Reeling Backward: "The Sundowners" (1960)

"The Sundowners" was a financial flop in the U.S. but made bank in other parts of the world, especially Australia, where it was set and shot. Despite its lack of domestic box office, the film received critical acclaim and an impressive slate of Oscar nominations: best picture, director, screenplay, actress and supporting actress, winning none.

Like a lot of quality of pictures of that era, its reputation has unfortunately waned with the passing of years, to the point it straddles into the "forgotten films" category.

Robert Mitchum was a last-minute replace for an ailing Gary Cooper, reteaming with his "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" co-star, Deborah Kerr, even offering her top billing. They play a husband-and-wife team of sheep drovers wandering the early 20th century outback. The title from the 1952 novel by Jon Clearly refers to people who willingly wander without a home: they pitch their tent wherever the sun goes down.

(I should mention this movie bears no relation to a 1950 one with the same title, a cattle-rustling Western starring Robert Preston.)

Both Kerr and Mitchum employ workable Aussie accents, though Mitchum's has a tinge of the Irish, befitting his portrayal of fiercely independent Paddy Carmody. It's a little unclear if Paddy actually emigrated from Ireland; based on the accent I'd guess he's a first-generation natural born son. He still has a fondness for drinking, fighting, gambling and singing, which apparently every Irish in the history of cinema does.

I've noted before that Mitchum's characters almost always have an aspect of danger about them, but Paddy's no threat to anyone. His tragic flaw is his wanderlust, which compels him to always stay on the plains, driving sheep from here to there, taking seasonal jobs as a shearer or what have you when the cash in the family jelly jar starts to run low again.

After nigh on 20 years of this, though, the life has taken its toll on his wife, Ida. As she often did, Kerr plays a strong-headed, smart redhead who knows just how to deal with rough, gruff men while letting them operate under the delusion they're in charge. Though Paddy is a little less blinkered, occasionally referring to Ida as "boss" in front of other men.

Ida desperately wants to buy a farm and settle down. She's a woman of simple tastes: she desires a big kitchen with a real stove, something solid over their heads and a bit of security for their future. Though there's one terrific wordless scene where Ida is standing next to their wagon, windblown and sunburnt, and gazes enviously upon a woman in fine clothes sitting in a train powdering her nose. Their eyes lock for just a second.

But she's mostly thinking of their son, Sean (Michael Anderson Jr.), who is 15 going on... maybe 13. He's a quiet, respectful lad but is clearly being held back by his pop, who won't even let him ride drover with him, despite having the size and skills. Ida wants him to go to school, learn a trade, meet some girls, and otherwise scoot on down the road toward manhood.

As the story opens Paddy has accepted a commission to drove a large herd of sheep to Cawndilla. Because they only have one old horse they need to pull the wagon, they have to take on another drover with a couple of mounts for himself and Paddy. Conveniently they run into Rupert Venneker, a refined British gentleman played by the great Peter Ustinov. He offers to come along, mostly to escape the clutches of the woman he works for, who clearly would like to convert him from employee to husband.

Rupert is a benevolent but intemperate soul with an air of mystery he enjoys cultivating. Rumor has it he was once a nobleman with lands and a title, disgraced and exiled after some mishap. He himself cops to having once been a cavalryman in Her Majesty's army and an officer of a merchant vessel in the Far East. He's not that old, but seems to have soaked up several lifetimes' worth of world-weariness during his treks. Like Paddy, he prefers to be on the move.

Paddy and Rupert exchange a few tongue-lashings that are understandable given their difference in breeding, but despite appearances the latter is a competent horseman and they make it to Cawndilla, escaping a fast-moving forest fire in the process. They're prepared to part ways, but Ida convinces the men for them all to take jobs working the sheep-shearing season at a big local farm operation.

Rupert later refers to himself as the Carmody's pet, a dyspeptic creature with "a hard shell and a soft underbelly." He even falls in with the local pub owner, a lively widow named Mrs. Firth (Glynis Johns). Rupert repeatedly talks about how he knows one day he's going to break her heart when it's inevitably time to leave again. Until then, they enjoy lively nights together, with Rupert creeping back to the farm around dawn.

But when that fated day does arrive, it's Firth talking c'est la vie while Rupert owns the hangdog pout.

Much of the second half of the movie has to do with money. Ida carefully counts their growing savings, quietly maneuvering to put a down payment on a lovely farm they passed at the beginning of their journey. Paddy mostly plays along, as long as he can go into town with the boys every now and then to drink, sing old Irish ditties and lose a little money at "two-up," a popular coin-flipping game. He doesn't know about the farm plan, but he's cagey enough to figure out she's up to something.

