OVP: True Grit (1969)

Film: True Grit (1969)

Stars: John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Jeremy Slate, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actor-John Wayne*, Original Song-"True Grit")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We talked a lot about John Wayne's career renaissance last week, with a focus on how Wayne was able to make some of the best movies of his career in the late 1950's & early 1960's by skewering or playing with the mold of his career.  That didn't, however, get him Hollywood's top prize.  Despite being a near constant presence in Best Picture nominees like Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, The Alamo, and How the West Was Won, Wayne was only ever cited for acting once prior to 1969, for his work in 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima (he lost to Broderick Crawford).  By 1969, it was clear that Wayne was starting to age, and the system that had made him a legend had collapsed.  True Grit, a massive hit in a year where traditional Hollywood fare was bombing while New Hollywood pictures were resonating with audiences, was a last gasp chance to give Wayne an Oscar, and AMPAS took it.  It is amusing to me that John Wayne, the conservative embodiment of a past generation, won his only Oscar on the same night as Midnight Cowboy, the lone X-rated film to ever win an Academy Award (a film that he probably hated).  Even the Duke knew he was getting this as a career achievement award more than anything else.  As a visibly moved Wayne accepted his statue from Barbra Streisand, he said "if I'd know that, I'd have put that patch on 35 years earlier"...understanding that it was perhaps the 35 years & not the eyepatch that had gotten him to that stage after decades of trying to reach it.

(Spoilers Ahead) True Grit is not really the tale of Wayne's Rooster Cogburn, but of Mattie Ross (Darby), a young girl who is attempting to avenge the death of her father Frank Ross, who was killed by a man named Tom Chaney (Corey).  She looks for someone to bring him in, picking Cogburn to track down Chaney, and offers to pay him, but with the proviso that she wants to come with him, sporting her father's gun along the way.  Initially he refuses, despite needing the money, and tries to abandon her at one point, but after she fords a river (in an impressive show of strength for Darby & the horse), she is allowed to join, along with La Bouef (Campbell), a handsome but dim-witted man who is familiar with Chaney.  Along the way, they meet a number of men connected to Chaney, including small parts played by Dennis Hopper & Robert Duvall quite early in both of their careers (this would've been the same year that Hopper was becoming a household name in Easy Rider), but eventually find Chaney & kill him, though in the process Mattie is injured and La Bouef killed.  The film ends with Mattie promising that she'll bury Rooster Cogburn in her family plot, meaning he now finally has a family of his own.

The movie, I'm sorry to say, is not good.  I didn't like the remake of this by the Coen Brothers, but by comparison that is better, largely because Hailee Steinfeld is not super annoying in that movie.  Darby's Mattie Ross, as I said, is the true central character of the film, but like most parts portraying children at the time (in real life, Darby would've been 21 when this movie was filmed), she is defiant and stringent in this role, and doesn't really have any sense of humanity.  There's a running joke about her wanting to refer everyone to her lawyer that goes nowhere, to the point where you aren't entirely sure it's supposed to be a joke by the film's end.  Darby left me cold.

The same could be said for Wayne, though in a different way.  As you might've been able to guess four weeks into our look at Wayne, despite the actor's complicated politics, I'm a fan.  Wayne had a sturdiness in his pictures that I find really watchable, and when he's great, he is really something to behold.  Given this won an Oscar for Best Actor, I was hoping for one of those special moments from Wayne, but I didn't get it.  This isn't bad, necessarily, but it's not good enough for an Oscar nomination.  John Wayne deserved an Academy Award at some point in his career, and so I'm glad he got one, but when we get to this year in the Oscar Viewing Project, don't expect to see Wayne's name show up-there were considerably better choices.  The film is pretty much a standard-issue Wayne western, not special in any way except for the title song, beautifully sung by one of my favorite singers (his costar Glen Campbell), which swells and is lovingly used throughout the film's score, and would become synonymous with Wayne in the decades that followed.

