I started listing my favorite performances in a Western and the list went on forever — it's probably my favorite genre. So I whittled it down to the top five (no slight intended if your favorite didn't make the cut).
In chronological order:
John Wayne (The Searchers)
Walter Brennan (Rio Bravo)
Eli Wallach (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)
William Holden (The Wild Bunch)
and
the dog in Big Jake.
Lot of great acting there, but the dog is the only one in the bunch I'd trust to do my taxes. If you've seen Big Jake, you know what I mean. And if you haven't, well, let me just say, John Wayne as an animal trainer makes Cesar Millan look like a crazy cat lady.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔.
I would tell you that I'd rather watch a spaghetti Western over an art film any day, or possibly vice versa, but The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is both — a masterpiece that stands alongside Ford's The Searchers and Hawks' Rio Bravo as one of the greatest Westerns ever made. And you know the Monkey loves him a good Western.
Bruce Brown, whose documentaries helped spark America's love of surfing, passed away Sunday at the age of 80.
For my money, his 1966 documentary The Endless Summer is the best film about surfing ever made — and one of the greatest documentaries on any subject. Here are some words I wrote a while back about that great film:
Adrenaline is the drug of choice for most Americans these days (that, and self-righteous bile). And of all the over-the-counter mood-altering agents, it's also the most overrated, a jangling noise that drowns out any quiet thought of our own mortality.
But Monkey, you may well ask, who wants to contemplate their own mortality? Nobody, admittedly. The end of everything — knowing death is coming — is our unique curse as a species.
But it's also our blessing. Do you think an animal is ever aware of a perfect moment, the fleeting in-between when the doing is done and we exist in harmony with the elements — when, if you listen quietly enough, you can almost hear the music of the spheres.
The world keeps turning, of course, and the perfect moment ends almost as we become aware of it, but because we're aware the moment will end, we know just how special, how precious, how fleeting those moments are.
In this time of constant distractions, there's something quaintly charming about the notion that a four-foot curl off the coast of South Africa was once thought of as the perfect wave. These days surfers ride fifty-foot monsters in the middle of the ocean, waves they can only reach at the end of a towline, and riding them is more akin to falling off a mountain than anything your father ever did on a surfboard.
I imagine The Endless Summer, Bruce Brown's 1966 documentary about an around-the-world search for the perfect wave, has as much in common with today's surfing scene as flying a kite does to space travel.
Maybe that's why I like it.
With Brown's passing, we speed a little bit faster into a future that has no time for perfect waves or perfect moments.
The Professionals is a well-made, fast-paced action-adventure western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode. It's a sharp, witty caper flick with a team of amusing specialists engaged in a job—rescuing a rich man's wife from a Mexican revolutionary—that should get everybody killed by the end of the first reel but you damn well know won't. A sort of Ocean's Eleven, if you will, set in the Mexican desert. But underneath all the rousing action is a melancholy meditation on the end of things (in this specific case, the Mexican Revolution) that, to me at least, makes The Professionals both a sublime western and something other than a simple caper flick.
"La Revolución," Jack Palance says in a great speech toward the end of the film, "is like a great love affair. In the beginning, she is a goddess. A holy cause. But every love affair has a terrible enemy—time. We see her as she is. La Revolución is not a goddess but a whore. She was never pure, never saintly, never perfect. And we run away, find another lover, another cause. Quick, sordid affairs. Lust, but no love. Passion, but no compassion. Without love, without a cause, we are nothing! We stay because we believe. We leave because we are disillusioned. We come back because we are lost. We die because we are committed."
It's a very good western, and may be the best of a list of those that, despite its cast and three Oscar nominations, no one seems to have ever heard of. Written and directed by Richard Brooks, with Oscar-nominated cinematography by the great Conrad Hall.
Oh, and Claudia Cardinale is spectacularly bosomy.
