Tag: Sterling Hayden

Rapid Response: Suddenly

Frank Sinatra plays a man trying to assassinate the President in this 1954 thriller.

SuddenlyPosterI found myself this Friday caught in a wormhole of reading articles about gun control. The San Bernardino shooting happened an hour from downtown LA where I now live, and it has stirred up a lot of opinions and emotions.

So you can imagine my frustration when the movie I pick for the evening, “Suddenly”, turns out to be a pro-gun movie!

I’ve been pouring through Frank Sinatra’s films for a piece on his centennial, and this one was recommended as a surprising example of Sinatra’s hard-boiled side. Sinatra plays John Baron, a Silver Star winning ex-pat who killed 27 people in the war, but as something of an extension of his PTSD, has now taken a job to assassinate the President of the United States. In the small town of Suddenly, Baron takes a family hostage in order to gain a good vantage point when the President passes through town.

Rumor has it that Lee Harvey Oswald watched the film shortly before killing Kennedy, prompting Sinatra to bury the film for years.

But “Suddenly” has an unfortunate MO that has aged it horribly. The little boy among the family of hostages is Pidge, and he gets the local Sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden) to buy him a toy cap gun. His mother Ellen (Nancy Gates) is strongly opposed, but even she’ll come around when the gun factors strongly into foiling Baron, not to mention that even she gets a shot or two off. Director Lewis Allen even gives Baron a cathartic feeling of self-esteem as he waxes on about the beauty and power of gun ownership saying, “When you have the gun, you are a kind of God.”

“Suddenly” often plays like a cheesy ’50s workplace PSA with a story shoehorned in around the war politics. Sinatra’s presence at the beginning of the movie is sorely missed, with the film’s flimsy supporting characters getting developed before we even know what the movie is about, not to mention that all the actors around him are atrocious.

But even Sinatra isn’t much better. Not once, but twice Sinatra plays directly to the camera, wide-eyed and scary in trying to amplify his past demons, but otherwise scowling and grimacing in his typical Sinatra persona and swagger.

“Suddenly” may try to avoid the politics of the time, or the political ramifications of killing the President (Baron at one point mentions the futility of his actions, knowing that as soon as the President is killed a new one will take his place), but with the gun argument front and center, this film is hardly a-political.

The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman updated Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe for his comedy noir classic “The Long Goodbye”.

TheLongGoodbyePosterReleased a year before “Chinatown”, Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” is the other dense masterpiece of mystery and contemporary noir with a plot so layered it may demand a second viewing to keep it all straight.

But Altman is a director of character and dialogue. For as complicated as the story gets, we never lose track of the people and the moods at its core. If “The Long Goodbye” has earned comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice”, it’s because Thomas Pynchon’s prose matches Altman’s attention to detail in the richness of his characters that color every moment. Altman’s signature conversational style and his theatrical cast of characters feel right at home with the thorny, pulpy stuff of a Raymond Chandler novel, as the menagerie of free-loving nudists, Jewish mobsters, Hemingway-grade drunkards, sinister psychiatrists and play-acting toll booth attendants wonderfully wrap us in Chandler’s twisted yarn.

In order to appropriately convey a place and a time Altman knew so well, he had to update the iconic character Philip Marlowe into the 1970s, transforming him from a hard-nosed detective played by the likes of Humphrey Bogart into a smart-talking loser whose body language and dress sense couldn’t be more out of place in this more modern world.

Altman enlisted Leigh Brackett to write the screenplay, who previously had a hand with another Raymond Chandler novel, 1946’s “The Big Sleep”. And Elliott Gould steps into Marlowe’s shoes and suit, a brilliantly pathetic and smarmy performance that finds Marlowe pitifully attempting to pass off a different brand of cat food to his cat.

For a while, “The Long Goodbye” is a lark. Topless women are making brownies next door to Marlowe’s apartment. When cops come and ask him about his friend who has disappeared, Marlowe is an utter smart-ass. When he gets pulled in for questioning, he sees the grocery clerk who insulted him at the store because he has a girlfriend and doesn’t need a cat. The two exchange quick words, and it’s another sign of how fully developed these characters are, however momentary they appear on screen. And when the detectives question Marlowe, he’s managed to put on a healthy coating of black face just to further play the fool.

