South
Pacific
An ultimate and
seemingly remote source of McHale’s Navy, that great view of the U.S.
Navy in the Pacific (and the Mediterranean).
Halliwell’s
Film Guide deprecates “a
regrettable tendency to use alarming colour filters for dramatic emphasis”.
So, from Seven
Against the Sea (dir. Bernard Girard) to the series one has a full and
complete analysis.
“But let’s not be too analytic,” said Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, carping. “Boffo,” said Variety. Time Out Film Guide echoes Halliwell.
Logan’s film goes beyond Mister Roberts to
an analysis and cure of Captain Morton. It could have done this in a fraction
of the time (he hates the ship as much as anyone else) but for the development
of the concluding image, the marbles Ens. Pulver has placed in his peritoneum.
The action takes place weeks after the earlier
film, no effort has been spared to establish the situation. The crew are
vegetables, the ship is infested with rot, it’s the Black Plague of cowardice.
The crew sing a song about this, and are punished.
Pulver slingshots the captain’s “bew-tocks” during
the enforced B-movie they’ve seen eight times, general quarters is sounded,
more punishment is handed out. And so on, until the captain and Pulver are
shipwrecked on an island, the ensign must operate for appendicitis.
Logan achieves a brutal effect by way of a précis
at the outset, Seaman Bruno’s infant daughter has died, he gets a telegram.
This is to resume the atmosphere of the first film, and is quite daring.
Scotty the nurse is a breath of fresh air, the wind
stirs her hair, “there’s a front coming in”. A close-up of Millie Perkins is
dazzling.
“The Great Ass-assin” operates by radio, instructed
by Doc, who diagnoses the ship’s condition.
The captain is a foolish officer. “I’ll take off my
bars and fight any man on this ship.” Ens. Pulver is practically illiterate,
and receives the legacy of Mr. Roberts’ medical books because he likes “dirty
pictures”. He has the dynamism for the job, Doc observes.
There are so many jokes, Scotty’s “turn your
liabilities into assets” among them, also the precision technique of Robert
Walker, Jr. focusing on Jack Lemmon, with Burl Ives and Walter Matthau
following suit, and Tommy Sands quite proficient as Bruno.
Camelot
The king who pulled it out and made Guinny whinny.
She wants storming. The queer with the spear,
miraculous Sir Lancelot, joins the Round Table (it’s the king’s invention,
borrowed from his father-in-law).
King Artie establishes justice in the realm on
spec, why not?
Transmogrified from Moss Hart’s staging to Logan’s
wide screen.
Morty, a day job if ever there was one, knights it.
Loewe right royally descends upon several trouvailles
throughout, like Sir Lancelot in the Garden of Eden.
Self-interest must be sacrificed to institute the
law, but it is the king’s wish.
This
famous and overwhelming film was synthesized into the Kung Fu television
series (Artie and Merloo).
There’s a lovely
story Borges tells of being cajoled into attending a Stravinsky concert, and
afterwards “laughing and slapping one’s companions on the back for no reason,
and that was Stravinsky.”
Now, the
punchline was written by Borges in quite another context. “Pater in 1877 had
affirmed that all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form. Music,
states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and
certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not
have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation
which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon” (cf.
Stravinsky, Le Rossignol).
Paint
Your Wagon
There’s a fine
view had by many a critic of this film as it soars away and out of sight. “Schmucke
dich,” says Bach, “O liebe Seele”, translating the title (Schoenberg
takes him at his word, Frost translates back as “get some color and music out
of life”).
The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance ponders the
problem, and here is Lee Marvin to prove it in a comic role accomplishing the
transition of Cat Ballou. It’s not so much Falstaff as Huck Finn, to
Clint Eastwood as the arch-romantic Tom Sawyer.
Altman
and Huston gathered up the feathers of this fabulous bird to make McCabe and
Mrs. Miller and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (No Name City
has a curious anticipation of Wise Blood’s “Church of Jesus Christ
without Christ”).
The
frontier is the theme. It was the ladies of New York who took the jackass
rabbit and “sivilized” him into just plain jack.
When
the gold mine runs out, the tunnels are extended under the town to catch its
siftings of dust, the final heap of all is a bull-and-bear match in a rodeo
arena. It’s a derivative mode of employment, to be sure, and on a Sunday gives
Cendrars by way of Dos Passos, “I don’t pay much attention to the financial journals
/ In spite of the fact that the stock reports are our daily prayer.”
Down
the whole thing comes smash, Huck is off to stay a hundred miles ahead of the
game, leaving Tom down on the deep-tilled farm.