This, coupled with Kael’s oft-quoted confusion about President Nixon winning re-election in 1972 because “everyone I know voted for McGovern” gives us the impression of a limousine radical.

But what was omitted from “The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael” would have balanced this portrait; it might even have showed some conservative sentiments on Kael’s part. The omission of her celebrated essay on “Citizen Kane” – done so because of suspicions it was plagiarized – would have revealed her to be in the Ninotchka (a 1939 film that hit Stalinism where it was weakest: in the funny bone) school of anti-communism.

In the essay, she argues that it was the joyless jargon merchants of American Stalinism that destroyed the screwball genre (“the Algonquin group’s own style was lost as their voice blended into the preachy, self-righteous chorus”).

She was even open-minded enough to understand the appeal of such vigilante films as “Walking Tall;” she admitted that such fantasies tapped into fears for her own safety in Warren Court America. Reviewing anti-blacklist “The Way We Were,” she lambasted the film’s message of there being only one alternative to the blacklisters: “ghastly” Stalinism.

Kael herself had briefly flirted with Stalinism while in college, but soon rejected it because of her lifelong aversion to dogma. She tried its leftist alternative of Trotskyism but this, too, failed her. In the new biography, close friends are quoted as seeing her as an “Adlai Stevenson liberal,” in love with the establishment.

Her writings certainly bears this out, but the editing of “Selected Writings” fails to bring her pioneering of political incorrectness to the fore.

CONFIRMED: ‘DARK KNIGHT RISES’ PROLOGUE TO PLAY BEFORE IMAX ‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE’

Truly a piece of genius marketing. Expect more of this.

I’m well aware I’m calling this idea a success before the results are in, but it’s a no-brainer.

LINDSAY LOHAN TO POSE NUDE IN PLAYBOY

The only thing worse than the Hollywood gossip media that feasts off the slow-motion train wreck of human beings who also happen to be celebrities is the infrastructure in place to capitalize on the train wrecks many stops along the way. The clubs, the dealers, the hangers-on, the elite rehabs, and of course Playboy. Instead of rallying to protect this young woman from herself, Playboy will exploit her need for money and addiction to attention.

Hell can never be hot enough.

WARNER BROS. PULLING ALL HARRY POTTER DISCS FROM STORES DEC. 29

Interesting idea to follow the Disney route and place these films on an announced moratorium. Since the beginning of VHS, films have been going on a moratorium where they are out of print for long periods of time, but they’re never announced as such, and I’ve always wondered why.

What better way to gin up sales than to announce the product will no longer be available?

REDBOX PICKING UP FLEEING NETFLIX SUBSCRIBERS

You can count me among them, and I am now eyeing the Blockbuster Movie Pass, as well.

HOW HOLLYWOOD SEDUCED AND ABANDONED CRITIC PAULINE KAEL

An old but always entertaining story. Basically, for practically no money, Warren Beatty completely de-fanged the most feared critic in Hollywood. The retelling of this tale in the link above all but dismisses that notion but few in Hollywood are as Machiavellian as Beatty.

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SCOTTDS’ EPIC LINK-TACULAR

NETFLIX WOES NEVER SEEM TO END

WHY SPIELBERG IS OPENING LATEST FILM OVERSEAS FIRST

HOW ‘THE HELP’ OR ‘MIDNIGHT IN PARIS’ COULD WIN BEST PICTURE

DETAILS ON JOSS WHEDON’S SECRET ‘MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING’ ADAPTATION

NBC PURCHASES TV PILOT ABOUT A DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY LIVING IN THE WHITE HOUSE

BEN AFFLECK TO DIRECT WHITEY BULGER MOBSTER MOVIE, TO STAR MATT DAMON AND CASEY AFFLECK

NEW TRAILER FOR ‘THE PHANTOM MENACE 3D’ RE-RELEASE

CINEMATOGRAPHER WAS MISQUOTED: SCENES FROM ‘THE AVENGERS’ WERE NOT SHOT WITH AN IPHONE

COOL PHOTO: INSIDE A REDBOX MACHINE

COOL INFOGRAPHIC: THE VARIOUS GANGS OF HBO’S ‘OZ‘

NORRIS! STALLONE! VAN DAMME! THE 10 BEST CANNON FILMS!

