The Shadow Cabaret

August Exits

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:22:29 +0000

Robert F. Boyle
Oct. 10, 1909-Aug. 1, 2010

Larry Yachimec
Jan. 11, 1959-Aug. 1, 2010

Mitch Jayne
July 4, 1928-Aug. 2, 2010

Joffre Rodrigues
Aug. 11, 1941-Aug. 4, 2010

Bruno Cremer
Oct. 6, 1929-Aug. 7, 2010

Charlie Davao
Oct. 7, 1934-Aug. 8, 2010

Patricia Neal
Jan. 20, 1926-Aug. 8, 2010

George DiCenzo
April 21, 1940-Aug. 9, 2010

Mariam Baharum
??, 1935-Aug. 9, 2010

Dana Dawson
Aug. 7, 1974-Aug. 10, 2010

David L. Wolper
Jan. 11, 1928-Aug. 10, 2010

Bruno Schleinstein
June 2, 1932-Aug. 11, 2010

Paul Ryan Rudd
May 15, 1940-Aug. 12, 2010

Edward Kean
Oct. 28, 1924-Aug. 13, 2010

Abbey Lincoln
Aug. 6, 1930-Aug. 14, 2010

Gloria Winters
Nov. 28, 1932-Aug. 14, 2010

Rina Franchetti
Dec. 23, 1907-Aug. 18, 2010

Efraim Sevela
Mar. 8, 1928-Aug. 18, 2010

Gyda Hansen
Feb. 7, 1938-20 Aug. 20, 2010

Jack Horkheimer
June 11, 1938-Aug. 20, 2010

Tiberio Murgia
Feb. 5, 1929-Aug. 20, 2010

Christoph Schlingensief
Oct. 24, 1960-Aug. 21, 2010

Satoshi Kon
Oct. 12, 1963-Aug. 23, 2010

Vladimir Msryan
Mar. 12, 1938-Aug. 24, 2020

Ary Fernandes
Mar. 31, 1931-Aug. 29, 2010

Alain Corneau
Aug. 7, 1943-Aug. 30, 2010

Victoria Longley
24 Sept. 24, 1960-Aug. 29, 2010

Mick Lally
Nov. ??, 1945-Aug. 31, 2010

August Links

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:04:51 +0000

Classic film buffs with a yen for building up their home libraries should appreciate this crop of August blogs devoted to movies on dvd:

Writing on the Turner Classic Movies site, film writer Glenn Erickson provides a critical overview of Akira Kurosawa’s earliest directorial efforts in an absorbing article commemorating their release on a new four-disc collection from Eclipse.

Matt Zoller Seitz takes a jaundiced look at “director’s cuts” – the good, the bad and the unnecessary – in an entertaining and opinionated Salon commentary.

Kristin Thompson rhapsodizes on a trio of Josef von Sternberg silent classics, newly released on dvd – and takes a side trip to the 1927 Chicago, home of the scandalous Roxie Hart.

Finally, those behind on recent releases can check out this podcast archive of Dick Dinman’s weekly show about Hollywood classics newly out on dvd.

What are you looking at? Start clicking these links.

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 02:01:20 +0000

No Cheat Code for Life

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:53:50 +0000

Coming-of-age stories are pretty much by definition also getting-over-yourself stories, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a prime example of both.

Though gussied up with slacker culture and a plethora of video game references, at its heart the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley on which the movie is based lies comfortably within that traditional niche, with a protagonist who’s forced to grow beyond the comfort of clueless self-absorption and take the first fumbling steps toward mature responsibility. Sometimes Scott Pilgrim is dragged kicking and screaming toward that goal, other times (playing off the gaming zeitgeist which O’Malley takes as a given among his readership) he advances punching and leaping … but the result is much the same as that of The Catcher in the Rye, The Red Badge of Courage or Huckleberry Finn.

Director Edgar Wright and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall have adapted O’Malley’s work into a good-hearted and fast-paced little film that’s about as faithful an adaptation as one could ask of a Hollywood production. Some of the character development and slice-of-life quality that distinguished the graphic novel have been jettisoned, but the inventive flashy visuals have been transferred with remarkable fidelity, as has an impressive amount of heart. As a comics adaptation, it’s every bit as obsessive on the surface as 300 or Watchmen; but as a movie, it’s immensely more satisfying.

