Apache
It seems typical
of Robert Aldrich’s sense of style that the work is couched in terms of
the severest Surrealism, and of his supreme artifice that the whole thing
should be presented ultimately in terms of a joke.
This revolt or
turning away from civilization and its trappings for a simpler mode of living
finds itself thrust into an even greater wilderness, where a man of the new
world apprises it of cultivation. Eventually the pilgrim and his puritan way of
life must come to grips with the dilemma of culture, and the joke here is on
domestic tranquility and the burdens of parenting.
Burt Lancaster
studied Douglas Fairbanks the way Laurence Olivier studied Valentino. This is
his film as much as anyone’s, and the middle
sequence of Massai’s raids on the pony soldiers exactly mirrors
Labiche’s Maquis operations in The Train.
Massai escapes
from a prison train and hitches a ride on another. Walking through a cornfield,
he snatches a scarecrow’s hat (his own scarecrow later on will have two
feathers). In a great sequence, he’s on Main Street after dark, a fire
wagon belching flames roars by him, a trolley lumbers past, newspapers are
hawked at him, a man holds out a hat but isn’t offering him the money in
it, another man is eating an opulent dinner behind glass, yet another is
sitting outdoors in a wooden chair as blacking is applied to his shoes, through
a door a Chinese man and woman are seen pressing clothes, richly attired folks
are entering a fashionable shop with a man in a uniform at the door, ladies
wear bustles, a player piano is demonstrated to the crowd on the sidewalk (and
behind Massai in the reverse shot is a sign for an Iron Works), a small dog
attacks his foot while men jape, he flees down a long hotel corridor, through a
room and out a window into the dark night lit by streetlamps, accompanied by
screams.
In a barn, he
eats corn from a cattle trough (cp. the dream of the Prodigal Son in
Buńuel’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe).
The influences
may be perceived on The Outsider, Lonely Are the Brave, and later
with his bride, Bonnie and Clyde, to cite but a few examples.
Aldrich’s
viewpoint is stark and realistic. These whites are brutal, but he moves from an
instance of this into a comfortable interior with a pipe-smoking officer, each
detail on his desk an integral labor like the skins pieced together on the
wooden armature of a tepee.
A remark of
Aldrich’s has been cruelly misunderstood (like the film itself) to mean
the ending is a violation of the auteur’s intent, but this is exactly the
situation of Hitchcock’s Suspicion.
The technique of
filming is in sharp, accurate cuts, the way a flint arrowhead is made. Lighting
is miraculously used here and there as an expressive element.
Vera Cruz
The dazzling
opening sequence shows the divisions and forces in play, and culminates in the
gag from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the two American
adventurers (Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster) in the town plaza are ringed by
hundreds of Juaristas on the rooftops.
This is one of
the masterpieces reflecting Vera Cruz more or less closely. Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch, Guillermin’s El Condor, Leone’s Gił
la testa, Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara, all directly
respond to it, and there are remote relations to Lester’s Cuba and
Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. If you follow a line of thought from What
Price Glory, you arrive at Bertolucci’s 1900, with Burt
Lancaster.
Peckinpah, above
all, has absorbed it completely. From the barest suggestion of the first shot
(Gary Cooper in the middle of nowhere with an exhausted horse) he arrived at
length at The Ballad of Cable Hogue. The relation of the two characters
figures in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and the conclusion of that
film is derived from Aldrich.
But even more
than that, Peckinpah’s editing originated here, in the Juarista assault
on the fortress. It starts with the rapid-fire cutting of Pat Garrett &
Billy the Kid and builds to the intercutting of The Wild Bunch
without the slow motion, but with Ernest Borgnine.
A key scene,
which might have been an influence on Sir David Lean, is a long shot of French
cavalry escorting a fabulous carriage past the great pyramids of Mexico,
followed by a POV halfway up one pyramid with a campesino (from Eisenstein,
perhaps).
Kiss Me Deadly
A Wilshire
Boulevard Hammer (he lives near Westwood, not far from the Sinai Temple).
Irrationality is the gumshoe’s bugbear, it springs up in his headlights
as a naked and bewildered girl in a trenchcoat, and when it’s all said
and done Pandora’s Box is no myth, baby.
The Big Knife
The rather
merciless quality of the play is maintained as a vital attribute derived from Rope,
to increase the sense of fatality in continuous playing. The spacious designs
give clear lines (a development from Kiss Me Deadly) forming a picture
of the business.
