bbrow07 Reviews

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

We don't really know who killed Liberty Valance. (SPOILERS)

[16 June 2004]

Who killed Liberty Valance? Why, Keyser Soze killed Liberty Valance!

But seriously, the film is worth seeing. Yes, it's black-and-white, claustrophobic and old-fashioned, the production values are low, and the sets are cheesy. Everyone here is a stereotype, or an archetype. The Good Guys wear white hats and the Bad Guys wear black hats. Mexicans in sombreros twitter in the corner and dance in the streets when Valance is shot, but never say a single line. Swedes speak like muppets. But that's probably not because of the age of the film - it came out in the same year as Lawrence of Arabia! - but more likely to be deliberate - this is a homage to, a farewell to, almost an affectionate parody of, of an obsolete kind of film. The political scenes are certainly parody. This is *not* a realistic film.

Three side-bar points:

The good: the supporting cast, as others have said, are excellent. Everybody overacts shamelessly except for the supposed leads. Stewart and Wayne play default Stewart and Wayne characters. Miles sinks blandly into the background. This allows the others to stand out against their neutrality and ham it up to their hearts content. The best are Carradine and O'Brien who don't so much steal their scenes as pick them up, elbow the opposition aside, and run over the line with them. Marvin & Strode are wonderful as well as being total stereotypes.

The Bad: Maybe Wayne can act, but he isn't doing it here. Perhaps he wasn't asked to. In only one scene does the seem to come alive emotionally, and that's when he sits on the stairs at the back of the convention hall hand watches what's going on while saying nothing. For the rest he's more a cipher than a character. Maybe there is an alternate universe in which Clint Eastwood played Tom. That would have been a different film, and probably a better one.

The Ugly: one of many American movies in which someone is placed in an absurd, unlikely, or extreme situation in which it becomes morally correct to use a gun to shoot someone. This is propaganda, Pilgrim.





But who was the Man who Killed Liberty Valance? The "Keyser Soze" crack is not entirely off the point. All we know is that Rance said that Tom said that he killed him. It is all a double-flashback. Either man could have reasons to be economical with the truth.

Rance might have made a lucky shot - we do see him firing first, before either Liberty or Tom. If Rance had killed Valance Tom might have lied about it to persuade him to stand for Congress. Rance might even have wanted to believe that Tom had done it to ease his own conscience. Or smooth his career. It might suit him to be known in the Territory as "The Man Who" - but to have a defence against any accusations made in Washington.

Or Pompey may have killed him. At the first account of the fight we don't know that Tom is even present. We do know that Pompey was in town and knew about the fight, and Pompey had a rifle and is a good shot. If Pompey had killed Valance, both Tom and Rance would have wanted it kept secret - at that time and place there'd have been a lynching.

We don't know what happened, only what was said. It is Tom's story within Rance's story within John Ford's story.

Print the Legend.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

[10/10 · 8 June 2004]

A glorious film

just a few things to add to what everyone else has said

[NB SPOILERS towards the bottom of the page - not that the plot is exactly a suspense]

• It's a "realistic" story on the face of it. The whole thing is reminiscent of the "verismo" Italian operas from the end of the 19th century, like Cavalleria Rusticana, where soap-opera plots about ordinary people are set to emotionally stunning over-the-top drama-queen music - inherently a democratic kind of style, saying that shopworkers and little old ladies have as much right to passion and glory as kings or gangsters or movie stars.

• Yes, the singing is silly. But the film knows this - in the very first scene the men in the washroom joke about "Carmen" (another example of the same style) and one of them sings something like "I'm going to see a film, I don't like Opera, I can't stand all the singing". Its a film that *knows* mechanics don't (usually) sing arias while they check the oil, and makes a joke about it. Buffy fans will have got the same point from "Once more with feeling" - the Fundamental Problem of the Musical is: "why is everybody singing?"

• But there is something unrealistic about it, the beauty. Everyone and everything is good-looking. The people are beautiful. The dirty old town is beautiful. Cheap bars are beautiful. Squalid damp flats are beautiful. Abandoned hulk ships are beautiful. A garage forecourt with petrol pumps and a canopy is beautiful. All the men are good-looking. And as for the women - someone asked why more men than women like this weepy film. The obvious answer is Catherine Deneuve. But Anne Vernon playing her mother is cuter than anyone her age has a right to be. And as for Ellen Farner... Guy has not one but two stupendously attractive women after him, which is about 1.99 more than the average member of the audience.

