THE EVOLUTION OF AMANDA: SHAWNEE SMITH ON MOTHERHOOD, ACTING AND SAW III

I remember seeing Shawnee Smith in the lobby of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood immediately after the cast and crew screening of Saw II last October, to which she was kind enough to invite me along. The movie was so viscerally effective, and the reveal of her involvement in Jigsaw’s grotesque gamesmanship so unsettling, that I experienced for the first time something that is perhaps common to those who can count actors among their friends (if those actors are good at their jobs, anyway)—a very real disconnect between the person I knew (the Shawnee who invites my daughters and I over to her house for parties and is about as unpretentious and welcoming as any old neighbor we might have known for years) and the Shawnee I’d just seen on screen being tossed into a pit of filthy syringes and, finally, taking her place within the legacy of one of horror cinema’s most unusual villains. There was a brief moment when I saw her, and when she saw me approaching her from across the lobby, that I felt irrationally uneasy, like I wasn’t sure if the woman I was about to hug and congratulate on her performance might not be a safe person to be hugging and congratulating after what I’d just seen. The moment was but a flash and then it was gone, but it has stuck with me as a testimony both to the power of movies and the power of good acting.

Last Tuesday night, after the cast and crew screening of Saw III, I caught up with Shawnee again, but there was no disconnect this time. She saw me, yelled my name, and the impulse I felt was one of pride, like a big brother wanting to express to a younger sister how proud I felt of her, of the work she’d done. I also wanted to congratulate her for her involvement in what has, with Saw III, coalesced into a consistently and memorably nightmarish trilogy with a very unusual and affecting relationship at its center (one that is no less perversely fascinating for having those qualities, either)-- that of the twisted love shared by Shawnee’s Amanda and Tobin Bell’s John, known by everyone but himself as Jigsaw.

When I talked with Shawnee this past summer, during a typically sweltering Burbank, California August, she had already seen the finished film and was genuinely excited about it. After initial disappointment with the first film, my hopes had been raised by Saw II and she could tell that I was anxious to see it, but she was not forthcoming with any specific details about the film, and I would have run from the room to avoid hearing them if she had decided to start spilling beans. So instead we enjoyed a lazy Saturday afternoon in her casually elegant and inviting home, talking about parenthood, acting and the Saw films, just like we had the previous winter. And just the same as in the winter of 2005, we were occasionally interrupted by my daughter and hers—usually in the form of a fashion show descending the stairway with as much pomp and circumstance as six and seven-year-old girls could muster—and by the occasional construction worker walking through the living room on a serious mission of remodeling. It was a rare opportunity to just sit back and talk with a very good actress, who I’m happy to consider a friend, with relatively little else going on, and enjoy each other’s company, united by our experiences as parents and our hopes for another good movie to talk about in October.

I began by reminding Shawnee about a Christmas wish she confessed last year...

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DC: The last interview we did, the very last thing I asked you was, “What do you want for Christmas?” So the first thing I’ll ask this time is, did you get your wish?

SS: (Laughs) Yep. (Shawnee’s Christmas wish was to hold her newborn son in her arms.)

DC: And?

SS: I thought I was gonna die getting that wish. My first birth, I had pain relief.

DC: You didn’t for this one?

SS: No. I made some kind of inhuman noise. (Television producer) Andy Ackerman was generous enough to rehearse with me through pilot season to try and get my pilot juices going again two weeks after giving birth—he has four kids. He said (regarding the noise), “Oh, yeah, that’s a kind of bray that all kinds of beasts in the animal kingdom do.” There was some term for it, but it sounded, when I made it, like a dying ox. It was this really low, low, guttural— It was the sound that singers in metal bands make, something similar to that. (She lets loose a low-frequency howl that sounds like a Jack Klugman imitating a foghorn.) My ex-husband was always trying to get me to make that sound in my old punk rock band, Fydolla Ho, and I just couldn’t get it.

DC: You needed the life experience.

SS: Yeah. I finally found the tone. (Laughs)

DC: Too bad there wasn’t a tape recorder in the delivery room. Or was there?

SS: Hey, it’s all on video.

DC: Well, obviously you think of motherhood as something you’re really enjoying, something that’s particularly meaningful to you.

SS: It’s been, essentially, my experience with truth and love. Being a parent is like standing in front of a brick wall of consequences. Somehow we are allowed this illusion of an absence of consequence in life and the illusion of freedom. You get relieved of that illusion when you have kids, because you see almost immediately direct consequences--everything you say, every choice you make. And having another little infant in my life reminds me that they’re just pure essence. It’s such a gift, this first year. Whenever I connect with him, his presence is so pure. It makes me really miss my daughter being this age. And it really condemns me in a lot of ways. I’m either facilitating her presence in my exchanges with her, or I’m not. And there’s been a lot of ways that I’ve helped build this husk of a personality over her seven years. It’s inevitable. It has to be built.

DC: Do you find it’s hard to be a new mother and to also interact with her in the way she’s come to expect? How much of a balancing act is it?

SS: Sure. I forgot, too, how much work a newborn is. Those first six weeks, especially, are like running a marathon at full sprint.

DC: And when you’re in the middle of it, it seems like it’s never going to end, never going to change.

SS: Mm-hmm. So, yeah, she got totally neglected that first six weeks. (Laughs)

DC: She’s better now, though, right?

SS: Yeah. It’s a constant striving for balance. It’s good, and it’s been good for everybody. It’s been useful for her not to be the center of attention for a while, because that won’t serve her in finding true love of her own.

DC: How do you feel new motherhood has renewed you, other than just remembering what it’s like to take care of somebody so small?

SS: Every time I come to him in a day, every time I look into his eyes, there’s none of the things that constantly pull you out of being present and having that pure exchange-- whatever history has been built, whatever habits. A child, a baby, doesn’t have an agenda as such, so you’re not guessing at what their motive is or whether they have one or not. There are just those automatic mental, emotional triggers that get pulled and the connection is made.

DC: There’s a purity about that that’s got to be refreshing, especially when you’re in a business where you are constantly guessing about things like people’s motivations. You know, as a parent of an infant, that you’re needed in every possible way. That’s scary, but it’s also nice bit of awareness to have.

SS: Also, when I look at my son it’s an affirmation that there’s more than this life. I don’t look at him and go, “Oh, what a cute little baby—“I mean, I do go, “God, what a cute baby!” But it’s not limited to that. I can see that, in a lot of ways, he knows a lot more than I know. He’ll start forgetting soon. But right now he knows a lot more. I know it; I’ve just forgotten.

DC: An infant who is just starting to be alive goes through a tremendous process of adaptation.

SS: Yeah, every time he wakes up, I look at him and think, “Ah, you’re back.” And you can see him getting back into his body and settling back in. It’s hard to remember what they seem to know—that there’s more than this. Everything about every day feeds our bodies and affirms that this, the material world, is what’s “real.” If you can’t feel it or buy it or eat it, it must not be real.

DC: Other than the arrival of Jakson, what’s been going on since we last talked officially?

SS: Well, it went like this-- Jakson, TV pilot season, Saw III and the home renovation you see going on around you right now.

DC: That’s a big enough bite to chew on.

SS: Yeah. Nothing much has been going on in my world. (Laughs)

DC: Well, I know you can’t get into too many details, and I wouldn’t ask you for them, but what can you say about Saw III?

SS: It’s a love story and a tragedy.

DC: Not the response I was expecting!

SS: It’s different than either Saw or Saw II.

Shawnee fits costar Bahar Soomekh with a deadly piece of jewelry in Saw III

DC: One of the things that I think is interesting about these movies is that, as opposed to the average Jason Voorhees kill-fest, the Saw series is driven by the philosophy behind the killing as much as the revealing of the elaborate traps. Whether that philosophy is a warped one or not, it is still a philosophy that creates believable motivation in the set-ups to the killings, rather than just setting the table for mindless, unfathomable bloodletting.

SS: There’s a genuine sort of search for truth that goes on in every department, from writing to directing, to acting, to props, to costumes, painting, set design, all of it.

DC: And it translates, certainly in Saw II, into a more interesting beast. This philosophy, if you will, can be refigured through a host of different characters and set-ups, so each new movie has the potential to set itself apart from a narrative standpoint. The most shocking things in that second movie were the discoveries the audience made about your character. We were witness, from the first movie, to how you were transformed-- in a way that’s not acceptable in standardized storytelling—not into angel of mercy in the typical sense, but a damaged angel, one who is just forming her own warped take on the mind-set of the most influential person in her life.

SS: Absolutely.

DC: Yet, in reading people who have written about the first two movies, particularly those who don’t seem to think much of them, there sometimes seems to be a set of preconceptions working there. Those who disdain the genre, or the specific subset of horror that has come to be known as “torture porn,” are often lumping the Saw movies into categories that don’t indicate just how transgressive the Saw movies, particularly II, actually are. Not just in terms of gore, either, but in terms of violating some of the basic tenets of the genre, like being so up front about imploring or otherwise insisting that the audience examines why it wants to see some of what it has come to see, or why it’s so easy to understand, and perhaps even, to some degree, empathize with the Jigsaw philosophy on a basic level. This is a disturbing route for the series to take, but a meaty one, and one that doesn’t let the audience off the hook in terms of its level of enjoyment. And it bodes well, I think, for Saw III.

