Films, A — Z, January 15, 2017: B
A year-long series of essays about my favorite films from A — Z
B
Barry Lyndon
1975, Color, Warner Bros. A Hawks Film Ltd. Production
Written, Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray
Starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee and Leon Vitali
Barry Lyndon hypnotized me. Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 costume epic of a handsome social climber wandering Europe, seeking his fortune in the years before the French Revolution, straight up hypnotized me, along with two others, the first time I saw it. It was on VHS. On a television set like this. And still it had the effect of putting me in a trance.
For a brief time in college I had a roommate named Jeremy. He was the only one who knew and loved films more than I did. Neither I nor Jeremy’s girlfriend had yet seen Barry Lyndon, so we rented it, popped it into the VCR and pulled back the paisley curtain Jeremy kept draped across the TV screen when the set was off. Back then TVs were called “sets.” It seems now like a distant age.
And as we watched unfold in an even more distant age the story of Redmond Barry, aka Barry Lyndon, the Irish upstart, brawler, soldier, deserter, police-spy-turned-double-agent, gambler, lover of wealthy widows and good-looking cousins, husband, father, duelist and drunkard, the afternoon light dimmed and died; in the dark not one of us moved in our seats, nor made any comment or asked any question. We hardly breathed.
Near the end of the Act I (By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon) Redmond seduces Lady Lyndon, a beautiful and wealthy woman in the prime of her life. Winning her heart will guarantee Barry the position of wealth and prestige he has been seeking his entire adult life. But first he has to reckon with her husband, Sir Charles, “Knight of the Bath, Member of Parliament, Ambassador to His Majesty King George III at various European courts…a cripple, worn out by gout and a myriad of diseases.”
Sir Charles Lyndon confronts Barry about the affair, but Barry unseats him with his cavalier attitude, and in a fit of anger the old man’s heart starts to fail right there in the gaming room. Sir Charles turns pale before our eyes. He reaches for his heart pills, but the attack sends a jolt through his chest, and the spasm scatters pills all over the place. His friends come to his aid. A distant piano sounds a grim chord. As the narrator starts to tell us what happened to Sir Charles…
THE PHONE RINGS. Not anyone’s cell phone, I mean like an actual house phone that goes like this.
We groaned and cursed as the film rolled into Intermission. The profound spell this film put us all under had been broken by the ting-a-ling of a tedious phone call. What kind of person calls at a moment like this? Certainly it was some cretin with no friends and no life who calls people just to fill their sepulchral room with something other than the sound of their own voice. But it was only our dear friend Brad, who used to be Jeremy’s roommate and now lived upstairs. He wanted to know what we were up to that evening. Though I forgave Brad, I never forgot.
After hanging up the phone, we resumed watching Part II (Containing an Account of the Misfortunes and Disasters That Befell Barry Lyndon). Barry marries his wealthy, distinguished Lady Lyndon and immediately sets about indulging himself: wine, women, cards, more women; when he’s caught with the nanny he makes a mortal enemy of his young stepson, the family heir and viscount Lord Bullington.
As Barry pursues his own path to a title, a Lordship that will secure his claim to Lady Lyndon’s money and property, we observe how all the qualities that brought him to this “pitch of prosperity,” his rakish good looks, his nose for opportunity, his gambler’s courage, and most of all his placid sense of entitlement, all these things in the end will be the ruin of him.
And then I fell back in that trance, and this time it went deeper. Part of it is due to the film’s celebrated use of natural light, with interiors lit only by candlelight, that make me feel like I’m in the 18th century, or at least a Hogarth painting. It’s also the Schubert piano trio, which evokes the moribund ceremony that colors even the moments of joy in the lives of these people. The film’s Epilogue states: good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now. That sentiment lurks in every frame of this, perhaps the most beautiful and splendid film I’ve ever seen.
As the story threads tighten and the final act becomes inevitable, I had time to think about what the film was saying.
