Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Raintree County

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edward Dmytryk (1957)

    Raintree County is famous because, during the making of it, Montgomery Clift had the serious car crash which changed his face – or is supposed to have changed his face.   Amy Lawrence suggests in The Passion of Montgomery Clift that it had already changed considerably in the three years between the release of From Here to Eternity and the accident:

    ‘… Early publicity photos for Raintree County are often hard to distinguish from those taken after the accident …  As one biographer wrote, the “physical damage [to Clift’s face] is barely discernible on screen but any child could see he looks a good ten years older”.  Comparing stills from before and after May 12, 1956, we see that, in Clift’s case, age is inseparable from injury.’

    One of the publicity photos to which Lawrence alludes appears in her book but I’m not sure how much it bears out her thesis.  Clift – smoking a cigarette and with the pallor of his face accentuated by the darkness under his eyes and his five o’clock shadow – looks ill but he doesn’t look as old as he does on screen.  As far as the film is concerned (as Lawrence also notes, his first movie in colour), he’s much too old anyway to play its youthfully idealistic hero John Shawnessy.  Clift was thirty-five at the time of the car crash (Raintree County was released in cinemas more than eighteen months later).  At the start of the picture, John is leaving school – and it’s hardly as if the action leaps forward many years for most of what follows.  It’s only in the last scenes, when John Shawnessy is a sadder-and-wiser man approaching middle age, that Clift looks anything like right:  from the very beginning, his John Shawnessy exudes a misery that suggests clairvoyance of the troubled times that lie ahead of him.

    There are moments when Clift’s thinness makes him seem young – not so much in the big scene when John competes in a running race as in the way he nips up and down high, wide staircases.  But there’s never any lightness of heart to match this lightness of step.  Once John is fighting in the Civil War and Clift has grown a beard, his quick movement has the unsettling quality you sometimes notice in winos (as they suddenly, dartingly, change direction in the street).  The combination of his skill and his unhappy presence makes Clift compelling to watch, but compelling in the wrong way.  His intensity feels involuntary, inescapable.  You see it in his first scene when John exchanges graduation gifts with his sweetheart Nell.  (Eva Marie Saint also looks too mature in the early stages but settles down to give a skilfully self-effacing performance.)  Nell gives John an illustrated history of the place they both come from – Raintree County, Indiana – and chatters about the pictures and the maps and statistics the book contains.  Clift examines it with a raptness that seems preternaturally grief-stricken.

    Raintree County was adapted, by Millard Kaufman, from a 1947 novel of the same name by Ross Lockridge, Jr.  It’s epic only in length (nearly three hours) and lurches between the intimate and the spectacular without being convincing in either mode.   The story involves racial themes sufficiently prominent to qualify a big popular film of the 1950s as ‘brave’, inherited insanity, suicide – and the legend of Johnny Appleseed (the pioneer nurseryman who introduced apple trees to Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, including the quasi-mystical rain tree of the title, which John Shawnessy keeps searching for).  This is a garish concoction and Edward Dmytryk treats the material with too much respect.  The early sequences in particular are bafflingly slow – the hushed, deliberate tempo implies that something deep is being revealed but the only thing that seems to be revealed is Montgomery Clift’s unhappiness.  Nat King Cole can’t do much with the title song, which he seems to be making it up as it goes along under the opening titles.  The look of the film, at this distance in time, makes it even more of an oddity:  the palette has shrunk to various shades of pink, occasionally darkening into unintended sepia.

    There are plenty of good actors in Raintree County, although you might not guess it from what the likes of Agnes Moorehead (as Clift’s mother) and Nigel Patrick do here.  (The actors who aren’t much cop anyway include DeForest (Dr ‘Bones’ McCoy) Kelley, who appears briefly as a Southern officer.)  Patrick’s character – ‘Professor’ Jeremiah Webster Stiles – is, however, pretty impossible.  At the start, the actor is working so hard to be eccentric and epigrammatic, he’s murder to watch and listen to.  I kept thinking George Sanders should be playing the Professor but then he starts saying the odd thing that’s meant to be sincere, which would have been outside Sanders’ comfort zone. Peter Ustinov might have managed this but then the Professor reveals a sexual side to his character too.  This is the kind of narrative where the key characters keep turning up no matter how improbable the circumstances:  during the Civil War action, the Professor has reinvented himself as a war correspondent.  By the end, I’d almost got to like his, and Nigel Patrick’s, staying power.

