

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Iguanas and Mustangs


THE MISFITS (1961) was just on TCM and for a big chunk of it I was floored by its poetic train wreck qualities and wondered why Marilyn Monroe's performance is often maligned in snootier film criticism as 'uneven'. It's like a bi-polar character written for a bi-polar actress by her bi-polar ex-husband can't get a break in this town. Now that we can diagnose and prescribe meds for these sorts of problems, the old school booze and tranquilizer self-medication regimen isn't as respected as it used to be, alas. Critics able to recognize her symptoms, and the brilliant parlaying she does bringing her own madness to bear on her character's, are soon tut-tutting and trying to prescribe her lithium rather than savoring her sexy descent. Most of all, it's because it's no longer 'cool' to confront death head-on, like a kid slamming into an oncoming wave with his bodyboard. But death is where madness and marriage are finally reconciled but the 'now' we are in is terrified to look at death, much more terrified than we were back in 1961 when atomic annihilation seemed only a motion away. Death barely factors into 'Big Art' cinema at all, unless it's too have a funeral and scenes of crying while watching old home movie loops of some backyard picnic over and over again. Once upon a time, though, unrestricted booze, cigarettes, uppers and downers access helped great white male writers and directors see into the void without flinching. Titans like Huston, Williams, O'Neill, Henry Miller (and --in a pinch--Arthur) could make movies and plays about cowboys that were really about how to face death, about dying and reconciling with fathers before it's too late, knowing full well the next bell tolls for thee. Now, with all these new SSRI prescriptions, we can't even remember where that damn void is much less stare into it.

But hey, man, MISFITS still looms tall, for all its faults, and the last family of wild mustangs roaming the wasteland are a handy catch-all metaphor for chain smoking drunk writers, and their indulgent women (and the gangsters that paw them while you watch helplessly from behind your typewriter). Here, in this Arthur Miller-scripted little chamber piece, Marilyn Monroe is both the cherry atop our collective American dream and its hungover, melancholic morning after. She's the enticing gauntlet that you mortgage your soul to grab. And she's the embarrassment when you come too quick and pass out, waking up feeling cheap and ashamed. She puts up with it all, it's part of the job. But she wants more and Miller digs it. He gets her, recognizes that she's the smartest person in every room, forced to couch her genius in breathy dopiness and to resign herself to being ignored even as everyone drools down her blouse. She's used to being alone in a crowd, exiled by her beauty, as if men--being rendered stupid by her allure--can't process her words beyond their shape in the wind. Only Gable's cowboy gets how sad she is. That's what wins her over.

Meanwhile, the stand-in for Arthur Miller (MM's newly-minted ex-husband) fumes back on the Reno divorce court steps, watching the cowboys fall over themselves at his once-wife's feet and secretly venting his spleen against them and her inability to fend them off or make her intellect known, the guys tossing him confrontational stares in between flirts, all resulting (or having resulted) in him feeling like he's being cuckolded every time they went out in public. He becomes like Welles cutting off ex-wife Rita' Hayworth's hair and dying it blond for LADY FROM SHANGHAI, a symbolic neutering, a vain (and in-vain) attempt his petulant egoic insecurity. But unlike Welles, Miller sees beyond his own genius far enough to recognize his pin-up ex-wife's mythic potential, and her deep insecurities and wildly-tilting mood swings. Hayworth's character in Welles' film could be played by anyone --it's generic femme fatale material. But for MISFITS, Miller clearly understood Monroe's full mythic American mirage potential and the intelligent would-be beatnik underneath it, and the bravery of trying to escape from her own demons as well as the publics, at the same time. As termite reward he writes for her these devastating one-liners that become private jokes between herself and maybe us if we're really listening rather than just drooling in the dark. Even if the rest of the world dismisses her quips as 'idiot savant wisdom' she at least has saved herself, the way Prospero saves himself from potentially infected late-coming party guests in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.  




















