Our heroine is never named other than with the pronoun “I,” and is portrayed by the then somewhat-unknown Joan Fontaine (sister of Olivia De Havilland), who offers up one of history’s most impressive “arrivals” as a full-blown movie star. Our heroine is an innocent who’s terribly vulnerable and a newlywed very much in love with her husband, Maxim (Laurence Olivier), a deeply troubled man still working through the death of his first wife.

Swept off her feet, this orphan who made un undignified living as a paid companion and doormat to an insufferable woman, is suddenly thrust into a world she never knew existed. Maxim is incredibly wealthy and sole-owner of Manderley, a breathtakingly gothic estate populated with servants and also the intimidating and suffocating shadow of Rebecca, Maxim’s dead wife.

It’s within this shadow that the new mistress of the house, already a fragile flower, wilts even further. Rebecca’s hold on the living is supernatural and the primary keeper of that flame is housekeeper Miss Mrs. Danvers (an unforgettable Judith Anderson), who wields the memory of her former mistress like a psychological club to break down her “replacement.” Miss Danvers is destined to succeed until a shipwreck uncovers truths that will either result in the destruction of all involved or their salvation.

Thanks to my notoriously bad memory, I had almost completely forgotten the plot of the film and did forget the outcome of the mystery. And what a treat it was to rediscover this spellbinding two hours full of unexpected twists and the kind of suspense Hitchcock perfected, that which comes from a man who unknowingly puts the woman he loves in terrible danger and finds he can only save her by crossing an emotional Rubicon.

“Rebecca’s” show-stopper is the masterful scene in which Maxim finally tells his full story, when the pieces of all that came before are made to make sense and come together. This is a moment of flashback that isn’t a flashback and one that only an actor and director in full command of their powers and perfectly in tune with one another could pull off.

But the real star here is Fontaine, who would go on the following year to work again with Hitchcock in “Suspicion” and win the Oscar for Best Actress. Selznick, hoping to recreate the public relations boost his search for Scarlett O’Hara created, auditioned anyone and everyone, but most certainly made the perfect choice. Fontaine’s beauty takes your breath away, but there is no more difficult persona to pull off than that of an innocent, and this the actress does flawlessly.

One of the pitfalls for Fontaine in playing this nameless heroine was not only the risk of melodramatic, wide-eyed pathos, but in not taxing the patience of the audience with a one-note performance that drains our sympathy through the act of being a perpetual victim. Through the hard work of plotting and characterization, a fine script certainly does some of the heavy-lifting, but it’s the bottomless depth of Fontaine’s eyes that does the real storytelling and communicates that it’s worth hanging in there because there’s much to be discovered in this woman.

As is always the case with timeless films and most of what this Golden Age of Hollywood produced, the essential basics of storytelling are all in place. Though the run-time is 130 minutes, the pacing is perfect and the plot engrossing from beginning to end. And, of course, the black and white photography — that comes alive on Blu-ray — and production design are about as good as it gets.

The Selznick Empire might’ve burnt out quickly, but the style itself has been made immortal thanks to a producer obsessed with perfection and a remarkable eye for talent.

“Rebecca” is available at Amazon.

Director Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” isn’t just The Great Slasher/Haunted House film of all time, it’s also one of the greatest films period. And what’s most remarkable is that though the story of Marion and Norman and Mother is now a full half-century old, there is no movie-lover walking around today too “sophisticated” to be knocked over by it. No matter how many films, horror or otherwise, you might have seen over the course of your post-modern lifetime, if you walk into “Psycho” cold — unaware of Hitchcock’s treasure trove of groundbreaking surprises — your jaw will still hit the floor at the precise moments the then-60 year-old director wanted it to.

And that’s the other thing that’s so impressive and unique, “Psycho” doesn’t look, feel, or perform like a story told by a middle-aged director at the top of his creative game. The films immediately surrounding it, “North By Northwest” “Vertigo” and “The Birds” most certainly do (which isn’t a criticism), but tucked in the middle of those polished, elegant accomplishments is this gritty, low-budget ($807,000), black and white grinder that’s positively bursting with the kind of energy, fresh ideas, and healthy contempt for the rules that you only ever see in audaciously arrogant and talented young directors looking to stake their claim. “Psycho” is the “Reservoir Dogs,” the “Easy Rider,” the “Night of the Living Dead” of its era, but those were all films birthed by first-time directors. Prior to 1960, Hitchcock had helmed over fifty features!   

From the opening Saul Bass titles set to Bernard Hermann’s iconic and immortal score, Hitchcock starts things off with the promise of a high-level energy experience he never breaks, thanks mainly to the fact that what the mischievous master has planned for his unsuspecting audience is one the greatest cinematic mind fucks of all time.

1. We’re assured by a lifetime of movie-going experience and knowledge that our protagonist is the lusciously gorgeous Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) – that her story is what this movie is about — and so we blindly follow her and are invested in her and are rooting for her for a full fifty minutes before Hitchcock brutally has her knifed to death in a motel shower. The shock that comes from this experience is not only the result of a justly famous murder scene but also due to our own personal storytelling equilibrium being unceremoniously ripped out from underneath us. The decision to kill Marion is so cinematically wrong that we keep waiting for it not to be true, for her to survive or wake from a terrible nightmare. It was all just a dream, right?

2. Our real protagonist is Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, in one of the screens greatest performances) and we’re not introduced to him until after a full 28 minutes have passed.

3. Oh, wait… Our protagonist is really our antagonist and—what the hell is going on here?!?!?

And it’s here that we pause to recognize the fact that we live in a world where Matt Damon’s won an Oscar, Alfred Hitchcock hasn’t, and ask where is your god now?

Even more impressive, however, is that even after you know exactly how the story rolls out, even after you’ve memorized every twist, turn, camera angle (and curve on Ms. Leigh’s otherworldly figure), the power the story still holds to grab you and creep you out – to soak you in the rich atmosphere of cinematographer John L. Russell’s shadows and composer Hermann’s shrieks – never fades, for this is the “Goodfellas” of re-watchable horror films. And whether it’s the ever-competent private investigator played by Martin Balsam or Marion’s flinty and determined sister (Vera Miles) entering the unforgettable production design of Mother’s dreadfully spooky old house — even though you know he’s doomed and that she isn’t, you still scream – sometimes out loud – “Don’t go in there!”

Best of all, “Psycho” is without a doubt the perfect introductory Halloween/horror experience for kids of a certain age. Sexy, but not too sexy; intense, but not unrelenting; violent, but mostly in the mind’s eye. What it most certainly is though, is perfect, a perfect piece of storytelling told by a paunchy, aging, jowly journeyman director who wasn’t about to let the fact that he had absolutely nothing left to prove get in the way of taking our breath away like nobody’s ever done before or since.

P.S. Thanks mainly to the presence of Perkins and Miles, 1983’s “Psycho II” is well worth a look and, though far from a classic, a  surprisingly successful and entertaining attempt to bring Norman Bates into the 80’s slasher genre that he helped to kick-start.

P.P.S. As a special Halloween bonus, over the weekend Big Hollywood contributor Charles Winecoff has agreed to let us publish some “Pyscho”-relates passages from his well-received biography, “Anthony Perkins: Split Image.” So be sure to look for that and a lot of other Halloween-related posts, including my final two picks.

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz.

At the same time, 3-D movies were another innovation being used to lure your grandparents and parents away from their televisions. Nineteen Fifty-Two, the year before Shane, saw the first flurry of attempts to do for depth what This Is Cinerama did for height and width. By 1955, audiences had seen Vincent Price (eventually christened “The King of 3-D!”) appear in House of Wax and several other horror titles. John Wayne used 3-D for Hondo. The now-famous cult classic Creature from the Black Lagoon crawled off the screen and toward audiences who didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. The great Alfred Hitchcock even toyed with the third dimension in Dial M for Murder.

While the two potential TV killers, widescreen and 3-D, warred with each other for supremacy (one contemporary ad for Cinerama proclaimed “NO GLASSES NEEDED,” reminding audiences of the eye fatigue and uncomfortable headgear necessitated by its rival), these fads spurred frenzied discussions among filmmakers and studio heads. The 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain was then in theaters, mocking the shortsightedness of many 1920s Hollywoodites caught in the bedlam of the transition from silents to sound. Everyone in modern Hollywood, therefore, was wary of catastrophically missing out on what, for all they knew, could snowball into the 1950s equivalent of that epochal transition.

