Lee Marvin Centennial

“Lee was my kind of actor, a real tough-looking, tough-talking sonofabitch.” – Sam Fuller

Lee Marvin was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1924. Today marks his centennial. (He died of a heart attack in 1987 in Arizona at the age of 63.) He was the quintessential movie tough guy of the 1950s and ’60s, emerging alongside Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Palance, and Lee Van Cleef, all of whom, like Lee, would eventually become stars, as well as a rogues’ gallery of equally rough-hewn, battle-scarred visages found among such contemporaries as Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, Ralph Meeker, Jack Elam, Leo Gordon, and Claude Akins, among others, nearly all of whom had served in the military in World War II. (Marvin was in the Marine Corps and was seriously wounded at the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific, for which he got a Purple Heart.)

THE BIG RED ONE (1980) directed by Sam Fuller

For years, these guys plied their trade in crime pictures, war movies and westerns, both on the big screen and small, as well as dramas about working men far removed from the centers of power, and became favorites of grindhouse and neighborhood theater audiences everywhere. (Quentin Tarantino regards these men with great awe in his books, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Cinema Speculation.)

Black-and-White Cinema in 1960s Hollywood

Black-and-white films were regularly produced and released by the major Hollywood studios right up through 1966, which happened to be the last year that the Academy Award categories of Cinematography, Costume Design and Art Direction & Set Decoration had separate divisions for Color and Black-and-White. Interestingly, the 1966 winner in the black-and-white division of all three categories was the last black-and-white film nominated for Best Picture in the 1960s, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, Mike Nichols’ film based on Edward Albee’s play and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a dysfunctional, bickering hard-drinking couple living on a college campus. The only other Hollywood studio releases in b&w to get Oscar nominations in any categories that year were THE FORTUNE COOKIE, SECONDS, and MISTER BUDDWING. Walter Matthau won Best Supporting Actor for THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Other b&w films nominated that year were all from Europe.

Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton in WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Ron Rich, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau in THE FORTUNE COOKIE

Rock Hudson, Richard Anderson in SECONDS

Jonas Mekas on the Joys of Hollywood Cinema 1960-65

Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) began writing a regular column, entitled Movie Journal, in the Village Voice of November 12, 1958. A filmmaker himself and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which he eventually curated and supervised, Mekas was a champion of what was then called “the New American Cinema,” including the burgeoning experimental and avant-garde films, many of which constituted the “underground film” movement of the 1960s and he chronicled their showings in scattered venues in Manhattan, often subject to police raids because of the controversial and “scandalous” nature of the films. But he also wrote about the pleasures of attending “people’s movies,” i.e. Hollywood movies meant for a mass audience, and disdained the “so-called American ‘art’ film” aimed chiefly at the middlebrow mainstream movie reviewers. He wrote about the more overtly commercial films with a fan’s delight, a breezy wit and a caustic tone aimed at the regular New York newspaper movie reviewers whom he often tangled with.

He collected his reviews in a book published in 1972 entitled, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971. I’m sure Mekas was still writing reviews for the Voice when I started reading the paper in high school. Mekas had brought in Andrew Sarris to cover mainstream cinema releases in order to free himself to devote more space to the likes of Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jean Genet, and Shirley Clarke, and recount his own filmmaking adventures and the movement’s constant battles with the police and the hidebound cultural establishment which rejected so much of the new work. As a budding auteurist, I was more interested in Sarris back then, but re-reading this collection reminds me of the turbulence of the era and Mekas’s singular voice, often laced with spirited outrage, pushing for acceptance of new ways of seeing the world through cinema and freedom of voice and vision.

Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, ca. 1963

Charles Bronson Centennial

He was an iconic action star who was one of The Magnificent Seven, one of The Dirty Dozen and one of three who made good The Great Escape. He was Charles Bronson and November 3, 2021 marks his centennial. (He died in 2003 at the age of 81 after a 48-year acting career.)