    Lee Marvin (as a rough diamond) and Rod Taylor (a thoroughgoing heel) acquit themselves well enough but the player that keeps you watching Raintree County is Elizabeth Taylor, as the doomed Southern belle Susanna whom John Shawnessy falls in love with and marries.  She’s more than enjoyably flirty in the early sequences, which include a perfect example of Taylor’s instinctual brilliance as a screen actress.  A firecracker goes off in a crowd and alarms Susanna.  In the course of her ‘Oh!’, Taylor magically moves from a natural reaction to the character’s trying to create an effect.  Later on, she has a long monologue in which Susanna explains to John what really happened on the night her New Orleans family home burned down.  As in her big scene in Suddenly, Last Summer, Elizabeth Taylor throws herself into protracted and preposterous explanation with such genuine passion that she transcends what she’s given to say.   I still didn’t understand what did happen on the night of the fire but Taylor makes it worth hearing about.   Worth noting too that, in spite of Susanna’s troubled mind and the traumas that causes in the lives of John Shawnessy and their bum-faced young son, Montgomery Clift is, in his scenes with Taylor, much more natural and relatively at ease.  You want to thank her for that as much as for her own richly entertaining performance.

    31 August 2011

  • Ragtime

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Milos Forman (1981)

    E L Doctorow’s Ragtime attracted a great deal of attention, as a novel historical novel, on its publication in 1975.  Set in New York in the early years of the twentieth century, the book’s dramatis personae include fictional characters, relatively minor actual celebrities of the era who play a sizeable part in the story, and major real-life figures, most of whom make cameo appearances.  The two main invented characters are Coalhouse Walker, an African-American piano player, whom outrageous racism drives to terrorism, and an East European immigrant, Tateh, who becomes a pioneer of film animation.  The second group is headed by the socialite Evelyn Nesbit; the architect Stanford White; Nesbit’s crazily jealous husband Harry Kendall Thaw, who murders White; and the New York Fire Commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo.  The third category boasts, among others, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J P Morgan, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Booker T Washington and Emma Goldman.  The definitions of major and minor here are entirely personal:  ‘minor’ means I’d not only never heard of the people in question when I first came to Ragtime in the late 1970s but also forgotten them again when I saw Milos Forman’s film for the first time yesterday.  I remember the book as an example of something I didn’t enjoy much but blamed myself for not enjoying because it was supposed to be brilliant.   I’d also remembered that the film flopped and was surprised to see its box-office receipts (around $11m), award nominations (including for eight Oscars, though it won none) and ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ fresh rating (90%, albeit from only ten reviews now).  If Ragtime wasn’t rated a dud, I think it should have been.

    On the surface, the fast-moving, multi-faceted novel might seem ideally suited to adaptation from the printed page to the cinema screen.  E L Doctorow’s mix of people in the story is a comment on how various media and pop culture had, by the 1970s, combined to shape – or jumble – the cultural memory of those who’d imbibed them.  I assume that Doctorow chose to set the novel in a time and place that would illustrate the development of popular music and film in particular, and the contribution of particular immigrant groups in America to these art forms.  The movie opens with genuine newsreel footage which then segues into mock newsreel footage and Forman repeats this device a couple of times subsequently.  Some of the real-life famous names appear in the genuine newsreel but only Booker T Washington has a significant role in the action that follows (with Houdini supplying a last-minute cameo).  Forman virtually replaces the A-listers element of the original material by casting some familiar movie faces of bygone days:  Donald O’Connor, Pat O’Brien and – most notably, after an absence from the screen of twenty years – James Cagney, as Waldo.  A more broadly-based big beast of American culture, in the shape of Norman Mailer, is Stanford White.

