Dogs Bark

High-Ridin’ Woman - - Forty Guns (1957) - - 22 January 2010

Strongly recommended. It’s incredible that this was the only movie Sam Fuller made with Barbara Stanwyck.  Forty Guns was pivotal to the Cattle Queen persona she rode into The Big Valley, but this is much, much more. The sexual camp of this film is breathtaking. Stanwyck opens the action on a white horse leading forty bought guns, riding down all comers and lashing Tombstone into submission. This spectacular tracking shot must be seen in wide screen. Barry Sullivan, as a Wyatt Earp knock-off, supplies the film’s real woodwork, artistically and anatomically. Further twisting the gender pretzel is Mistress Barbara in tight black jeans, a sexy lady gunsmith, and two cringing law men (Hank Worden and Dean Jagger). Fuller includes all his signatures, stylized shots, ferocious violence, and weird songs. Photographed by frequent Robert Aldrich colleague, Joseph Biroc (The Flight of the Phoenix), this is Cinemascope at its best!

More Fire For The Horn - - The Road (2009) - - 11 January 2010

Strongly recommended. I guess many of us approached this movie with creeping dread.  It wasn’t the predatory redneck cannibalism. It’s the Hollywood flesh eaters that caused concern. I just shuddered over them slicing up Cormac McCarthy’s masterly fable and dumping Charlize Theron’s lower lip into my popcorn.  But I was impressed.  Yes, the movie is reverent to the book and I dunno how I’d feel without it.  However, I suspect it stands well on its own two feet. Viggo Mortenson has been redeemed (The Appaloosa) with a strong, uncompromising performance, well-matched to kid actor Kodi Smit-McPhee as The Boy. The photography (Basque lenser of The Others and the two Twilights, Javier Aguiressarobe) is not ground-breaking - - just unsaturated and thus, simple and effective.  The tension is tightly wired thanks to cuts by Mike Leigh collaborator Jon Gregory. This is just a very well-made movie. So relax . . . you can come out of the cellar now.

My Little Pony - - The Scarlet Empress (1934) - - 06 January 2010

An essential. Over the course of four years, Josef Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made seven movies together, the most creative and infamous assignations between a star and her director that Hollywood ever saw. The Scarlet Empress was their orgasm. For one thing, it was pre-Hays, allowing Von Sternberg an erotic license from which he did not shrink. The opening montage of tortured, mostly female, flesh is something not seen again until the 70’s. Ostensibly, the story is about the rise to the Russian throne of Catherine the Great but Von Sternberg doesn’t let historical fact obscure his truth. He constructed this feverish dream almost silently. Sam Jaffe’s, eye rolling, giggling depiction of the half-wit Czar Peter III needs no dialogue. Ditto Dietrich, her face is luminous.  Catherine’s mounted ascent of the Winter Palace staircase, accompanied by the Royal Guard, also on horseback, is a spectacular image.

The Children of IBM and Tarzan - - Alphaville (1965) - - 05 January 2010

Recommended.  Twenty-six years after the passing of 1984, is it meaningful to call any movie Orwellian? If you reference a vast, right- or left-wing conspiracy controlling all human thought, I suppose it’s pretty dumb. However, that’s not Jean Luc Godard’s dystopia in Alphaville.  In 1965 and 2010, the self-destruction of individuality and feeling seems more threatening, even to a loopy Marxist, as we invent new technology that simulates, but does not replace, intimacy (like movie blogs). After all, Alphaville is not ruled, its programmed. As he did many times, Godard fronts pop culture as a malevolent, deadening force, effectively resisted only by instinctual brutes like his protagonist Lemmy Caution. The noir/futurist plot of the story is minimalist, boring if that’s important to you.  And we have the usual beeps, random violence and circular dialogue of le mise en Godard.  If you can get past all that, this is a great film.