That is, almost everyone. George Stevens, for his part, looked on these developments with wry amusement. His Shane was in the can, having been filmed a year earlier in the summer and fall of 1951. And he seemed perfectly comfortable knowing that his plain ol’ 2-D picture would be debuting in the midst of all this hoopla. “I’m interested in all the new ideas, such as 3-D and widescreen,” he told one reporter at the time, “but I don’t believe the technical method of presentation is the real important thing. Only the picture matters. It’s what goes on the screen that counts.”

Perhaps that is why, when Stevens was choosing a cinematographer to shoot Shane, he zeroed in on a man named Loyal Griggs. Griggs was a Paramount fixture. Born in 1906, raised in Los Angeles, and graduated from Los Angeles High in 1924, he immediately scored a grunt job at Paramount in their effects department. Beginning at a paltry $80 a month and often logging hundred-hour work weeks with no overtime pay, he persevered for nearly three decades, slaving his way up the Paramount food chain towards the coveted rank of Director of Photography. Finally, in 1950, he became head lensman on a trio of mediocre flicks (a gangster pic and two westerns) for producers Bill Pine and Bill Thomas.

At the comparatively late age of 44, he was at long last a full-fledged Hollywood cinematographer.

Stevens had employed Griggs for some process photography on his last film, the popular and well-regarded A Place in the Sun (1951), and during pre-production on Shane it was becoming increasingly apparent that he needed a cameraman who not only could film pretty pictures, but who could use color, lenses, and composition to manipulate images for serious dramatic effect. The director, you see, had chosen Wyoming’s Teton Range over a slew of other locations (Utah, Idaho, Colorado) after sending a camera crew on an exhaustive 4,500-mile trek around the American West, filming test footage in glorious Technicolor (itself an expensive concession made by the studio only after pressure from Stevens).

But while the awe-inspiring, snow-capped peaks and grand desolation west of Jackson Hole looked perfect, there was also a problem — the scenery filmed too well. New York Times writer Jack Goodman, who visited the Wyoming location while Shane was being shot, laid out the essential challenge in a September 9, 1951 article for that newspaper: “The Teton Range west of the Hole has been widely photographed before this and has become associated with tourism and dude ranching through hundreds of travel-magazine articles. . . Further, as Stevens now explains it, Technicolor ‘tends to glamorize and romanticize,’ its basic weakness being ‘the rainbow quality’ it lends to scenic shots.”

So the question was how to get rid of what Stevens once derided in another interview as the, “Oh, what a beautiful morning!’ Technicolor musical look.” How could one make rich, saturated Technicolor images bend to the will of a director who foresaw his story’s need not only for beauty and majesty, but doom and gloom?

Enter Loyal Griggs. He had worked in the various process, front-projection, and special effects departments of Paramount for three decades. There wasn’t a trick in the book he hadn’t seen. And he brought his full array of talents to bear on making Shane one of the most variegated Technicolor films in Hollywood history.

The goal was to achieve the filmic version of what in art circles is called “Rembrandt Lighting,” a classic, shadowy style filled with dramatic possibilities. To that end, Stevens and Griggs studied the famous photographs and drawings of the Teton Range made by William Henry Jackson, as well as the paintings of famed western artist Charles Marion Russell. Most Technicolor cinematographers were afraid to lose exposure and saturation, but Griggs ruthlessly degraded both when necessary. Early each morning weather stations were consulted, and if rain or clouds were on the way the filmmakers would rush out to take advantage. Many times the sun appearing through the gray expanse would ruin the effect, and so Griggs had such shots backprinted (made artificially darker) in the lab to preserve the shadow-laden, brooding atmosphere.

Back in the Fifties, film stocks weren’t “fast” enough (i.e. sensitive enough to light) to pick up anything during a nighttime shoot. So Griggs used a trick called “day-for-night” — first filming in bright sunlight, then adjusting the exposure in the lab to make it look as if it had been filmed in the evening — to capture some of the most important scenes in the movie, complete with visible mountains and vast plains in the distance.

This particular technique was itself common enough, but Griggs took it to the next level, using optical printing to single out characters in the frame and boost their exposure while leaving the rest of the image alone, giving the actors an eldritch, almost supernatural glow of the kind moonlight makes on Halloween. For the very last shots of the picture, he filmed a graveyard bathed in a severe darkness, then used optical printing to insert Alan Ladd’s character as a ghostly silhouette.

Jack Goodman, viewing the rushes while visiting for his New York Times article, came away most impressed: “[By] not hesitating to shoot portions of Shane on days when clouds race across nearby lakes, Stevens has managed to make this most beautiful of western vistas positively forbidding.”

Careful use of lenses also played a role. Stevens and Griggs show here some of the earliest examples of filming vast outdoor spaces with telephoto lenses normally used for facial closeups. The result was a flattening of the depth in an image, which made the distant mountains in the background seem far closer and more imposing. This is nowhere more effective than in the justifiably famous funeral scene of Shane. “There was the funeral on the hilltop,” Stevens explained, describing the master shot for this key sequence, “and there was the dis­tance where cattle grazed, and then there was the town at the crossing, a western town like western towns were. There were the great moun­tains that rose behind it. This was all arranged in one camera view, one camera view that had to do with a man being put away in his grave with the synthesis of the whole story wrapped around it.”

Stevens wanted to connect 1950s families with a time when “death was a very large part of living.” His inspiration for the scene came while visiting a tiny pioneer hamlet in California:

Bridgeport, on the way to the Sierra Nevadas, is. . . a poor little town. . . About three miles away, in the foothills, there is a graveyard. . . A man comes in his front door from a funeral and perhaps goes out the back door to bring in the pail of milk before he goes to bed that night. If he has just buried his mother, he can look up to where she is on that hillside. While he was at the cemetery, he could look back to those beautiful mountains. This is what the pioneers came for, this vast country, and a little cemetery with a fence around it. It’s there waiting. Mother, all those who have gone before, are there. It will be throughout his time, and the man can look down to the town and see the house where mother came as a bride, and where he was born and where he was raised. There is a convenience in being able to visually associate all of these essential aspects of life in a frontier world; some of it isn’t around the corner or on the other side of town, it’s all right there and it’s all true. I see that, I know what it means.

As Shane was nearing its release, Paramount ran a test of the film on one of the big new screens being developed, to see how it would look blown up to that size. To make the square-ish image fit onto a rectangular screen, they unceremoniously chopped off a portion of the top and bottom of Griggs’ lovingly composed compositions. Some critics noticed this right off and grumbled. (Lord knows what expletives emerged from Griggs’ own mouth!) But most thought it was a decent enough compromise for the treat of getting magnified, IMAX-like versions of Shane’s Wyoming vistas.

On April 15, 1953, the industry trade paper Variety ran an article stating that

Shane was previewed in a process stage on Paramount’s experimental widescreen, to an audience perched on makeshift seating. Despite these abnormal viewing conditions, the picture’s worth was not lessened, and the widescreen projection did contribute, in some measure, to a sense of bigness, although, again for the record, Shane would be a big picture on any size screen. Theaters equipped for widescreen showings should find the extra ballyhoo angle of this gimmick adding to the dollars taken at the box office.

The efforts of the cinematographer were especially singled out for distinction: “Pictorially, the picture has been beautifully photographed in color by Loyal Griggs. Wyoming’s scenic splendors against which the story is filmed are breathtaking. Sunlight, the shadow of rainstorms and the eerie lights of night, play a realistic part in making the film a visual treat.” The Hollywood Reporter chimed in as well, praising the use of “long shots and lovely Technicolor hues to establish mood, some of the scenes emerging like exquisite paintings.”

Soon after that test, Paramount debuted the film in New York at Radio City Music Hall, which had just installed one of the first widescreens in the country. On April 24, 1953, The Hollywood Reporter gushed to an industry town holding its collective breath: “New York Critics Enthusiastic About Shane, Wide Screen.” Frank Quinn of The New York Daily Mirror conveyed the almost futuristic, game-changing aspect of the event: “A thrilling new visual concept of motion pictures unfolds with the debut of Shane on the panoramic screen. The screen is wide, more oblong like a picture postcard.”