Lord Bullington calls out Barry in front of all the Great Men and Great Ladies whose influence and favor will earn him his coveted title of Lord Lyndon, and in the span of a minute his plans irrevocably crumble. “Fate had determined that he should leave none of his race behind him,” the narrator informs us, “and he should finish his life poor, lonely, and childless.”
Does this information diminish the suspense? Not a bit! In fact, it ramps up the suspense, because we can’t wait to see how he meets that fate. If we’ve learned anything about Redmond Barry in the course of the film it’s that he’s always a step from total disaster: he’s ambitious and unlucky, brave and foolhardy; he’s good in a fight and he gets in way too many of them; he has a talent for making money and a genius for losing it; he’s easy on the eyes and a true pain in the ass, and he brings misfortune to himself and all those who care about him.
At his lowest moment he’s forced to reckon once again with a member of the Lyndon family. Lord Bullington has grown to manhood and demands satisfaction for past injuries. The film’s final duel pits Barry against a man who not only hates him, but whose future depends on killing him. It’s perhaps the most suspenseful duel scene ever filmed, containing more twists and reversals and more character development than an entire feature length film. Barry makes a final stab at achieving the status of Gentleman of Quality, but the rules of the society he aspires to demand his expulsion.
In every one of his great pictures, Kubrick offers up an audacious idea that offends our idea of ourselves and of our civilization (in the course of this year’s articles there will be more Kubrick pictures on my list, and more discussion about these offensive ideas). Barry Lyndon proclaims that whatever we gain in this life due to our endless striving, or the highness of our birth, those qualities and values that win us Love, Wealth, Success, Prestige or whatever else we seek, are the same qualities that ensure we will lose those things; and that we all live just long enough to see it happen.
Redmond Barry started his life as a mama’s boy chopping wood in the Irish countryside. He suffers setbacks: he’s charmed by his pretty cousin, who rejects him for an English soldier, and when he challenges the soldier to a duel his family sets him up to get rid of him; he’s robbed off all his worldly property and later conscripted into the army, and when he deserts the Prussians nab him and make him their hostage. Somewhere in the middle of his life things turn around: he’s rescued by a spy, becomes a professional sharper and marries a wealthy woman. Later he’s introduced to the King of England as Barry Lyndon, a man of means and property, and soon to be a Peer of the Realm. In the end he’s just a name on an annuity check. We’ve followed him every step of his journey, and we marvel at how far a good bullshitter can get in this world, and how he, like all the rest of us, is doomed to go nowhere.
FINAL NOTE: Since balloting for Academy Award nominees ends this week, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the judgment of the Academy voters in 1975, the year Barry Lyndon was released, because the choices the voters made have held up remarkably well. That year the films the Academy nominated for Best Picture were:
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick also nominated for Best Director)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet also nominated for Director)
Jaws (director Steven Spielberg not nominated)
Nashville (Robert Altman also nominated for Director)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Winner, M. Forman also won for Director)
The fifth director nominated that year was Federico Fellini for Amarcord.
So that year five of the decade’s finest films made the shortlist for Best Picture, each of them a unique and exciting, even transformative, addition to their respective genres; and four of the finest filmmakers of their time were nominated for Director: three would later receive the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, one of whom (Fellini) bumped another future two-winner winner (Spielberg) off that year’s shortlist; Milos Forman went on to win another Directing Oscar for Amadeus.
Then there was Kubrick, the Great Sphinx himself. He never won an Oscar for directing or lifetime achievement, but history has furnished its own bounty of reward.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Babe: Pig In the City
1998, Color, Directed by George Miller
A chance to talk about another of Chicago’s treasured lost movie theaters: The Village Theater in Old Town.
Formerly known as The Gold Coast Theater — and before that the Globe, and before that The Germania until anti-German sentiment during World War I compelled a name change to the Parkside — The Village was a dump that had more paint than wood on its door frames. Still, every weekend people lined up around Lincoln and Wells to catch late night revivals of Swedish Sex Education subjects, Grindhouse treasures, early Jackie Chan imports, the oeuvre of Allen Funt and American second-run features.
