Category: Drama

CIVIL WAR

By Marc S. Sanders

On the drive home, my wife and I left saying that we could not recall this country existing on a such a divisive plane within our lifetimes as it is currently.  Maybe we were not paying enough attention as we were growing up.  With that in mind however, it’s not unreasonable to see a possible future coming to life from Alex Garland’s Civil War.  What’s clear is the vitriol displayed in Garland’s film is not surprising.

Civil War is an observational piece as it is told through eyes of photojournalists who function with no stake in the conflict.  Lee (Kirsten Dunst) has become a legendary war photographer.  Along with Joel (Wagner Moura), who’s a reporter, they intend to journey through the Northeastern battlegrounds from New York City to Washington D.C.  As they believe, the seceded states of California and Texas are close to overthrowing the government, they are determined to interview and photograph the President (Nick Offerman) before he’s taken prisoner or more likely, assassinated.  An old-time New York Times journalist named Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaney), a young photographer who idolizes Lee, tag along.  To do this trip is a crazy undertaking, but Lee and Joel know what importance their purpose serves and the fact that they have press passes should uphold their survival amidst violence and chaos. 

My wife asked which side does writer/director Alex Garland lean towards politically and I said I do not know as he’s primarily known for science fiction movies (Ex Machina, Annihilation).  Garland likely wants his political leanings to remain unknown as it upholds what Civil War deliberately steers its focus away from.  We never learn what policies each side of this war stands for or what instigated it.  In fact, it is quite intentional of Garland to make what are arguably the bluest and reddest states in the United States the united seceders who lead one side of this bloody chess board. 

This fictionalized war is well established when the picture opens.  The President attempts to deliver a speech that is clearly uncertain despite the staple resilient vocabulary he includes.  Nevertheless, buildings on fire randomly appear, looters are bloodied pulps who are strung up by random factions, downed helicopters are the carnage occupying a parking lot in front of a JC Penney.  Nothing that anyone says, much less the President of the United States are going to sway this country into a state of comfort.  That time has passed.

The production value of Civil War is astonishing.  Sometimes it looks just like photographic accounts of what we see on the evening news coverage from the Middle East.  Garland also never forgets that his main characters are photographers as he captures in freeze frame people being randomly shot or beaten or simply screaming at one another.  The film abruptly turns off the sound and a black and white photograph interrupts the chaos for you to catch a freeze frame glimpse.  The editing lends to the character designs of the story’s four main players.  I did question, however, why video footage was not also taken beyond just photographs.  Cell phones are not used or mentioned in this picture.  The inconvenience of Wi Fi on a laptop is however. 

The sound design of the film is spectacular and reminiscent of how powerful it served in the Oscar winning film The Zone Of Interest.  As the characters set up camp for the night, rapid pop pop pops are heard in the distance.  On multiple occasions, Garland gets you right in the middle of the various firefights that occur in and around office buildings or what were once shopping districts.  The machine gun fire and rubble blasts are all around you.  The cinematography is also quite eye opening.  I like to think of areas like Virginia and the Carolinas as beautiful American spots during the summertime, and that is when these events unfold. Yet, to see how ugly it is amidst endless debris and bloodshed is an awful, still convincing effect.

My Cinemaniac pal Thomas made a good point about Garland’s approach.  Out of nowhere a needle drop of songs will intrude on the picture and often I found them to be overly distracting and definitely unnecessary.  One such number is a hip hop tune with samples from an 80s tune (I can’t remember which one now) that plays over a gunfire scene.  Regrettably, it takes me a little out of the picture.  Thomas is entirely correct in this area. This technique is not effective as when Oliver Stone or Francis Ford Coppola included The Doors in their set pieces. 

Kirsten Dunst is quite good in her role.  Lee knows where to point her camera, and Dunst lives up to the legendary status that her character is supposed to have.  You can feel the exhaustion that teeters on her mental stability, especially as the story reaches its third act.  Lee has been doing this for far too long and the horrors are a part of her now.  Her trauma can never be erased or covered.  Cailey Spaeny is the standout performer though as Jessie, the young girl who is eager to reach the levels of her idol.  Lee wishes Jessie would just not tag along.  Alex Garland writes good characters, but they are not what stayed with me following the conclusion of the film.  What upholds Civil War is the depiction of this all too convincing reality. 

I write this article the morning after Iran delivered missiles and drones in the direction of Israel and with every article I’ve read, I ask myself again and again what is the purpose.  These efforts are not done for strategic overthrow.  Rather, actions are executed with hate and revenge and the only ones who are paying for it are those that are not arguing; those that are just trying to raise families and live in peace.  Alex Garland might know what finally began his fictionalized American civil war, but none of that matters any longer.  It’s what the pawns do to one another in place to place to place.

The fighters and individuals you meet in his film all move with their own ulterior motive.  A chilling scene includes Jesse Plemons (Dunst’s real-life husband) dressed in camouflage fatigues who does not even have a statement or a cause to deliver.  His minimal dialogue is nowhere near as expressive as the vast graveyard of Americans he’s sprinkling with lye and burying. When the press team comes upon him, nothing they say matters or motivates him to lower his machine gun.

Fighting, fighting, fighting.  That’s all you see in Civil War.  You don’t even know the position that the President holds, or even what his name is.  You never learn what party he represents either.  I salute Alex Garland for not leaning one way or another.  It is the divide that is tearing our country, our world, apart and not what we stand for. 

Sadly, some commentators on social media have already devised in their own minds that Civil War is a “woke film” (whatever the fuck that means) simply because of the pink (HOT PINK!!!!!) sunglasses that Plemons’ sadistic character wears.  Reader do not listen to the voices in your head.  There is no political agenda to this film.  Rather, Civil War shows us what occurs when political agendas have been entirely deafened by gunfire.

LACOMBE, LUCIEN (France, 1974)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Louis Malle
CAST: Pierre Blaise, Aurore Clément, Holger Löwenadler
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: In 1944, an 18-year-old boy from a small French village collaborates with the Gestapo and subsequently falls in love with a Jewish girl.


The effectiveness of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien may depend partially on how much you know about cinema history after World War II.  It’s a historical fact that there were French countrymen who sided with the invading Nazis, going so far as to infiltrate the French Resistance and inform on their neighbors to the Gestapo.  When the war ended, that fact was politely and discreetly avoided in war films for decades.  No one wanted to spoil the notion that the whole of France united with each other to harass the Nazis at every opportunity, and that the Resistance fighters were unambiguously, morally pure.  In France, surviving collaborators went about their business, some more anonymously than others.

