Ride Lonesome (1959) is one of a series of elegant, austere Westerns that director Budd Boetticher made with actor Randolph Scott in the 50's, most of them scripted by Burt Kennedy. They usually concerned a man on a mission, either of salvation or revenge, and once he had achieved his end there was no more for him to do. Jim Kitses, in Horizons West (Indiana University Press,1969) says "Boetticher achieves a formal rigour and philosophical nuance that recalls the most unlikely of parallels, the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu." and Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema (The University of Chicago Press, 1968) describes these films as "constructed partly as allegorical Odysseys and partly as floating poker games where every character took turns bluffing about his hand until the final showdown." Ride Lonesome is filmed in a widescreen format by cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. that effectively isolates Scott in his harshly beautiful environment, until Scott burns down the tree on which a man hanged Scott's wife and kills the man.
Raoul Walsh's Band of Angels (1957) is one of the idiosyncratic films that Walsh made in the fifties after leaving Warner Brothers. It's based on Robert Penn Warren's novel and is a complex view of a slave and her owner, played by Yvonne De Carlo and Clark Gable. In spite of its setting and its effective Max Steiner score the film is no Gone With the Wind, but rather an intense exploration of racial issues just as the Civil Rights era was beginning. It is also a typical Walsh story of being forced into a fate not of one's choosing, as De Carlo goes from rich girl to slave, once her true origins are revealed. It's beautifully filmed by cinematographer Lucian Ballard, who captures the oppressiveness of New Orleans and the antebellum South.
Young Bride, directed by William Seiter, and Central Park, directed by John Adolfi were both released in 1932 and depict the struggles of ordinary people in the Depression era. Young Bride stars Eric Linden and Helen Twelvetrees, two intelligent and sensitive actors whose careers were essentially over by 1940. Twelvetrees is a hard-working librarian who falls for Eric Linden, a con man who mainly cons himself. The taxi dancers, pool halls and bars entertain those who can't find jobs and Twelvetrees finds the library a refuge, though Linden can't stand even Dickens when Twelvetrees reads it to him. Linden has dreams and schemes of making money and can't even see the happiness Twelvetrees offers him in their tiny apartment, as the camera roves restlessly with him in a futile search for a big score. Central Park is a brisk film (only 58 minutes long) of two starving people looking for work: Joan Blondell gets caught up in a robbery at the Central Park Casino while Wallace Ford gets a job with the cops washing motorcycles. The film has a very strong class-consciousness, as the wealthy dance at the casino while African-Americans cook for them and serve them and people are sleeping on park benches. There is also a lion from the zoo that is released by a lunatic and a cop who is losing his eyesight and afraid of losing his pension. It all take place in a twenty-four hour period, with Adolfi effectively combining stock footage, back projection, and studio interiors to give a feeling of the details of the park and all it contains
No comments:
Post a Comment