SS: The movie is serving something bigger than any one individual part of it, whether that’s the director’s vision or the storytelling of the writer or the talents of the actors. So the series has to change its shape and form to grow, which is a bizarre and unlikely occurrence, especially in this marketplace.

DC: It’s the antithesis of what usually happens with a sequel-driven franchise which is, “Let’s make another one, and let’s make it as close to the last one as we possibly can.”

SS: Right. Keep the formula, and just make it “more”—bigger, gorier.

DC: I remember a couple of reviewers writing about Saw II who were pissed that the movie didn’t travel exactly the same road as the first one.

SS: Well, they should get ready to get pissed again!

DC: What was it like for you to find out what direction this character, Amanda, was going to go? And what kind of reaction did you get from people who either liked, or didn’t like, the second movie, based on the trajectory of your character?

SS: I haven’t yet encountered anyone who had a negative reaction personally. And Saw III evolves Amanda in ways that, as an actor, you just dream of. It’s like the character arc that never ends. I went from being an actress who typically had one scene or two scenes in big movies—the joke was, my characters never had an arc—and now the half-a-day’s work I do on the independent, low-budget horror movie turns into the arc that keeps on giving. In Saw III you really get to know Amanda, and there actually is a person here to get to know.

DC: To my eye, that was clear from the first movie, and so for me the way your role keeps expanding, in size and importance, in each movie feels like a kind of vindication of what I saw in that first wonderful performance you gave in Saw.

SS: It’s weird. It’s like there’s some kind of fairy dust on it, as if I’d mapped the whole thing out, starting with part one. Everything is connected, and it’s beyond me. There’s some bigger something at play—luck, or whatever.

DC: In that first movie, just in that two minutes you were on screen, there was a concentration of some kind of acting energy or essence that I don’t think the movie exploited. If it had, you would have had a much bigger part.

SS: And it’s interesting, too, how Saw II, of all the things it could have been—I happened to get pregnant. It wasn’t planned. So I had a four-month-old pregnant body, and I decided to chop my hair in a crazy manner. As an actor I could have just gone for the gold in that part. I could have spruced up my physical appearance, given myself more lines. But instead I took half my lines away from myself—“Do I really have to say this here, or can I just--” You know, I purposefully was very subdued. Well, the hairstyle wasn’t so subdued, but it wasn’t like—Like, her sexuality was totally repressed. And I had no idea that there would be any kind of pay-off for any of that in Saw III. Maybe it was because I was four months pregnant that I just wasn’t concerned, I had bigger things on my mind, I don’t know. But it’s been an actor’s dream to be able to connect it all in a meaningful way.

DC: Paradoxically, you weren’t trying to attract attention to yourself. And my guess is, you probably had to deal with some consequences of that, in the promotion of the film, because you couldn’t really talk about what you were doing, or what you weren’t doing, in the film.

SS: Yes. The marketing and promotion was skewed purposefully toward Beverly Mitchell, just to put people off the scent of the twist at the end.

DC: There’s integrity in your performance in the second movie, too. You did some great things in Saw, and looking at the second movie you might think, “Okay, she’s dialing it down here. The performance isn’t as distinct as it was in the previous film.” And it only becomes clear as the movie ends that there’s a rationale for that, and in a way your entire performance in Saw II is still rooted in the very unlikely choices you made in the first film to not wave your arms and call so much attention to yourself, to not chew the scenery. I actually thought it was rather brave to basically give yourself to the concept, and to the other actors.

SS: That’s what we were talking about. And maybe that’s the fairy dust of the Saw franchise—everyone sees to be serving something bigger than the individual.

DC: Talk about Tobin Bell (who plays “Jigsaw” in all three films).

SS: Working with him was the kind of experience that you hope, as an actor, you get once in your career. He’s one of the under-the–radar actors—kind of like myself—who’s been around for a long time.

DC: And his parts tend to be on the small side.

SS: But he fills every one of them out as though every part were as good as Jigsaw. Acting is a sport, like a game of tennis, and you and your opponent take turns setting the level of play. Rehearsal with Tobin was intense. All his script pages were taped to the wall of his hotel room. He was looking for flow and details within the script. He’d ask one question, which would lead to 10 more questions, which would lead to 10 more questions. And we’d keep asking ‘em. We’d just walk around the city of Toronto and talk, stop at a café, have some coffee, ask some more questions.

DC: Would you say that your work with Tobin in Saw II, and now Saw III, has been the most fruitful collaboration you’ve had with another actor?

SS: Well, Becker was certainly a fruitful collaboration. And so was Leaving Las Vegas, even though it was a tiny part. And even Summer School. But as far as a serious tennis match, working with Tobin on Saw III is it.

DC: This is a process that I don’t think a lot of people, even fans of this genre—maybe particularly fans of this genre-- believe takes place. And in most cases it may not happen. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the Saw movies stand out to the degree that they do. I just can’t imagine anyone sitting around on the set of Friday the 13th Part 7 talking about character motivation.

SS: Well, it might not still be happening by the time Saw VII rolls around. But it does sound weird to be talking about things like “the search for truth” in the context of making the third part of a horror franchise. And if you dare bring the concept of true love into it, it’s laughable, right?

DC: To those who have a pretty good idea of what a horror movie should be, maybe that might sound pretentious. But horror is a very malleable genre. It can be adapted to just about any kind of purpose-- political, social, satirical. There can be, and should be, more to it than just the gore factor.

SS: Yeah, I’ve definitely gotten an education in this genre in the last couple of years, as well as more of an appreciation.

DC: If you looked back on everything that you’ve been able to do so far with your acting, is there one project that you feel particularly proud of, one that touched you in a singular way that made it more special than the others?

SS: Mmm… probably Saw III. Isn’t that a silly answer?

DC: Not necessarily, because I see it coming from a place that’s clearly not marked “junket promotion sound bite.”

SS: (Laughs) That didn’t even enter my mind! If anything, I’d move against that kind of answer, especially at this stage. But I had the time of my life—personally, professionally. I had both my kids with me. I had a starring role, so I was really involved in the process on many different levels. It was challenging, frightening, no pun intended, and fun.

DC: Tell me a little about working with Darren Bousman again on Saw III.

SS: I think the world will taste many fruits of The Great Darren Bousman’s talents-- he likes to be referred to as The Great Darren Bousman. (Laughs) Darren was a total unknown, a wild card, for Saw II. I remember talking to James Wan (director and co-writer of Saw) and saying, “Oh, my God, do you think this guy can pull it off?” And not only did he pull it off, but he was a first-time director and he put his own stamp on a franchise. Well, I guess it wasn’t a franchise then, but he sure helped make it one. I mean, he stands tall on the shoulders of many talented people, but he knows it, and that’s pretty rare. It was smart on the producers’ part to put the same team behind him for Saw III. But even in Saw III he outdid himself from the previous movie. He put a new stamp on the series. He could have thought, “It’s a fluke. This movie I did was a success and I’m taking a chance doing part three, so I’d better just stick to the same formula.” But instead, he fought every good fight. I mean, there were all-out creative battles, and that happens in a worthy creative endeavor. But, intuitively, he knew what to fight for, and he fought.

DC: Did he collaborate on the script again, with James Wan and Leigh Whannell?

SS: Yeah, they all worked together on the initial concept, and then Darren and Leigh really got in there and reworked it together. Then Tobin and I got up to Toronto and started doing our own rehearsals and research. We had to fill in the life of these characters’ relationship—everything that will never be addressed in the script but has to be there for the movie to work. And so a lot of that ended up influencing the script in different ways—stuff that Darren and Leigh couldn’t have come up with just sitting in a room, talking. It’s stuff that came out of these characters. Darren told me that one of his favorite scenes in the movie is a scene that came out of just that process—a character moment with Amanda. And he said it’s one of his favorite scenes because it has nothing to do with the story. Right, and it’ll probably end up on the editing room floor! (Laughs) But he loved it because it’s purely a character moment.

DC: You don’t see that happen very often in a plot-driven horror sequel because there can be too much money at stake to risk alienating your audience base.

SS: Right. And he had to fight to even get that scene filmed. But I learned on this movie that you have to throw your ego out the window with these kinds of fights. You fight for all you can, take what you can get, do the most with what you do get. You kind of throw all shame out. Because sometimes you end up with a gem on film and it’s worth the struggle. But there were times when it got intense. There was one moment where the producers were really putting the pressure on Darren during this scene we were filming, and I saw this exchange happen. It’s one thing to hear, “I’m getting a lot of pressure, Shawnee.” It’s another thing to see the exchange and see the pressure coming down. And inside of myself I said, “I never want to be a director! I never want to be in this position! Ever!” But then the very next chance I had to take some heat off of Darren, I took it. You take it all for the team. You do it for the sake of a good movie.