TOP 10 MOVIES FOR HYPOCHONDRIACS

FOR YOU SCREENWRITERS: 10 WAYS TO JUICE UP A SCENE

25 THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT ‘WEST SIDE STORY‘

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CLASSIC PICK FOR WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26

TCM:

8PM EST: Razor’s Edge, The (1946) –  A young man’s quest for spiritual peace threatens his position in society. Dir: Edmund Goulding Cast:  Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, John Payne.  BW-145 mins, TV-G,

Bizarre but fascinating noir film and Exhibit A for those defending Power’s underrated talents as an actor.

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).

The first few chapters of the text are a well-balanced account of the 60s and 70s in America both culturally and politically. Courageously, Casper notes it’s so difficult to hear about centrist and conservative movies in many film courses because anti-American Marxists began to dominate the humanities fields in higher education. Continuing his discussion of the time, Casper says that “One nation, indivisible, under God, was turning into a secular series of ever-growing fiefdoms” (27), which accurately paints a picture for this tumultuous time period in American history (he also provides an honest depiction of the Kennedys which was a breath of fresh air). The lengthy breakdown of the changes occurring in America and Hollywood is essential in understanding this part of American film history (especially if you are like me and were born after the fact).

A large chunk of the book is dedicated to detailing how genres were used during this time period. Genres began to transition into what felt like a revolution (131), working primarily as a political force. The culture war blew up and all sides got in the fight. This period saw films working as renewal, hybridization as well as demythologizing of traditional genres (adventure, Western, family melodrama, comedy, etc). Casper accurately notes that “using genre as a soapbox, characters’ psychology became less significant than the ideas they incited” (134). The collective liberalism in the country was growing which led to far less superhero films (the genre is generally conservative) and many more Vietnam-Westerns. In addition, adventure films became popular but are widely overlooked by scholars. Films like Papillon, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen and Deliverance are given ample appreciation compared to past work on this timeframe.

The 60s and 70s saw a large downswing in war films which led to an upswing in Westerns, allowing filmmakers to comment on the war through metaphor. These films depicted a savage attitude towards Native Americans to address the violence in Vietnam (Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Ulzana’s Raid). Others became a platform for radical domestic politics such as Robert Altman’s widely praised McCabe and Mrs. Miller (which is a wonderful genre play that unfortunately becomes and anti-capitalist wet dream). While these films are certainly worth noting, Casper does the genre justice by also mentioning other important films the liberals like to ignore such as True Grit, Jeremiah Johnson, El Dorado, and overlooked (liberal) Sam Peckinpah films; The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. In addition, we see the popular Leone films examined as Marxist where the filmmaker “planned to expose the ‘real’ American West as one rough-and-tough environment diseased by the obsession with money” (338). It’s easy to see why these films consistently make the cut in film academia and it’s not just because of the amazing Ennio Morricone scores.

Another great genre, the vigilante film, is put into a helpful context in this book. As a film student, I’ve seen Serpico praised and Death Wish denounced for solely political reasons (which isn’t helpful to a student). Each film represents strong feelings from opposing sides that are worth discussing in terms of grasping the cultural climate. Casper says that “respective political ideologies could place a vigilante, someone who took or countenanced the taking of the law into his/her own hands to attain justice, in either camp – dutiful lawman (if you’re conservative) or fascist criminal (if you’re liberal)”  (309). This honest and balanced attitude towards the material presented is obviously why Casper has the respect and massive following that he does. During a time when social and political tensions were high, all sides need to be seen in order to get a complete view of Hollywood in the 60s and 70s.

