This week on the HomeVideodrome podcast, Hunter reviews Liam Neeson’s death-obsessed wolf-fighting-fest “The Grey,” Jim discovers “Blubberella” and extols on the greatness of “Adaptation” and the week’s releases get the usual treatment. Head on over to The Film Thugs and give it a listen.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” is the essence of crime cinema cool boiled down to its bones, combining the spartan feel of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai” with the sheen of Michael Mann’s ’80s output like “Thief.” Throw in a protagonist reminiscent of Ryan O’Neill’s strong silent wheelman in Walter Hill’s “The Driver,” and you’ve got a shiny movie buff confection.

Ryan Gosling completely owns the nameless lead role, shiny scorpion jacket and all. The year Gosling had in 2011 effectively silenced his critics who wrote him off as a pretty face in “The Notebook,” with “Drive” standing at the head of the pack. His soft exterior makes his cool-yet-vicious character in “Drive” all the more potent whenever he has to stomp some poor henchman’s head in.

I love grizzled, masculine action heroes like Liam Neeson and Lee Marvin as much as the next red-blooded American, but Gosling steps up to the plate, points to the outfield, and knocks the ball straight into the spark-spewing lights. Don’t let his soft features or feathery surname fool you. Gosling brilliantly channels the brand of cool perfected by Alain Delon in Melville’s quiet heist & hitman sagas.

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When I first started film school, it was frustrating to see specific movies vaunted for political reasons and others ignored because they didn’t adhere to that professor’s political agenda. Even films that weren’t overly political were avoided for other’s that had a specific (generally radical) political message. I recall sitting through films like Bamboozled in a course on writing about film where we were also told to emulate Pauline Kael (I didn’t want to adopt her condescending view towards cinema). The sanctimonious view of Spike Lee, Bob Rafelson and Robert Altman got old when I wanted to learn about John Ford, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock (oh you know – those guys who pioneered cinema as we know it).

Luckily, my experience in graduate school is a different story. My professors have been more concerned with historical relevancy and less about turning a film lecture into a civics lesson. One professor who does the field a favor by putting together a fair assessment is Drew Casper, the Alma and Alfred Hitchcock Chair of American Film at USC, with his latest book, Hollywood Film 1963-1976: Years of Revolution and Reaction. Casper takes on a time period of filmmaking very dear to him that he feels has been unfairly dominated by leftist praise that purposely ignores certain films. Exposing his frustrations, Casper says that “predictably, the [scholarly] discussions are rather obsessive, focusing on the same films time and again that fit the critically beloved template” (xvi). This is exactly what I went through as an undergraduate. Extra studying on my part had to be done to get a well-rounded view of film history.

This common template favors liberals, constantly overhyping films like The Graduate, Mash, and Five Easy Pieces with praise that is more suited for something like The Godfather. Casper’s problem is that in the usual  film history text, a film like the leftist McCabe and Mrs. Miller will take up an entire chapter while the conservative and more iconic True Grit (1969 version) goes overlooked. The pious view of some films like Dr. Strangelove will force the ignorance of an equally important film (even those with similar political leanings). This fidelity to the most radical films will create a predictable view of others, “sometimes a conservative film is noted, only to be vilified for its politics, such aspersion clouding any thoughts about its aesthetic merits” (xvii). This is the case with Dirty Harry, where the left loves to hold this film up as fascist (Casper describes the “self-righteous” vitriol spewed by Pualine Kael about this film).

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Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

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.

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“I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks.”

– John Wayne –

John Wayne was still young in 1944, only thirty-eight years old. And yet the major elements of his inimitable style were hardening into place. Perhaps no other actor in history has been so cognizant of using his body to express grand themes and timeless mythological underpinnings. Under Ford’s direction Wayne never just stands there, he poses, in ways and with effects that conjure up famous paintings and sculpture. When he fills the frame as Lieutenant Junior Grade Rusty Ryan in They Were Expendable, he becomes every man who ever fought a losing action in a war, who faced defeat with stoicism, who sacrificed for a greater good. In the history of film, John Wayne remains nonpareil in his use of presence to project subtext.

Little of that came naturally to the Duke — in his early films he’s tall and rangy and handsome, but with little of the gravity, focus, and dramatic weight that would come to typify his prime acting years. Those skills, and they were skills, were consciously learned over fifteen years of working with Ford and his old troupe of veteran actors. He watched the way they walked and carried themselves, studied the way they were directed, and began to divine the level of nuance Ford demanded. There’s a funny story from the making of Stagecoach (1939, John Wayne’s big coming-out party as an actor), where Wayne’s character was supposed to be washing his face after a hard day, and Ford started smacking him around screaming, “Christ Duke, wash you face like a man! You’re daubing it! You’re daubing it!” He was trying to teach Wayne that, when you are an actor in front of a camera, your every movement can and should mean something deeper than what is on the surface. The act of washing one’s face can be pedestrian, or it can be a sweeping gesture that evokes strength of character, or a relaxed demeanor, or a gentleness of heart. And those deft movements will unconsciously fire off all sorts of neurons in the brain of an audience. (more…)

The sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

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.” (more…)

Can you remember the last piece of film score that made you want to jump into the screen and join in on the action — that made you want to destroy an arch-villain’s volcano lair or swing into ship full of enemy pirates…? But of all the genres, there’s nothing quite like a  Big Western Score. The best are rousing, moody, flavorful… They drive a sense of danger and adventure into your innards and make you long to be a cowboy, which is no small achievement for someone like me who would rather spend a night in jail than outdoors.

Here are my 5 favorites in all their YouTube glory.

1. Dimitri Tomkin – Red River (1949): Sweeping, epic, majestic and impossible to believe never nominated for an Oscar. An important part of scoring is deciding where to put the music and ”Red River” has some of the best spotting choices I’ve ever seen. It kicks in precisely when it should, not just to enhance a moment, but also to change moods and start fresh. Watch the scene again where John Wayne (who’s absolutely brilliant in his most unsympathetic role) tells Montgomery Clift (every bit as good as Wayne) he’s gonna kill him. This is “the” moment in the film and you expect dark, melodramatic music, but when Clift walks away and gets on his horse the score soars with adventure completely changing the mood and stripping the melodrama from the moment. (more…)

9pm PST - Sunrise (1927) – In this silent film, a farmer’s affair with a city woman almost destroys his life. Cast: George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston, Bodil Rosing Dir: F. W. Murnau BW-94 mins, TV-PG

Set your TiVo and prepare yourself for a silent film for those who don’t think they like silent films — what you might call a gateway drug.

Studio chief William Fox brought F.W. Murnau to Hollywood and practically handed his entire studio over to the German director, promising him anything he needed to make the film he wanted. The result was a commercial disappointment, but a pure masterpiece, easily one of the five best films ever made, and something so emotionally haunting it will stay with you for days afterward, or in my case, forever. (more…)