Reeling Backward: "Last Train from Gun Hill" (1959)

 

There's a surprising amount of flesh and steel in "Last Train from Gun Hill," a largely forgotten Western that builds up to a real-time bloodletting in the mold of "High Noon" and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral." The latter was also directed by John Sturges and starred Kirk Douglas, and even much of the crew and background cast tagged along again.

There is not one but two scenes featuring topless women, albeit carefully obscured for Production Code compliance, including one offscreen rape. They actually use the word "rape" in the movie, which is in itself pretty astonishing for 1959.

Douglas' character, Marshal Matt Morgan, is notably hard-bitten and cunning, essentially taking a young man hostage and threatening to murder him. Though Morgan professes to never have killed an unarmed man, he certainly seems prepared to do just that, holding a double-barreled shotgun under his quarry's chin as he marches the lad down the titular town's dusty streets in the film's signature penultimate sequence.

It's now out in a splendid remastered Blu-ray from Paramount that's well worth checking out. The VistaVision colors are achingly vibrant and the screen image is as crisp as the day it hit theaters. A first-class restoration.

Morgan's best friend is Craig Belden, played by the immeasurable Anthony Quinn. It's suggested they rode together on the wrong side of the law back in the day. Now, in the fading years of the Wild West when things have become much calmer and gunplay unfamiliar, they find themselves become aging relics: one the upstanding lawman, the other the uncompromising cattle baron who essentially owns the town.

In a by-then familiar switcheroo on cinematic tropes, it is Morgan who wears the black hat and coat, while Belden is outfitted in an unassuming blue shirt, tan leather vest and white Stetson. If you knew nothing of the movie and saw photos of their get-ups, you'd assume their roles were opposite.

It's interesting that the script by James Poe, based on a story by Les Crutchfield, takes pains not to portray Belden as a maniacal dictator or Morgan as a pure-hearted do-gooder. Each in their own way is hidebound by their ethos as self-made individualists, and their inability to bend to changing times sets up their inevitable confrontation.

The story is set into motion when Morgan's wife, a Cherokee woman (played, sigh, by Israeli-Amerian actress Ziva Rodann), is brutally murdered by a pair of drunken cowboys while she is driving her 9-year-old son, Petey (Lars Henderson) home to their quiet town of Pauley. She manages to lay open one of her attacker's cheeks with the whip. The boy takes the killer's horse and rides back to tell all to his pa, the marshal.

The saddle is a handsome black-and-silver job with the CB brand Morgan recognizes as his friend's. Assuming the horse was stolen, he takes the train to Gun Hill with a pair of John Doe warrants in his pocket. He goes to see Belden, and their reuniting is both bittersweet and genuinely heartwarming, old range riders now widowers -- one recent and raw, the other long ago.

Both men quickly surmise, though, that the culprit with the cheek scar is Belden's own son, Rick (Earl Holliman), a disappointing offspring who the rich man clings to with a domineering sort of love-shame hybrid. Belden offers to let Morgan have the other man, Lee Smithers (Brian Hutton), but forbids him to arrest Rick.

Now, if Belden & Son had half a brain between them, they'd quickly decide it best for the young scallywag to hole up at their ranch, with the solitary Morgan having no chance to plow through Belden's several dozen gunmen to apprehend him. But then we wouldn't have a movie, so of course he traipses off to Gun Hill to gamble and drink, where he is quickly knocked out and taken captive by Morgan. He handcuffs Rick to the bed of a hotel room, awaiting the 9 o'clock late train back to Pauley.

At this point, the movie settles into a slow-burn affair with Belden and his toughs staking out Morgan in the hotel, alternating between exchanges of dialogue and bullets. 

There seems no possible way Morgan can get Rick to the train, with literally the entire town against him. The local lawman, Bartlett (Walter Sande), not only refuses to assist Morgan, he actually goes so far as to refuse to wear a badge or acknowledge he is the sheriff, arguing for a "long view" of the law that doesn't encompass crossing Belden.

The actual mechanics of the standoff aren't terribly interesting. What is is that neither man ever for a second considers backing away one inch from his position. Morgan is clearly motivated as much by a sense of personal revenge as duty to the law, even at one point musing that he'll leave Lee behind if he has to in order to see Rick to the hangman.

