Cimarron (1931)

The 1931 western Cimarron is on a short list of Oscar's most obscure best picture winners, and in a year that included such award-eligible features as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, breakout gangster dramas starring Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, and Bela Lugosi's horror classic Dracula, also one of its most undeserving.

But if you like your American history uncomplicated and your movies pleasantly forgettable, Cimarron is not half bad.

The story begins in 1889 with the Oklahoma Land Rush — where 50,000 people lined up at the border and raced to claim the two million acres the U.S. government had opened up for settlement, a perfectly insane way to parcel out land — and ends in 1930 with the descendants of these settlers marinating in oil wealth.

Cimarron stars Richard Dix as a hard-luck rancher turned newspaper publisher, and Irene Dunne as his long-suffering wife. Dix kills an outlaw and flees the territory, leaving his wife to run the paper, winning her fame and social status, and eventually a term in Congress.

Cimarron's audience would have been old enough to remember the events depicted — which were roughly as distant in time to them as Ronald Reagan is to us — and the movie was a critical hit even though it lost money at the box office.

Dunne was nominated for the first of five Oscars (she never won) and she carries the movie. Dix, on the other hand, was on the fast track to oblivion, drinking his way to B-picture has-been status within a couple of years.

Based on Edna Ferber's best-selling novel, Cimarron is more about the myth of the American West than the reality — plucky settlers make good against the odds, and the right people find a fortune in the ground.

That the oil originally belonged to the Osage Nation is largely glossed over except to suggest that the previous owners were grateful that civilized white men had relieved them of the burden of managing all that money.

If you've got six hours to kill, might I suggest watching Cimarron as a double feature with Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon? The story of corporate theft and murder in the Osage Nation after oil is discovered on their land, Flower Moon's locale and time line overlaps with Cimarron's and provides a radically different perspective on the same moment in history.

Sure, after watching the two, you'll suffer a serious case of mental whiplash — what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" (which I've written about here) — but you're a smart crew, you can take it.

As hard as it is to believe — given that the intervening years would see the premieres of Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Shane, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch and many, many more — Cimarron was the last western to win the Oscar for best picture until Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves sixty years later.

If you ever wonder what motivates otherwise seemingly sane people like me to start handing out alternate Oscars, there's a good part of your answer right there.

1966 Alternate Oscars

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 ✱.

The Hateful Eight: Simply Great

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After getting shutout of a sold-out performance Saturday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I drove back down to the AFI-Silver on Sunday to see the eighth film of Quentin Tarantino's illustrious career, aptly titled The Hateful Eight. Tarantino resurrected the long-abandoned Panasonic Ultra 70 film format, the same ultra-widescreen process used on the 1959 classic Ben-Hur (indeed, the film was shot with the same lens used to shoot the chariot race), and for one week only has released it in 98 theaters as an old-school roadshow engagement, complete with overture, intermission and commemorative program.

Just the way they used to make 'em in my childhood.

The story is essentially a three-hour retelling of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None in a Wild West setting. A motley crew of bounty hunters, war veterans, cow punchers, an Englishman with a fascination for the niceties of public executions and a gallows-bound Jennifer Jason Leigh wind up riding out a blizzard in a strangely-deserted general store deep in the trackless nowhere of a very empty Wyoming. They sit by the fire, drink coffee and talk, talk, talk.

And then when the talking is through, the blood and the bullets start flying.

Stripped of the filigree, this is the plot of every Quentin Tarantino movie ever made.

If you know and love Tarantino the way we do, you know you're in for a banquet of ornate oratory, digressions and shaggy dog stories that for someone eager to get to the point I suppose must be maddening. But I'll tell you right out, I like listening to a man who likes to talk and The Hateful Eight stars some of the great talkers of screen history.

Kurt Russell is the bounty hunter determined to see Jennifer Jason Leigh swing, Samuel L. Jackson is another bounty hunter lugging three dead bodies and a letter from Abraham Lincoln through waist-deep snow, Walton Goggins as a would-be sheriff finally gets a big screen role worthy of his silver-tongued talents, Tim Roth as the hangman channels Eric Blore in Top Hat, Bruce Dern is a broken-down Civil War general, and Michael Madsen is a passing cowboy who says he's just headed home to visit his dear old ma.

For such an out-of-the-way place, this deserted cabin starts to seem a bit like Grand Central Terminal. With the emphasis on "terminal."

This is Tarantino, and you know at some point you're going to get a bloodbath worthy of a 1970s horror movie, violence so over-the-top it has an innocence about it, like something a demented preschooler might doodle in his hymn book during a long, boring church sermon. As I put it in an e-mail to my good pal Mister Muleboy, "it's a 3-hour gabfest ... directed by a drunk Sam Peckinpah right after he'd seen John Carpenter's The Thing."

High praise, indeed.

What rating do I give it? Why, an 8 of course.

(8 stars out of 10).

They Came To Cordura (1959): Mini-Review

Katie-Bar-The-Door is out of town this weekend, so last night the Monkey sat on the couch with the dog and box of ginger snaps and watched They Came To Cordura, a mediocre late-50s western starring Gary Cooper as a coward ironically put in charge of making Medal of Honor recommendations during America's little-remembered invasion of Mexico in 1916.