In Los Angeles, the movie’s star-studded premiere was equally rapturous. Celebrities like Cary Grant, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Irene Dunne, Charles Coburn, Mitzi Gaynor, Rory Calhoun, Anita Ekberg, Shelly Winters, and Claire Trevor poured into Grauman’s Chinese Theater as hundreds of fans cheered. “Shane Premiere Gala Fete: Hollywood Turns Out in Panoramic Pandemonium,” was the headline in the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express.

Philip K. Scheuer, longtime film critic for the Los Angeles Times (who had begun his career covering the silents), penned in his own newspaper a thoughtful review of both film and presentation:

When, in the good old days, we called a picture an epic we must have had some reason for it. Later, through misuse and repetition, the word fell into disrepute and we put quotation marks around it to indicate we didn’t really believe an “epic” was an epic any more. With Shane one is tempted to leave the quote marks off. . . .

At the Chinese, where it premiered last night, it is being projected onto what is, by a slight margin, the largest screen in town (about 50 x 25 feet). Shane was not made for magnification, but its detail “blows up” very well in Technicolor, with not too much of the picture cut off at top and bottom. Directional sound, from three speakers, is used sparingly but effectively. . . However, I am quite sure Shane would hold you even on a 17-inch screen.

It wasn’t long before the trades were reporting that — much like today’s twenty-first-century theaters rushing to install 3-D capability — dozens of 1953 theaters were hurriedly converting to widescreen in a frenzied attempt to take advantage of Shane’s theatrical run. Reviewers and audiences alike were almost unanimously hailing it as an instant classic. The Saturday Review honed in on exactly the things that we’ve been discussing here, noting “Loyal Griggs’ handsome Technicolor photography. . . his cameras point insistently to the physical beauties of the place — the play of light on the distant mountains, the golden skies after a shower, the vast expanse of green and coppery fields. But none of this is merely travelogue prettiness. Nature enters dynamically into the development of the story, its moods matching and underlining the dramatic action.”

Conservative Henry Luce’s Time magazine made the distinction between gimmickry and artistry: “Without recourse to tricky 3-D photography and Polaroid glasses, Stevens, with ordinary Technicolor camera and sound track, has given his flat old story a real third dimension of believability.” A grandstanding Democratic politician from Wyoming, Lester C. Hunt, even went so far as to stand on the floor of the Senate and laud the picture’s stunning portrayal of the beauties of his home state.

So although Shane wasn’t a real widescreen Hollywood movie (the first real one was The Robe, a Christian tale shot in Twentieth-Century Fox’s Cinemascope format, which hit theaters later that fall and quickly became one of the all-time box-office champions), it was the first to be presented with much fanfare on a widescreen, and its marvelous cinematography did much to warm audiences to the new format. Meanwhile 3-D, hampered by a variety of technical limitations, would die out by the end of the decade, experiencing only intermittent spurts of life thereafter (time will tell how this latest 2010 revival pans out.)

Loyal Griggs won his first and only Oscar for Shane (the only Shane nominee to take home a gold statue that night), and went on to a distinguished career as a Director of Photography. A few years later, when Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a combined Technicolor/special effects/VistaVision expert, he turned to Griggs, and the result was another classic of gargantuan proportions, The Ten Commandments. That film netted Griggs another Oscar nomination, and in 1975 he received a special U.S. Bicentennial award for his photography on the picture. He died in 1978 at the age of 71, with two great Technicolor spectaculars forever linked to his name.

If I had to turn to one person to sum up the impact of Shane’s visuals, I’d pick the words of Hollywood writer/critic Ruth Waterbury, who’s own review appeared on Friday, June 5, 1953 in the pages of The Los Angeles Examiner. “The glory that God gave to the American West has been captured by it,” she said of the photography. “The strength, the fidelity, the weakness, the insecurity, that God gave man is reflected in it. . . Shane is on wide screen with stereophonic sound, all very fine. But it would still be magnificent if it were the size of a postage stamp. You’ll remember it long, long after you see it. In fact, I think I will personally remember it always.”

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The development of VistaVision: Here’s an informative overview of Paramount Pictures’ own 1950s widescreen format, which debuted a bit too late to be used in Shane. In my humble opinion, it was perhaps the most impressive of all the various permutations of widescreen created during that era. Loyal Griggs used VistaVision for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), John Ford used it for The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock for To Catch a Thief among others.

And check out the rest of The American Widescreen Museum website for even more history on widescreen photography in general.

Order a nifty CD-ROM book on The Making of Shane. Wish I had known about this before starting in on these articles. Compiled by Walt Farmer, it reportedly has a full tour of all of the film’s Wyoming locations, including detailed directions and GPS coordinates in case you want to hunt them down yourself (I love reading about — or performing myself — that kind of historical detective work). He reveals that the only structure still standing from the movie is Ernie Wright’s homestead (the sodbuster played by Edgar Buchanan, whom the Ryker Gang intimidates by running their cattle through his farm and crops). Apparently, the Cemetery Hill still sports a faint depression where Torrey’s grave was dug. Alas, save for a few fence posts and ruins, everything else is gone.

The cost is $20 plus $5 S&H, but if you are a hardcore Shane fan, or simply someone who’d like to poke around the film’s locations the next time you are out Wyoming way, it sounds like an invaluable purchase.

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

And yet Vidor (you pronounce it “VEE-door,” not “VEYE-door”) was no foreigner at all. Texas born and bred, he was a champion of the little guy, the average Joe. His Christianity (he was raised a Christian Scientist), optimism, and Americanism infuse all his work. A craftsman, an innovator, an auteur, he had one of the longest careers of any director. If you have always treasured those sepia-toned Wizard of Oz sequences, and would like to find more stuff like it, do yourself a favor and hunt down Vidor’s The Champ (1931), a film that shares many of the same qualities with his later work on Oz.

Growing up as a middle-class kid in Galveston, Texas, King Vidor (1894-1982) didn’t fall in love with cinema right away. He was born just at the time that movies began being projected for audiences, and as a kid he would occasionally frequent the local Nickelodeons (so named because they cost a nickel to get in) and see the very first silent films. He was far from impressed. “When I was a young kid in Texas at the beginning of the century, I used to hate movies,” he explained decades later. “I hated their phoniness, their fakeness, the makeup which used to mask the actor’s expressions, their dreadful unreal acting with overdone pantomime gestures. People find them laughable today. I found them laughable then.”

All of that changed when, as a teenager, he became a ticket taker and backup projectionist at one of the theaters in Galveston. With nothing else to do, he found himself watching the films over and over. “I saw that two-reel Ben-Hur (1907), made in Italy [sic], twenty-one times each day or one hundred and forty-seven times in its week’s run. The men who made it never sat through it as often.” Studying the pantomime, the acting, the lighting, the camerawork, Vidor began to see the possibilities and power of this nascent art form. One thing he noticed right away: “The better the technique of the director, the fewer the subtitles.”

When a neighborhood kid hatched a plan to build a functional movie camera out of “an old projection machine and cigar boxes,” Vidor jumped at the chance to join in the experiment. They worked like kiddie mad scientists on their project, then bought a hundred feet of unexposed negative and used it to capture the spectacular destruction of a bathhouse near the Galveston seawall during a raging storm. With the help of some adults they sold the film as a newsreel to a distributor, and it got a lot of play around Southern Texas. “The day that hurricane struck,” Vidor said, “the course of my future was settled.”

He continued making newsreels throughout high school and selling them to distributors, ever trying to expand his prospects and break into a real job as a director of honest-to-God movies. It seemed that every day came further confirmation that cinema was growing into a great art form with a power to be reckoned with. Once, while watching a Western in a North Texas theater, Vidor watched in shock as a cowboy in the audience suddenly drew his pistol and began shooting at the screen! “He had come to town for a Saturday night’s spree,” Vidor recalled, “but when he saw the hero was about to be hung unjustly for cattle rustling, he couldn’t sit there with his six-shooter without doing something. The film did not stop, nor did they arrest the shooting cowboy. I suppose the three bullet holes were later patched, the manager having decided the less said about the incident the safer.” Movies, Vidor believed, were quickly becoming, “as vital to everyone’s life as milk and bread. You grew up with it. It affected your character, your dress, your lovemaking, your courage.” It was an industry of dreams and illusion and humanity that he wanted to be a part of.

Newly married, Vidor rode out to California at nineteen and ended up in San Francisco with twenty cents left in his pocket. They survived with typical Vidor-ian ingenuity, by taking empty, discarded boxes from grocery stores and scraping out the crumbs of oatmeal, Shredded wheat, and corn meal found within until they had enough for a meal. Eventually they scrounged together enough money to take a steamship to Los Angeles, where they did their best to weasel their way into the budding Hollywood film industry.

