Hawks Marathon: El Dorado (1967)

Howard Hawks is known for his wide variety of genres he tackles, from screwball comedy to war to Westerns.  Having gone through a fair amount of his movies at this point, I will say that his versatility is probably a bit overstated.  It's perhaps the effect of watching his movies in a marathon setting - even if that setting is over a few months and not back-to-back - but his early to middle career seems defined by the screwball comedy.  And he tended to fall back on love triangles frequently.

Towards the end of his career, he gravitated towards one genre, Westerns.  I don't know if that was the only genre that interested him, or the only genre that he was actually allowed to make, but of his last six movies, three were Westerns and since John Wayne stars in one of the non-Westerns, I'm wondering if that will have the feel of a Western as well.

In any case, from what I understand, he made effectively the same Western three times, with one of those movies being El Dorado.  I am planning to watch all three by the end of the marathon, but for now, El Dorado is my first of the three.

And I'm kind of glad it's my first.  El Dorado and Rio Lobo are considered pale imitators of the bonafide classic Western, Rio Bravo (which was the first made of the three), and I really don't think I would have enjoyed El Dorado as much if I had just seen Rio Bravo recently.  Who knows?

I have a few complaints.  There is no suspension of disbelief I am capable of in believing that a woman who looks like Charlene Holt would be interested in a man who looks like old ass John Wayne.  Not to mention Wayne knew her as a kid and as I understand it, was something like a father figure, and yeah no.

Secondly, I don't actually think James Caan is very good in this movie.  I like James Caan.  And I'm mostly familiar with him as an older guy, where I think he just naturally has more presence.  Here, I don't know, he seems like a much worse actor than the James Caan I've watched.  (I haven't seen Godfather in a long enough time that I can't even remember how I felt about his performance, and that's the only young Caan I've seen I think)

Also, another John Wayne related complaint, but Wayne is just too old for this role.  Or out of shape.  Robert Mitchum specifically plays the out of shape, past his prime alcoholic that is very easy to buy, but Wayne still being as quick as ever?  Suspension of disbelief required.

I lead off with my complaints, because if you can get past those elements - and really if you're watching an older John Wayne movie, you probably understand what you're getting into and can look past those elements, then this is a good, solid Western.  You get exactly what you expect in this movie.

One thing that stands out is how great Christopher George is as the villain.  He mostly sits down, commenting on the action, bemused at the whole situation, and his performance alone makes you believe in his reputation.  Because... we don't really ever see it.  He has other guys do his bidding.  And it doesn't matter that we don't see it, because George has a great, above-it-all element.  It's so great that I'm genuinely disappointed he doesn't really seem to be in much else that I would watch.

Mitchum is of course great.  It's the type of great that can get overlooked because he's able to so embody his character, that it doesn't even look like he's trying.  And John Wayne, well, he's John Wayne.  He's playing John Wayne.  This is not one of those performances where Wayne is really acting.  And I'm starting to love Arthur Honnicut, who seems to be doing his best Walter Brennan impression here.

All in all, I enjoyed El Dorado despite my complaints.  It's a movie that doesn't feel like it should work as well as it does, but for some reason, it's able to blow past the things you can't accept and just makes you enjoy a good Western.

3/4 stars

The Longest Day (1962)

I'm impressed this movie exists.  This is entirely too ambitious to have any right to actually have become a finished product -much less a non-embarrassing, successful, critically well-received picture with a few star actors committing remarkably little screen time in the service of the film.  I really wish I had been able to watch this in 1962 though, because you can just tell it was a much better movie then.

Now?  Well, it's a little unfair, because Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and The Pacific also exist.  (I'm sure I missed a few as World War II is not a war lacking in representation in television and movies).  Specifically, the whole beach battle scene was distracting because - through absolutely no fault of The Longest Day - Saving Private Ryan just captures the horror much better.  It's really not fair.

The Longest Day is a movie that, for every positive I can come up with, a negative comes right along with it.  The scope is insane.  It's both a strength and a weakness.  I've never seen a movie mostly successfully include as many sides of a war as it did.  It was surprisingly fair to the Germans too.  Of course they came across looking the worst in this movie, but not near as much as you'd expect.  This pretty much came at the expense of the characters though.

It relied too heavily on us knowing the actors portraying the characters and that's sort of an issue when that includes Fabian in the year 2015.  He's an admittedly minor character, but in what I think was his death - I don't know if it was - the movie treats it like it's a big deal and I had no idea who the fuck he was.  That's essentially my problem with the movie.  It's an hour and a half of war action scenes involving characters I am not remotely invested in which means I have to completely get drawn into the spectacle itself.  That honestly probably would have been enough to get me to love the movie in 1962, but the technology has improved so vastly since then, it doesn't stand a chance of gripping me for an hour and half now.

