Sleep, My Love: race and resentment in Hollywood
Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love threatens to become a mundane gothic ‘gaslighting’ melodrama – in the mould of Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Suspicion and, indeed, George Cukor’s Gaslight – with dreary references, as was common at the time, to Freudian psychology, but is, after 30 minutes, rescued by a couple of unexpected innovations and turned into something hugely interesting and entertaining.
The first twist is Sirk’s decision to highlight the differences between the egotistical, repressed and calculating Richard Courtland – played flawlessly by Don Ameche – and Bruce Elcott, the epitome of effortless American masculine charm, common sense and determination – played with great appeal by Robert Cummings – by having Bruce, who has fallen in love with Courtland’s wife, Alison (Claudette Colbert), take the object of his forbidden desire to his ‘brother’s’ wedding, his brother turns out to be Jimmie Lin, who is not his real brother but his ’honorary’ brother since Jimmy is Chinese.
The Chinese wedding, happy, graceful, full of culture and style, is a surprising early attempt by Hollywood to deal with questions of race, racial discrimination and stereotyping – which, of course, Hollywood did so much to perpetuate – that Sirk was to return to more famously in Imitation of Life.
The Chinese couple’s wholesome and joyous relationship contrasts with the destructive and harrowing American relationships in the film – between Richard and Alison, between Bruce and Alison and, especially, between Richard and Daphne, the ravishing glamour model played by Hazel Brooks, who he is madly in love and lust with – the poor man cannot keep his hands off her – to the extent that he devises an elaborate plot to do away with his wife, colluding with a seedy photographer Charles Vernay superbly portrayed by George Colouris, which involves convincing her that she is mad and adding hallucinatory drugs to her drinks in order to make her more suggestive to his malign suggestions.
The second surprise in the film is the intensity of the hatred Richard feels for his wife. Not only does he find her physically repulsive – he recoils from her touch – but he is also bursting with resentment that she is above him in station.
If he were to simply leave Alison for Daphne, Richard would lose his right to his wife’s wealth, which, indeed, is why Daphne, one of the most cynical, acerbic, ruthless – and attractive – characters in film noir, urges her lover to get on with it and kill his unsuspecting spouse so that they can be together and enjoy the spoils of their crime.
In one of the most startling scenes in the film, Daphne explains what she wants and what she expects from her besotted lover.
‘I want what she’s got,’ Daphne says. ‘I want all of it. I want her house, her name, her man, and I want them now, tonight.’
Douglas Sirk’s Lured: between a film noir and a whodunnit
There is no discernible or worthwhile philosophical, psychological or emotional truth in Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947), often labelled a film noir but aside from a couple of striking expressionist shots involving suspicious characters lurking in the shadows there is nothing to suggest any of the moodiness, doom, existential crisis normally associated with the genre.
Indeed, if the film is characterised by anything then it’s its light-heartedness and breeziness, as if Sirk can’t quite come up with anything dark and meaningful to say in the script he’s been given to work with. Having comedienne Lucille Ball in the female lead doesn’t help with trying to give the film an air of gravitas or darkness.
In fact, the best scenes are those that have some comic appeal, particularly those involving Boris Karloff, who plays a deranged ex-fashion designer who has lured Ball to his flat and dressed her up as if she’s about to appear in a fashion show, only for Karloff to pull back the stage curtain to reveal an audience consisting of a dolorous canine and a mannequin.
How Ball has ended up at Karloff’s tells us something about the plot of the film. She’s got there after a friend of hers at the nightclub they both work at as dancers has gone missing – and is presumed the latest victim of a serial killer stalking London. The ‘poet-killer’, as the murderer is known, taunts police by sending them Baudelaire-inspired poems on death and beauty announcing he’s about to strike again.
Inspector Harley Temple, played by Charles Coburn, enlists Ball as an undercover detective to answer lonely hearts ads in the newspapers in the hope that she will flush out the killer. The killer’s modus operandi is to use newspaper advertisements to lure potential victims. Karloff is one of several eccentrics she encounters via the ads before she gets closer to uncovering the homicidal maniac.
The film boasts a stellar cast – as well as Ball, Karloff and Coburn, the film features George Sanders and Cedric Hardwicke – and is set in London, though it’s a London of the Hollywood set and not the real thing, which is a shame, since we get no sense of post-war London and all the social, economic and psychological conditions of the time that would have made for a far more interesting film. Instead, we get the impression that Sirk is going through the motions, delivering less a film noir and more a far-fetched police procedural and whodunnit.
Shockproof: breaking society’s shackles
With Douglas Sirk directing and Sam Fuller writing the screenplay, you’d expect that Shockproof (1949) would be an explosive film noir full of interest – and it is.
Sirk, the German exile, who became best known for a series of 1950s proto-feminist melodramas – such as Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession – and Fuller, who went on to direct memorable and idiosyncratic Westerns and film noirs in the 1950s and 1960s – Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Run of the Arrow, Forty Guns – create a film of bewildering twists and turns, not so much in plotting but in character, as the protagonists are put through the mill as they try to find their best selves and overcome their pasts, their families and society.
Patricia Knight plays Jenny Marsh, a convicted murderer who’s just been released from prison after five years. Her parole officer is the upright Griff Marat, played by the magnificent Cornel Wilde, devoted to his job, to the rules, to helping people get back on the straight and narrow, and to his family: his recently widowed blind mother and his younger brother, both of whom idolise him.
Griff is immediately attracted to the beautiful ex-killer and does all he can to make her parole a success: finding her work and somewhere to stay, and when these are insufficient, bringing her to his home, making her a carer and companion for his mother.
All this love, attention, compassion, rather than ‘civilising’ Jenny makes her sick, suffocates her, as she longs for Harry Wesson, the slick, flamboyant gambler, the man she loved before prison and whose life of glamour, danger and independence she wishes to rejoin.
It is a stunning repudiation of bourgeois society and domesticity that shocks the viewer to the core. How could Jenny reject the pure love of the hardworking, honest, handsome, dependable Griff for the superficial fop Johnny? But she does, going so far as to run away and risk violating her parole and being sent back to jail.
Griff, however, refuses to give up on Jenny and rather than letting her go decides to confess his love to her and ask for her hand in marriage. It is a proposal as Jenny’s parole officer that puts Griff’s career and future prospects at risk.
Jenny is moved. It’s the first time a man has wanted her for a wife. Her mind is in turmoil. What kind of life does she want? Which man truly loves her? The one who is prepared to give up his life for her or the one who allowed her to go to prison for a crime committed on his behalf?
She chooses the former, to Harry’s consternation, who sets out to destroy the man who’s taken his lover from him by revealing to him she’s an unrepentant deceiver who’s taken Griff for a fool. Jenny shoots her ex-lover and so begins the second part of the film as Griff, rather than turn Jenny in, goes on the run with her.
The fugitive couple now engage in a gruelling cat and mouse game as they seek to avoid capture by the police and the certainty that Jenny will be sent back to prison for life for shooting Johnny.
Griff and Jenny’s love is put to the test. They are short of money, the people they encounter want to betray them rather than help them, they become paranoid and argue with each other. They live in squalor, they go hungry, move constantly, do backbreaking work just to survive. All the while, the net closes in on them…
Sign of the Pagan: Douglas Sirk, feminism and tyranny
When
one thinks of Douglas Sirk, the German-born film director who fled Nazi
Germany for the USA in 1937, it is usually his 1940s film noirs – Lured; Sleep, My Love; Shockproof – and even more so his 1950s melodramas – Magnificent Obsession; All that Heaven Allows; Imitation of Life; The Tarnished Angels,
dismissed at the time as ‘women’s films’ but, to more discerning
critics, hailed as masterpieces for their dissection of American
bourgeois life and studies of female and racial hypocrisy and repression
– we have in mind.
