Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?

“If cinema if truth at 24 frames a second”, as Jean-Luc Godard famously said, then Breathless, the director’s estimable debut feature film and the breaking of the dawn for the French New Wave, absconds with that truth via Godard’s forgotten, demonic second-half riposte to the phrase: “and every cut is a lie”. With Breathless, Godard brought new meaning to the word “cut”, injecting his film with risky, tempestuous crackles, excising material, jumping between otherwise nominally cohesive sequences with jump cuts that turn the cinema into a seizure-filled parade of jumbled motion. Godard transformed the cinema by denouncing the claim that it was meaningfully realist altogether, implicitly connecting the dots between the cinematic hucksters of the world from Bunuel to Welles to even William Castle. In doing so, he skyrocketed the art-form to a higher plane of truth hop-scotching around its own limits by reveling in its own artifice. Continue reading →

Billy Wilder was on the hottest streak of his career in 1961, bucking the end of the studio era with two masterpieces of vigorous, and vigorously perfect, cinematic scab-scratching, 1959’s Some Like it Hot and 1960’s The Apartment. Both were films rooted in the classical Hollywood traditions of vertiginous pithy screwball comedy and intricately calibrated deep-focus drama, and yet both sneaked in their own silently naughty slices of screw-the-censors panther-wit, be it the deliciously filthy physical gestures lying dormant in Some Like it Hot or the venomous wordplay of The Apartment, a film that also managed to smuggle a visual ejaculation reference past the censors in 1960 (as diabolical in its own way as what master of the macabre Hitch managed to do with Psycho the same year). Continue reading →

7 Women

It’s no secret that John Ford expended a life’s worth of energy both begrudgingly celebrating and categorically expunging the individualist violence of the American West while also quietly questioning the worth of the supposed righteous path to civilization proposed by so many Westerns in the American mind. The Searchers, his most famous film, and his most piercing commentary on the harshness of the path to American civilization, ends with a beacon of wild and wooly old West vigilantism, embodied in the bellicose John Wayne, leaving through the doorway of civilization. Many classic Westerns begin with a mythic hero ceremoniously wandering into a town to engage in the violence Ford felt was ultimately, if unfortunately, necessary on the path to peace; The Searchers doesn’t radically reject the notion of Western civilization, although it proposes that the white men who paved the way for this society don’t belong in it much at all. So Wayne entered the new world, and so too he must leave. Continue reading →

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 →

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. 

By director standards, Howard Hawks is a peculiar case. By auteur standards, we only mount the confusion further still (and Hawks, by matter of fact, is definitionally one of the great auteurs, as he was one of the test-case directors used for the formation of the auteur theory by the French New Wave). Then again, an auteurist approach is perhaps best for Howard Hawks, a man who would have probably bemoaned auteur theory down to the core, owing primarily to his studio workhorse demeanor as a person. He was a man who made films sharply and quickly, a director who preferred to do as he was told while also quietly tackling his personal fixations within the bounds of the studio film. Continue reading →