• The costumes match the background far too often for it to be anything but deliberate. At first its even more confusing than the singing. Madame Emery dresses differently to match the wallpaper of the shop and her flat, sometimes her clothes even seem to change colour for no reason other than to match the scenery. Genevieve stands in front of a window while a truck that's exactly the same shade as her cardigan pulls up behind her. When she tries on her maternity dress it has the same combination of royal blue background and pink flowers as the wallpaper behind her. When she walks past the docks with Roland they are both wearing different shades of off-white - hers matches the rusting paint on the old ships, his matches the cliffs visible in the distance. When Guy and Madeleine sit next to each other outside the cafe her orange-brown clothes and even her lipstick match the door behind her while his dark brown jacket matches not only the wood behind him but also her hair - exactly the same trick we've seen when he was sitting next to the prostitute Jenny with her red dress on front of the red screen inside the other bar. We are in fantasy land here, even if it looks a little like Cherbourg.

• but this is all the same as the singing. To ask "how does a poor family afford such clothes?" or "why is the delivery van exactly that shade of yellow?" is to miss the point as much as to ask "why does a shopkeeper sing to his customers?" or "why does it always rain when we say goodbye?". In this movie, in this fantasy land, the world is turned upside down, the meek can inherit the earth (or at least look as if they might), small-town Cherbourg is as romantic as Paris, sailors and truck-drivers sing while they work, the poor wear clothes that money can't buy, the scenery changes colour to match your wardrobe, every man looks like a leading man, and every shop-girl truly is as beautiful as any duchess.

• This is "Singing in the Rain" set in the backroom of a shop instead of the back lot of a Hollywood studio, this is "West Side Story" without the violence, this is a small-town "Moulin Rouge", this is "Brief Encounter" on acid.

• It's not a tragic ending, any more than the endings of Casablanca or Brief Encounter are tragic. It's the right ending. We're not so much sad for Genevieve - even though we are crying - as we are happy for Roland (who deserves a break. Even though we know he's probably a crook) If we are crying its because Guy needs to hug Francoise. We expect that the marriages will work out in the end - maybe they have worked out already. If these people are not going to be happy its not because they married the wrong partners.

• and what other film has had hundreds of thousands of viewers in floods of tears watching an aerial shot of an Esso service station?

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Not so much an action flick with cute kids as a great bit of sf

[8/10 · 3 June 2003]

Do so many of you, especially the Americans, pan it because it isn't quite as nasty as the previous films?

I loved the invented language, loved the setting - much more believable than the place with the oil in MM2, loved the anthropological nature of it, loved the references to other films and to written science fiction.

MM2 is a film about the end of a civilisation. MM3 is about the start of one. See it again.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

And its funny too

[10/10 · 3 June 2003]

Quite possibly the best film ever made.

Certainly the one that shows Pressburger as the best screenwriter.

The tight plotting and constant textual and visual references backwards and forwards make it a marvel to watch, and one of the few films I know that bears watching twice in quick succession.

Some of the comments from US reviewers imply that a version has been shown there that is heavily cut and re-ordered. No wonder its confusing for them. You must miss quite a lot of the point if you don't see the first 3 or 4 scenes of the 1941 training exercise - and you'd better remember them because when the flashback catches up with the frame story we see that things weren't quite the way they seemed the first time.

Powell and Pressburger (and the designers and artists and technicians) really do manage to work together here. One of the reasons that the film is so good is that it is a work-out for more than one of your senses - to get the most out of it you have to keep your eyes and your ears open, you nave to keep track of the visuals and the text and the music. That's how a film is supposed to work, but so often doesn't.

As always with Pressburger, morality, ethics, and politics are on stage. He never wrote a war film in which Germans are cartoon bad guys, or the Allies painted angels. It's an anti-Nazi film, and its an intelligent and sensitive anti-Nazi film. As in Casablanca, part of this effect is achieved because the film was made by people who had lived through it. Walbrook and Powell were both in England to escape the Nazis. Livesey had volunteered for the war - and been turned down because he was too old. Kerr's father had been gassed in the trenches.

Here we see Clive standing up for the rules of war and honourable behaviour in three wars - yet we know that there are others on his side - the South African officer in the trenches, Spud, perhaps the Americans, the British commanders in South Africa - who are themselves willing to curt corners, to break the rules, to shoot or torture prisoners. In part this is a film about war crimes, and the ethics of war. It explicitly asks whether or not we have do evil to fight evil? Which is one of the reasons it is so relevant today.

All this, and its hilariously funny too! A description of the film makes it sound terribly serious, but it is in large part a comedy, and the Berlin scenes are some of the funniest ever filmed.

And the three male leads all get to marry their own private Deborah Kerr! That can't be bad. Though it does make you wonder about Powell...