It’s strange, therefore, to see Sirk's name associated with a film like Sign of the Pagan, a sword and sandal epic that purports to tell the story of the threat to the divided Roman empire – with the Western part led by Valentinian III in Rome and the Eastern part by Theodosius II in Constantinople – posed by the barbarian Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun.
It’s strange, therefore, to see Sirk's name associated with a film like Sign of the Pagan, a sword and sandal epic that purports to tell the story of the threat to the divided Roman empire – with the Western part led by Valentinian III in Rome and the Eastern part by Theodosius II in Constantinople – posed by the barbarian Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun.
The film takes the line that both these competing emperors are too self-absorbed, caught up in petty palace politics and the luxuries and fripperies of being emperor, to recognise the dangers the barbarian warlord poses to the existence of civilisation.
Civilisation in this case is identified in the film as Christianity, which has by now – the mid-5th century – been established as the state religion in both parts of the empire, but is reviled by Attila for its message of peace and love.
The film also posits that if Valentinian and Theodosius are too weak and short-sighted to confront the dangers of Attila, then the more robust Markianos, the stout Roman soldier, has the answers.
Markianos’ commitment to fighting Attila and devotion to a pacifist religion confuses Attila, who begins to doubt his venture to conquer the Roman world and destroy Christianity. Prophecies of his own doom also unbalance his mind.
And it is perhaps Attila’s descent into madness, which is of Shakespearean proportions, that provides us with Sirk’s interest in the story. We also note that Attila’s ultimate betrayal and killing are carried out by two women – it is his brow beaten daughter Kubra that betrays her father to the Roman enemy and it is the Huns’ brutalised concubine, Ildico – and not Markianos, as you’d expect – who delivers the final blow of the knife that ends the life of the savage tyrant. The fact that it is women who are given the role and satisfaction of bringing down tyranny perhaps points us to Sirk’s overtly feminist films to be made in the near future and alerts us to his interest in making this otherwise uninspiring historical drama.
The Glory Brigade: when Greek warrior meets American fighter
The Glory Brigade (1953) is an interesting if overlooked and obscure film purporting to be a Hollywood tribute to the Greek Expeditionary Force that took part in the UN mission to defend South Korea against North Korean invasion in the first years of the 1950s.
The Greek Expeditionary Force to Korea became known as the ‘Spartan Brigade’ and such was the good fighting reputation and devotion to the cause it demonstrated that the unit of 900 men was awarded the US Presidential Unit citation.
Seizing on the the widespread praise and interest the Greek soldiers garnered in the US press, Hollywood decided that a film depicting the brigade’s exploits would be appropriate.
Twentieth Century Fox undertook the production, no doubt inspired by the legendary head of the studio, Spyros Skouras, and the result is a good and more complex film than one would have expected, not only interested in recreating the brutal hell of the Korean War but also in dealing with issues such as American exceptionalism and racism – the Greek troops are initially disparaged by the Americans they are asked to fight with, who don’t want to trust their lives to foreigners they regard as inherently cowardly; but also the immigrant experience – the detachment of US engineers assigned to work with the Greeks is led by a Greek-American, Lt. Sam Pryor (superbly played by Victor Mature), whose attitude to his Greek colleagues goes from exaggerated admiration to loathing and rejection before he finds a more moderate and realistic way to deal with his heritage.
Unusually, the film depicts the Greek soldiers and their commanders as smart, disciplined and naturally brave while it is the American soldier, expressing individualism, cynicism and gung-hoism who is criticised and depicted as a threat to the military mission.
This is in contrast to any number of war films – The Guns of Navarone, The Angry Hills, Ill Met by Moonlight, They Who Dare – that portray Greek fighters as valiant but flawed by an excess of emotion. In The Glory Brigade, it is the American warrior who is shown as enthral to his emotions, irrational and impetuous.
Shoot Out: civilisation versus barbarism, women and children versus men
Shoot Out (1971) is a fine, overlooked Western directed by Henry Hathaway with Gregory Peck playing Clay Lomax, an ageing outlaw who’s just been released from a seven-year stretch in the pen for bank robbery and begins a journey to track down the partner who betrayed him, Sam Foley (played by James Gregory), who shot and left Lomax for dead and scarpered with the loot, which he used to set himself up as a successful businessman.
In the course of tracking down Foley, Lomax has thrust on him 7-year-old Decky Ortega, who may or may not be his daughter from a fling he had just before being imprisoned and whose mother has died leaving the little girl an orphan.
Meanwhile, Foley, aware that Lomax has been released from jail and in all likelihood will be coming after him seeking revenge, hires three young thugs – or ‘punks’ as Lomax calls them – to follow Lomax and report to him when he approaches Gunhill, the town he now lives in.
The trajectory of the story revolves around the increasing bond that develops between Lomax and his possible-daughter and the extent to which this new-found paternal purpose in his life will deter Lomax from killing Foley and, therefore, returning to jail, if he hasn’t ended up on the gallows. Lomax knows that doing what he’s been dreaming of doing, day in day out, for seven years, will satisfy his thirst for revenge but will also inevitably lead to the destruction of his life and destitution of the girl, who he now loves and may be his offspring.
The theme of domesticity versus the outlaw life is one of the most common in the Western and can also be expressed as the conflict that takes place on the frontier between civilisation and barbarism. Often, this conflict is expressed in the civilised values held by women and children – virtues of love, compassion, forgiveness – versus the barbarian ones held by men, values of violence, solitariness, hatred and revenge.
In Shoot Out, this contrast in values is emphasised not just by Lomax’s relationship with his young ‘daughter’ but also finds expression when, as he approaches Gunhill and his target, Lomax takes shelter from the torrential rain for the night with a beautiful widowed farm-owner and her young boy. In the best scene of the film, Juliana Farrell (played by Patricia Quinn) describes her crushing loneliness, how she needs alcohol to dull the pain and virtually begs Lomax (and his daughter) to stay with her and her son so that they can form a family.
It is an offer that Lomax is willing to consider, but as his thirst for revenge is ameliorated by the civilising influence of women and children, the threat of male violence, in the form of the three punks sent out to track him, threatens to ruin this final opportunity presented to him to lead a purposeful life, in communion with others and society rather than in opposition to them.
Meanwhile, Foley, aware that Lomax has been released from jail and in all likelihood will be coming after him seeking revenge, hires three young thugs – or ‘punks’ as Lomax calls them – to follow Lomax and report to him when he approaches Gunhill, the town he now lives in.
The trajectory of the story revolves around the increasing bond that develops between Lomax and his possible-daughter and the extent to which this new-found paternal purpose in his life will deter Lomax from killing Foley and, therefore, returning to jail, if he hasn’t ended up on the gallows. Lomax knows that doing what he’s been dreaming of doing, day in day out, for seven years, will satisfy his thirst for revenge but will also inevitably lead to the destruction of his life and destitution of the girl, who he now loves and may be his offspring.
The theme of domesticity versus the outlaw life is one of the most common in the Western and can also be expressed as the conflict that takes place on the frontier between civilisation and barbarism. Often, this conflict is expressed in the civilised values held by women and children – virtues of love, compassion, forgiveness – versus the barbarian ones held by men, values of violence, solitariness, hatred and revenge.