DC: I suppose it’s easier to keep that frame of mind when you really believe in the material and see that it’s coming together. And I’m glad to hear of him allowing for those kinds of character scenes.

SS: Yeah, to have that kind of confidence or instinct that early in your career—amazing.

DC: And those situations are from where privileged moments in movies, moments of unexpected business, special touches, often emerge. And it’s unusual for a young director, especially in this genre, to be open to the possibility of those things happening.

SS: I’m excited to see other things that he’ll do in his career, the stories that he’ll tell. He’s so full of enthusiasm. I adore him.

DC: So, if you stopped acting today and did a complete change in your career and your life, what do you think you’d be doing?

SS: (Pause) I would probably move to the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, get a big piece of land, tend to some animals, tend to my children, grow some food, and write, and read. There’s a lot of movement out here, and in Hollywood everything changes every second. But there’s not really much substantial happening. But take yourself to the Ozark Mountains and tend to some living things and each other—there won’t be a lot of movement, but there’ll be a lot more real, meaningful things happening. Why I’m still here I’m not sure, but I know it’s not time to move to the mountains just yet.

DC: Given that, then, where would you like to be in 20 years?

SS: Wow. Twenty years. (Pause) I’d like to still be in love. And that just implies that there’s truth involved, or else it wouldn’t be love. I’d like to be more comfortable with the pursuit of love, as opposed to the pursuit of power.

DC: In 20 years what do you think you’ll be able to say about your career and your life that maybe you can’t say now?

SS: I sure look good in Depends!

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(You can read my 2005 conversation with Shawnee Smith by clicking here.)

DOC HOLIDAY

I opened up the “Calendar” section of the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, and the question that Patrick Goldstein posed off the top of his “The Big Picture” column cut to my heart like an icy knife:

“Did you notice that there are suddenly a lot of good movies in town?

From early October until New Year's, the floodgates are open, with a stylish, daring or thought-provoking adult film arriving every week. This past weekend alone saw the arrival of a potential best picture candidate, Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, along with two confections of classy entertainment, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, as well as Running With Scissors, a literary adaptation with a stellar cast.”

The premise of Goldstein’s article, if you weren’t able to guess it from that tantalizing question and opening paragraph is that (wait for it)… Hollywood seems to put out “virtually all of its best adult-oriented films in the last 12 weeks of the year.” (Sarcastic italics mine.)

His conclusion, reached after just over 1,500 words and God knows how many column inches, some of which actually attempt to challenge the studios’ self-imposed reasoning that adults only go to movies in the fall and winter? Get this: Hollywood loads up the end of the year with prestige films in order to court Oscar. (Even more sarcastic italics courtesy of me.)

This is cutting-edge entertainment journalism, to be sure.

To be fair to Goldstein, however, I opened up the Sunday “Calendar” section just two days before, and I said aloud pretty much the same thing: “Wow! There sure are a lot of good movies opening in town next weekend!” The difference is, I wasn’t thinking exclusively, or at all, actually, of the heavily marketed studio titles one might expect to hear about in a low-cal think piece about Oscar campaigns and the myth of the adult movie season. Instead, I was fairly astounded to note that, in addition to at least two documentaries of unusually high interest that were already playing-- Jesus Camp and Deliver Us from Evil-- four brand-new docs, each one with its own unique and compelling area of inquiry, would be bowing on Los Angeles screens on October 27, not to mention one faux documentary that has many potential viewers up in arms before they’ve even seen it. It was enough to make me think that the upcoming holiday wasn't that familiar pagan ritual of candy consumption and corny horror imagery, but instead one devoted to the complex joys of, of all things, the modern documentary.

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That faux doc, by the way, would be Death of a President, which originated as a British television film, a curious investigation, through staged documentary framework, into the fictional assassination of George W. Bush and the possible repercussions of such an event. Many have found the movie as searing as did Noah Cowan, whose notes for the Toronto Film Festival, where the film was featured last month, revealed Cowan’s fascination with director Gabriel Range’s methodology:











“This is easily the most dangerous and breathtakingly original film I have encountered this year. Director Gabriel Range’s 2003 project The Day Britain Stopped – which asked what might happen if Britain’s transportation grid was suddenly halted – was his first experiment with this style. He assembles a vast array of media, manipulating and subtly altering it to act as a continuous background illustration of falsified history – and then employs the conventional, after-the-fact style of History Television and its ilk as narration.

But it’s a long leap from Britain’s trains to a gunned-down Commander-in-Chief. Range is up to the task: collaborating with some of the finest special effects wizards in the world, he inserts his characters seamlessly into existing footage. His narrative is also airtight. Cautionary tales are too often flights of fancy; as they push the envelope of credibility, the lessons gleaned from dark speculation become somehow tarnished. Not here. Every moment is completely believable, every comment is somehow appropriate – to the point of chilling, horrifying certainty.”

But not everyone has been similarly impressed. Stephanie Zacharek, the fine critic in the employ of the online magazine Salon, had serious reservations about DOAP’s approach and the depth of those conclusions, as well as the kind of intellectual engagement it encourages:

”Death of a President offers nothing but predigested ideas, spouted not by people but by stereotypes. The movie doesn't make you think; it just confirms what you already think you know. The picture is clearly geared to liberal audiences, and it plays to its crowd like a preacher at a revival meeting. But instead of guiding us toward any nuanced thought or complicated moral issues, Range merely outlines the kind of clichéd possibilities that most reasonably intelligent, left-leaning individuals could scrawl on a cocktail napkin in three minutes.”

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The gang of four actual documentaries opening this Friday in Los Angeles are led off by Marco Turro’s Excellent Cadavers, based on the 1995 book by Alexander Stille, which tours the scenes of crimes of the Italian Cosa Nostra and attempts to contextualize their causes. A.O. Scott, film critic for the New York Times, finds the cadavers well worth a cinematic autopsy:

”Excellent Cadavers does not dwell on the Mafiosi themselves, refusing them the honor of being cast as larger-than-life movie protagonists once again. The leaders of the Sicilian Mafia and their henchmen tend to be shown either as corpses or prisoners, sprawled on blood-stained sidewalks or crowded into cages in a courtroom in Palermo, the Sicilian capital. The film’s designated heroes are the men who, at great risk and against long odds, put them in those cages: in particular, two brave Palermo prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who were murdered in separate bombings in 1992. Before their deaths, Mr. Falcone and Mr. Borsellino (whose names now grace the Palermo airport) helped to bring about the convictions of hundreds of Mafia soldiers and bosses in the unprecedented “maxi-trial” of the mid-1980’s.”

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A new film chronicling both the horrors of Jim Jones’ Jonestown massacre and everyday life within the notorious cult compound is garnering a lot of attention as well. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice examines Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple:

“Ending with mass suicide in deepest Guyana, the story of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple is both the death rattle of '60s utopianism and—predicated on the desire to found a New Jerusalem in the wilderness—a very American saga.
Incredible as this story is, it's been surprisingly under-leveraged. Back in 1979, the super-8 filmmakers Beth and Scott B made a chilling little item called Letters to Dad, in which a dozen or so East Village bohos read excerpts from the fan mail sent Jones by his followers. Soon after, Powers Boothe played Jones in a suitably lurid made-for-TV movie; some 15 years after the journalistic accounts, Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris's phantasmagorical Jonestown subsumed the specificity of the massacre in a ‘dream book’ of Mesoamerican history.

Nelson's Jonestown is an arrangement of facts and recollections; with no voiceover, it's almost all oral history. (Sociologist John R. Hall is one of the few who provides an overview.) The narrative is assembled from home movies, interviews, and the cult's own documentation—including the final tapes of Jones exhorting his followers to suicide. There is no way to represent Jonestown's denouement except with itself. The spectacle of a thousand dead bodies, many children, huddled together in a jungle clearing, trumps the horror of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. (Nearly as awful are the snapshots Nelson shows of Jonestown's happy—even ecstatic—campers.)”

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Director Eric Steel mounted cameras on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge every day, 24 hours a day, for an entire year, and in the process captured several successful suicides and several more unsuccessful ones. His haunting, poetic documentary about the fatal attractiveness of this venerated, glorious and romantic steel-and-wire construction, The Bridge, has evoked similarly poetic and introspective reactions from those who have seen it. Here’s Jim Emerson:

“For me, as an American, a West Coaster and a cinephile, the Golden Gate Bridge has always loomed large in my consciousness. Today, as I attempt to digest this shattering film, I am moved and awed to offer… images, from Brueghel to the bridge -- visions not just of a magnificent structure or landmark, but of a place of mythic stature in the imagination.”

Jim goes on to quote in its entirety William Carlos Williams’ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus as accompaniment to a series of exceptional images comparing Brueghel’s painting of the same name with shots from Vertigo and The Bridge itself, and inviting comment from those who have seen it, all in anticipation of Jim’s actual review, which should be appearing soon. In the meantime, from the Chicago Sun-Times comes this interesting piece on director Eric Steel and questions of ethics that have arisen in the shadow of the film’s achievement.

