Der amerikanische Freund

Another of the foreign films that was sitting on my DVR about to expire that I had to make a point of getting around to before that expiration was Wim Wenders' The American Friend.

The movie is based on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley (played here by Dennis Hopper) character, as Wenders was apparently a big fan of Highsmith but couldn't get the rights to the particular Highsmith book he wanted to adapt. Ripley here is an underworld gangster shuttling between New York and Hamburg. In New York he commissions art from Derwatt (director Nicholas Ray), who has faked his own death because this raises the price of his art at auction; the auction is held in Hamburg. At the auction in Hamburg, Ripley meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a gallery worker who frames artwork, but the two don't get along.

Ripley has his life, and gets approached by Raoul (Gérard Blain), a French gangster, as part of a murder for hire plot in the Paris Métro. Jonathan has his life, which isn't much, considering that he's been diagnosed with a blood disease that may or may not be terminal. And he's got a wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) and young son to look after. Ripley isn't exactly pleased with the idea of killing this guy in Paris, but he has an idea which is to rope Zimmermann into killing the guy in Paris.

Raoul is no dummy, so he comes up with a good idea of his own to get Zimmermann to agree to do the murder. This is to take Jonathan to Paris for a second medical opinion, only to have the test results faked so that Zimmermann will believe he has a very short amount of time to live. So it won't really matter if he gets found out in the murder; he'll be dead soon anyway. That, and the money could leave his wife and kid financially secure.

Zimmermann is actually good at luring the guy to his death, but things get more complicated because Ripley and Zimmermann begin to form a friendship. So when Raoul wants to use Zimmermann to help commit another murder, Ripley is horrified. And he's right to be horrified, since this killing is going to set off a gang war that will leave Ripley in danger, but even more so the much less guilty Zimmermann who, after all, has been roped into something not of his own making.

The American Friend is a Wim Wenders film, which means that it runs at a leisurely pace and is more about the characters than the story. This may not be to everybody's taste. And, I have to be honest, I think I prefer some of the other Wenders films I've seen to The American Friend precisely because this one needs to be more story-focused. Hopper and Ganz both do a good job with their roles, and the film is visually interesting for its look at the late 1970s. But I think it could have been a better film.

TCM's Robert Duvall tribute

Robert Duvall died last month, and TCM altered its schedule slightly to include three of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles tonight. Those films are:
8:00 PM Tender Mercies, in which Duvall plays an alcoholic country singer; (the night's original lineup was movies with alcoholics)
10:00 PM The Great Santini, with Duvall as a martinet of a father in an Air Force family; and
12:15 AM Apocalypse Now, which saw Duvall pick up a Supporting Actor nomination.

As I happened to have Apocalypse Now on my DVR, I decided that I was going to watch this one to put up the post on it in conjunction with the tribute, instead of doing it fairly quickly after the announcement of Duvall's death as had been my original intention.

Duvall having picked up a Supporting Actor nomination, the star of the movie is actually Martin Sheen. He plays Ben Willard, a captain in the US Army who, as the movie opens, is in Saigon in late 1969/early 1970 during the Vietnam War where he's spending leave drinking heavily in his hotel room and trying to forget nightmares. Voiceover has Willard speaking after the fact, but the action on screen is actually the beginning. His sojourn in Saigon is interrupted by a couple of men who have orders to take Willard to see Lt. Gen. Corman (G.D. Spradlin). Spradlin tells Willard about a colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz had a rising career in the army, but it seems that in about 1964 he did an intelligence mission to Vietnam that soured him on the whole thing. He went to Fort Benning and paratroopers' school, returned to Vietnam, and then went native, basically deserting to fight his own war, or at least that's what the official US channels think. Kurtz is a danger to them, and somewhere in the jungle in the borderland between South Vietnam and Cambodia, and it's Willard's mission to find Kurtz, and terminate him with extreme prejudice. It's a top secret mission, and nobody is actually supposed to know why Willard is headed where he is.

Willard heads out to the river system where a small patrol boat is going to take him as close as they can safely get to where Kurtz is suspected to be. For part of the journey, they're supposed to have air support, commanded by Lt. Col. Kilgore (that's Duvall). The boat on which Willard is traveling has a motley crew of men who seem to have been deeply affected by their experiences in the war, although they're not all going to show the effects at the same rate. It's obvious, however, when they intercept a Vietnamese boat carrying goods to a farmers' market.