The American Friend (1977)

Film: The American Friend (1977)

Stars: Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Lisa Kreuzer, Gerard Blain

Director: Wim Wenders

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Throughout the month of June (and apparently a little bit of July), in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We bled a little bit into July with our film noir series, but it is now coming to an end for 2022 with our June Film Noir celebration.  It's possible we bring this back next year (I love doing it, but it's a lot of work & we're getting deeper and deeper cuts each season), but if we don't, I think ending in 1977 feels right for what we've covered this past month.  While neo-noir became a mainstay in the 1980's, really Body Heat and Blade Runner (both of which we've already covered, links are at the bottom of the article) kind of ushered in a new era of neo-noir, and while the genre would dominate the 1980's, it would be more something you'd catch in independent or emerging cinemas than in major blockbusters like Chinatown.  It seems fitting, then, that we finish with one of the great experimental filmmakers of the 1970's & 80's, Wim Wenders, and one of his most noted films, The American Friend.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is based off of the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, one of the novels Highsmith wrote about Tom Ripley (who modern audiences know as a character played by Matt Damon & John Malkovich).  Here he's played by Dennis Hopper, perhaps the most typecast actor for playing a boiled sociopath (given Hopper's on and offscreen choices through the years).  After he is mildly snubbed at an auction by a man named Jonathan Zimmermann (Ganz), who dislikes Ripley based on reputation (he is a criminal), Ripley decides to ruin Jonathan's life by tricking him into thinking his leukemia has worsened, and that he is soon going to die.  Worried about his wife and son, and what will be left for them, Jonathan takes on Ripley's assignment of becoming an assassin for hire, getting a lot of money but in the process giving up his humanity.  The two become friendly toward the end of the movie, with Ripley now seeing Jonathan as something of a vain extension of himself, but in the final moments, despite the fact that he will soon die, Jonathan gets his revenge on Ripley, abandoning him at a beach with a burning car & no way home.

The movie's plot involves some twists and you need to pick up on certain moods, but it's not as complicated as one might expect in the moment considering Wenders, who is not afraid of abstract cinema, is at the helm.  It helps that the film is acted by two performers at the top of their game.  Hopper, at this point in his "wilderness" phase between Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now!, where he was making some of the most fascinating independent cinema of the 1970's.  His acting here is perfect for Ripley, playing him as a charming, demented man who is willing to destroy another human being over a handshake.  Ganz is excellent too.  Though he is widely-regarded as one of the greatest actors in his adopted country of Germany (he was born in Switzerland), he rarely made high-profile English-language films, so if you're unfamiliar check him out here, in Wings of Desire and Downfall (the latter of which he should've gotten him the Oscar on a silver platter).  He plays Jonathan as someone who has never really contemplated what will happen once he's gone, and as someone who slowly realizes how foolish his impetuousness was.

Everything about The American Friend works-the writing, the directing, the acting, but nothing works quite as well as the cinematography.  I watched this on the BluRay edition of the Criterion disc (word-to-the-wise-it is currently July, which means Barnes & Noble is doing its half off sale, and I suggest not just shopping for a new disc there, but buying one you've never seen as cold-buying and watching a Criterion disc is one of the great joys, and it rarely doesn't pay off), and so I saw a high-quality print of the movie that might not have worked to the same degree on streaming...and I was stunned.  Every scene was a painting, mixing moody & bright lighting, oftentimes in the same shot, and using bright blues & reds in ways that just sing off the screen.  I found myself taking photos of Dennis Hopper in a Marlboro Man silhouette or two chasing cars, their reflections mirrored in a shallow pool of water they're cascading through, as I was watching, almost as if I was on a vacation and was struck by the beauty of my surroundings.  It's something to behold, and even if you're not a huge noir fan, I suggest checking it out for the cinematography alone.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler

OVP: Easy Rider (1969)

Film: Easy Rider (1969)
Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Luke Askew
Director: Dennis Hopper
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Jack Nicholson, Best Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Seeing a classic film is a bit trippy our your virgin viewing.  I've managed to avoid most spoilers regarding Easy Rider, but you can't avoid the iconic impact of the film.  You feel it the second that Peter Fonda rides onto the screen on that giant red, white, and blue Harley with "Born to Be Wild" howling at you.  When you view something as celebrated as Easy Rider, even though it's your first time through the movie, you can feel how familiar it is thanks to its influence on all subsequent cinema.