Such honesty about American film during a tumultuous time period is not common in the field which makes Hollywood Film 1963-1976: Years of Revolution and Reaction so good. The book is not meant to be a turning of the tables on liberal film historians; it is meant to be a balanced account of history when so many texts overanalyze the same select movies. I’ve read many books where the leftist films are referred to as “heroic” and “courageous” while the conservative films are called “reactionary” and “fascist.” What Casper does, that works so well for audiences of any political persuasion, is simply refer to films as “liberal,” “centrist,” or “conservative.” Understanding that taste is subjective, Casper allows the audience to decide which films they prefer.  I highly recommend this book to any film student or person interested in Hollywood films of the 60s and 70s. This text will definitely become a go-to reference as I continue my studies.

“As far as the favorites of my own films,” George Stevens said late in life, “I have a warm spot in my heart for Shane. It was enormously satisfactory to me from many standpoints. . . We were attempting something on more than one level, more than just the surface level. That’s where a film gets most interesting to me, with those aspects of it that are somewhat hidden, the secondary and third levels of interest.”

Shane is a myth, with all the grandeur and thematic sweep that the term demands. It revealed itself as such even at the beginning, back when it was just a pulp story written by a harried newspaperman who had never been out west. It became even more so when re-interpreted by a Hollywood director haunted by memories of the Holocaust, who was himself aided by a group of actors with a variety of talents and backgrounds, a cinematographer with thirty years in the Tinseltown trenches, and a musician taught in Europe by men who themselves had sat at the feet of Tchaikovsky. All of these people came together to craft a tale that digs deep into our collective psyches, stirring up ghosts from ancient layers of cultural sediment. This was clearly apparent to movie reviewers in 1953. “A homeless cowboy St. George slays the homesteaders’ evil dragon,” said Look magazine when Shane appeared, while Life titled its review “Galahad of the West.”

This patina Shane has acquired — the aura of True Art — tends to bother folks who feel superior to the simple (not easy, but simple) purity of its message and worldview. Pauline Kael found Shane’s mythmaking tiresome, calling the picture “overplanned and uninspired; the Western was better before it became so self-importantly self-conscious.” To answer those charges I turn to the great Swedish filmologist Harry Schein, who in his essay on Shane titled “The Olympian Cowboy” explained that, “Folklore demands a rigid form. If one is to feel the power of the gods, repetition is required. It is precisely the rigid form in the Western which gives the contents mythological weight and significance.” Anyone who has studied the “rigid form” of old myths and tall tales knows this to be abundantly true.

One of the reasons that even many old B-Westerns remain popular with audiences is that they adhere to these tenets and recapitulate that sense of early American morality. “The genre has produced several good and many bad films,” Schein admits, “but even the stuttering priest can speak about God.” We are a culture starved for both heroes and for priests willing to preach about them, and so many of us find ourselves renting old low-budget horse operas from Netflix in an almost pathetic attempt to fill that gaping hole in our souls.

For others, it’s not just the repetitive form of the Western that galls, it’s the message. In his Foreword to the critical edition of Shane, Marc Simmons tells how the picture was perceived by some college kids during the intellectual doldrums of the counterculture Seventies:

I recall attending a showing of Shane twenty-five years after its release, during a film classic series on a university campus. I was not surprised that it now appeared a bit dated and that some of its original luster had faded. But I was wholly unprepared for the reaction of the young audience. Throughout, they laughed at serious moments, jeered at Shane’s deference toward women, and hooted at Bob’s open admiration for his hero. Without making too much of that single incident, it seems to me at the very least that some of our youth have capitulated to the doctrine that the world is without serious purpose, chaos is our destiny, and serious thought is a pointless exercise in futility.

Sadly, it wasn’t just the youths — even Shane’s author, Jack Schaefer, succumbed to this disease in his dotage. Using books, speeches, interviews and essays, the old writer began publicly repudiating what he had come to see as the simplistic and misguided worldview espoused in his famous novel. Specifically condemning the righteous violence once depicted with pride, he went on to embrace a PETA-style morality based on the notion that humanity is a poison ruining planet Earth for all the little animals.