Willard sees more and more surreal things on his way up to the edge of where the US has any control, such as a USO-type show with Playboy playmates, but eventually gets to people who know where Kurtz are. Along the way, he's been reading up on Kurtz from the classified material the general gave him, and begins to gain some sympathy. He also learns that his is not the first mission to try to assassinate Kurtz. The other guy, Colby (Scott Glenn), is officially MIA, but the classified information suggests he may have joined Kurtz. There's also a photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) who has also turned to Kurtz' side.

As I said, they do eventually find Kurtz, but as to what happens when they do, you're going to have to watch the movie yourself for that.

Surprisingly, I'd never actually seen Apocalypse Now in its entirety before this. I think that's a lot to do with my not being of the generation to be terribly interested in the Vietnam War and movies about it. I'm much too young for the 1960s protest era, and by the time I got old enough to appreciate classic cinema, there would be other Vietnam movies like Platoon that were the big ones.

I have to say that for me, Apocalypse Now is another of those movies that's very well made, albeit a difficult watch. However, I think I'd put it with movies like Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, or Au hasard Balthasar where I see why they're good, but for me not good enough to put all the way at the top of all-time great film lists the way a lot of critics do.

Rumble Fish

I mentioned yesterday that I've got two unrelated movies on my DVR that TCM happens to be showing fairly early on May 11, so I'd be blogging about one of them on May 9 and the other on May 10. The first one up is Rumble Fish, which you can see at the midnight between May 10 and May 11 (technically the intro will start just after midnight on May 11 ET, which means that in other time zones it's still late in the evening of May 10).

After some stark black-and-white cityscapes in Tulsa, OK, we go inside a pool hall where a gang of high school friends hang out. The nominal leader of the gang is Rusty James (Matt Dillon), although he's only the leader if you will because he inherited it from his older brother, who had the nickname Motorcycle Boy. Motorcycle Boy left Oklahome some time back to go out to California. Among the friends are Smokey (a young Nicolas Cage), looking like he belongs in one of those 50s juvenile delinquent movies, and the rather nerdy Steve, who looks decidedly out of place although he seems closer to Rusty James than does Smokey.

Rusty James gets word at the pool hall that a member of another band of delinquents wishes to pick a fight with him; the two gangs are to meet at a designated location at 10 PM if Rusty James isn't a coward. Rusty thinks he isn't a coward, but first he has to go see his girlfriend Patty (Diane Lane) and have some nookie with her before he can go off for that fight. At first it seems like the fight is going to be your standard issue fistfight, but more like Fight Club than with Marquess of Queensbury rules, unti Rusty James' opponent pulls out a knife. Rusty James gets a board and is more or less able to subdue his opponent until a surprise -- the return of Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke). This distracts Rusty James, leading to his getting slashed in the abdomen.

Motorcycle Boy (I don't think his real name is ever given) doesn't really want it known that he's back in town. Meanwhile, Rusty James looks up to him much like the relationship between two brothers in American History X. This time, however, there's a father in the picture (Dennis Hopper) but no mother, although Dad is also an alcoholic, which is why he hasn't been able to keep his kids in check. Rusty James' behavior gets progressively worse, leading to a fight where the gets hit in the head and really ought to have suffered at least a severe concussion if not a fractured skull, although he goes on as if it's only a one-night headache, much like he's gone on from the stabbing.

Motorcycle Boy also returns to petty crime and, being known to the police already, this is bound to have a deleterious effect. Ultimately, he and his brother wind up at a pet store where Motorcycle Boy admires the Siamese fighting fish. He ultimately returns to the pet store to steal a tank of the fish, while at the same time liberating the other animals in a move that horrifies Rusty James since he doesn't want to run that afoul of the law.

There are two big problems that I had with Rumble Fish. One is that the protagonist, Rusty James, is in many ways not a particularly likable character. Once again this is the sort of thing that's a problem in a movie where we're probably supposed to be identifying with him. The even bigger problem for me, however, is how the story felt terribly aimless, as though there's no real plot. And what plot there is felt like it had terrible holes. Notably, how did Rusty James not end up in hospital considering how badly he got hurt? And how did someone like Steve both wind up with a badly wrong crowd and maintain his nerdiness at the same time.