Attack
The judge’s
son is a pathological coward, he joined the National Guard and became a company
commander under the ęgis of a childhood friend with political ambitions. At the Siegfried Line, a platoon goes out on the
coward’s promise of support and doesn’t come back. One platoon
leader vows revenge.
Aldrich opens on
a beautiful day, grassy slopes, a German pillbox
uphill. The downhill “track meet” into La Nelle
ends at a bombarded city crawling with SS. He anticipates the fine technique of
Furie’s trilogy in superbly complex interiors.
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Continuing from The
Big Knife, here are all the cruelties of the picture business and its
assassins laid out in a fine, sprawling, willowy wallow you can admire with a
sort of hair-raising hilarity that influenced Images.
Sodom and Gomorrah
This tells the
tale, and what tells the tale of this is Anouk Aimée’s glance of operatic
desire.
A fortuitous
co-operation of Aldrich and Sergio Leone.
4 for Texas
The structure is
a formal elaboration of the classic comedy 1-2-3, or setup-setup-punchline.
This is explicitly stated in the long scene after the beginning, in which
Sinatra and Martin trade upper hands.
Each of these
three numbers is divided into two parts: preparation and delivery.
1a. Martin,
searching a bandit at gunpoint, briefly inspects the man’s hat.
1b. Martin gets the drop on Sinatra by pulling a derringer from his own hat.
2a. During the
restoration of the steamboat, there’s a Three Stooges gag (painting the
door, door opens, man gets painted).
2b. The Three Stooges themselves appear.
3a. The entire
film is a preparation for:
3b. The revelation that the “East Coast Disaster” is a fraud.
The opening
sketches Olivier’s Henry V and Ford’s Stagecoach,
while the last scene echoes the finale of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The
staircase descent, with Anita Ekberg, deliberately recalls 8½.
The glimmer and
sparkle of this is a bit too grand for many tastes, it’s a bit too
savored, too juicy and just too much fun. Which is why
Hush... Hush, Sweet
Charlotte
A whirlwind of
parodistic material liquidating much if not all of Southern accretions from Big
Daddy on, which endows this transposition of Les Diaboliques with a
beautiful acidity setting off Bette Davis’ limpid performance.
The Dirty Dozen
The immediate
precedent (after John Ford’s Judge Priest) is a fierce and
little-known masterpiece by Gordon Douglas, Only the Valiant. The
prodigious amount of talent put to service in very small roles is a ground for
the groundlings, against which Aldrich swings first a very accurately
fine-pointed, almost insufferable analysis of military expediency as a form of
blockheaded disaster in the making, and then the Apocalypse.
Essentially Aldrich deploys his forces in a steady stream of geometric shots to
catch his screenplay’s best moments with the sparkle of a jewel. In this
kind of attentiveness, the actors are picked up going their rounds, making
deliveries as it were. Never has Ernest Borgnine appeared to more telling
effect in this commanding position. The cruel bitterness of Robert Ryan’s
dumbshow, and the refined articulation of Lee Marvin’s thinking reed, set
each other off like a bivouac fire on a winter night.
This is a vision of judgment. It opens with a hanging, and ends with an homage to It’s a Mad Mad
Mad Mad World. Between
the seriousness of war, and the formal absurdity of mid-rank military
organization, it finds a way to express a lot of abstract material in a
tangible way, as when Charles Bronson, given a word association test by Ralph
Meeker, keeps answering in terms of baseball, because “that’s what
I’m thinking about,” or when George Kennedy, as one of those
intellectuals not dispirited by Army discipline, gives a laughing demonstration
of the Heisenberg Principle in action.
Best of all in its way is a tiny scene with Borgnine, a major general embodying
the might and majesty of military law, brought to a pass of simple exasperation
on maneuvers by a captain who is unable to read a road map.
The Legend of Lylah Clare
Aldrich’s
master class in directing is a complete exposition of the entire art in such a
way as could not be understood by film critics for obvious reasons nor by the general public. It is therefore esoteric,
although the advanced models of presentation are Citizen Kane and Sunset
Blvd., the latter even named in the film.
While he is
letting in the breeze on his studio, Aldrich gives the explicit sign that his
source for The Dirty Dozen is indeed Ford’s Judge Priest, the
peculiar flashback effect in that film is reproduced.
