A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, June 21, 2020

The Baron of Arizona (Samuel Fuller, 1950)

Vincent Price and Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona
Cast: Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Robin Short, Tina Pine, Karen Kester, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale, Edward Keane, Barbara Woddell. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, Homer Croy. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Arthur Hilton. Music: Paul Dunlap.

"An occasionally true story" goes the tag line to Tony McNamara's delicious The Great, a miniseries about Catherine the Great. It's certainly a phrase that applies to almost every biopic ever made, but especially to Samuel Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, the second of his feature films as director, sandwiched between two better-known movies, I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Steel Helmet (1951). The film purports to tell the story of James Addison Reavis, a fraudster par excellence who tried in 1880 to lay claim to virtually the entire United States territory of Arizona. The real story of Reavis's scheme is far more complex and far less romantic than the one Fuller carved out of it. Fuller's version is full of shady doings in a monastery, a hair-breadth escape abetted by Spanish gypsies, high-rolling arrogance, near death by lynch mob, and sentimental true love, everything that could allow Vincent Price to play both dashing and disreputable. You can probably sense Fuller feeling his way as a director in the movie -- it's not quite as solidly grounded as either of the ones that flank it in his filmography -- and its budgetary shortcomings are evident. But few directors could do as much with so little.