Francis Ford Coppola directed, and the technical aspects of the film, especially the cinematography, are worth noting. I think the fact that it has a "name" director is part of why in the years since it was released it's gained a higher reputation than I would give it. But that's also the reason why you should probably watch and judge for yourself.

Gotta love those sports-film stereotypes

I actually watched a couple of sports films recently because they were both about to leave the Watch TCM app. One of them I'll save for later because I just did another movie with the same actor, so of the two, we'll start off by mentioning Hoosiers.

Of course, Hoosiers is probably the sort of movie you all know about not just because of the sports-film tropes about underdogs, but because of its reputation as a pretty darn good movie. Into the town of Hickory, IN, circa the fall of 1951 comes Norman Dale (Gene Hackman). He's a basketball coach who even used to coach in college, but has been in the service for the past 10 years. Now, that ought to put his leaving basketball as being at the same time as Pearl Harbor, but that of course is not the way it's presented in the movie. Instead, Dale had some ignominous exit from the college game, and is now trying to rebuild his career in a small town because presumably nobody else will have him except his old friend the high school principal Cletus Summers (Sheb Wooley).

Not only that, but nobody is sure of the new coach, with rumors about his past flying around. And this is one of those small towns that lives for its basketball the way the Texas town in The Last Picture Show lived for football. So they're not so certain about this new head coach who, after all, must have left the bigger college game for a reason. Dale doesn't make his life any easier by being a different sort of coach than the previous one, who was beloved by the small town before his untimely death. Indeed, the star of the team, Jimmy Chitwood, decided to quit basketball when the old coach died.

Frankly, however, that suits one teacher, Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) just fine. She's been a sort of foster mother to Jimmy who has had a fairly unstable family situation. Myra even warns Dale not to try to recruit Jimmy, becaue she hopes Jimmy can be successful enough to get a college education and get out of a dead-end town like Hickory. She in fact only came back because she had aging parents to take care of. Of course, you know that despite the inauspicious introduction Fleener and Dale have, they're going to wind up a lot lcoser by the end of the movie.

You also know that there's going to be a moment where Jimmy has to decide what he's going to do, which comes at a town meeting where the townsfolk are willing to tear up Dale's contract and fire him, contract law be damned. Somehow I doubt they could afford to buy out his contract. They don't like the unorthodox coach who drove away some of his few players at the beginning of the season although they return hat in hand, and because it's going to take a little while before he has success.

But because of the sort of film Hoosiers is, you know that Dale is ultimately going to have success, and that the town is ultimately going to line up behind him. In fact, the story is inspired by the real Indiana town of Milan, and their run to the state championships, although apparently a lot of liberties are taken with that story. Oh, and did I mention Dennis Hopper as the alcoholic father of one of the players who gets tapped to be an assistant coach as long as he can stop drinking?

As I said, there are a lot of tropes in Hoosiers. But despite all those tropes, it is a pretty darn good movie, in no small part thanks to the acting performances of Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper, the latter picking up an Oscar nomination. It was also filmed on location in Indiana, although there's no actual town of Hickory as far as I'm aware. In any case, the location shooting makes for a pretty darn good atmosphere. It's no wonder the movie gained a high reputation.

Edna Ferber movies Cimarron down to Texas

Another of the movies that would have been on my "Blind Spot" list if I were taking part in that blogathon is Giant. It was on TCM during Summer Under the Stars as part of a day of Elizabeth Taylor movies, and I recorded it then. It will be on again tomorrow at 4:30 PM, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Rock Hudson plays Joradn "Bick" Benedict Jr., who inherited a giant ranch from his father in Texas. However, at the start of the movie he's on a train to Maryland because he's looking to buy some horses from one of those southern gentlemen of a type, Dr. Lynnton (Paul Fix). Dr. Lynnton has two daughters, but for the purposes of our story the important one is Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). She's being pursued by a young Britsh diplomat (Rod Taylor in a small role), but when she sees Bick, she immediately falls in love with him. She's also quite open about speaking her mind. The feeling between the two winds up being mutual, so Leslie marries Bick and goes back to Texas with him on the train.

