Reeling Backward: "A Thousand Clowns" (1965)

There have been 520 films nominated for the Academy Award for best picture (as of this writing), and you would think every one of them is a cherished classic. After all, how many movies that don't get a best picture nod still go on to attain immortal status? If the best picture nominees are, broadly speaking, the best of the best, it seems intuitive that they would be remembered the best as well.

And yet, there are many films that received this distinguished honor that I have never even heard of, let alone seen. I've been making it a point to try to watch all the best picture winners -- by my count, there are nine remaining, the most recent being 1968's "Oliver!". Trying to get to all those that have merely been nominated seems a task worthy enough for a bucket list.

Let's start with "A Thousand Clowns," nominated for 1965. It's the tale of Murray Burns, a burnt-out television comedy writer who quit his job on the "Chuckles the Chipmunk" show in a fit five months ago and seems disinclined to rejoin ordered society. The unofficial ward of his 12-year-old nephew Nick, the iconoclastic Murray is threatened with having the boy taken away by child services unless he agrees to return to work and respectability.

Murray is played by the great Jason Robards, one of those actors made so iconic by his middle-age film roles that it's sometimes hard to even conceive of him as a young man. That's probably because he only got into acting after a naval stint during World War II, starting on the stage and working his way up to Broadway -- where his eight Tony nominations remain a record -- only making his feature film debut when he was sidling up to 40.

Robards starred in the Broadway production of the play by Herb Gardner, which ran for two years, so it was only natural for director Fred Coe to tap him for the film adaptation. It's a vibrant, scene-dominating performance. But interestingly, Robards did not get an Oscar nod himself. Gardner did for his screenplay, as did Don Walker for his music -- a schizophrenic mix of musical snatches, single instruments and random marches.

Martin Balsam, the wonderful character actor known for numerous sidekick roles, from "Psycho" to "Cape Fear" (both the original and remake), won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for playing Murray's brother, Arnold. He actually only has two substantive scenes in the entire movie totaling perhaps 12 minutes, but his rebuttal speech to Murray, defending his status as a well-to-do businessman toeing the line in the middle of the stream, is undoubtedly what earned his award.

He beat out the likes of Tom Courtenay as the dastardly Strelnikov in "Doctor Zhivago" and Ian Bannen as an uppity Scotsman in "The Flight of the Phoenix."

William Daniels has a fun, small role as Albert Amundson, the persnickety child welfare official sent to interview Murray after he predictably fails to respond to any of their letters or phone calls. He's brought along a junior assistant, one Dr. Sandra Markowitz, who is soon revealed to be a recent graduate and also Albert's fiancee. Over the course of the rambling interview, Sandra (Barbara Harris) becomes so disillusioned that she actually refuses to leave with Albert, resulting in the loss of her job and pending marriage.

Murray is not a particularly likable guy, and by that I mean he's kind of a self-important turd. Not only does he think a normal life of work and stability isn't right for him, he's contemptuous of those who do (in his mind) conform to societal dictates. He has a habit of interrupting people while they're talking with deliberately distracting non-sequiturs, trying to leave them confused and uncomfortable. He's quite successful at this.

In a lot of ways he makes me think of a grown-up Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of "Catcher in the Rye," who is endlessly obsessed with how much of a phony everybody but him is. Like a lot of underemployed folks predisposed to philosophizing, Murray is excellent at discerning the faults and foibles of others but does not care to point his high-caliber powers of observation at himself.

In a not particularly convincing turn of events, Sandra camps out at Murray's cramped, disheveled apartment -- which is repeatedly referred to as a "one-room apartment," even as characters walk through doors to other rooms. The two also are clearly inferred to have had sex, in a scene in which Sandra wakes up nude and Murray hands her her clothes behind a partition. Things would soon change with the death of Hollywood's production code, but for 1965 it's still a pretty ballsy scene.

They spend a magical day cruising around New York City, doing quirky things like bidding bon voyage to a departing passenger ship, pretending like they know somebody on board. At the end they are in love, and Sandra urges Murray to clean up his life the same way she's going to clean up his apartment for him.

(For unemployed people, Sandra and Murray appear to have plenty of money for a horde of flowers, new drapes, a new suit and briefcase, trips to the Statue of Liberty, etc. I always hate it in movies when characters are described as destitute and then they can seemingly pay for anything they want without any worries.)

Nick is an interesting kid. Played precociously by Barry Gordon, he's turning into a miniature Murray, cynic and wiseacre, who acts as his wingman and collaborator in making other people feel like fools. Nick isn't even his real name, as his mother (Murray and Arnold's sister) dropped him off as a tyke without even bothering to give him a legal moniker. So Nick awards himself a new name every now and then. Near the end of the film he decides to abandon Nick because, he says, it's a short person's name and he doesn't want to call attention to his stature.

Murray relents and goes to listen to some job offers Arnold has set up, which of course he haughtily refuses -- even slinking out of a lunch while some producer is in mid-pitch. Strangely, the job he has in mind is for Murray to just appear on television as himself, talking about whatever he wants. This would seem to be his dream gig, a venue in which he could tell the world they're a bunch of deluded clowns and get paid handsomely for it.

Instead, Murray agrees to meet with his old boss, Leo Herman (Gene Saks), a pathetic middle-aged man who puts on a furry suit to play Chuckles the Chipmunk for an idiotic kids' show in the Howdy Doody mold. Chuckles seems to exist mostly to sell merchandise, including some potato chips that are described as the worst-tasting in the world.

Leo is taken down by Nick, who tries to be polite for Murray's sake, but finally is honest when asked by Leo if he thinks his shtick is funny. It's the most effective moment of the film, probably because it's a (mostly) innocent kid speaking truth to power, rather than a resentful grown man who regards everyone else as chumps.