In 1974, Lacombe, Lucien became one of the first, if not THE first, French film to not only broach the topic of Nazi collaborators, but also to depict the French Resistance as employing guerilla tactics and carrying out assassinations that were just as morally questionable as any other similar attacks in history.  It was a bold move, to be sure.  Even when you remove that context from the film, when you watch it as a stand-alone piece of cinema, it is still makes for compelling viewing.  However, for my part, the very ending of the movie left me frustrated.  While French audiences may have seen it differently in 1974, I saw it almost as if the filmmakers simply ran out of story and used a title card to tie things up in a bow.  But the journey to get to those final frames is worthwhile, even though the lead character is one of the most loathsome people I’ve ever seen on film.  I would compare him to Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List, not because they are similar characters, but because they elicited the same reaction from me: disgust.  (Or maybe they are similar characters…you tell me.)

The film opens in 1944, just a few weeks after D-Day, in a small town in southwest France.  We first meet young Lucien Lacombe, maybe 17 or 18, mopping a hospital floor, apparently doing a good deed for his community.  Through an open window, he spies a small songbird chirping on a tree branch.  Lucien makes sure no one is watching, pulls a slingshot from his pocket, takes careful aim, and kills the little bird with one shot.  He smirks and goes back to the business of mopping.  We will witness many other instances of Lucien killing other animals.

Indeed, many of these scenes are done for real: the actor playing Lucien clearly kills several rabbits with a shotgun, one with a wooden club.  In another scene, he catches, decapitates, and calmly starts to pluck a chicken for dinner, all in one unbroken take.  Now, this would have been normal behavior for someone living in a farm community in the French countryside, where someone has to prepare tonight’s dinner.  The difference is, Lucien seems to enjoy these tasks a little too much.  Even worse, though, are the times where he is utterly impassive about it, especially with the one rabbit he catches in the snare.  These are hard scenes to watch, but in hindsight, they are vital to unpacking or interpreting Lucien’s actions later in the film.

Through a series of events that reminded me a little bit of Goodfellas (“All my life, I wanted to be a gangster”), Lucien allows himself to be recruited into a cadre of French collaborators whose base of operations is a fancy hotel where their opulent lifestyle is a rebuke to those silly Resistance fighters who must scrape a living from the dirt.  He is more than willing to do what it takes to get a taste of the good life.  He turns in a schoolteacher who is also a Resistance officer; he makes a show of being contrite about it, but he quickly gets over it.

The rest of the movie shows Lucien puffed up with pride in his new social status, bullying anyone and everyone who dares to talk down to him.  There are, to be sure, broader statements being made here about the psyche of anyone who deludes themselves into believing in their inherent superiority over their fellow man just because they’re handed a membership card, regardless of how small-minded or shallow they might be.  However, during the movie, I never thought of those broader implications.  It’s a testament to how well the movie was directed and acted that I was concerned only with how Lucien behaved and acted, and not with whatever director Malle was trying to say from a metaphorical or allegorical standpoint.

To watch Lucien bully people around was sickening and pathetic.  He is introduced to a tailor, Albert Horn, who will make him some new clothes.  Lucien’s friend in the Gestapo casually informs him that Albert is a Jew who is only allowed to live in relative peace because of his skills as a tailor, and because he makes regular payoffs to the Gestapo.  Albert has a 20-something-year-old daughter, improbably named France, with whom Lucien is almost immediately smitten, despite her ethnicity.  He tries to impress France by getting her to the front of a food line, but she demurs.  When people in line complain, he smugly explains he’s with the German police and he can do whatever he wants.  The idea of that kind of power in the hands of someone as despicable as Lucien made me as angry as I can ever recall being while watching a film.

In the background of Lucien’s plotline is the shadowy Resistance itself.  Various members of the French collaborators are being killed here and there, certainly not a bad thing.  But the aftermath of their attacks is no less disquieting than anything perpetrated by the pro-Nazi collaborators, especially after a brazen attack on the fancy hotel headquarters, where the bodies of the collaborators are just as dead as the bodies of the Resistance fighters.  Perhaps the film is making a point that dead is dead, no matter which side you’re on, so you’d better be sure you’re dead for the right reasons because history will remember you one way or the other.

At the center of all this is Lucien’s face with his cold eyes and virtually expressionless mouth.  He doesn’t smile, he smirks.  He threatens Albert and France with exposure and arrest if Albert doesn’t allow Lucien to date, then marry, France.  For her part, France is wise enough to know when to humor Lucien and when to go along with his behavior, for the good of her father.  Lucien, besotted with power, is too clueless to realize how smart she really is.

I have a general guideline that I dislike movies with rotten characters at the center of them.  But I must admit that Lacombe, Lucien sucked me into the story and kept me there, despite how much I disliked Lucien himself.  I guess I wanted to see how much the filmmakers would allow him to get away with before he was swatted down.  Whether he gets swatted down or not is for you to discover, but let it be said that the ending manages to have it both ways, which was challenging for me.  I both did and didn’t get the kind of closure I wanted, which explains my somewhat median rating despite how well-made the film is.

It may be that I’m not old enough, or knowledgeable enough, to really appreciate the impact Lacombe, Lucien had on 1974 audiences.  I can only report how it made me feel right now.  It made me feel anger and indignance towards Lucien throughout the whole movie, even when he makes a crucial decision that seems as if it will redeem his character.  I don’t think it does, because the damage he instigated has been done and cannot be undone by a single act of contrition when it’s far too late to make any difference.  Perhaps that’s not a very Christian idea, but that’s how the movie made me feel, regardless.  Lucien deserves what he gets and more.  Does that apply to the real-life French collaborators, many of whom were still alive when this movie was released?  It’s not for me to pass judgement on those people.  But I can’t deny how the movie itself made me feel towards the people within the world of the film.

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN

By Marc S. Sanders

You ever feel proud of a character in a movie?  Like you walk out, and you say to yourself, “Well done, Rocky!  You did it!!!”  That’s how I feel about Zack Mayo, the Navy enlisted candidate who has to survive his first 13 weeks of basic training on his way to eventually obtaining his dream of flying jets.  Just as important though, Zack has to mature as a responsible young man with a commitment to caring at least as much for others as they already care for him.  Richard Gere plays the guy who must become both An Officer And A Gentleman.