Because America will need live heroes to pimp for the coming world war, Cooper is charged with escorting the Medal nominees back to base, giving him a perfect opportunity to quiz each man on the essential nature of courage and to marinate in his own lack thereof. Unfortunately, the nominees aren't really heroes, just deeply (deeply!) flawed men who happened to have had one reflexive moment of extraordinary valor. Given ample opportunity to demonstrate their true nature, they talk-talk-whine gripe-carp-moan all the way home while the supposed-coward Cooper shows them what real men are all about.

Sort of a Red Badge of Courage for people who wished that classic novel had fewer battle scenes and more ham-handed philosophical discussions.

The main attraction of this film for me was its setting. My late father-in-law was pals with John Eisenhower who wrote a series of books about U.S.-Mexican relations including one, Intervention!, about the time Black Jack Pershing, his cavalry aide George S. Patton and half the U.S. Army chased Pancho Villa around the mountains of northern Mexico. Eisenhower sent me a copy of the book, wrote a nice note, and I've since become something of a nut for the subject. The movie doesn't have much to say about that farcical episode in American history, but there are a few location shots and when Cooper mentioned hiding in a railroad ditch in Columbus, New Mexico, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

So in a sense, this review is really about me. As is everything I write.

Also starring Rita Hayworth and Van Heflin.

Rating: 2 stars out of 5.

Trivia note: It was during the filming of this movie that Dick York of Bewitched fame severely injured his back leading to a lifetime of pain and addiction that cut short his career.

The Professionals (1966): A Mini-Review

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.

My rating 4.5 stars (out of 5).

Serenity (2005): Let's Misbehave

Katie-Bar-The-Door and I continue to binge-watch cult television, following up three seasons of Veronica Mars with Joss Whedon's sci-fi western, Firefly. Set five hundred years in the future, the story centers on the Firefly-class spaceship Serenity and its crew of would-be pirates who smuggle contraband between the outlying worlds and their moons, some of them technologically advanced, others as primitive as the 19th century American West.

Nathan Fillion (TV's Castle) was the swashbuckling captain, Gina Torres his first officer, Adam Baldwin, the brawny but brainless hired muscle. The chief engineer was a fresh-face farm girl with no formal training, the pilot a loveable goof who played with toy dinosaurs.

To pay the freight, they also ferried passengers hither and yon, including a high-priced courtesan, a preacher with a shady past (Ron Glass of TV's Barney Miller), and a doctor and his mad-genius sister, the latter two fugitives from the law. A three-hour tour, it wasn't—there were no space zombie cannibals on Gilligan's Island that I can recall—but it was great fun, filled with action, witty dialogue, and more cows than you'd expect, considering how much of it took place in outer space, sort of a steampunk cross between Star Wars and The Wild, Wild West.



To say that the Fox executives who commissioned the project didn't get it would be an understatement. They took one look and promptly buried it on Friday nights where its core audience was unlikely to see it. To make matters worse, they refused to air the two-hour introductory episode, showed the rest of it out of order and pre-empted it frequently for the baseball playoffs. Premiering in September 2002, it was off the air for good by New Year's Eve.

And then like another misunderstood sci-fi classic, the show refused to die, eventually winding up in the theater as a movie. That it failed to spawn multiple sequels and spinoffs, ala Star Trek, is not to say it wasn't worthy.

The film begins six months after the television series ended. The Alliance—the not so much Evil as too well-meaning for its own good Empire that runs the known galaxy—is determined to keep its citizens happy whether they like it or not. And for reasons even she doesn't understand, the girl mad-genius is a threat to that stability. To track her down, the Alliance brings in "the Operative" (Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor), the worst kind of assassin, a true believer who wants to create a world so perfect there won't be any place in it for people like him.

This presents a problem for Captain Malcolm Reynolds. He fancies himself a hard-nosed cynic and would like to give the girl the boot, but like Humphrey Bogart in most of his good films, he always finds himself fighting for lost causes. "They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people better," he says of the Alliance. "And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."

So guns blazing, he takes on the Alliance, the Operative and a horde of space zombies known as Reavers, and goes in search of an answer he's not sure he's going to like when he finds it.

If you haven't seen the series, don't fret—writer-director Joss Whedon wrote this as a stand-alone feature requiring no previous experience with the television show. Not that watching the series requires much of a commitment (there are only fourteen episodes) and doing so will add an extra layer of insight and understanding, but then maybe you aren't binge-watching fools and you're just looking for some top-notch fun-stupid. Serenity falls on the smart, fun, well-made end of the fun-stupid scale.

My ratings:
Firefly 4.5 stars out of 5
Serenity 4 stars out of 5

Note: I've written about Whedon before. Better known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers, his low-budget, modern dress production of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing was one last year's best movies. You can read my review of that one here.

Fritz and Tony

Am I the only person here who stopped the Blu-Ray player while watching Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained when Christoph Waltz introduced his two horses as "Fritz and Tony" and said, "Hey, William S. Hart and Tom Mix!" For it is a fact that the names of the horses belonging to the silent era's two greatest cowboys were Fritz the Pinto Pony and Tony the Wonder Horse.

That Tom and Tony on top, Bill and Fritz down below. (Do you suppose Tony signed his own name?)

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1966)

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)