I wasn't particularly impressed with "A Thousand Clowns." Its message is muddled -- work is bad? Those who conform have withered souls? -- and its messenger often seems mean-spirited and cowardly. Maybe there's a reason some Oscar nominees are forgotten.

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: "Once Upon A Time in the West"

Over the years, I have heard several people point to the moment near the beginning of "Once Upon a Time in the West" where Henry Fonda guns down a small boy as one of the watershed moments in their cinematic lives.

Here was an actor who had played presidents, generals, fathers, everyday decent men. If there was anything close to a movie star who personified everything that was good and true about American circa 1968, Fonda was it.

And then he shows up dressed all in black and blows away a kid -- and smiles leeringly while he's doing it, too.

Sergio Leone had wanted to make a movie with Fonda for years, and by '68 his "spaghetti Westerns" -- Italian in origin, shot largely in Spain -- had gained enough international respect and box office clout to finally interest Fonda. The actor was getting older (63), his star was fading, so it must have seemed like a good time to flip his career on its head by tackling a sinister, even vile character.

I've also read that Charles Bronson was Leone's first choice to play the "Man with No Name" role in his "Fistful" trilogy that made Clint Eastwood a star. Bronson and Eastwood have much the same onscreen persona in the Leone films -- taciturn, hard-hearted but basically good men who say very little, and let their six-shooters do most of the talking.

Ennio Morricone was, in my opinion, one of the greatest film composers of all time. (I say "was," incorrectly -- in his early 80s, he's still going strong with TV and film scores, including 2007's wonderful and underrated "The Weatherman.") He used all sorts of props and human voices in his scores in addition to orchestral instruments -- think of the signature "ayi-ayi-yah" singing that opens the iconic theme for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

In "Once Upon a Time in the West," each of the four main characters has their own musical cue. For Cheyenne, the cagey bandit played by Jason Robards, it's a sad and sweet ditty with banjos and the sound of horse clops. The melody is done sometimes with a whistle, sometimes a banjo, and sometimes a banjo combined with a tinny piano. I just love how that sound captures the essence of the character. Cheyenne is a hard man who's very protective of his badass image -- mainly so people stay out of the way of his robbing and pillaging. But, as he says himself, even he wouldn't shoot a 6-year-old boy.

For Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), the New Orleans prostitute who arrives in the dusty town of Flagstone to join her new husband, only to find him and his three children shot dead, the music takes on a syrupy tone with lots of strings. Jill is acknowledged by all three of the men whose stories revolve around her to be an extraordinary woman -- in some ways, she's tougher than all of them. But still, as in many Westerns the female characters represent society, stability and comfort, and Jill's musical theme reflects that.

The last two characters' music overlaps to a certain extent, and the reason becomes apparent at the very end when their story arcs converge in their quickdraw showdown in the sun.

Bronson's character is called simply Harmonica, and I don't think I have to explain what instrument dominates his music cue. It's not really a melody, though, but a plaintive wail consisting of just a few repeated notes. They echo across the plains in the film's opening scene, where three assassins await his arrival at a train station. We hear Harmonica's theme before we see him, playing the tiny instrument that is his name, his signature expression, his history and his inevitable destiny.

Morricone's score uses mostly just a few chords underneath the harmonica notes to give it some depth and a haunting lingering aspect. But when combined with some harsh electric guitar chords, later dissolving into swelling strings, the harmonica becomes a part of Frank's (Fonda) theme.

Frank is perhaps the most black-hearted villain ever to appear in a Western. With him, there's no prevarication or facade of civilization. He is a killer, who does what he does not only because there's money to be made at it, but because he genuinely enjoys it. Frank is not bothered by his nature; from Fonda's steely-eyed performance, I doubt he even gives it much thought.

Frank despises weakness, which is why he never shows any himself, and immediately preys upon others who do. Frank has spent the last few years working for Morton, a train magnate who dreams of completing the great East-West railroad line, even as his body is crippled by disease.

Morton hobbles around with crutches and a back brace, and uses a special drop-down set of hand bars to navigate the custom train car that serves as his mobile home and office. Frank calls Morton's condition "dry rot," and says any reasonable man would've put a bullet in his own brain long ago. For now, Frank is content to rub out any homesteaders who get in the way of Morton's railroad -- such as the McBains -- but it's clear he has ambitions to push the boss aside.

The story is an interesting and convoluted mix of divergent motivations and alliances. Jill believes Cheyenne and his men were responsible for killing her husband, since the murderers wore the long dusters that are his gang's trademark. But it actually was Frank and his men, looking to throw suspicion off themselves.

Cheyenne visits Jill to try to convince her he had nothing to do with it. Harmonica, seeming to have no allies or motivation, shows up and inserts himself into this vortex, protecting Jill when some of Frank's men return to finish the job. Harmonica and Cheyenne end up helping each other out of convenience, and at one point Harmonica actually protects Frank from his own men, who have been bribed by Barton to turn traitor.

Frank, meanwhile, is irritated by Harmonica's repeated intrusions, and his refusal to give his real name -- only reeling off names of men Frank has killed.

One could write a whole treatise about the sexual politics of this movie. In this worldview, men are all rapacious opportunists who revel in using their physical power to subjugate women. Harmonica, despite being the ostensible hero of the film, holds Jill down and rips her dress. Frank takes her prisoner and forcibly has sex with her. She goes along with it, but Frank correctly surmises that she'd do anything to save her own skin, even accept on her body the hands of the man who killed her spouse. Only Cheyenne maintains something resembling a respectful difference.

"Once Upon a Time in the West" is a great and strange Western, the apex of Sergio Leone's spaghetti movies.

3.5 stars