In Shoot Out, this contrast in values is emphasised not just by Lomax’s relationship with his young ‘daughter’ but also finds expression when, as he approaches Gunhill and his target, Lomax takes shelter from the torrential rain for the night with a beautiful widowed farm-owner and her young boy. In the best scene of the film, Juliana Farrell (played by Patricia Quinn) describes her crushing loneliness, how she needs alcohol to dull the pain and virtually begs Lomax (and his daughter) to stay with her and her son so that they can form a family.
It is an offer that Lomax is willing to consider, but as his thirst for revenge is ameliorated by the civilising influence of women and children, the threat of male violence, in the form of the three punks sent out to track him, threatens to ruin this final opportunity presented to him to lead a purposeful life, in communion with others and society rather than in opposition to them.
Only the Valiant: the marionette officer under duress
One of the most recognisable types in the Western is that of the marionette West Point officer whose inflexible devotion to orders, rules and the army alienates the men under his command and, indeed, puts military objectives in jeopardy.
Thus, in Only the Valiant (1951) Gregory Peck plays Captain Richard Lance, a senior officer leading the Fifth Cavalry fighting Apaches in New Mexico Territory. His decisions – on how to treat the enemy, on promotions, on discipline – have created so many malcontents that one is led to think that we are about to watch Murder on the Orient Express, with hatred providing any number of men with the motivation to kill him.
Matters come to a head when it’s suspected that Lance has, at the last minute, backed out of a dangerous mission and sent a popular junior officer out in his place not because he was ordered to do so by senior command but out of selfish interest – Lt Bill Holloway is a love rival. The fact that Holloway is brutally killed and his mutilated body returned to Fifth Cavalry HQ intensifies the enmity felt towards Lance, not only by his men but also by the woman both he and Holloway were courting, who now repudiates Lance.
Undeterred, Lance, not interested in his personal travails but only the military issues at hand, comes up with a plan to thwart the belligerent Apaches, now threatening to overrun the Fifth Cavalry. His mission involves taking a handful of men to trap the Apaches in a narrow pass and delay them until promised reinforcement can arrive.
With his plan approved, Lance chooses the men most hostile towards him for the assignment, the men, who at every opportunity have expressed the desire to kill him. Why has he chosen them to go on this perilous mission? The men believe it is because Lance has an overwhelming desire to die on the battlefield and be declared a hero and wants to take them, his foes, with him. But Lance insists he’s selected them to hold off the Indians because their discontent makes them a liability to the bigger objective of defending Fifth Cavalry HQ.
The tension in the film is which version is true: is Lance an inflexible marionette with a death wish or is he a man whose dedication to mission and the rules are the best way to get the job done?
While the film interrogates this subject it remains interesting and novel, but where it fails is in its horrific attitude towards Indians – the film was made just at a time where Westerns, in the aftermath of World War Two, were becoming more conscious of the negative way Native Americans were being portrayed – the joyful massacre by Gatling gun at the end of the film is particularly hard for the modern viewer to take; while Peck, too harshly, regarded the role of Lance as one of the worst of his career.
Matters come to a head when it’s suspected that Lance has, at the last minute, backed out of a dangerous mission and sent a popular junior officer out in his place not because he was ordered to do so by senior command but out of selfish interest – Lt Bill Holloway is a love rival. The fact that Holloway is brutally killed and his mutilated body returned to Fifth Cavalry HQ intensifies the enmity felt towards Lance, not only by his men but also by the woman both he and Holloway were courting, who now repudiates Lance.
Undeterred, Lance, not interested in his personal travails but only the military issues at hand, comes up with a plan to thwart the belligerent Apaches, now threatening to overrun the Fifth Cavalry. His mission involves taking a handful of men to trap the Apaches in a narrow pass and delay them until promised reinforcement can arrive.
With his plan approved, Lance chooses the men most hostile towards him for the assignment, the men, who at every opportunity have expressed the desire to kill him. Why has he chosen them to go on this perilous mission? The men believe it is because Lance has an overwhelming desire to die on the battlefield and be declared a hero and wants to take them, his foes, with him. But Lance insists he’s selected them to hold off the Indians because their discontent makes them a liability to the bigger objective of defending Fifth Cavalry HQ.
The tension in the film is which version is true: is Lance an inflexible marionette with a death wish or is he a man whose dedication to mission and the rules are the best way to get the job done?
While the film interrogates this subject it remains interesting and novel, but where it fails is in its horrific attitude towards Indians – the film was made just at a time where Westerns, in the aftermath of World War Two, were becoming more conscious of the negative way Native Americans were being portrayed – the joyful massacre by Gatling gun at the end of the film is particularly hard for the modern viewer to take; while Peck, too harshly, regarded the role of Lance as one of the worst of his career.
The Gunfighter: the futility and tragedy of trying to escape a violent past
The Gunfighter (1950) is an excellent Western, made even more interesting because at the height of the genre’s popularity it began to question the myths it was propagating and started a theme of the ageing man of violence, who’s not so quick on the draw anymore, tired of brutality, haunted by the men he’s killed and whose reputation is such that he is now not only the object of unwelcome curiosity and obsequiousness but also the target of young toughs who want to prove themselves against the most famous gunslinger in the West and, in doing so, seize his mantle.
Gregory Peck plays Jimmy Ringo, based on the famous outlaw Johnny Ringo, who’s reached the stage of his life where he wants to give up his tempestuous past and settle down. He tracks down the woman he loved before he embarked on outlawdom and wants to persuade her that he’s a changed man and now wants to be a family man.
As he waits, holed up in the town saloon, for her to make her mind up, the local population becomes increasingly agitated by having such a famous visitor in their midst, the town’s children, in awe of his exploits, want to catch a glimpse of the legendary man; the local businessmen see a chance to make money; the women’s temperance leaders notice an opportunity to express their moral outrage; while the town’s young loudmouth talks himself into taking on the notorious fighter.
While all this uproar is taking place, a trio of brothers are closing in on Jimmy wanting revenge for the killing of a family member. It seems that Ringo’s dream of a new life, a peaceful life, with his past behind him, is going to elude him.
Henry King directed the film from a screenplay by William Sellers and William Bowers, based on an idea from Andre de Toth. De Toth, as both screenwriter and director, is responsible for some of the finest Westerns – Man in the Saddle, Carson City, Springfield Rifle, The Stranger Wore a Gun, Day of the Outlaw – while the film is also referenced in the Bob Dylan song, Brownsville Girl:
Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that
Kid down and string him up by the neck
Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath
Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square
I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death
Indeed, Gregory Peck quoted Brownsville Girl in 1997 when presenting Dylan with the The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
Peck said in his speech: ‘Dylan was singing about a picture that I made called The Gunfighter about the lone man in town with people comin' in to kill him and everybody wants him out of town before the shooting starts. When I met Bob, years later, I told him that meant a lot to me and the best way I could sum him up is to say Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin' starts. Thank you, Mr. Dylan, for rocking the country... and the ages.’
As he waits, holed up in the town saloon, for her to make her mind up, the local population becomes increasingly agitated by having such a famous visitor in their midst, the town’s children, in awe of his exploits, want to catch a glimpse of the legendary man; the local businessmen see a chance to make money; the women’s temperance leaders notice an opportunity to express their moral outrage; while the town’s young loudmouth talks himself into taking on the notorious fighter.
While all this uproar is taking place, a trio of brothers are closing in on Jimmy wanting revenge for the killing of a family member. It seems that Ringo’s dream of a new life, a peaceful life, with his past behind him, is going to elude him.