I first saw Bronson on the big screen in John Sturges’ THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963), where he was among the 76 POWs in a German prison camp during World War II who made a dramatic prison break in 1943. He played Danny, the “tunnel king,” whose background in coal mining propelled him to take a major role in digging the escape tunnels. Bronson himself had worked as a coal miner in Pennsylvania before military service in WWII. In the movie his character was one of the three who successfully reaches neutral territory without being recaptured. The other two were played by James Coburn and John Leyton.

THE WILD BUNCH: 50th Anniversary of an American Classic

Sam Peckinpah’s provocative western, THE WILD BUNCH, opened in the U.S. on June 25, 1969, 50 years ago this month. I’ve seen the film many times over the years, including at least 20 times on the big screen and multiple times in a variety of formats: broadcast TV, VHS, DVD and Blu-ray. It was a sprawling epic western full of action, gunplay and bloodshed, rated R and featuring a predominantly male cast of Hollywood stars, dependable character actors, a couple of newcomers, and veteran Mexican performers, but only a handful of women with small speaking parts (mostly as prostitutes). The stars were William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sanchez, Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones, and Emilio Fernandez. In the leadup to the film’s release, I saw all the print ads—in newspapers and on the subway–with lines like, “Nine men who came too late and stayed too long.” I read all the pre-release articles and finally the reviews–the negative ones which criticized the blood-spurting and called William Holden “dissipated” and the positive ones like Vincent Canby’s in The New York Times who ranked it way above the other big westerns of that season, TRUE GRIT and BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST also opened that summer, a week after THE WILD BUNCH.

Jack Palance Centennial

Today, February 18, 2019, would have been Jack Palance’s 100^th birthday. He died in 2006 at the age of 87. He acted in films for the entire second half of the 20th century and his TV roles continued into the 21st century. The son of a Ukrainian coal miner, he had unusually taut facial features, a result of reconstructive surgery after his face was burned in a plane crash during a test flight in WWII, giving his face a dramatic look that made him a natural for villain roles, most notably the gunslinger Jack Wilson in SHANE, or various historical ethnic roles such as Attila the Hun (SIGN OF THE PAGAN), the Mongol chieftain Ogatai, son of Genghis Khan (THE MONGOLS), the Apache rebel Toriano (ARROWHEAD), Mexican revolutionary Raza (THE PROFESSIONALS), the biblical character Simon the Magician (THE SILVER CHALICE) and even Fidel Castro (CHE!).

Robert Aldrich Centennial

Robert Aldrich was born on August 9, 1918 and would have turned 100 today. (He died in 1983.) He was one of my earliest favorite movie directors. By the time I saw THE DIRTY DOZEN (pictured above, with Aldrich in the red sweater directing, with Charles Bronson on the right) in high school, I’d already seen three of his earlier films, two in theaters (THE LAST SUNSET, HUSH HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE) and one on TV (VERA CRUZ), and I loved DOZEN so much I made it a point to seek out every one of his films as they came out. In fact, just three weeks after I first saw DOZEN, I went to see his newest movie, TOO LATE THE HERO (1970) when it opened on Broadway. I missed the next one, THE GRISSOM GANG (1971), when it opened, but starting with ULZANA’S RAID (1972), a cavalry-and-Indians western starring Burt Lancaster, I saw every one of his remaining films in theaters on their original release. Also, as I began taking film classes in college and seeing movies in repertory theaters in Manhattan, I sought out Aldrich’s older films, especially as I learned of the high esteem he was held in by auteurists, and discovered for myself some of his very best films, including KISS ME DEADLY (1955), ATTACK (1956), and WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962), not to mention the chance to see VERA CRUZ (1954) on the big screen. At the beginning of 2018, I finally caught up with Aldrich’s debut film, THE BIG LEAGUER (1953), a baseball drama starring Edward G. Robinson, and, as of this writing, I have only one Aldrich film left to see, the rarely-screened lesbian drama, THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE (1969).