It was in this latter capacity that The Village booked Babe: Pig In The City just before it left town forever. In the winter of ’99 Gene Siskel passed away, and one of his final acts as critic of the Chicago Tribune was to select Babe: Pig in the City as his choice for the best film of 1998. So I went to The Village to see it for Gene’s sake.
And what I saw was, well let me ask what you think would happen if the director of this film signed on to make the sequel to this film? It sounds like a weird and memorable dream, but in 1998 it happened. It’s a triumph on every level: the script brims with wit; its voice talent casting is uncanny; its set pieces become more elaborate and awe-inspiring as the film gallops to its climax; each animal characters has a personality so specific you know their names on second sight; and its art direction depicts a place, as the narrator tells us, “just to the left of the 20th century.”
The story of Babe the pig and his animal friends picks up with the farm in jeopardy: “Before long two men showed up, two men in suits, men with pale faces and soulless eyes. Such men could have come from only one place: the Bank.” Esme, the Farmer’s Wife, takes Babe to compete in a State Fair, but they their connecting flight and get stranded in The City (a fantastic amalgam of some of the world’s most famous skylines). They end up in a quirky hotel where all the guests are animals, one of whom is Steven Wright as a slick-talking chimp named Bob. But the first act is soup and bread compared to the visual all-you-can-eat that concludes this picture. It must be seen to be believed. I hope you drop what you’re doing — i.e. reading this article — and see it.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
1970, Color, Warner Bros.
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Starring Jason Robards, Stella Stevens and David Warren
Cable Hogue is a man who must do everything exactly his own way. When we first see him he’s staring down a gila monster, crouched on a hot rock. He’s going to kill it for food. He has no idea how much in common he has with that obstinate wasteland lizard.
Soon he’s left for dead in the desert by his two no-account partners and just before starvation and thirst overtake him he stumbles upon a natural spring and is saved. Around it he creates an outpost: Cable Springs. He shoots first customer dead for not paying for his drink of water. The man is a great son of a bitch.
What a surprise this film was. Between his bloodbaths of principle “The Wild Bunch” and “Straw Dogs,” Sam Peckinpah made this film about a man who stands on principle every time, with just enough force to make his presence felt. Remarkably, he makes the world come to him. How good is Jason Robards? Most of the time he was cast in supporting roles, as if there were a perception in his time that he could support a film but never carry it. This time we get Robards from beginning to end. In some scenes he’s the only one there, and it works like a one-man show. If there were such a perception this film dispels it. Another actor might have pulled off the role of Cable Hogue, but only Jason Robards can bring his inimitable style, his grace, his unique swagger.
The Bank Dick
1940, Black & White, Universal Pictures
Directed by Edward F. Kline
Written by Mahatma Kane Jeeves (W. C. Fields)
SOUSÈ: Was I in here last night, and did I spend a 20-dollar bill?
BARTENDER: Yeah.
SOUSÈ: Oh, what a load that is off my mind. I thought I’d lost it!
I identified with the character of W.C. Fields more than a young man should when I first saw The Bank Dick. Onscreen he was always W.C. no matter what name he gave his character. He lived his own American Dream, which he understood as getting rich enough that you never have to work again; if you never get rich? well, don’t let that minor detail gum up your dream.
Here he’s Egbert Sousé, “accent grave upon the e” to set him apart from the common souse. He’s a man in futile pursuit of quiet (except when he’s talking), of solitude (except when near a pretty girl), of drink (except he’s always carrying). He has no need for children or dogs, and most other people upset him — they talk too loud and too much, and they’re always sneaking up on him. The entire world is an affront to his sensibility, which could be satisfied with a simple canoe floating on a whiskey stream shaded by trees that grow money. The stream would have to be whiskey. W.C. was disgusted by water because, he said, “fish fuck in it.”