The Professionals is a well-made, fast-paced action-adventure western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode. Alternate Oscar guru Erik Beck, whose site News From The Boston Becks I refer to more often than a preacher refers to the Bible, calls it a comedy, and while I doubt it's ever otherwise been characterized as such, I can see his point. It's a sharp, witty caper flick with a team of amusing specialists engaged in a job that should get everybody killed by the end of the first reel but you damn well know won't—a sort of Ocean's Eleven, if you will, set in the Mexican desert.
It's a very good western, and maybe the best of a list of those that, despite its cast and three Oscar nominations, no one seems to have ever heard of. And it is better than any of the overt comedies you can name from 1966, perhaps the worst year for American comedies since Americans started making comedies.
But ultimately underneath all the rousing action is a melancholy meditation on the end of things (in this specific case, the Mexican Revolution) that, to me at least, makes The Professionals both a sublime western and something other than a comedy.
"La Revolución," Jack Palance says in a great speech toward the end of the film, "is like a great love affair. In the beginning, she is a goddess. A holy cause. But every love affair has a terrible enemy—time. We see her as she is. La Revolución is not a goddess but a whore. She was never pure, never saintly, never perfect. And we run away, find another lover, another cause. Quick, sordid affairs. Lust, but no love. Passion, but no compassion. Without love, without a cause, we are nothing! We stay because we believe. We leave because we are disillusioned. We come back because we are lost. We die because we are committed."
Anyway, for me The Professionals falls on the drama side of the rather useless drama-comedy divide. Which leaves me without a real choice for best picture (comedy/musical) for 1966.
I could have gone with Alfie, which features Michael Caine's absolutely superb performance as a swinging Cockney nitwit who never grasps the human cost of his free-love lifestyle, but overall Alfie, like a sandwich that's been in the refrigerator too long, hasn't aged well and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
As for the other possibilities, Harper is a minor, though entertaining, Paul Newman take on Ross Macdonald's great Lew Archer detective series; and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, Lord Love A Duck and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum try too hard to be "wacky" and "zany," a problem shared by many of the comedies of that era.
In the end, I went for the last film standing, Cul-de-sac, Roman Polanski's twisted retelling of the basic Desperate Hours/Key Largo set-up: an inept crook (Lionel Stander) who's clearly seen too many gangster movies holds a disfunctional couple (Donald Pleasance, Françoise Dorléac) hostage during a home invasion while he waits for his own personal Godot to arrive and whisk him away to safety. Instead of murder and mayhem, though, we get cross-dressing, couples therapy and late-night confessionals, and even a bit of Godfrey-style butling courtesy of the gangster when unexpected guests arrive.
Cul-de-sac has more of a weird vibe than a screwball one, and it's not riotously funny to be sure, but it is sickly fascinating nonetheless.
Speaking of Polanski, I've mentioned him once before in a post I called "Cognitive Dissonance," the gist of which is that I think Polanski is (or was, anyway) a great filmmaker who is also a despicable human being. That he made great movies (particularly Chinatown) doesn't in any way excuse what he has done as a man, and I'd only ever shake hands with him in order to slap cuffs on his wrists in preparation for leading him off to the prison in California he will evidently never see.
At the same time, though, unless a movie is in and of itself despicable—Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will comes to mind—I won't condemn it just because I don't like the person who made it. Because lets face it, some of those people in Hollywood are absolute rats.
So judging Cul-de-sac on its own merits, rather than on Polanski's, I've reluctantly chosen it as the best English-language comedy of 1966.