The Best Films of 1956

The older I get, the more I like watching films from the 1950s, the decade in which I was born, especially the mid-1950s. I like revisiting my favorites from that period and continually discovering new films from that time, be they westerns, dramas, crime movies, historical epics, musicals, sci-fi, horror, etc. It was a unique period for filmmaking, as Hollywood was undergoing a transition from the studio era, its ironclad contracts and ownership of theaters to one of independent production, independent theater chains, a loosening of the Production Code, more location shooting and greater acceptance by the public of foreign films. The old guard was still turning out exemplary work, as seen in the films of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, William Wyler and King Vidor, all of whom had gotten their start during the silent era, while younger directors with bolder visions and new stylistic approaches had emerged during and after the war, including Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Elia Kazan, Anthony Mann, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Don Siegel, Samuel Fuller, Robert Aldrich, Douglas Sirk and Otto Preminger. In addition, a host of new talent was emerging from television, Broadway and documentaries and quickly finding their way to Hollywood, including Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Martin Ritt, Delbert Mann, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, and Robert Altman. These overlapping waves of directors offered an unprecedented talent pool the likes of which Hollywood has never seen since. It’s no coincidence that a group of French film critics developed the auteur theory around this time.

Burt Lancaster Centennial

Today, November 2, 2013, is the centennial of Burt Lancaster’s birth. When I was growing up, Burt Lancaster was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He was capable of making highly entertaining genre pieces, but was also considered a serious actor with Oscar nominations in his resume and one Oscar for Best Actor (ELMER GANTRY). He had his own production company and gave boosts to the careers of certain directors he’d worked with (e.g. Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer) and he’d also directed on his own (THE KENTUCKIAN). He co-starred in five films with Kirk Douglas and, indeed, the first film I saw Lancaster in was his fourth co-starring turn with Douglas, John Frankenheimer’s political thriller SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. Lancaster was an imposing presence who played larger-than-life roles—his Wyatt Earp in GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL is a mythical presence on a par with the heroes of ancient Greek tales—and had an athletic background that informed even his non-action roles. As he got older in the 1970s and 1980s, he turned to less showy, more character-oriented roles, with more than a touch of introspection and weariness, such as his grizzled army scout, McIntosh, in Aldrich’s cavalry western, ULZANA’S RAID (1972), and the Mexican-American sheriff, Valdez, who embarks on a quest for justice against a powerful rancher in VALDEZ IS COMING (1972), based on a novel by Elmore Leonard. I was lucky to see a lot of Lancaster movies on the big screen when I was growing up and then a lot of his older movies on television. He’s always been one of my favorite movie stars (second only to Robert Mitchum) and I’d like to recall some of my favorite movies of his.

 

1967: Action Cinema’s Greatest Year

45 years ago this month, I went to see the fifth James Bond movie, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967), when it finally came to the Fairmount, one of my neighborhood theaters. It was a single feature, very unusual for this theater, but interest was so high they didn’t have to book a second film (although other theaters in the neighborhood ran it with second features). They’d even raised the prices for this showing so I wound up paying kids’ price even though I was 14 (I was short enough for my age to get away with it) and sat with my 12-year-old sister Claire in the children’s section, presided over by a matron in a white dress and white gloves and wielding a flashlight. This film marked the first time American audiences got to see ninja action in a mainstream studio film. We’d never even heard of ninjas before this film. It was also the first time most kids got to see people fight with samurai swords in an action scene in a big-budget feature film. When the climactic assault by Bond and the ninjas on SPECTRE’s volcano rocket base began, the crowd in the theater went completely nuts. We’d never seen anything like this before and kids were roaring and applauding and cheering and jumping up and down like I’d never seen an audience react before. (Two little wise guys behind me simply exclaimed “Ooooh!” in unison every time something happened.)