Vidor’s pretty wife became a $10 a week actress, while Vidor himself wrote dozens of scripts, photographed newsreels and travelogues, and worked any odd studio jobs that presented themselves. His breakthrough came with The Turn in the Road (1919), a film he financed from money begged from a consortium of dentists. Shot for $9,000, he found a distributor to take a chance on it, and it made $365,000 in its run. With that notch in his belt he could finally get studio jobs, and at twenty-three he was a young up-and-coming director. (his wife, Florence Vidor, became a famous silent screen actress, and they would eventually divorce for all of the usual Hollywood reasons).

Always pushing the envelope and remembering the unrealistic movies of his youth, Vidor experimented and innovated in his films. He used bright lights to smooth out the wrinkles on actresses faces, and got them laughing off-camera before a scene to capture a bit of that authentic glow of humor on film. He began timing shots to classical music, building up the editing of scenes into what felt like a musical crescendo, calling his technique “silent music.” He would sometimes even make his actors march or walk to the pace of a metronome, and the effect was almost subliminal, but haunting.

At a time when most films were suffused with fantasy and spectacle, Vidor grew to appreciate human stories that carried with them what might be called American realism. There were seldom villains in his movies — he relied instead on the trials and tribulations of real life for his drama. “War, wheat, and steel,” was his way of summarizing his interests, meaning life on the streets of middle-to-lower class America.

The Big Parade (1925), a World War I film presenting for the first time the perspective of mud-soaked grunts and GIs, became the most profitable silent film ever made (had there been any Academy Awards back then, it would have won a pile of them). Another Vidor film, The Crowd (1928), was an experimental masterpiece about ordinary people making their way through the small triumphs and tragedies of American big-city life, and garnered nominations for Best Picture and Best Director at the very first Academy Awards.

With the coming of sound, Vidor didn’t suffer the career setbacks that actors like Wallace Beery did, but he did discover that he needed to make some serious adjustments to his filmmaking style, not all of them welcome:

Silent pictures were treasured as an art form, and when talking pictures came in, most of the silent film directors regretted the change, the transition, because there was a certain technique that was very much akin to music. A silent film was never seen without music, without an orchestra. . . .We believed in the articulate powers of pantomime; we felt the things we were doing were bigger than words.

[In talking films] words reduced the actions, the emotions, the story we were trying to tell. It was like using words at the ballet. It made specific what we wanted to keep general. We could no longer appeal simultaneously to all audiences, the various levels of age and intelligence and sophistication. People were no longer free to fill in their own words. . .

It was a time of quiet despair to those of us brought up to love the lucidity of silence.

He also bemoaned the fact that all of the wonderful (and today still very modern-looking and influential) camera movements for silent pictures like The Big Parade and The Crowd were now all but impossible in the sound era, as the cameras now had to be housed in soundproofed rooms or covered with bulky soundproofed housings.

These were the problems facing him as an artist when, in 1931, he got the chance to direct The Champ.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at The Champ with some stories about how Vidor worked behind-the-scenes with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, along with a look at the movie’s appeal both in 1931 and in 2010.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Watch eighty-five-year-old King Vidor receive his honorary Oscar at the 51st Academy Awards on April 9, 1979.

The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor: You can watch this silent film triumph in its entirety on YouTube. Part One starts here.

Hollywood Series — A Celebration of American Silent Film: King Vidor is a featured interviewee in this wonderful series by film historian Ken Brownlow. Many of the episodes are on YouTube, and I specifically recommend the first part of “The Pioneers” for an education about the true power and popularity of silent films in that era, how they were every bit as impressive to them as Star Wars and Avatar are to us.

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong.  There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.  Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time… 

10.  Ridley Scott:  Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.  He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces.  Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess.  Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff.  White Squall is the single most depressing film ever made.  Black Hawk Down is loved by conservatives because it isn’t anti-military, but that’s about the only praiseworthy element to a film that is an endless series of quick cuts between white guys who look alike in their helmets.  Who’s been killed?  Who’s still alive?  You have no way of knowing.  Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through.  Alien is slow.  GI Jane is hysterically terrible.  Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.  Scott is a key player in the rise of the infernal shaky-cam, which is not only biologically inaccurate (the human eye adjusts for bodily movements), but incredibly annoying.  For that alone, he should be exiled to a land without cameras. 

9.  Michael Mann: All style, no substance.  

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8.  David Lean:  Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour.  I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.  Great Expectations was good.  Everything else was downhill. 

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7.  Darren Aronofsky:  Aronofsky is a talentless dud who has bamboozled his way into Hollywood upper echelon.  Every film he’s ever made is a disaster. Pi is a jumble of nonsense that starts nowhere and goes nowhere.  It may be the worst film ever made.  Watching it made me want to rip out my own retinas, then replace them through surgery, then rip them out again.  Of late, Aronofsky has been spicing up his chaotic, disordered crap with explicit lesbian sex scenes, a stylistic trait he apparently cribbed from David Lynch (don’t worry, we’ll get to Lynch shortly).  Requiem for a Dream is noteworthy only in that Aronofsky somehow convinced Jennifer Connolly to participate in a lesbian scene involving mutual anal sex and a dildo (the scene, by the way, is meant to be depraved, but therein lies Aronofsky’s problem: he’s got to have sympathetic characters before we feel bad for them).  The fanboy press is already agog over rumors that his newest ode to depravity, Black Swan, will feature a sex scene between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.  Clearly, his target audience is pathetic losers in college dorms looking for an excuse to watch girl-on-girl action in the name of art.  Not one of his films has been a major commercial success. Yet somehow, someone keeps giving him money.  It’s enough to make one question the existence of a beneficent God. 

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6.  Mike Nichols: No.  Just no.  The Graduate is contemptible and snort-worthy spoiled 1960s-child angst.  The ending of that movie alone makes it unworthy of human viewing.  All future directors take note: having your main characters staring blankly into nothingness is not an ending.  It is a cop out.  Nichols’ directorial style is ordinary and he picks bland material.  And he was an icon for the Baby Boomers.  If that’s not a sign of their mental disturbance, I don’t know what is. 

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5.  David Lynch:  Pure and absolute suckage, with the exception of The Elephant Man.  Lynch is one of those annoyingly “deep” directors we’re all supposed to puzzle over.  Forget it.  There’s nothing worth puzzling.  He’s as empty as they come, and he makes up for it with graphic sex scenes, just like his imitator, Aranofsky.  John Nolte calls Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, “Mesmerizing, sexy, frightening … and all driven by a visionary director who created a hypnotic puzzlebox unlike anything we’ve seen before or will again.”  Uh … no.  This movie makes no sense, doesn’t try to make sense, and then fills the vacuum with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring feeling each other up.  This ain’t great moviemaking.  It’s Vivid Entertainment spliced with the worst of Raymond Chandler.  Unfortunately, that just about sums up Lynch’s career. 

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4.  Quentin Tarantino:  I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill.  But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema.  Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story.  His films are Wagnerian: long periods of boredom and “artistic” violence punctuated by moments of utter brilliance.  To paraphrase William McAdoo on Warren G. Harding, Tarantino’s films are like an army moving over a landscape in search of an idea.  Sometimes Tarantino’s films actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner … until the idea dies of servitude and overwork. Tarantino is to homages and gore what James Cameron is to spectacle.  Unfortunately, he is also to plot what Cameron is. 

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3.  Woody Allen:  He’s pretentious and unbearable.  His movies are like nails screeching on a chalkboard, only with less humor.  He is as nerdy as Peter Orszag, but he acts out his fantasies and illuminates his insecurities in film and expects us all to watch.  It’s okay for a director to be self-centered – Orson Welles was famously self-centered.  But you actually have to be an interesting person in order to spend that much time focusing on yourself.  Allen isn’t.  He’s a whiny narcissist with sexual inferiority issues.  And no one except for him cares about the status of his penis.  As a side note, he made Diane Keaton into a “legitimate actress,” which alone should qualify him for the Seventh Circle of Hell. 