Director Taylor Hackford goes deep into the bottom of the well to show what makes Zack such a loner.  His Navy enlisted father (Robert Loggia) abandoned him and his mother, and only reenters Zack’s boyhood life once his mother commits suicide. Zack spends time growing up on the Philippine Islands Naval base where he gets bullied while remaining unloved.

Years later, after college graduation, not knowing of any other direction to take with his adult life, he opts to go down the same path of his bum of a father and join the Navy where he’ll perform basic training when he arrives at a coastal Seattle base. The enlisted men do not have a good historical reputation in this area.  Many are known for bed hopping with the local factory girls, and then they relocate to where they are going towards next in their servitude, leaving the girlfriends behind and forgotten.  Zack’s father was one of these guys. The ladies in the area also have a stained legacy.  Many of them will deliberately get pregnant or even lie about missing their period to keep these enlisted men from leaving them.

Sergeant Foley (Louis Gossett Jr, in his unforgettable Oscar winning role) oversees Mayo and his class, specifically warning all of them that these trends occur over and over again.  When he’s not cautioning them, Foley attacks the character traits that weigh Mayo and the others down.  If they had a rough childhood or checkered background, Foley will not hold back.  He has to prepare these men and women for a possible war or a position of captivity behind enemy lines.  If these young folks can endure Sgt Foley’s cruel mind games and unforgiving, hard-hearted nature, then they are more prepared for any worst-case scenario that can come while performing military service.  

Mayo is a leading candidate in his class.  He has the potential to break the record on the brutal obstacle course, and he’s secretly resourceful with selling polished boots and belt buckles to his classmates ahead of bunk inspection.  Not bad.  However, he’s not mature and he doesn’t even realize it.  The first time he completes the obstacle course he sits over on the side, proud of himself, rather than joining his teammates in cheering each other on to finish the job.

Love is also not something Mayo is experienced with. He meets Paula (Debra Winger in a superb Oscar nominated performance) who is ready to love Zack but he’s not ready to open up to her.  Perhaps he never wants to love or commit to anyone to save himself from loss or further abandonment because it’s all he’s ever known.  An Officer And A Gentleman is very good at subtly covering what makes a loner a loner.  

Contrary to Zack’s background is the best friend he makes, Sid Worley, a fellow classmate (David Keith).  Sid is a happy go lucky fellow, but eventually the film shares what motivated him to enlist and how his relationship with a local girl pans out. Perhaps there’s some sense to what Foley has been warning these people about.  

An Officer And A Gentleman is sad at some points and very uplifting as well.  Sometimes it’s hard to watch the encounters that Zack and company must endure during these first thirteen weeks of a committed six-year servitude to the Navy.  The glamour of flying jets can only arrive once you shed away the person you once were by developing maturity, respect, resilience and honor.  

I love the way Taylor Hackford’s film tests Zack.  He’s tested by Paula, by Sergeant Foley and even by his own father.  Can he let go of the drunken whore parties arranged by his dad? Raised by a guy who might have worn the officer rankings and uniform, but now beds the women he picks up in bars only to finish it off with a drunken vomit session in the morning.  

Foley puts Zach to his mental and physical limits after he catches him in violation.  The sergeant then insists on the kid’s DOR (“drop on request”).  It’s up to Zack if he wants to take this seriously or simply quit and remain a loser like his father.

Then there is Zack’s commitment to Paula.  Can he trust Paula will not trick him or let him down, again like his father, then his mother, and followed by his father all over again?  

Richard Gere is sensational at balancing two stories at once.  This remains the best role of his career.  It’s a dynamic, multi layered performance.  First, the physicality he devoted to the role is impressive.  That is Gere doing the obstacle course and cockpit test crash dives in the swimming pool.  Gere is the one doing endless pushups in the mud and running in place with a rifle above his head while Gossett’s character torments him with his abusive yelling and a dribbling water hose.  Gere is also the one riding Mayo’s motorcycle.  The actor is completely absorbed in this divided character.  Arguably, he should have been considered for an Oscar nomination.  

Zack Mayo is not always likable.  The purpose of the film is to discover what is to admire about the conflicted loner who never had anyone to care for him or anyone for him to lend sincerity towards.  If joining the Navy can pull this guy towards a meaningful life that can be purely earned and not cheated or circumvented, then it’s possible to feel proud of what this man becomes.  

An Officer And A Gentleman is now over forty years old. So, it might feel dated. Yet, the traits that make a man and a woman good, honorable, and loving people has never lost their immense value.  If you have never seen this movie, it’s time you did, and if you have seen it, it is due for a rewatch.  

The last line of the picture, depicted in one of the greatest endings ever to close out a film, is “Way to go Paula!”  Allow me to also say “Way to go Zack!”

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI

By Marc S. Sanders

David Lean’s The Bridge On The River Kwai commits to a common theme.  The purpose of war means nothing to the pawns assigned to execute its actions.

The film primarily takes place in Japanese occupied Burma during World War II.  A prison has just acquired a British platoon of soldiers, and the Japanese have mandated this squad to construct a railway bridge that will run over the Kwai river benefiting the Axis efforts in the war.  Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness, in a celebrated early career role) respects the rules of war that come with his battalion being held as prisoners of the Japanese enemy, and he is prepared to have his men begin construction.  However, as his copy of the Geneva Convention Agreement dictates, his officers are not obliged to join in the assignment.  

This is a far off deserted jungle however, that does not even need to be fenced off because an attempted trek to escape is bound to fail.  Therefore, the Geneva Convention Agreement has no value of authority out here in this bug infested, stilted and sweltering heat with minimal resources of food, clothing or medicine.  The Japanese commander Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) does not hesitate to swat Nicholson’s copy in the Englishman’s face.  Now, since the politics of war are no longer a factor, the stamina of these two men are what’s at stake.

Saito forces Nicholson into a cramped, isolated hot box with next to no food or water.  He’s lucky because his remaining officers are forced to share the other box together.  Saito will force them to comply, or he may just have to kill himself.

The Bridge On The River Kwai explores how productivity, leadership and endurance thrive, but at a startling cost of madness.  Before you realize it, none of these characters are speaking of their respective war efforts or even the mandates of war.  As Nicholson persists in his stance as a defiant leader, a remarkable tide turns within this prison camp.  Soon, the question arises as to who is running this camp and overseeing this bridge project. The enforcers or the prisoners? 