Michael Cera stars as Scott, a young Toronto layabout who mooches room and board off his friends and plays bass with a struggling band called Sex Bob-omb (a Mario Bros. reference, for the older and more disinterested out there). A 22-year-old whose heart was broken a year ago when a girlfriend threw him over for somebody cooler, he’s struck up a platonic romance with high school student Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) – who’s so pure of heart and purely infatuated that she hasn’t noticed that he’s sponging off her, too.

Yes, Scott is a self-centered jerk, and it’s only Cera’s patented doe-eyed winsomeness that makes it possible to retain any kind of sympathy for him in the film’s opening half hour. At the same time, Cera’s presence in the role makes it hard to swallow Scott’s history as a ladies man. It’s a bit much to believe that this high-voiced man-child has such a long line of bitter ex-girlfriends in his past, and may make some viewers fear for the future of the species. But if you can accept that premise, buying into the rest of the movie is a piece of cake.

It’s the arrival of American mystery woman Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) that starts the story moving. Hard-shelled and apparently inaccessible, Ramona quickly becomes the object of Scott’s obsession. Eventually, his quirky charm wins her over and she agrees to date him – but it’s a victory that comes with a price: First he must battle and defeat her seven evil exes, each of whom wields awesome video game-inspired powers of destruction. And that’s when the movie really takes off.

The battles with the exes take up the bulk of the running time of this 112-minute film, and to director Wright’s credit, the predictability and monotony are kept to a minimum. Still, seeing Scott win coins, an extra life and other gaming tokens simply isn’t as funny on the fifth or sixth go-round as on the first. Wright has cannily deflected the sense of diminishing returns by setting up Scott’s world in gaming terms from the get-go, with sound effects forming words on the screen and the use of superimposed bars and meters for comic effect. But the sense of repetition does eventually sink in.

For all the flash and bang that results, it’s the cast that keeps the film lively. Though its concentration on the action means that important parts of O’Malley’s story have been excised or reduced to shorthand, the actors – frequently through sheer charisma – manage to keep the film from turning into a mindless hipster version of Mortal Kombat. Among the evil exes, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and Mae Whitman are particularly entertaining. Kieran Culkin is terrific as Scott’s roommate Wallace. (And yes, those are Thomas Jane and Clifton Collins putting in sly unbilled cameos as the Vegan Police.)

Though he’s quite good as Scott, Cera is frequently acted off the screen by the women in the film. Winstead is the epitome of cool as Ramona, a damaged young woman who’s trying to live down her train wreck of a past and just maybe learning something about herself as the chaos mounts. Wong is sunny and heartbreaking as Knives, in over her head among the comparatively fast crowd surrounding Scott. Perhaps best of all is Alison Pill as Kim, Sex Bob-omb’s freckle-faced drummer who’s also Scott’s ‘tude-heavy eternally annoyed old friend and one-time lover.

In a way, it’s a shame that the film doesn’t allow a little more time for these characters to simply hang out and interact, but making way for seven major action sequences doesn’t leave much room for basic storytelling. Among the things the characters do in O’Malley’s graphic novel is sit around and play video games…

but with so much game-style action on hand throughout the film, there’s virtually no time – or need – for the movie’s characters to kick back and pick up a controller. It’s worth noting that where actual games are concerned, Wright has it both ways: the few times we’re asked to consider video games themselves, they’re invariably symbols of immaturity (Scott embarrasses himself by spouting Pac-Man trivia at Ramona, arcade games are examples of the juvenile aspect of his relationship with Knives) … and yet much of the film’s humor is based on the viewer’s familiarity with how video games work. It’s almost as though Wright is getting away with telling the members of his target audience that they’re too benumbed by their PlayStations and Xboxes to notice when he’s slapping them in the face with their own failure to grow up.

But the film is such a funny and fast-moving romp that it’s unlikely that many of its intended ticket buyers are going to stop laughing long enough to take umbrage. As goofy and occasionally inconsequential as it is, it’s also one of those rare films that come along every decade or so, movies like Easy Rider or Rebel Without a Cause or even Casablanca, with the indefinable ability to read the minds and speak the language of the up-and-coming generation. Whether you enjoy it as a video game, an off-the-wall action flick or a romantic comedy, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a likable winner.

Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 112 minutes

July Exits

admin — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:03:46 +0000

Ilene Woods
May 5, 1929-July 1, 2010

Geoffrey Hutchings
June 8, 1939-July 1, 2010

Laurent Terzieff
June 27, 1935-July 2, 2010

M.G. Radhakrishnan
Aug. 8, 1940-July 2, 2010

Ed Limato
July 10, 1936-July 3, 2010

Murray Chercover
Aug. 18, 1929-July 3, 2010

Jia Hongsheng
Mar. 19, 1967-July 5, 2010

Rebecca Spikings-Goldsman
??-July 6, 2010

Robert Freitag
April 7, 1914-July 8, 2010

Vonetta McGee
Jan. 14, 1945-July 9, 2010

Aldo Sambrell
Feb. 23, 1931-July 10, 2010

Robert Spillane
Sept. 21, 1964-July 10, 2010

Ferenc Kallai
Oct. 4, 1925-July 11, 2010

Lucia Muresan
Jan. 31, 1938-July 12, 2010

Gilly Coman
Sept. 13, 1955-July 13, 2010

Alan Hume
Oct. 16, 1924-July 13, 2010

Tetsuo Mizutori
Dec. 25, 1938-July 14, 2010

Fabio Pillar
??-July 14, 2010

Peter Fernandez
Jan. 29, 1927-July 15, 2010

Kip King
Aug. 11, 1937-July 15, 2010

James Gammon
April 20, 1940-July 16, 2010

Bernard Giraudeau
June 18, 1947-July 17, 2010

Priscillano Romanillos
Jan. 11, 1963-July 17, 2010

Shirley Silvey
??-July 17, 2010

Larry Keith
Mar. 4, 1931-July 18, 2010

Cecile Aubry
Aug. 3, 1928-July 19, 2010

Carl Gordon
Jan. 20, 1932-July 22, 2010

Jan Halldoff
Sept. 4, 1939-July 23, 2010

Igor Talankin
Oct. 3, 1927-July 24, 2010

Redford White
Dec. 5, 1955-July 25, 2010

Ravi Baswani
Sept. 29, 1946-July 27, 2010

Maury Chaykin
July 27, 1949-July 27, 2010

John Aylesworth
Aug. 16, 1929-July 29, 2010

Antonio Feio
Dec. 6, 1954-July 30, 2010

Suso Cecchi d’Amico
July 21, 1914-July 31, 2010

Billy the Kid On Screen (Pt. 2)

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:22:55 +0000

(Part 1 began a look at Hollywood’s long-running love affair with the legend of Billy the Kid, whose brief and grubby real-life career came to an abrupt end at the hands of New Mexico sheriff Pat Garrett. The mythmaking continues:)

Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw had gone into production in 1941 and was briefly released in 1943, but censorship troubles kept it out of most theaters until 1946. Less a Billy the Kid picture than an inept sex comedy, it managed to insert Doc Holliday (played by Walter Huston) into the proceedings by making him an old pal of Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell). A waste of talent and an insult to the intelligence, The Outlaw depicts the tubercular Holliday as hale and hearty, Garrett as an impotent boob who kills Doc in a fit of jealousy over his friendship with the Kid, and Billy (Jack Beutel) as a cold-blooded killer who’s a devil with the ladies. (Imagine the real Billy so much as getting the time of day from star Jane Russell).

It’s often too easy to dismiss groundbreaking works of the past, especially those whose main contribution was in the relaxation of censorship; the more successful they were in pushing the envelope, the less consequential they seem in the light of the new perceptions they helped create. The Outlaw, however, would be inconsequential whenever you viewed it. Less substantial than many of the rote Billy the Kid programmers that Buster Crabbe was cranking out at the same time, its material is thin, its direction is arid and its acting is mostly sub-par. Hughes was too obsessed with displaying Russell’s breasts – and making the bold statement that people like to have sex – to be concerned with correcting such minor matters as an idiotic story and Beutel’s lack of acting ability. In between the sophomoric sex gags there’s a lot of lethal gunplay, but other than the entertainment to be had from watching a string of unimaginatively staged murders, it’s just a dopey movie that once again sees the Kid escaping fate to ride off with his lover.

For the next 10 years, the Kid became an increasingly generic figure. Alias Billy the Kid (1946) saw 6’4” Sunset Carson following in Roy Rogers’ footsteps by passing himself off as Billy to bring rustlers to justice. The 1948 Return of the Badmen pitted Randolph Scott against a supergang consisting of the Daltons, the Youngers, the Sundance Kid and Wild Bill Doolin, with Dean White almost lost in the crowd as Billy. The Lash LaRue vehicle Son of Billy the Kid offered William Perrott as a middle-aged reformed Kid who’s put his past behind him to become – yeah, right – a banker. Don “Red” Barry brought his intensity and charm to I Shot Billy the Kid in 1950, but he was too old for the role; 10 years earlier, he would have been excellent.