Against all of this lukewarm nihilism stands Shane, a genie that Schaefer and the rest, despite their best efforts, could never force back into the bottle. A fictional hero rendered so real by George Stevens and Company that, to millions of Americans, he’s as inspirational as if he’d really lived. A mythic figure who teaches stark lessons about violence and right that many find uncomfortable. Woody Allen, of all people, once praised the film along just those lines:

Shane doesn’t want to get back into gunfighting. He’s been trying the whole movie to put it behind him. But he knows that the only way to put an end to the violence in the valley is for him to do it. That’s what makes the film great in my eyes. He knows. He’s got to go in there and kill them. And sometimes in life — it’s such an ugly truth — there is no other way out of a situation but you’ve got to go in there and kill them. Very few of us are brave enough or have the talent to do it. The world is full of evil, and rationalized evil and evil out of ignorance, and there are times when that evil reaches the level of pure evil, like Jack Palance, and there is no other solution but to go in there and kill them.

That is exactly the lesson George Stevens took away from his experiences at Dachau, and that countless generations have learned in places less cloistered than the typical American university. One of the most valuable aspects of great myths is the beauty and poetry they bring to the telling of these hard, necessary truths. Author and Japanese film historian Donald Ritchie put it best to my mind, when he wrote of Shane that “Stevens knows what it means for a romantic to lose his romanticism. In this and in other of his later films he chooses to show us the post-romantic individual through the eyes of characters themselves romantic, and then to record the painful awakening to the real world which is the lot of all of us, if we live long enough.”

Shane was George Stevens’ only Western. Only one was needed. Right there, in a single story, he managed to gather together all the elements of Western myth and build a gateway to truths largely lost on a generation of Americans. Campus radicals can jeer at the way Shane treats women, or the sincerity with which a little boy worships his violent hero. Pseudo-sophisticates can bemoan the everlasting formula in Westerns that sees the good guys win, the bad guys get what’s coming to them, and Gaia’s fragile ecosystem choked by tendrils of gunsmoke. But truth always wins out in the end. As book critic Orville Prescott wrote when reviewing one of Schaefer’s later novels, “There is no escaping the cowboy myth. . . As long as our country survives, the cowboy myth will survive too.”

This concludes our seven-part look at one of the greatest of America’s Western myths, Shane. Come back next Saturday for a look at an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

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

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Shane is a movie that looks and sounds pretty good as-is, but is nevertheless begging for some sort of determined restoration with a host of extras. For instance, reading about the picture being screened in 1953 with “stereophonic sound” (a primitive attempt at achieving some spatiality and audio separation) makes me wonder if there are isolated audio tracks buried in the Paramount studio archive that might be made the basis for some sort of surround-sound conversion. Oh well, one can dream.

Until then, make sure you get the 2002 DVD release as opposed to the 2000 — the former has a commentary track featuring George Stevens Jr. and the late Ivan Moffat, producer of the film. Lots of great trivia is revealed, much of which I didn’t include in my essays, so it’s worth a listen. Amazon has the inferior 2000 released listed first when you do a search there, so be careful. Here’s the link to the correct one.

And of course, you can rent the film from Netflix — they offer the latest and greatest version as well.

It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

“The whole damn thing took over,” said his then-wife, the Academy-Award nominated actress Diane Cilento. “He really didn’t know who he was. People would call over to him things like, ‘Hey, Bondy, where’re you off to next?’ or ‘See any Soviet agents lately?’ It became impossible to have any sort of life. . . .It got madder and madder with each film.”

Every time it looked as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they did. In Tokyo (where they greeted him with screams of  “Bondo!”) Connery was using a bathroom urinal when he heard a quiet click. Startled, he glanced up to see a Japanese photographer peeking around his shoulder with a Nikon. On another occasion, after graciously signing his name for an elderly lady at the airport, she reacted with a look of horror. “No, no!” she said, “I wanted James Bond.” Director Terence Young, who was with Connery, remembers that “Sean sort of crumpled. It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being, he was a symbol.”

For a painfully private and unassuming family man like Connery, this insane superstardom — Bond-age, you might call it — was intolerable. And so even as Goldfinger was smashing box-office records across the world, the actor responsible for playing the hero was counting down the days until his contract expired.

Tommy Connery was born in 1930 on the wrong side of the tracks of Edinburgh, Scotland, arriving just in time to grow up amidst the poverty of the Great Depression (his crib was a dresser drawer). At age eight he was already finding whatever odd jobs he could to help support Mom, Dad, and a younger brother: delivering milk and newspapers, working for the local butcher. By fourteen he was working three different jobs.

What little spare time he had was spent bodybuilding, and he soon transformed himself into a formidable, well-muscled bruiser. “There was nothing of the long-haired poet about schoolboy Connery,” recalls one of his classmates. “He was big, and he was as hard as nails in an easygoing way, and anyone at school who messed him about got a thick ear and a black eye.” After opening up a can of whoop-ass on a gang of local bullies one day, kids on the street started respectfully calling him “Big Tam.” Later “Shane” became an alternate moniker, inspired by the 1953 film. According to one version of the story, years of neighborhood use eventually corrupted Shane into Sean, and thus Tommy Connery’s reputation for toughness earned him the name that would one day adorn theater marquees around the world.

From early on, Sean found himself looking for some way to escape the claustrophobic slums of postwar Edinburgh, where generations of lower-class workers slaved away in quiet toil only to have sons and grandsons repeat the whole business ad infinitum. At sixteen he abandoned school and joined the Merchant Navy (a pair of tattoos stenciled on his right forearm — “Mum and Dad” and “Scotland Forever” — gave him the requisite Popeye look), but a year later he was mustered out on medical grounds from an ulcer. He spent the rest of his teens bumming around town as an “odd-job man”: steelworker, road worker, coal delivery man, cement-mixer, lifeguard, artist’s model, newspaper press-room worker, and bouncer at the local Big Band dance hall.

It was while serving as a polisher of tables and coffins that a co-worker introduced him to stagehand work at King’s Theater, and the exposure gave Connery the acting bug. When he and a friend later went to London to compete in the Mr. Universe contest on a lark (Connery says he placed third in the tall men’s class, others insist he didn’t make the cut), his ears perked up when someone mentioned that the touring show for South Pacific was on the lookout for burly actors who could sing. Connery crashed the audition, won a job, and was soon traveling all around the British Isles performing six evenings a week as a grunt in the chorus.

Mingling with professional actors for the first time prompted the high-school dropout to begin educating himself with Ibsen, Proust, Tolstoy, Stanislavski, and Thomas Wolfe. At a party he met another young actor named Maurice Micklewhite, and soon the two blue-collar thespians were commiserating about their troublesome accents (a Scottish brogue in Connery’s case, a Cockney twang for Micklewhite). This new pal would eventually change his name too, inspired by a 1954 Bogart movie poster, and thereafter Sean Connery and Michael Caine would remain lifelong friends.

Connery’s athletic prowess was such that, after a soccer match between the cast of South Pacific and a local team, he was offered a professional contract with Manchester United. After thinking over his options, however, he turned it down, choosing instead to keep hammering away at the frustrating but ultimately fulfilling acting game. “One of my more intelligent moves,” Connery later quipped.

A lucky break came when Jack Palance suddenly pulled out of a BBC production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, causing the director to take a wild chance on a physically imposing but still largely untested Scotsman. Connery put in countless hours of practice learning his lines and molding a serviceable American accent, and when the play appeared on TV reviews were good. In the wake of this success, Twentieth-Century Fox’s British office signed the twenty-seven-year-old to a studio contract. which Connery would later say was akin to “walking through a swamp in a bad dream.” Over a period of years Fox didn’t use him in a single project, choosing instead to occasionally loan him out to other studios for a quick buck.