Sousé starts the film as just another stool jockey at the Black Pussy Café, relieved when the bartender reminds him he spent his last $20 on whiskey the night before, instead of losing it somewhere like a chump. He stumbles onto a film set and becomes the director, until he gets bored and stumbles off. He inadvertently foils a bank robbery and becomes the bank dick, then coerces his banker son-in-law to embezzle bank funds to invest in a boondoggle called the “Beefsteak Mine,” which improbably makes them millionaires. I’m not giving away anything. You don’t watch The Bank Dick for the plot — the whole story fits on the dry corner of a cocktail napkin. You watch W.C. Fields for the small pleasure of witnessing a befuddled souse drink deep of the world around him and wander off without paying his tab.
The Big Sleep
1946, Black & White, Warner Bros.
Directed by Howard Hawkes
Written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman
Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
First time I saw The Big Sleep was at Doc Films at the University of Chicago. Great programming, but the presentation? well… two quick stories: one time Doc presented a restored silent German classic, and hired a quartet to play an original score, but they neglected to account for the German titles, so just before the film started they enlisted a student with a smattering of German to read all the dialogue titles over the music, which he did loudly and poorly; another time the projectionist spooled in backwards the fourth reel of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, so Renèe Falconetti’s eyeline in her dramatic close up was suddenly reversed. Great programming, though.
I’ve seen this film in the theater as often as I’ve seen any other. You can only see The Big Sleep in a theater, because no other film embraces the shadows in the dark of night the way it does. The black and white world of Phillip Marlowe, of snug offices retreated late at night, of ornate bungalows where someone is always hiding, of bookstores staffed by savvy broads who’d make good detectives, it’s a world I would like to live in. There’s something cozy and romantic about the solitary work of the detective, his take it or leave it attitude towards everything and everyone. Everyone who loves films has some personal appreciation of film noir: as a visual style, as the locus for academic study of postwar life, as nostalgia for a time that never was. My appreciation starts here, with Doghouse Riley, aka Marlowe, aka Bogart, who was so good an actor we take his authority and gravitas for granted. He’s sitting in his car in the pouring, his mac wrapped tightly up to ears, watching Carmen Sternwood run into Geiger’s place .
Big Night
1996, Color, The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Directed by Campbell Scott & Stanley Tucci
Written by Joseph Tropiano & Tucci
Starring Tony Shalhoub, Ian Holm, Minnie Driver, Isabella Rossellini & Tucci
Before a fire gutted it in 2015, Piper’s Alley in Chicago held on to some of the last architectural vestiges of Gilded Age splendor in Old Town; its façade dated back to the Great Chicago Fire, and its complex hosted restaurants, shops, and businesses of all kinds, including Second City and a movie theater that had changed ownership too many times to count (off the top of my head I can recall Loews, Cineplex, Loews-Cineplex, Sony, and now its an AMC theater). When I loved the place it was a Loews theater, and it booked primarily films of the nascent American Independent variety, which Big Night falls into quite well.
I love this film because it does something most films try and fail at miserably: it shows experts plying their trade in a way you can understand and get excited about. We see experts in heist films, but how many of us can every really know what its like to pull off a heist? We see surgeons in film and TV all the time, but mostly they overwhelm us with quick cuts and whole dictionaries of medical jargon. In Big Night two brothers, Secundo (Stanley Tucci) and his older brother Primo (Tony Shalhoub) open an Italian restaurant in 1950s Baltimore and call it “Paradise.” Secundo is the shrewd businessman with aspirations of great success, but Primo runs the kitchen, and Primo is the star attraction. To everyone’s joy (and his brother’s despair) Primo is an Artist, the kind of chef restaurants are built around and named after. His thesis is clear and simple: “To eat good food is to be close to God.” And when Secundo stages a promotional event to drum up some much business, we all get to experience Primo’s art: dreaming up dishes, selecting ingredients, detailing the prep work, the cooking, and the presentation. And then, their guests feast. And we feast with them. And we’re all a little closer to God than we were when we came into the theater. This is the best film I’ve ever seen about the joy of cooking and the ecstasy of a great meal. You might pause the film to search your phone for a recipe for Timpano.
