Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

I was exhilarated by John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln when I saw it recently, finding all the things I loved about Steven Spielberg's own Lincoln but without some of my nagging reservations about the film. In fairness, the same issues that gave me pause in Spielberg's film (the optimism making the cynicism a bit too well, the way arduous political scheming is presented as heroic) exist in Ford's, but Ford casts everything in a tone of his trademark ambivalence, finding the divine and all too mortal in his protagonist and those around him and not forcing his interpretation on an audience. In many ways, Henry Fonda's fresh-faced, breakthrough performance contains even stronger hints of Machiavellian maneuvering than Daniel Day-Lewis' war-weathered mastermind, and various contrasts of mise-en-scene and tone subvert every image just as soon as it tries to take root. A masterpiece, and truly one of the finest Ford films I've yet seen.

I wrote a longer review of the film over at Spectrum Culture. Check it out.

Capsule Reviews: Other Men's Women, The Lovers on the Bridge, The Lady Eve, The Purchase Price

Other Men's Women (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Mary Astor herself called this picture a piece of cheese, but cheddar can be mighty sharp. Astor plays one of the men's women, the wife of a chirpy railroad engineer (Regis Toomey) who becomes entangled with his co-worker Bill (Grant Withers), a fall-down drunk who cleans up nicely. With only 69 minutes, Wellman doesn't have time to mess around, meaning Bill and Lily have to fall for each other with such passion they risk everything before most people can even ask what the other does for a living. Wellman's sturdy direction stands back to let the actors work, which isn't the best strategy given how unsalvageable some of the dialogue is but works best when the two men confront each other while working the same engine, the camera calmly letting the tension mount then somehow pulling back even more within the cramped space to capture their fierce, farcical fisticuffs. Things only get more darkly absurd from there, but then part of the charm of a good Pre-Code is the flamboyant yet gritty way things invariably go to hell. In the meantime, have extra fun with James Cagney literally dancing away with the show in a bit part and Joan Blondell as a diner waitress who is, except for Bill, strictly A.P.O.: ain't puttin' out. Grade: B+

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969)

The squealed harmonica refrain that runs through Sergio Leone's masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, sounds like the unholy death moans of a desert reptile. Its minimal, haunting, even terrifying noise reflects much of the film's style, which is at once epic and stark, melodramatic and painfully, acutely real. The harmonica itself is something of an absurdity, the embodiment of psychological trauma of a bloodthirsty gunslinger out to avenge his family's deaths, yet it, like all the other transparently cinematic, borderline Brechtian elements, fits with odd plausibility.

Lured into making another Western by the Hollywood system despite hoping to retire from the genre, Sergio Leone got a fast one over on them by elevating the Spaghetti Western (which he'd already raised well above its usual level) into the realm of genuine art. Once Upon a Time in the West certainly wasn't the first (nor last) film to document the downfall of the West, but it ranks among the merciless and unsparing. Before this, revisionist Westerns carried some sense of elegy, of the loss of the spirit embodied in the other Westerns. Even The Wild Bunch, released the same year, has its own sense of regret, even if it is in the futility of it all. Leone's film, though not scathing or condemning, is a depiction of an evil system replaced by another evil system, though that might not even be sufficient: this is not a changeover between parties so much as an evolution of the old way.

The Wrong Man

Alfred Hitchcock always was a cruel and calculating director. Even his most affecting pictures --Vertigo, Notorious -- have the disturbing undercurrent of sneering manipulation and condescension that served as identifiable a trademark of the director's work as his innovative camera work and the (possibly deliberate) lack of believability of effects. But The Wrong Man is cynical even by his standards, which would put it in the running of the most downbeat American film ever made. Perhaps that is because, as Hitchcock himself tells us at the start, walking in a barely lit studio stage in total silhouette -- a precursor to the film's aesthetic structure -- "This is a true story, every word of it. And yet it contains elements that are stranger than any of the fiction that has gone into many of the thrillers that I've made before."