Really, though, you should watch The Professionals instead.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:Blow-Up (prod. Carlo Ponti) nominees:A Man For All Seasons (prod. Fred Zinnemann); The Professionals (prod. Richard Brooks); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (prod. Ernest Lehman)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Cul-de-sac (prod. Gene Gutowski, Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser) nominees:Alfie (prod. Lewis Gilbert); Harper (prod. Jerry Gershwin and Elliott Kastner)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Persona (prod. Ingmar Bergman) nominees:Andrei Rublev (prod. Tamara Ogorodnikova); Au Hasard Balthazar (prod. Mag Bodard); La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) (prod. Antonio Musu and Yacef Saadi); Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) (prod. Alberto Grimaldi); Masculin-Feminin (prod. Anatole Dauman)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Richard Burton (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) nominees: Rock Hudson (Seconds); Steve McQueen (The Sand Pebbles); Paul Scofield (A Man For All Seasons)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Michael Caine (Alfie) nominees: Alan Arkin (The Russian Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming); Paul Newman (Harper); Don Knotts (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken); Zero Mostel (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum); Donald Pleasence (Cul-de-sac); Lionel Stander (Cul-de-sac)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Elizabeth Taylor (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) nominees: Anouk Aimée (Un homme et une femme a.k.a. A Man and a Woman); Bibi Andersson (Persona); Liv Ullmann (Persona)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Lynn Redgrave (Georgy Girl) nominees: Vanessa Redgrave (Morgan!); Tuesday Weld (Lord Love a Duck); Joanne Woodward (A Big Hand for the Little Lady)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner: Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up) nominees: Ingmar Bergman (Persona); Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthazar); Richard Brooks (The Professionals); Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin-Feminin); Sergio Leone (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo a.k.a. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly); Mike Nichols (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?); Gillo Pontecorvo (La battaglia di Algeri a.k.a. The Battle of Algiers); Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Jirí Menzel (Ostre sledované vlaky a.k.a. Closely Watched Trains) nominees: Lewis Gilbert (Alfie); Roman Polanski (Cul-de-sac)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: Walter Matthau (The Fortune Cookie) nominees: Jack Gilford (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To the Forum); George Segal (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?); Josef Somr (Ostre sledované vlaky a.k.a. Closely Watched Trains); Eli Wallach (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo a.k.a. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Sandy Dennis (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) nominees: Wendy Hiller (A Man For All Seasons); Vivien Merchant (Alfie); Shelley Winters (Harper and Alfie)
SCREENPLAY winner: Robert Bolt, from his play (A Man For All Seasons) nominees: Richard Brooks, from the novel A Mule for the Marquesa by Frank O’Rourke (The Professionals); Ernest Lehman, from the play by Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
SPECIAL AWARDS Ennio Morricone (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo a.k.a. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) (Score); Conrad Hall (The Professionals) (Cinematography); The Endless Summer (Documentary)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
The Professionals is a well-made, fast-paced action-adventure western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode. It's a sharp, witty caper flick with a team of amusing specialists engaged in a job—rescuing a rich man's wife from a Mexican revolutionary—that should get everybody killed by the end of the first reel but you damn well know won't. A sort of Ocean's Eleven, if you will, set in the Mexican desert.
But underneath all the rousing action is a melancholy meditation on the end of things (in this specific case, the Mexican Revolution) that, to me at least, makes The Professionals both a sublime western and something other than a simple caper flick.
"La Revolución," Jack Palance says in a great speech toward the end of the film, "is like a great love affair. In the beginning, she is a goddess. A holy cause. But every love affair has a terrible enemy—time. We see her as she is. La Revolución is not a goddess but a whore. She was never pure, never saintly, never perfect. And we run away, find another lover, another cause. Quick, sordid affairs. Lust, but no love. Passion, but no compassion. Without love, without a cause, we are nothing! We stay because we believe. We leave because we are disillusioned. We come back because we are lost. We die because we are committed."
In the end, I went for the last film standing, Cul-de-sac, Roman Polanski's twisted retelling of the basic Desperate Hours/Key Largo set-up: an inept crook (Lionel Stander) who's clearly seen too many gangster movies holds a disfunctional couple (Donald Pleasance, Françoise Dorléac) hostage during a home invasion while he waits for his own personal Godot to arrive and whisk him away to safety. Instead of murder and mayhem, though, we get cross-dressing, couples therapy and late-night confessionals, and even a bit of Godfrey-style butling courtesy of the gangster when unexpected guests arrive.
At the same time, though, unless a movie is in and of itself despicable—Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will comes to mind—I won't condemn it just because I don't like the person who made it. Because lets face it, some of those people in Hollywood are absolute rats.
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