SUMMERFEST '22: Sirk du Soleil

No apologies for the corny title. I’ll be on vacation this weekend and next week, but before I go I wanted to bask in the emotional turgidity of Douglas Sirk’s most saturated technicolor masterpieces. All of these are rewatches and they are all great.

Magnificent Obsession (1954) (rewatch)

Trailers: There’s Always Tomorrow, Thunder on the Hill

This is peak Sirk, with poetically tragic situations and information being withheld from people until it will cause the most devastation. I won’t describe the plot here but it’s like seven or eight soap opera plots rolled into one movie. They really play up what an absolute saint Dr. Philips is and what a shame it is that the horrible Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) survived at his expense. I love that the other doctors and nurses at the hospital treating Merrick say exactly that. I love how the late doctor’s great secret philosophy is basically “do nice things and help people and don’t take credit.” I love that Merrick pledges to adopt this philosophy and after doing one good deed thinks he’s about to get dividends from it. I love Merrick posing as a poor medical student to help the now-blind Helen (Jane Wyman) without her knowing who he is. I love the tortured narrative path that gets us to Merrick *having* to do the surgery because by gosh no one else can do it. And oh man, that ending. Only in a Sirk movie.

All That Heaven Allows (1955) (rewatch)

Trailers: Ali Fear Eats the Soul, Far From Heaven

This is my favorite Sirk and one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever seen. Of course, it’s Sirk’s deliberate indictment of 1950s America and its polite (white) society, so it’s *supposed* to be infuriating. Hudson and Wyman are reunited, with Wyman playing a widow who falls in love with her much younger tree man, played by Hudson, and having to endure the judgment of her snotty friends and the whining of her grown-ass children. Everyone in the movie aside from Hudson and Wyman are trash (well, Agnes Moorehead’s character has her moments). But Wyman’s son and daughter are the LITERAL WORST. Seriously, screw those two and their television “gift.” “Here mom, you clearly don’t have anything else to do because you’re too OLD to be in love and have sex!” I’d forgotten how early they plant the seeds for that, with Wyman’s friend telling her she ought to get a television so she won’t be lonely. In less infuriating news, it was this rewatch that I recognized William Reynolds (who plays the son, Ned) as Gordon from the classic MST3K episode “The Thing That Couldn’t Die.”

Written on the Wind (1956) (rewatch)

Trailers: The Tarnished Angels, Trouble in Paradise

On the surface this looks like pretty Southern Gothic trash, and indeed that seemed to be the general consensus of critics at the time it originally was released. But lurking under all that style is some razor-sharp parody, not unlike Sirk’s previous films (especially All That Heaven Allows). There are some very complex family dynamics that are the centerpiece here, but there are also some complicated romance dynamics and possible unrequited homosexual feelings and maybe even some incest-y vibes. It’s got a fantastic cast that knows exactly what’s expected of them – particularly the indisputable MVP of the whole enterprise, perfect horny queen Dorothy Malone (that last shot of her stroking the oil derrick is *chef’s kiss*). Something I noticed this time was that, in the opening credits, the main cast are introduced as they appear in the opening scene – as in, the scene is happening, we cut to a shot of Rock Hudson reacting to something (title card: Rock Hudson), then the same with Bacall, Stack and Malone. I just thought it was a cool way to introduce us to the main cast, like “hello, you’re watching Rock Hudson! And now you’re watching Lauren Bacall! Now Robert Stack! Now Dorothy Malone!”

Imitation of Life (1959) (rewatch)

Trailers: Imitation of Life (1934), Pinky

There are tons of “daddy issue” movies, but not nearly as many “mommy issue” movies. There used to be, though, and this is one of the best. The “main” story here is Lana Turner, playing Lora, a widow and late-in-life aspiring actress who is raising a young daughter named Susie. She meets Annie, a Black woman who has a daughter of her own, Sarah Jane, who is a couple years older than Susie and passes for white. Even though Turner is the star of the show, Sirk constantly and deliberately pulls the focus away from her to show us more of the life and conflicts of the POC characters. The element of racism is hugely significant to the film, obviously, but I was particularly knocked out this rewatch by the mother-daughter struggles. I have frequently found it difficult to get invested in mother-daughter dynamics in movies, given my own personal not-that-ordinary experience with mother figures in my own life. But I found myself really moved by both Lora’s relationship with Susie and especially Annie’s relationship with Sarah Jane, and I nearly couldn’t watch the end, it was so heartbreaking to me. There are some (probably intentionally) hilarious melodramatic moments in this (“Is a beer can real?”) but for the most part it’s a genuine hanky-destroyer. And that’s even before Mahalia Jackson sings “Trouble of the World.”

SUMMERFEST '22: 90s Westerns

The 1990s brought a renewed interest in westerns and, in turn, a new rush of western films -- some revisionist, some homages, and some in a more modern setting. All but one of these are rewatches, but it’s been a while on all of them.

