Johnny Guitar (1954)

(Image courtesy of Republic Pictures via http://cinemacc.files.wordpress.com)

If there were ever an American classic sorely in need of a home video revival, it would be The Magnificent Ambersons (Criterion, are you there? It's me - Zach). However, continuing down that priority list, somewhere not too far from the top resides Nicholas Ray's upheaval of the classic Western, Johnny Guitar.

Ray was a master of subverting genre and playing it cool under the Hayes Production Code, or later on, what was left of the Code in the mid-to-late 50s (see Rebel Without A Cause). The censors were always a little slow on the uptake when it came to Freudian psycho-sexual allusions, and Ray's work is loaded with repressed, dark tension. As a result, years later his films don't feel quaint and scrubbed clean in the way that even some of the greatest films from the same period are.

For any viewer with even the most casual knowledge of the classic Hollywood Western picture, Johnny Guitar stands out from the get go. As Sterling Hayden's titular character rides into a valley, a mountain range explodes. He then moves on to watch a stagecoach robbery and shooting, which the posited hero glimpses with little reaction. We are introduced into a world of chaos where the rules of the game no longer apply.

Our symbolically impotent hero carries a guitar, not a gun, and turns out to be not much of a hero at all. Good guys and bad guys are completely relative in Johnny Guitar - morally, we don't have much room to side with the law or the outlaws, which sort of disrupts the continuity for those who argue the film as an allegory for the McCarthy-era witch hunts. It's definitely there to some degree, but Ray isn't building up anyone to be 100 percent innocent of anything.

Joan Crawford's Vienna calls Johnny to her casino/pub joint in a frontier town under the auspices of needing entertainment for the place. Really, she's looking for protection from a long lost lover (don't worry, it's really not much of a spoiler). Vienna is caught in the throws of a Shakespearean stand off with Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) , John McIvers (Ward Bond) and what seems like the rest of the town. Partially, the feud is financially related, but much of Emma's deep-rooted hatred for Vienna comes from her inability to deal with her love for the Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady), a local outlaw with his eyes on Vienna.

The HUAC undertones come in as Emma tries to pin her brother's murder on Vienna (via her association with the Kid and his gang). If it sounds like I'm leaving out Johnny Guitar, it's because the title character is largely absent from his own film. As he confesses toward the beginning of the film, "I'm a stranger here myself." Johnny is largely cut from the action in deference to Vienna, his old flame. Traditional male heroism is continually undercut by a stronger female presence - it's something the men in the film never really come to terms with, mostly because the women won't allow them to.

Thematically, Johnny Guitar cooks up many of the ideas Ray would visit again in Rebel Without A Cause. Even in 1954, Ray sensed a paradigm shift in American values. He was a bit ahead of his time with Johnny Guitar, and as a result, the film's reception was pretty mixed in America. It's no surprise Variety didn't know whether to make heads or tails of the film. It's jarring. Everything that "should" happen in a Western generally doesn't, or at least happens in a very different way. Ray inverts the rules.

Some of Ray's most ardent contemporary support came from the young French critic Francois Truffaut, and it's easy to see why Truffaut and other future New Wavers dug so hard on Ray and Johnny Guitar (Truffaut called it the "Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream"). What the New Wave would do for the gangster film (Breathless, Shoot The Piano Player), Johnny Guitar at least partially does for the Western. The genre mold is there, barely, but within that structure, the language is completely different - far more poetic, far less literal.

There's plenty of lyricism in John Ford's masterpieces, but none of Ford's films is as truly bizarre as Johnny Guitar. I realize that's not necessarily a flat out endorsement, and I'm certainly not going to make any bullshit claim that Johnny Guitar is a masterpiece in league The Searchers or Stagecoach. But Ray's film is a wrongfully overlooked and influential chapter in the Western pantheon. In the very least, I think that warrants a proper DVD release.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

(Image courtesy of Warner Bros. via www.moviewallpapers.net)

All due respect to Casablanca, but Michael Curtiz was a goddamn hack. Maybe that's a bit strong considering all I've seen of his work is the aforementioned classic and Mildred Pierce. For all his competence on Casablanca though, Curtiz damn near capsizes Mildred Pierce, an otherwise pleasing melo-noir.