Belden, for his part, seems plainly confused and hurt that his best friend -- the only man in the territory he considers his equal -- would try to take his son away from him. The life of an Indian woman doesn't tip the scales one iota against the blood of his only child. Belden doesn't want to kill Morgan, but sees no other way if he continues on his stubborn path.

The confounding variable is Carolyn Jones as Linda, Belden's saloon worker (prostitute?) turned estranged mistress. She bumps into Morgan on the train ride back to Gun Hill and instantly takes a shine to him. It turns out she's just returned from an extended hospital stay resulting from Belden's latest beating, apparently after Rick was spreading lies about her nocturnal activities.

I knew I recognized Jones from somewhere, with her impossibly big eyes and narrow waist, and finally learned she played Morticia Addams in the original "The Addams Family" show that debuted five years later.

The attraction between Linda and Morgan is palpable, so it's no surprise when she helps him by acting as go-between with Belden, and even sneaks him the shotgun previously mentioned. She also clearly still has conflicting feelings for Belden, so it's something of a low-wattage love triangle.

(Again with my literalist quibbles: Morgan asks her for a shotgun, saying he needs one for what he has to do. But why wouldn't the same scenario of him force-marching Rick to the train station work if it was a six-shooter snugged up under his jaw instead of a double-barrel? The unsatisfying answer: because then we wouldn't get that great visual, or have something to drive the Morgan-Belden-Linda dynamic.)

Aside from the cowardly sheriff, there aren't a ton of notable supporting characters. Val Avery plays Steve, bartender at one of Belden's saloons, friend to Linda and someone sensible enough to acknowledge that the cattleman's rule is unjust but he isn't the one to oppose it. Beero (Brad Dexter) is Belden's cigar-chomping right-hand man, performing whatever duties required including besting Rick in a fistfight at his boss' behest.

Holliman as Rick isn't give a lot to do but bellyache and beg. He isn't necessarily an evil kid, just a weak soul spoiled and bullied by his father. We're not sad to see him go, the victim of a stray bullet from Lee, though his death prompts Belden to demand a quick-draw duel with Morgan, who seems positively weary at the prospect.

I admired a lot of things about this film, and in fact was left wanting more. At just a hair over 90 minutes, the movie moves very quickly through its plot steps without a lot of Dosey Doeing around into deep character investigation. I would've loved to see some flashback sequences of the two rivals as younger men, including the incident referenced several times where Belden saved Morgan's life.

That could have signified the strength of their bond, rather than just alluding to it, and maybe also hinted at early indications of the potential for a fallout... perhaps around the time they parted ways.

"Last Train from Gun Hill" is still a solid Western, rather daring for its time, one that relies more on telling than showing its bitter, shadowy heart.

 

Reeling Backward: "The Final Countdown (1980)

When pornographic films first went mainstream in the 1970s, the smut studios discovered it was actually very hard to fill up a feature-length movie run time with just depictions of sex. No matter how repetitive the various thrustings and couplings became, there just wasn't sufficient racy footage to get up to a respectable 80- or 85-minute length.

So they started to cheat by showing a bunch of "filler" -- stuff that a normal narrative film skips over. Things like cars pulling up to a house, the door opening, people walking inside, unnecessary conversations, etc. It made them seem more like, as famously described in "Boogie Nights," a "real movie."

Why do I bring up porno flicks in relation to 1980's sci-fi/action film, "The Final Countdown"? Because even though there's no sex -- indeed, there's only one female in an entire movie crammed with Navy dudes, and she doesn't do more than trade moony looks with an officer -- this low-budget spectacle is positively filled with filler.

Peter Douglas, son of Kirk, had a script but not much of a budget, so he turned to the U.S. Navy for help. They saw the project as a clever recruiting tool, and provided the complete use of the aircraft U.S.S. Nimitz, its aircraft and much of its crew for several weeks of shooting.

A few name actors carry the story -- besides Kirk Douglas there's Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, Charles Durning and James Farentino -- but an astonishingly large portion of the 103-minute runtime is made up of Navy personnel running hither and fro, loading weapons and moving ordnance, planes taking off and landing, and so forth.

