its cast (especially Dana Andrews, who gives one of his finest here). What stands out most, though, is Tourneur's use of color, every bit as subtle but showy as his shadow work and capable of deftly delineating the multiple leaps in perspective and POV. The handful of stills featured are only a fraction of the aesthetically beautiful but meaningful shots in the film.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

[The following is my June entry for Blind Spots.]

More than one person has referred to William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives as the "best" Best Picture winner. What many failed to mention is that it is also the "most" Best Picture winner. It resembles almost the quintessential essence of the ideal Oscar movie: socially conscious but inoffensive,  heart-wrenching on a surface level, and beautiful without being a true aesthetic marvel. But if the film represents the non plus ultra of Academy-pleasing filmmaking, it is also a demonstration of how great that kind of movie can be. Wyler's direction, aided by the great Gregg Toland, may not be fussy, but its framing offers direct snapshots of character insight that never let the pace lag on this three-hour extravaganza of post-war moralism.

The Best Years of Our Lives opens at a military post on an airstrip that houses soldiers, seamen and pilots waiting in limbo for an open plane seat to take them back home after the end of World War II. As they all wait for the chance to finally go home, rich civilians continue to fly undisturbed, not one inconvenienced for the sake of sending America's heroes back to their loved ones. At last, Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), an Air Force captain, manages to get his ride back to the Midwestern Boone City along with a sailor named Homer Parrish (Harold Russell). But the jovial, amusing tone of this cramped purgatory and the promise of a return to normalcy dies when Parrish goes to sign his name to get on the plane and reveals two prosthetic hooks where his hands used to be. The medium long shot remains unbroken as both Fred and the man in charge of scheduling instantly shrivel with pity, and the tone of the film, only subtly undermined to this point, instantly changes. Homer and Fred meet the last lead, Army sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March) on the plane ride home, and despite their rapport, it's clear that all three are as nervous to go home as excited.