A separate storyline involves an American prisoner named Shears (William Holden) – one of the last men in his platoon to survive, and now only here to bury his fallen comrades.  He’s introduced to describe the harsh reality of what Nicholson and his men can expect.  Yet once Shears escapes the camp, he is caught in a twisted irony, being forced to return to the prison camp where he must destroy the bridge under the command of a British special forces leader named Warden (Jack Hawkins).  Warden goes through his own form of madness.  A badly injured foot becomes something worse than a bloody stump and still he insists on leading his small brigade into the jungle.  

Meanwhile, as Nicholson develops more control over the camp, with Saito realizing his own pitiful ineptitude, a faction of the British are now likely to engage with Nicholson’s newfound achievement as a leader over his own squad, as well as the human Japanese resources he’s also recruited to complete this solid foundation.

David Lean had a reputation for never settling for less on his pictures and The Bridge On The River Kwai is a perfect example.  I recently watched the film, for a second time, with my fellow Cinemaniacs.  Thomas and Miguel assuredly pointed out that one less than sturdy bridge was constructed by Lean’s crew to demonstrate its weaknesses and the lack of engineering the Japanese possess, before Nicholson fully takes over.  That structure collapses on film and thus lends to the next plight in the story, when Nicholson proves to Saito that he is more capable than his enemy counterpart.

Later, the actual bridge is finished leading to a nail biting ending that elevates in suspense as an oncoming Japanese train is heard approaching with its signature whistle and chugging overheard as Colonel Nicholson proudly walks across his success, newly minted with a plaque carved with his name.  Elsewhere in the area are Stearns and Hawkins.  What began with Japanese antagonism has shifted to one side likely to do battle with itself.  

Who is fighting who?  More importantly, what are they fighting for?  War or persistent, delusional madness?

The Bridge On The River Kwai is a magnificent adventure produced with sensational filmmaking.  The investment and risk that David Lean took to assemble this picture is astounding.  It was filmed within the actual jungles.  (Miguel said somewhere around Sri Lanka.) The costumes worn by the thousands of extras are tattered dirty scraps that certainly does not invite the sex appeal you’d expect in a modern film of this kind.  Moreover, the audacity of the filmmaker at least matches the nerve of the story’s cast of characters.  

The cast is marvelous, but it is Sessue Hayakawa and Alec Guinness who serve the impact of Lean’s film.  The movie comes close to a three-hour running time.  The first half of the film has Hayakawa positioned as the leading antagonist, but the second half has Guinness filling that spot.  They almost seem to mirror one another as their character arcs move in parallel but opposite directions working to accomplish their goals, while shedding any kind of humane concern for their underlings or the countries they serve.  

I consider this film to be groundbreaking.  It’s a spectacle, but it allows much to be examined in mental acuity, military allegiance and endurance.  The Bridge On The River Kwai tests how effective war can be for any side that participates.  My Cinemaniac comrade, Thomas,  informed me that the story, adapted from a novel by Pierre Boulle, is entirely fictional.  Still, I believe it garners an important message.  Are we supposed to truly embrace “rules of war?”  This is not Risk the board game.

These men might carry the titles and rankings issued to them by their governments. However, isolate them in the middle of nowhere and who is going to uphold any semblance of regulation?  War functions on efforts of violence.  When was the last time anyone had respect for violence?

QUIZ SHOW (1994)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Redford
CAST: John Turturro, Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, Paul Scofield, David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald, Mira Sorvino
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In the late 1950s, a popular TV quiz show, along with its current champion, falls under federal investigation following allegations of rigging.


I imagine there will be no shortage of people more than willing to tell me how wrong I am, but while Robert Redford’s Quiz Show was well-directed, well-written, and well-acted, I never fell completely under its spell.  For that matter, it never felt like it had the director’s stamp on the material; a lot of it felt like a Ron Howard film.  No doubt the story captured a lot of attention when it happened in the late ‘50s, but it failed to grab mine, at least to that same degree.  It’s too well-made for me to skewer it mercilessly, but neither do I consider it a masterpiece.  It’s…okay.

It’s 1957, and Sputnik captures the world’s attention at (or at least near) the height of the Cold War.  To distract themselves from Sputnik’s implications, Americans tune their TV sets to the most popular game show on the air: Twenty-One, in which competing contestants are asked random trivia questions while isolated from each other.  These questions are something else.  One multi-part question includes: “Who rode with Paul Revere?  Who lent him his horse?  Was it a mare or a stallion?  And what was the horse’s name?”  I mean, really?  The current champion, Herbie Stempel (John Turturro), knows these answers and many others and has become something of a local hero, but he’s not terribly photogenic, with his oversized shoulders, those nerd goggles, and that one rotten bicuspid that you can’t take your eyes off.

Twenty-One’s showrunners decide Stempel’s run has come to an end and hatch a plan to throw the next episode to handsome young Charles van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a Harvard professor who in real life did not look quite as handsome as Ralph Fiennes, but whatever, this isn’t a documentary.  Both Van Doren and Stempel comply with this plan, but the scenes in which they make their decisions felt contrived, or false, or something.  I was never convinced of their motivations.  Stempel needed the money but was supposedly swayed by the possibility of being awarded his own “panel show.”  Van Doren clearly didn’t need the money and even turns the offer down at first, but then he changes his mind because…I guess he needed a way to live up to his Pulitzer-Prize-winning father?  All the pieces are there, but it’s never fully explained until his final speech in front of a Congressional committee.

The story engine involves a young DC lawyer named Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) who gets a whiff of potential scandal and, eager to make a name for himself – as a possible parallel to Van Doren himself – does some independent investigating.  His digging leads inevitably to Stempel, who is more than happy to name names, but whose irascible personality makes him a less than ideal witness.  Things get interesting when he interviews Van Doren.  He is clearly suspicious, but no hard evidence appears…until he watches an old clip of a previous Twenty-One contestant who appears to give an answer the host was not expecting…

I don’t know how relevant this is, but I feel compelled to observe that director Redford seems to have phoned in a lot of favors when it came to casting Quiz Show.  In addition to the fine performances from the leads (Rob Morrow is outgunned by Turturro and Fiennes, but he holds his own), the supporting cast reads like a Woody Allen picture: David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald (perfectly cast as the smarmy, superficial host of Twenty-One), Mira Sorvino, Martin freaking Scorsese, and walk-ons by Timothy Busfield, Ernie Sabella, Barry Levinson, Mario Cantone, Illeana Douglas, Calista Flockhart, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Ethan Hawke.  Redford clearly wanted to make sure his canvas was deep and well-drawn, and not just with the impeccable period production design.