The film, a modest hit at the time, has developed a cult status among military aficionados for its realistic depiction of operations aboard a modern aircraft carrier. Of course it's accurate -- director Don Taylor largely just filmed what was happening aboard the ship, and worked in a preposterous sci-fi plot in between the everyday doings.

And that story is a doozy: the Nimitz encounters a random time wormhole that takes it back to Dec. 6, 1941 -- the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Douglas, as the captain, must decide whether to intervene and prevent the massacre, or let history take its course. In the end he's a by-the-book man, and decides it's his duty to defend his country no matter when and where.

The entire movie is a big tease. No battle actually ever takes place between modern American jets and vintage Japanese Zeroes, as the never-explained wormhole opens up again just in time to suck the Nimitz and its planes back to 1980.

Returning to the porno reference, "The Final Countdown" is all foreplay and no main event, making its head-scratching title even scratchier.

There is one sorta-encounter between a pair of F-14 Tomcats and some Zero replicas (left over from "Tora! Tora! Tora!" supposedly). It's the one moderately entertaining segment of the movie, though we never really get the sense of a tense aerial dogfight. Even more ridiculously, one of the Japanese pilots (Soon-Tek Oh) somehow survives his crash, is taken prisoner and gets loose, managing to kill four or five Navymen.

Sheen plays Lasky, a Defense Department civilian observer placed aboard the Nimitz for reasons that are mysterious even to him. Farentino is the wing commander who just happens to be a Pearl Harbor history buff. Charles Durning plays a (fictitious) U.S. senator who was killed by Japanese fighters as part of the historical event, but who gets inadvertently saved by the time travelers. Ross is his smart and winsome right-hand woman, who falls for the Farentino character.

The film ends with one of those out-of-left-field twists that is supposed to make the audience drop their jaws, but which only raises more puzzling time-loop questions that aren't really all that interesting, anyway.

Even as downmarket entertainment, "The Final Countdown" feels cheap and lazy. The actors appear to be going through the motions -- Kirk Douglas does a winking turn that suggests he had a good laugh at how goofy the movie was during production. If you took out all the endless loops of Navy-action, the film would get chopped down from 103 minutes to about 20. I think I would've found that version more watchable.

Reeling Backward: "Seven Days in May" (1964)

"Seven Days in May" is considered one of the all-time great political thrillers, but I found the 1964 film directed by John Frankenheimer a bit stiff and theatrical. It's still a good ripping yarn, but hardly worthy of the accolades that have been heaped upon it.

Partly is that its subject matter -- about an attempted military coup of the United States -- felt a bit stale, even in 1964. The nuclear age spawned a tidal wave of anxiety and fear, and movies like this played upon them. Frankenheimer's own previous film, 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate," touched upon very similar themes.

Also in 1964 we had "Fail Safe" and "Dr. Strangelove," two movies with schockingly similar stories about a runaway American military setting off war with the Soviet Union, that approached the subject from polar opposite ends -- straight and satirical, respectively.

I can only imagine what it must have been like in that year, right after the assassination of an American president for reasons that still remain murky, with all these movies coming out about sinister plots to subvert the presidency and the democratic process. In some ways, it makes the previous decades' duck-and-cover drills seem reassuring.

Rod Serling wrote the screenplay based on the book Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, which was the best-selling novel in the country for almost an entire year. Serling's version centers around three pivotal characters: General James Scott (Burt Lancaster), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Jordan Lyman (Fredric March), president of the United States; and Col. Martin "Jiggs" Casey (Kirk Douglas), the man caught in the middle.

Lyman has just agreed on a proposed treaty with the Soviets to disarm all nuclear weapons. A great outcry has risen up against the movie, calling it foolish, and a gripping opening scene shows a riot between protesters in front of the White House. (Astonishingly, this was shot in front of the actual building. President Kennedy, before his untimely demise, gave his permission due in part to his relationship with Kirk Douglas.)

Scott is the shadow leader of this movement, and Jiggs Casey is his unknowing right-hand man. Casey's internal radar is set off by some communications among senior military leaders over secure channels regarding a wager on the Preakness horse race, to be held next Sunday. Only the leader of the Navy (an uncredited John Houseman) has declined to place a bet.

Casey also gets a visit from "Mutt" Henderson (Andrew Duggan), an old friend who says he's just been given a new post at eComCon -- an installation he's never heard of. With a little digging, it turns out to be a secret military base in the Texas desert established by Scott to train special forces for a military takeover.