Henry King directed the film from a screenplay by William Sellers and William Bowers, based on an idea from Andre de Toth. De Toth, as both screenwriter and director, is responsible for some of the finest Westerns – Man in the Saddle, Carson City, Springfield Rifle, The Stranger Wore a Gun, Day of the Outlaw – while the film is also referenced in the Bob Dylan song, Brownsville Girl:
Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that
Kid down and string him up by the neck
Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath
Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square
I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death
Indeed, Gregory Peck quoted Brownsville Girl in 1997 when presenting Dylan with the The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
Peck said in his speech: ‘Dylan was singing about a picture that I made called The Gunfighter about the lone man in town with people comin' in to kill him and everybody wants him out of town before the shooting starts. When I met Bob, years later, I told him that meant a lot to me and the best way I could sum him up is to say Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin' starts. Thank you, Mr. Dylan, for rocking the country... and the ages.’
The Bravados: revenge, Homer and Christianity
Revenge is a ubiquitous theme in Westerns. In frontier societies that have not yet acquired all the accoutrements of civilisation, such as the rule of law, the question of what is justice and, more importantly, how is to be achieved is inescapable. Indeed, it is what gives Westerns their Homeric flavour, makes them such an attractive genre for film-makers interested and inspired by the classical world and particularly the philosophy of The Odyssey and The Iliad.
But what of those makers of Westerns of a more Christian persuasion? While revenge is justified in the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – by the time we get to the New Testament, revenge is disparaged and Christians are advised not to seek it but to ‘turn the other cheek’.
The Christian edict eschewing revenge is problematic for Westerns, which are notorious for their ridiculing of religion, their assertion that it has no place in this world of violence, hostile landscapes, honour, shame and so on. The man who turns the other cheek in the West is a fool, a weakling, who would soon be dead.
An exception to the anti-religious bias of the Western is The Bravados (1958), which tries to temper the urge for revenge with a Christian perspective.
Gregory Peck plays Jim Douglass, a remorseless man on a mission, which is to see the men who raped and murdered his wife pay with their lives for their atrocity. He spends six months tracking them down and just when it seems his obsessive task has a been accomplished, with the four outlaws set to hang for an unrelated crime, the criminals stage a bloody escape.
Douglass now leads a posse hunting the fugitives, though, as one by one he finds them, it becomes clear that, vicious killers though they are, they may not have been responsible for the violation and killing of his wife. Is Douglass’s revenge still justified? And what has the pursuit of it turned him into? In tracking them down, has he not taken on their brutal characteristics? And what will their deaths actually achieve? They won’t restore the world before his wife’s murder. He will still have to live with the knowledge of her barbaric treatment.
It is these questions that place Westerns somewhere in the middle of the full-blooded Homeric concepts of revenge – where there is no time for questions of the psychological impact on the avenger or the long-term consequences of vengeance – and the Christian view of love your enemy, of empathy and forgiveness.
By all means, pursue revenge, Westerns tell us, but the original evil you have been subjected to will not be overcome, you and your life will not return to how it used to be. Your nightmares will not end.
Back to The Bravados, Henry King – a pioneer of Hollywood cinema – was more renowned for directing historical and romantic films, even if the three Westerns he directed, Jesse James, The Bravados and The Gunfighter are all classics of the genre. The dose of Catholicism he wants to inject into The Bravados is grating and can’t be reconciled with the Homeric affirmation of revenge or the Western’s more nuanced stance on the subject, which he seems to have embraced before his Christianity intervened. Still, when the film doesn’t get bogged down in overt theology, the depiction of the brutal landscape of the Texas-Mexico border is breathtaking and Peck’s performance is outstanding, and this is generally an excellent and interesting piece of work, which even has an ending that brings to mind the equivocal and troubling ending of Taxi Driver, rebuking and mocking society for its love of violence and those who perpetrate it.
But what of those makers of Westerns of a more Christian persuasion? While revenge is justified in the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – by the time we get to the New Testament, revenge is disparaged and Christians are advised not to seek it but to ‘turn the other cheek’.
The Christian edict eschewing revenge is problematic for Westerns, which are notorious for their ridiculing of religion, their assertion that it has no place in this world of violence, hostile landscapes, honour, shame and so on. The man who turns the other cheek in the West is a fool, a weakling, who would soon be dead.
An exception to the anti-religious bias of the Western is The Bravados (1958), which tries to temper the urge for revenge with a Christian perspective.
Gregory Peck plays Jim Douglass, a remorseless man on a mission, which is to see the men who raped and murdered his wife pay with their lives for their atrocity. He spends six months tracking them down and just when it seems his obsessive task has a been accomplished, with the four outlaws set to hang for an unrelated crime, the criminals stage a bloody escape.
Douglass now leads a posse hunting the fugitives, though, as one by one he finds them, it becomes clear that, vicious killers though they are, they may not have been responsible for the violation and killing of his wife. Is Douglass’s revenge still justified? And what has the pursuit of it turned him into? In tracking them down, has he not taken on their brutal characteristics? And what will their deaths actually achieve? They won’t restore the world before his wife’s murder. He will still have to live with the knowledge of her barbaric treatment.
It is these questions that place Westerns somewhere in the middle of the full-blooded Homeric concepts of revenge – where there is no time for questions of the psychological impact on the avenger or the long-term consequences of vengeance – and the Christian view of love your enemy, of empathy and forgiveness.
By all means, pursue revenge, Westerns tell us, but the original evil you have been subjected to will not be overcome, you and your life will not return to how it used to be. Your nightmares will not end.
Back to The Bravados, Henry King – a pioneer of Hollywood cinema – was more renowned for directing historical and romantic films, even if the three Westerns he directed, Jesse James, The Bravados and The Gunfighter are all classics of the genre. The dose of Catholicism he wants to inject into The Bravados is grating and can’t be reconciled with the Homeric affirmation of revenge or the Western’s more nuanced stance on the subject, which he seems to have embraced before his Christianity intervened. Still, when the film doesn’t get bogged down in overt theology, the depiction of the brutal landscape of the Texas-Mexico border is breathtaking and Peck’s performance is outstanding, and this is generally an excellent and interesting piece of work, which even has an ending that brings to mind the equivocal and troubling ending of Taxi Driver, rebuking and mocking society for its love of violence and those who perpetrate it.
Yellow Sky: rapine, hubris and redemption
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(Shakespeare: The Tempest)
Yellow Sky (1948) is an utterly brutal Western, which asserts that, when it is not mitigated, human nature – or at least how it is expressed in the context of the American West – is nothing but greed, violence, jealousy, fear and suspicion.
A gang of bank robbers in their desperate effort to outrun a posse are forced to enter the desert – the film is shot in Death Valley – where, on the verge of death, they fight over the last few drops of water, the beating sun and their weakening bodies turning them insane, until they see a town, Yellow Sky, which although isn’t a mirage turns out to be a ghost town, deserted, its shops, hotels and bars abandoned and collapsed.
This one last cruel trick seems to have sealed their fate, which is to die of thirst and exhaustion. Only for a beautiful young woman to appear out of nowhere, whose motivation in directing them to water is not to save them, however, but to drive them out from Yellow Sky as soon as possible. But why the ferocity in her determination to get rid of them? Is it simply the fear of a lone woman being confronted by several smelly, brutish, leering men who’ve appeared out of nowhere? Or is she hiding something? What is such a beautiful woman doing in such a godforsaken place?
The outlaws discover that the woman is in Yellow Sky with her grandfather who they surmise is a gold prospector. Dreams of wealth and sexual gratification now overwhelm the men, even as they fall out as to who is going to rape the woman first and whether they should take all the old man’s gold or split the treasure with him. The men’s morality is put to the test. How evil are they? After an adult life of robbing and murder, taking what they want without remorse, is there any residue of conscience left in them that will prompt them to spare the woman from rape and let the old man keep some of his hard-earned wealth?
