Reeling Backward: "Hell Is For Heroes" (1962)

By all accounts the production on "Hell Is For Heroes" was a total nightmare. And yet, the final result is a gritty, compelling war picture notable for its unblinking look at the horrors of combat. It's one of the earliest movies I can think of where a character dies not with noble silence, but screaming and convulsing while trying to keep his intestines inside his body.

Steve McQueen, an ensemble player who already felt like he should be paid and treated like the big star he was yet to become, was a surly jerk to cast and crew. Screenwriter Robert Pirosh was tasked with recreating the gritty feel of his masterpiece "Battleground," basing much of the plot and characters on his own World War II experiences. He was to have directed it, too, but walked off the project after dealing with McQueen's attitude.

The story, which reportedly was supposed to focus more on Bobby Darin's wisenheimer character, Corby, was rewritten after McQueen was cast, making his moody Private Reese the spotlight. Trusty action movie director Don Siegel ("Dirty Harry") was brought in as a replacement, a move that likely saved the picture.

It was so low-budget that other stars James Coburn and Fess Parker were essentially parachuted into the production a few days at a time while filming other movies. Bob Newhart wanted to go do stand-up comedy instead, and kept lobbying to have his nebbish character killed off. The props and costumes were cheap and unreliable, and eventually the studio just called a halt to production and told the filmmakers to edit together what footage they had.

For all this, "Hell Is For Heroes" is a worthy inheritor of other realistic war films like "Battleground" and a precursor to bloodier depictions of violence that would come with "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Wild Bunch."

And whatever McQueen's disposition toward the cast and crew, he's at his anti-hero cool best. He had the uncanny ability to fashion characters who seemed both remote and identifiable to audiences. His indifference was his hook.

Story-wise, there's not much to it. An American company of dogfaces expects to be sent home, but instead they're sent back on the line to plug up a hole on the front. A puppyish Polish refugee named Homer (Nick Adams) tags along everywhere, hoping to eventually join the soldiers on the trip home. At the last minute Reese (McQueen) joins the second squad as a reinforcement, and immediately sets about alienating everyone.

Reese, wearing a beard and a scowl, is too old and battle-hardened to be a private, but that's because he was just court-martialed down from master sergeant for going crazy on leave, crashing a colonel's jeep. He's a classic film archetype, seen more in Westerns and Japanese samurai flicks: the warrior who lives to fight, and isn't much good for anything anytime else.

The officers are attempting to outfox the Germans, moving in an entire company and then moving them out again quietly, hoping the enemy doesn't notice. That leaves the depleted second squad -- just six men -- to hold the line. The idea is the reinforcements will arrive before the Germans have noticed how thin they are, but of course things don't work out that way.

The rest of the squad is a typical war picture troupe. Coburn is Henshaw, the owlish corporal who likes to fix things. Harry Guardino is the commanding sergeant, Pike, who's smart enough to listen to Reese's advice on battle tactics. Corby (Darin) is the scrounger, always wheeling and dealing. There's Kolinsky (Mike Kellin), the only one who speaks Polish, and the quiet, naive Cumberly (Bill Mullikin)

Parker plays another sergeant who knew Reese back when. Newhart joins them halfway through as Driscoll, a weak-kneed private from the typing pool who got lost with his jeep full of typewriters, and gets conscripted (him, not the typewriters).

The squad comes up with some clever ideas of how to generate enough noise and activity to make the Germans think there's still a whole Army company defending the area. Henshaw rigs the jeep to groan and backfire like a tank. They string wire to ammunition cans filled with rocks or coins and hang them out in no-man's land, so they can pull on them and draw enemy fire.

It seems the Germans even rigged up a microphone in the bunker when they previously held the area so as to spy on the Americans. Driscoll is assigned to stay in the pillbox and simulate the radio chatter of a busy unit, drawing on Newhart's standup routines faking one end of a telephone conversation.

Nevertheless, the Germans do send a patrol to probe. Reese, using grenades and his M3 automatic "grease gun," manages to kill most of them, but some escape to report back. Reese decides the only way to make the Germans hesitate on a full-scale assault is to sneak across the battlefield and blow up their main bunker with a 40-pound charge.

This leads to a very tense scene of Reese, Henshaw and Kolinsky crawling through a minefield on their bellies, feeling for the triggering prongs with their fingers. It's certainly the film's visceral highlight.

"Hell Is For Heroes" is one of those forgotten war pictures that deserves a better place in the cinematic pantheon. Sometimes even when a shoot goes to hell, the result can still pack a wallop.