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2.  Martin Scorsese:  In the musical Damn Yankees, a group of hapless baseball players sing the following lyric: “You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart!”  Martin Scorsese never saw that musical.  His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.  They are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring.  Nobody cares what happens to Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed (in fact, in one screening I saw, people cheered when he got it in the head).  The Aviator takes as long to tell as Howard Hughes did to live.  Gangs of New York featured a brilliant performance from Daniel Day Lewis, and not much else (on a side note, there is no excuse for killing Liam Neeson in the first ten minutes of a film).  Casino is nasty, brutish, and long.  Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching.  Why anyone would want to spend several hours of his/her life with coke-snorting Ray Liotta and Co. is beyond me.  The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.  The Color of Money is a snooze-fest (if you want to see a directorial clinic rather than Scorsese’s garbage, try Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, to which The Color of Money is a sequel).  Raging Bull is gross.  Mean Streets is gross and soporific.  Taxi Driver is perhaps the most overrated film in Hollywood history — dreary, grungy, and subzero.  Scorsese has never seen a main character he liked, a villain he hated, or a pair of editing scissors. 

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1. Alfred Hitchcock: He’s not even close to the worst on the list, but he’s certainly the most overrated.  He never made a great film.  He was the Stephen King of the silver screen: he made films with great premises, but he never knew where to go from there.  The psychoanalysis at the end of Psycho is laughable.  North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again.  It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing, directed toward Fenimore Cooper: “the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.”  Not so much for Hitchcock.  Spellbound once again relies on amateur psychoanalysis.  Notorious is the same movie as Rebecca.  Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.  Vertigo makes one reach for the cyanide.  The Birds quickly becomes inane.  If you want to see good Hitchcock, rent Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Restricted to the one hour medium, he’s at his best.  Left to his own devices, he’s slightly better than mediocre. 

Whom would you nominate?

Anyone who has formally studied film certainly knows Robin Wood, who was a pioneer of the academic study of film as we know it.  One of his most famous essays, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” is one of the most important and influential essays in modern film theory.  In it, Wood provides a bridge between auteur theory (director is author of film and drives its content) and genre theory (genre characteristics drive film’s content) in a way that doesn’t try to disprove the other (which many theorists tried to do).  Wood lays out a good approach to both theories:

“One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful genre is to treat the genres as discrete. An ideological approach might suggest why they can’t be, however hard they may appear to try: at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions.”

He provided a deep understanding for each school of thought and put them together in a way that continues to help students of the discipline over thirty years later. A good overview of his life and work can be read in this recent New York Times post.

Wood’s views over the years have varied, but those who have read his work know that even if we disagree with him we dare not ignore him.  Wood has a sort of realism about himself, and his views.  As he aged, he came out as a homosexual and his politics turned sharply to the radical left.  However, he remained realistic in acknowledging that any kind of socialist world revolution was out of the question even though his colleagues refused to see it that way.  Even if we disagree with his politics, we can respect that he admitted his complete shift in his life’s focus to be “single-mindedly concerned with sexual politics.”  On some levels, he allowed his early work on film to be appreciated as it is.

Not much is taken away from his earlier work, even if he recanted some if it, we cannot ignore it.  He wrote important books about Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock.  While he eventually became sympathetic to their cause, Wood remained strong against feminist criticisms of Hitchcock.  Feminist critics tried to lump him in with the stereotypical oppressive male category, even though he was part of a minority group himself.  Wood comments on Hitchcock:

“I think what’s been crucial to any work on Hitchcock has been the work of radical feminists in the late in his films, and then to amend that…although women are constantly tormented, terrorized and murdered in his films, the women emerge as the most sympathetic characters and the ones with whom Hitchcock seems to most deeply identify. The whole thing is turned on its head, and the films become about male oppression, rather than about the terrorization of women. I think the best of Hitchcock films continue to fascinate me because he’s obviously right inside them, he understands so well the male drive to dominate, harass, control and at the same time he identifies strongly with the woman’s position. The struggle against that, his films are a kind of battleground between these two positions.”

Wood put together a great defense of Hitchcock that was troublesome for feminist critics like Laura Mulvey, whose “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay sought to destroy Hitchcock (and film in general).  Wood never dove into such nihilistic views of film; his criticism was always constructive instead of destructive like many who shared his convictions.  Even if we disagree with his worldview, Wood’s work is helpful in not only understanding film but also in understanding the political left.

Wood set the foundations for the academic study of film, which came to be during a time of fascination and obsession with psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives (although he did not jump on that bandwagon immediately).  Like any useful thinker, he played with ideas and theories for a long time before personally adopting them.  His books and essays are still important and useful and can be applied to a study of today’s filmmakers.  Personal politics set aside, anyone who studies or writes about film would be drastically undermining themselves to overlook the work of Robin Wood (1931-2009).

And so Smokey and the Bandit was made fast and loose, outside, on a low budget. In Reynolds’ words, they worked “lightning quick,” with first-time director Needham “reigning over crew and camera with instincts that made him, in my humble opinion, the best action director in the business.” The entire film was shot on location in the South. “We moved all over Georgia. . . It was a screwy chase picture, but Hal’s fun, outlaw, hell-bent-sensibility made it sparkle.”

Needham’s blistering pace also served to instill a certain freedom in his actors, of a kind seldom enjoyed by the more paint-by-numbers Hollywood productions. Critical darlings like Mike Leigh — Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004) et al. — are often praised to the high heavens for having actors invent a script during rehearsals. Although Needham doesn’t get anywhere near the same respect for it, he is also an expert practitioner of improvisation. Lots of his footage ends up on the cutting room floor, or in the blooper reels that often run under the credits of his movies (alas, he didn’t start that gimmick until after Smokey). Peeking at those muffed shots gives an idea of what it’s like to film a Needham script: lots of experimentation, lots of laughter.

This brand of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking requires the right talent, and — just like with the other aspects of a Needham production — pretentious people need not apply. Enter Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, a bunch of game amateurs and character actors, and a hound dog.

Field was the good-natured, saccharine star of television shows such as Gidget (1965-66) and The Flying Nun (1967-70), and by 1976 was firmly typecast as, in her estimation, “the All-American syrupy meaningless girl-next-door with no belly button. Just about as bland as you can get.” She took the Smokey role in an attempt to shatter that impression, scarcely aware of what she had gotten herself into. Flipping through her script on the first day, she innocently asked Reynolds why Big and Little Enos, the jolly pseudo-villains of the piece, shared such a strange name. “Because it rhymes with penis!” Reynolds happily replied (and if you think about it, that is exactly why the name is inherently funny). Her acting in Bandit would be nominated for a Golden Globe.

Jerry Reed (1937-2008) was a country music star and a friend of Reynolds and Needham, who had already acted for them in several earlier redneck movies. Originally slated to play the Bandit, he gamely allowed himself to be demoted to the role of Snowman when Reynolds entered the picture. In hindsight, it was a great move — Snowman was the role he was born to play. He also wrote and sang the iconic songs for the film. “Eastbound and Down” took Reed all of an hour to dream up, and looking back it was one of those tunes that perfectly encapsulates a movie and a genre. The fact that it wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award while the likes of Melissa Etheridge and Eminem have won Oscars tells you everything you need to know about how irrelevant the Best Song category has become in the modern age.

To find a suitable Chewbacca for Reed’s truckin’ Han Solo, Needham held a “canine beauty pageant” down in Atlanta, won by a dog named Happy (who is called Fred in the movie). Many of the sweetest laughs in the film concern the Snowman worrying and fussing over his dog, who Needham carefully includes in the corner of many widescreen compositions, panting contentedly as they motor down the highway. It’s a rare chase movie that makes time for things such as Snowman’s request that the Bandit get Fred a hamburger at the local “choke-n-puke,” or Reed pursuing a playful Fred into a nearby lake. Heck, the damn dog got laughs just from the Bandit and Snowman lugging it across the yard and into the truck. Another movie might have had the heroes leave Fred behind as an impediment to winning the bet on time. Not Bandit. And audiences didn’t need to be told why Snowman brought him along without a second thought, nor why the Bandit doesn’t raise the slightest objection. It’s his dog, man.

If there was one figure who held these disparate elements, characters, and improvisations together, it was Burt Reynolds. His energy and good humor fuels the picture and paces the action. “When I go on the set at the start of a picture,” Reynolds says

I make a nest for myself. I make jokes and try to get comfortable. When I’m doing comedy, I like to get into a rhythm. I begin working in that same rhythm with the crew first. Once I get them laughing, I know it’s working because they’re a very tough audience. Sometimes people on the outside who don’t know my way of doing things criticize me for wasting time or screwing around, not doing my lines. But I am actually preparing for what’s coming up in a scene.

