E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES

April 9, 2004

The Wrath of Grips

THE GRAPES OF WRATH
As auteurism heads into its 50th year (roughly), I think it may well be time to reassess many of the directors originally heralded by the first auteur critics. And the reasons for doing so are the very success of the auteurist approach to cinema in the first place.

As more and more reviewers through the '70s isolated the director as the driving force behind films, the director became more powerful within the industry and good directors were then freer to display their personality. The films of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino are much more readily identifiable as belong to them than, say, Bigger Than Life is as a Nicholas Ray film. Ray's film still shows Ray's hand; but it is still masked behind the studio sheen. The original point of auteurism was to unveil the distinct filmic personalities hidden behind the rules and style of the studio system. With the collapse of the traditional studio system, and changes in various social mores, there was no longer any need to stay hidden, especially when films were often promoted as the work of this or that director.

Looking back now in light of the often stylish films of today, many old studio films by notable "auteurs" now seem distinctly bland. For example, I think that George Cukor is a terribly overrated director. From GASLIGHT to MY FAIR LADY, his films tend to be bland with no discernible "personality," no issues or concerns that follow him from film to film, despite the cast, the story, or the studio. This was a man who actually thrived under the studio system because it meant that numerous technicians would do all his work for him. It is inconceivable that a modern director such as Robert Rodriguez would allow so much of a film to be crafted by anonymous technicians.

Another director who might bear some reassessment is John Ford. I like several of his films but his reputation within, for example, film publishing, strikes me as all out of proportion to his actual achievement. Without minimizing his importance to film history, it's interesting to wonder aloud if Ford still qualifies as a "Pantheon" director (and the same might be asked of Howard Hawks, whose films are entertaining, but which are in their way more fantastical than science fiction in their view of conduct, relations between the sexes, and the life of the mind. Part of the problem is the rash of director bios that have emerged. Born of an honest interest in the lives of these creators, the bios end up diminishing the careers of Hawks, Ford, Lang, and others by giving us the warts (a necessary condition of a faithful biography) along with the work. I find it a little less easy to admire Ford knowing that he was capriciously cruel to many of his employees, from grips to actors, though Joseph McBride makes a valiant attempt to portray this as a conscious technique to elicit certain performances from his cast.

McBride also pops up on Fox's new Studio Classic release (No. 17) of THE GRAPES OF WRATH. He gives a detailed account of the film's making (a reflection of his excellent biography, SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD), as does his associate on the track, Susan Shillinglaw, a Steinbeck scholar who concentrates more on the source novel. The rest of the extras on this single two-sided disc include the film's British territory text prologue, the A&E channel's BIOGRAPHY on producer Darryl F. Zanuck, three drought reports from 1934 from MovieTone News (including outtakes), some footage of FDR at the Academy Awards banquet, the theatrical trailer, stills gallery, restoration comparison, and trailers for other Fox Studio Classics. The transfer is luminous (though others have criticized some flaws), with audio options consisting of DD 2.0 stereo and the original mono. It comes in a numbered keep-case, hit the street Tuesday, April 6, and retails for a mere $14.98.

But back to Ford. GRAPES OF WRATH is a good test case of old and new auteurism because basically it is really a Zanuck film. It was produced at his studio, he bought the "property," he assigned Ford to direct it and interfered with the casting. He also shot some additional footage for the ending. Yet over the years it has come to seem more and more like a Ford film because the Joad family resembles the kind of poor Irish farmers Ford celebrated in some of his other films. Even Gregg Toland's photography seems today to be quintessentially Fordian, even though it was the first time they worked together.

Ford later made numerous films of a personal nature, such as THE QUIET MAN. And that's just the sort of thing I want out of a filmmaker: a personal film in which he is invested in the materials at hand. Obviously given the conditions of the studio system, that couldn't often be the case. It was the job of producers to round up subjects, cast them, and pick directors. That's why Orson Welles is the ultimate auteur. RKO basically said, Make a movie, any movie, and he conceived it (with help from others) from the ground up. The next level of authorship within the studio system itself is the writer-director (Sturges, Wilder), followed by the director who did anonymous writing on his pictures. And below that it's all hired hands and hacks. God, there were a lot of them!

I'm not suggesting that Ford and Hawks necessarily be devalued. However, I am suggesting that film students learn more about how movies were made in the old days, and that films by these directors be segregated into studio and personal films, and also that some filmmakers, such as Samuel Fuller, also a Fox director but whose films have a distinctive visual flair that is Fuller's alone, might be revalued as Pantheon material.