Thursday, April 26, 2012

Idiot Wind of the Locusts: SOYLENT GREEN (1973)










I also wish to further point out the hypocrisy of Heston's outrage over the "big" secret when he's shown to be a remorseless carnivore even when he knows "where" the meat is coming from, i.e. the scene wherein he brings home a pound of confiscated fresh beef to Edward G. Robinson. Old enough to remember when beef was ubiquitous, Robinson weeps when he sees it. No one even mentions, thanks, or says a prayer for that poor "final" cow, who died just so Eddie and Chuck could get a taste of the old world. I wonder if Heston's relatively young cop (who missed out on the heyday of livestock) would get outraged if he knew that the meat was from... you know.... a fellow mammal. I can see him exploring a whole new avenue of indignation: "Beef is.... cows?! Damn you, apes!"

He, you, we, should relax, man. Stress makes people gamey. We all should all agree to put our outraged moral muskets down and admit it: we're fascinated by cannibalism. We secretly, deep down, don't see what the fuss is. We know we've eaten each other in some distant primordial pre-language miasma past, and that we may end up eating each other in the over-populated future, so why not recognize the enemy we're facing isn't our instincts but our own antiquated morality? All those meat sticks starving to death because they'll only eat non-human animals --they're the worst kind of hypocrites. To paraphrase Dylan's "Idiot Wind," we're lucky we can even eat ourselves. After all, nearly ever other species of carnivore probably does it now and again. Sharks do it. Spiders do it. Know what happens to the principled objector to cannibalism in starvation conditions? Yum Yum! The tragedy is that decency prevents us doing it except as a last resort, by which time we're all skin and bones --the worst parts!

But before Chuck's climactic bout with civilization-tanking hypocrisy, SOYLENT offers one of those very touching and legitimately moving sequences that sometimes show up in the darndest of films, even when least expected. This one involving the disillusioned Eddie Robinson's trip "Home." It's the real climax of the film and if you haven't seen it, stop reading here as it could count as an AMBER SPOILER ALERT!

I got this off some Christian blog, hence the hilarious subtitle
When people can no longer take the heat of dystopia there is a nice available option in Soylent Green: 'Home' --a chance to stop out of the claustrophobic grim and into a giant white (air-conditioned!) edifice, a kind of fusion of airport and hospital, that draws the shambling elderly in like the clean white light at the end of a very long and filthy tunnel.

It's no coincidence that once one decides to shuffle off one's mortal coil everything becomes suddenly magical and precious. It's just like when you're tripping and have been having a terrible time, clawing at your tombstone in a third ghost Scrooge miasma, and then you finally realize--in a moment of glorious Xmas morning Scrooge awakening--that you're not actually dead --you're alive! But you're not afraid of dying anymore, either. You get the full picture at last: it's only by relinquishing that which you most love that you yourself become that love. As Glinda says at the end of OZ, "that's all there is" to "home." Thus suddenly, for the first time, it seems, in decades of this old man's life, there is air conditioning, and cleanliness, and nice people, and room to swing a cat.

Seems like heaven. Upon entrance to your special room in "Home," which is just a cool rounded white room with a comfy bed and a rounded full wall screen on all sides of the room, a man and a woman in white flowing robes let you pick the color of the blazing light you want to subsume you, and you get a full 20 minute film to bask in, all around fields of flowers and flowing  blue skies, orange sunsets, and all the wonderful things earth used to have. You lie in bed while the drugs drain the last gasps from your lips and then are free... your now useless corpse gently whisked off to the soylent plant.


Most of all, I wish my dear old granny could have access to an assisted suicide set-up like that one. They won't let her just die in her nursing home and she's fairly healthy for a 97 year-old. She can barely hear or see anymore, and can't walk because of a bad hip, and can't really think straight for long periods ---and she's been that way for 20+ years; but she could be good for another 5 or 10 years. I know she'd at least like to have the option, some button on her remote she could hit that signals a nice trippy out. Her own mom died at 107--and the last 17 years (!) were, as she put it even then, shamefully superfluous. (PS -2017-  my granny finally died --at 102- g'head on, Dorothy - I hope when I see you you're all young and foxy in your WW2 nurse uniform again!)

But anyway, it gets better. Heston shows up at "Home" halfway through Eddie's process and when he realizes it's too late to prevent his going, has to says good-bye to Robinson through the chamber's viewing window. When he realizes it's inevitable Heston pulls out a piece of acting that's so beautiful and touching it contrasts the general misery of the rest of the movie to such an extent we can hardly bear to return.