City Slickers (1991) (rewatch)

Trailers: Romancing the Stone, Crocodile Dundee

I love this movie so much, and it’s one of the most emotional comedies I’ve ever seen. I’d forgotten how many tear-jerking moments there are in this. Curly’s “one thing.” Norman’s mom. Phil’s breakdown. Ed’s best day. Bringing in the herd (complete with Bonanza sing-along). Jack Palance, after an incredible career, finally won an Oscar for this role and it’s a good one. Billy Crystal and his BFFs Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby play besties who are always taking over-adventurous vacations (the movie begins with a Pamplona bull run), and their latest is a cattle drive. I don’t know if people ever actually did this as a vacation, but I completely buy that this is a thing rich people would do for fun. Of course, in addition to being real work to begin with, things get complicated along the way and the group is stranded in the middle of nowhere with a herd of cattle and absolutely none of the people who were supposed to be responsible for them (the cattle *and* the tourists). This works not just as a comedy but as an action movie (a light action movie, I guess) and a western. It’s one of Billy Crystal’s best roles and one of Jack Palance’s best roles (in a career full of them), and the rest of the cast is uniformly great (including a very young Jake Gyllenhall). My one quibble – wow, that closing credits song is a horrible, generic 90s ballad that in no way fits with the movie.

Thelma & Louise (1991) (rewatch)

Trailers: Fried Green Tomatoes, Bound

This came out the same year as Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. And the same year that Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court and Anita Hill gave testimony against him to the Senate Judiciary – and we all know how that turned out. Oh, and it was also around the same time Rush Limbaugh coined the term “feminazis.” A lot of critics at the time clutched their damn pearls over violence they wouldn’t have given two thoughts about if the leads were men. And this movie is all about those kinds of double standards. Thelma and Louise are going on a weekend trip to the mountains, but their plans go to hell when one of them gets into a situation that far too many women find themselves in every day just because some man decides he’s entitled to a woman’s body. Our heroes bounce from one horrible situation to another and are forced to make increasingly worse choices until that infamous ending. Louise, and later in the film Thelma, make a point that is unfortunately still pretty relevant today – that they can’t trust law enforcement to help because no one will believe them. That’s at least part of why the ending actually works for me. A while back, the screenwriter, Callie Khouri, explained that she never saw the ending as literal. "It was a way of saying that this was a world in which they didn't believe there was the possibility of justice for them. … And that this was just a way of letting them go and letting them stay who they were, who they had become. …To me, they got away." The movie was nominated for six Oscars (including for its director, Ridley Scott, and both Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis for Lead Actress – a rare double nomination in that category). And Callie Khouri won for Original Screenplay (alongside Ted Tally’s Adapted Screenplay win for The Silence of the Lambs). It’s a great one and it still holds up, perhaps even more now than 31 years ago. I have loads of favorite moments, but I think the winner is when that disgusting truck driver f***s around and finds out.

Unforgiven (1992) (rewatch)

Trailers: For a Few Dollars More, The Beguiled (1971)

I have found that this one is somewhat controversial. A friend of mine doesn’t refer to it by name but instead calls it “that revisionist drivel.” And it’s certainly a bold step in a genre that had all but played itself out at least a decade before. The spaghetti western had already deromanticized audiences’ lofty notions of the American West, but with those there was still a sense, however slight, of who were the bad guys and who were the good guys (or at least the less bad). And good or bad, most of the heroes were still cool af. No one is cool in Unforgiven. This movie smashes all that to hell. Maybe we identify with some of the behavior but we shouldn’t feel good about it. Nearly every character in this movie is a subversion of what we’re used to seeing in a western and most of them are dripping with moral ambiguity. I feel like the best example of that is Little Bill (played by Gene Hackman, who won his second Oscar for this role). I’ve always thought of him as the villain of this movie, and that’s precisely how the movie presents him (even as we kind of triumph over his ownage of English Bob). But what does he do that’s so wrong here (other than badly building a house)? He just wants the people in his town to live in peace; he's not some oppressor, like Hackman's character in The Quick and the Dead. And yet we want to see him bested by Munny in the end.

Posse (1993)

Trailers: Buck and the Preacher, The Harder They Fall

This is just one of many stories about real American history that desperately need to be told. Like last year’s The Harder They Fall, this is an attempt to preserve (or perhaps restore would be a better word) a record that there were indeed Black cowboys in the Old West, and they have so many stories that have gone ignored for many many years (as the film’s closing text states). The cast is stacked with tons of legends, many of whom are in small roles and are, frankly, underused (blink and you’ll miss Pam Grier). There is some good camera work, but I wish this were a better movie. As important as telling this story is – not to mention the importance of having a Black filmmaker tell it – director Mario van Peebles doesn’t seem as interested in the story as he is in flashy camera moves and music video effects. The sepia-toned flashbacks bug me most of all, especially when they’re there to explain why the main character is killing someone we’ve never met before. Having said all that, I’m still glad this movie exists; there are still far too few doing the job it’s trying to do. (No comment on the “Can’t we all get along?” line in a movie released the year after the King riots.)