Interestingly, the wondering part is quite small -- Casey immediately goes to the president with the plot, and from there it's a battle of wits between the president's advisers and Scott and his cohorts to outflank each other. Lyman was scheduled to attend a huge military practice operation on the Sunday in question, and he correctly guesses that he would have been kidnapped and possibly executed while in Scott's custody.

This is the part of the movie I found weak. Once the president learned of the plot, why wouldn't he immediately fire Scott and have him arrested? There's this whole long section where Lyman frantically searches for proof of his joint chiefs chairman's treason before he can make a move. He sends top advisor Paul Girard (Martin Balsam) to coerce the Navy holdout into signing a confession, while the lush of a senator from Georgia, Raymond Clark, is dispatched to drive around in the desert looking for this mysterious military base. (Edmond O'Brien earned an Oscar nomination for his colorful portrayal.)

All this is hooey. All the president's cabinet and advisers serve at the pleasure of the chief executive, and can be dismissed by him or her at any time, for any reason. Lyman could fire Scott because he doesn't like the way he parts his hair.

There's a powerhouse of a scene near the end where Scott and Lyman confront each other, alone, in the Oval Office. The president reveals that he knows all about the plot, laying out his evidence in a prosecutorial fashion. Scott angrily denounces Lyman as a "weak sister" whose treaty amounts to a willing surrender to the enemy. Lyman persistently demands that Scott resign, and Scott refuses.

It's a fun scene, with Lancaster thundering away about protecting the country, and March makes a tidy speech about democratic processes must be respected or the nation into an abyss. Great acting, fiery dialogue, and all built on a premise that's utterly ridiculous. (My understanding is that in the book, Scott immediately resigns when confronted by Lyman.)

There's also a whole left-handed side plot about Ava Gardner as Scott's former mistress who supposedly has some incriminating letters written by him. Casey, pretending to pitch woo at her, gets his hands on the letters and turns them over to the president to use as leverage against Scott. But Lyman resists the urge to use the underhanded tactic -- which is supposed to demonstrate what a noble character he is.

It's a good, engaging movie -- great-looking, too, with top-notch photography and production design -- but it tends to fall apart when you start kicking the tires and peek under the hood.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1954)

Keeping with the nautical theme for this week's classic film columns, today I'll be taking a look at Disney's 1954 version of Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

Not long ago in this space I commented that I didn't think Golden Age Hollywood divided movies up so neatly into kids' movies and adult ones as they are today, and I think this adaptation of the famed 19th century science fiction novel helps prove my point.

"Leagues" is from Walt Disney, one of the first live-action films he produced himself, and there certainly are light-hearted moments meant to appeal to children. Most of these are centered around the character of Ned Land, a happy-go-lucky mariner played by Kirk Douglas. He sings, he carouses with women, he gets into fistfights ever 20 minutes or so, and befriends Captain Nemo's pet seal -- even singing a duet with it.

But watch James Mason's portrayal of Nemo, the mad submariner who's taken to the sea as his refuge from the evils of mankind. It's a hard-edged, dramatic performance, with no winking nods or cartoonish layers. You could transport Mason whole into a much darker movie with R-rated violence, and he would fit like a glove.

The other two main characters Paul Lukas as Professor Aronnax and Peter Lorre (grown old and thick) as his servile assistant, Conseil. I'm sure most people are familiar with the basic gist of the story: Arronax and his two companions are captured by Nemo, who makes them guests/prisoners aboard the Nautilus, his amazing submarine.

I just love the stupendous arrogance of Mason's Nemo, as seen in this exchange with the professor:

Arronax: "I'm afraid that I don't understand."
Nemo: "At the moment, I don't intend that you should."

Verne's novels were notable for their (often amazingly accurate) portrayal of the technology of the future, as seen from the mid-1800s. So it's interesting when filmmakers with another century of scientific advancement under their belts try to portray a futuristic past. All of the amazing stuff aboard the Nautilus -- diving suits, electrified hulls, periscopes -- were old hat by 1954.

Although Nemo's invention is not terribly advanced in weaponry: He doesn't have any torpedoes or guns -- he takes out offending ships trolling his seas by simply ramming them.