Now, that's not entirely true (Rope was based on the story of Leopold and Loeb), but the clear implication of Hitchcock's statement, at least in retrospect of the film's events, is that real life is far more malicious and abusive than he could ever be. Just compare it to Rope: Rope existed to fuel Hitchcock's aesthetic ambitions. Not just the director's first film in Technicolor, Rope is primarily remembered today for its long-take structure, the division of a 80-minute feature into just 10 cuts. Hitch approaches The Wrong Man from the opposite direction: in black-and-white, this case of mistaken identity -- a common theme, of course, in the director's oeuvre -- with such distance and workmanlike staging that one might reasonably suspect, at first, that he'd been fired during production and replaced by a hired gun.

One can see the difference between The Wrong Man and Hitchcock's usual whirlwind thrillers from the beginning, as the opening credits play over the banal image of a ritzy club, an unmoving shot of patrons dining on overpriced, under-portioned food and sipping on outrageously expensive drinks. Once the credits end, the camera moves to show the house band playing the light lounge music that fills this place. The bass player of this soul-crushing band, the kind of outfit that exists only as high-class elevator music, is Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a.k.a. Manny. Hitchcock does not push in on Manny as he packs up his bass and leaves, nor when he returns home to find his wife unable to sleep. Only after we hear of her impacted wisdom teeth and the need for Manny to take out a loan on her insurance policy to cover surgery does Hitchcock significantly move the camera within a shot, zooming in on the lovebirds as they set aside their money issues and recount how lucky they are to have each other.

It's one of the few changing shots in the entire movie, especially of the first act, which proceeds at a deliberately leaden pace. Hardly anything of interest happens as Manny breaks up a minor quibble between his two young sons, promises his mother that he'll visit his sick father and engages in other quotidian activities. Hitchcock ingeniously withholds the plot until just before Manny himself figures out what's about to happen to him: he heads to the insurance office to check his wife's policy and see how much they can borrow, and Hitchcock cuts to a closeup of the teller spotting Manny and reacting with inaudible terror.

Suddenly, the movie shifts gears, as the teller urgently but calmly makes her way to her co-workers and begins whispering that Manny looks like "that man" who robbed them twice. Hitchcock's previous emotional and spatial distance from Manny allows him to suddenly play up the suspense the teller feels when Manny reaches into his coat pocket and produces...the sheet of paper containing his wife's insurance policy. Some of the other workers come close to screaming, and one briefly faints, but the teller manages to keep her cool long enough to give Manny the price he came for and send him on his way.

The speed continues to firmly escalate from here, as authorities apprehend Manny and tell him that he fits a description, though they save the full accusation for later. To test the validity of the office workers' claims, the detectives take Manny to various stores also held up by the robber and have him pace back and forth and return to the car while the owners talk with the cops. Manny doesn't understand what's going on, he wants to call his wife just to let her know that he'll be late, but the detectives keep taking him around town. At the precinct, they ask him to write down a copy of a note the robber passed to the insurance teller during his heist, and the notes contain a rough similarity. So, the detective tells Manny and lets him write another one, and in his nervousness he misspells a word. The same word, in fact, that the robber misspelled. Oh, Manny.

Now, Hitch's pacing makes sense. The Wrong Man started out so slowly, yet Manny finds himself all but convicted with alarming speed. "The innocent have nothing to fear," as more than one cop assures Manny, but that is ludicrous. What could be more terrifying than facing a prison sentence for a crime you didn't commit? (Note that, today, cops often use a suspect's anxiety to exonerate him; it's the guilty who resign themselves to their capture.) Hitchcock uses Manny's plight, and the deep, sudden impact the world makes upon him when it collapses onto his shoulders, to show how insane the system is. A trial almost seems an afterthought when the police chief attempts to strongarm Manny into confessing based on the evidence that look so damning on paper -- handwriting samples, multiple witnesses -- yet the audience can clearly see how such "proof" isn't so solid. The handwriting "gotcha" is outrageous in its uselessness, and the witnesses who most vociferously claim that Manny is the robber are so terrified of him that they can barely look at him; clearly, they can only see the rough details in the same panic that allows them to emphatically assure authorities that they've got the right man.