Hats off to Joan Crawford in the titular role - she carries the film from beginning to end. Pierce sacrifices everything for her family, specifically her eldest child, the class-conscious, money-grubbing snob Veda (Ann Blyth). She takes a job as a waitress, which Veda resents as socially unacceptable, and eventually builds a successful restraurant mini-empire. Despite the accomplishment, Veda still looks down at her mother for working at all. How, exactly, Vera got these upper-class pretensions, we never really know (it's something that may have been lost in adapting James M. Cain's novel).

Even as Curtiz undermines the drama (more on that later), Crawford sells the tragedy of the woefully unappreciated mother. Ranald MacDougall's tight dialogue gives Crawford and co-star Jack Carson (Wally Fay, Pierce's business partner and one of her suitors) plenty to chew on, though the narrative construct (too much noir flashback and narration) feels a bit dated.

The structure allows the film to toy with the idea of femme fatale a little, especially in the juxtaposition of mother and daughter -- although there's not much in the way of contemplation on the noir figure. Really it's more of a ploy, albeit a pretty good one.

Where the film suffers is in the directorial/editorial department. It's no wonder Crawford won an Oscar for her turn in the film, but it's downright baffling how Curtiz and cinematographer Ernest Haller (Rebel Without a Cause) ended up with nods.

It's not just that Curtiz lacks any recognizable style - he undermines the drama with poor composition and editing. One can only imagine how much better Mildred Pierce could have been in the hands of Howard Hawks, who knew how to work magic on studio supervision. Curtiz's camera and cutting pattern move either too predictably or haphazzardly.

Each dolly in or out punctuates exactly when it you would expect it to. Rather than letting the action breathe within the frame, Curtiz (or Warner Bros., who may have been manning the puppet from behind the scenes) feels the need to break down each sequence with unecessary close ups, punctuating all the easy moments.

Without giving too much away, here's a pretty right on example. One character remains sick in bed, dying, with an oxygen tent around her. The POV shot from inside the tent is powerful -- we're isolated, trapped within the apparature. But when the reverse comes and Pierce runs to the character, we lose her in sight as she comes around the corner. At first, it appears as if Pierce's interaction with the character will occur off-screen -- an unusual and interesting choice for a studio film. However, Curtiz cuts back to a variation on the original shot, and then back to the reverse. The moment gets lost and segmented by adhering to the shot-reverse-shot convention, and to greater detriment, bad composition. It's a pivotal scene, or at least it should be, because for Pierce, it's a turning point.

I know it comes down to a question of preference, but I do not understand how critic Andrew Sarris can file directors like Carol Reed, Elia Kazan and John Huston under "Less Than Meets the Eye" and dub Curtiz "Lightly Likeable". When a lamp placed in the foreground blocks a character's movement in Mildred Pierce, it's doing just that and serves no other purpose.

Having ranted and raved, I still don't regret having seen the film, if only for Crawford's performance. Why this film enjoys such reverence (Amazon deems it "essential" for what it's worth), I have no clue. For my money, Out of the Past is a far stronger post-war melo-noir.

One last note -- Mildred Pierce is sort of atypical in the noir canon for its strong female lead. This could be interpreted as somewhat progressive given the time period. However, it is worth noting that Pierce, when interrogated by the police, admits divorcing her first husband, Bert, (Bruce Bennett) was a mistake. Bert who had lost his job, seemed reluctant to get a new one, admitted to detesting Veda and was openly cheating on Mildred with another woman. Given the mess Mildred's life becomes after the divorce, I guess this is somewhat understandable. Still, it rubs me the wrong way.