The production values of the film, directed by Richard Fleischer, hold up pretty well more than a half-century on. The art direction aboard the Nautilus has a splendid brass-and-iron look to it. Of course, the ship itself is a wonder of imagination, with its two large viewing windows resembling eyes, and overlapping hull plates that give it a crustacean look.

Like a lot of people my age, I first encountered the story of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by visiting the ride at Disney World. I was heartbroken, even well into adulthood, when they shut it down in 1994.

The film deviates quite a bit from the book, which featured a rash of other adventures never portrayed, including visits to the South Pole and the lost city of Atlantis.

The big battle with the kraken is the centerpiece of the movie, and it's still an energetic and swashbuckling scene. Reportedly it was originally supposed to take place in daylight on a calm day, but the technicians were worried the cables used to control the massive squid would be visible. So they changed it to a stormy scene at night -- adding hundreds of thousands of dollars (a fortune then) and six extra weeks of shooting to the production.

It's grown a little hokey with years, and there's now denying the film is pitched more to audience members who measure their age in single digits. But "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is a rousing adventure story with dark undertones that all ages can savor.

Notably, although there were several film versions prior to this one, it's stood for more than a half-century as the quintessential adaptation of Verne's book. (A few TV versions have come and gone.) Now Hollywood has two remakes in the works, racing to get into theaters first in 2012 or 2013. I enjoyed the Disney version, but I'd love to see a grittier take.

Too bad James Mason isn't around to star.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Spartacus" (1960)

"Spartacus" should have been a disaster. The original screenwriter, director and cinematographer were all fired off the project -- the latter two a week into filming.

It was more or less a vanity project for Kirk Douglas, who was angry he didn't get the lead in "Ben-Hur" and ordered up his own sword-and-sandals epic. Novelist Howard Fast was in over his head trying to adapt his novel about the Third Servile War of Rome for the screen, so Dalton Trumbo was brought in. Unfortunately, Trumbo was blacklisted at the time, and had to work under a pseudonym.

Douglas bravely insisted that Trumbo receive an onscreen credit, which led to the breakdown of the McCarthy-era blacklist.

But Douglas clashed with director Anthony Mann, and canned him after a few days of shooting. A 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick, who previously directed Douglas in the wonderful "Paths of Glory," was brought in.

Kubrick largely disavowed "Spartacus" later in his career, but mostly, I think, because of entering the project as a hired gun rather as the primary and unquestioned author of the film. The dark genius preferred to work in relative isolation, and to write and shoot his movies himself. (Russell Metty, pushed out by Kubrick, retained his credit for legalistic convenience, and thus won the cinematography Oscar for "Spartacus," even though he only worked on the film a little longer than Mann did.)

Far be it from me to call Stanley Kubrick stupendously wrong, but I think "Spartacus" is one of his finest films, and one of the true giants among the mid-century epics.

I won't belabor talking about the plot, since the story of the man who led a slave revolt against the Roman Empire is well-known.

What most interested me in watching the 50th-anniversary Blu-ray edition -- which is a marvel, with crisp lines and bold colors courtesy of the 1991 film restoration -- is the film's pace. At 3¼ hours, the film is certainly not in a hurry. And yet, it never feels like it's draggy or fat ... just taking its time.

It's amazing to watch simple establishing shots, or montages of marching armies. Or just the slow pan of the camera as it enters a Roman bath. It gives the audience a chance to breathe, soak up all the Oscar-winning sets, and sets the tone for the coming scene.

Nowadays editors would chop these moments by half or more. The movies have sped up in the last few decades, and have not improved in their quickness.

The fight scenes have held up fairly well, both the gladiator matched pairs and the huge battle featuring 10,000 extras. Content-wise, "Spartacus" was quite daring in the waning days of the old Production Code, before the Motion Picture Association of America starting giving out ratings. There's even a brief flash of Spartacus severing an arm, complete with twin arterial blood spurts.

The film was also bold sexually. Jean Simmons, playing Spartacus' slave wife Varinia, appears nude twice, although both times shot with a careful angle to avoid showing her breasts. There's a thrilling moment where they're cavorting in a meadow, and he is tracing her face with a bit of plant, and she opens her mouth to accept it. For 1960, this was pretty yowza stuff.

