NFR Project: 'Winchester '73' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “Winchester ‘73”

Dir: Anthony Mann

Scr: Borden Chase, Robert L. Richards

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Edward Curtiss

Premiere: July 12, 1950

92 min.

Anthony Mann (1906-1967) was a genius.

Although he is best known today for his extensive work with Jimmy Stewart, with whom he made eight films, five of which were Westerns, Mann worked his way up from nothing. He started his career as a stage actor, and worked his way up to the position of director.

In 1937, he went to Hollywood and again, working from the bottom up, graduated into the role of director. He was versatile, but he became first known for his film noirs – T-Men, Strange Impersonation, Railroaded!, and Raw Deal. When a deal to make this movie with director Fritz Lang fell through, Jimmy Stewart picked Mann to helm the film. Mann rewrote the script with Borden Chase, and Winchester ’73 was born. It was the first of his Western collaborations with Stewart.

The idea of the “adult” Western was new. John Ford had always presented Westerns as adult dramas, but by and large Westerns for decades were kid stuff – featuring a white-hatted hero, a dastardly villain, and a damsel in distress. Chases, fistfights, and shootouts were crammed onto the screen.

Then, in 1947, Raoul Walsh made what is considered the first “noir” Western, Pursued. Dark, forbidding, and full of psychological torment, it heralded a shift in the way Westerns were made. Suddenly, the genre could accommodate complexity and ambiguity, and began to address real-life issues.

Winchester ’73 is firmly in this new tradition. Here, Stewart plays Lin McAdam, a sharpshooter in pursuit of the villainous Dutch Henry Brown, for reasons we are not privy to. He and his saddle pal High-Spade (Millard Mitchell) ride into Dodge City, Kansas. Lin finds his prey but can’t shoot him, as all guns in town are confiscated on entry by the sheriff. Both men enter a shooting contest to win a “One in a Thousand” Winchester 1873 rifle. Lin wins, but Dutch Henry ambushes him and steals his new rifle. He and his gang flee town without their guns.

Now the film takes us on an odyssey. The rifle changes hands many times, bringing bad luck and destruction to all who come across it. First, a sharpie, Lamont, (John McIntire) wins the gun a card game. He goes to sell arms to the Indians. There, the chief (a young Rock Hudson) decides he wants the rifle, and casually kills Lamont for it.

The tribe then attacks a troop of soldiers, and the chief is slain. A young trooper (Tony Curtis!) then gives the rifle to another man, who is promptly killed for it by Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea, playing his usual film role of creep, only in Western wear). Johnny hooks up with Dutch, who takes the rifle back from him. Seeking to thwart another robbery by the gang, Lin kills Johnny.

Finally, Lin pursues Dutch into the bare and rocky landscape – and it is revealed that they are brothers. Dutch killed their father by shooting him in the back. A brief but exciting gun duel follows, with the brothers trying to kill each other with ricocheted bullets. Finally, Lin takes aim and nails Dutch, who falls to his death. The rifle has returned to Lion’s possession.

Stewart was playing a new kind of Western hero – a man haunted by past trouble, out for revenge. Stewart’s happy, lovable persona was replaced by something deeper. Lin is bitter, untrusting, obsessed. He refuses to share his problem with others, moving sternly forward in his quest for retribution. In a scene with Dan Duryea, Stewart snaps and dashes Duryea’s head on a bar, twisting his arm and demanding to know where Dutch is. There’s a wild gleam of rage in Stewart’s eye, and we feel how close he is to being overwhelmed by his violent instincts.

Mann’s West is markedly different from the usual setup. It’s dusty, dirty, crowded with characters following their own selfish agendas. Tragic blindness takes a front seat in Mann’s Westerns. Additionally, Mann upped the ante by shooting on location – the players are let loose in the vast empty space of the frontier, where their battles play out on an epic canvas.

Mann took the Western and moved it into new territory.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Strangers on a Train.

NFR Project: 'Sunset Boulevard' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “Sunset Boulevard”

Dir: Billy Wilder

Scr: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshan Jr.

Pho: John F. Seitz

Ed: Doane Harrison, Arthur Schmidt

Premiere: August 10, 1950

110 min.

It’s a monumental story; it’s no surprise it inspired a lavish Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It’s operatic. It’s a noir. It’s a black comedy. It’s a character study.

That a film can do so many things at once is a tribute to its director, Billy Wilder. His ability to distill the exact amount of footage to tell a story richly, serious or comic, is legendary, and he is rightly featured many times in the National Film Registry.

Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece. Richard Corliss called it a horror story; David Thomson notes its irony in that the guy who wanted a Hollywood swimming pool ends up face-down dead in his. There are a host of interpretations of the meanings to be found in Wilder’s film – so much the better for Wilder. The movie welcomes a multiplicity of thoughts, as a great film does.

It’s yet another “movie about the movies” story, about how Hollywood is all fakery and ego. Yet at its heart is a titanically tragic figure, an insane former silent screen goddess whose predatory claws turn everything around into death and waste. Norma Desmond is played by Gloria Swanson, who herself was a “forgotten” actress from the Silent Era, a great star who made millions and ruled as royalty in Tinsel Town.

Swanson here plays the role of her career. Norma is a monster of self-regard, insulated by wealth from reality, living cocooned in her past greatness. She lives in the decayed grandeur of her Hollywood mansion. Her narcissism consumes everyone around her, and into her orbit drifts lackluster young screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden in the first of his trademark “lovable heel” roles. Joe is a hack; he hasn’t sold a screenplay in years, he is behind on his rent, and he refuses to quit the movie business and go back to life as a copy editor in Dayton, Ohio.

