Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)

Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun

Pearl Chavez: Jennifer Jones
Lewt McCanles: Gregory Peck
Jesse McCanles: Joseph Cotten
Senator Jackson McCanles: Lionel Barrymore
Scott Chavez: Herbert Marshall
Laura Belle McCanles: Lillian Gish
The Sinkiller: Walter Huston
Sam Pierce: Charles Bickford
Lem Smoot: Harry Carey
Mrs. Chavez: Tilly Losch
Vashti: Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: David O. Selznick, Oliver H.P. Garrett
Based on a novel by Niven Busch
Cinematography: Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson
Production design: J. McMillan Johnson
Film editing: Hal C. Kern
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

This is a bad movie, but it's one distinguished in the annals of bad movies because it was made by David O. Selznick, who as the poster shouts at you was "The Producer Who Gave You 'GONE WITH THE WIND.'" Selznick made it to showcase Jennifer Jones, the actress who won an Oscar as the saintly Bernadette of Lourdes in The Song of Bernadette (Henry King, 1943). Selznick, who left his wife for Jones, wanted to demonstrate that she was capable of much more than the sweetly gentle piety of Bernadette, so he cast her as the sultry Pearl Chavez in this adaptation (credited to Selznick himself along with Oliver H.P. Garrett, with some uncredited help by Ben Hecht) of the novel by Niven Busch. Opposite Jones, Selznick cast Gregory Peck as the amoral cowboy Lewt McCanles, who shares a self-destructive passion with Pearl. Both actors are radically miscast. Jones does a lot of eye- and teeth-flashing as Pearl, while Peck's usual good-guy persona undermines his attempts to play rapaciously sexy. The plot is one of those familiar Western tropes: good brother Jesse against bad 'un Lewt, reflecting the ill-matched personalities of their parents, the tough old cattle baron Jackson McCanles and his gentle (and genteel) wife, Laura Belle. Pearl is an orphan, the improbable daughter of an improbable couple, the educated Scott Chavez and a sexy Indian woman, who angers him by fooling around with another man. Chavez kills both his wife and her lover and is hanged for it, so Pearl is sent to live with the McCanleses -- Laura Belle is Chavez's second cousin and old sweetheart -- on their Texas ranch. It's all pretentiously packaged by Selznick: not many other movies begin with both a "Prelude" and an "Overture," composed by Dimitri Tiomkin in the best overblown Hollywood style. It has Technicolor as lurid as its story, shot by three major cinematographers, Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, and Harold Rosson. But any attempt to generate real heat between Jones and Peck was quickly stifled by the Production Code, which even forced Selznick to introduce a voiceover at the beginning to explain that the character of the frontier preacher known as "The Sinkiller" (entertainingly played by Walter Huston) was not intended to be a representative clergyman. There are a few good moments, including an impressive tracking shot at the barbecue on the ranch in which various guests offer their opinions of Pearl, the McCanles brothers, and other things. Whether this scene can be credited to director King Vidor, who was certainly capable of it, is an open question, because Vidor found working with the obsessive Selznick so difficult that he quit the film. Selznick directed some scenes, as did Otto Brower, William Dieterle, Sidney Franklin, William Cameron Menzies, and Josef von Sternberg, all uncredited. The resulting melange is not unwatchable, thanks to a few good performances (Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey), and perhaps also to some really terrible ones (Lionel Barrymore at his most florid and Butterfly McQueen repeating her fluttery air-headedness from GWTW).

The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920)

Film firsts are usually worth checking out, and this one is a double first: It's the first appearance of the title character on-screen, and it's the first of the genre of films for which Fairbanks remains best-known, the swashbuckler. Since Fairbanks and co-scenarist Eugene Miller adapted Johnston McCulley's 1919 magazine story, "The Curse of Capistrano," the masked hero has been played by Tyrone Power, Guy Williams (in the Disney TV series), Frank Langella, George Hamilton (in a spoof featuring Zorro's gay twin brother), Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas (as the aging Zorro and his hand-picked successor), and appeared in numerous Mexican and European films, including one starring Alain Delon. The trope of the do-gooder who pretends to be a wimp but turns into a force for justice when he hides his identity behind a mask is seen in countless superhero tales, most notably the Clark Kent/Superman story. As the languid fop Don Diego Vega, Fairbanks affects a weary slouch and spends his time doing tricks that involve a handkerchief. When he turns into Zorro, with mask and scarf over his head, he pastes on a little mustache oddly reminiscent of Boris Badenov, but he succeeds in taking on the villains with great élan. The film itself begins slowly, with too much exposition crammed into the intertitles, but eventually Fairbanks gets his act together, and the climax of the movie is a hilarious showpiece for his acrobatic moves. He leads the Capistrano constabulary on a merry chase over walls and across rooftops, inevitably tempting them into disaster: He leaps over a pigsty, for example, whereupon the pursuers fall into it. At the end, revealing his secret identity, he wins the hand of Lolita Pulido (Marguerite De La Motte), by saving her family's estate from the clutches of the evil governor (George Periolat) and his henchmen, Capitán Juan Ramon (Robert McKim) and Sgt. Pedro Gonzales (Noah Beery), both of whom get branded with the emblematic Z (though the sergeant gets his only in the seat of his pants). Good fun, once it gets going. 

Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Marston, 2004)

A few months ago, I criticized Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) for trying to tell three or four very promising stories all at once, and not doing a satisfactory job of telling any of them, and for distracting attention away from the work done by less-well-known foreign actors by casting two movie stars (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett). It turns out that the kind of movie I was looking for had been done two years earlier: Maria Full of Grace features a then-unknown Colombian actress, Catalina Sandino Moreno, in the first feature film by writer and director Joshua Marston. It tells the story of a pregnant Colombian teenager, Maria (Sandino Moreno), who agrees to become a "drug mule," being flown to New York after swallowing small boluses of drugs encased in plastic; the drug-runners retrieve the packets after she excretes them. It's one of those behind-the-headlines stories that can easily turn melodramatic or preachy, and it's to Marston's and Sandino Moreno's credit that it never does. Her creation of the resourceful, rebellious, determined Maria, who keeps her head when things go seriously wrong, earned Sandino Moreno a nomination for the best actress Oscar in her film debut. She lost to Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), but has worked regularly since then: I saw her just the other night as Luisa, the girlfriend of Cole (Joshua Jackson) on the Showtime series The Affair.

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Some people think this is a great film. The American Film Institute in 2007 ranked Raging Bull No. 4 in its list of 100 best American movies, behind Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). It is certainly an accomplished film: Michael Chapman's cinematography uses black and white in ways that hadn't been seen since color came to dominate filmmaking in the 1950s; Scorsese and his joined-at-the-hip editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, accomplish wonders, especially with the fight sequences and the occasional eruptions of violence; the set decoration by Phil Abramson, Frederic C. Weiler, and Carl Biddiscombe evokes the shabby milieu and its changes over the decades convincingly; and the performances of then-unknowns Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty made them into overnight sensations. And then there's what even I will accept as Robert De Niro's greatest performance, which won him a best actor Oscar. The film critic Mick LaSalle likes to categorize Oscar acting nominations as either "transformations" or "apotheoses." In the former, actors create new images for themselves, while in the latter, they simply take their existing images and raise them to newly vivid heights. But in Raging Bull De Niro does both: He transforms himself into both the self-destructive young boxer Jake LaMotta and the bloated older LaMotta, living on his long-ago laurels, but he also brings something new and more intense to the existing image of De Niro as a fiercely inward actor. For these reasons, I think, the film makes many lists of the greatest films of all time. So why does it leave me cold? Why, among the Scorsese and De Niro collaborations, do I prefer Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Goodfellas (1990)? Is it that Mean Streets is more varied and colorful, Taxi Driver more probing in its exploration of psychosis, and Goodfellas smarter and wittier? Could it be that Raging Bull lacks texture, depth, and humor? Is it that Jake LaMotta is one of the most unsympathetic figures to receive a biopic treatment, or is it that Scorsese was never able to find a multi-sided personality in the screenplays credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin that were worked over by both Scorsese and De Niro? In another American Film Institute ranking, Raging Bull was proclaimed the best sports movie of all time. But Scorsese has said that he doesn't care for sports in general and boxing in particular, and I think it shows. His movie is about the brutality of boxing, not about the sport that involves both offense and defense, and requires not only a well-honed skill but also intelligence -- or if not that, at least a greatly developed cunning. There is nothing of that in his portrayal of LaMotta. The movie's reputation, therefore, remains something of an enigma to me.

Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936)

If Shakespeare's Juliet could be played, as it was in its first performances, by a boy, then why shouldn't she be played by 34-year-old Norma Shearer? Truth be told, I don't find Shearer's performance that bad: She lightens her voice effectively and her girlish manner never gets too coy. It also helps that William H. Daniels photographs her through filters that soften the signs of aging: She looks maybe five years younger than her actual age, if not the 20 years younger that the play's Juliet is supposed to be. I'm more bothered by the balding 43-year-old Leslie Howard as her Romeo, though he had the theatrical training that makes the verse sound convincing in his delivery. And then there's the 54-year-old John Barrymore as Mercutio, who could be Romeo's fey uncle but not his contemporary. In fact, Barrymore's over-the-top performance almost makes this version of the play a must-see -- we miss him more than we do most Mercutios after his death. Edna May Oliver's turn as Juliet's Nurse is enjoyable, if a bit of a surprise: She usually played eccentric spinsters like Aunt Betsy Trotwood in David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935) or sour dowagers like Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940). In the play, the Nurse rarely speaks without risqué double-entendres, but most of them have been cut in Talbot Jennings's adaptation, thus avoiding the ridiculous spectacle of Shakespeare being subjected to the Production Code censors. (Somehow the studio managed to slip in Mercutio's line, "the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.") Some of the other pleasures of the film are camp ones, such as Agnes deMille's choreography for the ball, along with the costume designs by Oliver Messel and Adrian, which evoke early 20th-century illustrators like Walter Crane or Maxfield Parrish. No, this Romeo and Juliet won't do, except as a representation of how Shakespeare's play was seen at a particular time and place: a Hollywood film studio in the heyday of the star system. In that respect, it's invaluable.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934)

This is Norma Shearer as queen of the MGM lot, taking on a role that had been associated with Katherine Cornell, who played Elizabeth Barrett in the 1931 Broadway production of Rudolf Besier's play and then toured the country with it. Irving Thalberg, the head of production at MGM, offered the role in the film version to Cornell, but she turned it down -- as she did all film offers. (Cornell reportedly was afraid of having her performances recorded on film because she feared they would grow dated and ludicrous, as so many performances from the silent era had become.) The logical choice for the movie then became Shearer, Thalberg's wife, who was entering a new phase in her career: Having turned 30 in 1932, she was beginning to outgrow the more lively persona that she displayed in her earlier movies. Unfortunately for her reputation today, most of the films she began to make have effaced the earlier image: She seems distantly "respectable" in them. The Barretts of Wimpole Street was one of her more popular vehicles, and although the film as a whole is stodgy, Shearer makes a credible transition from the oppressed invalid of the early part of the film to the defiant woman who elopes with her lover, Robert Browning (Fredric March), at the end. It helps that Charles Laughton hams it up wonderfully as Edward Moulton-Barrett, Elizabeth's father, who is determined to keep any of his eight children from marrying as long as he is alive. Although the Production Code forbade any explicit mention of either incest or sexual obsession, Laughton's performance makes it clear in the climactic scene not only that he is disturbed by his own sexuality and may have forced himself on his late wife, but also that he has incestuous feelings for Elizabeth. Her horror at this revelation precipitates her elopement with Browning.

Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin, 1943)

Like Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949) or Cliff Robertson in Charly (Ralph Nelson, 1968), Paul Lukas had the good fortune to land a movie role that won him the best actor Oscar on his one and only turn as a nominee. His competition included Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood), Walter Pidgeon in Madame Curie (Mervyn LeRoy), and Mickey Rooney in The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown). Oh, and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz), the one performance that everyone remembers. It's not like Lukas hadn't had plenty of opportunities to attract attention before: He had begun acting in movies in his native Hungary in 1915, and after coming to Hollywood had appeared in mostly supporting roles in numerous films, playing Professor Bhaer opposite Katharine Hepburn in Little Women (George Cukor, 1933) and the sinister Dr. Hartz in The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938), for example. He had also played the role of Kurt Muller, the coordinator of resistance movements against the Nazis, in the original Broadway production of Watch on the Rhine in 1941, so he was a natural choice for the film version -- though producer Hal Wallis wanted Charles Boyer instead. As often happens, the Oscar was no step toward better roles in movies, and Lukas spent much of his later career on stage, though he continued to appear on film and TV up till his death in 1971. The play was written by Lillian Hellman, whose lover, Dashiell Hammett, did the screenplay with some input from her. Unfortunately, the result is less a movie than a sermon about doing one's patriotic duty in the struggle against fascism. It didn't help that Wallis hired the play's director, Herman Shumlin, for the film: Shumlin had never directed a movie and had to be assisted throughout by cinematographer Hal Mohr. He was also unable to rein in Bette Davis, who is miscast as the noble and dutiful wife and has a tendency to slip into some of her familiar and caricaturable mannerisms in the film.

