NFR Project: 'Johnny Guitar' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Johnny Guitar”

Dir: Nicholas Ray

Scr: Philip Yordan, Den Maddow

Pho: Harry Stradling

Ed: Richard L. Van Enger

Premiere: May 5, 1954

110 min.

Should you be wary of a Western loved by French film critics?

Both Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut praised this film when it came out. It is a peculiar genre film, one that plays with the hallmarks of the type, turning them inside out and upside down. It is another remarkably idiosyncratic film by Nicholas Ray, who specialized in making movies his own particular way.

The film features two strong female leads, a real departure for the Western. Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a former prostitute who now owns a saloon and gambling house near a small Arizona frontier town. She forgoes frills and lace, and dresses like a man – and a gunfighter at that. Her stern, unmoving features make her a tight-jawed, thin-lipped protagonist.

She supports the incursion of the railroad to the area, setting her against the sentiments of the local cattle ranchers and the sheriff, led by McIvers (Ward Bond). In particular opposition to Vienna is Emma Small (Mercedes McCambriddge), who wants her dead and her saloon destroyed. Into this situation rides Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), a former gunfighter and former lover of Vienna. Bittersweet is their reunion, but he decides to help her out.

Emma blames Vienna’s current lover, the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), for a stagecoach robbery that resulted in the death of her brother. (Supposedly, Emma resents the Kid’s relationship with Vienna as well.) Finally, the townfolk give Vienna, and the Kid and his gang, 24 hours to get out of town.

Vienna goes to the bank to withdraw all her money the next day, planning to leave. The Kid and his gang, frustrated, angry, and broke, rob the town bank while Vienna is there. An enraged Emma, fresh from her brother’s funeral, blames Vienna and leads a posse of men dressed in mourning clothes to kill Vienna, Johnny, and the Kid and his gang. They capture one of the Kid’s men and hang him, and almost hang Vienna, who is saved by Johnny. Emma and her men burn down Vienna’s place.

By hook and crook, the posse finds the gang’s hideout behind a waterfall. They attack, and most of the gang is killed. Emma herself guns down the Kid. Vienna kills Emma. She and Johnny leave town.

Placing women in leading roles subverts the usual horse-opera dynamics. Vienna stands for integrity and reason; Emma is a vengeful Fury, out to destroy anyone who stands in her way. Later film critics have outlined the film’s lesbian subtext – Vienna is a butch hero and Emma, sexually frustrated by her inability to accept her own attraction to Vienna, wants to blot out the object of her affection.

The film sports many of the hallmark names of Western film – Ernest Borgnine, Royal Dano, John Carradine, Denver Pyle, and Sheb Wooley. The shifting psychosexual terrain makes this an oddball kind of feature, one in which the passions and actions are in the purview of the ladies.

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

NFR Project: 'The House in the Middle' (1954)

NFR Project: “The House in the Middle”

Premiere: 1954

13 min.

Oh my God! First, read Kelly Chisholm’s brilliant and funny explanatoryessay at the National Film Registry. It covers all the points I was going to cover! And more!

This is a civil defense film, much like Duck and Cover, which I covered previously and which you can read here. It comes from the birth of the Atomic Era, which affected me personally – I grew up downwind of a nuclear weapons plant, and had an atomic bomb shelter in our basement. You can read that story here.

This is yet another attempt by the U.S. government to instruct and inspire the public by making it seem believable to be able to survive a nuclear attack. In this film (sponsored by commercial interests – the National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association), we are told that keeping your yard and home tidy (and painting it with the sponsor’s product) increases your chances of surviving an atomic blast.

We are shown three miniature houses in the American desert, set up for a nuclear weapons test. The explosion damages all the properties, to some extent. However, the tidy house of the title does not immediately catch fire. Ergo . . .

The 1950s had its own vibe. So many created perfect little lives economically; yet paranoia thrived and ambiguity about America’s dropping of the Bomb plagued us. We had to imagine it as just another weapon – the indefensibility of the act was not yet prevalent. (I had an uncle, stationed in the Philippines, who would have been part of the infantry force attacking the Japanese mainland. He was very happy about the Bomb.)

