High Noon (1952), more than most other movies, lives in two worlds. And unlike so many others, it manages to be a watershed entity in both worlds. First and foremost, High Noon is a film. And a damn fine one at that. Director Fred Zinnemann employs a little-used (for the time) crisp black-and-white palette, an excellent score, a group of very talented actors, sparse sets, and a richly layered backstory. His film rightly deserves any and all accolades it has received. Quite simply, it's one of the greatest films ever made. While often standing as the epitome of the classic Western genre, paradoxically, High Noon is also said to be a Western for people who don't like Westerns. Believe me, it doesn't matter if you like Westerns or not, you will love this movie.
Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is the very recently married and even more recently retired marshall of Hadleyville, New Mexico Territory, 1876. Kane plans to take his young bride (a very young Grace Kelly in one of her first feature roles) away from the rough-and-tumble frontier town, and set up a storefront somewhere a little quieter. But Kane hasn't counted on Frank Miller and his gang, just released from prison and on the noon train bound for Hadleyville. Frank's looking to take back the town he used to run and get revenge on the man who put him behind bars, Marshall Kane.
What follows is a frantic 90 minutes (almost, but not quite, corresponding to real time), as the clocks tick away toward noon, and Kane looks for any allies he can find to help him defend the town. The best he'll find are the old, the young, and the infirm. The worst he'll find is open disgust and hostility from those loyal to the old days, when the Miller gang ran things. Frank Miller isn't the only ghost of Kane's past that will surface this day: he'll also have to contend with his fiery ex-deputy (Lloyd Bridges), and his even more fiery ex-lover, Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado). As his friends and fellow townspeople abandon him like rats fleeing a sinking ship, Kane holds out hope that his pacifist bride will fly in the face of her religion and stand by his side.
There are so many great aspects of this movie, so I'll just single out a few. The cast is incredible. We have aging stars (Gary Cooper and Lon Cheney), we have rising stars (Grace Kelly, Lloyd Bridges, Harry Morgan), and we have an amazing breakthrough performance for a foreign star (Katy Jurado). The acting is all exemplary, crowned by Cooper's quiet desperation and deep betrayed sorrow.
The character of Will Kane is unfamiliar territory for the likes of Gary Cooper, used to being the dashing, macho, easy hero. While Will Kane is a hero in his own right, there's nothing easy about him. He meets little more than apathy and hatred from the town he long protected. Betrayed, saddened, and scared shitless, he quietly awaits his doom, unable to flee for reasons he himself can't even fathom. And yet, there's no surprise in his eyes at the behavior of the townfolk. Deep down, it's as if he knew it would someday come to this. Abandoned. Left to die defending a town that was no longer his own. There is no surprise. Only a profound sadness and exhaustion.
Remember how I said High Noon lives in two worlds? You thought I'd forgotten about that, didn't you? Well, not quite. As a piece of cinema alone, it's an awesome achievement. But High Noon is not merely a movie. It's an extended metaphor for a transformation that was taking place in Hollywood at the time. It was the early 1950s. World War II was a recent memory, and the Cold War had settled on the globe. McCarthyism had taken hold of America, and the entertainment industry was no exception. Suspected communists and sympathizers were being rooted out and blacklisted, barred from making films in Hollywood. Brilliant screenwriter and producer Carl Foreman refused to go quietly, exposing many of his colleagues (including John Wayne) as McCarthyist hate-mongers. Foreman penned High Noon as a semi-autobiographical allegory, modeling Will Kane after himself: a lone man, beset by hatred and betrayal on all sides, yet continuing on in spite of it.
High Noon stunned Hollywood, and helped stem the tide of McCarthyism there, but sadly, it was too late for Carl Foreman. Producer Stanley Kramer removed Foreman's name from the credits, and shortly thereafter Foreman was blacklisted and thrown out of Hollywood by the likes of Kramer, John Wayne, and Ward Bond. Foreman continued to write, albeit anonymously or under pseudonyms, including the screenplay for 1957's The Bridge on the River Kwai. Throughout his illustrious career, High Noon remained his boldest work, his masterpiece.
Storyline & plot: 9/10
Cinematography & effects: 9/10
Music & mood: 9/10
Performances: 10/10
The Reverend says: 10/10
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
After Hours
After Hours (1985), sandwiched as it is between the more successful films The King of Comedy (1982) and The Color of Money (1986), is an oft-overlooked gem from legendary director Martin Scorsese. As he has so many times throughout his long career, Scorsese returns here to his old stomping grounds with another tale from the Big Apple, this time mining it for black comedy.
The script from rookie screenwriter Joseph Minion is a triumph: complicated, but smooth and never forced. He keeps all the plot point balls up in the air (and there are quite a few) until the very last moment, and only then does he let them fall into place. Minion and Scorsese succeed in giving us a portrait of NYC in the waning of the 1980s: a post-punk wasteland of the scary, the gritty, and especially, the crazy. There are, of course, undercurrents of the age-old uptown/downtown dichotomy and the class distinctions underpinned by such a comparison. Scorsese has touched on such broad social commentary in previous films such as Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), but After Hours represents his most comprehensive analysis. Scorsese and Minion also explore the changing face of employment at the time, a transition to more soulless, computer-driven cubicle desk jobs, rendering After Hours a bleaker and far more subtle take than Mike Judge's classic Office Space (1999).