In that moment, things get serious on a dime. In a few overlapping words and a jumble of point of view shots, Marlowe’s friend Terry, whom he just drove to Mexico to avoid suspicion, is dead. The stakes and suspicions have been raised. Someone is dead, the cops think it’s a suicide, but characters that we’ve met only in passing or not at all have enough depth to make us believe not all is right.

Altman is well known as a wonderful storyteller, but “The Long Goodbye” is good evidence of Altman as the brilliant visual stylist. When the reveal of Terry’s death is made clear, we get it from behind one-way glass, a coldly effective way to up the dramatic tension. When he’s calling Terry’s neighbor to follow his suspicions, the camera tracks in on Marlowe ever so slowly. The pace is measured and laid back, befitting of a comedy, but the urgency and curiosity is there. And when Marlowe first questions Terry’s neighbor Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt), Altman elegantly illustrates in one unbroken shot and no dialogue what another director would make all too obvious. Marlowe turns Eileen’s face toward the camera, revealing the bruised, drunken abuse of her husband Roger (Sterling Hayden), all without an additional close-up or point to call attention to it.

So much of “The Long Goodbye” is filled with these modest thrills and twists. Moments of great conflict, like when a mobster smashes a Coke bottle across his girlfriend’s face, or when Eileen spies Roger walking out into the ocean, are remarkably memorable. But all of them are executed minimally in the way that Altman does best. The latter doesn’t even utilize John Williams’s recurring “Long Goodbye” score motif. It’s not slow cinema waiting for a surprise or action cinema building tension. Altman has allowed his characters to stew in a pot, bubbling with humor, emotion, peculiarities and finally excitement, and what their actions mean in the grander scheme of a “plot” is almost beside the point.

That’s not to say “The Long Goodbye” doesn’t have an incredible story and a perfectly summed up finale. But its charms are in how it breaks apart the rigid confines of the mystery genre and makes a movie that’s equal parts funny and fascinating. It’s like the cat food Marlowe’s trying to pass off to his cat: what’s inside feels different and strange for those who haven’t tried noir or Altman, but the label surrounding it still makes a wonderful package.

Johnny Guitar: A Feminist Western with a dark twist

Joan Crawford leads Nicholas Ray’s film that’s surprisingly relevant on gender politics.

In a time when women are as vocal as ever about the hypocrisy of being shamed for their sexuality by both men and other women and when women become the villains and not the victims of abuse or even rape in relationships, a movie like “Johnny Guitar” in a genre historically associated with men, the Western, is surprisingly and strangely relevant.

Nicholas Ray’s film is a classic Old Hollywood Western, but at times it may as well be “The Scarlet Letter.” Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon owner in a small town that for some reason wants nothing to do with her. The railroad is on its way and Vienna has scooped up the rights to the train depot, so the value of her land is about to skyrocket. But on a particularly quiet and stormy night when a mysterious man named Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) has arrived to serve Vienna, a posse of men and the town marshall show up to harass Vienna and demand she leave town in 24 hours. The posse’s leader Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) suspects Vienna’s involvement with a local gang led by The Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), and she viciously wants all of them hung, believing them to be responsible for the death of her brother in a recent stagecoach robbery.

The story turns out to be intricately layered. Love triangles abound, no character is remotely trusting of the others, and some like Emma harbor deep seeded hatred of Vienna and the local gang. Emma is in fact so vindictive and spiteful of Vienna that she gets sadistic pleasure out of burning down Vienna’s saloon and calling for her hanging. She’s a coldly brilliant villain in the hands of McCambridge, and her performance is so good that she makes puddles into these hardened male gunslingers.

But Emma’s spite of Vienna runs so deep that she’s been labeled a tramp for no good reason, assumed to be involved with these bad men and harboring worse intentions. Emma also secretly loves the Dancin’ Kid, despite his own unreturned fancy for Vienna, and this only amplifies the sexual tension. In an early scene, Vienna speaks of this dilemma in a way that might still seem relatable to all women of today. “A man can lie, steal… and even kill. But as long as he hangs on to his pride, he’s still a man. All a woman has to do is slip – once. And she’s a “tramp!” Must be a great comfort to you to be a man.”

That kind of nuanced feminist plea feels mighty rare in a genre like this, and it carries all the way through to the showdown at the end between Vienna and Emma. Having two women face off in the spots where John Wayne and Clint Eastwood have stood so many times before may just be unprecedented.  Continue reading “Johnny Guitar: A Feminist Western with a dark twist”