    The first hour of Ragtime is so inert and unfocused that it’s hard to tell whether what you’re seeing is what Forman and the screenwriter Michael Weller had in mind or the consequence of a desperate attempt to patch together a narrative from a surfeit of footage.  In any case, the result is in no way a kaleidoscope of American life before the country’s entry into World War I (and/or of what that era had become in popular imagination by the 1970s).  The film is merely rhythmless and nearly incoherent.  Those who’ve read the book will wait in vain to see, for example, Freud and Jung riding the tunnel of love at Coney Island – or the minor celebrities or invented characters woven into any kind of larger fabric.  There’s a mercifully brief frenetic sequence set in Tateh’s neighbourhood with lots of effortful ethnic overexcitement in evidence.  Evelyn Nesbit features in this bit and the action otherwise concentrates either on the scandal and legal wranglings surrounding her and the killing of Stanford White at Madison Square Garden or on a well-off white family in New Rochelle in whose grounds a newborn black baby is abandoned.   None of these people is enough to sustain the viewer’s interest and the connections between the several narrative strands are tenuous.

    The father of the baby in the New Rochelle garden is Coalhouse Walker and its mother, Sarah, works as a housekeeper for the unnamed family:  they are ‘Father’, ‘Mother’ and ‘Younger Brother’.  The family, especially Mother and Younger Brother, take a shine to Coalhouse, who now makes a good living through his piano playing.  He’s set to marry Sarah when the film’s pivotal event occurs.   On his way to New Rochelle in his brand new Model T, Coalhouse is prevented by a crew of firemen from passing by a firehouse.  He goes to report this to a policeman and, when he returns, finds that someone has defecated in the car.  The policeman advises Coalhouse just to drive on, clean the car seats up and forget about it but he refuses and is placed under arrest.  Father pays to get him out of jail but Coalhouse can’t accept the insult and injustice he’s suffered.  He tries to sue but can find no lawyer to represent him.  He recruits a group of other African-Americans (how isn’t clear) and they start fire-bombing fire stations.  (Unbeknown to the rest of his family, Younger Brother joins them and makes their bombs.)  Once Coalhouse’s story becomes the centre of dramatic attention, Ragtime gets a focus it didn’t have before and doesn’t lose subsequently – but, as a result, the film becomes not much more than a protracted (the total running time is 155 minutes) racial crime drama.  The occasional returns to other elements of the story, from this point on, feel wholly perfunctory.

    Howard Rollins Jr is charismatic and sometimes affecting as Coalhouse.  Elizabeth McGovern is fresh and amusing as Evelyn more often than Milos Forman deserves.  The fine cast also includes Mandy Patinkin (Tateh), James Olson (conscientious in the thankless role of Father), a young Jeff Daniels (the policeman) and Richard Griffiths (some kind of shady lawyer).  Kenneth McMillan as the racist fireman Conklin is so vividly convincing – more than almost anyone else on screen – that you end up wanting more of the vile character he’s playing.  This was James Cagney’s final film role and his playing of Commissioner Waldo is economical and relaxed:  Cagney is well aware of the strength of his screen presence and of how little he needs to do to hold the camera.  By contrast, Mary Steenburgen (Mother) and Brad Dourif (Younger Brother) are ill at ease.  When Mother – who, as Steenburgen plays her, appears weak to the point of neurasthenia – finally leaves her husband and drives off with the now affluent Tateh, Forman and Weller seem suddenly to have lurched back into the synthetic, interconnected aspect of the novel that you thought they’d long since abandoned.  The film hasn’t aged well visually – or not in the print shown by BFI at any rate.  Forman may have wanted a sepia tint in some of the images to link them with the newsreel sequences but I’m sure the DoP Miroslav Ondricek didn’t come up with the pervasive pinky brown of this print.

    8 June 2014

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