A Nightmare on Main Street

THE CHASE
Arthur Penn's film of a screenplay by Lillian Hellman adapted from a play from Horton Foote is another exploration of southern life. But unlike Ford's jaunt into Steinbeck country, Penn's film has the ambition of an epic novel. The story has a unity of time and place, and looks at several social strata in a small Texas town. It's the kind of movie that Preminger might do (in fact, he did an epic novel adaptation in HURRY SUNDOWN, also with Jane Fonda), and has a "social conscience" like a Stanley Kramer film, but without the crude plot mechanics.

It's a terrific film. THE CHASE has a great cast (including Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, Robert Duvall, and James Fox) that includes a lot of faces later to gain prominence even in different fields, a complex and intricate story, and a social conscience. I can't understand why people seem to hate it.

Reviewers lambasted THE CHASE when it first came out. The fact that Penn disowned it didn't help. The film was seized by the studio and edited strictly to the script, with the editors usually using the first takes, which were more literal, rather than later takes, where Penn says actors such as Brando and Fonda shone. Later it was released in a truncated form that made much of cease to make sense. Now it's out on DVD and getting lambasted all over again. Calling it overwrought and lumbering other epithets, reviewers are shitting on it again, but far from being a "Hollywood train wreck" by the guy who was fired from THE TRAIN, THE CHASE may well be the great American movie. Meanwhile, contemporary DVD reviewers can't even be bothered to concentrate on the film: one reviewer wrote that the eventual singer-songwriter Paul Williams, who is in the film, plays the son of Duvall's character, when in fact Williams simply plays a next door neighbor. Complaints that the source play had been "opened up" with irrelevant scenes featuring Robert Redford on the run are also short-sighted because in fact Hellman's screenplay is a complete revision of the play, a talky boring static play in which most of the relationships are different (for example Redford's character is a villain not a hapless scamp, and the Sheriff shoots him, not one of the vigilantes).

I've been interested in THE CHASE for a long time. I saw it once at the drive-in when I was a kid, and then many times on the small screen. With the advent of digital technology it became a dream DVD. I was gratified many years ago to come across Robin Wood's small book on Penn and find that Wood esteemed THE CHASE as much as I did. In his recently updated book, HOLLYWOOD FROM VIETNAM TO REAGAN AND BEYOND, he dedicates another chapter to THE CHASE, though this time less from an auteurist position than from a political and feminist perspective.

One of the reasons that critics and auteur oriented reviewers don't like THE CHASE may be because as a social protest film it is all on the surface. There appears to be no thematic or visual directorial input that, say, a Sirk, would insert. It is what it is. Still, Robin Wood was able to point out that the triangle that arises among Redford, Fonda, and Fox is potentially progressive. But the backward social mores that make the town so etiolated destroy the trio before their notions can even take root. The film is a tragedy of injustice, not just of the legal system, but of social change.

It also baffles me that anyone could think that Brando is bad in a film in which he is in fact brilliant (his last truly great role until THE GODFATHER), and in a film that bears so many outstanding performances. Brando is beautiful to look at. He moves wonderfully, and his face is a symphony of subtle and varied expressions. He also plays an admirable character, with a solid, supportive wife (as in that other Great American Movie, JAWS, also about a small town cop fighting corruption). It's true that Brando had a hard time with the film and was also disappointed in the performance that the editors shaped, but one only knows that by reading Manso's bio. The knowledge that the screen itself provides is that Brando is brilliant.

Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment offers THE CHASE in a rich if grainy anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) enhanced for wide screen televisions, with DD 2.0 audio. It's the complete version of the film before it was re-edited and re-released, the cuts delineated in Wood's book on Arthur Penn. Extras are restricted to trailers for other Sony DVD releases. This is unfortunate, because there are plenty of things to put on the disc. I remember seeing a 20-minute promotional film about THE CHASE on TV back in the old days, and that must be around somewhere. Robin Wood could have done an audio track. The package comes in a keep-case, hit the streets on February 24th, and retails for $24.96.

Playing CHARADE

CHARADE
Another example of the strength of performance over material is Stanley Donen and Peter Stone's Hitchcock pastiche CHARADE. There are about as many versions of CHARADE out there on DVD as there are names for Cary Grant's character, but the premiere edition is the one from the Criterion Collection, which features a fine transfer and a commentary track by a bantering Donen and Stone. The only problem with it (as with some of the low digit early Criterion DVDs) is that it was no "anamorphic," i.e., enhanced for wide screen televisions.