And turns out there's a reason it's some of the best acting Heston has ever done:

John Nesbitt at Old School Reviews put it this way:







Long Day's Journey into Night (1962)




Monday, April 23, 2012

CinemArchetype 13: The Skeevy Boyfriend

Chris Sarandon - THE SENTINEL (1977)


As a viewer we want to see these guys get their comeuppance, willfully blind to the similarity between how the skeevy guy sees himself (as awesome) and how skeevy we ourselves may secretly look, when we look into a mirror under harsh florescent lighting. Part of this is an older sibling revulsion towards the younger self, still dealing with personally already-excised negative traits. We finally see how unattractive our past behavior must have looked. UGh! the pain.

The skeevy boyfriend represents these traits come back from the repressed, and if one of these murfs steals your girl then you know you've lost something vital in yourself along with all the negative stuff you got rid of. He doesn't correspond to the woman's animus or any other significant constellation of traits and symbols, rather he's like the dust that settles when the shelf is too long empty. And it's empty because you've been waiting to measure up to the woman's animus or a corresponding constellation of traits and symbols before throwing himself up upon it. He wins by default, because he is more able to embody the woman's animus, lacking any genuine spark of ornery originality, the sort that doesn't easily let some girl boss him around and try to turn him into a lukewarm version of her father.

John Cassavetes - ROSEMARY'S BABY

In using the term 'skeevy' for this archetype, I'm blowing it out to mean anyone in the movies who tries to win the girl meant for Cary Grant, the Ralph Bellamy on the bland end, the Sidney Berger on the sleazy end. Anyone who fails to see the difference between the persona required for social and private acceptance, or any dude who buys into the phony promises of the patriarchal sphere, who goes to Bed Bath and Beyond with his girlfriend and doesn't fight with her.

In liking a woman, a real (straight) man wrestles with himself in how to appeal to her; he may hobble  himself trying to fit in with her animus expectations - but the skeeve, never. He has no problem fitting them because he has no real personality to argue with this new enforced one. Thus he flaunts himself in our face with his smug limits. The man with nothing else to do will always be able to make your son's recital while you forgot or are stuck in.. uh... traffic. He's a good provider, and you're not even a good taker. But you're real. 

The skeeve represents our own frailty, our own insecurity, the danger of ever thinking we can 'pass' as cool leads without first knowing ourselves--if not in full, more than we do now. The skeeve is normal humanity's desperate, pleading grin. The girl we like goes out with him almost just to drive us crazy, to impel dissatisfaction with our easy existence. It's the discrepancy of when we see our gorgeous selves in the mirror and then take a picture, and what looks handsome and studly in the mirror looks all washed out, eyes glazed and beady, jawline weak, a pale beer-soaked wastrel of a self, in the pic. How on earth did that happen?




Oscar Shaw and Jack Buchanan--on the other hand--reside in that muddy, hissy and crackly trough between silent and sound cinema; they are both victims of their era's dolty insistence that music hall 'juveniles' should have a big shit-eating grin on their faces at all times. It doesn't help that Buchanan seems quite closeted in Monte Carlo, to the point where every crack he makes about ladies smacks of a vile burlesque of heterosexual masculinity's displays of sexual aggression. As I wrote in 2008, he channels his frustrated desire for men into his aggressive pursuit of Jeanette MacDonald and what's the fun in that?

