NFR Project: 'The Naked Spur' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The Naked Spur”

Dir: Anthony Mann

Scr: Sam Rolfe, Harold Jack Bloom

Pho: William C. Mellor

Ed: George White

Premiere: Feb. 1, 1953

91 min.

It’s not only one of the great Westerns, it’s flat-out one of the best films made. It also marks the apogee of the collaboration between director Anthony Mann and actor Jimmy Stewart. It’s a tale about greed, vengeance, and the nature of evil.

We are in the (ironically) beautiful and picturesque Rocky Mountains, near Durango, in 1868. Stewart plays Kemp, a bounty hunter determined to capture and bring back badman Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) for the large reward placed on his head. He enlists the help of a prospector, Tate (Millard Mitchell), and an ex-serviceman, Anderson (Ralph Meeker). Kemp’s motivation is disguised at the beginning; we only learn that he is not a lawman and that he is after the reward when Vandergroat, captured, tells the others.

Vandergroat is a role made for actor Robert Ryan, who built a career out of playing movie villains and tough cops. Here he is evil itself, working constantly after being caught to divide his captors, sabotaging their efforts and casting doubt about the others’ ability to share the reward money. He is accompanied by Lina (Janet Leigh), a young girl whose father was friends with Vandergroat. She’s on his side, but finds herself attracted to Stewart’s character.

A group of Native Americans soon confront them on the trail. It turns out that Anderson was discharged from the Army for raping a chief’s daughter. The Indians want him dead. Kemp tells Anderson to ride on and keep the rest out of danger, but Anderson shoots the chief from ambush. A fight breaks out, and all the Indians are killed. Kemp gets a bullet in the leg. There is a rueful moment when Kemp surveys the peaceful forest littered with the bodies of the dead.

Kemp survives his wound, but becomes delirious. It turns out that he signed over his ranch to his sweetheart when he went off to fight in the Civil War; while he was gone, she sold the ranch and ran off with another man. Kemp is determined to buy his ranch back with the reward money. Only problem: if he has to share it with Tate and Anderson, he won’t have enough to cover the purchase. The men fight over Vandergroat. “He’s not a man; he’s a sack of money!” shouts Anderson, who’d just as soon kill him as let him live (the wanted poster says “Dead or Alive”).

Kemp, stiff and wounded, endures more setbacks as he struggles to take Vandergroat to the authorities. He overcomes a nasty fall and a rockfall in a cave. Enraged, he dares Vandergroat to draw on him, but Vandergroat refuses.

Now the group must cross a Spring-flooded, rushing river. Vandergroat convinces Tate that he has knowledge of a gold mine that he will trade to Tate in exchange for his freedom. It’s a trick, and Vandergroat shoots Tate down in cold blood. He leaves his body out in the open so that he can ambush Kemp and Anderson.

I will not reveal the film’s climax; it deserves to be experienced as the director intended. Suffice it to say that Mann makes a statement about the commodification of human life and the emptiness or revenge.

The film is achingly beautiful, shot in the clear Colorado air. Bronislaw Kaper's score is top-notch. The script, by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom, is magnificent. Every line relates to the underlying themes, and the tension between the characters is a constantly shifting nightmare. It is not altogether clear that Vandergroat will be brought to justice. Everyone has pecuniary motivations that muddy their moral statures. This is a post-modern Western that deals in adult themes.

Stewart plays his typical Mann Western character – a man obsessed and in torment, working against his better nature. This darker, rougher side to Stewart’s acting would be epitomized in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Roman Holiday.

NFR Project: 'The Living Desert' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The Living Desert”

Dir: James Algar

Scr: James Algar, Winston Hibler

Pho: Robert H. Crandall, N. Paul Kenworthy

Ed: Norman R. Palmer

Premiere: Nov. 9, 1953

69 min.

Oh my God! Disney makes another film that I hate.

OK. A graduate student made a film of two insects fighting. He showed the footage to Walt Disney. Disney came up with idea of making a feature-length documentary about the lives of desert animals. The result is this, a jokey tour through the American desert environment and a profile of its denizens.

As is usual, Disney anthropomorphizes everything, even mud. The filmmakers built glass cases and put various natural enemies together in these environments, and filmed the conflicts. Thus the film is something of a series of cage matches engineered to provide exciting if not accurate footage. A cute musical soundtrack garnishes the film, cueing the audience as to how to respond to the film. Condescending. All the animals are cute and quirky, even the snakes and the spiders. The film is almost redeemed at the end by showing us a montage of time-lapse blooming desert flowers.