NOTE: Late last year Chicago city inspectors cleared the way for owners to demolish the distinctive facade of the original Piper’s Alley (built in the late 19th century when it was known as Piper’s Bakery), which was damaged by fire in 2015 and deemed a public safety hazard. No date for the final razing has been announced, and there is some talk of recreating the original facade’s bay windows and witch-hat turret for a future build on the site.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
1933, Black & White, Columbia Pictures
Directed by Frank Capra
Based on the novel by Grace Zaring Stone
Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther and Walter Connolly
Did you ever have a fever dream? The semi-conscious state when your subconscious miraculously can be seen clearly by your waking mind becomes a forum for your most frightening hopes. The centerpiece of The Bitter Tea of General Yen involves a missionary named Megan (Barbara Stanwyck) falling into sleepy reverie, where she imagines General Yen (Swedish actor Nils Asher), the Chinese warlord who opens up his palatial home to her while civil war rages outside its gate, breaking into room to ravish her. Her disdain for “the Oriental” manifests itself in his appearance: his incisors become fangs, his ears are peaked, his fingers are claws, like Max Schreck in Nosferatu. But before this apparition can sink his teeth into her another man appears, darkly handsome in a sharp suit and mask, and overtakes the Chinese vampire. Megan goes to him and takes off his mask: it’s General Yen.
For decades The Music Box on Southport screened classic Hollywood cinema every Saturday and Sunday morning. When I lived in Wrigleyville there was no better place to watch a black and white film than the Music Box, with its screening room decked out to resemble a Venetian courtyard. It was intimate and simple and perfect, with a low screen and great sound. In that little screening room I saw The Bitter Tea of General Yen.
Before he made any of his more notable classics It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra made this film right beginning of the sound era, The Bitter Tea of General Yen. In many ways it’s his best film, combining a thoughtful, articulate script and dialogue with the best elements of silent cinema, its atmosphere and air of mystery and magic. And its style matches its subject remarkably well: the film argues that the distinctions we make between the brotherly love of missionaries and the carnal desires which drive us into the arms of strangers are differences of degree only. All Love can, in fact, become True Love. In the end, General Yen puts his empire at risk to keep Megan near him. When his time runs out he drinks his bitter tea, with Megan sitting dutifully at his feet. Why is the tea so bitter? Because it’s brewed with such ambivalence.
Black Narcissus
1947, Color, General Film Distributors (UK), Universal-International (USA)
Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Based on the novel by Rumer Godden
Starring Deborah Kerr, David Farrar and Kathleen Byron
When a philosophy professor first introduced me to Powell & Pressburger (aka The Archers) I didn’t understand the way those words went together — were they some kind of company? I never thought directors could share that credit. The worlds created by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were so rich, so full of incident and ideas, that perhaps they could have into existence only by summoning the combined power of two gifted, charismatic storytellers. This won’t be the last Archer film I write about, not by a long shot, but it was the first of their films I saw. Their shared voice regales as the most singular in all British cinema, and their expressive powers present a formidable obstacle for any filmmaker who dares to top them. Scorsese himself often reaches so high, and sometimes gets there.
Black Narcissus was also the first time I saw Deborah Kerr. To be charmed by her emerald grace is as easy as catching a cold in November. No matter how many yards of gray flannel they wrapped around her, no matter how down to eyebrows and up to her chin that habit wore, no matter how much dignity she presented, there was always a vivacious woman ready for the right man to give herself to. Powell had been in love with her for some years when he cast her, and he could have not chosen better to play Sister Clodaugh, a nun trying in vein to fall in love with Christ, a woman who had a life before becoming a nun but is now devoted to her calling. But she can’t keep the mountain air from blowing through her Himalayan convent, and her own memories of lost love are always just below her formidable surface. Eventually Clodaugh becomes the focal point of an unlikely love triangle that plummets the story toward its unforgettable conclusion, but you’d never buy it if Deborah Kerr’s sensuality weren’t so apparent. She’s more than just the film’s star, she’s the reason the film was made at all. I applaud The Archers for their spirit and passion, as well as the work of their chief creatives, Alfred Junge and Jack Cardiff, but most of all I admire their understanding of why films are made and seen: to follow around people so fascinating we’d want to know about them even if they weren’t onscreen.