But to what end?  I went into Quiz Show thinking it would involve a much deeper conspiracy than just two showrunners who, following orders from corporate, simply bribed several contestants to follow a scripted playbook.  About halfway through the movie, I realized there was not going to be much more to that part of the story, and we were going to follow the lawyer on his quest to uncover the truth, and I was like, “…that’s it?”  Does that make me guilty of criticizing the movie that I wanted it to be, instead of criticizing the movie itself?  I’m not sure.  Rightly or wrongly, I felt the movie wanted me to empathize or sympathize, or one of the -izes, with Van Doren.  But I was not moved to goosebumps by Van Doren’s final speech at the end of the film.  I found myself siding more with the committee member who says, “I don’t think an adult of your intelligence ought to be commended for simply, at long last, telling the truth.”

(I suppose a case could be made that the whole film is a parable for Watergate, still several years in the future; Nixon is name-dropped a few times.  The end credits inform us that NBC and Twenty-One’s sponsor, Geritol, were never indicted because their underlings claimed full responsibility for their actions, much like Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the rest.  Does the buried subtext of America’s lost innocence make Quiz Show a better film?  Maybe a little, but only when you stand back from it, not while you’re watching it.)

ANOTHER WOMAN (1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
CAST: Gena Rowlands, Mia Farrow, Ian Holm, Blythe Danner, Betty Buckley, Martha Plimpton, John Houseman, Sandy Dennis, Philip Bosco
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 59%

PLOT: Facing a mid-life crisis, a woman becomes drawn to the plight of a pregnant woman seeking psychiatric help from the shrink next door.


Woody Allen’s Another Woman is the first movie I can remember that compelled me to do a little background research before writing about it.  It is moody, somber, theatrical, and by far the least funny of Allen’s films that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen Blue Jasmine).  It falls in that part of his career when he was delving into more dramatic fare; September had been released the year before, and Crimes and Misdemeanors would come a year later.  There is none of the charm and lightness of his earlier comedies, which may account for why I’ve never seen it mentioned alongside his other films whenever his filmography is discussed.  And yet, I was curiously drawn into this story to such a degree that when two revelations arrive almost on top of each other, I gasped.

Another Woman tells a brief chapter in the life of Marion (Gena Rowlands), a middle-aged woman married to Ken (Ian Holm).  Marion is Ken’s second wife; she was literally the “other woman” that caused Ken to divorce his first wife, Kathy, played by Betty Buckley in a single devastating scene that vividly showcases the guilt that Marion and Ken have both learned to live with in different ways: Ken gently accepts Kathy’s “condemnation”, while Marion buries the guilt deep.

Marion is a professor of philosophy at a local university.  To work quietly on a new book, she rents a small one-bedroom flat nearby and uses it as her office.  However, through a trick of acoustics, she realizes she can hear voices coming from the flat next door through an air vent on the floor.  It’s a psychiatrist’s office, and she is suddenly privy to intensely personal conversations with his patients.  (I was reminded for a minute of Rear Window.)  One such patient is Mia Farrow, playing a character whose name I won’t reveal because it’s barely mentioned in the film for a reason.  She is pregnant, and during her sessions, she reveals doubts about her identity and/or purpose in life.

For Marion, who has always been sure about everything and everyone in her life, Farrow’s confession strikes a nerve, and the rest of the film consists of Marion’s struggle to reconcile her perception of herself and her well-constructed life with how everyone else truly sees her.  Throughout the movie, people are telling her how wrong she is about her relationships with her divorced brother, with an old friend, with her own husband, with her best friend, even with the Mia Farrow character.  Has she been deceiving herself her entire life?

Okay, so this subject matter isn’t exactly a barnburner.  But consider how the movie looks and moves, and the performances from Gena Rowlands and her supporting cast (it’s Rowlands’s movie to win or lose).  Look at the warm, yet subdued lighting schemes, shot by Ingmar Bergman’s favorite cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.  (Allen is a huge Bergman fan – indeed, this film is actually a loose reinterpretation of Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries [1957].) Interiors look, not sad, exactly, but…lived in.  Bright sunlight is only ever seen from inside through a window.  Exteriors look as if Allen specifically waited for overcast days to shoot.  Everything matches Marion’s internal gloom as she re-examines her life.

At the center of the film is a dream sequence that feels more like a foreign film than anything I’ve ever seen from an American film.  Marion dreams she is in an old stage theater, where figures from her circle of family and friends are rehearsing a play based on moments in her life.  Is this self-indulgence from Allen?  Maybe.  The dialogue in this sequence is so formal and, I guess, elliptical at times that it almost feels as if it were something translated into English from another language.  Vincent Canby of The New York Times called this out, saying, “The rounded sentences sound as if they’d been written in a French influenced by Flaubert, then translated into English by a lesser student of Constance Garnett.”  I’ll probably understand this criticism more when I learn who Constance Garnett is, but I get his point.  However, while it was noticeable, I did not find it distracting.  I thought it was a fair interpretation of how our dreams rarely follow strict logic.  Marion’s dream is structured, but the content is skewed.  I was fascinated by it.

Do I think this is a movie you need to see?  Who can say.  I’m glad I saw it, at least.  It shows a side of Allen’s directorial psyche I had never seen before, even though I had read about it from many other sources.  And it inspired me to do a little introspection of my own, which is something, I guess.  The movie’s final scene includes a beautifully loaded question: “…I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you’ve lost.”  Marion has been asking herself this question the whole movie without realizing it.  I wonder if my answer would be the same as hers.  Or yours.

CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

By Marc S. Sanders

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan finds himself in an inadvertent private war between the United States and Colombian drug kingpins in Clear And Present Danger.  Harrison Ford returns as the heroic government operative. I like this film for much of the same reasons I liked the prior Jack Ryan pictures.  These movies give an inside view of internal politics within Congress, the CIA and inside the hallowed halls and Oval Office of The White House.  The Clancy adaptations are not just about action set ups and shootouts.  Though we are treated to plenty of that material as well.