There's shades of The Sea of Grass here, as Leslie has never been on a ranch, and doesn't yet know how to run it even if she is now technically the mistress of the ranch. Heretofore, running the ranch house and working well with Bick has been his elder sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge). Unsurprisingly, it's going to be a rough adjustment for both of the women, although thankfully for Leslie Luz dies off about a third of the way through the movie.

Working for Bick on the ranch is Jett Rink (James Dean), the sort of person polite society sees as uncouth and who bristles at being looked down upon. When Luz dies, she's bequeathed a small plot of land to Jett. Bick doesn't want Jett anywhere near the ranch, and offers to buy Jett out, but this is only going to make Jett angrier and determined to become a success as he prospects for oil on that small plot of land. This really ticks off Bick as the land is supposed to be for cattle, not oil. Eventually, of course, Jett does find that oil, and vows to show everybody just how big a guy he really is.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Bick and Leslie have obviously been busy having sex because Leslie first has twins who grow up to be Luz II (Carroll Baker) and Jordan "Jordy" Benedict III (Dennis Hopper), followed by a third child. Bick loves Jordy and doesn't really care for Luz, but that turns out to be better for Luz: Bick is raising Jordy to inherit the ranch, and Jordy would much rather become a doctor than a rancher. In fact, it's the third child, Judy, who would rather get into farming, although when she marries young ranch hand Bob, they would rather work their own land. This being a sprawling epic, World War II intervenes about here.

After the war is when Jett really becomes fabulously wealthy and, Charles Foster Kane-style, wants to use it. Young Luz, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Jett, because women apparently think James Dean is gorgeous, even when he has a horrible pencil moustache. Bick and Leslie don't know about this relationship, and are horrified when they learn about it.

For me, the big problem with Giant is that it veers too wildly from one plot line to the next, being the sort of story that probably would have worked better as a TV miniseries rather than a movie that, at 200 minutes without any sort of roadshow presentation like an overture or intermission, is way too long. I didn't even mention the racial tolerance part of the plot that's especially tacked on at the end: Leslie has been trying to help the poor Mexicans living in a shantytown on the ranch throughout the movie, while Jordy marries a young Mexican woman.

Even with the flaws, Giant is a memorable movie, thanks to excellent production design and good performances from all of the members of the elder generation. Among those I haven't mentioned in smaller roles in that generation are Jane Withers and Chill Wills; Sal Mineo plays a Mexican of about Jordy's age who gets killed in action in World War II. And I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who will like the movie more than I did. So definitely give it a watch.

Kid Blue

A movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation relatively recently is Kid Blue. I DVRed it, and since it's on again tomorrow morning at 11:45 and again at 9:50 AM Monday, I decided to watch it now to do a blog post on.

Dennis Hopper plays the titular Kid Blue, real name Bickford Waner. In the movie's opening scene he's leading a gang of outlaws in a robbery of a moving train in the late 1890s. Except that this is the gang that couldn't shoot straight, as it falls at the first hurdle -- and you get the impression this isn't the first attempted robbery that's gone badly wrong.

So Bick decides that he's going to try to go straight, since robbing trains clearly isn't working. He makes his way to the town of Dime Box, TX, where he begins to look for a job. The sheriff, nicknamed "Mean John" (Ben Johnson), isn't so sure about Bick. More accepting is crazy Preacher Bob (Peter Boyle), who is working on a human-powered airplane he calls the "aerocycle", real airplanes not having been invented yet so that Bob couldn't 100% know that human-powered planes are a fool's errand.

Eventually, Bick gets a job at the growing town's biggest employer, a ceramics factory producing kitsch and run by Hendricks (Clifton James). This brings Bick into contact with a co-worker, Reese Ford (Warren Oates), and his wife Molly (Lee Purcell). Both of the Fords have some odd ideas, as Reese tries to get Bick to take a bath with him, not wanting to waste the hot water, while Molly winds up seducing Bick.

But Bick has that past, and it's going to come back for him, in the form of Janet (Janice Rule). She's passing herself off as an actress, coming from Dallas, where Bick claims his girlfriend is from. Janet knows Bick, and knows that he used to be Kid Blue. Worse, she spills the beans to Reese, which is strike one for Bick. Strike two is that Reese learns of the relationship between Bick and Molly.