Things brightened considerably with The Kid from Texas the same year. In his first Western, Audie Murphy made a terrific debut as Billy – incredibly young and good-looking, coiled tight as a spring and in control of the material from beginning to end. The story plays fast and loose with history, renaming everyone but Billy and Garrett (played by the strapping, no-nonsense Frank Wilcox), but as an evocation of the myth of the Kid, it’s right on the money. No punches are pulled in depicting Billy’s bloody revenge, and when his unrequited love for Gale Storm leads him into Garrett’s gunsights, for a change there’s no sense that we’ve been had yet again; Murphy’s troubled Billy is The Kid that the romantics want to believe existed.

After Murphy, it was back to generic Billy again. Hulking Scott Brady squeezed into the role in William Castle’s 1954 The Law vs. Billy the Kid. Also released that year was The Boy from Oklahoma, a pleasant Will Rogers Jr. vehicle mostly remembered as the basis for the TV series Sugarfoot, but which also featured Tyler McDuff in a brief appearance as the Kid. Another brief glimpse came in the 1955 Strange Lady in Town with Greer Garson as a frontier doctor whose clientele included Nick Adams as Billy. Two years later, Rudolph Valentino look-alike Anthony Dexter starred in The Parson and the Outlaw, a quickie that portrayed Billy as a man trying to reform with the help of preacher Sonny Tufts.

Paul Newman had starred in Gore Vidal’s 1955 Philco Playhouse live TV drama The Death of Billy the Kid and so enjoyed the role that he pestered Warner Brothers to do a film version. The result was Arthur Penn’s The Left-Handed Gun (1958), an absorbing but meandering Method approach to the story that turned the kid into a James Dean-like figure whose hyper-sensitivity and lack of self-control leads him to violence.

Both wonderful and terrible (neither Vidal nor Newman was satisfied with it), the film presents Billy as a childish drifter with no idea of what makes people tick and no answer to any situation save violence. He stupidly makes an enemy of Garrett (played in imposing fashion by John Dehner) by murdering a man at Pat’s wedding; and when Billy’s wounded friend (James Best) leaves the gang, all the Kid can manage to offer him as a token of friendship is a box of cartridges.

There’s no denying Newman’s charisma in those scenes, but the film’s most important point is the negative portrayal of its doomed anti-hero. Much is made of Billy’s illiteracy (although the original could read and write), and the film’s coda is played out in a scene between Newman and Hurd Hatfield as the Kid’s biggest fan, who comes to realize that there’s nothing romantic about this desperate young man with blood on his hands.

With the TV Western boom of the late ‘50s-early ‘60s, there were Kid sightings all over the small screen for a while. The very best began a two-season run in 1960, with Clu Gulager as Billy in The Tall Man. Barry Sullivan played title character Pat Garrett, and the series posited a brief truce between the lawman and the wild Kid. As history, it was nonsense – but Gulager’s riveting performance made it work, creating a Kid the viewers could care about without forgetting that the day would come when he and Garrett would face each other in that dark room

After that bright moment, things got goofier than ever. In 1965 Billy, in the person of one Johnny Ginger, appeared as part of another supergang in the Three Stooges’ The Outlaws is Coming. The next year, Chuck Courtney strapped on his guns for William Beaudine’s Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, a silly but harmless bit of fluff about a reformed Billy’s marriage plans getting spoiled when his fiancée falls under the spell of John Carradine, who occasionally turns into a rubber bat the size of a terrier. Courtney’s character has nothing to do with the real Billy, but he makes an affable one-size-fits-all cowboy hero, and the cast includes such familiar Western faces as Roy Barcroft and Harry Carey, Jr.

By this time, spaghetti Westerns were in their heyday, and a relatively subtle Italian offering was The Man Who Killed Billy the Kid (1967), starring Peter Lee Lawrence as Billy and Fausto Tozzi as Garrett in a story centering on their uneasy friendship.

The beginning of that relationship was a subplot of the 1970 John Wayne film Chisum, a boring crock which whitewashed the career of that ruthless cattle baron while making hash of Lincoln County history as thoroughly as The Outlaw had done. Geoffrey Deuel was a waxworks Billy and Glenn Corbett’s potentially interesting Garrett was drygulched by the preposterous script. Not even the presence of the Duke could save this by-the-numbers oater.