Like John Wayne a generation before him, Reynolds worked damn hard to create the charisma he projected on the screen. It takes a certain courage and talent for an actor to just be, and to make “just being” something that possesses its own depth and meaning. “What is it about acting that grabs hold of us and won’t let go?” Reynolds once asked. “Acting! Why, it’s nothing but make believe. . . pretending to be something you’re not. Or is it a chance to be something you really are? A chance to transfer an emotion, like joy, to someone?”

That transference explains perfectly the appeal of guys like Reynolds and Wayne, and it serves as a rebuttal to the method excesses of all the De Niros and Streeps and Penns out there with their tiresome array of tics and quirks. The “charismatic hero” school of acting is designed to appear effortless, but in fact it takes a lot of work and concentration. “You’ve got to like the people in the picture for it to be successful,” Reynolds maintains.

Smokey and The Longest Yard, I think, were terrific films, better than most critics gave them credit for. When the gross is over 100 million dollars, a lot of people must like them. And in both of them, I was making a really conscious effort to have the time of my life in front of the camera. I think that’s what came through. . . the fun we had on the film was, I think, infectious to the American people who saw it.

Creating that sense of fun was easier said than done, given Reynolds’ precarious physical condition. He was then suffering from years of undiagnosed hyperglycemia, so bad that he would often faint dead away for no discernible reason. One of the reasons he looks so thin in Bandit is because he had lost a lot of weight. “It got to the point where they would just prop me up and put on more makeup because I’d turned white. I’d think, ‘We’ll, this is a good time to die. I have number-three Desert Tan on, and I’m nice and thin’.” If the role hadn’t allowed him to spend most scenes sitting in the Trans Am, he might not have finished the picture at all.

But it’s often the case that physical illness brings out the best in actors. Think of Gene Kelly doing his famous Singin’ in the Rain dance while running a temperature of 103, or Harrison Ford chasing Nazis and Arabs through the streets of Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark while racked with dysentery. And so it was with Reynolds — his sickness kept any pesky “Look at me — I’m a big star!” temptations in check, and gave him a down-to-earth, sympathetic streak that winningly offset his brash cockiness. Reynolds usually projects an anger simmering under the surface of his characters, but that quality is nowhere to be found in Smokey, leaving the Bandit far more endearing than he might have otherwise been.

Like Reynolds creating his “nest” and getting into a comedic rhythm, Needham also saw value in having a certain vibe course throughout his set. “Dailies were a big thing with me and my company,” he says today. “I would set up a bar and have some finger food, sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres and things, big table of it. I’d pay for it, not the company. I invited everybody on the crew. If we were on location, they could bring their wife and kids, I didn’t care.” Guys like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron shroud their sets in secrecy, but Needham’s viewings of the previous day’s work were family affairs. “Everybody’d get a drink,” Needham explains. “We’d put a reel on. That reel would go off, everybody’d get another drink. Hell, about five reels into it, we thought it was funny as hell whether it was or not.”

Perhaps it was this family-skewed audience that reminded him to keep the film relentlessly joyous and light on its feet. Like most other filmmakers in the 1970s, Needham easily could have added a bit of “the old ultra-violence” to Bandit, shocking the audience but ruining the movie’s charm. But like his mentor John Wayne, he would have none of it. “I think there’s a big difference between violence and action,” he says emphatically. “In any movie I ever directed, you’ll never see violence. You’ll see action but never violence. Never in all my movies was anybody ever killed. And I did a war film, for Christ’s sake. But that was my theory and my thinking, and I chose to do it that way.” Throughout Smokey and the Bandit, every time a stunt results in a crashed car or motorcycle, Needham is careful to include a shot of the occupants getting out of the wreck without any injuries. Little touches like that frequently escape the attention of Hollywood executives, but audiences notice and appreciate them.

All of this — the energy, humor, pace, improvisation, charisma, and action — paid off in spades. Smokey and the Bandit was first released in New York to terrible reviews and lukewarm box office. Needham told Universal that they were doing it all wrong — they needed to debut this picture among the people it was made for. So Universal changed tactics, opened the movie down South, and it took off like a rocket. Once the word spread, the movie was re-released in the cities and caught on there as well. It ended up being one of the biggest grossing movies of all time, an amazing feat given that it didn’t have any expensive special effects to buoy its must-see factor. What it had was humor, inventive stunts, a dash of romance, and a deep love of the South. And that was enough.

In between the critics panning the movie as crude, lowbrow, and racist/sexist/homophobic, a few managed to take the film’s proper measure. Writing in the Washington Post on July 29, 1977, critic Gary Arnold made an early case for Needham as a cultural throwback to a more optimistic era in our popular culture:

Needham seems to possess a comic outlook and timing extending beyond his erstwhile specialty. The prevailing mood of the film is cheerful and witty. Every element seems to be in balance, from the flirtatious exchange of Reynolds and Field, who make an endearing romantic comedy team, to throwaway bits of business, like the moment when Field begins practicing a dance step on the inside of the Trans Am windshield.

Needham also demonstrates a form of comic-poetry rabble-rousing talent that reminds one of Frank Capra at his most affectionate and, thankfully, least mawkish.

Affectionate. That is an adjective seldom attributed to Smokey and the Bandit, yet it gets much closer to the truth of what the movie was really all about than all the scathing reviews combined.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Smokey and the Bandit by addressing the movie’s cultural impact and its recapitulation of oft-derided American values.

Previous posts in the series “Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds and Smokey and the Bandit”:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

ANOTHER LOOK AT SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT: Here’s a very nice look back at Smokey from John Pearley Huffman at the Edmunds Inside Line website. Lots of clips, quotes from Needham and other principals, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Definitely worth a read.

THE COOLEST SMOKEY REVIEW EVER: Check out this hilarious appreciation of Smokey and the Bandit by a clever Austrian dude.

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We’ve heard a lot in the last few years about how American films now need to appeal to a broad international audience, and so they must tone down their American patriotism and values. The Austrian guy narrating the above video is a walking advertisement for the other point of view: that an America secure in its image is far more attractive to international audiences than the reverse.

The video is around ten minutes long, the narrator has all kinds of appreciation for and understanding of American culture, and it’s well worth watching until the end. Lots of laughs, and light-years better than what passes for film criticism on domestic TV these days. I especially enjoyed his takedown of those silly American Film Institute lists that come out each year.

BURT BUILDS A BANDIT: Netflix subscribers can rent a DVD containing a five-part miniseries from the cable reality show Celebrity Rides, wherein Burt Reynolds watches a modern car shop give his old Smokey and the Bandit SE Trans Am a hot update for the new millennium. Along the way he tells lots of fun, behind-the-scenes stories, such as learning that Alfred Hitchcock adored Smokey and the Bandit — his daughter told Reynolds that toward the end of his life he would watch it again and again and mutter “How did they do those things!”

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.”

In his now-famous 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne recalled his own loathing for the film:

Everyone says High Noon was a great picture because [Dmitri] Tiomkin wrote some great music for it and because Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly were in it. In the picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to church and asks for help and the guys go, “Oh well, oh gee.” And the women stand up and say, “You rats, you rats.” So Cooper goes out alone. It’s the most un-American thing I ever saw in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it.

Some critics like to nitpick and remind us that Cooper doesn’t actually step on his discarded tin star, but Wayne’s then-twenty-year-old memory is plenty close enough for government work. The conclusion of High Noon (former President Bill Clinton’s favorite movie, natch) has marshal Will Kane casting his badge into the dirt with a sneer, his features oozing contempt for the yellow-bellied townsfolk he defended. “That was like belittling a medal of honor,” Wayne seethed privately to his friends. And even as he graciously did his pal Gary Cooper the favor of stepping up at the 1953 Academy Awards and accepting the Best Actor Oscar for High Noon on Cooper’s behalf, the Duke began thinking about how such a role should have been played, and how he might someday use his superstar clout to craft the same basic story according to his own sensibilities. A story where the town didn’t cringe and run, but instead backed the marshal with their guns and their lives against the black-souled gangsters arrayed against them. A story which would ennoble America, flaws and all, instead of soiling her with a revisionist history at odds with how the brave pioneers of the west really acted.