Review: "12 Years a Slave"

It caused quite a sensation when it came out, but since 1853 the book “12 Years a Slave” by Solomon Northup has largely faded from memory. The movie adaptation by director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley brings the sin of slavery back into our faces with searing honesty about the brutality and dehumanization of an entire people.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, in an Oscar-worthy turn, plays Northup – an educated and talented musician and engineer from Saratoga, New York, kidnapped and sold into bondage in Louisiana, where he toiled and struggled to survive. Forced to take on the persona of “Platt,” he hid his abilities, including reading and writing, to pass himself off as a field laborer.

Over the next dozen years he experiences untold degradation and torture, having his back flayed until it is little more than a crisscross patchwork of scars. Separated from his wife and children, he can only imagine their own pain and torment. And he must submit to the rule of white Southerners who view him as a piece of chattel to be used and discarded as needs or whims serve.

Ejiofor brings an earnest grace to the role, an ordinary, intelligent man placed in hellish circumstances that defy logic. He holds onto his pride with great care, even violently defying an especially cruel overseer (Paul Dano) who can’t stand that a slave knows more about building houses than he does.
Even though he eventually learns not to make waves, he never loses track of his inner soul. Because of that, hope never truly dies.

If the film has a weakness, it’s that McQueen and Ridley overplay their hand. Northup’s life prior to his ordeal is an idealized existence in which whites and blacks live in perfect harmony -- eating at each other’s tables, shopkeepers enthusiastically offering their handshake and assistance.

Ironically, it’s only in traveling to our nation’s capital (where slavery was still allowed in 1841) that he exposes himself to nefarious types who make a business of carrying off free blacks to the deep South, where they can fetch prices of $1,000. A decent, law-abiding man, Northup at first reacts with disbelief and threats to sue his oppressors. Defiance is soon (literally) beaten out of him, and a host of merchants warn him upon threat of death never to mention his real name or origin again.

At first Northup is placed in the hands of a genteel owner named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who treats him with respect and makes use of the engineering skills of “Platt.” He even gives him a violin out of patriarchal devotion -- both to soothe the slaves and please his own ear.

But circumstances change, and Platt is sold to a vile man with a reputation for being stern with his slaves.
The film reaches its greatest emotional heights -- and depths -- under the reign of Epps, a plantation master played by Michael Fassbender. Conflating his religious beliefs with his inhuman instincts, Epps is a caricature of a character, frightening to behold but difficult to accept as truthful.

Fassbender is leering and electric, not content to just subjugate his slaves but fawn while doing so. A favorite move is putting his face right into theirs, practically nuzzling Platt or his favorite, Patsey, before putting them to the whip, or indulging his sexual cravings, or both.

Lupita Nyong’o is a terrific presence as Patsey, a slender reed of a woman who can pick three times as much cotton in a day as most men. But she must navigate the tumultuous river of jealousy springing forth from Mrs. Epps (Sarah Paulson), who fears that her husband values a slave more than his wife.

“12 Years a Slave” is a mesmerizing cinematic experience, easily one of the best of the year. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that the filmmakers would’ve better served the audience by exercising a little more restraint. By making the villain better resemble an actual human, the crucible of slavery would have had the weight of authenticity, and been made even more harrowing.

Review: "Shame"

Brandon is a sex addict. This may sound like a set-up for juvenile joking -- "What man isn't!" -- but the new drama "Shame" contains not an ounce of smirk. Its cinematic cousins are not T&A comedies but other dramas about addiction, and how it sucks all the joy out of people's lives.

The irony for Brandon is that one of the most beautiful, pleasurable experiences in human existence is the source of his pain. For him, the thrill of sexual intercourse plays like a dirge -- assisted by the film's dour, almost numbing musical score by Harry Escott.

German-born actor Michael Fassbender, best known to American audiences for playing young Magneto in last summer's "X-Men" reboot, gives a harrowing and haunting performance as Brandon. It's a revealing portrait, both physically -- the film's unabashed nudity and sex scenes earned an NC-17 rating -- and at its emotional core.

There's one amazing scene where we see Brandon engaged in vigorous sex with two prostitutes, and Fassbender shows us that the fleeting satisfaction of his physical urges only saps his soul.

Brandon lives alone in a fabulous Manhattan apartment, and works at an upscale ad agency where the boss (James Badge Dale) is a walking sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. Brandon is more circumspect about his desires, though, surreptitiously watching porn on his office computer and masturbating in the men's restroom.

He also takes care to avoid becoming the office lothario, generally shying away from the women he works with, until Marianne (Nicole Beharie) sidles up to him one day and makes her attraction clear. The sequence of their brief courtship is perhaps the most difficult thing to watch in the movie -- Brandon, presented with a genuine woman of wit and soul and charming awkwardness, struggles to relate. It's like a shark trying to go vegetarian.

It becomes clear exactly how alone Brandon is when his sister Sissy arrives unannounced and begs him to let her crash there. Their meeting is revealing: he catches her naked in the bath, thinking a burglar has broken in, and Sissy makes little attempt to cover herself up.

The suggestion that Brandon's obsession has touched even this sibling relationship is like a shadow that lingers over the entire movie.

Sissy is played by Carey Mulligan, in a tender, brittle performance that underlines her status as one of the best actresses of her young generation. The scene where she sings a sad, slow rendition of "New York, New York" at a nightclub while Brandon tearfully looks on is genuinely touching.

Director Steve McQueen (no relation to the screen legend), who co-wrote the screenplay with Abi Morgan, paints an unflattering picture of sexual obsession, though the sex scenes are clearly designed to be titillating -- with the exception of Brandon's foray into a gay club when his addiction reaches its nadir.

(I don't think McQueen is attempting to portray homosexuality as ugly, just a sick straight man who will do anything for sex, even if he doesn't enjoy it.)

"Shame" isn't a great movie, but quite a good one showcasing an amazing performance by Michael Fassbender that should get some attention when Academy Award nominations arrive.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Tom Horn" (1980)

There are the bones of a great story inside "Tom Horn," Steve McQueen's disappointing next-to-last film. But it's buried down deep in a desert of cinematic ineptitude, in between a TV hack of a director and a pair of screenwriters who seemed more motivated to deliver a star vehicle for McQueen than tell a gripping story.

McQueen was one of Hollywood's most iconic stars of the 1960s and '70s, but in his latter years he seemed to grow disinterested from movie-making entirely. He retired, sort of, reappeared for the lure of big money for a cameo in "The Towering Inferno," made a couple of flicks nobody saw, and was being offered ungodly sums for various big-budget projects, turning them all down. Then he quickly made his last two films, "Tom Horn" and "The Hunter," before dying in 1980 at age 50.

Having worked with some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, I can only guess why McQueen chose to have "Tom Horn" directed by William Wiard, a television veteran with zero film credits before (or after) this movie. Script men Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake similarly fail to acquit themselves with anymore more than ham-handed Western tropes and one of the most astonishingly unconvincing romances in cinematic history.

The film chronicles the last days of Tom Horn, a tracker, interpreter, ersatz lawman and assassin, with plenty of historical facts on its side.

Tom Horn was called the man who captured Geronimo, but the truth is a number of men helped bring in the legendary Indian chief, who ultimately surrendered himself after several fits and starts. Tom got involved in various scrapes between parties establishing the order of the dying Old West, as cattlemen who favored the free ranges butted up against the increasingly settled townships and farmlands.

As the movie opens, Tom is wandering without purpose. He gets into town, and while drinking a whiskey at the saloon manages to insult boxer "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, getting his tail handed to him in the ensuing melee. Tom actually runs from the encounter, cementing his position as a man who never initiates violence, even if he has spent his life putting an end to it, usually as the last one standing.

He's approached by John Coble, a member of the wealthy cattlemen's association played by the great character actor Richard Farnsworth. The association is tired of having their stock rustled and sold off, and want Tom to put an end to it. The hire him as a "cattle detective" to hunt down and deal with any rustlers -- arrest if possible, but killing is preferred.

At first things go well, as Tom's hard-won prowess is too much for the rustlers. But the townsfolk quickly become horrified by his brutal but effective killing. After being attacked in town, Tom wounds his would-be assassin, then casually walks up to him lying on the ground and finishes him off with a rifle shot to the head. The association realize this can only hurt their station and prospects.

This is where things go narratively askew. If the association wanted Horn gone, why didn't they simply pay him off and order him to move along? Given Tom's innate amiableness -- despite his ruthlessness with a gun -- its seems likely Coble could've convinced him to vamoose.

Instead, a local boy is shot under mysterious circumstances with a .45-60, the rare type of rifle used by Tom. Based upon only this happenstance and a conversation between Tom and the politically ambitious marshal, Joe Belle (Billy Green Bush), overheard by a local reporter, Tom is convicted and hanged.

The film is passable during the first hour or so, as a ham-handedly but often effective contemplation on the dying of the frontier days. Tom says he does not fear death, but he is afraid of losing the ability to come and go as he pleases, and live in the rough hills that are a home to him.

Once the trial starts, though, the film loses its way. Tom pays little attention to the proceedings, having daydreams about a romance with local teacher Gwendolene Kimmel (Linda Evans). I'm not exactly sure when this supposed relationship took place, since we never learn about it until after the time period when it was supposed to have occurred has passed. It's possible that Tom's musing remembrances are merely a fantasy about the life he could have had.

In any case, the pairing is fleeting and bewildering. Gwendolene practically throws herself into the cowboy's arms, that abruptly rejects him for his nomadic lifestyle.