That's what makes the casting of Peter Fonda so perfect. Who better to play a mistaken man than the most innately American of actors; he could be any one of us, or at least us as we like to see ourselves. That makes him both inspiring and fearsome, a dual nature enhanced by Fonda's own lumbering, awkward frame, which conveys both vulnerability and intimidation. A decade before Sergio Leone completely turned Fonda's All-American persona against himself (and the country he represented) in Once Upon a Time in the West, Hitchcock used the actor for a less openly confrontational but more pernicious subversion of Fonda's charm.

Hitchcock was, of course, a Brit, which makes the hint of class warfare given to the character seem all the more intentional. Fonda's Manny, a lower middle class schlub who receives meager payments to perform for the gaudy rich in town, draws immediate suspicion because of his occupation. The system values money so much that even the cops, a notoriously underpaid group, see Manny's occupation as sufficient motive for becoming a robber. The poor have been raised with such self-resentment for their social status that they look down upon those on the same rung of the ladder. Seeking to defend himself, Manny must turn to Frank O'Connor, an attorney who believes in his client but sheepishly admits that he does not usually handle criminal cases and will likely be no match for a trained criminal prosecutor; but where else can Manny turn?The stress of the investigation appears to jog Rose so violently that she suddenly sees with terrifying clarity just how infallibly the odds are stacked against them. This revelation sends Rose into a deep depression, and soon she believes that everything happening to Manny is just a way for the powers that be to get to her, and so she not only feels guilty for "bringing" this pressure on Manny but fears for her life as well.

However, compared to the Expressionistic portraits Hitch drew of many of his psychologically addled characters, Rose's madness never progresses outside her desperate eyes, as anything bigger would be a release. That's the last thing the director wants to give us; even Bernard Herrmann, that vibrant and thrilling composer so perfectly suited for Hitchcock's merciless roller coaster rides, turns in a subdued score for The Wrong Man. The film is filled with images of bars, separating the insurance teller from the clients, the endless partitions in the jail where Manny could wind up for many years, bars that emphasize how hollow the place is even as it makes prison into a cramped nightmare. Nearly every scene features so much use of shadow that one begins to wonder if the film was originally in color until the unremitting blackness in each scene drew all the other colors into its consuming maw. Only in a few choice moments -- a spiraling camera movement as Manny swoons in his jail cell from the fear, a pair of match cuts that gives the illusion that the camera zoomed in through the cell door's peephole and back out again -- does the director use any of the camera trickery for which he is renowned. But the film's most memorable shot simply involves a perfectly photographed moment, when an impassioned Rose hits Manny and cracks a mirror. Hitch then cuts to an image of Manny's face, broken along the line of the cracked looking glass as if splitting the innocent man from the guilty look-alike while overlapping the two to make them one person. Bergman would take this idea to its zenith with Persona, but this much simpler take is no less jarring and contemplative. This bleakness, a sense of evil that seeps into the frame even without the director's usual bag of emotional sucker-punches, imparts not necessarily the world as it truly is -- even the hardest cynic would have difficulty accepting this vision as truth -- but Hitchcock's view of it. By coldly, flatly showing us what he felt, he could use his next film, Vertigo, to visualize how he felt it.

This despair, so much more troubling when presented sans sleight of hand, builds to one of the most cynical endings in cinematic history. That the police capture the true robber and acquit Manny matters little, as Hitch places the final scene in the sanitarium where Rose is being treated. At last, Manny has some good news to tell his wife, but she's too far gone, registering her husband's acquittal with catatonic flatness. Of course, Hitchcock never gave Manny the triumphant day in court to prove his innocence: the bassist only gets off when a juror mocks the proceedings and a detective comes by to tell Manny that they caught the real perpetrator. Rose didn't see this happen, but she stresses how what would have been a climactic victory is but a small reversal in the pain heaped upon the family. It is a scathing, brutal denouement, made somehow worse by the textual epilogue that explains Rose's eventual recovery and the family's rebuilding. As with the acquittal, such a happy occurrence is, for Hitchcock at least, but a small reprieve, the eye of the storm of life. Perhaps that's why The Wrong Man remains relatively unseen among the mainstream then and now: most of Hitch's films were just as bleak, but, in retrospect, maybe his inability to dance around it with his cinematic lies was his way of doing us a favor.