UPDATE 10/27/2006 5:11 p.m.: Here's another post from Jim regarding The Bridge, which also includes a link to his full-length review as found in the Chicago Sun-Times and, of course, on RogerEbert.com.

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Finally, is disparaging the president, particularly President George W. Bush, the same thing as disparaging America? One would think the difference would be fairly clear to most people. But as the dawning of the war in Iraq inched ever closer a few years ago, Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines had the temerity to express her dissatisfaction with the direction the Bush administration was taking the country in the wake of 9/11, and she did it in public, on stage during a concert—she proclaimed that she and the Chicks were ashamed that Bush came from Texas. That one comment sent the Dixie Chicks into a career tailspin. Suddenly abandoned and vilified by country radio and the very fan base that had turned them into superstars, they were now fair game for character assassination, CD burnings and even death threats. Many who railed against Maines claimed that it was the fact that she made the comment on foreign soil (the group was in England at the time), and not the comment itself, that was so offensive. But that’s a paper-thin rationalization for jumping to the absurd conclusion that Maines was not exercising her right to free speech as an American citizen, on whatever soil she stood at the time, but instead condemning whole-hog the American system, the American way of life— for some, there is no difference between Bush-bashing and flat-out anti-American insurrection. (As I was writing this, KABC-TV “entertainment guru” George Pennachio, in a brief piece of the film during the 11:00 p.m. news broadcast, described Maines’ comment as “a sour concert occurrence.”)

Oscar-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A., American Dream), along with her longtime associate Cecilia Peck, followed the Dixie Chicks as they attempted to grapple with life in the ever-shifting political morass which has engulfed the free exchange of ideas in this country, and the result is the new documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, the last of the gang of four documentaries to open this weekend. The trailer seems to promise more of Kopple’s evenhanded observational approach to what is, for some of us (and certainly more of us than in 2003, now that the tide of public opinion has swung far more in Maines’ direction than Bush’s), a maddening, infuriating display of self-righteous hypocrisy on the part of the country music industry and those fickle, CD-burning fans. This hope is confirmed by Stephanie Zacharek, whose review of the film out of Toronto, was a wholehearted rave:

”Shut Up and Sing is a shout of defiance, a chronicle of the price we have to be willing to pay to stand up for what we believe in. (In the Dixie Chicks' case, that price included death threats.) But the movie is politically potent precisely because it's not solely about politics. This isn't a picture filled with speechifying; it's a movie about people's lives. The Dixie Chicks are all working moms with jobs. Their husbands often handle much of the day-to-day childcare. (Of course, the Chicks are rich enough to have nannies, and so they do.) These women are clearly in an income bracket that means they don't exactly qualify as regular folk, but they don't fit into any traditional mold. They essentially live as millions of American working women do, balancing jobs and a family, trying to hold everything together even as the world seems to be falling apart around them. Their politics inform their lives and help shape who they are. They're engaged with the world in a way that defies facile red state/blue state divisions or, worse, apathy born of discouragement. They're true, old-fashioned liberals in the sense that they refuse to yield to hopelessness or lazy cynicism.”

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Patrick Goldstein was right, of course. I did notice that there were an awful lot of good movies opening in town. My list of movies is just a whole lot different than the ones he chose to notice. While some of the studio films out now and scheduled for the coming weeks are undeniably tantalizing (Borat, Casino Royale, Pan’s Labyrinth, just to name a few), it’s mind-boggling to think that so much potentially excellent, or at least worthwhile, documentary work is on so many screens all at the same time, not only in Los Angeles, of course, but other cities as well.

And it’s rather sad, and a bit annoying, that a writer with a bully pulpit like Goldstein’s feels that it’s more important or interesting to rehash the same old Oscar-season questions, as if they’d never been posed before, or as if they held any real significance to anyone other than the studio executives whose jobs might be on the line if their big Oscar contenders this year turn out to be more Elizabethtown than The English Patient, than to talk about some of these much more vital, far less promoted films. But if one or more of these movies does find an audience, maybe they’ll get noticed later, in the inevitable Los Angeles Times think piece about the relevance of the Academy’s nominating process for documentary films. It’s truer than ever, it seems, than an industry town is getting not the paper of record that it deserves, but one that is more than ever willing to take on attributes of the star-maker machinery while still claiming standards of objective, relevant journalism regarding that industry.

PAULINE ON THE RADIO

A busy week is just getting busier as Halloween preparations are entering their final stages. Look for some juicy items on SLIFR to commemorate this popular pagan holiday toward the end of the week.

In the meantime, from the Bookworm archives at KCRW radio in Santa Monica comes a real treat for this Wednesday morning or any morning-- Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt and Los Angeles film critic Chuck Wilson talk to Pauline Kael in a 1991 interview recorded on the occasion of the release of her book Movie Love, the final volume of her collected film criticism.

(Thanks to Thom McGregor for pointing the way to this one!)

DRIVE-IN TRAILER PARK: BEWARE THE UNFLESHED!

Time is tight, so this week’s Drive-in Trailer Park is gonna be a quick one, sticking with the seasonal theme of science fiction and horror, of course.

Today’s double feature of classic drive-in newspaper ads comes from the Raleigh, North Carolina area-- the Tower Drive-in Theater and “Raleigh’s newest,” the Center Drive-in Theater. According to The Newspaper Movie Ad Archive (from which these images were obtained), the engagements described date to March and April 1968.

(Image courtesy of The Newspaper Movie Ad Archive. Click on image to enlarge.)

The first, showcasing a can’t-miss bill of “4 HORROR HITS!” is a great example of the slapdash collage approach to putting together drive-in ads on the movie pages of papers in the early ‘70s. Better than just the simple listing of film titles in simple typeface, which was most certainly the cheaper, more efficient option for drive-in owners trying to keep costs down, the slapdash collage at least employs the actual advertising logos of the films, often hastily snipped out of pressbooks provided by the studios and pasted upon a generic design, the nature of which depended on the movies themselves of course. (Horror films were easy, because the iconographic imagery was pretty abundant in newspaper layout formats—a good skull was never hard to find.)

In this case, the movie titles jet out of the eye sockets of the skull on harsh beams of light presumably originating from the devilish brain still contained within. The bill is a good one, too, well worth the time and effort to promote it in such a flashy way—two bottom-tier Hammer films-- The Reptile, The Mummy’s Shroud-- and Warner’s low-rent (but fairly entertaining) William Castle-esque knockoff Chamber of Horrors. (“The movie with the Fear Flasher and the Horror Horn!”)

But whoever put the ad together got a little excited—perhaps it was the end of the day and he/she had to beat bad traffic—and ended up forgetting to post the fourth feature! Oh, well, surprise and shock being the exploitable elements that they were in the day as far as drive-in combos went, perhaps it was more fun going to see this bill not knowing what feature number four was going to be—all the better to keep you awake until the wee hours when it would finally find its way to the big drive-in screen.

(Image courtesy of The Newspaper Movie Ad Archive. Click on image to enlarge.)

The second ad, for a double feature of almost completely forgotten horror films, is notable for a couple of reasons. I know that during this period, when I was watching the movie pages very closely, Fridays were typical release days, though it wasn’t unusual to see a new program beginning on Wednesday, to give enough time to build up interest for the weekend. And my local drive-in usually ran a Tuesday through Sunday schedule, six days with a change of program on the following Tuesday. But I don’t recall too many programs actually starting on a Sunday, the last day of the weekend, especially movies of this nature. (Maybe that’s just how they did it in Raleigh. Anybody know?)

The other thing that’s kind of amusing about this particular ad and its layout is its side-by-side design, and the fact that the art for Cave of the Living Dead seems either a lame knockoff of the already lame art for Tomb of Torture, or maybe even a total rip-off of it drawn up by a bored artist sitting around the newspaper office. And then there’s that ad copy: “Prey to the creatures from the grave…” Does this mean that, should these creatures’ potential victims hope to save themselves, they should hightail it to the nearest chapel and “prey” for deliverance, even as they were being sized up by the monsters as potential “pray”? And I’ve never, in my many dark, dank days of scrutinizing ads like these, ever heard of zombies described as “the unfleshed”! Boy, in comparison to this, the movie pages just aren’t any fun anymore, are they?

Okay, on to this week’s trailers. First out of the box is a movie that most of us have only seen on TV or DVD, but which I was lucky enough to see in a theater, at a canned-food matinee, as I recall, back in the early ‘70s. The WWF should bow before this film and acknowledge it as their primary source of inspiration…



And finally, to carry us into our weekend, what red-blooded young man in 1966 (and you really get an up-close look at the red blood in this movie) wouldn’t want Raquel Welch checking him out from the inside?



That’s it from the Drive-in Trailer Park for this week! Thanks once again to everyone who made the Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon so much fun to read and coordinate! Next week, in anticipation of Halloween, another visit with Saw III star Shawnee Smith and my look at some underrated, underseen and flat-out ignored horror films. All the best to you and yours for a great, relaxing weekend!