One of the most famous scenes did not make the cut, however. This was the bath scene where the Roman general Crassus (Laurence Olivier) asks his new slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis) if he prefers oysters or snails, calling it a question of taste rather than morality, and declaring that he eats both oysters and snails.

The barely-concealed reference to same-sex coupling was cut out of the original film, and only later restored. According to one account, the audio track for this scene had been lost. Curtis was still around to re-record his lines, but Olivier was dead by then. So Anthony Hopkins, once Olivier's understudy and a fearsomely good mimic, recorded the dialogue.

The cast is simply a marvel, although some of the smaller supporting performances (including Curtis) are a bit stiff. Peter Ustinov is a delightful scene-stealer as a mercenary slave trader -- he won the Academy Award, the only person to do so for a Kubrick film -- but the performance I keep coming back to is Charles Laughton as Gracchus, a Roman senator and political opponent of Crassus.

In less than perhaps 10 minutes of total screen time, he paints an indelible presence as a figure of integrity buried beneath a mound of corruption. Gracchus is a man of the people, both their virtues and their faults, and represents the last dying voice of democracy against the coming dictatorship of the emperors. Only an actor of Laughton's wit and weight (figurative and otherwise) could pull it off. I love this piece of dialogue in a scene between Laughton and Ustinov:

"You and I have a tendency towards corpulence. Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?"

Douglas of course is great, playing a powerful man of destiny who still seems full to the brim with a distinctive humanity. I love the scenes where Spartacus is at the hands of some evil Roman or another, his limbs in chains and his life on the line, and he stares at them with an impudence that could enrage even an emperor.

4 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Lust for Life"

One of the greatest piece of hooey ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public was the insistence that great artists are only made through great suffering.

Of course, when you consider that this claim is most vehemently championed by artists themselves, one realizes several things. First, that this precept has been employed over the years to justify any number of instances of damaging behavior in the name of art. Second, that it was often those around the artist who suffered even more than he did.

Lastly, it creates a bias to see the only legitimate art as that which casts a mournful attitude toward the human condition. After all, if all those great artists suffered horribly, they wouldn't be creating paintings and art works of joy and sunshine, would they?

"Lust for Life," the 1956 biopic on Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, is an enthusiastic adherent to this philosophy. Based on a historical novel by Irving Stone and directed by Vincente Minnelli -- who was best known for film musicals like "The Band Wagon" and "An American in Paris" -- the drama is a full-bore leap into the troubled life of the great artist.

Kirk Douglas, who was a prototypical Hollywood lantern-jawed hero type, gives a vibrant and unexpected performance as Van Gogh, portraying him as a mass of fears and obsessions. The painter seems not to possess an ounce of regard for anyone but himself, even pursuing marriage with an older cousin who labels his persistence "disgusting."

I liked the movie well enough, and the cinematography (by Freddie Young and Russell Harlan) of the landscapes and people who inspired Van Gogh is wonderful. I must confess that the continued wallowing in his misery got to be a bit tedious at times.

The central relationships in the film are between Vincent and his brother Theo (James Donald), an art dealer who supported him, and with Paul Gauguin, a French painter played by Anthony Quinn. Quinn won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his performance, despite a rather limited screen time.

The two are an interesting contrast. Gauguin declares that he wants no one to love him, because attachments distract from his painting. Van Gogh is the epitome of neediness, on the other hand. The sequence where they briefly share a house in the south of France is essentially one argument after another, until the showdown where Van Gogh cuts off his own ear.

Minnelli is sly to the point of squeamishness about portraying this infamous bit of Van Gogh lore. Douglas is shot almost entirely from his right side for the remainder of the film, although it appears they used some sort of make-up to portray the damaged ear. He also does not include anything about Van Gogh giving the severed ear to a prostitute, which is the gruesome detail that made the injury memorable in the first place.

Interestingly, some recent examinations of the circumstances of Van Gogh's injury have concluded that it was not self-inflicted. Gauguin was an expert swordsman, and -- consistent with Quinn's portrayal -- was quite a hothead. It seems likely, or at least possible, that Gauguin cut off the ear during a quarrel, and they concocted the story about Van Gogh slicing it off with a razor to save him from prosecution.