The Blood of Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes)
1949, Black & White, The Criterion Collection
Directed by Georges Franju
“I will strike you without anger and without hate…like a butcher,” said Baudelaire.
Don’t call it an advocacy piece. Yes, it’s a stark, shockingly frank documentary short subject detailing the grisly activities that comprise the daily work at an abattoir on the outskirts of Paris; yes, Director Georges Franju shows us the big wet eyes of a brown calf as the narrator states, “In order that the veal meat remain white, the animal must be totally bled by decapitation,” and then shows us just that; yes, we witness without blinking creatures of God reduced to collections of parts: heads, horns, hooves, hocks, hides. But the point of showing all this, and more, is not to advocate for its prohibition. Franju invites us to look squarely at the contradictions in our genteel culture: behind the art of presenting the things we eat, there are axes of strange proportion, knives that seem to unzip flesh, and a score of brutally efficient methods for using every part of an animal except its final shriek. And before any great expression of gustatorial ecstasy with an animal for an ingredient can be created and consumed, we must first observe the torrents of steam rising from entrails that spill on the ground, and the placid expressions on a dozen severed heads, and bodies without heads or limbs that still convulse and thrash even as they cease to be recognizable forms.
The black and white short documentary from 1949 was simply an extra on a DVD of Franju’s most famous film Eyes Without a Face. But for sheer abstraction of horror this short is that classic thriller’s equal. The high contrast black and white images spare us some of the worst details, but captures the surreal moments when these animals are reduced to antic clay. Franju also depicts how the workers are brutalized by their labor; what it takes to kill all day, every day. Even as the animals are taken apart we see workers with missing limbs, crooked digits, joints carbuncled from years of sustained trauma and as they transform the livestock of the French countryside into raw material for a thousand culinary masterpieces, I sense the love and pity Franju brings to all his subjects, the butcher and slaughtered alike. They all pay the price for the rest of us.
The Blue Angel
1930, Black & White, UFA (Germany), Paramount (USA)
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Starring Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich
Though made as they were in the early sound era, Josef von Sternberg’s films have maintained their quality of sophistication all throughout the decades. They tell their stories of complicated, restless people who find themselves in the odd position of actually getting what they want, and the consequences are beyond their imaginings.
Emil Jannings is Prof. Unrat, a distinguished teacher who suspects his young students are being corrupted by the influence of the local cabaret. He attends the show with the idea of confronting the intriguing star of the show, Lola-Lola — none other than Marlene Dietrich. He immediately falls under her spell and gives up everything to be with her. Then he loses his teaching post and becomes, quite literally, a clown in her cabaret show; when tasked with performing a humiliating trick, he goes mad. When you see it you might laugh — in which case you needs you — but if you’re attuned to the rhythms of this seminal movie the moment will turn your blood cold. I can see Prof. Unrat yet, crowing like a rooster that knows its head has been twisted off.
Bonnie & Clyde
1967, Color, Warner Bros.
Directed by Arthur Penn, Written by Robert Benton & David Newman
Starring Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons and Michael J. Pollard, with Gene Wilder, Denver Pyle and Dub Taylor
I saw this film many times on TV before I caught the last screening at the Normal Theater in downstate Illinois, a one-screen gem that programs prestige pictures during the week and American classics on the weekend. Back then tickets were $3 and every concession item was $1, and before every show they showed cartoons and held a raffle using your ticket stub; none too shabby.