LONE PINE DIARY

The Lone Pine Film Museum, Grand Central Station for the 17th Annual Lone Pine Film Festival, held October 5-7, 2006

Some might call it Cannes for the cowpoke set. Others might think of it as Toronto with tumbleweeds, or a six-gun Sundance. Some might, but not William Boyd, who was actually in town for the 17th Annual Lone Pine Film Festival held October 5-7 in the gateway to Death Valley, Lone Pine, California. Lone Pine has been popular with Hollywood location scouts ever since Fatty Arbuckle shot The Round-Up there in 1920. It was Arbuckle’s first feature, and the very first movie ever shot in Lone Pine. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, would follow, starring the likes of Tom Mix, Jack Hoxie, Tex Ritter, Tim Holt, Dale Robertson, Gene Autry, John Wayne and, most significantly, William Boyd, aka Hopalong Cassidy, the closest thing there is to royalty in these parts, who shot over 30 features in or near the desert town and may be the cowboy star most closely associated with Lone Pine.


Hoppy’s ghost, indeed the ghosts of all the stars who at one time or another visited and worked in Lone Pine, seemed to freely roam the streets for three days, ducking into saloons and in and out of porta-potties, munching on tri-tip and knocking back beers obtained from one of several open-air barbecues operating in town, and even settling in for an occasional screening at one of the two venues given over to this year’s festival. I saw Hoppy myself. I talked to him. Well, maybe it wasn’t really him, but deep down, some part of me really wanted it to be him. The magic of old Hollywood westerns grabbed on quickly upon my arrival in town and held their dusty sway over my imagination. The Second Coming of Hoppy was all well and good, but it was the panels, and the surrounding beauty of the Alabama Hills themselves, and, yes, even the films (which, if I had to guess, most of the people in town for the festival largely took a pass on) that would ensure the experience of the Lone Pine Film Festival would be placed securely in the firmament of my memory, a firmament almost as lovely and awe-inspiring as the one that shone down upon that tiny desert town during the nights after the projectors shut down and the cowboys all drifted off to sleep at their campsites.

A LOOK INSIDE THE LONE PINE FILM MUSEUM

A calendar for the Umberton Drive-in in Florida sits under glass along with a open script, complete with director and script supervisor notes, for Yellow Sky.


The hilarious/scary '50s sci-fi throwback Tremors was also filmed near Lone Pine, and the museum offers up this scaled down model of the movie's small town under siege by a burrowing Graboid.


A visitor to the museum peruses a display near a framed poster of Ride the High Country and an artfully placed tumbleweed. (Less artfully-placed tumbleweeds were accessible just about anywhere outside the museum doors.)


A wall devoted entirely to Bad Day at Black Rock, in several different languages.


Saddle up with John Wayne in Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska. This display is part of a huge, nicely arranged main entry room to the museum. Right next to the saddle, just out of camera range, is a full-sized stagecoach.


A giant poster for Ida Lupino's The Hitchhiker greets guests at the entrance to the Lone Pine Film Museum theater, a cozy screening room (about 60 seats) where I saw The Tall T and The Showdown.

In addition to the movies The Tall T, Violent Road, The Violent Men and Seven Men from Now, I spent a lot of time in the Lone Pine Film Museum, and I did get to attend one panel that revolved around stunt men and western movie villains. Present on the panel were stuntmen Loren Meyers and Diamond Farnsworth (son of actor/stuntman Richard Farnsworth), as well as memorable movie villains Ed Faulkner (McLintock!) and Jan Merlin, who traded his acting in for a career as an Emmy-winning writer of soap operas. Merlin provided the highlight of the panel when he acted out a hilarious story of how he, a New York-trained actor with no experience riding horses whatsoever, bluffed his way through his very first western action sequence, on a western programmer starring Dale Robertson called A Day of Fury. And it was Merlin who hit the weekend’s emotional high note when, near the end of the panel, he expressed heartfelt thanks to the audience for the opportunity to act in so many films an have so many memories. “It’s quite an honor to be part of a largely bygone group of Americans,” he said, his voice wavering, “who were so honored as to make their living portraying an even earlier generation of pioneering Americans.”


Western villain Jan Merlin entertains the crowd with a tale of a New York actor (him) trying to mount a saddled horse for the very first time, and on camera as well.

But as good as all that was, easily the best part of the LPFF was finally getting to meet one of my favorite bloggers, Brian Darr, who rides herd on Hell On Frisco Bay. Brian’s blog is ostensibly a chronicle of old cinemas and festival happenings in San Francisco, but it’s an excellent way to keep up on the forefront of independent, foreign, classic and rare cinema, as well as experimental films, too, because Brian’s reportage on the film festival scene in the Bay Area is so complete and engaging and consistently well-written. We had intended to meet for Bad Day at Black Rock Saturday afternoon, but unexpected car trouble had me taking a test-drive up into the Alabama Hills and beyond, to Whitney Portal at the base of Mt. Whitney, during the screening.


The Alabama Hills just outside of Lone Pine. Randolph Scott was here...


The intersection of Whitney Portal Road and Movie Road... Movie Road was, among many other things, the road down which the Lone Ranger righteously galloped to the strains of the William Tell Overture.



How nice of the Great Set Designer to show off Lone Pine to the tenderfeet like me in such a way. And if Movie Road didn't already exist, wouldn't Wim Wenders have to invent it?

Later in the afternoon, on my way out of a screening of Antony and Fulvio Sestito’s The Showdown, Brian saw me grilling the filmmaking fratelli during the after-screening Q & A and then spotted me on the street (I told him I’d be wearing a Dodgers shirt). He introduced himself and his dad—an extremely nice fellow (the apple has not fallen far from the tree here, obviously)—and we stood on the street, talked about the festival a bit and conspired to meet later that night for Rudolph Mate’s The Violent Men and Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now.



After we parted, I took a walk down the street and spied a big-screen TV inside a pizza parlor that was showing Game 3 of the Dodgers-Mets National League Division Series, so I decided an early pie and a pitcher of beer before the next screening would be just the ticket. I walked in the front door just as Greg Maddux threw the first pitch. By the time I waited in line long enough to get to the register and place my order, the Mets had jumped on Maddux for three runs, and suddenly I wasn’t so hungry. I sat down in front of the TV, right on the front window of the pizza parlor, and mustered all I could muster to help the Dodgers avoid elimination from the postseason, but it continued to not look so good, despite a two-run homer by Jeff Kent.


A one-sheet for Gordon Douglas's Only the Valiant graces the wall of a Lone Pine pizza parlor right next to the TV where I would watch the first half of the Dodgers' final, doomed effort to win at least one game in the National League Division Series. I somehow felt the one-sheet was a good omen and couldn't resist committing the juxtaposition to posterity...

Fortunately, less than 15 minutes after I sat down Brian and his dad came in. They joined me at my table, and let me tell you, talking movies and blogging with Brian (and his very accommodating and indulgent dad) was a whole lot more fun than watching my Dodgers creep slowly over the horizon of their season. They lost that game 9-5, thus making my early return to Los Angeles for Game 4 (I had a ticket) unnecessary. But all that didn’t matter, thanks to the great time had in the company of Brian, one of my earliest blogging acquaintances (it was he who invited me to participate in the very first blog-a-thon, all about Showgirls) and now the very first one I’ve met in person. We met again later for Seven Men from Now and capped what was my very first film festival on a high note with a superb western (even if it was digitally projected off of a DVD I have on my very own shelf at home). Brian, it was tons of fun and a great honor to meet you and spend time with you, and I hope we can figure out a way to make it happen again soon! (That Little Round-headed Boy and I have talked in passing about what fun a film bloggers convention would be…!)

Well, speaking of Brian, he has already done the heavy lifting in chronicling his experience of the Lone Pine Film Festival with dispatches posted on Green Cine Daily (part one and part two) that are beautifully evocative of the surroundings and the experience of seeing Bad Day at Black Rock and Seven Men from Now near the actual places where they were shot. He sums up everything in a much more succinct and probing way that I ever could, so I’ll leave the good words to him via those links above.



Two shots taken from my camp site. Yes, I camped in the shadow of all that useful beauty...

I do have one last thought about the festival, however, and it has to do with that DVD projection. I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed to discover this was going to be the way of the weekend—there was not a 35mm, or even a 16mm projector in sight. But it was easier to deal with when I reminded myself that this is a festival not necessarily built around an appreciation of cinema, but more about what the movies have meant to this community, and at the very least that appreciation is one that takes a much different, much more forgiving form in regard to aesthetic presentation in Lone Pine than it might in Venice or Toronto. (The cowboy-costumed and quite inebriated revelers turned loose on the streets Friday night did remind me of Cannes, though.) And as I found myself cooped up in the Lone Pine High School Auditorium watching Rudolph Mate’s delirious Cinemascope landscapes in The Violent Men, a film that almost renders the spectacular vistas of the Sierra Nevadas routine through the frequency—and relative lack of imagination—in which they are employed, something occurred to me. The DVD projection route could actually serve to make seeing a film at the Lone Pine Film Festival even more special if the programmers were to embrace a smidgen of the guerilla drive-in aesthetic. Instead of watching The Violent Men or Seven Men from Now or The Tall T in a stuffy auditorium, imagine how much more genuinely exciting it would be if a large portable screen and chairs could be set up among the Alabama Hills themselves and an audience were allowed to see the film not just near where the film was shot, but right smack dab among the actual canyons and crevices and ridges and rock formations where the likes of Randolph Scott and Hopalong Cassidy once so proudly trod. Given the chance to shine down on an audience taking in the outdoors while reveling in that most outdoor of genres-- the western, the Lone Pine western-- the stars in the big sky could be a terrific canopy for this festival’s screenings (weather permitting, of course) as it approaches its 20th anniversary in 2009.