The Grapes of Wrath

There may have been better America directors before John Ford, and there were certainly better ones after, but no other director so completely epitomized that vague yet long-enduring image of "America." Indeed, no other director of any nationality likely represents that country's image quite like Ford. He was the one to bring majesty to the Old West in cinema, reviving the romanticism of its mythology after talkies sidelined the Westerns for a decade; with Stagecoach, he not only made the genre popular again but brought it for the first time into the level of high art, and subsequent efforts only solidified his indelible mark in the Western and cinema as a whole.

Only a year after Stagecoach, however, Ford made a film set in the wide expanse of the West but wholly antithetical to his typical, romantic vision. The Grapes of Wrath, based of course upon the beloved John Steinbeck novel, trades the open, inviting beauty of Stagecoach's endless landscapes for an engulfing, foreboding perversion of it. Through this vast emptiness blow shrill winds that kick up dust, massive clouds of dust that swallow the characters more than the environment.

Tom Joad enters this terrible new world after his release from a four-year prison sentence. Incarcerated for murder, albeit in self-defense, Joad emerges from prison aiming to see his family for the first time since his trial. He hitchhikes all the way to the old dusty trail that leads home, and we can immediately see that something is wrong. Ford frames Tom in an extreme long shot against dry, infertile farm ground. Once he gets to the Joad family farm, he finds it deserted, save for fellow sharecropper Muley, who tells Tom what happened in a flashback.

Both Ford and producer Darryl F. Zanuck were conservative, which makes their decision to film the most famous left-wing publications of the time baffling. Ford certainly doesn't compromise Steinbeck's original vision with this flashback: the company that holds the deeds to the Okies' land comes around to announce that the farms are losing money because of the dust storms and the company is evicting the residents to hire a handful of tractor drivers to do the same amount of work. These farmers are second, even third-generation descendants of the people who signed the sharecropper agreements. They don't understand that the land they grew up on doesn't belong to them, and one farmer is so outraged that he asks the rep who is doing this. It's not a person, it's a company, the rep replies. No point in killing the company president, though; he just does what the bank tells him. However, the local bank is run by a manager who doesn't remotely have the power to make such decisions. "So who do we shoot?" the farmer seethes. "Brother, I don't know. You find out, you tell me." This scene is The Grapes of Wrath in a nutshell: the rich have created a system that allows them to survive even in a depression, one that works by completely casting aside the working class to starve.

Tom finds his family at his uncle's house, which is next on the chopping block. He is welcomed back with open arms, and he finds the family teeming with excitement over a letter they've received promoting jobs in California, with positions for 800 crop pickers. Oblivious to the full implication of this impersonal message sent en masse throughout all of Oklahoma -- possibly the whole Midwest -- the family speaks of California as if the promised land, and each of the family members sits at the bare table thinking of all the delicious fruits and sweets that await them.

And so, like the hopeful, naïve optimists a century ago, the Joads head west in search of prosperity. At every step, tragedy abounds, at all times revealing Steinbeck's original leftist messages. The grandparents die of old age and malnutrition. A man returning from the empty promise of California bitterly attacks the Joads' bumpkin sunniness with a gruesome description of his family's slow death from starvation. In California, the Joads shuffle through a series of worker camps, where land owners have refined class oppression to an art form: they drive wages down, charge outrageous prices at the only stores in town. Hell, even the cops are in on the shakedown. No matter where the Joads turn, they find only destitution and corruption, all of it brought on by the lingering stench of unrepentant capitalism. Even when the Joads at last stumble onto a clean and just camp, run tellingly by the government as one of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the corrupt deputies from the other camps come to wreak havoc on those who would find happiness in a community not run on greed.