Tombstone (1993) (rewatch)

Trailers: Young Guns, Wyatt Earp

It may be an unpopular opinion, but this doesn’t hold up that well for me. Val Kilmer’s performance is still one for the ages, but he feels like he’s in a different movie than everyone else. I’m tempted to say I wish I could watch whatever movie Kilmer is in, but I think he’s intentionally on another wavelength. Russell is mostly great, but he’s outshone by Kilmer every time they’re on screen together and he’s also saddled with a romance plot that seems an ill fit for both him and the movie. The love interest, Josephine Marcus (played by Dana Delaney), is the only woman the movie seems interested in. Which is a shame for Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (playing Wyatt’s common-law wife Mattie), who looks like she is giving a lot more than the director is interested in capturing. There’s undoubtedly some great stuff here. Lovely cinematography, good action, and Powers Boothe chewing every bit of scenery he can find in yet another one of those insanely stacked casts. But the movie has a similar problem to Posse, in that there are too many characters and too many conflicting motivations and too little time devoted to getting us invested in them. And, like a lot of 90s westerns, it is entirely too long.

Wild Bill (1995) (rewatch)

Trailers: The Long Riders, True Grit (2010)

Biopics and historical movies are painfully easy to make dull and formulaic, so Wild Bill is an interesting attempt to do something a bit different, even if it’s not all that successful. We start with Bill’s funeral and Bill’s friend Charley (played by John Hurt) starts telling us about who Bill was. It’s kind of a cool take to give us an impression of a man through a series of “there was this one time”s, but the movie is an absolute cacophony of flashbacks and styles and POVs within POVs. Again, it’s an interesting way to present him as a character and it seems to give truth to my own belief that people’s lives, birth to death, do not constitute A Story but many stories, many of which overlap. There’s a kind of half-plot here with David Arquette, but it’s almost background to the larger part of the movie, which is this hodge-podge of vignettes about Wild Bill. I kind of wish the movie had committed more to either the character study or the traditional plot. I suppose the character study informs the traditional plot, but it still feels like two different movies that don’t seem to mesh well. Having said that, it’s a great Jeff Bridges performance. I also spotted The West Wing’s Janel Moloney in a small role, four years before Donnatella Moss (I would not have known her from anything when I originally saw this in 1995), which was a nice surprise.

The Quick and the Dead (1995) (rewatch)

Trailers: Bad Girls, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Bless Sam Raimi and his peculiar sensibilities. This is by no means a spoof but it has loads of over-the-top moments that make it seem like one. It has a frankly astonishing cast (sounds familiar) – Keith David, Lance Henriksen, Tobin Bell, Kevin Conway, Pat Hingle, WOODY STRODE, Raynor Scheine, Roberts Blossom … and that’s not even getting to the main cast of Stone, Hackman, Crowe and tiny baby DiCaprio. Raimi regular Bruce Campbell even had a small role, though it ended up being cut. Everyone is mostly playing it straight here, but it’s so excessively earnest and unrestrained that it comes off as bonkers. This was considered a flaw at the time it came out but more people have come to appreciate the movie’s eccentricities. It’s wild seeing Russell Crowe in this, the same year as Virtuosity (the first film I saw him in) and well before he became a household name (in the States, anyway). Having once been a proud member of Hoes for DiCaprio, there’s a moment in this movie that always sent me into a squeeing fangirl frenzy. Watching it again last week, it still does.

Maverick (1994) (rewatch)

Trailers: Three Amigos, The Apple Dumpling Gang

I love this movie. I know almost nothing of the original television show, but the movie is like if they took the show, made it into a theme park ride, then made a movie out of that ride. I watched a reaction video to this a while back and the reactor seemed genuinely concerned that the movie’s main character was going to be killed at several points well before the end of the movie. Which I guess is a testament to how effective the action scenes are. And the movie is amazingly good at switching from action to comedy, which it does with great frequency. It’s directed by Richard Donner and stars Mel Gibson (with a brief cameo from their Lethal Weapon compatriot Danny Glover), and the screenplay is by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride, Misery). Add to the mix James Garner (who played Bret Maverick in the original show), Jodie Foster (who I just now learned replaced Meg Ryan in this role – can’t imagine Ryan as Annabelle, honestly), James Coburn and Alfred Molina, among others, and it makes an incredible western-action-comedy stew that’s a lot of fun to watch. And I love the use of modern (to 1994) country music, as well as a handful of country music stars in small roles (Waylon Jennings, Carlene Carter, Kathy Mattea, Clint Black, Vince Gill and Reba McIntire, and probably some more). There are some good twists and turns and double-crosses, and thank God no one took that ending and decided there needed to be a sequel. It’s perfect just as it is.