Terence Young, who would direct three early Bond films (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball), remembers working with the young Connery on an early movie shoot. “He came to me and said in that very Scots accent of his, ‘Sir, am I going to be a success in this?’” Touched by this display of hopeful innocence, and impressed by his raw if unfinished talent, the director leveled with the struggling actor: “No — but keep on swimming. Just keep at it, and I’ll make it up to you.”

And that’s exactly what Connery did, acting in whatever films Fox loaned him out for. One day, on the set of Another Time, Another Place (1958) co-starring Lana Turner, her notorious hoodlum boyfriend Johnny Stompanato stormed the set and began waving a gun at the Scotsman, threatening to pump Connery full of holes if he should touch the legendary beauty. In an instant the Big Tam of old roared to life, leaping out of his chair like a panther, twisting the gun away, and sending the gangster flying with a wallop to his nose. Still later Connery would star in the one high-point of his Fox contract: Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), a performance made possible by a timely loan-out of the actor to Disney. The film was the usual Magic Kingdom success (Connery’s rendition of “Pretty Irish Girl” was even released on the radio as a single), and ultimately it would become an instrumental stepping stone to Bond.

Throughout the Fifties various parties had optioned the rights to James Bond, but all of those efforts resulted in nothing more than a single, mediocre 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale. It wasn’t until the early Sixties that a pair of aging, on-the-rocks movie producers named Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman made the whole thing work. Crucially, after negotiating the rights, they hired Terence Young as their director. Soon after getting the gig, Young attended a play in England and noticed that one of the muscular figures up on stage looked familiar. It was that kid — Sean what’s-his-name — who had so impressed him years earlier. Remembering his old promise to give him a boost someday, the wheels started turning: could this fellow possibly handle the Bond assignment?

He mentioned Connery to Broccoli, who did his own research by taking his wife to see a reissue screening of Darby O’Gill. When she began panting over the actor’s raw sex appeal, the producer’s interest was piqued. One meeting later and Connery had the job. “He bounced across the street like he was Superman,” marveled Broccoli about their first encounter. “He moved like a cat. That did it for us. Harry and I both said, ‘This is the guy.’”

“We’d never seen a surer guy,” Saltzman added. “Or a more arrogant sonofabitch!” Connery later explained that he deliberately gave off that impression during their initial confrontation. “My strength as an actor, I think, is that I’ve stayed close to the core of myself, which has something to do with a voice, a music, a tune that’s very much tied up with my background experience.” That voice, that music, harkens back to the mean streets of the Edinburgh slums, when a muscled kid named Big Tam once faced down gangsters and gained the respect of the neighborhood.

The execs at United Artists weren’t convinced by Broccoli and Saltzman’s enthusiasm, cabling them back from America with a curt request to “See if you can do better.” But the minds of the two producing partners were all made up. “Put a bit of veneer on that tough Scottish hide,” Broccoli promised, “and you’ve got Fleming’s Bond instead of all the mincing poofs we had apply for the job.”

The “bit of veneer” was provided by director Young, a man of fine tastes and manners who took Big Tam under his wing and taught him how to act sophisticated. Young decked Connery out in the finest clothes from Savile Row using his own tailor, and continually coached the actor in the nuances of creating a polished performance (“Sean, do keep your mouth shut while chewing your food!” “Tone down that bloody Scottish brogue!”). Soon Connery was looking and acting the part, to the point where movie critic Pauline Kael would gush that, “Connery looks absolutely confident in himself as a man. Women want to meet him and men want to be him. I don’t know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much.”

Although the transformation sent the movie’s producers over the moon, the character’s creator took a bit more convincing. “I don’t think [Ian Fleming] approved of me terribly,” Connery later said. “But he did have casting rights over the film, so I guess he must have come round to the idea.” Fleming initially dismissed Connery as “that laborer playing Bond,” but once the first few films were successful he changed his tune, going so far as to adopt Connery’s Scottish background for the Bond of the books.