Paddy gets roped into a shearing contest against another farm crew, and finds himself put up against a doddering 80-something fellow. But the movie goes sideways from expectations, as the strapping Paddy is laid low by the tireless oldster. Still, no one blames him for the loss and life goes on. In some ways this sequence best encapsulates the film's theme, which is that luck changes but relationships endure.

At one point Paddy has a massive winning streak at two-up, and not only do they have enough cash for the farm he also wins a thoroughbred racing horse. Soon Sean is recruited as jockey and they're winning races and more dough. But something's got to give, and it does.

Gorgeously directed by Fred Zinnemann with wonderful cinematography by Jack Hildyard, "The Sundowners" is part travelogue exposing the Australian outback, part adventure story and part family dramaturgy. Isobel Lennart provided the screenplay adaptation, and it's probably her best-remembered work apart from "Funny Girl." (For which, oddly, she did not receive an Oscar nod.)

It's an old-fashioned story with some modestly modernistic aspects, such as a fairly frank attitude toward sex for 1960. Kerr disrobes for a nighttime scene with her figure starkly outlined behind a backlit negligee, as Paddy talks admiringly of her curves. And it would be hard to suppose exactly what else Rupert would be up to during his nightly sojourns into Cawndilla.

The film ends on an ambiguous note, with the Carmodys losing their entire stake but cementing their love for each other, with Rupert as the add-on uncle/mate/sheepdog. Some things can't be counted, only embraced.

Reeling Backward: "Quo Vadis" (1951)

I didn't care for "Quo Vadis" much at all. It's a slow-moving bison of a movie, waddling through its nearly three-hour run time with no apparent sense of haste, or inspiration. Despite its epic scale -- it still holds the record for most costumes used on a movie: 32,000 -- it's often cheap-looking and fake, like the obvious matte paintings to depict ancient Rome.

Really, there are only two things about it that (somewhat) redeem it: Peter Ustinov's vamping portrayal of Emperor Nero, and the shifting perspectives of the numerous characters.

Ustinov was 30 years old and already an accomplished writer, playwright, screenwriter and director. But as an actor he'd mostly had bit parts in movies, often uncredited. Really, his only significant screen role was the titular one in "Private Angelo," a little 1949 war comedy that he also co-directed.

But director Mervyn LeRoy ("Mister Roberts") recognized the oddball charisma in Ustinov, and saw a good match with this over-the-top conception of Nero. The script, adapted by John Lee Mahin, S.N. Behrman and Sonya Levien from the historical novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, portrays Nero as a narcissistic adolescent sociopath, the "supreme artist" who literally sees the whole world as as the plaything for his whims, which shift mercurially between creation and destruction.

Ustinov is a sheer delight every time he's onscreen, with his velvety whine of a voice and googled eyes. Nero insists that his various hangers-on address him as "Divinity," and listen to his unceasing, awful compositions. He's pure malevolence, but in a less sinister way than a Hitler: he's simply unassociated with the concept of goodness. Anything or anyone that does not exalt him, he must deride and smash.

Think Donald Trump, but with better hair.

Hating the stench and squalor of the common folk of Rome, Nero comes up with a grand vision to rebuild the city in vaulting columns of marble. (Interesting footnote: the massive model Nero displays of his plans for Rome was a real one created by Mussolini; the studio borrowed it from a museum.)

Only one problem: the old Rome is still there. So Nero orders it razed with fire, people and all. Then he plucks his lyre from on high and composes a warbling sonnet dedicated to the greatness of the destruction he has wrought.

Thus we got the phrase, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned." It's become a metaphor for poor leadership, though the historical record is sufficiently muddied that it's hard to say what really happened. It may well be the fire was truly accidental, and Nero's government was simply ineffectual at preventing or stopping it.

The movie is unequivocal, depicting Nero intentionally setting Rome ablaze and then blaming it on the nascent "cult of Christians." This leads to Nero famously introducing them to some hungry lions in the Colosseum. Perched in his high seat, Nero titters at the dying pacifists and screeches at them for singing a hymn instead of begging for mercy.

Ustinov deservedly earned the first of his four Oscar nominations for his turn. The next two, also for Supporting Actor, he won both times, including a somewhat similar role in another sword-and-sandals epic, "Spartacus." He also got a screenwriting nomination for 1968's "Millions."

So whatever else the film's limitations, I think it's fair to say that "Quo Vadis" marked Ustinov's breakout.

