Cover of 3:10 to Yuma (Special Edition)

A big sky above a stagecoach moving across the plain in a true long shot—now this is a title sequence for a Western—and this particular Western is the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957), not the Aughts remake.  This is the good one, adeptly directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford as the robber-killer who must be escorted to the 3:10 train to judgment-seat Yuma.

The man escorting him is a financially strapped rancher (Van Heflin), doing it for money.  The train can be caught in tiny Contention City, appropriately named because, for sure, contention is coming from reprobate underlings who wish to rescue Ford. . . Arising in the film is an interesting interaction between lawful people (Heflin and many others) and unlawful people.  They’re thrown together enough that Ford necessarily eats dinner at Heflin’s home and gets intimate with the female bartender (Felicia Farr) oblivious to the robber-killer’s awful doings.

Adapting an Elmore Leonard story, Halsted Welles did some bang-up writing, despite the limited realism.  At the end it is VERY limited, and all in all Ford’s character receives a bit more sympathy than he deserves.  But what a decent Western this is!

Mouchette (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is no repentance of sin in Robert Bresson‘s Mouchette (1967), though there should be.  Plus there is an old woman, a layer-out of the dead, who talks like a pagan.  Yet it is the Christianity of Georges Bernanos, on whose novel this film is based (and faithful to), that consistently matters here, even as the novelist’s negative mood over a youngster’s suffering becomes the filmmaker’s negative mood.

It so happens that many years before Bresson’s death, there was a rumor that he was calling himself a “Christian atheist.”  But no evidence of this ever emerged:  Someone must have merely assumed there was so much misery in the Sixties and Seventies films of Bresson that only an atheistic sensibility could have produced them.  This is nonsense.  Although his short novel might transcend orthodoxy, Georges Bernanos was a Christian man who wrote a Christian book (Mouchette) and, as I said, Bresson’s film is faithful to it.

The girl Mouchette is an unhappy Catholic non-Christian; she is persecuted.  Surely, however, she likes the thought of being among the dead who are gods:  The old woman tells her that certain pagans used to believe that the dead are gods.  But the film begins with a shot of Mouchette’s mother (Maria Cardinal), who is fatally ill, inside a church.  People need to be redeemed but, also, can life itself be redeemed?  Granted, it can’t be done by dead pagan religion, but can it be redeemed at all?

The answer in Mouchette is yes.  It was the view of St. Augustine that unbaptized babies go to Hell if they die.  Not so Bresson and Bernanos, for, here, a young girl, the Catholic non-Christian, goes to Heaven—after taking her life.  No one in the film is said to be in danger of Hell; the world alone seems pretty Hellish.  Mouchette escapes it by dying into that which redeems life.  The Monteverdi music at the end is certainly not a music of despair.  In some ways, it must be said, Bresson’s picture is weird but, in my view, it is not weird that it transcends orthodoxy.  This takes it to a terrain different from that of Diary of a Country Priest and Au hasard Balthazar.  

(In French with English subtitles)

In 1965, with Fist in His Pocket, Italy’s Marco Bellocchio proved he was an able film artist.  His movie is about a wretched family living wretched lives.  They, the people, are morally and existentially wretched:  One of them (Lou Castel) is an epileptic who dabbles in incest with his sister.  Disturbingly dark stuff.

Families, the film says, are often invaded by existential nightmares, although the oldest son in the present clan (Marino Mase) has a good chance of escaping it in the family he will start with his nice fiancee.  Who knows?  Life is hell, though.

To me, Fist in His Pocket is a bit tiresome.  It has been called nihilistic.  Actually, if it is, it slowly becomes so preoccupied with pathology that the nihilism—and everything else—seems like an afterthought.  This is a flaw.  To be honest, there isn’t much to the film.  Bellocchio, all the same, directs scintillatingly, and Castel, Mase and Paola Pitagora (pitiful Sis) have interesting faces and perform compellingly.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Cover of Romeo & Juliet

The famous 1968 Romeo and Juliet, by Franco Zeffirelli, tries too hard in its cinematic realization.  Much is overdone, such as the loathsome performance of John McEnery as Mercutio; and, withal, too much of the text is cut.  The killing of Paris, for example.

I agree with Philip T. Hartung about “the terrific fight between Romeo and Tybalt,” and—except for Juliet’s distracting cleavage in the balcony scene— the film’s sensuality works quite well.  Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey play the classic lovers and they’re not bad, but they’re defeated by something:  the film lacks tragic anguish, true tragic darkness.  We don’t feel the wound.  The movie is too noisy, too busy, and too commercial for tragedy to force its way through.  I said it tries too hard, but with tragic anguish it doesn’t try hard enough.

There is excellent work from actors Laurie Metcalf, Lois Smith (as a nun) and Saoirse Ronan in Greta Gerwig‘s movie, Lady Bird (2017), and pretty appealing work from Gerwig as well.  Ronan enacts “Lady Bird,” or Christine, McPherson, an adolescent girl who attends a Catholic high school and who frequently fights with her intolerant if concerned mother (Metcalf).

Director Gerwig wrote the intelligent screenplay, never lapsing, unlike other small-film scenarists, into smug pseudo-intellectualism.  Up to a point, even so, her writing is schematic:  Lady Bird drifts away from her best buddy and befriends a cool beauty, who disappoints her.  Chastened, she then returns to her best buddy with customary sentimentality resulting.  A letdown, this.  Also, the film could use more psychological believability, as when the defensive Lady Bird literally pleads with her mother to be reasonable about her going to an Eastern college.

But many jewels are glittering in Lady Bird.  It presents interesting characters and dialogue, and it boasts a lovely ending involving a church and a phone call.  It is, I think, a film that believes in God, along with being respectful of its few devoutly Catholic figures.