This film would prove to be a template for the hundreds of Disney nature films to follow – cutesy-poo writing, jocular narration, and contrived footage. This slap-happy approach to nature film would poison the genre for decades.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Naked Spur.

NFR Project: 'Little Fugitive' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “Little Fugitive”

Dir: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin

Scr: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin

Pho: Morris Engel

Ed: Ruth Orkin, Lester Troob

Premiere: Oct. 6, 1953

80 min.

This film is revolutionary. It flies in the face of feature-film values as codified and exercised by the major film studios of the time. It is a hand-crafted, naturalistic little masterpiece.

Morris Engel was the prime mover of this project, an experienced photojournalist who wanted to make a film in a new way. Redesigning a hand-held movie camera created to be used in combat conditions, Engel wound up with an unobtrusive recording device that was shoulder-mounted, held at the waist, with a viewfinder that one looked down into. This allowed footage to be captured on the sly, without anyone noticing. This means that, in a film filled with milling crowds, every action and reaction of the bystanders was spontaneous and unrehearsed. (He shot in black-and-white, and silent; all the dialogue and sound effects was dubbed in post-production.)

Engel, Ashley, and Orkin came up with a simple story to tell. In Brooklyn, seven-year-old Joey lives with his 12-year-old brother Lennie and his widowed mother in a cramped lower-income apartment. The mother has to go and care for her own sick mother, so she leaves Lennie in charge of Joey for a day. Lennie resents this, and decides to play a prank on Joey. He and his friends convince Joey that he has shot and killed his brother; they tell him to go and hide himself.

Joey takes this very seriously. He goes home and grabs the six dollars his mother had left out for groceries and, avoiding all the policemen he sees, gets on the subway. It takes him to the boardwalk and amusements of Coney Island. There he actually thrives, happily riding rides and eating junk food. Joey is obsessed with horses, and when he finds a pony ride, he yearns to go on it – but he has spent all his money. He learns from another kid the trick of picking up and returning empty glass soda bottles on the beach for money. This he does, and rides over and over, until the pony-ride man asks him who he’s there with.

Joey gets scared and runs away, and ends up sleeping out in the open under the boardwalk. His brother, meanwhile, is frantic. He repents tricking his brother and searches for him fruitlessly.

The next morning, Joey wakes and returns to the pony ride. Finally, the pony-ride man tricks Joey into giving him his name and address. He looks up Joey’s phone number and calls his home. Lennie answers, and begs the man to hang on to Joey until he gets there. However, Joey sees the man talk to a policeman, and he takes off again. Now Lennie searches among the crowds at the beach. He spots Joey but then loses him. It’s only when it starts to rain that Lennie finds Joey all by himself, still picking up empty bottles. He tenderly brings him home again.

They get to the house and arrange themselves in front of the TV. Their mother returns minutes later. She thinks they have spent the entire day indoors and promises them that, on the weekend, she will take them to Coney Island as a treat. The brothers look at each other ruefully.

All of the actors Engel and company used were amateurs. There is definitely a script, but the filming is so low-key and natural that the drama appears to be improvised. Engel was a masterful photographer, and the visuals in the film – the gritty streets of Brooklyn, the fanciful confines of Coney Island, the play of the waves on the shore, are all rendered exquisitely. The images are sharp and gorgeous.

The filmmakers easily take us into the mind of the child at the center of the film. He is wracked by guilt, afraid of the cops, but then is easily distracted by pleasures the amusement park affords. In making a movie about ordinary life, the filmmakers seem to have taken a page from the Italian neorealists, who filmed stories about the lower classes and the poor on location with amateur actors. In turn, this film is said to have influenced the directors of French New Wave cinema.

At any rate, the key here is that, with no money, few resources, and a cast and crew of volunteers, Engel, Ashley, and Orkin created a compelling and coherent fiction film – one that can stand up against anything put out by Hollywood. American filmmaking of the time was studio-centered. The idea that you could use film to create your own unique, home-grown stories would lay dormant in the U.S. until the advent of the independent productions, so-called “personal” films, helmed by director/writer/actor John Cassavetes in the late 1950s.

Another of the filmmakers’ great achievements is capturing the look and feel of a certain place and a certain time. It’s New York City on a summer’s day in the early 1950s. The clothes, the manners, the surroundings are all preserved forever. It’s a specificity that generates universal understanding, a sympathy for the kids and the helpful adults who come together to tell this charming little tale.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Living Desert.