Such nonsense left the door wide open for someone in a debunking mood to pick up where The Left-Handed Gun left off, and first-time director Stan Dragoti seized the moment with his Dirty Little Billy (1972), starring Michael J. Pollard in a bravura performance. Set at the beginning of the outlaw’s career, the film depicted a literally moronic Billy slogging through the mud of Coffeyville, Kansas, to commit various petty crimes and, eventually, his first murder. The most unflattering portrait of the Kid ever filmed, it was probably no closer to the truth than any other – but after the likes of Beutel, Courtney and Deuel, Pollard’s take on the character was a breath of fresh air.

Then came the revelation: Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. As elegiac in tone as the wonderful Ride the High Country (they were the director’s first and last major Westerns), it was yet another mythical approach to the Kid – but this was myth-making of a high order, a bittersweet violent poem for adults set in a dusty hell and related in unforgettable images.

The film begins with the final act in the Kid’s story, the Lincoln wars behind him and his old compadre Garrett about to pin on a sheriff’s badge. Though history gives us little reason to believe the two were more than casual acquaintances, it’s a fact rapidly forgotten as we watch the unfolding tragedy of two conflicting forces of nature – Billy the amiable wild man, and Garrett the wily old friend whose determination to move and prosper with the times has forced him to become the Kid’s nemesis. The movie nearly overflows with excellent character actors in terrific scenes, played against the strains of Bob Dylan’s moody score, but it belongs from beginning to end to Kris Kristofferson as Billy, the last avatar of the old West’s amoral “freedom,” and James Coburn as Garrett, increasingly relentless and embittered as he closes in to fire the shot that will drag the soul from both of them. Both men were considerably older than their real-life counterparts, but in this context it didn’t matter; their weathered faces perfectly suited their roles as symbols of a dying way of life. Neither actor was ever better, nor has there ever been a finer version of the story.

It would be 15 years before anyone tried it again. That effort, 1988’s Young Guns, drew critical fire for its Brat Pack cast, but despite a few egregiously Yuppified scenes, it’s the most faithful telling of the Lincoln County Wars ever filmed. Mounted with admirable attention to period detail, it gives such often-ignored figures as Alexander McSween and Dick Brewer their due, and offers a thoroughly acceptable version of Billy (Emilio Estevez) as a charming, trigger-happy sociopath.

The end of the ‘80s saw Billy back on television, first as a minor character played by Thomas Heinze in the German miniseries Wilden Westen (1988), and the following year in Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid, written to exorcise Vidal’s dissatisfaction with what The Left-Handed Gun had done to his original teleplay. Crammed with fact and a few choice cuts of fiction, the final result was often slow-moving and talky, but its look at the Billy/Garrett relationship was satisfyingly complex, offering former Zorro Duncan Regehr a chance to do some real acting as Pat. On the brink of major stardom, Val Kilmer put in an astonishing turn as Billy, who he played as a nerdy yahoo whose only chance for respect lay in his talent for violence.

On the big screen, a more generic Billy (Dan Shor) turned up in 1989 as one of the famous figures assembled to help a pair of slackers pass their history class in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And the inevitable Young Guns II (1990) brought us the most recent filming of the Billy story to date, with Estevez returning as Billy on the lam from his old saddle mate Garrett, played by William Petersen (replacing Patrick Wayne, who’d appeared in a couple of scenes in the first film)

Less satisfying and less accurate than the first Brat Pack opus, Young Guns II still had a couple of aces up its sleeve. One was the brief appearance of James Coburn as John Chisum, adding a needed touch of grit to the sequel’s pervasive slickness. Unfortunately, Coburn’s presence also points up the lightweight nature of the rest of the movie. The in-joke of his repeating one of Pat Garrett’s more memorable lines from the Peckinpah film is followed closely by a scene with Petersen, creating the effect of making the new Garrett look like a kid dressing up in his father’s clothes.

But Estevez is still good as Billy – and though the sequel goes the route of suggesting that he survived the final encounter with Garrett, it does so with a flair absent in the likes of The Outlaw by representing the whole thing as the dubious reminiscences of Brushy Bill Roberts, a real-life figure who surfaced in the early 1950s claiming to be the Kid himself.

Brushy Bill to the contrary, there remains little doubt as to who’s buried in that well-known grave in Old Fort Sumner, N.M. And though the Kid’s remains have rested there for more than a century, the question of who he really was lingers on, sure to inspire even more films striving to provide an answer for years to come.