That situation has been rectified by TCC, which has re-issued its disc with a new transfer (the disc was temporarily embargoed thanks to the release of the recent remake of the film called THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE). Unfortunately, I have a funny feeling that the non-anamorphic transfer was a tad better.

The new transfer looks to these amateur eyes to be a little darker and less sharp. I looked at it both on a TV and a computer screen, and compared it to the old Criterion disc I had, and I continued to get the same results. It's not a bad transfer, but still somewhat less vivid than the early one. But I am just speculating on a hypothesis; I know I don't know nothing.

Except for a different label and some changes o the language on the back of the box, this is the same disc as the original spine No. 57, that is, the 1999 commentary with Donen and Stone, the essay "The Films of Stanley Donen" by Stephen M. Silverman, some notes about Peter Stone's career, and the theatrical trailer, and color bars. The disc retails for $39.95, and hit the street Tuesday, April 6.

The Passion of the Heist

RANSOM
THE SINGING DETECTIVE
MEL GIBSON'S PASSION
Mel Gibson has been around just about as long as I have been reviewing movies. I started a short lived film magazine about the time Corman released MAD MAX here; and while I was reviewing movies for a weekly newspaper there was at least one if not two Gibson films a year. I can't say that I was ever really particularly fond of him in any of his non-Mad Max roles. He came across to me like a smart ass frat boy who slipped into movies because of his looks and didn't take his profession particularly seriously. When he "stretched" by taking serious roles, he became more masochistic, which struck me as his idea of what "serious" means, weak instead of strong.

But it turns out that Gibson did have a passion — for The Christ. After first bringing the life of The Bruce to the screen in BRAVEHEART (and being duly rewarded with an Oscar), Gibson eventually moved on to his real masochistic idol, Jesus.

In the Diane Sawyer ABC interview, Gibson allows as how he was a bad boy for a long time, and that maybe he didn't take his movies too seriously. At the same time, Gibson comes across like a madman, popping his eyes and shaking his head and doing humorless voices. He's like a drug addict with Tourette's Syndrome. It's all a defensive posture, and movie stars aren't used to being defensive. Generally they are interviewed by carefully selected "journalists" who lob softball questions at them. The controversy around THE CHRIST, self-generated or not, still required some public account of himself and his intentions, and ABC gave him a good forum to do so.

MPI's DVD of the 40 minute ABC interview is the perfect package. It's just long enough to give the illusion of information, and just enough to raise serious concerns about Gibson's stability. It could have been just a supplement on the PASSION DVD, but so many people are interested in the movie that packaging it separate is in fact a rather brilliant idea. There are no extras on the $14.95 disc. It is an extra.

Coincidentally or not, Touchstone-Buena Vista has re-issued the 1996 Ron Howard-Mel Gibson remake RANSOM, both in a year of official and unofficial remakes and also at the height of a CHRIST mania. It's kind of a wacky performance from Gibson, one that in a sense anticipates his wacky stress-induced performances on television promoting PASSION. He plays a flawed character (he is corrupt, and spends a lot of time acting impulsively and then crying), but with enough heroism to satisfy his fans of the time. At one point Gibson says to a kidnapper that he will have "your head on a fucking pike," a shout out to BRAVEHEART, perhaps.

Like an old episode of THE FBI, the film spends as much time on the criminals who have kidnapped young Sean Mullen, son of Gibson's aviation entrepreneur Tom Mullen and of Rene Russo's Kate. They include Gary Sinise, and then up-and-comers Lili Taylor, Liev Schreiber, Donnie Wahlberg, and Evan Handler. Suffice it to say that the criminals are somewhat more interesting. Sinise is truly frightening, and the rest are real characters, with troubles, woes, fears. Gibson's character is "flawed" too, but seems somewhat artificial.

Touchstone Home Entertainment has issued a non-anamorphic transfer of the film, probably the same one they published before. There are numerous extras, from Ron Howard's audio track, to deleted scenes, an offbeat "making of," and various trailers. Howard's audio track is intermittent (there may be an edited-out interlocutor, as his statements sometimes sound like answers to questions). His evaluations are on the order of "[Delroy Lindo] never makes the obvious choices, but is always truthful." He also says that he has never seen a kid pee on a rug, but that trick was used in THE EXORCIST. About the only interesting part of the yakking is when Howard describes the tension on the set with Gibson, who had just won an Oscar for directing BRAVEHEART, where he beat out Howard.