When Chevalier leers at MacDonald in other Lubitsch films, by contrast, it comes with the sense of his being much-laid and genuinely into her -it being an earlier era, and--being French instead of English, he has no onus to consider his carnality shameful. His is a knowing and enraptured sense of accumulated sexual experience which finds fine challenge in Macdonald's heaving diaphragm virginity. By contrast, to see the way Buchanan looks at Jeanette in Monte Carlo - his ghoulish smile plastered on as if permanently painted--is to see misogynist leering at its creepiest. To a 21st century audience with some idea of gay culture, it's fairly easy to see he's taking out his closeted frustrations playing the straight with all the vile aggression he thinks straight girls want, solely to prove himself "a man" to closeted queer pals Tyler Brooke and a doe-eyed hairdresser hunk (John Roche). When this gay threesome sings "Trimmin' the Women" the double entendres become triples, and the fun dissipates. Buchanan's tenacity as MacDonald's wooer rings like the obsessive stalker's, as when Robert Stack crowds in on Bacall in WRITTEN ON THE WIND, staring at her mouth as if he might suddenly pounce, Renfield-like, at a fly on her lower lip. Imagine Edward Everett Horton crossed with Nosferatu and there's Buchanan - fine in a horror film or as the fey best friend or a fiery Broadway impresario (as in THE BAND WAGON), but not so much as a romantic lead.

At the Criterion Contraption, Matthew Dessler writes of Berger:

3. John Malkovich - Portrait of a Lady (1993)

After the success of The Piano--which even we in the early 90s ecstasy-popping Wetlands-going, Mexican Mud-playing neo-hippie scene saw and talked about endlessly--hopes for Jane Campion's next project were almost as high as we were. Unfortunately Campion went with Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" instead of another semi-deconstructed Jungian fairy tale and she's never made a great movie since.

What was Campion thinking? We all wanted to see an emancipated Nicole Kidman in cute tight deconstructed purple period dresses but we sure as hell didn't want her to throw her newly-won fortune away on John Malkovich as a manipulative aesthete. Malkovich? Really? Just because Barbara Hershey said so? Bald and way too comfortable in his own oversize blouse, Malkovich lacks even the most superficial charm of a Troy Donahue gigolo soliciting money from Michael Corleone via sister Connie. It was like seeing Natalie Portman marry Gollum and watch powerless as she passively lets him spend all her money on trips to Sotheby's ancient ring auctions.

4. Albert Brooks - Taxi Driver (1972)
Betsy: I wouldn't be here if I didn't.

5. British boyfriend in Repulsion (1959)

With a few laddish sneers, a shaving razor dumped rudely into Catherine Deneuve's bathroom toothpaste rinsing glass, a general attitude of entitlement and gross physical presence, this goofus all but leaves a choking musky aftershave smell over the sisters' flat you can feel through Deneuve's rarefied nostrils for days. Imagine Blanche Dubois cranked to Roderick Usher levels of morbid acuteness of the senses (i.e. withdrawal) and Stanley Kowalski, with his animal magnetism swapped out for some garish sideburns, and you have an idea of some of what poor Deneuve goes through at the beginning of Polanski's classic. We barely even see him, but he's a classic 'exhibit A' in the defining of the skeevy beau archetype--his masculine entitlement and unconscious bullying are genre-defining. Between him and Cassavetes in Rosemary's, Polanski does more to illustrate how these guys choke the beauty out of birds than the entirety of Mad Men. 

6. Monroe Owsley (in everything)

Monroe Owsley (pictured with Thelma Todd in a still from CALL HER SAVAGE) will be familiar to any pre-code enthusiast as the “swine” who seduces naive heroines, impregnating and abandoning, blackmailing and tom-catting, dragging innocent girls down with him on his fall, all with a plastered sneer as he leans forward with his weird nose just begging to be punched. He makes Tom Cruise seem humble, makes Richard Gere seem like the Buddha. He makes Sidney Berger seem like Sidney Schorr. He’s cast to make the other guy’s gentle dull decency seem sexy by contrast. He’d do well on match.com vs. me.

Owsley died young in a car accident and manipulative jerks like the characters he plays became less popular as time went on. Was there a coincidence? Or was it that there was no time for cowards when WW2 rolled around, and afterwards? Breen’s code made sure girls were protected from tomcat tricks through sheer innocence and small town racist-cheeked gumption, and by the 1960s there was birth control so no one cared about his propensity to rape and impregnate girls within a stretch of miasmic seconds. Nowadays he'd be that hypocrite senator who preaches abstinence and then fires his assistant for rejecting his married advances two minutes later.


