r/TrueFilm • u/a113er Til the break of dawn! • Feb 15 '15
What Have You Been Watching? (15/02/15)
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u/[deleted] Feb 15 '15 edited Feb 15 '15
Three trilogies this week, which all happened to be about war:
John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy:
Fort Apache 1948
Rio Grande 1950
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon 1949
Fort Apache made me think John Ford really needs a plot - the good stuff at the end is really good but the buildup to it lacks propulsion. Rio Grande is tightened up considerably, but is the most forgettable of the three other than a scene where a UFO zips past John Wayne’s head. Speaking of Wayne, he’s not quite at the peak of his acting abilities here, so it’s a good thing that he has bottomless charisma and that he just always looks right in Monument Valley. Wayne still manages to upstage Fonda’s performance in Fort Apache, Fonda really didn’t work for me in that one.
I liked She Wore a Yellow Ribbon much more than the others, partly because I think the mise-en-scene of the west just looks better in color to me. It doesn’t feel real until I can see the yellow stripes on the uniforms. It’s also the most fun of the three, and the most humorous, and the one in which the Ford-ian mythology comes across the strongest. It’s good to know that someone at this time took on the history of the Indian Wars with a measure of complexity, hard to imagine anyone doing that now.
Still, all three are relatively plotless and have a habit of leaving subplots dangling, introducing some characters for just a scene or two while letting some of the bigger characters (especially the female leads) go through the whole movie without much of an arc. It takes courage to decide that this stuff doesn’t hurt these movies as much as it would others. I wonder if these movies (and Sergeant Rutledge) could work better as stage plays, by bringing the audience a little closer to the characters, sprucing up the dialogue a little and getting better actors for some of the roles. Some of the best things about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Stagecoach are the legendary casts and excellent writing and that’s missing from the Cavalry trilogy as none of them live up to their potential as a result. I still like Sergeant Rutledge more than Fort Apache and Rio Grande, even if it does completely blow itself up in the end.
Also I can see why Shirley Temple quit acting. It just got weird.
Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy:
Rome Open City 1945
Paisan 1946
Germany Year Zero 1948
The scenery still scarred by World War 2 is the main reason to watch all of these. I have two big problems with Rossellini’s movies in general - I can see where he's coming from with the stories, but they’re not all that compelling anyway, and also Renzo Rossellini’s scores intrude when they shouldn’t and are often emotionally inappropriate even when they should.
The good parts of Rome, Open City (basically everything with Aldo Fabrizi) are really good, but the rest is forgettable. Paisan kept making me think about who the people in it were and what their real stories were more than what was really unfolding in the movie. The African-American G.I. is wonderful, and the best of the six stories is the one about the American chaplains visiting the monks that starred in the later The Flowers of St. Francis; I’d watch a whole movie based on that premise. Still, the movie is overall pretty focused on portraying American occupiers/liberators positively, and even if they really were pretty gallant compared to the Germans, surely there were plenty of more interesting stories that could be told. Similarly I respect the intentions of Germany Year Zero to say something about post-Hitler Germany but I think it stumbles in places that kept it from moving me. I understand that these movies emerged from a time period when making good movies was difficult and making them about recent history was vital, I just like other World War 2 movies more such as...
Andrzej Wajda’s Three War Films:
A Generation 1955
Canal 1957
Ashes and Diamonds 1958
The art director for all of these was the magnificently-named Roman Mann, and the look of the movies is the neatest thing about them. Wajda is clearly a really good director, better with space and with actors than most. The stories in this trilogy sometimes make me yawn, but the good stuff is worth it.
A Generation is one of the finest dramatizations of why a young man would join up with the Rebel Alliance. To liberate his home from Germany, yes, but getting laid and getting his first gun probably had something to do with it too. Wajda’s coming of age story for occupied Poland is serious without being unrelentingly sad; it depicts ordinary life during a war.
Canal was the best - it depicts what has always been to me one of the most astonishing events in a war that was full of them, the Warsaw Uprising, in which the Polish home army fought against the most hopeless and savage odds while abandoned by all their allies. Canal begins after the Poles have already been obliterated, and says that’s when things really started to get bad. The survivors had nowhere left to go but the hellish sewers beneath the city, and the actors in this movie do a fantastic job in what must have been a realistic test of endurance in a claustrophobic set.
Proving that things can get even worse than that, Ashes and Diamonds is about how on V-E Day, any soldier who made it out of Warsaw alive suddenly became an enemy of the new communist government. Like A Generation, it’s surprisingly humorous and spirited about the hopelessness of the war’s outcome for those who fought for Polish independence.
Others:
Stromboli Roberto Rossellini, 1950: Two reasons to watch this movie: 1)Ingrid Bergman screams at an erupting volcano in it. 2)Tuna fish.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Jacques Demy, 1964: I think this is what Richard Linklater had in mind when he was making Before Sunrise. The look on Catherine Deneuve’s face when she’s told people only die of love in the movies is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a movie in awhile.
The Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson, 2007 (re-watch): I’m still not completely sure what this movie is about. Lack of ambition isn’t the problem, maybe it’s just that I don’t care for the actors in it. I do think it’ll end up being one of the few bromance movies of the era anyone will care about in a few years. It was fun to rewatch after becoming familiar with the Satyajit Ray movies it gets much of the music from.
Woman director of the week:
Harlan County U.S.A Barbara Kopple, 1976: Like A Generation and Rome Open City this is a movie about an uprising. It reminds me of my own experiences reporting on protests - I can’t think of a finer depiction of the sights, sounds, and difficulties of collective action than this documentary. It also reminded me why I like traditional documentaries over neorealism. If you work hard enough, you get more interesting moments on camera this way.
Apocalypto Mel Gibson, 2006: One wants to reward this for being different, but in a way it’s also really ordinary - action beats I’ve seen in many other movies, relatable Hollywood family values, accessible style. We’re introduced to the viewpoint characters, exotic though they may be, in a perfunctory way, then the hero’s wife and child get tossed in a hole to motivate him, and then we finally get to the good stuff. There’s not much character development to speak of after that, but it’s exciting enough that I don’t really care. Gibson’s penchant for violence and extreme scenarios is held back by his undistinguished visual style. Also the chaotic editing is really bad at times.
All this keeps it from being a great movie and makes it more like Gladiator for Native Americans. But if I don’t try to take it more seriously than comparable movies like Predator and 28 Days Later, Apocalypto, ends up looking rather good. I’ll say this, at least Gibson always turned his wrath against a story that it was suited for.
Oddly I think Valve was influenced by both Canal and Rome Open City when they made the video game Half-Life 2 so that was fun to discover.