Billy Wilder was the Hollywood cynic. We all know this. It wasn’t necessarily always the case (Some Like it Hot is one of the most delightfully buoyant screen comedies ever made, despite a dark edge). But he had it in him from the very beginning, and he kept it in him until the very end. If you want scabs though, and I mean pus-filled, oozing, inventing-colors-so-they-don’t-have-to-be-just-black-and-blue scabs, you have to stick with mid-period Wilder, who, with Sunset Boulevard, turned Hollywood against itself like a rabid dog unsure of its target and found that even this wasn’t enough. One year later, unfulfilled and still in need of making the nastiest Hollywood film yet made, he unleashed Ace in the Hole upon the world, and his vengeful edge, his sickly grotesque demeanor and love of exposing the least well-lit regions of human activity, absconded down the churlish rabbit hole. Continue reading →

Edited

For someone so often compared to John Ford, it is faintly surprising that Howard Hawks largely strayed away from conventional Westerns early in his career. In fact, he strayed away from conventional Westerns throughout his entire career (his two Western masterpieces, one of them our present subject and the other to come eleven years later, are hardly conventional). But he strayed from Westerns entirely for most of his early career at least. Perhaps he felt his duty lied elsewhere, perhaps he wanted to avoid the Ford comparison, or perhaps the ever-humble and straightforward, workaday director just did what he was told by the studio. For this last reason, Howard Hawks is often considered the secret auteur, or the greatest craftsperson in all of cinema, a director who favored perfection of nuts and bolts filmmaking over stylistic invention running away with his films. Continue reading →

Another little temporary series here. Nothing too fancy – mostly an excuse for me to catch up on some films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. We’ll be looking at three classical Hollywood filmmakers over time: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Billy Wilder, visiting each once in the annus mirabilis of classical cinema, 1939, when they were all still (relatively) young, again in the late ’40s and early ’50s at the middle of their careers (and the middle of classical Hollywood’s career), and finally when things were waning for each director and for classical Hollywood in general in the early ’60s, before the new school American New Wave would wreck up the joint. 

So, John Ford made Westerns, right? And John Wayne, he starred in them. They both had careers before they first met, but if 1939 is a notable year in film history, the truest reason for this may be the galvanic, volcanic meeting of talents with Stagecoach, a small, intimate film with an endless amount to say about humanity and the Wild West. Under the visage of a simple, largely narrative-less stagecoach trip from a small, lonely town to a slightly less small, less lonely town in the West, we meet a cast of broad, mythic types:  a thoughtful prostitute (Claire Trevor), a old-school Confederate with no small disgust for progressive values (John Carradine), an Eastern dweller struggling to acclimate to life out West (Donald Meek), a female stalwart of conservative social mores (Louise Platt), a doctor suffering from alcoholism (Thomas Mitchell), a naïve driver (Andy Devine), a federal marshall (George Bancroft), and a corporate type who generally shows disdain for anyone who isn’t himself (Berton Churchill). Pointedly, we don’t only meet them; they also meet each other, and if Stagecoach isn’t a Beckett-level exercise in avant-garde post-modernism, its decidedly conversational willingness to simply put these characters in a room and see what happens marks a serious progression in the artistry and conceptual thoughtfulness of the cinematic Western world. Continue reading →