Since the screenplay (by Norman Corwin, also nominated for an Oscar) was based on a work of fiction about Van Gogh, it's hard to say how much the film reflects the real artist. Douglas, in a reddish-tinged crewcut and beard, certainly bears an astonishing resemblance to the painter's many self-portraits. But the film often seems more interested in his misery than his ingenuity.

Finally, I'd like to comment on the film's title. "Lust for Life" seems an almost comically incongruous name to describe the life of a man that was essentially a litany of failure, poverty, loneliness and poor health.

It's interesting that most people who encountered Vincent Van Gogh during his lifetime regarded him as strange or even dangerous -- they called him the "red madman" in the neighborhood around the Yellow House where he and Gauguin lived. I think if he lived today, he probably would have spent much of his life institutionalized, or munching on a regimen of mind-altering prescription drugs.

Which isn't to say that Van Gogh wasn't a great artist. It's just that people, and movies, that try to conflate artistry with suffering are generally misguided. It's a paint-by-numbers mentality.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "The Bad and the Beautiful"

Have you ever noticed that movies about making movies are usually outstanding?

Yes, it's true that it is self-indulgent for millionaire movie stars, directors, screenwriters and other filmmakers to spend their time pointing the camera at themselves, so to speak. And they've done it a lot -- almost since the birth of cinema, movies about movies have been commonplace, like Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr.," in which a projectionist gets stuck in the movies he's showing.

I'd knock them for their narcissism, except for one thing: These flicks are usually just so darn good.

"Singin' In the Rain." "The Player." "Get Shorty." "Wag the Dog." "Adaptation." "Swimming with Sharks." "The Aviator." "Barton Fink." "Shadow of the Vampire." "Cinema Paradiso." "8-1/2." "Sunset Boulevard." Those are just a few of the great movies made about the craft or business of motion pictures.

I'd long heard that "The Bad and the Beautiful" was a worthy addition to that list, and after catching it recently I'm happy to report it's true.

This 1952 film stars Kirk Douglas as Johnathan Shields, an all-powerful movie mogul who manages to estrange nearly every person who's ever worked with him. Lana Turner, who plays a lush actress Shields turns into a superstar, actually got top billing over Douglas since Turner was at the height of her fame, and he was still relatively early in his film career, despite being 36 years old at the time.

The story plays in flashback as Shields' right-hand man has assembled the greatest actress, director and writer he ever worked with, and begs them to give him one more shot. He's exiled in Paris and hasn't made a picture in two years, mainly because he's alienated half of Hollywood, and gets them together in a room so he can (via telephone) make his one last pitch.

The stories tells how Shields done each of them wrong. There's his early film career with a film director. They spend their days making third-rate B pictures on a shoestring budget. When the director convinces Shields to take a shot at a real movie that's he's written the screenplay for, he double-crosses him and goes with another director after the studio chief greenlights the project. It launches his career, but ends their friendship.

He and the Lana Turner character are lovers, of course, although it's something of a teacher/pupil relationship at first that slowly blossoms into love. She's the daughter of a great film actor, now deceased, and believes all she's inherited from him is his love of the bottle. Shields convinces her otherwise, casts her in a huge make-or-break starring role, and then treats her like garbage just when her star is born.

I found the third sequence the least compelling of the three, as Shields befriends a professor who's written a popular novel and convinces him to move to Hollywood and become a screenwriter. Perhaps it's just the character, played by Dick Powell, who's very cut off from others and too unwilling to give of himself. I guess the movie did too good a job of making him seem like an actual writer.

"The Bad and the Beautiful" was directed by Vincente Minnelli, a top Hollywood genre director whose other credits include "Gigli," "Lust for Life" (also with Douglas), "Father of the Bride" and "An American in Paris." He shows his usual deft hand, turning up the melodrama and sexual energy as the situation allows.

A couple of random observations: I noticed how the Shields character often took off his shoes in an office setting -- something pretty unorthodox at the time. I wonder if it's supposed to show his contempt for the people he works with, or just that he's a man who doesn't abide by societal rules.

I also saw that the Latin Lover actor character, Goucho, was played by Gilbert Roland. His final film role was as the revengeful Don in "Barbarosa," the excellent 1982 Western starring Willie Nelson. Yes, Willie Nelson. Go rent it if you haven't seen it; it's wonderful.