Holden narrates the flashback from the afterlife, as his dead body is floating in Norma Desmond’s pool. It seems that Joe pulled in to Norma’s demesne one day, fleeing from men looking to repossess his car. She mistakes him for a funeral director; she is burying her pet monkey. Joe agrees to look over a script she contemplates as being for her big comeback (it is wretchedly awful). Norma is rich; she finds out he’s broke, pays off the landlord, and brings all his stuff to her house. She needs a new pet.

Slowly, Norma starts grooming him, taking him out with her, and eventually – yes, we are given to believe – sleeping with him. Swanson as Desmond is a grotesque caricature of a woman, but there are moments when you can see a ruined beauty in her tortured gaze. It is conceivable that Joe whores himself out, given his cynicism and self-contempt.

Norma is served only by her butler, Max, played by Eric von Stroheim (“the Hun you love to hate!”). Stroheim was a key director of the Silent Era; his comedown to playing a butler was not lost on studio viewers. Max writes fan mail to Norma on the sly, to keep her illusion alive. It later turns out that Max was a great director – and Norma’s first husband. (We watch Norma watching Swanson in Queen Kelly [1929] . . . which was directed by Stroheim! in her private theater.)

Joe’s lifeline to sanity is Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), fellow screenwriter and fiancée of Joe’s best friend. She reviews (and pans) his latest work . . . but then declares she sees some good in it, and proposes that they work on it together. Gradually, they fall in love.

Meanwhile, Norma thinks she is wanted to star in a new film for director Cecil B. DeMille; actually, his production sstaff wants to use her vintage automobile. Self-deluded, she begins planning her big comeback.

Joe starts sneaking out at night to work on the screenplay. Norma finds out and calls Betty. Joe reveals that he is a gigolo, and claims to prefer it. In short, he drives Betty away. He angrily tells Norma the truth – she is a has-been. He then goes to pack and head back to Dayton – and Norma drills him three times with an automatic.

The coda to the film is the most memorable closing scene of all. Norma, now completely insane and surrounded by police, is coaxed down from her bedroom by newsreel cameras she mistakes for DeMille’s crew. Down the stairs she floats like a ghost, with a leering rictus of a face. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” she says. And walks straight into the camera as the vision of her face diffuses.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Winchester ‘73.

NFR Project: 'In a Lonely Place' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “In a Lonely Place”

Dir: Nicholas Ray

Scr: Andrew P. Solt, Edmund H. North

Pho: Burnett Guffey

Ed: Viola Lawrence

Premiere: August 1950

94 min.

“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived for a few weeks while she loved me.”

The French have a phrase for it: amour fou, crazy love, love that makes no sense and leads nowhere. Ostensibly a film noir, this movie is a treatise on dysfunction and obsession, the portrait of a potential murderer, an epic emotional tale for an unlikely heroine.

The protagonist is nominally screenwriter Dixon Steele, played by Humphrey Bogart near the end of his era of plausibility as a romantic lead. Dix is a down and out storyteller who hasn’t written a successful movie since before the war. He is caustic, cynical, temperamental, morbid. We are told he broke a woman’s nose. In short, he is a jerk.

He’s supposed to read a book for adaptation as a screenplay. He gives it to the hat-check girl to read. She reads it, and purports to tell him the story. He suggests they go to his place. They do, she does. Nothing unseemly occurs. The girl leaves, headed around the corner to a cab stand.

The next morning, it is revealed that the girl was murdered. Dix is a suspect until a neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), testifies to the cops that she saw her leave his place alive, and that Dix was in after that. Dix thanks her, and the two fall madly and immediately in love. Suddenly, they are blissfully together, and Dix is writing better than he has in years.

But Dix feels he is being watched. He lashes out as random people, to the degree of nearly smashing a man’s head in with a rock. His erratic behavior begins to disturb Lauren. She is terrified, and reluctantly accepts his proposal to marry her – right away. She plans on leaving him, but he catches her on her way out and strangles her. “I can’t live with a maniac!” she screetches.

Suddenly, the phone rings. It is the police; the real murderer has confessed. Dix is off the hook. But as Laurel says, “It doesn’t matter now.” It’s over. Dix slinks away, down her stairs, out through the entrance of their apartment building. Laurel has narrowly avoided death at the hands of her lover.

Bogart plays a true villain. Supposedly this kind of behavior was acceptable when you were a hard-drinking cynical screenwriter after the war. Dix has a friendly relationship with the policeman in charge of the case, Sgt. Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), who refers to him as “major.” Obviously, Dix was in the fighting. Still, his nasty temper and suspicious mind poison the miraculous-seeming romance that ignites him and Lauren.

It’s only Ray’s fourth film, but he already infuses the story with a weary fatalism that would pervade his later On Dangerous Ground¸Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause. Ray gives his actors room to breathe here. We develop our understanding of them just as they do of each other.

Ray takes the full measure of Bogart’s character, and gently moves him from hero to heel as the picture progresses. Gloria Grahame is at her most beautiful and empathetic here (Ray obviously loved her, though their marriage was dissolving at the time), and she gets to play at three-dimensional character -- a thoughtful young aspiring actress who falls for the good she sees in a needy and dangerous man. Dix smothers Laurel with attention while he displays his distrust of her. It’s a no-win situation.

The original script called for Laurel to be killed. Ray changed it, not wanting to go for the obvious ending. In this way, In a Lonely Place persevered as a story of two people fated to find each other for only a short time. In an instant, loves shatters in front of our eyes.

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