The other thing I found interesting while watching it was the surfeit of characters, and how each of them holds the spotlight for a time. At its essence the story is about the excesses of the Roman Empire under Nero and its conflict with the rising church of Christ. Saint Peter (Finlay Currie) shows up about halfway through, and would seem to be the logical counterpoint to Nero, opposing him through a message of love in the face of cruel persecution, leading up to his infamous upside-down crucifixion.

(Currie's stunt double on the cross is quite obviously decades younger and dozens of pounds lighter.)

Thought it got a little "too much Jesus" for my taste, the film's emphasis on the plight of the Christians in the days after the fall and resurrection is not something you see a lot of at the movies. You could quite easily switch things around so Peter is the protagonist.

Or you could choose Petronius, the sardonic senator played by Leo Genn, who also earned a Supporting Actor Oscar nod -- a rare feat for two actors from a movie to be nominated in the same category. Petronius is Nero's chief friend and flatterer, who takes his sport from acting like a lickspittle while subtly mocking his patron.

Petronius is a fascinating, well-rounded character. He's a man of great intellect and ethics who threw it all away to be a cynical side player. He alone opposes Nero when he proposes to blame the Christians for his inferno, losing his status and, eventually, his life. He owns a beautiful Spanish slave (the stunning Marina Berti) who inexplicably falls in love with him, even after he has her (lightly) lashed for disobedience. He ends up returning her feelings, and the two embrace in a Romeo-and-Juliet type of death.

But it's actually Petronius' nephew who is the purported hero of this story. Robert Taylor plays Marcus Vinicius, an army commander who has recently returned to Rome in triumph after three years at war. Taylor -- who was only six years younger than the man playing his uncle -- is a horrible stiff, a weak-chinned excuse for a main character.

He starts out arrogant and martial, and slowly and inevitably softens to the Christians' message of peace and tolerance. This is helped along by Lygia (Deborah Kerr), a Roman hostage raised from childhood by a retired general (Felix Aylmer) and his wife, who converted to Christianity. Vinicius first tries to conquer her with his manly charms, and is rebuffed, and then arranges to have Nero grant her to him as his hostage/wife. The moment he gives up, though, she falls into his arms gratefully.

Kerr, of course, was one of the Golden Age's great talents. But even she can't rescue the plodding dialogue and bewildering character motivations.

Patricia Laffan plays Poppaea, Nero's conniving second wife -- he killed the first one, along with his own mother. Like Petronius, she carefully negotiates a dance of solicitude and manipulation with Nero. It's intimated that she feeds his nightly parade of bizarre sexual proclivities, while pursuing plenty of her own on the side. She lusts after Vinicius, and when he scorns her the empress vows revenge.

Again, it would've been fascinating to see this story play out from her perspective, instead of the one we do.

Finally, there's Ursus, the hulk-like bodyguard to Lygia played by boxer/actor Buddy Baer. He has very little dialogue, but he's often hanging around in the background of pivotal scenes, so you could easily make him the focal character. It's notable that in the culminating fight sequence in the Colosseum, where Lygia is tied to a stake and threatened by a massive bull, it is Ursus rather than Vinicius who protects her.

LeRoy lets the camera linger over Ursus' stone-hard face in close-up, and we are sucked into his peril. Wrestling the mighty beast bare-handed, he pins it to the ground and snaps its neck. Along with Ustinov crooning atonally as Rome burns, these are probably the best-remembered scenes from the film.

Baer's physique, which is much commented upon during the movie, is emblematic of sportsmen of this age. He's broad-chested with a thick waist, bull neck and arms that, while large, aren't bulging and veiny like you see in cinematic strongmen of recent vintage. At 6'7", Baer was the kid brother of heavyweight champ Max Baer, and when his own talent in the ring didn't measure up -- Joe Louis bested him twice -- he switched to movies, working steadily for nearly two decades.

 Like a lot of botched movies, there's a good one somewhere inside "Quo Vadis," a title that roughly translates as, "Where are you going?" -- a biblical reference to Peter meeting a resurrected Jesus along the road. The movie goes awry in its own journey, choosing a flat, generic romantic couple as the centerpiece of a story that has many much better routes it could have taken.

Reeling Backward: "Billy Budd" (1962)

 "You in your goodness are as inhuman as Claggart was in his evil."

So says the master of the ship in "Billy Budd," the 1962 adaptation of the Herman Melville novel directed, produced, co-written and starring Peter Ustinov as the conflicted captain who utters that line. This gripping and overlooked drama presents two men as paragons of innocence and depravity, and uses them as a lens to peer at the reactions they inspire in the muddled masses of the rest of the crew. It's a morality tale writ in stark shades of gray.

"Billy Budd" was the first major film role for 24-year-old Terence Stamp. Despite playing the title role and the protagonist, Stamp was only nominated for a Best Supporting Actor award at the Oscars. It's obviously a leading role, but older established actors like Robert Ryan and Ustinov received first and second billing, respectively.

It's a full-blooded performance that's built on vacancy. In the commentary track accompanying the DVD, Stamp confesses that he was barely able to speak a word to Ustinov at their initial meeting, so impressed was he by the older man's "powerful aura." It turns out this was the exact quality Ustinov had been seeking, interviewing dozens of young British actors to find someone capable of profound passivity.

He wanted Billy to be a reactive figure who absorbed the worst in other men and returned it with a smile. Indeed, after condemning Billy to death by hanging, Captain Vere (Ustinov) literally begs Billy to despise him for choosing duty over morality. Billy, who gives his age as "17, or 19 ... or 18," responds with his usual quizzical puzzlement. "I did my duty, and you're just doing yours," he says. Vere is more tortured by Billy's absolution than any hatred he hoped to inspire.

When impressed into service in the British navy in 1797, Billy finds the crew aboard the H.M.S. Avenger to be quaking in fear of the cruel master of arms, John Claggart (Ryan). A vicious man who delights in having men flogged for the most minute of infractions -- and even manufacturing ones when they can't be found -- Claggart sees the entire world as an endless chase of prey and hunted. The surface of the sea is calm, he tells Billy, but beneath it every creature is a killer. It's the same on land or on board the ship, he insists.

There's some suggestion that Claggart, who is educated and worldly, once held a high position in the British kingdom and has now fallen low due to outstanding debts or some other scrape with authority. This is a man who does not limit his a vengeful eye to a single person, but casts it upon the whole of society. "I am what I am and what the world has made me," he declares.

Billy, who is guileless to the point of the appearance of idiocy, looks upon Claggart and only sees a man who is lonely and afraid. Claggart nearly succumbs to Billy's offer of friendship, the bile in his soul finally rising to drown any hint of human kindness, which he views as weakness.

It's a chilling performance by Ryan, who often played well-meaning loners. The way he pounds his baton against his leg with every stroke of the floggger's whip, his lips quavering with hunger as he counts the strokes, is one of the most revolting depictions of sadism I've ever seen on film.

Billy, as written by Melville and faithfully translated by Ustinov and co-screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, is like an angel of God put on Earth unawares of his celestial grace. As a babe he was left on the door of a house in a silk-lined basket, hinting that he was the bastard child of a noble parent. With his nimbus of wavy blond locks, placid blue eyes and slightly androgynous beauty, Stamp truly seems like something not of this world.

Much of this is due to that aforementioned silence. Billy spends an astonishing amount of screen time just staring at and reacting to other actors. When he does speak, he does so in mellifluous tones that impart an organic sort of wisdom, like a child objecting to the wretched constructs of the adult world. "It's wrong to flog a man. It's against his being a man," he says on his first day aboard the Avenger.

Billy also suffers from unintentional silences. When sorely vexed, he is overcome by a stammer that prevents him from any speech. This is pivotal in the final confrontation with Claggart, in which the master-at-arms manufactures accusations of mutiny against Billy, who finally pummels him with a single blow to the chest. After he falls and cracks his head open on a post, the final contemptuous smile Claggart casts at Billy is the devil's sneer of victory.

"Claggart killed you the moment you killed him," Captain Vere tells Billy with sadness.

The officers overseeing the court martial are determined to set Billy free, seeing it as the just triumph of good over evil. But Vere insists their duty is to the laws of the wartime military, not their own personal sense of justice, and browbeats his underlings into returning a death sentence. The idea of stringing up Billy for killing the hated Claggart sets off a mutiny amongst the crew, but Billy quells it with his final, smiling words: "God save Captain Vere!!"

The cast of "Billy Budd" is spectacular. Melvyn Douglas plays The Dansker, an old Danish (he says) sailmaker who seems to have a religious background and acts as the conscience of the ship. The chief officers are ably played by Paul Rogers, John Nevill and David McCallum. Ronald Lewis has a memorable turn as Jenkins, the outspoken chief of the rigging crew who ends up a martyr to Claggart's cruelty. Lee Montague plays Squeak, Claggart's right-hand toady. And John Meillon plays Kincaid, who has his back laid open for insulting Claggart.

"Billy Budd" is a tremendous film, and seen in retrospect its single Academy Award nomination feels like a terrible oversight.

3.5 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