Gibson's company Icon, also produced the American remake of Dennis Potter's British mini-series, THE SINING DETECTIVE. It was a misguided effort. Potter's story is so indigenous, with its account of life in the Forest of Dean, and multi-layers — part musical, part memoir, part mystery, part medical drama — that transferring it to the United States adds noting. In fact, it takes something away, as the main character, a mystery writer suffering from a skin disease, is obsessed with American noir culture as an escape from his adversity.

Gibson gives himself the small part of a psychiatrist attempting to help Robert Downey, Jr.'s, character, but though he is disguised as a balding, bespectacled doc, the weight of his presence throws the character out of proportion to those around him. In the end, I couldn't really care for the film, but don't listen to me. There is a stirring defense of the film inthis story over at Senses of Cinema.com.

Paramount's DVD of THE SINGING DETECTIVE offers a high standard anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with DD 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 Surround audio. There is a commentary track by director Keith Gordon that is actually quite good. Gordon is a former actor and tells a good story. THE SINGING DETECTIVE hit the streets on March 23rd, for $29.95.

Hill of Beans

KING OF THE HILL, SEASON 2
Our roving DVD correspondent Damon Houx writes in with this report:

With the rise of prominence of shows like SEINFELD and FRIENDS, are the days over when every show ended with a big dumb moral?

I hope so, even though it will probably never happen (such moralizing is just too convenient for the system to ever give it up). One of the big problems with television is that it often feels the need to tie up narratives in neat little bows so if someone misses an episode it doesn't matter. It's why shows that work like soap operas (be it TWIN PEAKS or THE SOPRANOS) are usually the best things on TV. They work the way all great television does, by taking the time and energy to give us real characters unencumbered by cinema's running time. Meanwhile, sitcoms have always been the absolute worst about having characters learn life lessons, but after years of these life lessons, the characters tend not be too much smarter for it.

Which is something of the appeal of the snarky fox based animated sitcoms like THE SIMPSONS and KING OF THE HILL. Though they often have their "morals," just as often they undermine their messages.

Another television truism is proved by the release of KING OF THE HILL SEASON TWO, and that is no great show is ever at it's best in it's first couple episodes. Doing research to watch this, I tried sitting through SEASON ONE, and like most first seasons, it was raw, unformed, and reliant on those moral clichés. With SEASON TWO, the characters are better developed, the writers get into the rhythms of the show a little better, and the jokes are more hit than miss, while the writers also do a better job of tossing off the side bits that always make shows like this work. First seasons establishes who the characters are, while each season afterward tweaks those expectations.

The season starts strong with "How to Fire a Rifle Without Really Trying," an episode that allows the show to nudge its Texas characters' relationship with firearms, while focusing on one of the show's main elements: Hank Hill (voiced by Mike Judge) and his awkward relationship with son Bobby (Pamella Seagall), which wife Peggy (Kathy Najimi) can never help out. Here, though, that sort of material connects because it never feels pat. Most of the season is equally strong: "Jumping Crack Bass" has Hank finding a magical fishing technique by accidentally baiting his lures with crack cocaine, while "Husky Bobby" has the boy finding work as a plus size model, to his father's horror. Like most cartoon shows, there are numerous celebrity cameos: "Traffic Jam" features Chris Rock as a traffic school instructor more interested in making jokes about the differences between white people and black people, while "I Remember Mono" features Jennifer Jason Leigh as a girl who may ruin Hank and Peggy's relationship. Perhaps the best episode of the bunch is "Hank's Dirty Laundry" in which Hank is accused of having a 40-dollar late fee for renting a porno.

As someone with an interest in the auteur theory, I wonder how much Mike Judge has to do with this show, both as creator and voice star, All evidence points to "not much" as he's nowhere to be seen in the supplements. The discs feature commentaries for five of the 22 episodes. The first features co-creator Greg Daniels and writer Paul Lieberman, while the rest feature cast commentaries (including regular contributors Brittany Murphy, Stephen Root, Najimy, Seagall, Johnny Hardwick, Toby Huss) done (mostly) in character. Something that always sounds like a good idea.

Each disc features deleted sequences for every episode, sometimes fully rendered, while others show the rough draft animatic version, and all of the discs have director introductions, crudely animated title sequences not meant for the public. Each disc also has an additional supplement. The first disc has an animation evolution multi-angle and audio featurette, the second an art tutorial through the show's main characters, the third excerpts from the book "The Boy Ain't Right," while the fourth disc includes isolated music tracks from the show. I also found one Easter Egg in the fourth disc's bonus features section. The Disc retails for $49.98, and is available now.

NEXT TIME:Numerous STAR TREKS, ROSWELL, and more!

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES