Reeling Backward: "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970)

After essentially blowing up the Western genre, what do you do next?

In the case of Sam Peckinpah, coming off the divisive glory of "The Wild Bunch," which was excoriated for its brutal violence, you make a silly -- yet slyly consequential -- comedy like 1970's "The Ballad of Cable Hogue."

A casual observer of Peckinpah would be hard-pressed to even recognize the filmmaker's fingerprints on this gentle, life-affirming movie starring Jason Robards as a desert hermit who builds his own oasis in between tumbleweed towns. But they are there, including a general pessimism about the ability of the individual to conform to the strictures of society, and a sober realism about the usefulness, and misuse, of violence to address conflicts.

A big flop at the time, "Cable Hogue" essentially ended Peckinpah's career as an auteur. From there on out, he became a hired gun brought in -- usually reluctantly, due to his well-earned reputation for drunkenness and absenteeism on the set -- to work on prepackaged studio projects. But the movie has come to be reevaluated over the years and found new admirers, including myself.

Cable Hogue is not your typical Western protagonist, and he's certainly no hero -- at least not a cookie-cutter one. He's illiterate, ill-tempered, a skinflint to barter with, and seems to prefer the sun-baked company of lizards and rattlesnakes to that of most people. In the opening minutes he's even revealed to be a bit of a coward, declining to shoot his back-stabbing gold mining partners when he has the drop on them.

Yet Peckinpah and screenwriters John Crawford and Edmund Penney (plus an uncredited Gordon T. Dawson) delve deeper into Hogue's dust-caked, odorous personage and find a well-hidden nobility. Cable may be uncouth but he's not dull-witted; he's stubborn but capable of self-reflection and change; and he's intrinsically invested with enough pride to demand respect from those who would laugh at him -- which is pretty much everyone he meets, at least initially.

The movie is a celebration of a seemingly ordinary man who demands that he be accepted as he is, prodigious faults and all. He will make his own rules and abide by them, as will those who wander into his tiny two-acre domain. And he will never forget himself and dream of becoming something other than what he is.

In short, he is Cable Hogue, he is a man, and he will not be denied.

The story begins with those scheming partners, Taggart and Bowen (Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones, respectively), betraying Cable and leaving him in the desert to die without a drop of water or any possessions beyond the clothes on his back. Near death, he communes with the Lord, giving his feeble life over into His hands, and is rewarded by stumbling across a tiny water hole in the middle of nowhere.

Actually, the hole -- soon expanded into a well -- is right along the stagecoach route to the town of Deaddog. Cagey Cable reasons that having a place to stop and water horses will prove valuable to parched travelers. He refuses the offer of a lift into town and sets up shop, though his first transaction doesn't go so well when the customer refuses to pay the 10 cent fee to drink and Cable is forced to shoot him dead. But the miscreant has enough money in his pockets to secure the deed to the land, and Cable is officially in business.

His second customer is a mite better, the lecherous Reverend Joshua Sloan (David Warner), who sees the descended light of heaven in the curves of the female form, and is always ready to lay his gentle ministrations upon their quivering flesh. He wears a reverend's collar that can be turned around to become a gentleman's tie, depending on need and circumstance. Josh soon becomes Cable's confidante, assistant and needler-in-chief.

The heart of the story lies in Cable's initial visit to Deaddog to secure his claim and grubstake to build something out of nothing.. Laughed at by the town children, thrown out of the stagecoach office when he offers to sell half the deed to his land for $35, Cable runs into a pair of friendly faces that brighten his perpetually sour mood.

The first is Hildy (Stella Stevens), the preternaturally pretty town prostitute who kindly directs Cable to the proper destinations he seeks (since he can't read the signs) and rewards him with a backward glance or two. With her painfully thin waist and incongruously heaving bosom and ample hindquarters -- which Peckinpah's camera lingers over, again and again -- Hildy looks like a caricature of every female character in every Western ever made. She's sweet-natured but ambitious, mercenary but generous of spirit (and flesh). Hildy looks upon Cable with pity, which he interprets as affection, and to her surprise her feelings do eventually evolve in that direction.

The other kind encounter is with Cushing (Peter Whitney), the local banker who, like seemingly every banker in a Western, resembles a cross between a walrus and an owl. Cable barges into his office and starts rambling about how the world has wronged him, and they quibble over the meaning of "collateral," and if Cable has something of value to secure a loan.

Halfway out the door, Cable turns back and gives Cushing this look that is just an ocean of emotion and meaning -- pain, anger, regret, confusion, despair, neediness. Honestly, it's probably my single favorite moment of Jason Robard's career. The words that follow are almost beside the point:

"Well, I'm worth something, ain't I?"

In every other movie you've ever seen, the penitent man walks away rebuffed, and the unctuous official returns to his paperwork. But Cushing is genuinely moved and offers Cable $100 to start his business. He later makes sporadic visits to Jackass Flats, now redubbed Cable Springs, to check on his newest customer. In one sojourn, Cable is moved nearly to tears to receive an American flag designating his outpost as an official stop on the stagecoach line.

Most of the second half of the movie is taken up with romance. Joshua becomes enamored with a town woman whom he thinks has just been widowed, until her huge husband shows up in a huff. Hildy is thrown out of Deaddog by the burgeoning Bible-thumber movement, and opts to shack up with Cable (he has built himself a shack by this time) before lighting out for San Francisco. Her plans are to marry a rich man, preferably old or frail, and become "the ladyiest damn lady you ever saw!"

The love between Cable and Hildy deepens, but she is too set in her plans to remain, and he too focused on his little empire to go. That, and Cable has an ulterior purpose. He figures that if he remains in one key spot long enough,  Taggart and Bowen are bound to stumble across it and he can exact his revenge.

This actually does come to pass, but plays out in a completely different way than you'd expect of a Peckinpah film. It soon becomes clear that though Cable did have a score to settle, it was not with his erstwhile partners but with himself. Having failed to live up to his self-image of manhood, he cannot complete his journey until he proves to himself that he can pull a trigger when he has to. Having done so, his bloodthirst leaks out of him like sweat in the hot sun, and is consumed by the insatiable, uncaring desert.

The ending of "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" is a little too quick and gimmicky for my taste. I often feel that filmmakers kill off their main character because, having completed his or her personal quest, they don't really know what else to do with them. Personally, I would've liked to known if Cable Hogue, the humble but defiantly self-made man, could've stuck it out as Hildy's nicely creased arm candy.

Reeling Backward: "Time After Time" (1979)

Sigh. After my recent attempt at revisiting the time-traveling craze of the late 1970s and early '80s led me to watch the wrong movie, the mushy romance "Somewhere in Time," I thought I'd circle back and watch the movie I meant to see: 1979's "Time After Time." This film, which came out a year earlier, promised to be more of a straight action/fantasy than a kissy-kissy story.

Alas, it was another disappointment.

This was the debut feature film of director Nicholas Meyer, a novelist who segued into movies as a screenwriter. He would go onto a distinguished career, including directing "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," universally recognized as the best in that series, and the sixth Trek movie, which was pretty good, too.

His screeningwriting career has outpaced his directorial efforts, with other notable script credits including "The Informant," "Sommersby," "The Prince of Egypt," the under-appreciated "The Human Stain," and "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," based on his own book, for which he received his only Oscar nomination.

I saw "Time After Time" as a kid, and remembered as being a much darker film. It's a fanciful story about writer H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper through time using a machine he built. David Warner made a lasting impression as the gentleman serial killer, but Malcolm MacDowell as the protagonist is something of a wet blanket -- a socialist dreamer who's disappointed that the future hasn't turned out to be the workers' utopia he'd imagined.

The premise, of course, is a total lark. The story is set in 1893, when Wells was 27 and had yet to write any of his famously futuristic novels. The first, of course, was "The Time Machine" in 1895, and the idea is supposed to be that Wells got the notion for his writings by traveling 86 years into the future. Never mind that Wells wasn't a scientist, and couldn't have successfully built a toaster oven, let alone a time-traveling machine.

But even if one swallows the time-traveling thing, not to mention the idea that Wells' best friend was secretly The Ripper, the story -- based on a novel by Karl Alexander -- just doesn't do all that much with the premise. Jack (actual name: Dr. John Leslie Stevenson) realizes the coppers are about to nab him, so he jumps into Wells' machine and dashes off to 1979. (Why he chose that date, other than it is the same year the movie came out, remains a total mystery.)

Fortunately, Wells designed the machine with an auto-return function that automatically brings the gizmo back unless one has a long reddish wand-key. He goes after John, making sure to stuff his pockets with money before the trip.

The biggest downside of the movie is that it focuses too much on the stuck-out-of-time aspect rather than the conflict between the two men. When Wells does finally catch up with John, he simply knocks on his hotel room door and demands that the killer return with him back to 1893 and face the authorities. Only a simpleton would expect a man responsible for dozens of murders to comply, so it's no surprise when John assaults Wells and dashes off.

Instead, the plot focuses too much on Wells' romance with Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen), a modern liberated woman who more or less throws herself at Wells. ("I'm practically raping you," she exclaims when Wells hesitates when their first date ends up with them in bed.) Needless to say, The Ripper soon focuses his ire on her, building up to the inevitable showdown, and of course the predictable moment where Wells has to tell Amy he's a time-traveler, which puts a kink in their sex life.

Given my reaction to "Somewhere in Time," one might reasonably conclude that I'm simply anti-romantic. I don't believe that's true, but I do object when movies brazenly introduce a character, usually a woman, into movies that don't require a romantic angle.

"Time After Time" is about hurtling oneself through the fourth dimension, experiencing gobsmacking culture shock and (in Wells' case) profound disappointment, while chasing the most infamous killer in history. That's not enough to build an engaging tale around? Why does there have to be a girl?

I should also mention that the movie romanticizes Jack the Ripper by turning him into a standard-issue killer who slits women's throats or stabs them in the torso. Though there is one moderately gruesome scene where the police find a body they think is Amy's, including a severed hand. That's curious, since John is always show favoring small, scalpel-like implements -- it'd be pretty hard to lop off a whole limb.

In reality The Ripper was the gruesomest of murderers, not just killing prostitutes but disemboweling them, removing the uterus or other organs, stuffing foreign objects in their mouths or body cavities. People who kill like that do so out of a fetishistic obsession, and we never really see why John is so obsessed with his bloody trade.

Warner's still a hoot, penetrating the screen with an icy stare. I also enjoyed the transformation of John from a three piece suit-wearing Victorian gent into a 1970s dude with a hippie flair, including one denim jeans-and-vest outfit, complete with large square sunglasses, that was probably considered quite fashionable at the time.

Yet another reason why, despite some terrific filmmaking, I still think the '70s represents the cultural nadir of America.

2 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Tron" (1982)

"Tron" is at once a supremely silly movie and a groundbreaking one. Watching it nearly 30 years on it's hard to think that Disney saw it as anything other than a merging of "Star Wars"-style science fiction with the rising video game craze -- more market convergence than artistic endeavor.

A simple metric I use to measure the impact a film had on me is how much of it I remember years down the road. The less that sticks with me, the less it mattered in my cinematic life. And I have to confess that I remembered virtually nothing about "Tron." When I saw the trailers for the sequel, "Tron: Legacy" coming out this week, I was mystified by references to Flynn and CLU and Master Control Program.

And yet, for millions of others, "Tron" has endured.

Its special effects, which frankly looked chintzy back in its day and appear comically simplistic now, still represented the first major Hollywood film to employ computer-generated imagery, or CGI, on a large-scale basis. Yes, it was crude stuff, but it was the first stumbling steps of a whole new realm of filmmaking technology.

"Tron" is best seen as the maiden voyage of an expedition that has led us to wonders like Gollum from the "Lord of the Rings" movies and "Avatar."

Hey, Christopher Columbus' ships were leaky deathtraps that took months to cross the ocean, but they got him where he needed to go.

Watching it again recently, it was much better than I remembered. It's still a somewhat dimwitted kiddie flick, but is still enjoyable in a schlocky kind of way.

The thing that most stood out for me is that the title comes not from star Jeff Bridges' character, but from Bruce Boxleitner's. Bridges plays Kevin Flynn, a talented young video game designer ousted by the mega-corporation Encom. It seems the boss, Ed Dillinger (David Warner), stole several of Flynn's game designs and now he's hacking into the system in search of proof and a payday.

Alan Bradley (Boxleitner) still works at the company, and has come up with a security program that will not only protect their system, but also serve as watchdog over the Master Control Program, or MCP, to which Dillinger has turned over an increasing amount of control. Master Control, as is the wont of all 1980s computers, grows sentient and moves to eliminate the interference of those pesky humans.

The cleverest conceit of writer/director Steve Lisberger's script is having all the principle actors play dual roles inside the computer world. Here, all computer programs are thinking individuals who want to carry out their intended functions, only to have them blocked or usurped by MCP. The concept of humans or "users" creating and controlling them has been forbidden, and those who persist in believing thusly are treated as part of a cult.

I also loved that everything there happens on computer time -- which is to say, very very fast. Someone refers to something deep in to the future as being 200 nanoseconds away. The long, evil reign of Master Control began earlier in the same humans' day, when Dillinger shut off his programmers' access.

Boxleitner, of course, plays Tron, who is something of a resolute knight-errant, questing to restore faith in the Users. Flynn's hacking program is Clu, which was captured by Master Control and "de-rezzed" early in the movie. Then Flynn himself is atomized by a laser and transported into the computer world, where as a User he finds he has certain god-like powers to manipulate reality.

Warner had three roles: Dillinger, the voice of MCP, and as Sark, the evil general who carries out its orders. Master Control is Sauron-like, an unmoving entity who wields great power despite being little more than a disembodied voice and face.

Warner has a great, laughable line where they're trying to break through a force field in pursuit of Tron, and he turns to his henchman and shouts, "Bring in the Logic Probe!" For pure '80s cheese, this dialogue rivals "No! Not the bore worms!" from "Flash Gordon."

Cindy Morgan plays the love interest of Alan, Flynn and Tron. Flynn finds that Alan has stolen his girl in the real world, and finds the dynamic replicated in the computer one. As is often the case in movies of this sort, the lead female is completely unnecessary to the plot, and could be written out of the story with little effect.

I was surprised to find that the video game sequences with the light bikes and discuses, which are what everyone seems to remember most about the movie, take up such a small part of it. I still haven't puzzled out the deal with the Recognizers -- those strange, obelisk-like structures that fly around the computer world in search of prey.

I did enjoy "Tron," though it's sort of like my fondness for "Clash of the Titans" -- basking in its nostalgic glow while recognizing the hokiness of its charms.

3 stars out of four