WELCOME TO THE ROBERT ALDRICH BLOG-A-THON

Welcome to the central hub of today’s Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon happening throughout the blogosphere. At the end of this piece you’ll find an ever-evolving list of links to all the fine writers who have chosen to participate in the day-long celebration of one of Hollywood’s true mavericks, a director who rarely hid the rough edges of his films or his sensibility, whose films teem with vitality and power even when they stumble and fall, who deserves a whole lot more recognition 24 years after his death than he has managed to muster among all but the most dedicated cinephiles, those who think of The Longest Yard as Aldrich’s picture, not Burt Reynolds’. I’ve already discovered a previously unseen Aldrich picture that I’d now consider to be among his finest achievements-- Hustle. Such is one of the many joys of revisiting a director’s work in bulk, and if my Netflix queue can be trusted, the investigation of unfamiliar Aldrich will not conclude at the end of this day.

(The upcoming Torino Film Festival has also taken steps to ensure that this relatively unheralded director will maintain that status for only a short time longer—they’ve scheduled a full retrospective of Aldrich’s films that will hopefully precipitate, at the very least, a new wave of DVD releases, at the very most a whole new avenue for appreciating the movies of this most American of directors.)

So, without further ado, I’ll kick things off with my appreciation of Emperor of the North, a movie I loved unconditionally when I saw it upon its initial release back in 1973. I was a little nervous about revisiting it 33 years later—I’d not seen it since. Would this movie, which I’ve never forgotten from one screening at a drive-in during a slight summer sprinkle, still seem like the masterpiece that has been floating around in my memory all these years? Or would I have to chalk my assessment of it up to the untrustworthy enthusiasm of a young man discovering just how thrilled he was with the movies?

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“1933—The height of the Great Depression. Hoboes roamed the land, riding the rails in a desperate search for jobs. Spurned by society, unwanted and homeless, they became a breed apart-- nomads who scorned the law and enforced their own. Dedicated to their destruction was the Railroad Man who stood between them and their only source of survival—the trains.”

So reads the title card that leads off Robert Aldrich’s Emperor of the North, a brutal, ghostly, propulsive distillation, and heightening, of the existentialist, masculine codes of behavior found entangled among the roots of earlier Aldrich action pictures like Attack! and The Dirty Dozen. Where those films depended largely on how men interacted within groups assembled in wartime who were compelled by a tangible purpose, a mission, which was also informed by Aldrich’s distinctly anti-authoritarian bent, Emperor boils the conflict and the character elements down to their sturdy bones and turns its qualities of moral purpose or righteousness on its ear. Aldrich, working from Christopher Knopf’s lean, spare script, crafts a narrative where, despite the film’s historical context, the primary event is ultimately only of importance to the three main characters, and perhaps the Greek chorus of hoboes and disenchanted railway workers who dot the landscape down the parallel lines and take bets on its outcome. Can the hobo known only as A-#1 (Lee Marvin), and the young ‘bo who imposes himself onto A-#1’s legend (Keith Carradine), succeed in riding the #19 under the nose of its murderous conductor, Shack (Ernest Borgnine), who, as one character correctly observes, “would rather kill a man than give him a free ride”? As an audience, we’re geared to root without hesitance against Shack when his compulsion to protect his railroad, and his train (apart from his murderous sadism), is the one that could be argued as being based in a moral position. A-#1’s actions, on the other hand, stem from personal pride, a desire to survive a deadly situation set into motion by acts he willfully undertakes himself, and whose moral righteousness is derived almost exclusively from the rootless existence imposed upon him not by his deeds but by a country slowly going to hell. When we are forced, as we are in Emperor of the North, to consider this dilemma of identification, we’re set up for the key question for Aldrich within this narrative— just what will victory mean to the survivor?

The movie begins with a device that ties it to its period and to the early days of the movies-- an iris that opens slowly out onto a train, which we will come to recognize as the Oregon Pacific & Eastern #19, moving down the tracks through the Northwest countryside. The opening montage of this relatively idyllic footage is set to a song called “A Man and a Train,” written by Hal David and Frank DeVol (who also scored the movie), a somewhat hokey ballad with lyrics that illuminate the elemental approach to the film’s action but betray its serious, hard-boiled one with gee-whiz orchestration and Marty Robbins’ earnest vocals. Throughout the movie, the music is the movie’s one serious tonal misstep, and its effect is quickly corrected when we see Shack quickly, and with no small amount of delectation, use his sledge hammer to dispatch a hobo who obviously is unaware of exactly whose train he has hopped. The man falls screaming beneath the moving boxcars, and the last we see of him is his body lying perpendicular across the tracks, bisected by the locomotive as it continues toward its final destination.
Our first glimpse of A-#1 (the only name by which we know Marvin’s character, by which we also immediately understand his earned status among the ‘boes riding the Oregon line) is as he emerges from the trees and eyes Shack, whose train has stopped near the hobo’s camp to make a track switch. Marvin’s world-weariness is marvelously encoded here as he trudges back through his camp, holding a live rooster by its legs— this is one of the actor’s truly great, iconic performances, and the introduction of Cigaret (Carradine), who attempts to raid A-#1 of that rooster (which the elder bum swings as a weapon to defend himself), ensures he’ll have plenty of opportunity to set his features in various degrees of stone-faced disbelief over the course of the film. Cigaret ends up following A-#1, and blowing his cover, into an empty boxcar on the #19. Forced to set the car on fire in order to escape after being locked in by Shack, A-#1 and Cigaret separate, with the young man immediately seizing the opportunity to brag to a group of railroad men about how he rode Shack’s #19 and lived to tell the tale, leaving the old guy he was with to burn to death in the car.

The word spreads to the hoboes near the yard that the railway men have discovered a new king of the road—Cigaret—and to counter the young tramp’s self-created mythology, A-#1 vows to ride the #19 all the way to Portland, proclaiming his intention in writing on the water tower outside the train station. Meanwhile, Shack himself interrupts the rail workers and their setting up a bet with Shack’s right-hand man, Cracker (Charles Tyner), a bet in which Cigaret would be used as a ringer. Aldrich expertly draws out Borgnine’s self-righteous villainy in this scene through a spectacular series of extended close-ups, emphasizing the tensile contours of the actor’s face and the lunatic fire in his bulging eyes, when Cigaret carries on his façade of arrogant toughness to the conductor’s face. Shack responds by nearly strangling the kid, until one of the workers rushes in to report that water tower message and that A-#1 intends to be on Shack’s train when it leaves at 7:00 the next morning.Thus is the movie’s central cat-and-mouse game set up— Shack’s mania to protect the ride, a locomotive aboard which his authority goes unquestioned, where he has total confidence in his ability to exercise power, a mania borne of equal parts professionalism, pride and perversity, versus A-#1, a drifter of legend (whose back story is left unspoken), who is the Emperor of the North Pole, the top of the heap, simply because those who ride the same line as he does say he is, whose only real dignity lies in the ability, even under such dire economic and personal circumstances, to do what he wants to do, what he says he’ll do, and thus remind himself of his status as a man.

Yet Aldrich never emphasizes the crude sentimental streak that courses just underneath such a conceptualizing of these characters. He resists that temptation through his own fierceness and muscularity as a filmmaker, which thrives on seeing both Shack and A-#1 as larger-than-life archetypes brought to the level of mythology (whether self-imposed or granted them by others) and as players in a larger game whose futility is the stuff of bitterness, not tears. Of all the Aldrich films I’ve seen (and I’m still missing a few key titles in his filmography), Emperor of the North looks, to these eyes, like the director’s most sustained, well-paced, crisply edited and viscerally imagined film, surely the zenith of his career as an “action director.” Notwithstanding that overly grandiose song that opens the movie on a rather discordant note, there are few, if any, of the overripe touches that mar some of the director’s other pictures, touches that often get Aldrich, whose films are as tough and calloused as the director himself purportedly was in his life, written off as a simple, vulgar misanthrope. A masterpiece like Hustle is full of crudities that don’t fly in the eyes of those who like their policiers smoother, more even-handed, tonally consistent, and Aldrich hits like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, The Longest Yard and even Kiss Me Deadly (not to mention The Grissom Gang and The Choirboys) seem inconceivable without their wild streaks of vulgarity. Among these, Emperor of the North has an almost classical beauty, enhanced, of course, by the spectacular Oregon locales (the film was shot in and around the greater Cottage Grove area, where another classic of the rails, Buster Keaton’s The General, was also made), but also by the streamlined visual iconography of the train itself, as elemental a force as either Shack or A-#1 (sans any symbolic baggage courtesy of the writer or director), and the tracks stretching through canyons, across bridges, into the forested horizon and out of sight. And Aldrich himself, who may have taken the project on as a potential commercial picture in the wake of several flops which brought down his own independent studio, gives the movie the weight and clarity and fervor of his most personal projects through his brutal, sensitive, consistently compelling mise-en-scene, which takes advantage of all the opportunities afforded him by the film’s central vehicle and the rich locations, including brilliant exploitation of the geometry of the underside of a bridge in one of the film’s signature suspense set pieces.