Hawks agreed and, reinvigorated by the prospect of the film, he commissioned a script from the talented pulp writer Leigh Brackett, with whom he had previously collaborated on The Big Sleep (1946). He was re-invoking cinematic first principles, determined to “go back and try to get a little of the spirit we used to make pictures with.” Instead of High Noon’s straitjacket of a script, featuring automatons in the service of a preordained ideological payoff, Hawks strove to create characters that threatened to derail the plot with unpredictable and shamelessly entertaining personalities. In the place of a grim, constipated marshal standing alone and without help, Hawks envisioned a good-natured hero whose bacon is saved at every turn by the intervention of his colorful assortment of friends, in between raucous bouts of drinking, smoking, showering, shaving, shooting, kissing and singing — not necessarily in that order.

A big part of Hollywood’s Golden-Age spirit stemmed from the excellent writing to be found in many movies from the 1930s and ’40s. The best of these had wonderfully witty dialogue, spoken by characters so vibrant and alive that they fairly leaped off the screen and into the audience’s hearts. It’s worth remembering that underneath the gunshots and barroom brawls of Bravo is the clever and mischievous mind that once gave audiences hilarious screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Monkey Business (1952). “We used to use comedy whenever we could,” Hawks remembered about his early years in Hollywood, “and then we got too serious about it. So, in Rio Bravo I imagine there are almost as many laughs as if we had started out to make a comedy.”

One of the things modern filmgoers often forget is that movies like Bravo once played on big screens to packed audiences, eliciting massive laughs from scenes that we now watch alone in our living rooms on DVD with scarcely a murmur. Hawks once explained his particular brand of humor thusly:

I like things like — I think it was in Rio Bravo — Wayne went over to a man and said, “So nobody ran in here?” Some man said, “Nobody ran in here.” And Wayne went like this and hit him right across here with a gun so blood was coming all over his face. And Dean Martin said, “Take it easy, Chance.” And Wayne turned and said, “I’m not going to hurt him.” The audience laughed so at that.

Howard Hawks is often cited for his unobtrusive nature, his lack of a palpable style compared to other great directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. But this is a gross underestimation of a man that contributed far more to his films than he is given credit for. Rather than use the camera for an assortment of clever movements designed to catch the Academy’s attention come Oscar-time, Hawks used a minimalist compositional palette that refused to pan, crane or dolly ostentatiously. The results are often startlingly unique. Under Hawks’ direction, the first four minutes of Rio Bravo became a near-pantomime without a single word of dialogue, an apparent homage to the silent movies he had cut his teeth on so long ago. The next time you watch Bravo pay close attention to the compositions, most of which are medium-wide shots, with the camera at chest level. There are virtually no close-ups in the picture, a gutsy decision at a time when technique was becoming far more elaborate in Hollywood fare. In hindsight, it was a bold choice that enhanced the languorous, easygoing byplay between the film’s charismatic stars. Director Michael Powell once said that Hawks “had a very deep understanding of people, what was inside people.” The relaxed purposefulness of Rio Bravo’s confident compositions allows a rare richness of character to shine through.

Characters are the most important elements of any Hawks movie. By 1958 he had concluded that “audiences were getting tired of plots….But if you keep them from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest…It’s when a character believes in something that a situation happens, not because you write it to happen.” Hawks had an unparalleled flair for consciously using detail to expertly reveal character. All throughout the production of Rio Bravo, he would sit silently as the actors rehearsed their scenes, ever on the lookout for ways to organically grow their motivations cinematically, thereby creating deep wells of subtext without clubbing the audience over the head with a screaming, obvious M-E-S-S-A-G-E. Here’s Hawks describing just one example out of hundreds that he seized on to make the movie what it is:

In Rio Bravo, Dean Martin had a bit in which he was required to roll a cigarette. His fingers weren’t equal to it and Wayne kept passing him cigarettes. All of a sudden you realize that they are awfully good friends or he wouldn’t be doing it. That grew out of Martin’s asking me one day, “Well, if my fingers are shaky, how can I roll this thing?” So Wayne said, “Here, I’ll hand you one,” and suddenly we had something going.

Most crucially, it was director Hawks who crafted John Wayne’s character into a master not only of action but of reaction, in the process establishing an overriding feeling of camaraderie that makes the film endlessly rewatchable. “John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on screen,” Hawks claimed, and yet by dint of directorial will the star of Rio Bravo becomes everyone else’s straight man. During the course of the plot the Duke gets socked by Dean Martin (twice!), is verbally out-dueled by the precocious Ricky Nelson, suffers the outrageous behavior of Walter Brennan, is relentlessly teased by the ever-flirtatious Angie Dickinson, and is continuously rescued by all of the above. “You give everybody else the fireworks,” Wayne grumbled to Hawks at one point, “but I have to carry the damn thing.”

And yet Hawks knew that, with a universe of talents at his disposal, Wayne’s secret weapon was always his generosity and humility as an actor, his penchant for binding himself and his ego to the needs of a picture. He was unparalleled in his ability to lend his potent movie-star glow to others in a scene, holding up the entire business like a grizzled, enduring Atlas. For Rio Bravo, the breakthrough came during one of Dean Martin’s many set-pieces, while Wayne was standing aside and watching glumly as Martin got to once again chew up the scenery with his performance. “What do I do while he’s playing all of these good scenes?” he finally asked Hawks in frustration.

“Well,” Hawks replied, “you look at him as a friend.”

Suddenly everything Hawks had been striving for, the entire emotional spectrum he was meticulously constructing, became clear. And throughout the finished Rio Bravo, you can go to any point and see the spectacular results of Wayne embracing Hawks’ perceptive direction. Watch, for instance, the scene after Walter Brennan’s character Stumpy has almost killed Dean Martin by carelessly shooting at him through the jailhouse door. Wayne stands by as Brennan, one of the all-time great scene-stealing character actors, goes through an entire blabbering monologue of words and emotions that covers denial, mortification, and finally a resigned acceptance of responsibility. It’s all great stuff, hugely entertaining — but look closely at Wayne. Not a word spoken, not a single word. And yet his pitch-perfect reactions to each of Brennan’s lines gives the scene its touching pathos and power.

Wayne spends virtually the entire film loaning his star power to others in this fashion, not acting so much as reacting, and using those reactions to give his co-stars a much brighter spotlight in which to shine. Indisputably, we have Howard Hawks to thank for that. The Duke was known to sometimes distrust and argue with lesser directors, but along with John Ford only Howard Hawks commanded his absolute respect. “Hawks I trust with my life,” he once declared, a sentiment amply proven by the fearless bigheartedness of his performance in Rio Bravo. Both star and director were so happy with the way their collaboration went (only their second time working together after Red River eleven years before) that they more or less remade the same plot twice more in later years, as El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). The relationship was a special one. Long after both Hawks and Wayne had died, Peter Bogdanovich (who knew both) recalled in an interview that “The last times I saw both Cary Grant and John Wayne, they both talked about Howard, about missing him.”

What they missed — the desideratum of Hawks’ personality and artistry — can be sensed within every frame of Rio Bravo. The film features old friends (Bravo marked the twenty-second and final time that John Wayne and Ward Bond — a delightful character actor and Wayne’s best friend — would appear together in a movie), old props (in Bravo, Wayne wears the same, now-rumpled hat he wore twenty years earlier in his breakout role in Stagecoach [1939]), and old music (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” was created by adding new lyrics to a theme previously used in Red River a decade earlier). Surrounding all of this are seemingly endless moments of pure character-driven pleasure. Wayne scooping up a sleeping Angie Dickinson like a kindly father and carrying her to her room. Ricky Nelson taking a nervous drag on his cigarette and a deep breath of courage before brashly heading out the door to kill or be killed. Dean Martin pouring a glass of booze back into the bottle, hands steady as steel, finally conquering his demons. Wayne kissing Brennan on the top of his head and getting his ass swatted by the business end of a broom in return. And above all, that marvelous singing interlude in the jail, a masterstroke that releases the audience’s built-up tension via a sustained sequence of pure fraternal joy.