For all its wonders, being a pre-code cinema fan means a good part of your life is spent watching Young or Butterworth or Ruggles bust moves and flatter away and get nowhere with beautiful, usually taller women. It’s never funny (at least to me), but it seems to be necessary as reassurance and/or shading, to highlight the good qualities of the hero by having a schmuck around to keep trying, waiting until--in a fit of pique against the hero's stubbornness--she grabs the 'reliable' 'grounded' bore.  Sometimes these guys do get the girl (Young and Ruggles do all right, and all have a chance with Zasu Pitts or Billie Burke should either be around), but we learn by seeing, and kids like me grow up thinking it’s okay to have short people hit on your wife, because hey, you’re tall and so what? They're no threat, haw haw. And short people learn that they’re meant to be terse and klutzy, insecure and bald and uncouth, and might have a chance if they get rich and classy, but they'll still never get the girl unless the tall guys pass her down. Movies teach us that short people are meant to squirm with longing and gradually turn venomous, after which their Napoleonic codes get so complex that Stanley Kowalski must sometimes be sent in to call a friend of his who knows how read it over.

 8.  Ralph Bellamy

Hey - he's not skeevy per se, nor are many of the actors here, but he's a genius at being the 'safe, sensible' code-sanctioned choice when a bride is wary of Cary Grant or Gary Cooper. We all can imagine a happy and romantic life with either of those two, though peppered perhaps with neglect as they run around having boys' life adventures,  but thinking about a honeymoon with Bellamy, and a lifetime of darning his socks while his live-in mother henpecks and suffocates with doilies under every heirloom lamp, I can't breathe just writing about it. His earnest aw shucksiness is the sort of thing Algonquin wits like Ben Hecht can't resist hurling barbs at ("a home with mother... in Albany, too!") At the root of it all is the danger of a husband never straying from under mom's thumb, and so marrying him just means you're conscripted into his mother's roster of browbeaten subjects. Bellamy remains then stuck in the past era's morality, along with his small-town ma --exhibit A in illustrating the importance of leaving home and rebelling against mater asap, in all things, and for the slightest of reasons.


He's pretty creepy as the 'guide' (This being back in the day when trippers were expected to have them - the experienced but straight friend who can talk to the cops if need be, and coax you down from the ledge, if you get up there, and keep you from drinking paint) maybe messing with Peter Fonda's mind in THE TRIP. If you've "been there" you know the sort. The farther out you get on your trip the stranger he gets, masking what we suspect (but can't be sure since we're so high) are unseemly come-ons with hippy drippage about touch and closeness. Fonda's acid trip really doesn't pick up until he escapes Dern's crazy pad and heads off into la L.A. nocturne. If Dern had his way, god knows where Peter Fonda would have ended up. It sure as well wouldn't have been in bed with Salli Sachs.

In Ashby's undervalued classic,  Coming Home  Dern is an officer in Vietnam, married to Peter's sister Jane, and too boorish and asinine to question the validity of his country's sliding morals. In not doing so he embodies the Beatles' lyric heard in the film: "Living is easy with eyes closed..." His attitude of snickering, unconscious entitlement reminds me of morons I've met while crashing frat parties. His character eventually loses  Jane to Voight and goes for "the long swim" but if only he'd hung around awhile of course, he wouldn't have to worry-- the summer of lovers of the world lost out to the banal conformity and narrow sloppy drives of the Derns by 1981. All you need is love, but for the Derns of the world love is just another word for orgasm and instead of reciprocating with cunnilingus (Jane's big 'O' was heard 'round the world, to the point even I knew about it, via People Magazine in the grocer aisle, as an 11 year-old) going out to high five with the boys as soon as possible.

10. Herbert Marshall in Blonde Venus (1933)




While nosing around for 'Fugitive Kind' shots in my last post, I found a great comment comparing Russ Meyer and Tennessee Williams, since both were of the mind that a man is a failure if he can't satisfy his woman and it's her right to seek a stronger specimen and to keep seeking until she's satisfied. Amen, and that quote (which now I can't find again) would have been perfect for Harris here. In my mind he's the truer villain of the film. Z-Man's anti-lesbian homicidal crack-up aside (which I think was inserted just to answer the demand for misogynistic violence by Ebert's under-laid, tormented imagination).  Just look at that unassuming twinkle in his eyes (above).. he's just not ready for the fast track insanity of the Valley. Hell, he can't even satisfy the unquenchable Ashley St. Ives. And so, to teach them all a lesson, Harris hurls himself from the lighting rigs during a live taping. And somehow in Ebert's twisted fecund mind that kind of behavior should be rewarded! Insane.