The film opens with a luxury yacht being raided by the Coast Guard. They uncover Colombian killers that have murdered a wealthy American and his family for reasons of a failing partnership with drug dealers.  The incident can be bridged to the President played by Donald Moffat, a terrific character actor who also shared the screen with Ford in Mike Nichols’ Regarding Henry. He secretly initiates a retaliation for what has occurred while also insisting on collecting over six hundred and fifty million dollars he feels the US is entitled to, following his friend’s murder.  Henry Czerny, playing a carbon copy of his role in Mission: Impossible, headlines the covert plot and recruits a mercenary named John Clark (Willem Dafoe) to place a clandestine militant team into the South American jungles to take out the drug runners one by one.

The suit and tie formal dynamics fall on Jack Ryan when he swears testimony on the legitimacy of the country’s response.  However, the President’s armament exercises are unbeknownst to Jack.  When it finally dawns on him what has been occurring, into the field Jack Ryan goes to clean up the mess.

A lot of spinning plates structure the storytelling of Clear And Present Danger which is on par with Clancy’s thousand-page novels.  There’s an abundance of characters to address, betrayals to happen and even the mechanics of various weaponry and policy decisions that need exploring, despite the innate complexities of it all.  It can feel overwhelming.  However, with this film, as well as with The Hunt For Red October and Patriot Games, I feel included.  If you’re patient through the exposition and set ups, then these fictional controversies become very absorbing, and you feel like you’re there.  

There’s a great scene between Ford and Czerny racing to download vs delete some suspicious files on a computer.  These guys are in their boring offices, dressed in their boring suits and they’re clicking on the mouse pad and typing away on the keyboard.  Director Phillip Noyce gets nail biting back and forth closeups on each guy as they are off to the races trying to get ahead of each other.  Then it becomes a yelling match in the hallway with threats of prosecution between both men, and I feel I’m in on the whole thing.

There is also a good amount of internal conversations between the main drug czar (Miguel Sandoval) and his top henchman (Joaquim de Almeida).  Almeida’s role is written very well as we witness how smart and resourceful he is while protecting the best interests of his employer.

For the most part, the action is nothing special.  However, the highlight of the whole film involves an SUV convoy getting ambushed by Colombian terrorists mounted on rooftops firing missiles at the government vehicles below.  Harrison Ford prefers to do as much stunt work as possible and it definitely helps the ten-minute sequence.  This is an outstanding part of the picture with perfect editing of sound and photography. Later on, we see Ford leap on to the landing gear of an ascending helicopter. Very impressive. Harrison Ford always does his best to invest himself in his movies.

I also admire many of the explosions that went into the Special Forces’ continuing storyline of sabotaging the drug lords’ laboratories and various locales. Nothing is miniaturized here, and the resulting blasts are really big and eye opening. This movie did not shortchange on anything it was attempting to accomplish.

The film adaptation of Clancy’s fourth book takes some major liberties.  In the novel, the story is primarily focused on John Clark and his mission, with Jack Ryan not appearing until after the midway point.  However, at this stage of Harrison Ford’s career there was no way he’d accept just a supporting role.  The notable changes hold well within the screenplay though, and a showdown between Jack Ryan and the President is one for the ages.

Overall, Clear And Present Danger was a successful picture at the box office. Critics and Clancy fans alike had favorable responses to the picture.  So, it’s disappointing that producers decided to try numerous reinventions of the Jack Ryan franchise subsequentially.  Those other movies, along with a TV show, would prove well.  Yet, it is regrettable that Harrison Ford, or at least this interpretation of the hero, did not move on through Tom Clancy’s ongoing stories transcending within other areas of government and espionage.  If you have read the books, then maybe you recall the unbelievable ending to Without Remorse.  Boy, would I have loved to see what Harrison Ford did with the cliffhanger that closed out that book. Care to know? Then this Unpaid Movie Critic suggests you pick up a book.

NOTE OF TRIVIA: James Horner conducts the music for this film and he includes samples that were used in the beginning of Aliens. Interesting to catch this as the music works for both a science fiction piece, as well as for a political thriller.

TRUE BELIEVER (1989)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Joseph Ruben
CAST: James Woods, Robert Downey Jr., Margaret Colin, Yuji Okumoto, Kurtwood Smith
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Fresh

PLOT: A cynical former civil liberties attorney, now reduced to “specializing” in defending drug dealers, becomes transformed by an eight-year-old murder case.


I don’t know if True Believer counts as a “forgotten” film in today’s world, but it’s certainly not a movie that I hear mentioned anymore.  Directed by genre-hopping journeyman Joseph Ruben, whose films are more recognizable than he is (Dreamscape, The Stepfather, Sleeping with the Enemy), and anchored by James Woods and Robert Downey Jr., True Believer is a solid entry in the crime/courtroom drama/thriller arena, at least in broad strokes.  However, there are momentary lapses of logic that strain credulity, and despite the momentum of everything around them, they were enough to affect my opinion/impression of the movie.

After a flashback and prologue that introduces us to his future client, we meet Eddie Dodd (James Woods), a fiery former civil liberties attorney who once defended Black Panthers and other social revolutionaries in the 1960s.  Now, at the tail end of the ‘80s, in the waning days of the “Me Generation”, he specializes in defending drug dealers and/or distributors under the guise of painting the government’s use of wiretaps and undercover agents as invasions of privacy…a shabby attempt at investing his sleazy client list with some sort of social nobility.  Into his life comes an aspiring attorney, Roger Baron (future Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr., looking fresh and innocent during what must have been one of his infamous rough patches).  Roger idolizes the old Eddie Dodd, the idealist, and is severely disillusioned by the current Eddie, the opportunist.

Things change, though, when a Korean mother and daughter track Eddie down and ask him to defend their son and brother, Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto, The Karate Kid Part II, Better Off Dead), who is eight years into a prison term for a murder they say he didn’t commit.  The daughter says she tracked him down by going to all the courthouses: “They all speak of you, and they all say the same thing…you do cases cheap.”  He dismisses them with a vague promise to “review the material,” but after some predictable prodding from Roger, his new conscience incarnate, he takes the case.