William Wellman directed this masterpiece, Gregory Peck is Stretch Dawson, the conflicted leader of the gang, Richard Widmark, his ruthless no. 2 (or alter ego, if you prefer) and Anne Baxter plays Constance May, the object of the outlaws’ desire. The taut script and spartan dialogue full of bitterness and irony was written by Lamar Trotti and based on WR Burnett’s novel, Stretch Dawson. Indeed, Yellow Sky bears all the hallmarks of Burnett’s numerous novels and screenplays, Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, This Gun for Hire, The Asphalt Jungle – avarice, rapacity, hubris, the thin veneer of civilisation:
‘The worst police force in the world is better than no police force… Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours, and nobody would be safe, neither on the street, nor in his place of business, nor in his home. There wouldn’t be an easy moment for women or children. We’d be back in the jungle…’ (The Asphalt Jungle).
Yellow Sky’s template is Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Anne Baxter’s character as Miranda and Grandpa as Prospero.
In the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Tony Howard explains the relationship between The Tempest and Yellow Sky:
‘William Wellman’s Yellow Sky turned The Tempest into a harsh post-war Western where a gang of criminals (bankrobbers replacing aristocrats) stumble on an isolated old man and a girl. The elemental metaphors are reversed. Shakespeare’s sea gives way to thirst: fleeing across a desert, on the brink of death they discover no magic island but a ghost town where a prospector and his granddaughter guard water and gold. Wellman focuses on the girl, who is constantly threatened by rape but protects herself with tough talk and a rifle, and on the Caliban question: can any of these degenerates be redeemed?’
This one last cruel trick seems to have sealed their fate, which is to die of thirst and exhaustion. Only for a beautiful young woman to appear out of nowhere, whose motivation in directing them to water is not to save them, however, but to drive them out from Yellow Sky as soon as possible. But why the ferocity in her determination to get rid of them? Is it simply the fear of a lone woman being confronted by several smelly, brutish, leering men who’ve appeared out of nowhere? Or is she hiding something? What is such a beautiful woman doing in such a godforsaken place?
The outlaws discover that the woman is in Yellow Sky with her grandfather who they surmise is a gold prospector. Dreams of wealth and sexual gratification now overwhelm the men, even as they fall out as to who is going to rape the woman first and whether they should take all the old man’s gold or split the treasure with him. The men’s morality is put to the test. How evil are they? After an adult life of robbing and murder, taking what they want without remorse, is there any residue of conscience left in them that will prompt them to spare the woman from rape and let the old man keep some of his hard-earned wealth?
William Wellman directed this masterpiece, Gregory Peck is Stretch Dawson, the conflicted leader of the gang, Richard Widmark, his ruthless no. 2 (or alter ego, if you prefer) and Anne Baxter plays Constance May, the object of the outlaws’ desire. The taut script and spartan dialogue full of bitterness and irony was written by Lamar Trotti and based on WR Burnett’s novel, Stretch Dawson. Indeed, Yellow Sky bears all the hallmarks of Burnett’s numerous novels and screenplays, Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, This Gun for Hire, The Asphalt Jungle – avarice, rapacity, hubris, the thin veneer of civilisation:
‘The worst police force in the world is better than no police force… Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours, and nobody would be safe, neither on the street, nor in his place of business, nor in his home. There wouldn’t be an easy moment for women or children. We’d be back in the jungle…’ (The Asphalt Jungle).
Yellow Sky’s template is Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Anne Baxter’s character as Miranda and Grandpa as Prospero.
In the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Tony Howard explains the relationship between The Tempest and Yellow Sky:
‘William Wellman’s Yellow Sky turned The Tempest into a harsh post-war Western where a gang of criminals (bankrobbers replacing aristocrats) stumble on an isolated old man and a girl. The elemental metaphors are reversed. Shakespeare’s sea gives way to thirst: fleeing across a desert, on the brink of death they discover no magic island but a ghost town where a prospector and his granddaughter guard water and gold. Wellman focuses on the girl, who is constantly threatened by rape but protects herself with tough talk and a rifle, and on the Caliban question: can any of these degenerates be redeemed?’
The Guns of Navarone: it’s all about the cast
Of all the UK or US films made using events that took place in Greece during the World War II, films such as The Angry Hills, They Who Dare and Ill Met by Moonlight, set respectively during the fall of Athens, the Battle of the Dodecanese and the occupation of Crete, the most commercially successful and perhaps the best known is The Guns of Navarone (1961).
The film is based on the best-selling eponymous 1957 novel by Scottish writer, Alistair MacClean and even though Navarone is a fictional island the backdrop to the narrative – the Allied (British and Greek) special forces attempt to disrupt German domination of the Aegean – is real enough, even if the film’s attempt to suggest the outcome of the Battle of the Dodecanese was an Allied victory is wide of the mark.
The truth is that the British – against American advice, who felt Britain was getting distracted by another one of Churchill’s Eastern Mediterranean whims – having occupied the Dodecanese after the September 1943 Armistice of Cassibile and the surrender of Italian forces in Greece – were humiliatingly dislodged by a counter-attack from the Germans who remained in command of the islands until the end of the war.
Whereas in Ill Met by Moonlight and They Who Dare, the lead character – both times played by Dirk Bogarde – is miscast, and the same can be said of Robert Mitchum in The Angry Hills, what distinguishes The Guns of Navarone – apart from the well-plotted script by Carl Foreman – is how well cast it is.
Gregory Peck is entirely believable as the single-minded and ruthless Captain Keith Mallory, the leader of the mission, while Anthony Quinn does well as the tough but wily Colonel Andreas Stavrou, while Irene Papas is good as Maria Papadimos, the feisty Greek resistance fighter.
Interestingly, the renowned Greek opera singer Maria Callas was first signed up to play Irene Papas’ role, but she pulled out and her film career stalled, making her sole film appearance eight years later in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), in which Callas played the Colchian princess, who revenges herself on her duplicitous husband, Jason, by murdering their children.
The Guns of Navarone was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who had a long but indifferent film career both in the UK and in Hollywood. Ice Cold in Alex and the original Cape Fear – an inferior remake was made by Martin Scorsese in 1991 – remain his best known films after The Guns of Navarone.
Anthony Quinn described working with Thompson as follows.
‘[He] read a scene until he had to shoot it and approached each shot on a whim. And yet the cumulative effect was astonishing. Lee Thompson made a marvelous picture but how? Perhaps his inventiveness lay in defying convention, in rejecting the accepted methods of motion picture making and establishing his own. Perhaps it was in his very formlessness that he found the one form he could sustain, and nurture, the one form that could, in turn, sustain and nurture him. Perhaps he was just a lucky Englishman who pulled a good picture out of his ass.’
The film is based on the best-selling eponymous 1957 novel by Scottish writer, Alistair MacClean and even though Navarone is a fictional island the backdrop to the narrative – the Allied (British and Greek) special forces attempt to disrupt German domination of the Aegean – is real enough, even if the film’s attempt to suggest the outcome of the Battle of the Dodecanese was an Allied victory is wide of the mark.
The truth is that the British – against American advice, who felt Britain was getting distracted by another one of Churchill’s Eastern Mediterranean whims – having occupied the Dodecanese after the September 1943 Armistice of Cassibile and the surrender of Italian forces in Greece – were humiliatingly dislodged by a counter-attack from the Germans who remained in command of the islands until the end of the war.