The Cold War made us go mad. Those “Commie bastards” had the Bomb too, and the freedom of the world was threatened. We stockpiled nuclear weapons and built rockets to deliver them. Fighting Communism was the rallying cry for nationalists, a cry that still echoes today.

The film’s transparent attempt to calm public fears by urging it to conform its appearance and behavior to certain norms is sadly hilarious now. Keep a tidy home and avert annihilation? Such magic feathers we clutched to ourselves at the time.

They monetized the existential despair at the prospect of obliteration.

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

NFR Project: 'Carmen Jones' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Carmen Jones”

Dir: Otto Preminger

Scr: Harry Kleiner

Pho: Sam Leavitt

Ed: Louis R. Loeffler

Premiere: Oct. 28, 1954

105 min.

This film is a real problem. Is it progressive or retrogressive?

Time has not been kind to Carmen Jones. It all started with famous lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II’s desire to modernize Bizet’s famous 1875 opera Carmen. (The opera was itself derived from Prosper Merimee’s 1845 novel.) It was Hammerstein’s desire to indicate a contemporary, English-language equivalent of the supposed “hot-blooded” sentiments of the soldiers and the bandits in the old Spain of the opera’s story.

That he did so using Black America is today unforgivable. Mark you, the Broadway show ran for 502 performances. Carmen is probably the most popular and often-performed opera. It seemed like a great idea at the time. This film made money. Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for a Best Actress award at the Oscars – the first time a Black woman had won such a nomination.

It must have seemed like affirmative action to Hammerstein, Preminger, and the rest. To make a feature film in color! In widescreen! With an all-Black cast!

But it’s patronizing. It assumes the Black response to life is fundamentally emotional and unpractical. Every character in this film (except the always-great Pearl Bailey, who, significantly, sings in her own voice) is just a slave to their passions. Which is congruent with Bizet’s Carmen, but here seems to be an excuse for viewing Black people as exotic, untamed, fundamentally alien people.

The movie follows the opera in a contemporary setting. Harry Belafonte is Joe, an Air Force cadet who dumps his earnest, moral girlfriend from back home (Olga James) for the hot-blooded, fiery Carmen (Dandridge). She gets him in trouble; he still loves her. She ruins his life. They intersect with a prizefighter named Husky Miller. He abandons everything for her, then she dumps him for Miller. So he kills her.

The music is Bizet’s, or it is Bizet-adjacent. Dandridge and Belafonte were noted singers: still, they were overdubbed by Marilyn Horne (white) and LeVern Hutcherson (black). The arias that remain are the familiar ones; they are set to lyrics that are overwrought and ineffectual. There is such a desperate attempt here to make "art" here.

The absence of a white person in the film is glaring; the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “This glared like chauvinism in reverse.” You have a gaggle of white people who construct a vernacular for Black people, and then fail to inhabit it. To what? To not “break the spell” of this precocious fantasy? It dies of its intentions. It is exploitative. Would it have been made with a white cast?

Andrew Pulver of the Guardian wrote, in 2007, that the film was “a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks.”

One writer, notably, encountered the film on the page. James Baldwin’s “Carmen Jones: The Light Is Dark Enough” from his Notes of Native Son is a masterful deconstruction of the film. You can read it here.

Baldwin tags the movie as “a wedding of the blank, lofty solemnity with which Hollywood so often approaches ‘works of art’ and the really quite helpless condescension with which Hollywood has always handled Negroes.”

He continues, “ . . . it is important that the movie always be able to repudiate any suggestion that Negroes are amoral—which it can only do, considering the role of the Negro in the national psyche, by repudiating any suggestion that Negroes are not white.”

He describes the absence of white people thusly: “This seals the action off, as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its danger.”

“One is not watching either tenderness or love, and one is certainly not watching the complex and consuming passion which leads to life or death—one is watching a timorous and vulgar misrepresentation of these things.”

“One wonders, it is true, if Negroes are really going to become the ciphers this movie makes them out to be; but, since they have until now survived public images even more appalling, one is encouraged to hope, for their sake and the sake of the Republic, that they will continue to prove themselves incorrigible.”

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 House in the Middle.