Billy the Kid On Screen (Pt. 2) is a post from: The Shadow Cabaret Fandango - Search movie showtimes and buy tickets! THE SHADOW CABARET BY JAMES VANCE © 2007-2009 CATDANCER CORPORATION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July Links

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:24:12 +0000

July bloggers have covered the waterfront, with smart and entertaining pieces that range from the virtual dawn of cinema to thoughts on sharing movies with your offspring in your own home.

Turner Classic Movie “Morlocks” offer a roundtable discussion of what parents have learned about themselves while watching horror films with their children. You can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

A distinguished husband-and-wife team of film commentators write about a pair of rediscovered silent French treasures: David Bordwell discusses the goofy 1916 adventure serial parody The Clutching Foot…

while Kristin Bordwell turns in a fascinating essay on the techniques of innovative French director Albert Capellani.

Missed it last month, but it’s still worth a look: Film historian Robert Simpson looks back at the early innocent (and surprisingly tune-filled) days of Hammer Films, 75 years ago and long before they became masters of gothic horror.

Classic film buff “Rupert” enthuses over Barbara Stanwyck’s gutsy string of hardboiled dames in early ‘30s pre-censorship Code melodramas

Slip into something slinky and enjoy.

June Exits

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:08:16 +0000

Joseph Strick

July 6, 1923-June 2, 2010

Josefa Cotillo

June 16, 1944-June 2, 2010

Dorothy DeBorba

Mar. 28, 1925 -June 2, 2010

Rue McClanahan

Feb. 21, 1934-June 3, 2010

Himan Brown

July 21, 1910-June 4, 2010

Richard Dunn

Sept. 29, 1936 -June 4, 2010

Esma Agolli

July 1, 1928-June 5, 2010

Steven Reuther

??, 1951-June 5, 2010

Robert B. Radnitz

Aug. 9, 1924-June 6, 2010

Ladislav Smoljak

Dec. 9, 1931-June 6, 2010

Plamen Maslarov

Jan. 1, 1950-June 8, 2010

Ginette Garcin

Jan. 4, 1928-June 10, 2010

Shunsuke Ikeda

Nov. 11, 1941-June 11, 2010

Jimmy Dean

Aug. 10, 1928-June 13, 2010

Bekim Fehmiu

June 1, 1936-June 15, 2010

Yuri Ilyenko

May 9, 1936-June 15, 2010

Ronald Neame

April 23, 1911-June 16, 2010

Corso Salani

Sept. 9, 1961-June 16, 2010

P.G. Viswambharan

??, 1941-June 16, 2010

Tom Leahy

Sept. 13, 1922-June 18, 2010

Vince O’Brien

??, 1919-June 19, 2010

Vladimir Dlouhy

June 10, 1958-June 20, 2010

Irwin Barker

June 12, 1956-June 21, 2010

Tam White

July 12, 1942-June 21, 2010

Pennant Roberts

Dec. 15, 1940-June 22, 2010

Tracy Wright

Dec. 7, 1959-June 22, 2010

Frank Giering

Nov. 23, 1971-June 23, 2010

Viveka Babajee

May 23, 1973-June 25, 2010

Alan Plater

April 15, 1935-June 25, 2010

Alberto Guzik

June 6, 1941-June 26, 2010

Adoor Pankajam

??, 1925-June 26, 2010

Aldo Giuffre

April 10, 1924-June 27, 2010

Pietro Taricone

Feb. 4, 1975-June 28, 2010

Park Yong-ha

Aug. 12, 1977-June 30, 2010

June Links

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 20:03:22 +0000

JUNE LINKS

The lost worlds of Hollywood have been much on the minds of bloggers and reporters in June, including some rediscovered treasures that are sure to warm any movie lover’s heart:

The biggest news on the lost-film front in recent years has to be the discovery in New Zealand of 75 silent movies that were long considered gone forever, including a feature by John Ford, a chapter of the otherwise extinct serial The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies, a Mabel Normand comedy short and more. There’s a nice story on the rediscovered trove at the Los Angeles Times site, and a New York Times piece with a slideshow of tasty stills.

As a prologue to his think piece on long-ago movie critics, David Bordwell looks back at movie audiences of the previous century and shows us how little things have changed in a discursive but entertaining essay.

A second important discovery was logged this month, with the discovery of a forgotten early appearance by Charlie Chaplin in an obscure Keystone comedy. (Thanks to Leonard Maltin for pointing the way to this information.)

Finally, TCM Morlock “moirafinnie” looks at a lost world of a different kind: golden age Hollywood’s unlikely love affair with the sport of polo.