What follows is a well-directed, well-paced mystery-slash-courtroom thriller.  It’s not fancy or especially slick, but it held my interest, which is all I ask of a mystery where I’m expected to keep track of a lot of information.  And there is a lot of information to keep track of.  Eddie and Roger, with the assistance of their P.I., Kitty (the invaluable Margaret Colin), uncover inconsistencies in witness accounts, inconsistencies from their own client, the involvement of the Aryan Army, a bona fide conspiracy theorist who believes the phone company killed Kennedy, and a possible link to an 8-year-old drug bust.  (That’s about all I can say about the plot without ruining the surprises of the evidence chain.)

As I said before, the movie is solid, but they made one major misstep: casting the talented Kurtwood Smith as opposing counsel, D.A. Robert Reynard.  From his first scene, no matter how nicely he smiles or how friendly he seems, he is obviously the bad guy, because it’s Kurtwood Smith.  Because of his mere presence, you know he’s not to be trusted and must be brought low, no matter how logical his courtroom arguments are.  He is clearly the villain, even if he’s not doing anything truly wrong.  So right away, any possible objectivity about who’s right and who’s wrong is skewed.  It would have been more interesting if the ostensible bad guy had been cast by someone who is at least a little ambiguous.  Just my two cents.

There are other issues.  As the investigation progresses, there is an anguished speech from Eddie to Shu Kai Kim that spells out exactly where the title of the movie comes from and ends with some tortured dialogue that must have looked good on the page, but just doesn’t feel right coming out of James Woods’s mouth.   In another scene, Eddie walks away from two armed men who have every reason to shoot him in the back but inexplicably choose not to, presumably due to a sudden attack of conscience.  Given what these two men had done just previously, this inaction seemed wildly improbable.  Then the D.A., whom we have seen is highly intelligent, allows himself to get cornered in the courtroom when he absolutely should not have.  Not the actions of a smart man…but certainly the actions of the clear villain, because it’s Kurtwood Smith.

Because of these inconsistencies, True Believer will probably never be mentioned in the same breath with Jagged Edge or The Verdict or any other great courtroom thriller.  But the performances from the leads are more than adequate (despite James Woods’s incongruous ponytail), and the mystery is fun to unravel, and Joseph Ruben’s direction is competent if not splashy.  In other words, it’s your slightly above-average ‘80s genre movie.  (And I am sometimes a sucker for ‘80s nostalgia, so…there you go.)

TALK RADIO (1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone
CAST: Eric Bogosian, Ellen Greene, John C. McGinley, Alec Baldwin, Michael Wincott
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 82% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A rude, contemptuous talk show host becomes overwhelmed by the hatred that surrounds his program just before it goes national.


Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio is entertaining and, at times, mesmerizing without being an altogether enjoyable experience.  I salute the craft of the film and the bravura performance by Eric Bogosian, reprising the role he created on Broadway, but despite my high score, I’m not quite sure to whom I would recommend this film.  I believe it’s an important placeholder in Stone’s filmography, coming as it does after Wall Street and before Born on the Fourth of July.  It shows immense faith in the material and portrays its characters with brutal honesty.  The closest comparison I can make is to the Safdie Brothers film Uncut Gems.  Both films are fraught with tension, featuring unlikable fast-talking main characters who tend to step on or over or around the people closest to them to achieve their goal, or sometimes just to get their own way.  They’re fascinating to watch and listen to, but I would not want to be stuck in an elevator with them.

Talk Radio centers on a Dallas radio shock jock named Barry Champlain.  Bogosian’s look and performance seems so closely modeled on Howard Stern that I’m surprised Stern didn’t sue the filmmakers for not obtaining his permission to do so.  (In fact, the Barry character is modeled after real life talk show host Alan Berg, who was gunned down by an ultra-right-wing group in 1984.)  The whole first “act” of the film takes place in and around the broadcasting booth where Barry holds court, listening to and berating callers from all walks of life on topics ranging from “I Love Lucy” to the war on drugs to Holocaust deniers to one dude who eats dinner with his cat every night.  If nothing else, this sequence boosted my respect for anyone in Barry’s line of work.  To be able to take calls from random folks with random issues, and to somehow spin their questions or problems into a mini-monologue or diatribe that manages to entertain or offend – usually both – the caller or the listening audience – usually both – is a skill I will never possess.  (Bogosian’s voice is tailor-made for the role, a nice sweet-spot baritone that sounds as if he’s been doing radio for years.)

Mixed in with the calls are the ones from clear-cut racists, warning Barry that they know where he lives, that they know “Champlain” is not his real last name, calling him Jew-boy and “f—-t”, sending him packages in the mail and claiming they’re bombs.  One loathsome item is sent to him wrapped in a Nazi flag.  Other callers don’t seem to have any affiliation at all aside from their utter hatred of Barry Champlain.  There’s a scene where Barry has been invited to a public event to introduce someone.  The moment he takes the stage, there are a few cheers that are eventually drowned out by a sea of boos and jeers in concert with a hailstorm of food and garbage thrown by the audience.  Barry has the nerve to look a little shocked.  I remember thinking, “How can you not expect this kind of reception?”

But then I remember thinking, about the audience members this time, “Well, if you hate him so much, why are you listening to his show?”  The movie is making a statement about the bizarre relationship between the general public and entertainment celebrities that they “love to hate.”  It seems to me their lives would be infinitely happier and less angry if they just switched over to NPR or smooth jazz once in a while.  No one forces them, or anyone, to engage with a TV show or movie or radio show or anything else they don’t like.  But with Barry, and presumably many other shock jocks in real life, people seem to need them, to use them as an excuse, I guess, to get riled up, to feel fueled by righteous anger.  The shock jocks are handy targets, especially because the callers can remain anonymous, much like social media.

There is a long rant from Barry himself about this phenomenon late in the film.  There was a plan for his show to go national, but it has been derailed for nebulous reasons, and so a broadcast intended for the entire country is still confined to the Dallas area.  After an ill-advised guest appearance by a stoned idiot (Michael Wincott!) and a couple of calls that go completely off the rails, Barry loses it and tells his listeners:

“You’re happiest when others are in pain.  That’s where I come in, isn’t it?  I’m here to lead you by the hands through the dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation.  I’m providing a public service. … I come in here every night, I tear into you, I abuse you, I insult you, you just keep coming back for more.  What’s wrong with you, why do you keep calling?”