Also, it's a smart idea to include comedy in your blockbuster war movies so that you aren't depressed the whole time.  Problem: any time the movie attempts comedy, it's awful.  I'm pretty sure they were going for a fair amount of comedic scenes and there may have been one or two scenes where I didn't laugh, but thought it was amusing.  Maybe.   I hate to keep harping on how much better certain things are in 2015, but comedy is certainly one of them.

There were a few scenes that were so spectacular that I was amazed.  There is a scene where the German pilots - the two stranded ones who need to go alone against the entire opposing force - fly across the beach and it's one take.  The camera goes along the beach, the machine gun fires, and you see the people fall as they should.  And it keeps going and it must have been ridiculously hard to time and they pulled it off beautifully.  The scene where a man lays stuck in his parachute hanging from the church building and he watches all his comrades get slaughtered was tragic.  The scene where the nuns come and kick ass and just walk through battle to start healing the soldiers.  These are scenes that will come with no such negative attached to them.

Also I will note that the cast is incredible.  I do not however understand why John Wayne was cast.  He's not bad.  But you can't watch his scenes and think he's anything but John Wayne and that's super distracting when the movie is mostly going for authenticity.  Robert Mitchum fares better, although I was not a huge fan of him just walking around the beach without a gun like he's fucking Superman.  Henry Fonda really should not work, but he's playing a revered, mythical-like person in Teddy Roosevelt Jr. so you can get away with casting an actor with his ubiquity and star power and not get taken out of a scene.  Plus, Fonda plays the everyman in his movies.  John Wayne plays John Wayne.  Sean Connery shows up too.  He's energetic and barely in it.

A problem created by the ambition of the project is there's too many characters.  It's not even necessarily the number of characters, but characters who seem important turn out to not be that important and other characters who seem important get ignored with an hour left in the movie never to return.  The French resistance?  Was that really worth showing?  They blew up a train, presumably one that prevented reinforcements, but I wasn't ever sure what the train was for or how much it ended up helping.  And I believe that's their last scene out of like three total scenes.  I don't think Fonda's character got an ending.  He found out they missed their landing and then directed the soldiers were to go and I don't believe he got another scene.  It definitely didn't capture just how vital Roosevelt Jr.'s actions were to winning.

- This is a three hour movie so I have a lot of thoughts apparently.  I really liked the introduction scene where they kept cutting to different characters with snappy music and their title popping up on the screen.  Kind of wish they somehow maintained that tone.

- Possibly unfair complaint, but I don't remember a movie where deaths seemed to matter less than in this one.  I don't know how to explain that, but at the least this movie doesn't come close to giving death the proper weight it deserves.  (This is fairly typical in movies that glorify war admittedly and this movie certainly glorifies war)

- The acting in this is... inconsistent.  I said it has a strong cast and it does, but some of the time I was impressed by the acting and some of the time it was off-putting when the actor went into over-the top 40s war soldier mode.  (I like Richard Beymer a lot in Twin Peaks, but not so much in this movie until the last scene)

- The movie also had a tendency to explicitly express something that was already obvious by the way it was filmed.  And I didn't like the scenes where the characters seem to know way too much about the future - "People will laugh at us because we will lose the war because Hitler was sleeping" - I mean come on...

- For all my complaints this is wonderfully directed.  Action was clear, it was not boring for the most part despite its length, and a few shots were magnificent.

3/4 stars

Out of the Past (1947): High Body-Count

Film noir as a genre is notorious for not having happy endings.  Even with that in mind, Out of the Past has a particularly unhappy ending with just about everyone leaving this Earth.  Again, film noir is notorious for having femme fatales, but I think Kathie (Jane Greer) is the most duplicitous and self-serving of any I've seen so far.

Out of the Past is a movie that if I'm being honest, will probably understand and like more on second viewing and probably even more upon the third.  The second half of the movie in the present has somewhat of a confusing plot to me - I figured it out in the end, but I can't help feeling my enjoyment of it suffered in the moments when I was wondering what the fuck was happening.

As Roger Ebert notes, this movie is basically a series of one-liners, which could be a problem in any other genre, but really isn't in film noir.  And I know I'm picking these movies, but I keep getting blessed with amazing casts.  This is the best Kirk Douglas has ever been in the admittedly small amount of movies I've seen him in. (Somewhat underwhelming in Spartacus, decent in Detective Story)  And Robert Mitchum was created on this Earth to be a lead in a film noir.  Finishing out the main cast, Jane Greer's voice pretty much ensures the doom of any man she meets.

Given the cast, the quality of the movie is not surprising.  It is slightly surprised to see the director is Jacques Tourneur, who doesn't seem like a bad director at all, but his most well-known films are "Cat People" and "I Walked with a Zombie" so not the type of director you'd expect. (Both films, I should note, have pretty good ratings on IMDB)

4/4 Stars