For those of us who wish Connery could have played Bond all the way up to the present day, the way his participation in the series ended was unfortunate. Compared to what Broccoli and Saltzman were making, Connery’s share of the burgeoning 007 pie was small, with only a fixed salary and a bit of profit participation to offset all the hell that Bond’s fame was playing with his life. Meanwhile, his image was being used on all manner of merchandise (toys, cars, aftershave — hundreds of products in all) without him getting so much as a cent for it:

I was paying 98% tax. I was making all this money and making movies and I had nothing. . . . Basically I’m a private person, and the Bond producers wouldn’t let me be that. I’d work six days a week, all day, with much of the work physical, then have to spend every free moment answering stupid questions like, “Do you like to beat people up? Slap women around?”

As the character’s popularity reached insane levels with the release of Goldfinger, Terence Young (slated to direct Bond’s next adventure, Thunderball) sensed Connery’s dismay with his stardom, and advised the producers that they would be wise to take the actor on as a full partner. “He’s a Scotsman,” Young argued. “He likes the sound of gold coins clinking together. He likes that lovely soft rustle of paper. He’ll stay with you if he’s a partner, but not if you use him as a hired employee.” Broccoli and Saltzman rejected the idea out of hand. In their opinion, Connery was getting more than enough for his trouble, and could be replaced fairly easily if needed. “All I ever did to Sean Connery,” Broccoli later said, “was make him an international star and a very, very wealthy man.”

Insulted by their stinginess and tired of the demands put on his time and life, Connery would grudgingly finish out his contract with Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967), then after a one-film hiatus commit to a final movie, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), so that he could donate his million-dollar paycheck to charity. But even as he appreciated what 007 did for his career, he left the fold with bitter feelings towards the two producers who, in his judgment, got filthy rich while he did most of the heavy lifting. “I’ve been screwed by more people than a hooker,” he said in disgust at the end of his run with the Broccoli outfit. “Bond’s been good to me, but I’ve done my bit. I’m out.”

And except for thumbing his nose at his erstwhile employers with the non-Broccoli-produced Never Say Never Again (1982), he’s stayed out. Like another veteran actor, Gene Hackman, Connery retired almost a decade ago and hasn’t looked back. He now spends his days enjoying “golf, food and drink,” that first item being a passion developed in 1964 while training for Bond’s epic match against The Man With The Midas Touch in Goldfinger.

Decades after his own stint, Connery was asked whether he had any advice to offer the then-new Bond, Timothy Dalton. His answer was only half-joking: “I hope he has a good lawyer.”

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at (and a listen to) the iconic music of Goldfinger.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Sean Connery: Neither Shaken nor Stirred by Andrew Yule. (Also published as Sean Connery: From 007 to Hollywood Icon.) The world is chock-full of Sean Connery biographies, even though he’s kept pretty mum about his personal life in the decades since he gave up being Bond. I found this one to stand out above the rest by virtue of its anecdotes fueled by superior research and original interviews.

Sean Connery singing “Pretty Irish Girl” in Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959). This great live-action movie is of a kind that Disney gave up making long ago. Judge for yourself whether Cubby Broccoli’s wife was right when she thought that ol’ Big Tam displayed here the requisite sex appeal for his future role as James Bond.

Barbara Walters vs. Sean Connery! Watch Walters ambush Connery in typical leftist sneak-attack fashion, pitting her practiced feminist high dudgeon against his relaxed masculinity. Will he crack under the withering disapproval of this liberal-news-network Lady Macbeth? Or will he end up, in typical Bond fashion, “Neither Shaken Nor Stirred”?

Sean Connery — AFI Award Tribute. A nice 2006 career-capping speech from a class act.

My interest was piqued even more after reading John Nolte’s post about the New York Times review of the show. Apparently, reviewer Ginia Bellafante had a hard time appreciating the foibles of a family who try so hard to be perfect in how they live and how they relate to their black neighbors that their lives become highly stressful.  To quote The Times:

But the show feels aggressively off-zeitgeist, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s when it was still possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. But who really thinks of wind power – an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show – as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?