Whereas in Ill Met by Moonlight and They Who Dare, the lead character – both times played by Dirk Bogarde – is miscast, and the same can be said of Robert Mitchum in The Angry Hills, what distinguishes The Guns of Navarone – apart from the well-plotted script by Carl Foreman – is how well cast it is.
Gregory Peck is entirely believable as the single-minded and ruthless Captain Keith Mallory, the leader of the mission, while Anthony Quinn does well as the tough but wily Colonel Andreas Stavrou, while Irene Papas is good as Maria Papadimos, the feisty Greek resistance fighter.
Interestingly, the renowned Greek opera singer Maria Callas was first signed up to play Irene Papas’ role, but she pulled out and her film career stalled, making her sole film appearance eight years later in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), in which Callas played the Colchian princess, who revenges herself on her duplicitous husband, Jason, by murdering their children.
The Guns of Navarone was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who had a long but indifferent film career both in the UK and in Hollywood. Ice Cold in Alex and the original Cape Fear – an inferior remake was made by Martin Scorsese in 1991 – remain his best known films after The Guns of Navarone.
Anthony Quinn described working with Thompson as follows.
‘[He] read a scene until he had to shoot it and approached each shot on a whim. And yet the cumulative effect was astonishing. Lee Thompson made a marvelous picture but how? Perhaps his inventiveness lay in defying convention, in rejecting the accepted methods of motion picture making and establishing his own. Perhaps it was in his very formlessness that he found the one form he could sustain, and nurture, the one form that could, in turn, sustain and nurture him. Perhaps he was just a lucky Englishman who pulled a good picture out of his ass.’
They Who Dare: a heist film gone wrong
The gang starts off in good spirits, convinced that the job will succeed and they’ll all come out of it alive and well. But once they get going, all sorts of obstacles present themselves, the men argue and fall out among each other as their fears and weaknesses are exposed. The job, in a fashion, is completed, although some of the men are killed or captured in the process. Now, comes the second act: the getaway or the getaway as you are hunted down. The gang becomes increasingly desperate and relations among the surviving members become taut as capture or death seems imminent. Finally, you are caught or killed, though perhaps the strongest morally or physically will survive, albeit traumatised, empty, spiritually destroyed.
I say this is a regular plot for a heist film, but it also applies to They Who Dare, a Second World War movie made in 1954, which purports to tell the true story of the joint Greek commando and British Special Boat Section raid on Axis airfields on Rhodes in 1943.
Operation Anglo, as it was known, was led by Captain David Sutherland and its aim was to undermine Axis air dominance of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. In the film, Sutherland is played by Dirk Bogarde, himself a veteran of World War II, a British Army officer, whose experiences – particularly as a liberator of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – left him with a lifelong loathing of Germans.
Lewis Milestone, a legend of Hollywood, who made what is regarded by many as the greatest war film of all time – All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) – directed the film.
Yet, despite the auguries all being good, the film is a terrible disappointment and failure. Both Milestone and Bogarde hated the script when it was presented to them and Bogarde says he only agreed to do the movie for the opportunity to work with Milestone, forced out of American because of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and who Bogarde trusted to fix the script.
But the script couldn’t be fixed and Milestone’s attempts to give the film the All Quiet on the Western Front treatment by turning it into an anti-war film, traducing the motives of the Bogarde/Sutherland character and the usefulness of the mission, especially when it was known that the Germans were prone to exact brutal reprisals against the Greek civilian population for acts of resistance or sabotage, are unconvincing.
The film’s portrait of the Greek fighters and guides on the mission with the British commandos is also problematic. Despite Sutherland in his memoir – He Who Dared – heaping praise on the Greeks who he served alongside or aided the British in their operations in the Eastern Mediterranean – ‘They guided us, they fed us, they sheltered us and they died for us. No one in the SBS will ever forget this’ – the film has them as feeble-minded, over-emotional and more of a hindrance than a help to the mission.
Regarding the disappointing outcome of the film and the poor reception it received from critics and audiences – the press dubbed the film How Dare They – this is what Bogarde had to say in his memoir, Snakes and Ladders:
‘He [Milestone] made a cut of his version of the film and flew off to America; the producer made his cut and between the two of them we were a catastrophe. But it had been great fun and marvellous experience. And Millie taught me one of the greatest lessons to be learned in the cinema. “You can make a good script bad; but you can’t ever make a bad script good. Never forget that.” I was to be constantly reminded of his words for years to come. It is a lesson very few have bothered to remember.’
The Angry Hills: a story of what could have been
You’d be entitled to expect a lot from the World War Two drama, The Angry Hills (1959). It has all the ingredients to have been a memorable film. (See the film here).
It was written by A.I. Bezzerides, responsible for two classic crime novels, Thieves Market (1949) and They Drive by Night (1938), as well as the screenplays for film noir masterpieces such as On Dangerous Ground ((1952) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the latter, an adaptation of a Micky Spillane novel, directed by Robert Aldrich, who was also behind the camera for The Angry Hills.
Indeed, when one considers films Aldrich was responsible for throughout his career – Apache (1954), Vera Cruz (1954), The Big Knife (1955), 4 for Texas (1963), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Hustle (1975) – then we know that The Angry Hills was in the hands of one of the most capable and interesting American film-makers.
Add to this, the fact that the hero in The Angry Hills was played by Robert Mitchum – one of the biggest post-war Hollywood stars and perhaps the greatest male protagonist in film noir – Undercurrent (1946), Crossfire (1947), Out of the Past (1947) and The Big Steal (1949), and that his nemesis in the film was one of the best British actors of the 1950s and 1960s, Stanley Baker, then it’s even more perplexing that the film turned out to be so underwhelming.
The Angry Hills is set in Greece at the time of the Nazi invasion (1941) and involves Mitchum as an American journalist in possession of sensitive information trying, with the help of the Greek resistance, to escape the clutches of the Germans.
The film is messy and too interested in moving things along to get underneath the skin of its troubled protagonists. Bezzerides’ script wants to say something important about big themes – loyalty, betrayal, courage, duty, love – and is not squeamish about the barbarity of the German occupation, but Aldrich seems in a rush to unfold the plot and in the process loses what would have made this a good film, which is the human drama.
The Angry Hills could have and should have been in the mould of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City – which is also about the Gestapo hunting for resistance fighters and doesn’t shy from presenting German violence – but settles for less, the path of least difficulty, the lowest common denominator, i.e. the perennial problem facing the ambitious Hollywood film.
Aldrich admitted his failure, expressing his disappointment ‘not because it's not a good picture but because it could have been better. It had a potential that was never remotely realised... you feel sad about The Angry Hills... I'd know how to make The Angry Hills better in a thousand ways.’
Still, there are several interesting scenes – particularly, the village massacre – and the dialogue is good: at one point the Gestapo chief played by Baker tries to persuade a Greek resistance leader to hand over Mitchum by heaping derision on the American for not being a soldier, but a ‘journalist, a foreign correspondent. Do you know, Leonidas, what a foreign correspondent is? It is that brand of intellectual coward who observes while others die in order to publish his own version of events in a manner that will sell newspapers. This is the man you’ve been sheltering.’
Ill Met by Moonlight: is it about Cyprus?
Powell and Pressburger’s Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) tells the story of the celebrated kidnapping by British SOE officers and Cretan resistance fighters of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete in 1944.
Ill Met by Moonlight has many faults and Michael Powell – the greatest British film-maker, who, along with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger made a string of brilliant films, often on Second World War themes, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 49th Parallel, A Matter of Life and Death, The Battle of the River Plate – in the second volume of his autobiography Million Dollar Movie describes the film as ‘bad’ and ‘our greatest failure’.