The epic tragedy of America's collapse is perfectly accentuated by the photography of Gregg Toland, greatest of the cinematographers. Compared to the softer photography of most classic monochrome films, The Grapes of Wrath looks as real as if it were made today. Toland would help revolutionize cinema a year later with his work on Citizen Kane, but here he displays a command of the craft no less impressive, and Wrath contains some of the most strikingly realistic cinematography since Dreyer's 1928 opus The Passion of Joan of Arc. The film is on the cusp of its 70th anniversary, currently available on an old DVD master, yet in some shots you can practically count the pores on Tom Joad's face clogged by grime and dust. Those who believe in hell mistakenly describe it as a place of fire and brimstone, forgetting or simply neglecting that the Bible makes no mention of such a place until Revelation. No, a fundamental definition of hell is simply the absence of God, and the starkly photographed sparsity of the desolate western farmland interspersed with America's children reverted back to the humbled masses who spawned them is as chilling a depiction of the falsity of the American Dream, even of the notion that God blesses America, as anything in the Godfather saga.

For all of Ford and Toland's gorgeous and haunting visuals, however, they place all of the emotional and metaphorical weight on three steadfast and basic symbols. The first is the Joad family vehicle: they ride in a sedan converted into some garish flatbed truck, a revolting blob of warped wood and rusted metal, to house the family and their few remaining possessions. Due to The Beverly Hillbillies, this image is now a parody and a symbol of the stereotypical hick, but here it's as tragic as any of the stories of starvation and destitution. This rickety, decaying eyesore is the sad aftermath of a once-beautiful product of American ingenuity and prosperity, representative of America's shambolic descent in the Depression. Nevertheless, it must be noted that, for all its instability and obsolescence, the car always pulls through in the end.

The second symbol is Jim Casy, whom Tom meets on the way to the abandoned Joad farm. The preacher who baptized Tom, Casy is now an alcoholic disgrace who lost his faith after (consensual) liaisons with some of the young women of his congregation as well as the psychological strain of the Great Depression. In that sense, he recognizes this wasteland as hell and acts accordingly, but this is merely the start of Casy's rebirth, a religious conception, as a secular social reformer. In the camps, he deflects a worker's assault on an officer onto himself, and later he organizes a worker revolt, only to be killed by camp guards. Tom says of his friend's sudden drive to action, "He could have been a preacher, but he seen (sic) things clear," and indeed Casy's human concern for the oppressed workers is the most forceful, as well as ideologically Christian, action in the film.

The third, of course, is Tom Joad, though perhaps that's less apt than simply saying Henry Fonda. If John Ford is the most American of directors, then Fonda must surely be the most American of actors: in his roles he personified some aspect of the American ideal, from a sense of social and racial justice (12 Angry Men) to the admittedly false image of basic morality in the form of Wyatt Earp (My Darling Clementine). He even played Abraham Lincoln, the enduring symbol of American freedom. Here, in the role that made him a star, he is, quite simply, an American. Uneducated but smart, dangerous yet gentle, Tom stands in the middle of various contrasts, and furthermore in the middle of an intense struggle for the future of America's power structure, between the system that failed and now grabs blindly at the shards of its shattered constructs and a government that wishes to help those sucked dry and cast aside by the previous administrators. When I said that this film seems as real as if it came out yesterday, that is not only for its visual acumen but for its glaring parallels to our current situation.

If The Grapes of Wrath falters, it does so at the end, when, for all of Toland's sharp photography and Fonda's naturalistic acting -- seriously, compare Fonda's convincing readings to Carradine's, who literally proclaims his first lines to the heavens his character no longer believes in despite being in a conversation with Tom -- the script suddenly and shamelessly chucks in dialogue that makes everyone instantly aware that it came from a script. Tom's no dummy, but the idea that this farm-raised Okie could speak so poetically severely tests the tensile strength of one's suspension of disbelief. But no matter: The Grapes of Wrath, like its source material, is one of the towering works of the 20th century, and no single chunk of dialogue, however, contrived, could derail it. To better understand the heart of this picture, I would point to an earlier scene, of Ma Joad quietly turning out a box of sentimental possessions, only to discover a pair of earrings that she holds up to a mirror with a look of nostalgia before quietly saving them in her pocket. The scene is pure poetry, an depiction of an implacable sense of dignity that exists no matter how rough it all gets. As an expression of the basic qualities which make us human and give us our humanity, I have seen none better.