IwasSquidly Reviews

The Rifleman (1958–1963)

Unique in the genre

[3/10 · 5 February 2007]

I was the pre-pubescent target audience for this when it first ran and loved it. Like other 50s oaters Lucas carried a modified 'piece'. The title scene where Lucas street sweeps with his Winchester at noonday summa six shadows illuminates the careless production of the time. The cast adds gravitas to Conner's ball-field credits with the anchor of Paul Fixx playing the sagacious sheriff. Fixx had made his bones (albeit in a thinner incarnation) as the usual villain with the John Ford troupe. Every script was a convoluted morality play. Typically Lucas would blast some well deserving miscreant then hunker down to tell Mark this is what happens when you don't eat WonderBread or help old ladies cross the street. So far, there's nothing new here for a 50's horse opera save Lucas McCain was the one and only TV rancher with a mortgage. Where the Barkley's, the Cartwrights and the jokers on "High Chapperal" owned their states and governors, Johnny Yuma, Cheyenne, Sugar Foot, et.al. wondered alone blah blah, Chuck had to cough up monthly payments in a sedentary existence.

If you want to see the genre circa '58 watch "Rifleman" today on Encore/Western for great, unintentional humor. Watch 'Maverick' for scripted humor. Watch "Have Gun - Will Travel" for an adult western. See Chuck Connors on the big screen in "The Big Country" but don't spend money on the "Rifleman".

The Fog of War (2003)

Peter Principal has a Human Face

[18 November 2004]

Robert Strange McNamara had a remarkable and commendable career until he became SecDef. Plainly he had risen to his level of incompetence. The value of this film is in the human face it puts to the monster in the machine so long presumed. This old man admits of tangentials, deflects substantives and demures of the meaningful but demonstrates courage to speak at all. He's brought sympathy to the technocrat of a flawed technocracy.

The 11 Lessons rubric is incoherent and quickly undone. The empathy with others is another's understanding of Kruschev and Bob has none with Niki nor does he learn it with Hanoi. No element has a universal beyond the given particular.

Make no mistake. Bob MacNamara is the architect of the disaster that was the US in Viet Nam. Denied the bureaucratic interservice rivalry of JFK's fat defense budgets and with LBJ's blank check acceptance of the 'Best and Brightest' Mac the Secratary Of Defense had little on his plate but 'Nam. He concocted a scheme of graduated responses, escalating engagements(so much for proportionality), and even trifled with field weapons. He denied targets, designated safe areas and frustrated his own war efforts. Brought to account by his Georgetown cocktail party friends he freaked and left the mess in LBJ's ample and soon to resign lap. LBJ packed him off to a sinecure at the World Bank to keep his mouth shut.

It's sad to see all the talk from this implying meaning for Iraq or whatever when the film is all about Mac and it's not his fault.

Little Big Man (1970)

The Way the West Was (really) Won

[3 February 2004]

Before LBM indians were savages or wooden stereotypes and very unPC. After LBM broke the western mold films went the other way so that twenty years later you get the very PC and treacly mythologizing of Dances With Wolves. DWW other than the similar story is a poor comparison for LBM. Better to see it side by side with that other grand epic of the west, The Way the West Was Won. There the murder of the red man is incidental to the sweeping and righteous rapine of Manifest Destiny. LBM rips the facade from the theme and ravages its details. LBM does that to all the preceding westerns but it seems particularly true of HtWWW. Imagine Debbie Reynolds and Karl Malden as Mr. & Mrs. Pendrake and go from there. The self effacing humor goes a long way to redress the pretensions of 'epic westerns' made before and after.

Wryly the Cheyenne say of the Little Big Horn, "The Cheyenne won the battle. The Sioux got the glory and the Crow got the land." It's a game response for their long suffering.

For me it's always been unfortunate the title character shares the name, Little Big Man with a Lakota Sioux famously implicated in the death of Crazy Horse, the Ogalala warrior and mystic. ...so I call her Woman Who Doesn't Like Horses. Of course she's lying.

Easy Rider (1969)

having lived the era doesn't help

[23 January 2004]

As a long haired hippy (we preferred to be called 'heads', thank you) watching this in the theater for the first time I was appalled at the pretension. "Doing his own thing in his own time." says Fonda and I wanted to puke. Nodding solemnly to intone "heavy" was already sarcastic in popular usage. (an aside: why does Askew dab water to the armpits of his thick band jacket?) A veteran of many cross country thumbings I knew a yankee and especially a long hair didn't travel in the south (the midwest was bad enough for free haircuts in a local jail). If you were going to Florida you flew. The story is weak and sloppily told.

The redeeming parts for me are Jack's charming sequences, my intimate familiarity with the New Mexico/Arizona locations and the music.

As a road picture trip to an existential nowhere the contemporary 'Two Lane Blacktop' delivers better without the baggage.

As a time capsule, slice of life with great music of the same period 'Woodstock' covers the same ground on an epic scale with a better if unintended exposition of the joys and conundrums of freedom.

Junior Bonner (1972)

Nostalgic snapshot of Prescott

[22 January 2004]

I first heard of this film on a trip to Prescott for the 1973 rodeo. Three days of hard liquor, sex and wild livestock (I had sat out Woodstock in an NYC jail and had to make do) Of course the film was all the buzz but the highlight of '73 was an ill-advised visit by a chapter of Hell's Angels who didn't know the locals carried side arms. They had a most humiliating exit. The former territorial capitol, a moribund Prescott sat between the exhausted gold fields in the mountains and the ranches suffering from poor beef prices out on the high prairie. The Palace Bar was the queen of a raucous grouping of saloons on Whiskey Row. A place to rub elbows with crazed prospectors and working cowboys. The town's only nod to modernity was a Western Auto Parts store and Sears Catalog outlet...I don't think they had a McDonalds.