On the big screen I noticed for the first time the title sequence: dark sepia-toned photographs flash before our eyes to the rhythm of an old camera shutter; intercut between the images of rural American life are titles that bleed like fresh-cut wounds from bone white to yellow to red to black, while the love song of a bygone era whispers plaintively to us. The images introduce the setting: an America where guns are plentiful, where watermelon is eaten with a knife, where life is paradoxically precious and dirt cheap — “Sadly,” goes an old epigram, “the best way to understand the value of life is to take it.”
Eventually the images and titles introduce us to Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow of east Texas, and wearing silly duds over their giggling bodies they plop their lives right into our laps.
Rarely has a film managed to evoke so many complex feelings within its first five minutes as Bonnie and Clyde. Of course it could do that partly because we already knew the story so well. And so we witness them eating, laughing playing checkers, telling jokes and gathering for story time, and we get to enjoy them. Later things get more complicated: in nearly every scene they find themselves under existential threat. Sometimes sticking up for each other and other times they’re compelled to form new alliances. Finally, it’s a life and death struggle, and we’re in the getaway car with them, praying to get away. But you know how it ends. It’s the most bittersweet ride I know of.
Brokeback Mountain
2005, Color, Focus Features
Directed by Ang Lee Written by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana
Based on the short story by Annie Proulx
Starring Heath Ledger, Jack Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Ann Hathaway
I saw this film on a first date when it was released. Maybe not the best choice. We left the theater silently, each trying to process our thoughts and feelings. I screwed up my courage and went first. I said something about how that last scene made the film a happy one in the end, which was strange considering everything that came before. What did my date think? “That movie was hot.”
After a while we started a discussion that I’ve been having with others ever since: what really happened to Jack?
Ennis learns from his returned letter to Jack that the recipient is deceased. He makes a phone call, and Lureen, Jack’s icy, bleached widow, describes a random accident on a lonely roadside. The images intercut with her description show something different: Jack jumped by a trio of men and beaten to death with a tire iron. Most of the people I ask tend to think the images tell the real truth, that Jack’s homosexuality, which he was always more comfortable with than Ennis was about his own, got him killed; because that’s what happens to gay men in redneck country, right?
But every scene in the film is told from Jack’s or Ennis’ perspective (and some scenes are split between Ennis and his heartbroken wife, Alma). So from whose perspective is Jack’s murder? And the images are wedged between close-ups of Ennis’ broken expression. Are these his thoughts? The accident on the roadside must be taken at face value. The images of murder could only have sprung from Ennis’ tortured imagination, and this seems so much sadder and more poignant than just another violent movie death; realizing he’ll never see Jack again, Ennis has to punish himself with the idea that he was responsible for his death, as though he had killed Jack by not being there with him. That is grief on a universal scale. Though dissected into little bits about the deconstruction of the cowboy myth, the film’s message of love and responsibility is simplicity itself, and it resonates beyond the temporary vantage point that allows for irony and distance. It’s an unlikely love story, as unlikely as so many of the loves we have in our own lives.
AND SO MANY MORE TO SEE…
The Babadook (2014), Back To The Future (1985), Baby Doll (1956),
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Bad Boys (1982), Badlands (1973),
Bad Lieutenant (1992), Ball of Fire (1941), Bambi (1942),
Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), Barbary Coast (1935),
The Battle of Algiers (1967), Before Sunrise (1995), Being There (1979),
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Betrayal (1983),
Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971),
Bicycle Thieves (1949), The Big Easy (1987), Bigger Than Life (1956),
The Big Lebowski (1998), The Big Red One (1981),
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1988), Billion Dollar Brain (1966),
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), Blade Runner (1982) ,
Blazing Saddles (1974), Blood Simple (1985), The Blue Dahlia (1946),
Bob Le Flaumbeur (1956), Bob Roberts (1992), Body and Soul (1943),
Boogie Nights (1997), Bottle Rocket (1996), Breaking Away (1979),
Brute Force (1947)