Also less than completely realizes is the character of Sam Creedmore, the salty old sheriff played by Slim Pickens recruited to capture and imprison Tom during his trial. They talk to each other as if they've been friends or at least colleagues all their lives, but nothing is indicated that they even met before. Maybe Tom should've been having flashbacks about his jailer instead of the school teacher.

McQueen's performance is perhaps the film's only saving grace. With his ambling walk, unembellished skill at killing and quick-patterned speech, McQueen draws a portrait of a man who refused to walk away from his fate, even if he did not exactly embrace it. He was a certified minimalist as a performer, preferring to let actions and long glances take the place of big-scale emoting and loquacious dialogue.

I sometimes think McQueen would've been happier making movies in the silent era, when talking was considered overrated. Look at "Le Mans," the racing movie in which I don't think McQueen utters a single word for the first 45 minutes.

1.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Le Mans"

As someone with a lifelong passion for cars, most people who know me are surprised when I express my indifference to auto racing. Or at least the American version of it. I'm part of the crowd that dismisses it as a whole lot of boring left turns.

I've always preferred the European model of racing, in which competitors drive on real roads, in real conditions like rain or darkness. The endurance style of racing, typified by Le Mans, puts as much emphasis on the reliability of the cars as their speed, and the constitution of the driver in addition to his skills.

"Le Mans," the 1971 film starring Steve McQueen, is an odd duck of a movie. There really isn't much of a plot to speak of, other than the race itself. There's very little dialogue -- I don't think McQueen utters a word until almost halfway through the film.

Directed by Lee Katzin from a script by Harry Kleiner, "Le Mans" is really more a documentary of European racing. The first half in particular is an almost fetishistic orgy of shots of zooming cars, tires being replaced, men wrapping themselves in fire-resistant racing suits and the spectacle of the crowd. With all the close-ups of mechanisms and metal, it's practically racing porn.

McQueen, a serious racer in real life, had very specific ideas about how he wanted this movie to be made -- so much so that he clashed with the film's original director, John Sturges, several weeks into production. Sturges had directed McQueen in his star-making roles in "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Great Escape," but walked off the set.

The production was an amazing orchestration between fiction and reality. It was shot during the actual 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans race. McQueen in fact intended to participate as one-half of a racing team -- at that time, two drivers alternated in each car -- but that idea was scrapped. But cameras were set up all over the track, and additional scenes were shot after the race using the same cars from the Porche and Ferrari teams.

The studio even entered a special car in the race equipped with cameras to record the action on the track. That car did fairly well, although the team didn't win because it had to make extra stops to swap out film reels.

So as one watches "Le Mans," you're seeing a combination of footage of the actual race and scenes staged for the movie, but using the exact same cars and equipment the real drivers use. It's the ultimate in verisimilitude.

Perhaps that's one reason why this film, which was a critical and box office flop, has gained a cult status among racing fans for its devotion to realism and detail.

Several crashes were staged for the film, including the one where McQueen's character, Michael Delaney, is distracted by a fireball from another crash and wrecks his own car. He's not out of it long, though, as the Porche team leader substitutes him into another car to replace a soon-to-retire driver who's gotten overly cautious.

There's also a romance of sorts, between Delaney and the widow of another driver (the striking Elga Andersen). Delaney was part of the accident that killed her husband a year earlier, and perhaps he feels responsible, so they exchange a few looks and bits of dialogue that suggest an attraction.

She asks him why men like him (and her husband) risk their lives for something that's ultimately unimportant. Delaney delivers probably the longest piece of dialogue in the movie, and the most memorable:

"A lot of people go through life doing things badly. Racing’s important to men who do it well. When you’re racing, it ... it’s life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting."

The movie does not exaggerate the danger of Le Mans. Serious crashes happen every year, and in 1955 driver Pierre Levegh catapulted his car into the crowd, losing his own life and taking those of 84 spectators with him. Another 100 or so were injured.

I really liked the film's ending. Delaney and his arch-rival from the Ferrari team, Erich Stahler, are both waiting in the pits while their teams work out mechanical problems with their cars, numbers 22 and 8, respectively. In the down time, number 21 from Delaney's Porche team zooms by and takes the lead.

Stahler takes off and catches up with the 21 car, driven by a young and inexperienced driver. Delaney uses his vehicle to block out Stahler so he can't pass, preserving a win for the Porche team.

As the young drivers are feted by the crowd with champagne, Delaney stands alone, ignored, even though it was his actions that guaranteed the win for his team. He looks over at the driver he replaced and flashes two fingers twice, silently cheering their car and its decisive --if unheralded -- role in capturing glory.

3 stars