The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

After his great Neo-Realist films Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), and just as he was beginning his relationship with Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini made this sweet-natured film that combines some of his Neo-Realism (the use of non-professional actors) with some of the moral questioning he does in the four Bergman films, especially Europe '51 (1952). Based on two 14th-century books that retold legends of the life of St. Francis and his followers, The Flowers of St. Francis consists of a prologue and nine episodes. The actors, who were Franciscan monks, are not credited, although Francis was played by Brother Nazario Gerardi and the key role of Brother Ginepro by Brother Severino Pisacane. The only professional actor in the film is Aldo Fabrizi, who had worked with Rossellini in Rome, Open City. Fabrizi is the monstrous tyrant Nicolaio, who torments Ginepro until he is won over by the monk's gentle endurance of all the ills inflicted on him -- at one point, Ginepro is used as a human jump rope, then dragged around Nicolaio's camp behind a horse. The title of the film in Italian is Francesco, Giullare di Dio, meaning "God's jester," and the moral lesson constantly taught in the film is that of self-abasement to the point of ridicule. In a key episode, Francis and another friar go in search of perfect happiness. They find it when they go to the house of a man who repeatedly refuses their plea for alms until he finally beats them and kicks them downstairs. Then Francis explains that true happiness is to suffer in the name of Christ, a moral lesson not unlike the one learned by Irene Girard (Bergman) in Europe '51, where it's expressed in more secular terms. (And one that I might use as an excuse the next time I shut the door on a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon missionary.) The screenplay was written in collaboration with Federico Fellini with consultation from two Roman Catholic priests, though the film is much lighter in tone than that suggests.

Listen to Me Marlon (Stevan Riley, 2015)

It's a truism that Marlon Brando revolutionized film acting. (With a little help from Montgomery Clift and James Dean, and some pioneering by John Garfield.) And it seems that Brando believed the truism himself: At one point in this fascinating documentary he disses such older film stars as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart, asserting that they were always the same in their movies. This misses the point about film stardom, I think, which is that everyone who gets established as a film actor carries their image from movie to movie. How much variety, really, is there in Brando's most memorable film performances? Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Johnny Strabler in The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953), Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), and even Vito Corleone in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and Paul in Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) are all troubled urban Americans with a rebellious streak. And when Brando tried to break away from that type -- as Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! (1952), Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953), Napoleon in Désirée (Henry Koster, 1954), or Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (Lewis Milestone, 1962) -- the performances leave a lot to be desired. Mind you, I still think Brando was one of the greatest actors in film history, but only when he let himself play roles that suited him -- as Cooper, Gable, and Bogart did. This film, which uses Brando's own tape recordings as its principal source, shows him as a kind of tragic naïf in search of something that would heal the wounds he carried from childhood. He found it in acting when he fell under the spell of Stella Adler, although the Adler shown in this film is given to talking pretentious nonsense about how acting isn't about the words, it's about the soul. Brando also sought healing in sex, in psychoanalysis, in political activism, but the picture that emerges in the film is of a man who never succeeded in escaping his own tormented ego.

Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

Twenty years ago (!), when I wrote my book about movies that had been nominated for Oscars, I had this to say about Some Like It Hot: "Hilarious farce and one of the sweetest natured of Wilder's usually acerbic comedies, thanks to endearing performances by [Jack] Lemmon and [Joe E.] Brown, [Tony] Curtis' high-spirited mimicry of [Cary] Grant, and [Marilyn] Monroe's breath-taking luminosity." Today, after all we've learned about sexual orientation and identity, after many feminist critiques of Hollywood's depiction of women, and after many explorations of Monroe's tragic history, that comment sounds a little naive. Plumb beneath the surface of what seems to be mere entertainment and you'll find disturbance in the depths. Take the celebrated ending of the film, for example. Sugar (Monroe) gets Jerry (Curtis), but at what price? As he warns her, he's exactly the kind of guy she knows is bad for her. And Osgood's (Brown) shrugging off the fact that Daphne (Lemmon) is a man is one of the funniest moments on film, but in fact, the two men have the kind of chemistry together (as in the tango scene) that works, whereas Curtis and Monroe have no real chemistry. Is the film making a case, well in advance of its time, for same-sex attraction? Probably not Wilder's conscious intention, but what does that matter? As for the difficulties of working with Monroe that Wilder and her co-stars later complained about -- though Curtis eventually retracted the much-quoted (including by me) statement that kissing her was "like kissing Hitler" -- this remains perhaps her best film and best performance. Imagine the movie with Mitzi Gaynor (originally thought of for the part and on standby in case Monroe bailed on it) and you have nothing like the one we now know. In lesser hands than Wilder's the clichés (men in drag on run from gangsters) would have resulted in a second-rate comedy. The real marvel is that Wilder produced something enduring out of clichéd material. Curtis and Lemmon are great, even though their roles are the traditional comic teaming of a bully (Curtis) and a patsy (Lemmon), the formula already worked over by Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Sometimes what you have to do is take the formula and transcend it.