Powell berates the script, the casting – he thought Dirk Bogarde ‘a picture-postcard hero in fancy dress’, far too whimsical to play Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor (though, apparently, Leigh-Fermor liked Bogarde’s depiction of him as a latter-day Lord Byron) – the absence of women in the film, the location (he couldn’t shoot in Crete or Cyprus so ended up having to make the film on the French-Italian frontier), the decision to shoot in black and white rather than colour, his own direction, and laments the outcome which, he says, was like a Ministry of Information documentary rather than a piece of entertainment.
‘Nobody was cultivating what my friend Robert De Niro describes as an “attitude”. The script was underwritten and weak on action, the gags were unoriginal, and the surprises not surprising… The direction concentrated so much on creating a Greek atmosphere that the director had no time, or invention, for anything else. The performances of the principals were atrocious. Marius Goring as General Kreipe wouldn’t have scared a rabbit; David Oxley as Captain Stanley Moss was the rabbit; while as for Dirk Bogarde’s performance as Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor, it’s a wonder that Paddy didn’t sue both Dirk and me.’
Still, Powell says, he was pleased that he managed to convey the patriotism, bravery, fierceness and fidelity of the Cretan rebels. It’s a fair enough point – even if at times the film does patronise the Cretans and they can come across as a little childish and overly susceptible to their emotions.
The way the British like to portray themselves in war films of this period is also interesting and is perhaps why the elegant Bogarde is such a mainstay in them. In Ill Met by Moonlight, Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss are shown as unfailingly gracious, brave without being foolhardy, restrained, cool, calm, understated, self-deprecating, eccentric, humorous in the face of adversity, humane, cunning – all qualities lacking in the rigid, overbearing, brutal, bombastic, boastful Germans. A great deal is made in the film that even though Moss and Leigh-Fermor are officers in the elite special services SOE, they are essentially amateurs, men who joined up to serve from ordinary life, without pretensions to be professional soldiers, in love with glory and conflict.
It’s also quite odd to note that the film was made in 1957 at the height of the EOKA struggle in Cyprus to end British colonial rule and unite the island with Greece. The conflict in Cyprus is why the film could not be made in Cyprus or Crete, much to Powell’s disappointment. The film makes clear what the Cretans are heroically fighting for – to rid themselves of foreign occupation – and either Powell and Pressburger were completely oblivious that they were, in fact, making a good argument on behalf of the Cypriots and against Britain’s occupation of the island or they were quite conscious of the metaphor they were putting forward: of a Greek island, straining under the yoke of foreign rule, and the patriotic locals taking to the mountains to shake it off.
As a film, as a work of art and entertainment, Ill Met by Moonlight is flawed, but it was a success at the box office and you have to wonder if the depiction of Greeks fighting for their freedom against foreign occupation was lost on the British audience. No doubt, they would’ve balked at any suggestion that the British occupation of Cyprus smacked of the Nazi occupation of Crete. Certainly, the British public had no sympathy for Cypriots taking up arms against Britain, attacking their soldiers with guns and bombs. Nor would we expect such understanding. Invariably, the general public will support their boys, no matter the virtues of the cause they’re fighting for or against.
Born to Kill: lurid but likeable
Lawrence Tierney plays a psychopath who also happens to be irresistible to women, which enables him to ingratiate himself into the love life of wealthy San Francisco socialite Helen Brent (played by Claire Trevor) and her step-sister Georgia Staples (played by Audrey Long) and it is his character – Sam Wilde – who we presume is the person ‘born to kill’ of the film’s title.
However, the novel by James Gunn on which the film is based is called Deadlier than the Male and this should tell us that the story as originally imagined wasn’t about Sam Wilde but Helen Barnes and Georgia Staples and that Sam Wilde was just a cypher to explore the women’s turbulent inner lives and how this leads to them making catastrophic choices in the social world.
It’s a fault that the Sam Wilde character is supposed to carry the film. He’s not that interesting. Violent lunatics rarely are and, indeed, it’s difficult to imagine how this charmless, unpleasant and quite stupid man can still possess the animal magnetism to worm himself into so many lives, break their will power and warp their sense of right and wrong.
The film has a well-written script and is effectively directed by Robert Wise, who before this worked with Orson Welles as his editor on Citizen Kane and directed the Val Lewton-produced The Body Snatcher, though perhaps he’s best known for directing two musicals, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965).
What really lifts Born to Kill are the characters of the private detective Albert Arnett (played by Walter Slezak), his client, Mrs Kraft (played by Esther Howard) – the neighbour of the young woman murdered by Wilde – and Sam Wilde’s loyal friend, Marty Waterman (played by Elisha Cook Jr.).
Slezak is particularly entertaining to watch. His Bible-quoting private detective is unctuous and avaricious and has nothing in common with the tough-guy members of his trade – Dashiel Hammet’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, both moral crusaders out to assure right triumphs over wrong, regardless of the financial consequences, the personal dangers and harm that come their way.
Albert Arnett, on the other hand, has no such courage or convictions. He lives on the breadline and when he sees an opportunity to fleece his client he has no remorse, his motivation being to sell the information he has gathered through his investigation to the highest bidder. He has no consideration for justice or the restoration of order. He is not a seeker of truth nor an avenger, but a sleazy blackmailer.
Lawrence Tierney: the toughest man in Hollywood
The toughest, most remorseless, cold-hearted protagonist in film noir has to be Lawrence Tierney.
Apparently, in real life Tierney was just as hard, prone to losing his short temper, benders and bar room brawling that often ended with the Brooklyn-born actor on the wrong side of the law and in the clink.
Apparently, in real life Tierney was just as hard, prone to losing his short temper, benders and bar room brawling that often ended with the Brooklyn-born actor on the wrong side of the law and in the clink.
Since acting and film is about make-believe, it’s difficult to know whether Tierney was being himself when playing all these thugs and heavies or fell victim to believing his on screen image and acting it out in real life. No matter.
The Hoodlum (1951) is classic Tierney. In it, he plays Vincent Lubeck, who starts off his life of crime as an adolescent, gradually climbing – or going down – the ladder of lawlessness, his crimes becoming increasingly serious and his prison sentences increasingly long.
Not that the punishment he has to endure turns him onto the straight and narrow.
Rather, he comes to see himself as a victim of the system and is consumed by hatred of society, determined to revenge himself against it by repudiating its basic rules of hard work, family solidarity, deferred gratification, opting instead for the easy money that theft brings; showing contempt for the honest ways of his brother – the gas station owner who believes in the American Dream – seducing his earnest sibling’s fiancée; and wanting all his desires fulfilled and wanting them fulfilled right now.
Tierney gives a similar sociopathic portrait of John Dillinger in another collaboration with director Max Nosseck in the eponymous gangster film, which purports to tell the story of the Great Depression bank robber, whose crimes – and the notoriety and popularity they earned him – contributed to the formation of the FBI and helped make the name of J. Edgar Hoover.
The screenplay for Dillinger (1945) was written by Philip Yordan, whose career spanned everything from classic film noirs – House of Strangers, The Big Combo, Detective Story; to Westerns – The Man from Laramie, Day of the Outlaw, Broken Lance; and epics – 55 Days at Peking, The Fall of the Roman Empire, El Cid.
