The 1971 Dillinger was written and directed by John Milius, a right-winger and gun fan. Crisp and exciting, the movie focuses on gun violence and gun justice (no trials). With aplomb Warren Oates plays bank robber John Dillinger, and Ben Johnson—relentlessly out to get his man—is FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Here, Milius is Sam Peckinpah without the intermittent visual poetry. He gets the job done, though, and not without personal vision.
Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), set in the late 20s, is about “the dangers of [sexual] abstinence” (Stanley Kauffmann). It’s abysmally stupid.
The screenplay is flimsy and hyperbolic. (It was written by Kazan and William Inge; the story is Inge’s.) It is inexplicable for Warren Beatty’s Bud to break up with Natalie Wood’s Deanie, the girl he loves but who unhappily resists having sex with him. It is absurd for Pat Hingle’s Ace, Bud’s father, to do . . . well, everything he does.
Hingle overacts, but I don’t think Wood does. Her hysteria is probably right, no less than her gracefulness—and her beauty is assuredly right. The look of the film is lovely, but the film itself isn’t. It’s an unholy mess. . . William Inge is the author of such decent plays as Picnic and Bus Stop. Splendor, in which Inge ineptly plays a minister, is merely a homosexual writer’s cloak for expressing the desire to escape erotic inhibition. This desire is sad, and we can sympathize with Inge even as we recoil from his movie.
Cover of Splendor in the Grass
Nader and Simin, A Separation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The chief character in Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation (2011), Nader (Peyman Maadi) refuses to admit to his wrongdoing. Frustrated, he will not pay a disappointing caretaker of his sick father her proper wage and pushes her out the door of his apartment to get her to leave. The caretaker, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who is pregnant, takes a minor fall and subsequently miscarries. She and her angry husband blame Nader’s push for the miscarriage, thus an accusation of murder is made. But, regardless of everyone’s suspicions, the evidence for this is not there. (Does it matter to Iranian society?) What’s more, Razieh herself refuses to admit to wrongdoing. Yet I agree with David Edelstein that “What makes [A Separation] so good is that no one is bad.” They’re just put-upon and fearful.
There is nothing genuinely good about familial separation in Farhadi’s vision. Nader’s wife Simin (Leila Hatami) tries to divorce Nader because he will not leave Iran to go with her to a country more beneficial to their daughter. Rightly the man declines to leave his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. Simin’s desire to separate, and Nader’s willingness to let it happen, opens the door to a painful labyrinth. A grand hiding of the truth emerges. All the not-bad souls suffer, but they resemble most of those Chekhov characters who, rather than shoot themselves, respectably go on living. Fortunately, Farhadi is not hiding the truth.
(In Farsi with English subtitles)
Cover of McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Robert Altman‘s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) does appear to be far more truthful about the American West than other Westerns (i.e., mythological Westerns). However, I don’t know which is more ill-written—the movie’s Leonard Cohen songs or the Altman-Brian McKay script. Er . . . it has to be the script.
Warren Beatty enacts a profane cynic who becomes a dominating businessman in a frontier town, and gradually he begins a relationship with a brothel madam (Julie Christie) which is pretty hazy. The film is boringly and laughably anti-capitalist and has a lot of lame, dopey dialogue. Although it isn’t Beatty’s fault, he doesn’t really know what kind of man he is portraying, and yet his acting is assuredly superior to that of Christie and Rene Auberjonois, who are merely going through the motions.
The costumes and production design are exactly what a non-mythological Western should have. Even so, I said the Beatty character, John McCabe, is a profane cynic; hence it comes as no surprise that Altman’s film is an offputting, foul-mouthed (and unfocused) mess.
Roger Ebert called the John Huston film, The Man Who Would Be King (1975), “unabashed and thrilling and fun.” To me, there is too much brutality displayed for the picture actually to be fun, but a frank and enjoyable adaptation of Kipling it is. Peachy (Michael Caine) and Daniel (Sean Connery) are blackguards. A British colonial in India says he has no cause for arresting them but, as it happens, primitives in a faraway land have cause for executing them.
In point of fact, the men abide by certain values the Empire smiles on, but they also fail the Empire’s institutions, from the military to the church. Both are ex-soldiers, demonstrating as much gusto in their warfare as in their corruption. Good material is here for a film, which film is not much flawed and devotedly made. In terms of merit The Man Who Would Be King is the movie The Wind and the Lion should have been.