If there is a single criticism of Rio Bravo that grates above all others, it is the widely-held idea that the jailhouse duet between Martin and Nelson is a major artistic misstep, superfluous and corny. Nonsense. The memorable scene in question occurs almost two hours in. For much of the film, the audience has endured a mournful and threatening Spanish dirge called “El Degüello” (“a throat-slitting”), rumored to have been played by Santa Anna’s troops to the doomed defenders of the Alamo to weaken their resolve. It’s a song the villains play to signify “no quarter,” and as it begins to grate on the heroes’ nerves in Rio Bravo, we the audience worry right along with them. Then, deep in the movie, in a gripping emotional scene, Dean Martin with great agony renounces the bottle and regains his manhood. Finally, at long last, all four men are united in purpose, their doubts behind them. At that exact moment Hawks gives us a much-needed respite via the relaxed singing in the jailhouse. Coming on the heels of all that dramatic strain, it serves as a massive, cathartic release, a musical sunset after the long storms of the first two acts. It is male bonding on a par with the protagonists of Jaws (1975) comparing scars and warbling “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” It is the cementing of an oath-bound brotherhood between friends.

As Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing, we get lingering reaction shots of Brennan and Wayne appreciating the music — the first relaxed, genuine smiles we’ve seen for a long time. We listen as Dude and Colorado effortlessly merge their voices and complement each other, the beginnings of the teamwork that will become so important in the trials ahead. Stumpy asks Colorado to play something that he can sing along with, and Nelson obliges, bringing Brennan into the emotional core that has formed. This is one of the very few scenes without arguing or bickering of any kind — it’s a peek into the true feelings of a pseudo-family newly formed to confront a daunting menace. By the end of two songs, these disparate personalities have gained a much deeper sense of friendship and fidelity. We the audience have seen them at their most human — not as cardboard cutout plot points, but as people with longings and heartaches and dreams beyond the dusty and dangerous present. It’s the kind of scene that couldn’t possibly exist in a film like High Noon, with its relentless cynicism and sense of betrayal. And that, of course, is the point. “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” has become a thematic mirror-image to the sinister “El Degüello,” and it’s no coincidence that, late in the picture, Hawks has the former tune playing on the barroom piano in the hotel, serving as as a subtle, triumphant reminder of which song — and which worldview and moral code — has won the day.

Strangely, Hawks’ potent cinematic iconography seems to be lost on many of Rio Bravo’s most ardent admirers. Director John Carpenter has called Hawks “the greatest American director,” and he not only made Rio Bravo’s plot the template for his Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), he also remade Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951) as The Thing (1982) starring Kurt Russell. Neo-noir director Quentin Tarantino also reveres Rio Bravo, to the point of using it to screen potential girlfriends — if she doesn’t like Bravo, she’s outta there. And yet while the films of Carpenter and Tarantino possess many shallow Hawksian trademarks — groups of men struggling in environments poised on the razor’s edge of danger, conversations so hectic and colorful they threaten to derail the plot — they seem to pay scant attention to the emotional resonance Hawks strove to achieve. Film critic Robin Wood, who wrote what is by far the single best book-length treatment of Hawks and his films, notes that, “Hawks is not really a modern artist…he is a survivor from the past, whose work has never been afflicted with this disease of self-consciousness. An artist like Hawks can only exist within a strong and vital tradition.” Too often, a “disease of self-consciousness” overwhelms the work of directors like Carpenter and Tarantino, as they mimic the techniques and plot elements of Hawks without capturing (or indeed, hardly seeming aware of) the “strong and vital tradition” that makes his best films worth remembering in the first place.

Modern film critics, on the other hand, often recognize Hawks’ heart and soul, but just as often they tend to dismiss them with jaded cynicism. The late Pauline Kael, long the High Priestess of The New Yorker’s film criticism department, once sniffed around the edges of Rio Bravo and approvingly declared it a “semi-satiric western pastiche…silly, but with zest; there are some fine action sequences, and the performers seem to be enjoying their roles.” Satiric was a favored adjective of Miss Kael’s whenever she felt the need to explain away the pesky traditional mores of a film she otherwise liked. She also judged The Right Stuff (1983) to be “often satiric,” and for films that celebrated conservative values too unambiguously to laugh off — think Dirty Harry (1971) — she’d pull out the critical napalm and call it fascist. Liberals struggling to justify their forbidden love for John Wayne westerns often adopt such views. In Rio Bravo’s case, the argument usually goes: It’s a cult film, man. A hip film. It’s satiric, dude. Knowingly silly. So determinedly un-cool as to be super-cool.

I beg to differ. Dr. Strangelove (1964) is satiric. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is satiric. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is satiric.

Rio Bravo, in all of its particulars, is sincere.

A full half-century after its release, Howard Hawks’ masterwork still epitomizes the essential qualities that made Hollywood’s Golden Age glitter. It’s a nostalgic old man’s love song to the “spirit we used to make pictures with,” a movie that loves its characters — and through them its audience — with a sincerity that soothes like a shot of whiskey chased by a mouthful of warm apple pie. For fifty years now audiences have loved it back, with an ardor that is equally unabashed and unadorned. The song that haunts Rio Bravo is a elegiac melody celebrating humanity, friendship, honor, and tradition, all treasured parts of the deep, eternal river of memory that ever rolls through the God-fearing American soul.

By the memory of a song,
While the river Rio Bravo flows along….

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Buy the two-disc special edition DVD of Rio Bravo at Amazon. Rio Bravo is also available on Blu-ray.

Add Rio Bravo to your Netflix queue.

Buy Howard Hawks, a clearly-written, thoughtful critical volume by noted cinéaste Robin Wood.

Buy Howard Hawks: Interviews, a meaty collection of conversations with the master director.

Buy Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, the definitive biography by Todd McCarthy.

If you are ever down Arizona way, visit Old Tucson Studios, where the exteriors for Rio Bravo were shot.

View some great behind-the-scenes pictures from the set of Rio Bravo at Life magazine, The Dino Lounge, and Emulsion Compulsion.

“The Story Behind Rio Bravo: The Greatest Western Ever Made” by Kaleem Omar.

“Rio Bravo Still Popular and Hip at 50″ by Allen Barra at The Wall Street Journal.

“Rio Bravo“ by Jim Monaco at The Dean Martin Collector’s Club.

“Rio Bravo Turns 50″ by Phil Nugent at The Screengrab.

“The Duke and Democracy: On John Wayne” by Charles Taylor at Dissent magazine.

“The Great American Movie: Rio Bravo“ Charles Taylor (again), this time at Salon.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

#1 – JAWS
I saw this all-time classic as a 9-year-old on opening day, and saw it a second time at the Saturday matinee. To this day, I am afraid to swim in the ocean. That shark is always there in my imagination. The poster is literal, but haunting.

#2 – CHINATOWN
This is truly a work of art. The smoke shrouding the ultimate mystery of Evelyn Mulwray, and the stylized version of Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson), the hard-boiled detective who unravels it all.

#3 – THE DARK KNIGHT
Impossible to separate Heath Ledger’s death from his remarkable interpretation of The Joker. This is an amazing image. In 30 years, I will look at this poster and immediately feel the impact of Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece.

#4 – BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
You can almost hear Audrey Hepburn warbling “Moon River” at the sight of this iconic poster. Every woman wanted to be her and every man wanted to be with her.

#5 – SECRETARY
The 2002 cult classic about a sadomasochistic relationship between a demanding lawyer (James Spader) and a submissive secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The movie is an under-appreciated gem. The poster may be even better.

#6 – UNFORGIVEN
This is my favorite poster made for Clint Eastwood’s masterful revisionist Western. Simple. Classic. Tells you everything you need to know about Clint’s Bill Munny character.

#7 – AMERICAN BEAUTY
A beautiful image that suggests the perversity that lies just beneath the surface of the suburban neighborhood created by screenwriter Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes.

#8 – SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
“You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won’t you?” You can almost hear Dr. Hannibal Lecter say it. The Death’s-head moth “lodged” in Clarice Starling’s throat. Brilliant image.

#9 – VERTIGO
An ode to acrophobia as Detective Scottie Ferguson (as played by Jimmy Stewart) battles his fear of heights while becoming obsessed with Madeleine Elster (the stunning Kim Novak). This kaleidoscopic design immediately brings the strains of Bernard Hermann’s amazing score into my head.

#10 – PULP FICTION
Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in all her swagger. Yes, she does wind up with a sharpie circle on her chest and a shot of adrenaline, but the whole gritty movie is captured with this image.

HONORABLE MENTION
- in no particular order -
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
SWEENEY TODD
MEAN STREETS
AMADEUS
GONE WITH THE WIND
METROPOLIS
KING KONG (1939 Fay Wray version)
CLOVERFIELD
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter@LAMase.