Forward, into the past…

Billy the Kid On Screen (Pt. 1)

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:36:52 +0000

He’s been called everything from a homicidal moron to a cowboy Robin Hood – but whoever and whatever Billy the Kid really was, his brief and bloody career earned him an enduring place in the American imagination…and created a virtual cottage industry in Hollywood, where his legend has been mined, refined and reshaped in more than 60 motion pictures.

Billy had been dead only 30 years when a forgotten actor named Tefft Johnson became the first man to play him in Vitagraph’s 1911 Billy the Kid, followed in 1916 by an unknown Universal player in Billy the Bandit. While the standards of the day make it unlikely that either was much of an historical document, those lost films mark the only movie versions of the Kid’s story for the first three decades of cinema history. The glory days of silent film would celebrate the exploits of real-life frontiersmen ranging from big names like Hickok, Cody and Jesse James to such lesser lights as Bill Tilghman, Heck Thomas and Al Jennings – but Billy wouldn’t become an important film figure until the advent of sound.

It’s been said that his first major film appearance, MGM’s 1930 Billy the Kid, was okayed by studio chief Irving Thalberg as one in the eye to the “experts” who’d proclaimed outdoor sound recording unfeasible – but in truth, the boy genius was playing catch-up with Fox’s In Old Arizona and Paramount’s The Virginian of the previous year. (Of course, B-oater pioneers like Ken Maynard and Buck Jones had beaten them all to the punch, but the major studios weren’t about to credit matinee cowboys with breaking the sound barrier.)

Though not the first, MGM’s Western talkie was a cut above its predecessors on technical and artistic grounds. Audio effects, like the sizzle of frying bacon when Pat Garrett (Wallace Beery) is enticing a starving Billy out of a cave, not only added ambience but also furthered the story – and the lively dialogue and charismatic performances produced an effort far more entertaining than the austere Virginian.

The role of Billy was a watershed moment in former college football Hall of Famer Johnny Mack Brown’s career, transforming him from the generic leading man he’d been since the late ‘20s into an enduring Western star. Screen legend William S. Hart was coaxed out of retirement to coach the young actor in gun fighting and basic cowboy lore – at least, that’s how the studio publicists staged their photo ops –

but it was ultimately Brown’s own contribution that made the role a success. Handsome, athletic and likable, he further imbued Billy with a hint of sex and danger similar to the more urban brand of dark charisma that would propel James Cagney to stardom in The Public Enemy the next year.

It was a star-making performance, but it had little to do with the genuine article.

The historical Billy the Kid, aka William Bonney, aka Kid Antrim, aka Henry McCarty (the latter evidently his real name, though no one is sure), was a bucktoothed, pointy-chinned delinquent with a taste for violence and a talent for backing it up. His first recorded crime was the brainless pilfering of laundry in Silver City, New Mexico; from there he moved on to rustling and murder. His defenders point out that he killed only four men before he died at the age of 21, and those in self-defense…but the record makes it clear that at least one of those men he “defended” himself from was unarmed, and the other victims were shot from ambush.

What separates the Kid from the many similar examples of vicious saddle trash who are forgotten today was his participation in the Lincoln County Wars, a highfalutin label pasted over a feud between storekeepers that snowballed into violence.

In 1877, Englishman John Tunstall and attorney Alexander McSween had gone into competition with J.J. Dolan & Company, the Lincoln, N.M. mercantile that had held the monopoly over that part of the territory for more than a decade. Tunstall had the backing of the unscrupulous and powerful cattle rancher John Chisum, but that didn’t save him from being shot down by Dolan’s hired guns less than a year after he’d opened his store.

Tunstall also had owned a ranch, and among the hands outraged over their boss’ murder was one temporarily employed Billy the Kid, who decided to wipe out the gang responsible. Several murders later, the Kid was captured by Lincoln’s new sheriff, Garrett, and sentenced to hang. Disinclined to dangle from the gallows, Billy chose instead to kill his jailers in a flamboyant escape. He met his end three months later in July 1881 when Garrett plugged him through the heart in a darkened room. Though stories persist that the sheriff acted in self-defense, it’s unlikely that a hardcase like Garrett gave him any more chance than the Kid had given his victims.