It may be the director’s visual acuity, or the central metaphor of two men riding the rails, their destination meaningless in the shadow of the ride itself, but from the moment the #19 sets about pulling out of that train station, in a wonderfully sustained sequence which finds the immediate area of the train station blanketed in an eerie fog (“Sounds like a ghost story to me,” intones A-#1 to Shack, who he faces off on the tracks before slipping off into the mist, awaiting his opportunity to board the locomotive), a certain malaise begins to tinge the edges of the crisp, forceful action. Shack’s violent insistence on maintaining his dominant position as an unbeatable lineman has an almost religious intensity, enough to make one speculate as to whether he could or would feel the need to sustain this kind of intensity in whatever life he might have away from the train. (Aldrich and Knopf, of course, offer no clues themselves.) Conversely, A-#1 must keep moving, in part because of the disaster of the Depression and the level to which it has brought him (and all the men who ride the rails in search of a way out of their particular misery), but also because the mythology of being Emperor of the North Pole (the film’s original title during it’s New York run, before it was inexplicably trimmed, presumably by the Fox marketing department) gives him the only sense of himself that means anything to him—not that he’d ever admit to holding to a concept even as slightly romantic as that one. "Don’t ever grab on unless you’re sure you can hold on,” he tells Cigaret, who takes his advice only as far as it serves him in the moment. But A-#1 has the deliberate carriage of a man who fully subscribes to that notion, and who has seen that it can serve him well. But that little matter of destination haunts the blue skies and gorgeous scenery upon which the film’s central battle finally comes to a head, and much of the power that Emperor of the North delivers, apart from the violence of its visceral action, the sounds of chain and wood and hammer on flesh, comes from contemplating the degree to which any victory claimed by the end credits is profoundly hollow.

Perhaps even more satisfying than the moment when Shack takes his fall from the flatcar (“You ain’t heard the last of me!”) is the one immediately following. Cigaret, who has passively watched A-#1 fight for his life, offering no help, waits until Shack is not longer a threat before jumping down, laughing, and proclaiming his grand plans for their future together on the rails. But A-#1 has held his last session as mentor for this unrepentantly opportunistic kid and unexpectedly tosses him off the train and into the river below. As Cigaret gasps and treads water down at the bottom of the gorge, A-#1 shouts a rather long speech denouncing him and proclaiming his own triumph, continuing long after he (or any audience) could reasonably believe Cigaret could still possibly hear:

“Stick to barns, kid! Run like the devil! Get a tin can and take up moochin’! Tackle back doors for a nickel! Tell ‘em your story! Make ‘em weep! You could have been a meat-eater, kid, but you didn’t listen to me when I laid it down! Stay off the tracks! It’s a bum’s world for a bum! You’ll never be Emperor of the North Pole, kid! You had the juice, kid, but not the heart! And they both go together! You’re all gab and no feel! And nobody can teach you that! Not even A-#1! So stay of the train! She’ll throw you under for sure! Remember me for that! So long, kid!”

His voice booming, receding as the train pulls further down the track away from the camera, gaining a slight echo, as if he were proceeding out of this reality into some other, less-defined place (which is another way of saying that place that exists, if it exists, past “The End”), A-#1 continues on so long after Cigaret is out of range of hearing his voice that it’s not hard to assume that A-#1 is crowning himself at this point, trying to eke out some meaning to the course he has set and fought for, hoping the thunderous echo of his voice against the rattling boxcars and the whooshing pines will be enough to convince himself, if no one else. Aldrich never tips his own hand, despite the film’s apparently conventional “good” over “bad” conclusion—he’s a director with enough confidence to serve up a diamond-cut genre film imbued with enough ambiguity to make the film’s bitterness linger far beyond the final frame. Emperor of the North Pole is a sterling example of Robert Aldrich, perhaps more consistently overlooked and underrated that any major director, at his most brutal, insistent and confident as a storyteller.

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The following films directed by Robert Aldrich are available on DVD: Apache (1954), Vera Cruz (1954), The Big Knife (1955), Kiss Me Deadly (1956), Attack! (1956), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), 4 For Texas (1963), Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, The Flight of the Phoenix (1966), The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Killing of Sister George (1968), Too Late the Hero (1970), The Grissom Gang (1971), Emperor of the North (1973), The Longest Yard (1974), Hustle (1975) and The Frisco Kid (1979).

Aldrich’s first film, Big Leaguer (1953), shows up occasionally on Turner Movie Classics.

Still awaiting DVD release from the director’s filmography: World for Ransom (1954), Autumn Leaves (1956), The Angry Hills (1959), Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), The Last Sunset (1961), Sodom and Gomorrah (1961), The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), The Choirboys (1977) and …All the Marbles (1981).

I highly recommend two volumes that were very useful to me in preparing for this blog-a-thon: Robert Aldrich Interviews, edited by Eugene L. Miller, Jr. and Edwin T. Arnold, an endlessly valuable collection of interviews with the director spanning from Big Leaguer to …All the Marbles; and Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich? His Life and Films by Alain Silver and James Ursini. A third volume, Body and Soul: The Cinematic Vision of Robert Aldrich, is unfamiliar to me, but likely not to some who may be reading this. I’d love to know if it’s as worth reading as these other two!

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The blogsphere is alive with great writing in association with the Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon, and it is my pleasure to provide for you this ever-evolving list of links to the wealth of Aldrich appreciation available today. This list will undoubtedly grow throughout the day as I receive word of other pieces coming in from far-flung places of which I as yet know nothing. If you’ve posted a piece on Aldrich today and would like to be linked to this blog-a-thon hub, please drop a note in the comments column, or simply e-mail me at powser2@earthlink.net and I will hook you up. For now, here are the names and the movies that are making this a great day for celebrating the films of one of Hollywood’s most underappreciated giants:

That Little Round-headed Boy had his contribution ready to go on Friday, and he highlights a typically insightful piece entitled “American Craftsman: The Sturdy Art of Robert Aldrich,” featuring detailed and very thoughtful looks at 4 For Texas, The Flight of the Phoenix, Vera Cruz and Hustle.

John McElwee posted the first of his TWO entries for the Aldrich Blog-a-Thon on Thursday-- a massive piece (with lots of great pics) on The Dirty Dozen. And John promises another entry on Tuesday, this time on 4 For Texas.

Speaking of Aldrich’s 1967 popular classic, Andy Horbal hosts a great pictorial consideration of the Last Supper tableau as it pops up in The Dirty Dozen.

Peter Nellhaus gets his piece on Hustle started thusly: “Near the end of Hustle, police detective Burt Reynolds explains to grieving father Ben Johnson, "Don't you know where you live, Marty? Can't you smell the bananas? You know what country you live in, you live in Guatemala with color television." Thirty years after I saw Hustle in its initial theatrical release, that speech stayed with me.” I know you want to read more…

Bob Westal takes a look at "Ugly Bette" in his assessment of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Meanwhile, Adam Ross at DVD Panache reaps the harvest of Baby Jane's "sequel" and spends 15 minutes with Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

David Lowery is running up against a tight schedule but promises some commentary on Charlotte and Aldrich, "one of those classic directors who, like Sam Fuller, I essentially don't know at all." I'm looking forward to David getting know Aldrich and sharing his insights with us all.

Tom Sutpen has checked in with some excellent observations re Attack!, a film long considered one of the few genuine anti-war statements to emerge from Hollywood. Here's a taste:

"Elaborating somewhat on Samuel Fuller’s pulp war picture template (itself a jaundiced twist on the terse lyricism of films such as William Wellman's Battleground), Robert Aldrich skillfully injects a measure of ambiguity in Attack! – a film that might have been, in other hands, a live-action EC War Comic on the order of Two-Fisted Tales – without ever threatening to derail the story’s immediate, visceral impact. When you think about it, this was not a small achievement. Pulp melodramas, after all, do not bear subtleties and refinement with much ease. That’s just their nature. And like all such narratives, the conflict between Capt. Cooney and Lt. Costa, which is the core of Attack, is as fertile a field for action-packed histrionics as a filmmaker was likely to find. Yet somehow, in opting for a strategy of what we might call Serial Nuance, portraying his chief antagonists as both seriously flawed human beings as well as victims of rough equivalence, Aldrich manages to enhance, rather than mute, his film’s polemical thrust."