(Spoilers Ahead for the Uninitiated) The film feels so sincerely like a French New Wave movie that it's difficult to pinpoint down key plot points, particularly for the first half of the film.  The movie starts with Captain America (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) smuggling cocaine in from Mexico and receiving an enormous amount of money.  After this, we get a bird's eye view of the country in 1968.  While I didn't live through it, and am therefore unable to process exactly what was the stuff of peyote-induced myth and what truly happened, there's an authenticity in having three actors who came-of-age in the decade portraying these biking hippies.

The film takes us to a commune, and an extended portrayal of free love and community.  The film's strongest story element is the way it never really tells us what is going on in the heads and minds of Fonda's Captain America (who doesn't get a real name until the penultimate scene of the movie) and Billy.  While Billy is clearly the more temperamental of the two and Captain America the more mellow, we learn very little about their past and are only focused on the present.  This story-structure absorbs itself so well into the message of the film, about living for the moment, and really allows us as an audience to be sitting on the backs of their hogs, rather than trying to deduce their actions.

About the only character who gets a clearly defined history and sense of purpose is George Hanson (Nicholson).  Hanson is an alcoholic lawyer who clearly was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and with a sense of curious adventure in his heart.  He readily joins their gang, and sets out in the second half of their film on the adventure.  For those who think of this as a Jack Nicholson film (this was his first big break, and it's very rare to think of Jack as anything other than the star of a movie that he's in), he's actually only in the last third of the film in any prominent role.  After an hour of hippie-love and drugs and Route 66, the bikers head into the Deep South, and are greeted in an unfriendly manner.

First, after making eyes at some girls (really, they were making more eyes at our protagonists), the local men come and beat the bikers with bats, injuring Billy and Captain America and killing George.  The film then heads into an acid-induced haze, complete with dancing in a New Orleans graveyard and Fonda reciting a soliloquy to a statue that he confuses with his mother.  The film's final two scenes are left to be very open-ended, with Billy thinking that they succeeded in their journey and Captain America feeling "they blew it" (because of the enigma surrounding the two men, you don't 100% know what their goals of the trip were).  The final scenes involve a pair of Southerners in a truck shooting both Billy and Captain America in cold blood while they drive past them, afraid of their counter-culture status.

The best parts of the film are the breathtaking cinematography, quite frequently playing with the autumn colors of the road, and Nicholson's performance.  Nicholson, in his first big break as an actor, sells George with all of those flourishes that we'd come to associate with Jack, but he has a neophyte calmness to the movie.  There's no Jack Torrance-style flourishes in the film, just a cool, calculated drunken lawyer playing well within the film's boundaries.  Jack is one of the greatest actors in film history, but it's nice to see him before fame had hit and directors catered to him; it's proof that he could also fill the vision of the filmmaker.

The movie's soundtrack bellows pretty fiercely across the entire movie, filling every turn of the film with some great 60's band, whether it be The Band or Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan, it sounds like a Woodstock concert.  The film oddly landed a nomination for Best Screenplay, despite it clearly being quite improvised and rather light on dialogue (these days you'd never see such an out-there nomination in the category).  Really the only thing I can think of in the movie that doesn't play quite right today is the atmosphere of the piece-we've moved beyond communes and hippies and onto Miley Cyrus twerking debates (you can figure out for yourself what direction that's a step into), making this film very much a product of its own era.

But it's still a worthwhile adventure, and a movie I can definitely see the "classic" in.  For those of you who have taken in Easy Rider-what are your thoughts?  Do you think it still holds up some 44 years later?  Do you think that Jack should have beaten Gig Young for the Oscar?  Share in the comments!