A detective prone to smarmy moral high ground posturing, "the human ferret" just wants the brunette to admit the blonde he's hired to catch in a compromised position uses sex to get jewelry. When Jane says "I think I'm in love with that poor slob," and means Malone, you really have no idea why except for the script which was written long before Reid was cast. Just look at his smarmy grin in the pic above. At least Gus, the other moron male--the one chasing after Marilyn-- is inoffensive, a kind of Franklin Pangborn Jr. with owl glasses that fog up when Monroe kisses him--but Reid is unbearably smug and is the sole reason this film isn't one of my top ten favorite Hawks' films. Even now, I see his self-satisfied smirk and my hands involuntarily curl up into fists. Only Norman Foster in Skyscraper Souls beats him out for insufferable pipe-smoking entitlement (and maybe Walter Matthau in A Face in the Crowd).


Max von Sydow's relentless physicality and come-ons with his insane wife seems like both the cause and cure of her malady. At what point does horny husbandly relentless physical neediness turn vile? Is it just that her Lutheran upbringing has made warm physical affection between parent and child so strangled the whole family are all secretly driven to madness, drink, and despair, unable to endure sanctioned contact? Certainly he seems his usual Sydow self in the film's other scenes, but when she's onscreen he starts right back up, driving her over the edge with his needy come-ons. Bergman's made lots of slow but absorbing chamber pieces on his crazy island Faro and they're all classics that get better with each new viewing, but what keeps me away from seeing this a second time is the memory of my man Max suddenly reduced to one of those horny joes who keeps everyone awake at group slumber parties. Meanwhile the guy she really likes is her own shocked younger brother... yikes!

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Tennessee Williams at the Mill of Rubes: THE FUGITIVE KIND


Running a general store in this Nowheresville town, scarred by memories of racist mob violence against her late father (for daring serve drinks to colored people at his wine bar), Magnani stays married to racist invalid Jory, who's all dying and sweaty, and strung out on morphine upstairs, for vague reasons (some long term plan of Elektra-style vengeance gone dormant?). Into all this strained soap and free-floating malice walks wandering troubadour Brando, his snakeskin jacket a symbol of his individuality and his handling of his mama guitar as awkward as a lavender honeymoon. He could have hot mess Joanne Woodward (top), who's never seemed sexier, or more alive, or wilder, more intoxicating, rampaging around town in a cute raincoat with wild platinum blonde hair (we're so used to seeing it pulled back with unflattering bangs, that her sudden sex appeal makes her seem like some whole other being), but Brando prefers glum middle-aged Magnani, thus hinting that his character is not entirely straight. He wants a mother, not a lover. And while he claims to be free, he's so closeted/closed-off that his snakeskin may as well be a strait-jacket. Get it?

It's that kind of stiltedness that keeps Kind from being an A-shelf Williams, something perhaps partially explained by its having spent two decades buried deep in Williams' desk drawer (where it was called Battle of Angels), before he finally exhumed and reconfigured it into something called Orpheus Descending. What a title! What else is Orpheus gonna do? Orpheus Plateauing - now that would be an original title.

It's easy to forget, now that Freud has fallen into disreputability with many snotty academic circles, but the 50s-60s in (white middle class) America was a swingin' time thanks to Freud and the Kinsey Report. The success of Williams' plays, his bridge game buzzword popularity, was bound up in that, the idea of a truly adult sphere of entertainment (as in mature as well as decadent). A whole generation, home from the war, had picked up all sorts of "ideas" overseas and found they'd outgrown their parents' small town moral hypocrisy, moving wholesale into the post-war 'suburban dream.' It was this demographic that ate Williams up, sparagmos-style.