Social commentary notwithstanding, Scorsese largely eschews his political slant here in favor of the more personal. At its core, this film is an extended character study, not of our ostensible lead (Griffin Dunne), but of the city itself: Soho, the wee hours of a night much like any other night, filled with suicides, serial burglars, vigilante mobs, tortured artists, and lonely waitresses.
Uptown office word-cruncher Paul Hackett (Dunne) takes up the offer of a mysterious coffee shop acquaintance (Rosanna Arquette) to join her at her friend's (Linda Fiorentino) Soho loft in the early hours of the morning. Thinking it'll be an easy score, Paul readily agrees, and heads downtown with high hopes. But things take an irreversible turn for the worse when Paul loses all his money in the cab downtown. Furthermore, Paul's "date" with Marcy does not go at all as he planned after she unloads a mountain of emotional baggage. Eager to get away from Marcy and her weirdly kinky sculptress friend, Paul takes the first opportunity to bolt into the Soho night. Problem is, he's got no dough to get home. Paul spends the rest of the night bouncing around Soho, desperately trying to get home, but landing himself in the middle of an epic string of bad luck that plummets him into a surreal NYC nightmare.
The performances in After Hours are all superb. I'd expect nothing less from a film helmed by Scorsese. Griffin Dunne leads the way with a tight-wire act between composure and utter despair, maintaining a baseline of cool calm, but swinging randomly and wildly toward full-blown paranoid apoplexy in the face of the night's meltdown and very real threat of imprisonment or death. Joining Arquette and Fiorentino in a solid supporting cast are John Heard, Catherine O'Hara, and Teri Garr. The cast is rounded out by hilarious cameo appearances by Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong as a very CheechandChong-ish pair of petty thieves.
If you've ever wondered just how wrong a single night can go, Scorsese gives us a pretty good idea, with a little help from influences as far flung as Franz Kafka, John Landis, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (if Hopper had been on a coke and booze bender at the time of painting).
Storyline & plot: 10/10
Cinematography & effects: 9/10
Music & mood: 7/10
Performances: 9/10
The Reverend says: 9/10
The script from rookie screenwriter Joseph Minion is a triumph: complicated, but smooth and never forced. He keeps all the plot point balls up in the air (and there are quite a few) until the very last moment, and only then does he let them fall into place. Minion and Scorsese succeed in giving us a portrait of NYC in the waning of the 1980s: a post-punk wasteland of the scary, the gritty, and especially, the crazy. There are, of course, undercurrents of the age-old uptown/downtown dichotomy and the class distinctions underpinned by such a comparison. Scorsese has touched on such broad social commentary in previous films such as Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), but After Hours represents his most comprehensive analysis. Scorsese and Minion also explore the changing face of employment at the time, a transition to more soulless, computer-driven cubicle desk jobs, rendering After Hours a bleaker and far more subtle take than Mike Judge's classic Office Space (1999).
Social commentary notwithstanding, Scorsese largely eschews his political slant here in favor of the more personal. At its core, this film is an extended character study, not of our ostensible lead (Griffin Dunne), but of the city itself: Soho, the wee hours of a night much like any other night, filled with suicides, serial burglars, vigilante mobs, tortured artists, and lonely waitresses.
Uptown office word-cruncher Paul Hackett (Dunne) takes up the offer of a mysterious coffee shop acquaintance (Rosanna Arquette) to join her at her friend's (Linda Fiorentino) Soho loft in the early hours of the morning. Thinking it'll be an easy score, Paul readily agrees, and heads downtown with high hopes. But things take an irreversible turn for the worse when Paul loses all his money in the cab downtown. Furthermore, Paul's "date" with Marcy does not go at all as he planned after she unloads a mountain of emotional baggage. Eager to get away from Marcy and her weirdly kinky sculptress friend, Paul takes the first opportunity to bolt into the Soho night. Problem is, he's got no dough to get home. Paul spends the rest of the night bouncing around Soho, desperately trying to get home, but landing himself in the middle of an epic string of bad luck that plummets him into a surreal NYC nightmare.
The performances in After Hours are all superb. I'd expect nothing less from a film helmed by Scorsese. Griffin Dunne leads the way with a tight-wire act between composure and utter despair, maintaining a baseline of cool calm, but swinging randomly and wildly toward full-blown paranoid apoplexy in the face of the night's meltdown and very real threat of imprisonment or death. Joining Arquette and Fiorentino in a solid supporting cast are John Heard, Catherine O'Hara, and Teri Garr. The cast is rounded out by hilarious cameo appearances by Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong as a very CheechandChong-ish pair of petty thieves.
If you've ever wondered just how wrong a single night can go, Scorsese gives us a pretty good idea, with a little help from influences as far flung as Franz Kafka, John Landis, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (if Hopper had been on a coke and booze bender at the time of painting).
Storyline & plot: 10/10
Cinematography & effects: 9/10
Music & mood: 7/10
Performances: 9/10
The Reverend says: 9/10
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