The MacGuffin is
a recapitulation of a dead actress’s life in a film biography directed by
her husband and featuring a young starlet with an astonishing resemblance down
to her measurements. Likeness, inspiration, technique and style are briefly
considered, with the larger effort of depicting what it is to wrest the work
from all its contingencies.
The Killing of Sister George
When you want to
take something apart, for whatever reason, you don’t throw away the
pieces as you go, you place them on your workbench one by one in an orderly
fashion, so when you put it back together it will work as well as it ever did,
and you will have the knowledge of its workings.
TV is a pleasant
place. Soap operas have lots of nice, wicked people, but the pro forma
baddies and angels that you find on telly are a mixed bag when you get to know
them, just like the rest of us who idolize them, if not more so.
Emperor of the North Pole
It’s a rags to rags action feature where nothing counts but the
action and the code—Jacob wrestling with the angel, a strange lesson on
“this train.”
The Longest Yard
The same football
widow has the same conversation with Banacek in “Let’s Hear It for
a Living Legend”, and is Anitra Ford both times. Aldrich’s opening
scene is also that of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, out of this sort of
veiled joke he makes his dreamlike structure that looks like carelessness but
isn’t, it’s the reel of game film between the handcuffed prison
quarterback’s knees until he’s embraced by the warden’s
secretary and it drops to the floor.
Not that there
isn’t plenty of usable material en route to the yard that is the
longest because it leads to victory and damnation, but that’s the only
thing on Aldrich’s mind, the rest falls into his lap.
Wilder’s The
Fortune Cookie is among the precedents, and Huston’s Victory
can be described as a significant remake.
Nora
Sayre’s review in the New York Times expressed a certain longing
to know “what it means to be a captive.”
The Frisco Kid
This can be
compared to The Big Country, and there are doubtless many other
parallels, but what you have is a definitive joke: The Rabbi Goes West.
The specific gravity of the casting gives you Gene Wilder as the rabbinical
Westerner and Harrison Ford as the cowboy who befriends him on the way, in a
combination of irresolute determination and buck-naked wisdom that makes the
whole thing original and lively.
...All the Marbles
Like
McLaglen’s Something Big (and Aldrich’s Attack), the
title appears in quotation marks onscreen. The structure is not elusive, but
failure to take notice of it led Variety to say, “it never works
for a minute.” Two bouts open the film, both won by the California Dolls.
After the second, against two Japanese, a Japanese promoter offers to finance a
championship run. Eddie Cisco puts pressure on the Dolls’ manager, Harry
Sears, who smashes his Mercedes with a baseball bat.
The Dolls now
head for Reno against their rivals, the Toledo Tigers, whom they beat en
route and are beaten by, before the Championship Match. The essence of the
dramatic situation is that Aldrich plays it dramatically.
The point of
departure would appear to be Nora’s delightful response to the wrestling
match in Shadow of the Thin Man.
Aldrich’s
overhead camera is handy in the wrestling scenes, which are filmed with great
skill and attention and watched in her dressing room by the World Champion, Big
Mama, capable of crushing an empty can of Budweiser in one hand.
Harry’s
financing comes from a crap game where he has to use his baseball bat on two
hoods out of The Big Sleep. The tag team travels West from match to
match through the industrial heartland, allowing Aldrich to record the
landscape with a purely expressive eye. Their dusty Cadillac (with a California
personalized license plate, “TAG TEAM”) saunters along the
lakeshore and into Chicago, the inhabitable city. The thirty-minute
Championship at the MGM Grand lasts 29:29 on the arena clock (Chick Hearn
concludes it on a note of sublimity). The referee is greased by Cisco, the Dolls are getting pounded, only the most expert
of moves can win the day.
...All the Marbles is akin more or less to Slap Shot, Harry and Tonto,
Diggstown, Hal Needham’s Body Slam, and (finally) John
Huston’s Victory. The Toledo
Tigers enter the Grand wearing stylized cat costumes with long tails they throw
to the crowd as souvenirs. After a suspenseful delay, the California Dolls are
carried in wearing great silver-winged ensembles on the shoulders of bronzed
he-men to the sound of an ad hoc
children’s chorus singing, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”.
Afterward, at a
signal from Harry, the Bear Flag is unfurled to the tune of “California,
Here I Come”.