That said, even he'd clearly run out of things to say by the time he dug his old Battle of Angels-cum-Orpheus out of that desk drawer. Who among us hasn't gone thumbing through old work for inspiration when we've fallen into weary writer's blockage? Still, he should have left the Battle alone, he'd already cherrypicked ideas out of it for other plays anyway.

Furthermore, director Sydney Lumet's shadowy noir style seems way too sober and judgmental for the Dirty South. Lumet could be great with small casts where judgment didn't enter in (as with his masterful Long Day's Journey into Night or Dog Day Afternoon). But it's too easy to cast stones in the backwards county where Fugitive unfolds, to make characters grotesque without any real cause. Elia Kazan, by contrast, had a rootsy respect for the uneducated man, a respect Lumet lacks; even Kazan's most murderous rednecks had dimensions beyond the usual stereotype villainy, but Lumet's lynch mob is just raw undiluted evil, set up for us to throw rocks at, with no awareness of the vicious self-perpetuating irony such throwing engenders.

Most glaring of all the problems though, to my mind, is Brando. He's gorgeous, but he's also the most unconvincing, uncomfortable looking drifter/troubadour since Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar (1954), with which Fugitive would make an apt, if excruciating, lavender double bill. Both concern guitar slinging trouble magnets who hook up with middle-aged super-butch saloon/store owners and wind up in the crosshairs of two-dimensional vicious townsfolk who burn said saloon/store to the ground. Oh my god, it's the same damned movie!

The thing that Johnny gets right though, that Fugitive doesn't, is that stock outlaw guitar heroes need to be played by less awesome actors than Brando or Hayden to not seem forced. Musicians are always a little spacey because they're so attuned to the melodic spectrum; their personalities are incomplete without their instruments. Sterling's is just too big a persona to fit into generic guitar-playing drifter outlaw dungarees. Even his crazy generals and anti-semitic war vets have more complexly crosshatched pathos than required in a bearded cipher like Johnny. But Hayden knows one thing: to fade into the landscape as much as possible, to not try to act at all, to dampen his wattage. An even "bigger" actor than Hayden, Brando makes a bad casting choice worse by trying too hard to seem easygoing. Each monologue is practically hung on the wall of the Whitney like an American folk masterwork and I don't mean that as a compliment.

The dialogue wouldn't be bad for a normal writer, but we've already seen this collection of archetypes and deep south incidents before, in better Williams adaptations and better Williams dialogue: Woodward's bleached strumpet was already brilliantly essayed by Carroll Baker in Kazan's Baby Doll and Sue Lyon in Night of IguanaAnna Magnani had already done the horny middle-aged Italian widow in The Rose Tattoo; Ava Gardner stole (and likely improved on) the Magnani role in Iguana; the dying redneck patriarch shivering in the junky morphine prescription heat was done to a turn with breadth and sympathy by Burl Ives in Cat. Jory and his dumb redneck brother have suspicions about our guitar-wearing Brando's orientation, like he's a Skipper who didn't kill himself after he was outed after the big game, but then their jealousy makes no sense. The idea of the virile outside downstairs at the general store, taking over while the local boy fumes, is straight out of Baby Doll or Anthony Franciosa's jealousy over Newman's success in The Long Hot Summer (by Faulkner but similar). But you can't have it both ways, unless you're just ticking off the checklist of Tennessee tropes.



What Brando's 'fugitive kind' doesn't grasp is that beautiful people only trudge through the Dirty South for a reason. Paul Newman understood that in Sweet Bird of Youth --his cocky rentboy is shanghaiing a drunken Hollywood patroness and her Cadillac so he can rescue his hometown sweetheart from her cliche'd Kingfish-y mayor father --and it works because-- though Newman is in some ways even prettier than Brando--Newman the actor knows the way to seem a realistic local boy is to taint his beauty with cocky, needy cluelessness. When an already-perfect demigod puffs out his chest and struts to impress, he suddenly seems faintly ridiculous, and that's why Newman's performance works where Brando's fails. In refusing to show off and betray the insecure little boy behind the bravado, Marlon never quite 'gives' us anything. He's so wise to his own bullshit he barely says an untrue word, which means he barely says anything, just orates a series of trite poetic monologues of the sort Williams realized early on were best kept in a file drawer.




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