In another movie, that kind of rant might skew towards comedy.  Here, it serves as a painful peek into the psyche of a man who has a job that he’s good at, but there’s a part of him that despises himself for it, and that self-loathing has overflowed the boundaries of his own soul onto and over his listeners.  Even he can’t understand what his audience is thinking. I found myself wondering if any other shock jocks out there might feel this way.  I wonder if this might be one of Howard Stern’s favorite movies, or if it was one of Don Imus’s favorites.  I have never listened to either one of their shows because…well, because that’s my right as a human being.  But I wonder, nevertheless.

As I said before, I admire the craft of the film.  Stone and his collaborators (especially cinematographer Robert Richardson) do a great job with creative camera angles, lighting, and editing for those long stretches of the film where we simply sit and listen to Barry Champlain talking to that endless stream of callers.  Most of those calls end threateningly or are threatening throughout.  This has the effect of creating tension almost out of thin air, a tension that suffuses the entire film.  Are we going to get a maniac who takes Barry hostage on the air?  When Barry unwisely invites a listener to come down to the station and appear on the air, we’re thinking, “You idiot, he’s going to kill you!”  Even if none of that happens, we’re worried about it the entire time.  While this method is an effective use of cinema, as I said before, I cannot honestly say I had a “good time” watching it.  When the ending comes and the final credits roll, I will carefully say that there was a sense of relief, not at how it ended, but just relief that it ended.

Talk Radio is a well-made film featuring a stellar performance from Eric Bogosian.  If you sit down to watch it, I believe you will feel exactly what Oliver Stone meant for you to feel.  Just don’t expect it to tickle.

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (1957)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: John Sturges
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland, DeForest Kelley, and a young bit player named Dennis Hopper
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Fresh

PLOT: Lawman Wyatt Earp and outlaw Doc Holliday form an unlikely alliance which culminates in their participation in the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.


In real life, the legendary gunfight at the O.K Corral in the frontier town of Tombstone lasted thirty seconds, but what kind of movie would that be?  (Kill Bill: Vol. 2 springs to mind…)  A 1950’s Western requires a long-to-medium shot of the good guys – Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday – striding down the street to meet the challenge of the dastardly Clantons, who had gunned down Wyatt’s youngest brother in cold blood.  We need a gunfight, not too long, but longer than 30 seconds.  And we need to make sure the ratio of surviving bad guys to good guys is just right: 0 to all.

John Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral delivers the goods in a remarkably mature film for its time, free (for the most part) of cheap sentimentality and distractions from the main plot.  That’s a double-edged sword, though: we rarely leave the side of either Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, but the result is we get little to no information about Earp’s brothers until the final reel, nor do we get many details about Earp’s romance with the lovely Laura Denbow, a high-class gambler who knows enough about cards to beat the men at their own game.  We only find out they’re engaged as an afterthought, it seems.

As for Doc Holliday’s relationship with Kate Fisher (Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet), the word “dysfunctional” is woefully inadequate.  Loosely based on Holliday’s real mistress, referred to only as “Big Nose Kate” on Wikipedia, she seems to exist only to serve as Holliday’s psychological punching bag when required.  Her emotional yo-yoing gave me whiplash: she pledges her unending devotion in one scene, tries to stab him in another, helps him escape a lynch mob, takes up with the loathsome Johnny Ringo after yet another fight, begs to be taken back, and eventually tells him, “I’ll see you dead!”  With friends like these…

But even that kind of sordid melodrama is not enough to derail the throughline of the film, which is focused intently on establishing the rocky relationship between the morally good Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) – who nevertheless wears a black hat the entire film – and the morally chaotic Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas), a professional gambler who leaves a string of dead bodies behind him, all killed in self-defense, of course.  Earp also helps get Holliday out of town before a mob can lynch him, so Holliday decides to stick around until the debt is paid.

I think the essence of their relationship is summed up in a scene where Earp is forced to deputize Holliday when no other options are available.  Earp reluctantly walks up to Doc, tells him to raise his right hand, and says, “Do you solemnly swear to uphold…oh, this is ridiculous.  You’re deputized.”  Doc: “Wait a minute, don’t I get to wear a tin star?”  Earp: “Not on your life!”  Both men are torn between their philosophy and their sense of honor.  Holliday is no hero, but he’ll help Wyatt until his debt is paid.  Earp despises Holliday’s moral code, but he’s the best gunslinger in town.  What can you do?

All of this is handled in dialogue that seems mostly uncluttered by the hokey clichés I’ve heard in so many other films of the 1950s, even some of the great ones.  This may perhaps be due to the fact the screenplay was written by Leon Uris, a novelist who would eventually go on to write, among many others, Exodus, Topaz, and QB VII.  Listening to the characters talk, it was interesting to hear how natural they sounded, compared to the overblown melodrama of so many other westerns and dramas of that era.  The dialogue was clearly written by someone with a writer’s ear, who wants to get to the point of every scene with a minimum of fuss or flowery exposition.

As I mentioned, however, this quest for directness means we spend all our time with Earp and Holliday and almost no time at all with the Clantons or Earp’s brothers or anyone else.  By the time we hear Wyatt’s brother, Virgil, is in trouble, we’ve almost forgotten he HAS brothers.  As far as the Clantons go, we hear everything about them secondhand until we finally meet them in Tombstone.  We never even see Wyatt propose to Laura; we barely even see them courting (their courtship appears to consist of one false arrest and one kiss in the moonlight).

And I would be remiss if I did not mention…that song.  I learn from IMDb that the song, “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” that plays over the opening and closing credits, and which also plays over any transitional scene as Earp moves from one town to the next, was one of the inspirations for the theme song for Mel Brooks’s parody Blazing Saddles.  Brooks even got the original artist, Frankie Laine, to sing for his own movie.  It is so corny and earnest, juxtaposed against the gritty characters and scenery, that any sequence featuring that song loses all credibility.  If the filmmakers had just ditched that song, I might consider this one of the greatest Westerns of all time.  (see also Rio Bravo with Ricky Nelson’s crooning.)

But…having said all that, I must report that Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was entertaining from start to finish.  By avoiding the temptations to give in to melodrama and hokeyness, we are presented with a surprisingly solid Western drama that culminates in a decent (for the late ‘50s) gun battle.  It’s not as flashy as anything from one of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, and it’s not quite as thrilling as the one at the end of 1993’s Tombstone, but it’s satisfying, nevertheless.

(And for the record, when it comes to memorable lines, against Val Kilmer’s immortal “I’m your huckleberry”, I would gladly put Kirk Douglas’s venomous, “You slut!” …you have to see it in context, trust me.)