I guess Ginia didn’t read about the increasing numbers of Americans who believe that the global warming hype is exaggerated. And regardless of whether they believe it’s true, global warming is currently at the bottom of the list of Americans’ priorities. Poor Al Gore – time for another documentary to hype the masses.

That statement also made me think of the now famous quote by elite Manhattanite and New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael after Richard Nixon’s sweeping presidential victory in 1972: “I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” Maybe like Pauline, Ginia needs to get out a little more.

As my husband and I watched the show with our 16-year-old daughter, he told her, “Your mom and I were like that back in the ’90s.” To a certain extent, it was true. We used cloth grocery bags, we were vegetarians (but not vegans), we voted Democrat and saw Republicans as evil incarnate, and drove a Geo Metro, all the while patting ourselves on the back for being so caring and progressive. I even had Greenpeace checks, with a portion of the fee to buy them going toward the organization (shudder). My husband mowed the lawn with a no-gas lawnmower, huffing and puffing as he pushed. One of our neighbors, often when he’d been enjoying a beer or two, would hop on his rider mower and mow our lawn for us, laughing at us – in a good-natured fashion, of course. (When we returned to hilly New England from the flat Midwest, that people-powered mower went the way of the dodo pretty quickly.)

So as my husband and I laughed at the Goode Family, we were also laughing at ourselves and how self-absorbed we were at one time about being “good.” The reason for our “transformation” is fodder for another article at another time.

But The Goode Family has laughs for libs too:  In the premiere episode, mother Helen tries too hard to bond with daughter Bliss by being cool and hip when talking about sex. Creeped out, in an act of rebellion, Bliss invites father Gerald to a father-daughter “purity ball,” where daughters pledge to their fathers that they will keep their virginity until marriage. When they realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, Bliss and Gerald make their escape and Bliss admits to her mother that she didn’t belong with “those people” (Christian goody-goodies).

But libs, like reviewers at the New York Times, just can’t get past the fact that one of their core beliefs – global warming – has been snubbed.

And maybe, just maybe, they have a problem with the fact that while both Gerald and Helen Goode are both bleeding heart liberal weenies, Gerald seems to be the more reasonable one: he mentions the importance of tolerance of others’ beliefs and would rather shop at the less-expensive WalMart-like store than the Whole Foods knockoff, while Helen is much more militant about everything. This flies straight in the face of Hollywood sitcom couples today: the husband is a boorish buffoon, often overweight, who couldn’t tie his shoes much less hold down a job were it not for his wonderful, bright, sexy, witty wife who almost always manages to save the day.

How dare they make a woman look bad?

Overall, the show was fun, and I plan to give it another shot next week.

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.

The film was highly successful with audiences, making Bronson a big star and inspiring several sequels. Critics hated it.

Both reactions were caused by the same thing: the film’s uncompromising truthfulness. Death Wish marked the death of liberal illusions about crime and punishment: the idea that crime is caused by disadvantageous social environments and that the solution is to pour even more taxpayer money into bad neighborhoods in an attempt to buy submission from the poorer elements of society.

Death Wish showed that process to be an absurd sham. The film, based on a novel by Brian Garfield, clearly showed that giving in to such political extortion was making social conditions worse and exacerbating the nation’s already terrible crime problem.

Death Wish and its sequels refused to sugarcoat the villainy of the criminals the architect Paul Kersey pursues, nor did it state that he was justified in what he was doing. It simply showed the characters doing what they were inclined to do, making their choices and following the consequences. Such truth was impossible for Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and other elitist critics of the time to stomach.

As direct and truthful as Death Wish is, it is not simplistic or political, despite the ravings of critics at the time. It is a story that was all too plausible, and the characterizations and situations were accurately and insightfully portrayed.

In the years since its release, Death Wish and its sequels have received some of the positive reconsideration they deserve—long after I wrote a lengthy article defending Death Wish, Dirty Harry, and other vigilante films in Chronicles magazine in the mid-1980s.

AMC will show the film several times in the coming days; click here for a synopsis and schedule, and click here to have AMC send you a reminder to watch it.

Death Wish: Highly recommended.