Archive for Red River
I Am Groot
Posted in FILM with tags Arthur Hunnicutt, Cary Grant, Charade, His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks, Howard hawks Week, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Monkey Business, Red River, The Big Sky, Walter Brennan on August 19, 2017 by dcairns
Walter Brennan as Groot in RED RIVER.
I had a tooth pulled yesterday. It had been panging away badly. It had once been a heavily filled thing, more edifice than natural outcrop, but the back came off and the filling came out, so as to present only a facade to the world, like a western street in a movie backlot. So the dentist pulled itup by the groot, which turns out to be about the cheapest form of treatment you can have — only £12.50.
But now I'm rather sore. And sympathised more than I might have with Kirk Douglas and his finger-removal scene in THE BIG SKY. This drunken amputation was planned for RED RIVER but John Wayne didn't think it was funny. When he saw it performed he realised it WAS funny after all, and his trust in Hawks grew. It's quite a strong scene for its day.
Arthur Hunnicutt performs the op. If Arthur Hunnicutt ever met Walter Brennan, would there be a huge explosion?
Meanwhile, as I type this, Fiona is on the toilet watching CHARADE. She's been having a Cary Grant film festival today as she prepares for a colonoscopy tomorrow. She's going to star in a film, or a film's going to be shot inside her anyway. To prepare for this, you have to drink cement or something, and it means you spend a lot of time on the lavatory. Might as well spend it with Cary Grant.
While I was trying to sleep through the throb in my jaw, and Fiona was drinking cement or whatever it is, she watched HIS GIRL FRIDAY and yesterday we both watched MONKEY BUSINESS (the Hawks, not the Marx Bros). Fiona is well-read on the subject of chimps and observed that the young ape who swings from a lamp and batters scientists on the head is making his "play face." So s/he was having a good time on a Hawks set, as actors tended to do. Andy Serkis can stand down.
Bad End
Posted in FILM with tags El Dorado, Frank Capra, His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks, James Caan, James Stewart, John Wayne, Leigh Brackett, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Red River, Rio Bravo, Robert Mitchum, Sidney Buchman, The Big Sleep on February 13, 2015 by dcairns
Ahah! The Forgotten is postponed to next week, it seems, due to the extensive Berlin coverage at The Notebook. Meanwhile…
Finally watched EL DORADO, which a lot of people portray as being a thoroughly inferior copy of Howard Hawks' earlier Wayne western, RIO BRAVO (they share a writer, Leigh Brackett, but she kept warning Hawks that he was repeating himself — he didn't care). I found it very enjoyable. Wayne is Wayne, a little older (visibly struggling to mount his horse, but bizarrely elegant crossing a room and kicking an opponent); Mitchum is Mitchum, which ought to make him a worthy substitute for Dean Martin, but the role is less well-crafted; James Caan is a huge improvement on Ricky Nelson. Arthur Hunnicutt subs for Walter Brennan, as he often did, most skillfully. Angie Dickinson is replaced by a couple of women characters who don't get much to do — westerns didn't seem to allow Hawks to push his heroines as far into one-of-the-boys territory as he could manage in other genres, although I bet h could have had fun with a JOHNNY GUITAR scenario if anyone had encouraged him. A LOT of fun.
"How will you get down?" Wayne is asked, when the injured gunfighter proposes riding into battle against impossible odds on a cart. "That's easy, I'll fall down."
We also get strong support from Ed Asner, R.G. Armstrong and Christopher George, who could have had a very good career if confined to bad guys. He's really not appealing as a hero, though it probably doesn't help that the two leading man roles I've seen him in are THE DELTA FACTOR, a horrible Mickey Spillane thing that nearly did for director Tay Garnett, and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. Here, he's an amoral professional, not viciously evil but willing to do anything for a buck: Wayne's character treats him with wary respect (which is to say he kills him as soon as he gets a chance).
The very end is somewhat muffed, though, with the expected romance shoved offscreen and the laid-back conversational coda between Wayne and Mitchum ineffectually stretched across two scenes. They're both nice scenes, but they're kind of the same. Makes me wonder if Hawks were ever good at endings? He didn't care about PLOT, famously. I slightly cringe at HIS GIRL FRIDAY's fade-out (don't want it to end on Rosalind Russell crying) though I love the rest of it as much as you're supposed to, maybe more; RED RIVER, by the very nature of its story, has to cop out at the end to avoid becoming a tragedy; I can't actually remember the ending of THE BIG SLEEP, though I expect it's a clinch or at least a sly look between the leads — as Manny Farber points out, that movie creates so much goodwill in its first four sequences that it can coast along for the rest of its runtime without worrying about producing anything specially memorable.
So, a question for everyone: what are the classic movies you love which don't quite work right at the end? And not for reasons of studio interference, but because the writers/directors got it wrong. I'll kick things off with this one and MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON. When it played on TV, its screenwriter, Sidney Buchman, would switch it off before the failed suicide bid Capra added for extra weep value. I think he'd have been far better having Jimmy Stewart wake up and learn he's won — we may be able to figure out for ourselves that would happen, but wouldn't it be more emotional to SEE it? Still find it extraordinary that the film ends with the hero unconscious.
Let's hear from you!