Today the faceless crowd savors its victory. The ranchers cried "uncle" and gave in to the developers or joined them. Whiskey Row in name only the bars have become boutiques and the Palace is a salad bar. The city groans in gridlock under the traffic of her sprawling suburbs. Street widening has obliterated the familiar or bypassed now inaccessable charms. Strip malls and the usual fast food joints line the approaches for miles and miles. A flood of California retirees have raised the costs and codes to push Jo Don Baker's trailers to rural ghettos ranging thirty and forty miles out. Phoenicians have taken the old gold camps for summer homes and condos. The once unbroken mountain views and sweep of prairie are dappled blurs of asphalt shingle, stucco and neon. A straggling herd of antelope (a protected species) are under edict of removal in one housing developement and if Junior Bonner comes back to town he better be driving an Escalade.

The film is a poignant story proven true. I haven't the heart to revisit the rodeo.

Big Trouble (2002)

Too funny?

[15 January 2004]

Like his columns, Barry's book had me in stitches. It kept reminding me of Elmore Leonard, deadly serious plot elements wrapped in farce; "Tourist Season" came to mind. The film didn't do that for me. Why? It didn't really deviate from the book except for the appearance of Puggy . The FBI agents would have made J Edgar bust his bra but the casting was perfect. I thought maybe the music track was too light, too cheerful. There's never a harsh chord of drama or a deep tone of menace. I mean we've got Sizemore, Farina, Russian gangsters and a nuke but the pacing of ridiculous events never let the realization of peril sink in and contrast black to the humour.

So, I guess that's it. It's just too damn funny.

Waterworld (1995)

spoil sport

[15 January 2004]

Nothing but spoilers:

For scif-fi or fantasy to succeed the viewer or reader must be able to suspend his disbelief. To paraphrase Tolkien, it must create a believable universe in which all elements are coherent facets of the whole. Here Dennis Hopper's comic relief and Oscar worthy production values are wasted on an improbable premise followed by the unending distraction of implausible plot elements.

The premise fails on too many counts. There's not enough water in the world to submerge all but Everest's top. If there was and Waterworld existed the unbroken ocean currents and unimpeded prevailing winds would band the planet in raging storm tracks as typhoon followed typhoon in unending parade. None of the artifacts shown here would have survived heavy weather.

While it took 100 million years for fish to crawl on land and develope lungs and it took lung breathing cetaceans tens of millions to crawl back in the ocean and grow fins the hero of our story has developed gills and webs in a century or less.

Aside from a few cherry tomatos, some Spam and a tub of human debris what did these people eat? Of what are their clothes and sails made? How do they refine fuel? With what do they cut, weld and fabricate all this metal? Where does the bamboo come from? Inconsistancies flow on broad and deep as the ocean.

Every time I start to warm to Hopper's wisecracks or Tripplehorn's charms another dubious plot feature hits like cold water. The ending reveals our little girl of the tatoo really does come from dry land and we are left with the imponderable of why she ever left.

The Shootist (1976)

You have good color...

[21 September 2003]

Can't detract from this film. Maybe Wayne's best. "She reminds me of me" says Rooster in True Grit and it comes close to breaking the stigma but here finally, the line he'd made insipid in countless Howard Hawks and John Ford films where the 40 - 60 year old Wayne tells the 20 something female "You look pretty when you're mad." gets reworked.

The Horse Soldiers (1959)

...and I won't be put upon.

[21 September 2003]

The "...and I didn't kill either one of them..." speech is one of my favorite Wayne moments. Plainly past his conventionality, the Marlowe character gives breathtaking short shrift to the unending pettiness and fallibility he encounters; Kirby, Kendall, congressional wannabes, reb deserters et.al. It's an exemplar of the 'Duke' personna: dubious provenance, grand stature, indomitable purpose and a trace of sentiment. I'l put it with Searchers, Liberty', and Shootist (Wallace Beery impersonation in True Grit aside) as one of his best efforts.

Ford's battle scenes are as usual patriotically free of blood and require no reflection but the imagery is great (you want to join the cavalry) and the detail outstanding. We hear the clanking of canteens and cookpots, an argument over the placement of latrines and see the only filmic presentation of the making of Sherman Neckties (warped rails). The Ford family is well represented though we miss Harry Carey Jr (and Paul Fixx must have been tied up with the Rifleman).

If we had to have a love interest, Maureen Ohara could have at least tied this to "Rio Grande" and furthered the Ford library.

Normally wonderful Bill Holden has only brief bright moments and is mostly going through the motions and hung-over here. Neither Wayne nor Ford were slouches when it came to curling whiskey but by his own admission Holden aggravated all and threatened production with reckless, drunken extracurriculae, breaking an arm falling from a bridge.

This film was an inspiration in grade school and a guilty pleasure since.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)

sore sides and teary eyes

[16 September 2003]

....filled the theater when I first saw this film in it's theatrical release. The crowd was too exhausted from roaring with laughter to leave their seats. It is The Epic Comedy and was shown on the same screen reserved for David Lean's spectaculars ('Kwai, Lawrence) and deservedly so. It is not my favorite comedy (Strangelove is) and repitition has dulled my response but without doubt the film stands alone for cast and scope. Now, the film has become a Whitman's Sampler of delicious cameos of comics past. No, the film can not be remade. The original script plainly holds no humor for the Beavis and Butthead generation and if Sandler and Carey could be compelled to share the screen it would hold no interest for mine.