It's all enough for Bick to decide that going straight isn't going to work for him, so why not rob the payroll from his boss' factory? Perhaps he should have remembered that he wasn't very competent in his previous stint as an outlaw thief.

Kid Blue is one of those 1970s westerns that form a genre that I've found I'm not the biggest fan of. I was never the biggest fan of westerns in general, although I've warmed to Code-era stuff. As for the 70s westerns, it's not the "revisionist" nature of the westerns that makes me like them less, but the fact that most of the ones I've seen come across as meandering and self-indulgent. A big part of the big problem with Kid Blue is that it feels like it's not going anywhere, with characters who seem drawn as quirky only because now that the Production Code is gone, we can make them quirkier than ever and get away with it. It doesn't really work here.

People who like Dennis Hopper or Warren Oates will probably like this one; for other people I'd probably suggest starting with earlier westerns. Kid Blue got a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, but I don't know the status of their scheme since the takeover by Disney. The movie seems to be available currently on Amazon Prime video if you do the streaming thing.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Another recent movie viewing was the 1957 western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

If you've seen enough westerns, you probably know most of the characters in the story and the basic events of the gunfight, at least as it gets portrayed in the movies. (The actual gunfight was only about 30 seconds and, for dramatic reasons, it's usually more drawn out.) The gunfight in this version comes almost at the end of the movie, which focuses mostly on the back story of Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and his eventual friend of sorts Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas).

Wyatt, at the time the movie opens, was marshal in Dodge City, KS, having to deal with the cowboys who would come into town at the end of the cattle drive and consistently create a ruckus, not having had any way to have real fun while they were on the cattle drive for weeks at a time. While pursuing a criminal away from Dodge, Wyatt asks for information about Johnny Ringo (John Ireland) first from a lawman nearing retirement age, and then from Doc.

By this time, Doc already has his tuberculosis, a girlfriend Kate (Jo Van Fleet), and a reputation as a gunfighter that forces him to go from one town to the next. Eventually, he's going to wind up back in Dodge City, which makes Wyatt, not yet having Doc as a friend, thoroughly displeased. Things are going to become quite complicated, with the return of Johnny Ringo, and the entrance of lady gambler Laura Denbow (Rhonda Fleming).

Wyatt doesn't want women gambling in the "polite" side of town, but Laura is just so darn beautiful that Wyatt eventually relents, as long as she does it off to the side where most of the public won't see her. But Wyatt is also falling in love with Laura, taking the opportunity to do patrols where he knows Laura is going to be so he can run into her. Laura, for her part, isn't so certain she wants a lawman as her partner, not because she'd be expected to give up gambling, but because of the violent fate that's likely to befall lawmen.

Now, we all know that Wyatt Earp ends up at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, AZ, so he's going to be leaving Dodge. In this movie, it's presented as getting a telegram from his brothers, including Vernon (John Hudson) who is the marshal in Tombstone. Apparently the Clantons led by Ike (Lyle Bettger) has a ranch outside of town, and has bought a county sheriff who looks the other way when the Clantons are rustling Mexican cattle and trying to pass them through Tombstone on the way to getting them to the railroad. Laura just doesn't understand that Wyatt has to help his brothers....

Wyatt goes to Tombstone, and Doc makes it there as well. The Clantons, it seems are itching for a fight, while the townsfolk support the Earps but aren't necessarily willing to put the lives where their mouths are. Wyatt has to deal with Ike's drunken kid brother Billy (Dennis Hopper), while Ike concludes that the only way to get the fight is to make it personal, so he has Wyatt's kid brother Jimmy (Martin Milner) killed. It's enough to make anybody get in a shootout for vengeance....

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral felt to me as if it wasn't breaking any new ground, other than being in color and wide-screen which earlier versions hadn't. Still, the story is solid, and the acting uniformly quite good. Kirk Douglas is probably the best, followed by Jo Van Fleet. Burt Lancaster's Wyatt Earp comes across as having been written as not quite complex enough, so while there's nothing wrong with his acting, the script lets him down a bit. Among the supporting actors, Hopper is quite good, as are Earl Holliman as Wyatt's deputy in Dodge City, and in one scene, Olive Carey as the Clantons' mother.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a movie I can highly recommend.