While fascinating history, such a tawdry tale was hardly the stuff of a prestigious MGM release, so director King Vidor and his writers transformed Billy into a victim of circumstance forced to become an avenging angel. The real Garrett had evidently been on friendly terms with the Kid before a badge (and a sizable bounty) came between them – and spinning off the odd pairing which the towering, taciturn Garrett and the grandstanding, goofy-looking Kid must have made, the writers created an outrageous fiction revolving around Wallace Beery’s Garrett taking a shine to the misunderstood gunslinger. Two endings were filmed; the one released in Europe saw Garrett reluctantly shooting the Kid, while American audiences were treated to the spectacle of Beery smiling beatifically as he lets Brown and his beloved ride off together to start a new life in an absurdly happy ending.

Well acted and exquisitely shot in authentic locations, MGM’s Billy the Kid was a great success – but the liberties it took with history created the template for many of the Billy the Kid films that would follow.

Though Republic’s Billy the Kid Returns (1938) is occasionally cited as the first follow-up, it actually takes place after the Kid’s death, with Roy Rogers as a singing buckaroo who’s mistaken for the late outlaw. The real honors go to PRC’s 1940 Billy the Kid Outlawed, the first in a series of six films starring the inimitable Bob Steele as Billy Bonney. If any cowboy star ever had what it took to make a hero out of the Kid, it was Steele, a small but powerful actor whose winning personality masked the ability to play cold and vicious characters when called for. Had PRC’s writers chosen to utilize Steele’s complexities, the series could have been truly memorable; but this was the heyday of the simplistic B Western, and they chose instead to whitewash the Kid even more than MGM had, making him a generic Saturday matinee cowboy who’s constantly accused of crimes he has to solve in order to clear his good name. The real Kid had a knack for getting his companions shot to pieces, but Steele’s Billy was less careless with the lives of his buddies. He was accompanied through several entries by Carleton Young as “Jeff” and through all six pictures by Al St. John as comic relief “Fuzzy.”

While Steele and company were riding the low-budget range, MGM took a second shot at the Billy legend with a 1941 Technicolor remake, again titled Billy the Kid. A glossy picture with terrific Monument Valley locations, it was a financial success that gave a shot in the arm to Robert Taylor’s career and enabled the publicists to trot out William S. Hart as a technical expert once again –

but it was a load of applesauce from beginning to end, featuring a star at least 10 years too old for the title role and a lame script that had little more to do with the real Billy the Kid than B-meister Sigmund Neufeld was grinding out over at PRC with Bob Steele.

It’s doubtful that many audience members even noticed that Tunstall and Dolan had been renamed “Hickey” and “Keating,” or that they’d lost their general stores and simply become generic rival ranchers – but the transformation of Pat Garrett into Billy’s boyhood chum Jim Sherwood (played by Brian Donlevy) stuck out like a sore thumb, making their relationship even more preposterous than in the Vidor film. The result is a standard Western that very loosely follows the facts of Billy’s career in Lincoln, allowing Taylor to strut around in a black leather jacket and exchange hardboiled dialogue with Donlevy before Sherwood pins on a badge and brings his old buddy’s vigilante bloodbath to an end by shooting him dead.

For all its pointless inaccuracies, the script did contain one element that may have brightened the day of some historians in the audience: the establishment of Billy as a left-handed gunman, based on one of the few known photos of the real outlaw. It would be many years before more exacting historians would point out that the photo in question was actually an ambrotype, printed as a mirror image – and that the Kid actually wore his holster on the right side.

That same year, Steele dropped his Billy persona to play Tucson Smith in Republic’s Three Mesquiteers series, and PRC hired Buster Crabbe to pick up where Steele left off. With St. John at his side, Crabbe kept the series going for another six years over more than 30 installments that softened and finally abandoned the outlaw motif entirely, making Billy a wandering good guy who tracked down killers and rescued widows and orphans from swindlers. With 1943’s Devil Riders, he wasn’t even Billy the Kid anymore – he had been renamed “Billy Carson.” The 1945 Prairie Rustlers offered a nice plot twist involving Carson being mistaken for his cousin Billy the Kid, but for the most part the films were interchangeable in plot and heavy on stock footage. It didn’t matter to the fans; every entry had plenty of Crabbe (sometimes in dual roles or in disguise) and the popular “Fuzzy,” and that was enough. The opening credits always referred to Crabbe and St. John as “Our Old Pals” – and that’s what they had become.

Billy the Kid On Screen (Pt. 1) is a post from: The Shadow Cabaret Fandango - Search movie showtimes and buy tickets! THE SHADOW CABARET BY JAMES VANCE © 2007-2009 CATDANCER CORPORATION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.