The rest of Tom's excellent piece can be found right here. Thanks, Tom!

UPDATE TUESDAY 10/17 8:54 a.m.: New additions to the Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon in this morning from Wagstaff, courtesy of Edward Copeland On Film, who has written a great piece on Attack!.

Also, Brian Darr who, perhaps inspired by his recent wrestling with westerns at the Lone Pine Film Festival, has posted thoughts on Apache that are fairly scathing and well worth the wait. Brian also links to reports on the weather problems brutalizing Buffalo, which is why we haven't heard from Girish as yet, and maybe Matt too (No Aldrich worries, friends; just keep warm!)

John McElwee is back with part two of his Aldrich Blog-a-Thon contribution, a snazzy special on the Rat Pack "pleasures" of 4 For Texas, complete with squirm-inducing backstage tales of Sinatra's ridiculous demands, including a personal hairpiece handler! ("Aldrich spoke well of Dean," reports John, "but he was ready to liitigate on Frank.") There are some pretty squirm-inducing descriptions of the on-screen antics as well in this wonderful piece.

C. Jerry Kutner, of Bright Lights After Dark (an offshoot of Bright Lights Film Journal), offers up his favorite Aldrich, a sharp rah-rah for The Flight of the Phoenix. C. Jerry also links to a 2000 Bright Lights review of The Killing of Sister George by Gary Morris, published upon the film's debut on DVD, and Gary himself contacted me to let me know about his review of The Grissom Gang, a film which is being borne to me on wings of angels from Netflix as we speak. Gary's two pieces are ones Aldrich blog-a-thonners won't want to miss.

UPDATE TUESDAY OCTOBER 17 9:14 p.m. Word has it that Maya, besieged by deadlines up to this point, will be checking in later this week with a contribution to the Aldrich Blog-a-Thon that will no doubt be worth the wait, so keep your eyes peeled here for a link to that page when it comes up.

In the meantime, Matt Zoller Seitz is in the house, as it were, and he's got Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman, those backward-scrolling credits and, of course, the Great Whatsit in his sights:

"Calling Kiss Me Deadly one of the darkest detective thrillers ever made, or the ultimate film noir, doesn’t do it justice. Director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzeride’s 1955 version of Mickey Spillane’s novel – in which our thug hero chases a mysterious, all-powerful “Great Whatsit” in pursuit of fortune and glory -- doesn’t merely exemplify those two genres and identify the places where they overlap. It defines the difference between cynicism and nihilism, then throws down with the nihilists, if for no other reason than to show you what it means to live in a world where nothing matters. Cynics expect the worst of humanity and are rarely disappointed, but in their hearts, they hope for some evidence that humans are innately kind and that morality is more than a sucker’s game. Cynicism is pre-emptive disappointment; you can’t be let down by anyone or anything unless you secretly nurse a kernel of hope. A nihilist, on the other hand, knows that the difference between cynicism and optimism is a matter of degrees. Like Neo in The Matrix blocking the agents’ bullets and then suddenly understanding, truly and deeply, that the world he's long accepted as "real" is just an intellectual prison built of ones and zeroes, the true nihilist has had his moment of cosmic disillusionment, and his accompanying realization that democracy, religion, equality -- hell, the Golden Rule itself -- are all just scam jobs sold to sheep by wolves; that everybody’s mainly concerned with playing the angles and getting ahead in the here and now, even if they pretend otherwise. After realizing that morality and ethics, religion and philosophy, good and evil are illusions of various sorts, and that there’s no percentage in decency, guilt and shame vanish and life becomes a present-tense proposition, a zero-sum game played by beasts that wear suits and drive cars."

And that's just the opening paragraph! Get thee to the entire post and enjoy a fine writer on a head-spinning noir masterpiece. Thanks, Matt, for joining in the fun!

More updates as they happen!

And thanks again to everyone who has taken part, and to everyone who has stopped by, lurkers as well as those who dropped comments, on this site and all the sites taking part in the Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon.

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UPDATE WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2006 8:12 p.m.: Steve Carlson is ready to go with his look at Robert Aldrich's Big Leaguer (1953). Steve admits he's unfamiliar with Aldrich and wonders if grappling with a significant director's oeuvre via his debut film without having seen his other films is "a fool's errand." Nah! Steve pulls a rabbit out of his hat with a well-observed review that draws a sharp parallel between the young ballplayers trying to make the majors out of spring training and rookie director Aldrich at the helm of his first feature. Nice stuff, and well worth the wait!

Plus: Jim Emerson links to the blog-a-thon by way of Matt's blistering Kiss Me Deadly piece in a post entitled "Nightmare on Aldrich Street."

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UPDATE THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2006 11:20 a.m.:
Thursday brings us Alex's entry posted on his blog Motion Picture It's Called, which he says is all about Kiss Me Deadly, Los Angeles economics, RAND, game theory, Victorian architecture, Fritz Lang and the beach at Santa Monica. Congratulations, Alex, you're the first person in any way associated with this blog to mention Victorian architecture!

Michael Guillen takes time out from posting wonderful pieces on Calvaire (courtesy of contributing writer Michael Hawley; more on that one from me next week), Fur and two on David Thomson to offer up his observations regarding What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? which start off a little something like this:

"Imagine this. You are a young, naïve gay boy recently arrived in San Francisco during the mid-70s. On one of your first dates you are invited to a screening of Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? at the Castro Theatre. The palatial moviehouse is filled with an unruly audience of hissing queens. You feel you have been thrown into a snakepit and have deep concerns about your safety. They seem to have no self-control and laugh at things you consider worthy of serious attention. But eventually you begin to understand. This is not just about politely watching a movie on a screen. This is about an interactive movie experience and a stellar example of audience reception. It all comes home when pitiable Joan Crawford whines: "You wouldn't be able to do these awful things to me if I weren't still in this chair!" Without missing a beat the entire audience shouts out in glee: "But ya ARE, Blanche! Ya ARE in that chair!" The ensuing raucous laughter is as thrilling as a hallucinogen.

One of my most treasured cinematic memories!"

Thanks, Michael!

And as if to prove that there is no such ting as "late to this party," here comes Darren Hughes who offers a splendid account of Attack! that, in Darren's words, "examines the confluence of social, political, and economic events that allowed the financing and production of such an ambivalent anti-war film in Eisenhower America." I highly recommend this look at the context of the times in which Aldrich made this tough, uncompromisig film, and Darren's site Long Pauses, which is full of thoughtful and evocative writing, and boasts a header featuring a lovely still of Mia Kershner as seen in The Black Dahlia, is an excellent bookmark candidate as well. Enjoy!

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UPDATE SUNDAY OCTOBER 22, 2:22 p.m.:
Thankfully, Girish has finally emerged from the heavy snowstorm that buffeted and blanketed Buffalo over the last few days, and though he initially planned some comments on Hustle, he has changed gears slightly and offered up, in addition to Hustle, a look at one of Aldrich's most vilified and/or ignored movies, his adaptation of James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, entitled The Grissom Gang. The movie just arrived on the Netflix Express yesterday, so I plan to curl up with Kim Darby, Scott Wilson and company tonight, then savor Girish's observations afterward, a perfect end to what tunred out to be, essentially, a week-long Robert Aldrich Blog-a-Thon! Thanks, Girish, and I'm so glad, as I know we all are, that you are once again safe and dry and warm and back on the blog!

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But hold on! That's not all! For film bloggers and readers, the 2006 Blog-a-Thon experience is far from over. There are four big ones on the way before the end of the year, and one to kick 2007 right out of its diapers. If you want to contribute to any or all of these blog-a-thons, or just mark your calendar so you can keep up with what's happening and when, here's a brief round-up:

Nathaniel R. is hosting a VAMPIRES BLOG-A-THON at his Film Experience blog on Monday, October 30, the day before Halloween.

Squish kicks off a juicy double-header for November with his ALFRED HITCHCOCK BLOG-A-THON on Wednesday, November 15, originating from his Film Vituperatem site.

And then Flickhead will be coordinating a very special 90th-birthday blog-a-thon spectacular to honor the man who coined the term "science fiction" and who remains synonymous with the word "monsters," FORREST J. ACKERMAN, perhaps the most famous monster fan of them all! (I know this is gonna be a good one, folks!) Say happy birthday to Forry along with Flickhead on Friday, November 24.

Friend, blogger and Mets fan Andy Horbal takes the blog-a-thon in an interesting new direction for the weekend of December 1-3 with his FILM CRITICISM BLOG-A-THON, originating at his site No More Marriages. This one promises to have very long threads in the varuous comments columns! (Oh, and that Woody Allen DVD is on it's way, Mr. Horbal. Grumble, grumble, grumble...)

Finally, say Happy New Year with Harry Tuttle over at Screenville when he lets loose all manner of discussion about "boring art films" in his CONTEMPLATIVE CINEMA BLOG-A-THON slated for Monday, January 8, 2007.