The third film noir Tierney made with Nosseck was Kill or be Killed (1950), which is not only not set in the urban mean streets – it’s actually set in the Brazilian jungle – but it also has Tierney playing a more conventional hero, albeit a very tough, smart and proud one, who is framed for murder and sets out to find the real killers, on the way dealing with piranhas, poisonous snakes and the lethal husband of the woman he's fallen in love with.
The Wrong Box: Carry On Robert Louis Stevenson
Yet, while the film is entertaining enough and quite funny at times, it never takes off and this is no doubt because this is the sixties and Forbes decided to interpret Stevenson’s novel not only as a satire about the British establishment – with digs at the army, the police, the empire, the class system and so on – but also a farce that takes aim at British morés, particularly those that relate to sexual repression.
While there is satire in Stevenson’s novel – Stevenson, the conservative, displays considerable snobbery for the working classes and their burgeoning class consciousness – there is little of the simpering sexual innuendo of the film and Forbes adds nothing to the story by putting it there, other than suggesting we are watching a more upscale Carry On romp.
Stevenson’s novel was well received at the time, with Rudyard Kipling saying that while reading the novel, he ‘laughed over it dementedly. That man [Stevenson] has only one lung but he makes you laugh with all your whole inside’; though the film was a flop on release, Michale Caine explaining this by suggesting: ‘The film shows us [British] exactly as the world sees us – as eccentric, charming and polite – but the British knew better that they were none of these things, and it embarrassed us.’
Death: a story of punk rock resurrection
Death’s music was lost and forgotten for a long time, not regarded as having relevance to any rock and roll genre or moment – they were certainly never cited as an influence by any of the punk bands that did enjoy popularity, and this not out of oversight or mean-spiritedness but because no one had ever heard their music.
To all intents and purposes, Death was just another in a thousand bands that came close to having a rock and roll career, putting out a single here, an album there, but never catching on, some bands never having had sufficient talent or motivation, others quickly waylaid by the fast side of the business, while a small minority, like Death, falling to the curse of being ahead of its time.
In Death’s case, when they were trying to make their way in mid-70s Detroit, punk had yet to be identified, the belligerent commotion being made by three black guys – who saw their music coming out of Alice Cooper and The Who and had no notion that what they were playing would go on to become punk rock and they were in fact punk rockers, a term they would’ve found offensive – was met with indifference, bemusement and outright hostility. With nothing doing from the record industry, Death soldiered on for a while before rejection after rejection crushed their self-belief and the band petered out, dreams of living the rock life ending in withering failure, despair, addiction and illness.
The Hackney brothers dissolved their band in 1977 and settled for lives of obscurity, regret and, in the case of the band’s ideological force, David Hackney, alcoholism and an early death.
Until, of course, 30 years on, thanks to the fanatical, obsessive record collecting scene, punk aficionados were alerted to Death’s remarkable single Politicians in my Eyes. Soon enough, the unique quality and importance of the band, its unmistakable punk sound and attitude, was realised and master tapes of sessions recorded for a never-released album were unearthed. Death had been rediscovered or, more correctly, discovered, because they had never had any recognition or acclaim first time round.
The documentary film above – A Band Called Death – is the story of Death, their birth, death and resurrection, and what they lost on their way to finding the appreciation and kudos they deserved.
Charlton Heston: from Moses to Long John Silver
When you think of Charlton Heston, you’re likely to think of his roles in Ben Hur and El Cid, as Moses in The Ten Commandments, as Ramon Miguel Vargas in Touch of Evil, Major Matt Lewis in 55 Days at Peking, as General Charles Gordon in Khartoum, Major Amos Charles in Major Dundee and George Taylor in Planet of the Apes.
All these characters are incorruptible, out to right the world’s wrongs, save humanity, are moral to the point of sacredness or, if you prefer, annoyingly inflexible, self-righteous and superior to the point of self-abnegation and self-destruction.
In Major Dundee, Sam Peckinpah does try to thrust Heston and the Heston stereotype into situations where his morality and dutifulness are severely put to the test, offering him all the licentious delights that might break down his supercilious high-mindedness and make him more human; but the studios didn’t like what Peckinpah was up to and took the film away from him and cut it to preserve their image of Heston as pious hero.
There are instances in his career that Heston tried to break away from the stereotype. One is the Western Will Penny, another is the 1990 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Treasure Island, in which he plays Long John Silver. (See entire film here).
The buccaneer Silver is entirely corrupt, amoral, inspired by greed, a killer, a mutineer, a thoroughly disagreeable, incorrigible outlaw. We’re not even sure his willingness to betray his fellow pirates and protect young Jim Hawkins is genuine paternal instinct and not a cunning stratagem to eliminate rivals for John Flint’s loot or a base plan to save his own skin, realising that the mutiny he’s headed is doomed and that the gallows beckon unless he can convince Captain Smollett, Dr Livesey and Squire Trelawney that he’s redeemable.
Heston’s characterisation of Long John Silver doesn’t succeed. Heston can’t get away from injecting the lowly criminal with a dose of nobility and amputating the ambiguity of his actions. More convincing in the film are Oliver Reed’s portrayal of Captain Billy Bones – who he hilariously plays as a rambunctious Glaswegian – and Christopher Lee’s creepy depiction of Blind Pugh, the angel of death, who palms the Black Spot – the sign of imminent death – to Billy Bones.
We Live Again: Hollywood takes on Tolstoy and Russia’s turmoil
Gyorgy Lukacs says of Dostoevsky and Lenin said of Tolstoy – who the Bolshevik loathed – that they ask the right questions, regarding the state of society, they make the right diagnoses – in Tolstoy’s case that the evils plaguing Russia, barely a generation after the abolition of serfdom, were engrained in a system of exaggerated inequality, exploitation and injustice and that radical measures to remedy the situation were needed to avoid catastrophe – which is what befell Russian in 1917 and for the next 70 years – but come up with the wrong solutions.
Anyone familiar with the 19th century Russian novel, which along with Homer, Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, represent the highest forms of literature, will know of the febrile social and political climate that form their backdrop. While Dostoevsky’s solution to Russia’s turmoil was nationalism, tradition, Orthodoxy, Tolstoy understood that social and particularly economic reform was necessary.
Thus, in We Live Again/Resurrection, Prince Dmitri, the landowning nobleman, embraces land redistribution – as did the blue-blooded Tolstoy, partly inspired by Georgism and partly by Christian ethics – and sinks his teeth into the corruption and inhumanity of the church, the judiciary and class system. It was Tolstoy’s reformist approach that irked Lenin, whose vision for Russia was much more drastic and, stripped of any Christian outlook, deranged.
Indeed, it would be wrong to see Resurrection as a political novel and the resurrection of the title doesn’t just refer to national renewal, but personal revival. Both Prince Dmitri and the woman he has wronged, the peasant girl Katusha, have entered a spiritual Hades, out of which Tolstoy wants to lead them. Resurrection, an escape from hell, from death, is the fundamental tenet of Orthodox Christianity, which is why Easter plays such a prominent part in the novel and film.
All these social and political themes in Tolstoy’s novel are, remarkably you might think, prevalent in Mamoulian’s film. The film is clear in its denunciation and mockery of the Russian caste system and openly sympathises with those characters that offer a socialist critique and alternative to it. We Live Again may be one of the very few Hollywood film that positively refers to and discusses socialism.
Again, however, We Live Again is not an explicitly political film; it is a classic Hollywood melodrama, conceived by Samuel Goldwyn as a star vehicle for Anna Sten, who he promoted as a new Garbo, while the censors at the Hays Office overlooked all its controversial political and sexual themes precisely because they regarded the drama of sin and redemption as a morally instructive and uplifting message for American audiences.
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